Lecture 10: Global Warming Film

FLASH GAMES

1/ACID FACTORY




2/COMMANDO

Lecture 9: The Truth About Biofuels in America

Lecture 8: Managing Nuclear Waste: The Illogic of Reprocessing

Author: Dr. Frank von Hipple, The Robert Strauss Center for International Security and Law

Lecture 7: The Economics of Climate Change: Risk, Ethics, a Global Deal

Author: Nicholas Stern, Stem Review report on the Economics of Climate change and IG Patel Professor of Economics and Government

Lecture 6: The State of the Oceans

Author: Jeremy Jackson

Description:
Jeremy Jackson, marine ecologist and environmental advocate, professor of oceanography at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, describes how overfishing, habitat destruction, global warming and other human-induced activities have contributed to a crisis in the health of the world's oceans

Lecture 5: UK Minister of Finance - Why Climate Change has to be a priority for the Treasury Department

Author: Angela Eagle , British Parliament



UK Minister of Finance - Why Climate Change has to be a priority for the Treasury Department

Angela Eagle

Lecture 4: UK Minister of Environment - Tackling the Environmental Issue

Author: Joan Ruddock , British Parliament



UK Minister of Environment - Tackling the Environmental Issue

Joan Ruddock

Lecture 3: Stanford Experts on Climate Change and Carbon Trading

Author: Thomas Heller & Stephen Schneider , Stanford University

Description:
Dr. Schneider is one of the world's leading scientific experts of climate change (his name is cited on all those climate change charts and graphs we've seen so far). Dr. Heller has extensive experience with policy and negotiations surrounding climate change and sustainable development. Professor Heller also recently served as Sergey's host at the recent UN Climate Change Conference meeting in Montreal where Prof. Heller proved his indepth knowledge of thenuances of legislative works, such as the Kyoto Protocol, and the mechanisms that are currently being employed.

Stanford Experts on Climate Change and Carbon Trading

Thomas Heller, Stephen Schneider

Lecture 2: Sustainability concept of energy, water and environmental systems

Author: Naim Afgan , Instituto Superior Tecnico

Description:
This review first introduces the historical background for the sustainability concept development. Special reference is given to the energy resource depletion and its forecast. In the assessment of global energy resources attention is focused in on the resource consumption and its relevancy to the future demand. The recent assessment of sustainability is reflecting the normative and strategic dimension of sustainability. Special attention is devoted to the most recent development of the concept of sustainability science. A new field of sustainability science is emerging that seeks to understand the fundamental character of interactions between nature and society. With a view toward promoting research necessary to achieve such advances, an initial set of core questions for sustainability science was proposed.

Sustainability concept of energy, water and environmental systems

Naim Afgan

Lecture 1: Sea Levels and Climate Change

Author: David T. Pugh, Intergovermental Oceanographic Commission - Unesco

Description:
Popular interest and scientific concerns have focussed on the potential for sea level rise and increased risks of coastal flooding in a future warmer world. This talk will review the recent global evidence for changes, including the 2007 IPCC Report and look in detail at changes observed at the principal UK Tide Gauge site, Newlyn, from 1915 to 2005. Changes may include not only mean sea level rises, but also increased meterorological effects on surges, and changes in tidal regimes.

Sea Levels and Climate Change

David T. Pugh

VALENTINE'S DAY

Valentine's Day is a holiday celebrated on February 14. In North America, it is the traditional day on which lovers express their love for each other by sending Valentine's cards, presenting flowers, or offering confectionery. The holiday is named after two among the numerous Early Christian martyrs named Valentine. The day became associated with romantic love in the circle of Geoffrey Chaucer in High Middle Ages, when the tradition of courtly love flourished.

1/History

Numerous early Christian martyrs were named Valentine. Until 1969, the Catholic Church formally recognized eleven Valentine's Days. The Valentines honored on February 14 are:

• Valentine of Rome (Valentinus presb. m. Romae): a priest in Rome who suffered martyrdom about AD 269 and was buried on the Via Flaminia. His relics are at the Church of Saint Praxed in Rome. At Whitefriar Street Carmelite Church in Dublin, Ireland.
  
• Valentine of Terni (Valentinus ep. Interamnensis m. Romae): He became bishop of Interamna (modern Terni) about AD 197 and is said to have been killed during the persecution of Emperor Aurelian. He is also buried on the Via Flaminia, but in a different location than Valentine of Rome. His relics are at the Basilica of Saint Valentine in Terni (Basilica di San Valentino). The Catholic Encyclopedia also speaks of a third saint named Valentine who was mentioned in early martyrologies under date of 14 February. He was martyred in Africa with a number of companions, but nothing more is known about him
  
  Some sources say the Valentine linked to romance is Valentine of Rome, others say Valentine of Terni. Some scholars (such as the Bollandists) have concluded that the two were originally the same person. In any case, no romantic elements are present in the original Early Medieval biographies of either of these martyrs.

An overview of attested traditions relevant to the holiday is presented below, with the legends about Valentine himself discussed in the end.

2/February fertility festivals

Though popular modern sources link unspecified Graeco-Roman February holidays alleged to be devoted to fertility and love to St Valentine's Day, Professor Jack Oruch of the University of Kansas argued that prior to Chaucer, no links between the Saints named Valentinus and romantic love existed. Thus whether or not in the ancient Athenian calendar, the period between mid-January and mid-February was the month of Gamelion, was dedicated to the sacred marriage of Zeus and Hera is immaterial.

In Ancient Rome, February 15 was Lupercalia, an archaic rite connected to fertility, without overtones of romance. Plutarch wrote:

"Lupercalia, of which many write that it was anciently celebrated by shepherds, and has also some connection with the Arcadian Lycaea. At this time many of the noble youths and of the magistrates run up and down through the city naked, for sport and laughter striking those they meet with shaggy thongs. And many women of rank also purposely get in their way, and like children at school present their hands to be struck, believing that the pregnant will thus be helped in delivery, and the barren to pregnancy."

The word Lupercalia comes from lupus, or wolf, so the holiday may be connected with the legendary wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus. Priests of this cult, luperci would travel to the lupercal, the cave where the she-wolf who reared Romulus and Remus allegedly lived, and sacrifice animals (two goats and a dog). The blood would then be scattered in the streets, to bring fertility and keep the wolves away from the fields. Lupercalia was a festival local to the city of Rome. The more general Festival of Juno Februa, meaning "Juno the purifier "or "the chaste Juno," was celebrated on February 13-14. Pope Gelasius I (492-496) abolished Lupercalia.

2/Chaucer's love birds

A portrait of English poet Geoffrey Chaucer by Thomas Hoccleve (1412). The earliest known link between Valentine's Day and romance is found in Chaucer's Parliament of Foules

The first recorded association of Valentine's Day with romantic love is in Parlement of Foules (1382) by Geoffrey Chaucer

For this was on seynt Volantynys day
Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese [choose] his make [mate].

This poem was written to honor the first anniversary of the engagement of King Richard II of England to Anne of Bohemia. A treaty providing for a marriage was signed on May 2, 1381. (When they were married eight months later, he was 13 or 14. She was 14.).

On the liturgical calendar, May 2 is the saints' day for Valentine of Genoa. This St. Valentine was an early bishop of Genoa who died around AD 307. Readers incorrectly assumed that Chaucer was referring to February 14 as Valentine's Day. However, mid-February is an unlikely time for birds to be mating in England.

Chaucer's Parliament of Foules is set in a fictional context of an old tradition, but in fact there was no such tradition before Chaucer. The speculative explanation of sentimental customs, posing as historical fact, had their origins among eighteenth-century antiquaries, notably Alban Butler, the author of Butler's Lives of Saints, and have been perpetuated even by respectable modern scholars. Most notably, "the idea that Valentine's Day customs perpetuated those of the Roman Lupercalia has been accepted uncritically and repeated, in various forms, up to the present".

4/Medieval and modern times

Swedish calendar showing St Valentine's Day, February 14, 1712 Using the language of the law courts for the rituals of courtly love, a "High Court of Love" was established in Paris on Valentine's Day in 1400. The court dealt with love contracts, betrayals, and violence against women. Judges were selected by women on the basis of a poetry reading. The earliest surviving valentine is a fifteenth-century rondeau written by Charles, Duke of Orleans to his "valentined" wife, which commences.

Je suis desja d'amour tannéMa tres doulce Valentinée… (Charles d'Orléans, Rondeau VI, lines 1–2)

At the time, the duke was being held in the Tower of London following his capture at the Battle of Agincourt, 1415.

Valentine's Day is mentioned ruefully by Ophelia in Hamlet (1600-01): "Tomorrow is Saint Valentine's Day."

In 1836, relics of St. Valentine of Rome were donated by Pope Gregory XVI to the Whitefriar Street Carmelite Church in Dublin, Ireland. In the 1960s, the church was renovated and relics restored to prominence. In American culture,Saint Valentine's Day was remade in the 1840s; as a writer in GFTraham's American Monthly observed in 1849, "Saint Valentine's Day... is becoming,nay it has become, a national holyday."

In the 1969 revision of the Roman Catholic Calendar of Saints, the feastday of Saint Valentine on 14 February was removed from the General Roman Calendar and relegated to particular (local or even national) calendars for the following reason: "Though the memorial of Saint Valentine is ancient, it is left to particular calendars, since, apart from his name, nothing is known of Saint Valentine except that he was buried on the Via Flaminia on 14 February." The feast day is still celebrated in Balzan and in Malta where relics of the saint are claimed to be found, and also throughout the world by Traditionalist Catholics who follow the older, pre-Vatican II calendar.

Valentine's Day postcard, circa 1910

Tree decorated for Valentine's Day

The reinvention of Saint Valentine's Day in the 1840s has been traced by Leigh Eric Schmidt. In the United States, the first mass-produced valentines of embossed paper lace were produced and sold shortly after 1847 by Esther Howland (1828-1904) of Worcester, Massachusetts. Her father operated a large book and stationery store, but Howard took her inspiration from an English valentine she had received, so clearly the practice of sending Valentine's cards had existed in England before it became popular in North America. The English practice of sending Valentine's cards appears in Elizabeth Gaskell's Mr. Harrison's Confessions (published 1851). Since 2001, the Greeting Card Association has been giving an annual "Esther Howland Award for a Greeting Card Visionary."

In the second half of the twentieth century, the practice of exchanging cards was extended to all manner of gifts in the United States, usually from a man to a woman. Such gifts typically include roses and chocolates. In the 1980s, the diamond industry began to promote Valentine's Day as an occasion for giving jewelry.

The day has come to be associated with a generic platonic greeting of "Happy Valentine's Day." As a joke, Valentine's Day is also referred to as "Singles Awareness Day."

In some North American elementary schools, students are asked to give a Valentine card or small gift to everyone in the class. The greeting cards of these students often mention what they appreciate about each other.

New Year Messages

New Year is the time to bid farewell to the old year and welcome the coming year. It is the time to forget and get past memories that are no longer useful or worth pondering upon. It is the time for new beginnings and new starts in life. New Year has a message for each one of mine. One should let go of the past that has bad memories and accept what has happened, has happened for some reason. Instead of clinging onto your past and things that have gone, it is better to let go.There is an old saying that goes, "Don't cry because it is over, smile because it happened". This essentially means that there is no use crying over spilt milk. You cannot turn back time and do things that would benefit you. Accept that some days you are the pigeon and some days you are the statue. New year is the time of new beginnings. It is time to start afresh and do things that would make someone else smile. Make a pledge to make at least one person happy. You will see the difference it can make in both your lives. The essential message of New Year is let go off the past and embrace life as it comes to you. You will be happier and merrier that way.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!