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Never was so much pathos embodied in a punctuation mark.
The jaunty exclamation point at the end of the amusement park's name has one connotation when "Swamplandia!" opens. By the midway point, it becomes an uncomfortable reminder of what has happened to the Florida alligator wrestling venue where the novel is set, and by the end, well, let's just say you can hardly see it without cringing.
Karen Russell's novel — one of three nominees all snubbed for this year's Pulitzer Prize in fiction — sparkles with vivid imagery and bubbles with creative language. The rhythm of the words themselves evokes the mucky island setting where Ava Bigtree and her family run a down-on-its-luck tourist destination that features alligators all named "Seth."
Ava is a 13-year-old who is learning to wrestle alligators with her mother, the star of the family show, when a sudden cancer diagnosis leaves the family in desperate straits. Ava's sister Osceola may or may not be losing her mind, and her brother Kiwi gives up on their delusional father and leaves the island for the mainland, which the family has always belittled and feared.
What follows is a narrative that alternates between Ava — who ventures out into the bewildering Ten Thousand Islands with the mysterious Bird Man to find her sister — and Kiwi, who is trying to help the family by working for the park's competitor, The World of Darkness.
The language bristles with a newness that makes Russell a writer to follow, as when she writes about the tourists who come to Swamplandia! after Ava's mother, the star performer, has died.
"I came to hate the complainers, with their dry and crumbly lipsticks and their wrinkled rage and their stupid, flaccid, old-people sun hats with brims the breadth of Saturn's rings."
Occasionally, Russell uses words in such unconventional ways that the meaning gets a bit lost, but she redeems herself by pulling the reader into Ava's harrowing adventure. It's one of those stories in which the reader can see the inevitable crisis coming while the main character talks herself into continuing down a dangerous path.
If you read only one book this summer that doesn't have fifty shades of a certain color or shades of beachiness that make it an easy read, let it be "Swamplandia!" You may find yourself scratching imaginary mosquitoes and wishing you could shower off the swamp mud, but you'll also feel like you accomplished something. | <urn:uuid:8a4dd714-393c-4c86-8fec-8bc44ec6a48b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bethel.patch.com/groups/opinion/p/a-summer-challenge-read-the-wildly-inventive-swamplan2d8bf2b6e4 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961085 | 537 | 1.609375 | 2 |
On 28 February 2013 the Court of Appeal delivered judgment in Waterson v Lloyd EWCA Civ 136. The decision grapples, once again, with the elusive distinction between fact and comment in the law of defamation. By a majority, the Court of Appeal held that publications by a political candidate criticizing his opponent’s ‘scandalous’ parliamentary expenses claims were statements of comment, rather than statements of fact.
The case illustrates the difficulty of distinguishing between fact and comment in libel actions. Of the four judges who considered the issue, two thought the challenged words were statements of fact (Tugendhat J and Richards LJ) while two thought they were statements of comment (McCombe and Laws LJJ).
Although the decision provides little fresh guidance on this thorny issue, Laws LJ’s judgment contains an interesting discussion about the relevance of context – in particular the fact the articles were political speech published during an election – to the honest comment defence. It also reflects the growing influence of Strasbourg jurisprudence on English defamation law.
The claimant was the former Conservative MP for Eastbourne. In the run up to the 2010 General Election, the claimant’s Liberal Democrat rival, Stephen Lloyd, published two pieces of campaign literature that criticized the claimant’s parliamentary expenses claims. After losing to Mr Lloyd at the election, the claimant began libel proceedings against Mr Lloyd and his agent in respect of the publications.
The first publication was in the ‘Sussex Courier’, a free ‘local newspaper’ produced by the Liberal Democrats and consisting entirely of campaign literature. The front page bore the headline ‘Expenses scandal MP faces defeat’. An article below said taxpayers had paid almost £70,000 during the last four years towards the cost of the claimant’s family home, which was over 60 miles away from his constituency. It added that the MP had also claimed for food, cleaning and utilities and spent over £1,000 of taxpayers’ money redecorating his garage door.
The substance of the statements was repeated in a ‘Comment’ column on the following page under the headline ‘Expenses scandal: Eastbourne residents speak out’. The article included the following passages:
“Local residents have delivered their verdict on the MPs’ expenses scandal. Eastbourne’s Conservative MP Nigel Waterson has come under fire in recent months for his own scandalous expenses claims. Mr Waterson claimed almost £70,000 for the mortgage on his large family home in Kent, which is over 60 miles away from his constituents. He also claimed over £1000 to have his garage re-decorated. It’s clear that Mr Waterson’s expenses claims have upset many people in Eastbourne.”
The second publication was another Liberal Democrat campaign ‘newspaper’. It contained a column that included the statement: “We’ve seen the scandal of MPs abusing their expenses.” Alongside the column were articles which said the claimant had claimed £70,000 of expenses over four years. Another article described the constituency as a two-horse race and stated: “Voting Labour here in Eastbourne and Willingdon will just let our expenses scandal MP off the hook.”
The claimant argued that by linking criticism of his expenses claims with the overarching parliamentary expenses scandal, the publications meant that he was one of a number of notorious MPs whose expenses claims were unlawful and/or in breach of the Parliamentary rules and/or they were liable to repay the amounts they had received. The defendants argued that the words did not suggest the claimant had broken any rules. Instead, they were a simple comment that the claimant had used the expenses system for his own benefit in a way that was open to criticism.
Meaning and honest comment
The principles for ascertaining meaning and the honest comment defence were largely undisputed. In Jeynes v News Magazines Limited EWCA Civ 130 the Court of Appeal summarized the basic rules for determining meaning:
“(1) The governing principle is reasonableness. (2) The hypothetical reasonable reader is not naïve but he is not unduly suspicious. He can read between the lines. He can read in an implication more readily than a lawyer and may indulge in a certain amount of loose thinking but he must be treated as being a man who is not avid for scandal and someone who does not, and should not, select one bad meaning where other non-defamatory meanings are available. (3) Over-elaborate analysis is best avoided. (4) The intention of the publisher is irrelevant. (5) The article must be read as a whole, and any “bane and antidote” taken together. (6) The hypothetical reader is taken to be representative of those who would read the publication in question. (7) In delimiting the range of permissible defamatory meanings, the court should rule out any meaning which, “can only emerge as the produce of some strained, or forced, or utterly unreasonable interpretation…” (see Eady J in Gillick v Brook Advisory Centres approved by this court EWCA Civ 1263 at paragraph 7 and Gatley on Libel and Slander (10th edition), paragraph 30.6). (8) It follows that “it is not enough to say that by some person or another the words might be understood in a defamatory sense.” Neville v Fine Arts Company AC 68 per Lord Halsbury LC at 73″.
In Spiller v Joseph UKSC 53 the Supreme Court identified the requirements of the honest comment defence as follows:
(1) The comment must be on a matter of public interest.
(2) The comment must be recognizable as comment, as distinct from an imputation of fact.
(3) The comment must be based on facts that are true or protected by privilege.
(4) The comment must explicitly or implicitly indicate, at least in general terms, the facts on which it is based.
(5) The comment must be one which could have been made by an honest person, however prejudiced he might be, and however exaggerated or obstinate his views.
(6) The comment must not have been published maliciously.
Judgment of the High Court
Tugendhat J held that the defendants’ words would not be understood as meaning that the ‘scandal’ concerning the claimant was the mere fact of making claims for mortgage interest and costs of decoration pursuant to a scandalous system. The articles located their criticism of the claimant in the context of the ‘MPs’ expenses scandal’, which included all the forms the scandal had taken, including MPs whose claims were unlawful, those whose claims breached the parliamentary rules, and those who repaid their expenses voluntarily after being criticized by their parties or by an independent parliamentary audit.
Tugendhat J therefore held the articles would reasonably be understood as meaning that the claimant was guilty of abusing the Parliamentary rules for his own financial advantage. They were ‘plainly statements of fact’. The defendants had made no effort to distinguish what could only be factual statements (e.g. the statement that the claimant’s home was 60 miles from the constituency) from matters they claimed were comment or opinion. On this basis, the Judge entered summary judgment for the claimant.
Judgment of the Court of Appeal
By a 2-1 majority the Court of Appeal overturned the Judge’s ruling and held the words complained of were statements of comment.
McCombe LJ said the meaning of the words was quite simple:
“Mr Waterson has claimed nearly £70,000 from the taxpayer for a family home that is 60 miles from Eastbourne (fact). That is a scandal (comment).’
McCombe LJ said the claimant’s argument on meaning involved ‘the technique of the lawyer, rather than that of the layman’ . The impugned statements fell squarely within the type of material identified in Myerson v Smith’s Weekly Publishing Co. Ltd (1923) 24 SR (NSW) 20, 26:
‘To say that a man’s conduct was dishonourable is not comment, it is a statement of fact. To say that he did certain things and this his conduct was dishonourable is a statement of fact coupled with a comment.’
There was no express or implied statement that the claimant had acted unlawfully, broken the parliamentary rules or was required to repay sums previously claimed . The conduct on which the defendants’ comments were based was clearly identified . McCombe LJ explained:
‘In the precise factual circumstances identified in the publications it was being said that it was ‘a scandal’ that [the claimant] could and did claim very substantial sums to maintain a family home at the stated distance from his constituency at the taxpayer’s expense. There was, in my view, no allegation of scandal beyond the stated facts. The fact that there was thought to be a wider ‘scandal’ does not alter the position.’
Paraphrasing from Diplock LJ’s judgment in Slim v Daily Telegraph 2 QB 157, McCombe LJ said it would be unfortunate
‘for free speech in this country if this kind of controversy on a matter of public though local interest were discouraged by the fear that every word written to be read in haste should be subjected in a court of law to minute linguistic analysis of the kind to which these [papers] have been subjected…’
Laws LJ agreed with McCombe LJ. He added that the political nature of the publications was important. The court must avoid ‘over elaborate analysis’ – a principle that has ‘a particular resonance in the context of political speech’ . While politicians are entitled to protection under the law of defamation, ‘the limits of acceptable criticism are wider in relation to politicians acting in their public capacity than in relation to private individuals’ (Jerusalem v Austria (2003) 37 EHRR 25, para 38). Similarly, in Hrico v Slovakia (2005) 41 EHRR 18 the Strasbourg Court observed that, ‘there was little scope under article 10(2) of the Convention for restrictions on political speech or on debate on questions of public interest’.
Laws LJ said the Strasbourg authorities
‘exemplify…the common law’s increasing focus in this area on the balance to be struck between public interest and individual right: between free speech and private claims, rather than on reputation as akin to a right of property… A political context – and especially at election time – surely informs this balance.’
Richards LJ dissented. The references to ‘the MPs’ expenses scandal’ and to ‘the scandal of MPs abusing their expenses’ clearly referred to the large number of MPs who made claims that were unlawful, in breach of the rules or improper. These were statements of facts .
In the first article the reference to the claimant’s ‘scandalous’ expenses claims came immediately after the reference to ‘the MPs’ expenses scandal’. It therefore suggested a link between the two, insinuating that the claimant was one of those MPs who acted unlawfully, in breach of the rules or improperly .
Likewise, in the second article the reference to ‘our expenses scandal MP’ suggested a connection with ‘the scandal of MPs abusing their expenses’. It would not reasonably be read as a mere comment that the fact the claimant claimed expenses for a home a long way from his constituency was scandalous .
Identifying the line between fact and comment is notoriously difficult. That four experienced judges could not agree where the boundary lay speaks volumes about the uncertainty inherent in this area of the law. The divergent judgments will provide little comfort to politicians, journalists and other public commentators.
Nevertheless, the outcome of the Court of Appeal’s decision is a sensible one. As McCombe LJ recognised, in libel litigation it is too easy for a microscopic dissection of words to displace straightforward and commonsense interpretations. The law is designed to compensate claimants for injury to reputation actually caused – a forensic and sterile linguistic analysis is therefore best avoided. Richards LJ’s approach had a distinctly artificial air, whereas the majority’s approach – eschewing over-complicated analysis and focusing on the meaning that an ordinary layman would attribute to the publications – was grounded in reality.
Laws LJ’s judgment provides welcome recognition to the importance of free expression in the political arena. In Lingens v Austria (1986) 8 EHRR 407 the Strasbourg Court said that:
“… freedom of political debate is at the very core of the concept of a democratic society which prevails throughout the Convention. The limits of acceptable criticism are accordingly wider as regards a politician as such than as regards a private individual. Unlike the latter, the former inevitably and knowingly lays himself open to close scrutiny of his every word and deed by both journalists and the public at large, and he must consequently display a greater degree of tolerance. No doubt Article 10(2) enables the reputation of others – that is to say, of all individuals – to be protected, and this protection extends to politicians too, even when they are not acting in their private capacity; but in such cases the requirements of such protection have to be weighed in relation to the interests of open discussion of political issues.”
Of course, the deliberate dissemination of false statements about a political candidate can have a harmful effect on democracy. It was for this reason that Parliament enacted s. 106 of the Representation of the People Act 1983, which makes it an offence to publish, for the purpose of affecting any election, ‘any false statement of fact in relation to the candidate’s personal character or honour’. This provision was famously used to annul the re-election of the former Labour minister, Phil Woolas, after he made untruthful statements about his Liberal Democrat opponent during the 2010 general election.
But judges should be wary of letting libel law inhibit legitimate political discussion. Robust exchanges of opinion in election campaigns must not be quelled by the threat of defamation actions. Virulent criticism, puffery and overstatement are inevitable features of democratic debate. Political disputes should generally be settled at the ballot box, not the libel courts.
Edward Craven is a barrister at Matrix Chambers. | <urn:uuid:f12fb14f-8e2c-4607-b7c9-c3649c4ab0f7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://inforrm.wordpress.com/2013/03/02/case-law-waterson-v-lloyd-honest-comment-and-political-discussion-edward-craven/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973042 | 3,016 | 1.78125 | 2 |
China’s Wen warns “outside forces” off sea dispute
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said on Friday that “outside forces” had no excuse to get involved in a complex dispute over the South China Sea, offering a veiled warning to the United States and others not to stick their noses into the sensitive issue.
But Wen also struck a softer line during a summit with leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) on the Indonesian resort island of Bali, offering $10 billion in loans and lines of credit and saying China only wanted to be friends.
China claims a large swathe of the South China Sea, which straddles key shipping lanes and is potentially rich in energy resources.
Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei are the other claimants to parts of the sea, and along with the United States and Japan, are pressuring Beijing to try and seek some way forward on the knotty issue of sovereignty, which has flared up again this year with often tense maritime stand-offs.
While the White House says U.S. President Barack Obama will bring up the issue at another summit on Saturday, also in Bali, China has said it does not want it discussed, preferring to deal with the problem bilaterally amongst the states directly involved.
“The dispute which exists among relevant countries in this region over the South China Sea is an issue which has built up for several years,” Wen told the ASEAN leaders, according to a copy of his remarks carried on the Foreign Ministry’s website (www.mfa.gov.cn).
“It ought to be resolved through friendly consultations and discussions by countries directly involved. Outside forces should not, under any pretext, get involved,” he added.
Japan has also expressed concern over the dispute, and India has become involved via an oil exploration deal with Vietnam in the South China Sea.
Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa told reporters that China had sent positive signals about further discussing the code of conduct for the waters.
“I think this is an important development,” the minister added.
In July, China and Southeast Asian countries agreed on a preliminary set of guidelines in the South China Sea, a rare sign of cooperation in a row that has plagued relations in the region for years.
LOANS AND TRADE
Despite the disagreements over the South China Sea, Beijing has been keen to deepen trade and economic ties with Southeast Asia, and has a free trade agreement with the bloc.
“The China-ASEAN relationship is solidly based and has great potential and a promising future,” Wen said.
“China will forever be a good neighbour, good friend and good partner of ASEAN. We will work closely with you to implement all the agreements we have reached to bring more benefit to our people and make greater contributions to peace and prosperity in our region.”
To this end, Wen said China would offer ASEAN another $10 billion in loans and lines of credit, including $4 billion of soft loans, on top of a similar pledge of $15 billion two years ago.
China will also set up a 3 billion yuan ($473 million) fund to expand practical maritime cooperation by promoting cooperation in environmental protection, navigational safety and combating transnational crimes, Wen added.
He said that China and ASEAN should step up cooperation in the financial field, by increasing the use of local currency swaps and “encourage the quoting of China’s yuan and ASEAN currencies in each other’s interbank foreign exchange”.
“The world is undergoing profound and complex changes. The global economy may experience uncertainty and instability for a long time to come,” he said.
“China and ASEAN should be both confident and sober-minded, keep our destiny firmly in our own hands and advance in the direction we have set to pursue our goal.” | <urn:uuid:2e3b6e74-7927-48b4-b7d8-2df0099d2d5c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://dawn.com/2011/11/18/chinas-wen-warns-outside-forces-off-sea-dispute/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950518 | 818 | 1.65625 | 2 |
“A controversy over religious conversions that has captivated Pakistanis was resolved in dramatic fashion on Wednesday when a judge ruled that three Hindu women who converted to Islam under disputed circumstances had chosen to go with their new Muslim husbands, causing consternation among the families they left behind,” Salman Masood writes in The New York Times.
The Supreme Court had intervened in the three cases in recent weeks, “sequestering the women from their parents and their new husbands to consider their future without pressure,” Mr. Masood writes. “The court ruled on Wednesday that all three had freely chosen to remain Muslim.”
The decision met with heavy criticism from Hindu leaders and some rights activists, who maintained that the women were forcibly converted and that “their cases would make Pakistan’s already embattled minorities even more insecure,” he writes.
The most prominent case involved Rinkel Kumari, 19, a Hindu student who became Faryal Shah in order to marry Naveed Shah, a Muslim neighbor. In a hearing before the court on March 26, she and another woman — Lata Kumari, 29 — were given three weeks to make up their minds. Both women were then kept in a shelter in Karachi, the southern port city and provincial capital of Sindh.
During a packed hearing in the marble courtroom on Wednesday, Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry ruled that both women were adults and had had ample time to decide.
“You can go wherever you choose,” Chief Justice Chaudhry said as both women, who wore black niqabs, stood quietly alongside two female police officers.
“You will get police protection. No one will be allowed to harm you.”
Read full article here. | <urn:uuid:0250dd6a-9e9a-40c4-a122-37370106bdf4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/19/pakistani-judge-upholds-womens-conversions-to-islam/?ref=iftikharmohammadchaudhry | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981811 | 367 | 1.742188 | 2 |
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34 allow greater leveraging of ITS data. Developing an enterprise (2003), who compared boarding and alighting counts recorded data strategy requires resources, planning, time and expertise by TriMet's APCs against counts recorded by on-board cam- on the front end, but will result in overall savings over time eras directed at vehicles' doors. by providing a sustainable system that allows more people to Given verification of the accuracy of APCs, this system can access better data without forcing practitioners to become then be used to assess the accuracy of other on-board systems. expert users or hiring more technology staff to support daily For example, the CTA intends to check transaction summaries efforts. recorded by its smart card, magnetic card, and electronic Ideally, the departments within a transit organization registering fareboxes against corresponding APC counts. would work with their IT department to enlist the expertise Operator-keyed data from electronic registering fareboxes needed to construct an enterprise data strategy. The overall and mobile data terminals are probably subject to the great- goal in presenting an overview of enterprise data manage- est amount of error among on-board systems in terms of doc- ment has been to sketch a set of general guidelines and to out- umenting the actual incidence of represented events. The line the tasks and issues involved. End user departments will transit literature does not report attempts to validate event need to assist in specifying the relevant data and uses for that data, although analysts at the case study properties noted that data. Typically, success requires a joint effort of users and IT they were wary of interpretations where event data are treated professionals. as "ground truth." There are several possible ways of assessing the validity of operator-keyed event data. One would be to assign "silent ITS Data Validation shoppers" to a sample of trips to record selected events, and To ensure accuracy and integrity, ITS data recovered from then compare the manually recorded data against the operator- on-board systems must be validated before being forwarded to keyed data. Another approach that would likely improve va- the enterprise data system. An essential task in this process lidity would be to develop a data screening process to identify involves matching vehicles' AVL data records to their sched- instances where multiple specific events are keyed at the same ules and the base map of stops and time points associated with time or location, recognizing that in some cases (e.g., fare eva- assigned work. Selected event data recorded at locations other sions) multiple events can be valid. However, the operator than those represented in the base map must also be assigned training process probably offers the best opportunity for en- to base map locations. Examples of such events include suring the validity of event data. In this setting, it can be em- instances where a vehicle drops off or picks up passengers be- phasized that recording events is not simply a part of the job; tween scheduled stops, records for temporary re-routes, the rather, it is providing information that can often be used to record of a vehicle's maximum speed between stops, or a non- improve the conditions of operators' assignments, including stop event record reported by a mobile data terminal or elec- their safety and security. tronic registering farebox. Data are also screened to identify In the customer service area, ITS data can be applied extreme values, which may indicate a malfunctioning unit. beyond its common use in validating customer complaints. Records with extreme values are retained, but flagged to indi- For example, actual arrival time data from AVL can be com- cate that the data are suspect and may be unusable. pared to arrival times predicted by real time arrival software Validation of passenger loads and boarding and alighting to assess the accuracy and reliability of the predictions (Crout count data from APCs is especially important, given the need 2007). Such analysis can also contribute to determining how for accuracy of these data in meeting external and internal re- far out arrive time predictions can be accurately and reliably porting needs. For passenger loads, a procedure must be in made. place to "zero out" the totals at defined service junctures, rang- ing from the conclusion of a vehicle's daily assigned work to the Reporting and Analysis Tools completion of each trip. A routine must then be implemented to proportionately adjust boarding and alighting data to be Reporting and analysis tools drawing on archived ITS data consistent with the passenger load zeroing adjustment (Furth can be grouped into three categories: those developed by the et al. 2006). ITS vendor, those developed in-house, and those developed It is worthwhile to verify the accuracy of the actual boarding by a third party software vendor. and alighting counts recorded by APCs, in the system accept- ITS vendor developed reporting software is available for ance process and periodically thereafter. Some properties test ticket vending machines, electronic registering fareboxes, and accuracy by comparing APC counts against those recorded by AVL and APC systems. The software for ticket vending ma- ride checkers. The maintained assumption that ride checker chines and fareboxes report transactions data, as described in counts are error-free is a strong one, however. An alternative Chapter 2 of the Guidebook. Farebox software can also report to reliance on ride checker counts was used by Kimpel et al. operator-keyed events for systems that include this function-
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35 ality. Furth et al. (2006) conclude that farebox reporting soft- indicators of specific interest to the agency. Moreover, as in- ware is very inflexible, and that properties desiring to use terests in specific aspects of performance evolve, the report- farebox data to monitor ridership have to first export data ing system can be readily modified to evolve in tandem. from the farebox system to a database developed in-house in Generally, the data queries programmed within in-house order to structure reports. reporting systems can be structured to address virtually any Vendor developed performance reporting software for question represented in the space-time-customer dimensions AVL-APC systems is a fairly recent addition to the transit in- of the ITS database. dustry. This software is in use among properties of varying TriMet's experience with its in-house reporting system is size, but appears to be especially welcomed by smaller prop- approaching the 10-year mark. The system is considered to erties with limited IT resources. Previously, vendor-provided be among the most comprehensive in the transit industry AVL reporting software was limited to data "playback" rou- (Furth et al. 2006), and its periodic performance reports tines that were useful for investigating incidents and customer include indicators that have been designed to correspond to complaints, but had very limited capability to support offline service delivery attributes that the agency's satisfaction sur- performance reporting and analysis. veys have found to be important to customers. An example is More generally, the development of reporting software by shown in Table 4-1. ITS vendors reflects a change in their role in the technology TriMet surveys found that reliability issues were the second life cycle. As Furth et al. (2006: 71) observed, in the initial most important source of dissatisfaction among bus riders phase of advanced technology deployment in the industry, (after frequency of service issues). Table 4-1 provides informa- technology vendors viewed their principal role as being tion on three alternative reliability measures. The first, on-time providers of hardware, and "their job ended when they performance, is the transit industry's traditional measure of handed the transit agency the data." Whether the data could reliability. The second, headway adherence, reports the per- be rationalized and transformed into desired reports was an centage of trips that maintain an actual headway that is within issue that was usually left to the transit property to resolve. 50% of the scheduled headway. This proxy measures the spac- Consequently, in the 1990s era of ITS deployment, many ing or regularity of service. The third reliability proxy, excess properties struggled to produce useful performance reports wait, measures the additional time a typical rider would spend (Casey 2000). waiting for a bus given the actual headway deviations docu- The most important of the vendor-developed reporting mented in the AVL data. packages covers data from AVL and APC systems. An exam- The three measures of reliability often correspond, but not ple summarizing weekday service delivery performance on always. For example, the Route 64-Marquam Hill achieves the Denver Regional Transportation District's South Broad- high marks for on-time performance and headway adher- way route in October 2005 is shown in Figure 4-3. The report ence, but fares much worse on the excess wait measure. The provides information that operations managers usually track same is true for the Route 51-Vista. It could be argued that in assessing service delivery, including on-time performance, the excess wait measure best represents a rider's view of reli- boardings per mile and hour of revenue service, and actual ability. However, the choice of indicator could just as well be average speed compared to schedule speed. Passenger activ- informed empirically by relating the variation of each indica- ity is also reported by service period, and data are sorted to tor over the routes in the system to the route variation in sur- identify to most heavily used stops. Sorting by performance veyed satisfaction. In this case, the "best" customer-oriented category (boardings per revenue hour in this example) can measure would be the one that most closely corresponds to produce rankings among scheduled trips. Finally, perform- riders' reported satisfaction. ance for selected trips is reported. Reporting and analysis software developed by third party Vendor-developed reporting software is very useful for vendors range from fairly elementary packages that docu- communicating performance information at the managerial ment Web and automated telephone system activity to more levels of the organization. Its data querying capabilities be- advanced packages that support statistical and spatial analy- yond this important function, however, are limited. Thus, sis of data extracted from an enterprise database. Data recov- some properties have developed more flexible performance ered by Web and automated telephone system monitoring reporting systems in-house. It should be noted that in-house software are described in Chapter 2 of the Guidebook. reporting systems were often originally developed out of In their most elementary applications, statistical software necessity and were mostly confined to larger properties where packages allow researchers to logically summarize ITS data staff with the necessary advanced database querying skills and report patterns and trends. More advanced applications were in place. involve estimation of systematic relationships among ITS The main advantage of the reporting systems developed in- data elements within user-defined contexts. An important house is that they can be structured to produce performance feature of a statistical software package is its ability to easily
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36 Figure 4-3. Summary route performance report from vendor-developed software. extract data from an agency's ITS database. At TriMet, re- can then be easily imported for statistical analysis. Another searchers in the operations division use statistical analysis advantage of this software package is its extensive graphing software (SAS) for advanced analysis of ITS data. The main capability, which supports more effective communication of advantage of this package is that its programming features trends and patterns. allow analysts to directly query the Oracle data tables in the An example report from TriMet illustrating SAS graphing agency's enterprise data system and create data records that features is shown in Figure 4-4. This report is produced for | <urn:uuid:fc80cc3c-a540-4ae3-ba14-560c15836ec2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=13917&page=34 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945969 | 2,496 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Canada to tell G20 austerity and growth both possible
By Randall Palmer
MONTREAL (Reuters) - Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper will preach the benefits of austerity to world leaders when they gather in Mexico next week, arguing that tight budgets and healthy economic growth are both possible.
In a speech on Monday, Harper came down firmly on the side of Germany, which has emphasized the need for fiscal discipline as opposed to economic stimulus measures.
But as he seeks to gain influence ahead of the June 18-19 summit of the Group of 20 advanced and emerging nations, he framed the austerity-versus-growth debate as a "false choice".
"This will be Canada's message at the G20 summit: economic growth and fiscal discipline are not mutually exclusive; they go hand in hand," Harper said in the prepared text of his speech to a business audience in Montreal.
There is a growing push in the euro zone, led by newly elected French President Francois Hollande, to do more to stimulate growth and not just focus on reducing deficits. Harper met with Hollande in Paris last week.
Germany, the European Union's paymaster, has taken a hard line in favor of tough fiscal targets over the past several years, but it has recently softened its tone and agreed to allow Spain more time to cut its deficit as Madrid battles a deep banking crisis.
In the United States, President Barack Obama talks about the need to stimulate the faltering economy but has few options due to opposition from the Republic majority in the House of Representatives.
Harper said his Conservative government's approach should be a model for the rest of the world, portraying it as a balance between fiscal discipline and growth-boosting measures such as free trade agreements and changes to employment insurance, pensions and immigration policy. Continued... | <urn:uuid:16eb2067-9567-4bfe-a2f9-af44f4992a37> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ca.reuters.com/article/idCABRE85A1CN20120611 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963884 | 361 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Another front liner of the celebrated “Patriotic Series” category of KHHI released to honor one of the most fearsome and respected soldiers the modern world has ever seen; the GURKHAS.
“Aayo Gurkhali” in native Nepalese means “Here come the Gurkhas”, the famous war cry of the Gurkhas. The legend says it all, the fearless Gurkhas used to charge upon their enemies screaming this rousing phrase in a typical Gurkhali style. It is believed to have been the enemies’ worst nightmare and comrades/battalion best possession/armor at the same time. The Aayo Gurkhali kukri is put on KHHI’s shelf to honor all Gurkhas who were and are in the front line risking their lives to protect freedom and humanity. Khukuri House Handicraft Industry proudly presents this khukuri to show its deep respect and gratitude to all those brave soldiers who gave their lives and willing to give their lives for a noble cause and a better tomorrow.
This kukri is basically made in the “World War” version issued to the Gurkhas in world war days however with an improvised finishing. The documented source and collections say that the World War version was widely used by Gurkhas towards the end of World War period. This khukuri is fairly curved thus effective hence favorite of many. The knife is slightly larger and more curved than the current kukri issued to Gurkhas. Steel pommel and but cap are fitted in a regular horn handle to give an over all dashing look.
The scabbard of this knife is made in army green colored leather to give a different look and also to camouflage the Kukri with the uniform and gears of the soldiers. The beautiful green scabbard of the Kukri brings more durability and can be a displayable item at the same time. A cross kukri insignia of the legendary Gurkhas is also mounted on frog of the khukuri, done to further give a typical “Gurkhali” look.
The blade is engraved with the phrase, “Aayo Gurkhali” and the famous “War Cry” insignia (logo) of the Gurkhas as a dedication to the brave soldiers and also to recall their famous war action. | <urn:uuid:05786568-548e-4023-af20-a25a6b17bbcf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thekhukurihouse.com/catalog/product.php?id=313432fe4d5 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954184 | 500 | 1.742188 | 2 |
Blog: The meaning of the meaning of meaning
A somewhat less than meaningful discussion that is full of meanings
My recent piece on search engines provoked this email comment from Tom Welsh (Reg Dev contributor and Senior Consultant with Cutter Consortium):
"Most people are quite unaware of the yawning gap between data and "knowledge", which is what semantics is all about. As for the term "unstructured", I concluded long ago that it is thoroughly subjective, and means whatever the given speaker finds unclear."
Tom's quite right and it set me thinking. I remember when Microsoft's XML guru told me that XML has all the semantics anyone needs; of course, by itself it has no semantics at all (try reading a piece of valid well-formed XML in Mandarin and writing a program to process it correctly) which is why we need ontologies and the semantic web and so on. Our XML guru admitted this point, once he'd thought about it a bit.
And that's the issue. Issues of Semantics are "obvious" until we think about them.
We recognise an XML invoice - in English - but if we try to process it without knowing the legal significance of some of the terms we may come a cropper. Sometimes our assumptions will be right, however, and we'll get lazy - but assumptions about semantics are still assumptions.
I know that a customer is someone we've done business with, who has a validated credit rating; but you may think of a customer as anyone who has expressed an interest in our product. Mix well-formed XML documents corresponding to both types of customer in one database and I think we may have business-level issues to resolve sooner or later - but the associated automated processing will probably work just fine, up to the point of delivering the wrong answers.
I did think of taking a three-way view in my piece - Data is just raw data; Information (data plus metadata, schema, semantics etc) is data that we understand; Knowledge is information that we can, and do, actually use for something useful. Now, does semantics come in with Information or Knowledge? It's a question of semantics (and, yes, that's a different link and includes a slightly different meaning).
But it gets messier. Even raw data can be knowledge, perhaps, if we use it for something; but it's high risk knowledge because if we are using data blindly, there's a chance that we'll use it inappropriately...
Besides, is such raw data really raw data and not just low-value information? If we know that when a figure 6 appears on the dial we must splifflicate the bifurcator (even if we nothing more about what this means), that "6" data item has become both information (we know it relates to bifurcators) and knowledge (we use it), Which gets us into knowledge quality metrics and the like...
Just don't go there....
But someone will have to...® | <urn:uuid:14f34eb9-08ed-4e01-b23c-202c20c4267f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02/11/search_and_semantics/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959324 | 608 | 1.828125 | 2 |
Share facilities for tax breaks, private schools advised
Private schools could merit charitable status if they let state pupils use their facilities, say new draft rules.
Allowing state pupils to attend lessons or seconding teachers to their schools could also count, a Charity Commission consultation says.
The consultation follows a court ruling in favour of a claim by some private schools that said the existing guidelines were too narrow.
The commission said it was consulting on a complete review of the guidelines.
Fee-paying schools can claim charitable status and the resulting tax breaks if they can prove benefit to the public.Public benefit
The new document sets out what charities in England and Wales, including schools, must do to show they are acting in the public benefit.
The Independent Schools Council (ISC) said the original guidance from the Charity Commission was overly focused on bursaries and did not take into account all the charitable work done by private schools.
The ISC, which represents 1,200 schools, between them educating half a million children, took the case to the Upper Tribunal.
The judges ruled parts of the guidance were "erroneous" and ordered the guidance on how schools justify their charitable status be "corrected".
The revised guidance contains new information on charities, including schools that charge fees and a list of "illustrative examples" on how they could show public benefit.
The examples include offering bursaries or assisted places, collaborating with state schools and sponsoring academies.
Other options are allowing state schools to use facilities such as swimming pools, sports halls, playing fields and concert halls, allowing state pupils to attend classes or educational events, seconding teachers to state schools and colleges and working with non-fee-charging schools abroad.
The Charity Commission said the document was part of a complete review of the guidance and not just a response to the judgement.
It added the three-month consultation also included other changes made in response to the 2010 Equality Act and the 2011 Charities Act.
Dame Suzi Leather, chair of the Charity Commission, said: "Public benefit is the defining characteristic of charity but is a far from simple concept.
"We have worked hard to write guidance that accurately reflects the law but is accessible for a charity trustee who just wants to know what to think about when making decisions that might affect their charity's public benefit."
The document is published online, which the commission hopes will make it easier for charities to access the guidance. | <urn:uuid:0e0530f8-3694-4517-805f-1c70e557012f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-18624656 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969599 | 500 | 1.523438 | 2 |
December 19, 2001
Back in the bad old days academics and spooks called "Kremlinologists" worked assiduously to try to decipher the meanings and intentions of cryptic statements and portents from the central governing institutions of the secretive and security-minded masters of the Soviet Union. Although the attempts to predict what the Kremlin might do next were often backed up by sophisticated analysis done by people with long experience and sometimes by the kind of intelligence gathered by espionage Kremlinology was never an exact science.
Often the results of all that analysis were about as accurate as what might be derived from reading tea leaves or the entrails of animals and sometimes less so. The predictions were as likely to reflect the assumptions and biases of the analysts as to grow from a dispassionate analysis of the usually all too sketchy available facts.
Today, Americans seeking to figure out what their own government you remember, the institution designed to be our servant rather than our master will do next in the vaunted war on terror. To be sure, the difficulty may well be because the government itself (remembering that this term is in some sense an abstraction or oversimplification to describe a maze of institutions populated by ordinary human beings who sometimes have difficulty figuring out what they personally want to do next) hasn't decided yet. And there are wheels within wheels, backstage maneuvering, even personality quirks that are likely to affect ultimate courses of action not to mention the fact that what has gone before will influence what comes next.
Even given all that and more, however, it is fascinating that the government of a supposedly open and democratic society is so often a mystery to its citizens. In part this is because the government that has grown so massively in recent decades is unnecessarily large and complex. But in part it is because those who work in government feel little or no need to let mere citizens in on the secrets they hold as markers of power in the curiously insular and self-contained world that is official Washington.
So trying to figure out what comes next is always something of a guessing game. Nonetheless, I can't resist the desire to participate.
I have available no secret sources, no esoteric knowledge, just the ordinary tools of a working journalist. I call lots of people and read a lot. I also have some working assumptions that it seems only fair to share.
My most important working assumption is that the current war is only secondarily about finding, punishing or stopping actual terrorists although those making policy generally are constrained by the necessity of preserving the illusion that this laudable motive is the primary and only goal. As Randolph Bourne, one of the few liberal-to-radical American intellectuals not caught up in the exciting war fever surrounding the Great War (now downgraded to World War I) explained succinctly (and in more depth in articles too long to quote at length), "War is the health of the state."
Therefore, I operate on the assumption that the main purpose of the current conflict (I still dislike calling it a war despite the de facto truth so long as Congress doesn't have the gumption to do the constitutional thing and declare war) is to expand and perpetuate the power of the permanent government, the ruling class, the people who think ordinary human beings are an unruly lot that need a whole lot of supervision and imposed discipline and they're just the folks to handle the job. This class has an abiding interest not in a short war with clearly specified objectives that might yield a decisive victory, but in a long-running war with inchoate and constantly shifting objectives that will provide justifications for expanded government power for years and even decades to come.
To be fair to this class, it hasn't exactly hidden its designs. Everybody from George Dubya to Rumsfeld to Colin Powell to the most junior spokesperson for the most insignificant department has hastened to assure the American people that fighting terrorism or better yet, evil will take a long time and require great sacrifices on the part of the noble American people.
To a disinterested outsider this might not seem all that sensible, or at least not the only possible course of action, but for the most part the American people have bought it. They seem to want to trust their leaders in the wake of terrorism, even though some might argue that successful terrorist attacks amount to a massive failure by the very institutions that are now seeking even more power over ordinary American citizens.
The leaders have been assisted by the fact that those running the government have also run the schools for more than 100 years. Thus eager young minds have had it drummed into them that being suspicious of powers and influences outside government business, the media, genuinely independent scholars that might serve as countervailing forces against overweening government is the very essence of sophisticated analysis, keen intelligence and cutting-edge progressive thought. At the same time the attitude has been fairly thoroughly inculcated that being suspicious of government is the sign of a reactionary, overwrought, paranoid and not very bright ideologue (Beelzebub, what a useful word! apologies to C.S. Lewis).
Given the assumption that the powers that be desire a long, inconclusive conflict that justifies long-term and gradually increasing restrictions on American liberties, it seems only sensible (to me) to figure that there will be other theaters once the conflict in Afghanistan is declared over whether bin Laden's head is presented on a silver platter or not. Nation-building in the wake of bombing is rather boring, after all, with few dramatic photo-ops or opportunities for correspondents to feel like courageous heroes. Furthermore, although they would never admit it and wouldn't accept the reasons I gave in my column last week, at some level I believe most of the powers that be know that nation-building as they will practice it is bound to fail.
The useful idiots at the Weekly Standard and New Republic have been beating the drums for going after Saddam Hussein and Iraq for years, and with special intensity since 9/11, although Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, the PLO and even Iran have been touted as worthy targets.
Noticing that Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz has been all over cable television for the last week or so, receiving more public attention than before, might serve to reinforce the idea that Iraq will be next. Wolfowitz has long been a special favorite of the neocons and neo-whatevers, a hawk on regimes that build weapons of mass destruction. The fact that he's being pushed forward might be an indicator that everybody's favorite worst guy since Hitler will be the next target.
When I talked to Ted Carpenter at the Cato Institute last week, however, he suggested that it might not be so straightforward the corridors of power are filled with confusing mazes and secret passageways, after all. He reminded me that what Wolfowitz has actually been saying now that he's more in the public eye, is that there's still a great deal of unfinished business that will demand intense American attention in Afghanistan. I may have missed things, but I don't think he has even mentioned Saddam Hussein in public.
Could it be that Wolfowitz is actually distancing himself from his neocon coterie and the Saddam-next scenario? Rumors abound that the neocons and the Standard crowd are not held in great favor by the Bushies. Dubya is said to have been annoyed that they called him a wuss during the China spy-plane incident earlier in the year. Papa Bush has publicly criticized Kristol and others who have complained that we didn't march on Baghdad during the Late Great Gulf War.
Bush administration officials are said to have been annoyed at criticism from the Standard and New Republic crowds that they weren't being aggressive or decisive enough in the early stages of the Afghan conflict, waging only a sissy bombing war. Serendipitously enough, harsh editorials and articles from both magazines hit print the day Mazar-e-Sharif fell to the Northern Alliance and the Taliban (apparently) began to come apart.
I don't doubt that many in the administration still want to go after Iraq with a full-scale attack eventually. But the Bushies, more than the Standardites, value allies and semi-decent relations with the Europeans and it isn't just Colin Powell. The French are dead-set against attacking Iraq right now, and the British have offered demurrers. Dubya's new best friend, Vladimir Putin, is said to have weighed in against doing Iraq right now. Even the Israelis have said that their intelligence hasn't been able to find a direct link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 terror attacks.
Given all this, my guess and I am the first to acknowledge that it is a guess, though I think it's a reasonably informed guess is that Saddam won't be next. Maybe later. Or maybe they'll keep him around as a handy focus of hatred whenever some other phase of the all-consuming war on terror isn't going very well or is lagging in popularity.
So my best guess and it's hardly exclusive to me, is that Somalia will be next. Several administration officials have mentioned Somalia as one of the possible targets. There are apparently still some pockets of people in Somalia who may or may not be closely affiliated with al-Qaeda, but are widely believed to be. A recent Time.com article notes that Somalia might be a likely operating base for al-Qaeda if Afghanistan is made truly inhospitable.
The semi-amateur but somewhat respected Internet intelligence service Stratfor.com did a piece last week on Somalia as a base of U.S. operations in the extended war on terror. The Washington Post on December 11 did a piece noting that a five-member US delegation visited Somalia a couple of days earlier. A day later the London Telegraph had a piece saying flat-out that, "America is planning to attack al-Qaeda fugitives in Somalia and has relied on Britain to persuade neighboring Kenya to allow special forces to use bases there."
Somalia might be perfect in several ways. It is the site of a major American embarrassment that began under Bush pere. It has virtually no central government. Most authorities believe that the al-Qaeda affiliates there are relatively small and unsophisticated, so it shouldn't be all that difficult to achieve a few mediagenic victories.
A Somalia campaign would validate the claim that the US is serious about a worldwide war against terrorists wherever our doughty intelligence agents find them without moving first on some Arab or Middle Eastern country that would cause controversy among the putative allies. It would keep the justification for increased security measures and other restrictions on American liberties active. It would lengthen the war without great risk of unacceptable American casualties.
In short, it would be the health of the state.
Of course, that's just my guess.
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Your Contributions are now Tax-Deductible | <urn:uuid:422e7da2-aecf-4927-86c0-b9aa06d5db30> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.antiwar.com/bock/pf/p-b121901.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96949 | 2,285 | 1.796875 | 2 |
For Republicans everywhere, the memo was like the opening scene of an asteroid movie where a scientist in a white coat briefs world leaders on the trajectory of a very big problem headed their way.
The memo, released Friday by Jan van Lohuizen, a pre-eminent Republican pollster who worked for George W. Bush in 2004, clearly asserts the GOP is out of step with the rest of America — even many of its own voters — on gay marriage.
Like the giant space rock plummeting toward Earth, support for gay rights is accelerating at a fast rate, the memo showed. A review of public polling shows that up to 2009, support for gay marriage among Americans increased at a rate of 1 percent a year but is now increasing at 5 percent a year, the memo said, with supporters outnumbering opponents by about 10 percent.
"The increase in support is taking place among all partisan groups. While more Democrats support gay marriage than Republicans, support levels among Republicans are increasing over time," van Lohuizen wrote. "The same is true of age: younger people support same sex marriage more often than older people, but the trends show that all age groups are rethinking their position."
Mario Nicolais says Republicans need to take note of the sobering data.
Nicolais, a well-known Colorado Republican, is the spokesman for Coloradans for Freedom, a group of Republicans who support gay rights. The group backed legislation that would have created same-sex civil unions, which are legally recognized relationships that have have many of the same benefits as marriage but are of a lesser legal status.
"I think it (the memo) lends serious credibility to those of us that said this is an issue conservatives need to pay serious attention to, and that we're not just outliers — we're not on the fringe," he said.
Nicolais said Republicans who supported the civil unions bill at the Capitol were deeply disappointed not only in its failure but in how it failed. During the regular session that ended last week, Republicans blocked the legislation from coming to a vote on the House floor, where there were enough votes to pass it.
Thirty other bills died in the crossfire, which led Gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, to call a special session so that lawmakers would consider some pieces of legislation that failed — including civil unions.
But the bill, which had previously passed three committees with bipartisan support during the regular session, was defeated Monday when House Speaker Frank McNulty, R-Highlands Ranch, on Monday sent it to a "kill committee." Gay-rights supporters were angry, and wealthy Democratic donor Tim Gill even showed up at the hearing for civil unions Monday night.
"We understand that there are significant donors on the Democratic side that are interested in this issue, that are motivated by this issue," McNulty said. "I appreciate the fact that they have lots of money, and I appreciate the fact that they're going to play heavily in Colorado's elections over the upcoming months because they believe Colorado should be a same-sex-marriage state."
But the speaker, who has become a lightning rod for criticism from the gay community, said Republicans this election year "will be out talking about our record on job creation and economic recovery."
At a rally outside the Capitol on Tuesday, conservatives who gathered to defend "traditional marriage" lauded McNulty as a hero. That was quite a change from a pro-civil-unions rally Monday — attended by some big-name Republicans such as Dan Ritchie, Maria Garcia Berry, Pat Hamill and Greg Stevinson — where McNulty's name was not exactly toasted.
Republicans hold the House with a 33-32 majority and already faced a formidable challenge keeping it.
Even some Republicans who supported civil unions say they're not worried that the issue will be a significant factor in November.
"I'm not the least bit worried," said Sen. Nancy Spence, R-Centennial, a supporter of the bill. "What is an exciting, emotional story today is yesterday's news by November."
Rep. Don Beezley, R-Broomfield, another GOP supporter of civil unions, agreed.
"I think the public is mostly worried about the economy," Beezley said. "I really don't think the public is going to be hung up on this."
Even if it's not a problem this year, the van Lohuizen memo laid out the national trend going forward.
"Polling conducted among Republicans show that majorities of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters support extending basic legal protections to gays and lesbians," the memo said, adding, "only 29 percent of Republicans oppose legal recognition (of same-sex relationships) in any form."
The memo suggested talking points for Republicans to embrace same-sex marriage.
"As people who promote personal responsibility, family values, commitment and stability, and emphasize freedom and limited government we have to recognize that freedom means freedom for everyone," the memo said. "This includes the freedom to decide how you live and to enter into relationships of your choosing, the freedom to live without excessive interference of the regulatory force of government."
An April poll conducted by North Carolina-based Public Policy Polling showed 62 percent of Colorado voters favor legislation to allow civil unions vs. 32 percent against. The poll showed a majority of Coloradans also would legalize same-sex marriage.
Among Republicans, however, 31 percent favored civil unions while 61 percent opposed them. PPP polls are typically criticized as oversampling Democrats.
Notably, the poll also showed that 77 percent of all voters under age 30 think same-sex marriage should be legal, while 61 percent of independents support it.
Tim Hoover: 303-954-1626 or email@example.com | <urn:uuid:9bb2f473-24d3-4885-9315-e57001e9745e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.denverpost.com/legislature/ci_20632112/colorado-house-speaker-set-trend-aside-opposing-civil | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967252 | 1,187 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Lincoln- Gov. Dave Heineman, along with members of the Governor's Youth Advisory Council, announced Monday seven vacancies on the council with members from Districts two and three especially needed.
The council is facilitated by Nebraska Children and Families Foundations.
"I want to applaud the interest these young people have taken in civic issues," Gov. Heineman said. "These students are the future leaders of our state. I want to encourage more young people to be involved in public service."
Members meet quarterly to review pending legislation, discuss issues impacting youth, learn about politics and share this information with their individual communities.
Additionally, the council represents young people from their economic, cultural, geographic and familial backgrounds in discussions about important issues. This is done through regular meetings with the Governor and an annual luncheon with State Senators during the legislative session.
They provide input on topics including education, health, foster care, economic development and alcohol, tobacco and other drugs.
"As a youth delegate of the Nebraska Governor's Youth Advisory Council, I am privileged to have a voice in our state government," said Justin Korth. "Meeting with Governor Heineman is a profound opportunity for us to represent the youth voice from across Nebraska. Being the future leaders of our state, this exceptional opportunity to meet with Governor Heineman is a very rewarding experience."
The council is developing a video about the council and its impact.
A series of videos are being developed that will highlight particular issues, legislative and political processes and other important topics to encourage their peers to engage civically.
Created in 1993, the Governor's Youth Advisory Council provides an opportunity for young people ages 14 through 19 to be explore the legislative process, the role of the executive branch and encourage their peers to be more civically involved. This council informs the governor on issues impacting Nebraska's young people. Up to twenty-five youth can serve on the council with equal representation from each legislative district.
Current members of the council are Brent Comstock, Auburn; Jeffrey Hornung, Davey; Jeffrey Wallman, Filley; Ashlee Ernst, Lincoln; Aya Hinz, Lincoln; Connor McDonald, Lincoln; Emilio Ramiez, Lincoln; Leah Abebe, Lincoln; Katherine Cole, Tilden; Akansha Jain, Omaha; Katherine Baxter, Omaha; Nimansha Jain, Omaha; Sujaytha Pakinikar, Omaha; Connor Russell, Curtis; Ashley Bykerk, Grand Island; Patrick Lowe, Kearney; Justin Korth, Randolph; and Morgan Tranmer, Wilber.
Applications are available on the Nebraska Children and Families Foundation website at www.nebraskachildren.org or by calling 402-817-2003. | <urn:uuid:50f0e40e-add4-4473-a2f5-f3952927c773> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nebraska.tv/story/20960211/gov-seeks-out-youth-to-fill-vacancies-on-youth-advisory-council | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931957 | 562 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Several jurisdictions in southern Nevada have begun enforcement of the next edition of construction codes, including the Southern Nevada Electrical Code, which is based on the 2008 National Electrical Code® (NEC). Jurisdictions include the cities of Las Vegas, North Las Vegas, Henderson, Boulder City, Mesquite, as well as Pahrump Regional Planning District, Clark County, and Clark County School District.
The process to update the codes began in 2009 with formation of the code subcommittees by the Southern Nevada Building Officials (SNBO). Each subcommittee reviewed the new editions of the assigned codes and proposed amendments. The stated desire of the building officials was to minimize amendments; they asked for documentation and rationale for all submissions.
For the electrical code, several existing amendments were eliminated and there was discussion on other modifications. Some new NEC requirements also were reviewed. Two provisions that generated significant discussion were the expansion of arc-fault circuit interrupters (AFCI) and tamper-resistant receptacles (TRR). Based on direction from building officials, there was little or no justification to alter or remove these provisions.
While the reduction in local amendments and inclusion of major revisions to the 2008 NEC should be seen as a significant step toward meeting NEMA’s goal of adoption without amendment, it should be noted that adoption of this set of codes is advisory. Each individual jurisdiction must adopt the codes separately.
In the name of consistency, building officials strongly recommend adoption of the codes as recognized by SNBO. As a word of caution: there are reports that some of the local jurisdictions might modify some of the SNBO-recommended provisions, notably the TRR requirements. NEMA will continue to monitor the local adoption activities in the area and will report on any new developments.
Joe Andre, Field Representative | email@example.com | <urn:uuid:c1878caa-5258-45f9-8966-99523cc51262> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://nema.org/News/Pages/Southern-Nevada-Code-Updates.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954906 | 374 | 1.710938 | 2 |
President Obama on Tuesday twice used MSNBC’s slogan “lean forward” while addressing Red Cross headquarters in Washington, D.C., about relief for Sandy victims.
First he said this (video follows with transcript and commentary):
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We are going to continue to push as hard as we can to make sure that power is up throughout the region and obviously this is mostly a local responsibility and the private utilities are going to have to lean forward. But we are doing everything we can to provide them additional resources so that we can expedite getting power up and running in many of these communities. There are places like Newark, New Jersey, for example, where you have 80 percent, 90 percent of the people without power.
Later in his remarks he said this:
OBAMA: We can't have a situation where that lasts for days on end. And so my instructions to the federal agency has been do not figure out why we can't do something. I want you to figure out how we do something. I want you to cut through red tape, cut through bureaucracy. There is no excuse for inaction at this point. I want every agency to lean forward and to make sure we are getting the resources where they need -- where they're need as quickly as possible. I want to repeat, my message to the federal government, no bureaucracy, no red tape, get resources where they're needed as fast as possible, as hard as possible.
What does “private utilities are going to have to lean forward” even mean? Or “I want every agency to lean forward?”
Is that opposed to leaning backwards or not leaning at all?
In the case of MSNBC, we know what “lean forward” means? As was announced in October 2010 when it unveiled its new slogan, “Cable news network MSNBC said Tuesday it is launching a two-year, multimillion-dollar marketing campaign, embracing its politically progressive identity with the new tagline ‘Lean Forward.’”
Was Obama asking private utilities and every agency to embrace their politically progressive identities?
Or was the president reciprocating love for the so-called “news network” that adores him. After all, Chris Matthews practically demanded the president start watching MSNBC moments after Romney shellacked him in the first debate earlier this month.
Maybe Obama took Matthews’ suggestion and now can’t get “lean forward” off his mind.
This originally appeared on FoxNews.com.
As a follow-up, the Blaze noted Tuesday that as Obama made this statement, the slogan "Lean Forward" scrolled on MSNBC:
Now THAT'S entertainment.
On the flipside, I have received comments from FoxNews.com readers that "lean forward" is a military term.
One interested party wrote, "It is derived from the saying 'leaning forward in the saddle' to describe taking aggressive or proactive action." Another said it referred to "leaning forward in the foxhole."
As Obama was never in the military and doesn't appear to be all that enthralled with it, this connection seems like a stretch.
On the other hand, with only six days before the elections, and the President wanting to look like a strong leader in response to Sandy, it's possible one of his writers put these words in to appeal to members of the military that would get the reference.
White House press secretary Jay Carney used this phrase Saturday in a statement about the approaching storm.
What that in mind, I'm sure Obama's friends at MSNBC appreciate the plugs even if they aren't intentional. | <urn:uuid:ae5408c6-2b58-403c-b77f-88919f05b83c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://newsbusters.org/print/60049 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974055 | 747 | 1.554688 | 2 |
That's how witnesses described feeling after three people slipped into the foamy waters of the Big Sioux River, in the middle of a Sioux Falls park.
The youngest of three -- a 6-year-old boy -- was able to escape the frigid waters alive. But the other two people -- one of them his sister -- who went after him did not survive.
"These people literally jumped in without thinking of their own safety and trying to rescue that child," Sioux Falls fire Chief Jim Sideras said.
The drama unfolded Thursday evening amidst the 123 acres of Falls Park, which is named -- like the city of Sioux Falls itself -- for the series of picturesque Big Sioux River waterfalls that run through it.
According to Sioux Falls police Chief Doug Barthel, the boy had gone into the several-feet-high foam often generated there by the river, and perhaps into the water itself.
His sister, who Barthel identified as 16-year-old Madison Wallace, at one point went in after him and ended up falling into the surging water.
A bystander, 28-year-old Lyle Eagletail, then went into the river trying to help, said the police chief. He, too, was sucked in -- but not before others at the scene did what they could to save him.
One of those who tried was Napoleon Ducheneaux.
His shirt muddy, he told CNN affiliate KSFY on Thursday how he and two others had grabbed hold of the man who'd fallen into the river.
"We had him ... but he just slipped," Ducheneaux said.
"I heard him say, 'Hold onto me, I'll hold onto you.' That was the last I heard his voice."
Matthew Krier shared Ducheneaux's sense of helplessness about not being able to do more.
"Hopeless, I felt hopeless," Krier, who watched the scene unfold from a nearby bridge, told KSFY. "I wish there was something I could have done."
Authorities from various agencies converged on the scene, their task of finding the two people complicated by zero visibility in the cold, fast-moving, debris-filled waters.
Heavy machinery was brought in to break up and remove ice from the river, so that boats and divers could get in, Sideras explained. New water heading into the river was shut off Thursday night, slowing down its flow, but the task nonetheless remained difficult.
"Everybody here is essentially eyes on the water," said the fire chief. "We're looking for something maybe as small as a knee, a patch of clothing."
During the day Friday, the rescuers found the body of the rescued boy's sister. Sideras said he talked with her father afterward.
"They are all in a state of shock," the fire chief said. "Our prayers are with them, and we're just trying to help them cope as best we can."
That left authorities with one more person to find. While there's a limited area as to where he may be, that doesn't necessarily mean his body will be easy to spot.
"It's still going to be an issue of where we're going to find him," Sideras said. | <urn:uuid:144a6521-766e-41e3-94ea-93c2bb1619d7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kxly.com/news/Boy-rescued-2-lost-in-South-Dakota-river/-/101270/19340138/-/r1rcni/-/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.987033 | 666 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Where your money goes
BRACE is a “fundraising” charity but it is also, of course, a “fund-spending” charity. While you have been helping us build up our funds, the charity’s Trustees have been making sure that they are spent where they are needed.
In six meetings since November 2011, the Trustees have approved grants of more than £1.3 million. This sum is spread across several research projects in four universities (Bristol, Bath, Cardiff and the West of England).
Research projects generally last between two and three years. The latest round of grants means that BRACE funded research in progress at various times during 2012 has a total value of well over £2 million. Between them, the scientists working on these projects are helping to turn the tide against dementia.
It’s a great achievement and one that belongs to volunteers, donors and BRACE supporters of every kind.
We publish reports on different research projects in our newsletter and details of BRACE-funded research are updated from time to time on our website.
How research grants are approved
The ultimate beneficiaries of our work are people anywhere in the world who might one day develop dementia. To achieve this, we support research in universities in the West Country and Cardiff. Focusing on this region is a sensible strategy for a charity of our size, and we have helped create a formidable and growing network of researchers.
BRACE has its own Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC) under the chairmanship of Professor Stephen Lisney, one of our Trustees. When a researcher approaches BRACE with a proposal, it is first assessed by the SAC to make sure that it falls within our current policy guidelines. If it is acceptable in principle, the proposal is then sent to three carefully selected peer reviewers, all experts in the appropriate area of research.
The SAC then considers the proposal and expert reviews in detail and decides whether to recommend funding. The final decision is taken by the Trustees on the basis of the SAC’s recommendation.
This rigorous process is necessary to ensure that the money you raise is spent where it is mostly likely to be effective in the fight against dementia. | <urn:uuid:e4d2e2a5-5e62-41f2-af73-65d0a2bf5576> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.alzheimers-brace.org/where-your-money-goes | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947862 | 453 | 1.601563 | 2 |
Mass Changes Us
Aug. 28 issue feature: Cardinal Donald Wuerl offers an introduction to the Register's series on the new translation of the Roman Missal.
BY CARDINAL DONALD WUERL
| Posted 8/23/11 at 3:31 PM
The implementation of the new English translation of the Roman Missal provides an occasion for all of us to reflect once again on the meaning and central significance of the Mass. As we prepare to welcome the changes that will go into effect on the First Sunday of Advent, it is a time to renew our own understanding and appreciation of the Eucharistic Liturgy.
In his call for a New Evangelization, our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, pointed out that such an effort entails two aspects: a deepening of our own faith and a commitment to share it. What better way to prepare for the new English translation and, at the same time, participate in the New Evangelization, than refreshing and reawakening in our own minds and hearts our understanding of the Mass, so that we can share it with those who should be with us in the celebration of the great mystery of our redemption?
Blessed John Paul II, in his last encyclical letter on the Eucharist, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, sums up the Church’s ancient teaching on the Mass: “When the Church celebrates the Eucharist, the memorial of her Lord’s death and resurrection, this central event of salvation becomes really present, and ‘the work of our redemption is carried out.’”
The origins of the Eucharist are found in the Last Supper. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches us that “in order to leave them a pledge of his love, in order never to depart from his own and to make them sharers in his Passover, Jesus instituted the Eucharist as a memorial of his death and resurrection, and commanded his apostles to celebrate it until his return; ‘thereby he constituted them priests of the New Testament’” (1337).
In the Eucharist, Jesus has instituted the sacrament in which the very passion, death and resurrection he would undergo would be made present again in our lives in a way that enables us to share in the benefits of the cross. We speak of our dying to sin and rising to new life because we participate in the mystery of Jesus’ death and resurrection. The Church uses the word “re-present” to speak of what is happening in the Mass. The term “Holy Sacrifice” of the Mass is also exact, because sacramentally, but really and truly, the death and resurrection of Jesus are once again made present.
There is only one sacrifice — the self-giving of Christ on the cross at Calvary. Once and for all, Jesus was the victim for our sins, giving himself for our redemption. This one great sacrifice was accomplished by Jesus, the Priest and Victim, who offered himself on the altar of the cross for our salvation. This sacrifice cannot be repeated, but it can be re-presented so that we are able sacramentally and spiritually to enter it and draw spiritual nourishment from it.
In his apostolic exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis (The Sacrament of Charity), Pope Benedict XVI teaches us: “Through the sacrament of the Eucharist, Jesus draws the faithful into his ‘hour’; he shows us the bond that he willed to establish between himself and us, between his own person and the Church. Indeed, in the sacrifice of the cross, Jesus gave birth to the Church as his Bride and his body.”
As we set out to reflect anew on the celebration of Mass and the new English translation that we will use in the liturgy, we should clearly recognize that this is a time to deepen our faith so that we can more fully encounter Christ our Lord and Savior.
In the words of Pope Benedict XVI, “In the sacrament of the altar, the Lord meets us, men and women created in God’s image and likeness (Genesis 1:27) and becomes our companion along the way. In this sacrament, the Lord truly becomes food for us, to satisfy our hunger for truth and freedom.”
What we receive in the Mass we must take into the world. The challenging thing about the Christian faith is that we cannot hold onto it unless we give it away — unless we share it with others. We have received Christ.
The introduction of the new translation and our own preparation to participate more fully in our understanding of the Mass also invite us into the challenge of the New Evangelization, both the need to deepen our faith and to bring it to others — to share it.
Cardinal Donald Wuerl is the author of the new book
The Mass: The Glory, the Mystery, the Tradition.
The Register will feature a story on a different aspect of the new translation
of the Roman Missal in each issue prior to the First Sunday of Advent.
Copyright © 2013 EWTN News, Inc. All rights reserved. | <urn:uuid:0225b46f-b662-41e5-93a0-a3d15b454286> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ncregister.com/site/print_article/30185/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959544 | 1,057 | 1.84375 | 2 |
As Eleanor Clift of Newsweek sounds the alarm bells in her best Walter Cronkite fashion, we come to a critical point in time in the Iraq War, and the larger War on Terror. A tipping point can be reached from which there can be no turning back, and we are flirting with it in Iraq. This point has little to do with military conditions on the ground, and everything to do with public opinion.
For once, comparisons with Vietnam are apt, for as surely as a day came when public opinion forced Nixon's hand, the Bush Administration will find itself in a similar quandary if they don't get on top of the public relations game. With the benefit of hindsight, it's clear that we should not have disbanded the Iraqi army, but instead offered incentives to bring it under control. We should have imposed martial law, and not lifted it until it was prudent to do so. By not doing so, we have created a situation where we are bleeding troops and money.
What's to be done? Have we, then, lost? The answers are plenty, and of course not. If we left today, just packed it up and moved out completely, we have still accomplished the majority of our mission in Iraq. We have deposed the Butcher of Baghdad, ended his payments to Palestinian suicide bombers, paved the way for Iraqi democracy, and seen a brief flowering of further democratic hopes in places like Lebanon, so long under the boot of Syria, and Egypt. These are not small things, and indeed, arguably constitute victory.
Still, there is a growing unease with what seems to be a lack of progress. By some measures, the reality matches the appearance. Far too many Americans, and Iraqis, are dying violent deaths at the hands of terrorists. The costs of the continued operations are astronomical, and basic security is not being provided consistently. In other ways, though, we suffer from both the lack of will and the lack of opportunity to provide good news as a counterpoint.
Efforts like Arthur Chrenkoff's Good News From Iraq series should be undertaken by the administration. Regular briefings by top administration officials from the Pentagon, the State Department, and all other branches should be provided to spotlight the progress being made. President Bush himself should take a public tour, much like he does for issues such as Social Security, and hit the road in support of the initiative. I'm not talking about lying, or misleading; questions will arise from both friend and foe about the continued high casualties and large numbers of insurgents, and those questions should be answered as forthrightly as possible; at least the other view will get a hearing, though.
Why go to the trouble? It's no coincidence that the polls have headed downward since the Iraqi elections, because there has not been a 'TV-friendly' opportunity to spotlight the positive since that occasion, and as a result, the images we see are of mayhem and frightened civilians. We have to make our own opportunities with a savvy media strategy similar to the one that we mount for presidential campaigns, for the stakes are as high as they can be.
For similar reasons, the trial of Saddam must be undertaken with increased swiftness, and it must, of course, be televised worldwide. One way to put tempests in a teapot like Gitmo behind us is to throw as wide a spotlight as possible on the atrocities committed by the despotic deposed regime.
Of course, this will all be for naught if the situation on the ground doesn't improve drastically. We must spare no effort or expense in patrolling borders, examining tactics, providing financial incentives for new recruits, and pressuring Syria to do its part to stop the flow of terrorists across the border. We must also make every effort to let our troops know they have our eternal gratitude, and we have to increase our efforts at building bridges with communities in Iraq.
There are those who say that by invading Iraq, we have lost the wider battle for the hearts and minds of the Arab world. I don't see how that follows; the Islamic fanatics would have hated America no less if we had never invaded, and the secular and more moderate religious Arabs know that the enemy is not America, but the terrorists.
There is very little people like you and I can do about the military operations in Iraq; our military is led by fine men and women, and we can be assured they are doing their utmost to deliver a secure environment. We can make all the difference, though, in the area of public opinion. Here are the websites for the U. S. Senate, the House of Representatives, and the White House. It's easier than ever to contact your elected officials with web forms and e-mail. Please, I urge you, take the time to contact them and let them know you're behind our efforts in Iraq 100%. And while you're at it, check out America Supports You, an effort by the Defense Department to provide support in numerous ways to our men and women in harm's way. Just imagine how good it would make you feel, if you were stationed in Iraq, to hear from good Americans how important the job you're doing is. Let's not lose through public opinion what we've shed so much blood and treasure to win on the ground. | <urn:uuid:83743c74-42cb-48f2-b545-daeb21c779e1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://decision08.blogspot.com/2005/06/iraq-status-report-as-i-see-it.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972523 | 1,075 | 1.507813 | 2 |
None of the officials who spoke to CNN would discuss the issue for full attribution due to the sensitivity of the issue.
The intelligence was strong enough for President Barack Obama to issue a public warning to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Monday, according to one of the U.S. officials.
"I want to make it absolutely clear to Assad and those under his command -- the world is watching," Obama said at a speech at the National Defense University in Washington.
"The use of chemical weapons is and would be totally unacceptable. And if you make the tragic mistake of using these weapons, there will be consequences and you will be held accountable," he said.
Despite the concern, military officials say there's no imminent plan for U.S. military action. But the military has been planning for various scenarios and has assets in the region should Obama order a strike.
Officials note that regional allies like Jordan also have military capabilities and have been training, and are standing by.
While officials would not discuss U.S. military options, military officials speaking more generally have said that striking the sites would not be a good idea because ensuing explosions would disperse dangerous chemicals.
Senior U.S. military officials also said Tuesday that there was no indication the situation had deteriorated to the point where Assad would resort to chemical weapons, though rebels continue making advances.
A U.S. official not in the military said that the opposition is "maturing" forcing Assad into a tougher position.
"The regime's territorial control and influence appears to be narrowing. The will to fight looks like it's still there, but Assad's forces are struggling to beat back insurgent gains," the official said. | <urn:uuid:b49350d9-00b8-4ddb-8f02-689713fb3f98> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wpbf.com/news/nationalnews/US-concerned-Syria-may-be-mixing-chem-weapons-at-multiple-sites/-/8788944/17651534/-/item/1/-/40os0d/-/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975815 | 341 | 1.828125 | 2 |
Several weeks after making history with the world's first live-tweeted open heart surgery, Houston's Memorial Hermann hospital is dusting off its social media chops again.
The plan this time? To live tweet a brain operation performed by one of the world's foremost neurosurgeons.
Live social media coverage from the hospital's in-house team will begin Wednesday at 8:30 a.m. EST. The hospital's Twitter page, @houstonhospital, will relay the operation's preparation, play-by-play and wrap up over the next four hours while using the hashtag #MHbrain. The first actual incision is scheduled for 10 a.m. EST.
The operation is called a brain tumor resection. It's designed to remove a tumor to prevent seizures. It will be performed by Dr. Dong Kim, a neurosurgeon who helped lead the team that treated former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords after she was shot in the head in 2011.
A two-inch by two-inch window will be cut in the skull of the patient, who is a young woman, Dr. Kim told Mashable in an interview. The window will leave her brain exposed for between one and one-and-a-half hours. That will give Dr. Kim access to find and remove the tumor, which he says is probably located between two and three centimeters beneath the brain's surface.
"What will come out of this is a detailed, real-time sequence of what happens in a brain surgery through all the stages from preparation, to shaving the hair, to making the incision, to draping," Dr. Kim says. "People are very anxious and want to know what goes on in a brain surgery like this."
While Dr. Kim (left) works in the operating room, a team outside the room will work the social platforms. A brain tumor specialist will be present to help answer questions from the digital audience via Twitter. But the operation will expand to other social networks too.
Natalie Camarata, Memorial Hermann's digital marketing manager, told Mashable the plan to live tweet the operation was hatched following the open-heart surgery, which was viewed an estimated 125 million times through Twitter, Storify and media coverage.
"We had a lot of success with the open-heart surgery and saw there was a lot of interest in seeing what goes into something that's an everyday thing for some people," Camarata says.
Memorial Hermann's open-heart surgery live tweet was a world first, although other hospitals have used Twitter to cover different operations before, including a few brain surgeries. But Camarata and Dr. Kim say Memorial Hermann's social broadcast will break new ground in brain surgery live tweets by sharing the feed from Dr. Kim's fiber optic microscope to give viewers a new level of access and understanding.
"One neat thing about this is we should be able to get actual images of the brain surface itself," Dr. Kim says. "Hopefully you'll see video of the brain actually pulsating with heartbeats."
Do you think this is a good use of social media? Will you follow along Wednesday morning? Let us know in the comments.
Image courtesy Memorial Hermann Healthcare System | <urn:uuid:73306a41-8af5-4bf4-958f-43f4693b593a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mashable.com/2012/05/07/live-tweet-brain-surgery/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956266 | 666 | 1.632813 | 2 |
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is bringing with her an all-star team for the second round of U.S.-India Strategic Dialogue, which will take place later this year. Five heads of agencies are joining her, including the Director of National Intelligence, along with 3 officials who are one rung away from the top of their agencies. They will do useful work, but they need to make their game more ambitious.
When nine U.S. cabinet or sub-cabinet officers travel across nearly ten time zones together, it surely is an indication that the country at the other end of their long flight matters. Despite the impressive lineup, however, the focus is modest: continuing the work begun on homeland security during the visit of Secretary Janet Napolitano; chipping away at the governmental obstacles to expanded investment and technological exchange; bringing more vigorous life to the long-standing but under-performing energy dialogue. There is a long list of trade and investment issues that have been waiting for a solution for upwards of five years; unfortunately, the senior U.S. officials responsible for these aren’t on the delegation. Implementation is pesky but important, so one should not belittle high level dialogues that provide the visibility staff in both governments need to complete the job.
Those nostalgic for another game-changing initiative on the scale of the India-U.S. agreement on civil nuclear cooperation are destined to be disappointed. Neither government is ready for that kind of effort. The U.S. administration is overwhelmed with the debt ceiling, and behind it an equally nasty budget debate. The Indian government, hit by a string of scandals, has not yet regained the confidence it needs to navigate the treacherous waters of parliament.
But even recognizing the two governments’ political constraints and the difficulty (and lack of sex appeal) of implementation, one would have liked to see a bit more vision. I suggest three candidates.
First: a frank conversation about some of the broader strategic issues that concern both countries, such as Afghanistan and the emerging agenda for the United Nations Security Council. With India and Pakistan holding to their plans for talks despite the Mumbai blasts, one hopes the delegation will get a candid briefing on how India assesses the prospects – and will be able to discreetly encourage both sides to make real progress.
Second: Get serious about negotiating a Bilateral Investment Treaty. Preliminary moves have been stymied by differences between the two countries’ standard texts for such treaties, and by the Obama administration’s decision to review its template. Use the high level talent going to Delhi to achieve agreement in principle that both sides will need to deviate from their models, and get on with the job.
Third: There is a visionary goal out there, even if neither country is ready to embrace it yet: a free trade agreement. The delegation should at least get people talking about the idea – and why it could make the India-U.S. partnership truly strategic. | <urn:uuid:ac03f7c2-fa8d-4f72-9bac-131ba6483598> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2011/07/18-clinton-india-schaffer?rssid=indias+economy&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BrookingsRSS%2Ftopics%2FIndiasEconomy+%28Brookings+Topics+-+India%27s+Economy%29 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952543 | 605 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Supap Kirtsaeng, a native of Thailand attending college in the U.S., found a clever way to help pay his way. He had his family in Thailand buy and ship to him textbooks which he then resold at a profit netting him around $100,000.
Normally if you purchase a book, or music CD or even a computer you have the right to resell it. But the publisher in this case took the student to court arguing that because the books were printed and sold abroad the "first-sale doctrine" did not apply.
Today, in an opinion by Justice Breyer, the Supreme Court came down 6-3 on the side of the student.
Retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, right, watched as Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne defended Proposition 200, a state law that requires additional proof of citizenship in order to register to vote. O'Connor was on a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals panel that rejected the law.
When anthrax started showing up in the mail shortly after 9/11 it was detected in the Supreme Court as well. The Court kept to its schedule by moving a few blocks away to convene in the D.C. Circuit's ceremonial courtroom.
I'd been looking for this sketch for several years thinking it had been lost, but in fact had matted and framed it for exhibit and never returned it to the files. I found last week while moving stuff to storage. It shows Solicitor General Ted Olson arguing in Adarand Constructors v. Mineta. Seated in the foreground are NYT's Linda Greenhouse, left, and NPR's Nina Totenberg.
Notables of the civil rights movement sat in the audience as the Supreme Court yesterday heard arguments in a major challenge to the Voting Rights Act, Shelby County v. Holder. From 1965 when President Johnson signed it into law to the election of the first African-American president, the Voting Rights Act has been the most important and successful civil rights law ever passed. So successful that a slim majority of the Court seem to think that its most important part, Section 5, is so outdated it's no longer constitutional.
Justice Scalia,below, to Solicitor General Verrilli on why the were no votes against the 2006 reauthorization in the Senate, "I think that's attributable to a phenomenon that has been called the perpetuation of racial entitlements."
Maryland and 27 other states have laws that permit the taking of a DNA sample, usually by cheek swab, at the time of arrest, much like fingerprinting a suspect. Maryland's high court vacated the conviction of Alonzo King whose DNA, taken during an unrelated arrest in 2009, linked him to a 2003 rape. On Tuesday the Supreme Court heard arguments in Maryland v. King.
I drew this from a great little scale model of the courtroom on exhibit on the ground floor of the Supreme Court building. For something like this you have to get a head start. I'll finished up on argument day.
Another great discovered thanks to the blog Today's Inspiration. I don't know much about the artist Sandy Kossin, but these sketches make me want to find out more. Really exceptional in capturing the animating moment.
A sad day yesterday as a tearful Jesse Jackson Jr. pleaded guilty in a courtroom filled with friends and family, including his father, Jesse Jackson Sr.
The Judge who accepted Jackson's plea, Robert L. Wilkins, had, while a student at Harvard Law, supported the presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson Sr., and offered to recuse himself. Neither side thought that necessary.
Shown above, Jackson is at the lectern flanked by his lawyers. Supporters and family are in the background, while government prosecutors sit in the right foreground.
Jackson's wife, and former Chicago alderman, Sandi Jackson also entered a plea for hiding income. She is shown here with her lawyer, former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois Dan Webb.
Monsanto sells its brand of genetically engineered soybean seed to farmers with the stipulation that they will not replant the crop seed. Indiana farmer Vernon Bowman abided by Monsanto's rules when he planted his first crop, but for a second late-season crop he decided to plant seed purchased from a grain elevator figuring much of it would seed grown from Monsanto's Rounup resistant strain. He was right, but Monsanto sued.
Bowman's lawyer, Mark Walters, had a hard time convincing Justices that once Monsanto sold its seed the patent was exhausted. "The Exhaustion Doctrine permits you to use the goods that you buy," Justice Sonia Sotomayor said. "It never permits you to make another item from the item that you bought."
Monsanto's lawyer Seth P. Waxman said the company "never would have produced what is, by now the most popular agricultural technology in America" if the patent had been so easily exhausted. | <urn:uuid:f02036ff-5582-4fd8-b782-5c9dad2a495a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.courtartist.com/nbc_news/page/2/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974178 | 1,015 | 1.75 | 2 |
The Redwood County Sheriff’s Department reported late last week it received a report regarding a phone scam alleging involvement form local organizations. The Redwood Area Chamber and Tourism Office was contacted July 25 by a Redwood County resident who had become suspicious of a phone call requesting donations which would be used to fund community outreach programs. The caller indicated the fundraising was being done in partnership with the Redwood Chamber of Commerce, the American Red Cross and the Redwood County Sheriff’s Department
As the one being called recognized the discrepancy in the title for the local Chamber, the call was disconnected. The Redwood County Sheriff’s Department reminds residents to never provide banking information over the phone.
These scams have become very common and often sound quite convincing.
Citizens are encouraged to contact the sheriff’s department or one’s local police department if they feel they have been the victim of one of these scams. The incident remains under investigation. | <urn:uuid:e2900fcb-8155-4309-add4-517006756cb8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.redwoodfallsgazette.com/article/20120730/NEWS/307309955/0/googlenewssitemap | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964941 | 193 | 1.507813 | 2 |
A successful chore chart and system that really works.
Having a chore chart that our whole family can utilize is imperative to any family, especially a large homeschool family. We all must work diligently together and be responsible for our own specific daily and weekly tasks in order to maintain a house suitable for adequate living.
The Everyday Family Chore System helped me revise our family chore chart and cleaning system. We all got extremely lazy over the summer.
I have to admit I was impressed with the fact that this 88 paged ebook was created by a busy mom of eight and foster mom of over fifty!
This ebook is divided in three parts. The first two parts include many practical and helpful tips on training your children to complete a task thoroughly. I do believe this is crucial for the large family. A child needs to know what is to be expected of them and trained properly. However, this does take time, but it is worth it in the long run from my experience, as well.
The third part of this ebook entails the Actual Parts: How-To-Do-It Cards and Job Labels. Also, blank labels and cards are provided in the back to personalize to meet your family’s own need.
How it Worked for Us
I used several of the recommended tip suggestions and created a family chore chart with only the daily/weekly chores on a dry erase board designed specifically for a chore chart.
My little ones pick up all the toys that are out of place and put them in their shopping cart or lego wagon three times a day.
My favorite part of the book and probably the most useful for our family of 8 are the How – To -Do- It cards. These cards are designed with detailed instructions on completing a specific task ,such as, set table, dust living room, empty dishwasher and even clean the toaster. There are numerous more printable cards that we printed on heavy card stock and have stored them all in a index card box. These cards can be used with any cleaning system, not just the ones that are recommended in The Everyday Family Chore System. That was a plus for me.
I have gleaned and printed the suggested zone cleaning lists that are recommended in the ebook. We do our zone cleaning on Fridays.
I only have positive things to say about The Everyday Family Chore System. Even if you have the perfect chore chart, the How-To-Do-It cards alone are worth the price.
See a sample of The Everyday Family Chore System.
You can purchase The Everyday Family Chore System for 19.99. It is well worth in and it will bless your family if you are lacking a clean, organized home environment. Visit Everyday Homemaking for other wonderful homemaking tips.
See what the TOS Crew thinks about The Everyday Homemaker.
To read my other honest thoughts of products that our large homeschool family has experienced!
I have received an ebook, The Everyday Family Chore System, in exchange for my honest opinion. No other compensation was given.
Sharing with: WFMW, WLW, Encouraging One Another,RaisingHomemakers,Hearts4Home,SixSistersStuff,Saturday Show & Tell, Weekend Bloggy Reading,The Better Mom, Monday Musings, Mama Moments Monday,Domestically Divine Tuesday, Time – Warp Wife,Frugal Days,What Works,, Flash Blog, Thursday, Show Me Extraordinary, Mommy Teaches, , Inspire Me Monday, Big Family Linkup,Friday Favorites | <urn:uuid:1a5023a3-de8b-4f17-a9ef-870550220667> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.blessedbeyondadoubt.com/chore-chart/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95173 | 732 | 1.5 | 2 |
Search Results for: autism
April 3, 2012
- Autism Increase | Video
- New Numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicate more children than previously thought have autism. The increase is attributed to wider screening. Dr. Bryan Davey of the Arizona Autism Coalition Board and Director of Behavioral Services at ACCEL (Arizona Centers for Comprehensive Education and Life Skills) will discuss the new numbers.
September 4, 2007
- Health Epidemics?
- On this HORIZON special, we examine what some call health epidemics--conditions that appear to be diagnosed more frequently. We look at why asthma, sleep disorders, autism and obesity are becoming common topics of conversation and media coverage.
July 25, 2007
July 11, 2007
- Autism Society of America Conference
- More than 1,400 people will gather in Scottsdale this week for the Autism Society of America’s national conference. Find out more about the event and this developmental disorder that, according to the Centers for Disease Control, affects an estimated 1 in 150 births.
May 29, 2007
- Environmental Legislative Update
- Arizona state lawmakers recently passed two bills dealing with water, one deals with water adequacy and one that sets up a fund for infrastructure. Meantime it looks like Senate Bill 1552 the Air Quality Program--- will go to conference committee for additional amendments next week. The Sierra Club is asking legislators to make it as strong as possible. Joining Horizon is Sandy Bahr, Conservation Outreach Director for the Sierra Club Grand Canyon Chapter.
- We talk with Dr. Doreen Granpeesheh, founder and executive director of the Center for Autism and Related Disorders (CARD), about the study and treatment of autism.
- Arizona Stories: Tempe's Hispanic Heritage
- In the late 19th century, the communities of San Pablo, Sotelo Ranch, Hayden’s Ferry made up what is now known as Tempe. They were thriving neighborhoods, alive with the people and culture of Mexico, despite being hundreds of miles north.
May 8, 2007
- Mesa Budget
- Dial-A-Ride and Saturday transit services are in jeopardy of being cut by the City of Mesa because of its budget jam. We look at what the city is considering.
- We talk with Dr. Doreen Granpeesheh, founder of the Center for Autism and Related Disorders about the study and treatment of autism.
- Arizona Stories
- It's a rough stretch of Arizona road that has enough mystique to draw in tourists from all over the world. Learn more about the Apache Trail and how it was built. | <urn:uuid:da5d3693-3d97-4f2b-8c9c-5ec028c1387b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.azpbs.org/arizonahorizon/keyword_results.php?keys=autism | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941681 | 538 | 1.703125 | 2 |
That is likely several times more than Mitt Romney raised.
In a statement released on Twitter, Obama's campaign said 348,000 people contributed last month and 105,000 people gave money for the first time.
Nearly 98 percent of the month's contributions were $250 or less, it said.
"Since April 2011, a total of 1.64 million people have pitched into own a piece of this campaign," the Twitter message said. Obama's Chicago-based re-election effort has spent the last several months building up a grassroots effort it hopes will help turn out the vote on Election Day in November.
Obama's campaign, the Democratic National Committee, and other joint fundraising committees raised a combined $29.1 million in January.
Campaign officials are concerned that outside groups known as Super PACs could outspend Obama in their quest to put a Republican in the White House.
Super PACs are political groups that can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money to influence political campaigns.
Obama held a five-event fundraising spree on Friday in Chicago and Atlanta, where he was projected to raise nearly $5 million or more.
The president is his campaign's best fundraising draw, and Obama has done roughly twice as many fundraisers at this point in his re-election effort as his predecessor, Republican President George W. Bush, had done at the comparable time.
Not all is peachy for the president on the money front. The Washington Post is reporting that the president's high dollar donations are lagging compared to his 2008 numbers.
But Obama lags behind Republican front-runner Mitt Romney in finding donors willing to give $2,000 or more -- a surprising development for a sitting president, and one that could signal more worrisome financial problems heading into the general election. At this point in the last election cycle, Obama had received such large donations from more than 23,000 supporters, more than double the 11,000 who have given him that much this time. President George W. Bush had more than four times that number of big donations at this point in his reelection.
His Super Pac only raised $2 million in February, far behind GOP Super Pacs. Obama is not going to lose the fundraising battle. But he may fall short of his billion dollar goal when all is said and done. | <urn:uuid:d1a81e09-adf2-4712-825b-1a5a5cbac2c5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/03/obama_raises_45_million_in_february.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979024 | 465 | 1.539063 | 2 |
| With applications stretching across a remarkably wide spectrum, geotextiles continue to make inroads as a key sector for nonwoven materials worldwide. End uses range from civil engineering tasks such as road and railway construction, drainage and soil stabilization to geosynthetics for agricultural and ecological uses. In fact, applications, performance criteria and characteristics vary so widely that some manufacturers have given these specialty fabrics their own classification as “geononwovens.” No matter what they are called, however, these highly engineered nonwoven materials—paradoxically—face both heightened demand in certain markets and tough economic conditions in others.
According to the Dodge Index Report published by McGraw-Hill, in 2005 the U.S. construction market is expected to see modest slippage for housing and strengthening for nonresidential building. “The path for public works in 2005 remains a tough call. State fiscal conditions are showing some signs of improvement, but more spending restraint could be coming from the federal government, and the next multiyear federal transportation bill still awaits passage,” stated Robert Murray, vice president of economic affairs for McGraw-Hill Construction.
Offering a European perspective on the current market climate was Wolfgang Aue, group marketing manager for geotextile specialist Polyfelt GmbH, Linz, Austria. “The geotextile markets in Europe are growing at a fairly low rate. In almost all countries the growth of the construction business is below GDP growth.”
Overall, worldwide growth is slow in the civil engineering area with U.S. sales slightly stronger than in Europe. “Worldwide, we are not yet facing a real recovery of the economic setback,” opined Blair Rawes, director of sales and marketing, civil engineering for Colbond BV, Arnhem, The Netherlands. Mr. Rawes characterized the global marketplace in general as quiet and anticipating recovery.
“As far as Colbond is concerned, we notice growth in the building industry market segment in the U.S. In Europe, tunneling shows strong growth, while the Eastern European countries exhibit substantial increases with Enkagrid in soil stabilization projects,” he said.
In terms of specific growth sectors, steady and sustained growth continues in drainage, separation and stabilization applications. Agriculture and construction are both on the rise and geocomposite products have outpaced industry growth in a number of applications. Geographically, the largest growth markets are Eastern Europe and Asia, particularly Southeast Asia.
Specialize To Succeed
Historically, geotextiles has been known as a commodity-driven market with high volumes and competitive pricing structures. By adding new characteristics to nonwovens, many roll goods producers are finding new niches and innovative ways to add value to their products. “The nonwoven geotextiles market in general tends to be more commodity in nature,” said Dennis Norman, vice president strategic planning and communication for PGI, North Charleston, SC.
Mr. Norman reported that PGI continues to see opportunities for products that offer value-added characteristics. “Nonwovens are uniquely positioned in their ability to be highly engineered materials that can provide certain qualities. Those companies that can develop a nonwoven product that meets certain needs and can proactively take those solutions to customers will have an advantage.” Mr. Norman added that an example of a product PGI is working on is a material for shrimp farmers to protect shrimp crops from contamination and decrease variability in water temperatures.
Colbond BV is also keeping an open mind when it comes to innovative niche applications. The company specializes in 3D polymeric drainage products, which it sells under the Enkadrain and Colbonddrain brands for civil engineering, building and industrial applications. “Our research strategy focuses on targeted product development, looking for new possibilities and applications by optimally utilizing our core competencies,” commented
Mr. Rawes. In civil engineering, Colbond registers growth in the European tunneling segment where the company provides drainage to new deep base tunnels in Switzerland. This drainage product meets extremely high fire resistance specifications.
You Have To Grow To Win
Despite tough market conditions in certain areas, some manufacturers are gearing up for growth through capacity expansions and new product launches. One company poised for expansion in the geotextile arena is Polish roll goods manufacturer Novita SA. Plans for a new six-meter-wide line for the manufacture of geotechnical nonwovens are underway, with start-up slated for the second half of this year. The new line will enable the company to offer novelty products and thus enhance its portfolio. In addition to expanding Novita’s range of geotechnical nonwovens, the new line is also expected to improve the products’ resistance parameters. “The specialty materials will make our entire line of products more attractive and competitive,” commented Radoslaw Muziol, vice president, sales and marketing for Novita.
“Up until now, Novita has concentrated on servicing its domestic market, the aim being to achieve a leading position among Polish geononwoven producers. With our new line, we will be ready to compete with manufacturers all over the world, and our portfolio will be in line with the largest European concerns in terms of quality,” offered Mr. Muziol. He added that while Novita is considered one of the most versatile producers among both domestic producers as well as importers in Poland, numerous EU manufacturers have been much more active in Poland since the country’s accession to the European Union last May.
Russian company Komitex JSC has taken on a similar expansion strategy in response to year-on-year growth in the Russian market. In 2004 the company added a Dilo needlepunch line—the first to come onstream in Russia— which has improved the quality of Komitex’s geotextiles, broadened its product range to include 100-1000 gpsm weights and a 5 meter maximum width and bumped capacity to 30 million square meters per year.
In addition to its roll goods focus, Komitex also operates its own polypropylene production line. “Installation of this line provided us assurance of availability and quality of the raw materials necessary for geotextile production,” stated Komitex’s vice president Victor Pshunetlev.
Adding Value Where It Counts
Another noteworthy growth strategy for producers has been the introduction of new, value-added products for highly specialized geotextile applications. In the agricultural sector, one such product is PGI’s patent-pending Agriban agricultural barrier product line. The spunbond polypropylene-based product is designed to protect such crops as bananas by forming a multifunctional barrier around the banana bunches, protecting them from physical external damages, diseases and pests without insecticide use. Because it is not perforated, the product offers a full physical barrier as well as breathability and UV-resistance.
“Nonwoven fabric-enhanced performance products available through the Agriban brand by PGI are proving to be a very competitive alternative to existing polyethylene film products,” Mr. Sánchez continued. The technology base developed by PGI in support of the Agriban barrier product line has been found to enhance fruit coloration, minimize sunburns, achieve a better distribution of the fruits into the bunch from top to bottom, increase the generation of ripening gases and provide an outstanding physical barrier to keep away not only insects but other physical elements such as dust and volcanic ash.
Also from PGI in the agricultural sector is “Agribon,” which is used to protect plants and crops from insects and cold weather. “Used as a crop cover, Agribon creates a stable, protected environment from seed to maturation,” Mr. Sánchez said. The product was launched 10 years ago and continues to grow in usage, having achieved an 80% marketshare in Latin America. While most of the growth has been in the Latin American region, worldwide sales are increasing.
Other Key Geotextile Innovations
The latest innovation from SI Geosolutions, Chattanooga, TN, is its Pyramat with X3 fiber technology. Previously introduced in its line of conventional stitch-bonded turf reinforcement mats, the unique shape of the X3 fiber helps capture more seed, more soil and more water for faster vegetation growth. The high performance turf reinforcement mat is a permanent, non-degradable rolled erosion control product that is composed of UV-stabilized, synthetic fibers that are processed into a three-dimensional matrix.
New from Colbond BV is its Enkadrain B10 product, which the company reports has achieved significant success in Europe since its launch in mid-2004. Enkadrain B10 is a light and flexible composite matting made up of a drainage core of looped polypropylene filaments that give it a high drainage capacity. This is provided on one or both sides with a nonwoven filter fabric. The components are thermally bonded together over the entire contact area. Each of the nonwoven filters extends 100 mm to one side of the core in opposite directions.
Also in 2004, Enkamat II was introduced in the U.S. Designed as a solution to erosion control problems, Enkamat II is a next generation turf reinforcement mat combining the technology of the original Enkamat with cutting edge developments of fiber-reinforced biodegradable materials. Featuring a 95% open structure, the product creates the optimum micro-environment to enhance seed germination and plant emergence. The biodegradable component of Enkamat II is designed to create the right environment to enhance seed germination by insulating the seed bed, absorbing and retaining optimal moisture.
For Polyfelt GmbH, new geotextiles products have come in the form of reinforced high strength geotextiles with different kinds of polymeric yarns such as the Polyfelt Rock HM, which features a bicomponent mix of polypropylene and aramide. Also new from Polyfelt is Geodetect, which is an innovative geotextile-based monitoring system. It consists of Polyfelt Rock PEC high strength geotextiles equipped with optic fibers linked to a monitoring device and a PC or laptop.
The system is designed to increase the safety of civil-engineering infrastructure through cost-effective predictive maintenance, especially in sensitive areas. Geodetect is a system developed for the measurement of strain in application areas such as roads and railways, retaining walls, tunnels and other underground structures and pipes (for gas, water or oil).
In other Polyfelt news, at the beginning of the second quarter of this year, the company will bring onstream a 9500-ton, high performance geotextile line in Linz. The E11 million investment is designed to increase production capacity for geotextiles and further develop the company’s own cutting-edge technology. Polyfelt’s Linz site is expected to benefit from its close proximity to new EU members and the other growth markets of Central and Eastern Europe. Additionally, the company’s newest sales office in New Delhi is expected to help Polyfelt gain a foothold in the booming Indian market for geotextiles.
Powerful Pricing Pressure
Offsetting this push toward innovation in the geotextiles market is an undercurrent of serious concern from manufacturers regarding the current raw material situation. Due to resin cost hikes, producers are being forced to pass on price increases to customers throughout the industry.
According to SI’s director of marketing Deron Austin, “There are four key factors impacting the continued escalation of polypropylene resin: (1) crude oil prices are close to $50 a barrel; (2) the demand in the U.S. has increased 6.7% and exports are up 20.6%; (3) historically, there have been other, more profitable end uses for propylene–the feedstock used to produce polypropylene resin; and (4) resin producers are currently operating at over 97% capacity.”
Mr. Austin added that SI Geosolutions’ parent company SI Corporation is one of the largest independent users of polypropylene resin in the world, consuming more than 400 million pounds per year.
As far across the globe as Poland, manufacturers are feeling the same squeeze when it comes to raw material pricing. For Novita, in addition to constant price increases, the current climate has resulted in a lack of security due to the fact that only short-term supply contracts are available. “The raw material for the manufacture of geononwoven and geosynthetic materials is crude oil. Any fluctuations in the oil market directly affect this market,” said Mr. Muziol. “Considering the fact that long term raw material deliveries are necessary to complete major investments and the fact that purchase prices are steadily rising—there is a substantial risk in being involved in this market,” he commented.
For Colbond BV, another company reporting “soaring” raw material costs, one possible response is replacing or combining raw materials. “This, however, is no short term action and requires careful and thorough consideration prior to market introduction,” said Colbond’s Mr. Rawes. He explained that effective January 2005, Colbond increased prices worldwide for its entire product range, with the increase in the 8%-10% range. “Since January 2003, polyester, polyamide and polypropylene chips costs increased 30%-45% (20% of which happened in 2004) and a turnaround has not yet been observed,” he said. “We delayed the price increase for as long as possible; however, the magnitude of cost inflation unfortunately leaves us no other option than to pass on part of the costs to the customers.” | <urn:uuid:26e60e8e-3629-446d-8e50-6197a92a9a4d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nonwovens-industry.com/issues/2005-04/view_features/geononwovens-hang-tight/contents.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940665 | 2,906 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Public interest architecture.
If you couldn’t already tell by the diversity of the tag cloud down on the right, I have a pretty wide range of interests (even within the single category of design). If you ask me which one I care most passionately about, however, I have a clear answer: public interest architecture.
In 2008, Metropolis Magazine announced that “a new breed of architect has emerged.” Anna Muoio of Continuum, a “global innovation and design consultancy” with offices everywhere from Boston to Seoul, is quoted in Change Observer this past June as saying: “We are finding increasingly that young design talent cares and wants to work at a place where they can feel and see the impact they have in the world.” I consider myself a young design talent striving to be part of this new breed; and I very much believe that designers need to be considering the social impact of their projects – much the same way that they would consider the environmental impact.
You may be wondering why today is the occasion for this relatively momentous post. It’s not post number 50 or 100 (it’s just number 158), but it is going to preface a week of posts inspired by the Architecture for Change Summit and the City Lifters panel discussion. If you do a little clicky research, you’ll notice that many of the following posts could have only been written after their publish date. Could we just let that slide? I promise it will be worth it.
September 21′s daily design idea is seek out opportunities to explore what matters to you most. | <urn:uuid:c933f5eb-4bb3-41d8-9c69-8f302c14242d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://dailydesignidea.wordpress.com/2010/09/21/public-interest-architecture/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962136 | 331 | 1.507813 | 2 |
This spring’s Digital Library Federation forum, the last under DLF as an independent organization, included a session for “lightning talks”, where speakers take 5 minutes or less to present an idea or make a demonstration. Here are the remarks I prepared for the one I gave, building on some recent discussion of the Google Books Settlement. I’ve added some links to provide a bit more context to these remarks.
Like many other folks, I’m excited about the Google Books settlement, and the possibility that millions of out of print books may become available for our patrons to search and read online. I think the services that Google proposes could greatly expand the scope and the usability of our book collections.
But I also appreciate the concern expressed over some of the details of the settlement: in particular, the concerns over the monopolies that it creates. Monopolies have a tendency to impose increasingly onerous terms on consumers. They may raise prices to levels that make it difficult for libraries to fulfill their independent missions. They may also pay insufficient attention to concerns like privacy or intellectual freedom that are important for many of our readers.
A lot of people have commented on Google’s monopoly here, but the settlement actually creates another monopoly, one that may be more problematic, and that’s the Book Rights Registry. The name suggests a passive store of information, but in fact it’s an active agent that has the power to negotiate and set terms of access on behalf of publishers and authors for millions of out of print books. This is the body—and the only body—that will set the default wholesale prices for copyrighted books, whether they’re provided by Google or by anyone else that might get similar rights in the future.
And the information the registry maintains might not be what’s most useful to libraries and the public. As agents for copyright holders, they’re likely to keep very good records about who claims rights to various books, and who you should pay if you want to use them. But they won’t have much incentive to determine, for instance, that a particular work is actually in the public domain. As we saw in yesterday’s first panel, many works published after 1922 actually are public domain, but it’s often very difficult for someone to find this out. And I’ve already heard some folks advise publishers to claim anything they might have rights to, if there’s any uncertainty about its status. So there needs to be some counterbalance to the claims made by commercial publishers and rightsholder organizations.
That’s why I wonder whether it might be a good idea to imagine a sort of “Reader’s Rights Registry”, that would serve as a counterbalance to the Book Rights Registry. The reader’s registry would track information and advocate on behalf of readers and libraries. For instance, it could compile facts related to public domain status or open content licenses, and share these facts widely with the community. It could press Google and other vendors to keep prices affordable, and to make it easy for readers to protect their privacy. It could track books withheld or withdrawn from full text access, for whatever reason, and work to provide access through alternative channels where appropriate. It could press Congress or the Justice Department for reasonable and nondiscriminatory blanket licensing of orphan works and out of print works.
I’m not saying we necessarily have to create a brand new organization to do these things. They could be done by an existing organization, or set of organizations, or a newly merged organization. What’s; important is that we find a way to articulate what our readers need from mass-digitized book services, gather appropriate information to support these needs, and organize the resources to make that a reality. We shouldn’t wait for someone else, whether Google or the courts, to do it for us.
There’s also more work to be done in digitizing copyright registrations and renewals. I’m working on some of that now, and would be glad to talk about it later on. Google also is doing its own digitization of the complete Catalog of Copyright Entries, and plans to release it publicly. I’m looking forward to that.
Hathi Trust is also doing important work. As we heard yesterday, they’re doing their own copyright research on their books, and I hope they’ll eventually open up their research registry for the library community to use and contribute to. The scope of activities one might imagine for a Reader’s Rights Registry is a bit broader than what Hathi Trust is currently doing, and it would require a broader base of support that what Hathi Trust has now. But they’ve made a very good start on many of the kinds of independent activities I think we’ll need.
I know that all our libraries are going through difficult times in this economy, and any sort of external investment or organizational overhead can be hard to justify these days. But these mass-digitized collections could seriously reshape the nature of research and reading in the years to come. So I think it’s worth our putting some careful thought into how we want to influence that reshaping. Whatever happens in the courtroom in the next few months, we should marshal the information, the will, and the organization to make sure our readers will be well-served. | <urn:uuid:2d63863c-69d0-44c0-8e48-73b8440c93e3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://everybodyslibraries.com/2009/05/05/do-we-need-a-readers-rights-registry/?like=1&_wpnonce=84af3d0b4c | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953846 | 1,113 | 1.578125 | 2 |
Every generation seems to re-discover Louis Prima. Disney fittingly turned him into a jovial primate for The Jungle Book in 1967, David Lee Roth did a note-for-note cover of "Just a Gigolo/I Ain't Got Nobody" in 1985 and most recently, Brian Setzer and other Swing revivalists have used his sound as a template. Prima was a longtime veteran of the jazz scene who struck gold in the 1950s by mixing his Louis Armstrong influences with swinging jazz, throbbing Jump Blues, early R&B and Neapolitan zaniness. Just by itself, his music was unforgettable; but when combined with his hilariously brash sense of showmanship, Prima became unstoppable. Backed by saxophonist Sam Butera's band and a succession of straight-faced female foils (the finest being the angelic Keely Smith, who went on to achieve major success as a solo artist), Prima literally had "the wildest show in town" while also penning such standards as "Sing Sing Sing," and "A Sunday Kind of Love." His bawdy act excited the sex-starved masses of the Eisenhower era, earned respect from jazz hepcats, and was studied and appreciated by greasy-haired teenagers growing up on rock 'n' roll. While Prima's recorded output suffered when he left Capitol Records for supposedly greener pastures, he remained a very popular live act well into the '60s. | <urn:uuid:986e3f94-891d-4e1c-a1f7-8d1a19735bee> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.rhapsody.com/artist/louis-prima | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97835 | 303 | 1.617188 | 2 |
Parental Rating +18 (Available in both Print & E-Book)
Fiction and non-fiction, truth and non-truth yet the subject and the content of all truth may indeed be fiction or in fact, the fiction may be quite close to the truth. All of the characters in this novel are as true as characters can be, but the names aren't the same as the people they represent. Names have been changed to protect all innocents. Contents of the story are both real and present. The actual murder(s) in question have been solved; therefore, all places, names and references remain fiction.
Wallowa Country is a magical place in Northeastern Oregon where the fictional story takes place. It is a majestic region of untapped contours still as remote from urban civilization as any forested place within the developed world. Much of the story did happen and details of the events are as 'real' as any mediated present-day news report. Most of the fiction in the documentation of the story fills gaps where the mind demands knowledge within fiction. Outside of the novel, truth still wonders in the same darkness as ghost vapor in Mountain Meadows. This book is dedicated to Kaelin and her kindred sisters, who brought her back to life, and to Peter Matthiessen for the charm and style of Mister Watson.
The Murder of Kaelin is particularly dedicated to the tens of thousands of lost young runaways whose fates are usually never known. My dedication goes out to a multitude of young ones who disappear into the dark of our cities and to those who crawl into the black places in our rural forests destinies are as acrid as tortured victims 'round the world.
E-Book Price: $5.99 | <urn:uuid:bfc44141-3373-4c6c-bc84-e9416d02e17e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://stores.story-e-books.com/-strse-83/%22The-Murder-of-Kaelin%22/Detail.bok | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959446 | 354 | 1.664063 | 2 |
CHARLOTTE, NC – Whatever solutions are ultimately found to the challenge of developing a new energy policy, one thing is certain: those companies that take the lead in alternative energy technology today will position themselves as major players in the global economy tomorrow.
That was the consensus among the industry leaders who shared the stage at the “Energy, Inc.” conference in Charlotte on April 23, 2010. And while the speakers addressed national energy policy as well as international competition and trade, the event centered on energy sector growth in the Carolinas and, specifically, the Charlotte Region.
Having recently re-branded itself “The New Energy Capital,” the longtime banking center is quickly re-inventing itself as an international hub for energy research and production, according to executive vice president of the Charlotte Regional Partnership, Kenny McDonald: “We want things to be imagined here, designed here, manufactured here, maintained here, and distributed from here.”
New Opportunities, New Challenges
Overcoming the challenges involved in making such a transition, however, is no easy task. To work toward solutions, a consortium of companies, educational organizations, chambers, and economic development groups – coordinated by the Charlotte Regional Partnership – was developed. As these local and global players began to promote the region as an energy hub, the Charlotte Business Journal committed to holding an annual Energy, Inc. conference.
The inaugural conference’s panel members were as diverse as the opportunities and challenges discussed. French-born nuclear power booster and CEO of AREVA North America, Jacques Besnainou, together with Randy Zwirn from Siemens Energy, Jim Rogers from Duke Energy, and Tom Skains from Piedmont Natural Gas, touched on nearly every aspect of the carbon-neutral energy economy. The panelists predicted significant growth not only in nuclear power but in wind, solar, and natural gas.
Following the CEO panel, McDonald discussed the many ways his organization is already working to address the challenges the region faces in becoming an energy leader. “From assisting relocating companies with site selection in the region to placing signs outside the Charlotte Airport that let people know the moment they arrive that this is The New Energy Capital, we are now transforming our economy from one built on banking to one built on the energy solutions of tomorrow.”
While the panelists agreed that growth in these fields could dramatically impact the economy of the Carolinas, they expressed some concern over factors that could inhibit growth, including an aging workforce and a lack of traditional craftsmen, such as the welders, parts manufacturers, and contractors needed to build and maintain new energy-producing facilities. But these challenges present enormous opportunities for local suppliers. “We need the small suppliers to be advocates for new energy solutions,” Besnainou says.
A Solid Foundation for Growth
Top-flight engineering programs from the Charlotte Region and throughout the Carolinas already exist – including the University of North Carolina–Charlotte, North Carolina State University, the University of South Carolina, and Clemson University – to meet the emerging infrastructure demands. But new initiatives are also being launched in the region. The highly touted Energy Production Infrastructure Center (EPIC) at UNC-Charlotte was the only newly funded university program by the North Carolina legislature in 2009, and has helped UNC-Charlotte’s engineering college become one of the fastest growing in the nation. And the Nuclear Systems Technologies program at Midlands Technical College in Columbia, SC, began training a new generation of nuclear technicians in August 2009.
Having recently re-branded itself “The New Energy Capital,” the longtime banking center is quickly becoming an international hub for energy research and production. American and foreign corporations are looking at the entire Charlotte Region as a place for new development and growth. Numerous companies, educational organizations, chambers, and economic development groups throughout the Carolinas are helping the Region establish itself as a global player in the new energy economy. Some of those include:
Investment is also pouring in from the federal government, as a US$9 million grant from the Department of Energy was awarded to nine historically black colleges and universities in South Carolina and Georgia in March of 2010. The grant money is intended to help launch several training programs for students pursuing careers in nuclear materials and waste management.
An “All of the Above” Energy Portfolio
Building on the region’s strengths, the Energy, Inc. panelists envision a regional “energy portfolio” to be made up of traditional and alternative energy technologies – and are already working to make that portfolio a reality. Piedmont Natural Gas is currently building five new pipelines for liquid natural gas in North Carolina, while Duke Energy is at work on a pair of gas-powered plants that will be supplied by Piedmont. Siemens is involved in the wind energy research at Clemson and at a new wind farm in North Charleston. Meanwhile, companies like Proterra, the Greenville, SC–based transportation innovators responsible for the zero-emissions Zbus, and Charlotte-based lithium battery manufacturer Celgard are making major inroads in storable energy technologies. Greenfield Power, a Charlotte-based comprehensive solar firm, announced last week that it will build a PV unit that supplies more than 100 percent of the power needed at a Global TransPark facility in Kinston, NC.
Together, these developments reflect what the panelists called an “all-of-the-above” strategy that should be adopted when plotting the future of the energy industry. While such an approach poses further challenges – and while “70 percent of the hardware necessary for renewable energy production is still manufactured overseas,” according to panel moderator Scott Carlberg – suppliers across the Carolinas have emerged, and continue to emerge, to address these exact needs.
Solar module manufacturer Sencera and Innovative Solar Solutions, both based in Charlotte, represent just two companies making serious commitments to regionally based domestic solar hardware production. Closer to the coast, German-based wind turbine parts manufacturer IMO Group announced plans in March of 2010 to open its first U.S. manufacturing facility in Dorchester County, SC, just outside the port city of Charleston. IMO Group’s investment in Carolina-based wind energy technology is estimated at $47 million.
To underscore the potential for domestic manufacturing in the face of overseas competition from countries like China, Zwirn pointed out that Siemens Energy, “has the proven capability to produce domestically all the hardware its plants require for wind energy production.”
The Future Is Now
Just as Charlotte Region leaders are re-branding themselves as global players in the new energy economy, American and foreign corporations are looking at the entire region as a place for new development and growth. And just as two- and four-year colleges across the Carolinas are stepping up their efforts to train the engineers, technicians, and workforce necessary for this growth, measurable progress is being made to level the imbalance between foreign and local technology and suppliers.
As every panelist present at Energy, Inc. made clear, the existing industry is poised to enter a new era where profit and sustainability combine for a better, brighter future. The interest is here, the educational efforts are underway, and the investment capital necessary to move the region forward as a leader in new energy technology continues to pump in. At this point, it’s merely a matter of connecting the dots – and the Charlotte Region has proven it is already hard at work doing just that. | <urn:uuid:a056bb9e-0ab9-4bdc-91ef-82b59d469e6a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.gcbusinessjournal.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=357:global-carolina-profile-the-new-energy-capital&catid=104:global-carolina-profiles&Itemid=139 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949709 | 1,531 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Today, as I await the arrival of Aleksander & Chase, I was reading some Polish / Latin microfilm from the parish of Swiniary (south eastern Poland of today). I was searching for a marriage record for Tomasz Leszczynski & Julianna Kordos. No success in that hunt.
But I did find Julianna’s parent’s marriage record (in 1832) ! So that was exciting. Previously, I had found Julianna’s birth record in the year after her parents were married. But I found a bonus piece of data in an index and again in the Latin Box format of an ancestor of mine. This excited me, because this was the earliest Eliasz found in the parish of Pacanow. His name was Jakob Eliasz, yes, that is E-L-I-A-S-Z (not ELIJASZ as is the Russian form). Jakob was a 40 year old widower from Pacanow who married Katarzyna Paszenska of Oblekon, who was only 23 years old. House #1! That is usually the first house in a village and was most likely the house nearest the church. I am uncertain whether this was house number one in Pacanow or Oblekon ( I am, leaning to Oblekon since this is the Swiniary parish). But that is a bit surprising that a man from Pacanow ventured a bit up stream along the Vistula river to Oblekon to marry a woman. This was marriage on 4th-October-1797, so Jakob must have been born about 1757. So this the only record of I have of an Eliasz in Pacanow in the 18th century. The LDS microfilm for Pacanow spans only the years 1875-1884.
Jakob pre-dates Stanczyk’s 2nd-great-grandfather Marcin Elijasz, who was born about 1819 and who I know died in 1879 at the age of 60 (oh how Stanczyk hates those ages that end in zeroes). On that basis, I assume that Marcin was born in Pacanow in 1819. So Jakob predates Marcin by about 62 years. That makes Jakob about 2 or 3 generations earlier than Marcin. Perhaps, I will be able to add that many generations to my family tree in my lineal descent line. Does anyone out there have a marriage record for Marcin Eliasz (or Elijasz) married to Anna Zasucha? | <urn:uuid:6ca1aef2-d60b-4c5b-aad5-20ee2fae11d8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mikeeliasz.wordpress.com/2011/01/15/1797-marriage-in-swiniary-parish-jakob-eliasz-zuzanna-paszenska/?like=1&source=post_flair&_wpnonce=eb8d9d939c | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970186 | 539 | 1.578125 | 2 |
Search for Syrian Brides Unsettles Refugees in Jordan
Special to The Washington Post.
ZAATARI REFUGEE CAMP, Jordan — Between bitter fall weather and unceasing war at home, Syrian refugees at this northern desert tent camp have enough problems. But fathers like Abu Yousef say they must also contend with something else: older Arab men in search of Syrian brides.
"Of course I would rather her marry a Syrian, someone from our community, but what can we do?" Abu Yousef said of his daughter, whose husband was killed in the Syrian uprising. Although he at first rejected the idea, Abu Yousef said he had consented to an arrangement proposed by a 55-year-old retired Saudi engineer as an opportunity to provide for his widowed daughter, 27, and her three children.
Because most of the hundreds of Syrians who cross into Jordan each day arrive with little more than the clothes on their backs, relief officials and refugees said, offers that include dowries of as much as $5,000 can be hard to resist.
Proponents of the unions said they provide a humanitarian service to the more than 360,000 Syrians displaced throughout the region, often by arranging marriages for Syrian widows who would otherwise struggle to care for their families.
"This is not exploitation. This is generosity," said Ziyad Hamad, whose charity, Kitab al-Sunna, is one of the largest organizations helping Syrian refugees in Jordan.
But many refugees here are vowing to defend their families against the practice, which is being driven in part by websites, classified advertisements and matchmaking networks that target wealthy men in countries including Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.
"Just because we have lost our homes, they think our women are free for the taking," refugee Ibrahim Naimi, 42, said this week as he arranged water pipes in his makeshift cafe at the camp, home to 42,000 Syrians. "We are going to prove that you cannot buy Syrian women."
Refugees and relief officials said increasing numbers of Arab men and matchmakers have made their way to the camp, some of them posing as aid workers. They say the problem is growing along with the camp, near the northern Jordanian city of Mafraq, in part because many refugee families are impoverished and desperate.
United Nations officials said that most of the marriages are brokered and that many are not consensual. The results, they said, include increasing numbers of child brides and marriages that, in some cases, end in abandonment or forced prostitution. U.N. and Jordanian relief agencies estimate that some 500 underage Syrians have been wed this year. | <urn:uuid:8cfb1bcc-5c02-4ddf-bcea-24b2b4f90757> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.northjersey.com/news/international/180659711_Search_for_Syrian_Brides_Unsettles_Refugees_in_Jordan.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981039 | 545 | 1.585938 | 2 |
New Mexico Department of Game and Fish
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, MAY 7, 2012:
ALBUQUERQUE – More than 150 young archers representing schools from across New Mexico will test their skills learned through the National Archery in the Schools Program when they gather Saturday in Albuquerque for the fourth annual NASP State Tournament.
Fifteen-member teams representing at least 10 schools will begin competition at 8:45 a.m. at the National Guard Armory, 600 Wyoming Blvd., NE. Competition will conclude at about 2:30 p.m., followed by an awards ceremony. Admission is free for spectators.
Archers will shoot 15 arrows at 80-centimeter targets 10 meters away, and 15 arrows at targets 15 meters away.
This is the fourth year the Department of Game and Fish has coordinated the National Archery in the Schools program in New Mexico.
SANTA FE – Young hunters and others who need to complete a hunter education course to be eligible to hunt in New Mexico and many other states now have another free option to help them.
The Department of Game and Fish and Huntercourse.com are offering a free online manual and interactive hunter education course that qualifies as the homework requirement for the New Mexico course. The department spent $20,000 to provide the online course and manual to students at no charge through April 30, 2013. It is one of two online courses offered on the Department website, www.wildlife.state.nm.us. The second course, through Hunter-Ed.com, costs $24.50.
New Mexico law requires anyone younger than age 18 to have successfully completed an approved hunter education course before hunting with a firearm or bow or applying for a firearm or bow hunting license.
The department offers two types of hunter education courses: an accelerated eight-hour course for students ages 11 or older, and a standard course that includes 16 hours of class time. Both courses require students to have read the manual and have completed the online or paper homework assignment before the class begins.
SHARE WITH WILDLIFE PROGRAM ACCEPTING PROJECT IDEAS FOR FUNDING
SANTA FE – Share with Wildlife, a Department of Game and Fish program that funds wildlife in need, especially nongame wildlife, is accepting proposals for project ideas for funding consideration during the 2012-13 fiscal year.
Proposals will be accepted through June 1 for projects that benefit New Mexico wildlife through biological and ecological studies, conservation education, habitat conservation, and wildlife rehabilitation. Proposals will be considered for projects that begin from January through June 2013, and run for 12 months or less. Multi-year projects may be implemented through annual re-submission to the Share with Wildlife call for proposals. No matching funds are required.
Details about the types of projects eligible for funding, and how to apply are available on the department website, www.wildlife.state.nm.us. For more information, please contact the program coordinator, Chuck Hayes, firstname.lastname@example.org or (505) 944-5477.
Share with Wildlife is a program of the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, supported exclusively by donations. Its mission is to assist all New Mexico wildlife in need, no matter what species. The program is particularly committed to helping those species that do not receive funding from any other source, including many endangered and threatened species. In the 2011-12 fiscal year, the program spent $165,000 funding 28 projects.
Share with Wildlife was initiated by the state legislature in 1981. The program was created to "provide additional wildlife funds to perpetuate the renewable wildlife resource of New Mexico that gives so much pleasure and recreation to all New Mexicans." The means established for collecting these additional funds was a "check-off" on the state income tax form for those who receive a refund. Share with Wildlife receives most of its funding through the state income tax check-off and federal grants, but also accepts mail-in contributions.
(back to top) | <urn:uuid:c54af0d6-84fb-4291-891a-a719c9ba9cda> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://wildlife.state.nm.us/publications/press_releases/documents/2012/050712releases.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947079 | 820 | 1.84375 | 2 |
Tag Archives: network security
Earlier this week I met with security leaders at some of the largest organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area. They highlighted disturbing trends, in addition to the increased incidence of breaches they see increased:
- Numbers of customer who want to do security audits of their company
- Number of RFPs in which information is required about data security
- Litigation from data security breaches— and occurrences of class action lawsuits—as opposed to regulatory fines driving concerns
So much attention has been placed on defending the perimeter that many organizations feel they are in an arms race. Part of the problem is that it’s not clear how effective the firewalls are. While firewalls may be a part of the solution, organizations are increasingly looking at how to make their applications bulletproof and centralize controls. One of the high risk areas are systems where people have more access than they need to.
For example, many organizations have created copies of production environments for test, development and training purposes. As a result this data can be completely exposed and the confidential aspects are at risk of being leaked intentionally or unintentionally. I spoke to a customer a couple of weeks ago who had tried to change the email addresses in their test database. But they missed a few. As a result, during a test run, they sent their customers emails. Their customers called back and asked what was going on. That was when we started talking to them about a masking solution that would permanently mask the data in these environments. In this way they would have the best data to test with and all sensitive details obliterated.
Another high risk area is with certain users, for example cloud administrators, who have access to all data in the clear. As a result, the administrators have access to account numbers and social security numbers that they don’t need in order to do their jobs. Here, masking these values would enable them to still see the passwords they need to do their jobs. But it would prevent the breach of the other confidential data.
Going back to the concerns the security leaders had, how do you prove to your customers that you have data security? Especially, if it’s difficult to prove the effectiveness of a firewall? This is where reports on what data was masked and what it was masked to comes in. Yes, you can pay for cyberinsurance to cover your losses for when you have a breach. But wouldn’t it be better to prevent the breaches in the first place and showing how you’ve done it? Try looking at the problem from the inside—out. | <urn:uuid:0f4af66f-457c-44d9-bb95-07f55bbc5caf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.informatica.com/perspectives/tag/network-security/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971145 | 527 | 1.5 | 2 |
Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1936 (36.37)
Wrack: From the "Bertoloni Album," 1839
William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 1800–1877)
8 11/16 x 6 7/8 in. (22 x 17.5 cm)
Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1936 (36.37 (25)
Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1936 (36.37)
[Table Set for Tea]: From the "Bertoloni Album," 1839
William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 1800–1877)
Photogenic drawing from a paper negative
Image: 5 1/4 x 8 in. (13.4 x 20.2 cm); sheet: 6 3/4 x 8 5/8 (17 x 21.8 cm)
Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1936 (36.37.36)
6 3/4 x 8 3/8 in. (17.1 x 21.2 cm)
Anonymous Gift and Purchase, Alfred Stieglitz Society Gifts; 2004 Benefit Fund; W. Bruce and Delaney H. Lundberg Gift; The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund, through Joyce and Robert Menschel; Susan and Thomas Dunn and Constance and Leonard Goodman Gifts, 2009 (2009.279)
A young English gentleman on his honeymoon sat sketching by the shore of Lake Como early in October 1833, one eye pressed close to a camera lucida. With this simple draftsman's aid, consisting of an adjustable metal arm fastened at one end to the artist's sketchbook or drawing board and supporting a glass prism at the other, the young man saw a refracted image of the Italian landscape superimposed as if by magic on the pages of his sketchbook. It seemed a simple task to trace the features of the village buildings, lake, and distant mountains with his pencil. But alas, it only seemed simple, he later recalled, "for when the eye was removed from the prismin which all looked beautifulI found that the faithless pencil had only left traces on the paper melancholy to behold."
The would-be artist was William Henry Fox Talbot (18001877). A graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a recently elected Liberal member of Parliament in the House of Commons, Talbot was a true polymath. His intellectual curiosity embraced the fields of mathematics, chemistry, astronomy, and botany; philosophy and philology; Egyptology, the classics, and art history. He had published four books and twenty-seven scholarly articles on a variety of subjects and was a fellow of the Astronomical, Linnean, and Royal Societies. Amid shopping lists and daily reminders, he filled his pocket diaries with the titles of books to read, complex mathematical formulas, and notations of experiments and experiences.
Talbot's frustration that day with the camera lucida led him to recollect his experiences ten years earlier with another drafting aid, the camera obscuraa small wooden box with a lens at one end that projected the scene before it onto a piece of frosted glass at the back, where the artist could trace the outlines on thin paper. The camera obscura, too, had left Talbot with unsatisfactory results, but it was not his own feeble drawings that he remembered after a decade. Rather he recalled with pleasure "the inimitable beauty of the pictures of nature's painting which the glass lens of the Camera throws upon the paper in its focusfairy pictures, creations of a moment, and destined as rapidly to fade away." These thoughts in turn prompted Talbot to muse "how charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably, and remain fixed upon the paper." "And why should it not be possible?" he asked himself. Talbot jotted down thoughts about experiments he could conduct at home to see if Nature, through the action of light on material substances, might be brought to draw her own picture.
In January 1834, Talbot returned home to Lacock Abbey, an amalgamation of buildings incorporating the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century remains of a former abbey about eighty-five miles west of London. Within a few months, he began to experiment with the idea that had occurred to him at Lake Como and soon found that a sheet of fine writing paper, coated with salt and brushed with a solution of silver nitrate, darkened in the sun, and that a second coating of salt impeded further darkening or fading. Talbot used this discovery to make precise tracings of botanical specimens: he set a pressed leaf or plant on a piece of sensitized paper, covered it with a sheet of glass, and set it in the sun. Wherever the light struck, the paper darkened, but wherever the plant blocked the light, it remained white. He called his new discovery "the art of photogenic drawing."
As his chemistry improved, Talbot returned to his original idea of photographic images made in a camera. During the "brilliant summer of 1835," he took full advantage of the unusually abundant sunshine and placed pieces of sensitized photogenic drawing paper in miniature cameras"mouse traps," his wife called themset around the grounds to record the silhouette of Lacock Abbey's animated roofline and trees. The pictures, Talbot wrote, "without great stretch of the imagination might be supposed to be the work of some Lilliputian artist."
Occupied with other activities, Talbot worked little on his invention between the sunny days of 1835 and January 1839, when the stunning news arrived that a Frenchman, Louis Daguerre, had invented a wholly different means of recording camera pictures with dazzling precision on metal plates. Preempted just at the moment when he was beginning to revisit his earlier experiments with an eye toward publication, Talbot scrambled to stake a claim to priority, to produce pictures that might compare favorably with Daguerre's, and to solve the problems of lengthy exposure times and fugitive prints. Well before Daguerre revealed the details of his process, Talbot presented his own before the Royal Society in January and February 1839. At the time of Talbot's announcement, his "art of photogenic drawing" was clearly better suited for recording the shadows of plant specimens, lace, or similar flat objects by direct contactpictures we would now describe as photogramsthan for camera images.
Although such photogenic drawings were beautiful as objects and useful as scientific records, Talbot knew that a fast, permanent, and accurate means of producing photographic images in the camera was the true brass ring, and on September 23, 1840, he found a way to seize it. Talbot discovered that an exposure of mere seconds, leaving no visible trace on the chemically treated paper, nonetheless left a latent image that could be brought out with the application of an "exciting liquid" (essentially a solution of gallic acid). This discovery, which Talbot patented in February 1841 as the "calotype" process (from the Greek kalos, meaning beautiful), opened up a whole new world of possible subjects for photography.
Talbot's early photogenic drawings, such as those in the Bertoloni Album, with their shades of lilac and lavender, remained fugitive, for they were only partially stabilized with a solution of salt. A more permanent means of "fixing" the image with hyposulfite of soda was proposed by Talbot's friend the eminent scientist Sir John Herschel; "hypo" was adopted by Talbot for most prints beginning in the early 1840s and is still used today as a fixer for black-and-white photographs. With all the pieces of a workable process now in place, Talbot set out to promote his invention at home and abroad. He traveled to Paris in May 1843 to negotiate (unsuccessfully) a licensing agreement for the French rights to his patented calotype process and to give firsthand instruction in its use. At home, he demonstrated the commercial viability of his invention by means of a photographically illustrated book, The Pencil of Nature, published in parts beginning in 1844. In less than a decade, Talbot conceived and brought about a wholly new way of making pictures, perfected the optical and chemical aspects of photography, and learned to use the new medium to make complex images for the botanist, historian, traveler, and artist.
Talbot spent the last twenty-five years of his life developing and perfecting an effective photogravure process. That he should have spent so much time developing a process for printing photographs with ink rather than silver salts is not wholly surprising. Talbot's early photogenic drawings are so ephemeral that, despite their exceptional beauty, they can never be exhibited or exposed to light without risk of change. Even his far more stable calotypes fixed with hypo were inconsistent in their permanence, many deteriorating in quick order; a reviewer of the 1862 International Exhibition described some photographs as "fading before the eyes of the nations assembled." Thus, Talbot's search for a photographic process using permanent printer's ink was a final step in the refinement of his earlier, still imperfect, invention. | <urn:uuid:39210cf1-513e-48b0-af83-b8c9d27ca11c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://metmuseum.org/toah/hd/tlbt/hd_tlbt.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964637 | 1,883 | 1.679688 | 2 |
SINTON — Voters will decide in May whether to spend $18 million to build a new middle school in Sinton as part of the district’s ongoing efforts to tighten school security in the wake of the Newtown shooting.
Sinton Independent School District decided to hold a bond election to replace E. Merle Smith Middle School, an open-style campus built in 1956 that lacks the security of newer, closed-style schools that can better regulate visitors.
Visitors can walk on campus or students could disappear without teachers immediately knowing, Principal Jennifer Davis said.
“It’s not unsafe, but it’s not ideal,” she said.
Although district officials for years discussed the need for replacing the outdated school, the Newtown, Conn., shooting that killed 26 children and adults spurred the district to action, Superintendent Steve VanMatre said.
“When you see a whole classroom massacred, it’s a game changer,” he said. “I can have a bad testing year and sleep at night. It will bother me, but I can sleep at night. I can’t have an emergency happen that I’m unprepared for.”
VanMatre said he would rather have formed parent committees and conducted feasibility studies before calling a bond election, but believed that the district needed to take action immediately to protect students.
“We didn’t feel like we could wait,” he said.
The bond election decision comes on the heels of other district decisions made in the Newtown aftermath to amp up school security, including hiring armed security guards, restricting access to the high school and middle school tracks during the school day, and fingerprinting the district’s students, except those who opt out.
VanMatre said he was expecting more backlash to the district’s new security measures, but parents and the community have, in large part, supported the decisions.
“I think most people understand that things have changed,” he said. “Unfortunately, there’s a new normal that surrounds public schools.”
VanMatre said the district wants a new middle school not only to improve safety — “We have asked the architects to make it the safest school in America,” he said — but also to provide a better instructional environment more capable of accommodating new technology.
Lacking central air and heat, classroom temperatures are regulated by noisy portable units that teachers often turn off and on during lessons because children can’t hear. The open-style campus means many students have to walk outside to use restrooms, wind-driven rain makes the outdoor walkways slippery and wet, and wild animals are a common sighting.
In the fall, a dog attacked a coach, biting him on the leg. A nurse was chased by an opossum, which took refuge in a girls bathroom. A district video explaining the bond election shows security camera footage of the nurse walking to the cafeteria then sprinting back again, looking over her shoulder at the opossum tailing her.
Eighth-grader Lenny Sifuentes said he likes the middle school but expressed similar concerns about the outdated campus and animal sightings.
“The school campus is good now, but change wouldn’t hurt,” he said.
Plans call for building a new, larger middle school, with capacity for 150 more students, on the same 52-acre site as the existing school, then demolishing Smith Middle School.
If voters approved the bond, tax rates could increase by 25 cents from about $1.30 per $100 valuation to about $1.55 per $100 valuation. In Sinton, where the average home value is appraised $54,841, average homeowners would pay about $140 more per year in taxes.
That’s a conservative estimate, VanMatre said. He expects new developments, including a proposed liquefied natural gas substation, to boost the district’s tax revenue and reduce the bond’s rate increase on homeowners.
The election will be May 11.
SINTON ISD SAFETY
The Newtown, Conn., shooting in December that killed 26 children and adults spurred Sinton ISD to amp up security districtwide, including
Hiring an armed security guard for each of the district’s four campuses. The guards, who make $18 per hour, started in January.
Fingerprinting the district’s 2,200 students to better track those who ride school buses in cases of emergency. About 10 percent of students have opted out of the digital fingerprinting process, which began last week.
Closing the middle school and high school tracks to the public during the school day.
Changing the high school’s drop-off and pickup procedures to designated areas;
Upgrading the surveillance system by replacing analog security cameras with digital ones and doubling the numbers of cameras.
Source: Sinton ISD Superintendent Steve VanMatre | <urn:uuid:008ea0c3-73ee-4686-a43c-53bf5a2cecf0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.caller.com/news/2013/feb/23/sinton-isd-calls-bond-election-to-replace-middle/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95998 | 1,032 | 1.5 | 2 |
Well, I’ve been so busy with the conference and squeezing a bit of sight-seeing that I am only now getting around to posting the recaps of Thursday and Friday. I would say that my first QIP has been a major success for me personally as I learned an awful lot, including the very important differences between physicists and computer scientists. I have a much better appreciation for how the quantum information community as a whole operates, despite my many years working with APS GQI. Anyway, on to the talks.
Thursday morning’s session began with an awesome talk by Aram Harrow (see arxiv.org:0811.3171v3) on work he performed with Avinatan Hassidim and Seth Lloyd on developing a quantum algorithm for solving linear systems of equations. Now this is something just about anyone with an undergraduate background in engineering, math, physics, computer science, maybe even chemistry or even economics could wrap their head around. Solving linear systems of equations – linear algebra – is one of the most widely used bits of mathematics. For instance, it’s the basis of finite element analysis which forms the backbone of structural engineering. In any case, the idea is to solve the equation (by the way, I highly recommend watching the video if you can, since many of his early slides were hilarious). Here we’re assuming that A is an matrix. If A happens to not be Hermitian, then we have
Of course there are an endless number of classical algorithms out there to solve these types of things (just think back to your linear algebra class or google it). Essentially the goal, of course, is to invert A in order to find x. The efficiency of these algorithms can be compared via their condition number . So, the quantum algorithm is roughly as follows:
is a unit vector. Suppose A is a sparse and that . Then we have
What this algorithm produces is and latex \epsilon$ in a much better run-time than classical algorithms. Specifically, its run time is compared to (assuming I’m reading my notes correctly).
The advantages of this method come from the relatively small and the sparseness of A. The run-time really can’t be improved by much and so this is pretty much the limit on the optimality of the problem (from what I gathered anyway). The algorithm is based on two key primitives that are what invert the action of A: Hamiltonian simulation and phase estimation. Doing so coherently gives either a (destruction) or result. The best lower bound on the run-time with this method is .
Now, comparing this to finite element models, this quantum algorithm can apparently be tweaked to be a bit better than the best finite element models out there, e.g. it can solve thermal conductivity in 36 spatial dimensions. Actually, there are in fact several types of solutions for the quantum algorithm that can be used to compare to Monte Carlo methods. Now, interestingly enough if the run-time could be improved to , it would apparently imply that BQP = PSPACE, though I’ll readily admit I’m not entirely sure I understand why (but I trust they know what they’re talking about). In addition the algorithm also apparently proves BQP-hardness, though again, I’m not sure I understand the details.
One thing they’re looking for is more applications. Luckily, I used to be a mechanical engineer who worked on fluid mechanics. I may have some possibly wicked hard real-world problems that might be a good test for them. For instance, one interesting question Aram suggested is how costly would it be to high-energy theory with low-energy states? Anyway, on to the next few talks, but congrats to Aram on an excellent talk – probably my favorite from the workshop.
Stefano Chesi went next and gave a talk about self-correcting quantum memories in conjunction with a bath that is supposed to improve on the Kitaev model. The connection to the bath was in the weak coupling limit. Further details on this work can be found at arxiv.org:0908.4264. The next talk was by Robert Koenig on quantum computation on Turaev-Viro codes. It was basically cool topological stuff – lots of neat topological diagrams including one I’m calling the upside-down pants diagram. Their paper didn’t have a picture of it, but let’s just put it this way: Todd Brun, who was sitting next to me, noted that it seemed to indicate that crossing one’s legs (which I was doing at the time) is like performing a unitary transformation on a pair of pants (hey, I’m a talented guy). Anyway, there was a lot of cool category and graph theory stuff and it’s a really neat approach to coding. I can’t say I understood every last detail, but it was a cool talk nevertheless.
Mark Howard following that with some more topology/graph theory stuff relating to stabilizer codes. Basically it was about trying to enable universal quantum computation (UQC) or, put another way, how close to that ideal can we get? How much of the quantum computing “power” can we obtain? His work uses a Clifford polytrope with a nifty octahedron lattice (while the geek in me should have been thinking it looked like D&D dice, I’ve been playing Zome Tools recently and kept thinking it looked like something I had built with them). One of his results was that UQC for single-qubit gates reduces to UQC for single-qubit states. Given a noisy operation that violates something, for example, his approach can tell you which measurement to perform. At the moment he’s only tackled unital noise, but non-unital would be useful.
Hui Khoon Ng went next with a simple approach to approximate quantum error correction (AQEC). Prior work has mostly been on perfectly-correcting the CP noise channel asking how far a proportionality factor, , is from trace-preserving (in fact she later defined “perfect” QEC). So what is AQEC exactly? It’s a smaller system that’s used to encode the information while not sacrificing much reliance against noise. You could think about AQEC as an optimization problem. Semi-definite programming methods are one example, though it gives an average performance. What she was interested in was the absolute worst-case performance scenario so that she could come up with something that worked for all channels. What AQEC does is condition perturbation conditions by tossing in an extra factor to the channel. So, for example, take a look at this:
where we have . The are the minimum eigenvalues of and the is traceless.
In any case, she obtained a near-optimal recovery map for all channels with the optimality based on the worst-case fidelity (i.e. she used fidelity to identify her worst-case performance scenario for AQEC).
Following that, Roderich Moessner gave a talk on the statistical mechanics of disordered quantum optimization. Basically – and I find this fascinating – PNP apparently implies the existence of glassy physical systems. Now that’s wild. Now, the main crux of the talk was focused on more graph theoretic stuff. So, for instance, when they do stuff like this (applying graph theory to physical systems) you do things (as Moessner did) such as finding that the number of non-zero energy states depend on the properties of the graph. The punchline of his talk was that their methods provide improved lower bounds on the SAT-UNSAT transition (more complexity stuff).
Julia Kempe finished up the afternoon with a talk on a quantum Lovász lemma. A somewhat minor point I noticed was her “definition” of independent events. I’m still not entirely sure I agree (it’s the cosmologist in me talking). She “defines” them as, given two independent events, it means there is a non-zero probability that each occurs at some point. There’s something vaguely unsatisfying about this from a cosmological point of view, but I am also being cautious by putting things in quotes since her paper might be more rigorous. At any rate, her motivation, similar to the previous talk, revolved around K-SAT. Unfortunately, sitting in the airport almost two days later, I can’t read the rest of my own chicken scratch on the talk. My apologies to both readers and Julia on this.
The conference dinner was held at a lakeside restaurant. While very good, those of us who were still a bit jetlagged (like the poor Japanese guys next to me who had come in to town a bit later than me) started dozing. The main dish wasn’t served until 9 and dessert wasn’t served until 11. In the midst of this, Gilles Brassard (who has shed his beard) gave a nice historical talk on the BB84 protocol. The gestation for the idea actually dated to 1970 and a guy who’s name I have since forgotten (did I mention I was exhausted?). It was a great talk and included plenty of discussion about the failures of getting the idea published. Basically, Gilles said that they couldn’t convince anyone until they built an actual prototype.
Friday morning began with a great talk by Marcin Pawlowski in the principle of information causality. First, let me say that Marcin’s talk was by far one of the absolute funniest at the conference. He began with an awesome overview of just exactly what a physical principle is (this is so interesting from a foundational point of view). In relation to the idea of “reasonability” regarding communication between Alice and Bob, for instance, and relating to T’sirelson’s bound he really tried to explain why it is the way it is. He then began talking about mutual information and I SWEAR he was inches away from saying what I’ve said in my poster – mutual information is a statement of the second law, i.e. and (for isolated systems and where S is the usual thermodynamic entropy) are really the same thing. Plus he brought causality into it which is another thing I’ve been ranting about for years (not that I’m sold on causality being a necessary condition, just that I know it can be related to this). In regards to information causality, the principle is that the sender decides what information is transmitted. I think I could relate this to my CTC communication protocol too, but I’ll have to think about it some more.
Sergio Boixo and Markus Mueller followed with pretty good foundational talks, though I didn’t take too many notes at this point. Both used the CHSH inequalities (which is good stuff) and Boixo’s work assumed that quantum mechanics is at least good locally. His closing advice was “if you break something, break it big.”
I, alas, skipped the rest of the talks due to a melted brain and a stubborn insistence that I find Liechtenstein which I did (I’ll post pictures eventually). I even found a place to stamp my passport (since there are no official border crossings between Switzerland and Liechtenstein) thanks to a friendly truck driver whose wife is from Seattle. I also found the graveyard of famous astronomer Fritz Zwicky, but don’t think I actually found the real Fritz because there were several who were all about the same age! Every other name in the graveyard (which was the only one in town) was “Zwicky” and the local drug store was “Zwicky’s.” So I missed the actual grave apparently, but saw plenty of his relatives! I then drove up into the mountains until the road I was on was closed due to weather higher up. But I did see some wicked cool stuff up there and will – again – have pictures soon.
So, that was QIP 2010. It was a great experience despite my problems with the Program Committee and I thoroughly enjoyed Switzerland (though I need to bone up on my German for my next visit). | <urn:uuid:3692725c-09c7-4deb-ab68-0f4e0e0f3746> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://quantummoxie.wordpress.com/2010/01/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971219 | 2,587 | 1.578125 | 2 |
February 15, 2013 American University, Washington D.C. : B.A. to J.D. Pipeline
March 15, 2013 Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA : B.A. to J.D. Pipeline
Educational pipelines from the perspective of the dean. Focus on undergraduate offerings and courses that pre law advisors should be aware of using and explore additions to undergraduate and law schools that would assist in preparing and recruiting applicants from diverse backgrounds.
With the Supreme Court poised to hear arguments in Fisher v. Texas, this group of scholars will discuss what is at stake in the case and review some of the arguments made by the various interested parties.
This panel will discuss the research demonstrating the limitations of the LSAT exam and introduce possible alternative assessments. Panelists will disclose the broad range of skills and qualities that are necessary to succeed in law school and the legal profession but are not reflected in the LSAT exam.
Too many applicants rely on the U.S. News rankings to decide where they want to attend law school. How do the rankings inhibit successful applications from diverse applicants? How do the rankings affect the law school admissions process itself?
Research has revealed how successful students of color prepared for law school, applied, graduated, and succeeded in passing the bar. What lessons can we learn from this research to make pre law counseling more effective? | <urn:uuid:0bbd6f0c-249b-4b86-ad22-b933c8c33911> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.saltlaw.org/contents/view/08-27-12BA%20to%20JD%20blurb%20on%20front%20page | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938866 | 275 | 1.632813 | 2 |
DAYTON – Vice President Joe Biden took time at the beginning of his Wednesday campaign stop in Dayton to condemn an overnight attack that killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans, while praising the work and courage of American diplomats and promising to bring to justice those who carried out the attack.
“(This) brave — and it’s not hyperbole to say brave –— ambassador was in Benghazi while the war was going on. Our ambassador risked his life repeatedly while the war in Libya to get rid of that dictator was going on,” Biden said.
“These men are as brave and as courageous as any of our warriors.”
The Tuesday attack took place during a protest against an amateur short film made in the United States that protesters say insulted the Prophet Muhammad. U.S Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three of his staff members were killed.
“Let me be clear — we are resolved to bring to justice their killers,” Biden said.
The vice president made no mention of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s criticism of the Obama administration’s response from the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, which he characterized as “akin to an apology” and a “severe miscalculation,” but the vice president quickly segued into politics, alluding to Romney’s relative lack of experience in foreign policy.
“The task of a president is not only to defend our interests and causes and the cause of freedom abroad, it is also to build a nation here at home, to which the entire world can look and aspire to be like,” Biden said. “Whether we do that and how we do that, that is literally the essence of the choice we face in this presidential election. It really is that basic, and foreign policy is not some sideline to all of this.”
The Romney campaign in Ohio was quick to respond, calling Biden’s remarks “hypocritical” in an emailed statement.
“Vice President Biden’s appearance in Dayton only served further damage to his credibility as he reprised hypocritical and widely debunked attacks against Mitt Romney. Not only did the Vice President mislead Ohioans, but he attacked Mitt Romney for supporting the same tax policy the Obama Administration supported just last year,” Romney Ohio spokesman Christopher Maloney wrote.
“With today’s Census report showing nearly 1 in 6 Americans living in poverty and incomes continuing to decline, it appears that misleading attacks are all the Obama campaign has left to offer 400,000 Ohioans looking for work.”
Maloney’s email also fact-checked a claim made by Biden during his speech. Biden said that he opposed the so-called “territorial tax,” which he said would allow American companies that invested abroad to avoid paying taxes in the United States.
The email included links to an Associated Press fact checking article that concludes that Romney’s proposal was aimed at encouraging investment in the U.S. rather than overseas.
Biden spoke to a packed house at Wright State University in Dayton, with overflow crowds estimated in the hundreds viewing in separate rooms in the Student Union.
The vice president reiterated many of his usual stump speech points — the Romney tax plan’s negative effects on the middle class, the benefits of the Affordable Care Act and the Obama administration’s commitment to manufacturing — but much of Biden’s speech focused on education. He said a president Romney would cut funding for Pell Grants, meaning many students in the audience would have to leave school. He also lauded President Barack Obama’s administration’s enactment of a tax break of $2,500 for every family that sends a child to college.
The usually bombastic Biden wasn’t without his gaffes. Twice he referred to Wright State as “Wayne State,” which is in Detroit, despite a large Wright State University banner displayed in the conference room where he gave his speech.
The crowd was quick to correct him after the second time he misspoke.
“Wright State, which also includes Wayne State,” Biden said after he was corrected, eliciting laughs from the audience.
City Council on Wednesday overwhelmingly passed a measure that will offer benefits to domestic partners of city employees. The measure was introduced by Councilman Chris Seelbach and passed 8-1, the lone “no” vote coming from Charlie Winburn. Seelbach told The Enquirer that domestic partner benefits not only affect same-sex couples, but are also applicable to non-married partners, which is an added attraction to lure talented employees to the city. Covington officials passed a similar measure Tuesday.
If you owe the city of Cincinnati any parking fines, now would be a good time to pay them. Cincinnati police are going to start hearing descriptions of vehicles with multiple outstanding tickets during roll call and then head out to find them during patrols.
Eric Deters wants to be a real lawyer again. The attorney/radio personality/cage fighter says his current predicament — Kentucky law license suspension — is mostly because someone making the rulings “hates him” and is not due to the “ethical lapses” that caused his original 61-day suspension. If Deters can't get the Kentucky Supreme Court to help him out he'll have to go in front of a Character and Fitness Committee and explain all the crazy stuff he's done.
Gov. John Kasich is making changes to the state's Medicaid program, which he and its officials say will save money, though it will cause disruptions in the form of some recipients needing to find new providers, many of which have less access to medical advice and financial help. A similar program implemented in Kentucky last year resulted in complaints that patients couldn't get services authorized and providers didn't get paid on time, according to The Enquirer.
New Osama bin Laden documents published
online by the U.S. Government show concern over Muslim distrust of
his organization before he was killed last May, and much of which was due to the high numbers of civilians it was responsible for killing.
It's not very fun to be John Edwards these days. Already charged with using $1 million in campaign money to hide a pregnant mistress, testimony in his case for violating campaign finance laws has revealed that his mistress had a better idea in response to the National Enquirer's report on the affair: She wanted to say she was abducted by aliens.
Target is done selling Kindles, and although it didn't give a reason analysts suspect it is in response to Amazon's attempts to get retailers who see the products in a store to then purchase them online. Amazone last holiday season indroduced a Price Check app that offered in-store price comparisons and up to a $15 discount online.
Retired NFL linebacker Junior Seau was found dead at his home yesterday in an apparent suicide. Seau, who played in the NFL for parts of 20 seasons, was found shot to death. He was 43.
The City of Cincinnati’s unemployment rate moved down a notch between September and October, from 6.9 percent to 6.8 percent, according to data from the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services. Greater Cincinnati and Hamilton County followed suit; Greater Cincinnati dropped from 6.4 to 6.3 percent, and the county dropped from 6.4 to 6.2 percent.
The numbers, which were unadjusted for seasonal factors, seemed positive overall. Unlike last month, the unemployment rate did not move down due to people leaving the civilian labor force, which measures the amount of people looking for work in addition to the amount of people who have jobs. Instead, labor forces in Cincinnati, Hamilton County and Greater Cincinnati all grew.
The city is now better across the board than it was in October 2011. The civilian labor force and amount of employed are larger, and the amount of unemployed is lower. The city’s current 6.8 percent unemployment rate is also a vast improvement from the 9.1 percent unemployment rate in October 2011.
Greater Cincinnati and Hamilton County made similar improvements in all numbers. Back in October 2011, Greater Cincinnati was at 8.1 percent unemployment, and Hamilton County was at 8.3 percent.
However, Cincinnati remains below the state’s seasonally unadjusted unemployment rate of 6.3 percent. It does beat the nation’s seasonally unadjusted 7.5 percent rate, however.
Part of the recovery is likely fueled by improvements in the housing market. Cincinnati’s housing numbers from October showed a 16.5 percent year-over-year improvement, according to the Cincinnati Area Board of Realtors.
Unemployment numbers are calculated through a household survey. The unemployment rate gauges the amount of unemployed people looking for work in contrast to the total civilian labor force. Since the numbers are derived from surveys, they are often revised in later months. State and federal numbers are typically adjusted to fit seasonal employment patterns to give a more consistent rate, while local numbers are not.
A YouTube video that went viral over the weekend may have broken the rosy illusions the average American has about wealth and income inequality.
Using data from Mother Jones,
Dan Ariely, ThinkProgress and CNN, the video compares the average American’s ideal distribution of wealth, what the average American says wealth inequality looks like and how wealth is distributed in reality — ultimately showing that the average American says the nation is much more equal than it really is.
The video suggests investment income as one of the drivers of inequality. The top 1 percent wealthiest Americans hold 50 percent of the nation’s stocks, bonds and mutual funds, while the bottom 50 percent of Americans only hold 0.5 percent of such investments, according to the video.
“The average worker needs to work more than a month to earn what the CEO makes in one hour,” the narrator says.
In the past, the United States was a lot closer to equality. As the video points out, the top 1 percent only took home 9 percent of the nation’s income in 1976. Today, that number is up to 24 percent.
Ohio isn’t immune to the trend. A previous report from the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found Ohio’s income gap — the income difference between the rich and poor — is wide and growing, and low-income and middle-income Ohioans have actually seen their incomes drop since the 1990s.
The video doesn’t make any suggestions on how to fix the problem — it simply shows massive inequality exists — but there are plenty of ideas out there. A paper from the Congressional Research Service suggested the tax system may be playing a role in driving up income and wealth inequality: “However, the top tax rate reductions appear to be correlated with the increasing concentration of income at the top of the income distribution. … The statistical analysis in this report suggests that tax policy could be related to how the economic pie is sliced — lower top tax rates may be associated with greater income disparities.”
In December, The Washington Post posted 10 empirically supported ideas, which included funding preschool education, making unions easier to join and promoting trade in highly skilled professions.
In his 2013 State of the Union, President Barack Obama suggested raising the federal minimum wage to help combat poverty and income inequality — a policy that economist Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute recently advocated.
Here is the full video:
Former Ohio governor Ted Strickland will not run for governor in 2014. In a statement released today, the Democrat who previously served four years as governor did not give a reason for why he won’t run. But he did promise his wife and him will “continue to be politically active private citizens.” Strickland also touted his accomplishments as governor, including energy, health care, social services and property tax reform. In September, Strickland faced criticism from the left for pushing for the Democratic platform to include a mention of God and a proclamation that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. The platform amendment contradicts decades of U.S. foreign policy.
Hamilton County wants an efficiency review of the Metropolitan Sewer District. Republican Commissioner Chris Monzel ordered the review. He says he expects “things at the Metropolitan Sewer District are being managed and operated in a highly efficient and effective manner,” but he wants to make sure. MSD is currently taking part in a multi-billion dollar, federally mandated upgraded system. CityBeat wrote about MSD’s green initiatives here.
Findlay Market might soon host Cincinnati’s first freestanding restroom. If it goes well, it could be the start of a much bigger city-wide project, and freestanding restrooms will be built all around downtown and Over-the-Rhine. The test facility is being touted by Councilman Chris Seelbach and other city officials as they seek to provide better access to restrooms throughout the city.
Rep. Peter Beck, a Republican from Mason, is facing a possible ethics investigation from the Ohio House of Representatives. The controversy was prompted by a recently filed lawsuit, which alleges Beck participated in a fraud that cheated investors out of more than $1.2 million.
Some local educators are supporting the use of seclusion rooms in Ohio. The rooms, which are enclosed spaces used to calm or restrain children who become violent, have come under criticism after an investigation from StateImpact Ohio and The Columbus Dispatch found the rooms were being abused for the convenience of staff. Ohio does not currently regulate the use of seclusion rooms, but that is likely to change in an upcoming Ohio Board of Education meeting.
On the bright side, Ohio has the 10th best education laws, according to a study from StudentsFirst. Overall, Ohio got a C-, making it one of the 12 states to get a B or C. No state received an A. StateImpact Ohio has more on the grade here. State officials probably understand how I felt when I dropped out of a college history class because the professor was too strict of a grader. Then again, state education systems are probably more important than Colonial History 101.
The Blue Wisp, home of the greatest spinach-and-artichoke dip in the universe, is looking to renegotiate its lease. Over the holidays, restaurant hero and Blue Wisp manager Ed Felson told customers his jazz-themed restaurant and club is having financial problems.
The most emailed phrase while committing fraud at work is “cover up.”
One major problem with prolonged space missions: Humans become lazy and sleepy. It seems like being an astronaut isn’t different from any other job. Who can we rely on when aliens finally invade?
Conservative groups are pushing Ohio to purge its voter rolls. The move is largely seen by Democrats as an attempt to disenfranchise and suppress voters. The groups in support of the purge, which include Judicial Watch and True the Vote, typically cite voter-related errors and voter fraud as the main reason for their efforts, but there have been 10 cases of in-person voter fraud since 2000, according to a News21 study. Florida Gov. Rick Scott also pushed for a voter purge in his state, but Democrats vowed to fight the purge at every step.The Historic Conservation Board ruled in favor of the Anna Louise Inn yesterday. The ruling means the inn can now move ahead with its multi-million renovation project. The board’s ruling was despite Western & Southern, which has tried to block the renovation as part of a broader attempt to shut down the inn and buy up the property. CityBeat extensively covered W&S’s attempts here.
Cincinnati is No. 7 in the country for job growth, a study from Arizona State University found. Cincinnati beat out Riverside, Calif., but it lost to San Francisco, Denver, Houston, Phoenix, Seattle and San Diego.Secretary of State Jon Husted was advised to fire the Democrats on the Montgomery Board of Elections by Jon Allison, who overheard the hearing on the firings on Aug. 20. Allison is also the former chief of staff to Republican Gov. Bob Taft. The Democrats on the board attempted to expand in-person early voting to weekends despite Husted’s call to uniform voting hours that include no weekend voting. Ohio Democratic Party Chris Redfern said the recommendation was “no surprise” and the Republican Party should be expected to support voter suppression by now.
Josh Mandel, excessive liar, Ohio treasurer and senatorial candidate for Ohio, described Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio as “un-American” for his vote supporting the auto bailout, which helped protect 850,000 jobs in Ohio’s auto industry. But Mandel still refuses to give specifics on what he would have done differently to protect the auto industry.The federal government has given the go-ahead for fracking in Wayne National Forest in Ohio. The go-ahead will open up more than 3,300 acres for auction. Environmental critics say fracking is unsafe and should be banned, but Gov. John Kasich insists the process can be made safe with proper regulations. Previous analyses have found natural gas, which is produced from fracking, could help combat climate change. CityBeat previously covered the uncertainty behind fracking here.
Kentucky is getting another creationist attraction. Apparently not content with the false claims asserted at the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter, a new group wants to build a brick-and-mortar for the Founders of Creation Science Hall of Fame.Republicans almost went a day without saying something offensive about women. Tom Smith, Republican candidate for Pennsylvania’s senate seat, compared pregnancy from rape to pregnancy out of wedlock. Last week, Paul Ryan, Republican vice presidential candidate, described rape as a "method of conception."
Most people might not remember it since it’s rarely mentioned in the news anymore, but America is still at war in Afghanistan. Yesterday, the Taliban beheaded 17 civilians for having a party, two U.S. soldiers were killed by an Afghan soldier and 10 Afghan soldiers died to insurgents.A private funeral service is planned in Cincinnati for Neil Armstrong, who died last Saturday. A public funeral will be held at Wapakoneta. Armstrong was the first man to walk on the moon. His first steps inspired curiosity and innovation around the world when he said, “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Politicians will talk up Armstrong’s accomplishment in the following days, but Democrats and Republicans both supported cuts to NASA’s budget in recent years that Armstrong opposed.
It’s only one day after President Barack Obama’s re-election, and some groups are already demanding action. In a new report by left-leaning Policy Matters Ohio, the group says the expiration of federal unemployment benefits could leave Ohio’s jobless stranded.
“If Congress doesn’t renew federal benefits, the impact in Ohio will be immediate and negative,” said Zach Schiller, research director for Policy Matters, in a statement. “Not only will the unemployed suffer, but the state economy will take a hit as well.”
If Congress and the president do not act by Dec. 29, funding for emergency unemployment benefits approved in mid-2008 will be cut off. Nearly 50,000 Ohioans have been getting federally supported benefits every week, and “the bulk” will be cut off if funding expires, according to the report.
Even without expiration, Ohio is already in a bad spot when it comes to insuring the jobless. Altogether, the number of unemployed receiving benefits is lower than the national average, according to the report. Since 2001, Ohio’s unemployed have received fewer benefits than the national average. In 2011, 63 percent of Ohioans who filed claims received payments, while 71 percent of claimants all around the country got benefits.
The state program seems to be particularly weak. In 2012, the amount of unemployed Ohioans getting state benefits was 22 percent, while the national share was about 26 percent. The report shows getting fewer benefits in Ohio has been the majority trend for at least 29 years.
One statistic that drives the report’s point home is the fact the state only provides up to 26 weeks of benefits, yet the average unemployed Ohioan is jobless for 33.5 weeks, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That means the average unemployed Ohioan would be left without unemployment benefits for 7.5 weeks if the federal program did not exist.
And it’s not like the benefits offer an easy ride. The benefits “are hardly magnificent,” says Schiller. “Three-hundred dollars a week, you’re not going to take a jet to Tahiti and spend time on the beach with that kind of money. So, in fact, what people do with their $300 a week is spend it on necessities and in their communities.”
Schiller says the trend is poor economics, and the federal and state government should make sure Ohio’s unemployed continue getting benefits they need.
“When I was in high school, we heard of unemployment insurance as what was called an ‘automatic stabilizer,'" he says. “When the economy went into a dive, you would see increases in unemployment insurance that would automatically help stabilize the economy. This was seen by economists as a very useful and important thing that would reduce the depth of recessions.”
Schiller’s claim is backed by economic data. In a May 2012
report, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the nonpartisan agency
that measures the effect of federal budgets and policy, said the repeal
of extended emergency unemployment benefits would lower spending by $26
billion in the 2013 fiscal year. It would also increase the deficit,
according to the CBO report: “The weakening of the economy that will
result from that fiscal restraint will lower taxable incomes and,
therefore, revenues, and it will increase spending in some categories —
for unemployment insurance, for instance.”
Unemployment compensation also kept 2.3 million people from falling into poverty in 2011, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
In-person early voting is underway in Ohio. Find your nearest polling booth here.Josh Mandel, state treasurer and Republican U.S. senatorial candidate for Ohio, is denying he physically confronted a campaign tracker. According to Mandel, the tracker approached and confronted him, not the other way around. But the video of the confrontation shows Mandel approaching and getting really close to the tracker first. Ohio Democrats, who said Mandel’s campaign is a “campaign of unending dishonesty,” were quick to jump on another example of Mandel possibly being dishonest. CityBeat covered Mandel’s notorious dishonesty here. Mandel is running against Democratic incumbent Sen. Sherrod Brown.
Michelle Obama was in town yesterday. She spoke to a crowd of 6,800, asking them to take part in Ohio’s early voting process and encourage friends and family to do the same.
Grocery store competition could soon be bringing lower prices to the Greater Cincinnati area, according to analysts.
JobsOhio chief Mark Kvamme is stepping down. The high-profile venture capitalist, who was originally from California, was originally recruited by Gov. John Kasich to lead the Ohio Department of Development. But soon Kvamme hopped onto JobsOhio, a nonprofit company established by Kasich and the state legislature to bring investment into Ohio. Under Kvamme’s leadership, JobsOhio, which is supposed to replace the Department of Development, has brought in 400 companies to invest in Ohio, leading to $6.1 billion in capital investment, according to a press release. But the nonprofit company has been heavily criticized by liberal groups like Progress Ohio, which say JobsOhio is unconstitutional. Lower courts have generally legitimized Progress Ohio’s claims, but the Ohio Supreme Court recently turned down a case dealing with JobsOhio. The court said a lower court would have to give a declaratory judgment first.
William O’Neill, former judge and Democratic candidate for the Ohio Supreme Court, is asking Republican justices Robert Cupp and Terrence O’Donnell to “recuse or refuse.” O’Neill says the Republican justices are sitting on cases that involve FirstEnergy, an Akron-based energy company that has contributed to the re-election campaigns of Cupp and O’Donnell. O’Neill says the conflict of interest diminishes faith in the highest court of Ohio’s justice system.
A new study on Taser use in Hamilton County found local law enforcement have some problematic policies on the books and in practice. The study was put together by a local law firm that’s demanding policy reform.
Americans United for Life (AUL) is celebrating a federal court ruling against Planned Parenthood that maintains Ohio regulations on an abortion drug. The regulations require physicians to administer the drug in a clinic or physician’s office, and the drug may only be taken within 49 days of gestation. AUL says health groups like Planned Parenthood want to avoid sound health regulations, but Planned Parenthood argues the regulations make it too difficult for women to use the drug.
Natalie Portman is in a new commercial in support of President Barack Obama. In the ad, she touts Obama’s support of women’s rights.
It seems most Americans are avoiding or can’t afford as many trips to the doctor as before.
One of the most lucrative criminal enterprises in the world is wood.
It turns out the vampire squid is not a lethal ocean predator. Still, who wouldn't run away from that?
Cincinnati and Hamilton County are making a comeback. In August, the city dropped to 7.5 percent unemployment, down from 8.2 percent in July, according to new data released by the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services. The county dropped to 6.8 percent, down from 7.3 percent in July.
Ohio’s seasonally unadjusted rate saw a similarly large drop from 7.4 percent in July to 6.8 percent in August. The U.S. unadjusted rate dropped from 8.6 to 8.2 percent.
From a year-to-year basis, Cincinnati and Hamilton County saw even larger drops in unemployment. On August 2011, unemployment in Cincinnati was at 10 percent, 2.5 points higher than August 2012. Hamilton County was at 8.8 percent, 2 points higher than August 2012.
Greater Cincinnati’s seasonally unadjusted unemployment rate also saw large drops, remaining below the state and nation. The 15-county area dropped from 7.2 percent unemployment in July down to 6.7 percent in August. That is a 1.9-point drop from August 2011, which saw an 8.6 percent unemployment rate.
The federal and state unemployment rates are typically adjusted for seasonal factors, but the local rates are not. The adjusted unemployment rates for August were 7.2 percent for Ohio and 8.1 percent for the United States.
The unemployment rate only considers people who are unemployed and looking for work. People not looking for work are deemed to be outside of the labor force. | <urn:uuid:fc38f35d-a57b-41ad-8017-4e18fe5675d0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://citybeat.com/cincinnati/blogs-8-1-0-34-182.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967976 | 5,640 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Flip through our Glossary!
Varying in width from 1/4 inch to 2 inches wide, this utensil is to lift, reposition or remove small amounts of food often from within small spaces. The Narrow Spatula may be formed with a scoop so content can be removed from areas such as ketchup bottles or it may only be narrow so it can serve well as a lifting spatula to reposition smaller pieces of food. Narrow Spatulas are also used to spread cake icings or to add toppings to desserts. Most often, the spatulas that are designed to lift foods have an angled blade formed with an offset angle so the handle of the spatula can be held above the food being lifted to assist with the process. However, both angled and straight blades can be used for lifting foods.
Ratings, Reviews & Comments
There currently aren't any reviews or comments for this term. Be the first! | <urn:uuid:3d4f066d-2d88-454e-ac06-9103d18cb7e5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.recipetips.com/glossary-term/t--38338/narrow-spatula.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957321 | 194 | 1.742188 | 2 |
“In response to the new Facebook guidelines, I hereby declare that my copyright is attached to all of my personal details, illustrations, comics, paintings, professional photos and videos, etc. (as a result of the Berner Convention). For commercial use of the above my written consent is needed at all times!”
‘No such thing’
It’s a frightful message and those worried that Facebook will own their photos or other media are posting it — unaware that it is a hoax. Here’s the truth: Facebook doesn’t own your media and there is no such thing as the Berner Convention. (There is a Berne Convention!)
“We have noticed some statements that suggest otherwise and we wanted to take a moment to remind you of the facts — when you post things like photos to Facebook, we do not own them,” Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes said in a statement. “Under our terms (https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms), you grant Facebook permission to use, distribute, and share the things you post, subject to the terms and applicable privacy settings.”
‘Don’t bother posting’
Bottom line? Don’t bother copying, pasting, and posting. It was a hoax before and is still a hoax now.
Have you fallen prey to these “copyright” hoaxes on Facebook before? Tell us about other forms this hoax that you know of!
Image: Raw Signal | <urn:uuid:a5134d69-8270-45c6-a6e9-4ddf1c5b6f3c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://kozmedia.com/tag/serving-two-consecutive-four-year-terms/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.932246 | 314 | 1.585938 | 2 |
Below are some of the questions commonly asked by students within the Architecture Program at GCC. If your question is not listed, please let the Architecture Department Chair know and it may be added to the next update.
In what sequence should I take the Architecture classes?
You may take architecture classes in any order as long as you have taken the proper pre-requisite classes prior to taking advanced classes. Click here for a pdf file that gives the recommended order.
A college level algebra class such as Math 100 is sufficient to complete the certificate/degree. For the Bachelors Degree in Architecture (B.Arch) a Trigonometry class is required.
What classes do you offer that will teach me about commercial construction?
The Architecture 130 and 135 classes are both commercial projects. The Arch 130 is a 9-Unit strip mall, single story. The Arch 135 is a two-story, concrete block or tilt-up building. Both of these projects require the design of a parking lot.
What classes do you offer that will teach me about residential construction?
The Architecture 101, 102, 120, and 125 classes are all residential design based. They vary from a small two-bedroom cabin to a 4-unit townhouse complex.
Will you help me with drawings for an outside project, such as a room addition?
The instructors can answer your questions during their office hours regarding any project. Realize that they do not have an infinite knowledge of architecture and some questions may be beyond their level of expertise.
What do drafters and architects earn per year?
If you look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics website, there are listings of average earnings and descriptions of various career fields. Be sure to also check based on the region of the country that you are interested in.
How do I know if an architecture school is accredited? What does accreditation mean?
If your plans upon graduation from an architecture school include earning a professional license, then you must attend a school that has been accredited by the National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB). This organization is the sole agency that is responsible to insure that an Architecture Program is accredited.
What colleges could I transfer to after I leave Glendale College?
There are many colleges and universities that have architecture programs. The only state college option in the Southern California area is Cal Poly Pomona. There are also private colleges that have Bachelor Degree programs in Architecture. One of the main concerns that the student should have is if the school of Architecture is accredited. Most programs in this area are impacted and require a high GPA to transfer. Check with each college/university to find their criteria.
Do any of the architecture classes transfer to a 4 or 5 year architecture school?
No. Most colleges require that you take the entire curriculum at their campus. The main reason for taking architecture classes at Glendale College is to gain the necessary experience needed to begin a Bachelors Degree program. Most schools require that the students already know the basics of drafting and the CAD software used at the school.
What kind of drafting equipment do I need to take a manual drafting class?
There is tool kit for sale at the Glendale College Bookstore. Be sure to purchase the kit for the Architecture classes. You may also purchase the tools individually from a drafting supply store.
Where can I buy Autodesk software? How much is it?
If you are a current full or part-time student you may download the software from the Autodesk Student Community web site. The software is free and is licensed for approximately 3 years. Use this web link to access to Autodesk Student Community. You will need a GCC email address to register for the site. Many Autodesk programs are available for download including AutoCAD 2011 and Revit Architecture 2011.
What is SketchUp and how can it help with my drafting/design classes?
This software is useful for the design phase of an architectural project. Currently this software is taught as part of the Arch 105 curriculum. You can download a free home version called Google Sketchup. This software is currently used at Cal Poly Pomona and other architecture schools.
What is a portfolio and why is it so important?
A portfolio is a collection of your best work. Most architecture schools prefer that the drawings in a portfolio are completed using manual drafting methods. They are also interested in other work such as sketches, photographs, artwork, and renderings. Anything that can demonstrate you design ability is appropriate. Be sure to check with the Architecture school that you are interested in for their specific requirements. The Architecture 240 class will help you assemble a portfolio of the work completed at GCC,
Where do I go on the website to find out specific information about a class?
On the main page of the Architecture webpage is a link to individual classes. Information such as class description, unit value, and transfer information is given. If you need specific information contact the instructor.
How can I find out when a class will be offered?
The best way is to ask the Department Chair, Dave Martin. You can also click on this link to see a pdf file that gives this information.
Where can I buy my own large format printer? How much do they cost?
The printer that is used in the Architecture lab is manufactured by Hewlett-Packard. Any large format printer with at least a capacity for a 24" roll can be used for architectural drawings. Click on this link for pricing information. There are also companies that sell used equipment at a considerable savings.
Yes. Click here
for links to some student portfolios. Any student may submit work for display on the Architecture Department website. | <urn:uuid:34ce9d42-78cc-4f30-bd1f-91120acee477> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.glendale.cc.ca.us/index.aspx?page=3802 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948891 | 1,153 | 1.632813 | 2 |
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Trade Practices Amendment (Country of Origin Representations) Bill 1998
This Digest was prepared for debate. It reflects the legislation as introduced and does not canvass subsequent amendments. This Digest does not have any official legal status. Other sources should be consulted to determine the subsequent official status of the Bill.
Trade Practices Amendment (Country of Origin Representations) Bill 1998
Commencement: The provisions relating to country of origin representations in Schedule 1 are to commence on Proclamation, but not later than six months after this Act receives Royal Assent. The other miscellaneous amendments to the Trade Practices Act 1974 contained in Schedule 2 are to commence when this Act receives Royal Assent.
⢠To introduce a scheme governing representations about the country of origin of consumer goods offered for sale in Australia;
⢠To make a number of other amendments to the Trade Practices Act 1974 which are unrelated to the primary purpose of the Bill. These are discussed below, in the ‘Main Provisions’ section of this Digest.
Section 52 of the Trade Practices Act 1974 prohibits misleading and deceptive conduct in trade or commerce. Section 53(eb) of the Act makes it unlawful to make a false or misleading representation about the origin of goods offered for sale in Australia. The Section provides that:
53. A corporation shall not, in trade or commerce, in connexion with the supply or possible supply of goods or services or in connexion with the promotion by any means of the supply or use of goods or services-
(eb) make a false or misleading representation concerning the place of origin of goods.
All State and Territory Fair Tra ding legislation contain equivalent provisions.(1) However, establishing the test in relation to what is meant by a ‘false or misleading representation’ concerning the origin of goods has been a matter of considerable difficulty.
Case law has provided producers and manufacturers with some guidance on how the rules of country of origin claims apply to specific products.(2)
The Federal Court of Australia has considered the meaning of Section 53(eb) of the Trade Practices Act 1974 in only a small number of cases. In Thorpe v CA Imports Pty Ltd ,(3) the question of a misleading representation concerning the place of origin of certain manufactured toy koalas arose. In that case, Justice Sheppherd held that ‘the expression “Made in Australia” suggests at least substantial manufacture’, and the fact that the koala casings were cut and sewn in Korea prevented the statement from being one which correctly described the toy koalas in question.
Again, in Siddons Pty Ltd v Stanley Works Pty Ltd ,(4) the court held that a metal tool shaped in Taiwan and later modified and finished in Australia was not made in Australia. The words ‘Made in Australia’ in application to a simple tool like a metal spanner meant, in ordinary language, that most of the processes by which a piece of metal is transformed into the spanner which was offered for sale have occurred in Australia.
A third case involved a computer modem. In Netcomm (Aust) Pty Ltd v Dataplex Pty Ltd,(5) the expression ‘made in Australia’ was held by Justice Gummow to suggest:
that the steps in the composition or construction of the item, including the design which makes it the technically proficient equipment it is promoted to be, were taken in Australia.
In each of these cases the court held that the words ‘made in Australia’ and other like terms were to be given their ordinary meaning. The courts have looked at each case according to the facts, and have applied various tests, depending on the con text and nature of the goods at issue. It is clear, however, that even under the current law, the Federal Court has not required a product to be completely Australian in all respects before it can carry the label ‘Made in Australia’.(6)
Since 1992 successive Federal Governments have been working with industry and consumer groups to develop a scheme to govern representations about Australian origin of consumer goods. In October 1992 the pre vious Government set up two Working Groups to review the extent to which products currently provide an indication of their country of origin and to develop descriptors for ‘Australian Made’ and related terms. The Working Groups reported together and their Report on Country of Origin Labelling of Consumer Products was released in May 1993. The Working Groups were divided in their support for the various options they identified. The Report’s preferred option was to limit the range of terms describing Australian origin to three, namely ‘Made in Australia’, ‘Product of Australia’, and in the case of unprocessed primary produce, ‘Produce of Australia’. The Report recommended that in order to qualify for these descriptors, the goods must have acquired their essential character in Australia and that not less than 85% of the cost of producing the goods must have been incurred in Australia.(7)
On 23 March 1994 the previous Government introduced the Trade Practices Amendment (Origin L abelling) Bill 1994 (the 1994 Bill). The purpose of the 1994 Bill was to insert new provisions into the Trade Practices Act 1974 to deal with the method of labelling goods which claimed to be made, manufactured, packed or designed in Australia.(8) The 1994 Bill incorporated many of the recommendations of the Working Groups’ Report, although a secondary test based on a calculation of the costs of production incurred in Australia, was abandoned in favour of a descriptive option for the labelling of consumer goods.
The test used by the 1994 Bill was that goods could be labelled ‘Made in Australia’ only if they acquired their essential character or qualities in Australia. It was stated in the Explanatory Memorandum to the 1994 Bill that this was the test applied by the Federal Court in cases brought under the Trade Practices Act provisions prohibiting false and misleading claims.(9) Senator Meg Lees, in a Question Without Notice, disputed that the ‘essential character’ test proposed in the 1994 Bill was the same as that used by the Federal Court(10) and others have commented that the court decisions did not actually use the exact words stated in the Bill.(11)
The 1994 Bill was referred to two separate Parliamentary Committees.
⢠The House of Representatives St anding Committee on Industry, Science and Technology issued its report on the Trade Practices Amendment (Origin Labelling) Bill in June 1994.(12) The Committee concluded that the approach taken by the Bill was probably the best in practical terms and recommended providing additional information and clarifying the definitions used in the Bill in order to assist industry and consumers.
⢠The Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs issued a report on 1 September 1994.(13) This report, which contains two separate dissents, also recommended support for the Bill and for several amendments that had been foreshadowed. Th e report canvassed the views of a large number of producer, consumer and marketing groups and provides a useful analysis of the various descriptors used to describe the ‘Australian-ness’ of goods.
In the event, the 1994 Bill lapsed when Parliament was pror ogued prior to the March 1996 election.
At the same time as the 1994 Bill was being considered by Parliament, another case concerning Section 53(eb) of the Trade Practices Act 1974 was before the Federal Court of Australia.
The Trade Practices Commission v QSVD Holdings Pty Ltd (trading as Bush Friends Australia)(14) (the Bush Friends Case) again concerned koala soft toys. The koalas were manufactured partly in China and partly in Australia and all of the components, with the exception of the filling, were produced overseas. The toys carried a label containing the statement ‘Made in Australia’ in large capital letters. Underneath those words, in smaller print were the words ‘with some imported components’. The claims on the label were the subject of the litigation.
In his decision (which was later approved by the Full Court of the Federal Court of Australia), Justice Davies considered the possible bases on which an evaluation of whether the koalas had been ‘made in Australia’ could be made. He considered both the use of qualitative tests such as ‘essential character’ or ‘substantial transformation’, and quantitative measures such as a comparison of the costs incurred in each country where something had been done to produce the end product. He expressly rejected the ‘essential character’ test laid down in the 1994 Bill and held that the words ‘Made in Australia’ and other terms were to be given their common meaning.(15) In the second Bush Friends decision, Justice Nicholson said that he regarded the ‘ordinary meaning’ test as ‘a legitimate technique of statutory construction’.(16) He justified the subjective nature of this approach in the following way:
While it is true that the application of the ordinary meaning of the words leaves the judge deciding the effect of those words on consumers, it is in fact the impression of the words which is critical to the determination of whether they are, in the circumstances as found, misleading and deceptive either generally or in relation to the origin of the goods.(17)
Some commentators on the Bush Friends case have seen the decision as establishing a definitive precedent for the appropriate test to be applied in the case of ‘Made in Australia’ claims. The General Editor of the Australian & New Zealand Trade Practices Law Bulletin , Warren Pengilley wrote that:
It [the case] puts to rest the argument that the answer to the question of whether a produce is ‘Made in Australia’ should be determined by a comparative costing exercise or by an applications of customs law. The test involves neither of these issues. It is solely a question of assessing the effect of the representation on Australian consumers.(18)
In the Explanatory Memorandum to the current Bill the Government describes the decision in the Bush Friends case as being restrictive and says that it has resulted in many firms being potentially excluded from labelling their products as Australian made for fear of litigation.(19)
A more recent case [ Australian Competition and Consumer Commission v Lovelock Luke Pty Ltd (1997)](20) concerned air conditioners which consisted of a number of component parts, one of which (the compressor) was made overseas. The air conditioners carried labels and a logo, and were advertised by various combinations of words meaning made in Australia. In dismissing the case brought by the ACCC, Justice Lockhart held that ‘(w)hether an article of commerce is “Made in Australia” must be determined by reference to the circumstances of each case’.(21) Following the line of reasoning taken by Justice Sackville in the second Bush Friends case (the appeal),(22) Justice Lockhart said:
In my opinion, the expression ‘place of origin’ of goods in s53(eb) focuses attention on the finished product, that is the goods which the public sees and buys, the place where the goods acquire their essential character as articles of commerce, the place where the major processes of manufacture occur which transform the various component parts into a finished product, the place where the goods are given their essential function, shape or appearance. This is substantially the approach taken in the Trade Practices Amendment (Origin Labelling) Bill 1994 which has lapsed. It is a test appropriate to the goods in question in this case.(23)
According to the Explanatory Memorandum , this second case has compounded the uncertainty already created by the Bush Friends case. This is because the court:
expressly avoided setting down strict criteria for determining the validity of origin claims. The Court held that such cases should be resolved on a case-by-case basis. This represents a considerable impediment to compliance.(24)
In his Second Reading Speech, the Minister for Customs and Consumer Affairs, Hon Warren Truss MP, said that the recent court decisions have created confusion about the meaning of such terms as ‘Made in Australia’, and as a result, ‘the market value of Australian origin claims has been eroded, to the point that producers and manufacturers are wary of making claims and many consumers are losing confidence in labelling altogether’.(25)
The purpose of the current Bill is to introdu ce a scheme governing representations about the origin of consumer goods supplied in Australia. This purpose is to be accomplished by inserting a new Division 1AA into Part V of the Trade Practices Act 1974 . The Government's intention in introducing the scheme is to overcome the perceived uncertainty caused by recent Federal Court decisions, to encourage Australian industry to label products which have their origin in Australia, and to give consumers a reliable means of identifying Australian products.
The chief features of the scheme are as follows:
⢠It is voluntary and will apply only where a manufacturer or supplier chooses to represent that Australia or another country is the place of origin of goods;
⢠It covers goods produced for the Australian mark et and goods produced overseas and sold in Australia;
⢠It deals with representations that goods are ‘Made in’, or are ‘Produced in’ or are a ‘Product of’ Australia or another country;
⢠The scheme consists of a primary and a secondary test:
- The primary test is a qualitative measure, that the goods are ‘substantially transformed’ in a country if they undergo a fundamental change in form, appearance or nature such that the goods existing after the change are new and different goods from those existing before the change.
- The secondary test is a quantitative measure, and refers to the costs of production or manufacture incurred in Australia and other countries. For example, goods which claim to be ‘Made in Australia’, must have incurred 50% or more of their total manufacturing costs in Australia. Goods which claim to be a ‘Product of Australia’ or ‘Produced in Australia’ must have ‘all or virtually all’ Australian ingredients or inputs, and ‘all or virtually all’ of the steps in the production process must have occurred in Australia.
⢠The scheme covers representations made in words and by means of prescribed logos.
⢠The scheme provides a defence against prosecution for breach of Section 53(eb) of the Trade Practices Act 1974 . This defence is not extended to regional descriptors such as ‘Made in Queensland’ or ‘Product of Tasmania’.(26)
The Bill sets out the framework for the scheme. The details of a number of aspects are to be worked out in regulations. Some additional points are covered in the Explanatory Memorandum , including that:
⢠the Australian and New Zealand Food Standards Council will be asked to determine the need for any additional regulations for food; and
⢠the proposed legislative framework will be reviewed after five years or when the Worl d Trade Organisation’s international rules of origin are finalised.(27)
In the United States, the system used under trade law for determining the origin of a product centres around the ‘substantial transformation test’. This test is a judge-made rule and it is not defined in legislation. The test, simply stated, is whether the good has emerged from a given process with a ‘distinctive name, character or use’ in a particular country. For a product to be from a particular country, it must be substantially transformed there. To prevent a product from having multiple countries of origin, the good is a product of the country where it last underwent such transformation.
In the Bush Friends case Judge Davies considered the substantial transformation test. He concluded that, as a test under customs legislation, it was relevant to a determination of who should obtain a benefit or drawback in a tariff preference context, but it was not necessarily relevant in evaluating where a manufacturing process had occurred. Accordingly, he decided that the substantial transformation test, though firmly established under customs regulations, was a different test to that under the Trade Practices Act 1974 . This was because the Trade Practices Act 1974 test had to relate to the question of whether consumers in Australia would be misled or deceived or would be likely to be misled or deceived, and whether there had been a misleading representation in Australia as to the place of origin of the goods. Justice Davies did say, however, that if a substantial transformation test was applied in the Bush Friends case, he would hold that the component parts were transformed into a toy koala in Australia and that, prior to their transformation in Australia, they were merely component parts.(28)
In the context of discussing the substantial transformation test, Justice Davies referred to the approach taken by Joseph A LaNasa III from the Harvard Law School in an article published in 1993 in the Harvard International Law Journal .(29) The article discusses the use of the substantial transformation test in the application of customs legislation in the United States. The author was critical of the test saying that it:
Gives customs officials the freedom to apply the standard on a highly subjective, case by case basis that often results in seemingly arbitrary decisions. In reviewing these origin determinations, courts have had a great deal of trouble discerning the point at which a processing operation causes a product to be substantially transformed, and, as a result, they have developed a variety of inconsistently applied criteria. Not only have the courts failed to develop a uniform set of criteria for substantial transformation, but they have also applied the test inconsistently in similar situations depending upon the purpose of the determination.(30)
In his Second Reading Speech, the Minister for Customs and Consumer Affairs, Hon Warren Truss MP, said that ‘the use of the substantial transformation test will align Australian law with international practice’.(31) The Explanatory Memorandum to the Bill states that ‘“substantial transformation” will form the basis for the WTO’s [World Trade Organisation] international rules of origin and is widely utilised overseas’.(32) For a discussion of country of origin labelling requirements in other countries, the reader is referred to the Report of the Working Groups on Country of Origin Labelling of Consumer Products (May 1993, pages 10-11), and ‘It ain’t necessarily so: country of origin labelling’ (Department of the Parliamentary Library, Current Issues Brief 20/1994, pages 4-6).
Comparative costs of production
The issues here include the specified percentage of local costs, what components and processes are to be included in calculating the costs of productio n, and the period over which costs are to be calculated.
The Working Groups on Country of Origin Labelling recommended that, where the Australian input exceeded 85% of the cost of production, goods might be labelled ‘Made in Australia’ without qualification.(33) The Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs received submissions suggesting percentages of Australian input of between 85% and 95%. The Committee also received evidence that many Australian consumers believe that ‘Made in Australia’ means close to 100% Australian ingredients and processing.(34) The Minister for Customs and Consumer Affairs has explained the adoption of a figure of 50% by saying that a higher threshold would disadvantage many local industries which have always been considered to be producing Australian products. He went on to say:
These firms employ Australians and invest in Australia’s future. Who would tell a person working at General Motors-Holden or Ford that the cars they are making are not Australian, just because some of their components are imported? Our trading partners do not hesitate to recognise these products as Australia; nor should we.(35)
The Minister foreshadowed a public education campaign to make Australian consumers aware of the meaning of country of origin representations.
On the question of what is to be inclu ded in measuring the costs of production, the Working Groups recommended a system based on the practice of the Australian Customs Service which would include the cost of Australian materials received into the factory, manufacturing wages, factory overhead expenses, research and development, and the cost of internal containers. Sales tax, import duty, insurance charges, outer packaging, distribution and advertising costs would be excluded from the calculation.(36) The current Bill appears to follow this recommendation although the details of how costs are to be attributed throughout the production chain have yet to be spelt out.
The issue of the comparative cost of production also came up in the Bush Friends case. Comparative cost figures were given to the court but the court regarded them as unhelpful. Judge Davies noted that there was a considerable difficulty in using a comparison of labour costs because wages in China were so much lower than wages in Australia. Accordingly, he held that a mere comparison of cost figures did not accurately indicate the extent of the work done in one country as against that carried out in another.(37)
Country of origin rules were first introduced to gather statistics to assis t in determining supply and demand. Subsequently, countries entered into tariff arrangements and it became important to label goods so that a differentiation could be made for tariff and quota purposes. What was a relatively simple process, when countries were both the producer and exporter of the finished product, has now become very complex. The increased globalisation of business and the economic interdependence of countries have made the identification of the nationality of a product very difficult. Products today contain parts or ingredients from, or have undergone manufacturing processes in many countries before ending up on our shelves. The situation is not confined to technical goods but also applies to food manufacture where minor but important ingredients (such as colouring agents, concentrates and other additives) may be imported and added to the product for domestic consumption.
The World Trade Organisation recognises rules of origin used by Member countries in applications such as government procurement and trade statistics. Reports of surveys indicate that a majority of Australian consumers believe that buying Australian made products helps to support Australian industry, enterprise and employment.(38) Since 1986 Australian governments have supported the Australian Made campaign to encourage consumers to purchase locally made products in preference to imported goods, where quality and price were comparable. The financial allocation in 1994/95 (the last year in which the Australian Made campaign was financed by the Commonwealth Government) was $1.5 million. The Australian Made campaign was evaluated in 1994 by Marsden Jacob Associates. It was found to have had success in creating new jobs and in increasing Australian manufacturing output.(39)
The Commonwealth owns the Australian Made certification mark (logo), a green and gold triangle containing a representation of a bounding kangaroo. The logo has been available under licence to manufacturers for inclusion on their product.
Proposed section 65AB establishes the general test for country of origin representations. The test to be adopted is that the goods were ‘substantially transformed’ (as set out in proposed section 65AE ) and that 50% or more of the cost of producing or manufacturing the goods (as determined under Subdivision B of Part 1 of this Bill) occurred in the country to which a representation of origin is being made.
The effect of proposed section 65AC is to establish a test for representations that goods are the ‘Product of’ or ‘Produce of’ a country. Those descriptors may only be used if each of the significant ingredients or components of the goods come from the country of representation and virtually all of the production or manufacturing processes associated with the goods occur in that country.
The purpose of proposed section 65AD is to enable a stricter test to apply to goods licensed to carry a prescribed logo. Subsection 65AD(2) enables regulations to be made which may prescribe a higher than 51% component of the costs of production or manufacture for goods carrying a specified logo.
Proposed section 65AE defines the term ‘substantially transformed’. According to this definition, for a substantial transformation to occur, goods must undergo a fundamental change which alters their appearance, purpose or how they work. The effect of proposed subsection 65AE(2) is to enable regulations to be made which specify when a change is not a ‘fundamental change’.
Proposed subdivision B provides for the method to be used when calculating the costs of production or manufacture. The total costs of producing or manufacturing a good is defined as the sum of the expenditure on materials (as determined under proposed section 65AJ ), the sum of expenditure on labour (determined under proposed section 65AK ), and the sum of expenditure on overheads (determined under proposed section 65AL ). ‘Materials’ is defined in proposed section 65AG to include unmanufactured raw products, manufactured inputs, and the retail packaging in which the product is offered for sale. The retail packaging is defined as the ‘inner container’ to distinguish it from the outer packaging used when goods are transported. An example is given of a tin of tomatoes. The tin is included in the calculation of production costs under the definition of an ‘inner container’. The cardboard box in which the tins are packed for storage or transport is not.
Proposed sections 65AJ, 65AK, and 65AL provide a legislative framework for what can be included in the calculation of production costs.
All the costs of materials used in the production or manufacture of goods may be counted ( proposed section 65AJ ) with the exception of costs, or a portion of the costs, that may be disallowed by regulation ( proposed paragraph 65AJ(2)(a) ). Under proposed paragraph 65AJ(2)(b) the Minister is also able to make regulations prescribing the manner in which the cost of a material may be worked out. The Minister is given these powers to make regulations in order to address any possible uncertainty about how costs are to be attributed throughout the production chain.
The effect of proposed section 65AK is to include all labour costs that can be ‘reasonably allocated’ (the term is not defined in the Bill) to the production or manufacture of products in the calculation of production costs. Again the Minister is able to prescribe in regulations a manner for determining the cost of labour, and to disallow particular labour costs ( proposed subsection 65AK(2) .
Proposed section 65AL deals with the calculation of expenditure on overheads. All overheads that can ‘reasonably be allocated’ to the production or manufacture of the goods may be included, except where explicitly disallowed by virtue of a regulation made under proposed paragraph 65Al(2)(a) . The Minister is given the power to make regulations prescribing the manner in which the costs of overheads may be determined.
Proposed section 65AM enables the Minister to make regulations prescribing general rules to be followed when dividing the total costs of production between different countries. The same rules are to be used to allocate the costs of production to Australian and to overseas businesses in the production chain. This power to make regulations will enable the Minister to fine tune the working of the production cost test.
The effect of proposed subdivision C (Evidentiary matters) is to confirm that a person who seeks to rely in court on the defences provided by the proposed new Division 1AA (Country of Origin Representations), bears the usual onus of proof.
Part 2 of Schedule 1 contains a number of amendments that are consequential on the inclusion of proposed new Division 1AA. The effect of Item 2 is to limit the application of country of origin representations to goods sold or made available for retail sale in Australia. The proposed new Division 1AA has no extra-territorial application. Items 3-12 insert references to the new Division 1AA in the Trade Practices Act 1974 thereby ensuring consistency.
Schedule 2 of the Bill includes five other amendments to the Trade Practices Act 1974 which have no connection with country of origin representations. Item 1 concerns the appointment of Commissioners to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). The effect of the proposed amendment is to include consideration of small business experience as a relevant factor in appointing ACCC Commissioners. The second change brought about by Item 1 is to require the Minister to be satisfied that all the factors outlined in the subsection have been met before the Governor-General appoints an ACCC Commissioner.
The effect of Item 2 is to require the Minister, rather than the Attorney-General, to appoint a Deputy President or Acting Deputy President to the position of Acting President of the Australian Competition Tribunal should a vacancy occur.
Item 3 enables the ACCC to take representative actions on matters of alleged contravention of Part IV (Restrictive Trade Practices) of the Trade Practices Act 1974 . At present the ACCC’s powers to take such actions under subsection 87(1B) are limited to Part IVA (Unconscionable Conduct) and Part V (Consumer Protection). Item 5 is retrospective legislation. It extends the rights granted under Item 3 to include conduct committed before this amendment is passed.
1. A list of Commonwealth, State and Territory legislative requirements for country of origin labelling as at May 1993 is included in the Report of the Working Groups on Country of Origin Labelling of Consumer Products , Canberra, 1993, Attachment A.
2. The Trade Practices Commission also published draft guidelines on ‘Made in Australia’ labelling, Australian Trade Practices Reporter , CCH, Sydney, 1986, para. 30-361.
3. Thorpe v C A Imports Pty Ltd (1990) ATPR 40-996.
4. Siddons Pty Ltd v Stanley Works Pty Ltd (1990-91) 99 ALR 499.
5. Netcomm (Aust) Pty Ltd v Dataplex Pty Ltd (1988) 81 ALR 101.
6. Bailey, Brendan, It Ain’t necessarily so: country of origin labelling , Department of the Parliamentary Library, Canberra, 1994 (Current issues brief, Law and Public Administration Group 20/1994), 9.
7. Report of the Working Groups on country of origin labelling of consumer products , Federal Bureau of Consumer Affairs, Canberra, 1993.
8. Bini, Marco, Trade Practices Amendment (Origin Labelling) Bill 1994 , Department of the Parliamentary Library, Canberra, 1994 (Bills Digest 60/1994).
9. Explanatory memorandum , Trade Practices Amendment (Origin Labelling) Bill 1994, 5
10. Senate, Debates , 2 March 1995, 1281-2.
11. Bailey, Brendan, op cit, 9.
12. The Trade Practices Amendment (Origin Labelling) Bill 1994 , House of Representatives, Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology, Canberra, 1994
13. The Trade Practices Amendment (Origin Labelling) Bill 1994 , Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, Canberra, 1994.
14. Trade Practices Commission v QDSV Holdings Pty Ltd (trading as Bush Friends Australia) (1994) 128 ALR 551.
15. Ibid, 558.
16. QSVD Holdings Pty Ltd (t/as Bush Friends Australia) v Trade Practices Commission (1995), 131 ALR 493 (at 513).
17. Ibid, 513.
18. Pengilley, Warren, ‘Toy koalas and country of origin: the Trade Practices Act and ‘small print’ exclusions’, Australian and New Zealand trade practices law bulletin, ,v.10 (9), March 1995, 102.
19. Explanatory Memorandum , Trade Practices Amendment (Country of Origin Representations) Bill 1998, 2.
20. Australian Competition and Consumer Commission v Lovelock Luke Pty Ltd 1100 FCA (24 October 1977), 39 IPR, 439.
21. Ibid, 445.
22. QSVD Holdings Pty Ltd (t/as Bush Friends Australia) v Trade Practices Commission (1995), 131 ALR 493 (at 310-313).
23. Australian Competition and Consumer Commission v Lovelock Luke Pty Ltd 1100 FCA (24 October 1977).
24. Explanatory Memorandum , op cit, 2.
25. Second Reading Speech , Trade Practices Amendment (Country of Origin Representations) Bill 1998, House of Representatives, Debates , 8 April 1998, 1917.
26. A number of Australian States or regions have attempted to foster consumer awareness of their local products by creating regional ‘brands’. The 1994 Bill was criticised, particularly by State Governments and industry, for effectively prohibiting the use of local representations such as ‘Product of Tasmania’ or ‘Made in Queensland’. The Bill did this by prohibiting the use of any alternatives to the defined terms ‘Product of Australia’ or ‘Made in Australia’. Under the 1994 Bill, if manufacturers or suppliers wished to identify the town, city, region or State of origin of goods, they could only do so by adding an alternative identification to the authorised words, such as ‘Proudly Tasmanian’ or ‘Made in Australia at Bendigo’. The current Bill contains no such restrictions. However, if a manufacturer chooses to label a good, for example, both ‘Made in Australia’ and ‘Product of Tasmania’, the manufacturer will know with certainty what ‘Made in Australia’ will mean under the current Bill, but will have no certainty under this legislation about the meaning of the term ‘Product of Tasmania’. Such local representations will be subject to testing under Section 52 of the Trade Practices Act 1974 and/or under the equivalent provisions of State Fair Trading laws.
27. Explanatory Memorandum , op cit, 11.
28. Trade Practices Commission v QDSV Holdings Pty Ltd (trading as Bush Friends Australia) (1994) 128 ALR 551 (at 558).
29. LaNasa, Joseph A, ‘Rules of origin under the North American Free Trade Agreement: a substantial transformation into objectively transparent protectionism’, Harvard International Law Journal , v.34, no.2, Spring 1993, 381-443.
30. LaNasa, ibid, 385.
31. Second Reading Speech , op cit, 1917.
32. Explanatory Memorandum , op cit, 6. See also Agreement on rules of origin , World Trade Organisation, [n.d.], available on the Internet at http://www.wto.org/
33. Report of the Working Groups on Country of Origin Labelling of Consumer Products , op cit, ii.
34. Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, op cit, 10 and footnote 31 on that page. This issue is further discussed in the Dissenting Report by Senator Sid Spindler, [33-34].
35. Second Reading Speech , op cit, 1917.
36. Report of the Working groups on Country of Origin Labelling of Consumer Products , op cit, ii.
37. Trade Practices Commission v QDSV Holdings Pty Ltd (trading as Bush Friends Australia) (1994) 128 ALR 551 (at 556).
38. For example, the Advance Australia Foundation reported on a survey conducted by the Tavener Research Company in May 1995 which stated that ‘79% of consumers recognise buying Australian Made helps the economy and balance of trade’, and ‘95% of consumers agree that buying Australian Made products in preference to imports creates jobs for Australians’. The survey also suggested that the Australian Made campaign had been successful in encouraging more Australian consumers to purchase goods carrying the Australian Made logo. In May 1995 86% of consumers said they had purchased products carrying the green and gold symbol, compared with only 62% of consumers surveyed in May 1988. Australian Made , Advance Australia Foundation, Melbourne, July 1955, 1.
39. The Australian Made Campaign: relevance, rationale and general equilibrium effects in unemployment and full employment , Marsden Jacob Associates, Camberwell, Vic., 28 March 1994.
14 May 1998
Bills Digest Service
Information and Research Services
This paper has been prepared for gene ral distribution to Senators and Members of the Australian Parliament. While great care is taken to ensure that the paper is accurate and balanced, the paper is written using information publicly available at the time of production. The views expressed are those of the author and should not be attributed to the Information and Research Services (IRS). Advice on legislation or legal policy issues contained in this paper is provided for use in parliamentary debate and for related parliamentary purposes. This paper is not professional legal opinion. Readers are reminded that the paper is not an official parliamentary or Australian government document. IRS staff are available to discuss the paper's contents with Senators and Members and their staff but not with members of the public. | <urn:uuid:0ef3f8e5-a456-4cb8-92fb-0a265caba583> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id%3A%22legislation%2Fbillsdgs%2FEJ305%22 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946172 | 7,553 | 1.734375 | 2 |
A white Ford Bronco carrying O.J. Simpson is trailed by police in Los Angeles, June 17, 1994. (AP/File)Click the image to see more photos.
The Sept. 11 tragedy was the most powerful event in television history, according to a new study released Wednesday by Sony Electronics and Nielsen.
According to Nielsen's survey of 1,077 American adults, 9/11 was the most "universally impactful" televised moment of the last 50 years, followed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the O.J. Simpson verdict in 1995, the Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986 and the death of Osama bin Laden last May.
To measure impact, Nielsen and Sony created a score for each event derived by the number of people who viewed the event live, the number who could recall details about where they were during the occurrence and the number who could remember discussing what happened with others. Those parameters may explain why the surreal, slow-speed chase of Simpson's white Ford Bronco on June 17, 1994, ranked higher on the list than the 2011 earthquake in Japan, the Columbine High School shootings and the 2010 BP oil spill.
It may also be the reason that the endlessly hyped wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton in 2011 had more influence, according to Nielsen, than the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963.
Here are the top 20 events, according to the survey:
1. Sept. 11 tragedy (2001)
2. Hurricane Katrina (2005)
3. O.J. Simpson verdict (1995)
4. Challenger space shuttle disaster (1986)
5. Death of Osama bin Laden (2011)
6. O.J. Simpson white Bronco chase (1994)
7. Earthquake in Japan (2011)
8. Columbine High School shootings (1999)
9. BP oil spill (2010)
10. Princess Diana's funeral (1997)
11. Death of Whitney Houston (2012)
12. Capture and execution of Saddam Hussein (2006)
13. Barack Obama's acceptance speech (2008)
14. The Royal Wedding (2011)
15. Assassination of John F. Kennedy (1963)
16. Oklahoma City bombing (1995)
17. Bush/Gore election results (2000)
18. L.A. riots (1992)
19. Casey Anthony verdict (2011)
20. Funeral of John F. Kennedy (1963)
Five of the top 20 most powerful moments—bin Laden's killing, the earthquake in Japan, the Casey Anthony verdict, the royal wedding and the death of Whitney Houston—occurred within the last two years, while JFK's assassination and funeral in 1963 were the only televised events from the 1960s. And just one from the 1980s—the Challenger disaster—registered among the 20 most resonating, TV-wise.
The survey was conducted by Nielsen in February. Sony commissioned the study in part to prove that despite the prevalence of Facebook and Twitter, people still watch major news events on television. "The study shows that we still turn to TV to inspire those [social media] discussions," Sony Electronics VP Brian Siegel said. (Loose translation: We should buy more TVs, preferably from Sony.)
[Slideshow: Television's most powerful moments]
It also showed that age and gender play a big role in what we consider must-see TV.
Apart from 9/11, the most highly recalled events among females were the 1997 funeral of Princess Diana, the 2011 wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton and the 2004 finale of "Friends." Among men, the killing of bin Laden and the U.S. hockey team's 1980 Olympic "miracle" were the most powerful television events excluding the 2001 terror attacks.
Among women aged 18-34, the Tiger Woods cheating episode ranked highest in the scandal category, whereas President Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky had a greater effect among men in the same age range.
Men over the age of 55, meanwhile, were influenced heavily by the "Thrilla in Manila" bout between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, and Joe Namath's MVP performance in Super Bowl III. But 18-34-year-old men said they were most "impacted" by LeBron James' decision to sign with the Miami Heat.
What TV event most affected you and why? Tell us briefly and specifically in the article's section for comments. The best responses may be highlighted in another story. | <urn:uuid:e1d3376d-7459-4328-a104-c7b8aaa48dd2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/tv-most-memorable-moments-911-oj-katrina-nielsen-121010226.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937336 | 919 | 1.617188 | 2 |
Division of Audits
Pursuant to statute, the Division of Audits is empowered by the Board to examine and audit duly designated public utilities and other regulated entities subject to the Board’s jurisdiction. The Division consists of two Bureaus, which report to the Director.
Financial Audit Bureau
The Bureau of Financial Audits performs audits of Basic Generation Supply and Basic Gas Supply Service costs, utility construction programs, environmental remediation expenditures and New Jersey One Call related expenses. The Bureau also assists other agencies in investigations of public utilities and other regulated entities, maintains and reviews annual reports filed by all New Jersey public utilities and assists the Board’s Office of Budget and Fiscal with the Board’s annual assessment program. The Bureau is responsible for the licensing of third-party energy suppliers, energy agents and private aggregators and for issuing authority for Competitive Local Exchange Carriers for inter-exchange telecommunications services. The Bureau also assists the Universal Service Fund (USF) program staff with financial matters related to the USF program Budgets and collection and disbursements of USF funds.
Management Audit Bureau
The Bureau of Management Audits reviews the operations and management of gas, electric and water utilities with the goal of seeking efficiency and accountability of actions in order to assure safe, adequate and proper service. The goal of efficiency reflects endeavors to improve the future operations and management of each utility. This Bureau has investigated and recommended courses of actions to the Board on issues such as restructuring, electric outages and reliability of service, gas explosions, compliance reviews, competitive services, affiliate relations and telephone financial integrity. Under the Electric Discount and Energy Competition Act (EDECA) of 1999, the Staff of this Bureau has supervised competitive service compliance reviews which are performed by independent consultants per EDECA. | <urn:uuid:d5592079-e5dd-4bf2-9a92-ce0203522fbb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.state.nj.us/bpu/about/divisions/audits/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93204 | 362 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Fire Marshall Bill wrote:The US Navy is planning to have a fully operational Strike Force running on this product by the year 2016
Soladiesel BD® and Soladiesel RD® are the first algal-derived fuels to be successfully road-tested in blended and unblended (B100) forms for thousands of miles in unmodified vehicles.
Both are compatible with existing infrastructures, meet current U.S. and European fuel specifications, and can be used with factory-standard diesel engines without modification.
Soladiesel BD® is a Fatty Acid Methyl Ester-based (FAME) fuel, which has demonstrated better cold temperature properties than any commercially available biodiesel.
Soladiesel RD® (Renewable #2 Diesel) is ASTM D975 compliant and has demonstrated a cetane rating of over 74, which is more than 60 percent better than standard U.S. diesel fuel.
Soladiesel HRF-76 is renewable diesel for ships. It's currently being used as the base fuel for testing and certification of renewable F-76. To date, Solazyme is the only company to provide the U.S. Navy with fully in-spec HRF-76.
Solajet™ is the world's first 100 percent algal-derived jet fuel, for both military and commercial applications. The fuel has been used in a U.S. Navy testing and certification program and has met all non-petroleum military specifications for JP5 jet fuel.
In the longer term, we expect to sell our oil directly to refiners, accessing their distribution infrastructure.
What a waste to spend that on the gubmint navy.
Should have had BP do it. They have incentive as a private corporation.
Plus it'll never work. I know algae from growing up in 70's Euclid swimming off E 206th beach and that green stringy stuff will clog up a jet engine for sure. | <urn:uuid:c562d5d7-bccb-4240-8d01-a8a292410eee> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.theclevelandfan.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=415480 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940736 | 402 | 1.710938 | 2 |
Editor’s note: Aziz Al Shammari is one of thousands of international students who leave their native lands behind to study at West Virginia University. His story contains many of the same feelings shared by others who come here from abroad for the first time—fear, loneliness and homesickness—but eventually those get replaced by a sense of home, of family, of belonging. WVU now is home not only to Al Shammari, but many of his family members from Saudi Arabia, who have joined him in Morgantown. WVU has not only changed Al Shammari, but he and his family have changed WVU.
Aziz Al Shammari’s journey began Dec. 28, 2006, with the winter evening air gnawing through layers of sweaters and jackets coiled around him as, more than 7,000 miles from his Saudi Arabian homeland, he inhaled his first breath of American air.
This new experience wasn’t quite a “warm” welcome.
That time of year, Al Shammari is used to Saudi Arabia’s average lows in the high-40s and average highs in the low-70s. For West Virginia, it’s a seasonal scorcher if the temps reach anywhere near that.
The airplane might as well have dropped Al Shammari off at Mars instead of Pittsburgh International Airport.
No direction. No English. No friends.
Just goose flesh.
If cold weather was the least desirable aspect of Morgantown, everything else must’ve been paradise.
After all, Al Shammari remains firmly engrained here in Mountaineer nation five years later.
At 19, Al Shammari envisioned living the American Dream. As a young adult in Saudi Arabia, he wanted to come to the United States to earn an education.
His elders, particularly a late grandfather, weren’t so keen on his decision to leave home.
“My grandfather didn’t want me to come,” Al Shammari said. “He was old-fashioned. But he said, ‘I can see it in your eyes that you’re ready to go.’ So he let me go.”
Al Shammari originally had his eyes set on Arizona, but a friend of his father’s urged him to give WVU a try. That friend called West Virginia the “perfect location.”
Once he landed in Pittsburgh on that icy December night, Al Shammari couldn’t stop thinking about what was ahead in Morgantown. Snow-topped trees dotted the landscape and captured his thoughts on the drive down Interstate 79.
“I kept thinking about how Morgantown would look,” Al Shammari said. “I was excited to see what the morning there would look like.”
His vision did not match reality.
“I expected Morgantown to be a big city, like New York,” he said.
He plunged ahead anyway.
-Aziz Al Shammari
Al Shammari enrolled in the Intensive English Program at WVU to hone his proficiency in English before choosing an academic course of study. The program offers international students assistance with housing, banking, counseling, health care and legal matters an initiative to acclimate them to the new environment. He also acquainted himself with members of the Saudi Students’ Association at WVU and lived in an apartment with fellow Saudis.
Still, Morgantown didn’t seem like home to Al Shammari. He struggled socially through his first semester.
“I didn’t like it here that much,” he admitted. “I didn’t speak English. I didn’t know how to make friends. So when we went on break, I went to California.”
A cousin suggested he move out there with him, but Al Shammari wasn’t about to give up on WVU.
He told his cousin he needed time to think. He returned to Morgantown and graduated from the Intensive English Program. By then, even sunny California couldn’t lure Al Shammari away from WVU.
Al Shammari says there wasn’t any particular “gotcha” moment that made him realize he wanted to be a Mountaineer; it was a gradual immersion into the WVU community that hooked him.
“I felt I had already built myself as a Mountaineer,” Al Shammari said. “I went to football and basketball games, enjoyed the green mountains in the summer and the snow in the winter.”
He had a few options regarding his living situation after returning from his break in California. He could have continued rooming with other Saudis, but he eventually decided to live in the residence halls with mostly American students.
That was the best approach to practicing and learning English, he thought. That decision would pay off.
Al Shammari would engage himself elsewhere, not only in the halls.
“I learned how everything works around here,” he said, “and realized that people here are very friendly. When I walked to the store or a restaurant, I could stop anybody and start a conversation with them.
He added, “When I compared California to West Virginia, I found I’d benefit more by staying. It’s much easier here to make friends, practice English and participate in school activities.”
He even learned to ice skate, a skill he otherwise would not have acquired in Saudi Arabia, where ice skating rinks are as prevalent as golf courses in the Arctic.
“It’s the best,” Al Shammari simply said about his newfound hobby. “Skating is the best.”
The clash of the cultures spills beyond just weather and sports. Social aspects posed the most challenging adjustment for Al Shammari.
Back home, Al Shammari would never get to mingle with females because of the customs. At WVU, several of his best friends are women. Early on, he made a friend who introduced him to her family and their life on a southern West Virginia farm.
Director, WVU Office of International Studies and Scholars
Social interaction between different groups in Saudi Arabia is so limited that Al Shammari said it’s uncommon to even meet residents from different regions of the country.
“You don’t get to know people in the north or south (of Saudi Arabia),” he said. “Here (at WVU), I’ve met Saudis from all places and all cultures. We’re best friends.”
Don’t bother bringing up sexual orientation over there, either. It’s a topic that’s off-limits.
In Saudi Arabia, he’d never meet openly bisexual or gay people, Al Shammari said. “Over there, I wouldn’t know what to say. I’d probably just walk away.” Here, he says, he has learned to meet with people of all backgrounds.
“I’d be a totally different person if I hadn’t left Saudi Arabia,” he says.
It took some time, but Al Shammari carved a niche in the WVU community. He no longer lacked direction or stumbled over the English language. Just as important, he was no longer alone.
Equipped with a bright smile and gentle demeanor, Al Shammari has amassed a bevy of friends in Morgantown.
He became president of the Saudi Students’ Association and serves as an international student liaison for the Student Government Association.
His progression has not gone unnoticed. Michael Wilhelm, director of the WVU Office of International Studies and Scholars, remembers meeting Al Shammari not long after he arrived in Morgantown. At the time, Wilhelm was an instructor in the Intensive English Program.
“It was clear from the first meeting that he was a great kid who was very motivated to improve his English, but he really had a long way to go,” Wilhelm said. “His progress over the years at WVU has been simply amazing, and I don’t mean only in terms of his language skills.
“I have always appreciated the desire that Aziz has to put himself out there, to get to know new people both inside and outside of the international student community, and to simply get involved in a full student life here at WVU.”
Wilhelm believes the University community has benefited from Al Shammari coming here.
“He has led both the Saudi Students’ Association and the International Students Organization into a more visible position at WVU,” he said. “As the number of international undergraduate students has increased in Morgantown, it has been essential that University administrators establish a working relationship with the leaders of the various student groups, and Aziz was not only accessible, but would actively cultivate these types of relationships.”
As an Student Government representative, Al Shammari’s goal is to create unity between cultures and help assimilate international students with American culture.
He’s succeeded by introducing his family a mix of cousins, brothers and uncles to WVU.
Here’s the current roster: Aziz, Mathwad, Mamadouh, Youssef, Muteb, Sultan, Khalid, Fayez, Talal and another Aziz. Most are registered as either pre-engineering or Intensive English Program students at WVU.
“I feel responsible for them coming here,” he said with a hint of pride. “It was their decision to come here, but from my side they heard how beautiful the people of West Virginia are.”
In addition to his studies and own personal life here, he’s had to serve as a keeper/guardian of sorts for his relatives. He’s picked up each one from the airport, assisted them with their paperwork and schoolwork, and helped them adjust to the culture and landscape.
“If one of them wants to go to Kroger, I’ll go with them,” he said. “If one needs something from the University, I’ll call for them. We’re always together.”
Several like to “show off that they’re Americanized,” Al Shammari joked. They all carry iPods and cell phones. Some sport New York Yankees caps. Others try to talk with American accents.
“I would never have imagined listening to Akon and American music,” Al Shammari said.
Saudi Arabia comes to Morgantown
By the same token, Saudi Arabian culture has infiltrated WVU with the arrival of Al Shammari and his family.
They’ve made many friends and have incorporated them into their circle.
Middle Eastern cuisine and smoking hookah, a staple of their culture, have infiltrated the Mountaineer community.
Bryanna DeFazio, an occupational therapy student, met one of the Al Shammaris Youssef randomly in the Mountainlair. The two struck up a conversation.
“Youssef made me an honorary cousin,” DeFazio said. “Anytime I see an Al Shammari, I hear ‘Al Shammari! Al Shammari!”
They even gave her an Arabic first name, Ghazala, which means beautiful woman or cute animal.
“After summer break, when I arrived back to Morgantown, I saw Youssef for the first time and he hugged me and said, ‘Oh cousin, I’ve missed you so much,’” she said. “Little things like that would make anyone’s day a little better.”
DeFazio has taken a stab at speaking Arabic. She returns the favor by helping them with their English.
“The boys like to make fun of me when I say something wrong or when it sounds funny without the proper accents,” DeFazio said.
“I do my best to help with their English. Sometimes during conversation we come across a word one of the cousins doesn’t understand. I always do something to make them learn that word and its meaning.”
Kristen Pennington, a journalism student, met Al Shammari through Student Government, where she serves as executive secretary.
“My opinion about people of the world has been reinforced by the fact that a good laugh and great company can be found by any fellow human, regardless of ethnicity, nationality, race or creed,” Pennington said. “Aziz is a friend I will always cherish, and be proud to call my friend. He represents his country very well at WVU.”
More to come
With about another year of studies before graduation, Al Shammari isn’t in a rush to leave.
Alas, he needs to incorporate more family members into the American and Mountaineer culture. This summer, Bander and Sultan are expected to join the clan in Morgantown. By fall 2012, they hope to add Khaled and Mathwid, as well. Then they’ll have enough for a soccer team.
But out of all Al Shammaris at WVU, Aziz is the only one who plans to stay in the United States for the long-term. He’s uncertain about his future career, but would love to travel and live in different cities here.
For now, he is enjoying new relationships and old ones, that have come together magically in Morgantown.
It’s still cold here sometimes. But he’s no longer 7,000 miles from home.
By Jake Stump
CONTACT: University Relations-News
Follow @WVUToday on Twitter. | <urn:uuid:62e2e7e6-4411-4403-927f-ce2935c37919> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://wvutoday.wvu.edu/n/2012/03/02/the-saudi-mountaineer-a-family-story | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970969 | 2,957 | 1.539063 | 2 |
Dubai has The Burj, but Berlin might get The Berg
By Jeff Salton
November 19, 2009
Hoax or hopeful? Sky high or pie-in-the-sky? German architect Jakob Tigges has unleashed a daring plan to create a man-made mountain in Berlin – not exactly a feature you instantly associate with the German city, but if this “project” gets approval that could change. According to The Berg website, Berliners are getting behind the project as another tourist-attracting (money-making) option for their fair city.
The 1,000m-tall fake mountain is proposed for the site of the former Tempelhof airport and would be the largest man-made mountain ever constructed, even collecting snow on its peak. But although an uninhabitable monolith of this magnitude might look appealing to some, funding for it might be another matter. Not to mention the environmental impact of such a structure.
Via the Berg website, Tigges writes: “While big and wealthy cities in many parts of the world challenge the limits of possibility by building gigantic hotels with fancy shapes, erecting sky-high office towers or constructing hovering philharmonic temples, Berlin sets up a decent mountain … Hamburg, as stiff as flat, turns green with envy, rich and once proud Munich starts to feel ashamed of its distant Alp-panorama and planners of the Middle-East, experienced in taking the spell off any kind of architectural utopia immediately design authentic copies of the iconic Berlin-Mountain.”
Whether the world is gullible or people truly want to see and experience The Berg, the project is attracting a lot of local media, a huge following on Facebook and looks to have some product endorsements already. The mountain is so big it would alter the weather surrounding it and attract a wide range of flora and fauna. It would also provide Berliners with a convenient location to enjoy a range of activities including skiing, hang-gliding and rock climbing.
It seems like a monumental task, but we’ll keep a watching brief on The Berg to see if Berlin can indeed make a mountain out of a molehill. What do you think? Potential man-made monstrosity or marvel?
Just enter your friends and your email address into the form below
For multiple addresses, separate each with a comma | <urn:uuid:39bc445c-71af-4e7f-981a-22e2114d2772> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.gizmag.com/the-berg-man-made-mountain-berlin/13393/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940759 | 481 | 1.726563 | 2 |
PGA of America to support Sticks for Kids
Continuing its full-court press to grow the game, the PGA of America is partnering with the Golf Course Builders Association of America Foundation to expand the Sticks for Kids program.
The GCBAA's youth initiative provides golf courses with 10 sets of junior clubs for use at no charge. The program currently has 450 participating sites, with a presence in all 50 states and 17 international military bases. More than 63,000 children are playing the game as Sticks for Kids beneficiaries.
The PGA plans to pair its junior development program – the PGA Sports Academy powered by United Healthcare – with Sticks for Kids, providing youth with quality instruction with minimal or no cost.
"It’s important that the PGA of America support any program that makes clubs more accessible, and this program does exactly that,” said Allen Wronowksi, the association's president.
Since its founding in 1997, the Sticks for Kids program not only has promoted the game of golf to youth, but has served as an advocate for environmental stewardship and physical activity. The GCBAA is a nonprofit trade association for course builders and suppliers to the course construction industry. The foundation is its charitable arm. | <urn:uuid:9c83f539-51c3-44ca-940b-f3213710fe20> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://golfweek.com/news/2012/aug/07/pga-america-support-sticks-kids/?BLOG-BizBlog | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951199 | 258 | 1.546875 | 2 |
alphadogg sends in a Network World piece on the unexpectedly effective technologies Iran is now employing to thwart their citizens' access to the Net. "While the government's initial efforts to censor the Internet were blunt and often ineffective, it has started employing more sophisticated tools to thwart dissidents' attempts to communicate with each other and the outside world. Iranian dissidents are not alone in their struggle, however, as several sympathetic hacker groups have been working to keep them online. One such group is NedaNet, whose mission is to 'help the Iranian people by setting up networks of proxy severs, anonymizers, and any other appropriate technologies that can enable them to communicate and organize.' NedaNet project coordinator Morgan Sennhauser, who has just written a paper detailing the Iranian government's latest efforts to thwart hackers (PDF), says that the government's actions have been surprisingly robust and have challenged hackers in ways that the Chinese government's efforts at censorship have not." | <urn:uuid:3f200148-d4dc-4e55-995d-ee622298bf87> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/07/20/2211214/Five-Technologies-Iran-Is-Using-To-Censor-the-Net/insightful-comments | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963956 | 191 | 1.703125 | 2 |
Consuming Isn’t Evil
How to buy wisely by letting your spiritual side help make economic decisions
Most of us don’t like to think of ourselves as consumers. I know I’d always hated the term. I’m a human being, after all, not just a buyer of things. I disliked the word “lifestyle” for similar reasons; I live a life, not just a “style” that naturally requires buying more things.
Then a magazine story I was editing about Rob Walker, a consumerism critic for The New York Times, called me out. He was explaining why the Times needs such a thing as a consumerism critic.
“People constantly tell me that they’re ‘not much of a consumer,’” he said. “That’s the mindset everyone comes to this with. Everyone thinks they’re sharper, less greedy, and more virtuous than average. They recognize the silly decisions of others, who are influenced by status and marketing and other non-rational things. But people tend to see themselves as immune to all that.”
Oh, Rob. When did we meet, and how did you get to know me so well and so quickly?
The shock of self-recognition forced me to admit I am a consumer. I buy things — in fact, over time, lots of things. I choose which things to buy — sometimes for smart reasons and sometimes for silly ones.
Last year I decided to make that a positive power by buying more wisely for the world. I’d always tried to buy smart financially for myself to get the best deal. Now, instead of buying the cheapest products to benefit me, I regularly spend more to reward companies that are doing the best by the environment, their employees and their social contract.
My research reminded me that buying wisely starts before the act of purchasing. Choosing to reuse, buy secondhand or go without some things is still the wisest option for society’s triple bottom line.
Still, I need to buy new food, toiletries, cleaning products, clothing and plenty more. A fellow parish member recommended something called the Better World Shopper. Better World was multi-pronged: a rating system that grades companies with the highest regard for human rights, the environment, animal protection, community involvement and social justice. There is a website that explains how the ratings were arrived at, and an app to help people buy wisely on the go.
I purchased Better World Shopper for a few dollars (my first wise outlay). Right there in the store, choosing among brands of OJ, TP or beer, I could quickly choose the company making the best impact. I just pull up the category of products I’m looking at and see the major brands in order from A+ to F.
Often companies that put their environmental commitment right in their name or packaging, like Seventh Generation, top Better World’s grade lists. But there are surprises! Tropicana gets a B grade, while organic-looking Simply Juice gets an F.
Company characteristics like treatment of employees aren’t the only ways in which to assess compatibility with our spiritual beliefs, of course. Another app I’ve discovered, Free2Work, scans bar codes and reports back on how well the company tries to prevent child and forced labor.
My parish bulletin had recommended Free2Work in a section about human trafficking. That was an uncomfortable jolt. I hadn’t connected my purchases with the idea of human trafficking, which I had associated more with the horrifying reality of sex slaves. But factory conditions can be imprisoning as well.
I wish I could tell you that I’m totally there, buying few products and investing only in “A+” ones when I truly need to make a purchase. I wish I could say I do all my grocery shopping between the farmers market and the local co-op. And I wish my clothing purchases in particular were not so tagged to the most flattering fit and best sale.
I’m not there yet; but I do feel that triple bottom line — impact on the environment, employees and wider society — is connected to biblical teachings about love, justice and community. Catholic social teaching about the rights to human dignity and to work are not for nothing. My “steal” of a purchase would be named all too fittingly if it took away from another person.
So am I at greater peace with being a consumer? Consuming still connotes a certain powerlessness — at least compared to its opposite in economics: producing.
But I’ve started to think it’s not as different as you’d assume from being a child of God. Being a child is not a position of power. But a child can do her best in her own small way, in her own little corner of the web. That’s exactly what I try to do now as a consumer. | <urn:uuid:d825e9fd-ff55-41b9-81c8-e432a5a60d56> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bustedhalo.com/features/consuming-isnt-evil | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965314 | 1,033 | 1.726563 | 2 |
Ladies and gentlemen,
The report of the Commission on Macroeconomics and
Health was launched last December. Only six months ago. But since
then, much has happened. The report has aroused intense interest
around the world.
This meeting is important as it is the first time
that we have had a chance to focus specifically on what the CMH Report
means for individual countries. We are fortunate to have with us today
such a distinguished group of participants. From ministries of
finance, ministries of planning, ministries of health; the World Bank,
UN organizations, donor agencies, foundations and regional
commissions. We have with us members of the CMH family – both
Commissioners and working group members. From WHO too – we bring
together staff from our regional and country offices, as well as
colleagues from headquarters.
Let me warmly welcome you all, and thank you for
making this meeting possible.
Transformation. To me that is the central message
of the CMH Report. Transformation from better health to better
livelihoods. From better livelihoods to economic growth. And from
economic growth to a sustained, and sustainable, reduction in poverty.
One reason why the CMH Report has aroused such
intense interest is that it contains a powerful blend of aspiration
and realism. It is clearly an important advocacy document, but it also
contains many practical recommendations to national authorities.
This provides the theme for our meeting.
Transformation once again: but this time from advocacy to action. From
a global framework to country specific strategies. Not prescriptions,
of course – as each country will factor in its own circumstances –
but shared ideas, core functions and common objectives, as we work
collectively towards the Millennium Development Goals for health.
Ladies and gentlemen,
Two and a half years ago, when I asked Jeff Sachs
to lead an independent Commission, we had two objectives. The first
was a technical one. We were seeking a way of bringing together the
best brains in the world and getting them to focus on the complex set
of relationships that exist between health, economic development,
trade and poverty reduction. If we are to present the case for greater
investment in health, we must be standing on solid ground. We have to
get the facts straight and marshal the evidence. In this respect, the
Commission and its six working groups have helped us enormously.
But the Commission also had a political objective.
Including macro-economists and senior policy makers as members of the
Commission certainly brought a fresh perspective to the analytical
work. But these eminent individuals also have the ear of other
decision-makers who are less familiar with the world of health and
development. The Commissioners are powerful advocates for our message.
If I think back fifteen years, to the time when we
launched the report of the World Commission on Environment and
Development, we learnt some useful lessons. As with the CMH, there was
an inner circle of Commissioners – and around them a wider network
of people from government, researchers and academics, NGOs and many,
many others. Once the initial launch was over our strategy was to
keep widening the circle. Continuously expanding the network of
people that were actively debating and spreading the Commission’s
We see similar developments with the CMH and its
widening circle. The CMH was extensively discussed at the World
Economic Forum in New York this year, at the International Conference
on Financing for Development in Monterrey in March, and at the World
Health Assembly. In the discussions between heads of state and
ministers at Monterrey health featured prominently – and the CMH
helped in providing a well-argued case to illustrate the need for
increases in development spending by governments and international
agencies. And we are beginning to see a difference in renewed
commitments for increases in development assistance.
At this year’s World Health Assembly, the
recommendations of the CMH were explicitly recognized as part of the
strategy for achieving the millennium development goals. In August
this year, the follow-up to CMH will be central to WHO’s inputs to
the World Conference on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg.
All new ideas need their champions. Internationally
there are now many people that have internalized the ideas contained
in the CMH Report and made them part of their thinking. We now need
similar champions at national level.
As we work together over the next two days, we will
look at some of the responses that are being considered by countries
represented in this room. We will discuss some of the specific
recommendations of the CMH, such as the establishment of time-limited
national commissions. These are but one means of providing a national
focus for scaling up work on health.
From my experience with sustainable development, it
is important to recognize that a national commission, or its
equivalent, will only be a success if it is part of a much broader
national debate on health and poverty - which involves legislators,
civil society, local authorities, the media, academics, industry and
Health is now higher on the development agenda than
ever before. With global political commitment have come global
initiatives, new partnerships between public and private sectors, and
new alliances between countries. These are positive and exciting
developments. But they also bring with them a complexity that is new
for both national governments and their development partners. Our
challenge – which underpins the purpose of this meeting – is to
understand and to manage these developments in a way that brings
maximal benefit to poor people.
As we interpret the messages of the report –
balancing aspiration with realism – we have to take account of what
is feasible. But I am sure that Jeff Sachs would join me in urging you
not to lose sight of the aspirations. Achieving the Millennium
Development Goals will not happen if we stick to business as usual. We
have to scale up, think in terms of a quantum leap. Doing more, doing
it differently and doing it better.
A key challenge is to make sure that what we plan
is firmly embedded in national development processes. The CMH is not a
new stand-alone initiative. Let us see it as a stimulus to act. A
stimulus that will make us look closely to see whether health is
adequately reflected in a national poverty reduction strategies. A
stimulus to look closely at existing national health plans: are they
sufficiently focused? how can we make sure that poor people really
benefit? how can we create new partnerships that extend the reach of
health services? These are the kind of questions I hope you will be
The Commissioners' central message applies to
countries: it focuses on the need for additional resources and on the
ways in which these will be used. This is why our meeting brings
together officials from finance ministries and development agencies,
as well as health professionals. To achieve our shared goals will
require much more money than is currently available to many countries.
But let us remember: we know that we can ask for more, because we know
now how to spend it and we can show that we can spend it well.
Scaling up requires not only that we have a clear
sense of the cost of interventions, but that we can track progress and
measure results. It is not just a case of showing that there is a gap
between what is needed and what is available. We have to be able to
demonstrate clearly what can be achieved with the additional monies
that are becoming available: then we can seize current opportunities
and make the case for a long-term step increase in funding and action
We need to use the momentum generated by the CMH
Report to follow through actions at the country level that widen the
traditional constituencies of health, bringing in new and varied
partners working across sectors, placing poor people and poor
communities squarely at the centre. These new ways of working at
country level will yield rich dividends in terms of more monies and
better health outcomes for all.
Thank you very much, and I look forward to working with you over
the next two days. | <urn:uuid:1a0e37c4-4fb2-43e5-9ed9-54e7d2a42bac> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.who.int/director-general/speeches/2002/english/2002061718_consultationonnationalresponsestothecmh.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948595 | 1,728 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Write what you know
Poseidon and Amphitrite. Rupert Bunny [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
may be the most hackneyed advice out there. And, well, it really isn’t that well informed. Yes, writing the things you know about–especially when you’re starting out–are safe bets. Keeping to the zone of your knowledge means that you’ll likely not be called out as a fraud and that you’ll keep going because, well, you already know about it. And as writers we have a tendency to cluster around the things that inform our existence. It’s why I wrote about New England in the beginning of Pilgrim of the Sky
, even though I haven’t lived there in over a decade. It was part of my own origin story, a place I could walk around in the dark.
But getting stuck in what you know will plateau you as a writer. I noticed, in my writing, that I was falling into a bit of a pattern when it came to main characters. Cora from The Aldersgate, Marna from Indigo & Ink, Anna from Queen of None, and even Maddie from Pilgrim of the Sky all have some similar characteristics. They’re smart women who like to talk. They tend to fall in love with strong men. They explore the worlds around them from unusual perspectives. They grow on a similar trajectory in the narrative; most of them discover unseen worlds. Oh, they’re very different in other respects, but they’re characters written in my comfort zone. Not exactly Mary Sue variety, but more in a certain realm. I believe women need their stories told; I’m a woman. I tell the stories of women. (Kate from Rock Revival doesn’t share these characteristics, so I’m leaving her out; but she does share a lot with me in her background story, though our personalities differ greatly.)
One of the reasons Watcher of the Skies has taken a little longer than anticipated has to do with the time I’m taking to create Joss as a narrator. I don’t typically write in first person, and I don’t typically write novels that could be considered coming of age. And I don’t typically write male protagonists. But with Joss I’m not just telling his origin story, I’m building up character page by page. He’s telling the story, yes, but the character of Joss within the tale also changes with each chapter.
Now a couple of things have made Joss a challenge for me, personally. He’s a dude, in as much as godlings are dudes or chicks (which is a complicated post in and of itself). And he really digs the ladies. He’s physically enormous (over six foot three, which for his day, makes him a giant; I’m five foot five). He never asks questions in his dialogue, he simply states facts. He also doesn’t talk much, especially in the first three quarters of the book. Everyone around him does the talking. Here’s a quip from one of the later conversations he has with William Wordsworth, before he goes on his way:
“I was brusque with you, dear friend,” he said, sitting on the bed. I had come in from the roof and was still covered in rain, but he made no mention. He was quite used to my strange outdoor antics by that point. “I don’t know what came over me. I was drawn, almost inexplicably, to Mr. Coleridge. And we shared so much, as poets, that I was rather rude to you.”
“He doesn’t know me at all. I’d never steal from you,” I said.
“This is Londinium, I’m afraid,” William said, “and I worry that I did a terrible job preparing you for it. Samuel lives in a world, here, where there is so little trust between people. The streets are packed with thieves and there’s a swindler on every corner. You must understand, he was simply making a point.”
I nodded, not wanting to discuss it further.
“I just hope I haven’t scared you off for good,” William said, and I could hear the desperation in his voice. “You’ve been such a friend…”
“It’s been good for your poetry to have me around,” I said, voicing my fear for the first time.
William tried to say something and then looked down at his hands, which were still speckled with ink. “Yes, I suppose that’s true. Meeting you has somewhat increased my poetic capacity, but I don’t think…”
“I’ll not leave,” I said. “But I’ll need some space, you understand.”
He sighed like the bellows and agreed, though I could tell it pained him to do so. “Yes. I suppose that’s fair.”
After twenty years he meets up with Wordsworth again, and while he isn’t exactly a chatterer, Joss manages to command the conversation in an entirely different way.
“I’m sorry,” I said, for the first time feeling guilty as I should have. “I met a friend. And he…”
“He was like you,” William said. He held up his finger in a gesture of winking knowledge. “I saw you, that night. The fellow with the golden hair. Quite a picture. And you never looked back.”
“I thought of you often. I followed your career, when I could.”
William gave me a doubtful expression. “At any rate, my heart is glad to see you, though I suspect that I may not have the chance to again. You did come here to say good-bye, didn’t you?”
I nodded. “I did. I’m leaving, soon. For the New World.”
“Ah, you are escaping this den of sin and pestilence. You must leave me here among the mad young poets and crazed politicians.” He said it with mirth in his eyes, but I knew it was deeper than that.
“Don’t get lost,” I said, feeling the pull of tides as Aneirin had for so many years. I could feel what would happen to William. More sorrow, but more of a mental mire. He would get lost among the weeds and struggle to find his voice, his heart, until the very end.
“I fear I already am,” he said, and took my hand.
It’s interesting on a number of levels. The lack of questioning means that I never have scenes where Joss is asking what’s happening. He’s never lost. He, instead, says things like, “I don’t understand,” or, “I don’t know what you mean/where I am.” It dynamically changes the dialogue interchanges in the book, which with some characters (the loquacious La Roche who is the previous twin to Randall Roth from Pilgrim) isn’t terribly difficult. With other character interactions, it is. But Joss is an observer in every sense. And sometimes merely stating what he sees gives him power–more and more as he grows through the course of the book.
Joss is a fish out of water (literally and figuratively). He never manages to fit in with the godlings, most of whom are older and more conniving than he is, and he never manages to get on with the humans in his life, who either die or disappoint him greatly (or, uh, he kills…).
Which is all to say that writing out of my comfort zone has helped me think a whole lot more about the craft of writing this novel. It’s literally opened up a whole new arena for me to improve as a writer in a way that no other project has before. I can feel myself getting better, if that makes sense. And taking the time to make it as good as possible has been both challenging and exciting. I had a huge turning point in character development yesterday, and I could feel it happening. It was truly thrilling.
So, in short, take a chance. (No, I’m not qualifying this as writing advice, rather writing experience… or something… not a “how to” but a “what if”) Bleed over the edges. Step back and look critically at what you’re doing and see yourself in the words (I promise, you’re there even if you try to hide). The best thing you can do it be honest; through honesty comes growth. | <urn:uuid:260d9ba8-04d6-4c26-972d-eeb85b4b6508> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://nataniabarron.com/category/writing/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978028 | 1,913 | 1.539063 | 2 |
I am looking at a picture snapped this week in Tahrir Square, the now-famous stretch of land in central Cairo where so many hopes and dreams of a new Egypt have been voiced over the last 12 days. In the picture, a young man, maybe 20-years-old, is holding a simple handwritten sign that reads: "Dear Tourists, Don't Leave. We'll Protect You."
It's an arresting image that is already ricocheting around the Internet. And not only because the sign-holder is so young, but because of what it captures: a plea from the next generation to the international community not to abandon their economy. This sign is also a proclamation: we are not going to let our country fail, if you will only trust us.
The simple request begs a question. What moves are the leaders of the Arab nations and their private sector partners making to ensure that these brave citizens will get the support they need? In a world where the global business community is the new consensus-builder and FDI is the modern credibility index, it's time to act.
It is an understatement to say that the Arab World is amidst radical change -- political, economic, and social. We still don't know where the unprecedented popular uprisings started in Tunisia, followed by Egypt, and now posing a risk of the 'domino effect' in Yemen, Sudan, Jordan and possibly even Gulf states, will ultimately lead.
But what I do know, having organized dozens of high-level gatherings in the MENA region including the Middle East Peace Summit in Jordan and multiple summits in Sharm El Sheikh, is that there is an equally unprecedented opportunity right now for the region to come together in an inclusive way to make changes that will have an impact on many generations to follow.
As the demonstrators across the region have shown, the world is impatient for change. There is no more time to think and talk; it is time to act. And the most important question being faced across the Middle East today is not who will lead, or which party will rule -- but how will we survive?
Tourism revenues have bottomed out, with some estimates stating that Egypt has already lost $1 billion in tourism dollars since January 25th, and this represents but one strategic sector. Investors are fearful and hesitant to inject any more money into the market until it demonstrates political and economic stability.
The time is now to bring together all parties that will contribute to the future of the Arab World, including political and business leaders, academics, social scientists, constitutional law specialists, youth leaders and women's groups, as well as the foreign investment community. While it is clear that the Arab World must carve its own path, in this globalized world, it is essential to now involve friends that can help provide support them as they navigate to a new era.
And unlike previous summits, this is not an occasion for speeches and platitudes. It's time for to roll up sleeves, bring in the very best strategic advisors, and create a special fund to back an immediate action plan that supports political reform with the help of great institutions, promotes economic reform based on informed analysis and expertise, and initiates social reforms with the supports of worldwide experts and strategic firms.
The global marketplace needs confidence in the region, and there is still much to believe in. In their DNA, we see a deep reservoir of talent, education, natural resources, and open borders to FDI. But even more -- as the young man in the picture demonstrates -- the people are the greatest asset. There is a global culture present in the Arab world populated by citizens that are worldly, informed, speak perfect English and know what's happening around the world, from Brazil to China.
We have a responsibility to these people. Don't Leave. Come together.
Richard Attias, Chairman of the Columbia University Center on Capitalism and Society and creator of the New York Forum, has spent his career developing some of the most influential gatherings of global leaders in the last 20 years. | <urn:uuid:a06be6c2-2a9b-46f8-89e3-023daeb3259d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-attias/what-the-middle-east-need_b_821428.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958943 | 817 | 1.78125 | 2 |
Photo by DANIA MAXWELL, NAPLES DAILY NEWS // Buy this photo
At first glance, it's a limousine; on second look, a bus.
Upon closer inspection, you'll find a Busozene — a black party bus plastered with a decal that tricks the eye and elevates the mode of transportation.
It takes a few seconds to figure out, which is occasionally a problem for entrepreneur George Greer. When Greer, 78, came up with the idea for Busozene three years ago and ran an ad in Iowa's Quad City Times, even his close friends didn't see past the optical illusion.
"You stop someone right here," Greer said, "they're going to see nothing but the limousine. That's what makes it cool."
A part-time resident of Lehigh Acres, Greer and his wife, Tracy, brought the Busozene to Southwest Florida, most recently shuttling a group of 60 or so seniors to the Seminole Casino in Immokalee on Wednesday.
A native of Belfast, Tenn., Greer said he grew up without electricity or running water and attended a small school built by a wealthy local "so the black kids would have a place to go to school." He has always considered himself an entrepreneur.
"How else can you make it when you had to sell skunk hides for a dollar?" said Greer, whose childhood venture earned him the nickname "George the Trapper."
Even after a successful career running a cleaning supplies business up north, Greer sees no reason to stop working in his golden years. He came up with the idea for Busozene while playing a round of golf and thinking about a friend who had lost his home building business in the housing market crash.
"I have an idea," he told his wife.
"Please George," Tracy said. "Not another idea."
Greer's friend had converted a 1981 Greyhound bus into a party bus but wasn't having much luck building a customer base. Greer bought the materials, and with Tracy's help with graphic design, the couple created a decal that, against a dark background, made the bus look like a limousine.
Although Greer's business caters mostly to private clients, his ultimate hope is to transform public transportation.
"This is really my goal, to innovate public transit, to get more riders and make it more fun to ride a bus," he said.
Greer has created mock-ups of city buses in Fort Myers using the Busozene design and says he is pitching the idea to transportation officials in Lee County and across the country.
But for now, he is happy driving around with a Busozene full of seniors — a population for whom he has a certain affinity.
"Most people want to throw them under the bus," Greer said. "We put them on it." | <urn:uuid:99579037-7e6a-413a-b601-4d724767d129> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2012/dec/26/double-take-lee-entrepreneur-uses-optical-to-bus/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980467 | 602 | 1.640625 | 2 |
First, full disclosure. I have various dogs of various sizes in this fight. I am by training a scholar of Old English Literature. I have published a number of academic articles on Old English poetry, at times touching on Beowulf. Some years ago I completed (although I wouldn’t call it “finished”) a verse translation of Beowulf. And, perhaps the most biasing fact: I briefly tutored Hrothgar (David Ley) in his Old English pronunciation for this production.
I confess, after reading hints about Beowulf the King in the weeks leading up to opening night, I returned in my mind again and again to Richard Bentley’s on-target criticism of Pope’s “translation” of Homer’s Iliad: “It’s a very pretty poem Mr. Pope, but you must not call it ‘Homer’.” I worried that my reaction to the play would be similar or worse.
I’m very happy to report that Beowulf the King is a very pretty play, and, although it is very different from the poem in so many ways, it is perfectly appropriately titled. This play is not the Old English poem, but it is certainly a Beowulf for our time.
There, with the academic geekery out of the way, we proceed to the play (and strive to avoid spoilers) . . .
I don’t think I’m giving much away if I mention that the play opens, after a brief musical overture(more about that later), in Old English. Hrothgar (David Ley) strides onto the stage and declaims the first three lines of the poem and then steps aside to be the chorus to a series of battle scenes which effectively condense the genealogies which open the poem into an exciting little pill for the audience to swallow. The scene is set: battle, kingship and honour in Denmark. But, of course, something is rotten in Hrothgar’s kingdom . . .
But, I don’t want to just paraphrase the play or the poem; I’d rather you went to the play and read the poem (in translation, I expect). I’ll comment on things which struck me about the play — problems confronted and solved, felicitous interpretations and satisfying expansions and interpolations.
Grendel (Darren Paul) speaks. An obvious departure from the poem, Grendel’s monologues transform the monster from being a mute threat of the outside world he would be without speech into something more like the poem’s dark alternate of Beowulf — in the poem, many of the same words are used to describe both the “hero” and the “monster”. Having Grendel speak forces the investigation of his motivation – only hinted at in the poem – and also allows investigation of religion in a society in religious transition – again, only hinted at in the poem. The speaking Grendel must make us think of John Gardner’s short novel Grendel – was it an influence on the play or are the similarities the result of drawing on the same source? And, the gorilla in the mead-hall is Caliban, the cursed wildman of The Tempest, like Grendel, the son of a cursed mother. Darren Paul’s Grendel in another life could go toe to toe with Prospero.
Another interesting and fundamental addition is the curse Grendel’s Mother (Amber Borotsik) places on Beowulf (Sheldon Elter) just before her death. Beowulf forevermore will feel a mother’s pain at the loss of her son whenever he kills. This burden explains the half-century of peace (left unexplained in the poem) the Geats enjoy under Beowulf’s rule. Beowulf’s struggle to maintain peace – completely absent from the poem, but darn interesting in the play – dominates Act Two and provides an interesting twist at the very end. In the poem, Beowulf’s retainers (except for one), turn cowardly, following his orders to stay out of the fight with the dragon although honour would require them to rush in to his defence. In the play, the cowardly abandonment is more than just leaving Beowulf to fight alone. The real abandonment is the Geats’ return to warfare after their king’s death. Beowulf the King argues that easy cowardice is to do battle, while actual heroism is to take the difficult road of making peace.
Some things that concerned me anticipating the play:
All those fights!
I’d read that each of the six actors had at least five death scenes, but I was pretty sure there aren’t anything like thirty deaths described in the poem. I couldn’t help but expect a whole lot of gratuitous fighting, but . . .
. . . the fights are dramaturgically functional things, not extraneous at all. They make connections for the audience between characters and between narrative elements. They are actually narrative bridges in dance. When one considers the battles mentioned in passing in the poem, one of which – the Frisian war — is expanded to a vitally important scene of Beowulf’s character development, thirty-some deaths seem a low figure. I came dreading a silly blood-bath but was given a stylized battle-dance vitally necessary to the structure and message of the play.
When considering a staging of Beowulf it’s hard to imagine what will be done with the monsters. Grendel and his Mother are the least of the problem — they’re basically human and imaginative costumes take care of them. The Dragon is the obvious challenge, but when I heard that Beowulf’s swimming match with Breca (Bryan Web) was going to be staged, I thought “that’s it. It can’t be done.”
But, they did it! and it is magnificently done! I’ll say nothing more than the swimming match and the underwater fight with the monsters is a little dramaturgical tour de force worth the price of admission (okay, I had comps, but still) in itself.
The play, like the poem, ends with the dragon fight. The dragon (David Ley, in the biggest mask in theatre history) also speaks, unlike in the poem, but it is so right! And again, the representation of the dragon is brilliant, his paws and claws ingeniously so!
But, the dragon’s fire . . .
Somehow it just doesn’t quite do it. The smoke seems to be well represented/suggested by the two fabric flags/banners at each side of the dragon, but the lights and sound don’t quite have the lethal materiality the dragon’s flaming breath might need. But, that shortcoming is minor in what is a stunning execution of what would seem a staging impossibility.
The music by Joel Crichton struck me as a very appropriate blending of faux-Wagner and urban techno-something-or-other. The beatboxing in the overture gave the exactly right hint of gangsta which was picked up in the touches of inner-city gang in the design of set and costume. There are Jets and Sharks in the wings. I’ve long thought that the best modern analogy to the culture of war, honour and allegiance of Beowulf is the twentieth-century urban youth gang. I was pleased to see the analogy drawn in the play.
Beowulf The King really is, despite the rough edges of a preview performance (and the rough edges of a preview audience) a quite startlingly good and fascinating grapple with the monster that is Beowulf.
Finally, I strongly recommend Anna Dow’s brief essay “Whose Side Are You On, Anyway” on pages 26 and 27 of the program. It succinctly presents some difficulties of the poem and is very insightful about the play. As well, the “Playwright’s Notes” by Blake William Turner on page 9 contain a few gems. | <urn:uuid:bdf7a54f-b040-42cc-a3e7-e0624b5f43e5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://behindthehedge.wordpress.com/2012/04/13/on-beowulf-the-king-by-blake-william-turner/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955065 | 1,721 | 1.664063 | 2 |
OAK HARBOR, Ohio - Marine-engine repair training schools frequently drew 19 and 20-year-olds when Tim Baker got into the business in the mid-1970s.
But an industry Catch 22 often leaves budding marine mechanics stranded and local businesses shorthanded: You can't get training from an engine maker unless you're sponsored by a dealer, and you can't get a good-paying job without experience.
“You don't see many guys there under 35 years old,” said the owner of Professional Outboard Service in Marblehead, Ohio. “It's becoming sort of a lost art.”
Yet last year, a coalition of workforce development, training, and business professionals started shoring up such training in Ottawa County, where 480 marine-related businesses pepper the Lake Erie coastline.
The marine-skills program's latest 16-week class began last month at the Ottawa County Resource Centre east of Oak Harbor. It is a partnership among the Ottawa County Improvement Corp., WSOS Community Action Commission, Inc., and Penta County Vocational School.
The class is held four evenings a week to train students such as Tony Below of Oak Harbor. He has worked for five years at Ship Shape Marine Service, Inc., of Port Clinton, which wants to expand from cosmetic boat repairs, and is getting lessons on boat handling, safety, and other techniques as well.
“I figure if I'm going to be in the marine business, I want to know as much as I can,” said 28-year-old Mr. Below. “I'm going to be better off down the road.”
A $150,000 U.S. Department of Labor grant helped start the program, which costs trainees little, if anything, and provides them with $500 worth of tools after completion. Good mechanics can make $15 to $18 an hour, said Mr. Baker, a program instructor.
Coordinators achieved a coup last year when they called Volvo Penta of the Americas for help and wound up housing one of the engine maker's eight North American training schools at the county center. As part of three-year contract to host weekly classes from November to April, Volvo Penta is donating more than $500,000 worth of equipment and materials for the local program and is giving scholarships to top students.
Volvo Penta, which has 51 dealers in the tri-county area, wanted to move one of its schools from a rented facility in Chicago. Discovering that the five-county northwest Ohio area has the third largest concentration of pleasure boats in the nation helped seal the deal in Ottawa County, said John Brackbill, technical training manager for the engine maker, which has its North American headquarters in Chesapeake, Va.
“We like the area,” he said. “It's obviously working for us.”41.50821 -83.14501 | <urn:uuid:422db650-1a90-4529-8496-b0915db29f33> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.toledoblade.com/Economy/2002/10/03/Ottawa-County-program-buoys-ranks-of-marine-engine-techs.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971288 | 603 | 1.664063 | 2 |
IRANIAN THREAT – AT 9:28 A.M. ET: We're constantly being told that sanctions against Iran are "working." I wonder what that word means. There appears no evidence that the sanctions are stopping the Iranian nuclear program. And now we find that Iran is still attempting to get around those sanctions. From The New York Times:
Despite onerous sanctions that have basically shut Iran out of the global financial system, the country is still finding some ways to bypass them, the Treasury Department said Thursday, describing what it called a small but “emerging threat” to the effectiveness of the sanctions effort.
Adam Szubin, director of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which supervises American enforcement of the sanctions, said the Iranians were using private exchange houses and trading companies in other countries, masking transactions with fake identities and relying on the paperless practice known as hawala, common in parts of the Middle East and Asia, in which money is transferred informally and often illegally through trustworthy couriers.
Mr. Szubin’s office issued an advisory on Thursday aimed at informing American financial institutions about what it called Iranian evasion techniques to circumvent the sanctions, which have been greatly intensified partly in response to Iran’s disputed nuclear program. Iran says the program is for peaceful use, while Western nations and Israel suspect it is meant to develop the ability to make nuclear weapons.
The most vexing sanctions, from Iran’s viewpoint, are financial prohibitions that have blacklisted many Iranian banks, denied them access to international money and credit channels and severely restricted Iran’s ability to sell oil, the most important Iranian export. A new law signed by President Obama this month expands the sanctions to include shipping, shipbuilding and energy concerns, which are likely to hurt many Iranian industries, including construction, machinery and automaking.
In a conference call with reporters, Mr. Szubin described the sanctions as a large achievement that had left Iran “almost without recourse through ordinary banking channels.” At the same time, he said, “Iran is adapting.”
COMMENT: That is the point. Countries adapt to pressure. We bombed Germany relentlessly in World War II, but the Germans learned to put manufacturing facilities underground. In turn, the Germans placed enormous military pressure on the Soviet Union, which had a third-world economy. But the Soviets learned to direct their economic resources toward the war effort, and enveloped the Nazi armies in the East.
This may be crunch year for the Iranian nuclear program. They may pass the point where stopping them may be almost impossible. What will we do? What will John Kerry and Chuck Hagel recommend? Chilling, isn't it?
January 11, 2012 | <urn:uuid:1bfa117b-b321-4ea4-a844-552347bcd0b0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.urgentagenda.com/PERMALINKS%20VIII/JANUARY%202013/11.IRAN.HTML | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963244 | 565 | 1.742188 | 2 |
In earlier Fedora Linux releases there was generally a desire with having Btrfs
become the default file-system. It's generally proposed to make the next-generation Linux file-system the default in Fedora, but every time in the end the idea has been dropped
. With Fedora 19
due in mid-2013, Btrfs for Fedora is again being talked about.
Fedora has supported Btrfs as an install-time option
for many releases now, but it hasn't been made the default. Generally the idea gets canned every cycle over problems
and/or there being no viable fsck utility for the file-system. However, in February of last year, the Btrfs fsck repair tool was made available
. While it's been nearly a year that this tool to fix common Btrfs file-system errors has been available, Btrfs hasn't seen any new love in the Fedora land.
There's now a new mailing list thread on the Fedora "devel" list about making Btrfs the standard file-system for Fedora
Richard Jones of Red Hat was the first responder to this user's thread with saying there's still "a couple of issues with btrfs which I believe absolutely must be fixed before it can become the default." Richard pointed out two bugs in Btrfs dealing with data corruption
and poor performance in virtual machines
. In a later post, Richard Jones went on to say
, "I'm deeply unhappy about data corrupting bugs being effectively ignored by upstream for months. That's not good."
Reported by another Red Hat employee has been other Btrfs bugs
, including performance problems and other general issues.
Josef Bacik, a former Red Hat employee working on file-systems who is now working at FusioIO along with Chris Mason on Btrfs, said
he's waiting for the major Anaconda installer re-write that took place in Fedora 18 to settle down before he's pursuing Btrfs work in Fedora again.
Other responders to the Fedora Btrfs thread chimed in that they're waiting for Btrfs to be as reliable as the EXT4 file-system.
With there still being reported upstream Btrfs bugs that are yet to be resolved in the latest code (the Linux 3.8 kernel
), it's probably unlikely all of these remaining issues will be worked out in time for Fedora 19. At the moment developers are looking at releasing Fedora 19 in May of this year, which would be rather a rather tight time-line for working out the remaining Btrfs problems, seeing that the file-system receives sufficient widespread testing on Fedora Rawhide/19, and convincing the last of the developers holding out on endorsing Btrfs that it's a worthwhile change over EXT4. Fedora 20 looks much more likely for any potential Btrfs migration. | <urn:uuid:a698cc43-f105-4afd-83db-f665544a69c3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTI3NzA | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95983 | 591 | 1.617188 | 2 |
Merson emerged from the playgrounds of Brooklyn to become one of the best guards in New York City in the mid-1930s. He played at Long Island University under legendary coach Clair Bee when the Blackbirds were numbered among the top basketball programs in the country. As co-captain of the 1937 squad, Merson helped lead LIU to an undefeated season in 1936 when they captured the mythical Eastern championship.
Birth and Death Dates:
b. April 30, 1915 - d. May 8, 2001
After joining the LIU varsity basketball team midway through the 1934 season as a sophomore, Merson played a more prominent role for the Blackbirds in 1935. The 1934 team had finished 26-1 and was finally recognized as a basketball power (the program began in 1928 and struggled for recognition among New York Cityís other schools). During the 1934-35 season, the Blackbirds continued their ascent to the top of college basketball by going 24-2 and breaking a number of scoring records. Merson, primarily a guard who occasionally played forward, fit in well and scored 160 points, fourth most on the team (and sixth in the Metropolitan area).
In 1936, LIUís high-scoring attack went undefeated (26-0) and was finally recognized as New York Cityís preeminent basketball team by winning the mythical Eastern Championship. A starting guard, Merson finished second on the team in scoring with 199 points (third in the New York Metropolitan area), and was named first team All-Met alongside teammates Julie Bender (the leading scorer) and Ben Kramer (both were forwards).
In 1937, LIU continued its success as they added another star to the starting line-up, sophomore forward, Irv Torgoff (Bender moved to guard). Merson, co-captain with Bender, finished fourth on the squad in scoring with 180 points, as LIU won the mythical Metropolitan championship with a record of 28-3. They won their first ten games of the season, running their winning streak to an incredible 43 games before it was broken by Hank Luisetti and Stanford in one of the most famous games in college basketball history.
After graduating, Merson played in the American Basketball League for a couple of years and then became a coach. Merson coached Elizabeth of the ABL in 1947, and then the Patterson Panthers of the ABL in 1948-49, leading his teams to the league finals in all three seasons.
New York City
Merson played guard at LIU, 1934-1937.
Use links below to navigate through the basketball section of Jews In Sports.
encyclopedia of JEWS in sports, by Bernard Postal, Jesse Silver, and Roy Silver (New York: Bloch Publishing Co., 1965)
New York Times, March 6, 1935
New York Times, March 9, 1936
New York Times, March 15, 1937 | <urn:uuid:cea7b5fc-d413-4e66-9cc6-ff6af694072e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.jewsinsports.org/profile.asp?sport=basketball&ID=118 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976666 | 591 | 1.578125 | 2 |
Look into the mind of Lakewood’s great ape – if you dare
Ah, those warm, fuzzy childhood memories you have of Ivan the Gorilla, gazing longingly at you through the glass at the B&I shopping center in Lakewood.
Bet you’d never guess what was really on Ivan’s mind in the 27 years he spent in his circus-themed slammer before getting paroled to Zoo Atlanta in 1994.
For one thing, he thought you flapped your yapper too much.
“Humans waste words. They toss them like banana peels and leave them to rot,” mused the knuckle-dragging philosopher-poet.
“They chatter like chimps,” he continued, “crowding the world with their noise, even when they have nothing to say.”
Insulted? Wait til you hear what he was thinking while he watched you shop at the B&I.
“All day, I watch humans scurry from store to store ... They hunt frantically, stalking, pushing, grumbling ... But they are lousy hunters.”
Makes you wonder who was truly on display all those years, and on which side of the glass most of the brain wattage was being engaged.
The Ape Whisperer:
The way some folks talk, the big fella’s captivity was the worst injustice in Lakewood history. Except maybe for the hanging of Chief Leschi in 1858. And the installation of traffic cameras in 2001.
Lest you think the world-famous silverback gorilla has poured out his memories on Facebook, or sold his story to a tell-all celebrity biographer, that’s not the case.
His deep simian thoughts come from the imagination of Katherine Applegate, author of “The One and Only Ivan.” She got a major publishing house (Harper) to release her book this year based loosely (very loosely) on the story of the king of the South Tacoma Way concrete jungle.
Like Ivan, the namesake primate of her tale is sentenced to a drab life in a shopping center menagerie with little but a TV and a tire swing to occupy him. Like Ivan, he’s an artist whose works are in demand. And like Ivan, his fate is determined when the mall goes broke and animal-rights activists rally.
Friendships are formed, poop is flung and (spoiler alert!) he lives happily ever after with his own kind.
But some parts of Ivan’s true story are left out – for instance, his reputation as one of America’s most prolific gorilla sperm donors.
Did we mention this is a children’s book?
Nearly choked on a Tagalong:
That was our reaction the other day when one of our spies returned from the 100th-anniversary Girl Scouts awards luncheon at Hotel Murano and reported seeing a most surprising guest.
State Rep. Hans “Sounds like ‘TI-ger’” Zeiger was there to show his support for an organization he once decried as a “pro-abortion, feminist training corps.”
The Puyallup Republican has long since disavowed his youthful ramblings on conservative websites.
Now he’s gone over to the other side.
“Visitors to my legislative office have been known to grab a Samoa or two on their way in,” he told The Nose, “and I keep a box of Thin Mints in my desk on the House floor.”
Can’t wait for his reaction when the Girl Scouts unveil their new concept cookie: Ultraradical Gingerbread Women.
Seattle has too many letters:
The top crossword in Thursday’s fishwrap had a gimme putt for local puzzlers.
4 Down - Puget Sound Port.
By process of elimination, we know it starts with a ‘T’ and ends with an “A.” The rest is guesswork.
Let’s see, could it be ... Tahuya?
Did he, or didn’t he?
A couple weeks ago, we told you the organizer of Tacoma’s “Walk in Her Shoes” fundraiser had bought a pair of Size 17 pink pumps for Pierce County Prosecutor Mark Lindquist.
Suspense mounted to see if he would strap ’em on and walk the talk after years on the sidelines egging on his deputy prosecutors.
He did not.
“I think the 4-inch heels were a bit high for him!” said Tasha Church, executive director of the Sexual Assault Center of Pierce County. “Maybe next year I will find shorter heels.”
Until then, all we can say is the prosecutor’s personal views on cross-dressing appear to be evolving.
Got news for The Nose? Write to TheNose@thenewstribune.com. | <urn:uuid:dcd9fa0d-6033-494e-81f0-0c1b46015594> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thenewstribune.com/2012/05/11/v-lite/2139670/look-into-the-mind-of-lakewoods.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954974 | 1,047 | 1.710938 | 2 |
The Last of the Bushrangers by Sup Hare
Just as they were about to put this newly conceived plan into operation, Mrs Skillian, sister of the Kellys, dressed in a dark riding habit trimmed with scarlet, and wearing a jaunty hat adorned with a conspicuous white feather, appeared on the scene. Father Tierney earnestly requested her to go to the hotel and ask her brother and Hart to surrender. She said she would like to see her brother before he died, but she would sooner see him burned in the house than ask him to surrender. This, in fact, was the procedure which the police had decided upon in order to bring the outlaws from their cover. Some 700 people by this time had arrived on the platform.
The police opened up a heavy fire on the hotel from the front and rear. This was done in order to cover the operations of Senior constable Johnstone, who rapidly approached the house on the north side with a bundle of straw, which he placed against the weather-boards and set fire to. It was known that Martin Sherry, an old man, was still in the house, and when the last prisoners had escaped he was alive, though badly wounded. The thought that the unfortunate man would be sacrificed, and perish in the flames with the determined bushrangers who had made so long a stand, caused a feeling of horror to pervade the crowd.
Kate Kelly at this juncture came upon the scene, but the only expression which escaped her lips was the one uttered in heart-broken accents, "My poor, poor brother." Mrs Skillian exclaimed, "I will see my brother before he dies," and then sped towards the hotel, from the roof of which by this time tongues of flame were beginning to ascend. The police ordered her to go back, and she hesitated.
Father Tierney emerged from the crowd, saying he would save Sherry. The brave clergyman was encouraged on his mission by a cheer from the spectators. He walked boldly to the front door, was lost to view amongst the smoke, and directly afterwards a mass of flames burst from the walls and roof of the dwelling at the same instant. A shout of terror from the crowd announced the fear that was felt for the safety of the courageous priest. Constable Armstrong, with some other policemen, rushed into the building from the rear, and a few seconds afterwards their forms, with that of Father Tierney, were seen to emerge, carrying with them Sherry, who was in a dying state, and the dead body of the outlaw Byrne.
On reaching a place of safety they stated that Dan Kelly and Hart were lying upon the floor apparently dead. Nothing, however, could be done to rescue their remains from the fire. Soon afterwards the building was completely demolished, and on a search being made amongst the ruins, two charred skeletons were raked out from the smouldering debris. Wild Wright, Hart (the brother of Steve), and other well known friends were witnesses of this terrible scene. All the bushrangers were clad in the same kind of armour as that worn by Ned Kelly, which weighed as much as ninety seven pounds, and had evidently been constructed by some country blacksmith out of ploughshares. The marks on Kelly's armour showed that he had been hit seventeen times with bullets.
The unfortunate man Sherry died soon after being rescued from the burning building. Ned Kelly was brought on to Benalla by the evening train, and lodged in the lock up, to a wait the inquest to be held in the morning.
The statement of Constable Bracken is to the effect that the first intimation of the presence of the gang at Glenrowan was on Monday night at eleven o'clock , when he was bailed up by Ned Kelly. He had been confined to bed through illness. Whilst a prisoner in the hotel he courageously managed to steal the key of the front door, which enabled him to escape in time to warn the police that the outlaws were in the house.
This document gives you the text of the report about the KellyGang for this day. The text has been retyped from a microfiche copy of the original. We have taken care to reproduce this document but areas of the original text may been damaged. We also apologise for any typographical errors. This document is subject to copyright. | <urn:uuid:dc026224-9d2b-4f11-bf1f-8372729e5318> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kellygang.asn.au/documents/Hare/Hare_13_001.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.987981 | 887 | 1.695313 | 2 |
Washington: A long-awaited inquiry into a deadly militant attack on the US mission in the Libyan city of Benghazi late Tuesday slammed state department security arrangements there as “grossly inadequate.”
But the months-long probe also found there had been “no immediate, specific” intelligence of a threat against the mission, which was overrun on 11 September by dozens of heavily armed militants who killed four Americans.
“Systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels within two bureaus of the state department resulted in a special msecurity posture that was inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place,” the damning report said.
The Accountability Review Board (ARB) also concluded “there was no protest prior to the attacks, which were unanticipated in their scale and intensity.”
The attacks, in which the consulate and a nearby safe house were targeted, have become fiercely politicized, with Republicans skewering the administration for security failings as well as a possible cover-up over Al-Qaeda’s role.
The US envoy to the United Nations, Susan Rice, came under relentless Republican fire for saying days after the assault that, according to the best intelligence, it was triggered by a “spontaneous” protest outside the mission.
Rice has since been forced to pull out of the running to replace US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who steps down early in 2013.
In the unclassified section of their report, the five-strong board added they believed every effort had been made to rescue ambassador Chris Stevens, who died in the attack—the first US envoy killed on duty in three decades.
Clinton said she accepted “every one” of the 29 recommendations made by the ARB, which has spent the last three months investigating the events.
She also said the state department was working with the Pentagon to “dispatch hundreds of additional marine security gto bolster our posts” and was aiming to train up more diplomatic security personnel.
The report provided “a clear-eyed look at the serious, systemic challenges that we have already begun to fix”, Clinton said in a letter to lawmakers, adding that while everyone at State had a duty to ensure diplomats’ safety, “most of all it is my responsibility as secretary of state”.
Clinton also backed the report’s findings urging Congress to support moves to realign the department’s 2013 budget request to help reinforce its diplomatic outposts.
The report noted that the state department budget accounts for only a very small part of national spending, and warned “Congress must do its part to meet this challenge and provide necessary resources to the state department to address security risks and meet mission imperatives”.
The inquiry “found a pervasive realization among personnel who served in Benghazi that the Special Mission was not a high priority for Washington,” the report said.
Repeated requests for additional support from embassy staff in both Benghazi and the Libyan capital Tripoli had been ignored, the report said.
The Benghazi mission was also hampered by poor resources, and its reliance on armed “but poorly skilled” local militiamen from the 17 February Martyrs Brigade as well as local unarmed staff hired by a British company, Blue Mountain, was “misplaced”, it said.
Clinton has now entrusted Deputy Secretary Tom Nides with heading up a team which met for the first time Tuesday to implement the report’s recommendations.
The unclassified section of the report was posted on the state department website late Tuesday, while the classified findings were sent to members of two House and Senate committees.
ARB chairman, veteran diplomat Thomas Pickering, and vice chairman Admiral Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will brief those lawmakers on Wednesday behind closed doors.
The Benghazi report was sent by courier to Clinton at home on Monday, but she will not be testifying herself this week as had been planned after falling ill and being told by doctors to rest.
She stressed she had also already gone beyond the recommendations by launching periodic reviews of the nation’s top 15-20 high threat diplomatic posts, and moving to regularize protocols for sharing information about security incidents with Congress. | <urn:uuid:5ed86aed-568c-4663-b281-3eaecbaf6330> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.livemint.com/Politics/baPuQ1eeFFnPlAWzbPm2UN/US-inquiry-slams-grossly-inadequate-Benghazi-security.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977808 | 873 | 1.546875 | 2 |
“I was greeted by snapshots when I first entered Iraq in 2003,” writes the New York Times’s Marc Santora at the Times’s Lens blog. Santora, a foreign correspondent who “traveled in Iraq often from 2003 to 2010” and “is now covering real estate for the Times in New York,” continues:
Relatives clinging to snapshots of loved ones gone missing, pleading for help. Snapshots of family members killed in errant bombings, stained with the tears of grieving family members. Snapshots of happier times, proudly displayed by Iraqis kind enough to invite me into their homes.
With the chaos of war raging all around, these snapshots were something that could be grasped; moments frozen in time.
They told a story. Not the whole story. Not even a fraction of the whole story. But an important story.
Santora’s musings accompany a slide show of images collected in Iraq by the photographer Sergio Ramazzotti. Here is Ramazzotti explaining the snapshots’ provenance:
I recently developed photographs of people I never met, all shot in the same place in Baghdad, in 2003. The place was a panoramic restaurant on top of Saddam International Tower. I went there a few days after the war started. The tower was intact, but the building at the base had been torn apart by bombs. In a room that must have been the restaurant’s official photographer’s, I found many undeveloped photographic rolls. I took a bunch of them and stuffed them in my pockets. In the photographs you could see all the good Iraqi upper-middle class. Judging by their smiles, the perspective of war was still far away. Yet, if the photographer had not had the time to develop the rolls, the first bombs had to have begun falling soon. Who knows for how many of them, that merry moment might have been the last supper out.
The pictures are gripping. Eerie (when you know the context). Familiar and foreign. | <urn:uuid:84965991-bb1b-4578-8ca0-07465d65b2fc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cjr.org/the_kicker/snapshots_of_a_time_before_war.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970224 | 419 | 1.757813 | 2 |
|NATIONAL PARKS QUICKLINKS|
Backpacker Magazine – October 2008
On a snowy night in New Hampshire, Congressional candidate Gary Dodds crashed his car, wandered into the woods, and collapsed. Twenty-seven hours later, rescuers carried him out. And then the real drama began.
For Dodds, there was a bigger problem. While his clothes did contain river particles, they lacked urine. As a cold-weather specialist later testified in his trial, a human cannot last 27 hours without urinating–especially in cold weather, and after having been in frigid water. A person who passed out for that length of time would simply pee involuntarily.
As the weeks unfolded following the crash, Mitchell began compiling a criminal case. The rescue effort had cost more than $20,000. If Dodds had faked his disappearance, he had effectively stolen that money from the SAR community.
In a June interview with Mitchell, Dodds recalled most of the day clearly, but professed unlikely memory lapses. Dodds couldn't remember passing through the Dover tollbooth, headed south of the accident scene, at 7:39 p.m., 37 minutes before the crash, and couldn't explain how he ended up north of there, on the same highway, again driving south, before his wreck. When Mitchell told Dodds that EZPass records proved this sequence, Dodds said: "Wow." He paused. "7:39. So I went through the toll. That doesn't make any sense."
The talk ended without closure. Dodds continued to campaign, walking with a cane. But his candidacy never generated any voltage, and in the September primary he finished a distant third. The following year, on the anniversary of the crash, his 14-year-old daughter stood in church and explained why the day was special, how grateful she was that her father pulled through his ordeal. But when Dodds got home, the police were waiting with an arrest warrant.
His trial on three charges–falsifying physical evidence, causing false public alarm, and leaving the scene of an accident–began in January 2008. Strafford County Attorney Tom Velardi argued that Dodds faked the disappearance because his campaign was getting more attention from the FEC than New Hampshire voters. He was desperate. What better way to win overnight fame than to star in a survival story? Velardi theorized that Dodds spent the night indoors, then soaked his feet in ice water to simulate exposure.
The trial lasted three weeks. Velardi called Murray Hamlet, a retired Army officer who spent decades studying cold-weather injuries. Hamlet testified that exposure to frigid water is profoundly unpleasant. "A scenario that involves someone voluntarily going into cold water and continuing forward instead of going back," Hamlet said, "it just doesn't wash." He doubted that a five-minute river crossing would have caused Dodds's serious injuries, and also diagnosed trench foot.
The story never seemed more unlikely than when I visited Dodds's refuge, in a patch of woods off dead-end McKenna Street. I followed an informal trail out to the hemlock tree. I could plainly hear traffic noise. From the tree I counted steps back toward McKenna Street–the same direction Dodds would have been heading. After 25 strides, I'd walked up a slight rise and could see the roof of the nearest home, a tidy beige cape. Wimsatt had done the measurements: The tree is 470 feet from the house, and 550 feet from a schoolyard.
The jury deliberated for only six and a half hours. Guilty on all counts. On March 31 this year, Judge Fauver sentenced Dodds to a year in prison (with all but 20 days suspended) and ordered him to repay $21,500.05 for the SAR operation.
Things have gotten uglier since. Dodds has been arrested twice after altercations with Cindy; in July, a judge ordered him to undergo a mental-health evaluation. Dodds's friend Deb Crapo believes he is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. "I used to tell him, 'It's so wonderful because you have such a good attitude,'" she says. "He's not like that anymore. He's kind of beaten down."
In fact, the Gary Dodds who emerged from under that hemlock is hard to recognize as the man running for Congress a day earlier. Dodds's tragedy is not just that he lost his way–people make bad decisions–but that he made so many wrong turns afterward, deepening his dilemma just like a lost hiker who stumbles onward instead of staying put.
He lacked the critical ability to recalibrate–to assess all that had happened and all that could happen next, and react accordingly. With his reputation and future at stake, he has repeatedly slid deeper into the void. "The basic message of this case," prosecutor Tom Velardi told me, "is what I would tell my kids: 'If you've done something wrong, admit it.'"
Dodds didn't even have to do that. If he'd simply repaid the rescue costs, Velardi would have dropped the case. Instead, Dodds hired lawyers and attacked. The morning after his conviction, Dodds appeared on Good Morning America and reiterated the claim that witnesses had lied, telling Diane Sawyer, "May God have mercy on their souls."
One thing about survival situations: They strip away artifice. In Dodds's case, maybe there never was a steely Congressional candidate there. Maybe at his center resides a wounded, insecure, fatherless kid who never quite got over life's random injustices. What are we to make of Dodds's downward spiral? Is he more at fault than the summit-obsessed mountaineer who foolishly ascends into a storm, then requires rescue at great cost–and risk–to others? Or the inexperienced hiker who, on a scorching July day, marches blithely past the warning signs at the Grand Canyon's rim and later needs to be helicoptered out after collapsing from heat exhaustion?
Paradoxically, by inventing a hoax and stumbling through its disastrous aftermath, Dodds actually provides a blueprint for real life, both in the wilderness and out. The lessons are not surprising: Be humble. Have a plan, but remain flexible. Think through every scenario before acting. Avoid unnecessary risk.
I spoke to Dodds after his sentencing. He declined to be interviewed for this story, but insisted he would not go to jail, that he would win on appeal, that he would be redeemed. He didn't seem to realize how much was already lost. A man running for Congress crashed his car on a snowy night and went missing. Only one person can rescue him now. His name is Gary Dodds.
David Howard's first book, about a stolen copy of the Bill of Rights, is due in spring. | <urn:uuid:ebeeea93-c5e9-4b01-a28f-e5c034513e60> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.backpacker.com/october_2008_rescue_me_gary_dodds_new_hampshire_congress/articles/12602?page=5 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981573 | 1,424 | 1.507813 | 2 |
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Of rear-facing toddlers, missing e-mails and squeaky wheels
July 11, 2011 - Betsy Bethel
Are you aware that the guidelines for child safety seats have changed?
While not West Virginia law, the West Virginia Governors Highway Safety Program instituted a "curriculum change" in January incorporating the new guidelines into the training of its 218 child safety seat technicians statewide, according to state coordinator Trish Anderson. She said technicians are certified every two years, but she sent out a mass e-mail in January to all technicians informing them of the new guidelines.
Somehow, the e-mail missed the Wheeling Police Department's child safety seat technicians. They were not informed of the new guidelines until today.
The guidelines — from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration based on a policy statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics — state in part that all infants and toddlers should ride in a REAR-facing car safety seat until they are TWO (2) years old, or until they reach the highest weight or height allowed by the seat's manufacturer.
The reason for the policy change, according to the AAP, is to better support the child's neck and head, and "to distribute crash forces over the entire body." The guidelines were based on research by the University of Virginia and others using NHTSA statistics for crash victims ages 0-23 months from 1988-2003.
"Keep your child rear-facing as long as possible. It’s the best way to keep him or her safe," states NHTSA on its website.
Last week, however, Aimee Pokwatka of Newtown, Conn., a Wheeling native who was visiting her parents who still live locally, said she was told by a Wheeling police officer who is a car safety seat technician that her son's car seat had to be turned forward — because he was over the age of 1. That was the OLD guideline.
Pokwatka's son, Rainer, is 17 months old, weighs 25 pounds and is 32 1/2 inches tall — well within the AAP/NHTSA guidelines and manufacturer's recommendations for his Britax Boulevard seat, which says the weight limit is 35 pounds and the height limit is "within an inch of the top of the seat." Pokwatka said Rainer still has several inches to go.
Wheeling Police Chief Robert Matheny said this morning that the female officer — Nikki Anderson — was acting on the training she had received and that she was concerned not with the child's age as much as that the child's legs would be too long for the rear-facing seat.
"Nonetheless, I've instructed Sgt. (Phil) Redford to contact the Governors Safety Program to make sure we're compliant because we certainly want to do what's best for children's safety," Matheny said.
Even my first thought when I heard the new recommendations last year (See my "Safety First" blog post from August 2010) was: "What will they do with their legs!?" My daughter has always been near the 100th percentile or higher for height. How could her legs have possibly fit in a rear-facing seat until age 2?
On the AAP's HealthyChildren.org website, which has an extensive (eight-page) document titled "Car Safety Seats: Information for Families for 2011," it recognizes the most common question of parents regarding the new guidelines is "What if my baby's feet touch the back of the vehicle seat?"
Their answer is that the child can bend his legs easily and "will be comfortable in a convertible seat. Injuries to the legs are rare for children facing the rear."
"Obviously, this technician was not aware of the new guidelines," said Trish Anderson, but she added that Officer Anderson did not violate any laws or procedures, and that she was only "concerned for the safety of the child."
"I've provided this technician and the coordinator (Redford) again with these new recommendations (today) to ensure they understand," Trish Anderson said. "Why they did not receive it prior, I can't say. ... Sgt. Redford has assured me that he will make sure all the technicians are aware."
Pokwatka said she instructed her mother to leave the Wheeling station after the seat was uninstalled. "I was able to receive better-informed assistance later from Tara Smith, the Child Passenger Safety Technician at the Belmont County Health Department" in St. Clairsville.
Kudos to Ms. Smith for being up to date on the current recommendations that ensure our children's safety.
And I am certainly glad Ms. Pokwatka contacted the police department and the media following her experience. They say the squeaky wheel gets the grease. And, who knows, maybe in this case it will end up saving a child's life.
For more information about car seat safety, visit the websites in the Blog Links box.
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This photo of a rear-facing toddler sitting cross-legged accompanies the AAP's HealthyChildren article on Car Seat Safety. | <urn:uuid:1ddf0aff-ee5e-4ce1-bd5f-63b17abd3a05> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ovparent.com/page/blogs.detail/display/373/Of-rear-facing-toddlers--missing-e-mails-and-squeaky-wheels.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976043 | 1,047 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Title: Dockweiler Family collection
Collection number: CSLA-13
Dockweiler, Isidore B. (Isidore Bernard), 1867-1947
3 archival document boxes; 2 oversize boxes
Loyola Marymount University. Library. Department of Archives and Special Collections.
Los Angeles, California 90045-2659
Abstract: This part of the Dockweiler holdings at Loyola Marymount University consists of clippings, photographs, ledgers, ephemera,
and miscellany such as correspondence.
Languages represented in the collection:
Materials in the Department of Archives and Special Collections may be subject to copyright. Unless explicitly stated otherwise,
Loyola Marymount University does not claim ownership of the copyright of any materials in its collections. The user or publisher
must secure permission to publish from the copyright owner. Loyola Marymount University does not assume any responsibility
for infringement of copyright or of publication rights held by the original author or artists or his/her heirs, assigns, or
[Identification of item], Series number, Box and Folder number, Dockweiler Family Collection, CSLA-13, Department of Archives
and Special Collections, William H. Hannon Library, Loyola Marymount University.
Accession numbers: 2000.37; 2007.58
The Dockweiler family story has been closely intertwined with the course of Los Angeles and consequently California history.
The great Gold Rush was instrumental in bringing the first Dockweiler to Los Angeles, Henry Dockweiler (1824-1887), who settled
here by 1852 after trying, apparently without success, his hand in the gold fields of northern California. Part of the American
story of immigration, Henry and his wife Margaretha (1827-1924) were both immigrants, he from Bavaria, she from Alsace. They
married in Los Angeles in 1861, after meeting in the Buffalo, New York area, their chief residence in the United States before
making Los Angeles their home.
Henry established the Dockweiler reputation in Los Angeles religious, political, and civic life, areas in which his offspring
would also distinguish themselves and perpetuate the family name. Henry was one of the owners of the La Fayette (sic) Hotel,
a major social center in Los Angeles, and he also ran other businesses, such as a saloon. More importantly for Dockweiler
family history, Henry took up politics, which his youngest son Isidore would also successfully pursue. An active Republican
because of his opposition to the secession of the South, Henry held public office, serving the Third Ward as its representative
on the Los Angeles City (or Common) Council from 1870 to 1874. Henry also became involved in such reform groups as the People's
Independent Party, holding council office for the Third Ward in 1873 as a member of this party.
Henry was noteworthy not only for his secular pursuits in Los Angeles. Characteristic of the Dockweiler family, Margaretha
and Henry were devoutly Roman Catholic: Margaretha's obituary in the Roman Catholic newspaper
The Tidings lauded both her and her husband's piety and especially singled out her relationship with the Sisters of Charity.
Margaretha and Henry had four sons, one of whom, John Joseph, died in infancy. The three surviving brothers were John Henry
(1864-1941), Joseph Aloysius (d. 1918), and Isidore Bernard (1867-1947). The middle son would not distinguish himself, at
least not in the way that his brothers John Henry and Isidore did: the two would achieve prominence in Los Angeles and California,
and in Isidore's case, the nation.
John Henry Dockweiler's professional expertise lay in engineering, and noteworthy is his major role in the erection of the
infrastructure of modern Los Angeles. Henry, as he was called, served as the City Engineer of Los Angeles for two terms: 1890-1894,
and 1896-1898. Both stints were eventful. In the first Henry built the city's first outfall sewer, bringing the project in
under cost. In the second, Henry was a key player in the transfer of the city water system from private to municipal ownership:
he appraised, at the order of the Los Angeles City Council, the property of the Los Angeles City Water Co., the private company
that owned the city water system. His appraisal would play a role in a board of arbitration's decision on the price of the
transfer of the water system from the private company to the City.
Henry was also important in the development of other parts of water systems in California. In the first two decades of the
twentieth century, Henry would live in the Bay Area, where he ran an engineering firm that consulted on water works and irrigation
systems for, among other local governments, the Cities of San Francisco and Oakland. Henry also had a military career, serving
as a major and engineer officer in the California National Guard. Married to the widow Margaret ("Mattie") Ameila Dockweiler,
the couple had no children; Margaret followed Henry in death in 1952.
Isidore Dockweiler would gain even greater stature than that won by John Henry Dockweiler. The younger brother's life mirrored
that of his father and older brother—an active faith and political interests, and like his older brother, a Roman Catholic
education at old St. Vincent's, from which he received the first A.B. Isidore's professional calling was law, studying the
subject with the Los Angeles law firm of Anderson, Fitzgerald, and Anderson, and passing his bar examination before the California
State Court in 1889. How his legal practice grew after this point is uncertain. Isidore partnered with various lawyers, eg,
John Mott in the 1920s, and his sons would join him in these partnerships. No doubt, though, by the decade of the 1910s, the
Dockweiler law firm was powerful in Los Angeles, eventually counting among its many clients John Paul Getty, Hollywood celebrities,
the government of the Mexican state of Baja California, and such business corporations as Security-First National Bank.
Intertwined with the growth of Isidore Dockweiler's legal practice was participation in Democratic Party politics. As a teenager,
Isidore had rallied to the candidacy of Grover Cleveland, leading to further involvement in local Democratic politics. By
1896 he was prominent enough in the Democratic Party that he oversaw William Jennings Bryan's presidential campaign swing
through southern California. Isidore's status as a delegate to the county and state Democratic conventions had probably paved
the way for this leadership. In 1902, his stature in the party meant his placement as lieutenant-governor on Franklin Lane's
gubernatorial ticket. The Lane-Dockweiler candidacy lost, but barely, to the Republican George C. Pardee. In 1926, reacting
to the power of William McAdoo in the California Democratic Party and his pro-Volstead Act sentiments, anti-McAdoo Democrats,
such as James Phelan, would draft Isidore Dockweiler to run for senator in the Democratic primary against John B. Elliott,
whom McAdoo supported. Isidore would lose, but Elliott lost the general election to the Republican Samuel M. Shortridge.
Isidore Dockweiler would also participate in national Democratic Party activities, serving on the Democratic National Committee
from 1916 to 1932. He was a delegate to the Democratic National Conventions in 1908, 1936, and 1940, and in 1932 read Jefferson's
Inaugural Address to the Democratic National Convention. Isidore's influence proved critical in the Democratic Party's decision
to hold its national convention in 1920 in San Francisco.
Both as a lawyer and as a Democrat Isidore Dockweiler was influential, resulting in his membership on numerous corporate boards,
such as the Lincoln Building and Loan Association, the Security-First National Bank, and the Los Angeles Union Terminal Company.
In education, he served as trustee of the State Normal School in San Diego and of St. Vincent's College. Isidore Dockweiler
was instrumental in the growth of the Los Angeles Public Library, holding office as its president (1901-1911). He served on
the state board of parks and beaches; after his death Venice-Hyperion Beach was renamed Dockweiler State Beach in his honor.
To stimulate Roman Catholic culture in Los Angeles, he helped found the Newman Club; his overall
devotio fidelis to Roman Catholicism made him a Knight of St. Gregory, at the command of Pius XI in 1924. In national politics, his relationship
with President Woodrow Wilson led to his appointment to the Board of Indian Commissioners.
Isidore Dockweiler married Gertrude Reeve Dockweiler (1871-1937) in 1891. Gertrude was English by birth, her father the well-known
architect Burgess Reeve (d. 1936), designer of the old Episcopal Pro-cathedral and old St. Vincent's Church in Los Angeles.
Thirteen children were born to this marriage, eleven of whom survived infancy. Of these, John Francis Dockweiler (d. 1943)
followed in his father's political, Democratic footsteps. He was a Democratic U.S. Congressman and the District Attorney of
Los Angeles County (1940-1943), and ran unsuccessfully for governor of California in the 1938 Democratic primary. Henry Isidore
(d. 1970) served in the U.S. diplomatic corps in Japan, Spain, and China. Daughter Mary Dockweiler (d. 1988) was a prominent
Los Angeles socialite, also very active in such charitable causes as the Los Angeles Orphanage Guild. She married twice, first
to lawyer William Kenyon Young, son of the prominent California Democrat Milton K. Young, and after the former's death, she
married Dr. Daniel Sooy. Edward Vincent (d. 1961) retired from the U.S. Navy as a rear admiral and earned the Bronze Star
for his heroism in Japanese POW camps during World War II. George Augustine (d. 1983) was a well-known Los Angeles judge,
and Frederick Charles (d. 2000) was a lawyer active in Los Angeles and California political issues. The other Dockweiler children
were Louis (d. 1944); Ruth Dockweiler (d. 1992), who married Quinn Brady; Rosario Dockweiler (d. 1972), who married Marcus
Crahan; Thomas (d. 1959), prominent Los Angeles lawyer and member of the City Social Service Commission; and Robert (d. 1941).
This part of the Dockweiler holdings at Loyola Marymount University consists of clippings, photographs, ledgers, ephemera,
and miscellany such as correspondence. Photographs are mainly black and white.
The Dockweiler Family Collection (CSLA-13) is arranged in boxes according to format. Because of the small size of the collection,
there are no series.
The following terms have been used to index the description of this collection in
the library's online public access catalog.
Dockweiler, Isidore B. (Isidore Bernard), 1867-1947
Dockweiler, John Francis, 1895-1943
Civic leaders -- California -- Los Angeles -- Biography -- Sources
Los Angeles (Calif.) -- History -- 20th century -- Sources
Political campaigns -- California -- History -- 20th century -- Sources
Dockweiler family -- Archives
Young, Mary Dockweiler, 1894-1988 -- Archives
Women civic leaders -- California -- Los Angeles -- Biography -- Sources | <urn:uuid:17f08828-ad1b-4828-9df5-a01e72faa8b3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8708267/admin/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954254 | 2,462 | 1.609375 | 2 |
The Peabody Hotels' Environmental Commitment
Our commitment at The Peabody is to pursue a balance between our guests' comfort and an eco-friendly hotel operation. Our hotels analyze their operation and strive for innovative and strategic improvements at the property level via each hotels green team and green team sub-committees. We solicit feedback from our guests and associates and consider all suggestions for possible implementation. By engaging our guests, colleagues, suppliers, and contractors, our efforts to positively impact the environment will be sustainable.
For our guests, The Peabody Orlando offers water by Eco-Spring, an eco-friendly bottled water company. Each bottle of water saves 33 1/3 square feet of rainforest through their partnership with Cool Earth and each bottle is 100% recyclable.
In partnership with the Clean the World organization, luxurious Peabody soaps and shampoos are sterilized, re-processed and re-shaped. This effort results in an immediate benefit to Third World peoples, where the simple act of hand washing can greatly reduce the spread of such diseases as acute respiratory infection and diarrheal disease.
Through the Orange County Adopt-a-Highway program, dedicated members of The Greener Peabody Ambassador team embark on cleaning a one mile segment of a local road. These efforts will result in the removal of an estimated 300 pounds of litter annually.
The Peabody Orlando is proud to launch its new Organics Recycling Program in partnership with Waste Management, Inc. of Florida. Twice a week, Waste Management, Inc of Florida collects organic waste from the six containers on property to transport to their local facility. The waste is then composted over a period of 60 days to be used as a soil amendment to grow produce or in landscaping projects. Read more about this initiative.
View some of the milestones that The Peabody Orlando and Waste Management have achieved with our green committment this year.
On June 24, 2009 The Peabody Orlando was recognized as a Green Lodging Facility from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. In order to receive this recognition, it was mandatory to meet minimum requirements in areas of: water conservation, energy efficiency, waste reduction practices, and clean air practices.
View all of our Sustainable Initiatives - from Recycling to Green Meetings | <urn:uuid:dcb9bf64-b217-44eb-85ec-6e92b163dd29> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.peabodyorlando.com/greener-peabody/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934083 | 474 | 1.546875 | 2 |
We live in a connected world -- some may say that we all are
too connected when it comes to electronic devices. American Airlines is looking
to satisfy our cravings for "all access anywhere" with in-flight WiFi
beginning this summer.
Southwest is partnering with Row 44 to provide high-speed
satellite Internet access. The airline will equip four of its aircraft with the
service starting in summer 2008.
"Southwest Airlines is pleased to announce its
partnership with Row 44, and we intend to deliver the highest bandwidth
available to commercial airlines in the United States," said Southwest
Senior VP of marketing Dave Ridley. "Southwest's selection of satellite
technology will offer a more robust experience for more Customers per aircraft
versus other solutions available in the marketplace. Southwest is looking for
the best solution for our Customers not only for Internet e-mail access, but
for additional in-flight entertainment as well."
American Airlines will first
roll the service out with its Boeing 767-200 airliners. These large aircraft
typically make long, cross-country flights. After the initial test phase with
the 767s, American Airlines will slowly add WiFi to its entire fleet.
The costs for in-flight WiFi are expected to range from $10
for short flight and up to $12.95 for longer, cross-country flights.
The high-speed Internet will be provided
by AirCell. According to AirCell, the cost of providing Internet
connectivity to a single aircraft is $100,000
USD and adds roughly 100 pounds to the airframe. The equipment can be
installed overnight by airline crews.
Southwest and American Airlines are not alone in their
testing, however. JetBlue is trialing
in-flight WiFi with a single Airbus A320 aircraft dubbed
"BetaBlue." JetBlue's service is also provided by AirCell, but it
will not charge customers for connectivity.
quote: and it seemed like 1/2 the people on the plane were using it. | <urn:uuid:8878ccab-fe25-4699-8600-4a0ddc3672c8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=10445&commentid=242157&threshhold=1&red=736 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934688 | 422 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Recipe for Success: Padma Lakshmi
The Top Chef host dishes on food, fame, and her struggles with endometriosis -- plus she shares two delectable recipes.
Padma's Struggle With Endometriosis continued...
"I thought I was hypersensitive and just being a wimp," she says. Her mother
had suffered the same way. "I thought this was my lot in life."
In 2006, she had to leave a photo shoot doubled over in pain. Her internist
sent her to Tamer Seckin, MD, a laparoscopic surgeon in New York City
specializing in endometriosis.
Lakshmi was suffering from a severe case of the condition, which affects
more than 5.5 million women in the United States. It occurs when the
endometrium, the tissue of the inner lining of the uterus, grows in places
outside of the uterus -- most often on other pelvic structures, including the
ovaries and fallopian tubes, or behind the uterus. Researchers don't yet know
what causes this condition, but one theory is that endometriosis is linked to
menstruation backflow. Other possible theories include the involvement of
inherited genes, the immune system, the lymphatic or vascular system, and
chemicals in the body that somehow trigger the condition.
"These tiny pieces of endometrium attach and develop their own blood supply
and respond to the hormonal environment there," says Pamela Stratton, MD, chief
of the Gynecology Consult Service at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National
Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Bethesda, Md.
Symptoms of endometriosis vary widely, but include: extremely painful
menstrual cramps, pain during or after sex, ongoing pelvic and lower back pain,
heavy periods, spotting and bleeding between periods, painful bowel movements,
or painful urination during menstrual periods.
Endometriosis is one of the top three causes of female infertility; about
30% to 40% of women who have the condition become infertile. That's one reason
early diagnosis and treatment are key.
That treatment can include medication, hormone therapy, and surgery.
Treatment for infertility usually involves assisted reproductive treatments.
Getting to an Endometriosis Diagnosis
Lakshmi was relieved to finally have her endometriosis diagnosed, but
stunned that it had taken so many years to figure out what was wrong, says
"She said to me, 'Why am I being diagnosed this late?' She'd gone from
doctor to doctor at some of the best hospitals in the United States. She
rewound her history and realized she could have been diagnosed much earlier."
And had her condition been identified more promptly, says Seckin, she would
have been spared years of agony. Not to mention major surgery.
The longer endometriosis goes unchecked, the harder it can be to treat and
the more it can damage the body. Lakshmi's first surgery in 2006 to remove the
wayward tissue took four and a half hours.
"I had stitches in three major organs and was bedridden from Thanksgiving to
February 1," she says.
Lakshmi has had three additional surgeries since and is now better able to
control the pain with over-the-counter medication. | <urn:uuid:348a2a3d-d895-45a8-b930-2a607e82874b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://women.webmd.com/features/recipe-for-success-padma-lakshmi_?page=4 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966577 | 704 | 1.820313 | 2 |
The other side of the story. Watch. Keep an open mind.
My opinion: I think everyone do have a point. Uganda’s journalists, and the organization as well.
I might not know the whole story but I can say rumors is actually a friend of those who hunger for power. Kony 2012 doesn’t affect my country, neither does it affect anyone’s country but Africa, but if everyone of us will act selfishly, nothing will change. The easiest way for us to help is educate and spread awareness, why not do it? It’s just a simple click.
Awareness on cancer, HIV, other diseases, bullying, war, it’s not yet dead, it’s still out there, the thing is every thing goes through a trend, but, doesn’t it have one cause? to help people know that life is important and to unite people to survive this cruel world?
I want peace, that we all know is impossible to attain, but if we cut the roots of war - the warlords, it might be. This is why I support Kony 2012, not because the founder’s kid is cute, or I was just taken away by my emotions, but seeing people worldwide unite (youth specially), isn’t that great? FINALLY THE VOICES OF THE PEOPLE WILL BE HEARD AGAIN, NOT JUST THE FAMOUS AND POWERFUL PEOPLE.
My country goes through the same, journalists here sacrificing their lives to get the story out there, this is why I know that it will not be our country’s concern, we have so much to fix here, but I know that by helping spread awareness, countries that has the ability to help might be able to send help because of their people’s voices.
They say Kony might get scared and abduct kids again to protect himself because of the invisible children’s video, sure, it isn’t the smartest move but isn’t it also to help people in Africa be aware that this man might still be alive and their lives might be still in danger? What if Kony is not yet dead, but waiting for the right time to struck again?
“Temporary peace” is not enough, if the roots are not cut there will never be the possibility for peace.
He’s only one man, and still thousands of others, but one by one capture them, less problem.
Then the greedy politicians are the only people we need to chase (they breed fast, so I don’t know about that).
And about the money the organization is getting, why criticize it? they say that they help build school, and spread awareness, and it’s for office and travelling expenses. You all need to understand that they have their personal expenses as well, they work full time for this organization, how will the organization function if the employees don’t get an income? they have families too.
Do we always need to hear and see a lot of proofs before we believe in something? what? Do we need to see another mass murder before we act? Another traumatized victims?
Go on, act like the minister of magic and the magical people when they didn’t believe that Voldemort is still alive and they need to see him first and lives should be spared before they believe.
Kidding aside, The Invisible Children Organization is doing something, isn’t it better to spread awareness than do nothing at all after you hear these things?
THE THING IS, THE WORLD FUCKING SUCKS, THE ONLY THING WE HAVE IS OUR VOICES AND THE FUCKING INTERNET - THE ONLY WEAPON WE HAVE, WHY NOT USE IT? | <urn:uuid:61e5f6e0-d105-4898-92ac-70d18081f571> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://chaoticthinking.tumblr.com/post/19004433524/the-other-side-of-the-story-watch-keep-an-open | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949523 | 777 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Greens shackle national security – and renewable energy
By Paul Driessen
"China's control of a key minerals market has US military thinkers and policy makers worried about access to materials that are essential for 21st-century technology like smartphones – and smart bombs," the Wall Street Journal reports. Plus stealth fighter jets, digital cameras, computer hard drives – and wind turbine magnets, solar panels, hybrid and electric car batteries, compact fluorescent light bulbs, catalytic converters, and more.
China's dominance in mining and processing 17 "rare earth" metals "has raised alarms in Washington," says the Journal. These unique metallic elements have powerful magnetic properties that make them sine qua non for high-tech, miniaturized and renewable energy equipment.
China currently produces fully 97% of the world's rare-earth oxides, the raw materials that can be refined into metals and blended into specialty alloys for defense, commercial and power-generation components. However, the Middle Kingdom has slashed its rare-earth oxide and metal exports.
Beijing claims to be motivated by environmental concerns – reflecting the fact that rare earths are present in very low concentrations, mountains of rock must be mined, crushed and processed to get usable metals, and every step in the process requires oil, gasoline or coal-based electricity. A more likely reason is that the Chinese want to manufacture the finished goods, thereby creating countless "green" factory jobs, paid for with US and EU taxpayer subsidies, channeled through GE, Siemens, Vestas and other "socially responsible" companies that then install the systems across Europe and the USA.
So here we are, long beholden to foreign powers for petroleum – and newly dependent on foreign powers for "green" energy. National security issues (direct defense needs and indirect dependency issues) once again rise to the fore, and the Defense Department, Government Accountability Office, House Science and Technology Committee and others are busily issuing reports, holding hearings and expressing consternation. Congressman Bart Gordon (D-TN) worries that the United States is being "held hostage."
As well he should. However, the fault lies not in our stars, but in ourselves – or more precisely in our militant environmentalists.
Back in 1978, I ruined a perfectly pleasant hike in a RARE-II roadless area, by asking an impertinent question. "How do you defend prohibiting any kind of energy or mineral exploration in wilderness study areas?" I asked Assistant Secretary of Agriculture Rupert Cutler and Forest Service Chief John McGuire, "The 1964 Wilderness Act expressly allows and encourages those activities, so that Congress and the American people can make informed decisions about how to manage these lands, based on extensive information about both surface and subsurface values. How do you defend ignoring that provision?"
"I don't think Congress should have enacted that provision," Dr. Cutler replied.
"That may be your opinion," I responded. "But Congress did enact it, and you are obligated by your oath of office to follow the law the way it was written, not the way you think it should have been written."
"I think we've said enough to this guy," Cutler said to Chief McGuire, and they walked away.
A couple months later, I asked the Denver Sierra Club wilderness coordinator a related question: "Why are you focusing so heavily on areas with the best energy and mineral potential? Isn't that going to impact prices, jobs and national security?"
"Americans use too much energy, and they're not going to change voluntarily," he said. "The only way to make them change is to take the resources away. And the best way to do that is put them in wilderness."
And every other restrictive land use category that arrogant, thoughtless activists, bureaucrats, judges and politicians can devise, he might have added. Which is how we got where we are today.
As of 1994, over 410 million acres were effectively off limits to mineral exploration and development, according to consulting geologist Courtland Lee, who prepared probably the last definitive analysis, published in The Professional Geologist. That's 62% of the nation's public lands – an area nearly equal to Arizona, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming combined – primarily in Alaska and our eleven westernmost Lower 48 states. Today, sixteen years later, the situation is much worse – with millions more acres locked up in wilderness, park, preserve, wildlife refuge, wilderness study and other restrictive land use categories, or simply made unavailable by bureaucratic fiat or foot-dragging.
Due to forces unleashed by plate tectonics, these rugged lands contain some of the most highly mineralized mountain and desert areas in North America. They almost certainly hold dozens, perhaps hundreds, of world-class rare-earth deposits. The vast mineral wealth extracted from those areas since the mid-1850s portends what might still be there, to be discovered by modern prospecting gadgets and methods. But unless laws and attitudes change, we will never know.
How ironic. First eco-activists lock up the raw materials. Then they force-feed us "renewable energy standards" that require the very materials they've locked up, which we've never much needed until now. Thus China (and perhaps other countries a few years hence) will happily fill the breach, creating green jobs beyond our borders, selling us the finished components, and using our tax dollars to subsidize the imported wind turbines, solar panels and CFL bulbs that are driving energy costs through the roof.
Science historian James Burke became famous for chronicling the "Connections" between successions of past discoveries and achievements and various modern technologies. Unfortunately, today's increasingly powerful and power-hungry activists, jurists, legislators and regulators cannot see the connection between their actions and the economic havoc they leave in their wake.
Of course, there is little incentive for them to do so. They know they will rarely be held accountable. Others may freeze jobless in the dark – but most of them will keep their jobs, perks, pensions, positions of power over our lives, economy and civil rights progress.
However, there are bright spots. The upcoming elections offer hope for a general House (and Senate) cleaning. A recent poll found that a third of all Americans don't want to pay even $12 a year in higher energy costs, even to create "green" jobs or forestall Climate Armageddon. Many people are simply fed up – with Washington, and with constant assertions of imminent eco-catastrophes.
A steady stream of shale-gas discoveries in Europe and the United States suggests that we still have plentiful supplies of cheap natural gas. Evidence is mounting that petroleum is abiogenic in origin – and natural forces deep inside the Earth are constantly creating new hydrocarbons from elemental carbon and hydrogen. Both developments undermine a principle argument for pricey, land-intensive, intermittent wind and solar power: that we are running out of "fossil fuels."
Just north of the Mojave Desert, near Mountain Pass, California, Molycorp is working to restart mining operations at the largest rare-earth deposit outside of China. They had been suspended in 2002, for economic, permitting and environmental reasons that have since been resolved. China's Baotou Rare Earth Company was a happy beneficiary of the circumstances and US regulatory excesses.
Now there is hope that common sense will prevail at Mountain Pass, new processing methods will reduce costs and environmental impacts, and exploration may one day be permitted in areas locked up by Cutler & Company. Too many technologies depend on lanthanides to keep US deposits under lock and key.
Radical greens may not give a spotted owl hoot about military needs. But they may care enough about preserving their dream of a hydrocarbon-free future, while a few politicians may want to ensure that tens of billions in taxpayer subsidies for wind and solar power and electric cars don't all head overseas.
Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Congress of Racial Equality, and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death. He was an advisor to the Rutledge film and appears in it. | <urn:uuid:4d5fe57d-5f21-488c-9e25-a29673e09674> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/1010/1010greensmins.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951574 | 1,668 | 1.6875 | 2 |
Indigenous land claimants, Greens, vow to fight nuclear waste dump at Muckaty
AUSTRALIA: Indigenous representatives of Muckaty, Greens and environmentalists are vowing to fight the nuclear waste dump passed by the Australian Senate on March 13.
Source: Independent Media Central Australia
The Greens spokesperson for nuclear issues, Senator for Western Australia Scott Ludlam, said Labor and the Coalition colluding to pass the National Radioactive Waste Management Bill in the Senate today was "just the beginning of the next phase in the campaign to stop this waste dump".
"The locals don't want it and the Northern Territory government does not want it. Traditional Owners visited the parliament and Dianne Stokes wept here in this very place telling the story of her country. There is a Federal Court case currently unresolved as to the status of this land, yet the Government pushes on - led by an energy and resources minister obsessed with the nuclear industry."
"This legislation does not just represent a problem for Muckaty - it places enormous and virtually unchecked power in the hands of one minister."
The Greens have pushed for the creation of a commission of experts to determine how best to deal with radioactive waste in Australia, rather than concentrating the decision making power into the hands of one minister.
One of the problems seems to lie with which indigenous people the government has chosen to consult with. The Federal Government says the decision does not go against the wishes of traditional land owners in the area, but they are still waiting on the Federal Court decison as to whom the traditional owners of the land are.
The ABC report that, "Lorna Fejo was named in then-prime minister Kevin Rudd’s apology to the Stolen Generations. She says she is a traditional owner of the area and is dismayed the
Government has pressed ahead while the legal challenge is unresolved.
“I am really disappointed because all my life things have been taken, taken, taken,” she said.
Penny Phillips also says she is a traditional owner, and says her family has not been consulted about the proposed dump. She says her people do not want the dump on their land.
“I feel really sad, especially for the old, old people that fought for land rights for years and years and years to protect our environment and you get legislation that passed there so they can go destroy our environment,” she said. ...
The nomination of Muckaty as a site was put forward by the Northern Council on allegedly behalf of traditional owners. However, Maurice Blackburn lawyers are representing other traditional owners who are fighting the nomination.
The ABC also report that, "The Territory’s Chief Minister, Paul Henderson, has expressed strident opposition to the plan.
“I’m very disappointed that the Federal Parliament has once again trampled over the rights of Territorians by legislating away our rights in regards to Muckaty Station,” he said…. “My argument all along has been that this is a very big decision for our nation,” he said.
“I expect of our Federal Parliament to make those decisions based on science, not based on a constitutional weakness as to where they can put this waste because all of the other states don’t approve of it going into their particular areas.”
Meanwhile, the Public Health Association of Australia says the Northern Territory nuclear waste dump is not needed for medical wastes.
"Misleading arguments influence nuclear waste dump debate, Public Health Association of Australia, 15 March 12, Linking access to cancer treatment with the need for a nuclear waste dump in the Northern Territory is shameful and misleading, reflecting the pro-nuclear ideologies of Ministers rather than facts, said Clive Rosewarne, spokesperson for the Public Health Association of Australia (PHAA).
“Waste from nuclear medicine procedures, the majority of which is for diagnostic services rather than treatment, is low level and short term waste can be stored on site and safely disposed of locally. The small amount of higher level waste from nuclear medicine can also be stored locally, as it is currently,” explained Mr Rosewarne.
“Comments by senior Commonwealth Ministers upon the passing of the National Radioactive Waste Management Bill claiming that a dump is needed in order to have a nuclear medicine industry are a gross manipulation of public sentiment and an attempt to create fear in the community over access to health services. It is shameful that senior Ministers are misrepresenting the facts to foster their ideological support of the nuclear industry.
“The increased shipment of radioactive wastes across thousands of kilometres of Australia represents a far greater risk to public health than current storage practices and all of this could be further reduced if the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor was decommissioned and stopped from producing more waste. The only waste stream that requires a dedicated facility is soil waste from former CSIRO work and the ongoing waste generated at the nuclear reactor Lucas Heights.
“There is no long term solution to the highly dangerous radioactive waste produced by the nuclear industry and yet proponents of the industry hide from this fact. Transporting waste thousands of kilometres to a remote site certainly fits the Not In My Backyard syndrome, and attempts to locate the waste out of sight and out of mind.
“The anguish and suffering the passing of this Bill has caused to NT locals represents a low point in this nation’s dealing with Aboriginal people and may have long term health impacts. This does not seem to be of concern for Ministers who have refused to meet with traditional owners opposing the nomination of the Muckaty Station site. It would seem their health is of lower consideration than city folk in this appalling process,” said Mr Rosewarne.
Published by: Silja Somby | <urn:uuid:cdb80fd6-425c-4106-b64b-f48e7dbf92c7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.galdu.org/web/index.php?odas=5684&giella1=eng | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962036 | 1,172 | 1.578125 | 2 |
A few posts back, I told the story of how Trend Micro identified “Luckycat,” a Chinese hacker who had attacked the Dalai Lama, aerospace firms, and other targets. Based on what we know so far, it looks likely that the hacker is Gu Kaiyuan, formerly a student at Si Chuan University’s Information Security Institute and currently employed by Tencent, the huge Chinese instant message firm. Gu insists that two people used some of the credentials in question, and that he’s innocent. According to the New York Times, the University issued what seem like a carefully limited statement that it never “hired any unit or individual to participate in Internet attacks or hacking activities.” Tencent’s statement is similarly cautious: “We have checked with our colleague Mr. Gu Kaiyuan, who denied he was involved in any hacking activities…..Nor was he named by the author of the report as a hacker.”
It’s clear that Trend Micro has taken attribution pretty far, but more needs to be done if we’re going to get to the bottom of the case. The usual assumption in these cases is that nothing more can be done. The Chinese government isn’t likely to help, and Gu isn’t likely to come to the US any time soon.
But it’s a globalizing world. And the US has more leverage than it’s using. Let’s start with Tencent. It’s a big Chinese company, but it seems to do plenty of business in the United States as well. It has a joint venture in China with Groupon that might require CFIUS approval. It has a gaming company in Boston with 10 to 50 employees, so its executives are likely to want visas to come to the United States. Whether it’s seeking CFIUS approval or more visas, Tencent cannot afford to acquire a reputation for hiring hackers. If the United States asks for more information about Gu, or a chance to interview him, Tencent cannot say no.
Or take Si Chuan University. We’ve got some leverage there, too. The University sends plenty of students to the United States, and it accepts US exchange students as well. In fact, just three weeks after the Trend Micro report had fingered Si Chuan University for possible complicity in hacking American companies, the State Department sent a couple of consular representatives to the school to encourage its students to apply early for visas to study in the United States.
That of course was the wrong message for our diplomats to send, and it suggests that the State Department is still not taking hacker attribution and retribution seriously. Instead, the Department of Homeland Security, which has cybersecurity responsibilities as well as student visa authority, should open an investigation into Si Chuan University and its Information “Security” Institute. Those institutions may or may not be complicit in the Luckycat attacks, but the public data about Si Chuan and its Information Security Institute isn't particularly comforting on that score.
The Information Security Institute was China’s first, established in December 1997. It doesn't just do research; it actually produces products, and it benefited from “Program 863,” a government research program to develop and acquire sophisticated technologies in a handful of high priority fields. (A Chinese spy was convicted last year of stealing US technology and giving it to Program 863-- and to a Chinese university.) Among the Institute’s products that have been highly praised in China are systems “to improve network attack and defense and network behavior regulation, strengthen information security management, real-time monitoring, tracking competitors , industry, government and other sectors dynamic, capture, analysis, favorable or unfavorable information.” (Emphasis added.) It would be wrong to condemn the institution based only on the Google Translate version of an Internet report, but it’s surely fair to ask Si Chuan University if its products really do improve “network attack” or facilitate “real-time monitoring” of people in public networks. (Readers who know Chinese are invited to offer their views in the comments.)
The answers to these questions are surely relevant to how welcome Si Chuan researchers should be in the United States. After all, if the University is a front for organized attacks on US institutions, or a handmaiden of Chinese repression, or if it just refuses to cooperate in an inquiry, why should the United States grant visas to its students or professors?
Indeed, you kind of wonder why American schools, where academic boycotts to show moral disapproval of apartheid South Africa and even of Israel have been widely mooted, aren’t reconsidering their ties to Si Chuan over its possible complicity in attacks on the Dalai Lama. (If you'd like to ask them yourself, here’s a list of Si Chuan’s Western exchange program partners.) | <urn:uuid:45ebb11c-90c7-4f3c-be14-eca024588bc6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.skatingonstilts.com/skating-on-stilts/2012/12/more-on-retribution-sichuan-university.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952118 | 1,011 | 1.6875 | 2 |
In the war between politics-induced gridlock and fair, efficient government, gridlock just won a round.
Conservatives are cheering a ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that invalidates three appointments President Barack Obama made to the National Labor Relations Board last year. We doubt they will champion the court's reasoning the next time intransigence and inefficiency in the Senate prevent a Republican president from staffing the government. Manipulating the appointment process is a betrayal of senatorial duty that both parties have engaged in to gain short-term advantage, and the court's logic would give them a lot more power to do so.
At issue is the president's constitutional power to appoint officers of the government temporarily and without Senate confirmation when the chamber is in recess. Presidents of both parties have exercised this authority for decades. President George W. Bush made more than 170 recess appointments in his eight years in the White House.
There is good reason why presidents have used, and Senates have acquiesced to, this procedure. In an era when senators abuse the filibuster, government agencies regularly operate without leadership and federal judgeships often remain unoccupied, both despite qualified nominees. In the case of the NLRB, vacancies rendered the board impotent because it could not achieve a quorum.
Harvard law professor Noah Feldman points out that the recess appointment
In parsing the constitutional language, though, the court practically read the recess-appointment power out of existence. Recess appointments are allowed only between yearlong sessions of Congress, a three-judge panel found, and if Congress declares no recess between those sessions — even if the Senate is dark — then the appointments are invalid. The judges relied on their construal of what the Founders intended the Constitution's words to mean, but they produced a radical transfer of power from the executive to blocking minorities in the Senate.
If upheld upon further appeal, this reasoning would be disastrous. Hundreds of decisions made by recess appointees would come into legal question, and that's just the beginning. Members of both parties have proved willing to abuse the nomination process to serve inappropriate political, ideological or parochial ends. Republicans, for example, held up the nomination of Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau not because they regard Cordray as unqualified but because they dislike the agency he was tapped to head. The D.C. Circuit's ruling would only encourage such irresponsible hostage-taking.
We can only hope — but we hardly expect — that senators will stop the rank misuse of their chamber's duty to provide advice on and consent to presidential nominations. If they don't like the mission or the structure of a federal agency, or if they want to extract a favor from the White House, they should pass legislation, not deny the president his prerogative to appoint qualified men and women to serve.
— Washington Post editorial | <urn:uuid:325e7b6b-e1a9-4ac2-9469-5376139cd75e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.montereyherald.com/editorials/ci_22502770/gridlock-wins-yet-again | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955352 | 587 | 1.734375 | 2 |
Do you live in Mt. Vernon, Illinois and are you looking for clinical trials investigating Prednisone
Clinical Trials are medical research studies that are conducted on human beings to study the effectiveness of a medication, treatment method or investigational technique. Thousands of such trials are running in the United States alone for several medical conditions (read more about clinical trials in general). Prednisone as a treatment is currently being studied in clinical trials of conditions such as Prostate Cancer, Lymphoma Diffuse Large B Cell Lymphoma, Asthma and Chronic Gvhd. In the State of Illinois there are 163 clinical trials investigating the treatment Prednisone.
Some of these active clinical studies are listed below:
Clinical research studies are an important scientific method that have accelerated medical knowledge. You can check for currently active clinical studies (research studies) for Prednisone. We can advance this treatment together! | <urn:uuid:c3ceabfb-94b7-4027-8280-5cbc41dda3c4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://trialx.com/treatment/do-you-live-in-mt-vernon-illinois-and-are-you-looking-for-clinical-trials-investigating-prednisone-3/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94303 | 182 | 1.828125 | 2 |
I want my experiences to give hope to other people – things do not have to end when you find out that you have HIV.
In 2000 I arrived in the UK from Zimbabwe and in 2001 I started a new relationship with a man from a country where many people have HIV. To help protect ourselves against HIV and sexually transmitted infections we both went for tests. His test for HIV was negative. Mine was positive.
My initial reaction was fear. I thought that having HIV would mean that I would die in two or three years. My brother in Zimbabwe was very supportive and he told me that drugs were available that could help people with HIV live for longer.
Support also came closer to home. My HIV consultant and the nurses at my HIV clinic were very helpful and understanding and they put me in touch with support groups for Africans with HIV.
One of my big concerns was that I thought having HIV meant that I would die without ever having a child. You know, I was 34 when I found out I had HIV, so the biological clock was already ticking. And there is a real expectation in my culture that a woman should have a baby.
At a support group I attended, a speaker from Positively Women [now called Positively UK] explained that it is possible for a woman with HIV to have an HIV-negative baby. I met an HIV-positive man in 2002 and became pregnant.
But six weeks later I was dispersed from London to Manchester. I was very concerned because I'd had a miscarriage shortly before and feared that the stress of dispersal would cause me to miscarry again.
Even though I was HIV-positive and pregnant, I had to find an HIV clinic by myself – I did so using the Yellow Pages.
I'm glad to say that in 2003 I had a very healthy HIV-negative baby. My own health was good and my viral load was low so I only needed to take AZT during the last few months of pregnancy. I was even able to have a vaginal delivery, not a caesarean. My baby took a few doses of AZT after she was born. She is beautiful and very healthy.
My own health is very good – my CD4 cell count did dip when I was pregnant but it is now 580 and my viral load is only 68 copies/ml. My consultant said it would be many years before I need to start HIV treatment.
My immigration status has been a big worry. In 2003 my asylum application was refused – at a time when I was pregnant – and I really did fear that I would be deported. But because I'm from Zimbabwe I was advised to make another application which is still ongoing.
I have my HIV consultant to thank for putting me in touch with good immigration specialists when I was first diagnosed and the Terrence Higgins Trust and George House Trust have also provided very good support.
Nor can I forget the support I have received from other people with HIV in the UK – and they haven’t all been Africans! It has been wonderful.
But there has been discrimination and stigma. When I was first dispersed to Manchester, somebody I had to share accommodation with searched through my bags and found letters saying I had HIV. This person told other people I shared with and they asked me how I got infected with HIV. The worst thing is when you experience stigma from other people who have HIV.
Thanks to George House Trust I was moved and have my own place where I know my daughter and I are safe. But I still do worry – what will happen to me if we are sent back to Zimbabwe and I cannot get anti-HIV drugs? Thankfully I have sisters and I know that they will bring up my child if I die.
My experiences have taught me that it is really important not to give up hope when you find out you have HIV. Knowing that you have HIV means that you can start seeing a doctor who can help stop you becoming ill. Also, it's important to get help as soon as possible over immigration problems – don't ignore these problems if they come up as they will not go away.
So I'll finish by saying, when you find out you are HIV-positive, try and keep up a positive attitude, it really made a difference for me.
Help us to support people like Anciciaria and make a donation to NAM today. | <urn:uuid:18b2233c-2fe3-4943-b128-efac099eba7a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aidsmap.com/Having-a-baby/page/1255165/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.991415 | 887 | 1.554688 | 2 |
In most cases, a home lender will have someone appraise the home before you buy it. Still, you need to educate yourself about the appraisal process so that you can spot any red flags. One helpful resource is Our Family Place: House Appraisals
. There are also professionals who can help.
When you are considering a home purchase, professionals can help you find what you are looking for.
It's important to seek support if you need help dealing with a home loan. One suggestion is to communicate with a home loan professionals. Here are some tips for getting the best support possible:
- Ask all of the questions you have. The home loan process is full of jargon you may not understand. Dont be afraid to ask questions until you understand whats going on.
- Dont sign anything without reading it. Make sure you know exactly what each document means.
- Find someone you trust to show the house and tell you about the mortgage. Someone without an emotional investment in the process can help you make better decisions.
The following resources are recommended by survivors who have gone through the process of getting a home loan:
Getting a new home loan can be exciting -- if you're moving into a new home -- but the process can also be challenging. The financial burden may be great, and the process can be complicated. Educate yourself so that you are in the best possible position to keep your home and thrive. | <urn:uuid:e2d5b5bd-0033-445e-af16-2b5cb6c01e66> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thesurvivorsclub.org/money/home-loan/home-loans-support | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960286 | 290 | 1.773438 | 2 |
From the 7th Circuit court's opinion (PDF):
Odinism is a polytheistic religion, which was practiced for millennia in northern Europe before the rise of Christianity and has been revived in recent decades. The practice of Odinism includes group worship ceremonies. Pork is a sacred food to Odinists....Kramer had a larger problem with the group worship at the Green Bay Correctional Institution: The Department of Corrections lumps the "Pagan" religions together for group worship purposes, and he objected to a specifically Wiccan ritual at the service. The demand for an annual pork feast was part of a larger effort to separate the Odinists from the Wiccans.
Specifically, Kramer asked for a feast on December 21st for the “High Feast of Yule” and “further requested that HAM/PORK be included in with the FEAST MEAL.”...
Kramer's loss on everything but the pork feast (which he hasn't yet won) is based on procedural matters that are probably only interesting to lawyers — unless you know how to be interested in the way procedure can operate to undermine rights. | <urn:uuid:8e4958a0-3fb0-444a-b2fc-f9f95cf1349c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://althouse.blogspot.com/2012/12/court-keeps-alive-inmates-quest-for.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971347 | 231 | 1.570313 | 2 |
EJToday: Top Headlines
EJToday is SEJ's selection of new and outstanding stories on environmental topics in print and on the air, updated every weekday. SEJ also offers a free e-mailed digest of the day's EJToday postings, called SEJ-beat. SEJ members are subscribed automatically, but may opt out here. Non-members may subscribe here. EJToday is also available via RSS feed. Please see Editorial Guidelines for EJToday content.
"The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency this morning issued its proposed limits for phosphorus and nitrogen in Florida lakes and rivers -- a move anticipated by industry and environmental groups alike."
"An offline Florida power plant is providing a warm-water refuge for several hundred manatees who like the Sunshine State's human residents are shivering in record low cold temperatures."
"The tap water that Tampa residents consume is contaminated with low levels of antibiotics, nicotine byproducts and a chemical used to produce firefighting foams."
"A growing worldwide trade in exotic plants and animals, fueled by a fascination with the rare and beautiful, often wreaks havoc on Florida's native plants and animals and costs the nation billions each year."
"Frequent accidents at 10 of the state's biggest refineries resulted in the release of millions of pounds of toxic chemicals into the air and millions of gallons of polluted water into state water courses between 2005 and 2008, according to a report to be released this morning by the Louisiana Bucket Brigade."
"A large Southern utility said Tuesday that it would close 30 percent of its North Carolina coal-fired power plants by 2017, a step that represents a bet that natural gas prices will stay acceptably low and that stricter rules are coming on sulfur dioxide emissions, which cause acid rain."
"In a groundbreaking decision, a federal judge ruled late Wednesday that the Army Corps of Engineers' mismanagement of maintenance at the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet was directly responsible for flood damage in St. Bernard Parish and the Lower 9th Ward after Hurricane Katrina."
"U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle today said he will approve a legal settlement that calls for the federal government to set specific water quality standards for nutrients in Florida."
"A corridor of land protected by Puerto Rico's last governor hosts dozens of rare and endangered species .... Now new Gov. Luis Fortuno has revoked the reserve as part of a drive to bring jobs and investment for the U.S. territory's struggling economy."
"A U.S. agency has overturned its 2003 research that said no health hazards were caused by decades of military exercises on Vieques, a bombing range-turned-tourist destination off Puerto Rico's east coast."
"A weakened Tropical Storm Ida drenched the U.S. Gulf Coast and oil installations on Monday, shutting down nearly 30 percent of Gulf energy production."
"An expanded LG&E ash pond next to the Ohio River in Trimble County would have 100 foot tall walls and store more ash than burst across hundreds of acres in Tennessee last year." | <urn:uuid:cf446ac2-bc37-456e-9374-dc34170ea45f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sej.org/headlines/list/*/53?page=13 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942727 | 624 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Visa will soon allow customers to use their credit and debit cards to send money to other individuals, reports AP. It's the same type of service offered by the likes of PayPal, but Visa will come into the market with the advantage of 1.85 billion cards in circulation. One example of how it would work: A person initiates the transfer using the recipient's cell number or e-mail address; the recipient gets a notification message and enters his own Visa account number to finalize the transaction. But while users will find a lot of uses for the new service, so will scammers, warns the Consumerist. Click for that. | <urn:uuid:a00e2896-dc14-4978-b2e8-cf9c9e0ccc12> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.newser.com/story/114457/look-out-paypal-visa-wants-your-customers.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938301 | 129 | 1.78125 | 2 |
Connect me to:
Chinese Immigrant Cooking
by: Mary Tsui Ping Yee
First Glance Books 1998, $29.95, Hardbound
Reviewed by: Jacqueline M. Newman
Winter Volume: 1998 Issue: 5(4) page(s): 14 and 15
Growing up in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, the author adores the Cantonese cooking her mother prepares for the family and shares it adapted with produce from America. The book mixes these with spirit and wisdom gleaned from multiple travels to China, once as leader of a study trip for the Smithsonian. In this, Chinese Immigrant Cooking, a second book in the 'First Glance Immigrant Cookbook' series, you will enjoy more than one hundred thrity of her favorite recipes. They come with meal planning menus for several holidays including Mid-Autumn Moon Festival Banquet, Christmas Dinner, and a traditional Chinese New Year's Festival Banquet.
Recipes are in Noodles and Rice, Soups, Pork Beef and Lamb, and other food sections and each has a Cantonese transliteration. Most also have a color photograph to visualize the final product. All follow a four-page foreword by her daughter Melinda and an eight-page introduction by Mary, both with family photographs. Before each section and with each recipe learn about family, cultural milieu, and what makes for terrific tastes.
Try Mustard Green Soup, it is a must. So is the Dried Oyster, Dried Bok Choy, and Dried Tofu Soup. Both are rarely found in cookbooks but often found on Chinese immigrant family tables. They are there along with the more common Won Ton Soup and a Sour and Hot Soup, both better than most because they are loaded with wonderful ingredients, fresh and dried.
Anyone's Chinese meals will go better with Mrs. Yee's Homemade Cantonese Pickles, her sister Jennie's Roast Spareribs, the family's familiar yet simple standby of Steamed Meat Patty or their more complicated Lotus Leaf Buns. All should be tasted as should the Pickled Pigs Feet with Ginger, the Spicy Lamb Stew, her sister's poultry recipe called Ann's Steamed Chicken, Braised Mushrooms made with mushroom-flavored soy sauce, and a wonderful Cellophane Noodle Salad.
The author recommends a Chinese New Year's Banquet of Eight Delicacies Appetizer Platter, Tea Eggs, the above listed mushrooms, Braised Beef, Phoenix Tail Shrimp, Eight Treasures Stuffed Duck, and Snack Walnuts, and more. All the recipes are in the book; I recommend them to you to usher in this Year of the Rabbit on January 25th. They come with wonderful information and will enrich your holiday celebration.
There are wonderful color and black and white family pictures scattered throughout in addition to those at the book's beginning, a recipe index, and a general index. Unfortunately, for those not familiar with lesser known ingredients, there is no glossary of ingredients but there is a clear recipe for White Rice. Details enable your making this basic southern grain staple to your liking, soft or firm.
The book ends with a recipe for the tastiest taro-stuffed dumplings ever. They are loaded with dry shrimp and dry mushrooms, both soaked and softened, and chopped meat (I recommend a mixture of chicken, pork, and beef) and soy and oyster sauces. Not every recipe is great or clearly presented but try to figure them out. When I did as in that very last recipe, I read one ingredient listed only "1 tablespoon" so I made it one of cornstarch and the results rewarded as it worked out beautifully and tasted terrific.
The recipes and the color photographs are so tempting and the errors so few, that I recommend learning and loving her mostly Cantonese recipes. Even the Americanized ones are worth trying including the Peking Duck, made as I have--drying the skin with an electric fan. A must is also the Snack Walnuts: Reduced Fat Method. They allow for many more indulgences so that you can devour the Barbecued Steak, Chinese style, with dry sherry, soy sauce, garlic, ginger, sugar, and oyster sauce. Be assured the proportions are great and could go with other meats, too.
The book uses ingredients relatively new to this country such as pea shoots. The Three-Colored Steamed Eggs with both duck and thousand-year eggs, mushroom soy already mentioned, young ginger root, rock sugar, and more and with newer items, too. It also allows use of tropical fruits. The Mango Beef should be first on anyone's list, its recipe follows.
3/4 pound beef
1 Tablespoon soy sauce
1 Tablespoon shao xing wine
1 Tablespoon cornstarch
3 Tablespoons corn oil
1 scallion, minced
2 slices ginger root, minced
1 teaspoon grated orange peel
1 Tablespoon soy sauce
1 Tablespoon shao xing wine or dry sherry
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1 large almost but not ripe mango, peeled and cut in half-inch slices
1. Marinate the beef in a ixture of soy sauce, shao xing wine, and cornstarch for half an hour.
2. Heat two tablespoons corn oil and stir-fry the marinated beef just until no longer pink. Remove from the wok and set aside.
3. Add the rest of the corn oil and fry the scallion, ginger root, and orange peel for one minute then add the rest of the ingredients except the mango. Stir-fry one minute then add the mango and stir-fry just until heated through, about a minute. Serves 6. | <urn:uuid:e1b1373b-8597-477b-9e34-6303bc74b08b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.flavorandfortune.com/dataaccess/book.php?reviewID=90 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934574 | 1,206 | 1.570313 | 2 |
4:39 pm in Uncategorized by RFShunt
What you first notice, because they are everywhere, are the mounds of people’s things lining every curb. They stack up head-high, spilling out into the road, some of them still oozing water after three weeks. You park your car, careful not to scratch the side on all the debris, open the door and get hit with the sound of motors – chain saws, generators, drills, pumps. Everybody is hacking and cutting away at the accumulation of their lives, and dragging the now worthless pieces out to the street.
Toni and Gerry greet us at the door. They are both our first cleanup assignment and our hosts. Gerry is in his late eighties, a retired professor of French and Italian. Toni is more than a decade his junior.
It’s been a long car ride from Pittsburgh and Gerry and Toni want to show us where we’ll be sleeping and feed us. On the way in, we pass a computer-printed quote taped to the porch door: “Let me say at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.” — Che Guevara.
This is our first clue that Toni and Gerry are not your average retired couple. Over the course of the weekend, revealed bit by bit, we will learn much more about them.
Toni and Gerry feed us fruit and tea and introduce us to the three dogs and five cats that Toni has rescued from the shelters around New Jersey. Gerry has the grumble and faux scowl of a man who plays at being a curmudgeon. This falls apart when he talks about Toni’s cats and dogs – praising their fine looks and sweet dispositions. The dogs and two of the cats can’t get enough of Toni and Gerry. They know “great feelings of love” when they see it. We as new visitors get the spill over, especially Laney to whom animals are instantly drawn.
While we eat, David from Morristown and Kat, an Occupy Sandy organizer, arrive. Kat has an SUV full of tools and cleaning supplies and in her no-nonsense way unloads them and checks out the house. David is anxious to get to work. David is a mensch. The sooner we get going, he says, the sooner he can help other people. We change into work clothes and get busy. The basement is a jumble — upended shelves have scattered their contents on the floor to wallow in black, gritty mud. Everything smells of seawater and sewer and mold. The high-water mark staining the foundation wall is inches from the ceiling. The sodden items are heavy and it takes us the rest of the day to carry them out to the curb, adding to the giant abstract sculpture of destruction that the Asbury curbs have become.
When the sun is low, we call it a day, and I dial up Dawn, our contact with Occupy Sandy. She is the one who arranged our work schedule and accommodations. Dawn is a born organizer, marshaling and distributing hundreds of volunteers and donations from her cel phone. She’s an interior designer from the Bronx who dropped everything and is putting in twenty hours a day ferociously attacking the disorder of post-Sandy New Jersey. Each time I’ve spoken to her, her voice has gotten progressively raspier. I tell her how far we’ve gotten and she decides to send out a plumber to see why Toni and Gerry’s furnace won’t light. She also thinks she can get more people out to help with cleanup.
Dawn tells me a little about Gerry, our host. He’s an ex-marine and a saxophone player. I should talk to him, he’s interesting, she suggests. Before I hang up, I tell her to take some care of herself — her voice does not sound good.
“Yeah, yeah” she says.
We sit down to dinner, and Toni is excited to learn that Laney and Don are occupiers. She recounts her visits to Zuccotti Park – lighting up as she tells us about the time Naomi Klein showed up and she got to be part of the human mic amplifying her words. She talks to us about her work with stray animals, calling each one over and describing how this one or that one escaped being put down in the nick of time. Gerry beams at her when she talks, but isn’t saying much himself.
I decide to open him up a little. “I hear you’re an ex-marine, and a reed man,” I say.
“I suppose I should tell you about myself,“ he says reluctantly.
Read the rest of this entry → | <urn:uuid:233aa9a4-9a88-4ea4-8243-dea03ed7087a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://my.firedoglake.com/rfshunt/tag/occupy-wall-street/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967073 | 1,011 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Four technology giants have warned the Irish government not to touch Ireland's low corporation tax levels as the country struggles to finalise a bailout package with the International Monetary Fund and the European Union.
Ireland will borrow around £85bn - the exact amount will be agreed in coming days – to underwrite its banks. But HP, Intel, Microsoft and Google have warned that the country's low company tax levels are key to any economic recovery.
Speaking last week, the American Chamber of Commerce Ireland warned that the country's 12.5 per cent corporation tax was crucial to its competitiveness.
Lionel Alexander, VP HP manufacturing and president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Ireland, said: "Any increase in corporation tax will have a damaging impact on our ability to win and retain investment in Ireland. The simple truth is that Ireland's corporate tax rate is not the most competitive in the world. When we compete for jobs and investment we are competing not against the European Union, but against countries such as Singapore, Israel, India and China."
The statement was supported by Intel Ireland, Microsoft and Merrill Lynch. US tech firms played a crucial role in securing Ireland's reputation as the Celtic Tiger economy by bringing manufacturing and support jobs to the country.
Separately Google, with a 2,000-strong European headquarters in Dublin, told the Belfast Telegraph: "Anything that impinges on Ireland's competitiveness is going to be a big thing for Google, including corporation tax. And anything that increases the cost-base of a business is negative for competitiveness."
The Irish finance minister Brian Lenihan has made clear corporation tax will stay at its current low level.
But the decision might not be his to take - any loan from the EU or the IMF will come with tough conditions attached on government spending and tax policy. ® | <urn:uuid:f9b735ee-d510-4e5c-916e-51d2731720e7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2010/11/22/ireland_bail_tech/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963045 | 366 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Chevy1121 wrote:1. I'm trying to learn the bow drill method. Is there an easy way to start a fire primitively?
If there is, I am all ears.
Just kidding. The firebow is more efficient at generating enough pressure and friction to light wood dust.
Theoretically. If the wood is dry enough. No water or sap content. The harder (more dense) the wood is, the harder it is to generate the necessary pressure and friction. Hardwoods are such woods as oak and hickory. These are the kinds of woods I like to use for a handhold or socket. Typically soft wood is the best like cottonwood and velvetleaf but many medium hardness woods like willow and maple will work well also. You will find that wood density "does" make a difference whether the wood is freshly fallen, seasoned, or turning softer as it begins to decay. It is better to do a fingernail etch test first to tell if a wood is good for friction wood rather than knowing names right now. If the wood is solid and etches but is not rotten, you should be good to go. If it does not etch, it is probably too hard. Just press your fingernail into the bare wood.
Chevy1121 wrote:3. Does my notch need to cut through all the way to the bottom of the fireboard?
It would be better if it did so the dust will collect separate from the board.
Chevy1121 wrote:4. Will the coal get hard when close to ignition or will it remain a fragile bunch of powder?
It is fragile so treat it like a chicken egg. I will stress to you that you will know when you have a coal just by smoke rising continuously from the dust pile separate from the spindle and board smoke so pay attention to the dust pile. Do not stop spinning until you see the continuous smoke of the dust pile or you drill to the bottom of the board. The coal should remain lit for a good long while since you just put a lot of energy into generating it. Wave your hand briefly over the coal gently to add air and expand the coal to the surrounding dust. This will give you a larger coal. Be patient, determined, and persistent. Keep working at it and it will happen. Hope this helps. Good luck and let us know how you do.
- Robert M.
"I can do all things through Christ, who strengtheneth me." - Paul, c. A.D. 60 (Philippians 4:13) | <urn:uuid:88a57ebe-4344-4085-b3af-df7d26d3d985> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://wildwoodsurvival.com/_jthy/viewtopic.php?p=7194 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938515 | 529 | 1.835938 | 2 |
In the mid 2000’s, our children and student ministry teams began a journey of exploration into family ministry. For several years, our leaders struggled with this concept while we glanced at various models at other churches. We did some reading on this burning topic and looked anywhere we could to define what ministry to the whole family might look like.
Our curiosity literally took us on a journey. We met face-to-face with church leaders who led established family ministries. We discussed the pros and cons of various approaches we hoped would result in increased spiritual impact at home. Honestly, we were not certain where our research would take us or what family ministry would look like at our church. We continued our quest, believing it was worth the effort.
After a season of research, numerous meetings, and prayer, we realized that we could not add anything more to our ministries without first making some organizational changes.
Our church, like so many others, had created a very segregated approach to children and student ministries. At that time, we had three separate ministries led by three ministry directors. Each ministry had to stand on its own. Each leader had to work in a “silo” that led to less than the best cooperation, and it resulted in competition. The children’s ministry had to compete with the middle school ministry for budget dollars and space. The middle school ministry had to compete with the high school ministry. Don’t get me wrong, there was not open hostility; it was simply an atmosphere of competition for limited resources.
Our first and most significant step towards implementing family ministry was to restructure our existing teams. We chose to combine our children, middle, and high school ministries, under one leader and one central leadership team. We realized that before we could impact families, we had to get our ministry teams on the same page.
This single step has helped us accomplish the following:
- Shared Goals – Prior to our restructure, each ministry set its own ministry agenda, and none of it included impacting parents. The restructure changed those practices. Today, at virtually all of our meetings, there is significant inclusion of family conversation, and our goals reflect our aspirations. Most importantly, we share family ministry goals, from nursery leaders through our high school pastor.
- Shared Values – Our restructure helped our children and student ministries relate with each other. There were values that were lived out in our children’s ministry that were missing in our student ministries. Likewise, the opposite was true. By combining our ministries, we have seen the strength of one ministry rub off on another.
- Shared Resources – Rather than competing for money and space, we now complement each other. We cooperate for facility space and financial resources. We now combine dollars for many of our family ministry efforts.
Restructuring your children and student ministries does not create a family ministry in your church. However, I can testify that when you combine your ministry teams, you are setting a great foundation that will result in greater impact to families. | <urn:uuid:1744834a-95ee-40a0-9cf6-c30bd2490198> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://truministry.com/2013/01/03/3-reasons-to-restructure-your-ministry-for-greater-family-impact/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980312 | 615 | 1.710938 | 2 |
Cybersecurity Stalls in Senate, Obama Could Issue Executive Order
With deep divisions over the proper role of government, a comprehensive cybersecurity reform bill to shore up the digital infrastructure is on hold. The attention is now shifting to the White House, where officials are working to protect the nation's critical infrastructure from digital attacks and vulnerabilities.
Fri, November 16, 2012
CIO — WASHINGTON -- Now that the latest effort to advance comprehensive cybersecurity legislation has failed in Congress, attention is now shifting to the White House, where officials have been developing an executive order to better protect the nation's critical infrastructure from digital attacks and vulnerabilities.
--Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.)
That revelation came as Senate Republicans on Wednesday defeated a procedural measure that would have advanced the Cybersecurity Act backed by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), objecting that the Democratic majority was trying to push the bill through without sufficient debate and by limiting the number of amendments that members could introduce.
At the very least, that will move the debate over cybersecurity legislation into next year, and likely into the new session of Congress, with the primary fault lines in the debate -- whether the government should impose cybersecurity mandates on private-sector infrastructure operators; whether the military or Department of Homeland Security should take the lead in civilian cybersecurity -- expected to resurface, while the White House could still move ahead with a more expansive executive order that the policy directive Obama reportedly signed in October.
Cybersecurity Out of Congress' Hands (for Now)
Following Wednesday's vote, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) indicated that comprehensive cybersecurity reform is effectively off the table for this Congress, and called on the White House to move ahead with its executive order to address the issue.
"Given Republican intransigence, I hope President Obama uses all the authority of the executive branch at his disposal to fully protect our nation from the cybersecurity threat," Reid said.
But then on Thursday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) said he is hopeful that the chamber can return to cybersecurity in January with a more inclusive debate.
"The majority leader had made prior commitments to allowing a free and open debate on cybersecurity, a matter that Republicans acknowledge must be addressed especially in the areas of information sharing, and providing some degree of liability protection to those companies that do share cyberthreat information with one another and the federal government," McConnell said Thursday on the Senate floor, calling for consideration of an alternative -- and much more limited -- cybersecurity bill backed by several leading Republicans to be included in any debate of the more comprehensive Lieberman-Collins measure. | <urn:uuid:bab38751-5200-449f-9320-c781ded792f6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cio.com/article/721824/Cybersecurity_Stalls_in_Senate_Obama_Could_Issue_Executive_Order?source=sflowtweet | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954144 | 534 | 1.585938 | 2 |
The attempt to affect a global market in bonds long term by purchasing bonds short term is a futile effort and a total waste of resources - as we can all see.
Europe has “no credibility” in ruling out debt restructurings, Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard University professor and former International Monetary Fund chief economist, said in a Bloomberg Television interview broadcast today. “Greece will be very lucky to avoid restructuring, Ireland, Portugal -- they’re just in denial, saying it can’t happen. They really haven’t drawn clear lines, they haven’t really said what they wanted to do, they haven’t really made choices.”
Bingo! The professor is right on point. Thus far, it has been nothing but words that have been given as an indication that said states won't default. The market forces point to default. Their track record in terms of credibility point to default, as illustrated:
- Lies, Damn Lies, and Sovereign Truths: Why the Euro is Destined to Collapse!
The numbers show default.
- Here’s Something That You Will Not Find Elsewhere – Proof That Ireland Will Have To Default… November 30th, 2010
- A Comparison of Our Greek Bond Restructuring Analysis to that of Argentina
Only their proclamations say otherwise. Back to the Bloomberg article...
Under pressure to shield taxpayers in Europe’s largest economy, Merkel is drifting back into the role she played in the early stages of the crisis, when Germany held out against an aid package for Greece. The political standoff may saddle the ECB with more of the crisis-management burden, said Citigroup Inc. economists including Juergen Michels and Michael Saunders in London in a Dec. 3 e-mailed note. “Eventually the ECB will be forced to increase its contribution to the rescue packages substantially,” the economists wrote. “We expect that after another round of market tensions, the European fiscal policy makers will eventually come up with additional measures to fight the crisis.”
The inevitable truth of the matter is that several European states WILL default, and default they will. If Germany, or any other economy that still has its druthers to it decides to stand in front of said occurrence, it will likely be dragged down as well. The Germans apparently realize this. See this excerpt from our discussion on the topic regarding Ireland's prospects for default:
... from the post Ireland’s Bailout Is Finalized, The Indebted Gets More Debt As A Solution But The Fine Print Is Glossed Over – Caveat Emptor! wherein BoomBustBlogger Nick asked:
Do you have any reason as to why they are choosing 2013 as a deadline ? Seems like an arbitrary date.
Well, Nick, just follow the money or the lack thereof…
So, what debt raising and servicing that was unsustainable in 2010 was lent even more debt to become even more unsustainable. The chickens come home to roost in 2013, post IMF/EU/Bilateral state leveraged into Ireland loan/Pension fund raiding bailout! What Angela in Germany was alluding to was what all in the know, well… know, and that is that Ireland is already in default and those defaults have been purposely pushed out until 2013. Angela simply (and wisely from a local political perspective, although unwisely from a global geopolitical standpoint) admitted/suggested was that the defaults will be pre-packaged and managed ahead of time. The EU politbureau insists that politics rule the day, and no prepackaged structure be in place for the Irish defaults to be. This means the potential foe even more carnage through the pipelines of uncertainty!
And back to the article...
ECB Bond Purchases
The Frankfurt-based central bank said today it settled 1.965 billion euros of bond purchases last week. While the figure was the highest in 22 weeks, it didn’t include bonds bought between Dec. 1 and Dec. 3.
The bank is “actively” operating in the government bond market, Governing Council member Athanasios Orphanides said today in Nicosia. The ECB will act as necessary, said Orphanides, who heads the Cypriot central bank.
Greece won a 110 billion-euro EU-IMF rescue in May, leading the EU to create the three-year facility that was first tapped by Ireland with an 85 billion-euro program last month.
Both of these actions were clearly anticipated by BoomBustBlog research and analysis months ahead of time:
Reynders said the IMF also wants the EU to put up more money and would boost its 250 billion-euro share. IMF spokesman William Murray declined to comment. Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn is at tonight’s Brussels meeting.
Re-Introducing the Not So Stylish Portuguese Haircut Analysis
Note: this is a repost of the information initially made available to subscribers in the summer of 2010
For those who feel that the simple application of arithmetic and math amounts to “Doomsday Scenarios”, Fear-mongering, and vultures in the market place, I present to you BoomBustBlog’s scenario analysis of the Portuguese Haircut.
You think those are ugly? You ain’t seen nothing yet!
The Mathematical Truth Concerning Portugal’s Debt Situation
Before I start, any individual or entity that disagrees with the information below is quite welcome to dispute it. I simply ask that you com with facts and analysis and have them grounded in reality so I cannot right another “Lies, Damn Lies, and Sovereign Truths: Why the Euro is Destined to Collapse!“. In other words, come with the truth, or at lease your closest simulacrum of it.
In preparing Portugal’s sovereign debt restructuring model through maturity extension, we followed the same methodology as the Greece’s sovereign debt maturity extension model and we have built three scenarios in which the restructuring can be done without taking a haircut on the principal amount.
- Restructuring by Maturity Extension – Under this scenario, we assumed that the creditors with debt maturing between 2010 and 2020 will exchange their existing debt securities with new debt securities having same coupon rate but double the maturity. Under this type of restructuring, the decline in present value of cash flows to creditors is 3.3% while the cumulated funding requirements and cumulated new debt between 2010 and 2025 are not reduced substantially. The cumulated funding requirement between 2010 and 2025 reduces to 120.0% of GDP against 135.4% of GDP if there is no restructuring. The cumulated new debt raised is reduced marginally to 70.6% of GDP from 72.2% of GDP if there is no restructuring. Debt at the end of 2025 will be 104.8% of GDP against 106.1% if there is no restructuring
- Restructuring by Maturity Extension & Coupon Reduction – Under this scenario, we assumed that the creditors with debt maturing between 2010 and 2020 will exchange their existing debt securities with new debt securities having half the coupon rate but double the maturity. The decline in the present value of the cash flows is 18.6%. The cumulated funding requirement between 2010 and 2025 reduces to a potentially sustainable 99.5% of GDP and the cumulated new debt raised will decline to 50.1% of GDP. Debt at the end of 2025 will be 88.6% of GDP (a potentially sustainable).
- Restructuring by Zero Coupon Rollup – Under this scenario, the debt maturing between 2010 and 2020 will be rolled up into one bundle and exchanged against a single, self-amortizing 20-year bond with coupon equal to 50% of the average coupon rate of the converted bonds. The decline in the present value of the cash flows is 17.6%. The cumulated funding requirement between 2010 and 2025 reduces to 100.1% of GDP and the cumulated new debt raised will decline to 52.8% of GDP. Debt at the end of 2025 will be 90.9% of GDP (a potentially sustainable).
The scenarios above were also calculated using the haircuts necessary to bring debt to GDP below a pre-selected level (user selectable in the model, 80%, 85% or 90% - please keep in mind that a ceiling of 60% was necessary in order to gain admission into the Euro construct). We have also built in the impact of IMF/EU aid on the funding requirements and new debt raised from the market between 2010 and 2025 under all the scenarios.
A more realistic method of modeling for restructuring and haircuts
In the previously released Greece and Portugal models, we have built relatively moderate scenarios of maturity extension and coupon reduction which would be acceptable to a large proportion of creditors. However, these restructurings address the liquidity side of the problem rather than solvency issues which can be resolved only when the government debt ratios are restored to sustainable levels. The previous haircut estimation model was also based on the logic that the restructuring of debt should aim at bringing down the debt ratios and addition to debt ratios to more sustainable levels. In the earlier Greece maturity extension model, the government debt at the end of 2025 under restructuring 1, 2 and 3 is expected to stand at 154.4%, 123.7% and 147.0% of GDP which is unsustainably high.
Thus, the following additional spreadsheet scenarios have been built for more severe maturity extension and coupon reduction, or which will have the maturity extension and coupon reduction combined with the haircut on the principal amount. The following is professional level subscscription content only, but I would like to share with all readers the facts, as they play out mathematically, for Portugal. In all of the scenarios below, Portugal will need both EU/IMF funding packages (yes, in addition to the $1 trillion package fantasized for Greece), and will still have funding deficits by 2014, save one scenario. That scenario will punish bondholders severely, for they will have to stand behind the IMF in terms of seniority and liquidation (see How the US Has Perfected the Use of Economic Imperialism Through the European Union!) as well as take in excess of a 20% haircut in principal while suffering the added risk/duration/illiquidity of a substantive and very material increase in maturity. Of course, we can model this without the IMF/EU package (which I am sure will be a political nightmare after Greece), but we will be recasting the “The Great Global Macro Experiment, Revisited” in and attempt to forge a New Argentina (see A Comparison of Our Greek Bond Restructuring Analysis to that of Argentina).
Here is graphical representation of exactly how deep one must dig Portugal out of the Doo Doo in order to achieve a sustainable fiscal situation. The following chart is a depiction of Portugal’s funding requirements from the market before restructuring…
This is the same country’s funding requirements after a restructuring using the "Restructuring by Maturity Extension″ scenario described above…
And this is the depiction of new debt to be raised from the market before restructuring…
And after using the scenario “Restructuring by Maturity Extension″ described above… For all of you Americans who remember that government sponsored TV commercial, “This is your brain on drugs. Any Questions?“
The full spreadsheet behind all of the calculations, scenarios, bond holdings and calculations can be viewed online here (click this link and scroll to the bottom until you see the live spreadsheet) by anyone with the wherewithal to click the link. This product was formally available only to our professional subscribers, but I have decided to distribute it much more widely. Our Ireland, Greece and Spain (to be published within 72 hours) haircut models are available solely to professional and institutional subscribers. Click here to subscribe or upgrade.
Please be sure to read up on our full Pan European Sovereign Debt Crisis analysis, which is freely available to everyone. | <urn:uuid:317d8dc0-f9a5-49ed-b325-5188fe499571> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://boombustblog.com/index.php?option=com_k2&Itemid=200079&id=4124&lang=en&view=item | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940662 | 2,473 | 1.789063 | 2 |
Nissan sets the goal to assemble 1 million vehicles
Mexico City— With Nissan Mexican’s third plant in Mexico, to be located in Aguascalientes, the company is estimating they will assemble more than 1 million units per year in the near future.
Jose Luis Valls, President and Armando Avila, Manufacturing Vice-president, informed that they estimate they will produce 670,000 vehicles this year –last year 643,000 vehicles were assembled– and that the figure should reach 850,000 with the new plant.
“We want to exceed one million vehicles assembled in the future, to make of Mexico one of the most important centers in the world (in this field)”, they pointed-out.
Even if they would not disclose the model that will be produced at the new plant, which will start production in December 2013, they did say it will be a compact vehicle.
Source: El Diario de Chihuahua | Date: 12/07/2012 | <urn:uuid:9ff967b3-d7d3-4ce3-b150-226bfd54daa6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mexico-now.com/newsmn.php?id=4954 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947352 | 206 | 1.507813 | 2 |
When approaching restorations or restifications, some general principles apply. All electrolytic power supply capacitors usually need to be replaced. The risk of failure and damage to transformers, and/or homes is too great. I do analyze all can caps and in most cases replace them with new reproductions or rebuild the originals. Generally mica or ceramic capacitors do not need replacement, but critical ones will have their value verified, and replaced as necessary. Paper/wax coupling capacitors are problematic. Most are off value and leaky. This leads to poor performance and mushy sound. Many of the McIntosh “bumble bee” caps are fine, as they were very well sealed units, but if they need replacement I recommend new mylar/polyester audio caps. Using these new caps will significantly open up your sound field and liven the sound. If you prefer I do have a small number of NOS bumble bee and black cat coupling caps.
I measure values of all resistors and replace any out of spec with NOS, or new metal film ones. Where needed, I hand match precision sets. If you want complete originality, I have a stock of carbon comp resistors. If you want precision and low noise the carbon film are the way to go. For restorations, it is carbon comps and restifications it is carbon film. Selenium rectifies must be replaced with silicon diodes. This is for your equipments safety as well as performance. Up to the mid 60’s many bias supplies used selenium rectifiers. As these age they get less efficient. I have seen bias supplies that should have provided -35 volts provide as little as -15. This leads to output tube over-heating and plates glowing. I many cases I can hide the new silicon diodes and leave the selenium rectifier in place for cosmetic reasons. Tubes are another huge issue. I prefer to have you supply the tubes you wish to use in your completed amplifier. There are many sources of used, NOS and new production tubes today. Start with eBay or your favorite tube supplier. I can procure tubes for you, but this adds time and expense to your amp. I can make recommendations concerning tubes. My general ranking of tubes is as follows;
NOS→ Used Good→ Some Russian Military→ Some New Production Russian→ Chinese
You also have to take into consideration the use of the tube. Preamp tubes need to be quiet and have well matched sections. Output and rectifier tubes need to have good plate structures and high quality materials. Burn-in and matching are a plus with ALL new production tubes. I have found some of the new production Russian made tubes to rival British and US made NOS tubes. Some of the military surplus Russian tubes are also excellent. My limited experience with Chinese tubes is not very good. I have seen too many catastrophic failures. If one of these takes out an output transformer the money you saved (and a lot more) just went out the window. I do not recommend you spend hundreds of dollars on “Black plate, Grey plate, Smooth plate or Telefunken tubes advertised to be special. They usually aren’t. I have found a number of great suppliers for restoration items for tube and guitar amplifiers and want to share them with you.
www.dynakitparts.com -great source of Dynaco restoration parts and new kits
www.tubesandmore.com- great source for guitar parts, tubes and other restoration items
Restorations- Some examples of recent work
McIntosh C 20 preamplifier- This unit had a number of issues. I was lucky enough to find a reproduction front glass for this unit. The volume control was open in one channel and this necessitated a long search for a NOS part. Several resistors were noisy and a number of power supply caps were leaky. I have a large stock of carbon comp resistors and was able find some quieter ones. After several reforming operations the cap caps responded very well, with the exception of a single can. That one was replaced with an new production FP.
All the tubes were still within specs, even after 40 years. After cleaning all the controls and switches this unit functioned as good as new and met all factory specs. This was a relatively easy restoration.
McIntosh MC 30 power amplifiers- (set 1-after and before) These amplifiers were in extremely sad shape. The chassis were rusty, all ,most tubes were missing, the circuit boards were intact but a number of parts were missing and the can caps were shot. New stainless steel chassis were procured and a ground up restoration was begun. A completely original stock unit was used as guide. All missing bumble bee caps were replaced with NOS units, the can caps were replaces with new production units. The transformers were sanded, the decals masked off and painted with auto-body catalyzed gloss black. When the new chassis’s arrived, the NOS sockets were installed and wired. The wiring was duplicated for the power supply and boards. NOS tubes were selected and the amplifiers were power up and checked. The high voltage supply was fine tuned to meet factory specs. After the restoration the amplifiers were able to put out 34 and 35 watts respectfully. The cost for this restoration was around $1500. The customer was thrilled and loved them. He thinks they sound better than new.
McIntosh MC 30 Power Amps (set 2)
These were a very special set of amplifiers. They were consecutive serial numbers and the chassis’s had no rust, and they were completely original. The owner had stored them in his closet for over 20 years (dry and temp stable) and someone told him about my service and he contacted me. The filter caps were shot and the coupling caps to the outputs were leaky, the selenium rectifiers were very weak (only -10 volts of bias) and last, but not least, the input tube electrolytic’s and bias cap electrolytic’s were leaky and off value. The customer ‘s goal was to have a set of reliable amplifiers with the stock look. New production FP can caps were used with an extra section and slightly higher capacity. Wired correctly this substantially improves the transient and bass response of the amplifier. (while maintaining the stock look) The paper/ wax coupling caps were replaced with a matched pair of Sprague Orange drop capacitors. (These were extensively used by the famous MC Clinics when bringing MC equipment back to specs) The selenium bias diodes were very weak and were replaced with silicon diode, the bias cap was replaced with a substantially higher value, to stabilize the bias voltage at high volume levels. Another weak capacitor was located in the input tube cathode, this was replaced. Good used and NOS American made tubes were selected for the 9 pin tubes and the rectifier, while Russian made 6L6GC Tungsol re-issues were selected for the output tubes. The power transformer voltage tap was switched over to the 125 tap and the amplifiers were powered up. As typical with higher line voltage today and the silicon bias cap, the power supply voltages were about 15% high with the bias voltage at -57 volts where spec was -45 volts. A NOS 5R4 was substituted for the 5U4 rectifier tube. This brought down the power supply voltage about 7%, but the high bias voltage still persisted. By adjusting the resistor value that feeds the bias circuit and matching the needed value with fixed resistors I was able to achieve a bias voltage of -45.6 volts. This also resulted in the plate voltage of the output tubes to fall from 479 volts to 444 volts. (spec is 445 volts) The amplifiers were burned in for 5 days and voltages all rechecked. Everything was still in spec and they sounded wonderful. Evaluation of them demonstrated an RMS power without clipping at 35 watts, and a perfectly shaped sine and square wave response. The chassis was polished with a fine diamond based polish, then it and the transfomers were waxed with a high quality paste wax. The total cost of this restoration was $265 per amp.
Restification- can best be described as a rebuild utilizing the most current, up to date components and technology. These may include ultra-fast rectifiers, low noise resistors, high quality capacitors and high value electrolytic capacitors. Some examples of resitifications I have done are:
Heathkit W-5 Amplifier- Many of the original coupling capacitors in this amplifier were off value and leaky. They were replaced with high quality IC mylar/polyester capacitors. The AC surge delay was a mechanical unit and was replaced with a new replacement surge suppressor. Many of the carbon resistors were off value and replaced with high quality metal film resistors. The multi-section electrolytic can caps were leaky and one section was shorted, and they were replaced with new replacement can caps. I used new tesla caps with about 3 times the total capacitance. The input jack was corroded and loose and was replaced with gold plated RCA’s. Cosmetically these amps are far from perfect, but they reside in an audio closet and produce beautiful music. They are built like tanks, sound great and have been functioning flawlessly for 5 years.
Heathkit W-7- This is a very interesting amplifier, similar to the Dynaco Mark IV. They both use EL34’s as outputs and a single dual pentode/triode as the input and phase inverter. The output transformer is half again bigger than the Dynaco. The power supply with the W-7 is the primary problem. Heath stacked 4 insulated cans caps on the chassis. These capacitors were not very good and almost always need replacing. New capacitors are much smaller, so I was able dramatically increase the values, thus improving the amplifier transient response. In order to hide the new capacitors I built some small cages. The paper coupling caps were replaced with some high quality mylar/polyesters. This amplifier was a real surprise, it was much better than the Dynaco. This is one of the more powerful monoblock amplifiers from the "old days" It is probably one of the better ones out there. Unfortunately they are a lot rarer than the W5M's or the Dynaco Mark IV's. It had substantial bass and very clear treble. This customer wanted reliable power and was not concerned about originality or cosmetics.
Heathkit W-6AThis was Heath’s largest amplifier. It used as 12AU7, a 12AX7, a 12BH7 and a pair of 6550’s as outputs. It was rated at 70 watts RMS. These amplifiers are some of the best ever built, by anyone. The power and output transformers are huge and vastly underrated.As you can see this one arrived to me pretty homely. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and this one had a lot of potential. Properly built these amplifiers are virtually flat from 20 HZ to 20 kHz. They too have power supply issues, but have 5 large can caps and a half dozen axial lead caps stacked. I removed all these and built a new circuit board and almost doubled the power supply capacitance and cleaned up the under chassis. The paper coupling capacitors were awful and were replaced with high quality paper in oil caps. This amplifier turned out to be one of the best amplifiers I have ever heard. The first picture shows how the amp arrived. Customer wanted cosmetic external restoration and reliable “guts”. I was able to remove most of the splattered black pint off the chassis without much loss of the gold color. The completed amp looks a lot different, and preforms extremely well.
Dynaco Mark VI- (no pictures at this time) This was Dynaco’s larges tube amplifier, producing 120 watts RMS from four 8417 output tubes. Only about 1000 pairs of these ever made and they are relatively rare today. The several issues with these amplifiers; the output tubes have not been in production for almost 20 years and these amps required matched quads, so it is pretty much impossible to use the amp as is. The bias was set for all for tubes with one control, hence the need for matched quads. There are two ways I have restified these amps.
1. A mount plate was fabricated to hold 4 bias pots and a control to switch the meter to each individual 8417, allowing the use of unmatched tubes in the output circuit. While this doesn’t solve the problem of tubes made of unobtainium, it does allow relatively stock use of the amplifier.
2. Another solution was to replace the 8417 tubes with EL34’s and modify the bias system to bias a matched quad of EL34’s. This still requires a matched quad of EL34’s, but since these are being manufactured by a number of OUS vendors, the availability of tubes is very good. The power output with El 34’s is a little over 100 watts. While this is 20 watts less than the original amp, 100 watts of tube power is very impressive
3. My own personal pair of these amps were rescued after being modified by someone with little or no metal working and electronics skill. I am not a fan of adjustable fixed bias, so I set up each EL34 with an auto bias system. This allows the use of unmatched tubes and each tube adjusts it’s own bias based on its needs.
Vintage Solid State Amplifer Restification
Dynaco SCA 80- This was one of Dynaco’s most successful integrated transistor amplifiers. They were a good value n the 70’s and 80’s and make a very nice amplifier with some updates. All the electrolytic caps were replaced with new units and in some cases tantalum caps, the driver and output transistors were replaced with new matched TIP’s and large die TO3 transistors. Frank Van Alstine recommended a modification to the Dynaco PAT 4(back in the late 70's) that I applied to the preamp/driver boards on this amplifier also. This involves a considerable investment in large (read expensive) film caps and some large tantalum caps. What this mod does though, has to be heard to be believed. The internal chassis was painted, and rebuilt boards reinstalled. This is a sweet little amplifier that has classic good looks. With a little tweaking this amplifier puts out a solid 40 watts of power and sounds very good.
Dynaco SCA 80 with 200 watt Class D rebuild- A repeat customer wanted me to build him an amp for his college bound daughter, that looked classic but “would really kick butt”. I started with an old SCA 80 chassis(as you can see it was pretty much of a junker, purchased reasonable at a yard sale) and rebuilt the preamp circuit boards with a Frank Van Alstine Modification (discussed briefly in the previous SCA 80 mention) and then installed a 200 watt per channel Class D amp and 24 volt 15 amp switching power supply.These are a relatively new item to be available for experimenters. While the power supplies are quite common, compete class D amps have not been easy to find. This thing really was nasty starting point and a very nice finish. The chassis was completely stripped of parts, boards and transformer and it was refinished with an antique silver vein paint. The rebuilt boards and controls were reinstalled, and then the ClassD amp and power supply was added. One of the issues that I discovered with these imported modules was that they had a pretty substantial turn on thump, even thoug the mute on turn on function was activated. To solve this problem, I built a small timer delay that prevented the amps delay circuit from turning on for about 10 seconds after the power was applied. This solved the problem with turn on thump. It does exactly what he wanted. Looks good sound good and kicks.
Dynaco ST120- Several million of these transistor amps were built and they still represent a solid amplifier, with some modifications and updating. All the board electrolytic caps are replaced, ceramics replaced with tantalums. Driver transistors are replaced with matched TIP’s and outputs replaced with large die TO3’s. (identical to the transistors Dynaco used in the final version of the 120) I run all your large chassis mounted caps on my reformer/tester to determine their expected life. To non-TIP boards I add a couple of ceramic capacitors that Dyna added for stability. These stop the problem oscillation seen with some types of preamps. The power supply is replaced with a mosfet regulated supply with much larger outboard caps. (This was designed by Frank Van Alstine and by itself it is one of the best things you can do for a 120) It also adds individual fuses for each output channel. At you request, I will free of charge, replace your neon power indicator with a Blue (or what ever color you want) LED. I also add a surge suppression varister. If the case is in good shape I polish them with a diamond based polished, but more and more they require refinishing. Some cases are externally pretty good, but the inside is nasty.(As you can see on the left- this was a group of amps I bought on eBay-they were described as "good") I strip the components and paint the inside with an antique silver vein finish. I can also do this with the outside of case in situations where the nickel is flaked or rusted.
Another option is powder coating, but this adds about $50 to the cost of the project. It is by far the most durable and is available in just about any color you could want. I have had several customers who had me rebuild their 120’s, tell me that the sound was absolutely better after the restification. My personal belief is that the power supply with the mosfet makes the biggest difference in units that are still actually working. I have done a number of units, just adding the power supply and the bass and transient response is great improved. The rest of the rebuilds on these is just rplacing parts that have probably aged and are contributing to the veiled sound. The performance of these amps has degraded as the capacitors have naturally aged. (original expected life was 10-15 years) One of my complete rebuilds or ones I sell on my site, are guaranteed for 1 year. This does not include any original large can caps not replaced during the rebuild.I can rebuild your 120 with prices starting at $125, not including large output or power supply large cap replacement.
Dynaco ST 80- These are great power amps and a lot of people think they actually sound better than 120’s. The circuits are very similar, the major difference is the power supply. The 80 does not have a regulated supply. I think this may the reason they sound different. They are not as common as the 120’s and a little harder to find, but worth it.
This rebuild used the original power supply, updated boards, with new caps and drivers and new TO3 output transistors. This one also got gold plated binding posts and gold plated inputs. (the speaker terminals on 80's are awful) Most 80's power supply caps are still OK, probably because the were not as exposed to as high voltage as 120's. For some unknown reason the chassis on 80's stand up better to age than 120's. As you can see in the picture, the nickel in very nice shape.
AMPEG G20 Guitar amp- I don’t do a lot of guitar amps, mainly because of their shipping costs, but this one I restored, for my nephew. The G 20 is a rather obscure 6L6 based amp with dual input channels, a spring reverb and built in distortion and pedal effects. The most significant issue was finding a replacement reverb spring. Also the dial was very bad. After a long fruitless search, my wife took a shot at repainting it. The result was a lot better than the original. The power supply was rebuilt with significantly better caps and the widow maker switch was replaced with a new SPST switch and a 3 prong grounded cord. For those of you who do not know, a widow maker is a DPDT switch that reverses the 2 conductor AC line and grounds either one through a .01 mf 1KV ceramic cap. This was at one time helpful to eliminate ground loops when a number of pieces of equipment were used on stage. The problem is that if the .1 mf cap fails (they do frequently) you can have the live side of the AC line connected to chassis of the amp. Since the input jacks are grounded to the chassis, you end up with your guitar or microphone live. I explain this just to let you know that if I work on your guitar amp it will come back to you with a 3 way grounded cord and elimination of the widow maker.
The case of this amp was very dirty and took several good scrubbing with soap and water to get it clean. It was then waxed with a dark polish and a new replacement top handle and badge were added. (many guitar amp parts are still available or are being reproduced) The power supply caps were all replaced with new equivelent ones and several of the coupling caps were replaced in addition. All of the tubes needed replacement and a mixture of NOS and Russian ones were fitted.
This is only a small overview of some of the amplifiers I have done. I have rebuilt, restored or restified hundreds of amplifiers over the last 20 years. If you have specific questions, or just want to discuss you options, please fill out the contact form. (Link on Home page) I will get back to you via email within a day or 2. You may wonder why I do not list my email address anywhere on this site? Spammers do rountine searches of websites looking for email addresses. These addresses get sold and bombarded with SPAM.
General Pricing Guidelines on Rebuilds and Restifications-please contact me with web form for specific quotes on other types of equipment or options available.
Dynaco ST 120- $175.00- This includes a new mosfet power supply, and all parts, except the large chassis mounted capacitors.
Dynaco ST 80- $150.00- This includes all parts except the large chassis mounted capacitors
Dynaco SCA 80- $195.00- This includes all standard parts with the exception of the chassis mounted capacitors
Dynaco SCA 80 Upgrade- $260- This includes replacement of all board mounted caps with film and tantalums (preamp boards) and all board caps on amp boards, as well as new driver and output transistors. It does not cover replacement of any of the chassis mounted capacitors.
Dynaco PAT 4- $120- This includes replacement of all electrolytic caps with high quality replacements. This will bring your PAT up to factory standards.
Dynaco PAT 4- Upgrade- $255.00- This upgrades all board electrolytics with film and tantalum caps. This upgrade will significantly improve the sound of your PAT over the factory best.
Dynaco ST 70- $180.00- Basic replacement of all electrolytic caps including can and bias. Also includes replacement of coupling caps and selenium rectifier. Bring your ST 70 to factory specs. Does not include tubes. Additional upgrades can also be done.
Dynaco Mark III- $165.00- Basic replacement of all electrolytic caps including can and bias. Also includes replacement of coupling caps and selenium rectifier. Does not include tubes. Additional upgrades can also be done.
Dynaco Mark IV- $155.00- Basic replacement of all electrolytic caps including can and bias. Also includes replacement of coupling caps and selenium rectifier. Does not include tubes. Additional upgrades can also be done.
Dynaco Mark VI- $195 and up. Price depends on what the customer wants.
Heathkit W-5M- $200. Basic replacement of all electrolytic caps including can and bias. Also includes replacement of coupling caps and selenium rectifier. Does not include tubes. Additional upgrades can also be done.
Heathkit W-6- $250-up Basic replacement of all electrolytic caps including can and bias. Also includes replacement of coupling caps and selenium rectifier.. Does not include tubes. Additional upgrades can also be done.
Heathkit W-7- $250.00 Basic replacement of all electrolytic caps including can and bias. Also includes replacement of coupling caps and selenium rectifier. Does not include tubes. Additional upgrades can also be done.
McIntosh MC 30- $350- Replacement of all electrolytic caps including can and bias. Also includes replacement of problem coupling caps and selenium rectifier. Many times most of the coupling capacitors in the 30 are fine, but there are several that are usually off value and leaky. This contributes to degraded sound. I use Sprague Orange Drops for most MC's, these are the same type used my the famous MC Clinics. I include fine tuning your bias and high voltages to factory specs. Does not include tubes. The filter can is replaced with a new production unit that has significantly high capacitance value. This actually improves the performance of your MC 30.
My basic rate is $55/hr. and all work is guaranteed. I am currently book out about 4- 6 weeks. When you amp arrives it goes into the rotation.
Please use the contact form on the Home page for your questions. When you send to me I will respond with my email and phone number. The reason I do not publish my phone or email on this site is that spammer bots look for them on websites, and then you know what happens. | <urn:uuid:ebf8265e-dcf1-45c8-ada6-e347cc0e6ee2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://vintagetubeaudio.com/Amplifier_Restoration.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970573 | 5,416 | 1.765625 | 2 |
Anti-military women's organization founded in 1982
Helped the Leninist group International A.N.S.W.E.R. stage worldwide anti-war rallies in September 2003
Women's Action for New Directions (WAND) is a nonprofit organization that was established in 1982 as "Women's Action for Nuclear Disarmament." At the end of the Cold War, the group changed its name and expanded its vision to include demilitarization and the promotion of leftist female political candidates. Among WAND's current objectives are: eliminating the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (bunker buster) bombs from the U.S. arsenal; abandoning efforts to establish a missile defense system; repealing the Patriot Act; and pulling all American troops out of Iraq. When the Iraq War was in its earlist phase, WAND stated: "This U.S.-led war will threaten our economy, jeopardize our security, and cost countless lives. Severe cuts are already being made to vital programs in federal and state budgets even before paying for this war. This war will intensify hatred of the U.S. and spawn a whole new generation of terrorists. We hope that after the war comes to an end, we will reclaim some of our spirit by providing the victims of this tragedy with the humanitarian aid necessary to rebuild their lives and country."
In September 2006, WAND spokeswoman Amanda Hendler-Voss wrote: "I had great hopes that out of our grief and lament [over 9/11] would emerge a stronger nation, more compassionate to the world around us ... My grief curdled into anger when our national leadership ... called for vengeance, perpetuating the cycle of violence. I knew our best option was not a hasty resort to war ... I come from a religious tradition that urges me to love the enemy. And, as a woman who is always suspect of any good emerging from violence, I wasn't convinced that answering the attacks of 9/11 with a military response was the best use of the trust the American people had invested in our leaders. … [W]e can create an exit strategy in Iraq, eliminate the bloat in Pentagon spending (especially on obsolete weapons systems, such as the failed missile defense program), and increase funding for diplomacy and humanitarian programs which prevent terrorism by addressing the root causes of instability."
Rejecting military options under any and all circumstances, WAND asserts: "War is no longer tenable. There are always alter natives to war." In one part of its website, however, the organization does make allowance for the possibility, however remote, that military force might be required in some instances: "If military intervention is called for and agreed upon by the international community, it should be carried out by trained peace-keeping forces under international super vision. We support the United Nations and other forums for international cooperation and international law, which provide the greatest source of security for the people of the United States and the world."
WAND supports HR 4898, known as the Common Sense Budget Act, which would would take 17 percent of the Pentagon budget ($60 billion) and, as WAND explains, "reallocate it to programs that do make us safer and healthier: providing health insurance to children who lack it, rebuilding public schools, cutting reliance on foreign oil, and more!"
Not limiting itself to taking positions on issues of war and peace, WAND was a Cosponsoring Organization of the April 25, 2004 "March for Women's Lives" held in Washington, D.C., a rally that advocated unrestricted access to taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand.
(a) Women Legislators' Lobby (WiLL): Formed in 1991 and composed of one-third of all female legislators in the United States, WiLL seeks to "persuade Congress to redirect excessive military spending toward unmet human and environmental needs"; "address women's health issues"; "eliminate violence against women"; and "curb the proliferation of weapons." This Lobby spreads its message via workshops, policy briefings, and professional development programs. A subsection of WiLL is Trailblazers, a network of more than 300 "former women legislators whose contacts and influence continue to have an impact on national priorities and foreign policy issues."
(b) Students' Action for New Directions: Created in 1999, this program is intended "to empower young women to act politically, encouraging them to vote and connect with legislators across the country, to promote peace, equality, and progressive social change."
(c) WAND Education Fund: This Funds seeks to "challenge and promote alternatives to militarism and violence as the solution to conflict; shift from a military- to a civilian-based economy to address the threats to our real security …; clean up environmental effects of nuclear weapons production as well as toxic waste at all military facilities, and prevent further contamination; eliminate the testing, production, sale and use of weapons of mass destruction; prevent violence against women; [and] increase women's political leadership to further WAND's goals."
(d) WAND Political Action Committee: This entity supports women who run for Congress and who "advocate for peace and justice."
WAND's current Chair is Jo Carson, an attorney who served two terms in the Arkansas General Assembly. Executive Director Susan Shaer, who is married to Massachusetts state representative Jim Marzilli, was a founder of Win Without War.
Since Feb 14, 2005 --Hits: 61,630,061 --Visitors: 7,024,052 | <urn:uuid:2a7bc3ef-40eb-42d5-a133-59eb90cd05df> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6437 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952291 | 1,126 | 1.703125 | 2 |
| Theories may be removed if ...
- Stated as questions or possibilities (avoid question marks, "Maybe", "I think", etc).
- More appropriate for another article.
- Illogical or previously disproven.
- Proven by canon source, and moved to main article.
- Speculative and lacking any evidence to support arguments.
- Responding to another theory (use discussion page instead).
- This does not include responses that can stand alone as its own theory.
- Usage of an indented bullet does not imply the statement is a response.
See the Lostpedia theory policy for more details.
Possible Name ReferencesEdit
- "Eddie Mars" was a character in Raymond Chandler's novel The Big Sleep, as well as the film.
- Mars is the Roman god of war.
- Has the same last name as Veronica Mars, the title character on a popular TV program. During the 2005-06 season, Veronica Mars aired in the same time slot as Lost.
- In "The Third Expedition", a short story from Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, The is a line that reads: Mom. Dad. Edward. Mars. Earth. Mars. Martians.
- He brought Kate on the island by command of Jacob.
Quite possible...Cross reference []!
- He and Kate have a romantic history, as he seems to harbor a lot of resentment towards her, and said to Jack "whatever she makes you feel...she's dangerous."
- He may have eventually been healed by the Island's healing properties if Sawyer hadn't shot him, trying to euthanize him, and thus injuring him further.
- I feel the opposite, the Island wanted that man to suffer. thats why he wouldn't die, and thats why Sawyer missed the island was torturing him. | <urn:uuid:54717df3-fccf-4ab5-bb7a-1895fdda6dd9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Edward_Mars/Theories | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951954 | 379 | 1.742188 | 2 |
by Chuck Smith, Marketing Graphic Artist
When I was young, my dream of being an archaeologist or paleontologist was a close second to an artistic profession. After graduating, I became a full time graphic designer at the Indiana State Museum. I didn’t think it got any better than creating art for Indiana’s #1 place for science and culture, but I was wrong. For the past couple of years, I’ve been fortunate enough to spend a few days on the Megenity Cave dig with other museum professionals searching for ancient bones and tools.
Today is my first full day back in Indianapolis after three days in the cave and I still cannot believe how exciting the trip was. After only five minutes of digging on Day 2, I made my first real discovery! The hope of finding something special sometimes makes your mind turn every little piece of mud into a bone or rock into an arrowhead, but I knew right away that it wasn’t my imagination this time (or ‘bone fever’ as they call it). Something truly awesome had appeared on my shovel. I whipped off some dirt, held it up for a better look and realized that I had found a peccary jaw which I would later learn dates back between 35,000 and 42,000 years!
The digging and time spent with colleges and friends always makes for a great time, but experiencing the magic of unearthing something like this has made for a day that I‘ll never forget. | <urn:uuid:f9a660ad-8ec0-4f2a-9831-06ccc7ba2fe4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://indianastatemuseum.wordpress.com/tag/peccary/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971485 | 306 | 1.742188 | 2 |
Last summer I submitted an idea to Really Good Stuff. I seriously I have not thought much about it since. Until NOW!!! I received this letter and package today!! They put my idea into production and I can't even tell you how excited I am!!
Here's the letter! Woo hoo!
Here it is in the catalog!
Here it is in real life!
I am such a geek, but I really can't wait to tell my students about this process and show them the final product. So here is the backstory:
I attended the Reading and Writing Workshop at Columbia University last summer. The presenter suggested cutting clear Contact paper into strips so students could mark their own words in books. I love that, except clear contact paper is harder to find than you might think. I had the idea to put strips of regular highlighting tape on cards to give my first graders. It worked fine, but not great-and it was A LOT of work. So I submitted the idea to RGS when they ran one of their contests. It has been almost exactly one year.
How to use these:
to mark word families
to mark punctuation
to mark compound words
to mark nouns and verbs (different colors)
to find certain letters
to find suffixes and prefixes
to mark important fact
to highlight a specific text feature
to mark confusing/exciting/scary parts
to mark the big idea
to mark an unknown word
I could go on and on! These are perfect size cards to slide into their just right bag (you could even cut them in half!) so students have ownership of them. They will be so excited after seeing you model how to use them! How much? $9.99. Come see for yourself! Click on the pic to visit Really Good Stuff!
I am feeling a giveaway coming really soon! Happy weekend! | <urn:uuid:7a18d000-ddec-4983-9c07-92f9339f22ba> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mymommyreads.com/2012_06_01_archive.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965428 | 386 | 1.804688 | 2 |
Real Men Cook: Rites, Rituals, and Recipes for Living
Click to order via Amazon
by K. Kofi Moyo
Format: Hardcover, 192pp
Pub. Date: June 2005
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group
Book Review by Kam Williams
"Increasingly, African-American men in particular are often portrayed as criminals, drug addicts, absentee fathers, and jailbirds. Seldom are they depicted as defenders, providers, helpmates and companions. This picture is flawed. It fails to recognize the millions of everyday men who strive constantly to make their world, and the world at large, a better place.
That's part of why I, with my wife, Yvette, founded Real Men Cook. It is a crusade to build families and celebrate the Real Men who are often overlooked for their great deeds, mentoring, coaching, and doing their best against the odds of urban life. The Real Man is a man who loves his family, adores his children, enthrones the women in his life, and cherishes his friends.
Some might ask why we chose something like cooking. W.E.B. DuBois once said, 'The Negro race, like all others, is going to be saved by its exceptional men.' It is my belief that we are more likely to find that salvation over a plate of tantalizing food, cuisine that feeds our bodies, souls, spirits, and communities with a nutritional value that can neither be underestimated nor accurately measured."
’ Excerpted from the Introduction
On Father's Day 1989, Yvette and Karega Kofi Moyo, parents of nine, invited neighborhood families to gather at their home in Chicago for a pot luck feast in order to shed light on some unsung heroes of the community, namely, all the ordinary, hard-working men who cared for their loved ones 365 days a year. Over the intervening decade and a half, that local event blossomed nationwide into an annual affair which simultaneously raises money for a variety of worthy charities like the YMCA and the the Boys and Girls Clubs of America.
Now, just in time for Father's Day, Kofi and company have published Real Men Cook, a smorgasbord of recipes created by unsung heroes not only from the Windy City, but from African-American neighborhoods all over the country. But as important as the succulent treats featured in this coffee table book's glossy, full-page photos are the corresponding tributes to the chefs shown sharing their culinary secrets.
For each of these role models, whether previously known or unknown, has made a significant, continuing contribution to his extended family and community. And Real Men Cook offers the world an opportunity to meet over 100 of these gentle giants while savoring their mouth-watering dishes. And you can even meet some of the authors and others in person on Father's Day, June 19th, when Real Men Charities, an umbrella organization, will sponsor a series of charity cooking events from 3 till 6 PM in the following cities: Miami, Houston, Dallas, Detroit, Atlanta, L.A., New York, Philadelphia, D.C., and, of course, Chicago.
FYI, among recipes featured in the book are Captain Kofi's Candlelight Catfish, Darryl's Dynamite Chicken Wings, William Higgonbotham's Red Velvet Cake, Mel Monroe's Po' Folk Sea Summer Salad, Ron's Chicago-Style Ribs, Tim's Texas Corn Bread, Richard's Mean Cabrini Greens, Paul's Original Muslim Bean Soup, Atlanta Joe's N’awlins Spicy Jambalaya, Captain Leander's Chesapeake Bay Fish Chowder, and Scales Scrumptious Tropical Rum Coconut Pecan Ice Cream.
Now I can't personally vouch for any of these great-looking masterpieces, not having actually attempted to follow the instructions and whip any of them up . But that's really besides the point, isn't it, when it's all for such a noble cause.
Real Men Cook
Cook Books on AALBC.com | <urn:uuid:311b64c8-b585-48f3-a726-1ea0ea782320> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://aalbc.com/reviews/real_men_cook.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945568 | 845 | 1.585938 | 2 |
In the last year, the baking industry has flooded the marketplace with low-carbohydrate items. Only time will tell if these items have staying power.
The low-carbohydrate craze swept through the baking industry like a flash flood. It was sudden, with little warning and caused significant damage to the industry in the eyes of consumers. The million dollar question, though, remains whether the craze will leave in a hurry similar to a flash flood or stick around and evolve into a solid, niche category.
When Flowers Foods, Thomasville, Ga., launched one of the first new products catered to low-carbohydrate dieters, the ears of an industry beleaguered with decreasing volumes and excess capacity perked up. Many in the bread industry saw low-carbohydrate breads as the answer to declining white bread volumes. Others saw the trend as a way to jolt stagnant sales.
Soon, the bread industry's low-carbohydrate fever had spread throughout the entire baking industry. Low-carbohydrate cheesecakes, muffins, Danish and cookies all began hitting store shelves. And it just wasn't the retail environment that caught low-carbohydrate fever. Various foodservice outlets, from quick service to white tablecloth, were swept up in the low-carbohydrate craze.
That is a short history on how the industry reacted to carbohydrate-counting consumers. Now, the question is whether this craze will find staying power or go the way of previous fad diets, such as low fat.
Is the bubble bursting?
It has been more than a year since Flowers Foods launched its low-carbohydrate bread, and according to the company's latest analyst conference, the product is still performing exceptionally. George Weston Bakeries mirrored its competitor's attitude regarding its Atkins-endorsed low-carbohydrate breads.
However, the Canadian company is not finding identical success with the recent launch of low-carbohydrate Entenmann's products. The company recently announced that only two of its six low-carbohydrate Entenmann's products are reasonably performing. "This has been a bit of a disappointment to this stage," Gary Prince, George Weston Bakeries' president, said of the low-carbohydrate Entenmann's products. "This launch was expensive in the first quarter, and we'll have to watch the development carefully.
Gary Prince's comments about the product introduction being "expensive" should resonate with bakeries already manufacturing low-carbohydrate products and bakers considering launching a low-carbohydrate line. Because the staying power of low-carbohydrate products is up in the air, making significant equipment, ingredient and packaging investments may be a big gamble.
According to one baker who spoke at a recent low-carbohydrate forum, if a bakery has not yet released a lowcarbohydrate product, it should stay away from the category. Although this cautious approach may prove to be wrong, it is necessary to look at what goes into a low-carbohydrate product. The three main facets of a low-carbohydrate launch include research and development, manufacturing, and marketing.
Formulating low-carbohydrate products
The most difficult aspect of launching a low-carbohydrate product is developing the ideal formula that cuts carbohydrates and tastes good. Balancing these two factors could mean the difference between a successful low-carbohydrate product and one that tastes like cardboard. "Our initial approach was to make a product that was really low in carbs, about four to five net carbohydrates, and we found that the product tasted pretty bad," John Khoury, Custom Foods' president, says. "So the approach we took after that was to take the carb content up a little bit until the taste was acceptable."
Because there is no definition of low-carbohydrate by the Food and Drug Administration, products cannot be labeled as "low-carbohydrate." Therefore, manufacturers should not feel pressured to cut as many carbs as possible. Although slashing carbohydrates may lead to the lowest-carbohydrate product on the market, it will not guarantee repeat purchases if it tastes poorly.
Another consideration for low-carbohydrate formulation is the number of ingredients, blends and mixes available for bakeries to reduce their products' carbohydrate content. By now, the suppliers of these ingredients should be versed in low-carbohydrate formulations and should be able to help bakers formulate the type of product they desire.
Manufacturing and marketing
After developing a formula and testing it in the research and developmentlab, the next step in launching a low-carbohydrate product is moving the manufacturing of the product from the lab to the plant floor. For the most part, low-carbohydrate formulas perform similar to their traditional counterparts. In mixing, however, low-carbohydrate formulas tend to have increased mix times due to their hydration and high-gluten content.
Because manufacturing low-carbohydrate formulas generally does not require a significant investment in additional processing equipment, bakers can tinker with these formulas without committing big money to a new line.
However, if a bakery decides to move forward with the line, marketing the products could lead to a significant investment. Whereas competition in the low-carbohydrate arena a year ago was non-existent, it's almost certain that every category will have at least one competitor vying for shelf space. This could lead bakers to spend major money on promotions and selling. However, this could be a risky investment if the carbohydrate craze loses its legs.
Manufacturing low-carbohydrate products is a risky, yet potentially profitable venture. Before jumping into the low-carbohydrate pool, bakers have to look at the costs associated with the release, and the short-and long-term expected profits. After figuring this out, bakers must ask themselves if it's worth all the effort.
"I think it was worth the effort because we gained a good understanding of the product," Khoury says. "I don't think sales have been as robust as we've hoped, but there is still a lot of interest and we get calls about it all the time." | <urn:uuid:5b048e48-94a9-45ae-9be7-5e4873744754> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://modern-baking.com/mag/mb_imp_6513 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961764 | 1,234 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Limited space shouldn't be a barrier to a fun backyard for your toddler or preschooler. You just have to be creative with what you have. Check out our ideas to create a fun backyard for your little one!
Compared to the cost when we were kids, trampolines are surprisingly affordable. They are also much safer, with netting that surrounds them to keep your little one on the trampoline. Preschoolers have endless energy and a great way for them to get it out is to jump, jump, jump. Consider placing a trampoline in the corner of your yard. While space is definitely an issue in a small backyard, if you can make it work, try to purchase a trampoline that is large enough to last for several years and that has room below it (see our next tip). However, if space is at that much of a premium, you can most definitely find a "my first" style trampoline that is more compact. Just remember that if you do choose a larger trampoline, the manufacturer probably doesn't specify it for preschoolers. Constant supervision and immediate proximity are an absolute must.
Double up with sand
A universal truth is that almost all kids love to play in the sandbox. Even most little ones who are unsure of the texture eventually come to love digging and playing in sand. Putting a sandbox in your backyard is a great way to increase its value to your toddler or preschooler. Because you're dealing with limited space, double up! You can dig out the area under the trampoline and build your own sandbox. It's wasted space otherwise -- grass will die because of the lack of sunlight. You can use the flexible planter border to separate the sand area from the rest of your yard. If more than one child will be playing in your yard, remember that it's either/or -- either the sandbox or the trampoline, not both at once!
If placing a sandbox under a trampoline isn't an option, you can always build your own -- this gives you control over the size. For those who are even a little handy, check out thesestep-by-step sandbox building instructions and give it a go. When it comes to sand, it's not all created equal. At a minimum, buy play sand.
Swing from the rafters - literally
Who wouldn't love a giant swing set? Unfortunately, when space it as a premium, large playscapes aren't an option. However, most toddlers love to swing, so consider picking up a portable-style swing, such as the Little Tikes Snug Secure Swing. The manufacturer specifies that it is intended for kids between nine months and four years of age. It's reasonably priced and can be hung from a secure place. Just remember to always test out your hanging structure to be absolutely certain that the swing, plus your child's weight, won't cause it to break. Avoiding an injury is your number one priority.
It's the small things
Young kids don't need giant play structures in your backyard to keep them happy. They love water, so when you're up for careful supervision, you can fill up a small kiddie pool and let them splash away. The pools either deflate or fold up, making them easy to store and space-conscious. Simple push toys are also winners for toddlers. Lawnmowers that blow bubbles, Cozy Coupes that they can start by pushing and eventually learn to ride in and even an old-school corn popper are all great outdoor toys.
||You don't need a huge backyard to have fun with your toddler or preschooler this summer. Survey your space and get creative. Remember, despite what we thought for several years, bigger doesn't always mean better!
More outdoor decor ideas
Table settings for outdoor gatherings
10 Outdoor decorations under $20
9 Easiest plants for your backyard | <urn:uuid:f7080f54-1a18-4ef1-8b0b-5a9f5884a46c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sheknows.com/home-and-gardening/articles/830949/small-backyard-fun-toddler-style | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953807 | 797 | 1.789063 | 2 |
Infomancyn.1.The field of magic related to the conjuring of information from the chaos of the universe. 2.The collection of terms, queries, and actions related to the retrieval of information from arcane sources.
Meet the Infomancer
I am Christopher Harris, leader of a School Library System in New York. From a background in elementary teaching and instructional technology, I am now a librarian working as a school administrator to support and extend the powerful work of school libraries. As an ALA Emerging Leader and LJ Mover&Shaker I have continued to push for changes and improvements for our profession. These are my personal rambling thoughts from a different perspective on libraries, and do not reflect any position of my place of employment. I can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.org.
The traditional written essay accompanying an application for prospective teachers and teacher-librarians is not enough. The ability for a future educator to write a coherent essay must be one of our most base expectations. What we need applicants to prove is that they can produce in other media as well.
Applications to library and education programs should require podcast or video segments. But Chris, what if our prospective students don’t know how to podcast or produce videos? Well, if you expect to turn those potential students into teachers within a few short years, hadn’t they better be coming in to the program with some ability to already teach themselves?
If you want to provide support, give them a sample podcast and video that provides meta-instruction on how to create media in those formats.
“Hello, prospective student. This podcast will teach you how to create a podcast. I am recording this using . As you will notice, I used the editing capabilities of the software to remove any pauses or stutters in my recording. Please make sure that your submitted podcast meets the same professional level…”
If we want education and school librarianship to move forward, then it is time to set new expectations for base performance.
The Dewey Decimal Classification System (DDC) is broken. I am not going to entertain any sort of conversation on this point, it is just a fact you need to accept. Accept it, and move on. One of the incontrovertible facts that clearly demonstrate the brokenness of DDC is that we have to teach DDC, and that is the focus here.
Consider for a moment a brief exchange from Apple’s recent iPhone OS4 briefing:
“Q: How do you close applications when multitasking?
A: (Scott Forstall) You don’t have to. The user just uses things and doesn’t ever have to worry about it.
A: (Steve Jobs) It’s like we said on the iPad, if you see a stylus, they blew it. In multitasking, if you see a task manager… they blew it. Users shouldn’t ever have to think about it.” [Engadget]
If we have to teach our library classification system to a student, we blew it. If our users have to think about it, we blew it. If we have to spend weeks teaching students how to use DDC we certainly blew it. DDC does not, in any way, prepare students for success in college or in a career. As such, it is something that we cannot teach any longer. Let me repeat that. We cannot – indeed must not – waste our time teaching anything that cannot be shown to have a direct impact on the preparation of students for success in college and careers.
So when (not if, when) we get rid of DDC, we are going to need a new system. So what should it look like? The basis of the new system I would suggest needs to be the basic concept of “Don’t make me think!” When I walk into a school library, especially an elementary school library where the DDC is especially developmentally inappropriate, I should immediately and instinctively understand how and why books are classified. When I want to find a book about animals, why aren’t they all located together? Under the new system, they will be.
Why not have the types of animals in alphabetical order so I can find the cat books after the bird books and before the dog books. Countries? Put them in alphabetical order also. History? Timeline order would be much more sensible here. Now I am not a classifier, so obviously I am breaking all kinds of rules and mucking things up, but I strongly believe that these ideas are solid.
Instead of a 200 year old system that doesn’t make sense, we need a new system that just works. Steve Jobs, love him or hate him, makes things that work. You don’t have to learn how to use an iPad, children just pick it up and start using it because it is an almost instinctual interface. They have hidden the things that you shouldn’t have to think about and removed the minutia that require instruction. Libraries must do the same. We must make our collections accessible, with a user experience that just works. And to do that, we must rid ourselves of the Dewey Decimal System.
Anyone who has travelled by air recently should be quite familiar with the concept of security theater; the complex set of TSA rituals designed to make us feel more safe (or at least to make the TSA feel like they are making us feel safe) while not actually addressing any of the real safety issues. Is your library guilty of this as well? How many of the library policies and procedures that we adopt are created for the actual advancement of our mission, and how many exist simply as policy theater?
The biggest problem with security theater is that often the most basic safety measures that are most susceptible to theatrics. When it is something that has always been done, the safety measure takes on a higher power. Indeed, the measure itself becomes the authority in a recursive, self-supporting loop of justification that is almost impossible to break. Consider that signs on the back of most hotel room doors advising that, for your safety, you should always use the chain lock (or bar lock). Why? Because the chain lock makes you safe. But does it?
This video, linked in a BoingBoing post, got me thinking again about how many policies in libraries are built on the same recursive logic that make locks secure because locks are secure (even if some basic searches for lockpicking will quickly erase that notion). Our policies are established on the basis of their being policy, not on the basis that they are the correct actions for us to take in carrying out our mission. Why can second graders only check out two books? Because that is how many books a second grader is allowed to check out.
Reviewing some of the library policies that pop up from a search is a bit scary. Most of the check out limits are based on a student’s grade level with no opportunity for students to earn trust and increase their check out limit (except through time served). “Because kindergartners are just learning how to take care of books and how to become responsible library users, they may check out one book at a time” states one page. Strip away the recursive self-supporting nature of this statement, and questions start to emerge. If kindergartners are being taught to be responsible library users, then why wouldn’t we provide a scaffold to support their development by providing increasing opportunities for successful borrowing of multiple items at a time? Can a kindergartner somehow show they are a responsible library user with a history of successfully checking out multiple books from the public library? No, policy theater dictates that they can check out one book until they move up to first grade. Then they will be allowed two items.
Even worse are policies that limit not only the number of materials that can be checked out, but also the type of materials and the use of the materials.
“The number of books each student may check out depends on the grade. Students in Kindergarten, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade may check out one book a week. If they return the book sooner, then they may check out another. In Kindergarten and 1st grade, the books will remain in the classroom until the students form the habit of returning them to the library each week. After the winter holidays, small ones may take their book home for the week…Students in 4th and 5th grade may check out 2 books a week…In order to be fair, the student may check out only one book at a time from a series or on a given topic.”
Yes, that is rhetorical. I’m not naive, I have heard many of the reasons why libraries have these policies. My point is that any excuse that doesn’t start with “to meet student needs” and end with “bringing about increased student achievement” is self-serving and needs to be removed from a list of possible reasons. I know that we are over-worked and under-staffed. I know that books get lost and damaged. I also know that library positions are being cut at a rather startling rate. If I walked in to your library to try and decide if that was a place that could be cut, would I see barriers or would I see a passionate focus on improving students?
Library policies quoted without attribution to avoid casting negativity on a particular library; my concern is with the policies, not the programs or the librarians. Mean-spirited people who want to figure out where they came from can probably do so, but I won’t be part of it.
In response to some questions about details, Follett doesn’t specifically state that their new Cognite software is designed to replace a librarian, but using my library kung fu I read between the lines.
Check out http://www.follettsoftware.com/cognite/what.cfm – that is the page with the graphic I referenced. Notice how teachers, students and parents are arrayed across the top arc with library resources underneath them. In the middle, where one might expect to find a librarian, one instead finds Cognite. Not Cognite being used by a librarian, not library resources being selected and maintained by a librarian, not materials use being explained by a librarian on Cognite….just Cognite.
Then consider some of the copy (the marketing text): “Cognite leverages your district’s investments in Destiny Library Manager, Destiny Quest®, WebPath Express™, and Standards by expanding their reach to home and classroom use.” Really? Cognite doesn’t leverage your district’s investment in a certified school librarian?
Or another statement: “Cognite puts your district’s digital resources at everyone’s fingertips, and enables teacher collaboration, giving them an easy way to exchange ideas and educational materials.” The software may facilitate teacher collaboration, but where is the school librarian with whom the teacher is supposed to be collaborating? Even though Cognite marketing is being directed towards administrators, Follett could still have included the school librarian as a critical element for the successful implementation of their software. As it stands, it feels more like they threw us under the bus in the hopes of securing more sales.
Finally, I turn not to what IS there, but rather what is NOT on the site. As a Google ninja, I know that I can do a site specific search. http://www.google.com/search?q=site:follettsoftware.com/cognite+librarian asks Google to search just the Follett Software site for Cognite for the term “librarian.” No matches. Well…okay. Maybe Follett Software hasn’t changed over in response to AASL’s adoption of the term school librarian instead of school library media specialist.
So let’s do another search: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:follettsoftware.com/cognite+media+specialist – 1 match found (click omitted to see it is the same page). One single use of “media specialist” and that is in the drop down list where you select your job title to get more information. Follett is willing to sell Cognite to media specialists, but fails to talk about how we are an integral part of the implementation, training, and use of this information seeking tool. | <urn:uuid:1e7c94d0-6ad8-4863-8596-27f393ead569> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://schoolof.info/infomancy/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950856 | 2,606 | 1.695313 | 2 |
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