Dene Moore, The Canadian Press Published Sunday, May 18, 2014 8:14AM EDT Last Updated Sunday, May 18, 2014 1:56PM EDT

VANCOUVER -- The mountains of British Columbia cradle glaciers that have scored the landscape over millennia, shaping the rugged West Coast since long before it was the West Coast.

But they're in rapid retreat, and an American state-of-the-union report on climate change has singled out the rapid melt in British Columbia and Alaska as a major climate change issue.

"Most glaciers in Alaska and British Columbia are shrinking substantially," said the U.S. National Climate Assessment, released last week to much fanfare south of the border.

"This trend is expected to continue and has implications for hydropower production, ocean circulation patterns, fisheries, and global sea level rise."

According to the report, glaciers in the region are losing 20 to 30 per cent of what is melting annually from the Greenland Ice Sheet, which has received far more worldwide attention.

That amounts to about 40 to 70 gigatons per year, or about 10 per cent of the annual discharge of the Mississippi River.

"The global decline in glacial and ice-sheet volume is predicted to be one of the largest contributors to global sea-level rise during this century," the report said.

It is some of the fastest glacial loss on Earth. The cause: rising temperatures due to climate change.

"We've seen an acceleration of the melt from the glaciers," said Brian Menounos, a geography professor at the University of Northern British Columbia and one of the scientists involved in cross-border, multi-agency research into glacial loss.

Original post:
Rapid melt of B.C. glaciers cited as cause for concern in U.S. climate report

Dene Moore, The Canadian Press Published Sunday, May 18, 2014 8:14AM EDT Last Updated Sunday, May 18, 2014 1:56PM EDT

VANCOUVER -- The mountains of British Columbia cradle glaciers that have scored the landscape over millennia, shaping the rugged West Coast since long before it was the West Coast.

But they're in rapid retreat, and an American state-of-the-union report on climate change has singled out the rapid melt in British Columbia and Alaska as a major climate change issue.

"Most glaciers in Alaska and British Columbia are shrinking substantially," said the U.S. National Climate Assessment, released last week to much fanfare south of the border.

"This trend is expected to continue and has implications for hydropower production, ocean circulation patterns, fisheries, and global sea level rise."

According to the report, glaciers in the region are losing 20 to 30 per cent of what is melting annually from the Greenland Ice Sheet, which has received far more worldwide attention.

That amounts to about 40 to 70 gigatons per year, or about 10 per cent of the annual discharge of the Mississippi River.

"The global decline in glacial and ice-sheet volume is predicted to be one of the largest contributors to global sea-level rise during this century," the report said.

It is some of the fastest glacial loss on Earth. The cause: rising temperatures due to climate change.

"We've seen an acceleration of the melt from the glaciers," said Brian Menounos, a geography professor at the University of Northern British Columbia and one of the scientists involved in cross-border, multi-agency research into glacial loss.

Read this article:
Unprecedented melt of glaciers adding to U.S. climate change concerns

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The Trans-Canada Highway through the Rogers Pass in Glacier National Park in British Columbia. The rocky peaks are the Selkirk Mountains. The Canadian Press Images/Don Denton

VANCOUVER The mountains of British Columbia cradle glaciers that have scored the landscape over millenia, shaping the rugged West Coast since long before it was the West Coast.

But theyre in rapid retreat, and an American state-of-the-union report on climate change has singled out the rapid melt in British Columbia and Alaska as a major climate change issue.

Most glaciers in Alaska and British Columbia are shrinking substantially, said the U.S. National Climate Assessment, released last week to much fanfare south of the border.

This trend is expected to continue and has implications for hydropower production, ocean circulation patterns, fisheries, and global sea level rise.

According to the report, glaciers in the region are losing 20 to 30 per cent of what is melting annually from the Greenland Ice Sheet, which has received far more worldwide attention.

That amounts to about 40 to 70 gigatons per year, or about 10 per cent of the annual discharge of the Mississippi River.

The global decline in glacial and ice-sheet volume is predicted to be one of the largest contributors to global sea-level rise during this century, the report said.

It is some of the fastest glacial loss on Earth. The cause: rising temperatures due to climate change.

Read the original post:
Climate change report says B.C. glaciers melting rapidly

My Fortune, Bengaluruis all set to redefine the citys hospitality landscape with its prime downtown location at the epicentre of the commercial business district, on Richmond Road. After the success of the first property in Chennai under the new brand My Fortune, My Fortune, Bengaluru plans to attract both domestic and international travellers with its young and energetic offerings.

A stylish hotel that offers spirited service to savvy travellers, My Fortune, Bengaluruprovidesarange of accommodation options allowing you to choose the one that is best suited to your needs, be it business or leisure.

Commenting on the launch, Suresh Kumar, Chief Executive Officer, Fortune Park Hotels Ltd., said, There was a need felt for creating hotels that are contemporary, smart, young and vibrant with focus on technology, yet warm and caring. We are extremely happy and proud that My Fortune has been introduced under the Fortune banner and are confident that it would be firmly established as a successful brand with a strong identity in the times to come.

With a striking building faade finished with facing bricks along with glazing glass which allows natural daylight inside all rooms, My Fortune stands 9 floors tall over a built-up area of more than 15,000 sq. m.Nestled in the green cover of lush trees surrounding the hotel, the view invokes freshness and is a treat for the tired eyes.

Exuding a quiet elegance, the hotel features well-appointed rooms including 79 Standard Rooms, 32 Fortune Club Rooms and 4 Suites. Catering to the endless requirements of the demanding business traveller, the rooms are thoughtfully equipped with comfortable seating and work desks that are handy for carrying out business functions seamlessly. Conferencing and banqueting space to accommodate 400 persons and functional public spaces designed for interaction. The 24x7 business centre, My Business Point, provides our guests with all desired resources at their quick disposal.

For that much-needed work cleanse, patrons can indulge in a spot of luxurious rejuvenation at the Wellness Centre that is equipped with a languid spa, sun-kissed swimming pool and state-of-the-art gymnasium. Gourmands can experience the finest of cuisine atMy Indian Oven, the speciality restaurant that offers a cuisine that is enchantingly Indian orMy Caf, the 24 hour multi-cuisine restaurant. The bar & lounge,My Space, showcases the best of domestic and imported spirits and liquor.

Stylish, spirited and savvy, My Fortune, Bengaluru is a modern and trendy hotel with young, vibrant and tech-enabled features that set it a class apart.

Fortune Park Hotels Ltd is a wholly-owned subsidiary of ITC Ltd. and is India's fastest growing chain of first class, full service business hotels, with71 signed alliancesand5632 rooms, across55 citiesin the country.

The Fortune Hotels brand is further sub-categorised as; Fortune Select, Fortune Park, Fortune Inn and Fortune Resort-each catering to specific needs. My Fortune, the latest addition to the Fortune brand portfolio, is positioned at high end of pyramid, with the first hotel in Chennai and second hotel now flagged off in Bengaluru.

Fortune Park Hotels Ltd. brand philosophy is driven by its objective to provide contemporary accommodation that makes Good Business Sense to business and leisure travellers through its wide range of accommodation in pertinent destinations, with emphasis on efficient service and great value.

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Bengaluru welcomes My Fortune Hotel

Marcel Haniff saw the pair splashing around and shouting in the pool He thought Komba Kpawiki and Josephine Foday were 'joshing about' Later saw their bodies in the water and thought it was part of mystery event Mr Haniff ran to reception for help when horrific realisation dawned The pool's safety CCTV was not working at time of incident

By Sam Webb

Published: 11:27 EST, 13 May 2014 | Updated: 02:25 EST, 14 May 2014

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A hotel guest who witnessed two people drowning in an unsupervised hotel swimming pool thought they were 'joking' as part of an elaborate Murder Mystery weekend, an inquest has heard.

Komba Kpakiwa, 31, and Josephine Foday, 22, were discovered floating in an indoor 10.5-metre swimming pool at Down Hall Country House Hotel in Hatfield Heath on the Essex and Hertfordshire border.

Hotel guest, Marcel Haniff, made the grim discovery shortly after 7.30pm on Saturday, April 27 last year.

Josephine Newahun Foday, left, and Komba Kpakiwa, right, were found drowned at the Down Hall Country House Hotel in Hatfield, Essex

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Witness to drownings of married father and lover in hotel swimming pool

As the volume of data grows, organisations will need to democratise the use of analytics and make data-driven decision making intrinsic to their culture.

Over the last decade, businesses have undergone a transformation. The dynamic landscape has given rise to ill-defined and continuously shifting business problems. For example: how are my customer preferences changing? Who should I target? What is the right pricing model for different products?

In order to address such problems, organisations across industries are shifting from a knowledge-based to a learning-based approach. They can no longer rely on gut or past experience. They have to rely on the latest available information to infer and learn from, before making decisions.

This trend has been enhanced by the data age, where organisations are progressively looking to leverage data and institutionalise data driven decision making.

It is for this reason that many have gone on to term data as the economys new oil. However, as the volume of data grows, organisations will need to democratise the use of analytics and make data driven decision making intrinsic to their culture.

Ironically, even with so much data available, its true value has not been fully unleashed. One reason for this could be the severe talent shortage in the analytics realm. Research Organisation Gartner predicts that by 2015, Big Data will create 4.4 million jobs globally. Another alarming projection suggests only one-third of these positions will be filled. Make no mistake; we are not referring to people who at the core possess just one kind of skill. Rather, we are referring to people who are able to cull meaningful insights and findings from chunks of disparate data and information sources to enable better decisions.

Potent skills

Decisions is the operative word here. Although there is a lot of hype and talk around Big Data, organisations need to focus on the journey from Big Data to Big Decisions.

What is imperative for companies to understand is that as they embark on the journey of making data-driven decisions even the typical skills associated with the now popular term Data scientist may not be sufficient.

While a lot has been written about data scientists, we believe that the skills that they bring to the table need to be augmented. Just data, math and technology skills are not sufficient. One needs to take an interdisciplinary approach comprising a potent combination of skills such as applied math, business acumen, technology, design thinking, behavioural sciences as well as the ability to work with people. In this regard, what organisations really need is professionals from Decision Sciences.

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Why big data analytics needs huge talent

The Penn State Center, Pittsburgh Community Services and state Sen. Jim Ferlo have teamed up to combine two Allegheny County grants to leverage foundation support for a green infrastructure project in the East End's 15206 ZIP code area.

Project 15206 and the East End Rain Container Initiative have received $250,000 grants each from the County Infrastructure and Tourism Fund to target 10 sites in five neighborhoods to reduce storm runoff in the Negley Run and Heth's Run watersheds. Rapid runoff in August 2011 contributed to four deaths in floodwaters on Washington Boulevard.

Penn State Center has overall charge of the project and will coordinate site design, construction of wetlands, rain gardens and bioswales and work with TreeVitalize to strategically plant trees through 2015.

Community meetings have begun. The next one is from 5:30 to 8 p.m. May 28 at the Kingsley Association in Larimer.

Pittsburgh Community Services and Mr. Ferlo's staff have begun outreach and already have 250 households committed to having rain containers installed. There are funds for 400 containers that will be supplied by the Nine Mile Run Watershed Association's StormWorks program. Depending on people's incomes, they will be installed for free or at reduced cost.

Consultant Matt Graham of Landbase Systems estimates that 400 rain containers properly installed and drained of two-tenths of a gallon per hour -- a slow drip -- into a backyard or garden can prevent 2 million gallons of water from entering storm sewers each year.

"Whatever we do," said Deno De Ciantis, director of the Penn State Center in Pittsburgh, "our facilities will have to handle peaks. We need to align all the thinking among policy makers, design people, water scientists and residents so we can be as effective as possible in every opportunity to mitigate storm water," he said.

That likely will require changes to municipal regulations that conflict with rain infrastructure, he said.

The city of Pittsburgh will contribute funds and labor and the Allegheny County Sanitary Authority will monitor the sites. Three of the 10 proposed sites are between North Negley and Stanton avenues in Morningside and Highland Park. One is in East Liberty between South Negley and Centre Avenue -- the former Penn Circle South. A cluster of four straddles Washington Boulevard in Larimer and Homewood. One is above Washington Boulevard in Lemington and one is along Negley Run Boulevard in Highland Park.

Lisa Kunst Vavro, a landscape architect and the sustainable environments manager for the Penn State Center, said Negley Run is "the top priority because of the flooding that claimed four lives. By the end of May we should be full force into design."

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Groups pool grants to reduce storm water in East End

VOL. 129 | NO. 92 | Monday, May 12, 2014

SMALL BUSINESS SPOTLIGHT

Whether it was pagers, two-way radios, fax machines or the Internet, Michael Hatcher has always been quick to embrace technological advances as a way to help grow his small business, the landscaping firm Michael Hatcher & Associates Inc.

Landscaping, it was never considered to have much technology and was always thought of as a more hands-on business, said Hatcher, who founded the company in 1984. But weve always welcomed technology and thats where we are now, embracing the technology with the (applications) available on the smartphones and smart pads.

The company recently reinvented its entire office system to integrate it with smart mobile devices. Today, his employees no longer punch an old-school time clock. Instead, they check into work with their mobile devices. The new system helps him know exactly where his employees are, what they are doing and what type of materials theyre using, which helps with everything from ordering supplies to deploying employees.

Michael Hatcher, right, of Hatcher and Associates reviews order details with Hubert Turley in one of Dabney Nurserys greenhouses. The two businesses have been neighbors for 30 years.

(Daily News/Andrew J. Breig)

They actually clock in with their phone or pad, Hatcher said. Then when they get to a location they log in and it overlaps with a Google Earth system so we know where they are at all times. All of that information goes back to a software program so they know exactly how long they worked on a yard and what they did, what materials theyve used.

The company is currently beta testing an irrigation application where his employees can come into a clients property, take pictures and use GPS technology to show on a Google Earth map where each piece of irrigation infrastructure is located.

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Technology Keeps Hatchers Landscape Business Booming

Roberto Burle Marx's garden outside Rio de Janeiro.

What with the World Cup this June, followed by the Olympics in 2016, Brazil has become something of a mega-sporting-event hotspot. Intermittent economic crises notwithstanding, we are talking billion-dollar stadiums, arenas and highways. Less, however, is being said about the planting plans. While horticulturists spent years perfecting the wildflower meadows that stretched around London's Olympic Park in 2012, it is still unclear what spectators will find growing in Rio de Janeiro.

Brazilian gardens, though - and South American gardens, generally - are increasingly in the spotlight. A string of South American designers have visited Melbourne in recent years to speak about the landscapes they are fashioning in Chile, Argentina and Brazil, while last year's Melbourne Food and Wine Festival featured a South American-style coffee plantation at Southbank.

And then there is a 2006 book, New Brazilian Gardens: The Legacy of Burle Marx, that has just been reprinted and released in Australia as a paperback. By Roberto Silva - a landscape architect who divides his time between London and Brazil - the book is full of pictures of gardens with oversized leaves, diverse textures and bold colours. It shows how luxuriant drifts of plants and expanses of water can be used to accentuate all manner of natural topographies in a similar vein to what Roberto Burle Marx began doing in the 1930s.

Both a modernist and a conservationist, Burle Marx used the native Brazilian flora he had come across while studying painting in Germany to create great curvilinear landscapes that read as abstract paintings as much as gardens. He was - in the words of Warwick Forge, who has been taking Australian garden tours to South America for almost 10 years - a "game-changer".

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Burle Marx has been cited as an influence by most of the South American designers who have spoken at the Australian Landscape Conference - a biennial event held in Melbourne and also run by Forge - with the Brazilian's aesthetic also fitting our growing penchant for the climatically appropriate.

While South American gardens span tropical, temperate, arid and cold regions, the celebrated Chilean landscape architect Juan Grimm told last year's conference that the key to good garden design was to understand the order of the natural local landscape. "It's important to observe how plants relate to each other in the wild and then forge a dialogue between the natural and architectural elements of a site," he said.

Chilean landscape architect Juan Grimm's Los Vilos garden.

On Grimm's own property overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Los Vilos (a place similar to the Victorian coast in its ruggedness), he has coaxed an array of indigenous plants to creep, intermingle and dissolve into the wider landscape as if they have always been there. He has also thrown into the mix an overtly designed, perfectly circular swimming pool.

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Taking Latin lessons

Accommodation Reviews Travel Travel News

Anantara Emei Resort and Spa, China.

Anantara's Emei Resort and Spa has just opened in Sichuan, in an idyllic landscape with ancient trees, waterfalls, streams and springs at the foot of China's Mount Emei.

The luxury resort adjacent to Exiu Lake has 90 guest rooms, 40 pavilions and 20 villas with oriental design and lush garden or tranquil lake views.

Some villas have their own spas or swimming pools and indulgences available from the resort's spa centre include exotic bamboo massage or a ginger bath ritual treatment. There are also children's facilities, a main tropical swimming pool, yoga and tai chi classes.

Anantara Emei Resort's interior.

Sichuan's culinary tradition is on show at the resort's five restaurants and there are connoisseur evenings with wines, gourmet snacks, spirits and cigars, as well as degustation menus.

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Personalised dining is also available, with "dining-by-design" menus available for a romantic candlelight dinner by the pool or in your villa.

The resort's cooking classes include market tours and there are also visits to Haochi Street in downtown Emei and to an old farmhouse where tofu is traditionally made in ancient stone pots.

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Spa in a sacred place