Person of Interest

Perhaps it is not the best TV show of this decade, or perhaps it is, after all.... but it is superbly well done and its script do not leave to surprise me.

 If you like procedurals, or police-related, or spy-related, or post-9/11 fictions, or an updated good story about surveillance and 1984-like fears, or terrorism-fighting-related, or..... or even if you hate some of them, or most importantly, if you like good character-developed, human-approached stories.... you must watch it! From its very beginning, Season First, Episode One, right through the third season finale, and beyond (I hope!)..... it is, simply said, as entertaining as worthwhile..... 

 Check out the people's reviews, if you like.... i.e.: 

IMDB reviews

  

If its first season got us engaged in the innards of the Machine and how it interacts with the main characters, and the second season explained us the threats to those characters, plus some new enemies both to the Machine and the protagonists, along with some interesting stories about New York's Mobs and thugs, this third season has introduced us the dilemma of the prescient artificial intelligence on the verge of taking apart the humanity, nothing less!

Same old story as it has been told several prior times, in fiction, science-fiction and their crossovers, but this time it is on TV, with film quality, and with new twists and turns to make it even more appealing, and even more important, that we can easily get involved with the characters. The script is really careful in that matter and, despite the shoots and the rigid approach that always have obscured spy-related stories, this one feels both natural and human-warmed.... 

Also to pray is the acting. Michael Emerson on its bests, Jim Cazievel who fits his performance like a glove, also his best, and an ensemble cast of actors who have become deeply linked with this series and, in some cases, they have achieved a well-deserved recognition.

All in all, a fine piece of modern TV, which is on par with other shows like Homeland, to name just one with some terrorism and special services involved.... The sci-fi elements, like the Machine, could not be as fictional as they appear and most of us would like them, after all.... Just think about the Big Data problem and the use of it for develop best advertising, the several NSA-related scandals... 

The fog catcher's forest

The original document, as graphical PDF, here:

Gapped texts and other paraphernalia...

20140505_classwork.doc (on Google Docs)
<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bH7cgUK7MYf2OM2gC83q5qWvatZQo8DboU014d132fs/pub>

If you prefer to view and/or download it directly, and not to use Google Docs instead...

20140505_classwork.doc (on Google Drive)

<https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-AvDkFJA9-DMjJwQ0gyc0tfNTg/edit?usp=sharing>

The version as PDF, which also includes the proposed exercises which were scanned (the above Word document lacks those final scanned images, all is copied&pasted or typed):

20140505_classwork.pdf
<https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-AvDkFJA9-Da2hqNDVjalpyaGs/edit?usp=sharing>

CU!

Being out of your mind while others are out of their mind....

Speaking about recursive recursions which could never end........

I did think that I've seen almost every absurdity on TV realities..... You know, from 'woodcutters on a tight schedule' to 'we're not making our quota of crocodile purses', passing through (not without eye-sore sacrifice) all kind of nightmares on cooking, nightmares on auctions, nightmares on...... You get the idea, don't you?

By any means it was something related to some personal project. Actually, I do not watch that kind of TV shows. Probably, I do not see any kind of TV shows, such is my pleasure to pick up carefully which I really watch (out of its original scheduling). But you should live inside a salt mine, really far away of any copper electric-cable, not to mention TV/Satellite/IPTV and related sockets, to avoid watching some footage of those TV shows..... They enjoy far wide popular support and it's simply impossible not to get caught by them....

And it turns out that some of these shows are trying to entertain us, but also, disguised into the effort, to make some serious scientific research.... For that matter, there will be always some crazy guys devoted to 'capture the impossible'.....

Well, yesterday I got struck by the famous YouTube viral video of the 'Tornado Alley' TV show. It seems that finally they've got themselves caught inside a real tornado, and they have the footage ...and they survived the event.

Of course, the good IMAX quality footage would be reserved for the TV show. On YouTube you can see the footage taken by a normal video recorder inside the armoured car they used. It seems that they had several video recorders running, and this one was more or less focused on a 'hands-on subjective take', so it looses the steady shot from time to time. But given the weather conditions, it might be excused.... There was a serious risk of loosing the steady shot, the steady armoured car, even the steady terrain behind them....

They've also got a devoted Internet site, from which the image above was cut, that 'heavily-photo-shopped' imagery...... Do not miss the 'fun facts' and the hardware depictions under the 'explore' menu........

A mystery to solve....

Recently this faked photo, allegedly taken aboard the ISS in one of the two tours paid by Chris Hadfield to it, has struck the social media in Internet..... Hadfield got famous using his Twitter account @Cmdr_Hadfield to post news about his space journeys, and also for a really well made video in which he performed 'A Space Oddity' aboard the ISS.

One might think that, due to the troublesome process of getting crops in microgravity, which is fully explained in the May 2006 issue of 'Spaceflight', which you can access here, ISS astronauts have to stow (stow away!) their own weeds......

But not, they do not..... Probably they just got banned both to put 'that' in the payload of the Shuttle or Soyuz, and also to smoke anything in orbit.......

But that photo? Well, it's a fake, an elaborated one, if not too difficult to achieve one. The real photo is even more mesmerizing.....

What are those? Easter Eggs? 'Kinder Surprise'? Just coloured boiled eggs?....XDDDDD

Yeah, they were just Easter Eggs....

Candidate's Guide for Official Certification Tests. June 2014.

Anna has warned us about the Guide, which you can access or download using the next links:

At the cece..gva.es site....

Backup in the Google Drive, just in case....

In both cases you'll get direct access to the PDF, and it is up to you to download it from your embedded PDF reader or using the download tool in Google Drive.

CU!

More class materials!

This evening we've got more papers for our preparation:

* An example of real CPE Writing Tests, and its guidelines. The  CPE_Writing_Sample_Paper.pdf
* Several sheets with useful guidelines for several types of writing (essays, articles, formal letters, and so on...). The CPE_Writing_Guidelines.pdf
* A BBC online News article about the always on the vogue theme: Stem Cells. The original articles are HERE and HERE.

That's all, folks!