20071219

God's basic training!

'God's Basic Training' Coming Under Fire

 

http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,158531,00.html

 

The warriors pose for the camera in a group shot - some holding their weapons in one hand and their holy book in another.

Elsewhere, a poster bears a quotation calling for the killing of enemy leaders and forcing the defeated people to convert.

If you think the images come from Islamic fundamentalist training camps in remote regions of the Middle East you'd be wrong.

Poll: What should the relationship be between religion and the military?

The photo depicts Army trainees at Fort Jackson, S.C., where in addition to basic combat training recruits may also attend "God's Basic Training," while the poster -- boasting a quotation from conservative author Ann Coulter -- adorns the door of a Military Police office at Fort Riley, Kansas.

"These are startling and disgusting revelations of further unconstitutional behavior by technologically the most lethal organization ever created by humankind -- the U.S. military," said Mikey Weinstein, whose group, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, discovered the evangelical-oriented program at Fort Jackson and the Coulter poster at Fort Riley.

The group also has found at the Fort Riley exchange the Muslim-critical "Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam" on display right next to The Holy Bible. And at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Mont., a new "Enabled By Christ" Christian men's store operates at the base exchange, Weinstein said.

Officials with the bases in question and the Army and Air Force Exchange Service, however, deny there is any deliberate intent to impose a religious belief on troops, and a Fort Riley spokesman told Military.com command would look into Weinstein's allegations there.

"Command at Fort Riley takes the Army value of respect very seriously," said Maj. Nathan Bond."The things you have mentioned to me, if they are true, do not seem in line with the Army values of respect, and we will look into it."

Maj. Scott Bullock, chaplain for the 2nd Battalion, 39th Basic Combat Training Bn., at Fort Jackson, said in an interview the weekly Bible study program is strictly voluntary. "I make a simple announcement for new soldiers: If you choose to come to this Â… you are welcome to come, especially those from an evangelical protestant background."

Bullock said the recruits posing with their rifles in the photos do so because they've been directed to train as if they were in theater, taking their weapons with them everywhere they go. He said that recruits attending any religious service at the base chapel also would be carrying their weapons.

The "God's Basic Training" program is part of the military ministry backed by Campus Crusade for Christ.

Judd Anstey, a spokesman for AAFES in Dallas, described the "Enabled By Christ" store as a short-term concession, one of about 15 AAFES-wide -- of 50,000 -- that has a religious affiliation. He also said that 75 percent of the vendor's products are for hunting.

"Beyond what is in his stock," Anstey said, "if someone from another religion comes in, let's say, wanting a Torah or a Koran, he would order that special."

Weinstein said the officials can "tell it to the judge," since he plans to include the allegations into a lawsuit he and Army Specialist Jeremy Hall filed in September against the Defense Department over an officer's disrupting a meeting of non-Christian believers and allegedly threatening Hall with punishment for organizing the event, held in August at Camp Speicher, Iraq.

Hall is now stationed at Fort Riley. The case, filed in U.S. District Court in Kansas City, names as defendants Defense Secretary Robert Gates, representing the DoD, and Maj. Freddy Welborn, the officer who allegedly broke up the meeting and threatened to keep Hall from reenlisting.

Weinstein said they are seeking an injunction to prevent Welborn from conduct "that has the effect of establishing compulsory religious practices," and also asking Gates to ensure Welborn does not interfere with Hall's free speech rights.

Gates is named in the suit, Weinstein said, because he allegedly has let the military engage in a pattern of unconstitutional behavior regarding promotion of religious belief.

Earlier this year Weinstein's organization revealed that senior Pentagon officials participated in a Christian Embassy video, endorsing the work of the group and of Christianity, while in uniform and against the backdrop of the Pentagon.

The DoD Inspector General ultimately determined that seven officers, including four generals, engaged in misconduct by appearing in the videos. Weinstein said the Pentagon has never said what actions were taken against the officers.

 

20071217

3 Iranian among top 100 living geniuses


Top 100 living geniuses

Dr. Ali Javan from MIT is ranked 12.
Dr. Nima Arkani-Hamed (Canadian Iranian) from Harvard University is listed as Canadian and is ranked 32.
Dr. Pardis Saberi from Broad Institute Director Eric Lander's laboratory is ranked 49

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/10/28/geniustable128.xml


The top 100 living geniuses were compiled by a panel of six experts in creativity and
innovation from Creators Synectics, a global consultants firm.
Each genius was then awarded scores out of ten against criteria which included: paradigm
shifting; popular acclaim; intellectual power; achievement and cultural importance. So:
It is with honor that two Iranians are listed here: they are Professor Ali Javan, currently
the Wight Davis Professor Emeritus of Physics at MIT, founder of first major research
center in the field of lasers? Ranked 12 and Dr. Pardis Sabeti, Biological anthropologist,
Ranked 49.
 
Ali Javan was born in Iran in 1926, is an inventor and physicist at MIT.
He co-invented the gas laser in 1960, with William R. Bennett. He graduated from Alborz
High School, started his university studies at University of Tehran and continued at
Columbia University after coming to the United States in 1948. He received his Ph.D. in
physics in 1954. He joined the research staff of Bell Telephone Laboratories in
Murray Hill, New Jersey in September, 1958. In 1961, Professor Javan joined
Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an associate professor of physics and has been a
professor since 1964.
 
Pardis Sabeti earned her master's degree in human biology, and her
doctorate in biological anthropology at The University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar where
she specialized in genetic diversity and contributed articles to Encarta Africana, Genes and
Immunity and Nature. She will shortly complete her M.D. at Harvard Medical School, and
plans a career in academic medicine and research. Sabeti was born in Iran in 1975. She
arrived in the US at age 2 and now resides in Orlando; Fla. Sabeti plays guitar and bass
and is the lead singer of a rock band.
As a young scientist and medical student, Broad researcher Pardis Sabeti combined her
passions for scientific research and medicine into a singular goal: to gain a deeper
understanding of disease by decoding the evolutionary history that is recorded within DNA.
Now, her pioneering steps toward this goal have earned prominent awards from two
world-class organizations: summa cum laude graduation honors from Harvard Medical
School
and a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award.

Sabeti, currently a postdoctoral researcher in Broad Institute Director Eric Lander's
laboratory, conducted portions of her previous doctoral work here at the Broad. While
pursuing her graduate research into the genetic factors that predispose humans to
infectious diseases, she herself was bitten by a "bug" of sorts: Sabeti longed to become an
infectious disease physician. In particular, she sought to address the medical needs of
developing countries, which are often ravaged by communicable diseases, including
malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and others. Thus, she enrolled in medical school.

3rd Iranian among geniuses has been listed as Canadian because presently he is citizen of Canada.

Nima Arkani-Hamed (Iranian-Canadian)
Nima Arkani-Hamed was born in 1972 in the U.S. to Iranian parents (also physicists) and became a Canadian citizen.
Arkani-Hamed graduated from the University of Toronto with a Joint Honours degree in Mathematics and Physics, and went to the University of California, Berkeley for his graduate studies, where he worked under the supervision of Lawrence Hall. He completed his Ph.D in 1997 and went to SLAC for post-doctoral studies. During this time he worked with Savas Dimopoulos and this is when the idea of large extra dimensions emerged. In 1999 he joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley physics department. He took a leave of absence from Berkeley to visit Harvard University in the spring 2001. Shortly after arriving at Harvard he worked with Howard Georgi and Andrew Cohen on idea of emergent extra dimensions, dubbed deconstruction. These ideas eventually led to the development of little Higgs theories.
He officially joined Harvard's faculty in the fall of 2002. Arkani-Hamed has appeared on various television programmes and newspapers talking about space, time and dimensions and the current state of theoretical physics. In the summer of 2005 while at Harvard he won the 'Phi Beta Kappa' award for teaching excellence.
Nima Arkani-Hamed participated in the Stock Exchange of Visions project in 2007.
Currently, he is a Professor of Physics at Harvard University. He will join the Faculty at the Institute for Advanced Study, effective January 1, 2008.
The son of two Iranian physicists, Arkani-Hamed was born in Houston, Texas, and grew up in Boston. After the Iranian revolution of 1979, his family returned to their homeland, but as religious fundamentalists took over the government, his father was forced to go underground and the family eventually had to flee across the border to Turkey. By 1982, Nima was living in Toronto, Canada.
Recalling his early life, Arkani-Hamed says that his time in Iran was largely a positive experience. "The strange thing is that I have mostly wonderful memories," he says. If anything, he adds, it taught him to worry less about what others thought of him. "Given that so many aspects of my life have been unusual, I've never had a problem with feeling different or being different or doing different things."
Best regards
Manouchehr Gojgini


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20071214

IBM Electro-Optic Modulator Could Lead To Supercomputer-On-Chip

That will be a fun day! Can you imagine how difficult it will be for Microsoft to write a new version of Windows to make that one slow as a 386? I know it is a challenge but I am sure they will make it ready by the time the ICs are available!

 

IBM Electro-Optic Modulator Could Lead To Supercomputer-On-Chip

IBM Electro-Optic Modulator Could Lead To Supercomputer-On-Chip

IBM researchers have constructed a way to send pulses of light through silicon, a process that can substitute sending electrical signals over wires and ultimately shrink the size of today's largest supercomputers.

In a paper published in the journal Optics Express, IBM researchers detailed what the industry calls the silicon Mach-Zehnder electro-optic modulator, which converts electrical signals into pulses of light.

Using light instead of wires to send information between processor cores can be 100 times faster and use 10 times less power than wires, according to IBM.

Researchers hope the advancement will enable the rapid and compact transfer of information between multiple cores on a chip. Since the modulator is 100 to 1,000 times smaller than other modulators of its kind, it will one day enable optical routing networks to be integrated on a single chip, the company said.

That means that supercomputers — which now consist of thousands of processors connected by miles of copper wire — could one day fit into a laptop PC.

Energy consumption will also be slashed, according to IBM. Supercomputers that presently use enough energy to power hundreds of homes will only expend the energy of a lightbulb.

As the industry continues to pack more computing cores on a chip, current on-chip communications technology would overheat and be too slow to handle a major increase in workload, according to T.C. Chen, vice president of science and technology for IBM Research.

"What we have done is a significant step toward building a vastly smaller and more power-efficient way to connect those cores, in a way that nobody has done before," Chen said in a statement.

Will Green, lead scientist on the project, said the research is a major advancement in the field of on-chip silicon nanophotonics.

"Just like fiber optic networks have enabled the rapid expansion of the Internet by enabling users to exchange huge amounts of data from anywhere in the world, IBM's technology is bringing similar capabilities to the computer chip," Green said.

 

 

20071213

Iranians claim to have built Opteron-based supercomputer

They probably used the software from the following project:

 

http://oscar.openclustergroup.org/

 

 

 

Iranians claim to have built Opteron-based supercomputer

Patrick Thibodeau

December 06, 2007 (Computerworld) Despite federal antiterrorism trade sanctions that bar the sale of U.S.-made computer technology to Iran, a computing research center in Tehran claims to have used Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s Opteron processor to build the Middle Eastern country’s most powerful supercomputer.

The Iranian High Performance Computing Research Center (IHPCRC), which is located at Tehran’s Amirkabir University of Technology, said in an undated announcement on its Web site that it has assembled a Linux-based system with 216 Opteron processing cores. That’s a relatively small supercomputer, with a claimed peak performance level of 860 billion floating-point operations per second, or gigaflops. But the research center said that the system, which will be used for weather forecasting and meteorological research, is the fastest built in Iran to date.

This isn’t the first time that the Iranians have used U.S.-developed processor technology to build high-performance systems, according to a history posted on the research center’s Web site. For instance, the history says that in 2001, prior to the formation of the IHPCRC, researchers at Amirkabir University built a 32-node PC cluster based on Pentium III processors from Intel Corp. A year later, they used Pentium IV chips in another cluster, this one with eight nodes.

But how did the IHPCRC get Opteron processors for the new supercomputer if U.S. technology can’t be sold in or shipped to Iran? The research center may have provided a clue, though perhaps inadvertently, in a photo gallery that also can be found on its Web site. (Editor’s note: Since this story was posted, the photo gallery appears to have been removed from the IHPCRC’s Web site. As a result, the link in this paragraph and in the photo caption that follows are no longer working. A follow-up story with more details has now been posted on Computerworld.com.)

The gallery includes a series of photos dated this year, showing workers assembling what the research center describes as the “cluster of IRIMO.” That acronym refers to an Iranian meteorological organization, which would be a perfect fit for the planned uses of the Opteron-based supercomputer.

The first picture in that series of photos (see below) shows a staffer using a screwdriver on what appears to be the components of a server. Behind him, on a table, is a stack of similarly sized boxes, all of which appear to have the word “Thacker” and the initials “U.A.E.” written in hand on their sides.

Iranian researcher works on supercomputer cluster
A staffer at the Iranian High Performance Computing Research Center works on the “cluster of IRIMO,” in a photo from the center’s Web site. (Click for larger image.) A sharpened image shows more clearly the word Thacker and initials U.A.E. written on one of the boxes at the IHPCRC.
A sharpened image shows more clearly the word “Thacker” and initials “U.A.E.” written on one of the boxes at the IHPCRC.

Thacker FZE is an authorized distributor of AMD products that is based in the United Arab Emirates, in the state of Dubai. The company is also listed under the name Sky Electronics on AMD’s Web site. Sky Electronics, whose managing director is named Manoj Thacker, says on its Web site that it is a business partner of Intel, Microsoft Corp., Nvidia Corp. and several other technology vendors in addition to AMD.

Although the server components are exposed in the photograph on the IHPCRC’s Web site, no lettering or brand names can be made out on what appear to be two processing units. The faces of the two devices are blank, even after the clarity of the photo was enhanced by Computerworld’s design staff.

After a copy of the photo was e-mailed to Thacker/Sky Electronics, Anil Clifford, a Dubai-based spokesman for the firm, said Thursday that he didn’t understand the image because the company doesn’t have any customers in Iran. “It is an embargo [situation] for us,” he said.

Clifford said that boxes the size of the ones in the photo could include a variety of components, including server casings and power supplies – all of which are made in Taiwan.

Products can be imported into Iran from any number of countries, and by many different means, Clifford added. “There are a lot of Iranians in Dubai,” he said. “They might buy locally from here one or two pieces and take it to Iran.”

In response to questions about the IHPCRC’s claim that it is using Opteron processors in the supercomputer, AMD officials issued the following written statement: “AMD has never authorized any shipments of AMD products to Iran or any other embargoed country, either directly or indirectly. AMD fully complies with all United States export control laws, and all authorized distributors of AMD products have contractually committed to AMD that they will do the same with respect to their sales and shipments of AMD products.”

The statement added that any shipments of products to Iran by distributors “would be a breach of the specific provisions of their contracts with AMD.”

The chip maker has increasing ties to the UAE. AMD last month announced that it had received $622 million in funding from a unit of Mubadala Development Co., an investment firm that is based in the UAE’s capital of Abu Dhabi and owned by the Abu Dhabi government. Abu Dhabi is the largest of the seven emirates that make up the UAE, and its ruler – Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan – is also the UAE’s president.

Legal experts said U.S. law requires companies with distributors in other countries to ensure that they also adhere to the trade sanctions against Iran, which is categorized as a terrorist country by the U.S. government. Companies that re-export U.S products are also prohibited from shipping them to Iran.

Nonetheless, Iranian officials have long boasted that the U.S. trade sanctions have had little impact on their nation’s ability to acquire products that it needs from other countries.

Michael Izady, an adjunct professor of Middle Eastern and Western history at Pace University in New York, said via e-mail that “much of what Iran gets in computer parts and advanced devices are brought in – licitly or illicitly – from the UAE.”

Izady said that Iran is producing as many computers as it does automobiles – about 1.6 million per year – and that the computer and Internet industry is “ubiquitous” in that country. “Iran is advancing its computer and Internet knowledge and expertise much faster than its nuclear program,” he wrote.

“The fact there is stuff going into Iran is certainly well known to U.S. regulators,” said Christopher Wall, an international trade attorney in the Washington office of Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP. He added that the UAE has been a country of interest to a U.S. government program designed to stop shipments from foreign countries to Iran.

Although U.S. export law applies to foreign parties that are re-exporting U.S. products, a lot of that occurs without a license, according to Wall. In such cases, many of the foreign entities either don’t follow the law or don’t know its requirements, he said. Moreover, products may change hands many times before they get to their ultimate destinations.

“It’s very difficult to enforce – extremely difficult to enforce,” Wall said. That’s why the sanctions against trade with Iran “are, in some cases, not very effective, because the rules are very easy to get around,” he explained.

David Ivey, an attorney who specializes in international trade at Baker & Hostetler LLP in Houston, said that whatever the product is, exporters have to be sure it can legitimately be sold to other countries. AMD likely will have to do some due diligence to see if it can determine how its processors apparently ended up in Iran, Ivey said, “because the U.S. government may come and ask them that question.”

 

20071207

The Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard

Very interesting movie about our life and it’s impact on the world we live in!

The Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard

The Story of Stuff

What is the Story of Stuff?

From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It'll teach you something, it'll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.

 

Husbands for sale!!

A store that sells husbands has just opened in Johannesburg , where a woman may go to choose a husband. Among the instructions at the entrance is a description of how the store operates.

You may visit the store ONLY ONCE!

There are six floors and the attributes of the men increase as the shopper ascends the flights. There is, however, a catch . . .. you may choose any man from a particular floor, or you may choose to go up a floor, but you cannot go back down except to exit the building! So, a woman goes to the Husband Store to find a husband .

On the first floor the sign on the door reads:

Floor 1 - These men have jobs and love the Lord.

The second floor sign reads:

Floor 2 - These men have jobs, love the Lord, and love kids.

The third floor sign reads:

Floor 3 - These men have jobs, love the Lord, love kids, and are extremely good looking.

“Wow,” she thinks, but feels compelled to keep going.

She goes to the fourth floor and sign reads:

Floor 4 - These men have jobs, love the Lord, love kids, are drop- dead good looking and help with the housework.

“Oh, mercy me!” she exclaims, “I can hardly stand it!” Still, she goes to the fifth floor and sign reads:

Floor 5 - These men have jobs, love the Lord, love kids, are drop- dead gorgeous, help with the housework, and have a strong romantic streak.

She is so tempted to stay, but she goes to the sixth floor and the sign reads:

Floor 6 - You are visitor 4,363,012 to this floor. There are no men on this
floor. This floor exists solely as proof that women are impossible to please.

Thank you for shopping at the Husband Store. Watch your step as you exit the building, and have a nice day!

Please send this to all men for a good laugh and to all the women who can handle the truth!