Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Internship Opportunities: DHS. Office of Public Affairs


The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is accepting applications for internships in the Office of Public Affairs (OPA) for Summer 2013. OPA is responsible for managing the Department’s external and internal communications. For additional information, requirements and how to apply, please visit our website: http://tinyurl.com/atkxun3
 

How do you get started in the satellite business?

http://www.sspi.org/?Starting_Intro

 


According to recognized leaders in the industry, there are many paths as well as demand for many different skills. In these interviews, satellite professionals share their personal career journey.

Edward Horowitz, former CEO of SES AMERICOM (now SES World Skies), discusses how he went from roof top to top management.

Tom Moore, President, ViaSat-1, was looking to combine his passion for designing modems with his desire to get broadband connection where he lived. (audio)

Susan Irwin, President, Irwin Communications, talks about how she got her start in the satellite industry. (video)

Thaicom President Dr. Nongluck Phinainitisart discusses her start in the space industry during its early adoption in Thailand. (audio)

Sidney Topol, President, Topol Group LLC, former CEO of Scientific Atlanta and 1991 Hall of Fame inductee, recounts his entry into the satellite industry. (video)

Rick Sanford, COO, Cisco Internet Routing in Space, recounts his path fom Air Force to Department of State to a solid career in the space industry. (audio)

Nick Thompson, Managing Director, Arqiva, discusses his unique path to satellite communications. (audio)

The "Women in Space" issue of the Online Journal of Space Communications takes a closer look a the roles women play in the various disciplines and organizations that make up the satellite industry.

Max Kamenetsky, Principal System Engineer, Space Systems/Loral and 2009 Promise Award honoree, talks about how he got started and gives advice to other young enthusiasts.

Scott Chase, SATELLITE show Chairman, discusses the serendipitous phone call that led him to the exciting world of rockets and loud noises. (audio)



Robert Scheige, Assistant Vice President, Willis Inspace, discusses the connection between the psychology lab and the satellite insurance business. (video)

Dom Stasi, CTO Emeritus, Avail-TVN, discusses his early start via the Apollo program and an unknown little company called Home Box Office. (video)



Peter Shaper, CEO, CapRock Communications, discusses the various opportunities for careers in the industry. (video)

Phillip L. Spector, Intelsat Executive Vice President, Business Development, & General Counsel, talks about the creativity and entrepreneurial opportunities that make the satellite industry a dynamic career choice.. (video)

Tuesday, February 5, 2013

The Bounty Hunter: $3,500 to catch man who’s made 20 plus fake ‘mayday’ calls from Michigan

February 4, WDIV 4 Detroit – (Michigan)

US Coast Guard offers $3,500 to catch man who’s made 20 plus fake ‘mayday’ calls from Michigan. The U.S. Coast Guard turned to the public for help to catch an individual that has been making hoax distress calls since 2010, by offering them a monetary reward for assisting in his capture.

Source:   http://www.clickondetroit.com/news/US-Coast-Guard-offers-3-500-to-catch-man-who-s-made-20-plus-fake-mayday-calls-from-Michigan/-/1719418/18393460/-/v88pisz/-/index.html


Haiti: Make Haiti Green Again.


Former Envoy’s New Mission:
Make Haiti Green Again

by Larry Luxner
With a prayer and a speech, Raymond Joseph, Haiti’s former ambassador to the United States, has officially launched A Dollar A Tree for Haiti Inc.

Joseph’s ambitious goal: to restore his denuded Caribbean country to the lush green state it was in back in 1804, the year Haiti declared its independence from France.


Photos: Larry Luxner

Raymond Joseph, Haiti’s former ambassador to the United States, recently launched the nonprofit A Dollar A Tree for Haiti Inc. to restore his denuded Caribbean country to the lush green state it was in back in 1804, the year Haiti declared its independence from France.

Joseph unveiled the nonprofit organization from the pulpit of Greater Mount Nebo African Methodist Episcopal Church of Bowie, Md., and he did so on Jan. 12 — the third anniversary of the magnitude-7.0 earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince. At his side was Mount Nebo’s pastor, Rev. Jonathan L. Weaver, who called Joseph “an absolutely wonderful man of God, one who epitomizes integrity.”

Joseph, 81, represented Haiti in Washington from 2005 to 2010, resigning that year to run for president of his quake-ravaged country. No longer in politics, the former ambassador — accompanied by his wife Lola — has vowed to devote the rest of his life to Haitian reforestation efforts.

“Since August 2010, Lola and I have been living in Haiti, watching with sadness how the country is becoming a desert. Tree cover now stands at just 2 percent,” Joseph told about 50 parishioners at Mt. Nebo. “But this is the same country Christopher Columbus exclaimed was a beautiful place full of trees when he visited our shores in 1492.”

Actually, Haiti’s tree cover is even less — more like 1.2 percent, according to Franz Stuppard, a Haitian-American advisor to Trees for the Future. Stuppard’s nonprofit, headquartered in Silver Spring, Md., will work hand in hand with Joseph’s. And that makes perfect sense, since the two men go back a long way.

“The ambassador knew my father even before I was born,” said Stuppard. “When we met, he recognized my name. And now, he wants this to become his legacy. What he’s proposing to do is find funding, and we do the work. He doesn’t really plan to reinvent the wheel — just modify it.”

A Dollar A Tree for Haiti seeks to raise up to $500,000 a year to plant trees, with Trees for the Future doing the actual planting. Exactly how many trees and what kind remains to be seen; Stuppard says long term, it could be in the millions.

“That sounds like a lot, but Haiti is exactly the same size as Maryland,” he pointed out. “If you drive along I-70 west going toward West Virginia, you will see mountains covered with trees. And population density doesn’t matter. New Jersey is smaller than Haiti and has many more people, yet there are a lot of trees in New Jersey.”


Haiti’s tree cover is around 1.2 percent, according to the group Trees for the Future, which since 2002 has focused on planting trees to reforest the country’s degraded hillsides and produce sustainable sources of fuel, construction materials, food and biodiesel.

Unlike some other Haiti-related charities that surfaced after the earthquake and were later exposed as scams, turning off donors, “this is going to be a transparent, accountable organization,” said Joseph. “The website will show whatever we get and how we spend it. People will be able to work with us, because it’ll be interactive.”

The affable former diplomat warned that Haiti — already the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere — could suffer social unrest in the wake of continued food shortages caused by natural disasters.

“Whenever a hurricane comes to the Caribbean, Haiti bears the brunt of it because it has no tree protection. The United Nations said that because of Hurricane Sandy, we can expect famine later this year, since 60 percent of all the crops were destroyed. And when the people don’t eat, they rise up. Governments have fallen because of that.”

Joseph said he was inspired by a local politician, André Gustave Louis, who spearheaded an initiative to plant 20,000 trees in Kenscoff, a suburb in the mountains above Port-au-Prince.

“We want to plant 1 million trees in two years — all sorts of trees. Mango trees, avocado trees, citrus trees. We will employ botanists and agronomists to study which ones,” said the former ambassador. A Dollar A Tree for Haiti will also launch a public information campaign to promote the use of solar cookers and bakeries, decreasing the need for Haitians to cut trees down for firewood.

As Joseph explains it, the deforestation of Haiti began almost immediately following independence in 1804, at which time the struggling new country was home to only 400,000 people.

“We got independence by beating the French on the battlefield. Former slaves rose up and beat their masters. It was the first time a slave revolt had been successful,” he said. “But by 1825, the French had organized an embargo against Haiti, together with other powers including the United States. We had to pay reparations to France in wood, and soon, lots of mahogany trees began finding their way to European homes and cathedrals. That’s how the deforestation of Haiti began in earnest.”


Replenishing Haiti’s trees is key to helping the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere weather storms and rebuild its agriculture.

Within 100 years, Haiti’s forest cover had declined to 60 percent, but its population began taking off.

“In 1954, Hurricane Hazel tore down a lot of forest in Haiti. People started to do logging, and charcoal became big business,” he explained. “That caused the trouble we have in Haiti today — a deforested country of 10 million inhabitants which will continue getting worse unless we do something.”

A 1997 study by the U.S. Agency for International Development found that deforestation costs Haiti about 30 million trees annually. Furthermore, about 15,000 acres of topsoil are washed away every year, making it more difficult for farmers to grow food.

That’s why Trees for the Future, active in Haiti since 2002, has focused on planting trees to reforest degraded hillsides and produce sustainable sources of fuel, construction materials, food and biodiesel.

In the last four years, the NGO has reforested large portions of the Arcadins coast north of Port-au-Prince. In late 2010, despite the devastation left by the massive earthquake that had struck in January, the program was expanded to communities further north toward Gonaïves, in partnership with the Yele Foundation.

“Our staffers are former Peace Corps volunteers, people from the States who have lived overseas,” said Stuppard. “They know forestry, and that certain types of trees are ‘pioneer trees’ that will survive in any environment. The land is so degraded that you need to plant those pioneer trees first. They will rejuvenate the soil. As they grow, the leaves fall off and the soil comes back to life. The roots go down deep so that when it rains, the soil doesn’t run off. After six months to a year, when those trees are growing well, then you can introduce fruit trees.”

In 2011 alone, Trees for the Future worked with more than 1,000 farmers in 17 communities to plant 1 million trees; this includes a program in Medor in partnership with Our Lady Queen of Peace, a Catholic church in Arlington, Va. The organization is also active in Central America, Africa and Asia, planting coffee, maple, pine and cedar trees in dozens of countries worldwide.

Joseph said his group is targeting the Haitian Diaspora, which is 4 million strong and scattered throughout the world, but mainly in the United States, Canada, France and the Dominican Republic.

“In the U.S. alone, there are 2 million Haitians, and we’re trying to appeal to them,” said Joseph. “I believe that when they see an organization that is very transparent and accountable, they’ll come through.”

Bernice Fidelia, the liaison for Diaspora affairs in the government of Haitian President Michel Martelly, said A Dollar A Tree for Haiti is exactly the kind of program Haiti needs at this time.

“This program, combined with our Keep Haiti Green and Beautiful, is a great endeavor,” she said by phone from Miami. “I will do all that is necessary to support this program because this is a project that is very dear to the president.”
For more information, visit www.replanthaiti.org.

About the Author

Larry Luxner is the news editor for The Washington Diplomat.

http://washdiplomat.com/DPouch/2013/February/story5Haiti.html

Inspiration: The Hidden Stories of Your Soul


Don’t Take Anything Personally. Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering. ~Don Miguel Ruiz
Do You Take Things Personally?
When you take something personally or are offended, you are inadvertently agreeing with what has been said about you.
Does this ring true or are you still having a hard time grappling with this concept?
If you are still wrestling with this statement, it could stem from not being able to take responsibility for your own thought streams and self-identification.  I know this sounds a bit harsh but if we are going to effectively tackle self-worth issues; we need to get our hands initially dirty so that we can give them a good scrubbing.
Complete Honesty is Required
A wise man is superior to any insults which can be put upon him, and the best reply to unseemly behavior is patience and moderation. ~Moliere
When someone insults you it is only the tip of the iceberg to what’s lying underneath.  When you feel slighted you are actually supporting the view of your counterpart because it has touched a nerve.  If your nerves are being twisted, you know there is something more to the perceived insult that meets the eye.
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. ~Carl Jung
The person doing the insulting is only reminding you of something that needs to be taken out within yourself to have a good, long and hard look at.  Although you probably won’t want to give them a gold medal for their efforts, I assure you that some people are in this life to push your buttons.  Although this may seem unloving, they actually give you the opportunity to reconsider your belief structures – a chance to turn your trash into treasure.
Taking a Look at the Opposite Pole — Confidence
If someone tried to hurt you, or perhaps even unintentionally, says something to you that you don’t agree with – no problem – you usually brush off this kind of ‘offense’ because it really doesn’t bother you.  It could be an area in your life that you are 100% sure you have waxed.
We have to learn to be our own best friends because we fall too easily into the trap of being our own worst enemies. ~Roderick Thorp
So for instance, you are a rocket scientist and someone calls you stupid, the chances of you having a wobbly melt-down in the public lavatory are going to be slim. But let’s take another example, perhaps one that we all have had to deal with in one way or another.
Vanity Fair or Foul?
Let’s say you are happy with your appearance and feel you are a fine specimen, someone passes by in a vehicle and shouts out, ‘hey, freak!’
It ain’t what they call you, it’s what you answer to. ~W.C. Fields
Do you agree with that or not? If you are 100% confident that you are a perfectly dashing human being, just as the Universe intended, then you would most likely shrug the comment off and have a good chuckle about it. Why? This is because you whole-heartedly disagree with the statement.
However, if you are someone whose confidence peaks and troughs daily, you will probably instantly go into depression.  The nerve that has been struck is your internal agreement about yourself, not what the other person has said.  All they have done is ignited the spark on the BBQ that you are going to make sure you roast on.  It is a form of self-torture.   To agree with anyone over anything stemming from feelings of lack is disempowering.
Re-examine all that you have been told…dismiss that which insults your soul. ~Walt Whitman
We live and we learn, we travel within and we discover who we are.
And if you enjoyed reading this post, feel free to share it – Sharing is Caring and Wisdom Never Decreases by Being Shared.
This article was written by Cherie Roe Dirksen. Cherie is a self-empowerment author, multi-media artist and meditation music composer from Cape Town, South Africa.  
She has weekly blogs on her site www.cherieroedirksen.com where she discusses practical and insightful perspectives on taking responsibility for your actions and ultimately living the life you came here to experience.  
She also devotes a weekly blog to creativity and the artistic process. You can follow her on Twitter (@cheriedirksen) and Facebook (The Art of Empowerment)
http://www.purposefairy.com/8318/the-hidden-stories-of-your-soul/

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