When calling a phone number in another country, there is usually a prefix you have to dial to indicate that you're placing an international call; this varies by country.  After that prefix, you must dial the international country code for the country you are calling, followed by the local number.  There are 9 calling zones:

1 - North America and several Caribbean countries

2 - Africa and some others like Greenland, Aruba

3 - Europe

4 - Europe

5 - South America

6 - Southeast Asia and Oceania

7 - Russia and parts of the former Soviet Union, like Kazakhstan

8 - East Asia and some services like Inmarsat

9 - Central Asia, South Asia and West Asia

Note:  The United States, Canada, and several Caribbean nations share the international calling code 1, with each US state (or parts of US states), province, territory, or island nation given its own three-digit "area code".  Find all country calling codes at http://wikitravel.org/en/List_of_country_calling_codes

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg  "May you never be without books in the new year."

bildungsroman  (BIL-doongz-roh-mahn, -doongks-)  noun  A novel concerned with the maturing of someone from childhood to adulthood.  Example:  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.  From German, from Bildung (education, formation) + Roman (novel), from French roman (novel).  Earliest documented use:  1910.

locus classicus  (LO-kuhs KLAS-i-kuhs)  noun  An authoritative and often quoted passage from a book.  From Latin locus (place) + classicus (classical, belonging to the first or highest class).  Earliest documented use:  1853.  

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From:  Jeff Goodman   Subject:  bildungsroman

This word was one I heard often growing up, and my brother and I painted it in DayGlo on the wall of our basement.  Our mother was a literature professor and wrote frequently about the male-female double Bildungsroman (Jean Stafford’s The Mountain Lion and Willa Cather’s My Antonia).

People are nourished by other people.  The importance of social networks in health and longevity has been confirmed again by study of a close-knit Italian-American community in Roseto, Pennsylvania.  Study of the "Roseto Effect" began with a chance conversation over a couple of beers.  A local physician happened to mention to the head of medicine at the University of Oklahoma that heart disease seemed much less prevalent in Roseto than in adjoining Bangor, occupied by non-Italians.  When first studied in 1966, Roseto's cardiac mortality traced a unique graph.  Nationally, the rate rises with age.  In Roseto, it dropped to near zero for men aged 55-64.  For men over 65, the local death rate was half the national average.  The study quickly went beyond death certificates, to poke, prod, and extensively interview the Rosetans.  Instead of helping to solve the puzzle, all the data simply ruled out any genetic or other physical sources of the Rosetan's resistance to heart disease.  Two statistics about Roseto were eye-catching:  Both the crime rate and the applications for public assistance were zero.  Subsequent study showed that all of the houses contained three generations of the family.  Rosetans took care of their own.  Instead of putting the elderly "on the shelf," they were elevated "to the Supreme Court."  The scientists were led to conclude that the Roseto Effect was caused by something that could not be seen through the microscope, something beyond the usual focus of medical researchers.  It seemed that those groaning dinner tables offered nourishment for the human spirit as well as the body.  In fact, all of the communal rituals--the evening stroll, the many social clubs, the church festivals that were occasions for the whole community to celebrate--contributed to the villagers' good health.  In "The Power of Clan," an updated report on studies by Stewart Wolf, a physician, and John Bruhn, a sociologist, cover a broad period of time from 1935 to 1984.  They found that mutual respect and cooperation contribute to the health and welfare of a community and its inhabitants, and that self indulgence and lack of concern for others exert opposite influences.  http://www.uic.edu/classes/osci/osci590/14_2%20The%20Roseto%20Effect.htm

Dec. 30, 2014  Google’s Philosopher by Robert Herritt   One day this past September, Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, sat down with a group of experts in Madrid to begin publicly discussing how Google should respond to a recent, perplexing ruling by the European Union’s Court of Justice.  In May, the court had declared that, in accordance with the European “right to be forgotten,” individuals within the E.U. should be able to prohibit Google and other search firms from linking to personal information that is “inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant, or excessive.”  The Spanish authorities ruled that the search link should be deleted.  In May 2014, the European Court of Justice upheld the Spanish complaint against Google.  Since then, Google has received more than 140,000 de-linking requests.  Handling these requests in a way that respects both the court and the company’s other commitments requires Google to confront an array of thorny questions.  When, for instance, does the public’s right to information trump the personal right to privacy?  Should media outlets be consulted in decisions over the de-indexing of news links?  When is it in the public interest to deny right-to- be-forgotten requests?  The company is required by law to comply with the judgment, so it quickly assembled a panel of experts to help chart a path forward, starting with the meeting in Madrid.  Sharing the stage with Schmidt were the sorts of tech-industry insiders, legal scholars, human rights advocates, and media leaders that one might expect Google to call on, among them Wikipedia’s Wales; Le Monde’s editorial director, Sylvie Kauffman; and Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond.  But there was one advisor who stood out:  an Oxford professor, trained in metaphysics, epistemology, and logic, named Luciano Floridi.  To build its court of philosopher kings, Google needed a philosopher.  Handling these requests in a way that respects both the court and the company’s other commitments requires Google to confront an array of thorny questions.  When, for instance, does the public’s right to information trump the personal right to privacy?  Should media outlets be consulted in decisions over the de-indexing of news links?  When is it in the public interest to deny right-to- be-forgotten requests?  Here’s where the dapper Italian philosopher comes in.  Floridi is a professor of philosophy and the ethics of information, and he is the director of research at the Oxford Internet Institute.  For more than a decade, he has distanced himself from the sort of conventional Anglo-American philosophy that occupied him for much of his early career.  Driven by the idea that, as he put it to me, “philosophy should talk seamlessly to its time,” he has set about developing a new approach to his discipline that he calls the philosophy of information.  Floridi has described PI, as it is known, as his attempt to provide “a satisfactory way of dealing with the new ethical challenges posed by information and communication technologies.”  Read much more at  http://www.psmag.com/navigation/nature-and-technology/googles-philosopher-technology-nature-identity-court-legal-policy-95456/

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1245  January 19, 2015  On this date in 1883, the first electric lighting system employing overhead wires, built by Thomas Edison, began service in Roselle, New Jersey.  On this date in 1893 Henrik Ibsen's play The Master Builder received its premiere performance in Berlin.