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POPSAngola Miss Landmine Beauty Pageant The joint winners of the Angolan contest, Augusta Urica, 31, and Maria Restino Manuel, 26, were the embodiment of Traavik's ideal at the finale in the capital, Luanda, swathed in designer gowns, sashes and silver tiaras that crowned them Miss Landmine 2008. With 10 women representing their provinces, she hobbled up the platform on crutches to collect her prize - a golden, state-of-the-art prosthetic limb to replace the leg blown off 10 years ago. In Cambodia there should be no shortage of contenders for the 2009 title. There are 25,000 amputees among the country's 63,000 victims of landmines and blasts from unexploded ordinance left after 30 years of civil war. Up to 1m landmines remain buried, out of the estimated million mines planted along the border with Thailand after the invading Vietnamese left in 1989
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POPSSpore - A Computer Game to Teach our Children Long Term Thinking This game is about evolution and exploring our universe at all scales from the microscopic to the galactic. It is about the 'Big Picture' of life, and how to think about it in a multilevel multiscale fashion. It will give a real grasp of the complexity and interconnectedness of life, and will educate the players holistic long term thinking and planning. Watch the fascinating presentation of Will Wright in TED. Toys may change the world by changing us. I am all for it, and can't wait playing :-)
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POPSWar is not a video game During this, one of the bloodiest months in the Afghanistan war, the spots promote a somewhat comforting, if disturbingly misleading, message — and it is aimed not just at potential soldiers, but also at the public at large. For the former, the goal is reassurance. As Bush-era attempts to conflate bellicosity and patriotism were undermined by persistent body bags, military recruitment has become more challenging. In response, the Pentagon hopes to make prospective volunteers believe their tours of duty will be as safe as a night on the couch.
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POPSArtists Using the Full Spectrum "I’m excited by artists who are finding ways to adapt the rainbow spectrum in their work.The color field (or chromatic abstractionist) artists of the 50’s often painted with bold swaths of color but rarely used as many together as the featured artists of this article. In the 60’s, psychedelic art used colors and patterns together too. The modern artists I’ll cover in this post use color in an undiluted, anything but soft array of graphic lines and shapes resulting in work that is both vivid and alluring. Their work circumvents the boundaries their predecessors put in place to arrive at a new and bold take on prior styles."
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POPS9/11 Is Over "We can’t afford to keep being this stupid! We have got to get our groove back. We need a president who will unite us around a common purpose, not a common enemy. Al Qaeda is about 9/11. We are about 9/12, we are about the Fourth of July — which is why I hope that anyone who runs on the 9/11 platform gets trounced."
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POPSBlurring the Boundary Between Perception and Memory
Memory itself is not like a video-recording, with a moment-by-moment sensory image. In fact, it’s more like a puzzle: we piece together our memories, based on both what we actually remember and what seems most likely given our knowledge of the world. Just as we make educated guesses in perception, our minds’ best educated guesses help “fill in the gaps” of memory, reconstructing the most plausible picture of what happened in our past. The most striking demonstration of the minds’ guessing game occurs when we find ways to fool the system into guessing wrong. When we trick the visual system, we see a “visual illusion”—a static image might appear as if it’s moving, or a concave surface will look convex. When we fool the memory system, we form a false memory—a phenomenon made famous by researcher Elizabeth Loftus, who showed that it is relatively easy to make people remember events that never occurred. As long as the falsely remembered event could plausibly have occurred, all it takes
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POPSVery Long-Term Backup- Rosetta One side of the disk contains a graphic teaser. The design shows headlines in the eight major languages of the world today spiraling inward in ever-decreasing size till it becomes so small you have trouble reading it, yet the text goes on getting smaller. The sentences announce: “Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation.” This graphic side of the disk is pure titanium. A black oxide coating has been added to the surface. The text is etched into that, revealing the whiter titanium. This bold sign board is needed because the pages of genesis which are etched on the mirror-like opposite side of the disk are nearly invisible.
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POPSLiquid specs a bold vision for world's poor Changing the amount of oil in the lenses changes their curvature, which alters their strength. When someone has adjusted the lenses to suit their vision, the lenses are sealed with a valve and the syringes removed, giving near-instant glasses with no need for an optometrist.
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POPSasshole of the week in response to your remarks on epilepsy. 3 years ago I was diagnosed with epilepsy. I lost my license, I lost my job because I lost my license, then I lost my apartment because I lost my job. In these 3 years ive been discriminated against in the job market on 2 seperate occassions (that I know of). When I read a comment made by someone so obviously ignorant of the reality of epilepsy I feel compelled to correct that persons way of thinking. This is for all the daniel godfreys in the world....I propose that people like you wear a shirt in bold lettering that identifies you as an idiot!!!!!! so that when the rest of of us see you on the street we will know anything that comes out of your mouth will mostly be diarrhea of the brain. Good luck with the brain farts daniel seems to me your gonna need it
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POPSPlease, Let's Talk About Sex! "Let’s start there. Talk to your kids about sex tonight, with confidence and a straight face. “I’d prefer you waited to have sex. That said, whenever you choose to do it, make sure you use one of these condoms.” It works."
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POPSSingle Species Ecosystem Gives Hope For Life on Other Planets Scientists extracted all of the DNA present within 5,600 liters of fluid from a fracture deep within the mine. Expecting to find a mix of species within the fluid, the researchers were surprised to find that 99.9% of the DNA belonged to one bacterium, a new species. The remaining DNA was contamination from the mine and the laboratory. A community of a single species is almost unheard of in the microbial world. But this little bacteria has been happily living on its own and seems to have all of the genetic machinery to enable it to survive independently. Since it is the only species in the ecosystem, it must extract everything it needs from an otherwise dead environment.
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POPSNew Mexico: Land of Enchantment , Clean Energy State. Although 25 states have approved their own RPS, a national standard has stalled in the face of resistance from traditional coal-powered utilities and their allies in Congress. Wind and biomass are popular in New Mexico, but the desert sun that draws millions of tourists here also makes its solar power potential the second largest in America. So it is that the Clean Energy State's future just may lie in the south corner of the capital city, at the end of a dry road marked by a mile-long sculpture of a snake with jewelled eyes. ... Guardian
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POPS"We have no words left" <<<In Europe and the Middle East, the gap between leaders and led could not be greater when it comes to Israel. Official complicity and support for Israel contrast with popular outrage at war crimes carried out against occupied people and refugees with impunity. With governments and international institutions failing to do their jobs, the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee - representing hundreds of organisations - has renewed its call on international civil society to intensify its support for the sanctions campaign modelled on the successful anti-apartheid movement. Now is the time to channel our raw emotions into a long-term effort to make sure we do not wake up to "another Gaza" ever again.>>> • Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse
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POPSBold and Honest Questions • What will be the definition of "public interest"? • Who defines "public interest"? • Why should it be balanced? Because it's public airwaves? (Well, there are public roads that go by my house and I don't count how many Republicans and Democrats are driving on them) Day 2 • Who is "surrounding" the president in the White House? • Do any of the president's advisers have criminal records? • Are the president's advisers working to better the country or their own ideals? • Who are the anti-capitalists in Washington? • What role do they have in crafting bills? • What was "STORM"? What happened to the founders; where are they now? • What qualifications must one have to be a presidential adviser? • What is the difference between a community organizer and a community activist? • Do the "czars" have power? • Should a communist have the ear of the president of the United States? • What role did the Apollo Alliance play i
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