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The trading statement comes a day after Halifax reported that house prices jumped by 2.6% in May, the biggest one-month rise in more than six years. Last week, Nationwide also reported a rise in prices, although analysts have suggested that the small number of actual sales may be distorting the picture.
Despite its cautious tone, Bellway said it was looking to start buying land suitable for traditional two-storey housing, the first housebuilder to return to the land market.
In a research note on the company, Panmure Gordon described this as "the interesting part" of the statement: "We believe that this is the stage where those housebuilders with a strong balance sheet (Bellway/Bovis) will be able to gain advantage. Other housebuilders with weaker balance sheets (Barratt/Redrow/Taylor Wimpey) remain focused on debt reduction (which they need to do), and will have to rely on significantly dilutive fundraisings (which Taylor Wimpey has recently undertaken) in order to resume build activity/land purchases."
Bellway's first trading update since it announced its results at the end of March, which included an 80% cut in the firm's dividend, said "there has been no major change in demand for our products".
"First-time buyers continue to struggle to raise deposits and, consequently, access to the first step on the housing ladder remains difficult. With entry to the mortgage market still restricted and lenders' valuation policies remaining inconsistent, cancellation rates are still running at historically high levels," said Bellway, which last year held tentative merger talks with rival Redrow.
Despite this, net reservations - the number of buyers agreeing to buy a house, usually by paying a deposit, minus the number of cancellations - have continued to average 105 per week since 1 February.
To persuade people to buy, the company has continued to use discounts, part exchange and shared equity but Bellway said the offers were "not increasing as a percentage of selling prices, therefore bringing some stability to our pricing structure".

Current Windows Documentation includes:

• Complete Windows 2000 Guide - Includes detailed information about how Windows 2000 works along with many descriptions of its feastures and use. This guide is available in in Downloadable Zipped PDF Formfor off line reading.
• Windows TCP/IP Reference - Includes information about the OSI network model, TCP/IP addressing, SNMP, network tools (such as arp, ifconfig, netstat, nslookup, and route), ARP protocol, WINS, DNS, DHCP, RAS, and name resolution order for Windows networking.
• NFTS Rights For Fun and Profit - Explains the value of structuring file permissions and covers some permission settings.
• NT Workstation Guide - This document includes information about the system registry, configuration files, security, application support (NTVDM, WOW subsystem, POSIX, OS/2), system installation, the NT filesystem (including NTFS, FAT, VFAT, FAT32), system control panel, system utilities and tools, system commands, environment variables, printing, system performance, system services, user management, user rights, file permissions, NT groups, auditing, user profiles, system policies, network browsing, RAS, NT network model, How resources are accessed and how the redirector works, supported network protocols, system events, error handling, and diagnostic tools.
• NT Server Guide - This document includes information about NT Server utilities, the control panel, printing, filesystems, security, server roles, fault tolerance (including diak mirroring, disk striping, disk duplexing, RAID), volume sets, user accounts, NT groups, policies, user rights, auditing, user profiles, roaming profiles, domains (PDC and BDC), SAM synchronization, server management tools, directory replication, licensing issues, client administration, netware tools, MacIntosh support, RAS server, SNMP, DHCP, DNS, WINS, Mail, IIS, Routing, Firewalls, MPR, and static and dynamic routing.

This section is intended for Windows programs, documentation, articles, tips, editorials and associated web links. This section will cover all Windows versions from Windows 95 through Windows 2000.

This section currently contains several Windows NT documents and Windows operating systems links.

Science and technology is a growing and flourishing field in Pakistan. Since its independence from Great Britain in 1947, the newly-found nation of Pakistan has seen a large influx of scientists, engineers, doctors, and technicians assuming an active role in Pakistan's fields of science and technology. Pakistan has been known internationally for some of its major achievements in science and technology such as its possession of strong weapons in the military, growing base of doctors and engineers, and also a fair amount of its new influx of software engineers, which is however as not as much as counterpart India. Pakistan has achieved goals in Nuclear science,Space Science, Aerospace industries, biological industries, Communication technology and many other science. Pakistan is also the home country of many prominent scientists such as Dr. Abdus Salam who won a Nobel Prize in Physics.

Science and technology is a growing and flourishing field in Pakistan. Since its independence from Great Britain in 1947, the newly-found nation of Pakistan has seen a large influx of scientists, engineers, doctors, and technicians assuming an active role in Pakistan's fields of science and technology. Pakistan has been known internationally for some of its major achievements in science and technology such as its possession of strong weapons in the military, growing base of doctors and engineers, and also a fair amount of its new influx of software engineers, which is however as not as much as counterpart India. Pakistan has achieved goals in Nuclear science,Space Science, Aerospace industries, biological industries, Communication technology and many other science. Pakistan is also the home country of many prominent scientists such as Dr. Abdus Salam who won a Nobel Prize in Physics.

Still, current NASA missions to Mars take precautions with sterilization and clean rooms to prevent contamination prior to launch.

"I'm not overly worried that we're contaminating landing sights," Schuerger said. "I'm not suggesting that we relax planetary protection protocols, either, but current ones appear to be very good."

That's not to say that NASA missions don't pose any contamination risk, given the dust that may get kicked up and cover surviving microbes with a protective layer, he added. Future missions that have landers or rovers digging deeper beyond the top 10 or 20 centimeters of the Martian surface may require additional risk studies.

"Whether or not microbes will survive when we drill down to depth, that's a wide open question at this point," Schuerger cautioned. Studies like Schuerger's, and more complex robotic or human missions to Mars over the next several decades, may provide some answers.

Turns out that P. cryohalolentis finds precious little shelter from UV radiation, even under global dust storm conditions or sitting inside a salt mineral matrix.

"We found that the UV radiation was readily and easily able to penetrate the salt-organic matrix that the bacterial cells were embedded in," Schuerger said.

Such findings suggest that this type of extremophile poses little risk of spreading across the surface of Mars — at least not on its current-day hostile surface environment. P. cryohalolentis even fared poorly under the dry conditions on the lab bench, let alone inside the Mars simulator.

The study points to a need for future investigations on how much UV protection a microbe can find in salt mineral layers within the Martian regolith.

"The research emphasizes the point that you're not going to automatically get protection from UV when embedded within salt deposits," Schuerger noted. "Some salt encrustations might protect with just a few millimeters of salt, while others might need 5 to10 centimeters."

UV is not the only challenge facing hitchhiking microbes. Schuerger's past research found at least 13 separate factors on Mars that can kill Earth microbes, not counting perchlorate salts uncovered by NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander in the polar region of Mars.

Past studies have focused on moderate-temperature microbes that pose a more common risk of contaminating spacecraft parts and hitching a ride into space. NASA has long worried that contamination by Earth microbes could upset ongoing efforts to find Martian or other extraterrestrial life.

Schuerger and his colleagues chose to test Psychrobacter cryohalolentis, an extremophile that thrives under extremely dry conditions and at temperatures as low as minus 10 degrees C. That choice allowed them to push scientific understanding of what may or may not survive on the Martian surface.

"If we can find any of extremophilic terrestrial species that are capable of growth and replication under Martian conditions, it puts the search for life on Mars a bit closer to success," Schuerger explained.

Testing under Martian surface conditions meant turning to the Mars Simulation Chamber (MSC) at the Kennedy Space Center, where researchers simulated everything from dust free skies to global dust storm conditions. The study grew out of the undergraduate work of David Smith from Princeton University, who has since gone on to conduct his Ph.D. research at the University of Washington.

The team also tested how well a salt mineral matrix similar to parts of the Martian surface could protect against UV, and how well the extremophiles dealt with very dry conditions.

Past studies have focused on moderate-temperature microbes that pose a more common risk of contaminating spacecraft parts and hitching a ride into space. NASA has long worried that contamination by Earth microbes could upset ongoing efforts to find Martian or other extraterrestrial life.

Schuerger and his colleagues chose to test Psychrobacter cryohalolentis, an extremophile that thrives under extremely dry conditions and at temperatures as low as minus 10 degrees C. That choice allowed them to push scientific understanding of what may or may not survive on the Martian surface.

"If we can find any of extremophilic terrestrial species that are capable of growth and replication under Martian conditions, it puts the search for life on Mars a bit closer to success," Schuerger explained.

Testing under Martian surface conditions meant turning to the Mars Simulation Chamber (MSC) at the Kennedy Space Center, where researchers simulated everything from dust free skies to global dust storm conditions. The study grew out of the undergraduate work of David Smith from Princeton University, who has since gone on to conduct his Ph.D. research at the University of Washington.

The team also tested how well a salt mineral matrix similar to parts of the Martian surface could protect against UV, and how well the extremophiles dealt with very dry conditions.

Microbes Would Find Scarce Shelter on Mars
By Jeremy Hsu
Astrobiology Magazine
posted: 04 June 2009
07:31 am ET

Extremophile bacteria can tough it out in the Siberian permafrost, but the environment of Mars may still be too hostile for such hardy life.

That's the finding of a recent study conducted by Andrew C. Schuerger, a microbiologist at the University of Florida and the Space Life Sciences Lab at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and colleagues.

"Very seldom have microbes that grow well under cold or high salt conditions been subjected to Martian conditions," said Schuerger.

Harsh ultraviolet (UV) light proved particularly devastating for the survival of cold-resistant microbes under simulated surface conditions on Mars.

Such findings not only hone the search for traces of Martian life, but also could help focus NASA's procedures to prevent contamination of Mars by Earth microbes.

The "One Laptop per Child" (OLPC) scheme, which has sent over a million US$100 laptops to children in the developing world, has been criticised by researchers who found that, unless they are introduced with care, they become little more than distracting toys in the classroom.
The study, conducted in Ethiopia, revealed that students wanted more content on the laptops and teachers were not adequately trained on how to make use of them.
The OLPC scheme was launched in 2005 to provide each child in the developing world with a low-cost laptop to encourage "self-empowered" learning. More than one million laptops have been distributed.
David Hollow of the UK-based ICT4D Collective at Royal Holloway, University of London, and his team evaluated the OLPC initiative in Ethiopia by observing classroom sessions and interviewing students and teachers.
They told Africa Gathering — an information and communication technology and social networking conference organised by the London International Development Centre in April — that students tended to play with the machines, largely for taking pictures with the built-in digital camera.
Teachers were left frustrated because the students were better at using the laptops and played on them during lessons instead of listening to the teachers, Hollow told the conference.
"If I had the money, I would not spend it on laptops," Hollow told SciDev.Net. "It will cost about US$3 billion dollars to give every [Ethiopian] child a laptop. And as a proportion of the national budget for education, that's just ridiculous."
The approach "doesn't actually empower people in the way that we'd like. It just undermines the teacher … It's impossible to integrate it".
The ICT4D team worked with Swiss educational software provider BlankPage to develop Akili, a textbook reader that was used to download books and increase the educational content on the laptops.
"We felt that Akili was something of a bridge because it enabled the children to explore and engage with their own learning but, at the same time, they were still based within the national curriculum and the teacher's authority was not undermined."