Kenya and Wales Join Big Guns In Cup Quarters

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Kenyan Skipper Humphrey Kayange Kicking Ahead

Kenya and Wales have secured their places in the Melrose Cup quarter finals at the Rugby World Cup Sevens in Dubai as the two best runners-up across the six pools, joining New Zealand, Fiji, South Africa, Samoa, England and Argentina at the top table approaching the business end of the tournament.

The second day's play at 'The Sevens' provided a number of absorbing encounters, with several matches decided after the final siren.

To underline the competitive nature of play across the 24 teams, co-leaders on the IRB Sevens World Series South Africa and England were both taken to the wire on a day when New Zealand made light of their injury woes, Fiji quietly built up momentum and Argentina went about their business with some clinical performances.

Pool A

Even without injured Super 14 star Victor Vito, out with a claf injury, New Zealand proved too strong for all comers in Pool A. Tonga finished second courtesy of their 31-10 win over Italy. The Arabian Gulf went close to earning the biggest roar of the day but were pipped at the post by a tenacious Italy, 19-17.

Pool B

After a less than convincing 12-point win over the USA, Fiji finished strongly on the second day of their title defence, overpowering impressive France with a 38-5 victory. Les Bleus were rampant early on in seeing off Georgia 33-0 and with two good pool wins can count themselves unlucky not to make the last eight in the Cup.

Pool C

South Africa were tested by Canada in their first match of the day before sealing a 15-7 win. They needed all 14 minutes against the Cannucks and then scored again at the death to account for Scotland, 19-16.


Scotland were impressive winners over Japan earlier in the day and unlucky not to be in contention for the Melrose Cup, cruelly denied by Bok captain Mpho Mbiyozo at the death.

Pool D

Pool D was dominated by Samoa who remained undefeated on day two with a 19-0 over Australia and a 13-point victory over battling Portugal. But it was Ireland who sent out the early shockwaves with a 24-21 win over Michael O’Connor’s Australian side in the dying moments of the match. Ireland weren’t able to continue their run, though, downed by Portual 17-5.

All three eventually shared the honours on the second rung in the pool with one win apiece, none of them with a strong enough points difference to reach the Cup.

Pool E

England were pushed all the way by a determined Tunisia, who outscored them three tries to one in the second half, but got away with a nervous 28-24 win to ensure their quarter final aspirations remain on track.

Ben Ryan's side followed up with a much-improved performance over Kenya 26-7. Despite that loss, Kenya also advanced to the quarter finals after a solid win over Hong Kong 43-7 earlier in the day.

Tunisia and Hong Kong provided one of the more entertaining matches of the day with the score see-sawing throughout, the North Africans finally clinching the game on the final siren.

Pool F

Winners of the recent IRB World Sevens Series event in San Diego, Argentina crept under the radar all day with fine wins over Zimbabwe and Wales. They didn’t have it all their own way against the Welsh, who also booked a deserved place in the Melrose Cup quarter finals with a good win over Uruguay.

Zimbabwe and Uruguay also fought out a closely-contested match, Zimbabwe squeezing out a four-point win. Source IRBWC

Mdaku Says

Let Us Pray For Our Boys As They Check In For The Quarters, Go Kenya.

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Interview With Janice Brand VP Content And Community At Helium Dot Com

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Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.

You Can Check Out My Helium Profile Here

I am VP, Content & Community at Helium.com, an international community of active writers who use social networking to rate each other’s work. Our writers range from newbie to published professional, all contributing to a growing trove of more than 450,000 articles on subjects ranging from auto repair to Zen Buddhism. Our members actively engage each other through our community boards to help each other with writing and improving.

What are your goals?

We are building the richest resource of experience-based knowledge, wisdom and creativity. To achieve this goal, we are building an inviting, yet competitive community of members who write quality articles on subjects they care about. Today, you will find over 65,000 unique subjects on the site – and our aim is for double that very soon!

Notable achievements?

Thursday is our one-year anniversary. In that short time, we’ve gathered more than 80,000 writers to the site. Well, some testimony:

* I have enjoyed the readily available ability to publish immediately.
* Beefing up the portfolio and attempting brand-new subject areas have been quite helpful for practicing freelancing skills too.
* I’ve often wondered if publishers browse about here looking for writers and now I see they do!
* Began writing for Helium about six weeks ago - a mere blip in time ago. I was thrilled just to have a place to write and share my views and experiences with others, and getting paid to do so was the icing on the cake!


* My ten weeks in Helium has gained me more experience than a US$900 long distance writing course has….
* I love writing, but this is the first place that has built my confidence.

Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)

Our Community boards were started to really help the Help desk answer questions for the members. But the boards have turned into a vibrant aspect of Helium, with nearly a million page views a month.

Are you getting revenue for this? How?

We are generating revenue from ads (small) and from our partner publisher program called Marketplace (growing).

What’s next? What do you need to get to the next level?

We are about to kick off a College Writing Contest aimed at college students. But our goal here is to provide a platform for journalism professors to have their students write to specific, pre-determined topics online and get rated by the member community. The students will also be able to read and rate each other’s work.

Anyone you’d like to talk with, learn from, or work with at the summit
We’re interested in talking with colleges and universities, and anyone looking for trusted, community-generated content from our members.
Thanks To David Cohn

Mdaku Says.

NB-This Interview Was Conducted Sometime In Late 2007 Since Then Helium.com Has Grown By Leaps And Bounds, I Can Attest To The Fact That It Now Has Over 160,000 Active Writers I Can Attest To That Since I Am But One Of The Many Legion Of Writers Who Ply Our Craft There, Why Dont You Sign Up We Hook Up There

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SHENG DOT CO DOT KE-The Best Thing To Happen To Us Since Sliced Bread And Butter

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You should check out this very innovative Kenyan made website that is run and maintained by RasDunkie sheng.co.ke. It is not only a marvel in technical design but also a very functional and easily navigable website. The black background blends extremely well with the stark earth hues making it aesthetically pleasing to the eye.

But wait that is not the half of it, for those of you who might not be familiar with the word sheng, here goes. Sheng is a compound word that is derived from the words Swahili and English. It is a patois that is the language of choice for Kenya’s, especially Nairobi youth, a distinct lingua franca that cleverly blends and merges English and Kiswahili to come up with a unique inimitable slang.

It has spawned an entire genre of music,genge the Kenyan hiphop popularized by jua cali the master and a vibrant counterculture that revolves around it. This website is a portal to these world and to the language that is spoken and understood by over 90% of Kenya’s youth making it easily the most widely spoken tongue in the republic if not pardon my projection the entire region, with over 15 million strong speakers and people who can understand it in one way or another.

Sheng.co.ke is a repository of our fast evolving counterculture and it boasts of over 3000 members who interact exchanging and enriching its vocabulary more so in the popular language of jesting native to sheng known in these parts as mchongoano. It boasts of a vibrant forum a kamusi/dictionary of sheng words and a lyrics section. Sheng is a unifying language that can be used to heal the wounds of a fragmented nation still smarting from last years post-poll chaos.

Sheng in my opinion is the healing of the nation, being as it is the majority of the people who bore the brunt of the fighting were the youth, if only we can harness this collective language tool we can learn to speak with one voice and to listen to each other and flow with one spirit. So sign up and see you at the forums and lets speak sheng.

Poa wasee ebu tuchekiane asapo na tukule maristo zetu poa tumakesure sheng ina stay alive,mimi niko na 16A vile ni smatta, wazi Ras Dunkie na crew big up man. Wacha niambae.

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NASA's Kepler Seeks Another Earth Among The Stars

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Associated Press

This artist rendition provided by NASA shows the Kepler space telescope. Kepler is designed to search for Earth-like planets in the Milky Way galaxy.

The spacecraft launches Friday night to embark on the most exhaustive hunt for a potentially habitable planet beyond our solar system.

March 6, 2009

The first spacecraft dedicated to finding potentially habitable planets beyond our solar system is poised to blast off from Cape Canaveral tonight on a three-year mission to probe 150,000 stars in the most sweeping hunt for Earthlike objects ever undertaken by NASA.

By the end of the Kepler mission, scientists will probably know whether planets like ours -- where liquid water can exist on the surface to nurture life -- are common in the universe, or so rare that we are virtually alone in the cosmic sea.

 

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"This is not just another science mission," said NASA Associate Administrator Ed Weiler in a news briefing at the space agency's headquarters in Washington. "If you ask me, are there other Earths out there, I'd say absolutely. But I can't prove it."

"We certainly won't find E.T.," added Bill Borucki, the lead mission scientist from UC Berkeley, "but we might find E.T.'s home."

The $590-million Kepler mission, scheduled to lift off at 7:49 p.m. Pacific time, consists of the widest-field telescope ever flown by NASA. The nearly 15-foot-long instrument has a 55-inch-wide mirror that can simultaneously scrutinize thousands of stars in its search for extrasolar planets, or exoplanets. It will accomplish this by looking for periodic dimming -- or winking -- of a star's light caused by planets crossing in front of it, which scientists refer to as a transit.

Many of the 340 or so known exoplanets, principally discovered by a team in Europe and another at UC Berkeley headed by well-known planet hunter Geoff Marcy, have been found using the same method.

But most of those planets are gas giants, like Jupiter, that orbit very close to their parent stars. Those planets would be far too hot to sustain life, even if they had a rocky surface.

No potentially habitable planet has been found outside our solar system.

Finding one by using ground-based telescopes has been extremely difficult because of atmospheric interference. Even the Hubble Space Telescope, which has a larger mirror, falls short because its field of view is too narrow. It's designed to look deeply rather than widely.

The Kepler spacecraft -- named after 17th century German astronomer Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion -- will be able to scan a region of the northern sky between the constellations Cygnus and Lyra that contains about 4.5 million stars. Of the total, according to mission scientist Natalie Batalha of San Jose State University, 150,000 stars have been selected for intense study.

These are stars that are most like our sun, middle-aged and relatively cool, so that the "habitable zone" where life might flourish is close enough to the star that Kepler will be able to see a transit.

To spot a transit, Kepler will measure the brightness of each of these stars every 30 minutes for 3 1/2 years.

Even so, finding another Earth will be a challenge. Scientists figure that the change in brightness caused by an Earth-type planet will be less than 84 parts per million, or 0.008%. That's equivalent to measuring from several miles away the change in brightness caused by a flea crawling across a car's headlight.

Adding to the difficulty of the task is that dimming can be caused by events other than a transit, such as sunspots. Also, it is estimated that fewer than one star system in 100 will have planets properly aligned so that they pass between the star and Kepler's camera.

Kepler scientists are trying to overcome all these problems with brute scientific force. They figure that by looking at thousands of stars, at least some will be in the right configuration with the right temperature to produce another Earth. "It's all a numbers game," Batalha said.

Finding a planet is just the first stage of the process. After detecting a wink, Kepler would measure how often the dimming occurred. Knowing the orbital period and the star's size would allow scientists to discover the planet's location and size.

The dimming caused by an Earth-type planet orbiting its star at about the same distance as our home planet from the sun would occur once a year, or about three times during the mission.

Kepler will launch on a three-stage Delta II rocket and eventually drift about 45 million miles away so it won't have to contend with the reflected light of the moon and Earth.

Most of the stars in its survey are relatively close, from tens of light-years to 3,000 light-years away.

The first planets to be discovered in the coming months are likely to be more of the same gas giants that have been found so far. The earliest possible announcement that another Earth has been found would be December 2010.

Whatever Kepler uncovers, it is likely to change our view of our place in the cosmos. "It's possible that Earths are very, very common," Weiler said.

It's also possible that Kepler will discover how rare Earths are, he said. "That to me is scary, because I don't want to live in a universe where we're the best there is."

john.johnson@latimes.com

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CoolWeb Apps for Struggling Startups

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Cool Web Apps for Struggling Startups

Are you starting a business or already have a small business in operation? Taking the headache out of routine administrative tasks definitely goes a long way in freeing up more of your time to concentrate on building a great product for your company.


This is especially true if you’re running a small shop with limited staff.

So I came across this great resource for starter web apps for small businesses that I’ve found to be particularly useful and that I’m actually putting to use.

A few of the take-aways:

• Managing your projects - Basecamp
• Taking notes, capturing information - Evernote
• Billing, invoicing, client account management - FreshBooks
• Track employee status, clock-in and out times - InOutBoard
• Resume management, hiring - The Resumator

[Getty. Read via CNET Webware] Thanks To Shadrack At FortySouth

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