English Recordings

The fact that space and time are elastic, stretching and warping in synchrony with our passage, is weird, but inescapably true. The beams of particles at Cern, travelling within a mere fraction of light speed, arrive at their destination on time only when the subtleties of relativity are included in the accounting. GPS satellites locate you precisely, but have to include Einstein's arithmetic in the calculations. Some experiments at Cern agree with the predictions of relativity to better than one part in a trillion – that is like measuring the distance across the Atlantic Ocean to better than the width of a human hair – but only when relativity is taken into account.
For scientists certainly, and for many of us, perhaps surprisingly, Einstein's theory of relativity is needed to keep track of our daily affairs.
What has any of this to do with the speed of light?
Einstein's edifice is constructed on an experimental fact: that the velocity of light is independent of your own motion. Whether you are moving towards the source, or away from it, or are stationary, doesn't matter: speed of light is universal. This is counterintuitive. A fast racing car overtakes a slower one more gradually than it does the static spectators at trackside; however, a light beam passes everyone the same – spectators or Lewis Hamilton would measure the same speed. Counterintutitive certainly, but true, and it led to Einstein's world-view. And one of the basic consequences of Einstein's theory is that the speed of light – in a vacuum – is nature's speed limit. Nothing can travel through a vacuum faster than light.
Has Cern overthrown this paradigm? I doubt it. Light travels slower through water, glass, even air, than through a vacuum. Radio waves do, too. So light can be slowed down, but not sped up: the vacuum is nature's open road where light travels at the speed limit. We need to be careful when asking what exactly has the Cern experiment done, or, more pertinently, how did it do it?
Cern produces beams of neutrinos, ghostly particles that can travel through the earth as easily as a bullet through a bank of fog. A beam travels down through the surface of the Earth in a straight line, the Earth's surface curving upwards away from it initially, eventually bending downwards until, 730km later, at Gran Sasso, a laboratory near Rome, the neutrino beam re-emerges. This journey has taken about 1/500th of a second.

Professor Einstein, you can relax. E still equals mc2. Probably …
Renowned physicist Frank Close urges caution before we abandon the theory of relativity and prepare for time travel
The barman said: "Sorry, we don't serve neutrinos." A neutrino enters a bar.
This is but one of many tweets inspired by the news that neutrinos – ghostly subatomic particles – may travel faster than light. If so, science fiction could become science fact, with wonderful paradoxes such as effects preceding their causes. One example would be the punchline preceding the story (in case, like me, it took a while for you to decode the joke).
As a scientist I have grown up to believe this law of nature: the only thing that travels faster than light is a rumour. The story that scientists at Cern, Europe's giant particle physics laboratory near Geneva, had apparently created neutrinos that travelled faster than light, hit the news on Friday morning while I was half asleep and seemed to be the latest example of this law.
But as I awoke, and the story refused to go away, I began to panic that I would have to rewrite my book Neutrino – which it seemed was rapidly being overtaken by events. My only consolation was that this revision would be but a small tremor in the unimaginable change to our understanding of life, the universe and, indeed, everything, if this claim turned out to be true. The physics textbooks in the libraries of the world would be wrong; the foundations of science would crumble. Particles travelling faster than light, capable of carrying information, would alter everything. So, what's going on and why does it matter?
Einstein's theory of relativity was one of the great revolutions of 20th-century thought, and arguably the greatest theoretical construct of the human mind. When Isaac Newton built his laws of motion in the 17th century, he imagined space and time as some invisible matrix through which we pass without changing them. The metronome ticks steadily on as we move through a permanent static three-dimensional space. Einstein's vision was that space and time are fluid, intertwined, affected by our motion: the faster you move, the slower you age. This has many wonderful implications, such as the puzzle of the twins – Tweedledum who stays at home while Tweedledee takes a high-speed gap year and returns home wiser but, surprisingly, younger than his sibling.

To deal with attrition, social stagnation and economic competition, the kibbutzim had to open up. They accepted new members who were less committed ideologically and less bound by shared history. They took in the hordes of foreign volunteers who flooded Israel after the 1967 war. As the world was being ushered in, kibbutz members were gazing and venturing out, visiting the city, travelling abroad, watching TV. Their aspirations, tastes and calculations were being altered. Long-suppressed yearnings for individual autonomy and personal space began to surface, overwhelming the old slogans of togetherness and equality.
By the 1990s, virtually all kibbutzim had moved toward full-fledged capitalism, establishing individual wages, transferring ownership of the community's property to individual members, and renting kibbutz facilities to outsiders. In my former kibbutz, a wealthy American recently leased the old children's house where I grew up, turning it into a luxury apartment, complete with home theatre and a huge Jacuzzi.
By then, most kibbutzim had already turned away from communal sleeping. The move was in large part driven by women who grew up in the children's house and, having become mothers, refused to let their children experience that same system.
It is not a coincidence, I think, that my fondest memories of my daughter Maya's early years are of those times when she would wake late at night, from a nightmare or a toothache, get up in a daze, toddle over to our bedroom, crawl under the sheets and cuddle up at my side; warm, safe, sighing, sliding slowly back into sleep. I never had that. And neither did my parents. Is the goal of changing the world worth such sacrifice?
I don't know.

My father, large and hard-working, took wholeheartedly to the life of a farmer. My first words as a child were "Daddy" and "work". My mother, however, searching and restless, chafed against the kibbutz system for years. She wanted independence, privacy. She yearned for the world. "I feel my dead parents hovering over me," she told me years later. "They say: Live! Live!" But she could not persuade my father to leave the kibbutz and she was not about to break up her family, her only anchor in the world. So she bided her time. Only years later, kids grown up, did she give my father an ultimatum. They left for the city in 1987.
By then, all three of their children had also left the kibbutz, as well as many of their friends. The visionary movement was cracking. The predictions upon which the kibbutz was based have proven faulty. The young Marxists believed that their ideas would sweep Israel and the west. In addition, the pioneers believed, naively, that their group would be able to sustain a highly principled life, resisting outside influences and the internal ills that have bedevilled human societies since the dawn of time: greed, envy, selfishness, boredom and the inevitable fraying over time of every tightly wound construction, be it a human or a social body.
They failed to anticipate their revolution's "second day" – in which the self-defining project of their youthful rebellion would become a mundane, constricting "home town" to their children, propelling the children to seek their own identities and adventures elsewhere. They also failed to anticipate the messiness of sexual desire, and how it can, in a closed, family-like system, produce uniquely poisonous variants of hurt and betrayal.
The kibbutz labour system was also flawed. When everyone is assured equal rewards regardless of individual contribution and effort, why stretch yourself? Moreover, to prevent status differences among members, the kibbutzim shunned specialisation. Leadership jobs were assigned to members on a rotating basis, often disregarding talent, training and inclination. The resulting endemic inefficiency in time led the movement into dire financial straits.

Years later it also came out that a girl a few years ahead of me had been molested repeatedly by one of the members, the father of another girl. The community had no consciousness of evil back then, at least not internally. Evil was capitalism, the corrupt outside world, and the Jordanian soldiers across the border two miles to the east. No one envisioned a menace within. Trust was the system's currency. Kibbutz buildings had no locks on the doors. If anyone suspected something, they probably chose to look away. When a dream is prized, we often look away from any reality that threatens to undermine it.
There was no particular motivation for schooling because the kibbutz guaranteed each member a job, housing, food. In the early days, the kibbutz school system shunned tests and grades altogether. There was suspicion in the kibbutz about intellectuals, and about separating people by degrees of excellence. When I decided to quit high school, my parents hardly noticed.
For today's parents, such a hands-off approach must seem callous. But my parents, like many Jews of their generation, came to the task of making a family hobbled in ways quite unfathomable today. My mother was born in Belgrade in 1937. Sometime in 1941, with the German assault on Belgrade intensifying, her family escaped to a small village in the hills, where they found shelter with a Gentile business acquaintance of her father. One day word got around that the Nazis were coming. My mother later recalled that her mother brushed her hair before her father took her aside and spoke to her; what he said she could not recall. There was a stirring in the air of a kind she could not comprehend. Someone took her to another house and hid her under a bed. When she returned, her parents and baby sister were gone. She was baptised and her name was changed. She was told never to mention her parents' names again. She was five years old. After the war she was discovered and flown to Israel by a Zionist organisation. She had nothing and nobody. The kibbutz took her in.
My father's family crossed the border from Poland to Russia on foot just ahead of the Nazi advance on Poland. My father and his mother survived six years in a Siberian refugee camp until his father returned from the war. The family made its way to Israel, where my grandparents, poor and displaced, decided to send my father to the kibbutz because they had no money to feed him.
My parents met at the kibbutz when they were 19; my father shot some pigeons and made my mother a meal. That was his opening ploy. Naturally she fell for it. They got married at 21. I was born a year later. Like many of their generation, my parents did not speak about their past, in part because it was unspeakable. They were not much for talking in general; they were for surviving. The kibbutz offered stability, identity, community, a world view – all the things they had lost.

The kibbutz was, in some ways, a wonderful place for kids. It was safe – there was no crime or street violence, no traffic. We were poor, with few material possessions, but we wore our poverty with pride, because we were taught that material possessions were evil. We looked down on city children as weak, spoiled, misguided.
Entertainment was mostly of the found, not manufactured, sort. Our playgrounds were junkyards. We played with defunct tractors, old boxes, used clothing and discarded tools. We roamed the yard, mostly barefoot. We built tree houses. We took turns on the lone communal bicycle. In winter we collected mushrooms in the forest and brought them to the communal dining room to be cooked.
During mandatory afternoon naps, the care-givers would have us lie in our beds with our heads to the wall. We developed a code of communication, like prisoners: One knock on the wall, "Are you awake?" Two: "Yes." Three: "Watch out, the care-giver is coming!"
On hot summer nights we'd strip and run naked around the yard. Or we'd crawl over to the other children's house next door where the group a year younger than us were housed. We'd sneak in and paint their faces with toothpaste, mix up their shoes in their shoe drawers, put ice in their pyjamas and run off.
I have many such innocent memories. But there was another side to my kibbutz childhood. The pressure to conform was relentless. Individuality and competition were looked down upon. Children who were unusual, eccentric or sought to distinguish themselves, were shunned. We were socialised to be strong and sunny, simple and similar. Emotional expression was demeaned as weak and self-involved. We learned to numb ourselves. I haven't cried since I was 10. I'd like to but I can't.
A friend of mine, I found out years later, used to wake up every night and sneak out the window to go to his parents' room. Every night he would knock on his parents' door and beg to be let in. Every night they would take him back to the children's house. After repeated episodes, the kibbutz's solution was to move his parents to a room further away.

Noam Spancer grew up on a kibbutz in Israel where he was raised by night guards and 'care-givers' as part of an effort to demolish the nuclear family. Did it work?
A childhood memory: woken in the middle of the night with a piercing toothache, I stumble out of my room in a daze into the darkened corridor. I stand in front of the intercom that hangs on the wall above me and I call for help: "Night guard, night guard, please come over."
If this sounds like the memory of a child in an institution, it is in a way. I was a kibbutz child.
The Israeli kibbutz movement, born of an exuberant meshing of Marxist and Zionist passions in early 20th-century Europe, never involved more than 4% of Israelis, but its economic, political and cultural influence far exceeded its size. Economically, kibbutz agriculture became a powerful, technologically advanced enterprise. Politically, the kibbutzim helped secure – and in turn benefited from – the long reign of Labour governments in Israel. Culturally, kibbutz members came to embody the Zionist ideal – Jews who were strong and earthy, capable farmers and courageous soldiers, free of diaspora dread and malaise.
From the beginning, however, the pioneers' attempts to translate their revolutionary ideals of social equality and shared ownership into the language of daily life resulted in some outlandish adaptations. Most notoriously, children in many kibbutzim were raised from six months in communal "children's houses", monitored at night by rotating shifts of night watchmen (and women), who, with the aid of an intercom system, were supposed to locate and respond to children's night-time needs.
While many cultures around the world practice some form of communal child-rearing, the kibbutz is the only known society in history to attempt communal sleeping. Early kibbutzim gravitated toward that system for several reasons. Ideologically, kibbutz members wanted to break away from old Jewish-European traditions. They wanted to demolish the nuclear family structure in favour of the group. They wanted their children to grow up in a microcosm of the kibbutz system, to train for their future lives. Economically, raising children collectively made sense during the tough early days – food was rationed and members sometimes lived in small tents. There was also a feminist motive, as communal sleeping was supposed to free women to participate equally in community life.
As children, we spent most of our time in the children's house with our peers. We ate, played, studied and slept there. We would visit our parents every afternoon between 4pm and 8pm, then they would return us to the children's house to sleep. Our Jewish mothers never cooked us a meal, never washed our clothes or sang us a lullaby. The kibbutz system sought to limit private intimacies in case they diverted members' energy from the communal project.

1. Why did you leave xyz/Why are you considering leaving your present job?
Despite the fact that I am happy with my current assignment, I need a new challenge that should make deep impact not only my future career but also on products that the new assignment provides.
I have been assigned to the training department, which is under the Turkish National Police Academy not long ago in order to convey my operational and administrational skills to the recruited cadets.
Since I have substantial background for management in police and in operational level, I have to make a decision to be transferred to the new trainees when I was offered for the job. Then, I joined the training department.
I was planning also to join international environment which should satisfy my with outcome of job and looking for the new challenges. Once I came across with the TISP (Transitional Institutional Programme for Border Police), I realized that I should be with this team.
Those affects can be considered for changing the status.

“The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, the education, the money, than circumstances, than failure, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company... a church... a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice everyday regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past... we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude. I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it. And so it is with you... we are in charge of our Attitudes.”

(Charles R. Swindoll)

Close your eyes, visualize that all your pain, waste, bad energy and unnecessary thoughts are coming out from mind and body. You are becoming lighter and lighter. Think about your mind is becoming still and calm. You are feeling good from your heart and enjoying the moment. Your are smiling and happy after recollecting those happy moments happened in your past. You are grateful for all those things you have. You are having good intentions to do something for the world and your family. You are focused on your goals and following your intuition. You know the road you will be travelling. Think about how it feels after accomplishing what you desire. You are facing fear with courage and it is releasing from your mind. You are raising your self confidence after overcoming your biggest fear and feeling proud about yourself. You are feeling the power within you and you came to know that you are more than the flesh. Open your eyes after feeling the explicit emotion with a big smile over your face. Now you know that your heart can see more than your eyes. Listen to what your heart says and make decisions. The force of love comes from your heart and it carries all good emotions which makes your life more beautiful and worth living.