hung'sharin / distributed networking
National Geographic's International Photography Contest 2009 (25P)
National Geographic's International Photography Contest attracts thousands of entries from photographers of all skill levels around the world every year. While this year's entry deadline has passed, there is still time to view and vote for your favorites in the Viewer's Choice competition. National Geographic was kind enough to let me choose a few of their entries from 2009 for display here on The Big Picture. Collected below are 25 images from the three categories of People, Places and Nature. Captions were written by the individual photographers.
Jimmie Johnson Wins Fourth Consecutive NASCAR Championship
Congratulations are certainly due to Jimmie Johnson, who Sunday became the first Nascar driver ever to win four consecutive championships. But before racing nuts declare him the greatest, they ought to compare Mr. Johnson's résumé to those of other auto immortals. Truth be told, he isn't nearly as dominant as some of his peers.
A study of the drivers with the most impressive four-year stints—including David Pearson in the '60s, Richard Petty in the '70s and Jeff Gordon in the '90s—shows Mr. Johnson has some catching up to do. Compared to seven other drivers that Nascar says had authoritative runs, Mr. Johnson's win frequency is lower than Darrell Waltrip, Dale Earnhardt and Cale Yarborough, and the percentage of races he finished in the top-5 is nearly 24% worse than Mr. Petty's. Mr. Yarborough's run from 1976-79 is the most impressive in part because he finished in the top-5 in 73.6% of his races in that span. Mr. Johnson finished in the top-5 in just 44.4% of his races. Johnson-defenders will say the expanded fields in today's circuit explain his inability to finish high up consistently. During his run, the average race had 43 competitors, while the average number of drivers in Mr. Pearson's time was 30.5. But if bigger fields prevent drivers from reaching the top 5, someone forgot to tell Mr. Gordon. He mopped up the competition from 1995-98 when the average race had 41.7 contestants. He managed top-5 finishes 67.7% of the time and won 31.5% of his events, a better frequency than every driver in this sample.Gmail, Windows Live Hotmail and Yahoo Mail Comparison
Have you ever asked yourself how you did end up with the email account that you are currently using? Chance is that you have at least one account at one of the three most popular web based email service providers Gmail, Yahoo Mail or Windows Live Hotmail.
This question might have become insignificant in recent years as all three email providers have started to follow suite if one of them raised a limit or introduced a new service. But not everything is equal and some email users might be surprised if they take a look at the differences between these email providers. Did you for instance know that a free Yahoo Mail account expires after four months of inactivity but is the only one to offer free unlimited storage space?Gmail on the other hand is the only email service that is not expiring the account after a certain time of inactivity. It is on the other hand the email service that is offering the least amount of free storage space if you take Microsoft by the word that they increase the Windows Live Hotmail storage space automatically if the limit of 5000 Megabytes is reached. Back to the original question: Which email provider are you using primarily and why?
