Wriujfd

17/05/2022

Society and its problems

As we live in a very modern society fully using the gifts of nature and technology it is not surprising, that we often observe different problems of people, who have lost the feeling of responsibility and humaneness. It concerns everybody, children and adults.

Children at schools no more play on the playgrounds, communicating with each other normally, help each other without waiting for something in response. They are playing virtual games, spending hours writing messages, watching movies and competing with each other on who has better clothes or cell phones. Moreover children had become more independent and self confident. It is good, that they know now their rights, but it is more than bad that they offend their parents, do not respect them and talk rudely to them.

Adults have their own problems, in spite of being more experienced and smart. Alcohol, drugs, gambling are their ways of escaping from responsibility, everyday life, resolving home problems. Most of crimes happen because of alcohol and drugs. So many children suffer from violence by their parents being drunk or drugged. So many illnesses exist just due to the usage of drugs and alcohol. There are so many deaths caused by this, and no one can reduce its rate for so many decades.

I think that we as modern humanity should take more pains to prevent our children from going this wrong way leading to nowhere, just death and pain. No one knows his destiny and future, but it is in our power to fight the distribution and usage of drugs and alcohol in the society, and especially among young people. We need the right authorities which will realize the responsibility for the people, and heaviness of this burden. Only together we can open the real future for our children.

17/05/2022

19/04/2022

How 'OK' took over the world

"OK" is one of the most frequently used and recognised words in the world.
We generally spell it OK - the spelling okay is relatively recent, and still relatively rare.
Ordinarily a word so odd, so distinctive from others, wouldn't be allowed in a language to begin with. As a general rule, a language allows new words only when they resemble familiar ones.
On 23 March 1839, OK was introduced to the world on the second page of the Boston Morning Post, in the midst of a long paragraph, as "o.k. (all correct)".
How this weak joke survived at all, instead of vanishing like its counterparts, is a matter of lucky coincidence involving the American presidential election of 1840.
One candidate was nicknamed Old Kinderhook, and there was a false tale that a previous American president couldn't spell properly and thus would approve documents with an "OK", thinking it was the abbreviation for "all correct". Both these facts served to make people remember "OK".
Within a decade, people began actually marking OK on documents and using OK on the telegraph to signal that all was well. So OK had found its niche, being easy to say or write and also distinctive enough to be clear.
But there was still only restricted use of OK. The misspelled abbreviation may have implied illiteracy to some, and OK was generally avoided in anything but business contexts, or in fictional dialogue by characters deemed to be rustic or illiterate.
Indeed, by and large American writers of fiction avoided OK altogether, even those like Mark Twain who freely used slang.
But in the 20th Century OK moved from margin to mainstream, gradually becoming a staple of nearly everyone's conversation, no longer looked on as illiterate or slang.
US President Woodrow Wilson, early in the 20th Century, lent his prestige by marking okeh on documents he approved. And soon OK was to find its place in many languages.
But what makes OK so useful that we incorporate it into so many conversations? What OK provided was neutrality, a way to affirm or to express agreement without having to offer an opinion.
And yet, despite its conquest of conversations the world over, there remain vast areas of language where OK is scarcely to be found.
You won't find OK in prepared speeches. Indeed, most formal speeches and reports are free of OK.
But OK still rules over the vast domain of our conversation.

18/04/2022

18/04/2022

Government computer blunders common

The FBI's failure to roll out an expanded computer system that would help agents investigate criminals and terrorists is the latest in a series of costly technology blunders by government over more than a decade.

Experts blame poor planning, rapid industry advances and the massive scope of some complex projects whose price tags can run into billions of dollars at U.S. agencies with tens of thousands of employees.

"There are very few success stories," said Paul Brubaker, former deputy chief information officer at the Pentagon. "Failures are very common, and they've been common for a long time."

The FBI said earlier this month it might shelve its custom-built, $170 million "Virtual Case File" project because it is inadequate and outdated. The system was intended to help agents, analysts and others around the world share information without using paper or time-consuming scanning of documents.

Officials said commercial software might accomplish some of what the FBI needs.

The bureau's mess -- the subject of an investigation by the Justice Department and an upcoming congressional hearing -- was the latest black eye among ambitious technology upgrades by the government since the 1990s.

The Internal Revenue Service sought $388 million last year for its $1.7 billion "Business System Modernization" program, which congressional investigators said continues to be over budget and 15 months late. The plan will modernize the IRS systems for collecting taxes, auditing returns and helping taxpayers with questions.

The Federal Aviation Administration has doubled its cost estimates to $1.69 billion for its "Standard Terminal Automation Replacement System" since 1996, according to the Transportation Department's inspector general. The new system would replace the outdated computers that control air traffic within five to 50 miles of airports.

While these are current examples, the problem has lingered for years.

"The government is just as inept in buying computers as it is in using them for accounting," declared a 1994 report, called "Computer Chaos," from a Senate Governmental Affairs subcommittee. "The system is indeed broken and it is time to fix it."

Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont , the senior Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, called the FBI's computer overhaul "a train wreck in slow motion." Critics said the FBI's case illustrated government's propensity to build its software from scratch, which can dramatically increase a project's complexity and cost.

"They do have a tendency to reinvent the wheel," said James X. Dempsey, an expert on national security for the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington-based civil liberties group.

Yet some industry experts praised the FBI for its decision, saying that its potential $170 million loss paled in comparison to other government technology blunders. They also noted that FBI Director Robert Mueller acted properly to pull the plug when he realized the system wouldn't work as envisioned.

"To the FBI's credit, it could have been worse," Brubaker said. "They should build off-ramps early in the process, so if they think things are going south, they can push the reset button."

Experts note some services, such as tracking terrorists, are unique to the federal government, making it unlikely that commercial products would work without extensive modification.

"If you're in the commercial sector, there is some possibility that a packaged application might serve your purpose," said Nancy Harvey, chief executive of TenFold Corp., a small Utah-based company that builds specialized computer systems. "But it's unlikely that Robert Mueller can find an off-the-shelf product called 'Find Terrorist.' He probably has to build the application he really needs."

Harvey and others said that while government technology blunders frequently make headlines, large-scale computer upgrades in the private industry fail almost as often. But these corporate blunders aren't publicized by congressional committees, federal investigators and inspectors general, they noted.

"Ever since there's been IT (information technology), there have been problems," said Allan Holmes, Washington bureau chief for CIO, a magazine published for information executives. "The private sector struggles with this as well. It's not just ... the federal government that ... can't get it right. This is difficult."

16/04/2022

British stereotypes

Brits are portrayed as class-conscious binge-drinkers utterly obsessed with the war. It's a thumbnail sketch, not the whole picture, writes Jonathan Freedland.

The stereotype is itself a stereotype. The European image of the Brit – either pukingly drunk football fan or snooty City gent, both living off past imperial glories, sullenly resenting being in Europe rather than ruling the world – is itself a cliche. Just as Brits know that every good Frenchman wears a striped shirt and beret, and that ruddy-faced Germans subsist on a diet of beer and sausage, so we know precisely what all those Europeans think of us.

And, sure enough, drink, class and the second world war all crop up in the thumbnail sketch of the British (Europeans tend to use "British" as a synonym for "English", rather forgetting the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish) provided by our colleagues across the Channel. It would be nice to say that our neighbours have us all wrong – but, sadly, cliches only become cliches if they are built on a foundation of truth.

Start with the bottle. Sure, we can cling to the statistics that show we are far from Europe's heaviest drinkers. In fact, the last round of OECD figures ranked us 11th in Europe for alcohol consumption, far behind France in first place, followed by Portugal and Austria. But while the French, German, Spanish and Italians are drinking much less than they did in 1980, Britons are drinking 9% more.

Still, it's not the volume of pints (or litres) consumed that has led to our boozy reputation. It's the way we drink that's the problem. The French figure may be high, but that's driven up by a lot of people drinking moderately: the glass or two of red at dinner. The British disease has even entered the French language: le binge drinking is the preferred phrase for vast, rapid consumption aimed solely at getting hammered. It's this falling-over, vomiting brand of drunkenness, visible in most city centres on a Friday night, that has become part of our national image. One study found that 54% of British 15- and 16-year-olds admit to binge drinking, compared to a European average of 43%. In other words, there is more than a little reality behind the image.

12/04/2022

12/04/2022

Fable

Fable brief allegorical narrative, in verse or prose, illustrating a moral thesis or satirizing human beings. The characters of a fable are usually animals who talk and act like people while retaining their animal traits. The oldest known fables are those in the Panchatantra, a collection of fables in Sanskrit, and those attributed to the Greek Aesop, perhaps the most famous of all fabulists.

Other important writers of fables include Jean de La Fontaine, whose fables are noted for their sophistication and wit, the Russian poet Ivan Krylov, and the German dramatist and critic Gotthold Lessing, who also wrote a critical essay on the fable. In England the tradition of the fable was continued in the 17th and 18th cent. by John Dryden and John Gay. The use of the fable in the 20th cent. can be seen in James Thurber's Fables for Our Time (1940) and in George Orwell's political allegory, Animal Farm (1945).

The American poet Marianne Moore wrote poems quite similar to fables in their use of animals and animal traits to comment on human experience; she also published an excellent translation of The Fables of La Fontaine (1954).

10/04/2022

In cosmology, the steady state theory is a model developed in 1949 by Fred Hoyle, Thomas Gold and others as an alternative to the Big Bang theory. Although the model had a large number of supporters among cosmologists in the 1950s and 1960s, the number of supporters decreased markedly in the late 1960s and today it is considered a non-standard cosmology. It is also the basis for another theory known as the quasi-steady state theory which postulates a lot of little big bangs occurring over time.

Steady state theory.

The steady state theory was developed as a result of theoretical calculations that showed that a static universe was impossible under general relativity and observations by Edwin Hubble that the universe was expanding. The steady state theory asserts that although the universe is expanding, it nevertheless does not change its look over time. For this to work, new matter must be formed to keep the density equal over time.

Because only very little matter needs to be formed, roughly a few hundred atoms of hydrogen in the Milky Way Galaxy each year, it is not a problem of the theory that the forming of matter is not observed directly. Despite violating conservation of mass, the steady state theory had a number of attractive features. Most notably, the theory removes the need for the universe to have a beginning.

08/04/2022

Тим часом, суть і головна мета ЗОЖ – не виконання загальних правил, а постійне відчуття себе здоровою, красивою, сповненою сил і енергії людиною.

Основні принципи, які дозволяють досягти цього відчуття:

🍏відмова від шкідливих звичок,
🍎правильне харчування,
🍐фізична активність,
🍊дотримання режиму дня, режиму праці та відпочинку,
🍋здоровий сон,
🍉добрий психологічний стан, позитивні емоції.