Travel

The sisterhood is ready for travel

2009-03-09T02:00:00.001-07:00

Here she is in all her glory. I stitched her on 32 count Bone Lugana using DMC threads. She is done in blues to stay in my Arizona home. She is ready to travel in search of another sister stitcher.

This is the path she has taken on her journey.

Harmien in the Netherlands (November 3, 2009)
She sent it to Lili in France (June 17, 2009)
Who sent it to Barbara in Malaysia (June 25, 2009)
Who sent it to Tessa in Australia (July 16, 2009)
Who sent it to Lizzie in North Carolina, U.S. (February 26, 2009)
Who sent it to Barbara in the Netherlands (March 11, 2009)
Who sent it to Sarah (no blog) in Ohio, U.S. (April 11, 2009)
Who sent it to Anna in Pennsylvania, U.S. (May 28, 2009)
Who sent it to Wendy in Ontario, Canada (July 4, 2009)
Who sent it to Sue in Michigan, U.S. (August 2, 2009)
Who sent it to Jennifer in Pennsylvania, U.S. (September 2, 2009)
Who sent it to CJ in Texas, U.S. (October 25, 2009)
Who sent it to Claire in Nova Scotia, Canada (January 20, 2009
Who sent it to Kathy in Arizona, U.S. (February 17, 2009)

If you would like to be the next to receive the travelling pattern, please leave a comment on this post including your email address.
You have until midnight February 25th to leave your comment. I will draw a name on Feb. 26th and will mail her as soon as possible after that.
When you have finished stitching her please post her to your blog including a list of her journey and send her on her way.

Portsmouth frustrate liverpool

2009-03-07T21:10:00.001-08:00

Vladimir Putin's global warningTimes Online - People use the internet, they travel in huge numbers Tuscany is the new discovery and they connect with the West in all manner of wacky ways. Moscow has a chapter of Hells Angels, an Aerograf festival of stunningly painted cars, an annual .

Find discounted airfares and travel options on CheapTickets.com. Browse deals and specials on hotel rooms, rental cars, cruises, condo rentals, and airline tickets.Cheap Travel, Hotel Deals, and Cruise Getaways at CheapTickets.com

www.fodors.comGuidebook Feedback & Updates. The world of travel changes all the time. Here's the latest word on the places we cover. . About Fodor's. Contact Us. Work for Us. Our Web Site. Our Guidebooks. Bookseller Resources. Travel Agents. Newsletter . Contact Us | Link to Us Sign Up For Our Free Newsletter. Copyright ©2009 Fodor's Travel, a division of Random House, Inc. . or find out what others think before you go. Select a Category:. HOTELS. RESTAURANTS. SIGHTS. RESOURCES. Luxury Travel . See more Travel Wire FORUMS. Select a Forum:. . U.S. Canada. Europe. Caribbean. Latin America. Asia. Africa & the . New. and HOT. in Aruba, London, Los Angeles, and Shikoku Island. FODOR'S TRAVEL WIRE. Passport Requirements to Resume .

Choosing the appropriate travel nursing job

2009-03-07T13:40:00.001-08:00

The nurse travel jobs serve as a thrilling method to boost up oneâs career while visiting a beautiful country and gaining precious work experience. Myself webmaster of http://www.healthcareseeker.com dealing as Travel Nurse Agency for Travel Nursing jobs, travel nursing career, travel nursing employment by the certified travel nursing company With these travel nursing jobs, the professionals can actually enjoy broadening of their knowledge base or can experience a new practice environment. There are referral bonuses that are offered to the travel nurses if they refer some colleague or friend to the travel nursing company to make the entire healthcare industry stronger. Apart from getting handsome salary and visiting new places, there are completion and sign on bonuses as well that the travel nurses can enjoy. So, it is wise to choose the travel nursing company with due care in order to get the best nursing job that suits your interest and qualifications in the most effective manner. These jobs are also great alternatives to the boring and regular nursing jobs. The travel nursing assignments actually make it possible for travel nurses to visit the entire world while getting their fixed salaries. These travel nursing jobs are the short-term assigned healthcare jobs that vary from 4 to 26 weeks as per the contract. Such travel nursing jobs even allow the professionals to take pleasure in the carefree bohemian life and that too without any economic difficulties. By letting your travel nursing company know in advance that you are interested in getting some additional cash through means of bonuses and discounts, you can work with the specific hospital or employer offering these facilities. These travel nursing jobs are not just good as far as the pay scale is concerned, they are life changing and exciting as well. It is wise to let the travel nursing company know your priorities and expected salary scale in order to provide you with your desirable hospital or medical institution. If you have a sense for adventure and the right educational qualifications, travel nursing job can prove to be the best profession for you. In order to find the best travel nursing job for yourself, you can get registered with a reputed travel nursing company or agency that has links with some of the highly popular medical employers and hospitals. When the coworker or friend completes the 13 weeks assignment, the travel nurse is paid the referral bonus of about $500.

Public forum: opposition - where to?

2009-03-07T13:20:00.001-08:00

Public Forum: Opposition - Where To?

Organised by SDP

Date: 7 Feb 09, Saturday
Time: 2-5 pm
Venue: Copthorne Orchid Hotel, 214 Dunearn Road
Admission: Free

We are honoured to have the following party and civil society leaders as panel speakers:
1. Desmond Lim, Secretary-General, Singapore Democratic Alliance
2. Ng Teck Siong, Chairman, Reform Party
3. Sin Kek Tong, Chariman, Singapore People's Party
4. Sebastian Teo, President, National Solidarity Party
5. Gandhi Ambalam, Chairman, Singapore Democratic Party

Representing civil society are:
1. Chia Ti Lik, blogger and activist
2. Mohd Jufrie, activist and former election candidate
3. Ng E-jay, blogger and activist
4. Tan Kin Lian, blogger and financial activist
5. Seelan Palay, blogger and activist

Phil collins: tour guide

2009-03-07T04:20:00.001-08:00

Some stories speak for themselves:
Singer Phil Collins said his life now revolves around the Alamo.

Collins is in town, set to appear at local events commemorating the anniversary of the siege and battle of the Alamo. Though he's mulling the idea of recording a tribute cover album of 1960s songs, he said he's making the Alamo “my main thing” as a collector, history buff and possible author.

“Basically, now I've stopped being Phil Collins the singer. This has become what I do,” he said Monday, standing beside a 13-foot-by-15-foot model of the 1836 Alamo compound that will open to the public this week…

“He's very well read,” said Jim Guimarin, who owns the History Shop and has traveled with Collins to battle sites.
Perhaps Collins was hallucinating about being one of General Santa Ana’s soldiers when unleashing his faux-Mexican accent in “Illegal Alien”:

(Hat tip: FARK.com).

Online Sources- FARK.com, MySA.com, YouTube

Hawaii spring break specials 2009

2009-03-07T01:40:00.001-08:00

Aloha Best Hawaii Vacation blog visitors,
Let's stick with the theme of our last post 'Hawaii Spring Break Vacation with Kids'. Remember Hawaii hotels offer nice specials these days for spring season but you can save a lot of money by staying with your family at a fully equipped Hawaii vacation rental home near best beaches. You can cook 'at home' and take advantage of other free amenities offered by most Hawaii vacation rental hosts free of charge, like free high speed Internet and snorkel gear or boogie boards.

We've put together a list for you of Hawaii vacation rental homes, which offer great spring break accommodation specials or are worthwhile mentioning because of their low cost budget rentals. Here is our list of Best Hawaii Places for Spring 2009, from most expensive luxury homes to cheap, affordable vacation condos and cottages:

Spend Spring Break Kohala Coast Vacation at this brand-new Luxurious Kohala Coast Villa - 3 Bd/3.5 Ba - (Sleeps 6) at the lowest rate ever $810/nt.! This 3000sft Kohala Coast villa features spectacular ocean views from each room, private swimming pool and spa. Guests will enjoy all the luxury Kohala Coast resort amenities of Mauna Kea and Hapuna Beach Resort!

This Puako Oceanfront 4Bd/5Ba from $735/nt. (sleeps 8) is currently still available for spring months May + April 2009. This is the Best price for your family beach vacation in Hawaii! Book it when you can. There is no other Puako beach front home available at this low price.

Enjoy sunsets from the privacy of the large covered lanai, your own sandy beach, enticing tidepools, and ocean breezes in the trees at this lovely 3Bd/3Ba Puako Oceanfront Beach Home
on the Kohala Coast. Owners offer the Beach House at the lowest rate of Puako ocean front homes at $620/nt. for Hawaii Spring Special April and May 2009.

You look for a luxury Hawaii ocean view vacation home, then this one is right for you Kohala Coast vacation home 3BR/3.5BA, $435/nt. (dbl.) w/pool & tennis court Enjoy ocean views and top amenities at the most affordable rate at upscale gated community! At this moment, Spring months April + May 2009 are still available for your spring break vacation in Hawaii.

When you love the warm weather at Kailua-Kona and some late night action, this Kona 4Bd/5Ba Vacation Home with pool and jacuzzi Amazing 180-degree ocean views makes your Spring Break g vacation in Kona Hawaii a special one for special Spring rate $290/nt. Share this Kona ocean view home with friends or family. Available Spring Break dates 2009: 3/12 - 3/20 + April 2009.

2 Bd/2 Ba Kohala Coast vacation home at Kohala Estate with 180° ocean view offers a a 30% discount for Spring 2009 April, May and June at $175/nt. (dbl.). Experience Hawaii at its best. Enjoy the Aloha at this tropically decorates two bedroom, two bathroom Kohala Coast vacation home, minutes from best white sands beaches, world-class golf and five star resorts.

Opulent Executive Kona Vacation Home has panoramic ocean view, every amenity,long distance phone and internet,a two person jacuzzi bath with ocean view. BBQ and watch the whales from the deck and take in the continually comfortable Hawaiian breezes and the smell of flowers as you experience the beauty of paradise. This is a home you will want to come back to again and again. All this is available for Spring Special Rate from May 2009 at $150/nt.

Watch the waves at H-Bay and the ocean view sunsets off the water at Keauhou Bay at this 2Bd/2Ba Luxury Kona Country Club condo. You will have every amenity,long distance phone,high speed internet,granite counters throughout, gourmet kitchen, and BBQ from the beautiful lanai while listening to the luau music. Swim in the beautiful pool to relax and take in the Hawaiian lifestyle. You will not want to go home. Cheap Spring Rates for this Kona condo start May at $125/nt.

It's just the two of you and you love to stay close to the beach, this Puako Apartment is right across from Beach 1Bd/1Ba Puako Vacation Apartment (2 people max., no children). Best Deal Puako Beach $115/nt.! It is available for spring vacation in Puako on the Kohala Coast: 3/15 - 3/31 + April + May! In addition to Puako beach, just across the street from the apartment, best Big Island white sand beaches Hapuna Beach and Mauna Kea Beach are a short 5-min. drive away.

Waikoloa Golf Condo with full kitchen enjoys expansive ocean views is located directly on the beautiful Waikoloa Village Golf Course on the Big Island. It has expansive ocean and beautiful sunset views. Beautiful Anaeho'omalu Beach is a short 10-min. drive away. The Golf Condo offers a great cancellation special NOW for 2/14 - 28/09 at $100/nt. and Spring SPECIALS for April + May at $110/nt.

Save lots of money on your nightly rate for going out to dinner or do a whale watch tour when you stay at this fully equipped (full kitchen), private location on the sunny side of Waimea with short 10-minute drive to the beach, which is currently still available for Spring months 2009 at $95/nt. with 7-night booking: 3/5 - 3/31 + April + May. See more info Sunny Side Waimea Kohala Coast Vacation Rental Cottage Near Best Beaches

There is no place like Hawaii on a Spring vacation. Hope you found what you were looking for on our list of Best Places Hawaii for Spring Break vacation 2009. Please, share comments about your Spring Break vacation in Hawaii. Mahalo and aloha, Pua Hawaii Vacations

Related Articles

Why rent a Hawaii Vacation Rental? Best Big Island Luau Kohala Coast Shopping Best Big Island Beach
Tags: Spring Break Hawaii, Spring Break 2009, Hawaii Spring Specials 2009, Hawaii Spring Vacationhttp://kohalacoastweb.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

Travel channel

2009-03-07T00:30:00.001-08:00

Travel ChannelThere are many things that you can learn by simply watching the Travel channel. Do you want to find out what you can do while vacationing? The travel channel can help. How about where you should plan your next trip? Again, if you watch the travel channel you should not have any problems learning about the world as a whole. A lot of people watch the travel channel because they simply want to find out about what they are missing out on elsewhere in the world. So what is the point of watching the travel channel? There is really no reason as to why you should watch this channel. You will want to consider who you are as a person, and then ask yourself if there is anything that you can learn from the travel channel. Some people are simply addicted to traveling the world and the more that they can find out about travel destinations the happier they become. On the other side of things, if you work within the travel industry you may want to watch this channel in order to see what is going on. You never know when you will pick up a tidbit of information that can help you in your day to day work experiences. There are many different programs that air on the travel channel. You can watch everything from shows that detail the best vacation destinations to how certain areas in the world have changed drastically over the years. When it comes down to it the travel channel offers many programs that suit the needs of millions of people. Overall, if you have never watched the travel channel before you may want to think about doing so today. Many people rely on the written word when they want to learn about the travel industry or some of the destinations that are available for vacationing. Instead of doing this you should start to watch the travel channel on a regular basis. You may find out soon enough that you are addicted to the travel channel, and you are planning your schedule to ensure that you get your fill. About Authorworldtravels.co.uk is a huge database of travel trailers and amateur online videos taken from destinations around the world. It's easy to register and upload your own videos. Source: ArticleTrader.com

Oh oh oh...it's magic: givenchy magic kajal eye pencil

2009-03-07T00:10:00.001-08:00

Last Tuesday, a select group of bloggers was invited to the Givenchy offices in NYC to celebrate the launch of the Maharani Spring 2009 collection. Fresh fruit and yogurt were on the menu for this beauty breakfast, but I couldn’t be bothered with the food. I was too busy salivating over the products. It’s rare that I fall in love with an entire collection, so trust me when I tell you that every component of this compilation is a winner and deserves a spot in your makeup case. As Nicolas Degennes, Artistic Director of Givenchy Makeup, took us on a tour of his artistic imagination and described each Indian-inspired beauty, I fell a little deeper in love.

Once the presentation concluded, Nicolas (the creative genius behind the aptly named Phenomen'Eyes Mascara) approached me and whispered in French accented English, “My dear, you will love this eye pencil. You will love it.”

Initially, I was taken aback. Was Nicolas clairvoyant? Was he reading my mind? Could he see the eyeliner and sugarplums that dance in my head? Then I remembered that I had swathed my eyes in rings of bright blue pencil, earlier that morning. Of course Nicolas knew I was dying to try his new Magic Kajal Eye Pencil. My eyeliner junkie status was written all over my face.

After the breakfast, I couldn’t get back to my hotel room quick enough. I couldn’t wait another minute to experience Kajal’s conjury. I took the chubby crayon in my hand, ran circles around my eyes, then looked into the mirror for the final verdict. Survey says…WINNER! Rimmed in the glossiest, most bewitching black, I couldn’t take my eyes off of my eyes.

There aren’t enough superlatives in the English language for me to adequately sing the praises of Givenchy’s Magic Kajal Eye Pencil. This is the black smudgy pencil that eyeliner enthusiasts have been waiting for. The pencil contains wax and oil, which gives the crayon a creamy texture. This creaminess does cause the pigment to travel; so if you like a clean, more graphic line, I advise dusting some translucent powder underneath the lower lash line (I like Make Up For Ever’s HD Microfinish Powder).

I love how this liner makes me look like a badass.

Lonely planet's new morocco guide

2009-03-06T23:30:00.001-08:00

At the end of January, The View from Fez talked to Paul Clammer, co-ordinating author of Lonely Planet's new Morocco guidebook (see here). The book has now been launched.

Graced with a particularly striking cover photograph of the Royal Palace doors in Fez, the guidebook is now available. It costs £15.99 and can be ordered from LP's website shop. !-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:EN-GB;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} -->

"Morocco is sensory overload at its most intoxicating," runs the LP blurb, "from the scents and sounds of the medinas of Fes and Marrakesh to the astonishing Saharan landscapes. Roam its labyrinthine souqs, scrunch your toes into the sunset sand and let our guide take you to the cafes and hammams only the locals know."

Paul points out that the map of the Fes medina is much improved in comparison with the map in the last edition. The guidebooks are updated every two years and this is the 9th edition. Paul was aided and abetted by Marrakech expert Alison Bing (who also wrote LP's Marrakesh Encounter), and acclaimed travel writer, Anthony Sattin.

Tags: Moroccan Morocco Fes, Maghreb news

Travel search engine

2009-03-06T08:40:00.001-08:00

Zoomtra
There are two ways to find the cheapest air ticket. Browse through websites of airlines and other travel intermediaries, which can mean going to 10-12 sites. Even then, you are not sure whether you have covered all options. Alternatively, just land at one website, www.zoomtra.com.
The site serves only indian domestic flights. You can set alert to any flight route for a price. You can search hotels too in this search engine site.
Zoomtra is an independent search engine for travel deals (at present, domestic airline tickets and hotel rooms). What makes it unique is that it processes information from more providers — airlines and travel portals — than any other website. The advantage is two-fold. One, while other portals have ticketing tie-ups with select airlines, which can induce an element of bias in throwing up the cheapest option or select coverage, Zoomtra doesn’t. Two, travel portals draw from airline sites and their own tie-ups, but exclude rival portals; Zoomtra covers both sets.

Given your date of travel, Zoomtra throws up the cheapest options. Then, it helps you filter this further by airline, time of travel or fare. Once you decide on a flight, you are guided to the airline or portal that is offering that flight, and you pay there. Zoomtra doesn’t charge you anything — it makes its money through advertising and by getting a cut from airline and portals on tickets that are identified through its search engine.

The swankiest of all the club meds is now offering autumn weeks for $999, including airfare from ft. lauderdale

2009-03-06T06:00:00.001-08:00

Of all the Club Meds in the western hemisphere, the Club Med Columbus Isle in the Bahamas was designed to be the poshest of them all. From the beginning, its rates have been higher than all others, and its appeal was unashamedly towards the upper crust of vacationers. That's why its current cry for help is so revealing of how slow things are in the world of tropical vacations.

On departures through October 18, club Med Columbus Isle will charge you only $999 per person (based on double occupancy) for a seven-night vacation of everything -- meals, drinks, entertainment, transfers -- including round-trip airfare from Ft. Lauderdale. They will also arrange connecting flights into and out of Ft. Lauderdale for slightly more. Divide the price by 7 and you're paying only $142 a night for room, three meals, unlimited drinks, unlimited non-mechanized sea sports, entertainment and more, in a comfortable room with all amenities.

To book, call tel. 800/CLUB MED or go to www.clubmed.us.

Write and read comments about this post.

Our hertz nightmare

2009-03-06T01:40:00.001-08:00

After checking out of the hotel we took a taxi to the airport (12 Euros) and went to pick up our hire car from Hertz. Easier said than done! First we went straight to the car hire office in the car park, but were told that we had to pick the car keys up from the terminal building. I stood with the cases in the sweltering hot sun while Stuart picked up the keys - easy enough.

Unfortunately when we found the right number in the Hertz parking lot, the space was empty - no car! Stuart went back to the Hertz office in the parking lot to ask the woman where the car was. She came out of her office and wandered aimlessly around the parking lot for the next 15 minutes looking for the car, without success. She then told Stuart that he would have to walk back to the terminal building again and speak to the staff there. So he did, and came back a few minutes later with some new car keys.

We had booked the car through Expedia and selected the second car size up, which had room for two adults, two children and two suitcases. Much to our dismay, the keys that Stuart had been given were for a Fiat Panda - with a boot barely big enough to fit one suitcase.

The next half hour was spent with Stuart arguing with the Hertz staff, who refused to budge and wouldn't give us a car of the size that we'd ordered, despite the fact that there were a couple of hundred other Hertz cars in the parking lot and some of them weren't due to be picked up until the following day. Hertz refused to take responsibility for the car that they had lost.

In the end we had to make do with the pile of s**t known as the Fiat Panda . The Hertz guy actually had the audacity to tell us that we should think ourselves lucky, as this car was an upgrade from what we had previously ordered. Nothing like putting the customer first!

Indonesian traditional foods

2009-03-05T20:40:00.001-08:00

The celebrations usually takes place at Kemayoran, and there will be many people selling Kerak Telor there. You can find the great taste of otak-otak in Kota Serang. Bandung, the capital city of West Java, has many unique traditional foods. So, if you would like to try this Betawi traditional food, I would advise you to come to Kemayoran on June or July. There are five big islands and more than thirty provinces altogether, and each provinces has its own unique traditional foods. Many believe that Bandung people, usually called as Sundanese, would struggle living in a vegetarial garden because of this lalapan. This food is made from steamed fish wrapped in banana leaves. Kerak Telor would be easy to find on June and July when Jakarta celebrates its annyversary. Padang is famous for its spicy foods, and many of its foods use coconut milk as ingredient. Indonesia consists of many islands and many provinces. Gudeg is another traditional food which comes from Yogyakarta. Its unique traditional food is Asinan Bogor. Jakarta, the capital city of the country, or as its original people called as Betawi, has Kerak Telor as its traditional food. Like other Javanese foods, gudeg is rather sweety than salty. Be sure to have them when visiting Kota Serang. Below are some of those foods you should not miss them when you come to that country. This food can not be easy to find nowadays as Jakarta people like to flock to fast food restaurants and other modern foods which are scattered throughout the city. People usually eat gudeg together with warm rice and spicy krecek. In the contrary with Kerak Telor, you can almost find this food anytime you want. Nasi Rawon is traditional food from East Java. The dark color of the soup comes from seeds of kluwek nuts. Batagor, also called as baso tahu goreng, is fried meatball and tofu with peanut sausage. There are many Palembang people in Jakarta or in other town selling this food. Beside otak-otak, Kota Serang is also famous for its Ikan Bandeng. Peuyeum, which is soft and tastes sweet, made of fermented sago. Empek-empek is another Indonesian traditional food from Palembang. Rendang or spicy beef comes from Padang, West Sumatra. Nasi timbel is rice wrapped in banana leaves, usually served with fried chicken, lalapan, and sambal or spicy sauce. Other famous Bandung traditional foods are nasi timbel, comro, batagor, peuyeum, etc. This food is so popular that you do not have to go across that island to try this one. Just come to this town, ask people wherever they are, they will guide you to any place selling Asinan Bogor. This province is located in Sumatra Island. Lalapan is one of them. Beside Kerak Telor and Roti Buaya, there are also Ketoprak, and Soto Betawi. This Roti Buaya usually served at a Betawi's traditional wedding ceremony. If you have a chance to come to Yogyakarta, do not miss to try this food as Yogyakarta is also known as Kota Gudeg, means The City of Gudeg. Gudeg is made of young jackfruit which is cooked in Javanese traditional way. Your travel to Indonesia would not be complete without having its traditional foods. Other ingredients accompanying the young jackfruit are egg, tofu, and tempe. Lalapan is fresh vegetables accompanied by sambal or you may also say spicy sauce. Nasi Rawon is rice served with dark beef soup. Another Indonesian traditional food is otak-otak. Another food from Betawi is Roti Buaya, made of bread in a crocodile shape. Bogor is a small town near Jakarta.

So long, for now, rainbow room... and discovering muscat, oman

2009-03-05T09:10:00.001-08:00

Back in 1996, I had a chance to return to New York City on behalf of my boss at BMC Software. At the time, I hadn't been back to Manhattan since I was a small boy and the city always held a great fascination for me. I've been back about a dozen times since then but the city still fascinates me. One of the highlights of that trip was a visit to the Rainbow Room in Rockefeller Center. Our business meeting was held there and the experience was fantastic. I still remember taking in the view of the city from the 65th floor - amazing.

Well, it looks like part of the Rainbow Room, the Rainbow Grill, will be closing temporarily due to the economic downturn. A staple of the Manhattan nightlife for 75 years may be no more. Sad. Let's hope things pick up and the restaurant is fully open once again.

On to a complete unrelated item, I was reading something about Muscat, Oman today and it made me want to do some digging on Muscat. Apparently, it is a rarely visited but amazing destination in the Middle East.

From Shaw Travel

Not much is available online so here are a couple of brief pieces on Muscat:

Muscat, Oman: An Undiscovered Middle Eastern Treasure

Driving to Muscat from Dubai

Feet on the ground in amsterdam

2009-03-05T01:50:00.001-08:00

So I hop on my bike and head for Dam Square. Dam Square is the epicenter of Amsterdam. This is the place you start, finish or pass through while sightseeing. I really like the area of town called Leliegracht. This area is in the canal belt and is filled with quaint shops, cafes, bookshops, galleries and rolling streets with picturesque bridges. I think its a great place to base from to see the city because its a quiet area a night but only steps from the main areas. I spend the rest of the day just getting re acquainted with the city; the weather is mild, a little overcast and about 55 degrees. The first night in any city I travel to is the Jet Lag night... this means using all of my energy to stay awake until at least 10 pm. My body clock is 9 hours off back in PST so every atom in my bod wants to sleep.

Travel TIP: Don't plan any organized or paid sightseeing such as a tour on your arrival day; chances are you will be so fuzzy from the long flight and 9 hour time change that you wont remember a thing. My advise is get there, unpack, shower and head out getting to know the neighorhood around your hotel. Find the basics for a comfortable stay.. IE closest shop for soda, water and snacks. Closest ATM, cafe for a good cup of joe and place to grab dinner. This way you have a basic understanding of your surroundings and it helps keep you awake after you land.

Amsterdam has a ton of Gyro shops that make for a great, yummy fast meal. Shaved lamb, three different types of sauces, simple salad and flat bread made a perfect jet lag day dinner. Hit the sack, hoping for 12 hours of sleeping bliss to make up for the lost day of travel; it should get me back on local time quickly.

Barbarella (1968) - 40th anniversary retrospective

2009-03-04T13:50:00.001-08:00

BARBARELLA
(1968, France/Italy)
"The Universe has been pacified for centuries..."

Barbarella is definitely a cult film. It wasn't designed to be a cult, like some films, it was made to make money. But like Blade Runner it was rejected by critics and did badly in cinemas. The critics were especially harsh, and the film continues not to be taken seriously. But despite being ignored, it still finds a following - a cult film. It's at the top of my top films, not because it's an underdog, but because I genuinely love it and haven't tired of it in thirty years. I first saw Barbarella at midnight on TV in a double-bill with This Island Earth. I love the look, the story, the characters, the cast and the intent.
A recent announcement that Barbarella would be remade by Robert Rodriguez was good news, even if it would only inspire a DVD special edition of the original. Most cult movies get special editions, right? But the project has fallen through for the moment.

I considered building a Barbarella website, thinking this blog wasn't the best vehicle for picture-heavy adulation, so I put it off. But realising that this was the fortieth anniversary year of the film's debut, I'm going to start passing on what I know. Expect a series of articles that will hopefully inspire a few new fans for this mad, mad movie. I'll begin with a review, and there will be much more material along soon. A new sidebar heading will provide shortcuts to all the 'chapters'.

Barbarella started life as a French comic strip, written and drawn by Jean Claude Forest. Barbarella had similar adventures to another comic strip hero, Flash Gordon, travelling around the galaxy and meeting new futuristic species while fighting a common foe. But unlike Flash, she could sleep around - Barb was often naked and used sex to save the Universe, all very 1960s, and very much the age of 'free love'.

The comic strips first appeared in French magazines and were very popular, soon reprinted as books of complete adventures - early 'graphic novels' before the phrase had been coined. The first volume became the basis of producer Dino de Laurentiis' 1968 movie.

Creator Jean Claude Forest was brought in as an adviser, helping make it a faithful adaption. For whatever reason, there are also a raft of scriptwriters credited in the movie's titles, though the end result is remarkably smooth. The original trailer lists only one writer, the celebrated counter-culture author Terry Southern, who had co-written the screenplay for Kubrick's Dr Strangelove. Southern later worked on the script for Easy Rider, and his novel The Magic Christian was adapted as a Peter Sellers comedy.

It's easy to see elements of Southern's titular character Candy (also filmed in 1968) in Barbarella, but there's nothing that wasn't already in Forest's original comics. Both stories are variations on Alice in Wonderland with added sexuality and recreational drug use. My guess is that Southern provided much of the witty dialogue and added many of the double-entendres, like Barbarella's translator device, the 'tongue box'. References to the World President selfishly hanging onto his defence forces in times of interplanetary peril, and to the continuing existence of the poor, both hint at his subversive wit at work.

The story is set ridiculously far into the future, around 40,000 A.D. War no longer exists, the Universe is unified and all about love - again, very 1960s. The Earth President asks Barbarella to pursue a mad scientist, Durand Durand, the inventor of a doomsday weapon.

She sets off in her spaceship, Alpha 7, and heads for Planet 16 orbiting Tau Ceti. She crashed during a magnetic storm, and accidentally discovers Durand's wrecked ship, Alpha 1. There she assesses the lay of the land, trading sex for information that could lead to the scientist. The trail leads to a place of evil and depravity, the sinful city of Sogo (a pun on Sodom and Gomorrah). She encounters evil children, killer dolls, leather robots, a maze full of disintegrating outcasts and finally, the voracious consorts in the palace of the Black Queen.

The winding, cliffhanger plot, places the heroine in constant peril. A running gag is that Barbarella keeps losing her clothes, necessitating a string of outlandish outfits. Indeed, the opening credits are a zero gravity strip-tease, where she loses her spacesuit. She falls into sexual encounters with every unusual character she meets - whether male or female, friend or enemy. Though there's no explicit coupling (excepting the bizarre hand-to-hand future-sex), there is occasional nudity, enough to warrant an 'X' certificate in the UK.

The film was also trimmed down to get an 'R' in the US, when a (mild) lesbian love scene was excised. I assume these cuts weren't necessary in the more liberal European countries, but have found no evidence that there were longer, alternate versions that included this scene. The only existing variation I've seen, is the brief full-frontal nudity in the opening striptease - older TV prints showed the words of the opening credits differently animated over Jane Fonda's nudity.

It's both space adventure and satirical comedy. Fonda plays it straight-faced, though much of the dialogue is ridiculous and tongue-in-cheek. It's a companion piece to the style of Batman (1966), where comic strip hero ethics were also sent up, in the sense of no-one could be that virtuous. The debt to the original 1930s Flash Gordon comic strip was repaid when Barbarella heavily influenced De Laurentiis' later movie adaption. Though Flash Gordon (1980) lacks the nudity, psychedlia and drug references that put Barbarella into a relatively small genre of adults-only fantasy.

The special effects have dated, though the use of front-projection originally allowed for a startling new look, where shifting colourful patterns expand bare sets into looking huge and unworldly. The name of the liquid monster living under the city, has even been used as the name of UK lava lamp manufacturer, Mathmos.

The projections were used extensively in the flying scenes, the aerial battle, the Chamber of Dreams and the journey through space. It looks obvious, but is at least imaginative and fascinating. The modelwork is bizarre - from Barbarella's triple-throbbing spaceship to the spidery city of Sogo. The sky-ships of the Black Guard look like they've been built by breast-obsessed fashion-designers, rather than aviation engineers. The fantastic streets of Sogo look more like modern art than anything recognisably functional.

Unusually, the entire film was shot on a sound stage - not many other movies have been made like this so consistently. Everything had to be designed and built from scratch, giving the whole movie a pure fantasy feel. The sets and costumes are far-out, sexy and stylish, and the influence of the film has been huge but largely unrecognised. Some of the only acknowledgements that Barbarella has received were from the makers of The Fifth Element and Demolition Man (the latter also had a hand-to-hand sex scene, and was set in a future where weapons were history).

Barbarella was one of the first VHS tapes that I bought. Home video releases have always called it Barbarella - Queen of the Galaxy for no logical reason. I waited for a 2.35 widescreen version for many years and it finally appeared on laserdisc. I was asked to write the sleeve notes for the UK release and these were later reprinted as a DVD insert. I've also managed to see it in a cinema. The wider aspect ratio revealed many new details, like the large blue rabbits and other live animals used to populate the corners of the sets.

Paramount have yet to add any extra DVD material besides the (pretty poor) original US trailer (see YouTube clip below). Jane Fonda should at least be grabbed for a commentary session, especially now that many of the cast have passed away - most recently John Phillip Law. There was a great behind-the-scenes featurette that has some great behind-the-scenes footage, even showing Fonda at home cooking for husband Roger Vadim, the director of Barbarella. The DVD has been mastered from fairly scratchy film elements, and the colour isn't as vivid as it could be.

With an international cast, many have quite thick European accents, and even Fonda's voice is occasionally lost in the mix. Only by looking at the comic book, the script, or the very useful DVD subtitles, can you appreciate every line of dialogue.

In the future I want to talk more about the cast, characters, costumes, missing scenes, publicity posters, magazines... so stay tuned.

And remember... LOVE!

Most Barbarella fansites are either small, out of date and/or riddled with pop-ups. But this French site has more photos than most, and is the only one I'll recommend.

"tell them not to travel to america"

2009-03-03T16:30:00.001-08:00

Sherman Oaks, California

"I wanted to warn people about what can happen there, to tell them not to travel to America," Australian citizen Fazle Rabbi told the Los Angeles Times in describing his treatment at the hands of Customs and Border Protection officers at LAX. (The Sydney Morning Herald also ran a story.)

Rabbi and his family held valid Australian passports (having been naturalized from Bangladesh four years earlier), held valid U.S. visas (although, as Ozzies, they did not need them) but were refused entry to the United States. The reported reason was that he had been previously denied visas when he lived in Bangladesh.

We have the worst of both worlds: poor border security that alienates visitors.

Designing wisdom through the web: the passion of ranking

2009-03-03T13:20:00.001-08:00

Draft. Do not Quote. Presented at the workshop on Collective Wisdom, Collège de France, Paris 22-23 May 2009.

Let me start with a rather trivial remark: Design matters. This triviality is rich of consequences for collective wisdom. This is the central claim I would like to defend through this paper. No matter how many people are involved in the production of a collective outcome – a decision, an action, a cognitive achievement etc. – the way in which their interactions are designed, what they may know and not know of each other, how they access the collective procedure, what path their actions follows and how it merges with the actions of others, affects the content of the outcome. Of course this is well known by policy makers, constitution writers and all those who participate into the institutional design of a democratic system, or any other system of rules that has to take into account the point of view of the many. But the claim may appear less evident – or at least in need of a more articulate justification - when it deals with the design of knowledge and the epistemic practices on the Web. That is because the Web has been mainly seen as a disruptive technology whose immediate effect was to blow up all the existing legitimate procedures of knowledge access, thus “empowering” its users with a new intellectual freedom, the liberty to produce, access and distribute content in a totally unregulated way. Still, methods of tapping into the wisdom of the crowds on the Web are many and much more clearly differentiated that it is usually acknowledged. In his book on the Wisdom of Crowds – probably the only shared piece of collective wisdom that we are able to attribute to each other as a background reading in this very interdisciplinary conference – James Surowiecki writes about the different designs for capturing collective wisdom: “in the end there is nothing about a futures market that makes it inherently smarter than, say, Google. These are all attempts to tap into the wisdom of the crowd, and that’s the reason they work”. Yet, sometimes the devil is in the details and the way in which the wisdom of crowds is captured makes a huge difference on its outcome and its impact on our cognitive life. The design question that is thus central when dealing with these systems is: How can people and computers be connected so that—collectively—they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers?

In this paper I will try to go through the details of some of the collective wisdom systems that are nowadays used on the Web. I will provide a brief “technical” description of the design that underlies each of them. Then, I will argue that these systems work because of their very special way of articulating (1) individual choices and collectively-filtered preferences on one hand and (2) human actions and computer processes on the other. I will then conclude by some epistemological remarks about the role of ranking in our epistemic practices, arguing that the success of the Web as an epistemic practice is due to its capacity to provide not so much a potentially infinite system of information storage, but a giant network of ranking and rating systems in which information is valued as long as it has been already filtered by other people. My modest epistemological prediction is that the Information Age is being replaced by a Reputation Age in which the reputation of an item – that is how others value and rate the item - is the only way we have to extract information about it. I see this passion of ranking in collective wisdom as such a central feature that I’m tempted to add it as a condition in the very illuminating list of conditions that James Surowiecki imposes on the characterisation of a wise crowd, that is:

diversity of opinion (each person should have some private information)independence (people’s opinions are not determined by others)decentralization (people are able to draw on local knowledge)aggregation (presence of mechanisms that turn individual judgements in collective decisions)

presence of a rating device (each person should be able to produce a rating hierarchy, rely on past ranking systems and make – at least in some circumstances – his or her rating available to other persons)

I think that this last condition is particularly useful to understand the processes of collective intelligence that the Internet has made possible, although it is not limited to the Internet phenomenon. Of course, this opens the epistemological question of the epistemic value of these rankings, that it, to what extent their production and use by a group changes the ratio between truths and falsities produced by that group and, individually, how an awareness of rankings should affect a person’s beliefs. After all, rankings introduce a bias in judgement and the epistemic superiority of a biased judgement is in need of justification. Moreover, these rankings are the result of collective human registered activities with artificial devices. The control of the heuristics and techniques that underlie this dynamics of information may be out of sight or incomprehensible for the users who find themselves in the very vulnerable position of relying on external sources of information through a dynamic, machine-based channel of communication whose heuristics and biases are not under their control. For example, that companies used to pay to be included in search engines or gain a “preferred placement” was unknown to 60% of users[1] until the American Federal Trade Corporation wrote in 2002 a public recommendation asking to search engines companies to disclose paid link policies and clearly mark advertisements to avoid users’ confusion.

The epistemic status of these collectively produced rankings thus opens a series of epistemological questions:

1. Why do people trust these rankings and should they?

2. Why should we assume that the collective filtering of preferences produces wiser results on the Web?

3. What are the heuristics and biases of the aggregating systems on the Web that people should be aware of?

These questions include a descriptive as well as a normative perspective on the social epistemology of collective wisdom systems. A socio-epistemological approach to these questions - as the one I endorse - should try to elucidate both perspectives. Although this paper will explore more the descriptive side of the question, by showing the design of collective wisdom systems with their respective biases, let me introduce these examples by some general epistemological reflections that suggest also a possible line of answer to the normative issues. In my view, in an information-dense environment, where sources are in constant competition to get attention and the option of the direct verification of the information is simply not available at reasonable costs, evaluation and rankings are epistemic tools and cognitive practices that provide an inevitable shortcut to information. This is especially striking in contemporary informationally-overloaded societies, but I think it is a permanent feature of any extraction of information from a corpus of knowledge. There is no ideal knowledge that we can adjudicate without the access to previous evaluations and adjudications of others. And my modest epistemological prediction is that the higher is the uncertainty on the content of information, the stronger is the weight of the opinions of others in order to establish the quality of this content. This doesn’t make us more gullible. Our epistemic responsibility in dealing with these reputational devices is to be aware of the biases that the design of each of these devices incorporates, either for technical reasons or for sociological or institutional reasons. A detailed presentation of what sort of aggregation of individual choices the Internet makes available should be thus accompanied by an analysis of the possible biases that each of these systems carries in its design.

1. Collective intelligence out of individual choices

People - and other intelligent agents - often think better in groups and sometimes think in ways which would be simply impossible for isolated individuals. The Internet is surely an example of this. That is why the rise of the Internet created from the onset huge expectations about a possible “overcoming” of thought processes at the individual level, towards an emergence of a new – more powerful – form of technologically-mediated intelligence. A plethora of images and metaphors of the Internet as a super-intelligent agent thus invaded the literature on media studies – such as the Internet as an extended mind, a distributed digital consciousness, a higher-order intelligent being, etc…

Yet, the collective processes that make Internet such a powerful cognitive media are precisely an example of “collective intelligence” in the intended meaning of this workshop, that is, a mean of aggregation of individual choices and preferences. What Internet made possible though – and this was indeed spectacular - was a brand new form of aggregation that simply didn’t exist before its invention and diffusion around the world. In this sense, it provided a new tool for aggregating individual behaviours that may serve as a basis for rethinking other forms of institutions whose survival depends on combining in the appropriate way the views of the many.

1.1. The Internet and the Web

As I said in the introduction, the salient aspect of this new form of aggregation is a special way of articulating individual choices and collectively-filtered preferences through the technology of the Internet and, especially, of the World Wide Web. In this sense, it is useful to distinguish from the onset between the Internet as a networking phenomenon and the Web as a specific technology made possible by the existence of this new network. The Internet is a network whose beginnings go back to the Sixties, when American scientists at AT&T, Rand and MIT and the Defense Communication Agency started to think of an alternative model of transmitting information through a network. In the classical telephone system, when you call New York from your apartment in Paris, a circuit is open between you and the New York destination – roughly a copper line which physically connects the two destinations. The idea was thus to develop an alternative – “packet-switching” technology, by digitalizing conversations – that is – translating waves into bits, then chopping the result into packets which could flow independently through a network while giving the impression of a real-time connection on the other end. In the early Seventies the first decentralised network, Arpanet, was put in use that was able to transfer a message by spreading its chunks through the network and then reconstructing it at the end. By the mid Seventies, the first important application on the network, the mail, was created. What made this net such a powerful tool was its decentralised way of growing: Internet is a network of networks, which uses pre-existing wires (like telephone networks) to make computers communicate through a number of protocols (things like: IP/TCP) that are not proprietary: each new user can connect to the network by using these protocols. Each invention of an application, a mail system, a system of transfer of video, a digital phone system, can use the same protocols. Internet protocols are “commons”[2], and that was a boost to the growth of the network and the creativity of the applications using it. This is a crucial for the wisdom of the net. Without the political choice to keep these protocols free, the net would not have grown in a decentralised manner and the collaborative knowledge practices that it has realized would not have been possible. The World Wide Web, which is a much more recent invention, maintained the same philosophy of open protocols compatible with the Internet (like HTTP –hypertext transfer protocol or HTML- hypertext markup language). The Web is a service which operates through the Internet, a set of protocols and conventions that allows “pages” (i.e. a particular format of information that makes easy to write and read content) to be easily linked to each other, by the technique of hyperlink. It’s a visualization protocol that makes the display of information very simple. The growth of the Web is not the same thing as the growth of Internet. What made the Web grow so fast is that the creating a hyperlink doesn’t require any technical competence. The Web is an illustration of how an Internet application may flourish thanks to the openness of the protocols. And it is true that impact of IT on collective intelligence are due mostly to the Web.

1.2. The Web, collective memory and meta-memory

What makes the aggregation of individual preferences so special through the Web? For the history of culture, the Web is a major revolution on the storage, dissemination and retrieving of information. The major cultural revolutions in the history of culture have had an impact on the distribution of memory. The Web is one such revolution. Let’s see in what sense. The Web has often been compared to the invention of writing or printing. Both comparisons are valid. Writing, introduced at the end of the 4th millennium BCE in Mesopotamia, is an external memory device that makes possible the reorganization of intellectual life and the structuring of thoughts, neither of which are possible in oral cultures. With the introduction of writing, one part of our cognition “leaves” the brain to be distributed among external supports. The visual representation of a society’s knowledge makes it possible to both reorganize the knowledge in a more useful, more ‘logical’, way by using, for example, lists, tables, or genealogical trees, and to solidify it from one generation to the next. What’s more, the birth of “managerial” casts who oversee cultural memory, such as scribes, astrologists, and librarians, makes possible the organization of meta-memory, that is, the set of processes for accessing and recovering cultural memory.

Printing, introduced to our culture at the end of the 15th century, redistributes cultural memory, changing the configuration of the “informational pyramid” in the diffusion of knowledge. In what sense is the Web revolution comparable to the invention of writing and printing? In line with these two earlier revolutions, the Web increases the efficiency of recording, recovering, reproducing and distributing cultural memory. Like writing, the Web is an external memory device, although different in that it’s “active” in contrast to the passive nature of writing. Like printing, the Web is a device for redistributing the cultural memory in a population, although importantly different since it crucially modifies the costs and time of distribution. But unlike writing and printing, the Web presents a radical change in the conditions for accessing and recovering cultural memory with the introduction of new devices for managing meta-memory, i.e., the processes for accessing and recovering memory. Culture, to a large extent, consists in the conception, organization and institutionalization of an efficient meta-memory, i.e. a system of rules, practices and representations that allow us to usefully orient ourselves in the collective memory. A good part of our scholastic education consists in internalizing systems of meta-memory, classifications of style, rankings, etc.. chosen by our particular culture. For example, it’s important to know the basics of rhetoric in order to rapidly “classify” a line of verse as belonging to a certain style, and hence to a certain period, so as to be able to thus efficiently locate it from within the corpus of Italian literature. Meta-memory thus doesn’t serve only a cognitive function – to retrieve information from a corpus – but a social and epistemic function to provide an organization for this information in terms of various systems of classifications that embody the value of the “cultural lore” of that corpus. The way we retrieve information is an epistemic activity which allows us to access through the retrieving filters, how the culture autorities on a piece of information have classified and ranked it within that corpus. With the advent of technologies that automate the functions of accessing and recovering memory, such as search engines and knowledge management systems, meta-memory also becomes part of external memory: a cognitive function, central to the cultural organization of human societies, has become automated—another “piece” of cognition thus leaves our brain in order to be materialized through external supports. Returning to the example above, if I have in mind a line of poetic verse, say “Guido, i’vorrei...” but can recall neither the author nor the period, and am unable to classify the style, these days I can simply write the line of verse in the text window of a search engine and look at the results. The highly improbable combination of words in a line of verse makes possible a sufficiently relevant selection of information that yields among the first results the poem from which the line is taken (my search for this line using Google yielded 654 responses, the first ten of which contained the complete text from the poem in Dante’s Rime).

How is this meta-memory designed through the Web technology? What is unique on the Web is that the actions of the users leave a track on the system that is immediately reusable by it, like the trails that snails leave on the ground, which reveal to other snails the path they are following. The combination of the tracks of the different patterns of use may be easily displayed in a rank that informs and influence future preferences and actions of the users. The corpus of knowledge available on the Web – built and maintained by the individual behaviours of the users – is automatically filtered by systems that aggregate these behaviours in a ranking and make it available as filtered information to new, individual users. I will analyse different classes of meta-memory devices. These systems, although they both provide a selection of information that informs and influences users’ behaviour, are designed in a different way, a difference is worth taking notice of.

2. Collaborative filtering: wisdom out of algorithms

2.1. Knowledge Management Systems

Collaborative filtering is a way of making predictions about the preferences of a users based on the pattern of behaviour of many other users. It is mainly used for commercial purposes in web applications for e-business, although it has been extended to other domains. A well-known example of a system of collaborative filtering which I assume we are all familiar with, is Amazon.com : Amazon.com is a Web application, a knowledge management system which keeps track of users’ interactions with the systems and is designed to display correlations between patterns of activities in a way that informs users about other users’ preferences. The best known feature of this system is the one which associates different items to buy: “Customers who buy X buy also Y”. The originality of these systems is that the matching between X and Y is in a sense bottom-up (although the design of the appropriate thresholds of activities above which this correlation emerges are fixed by the information architecture of the system). The association between James Surowiecki’s book and Ian Ayer’s book Super Crunchers that you can find on the Amazon’s page for The Wisdom of Crowds has been produced automatically by an algorithm that aggregates the preferences of the users and makes the correlation emerge. This is a unique feature of these interactive systems, in which new categories are created by automatically transforming human actions into visible rankings. The collective wisdom of the system is due to a division of cognitive labour between the algorithms which compose and visualize the information, and the users who interact with the system. The classifications and rankings that are thus created aren’t based on previous cultural knowledge of habits and customs of users, but on the emergence of significant patterns of aggregated preferences through the individual interactions with the system. Of course, biases are possible within the system: the weights associated to each item to make it emerge are fixed in such a way that some items have more chances to be recommended that others. But given that the system is alimented by the repeated actions of the users, a too biased recommendation that couples items that users won’t buy together will not be replicated enough times to stabilize within the system.

2.2. PageRank

Another class of systems that realize meta-memory functions through artificial devices are search engines. As we all know by experience, search engines have been a major transformation of our epistemic practices and a profound cognitive revolution. The most remarkable innovation of these tools is due to the discovery of the structure of the Web at the beginning of this century[3]. The structure of the Web is that of a social network, and contains a lot of information about its users’ preferences and habits. The search engines of second generation, like Google, are able to exploit this structure in order to gain information about how knowledge is distributed throughout the world. Basically, the PageRank algorithm interprets a link from a page A to page B as a vote that page A expresses towards page B. But we’re not in democracy on the Web and votes do not have all the same weight. Votes that come from certain sites – called “hubs”- have much more weight than others, and reflect in a sense hierarchies of reputation that exist outside the Web. Roughly, a link from my homepage to Professor Elster’s page, weighs much less than a link to my page from that of Professor Elster. The Web is an “aristocratic” network – an expression that is used by the social network theorists – that is, a network in which “rich get richer” and the more links you receive the higher is the probability that you will receive even more. This disparity of weights creates a “reputational landscape” that informs the result of a query. The PageRank algorithm is nourished by the local knowledge and preferences of each individual user and it influences them by displaying a ranking of results that are interpreted as a hierarchy of relevance. Note that this system is NOT a knowledge management system: the PageRank algorithm doesn’t know anything about the particular pattern of activities of each individual: it doesn’t know how many times you and I go to the JSTOR website and doesn’t combine our navigation paths together. A “click” from a page to another is an opaque information for PageRank, whereas a link between two pages contains a lot of information about users’ knowledge that the system is able to extract. Still, the two systems are comparable from the point of view of the design of collective intelligence: neither requires any cooperation between agents in order to create a shared system of ranking. The “collaborative” aspect of the collective filtering is more in the hands of machines than of human agents[4]. The system exploits the information that human agents either unintentionally leave on the website by interacting with it (KM systems) or actively produce by putting a link from one page to another (search-engines): the result is collective, but the motivation is individual.

Biases of search engines have been a major subject of discussions, controversy and collective fears these years. As I’ve mentioned above, the refinement of the second-generation search engines such as Google has allowed at least to explicitly mark paid inclusions and preferred placements, but this needed a political intervention. Also, the “Mathiew effect” of aristocratic networks is notorious, and the risk of these tools is to give prominence to already powerful sites at the expense of others. The awareness of these biases should imply a refinement on the search practices also: for example, the more improbable is the string of keywords, the more relevant is the filtered result. Novices and learners should be instructed with even simple principles that make them less vulnerable to these biases.

3. Reputation systems: wisdom out of status anxiety

The collaborative filtering of information may require sometimes a more active participation to a community than what is needed in the examples above. In his work on Information Politics on the Web the sociologist Richard Rogers classifies web dynamics as “voluntaristic” or “non-voluntaristic” according to the respective role of human and machines in providing information feed-back for the users. Reputation systems are an example of a more “voluntaristic” web application than the ones seen above. A reputation system is a special kind of collaborative filtering algorithm that determines ratings for a collection of agents based on the opinions that these agents hold about each other. A reputation system collects, distributes, and aggregates feedback about participants’ past behaviour.

The best known and probably simplest reputation system of large impact on the Web is the system of auction sales at www.eBay.com . eBay allows commercial interactions among more than 125 millions of people around the world. People are buyers and sellers. Buyers place a bid on an item. If their bid is successful, they make the commercial transaction, then both (buyers and sellers) leave a feedback about the quality of that transaction. The different feedbacks are then aggregated by the system in a very simple feedback profile, where positive feedbacks and negative feedbacks plus some comments are displayed to the users. The reputation of the agent is thus a useful information in order to decide to pursue the transaction. Reputation has in this case a real, measurable, commercial value: in a market with a fragmented offer and very low information available on each offer, reputation becomes a crucial information in order to trust the seller. Sellers on eBay know very well the value of their good reputation in such a special business environment (no physical encounters, no chance to see and touch the item, vagueness about the normative framework of the transaction – if for example it is realized through two different countries, etc.), so there is a number of transactions at a very low cost whose objective is just to gain one more positive evaluation. The system creates a collective result forcing cooperation, that is, asking users to leave an evaluation at the end of the transaction and sanctioning them if they don’t comply. Without this active participation of the users, the system will be useless. Still, it is a special form of collaborative behaviour that doesn’t require any commitment to cooperation as a value. Non-cooperative users are sanctioned to different degrees: they can be negatively evaluated not only if the transaction isn’t good, but also if they do not participate into the evaluation process. Breaking the rules of e-bay may lead to the exclusion from the community. The design of wisdom thus comprises an active participation from the users for fear to be ostracized by the community (which would be seen as a loss of business opportunities). Biases are clearly possible here also. People invest in cheap transactions whose only aim is to gain reputational points. This is a bias one should be aware of and easily check: if a seller offers too many cheap items, he too concerned with his public image to be considered reliable.

Some reputational features are used also by non-commercial systems such as www.flickr.com. Flickr is a collaborative platform to share photos. For each picture, you can visualise how many users have added it among their favourite pictures and who they are.

Reputation systems differ from other systems of measurement of reputation that use citation analysis, like for example the Science Citation Index. These systems are in a sense reputation-based, given that they use scientometric techniques to measure the impact of a publication in terms of the number of citations in other publications. But they don’t require any active participation of the agents in order to obtain the measure of reputation.

4. Collaborative, open systems: wisdom out of cooperation

The collaborative filtering on the Web may be even more voluntaristic and human-based than the previous examples, while still necessitating a Web support to realize an intelligent outcome. Two are the most discussed cases of collaborative systems that owe their success to active human cooperation in filtering and revising the information made available: the Open Source communities of software development, like Linux, and the collective open content projects such as Wikipedia. In both cases, the filtering process is completely human-made: code or content is made available to a community which can filter it by correcting, editing of erasing it according to personal or shared standards of quality. I would say that these are communities of amateurs instead of experts, that is, people who love what they do and decide to share their knowledge for the sake of the community. Collective wisdom is thus created by individual human efforts that are aggregated in a common enterprise in which some norms of cooperation are shared.

I won’t discuss biases on Wikipedia: it is such a large topic that it could be the subject of another paper. Let me just mention that Larry Sanger, one of its founders, is promoting an alternative project, www.citizendum.org which endorses a policy of accreditation of its authors. Self-promotion, ideology, targeted attacks on reputation may of course act as biases in the selection of entries. But the fear of Wikipedia as a dangerous place of tendentious information has been disconfirmed by facts: thanks to its large size, Wikipedia is hugely differentiated in its topics and views, and it has been shown that its reliability is no less than that of the Encyclopedia Britannica[5].

Recommender systems: wisdom out of connoisseurship

Another class of systems is based on recommendations of connoisseurs in a particular domain. One of my favourite examples of wisdom created out of recommendations is the Music Genoma Project at www.pandora.com a sort of Web-based radio that works by aggregating thousands of descriptions and classifications of pieces of music produced by connoisseurs and matches these descriptions with the “tastes” of listeners (as they describe them). Then it broadcasts a selection of music pieces that correspond to what the listeners like to hear. And it works! Imagine how good would be to have a similar system that selects papers for you on the basis of recommendations of experts that match your tastes! Some recommender systems collect information from users by actively asking them to rate a number of items, or to express a preference between two items, or to create a list of items that they like. The system then compares the data to similar data collected from other users and displays the recommendation. It is basically a collaborative filtering technique with a more active component: people are asked to express their preferences, instead of just inferring their preferences from their behaviour, which makes a huge difference: it is well known in psychology that we are not so good in introspection and sometimes we consciously express preferences that are incoherent with our behaviour: If asked, I may express a preference for classical music, while if I keep a record of how many times I do listen to classical music compared other genres of music in a week, I realize that my preferences are quite different).

Conclusions

This long list of examples of Web tools for producing collective wisdom illustrates how fine-grained can be the choice of the design for aggregating individual choices and preferences. The differences in design that I have underlined end up in deep differences in the kind of collective communities that are generated by the IT. Sometimes the community is absent, as in the case of the Google users, who cannot be defined as a “community” in any interesting normative sense, sometimes the community is normatively demanding, as in the case of eBay, in which participation in the filtering process is needed for the survival of the community. If the new collective production of knowledge that the Web – and in particular the Web 2.0 – makes possible should serve as a laboratory for designing “better” collective procedures for the production of knowledge or of wise decisions, these differences should be taken into account.

But let me come back in the end with a more epistemological claim about what kind of knowledge is produced by these new tools. As I said at the beginning, these tools work insofar as they provide access to rankings of information, labelling procedures and evaluations. Even Wikipedia, which doesn’t display any explicit rating device, works on the following principle: if an entry has survived on the site – that is, it has not been erased by other wikipedians – it is worth reading it. This can be a too weak evaluative tool, and, as I said, discussion goes on these days on the opportunity to introduce more structured filtering devices on Wikipedia[6], but it is my opinion that the survival or even egalitarian projects like Wikipedia depends on their capacity to incorporate a ranking: the label Wikipedia in itself works already as a reputational cue that orients the choices of the users. Without the reputation of the label, the success of the project would be much more limited.

As I said at the beginning, the Web is not only a powerful reservoir of all sort of labelled and unlabelled information, but it is also a powerful reputational tool that introduces ranks, rating systems, weights and biases in the landscape of knowledge. Even in this information-dense world, knowledge without evaluation would be a sad desert landscape in which people would be stunned in front of an enormous and mute mass of information, as Bouvard et Pécuchet, the two heroes of Flaubert's famous novel, who decided to retire and to go through every known discipline without, in the end, being able to learn anything. An efficient knowledge system will inevitably grow by generating a variety of evaluative tools: that is how culture grows, how traditions are created. A cultural tradition is to begin with a labelling system of insiders and outsiders, of who stays on and who is lost in the magma of the past. The good news is that in the Web era this inevitable evaluation is made through new, collective tools that challenge the received views and develop and improve an innovative and democratic way of selection of knowledge. But there's no escape from the creation of a "canonical"—even if tentative and rapidly evolving—corpus of knowledge.

References

A. Clark (2003) Natural Born Cyborgs, Oxford University Press.

L. Lessig (2001) The Future of Ideas, Vintage, New York

G. Origgi (2009) “Wine epistemology: The role of reputation and rating systems in the world of wine”, in B. Smith (ed.) Questions of Taste, Oxford University Press.

G. Origgi (2009) « Un certain regard. Pour une épistémologie de la réputation », presented at the workshop La réputation, Fondazione Olivetti, Rome, April 2009.

G. Origgi (2009) Qu’est-ce que la confiance, VRIN, Paris.

R. Rogers (2004) Information Politics of the Web, MIT Press

L. Sanger (2009) “Who says we know: On the new Politics of knowledge” at www.edge.org

Taraborelli, D. (2009) “How the Web is changing the way we trust”, in: K. Waelbers, A. Briggle, P. Brey (Eds.), Current Issues in Computing and Philosophy, IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2009.

P. Thagard (2001). Internet epistemology: Contributions of new information technologies to scientific research. In K. Crowley, C. D. Schunn, and T. Okada, (Eds.) Designing for science: Implications from professional, instructional, and everyday science.Mawah, NJ: Erlbaum, 465-485.

[1] Princeton Survey Research Associates, “A Matter of Trust: What Users Want from Websites”, Princeton, January 2002, at: http://www.consumerWebwatch.com/news/report1.pdf . The case is reported in R. Rogers (2004) Information Politics on the Web, MIT Press.

[2] Cf. on this point, L. Lessig (2001) The Fututre of Ideas, Vintage, New York.

[3] Kleinberg, J. (2001) “The Structure of the Web”, Science.

[4] Knowledge management systems like Amazon.com have some collaborative filtering features that need cooperation, like writing a review of a book or ranking a book with the five stars ranking system, but these aren’t essential to the functioning of the collaborative filtering process.

[5] Cf. “Internet Encyclopedias go head to head” Nature, 438, 15 December 2009.

[6] See. L. Sanger «”Who says we know. On the new politics of knowledge” on line at www.edge.org and my reply to him, G. Origgi “Why reputation matters”

Venezians are pet lovers!

2009-03-03T06:10:00.001-08:00

Being an animal lover myself, I enjoy photographing pets on my travels. Here are quite a few I noticed in Venice. Pets are part of the way of life in Venice. A major part of Venice is out of bounds for cars and one finds that pets accompany their owners going about their daily life.

Here is the slideshow
http://travelphotolog.wildbytes.in/#7.0
http://travelphotolog.wildbytes.in/#7http://www.blogcatalog.com/directory/travel

Day 7 - rimini to san gimignano

2009-03-02T23:00:00.001-08:00

See more photos and details of this great tour here

See photos of the tour group having fun here

Its time to move on from San Marino and Rimini across the center of the country toward the regions of Umbria and Tuscany to our final stop of the day San Gimignano.

On our way we will make a special stop in Cortona. Cortona was put on the map by the film "Under the Tuscan Sun" from Frances Mayes's 1996 memoir by the same name.

When we leave the seaside town of Rimini we will travel through the rich green and hilly lands toward Rimini. Along the way we see the terrain change from flat to mountainess. Ancient Roman signaling towers are see upon the tops of hills used in ancient times to communicate with Rome along vast areas of land.

Cortona was founded by the Etruscans who were the ancient people of Italy dating back to 800 BC. Cortona was established around the 10th century and was just another castle hill town on the border of Umbria and Tuscany until the film was released.

Cortona Stats:

Region :Tuscany
Province :Arezzo (AR)
Mayor: Andrea Vignini (since June 2004)
Elevation: 494 m (1,621 ft)
Area: 342.33 km2 (132 sq mi)
Population: (as of 31-08-2009) - Total 22,777
Coordinates: 43°16′32″N, 11°59′17″E
Dialing code: 0575
Postal code: 52044

Now it attracts thousands of tourists per year but still maintains its small, castle hill town feel. Cortona is a great stop over for lunch or short visit. The area is an ideal place to base to explore the region of Umbria.

Our group arrives around lunch time for a two hour visit. Clients get to stretch their legs, eat a light lunch and take some photos of the quaint town.

Some café’s and shops have photos of Diane Lane during her free time from shooting the film, others have oil paintings from local artists.

If you want to take a break away from the shops then Cortona offers amazing views of the Umbrian and Tuscan countryside.

The weather is perfect for our visit. The coach can’t part up in the old town so we must drop the clients and take the coach down during their time exploring this unique town.

Travel ban for lebanese opposed to saniora government

2009-03-02T22:40:00.001-08:00

Suspension of Entry as Immigrants and Nonimmigrants of Persons Responsible for Policies and Actions That Threaten Lebanon's Sovereignty and Democracy

A Proclamation by the President of the United States of America

"In order to foster democratic institutions in Lebanon, to help the Lebanese people preserve their sovereignty and achieve their aspirations for democracy and regional stability, and to end the sponsorship of terrorism in Lebanon, it is in the interest of the United States to restrict the international travel, and to suspend the entry into the United States, as immigrants or nonimmigrants, of aliens who deliberately undermine or harm Lebanon's sovereignty, its legitimate government, or its democratic institutions, contribute to the breakdown in the rule of law in Lebanon, or benefit from policies or actions that do so, including through the sponsorship of terrorism, politically motivated violence and intimidation, or the reassertion of Syrian control in Lebanon.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, by the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, including section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, 8 U.S.C. 1182(f), and section 301 of title 3, United States Code, hereby find that the unrestricted immigrant and nonimmigrant entry into the United States of persons described in section 1 of this proclamation would, except as provided for in sections 2 and 3 of this proclamation, be detrimental to the interests of the United States.

I therefore hereby proclaim that:

Section 1. The entry into the United States, as immigrants or nonimmigrants, of the following aliens is hereby suspended:

(a) Lebanese government officials, former Lebanese government officials, and private persons who deliberately undermine or harm Lebanon's sovereignty, its legitimate government, or its democratic institutions, or contribute to the breakdown in the rule of law in Lebanon, including through the sponsorship of terrorism, politically motivated violence or intimidation, or the reassertion of Syrian control in Lebanon;

(b) Syrian government officials, former Syrian government officials, and persons who meet the criteria for designation under section 3(a)(i) or (ii) of Executive Order 13338 of May 11, 2004, who deliberately undermine or harm Lebanon's sovereignty, its legitimate government, or its democratic institutions, or contribute to the breakdown in the rule of law in Lebanon, including through the sponsorship of terrorism, politically motivated violence or intimidation, or the reassertion of Syrian control in Lebanon;

(c) Persons in Lebanon who act on behalf of, or actively promote the interests of, Syrian government officials by deliberately undermining or harming Lebanon's sovereignty, its legitimate government, or its democratic institutions, or contribute to the breakdown in the rule of law in Lebanon, including through the sponsorship of terrorism, politically motivated violence or intimidation, or the reassertion of Syrian control in Lebanon;

(d) Persons who, through their business dealings with any of the persons described in subsection (a), (b), or (c) of this section, derive significant financial benefit from, or materially support, policies or actions that deliberately undermine or harm Lebanon's sovereignty, its legitimate government, or its democratic institutions, or contribute to the breakdown in the rule of law in Lebanon, including through the sponsorship of terrorism, politically motivated violence or intimidation, or the reassertion of Syrian control in Lebanon; and

(e) The spouses and dependent children of persons described in subsections (a), (b), (c), and (d) of this section.

Sec. 2. Section 1 of this proclamation shall not apply with respect to any person otherwise covered by section 1 where entry of such person would not be contrary to the interests of the United States.

Sec. 3. Persons covered by section 1 or 2 of this proclamation shall be identified by the Secretary of State or the Secretary's designee, in his or her sole discretion, pursuant to such procedures as the Secretary may establish under section 5 of this proclamation.

Sec. 4. Nothing in this proclamation shall be construed to derogate from U.S. Government obligations under applicable international agreements.

Sec. 5. The Secretary of State shall have responsibility for implementing this proclamation pursuant to such procedures as the Secretary, in the Secretary's sole discretion, may establish.

Sec. 6. This proclamation is effective immediately. It shall remain in effect until such time as the Secretary of State determines that it is no longer necessary and should be terminated, either in whole or in part. Any such determination by the Secretary of State shall be published in the Federal Register.

Sec. 7. This proclamation is not intended to, and does not, create any right, benefit, or privilege, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity, by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, instrumentalities, or entities, its officers or employees, or any other person.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this twenty eighth day of June, in the year of our Lord two thousand seven, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-first."

GEORGE W. BUSH

Revised edition: the western desert of egypt

2009-03-02T14:10:00.001-08:00

Cassandra Vivian
The Western Desert of Egypt
New Revised Edition 2009
AUC

The revised edition of the only handbook for exploring the Western Desert of Egypt has turned up on my doorstep this weekend. I ordered it around a year ago to replace my battered 2002 edition when it was listed as available for order on Amazon. At the time it had a delivery estimate of a couple of weeks, but I have been receiving apologies from Amazon ever since.

I only received the book on Saturday so other than the addition of some glossy colour photographs I don't know what the revised edition adds to the existing one because the preface doesn't say. But it has some more pages (459 in total as opposed to 426 in the 2002 edition).

If you are travelling into the Western Desert this is the only real print resource, other than the eternally useful and enjoyable Sahara Overland by Chris Scott (which has a supporting website). Sahara Overland is a glorious book about travel throughout the entire Sahara desert, but obviously covers the Egyptian Western Desert area in much less detail than Vivian's book. For those wondering about portability Vivian's book weighs c. 0.91kg (just over 2lbs).
Vivian clearly shares the same concerns that many Western Desert travellers have about the impacts of tourism on the desert landscape. Growing numbers of visitors pose a potential threat to its beauty and to the lives of the people who dwell in and around the desert. She is careful to give GPS co-ordinates only for sites which she considers not to be at major risk and she makes an appeal to visitors to respect the desert, to move quietly through it and to be its friend. It has always seemed so strange to me, as it clearly does to Vivian, that some of the people who travel so far to see something so amazing, should treat the landscape and the archaeology such lack of care.

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

Sad news: virginia burton

2009-03-02T09:00:00.001-08:00

Richmond Times Dispatch (Ellen Robertson)

As a curator of Egyptian art for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Lucille Virginia Burton often traveled alone, except for a guide, to archaeological spots throughout the Middle East.

"'Ginny' learned that "if you don't show fear, that can get you out of situations," said her friend, Louise Friday of Urbanna. "She once thought two guides were getting ready to rob her, so she quickly jumped up and said, 'Let's go!' and forcefully dissuaded them."

A woman who had stayed in the cliffs of Petra and taught herself to read hieroglyphics, Ms. Burton, who died Sunday at 90 in a Richmond nursing home, said the pièce de résistance of her career was overseeing the transfer of the Temple of Dendur from Egypt.

The temple was given to the United States by Egypt in 1965 and allotted to the museum in 1967. Installation was completed in 1978 in the Sackler Wing, which was built around the temple as it was being reassembled.

See the above page for the complete article.Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

Sad news: virginia burton

2009-03-02T03:20:00.001-08:00

One Way Airfares - Flights Travel Tickets

2009-03-01T02:08:00.001-08:00

If you are seeing for one way airfares or flights travel tickets, anon you are in luck. There are myriad, umpteen resources on the net where you can find bulky deals for one way airfares or flights travel tickets. A detailed enumeration of where to shop nearby for economical one-way airfares or flights travel tickets on the net are listed below:Orbitz, located at orbitz.com on the internet provides one-way airfares or flights travel tickets.Buy Air Deals, located at buyairdeals.com on the internet, sells one way airfares.Qixo, on the internet at qixo.com, sells one way airfares or flights travel tickets.Shermans Travel at shermanstravel.com has ample deals on one way airfares or flights travel tickets.Travelocity, located at travelocity.com on the web has super deals on one way airfares.Air Gorilla, airgorilla.com, has held dear one way airfares or flights travel tickets on sale for flights to Asia, Europe, and Latin America.Booking Buddy on the internet at bookingbuddy.com has several discount one way airfares to research out.Rewards Genius, located on the net at rewardsgenius.com, sells super low one way airfares or flights travel tickets.There are several more bad on the internet flight search machines that can be utilized, but these eight services should tender you the prime incidental to do some comparison shopping on the internet before purchasing your one way airfares or flights travel tickets.

Phuket Promo (book between 15-31 Oct)

2009-02-27T13:05:00.001-08:00

3N @ S$315 nett (S$105/room/night)

- Standard Twin Sharing Room
- Include daily breakfast for 2

Choice of hotels:
- Leelawadee Boutique Hotel, Patong Beach
- Manathai Hotel and Resort, Surin Beach
- Orchidacea Resort, Kata Beach
- Serene Resort, Kata Beach

For enquiry/reservation, pls email fenoh18@yahoo.com.sg

Light Leaks, Chemical Weirdness and a Photo for the Baklas

2009-02-27T10:19:00.001-08:00

Yay! I received my latest batch of scanned film rolls from Digiprint last night. The shots from the Holga came out quite interesting, considering that camera leaks light like crazy and I deliberately mishandled the film.
Check em out. Click the thumbnail:

Charm Holiday Brush Set Now acquirable!

2009-02-27T10:15:00.001-08:00

Beauty & Minerals is proud to present, the Charm Travel Brush Set!8 luxuriously soft synthetic brushes with its signature pink handle and black ferrule, take your secret weapon in looking good, just most anywhere!The set in the picture is just a snapshot and is missing 1 piece - a lipbrush. The set includes a powder brush, a blush brush, a crease blending brush, an eyeshadow brush, an eyeliner brush, a concealer brush, a lip brush, and an angled stinkiness brush.This set is sold for P 950.0The Charm Holiday Set, Bent Liner Brush, and Flat Top brushes are now acquirable! No need to reserve! Order form link :http://beautyandminerals.multiply.com/reviews/item/5We also have two items up for grabs, but still don't have pictures.1. Charm Bent Liner Brush - makes eyelining covering a breeze by its bent ergonomics. 2. Charm Flat Top Brush - Flat tops are most favorably used with mineral makeup, and we are going to have it! Made of luxurious birdlike hair, buffing is...

SEAT SALE AGAIN!

2009-02-27T08:03:00.001-08:00

Here's added seat sale from Cebupacific!

How to join Travel Factor Group Tour?
1. Purchase your own plane tickets (if the tour requires participants to fly)
2. Download and fill-out registration form http://thetravelfactor.multiply.com/journal/item/84/TFRegform
3. Email your registration form and copy of e-tickets/flight schedule to travel.factor@gmail.com
4. Make sure you indicate correct email subject: Destination (Date)
5. Then you will receive complete trip details as soon as budget is finalized. Budget will depend on total number of persons joining the group tour.

Disclaimer: Please purchase your tickets first and email travel.factor@gmail.com your registration form with a copy of your e-ticket. Only Registered participants will receive complete trip details via email.

every Travel Factor Group Tours are budget tours that would range from P3,000 to P6,000 per pax, airfare not yet included. Non-Manila-based participants are welcome to join.

For SPECIAL composing (groups with differen...

Conquer: Mt. Pinatubo - Sunday Edition (Jan 25, 2009)

2009-02-27T03:05:00.001-08:00

Conquering Mt. Pinatubo personal't easy but definitely FUN!4 x 4 ride of a lifetimean hour of trekking and picture takingand the unforgettable swimming at the crater lake."Travel Factor, Ka-Sports Mo!"Special thanks to Ryan Ramos (host) and the crew of Sports 37 for sharing this undertaking with Travel

Thorn Tree Travel Forum - Lonely Planet

2009-02-26T20:57:00.003-08:00

travel bangkok buddyy...

2009-02-26T20:57:00.001-08:00

hiii i have been here since 10 january 2006..and l like thailand..i live in bangkok with girlfriend...and if u interesting we want to use this house hostel..:):):)we have a many room kitchen laundry room 2 bathroom , internet tv dvd.....some way here house and can find everthing and we have a big big swiming pool ...we want new guest ..people culture and new friendsss...and also we can travel thailand we are good travel buddy...if u want to contact with me goldenteethxl@gmail.com can wiright and will be sure i reply quikly:):):):) lovess from

Open Question: I need historical information on some clocks in the cathedrals and churches of Cologne, Germany.?

2009-02-26T20:02:00.001-08:00

My great great great grandfather, noble Hendricks, was a clockmaker in Germany in the mid 1800s. Family lore says he built a clock for the cathedral in Cologne. A German-speaking friend has told me that the Koln Dom, the main cathedral of Cologne, does not have a clock, and my research has turned up a lot of general information most the dozen or more extant churches in Cologne. I need to know details most the clocks of the churches of Cologne, including some that may have been destroyed in World War II. Even information in German would be unexceptionable, since I have a friend who can translate.Referrals to websites, books, and photographs would every be understood. I have found that commercial travel sites do not generally have every the details I need. Thanks in front for some help, and for saving me the trouble of going to Cologne myself at this time!

Funland Local

2009-02-26T17:26:00.001-08:00

the view

I am lucky enough to have work in Sandusky, OH. Sandusky is the best kept secret for family vacation. It is inexpensive to fly into Cleveland, it is a short drive to Sandusky, there is a lot of natural land, beaches along Lake Erie, family friendly restaurants, Cedar Point Amusement Park, local festivals and crafts to see, and other local attractions that would be fun for families. Sandusky also is in an area where I can eat really well from the local bounty.

corn at a farm stand

Along many of the side roads in and around Cleveland, there are farm stands in the driveway of family farms. There are peaches, plums, raspberries, corn, squash, tomatoes, variety of peppers and other locally grown veggies at these farms stands. On the way into Sandusky in Milan and Huron, there are farm stands that I bought veggies for the week. I got zucchini, corn, tomatoes, fresh banana peppers, peaches and plums and took it all back to my hotel room that has a microwave, fridge and coffee maker.

these bags work

I had no idea how I was going to make this food, but I went to the Target to help figure it out and buy a plate. When I got there, I was walking through the isles and saw the Zip and Steam bags, and I heard *ding ding ding* jackpot, this is how I am going to cook my veggies! Score. I usually don't use microwaves because I usually cook most of my food from scratch on the stove and oven, so I don' t know how to cook in microwaves. Luckily, the Zip and Steam bags have directions on them with the type of food being made. There was also an insert with recipes to cook in the Zip and Steam bag including making a chicken and veggie dish. Amazing. I am sold in this convenient technology. The Zip and Steam bag made my trip to Sandusky a healthier and tastier trip.

plate of local fruits and veggies

So, what I did for the week to feed my desire to have quality locally grown veggies in my diet, is that I had zip and steamed up corn and zucchini in separate bags. What I did not finish, I zipped up in the resealable Zip and Steam bag, and put in the fridge for the next day. I snagged a few salt and pepper packets from the Target food bar to season my veggies. For protein I went out to my favorite mom and pop chicken joint, and got takeout chicken to go with my veggies. At the Target, I got a $2 plastic reusable plate to eat with, and I took a plastic knife, fork and spoon from the hotel breakfast bar. I had peaches and plums for dessert, along with the locally made Toft's ice cream.

On Saturday, in downtown Sandusky, there is a 25+ year old farmer's market that I was waiting for. I got some black berries for breakfast, and I got 6 lbs of Avery, Ohio grown popcorn. I got only 1 bag last year, and the popcorn quality and flavor of this popcorn is far superior to any industrial made popcorn. Last year, that bag went quick. Last year, I popped this popcorn in a brown paper bag in my hotel room microwave, and brought the extra home to enjoy. This year, I am no dummy, and I bought 6 lbs of this golden goodness. I risked the volume in my luggage, and I indeed got stopped by TSA going through airport security because of the strange shapes seen in the X-ray machine. When the TSA officer opened the bag, she was just laughing at the volume of popcorn in my bag, and then she sent me on my way.

In closing, even on travel, it is possible to eat deliciously and eat locally.