Bismark’s Germany at the end of the 19th century was the first state to institute old age pension and other similar measures on part of the Government. This was followed by Great Britain in the early 20th century under Winston Churchill and Lloyd George, by instituting old age pension and welfare schemes.
Here’s one reason why the Euro is not a viable alternative (emphasis mine).
Among the greenback’s chief rivals, only the euro is widely held as a reserve currency, but it has some significant disadvantages relative to the dollar, including fractured debt markets and fiscal policies.
[Source]: The Economist Blog
Newborn babies have little visual acuity. They are not able to focus properly so things have to be held at the exact distance for them to recognize it.
So, people have begun streaming in. They are all sitting in the lobby talking in hushed tones. The phones have wrung almost every 12 minutes. Some callers are very persistant. How does one handle them nicely? I can smell a lot of incense so I guess things are ready for the next phase. The certificate of death needs to be stamped and photocopied. Someone should make a manual for all this. I wonder which ancient text of ours has all this documented.
A post I made to the seeing with sound list about my eating noodles and watermelon with the vOICe.
Hi all,
I have just finished eating breakfast. The different thing though about this breakfast was that I was wearing the vOICe while eating. I breakfasted on noodles and watermelon. When I eat food, mostly, I need to grope for the food on my plate. I do know where it is but I still need to utilise my hand to find the food. The idea was to eliminate the use of the hand. I set a zoom factor of 4 to restrict the camera view to my plate. This was pure guesswork but it seems to have worked well. I was able to sense the noodles falling into the plate as they were being served. I was also able to sense how the noodles were scattered. The main difficulty I had was figuring out what was in the radius of my plate and what was peripheral. Another problem was that even though I was using a headmounted setup, I had to look down directly on my plate to see the food. The next item of food that I had was a watermelon. It was cut into bite sized chunks. Things here worked a little better as in I was able to find the general concentration of pieces. I moved my hand in that general direction on the plate and was able to snag a piece of watermelon with my fork. Things did become a little difficult when I only had very small pieces left. By difficult I mean I had a hard time finding the smaller pieces of watermelon on my plate.
See the video clip of me eating noodles. The clip has been taken from my perspective so you can’t actually see me.
A video of my eating noodles with the vOICe
A sound scape of the box of spices
This image shows a box of spices. There is one big box and every individual spice is kept in its own box. You will be able to sense the different circles belonging to different boxes.
A view of the teraces facing my house. This photograph has been taken from my terrace. The image is extremely complex because it shows a variety of roofs of houses and I suspect, some other things.
This image shows the view of the side of a car. It has been taken from the backside passenger window of an other car. I have used the vOICe to take this image. You can clearly hear the doors of the car. I suspect most of the image is of the part of the door that is just below the passenger windows of the car.
The image below shows an autorickshaw from the side. You can clearly make out the dividing bar between the back and front halves. For more information on autorickshaw’s, see the following link.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto_rickshaw
A soundscape of the same image can also be downloaded here. I took this image using my Nokia E51 with the very latest version of the vOICe. Again, I was looking out the left side passenger window of a car.
Soundscape of a complex street scene.
Above is a complex street scene captured at a red light. There are a number of vehicles visible in the image.
