English Recordings

Are you horrified, excited or both? There's more. Perhaps the most extraordinary possibility arises from the fact that, as Susan Greenfield, a neuroscientist, puts it, the self is simply the personalisation of the brain. You are the individual you are because of the unique set of connections forged in your cerebrum. This means you are like a piece of software running on an organic brain, but which could, in principle, be run on a silicon computer as well. Rather than being housed in a brain and body, you could in effect “upload” yourself to a computer and live there in a virtual reality.
Bostrom sees no reason why uploading human experiences into a virtual realm should present a problem, in principle. "We know the atoms of your body are swapped out over a lifetime,” he explains. “You wouldn't benefit if you could somehow wrap yourself up in plastic and prevent the atoms from being exchanged.” He suggests that the uploading scenario is not so different from an accelerated metabolic process, where the atoms in your body are substituted for other atoms. Indeed, uploading would have the advantage of conferring on you virtual immortality. As long as you made sure you were “backed up” often enough, it wouldn't matter if the particular computer you were running on broke. Your service provider would just reload you onto a new one and you'd pick up where you left off.
To show why we should not be alarmed by this prospect, Bostrom offers an analogy: suppose that last night, while you were sleeping, a scientist had replaced your brain with a computer that had been programmed with all of the information that was contained in your brain. When you woke up, you would have no idea that this happened. It would seem that you were the same person who went to sleep the night before. Whether your thoughts came from an organic brain or a computer programmed to behave like one, Bostrom says, “It's not clear to me how that would matter at all."
But wouldn't uploading flesh-and-blood humans into synthetic virtual worlds, where they would be turned into super intelligent fast-thinkers, transform us into completely different creatures? Would homo sapiens be replaced by homo apparatus? Bostrom is unconcerned. He reminds me that humans already undergo a “profound” transition when we age from childhood to adulthood. "We have vastly greater capacities as adults than as children,” he explains. “Our whole mental lives are different, our preoccupations.” Yet we don't view it as bad for a child to grow up, so perhaps we’re more open to radical transformations than we might believe.

In contemporary fiction, however, there are plenty of examples that would give Disney's lawyers heart failure. Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, for instance, is a reworking of King Lear. Michael Dibdin's thriller Così Fan Tutti relies heavily on Mozart. In the cinema, Peter Benchley's bestseller Jaws essentially modernises the plot of that great Anglo-Saxon narrative poem, Beowulf.
Those narratives, of course, are all out of copyright. It's in the evolving world of international copyright that the real interest of plagiarism resides. The constant redefinition of "intellectual property rights" is at the cutting edge of 21st-century copyright law. No amount of new technology can disguise the fundamental clarity implicit in the act of scratching words on paper, or tapping them on to a screen.
Words belong to the person who wrote them. There are, says Malcolm Gladwell in "Something Borrowed", few simpler ethical propositions than this. Any fool can see when plagiarism is afoot. As the role of the writer became increasingly professionalised during the 20th century, more and more legal and institutional resources were directed towards the defence of intellectual property rights. There was now even a name for it, borrowed from those swashbuckling Elizabethans: piracy.
It has, however, become more complex with the IT revolution. Suddenly, the mass consumption and reproduction of original "content" turned this carefully constructed legal playground upside down. Free-thinking American professors such as James Boyle (The Public Domain) and Lawrence Lessig (Free Culture) have begun to develop radical new theories about what is, and is not, permissible in the Wild West of the "creative commons".
Happily, there was a supreme authority from the American past to whom they could turn. Lessig quotes Thomas Jefferson in support of his argument: "He who receives an idea from me," wrote Jefferson, "receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."

Over the last several years, such partnerships between corporations and those trying to save the world have become commonplace. Companies like Microsoft, Pfizer and General Electric have worked with nonprofit groups on health, technology and energy programs.
Not everyone is comfortable with the arrangements. Some critics complain that public health professionals are becoming too cozy with companies ultimately focused on their bottom lines. Others worry that these advertising techniques may be manipulative.
But what Dr. Curtis learned in Ghana suggests that saving the world may be as easy as hawking chewing gum, or, to use a more contemporary example, as simple as training Americans to spray perfumed water on couches that are already clean.
FEBREZE — the perfumed water used on couches — is one of the most successful examples of a habit-creation campaign, and, in a sense, the playbook for how Ghana learned to wash its hands.
Procter & Gamble introduced Febreze in 1996 as a way to remove odors from smelly clothes. Consumer surveys had shown that people were leaving their jackets and blouses outside after an evening in a smoke-filled bar. P.& G., which at the time already sold products that cleaned one out of every two laundry loads washed in American homes, decided to spend millions to create a spray to remove offensive smells.
The company ran advertisements of a woman complaining about a blazer that smelled like cigarette smoke. Other ads focused on smelly pets, sweaty teenagers and stinky minivan interiors.
But Febreze flopped. In fact, early sales were so disappointing that the company considered canceling the entire project.

For years, many public health campaigns that aimed at changing habits have been failures. Earlier this decade, two researchers affiliated with Vanderbilt University examined more than 100 studies on the effectiveness of antidrug campaigns and found that, in some cases, viewers’ levels of drug abuse actually increased when commercials were shown, perhaps in part because the ads reminded them about that bag of weed in the sock drawer.
A few years later, another group examined the effectiveness of advertising condom use to prevent AIDS. In some cases, rates of unprotected sex actually went up — which some researchers suspected was because the commercials made people more frisky than cautious.
To teach hand washing, about seven years ago Dr. Curtis persuaded Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive and Unilever to join an initiative called the Global Public-Private Partnership for Handwashing With Soap. The group’s goal was to double the hand-washing rate in Ghana, a West African nation where almost every home contains a soap bar but only 4 percent of adults regularly lather up after using the toilet.

Few unaccompanied children are assessed under the more comprehensive section 20. But a recent court case against Hillingdon Council has reversed this, saying that all children in Ajala's situation should be entitled to section 20 care.
Helen Johnson of the Refugee Council children's panel says the ruling has huge implications for local authority teams. "They are happy to do the work, but don't know how it will be paid for." If the government fails to provide extra funding, local authorities may be forced to divert overstretched budgets to fill the gap.
Ajala, meanwhile, maintains a dignity that conceals the fear and confusion his catastrophic childhood have instilled in him. Sometimes, though, the mask slips. "I have sometimes been suicidal," he says.
He feels that he has never known parental love: the nearest he has had is counsellor Nigel Consiglio who works with Off Centre, a voluntary organisation in Hackney. Consiglio says he fears that if Ajala were deported he would risk a recurrence of his breakdown, which without support could lead to full-blown mental illness. But despite his evidence and that of other supporters, Ajala's appeal has been turned down. In his explanatory letter, the adjudicator admits that in Lagos Ajala will be "a complete stranger" - but that, he implies, would not be a problem because his family does not live there.
The Home Office does not release figures for the number of unaccompanied minors given leave to remain only until their 18th birthday, something that bothers Laura Brownlees, policy officer of Save the Children's England programme: "We're very concerned that these numbers are disproportionately high and that it puts an incredible strain on young people as they approach their 18th birthday." There are no figures to indicate how many of these 18-year-olds are forcibly removed.
For Ajala, the thought of being forced to reurn to Nigeria fills him with terror. He says he has a life and a future here in the only place he really knows. He would like to be a social worker or a youth worker - something working with children, anyway. He knows what it is like to be a young person needing support: he would like to dedicate his own future to making sure that others do not suffer as he has.

Ajala was born in Nigeria on April 26 1985. His parents went to the UK when he was one year old, leaving him and his brother and sister with an aunt and uncle. He remembers being the victim of beatings and witchcraft rites. When his parents sent for him and his siblings, he was relieved. He was brought to the UK by a man who gave him a false passport and took him to his parents in Hackney, north London. "At first it was good," he says. But that soon changed. "I felt scared and uncomfortable. I didn't know my parents - I grew to hate them."
Ajala says that almost from the moment he arrived his family life was hell. After a few months his father took him to Ireland, where things went from bad to worse. "I had had enough. I went to the school counsellor," he says. He was taken into care, at the age of 12, before somehow being returned to his father and then back to the UK. The hell continued until he was 16 and at college. His father had left home, but Ajala felt he couldn't study and that life with his mother was not safe. In desperation he called the police and was once again taken into care. It was at this point that the family's immigration status came to the attention of the authorities.
Over the following months Ajala was housed in a series of hostels, but he doesn't feel he had the degree of care he needed. In February last year, the terror of his childhood and the uncertainty over his future caught up with him and he suffered a breakdown. He has since recovered, but he remains - not surprisingly - fragile.
After his 18th birthday, social services ceased to be responsible for Ajala: like any other adult asylum seeker, he was referred to National Asylum Support Services (Nass), which provides accommodation and about £30 a week, but no care. During the transition from care to Nass, Ajala slept rough for a while, or on friends' floors, and temporarily in a church. Like most unaccompanied asylum-seeking minors, Ajala had been dealt with under section 17 of the Children Act. Had he been assessed under section 20 he would have been deemed to need looking after, not simply accommodated, and would have been eligible for support through to his mid-20s after leaving care. Under section 17, says Melzak, children are given an assessment so brief that their vulnerabiliites tend to go unnoticed.
Another problem identified by experts is that many children do not get the level of social work intervention they need. "We have seen several cases of children waiting a long time for social workers to be allocated," says Alison Harvey, principal policy officer of the Children's Society and chair of the Refugee Children's Consortium. "I have met children who think all social workers are called 'Duty' because they have only ever seen a duty social worker."

As the contests proliferate, agencies lure girls in by dangling a financial carrot. In reality, it is more like bonded labour, as the money goes directly to the agencies, at whose mercy the models exist. The agency ensures that it is never out of pocket. Common practices include knocking fees down to eliminate the competition, taking effectively 40 per cent of the model's fee (20 per cent from the model, 20 per cent from the client), charging for all overheads, withholding fees until the client has paid, and only paying out so-called advances before then with an added 10-20 per cent commission.
One London-based agency added £300 for one day's 'bike charges' to my monthly statement, without being able to tell me exactly which continent they had been couriering my portfolio to. But complaining relegated me to the bottom of their pile, making it very difficult to acquire work.
Contrary to popular belief, magazines pay very little. Some pay nothing; the prestige of appearing in their pages is considered enough. One shoot I did for Vogue in Paris paid me the equivalent of £20, or £2 an hour. The system works for the simple reason that those pictures may, or may not, lead to more lucrative advertising contracts. This is what keeps models ensnared: the promise of a big-money job looming around the next corner.
So, I earned my living elsewhere, mostly in Tokyo, where the financial rewards are excellent, the working hours appalling (the average day lasts 15 hours, and it's seven days a week) and the body fascism unadulterated. All the girls at my agency were weighed and measured on a near-daily basis. Some were 'advised' not to eat - for brief periods, of course. I was once dangerously close to exceeding the 90cm hip measurement stated on my contract and told to try the 'hard-boiled egg diet'. I retorted that I preferred to stick to the 'balanced diet', but it fell on deaf ears.

I like to wear Bermuda shorts in the summer.

So my buddy decided to call the elevator when I had a grenade cooking to throw.

here’s some video that i make inside the toy store

He was wearing boxers.

he's eager to please

he was beaten to death

When I scold him, he always talks back to me.

I have to go to the hairdresser's to get a haircut

you're among friends.

you have sleep in your eyes

You have matter in your eyes

how dare you!

go on, dive in, I dare you!

Unzip your coat.

Did the children behave themselves?

"I remember my first year of college as if it were yesterday."

He talked about his thoughts without mincing his words.

There are as many recipes for clam chowder as there are eaters of clam chowder.

string of pearls worn round the neck

to shave one's legs

contingent
in abeyance
to shatter
inaction
jaundiced
trepidation
inferior
to be desirous of one’s company
preferment
obsequious
tuition
bulky
relentless
to fend for oneself
to file out
to preponderate
rectory
to assert
moat
to ignite
dumbfounded
informality
concomitant
to be hard up
to incense
exorbitancy
breach
to frown at
dissipations
acrimony
bloody-minded
intransigence
to supersede
in malicious exultation
prickly
to be wont to
abjectly
iniquity

sedulity
to marvel
vindictive
to extirpate
popular acclaim
lore
to sigh for
to arouse
vociferous
to rehearse
to settle one’s entire landed estate upon whom one pleases
broken reed
hindsight
fugitive
to toss into
to solace
abrasive manner
deliberations
wryly
in penury
implacable
disparity
forlorn
intelligibility
tapster
sequestration
with a contemptible eye
sorely
measly sum
sensuous
parsonage
in refutation
to linger
fragrant
unyielding
forthright request
dissimulation
ineluctable