Please provide values below to convert radian [rad] to minute ['], or vice versa.
Definition: A radian (symbol: rad) is the standard unit of angular measure. It is a derived unit (meaning that it is a unit that is derived from one of the seven SI base units) in the International System of Units. An angle's measurement in radians is numerically equal to the length of a corresponding arc of a unit circle. One radian is equal to 180/π (~57.296) degrees.
History/origin: Measuring angles in terms of arc length has been used by mathematicians since as early as the year 1400. The concept of the radian specifically however, is credited to Roger Cotes who described the measure in 1714. Although he described the unit, Cotes did not name the radian, and it was not until 1873 that the term "radian" first appeared in print.
Current use: The radian is widely used throughout mathematics as well as in many branches of physics that involve angular measurements. Although the symbol "rad" is the accepted SI symbol, in practice, radians are often written without the symbol since a radian is a ratio of two lengths and is therefore, a dimensionless quantity. As such, when angle measures are written, the lack of a symbol implies that the measurement is in radians, while a ° symbol would be added if the measurement were in degrees.
Definition: A minute (symbol: min) is a unit of time based on the second, the base unit of the International System of Units (SI). It is equal to 60 seconds. Under Coordinated Universal Time, a minute can have a leap second, making the minute equal to 61 rather than 60 seconds.
History/origin: The term "minute" is derived from the Latin "pars minuta prima" which means the "first small part." The minute was originally defined as 1/60 of an hour (60 seconds), based on the average period of Earth's rotation relative to the sun, known as a mean solar day.
Current use: The minute, as a multiple of the second, is used for all manner of measurements of duration, from timing races, measuring cooking or baking times, number of heart beats per minute, to any number of other applications.


If BBC television news has given up on showing us much from speeches (see previous post and links to others), their obsession with inflicting information overload on us via PowerPoint style presentations shows no sign of abating (for more on which, see below).
Last night, 10 o'clock newsreader Huw Edwards was out on location in front of Cardiff castle, from where he sent us "live from our health correspondent" (back in the studio) for a "reality check on health policy" - i.e. a slide-dependent lecture punctuated by a few words of wisdom from an 'expert'.
After watching it through once, wait five minutes and then see how many of her handy facts you can remember.
Or, if that's too painful, give it marks out of ten according to how well you think this 'news report' did in fulfilling each of the aims of the BBC as specified in its Royal Charter, namely 't0 inform, educate and entertain'.
Is there an open-mouthed school of acting?
A post at the start of the election - Blair speaks and the BBC tells you what he says - illustrated the continuing reluctance of British television news programmes to show us anything more than the briefest excerpts from speeches by politicians.
Another example from Newsnight was posted as Silent speeches by party leaders: the wallpaper of television news coverage.
On last night's BBC 10 o'clock News, there was another similar gem with political editor Nick Robinson standing on a balcony whispering about Gordon Brown's election strategy, while the PM himself was speaking, presumably about something else, to an audience down on the floor below (bottom left of the screen).
Local election news: is the horse manure coming home to roost?
"What do you want? A bag of horse muck?"
True or not, the fact that the story tells of a farmer raising the question about one of Mr Heathcote-Amory's more famous expenses claims must worry a candidate defending a 3,000 majority in a Con/LibDem marginal seat (Wells) - where most farmers tend to vote Conservative.
But it does rather confirm my earlier suggestions that it would have made more sense for him to have sourced the horse manure locally (HERE) rather than from Highgrove in Gloucestershire.
As the Labour and Conservative parties continue singing the same tune about the horrors of a 'hung parliament', I remain as baffled as ever by their shared willingness to spend decades in opposition in exchange for an occasional few stints in power (HERE).
And, having suggested (HERE) that one of the reasons for Nick Clegg's success in the first TV debate was that the other two parties misjudged just how different a three-cornered debate would be from a straight duel between two parties, I was fascinated over the weekend to stumble across this YouTube clip from nine months ago in which Labour's master of spin confirms exactly what I suspected.
On 29th July last year, Lord Mandelson told ITN that Gordon Brown would be up a televised debate - between two parties (full video HERE).
As I said in a post after the first debate, 'I should think that the Labour and Conservative negotiators are kicking themselves for (the rules) they agreed as much as the Liberal Democrats are patting themselves on their backs'.
And I don't expect the Mandelson of nine months ago expected that he'd be putting out memos like this one half way through the campaign.
Before we watch the debates, has anyone seen or heard any proper speeches yet?
Did the TV debaters tell too many stories?
Will the first leader to break down the 'ban' on applause be declared the night's winner?
Is the TV debate ban on applause holding firm because we're obsessed with following rules?
Two debates on and, to my amazement, none of the leaders has managed to break through the ban on applause. Gordon Brown came closest when he got a laugh by accusing the other two of squabbling like his two boys at bath time - as audience laughter often leads into a burst of applause.
So I'd love to know what dire threats about Rule 40 are being issued to the audiences during the pre-debate briefings.
Or is it just that we Brits are so obsessed with following rules that no one would dream of getting their hands apart having just been told not to do so?
After all, one of the reasons we get so irritated by some of the sillier rules coming out of Brussels is that we, unlike the citizens of certain other EC countries (e.g. France), feel obliged to follow them all to the letter.
OK, I give in: to those of you who seem to think you might have missed something on Newsnight last night - which is quite likely, as there was only 24 seconds of it - here my rather predictable comment to Michael Crick.
Note that it's a request rather than a straight ban on applause. And similar bans have failed to hold in US presidential debates - for more on which, see HERE.
As for how to maximise the chances of triggering applause in political speeches, of course, all is revealed in the books at the top of this page.
Last night's Newsnight on BBC2 featured a couple of spectacular illustrations of one of my repeated complaints about the way media coverage of politics in the UK has been going for at least a decade.
After one of the US presidential elections, I wrote on Mediated speeches: whom do we really want to hear?
I began the new year with a post asking the question Will the 2010 UK general election be the first one to leave us speechless?
At the start of the election, I posted a video clip under the heading Blair speaks and the BBC tells you what he said.
All three made the point that British television news programmes have increasingly given up on allowing viewers see and hear politicians making speeches - unless, of course they're staged events in their own studios, like the three leaders' debates - and prefer to have their reporters telling us what the speakers are saying.
This reached a high (or low?) point on Newsnight last night, when Nick Clegg and David Cameron were shown making speeches in total and complete silence.
Not only that, but the commentary from political editor Michael Crick didn't even give us any hints about what either of the party leaders had actually been saying in their speeches, concentrating in stead on a preview of tonight's leaders' debate.
So far, it's the most extreme example of speeches being treated as wallpaper that I've seen - and I'd be interested to hear from anyone who spots any similar examples between now and polling day.
I'd be even more interested to hear if anyone has actually seen or heard any news programmes featuring any excerpts from any proper speeches since the campaign began.
A few days ago, Iain Dale, one of our most high profile and prolific bloggers, complained that he was finding the election so boring that he'd got writer's block. I'm having a similar problem - even though I've been following elections more closely than average since I first started to collect recordings from them back in 1979.
As regular readers will know, I've been concerned for some time by the way that British media coverage of politics, aided and abetted by the politicians themselves, has more or less given up on filming proper speeches at proper rallies in favour of interviews, pointless photo opportunities and exegesis of the gospels according to the opinion pollsters.
It's a trend that's now culminated with three 90 minute television programmes.
As a result, election coverage - and you could say the whole election - is rapidly boiling down to a narrow and obsessive focus on a three 'act' play, with each 'act' preceded and followed by endless literary criticism in the form of commentary and analysis by reporters, pundits and pollsters about who did how well, which one should do what in order to do better in the next one and what effect they might be having on the opinion polls.
Meanwhile, the politicians seem to be just as preoccupied with the play, both on screen and behind the scenes as they rehearse for the next performance.
Last night, I tried, yet again, to find some semblance of excitement and/or enthusiasm on the television news programmes, but had to endure yet more footage of politicians walking around high streets, with a word or two to a reporter here and there - plus lots of authoritative sounding stuff from journalists about what (according to them) is actually going on out there - illustrated, of course, by ever more flashy PowerPoint style slides showing each party's progress in the polls.
How did Sky News become the LibDems of the TV debate broadcasters?
If it was a major victory for the Liberal Democrats to be granted equal rights in the rules of engagement in the TV leaders' debates (see previous post), the same can surely be said of Sky News being granted equal debate broadcasting rights with the BBC and ITV.
BARB statistics suggest that Sky News has an audience of about two million - but whether that includes all the people watching it in hotel rooms abroad isn't clear.
Unless something happens in the second debate on Sky News this Thursday to turn the third one on BBC into an exciting final knockout round, two advantages make it look as though ITV will be the winner in the ratings battle. They had the luck to draw the straw to make history by broadcasting the first ever televised debate in a UK general election. And, by scheduling it immediately after Coronation Street, they had a captive mass audience of soap opera fans ready and waiting as history was about to be made.
But the Sky News debate on Thursday will come on after - er - Sky News.
So as big a question as how the LibDems managed to get equal rights for their leader in the debates is how the Murdoch media group managed to elbow other worthy candidates like Channel 4 News into touch to put Sky News on an equal footing with the BBC and ITV?
One of the things that struck me about the first TV debate between party leaders was how very different it was from election debates between US presidential candidates - and, indeed, almost any other 'debate' I've ever come across.
The most obvious - and consequential - difference from the American TV debates is that the British version has three, rather than two, contestants. Add to that the fact that only two of the three are deemed to have any realistic chance of becoming prime minister, and you have very unusual set of dynamics indeed.
Compared with most conventional approaches to 'debating' - including other adversarial exchanges like those in courts of law - the presence of a third party makes these 'debates' about as different from a straight duel between two opponents as you can get.
In effect, there are two debates going on at the same time: one between the leaders of the two biggest parties trying to score points against each other, and another in which the leader of the third party tries to score points against the other two.
Brown and Cameron both acknowledged that Clegg did rather well in the first debate, and have announced that they'll counteract by turning their attacks on Liberal Democrat policies.
This might seem a rational and obvious enough response, but I suspect they'd do better by spending rather more time on analysing the dynamics of the unusual situation in which they find themselves and devising a workable strategy for dealing with it - because I suspect that one of the main reasons for Nick Clegg's unexpected success in the first debate came from the fact that neither of the main parties had realised beforehand how a three-sided 'debate' would actually work in practice.
So Brown and Cameron concentrated too exclusively on attacking each other, without much regard for the presence of a third party who, for once, had the same speaking and turn-taking rights as themselves.
Clegg's position as the 'third party' allowed him to align himself with the voting public and express their frustration at the other two parties "the more the two of them attack each other, the more they sound the same."
The LibDem leader only ever gets to speak third, after the other two leaders have already had a go.
House of Commons procedures allow the Conservative leader to ask the prime minister three times as many questions as the LibDem leader.
The Labour and Conservative leaders both have dispatch boxes to lean on, rest their papers on, bang their fists on and generally look like VIPs - compared with the Liberal Democrat leader, who has no dispatch box to lean on and nowhere to put his papers other than in his hands in front of him.
But in the TV debates, there is equality on all three fronts: how the turn-taking is organised, how long each leader may speak and where each one gets to stand (i.e. at identical lecterns).
During the protracted negotiations that eventually led to agreement on the 76 rules of engagement, I suspected that they might be creating a beast that wouldn't work in the quite the way they all expected (e.g. HERE) - and recommended that televising the debates between the politicians and broadcasters about the rules would have made for some very interesting viewing (HERE).
After the first debate, I should think that the Labour and Conservative negotiators are kicking themselves for what they agreed as much as the Liberal Democrats are patting themselves on their backs.
If I were advising the parties on how to deal with the next debate, I'd be telling the Brown and Cameron camps to give at least as much thought to the dynamics of dealing with a three-cornered debate as to working out attacks on LibDem policies.
Meanwhile, I'd be advising the Clegg camp to carry on with more of the same and urging him to make the most of the rare equality afforded to the LibDems by the rules.
As I said in my post on Vince Cable's victory in the 'Chancellors' Debate', attacking the other parties along the lines of 'a plague on both your houses' has been an recurring Liberal line of attack for more than thirty years. In the aftermath of the MPs' expenses scandals and widespread disaffection for politics and politicians, it's a line that seems to be playing better then ever - and whose moment may finally have come.
After his party has lost three consecutive general elections and spent thirteen years in opposition, Conservative leader David Cameron has started to issue dire warnings about the horrors that await us if we're stupid enough to vote for a 'hung parliament'.
I'm as flabbergasted by this as I was by Labour friends who continued to denounce proportional representation during their eighteen years in opposition between 1979 and 1997.
How does your party (not to mention the poor old country) benefit from your preference for letting the other lot do whatever they like for 13 or 18 years when you could, with a more rational voting system, be in a position to moderate and/or restrain the excesses that inevitably flow from absolute power?
Is your party quite happy to be powerless for a decade or two in exchange for being in power for another decade or two?
Could one or other of you please explain how anyone in the country actually benefits from this bizarre form of turn-taking?
As I suspected, I found the first TV debate as stilted, boring and uninspiring as I'd feared it would be.
Nor, however historic it may have been, did the continuous wall-to-wall media hype before and afterwards persuade me that the transfer of political coverage from traditional election rallies into television studios will ever generate much excitement or enthusiasm for politics among the wider public.
But, from an observer's point of view, there was rather more meat there than I'd anticipated.
So this is what I hope will be (time permitting) the first in a series of posts about the debate(s) - unless, of course, any of them distract me by taking to the stump and making proper speeches at proper rallies.
I've never come across any presentation skills researcher, writer or trainer who doesn't recommend stories as an effective way for speakers to get their points across.
So, perhaps not surprisingly, all three leaders came armed with collections of anecdotes that could be trotted out at suitable points in the proceedings.
But the question is whether I'm alone in thinking that they overdid it.
After the first one or two, I found myself groaning and thinking "Oh no - not another attempt to show how in touch you are with ordinary people around the country."
In case you didn't notice them, here's a selection by way of a reminder. I'd be curious to know whether anyone else thought there were too many. Or was the bronze medal awarded to Brown by the instant pollsters partly a result of the fact that he had fewer stories up his sleeve than the other two?
"I was in a hospital, a paediatric hospital in Cardiff a few months ago, treating very sick premature young babies. I was being shown around and there were a large number of babies needing to be treated. There was a ward standing completely empty, though it had the latest equipment. I said to the ward sister "What's going on? Why are there no babies being treated?" She said "New rules mean we can't employ any doctors from outside the European Union with the skills needed". That's an example of where the rules are stopping good immigration which actually helps our public services to work properly."
"I met a young man in London the other day. His flat had been burgled five times, and one of them, would you believe it, Jacqueline, was when he was away at his father's funeral. He said to me "Why can't this stop?"
"I was in a factory in my own city where I'm an MP in Sheffield just a few weeks ago. There was a great British company there, a manufacturing company, that produces great metal braces with these huge rollers, which apparently are sold to the American army. They attach them onto their vehicles, and when the rollers move over mines, the mines blow up, but of course, they destroy the rollers and not the soldiers. The American army says that those rollers, diesigned, manufactured by a great British business in Sheffield, have saved 140 lives. Why is it they're not being used by the British army?"
"I went to Crosby the other day and I was talking to a woman there who had been burgled by someone who had just left prison. He stole everything in her house. As he left, he set fire to the sofa and her son died from the fumes. That burglar, that murderer, could be out of prison in just four-and-a-half years. The system doesn't work, but that sort of sentence is, I think, just completely unacceptable in terms of what the public expect for proper punishment."
"I went to a Hull police station the other day. They had five different police cars, and they were just about to buy a £73,000 Lexus. There's money that could be saved to get the police on the frontline."
"I have a man in my constituency called Clive Stone who had kidney cancer who came to see me with seven others. Tragically, two of them have died because they couldn't get the drug Sutent that they wanted, that was on the market, that people knew was a good drug. That's a scandal in our country today."
"My mother was a magistrate in Newbury for 30 years. She sat on the bench, and she did use those short prison sentences that you're talking about. I've got to tell you, when someone smashes up the bus stop, when someone repeatedly breaks the law, when someone's found fighting on a Friday or Saturday night, as a magistrate, you've got to have that power for a short prison sentence when you've tried the other."
"When I was young, my father ran a youth club with my brother for young people, and the more people who do voluntary service and give their time in the community to getting young people off the streets doing purposeful activity, the better, whether it's sports, dancing or music or other activities that get people off the streets."
"I had a lady write to me who said that she would not be alive today if we hadn't introduced screening and we hadn't given the chance to see a specialist in two weeks."
Having just discovered (see P.S. to the previous post) that media reportage of one of the rules of engagement for the televised TV debates that interests me most was less than accurate, I thought it would be useful to check them out and make them available for readers to inspect before the fun begins.
How many of the rules get broken during each debate?
Who breaks which rules most often?
Which of the three chairman was most effective in curbing rule-breaches by the leaders?
The judge's decision will be final and the winner will be awarded a signed copy of Lend Me Your Ears. The runner-up will receive a signed copy of Speech-making and Presentation Made Easy.
1. The objective is to select an audience which is broadly a demographic cross section of the country.
2. the audience to be made up of roughly 200 people, subject to venue capacity.
4. recruit within a 30 mile radius of the host city, mindful of administrative borders on either side of that radius based on the revised ICM list of constituencies.
5. recruit according to gender, age, ethnicity and social class to best reflect the broader voting-age population. The recruitment procedure will be transparent, and its methodology will be available to the parties for comment.
6. ensure around 80% of the audience is made up of voters who express a voting intention at the time of recruitment.
7. These will be subdivided into ratios which reflect a ratio of 7 Labour, 7 Conservative, 5 LibDem. The political ratios will take precedence over the demographic in the final selection of the audience by ICM.
8. within the 80% (see point 6) the broadcasters retain the right to recruit some audience members who express an intention to vote for smaller parties.
9. ensure that around 20% of the audience will be undecided but will be politically engaged. ICM’s definition of undecided voters to be the basis of this selection.
10. reserve a small number of seats for participants from outside the ICM selected audience, whose questions have been pre-submitted and selected by the broadcaster’s editorial panel. The broadcasters may use a variety of methods to encourage the submission of such questions from across the UK in the build up to the debates.
11. the number of questions from outside the ICM selected audience will be a maximum of four per debate.
13. issue audience members with a protocol of rules, including security procedures for entry and conduct during the debates. The protocol will be agreed by the parties.
characteristic of these programmes - whilst allowing the audience’s voices to be heard directly posing questions.
15. Each broadcaster will nominate a panel to choose the questions for its debate. The panel's membership will be public, but they will meet in private.
balanced debate within the rules of our agreements.
18. The panel will meet confidentially in the weeks running up to their debate.
19. All questions submitted by the ICM selected audience will be seen by a member of the panel. Email questions will be sifted and a selection given to the panel.
20. Initially, each panel will sift through a selection of questions drawn from those submitted by members of the public.
21. They will narrow down their selections in a series of meetings up to and including the day of the debate.
22. Each panel will have five to seven members, including a designated chair who would have a casting vote if necessary.
23. The panel cannot be quorate with fewer than three of its members present.
25. each question will be relevant to all three party leaders.
26. no question shall focus on one party or one leader.
28. audience members will be made aware of these rules before submitting their final questions.
29. half the programme will be based on the agreed theme. Within that portion of the programme, a maximum of three questions will be selected on a single sub-theme (as listed in point 65 of this document).
30. half the programme will be unthemed. In this portion of the programme, a maximum of two questions will be selected on a single subject.
31. the range of questions chosen will reflect the broadcasters' legal and compliance responsibilities for due impartiality and fairness.
32. the panel will use its editorial judgement to select questions and will take into account factors such as the prominence of certain issues in the campaign, the distinctiveness of the different parties’ policies on election issues, voters’ interest and issues relevant to the role of the Prime Minister.
33. Within these rules, the editorial independence of the panel shall be paramount, because each broadcaster is answerable to its regulator for its programme content.
34. Questions may be selected by the editorial selection panel up to the start of the debate.
35. The selected questions will not be shown to anyone outside the editorial team in advance of the programmes.
36. Members of the audience will ask their questions. The moderator will ask the leaders to respond. The moderator may read email questions.
37. All questions will be addressed to and answered by all three leaders.
38. The audience members will be restricted to asking the selected questions.
39. There will be an option of viewer involvement via emails read by the moderator.
40. In order to maximise the time available for viewers to hear the leaders discussing election issues with each other, the studio audience will be asked not to applaud during the debate. There will be opportunities to do so both at the beginning and at the end of each programme.
41. the programme will start with all three leaders on set and standing at their podiums.
the audience and the leaders.
44. The first half of the programme will be on the agreed theme but with the agreement of all the parties, in case of a major national or international event not included in the theme of the debate, the moderator will ask the leaders for their reaction to the development at the start of the programme before moving on to the theme.
45. The time taken for the reaction to such an event will be added to the time available for the themed part of the debate, unless the event is clearly part of the theme of the debate, in which case the reaction will be counted as part of the time allotted to the theme.
46. Each leader will make an opening statement on the theme of the debate lasting for 1 minute. After the three opening statements the moderator will take the first question on the agreed theme. There will be closing statements of 1 minute 30 seconds from all three leaders at the end of the 90 minutes.
47. Each leader will have 1 minute to answer the question.
48. Each leader will then have 1 minute to respond to the answers.
49. The moderator may then open the discussion to free debate between the leaders for up to 4 minutes on merit.
50. The length of the debate on each question will be decided by the programme editor.
51. The programme editor will use their best endeavours to keep to the 4 minute time allowance but it may need to be extended in the interest of equality of treatment.
52. Questions will be taken on the theme until around half way through the programme, depending on timing and ensuring fair treatment of all three leaders.
selected by the broadcaster’s panel from the audience or via email.
55. There will be a clock indicating the time remaining for statements, answers to questions and responses. This will be visible to the candidates and moderator but not to the audience in the debate or on screen.
56. The order of speakers, based on an agreed grid, has been determined by the parties drawing lots.
57. At the end of the programme the three leaders will shake hands.
60. To ensure free-flowing debate being fair to all candidates over the course of the programme.
63. It is not the moderator’s role to criticise or comment on the leaders’ answers.
66. The leaders will stand at podiums throughout the debate. The positions of the three leaders during the debates are to be determined by agreement with all parties.
67. The moderator will have a podium/desk and will move within a small area to allow eyeline with the audience and the leaders.
68. Each broadcaster responsible for their own titles, music, branding etc.
69. The purpose of the programmes are for the viewers to see and hear the party leaders engaging in debate with each other and answering questions from the audience. The audience is a key element of the programmes and has to be seen by the viewers but there will not be undue concentration of the reactions of individual audience members.
70. There will be a close up of the questioner while he/she is asking a question.
71. There will be no close-up cutaways of a single individual audience member while the leaders are speaking.
72. However if one of the leaders directly addresses an individual audience member, a close-up shot of that individual can be shown e.g. if a leader answers a question by directly addressing the questioner.
73. There may be group shots and wide shots of the audience during the programme.
74. The programme will be confined to events inside the debate studio.
75. Breaking News straps will not be put over live coverage of the debate. On news channels (Sky News, BBC News channel), the scrolling news tickers will offer other news but will not cover breaking news lines from the debates while the debates are taking place.
76. Each party will have the right to recall the negotiating panel made up of representatives from the broadcasters and the parties, during the campaign to discuss issues arising from the debates.
As I've been away since the start of the election campaign, I haven't been able to monitor news coverage to check on whether or not one of my predictions is coming true.
A few months ago, I suggested that the 2010 general election could go down in history as the first one that leaves us completely speechless (HERE).
So I'd be very interested to hear whether anyone has seen or heard any of our leading politicians making a proper speech at a proper rally yet - and by 'proper', I don't mean formal statements to assembled groups of journalists and/or television crews.
As for the the much heralded televised debates, I don't share the eager excitement being drummed up by the media, not least because they have such an obvious vested interest in being able to film such stuff in their own studios without the expense and inconvenience of having to send camera crews out to to cover rallies miles away from London.
And, as I've mentioned before in relation to a recent speech by Tony Blair, and one of US election debates between Obama and McCain, British television is more and more obsessed with mediating what we hear rather than covering live speeches out there in the real world.
I shall be watching the 'debates', of course. But my main interest will be to see whether and how they manage to enforce the various nonsensical rules of procedure, most notably the ban on applause - for more on which, see TV Debate Claptrap: a warning to those cooking up rules for the leaders' election debates.
My other reason for watching is that the BBC website has asked me for some instant comment afterwards, which means that I'll have to record tonight's episode of Coronation Street.
However, by the time this had been 'mediated' to those of us who hadn't read the rules in detail, the media had translated it into a 'ban' on applause - providing yet further grounds for concern about relying on journalists for our 'facts'.
If you've been wondering why I haven't been blogging since the election got under way, it's because I've had much more important things to do - on a family skiing holiday in the French Alps.
When my son kindly (or pointedly?) bought me a private ski lesson for my birthday present, the instructor asked me how long I'd been skiing. The answer, somewhat embarrassingly, was that it was more than fifty years ago - when things were very different compared with today.
In 1957, the boots were made of leather and the skis were made of wood.
To select 'correctly' sized skis, you had to reach into the air as high as you could before being allocated a pair that were a full arm's length longer than your height (RIGHT: Me with leather boots and long wooden skis, December, 1957).
Since then, the design of boots and skis have changed dramatically - and for the better. The boots are now much more comfortable and the shorter spoon-shaped skis make the whole business far easier than it used to be - and raise the question of whether the absurdly long skis of the past were a cunning ploy by the ski schools to make sure that you paid for classes for much longer than necessary.
Apart from the kit, the best thing that's happened (except in smaller resorts) is the replacement of button and T-bar lifts that pull you uphill, wearing you out long before you ever got anywhere near to the top, with comfortable high speed chair lifts (and various high tech gondolas and cable cars).
I'd forgotten just how tiring and stressful it is being pulled up-hill on your skis before skiing down-hill until a recent visit to a small French resort - where, on a single day, I had to endure the torment of thirteen button-lifts.
A few days ago, I went up at least as many chair-lifts but was able to relax and enjoy the views on the way up to each of the summits - from where you felt suitably rested and ready for the descent.
However, although I'm all in favour of the modern chair lift, my favourite lift of all is the historic cog railway from Wengen to Grindlewald via Kleine Sheidegg, which originally inspired the foundation of the Downhill Only Club and the concept of lift-assisted skiing - without which it would never have become the mass pastime that it is today.
Fifty years ago, you went on 'winter sports' holidays and skiing was just one of the things you did among others, like skating, tobogganing and curling. Today, people just take to the slopes on skis or snowboards and doing anything else tends to be viewed as 'wasted time' - which seems a pity, as I enjoyed last week's expedition on a sledge pulled by Huskies as much as a toboggan ride we did a few years ago from Kleine Scheidegg to Wengen.
Fifty years ago, most of the ski resorts were farming villages or health resorts, mainly in Switzerland and Austria, that had just begun to develop skiing as welcome boost to their local economies.
Today, if skiing is your main aim, the post 1960s French purpose-built resorts, with their hundreds of kilometres of pistes, interlinked by high tech lift systems have transformed things beyond belief. Each one of the Thee Valleys (Courcheval, Meribel and Val Thorens/Les Menuires), so the anoraks tell me, is a bigger ski area than the biggest area at any resort in North America.
But, if you're after Alpine character and old world charm, forget about the architectural monstrosities and indoor camping in tower blocks bequeathed by the French revolution of the 1960s-70s, and head for a traditional Austrian or Swiss village (providing you can put up with more limited ski areas and the daily torment of drag lifts).
Fifty years ago, these were still a thing of the future. And, if their reduced representation on the slopes last week is anything to go by, I suspect that, fifty years from now, they'll be a thing of the past.
At one point during one of this morning's interviews on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, I began wondering whether James Naughtie would ever get to the end of the question he was asking.
It reminded me of how often the garrulous Mr Naughtie has had this effect on me, and got me wondering whether I'm alone in wondering why the BBC lets one of their top interviewers ask questions that are often longer (and less coherent) than the answers he elicits from his interviewees.
So I found it quite reassuring to discover from a quick Google search that you don't have to look far to find comments about his long-winded style of questioning. Nor did it take long to come across some fine exhibits (HERE), and the following specimens are reproduced in ascending order of length.
I haven't timed how quickly Mr Naughtie speaks. But if we assume that it's somewhere around the average conversational speed of 170-180 words per minute, it would have taken him more than a minute to get to the end of the longest of these (184 words).
Is this another example, I wonder, of the BBC's apparent preference for allocating more time to its own staff than to the people we'd rather be listening to - that I blogged about a few days ago (HERE)?
Q: What's very interesting here is that we're very quickly back into the arguments, which are quite familiar about the reasons for war. And let me suggest to you, Secretary of State, that the reason these arguments are still quite fresh in people's minds a few years on is because they realize this has been a campaign attended by mistakes. Of course, there were people thought it was a bad idea completely. But even those who said, well, maybe this is the way to deal with Saddam. Look at John Sawer's, who's political director now of the Foreign Commonwealth Office, his assessment in May 2003 just after the invasion about what the American forces were doing there: no leadership, no strategy, no coordination, no structure and inaccessible to ordinary Iraqis. Now that was the Pentagon in Iraq. That was a mistake (140 words).
Q: To the Foreign Secretary in one second, but on the question of why we went to war, yes, it was said Saddam was a bad man who was a force for instability. No question about that. But the American people were told pretty straightforwardly we're in the business -- the American Administration -- of regime change. The British people were told something quite different and very distinctly different; that if it wasn't for the WMD than the whole game would be different. Now we know that those weapons didn't exist in the way that we were told they existed. And Mr. Blair tonight persistently -- that the argument in Britain was about regime change, and yet we now know don't we because of the arguments that went on and the leaks we've had from the discussions in Washington that Mr. Blair's party was regime change all along (147 words).
Q: But the question is not whether liberal democracy -- you talked about this in your lecture on the eve of this program -- is a good thing or a bad thing, as most people in this country, as in yours, think it is a desirable state. The question is how you go about bringing it. Now let me remind you and I'm sure you know these words from President Bush himself in the presidential debate just before he was elected October 2000. He said, if we're an arrogant nation, they will resent us -- speaking about the United States. Now the problem is that many people who try to look at this fair-mindedly, look for example at the question of extraordinary rendition, people taken to third countries where there may be practices that amount under international convention as to torture and they know that they go through our airspace. And the government said, well, really request every time -- a permission is requested every time this happens. Is a rendition flight only allowed through our airspace if the British Government has been informed? (184 words).
... and I bet no one's bothered to read all the way down to here!
It really isn't an April Fools day joke.
My publishers (Random House) have decided that 1st April is the perfect date for releasing a book of speeches made by Gordon Brown in the two years since he managed to get rid of Tony Blair.
How on earth did he find a publisher?
As I'm quite an expert on the difficulties of getting books published (for more on which see HERE) and on how awful most of his speeches are, I can't help wondering how he managed to find a publisher at all.
All I can think of is that the CEO of Random House is Gail Rebuck, who also happens to be the wife of Philip Gould (aka Baron Gould of Brookwood) - close advisor to Tony Blair and New Labour on polling, spin and anything else to do with communication that you can think of.
So was it the New Labour network that landed a publisher for Brown, or does the April 1st publication date mean that it's a not very subtle form of Blairite revenge?
Did Brown take my advice?
Wisdom of forethought - can Labour afford to back Brown?


Ratings highlights for the week of November 6, 2017 - November 12, 2017 in the U.S.
Primetime sports held the top two spots for the week in the 18-49s. NBC's 'Sunday Night Football' topped the week with a 5.8/20 adults 18-49 rating/share and 17.51 million viewers. 'Thursday Night Football' was second on the week with 4.0/16 demo rating & 13.1 million viewers; ABC's 'CMA Awards' notched a 3.2/12 & 14.27 million viewers.
On the scripted side, CBS's 'The Big Bang Theory' (2.8/11, 13.8M) topped the week, followed by NBC's 'This is Us' (2.6/9, 9.89M) and CBS's 'Young Sheldon' (2.2/8, 12.39M). On the CW, 'Dynasty' (0.22 18-49) dropped below 'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend' (0.24) to become the lowest-rated broadcast scripted series while 'Jane the Virgin' (647,000) was the lowest viewed. ABC's week was topped by 'Grey's Anatomy' (1.9/8, 8.13M) on the drama side, and 'The Middle' (1.3/5, 5.63M) on the comedy side. 'Empire' (1.8/7, 5.4M) and 'The Simpsons' (1.9/6, 4.75M) topped the week for FOX, while 'The Exorcist' (0.4/2, 1.27M) provided the net's low point. Other shows of note include NBC's 'The Blacklist' (0.9/3, 5.04M) and ABC's 'Scandal' (1.1/4, 5M) both of which performed modestly.
On Sunday, FOX's 4 p.m. 'NFL Football' coverage notched a 12.8 household rating with 21.963 million total viewers (8.62M in the demo). FOX's 1 p.m. coverage had a 7.43 HH rating with 12.35 million viewers, and CBS's 1 p.m. coverage was slightly lower with a 7.21 HH rating and 11.827 million viewers.
Table 1: household rating, 18-34 rating 18-49 rating (to two-decimal places for shows in which I had that data), 25-54 ratings, and total viewers.


Fred is 17 years old and is serving a sentence followed by nine months of probation for robbery, which is an indictable offence. If Fred commits another offence after he turns 18, what will happen to his youth record?
It will be closed when he turns 18.
It will be closed five years after his latest offence.
It will be closed five years and nine months after his latest offence.
It may become part of his adult record and be subject to adult record provisions.
It will be closed five years and nine months after he has completed his latest sentence.


In 1000 blocks, your task is to position different shapes on the grid and clear all the blocks of stone to complete a level. Position the shapes strategically to build horizontal or vertical lines. - Play 1000 Blocks Free and Enjoy!


Are these Bill Murray stories true or false?
Bill Murray's spontaneous interactions with total strangers have become so legendary that they've spawned a meme: dedicated sites that collate user-submitted tales of bizarre encounters with the actor (many of which end with him saying, "No one will ever believe you"). Can you distinguish which of these stories are real and which are fake?
1. Once, when Bill Murray was in Bali, he drove a motorcycle into the interior and got completely lost. Stranded, he went into a shop and started talking to the locals. He took one of their hats and started clowning around, eventually putting on a show for the whole village. In return, they helped get him home.
2. In 1975, he crashed the afterparty for the premiere of Tommy after persuading the caterers to let him and his friends (including John Belushi and Harold Ramis) in through the back door. He went up to Andy Warhol and, nervous, exclaimed, "I love the soup can!"
Warhol's only response was a withering look.
3. Murray was in Scotland to play golf about ten years ago, when he came across a student who invited him to a house party. He decided to go, so she rocked up with him in tow. To say thank you for her hospitality, he did all the washing up that had amassed in the students' sink.
4. One night, Murray was in a taxi in Oakland, California and discovered that his driver played the saxophone - and that he had it in the car. He insisted that they swap seats. Murray drove the rest of the journey, while the other guy played in the back - only stopping to enjoy some barbecued ribs with his new friend - all the way to his destination.
"We met in Hong Kong, so it was like Lost In Translation, except both of us were Bill Murray"


-------------- "Deep Space 9" -------------- You've gotten plastered for Star Trek, you've gotten wrecked sipping every time Capt. Picard adjusted his shirt, and now you've got yet another excuse to drink beer: the "Deep Space 9" drinking game. Like the ST and ST:TNG games, a drink is taken for common events that are part of the show (such as Kirk always kissing the (alien) girl, Worf getting beat up, etc). Some fans start to look forward to these events. Just so I don't get blamed for somebody spewing, it's recommended that you use shots or small gulps of beer when you take a drink. You may want to have some harder stuff for special events mentioned below, or chug a whole beer as suggested. Before the show starts, everyone picks a character. Everytime the character you picked gets into a confrontation, conflict, or fight, take a drink. Plus take a drink whenever: -something isn't working properly on the station -anyone says 'DS9' as the name of the space station -violence breaks out on the promenade ring -the wormhole is shown/opens (this includes the opening credits) -the station is shown from outside -the 'cog' airlocks are used/operated -any door is seen opened manually (if it's a 'cog', take two) -somebody mentions Bjor (only one drink per line; any number during the scene) -Sisko threatens somebody -someone hits on Dax -Odo is puzzled by humanoid behavior -the Cardasian spy uses clothing as a euphemism for something else -Dr. Bashir suggests something patently unwise And then take a drink AND do an action everytime: -someone rides the elevator to/from the control room action: say "going up?" or "going down?" -a shuttlecraft is shown action: guess the name of the craft out loud -Odo shapeshifts action: say "Jell-O!" -O'Brien uses the transporters action: nostalgic sigh -Jake Sisko gets in trouble action: say "Kids these days!" -Kira has a case of divided loyalties action: put a drink in each hand and have a drink from both -Quark is seen behind the bar action: take a second drink, or have a shot of something stronger Plus, chug a whole beer when and if: -someone from Star Trek: The Next Generation makes an appearance (members of the O'Brien family don't count, but secondary characters and extras _if_ you can identify them _absolutely_ do count) -Sisko backs down or knuckles under to someone else -Odo does something intentionally humorous -Dr. Bashir does something clever not related to medicine. -Dax gets into an amorous (sexual) encounter -O'Brien is asked to jury-rig something to save the day and it doesn't work -Quark does something selfless An average one hour episode consumes three beers per participant.


Is Saturn's Innermost Moon Actually a parked Alien Spaceship, Resupplying itself with Water?
Be honest: What does this look like to you? A natural satellite, or an alien spaceship in orbit around Saturn?
When Astronomer Mark Showalter analyzed old Voyager 2 probe photos in 1990, he discovered something shocking: An enormous UFO parked in orbit around Saturn.
But wait, there's more: It is vacuuming in ice crystals from Saturn's innermost ring, just what you might expect a visiting starship to do.
Publicly, NASA says Pan is a small, saucer shaped moon approximately 20 miles across and 15 miles wide that orbits within the Encke Gap in Saturn's A Ring. In mythology, Pan was a shepherd. The small moon is a "ring shepherd," responsible for keeping a gap between rings free of ring particles.
If it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, it's a duck. This "moon" does exactly what you would expect a large UFO from another galaxy to do. It is resupplying itself with water, using the most obvious and easiest to access a source. And it looks like, well, you tell me.
A nuclear submarine can remain submerged for months because it splits hydrogen from oxygen in water, burning the hydrogen as fuel and breathing the oxygen. A spaceship could do the same, as long as it had a source of water.
This is not the first time a small moon in our solar system has been theorized to actually be a large spaceship. In the late 1950s and 1960s, the unusual orbital characteristics of Martian moon Phobos led to speculations that it might be hollow.
Around 1958, Russian astrophysicist Iosif Shklovsky, studying the secular acceleration of Phobos's orbital motion, suggested a "thin sheet metal" structure for Phobos, a suggestion which led to speculations that Phobos was of artificial origin. That it was in fact, an alien spaceship.
Shklovsky based his analysis on estimates of the upper Martian atmosphere's density, and deduced that for the weak braking effect to be able to account for the secular acceleration, Phobos had to be very light-one calculation yielded a hollow iron sphere 16 kilometers (9.9 mi) across but less than 6 cm thick.
Like a spaceship from Earth built by Nasa, Phobos and Pan are apparently both make from the alien equivalent of sheet metal--perhaps titanium hulls.
The alien's may actually have parked their ship around Saturn prior to 1985. These are clearly beings who can manipulate not just space, but also time, because the two are linked through Einstein's famous equation.
Is Pan, like Phobos, a discarded UFO-- an ancient alien spacecraft? From NASA, the people who brought you (and then denied) the Face on Mars, comes a new enigma: The Flying Saucer orbiting Saturn.
In 1986 Showalter et al. inferred its orbit and mass by modeling its gravitational wake. They arrived at a very precise prediction of 133,603 ± 10 km for the semi-major axis and a mass of 5–10×10−12 Saturn masses, and inferred that there was only a single moon within the Encke gap. The actual semi-major axis differs by 19 km and the actual mass is 8.6×10−12 of Saturn's.
Did NASA hide Pan's discovery from us long enough to understand its true origin? What does Pan portend for our future? Did its crew die before the resupply was complete, or are they in suspended animation? Only further study will likely answer these and other questions.


The business plan for energy efficiency in Russia seems compelling: Invest $300 billion over eight years and save the energy equivalent of 300 million tons of crude oil a year, an ongoing annual turnover of $204 billion at current oil prices.
But there's a catch. The variables, pitfalls, and unknowns include the Russian government's vaguely worded commitments and programs, procurement rules designed to promote transparency that actually inhibit risk-taking, and a populace that, although thought to be ready to embrace the latest technology in light bulbs, remains convinced it has enough energy resources for a long, long time.
All the same, firms are beginning to invest cautiously to participate in the game, encouraged by independent analysis that confirms the possible returns.
A study by the International Energy Agency last fall concluded that Russia could have saved over 200 million tons of crude-oil equivalent — enough to power a large EU country — if it had used technology available to developed countries in 2008.
The upshot, as the IEA report succinctly noted, is that "the world needs Russian energy resources, while Russia needs improvement of energy efficiency."
In 2008, then-President Dmitry Medvedev set a goal of slashing consumption 40 percent by 2020 and advocated "work on the energy efficiency of our economy, which ultimately will help solve the global task related to climate change." Domestic and international technology firms pricked up their ears.
Some, like Rostov-region-based bank Center Invest, have cashed in by offering loans to finance energy-efficiency projects.
Business empires like Viktor Vekselburg's Renova Group have at least started incorporating words like "smart grid" and "energy saving" into their corporate literature.
Vekselburg, who also oversees the government's Skolkovo innovation hub, announced last month that the Skolkovo fund would pursue energy-saving technology in cooperation with Chinese companies.
Meanwhile, the governments of Germany, France and Finland have established energy-efficiency centers of expertise here to demonstrate their commitment, share know-how and help their countries' companies stake a claim.
At the beginning of June, the United States sent a trade delegation to Moscow to tap into a potentially vast market for energy-saving technology that was opened by the Russian government's drive to slash domestic energy waste.
Francisco Sanchez, the U.S. undersecretary for international trade, led the delegation. He rejected the suggestion that Americans have arrived to the party late.
"President [Barack] Obama and Dmitry Medvedev discussed cooperation in this sector already in 2010," he told The Moscow Times.
Furthermore, American companies have already implemented similar projects in Russia. When the country joints the WTO, the market opening will be a springboard, he added.
Russia has the largest natural gas resources in the world, and at current production rates, proven reserves alone will be sufficient for at least 60 years. Its oil reserves, the world's eighth-largest, will be sufficient for over 20 years, not counting the discovery of new deposits, according to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy published in June.
As a result, few Russians see any looming risks to their energy security. Fully 53 percent surveyed by the Eurasian Monitor in 2007 said they did not believe the country is facing any shortage of energy resources.
However, Russia is not only an energy producer but a very hungry consumer. It is the third-largest primary energy consumer, after the United States and China, and it is much less efficient.
The United States manufactures almost twice as much for each unit of energy it consumes, according to World Bank figures. China produces about 20 percent more than Russia for each energy unit.
In 2008, the World Bank published a report that said Russia could reasonably slash its energy consumption by 45 percent. That would generate a potential annual saving of 300 million tons of crude-oil equivalent, enough to supply Germany, France, Brazil or South Korea for a whole year.
Medvedev's 2008 decree set a target of 2020 and aims to reduce Russia's energy consumption per unit of gross domestic product by at least 40 percent compared with 2007 levels.
That was followed in November 2009 by a federal law on energy saving. A year later, the Russian government approved a state program labeled "Energy Saving and Energy Efficiency Improvement till 2020."
The state program concedes that energy consumption per unit of GDP is 2.5 to 3.5 times higher in Russia than in developed countries.
This difference is partly explained by Russia's vast landmass, severe winters and industrial structure, IEA experts say. Other contributors include the enduring Soviet-era practice of artificially depressing prices for utilities and public services, and the outdated and inefficient heating, lighting, and air conditioning systems in many homes and businesses.
According to the state program on energy saving, the vast majority of power plants, homes, boilers, generation equipment and heat distribution networks were built before 1990.
About a quarter of the refrigerators in the country were purchased more than 20 years ago, and 15 percent of industrial capital assets are obsolete.
The state program calls for 9.5 trillion rubles (the above-mentioned $300 billion) of investment, but only 695 billion rubles will come from the federal and regional budgets. The rest is expected to come from private-sector investment.
The 165-page document is filled with copious subprograms, generalities and consolidated numbers. It is short on details, though it does foresee an energy savings of slightly less than half of what the IEA hopes for.
According to the text, 22 percent of the projected savings are to come from oil, gas and coal companies, including refining and transportation.
An additional 44 percent is to be saved by major consumers in the areas of housing and utilities. A further 15 percent will come from the rest of the industrial sector, and the remaining 19 percent will come from improved power transmission to homes and municipal institutions like hospitals and schools.
By far the most infamous waste of energy by Russia's primary producers is the wholesale burning of the petroleum gas produced as a by-product at oil fields.
Recovering, storing and transporting petroleum gas for commercial use is often considered too costly and too inconvenient. So since Soviet times, the gas has been routinely torched.
The resulting gas flares can be seen from space and make a spectacular sight for anyone flying over Siberia at night.
Russian agencies estimate that the country produces 60 billion to 70 billion cubic meters of associated gas per year, of which 15 billion to 20 billion is burned. That's enough gas to supply the whole of France for six months. Austria could live on it for two years.
The World Bank estimates that the losses are actually double the number Russia claims.
The state is aware of the problem. President Vladimir Putin said last summer, when he was prime minister, that "flares burning above oil deposits have become one of the symbols of careless and archaic treatment of our own natural resources."
Steps have been taken to rectify the situation. In 2009, the government told oil companies they must be using up to 95 percent of associated gas by 2012. But last spring, the Natural Resources and Environment Ministry acknowledged that this target would be missed.
While private companies, including Surgutneftegaz and LUKoil, have either achieved or are approaching the required level of recovery, the public sector is lagging behind. Rosneft, the No. 1 offender, is still burning 46 percent of its associated gas, and Gazprom Neft is flaring 44 percent, former Natural Resources and Environment Minister Yury Trutnev said.
Deputy Natural Resources and Environment Minister Denis Khramov said last month that oil companies would pay a hefty sum of 16.5 billion rubles in penalties for natural gas flaring this year.
That's an increase of 50 percent from last year, and it is the expected result of the decision to fine anyone who burns more than the 5 percent limit.
Oil companies are planning cumulative spending of 63 billion rubles in the 2012-14 period on projects to use the gas instead of allowing it to go to waste, former Energy Minister Sergei Shmatko said in March.
While producers are being pressed by fines, commercial consumers are moving toward efficiency out of practicality.
Given the steady increase in gas and power prices, efficiency is a matter of survival for most businesses, said Sergei Pikin, director of the Energy Development Foundation.
Individual consumers, however, are not feeling the pinch yet. Unlike their European peers, who shell out hundreds of euros for utility bills and cut costs at every turn, domestic consumers in Russia pay an average of just 3,000 rubles per month for heat, gas and power, Pikin said.
Surveys indicate that people understand the waste problem. A poll by state-owned VTsIOM shortly after Medvedev's 2010 announcement of a ban on incandescent light bulbs of more than 100 watts found that 80 percent of Russians recognize the importance of energy efficiency to the country's economy.
But two years later, that ban, which came into effect in 2011, remains the best-known effort to increase energy efficiency for members of the public, despite promises of a massive public information campaign, Pikin said.
The main potential for energy saving at home lies not in changing light bulbs, however, but in turning down the thermostat.
Energy Ministry figures show that heating makes up 70 percent of the energy consumed by the average household. Cooking accounts for 15 percent, domestic appliances for 10 percent and lighting for just 5 percent.
But for most Russians, turning down the thermostat is not an option. Partly because of the harsh climate, domestic heating in Russia is centralized in the truest sense of the word.
Water is heated at power stations and piped via an elaborate network to each radiator in each house. This means there is no individual control over the temperature in homes. If an apartment gets too hot, an open window becomes the thermostat.
One way to solve this problem is to install equipment that allows an apartment to take as much water from the heating main as it needs, and shut it off when it gets too hot.
But the solution requires not only money but also a collective effort, as it needs to be deployed in an entire building. Getting neighbors to agree can be tricky. Residential apartment blocks tend to be under the common ownership of their inhabitants rather than owned by a single landlord.
In the industrial sector, however, demand for energy-saving technology is beginning to boom.
Leonid Sorkin, general manager of Honeywell in Russia and the CIS, said that his firm has worked on dozens of projects with industrial enterprises in the past four to five years and that interest among industrial clients in energy-saving solutions picked up well before the government approved its program.
The second-most-important segment is large-scale commercial real estate projects and municipal buildings, he said.
But in the public sector, the one the government's program should be able to influence the most, things are only slowly beginning to pick up, Sorkin said. And progress is stymied by bureaucratic difficulties.
At the end of last year, Honeywell signed a "performance contract" with the St. Petersburg city government for an all-inclusive renovation of a city hospital – insulation, installation of a new energy supply, heating, air conditioning and ventilation systems.
It's one of the first examples in Russia in which the contractor has fully or partially covered the expenses and recovered the investment when the customer starts saving energy.
Such deals are common in Europe and North America and should be one of the key tools for aiding Medvedev's efficiency drive in Russia.
But Sorkin said performance contracts can run into difficulties because procurement legislation dictates that authorities put contracts up for public tenders, where the main criterion is competitive pricing.
Bidders who offer a minimal price will not necessarily have the technology and experience to slash energy use in the long term, Sorkin said.
Despite such challenges, officials see the market as wide open and highly competitive. The market is so large that many Western companies have begun transferring production to Russia, said Yulia Chernyakhovskaya, deputy general manager of the Russian Energy Agency at the Energy Ministry.
She cited a factory in the Krasnoyarsk region that started turning out smart meters this year based on technology by Sagemcom, a French company.
"We always support such initiatives. Transfer of Western technologies and know-how is a strategic direction of our work," she said.
Programs showcased by her agency at an April presentation for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the International Finance Corporation included heating-supply projects in the Tver and Kostroma regions, water-supply improvements in Perm region and Ingushetia, and work by a number of businesses in the Kursk region and Yakutia.
One project was recommended for EBRD financing, one has not secured funding so far, and five projects are being updated to attract financing from the International Finance Corporation.
According to the federal energy-saving program, Russia should have saved 32.5 million tons of fuel equivalent (about 23 million tons of oil equivalent) in 2011. But the government has not published any final results. Nor has anyone estimated any figures for the industry as a whole.
"Subsidies provided from the budget to support the best regional programs were received only at the end of last year," said Timur Ivanov, former chief of the Russian Energy Agency. "Therefore, all entities have been essentially involved in preparation until now. Now they must begin the actual project implementation."
Chernyakhovskaya said about 47 billion rubles was handed out for regional energy-saving programs in 2011, 19.7 billion rubles of which came from federal, regional and local budgets. The rest was provided by nonbudgetary sources.
State funding is meant to attract money from elsewhere, and in theory it is reserved for activities that precede investment efforts: energy research, development of consumption monitoring systems, regulatory and methodological support and administrative assistance to investors.
While there is no confirmed estimate of the value of the potential market, the uncertainty is not putting off major firms, said David Johnson, vice president of Nalco Ecolab, an American energy- and water-saving-technology supplier, which has been dealing with Russia for over 20 years and accompanied the recent U.S. trade delegation.
The surge in demand that Medvedev's initiatives are meant to unleash is still five to six years in the future, Johnson said.
Nonetheless, Nalco Ecolab has set a target of increasing its Russian business by 30 percent annually until it gains 30 percent market share.
The potential is huge, Johnson said.


Welezo Healthcare is hiring for the following positions. If you fit in any of the roles below and who would like to be part of a growing organization that is creating a positive social impact, email us your resume to hr@welezohealth.com You can also email us your queries, if any.
We are looking for a high-performing Sales Manager to help us meet our customer acquisition and revenue growth targets by keeping our company products competitive and innovative. You will be responsible for maximizing our sales team potential, crafting sales plans and justifying those plans to the upper management.
Achieve growth and hit sales targets by successfully managing the sales team.
Design and implement a strategic business plan that expands company’s customer base and ensure its strong presence.
Own recruiting, objectives setting, coaching and performance monitoring of sales representatives.
Build and promote strong, long-lasting customer relationships by partnering with them and understanding their needs.
Present sales, revenue and expenses reports and realistic forecasts to the management team.
Identify emerging markets and market shifts while being fully aware of new products and competition status.
Committed to continuous education through workshops, seminars and conferences, Training the team on sales & product.
Strong business sense and industry expertise.
Excellent mentoring, coaching and people management skills.
Achieving growth and hitting sales targets by successfully managing the sales team.
We are looking for an enthusiastic Customer Sales Representative to contribute towards generating sales for our company. You will be responsible for closing sales deals over the phone and maintaining good customer relationships. An effective telesales representative must be an excellent communicator and have superior people skills. They must be comfortable presenting products or services over the phone as well as dealing with complaints and doubts.
Cool-tempered and able to handle rejection.
Outstanding negotiation skills with the ability to resolve issues and address complaints.
Persistent and can do attitude.
Contact potential or existing customers to inform them about our service using scripts.
Answer questions about services and the company.
Ask questions to understand customer requirements and close sales.
Take and process orders in an accurate manner.
Handle grievances to preserve the company’s reputation.
Go the “extra mile” to meet sales quota and facilitate future sales.
Keep records of calls and sales and note useful information.
Generate References from existing and new customers.
We are looking for a competitive and trustworthy candidate to help us build our corporate business. You will be responsible for discovering and pursuing new sales prospects and maintaining customer satisfaction. The goal is to meet and surpass the company’s expectations to drive rapid and sustainable growth.
Ability to get through to the decision maker and negotiate.
Excellent Communication skills and presentable appearance.
2 – 5 years of sales experience.
Should have worked in Bangalore for alteast 2 years and ability to converse in local language.
Access to own vehicle, valid driver’s licence .
Proficient with MS Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Outlook .
Ability to work independently and without supervision.
Strong following on social media platforms like Linked in.
Salary- as per industry standards.
Prospect potential clients and turn this into increased business.
Meet potential clients by growing, maintaining, and leveraging your network.
Develop, build, and manage a client base of corporate accounts.
Oversee the sales process at each stage from quote to Health checkup camp to fulfilment and follow up.
Generate monthly budgets and sales forecasts.
We are looking for Relationship Officer who can promote and sell the company's concept, products and packages to Pharmacies.
Should have own vehicle & willing to travel across Bangalore.
Strong phone presence and experience dialing dozens of calls per day.
Kannada proficiency is a must.
Promote and sell the company's concept, products and packages to Pharmacies.
Visiting the pharmacies across Bangalore for tie-ups & generating the leads through them.
Convincing the pharmacist to buy the product in order to educate them about the same.
Conducting camps to spread awareness about the product & services. Also to collect the leads & converting the same into sales.
Grow the business by identifying new sales and business development opportunities.
Responsible for the assets required for the Pharmacy Channels.
Undertaking relevant research, attending and organizing trade exhibitions, conferences and meetings.
Motivating pharmacist to partner with us in order to sell our products.
Rappo building & maintain long term relationship with the pharmacy owners.
Maintaining detailed records & submitting the same to the concerned person.
Adhering to the targets set by the departmental heads.
Welezo Health Care Pvt. Ltd.


Does the newborn shake his chin need to panic or not?
Quite often young mothers, especiallyInexperienced treat their babies with a special, and sometimes excessive trembling. They begin to worry about it, and without it. So, the question "why does the newborn have a chin?", Every mother asks herself, probably.
At least with the first child for sure.
Let's try to understand, because of whatThe chin of an infant is shaking, in which cases there are no reasons for excitement, and when it is still worthwhile to show the baby to the doctor. If a newborn has a shaking chin, and also hands or feet at the moment when he cries, there is nothing to worry about. In children up to three months of age, the tremor is not considered pathology. These involuntary twitches of the muscles on the face, arms or legs are due to the fact that the little man still has immature nervous and endocrine systems.
A baby younger than three months old has not yetThe processes of development of nerve centers that regulate and control motor reflexes have come to the end. In addition to this, norepinephrine, excessively produced by immature adrenals, exacerbates such manifestations of emotion. In the end, it turns out that the kid tries to express his desire to eat or chat, but it turns out a kind of "hysteria" of the muscles.
Most often it is the physical load (and hereYou can also include sucking breast milk) and emotions (the joy of the mother's presence or the fear of loneliness in the room, just the desire to communicate) are the causes that trigger the tremor of the chin, hands or feet in the baby. The kid is just overexcited.
But my mom should be on the alert if the baby does notStrained (including eating), did not cry and did not experience other emotions (for example, he woke up alone in the room and did not see anyone next to him), but at the same time he has a tremor of limbs or chin.
Arising involuntary twitching of the muscles inSuch a situation can be signs of hypertonicity of the musculature. Here, of course, you need a doctor's consultation. Only he will decide how to help your baby relax the strained muscles.
In such situations, as a rule, it is recommendedRelaxing massage, warm baths with broths of lemon balm and mint, as they have a calming effect on the nervous system. Such baths are made no more than three times a week, as broths can cause allergies.
Not bad helps also foam for the bathroom or a little for the skin with lavender. You can hang in the arena (on the back, or put in the legs under the mattress) cushion with dried collection of soothing herbs.
But, firstly, only with the permission of the doctor,Because the aroma of herbs can cause an allergic reaction from the respiratory system, and secondly, for the same reason away from the child's head. Do not need intensive exposure - a light enough aroma.
In cases where your child has more than threeMonths, or at the child the chin, but also all head shakes - immediately address to the doctor. Obsessive muscle twitching can be a symptom of serious pathologies of the nervous system.
Hypoxia of the fetus during pregnancy. In this situation, the brain receives an insufficient amount of oxygen, its development processes are wrong and as a result - after birth, there is a tremor. Provocative hypoxia can be placental pathologies, intrauterine infections (both bacterial and viral), polyhydramnios, maternal vaginal activity or, on the contrary, too fast deliveries, umbilical cord entanglement, premature placental abruption, etc.
Another question that often torments the youngMom - why there was a rash on the nose or on the child's chin. The skin of a newborn baby after delivery experiences many changes and adapts to life "outside".
Various endocrinological processes in itCan cause a small physiological rash without obvious signs of inflammation. These are small, not very conspicuous pimples, sometimes look like a white dot or droplet under the skin.
Such a rash is not a cause for unnecessary anxiety, it does not require specific treatment and will disappear by itself - your baby's skin just adapts to the environment.
But in cases where the rash is presentedReddish dots, with liquid contents or merges into large spots - this is already an occasion to call a doctor. Such phenomena can cause allergic reactions, severe infectious diseases, hormonal disorders or hereditary diseases. Do not delay with the consultation in time to recognize and stop the disease.
Summarizing, we can say that at any ageHaving found out in the child a tremor or an eruption, it is better to reinsure and address to the doctor. But, even if your baby has some kind of pathology, the earlier you find it, the easier it will be to eliminate it.


Gay-rights advocates are cheering Tuesday's decision by a federal judge in conservative Riverside, Calif., to order an immediate end to the military's discrimination against gay service men and women. The Justice Department has not yet said whether it will appeal the order, which applies to the U.S. military worldwide, but already many supporters are calling on President Obama to let the ruling stand. Once again, the President finds himself outflanked by activists, this time the Republican gay-rights activists who sued to stop the "Don't ask, don't tell" policy and who keep winning in federal court even as Obama struggles to keep his promise to end discrimination against gays.
Choosing not to appeal carries big risks, and not just for the President. It's true that most Americans support ending the military's discrimination against gays. And it's true that the House has already passed a bill repealing "Don't ask, don't tell" (though the Senate has so far refused to follow suit). And yes, appealing would mean going to court to defend a law the President has himself denounced as unfair and wrong. But if Obama does not appeal, it's likely that no one else will have the standing to do so. The result: a single trial judge would then set policy for the entire country on a question of fundamental importance  a situation that the Administration perceives would be an uncomfortable one for a substantial number of Americans.
It's a box Obama finds himself in more and more when it comes to gay-rights issues. Even as U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips was issuing her worldwide injunction to the military on Tuesday, the Administration was filing notice that it will appeal a federal ruling in Massachusetts that earlier this year struck down another law that is anathema to gay-rights supporters: the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act. In its filing, the Administration called the law unfair and said it ought never to have passed but nevertheless argued that it does not violate the Constitution. That prompted gay-rights bloggers and others to cry foul, warning that their patience with Obama, who most argue has yet to keep his promises to gay and lesbian supporters, is running out.
Letting Judge Phillips' ruling stand would be a good way to get gays and lesbians off the sidelines. But allowing a single judge to overturn "Don't ask, don't tell," without any review by a higher court, could raise questions of legitimacy, and not just about the "Don't ask, don't tell" decision. Gays have won a remarkable sweep of victories in federal court this year, with judges striking down "Don't ask, don't tell," the Defense of Marriage Act and, in San Francisco, a voter-approved state ban on gay marriage known as Prop 8. Those victories have cheered gay-rights supporters enormously, but opponents pointedly note that Americans continue to reject gay marriage anytime the question is put to the ballot. And while polls show that Americans support the repeal of "Don't ask, don't tell," the fact is that if it were so unpopular, Congress wouldn't be having such trouble repealing it.
The gay-marriage case in California has strong parallels to the "Don't ask, don't tell" decision now confronting Obama. The marriage decision is under appeal, with arguments scheduled to take place before a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals panel in early December. But already, questions of legitimacy have dogged the case. That's because California's elected leaders did what Obama has so far refused to do: Attorney General Jerry Brown and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declined to appeal the ruling. For now, a third-party group has been allowed to step in and appeal, but many observers  including the trial judge who heard the case  have said the Ninth Circuit may rule that they lack standing. If that happens, gay-marriage opponents tell TIME, the courts risk damaging their legitimacy.
Indeed, those kinds of concerns are one reason that Obama is unlikely to let the "Don't ask, don't tell" ruling stand unchallenged. Former U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson, one of the lawyers who brought the successful challenge to Prop 8, told TIME this summer that the White House nearly always defends statutes in court, whether the President agrees with them or not. There are exceptions, he said, but they typically involve laws that the President believes are clearly unconstitutional or that infringe upon the constitutional power of the Executive Branch.
But no matter what happens, Judge Phillips' ruling stands as a powerful vindication for gay-rights supporters and for the many critics of the military's discriminatory policy. Enacted after President Bill Clinton failed to lift the ban on gays in the military altogether, the policy had kept in place the military's blanket prohibition of gays serving in its ranks, but also set up strict rules for when and how officers could inquire whether a member was gay. As long as a soldier did not announce his or her homosexuality and avoided doing anything that revealed it, the military was barred from asking.
It was an uncomfortable compromise from the beginning. Between 1993 and 2001, the military discharged some 7,856 service members, according to Phillips' 86-page ruling. After the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began, the rate of dismissal declined, but didn't stop: another 5,167 were dismissed between 2002 and 2009. At trial, gay soldiers and officers testified to the corrosive effects of the policy. One such witness was Air Force Major Michael Almy, a decorated officer who served three tours in Iraq. He testified that he came out to himself as a gay man a few years after his enlistment, but never told anyone in the Air Force of his orientation. In 2005, 12 years after his enlistment, someone searched the private e-mails on his computer and found a message by Almy "discussing homosexual conduct," and as a result, the major was eventually discharged.
Hearing that story and others, Phillips ruled that the military's treatment of gays and lesbians offends the basic notions of decency in the country and is illegal. With Obama likely to appeal, the question becomes whether Tuesday's victory for gay rights will stand as just another moral victory or become the law of the land.


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Could u please tell me that how much would I get for this essay?
Evidently, humans are the most intelligent creature in this world, so humans have been killing animals since they evolved to satisfy their needs like food, clothing, fire etc. However, modern society feels that animals should not be killed anymore which is not right according to me.
Firstly, humans kill animals for imperative purposes, for instance animal's body parts are being used by Doctors to evolve new medicines and to cure some dangerous diseases which are essential for the survival of humans. If animals will not be killed than there population will get abundant which will be dangerous for both human and nature.
In addition, Scientists and doctors used to do their researches and tests on the animals, so they can find the flaws before applying that on humans. If they directly apply that on humans then it will lead to be a serious issue for the society. Eventually, these all are for the welfare of humans.
On the contrary, Due to over killing of animals, some species of animals are on endangered state and some of them have already been extinct which includes some beautiful species like stingray,so Humans are destroying the nature. We cannot ignore the fact that animals have feelings too and they are also a creation of god, so it so cruel to kill animals.
So it can be concluded, Despite the fact that animals have feelings, humans need to kill them for their own welfare and it is necessary for the survival of humans but they must avoid over killing of animals and killing of rare or endangered species to retain the beauty of our nature.
I would like to know how many point can I get if I do the animal cruelty essay like this?
Any mistake that I need to correct?
Discuss these view and your opinion of hunting.
Some people argue that culling animals is a bad activity,while others believe that killing animals is necessary.In my opinion people should not hurt animals for business purpose,for example selling animals skins,feather and shells. However,it is acceptable if people hurt animals to keep their tradition.
People such as Indigenous people in Taiwan,hurt for a number of reasons.Firstly,they argue that hunting animals is a cultural traditional.For instance males have to hunt animals to prove that they are an adult,and that they are good enough to protect a family and ready for marriage. Secondly,there are too many animals attacking some families and destroying their food sources.
However, others believes hunting should be outlawed.They believe animals can be hunted over and become endangered or even extinct such as the Bengal tiger and panda bear.The worst fad is hunting animals can disturb the food chain. For example,if humans catch a lot of fish sharks might be hungry and they might interrupt the other food chain,and it may cause lot of problem in an ecosystem.
In conclusion I think hunting as acceptable if people depend on it in order to keep their tradition,if animals are hunted for business reasons they must stop it because the ecology system and food chain might suffer a lot of problems if animals are over hunted.
Hello guys, this is my attempt on an IELTS question, please feel free for correction on my essay.
It has become a debatable topic increasingly in number of people think that animals should get rights as people and animals should not be used by mankind. On the contrary, others dispute that humans must utilize animals to fulfill their various demands, including uses for nutriment and experimentation. This essay will discuss both views.
With regards to the exploitation of animals, people believe it is acceptable for few reasons. Firstly, scientist develop method to mitigate pain and discomfort suffered by animals during scientific experiment. For instance, injection of drug on animals carried out by researcher before inception of experimentation. Furthermore, make use of animal is crucial to invent new medicine to cure illness. This is because when a new drug or surgical technique developed, many believe that it is unethical to use first on human-being as it may cause harm rather than good. Instead, the drug and technique is tested in animals to ensure that it is safe and effective.
However, many people disagree employment of animals for human needs. Firstly, it is unnecessary to kill animals for food. A healthy diet is possible without eating meat. For instance, human could get adequate nutrients from nut, seed, soy product , vegetable, and fruit. Secondly, the lives of animal s should be respected. Animals are also living creatures in the earth, and as such animals deserved rights to be respected. That is to say animals have consciousness and empathy, like human-beings possess. They do know who their friends are and who their rivals are.
In conclusion, I agree completely humans do not own the rights to exploit animal to fulfill their own needs. If human decrease the utilization of animals, all the living creatures in the world could live peacefully.


 By comparison, General Motors Co's January-June salesrose 4 percent to more than 4.85 million cars and light trucks,while Volkswagen AG's climbed 5.5 percent to 4.7million vehicles, those companies reported earlier this month.
 But Mrs Hodge replied: "If I may say so, it is not putting it in the public domain which is wrong, it is the action of suspending it which is wrong... it is the action, not the reporting of the action, which is vital."
Excellent work, Nice Design wallpaper at b&m Other lingering misapprehensions — particles of what James Hawes, in his satirical 2008 study Excavating Kafka, called “the K-myth” — are exploded with equal good cheer. Was Kafka unknown in his lifetime? Not at all: his publishers printed his books and begged him for more, his pieces were added to the repertoire of a famous elocutionist and reciter and he belonged to an influential band of writers, none of whom was averse to rolling a log for a friend.
What do you like doing in your spare time? wallpaper jatt Holder's actions were hailed by civil rights groups. "Texas has a deeply disturbing history of brazenly suppressing the votes and voting strength of black and Latino voters," said Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. "The voter ID law in Texas is a solution in search of a problem. A Texas voter is more likely to be struck by lightning than to see someone attempt to vote fraudulently at the polls."
 These include fungi, such as wheat rust that is destructive harvests in Africa, the Middle East and Asia; insects like the mountain pine beetle that is destroying trees in the US; as well as bacteria, viruses and microscopic nematode worms.
 When Superstorm Sandy hit New York and New Jersey last year, day laborers were among the first to lend a hand. They helped home- and business owners find safety during the storm, and they did the rebuilding to get life back to normal. Similarly, when homes in Southern California faced raging fires, day laborer worker centers formed volunteer brigades to do what they could to help.


What Happens to Delegates When a Candidate Drops Out?
Home History & Politics What Happens to Delegates When a Candidate Drops Out?
The world of politics in every country seems to be a culture of chaos. There’s lots of confusion on various topics. Topics like who’s really in charge, who actually makes and changes laws, and how does a given part of a certain system work?
For example, what happens to delegates when a candidate drops out?
In order to answer a question like that, some terms need to define and understand.
A delegate is a person who attends a meeting or conference on behalf of a group. Usually, organizations put together these meetings or conventions. These gatherings are where members from different parts of the organization can assemble together.
An example of this would be an organization with the nationwide membership. They may hold an annual convention in which local branches can send members to both vote and represent on behalf of the club.
Groups with delegates may be anything from a church denomination to a political party, social group or parachurch ministry. It means outside of a denomination but still religious or faith-based in nature – or even a sports club.
What is a Delegate Within the Political Sphere?
“Delegate” is the title of a person who is sent to represent a certain state in the presidential primaries. This is in reference to American political parties. In some way or other, delegates are people who involve themselves in their state’s politics. To this effect, they could be local party chairs, volunteers, or just citizens. They are interested in participating in the election process.
Depending on the state, there may be superdelegates who also represent the state. Usually, these are elected officials. Superdelegates can choose to vote regardless of primaries or caucuses. A superdelegate is someone who is free to vote for whoever he or she decides to.
The goal of a political party primary is to nominate the party’s candidate for the presidential office. There are two main methods in which a candidate can win delegates in a primary.
The proportion method is when a given state has fifty delegates and a candidate manages to win half of those delegates. This means the candidate has twenty-five delegates for the primary.
The winner-takes-all method is the method when a candidate manages to win the majority, even if it’s only 51 percent of the vote. When this happens, that candidate gets all the state’s delegates.
When a candidate wins delegates in a state, these delegates as assumed are now committed to voting for the candidate at the convention. Or whichever the method is.
In order for a candidate to win their nomination in a presidential race, a candidate has to gather the majority of the delegates. As long as the candidate has at least one more delegate than the other candidates do, that candidate wins the primary.
However, in the case of a tie, this may result in several more rounds of voting and the numbers can change. There is a clause allowing a delegate to change their vote if the first round ends up in being a tie. This allows a delegate to realign his or her alliance with the candidate he or she deems most appropriate for the candidacy.
As a primary season begins there are typically numerous candidates.
As the season progresses, several candidates typically drop out of the race as they do poorly in the polls.
So, what happens to delegates when a candidate drops out of the race?
Depending on the state which they represent, they allow the delegates to attend the national convention without a commitment, similar to a superdelegate does. If the candidate they represented chooses to endorse another remaining candidate, the delegate may choose to endorse that candidate.
However, certain states have rules that dictate what a delegate has to do when the candidate they support drops out of the race. The states of Nevada and Puerto Rico have their delegates committed to vote for their delegate. Also included are Washington, Iowa, Texas, Virginia, and Montana. This is for one round, regardless of if they are still participating in the race or not.
Incredibly, delegates from Tennessee have their delegates bound for two rounds. Even though if they no longer have a candidate running for office. South Carolina has their delegates bound to vote for their committed candidate for the first ballot. If that candidate is not nominated then they are bound to vote for the candidate who finished second or third in their state.
Delegates and Candidates: What Now?
Ultimately, a delegate in some states has the right to choose to align with another candidate if his original candidate drops out. In other states, however, they require delegates to stick with the original candidate, even after she drops out. To understand what’s happening with a specific delegate in a race, check in with your state’s websites regarding the primaries.
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