Saturday, November 17, 2007

Oral Roberts, founder and former faith healer, called an “emergency meeting” to reinstate Richard Roberts as president of Oral Roberts University. Richard stepped down last month when he was accused of illegal political contributions, financial wrong-doing, and wrongful firings in a lawsuit.

On Wednesday Oral called an ’emergency meeting’ for the faculty following the previous “no confidence” vote. At the recent meeting Oral asked for the faculty who were willing to forgive and start fresh to “stand up.” Donald Vance, a professor of Bible studies, said that when no one person at the meeting stood, Oral Roberts asked one of them, “‘Are you not ready to start over?'”

Vance reported, “The faculty member said, “I don’t know what that means, to start over.”

“‘I would think that would be obvious,'” Oral Roberts responded.

After that, Vance stated “No, Chancellor Roberts, it’s not clear, are you asking us to rescind our three motions?” Then Oral Roberts said that the faculty should drop it.

Following the meeting Provost Mark Lewandoswki wrote a letter to ORU Board of Regents promising to step down if Richard Roberts returns as president. Tulsa World reported that the atompshere at ORU is “divise” noting that when Regent chairman George Pearsons, took his position in May he said in an address to the board: “I am standing here today because the Lord clearly spoke to me and said, ‘Do whatever Richard Roberts asks you to do.'”

The school declined to comment on the meetings.

Friday, June 19, 2009

The University of Toronto SciNet Consortium went online yesterday with the IBM System x iDataPlex Supercomputer.

U of T’s IBM System x is now the fastest computer outside of the United States, the largest Intel processor based IBM installation internationally and the twelfth most powerful globally. It will be used for a wide variety of operations, such as analysing climate change models, aerospace, astrophysics, genetics, bioinformatics, chemical physics, medical imaging research and other highly calculation-intensive tasks.

The C$50 million dollar supercomputer can perform 300 trillion calculations per second and uses the equivalent amount of energy which would power 4,000 homes. The supercomputer will be cooled by outdoor winter air assisted by a water based cooling system during warmer summer months.

The computer will provide computations for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that started preliminary experiments on September 10, 2008 at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. The LHC will produce cataclysmic collisions that will mimic the conditions that existed shortly after the beginning of time. The IBM System x’s 30,240 Intel 5500 series 2.53 GHz processor cores — arranged in 45 file-like stacks — will examine the results of the particle collisions.

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Controversial and explicit Canadian workplace safety ads have been pulled from television, and paper ads from some bus shelters for the Christmas season. However, the ads will return to air in January.

“It’s totally erroneous to suggest we’re pulling anything,” chairman of the Workplace Safety and Information Board of Ontario, Steve Mahoney said. “Our plan from Day 1 was to stop the ads around the middle of December when most of the advertising that’s in the media is focused on Christmas and purchasing gifts. We just didn’t want to be competing with all that stuff.”

In one of the TV ads a woman accidentally slips on grease on the floor and a large steaming pot falls onto her face, and she starts screaming to death. The ads end with the message “There really are no accidents”.

A paper ads shows a construction worker who is in a pool of blood with a forklift operation manual stuck in his chest. Another with a man who is slit by a “Danger” sign with his leg stuck in a machine. They show the messages: “Lack of training can kill” and the other “Ignoring safety procedures can kill”.

“The critics amount to about 25 per cent rating, and I’m delighted they’re upset about the ads because I wouldn’t want anyone to enjoy watching them.”

The videos have been viewed more than 70,000 times on the Board’s website and are gaining large amounts of views on YouTube.

The transit authorities of Hamilton and Mississauga will show modified advertisements. The transit authority of Guelph will show the ads in bus shelters, but the transit authority of Windsor will not because of the graphic nature.

“We’re not against workplace safety, but this is too graphic,” said Caroline Postma, chair of the Transit Windsor board.

Mississauga city councillour Carolyn Parrish said: “My son-in-law was telling me that they shouldn’t be on in prime time because when [my grandson] watches them he just about bursts into tear. Now he follows his mom around the kitchen to make sure she doesn’t spill grease. And he’s only four. There’s too much of a chance that … people are really badly affected by it, and can’t really do anything about it anyway.” She suggested the ads only be aired to workers with the jobs shown in the commercials.

Mahoney changed the earlier promise to air the ads only after 8:00pm to after 9:00pm at last nights meeting with Mississauga city council.

Mahoney said the commercials and paper ads are not “too graphic at all”. And they are “absolutely appropriate and they’re doing what they’re intended to do, they’re creating what I call a water cooler topic of conversation.”

Ninety-eight Canadian workers so far have been killed on the job this year.

Wednesday, August 5, 2015

U.S. Republican Party presidential candidate Mark Everson, former commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), filed a complaint on Monday with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to challenge his exclusion from Thursday’s first Fox News Republican Party presidential debate. Everson argues his exclusion violates Title 11 of the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations in that debate hosts must not “structure the debates to promote or advance one candidate over another”, and must “use pre-established objective criteria to determine which candidates may participate in a debate.”

Everson served as Commissioner of the IRS from 2003 to 2007, during the George W. Bush administration. After his departure, he briefly served as CEO of the American Red Cross, worked in the cabinet of Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, and worked for the tax consulting firm alliantgroup. He announced his candidacy this past March with a sixteen-page open letter in which he outlined the six pillars of his campaign: amnesty for illegal immigrants, reinstatement of the military draft, a promise to serve only a single presidential term, and calls for tax reform, deficit reduction, and corporate responsibility.

Fox News claims Everson fails to meet the criteria it established for Thursday’s two debates. Only seventeen candidates meet the criteria, which require a candidate “consistently” be included in “recognized” opinion polls. The prime-time event features the top ten candidates by average polling percentage. The other seven participate in a separate debate just before the prime time event.

In his complaint, Everson urges the FEC to compel Fox News to include him in the second tier debate as the eighth participant.

Everson argues Fox News, in violation of Title 11, “structure[d] the debates to promote or advance one candidate over another” through a July 27 change to its criteria that replaced a pre-existing one percent polling threshold with a threshold admitting those “consistently” included in “recognized” polls. He alleges this was done to ensure the inclusion of the low-polling candidates former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, former New York governor George Pataki, Senator Lindsey Graham, and former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore, because Fox News recognizes these candidates as “major players.”

Furthermore, Everson argues the Fox News criteria are not “objective,” as Title 11 requires, because they fail to define the terms “consistently” and “recognized” when referring to polls. He asserts he was included in the Republican Party’s online straw poll in May and is the only candidate still listed on that poll who has been excluded from Thursday’s debate.

Election law expert Richard Winger, publisher of Ballot Access News, says Everson is “completely correct” in his challenge. However, he believes Everson only has a chance of success if he actually files a lawsuit rather than simply complaining to the FEC.

Thursday, February 14, 2008

According to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), the 2007 rate of employment in Brazil was 2.2% higher then figures for 2006. According to the IBGE the employment figures are at their highest since 2001.

The IBGE reported growth in employment levels for all the 14 regions surveyed, with the highest rates of increase being recorded in the states of São Paulo (with an increase of 3.5%) and the state of Paraná (with an increase of 3.1%). Região Nordeste and Minas Gerais had increases of 1.4% and 1.5% respectively.

According to the IBGE, the industries with the biggest increase in employment figures were food and drink, transport, metal and machinery. The biggest falls in employment figures were in footwear, woodwork and clothing.

Friday, March 18, 2011

A power line to the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant in Japan was completed Thursday, which will allow cooling systems at one of the facility’s reactors.

The new line, roughly one kilometer (0.6 miles) in length, connects the power grid to the power plant’s second reactor. It was completed at about 1730 local time (0830 UTC) on Thursday, and will be energized once spraying of seawater over reactor three is complete.

According to a Tokyo Electric Power Company spokesperson, once the power line is energized “we will be able to activate various electric pumps and pour water into reactors and pools for spent nuclear fuel,” thus cooling temperatures within the reactor.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has said that the stricken power plant is currently stable, though there is still the chance of matters growing worse. An official at the agency said that “it’s reasonably stable at the moment compared to yesterday.”

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

US-based Oracle Corporation announced earlier today that they are buying rival US-based Siebel Systems for $10.66 USD per share. Siebel shareholders have the option to receive the $10.66 per share in cash or in Oracle stock. This deal is valued at approximately $5.85 billion USD. Siebel Systems’ Board of Directors has already voted in favour of the acquisition. Founder Thomas Siebel has also given his support. A special meeting will soon be held for Siebel stockholders to vote on the acquisition. If all goes well the deal should close in the early part of next year.

After acquiring Siebel; Oracle, which specializes in database applications, will become the second largest software company. Oracle has offices in more than 145 countries, and employs over 50,000 people. This acquisition will make Oracle the largest customer relationship management (CRM) applications company in the world. CRM applications include accounting, inventory management and customer management software. “Siebel’s 4,000 applications customers and 3,400,000 CRM users strengthen our number one position in applications in North America and move us closer to the number one position in applications globally”, said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.

“Today is a great day for Siebel Systems’ customers, partners, shareholders, and employees,” said Thomas M. Siebel, Chairman and Founder of Siebel Systems. Many analysts predicted the acquisition of Siebel after Oracle bought competitor PeopleSoft for $10 billion USD, last December.