Kool Study

A trip back to your roots

Thousands of people flock to Salt Lake City each year, not for Utah’s skiing or national parks, but to search through endless records of births, deaths and marriages at one the world’s largest repositories of genealogy information on the planet.

There is a new breed of traveller focused on uncovering family narratives, as evidenced by the 1,500 visitors who visit the Family History Library every day. Run by the Mormon Church, it contains more than two billion names of the deceased, more than 2.2 million rolls of microfilm and 300,000 books.

Utah is not the only place focused on roots tourism. The newly opened £8.2 million Cumbria Archive Centre in England’s northwest, with records dating back to the 12th Century, is banking on the boom. The fact that Cumbria is home to relatives of three former US presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson fuels interest among genealogy tourists there.

source: bbc.com

Sydney’s gourmet food safaris

Gourmet Safaris are off-the-beaten-path culinary tours that explore Sydney’s diverse cultures through its unique and authentic restaurants, cafes and shops — particularly those that are fairly unknown to the general public.

On the United Flavours of the World tour, I was chauffeured with a bus of about 25 food lovers, led by Maeve herself, to Sydney suburbs I had never heard of on a quest to find the best South American butchers and pastry shops, Portuguese delis, Vietnamese restaurants and desserts of Lebanese, American and English origin.

The eight-hour tour included visiting various establishments, tasting their goods and hearing their stories. We met Jose and Maria Pereira ofSunshine Meats in Milperra, who worked for years to make their wholesale small goods meat business the success it is today, and tasted one of their bestselling products — a chorizo that Jose perfected as a young man living in Portugal. Another shop owner, Margarita Garcia, talked about running her husband’s Chilean butchery after he passed away, now called Margarita’s Cecinas (205 Hamilton Road, Fairfield West; 029-726-0673).

United Flavours of the World is one of 10 bus tours around Sydney, all focusing on specific food cultures and the neighbourhoods in which they are found. For example, Italian Classics takes you to the inner-city suburb of Leichhardt, where Italian immigrants settled, or explore The Exotic Flavours of Lebanon in Punchbowl in southwest Sydney. A local from each neighbourhood accompanies each tour, as well as a specialist guide – or if you are really lucky, Maeve herself.

Seven Sydney walking tours, covering similar themes to the bus tours, are also available for those that prefer to burn a few of the calories acquired during the day’s eating activities.

source: bbc.com

The ultimate New York City food tour

For Famous Fat Dave, aka David Freedenberg, this is his job: providing a mobile buffet featuring the best food you’ll never find near Times Square. Dave leads fun food tours made on the fly from hundreds of hand-picked sandwich shops, pizzerias, bakeries and noodle houses. Many are old-school dives in the boroughs, where accents run deep. How does he pick them?

“‘I’m not a foodie,” he admitted. “I just like food for its pure taste.”

I also like food for its pure taste, and on a recent tour of seven stops in several hours, I ate memorable meals at places that I hadn’t previously noticed on long-familiar streets. In SoHo, we started with a 90-year-old Italian butcher’s, picking up pepper sausage to snack on while criss-crossing Brooklyn’s back streets. At Defonte’s in nearby Red Hook, I wolfed down a delicious beef, aubergine and mozzarella sandwich. In Sunset Park – Brooklyn’s Chinatown – we squeezed into Yun Nan Flavour Snack, a cubbyhole serving an unreal cold noodle bowl of pork, peanuts and spicy chilli sauce. Read this post

Gorillas in the mix in Uganda

From its top to its tail, Uganda is rife with national parks. Chimpanzees play in the shadow of the snow-capped Rwenzori Mountains, elephants drink from the gushing waterfalls of Murchison Falls National Park, and lions and Ugandan cobb graze on the beautiful savannah grasslands of Queen Elizabeth National Park.

But delve deeper into the country’s southwestern corner, and you will find a different type of creature. Here, in the depths of the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, half of the world’s remaining wild mountain gorillas roam free, and you can trek through their disappearing habitat to see them at work, rest and play.

October 2012 marks the 50th anniversary of Uganda’s independence from British rule, and to help safeguard the country’s environmental future, a number of government initiatives have been pushed to the top of the political agenda. Coordinated patrols to curb poaching are increasing, and benefit sharing schemes — including the sharing of tourism revenue with local communities — have been rolled out.

Only 72 trekking permits are issued each day by the Ugandan Wildlife Authority, and each must be applied for through a registered safari operator. But staring in June, the Ugandan Wildlife Authority is expected to follow the Rwandan government in increasing the permit rate from $500 to $750 per person. While it is a fiercely debated political topic in Kampala, the capital of Uganda, many hope the move will help further restrict human-gorilla interactions and raise funds to protect the park’s boundaries from encroaching farm lands and ever resilient poachers.

Having similar DNA to humans, gorillas are highly susceptible to illness, and even catching a common cold could wipe out an entire group. Park visitors must keep a minimum distance of seven metres from the animals at all times, and visits are limited to one hour in the company of one of three habituated families.

Because of these restrictions, the future of this critically-endangered creature looks bright. Following decades of illegal deforestation and poaching, the number of gorillas at Bwindi has steadied at around 340, and for the first time in years, it is very slowly on the rise.

But gorilla tracking is no stroll in the park. It can take anywhere up to 10 hours to find the elusive creatures in the dense undergrowth. Guides lead trekkers up precipitous verges and across rivers, and rusty machetes are used to hack paths through the thick, thorny rainforest. It is the perfect place to live out a childhood Tarzan fantasy, with vast swathes of trees, vines, branches and bushes surrounding trekkers as they penetrate deep into the rainforest.

Treks begin with an early morning safety briefing. Depending on gorilla movements, you can spend a morning anywhere within the park’s 331sqkm forest with either the Mubare gorilla family, the Habinyanja or the Rushegura group. The biggest is the Rushegura, a 12-strong group of habituated gorillas, including what is believed to be the world’s largest silverback, named Mwirima and weighing nearly 200kg.

In his family troop is Karungi, Nyamunwa, Kibande, Nyampazi, Ruterana, Kalembezi, Buzinza and several young males, including a couple of babies. Each is so named because of their individual markings in the local Ugandan language. Their broad shoulders look menacing but their eyes show wariness and they are incredibly shy. Though the woods are dense and thick, the gorillas leave behind muddy prints the size of baseball mitts, and are easier to spot than you may think. Wherever their leader Mriwima goes, they follow, leaving battered trees with broken limbs and chewed pieces of bark and bamboo in their path.

So what is it like seeing a wild gorilla only a few metres away? Well, at first, there may be a fluster in the trees or a violent shake in the canopy above your head. Then there may be a bang and a clatter, or a snapped branch and dark shapes plummeting into a clearing in front of you. Expect your adrenaline levels to rocket and, in the warm, thin air, you will realise that cowering in front of an oncoming silverback is not something you could ever get used to.

source: bbc.com

850,000 Android devices activated each day now

Google Chrome browser has 200 million-plus users, and Gmail has over 350 million users, with more than 5,000 new businesses and educational establishments signing up each day. (GigaOm)

Meanwhile, in other Google (GOOG) news, the Mountain View, California-based company has reportedly pushed back the release of its first Android tablet to make some design tweaks and potentially lower the $249 price. (The Verge)

Yahoo (YHOO) Chief Product Officer Blake Irving has resigned. Irving joined the company in mid-2010, as one of former CEO Carol Bartz’s hires. (All Things D) Instagram is nearly done raising a $50 million round of funding which would value the popular photo-sharing start-up at $500 million. (All Things D) According to a new study, Pinterest is now the third most popular social network behind Facebook and Twitter. (Venturebeat)

First-quarter profits for handset-maker HTC plummeted 70%. “We simply dropped the ball on products in the fourth quarter,” said Chief Financial Officer Winston Yung. (Bloomberg)
Microsoft (MSFT) is so keen on having developers create apps that they’re willing to financially cover the Windows Phone versions. (The New York Times)

source: cnn.com

Apple closes a trojan loophole after 550,000 Macs are infected

Having written several times — and taken a lot of heat from PC users — about the relative security of Apple’s (AAPL) operating systems (See Why are there no Mac viruses), I feel obliged to report that Mac OS X is under what appears to be the most serious malware attack to date.

According to a report posted Wednesday by Dr. Web, a Russian anti-virus vendor that may have a stick in this fire, the security of more than 550,000 Macs around the world have been compromised by the Flashback trojan.

Dr. Web, which sells an antidote for the versions of Flashback that run on Microsoft (MSFT) Windows machines, describes the Mac variant like this: JavaScript code is used to load a Java-applet containing an exploit… The exploit saves an executable file onto the hard drive of the infected Mac machine. The file is used to download malicious payload from a remote server and to launch it…It may get and run any executable specified in a directive received from a server.

Oracle (ORCL), which assumed responsibility for the the Java programming language when it acquired Sun Microsystems in 2010, released a fix for the vulnerability in February. According to Ars Technica’s Jacqui Cheng, “Apple didn’t send out a fix until earlier this week, after news began to spread about the latest Flashback variant.”

The fix is part of the OS X software update called Java for OS X 2012-001. You’ll find it in Software Update in System Preferences. If you think one of your Macs is infected, F-Secure has instructions on how to use the Terminal application in your Utilities folder to find out.

source: cnn.com

The real importance of the revived Viacom-YouTube case

Yesterday’s federal appeals court ruling, reinstating Viacom’s 2007 copyright lawsuit against Google’s YouTube, may be of greater importance to the nation’s technology and media lawyers than to the parties in the suit.

Viacom (VIA) and YouTube themselves have been peacefully coexisting fairly well since 2008, when YouTube initiated its Content ID filtering program, which Viacom finds satisfactory. (Earlier this week Viacom’s Paramount unit and YouTube announced a deal to rent Paramount movies from the site.) Their dispute is backward looking and finite.

Nevertheless, the decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit is of tremendous ongoing interest to the tech and content industries because it fiddles with bedrock definitions that determine the outcome of a crucial recurring question in our Web 2.0 world: When are Internet companies liable for their users’ online copyright infringing activities?

The court’s puzzling, gnarly, 39-page answer to that question, written by Judge Jose Cabranes, will certainly make lawyers earn their fees. What it gives with the right hand, it seems to take away with the left. It will give each side both ammunition and headaches in current and future litigation over such controversial businesses as cyberlockers, like Hotfile.com and RapidShare, which are hotbeds of infringing file-sharing.

Despite the ambiguity, though, the ruling clearly nudges the lines of demarcation modestly in the direction content-owners had hoped. It allows Viacom’s suit against YouTube to go forward “at least with respect to a handful of specific clips” for which Viacom was able to show (mainly through internal YouTube emails) highly specific knowledge of infringement on YouTube’s part. The ruling also reinstates a related class-action copyright suit against YouTube, whose representative plaintiffs include the Football Association Premier League (an English soccer organization), the French Tennis Federation, and a number of music publishers. Those plaintiffs seek damages for ongoing alleged copyright infringement on the site.

In brief statements, both Viacom and YouTube maintained that the wording of the court’s ruling amounted to a victory for it. According to Viacom, “The Court delivered a definitive, common sense message — intentionally ignoring theft is not protected by the law.” YouTube countered: “All that is left of the Viacom lawsuit . . . is a dispute over a tiny percentage of videos long ago removed. . . . Nothing in this decision impacts the way YouTube is operating.”

The ruling’s greatest contribution might be its conclusion that site-owners’ “willful blindness” to users’ infringing activity can be deemed to be “knowledge” on their part, potentially disqualifying them from the protections of the safe harbor. (Explicit recognition of the “willful blindness” principle had been proposed in the recent Stop Online Piracy Act bill, or SOPA — which was dropped after spectacular Internet protests in January — and had been one of the hot-button issues that had alarmed tech lawyers and digital rights advocates.)

Viacom’s case arises from the early history of YouTube, and illustrates well the temptations startup web businesses may have to turn a blind eye to users’ copyright infringement, at least while building scale and audience.

source: cnn.com

Dan Evans fails to repeat Davis Cup heroics as Britain trail Belgium

It seemed an almighty task before the start against a country with two top-100 players but Evans’ two victories against significantly higher ranked players in February’s win over Slovakia had made the unlikely seem possible.

At 344 in the world Evans is ranked almost 300 places behind the No59 Rochus but the 21-year-old from Birmingham pushed his experienced opponent all the way and may well have won had he taken the closest of tie-breaks in the third set.

Josh Goodall’s 6-7, 6-3, 6-4, 6-4 defeat by Steve Darcis earlier had set the stage for Evans again to be the hero but Rochus was a step up from either Lukas Lacko or Martin Klizan, his conquests in the Slovakia match.

Evans picked up where he left off, though, coming back from 40-0 to break Rochus in the opening game and then repeating the feat to win the first set with a stunning forehand down the line.

As if to emphasise the quality of Rochus, the 31-year-old has been in the top 100 for the majority of the last 12 years and has won three of his five meetings with the world No1, Novak Djokovic.

The Belgian showed his quality at the start of the second, reeling off four games in a row after Evans missed a chance to break, and, although the home favourite pulled one back straight away, he could not retrieve the second.

Evans was starting to show his frustration, smacking the net when he missed a volley that would have given him a point for 4-4, but he continued to match his opponent in the third set.

A crunch backhand volley saved a rare break point in the fifth game and, when he was finally broken at the fourth attempt to leave Rochus serving for a two sets to one lead, he broke straight back to love.

In truth that was more to do with some tight play from the Belgian but he eventually prevailed in the most tense of tie-breaks.

There was never more than a point between them but Evans could not take advantage of two set points and Rochus took his first after a linesman seemed to change his mind in calling an Evans forehand wide.

It was desperately close but Evans put the disappointment behind him by breaking in the opening game of the fourth set.

Both players looked very weary and sought to shorten the points but that policy cost Evans as a poor volley and netted drop shot gave Rochus the break back for 4-4, two games after he had hit two aces to deny the Belgian.

Evans was now on the brink. He quickly found himself facing two match points at 4-5 and a cramping Rochus took the first when his opponent missed a forehand.

Ross Hutchins and Colin Fleming must now win the doubles rubber to give Britain hope of coming back to win the tie, something they have done only once before from 2-0. That was in 1930 against Germany.

source: guardian.co.uk

Crucial Manchester United penalty leaves QPR’s manager fuming at referee

They got a huge one regardless after 14 minutes here when handed a penalty by Lee Mason, the referee, and his assistant Ceri Richards. Everything is coming off for Sir Alex Ferguson’s side.

Wayne Rooney threaded a ball into the QPR area where Ashley Young, feeling a hand placed on him by Shaun Derry, went down precipitately. Perhaps Derry should not have touched Young, who will reject any suggestion of a dive, and maybe Mason was correct to point to the spot and show Derry the red card, the seventh of QPR’s relegation-haunted season. Yet the captain’s sending off made it a triple whammy of suspect officiating as Richards, perfectly in place, had failed to spot that Young was a few feet offside; had he flagged for that, QPR would have been punting the free-kick away instead of restarting 1-0 and a man down after Rooney had slotted his 29th goal of the season.

The penalty killed off both United’s nerves and any hopes Manchester City might have had of a result that would place the destiny of the title back in their hands before they kicked off at Arsenal.

“You should have confidence that the referees will get the key decisions right,” QPR’s manager, Mark Hughes, said. “Just lately a lot of managers have lost faith in them.” The club is expected to appeal against Derry’s dismissal.

Ferguson agreed the officials got the incident wrong and of his side’s title hopes he said: “It is important us winning today whatever happens at the Emirates. We will just have to wait. But we have done our job.”

Rio Ferdinand, who had to deal with few scares in the United defence, concurred with his manager’s assessment of the penalty. Regarding their ascendancy over City, whom they previously trailed for most of the season, he said: “We didn’t think about getting back into this position [but] we never doubted we could put a run of games together.

“You need to get momentum at this stage of the season, that is the most important thing, making sure you get a run of games together. We have picked another one off and hopefully we can keep that going.”

United dominated, each half a game of attack versus defence that featured Paul Scholes spraying passes to colleagues at will, although Ferguson had a point when he said Derry’s marching orders blunted United as an attacking force.

“I’m happy we’ve won, it’s the name of the game at the moment,” the manager said. “But to be honest the sending-off gave us too much of a comfort zone. I don’t think we had a shot at goal in the first half. At least in the second half we improved on that part and had lots of shots on goal and a few chances.”

The visitors had their moments, though these were rare. In the first half David de Gea made his sole save of the contest when Adel Taarabt’s deflected shot looped under his crossbar, and the story of United’s dominance is found in the passing statistics: 664 completed from 734 attempts against the 210 managed from 269 made by their visitors.

Nevertheless, before Scholes added the second goal there was still the niggling possibility of QPR scoring an equaliser, as Ferguson acknowledged. “Absolutely. It only takes a second to lose a goal or score one. We kept missing at vital moments – Danny Welbeck was through, we hit the post and the bar,” he said of chances for Michael Carrick and Rafael da Silva, respectively.

“The second goal from Paul Scholes calmed everyone down. He’s capable of that and should perhaps have been having more shots. But we just didn’t shoot enough from outside the box today.”

Regarding a result that makes it eight straight league wins, Ferguson added: “I am pleased with that. There is good consistency in terms of the defending, although today we did not have a lot to do in terms of defending. The other good thing is there is also a game less. There are only six left now, three at home and three away.”

Scholes’s decisive strike arrived on 68 minutes. A failure to control the ball by Taarabt allowed Rafael to feed the maestro and his 25-yard bullet beat Paddy Kenny to his right. As Ferguson mentioned, Carrick crashed a late effort off the post but the abiding memory will be of Young being booed by the visiting supporters every time he touched the ball.

While they had a case, it is now even more emphatically United’s title to lose as they travel to Wigan Athletic on Wednesday.

source: guardian.co.uk

Mario Balotelli may have played last Manchester City game – Mancini

Balotelli was dismissed after receiving a second card yellow in stoppage time to incur a three-match suspension, having previously been sanctioned this season for a red card at Liverpool and a stamp on Tottenham Hotspur’s Scott Parker that prompted a retrospective ban. Yet City are resigned to losing the 21-year-old for at least three further matches after a lunge high into Alex Song’s shin apparently went unnoticed by the referee, Martin Atkinson.

The Football Association will await the referee’s report to see whether mention is made of that first-half incident – no foul was awarded – though, with six games still to play, Mancini will not call again upon a player who has increasingly become a liability. “Mario should have been sent off after 20 minutes,” said the City manager. “I’ve finished my words for him. I’ve finished. I love him as a guy, as a player. I know him. He’s not a bad guy and is a fantastic player. But, at this moment, I’m very sorry for him because he continues to lose his talent, his quality.

“I hope, for him, he can understand that he’s in a bad way for his future. And he can change his behaviour in the future. But I’m finished. We have six games left and he will not play. It’s not sure he’ll [be available] because he could get a three- or four-game ban. Now, I need to be sure that I have always 11 players on the pitch. With Mario, it’s always a big risk. Every time we risk one [man] being sent off, even if he can also score in the last minute.”

Mancini admitted that José Mourinho’s assessment of the striker as “unmanageable” may prove prophetic, with team-mates visibly frustrated as Balotelli’s second foul on Bacary Sagna prompted the late red. City were quick to distance themselves from suggestions that there had been a physical confrontation between players in the dressing room after the game, but when asked whether he would now seek to sell a player who has scored 17 times this season, Mancini said: “Probably.” He was reportedly more explicit on Italian television, saying: “We will sell him.”

“I am disappointed in him,” added Mancini. “He is young and he continues to make a lot of mistakes. I have punished him during the season – it’s totally false that I have different behaviour with Mario than the other players – and he still needs to change his behaviour if he wants to improve. I’ve seen players with huge talent finish in two or three years because they do not change. I hope, for him, he will.”

City’s title challenge effectively fizzled out in defeat in front of the chairman, Khaldoon al-Mubarak, with Mancini’s side having now mustered only one win in six away games. Yet the Italian insisted he remains the man to bring the title back to the club. “When I arrived, City were eighth,” he said. “After six months, we were fighting for a Champions League place. Last year we were close to second and won the FA Cup and, today, we have 15 points more than this time last year.

“When you start a project it’s important you improve, and we have. But we need more experience and to change something. We’ve only worked here for two years. Now the title is more difficult, but we have 18 points to play for and a derby at home. United have had an incredible run in the last two months. But, in football, it can change. Ten days ago we were one point behind. Today it’s eight points. United have more experience than us, so probably it’s difficult, but until it’s impossible, we keep going.”

Arsène Wenger, whose side have returned to third place, conceded that Manchester United are now likely to retain their title. “In France we say that when a horse smells its stable it’s difficult to stop him,” said the Arsenal manager. “It’s not completely over but, eight points behind with six games to go, they can smell that stable.”

source: guardian.co.uk