Photography

Korean Air Chief Bows In Apology For His Daughter”s Action …

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On Friday, Korean Air and Hanjin Group chairman Cho Yang-ho bowed apologetically and blamed himself for the outlandish behavior of his eldest daughter and former Airline executive Heather Cho.

The younger Cho landed in hot water last week after she ordered a flight she was on to return to its gate at New York’s JFK International Airport. Why? To kick off the head flight attendant due to unhappiness over how she was served macadamia nuts.

The international outcry from to the incident led Cho – who was in charge of in-flight service and catering for Korean Air as well as hotels for a Korean Air subsidiary – to resign her post as executive vice president of her father’s multi-billion dollar conglomerate, the Hanjin Group, earlier this week.

T he Hanjin Group is comprised of major international shipping lines and logistics companies, as well as Korean Air.

In an attempt to regain some of the luster the family lost over the past week, the elder Cho stepped in front of a slew of reporters and apologized profusely for his daughter’s behavior.

He also announced his daughter’s dismissal from any position within Hanjin Group from which she has not already resigned.

“I apologize to the people of [South Korea] as chairman of Korean Air and as a father for the trouble caused by my daughter’s foolish conduct,” the tycoon said, according to Reuters.

“Please blame me; it’s my fault,” Cho said, according to the New York Times. “I failed to raise her properly.”

Korean Air Heather ChoAP/Lee Jin-manHeather Cho apologizes to the press.

In a separate press conference, Heather Cho also took questions from a gaggle of reporters. In a dramatic turn of events, the executive appeared sullen and spoke almost inaudibly as she apologized for her behavior.

The controversy began when the younger Cho, seated in first class of a Korean Air Airbus superjumbo, was served macadamia nuts in its original packaging by a junior flight attendant instead of following the airline’s service procedure, which requires the crew member to ask if the passenger would like some nuts and then serve the snacks on a plate.

Cho then proceeded to grill the flight’s head flight attendant over the company’s service policies. Apparently unhappy with the crew member’s response, Cho ordered the airliner to abandon its place in line for take off and return to its gate at JFK to deplane the head flight attendant. This maneuver cause the flight to be delayed 20 minutes and arrive at its destination in South Korea 11 minutes late.

Korean Air Airbus A380Flickr/John MurphyKorean Air super jumbo

Korean media is reporting that the country’s transport ministry is investigating whether Cho violated any Korean aviation regulations.

According to Marketwatch, Korean aviation regulations state that an aircraft preparing for takeoff should only return to the gate if the pilots determine that there’s an emergency that would threaten the well being of the plane and its passengers. Violators could be subject to 10 years of jail time!

The incident has invited criticism of family owned conglomerates – known as “chaebols”- in the Korean economy. In addition to Hanjin Group, other chaebols such as Samsung, Hyundai, and LG have risen to global prominence over the past few decades.

Many in the public as well as the press characterised the Hanjin’s airline heiress as entitled and inappropriate.

Hopefully, the elder Cho’s apologies have walked back some of the uproar over the ugliness of the incident

SOURCE:::: http://www.businessinsider .in

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” Bruce Lee in Afghanistan …” ? !!!

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Abbas Alizada not only looks like kung Fu legend Bruce Lee, but has the skills to prove it too. And he has become an instant internet sensation.

The 20-year-old, now being called the ‘Afghan Bruce Lee’, is from an impoverished Afghan family of 10, and hopes that his sudden internet fame pulls him away from his war-torn country and poverty.

“I want to be a champion in my country and a Hollywood star. The destruction here saddens me, but it also inspires me,” he told Reuters in an interview.

His parents did not have enough money for him to study Wushu, but after, realising his potential, the school’s trainer agreed to teach him.

He is disdainful of the name Bruce Hazara as he is known by his friends because it points to his ethnicity, which, in a country like Afghanistan can mean the difference between life and death.

“Afghan Bruce Lee is just fine,” he says.

Alizada owes his rising fame to the fall of the Taliban government which had  banned the internet, as well as TV and other forms of entertainment, until it was toppled by a United States invasion in 2001, following the September 11, 2001 attacks.
“The only news that comes from Afghanistan is about war; I am happy that my story is a positive one,” he told Reuters.

All photographs: Mohammad Ismail/Reuters 

SOURCE:::: http://www.rediff.com

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Image of the Day…Super Guppy Aircraft in NASA Hangar !!!

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Super Guppy Spends a Restful Night in the NASA Langley Hangar

NASA’s Super Guppy aircraft, designed to transport extremely large cargo, rests after making a special delivery to the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. The aircraft measures more than 48 feet to the top of its tail and has a wingspan of more than 156 feet with a 25-foot diameter cargo bay – the aircraft features a hinged nose that opens 110 degrees.

A representative test article of a futuristic hybrid wing body aircraft will be unloaded from the Super Guppy on Friday, Dec. 12 at Langley Research Center. The large test article, representing the uniquely shaped fuselage cross-section, is made out of a low-weight, damage-tolerant, stitched composite structural concept called Pultruded Rod Stitched Efficient Unitized Structure, or PRSEUS. Langley’s Combined Loads Test System will subject the revolutionary carbon-fiber architecture test article to conditions that simulate loads typically encountered in flight.

Image Credit: NASA 

SOURCE::::www.nasa.gov

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M.S. Subbulakshmi in Thiagaraja Aradhana Festival 1986…. A Video Clip

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SMT.M.S.SUBBULAKSHMI—MEMORIAL DAY–11TH DECEMBER.
———————————————————————————————
,
11th December 2014 marks the tenth anniversary of the demise of
Smt.M.S.Subbulakshmi, QUEEN OF MELODY. She will live in our hearts
with her divine music. Her “Rama nannu Brovara ” comes to help you to
pay homage to her. Please also enjoy her other songs on the site.
SOURCE:::You Tube
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World”s Scariest Bus Ride …

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Kishtwar Kailash – Road To Basecamp

<a href="/channel/UCVw1bobpp5d8BZfU6JwQprQ" class=" yt-uix-sessionlink spf-link g-hovercard" data-sessionlink="ei=0lKMVJLVMca9c4_OgvgI" data-name="" data-ytid="UCVw1bobpp5d8BZfU6JwQprQ">Berghaus</a>

In October 2013 Berghaus athlete Mick Fowler and his climbing partner, Paul Ramsden, succeeded in making the first ascent of Kishtwar Kailash in the Indian Himalaya.

Located in the remote Kishtwar region, it took the team 8 days just to reach basecamp. This hazardous stretch of road was part of the approach.

SOURCE:::: You Tube

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Image of the Day…” Father , Son and The Moon …” !!!

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The father, the son and the moon

Silhouette of statue in Sweden, under a waning moon, by a master sky photographer.

Photo by Göran Strand. Used with permission. Thank you, Göran!

Astrophotographer Göran Strand captured this beautiful shot on November 11, 2014, in the early morning. It features the silhouette of bronze statue in Östersund, Sweden – titledFather and Son – made by artist Olof Ahlberg in 1917. The moon was in a waning gibbous phase that morning, as it was in this morning’s sky.

SOURCE:::: http://www.earthsky.org

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Image of the Day…A View From International Space Station !!!

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From the International Space Station, Expedition 42 Commander Barry Wilmore took this photograph of the Great Lakes and central U.S. on Dec. 7, 2014, and posted it to social media.

This week on the station, the Expedition 42 crew has been busy with medical science and spacesuit work while preparing for the arrival of SpaceX’s Dragon commercial cargo craft, scheduled to launch on Dec. 16 on a two day trip to the station before it is captured by the Canadarm2 and berthed to the Harmony node.

Image Credit: NASA/Barry Wilmore 

SOURCE::::www.nasa.gov

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Nobel Prize Winning Indians… 1913 to 2014 !!!

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Rabindranath Tagore was the only Indian Nobel literature laureate. In 1913, In his acceptance speech, he said, “I beg to convey to the Swedish Academy my grateful appreciation of the breadth of understanding which has brought the distant near, and has made a stranger a brother.”
Sir C.V. Raman won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1930 for his work in the field of light scattering. This effect is now named after him — the Raman scattering. In his speech, he said he was inspired by the “wonderful blue opalescence of the Mediterranean Sea”, during a voyage to Europe in 1921.
Hargobind Khorana (Far right) shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1968, with Marshall W. Nirenberg and Robert W. Holley by showing the the order of nucleotides in nucleic acids. In his speech, he thanked ” a very large number of devoted colleagues, chemists and biochemists” .
S. Chandrasekhar, along with William A. Fowler won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983 for their mathematical theory of black holes. The Chandrasekhar limit is named after him. In his speech, he quoted Tagore’s Gitanjali and said, “May I, on behalf of my wife and myself, express our immense gratitude to the Nobel Foundation for this noble reception in this noble city?”
Again a first and only, Amartya Sen won The Prize in Economics in 1998. In his speech, which he began with a “silly thought”, he said, “economists too can learn from the kind of open minded reasoning employed by Tagore and Chandrasekhar”.
Mother Teresa won the Nobel Peace prize in 1979. In a lecture played on the day of the ceremony, she said, “We must give each other until it hurts. It is not enough for us to say: I love God, but I do not love my neighbour.”
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009, along with Thomas A. Steitz and Ada E. Yonath, “for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome”. In his speech, he thanked “the dedicated work and intellectual contributions of generations of talented postdocs, students and research assistants”.
Kailash Satyarthi who won the Nobel Peace Prize 2014 at his Bachpan Bachao Aandolan office soon after announcement of the prize, in New Delhi. An avid follower of Gandhian philosophy, he vowed that “the fight would continue”. Photo: V. Sudershan
SOURCE:::: http://www.the hindu.com
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Image of the Day…Incredible Video of Dense Fog Over Dallas…

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Video capture by a drone of dense fog with zero visibility on Tuesday, December 9, in Dallas, Texas. Amazing visuals!

 

 

 

What happens when it’s so foggy outside, you can’t see anything? Simple. You grab a drone, fly it into the air and use it to capture some amazing video. Mike Prendergast posted an aerial view of today’s dense fog – December 9, 2014 – in Dallas, Texas. The footage is incredible. Check it out above!

On Tuesday, December 9, a dense fog advisory was issued for parts of the Dallas/Fort Worth area. Visibility was less than a quarter of a mile across a good bit of northeast Texas. According to observations at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, visibility dropped to zero for three hours from 7 to 10 a.m. CST. In conditions like this, it’s nearly impossible to drive.

The fog continued after 10 a.m. CST, so the National Weather Service at Fort Worth extended the dense fog advisory until noon.

The fog was so dense that it affected flights out of the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. Several delays were reported as runway visual range showed airfield visibility down to 700-1000 feet.

Dense fog over Dallas, Texas. Image Credit: Mike Alvstad

Dense fog over Dallas, Texas. Image Credit: Mike Alvstad

Bottom line: What do you do when you have a drone and a ton of fog? If you do what Mike Prendergast did, you’ll capture amazing footage in high definition of a rare sight to see.

source::::  in http://www.earthsky.org

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Image of the Day…Martian Lakebed …!!!

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This evenly layered rock photographed by the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover shows a pattern typical of a lake-floor sedimentary deposit not far from where flowing water entered a lake.

The scene combines multiple frames taken with Mastcam’s right-eye camera on Aug. 7, 2014, during the 712th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity’s work on Mars. It shows an outcrop at the edge of “Hidden Valley,” seen from the valley floor.  This view spans about 5 feet (1.5 meters) across in the foreground.  The color has been approximately white-balanced to resemble how the scene would appear under daytime lighting conditions on Earth. Figure A is a version with a superimposed scale bar of 50 centimeters (about 20 inches).

This is an example of a thick-laminated, evenly-stratified rock type that forms stratigraphically beneath cross-bedded sandstones regarded as ancient river deposits.  These rocks are interpreted to record sedimentation in a lake, as part of or in front of a delta, where plumes of river sediment settled out of the water column and onto the lake floor.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. JPL designed and built the project’s Curiosity rover.  Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego, built and operates the rover’s Mastcam. For more information about Curiosity, visit http://www.nasa.gov/msl and http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl.

SOURCE::::www.nasa.gov/msl

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