Article on "How we developed a cheap, accurate, on-the-spot test for Ebola"

Here are the links:

"How we developed a cheap, accurate, on-the-spot test for Ebola"

Field-deployable, Quantitative, Rapid Identification of Active Ebola Virus Infection in Unprocessed Blood.

Raising The Spectre Of Being On Opposite Sides - Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım of Turkey

Under the headline ‘Turkey and Russia agree sale of S–400 missile defense systems’ Debka reports that Turkey and Russia have reached agreement on the sale of Russian S–400 missile defense systems to Turkey with the final decision to be made by the executive committee of Turkey’s defense industry, as disclosed by Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım last Friday. He also said, defending Turkey as a NATO country buying arms from Russia, that his country was working with Russia and Iran in Syria and “there should be no reason for the United States and Turkey to be on opposite sides.”

Who has raised the spectre of the United States and Turkey being on opposite sides other than in this statement by Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım?

Milton neologisms

John Crace in the Guardian

According to Gavin Alexander, lecturer in English at Cambridge university and fellow of Milton's alma mater, Christ's College, who has trawled the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) for evidence, Milton is responsible for introducing some 630 words to the English language, making him the country's greatest neologist, ahead of Ben Jonson with 558, John Donne with 342 and Shakespeare with 229.

The Web Hosts That EIG Owns

All The Web Hosts That EIG Owns

Here is a link to an article with a list of web hosts that Endurance International Group (EIG) owns.

And here is another link to a similar article.

Adobe Camera RAW Lens Correction

Article originally published by me on my WordPress.com blog at PhotographWorks: Adobe Camera RAW Lens Correction

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Adobe Camera RAW is part of Photoshop.

RAW is a proprietary format with which the camera records the information that comes in to the sensor when you take a photo. Unless you have a reader for that format, you can't see the image.

Contrast that with, for example, JPEGs and TIFFs, which every camera and every computer can read.

Every camera manufacturer has its own RAW format. Nikon cameras record in a format named .NEF. Fuji cameras record in a format named .RAF, Olympus cameras record in a format named .ORF, and so on.

Photoshop can read all these different formats, but unless you have the latest version of Photoshop it may not be able to read the format for a recent model of a particular camera even if it can read the format for that brand of camera - that's how specific the readability of RAW formats is.

If you open a RAW file in Photoshop it will open in Adobe Camera RAW. It will read the information and give you the option of tweaking it and then opening it in Photoshop 'proper' and tweaking it some more.

You then have the option of saving it in a number of different formats. There is PSD, which is Photoshop's own format, and there are JPEGs and TIFFs and PNGs and... etc.

And now to the point of this article which is about lens correction and how versatile Photoshop is.

You may not know how much lens correction is possible in Adobe Camera RAW.



This is one of the screens you see in Adobe Camera RAW and on the right you can see 'Lens Corrections' and a set of sliders. (Click the image to see it larger)

I took the photo you can see at the top of this article, and I moved it around in Adobe Camera RAW using these sliders.

Then I opened it as a PSD in Photoshop 'proper' and used the Transform/Skew and Transform/Scale tools to tweak the image a bit more. And then I cropped it to end with the part of the image I wanted.

Here is the uncorrected 'out of the camera' version again, and then the corrected and cropped version. As you can see, with Adobe Camera RAW you can 'swing' the perspective around and see a completely different aspect of the photo.

The Perseid Meteor Shower

This year, the Perseid meteor shower that trails the Swift-Tuttle comet is visible from July 17 to August 24.

The shower will peak on the night of Saturday, August 12, and in the early hours before dawn on Sunday, August 13.

The Earth crosses the orbit of Swift-Tuttle every year and the meteor shower races across Earth's upper atmosphere at over 100,000 miles per hour.

Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic

I am writing this partly because of the oddity of what was on the map I was looking at and that it might be worth five minutes of your time.

I was looking at Google maps and I came across a part that was divided off by an international border but wasn't marked with a country name.

It was surrounded by Armenia, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Iran. So what country was it?

My first thought was to zoom in, in case a country name popped into view, but it didn't.

I googled the name of the largest town/city (Nakhchivan) and I found out the region is the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic, an autonomous enclave of Azerbaijan.

It is separated from the rest of Azerbaijan and completely surrounded by other countries: hence it being an enclave.

A bit more googling and I found out it was formerly owned by what was then Persia (now Iran) and then in the early 1800s after the Russian-Persian war, by Russia.

That changed again with the 1917 Russian revolution when it was contested by Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Fast forward to 1990 when it declared independence from the USSR to show solidarity with the nationalist movement in Azerbaijan, and the following year it declared itself the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic within the newly independent Republic of Azerbaijan.

So it is an autonomous region of Azerbaijan. Now we know.

That decision to ally with Azerbaijan resulted in conflicts and cross-conflicts with Armenia, Turkey, and Russia - who all had an interest in the outcome in terms of with which country the region would associate itself.

Google maps doesn't have a street view of the point at which Turkey, Iran, and the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic meet. Is it bristling with guns and tension or is it a backwater? Who knows? It must be interesting travelling from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea along this route...


So far so good. But reading about it led me on to the Nagorno-Karabakh War and Nagorno-Karabakh which is a region to the east of Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic and totally within Azerbaijan.

It is internationally recognised as being part of Azerbaijan but is run as an independent state by the Armenian ethnic majority. Not being a country, it isn't marked on most maps, but it exists.

Originally published as Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic on PhotographWorks