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The quadrennial Olympics are a snapshot of the world at its best, a portrait of a future in which nations compete as equals in the global arena and individuals metaphorically medal in any number of events. And while the realm of governance is vastly more complex than that of a sports stadium, a number of observations about the global community as seen at the Olympics may be of relevance to Americans preparing to chart the course of their country for the next four years by electing a new president.

*First, the Olympics show that youth is good and that elders have nothing to fear about youthful preeminence. The energetic endurance of youth creates the opportunities for elders to be of relevance. There is no Olympic medalist without a coach and there are few without supportive parents.

*The Olympics also show the world as a delightful mix of racially, ethnically, nationally and regionally interconnected people. Value judgments are overruled by a visceral reaction to the exquisite capabilities of the human mind and body.

*Experience is not necessarily an indicator of fitness for performance in Olympic competition. The most seasoned athletes make decisive mistakes. Novices benefit from those errors. Graciousness in accepting and admitting the result is the measure of the respect to be accorded for performance. Pre-competitive gloating or mudslinging brings the greatest disgrace, especially to a loser.

*The Olympics are globally important enough that the near-200 country members of the United Nations overwhelmingly adopted an Olympic Truce in 2007. That agreement to stop hostilities for the two-week period of the Olympic Games did not deter the Georgians and the Russians from armed engagement. Suicide bombers in Pakistan were also not bound by the globally accepted compact. The world needs organizations with the teeth to nonviolently sanction those who don’t abide by its standards.

*The Olympics are a showcase for the prowess of attractive, healthy and fit humans of every shape, size, color and gender. Performance is a prerequisite for Olympic competition, which proves that attractiveness need not be a sign of vanity, vapidity or shallowness. The attractiveness of a top performer in any arena is a by-product of the mental, emotional and physical integrity that top-level performance requires.

*The American image that comes across in the Olympic global mix is one of exuberance, health, vitality, competence and good will. It is an image that any nation would be privileged to nurture and foster with the confidence of being assured its grounds for excellence were founded in its appreciation and good use of blessed resources toward good ends.

*The Olympics are a presentation of the world in all its vastness, diversity and glory. Viewership of the events shows Americans are interested in that world beyond their own borders. The NBC network covering the Games reports a 16.3 rating and an average audience of 26.6 million during primetime on a typical weekday night, which is up from a 15.7 rating with 25 million viewers four years ago in Athens.

*NBC’s television coverage of the 2008 Olympic Games has also revealed that America itself has numerous cities and small towns where Olympic-level athletes are trained. In Des Moines, Iowa, for example, American immigrant and Beijing-born Liang Chow coached gymnast Shawn Johnson to a 2008 Olympic gold for nearly ten years. Media anticipation of forthcoming national honors on the global stage can be a tool for America to know itself better.

*Finally, the Olympics show that nationalism is a universal trait, just as is family loyalty, favoritism and support. But the Games also demonstrate that the huge asset of lending power to the individual through the team effort of kinship shines only in the global forum. They prove that cooperative competition stirs the blood from individual events to the outcome of the Games overall.

Helen Fogarassy is the author of a suspense novel, The Midas Maze, about murderous hijinks in UN/US relations. She is also the author of The Light of a Destiny Dark, a novel about the Euro-American cultural gap through Hungarian eyes, and a nonfiction tribute to the UN’s work, Mission Improbable: The World Community on a UN Compound in Somalia.

In a departure from what you might expect from an article forum, we would like to offer the opportunity for you to take a more interactive approach to learning the basics of The Skills. Anyone can try these exercises either in their personal or professional encounters, or both, and better yet, no one need know that they are participants in your learning!

Rather than simply tell you what you should be looking for in these exercises, we think it would be more fun for all involved if we held back a little and let you experience for yourself the most important building block of The Skills.

Modern presentation theory espouses a conversational approach to presenting, because that’s the way to maximize both comfort and trust between you and the audience. The conversational approach, a modern refinement of the humanist style first made popular in western cultures by president John F. Kennedy, is quite a bit different from the oratory style that most people associate with earlier great speakers such as Winston Churchill.

The foundation of the conversational approach is proper eye-contact, and the nature of that eye-contact is quite unlike the way 99% of presenters practice. In fact, once you know what to look for, you will discover that what first differentiates those who have The Skills from those who don’t is the way they engage their audiences with their eyes. Make no mistake, proper eye-contact is only one component of The Skills, but when you understand exactly how you must look at your audience to be a great speaker, the other components tend to fall into place.

When you nail down these (surprisingly straightforward) eye contact techniques, you can deliver to a group of 500 without ever feeling more anxiety than you would when discussing your job to friends around a lunch table. Most people find that hard to believe until they’ve actually received training in The Skills, but when you get it, it’s rather powerful stuff!

These exercises sound simple enough, but they do require a bit of vigilance on your part to have the desired effect. You must practice them at every opportunity for a week or so. At the end of that time you will know what you need to know to move on to the next level of acquiring The Skills, but only if you make a conscious effort to do what the exercises ask you to do every day.

Exercises:

1. Observe others’ eye contact. In every situation in which you interact with others, watch their eyes. Observe how long they maintain eye contact while they are speaking to you. Watch how they maintain eye contact while speaking to others. As often as you can, count the number of seconds they maintain continuous eye contact before switching to a new target and note this, preferably in a log of some sort.

2. In situations where someone is speaking to a group, again count the number of seconds the speaker maintains eye contact with each individual. Determine what the average amount of time is.

3. Be conscious of your own eye contact. When speaking with someone, do you stay focused on them? Do you look up, away, or down while speaking? Or do you maintain eye contact the entire time you are speaking with someone? How often do you move away from eye contact and then return? Do you look at other people for the same amount of time when talking to one as when you are talking to many?

If you’ve vigilant in your observations, you’ll probably be very surprised at the amount of time people hold continuous eye-contact when speaking. And yet it is this amount of time that sets the tone for what makes average speakers average and great ones great.

J. Douglas Jefferys brings twenty-five years of corporate training experience to his role as a principal of PublicSpeakingSkills.com [http://www.publicspeakingskills.com]. His firm changes presenters lives forever with their unique apporach to training presentation design and delivery skills. Discover how to design and deliver presentations that audiences actually listen to by visiting their website now. For a quick and entertaining video of Mr. Jefferys’ unique style and approach, check out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whTwjG4ZIJg

THE RAVEN PARADOX - THE FLAWS IN THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD

HEMPEL’S LOGIC All scientists use reasoning and logic at some stage, to create hypotheses and design robust experiments. In a beautiful and elegant treatise, the German philosopher Carl G Hempel, in 1965, showed that there were flaws in these long-established processes. His Raven Paradox called into question the established processes of inductive reasoning, generalization and falsifiability

THE INDUCTIVE HYPOTHESIS Imagine that a scientist, after years of going for long walks in the countryside, observes that every single raven he has ever seen is black. As a dutiful researcher, he uses inductive reasoning to postulate the hypothesis:

“All ravens are black.”

This is a perfectly acceptable conditional hypothesis. Firstly, it is testable, because you could sample raven populations and verify that they are all black. The statement is also falsifiable because even one non-black raven amongst the sampled population would disprove the hypothesis.

This is all great science, so far, following the established methods of inductive reasoning. The researcher could even design an experiment to sample raven populations, with thousands of ravens observed. If they are all black, the hypothesis is supported and plausible. Over time, repeated experiments and observations further confirm this and the hypothesis becomes accepted as a law.

THE PROBLEM OF GENERALIZATION AND FALSIFIABILITY The first part of the Raven Paradox proposal questions the process of generalization. It is practically impossible to sample every single raven in the world and there may a few non-black individuals. Hempel was not trying to comment upon the exact science, but as an interesting aside, about 1 in 10 000 raven eggs contain partially or fully albino birds.

Most albino birds are more visible to predators, suffer from health problems and may be a localized phenomenon. The odds of seeing an albino raven are very small and sightings are extremely rare. A researcher could sample many thousands of Ravens and not see one white bird, even though they do exist.

Thus, the notion of falsifiability is questioned and undermined by the Raven Paradox. Although the original hypothesis is technically falsifiable, in practical terms it is very difficult to disprove, because the chances of observing a white Raven are very slim. Even if you sampled the entire known population of ravens, there may be an undiscovered group containing a non-black individual.

FLAWS IN THE INDUCTIVE REASONING PROCESS The next part of the Raven Paradox questions the processes of reasoning and deduction that are an integral part of the scientific process. When a researcher states that all ravens are black, the laws of logic demand that this conditional statement has a contrapositive, statement.

Therefore, according to inductive reasoning, “Everything that is not black is not a raven.” This means that every non-black object observed, that is not a raven, equally strengthens the hypothesis. There are a countless number of non-black objects in the universe and we should pity the poor statistician who has to analyze this!

To take the analogy further, another researcher in another part of world, through fluke, may have only seen one raven in their life, which happened to be white. Their deduced hypothesis may be that “All ravens are white.” Every non-white object, which is not a raven, strengthens this opposing hypothesis too. This is the Raven Paradox.

THE END OF THE SCIENTIFIC PROCESS? What does this paradox mean? Has the world of science come crashing down around our ears?

The answer is a resounding NO!

The Raven Paradox is a useful philosophical observation and helps to ensure that we constantly probe and test the steps of the established scientific processes. The examples given in the paradox are simplistic and unlikely, merely serving as an exercise to test the boundaries of the philosophy of science.

In reality, for the vast majority of cases, Hempel’s treatise makes no difference and the normal reasoning and experimental design processes work perfectly well. The paradox does not detract from science, but actually enhances it, by preventing scientists from believing that they have proved something beyond doubt.

The Raven Paradox should remind every scientist of the dangers of generalization and that they must ensure that all hypotheses are realistically falsifiable. If the researcher has said, “All ravens in Norway are black”, this is more realistic as ornithologists could feasibly observe every raven in Norway.

PARADIGM SHIFTS Even long-standing theories, which became established as laws and immovable paradigms, can be proved incorrect over time. Science is really all about testing probabilities and assumption. If something has a 99% chance of being correct then it should be accepted as the likely explanation.

The chances of someone seeing only one raven in their life, which happens to be white, are tiny. However, this is not the same as impossible and that possibility must never be ignored. This is why all experiments are rigorously validated and reviewed before gaining widespread acceptance, to minimize the effects of the Raven Paradox.

For example, Newton’s laws were accepted as truth until Einstein’s theories blew them out of the water. In turn, General Relativity is not the answer to fundamental physics and has been superseded by other theories.

This is how science evolves, by challenging and adapting established paradigms and laws. The creation of Chaos Theory was a perfect example of ‘maverick’ scientists chipping away at the established laws until the theory could no longer be ignored. It eventually burst into the public consciousness and fractal models appeared as prints on T-Shirts.

Hempel’s Raven Paradox stands to remind us all that no theory, however established, should be immune to challenge or debate. As new evidence is uncovered, science must adapt and change to assimilate the new data.

Martyn lives in the beautiful Peloponnese area of Greece and is absorbing the philosophy buried deep within the bones of the land.

He specializes in science and philosophy articles.

Please find the original article at http://www.experiment-resources.com

Martyn’s website is at http://www.amethyst-web.net

You who read this, may be an engineer, a mechanic, an inventor, a student, or even someone without an engineering background. My observation is that the general public has little knowledge of basic science and even engineers and other professionals often lack in basic insights, in spite of being advanced in their specific fields. This often leads to unfeasible projects and wrong choices, based on wrong assumptions, that no computer can correct.

I myself am a graduated engineer on B.Sc level in both mechanics and electrics. Nevertheless, most of what I know worth knowing as an engineer today, I learned from practical experience and backing it up with own theoretical studies afterwards. It forced me to focus on basics. When you have the basics right, the rest is just methodology, where the computer can be very helpful, but don’t let it “think” for you!

If you have no engineering background, why would you need to have some basic knowledge of all this, you may ask? Well, we live in a technological society and so we are confronted with technological matters and products, that we need to understand the basics of to make proper choices. Ever bought expensive “energy-saving” lamps, while in the same time needing to heat your home? Do you think hydrogen and/or fuel cells are energy sources? Do you think energy can be produced and consumed? Would you invest money in solar panels, or other renewable energy technology for your home? The more these kinds of things apply on you, the more you need to read this article.

The Laws of Newton

The metric, or SI system of units is based on the laws of Newton and so is most of modern mechanics and dynamics. They are essential for basic understanding:

• 1. A mass object persists in its momentary motion to speed and direction, unless it is forced to change it by external forces working on it.
• 2. The acceleration of an object is proportional with the force F working on it and inverse proportional with its mass m. Hence, the acting force is given by: F = m.a
• 3. A force acting on an object, will yield a counter force of the same strength in the opposite direction: action = reaction.

Although these laws sound simple, they are often wrongly applied, or overlooked. Especially the third law appears to be the most fundamental one, still not fully understood by Science and subject for discussions on the highest levels (how can you move a table for example, as it pushes back with the same force?).

Power and Energy.

Power and energy are very often mixed up. For example a lightning, causing a tree to split into half, is very powerful, but it has very little energy, because it lasted only a fraction of a second. Energy is the range of power and time. Power is expressed in Watt and energy in Joule - 1 Watt thus is 1 Joule per second, inversely 1 J = 1 Ws (Watt second). If you during one hour would apply a power of 1000 Watt (1 kW = 1 kJ/s), which approximately is what a flat iron takes, the energy involved is 1 kWh and this is thus equal to 3600 kJ. If you instead would develop that energy in one second, the power becomes 3600 kW, or 3.6 MW - a small power plant! If thus a lightning would have a power of say 10 GW and lasted 1 millisecond (it looks much longer, because of the glowing air around it), it contained an amount of energy of just 10 MJ = 10,000 kJ, not more than 2.8 kWh, or to power a flat iron for around three hours! If you in brochures would read dimensions like kilowatt per hour, or horsepower per hour, you can know that the author has no idea what he/she is talking about.

Energy is also the range of force and traveled way. If you lift up a mass of 1 kg to a height of 1 meter, the force needed for that is the range of mass and gravity acceleration, as per Newton’s second law. On Earth, gravity acceleration is 9.8 meter per second square, which we can round to 10. The lifting force then becomes 10 kilogram meter per second square, which is called the Newton (N) and the work done is then 10 Nm (Newton meter), which is 10 Joule: 1 J = 1 Nm.

The same confusing exists around temperature and energy. What would you rather have in your hand, a 1 inch red glowing sewing needle, or a 4 inch red glowing bolt? Though both have the same temperature, the needle will just cause you a blister, whereas with the bolt, you won’t have a hand any more. The bolt contains much more energy (more mass) than the needle and that makes the difference, not the temperature.

If you would be interested in a solar panel to heat water in your home, the temperature it can yield is therefore not that important. You pay for energy instead and that is what you want to save on. Ideally, a solar water heater should work on a low temperature, so it doesn’t loose too much heat through its insulation and produce a larger water flow instead. You then save more energy = money, because of the higher efficiency on which your solar panel works. To reach your desired water temperature in the kitchen and bathroom, you can heat additionally with say an electrical heater. Combination with a heat pump, also taking up heat from your warm waste water, would give the absolute best results (but high installation costs). Read more about that at the end of this article.

However, manufacturers of solar panels optimize on temperature, which is a good selling argument for the energy-unaware public. At higher temperatures, the size and thus the costs of the whole installation, including storage tank, become lower, which also sells better. They don’t talk very much, or at all about efficiency, being the relationship between how much solar energy hits the solar panel and how much of that you can use in the end. They talk about capacity instead - solar energy is “free”!

Next to consider is Pressure. Usually it is that of a fluid, like a gas. It is expressed in Pascal (Pa) which is force (N) per unit of area and thus 1 Pa = 1 N/sqm (Newton per square meter). Atmospheric pressure at sea level is roughly 100 kPa, thus 100,000 N/sqm. In technical descriptions it is also often called the bar - 1 bar is thus atmospheric pressure. Pressure can also be seen as stress in materials, tension. In the SI system of units, pressure and tension are thus both expressed in Pascal.

Then there is contact-pressure. This is what makes a knife work. The sharper a knife, the smaller its edge area (A) is and for a given force (F), the contact-pressure (F/A) becomes larger, also expressed in Pascal. With this, all units in the SI-system are given. It has only three basic units, the kg for mass, the meter for length/distance and the second for time. No conversions are needed

Circular Motions.

From Newton’s third law follows the perception that on an object in mechanical rotation, two forces are working, a centripetal one, pulling the objects towards the center of rotation, and a centrifugal one, tending to push it out radially away from that center. If the mechanical contact with the center of rotation suddenly is broken, in that very moment no forces are working on the object any longer and thus it will move as per Newton’s first law, meaning it keeps its speed in the direction it had in the moment just before losing contact. That speed was directed tangentially and thus the object will “fly out” in the tangential direction, not radially. In fact, centrifugal forces do not exist, because then there would be no resulting force to keep an object in its circular path - only the centripetal force exists. This is a hot discussion point in Science - Newton’s third law.

Hence, when you are in a car that makes a sharp curve, your body does not push against the inside of the car (centrifugal), but the inside of the car pushes your body into the curve (centripetal). As per Newton’s first law, your body wants to keep its direction of motion, straight ahead, just before entering the curve - it’s called inertia. There is only one force, the centripetal one (free motions in gravitational fields, such as orbits of planets and satellites, are described in General Relativity, which we won’t discuss here).

From this follows the notion of “inertial” systems, which are frames of reference in which Newton’s laws are valid. An accelerated system is thus not an inertial system, because motions described in it, would not follow Newtonian laws. This causes a severe point of confusion, as follows:

If you are an inventor of “fantastic” mechanical machines, your really should understand the implements of impulse. Impulse (p) is the amount of motion, being the range of speed (v) and mass (m), which is equal to the range of working force (F) and the working time (t): F.t = m.v = p. An impulse has a direction, which (kinetic) energy has not and therefore impulses can have a positive or a negative sign between opposite directions of motion. Because impulse is a function of force (the time-derivative of it), Newton’s third law requires that the sum of all impulses of moving components within a system (machine) must be zero. However, many inventors, not being aware of this, “create” a resulting impulse, that accelerates the system.

What they do is mixing up reference systems and impulse with energy. If you consider a mechanical system (machine), that has a certain total mass, but also internally moving parts, the resulting impulse of those parts, the sum of all impulses, will be zero relative the system’s center of gravity, but not necessarily relative a resting frame of reference (an observer) in which the whole system (machine) may be moving (at constant speed). The sum of kinetic energy of all the internally moving parts, is of course a positive value (negative energy is less than nothing). This value is the system’s internal (kinetic) energy. Since this internal energy is needed to keep the internal parts moving, there cannot be any energy left to accelerate the system (machine) as a whole. On the contrary, energy must be applied all the time to overcome the friction that the internally moving parts are subjected to, otherwise they would come to a halt. This applied energy converts to heat.

Sadly, there are several patents on according designs, claiming to be “inertial drives” for space-ships or whatever. Their inventors, some of which may have ruined their private economies on this, were not confident with the basics of dynamics, as outlined above. See some of those unfortunate examples here: http://jnaudin.free.fr/html/IPEmain.htm

Mechanical Engineering Concepts

Now, imagine you had a ball that is perfectly spherical and a table that is perfectly smooth, so when the ball is placed on the table, the contact area becomes a dimensionless point - zero whatever. Then the contact-pressure F/0 becomes infinite, regardless how light the ball is - something must break. No material could withstand an infinite contact-pressure and from this follows that not even with the most fantastic materials, yet to be developed, a frictionless machine could ever be built (that would require ideal point and line contacts).

Some inventors have a problem with that, like a patent I once saw, where a 15 cm (6 inch) diameter cylinder was rotating at 1500 rpm in a somewhat larger cylinder, supported by a number of smaller rollers in the size of just a few millimeters - it looked like a ball-bearing in cross section. These rollers would rotate at roughly 50,000 rpm. You look in any bearing table what the admissible speeds are and you would see that this design exceeds the limits by far; self-destruct through friction!

Another problem that many inventors have is judging leakage potential. Leakage is a function of pressure ratio, not of pressure difference and it varies to the third power with the clearance gap between the boundaries. It means that the same sealing device, that would leak in an however deep submerged submarine, would leak more in a space craft, because there the pressure ratio to vacuum is infinite - many don’t seem to know that. In addition, even less known, is that the best sealing is obtained with a single, unbroken sealing line, ideally a circle.

Therefore, the reciprocating circular piston machine will always prevail over any rotational displacement concept, that contains several broken (discontinuous) sealing lines. These rotational concepts can be used and are used in low-duty applications, where they have their advantages, such as in air-driven hand tools, industrial compressors, etc, but not in heavy-duty combustion engines. This is why the Wankel never became commercial, except a few years in cars from German NSU, that went bankrupt on it in the 1970-ies.

One can see the most ‘horrible’ designs in various patents, the worst I saw being an engine, consisting of a torus shaped tube, with a slot over its inner length to let through a piston rod, attached to a circular piston moving in that torus, while flat plates were sliding radially in and out the torus to form alternate compression and expansion chambers - at best a good cream-wiper (but it got a gold medal in an inventors contest - its glorious funeral)!

Many inventors have tried to find a linear transmission, that can replace the pendulous crankshaft. It has various disadvantages, such as causing vibrations of higher order, but most of all causing side-forces on the pistons, resulting in excessive wear and leakage there. I once read a statement from a development manager at Volkswagen in Germany, that the crank mechanism alone stands for 20% of the fuel consumption. All alternative designs I have seen, indeed convert the linear piston motion into a rotating one on the shaft and without causing side forces on the piston, but instead they generate the same or higher side forces on sliding parts elsewhere in the design, causing excessive friction and wear there - definitely no fuel savings. I have found a design that does not contain any sliding parts, but consists of rotating components only (I got the idea, when I was with my kids in a merry-go-round). Had I only come up with this a good 100 years ago, I could have made it, but now the pendulous crankshaft is so well established in automated production lines, that it can’t be changed any more. I almost hade it made with Compair-Reavel in the UK, around 20 years ago, but also they found it in the end too costly too change their production line - my bad luck!

Thermodynamics

Another basic thing, often misunderstood, is that energy can’t be “used up”. Surely, the gasoline you put in your car is used up, but the energy it developed is still there, to stay around for all eternity. All the chemical energy that was stored in the original fuel, is converted to heat. Firstly at high temperatures in the car’s engine, but then decaying to heat at ambient temperature. The rest is also converted to heat by friction, the tires on the road, the transmission, air resistance, etc. All energy that we “use” with our technology, finally decays to heat at ambient temperature, even the light from your lamps at home does that.

So is there the term “waste heat”, as opposed to “useful heat”.What is useful? Take “energy-saving” lamps for example. If you live in a cold climate, where you have to heat your home, a normal cheap hot glowing light bulb actually delivers 100% useful energy, 5% of which is light, the rest is heat, that helps heating your home, but this is not what you are told. Only the 5% light is brought forward as “useful” and you are told that you are “wasting” 95% with a normal glow bulb. Only in warm climates, especially third-world countries with very expensive electricity, or in cooled rooms, the use of energy-saving lamps makes sense!

The misconception by the public is that useful energy is “consumed” and waste energy is not. The real situation is that the useful energy is just used, but not “consumed” and is wasted after usage just the same. That’s why your energy bill comes back every month - nothing of what you used, is left. Therefore you read everywhere about “energy production” and “energy consumption”, not in the least used by decision makers in energy politics! It indicates that there is no basic understanding in public society, what energy is about and so unfeasible projects are initiated, wasting time and (your tax) money.

The First Law of Thermodynamics says that energy cannot be created (produced), nor destroyed (consumed). We can only convert energy from one form to an other and the Second Law of Thermodynamics says that it all finally must decay to heat at ambient temperature and so it does. Even though many know this, that is end of story for them, as far as the First Law is concerned. However, the scientific definition of the First Law says that if you add energy to a system to bring it in an other condition, you must remove the same amount of energy to bring it back in the original condition. Naturally, because if we could remove more, energy would be created from nothing and if less, energy would disappear into nothing. This formulation has great consequences, as follows:

Let’s consider an ideal hydrogen (water) engine, by which we pour water in it on one side and the same water AND useful mechanical energy comes out on the other side. Because the engine returns the same water as was applied (firstly as steam, but than condensing to water at ambient temperature), there cannot be a net output from the engine - it would have been created from nothing. If there is an output anyway, this means that the according energy had to be applied as well, not only the water. Indeed, we must apply energy to split the water in hydrogen and oxygen. If that could be done at an efficiency of 100% (electrolysis has only 60%), then that energy could appear as mechanical work on the shaft. This then means that the hydrogen only was an energy converter, definitely not an energy source!

Hydrogen does not occur in free form on Earth, like fossil fuels do and therefore hydrogen can never be an energy source. Give me a dollar for every article that says different and I will be well off!If there would be a method to obtain free hydrogen at considerably less energy input than what combustion with oxygen gives in output, yes, then it would become an energy source, but such a method has not yet been found.

Instead of splitting water, hydrogen can be obtained from natural gases, such as methane. It shows however that the overall efficiency of such a hydrogen loop in a combustion engine would have a somewhat lower overall efficiency than using the natural gas (or bio-gas) directly in a combustion engine. Moreover, hydrogen is a very tricky gas to store and to handle. Not only is it very explosive, but it tends to exude through most metals as well. It is very voluminous, around ten times more than air and thus needs to be brought on high pressures to keep the volume down and that takes a lot of compression energy. Liquefying it would even take more energy, plus a temperature problem for storage as well. There are materials that can absorb hydrogen gas at a lower temperature and give it off again at a higher temperature, surely the better way, but also not very cheap and practical in a distribution system. All together, there is no economy in hydrogen engines, but it may have an environmental advantage - the only viable argument for using it, provided the consumer wants to pay the higher costs, do you?

The same can be said from fuel cells, working on hydrogen - they produce water (steam) and need a steady supply offresh hydrogen and oxygen to work continuously- whereto get how? Yes, the energy that fuel cells are supposed to “produce”, originally came from fossil fuels to manufacture the input hydrogen. Can we call that “non-pollutant” energy? A fuel cell is NOT an energy source, just an energy converter.

The importance of using spontaneity in physical processes is largely unknown, because it has to do with entropy, something not explained very well in schools. So I had to learn in practice, by trial and error, that if you want to separate fluids from each other, you must try to find a design by which this happens as spontaneously as possible, for example with “smart” piping, rather than using filters. The more you try to force it about with various design details, the more you will lose in efficiency - you “produce” entropy as it wrongly is called. The more you force about a process (introduce “irreversibilities”, as it is called correctly), the greater the change of entropy is, the lower the efficiency becomes. Entropy is an essential part of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, not to say the whole of it, but yet there is no general agreement among scientists, what entropy actually is - very confusing.

The Second Law is actually not a “real” law, because it is based on observations only, not on any physical principle. This means that if the observations would change, the Second Law would have to change too, but this hasn’t happened yet, which makes it a law. In everyday life we experience that most things don’t happen spontaneously, only accidents, or coincidences in general, do (”Murphy’s Law”). If we want things to happen, we usually have to do work for it. Hence we could formulate the Second Law as: “for free only the Sun goes up”. On the internet, this formulation of the Second Law is widely violated by millions of web sites, trying to let you believe that for a small investment, you can become rich very soon. But that is not engineering (rather “religion”), so I leave you with that.

In engineering, especially when it comes to renewable energy sources, the Second Law is also widely violated, or rather ignored. Oh yes, solar energy is free, but you can’t use it for free, why not? Because it is widely spread in Nature and thus the effort to collect it into one point of usage and to present it in a usable form, is very large and you have to pay for that effort. Using fossil fuels is cheaper and easier and that’s what we do instead. The same would be valid for nuclear power, but there the “environmentalists” have been successful to obstruct it - with thanks from the Arab oil sheiks.

Renewable energy is something the Second Law is very much against, because it wants to spread it out in the environment, not to collect it for our use. Therefore these renewable energy sources are high-entropy ones, meaning you must do a lot of work to make use of them (low efficiency). There is one exception though and that is hydro-electric power. The forces of nature actually do all the work for us, by collecting rain water in high situated reservoirs, ready for us to use; they are low-entropy sources. But also here the “environmentalists” choose to favor the oil sheikhs instead.

Next would be heat pumps, which are inverted refrigerators. A heat pump absorbs heat from the environment, usually from the ambient air, by generating a cold surface there. This surface is small, but it actually collects heat from large, remote areas, brought by the wind. Also here, the forces of nature do the collecting work for us, a second exception on the rule (compare with a storm blowing aside of your wind propeller, without affecting it, or the Sun burning a hole in the ground next to your solar panel, also without affecting it).

The heat pump, as the name says, pumps up the ambient heat to a higher temperature that we can use, for example to heat water. Also its drive power is given off as heat at usage temperature, is thus no loss (where it is in a refrigerator) and so a heat pump can give off between 3 and 4 times more energy than what it takes to run it. If all the billions of dollars that to date and ongoing are wasted on wind propellers and solar collectors of various kinds, would have been used to provide all households with heat pumps, many power plants could have been shut down by now and no more oil would be burned in homes for heating. This however is a truth with modification. A huge polluting industry, likely using fossil fuels, would be behind all those heat pumps, but that would be the same also for wind propellers, solar panels and the production of hydrogen and fuel cells, all having to be financed by the consumers and making profit as well - the Second Law all right:”For free, only the Sun goes up”

Rudolph N. J. Draaisma
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Despite the widespread agreement, some participants in the debate remained skeptical. Indeed, prescient commentators of that era ocProzac Market ocasionally expressed the fear that the interrelationships of stockprice changes are so complex that standard tools like these cannot reveal them. That fear led to efforts to dispute the model by designing trading rules that could achieve above-normal returns by uncovering and exploiting these greater complexities.

Among the most primitive though most illustrative trading rules was Sidney Alexander’s “filter technique.” This is a strategy designed to discern and exploit assumed trends in stockprices that, in Alexander’s piquant phrase, may be “masked by the jiggling of the market.”

For instance, a “5% filter rule” for a stockwould say to buy it when the price goes up 5% (and watch it rise to a higher peak); then sell it when the price goes down 5% from that peak(and watch it fall to a lower trough); then short the stock(i.e., borrow it and sell it at the prevailing price, promising to repay with the same stock, to be purchased for the price prevailing at the time of repayment); then, when the price rises 5% from that trough, cover the short position. If this works, you get a gain on the initial sale plus a gain on the short position. More important, if it works, prices are following a peak-trough pattern. That means they are not random and the random walkmodel is contradicted.

Alexander’s initial results indicated that such a technique could produce above-normal returns. Subsequent refinements of Alexander’s workby himself and others, including Fama, however, demonstrated that relaxing or changing certain assumptions eliminated the abnormal returns, particularly the original filter technique’s failure to note that dividends are a cost rather than a benefit when stocks are sold short.

Alexander’s filter technique epitomizes the chartist or technical approach to stockanalysis and trading, under which a study of past prices (or other data) is used as a basis for predicting future prices. Indeed, Alexander’s filter technique is a conceptual cousin of limit orders and similar techniques prevalent in securities trading today. These techniques include conventional technical methods that rely on anomaly effects (the insider, month, weekend, and analyst effects) as well as the more unconventional methods (the hemline indicator, the Super Bowl indicator, and so on).

These and related philosophies such as “momentum investing” and “sector rotation” remain staples of Wall Street futurology. They are widely and increasingly used by traders and recommended by investment advisers and brokers. They are nonsense, as many students of the random walkmodel (and EMT) recognize based on the foregoing analysis.

They are nonsense not because of EMT but because they fly in the face of business analysis. “We shall dismiss these with the observation that their workdoes not concern ‘investors’, the trouble with all these tests of the random walk is that they are linear. They do not investigate the presence of nonlinear price dependence, something that in the early 1960s researchers simply lacked the computer horsepower to do.

The trading rule test, for example, is linear in that it operates in chronological time (or real time). Neither it nor the other old tests consider the possibility that market time may be better understood from a perspective that is nonlinear. Einstein demonstrated that time is not absolute but works in dozens of different ways depending on the context, including forward (or linear), backward, circular, slow, and erratic (nonlinear), and can even stand still.

Tips to turn $1000 into $1,00,000, articles on stock market trading and investing. To get detail about the stock market and finance visit 2stocktrading.com.

The African elephant is the biggest land animal on earth. With adult males weighing as much as seven tonnes, and with a height of well over two metres at the shoulder, the jumbo is no doubt an awesome sight. When watching the animals at close range, it is even more exciting. This is what Amboseli national park promises the visitor.

Situated on the Kenyan side at the foot of the world’s highest free standing mountain, Mt. Kilimanjaro, the park prides itself as the custodian of the most documented elephant herds on earth. Elephant researchers have been working here since the early 1970’s and they know virtually every elephant by name. Every new born is recorded, just like every death. The animals have tags that track their movements sometimes migrating to Tsavo national park over one hundred miles away.

For the visitor, the opportunity to view an elephant at close range can not come any better. Amboseli is an open plain park with two main swamps, that are a major attraction to the elephants. They love to feed on the reeds in the waters, sometimes sub merging themselves save for the trunks that are used as both the hand and the nose. When they are not in the waters, the elephants are feeding on grass. This provides the best opportunity for a close range photograph.

Elephants when relaxed are a joy to watch. One is able to tell the pecking order in a herd. The leader, usually a female will in most cases initiate moves, be it to go for the watering the point, cross the park for grazing on the opposite side or just take it easy relaxed. The mature bulls do not stay with the herds. When they do come, it is interesting to see their behavior. Like a senior soldier in the army, a bull joins in the herd, walks across inspecting each member of the herd. You can see the other bulls giving way, sometimes the senior one challenging them but rarely will they challenge him to a fight.

The big bull inspects all the females in a herd in a no nonsense kind of approach. It is more like greetings, without wasting too much time on any one individual. Satisfied that none of the females requires his attention, he may choose to graze briefly with the herd, before proceeding on to other herds. It is rare to witness a territorial fight, but when it happens, it is a sight to behold. The fight may last a whole day or more, sometimes leading to serious injury or death. It can be very dangerous though to go close to fighting bulls. Frustrated losers have been known to vent their anger on human onlookers.

Amboseli does have other animals as well. In fact all the big four of the five are available only a few metres from the hotel room. The roar of the African lion, which brings everything in the vicinity to a standstill is common at night and early morning. Lions are easily spotted here especially if the game drive is early morning or late evening. There are a number of cheetahs here as well that can be spotted hunting during the day. But the hyena steals the show. They have an exclusive corner for themselves, the hyena’s camp, where their young are reared in dens. Several adult females are on guard here 24/7. After a successful hunt, the rest of the park comes to the camp with swollen stomachs and enough meat to feed both the young and the guards.

In the recent past, balloon watching of the wildlife has been introduced in the park. It is now possible to fly over the park and watch the animals from the air in the luxury of a hot air balloon. Unlike many other parks, Amboseli has an area that is allowed to watch the animals on foot. It is at the safety of the observation hill though, that has an excellent view of the hippo invested Amboseli lake. With a pair of binoculars, one is able to watch the animals with from a distance and with a feeling that one is actually in the wild. Elephants and buffaloes also love to graze at the lakes.

Amboseli offers excellent viewer ship of game with minimal distances covered in game drives. It is one destination that a Kenyan traveler should not miss out.

James G. Kamweru is a tour operator and has been organizing and reporting on Vacation, Travel and Tours for years. For More Information Visit his site at Kenya Travel I Will Also Highly Appreciate Your Comments Kenya Travel On My Blog Here Kenya Travel

Every time you look into the mirror, do you feel that your lips would have looked more sensuous and appealing if they were much enhanced and full? Or do you think that the lips have lost their original size and swell with the passage of time and spoiled the gorgeous look that you used to have? Then lip augmentation is probably the best way to make them look as good as before. This is a particular type of cosmetic procedure wherein some cosmetic filler is implanted inside the lips in order to increase their size. But at the same time this treatment can provide you with a temporary result as with the passage of time, the injected substance gets absorbed by the body and in order to maintain the desired look you need to get yourself regular sittings with the doctor.

Procedure of Lip Augmentation

There are several different fillers that are inserted into the lips in order to make them look fuller. The most frequently used ones are Collagen, fat and Restylane. The collagen is a typical protein that generally supports various body parts and commonly used in lip augmentation. The collagen used for this purpose is prepared from disinfected bovine collagen of the tissue. The other biodegradable as well as non-animal substance, widely used to enhance the size of the lips is Restylane. The procedure is quite short and simple that hardly takes half an hour to finish. You will not feel any pain as a local anaesthesia is performed before this. You just need to go for an allergy test before lip augmentation so that the right filler can be chosen for you.

Should You go for a Lip Augmentation?

If you are confused about the requirement of a lip augmentation for yourself then let me inform you that there are some factors that you need to consider before going for this cosmetic treatment. The benefits that you will surely get are that you will get a sumptuous look because of your lips. This will also add a balanced look to the other features of your face.

Moreover the overall improvement in appearance will surely boost up your confidence. At the same time there are certain demerits of this procedure. Collagen can cause severe allergic reactions wherein fat is sometimes responsible for infection. The other filler, Restylane can show up side effects like pain, redness or bruises. So be sure about your priorities before opting for a lip augmentation.

How Much will it Cost?

The general observations by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons show that a normal lip augmentation, excluding the expenses for fillers can cost you around $1400 wherein the fillers will come for another $400 approximately. Then again it all depends on the surgeon who is going to handle your case.

April owns website Lip Augmentation VIP which includes articles about collagen lip injections and lip enhancement techniques.

The Armed Forces always believed that subordination of the troops to the command was essential. If there were strictly enforced rules of behaviour it was maintained, then the soldier next to you would be able to rely on you performing according to drill during the times when the battle made everything else unpredictable.

At what stage does a strong command based culture change into a bully culture? Or does it change. Is the ‘ you will follow orders no matter what’ not inherently the characteristic of a bully culture. This question came up in an interesting article in the UK Independent.

Facebook and MySpace are again in the line of attack. This time the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) have their sights on the social networking sites. The problem for the MoD is the fact that members of these online communities have shared their experiences in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Those that have been sharing, have been military personnel.

What is concerning the MoD is the bad publicity the Department is getting through a series of negative stories which paint an unflattering picture of troops having to cope with faulty equipment, bad accommodation and lousy pay.

It was interesting to see how the MoD has decided to react. The MoD, according to the article, has warned that more discipline and greater enforcement of the military code of conduct will be required in order to tackle this insubordination of the troops. One need not be that surprised at this.

What the MoD is proposing is to court martial armed forces personnel who use the internet to publish unauthorised videos and photographs or to complain about the conditions they are experiencing. It could also mean dismissal from the army.

Once the strong arm tactics have put paid to the bad publicity, then the MoD thinks it should use the same internet facility to put a good spin on the activities it is involved in. With other words watch out for the MoD’s page on Facebook promoting their campaigns, right next to the ones where members are agitating against the wars.

Of course there is no reason why the MoD shouldn’t be able to promote their side of the story on these sites. But it seems that the Department thinks it can control the content that users post on the internet. This is absurd. The more the MoD will want to control the information published on the internet, the more the users will rally behind the private publishers of information.

I suppose an organisation whose reasons for existence is to beat the daylights out of its enemies will think that controlling a few naughty citizens will be a stroll in the park. Is there any doubt in the minds of people who know their way around the internet, what the outcome of this will be? Me neither.

Anja Merret lives in Brighton, UK, having moved across from South Africa just over a year ago.

She now looks after the business interests of her daughter who is a Flash Developer and Accessibility expert. She started a blog at the beginning of the year under the heading of chatting to my generation. Although she is chatting to the baby boomer generation, she sometimes feels that all generations have the same issues to face, they just don’t have hearing aids or walking sticks!

One of her pet peeves is the war in Iraq and in fact anything that causes innocent people to get hurt. But she also loves tech stuff, although only as an amateur. She considers herself a Silver Surfer Gadget Geek. She is even considering queuing for an iPhone in the UK later on in the year. But her daughter has offered, so she will only be taking hot food to the Brighton Geeks waiting in line.

Her musings may be found on http://www.anjamerret.com . Her observations on personal power and self-development may be found on http://www.pinkblocks.com