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Tuesday, February 15, 2005

Fuxin city (???; pinyin: Fùx?n shì) – An underground explosion in a mine in China’s northeastern Liaoning Province has left over 200 miners dead.

Current figures say 203 miners were killed, and another 22 were injured with 13 miners still missing. The blast occurred at 3:49pm local time on Monday afternoon.

The explosion, 242m underground, is believed to have been caused by gas igniting.

This morning a rescue team arrived at the site in Fuxin to attempt locate survivors and treat injured.

China has a history of major mining accidents. Last November, 166 miners died in an explosion in mine in Chenjiashan mine in Shaanxi province. In 2004, a official figures show that 5,000 workers died in accidents in mines, 35% of the world-wide death toll in coal mines.

Wednesday, April 29, 2015

In Seattle, on Sunday, Seattle Sounders FC beat the Portland Timbers 1–0 in the Cascadia Cup battle. Stefan Frei notched his fourth shutout this season while Clint Dempsey scored the winning goal in the 77th minute with an assist from Andy Rose. Seattle is now 1–0 in the cup while Portland falls to 0–2.

Portland almost scored minutes later when sub Fanendo Adi rattled the crossbar in the 81st minute. The Timbers also led the Sounders in shots with 11–10. Seattle was glad to have points before hitting the road. Head Coach Sigi Schmid added “We’ve got 13 points now in seven games, so we’re happy with that and we want to come back from these three road games with as many as possible.”

The total crowd on Sunday was tallied at 41,451. Seattle now stands at 4-2-1 with Portland struggling at 2-3-3. Portland hosts the Vancouver Whitecaps next weekend and Seattle travels to face New York City FC.

Sunday, October 8, 2017

In a study scheduled for publication in the December 1 issue of Forest Ecology and Management, scientists from the University of California, Davis; USDA Forest Service Pacific Southwest Research Station; and University of Washington have found a way to resolve the conflict that has sprung up between protecting forests from increasingly frequent wildfires and droughts and preserving sufficient habitat for the endangered spotted owl, Strix occidentalis. The study was performed in two national parks in California, United States.

For the past twenty-five years, spotted owl habitat preservation has focused on keeping 70% or more of the total ground area covered by natural tree canopy, a tree density that leaves forests prone to wildfires and trees more likely to die during droughts. Both wildfires and droughts have become more frequent in the years since the program began.

However, the previous studies upon which the 70% figure was based only measured overall canopy coverage. In this work, researchers used aerial LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) imaging technology to scan areas within Kings Canyon National Park and Sequoia National Park in California. The regions were analyzed by distribution of foliage, tree height, and the sizes of the spaces between trees and stands. These data were then cross-referenced with decades of field studies showing the locations of hundreds of owl nests. They found that spotted owls clustered in areas with very tall trees and stands almost exclusively, over 150 feet (48 m), avoiding areas that only had moderate or low canopy, regardless of how dense or wide.

“This could fundamentally resolve the management problem because it would allow for reducing small tree density, through fire and thinning,” said lead author Malcolm North, of UC Davis and the USDA Pacific Southwest Research Station. “We’ve been losing the large trees, particularly in these extreme wildfire and high drought-mortality events. This is a way to protect more large tree habitat, which is what the owls want, in a way that makes the forest more resilient to these increasing stressors that are becoming more intense with climate change.”

The spotted owl gained national prominence in the United States during the 1990s, when environmentalists’ efforts to preserve its habitat resulted in federal measures forbidding logging on large swaths of land, as well as federal limits on the sales of harvested wood. There was a 1995 U.S. Supreme Court case which was preceded by lawsuits on the part of timber companies and by years of large protests by timber workers and their communities who feared job losses. For a time, it seemed that the spotted owl was also threatened by competition from the faster-breeding barred owl, which had moved west into its territory.

This is not the only major study of spotted owls to reach the public eye this week. On Thursday, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released the California Spotted Owl Conservation Objectives Report, which analyzes the past several decades of research on the California spotted owl and provides recommendations for ecologically and economically viable conservation.

Friday, August 5, 2005

I-Holding ehf, a Icelandic investment company owned by Baugur Group, Straumur investment bank, B2B Holdings and Birgis Bieltvedts, has bought 80% in Illum warehouse in Denmark from Merrill Lynch International Global Principal Investment. The same group recently bought Wessel & Vett A/S and Magasin du Nord, so it already owned 20% in Illum.

Illum will be run separately from Magasin du Nord.

Illum reported a profit and 11% gain in sales the first three months of 2005.

Skarphéðni Berg Steinarssyni from Nordic Investment at Baugur Group said the Danish retail market is increasing and they believe in Illum because it’s a well known brand in Denmark.

Icelanders invest in Denmark and UK

Icelandic companies have been investing heavily in Denmark for the last few years. Recently the Fons Investment ehf. bought the Danish airlines Sterling Air and Mearsk Air. Eimskip, a shipping company in Iceland, recently bought the shipping division of Mearsk. I-Holdings have been investing heavily in the Denish retailer market.

Baugur Group, as well as FL Group, have been investing in the UK market. FL Group has bought 11% in easyJet.com and has shown an interest in buying more. Baugur Group has been investing in the retailer market and has bought among other things Iceland supermarket chain as well as Hamleys, a well known toy store.

See the discussion page for instructions on adding schools to this list and for an alphabetically arranged listing of schools.

Due to the damage by Hurricane Katrina and subsequent flooding, a number of colleges and universities in the New Orleans metropolitan area will not be able to hold classes for the fall 2005 semester. It is estimated that 75,000 to 100,000 students have been displaced. [1]. In response, institutions across the United States and Canada are offering late registration for displaced students so that their academic progress is not unduly delayed. Some are offering free or reduced admission to displaced students. At some universities, especially state universities, this offer is limited to residents of the area.

Friday, March 2, 2007

Sirius CEO Mel Karmazin appeared before a newly formed Antitrust Task Force, a sub-committee of the House Judiciary Committee, on Wednesday last week in Washington, D.C. to defend the proposed U.S. merger between XM and Sirius satellite radio services.

The hearing, carried live on C-SPAN, was attended by representatives from various competing broadcast companies. The representatives challenged the merger deal, and some speakers were openly hostile to Karmazin and to satellite radio in general, while other speakers were more civil.

Several times during the debate, the discussion centered on the failed merger deal between the two satellite television networks DirecTV and Echostar. The comparison between this proposed radio merger and the failed television merger was settled to some extent with an understanding that nearly all television viewers now use either cable or satellite to view available programming. Televised programming content is now delivered mainly in the form of a subscription, rather than airwave transmissions.

Unlike television programming, most radio listeners use over the air receivers to listen to free programming content supported advertisers.

“We come to this hearing with an open mind, but we recognize that the companies have the obligation to convince the Congress, the regulators, and most importantly, the American People that this combination will improve the competitive playing field and benefit consumers,” said John Conyers, the sub-committee chairman. To determine the legality of this merger, Congress first needs to decide whether a combined XM and Sirius would be a monopoly, as the only satellite radio provider in the United States, or whether the new company will actually be in competition with other forms of radio-like entertainment, according to Conyers. The hearing focused on alternatives such as Internet radio, terrestrial radio, portable audio devices, and emerging services, such as cell phone services and WiMax.

Wednesday, February 23, 2005

On Monday, at 10.14 pm UTC, the Wikimedia server cluster experienced a total power failure, taking down Wikipedia, Wikinews, and all other Wikimedia websites.

The servers are housed in a colocation facility (colo) in Tampa, Florida, USA. They occupy two racks, with each rack receiving electricity from two independent supplies. However, both supplies have circuit-breakers in them, and both opened at the same time, leading to a total power failure. All computers immediately went down. It’s normal for fire safety regulations to prohibit uninterruptible power supplies in colos, with the colo providing its own UPS and generator instead. The circuit breakers were on the computer side of this emergency power system, so none of the computers continued to receive power to survive the breaker trip or shut down safely.

The actual reason why the circuit breakers tripped is currently unknown.

When power was restored, it was discovered that most of the MySQL databases that store the data which makes up Wikipedia et al had been corrupted. The main database and the four slaves had all damaged the data on their hard disk drives beyond the ability of the auto-correction to repair. Only one copy survived safely, on a machine that is used for report generation and maintenance tasks, which remained 31 hours backlogged while catching up after an unusually heavy update load during the previous week.

Volunteer Wikimedia engineers worked through the night rebuilding the databases from the sole good copy onto the other servers. The Wikipedia database is over 180Gb in size, making the copying process last 1.5 – 2 hours for every server it was performed upon.

Regular back-ups of the database of Wikipedia projects are maintained – the encyclopedia in its entirety was not at risk. The last database download was made on February 9; all edits since then could only have been laboriously rebuilt from logs and recovered from the damaged database requiring much more time and effort.

Limited read-only service was established late Tuesday afternoon, with editing becoming possible 24 hours after the power failure. Final repairs continue now, as well as upgrades to prevent similar issues in the future. Server-intensive features, such as categories and ‘watchlists’ that display recent changes to selected articles to registered users, remain disabled to ease the load on the recovering systems.

The process which led to the damage originated with the operating system, disk controllers, or hard drives failing to flush the data correctly.

If the power to a database server is cut mid-write, the database may be corrupted and unreadable, however the operating system, hardware, and software are designed to make this very unlikely. In a previous incident in 2004 power was also lost to a server but the database was undamaged.

To avoid such damage, each database server saves a copy of an edit to be applied to the database on a separate storage system before making the actual update to the database itself. This so-called ‘write-ahead logging’ should ensure that in the event of a system crash, the database can be rebuilt from a ‘last-good’ state by replaying the edits saved in the log.

Earlier this year popular blogging site LiveJournal suffered a similar power failure when another customer at their colocation facility pressed an Emergency Power Off button, intended for use only by firefighters. The company suffered database corruption similar to that seen at Wikimedia.

LiveJournal are now fitting UPS to their servers to ensure that they have time to shut down safely in the event of a power failure. Wikimedia was said to be investigating the possibility of fitting similar equipment at the time of this failure.

Several pundits have suggested that the use of another database, such as the proprietary database Oracle or the free PostgreSQL, would have avoided the database corruption seen at the server cluster. A post-mortem of the incident show the failure was in the operating system, or the hardware, or some combination of the two. LiveJournal, which also uses MySQL, reported similar database corruption after their power cut.

The Wikimedia foundation only allows the use of free software on its systems, and future versions of the Mediawiki software will support the PostgreSQL database.

Users are reminded that during times of system failure or excessive demand, they can still search Wikipedia using Google. The articles may be viewed using Google’s cache.

Thursday, August 14, 2014

On Tuesday many internet routers, used to find the pathways to different parts of the web, reached their memory limit of 512,000 entries in the tables they use to store the routes, causing problems for many users.

A router is used to direct a user towards the area of the internet where they will find the content they are looking for, e.g. a web page. The recent problem was caused by the arbitrary memory limit built into the design of many aging routers. A limit was needed to prevent the cost of hardware from becoming prohibitively expensive in the days when physical data storage was still comparatively expensive. This small amount of memory in turn limits the number of directions which can be stored on a single router leading to different parts of the internet. When this limit was reached, it caused outages of services among Internet Service Providers. Many routers, including older ones provided by Cisco Systems Inc., are limited to storing a total of 512,000 routes or paths.

This limit was reached on Tuesday, reported to have been triggered by Verizon publishing another 15,000 paths. Those affected included eBay, LastPass, and clients of the web hosting company Liquid Web, who lost much of their services until Verizon withdrew some of these new paths. Problems nevertheless continued throughout the day, even after the withdrawal.

A longer term fix is possible, but it would require manually replacing old routers with newer, more capable ones. It is hard to tell what issues would temporarily cascade though the internet by taking down routers from part of the internet for maintenance. Many experts have warned that problems could continue until these difficult fixes have been implemented, although the recent switch to a newer form of IP Addresses, IPv6, will temporarily help the issue. Wired News reported that Andre Toonk, a network engineer, had stated that the number of network outages on the internet, typically around 1,500, yesterday peaked at 2,587, enough to become clearly noticeable.

Thursday, August 14, 2014

On Tuesday many internet routers, used to find the pathways to different parts of the web, reached their memory limit of 512,000 entries in the tables they use to store the routes, causing problems for many users.

A router is used to direct a user towards the area of the internet where they will find the content they are looking for, e.g. a web page. The recent problem was caused by the arbitrary memory limit built into the design of many aging routers. A limit was needed to prevent the cost of hardware from becoming prohibitively expensive in the days when physical data storage was still comparatively expensive. This small amount of memory in turn limits the number of directions which can be stored on a single router leading to different parts of the internet. When this limit was reached, it caused outages of services among Internet Service Providers. Many routers, including older ones provided by Cisco Systems Inc., are limited to storing a total of 512,000 routes or paths.

This limit was reached on Tuesday, reported to have been triggered by Verizon publishing another 15,000 paths. Those affected included eBay, LastPass, and clients of the web hosting company Liquid Web, who lost much of their services until Verizon withdrew some of these new paths. Problems nevertheless continued throughout the day, even after the withdrawal.

A longer term fix is possible, but it would require manually replacing old routers with newer, more capable ones. It is hard to tell what issues would temporarily cascade though the internet by taking down routers from part of the internet for maintenance. Many experts have warned that problems could continue until these difficult fixes have been implemented, although the recent switch to a newer form of IP Addresses, IPv6, will temporarily help the issue. Wired News reported that Andre Toonk, a network engineer, had stated that the number of network outages on the internet, typically around 1,500, yesterday peaked at 2,587, enough to become clearly noticeable.