Planes collide in Canada
Five killed in collision of two small planes over Canada
(CNN) – Five people were killed Saturday when two small planes collided in the air northeast of Saskatoon, Canada, officials said.
Both planes involved were single-engine aircraft.
One was en route to La Ronge from Regina with a man and woman aboard, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said.
The other was traveling to St. Brieux, Saskatchewan, where the crash occurred, from Calgary. Two men and a male juvenile were aboard, police said.
The Transportation Safety Board of Canada is investigating the crash.
Bodies recovered from Russian plane crash in Jakarta
Rescuers comb wreckage of Russian jet that crashed on Indonesian mountain
Jakarta, Indonesia (CNN) – Bad weather hampered recovery efforts Friday as rescue teams combed a forbidding slope of an Indonesian mountain where a Russian jetliner crashed on a demonstration flight this week.
Rescuers found 12 bodies early in the day, according to Vice Marshal Daryatmo, head of the National Search and Rescue Agency, who like many Indonesians uses only one name.
It will take at least two weeks to identify the victims through DNA tests, Indonesian authorities said.
All 45 on board the Sukhoi Superjet 100 are feared dead.
The Superjet 100, Russia’s newest passenger plane, slammed into Mount Salak, a volcano south of Jakarta, after disappearing from radar screens Wednesday.
The cause of the crash remained unclear. The Russian Investigative Committee said it has launched a criminal probe into possible safety violations.
“We can understand how the families are feeling right now, and we want to do this evacuation as fast as we can, but the problem is the crash site terrain is unreachable by parachute,” Daryatmo said at a news conference Friday.
Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono announced a joint investigation Friday after a phone call with his Russia counterpart, Vladimir Putin.
“I welcome the offer from Russian President Putin because the goal is to investigate what could have caused the plane crash,” Yudhoyono said.
The Russian Investigative Committee had said 48 people were on board the plane, including eight Russian crew members. But the Russian state-run news agency RIA Novosti said the number was 45, citing Sukhoi Civil Aviation President Vladimir Prisyazhnyuk as saying three of the people on the passenger list did not board the flight.
The plane was on a demonstration flight for Indonesian Ministry of Transportation officials and representatives of Indonesian airlines, the Russian Embassy in Jakarta said before the crash.
Indonesia’s Sky Aviation signed a $380 million deal in 2011 to buy 12 Sukhoi Superjet 100s, and press reports said a number of Sky employees were on the plane that went down. Sukhoi employees are also among the missing.
It was the first crash of a Sukhoi Superjet 100, RIA Novosti said.
The plane was on its second demonstration flight Wednesday when it lost contact with air controllers at Jakarta’s Halim Perdanakusuma Airport.
The Sukhoi jet arrived in Jakarta as part of a demonstration tour of six Asian countries. It had been to Myanmar, Pakistan and Kazakhstan, and was scheduled to visit Laos and Vietnam after Indonesia, RIA Novosti said.
Sukhoi manufactures military aircraft and is known especially for its fighter jets. Its civilian aircraft is narrow-bodied with a dual-class cabin that can transport 100 passengers over regional routes.
It flew its maiden flight in 2008 and has had encountered problems in the past.
In March, a Superjet 100 operated by Russia’s Aeroflot Airlines was forced to abandon its flight to Astrakhan, Russia, and return to Moscow because of problems with the undercarriage, according to RIA Novosti.
A similar defect in another Aeroflot-operated Superjet 100 plane had to be fixed in Minsk in December. However, Russia’s state-run United Aircraft Corp. said the defect did not affect passenger safety.
Russian passenger plane disappears
Russian plane missing in Indonesia
The Sukhoi Superjet 100, Russia’s newest civilian airliner, was carrying 42 passengers and eight Russian crew members, said Sunaryo, an official with Sukhoi’s Indonesian agent, Trimarga Rekatama.
However, the number was in dispute. The Indonesian National Search and Rescue Agency said only 37 of the 42 invited passengers were on board. Russian state-run news agencies reported 44 people were on the plane.
The plane was on its second demonstration flight Wednesday when it lost contact with air controllers at Jakarta’s Halim Perdanakusuma Airport.
“The first demonstration flight in the morning went smoothly,” said Sunaryo, who uses only one name. “There were no problems.”
On the second flight, the plane began making its descent but vanished from radar screens at 6,200 feet in a mountainous area.
The plane lost contact with air traffic controllers at 2:12 p.m., 21 minutes after taking off, said Marsda Daryatmo, head of the search and rescue agency. Two helicopters were immediately sent out to search for the plane but had to return to their bases due to strong winds and unpredictable weather.
Ground teams were continuing to search. The air search will resume at daylight, depending on the weather, Daryatmo said.
The plane was flying over Mount Salak, a volcano south of Jakarta, and was presumed to have crashed.
The Sukhoi jet arrived in Jakarta as part of a demonstration tour of six Asian countries. It had been to Myanmar, Pakistan and Kazakhstan, and was due to visit Laos and Vietnam after Indonesia, said the Russian news agency RIA Novosti.
Sukhoi manufactures military aircraft and is known especially for its fighter jets. Its civilian aircraft is narrow-bodied with a dual-class cabin that can transport 100 passengers over regional routes. It flew its maiden flight in 2008.
In March, a Superjet 100 operated by Russia’s Aeroflot Airlines was forced to abandon its flight to Astrakhan, Russia, and return to Moscow because of problems with the undercarriage, according to RIA Novosti.
A similar defect in another Aeroflot-operated Superjet 100 plane had to be fixed in Minsk in December.
Russia’s state-run United Aircraft Corp. said the defect did not affect passenger safety.
Spacewalking like ‘giving birth to yourself’
Spacewalking like ‘giving birth to yourself’
Cameras on the international space station, and also mounted on the cosmonauts’ helmets, are showing me their every move.
It’s fascinating.
A translator relays the conversation between the spacewalkers and mission control in Korolev, Russia.
During this spacewalk the pair were due to move a 46-foot (14 meter) crane from one part of the space station to another and install some shields to protect the station from space debris.
After grappling with the crane they ran out of time for installation of the shields and instead concentrated on taking some swab samples of surface residue from the Zvezda service module. The hope is to study the residue to get a better idea of the space station’s lifespan.
The reason I’m smiling continuously throughout this six-hour EVA (extra-vehicular activity) is that I had the pleasure of meeting and befriending Anton Shkaplerov before he launched into space.
The author with Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov.
Today I witnessed Shkaplerov take his first steps outside of the space station and I feel full of excitement. Watching him work in space is breathtaking, so what must it be like for him on his first spacewalk?
I asked Canadian astronaut Commander Chris Hadfield to describe what it’s like to pass through the ISS hatch and out into space.“Pulling yourself out into the void is bizarre” he said, “like deliberately giving birth to yourself.”
“It is hard to concentrate on the vital work with the world pouring by next to you” he explained. “Africa going by gave me vertigo, which made me laugh.”
I continue watching the live video stream from the cosmonauts’ helmet cameras, watching the world pass below them. “To be alone, weightless, between the brilliant colors and textures of Earth and the eternal velvet blackness of space is a magnificent human experience,” says Hadfield.
I can only imagine what that must be like, but I feel privileged to have been able to join Anton and Oleg on their spacewalk today. In spirit, at least!
36 People die in 2011 from mother nature, 2011 weather review
- 12 disasters in 2011 each caused more than $1 billion in damage
- Rare events include EF5 tornadoes hitting Missouri and Alabama and Hurricane Irene threatening New York City
Satellite image of Hurricane Irene before it made landfall in NYC. Courtesy: NASAExtreme weather came in fast and furious in 2011, with unwavering intensity for all twelve months of the year.
From snowstorms to drought, hurricanes to wildfires, epic floods to heat waves — 2011 shattered records with “a total of twelve weather and climate disasters,” according toThe National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), with “each causing $1 billion or more in damages — and most regrettably, loss of human lives and property.”
The New Year started off with a bang as an unusually intense — and poorly timed — January 2011 snowstorm in the Washington DC area left some motorists stranded in their cars for more than 10 hours during an evening commute.
The following month, an even larger, monster winter storm brought Chicago to an utter standstill. The Groundhog Day Blizzard brought two feet of snow to the area, while wind gusts as high as 60 mph piled snow drifts in some spots 10 feet high! Cars were left abandoned on major thoroughfares like Lake Shore Drive and Michigan Avenue. This wallop of a storm didn’t just impact Illinois, but many central, eastern, and northeastern states. According to the National Climatic Data Center, it brought insured losses
greater than $1 billion and total losses greater than $1.8 billion and unfortunately 36 deaths.
Record-shattering tornadoes
The spring thaw that followed did not evoke calmer conditions to the U.S. In both April and May, devastating record-shattering tornado outbreaks slammed the South, Midwest and other regions. In late April, an outbreak of 343 tornadoes in central and southern states caused 321 deaths. Of those fatalities, 240 occurred in Alabama alone. The deadliest tornado of the outbreak, an EF-5, hit northern Alabama on April 27, killing 78 people.
On May 22, an EF-5 (winds over 200 mph+) tornado struck Joplin, Missouri. It was one mile wide and traveled for 22 miles on the ground. According to NOAA, the Joplin tornado was the deadliest single tornado to strike the U.S. since modern tornado record-keeping began in 1950. 158 people lost their lives in this weather event.
Scorching summer
Hot and dry would be two good words to describe the summer of 2011: It was a season plagued by drought and extreme heat. Temperatures not only soared, but stayed unbearably scorching for weeks! Dallas, Texas saw 71 total days of 100+ plus temperatures. That’s the highest total number of 100 degree + days the city has ever seen. The Northeast wasn’t spared from triple digit temps either. Newark, New Jersey set a new all-time record high of 108 on July 22, shattering the old record of 105 degrees, set on August 9, 2001.
The combination of hot temperatures and lack of rainfall caused Texas to see “its most severe one-year drought on record,” according to John Nielsen-Gammon, the Texas State Climatologist and professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University. “Twelve month rainfall was the driest on record across much of Western, Central and Southern Texas,” he concluded. Many areas saw less than 25% of their annual precipitation.
Raging wildfires and rainfalls
The heat and drought led to a record wildfire season in many states. This occurred in the summer of 2011 and into the fall. Fires that ignited in states like Arizona and Texas were not only enormous in size, but also incredibly destructive. For example, the Bastrop Fire in Texas destroyed more than 1,500 homes and in Arizona. The Wallow Fire consumed more than 500,000 acres, making it the largest on record in the state.
While some areas didn’t receive enough water, others were inundated. In the Ohio Valley, rainfall totals increased by around 300%. This, combined with melting snowpack, caused catastrophic flooding along the Mississippi River. Further north, according to the National Climatic Data Center, “an estimated 11,000 people were forced to evacuate Minot, North Dakota due to the record high water level of the Souris River, where 4,000 homes were flooded.”
Mandatory evacuation for New Yorkers
Fast forward to the start of the Atlantic hurricane season on June 1. An “above average” season was predicted by forecasters at Colorado State University, and it lived up to that prediction. There were 19 tropical storms in the Atlantic this year, making 2011 the 3rd busiest season since record keeping began in 1851. One hurricane that developed in August grabbed the headlines with ferocity. That’s because this hurricane’s forecast track was headed directly towards a major metropolitan city that hadn’t seen a hurricane make landfall since 1985: New York City. For several days in late August, Hurricane Irene had the entire east coast on alert.
On August 26, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg made this memorable announcement from City Hall:
“The sun is shining, but don’t be misled. There is a very dangerous storm headed in our direction, and it could go slightly to the east or slightly to the west. It could speed up, it could close down, it could grow or diminish in intensity, but there is no question that we are going to get hit with some wind and high water that is very dangerous … We are today issuing a mandatory — I repeat the word mandatory — evacuation order for all New Yorkers who live in the low-lying Zone A coastal areas in all five boroughs that are at greatest risk of damage relating to Irene.”
It was the first mandatory evacuation the city had ever seen. It was also the first time the New York City transit system was ever shut down in advance of a storm.
Hurricane Irene initially struck the U.S. as a Category 1 hurricane in eastern North Carolina on Saturday, August 26, and then moved northward along the Mid-Atlantic Coast. According to NOAA, “wind damage in coastal North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland was moderate, with considerable damage resulting from falling trees and power lines.” Luckily, the worst case scenario did not occur when Irene made its final landfall as a tropical storm in the New York City area. However, Irene did dump excessive rainfall in the Northeast that caused widespread flooding.
More than 7 million homes and businesses lost power during the storm, and Irene caused at least 45 deaths and more than $7.3 billion in damages.
And winter begins…
Finally, the last month of the 2011 brought a life-threatening early start to winter for residents of the Plains states. In the week before Christmas, a paralyzing blizzard struck the region. White-out conditions caused road closures of highways in Kansas, New Mexico, and Texas, Oklahoma and Colorado on December 19th and 20th. That’s two days before the official start of winter on December 22.
Tell IJR News, How did this year’s extreme weather impact you?
Machines keep getting more and more jobs
More Jobs Predicted for Machines, Not People
By STEVE LOHR
Published: November 7, 2011
A faltering economy explains much of the job shortage in America, but advancing technology has sharply magnified the effect, more so than is generally understood, according to two researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Mark Ostow for The New York Times
Erik Brynjolfsson, left, and Andrew McAfee, authors of “Race Against the Machine,” argue in their e-book that technological advancements are outpacing the human worker.
The automation of more and more work once done by humans is the central theme of “Race Against the Machine,” an e-book to be published on Monday.
“Many workers, in short, are losing the race against the machine,” the authors write.
Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist and director of the M.I.T. Center for Digital Business, and Andrew P. McAfee, associate director and principal research scientist at the center, are two of the nation’s leading experts on technology and productivity. The tone of alarm in their book is a departure for the pair, whose previous research has focused mainly on the benefits of advancing technology.
Indeed, they were originally going to write a book titled, “The Digital Frontier,” about the “cornucopia of innovation that is going on,” Mr. McAfee said. Yet as the employment picture failed to brighten in the last two years, the two changed course to examine technology’s role in the jobless recovery.
The authors are not the only ones recently to point to the job fallout from technology. In the current issue of the McKinsey Quarterly, W. Brian Arthur, an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, warns that technology is quickly taking over service jobs, following the waves of automation of farm and factory work. “This last repository of jobs is shrinking — fewer of us in the future may have white-collar business process jobs — and we have a problem,” Mr. Arthur writes.
The M.I.T. authors’ claim that automation is accelerating is not shared by some economists. Prominent among them are Robert J. Gordon of Northwestern and Tyler Cowen of George Mason University, who contend that productivity improvement owing to technological innovation rose from 1995 to 2004, but has trailed off since. Mr. Cowen emphasized that point in an e-book, “The Great Stagnation,” published this year.
Technology has always displaced some work and jobs. Over the years, many experts have warned — mistakenly — that machines were gaining the upper hand. In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes warned of a “new disease” that he termed “technological unemployment,” the inability of the economy to create new jobs faster than jobs were lost to automation.
But Mr. Brynjolfsson and Mr. McAfee argue that the pace of automation has picked up in recent years because of a combination of technologies including robotics, numerically controlled machines, computerized inventory control, voice recognition and online commerce.
Faster, cheaper computers and increasingly clever software, the authors say, are giving machines capabilities that were once thought to be distinctively human, like understanding speech, translating from one language to another and recognizing patterns. So automation is rapidly moving beyond factories to jobs in call centers, marketing and sales — parts of the services sector, which provides most jobs in the economy.
During the last recession, the authors write, one in 12 people in sales lost their jobs, for example. And the downturn prompted many businesses to look harder at substituting technology for people, if possible. Since the end of the recession in June 2009, they note, corporate spending on equipment and software has increased by 26 percent, while payrolls have been flat.
Corporations are doing fine. The companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index are expected to report record profits this year, a total $927 billion, estimates FactSet Research. And the authors point out that corporate profit as a share of the economy is at a 50-year high.
Productivity growth in the last decade, at more than 2.5 percent, they observe, is higher than the 1970s, 1980s and even edges out the 1990s. Still the economy, they write, did not add to its total job count, the first time that has happened over a decade since the Depression.
The skills of machines, the authors write, will only improve. In 2004, two leading economists, Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane, published “The New Division of Labor,” which analyzed the capabilities of computers and human workers. Truck driving was cited as an example of the kind of work computers could not handle, recognizing and reacting to moving objects in real time.
But last fall, Google announced that its robot-driven cars had logged thousands of miles on American roads with only an occasional assist from human back-seat drivers. The Google cars, Mr. Brynjolfsson said, are but one sign of the times.
As others have, he pointed to I.B.M.’s “Jeopardy”-playing computer, Watson, which in February beat a pair of human “Jeopardy” champions; and Apple’s new personal assistant software, Siri, which responds to voice commands.
“This technology can do things now that only a few years ago were thought to be beyond the reach of computers,” Mr. Brynjolfsson said.
Yet computers, the authors say, tend to be narrow and literal-minded, good at assigned tasks but at a loss when a solution requires intuition and creativity — human traits. A partnership, they assert, is the path to job creation in the future.
“In medicine, law, finance, retailing, manufacturing and even scientific discovery,” they write, “the key to winning the race is not to compete against machines but to compete with machines.”
Coal Power states the Earth’s Energy equilibrium is inedible
Is the earths energy out of balance? Coal Power thinks it is http://coalpower.co/coal-news/
Coal Power the latest company to gaze at solar storms as a future answer to mankind’s requirement for energy
Coal Power the latest company to gaze at solar storms as a future answer to mankind’s requirement for energy
According to Wikipedia, A solar flare is a large explosion in the Sun’s atmosphere that can release as much as 6 × 1025 joules of energy. Harnessing this energy could solve all energy demands.
(International Journalism Review (IJR) 9/21/2011) Earth Energy Exploration (EEE) said exactly one year before today’s date, “If Doc did it on Back to the Future so can we.” Although obviously years away from harnessing, it actually seems possible, and Coal Power is the next goup to come forward and agree.
Interesting enough, Solar flares affect all layers of the solar atmosphere (photosphere, corona, and chromospheres), heating plasma to tens of millions of Kelvin’s and accelerating electrons, protons, and heavier ions to near the speed of light. Coal Power (CP) states that this type of energy, if one can imagine, is enough energy to feed all the earth’s human demands for many years. wwwCoalPower.co asks if this could this be our next source to explore?
Although a massive solar storm could leave millions of people around the world without electricity, running water, or phone service, government officials say, Earth Energy Exploration (EEE) and now Coal Power, both believe we must look beyond our capabilities and challenge ourselves like never before. See if we can capture that energy much like Michael J. Fox did in the movie “Back to the Future,” when they captured lightening to produce the amount of energy required for them at that time. movies of yesterday become reality of tomorrow.
Solar storms happen when an eruption or explosion on the surface of the sun sends radiation or electrically charged particles toward Earth. Minor storms are common and can light up the Earth’s northern skies and interfere with radio signals. To illustrate the magnitude and power of these storms, scientists have observed that every few decades, the sun experiences a particularly large storm. These can release as much energy as one billion hydrogen bombs.
The frequency of incidence of solar flares varies, from several per day when the Sun is particularly “active” to less than one each week when the Sun is “quiet”. Large flares are less frequent than smaller ones. Solar activity varies within an 11-year cycle (the solar cycle). At the peak of the cycle, there are typically more sunspots on the Sun and hence more solar flares.
Solar flares rise and fall on an 11-year cycle, and last year (2009) marked what scientists thought was the solar minimum. But through the beginning of 2009, the sun stayed unusually quiet. However in October of 2009, NASA discovered some Earth Energy firsts. A major sunspot appeared on the backside of the sun, where it was captured by NASA’s STEREO instrument (http://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov/instruments/instruments.shtml).
“This is the biggest event we’ve seen in a year or so,” said Michael Kaiser, research scientist with the heliophysics division at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. “Does this mean we’re finished with the minimum or not? It’s hard to say. This could be it. It’s got us all excited.”
People have been counting sunspots since Galileo first observed one in the early 17th century. Through the 28 cycles that have been well-documented, stretching from 1745 to today, the average cycle length has been 11 years, but shorter and longer cycles have been observed. The polarity of solar storms also alternates, so technically, a full cycle is 22 years. Either way however, being able to track consistency and its outburst of energy allows mankind to also be able to investigate ways to predict and capture it as well.
Newly uncovered scientific data of recorded history’s most massive space storm is helping a NASA scientist investigate it’s intensity and the probability that what occurred on Earth and in the heavens almost a century-and-a-half ago could happen again, but this time being prepared and possibly capturing its massive energy.
Earth Energy Exploration, and now Coal Power continue with their respective missions to educate the masses of alternative energy in various areas to let investors make sound decisions. Most recently, CP has begun to brainstorm in the world of science to look at earth’s energy beyond what we think is possible today.
References
Kopp, G.; Lawrence, G and Rottman, G. (2005). ”The Total Irradiance Monitor (TIM): Science Results”. Solar Physics 230: 129–139. doi:10.1007/s11207-005-7433-9.
“The Mysterious Origins of Solar Flares”, Scientific American, April 2006
Socioecohistory / worldpress /NASA warns of super solar storm 2012
Tamrazyan, Gurgen P. (1968), “Principal Regularities in the Distribution of Major Earthquakes Relative to Solar and Lunar Tides and Other Cosmic Forces”, ICARUS (Elsevier) 9: 574–592.
“New Study Questions the Effects of Cosmic Proton Radiation on Human Cells”. Retrieved 2008-10-11. A New Kind of Solar Storm
“Japan launches Sun ‘microscope’”. BBC. 2006-09-23. Retrieved 2009=05-19.
“Superflares could kill unprotected astronauts”. NewScientist.com. Retrieved 17 June 2005. Mewaldt, R.A., et al. 2005. Space weather implications of the 20 January 2005 solar energetic particle event. Joint meeting of the American Geophysical Union and the Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical Society. May 23–27. New Orleans. Abstract.
Written By Chris Greenman, Independent Journalist (IJR) /
SEO & Marketing Specialist
2016 Presidential hopeful
ChrisGreenman@live.com
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