World’s highest ad at Burj Khalifa breaks Guinness Record
Dubai: An advertisement at the height of 452 metres at the world’s tallest building Burj Khalifa here has broken the Guinness World Record, held in the US.
Sheikh Mansour bin Rashid Al Maktoum of Dubai World Hospitality Championship received the Guinness World Records certificate on the sidelines of the second edition of DWHC which concluded on Saturday at the Dubai World Trade Centre.
The previous highest advertising was recorded in the US at the height of 310 metres.
Omar Amin, member of DWHC Organising Committee, said the unique advert was aimed to promote DWHC from the top of Burj Khalifa as the world’s tallest tower attracts almost 150,000 visitors from across the world every month.
“Since Dubai attracts tourists from all over the world, DWHC is designed to offer an ideal platform to introduce the world Emirati cooking and hospitality with focus on the traditional popular dishes that the UAE has been long known for,” Amin said, adding that the second edition of DWHC managed to attract over 25,000 visitors.
Amin said DWHC had received three Guinness World Records in its first edition last year for making the world’s largest Aseeda – a dish made of a cooked wheat flour – at a weight of 2.8 tonnes, and largest pickled vegetables weighing 1.5 tonnes which took 19 men to make it in 166 hours using 1,520 litres of vinegar blended with herbs and 1579 kilos of vegetables.
The third Guinness entry was the creation of the world’s largest chocolate truffle mosaic that displayed Dubai’s logo for Expo 2020, using 4,000 pieces of chocolate over a 400 square metre area. (PTI)
Ivy League University offers ‘wasting time on internet’ course
Washington: A prestigious Ivy League University is offering a new course on ‘wasting time on the Internet’ which requires students to stare at a screen for hours and only interact via chat rooms and social media. The Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania is offering the course titled “Wasting time on the Internet” for the spring 2015 semester.
According to the course description on the university’s website, “we spend our lives in front of screens, mostly wasting time: checking social media, watching cat videos, chatting, and shopping. What if these activities – clicking, SMSing, status-updating, and random surfing – were used as raw material for creating compelling and emotional works of literature?” “Could we reconstruct our autobiography using only Facebook? Could we write a great novella by plundering our Twitter feed? Could we reframe the internet as the greatest poem ever written? “Using our laptops and a wifi connection as our only materials, this class will focus on the alchemical recuperation of aimless surfing into substantial works of literature,” the description said.
Students will be required to attend a weekly three hour seminar where they stare at the screen for three hours, only interacting through chat rooms, bots, social media and listservs.
The students will also explore the long history of the recuperation of boredom and time-wasting through critical texts by thinkers such as John Cage, Betty Friedan and Guy Debord. Distraction, multi-tasking, and aimless drifting is mandatory, the course description added. (PTI)