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Garuda Buka Rute ke Belitung, Dukung "Visit Babel Archi 2010"

Rabu, 14 Oktober 2009 | 22:16 WIB

PANGKALPINANG, KOMPAS.com - Garuda Indonesia akan membuka rute penerbangan Bandara Depati Amir Kota Pangkalpinang -Hanandjoeddin Tanjungpandan Kabupaten Belitung, Provinsi Bangka Belitung (Babel).

"Pihak Garuda Indonesia sudah menjanjikan membuka penerbangan ke Belitung, realisasinya pada 2010," kata Gubernur Babel, Eko Maulana Ali di Pangkalpinang, Rabu (14/10).

Pembukaan rute penerbangan ke Belitung tersebut bentuk dari dukungan pihak Garuda Indonesia terhadap program Visit Babel Archi 2010.

"Aktivitas penerbangan ke Pulau Belitung mesti menjadi perhatian karena kabupaten itu salah satu daerah kunjungan wisata," katanya.

Menurut dia, frekuensi penerbangan di Babel cukup tinggi yaitu mencapai 70 hingga 75 persen sebagai bukti arus kunjungan dan pendatang sangat tinggi di Negeri Laskar Pelangi itu.

"Kami optimistis program Visit Babel Archi 2010 yang merupakan titik awal kebangkitan pariwisata dengan menarik para wisatawan domestik dan mancanegara, berjalan dengan baik jika melihat dari arus kunjungan ke Babel," ujarnya.

Gubernur mengakui, fasilitas pendukung dunia kepariwisataan belum memadai dan perlu ditingkatkan seperti bandara, pelabuhan, hotel, jalan dan fasilitas di obyek wisata.

"Kami terus genjot pembangunan yang berhubungan dengan kepariwisataan dalam rangka menyongsong Visit Babel Archi 2010," katanya.

Dijelaskan, pembangunan Bandara Depati Amir terus ditingkatkan seperti menambah panjang dan lebar landasan agar bisa didarati pesawat berbadan lebar dan pembangunan terminal.

"Diharapkan pada tahun 2010, Bandara Depati Amir mampu menjadi bandara internasional dan bisa melayani rute penerbangan internasional," ujarnya.

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Peringatan Dini Cuaca di Indonesia
Ilustrasi
Jumat, 25 September 2009 | 01:43 WIB

JAKARTA, KOMPAS.com - Badan Meteorologi, Klimatologi dan Geofisika (BMKG) mengeluarkan peringatan dini kondisi cuaca di Indonesia yang berlaku mulai Jumat (25/9) hingga Senin (28/9).

Salah satu faktor dikeluarkannya peringatan dini adalah aktivitas daerah tekanan rendah di Samudera Pasifik sebelah Timur Filipina yang mempengaruhi kondisi atmosfer di wilayah sekitar Indonesia dengan terbentuknya daerah pumpunan angin yang memanjang dari Sumatera bagian Utara, Laut Cina Selatan, perairan sebelah Utara Kalimantan hingga perairan sebelah Utara Papua.

Faktor lainnya adalah kondisi suhu muka laut di Samudera Hindia sebelah barat Sumatera dan perairan sebelah Utara Indonesia cukup hangat sehingga memberikan suplai uap air yang cukup untuk daerah disekitarnya. Kondisi tersebut berpotensi menumbuhkan awan-awan hujan di wilayah Indonesia, terutama di Indonesia bagian Barat dan Utara serta disekitar ekuator.

Selain itu, adanya aktifitas konvektif terkait dengan tingginya temperatur pada siang hari yang merupakan aktivitas atmosfer berskala lokal di sebagian wilayah Indonesia perlu diwaspadai, karena berpotensi menimbulkan hujan lebat disertai angin kencang dan petir dalam waktu yang tidak terlalu lama.

Wilayah yang berpotensi hujan lebat disertai petir dan angin kencang adalah pesisir Barat Sumatera, NAD dan Sumatera Utara, Sumatera Barat, Bengkulu dan Riau, Jawa bagian Barat, Kalimantan Barat dan Kalimantan Timur, Sulawesi bagian Utara, Barat dan Tengah, Maluku bagian Utara dan Tengah, serta Papua bagian Barat, Utara dan Tengah.

Sent from Indosat BlackBerry powered by

JIM
Sumber : BMKG

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Indonesian Heaviest Newborn Baby


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Big baby: The heaviest newborn ever recorded in Indonesa (right) was born yesterday
Friday, 25 September 2009 | 2:03 AM

KOMPAS.com - Dwarfing the infant next to him, his mouth open in an angry roar, this is the heaviest newborn ever recorded in Indonesia.

An Indonesian woman named only as Ani gave birth to the 19.2lb baby boy in Medan, North Sumatra yesterday.

She named him Muhammad Akbar Risuddin after the local district chief. 'Akbar' means 'big' in Indonesian. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he was delivered by Caesarean section. Britain's heaviest newborn was delivered in Cumbria in 1992 weighing 15lb 8oz.

The heaviest baby ever born was produced by Anna Bates of Canada in 1879, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. It weighed 23.12lb and died 11 hours after birth.

The record for a baby which survived, according to the Guinness record keepers, is held by a boy born weighing 22lb 8oz at Aversa, Italy in 1955. More recently Francisca do Santos gave birth to a son weighing 16lb 11oz by Caesarean section in Brazil.



Sumber : The Daily Mail

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How Xbox Can Help Fight Heart Disease
Visitors play Microsoft Xbox 360 during a Tokyo Game Show 2009 in Makuhari near Tokyo, Japan, Thursday, Sept 24. 2009. The Tokyo Game Show, billed as the world's largest computer entertainment fest, kicked off Thursday with hopes that depressed sales of game consoles will enjoy a holiday resurrection.
Friday, 25 September 2009 | 2:15 AM

KOMPAS.com - Countless medical studies have concluded that playing too many video games can be harmful to one's health. Now, however, it turns out that one of the more popular video-game consoles on the market, the Xbox 360, could be used to save lives.

A computer scientist at the University of Warwick in England has devised a way to use an Xbox 360 to detect heart defects and help prevent heart attacks. The new tool has the potential to revolutionize the medical industry because it is both faster and cheaper than the computer systems that are currently used by scientists to perform complex heart research.

The system, detailed in a study in the August edition of the Journal of Computational Biology and Chemistry, is based on a video-game demo created by Simon Scarle two years ago when he was a software engineer at Microsoft's Rare studio, the division of the U.S.-based company that designs games for the Xbox 360. Scarle modified a chip in the console so that instead of producing graphics for the game, it now delivers data tracking how electrical signals in the heart move around damaged cardiac cells.

This creates a model of the heart that allows doctors to identify heart defects or conditions such as arrhythmia, a disturbance in the normal rhythm of the heart that causes it to pump less effectively.

"This is a clever use of a processing chip ... to speed up calculations of heart rhythm. What used to take hours can be calculated in seconds, without having to employ an extremely expensive, high-performance computer," Denis Noble, director of Computational Physiology at Oxford University, tells TIME.

To create a heart model now, researchers must use supercomputers or a network of PCs to crunch millions of mathematical equations relating to the proteins, cells and tissues of the heart, a time-consuming and costly process. Scarle's Xbox system can deliver the same results at a rate five times faster and 10 times more cheap, according to the study.

"These game consoles aren't just glorified toys. [They] are pieces of very powerful computing hardware," Scarle says. "I can see this ... being most useful for students and early-career scientists to just quickly and cheaply grab that extra bit of computing power they otherwise wouldn't be able to get."

Scarle attributes his breakthrough creation to his unusual background of working as a software engineer in the gaming industry and performing electrocardio-dynamics research at the University of Sheffield in England. The idea for the heart-modeling tool came from a "little shooter game" he developed at Microsoft in which a player trys to gun down enemies in an arena meant to resemble a heart.

"I did a game-ified version of my old cardiac code. I could actually present some 'proper' science [based on] the cool things us game developers do," Scarle says.

The Xbox 360 isn't the only video-game console that is being used for scientific research. At the University of Massachusetts campus in Dartmouth, scientists are using Sony PlayStations to simulate black-hole collisions to try to solve the mystery of what happens when a supermassive black hole swallows a star.

So perhaps parents shouldn't be too worried if their children are spending an inordinate amount of time playing video games. Who knows, today's Grand Theft Auto or Halo addict may end up discovering a new moon around Saturn or finding a cure for cancer.

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SBY Tunjuk 3 Orang Plt Sementara Pimpinan KPK

Selasa, 22 September 2009 | 20:17 WIB

JAKARTA, KOMPAS.com - Menteri Sekretaris Negara Hatta Radjasa memastikan Presiden Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono akan mengisi seluruh posisi pimpinan Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi (KPK) yang kosong sebanyak tiga orang.

Usai rapat di Kantor Sekretariat Negara, Jakarta, Selasa, dengan Sekretaris Kabinet Sudi Silalahi dan Plt Menko Perekonomian Sri Mulyani, Hatta tidak mau menyebutkan nama dan asal instansi tiga plt sementara pimpinan KPK yang ditunjuk langsung oleh Presiden tersebut.

"Ya, yang sisanya yang kosong," ujar Hatta ketika ditanya jumlah plt sementara pimpinan KPK yang akan ditunjuk Presiden.

Menurut dia, tiga orang tersebut bisa berasal dari berbagai institusi asalkan memenuhi syarat kredibel di bidangnya serta dapat diterima oleh publik.

"Pokoknya berbagai macam ’source’( asal mereka, red), yang penting kredibel di bidangnya dan akseptabel," jelasnya.

Saat ini, lanjut dia, Presiden sedang mempertimbangkan berbagai masukan guna memilih tiga nama yang dapat diterima oleh publik secara luas. Ia mengaku tidak tahu apakah Presiden telah mengantungi tiga nama tersebut atau tidak ."Saya
tidak berani berspekulasi," ujarnya singkat.

Presiden telah menandatangani Perppu tentang perubahan atas UU No 30 Tahun 2002 tentang KPK dan Keppres pemberhentian sementara dua pimpinan KPK, Chandra Hamzah dan Bibit Samad Rianto.

Menurut Hatta, Perppu itu hanya menambahkan dua pasal dalam UU KPK yaitu tentang kewenangan Presiden untuk menunjuk langsung plt sementara pimpinan KPK apabila terjadi kekosongan yang mengakibatkan pimpinan KPK berjumlah kurang dari tiga orang. "Oleh sebab itu Perppu itu nanti diikuti dengan keppres pengangkatan," ujarnya.

Namun, Hatta belum bersedia mengatakan kapan Presiden Yudhoyono akan menandatangani leppres pengangkatan tiga plt sementara pimpinan KPK yang ditunjuknya secara langsung.

Usai rapat, Hatta dan Sudi langsung meninggalkan Kantor Sekretariat Negara menuju kediaman Presiden Yudhoyono di Puri Cikeas Indah, Bogor.

Namun, Hatta juga tidak mau mengatakan apakah kedatangannya ke Cikeas untuk menyerahkan draft keppres pengangkatan tiga plt sementara pimpinan KPK guna ditandatangani oleh Presiden.

"Saya tidak ingin mendahului Presiden, nanti dulu. Tunggu saja, kalau ada lanjut pasti saya sampaikan," ujarnya.

Presiden Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono besok dijadwalkan meninggalkan tanah air pada pukul 09.00 WIB dari Bandara Internasional Halim Perdanakusuma untuk memulai kunjungan kerja selama tujuh hari ke Amerika Serikat. Presiden Yudhoyono baru kembali ke tanah air pada 30 September 2009.

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Exhibition tip: Muzi Quawson in Amsterdam

If you happen to be in Amsterdam over the next couple of weeks you might want to walk or bike and see the exhibition of Muzi Quawson's work at the Annet Gelink Gallery.

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Muzi Quawson, The Stone House, 2009

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Muzi Quawson, Set in Time, 2009

Set in the most boondocks boundaries of Glasgow, Northeastern Montana (USA), Quawson's new film The Old Home examines "the nature of existence from society's outsiders." Her camera silently follows Ivar "Duke" T Pederson: an aging cowboy who incarnates an Old American West that mirrors almost too well our most used and abused clichés. On several occasions over the last two years Quawson stayed with Duke either in his Mid-Western bungalow or out there in the vast open fields with his cows and his dog, exploring the American West and its detachment from modern day civilisation.

My grandmother was smart and witty but she was madly in love with John Wayne. She would catch every single opportunity to watch western movies. It put me off cowboys forever. Yet, I sat in the gallery and watched The Old Home twice, it's breathtakingly beautiful.

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Muzi Quawson, Horses, 2009

In another room of the gallery, a slide show entitled The Hissing of the Summer Lawns (2008) accompanies a run-of-the-mill family from Georgia, USA.

See The Old Home at Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, through October 17, 2009

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Will SBY Meet Obama at G20?
Tuesday, 22 September 2009 | 11:44 PM

JAKARTA, KOMPAS.com - President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has no schedule to meet US President Barack Obama on the sidelines of the G-20 Summit in the US this week, presidential spokesman Dino Patty Djalal said here on Tuesday.

"There is no schedule for a bilateral meeting between President Yudhoyono and President Obama," he told ANTARA.

He said President Yudhoyono was only scheduled to meet Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama and Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on the sidelines of the summit.

Regarding the scheduled meetings Dino said the meeting with the Japanese prime minister would be the first and so it was not known for sure what the two leaders would discuss.

"In a meeting with Rudd, President Yudhoyono meanwhile would discuss environmental and forestry issues," he said.

President Yudhoyono is scheduled to leave for the US on Wednesday to attend the G-20 summit to be held from September 24 to 26 in Pittsburgh. He is scheduled to return home on September 29.

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