The Sistine Chapel's transformation from a world-famous tourist site to the prayer-filled space where cardinal electors will choose the next pope is under way.
Vatican workers have begun installing protective panels to cover the mosaic tile floors, and mini-scaffolding will raise a false floor level with the altar and eliminate any steps.
Workers will then have to put in tables and chairs for the expected 115 cardinal electors.
Like for the 2005 conclave, two stoves will be installed: one to burn ballots and the other to burn chemicals to create different colored smoke to let the public know if a pope was selected or not. Father Lombardi said that burning the ballots with wet or dry straw had made the right color, but never really created enough smoke to offer a clear signal.
In order to begin the preparations, the chapel, where the conclave will take place, was officially closed to tourists March 5.
Maintaining secrecy is part of the cardinals' oath, and technicians sweep the chapel for electronic surveillance or recording devices before the conclave.
Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, Vatican spokesman, told journalists March 6 that jamming devices are used to disable cellphone signals, but that they are not installed under the false flooring as had been reported in the past.
However, even the innocuous climate sensors dotted about the chapel will be dismantled to remove any suspicion of being spied on, said Antonio Paolucci, director of the Vatican Museums.
The head of the Vatican police, Domenico Giani, said it would be a good idea to take them down, "perhaps to avoid every feeling and fear, too, of Big Brother," Paolucci told the Italian newspaper Il Messaggero March 6.
Even though the sensors don't present a security risk, the head of the Vatican police force "wanted to avoid even what might be the most minimal psychological discomfort," the museums' director said.
The sensors were eventually going to be replaced anyway, he said, when the museums install a new climate-control system for the chapel.
Security concerns are so tight that it looks as though, during the voting sessions, cardinals will not be allowed to use the museum lavatories, Paolucci said.
"Something different has been decided on; I believe they may be installing portable chemical toilets inside the chapel," he said.
A few other areas of the Vatican Museums will also be closed in the run-up to and during the conclave because of their proximity to the chapel, he said.
Cordoned off to the public will be the Borgia apartments, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Matisse and Manzu halls, he said.
Though they blocked reservations for visits to the chapel as soon as retired Pope Benedict XVI announced his resignation Feb. 11, Paolucci said, the museums still had to spend weeks contacting individuals and groups who had already made advanced reservations.
More than 5 million people stream through the Sistine Chapel each year, and many were bound to be disappointed the chapel would be closed for an unspecified amount of time in March; however, people have been very understanding, he said.
"If the Sistine Chapel were closed because a custodian called in sick, then they would complain, but in this case, they get it," he said.
From the outside, the only sign of the conclave proceedings will emerge from the smokestack on top of the chapel's roof. Barely visible from St. Peter's Square, it is kept in the viewfinder of telephoto lenses until a new pope is elected and white smoke pours out.
The Pandora Avenue hotel began life in 1911 as the upscale Westholme. It housed a swank restaurant boasting an orchestra and “a brigade of 50 waiters,” said Sarah Smith, co-creator of a new play exploring the hotel’s chequered history.
Over the years, the hotel boasted an Arabian Nights theme and a groovy beatnik hangout that, according to legend, attracted a young David Foster. There were rumours of ghosts, suicides, shady characters and ladies of the night.
Smith and her writing partner, Sadie Forbes, are the writers of Ghosts of the Plaza — a one-hour romp chronicling the Victoria Plaza Hotel in all its incarnations. Following sold-out shows in November, these first-time playwrights and the show’s producer, burlesque dancer Miss Rosie Bitts, have remounted Ghosts of the Plaza for a two-night run at Odd Fellows Hall.
For a decade, Smith — who holds a University of Victoria degree in women’s studies —waitressed at Monty’s Showroom Pub. The strip club, which shut down in January, achieved international infamy in 2005 thanks to a National Enquirer story headlined, Matt LeBlanc: My Wild Night with a Stripper. (Actor LeBlanc played Joey on the TV sitcom Friends.)
Smith always loved the low-rent dinginess of Monty’s. Eventually, that interest extended to the hotel itself. She explored its basement, stuffed with discarded beds, lamps and other detritus. Underneath, she saw the floor was richly decorated with mosaic tile, a legacy of more prosperous days.
Smith and Forbes — also a history buff — started researching the Victoria Plaza Hotel. In the city archives they found an old newspaper story detailing the Westholme Hotel’s glorious opening.
By the 1920s and ’30s, the hotel had lapsed into ill repute, its rooms favoured by prostitutes. A rebirth came in the 1960s with an Arabian Nights-themed revamp. Staff sported turbans and harem outfits. Central to the decor was a working model of the Centennial Square fountain.
2013年3月5日星期二
My Republican Weekend
As we walked through the bland doors of the Hyatt Regency, we had no idea what was waiting for us on the other side. Imagine for one moment a Turkish bazaar, right after it rear ends a traveling medicine show. Carnival barkers swarmed around, chanting names and phrases over and over while handing out pieces of paper.
We barely had time to register this before we also came to the unfortunate realization that we had entered the wrong door. It had to be the wrong door because everyone was walking in the exact opposite direction we were walking in. We were the salmon, they were the falls. We steered ourselves and plowed into the mob heading towards us, all of them sporting patriotic pins and clothing, gripping wine glasses and beer bottles with a steely determination, and all thinking the same thing...Karl...Karl...Karl.
"We" in this case referred to me and Melissa Griffin, ace political writer for the San Francisco Examiner. And we were trying to get our press passes so that we could join in the crowd barreling toward that ballroom.
Ok, I need to back up here for a moment. When I found out that the Republicans were having their confab right down the road in Sacramento, I knew I had to go. Now stop the wagging of heads and rolling of eyes. I know you think is a "Democrat goes to Sacramento to make fun of the Republicans" story, but that was not my intention. Well, in the spirit of full disclosure, I did want to make fun of Karl Rove. The rest, though, I was determined to keep an open mind about. I mean, and the end of the day they put on their L.L. Bean pants one leg a time just like us, right? And I was curious to see this legendary fractionalization up front, this divisive split between Rove's Victory Project and the Tea Partiers that I've been reading about. We in the fourth estate love nothing more than a train wreck, and from all accounts you can hear the screeching brakes on the GOP from a mile down the track. Of course there is the additional benefit of the media being demonized by the GOP at every turn. Put that all together, and I was sharpening my knives the whole way up from San Francisco.
I had great hopes too. Besides the aforementioned Karl Rove, there were threats of frenzied GOP parties late into the night, and knickknacks for sale such as bumper stickers that said things like "Keep Honking, I'm Reloading" -- all of which made me completely ill-prepared for the chaos we had just walked into. Although by all counts election of the major officers was pretty much a done deal, the walls of the Hyatt were plastered with campaign posters like an election at a high school (paging Tracy Flick, paging Ms. Tracy Flick). The campaign staffers would descend and feverishly push paper into your hands. Campaign flyers? Nope. Positions and issues? Um, no. The flyers were announcing where that candidate's party was that night.
That's right, the battle for the hearts and minds over the future leaders of the Republican Caucus was apparently a battle over their livers. This was not terribly surprising given a chat with a bartender later that day. Apparently, when the staff arrived to set up the bar (which opened at 10:30 a.m.) hey found people waiting. They commenced serving drinks at 10:31, and went nonstop until they started prying glasses out of people's hands at 2:30 a.m. Which would explain the gimlet-eyed nature of the clientele. They really were gimlets. Could we be looking at the first coalition of the swilling?
There was no time to ponder this, as the wine-toting crowd swelled into the ballroom to hear the words of Karl. The press was barricaded up against the back wall, with a rope making sure we were kept far away from Rove. He powered up to the stage while the room wobbled to their feet and gave him a less than thunderous response. It turned out to be completely warranted as Rove spent almost half an hour insulting California at every turn, while the room quietly pushed their salads around their plates. When he wasn't blasting California, he was extolling his home state of Texas and telling everyone how happy he was that businesses were going to leave California. He glared at the room and informed us that "California used to lead the country, but no longer, and I say good!" I expected a riot to break out, but a few of the people around us had actually fallen asleep. Finally the mighty Rove told the room to get off their asses, and get back in the game. Then he got back in his car and scrammed as fast as he could.
"He Who Shall Not Be Named" had lived up to everything I hoped. He displayed every bit of arrogance, spite, and complete disregard for his audience that I had hoped for. He made a joke about Al Gore and the Internet. He made jokes about Democrats doing "goofy things." He trotted out the (at this point cliché) "we are turning into Greece" schtick. He made fun of the president. It was all sadly predictable.
And then their savior blew town as fast as his PAC-funded airline ticket could manage. The room suddenly deflated, and were left standing wondering what to do next. The only answer was of course to head back out to the carnival outside. The show in the hallways between the candidates' conference rooms was a lesson in surreal excess. There were purses, festooned with enough faux bling to make Liberace blush. The bumper stickers with their strident slogans. On a table were dozens of photos of grinning delegates posing with the now departed Rove. In the corner was a vendor from Orlando selling pins and jewelry, alongside some truly heroic paintings of George W., Reagan, and Lincoln done in a vaguely "color by numbers" fashion. When I asked him if he was doing well, he sadly shook his head. Given the wares, I inquired if he had also attended the Republican national convention in Tampa. "They didn't want vendors there," he said. "It's not for small business." Ok, so much for that platform.
It turned out we were not the only salmon swimming upstream in that building. There was an undercurrent of understanding that things were not going the way they had envisioned just a short 12 months ago. The previous year, the powers that be told these exact people that inevitable victory was coming that fall, that the forces of conservatism would once again resonate with the electorate, and their Mormon chosen one would lead them back. And instead, as one candidate put it, "we got our asses kicked."
And then just like that, it turned around. One of the many press flacks that trolled the crowd accosted Melissa and I. He was introducing the press to Marcelino Valdez. Valdez is 33 years old, living in Fresno, and just got elected Central Valley Region vice chairman. He is being groomed by the GOP, and not just for the obvious reason. Yes, he is Latino, and yes the GOP got their clock cleaned last year in part because they only got about 11 Latino votes The need to get right with this important voting block was palatable. On Friday night a mariachi band entertained the delegates. Get it?
We barely had time to register this before we also came to the unfortunate realization that we had entered the wrong door. It had to be the wrong door because everyone was walking in the exact opposite direction we were walking in. We were the salmon, they were the falls. We steered ourselves and plowed into the mob heading towards us, all of them sporting patriotic pins and clothing, gripping wine glasses and beer bottles with a steely determination, and all thinking the same thing...Karl...Karl...Karl.
"We" in this case referred to me and Melissa Griffin, ace political writer for the San Francisco Examiner. And we were trying to get our press passes so that we could join in the crowd barreling toward that ballroom.
Ok, I need to back up here for a moment. When I found out that the Republicans were having their confab right down the road in Sacramento, I knew I had to go. Now stop the wagging of heads and rolling of eyes. I know you think is a "Democrat goes to Sacramento to make fun of the Republicans" story, but that was not my intention. Well, in the spirit of full disclosure, I did want to make fun of Karl Rove. The rest, though, I was determined to keep an open mind about. I mean, and the end of the day they put on their L.L. Bean pants one leg a time just like us, right? And I was curious to see this legendary fractionalization up front, this divisive split between Rove's Victory Project and the Tea Partiers that I've been reading about. We in the fourth estate love nothing more than a train wreck, and from all accounts you can hear the screeching brakes on the GOP from a mile down the track. Of course there is the additional benefit of the media being demonized by the GOP at every turn. Put that all together, and I was sharpening my knives the whole way up from San Francisco.
I had great hopes too. Besides the aforementioned Karl Rove, there were threats of frenzied GOP parties late into the night, and knickknacks for sale such as bumper stickers that said things like "Keep Honking, I'm Reloading" -- all of which made me completely ill-prepared for the chaos we had just walked into. Although by all counts election of the major officers was pretty much a done deal, the walls of the Hyatt were plastered with campaign posters like an election at a high school (paging Tracy Flick, paging Ms. Tracy Flick). The campaign staffers would descend and feverishly push paper into your hands. Campaign flyers? Nope. Positions and issues? Um, no. The flyers were announcing where that candidate's party was that night.
That's right, the battle for the hearts and minds over the future leaders of the Republican Caucus was apparently a battle over their livers. This was not terribly surprising given a chat with a bartender later that day. Apparently, when the staff arrived to set up the bar (which opened at 10:30 a.m.) hey found people waiting. They commenced serving drinks at 10:31, and went nonstop until they started prying glasses out of people's hands at 2:30 a.m. Which would explain the gimlet-eyed nature of the clientele. They really were gimlets. Could we be looking at the first coalition of the swilling?
There was no time to ponder this, as the wine-toting crowd swelled into the ballroom to hear the words of Karl. The press was barricaded up against the back wall, with a rope making sure we were kept far away from Rove. He powered up to the stage while the room wobbled to their feet and gave him a less than thunderous response. It turned out to be completely warranted as Rove spent almost half an hour insulting California at every turn, while the room quietly pushed their salads around their plates. When he wasn't blasting California, he was extolling his home state of Texas and telling everyone how happy he was that businesses were going to leave California. He glared at the room and informed us that "California used to lead the country, but no longer, and I say good!" I expected a riot to break out, but a few of the people around us had actually fallen asleep. Finally the mighty Rove told the room to get off their asses, and get back in the game. Then he got back in his car and scrammed as fast as he could.
"He Who Shall Not Be Named" had lived up to everything I hoped. He displayed every bit of arrogance, spite, and complete disregard for his audience that I had hoped for. He made a joke about Al Gore and the Internet. He made jokes about Democrats doing "goofy things." He trotted out the (at this point cliché) "we are turning into Greece" schtick. He made fun of the president. It was all sadly predictable.
And then their savior blew town as fast as his PAC-funded airline ticket could manage. The room suddenly deflated, and were left standing wondering what to do next. The only answer was of course to head back out to the carnival outside. The show in the hallways between the candidates' conference rooms was a lesson in surreal excess. There were purses, festooned with enough faux bling to make Liberace blush. The bumper stickers with their strident slogans. On a table were dozens of photos of grinning delegates posing with the now departed Rove. In the corner was a vendor from Orlando selling pins and jewelry, alongside some truly heroic paintings of George W., Reagan, and Lincoln done in a vaguely "color by numbers" fashion. When I asked him if he was doing well, he sadly shook his head. Given the wares, I inquired if he had also attended the Republican national convention in Tampa. "They didn't want vendors there," he said. "It's not for small business." Ok, so much for that platform.
It turned out we were not the only salmon swimming upstream in that building. There was an undercurrent of understanding that things were not going the way they had envisioned just a short 12 months ago. The previous year, the powers that be told these exact people that inevitable victory was coming that fall, that the forces of conservatism would once again resonate with the electorate, and their Mormon chosen one would lead them back. And instead, as one candidate put it, "we got our asses kicked."
And then just like that, it turned around. One of the many press flacks that trolled the crowd accosted Melissa and I. He was introducing the press to Marcelino Valdez. Valdez is 33 years old, living in Fresno, and just got elected Central Valley Region vice chairman. He is being groomed by the GOP, and not just for the obvious reason. Yes, he is Latino, and yes the GOP got their clock cleaned last year in part because they only got about 11 Latino votes The need to get right with this important voting block was palatable. On Friday night a mariachi band entertained the delegates. Get it?
2013年3月3日星期日
China's New Record: World's Biggest Cost Blow-out
China is justifiably proud of its economic development, but there’s one “achievement” rarely mentioned, a project which has suffered what is possibly the world’s worst cost blow-out and completion delay — an iron ore mine which is three years late, three-times over budget; and counting!
When construction started at the Sino Iron project on the north-west coast of Australia in 2006 the wholly-Chinese owned mine and associated processing facility was expected to cost $2.5 billion and start shipping iron in 2009.
At last count the budget had passed $8 billion and was said to be heading for $10 billion with the first shipment date pushed out again just last week to “late March or early April”.
The new deadline was revealed after Sino Iron’s owner, the Hong Kong-based CiticPacific, filed its annual results and provided an update on a mine which has caused nothing but trouble since it was approved, and now threatens to become tangled in legal disputes.
One of those disputes is with the major construction contractor, a Chinese company called Metallurgical Corporation of China, another is with Clive Palmer, the self-made Australian millionaire with a plan to build a replica of Titanic, the unsinkable passenger liner that claimed 1502 lives when it sank in the North Atlantic in 1912.
Palmer pocketed more than $400 million when he sold Citic Pacific the right to mine two billion tonnes of iron ore on tenements he had held for more than 20 years, and also secured a future royalty deal which should be generating more than $100 million a year – if the mine hits its targets.
But, failure to build the mine on schedule and failure to stick to its budget means that Citic Pacific is looking for a way to minimise its exposure to the Palmer royalty which is why the two are locked in a battle in the Supreme Court of Western Australia over the precise terms of the original deal with Citic, naturally, wanting to pay less and Palmer, naturally, wanting to maximise his return for other projects, such as the Titanic replica.
Meanwhile, at the Sino Iron site the latest deadline nears for first shipment from a project which still faces two big challenges.
The first is that Citic Pacific has decided to limit its immediate annual production target to 10 million tons of exportable iron ore a year from two ore-processing “lines” rather than push ahead to the original target of 28 million tons from six lines, a decision which will dramatically increase the cost per ton.
The second is that the export phase of the project will use a shipping system untried in Australia’s hurricane-prone north-west.
Despite the cost blow-out and completion delay Citic Pacific’s chairman, Chang Zhenming, said with the release of the company’s 2012 profit result (down 25% to HK$6.95 billion) that the company would press ahead with Sino Iron.
“We have put so much into this project in every sense, time, energy and capital, that it is indeed gratifying to see the progress we have made despite the delays and unexpected costs,” Chang said.
There has not been a single issue which has tripped Citic Pacific with problems encountered in under-estimating Australia’s high domestic costs, labor shortages, a sharp increase in the exchange rate, and difficulties operating in a remote region.
The challenge of the location will be put to its next test when loading starts for the first export shipments because the Sino Iron project does not include a conventional wharf, opting instead for “trans-shipping” with tugs pulling barges to bulk carriers anchored offshore, a system which works well in calm waters but could be a challenge in heavy seas.
Financially, the Sino Iron project is already a disaster. Whether it can ever recover from the capital cost blow-out is questionable, more so now that Citic Pacific has decided to go slow on finalising what it started because the operating costs will be sky-high thanks to the sunk capital and limited early-year production.
With regards to mechanized data processing procedures, data fusion is defined as an ongoing and hierarchic computational process in conditions of uncertainty. This is based on multiple sources of information that refer to objects in the expanse, with objectives that include: improving measurement performance with regards to a solitary sensor; adding new information fields; creating a situational picture; assessing a situation; creating insights and more.
With the development of sensory measures, the collection of digital information and the computational capabilities of modern processors, there is a growing awareness and desire to impart similar capabilities to automated systems as well. If in the past the bottleneck was in the amount of relevant data available for fusion, then today the bottleneck is the flood of information that cannot be handled by human elements.
The methods and algorithms developed over the course of recent decades are divided into several categories according to the various levels of processing. One of the division manners accepted today was formed in the US starting from the mid 1980s, and is called as the “Joint Directors of Laboratories (JDL) Model.” This model proposes the division of data fusion stages according to the processing of raw data (at the sensor level, for example), object qualities, situation assessment, threat assessment, procedural feedback, and man-machine interface.
Several improvements and expansions were proposed for the model. At the lower fusion levels, we will note algorithms dealing with geographical data, spotting, course tracking and more, among them a "Kelman" filter and a particle filter. We also mention methods for imagery fusion, starting with the single pixel level and up to the level of characteristics, including many registration methods, PCA and wavelet decomposition-based algorithms, Bayesian models, making deductions in conditions of uncertainty (the Dampster- Shafer theory) and more.
The types of systems that make use of the potential embodied in the fusion process are wide, and include civilian, military and defensive electronic systems, such as medical, port security, border, command and control, HLS, air control, field intelligence systems and more.
When construction started at the Sino Iron project on the north-west coast of Australia in 2006 the wholly-Chinese owned mine and associated processing facility was expected to cost $2.5 billion and start shipping iron in 2009.
At last count the budget had passed $8 billion and was said to be heading for $10 billion with the first shipment date pushed out again just last week to “late March or early April”.
The new deadline was revealed after Sino Iron’s owner, the Hong Kong-based CiticPacific, filed its annual results and provided an update on a mine which has caused nothing but trouble since it was approved, and now threatens to become tangled in legal disputes.
One of those disputes is with the major construction contractor, a Chinese company called Metallurgical Corporation of China, another is with Clive Palmer, the self-made Australian millionaire with a plan to build a replica of Titanic, the unsinkable passenger liner that claimed 1502 lives when it sank in the North Atlantic in 1912.
Palmer pocketed more than $400 million when he sold Citic Pacific the right to mine two billion tonnes of iron ore on tenements he had held for more than 20 years, and also secured a future royalty deal which should be generating more than $100 million a year – if the mine hits its targets.
But, failure to build the mine on schedule and failure to stick to its budget means that Citic Pacific is looking for a way to minimise its exposure to the Palmer royalty which is why the two are locked in a battle in the Supreme Court of Western Australia over the precise terms of the original deal with Citic, naturally, wanting to pay less and Palmer, naturally, wanting to maximise his return for other projects, such as the Titanic replica.
Meanwhile, at the Sino Iron site the latest deadline nears for first shipment from a project which still faces two big challenges.
The first is that Citic Pacific has decided to limit its immediate annual production target to 10 million tons of exportable iron ore a year from two ore-processing “lines” rather than push ahead to the original target of 28 million tons from six lines, a decision which will dramatically increase the cost per ton.
The second is that the export phase of the project will use a shipping system untried in Australia’s hurricane-prone north-west.
Despite the cost blow-out and completion delay Citic Pacific’s chairman, Chang Zhenming, said with the release of the company’s 2012 profit result (down 25% to HK$6.95 billion) that the company would press ahead with Sino Iron.
“We have put so much into this project in every sense, time, energy and capital, that it is indeed gratifying to see the progress we have made despite the delays and unexpected costs,” Chang said.
There has not been a single issue which has tripped Citic Pacific with problems encountered in under-estimating Australia’s high domestic costs, labor shortages, a sharp increase in the exchange rate, and difficulties operating in a remote region.
The challenge of the location will be put to its next test when loading starts for the first export shipments because the Sino Iron project does not include a conventional wharf, opting instead for “trans-shipping” with tugs pulling barges to bulk carriers anchored offshore, a system which works well in calm waters but could be a challenge in heavy seas.
Financially, the Sino Iron project is already a disaster. Whether it can ever recover from the capital cost blow-out is questionable, more so now that Citic Pacific has decided to go slow on finalising what it started because the operating costs will be sky-high thanks to the sunk capital and limited early-year production.
With regards to mechanized data processing procedures, data fusion is defined as an ongoing and hierarchic computational process in conditions of uncertainty. This is based on multiple sources of information that refer to objects in the expanse, with objectives that include: improving measurement performance with regards to a solitary sensor; adding new information fields; creating a situational picture; assessing a situation; creating insights and more.
With the development of sensory measures, the collection of digital information and the computational capabilities of modern processors, there is a growing awareness and desire to impart similar capabilities to automated systems as well. If in the past the bottleneck was in the amount of relevant data available for fusion, then today the bottleneck is the flood of information that cannot be handled by human elements.
The methods and algorithms developed over the course of recent decades are divided into several categories according to the various levels of processing. One of the division manners accepted today was formed in the US starting from the mid 1980s, and is called as the “Joint Directors of Laboratories (JDL) Model.” This model proposes the division of data fusion stages according to the processing of raw data (at the sensor level, for example), object qualities, situation assessment, threat assessment, procedural feedback, and man-machine interface.
Several improvements and expansions were proposed for the model. At the lower fusion levels, we will note algorithms dealing with geographical data, spotting, course tracking and more, among them a "Kelman" filter and a particle filter. We also mention methods for imagery fusion, starting with the single pixel level and up to the level of characteristics, including many registration methods, PCA and wavelet decomposition-based algorithms, Bayesian models, making deductions in conditions of uncertainty (the Dampster- Shafer theory) and more.
The types of systems that make use of the potential embodied in the fusion process are wide, and include civilian, military and defensive electronic systems, such as medical, port security, border, command and control, HLS, air control, field intelligence systems and more.
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