Author: Leonid Mamchenkov

World largest statue planned for Cyprus

Cyprus Mail reports:

WHAT MIGHT be the world’s tallest statue is being planned at a Russian backed development off the coast of Limassol.The 135 metre statue of an angel named The Kind Angel of the World is being planned at Monagrouli, about 20km from Limassol.The development is being planned by a Russian foundation, the International Club philanthropists and Patrons of Europe and will include a conference centre for 1,300 delegates, a ‘presidential’ convention centre for 300 delegates, a theatre and banqueting hall. It will also include a number of cafés and restaurants.

Just to put this thing into perspective:

The statue itself will rise 135 meters from the ground, and visitors will be taken up via lifts. Inside, or atop, the head of the Kind Angel a restaurant/café will offer spectacular views.Currently the world’s tallest statue is the Spring Temple Buddha in China, which is 128m high. New York’s Statue of Liberty is 93m high.

This sounds like an ambitious project which, when completed, will provided a much needed boost to Cyprus tourism.

 

Day in brief – 2011-06-09

Content authorship is a new cool

Here is a quote directly from Google’s Inside Search blog:

We now support markup that enables websites to publicly link within their site from content to author pages. For example, if an author at The New York Times has written dozens of articles, using this markup, the webmaster can connect these articles with a New York Times author page. An author page describes and identifies the author, and can include things like the author’s bio, photo, articles and other links.

If you run a website with authored content, you’ll want to learn about authorship markup in our help center. The markup uses existing standards such as HTML5 (rel=”author”) and XFN (rel=”me”) to enable search engines and other web services to identify works by the same author across the web. If you’re already doing structured data markup using microdata from schema.org, we’ll interpret that authorship information as well.

[…]

We know that great content comes from great authors, and we’re looking closely at ways this markup could help us highlight authors and rank search results.

In simple terms, this means that you should make sure that all your content – no matter where it is published – identifies you as an author.  This will help link all your content together, create your author profile, and use that as yet another criteria in ranking and searching.  Those of you publishing with WordPress shouldn’t worry at all – adding authorship is either already done or will take a minor modification to the theme. WordPress provided both author pages and XFN markup out of the box for years.

Day in brief – 2011-06-08

  • New note : Top Tips for new CloudFlare Users – CloudFlare's blog http://bit.ly/m9B6lc #
  • Object-Oriented PHP: Working with Inheritance http://bit.ly/lWZcWo #
  • I thought it was about 2am. It's actually 4:31am. Damnit! #
  • @CloudFlare IMHO you should by cloudflaire.com and redirect it to your site. Out of 3 people I recommended your site to, 2 went that way. #
  • @eastdakota Thanks! :) Can you please DM me the email address I should send it to. #
  • @eastdakota done, thanks. :) #
  • GitHub: mamchenkov started watching seanpowell/Email-Boilerplate http://bit.ly/lglLQ1 #
  • Google Discontinues Its First Specialized Search Engines http://bit.ly/ikuJs2 #
  • Shared: Church threatens to shut down KEO http://bit.ly/k0n4Wv #
  • @gcmougias They should give me a bit of time. I just switched to KEO recently. :) #
  • @steverubel @gigaom The only platform I'd trust right now is WordPress. #
  • @steverubel @gigaom Throwing away personal blogs makes no sense. Niche and corporate – maybe. #
  • I'm at Chester's http://4sq.com/jF8Fei #

On free education

Cyprus Updates points to several studies, one of which indicates how much money people in Cyprus spend on compensating the poor quality of public education.

In Cyprus, tutoring consumed €111.2 million in 2008, of which €30.5 million was for children in primary schools, and €80.7 million was for students in secondary schools.

For me, it reminds and aligns with many of those things Sir Ken Robinson discusses in his talks.  The world is changing very fast and education system should keep up with these changes.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U]