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Fred Hollows Foundation Awarded the Golden Cup
Andy Nilsen | May 13, 2010The Fred Hollows Foundation recently received a very special award from the Vietnamese Government. The award, named the Golden Cup for Community Development in Vietnam, recognises individuals and organisations and honours their contribution to poverty reduction and community development.
It is the fifth time this award has been granted in Vietnam since 2004 and The Foundation was one of 11 international non government organisations (NGOs) to receive it in 2010.
In Vietnam, receiving this award is a pretty big deal. The award was presented to The Foundation’s Vietnam Country Manager Dr Huynh Tan Phuc at a ceremony in the Hanoi Opera House and broadcast live on national television.
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Should computers have rights?
quagga | May 11, 2010Here's a question for you: Where does a human's human-rights lie?
I personally answer this question by the following reasoning. When somebody's leg is amputated it is the rest of the body retains the rights of the person, not the discarded leg. Likewise when you preform heart transplants, the rights of the person remain with the person and not with the old heart nor the new heart. The extreme logical conclusion of this is that if we progressively replace or destroy each part of the body…starting at the feet working our way up to the eyes then it is the remaining part of the original body that retains the person's rights.
In otherwords, the rights belong to a person's brain/mind: ie, when we say that a person has rights, what we're really saying is that a brain/mind has rights. The human rights, such as the right to freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom to trade, etc.., lie with the brain.
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And then they came for me – why anti-racist Australians must Vote #1 Green and Put Labor Last
Dr Gideon Polya | May 10, 2010
The Slow but Sure may not win this race
foggy | May 7, 2010I read this article Point:Hypotheses first,by Robert Weinberg,under the caption "Has genomics done a lot to fight cancer?" In Nature published online 31 March 2010.(From Twitter
RT @NatureNews: Has genomics done a lot to fight cancer? Robert Weinberg argues no http://bit.ly/9leNsW ; Todd Golub argues yes http://b … 1:15 PM Apr 4th via web).
Robert A. Weinberg is at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, and in the Department of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142, USA.
Email: weinberg@wi.mit.edu
see also this website:
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100412/full/news.2010.178.html?s=news_rss
Market Fever Index 2010 – and some thoughts on the mining industry
patrickcallioni | May 5, 2010In April, perhaps because of Easter or perhaps because the smart money is now moving towards real estate, the index fell back to cover only 908 items, which gives us a value of just under 47. The new, broader index gave us a total of 374,000 hits for the week in question, which became our baseline or 100. This month, I decided to use only the broader index, because there has been too much fluctuation in the results from the other sample. The number of hits has risen to 972,000 – which is a big change. The Easter week must really have had an impact.
I am beginning to think that we really need something a little more sophisticated to make this work. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Surveying from Space: the infrastructure challenge
Assoc Prof Linlin Ge | May 5, 2010Earlier this month when there was an oil spill on the Great Barrier Reef, surveyors were called in to gather important spatial data. This can be an expensive exercise as it requires chartering a plane or helicopter to survey from the air. Funnily enough, these days it is actually much cheaper and quicker if you can survey from space, provided you have the right infrastructure in place.
In many disaster situations one of the first things you have to do is leave the area and get out of the air space. Ironically this is the time you most need to gather intelligence from that area.
W3C Workshop on Privacy for Advanced Web APIs
Malcolm Crompton | May 3, 2010W3C and PrimeLife are convening a W3C Workshop on Privacy for Advanced Web APIs on 12-13 July. This is long overdue!
The Background to the Call for Participation in the Workshop puts it this way:
"As the Web advances toward becoming an application development platform that addresses needs previously met by native applications, work proceeds on APIs to access information that was previously not available to Web developers. The broad availability of possibly sensitive data collected through location sensors and other facilities in a Web browser is just one example of the broad new privacy challenges that the Web faces today."
The People of Australia
Sue Ellson | April 30, 2010Some practical responses to the The People of Australia Australian Multicultural Advisory Council Statement on cultural diversity and recommendations to government which was launched in Melbourne on Friday 30 April.
I attended the Australian Multicultural Advisory Council launch of its Cultural Diversity Statement presented by the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Senator Chris Evans MP, at the Immigration Museum in Melbourne today.
You can access the document online, it’s titled: The People of Australia Australian Multicultural Advisory Council Statement on cultural diversity and recommendations to government.
Living the American dream
Open Forum | April 29, 2010Its 4 O’ Clock in the morning when the alarm rings, Piedad’s ride will be coming by 5am, this gives her an hour to leave food ready for her children and get ready for work. By six, she will be arriving for her first shift at the IBM Factory in Palatine, Illinois, a suburb outside Chicago.
“Life for an illegal Mexican in United States can be rough”, says Piedad Morfin Martinez, now a 73 year-old woman. She moved to United States when she was 23 years old, back in the early sixities. At 7-months pregnant, she had her two and five year-old daughters, one in each hand. “It was the Nogales border”, she remembers. After a long day they finally arrived to Tucson, Arizona. They still had a 35 hour bus ride ahead, Chicago was the destination. “My comadre was waiting for us”, she said.
The ANZAC Book
Les Carlyon | April 27, 2010On 26 March 2010, I had the honour of giving a speech at the launch of The ANZAC Book at the Australian War Memorial. It’s a great book, and as we all get back to work following the ANZAC day long weekend, I’d like to share this transcript of what I had to say on the day.
I guess many of you here today would know of the English author Antony Beevor, who’s famous for his account of the battle of Stalingrad.
I had a yarn to him in Melbourne last year when he was here to promote his new book, which is on D-Day (D-Day: The Battle for Normandy).
I made the remark – and I thought it sensible at the time – that he was fortunate that so many survivors of D-Day were still alive and able to tell him things.
He surprised me by saying that this didn’t count for much.
Why? I asked.
1918 Year of Victory
Ashley Ekins | April 21, 2010On 11 November 1918, after more than four years of continuous warfare, the guns of the Western Front finally ceased firing, bringing to an end the bloodiest conflict the world had then known. An eerie silence descended along the 760-kilometre-length of the Western Front – a silence still recalled each year ‘at the eleventh hour’.
Getting up to speed with workplace flexibility in SMEs
Juliet Bourke | April 15, 2010As a partner in a business, plus an outspoken advocate on workplace flexibility, I am very conscious of practicing what I preach and maintaining a competitive business edge.