Paranoia has gripped the streets amid a government crackdown that’s trampling due process and blurring the line between the innocent and the guilty.

It’s not Myanmar, but Paragon City, the hub of the massively multiplayer online game City of Heroes, where a bizarre McCarthy-like crisis has broken out among the virtual populace. Handed new tools to create their own missions, many of the metropolis’ caped crusaders have rushed to exploit loopholes that allow them to rack up massive experience points with minimal effort. In a desperate bid to restore balance, the game’s creators have threatened to revoke experience points and ban players for abuse without explanation, unleashing a furor of protest.

The future of a world may hang in the balance.

“Newsflash — your idea of fun isn’t everyone esles [sic],” one disgruntled subscriber remarked.

The face-off underscores an iron law of MMO play: Give participants the tools to mold a game into an ideal form, and they’ll quickly use them to generate so-called min-max exploits that produce the fastest possible experience or in-game wealth for the least effort possible.

Free to play the game as they like, players frequently make choices that ruin the fun. It’s an irony that can prove death to game publishers: Far from loving their liberty, players seem to quickly bore of the “ideal” games they’ve created for themselves and quit early.

“It may seem sad that giving the players what they want is detrimental to the player’s overall length of enjoyment of the game, but that’s the truth,” says Eric Heimburg, the lead engineer and producer on Asheron’s Call, and the systems designer for the upcoming Star Trek online MMO. “Once you reached that top of the hill, if there’s nothing left to do or see, players are likely to move on. Length of enjoyment (equals) amount of money earned, so developers have a strong incentive to keep players from gaining power and levels too quickly.”
 

As more and more game developers allow players to create their own levels, users are harnessing this power to game the system. In Sony’s LittleBigPlanet, for example, players unleashed “trophy farms” — hundreds of user-generated levels that exist only to rack up a player’s PlayStation 3 achievement list with minimal effort.

City of Heroes was originally released in 2004, but its current woes started with the Mission Architect feature released in April. Suddenly, players could design their own missions, and a new class of villain quickly vaulted to power: the Farmer.

With the Mission Architect, players are able to create quests that offer rewards in parity with the standard, developer-created content. Once they’ve played a user-generated mission, they can rate it.

Mission creators with popular levels receive Architect Tickets, which can be cashed in for rewards. This gives architects incentives to crank out the sorts of missions their peers are likely to enjoy. Some gamers want engaging stories, while others want fun challenges.

But the Farmer has something a bit different in mind: laying out hordes of powerful, reward-laden enemies with glaring weaknesses, packed like sheep for the slaughter. Weeks’ worth of tedious labor for experience points could now be completed in mere hours, and the unscrupulous Farmers grew fat off their misdeeds.

“I don’t think any developer should be surprised that people who enjoy these sorts of quests would be drawn to the fastest power-gathering mechanism available,” Heimburg says. “I don’t blame the players one bit for abusing the system.”

Not so the developers at Paragon Studios. Klaxons wailing, they sprang into action, striking down “exploitative” quests and threatening to do the same to players who abused the newly implemented system.

“In order to keep the game fair, balanced, and challenging, we have to maintain a risk/reward ratio,” City of Heroes lead designer Matt “Positron” Miller explained in a missive to the players.

But while the developer is removing missions it deems exploitative, there hasn’t been much information on what constitutes breaking the rules. In fact, according to Miller, such transparency is not likely to be effective and could even backfire.

“If we say that the definition (of abuse) is ‘you gained 4 levels in under 30 minutes’, then someone will make sure that they gain 4 levels in 31 minutes, so they can claim they were within the allowed limits and not abusing,” he wrote.

That’s left players sitting on pins and needles. Says City of Heroes player TaintedAngel: “If you could look at the servers and see 10 percent of people had been spanked somehow, a whole lot of people would be letting out a long-held breath.”

Of course, players could always vote with their wallets.

At the dawn of the MMO genre, EverQuest saw great success despite a penchant for game-balancing changes that flummoxed subscribers. Then the competition arrived, and many left for “fairer” options.

“City of Heroes’ decision to punish players for infractions the players cannot predict is rather unusual,” Heimburg remarks. “When competing superhero-based MMOs become available, that could be a problem.”

Source: Wired

His accounts, to which you don't know the passwords, go idle. His e-mails go unanswered, his online multiplayer games go on without him and bidders on his eBay items don't know why they can't get an answer from the seller.

Web site domains that he has purchased, some of which are now worth hundreds of thousands of dollars,­ will expire, and you may never know.

It's a scenario that's becoming more likely as we spend more of our lives online. And it's raising more questions about what happens to our online lives after we log off for the final time.

The answer, until recently, was nothing.

But now, as online usage increases and social-media sites soar in popularity, more companies are popping up to try and fill that void created in your digital life after death.

Jeremy Toeman, founder of the site Legacy Locker, recognized that when he was on a plane and wondered what would happen to his online life if it crashed. While his will leaves everything to his wife, including all of his digital assets, Toeman realized how difficult it would be for her to access his accounts.
 

"My GoDaddy account would belong to her, but it doesn't solve the practical reality of how she would get access to it," he said. He experienced a similar scenario after his grandmother died, and he tried to get the password for her e-mail account -- only to give up because of the hassle.

So Toeman built his company to change all that. Legacy Locker allows users to set up a kind of online will, with beneficiaries that would receive the customer's account information and passwords after they die.

"We know it's a hard thing to think about -- to get people to face mortality. We know it's kind of morbid, but for those who live their entire lives online, it's also very real."

A Legacy Locker account costs $29.99 a year. Users can set up their accounts to specify who gets access to their posthumous online information, along with "legacy letters," or messages, that can be sent to loved ones.

If someone contacts Legacy Locker to report a client's death, the service will send the customer four e-mails in 48 hours. If there's no response, Legacy Locker will then contact the people the client listed as verifiers in the event of his or her death. Even then, the service would not release digital assets without examining a copy of the customer's death certificate, Toeman said.

Eddie Lopez is the kind of tech-savvy guy for which a service such as Legacy Locker was made. The St. Paul, Minnesota, man has three online banking accounts, a PayPal account, domain names, Web-hosting accounts, multiple e-mail addresses and many social-networking accounts.

"I do think this is something people should be really considering these days," Lopez told CNN when asked about services such as Legacy Locker. He wants to hire a service to handle his digital assets but is concerned about privacy.

"Although I'm glad there's people breaking ground in this area, I don't think I would jump at the first opportunity to sign up," Lopez said. "My concerns are turning over such an exhaustive list of user names and passwords to a single business. That's one-stop shopping for any hacker to get access to just about every detail of my life."

Lopez would prefer to entrust half of his digital-security information to a service such as Legacy Locker and the other half to family members, so that each side's information would be useless without the other's.

"I hope Legacy Locker and similar services can address these privacy-security concerns with some real-world solutions," he said. "I just don't feel comfortable turning over my digital life -- built over 15 years -- to a kind promise."

Legacy Locker isn't the only new company helping techies plan for death in the digital age.

AssetLock (formerly YouDeparted.com) offers a "secure safe deposit box" for digital copies of documents, wishes, letters and e-mails. Deathswitch and Slightly Morbid also offer similar services in a variety of prices and packages, depending on how many accounts are involved.

Not all of these services deal with online assets. There's also a growing trend towards giving all aspects of death --­ the grieving process, the funeral, the memorial and even the grave site --­ a digital makeover.

FindaGrave.com claims to have cemetery records for 32 million people in its searchable database, while EternalSpace.com offers a new spin on the traditional grave site by offering virtual memorial pages ­full of videos, pictures and tributes.

On Eternal Space, loved ones can choose from different headstones and bucolic landscape backgrounds -- the mountain lake is a popular option -- to create a customized online grave site. Loved ones can add "tribute gifts" such as roses, candles, stuffed animals and other items, while mourners can access photos and videos in a "Memory Book" and leave remembrances of their own.

Jay Goss, president of Eternal Space president, is trying to bring the funeral experience to anyone who can access the Web. In that way, he hopes to provide a gathering place, and a voice, for mourners who may not be able to attend the real-life memorial service.

"It'd be the equivalent of a funeral where everyone can attend and everyone can spend 30 minutes behind the podium," Goss said. "It gives everyone a chance to put a 360-degree wrapper on the life the person lived and celebrate that life from how every person knew them."

Eternal Space's virtual memorial sites are currently only being offered through select funeral homes, cemeteries and crematoriums. Goss' hope is that the site will help allow the deceased's memory to be "eternally" passed on.

"All of these stories and videos are being left, in essence, to this Eternal Space Web site so that everyone can share, not just that day, not the days after, but the weeks after and years after," he said.

Some funeral-industry professionals believe these online memorials and virtual grave sites provide a valuable service.

"Assuming the site is handled with respect, virtual memorials respond to a basic human need to remember our deceased family, friends and colleagues," said Robert M. Fells, general counsel for the International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association.

"Based on our members' feedback, I'd have to say that virtual memorial sites are gaining popularity with the public as a very practical alternative to being present at the grave site," he added. "There's nothing 'weird' about them as far as we have seen."

"There are funeral homes out there that will help families create virtual memorials, but ... we've also seen Facebook and MySpace profiles of deceased persons being turned into memorials," agreed Jessica Koth, spokesperson for the National Funeral Directors Association. "Consumers have become increasingly comfortable with expressing their grief online."

It is my hope that these words and those of others will break the silence and break open a sea of action to move Congolese women toward peace, safety and freedom.

My play, "The Vagina Monologues," opened my eyes to the world inside this world. Everywhere I traveled with it scores of women lined up to tell me of their rapes, incest, beatings, mutilations. It was because of this that over 11 years ago we launched V-Day, a worldwide movement to end violence against women and girls.

The movement has spread like wildfire to 130 countries, raising $70 million. I have visited and revisited the rape mines of the world, from defined war zones like Bosnia, Afghanistan and Haiti to the domestic battlegrounds in colleges and communities throughout North America, Europe and the world. My in-box -- and heart -- have been jammed with stories every hour of every day for over a decade.

Nothing I have heard or seen compares with what is going on in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where corporate greed, fueled by capitalist consumption, and the rape of women have merged into a single nightmare. Femicide, the systematic and planned destruction of the female population, is being used as a tactic of war to clear villages, pillage mines and destroy the fabric of Congolese society.

In 12 years, there have been 6 million dead men and women in Congo and 1.4 million people displaced. Hundreds and thousands of women and girls have been raped and tortured. Babies as young as 6 months, women as old as 80, their insides torn apart. What I witnessed in Congo has shattered and changed me forever. I will never be the same. None of us should ever be the same.

I think of Beatrice, shot in her vagina, who now has tubes instead of organs. Honorata, raped by gangs as she was tied upside down to a wheel. Noella, who is my heart -- an 8-year-old girl who was held for 2 weeks as groups of grown men raped her over and over. Now she has a fistula, causing her to urinate and defecate on herself. Now she lives in humiliation.

I was in Bosnia during the war in 1994 when it was discovered there were rape camps where white women were being raped. Within two years there was adequate intervention. Yet, in Congo, femicide has continued for 12 years. Why? Is it that coltan, the mineral that keeps our cell phones and computers in play, is more important than Congolese girls?
 

Is it flat-out racism, the world's utter indifference and disregard for black people and black women in particular? Is it simply that the UN and most governments are run by men who have never known what it feels like to be raped?

What is happening in Congo is the most brutal and rampant violence toward women in the world. If it continues to go unchecked, if there continues to be complete impunity, it sets a precedent, it expands the boundaries of what is permissible to do to women's bodies in the name of exploitation and greed everywhere. It's cheap warfare.

The women in Congo are some of the most resilient women in the world. They need our protection and support. Western governments, like the United States, should fund a training program for female Congolese police officers.

They should address our role in plundering minerals and demand that companies trace the routes of these minerals. Make sure they are making and selling rape-free-products. Supply funds for women's medical and psychological care and seed their economic empowerment. Put pressure on Rwanda, Congo, Uganda and other countries in the Great Lakes region to sit down with all the militias involved in this conflict to find a political solution.

Military solutions are no longer an option and will only bring about more rape. Most of all, we must support the women. Because women are at the center of this horror, they must be at the center of the solutions and peace negotiations. Women are the future of Congo. They are its greatest resource.

Sadly, we are not the first to testify about these atrocities in Congo. I stand in a line of many who have described this horror. Still, in Eastern Congo, 1,100 women a month are raped, according to the United Nations' most recent report. What will the United States government, what will all of you reading this, do to stop it?

Let Congo be the place where we ended femicide, the trend that is madly eviscerating this planet -- from the floggings in Pakistan, the new rape laws in Afghanistan, the ongoing rapes in Haiti, Darfur, Zimbabwe, the daily battering, incest, harassing, trafficking, enslaving, genital cutting and honor killing. Let Congo be the place where women were finally cherished and life affirmed, where the humiliation and subjugation ended, where women took their rightful agency over their bodies and land.

Source: CNN

E&P has the full text of the memo; one of the main rules is that writers should check in with an editor before “friending” contacts that could wind up being confidential sources. Writers are also instructed not to “recruit friends or family to promote or defend your work;” the e-mail concludes by reminding them that “business and pleasure should not be mixed on services like Twitter.”

The revised code of conduct also includes details about offline friendships, freelance work and public speaking arrangements, but the inclusion of Twitter and Facebook “etiquette” is just one more example of how social media has reshaped the business of reporting news. 

When your hobby is baiting 419 scammers (also known as Nigerian scammers or advance-fee fraudsters), a death threat isn't cause for concern—it's a trophy worth bragging about to your friends.

Scam baiters are the vigilante enforcers who come together to waste hours, weeks, or months of 419 scammers' lives for nothing more than the satisfaction of knowing that they are distracting them from real victims. Though the world of 419 scams has existed since long before the Internet, people continue to fall for scammers in droves—certainly, scammers are making millions of dollars every year by promising money, goods, and romance that they never deliver on. That's part of why scam baiting has actually become a somewhat popular pastime online, with thousands of users flocking to scam baiting forums to share stories and ideas on how to string along more scammers. And hey, why not? Most of us end up spending too much time screwing around on the Internet anyway—these folks just use that time to make scammers miserable.

But when you hear stories like this, it makes you wonder. "I get death threats on regular basis," a student who goes by -C- told Ars. "Death threats are not uncommon and are actually considered achievements: they are a testament to the fact that the baiter managed to annoy his/her scammer nicely."
 

Why would you want to start baiting scammers?

Who are these people? As it turns out, the scam-baiter demographic is more diverse than one might think, though much of the reasoning for participating is the same. "My initial reason for baiting was to give myself an outlet for the practical jokes that I am 'too old' to play on my dog/little sister/friends/neighbor's cat," a 32-year-old baiter who goes by blah told Ars. "But after I joined 419eater, I realized that we actually do make an impact on the entire scamming business by running interference and wasting these scammer's time."

Other scam baiters we spoke to (all of which wished to remain anonymous for their own safety) echoed this sentiment, many relaying feelings of boredom or frustration with scammers. They also had heard humorous stories from experienced baiters and wanted to get involved. And, of course, there's always those who simply do it because they feel like it's payback. "I'm an absolute stickler for justice and hate any form of abuse," a UK production company owner who goes by Paddy told Ars.

The things baiters do to scammers range from "boring," menial tasks like seeding false information or questionable wording into the scamming community (tasks that don't necessarily bring the glory, but are equally necessary) to sending scammers on full-on safaris across Africa—or sometimes, the globe—in search of money that will never come. The baiters we spoke with said that they spend anywhere from a an hour per day (usually arranged around other things, like TV or just casual Internet surfing) to a full 8 to 10 hours per day, especially if they are working on a collaborative safari. We'll get to that in a minute.

Some of the more menial tasks involve posing as experienced scammers trying to befriend newbies in order to give them sage advice. "For example, scammers like idioms, but many of their native idioms are different to those of English language and they may not know that many from the latter. Teach them a new one: tell them that 'take this offer of mine with a huge grain of salt' means 'this is the chance of your life time and I am very serious about this,'" -C- says.

-C- describes another way of "de-educating" scammers: giving feedback on their fake documents in order to make them look less realistic. -C- explains: "When the scammer sends you a fake passport that looks like it was made by a blind hamster with a piece of charcoal in ten seconds, you praise it and say it really helps you to build trust. Then, hope he is encouraged by this to send it to real victims too, who on the other hand will hopefully recognize it's a fake."

We're going on a surfin' safari

On the more extreme end of the scale, the tales from baiters are both horrifying and hilarious, depending on where your sympathies lie (and how much you enjoy tales of lengthy snipe hunts). 28-year-old manny relayed a story wherein he and several other baiters talked a scammer into traveling from Port Harcourt, Nigeria to Darfur to pick up a nonexistent $500,000. The 3,000-mile roundtrip got the scammer stranded for two weeks before he managed to make it home. Craig, a professional airline pilot, said that he and three other baiters got a scammer to travel from Lagos, Nigeria to Paga, Ghana—a total of 3,800 miles.

blah had fun with a scammer and airport security in London, resulting in his being detained for several hours. "He was waiting for me to arrive on a flight that I wasn't actually on. I told him to show up with a black backpack and hold it very very close to his chest (that's how I would know that it was him). Airport security didn't find it amusing, apparently, and thought he was acting suspicious," blah said. "My plane fictitiously arrived after he had been detained and I ended up chewing the scammer out for being so inconsiderate as to get detained and leave me waiting for an hour until I finally just hailed a cab and went to my hotel. When airport security finally released him, he went and waited in the lobby-bar of the hotel for four additional hours while I 'freshened-up' in my room."

Do ethics apply to this game?

There are many other stories easily found online—ones that none of our baiters were willing to fess up to—about having scammers get tattoos saying ridiculous things, or sending them into truly dangerous regions of Africa that have almost gotten them killed. The general consensus among the baiters we spoke to, however, was that they feel even the most dangerous of safaris is payback for all the scammers do. "The scammer makes the decision to put themselves in harm's way; if something happens to them, so be it. Most of them would have no problem with you dying if it meant that they would make a dollar," said manny. "One baiter's character recently told the scammer that he had a choice between sending the scammer $5,000 or using the same money to pay for his baby daughter's cancer treatment—I think you can guess which option the scammer chose."

Craig agreed. "Making a lad sweat it out in Niger, 100° heats, with the need to drink two gallons of water a day or die, is petty punishment for their crimes," he said. "A lad returning from a long journey, financially worse off, demoralized completely, may lose interest in scamming."

That's really the end goal—to keep the scammers' attention directed away from real victims and hopefully frustrate them to the point of quitting. "Every minute the scammer I'm communicating with is spending on me is a minute he is not scamming a real potential victim," manny told Ars. 

Others agreed wholeheartedly. "Whether he is wandering through the desert hundreds of miles from home, or making yet another fruitless trip to the Moneygram office, that's all time he is not behind a computer scamming someone's elderly parents." Many of the baiters also spend time working with other sites to warn victims and help educate people about 419 scams (Paddy told me he spends a lot of time warning victims at scamwarners.com, for example). "I love to hear is someone ripping up a fake check they just received from the scammer and/or telling me that we just saved them their life's savings."

Source: Ars Technica

Men really do have an excuse for supposedly being wimpy about coughs and colds - their immune systems are not as strong as women's, research suggests.

A Canadian study indicates that the female sex hormone oestrogen gives women's immune systems added bite at fighting off infection.

Oestrogen seems to counter an enzyme which blocks the inflammatory process.

The McGill University study appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

 

The researchers focused on an enzyme called Caspase-12, which is known to put a brake on the inflammatory process, the body's first line of defence against harmful invaders such as bacteria and viruses.

They worked on mice that lacked the Caspase-12 gene, and were thus extremely resistant to infection.

The human Caspase-12 gene was implanted into a group of male and female mice, but only the males became more prone to infection.

The researchers concluded that oestrogen produced by the female mice blocked the expression of the human Caspase-12 gene.

They were also able to locate the precise place where oestrogen binds to the gene in order to block its activity.

Since the experiments were conducted using a human gene, the researchers are confident their work is applicable to humans.

Lead researcher Dr Maya Saleh said: "These results demonstrate that women have a more powerful inflammatory response than men."

The researchers believe women may have evolved a more robust immune system because of their key role in producing and nurturing young.

Their work raises the possibility of new ways to reinforce the immune system using genetic manipulation.

But writing in the journal, the researchers said: "A question remains: will men be amenable to the idea of being treated with an exclusively female hormone?"

Dr Leslie Knapp, of the University of Cambridge, said there was a substantial body of evidence to show that women were better at fighting infections than men.

She said: "Women are well known to be able to respond more robustly to infections, and to recover more quickly than men.

"In evolutionary terms it only takes one male to reproduce with lots of females, but females are much more important in terms of producing offspring."

After her own hopes of being a gynecologist were dashed because the Taliban forced her Afghan-run university in Pakistan to close, Saleem pooled her personal savings with that of a few other women, founding the only girl's school in Godah. Since then the system has expanded, and her organization, the Oruj Learning Center, has started five more, though not without difficulty. It's been less than a decade since Taliban rule blocked girls from attending school, and threats, both real and imagined, continue. Though the Taliban has its strongest hold on southern provinces like Kandahar, the communities that house Saleem's six schools in eastern Afghanistan still feel its influence. A male teacher from one of her schools was stopped on the street by a stranger last year and asked if he teaches at a girl's school. He quickly answered no, fearing for his life, and waited each day for further incident—but nothing more came of the conversation. "The sense is that [any of us] could be targeted at any time," says Saleem, who is currently working toward a B.A. in international relations at Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts, spending her summer and winter breaks overseeing the schools in Afghanistan and checking in on operations from afar the rest of the year.

In 2005, the tents that housed the Godah school burned to the ground. Though no one claimed responsibility for the midnight act of arson, and many think the tents were a target because they were to be a voting site in the first parliamentary elections (not because they housed a girls' school), the attack still left some parents anxious about sending their daughters to school the next day. Most girls continued to show up, though, studying in the hot summer sun while waiting on new tents. Then two years ago, as reports of violence across Afghanistan increased, the schools moved once again from tents that had replaced the burnt ones to the school's current locations: several volunteered private homes. "Just in case," Saleem says, noting that the move would make the girls safer since culturally it would be less acceptable for a stranger to enter a private home than a public space.

The Godah school isn't the only one concerned for its safety. The Afghanistan Ministry of Education says that 458 government schools (mostly in the south) are closed due to threats of violence, leaving 400,000 boys and girls at home. In the 2008 school year alone—from March 2008 to March 2009—22 students and teachers were injured (including a November acid attack that left 15 girls and teachers scarred in Kandahar province). Another 33 were killed, a ministry spokesperson reports.

Building schools and ensuring that girls can attend has been one of the main objectives of the Afghani government and the nations that have contributed to its reconstruction, yet the guerrilla warfare that has sprung up in southern and eastern Afghanistan has proved a formidable obstacle.
 

Still, many of the girls continue to show up, encouraged by mothers, sisters and cousins who never had any chance to learn basic reading and writing themselves. In the aftermath of the tent burning, the girls studied in the shade for the next month, taking frequent breaks to drink from a nearby stream. "In 2005 things weren't that bad. People were much more hopeful about the future," explains Shirin Sahani, 33, then a graduate student from Georgetown who visited the Godah school postfire while she interned with the Oruj Learning Center.

For Saleem, seeing the girls wash off the charred chairs and search through the ashes for usable supplies reminded her why she had worked to set up the school in the first place. "Bringing education to girls was based on the needs I witnessed, not a drive to bring about social change," she says.

It hasn't been easy. Saleem remembers sitting with Godah community members three years before the fire, trying to persuade them to educate their daughters. Though many families had resisted the idea, she had two advantages: the support of her father, a respected elder in the community, and her own educational background. Saleem's early education at an Afghan refugee camp in Pakistan and later at a Pakistani private college had equipped her with the skills that would make her good money as a tutor.

But it is her religious faith that is her best weapon in trying to convince reluctant parents that the education of girls is sanctioned by the Qur'an. "The first word revealed to the Prophet is iqra: read," she says as part of her argument. "By educating girls you are honoring God. It's right there in the Qur'an." She attributes her drive to make these schools succeed to her deep religious faith too. "I believe from my religion that if you have good intentions and keep it up, the time will come to do your good deed."

At the Godah school most students cluster for three hours a day, every day but Friday, learning to read, write and do math, and studying geography and the Islamic texts—standard curriculum in Afghanistan. The oldest students, fifth and sixth graders, also take on biology and history. Though it would be more culturally accepted to have female teachers for Godah's older students, the Oruj Learning Center continues to employ mostly men since literate, educated women are hard to find in Afghanistan.

Despite all the hurdles, the students and their teachers continue to come. Even though the schools are now registered with the Afghanistan Ministry of Education, Saleem's international donors (whose funds are often funneled through the Washington, D.C.-based Advocacy Project) foot the bill for most of the teachers' salaries, and the school continues to recycle many old school supplies while waiting on new ones from the government. Saleem hopes to be able to hand her current crop of schools over to the government and move on to founding new ones, but for now she thinks she needs to continue her work there. "If I leave, I don't see anyone else who will step up," she says.

This summer, diploma in hand, Saleem plans on returning to Afghanistan to oversee the schools and plan her next steps with her husband, a doctor who has supported Saleem's own quest for education from their home in Afghanistan. The news is not good back home, she says. Earlier this month prominent Afghani women's rights activist Sitara Achikzai was murdered outside her home in Kandahar province, and the Taliban claimed responsibility. "I'm not concerned for me but I am concerned for my girls, the students. Really, for everyone," she says. But she won't quit, not as long as the students show up.

Source: Newsweek

BEIJING (Reuters) - A 107-year-old Chinese woman who was afraid to marry when she was young has decided to look for her first husband and hopes to find a fellow centenarian so they will have something to talk about, a Chinese paper reported.

Wang Guiying is worried she is becoming a burden to her aging nieces and nephews since breaking her leg when she was 102 and had to stop doing chores like washing her clothes.

"I'm already 107 and I still haven't got married," the Chongqing Commercial Times quoted her saying. "What will happen if I don't hurry up and find a husband?"

Born in southern Guizhou province the child of a salt merchant, Wang grew up watching her uncles and other men scold and beat their wives and often found her aunt crying in the woodshed after an attack, the paper said.

"All the married people around there lived like that. Getting married was too frightening," she said of an era when Chinese women had few rights and low social standing.

Many also had their feet bound in an excruciating process aimed at making them look more dainty and marriageable.

After Wang's father, mother and older sister died, she still shied away from marriage. Instead she moved to the countryside and survived as a farmer until she was 74 years old and no longer strong enough to work in the fields, the report said.

Her nephew in the booming city of Chongqing then took Wang in, but she is worried he and her other nephews and nieces are too old to take care of her now even the youngest is 60.

"My nephews and nieces are getting older and their children are already tied up with their own families and I am becoming more and more of a burden," she said.

Local officials have said they are happy to help Wang search for a 100-year old groom, and suggested her family get in touch with old people's homes to find candidates, the paper said.

(Reporting by Emma Graham-Harrison; Editing by Nick Macfie and Sugita Katyal)

Britt, an industrial-organizational psychology professor, outlines his research in "Amplifying the Relationships Between Organizational Constraints and Outcomes," currently under review at the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology; as well as in prior work published in 2003 in the Harvard Business Review and in the 2007 book chapter "Self-Engagement at Work."

According to Britt, there is a difference between an engaged worker, meaning one who invests himself or herself in superior job performance, and organizational commitment, a worker's psychological attachment to his or her organization or employer. Britt's research found that an engaged employee isn't necessarily committed to the organization.

"When the economy is experiencing a general downturn, it may be unlikely that engaged employees low in organizational commitment can find another position. But if they do have the opportunity to change jobs they will," he said. "Managers who fail to position employees to be effective in their roles and provide organizational support may lose their most talented and energetic people.

"The ones who stay behind may well be the ones who just don't care," said Britt.

Engaged workers are highly attuned to aspects of their work environment that either will facilitate or thwart job performance, said Britt. If the workers are not getting the resources they feel they need to perform at their best, their engagement may be diminished.

"Engaged workers are more likely to place importance on being able to perform well because their performance matters to them ahead of corporate loyalty," Britt said.

Britt said barriers to engaged workers' peak performance may include lack of budget and equipment support, access to important information, work overload, unclear objectives and goals and assigning employees tasks that don't fit their training.

Britt's research finds that employees are more engaged when their leaders provide clear guidelines for job performance, which gives the employees a greater feeling of clarity and control over what they were supposed to do.

According to Britt, the benefits of employee engagement can be squandered if leaders do not position employees in roles that match their skills and provide the workplace supports they need to carry out their responsibilities.

Another limit is work overload, which can lead to lower levels of morale and job satisfaction. In other words, the workers who care most about their work feel they are not performing to their full capability because they have so much to do that they cannot do anything well, Britt said.

One obvious consequence of this is burnout. Highly motivated employees are willing to go beyond the call of duty to help the organization, but when temporary overload continues and they continuously fail to meet their own high expectations, their motivation becomes directed at locating other job possibilities.

These are critical times for managers, said Britt, citing the economy and organizations' efforts to trim costs. Managers need to balance the pressure from their bosses to do more with less against motivating and keeping their employees engaged in their work and in the organization. This becomes more important when work forces are reduced and employees are asked to increase their work output, especially work that reaches beyond the scope of their jobs and their capabilities.

Britt's research shows engaged employees are likely to become frustrated and dissatisfied and may blame their supervisors if they do not have the systems and support necessary to be effective. Given the higher proactivity and energy levels of engaged employees, this frustration could lead to turnover as they begin to look for more supportive work environments.

Technology brings fashion to the future with new innovations for "wearable technology".

Alien creatures are the least of NASA's worries when it comes to moon travel. There are several potential threats to future missions - with space radiation at the top of the list. Now, a group of students at North Carolina State University has developed a "blanket" of sorts that covers lunar outposts - the astronauts' living quarters - to provide astronauts protection against radiation while also generating and storing power.

Astronauts who previously traveled to the moon had little protection against radiation, but were only exposed to it for a short amount of time. NASA's plans to return astronauts to the moon by 2020 - and to potentially keep them there for several months at a time - could be stymied by space radiation.

The surface of the moon is exposed to cosmic rays and solar flares - making radiation hard to stop with shielding. When these rays hit matter, they produce a dangerous spray of secondary particles which, when penetrating human flesh, can damage DNA, boosting the risk of cancer and other maladies.

Groups all over the globe are trying to determine ways to combat space radiation - including Michael Sieber, Ryan Boyle and Anne Tomasevich, all recent graduates of the textile engineering program at NC State. Their design of a lunar radiation shield with the ability to protect its inhabitants from radiation was reviewed by a panel of industry experts and chosen as one of 10 undergraduate abstract finalists in the Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) competition.

Sponsored by NASA and the National Institute of Aerospace, the RASC-AL competition challenges university students to think about what sorts of conditions astronauts will face when returning to the moon, then design projects that might become part of actual lunar exploration.

"We had many factors to consider in developing this outpost cover - not just being able to protect against radiation," Sieber says. "The product needed to be as lightweight as possible to feasibly fit on the transportation module, and have the ability to be easily erected by a minimum number of astronauts for immediate use once landing on the moon."

"These obstacles are where our knowledge of textile properties will give us an advantage," adds Dr. Warren Jasper, professor of textile engineering and advisor for the project. "This is a competition aimed at aerospace engineering students, but we understand the properties associated with different textile materials, and that gives us unique insight on how to troubleshoot some of these issues."

The "lunar texshield" is made from a lightweight polymer material that has a layer of radiation shielding that deflects or absorbs the radiation so astronauts are only exposed to a safe amount. The outermost surface of the shield includes a layer of solar cells to generate electricity, backed up by layers of radiation-absorbing materials. The advantages of the materials used in the design include flexibility, large surface area, ease of transportation, ease of construction and the ability to have multiple layers of independent functional fabrics.

The students will present their lunar texshield at the 2009 RASC-AL Forum held June 1-3 in Cocoa Beach, Fla. The project will be judged by a steering committee made up of experts from NASA, industry and universities.

"We aren't even sure what the prize is for being named first place - but that wasn't what was important to us," Sieber says. "We used what we've learned throughout our college careers and were able to apply that logic to provide a solution a real-world problem. That is what is cool to us."

Source: ScienceBlog
 

Overview

Preliminary results from the July-December 2008 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) indicate that the number of American homes with only wireless telephones continues to grow. More than one of every five American homes (20.2%) had only wireless telephones (also known as cellular telephones, cell phones, or mobile phones) during the second half of 2008, an increase of 2.7 percentage points since the first half of 2008. This is the largest 6-month increase observed since NHIS began collecting data on wireless-only households in 2003. In addition, one of every seven American homes (14.5%) received all or almost all calls on wireless telephones, despite having a landline telephone in the home. This report presents the most up-to-date estimates available from the federal government concerning the size and characteristics of these populations. 

NHIS Early Release Program

This report is published as part of the NHIS Early Release Program. In May and December of each year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) releases selected estimates of telephone coverage for the civilian, noninstitutionalized U.S. population based on data from NHIS, along with comparable estimates from NHIS for the previous 3 years. The estimates are based on in-person interviews that NHIS conducts continuously throughout the year to collect information on health status, health-related behaviors, and health care utilization. The survey also includes information about household telephones and whether anyone in the household has a wireless telephone. 

Two additional reports are published as part of the Early Release Program. Early Release of Selected Estimates Based on Data from the National Health Interview Survey is published quarterly and provides estimates of 15 selected measures of health. Health Insurance Coverage: Early Release of Estimates from the National Health Interview Survey is also published quarterly and provides additional estimates of health insurance coverage. 

Methods

For many years, NHIS has included questions on residential telephone numbers, to permit recontacting of survey participants. Starting in 2003, additional questions were asked, to determine whether the family's telephone number was a landline telephone. All survey respondents were also asked whether "you or anyone in your family has a working cellular telephone." 

A "family" can be an individual or a group of two or more related persons living together in the same housing unit (a "household"). Thus, a family can consist of only one person, and more than one family can live in a household (including, for example, a household where there are multiple single-person families, as when unrelated roommates are living together). 

In this report, families are identified as "wireless families" if anyone in the family had a working cellular telephone at the time of interview. This person (or persons) could be a civilian adult, a member of the military, or a child. Households are identified as "wireless-only" if they include at least one wireless family and if there are no working landline telephones inside the household. Persons are identified as wireless-only if they live in a wireless-only household. A similar approach is used to identify adults living in households with no telephone service (neither wireless nor landline). Household telephone status (rather than family telephone status) is used in this report because most telephone surveys draw samples of households rather than families. 

From July through December 2008, information on household telephone status was obtained for 12,597 households that included at least one civilian adult or child. These households included 23,726 civilian adults aged 18 years and over and 8,635 children under age 18. 

Analyses of demographic characteristics are based on data from the NHIS Person and Household files. Demographic data for all civilian adults living in interviewed households were used in these analyses. Estimates stratified by poverty status are based on reported income only. Household income was unknown for nearly 18% of adults. 

Analyses of selected health measures are based on data from the NHIS Sample Adult file. Health-related data for one civilian adult randomly selected from each family were used in these analyses. From July through December 2008, data on household telephone status and selected health measures were collected from 9,841 randomly selected adults. 

Because NHIS is conducted throughout the year and the sample is designed to yield a nationally representative sample each week, data can be analyzed quarterly. Weights are created for each calendar quarter of the NHIS sample. NHIS data weighting procedures are described in more detail in an NCHS published report (Series Report No. 2, Vol. 130). To provide access to the most recent information from NHIS, estimates using the July-December 2008 data are being released prior to final data editing and final weighting. These estimates should be considered preliminary and may differ slightly from estimates using the final data files. 

Point estimates and 95% confidence intervals were calculated using SUDAAN software, to account for the complex sample design of NHIS. Differences between percentages were evaluated by using two-sided significance tests at the 0.05 level. Terms such as "more likely" and "less likely" indicate a statistically significant difference. Lack of comment regarding the difference between any two estimates does not necessarily mean that the difference was tested and found to be not significant. Because of small sample sizes, estimates based on less than 1 year of data may have large variances, and caution should be used in interpreting these estimates. 

Questionnaire Changes in 2007

From 2003 to 2006, families were considered to have landline telephone service if the survey respondent provided a telephone number, identified it as "the family's phone number," and said that it was not a cellular telephone number. If the family's phone number was reported to be a cellular telephone number, the respondent was asked if there was "at least one phone inside your home that is currently working and is not a cell phone." 

In 2007, the questionnaire was changed so that the survey respondent for each family was asked if there was "at least one phone inside your home that is currently working and is not a cell phone," unless the respondent indicated not having any phone when asked for a telephone number. 

From 2003 to 2006, the questions about cellular telephones were asked at the end of the survey. Because of incomplete interviews, more than 10% of households were not asked about wireless telephones. In 2007, the questions were asked earlier in the survey, resulting in fewer families with unknown wireless telephone status. 

In 2007, a new question was added to the survey for persons living in families with both landline and cellular telephones. The respondent for the family was asked to consider all of the telephone calls that his or her family receives and to report whether "all or almost all calls are received on cell phones, some are received on cell phones and some on regular phones, or very few or none are received on cell phones." This new question permits the identification of persons living in "wireless-mostly" households, defined as households with both landline and cellular telephones in which all families receive all or almost all calls on cell phones. 

Finally, in 2007, the questionnaire was redesigned to improve the collection of income information. Initial evaluations suggest that the resulting poverty estimates are generally comparable with those from years 2006 and earlier. However, as a result of the changes, the poverty ratio variable has fewer missing values in 2007 and 2008 compared with prior years. 

Telephone Status

In the last 6 months of 2008, more than one of every five households (20.2%) did not have a landline telephone but did have at least one wireless telephone (Table 1). Approximately 18.4% of all adults--more than 41 million adults--lived in households with only wireless telephones; 18.7% of all children--nearly 14 million children--lived in households with only wireless telephones. 

The percentage of households that are wireless-only has been steadily increasing. In fact, the 2.7-percentage-point increase from the first 6 months of 2008 is the largest 6-month increase observed since NHIS began collecting data on wireless-only households in 2003.

 The percentage of adults living in wireless-only households has also been increasing steadily (see Figure 1). During the last 6 months of 2008, more than one of every six adults lived in wireless-only households. One year before that (that is, during the last 6 months of 2007), one of every seven adults lived in wireless-only households. And 2 years before that (that is, during the last 6 months of 2005), only 1 of every 13 adults lived in wireless-only households.

 The percentages of adults and children living without any telephone service have remained relatively unchanged over the past 3 years. Approximately 1.9% of households had no telephone service (neither wireless nor landline). Nearly 4 million adults (1.7%) and 2 million children (2.4%) lived in these households. 

Demographic Differences

The percentage of U.S. civilian, noninstitutionalized adults living in wireless-only households is shown by selected demographic characteristics and by survey time period in Table 2. For the period July through December 2008,

• More than three in five adults living only with unrelated adult roommates (60.6%) were in households with only wireless telephones. This is the highest prevalence rate among the population subgroups examined.
• Nearly two in five adults renting their home (39.2%) had only wireless telephones. Adults renting their home were more likely than adults owning their home (9.9%) to be living in households with only wireless telephones.
• More than two in five adults aged 25-29 years (41.5%) lived in households with only wireless telephones. Approximately one-third (33.1%) of adults aged 18-24 years lived in households with only wireless telephones.
• As age increased from 30 years, the percentage of adults living in households with only wireless telephones decreased: 21.6% for adults aged 30-44 years; 11.6% for adults aged 45-64 years; and 3.3% for adults aged 65 years and over. However, as shown in Table 2 and Figure 2, the percentage of wireless-only adults within each age group has increased over time.
• Men (20.0%) were more likely than women (17.0%) to be living in households with only wireless telephones.
• Adults living in poverty (30.9%) and adults living near poverty (23.8%) were more likely than higher income adults (16.0%) to be living in households with only wireless telephones.
• Adults living in the South (21.3%) and Midwest (20.8%) were more likely than adults living in the Northeast (11.4%) or West (17.2%) to be living in households with only wireless telephones.
• Non-Hispanic white adults (16.6%) were less likely than Hispanic adults (25.0%) or non-Hispanic black adults (21.4%) to be living in households with only wireless telephones.

Wireless-Mostly Households

Among households with both landline and cellular telephones, 24.4% received all or almost all calls on the cellular telephones, based on data for the period July through December 2008. These wireless-mostly households make up 14.5% of all households.

The percentage of adults living in wireless-mostly households has been increasing (see Table 3). During the last 6 months of 2008, approximately 35 million adults (15.4%) lived in wireless-mostly households. Although this prevalence estimate was not significantly different from the estimate for the first 6 months of 2008 (14.4%), it was significantly greater than the estimate for the first 6 months of 2007 (12.6%).

Table 3 presents the percentage of adults living in wireless-mostly households by selected demographic characteristics and by survey time period. For the period July through December 2008,

• Adults with college degrees (18.0%) were more likely to be living in wireless-mostly households than were high school graduates (13.2%) or adults with less education (9.8%).
• Adults living with children (19.2%) were more likely than adults living alone (12.2%) or with only adult relatives (13.2%) to be living in wireless-mostly households.
• Adults living in poverty (9.5%) and adults living near poverty (11.3%) were less likely than higher income adults (18.2%) to be living in wireless-mostly households.
• Adults living in metropolitan areas (15.8%) were more likely to be living in wireless-mostly households than were adults living in more rural areas (13.4%).

Selected Health Measures by Household Telephone Status

Most major survey research organizations, including NCHS, do not include wireless telephone numbers when conducting random-digit-dial telephone surveys. Therefore, the inability to reach households with only wireless telephones (or with no telephone service) has potential implications for results from health surveys, political polls, and other research conducted using random-digit-dial telephone surveys. Coverage bias may exist if there are differences between persons with and without landline telephones for the substantive variables of interest. 

The NHIS Early Release Program updates and releases estimates for 15 key adult health indicators every 3 months. Table 4 presents estimates by household telephone status (landline, wireless-only, or without any telephone service) for all but two of these measures. ("Pneumococcal vaccination" and "personal care needs" were not included because these indicators are limited to adults aged 65 years and over.) For the period July through December 2008,

• The prevalence of binge drinking (i.e., having five or more alcoholic drinks in 1 day during the past year) among wireless-only adults (36.7%) was nearly twice as high as the prevalence among adults living in landline households (19.7%). Wireless-only adults were also more likely to be current smokers than were adults living in landline households.
• Compared with adults living in landline households, wireless-only adults were more likely to report that their health status was excellent or very good, were more likely to engage in regular leisure-time physical activity, and were less likely to have ever been diagnosed with diabetes.
• The percentage without health insurance coverage at the time of the interview among wireless-only nonelderly adults (27.5%) was considerably higher than the percentage among nonelderly adults living in landline households (16.4%).
• Compared with adults living in landline households, wireless-only adults were more likely to have experienced financial barriers to obtaining needed health care, and they were less likely to have a usual place to go for medical care. Wireless-only adults were also less likely to have received an influenza vaccination during the previous year.
• Wireless-only adults (47.0%) were more likely than adults living in landline households (37.1%) to have ever been tested for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

Conclusions

The potential for bias due to undercoverage remains a real and growing threat to surveys conducted only on landline telephones. For more information about the potential implications for health surveys that are based on landline telephone interviews, see

• Blumberg SJ, Luke JV. Coverage bias in traditional telephone surveys of low-income and young adults. Public Opin Q 71:734-49. 2007.
• Blumberg SJ, Luke JV, Cynamon ML. Telephone coverage and health survey estimates: Evaluating the need for concern about wireless substitution. Am J Public Health 96:926-31. 2006.
• Blumberg SJ, Luke JV, Cynamon ML, Frankel MR. Recent trends in household telephone coverage in the United States. In: Lepkowski JM et al., eds., Advances in telephone survey methodology. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 56-86. 2008.

The potential for bias may differ from one state to another because the prevalence of wireless-only households varies substantially across states. For more information about state-level prevalence estimates from the 2007 NHIS, see

• Blumberg SJ, Luke JV, Davidson G, Davern ME, Yu T, Soderberg K. Wireless substitution: State-level estimates from the National Health Interview Survey, January-December 2007. National health statistics report; no 14. Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics. 2009. 

For More Information

For more information about the National Health Interview Survey or the NHIS Early Release program, or to find other Early Release reports, please see the following websites:

• National Health Interview Survey homepage.
• National Health Interview Survey - Early Releases of Selected Estimates.

Suggested Citation

Blumberg SJ, Luke JV. Wireless substitution: Early release of estimates from the National Health Interview Survey, July-December 2008. National Center for Health Statistics. May 2009. Available from: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nhis.htm. 

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Building 31 North, which sits on the grounds of Houston's Johnson Space Center, is where NASA keeps all 600 pounds of the moon rocks it has secured. They are the sole property of the government, collected over six lunar missions and protected with the dramatic intensity of national treasures. Building 31 North is one of the few buildings on earth constructed under Class 100 standards—it is a structure that can withstand 1000 years of water submersion, among other durability metrics that should not be tested this side of Armageddon.

Breaking into it is designed to be impossible for normal people. But not harder than building a shuttle, or figuring out how to put a rover on Mars. The agency hires people with the ability to find solutions for intimidatingly large problems exactly like this one. In this regard, Roberts was your typical NASA intern. The 25-year-old was pursuing multiple degrees in Physics, Geology and Anthropology. But while Thad was school smart, he also has an almost unquencheable adrenaline-seeking side, and was consumed with a strange Excel spreadsheet of personal goals that read like he was trying to prove himself to Evel Knievel and a rocket scientist at the same time: Experience zero gravity, check; experience severe dehydration, check; find dinosaur tracks, no problem. The list was long, and as he checked off one after another, maybe Thad's ego began to believe anything was possible.

But Thad wasn't in this alone. He was on his way to a divorce fueled by an affair he was having with fellow intern Tiffany Fowler. Tiffany was equally dynamic—a firecracker and former cheerleader who spoke French in bed and conducted stem cell research on NASA's behalf. Thad wanted her, so when Tiffany begged to hear his idea to liberate the moon rocks, he told her. And when she wanted to follow through with the plan, the romantic and exciting thing was to start hatching a plan as if it were yet another science problem at work. One that would could make them very rich, or ruin their lives.

Soon one more curious co-op, the 19-year-old Shae Saur, had joined in on the heist. After months of preparation, they found themselves embarking on their unauthorized mission, driving for Building 31 North after dark with intel on every security device—and plans to get around them.

The combinations can be tested and become available after hitting the apply button. Most interesting are probably the options to launch a website, program or location.

I was discussing this subject recently with my friend Michael, who runs the career development office at Western Oregon University. He takes pride in helping students get good jobs with good salaries. Michael recommended a book called Negotiating Your Salary: How to Make $1,000 a Minute by Jack Chapman, so I picked up a copy for $7 at a local used book store. I recommend it highly.

How to earn $1,000 a minute
“We spend years thinking about what we’ll be when we grow up,” Chapman writes. “But when it’s time for a raise, most of us just accept whatever we’re offered. How many minutes do we spend negotiating the money? Zero.”

Chapman argues that by spending just a little time up front, you can put yourself in a strong position to negotiate an increased salary, either during a performance review or when applying for a new job. Those few minutes in an interview during which you ask for what you’re worth can make a difference of tens of thousands of dollars over your lifetime. Maybe hundreds of thousands. You can literally earn $1,000 a minute if you do this right.

His book offers five specific rules for negotiating your salary:

1. Postpone salary negotiations until you have been offered a job. “The same applies to raises,” Chapman writes. “There, the rule is never discuss a raise until you’ve had your review.” Chapman says that the hiring (or evaluation) process consists of two phases: judging and budgeting. You can only hurt yourself by dealing with salary when the employer is judging instead of budgeting. (Chapman actually says there’s an intermediate “fudging” stage, too, but it’s not relevant to this review.)
2. Let them go first. Chapman argues that it’s difficult to win by being the first to name a number. Do what you can to let the employer name a salary first. For many people (and I’m one of them), it can be awkward to evade direct questions. Chapman recommends preparing for this situation. His website includes a short video on how to answer the question, “What are you earning?” or “What are your salary expectations?” (See also: Penelope Trunk’s advice on how to answer the toughest interview question.)
3. When you hear the offer, repeat the top value — and then be silent. “The most likely outcome of this silence is a raise,” Chapman writes. The book offers a specific technique for responding when you hear the salary offer, a technique that’s designed to give you time to think about it while also putting a little pressure on the employer.
4. Counter the offer with a researched response. Your next move is to make a counter-offer based on what you know about yourself, the market, and the company. Chapman says that it’s important to do your research before the interview so that you’re prepared with a reasonable expectation of the salary range for the position. The book explains what to if the offer is too low, too high (a nice problem to have), or just right.
5. Clinch the deal — then deal some more. The final step in salary negotiations is to lock in the offer, and then negotiate additional benefits. This is like locking in the price of the car you want to buy before you begin negotiating the value of your trade-in.

Negotiating Your Salary contains detailed instructions for each of these five steps. It also offers information for determining your fair-market value (though much of that can be done online now with tools like PayScale, SalaryScout, and GlassDoor), explores special situations that break the rules, and offers tips for applying these techniques to raises and performance reviews.

Additional resources

Chapman’s website contains a series of free resources that draw from the information in his book. He divides these resources into five sections (each of which has a corresponding YouTube video like the one above):

• When to discuss salary (YouTube video)
• Who goes first? (YouTube video)
• Your first move (YouTube video)
• Your researched response (YouTube video)
• Clinch the deal and deal some more (YouTube video)

I bought my copy of Negotiating Your Salary for $7 at a used bookstore. If you need instant access to the book, you can download it for $30 from Chapman’s website. (You also receive a couple of bonuses when you purchase online.) Or you can buy Negotiating You Salary for about $10 through Amazon. And, of course, you can probably borrow it from your public library. (Although my county library system only has one copy.)

It may sound as if Jack Chapman has paid me money to pitch his book. He hasn’t. I’ve never communicated with him. But I don’t think people spend enough time looking for ways to boost their income. Learning how to negotiate your salary is one of the best ways to improve your financial well-being, and this book is an excellent source for tips on the subject.

For more information on this subject, check out 4 tips for salary negotiation from Penelope Trunk.

Will Whitehorn has worked at Virgin for 22 years. Before he ran Galactic, which he named, he did search and rescue for Sir Richard Branson's world-record-attempt balloon flights, and flew helis for British Airways. I got him on the phone for a few minutes to talk about space travel.

How'd Virgin get into the business of civilian space flight?
Sir Richard has always been into space. In the '80s, he was in touch with Gorbechev about getting into the Soyuz. And his first movie produced was The Space Movie [commissioned by NASA to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Apollo mission].

But Virgin Galactic's origins began with a conversation between me, Buzz Aldrin and Sir Richard Branson in the winter of 1996. We asked him why the American space program never launched crafts from air. Buzz explained that the US had the X-15 project in the '60s and they did test launches from a balloon before, and that the US did these experiments when Buzz was a pilot for the Navy in the '50s.

In 1999 we decided to register the name Virgin Galactic, not knowing where we'd find a spacecraft.

In 2003, Steve Fossett and Virgin cofunded the Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer, a plane Fossett would [use to] circumnavigate [the earth] on a single tank of fuel, setting a record. I was watching Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites build the flyer, and noticed he had a small spacecraft in the corner of his factory—it being the ship [SpaceShipOne] that Paul Allen was funding for the [Ansari] X Prize.

That's how we found our ship builder.

How are your customers going to be prepped for space?
There's a three-day training program in our New Mexico facility where, among other things, they'll get G-force training. We've tested 100 of them already using a centrifuge, so they'll understand the forces. If you look at the WhiteKnightTwo [launch vehicle], the starboard hull has an identical cabin to the space ship [see below], and the WhiteKnight has the unique ability to be an astronaut training vehicle, creating forces up to 7Gs. And it can be used as a zero-G flying plane, so passengers can experience G forces and zero G. When White Knight is bringing SpaceShipTwo and its load of passengers into orbit, it is also training the next day's travelers in its hull.

What's the in-flight entertainment going to be like?
The in flight entertainment system won't be like a normal entertainment system. Every customer will have a record of their flight. And lots of data: They'll see how many G's they sustained on the way up, they'll see what time they've arrived, etc. Of course, the best in flight entertainment of all will be the view of the Planet Earth; you'll be able to see the blue planet and the blackness of space while you're weightless.

When's the price coming down to $10,000?
Once the program gets regularized, and we get enough volume, we will be able to reduce the costs. But we believe after 3 to 5 years, we can get it down to $100,000 from $200,000. We can get it down to $100,000 but don't think we'll get it down to $10,000.

Gravity doesn't go on sale.
Gravity doesn't give you a discount.

Have you already started engineering the zero-g airsickness bags?
NASA already makes one. They're easy to get. But of our 100 customers that we put through the centrifuge, none felt ill from the test.

What other plans do you have for Virgin Galactic?
It's also an industrial and scientific system. We'll bring scientists into space to do microgravity experiments. And we can launch small unmanned rockets or satellites into space, up to 200 kilos, much more cheaply and safely than ever before.

Why should we send people into space?
Stephen Hawking believes that too many scientists in the '80s and '90s got into the mindset that we could just send robots into space. But he said it's wrong to think that way, because humans need to explore. And we now know enough about our planet that we know that a catastrophic event will happen in the next few thousand years—volcanic or otherwise—which would have the propensity to wipe us out. We have to have the ability to leave the planet, and we're only going to be able to do this if we develop manned space flight.

The laptop that probably caused the death of 26-year-old Delta resident Heather Storey was on display at a Wednesday morning RCMP news conference in Surrey.

The slim dark-grey metal shell of the laptop was bent and dented by the force of the collision between Storey’s Volkswagen and a tow truck at Scott Road and 103 Avenue in March.

Forensic experts now believe that Storey might have survived the crash if it wasn’t for her portable computer, which was sent flying by the force of the impact into the back of her head, hard enough to cause fatal blunt force trauma.

Speaking at the news conference, Heather’s mother and brother made a public appeal to have drivers secure their possessions in their vehicles.

“It’s a freak accident, but it can happen,” said mother Marilyn Storey.

Brother Michael Pratt said he’s stopped transporting metal parts on back seats and so have other people at his workplace.

“I really hope maybe we can prevent something from happening to someone else.”

Shortly before the crash, Heather used the computer to send her mother Marilyn a quick e-mail to let her parent know she’d packed her bags for a business trip and was on her way.

Surrey RCMP said Heather was driving her company-issued red Volkswagen north on Scott Road near 103 Avenue about 8:30 a.m. when a southbound tow truck made a left turn and slammed into the smaller vehicle.

Heather was the middle child of five in her family, a vegetarian who took up target shooting at local ranges with her boyfriend (she would not shoot at anything living) and ended up featured in a Vancouver newspaper article about women involved in gun sports.

She was also an able mechanic who restored two cars.

Police are still looking for witnesses to the crash, especially the driver of a large commercial vehicle that was northbound on Scott Road and was making a left westbound turn onto 103A Avenue at the time of the collision.

Anyone with information about the crash is urged to contact Const. Phil Dobernigg at 778-593-3277.

dferguson@surreyleader.com