Good Afternoon All,
Today I'm afraid I don't have time to expound on the news. I may come back later and give a brief synopsis. I did want to point out the article about the marathon runner who donated his hair for cancer. In the US there is also a program for this, called Locks for Love. It's a great program, which both my sister and I have participated in, as well as a couple of good friends. If you plan to totally change your hairstyle, may I suggest this as a course of action? And if you're in Wales, look up the Kith for Kids charity. :)
Have a great day, enjoy the posts, and I'll see you tomorrow! :)
Today's Top 5:
1. Historic 91-year-old Anime Discovered in Osaka (Mainichi News)
2. Free Cancer Screenings for (Idaho) Women Through April (Idaho Statesman)
3. Helping the Homeless with Hands, Heads, Hearts (Seattle Times)
4. World's Biggest Collection of Dead Butterflies Moves its Home (Earth Times)
5. French Architect Wins Pritzker Prize
Honorable Mention:
1. Kids Who Talk to Themselves do Better (Times of India)
2. Dressing Down for National Pyjama Day (Irish Independent)
3. Idaho Youth Named as Epilepsy Spokesperson (Idaho Statesman)
4. Hair’s a Really Great Way to Help a Worthy Cause (IC Wales)
Today's Top 5:
1. Historic 91-year-old Anime Discovered in Osaka
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/national/news/20080329p2a00m0na029000c.html
March 30, 2008
A scene from Japan's oldest existing animation, "Namakura Gatana," which was discovered in Osaka. (Original image in the possession of Mr. Natsuki Matsumoto; restored by the National Film Center, Tokyo)OSAKA -- Footage of an animation film dating back to the Taisho Period (1912-1926) has been discovered here, and has been confirmed as the oldest existing example of Japanese animation ever produced.
The 2-minute animation, directed by Junichi Kou'uchi and titled "Namakura Gatana," was the second animation film ever made in Japan and was first shown at domestic theaters in 1917.
It was purchased at an antique fair in Osaka in July last year by film historian Natsuki Matsumoto. The film was found in nearly perfect condition.
The historic footage was unveiled during a press conference in Tokyo on Wednesday, following restoration work by the National Film Center in Tokyo's Chuo-ku.
The film is a comedy about a samurai warrior, who tries out a new sword only to suffer revenge at the hands of his would-be target.
"We knew the film was highly acclaimed at the time, but there was no information on the content of the film. I am surprised that it was actually found. It's a major discovery that will shed light on the origin of Japanese animation," Yasushi Watanabe, an animation historian, said.
The film was initially screened in 1917 at theaters following the release of the nation's first animation film, "Imokawa Mukuzo Genkanban no Maki" (1917), which remains lost to this day.
Almost a century after its initial release, the film "Namakura Gatana" will be shown again at the National Film Center in the Kyobashi district, starting on April 24.
2. Free Cancer Screenings for (Idaho) Women Through April
http://www.idahostatesman.com/newsupdates/story/337432.html
Edition Date: 03/30/08
The Idaho Foodbank and the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare are partnering to spread the word about Women's Health Check, a program providing free breast and cervical cancer screening to women age 40 and over who are uninsured and economically disadvantaged.Health and Welfare will take advantage of the foodbank's extensive statewide network to distribute information about the screening to its target audience.
The goal of the program, which is scheduled to run through the end of April, is to increase the number of Idaho women who have regular mammograms and pap tests.
Pantries, feeding sites and other foodbank partner agencies will have information cards about the free screenings and who qualifies prominently displayed.
For more information about the program, call the toll-free Idaho Careline at 211.
3. Helping the Homeless with Hands, Heads, Hearts
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2004315716_design30m.html
By Haley Edwards
UW architecture student Sean Kelly, seated, and his classmates are building a composting toilet out of recycled materials such as wooden pallets and burlap sacks — and their design would require no tools or nails for assembly.You've got four friends, six bucks and 72 hours to build a portable toilet for the homeless. You ready?
Then welcome to this year's Design Build Challenge, a three-day competition in Seattle in which teams of amateur architects team up with local nonprofits to create innovative solutions to real-life problems. This year, all the nonprofit partners serve the area's homeless.
The competition is sponsored by Project Locus, a national nonprofit that encourages social responsibility among architects.
Beginning late Thursday, 30 amateur architects, most of them University of Washington students, divided into five teams, met their nonprofits and got their assignments.
Two teams were asked to design and build portable toilets for the homeless. Two other teams were asked to design traveling memorials for homeless people who have died. The fifth team was asked to design an educational kiosk where homeless communities could learn about waste management.
There's a chance, if the final results are good enough, the designs could actually be used to help the homeless.
The two teams assigned the task of building a portable toilet labored in separate backyards on opposite sides of the city.
In Ballard, five guys, all undergraduates at the UW, built a toilet out of wooden shipping pallets, burlap sacks from the Tully's Coffee plant, and an old tub that once held kalamata olives. Their compostable toilet's bowl was a blue plastic barrel the team saw on the street and traded for a six-pack of beer.
While there's no official budget for the projects, teams are encouraged to use recycled goods and spend as little as possible.
The Ballard-based toilet-building team used tools, but no hammers or nails. The finished kit would require no tools for assembly.
"We wanted to create a port-a-potty prototype that anyone could re-create using things they could find on the street," said Kit Kollmeyer, 26. Their nonprofit partner was Operation Nightwatch, a Central District-based homeless-aid program.
"So much of what we do as students is theoretical," Kollmeyer said. "This is actually something that's needed, and it's something we can build ourselves. That's kind of cool."
Meanwhile, in Madrona, the other toilet-building team spent Saturday in a basement workshop where it was so cold you could see your breath. Ashle Fauvre, 25, used a jigsaw on plywood to make the structure's base, while her teammates — all first-year graduate students — sawed, drilled and hammered.
"We're trying to create something that'll be really quality, but easily replicable," said Fauvre, whose team's nonprofit partner was SHARE/WHEEL, a group that works with tent cities in the Seattle area. "It'll slide apart and fold up into a portfolio-sized package."
The toilet-building project happens to come just as Seattle Public Utilities last week recommended that the city's pricey self-cleaning public toilets, installed in 2004 to provide clean facilities for the homeless and others, should be discontinued because of cost.
"It's an important project right now, and we hope our design is actually something that can be used," said Jack Hunter, 30, of the Madrona crew. "We don't know a whole lot about toilet building. We're longtime toilet users, first-time toilet builders."
A panel of five judges is to critique each team's final products at 4 p.m. today at Our Redeemer's Lutheran Church, 2400 N.W. 85th St., Seattle.
4. World's Biggest Collection of Dead Butterflies Moves its Home http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/195476,worlds-biggest-collection-of-dead-butterflies-moves-home.html
Posted : Sun, 30 Mar 2008 10:24:00 GMT
Munich - The world's biggest collection of preserved butterflies has been safely moved to a bigger, new home in the southern German city of Munich, museum officials said Sunday. Prize specimens from the 10-million-insect collection will go back on public display on Friday. They were netted over decades by German scientists and enthusiasts all over the globe and neatly pinned on cards at the Bavarian Zoological Collection ZSM museum.
It took several months to gingerly transport the fragile butterflies, which are now kept in 50,000 glass cases.
Chief conservator Axel Hausmann said the new space in the building would allow 100,000 species to be put on public display at any one time.
Friday's re-opening of the collection will also feature an award to Zoltan Varga, a Hungarian professor who donated his huge collection of Noctuidae butterflies to the ZSM.
Varga, who collected them on several expeditions to Central Asian mountain ranges, will receive the Ritter von Spix Medal.
5. French Architect Wins Pritzker Prize http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/31/arts/design/31prit.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1206907711-Bz080UccynHInA0c/TLDhg
By ROBIN POGREBIN
Published: March 30, 2008
Jean Nouvel, the bold French architect known for such wildly diverse projects as the muscular Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and the exotically louvered Arab World Institute in Paris, has received architecture’s top honor, the Pritzker Prize. Jean NouvelMr. Nouvel, 62, is the second French citizen to take the prize, awarded annually to a living architect by a jury chosen by the Hyatt Foundation. His selection is to be announced Monday.
“For over 30 years Jean Nouvel has pushed architecture’s discourse and praxis to new limits,” the Pritzker jury said in its citation. “His inquisitive and agile mind propels him to take risks in each of his projects, which, regardless of varying degrees of success, have greatly expanded the vocabulary of contemporary architecture.”
In extending that vocabulary Mr. Nouvel has defied easy categorization. His buildings have no immediately identifiable signature, like the curves of Frank Gehry or the light-filled atriums of Renzo Piano. But each is strikingly distinctive, be it the Agbar Tower in Barcelona (2005), a candy-colored office tower that suggests a geyser, or his KKL cultural and congress center in Lucerne, Switzerland (2000), with a slim copper roof cantilevered delicately over Lake Lucerne.
“Every time I try to find what I call the missing piece of the puzzle, the right building in the right place,” Mr. Nouvel said recently over tea at the Mercer Hotel in SoHo.
Yet he does not design buildings simply to echo their surroundings. “Generally, when you say context, people think you want to copy the buildings around, but often context is contrast,” he said.
“The wind, the color of the sky, the trees around — the building is not done only to be the most beautiful,” he said. “It’s done to give advantage to the surroundings. It’s a dialogue.”
The prize, which includes a $100,000 grant and a bronze medallion, is to be presented to Mr. Nouvel on June 2 in a ceremony at the Library of Congress in Washington.
Among Mr. Nouvel’s New York buildings are 40 Mercer, a 15-story red-and-blue, glass, wood and steel luxury residential building completed last year in SoHo, and a soaring 75-story hotel-and-museum tower with crystalline peaks that is to be built next to the Museum of Modern Art in Midtown. Writing in The New York Times in November, Nicolai Ouroussoff said the Midtown tower “promises to be the most exhilarating addition to the skyline in a generation.”
Born in Fumel in southwestern France in 1945, Mr. Nouvel originally wanted to be an artist. But his parents, both teachers, wanted a more stable life for him, he said, so they compromised on architecture.
“I realized it was possible to create visual compositions” that, he said, “you can put directly in the street, in the city, in public spaces.”
At 20 Mr. Nouvel won first prize in a national competition to attend the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. By the time he was 25 he had opened his own architecture firm with François Seigneur; a series of other partnerships followed.
Mr. Nouvel cemented his reputation in 1987 with completion of the Arab World Institute, one of the “grand projects” commissioned during the presidency of François Mitterrand. A showcase for art from Arab countries, it blends high technology with traditional Arab motifs. Its south-facing glass facade, for example, has automated lenses that control light to the interior while also evoking traditional Arab latticework. For his boxy, industrial Guthrie Theater, which has a cantilevered bridge overlooking the Mississippi River, Mr. Nouvel experimented widely with color. The theater is clad in midnight-blue metal; a small terrace is bright yellow; orange LED images rise along the complex’s two towers.
In its citation, the Pritzker jury said the Guthrie, completed in 2006, “both merges and contrasts with its surroundings.” It added, “It is responsive to the city and the nearby Mississippi River, and yet, it is also an expression of theatricality and the magical world of performance.”
The bulk of Mr. Nouvel’s commissions work has been in Europe however. Among the most prominent is his Quai Branly Museum in Paris (2006), an eccentric jumble of elements including a glass block atop two columns, some brightly colorful boxes, rust-colored louvers and a vertical carpet of plants. “Defiant, mysterious and wildly eccentric, it is not an easy building to love,” Mr. Ouroussoff wrote in The Times.
A year later he described Mr. Nouvel’s Paris Philharmonie concert hall, a series of large overlapping metal plates on the edge of La Villette Park in northeastern Paris, as “an unsettling if exhilarating trip into the unknown.”
Mr. Nouvel has his plate full at the moment. He is designing a satellite of the Louvre Museum in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, giving it a shallow domed roof that creates the aura of a just-landed U.F.O. He recently announced plans for a high-rise condominium in Los Angeles called SunCal Tower, a narrow glass structure with rings of greenery on each floor. His concert hall for the Danish Broadcasting Corporation is a tall rectangular box with transparent screen walls.
Before dreaming up a design, Mr. Nouvel said, he does copious research on the project and its surroundings. “The story, the climate, the desires of the client, the rules, the culture of the place,” he said. “The references of the buildings around, what the people in the city love.”
“I need analysis,” he said, noting that every person “is a product of a civilization, of a culture.” He added: Me, I was born in France after the Second World War. Probably the most important cultural movement was Structuralism. I cannot do a building if I can’t analyze.”
Although he becomes attached to his buildings, Mr. Nouvel said, he understands that like human beings, they grow and change over time and may even one day disappear. “Architecture is always a temporary modification of the space, of the city, of the landscape,” he said. “We think that it’s permanent. But we never know.”
Honorable Mention:
1. Kids Who Talk to Themselves do Better
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Kids_who_talk_to_themselves_do_better_/articleshow/2911489.cms
30 Mar 2008, 1415 hrs IST,ANI
WASHINGTON: The next time you see your kids chatting to themselves, don’t worry - for a new study has shown that children who talk to themselves do better on motor tasks.
The study led by Adam Winsler, an associate professor of psychology at George Mason University showed that preschoolers perform better while doing their tasks when they talk to themselves out loud (either spontaneously or when told to do so by an adult) than when they are silent.
"Young children often talk to themselves as they go about their daily activities, and parents and teachers shouldn’t think of this as weird or bad," said Winsler.
"On the contrary, they should listen to the private speech of kids. It's a fantastic window into the minds of children," he added.
During the study 78 per cent of the children performed either the same or better on the performance task when speaking to themselves than when they were silent.
Private speech helps the children to improve their communication skills with the outside world.
"This is when language comes inside. As these two communication processes merge, children use private speech in the transition period. It's a critical period for children, and defines us as human beings," Winsler added.
Winsler also conducted the study in children with autism. The findings revealed that high-functioning autistic children talk to themselves often and in the same ways that non-autistic children do. Talking aloud also improved their performance on tasks.
"Children with autism have problems with their external social speech, so psychologists assumed that their private speech would also be impaired," he said.
"But this study shows that it is not the case-that autistic children use their private speech very effectively as a tool to help them with tasks," he added.
The study titled ‘ Should I let them talk?': Private speech and task performance among preschool children with and without behaviour problems’ is published in Early Childhood Research Quarterly .
2. Dressing Down for National Pyjama Day
http://www.independent.ie/national-news/dressing-down-for--national-pyjama-day-1331732.html
Saturday, March 29 2008
Dressing up was not the fashionable thing to do yesterday - at least not for one charity fundraising event. The opposite was the case as children, including Molly Fallon, Andrea Ragulaite and Zuikomboreko Kufazuvinei, pictured , were told to stay in their pyjamas while attending the nursery in an effort to make €500,000.
The drive was part of the National Children's Nurseries Association's 'Pyjama Day' in which 40,000 children did not bother getting changed when they got up. Parents were asked to sponsor a child to raise money for the Make-a-Wish Foundation and Children in Hospital Ireland.
3. Idaho Youth Named as Epilepsy Spokesperson
http://www.idahostatesman.com/newsupdates/story/337447.html
Edition Date: 03/30/08
Nine-year-old Sam Gottsch of Boise is one of 50 young people with epilepsy from across the country who will travel to Washington, D.C., next week to meet with congressional leaders. The young lobbyists, ranging in age from 7 to 16, will encourage lawmakers to support the Americans with Disabilities Act as well as public health programs and research toward finding a cure for epilepsy.
Gottsch is part of Kids Speak Up!, a national program coordinated by the Epilepsy Foundation.
4. Hair’s a Really Great Way to Help a Worthy Cause
http://icwales.icnetwork.co.uk/news/wales-news/2008/03/29/hair-s-a-really-great-way-to-help-a-worthy-cause-91466-20688897/
Mar 29 2008
by Katie Norman, South Wales Echo
A MARATHON runner has given up his hair to help children with cancer.
Terence Canning, 35, of Llandaff North, Cardiff, not only shaved his head to raise money for charity – he also gave his locks to help make a wig for a young cancer patient.
The former London banker, who recently quit his job and returned to Cardiff, decided to raise sponsorship for his forthcoming London Marathon bid by cutting off his 16-inch ponytail and shaving his head.
The money raised will go to Kith and Kids, a charity running activities for young people with learning and physical disabilities.
But instead of throwing his locks away, Terence has giving them to the charity Little Princesses, which helps create real-hair wigs for young cancer sufferers whose families would not otherwise be able to afford one.
Terence, who has been growing his hair for about four years, said: “I heard about the idea through someone I met on holiday and I just thought it was a good chance to put my hair to good use while I was shaving it off for charity.
“I don’t think I will miss my hair. I won’t miss washing it. I just hope I don’t get sunburnt on my head while I’m running.”
To help Terence raise money for Kith and Kids, visit www.justgiving.com/ terencecanning
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