Global View

ICC awards

asianlanka — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 06:35:00 +0000

Award categories

● ICC Player of the Year

● Women’s Cricketer of the Year

●Test Player of the Year

●One-day Player of the Year

●Captain of the Year

●Emerging Player of the Year

●Test Team of the Year

● One-day Team of the Year

●Spirit of Cricket Award

●Umpire of the Year

Eiffel Tower

asianlanka — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 06:52:37 +0000

The Eiffel Tower is an iron tower built on the Champ de Mars beside the Seine River in Paris. The tower has become a global icon of France and is one of the most recognizable structures in the world.

Named after its designer, engineer Gustave Eiffel, the Eiffel Tower is the tallest building in Paris and one of the most recognized structures in the world. More than 200,000,000 have visited the tower since its construction in 1889,including 6,719,200 in 2006,making it the most visited paid monument in the world.Including the 24 m (79 ft) antenna, the structure is 325 m (1,063 ft) high (since 2000), which is equivalent to about 81 levels in a conventional building.

When the tower was completed in 1889 it was the world’s tallest tower — a title it retained until 1930 when New York City’s Chrysler Building (319 m — 1,047 ft tall) was completed. The tower is now the fifth-tallest structure in France and the tallest structure in Paris, with the second-tallest being the Tour Montparnasse (210 m — 689 ft), although that will soon be surpassed by Tour AXA (225.11 m — 738.36 ft).

Key figures

• Initial height: 312 m (to the top of the flagpole)

• Current height (including antennas): 324 m

• The deepest foundations: (North and West) lie 15 meters

underground. In each of these foundations, four pillars of masonry

are built, which bear the four uprights of each leg of the Tower,

known as rafters.

• Total weight: 10,100 tons

• Weight of the iron structure: 7,300 tons

• Space between the pillars:

1st platform: 4,415 m2

2nd inner platform: 1,430 m2

3rd inner platform: 250 m2

• Height of the platforms:

1st platform: 57 m

2nd inner platform: 115 m

3rd inner platform: 276 m

• Lighting: 336 600-W projector lamps (sodium lamps).

• Number of bulbs for the Sparkling Tower: 20,000

• Number of steps in the East pillar to the top: 1,665

• Number of rivets (total): 2,500,000

• Weight of paint used: 60 tons for each repainting campaign

• Time required for painting: the Eiffel Tower was repainted

in its entirety every seven years.

• Number of elevators: From the ground to the second floor:

5 (one in the East pillar, one in the West pillar, one in the North

pillar, one private elevator in the South pillar for the “Jules Verne”

restaurant and one goods elevator in the South pillar). From the

second floor to the top: two sets of two duolifts.

• Elevator speed: 2 meters/second.

• Passenger flow and capacity of the elevators

North pillar: 920 persons/hour

East pillar: 650 persons/hour

West pillar: 650 persons/hour

Duolifts: 1,140 persons/hour

Jules Verne: 10 persons/ascent

Goods elevator in the South pillar: 30 persons or 4 tons/ascent

• Number of persons working on the Tower:

SNTE: 280

Restaurants: 240

Souvenirs: 50

Other: around 50

• Number of analogical TV stations: 6

• Number of free digital TV stations: 30

• Number of radio stations: 31

• Number of antennas: 120

How to build the Eiffel Tower

source -tour-eiffel.fr \wikipedia

British Airways buys France’s l’Avion

asianlanka — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 09:16:23 +0000

British Airways has agreed to buy small French business airline l’Avion for 68 million euros (52 million pounds) and it will become part of its new OpenSkies unit, they said in a joint statement on Wednesday.OpenSkies started on June 19 a Paris Orly to New York JFK connection with a Boeing 757 while l’Avion operates two Boeing 757 planes between Orly and New York Newark.
Privately-owned l’Avion was originally called Elysair and specialises in business travel. It was one of the last remaining trans-Atlantic all business airlines as the sector was savaged by high fuel prices and cutbacks on business travel.It was founded by pilot Frantz Yvelin and Marc Rochet, chief executive, who formerly ran Air Liberte
L’Avion started in January 2007 and has transported 65,000 passengers. The acquisition price includes l’Avion’s cash reserves of 33 million euros.

Most Expensive Female Artist

asianlanka — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 09:12:28 +0000

South African born artist Marlene Dumas set a new record this month for the most expensive living female artist, when her painting The Visitor, fetched £3.1 million (R47 million) at a Sotheby’s auction.
Dumas’s painting was sold to New York private dealer Nancy Whyte at the Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Sale held in London on the 1st of July. The £3,177,250 million bid for the painting surpasses Dumas’ previous record of £1.8 million set in February 2005.
The painting shows six young sex-workers in a room looking towards a door at the end of the room. The poses of the women suggest that they are competing for their trade while anticipating the imminent arrival of a client. Described by Sotheby’s as a psychologically challenging and strikingly beautiful painting, The Visitor is a large scale (180cm x 300cm) depiction of a group of female streetwalkers.

Beach House at Manafaru

asianlanka — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 09:10:27 +0000

The Beach House at Manafaru Maldives is located in the Haa Alifu Atoll in the Northern Maldives and is surrounded by coral reef lagoons. Upon arrival at Malé International Airport, guests will be met by a representative from The Beach House who will transport them to the 45 minute domestic flight. This allows guests the chance to fly over some of the most beautiful Maldivian islands. The Beach House not only benefits from having some absolutely stunning natural beaches but it also has a wealth of vegetation which is very rare in the Maldives.The Manafaru Retreat encompasses of a selection of beach villas, water villas and grand water suites. Each villa is totally private surrounded by lush tropical vegetation with a private pool and sala. Villas offer intimate luxury and are designed in a contemporary style with sleek lines and chic minimalism, as the spectacular views of the surrounding beauty are the main focal point. This is complemented with rich dark woods, crisp white linens and natural fabrics. Each of the villas also come fully equipped with a range of state of the art amenities which include a flat screen LCD TV, CD and DVD players, high speed internet access, coffee making machine, Egyptian cotton linens and pillow menu, terrace sun bed, double bathroom and dressing area, oversized terrazzo bath, hairdryer, personal safe and mood enhancing lighting. Seven nights at The Beach House start at from £1,779 per person.

Sgt Pepper Drum Skin Sells At Auction

asianlanka — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 09:08:50 +0000

The drum skin used on the cover of The Beatles 1967 ‘ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band has sold for a whopping £541,250 ($1m) at an auction in London. The skin was sold at Christie’s Auction House in the capital (July 10) for almost four times the estimated price. It was part of a large rock memorabilia auction which also featured Jimi Hendrix, The Who and Ella Fitzgerald lots.
The album was the first of the concept albums, a format that was repeated many times through the 70s.
The meaning of the song lyrics are still debated today. Was ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ really about LSD or just something John’s son Julian said’ Does John really refer to Paul being dead when you play the inner groove backwards’The cover also featured an array of personalities. Look for Lenny Bruce, Bob Dylan, Dion, Tony Curtis, Marilyn Munroe, and Sigmund Freud on the cover.

CCTV Tower -Beijing

asianlanka — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 15:56:22 +0000

CCTV’s new 550,000 square meter headquarters, to be completed for the Beijing Olympics in 2008, will be among the first of 300 towers to be constructed in Beijing’s new Central Business District. On the 10-hectare site in the new Central Business District in Beijing, the OMA proposal consolidates the program in an iconic configuration of two high-rise buildings.The design of the new Central Chinese Television (CCTV) headquarters defies the popular conception of a skyscraper and it broke Beijing’s building codes and required approval by a special review panel. The standard systems for engineering gravity and lateral loads in buildings didn’t apply to the CCTV building, which is formed by two leaning towers, each bent 90 degrees at the top and bottom to form a continuous loop.

The total development is 5 813 000ft² (540 000m²) consisting of two main buildings: the CCTV building and the Television Cultural Centre (TVCC).The new centre combines administration with news, broadcasting, studios and programme production – the entire TV process – in a sequence of interconnected activities.This first building is not a traditional tower, but a continuous loop of horizontal and vertical sections that establish an urban site rather than point to the sky. The irregular grid on the building’s facades is an expression of the forces travelling throughout its structure.It would be a significant structural challenge anywhere in the world, but is especially so as Beijing is in a highly seismic zone. Arup carried out a huge amount of work to demonstrate structural stability in order to satisfy local planning needs.A Media Park forms a landscape of public entertainment, outdoor filming areas and production studios as an extension of the central green axis of the CBD.Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren will be partners-in-charge. The OMA design team will consist of Shohei Shigematsu, Adrianne Fisher, Hiromasa Shirai, Anu Leinonen, Charles Berman and many others. Qingyun Ma from Shanghai will be advisor to the project.
The CCTV Headquarters will be realized in collaboration with ECADI, the East China Architecture & Design Institute from Shanghai.Cecil Balmond and his team of Ove Arup & Partners will be responsible for the structural and mechanical engineering.OMA will collaborate with its media and research branch AMO.

source -arup /arcspace

Aerogel

asianlanka — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 15:27:37 +0000

Aerogel was first created by Steven Kistler in 1931, as a result of a bet with Charles Learned over who could replace the liquid inside a jam (jelly) jar with gas without causing shrinkage.

Aerogel is a low-density solid-state material derived from gel in which the liquid component of the gel has been replaced with gas. The result is an extremely low density solid with several remarkable properties, most notably its effectiveness as a thermal insulator. It is nicknamed frozen smoke, solid smoke or blue smoke due to its semi-transparent nature and the way light scatters in the material; however, it feels like expanded polystyrene (Styrofoam) to the touch .

Water Cube beijing

asianlanka — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 15:19:11 +0000

A general view of the exterior of the National Aquatic Centre, also known as the Water Cube, lit up at night during the opening of the Good Luck Beijing 2008 Swimming China Open in Beijing, China, 31 January 2008. The National Aquatic Centre, located next to the National Stadium, is one of the main venues for the 2008 Olympics

The Water Cube was initially designed by PTW Architects , CSCEC International Design and Arup with structural Engineers Arup conceiving the structure. The structure was built by CSCEC (China State Construction Engineering Corporation). Comprising a steel space frame, it is the largest ETFE clad structure in the world with over 100,000 m² of ETFE pillows that are only eight one-thousandths of an inch in total thickness, The ETFE cladding allows more light and heat penetration than traditional glass, resulting in a 30% decrease in energy costs.The outer wall is based on the Weaire-Phelan structure, a foam (structure formed by soap bubbles).The pattern is formed by taking a slice through the foam, and it was chosen in preference to the Kelvin foam because the more complex Weaire-Phelan structure results in more irregular, organic patterns than slices through the regular Kelvin foam.The structure will have a capacity of 17,000during the games that will be reduced to 6,000 afterwards. It also has a total land surface of 65,000 square metres and will cover a total of 7.8 acres.

Obama -biography

asianlanka — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 15:13:25 +0000

Barack Obama, the junior U. S. Senator from Illinois, is the first ever African–American to become the presumptive presidential nominee for a U. S. major political party. On June 3, 2008, he gained enough delegates to be nominated by the Democratic party at its national convention in August.

Barack Hussein Obama was born Aug. 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii. His father, Barack Obama, Sr., was born of Luo ethnicity in Nyanza Province, Kenya. He grew up herding goats with his own father, who was a domestic servant to the British. Although reared among Muslims, Obama, Sr., became an atheist at some point.

Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, grew up in Wichita, Kansas. Her father worked on oil rigs during the Depression. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he signed up for service in World War II and marched across Europe in Patton’s army. Dunham’s mother went to work on a bomber assembly line. After the war, they studied on the G. I. Bill, bought a house through the Federal Housing Program, and moved to Hawaii.Meantime, Barack’s father had won a scholarship that allowed him to leave Kenya pursue his dreams in Hawaii. At the time of his birth, Obama’s parents were students at the East–West Center of the University of Hawaii at Manoa.Obama’s parents separated when he was two years old and later divorced. Obama’s father went to Harvard to pursue Ph. D. studies and then returned to Kenya.His mother married Lolo Soetoro, another East–West Center student from Indonesia. In 1967, the family moved to Jakarta, where Obama’s half-sister Maya Soetoro–Ng was born. Obama attended schools in Jakarta, where classes were taught in the Indonesian language.

Four years later when Barack (commonly known throughout his early years as “Barry”) was ten, he returned to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham, and later his mother (who died of ovarian cancer in 1995).He was enrolled in the fifth grade at the esteemed Punahou Academy, graduating with honors in 1979. He was only one of three black students at the school. This is where Obama first became conscious of racism and what it meant to be an African–American.In his memoir, Obama described how he struggled to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage. He saw his biological father (who died in a 1982 car accident) only once (in 1971) after his parents divorced. And he admitted using alcohol, marijuana and cocaine during his teenage years.After high school, Obama studied at Occidental College in Los Angeles for two years. He then transferred to Columbia University in New York, graduating in 1983 with a degree in political science.

Obama moved to Chicago in 1985. Obama entered Harvard Law School in 1988. In February 1990, he was elected the first African–American editor of the Harvard Law Review. Obama graduated magna cum laude in 1991.Obama published an autobiography in 1995 Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. And he won a Grammy for the audio version of the book.

He was elected in 1996 from the south side neighborhood of Hyde Park.In 2000 .

The war with Iraq began in 2003 and Obama decided to run for the U.S. Senate open seat vacated by Republican Peter Fitzgerald. In the 2004 Democratic primary, he won 52 percent of the vote, defeating multimillionaire businessman Blair Hull and Illinois Comptroller Daniel Hynes.

In August 2004, diplomat and former presidential candidate Alan Keyes, who was also an African American, accepted the Republican nomination to replace Ryan. In three televised debates, Obama and Keyes expressed opposing views on stem cell research, abortion, gun control, school vouchers and tax cuts.

In the November 2004 general election, Obama received 70% of the vote to Keyes’s 27%, the largest electoral victory in Illinois history. Obama became only the third African American elected to the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction.

Sworn into office January 4, 2005, Obama partnered with Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana on a bill that expanded efforts to destroy weapons of mass destruction in Eastern Europe and Russia. Then with Republican Sen. Tom Corburn of Oklahoma, he created a website that tracks all federal spending.

Obama was also the first to raise the threat of avian flu on the Senate floor, spoke out for victims of Hurricane Katrina, pushed for alternative energy development and championed improved veterans´ benefits. He also worked with Democrat Russ Feingold of Wisconsin

His second book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, was published in October 2006.

In February 2007, Obama made headlines when he announced his candidacy for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. He was locked in a tight battle with former first lady and current U.S. Senator from New York, Hillary Rodham Clinton until he became the presumptive nominee on June 3, 2008.

Obama met his wife, Michelle, in 1988 when he was a summer associate at the Chicago law firm of Sidley & Austin. They were married in October 1992 and live in Kenwood on Chicago’s South Side with their daughters, Malia (born 1999) and Sasha (born 2001).

Barack Obama, the junior U. S. Senator from Illinois, is the first ever African–American to become the presumptive presidential nominee for a U. S. major political party On June 3, 2008, he gained enough delegates to be nominated by the Democratic party at its national convention in August to eliminate gifts of travel on corporate jets by lobbyists to members of Congress.

via biography