text stringlengths 211 577k | id stringlengths 47 47 | dump stringclasses 1 value | url stringlengths 14 371 | file_path stringclasses 644 values | language stringclasses 1 value | language_score float64 0.93 1 | token_count int64 54 121k | score float64 1.5 1.84 | int_score int64 2 2 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
300 students attend annual Farm Day
1 of 5
Several children use stethoscopes to hear a calf's heartbeat during Farm Day.
300 students attend annual Farm Day.
The classroom went to the farm on Wednesday as fourth-graders from around Glenn County attended Farm Day at the Glenn County Fairgrounds in Orland.
This annual event is sponsored by the Glenn County Farm Bureau's Young Farmers and Ranchers group to educate children about farm life and agr. Read 300 students attend annual Farm Day... | <urn:uuid:ec77f25c-c860-4574-889f-1fe77aa77dae> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.appeal-democrat.com/sections/article/gallery/?pic=1&id=8988&db=wjournal | 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 | 0.968355 | 105 | 1.710938 | 2 |
|Robert L. Crippen, BS ASE 1960|
Robert L. Crippen became a NASA astronaut in September 1969. He was a member of the astronaut support crew for the Skylab 2, 3, and 4 missions, and served in this same capacity for the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) mission, which was completed successfully in July 1975. He served as pilot on STS-1 (April 12-14, 1981), and was the spacecraft commander on STS-7 (June 18-24, 1983), STS-41C (April 6-13, 1984) and STS-41G (October 5-13, 1984).
During the spring semester of 2010, Captain Crippen returned to campus to visit with our students. Read more about his visit.
Longhorns on Mars
Many of our former graduate students were involved with the Mars Curiosity mission. Learn about their experiences in the Alcalde story, "Longhorns on Mars." Read more... | <urn:uuid:3e67ceba-6d1c-4253-a6ac-1d28cf7046fb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ae.utexas.edu/alumni-friends/profiles/233-crippen | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977775 | 208 | 1.5 | 2 |
The Wall Street Journal Health Blog has some “eye-popping” news — a doctor has been caught fabricating 21 drug studies, some of which were favorable to drugs that have since been pulled from the market — Merck’s Vioxx and Pfizer’s Bextra.
Newly unearthed documents may reveal that Merck Pharmaceuticals ghostwrote dozens of Vioxx studies and then paid well-known doctors to put their name on them as if they wrote them, according to a new article to be published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). In one instance, a draft version of an article to be published listed the lead author as “External author?” Dr. Steven H. Ferris, one of the doctors whose research was questioned, call the article “simply false”, its allegations “egregious.” Let’s see what the JAMA article has to say about the study Ferris supposedly worked on:
Merck has announced that it has agreed to settle the majority of the 60,000 Vioxx-related individual claims against it.
The study was outed yesterday on the New England Journal of Medicine’s website. The editors of the journal and the study’s lead author both warned that the research methodology left the “findings open to interpretation.”
Supporters of a new bill working its way through Congress say that limiting the amount of direct to consumer advertising in the first two years of a drug’s life would help insure that drugs are safe before patients are encouraged to seek prescriptions from their doctors.
The Food and Drug Administration said yesterday that it is making changes in the way it operates to prevent the kind of drug safety controversies that have dogged the agency in recent years.
Merck’s getting in on the arthritis market again with a new drug, called Arcoxia. You might remember their previous offering, Vioxx, which was discontinued two years ago after octogenarians countrywide lifted their contorted, claw-like hands to a withered chest and let out a rattling gasp under the influence of a massive, Vioxx-induced heart attack. Lawsuits abounded.
• Home field advantage. Shortness of breath ensues amongst the 16,000 coat-tail hopefuls, causing them to reach for their pills. [LAT] “Verdict Bolsters Merck’s Vioxx”
A jury awarded $9 million in punitive damages to John Darby who blamed his heart attacks on Vioxx. The sum is a defeat for drug-maker Merck, which, for some fucking reason, was assumed to be “bulletproof” because the trial took place in New Jersey. | <urn:uuid:380d1c82-41b3-46b5-9b20-04d5c74ad035> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://consumerist.com/tag/vioxx/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965272 | 573 | 1.632813 | 2 |
These two exhibitions featuring portraits by François Deschamps and well-known Malian photographers Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta amongst many others provide a fascinating glimpse of the rich photographic tradition in the West African nation of Mali. Photo-Rapide features photographs by Deschamps made in collaboration with his Malian sitters. "Malian Portrait Photography" showcases historic and contemporary Malian portraits by Sidibé and Keïta.
Like all museums, the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art depends on the generosity of others when it comes to expanding its permanent collection. This exhibition focuses on a representative selection of both two-and three-dimensional artworks created by artists from around the world which have come into the museum's collection from 2008 through 2012. A short list of artists includes W. Eugene Smith, Andy Warhol, Richard Hunt, Dorothy Dehner, Harold Edgerton, Mary Frank and Utagawa Hiroshige.
Master Class: A Ride on the Underground Railroad
Artists from A Ride on the Underground Railroad concert will give a vocal master class. | <urn:uuid:cbb02ba5-8f0d-435d-89f0-f30a1a7f3ffe> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.newpaltz.edu/artsnews/events.php?calendar_month=02&calendar_year=2013&calendar_day=6 | 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 | 0.931275 | 228 | 1.742188 | 2 |
Factory output contracts, supports rate cut
South Africa’s manufacturing output contracted in the year to May, official data showed, indicating the sector remains under pressure from depressed demand and backing the case for possibly another interest rate cut.
Manufacturing makes the second largest contribution to the economy, accounting for about 15% of GDP, but has taken a knock from sharply lower demand both at home and globally as world economies grapple with recession.
Data from Statistics South Africa showed May output contracted by 17,1% year-on-year in volume terms, albeit a lower pace of decline than the revised 21,8% contraction for April.
“It is still pretty weak, but it is definitely better than what would now appear to look like ... was the trough and that is the April number,” said Nedbank economist Nicky Weimar.
“But the fact that it is still declining by 17% is not good, and it suggests that manufacturing of the second quarter remained very, very weak, and that’s going to be a major drag on GDP.”
Manufacturing production fell by an annualised 22,1% in the first quarter of 2009, the biggest decline on record.”
The central bank has sought to breathe life into the economy through 450 basis points worth of interest rate cuts since December, which have brought some relief to debt-ridden consumers after 500 basis points of increases in the two years to June 2008.
The bank however left rates unchanged last month, as targeted annual consumer inflation remains worryingly above a 3% to 6% band, at 8%.
The central bank is due to hold five more monthly meetings between August and December, and some analysts believe these might yield at least one more rate cut.
Stats SA said compared with April, manufacturing production in volume terms rose by a seasonally-adjusted 1% in May.
Factory output was down 3% in the three months to May compared with the previous three months, also on a seasonally-adjusted basis.
The World Bank says South Africa’s economy will shrink by 1,5% this year. The National Treasury has also conceded it will have to revise downwards its own February forecast of 1,2% growth. - Reuters | <urn:uuid:76bf9c36-a61e-4bf9-8dd0-62c5f241d50b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mg.co.za/article/2009-07-09-factory-output-contracts-supports-rate-cut | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968565 | 458 | 1.765625 | 2 |
Original Cramer Inc. mid century vintage modern office chair.
Perfect conditions, cleaned carefully regularly.
Reclinable, ergonomic, extremely confortable,
The Posture Chair
Harold left Cramer in 1930 to work in the office furniture industry. There he learned about posture chairs, which despite the Depression were in high demand as more American workers migrated from the fields and farms into office jobs.
While the posture chair offered adjustability and back support, Harold came to understand its shortcomings – the tools were tricky to operate, and the nuts and bolts often fell off during use. A year later, Harold returned to Cramer and there led the development of a new, improved concept in office seating.
In 1934, the Cramer Posture Chair was born, featuring an adjustable upholstered seat and back. When Harold demonstrated the chair for J.C. Hall, President of Hallmark Cards, Inc., he was greatly impressed, and Hallmark would go on to buy thousands.
The safe business was sold in 1940, and the newly-named Cramer, Inc. staked its future on product innovation – chairs designed to support the posture and comfort of every seated worker.
In-person pickup only | <urn:uuid:fb2a60d1-17d5-4932-9b05-df9ae0ce624b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://classifieds.apartmenttherapy.com/posts/21682-vintage-cramer-inc-mid-century-modern-office-chair | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970144 | 250 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Beginner's Guide: Your First Set of Fishing Tackle
Need help choosing your first set of fishing tackle? Want something that can be used for a range of applications? The following fishing tackle should give you an all-round set up. This type of fishing gear will work for bay fishing, pier/jetty fishing and some rock fishing, estuary and beach fishing.
There is no true one size fits all when it comes to fishing tackle, you will have to compromise and take local advice. Sea Fishing tackle is like any sporting equipment, the more role specific it becomes the less forgiving it is.
A mid-sized fixed spool fishing reel will set you up nicely. It will cope with heavy lure work, pier fishing and everything mentioned above.
Casting with a fixed spool reel is quite easy and requires a lot less skill than a multiplier or overhead/bait caster reel for basic casts.
$30-$60 should buy you a nice fishing reel, if looked after should last you a few good seasons.
Look for a fishing rod with a soft through action, meaning as it sounds: a fishing rod that flexes easily and gently without snapping back straight, taking the curve from the tip gradually down towards the butt. A fishing rod of this make up will not fight you back and will allow for initial mistakes in casting and playing fish.
A 10-12 foot fishing rod would be sound. A shorter fishing rod makes rock and pier fishing hard, and any longer makes it very ungainly and hard to use for the beginner.
Think about what type of fishing you are going to do most often. A lighter casting weight will suit the pier / estuary angler, if casting distance is more important then consider a heavier casting weight. A casting weight of 1-3 ozs is considered light, 3–6 ozs moderate and 4–8 ozs heavy.
You will hear a lot about braid and new hi-tech fishing lines which out-fish standard mono-filament. Don’t worry and stick to good old fashioned mono. It's far more forgiving than many of the new fishing lines on the market and until you become confident at what you are doing stick to the old favorite.
Fishing Rigs and Fishing Gear
When you have decided on the location you are going to fish and your target species, take advice from you local fishing tackle shop and get good quality fishing rigs, weights and other fishing tackle. Feel free to contact us for advice and help with selecting tackle. | <urn:uuid:a9cfe737-9da8-4b32-9183-8caa1f3e1aea> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://premiumfishing.com.au/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=40&Itemid=129 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940532 | 515 | 1.617188 | 2 |
"Are you a good pentagon, or a bad pentagon?" I asked the flower.
"Oh, I'm neither good nor bad. I'm just peaceful," she replied.
"Peace isn't good?" I asked.
"Peace is a place of nurture," she whispered.
"But isn't that good?" I insisted.
"You think in terms of absenses ~ the lack of strife and conflict. Your thoughts have created many wars my child."
Words suddenly escaped me. I create wars? I put down my camera and sat down beside her, and the two of us watched the clouds perform transient dances of wonder across the sky for awhile.
"But wait!" I blurted, "Everyone knows a peaceful world is one without war."
"Leave war out of the conversation, my dear, for peace has no need for war in its definition. Stop wasting your time with such misguided ideas. Peace need not be defended. It is chosen."
A white elephant raised it's cumulous trunk spewing dark clouds across the sky who argued and thundered against each other, raining tears across the land.
"Does understanding the war up there in the sky ~ does this make you happy?" the pentagonal being inquired.
Tears, now tracing the lines of ignorance etched in my face ~ rain cleansing so many wrong perceptions like briars wedged into the scarred and frightened recesses of my soul ~ I wept as I had never wept before.
"Why have I always thought of peace this way?" I whispered, unable to look her in the eye."
She took my hand and said nothing for a very long time then finally offered, "You need not defend yourself. Choose peace now."
Posted by susan at August 4, 2006 7:11 AM
We are the mirror as well as the face in it.
We are tasting the taste this minute of eternity.
We are the pain and what cures pain, both.
We are the sweet, cold water and the jar that pours.
~ Jelaluddin Rumi
[You are certainly on a roll here, my dear. ~ eB]
Posted by: eB at August 4, 2006 10:09 AM
You are on a roll!! And a most beautiful one! Keep it up dear friend!!
Posted by: jzr at August 4, 2006 11:54 AM
Posted by: dan at August 4, 2006 12:18 PM
what an incredible, amazing, priceless experience. we should all sit and talk with nature more often, gleaning from it's wisdom.
Posted by: la vie en rose at August 4, 2006 3:02 PM
wow, Susan.... that's beautiful. someday, i'd like to illustrate your incredible stories... they touch me deeply.
Posted by: Lisa at August 4, 2006 4:18 PM
Good one. Peace to us all.
Posted by: Cynthia at August 4, 2006 7:23 PM
Both your photos and your writing are incredibly beautiful - thank you for this
Posted by: Catherine at August 5, 2006 6:25 AM
Just lovely, thank you for your wonderful words and imagery. Thank you also for visiting my blog!
Posted by: Spooky Suzie at August 5, 2006 12:32 PM
wow, amazingly beautiful! You know, there is a website by the name choosepeacenow. I think it's dot org, but I"m not sure. Run by a guy who works with a group of politicians etc to create a federal Department of Peace, and many other wonderful things.
Posted by: Wandering Willow at August 5, 2006 7:12 PM
Peace is chosen. Profound. True. Peace to you. Peace to me. Peace to the world.
Posted by: janet at August 7, 2006 12:55 PM
A peaceful bit of prose. Thank you.
<smile> An interesting play on the term "white elephant".
Posted by: Mark W. at August 9, 2006 2:17 PM | <urn:uuid:f5cda1f5-5166-44c7-b535-bf4c7f95ae82> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.visual-voice.net/archives/2006/08/department-of-d.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951947 | 842 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Sat January 12, 2013
What Would Obama Do (If There's No Debt Ceiling Deal)?
Originally published on Sat January 12, 2013 10:08 am
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Scott Simon.
You might've chuckled a bit this week, if you heard about the trillion-dollar platinum coin plan, to perhaps address Washington, D.C.'s debt ceiling stalemate. But it will certainly be no laughing matter if the U.S. Congress refuses to raise the borrowing limit, and the U.S. government defaults on its debt. Global financial markets would likely plummet.
NPR's John Ydstie reports on some of the options the president has if he and Congress cannot reach an agreement.
JOHN YDSTIE, BYLINE: President Obama says he won't negotiate. He says the Congress must raise the debt ceiling to pay for spending it's already OK'd. But Republicans say they'll use the threat of default to get more spending cuts from the White House. Of course, the best outcome would be for the two parties to agree on the package of spending cuts they postponed for two months, to avoid the fiscal cliff. That could clear the way for hike in the debt ceiling.
But if faced with default, the president could consider a few options, says Donald Marron, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office; now at the Tax Policy Center. First, Marron says, delay some payments.
DONALD MARRON: You might pay Medicare doctors a week later than usual. You might pay government contractors two weeks later than usual.
YDSTIE: But former Fed Vice Chairman Alan Blinder says that's not as easy as it sounds.
ALAN BLINDER: It's not even so clear the government's computer programs are capable of doing that right. They're sort of on autopilot, to spit out millions and millions of checks.
YDSTIE: Even if the computers cooperated, says Blinder, deciding how to cut one out of every $4 the government spends each day, would be difficult.
BLINDER: You know that they're going to keep the Social Security checks coming; they're going to pay the military; they're going to pay the interest on the debt. And pretty soon, you're down to a very small corner of the budget that's going to have to absorb all the cuts.
YDSTIE: Another option, says Blinder, is for the president to invoke the 14th Amendment, which essentially says the government must pay its debts. But a huge legal battle would likely ensue, and the White House has ruled that out.
Marron says that brings us to the platinum coin.
MARRON: In principle, the Treasury secretary could issue high-denomination platinum coins, and use them as a way to finance the government if the debt limit isn't increased.
YDSTIE: The law that allows this is really intended for use in minting collectible coins, and Marron says he fervently hopes the parties can reach a deal.
MARRON: But if we got to the state of the world where the Treasury secretary faces this decision of do we default on the debt, or do we invoke a loophole; I am very strongly in the camp that I would like to see him invoke a loophole, rather than default.
YDSTIE: The way it would work, says Marron, is that the Treasury would mint a coin - or coins - in, say, $25 billion denominations and deposit them at the Federal Reserve; then draw on the funds to pay the government's bills. He says a trillion-dollar coin makes no sense. If the administration didn't want to involve the Fed, it could mint smaller denominations - in the 50- to $100 million range - and sell them to big banks or institutions.
MARRON: It's not something you want to embrace; it's not the way we ought to run a normal business. It really does sound like a "Simpsons" episode, or an "Austin Powers" sequel.
YDSTIE: But so far, the Obama administration hasn't explicitly ruled it out.
John Ydstie, NPR News, Washington.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR. | <urn:uuid:01904499-14eb-456f-a943-89ddcbdeb1cd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kvnf.org/post/what-would-obama-do-if-theres-no-debt-ceiling-deal | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956247 | 897 | 1.804688 | 2 |
Translated into English by Suyematz Kenchio, 1900.
he Romance of Genji."]
THE CHAMBER OF KIRI
In the reign of a certain Emperor, whose name is unknown to us, there was, among the Niogo and Kôyi of the Imperial Court, one who, though she was not of high birth, enjoyed the full tide of Royal favor. Hence her superiors, each one of whom had always been thinking--"I shall be the one," gazed upon her disdainfully with malignant eyes, and her equals and inferiors were more indignant still.
Such being the state of affairs, the anxiety which she had to endure was great and constant, and this was probably the reason why her health was at last so much affected, that she was often compelled to absent herself from Court, and to retire to the residence of her mother.
Her father, who was a Dainagon, was dead; but her mother, being a woman of good sense, gave her every possible guidance in the due performance of Cou | <urn:uuid:15d57371-f26b-4ca3-9dd5-a9fff28a5e8c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://manybooks.net/titles/murasakisother07tale_of_genji.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.991002 | 217 | 1.75 | 2 |
Online Reputation Management (ORM) deals with everything about your company’s brand in the online community. This community includes the entire web – search engines, forums, blogs, news sites, social networking sites, etc…
Online Reputation Management is first being mindful of your company’s online brand then building on that brand in the search engines (chances are this is where you are sought for the most) through social media and other websites that produce and disseminate content.
Online Reputation Management is done through a funnel of three main processes:
Being mindful of your company’s online brand (Monitoring)
First and foremost, you have a brand – as the owner and manager of that brand, you have to be mindful about it. Know what’s happening to your brand. Know what’s the latest news about it. Know what people think about it. Where are you mentioned? What are they talking about when your brand is mentioned?
There are tons of tools that you can use in order to monitor your brand in the online world:
This will be your best friend when you’re monitoring your brand online. You can track web results, news, blogs, video results, and groups results. There is no better way to get all of your brand mentions than Google Alerts. ‘Nuff said.
Set up for free to track news by keyword, stocks, local news, feeds and more. Receive notifications via email, Yahoo Messenger or mobile.
Twitter has grown to be one of the best places to monitor your brand in. Almost everyone in the Twitter world retweets content with or without hashtag. The beauty of Twitter search is that it also lets you set-up search parameters such as dates, links, location, sentiment, Twitter account, and more.
Social mention is the social media version of Google Alerts. It helps you monitor your brand in different social platform throughout the web. you can subscribe to the feed, get email alerts or download the Excel file.
Building on that brand (Prevention)
Online Reputation Management extends to these factors connected to you:
- Your Name
- High profile employees
If one of these things get affected by a bad reputation, it would usually spread itself to the others like a festering disease. Protecting your name, company, products and high profile employees are carry less impact compared to your brand (which should almost always be your username). For this tutorial, we will be discussing more about your brand and how to protect it.
BRAND / USERNAME:
This is the best thing you can do in managing your online reputation. Build and build and build and build on your brand. Branding is key to ORM. Surprisingly, it’s also arguably your most powerful asset when it comes to SEO. Building your brand can start from getting all of your brand’s social media usernames. You can find it out using Knowem.
As soon as you know on which social media sites your brand is still available as a username, grab the opportunity to register it there. These accounts are your online licenses to build ‘online real estates’. It will boost the chances of you filling up the first page of your brand SERP if you own powerful social media accounts with your brand as a username.
Some of the key social media accounts you SHOULD get are:
If you have these accounts, interlink them with each other and link to them from your blog / website and they should rank really well in the search engines.
Another great way to prevent bad reputation webpages from ranking as your brand is to create and maintain a blog. Search engines love blogs. That’s enough for you to know that you SHOULD get a blog for yourself in order for you to rank well and to have that powerful leverage for your brand that you can flexibly use whenever there is any newly published bad reputation out there.
There are a lot more reasons why you should have a blog for your company – you can publish company news, establish a readership, promote products and services, etc…
We will be discussing more about ORM Prevention methods in the next lessons of this tutorial.
Fixing any damaging content to your brand (Cleaning)
- Hire an ORM consultant
- Contact the owner of the bad reputation site and humbly ask if he/she can put it down
- If it is against the law, contact any possibly concerned government body and ask them for help to bring it down
- Ask Google to de-index it if there are any elements in the page against Google’s guidelines
If all of those are not an option for you, start with getting all those powerful social media accounts and create a network of links to them using your website. Start a blog and interlink that blog with those social accounts and with your main website. It will take more time for these to rank – and most probably the damage will already be done by then.
ORM work is mostly about establishing that bullet-proof reputation in the web by getting all the possible ‘real estate accounts’ you can for your brand.
As much as possible, the Online Reputation Management campaign / work SHOULD NOT reach the Cleaning stage. It amplifies the workload on any Online Reputation Manager – all the while the damage has already occurred. The funny thing is, most companies that look for Online Reputation Management only do so whenever there is damage already done. Online Reputation Management is not about damage control, it is about establishing online brand foundations.
Tips for Keeps: If you have not already taken your brand name as your username in all the powerful social networking sites, do it. Now. | <urn:uuid:1cb7ccd5-5745-4aaa-8c5f-24afd640e1a6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://seo-hacker.com/about-online-reputation-management/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.932999 | 1,177 | 1.773438 | 2 |
Knox College is making an unedited PDF version of Michael Burlingame’s 2008 two-volume biography Abraham Lincoln: A Life, which was published by John Hopkins University Press. Here are the details from their website:
Abraham Lincoln: A Life
by Michael Burlingame – Unedited Manuscript by Chapters
Michael Burlingame’s long-awaited Abraham Lincoln: A Life, published in 2008 by the Johns Hopkins University Press in two large volumes and nearly 2,000 pages, is believed by many Lincoln scholars to be the most exhaustively researched and fully documented biography of Abraham Lincoln ever written.
The work as originally submitted was even more extensive, but largely because of space limitations, it was considered necessary to condense both the narrative and the accompanying documentation. By agreement with the author and the publisher, and in the interest of giving scholars and other students of Lincoln access to references and sources not appearing in the published version, the Lincoln Studies Center is privileged to present on this site the author’s original unedited manuscript. This manuscript is accessible by individual chapters, which are displayed in searchable, read-only PDF format.
The user is advised that the work presented here is copyrighted, that Johns Hopkins University Press reserves all rights, and that this material may not be reproduced without permission.
The two-volume set may be ordered at a 25% discount (promo code GZA) direct from the publisher.
Only the unedited manuscripts for the chapters in Volume One are available at present. Those for Volume Two are in preparation and will be available soon.
I hope you will all check this out. I know I will. | <urn:uuid:95282877-80db-46f4-8890-5d57b3131249> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://civilwarhistory.wordpress.com/2009/07/19/free-access-to-lincoln-biography/?like=1&source=post_flair&_wpnonce=428bad2630 | 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 | 0.937184 | 338 | 1.609375 | 2 |
California's credit quality could improve with tax measure-S&P
SAN FRANCISCO |
SAN FRANCISCO Nov 7 (Reuters) - California's credit quality looks to improve after voters approved a measure on Tuesday that increases taxes to avoid education spending cuts in the near term and bolster the state's budget in coming years, Standard & Poor's Rating Services analysts said in a note on Wednesday.
"The measure does more than temporarily increase operating revenues and, in our view, is the linchpin to the governor's broader, multiyear strategy for reversing the state's negative budget position," the analysts said.
"By providing a temporary but significant boost in tax revenues and permanently lowering its general fund spending baseline, we believe Proposition 30 helps alleviate the state's chronic fiscal strain," the analysts added.
They said improvement in California's credit rating depends on whether its legislature will be able to enact substantive fiscal reforms now that it has additional revenue to stabilize the state's finances. S&P rates California's general obligation debt 'A-minus' with a positive outlook. The rating is lower than all other states other than Illinois.
- Tweet this
- Share this
- Digg this | <urn:uuid:055799ce-67f6-4704-add0-7ee3527ae55c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/07/california-credit-quality-idUSL1E8M7FS420121107 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939214 | 243 | 1.625 | 2 |
Listening to the audiobook of John Grisham’s new novel, Calico Joe, I heard something which made me pause, not unlike how Jaguar Paw might have reacted to coming across a Chili’s outside a Mayan city.
What I heard was that Joe Castle was coming to bat for the 4th time — in a game tied at 6 — with 2 outs in the top of the 9th inning. Any MLB fan fan worth his Bill James Baseball Abstract collection would feel cognitive dissonance rippling through their DNA at the notion that a hitter in that scenario would only have 4 at bats, if he had been in the lineup for the entire game.
Here are the limited facts that Grisham provides about Castle’s at bats and the game scenario:
- Castle was in the starting lineup and hit 7th.
- Came to bat for the 1st time in the top of the 2nd inning. Home run.
- 2nd at bat came in the 5th inning. Home run.
- 3rd at bat came in the 7th inning. Home run.
- His team had scored 4 runs before his 3rd at bat.
- Before his next at bat in the 9th inning, Grisham notes that Castle had hit 3 home runs in “consecutive” at bats and in his “first 3 at bats.” This rules out that Castle could have had a non-HR at bat [i.e., walk, error, HBP]. If that had been the case, Grisham could not have accurately described his at bats as “consecutive.”
- 4th at bat comes in the 9th inning with Don Kessinger on 3rd base and 2 outs with the score tied at 6. Castle bunts for a base hit and Kessinger scores. That 7th run is described as the “eventual winning run.”
Here’s the problem. In order for Castle’s 9th inning at bat to match Grisham’s game scenario [Castle is the Cubs 34th batter], he unrealistically limits the runners left on base by the Cubs during a game in which they had scored 6 and eventually would end up with at least 7 runs — “eventual winning run” means the Cubs could have gone on to score more than the 7 runs, but the opponent was held to 6. Here are the results of the previous 33 at bats:
- 26 – outs made – with 2 outs in the 9th inning
- 06 – runs scored
- 01 – runner [Kessinger] on base in the 9th
- 00 – runners left on base [LOB] during first 8 innings
How unusual is it for a team which, after Castle’s bunt, had scored 7 runs and left only 1 runner [Castle in the 9th] on base to that point in the game? Let’s look at the actual team which was the basis for the story, the 1973 Chicago Cubs. The Cubs scored 7 runs in 8 games that season. They averaged 8 runners LOB in those 8 games. The lowest total was 6, the highest was 9.
This might be the last MLB trivia question which cannot be answered online: What is the most runs scored by a MLB team with zero runners left on base? I’d love to know. Even the great Baseball Almanac, does not provide records of Team LOB records based on the number of runs scored.
But Grisham has another problem. During 1973, Don Kessinger’s place in the batting order was 1st, 2nd or 8th. Since Kessinger was the runner on 3rd base during Castle’s 9th inning at bat with 2 outs, this would mean that Kessinger was hitting anywhere from the 4th to the 6th [since Castle was hitting 7th] spot in Grisham’s lineup.
So the question is why Grisham lays out a baseball scenario which is so unrealistic? I get why homering in consecutive at bats makes a better story than squeezing a walk in between. I get why his last at bat comes in the 9th inning. What I don’t get is why he sacrificed the plausibility of his game scenario by giving Castle’s team 6 runs and putting Kessinger on 3rd base, instead of 3 runs and Ron Santo or Billy Williams on 3rd base when Castle batted in the 9th?
I don’t object to a major leaguer’s storybook first game. But Grisham draws readers into the story with a number of baseball insights which indicate that a degree of authenticity was important to the story. Hell there was even Willie Montañez reference. One of the main characters even describes himself as obsessed with baseball statistics in his youth. And yet he fails the authenticity test in the most basic way.
The most logical conclusion must be that Grisham never even considered that there might be an issue given Castle’s at bats and the score. All of which just makes Grisham [and a few well-paid editors and one fact checker] more normal than those of us who love the statistical aspect of the game. So it may not even a case of the author not doing his homework, perhaps he didn’t even realize there should have been an assignment. | <urn:uuid:1ad0967f-c2c2-429e-ab51-fa190d2d82ca> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://2thinkgood.com/2012/08/13/john-grishams-mini-brain-fart/?like=1&_wpnonce=8ff8af45e4 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.986886 | 1,129 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Ron Morris of Ranch Marketing Associates reports that the Y Cross Ranch has come on the market for the first time since it was assembled by Courtenay Davis in 1941. Located northwest of Cheyenne, the 60,000+ acre swath of Wyoming cattle country will be sold via sealed bid. The ranch totals 60,782 acres and consists of 50,333 deeded acres, a 3,949-acre State of Wyoming lease, and a 6,500-acre Forest Service lease acres for a total of 60,782 acres.
The Y Cross Ranch has traditionally operated as a cow/calf ranch and averages 650 to 850 pairs along with 650 to 800 yearling cattle. The ranch’s water rights, some of which date back to the days of the Wyoming Territory, support the production of more than 1,000 tons of grass hay. In addition to its cattle operation, the ranch supports a significant big game population, including elk, mule deer, antelope, black bear, and the occasional moose or mountain lion. Yearly hunting revenues range from $40,000 to $60,000.
In 1997, the ranch was donated by the Courtenay Davis Foundation to the Colorado State University Research Foundation and the University of Wyoming Foundation as joint beneficiaries. Since then, the Y Cross has served as a working laboratory for observation and study of plant and animal systems in a natural environment along with scholarship and/or internship support for Colorado State University and University of Wyoming students majoring in agriculture and natural resources.
The Y Cross Ranch is being offered for sale in its entirety and includes all real estate, improvements and water rights, through a sealed bid process. Broker cooperation is invited. Contact Ron Morris of Ranch Marketing Associates for details at (970) 535-0881 or firstname.lastname@example.org.
Read more HERE. | <urn:uuid:745f3122-5ef3-4a9f-b0f9-a4968d01d90d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.landreport.com/tag/laramie-county/ | 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 | 0.948109 | 378 | 1.789063 | 2 |
Operational and Overclocking Specifics
Upon boot-up MSI Z77 MPOWER mainboard displays a startup image where they remind us of the supported hot keys.
Moreover, even if you disable the start-up image in the settings or by pressing the Tab key, there will still be a hot key hint at the bottom of the screen. However, for some reason the mainboard no longer displays the current processor frequency. We only see the nominal frequency, which has nothing to do with the real one. We also see the system memory size and operational frequency there.
In our MSI Z77A-GD65 mainboard review, we were very pleased to see a new parameter in the BIOS called “Enhanced Turbo”. This parameter allows the processor clock frequency multiplier to rise to the maximum for this specific processor model as allowed by Intel Turbo Boost under any type of load. This is a very easy and safe way of slightly overclocking your system. However, today our opinion about this feature has changed, and we are inclined to consider its implementation on MSI Z77 MPOWER mainboard a drawback rather than an advantage. The first reason for that is the fact that “Enhanced Turbo” option is enabled by default, and therefore the processor is not working in its nominal mode. This function can be easily disabled, but even after that the nominal operational mode cannot be restored. Now the clock frequency multiplier of our test Core i5-3570X processor will rise only to 36x, although under low loads it should be able to rise to 38x. The thing is that the “Intel C-State” parameter is set at “Auto” in the BIOS, but in this case it doesn’t work, and you must manually change its setting to “Enabled”. Because of all that the MSI’s proprietary power-saving technology called APS (Active Phase Switching) also doesn’t work by default. Micro-Star has every right to consider this technology one of their mainboards’ advantages, and what happens when the advantage disappears? It would be wrong to assume that in this case nothing happens and that the board simply has one advantage less. When the plus is gone, the minus remains, and we are going to prove it during our power consumption tests later in this review.
Another peculiarity of Micro-Star’s mainboards is their automatic overclocking system called “OC Genie II”, which allows overclocking the system by selecting the corresponding option in the BIOS or by pressing the namesake button. We do not intend to overestimate its potential, because like any other automatic overclocking system it does have its imperfections, but it has a few undeniable positives. The thing is that many similar technologies from other manufacturers overclock only the processor, and totally leave out the memory. In our tests, we increased the processor frequency to 4.2 GHz, but the “OC Genie II” technology also increased the memory frequency to 1867 MHz and set all appropriate timings for it, with the help of the X.M.P. profile recorded in the modules SPD. This is the right approach, because system should be overclocked in its entirety.
Everyone knows that no automatic overclocking system will produce the same exceptional and adequate results as manual overclocking, when each and every parameter is carefully selected. However, overclocking with Micro-Star mainboards may not be as versatile. The thing is that their voltage regulator circuitry doesn’t allow increasing the processor core voltage in Offset mode by adding the designed value to the nominal setting, and if the Vcore is set at a fixed value, then all power-saving technologies stop working. We have explained multiple times in our reviews why power-saving modes are important even for overclocked systems, and the most recent occasion when we dwelled on this topic in detail was in our Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UP7 mainboard review, therefore, we won’t repeat all of that here today. However, those processors, which are overclocked by raising their clock frequency multiplier, could be pushed to the limits with all Intel’s power-saving technologies and MSI’s proprietary APS technology intact even on MSI mainboards. All you have to do to accomplish that is to overclock without raising the core voltage. Therefore, it is impossible to overclock our specific test processor to its absolute maximum of 4.6 GHz. In our case, even 4.5 GHz became quite a challenge and only gave in when we set the Vdroop to the maximum. At the same time we set the memory frequency to 1867 MHz and adjusted its timings accordingly.
The system was overclocked in such a way that it could be used in this mode for a prolonged period of time. We did not disable any of the mainboard features or onboard controllers, kept all Intel processor power-saving technologies up and running normally, so that in idle mode the CPU voltage and frequency multiplier would get lowered, and all idling processor units would get disabled to bring the CPU into the energy-efficient mode. MSI’s proprietary APS power-saving technology was also up and running and adjusted the number of active phases in the processor voltage regulator circuitry dynamically depending on the workload level. | <urn:uuid:ba715ab7-f8e5-4ee6-bc9b-9c6128464c71> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/mainboards/display/msi-z77-mpower_6.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944568 | 1,085 | 1.578125 | 2 |
[Matt Roth is Deputy Editor of Streetsblog San Francisco, and a rabid bicycle enthusiast working towards the realization of a world full of bike-friendly cities. This post is part of the Metropol Blog Series.]
Photo by Michael Holden
Anyone who has lived in a relatively flat and congested city can tell you the best way to get around is on a bicycle. The Chinese, the Dutch and the Danish know it, and increasingly Americans are coming to understand there are few modes of urban mobility as convenient and healthy as putting the fun between your legs and pedaling where you want, when you want.
As the legions of urban bicycle riders grow, city planners have begun to take note and have carved away precious space from several generations of begrudging motorists who have long believed streets were their sole domain. Politicians now boast of how many bicycle lanes they have added, sometimes buffered from traffic, sometimes painted green, red or blue. Some cities have instituted bicycle sharing systems, where a fleet of public bicycles are maintained for use by anyone who signs up and pays a small fee. The newest bicycle trend to gain popularity in cities around the world is the ciclovía, a car-free event where roads are opened to bicycles, skaters and pedestrians for the day to enjoy streets as public space for recreating and socializing.
Bike Arch by Ilana Spector and Mark Grieve, Photo by Waldemar Horwat
Black Rock City, more than any other urban area, has been given over completely to bicycles, making it unquestionably the highest bikes-per-capita metropolis anywhere on the planet. The playa is the perfect place to ride, flat as a board and expansive. The prohibition on driving anything but art cars beyond the Esplanade makes Burning Man an enormous week-long ciclovía, and makes bicycles of the ultimate utility during the event.
Kinetic Sculpture Race, Photo by Christian
As with most everything else on the playa, a simple bicycle, with one wheel in front of the other, would scarcely begin to capture the experience of participating in Burning Man, nor would it be very cool. Though the dynamics of bicycle engineering haven’t changed much in a hundred years, Black Rock City has spawned a menagerie of innovation, still pedal-powered, but only vaguely resembling a “bicycle.” There are giraffes and fishes, camels and glowing eyeballs, carriages adorned with mastodon bones, tall bikes five frames high, and an number of kinetic sculptures belching plumes of fire and smoke from their steel innards. Whimsy trumps utility and getting to the destination is less important than preening like a peacock along the way (a twelve-foot tall fire-spewing peacock, of course).
Read more » | <urn:uuid:566c1de9-af16-47b8-b469-f7fde813f42a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.burningman.com/tag/bike-culture/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956642 | 578 | 1.796875 | 2 |
Skip to Main Content
The study of Quality of Service (QoS) and the extent of resource utilization are the two major components of Cloud Computing. The accurate modelling and simulation of flow of processes in cloud environment is an essential part of service level architecture. In this paper, an analytical model has been developed for identifying the pattern of inter-arrival processes and the service of processes. Empirical studies have shown that failure of processes after assignment to a suitable resource may affect the service pattern of the scheduling. Hence, the assumption that inter arrival, and service of processes are Poisson in nature does not always hold true, as it does not represent the real dynamics involved in service level cloud. The proposed paper has recognized the distribution pattern dynamically and scheduled the processes based on the distribution characteristics thus making the system more robust and dynamic. A fault tolerant mechanism has been built by rescheduling the failed processes.
Date of Conference: 30-31 March 2012 | <urn:uuid:9fcf6410-7fe9-4efe-ac75-bfdd646e97ac> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?reload=true&arnumber=6215914&contentType=Conference+Publications | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939731 | 191 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Here is a link to the math in creating one.
Torispherical Dome equations
What equipment do you have available? How accurate does it need to be?
You could vacuum form the dome on a piece of hard wood, then trim the .04 thick material to suit.
How about metal spinning out of soft copper or aluminum sheet? For that matter, you may be able to do this by hand working the copper with a wood mallet on a form tool too. | <urn:uuid:97405003-49dd-412d-9a55-77bddd3333f3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cnczone.com/forums/moldmaking/29300-make_plastic_torispherical_dome.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931354 | 97 | 1.765625 | 2 |
watch a festival
Director: Sara Hopman
Producer: Sara Hopman
Winner of the ECONOMIC JUSTICE AWARD
ABOUT THE FILM
From the beginning, filmmaking and positive social change have always gone hand-in-hand for me. After working with non-profit organizations such as Environment California, the Human Rights Campaign, and CalPIRG, I was further inspired to use my strengths in filmmaking to help facilitate progress in our communities. In October of 2009, I had the opportunity to create a film that could make such an impact, DAY JOB.
We’ve all seen day laborers standing and waiting in public places, but most of us pass by without thinking twice. I wanted to discover the story behind these workers - who are they and what are their lives like? This is a current, pressing issue, commonly ignored by the media; this is a group of people with little to no voice in our society; this is happening right now, in my city, and many cities across the country.
During the making of my film, I found Faye, a temporary employer of laborers. She has an extraordinary perspective that I felt I had to share with the world. With the help of four translators, which included two crew members, I was able to record the images and voices of a shunned community, for all the world to see.
RELATED CATEGORIESeconomic justice, immigration, international, racial justice, Media That Matters 10,
SPONSOR MEDIA THAT MATTERS
Reach over 100,000 mediamakers, educators, nonprofits and activists at Media That Matters 13! Download this PDF for more info. | <urn:uuid:90ebf710-f66c-4a73-a35e-f25517391d17> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mediathatmattersfest.org/films/day_job | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962886 | 343 | 1.8125 | 2 |
- What is Business Aviation?
- Flight Department Administration
- Aircraft Operations
- Professional Development
- News & Publications
- Products & Services
Maine Legislature Seeks to Make State More Welcoming to Business Aviation
April 25, 2011
Under current state law, if you bring your aircraft to Maine for more than 20 days in the first year after purchasing it in another state, you could get hit with the state's 5 percent use tax.
"That's a huge boogeyman out there in the industry," said Nate Humphrey, CEO of Twin Cities Air Service, a fixed base operator (FBO) and charter service on Maine's Auburn-Lewiston Municipal Airport (LEW). "The perception is, 'Don't fly your aircraft to Maine; you'll get hit with use tax.'"
"Even if operators are not affected by the use tax, the perception is Maine is unfriendly to aviation business," said Steve Levesque, executive director of Maine's Midcoast Regional Redevelopment Authority.
That perception is one of the toughest challenges Levesque faces in his role. His office is dedicated to transforming the soon-to-be-closed Naval Air Station Brunswick into a thriving business hub centered around the new Brunswick Executive Airport (BXM). "Whenever I go to a trade show or conference to attract aerospace business to Brunswick, people bring it up," said Levesque, "They say, 'Maine? That's the state with the awful use tax.'"
Pro-Business Legislation in the Works
All that may be changing, thanks to two bills introduced this month: one that would remove the limitations on aircraft use during the 12 months after purchase (LD 946) and another that would expand the current sales tax exemption for turbine powered aircraft over 6,000 pounds or aircraft used by a Part 135 operator to all aircraft (LD 1096).
The bill to lift the use tax on nonresidents (LD 946) was introduced by Sen. Stanley Gerzofsky (D), who represents Brunswick, demonstrating he understands that attracting more aviation business to Maine means attracting high-paying jobs. For example, startup turboprop manufacturer Kestrel Aircraft, launched by Cirrus co-founder Alan Klapmeier, plans to establish its headquarters at Brunswick Executive, creating as many as 300 new jobs.
The change in the tax law could be a huge boon to Maine's aviation industry.
"Until now the new and used aircraft market has been virtually nonexistent in Maine," said Mark Goodwin, vice president of Northeast Airmotive, an FBO and repair station on Portland International Jetport (PWM). "This tax exemption isn't a giveaway to companies that are already here; it's about enticing business to come to Maine that isn't coming now. Today, most operators are stopping at the border and buying parts and maintenance in New Hampshire. This legislation could bring many times the number of business aircraft to Maine as are here now – and with each one, at least three high-paying jobs."Learn more about the proposed Maine tax legislation and how to get involved.
For additional information, contact NBAA’s Operations Service Group at (202) 783-9250 or firstname.lastname@example.org. | <urn:uuid:07603c7c-73c7-4f58-abf8-835bbc0f6f3a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nbaa.org/admin/taxes/state/me/20110425-maine-welcomes-business-aviation.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951426 | 664 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Creating a fairer Britain
On 20 November the Commission submitted its formal response to the Department of Health consultation - 'Shaping the Future of Care Together - Adult Social Care Green Paper', which ran from July to November 2009.
The Commission welcomes the opportunity to respond to this important consultation on the future of the adult social care system. Care and support is at the heart of our mission of:
The Commission congratulates the Government for moving the agenda forward. The current system is unsustainable and is already failing thousands of the most marginalised and excluded members of society. Some fundamentally hard decisions need to be made to achieve long-term solutions, and they can only be made through debate and consensus.
Download our response in full (Word). | <urn:uuid:1ffd9f21-7edd-4cd8-9441-723cbb37b5a7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://waleshelpline@equalityhumanrights.com/legal-and-policy/consultation-responses/response-to-shaping-the-future-of-care-together/?size=825 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941952 | 148 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Each day this week I’m posting a different story from the university I taught at in China; which I often felt was a kind of microcosm of the country as a whole. It’s hard to say to what extent the communist system has shaped Chinese culture from the top-down and what pre-existing Chinese values lent to the rise of authoritarianism from the bottom. I feel these stories each demonstrate a trend in Chinese culture that can be felt at many different levels. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether it’s politics, imbedded values or something else that enabled these stories.
Part 4: The Slackers
It’s easy to be impressed by Chinese students when you first come to China. The amount of dedication some of them put into their studies at the expense of their social life, and even health, has a way of putting you to shame. But then there are people like Jackson who make you second-guess a lot of the “hard-working Chinese” stereotypes.
Jackson was one of my undergraduates and it didn’t take me long to wonder just what the hell he was doing majoring in English. I couldn’t understand a word he said and his writing assignments looked like he’d randomly plucked words from the dictionary and splattered them across the page. He was a stark contrast to every other student in the class.
But then the others brought me up to speed. Jackson’s father was a famous rocket professor at the university and his mother was the finance president of the school hospital. And by astonishing coincidence, Jackson had been admitted to the university in spite of his dismal entrance exam performance.
But the astonishing coincidences didn’t stop with his admission. When all the students had to pass a listening comprehension test to move on to their junior year, Jackson was conspicuously absent – yet still ended up with a passing score. When it came time to write his final thesis, a teacher was dispatched to complete it for him. And he was never bothered to defend it like the other students. Upon graduation he went to get his Master’s degree in an English program in Sweden. How he managed that and how he fared when he arrived, I can only imagine.
All of Jackson’s classmates knew he was a special case and generally accepted it as a fact of life. But that’s not to say they couldn’t buy some of the opportunities he had. During their senior year everyone took the TEM-8, a certification test for English majors that’s usually needed to get a teaching job, and generally very helpful for other careers.
When the scores came out, several failed while some of the worst students had gotten the highest scores. A friend told me that they’d each bought the answer key beforehand for 3,000 yuan ($470) – a sum of money far out of reach for most.
I remembered a few months earlier when a graduate student was straddling his 6th story window threating to jump. His professor was holding his degree ransom – refusing to let him graduate until he did more research and completed a paper in the professor’s name. The student felt the threat of suicide was the only way to get the attention needed to get his rightful diploma.
So I was furious when weighing this against what my cheating students had done – ensuring that when recruiters came the following month they’d take the jobs away from the more qualified (albeit less affluent and dishonest) people. On my Renren (Chinese Facebook) account, I was friends with most of those I taught. I wrote a status update saying, “It seems many students cheated on their TEM-8. It also seems the university doesn’t plan to do anything about it. Disgraceful.”
The comment caused a sensation in the dorms. Apparently I had broken a taboo that everyone knew about, but wouldn’t dare mention in such a public forum. Later that night I got an email from one of my students:
“Thank you for your support for those students who have failed the TEM-8 because of others cheating. In fact, I am so miserable that there are only 2 scores I need to get the certificate. But many students like me can do nothing but to accept the reality and blame ourselves for the fate…”
The following year those who failed were allowed to take the test one more time. I later found out that that girl, and most others, saved up and bought the answers the second time around. | <urn:uuid:c3d33c1a-c8ff-455e-bc06-b5df6b53e919> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://sinostand.com/tag/cheating/ | 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 | 0.983473 | 948 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Clashing budget realities and preferences face additional action in the Mississippi Legislature in a disagreement between legislators who live and breathe tax exemptions for every imaginable constituency and those who believe the general fund’s integrity must be maintained if Mississippi has any hope of meeting its financial obligations.
It is difficult to say no when a constituency seeks an exemption on taxes, especially sales taxes and other levees paid in the course of doing business, which eventually becomes a source of revenue to pay the public’s bills.
So far, the Mississippi House in 2013 has approved tax exemptions worth about $50 million per year. If the tax is exempted the general fund gets that much less money. However, exempting the tax does not necessarily lessen what the state owes its employees and contractors, which becomes problematic when bills and are paychecks are due.
Concern about the landslide of exemptions worries Democrats and Republicans alike who foresee perhaps unintended consequences in the long term if the laundry list stands as passed by the House when it reaches the Senate.
It’s probably true that every special and vested interest likes a little tax break when it’s to their advantage, but soon enough, what seemed reasonable in isolation becomes threatening to fiscal stability in the aggregate.
House Appropriations Committee Chairman Herb Frierson, a Republican from Poplarville, said the tax breaks so far proposed or passed in one chamber total about $50 million.
Frierson, a veteran of many sessions, has said the state is on a tight budget and already is $172 million short of paying for critical needs.
The House needs to learn to say no to groups that want something, whether it’s more state funding or a lower tax bill, Frierson said in an Associated Press article.
Some of the exemptions will be beneficial, but the whole list needs the tempering process of a thorough examination and perhaps a winnowing in the Mississippi Senate.
Colleagues often don’t like having to eliminate the exempting legislation introduced by colleagues in the same chamber, which is one strong argument for the balancing examination of the other chamber.
Mississippi hasn’t recovered from the recession; revenue reduction without a compelling reason is an excessive risk. | <urn:uuid:67120a77-5554-4783-a325-e17840f1b951> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://djournal.com/view/insideolemisssports_full/21840334/article-OUR-OPINION--Be-cautious-handing-out-tax-exemptions | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952365 | 449 | 1.5625 | 2 |
The revolution that saved rock
A new boxed set celebrates '70s punk
By Todd Leopold
The Ramones: They've been called the first punk group, and they blazed the trail for the many that followed.
(CNN) -- It was 1975, and rock was dead.
OK, maybe not dead, but certainly as bloated and ponderous as a 300-pound politician at a school board hearing.
Paul McCartney -- Paul McCartney, who once scorched through "I'm Down" and "I Saw Her Standing There"! -- was telling listeners to "Listen to What the Man Said." The Who -- the Who! -- were 10 years removed from "My Generation" and offering up "Squeeze Box." And the Rolling Stones, well exiled off Main Street, were about to start recording "Black and Blue," surely their '70s nadir.
Oh, sure, those heroes could still bring it occasionally, and there was some good stuff around -- Bob Dylan's "Blood on the Tracks," Roxy Music's "Siren," Springsteen's "Born to Run," late funk/early disco -- but music was, in general, being dominated by self-important artistes who'd given up changing the world for a little of the world's change.
But on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, during a grubby time in New York when the Daily News blared "Ford to City: Drop Dead," there were stirrings of a revolution.
One band was singing about sniffing glue and blitzkrieg bops. Another offered wild, intertwined guitars as it sang about the Venus de Milo and a "Marquee Moon." Four neatly dressed kids, three recently arrived from art school, told deadpan tales about psycho killers and reading books.
And there were several more, some playing hard and fast, others playing slow and off-kilter, and they had a scene revolving around a club called CBGB.
It was called "punk."
'We were bored with everything we heard'
Nowadays, people tend to think of punk as snarling kids in dirty leather bludgeoning fast, power-chording guitars. But, as a new four-CD boxed set, "No Thanks: The '70s Punk Rebellion" (Rhino) indicates, it was a heck of a lot more.
"We wanted to reclaim punk in the '70s as a movement," says Gary Stewart, the boxed set's producer. (Rhino is a division of Time Warner, as is CNN.) "People see it as a genre, as loud, fast, angry music. But for every Ramones, there was a Blondie or a Rezillos. Some of the music was very literary, other music was bubblegum."
The connection between it all, he says, was in its rejection of the status quo -- in the form of corporate rock and comfortable rock stars -- and its determination to reclaim earlier influences, such as the British Invasion.
"We decided to start our own group because we were bored with everything we heard," Joey Ramone once explained. "Everything was 10th-generation Led Zeppelin ... overproduced, or just junk. We missed music like it used to be."
Punk was nothing new. The term was reportedly coined in 1971 by rock critic Dave Marsh in a review of a show by Question Mark and the Mysterians, themselves part of the great thrash of 1960s garage bands, the movement's forerunners.
And elements of punk rock arguably can be traced back to the beginnings of rock 'n' roll. After all, who are early Elvis, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis if not punks?
Still, few people were listening in the beginning.
'It was a totally different world'
|WHERE ARE THE SEX PISTOLS?|
One key band is missing from "No Thanks": the Sex Pistols.
Try as it might, Rhino couldn't get permission to use any Pistols songs.
"It hurts me not to have them," says set producer Gary Stewart. "We can't pretend it doesn't matter. It's like a British Invasion set without the Beatles."
So, in the back of the "No Thanks" booklet, there's an apology: "We tried our best to get the Pistols on this set; it just didn't work out. And let's be honest: 'Never Mind the Bollocks' -- the punk equivalent of 'Sgt. Peppers' -- is a more essential purchase than this set."
After encouraging listeners to buy "Bollocks" -- if they haven't already -- Stewart signs off, "Apology accepted?"
Television guitarist Richard Lloyd remembers having a difficult time finding a place to play in the early days. The group discovered CBGB, a "s***hole" underneath a Bowery flophouse, and essentially told owner Hilly Kristal whatever he wanted to hear -- "anything to get in," Lloyd says. The group needed a place "to be the house band and not get kicked out," he recalls.
He remembers making maybe a buck or two the first night, but people showed up, so Kristal invited the band back.
Television was quickly followed by the Patti Smith Group, the Ramones, Blondie and Talking Heads. But even as the groups at CBGB earned a following, the wider world was mostly unaware.
"The music we would see was underground rock nobody cared about," recalls downtown New York denizen Ira Robbins, the founder of the music magazine Trouser Press and a contributor to the "No Thanks" liner notes. "Then, in 1976, word filtered out about the Sex Pistols and the Damned. Now we had something to get excited about."
Ironically, the New York-based magazine had refrained from covering the New York bands because "it seemed myopic," Robbins says.
A turning point in punk's acceptance, he notes, was a Ramones concert at London's Roundhouse on the all-too-appropriate date of July 4, 1976.
The kids from Queens were unpretentious, wrote songs from sidewalk level, were adequate musicians at best -- and showed you could form a band with those attributes.
"Everyone in England saw something they'd never seen," Robbins says. Working-class English musicians, living in a country with few choices and a music business that trumpeted art-rock or polished glam, now saw a way out. "It was a totally different world."
At the same time, the raw Sex Pistols came into prominence. The group was led by John "Johnny Rotten" Lydon, and they sang of "No future" and pierced their clothes with safety pins. British authorities banned the group and their singles "Anarchy in the UK" and "God Save the Queen"; the songs went to No. 1 anyway, and in 1977 punk hit the cover of Time magazine.
The gold rush was on.
'Things started to split'
The Clash reflected the bitterness of late-'70s British youth, the multiculturalism of a changing UK, and released a string of classic albums.
Well, not immediately. Punk may have overtaken England, but in America, disco and laid-back California cool reigned.
"It was like pulling teeth to get signed," Lloyd recalls. "Everybody [at record labels] was hesitant. None of the bands were easy to see business-wise."
"I didn't think any of the bands would make it," Robbins adds. "There was no context for this, no indie rock [in '75-'76]. ... There were only [the big labels] and their goal was to put out records and get on the radio."
Gradually the tide turned and the public caught on. The song selection on "No Thanks" roughly traces the music chronologically, and while the first disc includes bedrock songs of the era -- the Clash's "White Riot," Richard Hell and the Voidoids' "Blank Generation" -- by discs three and four some minor hits are emerging, such as the Cure's "Boys Don't Cry," Elvis Costello's "Radio Radio," and Joe Jackson's "Is She Really Going Out with Him?"
Elsewhere in the music biz, Blondie had hit No. 1, the Ramones were being produced by Phil Spector, and The Clash had shown their chops -- and hit-making ability -- with "London Calling." The punk movement had started going mainstream -- if that isn't an oxymoron.
"By 1980, you had college radio and later [in 1981] MTV, and things started to split," Stewart says. "Some bands had become more established, and others went underground. All of it was good, but it just wasn't part of the same movement."
Television, once the house band at CBGB, went against the punk grain with lengthy compositions -- but the band's gutsy guitar interplay fit right in.
The seeds punk planted gave birth to the great American indie boom of the '80s and the early-'90s grunge sound. As a style it underscores much of today's alternative radio, from the angular desperation of the Strokes to the force of Rage Against the Machine.
Will there be a new punk movement? The original punk scene, like the rap/hip-hop movement that paralleled it in black music, had the element of surprise. Today, in our ultra-wired world, it's hard to stay underground. "[Record industry] people don't want to have bands get away from them," Robbins says.
On the other hand, as Paul Weller noted in the Jam's 1977 song "The Modern World," "I know where I am and going to/It's somewhere I won't preview." The record business is in a funk; radio is dull and flat.
Perhaps another punk age may be just a paradigm away. | <urn:uuid:42eb619c-743a-44f9-9b24-735aefdd0778> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cnn.com/2003/SHOWBIZ/Music/11/13/punk.box/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978195 | 2,047 | 1.734375 | 2 |
Among their many wonderful community programs, ARF's Learning Center is one of the best, as being the first hands-on museums connected with an animal adoption center. Trained docents offer a 90-minute program, designed to teach children responsible ownership of pets, as well as how to care for pet. The "Walk in my Paws" portion of the program is particularly delightful, and gives kids a real-life experience of the world from a cat's or dog's viewpoint. The volunteer in the photos is demonstrating her scratching skills at the human-sized scratching post. The oversized electrical wall socket is about the same size as seen from a cat's viewpoints, and human-sized food and water bowls complete the lesson. Out of sight, behind the screen (as fitting), is a human-sized litter box. I kid you not!
The Children's "Store" in the ARF Learning Center | <urn:uuid:922f797b-9310-44a8-9933-b46cf8ee318b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://cats.about.com/od/advocacy/ss/arf_7.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962918 | 183 | 1.796875 | 2 |
I could spend all my time lecturing new inventors about how their own work attitudes and behaviors influence the success of their inventions more than any other factor. They would continue to think that invention success happens magically, or worse, from an "invention success" company.
But every once in awhile, I run into a three-dimensional, walking, talking and, most of all, hard-working soul, who embodies the qualities that make inventors successful. This time it's Robert ("Bobby") Amore who, with his "Toner Belt," made it to the round-of-twelve in season one of American Inventor (ABC, 2006). Bobby just happens to be one of the few contestants from season one and two who has reached the mass market with his product... now being sold as the "Walk n' Burn."
Bobby's a guy who has never taken "no" for an answer; not when something mattered to him. He played varsity ice hockey at Power Memorial Academy, a NYC high school that groomed athletes the likes of NBA's Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Chris Mullen, and NHL players, Brian and Joe Mullen. In his senior year, Division A hockey recruiters told Bobby he "hadn't grown enough," for Division A. He was five feet, six inches tall, but he went on to become of the best players in Division B.
When Bobby wasn't taken by the pros after college, again because he wasn't tall enough, he became a sports diplomat with a People to People program to the then "Soviet block" countries. It turned out to be the best job in the world for Bobby: a life of travel, hockey playing, and diplomacy in other countries.
Curiosity, diligence, optimism, and perseverance are Bobby Amore's trademarks, and these characteristics can be seen in everything he does. These traits were no less obvious to commodity traders on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange where Bobby, knowing nothing about trading or commodities, went from a floor runner to highly-paid trader, than they are to his invention partners.
Like most inventors, Bobby's first invention, a skate brake called SKIDS, didn't just hop from his frontal lobe to every pair of inline skates. SKIDS had its ups and downs. When financing fell through the first go-around, Bobby spent a year looking elsewhere, got his product patented, produced, licensed, and then he collected royalties on it for eight years.
When his first movie role with his friend, actor/director Tim Robbins, wasn't going too well, Bobby graciously bowed out and went to acting school until he got the confidence to get behind a camera again. To date, Robert Amore has had five other movie roles.
So what did Robert Amore do when the judges on American Inventor said 'sorry Bobby?' After months away from home, devoting almost every waking moment to creating packaging prototypes for the Toner Belt and scenarios for his TV appearances, after commiserating with all the other hopeful inventors on the American Inventor show day in and day out, after his family was misled by the producers into believing that Bobby would make it to the round of four.... What did Bobby do? He went out and made his product a success without American Inventor.
Bobby says he doesn't know exactly why the Toner Belt didn't progress further on American Inventor, but his disappointment didn't hang around for long. After all, he had received a U.S. patent for it, the Toner Belt was needed (especially by couch potatoes!), and he was determined to make it a winner.
Contacts with his patent attorney and others involved in the development of Toner Belt - now Walk n' Burn - introduced Bobby to licensing companies. Last summer, Bobby spent four entire days making connections with big licensing companies at the NYC Licensing Show. Bobby talked to a few companies before settling on a license deal with one of them. Now that his Walk n' Burn is off the ground, selling through infomercial and website, other licensing companies are asking Bobby to bring them more inventions.
Who's the winner of American Inventor? I say it's the guy who has thousands, maybe soon-to-be millions, of people buying his product. Bobby Amore only made it to the round-of-twelve on American Inventor Season 1, but that didn't keep him from making it to Number One in the real world.
If you want Bobby's help...
With an already full plate of his own inventions, a large new website venture, and weekly hockey coaching, Bobby is helping other inventors present their inventions to potential licensees If you want him to help you get your invention licensed, you'd better have your homework done ahead of time! He needs you to prepare a good drawing and/or prototype, a statement of purpose, marketing research, and a preliminary patent search. If Bobby thinks your invention will make a good fit with one of his contacts, he'll present it for you. Write him a note through Toner Belt.
(Another personal hero is Roger Brown, a successful inventor who writes for InventorSpot.com and participates often in the Forums. His interview can be read here.) | <urn:uuid:b1b70c73-005f-466f-a65f-c38c670f42bf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://inventorspot.com/articles/american_inventor_who_real_winne_9692 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.983058 | 1,086 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Lyme Disease Treatment | One Woman's Quest for Answers
One woman’s quest to find Lyme disease treatment takes her through Lyme tick country and deep into the place where medicine and politics collide.
In July 2002, having spent an idyllic week’s vacation on one of the Elizabeth Islands off Cape Cod, I came home to New Hampshire. The island — a glorious, wild place marked by ancient beech forests, kettle ponds, and open grasslands — is also crawling with ticks, which at the time seemed only a minor obstacle to enjoying the abundant gifts it offers.
Within a month of my return, however, I would begin to learn a bitter lesson — in the history, ethics, and politics of a debilitating disease, and the mystery that has surrounded it for more than 50 years.
Like many others who visit New England’s islands, I was bitten by ticks, more than once. Ten days after getting home, on a very hot day, I felt cold. I put on sweaters and heavy socks and lay down under a pile of blankets. I shivered and shook. My head pounded. More than anything, I craved sleep. I lay in bed, shivering and sweating. I finally found the strength to call my doctor, who waved away my suggestion that I might have Lyme disease.
Some days later, bruises appeared on my legs, first one and then another, and within another day, my entire body was covered in them. A friend, a nurse, saw the deep blue marks and said, “You have Lyme disease! Get to a doctor right away!” How she knew I have no idea — because they didn’t look like the pictures of the bull’s-eye rash I’d seen in books.
My doctor ordered blood tests. Indeed, I had Lyme. Soon my doctor was talking with specialists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia. I was a rare case. I had all four of the identifying factors: a verified tick bite, flulike symptoms, a positive blood test, and a bruiselike rash, known medically as erythema migrans, or EM. My doctor prescribed four weeks of a powerful antibiotic, doxycycline, and when the symptoms hadn’t completely subsided in that time, an additional two weeks.
The antibiotics cleared the rash immediately. The fever was subdued, but not my fear. I Googled “Lyme disease” on my computer. More than a million results came up, and to my dismay, many of them were in remarkable disagreement about almost everything. There were scores of “Lyme disease associations” to consult. Which ones were useful? I had no way to tell. I read dozens of personal stories — all with the same theme. The Lyme disease treatment was as perplexing as its cause.
I read about Allen C. Steere, M.D., the physician who first gave the disease its name — and who later received death threats and refused to make public appearances without security guards. I read about doctors who had been hauled before their state medical boards for prescribing long-term antibiotics, risking suspension of their licenses. I was mystified. This was beginning to sound like a John le Carre novel. My journey down the information highway had left me with more questions than ever.
Some of the Web sites I visited, such as lyme-rage.info, appeared to be outlets for fury against the medical establishment and the insurance companies. I could relate to that. My health insurance had expired just two weeks before I was diagnosed. A cancer survivor, I was in the midst of applying to insurance companies when I received the Lyme diagnosis. And so, on the next application, I dutifully reported my past history — not only with cancer but now with Lyme. That application was denied. The reason stated? Lyme disease. I thought, “How could Lyme” — which I thought of then as merely an achy, flulike illness — “be worse than cancer?” | <urn:uuid:1bf42f15-159a-4dbf-ac9c-1066edc991a1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.yankeemagazine.com/article/features/lymecountry | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980719 | 842 | 1.695313 | 2 |
- My NYPL
New & Notable
Made at NYPL
Tools and Services
- Using the Library
I am a...
- Classes & Events
- Support the Library
Goin' to the Dogs Part 2: A List of Stories About Man's Best Friend
Dog stories was the January theme for Mixed Bag: Story Time for Grown-Ups, the read-aloud program I do on Wednesdays at lunch-time every other week. (I promised to read cat stories later this year in rebuttal.) Most of the stories I chose to read in January were selected from the book The Best Dog Stories. Since I included a list of 25 favorite films about dogs in my last blog post, this post features a list of favorite books about dogs.
As with the list of films, this list of dog books is not intended to be exhaustive, just some of the more popular and well-known stories about dogs, listed in chronological order by publication date. Whenever a book on the list was adapted into a film, I noted it and linked it to the Library's catalog, if possible. Eleven of the titles on the dog film list were based on books, plus the recent biography of Rin Tin Tin by Susan Orlean. I did not include those titles on this list. Please let me know which is your favorite dog story or if I left your favorite one off the list (sorry!)
- Beautiful Joe: An Autobiography of a Dogg (1893). First on the list is my personal childhood favorite by Margaret Marshall Saunders. The story is based on a real dog in Ontario, Canada, an Airedale terrier who was abused but eventually rescued in 1890. The dog tells his own story, similar in style to Black Beauty, written by Anna Sewell in 1877. The full text of Beautiful Joe is available online to read or to download free from Project Gutenberg.
- Lad, A Dog (1919). Near the top of the list is one of the most famous writers of dog stories, Albert Payson Terhune, an author and journalist who bred collies on his estate in New Jersey. This is his most famous work, based on his collie Lad. The book was a best seller that has been reprinted 80 times and was adapted into a film of the same name in 1962.
- Big Red: The Story of a Champion Irish Setter and a Trapper's Son Who Grew Up Together, Roaming the Wilderness (1945). Jim Kjelgaard was an American author of young adult novels known for his stories of dogs and animals, and this is his most famous book. It was made into a Disney film in 1962.
- Where The Red Fern Grows: The Story of Two Dogs and a Boy (1961). This is a children's book by Wilson Rawls about a boy who buys and trains two Redbone Coonhounds in the Ozarks. It was made into a popular film of the same name in 1974.
- Travels with Charley: In Search of America (1962). In 1960, John Steinbeck took a road trip with his French standard poodle Charley and wrote this travelogue about the trip — an old man with his ageing dog as his companion, driving cross country together, seeing the whole country one last time, and trying to make sense of it.
- The Plague Dogs (1977). Richard Adams, most well-known for his heroic fantasy Watership Down (1972), which features rabbits, subsequently wrote this adventure story about two dogs, a mongrel named Rowf and a fox terrier named Snitter, who escape from a British animal testing facility and become the targets of a nationwide doghunt. It was made into an animated film of the same name in 1982.
- A Dog's Life (1995). Peter Mayle is most famous for his series of autobiographical novels, beginning with A Year in Provence. A Dog's Life tells the story of the dog named Boy that Mayle adopted while living there, told from Boy's point of view. Boy is a witty and urbane narrator who comments freely on the foibles of "management" (his owners). The black and white whimsical illustrations are by Edward Koren. (Note: There is an unrelated silent film of the same name from 1918, starring Charlie Chaplin and a mongrel named Scraps.)
- Roverandom (1998). J.R.R. Tolkien told this story to his son in 1925, but it was not published until 1998. A young dog named Rover annoys a wizard who turns him into a toy. Rover travels the world over, to the moon and under the sea, to find the wizard and ask to be turned back into a normal dog again. The full text is available online.
- Timbuktu (1999). Award-winning American author Paul Auster wrote this story about a dog named Mr. Bones whose master, a homeless man named Willy G. Christmas, is dying. Christmas refers to heaven as Timbuktu, and Mr. Bones is worried that dogs don't go to Timbuktu and that he may never see his master again.
- Because of Winn-Dixie (2000). Kate DeCamillo (who also wrote The Tale of Despereaux) won a Newbery Honor in 2001 for this children's book about a 10 year-old girl named India Opal Buloni who lives in a trailer park in Florida. She finds a dog in the supermarket and claims he is hers in order to save him from going to the pound. The book was adapted into a film of the same name by Twentieth Century Fox in 2005.
- For the Love of a Dog: A Memoir (2001). Elisabeth Rose wrote this biography of her beloved border collie Kierney. During the course of the book, she describes the unusual communion that humans have with their animal companions. At age 12, Rose can't believe it when the priest tells her animals don't go to heaven because they don't have souls. Living with, listening to, and loving her pets leads her to believe otherwise.
- A Dog Year: Twelve Months, Four Dogs, and Me (2002). Jon Katz is an American journalist and author who has written several books about dogs and training dogs. This is the story of Devon, the troubled border collie he adopts shortly after his two yellow Labrador retrievers die. Working with Devon helps Katz refocus his life and work through a mid-life crisis. The book was made into a film starring Jeff Bridges in 2008.
- The Darkest Evening of the Year (2007). Dean Koontz is a prolific novelist whose suspense novels and thrillers include elements of horror, mystery, and science fiction. In this mystery, the protagonist, Amy Redwing, has founded an organization called Golden Heart that rescues abandoned golden retrievers and finds homes for them. Amy has developed a special bond with her newest dog Nickie. However, after Nickie's rescue, Amy begins to experience a chain of supernatural events, and thereby hangs a tale. Koontz is a dog lover who has written several books "with" his golden retriever Trixie: A Big Little Life, Christmas is Good, Bliss to You, and Life is Good: Lessons in Joyful Living. He is also an avid supporter of Canine Companions for Independence, a non-profit organization that trains and provides assistance dogs.
- Christmas Dogs: A Literary Companion (2005). This anthology of short stories about dogs and their owners at Christmas time includes works from James Herriot, Willie Morris, Jon Katz, and Susan Orlean.
- Dog Spelled Backwards: Soulful Writing by Literary Dog Lovers (2007). Author Mordecai Siegal presents a collection of writings about the divine nature of dogs from American and English literature, including selections from fiction, nonfiction, prose, and poetry.
Some dog books and stories are out of print but available online. The story I read on January 25, 2012, by Terhune was "The Coward," written in 1922, about a six-month old collie puppy named Laund who shows a natural talent for herding sheep. He is so good his owner wants to enter him in the annual field trials competition held by the National Collie Association. Then Laund is savagely attacked and wounded by a hawk and apparently loses his nerve. The full text is available on line.
In that same session, I read a story called "The Mixer" by P. G. Wodehouse, a British humorist who is famous for his stories and novels about Jeeves, the inimitable British valet who continually saves the day for his master, Bertie Wooster. With typical Wodehouseian wit, the dog tells the story of how he unwittingly gets involved in an attempted burglary. This story was first published in the United States in the June 1916 issue of Redbook under the title “The Mixer: He Meets a Shy Gentleman.” A follow up story appeared in the July 1916 issue called “The Mixer: He Moves in Society.” The full text of both stories is available on line.
Next Story Time: Wednesday, February 22, from 1 p.m. to 1:45 p.m., on the first floor of Mid-Manhattan Library.
February's theme: Celebrate Black History Month with readings of Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, and Zora Neale Hurston. | <urn:uuid:b4eda47e-2fb7-4792-a6aa-77b35a00dc7f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nypl.org/blog/2012/02/13/goin-dogs-pt-2-list-stories-about-mans-best-friend | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964785 | 1,958 | 1.757813 | 2 |
View Larger Map
A mysterious mega-stink showed up in the greater St. Louis area on Sunday morning. St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Carolyn Tuft attempted to track down the source of the foul odor. She checked the with usual suspects, but both the gas company and a local sewage treatment plant said “it’s not us.”
Ms. Tuft followed up one rather unusual explanation: that the smell is from chemically treated road salt that’s been spread around recently. That drew a denial from the Missouri Department of Transportation.
The online version of her story attracted nearly one hundred comments. Several people thought the smell resembled that of oil refineries in nearby Illinois. Other suggested a more exotic source: sulphurous fumes seeping out of the ground as a result of recent seismic activity (the New Madrid fault, site of a devastating 19th century quake, runs close by.)
I emailed Ms. Tuft who continues to follow the story; she is looking into the seismic theory.
The online comments run from the usual jokes and posturings to local people simply adding their olfactory observations. These latter are potentially valuable data points. For example, Lulu C. says “I still smell it today everywhere from Sunset Hills to St. Ann.”
Being unfamiliar with the local geography, I decided to take all eighteen smelly locations specifically mentioned in the comments and map them. The result is the Google map atop this post; it can also be found here.
To me, the odor locations form a remarkable pattern: they closely track the western bank of the Mississippi River. Could the river be the odor source?
UPDATE 8:42 PM
On reflection, there may be a better explanation. Look at a large version of the Google map; imagine a line running through the map pins. It runs from SW to NE—pointing directly at Roxana, Illinois, which commenters “nickylouse” and “wmh95970” said is the home of oil refineries. I don’t know the area but the Google satellite view shows what look like oil storage facilities in Roxana. The wind during the smell episode was from the northest. Could the Roxana refineries be the source of the stink?
UPDATE January 28, 2009 With a Whimper Not a Bang . . .
Here, in its entirety, is the followup to the Big Stink in St. Louis, from today’s Post-Dispatch:
Foul Odor Fades Away, at LastWell, there you have it. Despite a string of odor “sightings” aimed directly at the refineries of Roxana, IL, Fire Capt. Keuss declares it “one of those mysteries.”
A St. Louis fire captain said that the foul odor that permeated the St. Louis area Sunday and Monday has gone away, but no one knows what caused it.
St. Louis Fire Capt. Robert Keuss said Tuesday evening that there have been no more reports of the rotten smelling air. Yet, no one—from gas companies to sewage treatment plant operators—know what caused it.
“It just remains one of those mysteries,” Keuss said.
I wonder if that’s what he tells his family when he cuts the cheese. I guess it’s better than blaming it on the dog. | <urn:uuid:ba3d9ac6-17b1-417b-8a25-59775ade461a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.firstnerve.com/2009_01_01_archive.html | 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 | 0.93813 | 703 | 1.828125 | 2 |
I’m an engineer at ‘the track.’ We have 327 acres in Connecticut, where Consumer Reports owns its own test track.
We have over 50 different tests that we do on cars, ranging from acceleration and braking and emergency handling to going out for a daylong drive with five or six cars all in a convoy, after which we come back and record our results.
I drive a different car to and from work every day. At the end of the day, I walk up to a wall with a board of keys on it. And there are usually 40 or 50 different cars that are available for me to drive. I’ll drive a car home and back the next day, paying attention to how it handles, how easy its controls are to use, and its fuel economy. Each car has a logbook where we record our notes.
Tom Mutchler ’93
Automotive Test Engineer, Consumer Reports
Major: Mechanical Engineering
Car driven at Rochester: 1981 Buick Electra. “My grandfather was nice enough to loan it to me. It wasn’t the best car in the snow. I remember it in the Hill Court parking lot just spinning its back tires.”
My wife and I own one car, a 2010 Honda Odyssey. We don’t have kids. But we have this minivan because we kayak, we mountain bike, we do all these outdoor activities. It’s so nice to have the space. The way we wound up with it is we took the car on vacation. And then we started borrowing it on weekends.
If you’re going to buy a car, be really honest with yourself. How much car do you need? There’s been this tendency toward buying large SUVs or four-wheel drive. But if you live in a place where it only snows once a year, you probably don’t need four-wheel drive. You might watch ads where you see an SUV going off-roading, yet you’re probably never going to do that. If you’re able to separate your wants from your needs, you’ll probably buy a vehicle that will cost you less money and get better fuel economy.
There are two companies that clearly stand out. One of them is Hyundai. Hyundai used to be a laughingstock. Even today, people will say, ‘Hyundai? Are you crazy?’ But they’re incredibly determined, and it’s showing up in their products. Virtually every car they come out with ends up scoring very well and winds up being very reliable.
The other stand-out company is Ford. They’ve been very focused. That’s a horrible pun. But they’ve taken cars that were OK cars, like the Mustang and the Fusion, and they’ve extensively reworked them. The Focus and the Fusion are more reliable than the Japanese competition, which to many people would have been unimaginable just a few years back.
One of the things I’ve learned is that it’s very difficult anymore to say that an entire brand is good. Ford has a few products that aren’t that great. Toyota has some terrific products, and they also have some lousy products. There are some recent Hondas we don’t recommend.
It’s fascinating to be in the business at this point because it’s anybody’s game. You can’t say anymore, ‘Oh well, that car’s made by so-and-so, it’s not going to be good.’ You can now be surprised all the time. And we are. | <urn:uuid:9ff3b553-e888-4c35-a8dd-a7d594ab7a8a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.rochester.edu/pr/Review/V73N3/1001_masterclass.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970628 | 769 | 1.601563 | 2 |
Machine design is a broad field, encompassing many disciplines. While it includes hydraulic systems and electronic controls, they are given their own sections and we also provide them as isolated services. Within the field of Machine Design, we are known for the following services:
Qsine provides complete research, development and design
services that enable us to take new ideas or problem situations and
systematically develop machinery for the application. Our service range includes:
Qsine designs custom machine components and complete mechanical systems. Our capabilities are broad ranging from structural elements such as skids, to complex power transmission systems. We will develop systems with the functionality and structural integrity required for the application.
Our specialty is custom work. Normally, we help our customers pioneer products or process's that are not governed by standards bodies. We generally refer on work that involves building to codes and standards, such as building structures, to firms that specialize in that area.
|Qsine offers cast product and tooling design services for both ferrous and non-ferrous materials using sand pattern processes. We do not offer foundry services but we can help you find a foundry to meet your needs. We also have limited experience designing plastic moulds for both gravity and pressure injected parts.|
The Difference at Qsine...
The experience gained from manufacturing in-house has deepened our understanding of material properties and behaviors, tooling, set ups and countless other details. It makes us better, more comprehensive designers than when we relied entirely on outside help for fabrication and machining. Back then it was hard to foresee all the challenges involved in getting to the finished product.
We can now design to detail levels that were previously impossible because we lacked control of the tooling used in production. For example, we can now design bend allowances into templates of formed parts that suit our tooling. The result is faster production with better accuracy, fit and finish.
Not only do we design products around our tooling, we now design and build the production tooling and fixtures required for the product. This ensures that we, as designers, think out the whole manufacturing process right to the end. We believe it gets better results than just designing the product and leaving the rest of the thinking to the contracted shop.
At Qsine, our people are more than "CAD Operators". Our designers manage all aspects of the work from concept development through to detailing their own drawings. They take responsibility for not only the quality of the finished products but for the process of taking it from prototype development to final production. We believe that managing these responsibilities makes us better overall designers also.
To make the design process more effective we encourage our shop workers come into the office and layout their own parts in CAD or to work directly with designers. Regardless of a person's primary role, we try to train all of our people to be multi-disciplined and to learn as many aspects about designing and making machinery as possible.
We have staff with a great depth and knowledge in CAD systems and customizing it to suit our needs. Qsine adopted 2D CAD in 1987 and went into full 3D solid modeling in 1993. We were one of the participants in the "pioneering" stage of mid-range 3D CAD systems and we have used our software to develop many sophisticated parts and assemblies. As an example, the military project ILDS Remote Detection Vehicle was modeled in 3D, including every nut and bolt.
At Qsine we see design as integral to the manufacturing process. We feel that we are different from most firms both because of the way we encourage shop hands to develop and enhance design skills while also having designers do the same with their shop skills. This keeps everyone focused on creating better designs and products and assuming the responsibility for the outcome of projects they participate in. | <urn:uuid:5a5aaa12-b133-492d-adef-7d71cc516615> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://qsine.ca/?page=InDesignMachine | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957798 | 778 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Habitat for Humanity was founded on the conviction that every man, woman and child should have a decent, safe, and affordable place to live. Through volunteer labor and donations of money and materials, Habitat and its homeowner families have built or rehabilitated more than 400,000 houses. A nonprofit, nondenominational Christian housing ministry, Habitat invites people of all backgrounds, races, and religions to build together in partnership.
First Baptist is joined with 11 other churches in constructing a Habitat Home at 2803 S. Houston. We had a hugely successful work day September 24, 2011...check out our project gallery. | <urn:uuid:f950ecf2-4e96-4020-ba8c-3aa4e09e4cec> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.firstamarillo.org/missions-habitat-house | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954346 | 127 | 1.734375 | 2 |
In the past year, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) has renewed its focus on combating employee misclassification, and there has been a recent significant increase in the number of wage-and-hour lawsuits. In many of these cases, workers are challenging their designation as exempt employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act ( ).
A recent case, Mullins v. Target Corp. (No. 09-07573, N.D. Ill., 2011), illustrates such a situation and emphasizes the need for employers to properly classify their employees.
Case of the retail detective
In July 2002, Christine Mullins began working in the Target retail chain’s Assets Protection Division as an assets protection team leader, an exempt position. Employees in the division work to prevent employee theft and customer shoplifting in an effort to enhance profitability, minimize loss and business disruptions and provide a safe and secure environment.
About two years later, Mullins was ...(register to read more) | <urn:uuid:f32e4311-77ab-4e40-a026-ea9b6ea54081> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.businessmanagementdaily.com/14863/dol-cracks-down-are-your-classifications-flsa-compliant | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958729 | 200 | 1.578125 | 2 |
Selected over Athens to host the Centennial Summer Games, Atlanta staged one of the most extravagant Games in Olympic history. With a five-hour opening ceremony and the creation of a country fair atmosphere complete with booths, amusement park rides, and concerts, the 1996 Olympics cost nearly $1.7 billion. For the first time, the Games received no governmental financial support. Instead, corporate sponsorsincluding Coca-Cola, which supplied over $300 millionand television rights were relied upon to defray costs. The result, many claimed, was excessive commercialization, and few believed that a privately funded Games would be held in the future. The Games also experienced transportation and accommodation problems, and, though extra security precautions were taken, a pipe-bomb explosion in Centennial Olympic Park caused one death. The perpetrator, American Eric Rudolph, also later bombed a gay night club in 1997 and an abortion clinic in 1998. He was sentenced to multiple terms of life imprisonment in 2005.
For the first time, all national Olympic committees (NOCs) invited to compete sent athletes, including each of the former Soviet republics, Burundi, North Korea, the Palestinian Authority, and Hong Kong, which won its first (and last) gold medal before its reunification with China (1997). A record 197 NOCs sent more than 10,000 contestants. The number of events reached 271 as women's football (soccer), beach volleyball, lightweight rowing, women's softball, and mountain biking (cross-country cycling) made their debuts.
Standouts at the Atlanta Games included Carl Lewis (U.S.), who won his ninth gold medal in track and field, and Fu Mingxia (China), who won the women's platform and springboard diving events. The 200-metre and 400-metre sprints were swept in the men's and women's competitions by Michael Johnson (U.S.) and Marie-José Pérec (France), respectively; Svetlana Masterkova (Russia) won the 800- and 1,500-metre titles.
Women's swimming was dominated by Michelle Smith (Ireland). Her three gold medals, however, came amid rumours of drug use. In the men's events three swimmers each captured two individual gold medals: Aleksandr Popov (Russia), Danyon Loader (New Zealand), and Denis Pankratov (Russia). In women's gymnastics the team event was won by the surprising U.S. squad, while the individual contests were dominated by Lilia Podkopayeva (Ukraine), who won two gold medals and one silver, including the title in the all-around. Aleksey Nemov (Russia) was the standout in the men's gymnastics competition. His six medals, including two gold, were the most won at the 1996 Games. | <urn:uuid:cb1fccb7-a952-47e6-917f-016316fc42cc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.britannica.com/olympics/reflections/article-9487620 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973857 | 579 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Victor Fries was a talented scientist, with a horrible past (a violent father, no friends) that married the love of his life, Nora Fries. When Nora is diagnosed with a rare terminal illness, Victor's life begins to spiral downhill. In a desperate attempt to save her life, he begins work at a large corporate company run by the evil and corrupted Ferris Boyle. Fries, as he cannot find a way to cure Nora, finds a way to place her in cryo-stasis. In order to save Nora he has to steal equipment from the company he is working for. When Ferris finds out about Fries stealing from him, he and some of his goons try to kill Fries in the cryo lab. This results in an accident changing Fries so that he can only live in sub-zero temperatures. To counter this, Fries builds himself a cryo-suit to keep his body temperature below zero (powered by diamonds) and an ice gun. Mr. Freeze is born. Freeze was first known as Mr. Zero (Batman issue 121). The Title of "Mr. Freeze" was thanks to the 1960's television series which popularized the character. And little known fact: Two-Face was originally slated to be the character but it was thought that he would be "too scary" for kids.
Mr. Freeze was created by Bob Kane, Sheldon Moldoff and Dave Wood (the last two creators are uncredited).
Silver Age: Earth-One
The Silver Age incarnation appears in Comic Book Limbo and is encountered by Animal Man. Mr. Freeze claims that he has been in Limbo so long he has forgotten what a human face looks like. Animal Man, taking pity on Freeze, gives him a photograph of his family.
Modern Age: New Earth
The main difference between Freeze and the other Batman´s foes is that he is not a madman like the Joker. Freeze´s actions used to have logic and a deep motivation (to collect diamonds to preserve his life and find a way to save his wife). This explains why he does not like to collaborate with the other Gotham criminals. An exception happened during "Dark victory", when he worked with Two-Face. Two Face paid him a lot of money and Freeze helped him to escape jail and to kill some mob´s bosses. It must be noted that Harvey Dent had Freeze´s sympathy because of his strange and tragic situation with his wife, Gilda Dent. Also, sometimes when he´s very enraged, frustrated or confused, Freeze has arrived to attack directly Gotham´s inhabitants ("Batman: Mr. Freeze"), killing innocents, but it is not his habitual behavior. He is not a mass-murderer, like Poison Ivy or the Joker.
Nearly all of Mr. Freeze's crimes are attempts to try and save Nora's life, although he has also tried to take revenge for his mutation on Ferris. Mr. Freeze finally killed Ferris. Mr. Freeze´s weak point, then, was his helmet, that was broken by Batman, seriously damaging his cryo-suit, and allowing the Dark Knight to catch Fries, who later, fixed it. During "No Man´s Land", he took control of Gotham during some weeks. His kingdom was defined as the less brutal, compared with Killer Croc´s occupation. Mr. Freeze has defeated during his career Robin ( Tim Drake) and Batgirl (the last one). He also survived to the attack of a Predator ("Batman VS Predator III"). Also, his freezing technology defeated Catwoman (in Rome) and a Predator (when Batman used Freeze´s weapon). Freeze showed also his good deeds years ago, helping the Flash to solve a crime. He also helped Batman defeat Clayface ("Shadow of the Bat 75", but only because Batman manipulated him), and also, recently, helped Batgirl to defeat Ra´s Al Ghul´s plans of world destruction.
Mr. Freeze has been announced to be the main antagonist of the crossover Night of the Owls. The Court of Owls sends Talons to kill almost forty of the most important citizens of Gotham, being Mr. Freeze one of them. Red Hood, Starfire and Red Arrow choose to save him, and Red Robin is set to be part of it.
Major Story Arcs
Modern Age: New Earth
During War Games, Freeze is brought in by a rival gang to kill several members of the mafia, in retaliation for their attacking of family members, in exchange for diamonds. Following the gang members arriving at what they believe to be a peace conference Freeze ambushes them, freezing them only to be attacked by Catwoman. Catwoman manages to defeat him by kicking him out of a window, which he then hits a brick wall incapacitating him, while Catwoman calls Bruce so he can be locked up in Arkham.
In 2005 ("Legends of the Dark Knight 190-1"), he suffered a depression, caused by his lack of success healing / resurrecting his wife, and considered the idea of suicide, but Batman saved him. In that episode, he defeated Batman with gas, but let him live. He also, months later, ("Gotham Knights, 59") captured Batman again, and created a trap that would have killed Batman and himself, but Freeze had a long conversation with Batman, and finally recovered his aim, and even helped Batman to escape. Since then, his depression finished, and Freeze recovered his strength to save his wife.
Freeze is one of the villains to join the latest incarnation of the Secret Society of Super VIllains. He used the teams connections to contact Nyssa Al Ghul in order for him to gain access to the Lazarus pit. He builds a machine for the society in return for access to the pits. The procedure is successful in bringing Nora back to life, but she returns damaged and mutated. Thanks to years of experimentation and decomposition Nora has absorbed the properties of the Lazarus Pits and has become Lazara.
Freeze later worked for the first Black Mask when the Red Hood was stirring up trouble in the Gotham Underworld. During Salvation Run he was one of the few Batman´s foes that joined Luthor´s side, instead of the Joker´s. In that comic, he destroyed some of Darkseid´s parademons, freezing them. Afterwards, Freeze briefly allied himself with Hush when he placed Catwoman's heart in cryogenic suspension. Freeze was next seen in Battle for the Cowl, Mr. Freeze captured Commissioner Gordon and held him hostage. However, he was defeated and sent to Iron Heights until Arkham Asylum is rebuilt. Freeze was then freed along with the rest of the prisoners by Black Mask. An explosive device was planted in his head to prevent himand the rest of the group from rebelling. Not wanting to work for Mask, Mr. Freeze sets up a device to remove the chip. It needs a power source, so he captures Black Lightning. Black Lightning escapes, and knocks out Mr. Freeze. The Outsiders take pity on him and remove the chip.
On the Night of the Owls, Mr. Freeze stages a breakout at Arkham, ruthlessly attacking many guards in search for his cryo-suit and makes his way to the Penguin's Iceberg Lounge in order to obtain his weaponry. Fries endeavors to resurrect Nora using a formula he developed, which was used by the Court of Owls to raise the Talons. A flashback event from six years ago reveals that Bruce Wayne was instrumental in firing Victor from Wayne Laboratories and decommissioning the research that he was working on--namely bio-cryonics. Freeze, enraged by this, hurled a chair at Bruce, which hit the cryotanks in the laboratory and exploded all over him. The accident left Victor biologically changed, his skin cells now storing the cold and rendering him unable to live without being in constant cold temperatures.
Mr. Freeze finds Nora in the penthouse of Wayne Tech. Batman is there to stop him. Mr. Freeze engages Batman in battle, and Batman takes the opportunity to reveal information about the cryogenically frozen Nora. She is not Nora Fries, but a woman named Nora Fields, born in 1943. She was engaged to a lawyer, was diagnosed with an incurable heart condition at 23, and had graduated from college. Her parents decided to place her under this controversial treatment. This is what brough Victor to work for Wayne Industries. She was the first person to undergo crygenic stasis and wrote his doctoral thesis on her decades ago. A separate flashback from Fries' childhood reveals a sinister, twisted, and perhaps delusional, aspect of his personality. A young Victor was walking over the frozen lake to a snowman contest in Nebraska with his mother. She was talking about the tradition of using an apple to create the snowman's eyes, nose, and mouth. Victor was ahead of her when the ice broke and she fell in. The ice preserved her until help arrived. The ice preserved her but, she was left paralyzed and she no longer thought clearly. She had forgotten the apple and when she showed young Victor her hand was bleeding in two circles. He kissed her and telling her to rest, he pushed her into the hole in the lake to drown.
Powers and Abilities
Mr Freeze wields a laser-powered cold gun, capable of creating ice or freezing people or objects. He is a genius and has advanced expertise in the field of cryogenics. His cryo-suit also gives him increased strength and durability. Also because the experimental coolants he fell in were meant to preserve life, his aging process was greatly decreased making him almost immortal.
Weight: 190 lbs
In the future, Mr. Freeze is cryogenically preserved (his head anyway). He undergoes a process by Dr. Stephanie Lake that will give him a new body. Dr. Lake's reasons for giving Freeze a new life is so her employer Derek Powers can transfer his memories into an entirely new body since his temper causes his synthetic skin to shed thus revealing his alter-ego Blight. The process was a complete success for Freeze but only for awhile. Freeze's cellular or molecular form started to become unstable so Dr. Lake decided to cut her losses and attempts to kill Victor. He manages to escape and designs a new cryo suit to keep him preserved. Freeze kills Dr. Lake and exposes Derek's radioactive abilities. Freeze manages to subdue Blight but the warehouse that they were in comes crashing on him. Terry McGinnis and Bruce Wayne both think that Freeze may have survived since he is practically immortal. If Freeze did survive, he is likely to become a target of the new Hush that has come to Gotham City.
An alternate version of Freeze appears in the Reverse Flash altered world of Flashpoint. Freeze's origin appears the same, as he is attacking STAR Labs for technology that could possibly assist his ill wife. He is attacked by Citizen Cold, a villain posing as a hero. Freeze is frozen, but his head escapes on mechanical spider legs, similar to Batman: the Animated Series.
The Doom That Come to Gotham
In the HP Lovecraft inspired Elseworlds, The Doom That Came to Gotham, Mr. Freeze is a man named August Grendon. Grendon is a member of the Cobblepot expedition to Antarctica. Grendon is chosen by the Cthulhu-esque entity called Iog-Sotha to be an agent, and, in a pastiche to the Lovecraft story "Cool Air", is saved from death and decay when in cold temperatures. He is rescued from the Antarctic by a rescue expedition helmed by Bruce Wayne. One of Wayne's sailors, Jason Todd, rigs a refrigerated suit for Grendon whilst keeping Grendon in the freezer of the ship. Grendon ultimately freezes the entire ship in Gotham Bay, and escapes. He is killed when Killer Croctears his suit so that Ra's Al Ghul can create an agent of Iog-Sotha with his corpse.
Batman & Robin
In the movie Batman and Robin he is played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. In Batman and Robin, Mr. Freeze and Poison Ivy are the two villains, but in the last scenes, Freeze is redeemed by Batman, and saves Alfred Pennyworth´s life. Later, he punishes (and probably kills) Poison Ivy by having attempted to kill Nora Fries.
Batman & Mr. Freeze: SubZero
Batman & Mr. Freeze: SubZero is a 1998 direct-to-video animated feature film based on Batman: The Animated Series. It serves as a sequel to both the episode "Deep Freeze" and the feature film Batman: Mask of the Phantasm.
In Batman´s TV series, staring Adam West, he was played by George Sanders (first), Otto Preminger (later) and Eli Wallach (finally). George Sander´s Freeze is serious and tragic, very interesting, marked by the accident that Batman caused (this fact was introduced), and forced to live "sub zero". Otto Preminger's Freeze was the creepiest as, besides discrediting Batman as being a coward and on the make, he kidnapped 'Miss Iceland' from a beauty contest and tried to reduce her tempreture to sub zero, so he could have a girlfriend. Eli Wallach's Freeze is campy and funny and the only Freeze to have a girlfriend that sincerely liked him as well as having a pet seal. The three versions of Mr. Freeze show a strong German accent.
List of Episodes
Season 1, Episode 7: Instant Freeze
Season 1, Episode 8: Rats Like Cheese
Season 2, Episode 19: Green Ice
Season 2, Episode 20: Deep Freeze
Season 2, Episode 59: Ice Spy
Season 2, Episode 60: The Duo Defy
Batman Cartoon (1970's)
Freeze appeared in an episode of Batman´s 1970´s cartoons. The character is like Preminger's version, but bald.
Batman: The Animated Series (1992-1995)
When Mr. Freeze first appeared in Batman: The Animated Series (part of the DC Animated Universe), he had gone through a monumental change from his original comic counter-part. Bruce Timm had transformed him into a victim of injustice and a hero in his own mind. He starts a crusade against the man that caused his accident, and finally, he destroys his financial empire. This version was well accepted by fans and became canon in the regular DC Universe, after Paul Dini´s one-shot comic book "Batman: Mr. Freeze". This version shows Freeze as an anti-hero, instead of as a ruthless villain. In his final appearance in the series, before the film "Batman: Subzero", Freeze helps Batman to defeat a villain that wanted to annihilate the mankind. That villain offered Freeze to resurrect Freeze´s wife, but Victor, man of honor, rejected him, because "Nora would not have accepted the exchange".
List of Episodes
Batman The Animated Series (1992)
Season 1, Episode 3: Heart of Ice
Season 3, Episode 10: Deep Freeze
The New Batman Adventures (1997)
Season 1, Episode 3: Cold Comfort
Freeze would go own to make numerous appearances in the DC Animated Universe, even in the future of "Batman Beyond", where, again, finishes joining Batman´s side, to defeat a powerful villain. Freeze (who knew that his wife died years ago) scarified his life, but destroyed the creature, and saved the city.
List of Episodes
Season 1, Episode 5: Meltdown
The Batman (2004)
Freeze appears in number of episodes of The Batman.
List of Episodes
Season 1, Episode 6: The Big Chill
Season 2, Episode 3: Fire and Ice
Season 3, Episode 12: The Icy Depths
Season 4, Episode 7: Artifacts
Batman the Brave and the Bold
He appears in Batman the Brave and the Bold as Mr. Zero.
Freeze appears in the opening episode of Young Justice, he is fighting against Robin.
In Lego Batman The Video Game, he is a boss and a unlockable character. His powers are Super Strength, and he is immune to acid, he also has a freeze gun that he can freeze teammates or foes with. Mister Freeze also has a watercraft that is immune to acid (Only other person with this kind of watercraft is Killer Croc, who drives some kind of small boat) This can be used to beat certain levels and access certain areas.
Batman: Arkham Asylum
He is mentioned in one of the Riddler's challenge. During the boss fight with Harley Quinn in the Penitentiary area, Mr. Freeze's prison cell can be seen in a corner of the room, encased in ice. Scanning it solves the Riddler challenge and unlocks his character bio.
Batman: Arkham City
Mr. Freeze is introduced in Arkham City where he is voiced by Maurice LaMarche. Mr. Freeze has, like all other Arkham Asylum and Blackgate prisoners been transferred to the newly created Arkham City, here he continued to work on the cure for his beloved Nora from the old GCPD building before she is stolen from him by the Joker, who threatened to kill her unless he worked out a cure for his Titan poisoning. Reluctantly Victor came close to a cure before he was attacked by the Penguin and dragged off to his museum stronghold where he was put on display. Batman finds him there and threatens him to reveal how to by pass his freeze gun that the Cobblepot had armed himself with. After Cobblepot's defeat Freeze is reinstalled in his suit, only to reveal that the cure could not be made unless a specific compound was added ... a compound Batman realises is swimming around in Ra's al Ghul's blood. After retrieving the blood however Freeze double crosses Batman, having been fed up with being pushed around, leading to a harrowing fight in the GCPD station where Batman could not employ the same tactic twice to defeat him. Freeze is eventually defeated however, and Batman promises to find his Nora after Harley Quinn stole the cure during the fight.
DC Universe Online
Mr Freeze appears through out DC Universe Online, having taken over Gotham Mercy Hospital in a villain exclusive mission. He later reappears as one of the three villains who have taken Batman hostage and taken over Arkham Asylum in one of the T2 Alerts. | <urn:uuid:9f1bb055-ff15-485c-a900-e3b89a0eb40a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.comicvine.com/mr-freeze/4005-3715/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975266 | 3,771 | 1.726563 | 2 |
New Tool Cuts Through Wrap Rage
Ever suffer from "wrap rage"? Like when you buy a toy or a kitchen utensil so tightly wrapped in plastic it takes an act of congress to get it open? Now there's a solution.
Mike Sherman, CEO & Founder of Zibra explains.
What is "Open It" ?
It's a consumer friendly product that can open any package. It's a cure for Wrap Rage. Groups of women known as "Designing Women" with the Zibra Company, suffering from frustration of opening plastic packaging took action and developed a solution.
The Open It combines a cutting tool, dual-head screwdriver and retractable cutting blade in one safe and easy to use tool. The Open It easily opens clamshells, toy packaging, boxes, CDs, DVDs, battery compartments and more.
What makes it unique?
The unique part of it is that the jaws are offset - this keeps your hand out of the way so you don't cut your hands.
The Open It cuts thru the wire ties on toys, or electronics, corrugated heavy tape.
But what really makes us unique in the marketplace is we design our products for women, but also by women. We have teams of women, maybe 8 people, and we make sure the chemistry is right. We never talk about products. They talk about the experience of something. So we had a group that explored the problem of opening things - packages, presents, things that arrive at your house. And when we realize we've got something, we add in some engineers who can solve the problem.
Since 83% of all consumer purchase decisions are made by women, we thought it would be a good idea to create products that are designed by women who actually use and have a need for these products.
Are you making money ?
This tool has sold extremely well at Home Depot, Walgreens and Bed Bath & Beyond. We originally placed it in 10,000 retail outlets, now it's in 30,000. It works, it solves a problem.
Why the different colors?
The group that liked the orange was a younger group, and other groups liked berry red and mocha.
Why is it in a hard-to-open package ?
People always ask that. Retailers won't sell it any other way.
How did you get started, and what's ahead ?
I put up my own money. Now we are in the black, and not looking for capital at the moment. But we are looking for more problems to solve and to expand our business. Then we'll look for capital.
Are you a buyout target ?
Not today, we're relatively new. Maybe in 3 or 4 yrs if we maintain the growth. | <urn:uuid:900ea866-486a-4286-9c05-e5f999572918> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cnbc.com/id/24949946 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963969 | 572 | 1.625 | 2 |
Nonetheless, break-ups are an inevitable part of growing into the people we want to become, living the lives we want to lead.
Break-ups can happen for limitless reasons. But you can handle this event with dignity and sensitivity for the other person's experience.
The following are my suggestions for staging a respectful, honest break-up, while leaving room for a potential friendship in the future. Even if future contact isn't your goal, you'll be a happier person for handling a break-up responsibly, with grace and dignity.
I am not a professional counselor, but I have sought the advice of one in the writing of this Instructable.
special thanks to all of those who put creative commons licensing on their photos which allowed me to illustrate this instructable.
Step 1: Know why you want to break up
Your partner's going to want to know what the heck is going on. It's best for both of you if you are prepared to face this question.
If you're mad, that's one thing. Don't act on it just yet. It's really important that you take some time and consider exactly what it is that's made you mad.
If you're sad, or feeling some kind of hard-to-explain or unclear (even to you) emotion, you need to identify that too. It might not seem easy (perhaps you've been avoiding it?), but now's the time.
Is there someone else? Has another prospect drawn your eye? Have you already acted on these feelings? Whether or not you have, you need to get to the bottom of why this is happening - why you're attracted to someone else right now. Working this out now will help prevent a long series of making the same mistakes in the future.
Get some paper. Write down everything you're feeling.
It doesn't have to make sense. It doesn't need punctuation or good spelling or even legible handwriting. This is for your eyes only!
While you're writing, ask yourself some questions:
- Does the relationship make you feel good?
- Does the relationship allow you to evolve and grow in your own directions?
- Does your partner accept you exactly the way you are?
- Do you communicate well?
- Can you resolve conflicts together?
- Do you feel safe?
- What do you feel you're missing? | <urn:uuid:068233d7-b065-486f-ae67-a4c44916095c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Break-Up/CWQ2TJ0GKLIWII2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963385 | 486 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Wired 2012 wasn't just a special event because
of its line up of speakers and endless networking
opportunities -- it also hosted the first live recording of
the Wired.co.uk podcast in front of a paying audience. Joining us
on this very special occasion was David Karp, founder of Tumblr.
Having given a captivating talk to the Wired 2012
conference on Tumblr's ability to disrupt the social network model
by empowering countless forms of media, Karp spoke to the Wired.co.uk podcast team
about life before Tumblr, censorship and becoming a space
Presented here are some highlights from Karp's appearance on the
2012 epsiode of the Wired.co.uk podcast.
Wired.co.uk: Tumblr, for anyone who has managed to avoid
it, is a microblogging platform that David founded when he was 19.
Even when we wrote about you and the business in Wired earlier this
year it had 36 million users -- I think as of the talk you gave
earlier today it now has over 70 million
David Karp: We've just gone past 80 million I think.
When we covered it in the magazine, it was worth over
half a billion pounds -- which is a pretty impressive figure. What
is it about Tumblr that makes it so compelling to users over
traditional blogging platforms?
I think the important distinction is that we're not
thinking about "users", we've really spent the last five years
thinking about "creators" and empowering creators -- I think that
really makes us stand apart from the other big companies, at least
in the consumer web right now -- they're thinking about consumers.
Facebook is trying to get everybody in the world inside its
network, Twitter is trying to give everybody access to events and
celebrities that they appreciate. Tumblr has really been focused on
perhaps not the billions, but the tens of millions of people who
"make the stuff that makes life fun" -- that entertain us, that
inspire us that.
We had much more modest ambitions in the beginning, but from the
very outset this was a set of tools and products intended to help
creators make stuff.
Before Tumblr, before you were even old enough to drink
in the UK, you were made head of product at the website
Yeah, a Mom-and-Pop shop, with a team of like six people
It was more than I was doing at 16! What kind of lessons
did that teach that you've been able to take forward?
The really big thing for me was that I had the privilege
of getting to work with some really smart people on some very
interesting projects from a pretty young age. I picked up some
engineering jobs along the way as I was getting to work on this
tech. I had the unique perspective of getting to work on a lot of
projects that were very much… I wouldn't even say community
orientated, they were things that people lived in, they were
websites that people spent hours a day on. You develop this real
sense or set of sensibilities for what it means to come in and
change a space, or change a place where people spend all their
It was literally a case of any time we would do something
totally inane -- changing the colour of links or moving something
from here to there or changing a label, adding a great new feature
-- the effect that it has on people is the same you can imagine
from your favourite pub that you've been going to for years,
spending hours of every weekday there for a good chunk of your
life, having someone that you can't see come in and change all the
furniture. It doesn't feel good, it feels out of your control. You
take that in an even more personal place, [a place where] you're
creating something inside a network that's really your own, and
then somebody comes in and changes your furniture without your
permission. You develop some really sensibilities about what it
means to develop places on the internet where people
You've always maintained a very open minded view as to
what's acceptable on Tumblr -- how do you maintain that as the site
grows to such huge levels?
There are really two things: the first is that we have
drawn lines, and we were really considerate about where we drew
those lines -- we actually brought somebody into the company who
ran policy at Google for nearly a decade, a guy named Andrew
McLaughlin, who helped us craft a lot of those policies. We worked
with a whole lot of people and we spent a lot of time on it -- I
waited four years to go in and reevaluate those policies.
We're incredibly proud of them today; if you want to read
through our terms of service or community guidelines you'll see we
took a lot of care in crafting those words, and they've held up --
but we have drawn lines around things that we think are wrong, that
we don't want to harbor on Tumblr, and those are some very obvious
things. Some obviously illegal things like child pornography, which
we police very, very aggressively, and then there are things on the
other end that are moral grey areas with things that we're not
comfortable with, like bullying, anything that involves children --
if you're doing something to harass or harm kids then it's not
allowed, anything promoting eating disorders is not allowed,
anything promoting any sort of self harm -- these are things that
we do police aggressively.
Then you get into freedom of expression stuff, and we do allow
"not safe for work" content on Tumblr. One of the best examples I
can give of this happened shortly after an interview I'd given on
the subject and explained "it's too hard to police this stuff,
where do you draw the line; we've got so many professional
photographers on Tumblr, are we going after people over nipples?"
-- that week Lady Gaga posted a photo of her tits, and I was like
"That's it, I'm not going to pull Lady Gaga from the site because
she wanted to post this slightly raunchy photo".
The important thing about the grey area is that we make sure
that nobody is surprised, so we've added a lot of measures and we
continue to add measures that make sure you don't run into that
sort of stuff on Tumblr when you're not looking for it.
At one point Richard Branson got in touch with you
asking if you wanted to be an astronaut -- have you taken him up on
I haven't, I would love to. I don't think they're live yet, I
think they're still waiting for launch. I hope I'm on the waiting
Mark Zuckerberg once told you that you shouldn't give up
on being clever. Do you still speak to Mark much?
I don't unfortunately -- I do a very bad job of turning
up on the West Coast, but the New York team is pretty tightknit --
we roll deep in NYC. I have the privilege of getting to hang out
with these people when I do go out West. On my last trip out there
I got to spend some time with a few of the new people who are
showing up, some people I haven't seen in a while. I did get to
spend some time with the Facebook crew, all of whom are brilliant
-- Shrep on that team is one of the smartest humans you'll ever
interact with. They're all so humble, so excited about the stuff
that they're working on.
Do you "Like" Facebook?
The company is extraordinary, there's so much to take away from
that. They have very different sensibilities than we do -- I really
appreciate their sensibilities. Consider the undertaking of taking
the internet [in which] anonymity was so inherent… and Facebook
[bringing] some sense of true identity to the internet and to the
world -- what an impossible undertaking that they did an incredible
job with, and still do.
What keeps you up at night?
The stuff that keeps me up at night is usually fun stuff
or stuff that I can't wait to get back to work and dig into. The
big thing for me is… there are two things: one is this team that
we've put together. I take so much pride and joy in getting to go
to work with so many smart people, not just unbelievably talented
engineers, but real creative people, real creators. We've managed
to bring a uniquely creative set of product people and engineering
minds together -- we have tons of photographers on our team, tons
of people moonlighting in bands and musicians recording albums,
people writing, hilarious performers -- all sorts of people that
really represent the products that we build and the community that
we are trying to build those products for. I bask in that
The other thing is the big drive; we've set out to make Tumblr
this perfect platform for self-expression. To that end, I don't
want it to be the big monolithic product, the "Facebook" where it
keeps growing and growing and growing, and functionality keeps
getting globed onto this one uber thing. Instead our guiding light,
our vision for this thing is the iPod -- [Apple wanted] this thing
to be perfect at what it does, and reduce it down to the bare
essence of what it means to be a music player -- how to create the
perfect portable music player, and they kind of got it. Over a few
iterations and a few generations of technology it got better and
better and better, but they reduced it to its essence. That's why
we talk about taking away as much from Tumblr as we put into it,
we're trying to find stuff that makes it perfect toward that | <urn:uuid:6c196408-0f56-4d41-940e-bdf7dd18a5a9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-11/06/david-karp-on-tumblr | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973853 | 2,076 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Podcasts & RSS Feeds
Thu February 23, 2012
Exploring the rise of Nigeria's Boko Haram
Nigeria appears to be on the verge of a civil war. The instigator of escalating sectarian conflict seems to be a militant Islamic sect known as the Boko Haram.
The Boko Haram seems bent on toppling the government and bringing Sharia law to Nigeria. The group is blamed for killing more than 300 people -- more than half of them during attacks in January in the northern city of Kano.
To get an insider’s perspective, host David Reed was joined by Tolu Ogunlesi, Omeyele Sowore and Monica Mark.
Tolu Ogunlesi writes a weekly column for a Nigerian newspaper and contributes articles to several British-based publications along with CNN’s website.
Omeyele Sowore is the founder of Sahara reporters, an online community of international reporters and social advocates who write news reports and commentaries from an African perspective.
Monica Mark is the Guardian newspaper's Nigeria stringer and contibutor to TIME magazine. She’s been focusing on sectarian violence in the country and recently interviewed a member of the Boko Haram sect. | <urn:uuid:3ac84134-8b7f-4a05-8c58-167b028018f3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://kbia.org/post/exploring-rise-nigerias-boko-haram | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944958 | 248 | 1.5 | 2 |
Question: Should the city of Rockville be investigated for charges of racism and harassment?
Three Quarters UP
Three Quarters Up
The controversial 70s: Sex, drugs, violence and a teenage boy named Jimmy.
While the world revolves around issues like school integration, forced busing, the end of the Vietnam War and the post-Beatle break-up world of rock and roll, young Jimmy Kayrouz is trying to get over the ffith anniversary of his father's death.
A high school football player with no sense of what's going on around him, he finds himself in the middle of a racial controversy when he begins dating a girl with a "Big Ole Smile".
What happens next is the quintessential tale of growing up in the 70s. | <urn:uuid:c067a8e6-e812-4420-b82d-1fe52f24f59f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thesentinel.com/mont/Mail/GoodCounsel10-11-12 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944761 | 158 | 1.671875 | 2 |
Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco), the operator of the wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant, said on Friday it could have dealt better with the plant's meltdowns if broad preparations were taken, reversing the previous management's view that the disaster was unavoidable due to an unexpected force of nature.
The owner of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle that washed up on B.C.’s Haida Gwaii — a rusty remnant of the devastating tsunami that struck Japan a year ago — has been identified
Nearly 30,000 people lost their jobs in the few minutes that it took the tsunami to cover about half of Ishinomaki, Japan in water. If they do not find work again soon, the city’s prospects are bleak.
The U.S. Coast Guard, firing repeated machine-gun blasts from one of its cutters, on Thursday sank an abandoned Japanese “ghost ship” that had been drifting at sea since last year’s devastating tsunami
An unmanned Japanese 'ghost ship' fishing vessel that was cast adrift following last year’s devastating earthquake and tsunami has likely seen its last day as the U.S. Coast Guard makes plans to sink the vessel as it nears the shores of Alaska.
Powered by WordPress.com VIP | <urn:uuid:805a3e0a-0c01-4454-b4f2-be7f916db90b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://news.nationalpost.com/tag/japanese-tsunami/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967896 | 261 | 1.53125 | 2 |
The Japanese yen has been rising steadily against the dollar for a quarter of a century now. The trend started in 1985 when Japan agreed, in an international accord signed at New York’s Plaza Hotel, to intervene in currency markets to arrest what seemed at the time as an excessive U.S. trade deficit aggravated by the strength of the dollar.
While most economic commentators portray the strong yen as a fundamental problem for Japan, portfolio manager Drew Edwards of Advisory Research (ARI) Funds says the Japanese have proven themselves adept at adjusting to a stronger currency. The yen has appreciated over 50% against the dollar in just the past five years.
In an interview with AdvisorOne, Edwards said it is true that Japan is a global exporter and as such can be adversely impacted by a strong yen. But that’s not the whole story. “Seventy percent of Japanese GDP is based on domestic consumption,” he says. “Domestic consumers benefit from this.”
Another key beneficiary of a strong yen is investors, Edwards (left) adds. “Most of the companies we invest in are usually net cash. They have strong balance sheets with a lot of cash. What they’re doing with it increasingly is invest outside of Japan. The yen is so strong that they’re able to buy foreign assets at a great discount.”
The result, he says, is a significant pick-up in corporate M&A. When his Advisory Research team visits companies, “We ask what they’ll spend their cash on; that’s what they say.”
Edwards emphasizes that his team members are bottom-up investors, so they’re not focusing their search specifically on companies that are takeover targets. “We’re buying companies that are asset rich, trading at a discount to net asset value.” But he says it is precisely those stocks that are cheap relative to NAV and out of favor that are often attractive as acquisitions.
Edwards says that the energy sector particularly is a “space where we’re seeing a lot of Japanese interest.” Because Japan imports nearly all of its energy resources, the Japanese are keenly interested in the new fracking technologies that can extract abundant natural gas in friendly allied countries like the U.S. and Canada, he adds. And he notes that the strong yen helps Japanese companies importing energy and raw materials used in production, though he acknowledges that Japanese companies on an aggregate basis will be hurt by the yen’s strength.
In any event, most of Advisory Research companies are net cash, and consequently store their financial assets in a rich currency, giving them a strong advantage as investors.
Though the firm does not make its investment decisions on macroeconomic criteria, most of the international stocks they are buying tend to be in Asia and Japan and not in Europe or the U.K. “We’re just not finding that the valuations [of European companies] are cheap enough to justify the macro-level risk in the region,” Edwards says.
Two of Edwards’ current favorites are Chugoku Marine Paints (TYO:4617) and Maruichi Steel Tube (TYO:5463). Chugoku a $500 million market-cap, Tokyo-based industrial paint manufacturer with a leading position in the market for paints used on ships and containers. Edwards calls it a play on emerging-markets growth since most of the company’s revenue stems from rapidly growing Asian markets like China, South Korea and Vietnam. Edwards says its current P/E is 6.3; its price-to-book is just 0.75 despite a consistent 13% return on equity.
Maruichi Steel Tube is a $2 billion market-cap, Osaka-based manufacturer of welded steel tubes and pipes. The company has no debt, pays a 2.8% dividend and has a price-to-book ratio of just 0.7 and a P/E of 13.9. Edwards says its low valuation is due to a perception that the construction market has matured, but he says this overlooks the fact that “Maruichi has invested significantly in growing overseas markets, such as Vietnam and India.” Edwards says shareholders will benefit from rapid revenue growth and improved return on earnings as the firm leverages its strong balance sheet.
Advisory Research, which targets institutional and high-net-worth investors and investment advisors, manages four funds: the All-Cap Value Fund (ADVGX); Global Value Fund (ADVWX); International Small-Cap Value Fund (ADVIX); and the International All-Cap Value Fund (ADVEX). | <urn:uuid:84477247-2dc8-44e3-9a8a-9e3ee8225da9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.advisorone.com/2011/11/11/strong-yen-puts-foreign-companies-in-easy-reach-of?t=economy-markets&page=2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962319 | 965 | 1.757813 | 2 |
Change of address
If you want to change the physical or mailing address of your business (sole proprietorship, partnership, or corporation), you or your representative have to notify the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) as soon as possible.
Why is it important?
Correct address information is crucial to your business accounts since it affects such things as the mailing of notices, returns, and remittance forms. Mailing addresses also determine the office of responsibility of an account.
Your business accounts could be: GST/HST, payroll, corporation, import/export, registered charity, or any other business account.
Owners can change the mailing, physical, and books and records address of their business by using the "Manage address" service in My Business Account. This service is available to business owners only. However, representatives will continue to have access to the "View address" service.
For information on who can change the address of your business, see Authorizing a business representative.
By mail or fax
Send your request by mail or by fax to your tax centre. Include the following information:
- your signature
- your business number (BN)
- your new address
- the effective date of the change
What is a physical address?
The physical address is the business or head office address. This address must be where the day-to-day activities take place.
It must represent the physical location of the actual business. You cannot use such things as RR#s or PO boxes as a business address. If a street address is not available, use the legal description of the location of the business. For example, Lot 1, Concession 2.
Can the mailing address be different from the physical address?
Yes, the mailing address can be different from the physical address. For example, you could have your business mail delivered to your home or your accountant.
Do you have different mailing addresses for each of your registered business accounts?
If you have different mailing addresses for your registered business accounts, you or your representative must notify us of the change of address.
- E-services for businesses
- Change of contact person
- Change of representative
- Canada Business Network
- Related provincial and territorial government sites
- Industry Canada
- Date modified: | <urn:uuid:736ba1b2-f361-4def-8539-6f70d9742afc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/tx/bsnss/tpcs/lf-vnts/chngddrss-eng.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930315 | 465 | 1.84375 | 2 |
Serious readers can always use a little help in the organizational efforts, and nothing helps organize your reading materials as efficiently and attractively as a library stand
selected from our many options. Choose a free standing library stand that can fit into any room of the home or office, and give you a permanent place to sort and access any variety of reading materials you have on hand. From oversized industry magazines to the smallest paperbacks, you can use a library stand to sort and store a wide range of different types of reading materials while keeping each handy and ready for immediate use. To bring an increased mobility to your intentional professional flexibility, choose a library stand that features strong caster wheels to bring your books and reference materials to wherever you need them the most, from the office to boardroom and back again with ease.
The library stand also makes a great addition to the interior design plans of your home, as the sturdy frame will gently but elegantly fit within the colors and balance of any future look or feel you create. A library stand
will keep your favorite books separated from your larger collection, or create a stable, safe and special place for your children to build their own growing fascination for all things written. For better organizational and ergonomic possibilities in any personal or professional environment, you can rely on a library stand to hold your smartest solutions. | <urn:uuid:f05b722d-c9c2-4958-b179-80641754b18f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.levenger.com/SHOP-1267/Product-Guide-559/Tables---Stands-681/Library-Stands-21887.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942422 | 268 | 1.554688 | 2 |
The African Development Bank (AfDB), has begun constructing East African roads with the 120-kilometer Namanga-Arusha-Moshi-Holili road in Rombo District, Kilimanjaro Region.
The project is aimed at simplifying communication with other countries as well as boosting their economic growth.
This was said yesterday by AfDB representative Laurence
Shigundu at the road stakeholders’ meeting in Kilimanjaro Region where he also pointed out that the project will be administered by the governments of Tanzania and Kenya in order to achieve the required standards.
Shigundu said that road is essential for the economy and cooperation of East Africans, adding that the completion of construction will bring development among the countries.
Moreover, Shigundu said the completion of the road will significantly help reduce traffic congestion and accidents besides improving the growing markets regional.
Speaking at the event, Moshi District Commissioner Moses Samizi said the government will give all the cooperation required to make the project successful.
He said in areas where people deserve to be compensated, they will be paid according to the law.
Meanwhile, Tanzania National Road Agency (Tanroads) manager Engineer Rubirya Marwa urged the residents of the areas where the projects are going to be implemented to abide by the law including refraining from putting up any structure on the road reserve since the practice blocks implementation of national and international projects.
Rubirya said the road project is very important for the development of the citizens of the two countries. | <urn:uuid:96e85010-c8f4-4ca9-8ed2-4f98ad28c5de> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ippmedia.com/frontend/index.php/hl=23tion=com_content.com/29rontend/rd-after-recent.htmlhl=23tion=com_content.com/29rontend/?l=40958 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95241 | 310 | 1.773438 | 2 |
Los Angeles–based photographer John Divola is perhaps best known for this series of photographs documenting the gradual destruction of an abandoned and oft-vandalized beachfront property at Zuma Beach in Malibu. Without a studio of his own in the 1970s, the artist roamed Los Angeles in search of vacant properties that he could photograph. Using them as his canvas, he sometimes spray-painted his own designs onto their interiors, photographing them before the buildings were destroyed. Reflecting his painterly manipulation of the physical site, Divola’s Zuma photographs skillfully frame spectacular sunset views within these dilapidated structures, making his visually compelling, color-saturated photographs more than just pure documentation. See Divola’s work in Under The Big Black Sun currently on view at MOCA until February 13th, 2012. | <urn:uuid:e65257b1-60a2-472a-b3dc-42d35599b573> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://beautifuldecay.com/2011/10/24/john-divolas-abandoned-zuma-beach/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973495 | 171 | 1.84375 | 2 |
High-Expenditure Part B Drugs
GAO-13-46R, Oct 12, 2012
- Accessible Text:
What GAO Found
In 2010, the 55 highest-expenditure Part B drugs represented $16.9 billion in spending, or about 85 percent of all Medicare spending on Part B drugs, which totaled $19.5 billion. The number of Medicare beneficiaries who received each of these drugs varied from 15.2 million receiving the influenza vaccines to 660 hemophilia A patients receiving a group of biologicals known collectively as factor viii recombinant, which had the largest average annual cost per beneficiary--$217,000. Our analysis showed that most of the 55 drugs increased in expenditures, prices, and average annual cost per beneficiary from 2008 to 2010. The 5 drugs with the largest increase in Medicare expenditures over this time period also had the largest increase in the number of beneficiaries receiving each drug. Four of the 10 drugs which showed the greatest increase in expenditures were also among the 10 drugs showing the greatest price increases.
Spending on Medicare beneficiaries accounted for the majority of estimated total U.S. spending for 35 of the 55 highest-expenditure Part B drugs in 2010. For 17 of the 35, Medicare spending accounted for more than two-thirds of total U.S. spending, defined as spending by the insured population in the United States.
Why GAO Did This Study
In 2010, the Medicare program and its beneficiaries spent about $19.5 billion on Part B drugs--drugs that are commonly administered by a physician or under a physician's close supervision in physicians' offices and hospital outpatient departments. Some of these drugs are particularly expensive for Medicare, either because they are used by a large number of beneficiaries or because their prices are high. These drugs generally differ from drugs beneficiaries obtain through Medicare Part D, which are usually self-administered and for which Medicare, its beneficiaries, and the states spent $61.7 billion in 2010.
Medicare bases its payments for most Part B drugs on the average sales price (ASP), which is calculated from data that manufacturers report quarterly to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the agency within the Department of Health and Human Services that administers Medicare. ASP is the average price, after rebates and discounts, of all sales of a specified drug in the United States; consequently, Medicare's payment rates for Part B drugs are based on prices set by the private market.
Congress asked us to analyze trends in utilization and expenditures for high-expenditure Part B drugs and to estimate Medicare's proportion of total U.S. expenditures for these high-expenditure drugs. This report examines (1) the Part B drugs for which Medicare expenditures were highest in 2010 and the utilization and spending trends for these high-expenditure Part B drugs from 2008 to 2010, and (2) nationwide spending levels for the total U.S. population for these high-expenditure Part B drugs in 2010 and Medicare's percentage of total U.S. spending.
For information, contact James C. Cosgrove at (202) 512-7114 or firstname.lastname@example.org. | <urn:uuid:f9a1427b-5299-4e2d-9898-e8218e511af1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://gao.gov/products/GAO-13-46R | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948253 | 653 | 1.703125 | 2 |
Clickfraud (v., n.) Refers both to the act of, and the person who commits the act of, dropping names and references in email, without explanation, knowing that readers will have to use Google and/or Wikipedia to understand.
The clickfraud gains a temporary superiority over his reads ("I know stuff you don't") but at the cost of extra (and wasted) clicks for his readers. See also urldumper. Clickfraud is usually a sign of insecurity. Clickfraud can be cured with humour and gentle mockery: the clickfraud (n.) will either understand and change his habits, or will find another community in which to grandstant. Aggressive and persistent clickfraud is a form of trolling, and considered offensive. | <urn:uuid:24deb392-0b3d-4337-a628-c826f691d20c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.devilswiki.com/wiki:clickfraud | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945732 | 156 | 1.742188 | 2 |
May 4th, 2010 | Posted by: Chris Stedman
Yesterday The Friendly Atheist reported that a student group, the Atheists, Humanists, & Agnostics (AHA) at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is engaging in a “Draw Muhammad” project today. They are not the first; other campus groups have done the same. But this group did something a little different — they reached out to the Muslim Student Association on their campus one day in advance with this letter warning that they would be drawing images of the Prophet Muhammad in chalk on their campus in response to the protests of extremist Muslims over a recent South Park episode.
The MSA responded, saying that they were, in fact, offended. The MSA’s response was thoughtful and patient, pointing out that sending a warning does not absolve one of being disrespectful: “To slap someone in the face, despite warning the person in advance and assuring them of you good intentions, does not make slapping someone in the face ok.” Their letter did nothing more than point out that the AHA’s planned activity was misguided — “Why do you not direct your protest to the groups in question instead of engaging in acts that you yourself acknowledge will offend the vast majority of Muslims, on this campus and off” – and suggest that it was in violation of the campus’ discrimination policies. How did the AHA respond? By saying that the MSA was “using fear and intimidation to suppress criticism of their religion.” Did I miss the fear and intimidation buried in there somewhere?
The idea behind the campaign is to advocate for free speech. It seems to me, however, that the campaign is masking an attack on religious identity with a martyrical “free speech” claim. There are other ways to go about this that don’t knowingly target a specific belief of a particular identity. The Friendly Atheist blog wrote, “It’s a stick figure drawing. Chill. Out.” Instead of recognizing the ramifications of offensive images — let’s say they were chalking swastikas or, more specific to this issue, something anti-Atheist — we secularists seem far too keen to tell people to “just get over it.” Because that’s an effective approach, right?
The AHA at UW Madison has made an enemy where they could have had an ally. And over what? “Principle”? It seems like a way to stir up negative feelings, an immature approach to a complex situation. Why not instead reach out to the MSA and plan an activity that condemns the extremists who threatened the creators of South Park while still acknowledging that it is a complex issue? Oh, right — because then you couldn’t draw pictures of Muhammad in chalk and create controversy on your campus.
The American Atheists wrote on their “No God” blog on April 29th that “Muslims have been in the news lately with their ridiculous behavior… One thing we need to keep in mind is that Muslims are particularly barbaric and primitive.” This isn’t just bad and oversimplified writing; it is lazy, dangerous, and divisive. Two entries before they too promoted “Everybody Draw Mohamed [sic] Day.” It seems so basic to ask: is this really the best use of our time and resources?
People who engage in such activities are drawing a line (or as Interfaith Youth Core founder Eboo Patel might say, a “faith divide“) between themselves and others, and it is not something as impermanent as one made in sand or etched with chalk. It cannot be so easily erased.
We secularists need to think long and hard about what lines we’re drawing — and who we’re boxing out in the process. We say we want “free speech;” now let’s recognize that with freedom comes responsibility and the need for respectful dialogue despite differences. In other words, as my mom might say: “just because you can doesn’t mean you should.” Chalk may wash away but the divides we build often don’t.
Let’s talk the talk, not chalk for shock. | <urn:uuid:7d9e041d-8dbe-4caf-b042-7084103df5e3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://nonprophetstatus.com/2010/05/04/talk-the-talk-dont-chalk-the-chalk-drawing-a-divide-with-the-draw-muhammad-campaign/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967796 | 885 | 1.546875 | 2 |
PoliticsHome | Only the latest five entries on the PhiWire are visible to non-subscribers
- Sign up to see last 24 hours
Dont have an account?Sign up here
Tuesday 22nd May 2012 | 00:01
Deputy Prime Minister's Office press release
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg will deliver a speech to the Sutton Trust today on social mobility. Extracts from the speech are below.
Check against delivery
Our society is still too closed, too static. A society that still says where you are born, and who you are born to, matters for the rest of your life.
Where working hard and doing the right thing does not guarantee you a better future.
Where children of poor people are more likely to be illiterate. More likely to be unhappy. More likely to die young.
Today, I want to talk about how we can change that.
First let me indicate the scale of the problem we face.
· One in five children are on free school meals; only one in a hundred Oxbridge entrants were;
· Only 7% of children attend independent schools, but public schools provide 70% of high court judges and 54% of FTSE 100 CEOs;
· One in five children from poorer homes achieve five good GCSEs, compared to three out of four from affluent homes.
This is a legacy we cannot afford. Morally, economically, socially: whatever your justification, the price is too high to pay.
We must create a more dynamic society. One where what matters most is the person you become, not the person you were born.
For liberals, this is core stuff. It gets to the very heart of our politics. We are a party and a creed that is defined by our belief in a fairer, more open society.
For me, it's the reason I do this job.
It is the impulse that lies behind our education reforms, including the pupil premium. Education is critical to our hopes of a fairer society. Right now there is a great rift in our education system between our best schools, most of which are private, and the schools ordinary families rely on. That is corrosive for our society and damaging to our economy.
I don't for a moment denigrate the decision of any parent to do their best for their child, and to choose the best school for them. Indeed, that aspiration on behalf of children is one of the most precious ingredients of parenthood.
But we do need to ensure that our school system as a whole promote fairness and mobility, rather than closing down opportunities. We are committed to narrowing the gap in our school system - state and private - and ensuring that all children are given the chance to rise.
The way to do that is to make the state education system better - to level up - and ensure that anyone can get ahead.
And let me get something out of the way right now. I know some people will say I should keep quiet about social mobility.
That my birth, my education, and my opportunities mean I have no right to speak up. I couldn't disagree more. If people like me who have benefited from the system don't speak up, we will never get anywhere.
We have to fight for a society where the fortunes of birth and background weigh less heavily on prospects and opportunities for the future.
I was lucky. But it should not be a question of luck.
It is my strongest political conviction that that if we have a chance to change the way our society works, if we have a chance to open up success to all, we must seize it.
In a moment, I want to tell you how we're going to do so.
But first, I want to take on a few myths.
Myth 1 is that social mobility is simply a sub-set of income inequality. According to this myth, mobility will follow automatically in the wake of greater equality. And so it follows that the only thing we should worry about is closing the gap between rich and poor.
Of course, reducing inequality is a good and laudable aim. But unfortunately it's not the straightforward route to social mobility that its proponents suggest.
In many ways, I wish it was. Life would be much simpler. Our goal would be clear: redistribution of income would do the job.
The trouble is that, as this conference has been discussing, it is just not that simple. The causal links are not that clear.
Of course if the gap is narrower you have less distance to travel. But the uncomfortable truth is that nations with similar levels of income inequality have dissimilar levels of social mobility. Why do Australia and Canada have UK levels of inequality, but almost Scandinavian levels of mobility?
So there must be other things going on here. In the education system; in the housing market; or perhaps in social attitudes. Factors impacting on mobility that closing the income gap will not, and cannot, address.
That is why the Coalition Government is deliberately focusing on the public investments most likely to impact directly on social mobility: especially on closing educational attainment gaps, and improving early years education. The strong evidence for the impact of pre-school learning on life chances has become unanswerable in recent years - and I know you saw even more evidence on this from Jane Waldfogel and Liz Washbrook here yesterday - hence the Government's investment in this area.
You can see our priorities by following the money: and I hope that you can also see that our money is following the evidence.
Myth 2 is that social mobility is a project for economic good times - and when the economy is weak and public spending contracting, it is futile or pointless.
Partly this myth comes from those who think our spending plans are dismantling the state's capacity to help. That we are turning the clock back to the 1930s.
This is simply not true. At the end of this Parliament, public spending will still account for 42% of GDP.
And actually, is the link between economic growth and mobility is not straightforward.
A growing economy will often do a good job of increasing absolute social mobility - simply by making everyone better off than the previous generation. But growth does not necessarily improve relative social mobility, in other words the way your background affects your life chances.
And it is worth noting that during the long economic upturn from the mid-nineties to the financial crash, social mobility rates remained flat.
So the link between growth and mobility is not entirely clear.
And I strongly believe that opening up our society is a vital ingredient in our future productivity.
Just think how our economy might have responded to the crisis if everyone who'd ever thought about starting a business could get on with it. If everyone who'd ever hungered after the best education could go for it.
Wasted talent is always a moral crime: but it is increasingly an economic crime, too. The Sutton Trust's own work has suggested that boosting poor educational attainment up to the UK average would increase GDP by £140 billion by 2050, and increase long-run trend growth by 0.4 percentage points.
Social mobility is a long-term growth strategy.
So yes, it might be harder to find the money. But that just means keeping your focus, because the long-term social and economic goals are so clear.
The Coalition was formed around a belief in government for the long-term. That's why we've found:
· £8 billion for universal pre-school education for three and four year-olds;
· a further £760 million for early education for 40% of two year-olds;
· £2.5 billion by the end of this Parliament for our pupil premium to close the attainment gap in school; and
· £1bn for our Youth Contract to get young people earning or learning,
Myth 3 is that the promotion of social mobility means lowering standards, or somehow 'dumbing down', to 'socially engineer' a particular outcome.
Again, this is nonsense. Nonsense, I should add, which is usually peddled by those who benefit from the status quo - and therefore want to keep things the way they are.
Social engineering is what's happening now: the unfairness in our society, and the system that perpetuates it.
Social mobility is all about creating a truly level playing field, and a fair race. That is why, for example, the Coalition Government is encouraging universities to recruit on the basis of objective potential, on the basis of an ability to excel, not purely on previous attainment.
Now it may surprise the non-Brits among you to learn that in some quarters, the idea of carefully taking into account the impact of background in assessing university applications has been painted by some as a dangerous piece of revolutionary socialism.
But far from dumbing down, it's about increasing opportunity to achieve excellence.
There is compelling evidence that translation of ability into attainment is affected by your social and educational background. A study at the University of Bristol showed that state school educated children with top A-levels were 50% more likely to get first-class degrees than privately educated children with the same grades.
So for me this is plain common sense, and a move towards real fairness.
Confronting these myths is critical: we need to show everyone with a stake in social mobility that the Government understands what drives it.
We also need to prove that our commitment to a fairer society runs deep. That we are not just throwing money at the problem and hoping it will go away. So we are putting in place the mechanisms to hold our own government and future governments to account:
· A powerful set of indicators to show our progress, which we are publishing today;
· A Ministerial Group on Social Mobility to co-ordinate our work across Whitehall;
· The establishment of a statutory Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, to report independently on our progress.
And perhaps to this scholarly audience I might even give a plug to our creation of the Social Mobility Sector Transparency Board.
Not perhaps the most exciting ministerial announcement! But the Board will be working to link up and make better use of official data, in order to gain a fuller picture of the levels of mobility in our society. It will also help open up government data to outside scholars and academics. And those of you working in this field will know how important it is to get the data right. | <urn:uuid:8eb9af7a-96bb-4ee6-93e3-a615c6de8d59> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.politicshome.com/uk/article/54033/deputy_pms_office_extracts_from_deputy_prime_ministers_speech_on_social_mobility.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963211 | 2,131 | 1.609375 | 2 |
New figures show drop in road deaths - but pedestrians and cyclists still in danger
ROAD deaths last summer were down on the same period in 2011 latest Government figures show.
But the number of child pedestrians killed or seriously injured rose eight per cent, the provisional statistics also revealed.
Overall, there were 470 people killed in reported road accidents in summer (July to September 2012) – a five per cent dip on the figure of 494 for the same period in 2011.
Adding serious injuries to deaths, there were 6,620 casualties last summer, almost exactly the same figure as the 6,640 in summer 2011.
Business Cards From Only £10.95 Delivered www.myprint-247.co.ukView details
Contact: 01858 468192
Valid until: Friday, May 31 2013
Slight injuries last summer fell by three per cent to 44,140.
Including slight injuries, total casualties on the roads involving children fell nine per cent but child pedestrian KSIs (killed or seriously injured) rose by eight per cent - from 390 in summer 2011 to 420 in summer 2012.
Overall, pedestrian and pedal cyclist KSIs last summer rose six per cent and seven per cent respectively. Car user KSIs were down six per cent and motorcycle KSIs fell by two per cent.
The number of accidents involving deaths fell five per cent to 440 in summer 2012 while the total number of accidents was down two per cent at 37,700.
The latest figures, albeit provisional, mean that the number of people killed on the roads in the 12 months ending September 2012 totalled 1,760 – a seven per cent drop on the figure for the 12 months ending September 2011.
But KSIs in the 12 months ending September 2012 were two per cent up at 24,860.
Despite the drop in overall road casualties, safety charity the Institute of Advanced Motorists (IAM) warned against complacency towards cyclists and pedestrians.
IAM director of policy and research Neil Greig said: "It is reassuring to see an overall drop in the number of road casualties, however this should not mask the increase of deaths and serious injuries for cyclists and pedestrians."
"The rise in the number of fatal and serious accidents on minor and built-up roads is concerning. The government needs to think about which roads are the safest and where they should be dedicating their resources."
The IAM said it would like to see:
Changes to the driving test to make drivers much more aware of cyclists and pedestrians
Improved infrastructure for cyclists, including more segregated cycle paths
The government commit to reinstate funding for road safety campaigns and education. | <urn:uuid:015afad9-52e5-4d78-8dd6-cf3aeab5d391> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thisisplymouth.co.uk/New-figures-drop-road-deaths-pedestrians-cyclists/story-18124948-detail/story.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95767 | 540 | 1.601563 | 2 |
Face to Face Networking - The Power of Personal Contact
TORONTO, February 9, 2012 – When it comes to networking, it’s hard to deny the importance of Linkedin and the other social networking sites, but according to Stacy Parker, Executive Vice-President of Marketing at Randstad Canada, the country’s leader for staffing, recruitment and HR Services, good old-fashioned face to face networking is also an important component that needs to be developed in today’s competitive job market.
According to Parker, it’s important to think about networking every day, not just when you are looking for a job. “Networking occurs all day, every day, both at work and in your private life. It’s about connecting with people and building relationships. You are networking when you meet parents at the hockey rink, when you volunteer in your community or even when you join a new group or committee,” she explains.
It is often said that in order to increase your network you should attend industry events - but just showing up at these events is not enough - it’s important to be proactive when networking.
Parker shares 5 useful ways to fine-tune your networking skills:
- Plan ahead and be prepared before you go to a networking event.
- Know what you are going to say when people ask about you and your business. Puttogether a short description of who you are and what you do. Create enough interest to prompt people to ask more questions.
- Talk to people you don’t know. It is easy to spend your time talking to people you arefamiliar with but you must show interest in those you don’t know. Find out what they do, what needs they have, and how you might be able to help them.
- Remember that networking is about building relationships, not selling. Truly listen towhat others are saying and look for opportunities to help them and to enhance the relationship. You want to be prepared to talk about yourself if asked, but your focus should be on others.
- Follow up with the people you met to further develop these relationships.
Parker admits that in today's technological world, it’s still important to take advantage of the various social media sites that are available to bridge these important connections. “Once you have invested time and effort into face to face meetings, you can rely on online networking to stay in touch and strengthen your relationships. That’s where the two methods fit well together,” she says.
Visit the Randstad Canada’s Career Tools page to watch our video on networking or visit Randstad Canada’s YouTube page for more tips and techniques that will help you maximize your job search process and career growth opportunities.
About Randstad Canada: Randstad Canada is the Canadian leader for staffing, recruitment and HR Services. As the only fully integrated staffing company in the country, we understand the recruitment needs and demands of employers and job seekers across all levels and industries. Through our insightful knowledge of local markets, employment trends and global network of recruitment experts, we are shaping the Canadian world of work. Visit randstad.ca | <urn:uuid:2c5415c0-a68e-4108-bc8d-920f44416eac> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.randstad.ca/news/bid/102143/Face-to-Face-Networking-The-Power-of-Personal-Contact | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954147 | 651 | 1.765625 | 2 |
2010 has been a tough year for Russia. See here, here and here. 2010 has also been tough for Fedor. See here, here and here. Sadly this summer, Mother Nature decided to pile on. Below, Fedor describes what it’s been like to live through the heat and wildfires surrounding Moscow.
Hey guys! While you were out enjoying the #rmnbparty a few weeks ago, I was sweating profusely in front of my PC in Moscow. Suffice to say, it’s been sweltering in my home city and it’s driving people crazy. For example on Twitter, some of the “trending topics” in Central Russia are heat and wildfire. Why all the hubbub? This Boston Globe report summarizes it well:
Last month, Russia endured the hottest July ever recorded since records began 130 years ago. The intense heat and drought affecting central Russia has been drying out trees and peat marshes, which have been catching fire recently, burning forests, fields and houses across a massive region. Some 500 new fires have been reported in the last 24 hours alone, and a mobilization of hundreds of thousands of emergency workers is underway to combat them. President Dmitry Medvedev has now declared a state of emergency in seven regions. To date, over 1,500 homes have been destroyed and 40 lives have been lost as wildfires continue across over 300,000 acres. | <urn:uuid:48e9bd42-eb94-49c4-864c-243210d1ac82> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.russianmachineneverbreaks.com/tag/worst-summer-ever/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965716 | 291 | 1.570313 | 2 |
View from Four Mile Trail, Yosemite Valley
|[ Sizes: Orig | Large | Med | Small | Thumb ]|
This is a view of the opposite side of Yosemite Valley, CA during the early part of the hike up Four Mile Trail to Glacier Point. The prominent summit to the left is Eagle Peak (7,779-feet). Columbia Rock is to the right. Lost Arrow Spire is to the extreme right. Yosemite Falls, which has the potential to be a very dramatic presence during this hike, was almost completely dry. You can see it as the black smudge on the cliff-face to the far right. Imaged in July 2007. | <urn:uuid:87e27365-4fa6-4245-8fe8-b27a836a2535> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.summitpost.org/view-from-four-mile-trail-yosemite-valley/341353/c-364597 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971241 | 135 | 1.585938 | 2 |
French and Malian troops have advanced into northern Mali and reached the town of Hombori, about 160km south of the rebel stronghold of Gao, after French air strikes drove back the fighters, military sources say.
Sources on the ground, who declined to be identified, said on Friday the Malian army had moved forward after taking the central town of Douentza on Monday.
"We have taken Douentza and are now moving into other rebel-held towns," Diaran Kone, defence ministry spokesman, told Reuters news agency, without providing further details.
|Public opinion on the French military intervention via SMS
Meanwhile, French and Malian troops have staged joint patrols for the first time in Mali's east, AFP news agency said quoting a Malian military source.
"It's a first" in the region near the border with Niger, the source said.
French fighter jets bombed two rebel bases near Gao early on Thursday, targeting Ansongo, about 80km from the town and extremist bases in a nearby village, according to Malian and Niger security sources.
Meanwhile, Mali's government has warned soldiers to respect human rights following reports that the military killed civilians at a bus stop in central Mali.
A government statement said "the army should be irreproachable".
West African troops
For nearly two weeks, French aircraft have bombarded rebel positions, vehicles and stores in the centre and north of Mali, as a ground force of African troops assembles to launch a UN-backed military intervention.
On Thursday, around 160 troops from Burkina Faso deployed in the dusty central Malian town of Markala - the first West African troops to link up with French and Malian forces.
More than 2,000 Chadian soldiers and 500 troops from Niger are being deployed in Ouallam in Niger, near the Mali border, to open a second front against the rebels, as part of a UN-mandated African force to boost and eventually take over, the French-led offensive.
France has about 2,150 troops on the ground.
Regional bloc ECOWAS said that West African defence chiefs will meet in an emergency session in Abidjan on Saturday to discuss military operations in Mali.
| Al Jazeera's Jacky Rowland reports from northern Mali
The military chiefs "will meet in an emergency session in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, on Saturday ... to appraise the status of the ongoing deployment of the African-led International Support Mission to Mali (AFISMA)", it said in a statement on Friday.
Police chiefs from the 15-nation bloc as well as the commander of the ECOWAS-led force, a Nigerian, are also to attend the one-day meeting, it said.
West African nations have set out plans to deploy 3,300 troops to help Mali retake its rebel-occupied north, but the deployment has been delayed by financing concerns.
Gao has been under the control of the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO), an offshoot of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), for more than nine months.
MUJAO had enforced an extreme form of Islamic law and Gao, one of the three main towns in northern Mali with Kidal and Timbuktu, had seen some of the worst punishments meted out in the name of sharia.
A coup by renegade soldiers in Bamako allowed the rebels to seize the entire desert north almost unopposed but they were soon overpowered by Ansar al-Dine (a homegrown ultra-conservative group), MUJAO and AQIM.
Mali's crisis began when Tuaregs last year revived a decades-old rebellion for independence of the north, which they call Azawad. The Tuaregs have since been sidelined by groups which imposed strict Islamic law in the region. | <urn:uuid:53a1fc7d-d651-49a7-87ab-bf1cff38d439> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2013/01/2013125113149105505.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961201 | 793 | 1.5 | 2 |
A Parabolic Aluminized Reflector lamp is a type of electric lamp that is widely used in commercial, residential, and transportation illumination. Usage includes locomotive headlamps, aircraft landing lights, and residential and commercial recessed lights.
The choice by most professionals that have serious lighting needs as part of their business model is simple; utilize high quality and flexible halogen PAR can bulbs having excellent light casting properties. Although other alternatives are available for stage/mood lighting, many turn to the most popular PAR 64 model to meet their needs. With demanding lighting technicians using 1,000 watt PAR 64 lamps all across the world, this model has become a real favorite with lighting designers and stage professionals due to the power of this unit, its color intensity, and the very uniform luminescence that this lamp provides.
Par can bulbs, especially those used in a mogul prong version, are exceptionally durable even in circumstances where they see heavy use. Easily replaceable, the Par 64 lamp, the largest in terms of diameter in the PAR series coming in at a whooping 8 inches, this lamp is truly in a class by itself. With its official designation of "Par 64 " this designation is a function of 64/8" and these lamps are suitable for all major beam spreads including very narrow, narrow, medium, and wide types. With PAR can bulbs providing different effects and a wide variety of lighting options, it is no wonder that people contact us for our expertise and assistance with their selection. Check us out today! | <urn:uuid:b72b9a96-80fa-4697-8cf3-37e1a7b97085> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bulbamerica.com/light-bulbs/par-can-bulbs-2.html?manufacturer=15 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951957 | 308 | 1.539063 | 2 |
Reviewed by Shelby G (age 9)
Small Steps illustration will appear here.
The book was fun to read because it had an interesting plot and was easy to follow. My favorite part was when Armpit gave his speech about Coo, one of Ginny's stuffed animals. I liked that part because it was fun to see that Armpit isn't bad and he cares about Ginny and Coo. Ginny was my favorite character because she had her own imagination. Even though she was born with blood on her brain, she's determined to be just like everybody else.
What's unique about the book is that it's different than other chapter books because it has an easier plot to follow and still interesting. This is not like Holes because he was trying to stay someplace instead of leave it. It is partially part of a series because it's only a sequel, but probably is going to become part of a series. It's similar to the first book because it's about somebody from Camp Green Lake.
I recommend this book because it's fun to read. People who liked Holes would like this book. | <urn:uuid:bf0c4fc1-d98f-453d-a70d-6b7d07a6c105> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://spaghettibookclub.org/review.php?review_id=7621 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.995006 | 227 | 1.578125 | 2 |
Posted on Wed, May. 11, 2011
last updated: May 11, 2011 07:47:54 AM
The welcome end of Osama bin Laden at the hands of helicopter-borne American military commandos raises a number of issues.
Americans rejoiced at news of the end of this psychopathic mass murderer, and, privately, are probably relieved that he was not to be captured and extradited to Guantánamo. If bin Laden had been taken alive, we might be revisiting the controversy surrounding the Obama administration's failed efforts to try in a civilian federal court bin Laden's subordinate, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- the master planner behind 9/11.
But what, exactly, are the moral, legal or practical rules in going after terrorist leaders or the savage dictators of rogue regimes? We went into a foreign country to kill, not capture, bin Laden. Was that killing permissible since a firefight preceded it, or because he was a terrorist rather than a head of state?
Furor surrounded the waterboarding of Mohammed that purportedly resulted in valuable intelligence about future terrorist operations. But why was that considered immoral and illegal when we routinely act as judge, jury and executioner of suspected terrorists through predator drone attacks inside Pakistan?
Mohammed, a confessed killer, was one of just three detainees waterboarded. In contrast, we have executed from the air well over 1,500 suspected terrorists by Predators. President Obama has ordered four times as many drone attacks in the past two years as former President Bush did in eight. Are those killings more constitutionally suspect than Bush's treatment of the three terrorists at Guantánamo?
Last week, NATO warplanes deliberately targeted Moammar Gadhafi's family compound and residence in Tripoli, purportedly killing the dictator's youngest son, Saif. A surviving son, also named Saif, not long ago was a Western darling who bought a doctorate from the London School of Economics, and wined and dined Western intellectuals and oil executives. At what point do dictators' sons devolve from darlings to demons?
The United States had just days earlier sent two predator drones to Libya -- no doubt to help the British and French focus their attacks on the Gadhafi family. Are such targeted airborne assassinations the type of killings expressly forbidden by U.S. law? Or are they permissible on the grounds that enemy dictators are military commanders -- and their fortified homes are thus legitimate wartime targets?
Could we then legally, morally or practically drop a team in Tripoli to kill Gadhafi and his son in the manner that we killed bin Laden and his son? What are the rules that govern the killing of enemy leaders?
First, it seems OK to assassinate a terrorist kingpin either by air attack or commando raid. But legal and moral problems arise if he is captured, detained, waterboarded or tried in a military tribunal. A quick death seems to end almost all legal discussions and controversies.
Second, there is also no problem in assassinating a foreign dictator as long as the mission meets two criteria: We must be engaged in some sort of conventional battle with his forces, and we have to kill him through aerial bombing. For some reason, vaporization by a bomb seems to raise fewer ethical issues than execution by a sniper's bullet.
Third, targeted assassinations are better done under liberal presidents, who are more likely to be seen as humanitarians who only reluctantly order such killings. The Bush antiterrorism protocols -- tribunals, renditions, preventative detentions, Predator assassination missions, Guantánamo Bay -- were decried as illegal and immoral. Such furor vanished, however, when President Obama embraced or expanded them all. The effort to preemptively remove the mass-murdering Saddam Hussein to foster democracy in his absence was seen by many in the media, universities and legal community as morally wrong -- and yet preemptively bombing Gadhafi to foster democracy in his absence is now considered morally justified.
Fourth, success seems to end moral ambiguity in much the same way failure invites it. Had we gone into Pakistani territory and landed in the wrong compound, legal and ethical issues would have been raised. If we keep killing members of the Gadhafi family without hitting Gadhafi himself, at some point the denial of targeted assassination will seem empty. Targeted assassinations apparently have to work on the first or second attempt to be deemed moral and legal.
In recent years the United States has been in a number of undeclared wars against terrorists, insurgents and authoritarian dictators -- Mohamed Farrah Aidid, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Slobodan Milosevic, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Manuel Noriega, Mullah Omar, Moammar Gadhafi, the Taliban, al-Qaida and others -- whom we sought to kill, capture or put on trial.
It is about time that we clarified the rules that determine their fates. | <urn:uuid:efa069aa-853d-4793-a4f5-cee436a91fa6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/05/11/v-print/113902/commentary-are-there-rules-for.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962346 | 1,003 | 1.59375 | 2 |
The author of the first quotation is that social progressive paragon Henry Ford (irony impaired technobooster ignoramuses lurking hereabouts, please insert smiley with emphatically gasping mouth here), from his memoir My Philosophy of Industry, published in 1929:
"Machinery is accomplishing in the world what man has failed to do by preaching, propaganda, or the written word. The aeroplane and wireless know no boundary. They pass over the dotted lines on the map without heed or hindrance. They are binding the world together in a way no other system can. The motion picture with its universal language, the aeroplane with its speed, and the wireless with its coming international programme -- these will soon bring the world to a complete understanding. Thus may we vision a United States of the World. Ultimately it will surely come!"
Notice here, Superlative Technoboosters, first the evocation of the figure of the preacher now secularized through technoscience, second the conjuration of the transcension of all limits, third the facile misconstrual of the parochial with the universal, fourth the easy transition from an overassured predictive judgment of "soon" to the messianic cadences of "Ultimately it will surely come!" These dance steps are by now as dusty and dull and routinized as a stiff minuet, but it pays to be reminded that they have been dull an awfully long time by now -- ever heard of Jacques de Vaucanson, you triumphalist Singularitarians and scientistic reductionists? Hence, in reaction to such tired rhetoric George Orwell is quoted from a 1944 column:
"Reading recently a batch of rather shallowly optimistic 'progressive' books, I was struck by the automatic way people go on repeating certain phrases which were fashionable before 1914. Two great favourites are the 'abolition of distance' and the 'disappearance of frontiers'. I do not know how often I have met with statements that 'the aeroplane and the radio have abolished distance' and 'all parts of the world are now interdependent'.
This is an especially enjoyable quote to unearth since I recently had a set of exchanges with would-be Singularitarian guru Eliezer Yudkowsky in which he rather hilariously seemed to imagine himself a latter-day avatar of Orwell (except, you know, as an authoritarian High Priest awaiting the arrival of the Robot God). This leads me, by way of conclusion, to a reminder of why I devote so much attention to the marginal and curious sub(cult)ural futurisms of transhumanism, singularitarianism, extropianism, techno-immortalism, and so on in the first place.
For one thing, these sub(cult)ures offer up discourses that -- despite their abiding marginality and extremity in the strict sense -- combine attitudes and formulations favoring technocratic elitism over democratic deliberation, technofixes over engagement with structural social problems (like unsustainable industry and hyper-consumerism, like anti-social hyper-individualism, like the interminable cycles of violence maintained by militarism, like the corrupt and antidemocratizing manufacture of consent via broadcast mediation), foreground reductionist explanatory vocabularies that valorize instrumental rationality over moral, aesthetic, ethical, and political rationalities (thereby deranging them all -- including instrumental rationality itself), insist on an impoverishment and naturalization of the "developmental" imaginary to terms expressive of corporate-military competitiveness -- all in ways that are too readily appropriated (sometimes in slightly diluted forms) by incumbent elite interests I oppose as a champion of democracy, sustainability, and social justice.
Just as bad, as I have repeatedly tried to show, they cite and mobilize transcendental vocabularies that activate irrational passions at precisely the moment when planetary technodevelopmental social struggles demand clear deliberation, evoking the inevitabilities of providential discourse, the rapturous totalities of apocalyptic and transcension discourses, the acquiescence to authority of Priestly discourses, and so on, all of which I abhor as barriers to nonviolent deliberation and contestation of the terms of ongoing technoscientific change I demand as a champion of democracy.
For another thing -- apart from this practical point of their sometimes disproportionate influence on public discourse as an especially nice fit with incumbent politics (even if many incumbents would publicly disassociate themselves from the letter of Superlative formations) -- it is also true that one can sometimes understand the dynamics and categories and relations in more prevailing discourses by locating especially pure variations of these discourses at their extremes or at their vital cores.
It is immensely clarifying to one's understanding of the market fundamentalism of neoliberal globalization (the most influential political ideology of the last thirty years, amounting to the incumbent conventional wisdom governing the mostly dreadful domestic and international policies of my entire adult lifetime) to study the especially clear-eyed anarcho-capitalist formulations of David Friedman (son of neoliberal luminary Milton) and the especially unabashed narratives of Ayn Rand (best-selling reactionary crap-novelist), even if the mainstream wonks, pundits, legislators, and functionaries who actually implement the neoliberal vision on the ground are little likely to invoke these uncompromising figures at the vital core of their discourse, or necessarily even to have read them.
So, too, one arrives at an especially clear understanding of the curious aspirations, distractions, emphases, aporias, and tics that drive privileged technocentric and technocratic public discourses (from the apologias for various devastating extractive industries to the technophilic neoliberalism of Tom Friedman or the technophilic neoconservatism of Glenn Reynolds), by focusing on the workings of the Superlative Technology Discourses that express undiluted, if possibly more deluded, forms of these aspirations, distractions, emphases, aporias, and tics.
As I have said before, the technophilic libertopian cult of Extropianism was incomparably more interesting and influential as a symptom, or even condensed essence, of the irrational exuberance of the "Long Boom" digirati of the 1990s of which they were also a part, than they ever were on their own terms, and it was as a symptom, as a signifier of those more dense, more qualified prevailing tendencies that Extropianism attracted the critical attention it did from technocultural scholars and others. The same remains true of my own interest in Superlativity in our own historical moment.
Both of the quotations above may be found David Edgerton's book The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900, by the way, which Arthur recommends in his blog-post (I haven't read it myself, but it looks quite interesting). | <urn:uuid:09fb4100-0c60-495c-a40f-eb77ea9d4823> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://amormundi.blogspot.it/2007/10/why-pay-attention-to-marginal.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937541 | 1,399 | 1.515625 | 2 |
Terrorist Offers Hurricane Sandy Aid; US Says No Thanks
(ISLAMABAD) -- The U.S. has turned down an offer of post-Hurricane Sandy assistance from one of the world's most wanted men, a Pakistani terrorist leader with a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head.
Hafiz Saeed, an Islamist militant who is alleged to have masterminded the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks that left more than 160 people dead, issued a written statement Wednesday saying his organization was willing to send supplies and volunteers to help the U.S. East Coast recover.
"We are ready to send food items, medicines and doctors to the U.S. for the people affected by the storm," said Saeed. "America [may] fix bounties on our heads but as followers of the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him), we feel it is our Islamic duty to help Americans trapped in a catastrophe." Saeed noted that the charity he heads had provided aid in Sri Lanka and Indonesia after the 2004 tsunami.
Saeed is the founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a terrorist group banned by the Pakistani government, and still heads its charity wing, Jamaat ud Dawa. Earlier this year, the U.S. State Department offered a $10 million reward for information leading to his capture or arrest.
After Saeed's offer of assistance, the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan declined his help via Twitter.
"We respect the Islamic tradition of help to the needy," said the tweet, "but we can't take Hafiz Saeed's offer seriously."
Saeed founded Lashkar-e-Taiba more than 25 years ago and has mounted many attacks against India as part of a campaign to wrest the Kashmir region from Indian control. Saeed is accused of masterminding the Nov. 26, 2008 terrorist attacks on the city of Mumbai. Ten gunmen took part in the multi-day assault, which cost the lives of at least 166 people, including six Americans. The lone surviving attacker, who faces a death penalty, has accused Saeed of hatching the plot.
Pakistan kept Saeed under house arrest for some months after the attacks but then released him. He maintains a high public profile inside the country. In September, he led street protests against the anti-Islam film Innocence of Muslims.
On April 2, when the State Department announced its $10 million reward for Saeed, it said the bounty had "everything to do with Mumbai and his brazen flouting of the justice system."
Saeed responded to the announcement of the bounty by publicly taunting the U.S. government. "I am here, I am visible," said Saeed on April 4. "America should give that reward money to me."
"I will be in Lahore tomorrow. America can contact me whenever it wants to," said Saeed. He also expressed surprise that the U.S. did not know where he was, offered to face charges in an American court, and said America had "gone blind" because of its hatred of Islam.
State Department spokesman Mark Toner reacted to Saeed's taunts by stressing that the reward was for information leading to his arrest or conviction, not his location.
"We all know where he is," said Toner. "Every journalist in Pakistan knows where he is."
Toner said it was unfortunate that Saeed was free to give press conferences, but that the U.S. hopes "to put him behind bars" and is seeking information that would "give the Pakistani government the tools to arrest him."
The $10 million bounty makes Saeed among the top-five most-wanted on the U.S. terrorism list; al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri is worth a $25 million reward. The U.S. also offered up to $2 million for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Saeed's brother-in-law, who is the deputy leader of Lashkar-e-Taiba.
Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio | <urn:uuid:b8f87ef0-6d02-4155-bfd5-35b8ebc69b3a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.eastidahonews.com/2012/10/terrorist-offers-hurricane-sandy-aid-us-says-no-thanks/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977132 | 839 | 1.523438 | 2 |
OfficeTeam Research Reveals Importance of Understanding Work Styles
MENLO PARK, CA -- Great minds don’t always think alike, a new OfficeTeam study suggests. In fact, work styles vary based on individual personality traits, communication preferences and organizational methods. While most (70 percent) administrative professionals surveyed said it could be challenging to team up with colleagues who don’t have styles similar to their own, two-thirds (66 percent) recognized benefits to collaborating with those who approach things differently.
The study was developed by OfficeTeam, the International Association of Administrative Professionals (IAAP) and Insights Learning and Development and includes responses from 3,249 administrative professionals in the United States and Canada. The full survey results are featured in Your Work Style in Color: A Colorful Approach to Working Relationships, a research guide available at www.officeteam.com/workstyle.Theguide is accompanied by an online survey where users can identify their work style.
A majority (81 percent) of administrative professionals prefer to collaborate with colleagues who have similar work styles.
Seventy percent of support staff said it could be challenging to team up with someone who has a different style, but 66 percent cited benefits to working with those who approach things differently.
Sixty-five percent of administrative professionals said they adapt to their manager’s work style to a great extent; 58 percent indicated their supervisor only adjusts “somewhat” to their preferences, and 14 percent said their manager doesn’t adjust to their style at all.
“At work, employees who have differing perspectives and approaches bring fresh ideas to projects,” said OfficeTeam executive director Robert Hosking. “You can improve team collaboration by taking advantage of complementary strengths and adapting your own work style to suit the situation.”
More than eight in 10 (81 percent) administrative professionals admit they prefer working with someone who has a style similar to their own. It might sound attractive to partner with people who think and behave like you do, but most offices bring together individuals with various strengths and personalities. While 70 percent of respondents said it could be challenging to collaborate with someone with a very different style,66 percent recognized benefits to working with those who have alternate approaches.
Successfully interacting with others requires a little give and take, but, according to the study, support staff are doing more of the bending. Nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of administrative professionals said they “greatly” adapt to their boss’s work style. However, the majority (58 percent) indicated that their supervisor only adjusts “somewhat” to their preferences. And 14 percent said their manager doesn’t adapt to their style at all.
OfficeTeam offers three tips for overcoming conflicting work styles:
1.Take the high road. Your attitude, effort level and reactions are all in your control, even if others’ behavior isn’t. If an issue arises or you disagree with someone, always be positive and professional. You don’t have to be best friends with everyone -- you just need to find a way to collaborate effectively with them.
2.Work with what you have. Accept the person you’re working with as he is, perceived quirks and all. If your colleague prefers scheduled meetings and you like to simply drop by, try it his way to reduce conflict.
3.Get on the same page. Simple miscommunication -- such as the desired outcome of a project -- can cause friction. Arrange a face-to-face meeting with a colleague to make sure you’re on the same page, and follow it up with an email recapping what you discussed.
OfficeTeam is the nation’s leading staffing service specializing in the temporary placement of highly skilled office and administrative support professionals. The company has more than 320 locations worldwide and offers online job search services at www.officeteam.com.
About the International Association of Administrative Professionals
The International Association of Administrative Professionals (IAAP) is the world’s largest association for administrative support staff, with more than 550 chapters and approximately 24,000 members and affiliates worldwide. For more information, visit www.iaap-hq.org.
Insights is a people development company working in partnership with leading organizations across the world. Their transformational learning solutions are supported by an extensive portfolio of customizable products and services. For more information, visit www.insights.com. | <urn:uuid:b92aa2f4-9062-4d4d-a1af-77cdf35dedc3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://officeteam.rhi.mediaroom.com/workstyle | 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 | 0.949433 | 919 | 1.78125 | 2 |
Leave It to Beaver
|Leave It to Beaver|
Season one title screen
|Also known as||Beaver|
|Created by||Joe Connelly
|Theme music composer||David Kahn
|Opening theme||"The Toy Parade"|
|Composer(s)||Pete Rugolo (1962–1963)
Paul Smith (1962–1963)
|Country of origin||United States|
|No. of seasons||6|
|No. of episodes||234 (excluding pilot) (List of episodes)|
Los Angeles, California
|Running time||25 minutes|
|Production company(s)||Gomalco Productions (1957–1961)
Kayro Productions (1961–1963)
|Original channel||CBS (1957–1958)
|Original run||October 4, 1957– June 20, 1963|
|Followed by||Still the Beaver (1983)
The New Leave It to Beaver (1985–1989)
|Related shows||Leave It to Beaver (feature film, 1997)|
Leave It to Beaver is an American television situation comedy about an inquisitive and often naïve boy named Theodore "The Beaver" Cleaver (portrayed by Jerry Mathers) and his adventures at home, in school, and around his suburban neighborhood. The show also starred Barbara Billingsley and Hugh Beaumont as Beaver's parents, June and Ward Cleaver, and Tony Dow as Beaver's brother Wally. The show has attained an iconic status in the US, with the Cleavers exemplifying the idealized suburban family of the mid-20th century.
The show was created by writers Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher. These veterans of radio and early television found inspiration for the show's characters, plots, and dialogue in the lives, experiences, and conversations of their own children. Leave It to Beaver is one of the first primetime sitcom series written from a child's point-of-view. Like several television dramas and sitcoms of the late 1950s and early 1960s (Lassie and My Three Sons, for example), Leave It to Beaver is a glimpse at middle-class, white American boyhood. In a typical episode Beaver got into some sort of trouble, then faced his parents for reprimand and correction. However, neither parent was omniscient; indeed, the series often showed the parents debating their approach to child rearing, and some episodes were built around parental gaffes.
With six full 39-week seasons (234 episodes), the show had its debut on CBS on October 4, 1957, and then moved to ABC the following year, completing its run on June 20, 1963. During the whole of the show's run, the series was shot with a single camera on black-and-white 35mm film. The show's production companies included comedian George Gobel's Gomalco Productions (1957–1961) and Kayro Productions (1961–1963) with filming at Revue Studios/Republic Studios and Universal Studios in Los Angeles, California. The show was distributed by MCA Television.
The still-popular show was canceled in 1963 because the stars wanted to move on. Jerry Mathers was entering his freshman year in high school and actor Tony Dow was about to graduate from high school.
Contemporary commentators praised Leave It to Beaver, with Variety comparing Beaver to Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer. Much juvenile merchandise was released during the show's first-run including board games, novels, and comic books. The show has enjoyed a renaissance in popularity since the 1970s through off-network syndication, a reunion telemovie, Still the Beaver (1983), and a sequel series The New Leave It to Beaver (1985–89). In 1997, a movie version based on the original series was released to moderate acclaim, and, in October 2007, TV Land celebrated the show's 50th anniversary with a marathon. Although the show never broke into the Nielsen ratings top-30 nor won any awards, it placed on TIME magazine's unranked 2007 list of "The 100 Best TV Shows of All-TIME."
According to Tony Dow, "if any line got too much of a laugh, they'd take it out. They didn't want a big laugh; they wanted chuckles."
Concept, pilot, and premiere
In 1957, radio, film, and television writers Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher developed a concept for a TV show about childhood and family life featuring a fictional suburban couple and their children. Unlike The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, Father Knows Best, and other sitcoms and domestic comedies of the era, the show would not focus upon the parents, but upon their children, with the series being told from the kids' point-of-view. Working titles during the show's gestation period included It's a Small World and Wally and the Beaver. The pilot aired April 23, 1957 as "It's a Small World" on anthology series Heinz Studio 57.
Pilot stars Casey Adams and Paul Sullivan (as father and son Ward and Wally Cleaver) were replaced as series production neared. Six months after the pilot's broadcast, the series debuted on CBS Friday October 4, 1957 as Leave It to Beaver with the episode third in production order, "Beaver Gets 'Spelled". The intended premiere, "Captain Jack", displayed a toilet tank (which didn't pass the censor's office in time for the show's scheduled debut) and aired the week following the premiere. "Captain Jack" has claimed its place in television history as the first American TV show to display a toilet tank. In 1997, it was ranked #42 on TV Guide's 100 Greatest Episodes of All Time.
Sponsors and budget
Remington Rand was a potential sponsor during the show's conception, and counseled against the show's suggested title, Wally and the Beaver, believing viewers would think the show was a nature program. The show was ultimately sponsored by Ralston Purina, with General Electric and Chrysler Corporation sponsoring the later seasons (Ward Cleaver was seen driving a Plymouth Fury during the opening credits in the final season).
Episodes were budgeted at $30,000 to $40,000 each, making the show one of the most expensive of its kind during its years of production. High costs were incurred with the show's many outdoor scenes. The most expensive single episode, "In the Soup" (in which Beaver gets stuck in an advertising billboard with a gigantic make-believe cup of soup, curious as to how "steam" could issue from the cup), was budgeted at $50,000. Two billboards were built for the episode: one outside on the backlot, and the other inside the studio.
Characters and casting
Casting directors interviewed hundreds of child actors for the role of "Beaver" but kept calling back Jerry Mathers, an eight-year-old with substantial acting experience. At one of many auditions, Mathers wore his Cub Scout uniform and told casting personnel he was anxious to leave for his den meeting. Connelly and Mosher were charmed with Mathers's innocent candor and cast him in the title role. Barbara Billingsley, an actress with experience in several B-movies and one failed television series (Professional Father), was then hired to play Beaver's mother, June Cleaver. Preteen Tony Dow accompanied a friend auditioning for Johnny Wildlife to the studio, and, although Dow had no aspirations to an acting career, tried out for the role of Beaver's brother Wally Cleaver and was hired. Several adult candidates then auditioned for the role of Beaver's father Ward Cleaver, but Connelly and Mosher finally signed Hugh Beaumont, an actor and Methodist lay minister who had worked with Mathers in a religious film.
Recurring characters included Eddie Haskell (played by Ken Osmond), Larry Mondello (Rusty Stevens), Hubert "Whitey" Whitney (Stanley Fafara), Gilbert Bates (Stephen Talbot), Judy Hensler (Jeri Weil), Clarence "Lumpy" Rutherford (Frank Bank), Violet Rutherford (Veronica Cartwright) and Mary Ellen Rogers (Pamela Beaird). Burt Mustin played elderly fireman Gus, Richard Deacon played Ward's co-worker Fred Rutherford, and Sue Randall played schoolteacher Miss Landers.
Writers and directors
The show's chief writers, Bob Mosher and Joe Connelly, met while working in New York City for the J. Walter Thompson Agency. Once in Hollywood, the men became head writers for the radio show, Amos 'n' Andy and continued to write the well-received show when it moved to CBS television in 1950. Although both men initially wrote all the scripts for earlier episodes of Leave It to Beaver, after becoming executive producers, they began accepting scripts from other writers, refining them if necessary.
With Mosher the father of two children and Connelly six, the two men had enough source material and inspiration for the show's dialogue and plot lines. Connelly's eight-year-old son, Ricky, served as the model for Beaver and his fourteen-year-old son, Jay, for Wally, while Eddie Haskell and Larry Mondello were based on friends of the Connelly boys. Connelly often took the boys on outings while carrying a notebook to record their conversations and activities.
Other writers who contributed to the show were Bill Manhoff, Mel Diamond, Dale and Katherine Eunson, Ben Gershman, George Tibbles (who later became the head writer on My Three Sons), Fran van Hartesvelt, Bob Ross, Alan Manings, Mathilde and Theodore Ferro, John Whedon, and the team of Dick Conway and Roland MacLane, who wrote many of the shows for the last two seasons. Connelly told an interviewer, "If we hire a writer we tell him not to make up situations but to look into his own background. It's not a 'situation' comedy where you have to create a situation for a particular effect. Our emphasis is on a natural story line."
Connelly and Mosher worked to create humorous characters in simple situations, rather than relying on contrived jokes. The two often adapted real-life situations in the lives of their children. "The Haircut", for example, was directly based on an incident involving Bobby Mosher, who was forced to wear a stocking cap in a school play after giving himself a ragged haircut. Fourteen-year-old Jay Connelly's preening habits became Wally's frequent hair combing. Seven-year-old Ricky Connelly's habit of dropping the initial syllables of words was incorporated into Beaver's character.
Norman Tokar, a director with a talent for working with children, was hired to direct most of the episodes for the first three years and developed the characters of Eddie Haskell and Larry Mondello. Other directors included Earl Bellamy, David Butler (who had directed child actress Shirley Temple), Bretaigne Windust, Gene Reynolds, and Hugh Beaumont. Norman Abbott directed most of the episodes through the last three years.
For the first two seasons, Leave It to Beaver was filmed at Republic Studios/CBS Studio Center, 4024 Radford Avenue, Studio City, Los Angeles, California. For its final four seasons, production moved to Universal Studios. Exteriors, including the façades of the two Cleaver houses, were filmed on the respective studio back lots. Stock footage was occasionally used for establishing shots.
The script for an upcoming episode would be delivered to the cast late in the week, with a read-through the following Monday, awkward lines or other problems being noted for rewrites. On Tuesday afternoon, the script was rehearsed in its entirety for the camera and lighting crew. Over the following three days, individual scenes would be filmed with a single camera.
Filming was limited to one episode per week (rather than the two typical of television production of the period) to accommodate the large number of child actors, who were allowed to work only four hours a day. Scenes with children were usually filmed first, with adult actors having to wait until after 5:00 pm for filming.
Series cinematographers included Mack Stengler with 122 episodes between 1958 and 1962, Jack MacKenzie with 40 episodes between 1962 and 1963, and William A. Sickner with 37 episodes between 1957 and 1959. Fred Mandl (1962), Ray Rennahan (1958), and Ray Flin (1960) served as cinematographers on less than five episodes each.
Opening and closing sequences
||This article may contain original research. (March 2013)|
In the first season, each episode opens with a teaser featuring clips from the episode (or generic footage from other episodes) and a voice-over introduction by Beaumont briefly stating the episode's theme. The teaser is followed by the main title and credits in which the show's four main stars are introduced. In seasons 5 and 6, significant crew are listed in an extension of the opening credits after a commercial break. Midway through the first season, the Beaumont voice-over introduction was discarded in favor of a brief scene extracted from the episode at hand, and, at the end of the first season, the teaser was entirely discarded, moving immediately to the title and credits.
Each season had an individually filmed sequence for the opening credits. In season one, for example, a cartoon-like drawing of a freshly-laid concrete sidewalk was displayed with the show title and stars' names scratched into its surface, while in the final season, the Cleavers left the house through the front door carrying picnic items. (See List of Leave It to Beaver episodes for specific season opening sequences). Billingsley was the first to be introduced in all opening sequences, followed by Beaumont and Dow. Mathers was introduced last, with the voice-over line, "...and Jerry Mathers as The Beaver".
The closing sequence for the first season featured a simple, dark background as the credits rolled. In the second season, Wally and Beaver are seen walking home from school with their schoolbooks and entering the house through the front door. In the third through fifth seasons, Wally and Beaver are seen walking towards the Pine Street house. Beaver carries a baseball glove and limps along the curbstone. In the last season, Wally pushes teen Beaver into the street, then Beaver pushes him back and they start chasing each other around a tree and into the house.
The show's opening and closing sequences are accompanied by an orchestral rendition of the show's bouncy theme music, "The Toy Parade", by David Kahn, Melvyn Leonard, and Mort Greene. For the third season, the tempo was quickened and the tune whistled by a male chorus over an orchestral accompaniment for the closing credits and for the production crew credits following the opening sequence. For the final season, the song was given a jazz-like arrangement by veteran composer/arranger Pete Rugolo. Though lyrics exist for the theme tune, an instrumental arrangement is used for the show's entire run. Elements of the theme tune were given a subdued musical arrangement, which was then used as background music for tender and sentimental scenes. Occasionally, a few phrases from well-known musical compositions such as Chopin's "Funeral March" and the French national anthem "La Marseillaise" are quoted.
This CBS show required "wall-to-wall" music, a term for productions that utilize musical "tag" pieces between scenes as needed. While "The Toy Parade" theme was written for the show, incidental music was not. This is evident through the progression of the series, as the theme matures, the usual background music does not. This would be the equivalent of the "needle-drop" library of pre-recorded music that is still prevalent today. This incidental music was likely a product of the CBS Television Orchestra, and clearly sounds reminiscent of the early 1950s, especially by 1963. In fact, identical background music is present in the "The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show" from October 1950.
The time setting of Leave It to Beaver is contemporary with its production—the late 1950s and the early 1960s. References to contemporary news issues or topics are infrequent. Communism is mentioned in "Water, Anyone?".
Contemporary cultural references are more frequent but not overwhelming. The show acknowledges the greaser subculture and, in the last season, "The Twist", a popular song and dance craze of the early 1960s. The dance's promoter, Chubby Checker, is hinted at in the episode's fictional "Chubby Chadwick" and his fictional hit tune, "Surf Board Twist". Wally and his friends perform a tepid version of The Twist at Wally's party in "The Party Spoiler". The 1960 Kirk Douglas vehicle Spartacus is brought up, Eisenhower is mentioned and, in one episode, Beaver's best friend Gilbert says Angela Valentine wore a "Jackie Kennedy wig" to class. Contemporary celebrities mentioned on the show include Rock Hudson, Tuesday Weld, Sal Mineo, Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis, Sonny Liston, Cassius Clay, Bob Cousy, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Jack Paar, John Glenn, Warren Spahn, Fabian and others. Then current Los Angeles Dodgers celebrity star Don Drysdale appears as himself in one episode. When Beaver appears on a TV show, not knowing it is being recorded to air another day, Gilbert compares the misunderstanding with "a Rod Serling Twilight Zone". The episode in which Beaver graduates from grammar school (8th grade) is perhaps the only time a year is mentioned. June and Ward inspect the gift they have for Beaver's graduation and read the inscription, "...Class of '63".
Leave It to Beaver is set in the fictitious community of Mayfield and its environs. The principal setting is the Cleaver home. The Cleavers live in two houses over the series' run. The "move" was necessary when the façade of the original house—located at Republic Studios—became unavailable for filming following the production's move to Universal. The "new house" stood on the Universal backlot. The first house is 'located' at 485 Mapleton (sometimes Maple) Drive, and the second at 211 Pine Street. In an early episode set in the Mapleton Drive house, Beaver speaks of living in another house where he suffered the measles and became attached to "Billy", his first teddy bear. In another episode Beaver indicates the Mapleton Drive house was the first house he'd ever lived in.
Social and ethnic setting
||This article may contain original research. (March 2013)|
Characters are nearly uniformly white, middle-class and heterosexual. Only one African-American had a speaking role during the run of the series; in 1963, Kim Hamilton played a maid in episode 212, "The Parking Attendants". Four years earlier, an episode featured a Hispanic family, as Alan Roberts Costello played Roberto "Chuey" Varella, a friend and weekend house guest of the Beaver in 1959's "Beaver and Chuey". The friend spoke only Spanish, leading to a cruel Eddie Haskell prank.
Mapleton Drive house
Surrounded by a picket fence, the Mapleton Drive house is two stories with a first floor kitchen, dining room, living room and adjoining patio, and at least three bedrooms on the second floor—one for the boys, one for the parents, and a guest room into which Beaver moves for a night. The cellar is accessible through a diagonal door in the kitchen. A kitchen door opens onto a small side yard, the driveway, and a single-car garage—a frequent setting for get-togethers between the boys, their father, and their friends.
Toward the close of season two, the Cleavers discuss moving. In the season's closer, Ward tells the boys the Mapleton Drive house has been sold. In the season three opener, the Cleavers are comfortably settled in a new house at 211 Pine Street. No episode features the actual move.
Pine Street house
The Pine Street house consists of several rooms (kitchen and laundry room, dining room, living room, den) on the ground floor and at least three bedrooms on the second floor. None of the furnishings from the Mapleton Drive house appear in the new house. Reproductions of Gainsborough's The Blue Boy and Lawrence's Pinkie hang in the front entry above graceful bergères. An upholstered wing chair at the edge of the hearth in the living room is covered in a chinoiserie print.
After the move to Pine Street, the boys continue to attend the same schools, frequent the same hang outs, and visit the same friends. The Pine Street house is in the vicinity of the Mapleton Drive house; in one episode, Beaver and Larry walk to the Mapleton Drive house, uproot a small tree, and transport it to the Pine Street house in a wagon.
In the Pine Street house, Ward has a den near the main entry, which serves as a setting for many scenes. The garage at the Pine Street house is used less often as a setting for masculine get-togethers than the Mapleton Drive garage had been. June and Ward's bedroom is seen for the first time in the Pine Street house. They have their own bath, sleep in twin beds, and have a portable TV in the room.
Two years before Leave It to Beaver went into production, the Pine Street façade and its neighborhood were employed extensively in the 1955 Humphrey Bogart film, The Desperate Hours.
In 1969, the Pine Street house was reused for another Universal-produced television hit, Marcus Welby, M.D. This house can still be seen at Universal Studios, though the original façade was replaced in 1988 for the following year's The 'Burbs and sat in storage elsewhere on the Universal lot. The façade was replaced again for the 1996 Leave It to Beaver movie. The house and the street it sits on were used as the main exterior set for Wisteria Lane of Desperate Housewives, and was also previously used as the Pearson family house on The Bill Engvall Show.
Themes and recurring elements
Format and content
Leave It to Beaver is light drama with the underlying theme that proper behavior brings rewards while improper behavior entails undesirable consequences. The juvenile viewer finds amusement in Beaver's adventures while learning that certain behaviors and choices (such as skipping school or faking an illness in order to be the recipient of "loot" from parents and schoolmates) are wrong and invite reprimand. The adult viewer enjoys Beaver's adventures while discovering tips for teaching children correct behavior and methods for successfully handling common childhood problems. Parents are reminded that children view the world from a different perspective and should not be expected to act like miniature adults. The writers generally emphasized permissive child rearing techniques, and urged parents to serve as moral role models.
A typical episode generally follows a simple formula: Beaver or Wally (or both) get into trouble and then face their parents for a lecture regarding the event. Lectures sometimes take the form of fables, with Ward allowing the boys to discover their moral meanings and applying those meanings to their lives. Occasionally, when offences are serious, punishments such as being grounded are dealt the miscreants. The parents are sometimes shown debating the best approach to the situation. Other episodes (especially in earlier seasons) even reverse the formula, with Ward making a parenting mistake and having to figure out how to make up for it.
While the earlier seasons focus on Beaver's boyhood adventures, the later seasons give greater scope to Wally's high school life, dating, and part-time work. Several episodes follow Wally's acquisition of a driver's license and a car. The show's focus is consistently upon the children. No episodes examine the marital concerns of June and Ward who are depicted from one episode to the next as an untroubled, happily married couple.
Education, occupation, and marriage and family are presented in Leave It to Beaver as requisites for a happy and productive life.
Beaver and Wally both attend public schools and are encouraged to pursue college educations as a means to prepare for their futures. Ward and June attended prep school and boarding school respectively and both attended college. Their sons are expected to do the same. While both boys consider prep school educations, Wally at the Bellport Military Academy and Beaver at an eastern school called Fallbrook, both remain at home and attend Mayfield High with their friends. School and homework are the bane of Beaver's existence. In "Beaver's Secret Life", the boy decides to become a writer in adulthood because "you don't have to go to school or know nothing ... You only have to make up adventures and get paid for it." Beaver's attitude toward education provides comic counterpoint to the backgrounds, values, and ambitions of his parents.
Occupation is presented as important to the happy life with Ward representing the successful, college-educated, middle-class professional with a steady but obscure office job, and June the competent and happy homemaker. When Beaver expresses interests in lower class occupations (such as trash collector), his parents understandably squirm with embarrassment and discomfort.
According to the social mores represented in the show, a happy marriage is the cornerstone of successful middle-class family life, and June and Ward represent the warm, happily married, successful middle class couple. In contrast, the parents of Beaver's friend Larry Mondello are a husband frequently out of town on business and an exasperated wife struggling singlehandedly to raise a son and sometimes depending on Ward to help discipline him. Spinsters like prim Aunt Martha are shown as out-of-touch and irksome, while bachelors like globe-trotting, yarn-spinning Uncle Billy, free-loading Jeff, the tramp, and Andy, the alcoholic handyman are shown to be untrustworthy. The one episode dealing with divorce understandably shows it as having negative effects on children and family life.
June and Ward are conscientious parents, keenly aware of their duty to impart traditional, but proven, middle-class family values to their boys. They do so by serving as examples in word and deed, rather than using punitive means. Ward and June are models of late-1950s, conscientious parenting. Stay-at-home June maintains a loving, nurturing home and Ward consistently supervises the behavior and moral education of his sons. While the series portrays the world through the eyes of a young boy, it sometimes dealt with controversial and adult subjects such as alcoholism and divorce.
June Cleaver remains calm amid household tumult, providing crucial guidance to her sons while shielding them from nefarious outside influences with a matronly force of will. Her protection is frequently needed against the pernicious intrigues of Eddie Haskell. He engages in impulsive, selfish, disruptive, and malevolent schemes. For crafty Eddie, each day is one more step toward the twilight of the adults, which will herald his ascension to neighborhood ruler.
Ward Cleaver is a Solomon-like figure of quiet dignity who dispenses parental justice tempered with understanding. He sometimes finds himself punishing his sons for deeds he admits he committed as a child. He often finds himself learning the most in the episode from something his sons, or sometimes his wife, say.
Signature show elements
The show employs contemporary kid-slang extensively. Wally and Beaver both use "gyp" (to swindle), "mess around" (to play), and "hunka" (meaning "hunk of" in relation to food portions such as "hunka cake" or "hunka milk"). "Junk", "crummy", "gee whiz", "gosh", "wiseguy", "grubby", "rat", and "creep" are frequently heard. The word "beef" was also used at times (mostly by Wally) over the course of the show's run, meaning "disagreement" (as in contemporary hip-hop). Ward and June disapprove. Wally uses "sweat" to his mother's annoyance; she prefers "perspiration" and asks him not to use the slang word "flip". "Goofy" is one of Beaver's favorite adjectives, and it is applied to anything that lies outside the bounds of 1950s conformism. "Giving me/you/him/her the business" was a phrase used to describe a character being sarcastic with or otherwise teasing another character.
Physical punishment looms large in the boys' imaginations, but such punishment is never seen. Though Ward tells Beaver he has never physically punished him, Beaver reminds his father of past incidents when he did. In one episode, Beaver mentioned a time when he spilled ink on a rug and his father spanked him. In a season two episode, Beaver states that his parents "hardly ever" hit (spank) him. Both boys use the phrase "Dad's gonna clobber you!" (meaning to spank, or hit) when assessing the other's misdeeds. Ward himself mentions being the victim of his father's belt, and Larry's homelife is described as one of being "hollered" at and hit. In one episode, Larry begs, "Don't hit me! Don't hit me!" when his mother discovers him reading his sister's diary. Punishment in the show is restricted to being grounded, spending time in one's bedroom, losing movie-going or television privileges, or pulling weeds in the yard.
Beaver's speech habits
Beaver has several speech habits peculiar to himself—dropping first syllables, for example (forgot becomes "'got", expelled becomes "'spelled", aggressive becomes "'gressive"), and malapropisms (consolation prize becomes "constellation prize", amulet becomes "omelette"). Grammatical errors are frequent. When Miss Canfield asks Beaver if "Beaver" is his 'given name', Beaver tells her, "My brother given it to me." Beaver uses the phrase "kinda-sorta" to mean "somewhat" throughout the first season. Beaver's speech habits were based on those of Joe Connelly's son, Ricky. Connelly noted the conversations of his sons and their friends, and then incorporated his notations into Beaver's character. As the more educated Beaver grew into a young teen, his errors with the English language diminished significantly, ending one source of mirth.
Recurrent humor is generated on the show by contrasting the 'squeaky-clean' habits of June and Ward with the 'grubby' ones of Wally and Beaver. While Ward and June stress cleanliness, bathing, and good grooming (ordering both boys to wash their faces, hands, and fingernails before dinner), both boys generally prefer being unwashed and dressed in dirty clothes. In the premiere episode, Wally and Beaver fake bathing by rumpling towels and tossing "turtle dirt" in the bathtub. In "Cleaning Up Beaver", June and Ward commend Wally on his neat appearance and chide Beaver for his untidiness. When Wally calls Beaver a "pig", Beaver moves into the guest room where he can be his own dirty, messy self without comment or criticism from others. Frightening shadows in the room force him back to his old bedroom and the safety of being with his brother. The two boys strike a middle ground: Beaver will be a bit tidier than he usually is and Wally will be a bit sloppier.
Leave It to Beaver is unique in 1950s television sitcom history for its extraordinary number of bathroom scenes. Beaver and Wally have a bathroom adjoining their bedroom, and many scenes are set in their bathroom. One early episode, "Child Care", is set almost entirely in their bathroom. Other episodes include major scenes set in the boys' bathroom. Additionally, in almost every scene set in the boys' bedroom, the bathtub, shower curtain, or vanity can be seen through the open bathroom door. Beaver uses the bathroom countless times to escape his brother when angry, slamming the door to express his emotions. At such times, June and Ward are called upon to order Beaver to vacate his refuge. In "Beaver's Good Deed", a scene is set in Ward and June's bathroom. A tramp takes a bath in their tub and slips away wearing one of Ward's suits and a pair of his shoes. In the "Captain Jack" episode, Wally and Beaver try to hide a baby alligator they bought by keeping it in their bathroom's toilet tank. (Network censors, uncomfortable about showing a toilet, compromised by only having the tank visible.)
Beaver and girls
Beaver's attitude toward girls is a thread that runs throughout the series, providing comic contrast to his brother's successful dating life and his parents' happy marriage. Beaver tells off his female classmates, telling Violet Rutherford she drinks gutter water, calling Linda Dennison a "smelly old ape", and threatening to punch Judy Hensler if she gets "mushy" on him. Though loathing girls his own age, Beaver develops crushes on schoolteachers Miss Canfield and Miss Landers—motherly women—and in one episode says he's going to marry a "mother" when the time comes. Beaver disparages marriage saying, "just because you're married doesn't mean you have to like girls." In the later seasons, Beaver has adjusted his outlook somewhat and dates a few girls. The dates, however, turn sour and Beaver never enjoys the kind of success with the opposite sex his brother does.
Cancellation and subsequent developments
In its first season on CBS (1957–1958), Leave It To Beaver received only fair Nielsen ratings and CBS canceled it. ABC then picked up the program, and although the series never entered the list of the top 30 television shows, its ratings warranted a five-year run. By the start of the 1962-1963 season, the show was reaching an impasse. The series was still popular with audiences, but Jerry Mathers wanted to retire from acting at the end of the sixth year to attend regular high school. As a result, Leave It To Beaver ended its network run on June 20, 1963. The series' final episode, "Family Scrapbook", offers a retrospective look at the show's six seasons as the Cleavers leaf through an old scrapbook, recalling past moments. The episode closes the series at milestones in the lives of the Cleaver boys: Wally readying himself for his first year of college and Beaver leaving grammar school for high school. The episode is directed by Hugh Beaumont, written by Connelly and Mosher, and is regarded as being one of the first sitcom episodes written expressly as a series finale.
Cast appearances on Lassie
Several Leave It to Beaver performers appeared on the long-running CBS television series Lassie. Hugh Beaumont had yet to snag his signature role as Ward Cleaver when he appeared in "The Well", one of the two pilots filmed for the series. The episode was filmed in color and aired monochromatically in the series' first season (1954). In 1968, Jerry Mathers appeared in "Lassie and the 4-H Boys", an episode about two teen brothers quarreling over the disposition of a prize-winning bull, while, the same year, Tony Dow appeared with Jan-Michael Vincent as a hippie-type character in a three-part story called "Hanford's Point". Stephen Talbot (Gilbert) was featured in two episodes of "Lassie" in 1959, "The Flying Machine" and "Growing Pains". Before their commitments to Leave It to Beaver, "Tiger" Fafara appeared in one Lassie episode while Madge Blake made appearances in two episodes. In the 1960–1961 season, Richard Correll played Steve Johnson, one of Timmy Martin's Calverton friends in two episodes. Ken Osmond played a delivery boy in a second season episode and a smart-aleck kid whose carelessness causes a forest fire in the fourth season episode "The Cub Scout". One Lassie episode is titled "Leave It to Lassie and the Beavers".
Reunion telemovie (1983)
Except for Beaumont, who had died in 1982, and Stanley Fafara, who was replaced as Whitey by Ed Begley, Jr., the main cast appeared in the reunion telemovie Still the Beaver (1983). The film followed adult Beaver's struggle to reconcile his recent divorce and single parenthood, while facing the possibility of his widowed mother selling their childhood home. June Cleaver is later elected to the Mayfield City Council.
Sequel series (1984–1989)
Its reception led to a new first-run, made-for-cable series, The New Leave It to Beaver (1984–1989), with Beaver and Lumpy Rutherford running Ward's old firm (where Lumpy's pompous, demanding father—played by Richard Deacon in the original series before his death in 1984 — had been the senior partner), Wally, who married his high school girlfriend Mary Ellen Rogers, as a practicing attorney and expectant father, and June having sold the old house to Beaver himself but living with him as a doting grandmother to Beaver's two young sons. Eddie Haskell runs his own contracting business and has two sons; eldest son Freddie (played by Ken Osmond's real-life son, Eric Osmond), who was every inch his father's son—right down to the dual-personality, and a younger son, Eddie, Jr., aka "Bomber" (played by Osmond's younger real-life son, Christian Osmond), who was often away at military school, but would periodically come home to visit.
The show proved to be a scheduling headache for CBS and ABC, airing on four different evenings (Wednesday through Saturday) during the series' run.
CBS first broadcast the show on Friday, October 4, 1957, at 7:30 pm (EST) opposite Saber of London on NBC and The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin on ABC. In March 1958, Beaver was moved to Wednesdays at 8:00 pm opposite Wagon Train, then on NBC.
CBS dropped the show after one season. ABC picked it up and ran it for another five seasons, from October 2, 1958, to June 20, 1963. In his memoirs, Jerry Mathers states the move was the decision of the sponsor, Ralston Purina, who arranged a better deal with ABC than with CBS.
On ABC, the show saw several time slots over its run. From October 1958 to June 1959 it aired on Thursdays at 7:30 pm (EST), with summer 1959 reruns airing at 9:00 pm. From October 1959 to September 1962 the show was televised Saturdays at 8:30 pm, and during its last season (1962–1963) the show aired Thursdays at 8:30 pm.
Reruns of the show became part of CBS daytime lineups in the mornings for several years to come. The show was syndicated in the late 1960s. By the mid-1970s, the show was only on in a few markets, one of which was Atlanta, Georgia on Ted Turner's Channel 17, WTCG. In 1976, when WTGC went on satellite and became a Superstation available nationwide, Leave It To Beaver was exposed nationwide. From the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, Leave It To Beaver gained in popularity. In Chicago, the show aired on a shaky independent station 44 WSNS. But when WSNS began to phase in subscription TV in 1980, they did not renew and WGN-TV, which also became a Superstation picked it up. So in the early 1980s the show was airing in most large, major, and medium TV markets. Still, TBS and WGN showed it for many years in the late 1980s and into the 90's (TBS sometimes running it back-to-back with the New Leave It to Beaver on occasion), and briefly on Nick at Nite from July 12, 2002-August 10, 2002 as part of TV Land Sampler. It currently airs on TV Land, where it has been shown since July 1998. Today, NBC Universal Television owns the syndication rights and all properties related to the series.
The show also aired on the digital TV network Retro TV from 2006 to July 2011, when Retro's rights to MCA/Universal product expired. Digital TV Network, Antenna TV then began running Leave It To Beaver from October 3. 2011-April 27, 2013.
Marketing and merchandise
During the show's first run, merchandise including novels, records, and board games was generated for the juvenile market. With the show's renaissance in popularity decades later, merchandise produced was aimed toward the adult babyboomer/nostalgia collectors market and included pinback buttons, clocks, greeting cards, calendars, non-fiction books about the show's production, memoirs, and miscellaneous items. In 1983, Jerry Mathers and Tony Dow appeared on boxes of Kellogg's Corn Flakes. In 2007, one of the cereal boxes fetched $300 at auction. Promotional photographs from the studio, autographs, original scripts, copies of TV Guide and other magazines from the period featuring articles about the show are all collectibles. Props and costumes from the show with documentation establishing provenance are highly prized.
During the series' run, Little Golden Books published Leave It to Beaver (1959), an inexpensive storybook for young children. Distinguished children's author Beverly Cleary published three softcover novels based on the series, Beaver and Wally, Leave It to Beaver (1960), and Here's Beaver (1961). Whitman Publishing printed Leave It to Beaver: Fire! (1962), a hardcover novel by Cole Fanin. In 1983, The Beaver Papers (ISBN 0-517-54991-3) by Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones was published. The book is a parody of a lost season comprising twenty-five episodes written in the style of various authors such as Tennessee Williams.
Dell comic books
Dell Comics published six Leave It to Beaver comic books with photo covers of Beaver, Beaver and Wally, or Beaver and Ward. The first comic book (Four Color No. 912) is dated June 1958 and the last (Four Color No. 01-238-207) May–July 1962. In 2004, all six Dell Leave It to Beaver comic books in 'Near Mint' condition were valued in excess of two hundred dollars each.
Hasbro board games
Three Leave It to Beaver juvenile board games were released in 1959 by toymaker Hasbro. The games were typical roll-and-move track games for two to four players. All three game box covers feature photographic portraits of Jerry Mathers as Beaver.
"Leave It to Beaver Money Maker Game" suggests one of the show's recurrent themes—Beaver's attempts to make money. Equipment includes a center-seamed board with illustrations of Beaver and Ward. One player distributes and collects money as "Father".
"Leave It to Beaver Rocket to the Moon Space Game", rather than using dice or a spinner to advance players along the track, employs a rocket-shaped cone that is flipped onto a board to determine the number of spaces to be moved. "Leave It to Beaver Ambush Game" is a track game with an Old West theme.
Feature film adaptation
1997's movie adaptation of the series starred Christopher McDonald as Ward, Janine Turner as June, Erik von Detten as Wally, and Cameron Finley as the Beaver. It was panned by many critics, with the notable exception of Roger Ebert, who gave it a three-star rating. It performed poorly at the box office, earning only $11,713,605. Barbara Billingsley, Ken Osmond and Frank Bank made cameo appearances in the film.
Universal Studios Home Entertainment released the first two seasons of Leave It to Beaver on DVD in Region 1 in 2005/2006. Season one was released in two versions: an inexpensive cardboard slip-cased collection and a costlier version in which the DVDs were contained in a retro-styled, plastic photo album tucked inside a plaid metal lunch box displaying portraits of the cast on its exterior.
On January 26, 2010, it was announced that Shout! Factory had acquired the rights to the series (under license from Universal). They subsequently released the remaining seasons on DVD as well as a complete series box set.
On January 31, 2012, Shout! Factory released a 20 episode best-of set entitled Leave It to Beaver- 20 Timeless Episodes.
|DVD Name||Ep #||Release Date|
|The Complete First Season||39||November 22, 2005|
|The Complete Second Season||39||May 2, 2006|
|Season Three||39||June 15, 2010|
|Season Four||39||September 14, 2010|
|Season Five||39||December 14, 2010|
|Season Six||39||March 1, 2011[|
|The Complete Series||234||June 29, 2010|
In spite of solid and consistent ratings, Leave It to Beaver never climbed into the Nielsen's top-30 though similar sitcoms of the period like Father Knows Best, The Donna Reed Show, The Real McCoys, and Dennis the Menace managed to do so.
Leave It to Beaver faced stiff competition in its time slots. During its next to last season, for example, the show ran against The Defenders, a program examining highly charged courtroom cases about abortion and the death penalty. In its final season, the show was up against Perry Mason and Dr. Kildare but was in the ABC line-up with television greats The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, The Donna Reed Show, and My Three Sons.
Critical reception was generally favorable. In the New York Herald Tribune, John Crosby stated the show was "charming and sincere" and featured "the wonderful candor and directness with which children disconcert and enchant you". Variety favorably compared the premiere episode with the classic Tom Sawyer and noted at the fourth season's opening that the show had "never been a yock show in the sense of generating big and sustained laughs, but it has consistently poured forth warmth, wit and wisdom without condescension or pretense." TV Guide dubbed the show "the sleeper of the 1957–58 season" and later noted that the show was "one of the most honest, most human and most satisfying situation comedies on TV." The New York Times, however, found the show was "too broad and artificial to be persuasive".
A comparison of how children interact with their brothers and sisters on such 1950s situation comedy television programs as Leave It To Beaver and Father Knows Best with those on such 1980s programs as The Cosby Show and Family Ties found that children interacted more positively in the early period but were important and central—if more conflictual—to the main story action in the 1980s.
Awards and nominations
The show received two Emmy nominations in 1958 for Best New Program Series of the Year and Best Teleplay Writing—Half Hour or Less (Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher) for the premiere episode, "Beaver Gets 'Spelled". In 1984, Jerry Mathers was awarded the Young Artist's Former Child Star Special Award, and in 1987, Ken Osmond and Tony Dow were both honored with the Young Artist's Former Child Star Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2003, Diane Brewster was nominated for TV Land's Classic TV Teacher of the Year Award while, in 2005, Ken Osmond was nominated for TV Land's Character Most Desperately in Need of a Timeout Award. Leave It to Beaver placed on Time's "The 100 Best TV Shows of All-Time" list. Bravo ranked Beaver 74th on their list of the 100 greatest TV characters.
- Applebaum, Irwyn. The World According to Beaver. TV Books, 1984, 1998. (ISBN 1575000520).
- Bank, Frank. Call Me Lumpy: My Leave It To Beaver Days and Other Wild Hollywood Life. Addax, 2002. (ISBN 1886110298), (ISBN 978-1886110298).
- Colella, Jennifer. The Leave It to Beaver Guide to Life: Wholesome Wisdom from the Cleavers! Running Press, 2006. (ISBN 0762427736), (ISBN 9780762427734).
- Kassel, Michael B. "Mass Culture, History and Memory and the Image of the American Family", PdD dissertation, Michigan State U. 2005 65(9): 3537-A. DA3146050 613p.
- Keck, William. "Leave It to Jerry 'Beaver' Mathers, Tony Dow". USA Today
- Mathers, Jerry. And Jerry Mathers as "The Beaver", (1998), memoir.
- Shaffer, Jeffrey. "Epic Beaver Cleaver", Christian Science Monitor, May 28, 1999, Vol. 91, Issue 128
- Leave It to Beaver: the complete first season. Universal Studios, 2005.
- Leave It to Beaver: the complete second season. Universal Studios, 2006. (ISBN 1417074876)
- Mathers, Jerry. ...And Jerry Mathers as "The Beaver". Berkley Boulevard Books, 1998. (ISBN 0425163709)
- Applebaum, Irwyn. The World According to Beaver. TV Books, 1984, 1998.
- Mathers, Jerry. ...And Jerry Mathers as The Beaver. Berkley Boulevard Books, 1998. (ISBN 0425163709)
- TIME magazine: "The 100 Best TV Shows of All-TIME". Retrieved 2008 April 15.
- Beaver's Back!, AARP, July & August 2010
- Orlick, Peter. Leave It to Beaver. The Museum of Broadcast Communications. Retrieved 2008 April 15.
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 1: "Beaver Gets 'Spelled".
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 2: "Captain Jack".
- "Special Collectors' Issue: 100 Greatest Episodes of All Time". TV Guide (June 28-July 4). 1997.
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 149: "In the Soup"
- Interview with Jerry Mathers | PARADE Magazine
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 3: "The Haircut".
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 1: "Beaver Gets 'Spelled"
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 1: "Beaver Gets 'Spelled".
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 1: "Beavers Poem".
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 1: "Blind Date Committee".
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 1: "Beaver Won't Eat".
- "The Toy Parade" lyrics.
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 7: "Water, Anyone?"
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 73: "Wally's Haircomb".
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 204: "Beaver Joins a Record Club".
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 32: "Beaver's Old Friend".
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 21: "Cleaning Up Beaver".
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 55: "The Boat Builders".
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 28: "Next Door Indians".
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 24: "The State vs. Beaver".
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 57: "The Garage Painters".
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 68: "Beaver Says Goodbye"
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 78: "Most Interesting Character".
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 79: "Blind Date Committee".
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 86: "Beaver's Tree".
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 56: "Beaver Plays Hooky".
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 31: "New Doctor".
- Lillico, Neil B. Television as Popular Culture: An attempt to influence North American Society? An Ideological analysis of Leave it to Beaver (1957–1961). A memoir submitted to the School of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the M.A. degree in History. University of Ottawa. 1993.
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 100: "Larry's Club".
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 115: "Wally's Play".
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 82: "Beaver's Prize".
- Leave It to Beaver, episode : "Beaver's I.Q".
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 222: "Beaver's Prep School".
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 14: "Part Time Genius".
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 77: "Found Money".
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 93: "Larry Hides Out",
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 11: "Beaver's Short Pants".
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 221: "Uncle Billy's Visit".
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 214: "Beaver's Good Deed".
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 98: "Beaver and Andy".
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 119: "Beaver's House Guest".
- Jeffrey Shaffer, "Epic Beaver Cleaver", Christian Science Monitor, May 28, 1999, Vol. 91, Issue 128
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 102: "The Hypnotist".
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 93: "Larry Hides Out".
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 1: "Beaver Gets 'Spelled"
- Leave It to Beaver, episode : "Cleaning Up Beaver".
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 18: "Child Care".
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 47: "The Shave".
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 80: "Beaver Takes a Bath".
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 8: "Beaver's Crush".
- Leave It to Beaver, episode 169: "Beaver's First Date".
- Lassie, episode 24: "The Well".
- Lassie, episode 485: "Lassie and the 4-H Boys".
- Lassie, episodes 470, 471, 472: "Hanford's Point".
- Lassie, episode 66: "Friendship".
- Lassie, episode 29: "The Kittens".
- Lassie, episode 89: "The Artist".
- Lassie, episode 250: "The Greyhound".
- Lassie, episode 253: "Timmy and the Martians".
- Lassie, episode 36: "The Rival".
- Lassie, episode 138: "The Cub Scout".
- Leave It to Beaver – TV.com
- "Nick at Nite Summer Camp 2002". http://www.sitcomsonline.com/boards/showthread.php?t=37289&highlight=nick+nite+leave+beaver.
- Overstreet, Robert M. Official Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide, 2004. Gemstone Publishing, 2004.
- "Season 3 Still On Schedule, But a Short Delay for The Complete Series"
- Leave it to Beaver: The Complete First Season
- Leave it to Beaver: The Complete Second Season
- Leave it to Beaver: Season Three
- Leave it to Beaver: Season Four
- Leave it to Beaver: Season Five
- Leave it to Beaver: Season Six
- Leave it to Beaver: The Complete Series
- Mary Strom Larson, "Sibling Interactions in 1950s Versus 1980s Sitcoms: A Comparison", Journalism Quarterly 1991 68(3): 381–387
- "The 100 Greatest TV Characters". Bravo. Archived from the original on October 15, 2007. Retrieved October 19, 2010.
|Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Leave It to Beaver|
- "Golly, Beav, We’re Historic", by Neil Genzlinger, New York Times, June 25, 2010
- episodes of Leave It to Beaver on TVLand.com (USA only)
- Leave It to Beaver at the Internet Movie Database
- Leave It to Beaver at TV.com | <urn:uuid:7ec5a873-a2b2-4e93-8db2-2a80a097f342> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leave_It_To_Beaver | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957086 | 11,706 | 1.742188 | 2 |
Motlanthe address the SADC summit in Uganda
By Mandisi Tyulu
23 October 2008
South African president kgalema Motlanthe said that regional integration is central component in Africa’s development and that all this was aimed at achieving sustainable development because of the recent market upheavals.
Motlanthe was speaking at the Southern African Developing Countries summit in Uganda. Motlanthe says while Africa and other developing countries had marginal influence over the decision that have brought the international financial system into the bring of collapse and that the poor of these countries will bare the effect of this crisis.
He added that since SADC establishment it has made trumederous strides in regional co-operation and integration. He said today SADC comprises 15 member states, a population of 200 and forty eight million and a combined GDP of over three hundred and seventy five billion Us dollars.
‘‘All this is aimed at accelerating efforts to achieve sustainable development and more recent upheavals in the financial markets.’’ | <urn:uuid:1b88a263-f78e-40c2-b31c-c8b9e44fef42> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bushradionews.blogspot.com/2008/10/motlanthe-address-sadc-summit-in-uganda.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952858 | 217 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Posts Tagged ‘federal taxes’
Critics have urged Romney to release more than just the two years of returns and follow his father’s model. When George Romney ran for president, he released 12 years of tax returns.
by Bernadette Starzee Published: August 29, 2012
Tags: accounting, accounting firms, bisexual, federal taxes, Finance, gay, legislation, lesbian, LGBT services, Marcum, marital deduction, MayerMeinberg, non-traditional family, Same-sex marriage, tax issues, taxes, transgender, Vishnick McGovern Milizio
Many cheered last year’s legalization of same-sex marriage in New York. Among those showering rice along with best wishes were perceptive accounting firms.
Thousands of Medicaid health care service providers still got paid by the government even though they owed hundreds of millions of dollars in federal taxes, congressional investigators say. A legal technicality is making it harder for the IRS to collect In a report being released Thursday, the Government Accountability Office says Medicaid payments to doctors, [...]
Contrary to public opinion and what the Occupy Wall Street protesters would lead you to believe, the top 1 percent pay a huge chunk of the nation’s taxes. Of the $865.9 billion in federal taxes paid in 2009, the top 1 percent (about 1.3 million people earning at least $344,000) paid $318 billion, or 36.7 [...]
Some airline customers won’t see savings this weekend even though several federal taxes on tickets have expired. US Airways and American Airlines say they’ve raised fares to offset any tax savings. That means instead of passing along the savings from expired taxes, the airlines are pocketing the money while customers pay the same amount as [...]
WASHINGTON – Taxes too high? Actually, as a share of the nation’s economy, Uncle Sam’s take this year will be the lowest since 1950, when the Korean War was just getting under way. And for the third straight year, American families and businesses will pay less in federal taxes than they did under former President [...] | <urn:uuid:5c545ad4-b906-4bd7-876d-b36ed08e05dc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://libn.com/tag/federal-taxes/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947712 | 431 | 1.671875 | 2 |
Leonard Pitts, a black columnist with the Miami Herald has his column in today’s JS. In my opinion, Mr. Pitts doesn’t fall into the category of other columnists such Thomas Sowell and William Raspberry but his article today makes sense. He is talking about a newly proposed million man march to Washington and laments the results of the first march ten years ago. He says “ten years later, 65 percent of our children are still born out of wedlock, five times more of us are likely to die of homicide, fewer than half of us own our homes, we still marry less, go to jail more and die sooner. Ten years later, the promises we made that crisp Monday in November, lie fallow and unredeemed. We stood in a crowd of generation be-bop, generation doo-wop and generation hip-hop, gathered to slap backs and shake hands, to hug and laugh and be shoulder to shoulder and man to man, serenaded by the heartbeats of African drums. Speakers spoke but they were not the show. The show was us, standing there on what we thought was the pivot of change.
Yet here we are 10 years later (and planning another march led by the wrong leaders), still damned by the numbers. Because change is not something you talk into existence. Change takes action.
Credit where it is due: some of us did go back to our communities and work to change them. But too many of us, just went back.
And yes, I know about cops and court, about the loan officer at the bank and the hiring man downtown and I know about the lies too many white people tell themselves, including the one that goes “liberty and justice for all.” I know about the truths some people won’t, can’t face because it cuts too close to their most cherished conceits and necessary self deceptions.
But I also know that much of what is needed to fix our communities requires no white person’s consent:
Seek a career, Not a job. (Merle’s comment here is get a job and prepare yourself for a career)
Don’t make children you can’t support. (Merle’s comment here is that it usually takes two consenters to cause a pregnancy)
Understand that support means money.
Understand that support means more than money.
Marry the woman. (Merle’s comment, don’t impregnate someone you don’t want to live with for a very long time)
Model manhood for your children.
Save some money.
Buy a home. (Merle’s comment: rent first and save your money and make sure you can afford to MAINTAIN the house you buy.)
Build a life. (Merle’s comments: I am of an age older than 95% of those reading this and I’m still building.)
Easier said than done? Yes, very much. A guarantee you will live happily ever after? No such guarantee exists nor ever will.
Yet I persist in believing that for African America ( Merle does not agree with him here, I would say black Americans in America), changing the world lies in the embrace of these and other old-school dictums. And that revolution can be as simple as a family, checking homework and going to church on Sunday.
I thought we all understood that as we gathered under that autumnal sun. I thought this is what we meant when we laughed and hugged and made promises for the future. But 10 years later, the future is still here and it is hard to glimpse even the bare outlines of change.
There used to be a song that said, “Brother’s gonna work it out.” Ten years later; another autumnal sun. And we are waiting on brother, still.”
End of my somewhat condensed version of Mr. Pitt’s column.
Common sense black leadership appears to be asking why many blacks are caught in a “time warp” while other blacks are springing into action and taking charge of their own destiny.
As someone who first met a black person in high school and then worked with them, hired them, visited their homes, socialized with them, tutored them, played with them; basketball, softball and tennis, I believe I am somewhat qualified to give some white person insight to black leadership in all walks of life; public, private and social leadership as well as some writers and some like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton who would probably never agree with me under any circumstance.
When you realize someone is talking to you in a “political correct” form, tell them you value their friendship, advice or whatever but tell them to GET REAL!
Say I am an American and you are an American; you are a Swiss American and I am an African American but we are BOTH Americans. Let’s knock off the formalities and just talk as Americans and call each other friends and forget the race designations. If you get your doctoral degree, am I to, say, introduce you as Dr. so and so who is an African-American with a degree in whatever. Get real again! I would really think it was stupid if someone would call me a Swiss-German American, which I am and will mention it if I really thought someone was interested. They are not!! (If you are a citizen of another country, say some country in Africa, no problem, say so if you wish.)
Try not to be so sensitive unless you REALLY believe someone is insulting you in a derogatory manner or is truly trying to make you feel inferior. If you are sure, then advise them of your feelings in a polite manner. I was called many names I didn’t like when I was growing up, yet I never complained to my folks, teachers or the news media.
Realize that the better you are prepared to impress the “hiring man downtown” the greater become your chances of being hired.
Don’t believe because you are black or poor that people don’t like you. A few will never like some of you just like some people will never like me. So WHAT?
We are all victims at some time or another. Why do you think you have “dibs” on being a victim? Get busy and get a life! All of us with some common sense are getting tired of that old “victimization” stuff.
Who do you think takes entry level jobs? Just black people? What kind of “fine position” white collar job do you think most dropouts of any color are qualified for? Many of us have taken entry level jobs, learned more, and moved up or found a satisfactory job or found a niche where we were financially independent. Try working on a farm where I worked for 18 years. (Well, I was about six years old before I was assigned to my first entry level job like pulling weeds and cleaning up after the chickens.)
Where in our Constitution does it say the “hiring man downtown” owes you a job just because you are black? If you are truly qualified and believe you have been by passed because of race, our laws permit recourse. Qualified people are getting harder to find so go to school, listen up and learn a trade and then become indispensable. If you are turned down by someone, someone else will hire you. If you don’t keep trying, there are always immigrants coming to this country who will take those jobs and move up to management while some of you will be dropouts, poor unmarried and pregnant, become gang bangers or hip-hoppers, (yes some make big money but too many become addicted to something or another and often die young) or become dependent on welfare and wind up going nowhere.
Lastly, try to sort out the racists of your own race and denounce them as such. Pay attention to what Bill Cosby said; he dropped the mask of “political correctness” and drew the ire of the racists and “bleeding” liberals. There are many millions of successful black people in America, from Mr. Cosby, Ward Connerly and all the way up to Ms. Rice. Find them, read them and listen to them and model yourself accordingly.
Demand that you have competent teachers, principals, school board members and administrators. If you are born in dire straits; there are usually people who are interested in you (churches, schools, social services, other relatives and safety nets that will try to help you. Avoid becoming a member of a gang; they only want to drag you down as they build themselves into the phonies they are. You will soon learn how to help yourself to a better way of life than the one you were born into. There are so many people in the United States and the world that are born in “dire straits” making it imperative that you do not wind up being “un-coachable” because try as we might, society can not save everyone in the world, not even in our own country or community.
Understand that being an athlete or a pretty good one does not guarantee you a job in later life. Even a college degree is just a “hunting license” and does not GUARANTEE any person of any color, a job.
At a very early age get involved in a POSITIVE way in your community and pick your close friends and leaders very, very carefully.
Remember your ancestry and honor it and them if you wish. But always remember, all citizens of any color of this country are AMERICANS and entitled to liberty (if you obey the law) and the pursuit of a reasonable amount of happiness!! (We often treat non-citizens as good or better than we do some of our own citizens of any color)! | <urn:uuid:1296bc0f-e84f-41af-a3b4-cb3805ac52bf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://widmer-peoria-watch.blogspot.com/2005/10/still-waiting-for-change.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971228 | 2,066 | 1.820313 | 2 |
LST-705 was laid down on 21 April 1944 at Jeffersonville, Ind., by the Jeffersonville Boat & Machine Co.; launched on 7 June 1944; sponsored by Miss Rose Zeller; and commissioned on 4 July 1944.
During World War II, LST-705 was assigned to the Asiatic-Pacific theater and participated in the following operations:
Leyte landings—November 1944
Lingayen Gulf landing—January 1945
Mindanao Island landings—March and April 1945
Following the war, LST-705 performed occupation duty in the Far East until late February 1946. She returned to the United States and was decommissioned on 22 July 1946 and struck from the Navy list on 25 September that same year. On 8 December 1947, the ship was sold to the Learner Co., of Oakland, Calif., for scrapping.
LST-705 earned three battle stars for World War II service. | <urn:uuid:bdbdca5c-3eee-49b2-adbe-1dca8bf6d566> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.history.navy.mil/danfs/l23/lst-705.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967089 | 192 | 1.625 | 2 |
Indoor Water Use
Simple, minor adjustments to your house and your behavior can work wonders when it comes to water conservation. People all across the country are using less water than they used to by shutting off faucets, fixing leaks, and installing more efficient appliances and fixtures. Click on the links on the left to explore water efficiency by fixture and appliance.
How much can you save? It all depends on how much you’re using right now. Estimate your water use and potential savings with the Home Water Works Calculator. | <urn:uuid:4df2e9d3-0853-45fd-8e30-5eb0c05d8ed5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.home-water-works.org/indoor-use | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941752 | 108 | 1.820313 | 2 |
Recent Utilities Policy Articles
Karen L. Palmer | Samuel Grausz | Blair Beasley | Timothy J. Brennan
Abstract: Energy efficiency resource standards (EERS) refer to policies that require utilities and other covered entities to achieve quantitative goals for reducing energy use by a certain year. EERS policies generally apply to electricity and natural gas sales and electricity peak demand, though they also cover other energy sources in Europe. Our study aggregates information about the requirements of existing EERS policies for electricity sales in the United States. We convert quantitative goals into comparable terms to compare the nominal stringency of EERS programs across states. EERS programs also differ in their nonquantitative requirements, including flexibility measures; measurement and verification programs; and penalties and positive incentives. We compare the U.S. policies to similar policies in Europe and discuss important policy issues, including exogenous changes in fuel prices and issues with utility management of energy efficiency programs.
Gilberto Antonelli | Giuseppe Cappiello | Giulio Pedrini
Abstract: The paper investigates that particular training model represented by Corporate University, as it has been developed in the European utility industries. The Corporate University may in fact represent a consistent choice with a strategy aiming to diversify and expand the utility company into increasingly deregulated and contestable markets. At the same time the Corporate University holds a close relationship between business strategies and the internal organization of knowledge of the firm. A survey on six major energy companies reveals the heterogeneity of the phenomenon with reference to quantitative variables, while common features arise with regard to qualitative analysis. In particular our investigation shows that CUs in the energy industry are typically committed to Corporate Social Responsibility principles.
Timothy J. Brennan | Karen L. Palmer
Abstract: Twenty states in the United States have adopted energy efficiency resource standards (EERS) that specify absolute or percentage reductions in energy use relative to business as usual. We examine how an EERS compares to policies oriented to meeting objectives, such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions, correcting for consumer error in energy efficiency investment, or reducing peak demand absent real-time prices. If reducing energy use is a policy goal, one could use energy taxes or cap-and-trade systems rather than an EERS. An EERS can be optimal under special conditions, but to achieve optimal goals following energy efficiency investments, the marginal external harm must fall with greater energy use. This could happen if inframarginal energy has greater negative externalities, particularly regarding emissions, than energy employed at the margin. We conclude with a table of suggestions policy makers should consider when deciding whether and how to adopt an EERS.
European Union regulation of gas transmission services: Challenges in the allocation of network resources through entry/exit schemes
Michelle Hallack | Miguel Vazquez
Abstract: The current definition of “commercial” gas networks in the European Union (EU) is based on entry/exit schemes and balancing mechanisms. This regulation of grid services aims to enhance the liquidity of wholesale markets. In order to facilitate the gas commodity trade among players with different network usage profiles and different network connection points, some network services are socialized across the market zone. That socialization of network services in the EU leaves the task to reconcile physical gas flows and commercial gas flows to a regulated system operator. We show that in practice, it leads, on the one hand, to offer less “commercial” transmission capacity than the physical capacity of the network, and on the other, to the cross-subsidization of line-pack services between high profile and low profile users. The guidelines proposed by the Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators (ACER) for the gas balancing network code do not explicitly address all the drawbacks of existing entry/exit schemes, but they leave room to design mechanisms that increase the efficiency of short-term network allocation. Contributing to this open debate, we point out that improved allocation comes with market mechanisms to allocate short-term network services, instead of relying solely on Transmission System Operators' management of network resources.
Lourdes Trujillo | María Manuela González | Juan Luis Jiménez
Abstract: In Africa, the main objective of the port sector is to improve trade competitiveness and to reduce government expenditures. Nevertheless, the reform process in African ports is complex due to some factors, which adversely influence their ability to further develop and affect port efficiency. This paper examines this process and the factors that are slowing it. The first objective is to measure the evolution of port efficiency during the port reform process using a stochastic production frontier. Our results suggest that reforms are producing the first positive results. In fact average efficiency has continuously increased from 2004 to 2007, nevertheless there is still much room to improve port efficiency. The second objective is to estimate what factors affect perceived port quality using an OLS regression. We control by type and size of port, location, GDP and corruption. Overall results show that landlord ports are not only the most efficient ones but also the most valued ones.
Hagen Worch | Bernhard Truffer | Mundia Kabinga | Anton Eberhard | Jochen Markard
Abstract: This paper proposes a capability-based framework to explain performance deficiencies in utility firms as a result of policy and regulatory changes. The framework complements conventional explanations such as transaction cost and agency approaches, which suggest that appropriate incentives and regulations increase the performance of public utilities after relatively short adaptation processes. In contrast, we argue that capability gaps – understood as an inadequate availability of competences, skills and experiences – tend to have long-lasting effects on firm performance. A crucial implication of the capability perspective is that regulatory interventions that create capability gaps at the firm level may affect utility performance – and the ability of infrastructure sectors to provide adequate services – more severely than expected by traditional approaches.
Rui Cunha Marques | Sanford V. Berg
Andrea Guerrini | Giulia Romano
Abstract: The Italian water sector has undergone profound change since 2006, when a revised governance framework and new tariff models became law; further innovations were introduced after a national referendum in June 2011. This paper discusses the process of tariff setting in Italy in the light of reforms since 2006; a qualitative case study approach is used to investigate the tariff-setting process and the impact of the new regulatory framework on water utilities and local regulatory authorities. Results show that both utilities and authorities altered their investment policies to reduce financial risk in view of the uncertainty surrounding the new regulatory framework. Moreover, several water utilities have not yet fully implemented the new tariff model introduced by the June 2011 referendum, for the reason that it prohibits the inclusion in water tariffs of a fixed return on investment component; when applied, the new model is expected to determine a significant decrease in both the annual income and cash flow of water utilities.
Antonio Massarutto | Paolo Ermano
Abstract: Italy reformed its water and sanitation services in 1994. The strategy aimed at transforming public entities, financed by the central budget, into self-sufficient professional companies regulated at arms' length. Nearly 20 years after, the reform has failed to deliver (despite some partial success). Italians have been divided in two parties: those blaming public sector inefficiencies and calling for competitive tendering; and those refusing to privatize water and willing to go back to the fiscal budget. In this article, we suggest that both parties are wrong. Underperformance is not related to the ownership structure of water companies, but rather to poor regulatory design and lack of understanding of the regulatory requirements that are implicit in the management model chosen, namely the concession contract.
Abstract: This paper provides a synopsis of the current regulatory and institutional arrangements that pertain to the urban water and wastewater sector in Australia. A short and selected institutional history of the urban water sectors in the Australian cities of Sydney and Melbourne is outlined, followed by an analysis of the relative effectiveness of the institutional structures in enabling the sector to respond to the challenges faced by the sector in the future.
Arnaud Reynaud | Alban Thomas
Abstract: The profitability of a firm is a highly complex concept, as it results from firms' decisions on investment and production plans, but also from constraints beyond their control (economic regulation, level of competition, economic growth). We analyze the profitability of firms in the water industry by focusing on the impact of economic regulation and the economic environment. The objective is to determine empirical regularities which could explain profitability. Using a panel of firms from developed and transition countries, we show that the profitability of firms in the water sector is in line with that in other network industries. Profitability varies greatly depending on the chosen measure of profitability, firm's size, the economic environment and the characteristics of regulation in place are essential to understand and explain firm's profitability. In particular, being regulated by a price-cap scheme appears to be an important determinant of profitability.
Nuno Ferreira da Cruz | Pedro Carvalho | Rui Cunha Marques
Abstract: Providing operators with objective incentives for cost efficiency and continuous improvement in the provision of public services are major concerns for regulators. Measuring efficiency empirically is complex and this complexity is accentuated when the same operator is responsible for delivering more than one service (e.g. in order to explore potential economies of scope). Based on a sample of operators that provide water and wastewater services, this paper uses a shared input data envelopment analysis model to measure separately the efficiency of each service. The results show that a single measure may not provide enough information for monitoring multi-utilities. Together with other indicators, the proposed model can assist decision-makers in prioritizing efforts to improve overall efficiency.
Janice A. Beecher | Jason A. Kalmbach
Abstract: The structure and regulation of the U.S. water industry is more complex than is often apparent and pricing practices vary substantially. While not representative of the region or nation, a survey of the largest water systems in the wider Great Lakes region is illustrative as well as revealing of salient considerations within the sector. Data from Wisconsin provide additional perspective with regard to trends in costs and prices for water. The context of rising costs and prices, and growing concerns about accountability and sustainability, suggests consideration of pricing practices as well as the role of economic regulation in the water sector.
Is the price of water for residential use related to provider ownership? Empirical evidence from Spain
María de los Ángeles García-Valiñas | Francisco González-Gómez | Andrés J. Picazo-Tadeo
Abstract: This paper assesses the relationship between provider ownership and the price of water for residential use set by 386 Southern Spanish municipalities. Our main contribution to the previous literature is that we go much further than merely distinguishing between private and public ownership. First, we find that prices are lower when the urban water service is directly provided by town councils. Second, when water services are contracted out to external companies, the prices set by public utilities are higher than the prices of private utilities due to larger fixed quotas. Finally, water prices are also higher when the provision of the service has been privatised to an institutionalised public-private partnership compared to contractual public-private partnerships.
Abstract: Water services in England & Wales were corporatized in 1974 and privatised in 1989. Quality regulators were appointed to ensure good quality of drinking water supplied and waste water discharged. An economic regulator, Ofwat was appointed to secure that water services were properly provided to customers and that they could be financed. The economic regulator was also charged to promote efficiency, enhance competition and protect customers. A similar body in Scotland was appointed in 2005, following corporatisation of water services in 1996 and the formation of Scottish Water as a Public Corporation in 2002.Ian Byatt was appointed the first Director General of Ofwat in 1989 and the first Chairman of the Water Industry Commission for Scotland in 2005. In this article he gives his account of the regulation and draws some lessons from his experience. Regulatory strategy, he argues, not detail, is the key to success. Constant adaptation to changing circumstances is both inevitable and highly desirable. To be successful regulation requires careful explanation both to key decision-makers and to the public.
Xeni Dassiou | Jon Stern
Abstract: This paper provides a short introduction to the papers in the special section below on economic regulation in infrastructure industries. The papers are from the CCRP Research Workshop held at City University, London in January 2012. The topics covered include (i) supply-side competition for airports (Bilotkatch and Mueller); (ii) resource cost pricing in the water supply industry and how best to establish the value of water (Stern and Mirrlees-Black); and (iii) the role and regulation of hydro pumped storage for electricity in an environment where the role of intermittent renewable generation is growing (Rangoni).
New regulatory policies in Italy: Impact on financial results, on liquidity and profitability of natural gas retail companies
Guendalina Capece | Livio Cricelli | Francesca Di Pillo | Nathan Levialdi
Abstract: During the three-year period 2007–2009, the Italian Regulatory Authority for Electricity and Gas has issued numerous measures concerning the retail market of natural gas. The same period was characterized by a deep economic and financial crisis involving the industrial sector and, in particular, the energy companies.This paper aims to analyse the combined effect of the new regulatory measures and of the economic crisis on the business performance of natural gas retail companies. To that aim, the balance sheets were analysed for a sample of 111 companies and the profitability, financial and liquidity indicators were calculated. A cluster analysis was then performed utilising the most important performance indexes. The firms within each cluster were analysed with respect to the main company characteristics.
Volodymyr Bilotkach | Juergen Mueller
Abstract: This study evaluates the issue of market power of Amsterdam airport Schiphol, focusing on the substitutability between this airport and nearby gateways. We focus separately on substitutability with respect to origin-and-destination passengers, and transfer passengers. These two types of passengers represent different markets in terms of both geographical boundaries and competing airports. Analysis of Official Airline Guide data, along with the information obtained during the interviews with stakeholders, clearly demonstrate that Schiphol has a potential to exercise its market power on both markets we identified.
Abstract: The European Commission's proposal to unbundle electricity transmission network encouraged a great debate among involved players. Mainstream economists suggest that unbundling of both the transmission network and the interconnections can be seen as a structural solution to the problem of low investments in the grid and consequent high concentration of markets in favour of incumbents (among others, Léautier, 2001). Other scholars point out that benefits have to be compared to costs of unbundling (Kwoka, 2002). Recent literature underlines that net effect is ambiguous; more empirical evidence is needed (Pollitt, 2008). This paper proposes an empirical analysis to evaluate whether, and to what extent, unbundling measures are related to the increase of grid investments, focussing on 14 UCTE countries between 2001 and 2010. Results are twisted: legal and ownership unbundling show higher investments in the network, although, only for ownerhip unbundling, a substantial lack of quality emerges, confirming the risks of diseconomies of coordination in ownership unbundled systems and the need of incentive regulation.
Dmitry Kuleshov | Satu Viljainen | Salla Annala | Olga Gore
Abstract: The Russian power sector reform initiated in 2001 endeavored to introduce competition into major segments of the Russian electricity market. This paper examines how far the reforms have advanced in the retail electricity market and discusses social, political and technological barriers to market liberalization. Market shares of retailers are used as the main indicator to assess competition. The results indicate that the retail market is currently divided into inactive and sub-active markets. Future development of retail competition in the Russian electricity market needs to take into account the reasons for this market asymmetry.
Adopting electricity prepayment billing system to reduce non-technical energy losses in Uganda: Lesson from Rwanda
Francis M. Mwaura
Abstract: Uganda is contemplating adopting an electricity prepayment billing system (EPBS) as an intervention to reduce non-technical energy losses. To provide more insight on EPBS a study was formulated to assess potential benefits of the EPBS in reducing power theft; understanding how EPBS operates and evaluating the possibility of EPBS adoption in Uganda. Rwanda provided a good case study considering its successful implementation of EPBS. Successful adoption of EPBS in Uganda will depend on capital availability, proportion of EPBS targetable customers, energy use and revenue for those being targeted; and enforcement of a deterrent penalty for those apprehended stealing power.
Performance assessment of Turkish electricity distribution utilities: An application of combined FAHP/TOPSIS/DEA methodology to incorporate quality of service
Aydın Çelen | Neşe Yalçın
Abstract: The recent years have witnessed the increase in the importance of service quality in the performance measurement of the regulated utilities. In this study, to incorporate quality of service in performance measurement, we propose a combined methodology of FAHP/TOPSIS/DEA methods, and apply it to the Turkish electricity distribution market. With FAHP method, the relative importance levels of different quality indicators are determined. Then TOPSIS method is used to generate quality of service variable. And finally this variable is used as an output in the DEA stage, and efficiency performances of the electricity distribution utilities are determined. The most important advantage of the combined methodology is that it allows taking into account several quality measures simultaneously instead of relying on only one dimension of the quality.
Abstract: Climate change is a particular threat to long-lived infrastructures as many existing and planned infrastructures will still be in use by 2030 or 2050 when climate change might have far more substantial impacts then today. Consequently, to avoid financial losses and service disruption, the infrastructure planning process has to be entirely redefined to be able to successfully integrate climate change uncertainties. This paper explores the relationships between climate change and long-lived infrastructure according to the different types of direct and indirect uncertainties surrounding climate change, demonstrates the importance of acknowledging climate change as one of the components of the infrastructure planning process and explains how this same process could be reviewed to make it more responsive to the many uncertainties surrounding our future. It points out the different measures which could be undertaken to improve the planning process.
Abstract: Ongoing shifts in energy supply and demand dynamics have created extensive, volatile mismatches in electricity spot market pricing between neighboring Canadian and US jurisdictions. Under such circumstances, it is tempting to assume that additional international transmission interconnections are urgently required and would help to mitigate costly pricing incongruities. However, a number of geopolitical, economic, social, environmental, and technical uncertainties are emerging in North American energy markets and should be prudently assessed prior to the initiation of large-scale infrastructural upgrades or new investments. This brief article outlines five key trends for transmitters and policymakers to consider going forward and concludes that, if current trends discussed herein continue unabated, further trans-border grid integration will likely be unfeasible in the relatively short-term. Further research into this critical topical area is urged.
Don C. Smith
A contribution on electricity storage: The case of hydro-pumped storage appraisal and commissioning in Italy and Spain
Abstract: This paper investigates hydro-pumped storage appraisal and commissioning in Italy and Spain. It argues that analyses to evaluate what is the most cost-efficient flexibility solution, including the possibility of improving existing facilities and regulatory frameworks, should be implemented on a case-by-case basis, as electricity storage is only one out of many possible sources of flexibility. Where pumped hydro is identified as the best solution to provide the ancillary services needed, a market's ability to deliver it should then be tested, by addressing the major concerns for ex-ante appraisal the paper identifies. Only where a market ‘fails’ to deliver such capacity, a case for commissioning hydro-pumped storage may be justified. The key areas are then: (i) the criteria to define capacity adequacy and (ii) the procedures to select who should build and who should run such facilities. The risks and challenges identified suggest that this solution should be considered with caution.
Jon Stern | Jonathan Mirrlees-Black
Abstract: The paper has as its main objective the design of a framework for valuing water in England and Wales in the medium-term i.e. 2015–2020/25. However, the paper addresses this in the context of what would be the most appropriate long-run market and trading framework for the efficient abstraction and use of water in the long-run, i.e. post 2025. We set out objectives and constraints both for the medium-term and the long-term. The main objectives are to provide effective signals (a) for the right level and type of investment in both new resources and network infrastructure; and (b) for efficient water resource use. Given the length of life of new water industry investment, we attach greater priority to investment incentives. For the medium-term, we also attach considerable importance to the objectives of a flexible framework and evolutionary potential. We conclude that for the medium-term, the best alternative is a “BST” (bulk supply tariff) model. Under a BST model, the incumbent water company is required to offer water at a ‘default’ regulated wholesale price, but wholesale and retail parties eligible to trade can do so bilaterally outside this mechanism.
Enabling technologies and energy savings: The case of EnergyWise Smart Meter Pilot of Connexus Energy
Available online 9 November 2012
Chris Ivanov | Lullit Getachew | Steve A. Fenrick | Bethany Vittetoe
Abstract: We examine the demand impact of a smart meter pilot conducted by Connexus Energy from 2008 until 2010. We focus on the amount of peak time energy use reduction, either through forgone usage or load shifting to off-peak times, as a result of enabling technologies in the form of in-home displays and smart thermostats. The in-home display allows the treatment group members to voluntarily alter their power use during “red alert” (critical peak) days. The smart thermostats also installed for the treatment group enable the utility to reduce AC usage of that group during red alert days by remotely turning up the temperature setting by 3 degrees Fahrenheit (°F) (i.e., a form of direct load control). We use hourly fixed effects models to examine peak time energy use changes in the summer of 2010. We find that treatment group members reduced their peak time energy use relative to the control group, which had no in-home displays or smart thermostats. Treatment group members who had the enabling technologies used, on average, 0.47 less kW, or 15% less energy, during peak hours on an average red alert day.
Realizing truly sustainable development: A proposal to expand Aboriginal ‘price adders’ beyond Ontario electricity generation projects
Available online 4 September 2012
Abstract: Recognizing the sustainable development potential of incentivizing domestic renewable energy generation, the Province of Ontario (Canada) presciently implemented the Green Energy Act in 2009. The feed-in tariff provisions of this Act provided guaranteed, premium price contracts for new renewable energy generators utilizing a variety of different technologies. Of particular relevance to this article, the Act also included a $0.015 per kW h price adder for those projects that included Aboriginal economic participation. As a result, this policy framework permitted the inclusion of Canada's historically marginalized indigenous peoples in decentralized, small-scale power generation. Although some Aboriginal groups have been able to take advantage of this novel energy supply policy framework, others have been hamstrung by looming caps on new supply procurement and, especially, a lack of transmission capacity. This article picks up on this latter point, contending that the Province should expand the applicability of their policy innovation and consider the adoption of a comparable ‘price adder’ for new transmission projects, given that an estimated $20 billion in new high voltage direct current transmission lines will need to be built over the next 20 years in Ontario. Much, if not all, of this transmission capacity will need to be built on the traditional territories of Aboriginal groups – many of which have unsettled land claims with the Canadian government – and it is crucial that this minority group is included in future energy-related development initiatives. The article concludes by offering suggestions for Aboriginal adders in other energy developments across Canada (and potentially in other international contexts that involve indigenous peoples), including planned transmission projects across the country, ongoing shale gas developments in British Columbia, and controversial oil sands extraction in northern Alberta. Further research into optimal methods for facilitating indigenous participation in energy developments is urged.
The ‘duty to finance’, the cost of capital and the capital structure of regulated utilities: Lessons from the UK
Abstract: This work assesses the main regulatory responses to the changes in the capital structure of the utilities firms. It examines the different means of influencing the capital structure and the various concerns related to high gearing; particularly in relation to the cost of capital and risk. The paper argues that several of those concerns are unfounded and that the effectiveness of various aspects of the regulation of capital structure and the setting of the cost of capital are highly questionable.
Sergio Perelman | Tomás Serebrisky
Abstract: Relying on a unique dataset this paper uses Data Envelopment Analysis methods to compute an efficient production frontier for a representative sample of Latin American airports. Latin America has implemented a wide variety of private sector participation schemes in the airport sector since the late 90s. To assess whether privately operated airports had higher rates of total factor productivity growth than public airports we compute Malmquist indexes for the period 2000–2007. Results indicate that privately operated airports enjoyed higher rates of total factor productivity growth.
Urban water sector performance in Africa: A step-wise bias-corrected efficiency and effectiveness analysis
Dorcas Mbuvi | Kristof De Witte | Sergio Perelman
Abstract: Productivity analyses focus on either efficiency or effectiveness. This paper provides a step-wise approach for evaluating utility performance. In a first step, utilities’ technical efficiency is estimated. In a second step, we examine utilities’ effectiveness in meeting existing customer demands for drinking water services within their licensed jurisdiction. The difference between inefficiency and ineffectiveness is decomposed in a third step. A final step explores country-specific (e.g., income per capita), sector specific (e.g., regulation) and utility-specific (e.g., density economies) inefficiency and ineffectiveness determinants. The four steps are applied to the African drinking water utilities. The results indicate that the utilities face technical inefficiency rather than ineffectiveness challenges. This is consistent across the various African regions. Economic development is positively and significantly associated with increased technical efficiency and effectiveness levels.
Francisco González-Gómez | Roberto Martínez-Espiñeira | María A. García-Valiñas | Miguel A. García-Rubio
Abstract: The need for strategies leading to the sustainable management of water resources is an increasingly pressing issue, particularly in regions that suffer great water stress. Paradoxically, in many cities of the world, water losses remain high. This is of concern not only in developing countries but also in the developed world. Analyzing data from 133 Andalusian cities, we ask ourselves why water losses are so high in some of the cities in this region, a region which has itself the greatest level of water stress in the European Union and also exhibits relatively high urban water losses.
Abstract: Energy efficiency standards are often cited as a potential economic driver for states that implement them. We identify the major factors that need to be included when determining the economic impact of energy efficiency standards and discuss how these determinants may be incorrectly estimated or ignored within the economic impact literature. Finally, we find that there is a tendency to over-estimate the economic impact of energy efficiency standards and that any jobs created may come at the cost of reduced employment in relatively well-paid sectors.
Public–private partnership and corporate public sector organizations: Alternative ways to increase social performance in the Portuguese water sector?
Hugo Consciência Silvestre
Abstract: Using survey data from the Portuguese Water Sector Regulator, the following study explores the relationship between social performance and the sector providing water service. In that sense, lower user prices and higher quality goods and services are linked to superior social performance. Our empirical analysis demonstrates that user prices have a stronger relationship with organizational costs than with property or the adopted management model in the delivery of public services. In contrast, the quality of the goods and services possesses a stronger connection with property rather than with organizational costs or management models. Such results contradict the New Public Management ideas; mainly that private sector participation through public–private partnerships in the delivery of public services will inevitably lead to a better use of scarce resources, and consequentially to lower user prices and higher quality goods and services. In the Portuguese case, policy implications are that public–private partnerships ceased until lower organizational costs, higher quality services and lower user prices are secured.
Kaisa Tahvanainen | Samuli Honkapuro | Jarmo Partanen | Satu Viljainen
Abstract: This article seeks empirical evidence of how the Finnish electricity distribution companies have responded to regulatory incentives in the rate of return regulation. The effects of regulation on company behaviour were studied by a questionnaire and interview survey. After more than ten years of regulation, the results show that the investment, operation and pricing behaviour of companies have been influenced by regulatory incentives, but the future role of regulation is expected to be even greater. Regulatory incentives were recognised by the companies, but the role of other drivers such as customer value was considered strong. Public companies reported stronger response to regulatory incentives.
Michael G. Pollitt | Steven J. Steer
Abstract: Many studies of the water and sewerage industries place significant importance on the benefits of economies of scale and scope and how these relate to vertically integrated firms. We have re-examined the early literature on scale and scope economies and find that these studies do not implicitly preclude non-integrated firms from fully utilising assets for multi-product activities; they can still reap scope economies through trading in the open market. Further, we demonstrate difficulties in separating these two types of economies when assessing firm performance. Trade-offs between governance and production costs are a key issue in determining the value of vertically integrated firms that may undergo divestiture. We discuss the present policy debate regarding the optimal structure of the water and sewerage markets in England and Wales in the light of this, and recommend avenues of research that will help determine the optimal policy.
Abstract: This paper sets out the main reasons for introducing upstream competition in the water supply industry of England & Wales i.e. competition in the supply of raw and potable water to retailers and large users as well as some competition options. The paper discusses the possibilities for trade both in abstraction rights and in bulk water. The paper covers the issues that would need to be resolved for such competition to be effective, including rents, stranded assets and the concentration of water rights ownership. A lot of attention is given to transitional issues drawing on the lessons learned in UK natural gas industry liberalization and EU energy sector reforms over the last 15 years.
Abstract: The key question addressed here is whether US utilities can sustain their current natural gas deliveries, and fund growth, as strategically required for the clean energy transition. A case is made here for adjusting regulatory policy, as past and current policies have led to a steady profit decline for mid- and downstream US energy companies. Capital markets have rated several major energy companies as ‘junk bonds’, which means default risk is substantial from an investor perspective. Arguably, overly tight price regulation and declining credit ratings have pushed the industry into a decade-long downward business cycle, which started even before the Great Recession provided additional challenges. Recommendations are formulated for improving the US energy regulation of the mid and downstream natural gas segments in order to revitalize these key pillars of the energy transition program. Insights developed here based on the regulatory development and business performance of energy utilities in the US may provide a useful reference for liberalized and liberalizing energy markets elsewhere in the world.
Pedro Carvalho | Rui Cunha Marques | Sanford Berg
Abstract: This paper updates the literature on water utility benchmarking studies developed worldwide, focusing on scale and scope economies. Using meta-regression analysis, the study investigates which variables from published studies influence these economies. Our analysis yields several conclusions. The results indicate that there is a higher probability of finding diseconomies of scale and scope in large utilities; however, only the results for scale economies are significant. Diseconomies of scale and scope are more likely to be found in publicly-owned utilities than when the ownership is private; as would be expected, multi-utilities are more likely to have scale and scope economies.
Josephine Gemson | K.V. Gautami | A. Thillai Rajan
Abstract: Private financing of infrastructure projects is commonly seen in many countries today. In recent years, many private infrastructure projects have also attracted investment from Private Equity (PE) firms. Though there have been instances of PE investment in infrastructure even in the past, the growth has been substantial in recent years. This paper analyses the role of PE investments in infrastructure financing. The findings are based on an analysis of 2821 infrastructure projects that were announced during 1990–2009. It was found that projects with PE investment were larger when compared to projects that did not have PE investment, indicating that that PE investment helped in successfully financing larger projects. Our analysis also indicated that PE investment in infrastructure is more frequently seen in developed countries as compared to developing countries. In developing countries, the number of sponsors is higher in projects with PE investment without any corresponding increase in project size. This indicates that PE investors have helped in sharing the project risk among a larger group of investors, thereby reducing the risk faced by the individual sponsors.
Maila Elina Herrala | Heikki Huotari | Harri Jouni Olavi Haapasalo
Abstract: The efficiency of water and sewage services has been studied worldwide for decades and it has also attracted interest in Finland. The objective of this research is to find out whether a governance model has an effect on the efficiency of waterworks in Finland. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) was used as a tool to measure the efficiency of 19 waterworks. The research results indicate a statistical difference between two governance models analyzed. This study was the first attempt to compare the efficiency of the governance models of waterworks in Finland and it can be used as a foundation for improved models in the future. | <urn:uuid:efc9150d-15d7-4345-b18a-58bc4d15fcd5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.journals.elsevier.com/utilities-policy/recent-articles/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935836 | 7,187 | 1.601563 | 2 |
Early versions of Puppy had PDQ, which is very nice, really tiny. It fell by the wayside for various reasons:
No longer being developed.
GTK 1.2 GUI application only.
Some apps expect CUPS to be there.
Very basic printer configuration.
We could save an incredible amount of space with PDQ, plus it is very simple, and "just works". But, it would need someone who is able to commit to developing it. It is written in C. For a start, the GUI application would have to be rewritten for GTK2.
Mandrake Linux used to use PDQ as the default printing system. Um, I can't recall what version was the last to do that... 8.x comes to mind. The thing is, those guys had developed PDQ to a high art, did very nice things with it. But, like all the other distros they dropped it and went for CUPS
So, if anyone wanted to take on PDQ as a project, getting an old Mandrake distro would be useful.
I don't recall the last version of Puppy that used PDQ -- it would be in my online blog archive.
I had developed a setup GUI that asked various questions about your printer, like how many color nozzles in an inkjet cartridge, so it didn't need a big database of printer types, but that would probably need to be developed further -- which is where the Mandrake stuff would be useful.
I wouldn't mind messing around with it again. Anyone interested in helping out with porting it to GTK2?
Comments:Posted on 19 Nov 2009, 18:47 by BarryK
Old puppies with PDQ
I have just checked the history. Puppy 2.16 and 2.16.1 have PDQ. 2.17 has CUPS only, but then 2.17.1 has both CUPS and PDQ -- interesting, gave people a choice. I think 2.17.1 was the last that had PDQ.
I recall, jcoder24 developed print-to-PDF for PDQ, which is in those releases.
Posted on 19 Nov 2009, 21:23 by capoverde
Back to PDQ hopefully?
when you annouced that CUPS would become the printing manager for Puppy, I groaned loud; and with good reasons, sadly... In other words, PDQ's comeback is good news here!
A dreamer's view: the PDQ source should be translated into Vala/Genie, and then it would probably be easier to find some good-hearted coders to maintain and update it.
Sure it's just a dream, since although the Vala compiler also yields a corresponding C code, that doesn't work the other way 'round... Doh! :°((
Posted on 20 Nov 2009, 4:39 by 8-bit
One of the problems with the linux printing system using either PDQ or CUPS is the inability to use drivers that came with purchased printers.
The software driver designers for a long time designed their drivers for windows and that was that.
It is only recently that some of the printer manufacturers have offered linux drivers for their printers.
I would like to actually see a wrapper designed for CUPS or PDQ that would let the user use the drivers supplied with his printer.
In other words, the wrapper would use the windows printer drivers.
The big problem is bloat. The windows printer drivers want to use a bunch of DLLs and support that is in Windows but not in linux.
Posted on 20 Nov 2009, 7:25 by ttuuxxx
Firefox was having issues with printing in 2.14x, I found a solution online and it worked :)
Basically it was a way to removed cups from firefox, what you do is delete /usr/bin/lpr and make a script with the same name that launches /usr/bin/gtklp that works like a treat :).
Here's a link to the original thread
Posted on 20 Nov 2009, 11:12 by cli_user
running win lp drivers
well, there's ddiwrapper from SUSE 10.3. It looks like google summer of code 2009 and openprinting haven't tackled it either.
The pdq code itself looks really good. I'd be happy with a cli tool (duh!).
I'd also suggest a tool to automatically convert printer defns from cups.
Posted on 20 Nov 2009, 11:26 by cli_user
running win lp drivers #2
Most of the files listed for ddiwrapper are the same as those for ndiswrapper, which we're already using. The filesize hit might be tolerable. | <urn:uuid:cdae0e05-9df5-45be-9233-c5e9e971c940> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bkhome.org/blog/?viewDetailed=01212 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96949 | 994 | 1.6875 | 2 |
BAGLEY TWP. — A new road salt storage facility completed last month at the Otsego County Road Commission has more than doubled the capacity to store salt for use on county and state winter roads.
Tom Deans, road commission manager/engineer, said the new building, constructed at a cost of $806,957 by Alpena-based Hunter Construction, can hold up to 7,000 tons of salt.
The old storage dome, which was built in the mid-1980s, has a capacity of 3,000 tons.
“The new storage facility allows us to store and load our salt and salt/sand mixture right inside the building,” said Deans, who noted most county road applications receive a mix of around 80 percent sand and 20 percent salt. “State roads require us to typically use a little more salt.”
Deans said on average snowplow trucks spread 4,000 to 5,000 tons of salt on the county’s road system each winter. Through a contract with the Michigan Department of Transportation, Deans said the road commission’s state plow crew will use approximately 9,000 to 10,000 tons of salt annually on state trunk lines M-32 and I-75 in the county.
The new building was financed through a bond approved by the Otsego County Commissioners and is currently owned by the Otsego County Building Authority until the road commission pays off the bond in 20 years.
Contact Michael Jones at 732-1111 or michael@ | <urn:uuid:6d0d8196-6dda-4ce5-b2ec-5ba3496de923> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.petoskeynews.com/2012-01-06/salt-storage_30600072 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951321 | 318 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Web Search powered by Yahoo! SEARCH
Odds of winning the $600 million? 1 in 175.2 million |
Poll: Plan on buying a ticket?
The other day I was out jogging and a driver pulled into a driveway I was about to cross. If I hadn't been watching, she would have hit me. She was texting, and she never saw me. Unlike seatbelts, a law against texting can save other people, not just the driver. Also, statistically, texting and driving is more dangerous than drinking and driving.
Want to participate in the conversation? Become a subscriber today. Subscribers can read and comment on any story, anytime. Non-subscribers will only be able to view comments on select stories.
Feels Like: 85°
Feels Like: 76°
Pruitt Meter ticking on St. Lucie County's property appraiser.
Indian River County
St. Lucie County | <urn:uuid:639bb13a-eb51-43f2-90f5-59292a1fa0b9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.tcpalm.com/comments/reply/?target=78:2877&comment=1017015 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957001 | 196 | 1.78125 | 2 |
Choosing the right school for our children is an important decision. Like whether to take the better paying but more demanding job further from home or stay with the company you’re currently with, it’s a decision that impacts not only your future, but the future of your family. It seems almost an impossible task to foresee the result of the plans we make for our children at an early age, but by gathering as much information as we can and weighing our options the odds become better.
(WATCH: Canada’s largest school expo.)
Our Private School Expos are a great way for students and parents to get to know and become familiar with all the options available. For the past 10 years Our Kids has organized the most attended and largest Private School Expo in the country. Curious to see what one of our expos is like? Watch what previous parents and educators had to say at our last expo.
It’s important to consider all the variables to make the right decision for your children’s education. “There are schools from around the country as well as from around North America, which is wonderful because it is a one stop shop for many parents to come and find out more about independent and private schools in those different locations,” says one attendee.
Learn more about the application process by attending one of the Private School Expos! Attend information seminars and meet with school officials and current students face-to-face. Register now to get 50% off your admission! | <urn:uuid:03b86ada-ba43-4aab-ba3a-5e2564c1434c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ourkids.net/blog/private-school-expos-our-kids-tv-spotlight-24243/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97199 | 309 | 1.65625 | 2 |
The Thelonious Monk Reader
After the publication of intriguing anthologies such as Mark Tucker’s The Duke Ellington Reader and Todd Selbert’s The Art Pepper Companion, this collection of writings about Thelonious Monk, dating from 1947 to 1999, is a disappointment. Part of the reason is Monk himself. He had few close friends to recount stories about him; he seldom gave interviews and he said little of interest when he was interviewed; after his youth, he seems to have led a very quiet private life apart from the music he created. Apart, too, from the occasional psychological crisis, for he was a fragile personality who became more fragile over the years, as he ingested many drugs, during the last decade of his life he abandoned music and most human contact. What did Monk and his family think and feel? Nobody says—there is no intimacy at all in this book.
If you’ve read Leslie Gourse’s valuable Monk biography Straight, No Chaser—and if you haven’t, by all means read it first—this book adds little about Monk the man and his career. It includes important articles such as Peter Keepnews’ “Young Monk,” early Paul Bacon and Nat Hentoff pieces, the 1964 Time magazine article, Amiri Baraka’s 1964 description of Monk at the Five Spot, some of Orrin Keepnews’ reminiscences and Whitney Balliett’s brief New Yorker memorial. The early reviews of his recordings and performances are interesting for what they show of the reviewers’ misunderstandings. It’s sad but significant that among musical associates, only Mary Lou Williams and Dizzy Gillespie discuss Monk, and only briefly. A number of journalists, though, write about what an enigmatic or weird character he was. The Bill Gottlieb and Albert Goldman pieces are annoying as well as worthless, and some others, including most of the interviews, could also be omitted. Gerald Early’s essay is provocative. He tries to be sympathetic, but he has something to dispute in nearly every paragraph, especially his attempted psychoanalysis of Monk. The very first printed discussion of Monk’s music, a 1944 piece in The Music Dial by none other than Herbie Nichols, is not in this book—shame on van der Bliek for including only a one-paragraph quote from this major article.
Discussion of how Monk’s music developed would be welcome, and in fact there’s an excellent analysis of his classic 1947-to-’52 Blue Notes by Max Harrison. But the almost equally important 1952-to-’54 Prestiges are largely ignored in this anthology, although Martin Williams wrote eloquent liner notes for some LP reissues of them. By the late 1950s Monk was playing in public and recording regularly, but seldom composing anymore. There’s no discussion of Monk’s development through the 1950s Riversides, the 1960s Columbias or his last years before he withdrew from music in 1973.
Monk was such an original and dramatic artist that he inspired much intelligent, useful critical commentary; van der Bliek reprints some. Noted critical essays by Andre Hodeir, Michael James, Williams, and Gene Santoro are here, along with Gunther Schuller’s appropriately critical review of the first (1959) Town Hall concert. But Schuller’s much more important overview of Monk’s career, from the Jazz Review, is omitted, as are additional important Harrison and Williams essays, and I’m sure there are other useful writings that I don’t know about. In conclusion Ran Blake offers a fine analysis of Monk’s style and Scott DeVeaux, while pursuing lesser academic matters, also shows how Monk achieved his singular harmonic impact.
Were van der Bliek’s choices arbitrary? Couldn’t he get permission to reprint some of the important writings? Is he unfamiliar with some of the Monk literature? Even if the good parts are quite good, this could have been a better, fatter book. | <urn:uuid:a17d8ee0-c63f-4b81-b664-a5a317ddbbb0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://jazztimes.com/articles/20180-the-thelonious-monk-reader-rob-van-der-bliek | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959256 | 848 | 1.789063 | 2 |
Shortly after US President Barack Obama’ surprise nomination of Jim Yong Kim to head the World Bank last week, Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame is reported to have said: “He [Kim is] a true friend of Africa and a leader who knows what it takes to address poverty”.
In a story filed shortly after the announcement, the Associated Press (AP) reported that Obama’s “choice of Kim, with his foreign roots and years of experience fighting disease in poor countries, could neutralise any opposition among developing nations to another American” to replace outgoing president Robert Zoellick.
AP said Kagame “quickly praised” the nomination of the Dartmouth College president. Why Kagame?
Knowledgeable sources in the Rwanda capital Kigali tell me that Kagame now finds himself in an awkward after his praise of Kim.
Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, who was lobbying hard for the job, is a friend of Kagame. And, my sources told me, he had asked Kagame to help campaign for him, including “putting in a word for me with your friends at the White House”. Traditionally the World Bank president is nominated by the US.
However this time, there has been a challenge to the tradition by, especially, Developing countries who are fed up with American domination of the World Bank leadership – and Europe’s hold on the related IMF top job. This challenge opened up some competition, and Sachs threw his hat in the ring fairly early.
Kagame, the sources, say kept his word and called the White House to say Sachs is “a friend of Africa”—which he is. Some hours after that call, the White House (sources suggest Obama himself) called Kagame about the World Bank job; but about a different candidate – Kim.
Kim is Kagame’s friend too, and my sources say the Rwanda president figured that if the US wants Kim, then he would get the job and Sachs’ quest was effectively over. The White House told Kagame it would help if leaders from
the developing world like him who knew Kim wrote short notes commenting on his suitability.
Kagame wrote the note that, the flies on the wall in Kigali suggest, was quoted in the AP. Apparently Kagame was under the impression that it was a private letter. However, the White House allegedly “leaked” it to help bolster Kim’s case.
I have not been able to establish whether Kagame spoke to Sachs, but I suspect he did because in the same story, the Columbia University economist said nice things about Kim: “He’s an outstanding choice,” Sachs said.
“For the first time in the bank’s history, it will have a president whose life mission is what the bank aims for: the elimination of poverty … It’s a brash decision which breaks the standard practice of going with a banker or a political insider.”
If Kagame thought the matter was settled, he was wrong. A few hours after he sent the letter backing Kim to the White House, it was announced that Nigerian Finance Minister Ms. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala was also in the running for the job; and she was Africa’s candidate.
Rwanda’s former Finance minister, Dr Donald Kaberuka, is president of the African Development Bank (AfDB), a job he was voted into in 2005 at a time when Olusegun Obasanjo – and a close friend of Kagame – was still Nigeria’s president. Kagame would be seen as a traitor if he didn’t back an African for the World Bank job, particularly a Nigerian.Until that point, apparently Kagame didn’t know that Africa was going to enter a horse in the World Bank race.
Kagame is a man whom Dr Richard Sezibera, the Secretary-General of the East African Community (EAC), from Rwanda, said early this year in a Twitter post, “never goes back on his word”.
It is a view shared widely in Kigali, so he is unlikely to publicly back away from his written endorsement of Kim.
Kagame is a man who has fought and won big wars. However, this small problem of the World Bank chieftainship has become a headache for which he struggling to figure a cure for.
© email@example.com / twitter@cobbo3 | <urn:uuid:8dddc455-7a11-46ef-a0a1-427de52c0c34> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://nakedchiefs.com/2012/03/25/a-fly-on-the-wall-in-kigali-says-president-kagame-has-a-world-bank-headache-and-there-is-no-cure-in-sight-yet/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974432 | 944 | 1.765625 | 2 |
If you are reading this page, it probably means you or someone you care about is significantly overweight and has tried virtually every imaginable method to become healthier. Too often, despite years of diets, exercise programs, and pills, Americans find the extra pounds and associated illnesses continue to affect their lives. weight-loss surgery may be the answer.
Studies have shown that weight-loss surgery can lead to better health, which in turn leads to a higher quality of life and increased lifespan. So, please let us tell you about the options for weight-loss surgery and the benefits of UNC's highly personalized approach.
|Is weight-loss surgery for me?||What are the benefits of surgery?|
If you've tried but can't lose the excess weight that's causing health problems, weight-loss surgery may be right for you. Find out if you are a CANDIDATE for weight-loss surgery.
Severe obesity can lead to many life-threatening health problems and a shorter life span. Learn about the BENEFITS of weight-loss surgery.
|What procedures are available?||What can I expect?|
Once you and your doctor have determined that weight-loss surgery is right for you, UNC Health Care offers different PROCEDURES to fit your individual needs.
Timothy Farrell, MD, FACS, Professor, Director, Minimally Invasive Surgery
Tara Zychowicz, NP
Lisa Prestia, RN, Certified Bariatric Nurse, Clinical Program Director-OP, 919-966-8436
Susannah Southern, Clinical Dietitian
, PhD, Psychologist.
|Bill Biggers of Chapel Hill recounts how weight-loss surgery has given him a new lease on life.||Phyllis Thomas, Pittsboro, North Carolina, describes how she came to undergo gastric-bypass weight-loss surgery and the health benefits it’s provided her.|
"Burlington Times News"
After further consultation at UNC Hospitals, Sharon Catlett, 56, moved forward with her Gastric Bypass Surgery in August 2010.
Weight-loss Information Seminar:
Please join us for a monthly information session to learn how weight-loss surgeries can help you or someone you care about. In the sessions, members of UNC Health Care's team—one of the nation’s leading Bariatric groups—provide details on the options for weight-loss surgery and on the benefits of UNC's personalized approach.
Wellness Center -Located at Meadowmont, 100 Sprunt St. Chapel Hill, NC . Led by either Dr. Timothy Farrell or Dr. Wayne Overby. Seminars are held:
- January 15, February 19th, March 19th, and April 9th from 6-7pm.
- May - December 2013 will be held 1st Tuesday of the month from 6-7pm.
- Please call to register at: 919-966-8436.
Support Group - Held 2nd Wednesday of each month from 6-7pm at the new Aesthetic Center, 151 Old University Station Road, Chapel Hill, NC 27514. For questions, please call Bariatric Coordinator, Lisa Prestia, RN, CBN, at 919-966-8436.
- Guest speaker for February: Chris Parker, Licensed Clinical Social Worker, General Psychotherapy, will be speaking "Surgical Journey" from her perspective.
- March 13, 2013, Patient Led Group.
- April 10, 2013, Patient Led Group.
- May 15, 2013, Patient Let Group
The program has been accredited as a Level 1b facility by the Bariatric Surgery Center Network (BSCN) Accreditation Program of the American College of Surgeons (ACS). In addition, the program was named a Blue Distinction Center for Bariatric Surgery by Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina. Read more | <urn:uuid:e9d03457-b7ee-41ee-ac60-74e745228009> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.med.unc.edu/pedssurgery/gisurgery/patientinfo/Weight-loss%20Surgery | 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 | 0.932121 | 798 | 1.664063 | 2 |
"When we run out (of food), we go on Facebook and say 'We have an immediate need,' and within an hour we get food," said volunteer Yren Berry.
Last week, the group received a star-powered dose of support when members of the U.S. Women's Olympic Gymnastics team swung by to pitch in and donate supplies.
"Until you're actually here helping people find sweaters and pants ... you don't realize how big of a deal it is," said Nastia Liukin, a gold medalist in the 2008 Olympics.
Liukin -- who has more than 190,000 followers on Twitter -- then took to the micro-blogging site, asking people to send "canned food, bread and non perishable foods to 83 Wayne St" in Jersey City to support the relief effort.
"Hopefully if at least one of those followers came and donated that would do something," she said.
Larger organizations like FEMA and the Red Cross have also taken note.
"We are working closely with these volunteer agencies," said Alberto Pillot, a FEMA spokesman who encouraged residents to register online for disaster assistance and contact their insurance providers.
"But housing issues are going to be the problem in the long run," he said.
Faced with a lack of physical space for FEMA trailers and limited access to available rental apartments and hotels, the agency says it's now bent on making flood-soaked homes inhabitable as the winter weather moves in.
That "keep-'em-in-their-homes" strategy likely means that the man-power behind volunteer efforts will continue to be needed as temperatures drop.
Yet as national interest wanes and volunteers return to their own jobs and families, the resolve of relief efforts in places like Jersey City will likely be tested.
As of Tuesday, more than 18,000 homes were still in the dark across the region. | <urn:uuid:66f72e52-7a54-4a84-9b7a-e44547ed2dc2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.clickondetroit.com/news/With-a-sign-and-Facebook-a-city-rebuilds/-/1719418/17488534/-/item/1/-/ntmlflz/-/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973106 | 393 | 1.601563 | 2 |
Earlier this week there was an article in North Carolina about a patient who was unemployed and had mounting medical bills that the hospital allegedly would not negotiate a discount or payment plan. The hospital is a non-profit tax-exempt organization as permitted under the Internal Revenue Code Section 501(c)(3). Therefore, the hospital is not required to pay taxes. However, the hospital must provide services to the community to support its charitable purposes. Over the last several years there has been an increased scrutiny on tax exempt hospitals to determine whether the facility is acting “for profit” or if it is in fact satisfying the charitable objectives and purposes which afford it the tax exemption. In fact, several hospitals lost their tax exempt status as a result of this increased scrutiny.
In order to address the tax exempt objectives of ensuring hospitals provide care to all patients and meet the needs of the community, the Patient Protection and | <urn:uuid:196e58f3-7e76-4f6e-8af5-1f18f5df734c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.ajc.com/health-flock/2012/04/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973299 | 180 | 1.664063 | 2 |
A widely mis-printed spelling of Dan Adler’s business partner’s name led us to misattribute the purchase to Maroon 5′s Adam Levine. We thought it was odd, and turns out it is. We regret the error. And it’s too bad to learn that Adler doesn’t intend to use his purchase of the team to make a statement, telling Haaretz: “”I respect every person’s opinion, and we’re not here to educate or change the fans. Each person should live according to his beliefs. I can tell the fans that we don’t have to love each other, but we must respect each other. We’re here for sports and for the community, not for politics.”
It goes without saying that Israel is a divided society. The conflict between Jews and Arabs is evident throughout Israel, complete with discrimination, double-standards, and regular violence.
Yet like in many areas of conflict around the world, sports have been a bridge for multicultural understanding in Israel. One need look no further than Abbas Suan, an Israeli-Arab who became a national hero in 2006 when he scored a last-minute tying goal against Ireland during a World Cup qualifying match.
But even as most Israelis embraced their newfound hero, regardless of his ethnic background, one group remained notably defiant: supporters of the Israeli soccer club Beitar Jerusalem F.C. When Suan’s club team, Bnei Sakhnin, played Beitar Jerusalem in an Israeli Premier League match, Beitar fans welcomed him to the stadium by holding up a large sign with the words, “You do not represent us.” Beitar fans’ racism is not an isolated incident — instead, it’s an established part of their cheering culture. In games against Sakhnin, Beitar fans regularly chant “Death to the Arabs” and “Muhammad is a homosexual.” Supporters booed during a moment of silence for slain Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated after signing the Oslo Accords. Beitar has never had an Arab player. And while the team’s done things like wear jerseys with “Stop Racism” emblazoned on them, those gestures towards reconciliation are generally considered attempts to avoid or minimize league penalties rather than to actually change fan culture.
So why did two liberal Americans just buy this right-wing Israeli soccer club that’s defined by its distate for Arabs? The first is Dan Adler, an investor with a long history in Hollywood whose projects include Causes.com, a site that encourages activism and philanthropy. Adler recently ran in California’s 36th congressional district special election where his candidacy was best known for an ad highlighting his Jewish background and marriage to a Korean woman, with the message “minorities should stick together”:
Adler is also on the board of directors of the Israeli Policy Forum, a left-of-center American Jewish organization working towards a two-state solution.
The second is Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine. Levine isn’t notably political — his biggest cause is testicular cancer research, though he did perform at a White House Christmas tree lighting last year — nor is he particularly observantly Jewish. But there’s nothing in his record to suggest he’d be comfortable with a racist fan base. So why did Adler and Levine decide to purchase a team antithetical with values that seem far from their own? Surely they were aware of the team’s culture. Either they turned a blind eye to Beitar’s racism, or they have plans to clean house and reform the team’s culture.
Sensible minds would hope for the latter. Using soccer as a vehicle for social change is not without precedent. Following Abbas Suan’s heroics in 2006, for example, a Jewish ultranationalist fan of Beitar gave an interview in which he declared that he “wouldn’t mind if Abbas married his daughter.” Adler and Levine could, and should, make a quick and strong statement about a new direction for Beitar by trying to sign up Suan when his contract’s up, or signing another Israeli-Arab star to the team. But if they’re going to reckon with their new purchase, it’ll take more than a single gesture and a single player. | <urn:uuid:e3d47965-34d2-4384-a6e8-492c01ca018b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thinkprogress.org/tag/maroon-5/?mobile=nc | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962079 | 924 | 1.726563 | 2 |
Girls of Riyadh
, or Banat al-Riyadh
, is a novel by Rajaa Alsanea
. The book, written in the form of e-mails, recounts the personal lives of four young Saudi
girls, Lamees, Michelle (half Saudi, half American), Gamrah, and Sadeem.
The novel describes the relationship between men and women in the conservative Saudi-Arabian Islamic culture.Girls of Riyadh tells the story of four college-age high class friends in Saudi Arabia, girls looking for love but stymied by a system that allows them only limited freedoms and has very specific expectations and demands. There's little contact between men and women—especially single teens and adults—but modern technology has changed that a bit (leading to young men trying everything to get women to take down their cellphone numbers). The Internet is also a new medium that can't contain women and their thoughts like the old system could, and the anonymous narrator of the novel takes advantage of that: she presents her stories in the form of e-mails that she sends out weekly to any Saudi address she can find. Sex is described in this novel, and how men ignore women if they give themselves up before marriage.
Originally released in Arabic in 2005, Girls of Riyadh
was immediately banned in Saudi Arabia
due to controversial and inflammatory content. Black-market copies of the novel circulated and Girls of Riyadh
has been a bestseller across much of the Middle East. As... Read More | <urn:uuid:c81deb9d-5892-4779-ac62-4b41871bdafd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://pages.rediff.com/girls-of-riyadh/1547614 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95585 | 305 | 1.726563 | 2 |
Richard Minifie was born in Alphington on 2 February 1898. In 1916 he joined the Royal Navy Air Service and served at the Battle of Ypres as a Flight Lieutenant. Flying both the Sopwith Triplane and the Sopwith Camel, Minifie proved an excellent pilot and soon became an ace. With twenty one kills, the Distinguished Service Order and two Bars, Minifie was one of Australia’s most successful World War One fighter pilots. After the war Minifie became involved in the family business, flour milling and later rose to become President of the Victorian Flour Miller’s Association. Minifie was living in Malvern when he died in 1969.
Australian Dictionary of Biography, 1851 – 1890. pub. 1969 | <urn:uuid:895324fa-b035-49a4-b190-d0e63299e641> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://dhe.darebin-libraries.vic.gov.au/encyclopedia.asp?id=620 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965221 | 158 | 1.773438 | 2 |
ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund (PPAF) has allocated Rs258 million and started relief work to help 400,000 displaced people in 14 union councils badly ravaged by the raging flood waters in Badin.
Through its partner organisations, namely the Badin Rural Development Society, National Rural Support Programme and Health and Nutrition Development Society, the PPAF has started providing dry ration packs containing flour, rice, cooking oil, sugar, pulses, etc to the people.
Hygiene kits containing buckets, jerry cans, soap, etc. are also being distributed, said a statement issued by the PPAF on Thursday.
The PPAF has started organising mobile medical camps which will continue working through September. Once relief work is done, the PPAF will start working on the early recovery, reconstruction and rehabilitation and mitigation and preparedness phases of disaster management along the Sindh coast, as in other areas of Pakistan.
The floods triggered by heavy monsoon rains in Sindh have affected about 3.8 million people besides causing an estimated loss of $7 billion to the agrarian economy as over 2.5 million bales of cotton, two million tons of rice, four million tons of sugarcane and many other small crops have been destroyed. About 0.1 million cattle head have been killed.
Agriculture experts are of the view that current rainy spell, which started on August 13, has not only resulted in the deaths of nearly 150 people but has also destroyed standing crops across 10 million acres out of 14.2 million acres in the province.
The PPAF is already executing a multi-pronged Rs2.6 billion Sindh Coastal Area Development (SCAD) programme with the allocation of over 65 per cent of its resources to districts of Badin and Thatta. SCAD includes projects for social mobilisation, integrated infrastructure upgrading projects, and technical innovation projects, health, mobile medical camps, education, livelihood rehabilitation, all targeting the ultra poor.
To date, as many as 2,691 infrastructure schemes benefiting 730,158 people (half of them female) have been completed in coastal communities.
The PPAF has established 71 health centres in Tharparkar, Thatta, Karachi and Badin. Of these 71 centres, 27 are in SCAD areas. These adopted health centres have been provided support for repairs, the renovation of buildings, provision of medical equipment, medicines, capital items and additional staff.
It has set up 210 schools benefiting over 25,000 students (10,995 boys and 11,210 girls) as well. These schools have been provided financial and technical support to repair and renovate their buildings and add drinking water facilities, toilets, furniture, teaching aids, uniform and shoes.
Under the Targeting the Ultra Poor (TUP) programme, assets of up to Rs15,000 are being provided to each of the 1,000 selected households with Rs12,000 as a subsistence allowance and social healthcare worth Rs12,000 over a period of one year. In addition, training is provided for a maximum of Rs3,000 per beneficiary.
The target areas for TUP have been the coastal areas of Badin, Thatta and Karachi west districts and the adjacent union councils of Tharparker.
Published in The Express Tribune, September 9th, 2011.
More in PakistanTaseer and Weinstein ‘sold by original abductors’ | <urn:uuid:2ad6cac7-6bd9-404c-afb4-456502b77ac3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://tribune.com.pk/story/248141/rations-and-relief-poverty-fund-sets-aside-rs258m-for-sindh/ | 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 | 0.955465 | 705 | 1.65625 | 2 |
The Parisian Chef Reimagines Modern Cuisine From the Heights of the Alps
“The rhythm of French cuisine has always been dictated by its jus and its sauces—that’s what its DNA is made of, but it’s time to blur the lines,” says award-winning chef Yannick Alléno, the subject of this new short by French filmmaker Frédéric Guelaff. Heard among the incidental sounds of Alpine winds and feet trudging through snow, Alléno narrates the philosophy behind his relaunch of 1947, the top restaurant at the Cheval Blanc hotel in the winter paradise of Courchevel. The gastronomic créateur recently announced his departure from the prestigious Hôtel Meurice, a Parisian palace for which he earned three Michelin stars, to dedicate himself to this high-altitude culinary refuge designed by interior architect Sybille de Margerie, who dressed the locale in white leather and coriander green finishings. Known for pushing research into taste and texture as far as possible, Alléno's current obsession is “extraction,” a new cooking technique that optimizes flavor beyond compare. The results are advanced foods like truffled bread and essence of smoked parmesan, cooked in a vacuum and followed up with “cryoconcentration” to make a powerful elixir that gives a granulated texture to pure liquid. Is this molecular cuisine at its peak? “Not at all,” he says. “I am just thinking about what modern cuisine should be. Everything is put into question and thought of in a new way.”
The Model Steps Forward as the Roguish Heroine of a Surreal Desert Tableau
Sauntering down a desolate highway in opaline pasties and pink latex knickers, an otherworldly Erin Wasson enacts an unexpected domesticity in this short by filmmaker Columbine Goldsmith, shot in California’s Mojave Desert. Wearing spring/summer 2013 looks from the likes of Fendi, Bottega Veneta, Chanel and Alexander Wang, Wasson walks the line between the real and the extraterrestrial as an apathetic housewife tending to a fantastical plot of American soil. “The landscape doesn’t reveal time or place, so I wanted to imbue the protagonist with a more defined character: an old-fashioned housewife in 60s and 70s silhouettes who also has something discernibly futuristic about her,” says Goldsmith. Referencing the bleak landscapes of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura and the humanoid alien of The Man Who Fell To Earth, the film’s title comes from a serendipitous moment: during the shoot at Joshua Tree National Park, Goldsmith noticed a plaque on a nearby boulder that read “La Intrusa Piedra” (The Intruder Rock), an unexpected and welcome nod to Wasson’s outsider status in the film. Below, the Texan supermodel, veteran of the pages of Vogue and the runways of Balenciaga, Gucci and Lagerfeld, and muse to the likes of Ellen von Unwerth, steps out of the sand to reveal her chill-out preferences.
Five Days of Food, Part Four: Body Architect Lucy McRae Fuses Science and Art for a Lurid Feast
A crude laboratory plays host to a series of macabre experiments in this short from the burgeoning artist and filmmaker Lucy McRae. Inside, glowing comestibles drip and flow to mold bodily shapes that are then harvested, sliced and repackaged for consumption. Having featured in such publications as Dazed & Confused and Wallpaper*, as well as directing the award-winning Morphē for the skin care brand Aēsop, this latest endeavor from the self-styled “Body Architect” explores how food connects to the body, inside and out. “Everything is edible,” says McRae of her gelatinous props. “The stuff on the model’s face is inked rice paper, and the jellies on her body are molded agar agar, which is made from natural seaweed.” The impulse to show what we are turn into what we eat—and vice versa—was inspired by an encounter with Vietnamese restaurateur Nahji Chu whose outlets in the director's native Australia merge the culinary arts with an investigation of cultural and individual identity. Taking a hands-on approach to every aspect of production, from the cinematography to the science, McRae adds a personal element to that notion of synthesis, inspired by human biology. “The idea is to create genetic manipulations,” she explains. “Eating them is a transdermal absorption.” | <urn:uuid:cc14ff60-80a7-4b7c-a2aa-02413ae0d1b9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nowness.com/home/2013/1/11/2729/yannick-alleno-the-french-revolution | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930609 | 1,002 | 1.671875 | 2 |
Washington (CNN) -- When the nation's top transportation security official announced a plan to allow some small knives on planes, he spoke to a group receptive to his message: international aviation folks that already allow knives.
It may be the only receptive group.
In the week since Transportation Security Administration chief John Pistole made his announcement, a parade of groups has stepped up to voice opposition or concern.
The list is a virtual who's who of what the TSA typically calls its partners or stakeholders in aviation security.
-- The American Federation of Government Employees, a union that represents the nation's 50,000 airport screeners.
-- The Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, a nonprofit group that represents an undisclosed number of federal air marshals.
-- The Flight Attendants Union Coalition, a group of five unions representing 90,000 flight attendants.
-- The Coalition of Airline Pilots Associations, which represents pilots.
-- U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the senior Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee.
-- Major airlines, represented by their trade association, have expressed concern with the policy as a group. But individually, three of the five biggest carriers -- Delta, American and US Airways -- have come out against it.
Supporters of the initiative are more difficult to find.
None of the groups that the TSA labels "stakeholders" has publicly endorsed the small-knife policy, and only a handful of policymakers, lawmakers and security experts have lent it their support.
The Air Line Pilots Association International, the nation's largest pilots union, has neither supported nor opposed the knife rule directly, saying only that it supports initiatives such as Pre-Check that "focus on the real security threats instead of objects."
Pistole's predecessor, former TSA Administrator Kip Hawley, supports the move.
"In retrospect, I should have done the same thing," Hawley told CNN.
"The air marshals and the flight attendants have legitimate concerns, certainly, for their own safety. But the threat of taking over a plane with a small, sharp instrument is zero. And I think with locked cockpit doors, the air marshals themselves, the pilots, the passengers, the screening that goes in ... you cannot necessarily prevent violence on an airplane, but that is not the TSA's mission. TSA's mission is to prevent a successful, catastrophic terrorist attack, and you cannot get a successful, catastrophic terrorist attack with a small knife or a whiffle ball bat," Hawley said.
The American Federation of Government Employees, the screener representative, voiced this concern:
"TSA has created a situation where TSOs (transportation security officers) will be required to discern the length and width of a knife blade in a very short period of time. Disagreements over the TSOs' determination as to whether the knife will be allowed through checkpoints may result in a confrontation," AFGE National President J. David Cox Sr. said in a statement.
"Far too often, TSOs are threatened and even assaulted by irate passengers at the checkpoint; this ambiguous new policy will only escalate those incidents. In addition, TSOs face possible discipline from an increasing number of checkpoint disputes surrounding the new policy."
The TSA said this week that Pistole will stick with the policy and implement it, as announced, on April 25. In the meantime, he will advocate for the change Wednesday in a meeting with flight attendants and Thursday at a hearing before the House Homeland Security Committee. | <urn:uuid:e9f2d59f-c525-47ef-8581-a510282d126f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/12/travel/planes-knives/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940159 | 716 | 1.640625 | 2 |
For this two player math game each chick is pre-filled with marbles (1-5). Kids pick chicks and add marbles to see who wins. We also used the chicks for a couple rounds of ”ROTTON EGG!”
Our favorite art project of the week! Inspired by the marvelous kids and teachers at Irresistible Ideas for Play Based Learning.
My favorite four year old CHICK!!!
I looked in the mirror today before I went into the grocery and I too had pink paint of my face left over from this project.
Chicks ARE-CAN-HAVE activity… Idea via The Inspired Apple!
Chicks are: fluffy, yellow, black, brown, cuddly
Chicks can: poop, walk, sleep, peck
Chicks have: feet, wings, beaks
They were in heaven with these sweeties!! Emerson even read to her fuzzy little friends.
Fun with Chicks PART I HERE!
Love and blessings to you as you prepare for the miracle of EASTER! | <urn:uuid:3494f5fb-3fa9-4a92-878c-8b3f3c4e45fd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://katherinemaries.com/blog/archives/tag/kid-crafts-easter | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931388 | 217 | 1.75 | 2 |
- Posted June 7, 2012 by
- My Ten Sense: What to do when your money is low
- My Ten Sense: Making more money isn’t the answer
- My Ten Sense: 6 keys to couples happily managing their money
- My Ten Sense: Prepare your children so they don’t ask for handouts
- My Ten Sense: 10 things college students should know from student loans to landing their dream job
My Ten Sense: How to loan money to loved ones
You’ve done it. I’ve done it. We’ve all done it. At some point in your life, you asked to borrow money for something you thought was so important or such an urgent need that you couldn’t wait until you actually earned the money to get it by your own means.
You said whatever it took to get someone to agree to give you a loan to bail you out of a jam. But once the emergency was over, did you pay the person back the money you borrowed?
I admit sometimes I did. Sometimes I didn’t. I know I’m not the only one who has never paid someone back money I borrowed. Look at all the home foreclosures and bankruptcies from people reneging on paying what they owe. Heck, even the federal government hasn’t paid all of its debt, so we’re running a deficit in the trillions and China owns us.
This is why I advice you not to loan money to anyone because you may not get your money back and that can ruin or end your relationship with a family member or a friend.
Instead you should give away your money. Find out how much and why, when to just say no and the reason I recently turned a family member in need on my blog, www.mytensense.com. | <urn:uuid:e599fd10-94dd-4f23-b688-c4373f2118a3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-800041?ref=feeds%2Flatest | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97111 | 381 | 1.695313 | 2 |
The Eco Kids Film Initiative (EKFI) is the first festival of its kind aiming to stimulate environmental awareness in young viewers. It is also the first children's film festival and the first environmental film festival on the African continent.
The e-Waste Alliance (eWA), together with the Institute of Waste Management of Southern Africa (IWMSA) is delighted to announce its third public e-Waste Collection Drive that will be taking place on Saturday 24 September 2011.
'Waste pickers are not fighting for the right to be on landfill sites, they are fighting to be part of the waste management system,' said Mr Simon Mbata, representative of the South African Waste Pickers Association (SAWPA) at a workshop debate hosted by the Institute of Waste Management of Southern Africa (IWMSA) in Midrand last week.
Spring is in the air and South Africans are starting to emerge from their homes after a long and cold winter.
Many people are aware of the recent campaign in the Karoo against a proposed natural gas mining process known as hydraulic fracturing or 'fracking'. However most do not realise that large parts of the Free State, Eastern Cape Highlands and KZN are also under threat.
Gift of the Givers has just been granted permission to set up base, medical teams, equipment and supplies at Banadir Hospital, the largest hospital in Mogadishu (the largest city in Somalia) where thousands of patients are flocking to from various refugee camps in and around Mogadishu and the South, and are in desperate need of life saving medical assistance.
A database detailing all microhydro installations in Eastern and Southern Africa will be launched at the upcoming Hydropower Africa conference and exhibition in Johannesburg from 19-23 September.
Massive public enterprises are still battling to get maintenance off the back-burner while at the same time huge investment is going into new-build projects, according to Tracey-Lee Zurcher, the project director of Reliability & Maintenance Week, taking place in Johannesburg in November.
Uganda's president, Yoweri Museveni, recently announced that he would allow the destruction of 7,100 hectares of the Mabira Forest to make way for sugarcane plantations. If REDD is to mean anything in Uganda, it has to provide some sort of mechanism for preventing this sort of destruction. So far, there is no sign that this is the case.
The environmentally-aware traveller represents one of the fastest growing niche markets in the tourism, travel and leisure sectors today and this discerning market is set to become one of the key income generators in global tourism over the next decade. For the southern African travel industry, this global trend presents an opportunity for sustainable growth, but this will require tourism professionals to understand the profile of the 'green' traveller and how to meet their expectations as a service, establishment or destination.
Indians of the Guarani tribe in Brazil have demanded that energy giant Shell stop using their ancestral land for ethanol production. | <urn:uuid:d565360c-ebe5-4b0f-ac5c-c9457435b600> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thegreentimes.co.za/stories/trees/itemlist/tag/Issue%2034 | 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 | 0.940597 | 618 | 1.679688 | 2 |
Ghada Amer (b. 1963) was born in Cairo, Egypt. She earned a B.F.A. in 1986 and an M.F.A. in 1989 from École Pilote Internationale d’Art et de Recherche, Villa Arson, Nice, France. In 1997 she was the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, and in 1999, she received the UNESCO award at the Venice Biennale. She has had solo exhibitions at San Francisco Art Institute; De Appel Foundation, Amsterdam; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Ind.; Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, Spain; Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Wellesley, Mass.; H&R Block Artspace at Kansas City Art Institute, Missouri.; and Gagosian Gallery, New York. Her work has been exhibited in group shows at such venues as Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Deste Foundation Centre for Contemporary Art, Athens; National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C.; Queens Museum of Art, New York; İstanbul Modern Sanat Müzesi; and AroS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Århus, Denmark. She participated in the Johannesburg Biennale in 1997, the Venice Biennale in 1999; the Kwangju Biennale, South Korea, and the Whitney Biennial, both in 2000; and the Venice Biennale in 2005. Amer’s work can be found in numerous prominent collections including the following: Art Institute of Chicago; Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama.; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf; Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul; and Tel Aviv Museum of Art. She now lives and works in New York.
Feminist Artist Statement
The history of art was written by men, in practice and in theory. Painting has a symbolic and dominant place inside this history, and in the twentieth century it became the major expression of masculinity, especially through abstraction. For me, the choice to be mainly a painter and to use the codes of abstract painting, as they have been defined historically, is not only an artistic challenge: its main meaning is occupying a territory that has been denied to women historically. I occupy this territory aesthetically and politically because I create materially abstract paintings, but I integrate in this male field a feminine universe: that of sewing and embroidery. By hybridizing those worlds, the canvas becomes a new territory where the feminine has its own place in a field dominated by men, and from where, I hope, we won’t be removed again.
I integrate this same feminine universe into my gardens. When I had to start working outdoors I needed to find some kind of translation, something I could do instead of embroidery, but something that had the same idea. So I thought, “What can a woman do outside?” Gardening was a woman’s activity just like embroidery. This is how I decided to create gardens.
My work starts always as a slight critique, then I take it seriously and I try to find the beauty and poetry of these activities. I always try to connect both ideology and aesthetics in my work as a painter or a sculptor, in one way or another. I am very much interested in this specific relationship. Aesthetics alone are not enough for me and a message alone is just propaganda.
View Ghada Amer's CV (PDF)
New York, NY
No contact information provided for this artist.
Text, images, audio, and/or video in the Feminist Art Base are copyrighted by the contributing artists unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved. | <urn:uuid:8ff8a5fe-db05-41ff-b8f7-39a574a528d6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/feminist_art_base/gallery/ghada_amer.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939828 | 767 | 1.515625 | 2 |
Posts Tagged ‘Ivy Compton-Burnett’
July 30, 2010 | by The Paris Review
What we’ve been reading this week.
First published in 1935—but set in the 1880s—A House and Its Head is a late, obsidian instance of Victorian Survivor Literature. It concerns a tyrannical father, his idle grown children, and the young second wife he brings home to them. Imagine The Way of All Flesh written by a woman under the influence of Oscar Wilde. What I and everyone else especially like about Ivy Compton-Burnett is her dialogue. Her characters make asides, they soliloquize, they turn epigrams, and yet the effect isn't exactly stagey. (As Oscar liked to say, “Art doesn’t imitate life; life imitates Shakespeare, as best it can.”) —Lorin Stein
I visited Cuba for the first time in January. On Revolution Day, July 26, I read about Fidel Castro’s surprise appearance in public and the rest of the coverage of the holiday I could find. Unsatisfied, I found and read “Cuba—A Way Forward,” the riveting, deeply distressing report from Daniel Wilkinson, Deputy Director for the Americas at Human Rights Watch and Nik Steinberg, a researcher there, in the New York Review of Books. It makes me desperately sad to think about the amazing people I met in Havana that have almost no chance of reading Yoani Sánchez’s incredible blog, even though they live in Havana, as she does. Wilkinson and Steinberg are forceful and eloquent on the reality of the political situation in Cuba: “It is hard to think of a US policy with a longer track record of failure. The embargo has caused much hardship to the Cuban people but done nothing to loosen the Castros’ hold on power. Instead it has provided the Cuban government an excuse for the country’s problems.” —Caitlin Roper
I’ve been following the debate surrounding Odyssey, Andrew Wylie’s latest venture in publishing e-books with Amazon. As an observer, I find it upsetting that the publishing world is squabbling over backlist e-book rights. But do I blame them? The pie is shrinking for everyone. Except Amazon. —Thessaly La Force
I’ve been reading Pig Earth, John Berger’s cycle of stories, essays, and poems about peasant life in the Savoyard village where Berger settled with his family in the mid-seventies. This cycle is also a study in oral tradition, and of life in a place where nobody has any secrets. It is also—according to Wikipedia—a novel. But I’ll keep you posted. —L. S. | <urn:uuid:20656085-6da5-4af3-8471-86641a7af23c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/tag/ivy-compton-burnett/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950771 | 584 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Let’s stipulate at the outset here that many, perhaps even most, of the private schools funded in part by taxpayers through vouchers are doing a good job of educating kids.
But some of them aren’t.
An INTERESTING ARTICLE by John Aravosis lists some of the nonsense that’s been taught in voucher schools. A few examples:
–The Ku Klux Klan was a force for good.
–The majority of slaves in the Old South were treated well.
–Dinosaurs and humans lived side by side.
–Fire-breathing dragons may actually have existed.... | <urn:uuid:1854e74c-f193-43d8-99fa-5ffce75883f8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.enterprisenews.com/community/blogs/applesauce/x1893340647/A-sampling-of-the-drivel-taught-in-some-voucher-schools | 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 | 0.976419 | 128 | 1.710938 | 2 |
Memorable Biting Incidents in Sports History
Former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson will star in a one-man show on Broadway titled Undisputed Truth.
It is not a comedy.
You could've won a lot of money back on June 28, 1997, betting that the man responsible for one of the most bizarre incidents in sports history would one day work with Spike Lee on a Broadway production.
But 15 years after he bit the ears of opponent Evander Holyfield during a WBA title bout, that's exactly what Tyson is doing.
During the promotional tour last week, (former) Today host Ann Curry interviewed Tyson about his reasons for doing the play and about his decision to follow a healthier lifestyle.
"You're a vegan?' asked Curry with no hint of irony. 'What changed you?'
Said Tyson, "There's too many prison cells, too many jails, too many lawsuits, too many bankruptcies, too many women, too many venereal diseases, too many everything."
If only he'd been a vegan 15 years ago, Holyfield would've been better off.
Tyson actually bit Holyfield twice in the bout. Referee Mills Lane deducted two points the first time. When Tyson bit Holyfield again in another clinch in the third round, Lane called the bout.
Announcer Jimmy Lennon Jr.'s reading of the decision -- "Referee Mills Lane has disqualified Mike Tyson for biting Evander Holyfield on both of his ears" -- was perhaps the most interesting in boxing history.
Tyson lost his boxing license but was reinstated a year later.
In 2009, Tyson apologized to Holyfield on Oprah. But barring even more bizarre behavior on Broadway, that incident is guaranteed to get top billing in Tyson's obituary.
Almost as shocking as the actual incident itself is that Tyson wasn't the first or the last sports figure involved in a biting incident:
In the 1983 NBA playoffs, a scrum broke out between Atlanta's center Wayne "Tree" Rollins and the Boston Celtics' Danny Ainge. Because Ainge was the smaller man and such a pest as a player, many mistakenly believe to this day he did the biting. But it was Ainge who received stitches and a tetanus shot after Rollins clamped down on his finger.
They never made up on Oprah. Not even on Geraldo.
The next day's classic newspaper headline had to suffice: "Tree Bites Man."
South African rugby player Johan Le Roux bit New Zealand's Sean Fitzpatrick's ear during a real scrum in 1994. After learning of his lengthy suspension, Le Roux said, "For an 18-month suspension, I feel I probably should have torn it off."
Ottawa Senators right wing Jarko Ruutu denied biting the thumb of Buffalo's Andrew Peters in 2009 but was suspended for two games and fined $31,700. Makes the price of Kobe beef look like Alpo.
"I don't think if I did something that stupid I'd really be admitting to it either," Peters said.
Sevilla midfielder Francisco Gallardo celebrated a teammate's goal by biting on his genitals in the ensuing pileup. The teammate's genitals. The Royal Spanish Football Federation suspended and fined him for violating "sporting dignity and decorum."
It's the age-old question. Why did he do it? Because he could.
Said Gallardo: “I am sure I didn’t offend anyone. I don’t think what I did was very noteworthy.”
An English club rugby player accepted a 80-week ban in 2008 for an incident that left an opponent with "a partial amputation of the right index finger."
Vancouver winger Alex Burrows appeared to bite the right finger of Bruins center Patrice Bergeron during the first game of the 2011 Stanley Cup finals.
"They didn't see it," Bergeron said of the refs. "But we were speaking French and I [asked Burrows] why did he do that. That linesman speaks French, and he said that [Burrows'] explanation was that he put my finger in his mouth and he had to do it."
Boston's Milan Lucic taunted Burrows later in the series, offering his finger for a nibble.
Philadelphia Flyers enforcer Daniel Carcillo claimed Boston's Marc Savard bit him during Game 2 of the Eastern Conference semifinals series in 2010.
"Last time I have been bit was in grade school. It's not a good feeling. ... Guys don't bite. Men don't bite," Carcillo said.
Said Savard, "He pummeled on my face. He pulled on my teeth, so I guess that's biting when a guy tried and pull your front teeth out like his."
Alabama wide receiver Robert Baker caught a touchdown pass on the final play of a 1996 game against Georgia. Alabama won, apparently riling up Georgia Bulldog mascot Uga V, who lunged at Baker in the back of the endzone and tried to bite him. We should probably clarify here that Uga V is an actual canine and not a man dressed up as a dog.
Philadelphia's Aaron Asham claimed Pittsburgh Penguins' forward Matt Cooke bit him during a fight. "My glove got tangled in his mouth and he bit me, so I lost it," said Asham.
In 1997, broadcaster Marv Albert bit female companion Vanessa Perhach multiple times in Virginia, leading to a trial on assault charges. Albert admitted at the trial that biting was part of their sexual encounters but that long-time acquaintance Perhach had never lodged any complaints over it.
The plea agreement didn't come until after testimony from a surprise witness, Hyatt Hotels concierge Patricia Masten.
She said in another time and place she rejected Albert's biting advances, telling the court, “I went to grab his hair, and his hair lifted off.”
Albert understandably entered the plea agreement soon after and was given a 12-month suspended sentence.
Sports isn't the bastion of biting it might seem after reading these examples. In 2011, a Denver woman, Emi Coleman, walked into a store, groped a male customer and bit him on the neck. She then approached a store clerk, asked for a hug and proceeded to bite the woman on the neck, too.
She's included on this list because shopping is more competitive than most sports.
Not sure who's to blame for setting a bad example for Coleman: Tyson, Albert or Barnabas Collins?
Bud Shaw is a columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer who has also written for the Philadelphia Daily News, San Diego Union-Tribune, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The National. You can read his Plain Dealer columns at Cleveland.com, and read all his mental_floss articles here. | <urn:uuid:747edf29-074d-46fa-8fce-9677259577a5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mentalfloss.com/article/31047/memorable-biting-incidents-sports-history | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974512 | 1,410 | 1.632813 | 2 |
LA CROSSE, WI (WTAQ) - A private foundation in La Crosse plans to raise almost a half-million dollars so the Police Department can operate 41 surveillance cameras downtown.
The La Crosse City Vision Foundation came up with the idea, after downtown camera shop owner Paul Petras and his son were murdered in September.
Officers made an arrest after reviewing hours of footage from security cameras put up by the downtown businesses. But Police Chief Ron Tischer said officers wasted a lot of time finding all the footage, verifying the accuracy of the dates and times listed on the videos, and converting all of it to a usable format.
Tischer said if the police could get their own cameras, it would be much easier to track down the video evidence they need.
Private donations would pay for the cameras, and the foundation wants enough money to add new cameras in the future without having to seek donations over and over again.
There have been concerns that the police are setting up a “Big Brother” operation. But Tischer said officers won’t have the time to constantly monitor the cameras – but they’ll keep rolling, and producing evidence. And they’ll be clearly marked, in the hopes that at least some crime will be prevented. | <urn:uuid:57b7073f-f434-4820-af9b-0052308d7c21> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://wifc.com/news/articles/2013/jan/11/la-crosse-foundation-aims-to-raise-money-for-downtown-surveillance-cameras/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95448 | 260 | 1.507813 | 2 |
The Parties Should Foot The Bill
September 21, 2012 by Chip Wood
Those costly conventions. How big was the tab for U.S. taxpayers for the two political conventions that recently concluded? At least $136 million. That includes $18.2 million to help cover the costs of both the Republican and Democratic national conventions, plus another $50 million spent on security at each gathering. While this is a tiny fraction of overall Federal expenditures (and deficits), does anyone want to suggest that it should be the political parties themselves — not the taxpayers — who foot the bills for these lavish affairs?
A whistle-blower gets a big payoff. Bradley Birkenfeld, a former employee of Swiss banker UBS AG, has been awarded $104 million by the Internal Revenue Service — the largest payout the agency has ever made to an individual whistle-blower. Birkenfeld previously pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy to defraud the United States and received a 40-month sentence. As a result of the case, UBS agreed to reveal the names of some 4,000 U.S. taxpayers with secret Swiss bank accounts and to pay $780 million to resolve a related criminal case.
A more accurate measure of inflation. Years ago, the British magazine The Economist created something it called the Big Mac index as an easy way to compare prices of a common product in various countries. It’s also a pretty good way to measure rising prices in the United States. In the past three years, the Federal government says the official rate of inflation has been 6.2 percent. But in the same period, the price of a Big Mac has gone up, on average, by some 17 percent — or almost three times what Uncle Sam’s statistics say. Is anyone surprised?
Jay Leno takes a pay cut. Comes word out of Hollywood that NBC slashed the budget for the “The Tonight Show” in an effort to keep the long-running program profitable. As part of the cuts, host Jay Leno agreed to take a 50 percent pay cut, enabling the network to cut the show’s $100 million budget by 20 percent. Don’t feel too sorry for the veteran star, however. He’ll still be raking in about $15 million a year. | <urn:uuid:626bd72a-70aa-4988-92d1-6101f09261b4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://personalliberty.com/2012/09/21/the-parties-should-foot-the-bill/?like=1&source=post_flair&_wpnonce=a832ba55c5 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954762 | 467 | 1.6875 | 2 |
- Filed Under
here are just days left before streets across the island will crowd with trick-or-treaters in pursuit of Halloween loot. Whether your trick-or-treaters are big or small, their safety should be your first priority on what's expected to be a busy night.
"As a police officer and a parent of young children, their safety and well-being is always on my mind," says Guam Police Department spokesman Officer A.J. Balajdia.
An example would be when you're driving your car, Balajadia says. You look for any potential problems and adjust accordingly to avoid an accident. It should be the same with ... | <urn:uuid:79ceb7e7-d46b-4b97-9302-b3620ed27006> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.guampdn.com/article/20121027/LIFESTYLE/210270318 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95641 | 140 | 1.59375 | 2 |
There’s a lot of talk about online research communities at the moment. At almost every event I go to people want to talk about using online communities for market research, often creating their own communities. And every week there seems to be the announcement of another brand launching such a community (this week it was the Mirror newspaper with their Mirror Mouthpiece).
It’s great to see so many brands recognising the power of online research communities. At FreshNetworks, we’ve been running online research communities for a while now (FreshMinds, our parent company is an award-winning research agency in the UK) and even wrote a paper about earlier this yea (click here to read an earlier post about this). But looking at some of the online research ‘communities’ that exist, I’m not sure all of them actually are communities, rather than networks or panels of respondents.
There are a number of characteristics that define a community and these should be present in a true online research community. Some of the most pertinent include:
About a common issue not individuals – A community is focused on a common or shared interest, issue, end point or goal; as a community member you are working with the other members to a common goal. That’s why, amongst other things, research communities are great for helping to create new ideas for products or services, having discussions on brand positioning, getting depth of understanding behind quantitative results and for deliberating. If you don’t have a common goal or purpose to the community, and a focus on, then you probably don’t have a community.
Members discuss issues with each other – In a community, members talk and form relationships with each other. This isn’t a one-way exchange from brand to consumer, nor the two-way ‘conversation’ between these two. A real community is driven by the conversations between consumers – which the brand just watches. For research, these conversations are critical – they allow you to see how your consumers talk unprompted – what issues do they raise, what language do they use?
Used for depth and breadth of qualitative comment – Because of the nature of communities, they make an ideal space to watch and lead discussions. They allow individuals to respond to questions in a thought-through manner and to review and comment on the thoughts of others. This offers a real depth and richness of qualitative comment and should be the heart of the community. It isn’t a place to just run quantitative surveys, but needs to be nurtured as you would with other qualitative techniques (like focus groups or interviews).
Allows reflection and reviewing – A community is always on. Unlike issuing people with surveys you let them respond in their own time, then go back and see what contributions they made and add further to their original thoughts when they’ve had chance to reflect a little. This kind of reasoned response, done in a way that lets you analyse how people’s thoughts have changed, is a real opportunity for research. But to get this kind of reflection and reviewing you have to create a vibrant online community where members contribute and share.
A few of the online research ‘communities’ do not make the most of these criteria. They are using the new technology to deliver an old process, rather than offering a completely new service. This is a real shame as online communities offer the chance to really revolutionise research, especially qualitative. And this is something all brands should be ceasing.
Thanks to Drew Meyers for pointing me in the direction of Small Box‘s ten tips for building an online community. A good collection of criteria which sum up some of the basics of building a community online:
Have a purpose to the community
Start with people you can have a meaningful conversation with
Be authentic and honest
Think small. Get a conversation going with 50 people rather than trying to appeal to 1,000
Be personal and greet every new member
Be an enabler and provide as many ways as possible for people to share and comment on content
Drip content to members, don’t give them all your great stuff on day one because they won’t read it
Be proactive and ban members who break house rules
Nudge, don’t push. You’re role is to help others start a conversation not to force a conversation on them
Give up control, the community will grow beyond you so let them take charge
Of these maxims, I think that the most important are to be authentic and honest and the tips which focus on being a facilitator of the community rather than somebody driving it.
It’s critical to be authentic online. Examples such as Wal-Marting across America only go to show the damage that being less than authentic online can have. If you want to truly engage people in online communities you need to be as honest with them as you expect them to be with you. Very, in other words!
From our perspective we also think that it’s critical that you aren’t driving the community just managing it. This is more about the kind of community you create than anything you actually do. A successful and rich online community would be one that creates a managed environment where members want to add content and drive the direction of the site. This is where the real difference in quality of community can be seen – bad sites will seem forced, with a moderator leading and forcing every discussion. A well managed community, on the other hand, will see the community manager encouraging participation, organising discussions and helping people feel comfortable and confident enough to contribute to and help to grow the site.
Overall these are a good set of rules that would be a great starting point for anybody looking to understand how to set up an online community. Good work!
At FreshNetworks, we work very much in Research 2.0. Our sister company, FreshMinds, has been market research agency of the year here in the UK for the last couple of years and some of our communities are specifically designed for research. It was interesting, therefore, to listen to a great presentation from Guillaume Weill at CRM Metrix on his take on what Research 2.0 is.
For Guillaume, Research 2.0 is letting brands finally converse with their customers. They talk to them (advertising) and listem (market research) but don’t actually engage with them. In fact Guillaume would say that brands talk 50 times more than they listen as global advertising spend is about 50 times the spend on market research.
To start to converse, Guillaume things that market research companies need to shift from a vertical view of the world to a horizontal one. He defines these as follows:
Quant vs Qual
Quant and Qual
Art and Science
To acheive this, Guillaume recommends that brands and market research agencies:
use the potential of online conversations to listen to their customers
analyse these conversations in a new way – allowing customers to comment on and refine others’ contributions
converse more often with their consumers, ideally leaving the conversation on all the time
This all makes sense and is similar to what we have been saying for a while and wrote in our white paper earlier this year (see post here).
So what does this all add up to? Guillaume thinks that Research 2.0 allows you to get the same quality of results but more quickly. This is where we disagree. We think that the quality and depth of insight you can get from a well managed conversation with your customers can be qualitatively different to traditional research techniques. Taking qualitative methods online can revolutionise the depth of insight you get and the ability to bring your customers inside your business.
If you want to find out how we’d do this then feel free to get in touch of course!
Forrester released a report on this issue last week (see here) and their answer is “Yes, but high costs mean that firms with big budgets lead”. This may be true and if it is then it’s more to do with the nature of using online communities for research. They mean building an ongoing relationship with a group of people than needs to be actively managed at all times. This is then available for the brand to dip into for research or to track.
The real issue here seems to be the shift from a project-based approach to research buying and running an ongoing research resource (which obviously has an ongoing cost). At FreshNetworks we think the benefits of using online communities for qualitative research are huge. We wrote our own white paper on the issue earlier this year (see post here). The depth and quality of insight you can get by building real communities with stakeholders can be incredible and the real value comes from the other benefits of building a community like this.
Traditional market research is very transactional. People answer a survey or attend a focus group. Using online research communities, brands can really engage with people. Involve them in their research, feedback to them and incentivise them not with the cash of traditional methods, but with the knowledge that their input is making a difference. Critically, and this is the really exciting bit, traditional market research depends on you know what questions you want to ask. With online communities, the community can tell you what you need to ask. And that’s probably something much more important and relevant to you!
Thanks to Outside Innovation for pointing me in the direction of a report by Matthew Lees, How Should you Manage Customer Communities? (see here)
As Lees points out, designing, deploying and then managing a customer community is a nascent science. It’s a new but burgeoning area of expertise in customer engagement and is seeing influences from marketing, consulting and market research. The people you have desiging and running a community are critical, and it’s not a role just anybody can do. They need to be good community managers and also have an ability to interact with and input to the core of the brand.
A good community manager acts as the glue between a customer community and the brand and makes sure that every party gets the most they possibly can out of the experience. It’s a tough role and one worth investing in.
FreshNetworks is a social media agency. We help global brands, including Telefonica, Jimmy Choo and American Express, use social media to achieve their key business goals. Latest news and press information | <urn:uuid:70ba88fb-5c8c-4478-910c-83cda3493bc2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.freshnetworks.com/blog/tag/marketing-research/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958597 | 2,155 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Intel Finds 'Sandy Bridge' Support Chip Glitch; $1B to Fix
Intel said Monday that the company had discovered a glitch with a support chip used with its latest "Sandy Bridge" microprocessors, which will cost the chipmaker a billion dollars to fix.
Intel has halted shipments of the component, a support chip code-named "Cougar Point" that was part of its Intel 6-series of chipsets. It was found to have a structural flaw inside of it that degraded the performance of SATA-linked devices such as hard-disk drives, Intel said, perhaps 6 percent across a three-year lifespan. The glitch snuck by Intel on initial tests.
Halting shipments of the support chip will also affect shipments of the surrounding Sandy Bridge platforms. "We do believe there will be disruption of the supply chain," Stephen Smith, vice president and director of PC client operations, said during a conference call, although he said that Intel believed that Intel could fill some of the hole with older platforms.
Intel said it had halted shipments of the chip and would issue a fix, which would fix the problem. Intel said it would deliver the updated version of the chipset to customers in late February and expected a "full volume recovery" in April, by which Intel would resume shipments of the fixed chipset at their normal levels.
The Sandy Bridge launch will be pushed a bit later into the quarter, from a few weeks in the future to ad "we need to understand from our partners how quickly they can take this new Cougar Bridge chip and get it into their pipeline," Smith said. The delay should be measured in a "few weeks", he added.
The affected chip began shipping on Jan. 9, and the company said it expected that few end customers would be affected. Only the "second-generation Core i5 and i7" or "Sandy Bridge" products are affected; the main Sandy Bridge processor is not, Intel said, and Intel continues to ship other Sandy Bridge components.
Intel said that a metal layer of the chip had been affected, and executives said that they "were very confident that they understood the issue". Stephen Smith, vice president and director of PC client operations, described it as a "design related problem of a single circuit".
"Intel stands behind its products and is committed to product quality," the company said. "For computer makers and other Intel customers that have bought potentially affected chipsets or systems, Intel will work with its OEM partners to accept the return of the affected chipsets, and plans to support modifications or replacements needed on motherboards or systems."
Financially, the glitch will cost Intel $700 million to replace the part, and the company said it will also cost the company abut $300 million in lost revenue. Executives said that it was fair to add the two costs together.
Intel also adjusted its first-quarter revenue projection, which is now expected to be $11.7 billion, plus or minus $400 million, compared to the previous expectation of $11.5 billion, plus or minus $400 million. Because the chipset shipped during the fourth quarter, the company reduced its gross margin by 4 percentage points from the previously reported 67.5 percent.
Separately, Intel said that it had completed the acquisition of the Infineon Technologies AG Wireless Solutions business, which will now operate as the Intel Mobile Communications group. The company also expects to complete the acquisition of McAfee by the end of the first quarter.
blog comments powered by Disqus | <urn:uuid:8badec2a-b5a1-4a49-a136-728e7df08a59> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2378975,00.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978312 | 721 | 1.6875 | 2 |
1:00 PM to 3:30 PM
Room: Room TBD – Hotel TBD
Theme: Patristic Interpretation of Genesis 1-3
George Hunsinger, Princeton Theological Seminary, Presiding
Peter Martens, Saint Louis University
Origen’s Doctrine of Pre-Existence in its Exegetical and Heresiological Contexts (25 min)
People often talk about Origen’s doctrine of the pre-existence of souls or minds as “speculative,” implying that this is a whimsical and largely conjectural theme. This teaching is also invariably framed as yet another sad episode in the Hellenistic take-over of Christian doctrine, and thus, that it was deservedly anathematized. I will re-examine this doctrine. I will begin with an overview of the cardinal elements in Origen’s understanding of the pre-existent state, including his account of the fall of minds (drawing primarily from On First Principles). Without denying his sources in Hellenistic philosophy, I will pursue two lines of thought. (1) How did Origen seek to integrate Scripture, and in particular, the opening chapters of Genesis, into his curious account of beginnings? Origen was undeniably an exegete, and so too sensed (as many of his readers have also often sensed) that there was some disconnect between his account of beginnings and the account we find in Genesis. (2) To what extent did Origen’s doctrine of pre-existence serve as a calculated rebuttal of “Gnostic” theology? I will argue that there is a lot less idle speculation and a lot more pointed agenda in the contentious doctrine of preexistence than most scholars recognize. The key texts for my argument will be Origen’s first Homily on Genesis, books 1-2 of his Commentary on John and his Commentary on Genesis.
George Kalantzis, Wheaton College (Illinois)
“‘Did God Plant a Garden in the Manner of a Farmer?’ Divine / Human Relationship in Origen.” (25 min)
This paper examines Origen’s view of scriptural hermeneutics through his lens of the hexameron, as he presents it in De Principiis IV.
Kathryn Greene-McCreight, St John’s Episcopal Church, New Haven, CT
Augustine and the Role of Scripture in Christian Formation: Genesis 1-3 (25 min)
Augustine apparently never held a single-volume Bible in his hands. His Bible was a collection of many different books, or collections of books and letters. After all, Augustine’s conversion experience at hearing the children’s sing-song “Take and Read; Take and Read” led him to open his collection of Paul’s letters to the scale-tipping Romans 13:13. And Augustine’s now-famous request, upon his ordination to the priesthood, that Bishop Valerius allow him some time to read and study Scripture, is just as striking. Certainly it was Ambrose’s preaching that opened up particularly the Old Testament to Augustine. What does this tell us about the role of Scripture not only in Augustine’s conversion, but also in his understanding of the ongoing nurture of the soul before God? Why does Augustine focus on certain parts of Scripture more than others, returning as he does throughout his life in particular to Genesis 1-3? What is it about these first three chapters of the Bible which fascinate and vex him so, apart from trying to correct and win over his theological adversaries?
Thomas Holsinger-Friesen, Spring Arbor University
“Never Did Adam Escape the Hands of God”: Irenaeus’ Vision of Genesis 2:7 (25 min)
In Adversus Haereses, Irenaeus is renowned for formulating points of doctrine (e.g., “recapitulation” and the regula veritatis) that would be of great import in the development of early Christian thought. Yet his contribution to theological hermeneutics is no less significant. Given that Irenaeus and his “Gnostic” opponents shared a strong interest in origins, the Genesis creation texts served as a crucial battleground. In particular, Irenaeus found the Genesis 2:7 “breath of life” text to be conducive for exceptionally wide typological readings. In order to contradict a Valentinian anthropology appealing to 1 Corinthians 15:50, Irenaeus mines theological riches from Genesis 2.7. The images of God’s formation of the human body from dust and that of his inbreathing the breath of life enable Irenaeus (or so he claims) to interpret a broader range of texts: prophetic, apostolic, and gospel. In so doing, Irenaeus models an innovative hermeneutic of Scripture that is painstakingly christocentric, while showing remarkable flexibility and interpretative freedom. By means of focal texts like Genesis 2:7, he casts an expansive, unique vision of God and prepares the way for an anti-Platonist Christian anthropology. For Irenaeus, the purposeful work of the Father, through his two hands (Son and Spirit), will present the human creation as fully alive – in body no less than soul.
R. W. B. Moberly, Durham University, Respondent (25 min)
Discussion (25 min)
Filed under: Conference | Tagged: SBL | 1 Comment » | <urn:uuid:df4c00d6-6802-4788-888f-568374796421> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://christiantheologyandbible.wordpress.com/2010/06/02/ | 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 | 0.944243 | 1,154 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Please note that several sources are contradicting each other with dates.
It is during this decade that the Master Control Program, an administrative program that oversees ENCOM's mainframe, and its Game Grid, is developed. Ed Dillinger, a programmer at ENCOM, secretly begins to write codes into the MCP that tells the program to steal functions from other programs.
- Kevin Flynn, one of ENCOM's brightest software engineers, codes "Space Paranoids", "Matrix Blaster", "Vice Squad" and two other high profile video games.
- Ed Dillinger steals Flynn's programs and presents ENCOM with five video games that he claims as his own.
- Ed Dillinger gets promoted among the ranks of ENCOM. He soon reaches as Executive V.P. of the company.
Between 1978 and 1982
- Flynn and Lora Baines meet and become lovers.
- Kevin Flynn is fired by Mr. Dillinger.
- Alan Bradley, also a programming engineer, starts coding Tron, an independent security program that monitors all contacts between ENCOM and other systems.
- Flynn and Lora end their relationship.
- Alan and Lora get together in a relationship.
- Flynn writes his best program yet, Clu, with the purpose of breaking into security systems.
- Lora begins 'Matter Transform' tests using a laser that dismantles the molecular structure of objects in a process called digitization.
- June 3rd. Flynn opens his own arcade, Flynn's. (From Home of TRON )
- Flynn starts using Clu to hack ENCOM's system and periodically tries reading the different mainframe's memory modules to reconstruct the file he needs as solid evidence to prove he's the one who programmed the video games.
- The MCP has become 2,415 times smarter since Ed Dillinger wrote it.
- Sep. 22. Mr. Dillinger shuts down access to all Group-7 personnel. Alan is denied access to his Tron program.
- Lora, working together with Dr. Gibbs, finish yet another 'digitizing' test. Her theory of a scanned U-V laser beam being superior to single pulse exposure is a success.
- Flynn sets an all-time world record in 'Space Paranoids' with 999,000 points.
- Alan, Flynn and Lora use a terminal from within ENCOM to forge a Group-6 access, planning to get into the system to activate Tron and use it as a means of shutting down the MCP and retrieve the evidence.
- Flynn gets digitized into the Game Grid by the MCP while trying to access the mainframe. He succeeds in retrieving and printing the file needed as evidence after derezzing the MCP with Tron and Yori's help. He also becomes ENCOM's CEO.
Kevin Flynn's ascension to leadership of ENCOM brings about many years of stability for the company.
- Kevin Flynn is reinstated as an employee of ENCOM and gets promoted as V.P. Creative Development. (Source)
- Flynn redesigns the Grid to his own specifications.
- Flynn creates Clu 2 to watch over the Tron system in his absences, which began to anger Clu whenever he needed Flynn's permission to make major changes to the Grid, making him think he's been set up to fail his function of perfecting it. Over time begins to declare himself the creator of the Grid and decides to create his version of "the perfect system" by ruling over the Tron system without Flynn's permission. He intends to imprison Flynn after he refuses Clu's wish to destroy self-created programs called ISOs.
- Sam Flynn is born.
- Flynn publishes a book about "a digital frontier that will reshape the human condition." (Source)
- Flynn retires from ENCOM to take care of Sam, leaving Alan in charge.
- Jordan Canas dies in a car accident.
- The Grid begins to experience power failures.
- Kevin Flynn creates Anon, a System Monitor.
- Anon defeats Abraxas.
- Anon is derezzed after falling from Clu's warship, the Regulator.
- Flynn is trapped in The Grid by Clu.
- Clu commits mass genocide against the ISOs.
- Flynn disappears, leaving Sam as a orphan but shareholder of ENCOM's stock. (Source)
- Sam Flynn infiltrates ENCOM and releases ENCOM OS-12 to the world, free of charge.
- Alan Bradley tells Sam that he had received a page from Flynn's Arcade. Sam goes to investigate and gets digitized into the Tron system.
- Sam Flynn emerges from the Tron system, accmpanied by Quorra, with a new outlook on life.
- In a shocking announcement, Sam Flynn seizes control of ENCOM and names Alan Bradley as ENCOM's new chairman of the board.
TRON 2.0 Timeline
The events of TRON 2.0 are structured as a sequel of sorts to the events of TRON. They are regarded as non-canon within the TRON franchise.
- Note: The following section contains information that appears in the TRON 2.0 storyline, which has been classed as non-canon with the TRON mythology and takes place in an alternate timeline.
- Lora marries Alan; Jet Bradley is born.
- Flynn has Alan abandon his TRON: Legacy project, stating that the program is useless without the ability to digitize (due to the MCP being destroyed).
- Kevin Flynn resigns from ENCOM; Walter Gibbs Jr. replaces him as Senior Executive VP.
- Lora Bradley killed in digitizing bay at ENCOM by a digitizing laser misfire.
TRON 2.0 E-mails List
- 1982 - May - Lora pregnant - asks Flynn to be the godfather.
- 1982 - Dec - Jethro Eugene Bradley born.
- 1984 - Feb - Lora still having problems with digitizing without MCP.
- 1988 - Mar - Ma1a compiled.
- 1990 - Jun - Flynn leaves Encom. Gibbs Jr. takes over.
- 1994 - Oct - Lora dies in freak LASER misfire. Jet was 11.
- 1996 - Jun - Ma2a - Exhibits traces of Lora - Meghan Gabrielle discussed in email.
- 1998 - Mar - Jet having problems at school. Attitude issues.
- 1998 - Aug - Jet not heading home. Staying out.
- 1999 - - Flynn worried about Alan
- 1999 - Feb - Jet getting bad reports.
- 2002 - Jun - Jet starts on SP3D (Space Paranoids 3D).
- 2002 - Aug - Correction Algorythms finally fixed.
- 2002 - Dec - Encom sold to FCON. 03 - Mar - Jet lead programmer at Encom.
- 2003 - Mar - Digital Pal award to Alan for Ma3a. | <urn:uuid:20ae57ac-bd5b-4c3c-ace2-706331c71b1f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://tron.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_(TRON)?diff=prev&oldid=33420 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934562 | 1,466 | 1.75 | 2 |
Saturday, March 18, 2006
What We Can Learn from Hunan
Discussions on A-P-C and elsewhere show that tremendously important lessons can be learned from the events recently concluded in Hunan Province. It might do well to summarize what we have learned and the lessons we can take away from this event.
Most adoptive families choose China as a result of the perception that there are "thousands" of unwanted children languishing in the orphanages. The events in Hunan, and a growing body of other evidence, clearly show that this is not the case, at least in the case of those orphanages that participate in the international adoption program.
At its foundation, the Hunan story centered on a director who sought to purchase young children to increase adoption fees to his own orphanage and the orphanages in his immediate area. We can debate the reasons he did this, whether it was to line his own pockets or to get enough money to improve the facility he ran; but the bottom line is he wanted more money.
Parents can take comfort in the fact that the children were trafficked from Wuchuan (Guangdong) to Hunan, and not from Wuchuan to the Wuchuan orphanage. It seems likely these traffickers contacted the large orphanages in Wuchuan and Zhanjiang, because directors in Guangdong have confirmed to me that they have been contacted in the past (it is not known if the traffickers were the same ones involved in this story). So it seems, at least anecdotally, that most directors wished no part of a baby-trafficking program. As one director recounted her response, "We will take in all babies that are abandoned, but we will not pay for them."
But a few directors decided to take them. Why? If there are so many unwanted children being found, what is the incentive for these orphanages to take in more children? Because it is becoming clear that the number of healthy baby girls being abandoned is falling, at the same time demand for these children is increasing.
One would have to travel several times to China to gain an appreciation how quickly things are changing here. On my first trip to rural DianBai (Guangdong) six years ago, I had to prepare for the trip by bringing my own cash, my own laptop (usable only with dial-up), and expect to eat only Chinese food. The only hotel was at the end of the main street and had little heating and no hot water. The stores were limited to small shops along the main street. It was a small town in the backwoods of China.
Today, DianBai has transformed itself. On my last visit, I found four Bank of China branches with ATMs, I ate in Western restaurants, stayed in a three-star hotel with in-room high speed internet, and showered in blistering hot water. I walked their new shopping mall filled with designer clothing shops, electronics, and other modern conveniences.
I see this transformation occurring wherever I travel. I am about ready to name the building crane China's national bird.
This transformation is having a dramatic affect on the number of children abandoned in China. Nearly every orphanage director I speak with confirms that the number of children being found is falling. This is due to two forces: increased ability to pay the fines associated with illegally birthed children and decreasing traditionalism, which bestows a preference on boys.
The increased affluency would lead to an increase in the domestic demand for children, as more couples are able to afford to adopt a child. Thus, domestic adoption rates are probably increasing, at the same time international demand climbs, and the number of children found is decreasing.
This creates the perfect storm found in Hengyang, and explains why a director would buy babies.
A Chinese couple wanting a child has four options for obtaining a child. Frequently, if they live in the countryside, word is put out that they are interested in adopting an unwanted child, and often a match is made with another couple. A friend of mine recently experienced this first-hand as her husband's mother let is be known that my friend and her husband were interested in a son (they had an adopted daughter, and in fact were happy, but the mother-in-law felt otherwise). Within a year, the husband's mother was told of a couple who wanted a girl but were pregnant with a boy (not every unwanted child is a girl!). My friend declined the child, but this case illustrates a primary method employed to locate a child.
Another way for wealthier families to obtain a child is through contacting an orphanage. Since adoption fees in even non-internationally adopting orphanages are often in the range of 3-5,000 yuan ($400-700 USD), one must be firmly middle-class to afford this route. But clearly more and more families are finding this as an acceptable way to build a family (I will be detailing the stories of three adoptive families from China in a future blog).
Families who lack financial means and social status are left with only two alternatives: buying a baby from a trafficker and kidnapping one. Baby trafficking is common in China, as the Hunan story illustrates. What must be remembered is that Liang Guihong, the Wuchuan woman responsible for collecting the trafficked children, had been performing "adoptive" services for nearly a decade, finding homes for the unwanted children that were brought to her.
As adoptive parents, we must realize that all of the trafficking and kidnapping stories we read about deal with one common theme: They all are driven by families in China who wish to have children.
We must realize that for the most part, the days of healthy, unwanted children staying in orphanages for long periods of time is over. Anecdotal evidence such as visits to orphanages "full of children" supply scant evidence, because tghe processing time from finding to international adoption is usually a minimum of eight months, and can often take up to 18 months. Healthy babies seen on orphanage visits are almost certainly at some point of the international adoption process.
There are a large number of children found, but again that has no bearing on the supply of available children in the orphanages unless the domestic and international adoption rates is also known. Eventually, if it hasn't already, the domestic demand for children will overtake supply, and it will be time to terminate China's international adoption program. Are we prepared for that day? | <urn:uuid:ce35de39-e21b-4ae3-9bc5-a447c3070f3f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://research-china.blogspot.com/2006/03/what-we-can-learn-from-hunan.html?showComment=1143332940000 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976874 | 1,330 | 1.828125 | 2 |
NWA Leaders Speak Out About Medical Marijuana Act
With less than two weeks before the election, people on both sides of the medical marijuana issue are making their case for why it should be passed or defeated.
The proposed Arkansas Medical Marijuana Act is on this year’s ballot as Issue 5.
Friday, several Northwest Arkansas leaders came together at the Jones Center in Springdale to voice their opposition.
“No one wants to deny people care when they are in pain or when they are suffering,” said Senator Cecile Bledsoe. “But there are too many unknowns about marijuana. There are too many different side effects. Medical marijuana is not the answer.”
Emily Williams is a lymphoma survivor who smokes marijuana to relieve nausea and other side effects of chemotherapy.
“Whether you like the idea of medical marijuana or not it’s going to be used so you might as well bring it out into the open and put some day light on it,” Williams said.
General Surgeon Dr. Jim Bledsoe suggests patients talk to their doctors about other prescriptions like FDA approved Marinol.
“It does work. It does work on nausea, it does work on anorexia, people who have difficulty eating like age patients but it does not give the high that say certain other controlled substances do,” Dr. Bledsoe said.
Williams said if the proposal fails on Election Day, some people seeking pain relief will still use the drug, making them lawbreakers.
“If this law doesn’t pass, medical marijuana is still going to be used,” Williams said. “There will be people who need it who don’t use it but there are going to be other people who are going to use it.”
If the proposal passes, a patient would have to submit to the state written approval from a physician saying they qualify. | <urn:uuid:8cf9157c-8258-40e1-830a-af5140a78f89> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://5newsonline.com/2012/10/26/nwa-leaders-speak-out-about-medical-marijuana-act/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969229 | 398 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.