查看文章 |
.世界最伟大的一百首流行歌曲
2008-02-10 23:43
©2008 Baidu
Wednesday, December 03, 2008
Friday, November 28, 2008
Taiwan - Culture & History
Modern History
When Communist forces took control of China in 1949, the president, General Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang (KMT), fled to Taiwan to plan their reconquest of the mainland. One and a half million Chinese also left the mainland for Taiwan when Mao took control. In 1971 the KMT lost the Chinese United Nations seat and in 1979 the USA withdrew its recognition of the Republic.
When Chiang Kai-shek died in 1975 and was replaced by his son Chiang Ching-kuo, Taiwanese started muttering the word 'dynasty', and criticism of the one-party system rose. In 1986, with martial law in force, Taiwan's first opposition party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), formed and was elected into the legislature. Two years later Chiang Ching-kuo died and was replaced by the first native-born president, Lee Teng-hui.
In 1995 relations between the two Chinas, always chilly, plummetted to a new low. Lee Teng-hui's high-profile visit to the United States brought mainland China out in a rash of nervous jealousy. Determined to isolate Taiwan and sway the minds of its voters, China held intense military exercises near the Taiwanese coast. In response, the United States sent warships to monitor the situation. Despite the region's sudden high concentration of itchy trigger fingers, the first direct presidential election was held without incident, and Lee Teng-hui was returned to office.
Taiwan's fortunes took a turn for the worse in September 1999 when a massive earthquake hit the island, the largest in its history, leaving over 2000 islanders dead and a rubble-strewn country. Even in this time of crisis, however, the snippy relationship between mainland China and Taiwan continued. A defiantly sulky China demanded that any country entering Taiwan to offer earthquake relief get permission from the Chinese government first: a demand that was met with less-than-hearty agreement from humanitarian organisations and other countries around the world.
Recent History
In March 2000, Taiwan elected as its president Chen Shui-bian of the Democratic Progressive Party, which believes in a formal declaration of independence for the island. This ended 54 years of Nationalist rule and alarmed China, which demanded a firm commitment to the 'One China principle'.
Reelected by the narrowest of margins in 2004, Chen's second term as ROC president has been marked by scandals involving family members and island-wide protests that have widely gridlocked the government. If he's not impeached beforehand, Chen's constitutionally barred from seeking a third term in 2008.
The question of Taiwan's future vis-à-vis China looms large. While political leaders from one side creep slowly towards codifying the island's de facto independence (renaming state-run departments and buildings to include the word 'Taiwan' rather than 'China', and removing Chiang Kai-shek statues from public spaces), those from the other camp have been making highly publicised pilgrimages to the mainland in order to create a framework for eventual unification. In the middle stand those who'd prefer to keep the status quo, neither admitting nor denying either Taiwan's independence from, or inclusion within, the greater Chinese nation. If and how the situation will be resolved in the coming years is anyone's guess.
Pre 20th Century History
Little archaeological evidence remains from Taiwan's early history. People - probably from Austronesia (though there is serious speculation that Taiwan is the origin of all Austronesian peoples) - are thought to have inhabited the island since 10,000 BC with migration from China occurring much later in the 15th century. In 1517 Portuguese sailors reached Taiwan and named it Ilha Formosa (Beautiful Island). The Dutch invaded in 1624 and built a capital at Tainan - two years later they lost the island to a Spanish invasion but returned the favour by booting the Spanish out in 1641. During the 1660s the Ming and Manchu (Qing) dynasties arrived on the scene, kicking out the Dutch and wrestling one another for control of the island. The Manchus eventually won, making Taiwan a county of Fujian province and triggering a flood of Chinese immigration. At the end of the 19th century, the Japanese decided to weigh in as well: Taiwan was ceded to them in 1895 following China's defeat in the Sino-Japanese War. The Japanese quashed a republican rebellion organised by the local Chinese population and went on to establish a military base on the island and to promote education and economic development. After Japan's defeat at the end of WWII, Taiwan was handed back to China.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
狗十戒
打动人心的“狗十戒”
1.请对我耐心一点。
2.请你相信我，只要这样我就感到很幸福了。
3.请不要忘记我也有心。
4.我不听你的话是有原因的。
5.请多和我说说话，虽然我不会说人类的语言，但我能明白你的意思。
6.别打我，请别忘了如果要动起真格来我比你厉害。
7.如果我老了，请照顾我。
8.我只能活十年左右，所以请尽量和我在一起。
9.你能去上学、有很多朋友，但我只有你。
10.当我死的时候，请陪伴在我身边，请你记住，我永远爱你
1.请对我耐心一点。
2.请你相信我，只要这样我就感到很幸福了。
3.请不要忘记我也有心。
4.我不听你的话是有原因的。
5.请多和我说说话，虽然我不会说人类的语言，但我能明白你的意思。
6.别打我，请别忘了如果要动起真格来我比你厉害。
7.如果我老了，请照顾我。
8.我只能活十年左右，所以请尽量和我在一起。
9.你能去上学、有很多朋友，但我只有你。
10.当我死的时候，请陪伴在我身边，请你记住，我永远爱你
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
chen shui-bian detained 11-10-2008 by KMT
Detained Chen in Taiwan hospital
 Earlier in the day Mr Chen was dramatically led away in handcuffs |
A court proceeding against Taiwan's former President Chen Shui-bian has been suspended after he asked to be taken to hospital.
Mr Chen told the judges he needed treatment after being pushed earlier in the day, opposition lawmaker Lai Ching-teh told reporters.
Earlier, Mr Chen was detained by prosecutors questioning him over corruption charges.
The charges relate to his eight years in office, which ended in May.
He is accused of money laundering and illegally using a special presidential fund.
He denies any wrongdoing, and accuses the new administration of persecuting him to bow to the wishes of Beijing.
Mr Chen is an ardent supporter of Taiwanese independence, and a trenchant critic of President Ma Ying-jeou's Kuomintang (KMT) administration, which he accuses of pandering to Beijing.
His detention comes days after a historic visit to the island by a senior Chinese envoy was marred by violent protests.
'Pushed from behind'
The former leader was in court for a hearing to decide whether his detention earlier in the day by prosecutors should be formally approved.
 |   The KMT and the Chinese Communist Party see me as their number one prisoner as I am the biggest stone blocking their way to reunification  Chen Shui-bian  |
"The former president told the judges that he was pushed from behind while being escorted out of the prosecutors' office, and demanded that he be sent to the National Taiwan University Hospital to examine his injuries," Mr Lai told reporters, according to the AFP news agency.
"The judges have taken seriously the former president's complaints and decided to suspend the hearing," Mr Lai said.
There were no more details on the type of injury Mr Chen may have sustained.
Earlier on Tuesday, Mr Chen had spent more than six hours in the prosecutors' office answering questions about corruption before he was dramatically handcuffed and led to a waiting car.
'A sacrifice'
As he was led out, he put his handcuffed hands in the air and shouted "political persecution" to an audience of dozens of protesting supporters.
"The KMT and the Chinese Communist Party see me as their number one prisoner as I am the biggest stone blocking their way to reunification," Mr Chen reportedly said.
He said the Chinese envoy, Chen Yunlin, "had a bad time in Taiwan... so Ma Ying-jeou wants to put me in jail as a sacrifice to appease China. I am very honoured and proud to play such a role."
Mr Chen and his family have been mired in corruption allegations since 2006, when his son-in-law was charged with insider trading on the stock market and then jailed for seven years.
The former president is under investigation for allegedly embezzling 14.8 million Taiwan dollars (US$480,500; £306,000) from the government.
The charges have damaged the reputation of the main opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), observers say, which now faces a rough ride in local elections next year.
Taiwan has been ruled separately since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949; the defeated Kuomintang retreated to Taiwan to create a self-governing entity.
But Beijing sees the island as a breakaway province which should be reunified with the mainland, by force if necessary.
Bookmark with:
Monday, November 10, 2008
你的身體需要那種水果
你的身體需要哪種水果
頭髮 染髮燙髮－－酪梨染髮燙髮過易奪走頭髮的水分和油脂，頭髮變得乾枯。成熟的酪梨中含有30的珍貴植物油脂－－油酸，對乾枯的頭髮有特殊功效。
大腦 過度用腦－－香蕉過度用腦導致人體內維生素、礦物質及熱量缺乏，除了大腦疲憊，還常常感到情緒低落。此時補充香蕉可提供所需營養物質並緩解消極情緒。由於過度用腦消耗多種維生素，因此營養師建議同時補充善存等多維生素片。
眼睛 過度用眼－－木瓜長時間盯著電腦屏幕或電視屏幕，過度用眼，則視網膜感光所依靠的關鍵物質維生素A大量消耗，眼睛感到乾燥、疼痛、怕光，甚至視力下降。此時就需要食用可提供大量維生素A的木瓜。
牙齦 牙齦出血－－奇異果牙齦健康與維生素C息息相關。缺乏維生素C的人牙齦變得脆弱，常常出血、腫脹，甚至引起牙齒鬆動。奇異果的維生素C含量是水果中最豐富的，因此是最有益於牙齦健康的水果。
心臟 心臟病史－－葡萄柚膽固醇過高嚴重影響心血管健康，尤其有心臟病史者，更要注意控制體內膽固醇指標。葡萄柚是醫學界公認最具食療功效的水果，其瓣膜所含天然果膠能降低體內膽固醇，預防多種心血管疾病。
肺臟 長期吸煙－－葡萄
長期吸煙的肺部積聚大量毒素，功能受損。葡萄中所含有效成分能提高細胞新陳代謝率，幫助肺部細胞排毒。另外，葡萄還具有祛痰作用，並能緩解因吸煙引起的呼吸道發炎、癢痛等不適症狀。
肌肉 肌肉拉傷－－菠蘿肌肉拉傷後，組織發炎、血液循環不暢，受傷部位紅腫熱痛。菠蘿所含的菠蘿蛋白成分具有消炎作用, 可促進組織修復，還能加快新陳代謝、改善血液循環、快速消腫，是此時身體最需要的水果。
皮膚 預防皺紋－－芒果若皮膚膠原蛋白彈性不足就容易出現皺紋。芒果是預防皺紋的最佳水果，因為含有豐富的β－胡蘿蔔素和獨一無二的，能激發肌膚細胞活力，促進廢棄物排出，有助於保持膠原蛋白彈性，有效延緩皺紋出現。
血液 供氧不足－－櫻桃容易疲勞在多數情況下與血液中鐵含量減少，供氧不足及血液循環不暢有關。吃櫻桃能補充鐵質，其中含量豐富的維生素C還能促進身體吸收鐵質，防止鐵質流失，並改善血液循環，幫助抵抗疲勞。腳部 腳氣困擾－－柳橙體內缺乏維生素B1的人容易有腳氣困擾。這種情況下最適合選擇柳橙，它富含維生素B1，並幫助葡萄糖新陳代謝，能有效預防和治療腳氣病。
頭髮 染髮燙髮－－酪梨染髮燙髮過易奪走頭髮的水分和油脂，頭髮變得乾枯。成熟的酪梨中含有30的珍貴植物油脂－－油酸，對乾枯的頭髮有特殊功效。
大腦 過度用腦－－香蕉過度用腦導致人體內維生素、礦物質及熱量缺乏，除了大腦疲憊，還常常感到情緒低落。此時補充香蕉可提供所需營養物質並緩解消極情緒。由於過度用腦消耗多種維生素，因此營養師建議同時補充善存等多維生素片。
眼睛 過度用眼－－木瓜長時間盯著電腦屏幕或電視屏幕，過度用眼，則視網膜感光所依靠的關鍵物質維生素A大量消耗，眼睛感到乾燥、疼痛、怕光，甚至視力下降。此時就需要食用可提供大量維生素A的木瓜。
牙齦 牙齦出血－－奇異果牙齦健康與維生素C息息相關。缺乏維生素C的人牙齦變得脆弱，常常出血、腫脹，甚至引起牙齒鬆動。奇異果的維生素C含量是水果中最豐富的，因此是最有益於牙齦健康的水果。
心臟 心臟病史－－葡萄柚膽固醇過高嚴重影響心血管健康，尤其有心臟病史者，更要注意控制體內膽固醇指標。葡萄柚是醫學界公認最具食療功效的水果，其瓣膜所含天然果膠能降低體內膽固醇，預防多種心血管疾病。
肺臟 長期吸煙－－葡萄
長期吸煙的肺部積聚大量毒素，功能受損。葡萄中所含有效成分能提高細胞新陳代謝率，幫助肺部細胞排毒。另外，葡萄還具有祛痰作用，並能緩解因吸煙引起的呼吸道發炎、癢痛等不適症狀。
肌肉 肌肉拉傷－－菠蘿肌肉拉傷後，組織發炎、血液循環不暢，受傷部位紅腫熱痛。菠蘿所含的菠蘿蛋白成分具有消炎作用, 可促進組織修復，還能加快新陳代謝、改善血液循環、快速消腫，是此時身體最需要的水果。
皮膚 預防皺紋－－芒果若皮膚膠原蛋白彈性不足就容易出現皺紋。芒果是預防皺紋的最佳水果，因為含有豐富的β－胡蘿蔔素和獨一無二的，能激發肌膚細胞活力，促進廢棄物排出，有助於保持膠原蛋白彈性，有效延緩皺紋出現。
血液 供氧不足－－櫻桃容易疲勞在多數情況下與血液中鐵含量減少，供氧不足及血液循環不暢有關。吃櫻桃能補充鐵質，其中含量豐富的維生素C還能促進身體吸收鐵質，防止鐵質流失，並改善血液循環，幫助抵抗疲勞。腳部 腳氣困擾－－柳橙體內缺乏維生素B1的人容易有腳氣困擾。這種情況下最適合選擇柳橙，它富含維生素B1，並幫助葡萄糖新陳代謝，能有效預防和治療腳氣病。
Monday, November 03, 2008
Ann Dunham
Ann Dunham
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Anne Dunham" redirects here. For the British equestrian, see Anne Dunham (equestrian).
| Ann Dunham | |
 Photo of Ann Dunham, circa 1971 | |
| Born | Stanley Ann Dunham November 29, 1942 Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, US |
|---|---|
| Died | November 7, 1995 (aged 52) Honolulu, Hawaii, US |
| Cause of death | Ovarian and uterine cancer |
| Resting place | Pacific Ocean |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | B.A., M.A., Ph.D.[1] |
| Alma mater | University of Hawaii |
| Occupation | Rural development |
| Home town | Wichita, Kansas |
| Spouse(s) | Barack Obama (Sr.) (1961–1964) (divorced) Lolo Soetoro (c. 1967–1980) (divorced) |
| Children | Barack Obama Maya Soetoro-Ng |
| Parents | Madelyn and Stanley Dunham |
Dr. Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro (November 29, 1942 – November 7, 1995), known as Ann Dunham, and later as Ann Sutoro[1] was an anthropologist who specialized in rural development. Born in Kansas, Dunham spent her teenage years in Mercer Island near Seattle, Washington, and much of her adult life in Hawaii. She is the mother of United States Senator and 2008 Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.[2]
Contents[hide] |
[edit] Early life
Ann Dunham was born in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas[3] while her father was in the Army.[4] She was named after her father,[3] who reportedly gave his daughter and only child his name because he had wanted a boy; however, she was referred to as "Ann."[5]
Her parents, Stanley Armour Dunham and Madelyn Dunham, met in Wichita, Kansas, and married on May 5, 1940.[6] She had Cherokee, English and Irish heritage from her parents. She was a distant cousin of Vice President Dick Cheney.[7]
After the Pearl Harbor attack her father joined the Army and her mother worked at a Boeing plant in Wichita.[3] At the end of World War II she moved with her parents to California, Texas, and Seattle, Washington, where her father was a furniture salesman and her mother worked for a bank. The family moved to Mercer Island, Washington, in 1956 so that 13-year old Ann could attend the Mercer Island high school that had just opened,[5] where teachers Val Foubert and Jim Wichterman taught the importance of challenging societal norms and questioning authority. Dunham took the lessons to heart; "She felt she didn't need to date or marry or have children." A classmate remembers her as "intellectually way more mature than we were and a little bit ahead of her time, in an off-center way."[5] One high school friend described her as: "If you were concerned about something going wrong in the world, Stanley [Ann] would know about it first ... We were liberals before we knew what liberals were." Another called her "the original feminist."[5]
[edit] Move to Hawaii and first marriage
In 1960 Dunham's parents moved to Hawaii to pursue further business opportunities in the new state. She soon enrolled at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where she studied mathematics and later anthropology. She met Barack Obama Sr., a student from Kenya and the school's first African student, in a Russian language class at the University.[2] When they became engaged, both sets of parents opposed the marriage, with Obama's father Hussein Onyango Obama in particular objecting. Nevertheless, the couple married on February 2, 1961 in Maui, Hawaii, after discovering she was pregnant.[5][1] On August 4, 1961, at age 18, she gave birth to her first child in Honolulu, named Barack Obama II.[8]
Dunham left school to care for the baby, while Obama Sr. completed his degree. He graduated from the University of Hawaii in June 1962, leaving shortly thereafter to travel to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he would begin graduate study at Harvard University in the fall.[9] Later that summer, Dunham and the year-old baby Barack stopped to visit her friends in Mercer Island[9][10][11] before joining Obama Sr. in Cambridge. However, mother and son soon returned to Seattle, where she enrolled in the University of Washington.[10][9] Dunham, missing her family, then moved back to Hawaii[10] and filed for divorce in Honolulu in January 1964. Obama Sr. did not contest, and the divorce was granted.[1] Obama Sr. received a Masters degree (AM) in economics from Harvard in 1965[12] and only saw their son again once, in 1971, when Barack was 10 years old.
In an interview, Senator Obama referred to his mother as "the dominant figure in my formative years...The values she taught me continue to be my touchstone when it comes to how I go about the world of politics."[5]
[edit] Second marriage
A few years later, Dunham met an Indonesian student, Lolo Soetoro (ca. 1936-1987), at the East-West Center on the University of Hawaii campus.[13] They married in 1967 and moved to Jakarta, Indonesia, after the unrest surrounding the ascent of Suharto,[2] where he worked as a government relations consultant with Mobil Corporation, the U.S.-based international petroleum company.[14][15]
Soetoro and Dunham had a daughter, Maya Kassandra Soetoro, on August 15, 1970.[6]
In Indonesia, Dunham enriched her son's education with correspondence courses in English, recordings of Mahalia Jackson, and speeches by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. When the young Obama asked to return to Hawaii for high school rather than stay in Asia with her, she agreed, despite the decision being painful for her.[2] Madelyn Dunham's job as a vice-president at The Bank of Hawaii helped pay the steep tuition at Punahou School,[16] with some assistance from a scholarship.[17]
In the 1970s, as Dunham wished to return to work, Soetoro wanted more children. "He became more American," she once said, "as she became more Javanese."[2] Ann Dunham left Soetoro in 1972, returning to Hawaii and reuniting with her son Barack for several years. Soetoro and Dunham saw each other periodically in the 1970s when Dunham returned to Indonesia for her fieldwork[2] but did not live together again. They divorced in 1980.[18]
[edit] Later life
Dunham was not estranged from either ex-husband, and encouraged her children to feel connected to their fathers. She returned to graduate school in Honolulu in 1974, while raising Barack and Maya. When Dunham returned to Indonesia for field work in 1977 with Maya, Barack chose not to go, preferring to finish high school in the United States.[2]
Having been a weaver, Dunham was interested in village industries, therefore moved to Yogyakarta, the center of Javanese handicrafts.[19] In 1992 she earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Hawaii, under the supervision of Prof. Alice Dewey, with a dissertation titled Peasant blacksmithing in Indonesia: surviving and thriving against all odds.[20] Dunham then pursued a career in rural development championing women’s work and microcredit for the world’s poor, with Indonesia’s oldest bank, the United States Agency for International Development, the Ford Foundation, Women’s World Banking, and as a consultant in Pakistan. She mingled with leaders from organizations supporting Indonesian human rights, women's rights, and grass-roots development.[2]
In 1994, Ann Dunham was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and uterine cancer; she moved back to Hawaii to live near her widowed mother.[2] She died there in 1995 at the age of 52.[21][22] Following a memorial service at the University of Hawaii, Barack and his half-sister, Maya, spread Ann's ashes in the Pacific Ocean on the south side of Oahu.[2]
[edit] Religion
An acquaintance from high school has said that Dunham "touted herself as an atheist, and it was something she'd read about and could argue."[5]
Maya Soetoro-Ng, when asked if her mother was an atheist, said, "I wouldn't have called her an atheist. She was an agnostic. She basically gave us all the good books — the Bible, the Hindu Upanishads and the Buddhist scripture, the Tao Te Ching — and wanted us to recognise that everyone has something beautiful to contribute."[23] "Jesus, she felt, was a wonderful example. But she felt that a lot of Christians behaved in un-Christian ways."[24]
In his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father Barack Obama wrote, "My mother's confidence in needlepoint virtues depended on a faith I didn't possess... In a land [Indonesia] where fatalism remained a necessary tool for enduring hardship... she was a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism."[25] In his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope Obama wrote, "I was not raised in a religious household... My mother's own experiences... only reinforced this inherited skepticism. Her memories of the Christians who populated her youth were not fond ones... And yet for all her professed secularism, my mother was in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that I've ever known."[26] Religion for her was "just one of the many ways — and not necessarily the best way — that man attempted to control the unknowable and understand the deeper truths about our lives," Obama wrote.[24] In 2007 Obama described his mother as "a Christian from Kansas." "I was raised by my mother," he continued. "So, I’ve always been a Christian."[27][28] Also in 2007, he said in a speech, "My mother, whose parents were nonpracticing Baptists and Methodists, was one of the most spiritual souls I ever knew. But she had a healthy skepticism of religion as an institution."[1]
[edit] 2008 presidential campaign ad
A photograph of Dunham holding a young Obama was included in a 30-second television advertisement called "Mother".[22] Obama says in the ad, which focuses on his calls for health care improvements, that his mother spent her final months "more worried about paying her medical bills than getting well."[22]
Barack Obama Biography
Barack Obama Biography
By BarackObama.net Staff
Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 4, 1961.
The name “Barack” means “one who is blessed.” And when Barack was young his family and friends called this blessed young boy “Barry” for short.
His father, Barack Obama, Sr., was from Kenya, and his mother, Ann Dunham, was from Kansas. His parents met at the University of Honolulu when they were students (his father was attending on scholarship).
Barack’s parents separated when he was two years old and then divorced when he was four, and his father eventually returned to Kenya. His mother later married another foreign student, Lolo Soetoro, who was from Indonesia; and in 1967, Barack moved with his new stepfather and mother to Jakarta, where he lived from age six to ten.
When Barack was ten, he returned to Honolulu and lived with his grandparents, who took over parenting duties. While in Honolulu, Barack attended the renowned Punahou School until he graduated in 1979.
During this period, Barack was able to see his biological father, who returned to Honolulu for a brief visit in 1971. Sadly, that would be their last meeting as his father died in an automobile accident in 1982. (Barack would lose his mother to cancer 1995.)
After his 1979 high school graduation, Barack moved to Los Angeles to attend Occidental College. He studied there for two years and then transferred to Columbia University in New York City, where he majored in Political Science and received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1983.
After graduation, Barack worked in New York at Business International Corporation and New York Public Interest Research Group before returning to Chicago, where he became a community organizer with a church-based group which worked to improve living conditions in poor neighborhoods.
He entered Harvard Law School in 1988, where he was elected the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review in its 104-year history. He went on to receive his J.D. degree from Harvard in 1991 with magna cum laude honors.
He then returned to Chicago, directed a voter registration drive, and soon became a civil rights attorney and a lecturer on constitutional law; and in 1992, married the love of his life, Michelle.
And it was in Chicago in 1995 that Barack released his first best-selling book: “Dreams from My Father.” He was offered the book contract shortly after becoming the president of the Harvard Law Review. The book is a compelling memoir of his life.
Barack’s political career began with his election to the Illinois Senate in 1996, where he would serve from 1997 to 2004. In 2000, he ran an unsuccessful campaign for a seat in the House of Representatives, but would go on to run for the U.S. Senate a few years later.
And while Barack was running for U.S. Senate, he was presented with the opportunity of a lifetime: to give the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston. And it was at that convention that Barack gave one of the most inspiring and moving political speeches ever delivered, and by the time the speech was over, Barack became a political heavyweight and an instant celebrity.
Barack went on to win his U.S. Senate race in a landslide, capturing 70% of the votes. And, riding a wave of strong popularity, published his second best-selling book in 2006, “The Audacity of Hope,” which expanded on the issues he touched on in his 2004 DNC speech.
On February 10, 2007, Barack Obama announced his candidacy for president of the United States.
But of all of Barack’s achievements, nothing has made him prouder than becoming a father to his two wonderful girls: Malia (born 1999), and Sasha (born 2001).
We love you and support you Barack Obama!Barack Obama's Parents
Barack Obama's Parents
Barack Obama's biological father, Barack Obama, Sr.
(Barack Obama, Sr. was from Kenya.)
Barack Obama's biological father, Barack Obama, Sr.
Barack Obama’s biological mother, Ann Dunham
holding a very young Barack Obama
(Ann Dunham was from Kansas.)
Barack Obama’s stepfather Lolo Soetoro; biological mother Ann Dunham;
and half-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng
(Ann Dunham married Lolo Soetoro, from Indonesia, after she and Barack Sr. were divorced. Barack lived with his stepfather and mother in Indonesia from age 6 - 10.)
Barack Obama's Grandparents
(When Barack returned to Hawaii at age 10, he lived with his grandparents.)
Microsoft Research Redmond Research in Software Engineering
New Area in Microsoft Research: Looking for a RiSE in Developer Productivity
By Rob Knies
Related Links |
In the summer of 2008, the leadership at Microsoft Research Redmond reorganized an existing set of research groups with a refreshed, more encompassing mandate: reinventing all aspects of software development. The revamped area, Research in Software Engineering (RiSE), headed by Wolfram Schulte, includes a diverse set of topics such as experimental software engineering, human interactions in programming, software reliability, programming-language design and implementation, and theorem proving. He recently found time to discuss the new area and the challenges it is addressing:
Q: How is RiSE going to address all of those topics?
Schulte: As our Web site shows, you’ll see that it is organized into 10 broad research areas, ranging from the development process itself all the way to the underlying runtimes and system software the code eventually runs on. Our research projects span multiple areas. The important thing is to address the set of current challenges we see: global software development, multicore and Web concurrency, reliability, security, and energy-efficient computing. These challenges are interdependent and so their solutions must be as well.
Q: Concurrency is a hot topic these days. What is RiSE doing in that area?
Schulte: With multicore machines, most of our programs are parallel. Today, we need a way to express parallelism, and we need analysis tools to find errors related to concurrency.
Wolfram Schulte
To give .NET programmers a much more reliable way to program multi-core machines, Daan Leijen recently developed a library of high level concurrency abstractions, called the Task Parallel Library (TPL), which will ship as part of the Parallel Extensions to .NET in .NET 4.0.
Now that we can express parallelism, we need to have analysis tools to make sure there are no races, deadlocks, or performance bottlenecks. To address some of these problems, Madan Musuvathi and Shaz Qadeer have developed CHESS, which uncovers data races by controlling the scheduler for the different threads in a program. CHESS will be presented during the Professional Developers Conference [PDC].
But in the long run, our existing concurrency models of programming, with threads and locks, are not adequate. If you think about the way that our abstractions have evolved, we started with assembly language, we went to C, and we have managed languages today. Threads and locks should be seen as the assembly-language level. We need better abstractions and are looking to do more here.
Q: Static analysis has always been a strong point of MSR. What is new in that area?
Schulte: Yes, we have had a lot of success in static analysis. For instance, Tom Ball and colleagues built the Static Driver Verifier toolkit, which helps eliminate blue screens from drivers in Windows and improves the reliability of the platform. Manuel Fähndrich contributed to the SAL project, the annotation language for the static checkers PREfix and PREfast, which won Microsoft’s Chairman’s Award for Excellence in Engineering in 2007. Rustan Leino has led the Spec# project, a research effort that has created the world’s leading program-verification system for object-oriented programming.
Now, a spinoff from our previous work is making its way into .NET. At PDC, the Code Contracts project will be shown. It has been developed in part by Mike Barnett and Francesco Logozzo. It provides a language-independent way for programmers to record their design decisions for any .NET language. We then have tools that mine those contracts to generate proper documentation, to check them at runtime, or even to statically verify code relative to the contracts. In a sense, code contracts and the associated tools act as grammar checking for programmers, while today’s compilers are like spell checkers.
Q: What does the virtual team for testing work on?
Schulte: Testing is in desperate need of automation: It continues to cost as much as 50 percent of the development effort. We have recently combined automated testing with static analysis based on research Patrice Godefroid started while he was at Bell Labs.
Another PDC presentation will be the Pex project, headed by Nikolai Tillmann and Peli de Halleux. Pex builds on Patrice’s ideas and brings them to a new level. It performs an intelligent exploration of software to systematically discover its behavior, thereby forcing it into the possibly faulty corner cases that manual testing is often unable to find. Even without guidance, Pex often automatically reaches high code coverage. As a side effect, Pex immediately generates concrete test cases. The test cases can be used for immediate debugging or as regression suites.
Q: What does the virtual team for experimental software engineering look at?
Schulte: This is an interesting virtual team because it spans two Microsoft Research labs. It includes Nachi Nagappan in Redmond and Brendan Murphy of Microsoft Research Cambridge. They measure Microsoft’s internal software-development process to make better predictions on how the next similar project will run. The team analyzes the development process and resulting software artifacts to understand how likely it is that a particular piece of code still has defects. If you do those analyses and have the right statistical models, you can also do better risk estimation and resource allocation. Their focus is not just at the software-system level, but also, more holistically, at the team/project level, for instance, the impact of organizational structure on software quality.
Q: This all sounds very applied. Are any teams looking at more foundational issues?
Schulte: Certainly! But foundations often pay off in very applied ways. We are doing amazing work on automated theorem proving. Nikolaj Bjørner and Leo de Moura have created Z3, which has won most of the categories in the worldwide competition for Satisfiability Modulo Theorem solvers. This is not only a theoretical achievement, but also provides the underlying engine for most of our program analysis and testing tools.
A true foundational result is recent work by Yuri Gurevich: he has solved a logic problem that has been open for more than 70 years. Yuri has proven Church’s thesis, which tries to rigorously define what computability means.
Q: People in your area are also looking at the human side of programming. What is the research there?
Schulte: Ultimately, our code is all developed by people. If we don’t understand how people collaborate with their teammates, we might miss a huge opportunity to help the overall development process.
Previous work by Rob DeLine and his team has had impact by mining all of the information related to a development project to help new developers who have just joined a product team. During PDC, Andrew Begel will show one incarnation of this work, Deep Intellisense.
One interesting future question is: How can we develop a code base when engineers are distributed over different locations and over different time zones? It’s the question of global software development. Can we provide tools to enable them to work as if they were in the next room?
Q: Then you have a virtual team looking at programming languages themselves. What is going on there?
Schulte: You can either create a new programming language or impose rules for using an existing programming language. We are working on both.
For members of the RiSE group, the passion to improve software engineering runs red-hot.
Programmers appreciate type systems because they provide partial guarantees for your program, for instance, that the variables only hold values of a proper type. But the type systems for existing languages such as C# and Visual Basic are very restrictive. We are exploring much more expressive type systems. For instance, we can guarantee that processes have to obey a certain protocol if they want to exchange messages with each other. The Singularity project followed this approach with the static analysis enabled by type system extensions to C#.
But we also need to address all the systems already written. In fact, we can improve them a lot just by changing the underlying runtime systems. Using the traditional engineering techniques of redundancy and randomization, Ben Zorn has created RobustHeap, a memory allocator resilient against buffer overruns. Trishul Chilimbi uses program analysis from the performance point of view. He has built various low-overhead profiler and data-relocation tools that help find performance bottlenecks in code, whether it’s sequential code or contention problems in concurrent code. And he is focused on extending this work to improve software energy efficiency.
Q: Another hot topic these days is Web programming. Are you looking into that?
We have three great projects that will be presented during PDC. Ben Livshits and Emre Kıcıman have developed AjaxView, the first system that provides a view of the overall performance of a Web application. This includes the server, the client, and the latency on the wire in between. They also developed Doloto, which rewrites a JavaScript application so that individual pieces can be downloaded on demand, thus reducing the wait before a Web application can begin running. Finally, there is BAM, developed by Ethan Jackson, which enables cloud applications to be specified as logic programs independently from implementation technologies and service connectivity. Complete, runnable, programs are then generated with the single push of a button.
Q: How would you like to engage the research community outside of Microsoft?
Schulte: We already have lots of interactions with the academic community. We host many visiting researchers and Ph.D. interns. We participate in conferences and co-author papers with researchers outside of Microsoft. But I would also like to have more interaction with the broader developer and tester community.
Q: Your team is playing a larger role in this year’s PDC. What are your goals for that event?
Schulte: The most important goal is engaging in a discussion with developers who work on the Microsoft platform. Going to academic conferences, we get a lot of exposure to one set of people, but not to those people who would just like to use our research ideas without necessarily going into the details. They just want to see how they work. By going to the PDC, we hope we can attract lots of developers and testers and engage with them in a discussion about whether they like what they are seeing. Maybe we misunderstand their main problem. Maybe it’s the build system, not the programming environment per se, that is the most difficult to use for them. That might reprioritize our research efforts.
We’ll have several tools as downloads available for the PDC, either from DevLabs, where prototype tools for Microsoft Visual Studio can be downloaded and explored, or from the Microsoft Research Web site, where we make tools available for non-commercial use to get feedback.
Q: With the RiSE initiative, how long will it take before you can evaluate what you have accomplished? What are you hoping to see once you get there?
Schulte: We believe we can make major advances in each of the research areas we are looking at. For instance, in concurrency we think that a new programming model will emerge that can guarantee programs will behave correctly by construction. For testing, we think we can extend the impact we have had on finding security bugs for codecs to whole applications.
Research isn’t on a time schedule. Addressing the right research questions, then coming up with solutions, and then looking for opportunities to harness those ideas—that’s what we would like to do.
Article from microsoft reseach 11-03-2008
The computer, once a tool for scientists, is becoming a collaborator
It's not just a tool serving science anymore. It's becoming a part of the science.
Computer science -- it's not just about hardware and software anymore.
It's about oceans, stars, cancer cells, proteins and networks of friends. Ken Birman, a computer science professor at Cornell University, says his discipline is on the way to becoming "the universal science," a framework underpinning all others, including the social sciences.
An extravagant claim from someone with a vested interest? The essence of Birman's assertion is that computers have gone from being a tool serving science -- basically an improvement on the slide rule and abacus -- to being part of the science. Consider these recent developments:
"Systems biologists" at Harvard Medical School have developed a "computational language" called "Little b" for modeling biological processes. Going beyond the familiar logical, arithmetic and control constructs of most languages, it reasons about biological data, learns from it, and incorporates past learning into new models and predictors of cells' behaviors. Its creators call it a "scientific collaborator."
Microsoft Research (MSR) is supporting a U.S.-Canadian consortium building an enormous underwater observatory on the Juan de Fuca Plate off the coast of Washington state. Project Neptune will connect thousands of chemical, geological and biological sensors on more than 1,000 miles of fiber-optic cables and will stream data continuously to scientists for as long as a decade. Researchers will be able to test their theories by looking at the data, but software tools that MSR is developing will search for patterns and events not anticipated by scientists and present their findings to the scientists.
Last year, researchers from Harvard Medical School and the University of California, San Diego, used statistical analysis to mine heart-disease data from 12,000 people in the Framingham Heart Study and learned that obesity appears to spread via social ties. They were able to construct social networks by employing previously unused information about acquaintances that had been gathered solely for the purpose of locating subjects during the 32-year study.
Computer scientists and plant biologists at Cornell developed algorithms to build and analyze 3-D maps of tomato proteins. They discovered the "plumping" factor that is responsible for the evolution of the tomato from a small berry to the big fruit we eat today. Researchers then devised an algorithm for matching 3-D shapes and used it to determine that the tomato-plumping gene fragment closely resembles an oncogene associated with human cancers. That work would have taken decades without computer science, researchers say.
While these applications might seem to have little in common, they represent a class of scientific problems involving experimental data that is voluminous and complex. In fact, the raw information is so overwhelming that scientists are often at a loss to know where to begin to make sense of it. Computer science is pointing the way.
"A trend that is becoming increasingly clear is that computer science is not just a discipline that provides computational tools to scientists," says Jon Kleinberg, a Cornell professor who won a MacArthur "genius" grant in 2005 for his work on social networks. "It actually becomes part of the way in which scientists build theories and think about their own problems."
Kleinberg, who discovered the underlying rules that govern the widely publicized "six degrees of separation" phenomenon, says that computer algorithms will be to science in the 21st century what mathematics was in the 20th century. He says tackling a problem algorithmically allows scientists to change the question from "what is" to "how to," he says.
For example, the "small world" principle -- in which any two people are connected by short chains of acquaintances -- was demonstrably true, but no one understood just how these chains worked or why they were so short. "Looking at it as a computer scientist, I saw there was really an algorithm going on, a subtle algorithm based on distributed routing," Kleinberg says. His predictions about how friendships are formed at different distances, based on those algorithms, have been borne out by experiments.
In another example, biologists struggled with something called the Leventhal Paradox: From an astronomical number of possibilities, proteins fold in the optimum way far faster than can be explained by trial and error. Biologists and computer scientists working together developed algorithms that in essence showed how the proteins find shortcuts to optimum folds without trying every possibility. "That turned out to be a very nice 'how to' problem," Kleinberg says.
Tony Hey, Microsoft Corp.'s vice president for external research, speaks of "e-science," a set of technologies for supporting scientific projects where there is a huge amount of data (often distributed), the data and multiple collaborators are networked, and multiple disciplines, including computer science, converge. These projects tend to be enormously complex, and sorting them out is what the tools, algorithms and theories of computer science can help do, he says.
Hey says a "fourth paradigm" in science is emerging. For thousands of years, we have had experimental science, he says. Since Newton, we have had theoretical science, by which experimental results can be predicted by equations. Then, in the second half of the 20th century, we added simulation science, enabled by fancier equations and supercomputers. Now, Hey says, we are entering the era of "data-centric science."
The essence of data-centric science is to aggregate data, often in large quantities and from multiple sources, and then mine it for insights that would never emerge from manual inspection or from analysis of any one data source. He cites as an example a project called Galaxy Zoo, in which the public was invited to help classify millions of galaxies as either spiral or elliptical based on a million detailed images posted online by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
The work behind Galaxy Zoo is simple, boring even, and the goal was just to establish a large-scale inventory that would help scientists derive theories about how galaxies evolve. But a year ago, a strange and wondrous thing happened. A high school teacher and Galaxy Zoo volunteer in the Netherlands discovered what would become known as Hanny's Voorwerp, an enigmatic object of a type never seen before. No one is sure just what the distant green cloud is -- perhaps an extremely rare type of quasar -- and it is now getting intense scrutiny from astronomers.
Roger Barga is a researcher at MSR who is developing tools for e-science, which he calls "in silico science -- science done inside the computer." He says two technological developments are driving e-science. "The first is that our ability to capture data -- through bigger machines, bigger colliders, more sensors and so on -- is outpacing our ability to analyze it by conventional means."
The second is the emergence of new tools for pattern recognition and machine learning -- algorithms that improve over time as they deal with more and more data, without human programming -- and other new ways to organize, access and mine vast amounts of data. For the Neptune ocean observatory, MSR is building a "scientific workflow workbench" on top of Microsoft Windows Workflow, to save, systematize and catalog all the data. It will help scientists visualize oceanographic data in real time and compose and conduct experiments.
The workbench work recognizes that it isn't enough to just analyze data. When data is distributed, complex and voluminous, just getting organized and keeping track of progress is a daunting job for the scientist. The days of microscope, pencil and notebook research are long gone.
Barga says e-science will profoundly affect the practice of science. "Scientists will have to ask themselves if they are theoreticians or bench scientists or one of these new computational scientists in their area. You'll see the branding of a new kind of scientist."
The availability of petabytes of data from the Internet will transform the practice of sciences involving human behavior, Kleinberg says. "For millennia, social interaction has been transient, ephemeral and essentially invisible to the standard techniques of scientific measurement," he says. "It's hard to go around measuring people's friendships and conversations, or why they make decisions. But now we have these digital trails that were never available before. Google is not just looking for simple correlations; all that data is being passed through very sophisticated probability models."
He says the vast data stores and analytical techniques now available mean that scientists no longer have to formulate detailed theories and models and then test them on experimental data. Sketchy ideas can be tried against the data, with the data and tools fleshing out the model, in effect collaborating with the researcher to develop a theory. "The mass of data lets you fill in the details whose broad outline you have created," he says. "Then you run massive amounts of data through it and discover that in the specifics, certain things matter much more than we thought and certain things much less."
Jeremy Gunawardena, director of the Virtual Cell Program at Harvard Medical School, says an emerging model of the cell likens it to a computer -- with inputs and outputs and logical decision-making processes.
"A number of biologists with significant stature in the field really feel this is the new way forward for biology," he says. "But we are still in the very early days."
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)