Miss Singapore - Valentane Huang

'IT'S kind of a shallow reason,' said Valentane Huang when asked why she joined beauty pageants.

It was - you guessed it - because of a boyfriend.

This one used to boast about dating models, pageant winners, actresses and Valentane said she was the only one who wasn't 'famous' in this area.

One day, as a joke, she told him maybe she might win a pageant someday too.

'So go ahead and prove it to me,' she recalled him saying.

So she went and took part in Miss Singapore Chinatown last November and got into the final five.

The 1.7m-tall Valentane, who has modelled part-time since she was 14, decided to join the bigger Miss Singapore World in March.

Miss Singapore Chinatown didn't give her a great sense of accomplishment as it was only competing among the Chinese, she said, while Miss Singapore World is multiracial.

What does her father think of her participation?

'Not encouraging but not discouraging either,' she said.

She didn't even tell him - or colleagues, friends and other family members - that she was taking part.

He got wind of it only when Lianhe Wanbao ran a story on her and he only brought it up briefly, she said.

She recalled how, during the preview shows, the parents and friends of other contestants would shout their support, but when she went on stage it was very quiet.

The Miss Singapore World 2008 grand final will take place at the Raffles Ballroom, Swissotel TheStamford, at 7pm on 16 Aug.

The Grand Final of Miss Singapore 2008
16th August 2008, Saturday at the Swisshotel - The Stamford,
Raffles Ballroom - 7.00 pm

One dream - to be Miss Singapore World 2008.
The Contestants winner goes to Miss World 2008.

Miss World 2008, the 58th Miss World beauty pageant, will be held on October 4, 2008, at the Ukraina National Palace in Kiev, Ukraine.

Meet 25 Beautiful ladies :

01 Fiona Teo Age: 20 Occupation: Student
02 Sydney Ho Age: 19 Occupation: Undergraduate
03 Cherlyn Loke Age: 20 Occupation: Undergraduate

04 Hannah Lau Age: 19 Occupation: Account Manager
05 Samantha Toh Age: 20 Occupation: Property Executive
06 Helena Age: 18 Occupation: Undergraduate

07 Fiona Cheong Age: 24 Occupation: Public Relations Specialist
08 Ernany Siregar J. Age: 22 Occupation: Nurse
09 Sherry Peng Age: 19 Occupation: Makeup Artist

10 Chloe Fong Age: 20 Occupation: Undergraduate
11 Preeti Sawlani Age: 22 Occupation: Undergraduate
12 Valentane Huang Age: 25 Occupation: Logistics Manager

13 Andrea Lim Age: 22 Occupation: Undergraduate
14 Adeline Quek Age: 23 Occupation: Graduate
15 Dione Chan Age: 23 Occupation: Product Specialist

16 Charlyene Choo Age: 22 Occupation: Undergraduate
17 Veriza Yew Age: 26 Occupation: Associate
18 Phoebe Tan Age: 20 Occupation: Graduate

19 Joyz Goh Age: 25 Occupation: Money Broker
20 Sherlyn Tan Age: 19 Occupation: Undergraduate
21 Catherine Tan Age: 24 Occupation: Personal Banker

22 Faraliza Tan Age: 21 Occupation: Undergraduate
23 Katie Kang Age: 19 Occupation: Undergraduate
24 Sharifah Shazana Age: 19 Occupation: Guest Service Agent

25 Nicole Ang Yu Jun Age: 20 Occupation: Undergraduate

Unabomber Manifesto - Oklahoma City Bombing

The Bombing

On April 19, 1995, around 9:03 a.m., just after parents dropped their children off at day care at the Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City, the unthinkable happened.

A massive bomb inside a rental truck exploded, blowing half of the nine-story building into oblivion.

A stunned nation watched as the bodies of men, women, and children were pulled from the rubble for nearly two weeks. When the smoke cleared and the exhausted rescue workers packed up and left, 168 people were dead in the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

Just 90 minutes after the explosion, an Oklahoma Highway Patrol officer pulled over 27-year-old Timothy McVeigh for driving without a license plate.

Shortly before he was to be released on April 21, McVeigh was recognized as a bombing suspect and was charged with the bombing.

When McVeigh's ex-Army buddy, Terry Nichols, discovered that he, too, was wanted for questioning, he voluntarily surrendered to police in Herington, Kansas, and was later charged in the bombing.

McVeigh and Nichols are awaiting trial in Denver, Colorado, and could receive the death penalty if convicted of terrorism, murder, and conspiracy charges.

Quicktime Movies

• Overview (1.2M)
• Damage to the Murrah building (608K)
• Rescuing the injured (640K)
• Implosion of the Murrah building (416K)

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Terror in the Heartland

• The worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil - Dec. 30, 1995
• Terror in the Heartland - May 5, 1996

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The Victims

• Dwindling hope: identifying the bodies - April 25, 1995
• Julie Welch will never see her future - April 27, 1995

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The Survivors

• A small victim goes home - July 26, 1995
• OKC Survivor believes she got a second chance - Aug. 5, 1995
• Book commemorates OKC bombing - Aug. 11, 1995
• Surgery offers hope to mother - Aug. 23, 1996
• Man who snapped tragic photo fired - Sept. 13, 1995
• Youngest victim of Oklahoma bombing - Nov. 22, 1995

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The Rescue

• The limits of hope in Oklahoma City - April 23, 1995
• Search stress also hard on dogs - Apr. 28, 1995
• OKC rescue winds down - May 2, 1995
• Search for bombing survivors ends - May 5, 1995
• Firefighter details experiences in book - June 26, 1995

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Recovery

• Time to heal - May 4, 1995
• Murrah building to be imploded - May 9, 1995
• Bringing down the Murrah Federal Building - May 16, 1995
• Federal Building Demolition - May 23, 1995
• Bombing survivors start healing - June 30, 1995
• Healing ceremony on July 4th - July 4, 1995
• Federal building workers return to work - Aug. 10, 1995
• Bombing still vivid in memories - October 19, 1995

Source - CNN

Cuil looks kewl

When you've got Google, who needs another search engine, right? That didn't stop the folks over at Cuil (pronounced COOL) who claim to provide a new approach to search which combines the biggest Web index with content-based relevance methods, results organized by ideas, and complete user privacy.

Ex-Google engineers debut 'Cuil' way to search

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Anna Patterson's last Internet search engine was so impressive that industry leader Google Inc. bought the technology in 2004 to upgrade its own system.

She believes her latest invention is even more valuable — only this time it's not for sale.

Patterson instead intends to upstage Google, which she quit in 2006 to develop a more comprehensive and efficient way to scour the Internet.

The end result is Cuil, pronounced "cool." Backed by $33 million in venture capital, the search engine plans to begin processing requests for the first time Monday.

Cuil had kept a low profile while Patterson, her husband, Tom Costello, and two other former Google engineers — Russell Power and Louis Monier — searched for better ways to search.

Now, it's boasting time.

For starters, Cuil's search index spans 120 billion Web pages.

Patterson believes that's at least three times the size of Google's index, although there is no way to know for certain. Google stopped publicly quantifying its index's breadth nearly three years ago when the catalog spanned 8.2 billion Web pages.

Cuil won't divulge the formula it has developed to cover a wider swath of the Web with far fewer computers than Google. And Google isn't ceding the point: Spokeswoman Katie Watson said her company still believes its index is the largest.

After getting inquiries about Cuil, Google asserted on its blog Friday that it regularly scans through 1 trillion unique Web links. But Google said it doesn't index them all because they either point to similar content or would diminish the quality of its search results in some other way. The posting didn't quantify the size of Google's index.

A search index's scope is important because information, pictures and content can't be found unless they're stored in a database. But Cuil believes it will outshine Google in several other ways, including its method for identifying and displaying pertinent results.

Rather than trying to mimic Google's method of ranking the quantity and quality of links to Web sites, Patterson says Cuil's technology drills into the actual content of a page. And Cuil's results will be presented in a more magazine-like format instead of just a vertical stack of Web links. Cuil's results are displayed with more photos spread horizontally across the page and include sidebars that can be clicked on to learn more about topics related to the original search request.

Finally, Cuil is hoping to attract traffic by promising not to retain information about its users' search histories or surfing patterns — something that Google does, much to the consternation of privacy watchdogs.

Cuil is just the latest in a long line of Google challengers.

The list includes swaggering startups like Teoma (whose technology became the backbone of Ask.com), Vivisimo, Snap, Mahalo and, most recently, Powerset, which was acquired by Microsoft Corp. this month.

Even after investing hundreds of millions of dollars on search, both Microsoft and Yahoo Inc. have been losing ground to Google. Through May, Google held a 62 percent share of the U.S. search market followed by Yahoo at 21 percent and Microsoft at 8.5 percent, according to comScore Inc.

Google has become so synonymous with Internet search that it may no longer matter how good Cuil or any other challenger is, said Gartner Inc. analyst Allen Weiner.

"Search has become as much about branding as anything else," Weiner said. "I doubt (Cuil) will be keeping anyone at Google awake at night."

Google welcomed Cuil to the fray with its usual mantra about its rivals. "Having great competitors is a huge benefit to us and everyone in the search space," Watson said. "It makes us all work harder, and at the end of the day our users benefit from that."

But this will be the first time that Google has battled a general-purpose search engine created by its own alumni. It probably won't be the last time, given that Google now has nearly 20,000 employees.

Patterson joined Google in 2004 after she built and sold Recall, a search index that probed old Web sites for the Internet Archive. She and Power worked on the same team at Google.

Although he also worked for Google for a short time, Monier is best known as the former chief technology officer of AltaVista, which was considered the best search engine before Google came along in 1998. Monier also helped build the search engine on eBay's online auction site.

The trio of former Googlers are teaming up with Patterson's husband, Costello, who built a once-promising search engine called Xift in the late 1990s. He later joined IBM Corp., where he worked on an "analytic engine" called WebFountain.

Costello's Irish heritage inspired Cuil's odd name. It was derived from a character named Finn McCuill in Celtic folklore.

Patterson enjoyed her time at Google, but became disenchanted with the company's approach to search. "Google has looked pretty much the same for 10 years now," she said, "and I can guarantee it will look the same a year from now."

Cuil search engine takes on Google

A new search engine dubbed Cuil is hoping to offer a rival to the likes of Google, Yahoo and Ask.

Cuil is pronounced 'cool' and comes from an old Irish word meaning 'knowledge'.

The site has indexed 120 billion web pages, which it claims is three times more than any other search engine, and results are organised by ideas rather than just rankings. Cuil also boasts complete user privacy.

The new search engine will attempt to analyse the context of each page and the concepts behind each query, thereby grouping similar results together and sorting them by category.

These groups are divided by tabs which aim to clarify subjects, offer images to identify topics and search refining suggestions.

"The web continues to grow at a fantastic rate and other search engines are unable to keep up with it," said Tom Costello, chief executive and co-founder of Cuil.

"Cuil presents searchers with content-based results, not just popular ones, providing different and more insightful answers that illustrate the vastness and the variety of the web."

However, it seems that the new site has been more popular than its makers had anticipated, as the servers seem to have buckled under the strain.

Many users trying to access the site are seeing an error message which reads: "We'll be back soon ..."

"Due to overwhelming interest, our Cuil servers are running a bit hot right now. The search engine is momentarily unavailable as we add more capacity. Thanks for your patience," the notice says.