Harry Potter: Can’t wait … Live Video: Watch the ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 2′ Premiere in London – TIME NewsFeed.
NASA, end of an era:
Human spaceflight is dangerous — and it’s about to get more so, according to former Johnson Space Center director Christopher Kraft, who says NASA is making a mistake by retiring the space shuttle.
Kraft has co-written a letter, endorsed by a number of Apollo-era NASA veterans and astronauts, contending that the international space station will become more hazardous for astronauts without the shuttle’s resources as an emergency backup.
Born out of a grand vision of space exploration after the Apollo moon missions, NASA’s manned space vehicle, Columbia, lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in 1981. The final flight of Atlantis will mark the end of the space shuttle era after 135 missions.
Space program’s final shuttle flight resonates in Cape Canaveral: The home of NASA stands to lose thousands of jobs after Atlantis goes on the last flight of the shuttle program.
“I think they’ve got their head in the sand,” said Kraft, who was NASA’s first flight director.
He said the shuttle’s robotic arm has no duplicate on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, which NASA will need to rely on for several years as the private sector develops new vehicles for getting astronauts into orbit. Nor can the Soyuz permit two astronauts to conduct spacewalks simultaneously, Kraft said. Such spacewalks might be necessary if the station lost power or underwent decompression.
Civil War, photography, ethics:
One of the most famous photographs from the Battle of Gettysburg is also the most controversial.The photographer moved the body for a better composition. In the Newseum’s Ethics Center we ask “Should he have moved the body?” What do you think?
Great Recession Recovery, China, US, Europe:
China’s economic expansion into Europe is gathering pace, as we report in a briefing in our latest print edition. We also argue, in a leader, that America needs to worry about the contrast between its own attitude to China and Europe’s.
via China’s presence in Europe: The long march | The Economist.
technology, education:
Co-founders Michael Chasen and Matthew Pittinsky created Blackboard in 1997 with a handful of friends, growing it through the dot-com bust and into a global business that turned a $16.6 million profit last year.
The company has made a concerted effort in the last year or two to target emerging technologies, such as mobile and social media, that might have applications in the education arena.
“Through our conversations, Providence has expressed interest in our business model,” said Chasen, the company’s chief executive. “We are very much not only going to continue to develop and bring new products to market in those areas, but with Providence I think we can accelerate some of that.”
Indeed, Providence is no stranger to the education marketplace. Its portfolio includes Archipelago Learning, Ascend Learning, Catalpa, Edline, Education Management Corp. and Study Group, according to a statement.
via Blackboard agrees to $1.64 billion buyout by Providence Equity investor group – The Washington Post.
statistics: So more free time … but is anyone happier?
Americans are gaining more free time, but are devoting most of it to leisure rather than learning new skills or working out, according to a new government survey.
On average, Americans aged 15 or older spent about three hours and 58 minutes working on weekdays, according to the 2010 American Time Use Survey released Wednesday by the Labor Department. That was a six-minute decrease from 2009, and down 26 minutes from 2007, before the recession hit.
In its annual Time Use Survey, the Labor Department says Americans are working less, sleeping more and watching a lot of television. Joseph Light explains why.
According to the survey, that time has been allocated largely to leisure activities and sleep. In 2010, for example, Americans spent an average two hours and 31 minutes watching television on weekdays, up 5.4 minutes from 2007. They caught eight hours and 23 minutes of shut-eye per day, up more than five minutes from 2007.
The Census Bureau conducted the survey by interviewing about 13,200 people, across a range of demographic categories, who were asked to keep a diary of how they spent their time on a given day. Between years, average changes in time spent on activities tend to be very small. That means that changes of a few minutes are considered significant.
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