Tips to improve your fuel economy

Before you drive

1. Tune and service your engine – A well-tuned engine can improve fuel economy by up to 5%*, so always use the recommended grade of motor oil and follow your car manufacturer’s recommendations on servicing.

2. Keep your tyres at the right pressure – Correctly inflated tyres are safer, last longer and drive more efficiently. A tyre that is under-inflated by just 1psi can reduce fuel efficiency by 1-2%.* An under- or over-inflated tyre is also more susceptible to failing and blowout.

3. Avoid carrying excess weight – For every extra 100lbs (45kg) you carry your fuel efficiency can drop by 1-2%*, so keep your boot or back seat clear of unnecessary items that just add weight to your vehicle.

4. Take the roof rack off – If you’re not using your roof rack then remove it. Racks affect the aerodynamic efficiency of your car, creating drag which can result in your car using up to 5% more fuel*. It all adds up to less mileage.

5. Plan trips carefully - Cutting down on the time spent in the car is the easiest way to conserve fuel. To reduce driving time, know where you’re going and, if possible, travel outside of peak times.

While driving

1. Drive smoothly and keep calm – Aggressive driving can use as much as a third more fuel than safe driving. Avoid accelerating or braking too hard and try to keep your steering as smooth as possible.

2. Use high gears and avoid over-revving – The higher gear you drive in, the lower your engine speed is, which can improve fuel efficiency. Change up a gear whenever you can, without labouring the engine. Never ‘redline’ the rev counter because you unnecessarily waste fuel.

3. Use cruise control and avoid high speeds – Using cruise control on major roads helps you maintain a constant speed and, in many cases, will reduce fuel consumption. Driving just 5mph (or 8kmph) over the speed limit can affect fuel economy by up to 23%.**

4. Avoid excess idling – Idling gets you nowhere but still burns fuel. Turn the engine off when you’re in a queue or waiting for someone for more than a minute or two. Use ‘Start-Stop’ button/functionality, when available in your car.

5. Use air conditioning sparingly – Air conditioning puts added strain on the engine. Try to limit its use to particularly hot days and, on temperate days, just use the fan. Alternatively you can wind down the window - though you will lose some fuel efficiency with the window open, it is still far more economical than using the air conditioner.

If Your Password Is 123456, Just Make It HackMe

Back at the dawn of the Web, the most popular account password was "12345."

Despite all the reports of Internet security breaches over the years, including the recent attacks on Google's e-mail service, many people have reacted to the break-ins with a shrug.

According to a new analysis, one out of five Web users still decides to leave the digital equivalent of a key under the doormat: they choose a simple, easily guessed password like "abc123," "iloveyou" or even "password" to protect their data.

"I guess it's just a genetic flaw in humans," said Amichai Shulman, the chief technology officer at Imperva, which makes software for blocking hackers. "We've been following the same patterns since the 1990s."

Mr. Shulman and his company examined a list of 32 million passwords that an unknown hacker stole last month from RockYou, a company that makes software for users of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. The list was briefly posted on the Web, and hackers and security researchers downloaded it. (RockYou, which had already been widely criticized for lax privacy practices, has advised its customers to change their passwords, as the hacker gained information about their e-mail accounts as well.)

The trove provided an unusually detailed window into computer users' password habits. Typically, only government agencies like the F.B.I. or the National Security Agency have had access to such a large password list.

"This was the mother lode," said Matt Weir, a doctoral candidate in the e-crimes and investigation technology lab at Florida State University, where researchers are also examining the data.

Imperva found that nearly 1 percent of the 32 million people it studied had used "123456" as a password. The second-most-popular password was "12345." Others in the top 20 included "qwerty," "abc123" and "princess."

More disturbing, said Mr. Shulman, was that about 20 percent of people on the RockYou list picked from the same, relatively small pool of 5,000 passwords.

That suggests that hackers could easily break into many accounts just by trying the most common passwords. Because of the prevalence of fast computers and speedy networks, hackers can fire off thousands of password guesses per minute.

"We tend to think of password guessing as a very time-consuming attack in which I take each account and try a large number of name-and-password combinations," Mr. Shulman said. "The reality is that you can be very effective by choosing a small number of common passwords."

Some Web sites try to thwart the attackers by freezing an account for a certain period of time if too many incorrect passwords are typed. But experts say that the hackers simply learn to trick the system, by making guesses at an acceptable rate, for instance.

To improve security, some Web sites are forcing users to mix letters, numbers and even symbols in their passwords. Others, like Twitter, prevent people from picking common passwords.

Still, researchers say, social networking and entertainment Web sites often try to make life simpler for their users and are reluctant to put too many controls in place.

Even commercial sites like eBay must weigh the consequences of freezing accounts, since a hacker could, say, try to win an auction by freezing the accounts of other bidders.

Overusing simple passwords is not a new phenomenon. A similar survey examined computer passwords used in the mid-1990s and found that the most popular ones at that time were "12345," "abc123" and "password."

Why do so many people continue to choose easy-to-guess passwords, despite so many warnings about the risks?

Security experts suggest that we are simply overwhelmed by the sheer number of things we have to remember in this digital age.

"Nowadays, we have to keep probably 10 times as many passwords in our head as we did 10 years ago," said Jeff Moss, who founded a popular hacking conference and is now on the Homeland Security Advisory Council. "Voice mail passwords, A.T.M. PINs and Internet passwords — it's so hard to keep track of."

In the idealized world championed by security specialists, people would have different passwords for every Web site they visit and store them in their head or, if absolutely necessary, on a piece of paper.

But bowing to the reality of our overcrowded brains, the experts suggest that everyone choose at least two different passwords — a complex one for Web sites were security is vital, such as banks and e-mail, and a simpler one for places where the stakes are lower, such as social networking and entertainment sites.

Mr. Moss relies on passwords at least 12 characters long, figuring that those make him a more difficult target than the millions of people who choose five- and six-character passwords.

"It's like the joke where the hikers run into a bear in the forest, and the hiker that survives is the one who outruns his buddy," Mr. Moss said. "You just want to run that bit faster."

- http://www.nytimes.com

Maybank2u.com now on your Mobile Phone!

From 19 January 2010, you can access Maybank2u.com on your mobile phone anytime, anywhere!

Our M2U screens have now been optimised to fit within the screen of your mobile phone. Just login to M2U from your mobile device using your existing M2U username and password, just like you would on your computer!
Steps to log on

1. Launch your Mobile Browser
2. Key in the URL - http://mobile.maybank2u.com.my
3. Click Login
4. Enter your existing Maybank2u.com Username and Password.
5. You are now logged in to perform your banking transactions!

Current services offered at Maybank2u.com on your Mobile

* Account Summary
o Balance Inquiry (Savings, Current, Credit/Debit Card)
o M2U History, Recent Transaction, Today's Transactions, Transaction History (Deposit, Credit/Debit Card)
* Funds Transfer
o To Own Accounts
o To Registered 3rd Party Accounts
o To Registered Interbank GIRO
* Payments
o Registered Bill Payment
o Card Payment (Own)
o Card Payment (Registered 3rd Party Accounts)
* View Rates
o View Forex & Deposit Rates

Maybank2u.com on your Mobile will be available for a period of 3 months. Try it now and tell us what you think! This will help us improve the service to better suit your needs in the future. Email us your feedback at mgcc@maybank.com.my
Important note

Please note that when you access Internet from your mobile, you will be charged data charges by your Telco. If you have not subscribed to a data plan, the charges can be expensive. We advise that you contact your Telco to subscribe to a data plan. There are many types of data plans offered by Telcos & the charges vary depending on the plan you choose. The charges will depend on the amount of data (bytes) requested and sent from and to your mobile phone. Please contact your Telco for further enquiries on data activation & the different types of data plans.

- MAYBANK

Speeding Stars Confirm Bizarre Nature of Faraway Galaxies

Stars in a distant galaxy move at stunning speeds — greater than 1 million mph, astronomers have revealed.

These hyperactive stars move at about twice the speed of our sun through the Milky Way, because their host galaxy is very massive, yet strangely compact. The scene, which has theorists baffled, is 11 billion light-years away. It is the first time motions of individual stars have been measured in a galaxy so distant.

While the stars' swiftness is notable, stars in other galaxies have been observed to travel at similarly high speeds. In those situations, it was usually because they were interlopers from outside, or circling close to a black hole.

But in this case, the stars' high velocities help astronomers confirm that the galaxy they belong to really is as massive as earlier data suggested.

Bizarre, indeed

The compact nature of this and similar galaxies in the faraway early universe is puzzling to scientists, who don't yet understand why some young, massive galaxies are about five times smaller than their counterparts today.

"A lot of people were thinking we had overestimated these masses in the past," said Yale University astronomer Pieter van Dokkum, leader of the new study. "But this confirms they are extremely massive for their size. These galaxies are indeed as bizarre as we thought they were."

Scientists used the new velocity measurements, conducted with the Gemini South telescope in Chile and the Hubble Space Telescope, to test the mass of a galaxy identified as 1255-0. The same way that the sun's gravity determines the orbiting speed of the Earth, the galaxy's gravity, and thus its mass, determines the velocities of the stars inside it.

The researchers found that indeed, the galaxy is exceptionally dense.

Given its distance of 11 billion light-years, galaxy 1255-0 is seen as it existed 11 billion years ago, less than 3 billion years after the theoretical Big Bang. Among other galaxies we can observe from this time period, about 30 to 40 percent are compact like this one. But in the modern, nearby universe, astronomers don't find anything similar.

Something wrong?

Somehow, high-mass galaxies from the young universe grow in size but not in mass – they spread out but maintain their overall heft – to become the high-mass galaxies we see today.

"It's a bit of a puzzle," van Dokkum told SPACE.com. "We think these galaxies must grow through collisions with other galaxies. The weird thing is that these mergers must lead to galaxies that are larger in size but not much more massive. We need a mechanism that grows them in size but not in mass."

So far, such a mechanism is elusive, but astronomers have some ideas. Perhaps these galaxies expand their girth by merging with many small, low-mass galaxies. Or maybe these galaxies eventually become the dense central regions of even larger galaxies.

"It could also still be that we are doing something wrong," van Dokkum said. "But I think at the moment you could say that the ball is somewhat in the court of the theorists. Hopefully they can come up with some kind of explanation that we can test further."

- SPACE.com

Submit blog to blog directories and increase the traffic

This post explains how to increase your blog traffic by submitting your blog to different kinds of blog directories which rates,provide statistics about your blog and provide free traffic and maximum exposure to your blog.

Submitting your blog to these directories is a very good thing to do particularly if your blog is very new one with low traffic.

These blog directories have high pageranks than your blog(since your blog is a new one with pagerank Zero).So, if someone searches for a particular keyword,there is more possibility for the blog directory to appear in the results than yours.

So,by adding your blog to these directories,the visitors enters these directories containing your articles(when they click the article,they enter your site) and also your blog posts will be indexed little faster.So,submitting your blog to these directories will gain you more traffic.

(If your blog is a new one,then put a visitors tracker button in your blog,sothat you will see how many visitors are coming from these directories,from search engines,visitors geolocation,etc).

Here are a few popular visitor tracker websites:

1.Histats(histats.com)
2.Sitemeter(sitemeter.com)
3.Statcounter(Statcounter.com)

So,let me come to the main topic...

Before submitting your blog to these blog directories,my personal suggestion is to create a new email address for this purpose so,your personal emails can't flooded with the emails from the blog directories administrators,etc.)Creating an email is free lol....creat one.

Many of these directories asks you to register before submitting blogs.
There are so many hundreds of blog directories,here is the list of very good popular directories which will send you maximum traffic.

LIST OF POPULAR BLOG DIRECTORIES:

Technorati:
http://technorati.com/
Technorati is the largest blog(weblog) directory currently tracking more than 112.8 million blogs.Join technorati and verify your authorship,then you will be provided with detailed statistics regarding your blog,how many blogs are linking to your blog,(they call it 'authority').It is one of the best blog directory and will send tons of triffic if your blog is regularly updated.

Topblogarea:
http://topblogarea.com/
This is another big blog directory which rates and rank the blogs interms of Unique visitors your blog gets.They start the counting from Zero every week, so that even newly submitted blog can have the chance to rank higher in the list.

Topblogging.com:
http://topblogging.com/
This is another source of weblogs which also rank the blogs according to the unique hits they get.Nice blog resource,bring you lots of traffic to your blog.

Blogtoplist:
http://blogtoplist.com/
Same here,they rank according to the unique hits you get.But,there is a little change, they will give you to place a voting button in your blog.If any visitor votes for your site from your blog,that is equal to 100 unique hits,but there is only one chance per visitor(one IP address) a day.

Fuelmyblog:
http://fuelmyblog.com/
This is a cool weblog resource which is different from the ones we discussed so far.You can vote to other blogs and others vote to you.They will keep the top six blogs(voted the most) on the homepage.You can join their forums, read other blogs content,joining in the compitetions and win prizes,etc.

MyBloggingarea:
http://mybloggingarea.com/
This is a very good weblog directory which ranks the blogs accoring to the unique visitors they get,brought me so much traffic to my celebrity blog than all the other blog directories.I recommend this.

BlogCatalog:
http://blogcatalog.com/
It is another good blogging resource,you can promote your blog here for FREE,find other blogs related to yours,etc.They have a special formula to rank the blogs,the more visitors,hits,comments,neighbourhood you get the more your rank will be.Another recommended one.You can join their forums,discussion board,groups,etc with other bloggers and share your thoughts.

BloggingFusion:
http://bloggingfusion.com/
It is a new one and not a very big one(around 950 blogs) at this time.But,it is a good one and doing pretty well.You can increase your blog exposure, worth a link to it.

Bloghop:
http://bloghop.com/
You can find blogs related to your blog topic here.Have a nice tracking button and currently having more than 29,000 blogs.

Blogarama:
http://blogarama.com/
Cool weblog directory currently having more than 69,000 blogs.It will list the blogs in terms of the score your blog have.The score depends on so many things like incoming traffic,outgoing traffic,user ratings,etc. and if you send more traffic to they,they will list your blog in the top 100 blogs.

Topbloglists:
http://topbloglists.com/
Another blog directory which will rank your blog according to the unique hits your blog will get.

Myblogdirectory:
http://myblogdirectory.com/
This doesn't list blogs interms of any visitors,etc. All blogs are listed randomly so,every blog get the same exposure.If you sent more traffic from your blog to them,your blog will be choosen as a BLOG OF THE DAY which will be placed on the homepage and your blog will recieve the whole traffic their site gets on that day.

Blogroll.net:
http://blogroll.net/
Another blog resouce which rank accorking to the votes and unique hits your blog get.

SOURCE:
http://www.bloggertricks.com

Cyber attacks hit 2 countries

South Korean intelligence officials believe North Korea or pro-Pyongyang forces committed cyber attacks that paralyzed major South Korean and U.S. government Web sites, aides to two lawmakers said Wednesday.

The sites of 11 South Korean organizations, including the presidential Blue House and the Defense Ministry, went down or had access problems since late Tuesday, according to the state-run Korea Information Security Agency. Agency spokeswoman Ahn Jeong-eun said 11 U.S. sites suffered similar problems. She said the agency is investigating the case with police and prosecutors.

In the U.S., the Treasury Department, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission and Transportation Department Web sites were all down at varying points over the July 4 holiday weekend and into this week, according to American officials inside and outside the government.

Others familiar with the U.S. outage, which is called a denial of service attack, said that the fact that the government Web sites were still being affected three days after it began signaled an unusually lengthy and sophisticated attack. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter.

The Korea Information Security Agency also attributed the attacks to denial of service.

Yang Moo-jin, a professor at Seoul's University of North Korean Studies, said he doubts whether the impoverished North has the capability to knock down the Web sites.

But Hong Hyun-ik, an analyst at the Sejong Institute think tank, said the attack could have been done by either North Korea or China, saying he "heard North Korea has been working hard to hack into" South Korean networks.

On Wednesday, the National Intelligence Service told a group of South Korean lawmakers it believes that North Korea or North Korean sympathizers "were behind" the attacks, according to an aide to one of lawmakers who was briefed on the information.

An aide to another lawmaker who was briefed also said the NIS suspects North Korea or its followers were responsible.

The aides spoke on condition of anonymity and refused to allow the names of the lawmakers they work for to be published, citing the classified nature of the information.

Both aides said the information was delivered in writing to lawmakers who serve on the National Assembly's intelligence committee.

The National Intelligence Service — South Korea's main spy agency — declined to confirm the information.

South Korea's Yonhap news agency said military intelligence officers were looking at the possibility that the attack may have been committed by North Korean hackers and pro-North Korea forces in South Korea. South Korea's Defense Ministry said it could not confirm the report.

Earlier Wednesday, the NIS said in a statement that 12,000 computers in South Korea and 8,000 computers overseas had been infected and used for the cyber attack.

The agency said it believed the attack was "thoroughly" prepared and committed by hackers "at the level of a certain organization or state." It said it was cooperating with the American investigators to examine the case.

South Korean media reported in May that North Korea was running a cyber warfare unit that tries to hack into U.S. and South Korean military networks to gather confidential information and disrupt service.

An initial investigation in South Korea found that many personal computers were infected with a virus program ordering them to visit major official Web sites in South Korea and the U.S. at the same time, Korean information agency official Shin Hwa-su said. There has been no immediate reports of similar cyber attack in other Asian countries.

Yonhap said that prosecutors have found some of the cyber attacks on the South Korean sites were accessed from overseas. Yonhap, citing an unnamed prosecution official, said the cyber attack used a method common to Chinese hackers.

Prosecutors were not immediately available for comment.

Shin, the Information Security Agency official, said the initial probe had not yet uncovered evidence about where the cyber outages originated. Police also said they had not discovered where the outages originated. Police officer Jeong Seok-hwa said that could take several days.

Some of the South Korean sites remained unstable or inaccessible Wednesday. The site of the presidential Blue House could be accessed, but those for the Defense Ministry, the ruling Grand National Party and the National Assembly could not.

Ahn said there were no immediate reports of financial damage or leaking of confidential national information. The alleged attacks appeared aimed only at paralyzing Web sites, she said.

South Korea's Defense Ministry and Blue House said that there has been no leak of any documents.

- AP

Lethal gas

By MICHAEL CHEANG

If you truly want to be a greenie, you should reconsider buying that flat screen TV.

Next time you turn on that shiny new flat screen plasma television of yours, think about this – that very TV may have contributed to global warming, and helped make the Earth’s atmosphere a little warmer for the rest of us.

This is because the manufacturing of plasma televisions includes the usage of a gas called nitrogen triflouride (NF3), a greenhouse gas so potent that it is 17,000 times more lethal as a global warming agent than an equivalent mass of carbon dioxide (CO2). In layman’s terms, NF3 is 17,000 better at warming the Earth’s atmosphere than CO2.

NF3 is one of the gases used when manufacturing liquid crystal flat-panel displays, thin-film photovoltaic cells and microcircuits. Which basically means that it’s not just TVs that use NF3 – it’s used also in making semiconductors, monitors, computer microchips, and ironically enough considering the “green-ness” of the technology, solar thin-film photovoltaics used to convert sunlight into electricity.

Even more ironically, NF3 was first used as an alternative to perfluorocarbons, another potent greenhouse gas. At the time, it was believed that the amount of NF3 used in the process was too miniscule to matter. It was even considered so insignificant that it wasn’t even included in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol – an agreement signed by 182 countries to reduce greenhouse gases.

However, a team of scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego discovered last year that NF3 is at least four times more prevalent in the atmosphere than originally expected.

The team’s results were published in October in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union. Led by Scripps geochemistry professor Ray Weiss and Jens Muehle, they made the first atmospheric measurements of NF3 by analysing air samples gathered over the past 30 years, and found that there were about 4,200 tonnes of the gas in the atmosphere in 2006 as opposed to the previous estimate of 1,200 tonnes. In 2008, this amount was 5,400 tonnes, which means the quantity of the gas has been increasing about 11% annually.

In short, what was previously considered to be an insignificant greenhouse gas has been quietly increasing its presence, largely in part to the increasing demand for plasma TVs and other electronics that use NF3 in their manufacturing process.

In a study published last June in Geophysical Research Letters, atmospheric chemists Michael J. Prather and Juno Hsu of University of California Irvine called NF3 the “missing greenhouse gas”, and said that the market for NF3 has exploded recently with the increase in demand for flat-panel displays.

The gas is also an extremely long-living gas that can take years, maybe centuries, to eradicate from the atmosphere. So even though only a small amount of the gas is released into the atmosphere, it may still add up into one big problem eventually, especially with the increase in demand for plasma products such as TVs, monitors and even mp3 players.

However, that doesn’t mean that one should throw out that brand new TV or stop buying them altogether. While the dangers of the gas have finally been highlighted, there is still research to be done to determine just how much damage it is causing to the atmosphere.

Already, steps have recently been made to rectify the NF3 oversight. Scientists all over the world have recommended that the gas be added to the Kyoto Protocol and just last month, the US Congress passed a climate change and energy bill that includes NF3 in the list of greenhouse gases, alongside sulphur hexafluoride, perfluorocarbons, and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs).

Also in June, the world’s first NF3-free thin-film solar module factory was launched in Germany by a company called Malibu. The factory is said to have completely eradicated the use of NF3 from the manufacturing process.

While such measures should be hailed as steps in the right direction, it remains to be seen if the rest of the world recognises the global warming threat of NF3, and acts accordingly before it’s too late.

- THE STAR

New type of black hole found

Astronomers on Wednesday said they had identified an intermediate class of black hole that could explain how supermassive, light-sucking monsters develop in the heart of galaxies.

Their find -- a black hole more than 500 times the mass of the Sun, on the fringe of galaxy ESO 243-249 -- is reported in the latest issue of Nature, the British-based science journal.

In terms of size, it lies between supermassive black holes, which can be billions of times the mass of the Sun, and relative tiddlers, which are between three and 20 solar masses.

Black holes are among the most powerful forces in the Universe. They are concentrated fields of gravity which are so powerful that nothing, not even light, can escape them.

Stellar-mass black holes are believed to have been created from the death throes of massive stars.

But there is less consensus over how supermassive black holes, which lurk in the centre of galaxies, including the Milky Way, are formed.

"One theory is supermassive black holes may be formed by the merger of a number of intermediate-mass black holes," said lead author Sean Farrell, an astrophysicist at Britain's University of Leicester.

"To ratify such a theory, however, you must first prove the existence of intermediate black holes."

As black holes do not emit light, the existence and size of the intermediate black hole was detected thanks to its "ultra-luminous" X-ray emissions, spotted by Europe's XMM-Newton orbital telescope.

- AFP

Cloud concern

Scientists probe how clouds react to climate change.

Wearing 3-D viewing goggles, scientists peer at virtual pink, blue and purple clouds billowing in cyberspace at a research laboratory in the Dutch city of Delft. By tracking how particles move in and around computer-simulated clouds, they hope to shed light on one of the unknowns of climate forecasting: how these masses of water droplets and ice crystals influence changing temperatures.

The research, at Delft University of Technology, was undertaken because of the growing urgency for scientists to improve ways of forecasting climate change.

Researcher Thijs Heus, a former student at the laboratory, explained that he used the simulations to chart data such as the speed, temperature and lifespan of clouds.

“We number the clouds and we track them from their infancy through their entire life cycle,” he said. “We can also give them colour to see if dust particles are moving up or down within and around the clouds,” Heus added, demonstrating ways to observe clouds in more detail by magnifying their virtual images on screen.

Using powerful computer technology and satellite data, the scientists at Delft hope to gain a more accurate picture of how clouds react to climate change.

“There is enormous uncertainty about what clouds will do, and how they will respond to a changing climate and that is a major impediment for climate predictions,” said Harm Jonker, associate professor at the university.

Projections of how much the earth’s temperature will rise in the next century vary from 1.1 to 6.4°C, with the effect of clouds remaining one of the main sources of uncertainty, the United Nations climate panel found in its 2007 climate assessment report.

Jonker said it was unclear, for example, whether there would be more or fewer of low clouds such as cumulus in warmer conditions, which would affect the rate of global warming because of their role in reflecting sunlight away from the earth.

“In a warmer climate, if there is more evaporation, that could lead to more of the lower clouds, which could diminish the effects of climate warming,” said Jonker.

He added warm air could hold more water vapour than cold air before it formed clouds, so there might be fewer low clouds as the earth heated up, which would accelerate global warming.

Rising sea levels and increased risk of droughts, flooding and species extinction are some of the likely effects of global warming, caused mainly by emissions of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels.

European and Japanese space scientists have turned their attention to clouds because of the pressing need for research. A 350mil (RM1.7bil) satellite project, due for launch in 2014, aims to improve understanding of the role they play in climate regulation. The project, known as EarthCARE, is being assembled mainly by the Astrium unit of the European aerospace group EADS and combines the technology of existing cloud observation satellites with new instruments for a more accurate picture.

“It’s much more complex then anything that’s flying at present,” said Stephen Briggs of the European Space Agency. “The difficulty with clouds is that you can’t see into them, so you have to find ways of looking into their three-dimensional structure, such as with radar systems.”

Jackson death was twittered, texted and Facebooked

"Ladies and gentlemen, Michael Jackson has just died," the woman called out breathlessly upon boarding a Manhattan bus, moments after the news had broken.

Not a word was spoken in response.

But nearly every passenger reached for a BlackBerry, a cell phone, whatever device was at hand.

"People are already texting about it, putting it up on Facebook, remembering his greatest moments," noted Delmar Dualeh, sitting in the back.

At 17, he confessed, the news didn't really move him emotionally.

He was too young to recall the 50-year-old entertainer in his prime.

But he was fully engaged in the cultural moment.

He hurried the conversation along so he could get back to texting.

In Iran, people speak of a Twitter uprising.

Was this the first major Twitter celebrity death?

Because it wasn't just HOW lots of people first learned of Jackson's demise, but what they did once they found out.

"Once you knew the news, there wasn't so much more to know - the rest is all comment," said media critic Jeff Jarvis.

So, he said, maybe you'd go to your friends instead of the news: "You might care more what your friends say than some analyst." Jarvis himself tweeted the moment he heard of the death: He noted that Iran's spiritual leader should be grateful to Jackson because the story wiped Iran off the day's news agenda.

"That was re-tweeted a lot," Jarvis said. The company said news of Jackson's death generated the most tweets per second since Barack Obama was elected president, and more than twice the normal tweets per second from the moment the story broke.

Plain old texting, Dualeh's choice, had its largest spike on AT&T's network in history. Nearly 65,000 texts per second were sent, the company said - more than 60 percent over normal volume.

And on Facebook, "sharing of all types went up - including wall posts, comments, notes, posted links," wrote spokeswoman Jaime Schopflin in an e-mail. "Status updates in particular saw an increase of more than three times the amount than usual."

Some posters were cynical, but many more were grief-stricken, like Jackson fan Scott Friedstein, an administrative assistant who lives in Brooklyn.

"There will never be another like him, ever," Friedstein wrote.

"The word 'superstar' is tossed around a lot, but no one personified the term, lived and breathed it, and delivered like he did. To all the people who liked Michael Jackson when it wasn't cool to ... I feel for you."

Facebook said there were no internal reports of the site slowing from too much traffic. But there were slowdowns or outages on other sites.

Google said the spike in searches related to Jackson was so big that Google News initially mistook it for an automated attack.

Wikipedia, meanwhile, had trouble with traffic, with people getting intermittent error messages, said Jimmy Wales, founder of the online encyclopedia.

He also described an online debate between users and regular editors over whether Jackson's death should be added to his entry before the news was officially confirmed.

Finally, editors intervened and prevented entries about Jackson from being modified for about six hours, Wales said.

On MySpace, Jackson's own profile was seeing an average of 100 new friends added per minute, the company said, and his friend total was on its way to being the site's highest increase in one day.

And Jackson's former wife, Lisa Marie Presley, posted a long, emotional statement on her own MySpace page.

"All of my indifference and detachment that I worked so hard to achieve over the years has just gone into the bowels of hell, and right now I am gutted," she wrote.

She also said Jackson had long feared dying young and tragically.

The initial news of Jackson's death broke on TMZ.com at 5:20 p.m. EDT (2120 GMT) The Los Angeles Times and then The Associated Press confirmed the death just before 6:30 p.m. EDT (2230 GMT), and networks then led their broadcasts with the news.

"TMZ is an AP customer and a good customer, but that report did not meet our standards for putting something on the AP wire," the news organization's vice president and managing editor for entertainment news, Lou Ferrara, said Friday.

TMZ turned out to be right.

But there were plenty of false reports circulating across the Web that mainstream news organizations had to chase: Rumors of actor Jeff Goldblum falling off a cliff, Harrison Ford falling off a yacht and, on Friday, George Clooney in a plane crash.

Another challenge the mainstream media faced was presenting both sides of Jackson himself, and balancing the polarities of his story.

On the one hand, there was ample video evidence of the extraordinarily gifted young man who took the world by storm, moonwalking on the Apollo Theater stage, or dancing hypnotically in the groundbreaking "Thriller" video.

On the other, there was the pale, older man, dangling his baby off a hotel balcony, or seen in video from his trial on charges of child molestation. So which Jackson to show?

"There was a duality to Michael Jackson that you had to deal with," said Susan Zirinsky, executive producer of "48 Hours" and CBS specials.

"The man died with a legacy of shame. The news had to be a combined sentence."

To open the one-hour special she produced, anchored by Harry Smith, Zirinsky chose four words that she felt conveyed the dichotomy: "A prodigy. A sensation. The controversy. The tragedy."

The same duality was evident on NBC's "Today" show, where one moment Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira were describing how Jackson was the most compelling entertainer they had ever seen.

Later, writer Maureen Orth, a guest on the show, told Lauer that Jackson had ruined the lives of families and children, and she cast doubt on the justice of his acquittal.

"But I did love his music," Orth added.

"Today" executive producer Jim Bell acknowledged it was a challenge to balance the two sides.

"But that was one of the main reasons he was such a compelling figure," Bell said.

"Otherwise, I don't know that his death would have been such a momentous occasion."

The fact that the news broke on a celebrity Web site and spread like wildfire across the social networking sites is a noteworthy change in how celebrity deaths get reported, Bell said.

But he added that the mainstream media is becoming more nimble as a result.

And, Bell added, with a huge media event such as Jackson's death, the audience is going to increase everywhere, including network TV.

"There's going to be a lot of eyeballs in both new and traditional media," Bell said.

"It's not a zero-sum game."

Maybe not, but Friedstein, the Brooklyn man, went home Thursday night and logged onto Facebook right away. He didn't turn on the TV - he doesn't even have one.

"I just wanted to see how other people were feeling," he said later by telephone.

"This was shattering, surreal even. It's my generation's version of Elvis dying."

- AP

Measat-3a a success, satellite launched at Cosmodrome

BAIKONUR (Kazakhstan): The clear sky was ablazed with the launch of Measat-3a at the Cosmodrome.

At 5.50am Malaysian time yesterday, a Russian-made rocket launched the 2,417kg satellite into space as more than 50 Malaysians gathered to watch the event several kilometres from the launch site.

The satellite is manufactured by Orbital Sciences Corporation, USA, at a cost of RM600mil.

Student Ahmad Ruiz, 17, said watching the whole sequence of the 60m rocket blasting off into space and the spacecraft separation left him speechless.

“I was gobsmacked. I expected to see the rocket shoot straight up but instead it started moving left very fast,” he said.

Fellow student Cliff Asher R. Ongil said he had wanted to be a doctor, but witnessing the event made him consider moonlighting as a cosmonaut.

The group, led by Information, Communications and Culture Minister Datuk Seri Dr Rais Yatim, had gathered at specially set up tents near the launch pad.

Dr Rais, who was watching a rocket launch live for the first time, said he was “very proud and jubilant.”

“This has expended Malaysia’s technological leap into the future as a successful nation.

“The challenge now is whether young Malaysians can one day create their own rockets to send into space,” he said.

Dr Rais also said the Government would work closely with private corporations to develop a training programme for students interested in outer space advancements.

Astro TV chief executive officer Rohana Rozhan said besides providing a backup for Measat-3, the new satellite would enable the company to introduce more products and services.

Later at a press conference in Moscow, Measat vice-president of engineering and operations Dr Ali R. Evadi said the satellite was in the transfer orbit where it would remain for about a week before moving into the designated 91.50E orbital hotslot.

The satellite with a 15-year life span successfully separated from the launch vehicle at 12.15pm Malaysian time.

PMR 2007 top-scorers K. Chandra Sekhar, Cliff Asher, Ahmad Ruiz, Lina Na’ilah and Edmund Lau from Malaysia were among a group of 14 from Indonesia, India, Britain and the Philippines who were on an all-expense paid trip to observe the launch and the Russian space industry.

- THE STAR

How to submit website to search engine manually?

Search Engine give me a constant traffic, before I start on how to submit website to search engine manually, let review back my experience on submiting my sitemap to search engine, after I have submit sitemap to Google, submit feed to Yahoo SiteExplore, also submit sitemap to Msn Live Webmaster Center, the traffic increase time to time. 

 I found that google spider come to my website 3 time a month (March08) and my google traffic raise from 30/days to 100/days on that month. Now, google come to crawl my website when I make a new post. Traffic raise to 600-800/days ( statistic at November 2008), and 1000-1200/days (statistic at March 2009) 

 If you would like to have natural traffic (organic traffic) from search engine, 1st you need to let search engine know your website. Basically, you need to submit your URL to Search Engine, also your sitemap, this is the few main search engine on the world, just use the link below to submit your website to search engine 

 Add Your URL to Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/ 

 Add Your URL to Yahoo: http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html (Require Login) 

 Add Your URL to Yahoo Site Explorer: https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit 

 Add Your URL to Msn.com: http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx 

 Add Your URL to Live.com http://search.live.com/docs/submit.aspx 

 

Other then this, there are a lot search engine out there, to fully optimize & publicize your website, here have a list of search engine link that you can add your website to :

 

http://www.burf.com/submit.php 

http://www.exalead.com/search/submitYourSitePage 

http://dir.guruji.com/misc/SubmitSite.php 

http://beta.gigablast.com/index.php?…age=about& 

http://www.entireweb.com/free_submission/ 

http://www.fybersearch.com/add-url.php 

http://www.mixcat.com/addurl.php 

http://www.oneseek.com/listings.htm 

http://www.whatuseek.com/addurl.shtml http://www.scrubtheweb.com/addurl.html 

http://searchsight.com/submit.htm http://www.infotiger.com/addurl.html http://www.sonicrun.com:8081/add 

http://www.uk.abacho.com/anmelden.html#nogo 

http://www.acoon.com/addurl.html 

http://addurl.amfibi.com/ 

http://www.homerweb.com/submit_site.html 

http://www.jdgo.com/add.html 

http://www.myahint.com/addurlmyahint.html 

http://www.walhello.com/addlinkgl.html 

http://www.bigfinder.com/submit/ 

http://www.websquash.com/cgi-bin/sea…l?Mode=AnonAdd 

http://w8.net/search/s-ctm.cgi?s-addurl.ctm 

http://www.towersearch.com/addurl.php

http://www.baidu.com/search/url_submit.html 

http://www.google.com/addurl/ 

http://search.live.com/docs/submit.aspx 

http://search-o-rama.com/AddURL.asp 

http://igwanna.com/submit.php 

http://cipinet.com/addurl/ 

http://navisso.com/add 

http://www.axxasearch.com/submit-site.htm 

http://www.dinosearch.com/dinosearch/addurl.asp 

Scientists discover a nearly Earth-sized planet

In the search for Earth-like planets, astronomers zeroed in Tuesday on two places that look awfully familiar to home. One is close to the right size. The other is in the right place. European researchers said they not only found the smallest exoplanet ever, called Gliese 581 e, but realized that a neighboring planet discovered earlier, Gliese 581 d, was in the prime habitable zone for potential life.

"The Holy Grail of current exoplanet research is the detection of a rocky, Earth-like planet in the 'habitable zone,'" said Michel Mayor, an astrophysicist at Geneva University in Switzerland.

An American expert called the discovery of the tiny planet "extraordinary."

Gliese 581 e is only 1.9 times the size of Earth — while previous planets found outside our solar system are closer to the size of massive Jupiter, which NASA says could swallow more than 1,000 Earths.

Gliese 581 e sits close to the nearest star, making it too hot to support life. Still, Mayor said its discovery in a solar system 20 1/2 light years away from Earth is a "good example that we are progressing in the detection of Earth-like planets."

Scientists also discovered that the orbit of planet Gliese 581 d, which was found in 2007, was located within the "habitable zone" — a region around a sun-like star that would allow water to be liquid on the planet's surface, Mayor said.

He spoke at a news conference Tuesday at the University of Hertfordshire during the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science.

Gliese 581 d is probably too large to be made only of rocky material, fellow astronomer and team member Stephane Udry said, adding it was possible the planet had a "large and deep" ocean.

"It is the first serious 'water-world' candidate," Udry said.

Mayor's main planet-hunting competitor, Geoff Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, praised the find of Gliese 581 e as "the most exciting discovery" so far of exoplanets — planets outside our solar system.

"This discovery is absolutely extraordinary," Marcy told The Associated Press by e-mail, calling the discoveries a significant step in the search for Earth-like planets.

While Gliese 581 e is too hot for life "it shows that nature makes such small planets, probably in large numbers," Marcy commented. "Surely the galaxy contains tens of billions of planets like the small, Earth-mass one announced here."

Nearly 350 planets have been found outside our solar system, but so far nearly every one of them was found to be extremely unlikely to harbor life.

Most were too close or too far from their sun, making them too hot or too cold for life. Others were too big and likely to be uninhabitable gas giants like Jupiter. Those that are too small are highly difficult to detect in the first place.

Both Gliese 581 d and Gliese 581 e are located in constellation Libra and orbit around Gliese 581.

Like other planets circling that star — scientists have discovered four so far — Gliese 581 e was found using the European Southern Observatory's telescope in La Silla, Chile.

The telescope has a special instrument which splits light to find wobbles in different wavelengths. Those wobbles can reveal the existence of other worlds.

"It is great work and shows the potential of this detection method," said Lisa Kaltenegger, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

- AP

Beware Conficker worm come April 1

In an event that hits the computer world only once every few years, security experts are racing against time to mitigate the impact of a bit of malware which is set to wreak havoc on a hard-coded date. As is often the case, that date is April 1.

Malware creators love to target April Fool's Day with their wares, and the latest worm, called Conficker C, could be one of the most damaging attacks we've seen in years.

Conficker first bubbled up in late 2008 and began making headlines in January as known infections topped 9 million computers. Now in its third variant, Conficker C, the worm has grown incredibly complicated, powerful, and virulent... though no one is quite sure exactly what it will do when D-Day arrives.

Thanks in part to a quarter-million-dollar bounty on the head of the writer of the worm, offered by Microsoft, security researchers are aggressively digging into the worm's code as they attempt to engineer a cure or find the writer before the deadline. What's known so far is that on April 1, all infected computers will come under the control of a master machine located somewhere across the web, at which point anything's possible. Will the zombie machines become denial of service attack pawns, steal personal information, wipe hard drives, or simply manifest more traditional malware pop-ups and extortion-like come-ons designed to sell you phony security software? No one knows.

Conficker is clever in the way it hides its tracks because it uses an enormous number of URLs to communicate with HQ. The first version of Conficker used just 250 addresses each day -- which security researchers and ICANN simply bought and/or disabled -- but Conficker C will up the ante to 50,000 addresses a day when it goes active, a number which simply can't be tracked and disabled by hand.

At this point, you should be extra vigilant about protecting your PC: Patch Windows completely through Windows Update and update your anti-malware software as well. Make sure your antivirus software is actually running too, as Conficker may have disabled it.

http://tech.yahoo.com

Spirit of the mosque

By Prof Dr MOHAMAD TAJUDDIN
Universiti Teknologi Malaysia Lecturer

Mosques should not be about how grand they are. They should be all about recreating the spirit of the Prophet’s mosque.

IT seems to me that, in the minds of Malaysian Muslims as well as Muslims around the world, building the biggest and most expensive mosques would be the greatest gift man could make to Allah the Most High. I am not sure where they get the idea from, but it is certainly not from the sayings, or hadith, of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him).

Or perhaps they are thinking of the saying that if one were to build a mosque for the Muslim community, Allah will reward one with a big house in Paradise – ergo, the bigger the mosque, the bigger the reward. Well, I think Muslims who think like this have forgotten one teensy, weensy little detail about the mosque: its spirit. It is the spirit and values of this institution that should be emphasised, not its architecture.

Before the grand design must come the values and culture of the users. Before the mosque, must come the responsibilities of the Muslim community towards the individual, and vice versa. Muslim scholars are always pointing out that in Islam, unlike in Christianity or other religions, there is no priesthood. The whole community must ensure that there are ustazs, or learned scholars, to explain Islam not only to Muslims but also non-Muslim societies for mutual understanding. If not, the whole community would be committing a grave sin.

The other responsibility of the community and the individual is the amar maaruf nahi munkar or the encouragement of good deeds and the discouragement or prevention of evil deeds.

These objectives and principles can be spelled out in terms of activities and functions, which in turn can be used to generate actual spaces, furniture, and structures to fit the activities and functions. Now that is real architecture. Not the I-saw-a-beautiful-Ottoman-mosque-so-I’m-going-to-copy-it approach to design so many architects seem to take nowadays.

In today’s column I wish to question one important feature that is totally missing from not only the multi-million ringgit mosques but from most mosques in Malaysia: the place for suffa.

When the Prophet fled from the hostile forces of Mecca and made for the sanctuary of Medinah, He built His home where His camel stopped to rest to deal diplomatically with the many invitations from the Medinans.

His adobe brick home was a simple affair of several small apartments in a row for His wives, a generous wall system that fenced up a squarish compound with one roof structure covering the links to the apartments and another roof structure at the opposite end. In the middle of the compound was a courtyard open to the sky. It was nothing more than the typical simple Arab house that can still be seen today.

Now read the following two hadiths concerning the spirit that imbued the Prophet’s mosque when He was alive:

“Anas bin Malik reported that some people came to the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) and said to Him: ‘Send with us some men who may teach us the Quran and the Sunnah.’ Accordingly, He sent 70 men from the Ansar. They were called the Reciters and among them was my uncle, Haram. They used to recite the Quran at night and ponder over its meaning and during the daytime they brought water in pitchers to the mosque, collected wood and sold it, and with the sale proceeds bought food for the people of the suffa, which were the poor who stayed in the mosque of the Prophet, and the needy.”

Mundhir bin Jarir reported on the authority of his father:

“The Messenger of Allah said, ‘He who sets a good precedent in Islam, there is a reward for him for this act of goodness and reward also of that who acted according to it subsequently, without any deductions from their rewards; and he who sets in Islam an evil precedent, there is upon him the burden of that and the burden of him also who acted upon it subsequently, without any deduction from their burden’.”

The suffa were the people who lived under the roof structure on the opposite end from the roof structure linking the apartments of the Prophet’s wives. They were of three kinds:

The first were the Muhajirrun or the Meccan people who fled the city to start a new Islamic life in Medinah. These Muhajirrun left everything, their houses, properties, relatives. They had only, as the Malays say, “Sehelai, sepinggang” (roughly, “one Right: cloth, one plate”), or, literally, the clothes on their backs. Although the Prophet had declared the Muhajirrun relatives-in-Islam with the Ansar of Medinah, most of the Muhajirrun did not want to burden their new relatives and opted to stay at the mosque.

The second kind of suffa were the poor who had nothing to begin with; they stayed at the mosque for shelter and helped maintain the building and its environs.

The third suffa were the Medinans who had homes, wealth, and relatives but who opted to be close to the Prophet and become voluntary “slaves” to Him in order to learn and benefit from the closeness to their beloved, the Prophet.

Thus we can see that the mosque of the Prophet was humble in its simplicity of adobe bricks and date palm columns but shone gloriously in the spirit of caring as well as the brotherhood of man.

The question I have for Muslims today is, simply, where is the place for the suffa in our modern, monumental, and lavishly decorated mosques? Where can the poor and needy find shelter in these multi-million ringgit structures?

I have walked and prayed in many monumental mosques, and I have yet to see one that has room for the suffa, a place where homeless people, whether they are drug addicts or prostitutes or simply poor travellers or struggling students, can abide a while. Most of the time, the mosque committee or security guard would throw such people out into the streets so they won’t “defile” the sanctity of the mosque.

As an architect and as a Muslim, I say that inconveniencing the guests of Allah in His house is a grave sin in Islam, and that there is no barakah, or blessings, in such mosques no matter how many minarets or domes they have.

It is curious to me to know that the gurdwara (Sikh temples) prepare meals daily for anyone who comes to the temple and serves them in the langar, or refractory. They feed anyone, not just the faithful. What of the multi-million ringgit mosques? Or any community mosque in Malaysia? As far as I know, food is cooked only during the month of Ramadhan, none is prepared for the needy at any other time.

The spirit of the suffa in the Prophet’s mosque should be a great lesson in the development of a mosque management system as well as in formulating the architecture of the mosque. Mosques should be a place of shelter where the needy can reside, and where those who are wealthy can open their hearts and wallet to feed these people daily. Now that is the true spirit of the mosque, be it a multi-million ringgit one or a humble structure in a village.

I would like to stress to the mosque committee as well as to the architect, the spirit of welfare is the most important spirit, one that can transform Muslim society as well as provide a new expression of humility and people-driven architecture for architects and designers.

- THE STAR
www.thestar.com.my

New gloomy findings on global warming

Last week’s gathering of 2,500 scientists found the climate change situation is much worse than previously reported. They called on politicians to act quickly and decisively.

With the world in economic recession, there is a temptation to downgrade or sideline climate change. That would be a great mistake.

However serious the recession, the effects of climate change will be even more devastating and long lasting.

Last week, 2,500 scientists met in Copenhagen and issued a grim warning that the climate situation is far worse than what had been depicted in 2007 by the United Nations’ inter-governmental panel on climate change (IPCC).

They said that global warming is increasing beyond the worst forecasts, threatening to trigger irreversible shifts on the Earth’s environment, and resulting in social conflict and war in much of the world.

In a statement addressed to politicians, scientists warned: “The worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised. There is a significant risk that many of the trends will accelerate, leading to an increasing risk of abrupt or irreversible climatic shifts.”

One example is that the IPCC predicted the sea level would rise by 7ins-23ins by the end of the century. But recent research showed that the rise could be 20ins-39ins.

The rising sea level is caused by the melting of glaciers and ice sheets, and the effect is to flood coastal areas, causing millions of people to move from their homes and lands.

Warning that “dangerous climate change” is imminent, the statement said there is “no excuse for inaction” and that weak and ineffective governments must stand up to big business and vested interests.

The British economist Lord Nicholas Stern, who in 2006 wrote a famous book on the economics of climate change, said his report had under-estimated the risks of global warming.

“The reason is that emissions are growing faster than we thought, the absorption capacity of the planet is less than we thought, the probability of high temperatures is likely higher than we thought, and some of the effects are coming faster than we thought,” he said.

The effects will be devastating unless politicians grasped the gravity of the situation, added Stern. The most talked about scenario is for the average global temperature to rise by 2°C-4°C by the end of this century (compared with pre-industrial levels).

But Stern warned that a 6°C rise is an increasing possibility. That could mean massive rises in sea levels, whole areas devastated by hurricanes and others turned into desert, forcing billions of people to leave their homes.

Much of southern Europe would look like the Sahara, many of the world’s major rivers would dry up in the dry season or re-route, Stern added.

Hundreds of millions or probably billions would have to move, and the implications of that is “extended conflict, social disruption, war essentially, over much of the world for many decades”.

The conference heard that much of the Amazon rainforest may already be doomed. A study by the Hadley Centre of Britain showed that even a rise of just 2°C (above pre-industrial levels) could cause 20%-40% of the forest to die in the next hundred years.

But this horror story is from the best scenario, that global emissions will peak in 2015 and then decrease significantly from then, while in fact emissions are presently still rising.

A temperature rise of 3°C would see drought destroy 75% of the forest, and a 4°C rise would kill 85%, according to a Guardian report of the paper. The loss of the Amazon would in turn have a catastrophic effect on climate.

Another study showed that global warming may be converting tropical forests from net carbon sinks (that absorb carbon) to net carbon emitters.

Rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere increase the growth of trees but also cause trees to die younger, and this reduces the carbon storage capacity of the rainforests.

According to a Guardian report, Australian scientist David Hilbert estimated that each degree of temperature rise will result in 14 tonnes of carbon emissions per hectare of rainforest, equating to 24.5 gigatonnes of carbon worldwide, or two-and-a-half times the world carbon emissions in 2007.

At a warming rate of 0.05°C per year, forests will produce 1.2 gigatonnes a year of carbon, more than they are currently absorbing as a sink (about 1 gigatonne a year).

The Copenhagen meeting also heard other scientific findings showing why the climate situation is worse than that depicted by the IPCC’s 2007 reports.

The Guardian columnist George Monbiot reported:

> Partly because the IPCC estimates took no account of meltwater from Greenland’s glaciers, the rise in sea levels this century could be two or three times as great as it forecast, with grave implications for coastal cities, farmland and freshwater reserves.

> A warming of 2°C in the Arctic could trigger a massive bacterial response in the soils there. As the permafrost melts, bacteria are able to start breaking down organic material that was previously locked up in ice, producing billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide and methane. This could catalyse one of the world’s most powerful positive feedback loops, with warming causing more warming.

Perhaps the most bitter-sweet report from Copenhagen was the “good news” that the current world recession could cause greenhouse gas emissions to drop by 40%-50%, according to an estimate by Terry Barker, director of the Centre for Climate Change Mitigation Research at Cambridge University.

The world should cut emissions very steeply. But this should be done in a planned way that minimises economic disruption. Having the global recession to do the job of cutting emissions is the wrong way, and hopefully it does not prove to be the only way.

- THE STAR
www.thestar.com.my

Shuttle Discovery blasts off for space station

The U.S. space shuttle Discovery blasted off its seaside launch pad on Sunday with a pair of solar wing panels and the first Japanese resident astronaut for the International Space Station.

NASA shook off a month of delays to launch its 125th shuttle mission at 7:43 p.m. EDT (2343 GMT) from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

"We had a little bit of a wait but that'll just make the payoff that much sweeter," shuttle launch director Mike Leinbach radioed to the Discovery crew shortly before liftoff.

"Thanks for the work. We'll see you in a couple of weeks," shuttle commander Lee Archambault replied.

There was no sign of the hydrogen fuel leak that shut down Discovery's launch attempt last week and no issues with valves in the ship's engines that triggered four previous delays. In the final hour before launch, even Florida's notoriously fickle weather was perfect.

The shuttle rode into the clear sky trailing a column of pale smoke that turned into a knot of bright pink as it caught the light of the setting sun. Two and a half minutes into its climb to orbit the ship dropped its booster rockets, which could be seen drifting back to Earth as pinpoints of light against the darkening sky.

Discovery will spend the next 13 days in orbit, speeding around the Earth at 17,500 miles per hour (28,160 kph). For eight of those days it will be lodged at the space station, which is nearing completion after more than a decade of construction 225 miles (360 km) above Earth.

The space station is about 75 percent complete. When it's finished it will be larger than a full sized soccer field.

The primary goal of the mission is to deliver the last piece of the station's 11-part external backbone, the structural spine of the $100 billion outpost.

FULL POWER

The $300 million truss segment in Discovery's cargo hold contains the final set of solar wing panels to bring the station up to full power, with 120 kilowatts of electricity -- enough to power 42 homes of 2,800 square-feet.

"That's a pretty healthy neighborhood," said NASA spokesman Allard Beutel.

The power boost will pave the way for NASA and its 15 partners to double the station's crew size from three to six members as early as May.

Japan's tenure as a prime station operator begins sooner. Discovery's seven-man crew includes Koichi Wakata, 45, who will be left behind on the space station as Japan's first resident crew member. NASA last year delivered and installed the main components of Japan's Kibo laboratory at the orbital complex.

"It is over 20 years since Japan started this endeavor, in participating in the International Space Station program," Wakata, a veteran of two previous shuttle missions, said in a preflight interview.

"To be able to conduct a variety of experiments, we need to be able to stay on board the space station on a long duration," he said. "I am very fortunate to be able to participate in a long-duration flight to fully utilize the Kibo module."

Joining Wakata are commander Lee Archambault, 48; pilot Dominic "Tony" Antonelli, 41; flight engineer and lead spacewalker Steven Swanson, 48; spacewalkers Joseph Acaba, 41, and Richard Arnold, 45; and John Phillips, 57, who already has served as a resident space station crewmember.

The crew plans to conduct three spacewalks to hook up the new solar wings and prepare the outpost for future additions.

Discovery also will be delivering parts to fix the station's water purification system, which recycles urine and condensate into clean water for drinking. The system was delivered during the shuttle's last mission in November, but stopped working shortly thereafter.

NASA has eight flights remaining to complete space station assembly before retiring the shuttle fleet next year. A proposal to fly a ninth mission to the station to deliver a dark matter experiment is pending before Congress.

The U.S. space agency also plans to fly a final servicing call to the Hubble Space Telescope in May.

- REUTERS
www.reuters.com

Online shoppers flock to the way of the Taobao.com

In the three years since it began, this shopping portal has captured some 75% of China’s online retail market.

At A weekend badminton session, my Chinese badminton mate revealed that we had been playing with shuttlecocks he had bought online.

“It was as simple as ABC, and furthermore, convenient,” he said of online shopping, a trend that has grown in recent years.

Lucy Jin, 24, who has been buying and selling stuff on Taobao.com at least once a month since two years ago, says: “Shopping online is very interesting. I bought tickets for performances at cheaper prices. And delivery fees are very cheap, too.

“Sometimes, I buy gifts for my friends. And you don’t have to meet up with your friend to give him or her the present. Almost every Chinese girl uses Taobao.”

She said a good buyer could walk away with a good bargain – just like in real-life shopping.

“The owner and I will talk online or via e-mail on discounts,” the Shanghainese lass added.

A Malaysian student, who only wanted to be known as Fiza, was influenced by her Chinese friends into buying things on the popular shopping portal.

“I buy clothes. Sometimes they are cheaper than what I can get at the shopping malls,” she said.

The buyer can also return defective products for an exchange. One can use Internet banking to pay for the goods and check the delivery status on the portal.

Buyers can also obtain receipts from the sellers – individual and corporate – for the products.

Taobao, established in 2003, has become China’s most-used consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer website in less than three years.

Taobao facilitated the sale of 99.96bil yuan (RM54bil) of merchandise last year, more than double the 43.3bil yuan in 2007.

Bloomberg reported that Taobao, the e-commerce unit of Alibaba, dominates 75% of China’s online shopping market, citing data from third-party research firm iResearch.

With 62 million registered members, it is not a hard decision for many to turn to Taobao to fulfil their dreams of doing business online, as setting up their own e-commerce portal would require a lot of capital.

However there is still a learning curve.

A Taobao “shop owner” said she sat in front of her computer for days without receiving any orders.

“At the beginning I was worried as I didn’t know if I could recoup the investment I put into my computers and office. But, my perseverance finally paid off,” she said.

Another “shop owner” who succeeded in establishing her own retail brand after years of trial and error, said when she first joined the fray years ago the market was rather new, but the Taobao operator and users upgraded the platform to meet consumers’ demands.

“I think every ‘shop owner’ has faced difficult times in finding the right product to sell.

“There are many success stories among Taobao ‘shop owners’. It’s a matter of whether you put your heart into it.”

She said she had learned to zoom in on her target audience, be specific about the product she was selling, and to vary her marketing strategies.

For another trader, having his product information on various platforms helped develop him into a credible “shop owner”. He sells decorative glass products.

“I started doing business on Taobao in 2005 hoping that I could promote my products to more customers than I could through conventional retailing,” he said.

“When I first registered myself on the portal, I was so naive that I used my real name and personal details, which I shouldn’t have. Now, I have learned a lot and gained tremendous profit in online sales.”

He spends about 10 hours online daily to communicate with his customers and to complete transactions.

Taobao welcomes any company or retailer, and e-commerce has been an effective platform to reach out to the world, he added.

According to an iResearch survey, Taobao created some 570,000 jobs last year, 19% of it in Shanghai, the international gateway to China.

More than half the individual sellers on Taobao are aged between 23 and 32, the majority fresh graduates.

Some 44% earn between 1,000 yuan and 2,000 yuan a month; 4% between 4,000 yuan and 5,000 yuan, and 2% more than 6,000 yuan a month.

- THE STAR

iPhone is finally in Malaysia

For the first time since the Apple iPhone was released in the United States in 2007, Malaysians can now get their hands on the phone legally.

Previously, iPhone aficionados resorted to purchasing parallel imports as it was not available here, but they can now own the popular gagdet come March 20 under Maxis Communications Bhd’s postpaid plans.

The iPhone 3G combines three products in one – a phone, a widescreen iPod, and an Internet device – and it can be booked via Maxis website or at any of the 29 Maxis Centres nationwide.

Maxis, which is the iPhone partner for Malaysia, announced in a statement yesterday that it would be offering a range of new tariff plans starting from RM100 a month.

For more information, go to www.maxis.com.my/iPhone

- THE STAR

Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs (CFL)

Incandescent light bulbs are the original light bulbs and as the name implies, produces light by passing an electric current passes through a thin filament, thus heating it until it produces light. The enclosing glass bulb prevents oxygen in air from reaching the hot filament.

Unfortunately, incandescent light bulbs use energy inefficiently – almost 90% of the energy used to power these bulbs is lost as heat. Hence, many countries are phasing out this type of lights in favour of more energy-efficient alternatives, such as compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFL) and LED lights. Brazil and Venezuela phased out incandescent bulbs in 2005 while the Philippines intends to ban them by 2010.

CFL consist of a phosphor-coated glass tube containing some mercury vapour. The vapour is energised when the electricity is turned on, causing it to send out ultraviolet (UV) energy, which is then absorbed by the phosphor coating, causing it to fluoresce and send out visible light.

While they can save more than 70% of the energy used in incandescents and can last a lot longer, CFL come with its own problems – namely, the use of mercury. If not properly disposed off, the mercury in CFL can cause environmental and health problems.

In the United States, lighting manufacturer have capped the amount of mercury used in CFL to less than 1.5mg per bulb.

Manufacturers insist that the amount of mercury in CFL is small and thus poses little risk. And if a CFL does shatter on the floor, the greatest danger may be the broken glass. But to minimise exposure to mercury vapour, the US Environmental Protection Agency advises a few precautions: children should stay away from the area and windows should be opened for at least 15 minutes so that vapours may disperse. Scoop up the materials with stiff paper or cardboard, and use sticky tape to pick up small pieces and powder. Clean the area with a disposable damp paper towel.

Besides CFL, fluorescent lights that are commonly found in Malaysian homes have their own environmental issues, due to their mercury and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB) content. PCB are a class of chemicals that have good electrical insulating properties, but are toxic. While their use have been banned in Malaysia, old lamps still contain the hazardous chemicals, not to mention mercury, and should therefore be disposed of with care as well.

Because of their mercury and PCB contents, old fluorescent lights should not be dumped in the bin but the Government has no solution for such waste as yet.

How many light bulbs do you have at home? What kind are they? How many do you change in a year? What do you do with the spoilt lights? Throw them in the thrash? Recycle them? What happens to these light bulbs once you throw them away?

For some, these questions may seem pointless. After all, a typical household may only need to change one or two light bulbs a year – surely such a miniscule amount of light bulbs won’t cause any harm, right?

Well, think again. Depending on what sort of light bulb you are using, be it incandescent, fluorescent or compact fluorescent light bulbs, you could be still be releasing toxics such as lead polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB) and liquid mercury into the environment. You might think that discarding one or two light bulbs won’t make a difference but what if each of the millions of households in Malaysia thought the same? Now that would be a lot of light bulbs, wouldn’t it?

An official of a major player in the solid waste management industry (who wishes to remain anonymous) says light bulbs should not be disposed together with household waste as they would only end up in dumpsites and landfills, and could contaminate groundwater if the landfills are not lined or equipped with leachate treatment facilities.

The thing is, almost every single component of a compact fluorescent light (CFL) can be recycled. The metal parts can be sold as scrap metal, the glass can be recycled into other glass products, and most importantly, the hazardous mercury can be reused to make new light bulbs. Unfortunately, while there is a need to recycle light bulbs, or at least dispose of them correctly, there are currently few options available to the general public. There are currently no specific guidelines or regulations concerning the disposal of light bulbs. Because they contain liquid mercury, light bulbs are classified as “scheduled waste” – this requires that they be treated like any other hazardous industrial waste.

This means two things – we cannot throw them out with the trash, and they should be properly disposed off, either at a recycling plant or at an approved hazardous waste facility (such as Kualiti Alam in Bukit Nanas, Negeri Sembilan).

But these legal provisions have never been enforced. Perhaps because no system or procedure are in place to collect hazardous waste from households which includes lights, old paints and batteries, unlike in countries such as Germany, where there are designated places to send such waste.

Also, the Department of Environment has said that its jurisdiction does not cover household waste. And even if such waste was collected, who is going to pay for the disposal say, at Kualiti Alam? Certainly not the domestic waste concessionaires such as Alam Flora or Southern Waste Management, who would insist that scheduled waste is not under their purview.

As such, all our discarded lights have ended up in dumpsites and landfills – sources from the waste concessionaires admit as much. This is also confirmed by Dr Nadzri Yahaya, director-general of the National Solid Waste Management Department: “Right now, light bulbs from household waste are all dumped together with normal garbage, which all ends up in landfills.”

He assures however, that when the Solid Waste And Public Cleansing Management Act 2007 comes into place, there will be a regulation requiring households to sort their waste. “We will then collect the light bulbs and keep them in storage until there is a large amount for sending to recycling plants or proper disposal at facilities prescribed by the DOE.”

Nadzri sees rising awareness among Malaysians on the hazards posed by discarded lights but there is just no means of proper disposal.

“That’s where the regulation comes in. We get them to sort at source, then we help them recycle or dispose of it properly,” he says.

A source in the solid waste industry says a take-back system through retailers is the best solution for the disposal of light bulbs. Such a take-back policy exists in Europe, whereby the responsibility for disposal of electrical and electronic equipment waste is imposed on the manufacturers. These companies must establish an infrastructure to collect the waste from consumers free of charge but the cost would have already been added to retail prices.

The good news is, such a policy might come up in Malaysia soon. A Department of Environment (DOE) official discloses that the agency is working on a take-back system for electronics and electrical items under the Environmental Quality Act – Environmental (Scheduled Waste) Regulation 2005.

But until these collection systems for waste bulbs are up and running, there is little that consumers can do except to just store those old bulbs – that is what some green-minded individuals are doing.

- THE STAR