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101-year-old man parachutes into record book A 101-year-old man is believed to be the world's oldest skydiver after he accepted a dare from friends and jumped out of an airplane at nearly 10,000 feet. Frank Moody, from Holloways Beach on Australia's northeastern coast, beat the record set by a 94-year-old Norwegian in 1999, said Amanda Pilkington, from Skydive Cairns, which organized the jump. On the morning of June 16, Moody jumped in tandem with an experienced skydiver from more than 9,900 feet, she said. "He's an absolute legend. It was a bit of a drunken dare by some of his mates at the local Holloways Beach football club. He said: 'Sure, I'll go jump out of an airplane,'" Pilkington quoted him as saying, adding she nearly fell off her chair when she first heard Moody go for the record. "We decided to attempt to beat the record as well as giving Frank an awesome experience and one that he'll remember for the rest of his life. He's very switched-on and very witty and charming. It's an absolute pleasure to have done this for him," she said.
Pilkington said the club would send video of the jump and other details to the Guinness Book of Records head office in London and expects confirmation of the record shortly. Moody went down to the football club with his son John after the jump to have a Guinness beer to celebrate and collect on bets place by his friends. "He's been given his footage and photographs so he's got proof and evidence that he's done it," Pilkington said.
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Briton who saved Jews remembered A British agent who saved thousands of Jews from the Nazis is being remembered with a plaque being placed outside the British embassy in Berlin. Frank Foley was based in Berlin in the 1930s, working as a passport control officer, and using his position to provide papers for Jewish people. It is believed Mr Foley saved tens of thousands of lives, even hiding people in his own home. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw described him as "a true British hero". Eyewitnesses recall Mr Foley as an unassuming hero - a small, slightly overweight man with round glasses . But he was actually Britain's top spy in the city. He not only interpreted the rules on visas loosely, enabling Jews to escape to Britain and Palestine, but he also helped to forge passports. And, despite not having diplomatic immunity, he gave shelter to some people in his own home. Mr Foley's efforts have already been recognised by Israel, which declared him a righteous gentile, like Oskar Schindler, and he has also been honoured by his home town of Stourbridge in the West Midlands. Michael Smith of the Daily Telegraph, who wrote a book about him, said that although it is not known exactly how many lives Mr Foley saved, archive evidence would suggest the number was in the tens of thousands. He said, "With Schindler you had 1,400 people working in a factory, working with him, they
worked closely together. Their lives were together. "So when they moved to Palestine, which later became Israel, they are all talking to each other, they are still on the phone to each other even if they are not living in Israel - they have a collective memory of what Schindler did. "But with Foley a lot of the people he helped probably didn't even know he helped them. "They were helped in ones or twos or in small family units - five or six people perhaps. They have got to Palestine. They have a visa they know they shouldn't have - they are not going to talk about it."
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The Firm Helen Keller In 1882 a baby girl caught a fever that was so fierce she nearly died. She survived but the fever left its mark - she could no longer see or hear. Because she could not hear she also found it very difficult to speak. So how did this child, blinded and deafened at 19 months old, grow up to become a world-famous author and public speaker? The fever cut her off from the outside world, depriving her of sight and sound. It was as if she had been thrown into a dark prison cell from which there could be no release. Luckily Helen was not someone who gave up easily. Soon she began to explore the world by using her other senses. She followed her mother wherever she went, hanging onto her skirts; she touched and smelled everything she came across. She copied their actions and was soon able to do certain jobs herself, like milking the cows or kneading dough, she even learnt to recognize people by feeling their faces or their clothes. She could also tell where she was in the garden by the smell of the different plants and the feel of the ground under her feet. By the age of seven she had invented over 60 different signs by which she could talk to her family, if she wanted bread for example, she would pretend to cut a loaf and butter the slices. If she wanted ice cream she wrapped her arms around herself and pretended to shiver. Helen was unusual in that she was extremely intelligent and also remarkably sensitive. By her own efforts she had managed to make some sense of an alien and confusing world. But even so she had limitations. At the age of five Helen began to realize she was different from other people. She noticed that her family did not use signs like she did but talked with their mouths. Sometimes she stood between two people and touched their lips. She could not understand what they said and she could not make any meaningful sounds herself. She wanted to talk but no matter how she tried she could not make herself understood. This makes her so angry that she used to hurl herself around the room, kicking and screaming in frustration. As she got older her frustration grew and her rages became worse and worse. She became wild and unruly. If she didn't get what she wanted she would throw tantrums until her family gave in. Her favorite tricks included grabbing other people's food from their plates and hurling fragile objects to the floor. Once she even managed to lock her mother into the pantry. Eventually it became clear that something had to be done. So, just before her seventh birthday, the family hired a private tutor - Anne Sullivan. Anne was careful to teach Helen especially those subjects in which she was interested. As a result Helen became gentler and she soon learnt to read and write in Braille. She also learnt to read people's lips by pressing her finger-tips against them and feeling the movement and vibrations. This method is called Tadoma and it is a skill that very, very few people manage to acquire. She also learnt to speak, a major achievement for someone who could not hear at all. Helen proved to be a remarkable scholar, graduating with honors from Radcliff College in 1904. She had phenomenal powers of concentration and memory, as well as a dogged determination to succeed. While she was still at college she wrote 'The Story of My Life'. This was an immediate success and earned her enough money to buy her own house. She toured the country, giving lecture after lecture. Many books were written about her and several plays and films were made about her life. Eventually she became so famous that she was invited abroad and received many honors from foreign universities and monarchs. In 1932 she became a vice-president of the Royal National Institute for the Blind in the United Kingdom. After her death in 1968 an organization was set up in her name to combat blindness in the developing world. Today that agency, Helen Keller International, is one of the biggest organizations working with blind people overseas.
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Bill Gates in His Boyhood As a child-and as an adult as well-Bill was untidy. It has been said that in order to counteract this. Mary drew up weekly clothing plans for him. On Mondays he might go to school in blue, on Tuesdays in green, on Wednesdays in brown , on Thursdays in black, and so on , Weekend meal schedules might also be planned in detail. Everything time, at work or during his leisure time. Dinner table discussions in the Gate's family home were always lively and educational. "It was a rich environment in which to learn," Bill remembered. Bill's contemporaries, even at the age, recognized that he was exceptional. Every year, he and his friends would go to summer camp. Bill especially liked swimming and other sports. One of his summer camp friends recalled, "He was never a nerd or a goof or the kind of kid you didn't want your team. We all knew Bill was smarter than us. Even back then, when he was nine or ten years old, he talked like an adult and could express himself in ways that none of us understood." Bill was also well ahead of his classmates in mathematics and science. He needed to go to a school that challenged him to Lakeside-an all-boys' school for exceptional students. It was Seattle's most exclusive school and was noted for its rigorous academic demands, a place where "even the dumb kids were smart."
Lakeside allowed students to pursue their own interests, to whatever extent they wished. The school prided itself on making conditions and facilities available that would enable all its students to reach their full potential . It was the ideal environment for someone like Bill Gates. In 1968, the school made a decision that would change thirteen-year-old Bill Gates's life-and that of many of others, too. Funds were raised, mainly by parents, that enabled the school to gain access to a computer-a Program Data processor(PDP)-through a teletype machine. Type in a few instructions on the teletype machine and a few seconds later the PDP would type back its response. Bill Gates was immediately hooked- so was his best friend at the time, Kent Evans, and another student, Paul Allen, who was two years older than Bill. Whenever they had free time, and sometimes when they didn't, they would dash over to the computer room to use the machine. The students became so single-minded that they soon overtook their teachers in knowledge about computing and got into a lot of trouble because of their obsession. They were neglecting their other studies-every piece of word was handed in late. Classes were cut. Computer time was also proving to be very expensive. Within months, the whole budget that had been set aside for the year had been used up. At fourteen, Bill was already writing short programs for the computer to perform. Early games programs such as Tic-Tac-Toe, or Noughts and Crosses, and Lunar Landing were written in what was to become Bill's second language, BASIC. One of the reasons Bill was so good at programming is because it is mathematical and logical. During his time at Lakeside, Bill scored a perfect eight hundred on a mathematics test. It was extremely important to him to get this grade-he had to take the test more than once in order to do it. If Bill Gates was going to be good at something. It was essential to be the best. Bill's and Paul's fascination with computers and the business world meant that they read a great deal. Paul enjoyed magazines like Popular Electronics, Computer time was expensive and, because both boys were desperate to get more time and because Bill already had an insight into what they could achieve financially, the two of them decided to set themselves up as a company: The Lakeside Programmers Group. "Let's call the real world and try to sell something to it!" Bill announced.
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AN UNUSUAL ARCHITECT—LEOH MING PEI On this vivid planet, it appears colorful with azure blue seawater, lush green plants and many world famous buildings. Among these largest artificial articles in the world, many originated from the same architect—Ieoh Ming Pei. Ieoh Ming Pei, the 1983 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, is a founding partner of I. M. Pei & Partners based in New York City. He was born in China in 1917, the son of a prominent banker. He came to the United States in 1935 to study architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (B. Arch. 1940) and the Harvard Graduate School of
Design (M. Arch. 1946). During World War Ⅱ, he served on the National defense Research Commission at Princeton, and from 1945 to 1948, taught at Harvard. In 1948 he accepted the newly created post of director of Architecture at Webb & Knapp, Inc., the real estate development firm, and this association resulted in major architectural and planning projects in Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, Pittsburgh and other cities. In 1958, he formed the partnership of I. M. Pei & Associates, which became I. M. Pei & Parteners in 1966. The partnership received the 1968 Architectural Firm Award of The American Institute of Architects. Pei has designed over forty projects in this country and abroad, twenty of which have been award winners. His more prominent commissions have included the East Building of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D .C.; the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library near Boston; the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado; the Dallas City Hall in Texas; the Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation Centre (OCBC) and Raffles City in Singapore; the West Wing of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Fragrant Hill Hotel near Beijing, China, designed to graft advanced technology onto the roofs of indigenous building and thereby sow the seed of a new ,distinctly Chinese form of modern architecture; the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse , New York; and the Texas Commerce Tower in Houston. He has designed arts facilities and university buildings on the campuses of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Rochester, Cornell University, the Choate School, Syracuse University, New York University and the University of Hawaii. He has been selected to design the headquarters for the Bank of China in Hong Kong. Pei is currently a member of the National Council on the Arts, and previously served on the National Council on the Humanities. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (of which he served a term as Chancellor), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Design. He is a member of the Corporation of the Massachusetts Institue of Technology. As a student, he was awarded the MIT Traveling Fellowship, and the Wheelwright Traveling Fellowship at Harvard. His subsequent honors include the following: the Brunner Award, the Medal of Honor of the New York Chapter of the AIA, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Medal for Architecture, the Gold Medal for Architecture of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Alpha Rho Chi Gold Medal, la Grande mé-daille d’Or de I’ Académie d’ Architecture (France), and The Gold Medal of The American Institute of Architects. In 1982, the deans of the architectural schools of the United Sates chose I. M. Pei as the best designer of significant non-residential structures.