Thursday, 9 June 2011

Alexey Navalny: Russia's Julian Assange?

Alexey Navalny is decidedly not a journalist; the young corporate lawyer has dabbled in property development, the stock market, and politics (in the late 1990s he joined the liberal opposition party Yabloko and in 2005, he founded a kind of youth movement with Maria Gaidar, the daughter of one of Yeltsin's top economic advisers, called Da! or Yes!). He has a master's degree in finance and currently runs his own law firm from a small office in the center of Moscow. His résumé reads like an ambitious Russian entrepreneur's. Except that Navalny has also become the country's leading anti-corruption crusader, described variously as "a one-man WikiLeaks" and "a kind of Russian Julian Assange or Lincoln Steffens."
His public interest work, which he undertook on his blog several years ago, largely focuses on issues of transparency, corruption, and shareholder rights. (Navalny got his start as a muckraking blogger by purchasing a small number of shares in several state-owned enterprises to get an insider's view of how they operate and by exposing the fraud he discovered.) Early this year Navalny launched a new site, RosPil, designed to harness the power of the web and his devoted readers. It relies on simple crowd sourcing methods whereby registered users and a group of experts review public documents for wrongdoing and post their findings. Anyone can submit a government request for tender (a bid for services) to the site and, if it looks dubious enough, it is promoted to the main page. This has become far easier for the average citizen to do under President Medvedev who, two years ago, announced that all government requests for tender would be posted online. Once the documents have been published on RosPil, registered members evaluate the complaint and decide whether it should be pursued. If they vote yes, Navalny showcases the alleged fraud on his blog.
Two remarkable things have happened since Navalny started RosPil: after an appeal for contributions to the site in February this year, Navalny raised more than $120,000 in a week, highly unusual in Russia for a journalism website (it broke fundraising records according to Yandex, Russia's leading search engine); more remarkably yet, according to the site, RosPil has caused the annulment of about $12 million in requests for tender, as well as the resignations and public shaming of several government officials. Revelations range from the absurd (the Interior Ministry ordering a gilded bed for its suburban residence) to far more serious allegations of fraud and embezzlement...

Continue reading

Adam Federman @'The Investigative Fund'

Life sized stained glass AK 47 with a poppy in the barrel for remembrance

the end of the revolution
by shanti1971
Via

♪♫ The Stems - For Always

♪♫ Bruce Springsteen - Seeds

Info

Wednesday, 8 June 2011

Domus Mixtape Live #6: THE SOUND OF LONDON by Scanner + Allard van Hoorn, Beatrice Galilee

Mystery surrounds death of Aryan Brotherhood boss

HUGE explosion on the Sun on June 7, 2011

The Sun let loose with an enormous explosion on the morning of June 7, 2011. The entire eruption was captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. The animation here is from the ultraviolet camera, colored orange to make it viewable.
Here's my blog post with details and more video: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/06/07/the-sun-lets-loose-...

Ad break # 24

(Click to enlarge)

Recognizing the Human Potential

At the beginning of 1991—almost ten years after the cause of AIDS had been identified—researchers thought they might have a vaccine. Evidence from several laboratories suggested that it was possible to develop a vaccine against HIV by inoculating individuals with a crippled version of the virus that could not replicate—a time-tested strategy similar to that used to produce effective measles, mumps, and polio vaccines. In animal experiments, researchers used an HIV-like virus called simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) which infects rhesus macaque monkeys. Over time, infected monkeys developed AIDS-like symptoms, much like humans. Researchers inactivated SIV, injected it into monkeys, and tested whether the animals were protected against live SIV infection. Most vaccinated monkeys were indeed protected, encouraging AIDS researchers to believe that an effective human AIDS vaccine would soon follow. However, in October 1991, a brief article was published that sent AIDS vaccine research into a tailspin.¹ Like other labs,²^,³ E. James Stott’s laboratory had immunized macaques with inactivated SIV, which protected them against subsequent infection with live virus. However, the Stott laboratory included a negative control that was missing from the earlier studies: a second group of monkeys was immunized with just the human host cells that had been used to grow the inactivated SIV, but in this case, with no trace of the virus.¹ The purpose of this negative control was to ensure that the immune reaction that had successfully protected the monkeys was specific to SIV antigens, and not induced by something else. Surprisingly, the “negative control” produced protective immunity against SIV infection. Equally surprising was the fact that protection in the vaccine group was not associated with antibodies that recognized SIV antigens.
The finding was viewed by most in the field as an artifact and in the years that followed, researchers continued to focus on developing vaccines against HIV that specifically targeted proteins on the surface of the virus. However, HIV proved to be a moving target, avoiding vaccine-induced immune responses by rapidly mutating its surface proteins, and thereby thwarting this type of virus-specific vaccine effort...

Continue reading

Gene M. Shearer and Adriano Boasso @'The Scientist'

Russian Hacker Has Skype Fuming

Carl Jung speaks about Death

Via

Are we in denial about loud music and hearing loss?

The message was one that most rock fans didn't want to hear.
They were willing to listen, however, because it came from one of their idols -- Pete Townshend.
The legendary guitarist of the Who validated the concerns of parents around the globe -- the ones who had cried out, "turn down that music or you'll hurt your ears!" -- when in 1989 he disclosed his own hearing loss, which he attributed to long exposure to loud rock 'n' roll.
Suddenly, the topic was on the table. And people started talking about it, with some embracing Townshend's advice to take the necessary steps to protect their ears at concerts.
More than 20 years later, awareness of the issue is much higher. But the problem certainly hasn't gone away. In fact, with the advent of MP3 players and their ubiquitous earbuds, it has grown significantly. It's one thing to know that loud music can damage your hearing, it's quite another to do something about it. And only a small percentage of concertgoers actually wear earplugs, despite that they are available for free (or a small donation) at most venues in the Bay Area.
"I feel rather passionately about this," says Dr. Vikram Talwar, an East Bay-based physician who has volunteered for the past 10 years at Rock Med, the Bay Area-based organization that provides free medical care at concerts. "I'm wearing ear protection all the time. It doesn't matter how good the band is -- I'm wearing ear protection."
Talwar is on eof many crusaders for this cause, handing out earplugs at shows and talking to fans about the dangers of not wearing ear protection. But his efforts routinely are rebuffed."I drum (the importance of ear protection) into everyone I know, even my close personal friends," he says. "Nobody gives a (expletive) about it. They don't think it is going to happen to them."
And, more and more frequently, it is.
Studies show hearing loss is an increasingly significant issue these days. On both ends of the age spectrum. A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association says hearing loss among U.S. adolescents has jumped by about 30 percent in the past 20 years. The findings were based on surveys conducted on youths ages 12-19 during 1988-1994 and again in 2005-2006. Now, says the AMA, 1 in 5 adolescents shows some signs of hearing loss.
As for seniors, AARP reports that nearly two-thirds of Americans age 70 and older have experienced mild to severe hearing loss.
And while loud music from mp3 players and earbuds and/or concert halls isn't the only factor, it is a key factor for some...