Azerbaijani and Turkish MPs from the regions are strengthening ties, Parliamentary Assembly of Turkic-Speaking Countries (TurkPA) Secretary General Ramil Hasanov told Trend today.
He added that an agreement was signed during Turkish President Abdullah Gul’s recent visit to Azerbaijan. The document seeks to establish cooperation between MPs from the Azerbaijani and Turkish regions of Sheki and Bursa.
Hasanov said local entrepreneurs will also develop closer ties under the cooperation agreement.
“It is important to establish cooperation in the economic, political, cultural and scientific fields,” he added. “Businessmen and MPs from the regions will also take part in the meetings.”
Baku hosted the TurkPA’s first plenary meeting Sept.29, 2009.
TurkPA’s main goal is to support Turkic-speaking countries in international organizations, as well as to help them share their experiences in legislative processes. The assembly also aims to preserve language, culture and history in Turkic-speaking countries, and to further strengthen political, economic and cultural ties between member countries.
Do you have any feedback? Contact our journalist at trend@trend.az
https://en.trend.az/news/politics/foreign/1740640.html, Aug. 25 2010
Two Israeli groups set up training courses in Wikipedia editing with aims to ‘show the other side’ over borders and culture
Rachel Shabi in Jerusalem and Jemima Kiss
Two Israeli groups have set up 'Zionist editing' courses with aims to alter perceptions about Israel. Photograph: David Silverman/Getty Images
Since the earliest days of the worldwide web, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has seen its rhetorical counterpart fought out on the talkboards and chatrooms of the internet.
Now two Israeli groups seeking to gain the upper hand in the online debate have launched a course in “Zionist editing” for Wikipedia, the online reference site.
Yesha Council, representing the Jewish settler movement, and the rightwing Israel Sheli (My Israel) movement, ran their first workshop this week in Jerusalem, teaching participants how to rewrite and revise some of the most hotly disputed pages of the online reference site.
“We don’t want to change Wikipedia or turn it into a propaganda arm,” says Naftali Bennett, director of the Yesha Council. “We just want to show the other side. People think that Israelis are mean, evil people who only want to hurt Arabs all day.”
Wikipedia is one of the world’s most popular websites, and its 16m entries are open for anyone to edit, rewrite or even erase. The problem, according to Ayelet Shaked of Israel Sheli, is that online, pro-Israeli activists are vastly outnumbered by pro-Palestinian voices. “We don’t want to give this arena to the other side,” she said. “But we are so few and they are so many. People in the US and Europe never hear about Israel’s side, with all the correct arguments and explanations.”
Like others involved with this project, Shaked thinks that her government is “not doing a very good job” of explaining Israel to the world.
And on Wikipedia, they believe that there is much work to do.
Take the page on Israel, for a start: “The map of Israel is portrayed without the Golan heights or Judea and Samaria,” said Bennett, referring to the annexed Syrian territory and the West Bank area occupied by Israel in 1967.
Another point of contention is the reference to Jerusalem as the capital of Israel – a status that is constantly altered on Wikipedia.
Other pages subject to constant re-editing include one titled Goods allowed/banned for import into Gaza – which is now being considered for deletion – and a page on the Palestinian territories.
Then there is the problem of what to call certain neighbourhoods. “Is Ariel a city or a settlement?” asks Shaked of the area currently described by Wikipedia as “an Israeli settlement and a city in the central West Bank.” That question is the subject of several thousand words of heated debate on a Wikipedia discussion thread.
The idea, says Shaked and her colleauges, is not to storm in, cause havoc and get booted out – the Wikipedia editing community is sensitive, consensus-based and it takes time to build trust.
“We learned what not to do: don’t jump into deep waters immediately, don’t be argumentative, realise that there is a semi-democratic community out there, realise how not to get yourself banned,” says Yisrael Medad, one of the course participants, from Shiloh.
Is that Shiloh in the occupied West Bank? “No,” he sighs, patiently. “That’s Shiloh in the Binyamin region across the Green Line, or in territories described as disputed.”
One Jerusalem-based Wikipedia editor, who doesn’t want to be named, said that publicising the initiative might not be such a good idea. “Going public in the past has had a bad effect,” she says. “There is a war going on and unfortunately the way to fight it has to be underground.”
In 2008, members of the hawkish pro-Israel watchdog Camera who secretly planned to edit Wikipedia were banned from the site by administrators.
Meanwhile, Yesha is building an information taskforce to engage with new media, by posting to sites such as Facebook and YouTube, and claims to have 12,000 active members, with up to 100 more signing up each month. “It turns out there is quite a thirst for this activity,” says Bennett. “The Israeli public is frustrated with the way it is portrayed abroad.”
The organisiers of the Wikipedia courses, are already planning a competition to find the “Best Zionist editor”, with a prize of a hot-air balloon trip over Israel.
Wikipedia wars
There are frequent flare-ups between competing volunteer editors and obsessives who run Wikipedia. As well as conflicts over editing bias and “astroturfing” PR attempts, articles are occasionally edited to catch out journalists; the Independent recently erroneously published that the Big Chill had started life as the Wanky Balls festival. In 2005 the founding editorial director of USA Today, John Seigenthaler, discovered his Wikipedia entry included the claim that he was involved in the assassination of JFK.
Editors can remain anonymous when changing content, but conflicts are passed to Wikipedia’s arbitration committee. Scientology was a regular source of conflict until the committee blocked editing by the movement.
Critics cite the editing problems as proof of a flawed site that can be edited by almost anybody, but its defenders claim the issues are tiny compared with its scale. Wikipedia now has versions in 271 languages and 379 million users a month.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/aug/18/wikipedia-editing-zionist-groups, 18 August 2010
Red-faced IT bosses at Stafford Borough Council are hacked off after the authority’s website was broken into by a Turkish protest group.
The hackers forced the council to close its site after a member of staff noticed the problem when they tried to log on and saw a black screen proclaiming the Turkish Cyber Army.
The group broke into the server which provides the site, run by Mid Counties Co-op, redirecting surfers to their own site. Their home screen displayed a picture of an ancient scroll. with the words “world protest”.
It also said: “We are the king of the world/Turkish Cyber Army!” It is the first time the site, which has been running for 15 years, has been compromised and IT chiefs said no data was at risk.
The site was taken down last Wednesday, August 11, afternoon until Thursday morning.
Council spokesman Will Conaghan said the public web site is a copy that doesn’t contain any sensitive details or data.
The master site containing key information was kept safe behind firewalls, he added.
Peter Kenrick, the council’s head of technology, said: “There was no risk to data at any time. We took the site down to make sure we had the full picture. The company that services the website needs to look at security there.” The site attracts more than a thousand hits every day.
DAVID KELLY: Weapons inspector died sedated with his wrists cut.
ALISON CAMPSIE
A group of prominent medical experts has demanded a full inquest into the death of government weapons inspector David Kelly.
They described the official cause of death, bleeding from a self-inflicted wound, as “extremely unlikely” in the light of evidence since made public.
The call came in a letter to a national newspaper signed by eight senior figures, including Michael Powers, a former coroner; Margaret Bloom, a former deputy coroner; and Julian Bion, a professor of intensive care medicine.
Coalition ministers are currently exploring how best to address concerns over the official version of Dr Kelly’s death.
The scientist was found dead in woods near his Oxfordshire home in 2003 after he was exposed as the source of a BBC story suggesting that a dossier on the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq had been “sexed up” by the Government.
An inquest was suspended to make way for the Hutton Inquiry, which examined the full circumstances surrounding his death.
The inquest was never resumed, with the inquiry finding his death was self-inflicted. But in their letter, the experts claim this conclusion is unsafe.
They write: “We would like to express our concerns about the conclusion as to the cause of death in the light of the information now in the public domain.
“It is extremely unlikely, from a medical perspective, that the primary cause of death would or could have been haemorrhage from a severed ulnar artery in one wrist without any evidence of a blood-clotting deficiency.
“Insufficient blood would have been lost to threaten life.
“The inquiry by Lord Hutton was unsatisfactory with regard to the causation of death. A detailed investigation of all the medical circumstances is now required and we support the call for a proper inquest into the cause of Dr Kelly’s death.”
Other concerns have been raised about the inquiry’s finding that Dr Kelly cut his own wrist after consuming a number of high-strength pain-killing muscle relaxants.
Mai Pederson, a colleague who served with him in Iraq, says a hand and arm injury had left him “too weak” to cut his own wrist.
Retired detective Graham Coe, the officer who stood guard over Dr Kelly’s body after it was first discovered, said there was very little blood at the scene.
No fingerprints were found on the knife Dr Kelly is alleged to have used, it later emerged, and he was not wearing gloves when his body was discovered.
In January, it emerged Lord Hutton secretly classified all medical and scientific records relating to Dr Kelly for 70 years,including the post-mortem examination report and photo of his body.
Justice Secretary Kenneth Clark would have to overturn the order to allow a coroner’s inquest to take place.
There is ongoing legal action by a separate group of doctors to secure an inquest, while Attorney General Dominic Grieve can apply to the High Court for an inquest if he believes there is considerable doubt in the public’s mind that Dr Kelly killed himself.
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The website has a built in social network, forums and, professional assistance.
Once a book is ready for print, TheBookPatch.com provides a built in cover design wizard and printing at a push of a button directly from the site. There are no set up fees or royalty sharing. The author retains 100% copyright and can order as little as a single copy. TheBookPatch printing price is unparalleled and declines with every additional copy even if ordered one at a time. Authors can update and make changes to their books with no additional charges and retain the previous editions discounts. An average book price for a 200 page book with a full color cover will run between $5.50 and $16 on the average. \TheBookPatch also offers an online book store where authors can sell their books and collect the profit while TheBookPatch retains only the printing cost.
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Krista D. Zanolli, Contributing Editor, krista.zanolli@photonics.com
With the inevitable decline of fossil fuels, the race is on to discover renewable energy solutions. As an alternative, researchers from the University of Cincinnati have found a way to convert solar energy and carbon dioxide into sugars to create new forms of biofuel.
The natural process of photosynthesis involves plants taking energy from the sun and carbon from the air and converting them into sugars. It’s those converted sugars that make biofuels like ethanol and bioethanol viable alternatives to fossil fuels. The problem is that the cost of growing and processing crops for biofuel production reduces efficiency rates to as low as 5 percent.
University of Cincinnati researchers are finding ways to take energy from the sun and carbon from the air to create new forms of biofuel, thanks to a semitropical frog species. Courtesy of the University of Cincinnati.
The researchers now say that they have fashioned an artificial photosynthetic material that can convert solar energy and carbon dioxide into sugars with an efficiency rate approaching 96 percent. And, oddly enough, they owe their inspiration to the nesting habits of a subtropical frog – the Tungara.
The female Tungara generates a resistant biofoam nest to protect her fertilized eggs from sunlight, temperature and pathogens until the eggs hatch. The foam is effective because it allows light and air to penetrate while still concentrating the reactants. The foam nests are also resistant to bacteria and fungus and can last up to two weeks. Similarly, the artificial photosynthetic material, which uses plant, bacterial, frog and fungal enzymes trapped within a foam housing, produces sugars from sunlight and carbon dioxide.
The artificial material’s major foam-forming ingredient is the Tungara frog’s surfactant protein Ranaspumin-2. Unlike chemical detergents, the Rsn-2 protein surfactant enables foam formation in low concentrations without disrupting cell membranes.
According to the study published online in Nano Letters, the foam converts light into adenosine triphosphate or ATP (considered the major energy currency of a cell) and then carbon dioxide into sugar using the Calvin-Benson-Bassham cycle. The ATP synthesis is initiated by the lipid vesicles’ exposure to green light.
“The advantage for our system compared to plants and algae is that all of the captured solar energy is converted to sugars, whereas these organisms must divert a great deal of energy to other functions to maintain life and reproduce,” said David Wendell, research assistant professor and co-author of the study, along with Carlo Montemagno, dean of the college of engineering and applied science, and student Jacob Todd. “Our foam also uses no soil, so food production would not be interrupted, and it can be used in highly enriched carbon dioxide environments, like the exhaust from coal-burning power plants, unlike many natural photosynthetic systems.”
Wendell added that too much carbon dioxide shuts down photosynthesis in natural plant systems, “but ours does not have this limitation due to the bacterial-based photocapture strategy.”
“The system that we have takes carbon out of the atmosphere and uses the sunlight to go and remold the molecules into a fuel – so it’s carbon neutral,” said Montemagno in an interview with Cincinnati public radio station WVXU. “I think the features of what we’ve done allow it to be scalable and commercially deployed. For me the real underlying advantage of this is that we’re demonstrating that we are able to incorporate life processes and make it intrinsic, and that’s what is really magical about this.”
“You can convert the sugars into many different things, including ethanol and other biofuels,” Wendell said. “And it removes carbon dioxide from the air but maintains current arable land for food production.”
“This new technology establishes an economical way of harnessing the physiology of living systems by creating a new generation of functional materials that intrinsically incorporates life processes into its structure,” Montemagno said. “Specifically, in this work it presents a new pathway of harvesting solar energy to produce either oil or food with efficiencies that exceed other biosolar production methodologies. More broadly, it establishes a mechanism for incorporating the functionality found in living systems into systems that we engineer and build.”
The team says the next step will be to try to make the technology feasible for large-scale applications like carbon capture and coal-burning power plants.
“This involves developing a strategy to extract both the lipid shell of the algae (used for biodiesel) and the cytoplasmic contents (the guts), and reusing these proteins in foam,” Wendell said. “We are also looking into other short carbon molecules we can make by altering the enzyme cocktail in the foam.”
“It is a significant step in delivering the promise of nanotechnology,” Montemagno added.
Azerbaijan, Baku, Aug. 25 / TrendK.Zarbaliyeva /
