數年前曾經向特首要求安樂死的阿斌(鄧紹斌),昨天遇上澳洲「死亡醫生」 Philip Nitschke。阿斌沒有向這位致力協助病人選擇安樂死的醫生討教結束生命的方法,但四肢癱瘓的他,內心仍有揮不去的恐懼:「我想我不可能舒服的死去,我害怕死前時一刻會很痛苦。」
十多年前曾在澳洲合法地為四名病人結束生命的 Philip Nitschke,昨天到本港外國記者會出席探討安樂死問題的電視節目《安樂善別》發佈會,阿斌明顯有備而來,現場設施不能讓他坐輪椅到二樓,於是他在大門等候這位醫生。
曾著寫《我要安樂死》的阿斌,與「死亡醫生」同場出現,又再被問及生死意向,「我依然堅持我們有權選擇是否安樂死。但在它合法化以前,我不會作出決定,以免影響身邊的人。」
「安樂死是人權」 多年前因為意外導致四肢癱瘓的阿斌,只能移動頭部,能說話,其餘一切事情要靠人協助。近年他寫書、出席公開活動,生活態度明顯傾向積極,記者問他對生命是否仍然充滿希望,「我有腦袋,仍然可以做一些事情。此時此刻,生命仍然有意義。」
安樂死問題充滿爭議,「死亡醫生」經常被公開挑戰,但在阿斌心目中,他很勇敢。他以英語向 Philip Nitschke提出三個問題;為何死亡醫生要協助病人安樂死?澳洲處理安樂死問題的情況?病人神志不清時怎樣處理安樂死的意願?
安樂死曾一度在澳洲合法化,但 96年被推翻, Philip Nitschke認為協助有需要病人選擇安樂死能造福文明社會。他說,在合法化地區,病人若想貫徹安樂死的意願,最好預先訂立遺囑。阿斌認為:「選擇安樂死不是造福與否的問題,這是我們的基本人權。」
記者 冼麗婷
中區昨晨兩部電車出軌
手快有,手慢無,一個終極「抵到爛」套餐,讓遊客在意大利水都威尼斯享受浪漫周末,入住四星級酒店一晚只要 1毫子!可惜,超特惠價格原來是酒店搞錯……好消息是,酒店決定不讓顧客失望,成功訂房的人可繼續以 1毫房租入住。
四星級 Crowne Plaza酒店(圖),原擬推出入住兩晚半價優惠,但酒店的美國母公司、洲際酒店集團辦事處擺烏龍,周日在網站推出 1歐仙(約 0.11港元)房租,結果網民蜂擁訂房,一夜之間有 5,000人預訂至明年的房間。該酒店房租原價要 90至 150歐元( 990至 1,650港元)。
酒店經理最初以為是黑客搞鬼,但在發現是母公司出錯後,前天(周五)表示會承擔責任,讓成功訂房的 228名顧客以 0.1港元一晚的租金,入住合共 1,400晚,預計酒店因此損失 9萬歐元(約 99萬港元)。美聯社
尋日明明重有綠色杯,今日冇晒 (尋日明明都係話買綠色杯,點知來咗個青檸色)
尋日冇食到雞翼餐,今日就買咗4隻雞翼 ~ 以前12蚊,原來已經加咗價到13蚊 (唔知兩隻係咪重係賣6蚊?)
啲M記經理話今晚12點有杯,係咪真嘅呢?! 重話係啥色都有,除咗綠色 (而家就係差紅色同綠色,不過其實都好想要個黑炭色;阿妹已經有一隻喇)
食咗兩隻雞翼之後 (夜晚屋企都係食雞餐 ~ 豉油雞翼) 阿妹出咗門口 阿爸阿媽就開始清個騎樓,準備聽日師傅上來整嘢 (但究竟係整乜嘢呢,其實都唔係好知 ......)
只係知道阿妹真係好多對鞋同好多一樽二樽 ......
幫手掃完塵之後 就落樓襟機
不過就唔記得襟錢畀阿媽 ~ 如果真係要拆咗個鋁窗就要再安過喇 ......
順便買咗本《選擇》同買咗3隻大腳板,一包薯片 ...... 終於可以換多個小丸子文具 ~ 今次係花輪同學嘅膠紙座 ~ 唔知黐住佢把口之後,佢會唔會叫少啲「Baby」呢?
只知道啲大腳板返到屋企都溶晒 .......
去襟機之前 見到定天有本李志清嘅新作 ~ 竟然係《項羽劉邦》 ~ 唔計橫山光輝 (佢都出咗套《項羽與劉邦》,全60卷;畫功真係嚇人 ......),黃玉郎都畫過
今次清兒 (《三國志》面世後廿年重應唔應該叫佢做「清兒」呢.....)再拍寺島優畫劉邦稱帝話頁頁跟足歷史 唔知係咪真?! 橫山光輝跟足歷史多啲定係寺島優跟得足啲呢就真係唔知
只知道如果又出二、三十期就真係冇位擺 如果又畫成廿年 或者好似《孫子兵法》恁話足十幾年先畫得十期重連名都改埋就只怕自己未必等到
如果今朝早啲起身就可以去睇《G.I. Joe》喇 ~ 更可以買番張新嘅西鐵全月通喇 (可以搭足個半月 重可以畀屋企人拎來用)
不過就真係唔多妥佢要cut K16,重唔知要cut幾多條巴士線 (包括63X),亦唔妥佢要因為西鐵東鐵駁通後要改部份巴士班次(包括260X) ...... 08月16日 Sun 22:00:36 / 22:22:36
10 pricey cities that pay off
By Matthew Bandyk of U.S. News & World Report
Seven Summertime Auto Myths Debunked Summer is in full swing and you know the heat can be hard on your car. But which of those cooling tips you've heard about really work and which are just urban myths?
From "American Gladiators" to "Unbeatable Banzuke," where to find the best falls, flubs and face-plants on TV ~ By Ben Silverman ~ Special to MSN Entertainment 08月16日 Sun 23:05:57
10 Best-Kept-Secret Careers Job seekers in today's economy are all familiar with the difficulty in finding a job. Adding to that difficulty is the fact that many job seekers are competing for the same positions and job titles.
Perhaps the secret to finding a job in this competitive market is looking for work in a field that not many people know about. Do such industries exist? Absolutely -- you just need a little help in finding them.
U.S. News and World Report compiled its annual "Best Careers" report and this year added something new. It profiled 10 jobs that scored just below best-career level but that -- because they're little-known -- may offer greater opportunities for job seekers.
Here are 10 of the best-kept-secret careers, in alphabetical order, according to U.S. News and World Report:
1. Accent-reduction specialist What you do: Trying to understand and communicate with people who have heavy regional or foreign accents can be difficult and frustrating. Whether your accent is from Brooklyn, India or the Southern United States, accent-reduction specialists will work with you to help you communicate more clearly and effectively.
What you need: A master's degree or Ph.D. in speech-language pathology, a state-issued license in speech-language pathology, a specialty credential in accent reduction or English as a second language training.
Salary*: N/A
2. Casting director What you do: You cast all of the actors in commercials, movies, plays, etc., from the leading role to the hundreds of extras. You'll schedule auditions, read scripts, talk to agents and help actors relax in their auditions. Casting directors typically work alongside directors and producers to find the right person for a role.
What you need: No formal training is required, but experience is vital. Many start out as interns or in an entry-level position as an assistant in a talent agency or as a casting assistant. A background in arts, English, film or theater is helpful.
Salary: $42,333
3. Child-life specialist What you do: In this rewarding field, you'll work with sick children and their families in hospitals, hospices or programs for children with serious diseases. You'll determine the medical and emotional needs of children and support them, whether it's creating games and activities, helping to get them comfortable in their surroundings, or role-playing scary medical procedures. You'll also help support the patient's family.
What you need: A bachelor's degree in a related field and one year of experience working with hospitalized children.
Salary: $43,997
4. Creative perfumer What you do: Without getting too technical, you'll mix several scented chemicals to concoct the perfect fragrance. It can take hundreds of trials and consumer testing to get it just right.
What you need: A good nose, lots of patience, experience and an education at perfumery school. It takes about seven years to train as a perfumer, and about 10 years before you are considered a qualified perfumer.
Salary: $21,791
5. Orthoptist What you do: Orthoptists provide vision training for patients with correctable vision defects like a cross or lazy eye. They measures visual acuity, focusing ability and eye-motor movement, then work with ophthalmologists (eye doctors) to create treatment plans for the patient.
What you need: A combination of more than one year of directly related training and/or experience; two years of post-bachelor's training is typically required.
Salary: $40,280
6. Orthotist/prosthetist What you do: Help patients with partial or total absence of limbs by either creating a custom-designed orthopedic brace (orthotist), or designing and making custom-fit artificial limbs (prosthetist).
What you need: A combination of more than four years of directly related training and/or experience.
Salary: $58,134
7. Program analyst What you do: Also called a management analyst, you'd work in federal and local governments, providing information on the most effective way to carry out a project or procedure. The job involves gathering and analyzing lots of data, in addition to writing reports outlining the information you found.
What you need: A master's degree in public policy is preferred, but a bachelor's degree and experience is standard.
Salary: $63,610
8. Program evaluator What you do: You'll evaluate several different programs, making suggestions about changes to make them better, or whether they should even continue. You'll switch programs every few weeks (or whenever you are done evaluating), so you'll get to work with a variety of clients, whether it's a nonprofit, a company or a government initiative.
What you need: A bachelor's degree is sufficient, although some evaluators have a Ph.D. from specialized training programs.
Salary: $56,647
9. Prospect researcher What you do: True to their job title, prospect researchers identify prospective donors who are likely to contribute to a cause. Typically employed by nonprofit organizations, they find people who have donated to similar causes in the past and dig up detailed information about them to help solicitors maximize the donation.
What you need: N/A
Salary: N/A
10. Surgical technologist What you do: Essentially, you will scrub into surgeries and assist surgeons, nurses and other operating room personnel by arranging equipment and supplies, placing patients on the table and handing the surgeon his tools. "Scalpel!"
What you need: Training programs last nine to 24 months and lead to a certificate, diploma or associate degree.
Salary: $33,777
*Annual salaries according to CBSalary.com, powered by Salary Expert
Rachel Zupek is a writer and blogger for CareerBuilder.com and its job blog, The Work Buzz. She researches and writes about job search strategy, career management, hiring trends and workplace issues. Follow her on Twitter: https://twitter.com/CBwriterRZ.
Copyright 2009 CareerBuilder.com All rights reserved. The information contained in this article may not be published, broadcast or otherwise distributed without prior written authority. ~ Story Filed Wednesday, August 12, 2009 - 11:37 AM
Coming soon: Battery-powered homes? If you can create your own electricity, this new battery will be able to store enough to last about a day.Posted by Mai Ling at MSN Real Estate on Wednesday, August 5, 2009 11:55 AM 08月16日 Sun 23:20:16
>>August 20, 2009 at 1:32:24 PM GMT+8
2009 年 8 月 16 日 星期日 【晴】
Page last updated at 14:56 GMT, Tuesday, 11 August 2009 15:56 UK 22:56 HK
http://news.bbc.co.uk/weather/hi/gallery/ Chris Campbell was in Valencia, Spain when he captured this dramatic picture of cloud-to-cloud lightning overhead on the evening of 9th August.
The last rays of the setting sun pushed their way through a layer of stratocumulus clouds, creating this breathtaking effect. Chris Sharp captured this image from Limpsfield in Surrey, looking towards Gatwick Airport.
Residents in Burrelton, Scotland were treated to this sight of a rosy-cheeked towering cumulus cloud as the sun set on 10th August. Picture taken by Stewart Malecki.
Kevin Grierson was watching the sunset on 7th August when he captured this image of the delicate-looking stratocumulus clouds above partly reflecting the light. He was standing on the beach in Troon looking towards the Isle of Arran.
Carol Palin photographed ominous-looking stratocumulus clouds overhead from her narrowboat on the Grand Union Canal at Stoke Hammond, Buckinghamshire on 6th August.
The light of the setting sun reflected dramatically against the cloud cover of a clearing cold front over Whaley Bridge in Derbyshire on 6th August. Photographed by Peter Smith.
The double rainbow that appeared over Botany Bay in Sydney, Australia looked striking against the dark sky. Mick Handcock took this picture on 7th August.
Is Television Over?
An intriguing new book about the ad recession's next victim. By Seth Stevenson ~ Posted Monday, Aug. 10, 2009, at 12:07 PM ET
If you love to hate ads, you might enjoy two new books that train their sights on modern marketing. The first makes the case that advertising as we know it is about to be obliterated. The second suggests that we should all dance a gleeful polka on its grave.
In The Chaos Scenario, Bob Garfield—ad critic for Advertising Age and co-host of the NPR show On the Media—argues that the long-standing, two-way partnership between advertising and content is due for a violent rejiggering. This notion is a familiar one by now, but Garfield asserts that the big ad agencies and media companies haven't yet managed to fully internalize it. (Particularly television networks, which have so far weathered the storm in a way that newspapers haven't.) Garfield also claims that the painful consequences of this upheaval will extend to you, the content consumer. You've probably already noticed the punishing body blow delivered to your local newspaper after once-lucrative advertising niches such as classifieds and real estate got eaten by the Internet. Garfield's feeling is that your beloved television shows will soon meet a similar fate.
There are now hundreds of cable channels and any number of captivating items to look at on the Web. As a result, the television audience is scattering. In 2008, Garfield notes, a top-rated TV drama like The Mentalist might have been watched by 3.2 percent of the U.S. population in a given week. Fifty years ago, a top drama like Gunsmoke would have been routinely watched by three times as many Americans percentagewise. It's much harder these days for a major advertiser to find the concentrated mass of eyeballs it needs to reach in order to boost its sales numbers. Garfield argues that those most affected by this sea change haven't yet faced up to the new reality.
Television networks, for example—which, though not as widely watched as they used to be, are still the only place to go to find eyeballs in any concentration at all—have so far been able to keep revenues relatively intact by charging higher rates per viewer while reaching fewer viewers. The rug is due to be pulled out from under them. The upshot, in Garfield's view: a vicious cycle in which television audiences fragment, so advertisers stop paying big bucks to run commercials on TV shows, so the funding for the shows dries up, so the quality of the shows declines, so the audience begins to flee even faster.
I'm not sure I buy the part about quality playing a role in audience behavior. Not when a show like The Bachelorette is a ratings winner. (Garfield might argue that even tripe like this offers network-level production values and thus requires a production budget that soon won't be sustainable.) But it seems reasonable to assume that advertisers will at some point refuse to pay hefty fees to capture ever-shrinking slices of the population. Eventually—and in fact, it's already happening—they'll find other uses for their marketing dollars.
This means there will be no one to foot the bill for your favorite high-quality show, unless 1) it's on a premium channel like HBO, where the revenue comes from subscriptions instead of ads, or 2) it's a bunch of webisodes, made on a shoestring, that air on YouTube and don't require a deep-pocketed sponsor. For now, 1 is much more likely than 2. While there's no doubt some terrific low-budget stuff that's being made for the Web—and this stuff will certainly get better and better—at this point, not a lot of it compares to The Wire. Or, for that matter, The Mentalist. (To paraphrase a joke I recently heard somewhere: What do you call a homemade video that holds your attention for 20 minutes? A celebrity sex tape.)
It all portends chaos for the television industry. But Garfield foresees equal tumult in store for the big-time ad agencies. He predicts the gradual demise of the classic, 30-second TV spot, which has been the lifeblood of major agencies for half a century. His prescription: Advertising will need to be less about displaying hip imagery and implanting mood associations and more about interacting with consumers online, analyzing their complaints and desires (as revealed in their blog posts and Web site comments), and providing utilitarian information to those who seek it out.
This approach, which Garfield dubs "listen-omics," may well turn out to be a more effective method of marketing. But there's also far less money in it. To illustrate this point, Garfield relates an anecdote about the Six Flags theme park deciding to give away 45,000 tickets as a promotion for its 45th anniversary. They told their big ad agency to figure out the logistics. Once upon a time, the agency might have spent lots of time and resources creating radio spots or billboard ads, and then securing placements for them, to make the public aware of the free tickets. Instead, recognizing the new reality, the agency just typed up a little blurb on Craigslist. The tickets were gone in five hours. Worked great, but as one of the agency executives subsequently wondered: How do you bill the client for that?
The thought of a scared and confused ad exec would no doubt delight Carrie McLaren and Jason Torchinsky, editors of Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. Many of the essays in this compilation originally appeared in Stay Free!—a zine, and later a Web site, that McLaren launched in 1993. The unifying theme: a deeply held suspicion, verging on primal fear, of marketing's quest to creep into every corner of our lives.
I can get weary of earnest, anti-consumerist droning. (I'm looking at you, Adbusters.) But Ad Nauseam manages to serve up its paranoia with a light and funny touch. It begins by tracing the evolutionary arc of persuasive advertising, from the stuffy pedantry of the 1800s to the "science"-laden claims of the 1920s through the 1940s to the eventual disappearance of text and arguments in favor of striking, emotional images. Another essay ridicules moments of sudden, radical brand repositioning, noting, for instance, that Marlboro cigarettes were first targeted at women before the company settled on a rugged, manly image. The book also recounts some dark chapters in marketing history, including Coca-Cola's successful effort to get Olive Garden to stop serving free tap water and instead push soft drinks on its patrons.
At all times, the goal is awareness. The underlying assumption is that consumerism has so pervaded our surroundings that it's vital to step back and assess just what it is we're up against. As McLaren posits in her introduction, decades of sophisticated, ubiquitous marketing have turned us all into "fish who can't see the water."
Both The Chaos Scenario and Ad Nauseam provide entertaining material for armchair marketing scholars and ammunition for sworn advertising haters. Ultimately, though, they come from opposite tacks. Consider the recent revelation, on the official Google blog, that a cute home video of a choreographed entrance dance at a Minnesota wedding managed to double typical YouTube advertising click-through rates and also dramatically boost sales of a year-old R&B single. The Ad Nauseam folks might see this as the latest outrage—now even our wedding videos are fuel for the marketing juggernaut. Bob Garfield, on the other hand, might view this as a step in the right direction.
Related in Slate Farhad Manjoo considered the options and ethics behind popular ad-removal software. James Surowiecki discussed the advertising trend that depicts consumers as befuddled, bumbling idiots. Seth Stevenson compiled readers' recommendations for examples of terrible advertising, and rated catchy credit report ads.
Page last updated at 13:26 GMT, Friday, 7 August 2009 14:26 UK 23:41 HK
http://news.bbc.co.uk/weather/hi/gallery/ Michael Reilly was standing on a beach on the Isle of Arran, watching as cumulus clouds gathered over the Isle of Cumbrae in the distance, when he took this picture on 5th August.
Pentylands Country Park in Highworth, Swindon was bathed in the ethereal light of crepuscular rays on 5th August. Picture taken by Tony Strover
These delicate-looking feather shaped cirrus clouds were shaped by the wind above Mansfield in Nottinghamshire. Trevor A. Heath captured this image on the evening of 6th August.
The sky above South Shields seemed to catch fire as the light of the setting sun reflected against the underside of a layer of altocumulus cloud. Neil Reay took this picture on 3rd August.
As Pippa Swannell drove from a rainy Liverpool towards a sunnier Scotland on 28th July, she noticed this spectacle whilst on the M6. The cloud is an altocumulus lenticularis, which is formed by winds moving over hills and mountain ranges.
These altocumulus clouds would have been shaped by the wind to gain their unusual appearance. Nigel Corby spotted them as he was looking south towards Chelmsford from Grantham on 5th August.