Explore your campus with foursquare!
A few months ago, we put a call out for college students who wanted to represent foursquare on campus and the response was astounding. So today, with everyone settled in on campus, we’re happy to announce official partnerships with over 20 universities, student ambassadors in several dozen others, and we’re adding more every day.
With foursquare, universities can help students explore their campus by sharing school traditions, information about classes and building hours, and insider tips. Students can now unlock new badges from an exclusive campus badge pack, rewarding them for their late nights at the library and attendance at sports games. Now, not just seniors will know about campus shortcuts, dining hall secrets, and the can’t-miss campus events.
If you’re interested in joining our program and would like to see how some of our university partners are using foursquare on campus, please visit us at www.foursquare.com/universities
Have fun showing your school pride with foursquare!Congrats to Anna, this is her baby!
Before you want to complain about public transport think again…
A train is packed with passengers as it leaves Taungbyone station during the Taungbyone spirit festival, about 20 miles north of Mandalay, in central Myanmar. The ten-day annual festival, believed to be one of Myanmar’s most loudest celebrations, is held in otherwise the sleepy town to honour the Taungbyone brothers whom local people believe can bring luck and prosperity, thus attracting spirit worshippers from throughout the country as well as tourists from the world.
Not A Drop Left…
On the face of it, Earth has plenty of the stuff. We live on a water world: about three quarters of the earth’s surface is submerged. And, give or take a few H2O molecules, there’s the same amount circulating through the water cycle now as there has been for thousands of years.
So why is there more and more talk about water scarcity?
99,7% is undrinkable
Of the world’s water, about 97% is salt water.
Of the 3% that is fresh water, most is locked up in ice caps and glaciers, or it’s sunk in the ground where it’s hard to get at.
All in all, less than 0,3% of the world’s water is available to us. Not just for drinking and sanitation of course – for agriculture, industry and energy production too.
And that 0,3% is shrinking all the time, as surface and ground water sources get polluted. Also, there are just more of us, every passing second. Watch world population grow.
1 in 6 people lack clean water
The UN has estimated that the minimum amount of clean, fresh water for a person’s basic daily needs (drinking, cooking and cleaning), is 20-50 litres. If you live in a context where you have clean piped water and a well-functioning sewage system, this is about the amount of water your household flushes down the toilet every day.
More than one in six people – 1.1 billion – don’t have access to this basic minimum. Two in five lack proper sanitation facilities. Every day, 3 800 children die from diseases associated with lack of safe drinking water and proper sanitation.
South Africa: one of the drylands
Water scarcity is most acute in the driest areas of the world - the drylands - home to over 2 billion people. Drylands include most countries in the Near East and North Africa, Mexico, Pakistan, large parts of China and India, and South Africa.
In this country, 12% of the population lack access to piped or well water and 35% lack proper sanitation.
This unacceptable state of affairs can be partly alleviated by improved infrastructure and stricter water use legislation. But there’s still only so much water, which means those of us for who can just turn on a tap have a practical, and moral, obligation.
5 easy ways to save gallons of clean water
Call a plumber. A dripping tap can lose up to 100 litres per day – about eight buckets of water. And toilet leak can waste up to 30 litres an hour. An ingenious way to check if your toilet is leaking: add a few drops of food dye to the cistern - if the colour seeps into the bowl, you have a leak.
Don’t flush. Flushing every time you use the toilet is unnecessary and is one of the most blatantly wasteful domestic uses of potable water.
Have a sponge bath. Or at least a shower. Showering uses only about a third of the water bathing does.
Go grey. Grey water doesn’t sound very appealing, but if you get into the habit of using it, you’ll never have to worry about your garden in summer again.
Keep it clean. Not much point in saving water if it’s quality goes down the drain. Are you a storm water polluter?
- Olivia Rose-Innes, EnviroHealth Editor, Health24, updated July 2010
References:
United Nations, 2007, World Water Day
Read more about water and your health: Water Centre
Woman jailed for faking cancer
Tennessee - A judge sentenced a woman to 42 months in prison for faking breast cancer and told her it was “reprehensible” that she took donations of sick leave, money and cancer patient support services for five years.
“It seems like to me some confinement is necessary,” Hamilton County Criminal Court Judge Don Poole said on Monday after a four-hour hearing in which attorneys for 39-year-old Keele Maynor of Chattanooga asked for a probation sentence that would allow her to work and pay about $54 000 in restitution.
Poole added 10 years of probation to the sentence for Maynor, a mother of three, and ordered her taken into custody immediately.
She will be eligible for parole after serving one-third of the prison sentence. He ordered her to start making $300 monthly restitution payments after her release.
“I have problems with somebody who shaves their head and says they have cancer,” Poole said.
Wanted attention
Maynor cried at times while testifying that she is sorry for “hurting so many people”. She said she had felt unloved and carried out the terminal cancer scheme to get attention.
She described herself as a victim of emotional abuse as a teenager by her mother and sexual abuse by a stepbrother.
“I will spend the rest of my life trying to make my wrong right,” she said.
Assistant District Attorney Neal Pinkston said the prison time was justified in Maynor’s case because she duped co-workers, friends, groups such as Breast Cancer Network of Strength, a church and a high school football booster club.
Benefit and auction
Maynor in 2008 said in an email when she left her job in the city’s regional planning department that her claim of having cancer was a “charade”. She pleaded guilty to theft and forgery as part of a deal with prosecutors.
The charade included Maynor getting more than $4 000 from a silent auction at a benefit that was held on her behalf. Maynor said she spent that money on Christmas presents for her children.
Sandra Hughes testified that she worked side by side with Maynor before retiring and helped raise money for her, including a bank account that Maynor could draw money from “whenever she needed to pay a bill”.
“She would inform me if there were needs, financial needs ” said Hughes, a breast cancer survivor who walked across the courtroom to Maynor and hugged her after testifying.
- AP
