---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2005 16:04:44 -0400 (EDT)
From: moderator@portside.org
Reply-To: portside@portside.org
To: portside@lists.portside.org
Subject: 39,000 Iraqis killed in fighting - study
39,000 Iraqis killed in fighting - study
Mon Jul 11, 2005 7:43 PM BST
By Irwin Arieff
Reuters UK
http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticleSearch.aspx?storyID=191558+11-Jul-2005+RTRS&srch=death+iraqi
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Some 39,000 Iraqis have been
killed as a direct result of combat or armed violence
since the U.S.-led invasion, a figure considerably
higher than previous estimates, a Swiss institute
reported on Monday.
The public database Iraqi Body Count, by comparison,
estimates that between 22,787 and 25,814 Iraqi
civilians have died since the March 2003 invasion,
based on reports from at least two media sources.
No official estimates of Iraqi casualties from the war
have been issued, although military deaths from the
U.S.-led coalition forces are closely tracked and now
total 1,937.
The new estimate was compiled by the Geneva-based
Graduate Institute of International Studies and
published in its latest annual small arms survey,
released at a U.N. news conference.
It builds on a study published in The Lancet last
October, which concluded there had been 100,000 "excess
deaths" in Iraq from all causes since March 2003. That
figure was derived by conducting surveys of Iraqi
mortality data during the war and comparing the results
to similar data collected before the war.
The government rejected The Lancet's conclusions
shortly after their publication.
The Swiss institute said it arrived at its estimate of
Iraqi deaths resulting solely from either combat or
armed violence by re-examining the raw data gathered
for the Lancet study and classifying the cause of death
when it could.
Its 2005 small arms survey generally concludes that
conflict deaths from small arms have been vastly
underreported in the past, not just in Iraq but around
the globe.
The total number of direct victims of such weapons
likely totaled 80,000 to 108,000 during 2003, for
example, compared to earlier estimates by other
researchers of 27,000 to 51,000 deaths from small arms
that year.
INACCURATE ESTIMATES
The undercounting is due mainly to a paucity of hard
data and an over-reliance by analysts on estimates
based on government and media accounts of wars, "which
are often inaccurate," according to the 2005 survey.
The number of indirect deaths around the world that can
be blamed on small arms has also been underestimated,
as these types of weapons typically trigger significant
social disruption that leads to malnutrition,
starvation, and death from preventable disease,
according to the survey.
Depending on the nature of the conflict, small arms
cause between 60 percent and 90 percent of all direct
war deaths, the study said.
Following a formula developed at the United Nations,
the small arms survey covers a broad range of hand-held
arms, ranging from pistols and rifles to military-style
machine guns, small mortars and portable anti-tank
systems.
The survey's release coincided with the opening of a
weeklong U.N. conference intended to assess progress on
a U.N. action plan for cracking down on the illicit
global trade in small arms, adopted in 2001.
While worldwide public attention is riveted on the
devastating potential of biological, chemical and
nuclear weapons, small arms typically carried by a
single individual "are the real weapons of mass
destruction," said Ambassador Pasi Patokallio of
Finland, the conference's chairman.
Heavy concentrations of small arms in a region are
often enough to fuel a conflict, the small arms survey
said.
In the tense Middle East, for example, private gun
ownership is widespread and on the rise, and
"representatives of several governments have expressed
concern that gun violence is becoming a major threat to
public safety and a source of regional instability,"
the survey reported.
It estimated that 45 million to 90 million small arms
were in the hands of civilians across that region.
� Reuters 2005. All rights reserved. Republication or
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caching, framing or similar means, is expressly
prohibited without the prior written consent of
Reuters. Reuters and the Reuters sphere logo are
registered trademarks and trademarks of the Reuters
group of companies around the world. Close This Window
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after the accident
http://www.asondheim.org/new/probe2.mov *
vibration meter falling thru ecstatic **
mdhd :hdlr mhlrsounappl Apple Sound Media Handler minf smhd 9hdlr
dhlralisappl Apple Alias Data Handler $dinf dref alis stbl 4stsd $raw stts
(stsc stsz stco trak \tkhd $edts elst 3-mdia ***
mdhd :hdlr mhlrvideappl Apple Video Media Handler minf vmhd 9hdlr
dhlralisappl Apple Alias Data Handler $dinf dref alis 2Rstbl fstsd VSVQ1
SVis Sorenson Video stts stsc Dstsz stco free wide mdat wide mdat ****
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* very poor quality, it is all i could do to make this accessible
** meter registers impact then centimeters/second
*** meter recently calibrated
**** meter recently overhauled
_
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2005 11:11:59 -0400
From: physnews@aip.org
To: sondheim@PANIX.COM
Subject: Physics News Update 737
PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE
The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News
Number 737 July 14, 2005 by Phillip F. Schewe, Ben Stein
CIRCUIT ELEMENTS FOR OPTICAL FREQUENCIES. Researchers at the
University of Pennsylvania propose to shrink circuits in order to
save space and power and, more importantly, to accommodate
electronic applications at much higher frequencies than are possible
with current models, applications that include nano-optics, optical
information storage, and molecular signaling.
Electric circuit elements, among them resistors, capacitors, and
inductors, come in a variety of sizes to deal with a variety of
applications at a range of frequencies. The familiar electrical
grid, for example, operates at a frequency of 60 Hz. A circuit
designed to process radio signals operates at the 100-megahertz
range. A typical frequency domain for computers is 1 GHz. Higher
still, microwave applications often operate at the 10-GHz (10^10 Hz)
level. Nader Engheta (engheta@ee.upenn.edu, 215-898-9777) and his
Penn group would like to extend the circuit concepts up to optical
frequencies, around 10^15 Hz. To do this, instead of just shrinking
the classic circuit elements to fraction of the typical wavelength
of the optical signal being processed (around 500 nm), the Penn
proposal is to make nano-inductors, nano-capacitors and
nano-resistors out of sub-wavelength nano-particles, fashioned from
appropriate materials on a substrate with lithographic techniques.
Possible applications would include direct processing of optical
signals with nano-antennas, nano-circuit-filters, nano-waveguides,
nano-resonators, and even nano-scaled negative-index optical
structures. (Engheta et al., Physical Review Letters, upcoming
article; http://www.ee.upenn.edu/~engheta/)
STRENGTHENING QUANTUM CRYPTOGRAPHY BY PUTTING ON BLINDERS. A
Korea-UK team (contact Myungshik Kim, Queen's University, Belfast,
m.s.kim@qub.ac.uk , or Chilmin Kim, Paichai University) has
introduced a method for preventing several clever attacks against
quantum cryptography, a form of message transmission that uses the
laws of quantum physics to make sure an eavesdropper does not
covertly intercept the transmission. Making the message sender and
receiver a little blind to each other's actions, the researchers
have shown, can bolster their success against potential
eavesdroppers.
In quantum cryptography, a sender (denoted as Alice) transmits a
message to a receiver (called Bob) in the form of single photons
each representing the 0s and 1s of binary code. If an eavesdropper
(appropriately named Eve) attempts to intercept the message, she
will unavoidably disturb the photon through the Heisenberg
uncertainty principle, which says that even the gentlest observation
of the photon will perturb the particle. This will be instantly
detectable by Alice and Bob, who can stop the message and start
again. Quantum cryptography is already being used in the real world
and is even available commercially as a way for companies to
transmit sensitive financial data. But in its real-world
implementation, a weak pulse of light (rather than a perfect stream
of single photons) is sent down a transmission line that is "lossy,"
or absorbs photons. So feasible attacks on quantum cryptography
include the pulse-splitting attack (in which Eve splits a
transmitted pulse into two pulses and examines one of them for
information), the pulse-cloning attack (in which a transmitted pulse
is copied to relatively high accuracy and then inspected for its
information), and the "man-in-middle" or impersonation attack, in
which Eve could impersonate Alice or Bob by intercepting the
transmission and acting as sender or receiver.
A new paper proposes a solution to these three attacks by proposing
a technique called "blind polarization." In this technique, Alice
and Bob verify their identities to each other in a rather
paradoxical way, by performing some actions that is their own
private information. Yet these actions make the message completely
indecipherable to a third party. Alice creates a pair of pulses, but
with random polarizations (polarization indicates the direction or
angle in which each pulse's electric field points relative to some
reference, such as a horizontal line) Alice sends the pulses to
Bob, who does not know the polarizations. Nonetheless, without
measuring the polarization values, Bob is able to rotate the
polarization of one pulse by one amount and the other pulse by
another amount, but he doesn't tell Alice which pulses got which
treatment. Alice receives the pulses, and then encodes them with a
message (representing the binary value 0 or 1, which could stand for
"no" or "yes), then blocks one of the pulses, without telling Bob
which one was blocked. Bob then reverses the various polarizations
by a certain amount to get the desired message. The various
polarization adjustments are designed in such a way that either
pulse Alice sends will yield the desired information. According to
researcher Myungshik Kim, Alice has her own private information on
which pulse is blocked, while Bob has his own private information on
which pulse he rotated by a given amount. Once Alice begins the
transmission, there is no way for Eve to have this private
information which makes their protocol effective against the
man-in-middle and other attacks. (Kye et al., Physical Review
Letters, upcoming article). This paper is the latest in a wave that
plugs up potential vulnerabilities in quantum cryptography (for an
example of using
"quantum decoys" to thwart attacks, see Lo et al, Physical Review
Letters, 17 June 2005)
***********
PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE is a digest of physics news items arising
from physics meetings, physics journals, newspapers and
magazines, and other news sources. It is provided free of charge
as a way of broadly disseminating information about physics and
physicists. For that reason, you are free to post it, if you like,
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VLF acoustic
==
at the moment I'm typing and feeding this into a motion detector which is
reproducing the words at an unholy rate; you can hear the result if you
dare, listening to the mp3 that will eventually come out of this. In the
meantime I'm watching the result on a screen, simultaneously typing and
recording the strange mechanisms that are underway....
now for a moment will say something at quite great volume - ok now back
into it, see what happens on the recording, goodbye.
http://www.asondheim.org/compu.mp3
http://www.asondheim.org/compu2.mp3
frequency raised into audible domain
the motion detector is acoustically coupled to a metal table coupled to a
cement floor. the room has a number of resonances. objects on the table
include the laptop, a large (linux) desktop and small flat-screen monitor.
the desktop contributes; the other objects are too small and loosely
coupled at best.
"Recently I've been at a loss in relation to my work. My projects are just
that, projects; they could stop now or go on forever. I want to work on a
'summing up.' No one knows how much time they have, and my work seems so
utterly disparate. I'm in a permanent state of being distraught. What I've
done up until now is nothing but spew."
_
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2005 19:57:51 -0300 (GMT-03:00)
From: newsletter@amazonia.org.br
To: sondheim@panix.com
Subject: Amazon News - July 14th, 2005
Amazon News
Friends of the Earth - Brazilian Amazon <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns =
"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
Amazon News is a weekly information service provided by
www.amazonia.org.br, the largest bilingual site on the Brazilian Amazon
region, in partnership with several Brazilian media.
Its publisher is Friends of the Earth - Brazilian Amazon, a Brazilian
non-profit and public interest registered organization.
________________________________________________________________________________
Dear Friend,
After Huaorani protests this week in Quito, the Ecuadorian government
announced the creation of a commission to inspect the impacts of the oil
exploitation in indigenous territories. The protesters request the
moratorium on oil exploitation and that Lula remove Petrobras from
Ecuador. Read more at:
Ecuador creates commission to analyze license given to Petrob ras in the
Yasun� Park
Amazonia.org.br
Other news on the subject:
Ecuador Indians Protest Petrobras Oil Development
The New York Times - 07/12/2005
Indigenous Peoples request that Lula remove Petrobras from Ecuador
Ag�ncia Estado - 07/11/2005
Huaorani People in Ecuador march in protest against Petrobras
Rede Brasileira de Justi�a Ambiental - 07/08/2005
The news this week:
37 tons of mercury contaminated Para state
O Estado de S.Paulo - 07/12/2005
Brazil arrests 35 Peruvians caught stealing timber
Minist�rio do Meio Ambiente - 07/12/2005
Judge dismisses action vs. expropriation of lands for Indigenous
Territory in Para state
Supremo Tribunal Federal - 07/12/2005
Xingu's Indigenous Peoples demonstrate successes in the management of
natural resources and the recuperation of cultural traditions
ISA- Instituto Socioambiental - 07/12/2005
Chamber of Deputies approves sustainable development project for Amazon
Radiobr�s - 07/11/2005
From bad to worse
O Eco - 07/10/2005
IBAMA applies fines for a total of R$ 8 million due to deforestation in
Amazonas' south
Radiobr�s - 07/09/2005
More invasions in certified timber areas
Di�rio do Par� - 07/08/2005
70 workers living in slave-like work conditions are liberated in Para
state
Ag�ncia Estado - 07/08/2005
More news
Click here if you want to unsubscribe for the newsletter.
If the links are not displayed correctly, click here.
________________________________________________________________________________
You are receiving this communication because your e-mail address has
been registered with Friends of the Earth - Brazilian Amazon.
This newsletter is produced by Friends of the Earth - Brazilian Amazon.
www.amazonia.org.br
"Amazon is not just a forest"