Because “Torchwood: Miracle Day” (11 p.m. MDT Friday, July 
is pretty much a reboot (with the same, small, three-person central cast and a lot of new characters), it does not rely on viewers having seen previous seasons, including the most recent, critically acclaimed “Torchwood: Children of Earth,” which aired in 2009.
New viewers may be confused by some references (Ianto is a former “Torchwood” team member), but “Miracle Day” takes great pains to welcome newcomers.
All you really need to know is explained in the new season’s first hour: Capt. Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) is the immortal leader of the Torchwood Institute, established by the British royal family in 1879 to investigate the unusual, strange and alien and to protect the realm. the group’s headquarters have been blown up, Capt. Jack went somewhere far away and the only other surviving team member, Gwen Cooper (Eve Myles), has exiled herself to a house on the coast of Wales where she lives with her husband, Rhys (Kai Owen), and their baby.
The Torchwood team reluctantly reunites following a world-altering event: Miracle Day. Suddenly, no one on the planet dies. Even those whose bodies have been ripped limb-from-limb continue to have life. the first hour pounds away at this premise to the point that some viewers might want to shout at the TV, “Yes, we get it, no one’s dying!”
The plot pace picks up in episodes two and three, the only other hours immediately available for review. These episodes feel more like past seasons of “Torchwood” with a cheekiness surrounding the action sequences (in hour one, there are a lot of things that go boom but not much of a sense of humor).
Eventually, Jack and Gwen team up with CIA agents Rex Matheson (Mekhi Phifer, “Lie to Me”), an unlikable jerk, and Esther Drummond (newcomer Alexa Havins), to investigate the Miracle Day phenomenon, which may involve their CIA boss (Wayne Knight, who played Newman on “Seinfeld”) and his toady (Dichen Lachman, “Dollhouse”).
Executive producer Russell T. Davies, who wrote the first hour of the new season, tries to weave the miracle into the new team’s midst through Rex, who is gravely injured in a traffic accident that, on any other day, would have killed him.
I bought an air ticket online from a travel agent and they will be sending me the paper ticket. If my paper ticket gets lost in the mail, will I be able to check in with my flight booking reference number?
No, you cannot. The agent at check-in cannot process you without receiving the flight coupon from you. Your money is sitting on the paper ticket.
If this place is mailing it to you by post, then it must really be a paper ticket. why paper ticket? is this a reputable online agent? If you already have the ticket number, check with the airline to make sure the ticket they're sending you is good.
You should be able to as they will have you listed by your name and reference number. Make sure you have passport however. most online bookings don't send paper tickets. Copy the reference number down carefully and keep it in a safe place with your passport. I know this sounds obvious, but when it comes to last minute preparations for long trips you would be surprised how one forgets things. Print out your online reservation confirmation. have a good time.
No, you will need the paper ticket. If you don't get it 2 days before your flight, call them and they will re-issue it either by mail or have you pick it up at the airport.
EDIT: in response to the others who are telling you to use a better agent next time and get an e-ticket….it has nothing to do with the travel agent, it is the airline that issues an electronic or paper ticket. not all airlines use e-tickets.
Nope. Your paper ticket is proof that you paid. like Kiara said, you can buy a ticket at the counter then get that money refunded (the higher priced ticket you buy at the counter is the one that gets refunded I believe) once you get the original paper ticket. Next time go through a place that issues electronic tickets, its just so much easier.
Go on the website where you bought your ticket from and put in your reference number and it will bring up your details and an opportunity to resend the paperwork to your email address for you to print off again.
As a rule no if the airline have issued a paper ticket it is because they dont have etickets on that route. Iwould contact the airline and explain the situation and they will advise on what you can do. they may issue you another ticket which you pick up at the airport. You can always call the agent you booked with and they should sort this for you.
depends on the airline so ask them
As an academic, I live in an information universe populated in large part by PDFs—PDFs of journal articles, PDFs of book chapters, PDFs of entire books, and so on. Journals tend to create digital versions of their own articles, but even as eBooks take over the world, academics are a bit slow to take them up, largely because every college campus has a tremendous library of dead-tree books that we can pore through for free—that and the fact that citing a page number from an eBook has until recently been a remarkable headache.
More and more, though, it’s not the books themselves we’re using, but scans of articles and chapters from them. Scans make it possible to keep only the parts of a large book or anthology you’re interested in and they facilitate easy sharing of readings between colleagues and students. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, reference and citation management has become increasingly digital. EndNote once ruled the market, but has recently seen competition from a growing roster of programs and services, including Zotero, Sente, Mendeley, Papers, RefWorks, Bookends, CiteULike, and more. rather than keeping shelves upon shelves of printed books and articles that turn our offices into cramped fire hazards, we now ideally keep a digital copy of the manuscripts we want right in our citation management software, making it easier than ever to locate and search the content of our libraries.
But in this increasingly paperless ecosystem, nothing sucks worse than a badly scanned PDF. by badly scanned, I mean one that fits any of these descriptions:
(1) Is low resolution, dark, or otherwise difficult to read.
(2) Contains indecipherable photos and figures.
(3) Contains pages that are crooked, upside down, or otherwise oriented incorrectly.
(4) Is cropped poorly, such that text is running off the page, or conversely is too small for the page resulting in enormous dark margins.
(5) has missing bibliographic information, footnotes and/or no reference list.
Why this Matters
Many of these things may not seem to matter at the moment the person scans the document, especially when it’s for personal use—they know what book it’s from, they don’t care about the photos, they don’t need the references, they have the book sitting on their desk when they need the bibliographic information, they don’t plan on printing more than one copy, and so on. But those things can change quickly. Some examples…
(1) One day, you change computers, or perhaps migrate from broken reference management software, only to find that all your citations are incomplete or missing in the new system. you have the PDFs, but none include the reference information you need.
(2) you turn a book back in to the library and in a year or two forget where the hell the resulting PDF came from. you rectify this after a half hour of Googling, but then realize that you’re still not sure which edition of the book you’re referencing.
(3) you distribute the PDF to a class and get 40 complaints from students who can’t read the illegible text, whose inkjet cartridges expired printing those enormous black margins, or who paid twice what they would have to print it at the library, had the pages been scaled to fit two to a side. later you get their term papers, and none of them have cited the article correctly, because they didn’t go out of their way to track down the missing bibliographic information.
(4) you change schools and find that your new library doesn’t have the book with the chapter you want; your only copy is the PDF that’s missing the footnotes and references, which now seem much more important in your new job.
(5) you recall a photo or figure from the text that you want to include in a presentation slide, only to find that it looks like a dark blob.
And of course, receiving a bad PDF from someone else and inheriting these sorts of problems is even more annoying. Few things are more annoying than to receive a PDF of a really useful article, only to realize you’re not sure how to cite it. Many PDFs in my library are scans passed down from a decade ago, which my professors probably received from their own mentors. So keep in mind that scanning sins will be visited on future generations.
With that in mind, as a public service, I’m going to lay out in this post how to scan a PDF that won’t make future recipients curse you. The instructions may sound in-depth, but in practice they won’t take you much extra time at all. It’s primarily a matter of considering what’s important as you go about the various things you’d do anyway in scanning a book.
What to Scan
Every book chapter scan should include five things:
(1) The title page, which includes the full title of the book, the author, and the publisher information.
(2) The copyright page, which includes the year, edition, and the ISBN number. The ISBN may not seem like a big deal, but it’s fast becoming the most reliable way of importing accurate reference information into citation management software. try Zotero’s “magic wand,” for instance and compare the quality of the metadata you get by pasting in the ISBN to what’s auto-imported from Google Books or Amazon. The ISBN invariably produces a more complete and accurate reference. for this reason, the ISBN—like the DOI for journal articles—is likely to become a widely adopted standard for importing and accessing metadata.
(3) The article (duh.)
(4) any references, even if you have to look to the back of the volume for them.
(5) any footnotes or endnotes for the chapter, again, even if you have to look to the back of the volume. I can’t count the number of times that references and footnotes came in handy months or years later when I revisted a topic in more depth.
If a student or colleague doesn’t want to print a reference list or title page, they can easily omit these from their printout. But when the person does want them, she’ll be annoyed to find they’re not there.
If you risk the moral condescension of librarians or the wrath of the publishing industry and scan a full book, you should also include the table of contents and the index—there are plenty of skimming techniques that rely on these. Some future grad student who ends up with a copy will thank you.
A side note for book editors: Combined reference lists for anthologies are a real pain nowadays—if I want to make sure I have the references for a ten page chapter, I have to scan 30 pages of bibliography, since the references for the whole book are lumped together.
Measuring Your Original
The first thing to do before scanning is to measure the actual dimensions of your open book. In what follows, I assume that you’ll be scaling two facing book pages to fit on a single PDF page, but you can adjust as necessary if you want to do otherwise.
Some copier-scanners have a ruler, or at least a few measurement marks, running along the edge of the platen glass. If not every inch is marked, I generally guesstimate, round up a half inch or so to be safe, and use that as my measurement. If there aren’t any good measurement marks on the scanner, oftentimes there’s a paper cutter hanging around nearby with a ruler on it (just remember paper cutter rulers don’t always start from zero).
Since, an adequate scan will generally include pages from the beginning (title and copyright), middle (chapter), and end (bibliography and endnotes) of your book, note that the way volumes are bound will often cause the the length of the open book, as measured across facing pages, to change as you go from the from the first to the last pages of the book. to compensate for this, take three length measurements from the beginning, middle, and end of the book and use the longest one. This way nothing will get cropped unexpectedly as you make your way through the book.
Setting Dimensions on the Scanner
Now that you have your book dimensions, you’ll need to configure the scanner. Today, an increasing number of copy machines have PDF scanning functionality, which makes quickly scanning full book chapters easier than ever. Unfortunately, these scanners don’t always have sane defaults, so it’s important to be a bit careful about entering your scan dimensions and other settings.
Some scanner-copiers will offer to auto-detect the dimensions of your original. Generally, you’ll want to avoid this, as auto-detection can be unreliable, leaving you with badly cropped pages and a PDF with pages of all different dimensions. Instead, you’ll want to enter some concrete scan dimensions into the machine. in doing so, know there are three kinds of scanner-copiers:
(1) Contemporary. Some copiers will let you enter the actual dimensions of the book. this is terrific, and hopefully straightforward.
(2) Nostalgic. Despite the fact that PDFs can be any size, some copier-scanners force you to treat scanning as though you were making an 8.5″ X 11″ copy, thus forcing you to scale any book you’re scanning to fit an 8.5″ X 11″ page. to do this, you’ll probably need to set the copier to landscape mode, since most books will only fit on the platen-glass lengthwise. then do two quick calculations. First, divide 8.5 by the measurement in inches of the short edge of your book and note the resulting number. then divide 11 by the measurement in inches of the long edge of your book and note the resulting number. take whichever resulting number is smaller, multiply it by 100, and you’ve found the zoom setting that will best fit your book onto an 8.5″ X 11″ page, keeping text from running off the edges and black margins to a minimum. for example, if you end up with 85, set the zoom to 85%. Some copiers ask for a “lens” setting, rather than a zoom setting, which is the same number, but as a decimal rather than a percentage. So, in the example, rather than multiplying by 100 to get 85, you’d just enter 0.85. this calculation also works for books that are smaller than 8.5″ X 11″. in such cases you’ll end up with a zoom setting greater than 100%, or a lens setting greater than 1, which will scale the book up to fill the “page,” reducing the black margins. to simplify this process, I created an online calculator that will do all this math for you.
(3) Platonic realists. this is the most annoying type of scanner-copier. It’s programmed to believe that all originals come in standard sizes, and will only allow you to choose from a menu of preset options, like 8.5″ X 11″, 11″ X 17″, A-series, B-series, etc. The problem is that many books don’t come in handy sizes like these. The solution is to pick a preset size that’s larger than your book, and then set the zoom to scale the book up to those dimensions. to do this, after you’ve selected a workable page size, set the zoom using the instructions for a nostalgic scanner-copier above, but substitute the dimensions of the page size you’ve chosen for 8.5 and 11 when you do the long division. Wikipedia has a handy list of dimensions for just about any standard paper size.
Lastly, if you’re stuck with a separate copier and scanner, you can either scan the book directly, or Xerox the book using the directions for a nostalgic copier, then feed the resulting pages into the scanner.
Resolution and Mode
If you have a choice of resolution, set it to 300 dpi or higher.
As for mode, if your scan contains only text and black-and-white figures—no images or figures with grays, color, or gradients—set the mode to black and white, or “bitmap” (which is the same thing by a different name). If you have images or shaded figures, set the scan mode to grayscale. A single PDF can contain both types of pages, and many scanner-copiers will let you switch between grayscale and bitmap mode while scanning. Keep in mind, the more you can scan in black and white, the smaller your file size will be, which is always nice. Pages with nothing but text also tend to be more legible when scanned in black and white. If you can’t switch between modes and have only a few pages requiring grayscale scans, you might consider scanning these pages separately and using a computer to combine them later with a black and white scan of the rest of your text.
That’s all you need to know to make your scan. Lastly, a few tips for optimizing the PDF. I use Acrobat and give instructions for that software, but there should be similar options in other PDF-editing applications.
Reducing the File Size
Many, if not most, scanner-copiers make PDFs without much compression. that makes the files backward compatible with software from the 1990s, but it also results in huge files. And since PDF reading software is free, most people keep it up to date anyhow. So you’ll probably want to take the file size down to something reasonable. to do this, open your new PDF in Acrobat, go to the “Document” menu, and select “Reduce File Size.” Acrobat will ask you which version of the software you want your PDF to be compatible with. Select the latest available version, clock “Okay,” and then re-save the file when prompted. this will often reduce the size of the PDF dramatically.
Deleting Duplicate Pages
Sometimes when I’m scanning, I know I’ve messed up a page—perhaps I’ve scanned it in the wrong mode, or placed it crookedly on the platen glass. when something like that happens, I simply scan the page twice, knowing that I can delete the unwanted duplicate page later in Acrobat. to do this, open the PDF in Acrobat and find the page or pages you want to eliminate. then select Document > Delete Pages and enter the page numbers you want gone. Once you’ve done this, resave the file.
Combining Multiple Files
Sometimes I forget to scan something, or I’ve realized after my initial scan that I need to rescan a couple pages. Afterward, I’ve scanned these, I need to add them into the original PDF. to do this, go to Acrobat and select File > Create PDF > From Multiple Files. this menu option is located a bit differently in different versions of Acrobat, but you should find an option that looks similar if you hunt for it a bit. when you’ve found it, use the “Add Files” button to add the files you want to combine to a list. Order them using the “Move Up” and “Move Down” buttons. then select them and use the “choose Pages” button to select the pages you want to include from each file. you may need to add a page to the list twice. for example, if I want to add a PDF of a missing page to the middle of a scanned chapter (“Tunstall 2001″), I might have to create a list that looks like this:
Once you’ve arranged your list, click “Next,” select “Merge Files into a Single PDF”, and finally click “Create.” a new PDF file will be created and you’ll be asked to save it. Lastly, merging files in this manner creates bookmarks in the resulting PDF showing where each part of the file was stitched from. If these are useful, keep them, but if you’d like to eliminate them, go to View > Navigation Panels > Bookmarks. The bookmarks sidebar will open. Select all the bookmarks in it and hit the delete key to get rid of them. then re-save the file.
OCR
It’s often nice to OCR a document after you’ve scanned it. this will make it searchable, and will also allow you to cut and paste from it. to OCR a document in Acrobat, go to Document > OCR Text Recognition > Recognize Text Using OCR. you can then choose the pages you want OCR’d or do the whole thing. Remember to save the file when you’re done.
