Window Cleaning, Snow, Ears, Burgers & Borrowing 10 Billion

Tony Evans of "A New View window cleaning" braves the snow & gives us another episode in the new third "weather or not" winter edition. Whilst Chris Dawber decides not to bother going to work!

A former window cleaner prone to attacking strangers was jailed indefinitely for chomping on a man’s ears while trying to rob him. Mark Rawlings, 24, who has been in and out of prison since his teens, was described as “unstable” by Judge Stephen John as he was sentenced to a minimum of two years for attempted robbery on December 18. The court heard how Rawlings, of Hazel Crescent, Whitley, attacked his victim after leaving a pub on August 8, at 11.30pm, the day after being released on licence from a previous offence. He said he did it because someone had stolen a pair of trainers given to him by his mum.
Sentencing, Judge John said: “The victim had left the pub when you came up behind him and put your arms around his throat, bit his ears and demanded he take you to a cashpoint saying you wanted at least a grand. “He managed to fight himself free and ran back to the pub where the door was locked behind him but you broke that lock and assaulted the publican. “This was a very frightening incident.”
Rawlings had been released on the same day from a two-year sentence imposed in June 2008 for one offence of actual bodily harm and two offences of common assault. He had been shouting abusively down a mobile phone at Reading train station when he was asked to quieten down and leave. Instead he punched a member of staff in the face, another two employees in the head and threatened to throw one of them on the railway track before striking a member of the public, the court heard.
In another offence in 2004, Rawlings, a window cleaner at the time, sank his teeth into a pensioner’s neck and another man’s ear. He also picked a fight with two men as they left a shop in Overdown Road in Tilehurst, biting one of them on the ear and finger and then punching the other. He was jailed for 13 months. Rawlings has been diagnosed with two personality disorders, describing him as emotionally unstable and socially incapable.
He claimed he carried out the offence in August because someone had stolen a pair of trainers from him that his mum had bought. Judge John added: “These are impulsive acts of violence against strangers, there is a worrying and unstable nature to your behaviour. “I have significant concerns that you were not able to cope on your return to the community. You have a marked tendency to act impulsively with no thought or consequence.” Rawlings was given an indeterminate sentence for the protection of the public and was warned if he did not deal with his behaviour he would never be released. As he was taken away, Rawlings shouted across to his father in the public gallery: “That’s alright, two years, it’s good.”

Dreaming to bridge surface science and materials science: An interview with Prof. Kai Wu of Peking University - What are the short-term and long-term research plans?
Kai: They are quite simple. In the short term, I would like to finish the projects that I’m working on. Surface science is a money-eating machine. I have to find extra funding to build the new machines we need to use in our research. In the long term, I would concentrate on the good science, in my eyes. I would definitely try to bridge surface science and nanomaterials. In conventional surface science, all crystals in the periodic table have been studied. One has to find a new field. I believe nanocrystals can open a new window for surface scientists because people can now prepare tons of novel nanocrystals.

Dubai's Khalifa Tower, World's Tallest Building, Opens with Fanfare: Building is so tall that it is ten degrees Celsius cooler at the top than at the base. The tallest building in the world has opened in the Gulf emirate of Dubai. But the 828-meter tower formerly known as the Burj Dubai has been renamed the Burj Khalifa, to honor the leader of neighboring Abu Dhabi, who gave Dubai $10 billion last month to help repay its debts. Dramatic music, fireworks and men parachuting from the sky helped Dubai introduce the world to its new tallest building. Its inauguration comes during a deep financial crisis in Dubai. Lead architect George Efstathiou says the building symbolizes the emirate's perseverance.

Brave window cleaners take on the challenge of the world's tallest skyscraper, Dubai's Burj Khalifa: Cleaning the windows of skyscrapers can be a daunting process. But never more so than for the company who landed the epic task of cleaning the windows of the world's tallest skyscraper in Dubai, the Burj Khalifa. Towering at 2,717ft and with 1,292,500 sq ft of glass, the £1billion Burj is an imposing building, and one designers were determined would be sparkling clean in time for yesterday's extravagant opening ceremony. Dale Harding, the general manager of cleaning company Cox Gomyl, said the firm installed £5 million of hi-tech equipment, including unique window-cleaning carousels which they designed, to ensure the Burj was constantly clean. Twelve machines weighing 13 tons carry up to 36 cleaners, who use ordinary soapy water to wash down the Burj's 24,830 reflective windows in a process that takes three months from top to bottom.

The cleaners stand on the specially designed machines, which emerge from cavities in the skyscraper and track along rails skirting its curved towers. Mr Harding said the company, based in Melbourne, Australia, had been working overtime to get the Burj gleaming for Monday's extravagant opening ceremony. He said: 'It's an enormous challenge. The architects had some fairly high expectations. 'It's an iconic building with high exposure. They wanted it as clean as possible, particularly for the opening. There have been some fairly tight deadlines over the past few months. 'It's an incredible construction. People are focusing on the height of the building but the sheer size of it, the footprint, is huge. It's really 10-15 conventional buildings.' Click pictures to enlarge.

And in a spectacular blunder just months before the opening ceremony, which was attended by over 6,000 people, Samsung Besix Arabtec Joint Venture, which built the Burj, were forced to rush in Mick Flaherty after they realised they had forgotten to fit lights to the tip. The 35-year-old, originally from Tyne and Wear, and his company Total Solutions Middle East, worked on the pre-fabricated spire of the building for more than a month before it was officially unveiled to the world. His daily commute to work involved him taking five lifts to the 160th floor, climbing through a further seven tiers on vertical ladders, then squeezing into the 6ft wide spire and out of a hatch. Mr Flaherty said: 'I felt like I could see the whole world. It was absolutely breathtaking.

Window cleaning chemical injected into fast food hamburger meat: If you're in the beef business, what do you do with all the extra cow parts and trimmings that have traditionally been sold off for use in pet food? You scrape them together into a pink mass, inject them with a chemical to kill the e.coli, and sell them to fast food restaurants to make into hamburgers. That's what's been happening all across the USA with beef sold to McDonald's, Burger King, school lunches and other fast food restaurants, according to a New York Times article. The beef is injected with ammonia, a chemical commonly used in glass cleaning and window cleaning products.
This is all fine with the USDA, which endorses the procedure as a way to make the hamburger beef "safe" enough to eat. Ammonia kills e.coli, you see, and the USDA doesn't seem to be concerned with the fact that people are eating ammonia in their hamburgers. This ammonia-injected beef comes from a company called Beef Products, Inc. As NYT reports, the federal school lunch program used a whopping 5.5 million pounds of ammonia-injected beef trimmings from this company in 2008. This company reportedly developed the idea of using ammonia to sterilize beef before selling it for human consumption.
Fascinating. So you can inject a beef product with a chemical found in glass cleaning products and simply call it a "processing agent" -- with the full permission and approval of the USDA, no less! Does anyone doubt any longer how deeply embedded the USDA is with the beef industry? Apparently, this practice of injecting fast food beef with ammonia has been a well-kept secret for years. I never knew this was going on, and this news appears to be new information to virtually everyone. The real shocker is that "a majority" of fast food restaurants use this ammonia-injected cow-derived product in their hamburger meat. It sort of makes you wonder: What else is in there that we don't know about? "School lunch officials and other customers complained about the taste and smell of the beef," says the NYT. No wonder. It's been pumped full of chemicals. It's almost enough to make you want to puke. If you do so, please aim it at your windows, because ammonia cuts through grease like nothing else, leaving your windows squeaky clean!

Scaffold affects business: The company behind rapper-turned-fashion guru Sean "Diddy" Combs is suing the landlord of its flagship New York shop over a scaffold that has been hanging over its window for more than three years. It wants at least $2.5 million in damages and freedom from its more than 660,000 dollars-a-year lease. It claims the scaffold is affecting business and is not good for the company's image.