KC GlobeNews MAY 2003 Mothers Day Special Vol.4, No.5 Current events, trends, travel, politics, eco and tech topics. Add earthlings to our mailing list - email: subglobenews-@-kahl.net CONTENTS SARS SCAM? LOVE YOUR MOTHER EARTH LET THERE BE LED LIGHT SCORECARD FRIENDSHIP AMONG WOMEN ASIMO THE ROBOT ONLINE SERVICE MAPS COUNTY GRASSLINKS SCAM THE SCAMMER ============ !!GLOBALERT!! ============ SARS SCAM? ~~~~~~~~~~~ Public health expert Dr. Leonard Horowitz ask these questions: Last year, didn't more than 36,000 people die of the flu in the U.S.? Weren't they, almost all, elderly or very young? Weren't these victims, almost all, immune compromised? Had not the major source of their weakened immunity been drug side effects and vaccine-induced toxicity and autoimmunity? The answer is YES to each of these questions. Why was there nearly no mention about this widespread mortality from flu in previous years, compared to SARS this year, which to date has killed no one in America? Alternatively, with zero deaths in the U.S. from SARS thus far, why has so much media attention focused on this newest microscopic menace? Why hasn't the mainstream media asked these simple questions? You probably won't agree with everything that Dr. Leonard Horowitz has to say about SARS on his SARSScam website - I didn't either. But it will make you think twice about everything you've read in the mainstream press about SARS. SARS Scam http://www.sarsscam.com/ KEEP IN TOUCH -------------------- Get great LONG DISTANCE RATES with GLOBALCOM great calling services. Look at these sample RATES from ANY phone in the USA: * 5¢ per minute USA, Canada, UK, HK, Sweden * 5.5¢ per minute Belgium, Germany, France, Spain * Even works worldwide (via web enabled CALLBACK)! * No Monthly Fees! No Hidden Fees! Save even more! In OVER 20 States our rates are cut another 1.5 cents/min! Talk for hours with Click4Prepaid from GLOBALCOM: http://www.kahl.net/global/ ============== THE GOOD NEWS ============== LOVE YOUR MOTHER ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Happy Mothers Day! We all love our moms, that we can agree on – where Mother’s Day originated – that’s another story! So how about some Mother's Day history? Some folks think every day is Earth Day. Others celebrate it once a year. Some celebrate it on Mothers Day in honor of Mother Earth.In fact the concept of Mother's Day may have emerged from the ancient pagan festival dedicated to Mother Earth. Others look to ancient Greece where Rhea, wife of Cronus, and mother of Gods and Goddesses was worshiped. In Rome too, Cybele, a mother Goddesses, was worshiped, as early as 250 BC. With the advent of the Christian religion Mother Church was substituted for Mother Goddess and ceremonies in honor of Cybele were adopted by the church to venerate the Mother of Christ. In old England the observance became known as "Mothering Sunday", or the "Mid-Lent-Sunday”, on the fourth Sunday in Lent. Church goers would attend the mother church of their parish, laden with offerings. In the 16th century it became a celebration where workers would return to their homes with gifts of food for their mothers. In the USA, Anna M. Jarvis is credited with beginning the celebration of Mother's Day. She was greatly attached to her mom, Reese Jarvis, and turned her deep sorrow over her death into action. Anna and her friends began a letter-writing campaign to gain support of influential ministers, and congressmen in declaring a national Mother's Day holiday. She felt children often neglected to appreciate their mother enough while she was still alive. As a result of her efforts the first Mother's Day was observed by a church service on May 10, 1908. The first Mother's Day proclamation was issued by the governor of West Virginia in 1910. By 1911 every state had its own observances and the Mother's Day International Association was incorporated on December 12, 1912. Today Mothers Day is celebrated around the world But decades earlier, back in 1870, American poet and women's leader Julia Ward Howe already called for the establishment of the holiday. She called for women to not allow their men to constantly play war. Her Mother's Day Proclamation is the basis this year for parades, remembrances, and other events. The radical origins of Mother's Day -- as a powerful feminist call against war, penned in the wake of the U.S. Civil War in 1870 -- are fully compatible with the universal notion of honoring mothers. Women, even more so now, are the primary sufferers of warfare. In the 20th Century, civilian populations bore 90 percent of war's casualties around the world. Here is the pre-Hallmark, Mother's Day Proclamation, penned in Boston by Julia Ward Howe in 1870: Arise, then, women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts, Whether your baptism be that of water or of tears Say firmly: "We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, Our husbands shall not come to us reeking of carnage, For caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country Will be too tender of those of another country To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. >From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with Our own. It says, "Disarm, Disarm!" The sword of murder is not the balance of justice! Blood does not wipe out dishonor Nor violence indicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war. Let women now leave all that may be left of home For a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means Whereby the great human family can live in peace, Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, But of God. In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask That a general congress of women without limit of nationality May be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient And at the earliest period consistent with its objects To promote the alliance of the different nationalities, The amicable settlement of international questions. The great and general interests of peace./ LET THERE BE LED LIGHT ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ How many scientists does it take to change the light bulb? It's not a joke. The light bulb is on its way to becoming as quaint a relic as the gas lanterns it replaced more than a century ago. Incandescent bulbs, neon tubes and fluorescent lamps are starting to give way to light-emitting microchips. They work longer, use less power and allow designers to use light in ways they never have before. The chips -- 18 million of them -- are already on display in the $37 million Nasdaq sign in Times Square. They are in the vibrant facade of Chicago's Goodman Theater and adorned last year's White House Christmas tree. More notably, the chips are penetrating such blue-collar tasks as illuminating traffic lights, brake lights and exit signs. Lighting experts expect the pace of change to pick up as researchers continue their relentless efforts to shrink the chips to microscopic size, improve on their already impressive energy efficiency and increase their brightness. The chips are expected to move into the home and office lighting market as early as 2007. The eventual result, the experts say, will be savings of billions of dollars annually in energy and maintenance costs and a revolution in how people use lighting in homes and offices to influence their moods. "We are not talking about replacing light bulbs," said Arpad Bergh, a former Bell Labs researcher who is president of an industry trade group working with the U.S. government to promote the new technology. "We are talking about a totally new lighting industry." The vision of revolutionary new uses of light reflects the ability of such lighting, also known as solid-state lighting, to switch virtually instantaneously among more than a million shades of color at the command of a computer. Imagine: the dramatic lighting of a movie battle scene leap off the screen and be reflected within a theater. Or the color and brightness of lighting in nursing homes alters to help caretakers stimulate or soothe residents. The chips, which are known as light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, have huge performance advantages in many mundane tasks. In devices like traffic lights, for example, they consume 80 percent less electricity than the bulbs they replace, and last up to 10 times as long. Another safety advantage: they gradually fade instead of unpredictably burning out. It is the ease of mating the chips to computers that is driving interest. Programs that run on handhelds can alter the intensity, pattern and colors produced by solid-state lights. That flexibility is already used in advertising and entertainment. Solid- state lights are featured in numerous Times Square signs and Broadway shows like "Hairspray." Mad Doc Software has designed tools to link video games to room lighting. A player in a Star Trek game passing a red nebula would have one side of a room shift in color. Architects and building designers have far more ambitious possibilities in mind, including mimicking indoors the variability of natural lighting as the day progresses. Lighting experts predict that once costs come down, such flexibility will vastly increase the attention paid to the role of light in people's moods and health. While most market projections are based on comparing the progress of solid- state lights toward matching the cost and performance of traditional incandescent and fluorescent white lights, some experts say that such comparisons miss the point. "The ability to do things you couldn't do before is what will trigger mass adoption," said Michael Holt, president of LumiLeds, a leading diode producer that is a joint venture of Agilent and Philips. "People will become much more attuned to the mental and health aspects of light in the next five to 10 years. " Read the full article in the San Francisco Chronicle http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/04/15/BU148355.DTL&type=tech ========== GLOBESITES ========== SCORECARD ~~~~~~~~~~~ Scorecard is an website set up by Environmental Defense that offer easy access to data on pollution and hazards for all regions of the USA. It has information about pollution in every community as well as maps of EPA Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) data. Simply insert your zip code to find out what chemicals infest your community. With a click of the button, learn who is polluting, the names of the pollutants, about the pollutants and the chemical effects of the pollutants, and then send faxes directly and for free to major polluters. Scorecard: http://www.scorecard.org EPA TRI Program: http://www.epa.gov/tri/ KC WEBSITE HOSTING ---------------------------- Kahl Consultants offers WEB SERVICES and HOSTING for small business and individuals. * World Class Hosting with Personal Attention * Online Marketing Plans * Website Traffic Analysis $60 per quarter or $220 per year (get one month free!) All this and more can be found here: http://www.kahl.net/hosting ========= GlobeNews ========= FRIENDSHIP AMONG WOMEN ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ [Thanks Leila!] Friendships between women are special - says a landmark UCLA study. They shape who we are and who we are yet to be. They soothe our tumultuous inner world, fill the emotional gaps in our marriage, and help us remember who we really are. By the way, they may do even more. Scientists now suspect that hanging out with our friends can actually counteract the kind of stomach-quivering stress most of us experience on a daily basis. A landmark UCLA study suggests that women respond to stress with a cascade of brain chemicals that cause us to make and maintain friendships with other women. It's a stunning find that has turned five decades of stress research---most of it on men---upside down. Until this study was published, scientists generally believed that when people experience stress, they trigger a hormonal cascade that revs the body to either stand and fight or flee as fast as possible, explains Laura Cousin Klein, PhD, now an assistant professor of Biobehavioral Health at Penn State University and one of the study's authors. It's an ancient survival mechanism left over from the time we were chased across the planet by saber-toothed tigers. Now the researchers suspect that women have a larger behavioral repertoire than just fight or flight. In fact, says Dr. Klein, it seems that when the hormone oxytocin is released as part of the stress responses in a woman, it buffers the fight or flight response and encourages her to tend children and gather with other women instead. When she actually engages in this tending or befriending, studies suggest that more oxytocin is released, which further counters stress and produces a calming effect. This calming response does not occur in men, says Dr. Klein, because testosterone -- which men produce in high levels when they're under stress -- seems to reduce the effects of oxytocin. Estrogen, she adds, seems to enhance it. The discovery that women respond to stress differently than men was made in a classic "ah-ha" moment shared by two women scientists who were talking one day in a lab at UCLA. There was this joke that when the women who worked in the lab were stressed, they came in, cleaned the lab, had coffee, and bonded, says Dr. Klein. When the men were stressed, they holed up somewhere on their own. "I commented one day to fellow researcher Shelley Taylor that nearly 90% of the stress research is on males. I showed her the data from my lab, and the two of us knew instantly that we were onto something." The women cleared their schedules and started meeting with one scientist after another from various research specialties. Very quickly, Drs. Klein and Taylor discovered that by not including women in stress research, scientists had made a huge mistake: The fact that women respond to stress differently than men has significant implications for our health. It may take some time for new studies to reveal all the ways that oxytocin encourages us to care for children and hang out with other women, but the "tend and befriend" notion developed by Drs. Klein and Taylor may explain why women consistently outlive men. Study after study has found that social ties reduce our risk of disease by lowering blood pressure, heart rate, and cholesterol. There's no doubt, says Dr. Klein, that friends are helping us live longer. In one study, for example, researchers found that people who had no friends increased their risk of death over a 6-month period. In another study, those who had the most friends over a 9-year period cut their risk of death by more than 60%. Friends are also helping us live better. The famed Nurses' Health Study from Harvard Medical School found that the more friends women had, the less likely they were to develop physical impairments as they aged, and the more likely they were to be leading a joyful life. In fact, the results were so significant, the researchers concluded, that not having close friends or confidants was as detrimental to your health as smoking or carrying extra weight! And that's not all! When the researchers looked at how well the women functioned after the death of their spouse, they found that even in the face of this biggest stressor of all, those women who had a close friend and confidante were more likely to survive the experience without any new physical impairments or permanent loss of vitality. Those without friends were not always so fortunate. Yet if friends counter the stress that seems to swallow up so much of our life these days, if they keep us healthy and even add years to our life, why is it so hard to find time to be with them? Source: Gale Berkowitz ============= FUTURE IS NOW ============= ASIMO THE ROBOT ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ASIMO the robot is so advanced it somehow looks old-fashioned. Like the robots imagined decades ago by science fiction writers such as... Isaac Asimov! Made by Honda, Asimo is visiting 14 US cities this year and next. The Asimo show features 25 minutes of the plastic-clad robot walking forward, backward, sideways and in a figure-8, climbing and descending stairs, dancing with students, waving to the crowd and leading the applause. Getting a machine to walk like a human is a technological breakthrough and the only way to appreciate it is to see it live. People accustomed to special effects often question whether Asimo is real when they see it in Honda television commercials. That's why Honda has taken Asimo on the road. Honda envisions Asimo someday evolving into a robot that can assist the elderly and disabled, fetching things for them, opening doors, turning on lights and doing other chores. Its 4-foot height places Asimo's head at eye level with a sitting adult and also allows it to reach most switches and handles in the average home. Larger, heavier versions conceivably could take over dangerous tasks, such as firefighting or cleaning up hazardous wastes. Honda is not alone in developing robots in a human shape. Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) several years ago made general-purpose humanoid robots a national research focus. Several Japanese universities have humanoid robot programs and Sony last year unveiled a prototype of a small, two-legged robot. Sony has no immediate plans to market its 2-foot-tall bipedal robot, the SDR-4X. Like the four-legged, dog-like robot, Aibo, that Sony makes and sells, the two-legged robot might initially be an entertainment robot, designed to be fun more than anything else, he said. But Sony also anticipates the robots will evolve into companions and personal agents. It might soon be possible for such a robot to wake its master up in the morning and provide updates on weather and traffic conditions. Asimo cost $1 million per copy but you can rent him for $20,000 a day. The price will have to come way down and Asimo's abilities will have to increase before mass production occurs. Asimo is not an autonomous robot, but is operated remotely -- one operator for the lower body and legs, one operator for the upper body and head. Its five-fingered hands are fully articulated, but not equipped with pressure-sensors that would help it grasp objects. Its chief accomplishment is its ability to walk. Though that may sound simple, it took 17 years to enable a machine to balance itself on two legs, walk and change directions. Asimo Website: http://www.asimo.honda.com RoboCup American Open 2003: http://www.americanopen03.org Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article: http://www.post-gazette.com/healthscience/20030502asimosci3p3.asp ====== NetTips ====== ONLINE SERVICE MAPS COUNTY ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Marin county homeowners who want to create a custom planning map of their properties or find the nearest park have a new tool: www.MarinMap.org. The site offers a printable photo display of every parcel in Marin and its surrounding neighborhood - with overlays such as the parcel's elevation or slope. Previously, if you wanted to information on an individual parcel, you would have to request a map from the county. Now you can stay home and get all this information online. The idea is to build a countrywide geographical information sharing system that anyone can access, said Martin Nichols, Marin Telecommunications Agency executive director and supervisor of MarinMap. "This is a demonstration of a good collaboration of all local governments in Marin working together to produce a very valuable information tool that none of them could have afforded to produce on their own," Nichols said. "What we've created here will allow us to access and manipulate any piece of information from breast cancer to fires to dead oaks to streets." A future upgrade - called "My Neighborhood" - will add custom features such as driving directions to your house or a list of your community's public officials, libraries or emergency numbers. MarinMap is one of the few publicly operated geographic information system (GIS) Web sites in California - the significant other one being in Los Angeles County. Source: Marin IJ GRASSLINKS ~~~~~~~~~~~ GRASSLinks is a web interface to a geographic information system (GIS) that offers public access to mapped information for Northern California. Developed at UC Berkeley, GRASSLinks provides GIS display and analysis tools to facilitate data sharing and cooperation between environmental planning agencies, public action groups, citizens, and private entities. http://www.regis.berkeley.edu/glinks/ Thanks to all who wrote in! And to everyone else, speak up! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ GlobeNews by Kahl Consultants Visit us: http://www.kahl.net/globenews Email GlobeNews: globenews-@-kahl.net SUBSCRIBE: subglobenews-@-kahl.net Unsubscribe: unsubglobenews-@-kahl.net ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ THE PLUG ======== How has your small business or organization been performing? Happy with your work? Let Kahl Consultants help! Technology. Use it appropriately. Put it in our hands. http://www.kahl.net If you got this far you obviously enjoyed GlobeNews. Please pass it on! Remember, the best things in life are free. THE PUNCH LINE ============== SCAM THE SCAMMER ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ A site called SCAMORAMA is dedicated to scam artists, in particular the to infamous "419 ADVANCE FEE FRAUD" scammers from Nigeria. They have plenty of scam letters and replies to read, and one of the funniest email dialogues is between a scammer and a person who scams the scammer for three bucks! Take a look: http://www.scamorama.com/threebucks.html