Vardaman Virtual Forestry Company
FRIDAY REPORT OF 09/08/06
The Most Direct, Frequent Link to Knowledge Workers in the Eastern Forest Economy
Excerpt from THE WALL STREET JOURNAL print edition of 9/06/06:
“The Mossberg Solution by Walter S. Mossberg and Katherine Boehret
“Building a Family Tree Using an Upgraded Site
“This week, we tested a recently revamped Web site, Ancestry.com (www.ancestry.com), which helps you build a family tree and can integrate your tree’s data with 500,000 other family trees and records containing five billion names. The site has been around for 10 years, but an overhauled version that intends to be more complete and intuitive was launched in a prerelease version six weeks ago.
“The new Ancestry.com offers numerous features, the most important of which is much better integration of the site’s data with our own information. These data include census records, military draft-registration cards, marriage certificates and immigration records. Some of this information has been available before, on CDs and on the Web, but digging it up has largely been a separate process from creating a family tree.
“You can build a family tree right on the Web site, without the need for stand-alone software, and you can share that tree with others. As names are added to the tree, icons that look like green leaves appear beside those of your family members to whom data on Ancestry.com might be linked. You can ‘grow’ your tree by attaching those data if they’re relevant, further enhancing your finished product…”
“THE MAN WHO FED THE WORLD
by Ronald Bailey in OpinionJournal of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL”
“Who won the Nobel Peace prize in 1970? You may be forgiven for not remembering, given some of dubious recipients over the years (e.g., Yasser Arafat). Well, then: Who has saved perhaps more lives than anyone else in history? The answer to both questions, is of course, Norman Borlaug.
“Who? Norman Borlaug, 92, is the father of the ‘Green Revolution,’ the dramatic improvement in agricultural improvement that swept the globe in the 1960s…
“After graduating from the University of Minnesota in 1944, Mr. Borlaug accepted an invitation from the Rockefeller Foundation to work on a project to boost wheat production in Mexico. At the time, Mexico was importing a good share of its grain. Working at plant breeding stations near Mexico City in the south and near Obregon in the northwestern part of the country, Mr. Borlaug and his staff spent nearly 20 years breeding the high-yield dwarf wheat that sparked the Green Revolution. (Using two stations allowed them to plant two crops a year instead of one, doubling the speed of research.) The key to their success was painstakingly cross-breeding thousands of wheat varieties to find those resistant to highly destructive ‘rust’ fungi. They also changed the architecture of the wheat, from tall gangly stems to shorter studier ones that produced more grain…
“Fair prices and high doses of fertilizer, combined with new grains, changed everything. By 1968 Pakistan was self-sufficient in wheat, and by 1974 India was self-sufficient in all cereals. And the revolution didn’t stop there. Researchers at a station in the Philippines used Mr. Borlaug’s insights to develop high-yield rice and spread the Green Revolution to most of Asia. As with wheat, so with rice: Short-stalked varieties proved more productive. They devoted relatively more energy to making grain and less to making leaves and stalks. And they were sturdier, remaining harvestable when traditional varieties – with heavy grain heads and long, slender stalks – had collapsed to the ground and begun to rot.
“Hence the Nobel Prize. The chairman of the Nobel committee explained why it had chosen Mr. Borlaug in this way: ‘More than any other single person of this age, [he] has helped to provide bread for a hungry world. We have made this choice in the hope that providing bread will also give the world peace.’…
“Mr. Borlaug is still tirelessly working to keep hunger at bay. He remains a consultant to the Intercontinental Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico and president of a private Japanese foundation working to spread the Green Revolution to sub-Saharan Africa. He believes that biotechnology will be crucial to boosting the world’s food supplies in the coming decades and decries the underfunding of the world’s network of nonprofit agricultural research centers…
“VOICE OF REASON”
from an interview of ALAA AL ASWANY in the print edition of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC of September 2006
“Just who is the Arab world listening to? Not only radical sheikhs and militant politicians. The man whose voice has captivated the Arab public is a Cairo dentist by day and a novelist by dawn. Alaa Al Aswany’s novel The Yacoubian Building is a phenomenon – the best-selling novel in the Middle East for two years and the inspiration for the biggest budget movie ever produced in Egypt. The novel paints a poignant and uncompromising picture of life in modern Cairo, as seen through the eyes of a carnival of characters – from the richest and most powerful to the poorest…
“There is much talk now of a ‘clash’ of civilizations in the Muslim world and the West. How do you see this clash?
‘I don’t think it’s a question of civilizations. Civilizations are the best part of human creation. They don’t cause any kind – they are a means to communicate. The clash comes from the aggressive interpretation of some religions. Religions have been used throughout history as a cause to wage war and kill people, but it’s my opinion that religions are the same everywhere. They are a way to find God, a way to have positive values, to prove oneself as a good human being’…
“So God is not the true impetus behind extremist behavior?
‘You feel God in your heart, you feel God when you love others. Killing is not done because of God, but because people are marginalized and oppressed, without any future and any kind of human dignity. I tried to explain that in my novel…
“There is a lot of discussion about the role of women in society. What do you think it should be?”
‘I don’t see women as women, I see them as human beings. So I don’t believe that you must encourage women particularly. Introducing the issue is like dealing with women as handicapped members of society.’…
“You studied dentistry at the University of Illinois in the 1980s. How do you feel about your time in the U.S.?
‘…I often tell a story about an experience I had one windy Chicago day. I was walking across the campus at the University of Illinois, holding my thesis, when the wind blew it out of my hands. All the people walking past stopped to help me gather the pages. This is the real American character.’
PROMOTION
Our editor’s youngest son, a combat veteran, has been promoted to Lt. Col., Air Force.
Visit our partner Wiley.com to save 15% on How
to Make Money Growing Trees and their entire selection of Forestry and Agricultural titles. Your discount will be applied automatically
upon checkout. If you do you not see the discount being applied, please enter
code aff15 in the Promotion Code field and click the Apply Discount button.
|
