Maj. Jennifer Grieves is the first female helicopter aircraft commander in the history of Marine One, the HMX-1 helicopter the president of the United States flies on.
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Like Air Force One, the presidential plane, it is only called Marine One when the president is aboard.
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“It’s not really about being a female,” said Grieves, 38. “It’s about being a Marine and about being part of an organization that is exceptional.”
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There are only five Marine pilots selected at any one time to fly the president and his family.
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“Of course, it’s nerve wracking to fly the president of the United States,” she said. “I think my most stressful days are when I fly Sasha and Malia.”
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| Blue is sometimes not an easy color to make. |
Blue pigments of the past have often been expensive (ultramarine blue was made from the gemstone lapis lazuli, ground up), poisonous (cobalt blue is a possible carcinogen and Prussian blue, another well-known pigment, can leach cyanide) or apt to fade (many of the organic ones fall apart when exposed to acid or heat). So it was a pleasant surprise to chemists at Oregon State University when they created a new, durable and brilliantly blue pigment by accident. The researchers were trying to make compounds with novel electronic properties, mixing manganese oxide, which is black, with other chemicals and heating them to high temperatures. Then Mas Subramanian, a professor of material sciences, noticed that one of the samples that a graduate student had just taken out of the furnace was blue. Read more at www.nytimes.com |
In the technology environment we create new identities for ourselves which are persistent and mirror-like reference points which keep our former lives under constant view . This is what the writer says but I have a feeling that the mirror-like reference points do not necessarily replace what the others think of you in your work envirnment or rather what you think others think of you .Thus your identity reflected by Twitter or Facebook may not necessarily tally with your identity in your work environment which is largely derived from others’ experiences with you in the organization .It is not always that the identity built up in the organization will remain less dominant than your online identity unless your online activities are a part of your work i.e. you work in a technology envirnoment. | A key part of the process of reinvention of self is the acquisition of new reference points that serve to give us a sense of our new identity — new friendships, new relationships, new places. An equally important part of this process is the shedding of old ones |
| We realize that the people in the room who were so important to us during our teenager years, whose acceptance and approval defined so much how we thought about ourselves, matter so little to us twenty years later. Indeed, it is hard to believe they once mattered so much at all. They simply no longer serve as reference points to who we are today.
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| Almost ten years ago when doing research on technology and identity, my colleague Kathi Vian wrote: ”We create our identity through reference points. We know who we are in reference to others… Identity is a conception of self that we create based on various reference points in our life.” Meaning that we know we are tall because there are people around us who are shorter, we know we are smart because someone tells us we are, and we know we are shy or outgoing by comparing ourselves to those around us.
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| What is interesting about the technology environment we live in is that for the first time in our human history we are able to create persistent and mirror-like references points of our lives that keep former identities in constant view. Videos and photographs taken from birth, snippets of life documented on Facebook, streams of thoughts on Twitter, inner wonderings revealed in blogs — these are all new reference points for creating and shaping our identities, our senses of self. And unlike previous reminders, often tucked away in shoe boxes, desk drawers, and attics, these are much more sensory-rich, pervasive, and easily accessible, to us and others.
Read more at www.boingboing.net |
Amazing discovery ! It makes me sad these beautiful creatures die in large numbers during the journey making it possible only for the fourth generation to complete the round trip. | Every year, millions of dragonflies fly thousands of kilometres across the sea from southern India to Africa. |
So says a biologist in the Maldives, who claims to have discovered the longest migration of any insect. |
If confirmed, the mass exodus would be the first known insect migration across open ocean water. |
It would also dwarf the famous trip taken each year by Monarch butterflies, which fly just half the distance across the Americas. |
Biologist Charles Anderson has published details of the mass migration in the Journal of Tropical Ecology. |
That strongly suggest that the dragonflies take advantage of the moving weather systems and monsoon rains to complete an epic migration from southern India to east and southern Africa, and then likely back again, a round trip of 14,000 to 18,000km. |
The monarch butterfly is often cited as having the longest migration of any insect, covering around 7000km in an annual round trip from Mexico to southern Canada. |
On average, it takes four generations of butterflies to complete the journey. |
Anderson believes that the dragonflies survive the ocean flights by gliding on the winds, feeding on other small insects. |
He says the migratory paths of a number of insect-eating bird species, including cuckoos, nightjars, falcons and bee-eaters, follow that of the dragonfly migration, from southern India to their wintering grounds in Africa. That suggests the birds feed on the dragonflies as they travel. |
They too, take four generations to make the full round trip each year. |
“They [fly] at the same time and altitudes as the dragonflies. And what has not been realised before is that all are medium-sized birds that eat insects, insects the size of dragonflies,” he says. Read more at news.bbc.co.uk |
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Yes,he can.
