Disturbers

Bear Grylls will be the UK’s youngest Chief Scout, aged 34. Whether it is crossing oceans in an open boat, scaling Mount Everest or flying a powered paraglider to 29,000ft in the Himalayas, Bear knows a thing or two about adventure.

As an ex Special Forces soldier, he is not only known around the world as the host of the hit TV series Born Survivor and Man Vs Wild, he is also an inspirational speaker, best selling author of nine books and a fervent supporter of young people getting out there to experience adventure for themselves.

Bear got his taste for the outdoors as a Scout, whilst a young boy. He was taught to climb by his late father on the sea cliffs of the Isle of Wight, and this interest rapidly developed when he left school.

His military service saw him trained in combat survival, parachuting, demolitions, trauma medics and mountain warfare as a trooper with 21 SAS.

During one parachute jump he sustained a massive injury breaking his back in three places. After intense military rehabilitation, he made a full recovery and went on to become one of the youngest climbers ever to reach the summit of Everest and has led numerous other expeditions around the world.

‘Honoured to be offered this position’


When invited to take on this role with the UK’s largest co-educational youth movement Bear said ‘I feel so honoured to be offered this position, and have always held such admiration for Scouts and all they do around the world. The Scouting Movement is a massive force for good, touching many, many young lives. Above all, it gives millions of kids the chance to live and learn about the wild and to experience real adventure. My hope is to help Scouts of all ages, including adults, to reach their full potential, to follow their dreams and to enjoy the camaraderie that the Scouts is famous for.

'In particular I want to continue the inspirational work that the current Chief Scout Peter Duncan has begun by showing the public how Scouting continues to open young people’s eyes to a world of extraordinary promise and possibilities.'

This is not Bear’s first volunteer role. He is also an ambassador for the Prince’s Trust and is Vice President of the Journey of a Lifetime Trust, which helps young people from troubled backgrounds experience the 'journey of a lifetime'.

Bear also balances his demanding life with a young family. Married to Shara, he has three sons all aged under six.

A global ambassador for a global movement


Scouting is a global movement and Bear has travelled extensively to every continent in the world. Known and respected in many countries outside the UK he is truly a global ambassador for a global movement. His languages include Spanish and French, and he has a deep respect for diverse faiths and cultures.

‘I can't wait to

We rarely find examples of constant persistence for success, like those of Abraham Lincoln. If anyone wants the inspiration of how many efforts a human can make, here’s his life sketch.
Born in poverty, he had to face defeat throughout his life. He lost eight elections, twice failed in business, suffered nervous breakdown and was bedridden for six months. He could have quit many times, but he didn’t quit and became one of the greatest presidents in America.
Here is a sketch of Lincoln’s road to White House
His family was forced out of their home AND He had to work to support them
His mother died
Failed in business
Ran for State legislature –lost
Also lost his job-wanted to go to law school but couldn’t get in.
Borrowed some money from a friend to begin a business and by the end of the year
He was bankrupt. He spent the next 17 years of his life paying off this debt.
Ran for state legislature again—won
Was engaged to be married, sweetheart died and his heart was broken
Had a total nervous breakdown and was in bed for six months
Sought to become speaker of the state legislature – defeated.
Sought to become elector – defeated
Ran for Congress –lost
Ran for Congress again – this time he won-went to Washington and did a good job
Ran for re-election to Congress-lost
Sought the job of land officer in his home state-rejected
Ran for Senate of the United States-lost
Sought the Vice Presidential nomination at his party’s national convention – got less than 100 votes
Ran for U.S. Senate again- again he lost *
Elected President of the United States.
The part was worn and slippery. My foot slipped from under me, knocking the other out of the way, but I recovered and said to myself," It’s a slip and not a fall". Abraham Lincoln –After losing a senate race-1858
One who never fails, but learns, succeeds finally.
Abraham Lincoln

Highlights:Text, talk and watch, WeChat is the latest free messaging cross-platform mobile application, which ensures to keep you connected with everyone close to you. Reliable and interactive, WeChat proves to be a perfect social networking app available for free download.
 Pros:
• Clear voice quality
• Free
• Sharing between group
• Catches voice perfectly
Cons:
• Interface takes time to understand
• Needs quick response unlike IM and email
Introduction
There is no dearth of free SMS mobile applications these days. We do have loads of option to select from, like WhatsApp, Numbuzz, Viber and TalkBox. But still, there is space for some better cross-platform applications in the mobile market. To fill-up the space, Tencent Technology launched its new mobile app, WeChat, a new text and voice SMS communication service available for Android, iOS, Windows Phones and Symbian platforms.



A robust and fat performing free mobile text and voice messaging app, WeChat can be downloaded from Google Play for Android devices. With the estimated download of more than 100 million, WeChat is sure to attract more users in coming days. Let us check out whether this new text app is worth the installation?

GetConnectedwithWeChat
To get started with, you need to download and install WeChat in your smart phone. After the installation, the app will prompt the users to create user ID and PIN, which require them to enter their mobile number and 4 digits PIN sent via SMS to their phone number.



After completing the registration, WeChat will access the Address Book from the user’s mobile phone and even from Facebook to create a list of contacts already in WeChat. This new text app has taken a great leap since its launch in the mobile market. The use of WeChat allows the users to send and receive voice messages at a speed, which far more fast then sending the text messages. Just speak up and your message gets delivered to the recipients ASAP.

Also, the app makes use of front camera from your smart phone to start the video calling. Just click on the add button given at the lower bar and select video call.

Interface

The first continental-scale reconstruction of temperatures over the past 2000 years has found 20th century warming was a global event that has produced the hottest global average temperature in 1400 years.
The study by 78 scientists from 24 countries was published in Nature Geoscience and combined Northern and Southern Hemisphere temperature reconstructions has highlighted the unusual nature of the 20th century warming.
The findings are in stark contrast to the Mediaeval Warm Period and Little Ice Age, which the study revealed did not occur simultaneously across the globe.
The international study led by the Past Global Changes (PAGES) network in Switzerland, included Australian scientists from the University of Melbourne, the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science at the University of New South Wales and the Australian Antarctic Division.
Co-author of the paper from the University of New South Wales’ ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, Dr Steven Phipps said the striking feature about the sudden rise in 20th century global average temperature is that it comes after an overall cooling trend that lasted more than a millennium.
“This work has transformed our understanding of temperatures over the past 2000 years,” he said
“This research shows that in just a century the Earth has reversed 1400 years of cooling.
“Armed with this information, future researchers will able to better understand the causes of climate variability at a regional and global level and help forecast the changes we can expect as our planet warms.”
To reconstruct 2000 years of temperature, the researchers used data from 511 individual proxy records. The majority of these records came from tree ring measurements but also included coral reefs, cave formations, ice cores, lake sediments and some historical documents.
The 2000-year temperature snapshot revealed by the researchers showed a long-term cooling trend before human influences began to become significant. This trend was primarily driven by natural cycles in the Earth's orbit. At the same time there were also natural fluctuations caused by volcanic eruptions and variations in solar activity.
It is these natural variations, and in particular the changes in the Earth’s orbital cycle, that explain why some of the average global temperatures prior to AD 600 were as warm as today. However, none of these natural influences account for the dramatic global temperature rises of the 20th century.
Palaeoclimatologist Professor Jonathan Overpeck from the University of Arizona, US who is a Visiting Fellow of the Victorian Centre for Climate Change Adaptation Research at the University of Melbourne and Visiting Scientist with the ARC’s Centre of Excellence For Climate System Science, said the work was very exciting.
“The work has confirmed that there was no period of global warmth similar to that of the last 60 years in the preceding circa 2000 years, and adds to the evidence that the so-called Medieval Warm Period was quite different from the recent period of human-caused warming,” he said

A University of Waikato academic involved in a groundbreaking and controversial new study on words which have remained in use for around 15,000 years says the team involved expected the results to be controversial but the years of work that went into it were worth it.
"It's a new thing and won’t be accepted by everyone," Dr Andreea Calude says.
Dr Calude, from the University's Department of General and Applied Linguistics at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, was part of a team led by Mark Pagel, an evolutionary theorist at the University of Reading in England, which has come up with a list of words which can be traced to old forms around the time of the last Ice Age.
These 'ultra-conserved' words suggest that separate language families - thought to be unique - can be traced back to a common ancestral language dating back centuries and used across much of Europe to North America and as far south as the Indian Sub-Continent.
Dr Calude says it had been generally accepted that while languages could be classified into families, there was no good way of making links between the different families.
"Most people think you can't reconstruct history beyond language families," she says.
"They think going beyond a single language family is impossible. We had the sense that one should be able to go beyond a language family to a super language family.
Language families do not 'know' that they are a family and not a language, so the process of reconstruction should be the same between families as it is across individual languages. That was the start of this idea. We thought, does it even make sense to look beyond a single language family? It could be rubbish but we looked to see what was in it."
What they found was startling.
They looked at cognates as established by the LWED database (Languages of the World Etymological Database) - words which have a similar sound and the same meaning in different languages - across language families, rather than within languages from the same family, and found systematic relationships where none had been thought to exist.
"We constructed a language tree and what's cool about that is we got relationships between language families, not just languages," Dr Calude says