In late October last year, about six weeks after I arrived in Kenya, I interviewed a Chinese minister and commercial counselor in Nairobi. Dr. Guo Ce bowled me over with his enthusiasm and immense hope for Kenya’s development and long-term partnership with his homeland. A few weeks later, he asked me to withdraw this blog… Read More
I wrote the story on Indonesia’s attempts at natural disaster warning and prevention for Earth magazine last April, based on reporting I did in Indonesia in late December. Now with the Sulawesi quake and tsunami disaster, I print it below. The sheer unpredictability of quakes and tsunamis in a nation of 6000 inhabited islands spread… Read More
After staying in Nairobi 24 hours on no sleep, I took a flight to Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania to attend a conference entitled Africa-Asia: ‘A New Axis of Knowledge 2.’ The object was to learn about the region and run into contacts who might help me locate Chinese enclaves and business folks making interesting money… Read More
Just two blocks from my Charleston-style home on Bridges Farm Rd., I plunge almost every day into Lake Davidson, the horseshoe-shaped lake with the gooey clay bottom. On sunny days, when the water turns a pellucid blue-green, I swim as freely as the sparrows and Great Blue Herons swooping down from the trees. Immersed in… Read More
January 11, 2016. As I stepped off the train at Harbin West station after an eight hour train ride across the Manchurian flatlands from Beijing, the station was moist and frigid with the Siberian wind and the night which had fallen hours before. It was -29 degrees Celsius as I dragged my two suitcases and… Read More
It’s been three weeks so chock full of Indonesian experience. Each day new lectures, close encounters with medical and comm students, children, security guards, cooks, geophysicists, random athletes and mop-haired photojournalists and artists. It’s as though I’m being flooded with torrents of images, data, and experiences and I can’t stop the flow. Surprisingly, at… Read More
by Arielle Emmett Given the dire warnings about climate change, some business leaders and IT professionals are pondering this question: How should data center managers handle the crop of so-called 100- and even 500-year storms, coastal floods and other ecological disasters that climatologists predict are heading our way? Some experts suggest that managers of mission-critical… Read More
The Scientist 14[19]:1, Oct. 2, 2000 This article originally appeared in The Scientist with an accompanying interview with Dr. Colwell. NEWS Biocomplexity: A New Science For Survival? NSF director Rita Colwell sees great potential in integrating the physical universe with biology By Arielle Emmett Going beyond biodiversity and traditional ecology, the new research field called… Read More
“Welcome to Voice Print Identification.” The silky computer voice that sounded like a cocktail hostess circa 1968 ushered in a new era of thinking about biometric authentication. By Arielle Emmett “Welcome to Voice Print Identification.” The silky computer voice that sounded like a cocktail hostess circa 1968 ushered in a new era of thinking about… Read More