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Thursday, 19 May 2011
DP CleanTech has recently sold 3 more straw-fired power plants in China and thus increased its market dominance in the region.
DP CleanTech has recently sold 3 more straw-fired power plants in China and thus increased its market dominance in the region. DP CleanTech’s success in China has driven further improvements to its core product and the company has plans to release a new straw boiler to meet the increasing demand. To date, DP CleanTech has completed 27 biomass power plants in China and has a further 24 under development. The latest 3 boilers were sold to China Everbright International. The projects will be delivered in Linyi, Laiyang and Shuyang in Eastern China. The boilers have been designed specifically to convert Chinese soft straw into high temperature, high pressure steam. Each biomass power plant will deliver 30 MW of electricity to the China State Grid.
It is not the first time Everbright has called on DP CleanTech’s expertise in biomass. Everbright’s 30 MW straw-fired power plant in Dangshan, for which DP CleanTech also provided the technology, is close to completion. The Dangshan project is expected to provide 220,000,000 kwh of clean electricity to the State Grid annually.
DP CleanTech’s advanced European technology is continually being adapted for different markets, and a new 130tph boiler for the Chinese market is nearing the final stages of development . The boiler is designed to handle even larger variations in fuel quality, and is cost- optimized for the Chinese market.
Chief Technical Officer, Kenneth Jorgensen explained: “Most straw boilers are developed for dry, low ash content European fuel. The reality is that in China the straw has a high ash and moisture content”.
The new product is expected to further strengthen DP CleanTech’s dominance in the high potential Chinese market.
About DP CleanTech: Founded in 2004, DP CleanTech designs, engineers, manufactures and commissions biomass and waste to energy power plants, providing complete solutions for turning waste materials into clean energy. DP CleanTech has built 50 biomass power plants around the world, using high pressure, high temperature technology originally developed in Denmark. Today DP CleanTech is recognized as a world leader in the biomass clean energy field with a strong presence in both Europe and Asia. DP CleanTech built the first biomass power plant in China and is responsible for 70% of the biomass power plants operating in China today. | <urn:uuid:b3d3ef8e-a4d1-403d-a888-314ad51aa25b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dpcleantech.com/medias/news/dp-cleantech-makes-further-advances-for-straw-fired-technology-in-china | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952611 | 511 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Bird farmers on Cape Cod say there’s a good reason a wild turkey is stalking a mail truck; he’s lonely and it’s getting close to mating season. A black tom turkey near Centerville, MA, is so obsessed with a local postal truck that MA wildlife officials set up a sting to try to catch him in a net, Cape Cod Online reports.
Adding intrigue, The Washington Post reports on a possible Kennedy connection. Ethel Kennedy had her son Bobby, Jr., pick up a couple turkeys on Thanksgiving from Brewster farmer Heidi Howell to show the kids what a live turkey is like. When Bobby opened the door, the male turkey escaped, she told the Boston Herald. “The grandchildren were thrilled,” Ethel sid. “For three days, they chased it everywhere.” Was Bobby driving around with two wild turkeys free range in his car? Anyway, Howell says it’s not the right size.
Mail carrier John Moran says he’s afraid to get out of his truck, lest he be savaged by the bird. From the video, you can see why somebody wants to put a stop to the ridiculous spectacle, more for the turkey’s sake than the mail man’s. The turkey also seems specifically attracted to the mail truck, which just so happens to have a giant USPS eagle painted on three sides. Oddly, this isn’t even the first time turkeys have been drawn to eagle-adorned mail trucks: this flickr picture shows them courting one in Gloucester on Cape Anne. Another shows one flirting with his own reflection in a bumper.
Where to See Wildlife in the Northeast
Where to See More Weird Birds | <urn:uuid:03ead283-322e-4d68-94e1-49110fe3b64d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://animaltourism.com/news/2011/02/07/postal-turkey | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949838 | 355 | 1.578125 | 2 |
Breathing space – a blog about creativity
Inspiration is unpredictable.
This morning I was leaning into a wardrobe to hang up an item of clothing when an idea popped into my head. I had to dash to the computer to tap out this little gem before it faded. Good job, too, because it’s transformed the short story I’m working on. It wasn’t exactly a bolt from the blue, rather a distillation of several ideas and possibilities I’ve been mulling over. But it certainly highlights something about the creative process.
I used to believe that if I wasn’t sitting down at a computer or with a notepad, staring at the screen with my fingers poised above the keyboard or chewing the top of a pencil, then I wasn’t working. And being the kind of guy I am, I tend to feel guilty when I’m not working. Yet it’s often when I’m not consciously thinking about a project that the most important developments occur, when the subconscious mind has space to do its stuff.
This is something I’ve only recently come to fully appreciate and accept; and it’s a realisation that makes my creative endeavours somewhat less stressful. Sitting down with a pencil and paper/laptop/iPad/[insert your weapon of choice here] and staring through the window are undeniably important aspects of the game, but most good things need time to mature.
So if you’re struggling, just relax. Watch television, play a video game, go for a walk or a bike ride* – and don’t feel guilty. But carry a pencil and a scrap of paper with you. Just in case.
* Both forms of exercise which stimulate blood flow and oxygen intake – just right for boosting creativity. | <urn:uuid:2e40e1a4-1f91-4bcf-84cb-87ef4b1e4fa3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://martinsketchley.wordpress.com/2012/06/27/breathing-space-a-blog-about-creativity/ | 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 | 0.936524 | 377 | 1.640625 | 2 |
In the Sign in with your Google Account box, click Sign in as a different user.
If you use the same computer to sign in to both your business and personal Google Accounts, always make sure that you're signing in with the correct username for the account. For example, if you sign in to your personal Google Account first and don't sign out, the username associated with your personal Google Account will be automatically filled in when you try to sign in to your business Google Account. When this happens, click Sign in as a different user and sign in with the username associated with your business Google Account.
Still can't sign in? Try this Google Accounts Troubleshooter. | <urn:uuid:8953c5f3-a834-4aa4-94f7-9de1a879c3fe> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://support.google.com/dartsignin/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=117431&ctx=cb&src=cb&cbid=-1i9sw34gsxucw&cbrank=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934761 | 137 | 1.625 | 2 |
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Medical Esthetics Treatments
AAD Offers Tips on Seeking Out Safe Cosmetic Procedures
Posted: September 28, 2009
The American Academy of Dermatology recently offered suggestions on what patients should look for when choosing where to have minimally invasive cosmetic performed.
Today, there are more ways than ever before to “get a little work done.” From skin fillers to fat reduction procedures, the options are endless for those looking to improve their appearance and boost their self-esteem. But with so many physicians and options from which to choose, consumers can be confused about where to start and who to trust to perform a cosmetic procedure.
At the American Academy of Dermatology’s Summer Academy Meeting 2009 in Boston, dermatologist C. William Hanke, MD, MPH, FAAD, clinical professor at Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis, offered advice to help patients determine if a cosmetic procedure is right for them, including questions to ask the physician to ensure a safe and effective result or outcome.
“The best advice I can offer consumers is not to be afraid to ask physicians direct questions about their credentials, training and patient results with any cosmetic procedure,” said Dr. Hanke. “If you are not satisfied with the answers to your questions or if a physician becomes defensive, then these are red flags and you should seek another opinion.”
To help consumers in choosing a qualified physician for a safe and effective cosmetic procedure, Dr. Hanke recommends the following:
- Look for a physician who specializes in the cosmetic procedure. Dr. Hanke cautioned that no physician is an expert at every cosmetic procedure. For example, some physicians specialize in laser procedures or liposuction, so Dr. Hanke suggested that consumers look for physicians with particular expertise in the procedure they are considering. Ideally, patients should request to see “before and after” photos of a physician’s actual patients, rather than of another physician’s work. | <urn:uuid:c458baa8-3009-4e30-b0f8-d0d86d2327ad> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.skininc.com/treatments/medicalesthetics/62323787.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939779 | 432 | 1.570313 | 2 |
The recent downfall of print media has had a large impact on the medium of magazines. Hard copies of magazine giants like The New Yorker, Newsweek and Playboy -yes, even Playboy might be a thing of the past. As print magazines quickly go the way of the Dinosaurs, (do not pass extinction, do not collect $200 dollars) contemporary on-line magazines such as FLYP are slowly climbing atop the multimedia food-chain.
FLYP For It…
FLYP has simply taken the template of magazine-style publication and created a virtual version for the digital consumers of today’s mass media market. The layout of the site is cleverly designed to replicate the experience of reading a magazine. As you read the articles and tick the page arrow button, a simulated page flips over, which is accompanied by the familiar sound of an actual page turning. This is one of the little style features that makes FLYP stand out.
More Than Magazines
The overall content was entertaining and informative just like a print magazine. FLYP brings their content together in such a way that each story displays a multi-layered, multimedia attack on the senses. The best example of this is the “ballhawk” story on Zack Hample. The story’s lead is a simple feature write-up about 500 words long, but as the reader continues to flip the fabricated pages the story gets more complex. This particular story includes video, charts, graphs, audio, links and pictures, which are easily accessible and interactive allowing the reader to scroll through and share the experience of the story while reading along.
The FLYP method explores almost every aspect of the 10 Laws of Interactive Storytelling. There are a few laws that do not apply to FLYP, such as number seven and nine. The site could try to figure out ways to make their stories more viral and work on a few minor page navigation issues, but overall FLYP is truly more than a magazine. | <urn:uuid:c111c391-a481-4712-8fb8-3f9327b70745> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://johnniederkorn.wordpress.com/2010/01/19/flyping-the-script/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931497 | 398 | 1.609375 | 2 |
I was dispatched to a rural outpost in nearby Franklin County Tuesday when two people were found dead in a car along a back-country road.
Penhook is, in technical terms, a “census-designated place.” That essentially means there are some mailing addresses that include “Penhook, VA,” but it isn’t a town, or a city or even some sort of village. According to a quick Wikipedia search, Penhook consists of 12.6 square miles and 726 people.
On the way, an editor and a reporter here at the paper who are more familiar with Franklin County told me there was a Minute Market there that locals frequented, using as a general store and knowledge center.
After checking to see if police would give me any information at the scene where two people were found shot to death — they wouldn’t at that point — I made my way to the Minute Market, where the clerks probably noticed me while I was still parking my car.
They know their customers, and they probably knew I wasn’t one of them. But they also knew something strange was going on that day, and they weren’t surprised when I told them I was a reporter.
The clerks, who were rightfully disturbed by the violent event that had apparently occurred just down the road from the store, already had an idea what had happened. In fact, they already knew who called 911 and what the caller had seen.
Going to a small town, or a place like Penhook that isn’t even big enough to be a “town,” is an inherently different experience as an outsider. But many rural areas, like this one, will welcome outsiders into the fold if they come bearing some sort of help.
In this case, I was attempting to find out what had happened down the road, just like them.
And it’s general stores and communities like the Minute Market and Penhook that make small towns extremely rewarding to report from.
In larger areas, the magnitude of any one event — even the violent deaths of two people — is diluted by the simple fact that only so many people can feel affected by it. What happened Tuesday night in Penhook — when every person who walked into the store began talking about the shooting — simply doesn’t happen in large communities.
I was standing with the clerks when one of them received a text message. We had heard from the 911 caller that the victims had been found in a metallic Jeep. The clerks and customers had been wracking their brains to come up with an idea of who could be involved. The text message brought the answer.
It was only a rumor at that point, but it spread like wildfire through the night, and it turned out to be true. When the clerks read the message, saw the names of the supposed dead, the light bulbs went on. They drove a metallic Jeep.
And then the pain and disbelief set in. They were regulars, like most customers, and they were local business owners, and they loved their dog, and they were such a nice couple. Everything there was to know, seemingly, was known in this store.
In that rural outpost, everyone is connected. The people feel these connections deeply and when one or two are lost, it resonates.
Below I’ve got some recommended reading: Stories set in these hyper-connected small communities.
The Hanging by Rich Schapiro, The Atlantic: This great piece is in the new issue of the magazine and debuted this week. Along with my experience, it sparked the idea for this post. This tale, however, shows the part of the story that comes after the big news: When some violent event happens, no one can believe so-and-so would do such a thing. And that’s when you realize that no community, no matter how tightly bound, can completely know and understand a person.
The Ballad of Johnny France by Richard Ben Cramer, Esquire (1985): A classic on a sheriff’s search for two mountain men. (Link is to the excellent Bronx Banter blog.)
Finally, I have a big piece coming out as part of a special report in tomorrow’s paper. It is also, coincidentally, about rural life. Stay tuned. | <urn:uuid:d85e0da3-6754-41f0-981b-1f23b89775b8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://zachcrizer.com/blog/ | 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 | 0.986544 | 891 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Weather forecasters are saying that a significant storm may sweep into Northern California next week.
Published: Thursday, Sep. 29, 2011 - 6:54 am
Last Modified: Thursday, Sep. 29, 2011 - 9:26 am
The timing and intensity of the storm are still difficult to pin down, but the big change in the weather is currently forecast to arrive Monday and exit on Wednesday.
The brunt of the storm is expected on Tuesday and overnight into Wednesday. The storm may bring moderate to heavy precipitation, winds of 25-35 mph, with gusts to 40 mph, according to an e-mail from Kathy Hoxie, warning coordination meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Sacramento.
Hoxie notes that a mixture of heavy precipitation and wind early in the season before trees drop their leaves often results in broken limbs, downed trees, power outages and clogged street drains.
"On the positive note, this storm system may provide enough precipitation to all but bring the fire season to a close," she wrote.
Snow levels from the storm in the Sierra should be above the passes through the mountains early next week. However, some snowfall could occur on trans-Sierra passes Wednesday after most of the precipitation has moved out.
Until fall arrives via the cold front, the Sacramento region is expected to have another afternoon of summer-like temperatures today. The high today is predicted to be 94 degrees downtown.
Temperatures start to cool Friday. The weekend weather is forecast to be cloudy and cool, highs around 78 degrees.
The detailed, 7-day forecast for the Sacramento region:
Today: Sunny, with a high near 94. Southwest wind between 3 and 9 mph.
Tonight: Mostly clear, with a low around 61. South wind between 8 and 10 mph.
Friday: Mostly sunny, with a high near 85. South southwest wind between 6 and 10 mph.
Friday night: Partly cloudy, with a low around 59. South southwest wind around 9 mph.
Saturday: Mostly sunny, with a high near 78. South southwest wind around 6 mph.
Saturday night: Mostly cloudy, with a low around 54.
Sunday: Partly sunny, with a high near 78.
Sunday night: Mostly cloudy, with a low around 54.
Monday: A chance of rain. Partly sunny, with a high near 74.
Monday night: A chance of rain. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 55.
Tuesday: A chance of rain. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 74.
Tuesday night: A chance of rain. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 56.
Wednesday: Rain likely. Cloudy, with a high near 72.
© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved. | <urn:uuid:25b790ad-8213-4d5b-8d66-7389571436f9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://somalipeacemaker.blogspot.com/2011/09/storm-expected-sometime-next-week.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954165 | 565 | 1.5 | 2 |
Flaming Gorge dam
“Double Arch” at Arches National Park
A young dinosaur celebrates
What happens when you reach the age of eighty? Well, you're one day older than you were when you were seventy-nine, and you celebrate as you move into the next decade of your life. I celebrated by getting closer to the age of dinosaurs.
My eightieth birthday celebration was a tour of dinosaur country with my husband, who just celebrated his eighty-fifth year, and our white-water-rafting-enthusiastic family. They were leaving on just such an adventure shortly after we came to visit, and we had been invited to come along.
We watched with interest as they gathered provisions, equipment, and clothing, packed two cars, plus made use of a fellow traveler’s truck space. We left Placitas with seven passengers in two cars, and a goal of reaching Grand Junction for an overnight stop, passing through Silverton and Ouray, Colorado, and traversing two wondrous but scary mountain passes that took us up to more than ten thousand feet.
We were following our son-in-law in his weathered Explorer, easy to see because of the gear stowed on the roof, and carrying our twenty-one-year-old Pittsburgh grandson and his friend. Our car, driven by our sixteen-year-old grandson, carried our daughter, my husband, and me. As we climbed the heights and dived the depths of the passes, my husband repeatedly cautioned our driver that he was putting his grandfather within eight inches of death! The dropoff at the road’s edge was frightening.
On arising the next morning, we left Grand Junction for the Gates of Lodore, with a stop in Fruita, where we played musical cars with members of our caravan, picking up four more river enthusiasts and adding two more cars to the string.
At the put-in we watched the unloading of deflated rafts, frames, dry bags, coolers, and watertight boxes, and watched tents pop up under the shade trees. Bob and I decided we had better leave on our two-and-a-half-hour drive to Dinosaur, Colorado, where we were to begin our journey into real dinosaur country. We drove back to the main road and turned west. We were absolutely alone on the road. At Dinosaur, population three hundred, I was greeted at the Terrace Motel by a cute little Aunt Bee lady.
In the morning, we bade good-bye to Aunt Bee and headed for Vernal, Utah, for the next part of our celebration. We took Highway 191 out of Vernal about forty miles north, past incredible rock canyons walls, to Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area. Information signs told the ages of the rock formations and what life if any had existed there. We were looking at rocks formed 548 million years ago, some from the early- and late-Jurassic periods and the Paleocene and Eocene epochs. We passed the Morrison, Entrada, and Navajo sandstone formations, driving over what had been a huge sea millions of years ago. At the visitors' center, the dam rises 502 feet above bedrock and creates a reservoir covering 42,020 acres, with more than three hundred miles of shoreline, boat ramps and marinas, campgrounds, and full-service lodges. Gorge National Recreation Area is most famous for its fishing, producing enormous trout of world-record size, including a Mackinaw (lake) trout weighing more than fifty pounds and rainbow trout over twenty-five pounds. Petroglyphs and artifacts suggest that prehistoric people of the Fremont culture hunted game near the gorge and Ute tribes visited there later. We continued north to Dutch John and Antelope Flat along the reservoir.
The next day we visited the new State of Utah Dinosaur Museum in Vernal and enjoyed an awesome display, complete with a gigantic woolly mammoth standing outside in the garden. His “wool” is made of hemp and has to be replaced periodically because the birds like to use it to make their nests.
The next day was July 4 and time to head for the takeout and welcome back our river rafters, but first we visited the Dinosaur Quarry at the Dinosaur National Monument, another amazing display. Then we headed for Split Mountain takeout point. Around the bend they came, all seventeen travelers, tired and full of mosquito bites, but all in one piece.
We traveled with our daughter and family to Moab, with a stop in Fruita to discharge our pickups and say farewell to the group as they headed for home. In Moab we were in time to enjoy the Fourth of July fireworks display from our motel veranda.
The following day we drove through Arches National Park, where we gazed at the monoliths, arches, spires, balanced rocks, sandstone fins, and eroded rock formations atop an underground salt bed responsible for these wondrous sights. This salt bed was deposited across the Colorado Plateau some three hundred million years ago when the land was still a sea (it eventually evaporated).
We drove through Canyonlands National Park to the Island in the Sky, a vasat expanse of canyon lands formed 185 million years ago during the early-Jurassic age of the dinosaurs. Navajo sandstone forms the mesa tops, and petrified wood and dinosaur tracks provide more evidence that Horseshoe Canyon, in the park, was once lakefront property
We ended my celebration journey that night with a float on the Colorado River through towering walls of Navajo sandstone illuminated by klieg lights, while listening to the history of the canyon and the town of Moab—a wonderful end to a wonderful celebration.
So what have I learned as I enter the ninth decade of my life? I'm not as old as the dinosaurs; life is a celebration to be enjoyed every moment we are allowed; we need to protect this world in which we exist; and we need to adapt to change or disappear.
What will I do to celebrate my ninetieth? Perhaps step on that raft and shove off to enjoy a great white-water adventure!
Recruitment underway for Department of Game and Fish conservation officers
The New Mexico Department of Game and Fish is looking for a few good men and women to join the next generation of professionals who protect and conserve our precious wildlife. Recruitment is underway for conservation-officer trainees to fill multiple positions statewide.
The department is encouraging people with diverse educational degrees to apply for the positions. Qualifications include a degree from a four-year accredited college, passing a physical fitness test, and successfully completing a five-month training course at the state Law Enforcement Academy. Acceptable college degrees include biology, fisheries science, wildlife science, animal science, forestry, range science, agricultural science, communications, journalism, outdoor recreation, environmental science, wildlife law enforcement, resource economics, criminal justice, ecology, natural resource management, zoology, behavioral science, social science, and others.
Applicants can find the recruiting notice and application instructions on the State Personnel Office Web site, www.state.nm.us/spo. Trainee annual salaries begin at $27,331. Eligible applicants must have completed their degrees by December 2005 and show proof of the degree by January 9, 2006, the projected start date. The projected start date for successful applicants who already have an appropriate degree is September 26, 2005.
Interested applicants can obtain more information about conservation officer duties, educational and physical requirements, training, and employee benefits by contacting the Department of Game and Fish Human Resources Office at (505) 476-8028 or visiting www.wildlife.state.nm.us. | <urn:uuid:ef0e44ef-edab-4e93-8a25-5b58578770f7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sandovalsignpost.com/aug05/html/time_off.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960734 | 1,591 | 1.585938 | 2 |
The UK's growing support for the offshore wind industry stands it in good stead to benefit from a large share of the global market, householders wanting to switch energy might be pleased to learn.
More people could be looking to switch gas tariffs soon as it has been revealed the new smart meters save an average of just £23 a year.
Householders in Wales who are in need of cheap electricity tariffs to drive down energy bills might be able to access help from a new government scheme.
Plans to deliver renewably sourced power to energy comparison customers in Scotland have been stalled because one resident is refusing to sell his land.
Householders wanting to compare energy deals might be interested to hear that the government has unveiled plans for the rollout of smart meters.
Elderly people are being urged to switch energy deals following research that shows more retirees are living on the breadline.
The reduction in the winter fuel allowance for pensioners could see more householders deciding to switch energy provider? in a bid to save money.
The south-west of England should be held up as a model for developing green energy, customers who are wishing to switch gas deals might be interested to hear.
Energy comparison customers have been warned that fraudsters masquerading as energy suppliers have been trying to target households.
Consumers who heard chancellor George Osborne say in this month's Budget that a higher carbon floor price is to be introduced might be tempted to switch gas deal.
Energy customers who want to switch gas could check how much they are paying compared to the average in their region.
A lack of clear vision about the UK's green electricity future has resulted in the loss of overseas investment opportunities.
Ofgem's decision to make energy suppliers give their customers 30 days' notice if they are planning to introduce price rises is a good move, consumer group Which? has said.
Deputy prime minister Nick Clegg has come under attack for the government's stance on green power, energy comparison customers might be interested to learn.
Energy suppliers will be required to give their customers at least 30 days' notice before increasing their prices, Ofgem has ruled.
Industry regulator Ofgem has appointed independent accountants to investigate the financial results of five of the Big Six UK energy suppliers
The UK will require "record investment" to ensure its cheap energy needs are met in the future | <urn:uuid:bd3cc94f-03f6-4a4e-b519-6c1fc0b01281> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.energyhelpline.com/news1/fri/domesticenergy/news/2011/3/5 | 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 | 0.965197 | 477 | 1.820313 | 2 |
March 20, 2012
Ontario College of Trades allows industry to be in charge of own destiny: Guthrie
The Ontario College of Trades is a “great opportunity” for the trades in the province to be in charge of their own destiny, says a College top official.
Bob Guthrie, Registrar and Chief Executive Officer of the Ontario College of Trades (OCOT), recently moved from Saskatchewan, a province which he said put industry in charge of apprenticeship training and the certification process a few years ago.
“Ontario, it seems to me, is building on what was done elsewhere and has gone a bit further.
“I think it’s a great idea to let the people who are most directly affected by the decisions, that are made within the apprenticeship training and certification system, essentially regulate that system.”
Guthrie served seven years as the Chief Executive Officer of the Saskatchewan Apprenticeship and Trade Certification Commission. He has nearly 30 years of experience working with trades and apprenticeship, as well as an extensive knowledge of industry standards and labour market needs.
OCOT is a self-regulated body that was legislated in 2009 and was formed as a response to one of the recommendations suggested in the 2008 Compulsory Certification Project Review by Tim Armstrong . Its mandate includes building the professional profile of the skilled trades and promoting the trades to young people.
Guthrie said the skilled trades, along with every other sector, are competing for the hearts and minds of young people and OCOT will help with that task.
“I think that there are great opportunities for young people,” he said.
“We’ve done some research in other jurisdictions that indicate that people that have a journeyperson’s certification in a skilled career have high rates of employment, have a lot of job satisfaction and have high job security and good incomes. It seems to me that’s an important message to tell young people.”
OCOT recently took a significant step forward by setting its ratio review schedule, with the first group’s review this April. Guthrie said he hopes the College will open its doors and begin enrolling members on Jan. 1, 2013.
The ratio review process is legislated to take 120 days though there is a provision to extend if necessary. All written submissions will be posted on OCOT’s website. This is followed by a hearing where the panel listens to oral submissions. The panel will then make a decision and provide it to the Board of Governors.
A coalition of construction employers once called for the complete overhaul or abolition of the College, citing issues over the governance structure, transparency and its perceived union bias.
Guthrie said OCOT has made a commitment to an open and transparent process with the ratio reviews.
“Anyone who is interested will be invited to make a submission to the review process. Everyone will be able to see what all of the stakeholders have to say about the process.”
There about eight or 10 significant projects that need to be completed before the College can open its doors, said Guthrie, including developing an IT system to enroll members.
They are also looking at the governance structure of the institution. Between the Board of Governors, Roster of Adjudicators, divisional boards and trade boards, there are several hundred people involved in the governance structure.
“They are the subject matter experts in many cases. It’s a large group, but it really represents very broadly all of the stakeholders in the College,” said Guthrie.
Skills Competences Canada held its 2013 Skills Canada National Competition at BC Place in downtown Vancouver from June 5th to June 8th.
Reed Construction Data's chief economist, Alex Carrick, updates the status of Canada's exports industry, breaking it down by the country's regions.
In this week's update, we look at some of the stories we'll be covering in the Journal of Commerce for the week of June 17th, 2013.
The Vancouver Regional Construction Association held its annual Construction Learning Forum in Whistler, B.C. from May 31 to June 1st. The event featured many educational panels including a very informative session on substance abuse in the construction industry.
This year’s Canstruction Toronto event saw 18 teams of designers, engineers and architects build larger than life sculptures made out of cans. Designs ranged from the winning “Two Cans“ depicting two toucans to Humpty Dumpty sitting on a wall.
In this week's update, we look at some of the stories we'll be covering in the Journal of Commerce for the week of June 10th, 2013.
The BC chapter of the Canadian Institute of Steel Construction held the2013 BC Steel Design Awards of Excellence on May 23 at the Fairmont Waterfront Hotel in downtown Vancouver.
In this week's update, we look at some of the stories we'll be covering in the Journal of Commerce for the week of June 3rd, 2013.
Founded in 1947, ATCO Structures and Logistics has long supplied both Albertan and international customers with modular buildings for use on worksites and other locations. | <urn:uuid:51b31ee7-e379-4985-8896-0d87fc68c86f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dailycommercialnews.com/article/id49285/profdevelopments | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967319 | 1,067 | 1.59375 | 2 |
The splendid architecture of the Panthéon can be admired from many angles across the city. If you choose a bed & breakfast near the Panthéon you'll be able to enjoy a romantic atmosphere and all the history of the left bank just as the locals do. The story of the monument is fairly tortuous. Built originally as a church in the 15th century it became a laic temple during the revolution and is the final resting place of great free thinkers such as Voltaire and Rousseau. It was later turned back into a church and then again transformed into a non-religious building during the funeral of Victor Hugo who is now buried inside. The monument is open everyday from 10am until 6pm. Tickets are 7 and free for minors. All around the area you'll find bars, friendly neighborhood restaurants, luxurious eateries, art galleries, and antique shops. Don't hesitate! Reserve your Panthéon B&B and come discover the hidden corners of the Latin Quarter.
Bed and Breakfast Panthéon In the heart of the Latin Quarter, come discover Paris with a B&B! A carefully selected list of accommodations has been chosen for you: reserve the accommodation you prefer, Paris is waiting for you! Go to 2binparis.com and make your choice, everything is quick and easily done from your home. | <urn:uuid:68cd568f-c437-41db-aabb-f5be48d40f85> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.2binparis.com/en/bed-breakfast-chatillon/zone-panth%E9on.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966461 | 272 | 1.671875 | 2 |
Many Ohioans are aware of the interest to expand oil and gas development in the state. Rural Landowners are being approached about leasing their mineral rights for development. Many communities are increasingly concerned that
Appalachia will again be exploited for its natural resources at the expense of the land, people, and long term sustainable economic development. There is an immense amount of pressure on the landowner to sign a lease.
Overview of our work
In January of 2011, The Look before you Lease (LB4UL) group began looking at oil and gas issues facing landowners in Ohio, particularly around newer technologies such as horizontal hydraulic fracturing or “hydrofracking” and private landowner leases. Rural Action, Ohio State University Extension in Athens County, Athens County Farm Bureau, and Appalachia Ohio
Alliance (AOA) are the working organizations of the LB4UL group. All four organizations have a history of working with landowners in Appalachian Ohio.
The name Look Before You Lease is in reference to the very successful Call Before you Cut Program. In 2002, both Rural Action and OSU Extension participated (with several other groups) in the creation and establishment of the Call Before you Cut program, now managed by the Department of Natural Resources Division of Forestry and OSU Extension. Call before you cut has been very successful over the years in educating landowners about their rights and responsibilities, as well as understanding the language of timber sale contracts in such a way that the results meet landowner expectations. The adoption of Call Before You Cut in several Midwestern states is one more indicator of its success. We intend to generate this same level of interest and enthusiasm from landowners through LB4UL.
In August, we completed the first version of our landowner tool kit. We have also secured funding to get an explanatory lease template written that will assist landowners in understanding many provisions needed in newer lease agreements. Our next step will be to organize a series of meetings meetings in Athens County and to recruit and train volunteers who will educate their neighbors about questions to ask if they are approached by a landman. Ultimately, we want landowners to understand the risks, benefits, and responsibilities of entering into an oil and gas lease agreement.
The LB4UL group recognizes that additional shale development in Ohio is likely to play an important role in our states energy portfolio as shale gas now represents 30% of natural gas used in the United States. With this recognition we caution that this development does not happen at the expense of smart and protective policies for the citizens of Ohio. We also caution that
development does not happen at the expense of our most precious natural resource, water. Rural landowners and business owners are very concerned about the potential reduction in quantity and quality of both surface and sub-surface water sources for human and animal (domestic and wild) consumption. Our goal is assist the landowners by to providing enough education, resource, and guidance to make them feel comfortable with their decision. We recognize that each landowner is unique and that our effort is not a substitute for legal counsel.
- Become a trusted resource for landowners in Appalachian Ohio; focused primarily on private landowner property rights and leases.
- The 32 Appalachian counties of Ohio (where educational efforts will be targeted) this is also likely to be where the majority of oil and gas reserves will be found in the Marcellus and Utica formations. We intend to initiate this effort in Athens County and to refine our format and materials prior to organizing a larger regional effort.
- Rural Landowners who want reliable information about oil and gas leases, rights, and other considerations such as conservation values. Our effort will be geared towards landowners who are considering a lease on their property.
- Work with an attorney familiar with Oil and Gas Leases in order to come up with an explanatory lease template that covers side by side explanations of unusual provisions or landowner options for various provisions;
- Assemble an informational toolkit utilizing existing publications from trusted sources;
- Organize and train community volunteers;
- Provide community outreach through volunteers and educational sessions;
- Seek out additional funding for this initiative.
The LB4UL Website
This site is a shared, non-partisan site that resulted from diverse groups talking about their questions and concerns for the new wave of oil and gas exploration coming into Ohio. These groups decided they wanted a place to learn and share more about oil and gas lease options, regulations, policy, science and technology, impacts, and many more issues around this activity.
To that end, what you will find here is a wide range of perspectives, information, and resources. The participating groups come from different backgrounds and have different levels of engagement on this issue.
To the left is a navigation pane that will help you get around the site.
More about us and our work:
Rural Action is a membership-based organization that has worked with communities in Appalachian Ohio to find enduring solutions to social, economic, and ecological problems for 20 years. Our mission is to work for social, environmental, and economic justice in Appalachian Ohio.
The organization takes a comprehensive, integrated approach to rural community development that creates economic opportunities, conserves and restores the environment and strengthens communities. Rural Action’s project areas include Sustainable Agriculture, Forestry, Watershed Restoration, Waste Stream and Recycling, Energy, and Environmental Education.
Our vision is to live in a region of clean streams, healthy forests, thriving family farms, meaningful jobs for everyone, lively towns that remember their history and people working together to make this a reality.
OSU Extension Athens County, Engaging people to strengthen their lives and communities through research-based educational programming.
Appalachia Ohio Alliance (AOA) is a regional land trust that operates in Southeastern Ohio with headquarters in Logan. AOA promotes the conservation of natural areas, farmland, forestland and open space. AOA has been actively helping families protect their lands since 2002. | <urn:uuid:7fafc243-ebf8-4f0d-b039-77b6016b40ac> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://lookbeforeyoulease.org/about/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954283 | 1,201 | 1.804688 | 2 |
President Obama has directed federal agencies to install programs to thwart internal threats, including espionage, violent acts against the government, unauthorized disclosures of classified information and sensitive data stored on government computer networks and systems. (Mandel Ngan / AFP via Getty Images)
The White House on Wednesday issued new minimum standards for agencies to guard against insider security threats such as those that led to the 2010 WikiLeaks breach.
In a memo, President Obama directed agencies to install programs to thwart internal threats, including espionage, violent acts against the government, unauthorized disclosures of classified information and sensitive data stored on government computer networks and systems.
According to the memo, minimum standards for a governmentwide insider threat program should include:
The ability to gather, integrate and centrally analyze and respond to key threat-related information.
The ability to monitor employees’ use of classified networks.
Insider threat awareness workforce training.
Protections of civil liberties and privacy of all personnel.
Obama called for new programs and policies in the wake of the massive public release by WikiLeaks in 2010 of hundreds of thousands of sensitive government cables, reports and other military and diplomatic materials.
At a Washington conference earlier this year, government officials said the maturity of insider threat programs varies across government and agencies would not be expected to implement the standards overnight.
“We are going to have to give agencies a considerable amount of time to implement those standards,” said John Swift III, senior policy adviser to the task force that worked on the draft policy.
Swift said defense contractors and others that have access to classified networks would also likely be expected to adhere to insider threat policies and standards. | <urn:uuid:57836890-8c33-4204-a58b-f61049769fcc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.federaltimes.com/article/20121121/AGENCY04/311210002/White-House-issues-insider-threat-guidance-agencies?odyssey=tab%7Ctopnews%7Cimg%7CIT | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952736 | 331 | 1.742188 | 2 |
See Full Story
Guess what? Your digital music library is not actually a library. It's considered "hoarding." The entertainment cartels have already pirated the word "pirate" to replace "counterfeit" and/or "duplicate" and/or "share." It's so much more PR-friendly -- more emotive and evocative. And it works so well in a sound-bite or a headline. Now the Organized Music family, Sony BMG, Vivendi Universal, Warner Music and EMI, plan to do the same with "collection" and/or "library" when applied to file sharing, and they've chosen the shadowy NPD Group to deliver the message via a "study."
In the '70s I bought my music collection on 8 track tapes, then in the '80s I bought alot of the same music on vinyl, then in the '90s I bought the same music on cds. How many times should I have to buy my music? Shouldn't I be able to listen to my music on any player that I want? Why should I have to repurchase my collection each time a new player format comes along? I think the consumers are fed up. Add to the fact that on alot of cds there may only be couple really good songs. If the record companys would charge a reasonable price for their product people would not take the time or chance of getting caught to pirate music. Talk radio is looking better all the time! | <urn:uuid:aad46c5e-805c-4e6a-b780-c0b609e330f9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ectnews.com/perl/board/mboard.pl/tnwtalkback/thread4228/4228.html | 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 | 0.951905 | 307 | 1.53125 | 2 |
I thought you might be interested in this page about Benjamin Cutbirth:
--Janiejac 15:30, 6 January 2008 (EST)
- Thanks, I'll look into this a bit more. The definition of a "Long Hunter" is fairly specific. There were lots of men hunting westward fairly early on, even before the 1767 date for Benjamin Cutbirth, but that doesn't necessarily make him (or them) one of the "Long Hunters", at least as defined by Hamilton. The Long Hunters were a fairly organized bunch, banding together to hunt in SW VA, Northern TN, and beyond the Cumberland Gap. Possibly Cutbright should be included amongst their number. The page you point to doesn't include any mention of the commonly accepted Long Hunters being on this trip with Benjamin. I have to check with Thwaite on what he has to say about him. On the otherhand, there's probably no point in being overly restrictive in the definition of "Long Hunter". I'm basically following Hamilton in this, but perhaps his definition is too restrictive. Alternatively, perhaps what is needed is a page dealing with ALL of the early hunters and explorers in the Southwest VA. area. I appreciate having you point this out, as at a minimum Cutbright's story is worth presenting---especially since there Documentation for it in the Draper MSC. Thanks again, Bill 19:58, 6 January 2008 (EST)
Found a reference to Long Hunter Michael Stoner (Steiner) here:
"As the other settlers, Patrick Porter, William Cowan, John Cowan and John Snoddy, he settled on Indian land, and many of the land titles were not recorded until after the Revolutionary War. Other early settlers of Castle's Woods were: Joseph Moore, William Moore, John Smith, Nathaniel Gist, David Gass, James Anderson and James Wharton. Among these Scotch-Irish and English was another German, Michael Stoner (original German name, Steiner). Stoner was a long-hunter, an associate of Daniel Boone, and soon moved on to Kentucky."
Can't help but think of you when I run onto something like this. --Janiejac 22:56, 20 May 2009 (EDT)
- thanks again. I appreciate the pointer. Michael Stoner is another one that I need to work on. Frederlick Fraley too, though he's not a LongHunter, he was important in the castle's Woods community in the early years. Q 13:52, 21 May 2009 (EDT) | <urn:uuid:899e8da3-7295-47d4-976c-84c78aac8166> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.werelate.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_Long_Hunters | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967223 | 519 | 1.796875 | 2 |
Every step we take at COCO-MAT is helping us achieve one greater goal: peaceful sleep. Our mission is to help everybody enjoy a good night’s sleep. And to make this possible, simply making the world’s greatest sleep products is not enough. We need to go to bed with a clear conscience too. That’s why we always try, in any way we can, to contribute to society, protect the environment, raise environmental awareness, promote sustainable development (“aeiphoria”), and support personal growth for our employees.
We use our bikes as much as we can. Recycling rates at our factory reach 96%. We actively support non-governmental organizations and charities. We respect the environment, but most of all, we respect each other. We promote equal opportunities among our employees and we embrace people from all sorts of ethnic, cultural or religious backgrounds. We are the proud employers of many people with special skills (that’s our definition of the handicapped).
We always make sure that nothing we do leaves a negative footprint on the environment or society. And we strongly believe that being socially responsible is our constant duty, one we undertake with consistency and modesty. And we try to pass on our ideas and a healthy attitude of responsibility and comradery to everyone we meet.
We pride ourselves on being the makers of the best beds in the world. And we know that together, we can also make a better world. It just takes a little try. | <urn:uuid:d3439308-b2d3-4af6-ab4c-c63f2f047149> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.coco-mat.com/?i=coco_fr.en.csr | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94329 | 307 | 1.585938 | 2 |
Reflections on Open Gym
My son Cody is a senior at the oldest high school here in Colorado Springs. We decided together to start a volleyball club at his school this year, to help grow the boy's high school club program. He is also captaining the varsity lacrosse team again this spring, as an attackman, and by my being head coach, I can fit spring volleyball practice better around the school lacrosse training. In the past he played for his old school district program where he had gone to school for elementary and junior high, before opting into the International Baccalaureate program closer to home. Starting a new team would mean leaving a team which was 3rd in the State Championships last year, but he wants his schoolmates to know the joy that comes from playing this sport so many think is just a girl's game.
The groundwork for Colorado's boys high school club program began over a decade ago, when Paul Hastings almost singlehandedly worked for months to find "advocates" at high schools all over the front range, to work with the Athletic Directors to create an opportunity for boys to play. He got the support of the Colorado Rocky Mountain Region of USA Volleyball, and the Colorado Officials, thanks in large part to Nancy Holm, who continues to this day to provide guidance and support at all levels. Paul lost a long fight to cancer a couple of years ago, but left behind leadership like that provided by Josh Crosier, former Johnson and Wales Head Men's college coach. The whole story on how we in Colorado have been working to get boys volleyball to become a varsity sport can be seen at http://www.cbhsva.org/ and you can contact Jeff Mosher at USA Volleyball, as that is his main staff focus - growing the under-represented population in our sport of the boys and men's game.
One of the biggest errors well intentioned volleyball leaders make is to follow the old maxim of "if you can't pass, you can't hit," along with its sister phrase "the most important skill in volleyball is passing." There is a lot of truth in these sayings, all the way from beginner to the Olympic level, though I am adamant in noting that the most important skill in our sport is "reading" - and I don't mean books. That said, the problem is how we traditionally introduce the game to boys and really everyone at the youth level - by teaching passing first.
When quizzed on this fill in the blank phrase "Coach, when do we get to ___________?" Most coaches know the two "correct" answers are "HIT!" and "PLAY!" One of the most important quotes I put in the original IMPACT manual is that from our 1988 Gold medal men's coach Marv Dunphy, which in condensed form notes that the most important hitting drills are pass-set-hit, and dig-set-hit drills. So all this leads us to listening better to the kids and thus setting aside the oft said "once you can pass, you will get to hit" concept and putting hitting first. Now maybe you are starting to understand why in theIMPACT Plus section, the skill pattern is introduced starting with the spike, and then overhead pass, serve, forearm pass....
This leads us to how to hook boys on volleyball - which hopefully can now more clearly be seen. You say "Hi , I am a volleyball coach, let me show you what a spike looks like, and then let's hit." Then after pounding a couple of real spikes, off of a toss from the setter which you overhead pass back, then get set and crush, you then stop and say - "Now I am going to teach you three Olympic team spike calls - which are done at this line - known as the 3 meter attack line - and those are "A" "Pipe" and "D." "When you watch the 2012 Olympics or our national men and women's teams at any time, these are three standard spike calls we use. So let's have at it" - and you set up, hitting the same direction over the net, with two or even three setters (coaches perhaps at the start), calling for A/Pipe/D.
At the same time, watch their footwork, and if a player finishes "backwards" with a left-right finish, and they are not a lefty, take them aside and get them to finish right-left. Teach the parts each player may show you they need - take a minute to show the arm swing with full reach if they don't know how to swing - but make sure they are erring in technique before fixing their technique. It is more likely to be an error in timing/judgment that is happening, which is not solved by talking more about the technique.
So why back row first always? This goes back to the principle of teaching positive errors first. These aggressive athletes may want to pound down, like you demonstrated at the net originally, but they do not have the body awareness to stay out of the net. More like crash into the net actually. By starting every training with back row attack, you accomplish three important things - safety (by not crashing into the net), positive hitting (learning an over the net arm swing/timing first, not an into/under the net one) and positive setting (putting the first sets off the net for both front and back sets, not tight to the net).
Once you have set a few to role model setting and the skill they are first doing of overhead passing, you then step out and let the athletes to the setting too, by creating a pattern that is foreign, but important to the attacker - that is to hit, land then become the setter. Right now our traditional hitting pattern teaches the spiker to fly after the hit. When done on the net, we are teaching our spikers to not have near -the-net body control and simply fly under to chase their spike. It is one of the top ten most non-gamelike things we unknowingly teach our players - the skill of looking like a chicken pecking for corn. It is a skill I can NEVER do in a game - hit and fly under the net - but a skill we "teach" to our players ad nauseum.
What SHOULD we be teaching? How about the six most common things you must do in a GAME after you strike the ball in the air for a spike. Those are:
1. Land balanced and safely and become a blocker AT the net, since you did not kill it.
2. Land balanced and safely and then JUMP up quickly with no real approach to kill the overpass the digger does to your spike (since they are pepper players and trained to dig back to the spiker)
3. Land balanced and safely and then fly down ALONG the net to be a blocker in a new position, as your coach knows the concept of putting your best hitter against their weakest blocker, while putting your best blocker against their best hitter, and since you did not kill the ball, you need to slide along the net to front their best hitter.
4. Land balanced and safely and then BACK UP as fast as you can in transition away from the net.
5. Land balanced and safely and then turn and lift your arms up to celebrate as you run AWAY from the net towards your teammates as you killed the ball.
6. Land balanced and safely and then lift both hands above your head, brushing one hand on the other as you run ALONG the net towards a referee, using the universal signal for the officiating crew that the blocker touched the ball.
What DO we do right now? Hit and fly under the net, never learning to land like we will always need to in every point in a game we play, learning instead how to ankle sprain and get roofed on tight sets - rather than how to stay off the net and tool/wipe the block when it is tight. The new net touch rule is not the problem, it is how we teach play at the net - setting tight/negatively and hitting down into the net/negatively versus teaching positively first.
One of the funniest things is to force them to generalize early on (a GOOD thing) by having them hit then set then chase. It seems it is human sport nature to hit and chase - as player after player will hit then land in an immediate sprint to their spiked ball. So I will put in a big request here for creating more hitters who can set, and hitters who can hit off of any set, by having the tradition change to spike - set - chase. In time, you will pick setters from the athletes you have, but at the start, everyone needs to learn to set, so have them set after they hit, then retrieve the spiked ball of the teammate they set. I promise, they won't be able to do it at the start. They will hit and get well past the three meter line, often even already running under the net before realizing "Oh, I am supposed to set next..." It is a change well worth making, for boys and girls of all ages.
While I am at it, remember the easier sets to set and hit are lower ones. So set more meter balls to start as these volleyball hopefuls first spike the ball - a pretty easy set to hit as the timing is easier, and an easier ball to set, as you don't put the ball up high out of your set, you simply put it a meter or maybe two meters above the height of the net. The antenna serves as the accuracy marker, as it is exactly a meter above the height of the net. Even little kids can set a meter ball.
So we have had two Open Gyms for Palmer, starting early on Tuesday mornings when there is a late school start due to teacher training. I still say pretty strongly that, having come from an ice hockey background when the HS team I coached would have 11pm and 5 am practice start times, that we can find practice times early in the morning, we just don't think we can - despite what swimmers and skaters do. So just after 7 am the first week, 10 boys showed up. I taught them the 3 meter line attacks as above, then the standard floater serve, and then we played speed ball for the last 45 minutes. Maybe this is modified Open Gym, for there is a coach who is introducing something, but most the time they do all the teaching and learning and I am just listening in.
One player I overheard saying that it was the most fun he had had in any sport in years. They did not want to stop when it was time to take down, but culture has to be taught as well, and they did a great job of sharing the breakdown/clean up of the gym, doing it far faster than I expected. You see, one of the "traditions" we want to teach all our sport's teams to have it to "Leave the place you practice/play BETTER than when you came there." Just another part of my core coaching philosophy of "Developing Amazing Leaders." We all should leave the places we visit cleaner than when we got there, it is good for our sport and our athletes.
The second open gym? Twice as many boys showed up, so that said something. Got the players from the week before to partner up and teach the skills of hitting and serving to the new players. Set up a second net with a rope as we had too many players for one net. Added demo-ing then doing the slide jump serve - as that teaches the importance of torque and a low toss (done to themselves in this closed motor program), and then played more speed ball with larger team size. One of the varsity girls team's players, season now ended joined in. Matt, a frosh roofed her - which gave all the chance to chant "He's a freshman" - one of my favorite school cheers to hear in the gym, as it is a cheer for the future of our sport and the team getting to cheer.
The second practice ended with an event I had never seen in my life in the way a six pack came off an overpass. We were playing in a diamond formation in speed ball - three back row hitters and one setter to the right of center, 2 meters off the net. A overpass happened, yet the novice setter jumped 2 meters back anyways, thinking he could set it I suppose. He could not, so he turned, still in the air, and looked at the ball flying over, which was hit full force by my son Cody, drooling at such a nice gift, even though the ball was a couple of meters off the net. Now, I have seen players get hit in the face while at the net blocking and I have seen players digging down the line, nice and low and ready but whapped in the face. But i have NEVER seen an overpass hit from 2 meters back, strike a player in the face who was up in the air looking at the attacker while also being a couple of meters back.
The ball richocheted off the poor "setter" and flew back over the net, and landed on for a "transition kill" of sorts. Nobody went for the save however, as every player, on and off the court, were on the floor laughing in hysterics. Cody even landed and fell to the floor laughing as hard as he ever has, while also watching the facial dig fly back over to his side. Last nite I took the kids to see Brad Sherwood and Colin Mocherie performing live here at the Pike Peak Center, if you know what I mean....These are two of the most giften improv comedians ever, you may have seen them on "Whose Line is it Anyways." They did the mousetrap game, where 100 loaded traps are on the stage and they walked around barefoot, with blindfolds, speaking to each other in the alphabet game, and trying to avoid the traps. We laughed hard all thru that and the show, but i still think the hardest I ever saw Cody laugh was after that unique six pack he delivered.
I went back to USA Volleyball, got on EBay, and ordered three rope nets for about $25 each. The next practice I bet over 30 students will show up, and since I don't have a key to raise the endline baskets, we are just going to put up the center court, and as the bleachers are back, create courts to either side of the center court, anchoring the whole 3 nets/100 foot net line from one wall to the other. I can put in a long piece of wood into the stair step space in the bleacher wall - and anchor there to tighten the net. It will take less than 5 minutes to set up all three nets I estimate. Might put down a painter's tape 3 meter line for the side courts, if there is not a line to use as the attack line, will see. The program has two players who have ever played the game before last Tuesday's first Open Gym. I will let you know how things go.....
So in closing, Jeff and I have some great material out on how to start school programs, spring leagues for boys and girls, and how a JOV club benefits from adding a boy's program. It's all on the best practices section of the USAV Grassroots button, so check it out. While you are at it, take a look at the Fun Theory Website, and come up with ways to make our game even more fun, and share them below, rather than keep the ideas a secret. Thanks for growing the game and remember to laugh and have fun along the way...
The following comments were made on our previous web platform and have been transferred here to maintain the historical record.
On February 02, 2010 John Kessel wrote
I have done a lot of research on the value of unstructured play. Help with the Institute for Play and other Play groups. The value of "Street Soccer" noted in a previous blog, with no coaches around and just playing to gain what can be called deliberate practice now.... This new SI article shows the value better than most I think...matching with the Wired article on teaching reading and game sense based in part on Wayne Gretzky http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1165306/index.htm For those who have not read the Wired article, and to help you share it with others, here that is... http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/15-06/ff_mindgames Kessel
We very much welcome additional new comments, to be contributed below: | <urn:uuid:9ed8487c-873b-45eb-9e38-9a7d6e114fbb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.teamusa.org/USA-Volleyball/Features/2009/November/09/Reflections-on-Open-Gym.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973716 | 3,465 | 1.671875 | 2 |
On November 5, 1688, Protestant Prince William of Orange answered the call of nobles and churchmen to come and "rescue the nation" from the Catholicism of King James II. Dutch warships sailed unchallenged into English waters. Despite misgivings about King James, Thomas de Chastelain stays true to his oath of loyalty to the monarchy - thereby imperiling himself, his wife Libby and his children Piers and James. Defeated in battle, Thomas eventually has to flee with the rump of the royal party to Scotland, where he lives the life of an outcast. All the while, a noose is tightening around the family he has left behind in England. The temptation to compromise is great, as Thomas' father-in-law Lord St. Clare, who has effortlessly switched sides, never ceases to remind him. But Thomas is made of sterner stuff, and his fateful decision triggers a series of dramatic events. | <urn:uuid:81c00379-0dfe-4da8-8a62-b1b898094a59> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bookcloseouts.com/Store/Details/Civil-Blood/_/R-9781552786703B | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966183 | 193 | 1.734375 | 2 |
The speech by Ms. Grace Fu, Senior Minister of State, Ministry of National Development and Ministry of Education, at the Caring Teacher Awards 2010 on Thursday, 8 April 2010, at the NTU Alumni Club is revealed to have adorned the whole event.
She gave her special regards to Professor Lee Sing Kong, Director, National Institute of Education, Mr Loh Pin Chuan, Manager, Public & Government Affairs, ExxonMobil Asia Pacific, Dr Nick Aplin, Chairman of the Caring Teacher Awards Organising Committee, and other colleagues and students.
The event highlighted the education landscape for the past years. In addition, she outlined the measures that were undertaken to introduce greater diversity and flexibility into the system aimed to enable them to progress according to their individual abilities.
MOE recently uncovered a new framework aimed to enhance the development of 21st century competencies in students.
These competencies were posted to underpin the holistic education scenario that the schools will facilitate in order to better enable young to survive in today's fast-changing and highly connected world of tomorrow.
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- David Cameron Blamed for ‘Scaremongering’ Over Health Tourism | <urn:uuid:78716b44-d642-47fe-a803-6296dc6ce251> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://topnews.co.uk/23380-singapore-sheds-light-role-teachers-21st-century | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.932063 | 297 | 1.789063 | 2 |
– E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born
Posts Tagged ‘Quote’
– E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born
I’m writing to you today out of sentimental necessity — I have an anguished, painful need to speak to you. It’s easy to see that I have nothing to tell you. Just this: that I find myself today at the bottom of a bottomless depression. The absurdity of the sentence speaks for me.
I’m having one of those days in which I never had a future. There is only a present, fixed and surrounded by a wall of anguish. The other bank of the river, because it is the other bank, is never the bank we are standing on: that is the intimate reason for all my suffering. There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful; nor is there any port of call where it is possible to forget. All of this happened a long time ago, but my sadness began even before then.
On days of the soul like today, I feel, with all the awareness in my body, that I am a sad child abused by life. I was abandoned in a corner where I could hear other children playing. I feel in my hands the broken toy I was given out of malicious irony. Today, March 14, at 9:10 P.M., my life knows just how much all that is worth.
In the garden I can just make out through the silent windows of my cell, someone has thrown all the swings over the branches they hang from; they’re tangled up, high and out of reach; the result is even the idea I have in my imagination of myself running away cannot have swings to play with.
And that is, more or less, but without style, the state of my soul at this time. Like the woman who waits in “The Sailor,” my eyes burn from having thought about weeping. Life pains me bit by bit, in sips, through interstices. All this is printed in very small type in a book whose binding is already coming apart.
If I weren’t writing to you, I would have to swear to you that this letter is sincere and that the hysterically linked things in it spring spontaneously from what I feel. But you must sense that this unstageable tragedy is of a rigorous reality — full of the here and now — and taking place in my soul just like the green on the leaves.
It was for that reason the Prince did not rule. This sentence is entirely absurd. But in this moment I feel it’s the absurd sentences that really make me want to cry.
If I don’t mail this letter today, it may be that when I reread it tomorrow, I’ll make a typescript of it, so I can insert sentences and expressions from it into The Book of Disquiet. But that would not deprive it of any of the sincerity with which I’m writing it, nor the dolorous inevitability with which I feel it.
This is the latest news. So is our being at war with Germany, but even before that, pain made me suffer. From the other side of Life, all this must seem like the caption for some caricature.
This is not exactly madness, but madness must bestow a relaxation on the person who suffers it, the astute pleasure of the soul’s bounces, not very different from these.
What color can feeling be?
Thousands of hugs from yours truly, always truly yours,
P.S.- I wrote this letter in one rush. Rereading it, I see that I will definitely copy it over tomorrow before sending it to you. I have rarely written out my state of mind — with all its sentimental and intellectual attitudes, with all its essential hysterico-neurasthenia, all those interstices and corners in its self-awareness that are so characteristic of it — so completely…
You think I’m right, don’t you?
Mário de Sá-Carneiro, a major Portuguese avant-garde poet who collaborated with Fernando Pessoa on numerous occasions, committed suicide in Paris in 1916, at the age of twenty-six. [editor's note]
I know from my own experience that telepathy is a fact. I have no interest in proving telepathy or anything to anybody. I do want usable knowledge of telepathy. What I look for in any relationship is contact on the nonverbal level of intuition and feeling, that is, telepathic contact.
– William Burroughs, Junky
I lay on the narrow wood bench, twisting from one side to the other. My body was raw, twitching, tumescent, the junk-frozen flesh in agonizing thaw. I turned over on my stomach and one leg slipped off the bench. I pitched forward and the rounded edge of the bench, polished smooth by the friction of cloth, slid along my crotch. There was a sudden rush of blood to my genitals at the slippery contact. Sparks exploded behind my eyes; my legs twitched — the orgasm of a hanged man when the neck snaps.
– William Burroughs, Junky
In the French Quarter there are several queer bars that are so full every night the fags spill out on to the sidewalk. A room full of fags gives me the horrors. They jerk around like puppets on invisible strings, galvanized into hideous activity that is the negation of everything living and spontaneous. The live human being has moved out of these bodies long ago. But something moved in when the original tenant moved out. Fags are ventriloquists’ dummies who have moved in and taken over the ventriloquist. The dummy sits in a queer bar nursing his beer, and uncontrollably yapping out of a rigid doll face.
Occasionally, you find intact personalities in a queer bar, but fags set the tone of these joints, and it always brings me down to go into a queer bar. The bring-down piles up. After my first week in a town I have had about all I can take of these joints, so my bar business goes somewhere else, generally to a bar in or near Skid Row.
But I backslide now and then. One night, I got lobotomized drunk in Frank’s and went to a queer bar. I must have had more drinks in the queer joint, because there was a lapse of time. It was getting light outside when the bar hit one of those sudden pockets of quiet. Quiet is something that does not often happen in a queer joint. I guess most of the fags had left. I was leaning against the bar with a beer I didn’t want in front of me. The noise cleared like smoke and I saw a red-haired kid was looking straight at me and standing about three feet away.
He didn’t come on faggish, so I said, “How you making it?” or something like that.
He said: “Do you want to go to bed with me?”
I said, “O.K. Let’s go.”
As we walked out, he grabbed my bottle of beer off the bar and stuck it under his coat. Outside, it was daylight with the sun just coming up. We staggered through the French Quarter passing the beer bottle back and forth. He was leading the way in the direction of his hotel, so he said. I could feel my stomach knot up like I was about to take a shot after being off the junk a long time. I should have been more alert, of course, but I never could mix vigilance and sex. All this time he was talking in a sexy Southern voice which was not a New Orleans voice, and in the daylight he still looked good.
[From William Burroughs' Junky]
It may be, indeed, that the differences between us lie not so much in the nature of our respective experiences as in our fashion of describing them.
– A. J. Ayer, from Philosophical Essays
We should realize that we have abandoned not only the ordinary notion of a language, but we have erased the boundary between knowing a language and knowing our way around the world generally. For there are no rules for arriving at passing theories that work. . . . There is no more chance of regularizing, or teaching, this process than there is of regularizing or teaching the process of creating new theories to cope with new data — for that is what this process involves.
There is no such thing as language, not if a language is anything like what philosophers, at least, have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned or mastered. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language users master and then apply to cases . . . We should give up the attempt to illuminate how we communicate by appeal to conventions.
– Donald Davidson, from “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs”
A young man has hoped for a happy or useful or glorious life. If the man he has become looks upon these miscarried attempts of his adolescence with disillusioned indifference, there they are, forever frozen in the dead past. When an effort fails, one declares bitterly that he has lost time and wasted his powers. The failure condemns that whole part of ourselves which we had engaged in the effort. It was to escape this dilemma that the Stoics preached indifference. We could indeed assert our freedom against all constraint if we agreed to renounce the particularity of our projects. If a door refuses to open, let us accept not opening it and there we are free. But by doing that one manages only to save an abstract notion of freedom. It is emptied of all content and all truth. The power of man ceases to be limited because it is annulled. It is the particularity of the project which determines the limitation of the power, but it is also what gives the project its content and permits it to be set up. There are people who are filled with such horror at the idea of a defeat that they keep themselves from ever doing anything. But no one would dream of considering this gloomy passivity as the triumph of freedom.
– Simone de Beauvoir, from The Ethics of Ambiguity
Brevity is a great virtue [. . .] yet it may be overestimated. The reader’s mind must be permitted to eddy around the subject. . . . [Yes, brevity is a virtue,] but we must not make a fetish of it. . . . Must one never say great big dog because great equals big? Nay, it is a mark of man’s overflowing vitality and sheer joy in emphasis to say great big dog.
– Edwin Herbert Lewis
[Courtesy of The Boston Globe]
And as so often, he set out to follow him.
– Thomas Mann, Death in Venice [translated by David Luke]
Referring to the end of Latin civilization, I represented artistic culture as a type of secretion welling up within a people, at first indicating a plethora, an abundance of health, but later congealing, solidifying, forming a hard membrane preventing direct contact between spirit and nature, creating an appearance of vitality which disguises the decline of life within, like a casing in which the spirit languishes, wilts and finally dies. Pushing these thoughts to their natural conclusion, I made the assertion that Culture, which is born of life, ends up killing it.
Historians accused me of overgeneralization. Others criticized my methods. And those who complemented me were the ones who had understood me the least.
– André Gide, The Immoralist
Blood pools in the temples; reddened rocks
soaked in slaughter. Age is no help:
no shame in hastening an old man’s dying day
nor in cutting off a babe on the brink of life.
For what crime could these young deserve death?
Now, it is enough just to die. Bloodlust carries them away:
a man shows himself weak if he inquires about guilt.
Many die to stack the numbers; a bloody winner
snatches a head severed from unknown neck, ashamed
to walk empty handed. . . .
– Lucan (2.103-13), translated by Braund and Hooley
It was a fine day, I felt well rested, not at all weak. I was happy, or rather in high spirits. The air was calm and warm, but I took my shawl anyway, so that I might ask someone to carry it and thereby strike up a new acquaintance. I have mentioned that the park adjoins our terrace, so I got there in no time. I walked into its shade with a sense of rapture. The air was luminous. The cassias, which flower long before they come into leaf, gave off a sweet scent — or perhaps it emanated from everywhere, that light, unfamiliar smell which seemed to enter into me by all my senses and filled me with a feeling of exaltation. I was breathing more easily, walking with a lighter step. I did have to sit down on the first bench, but I was more intoxicated, more dazzled than tired. I looked around. The shadows were light and fleeting; they didn’t fall on the ground, they barely skimmed it. O light! I listened. What could I hear? Nothing, everything; every sound amused me. I remember a shrub whose bark, from a distance, seemed to have such a strange texture that I had to get up to go over and feel it. My touch was a caress, it filled me with rapture. I remember . . . was this finally the morning when I was to be reborn?
I had forgotten I was alone; I sat there, waiting for nothing, oblivious of the time. Until that day, it seemed to me, I had felt so little and thought so much, and I was astonished to find that my sensations were becoming as strong as my thoughts. I say ‘it seemed to me’, for from the depths of my early childhood the glimmer of a myriad lost sensations was re-emerging. With my new-found awareness of my own senses I was able to recognize them, albeit tentatively. Yes, as my senses awoke, they rediscovered a whole history, reconstructed a whole past life. They were alive! Alive! They had never ceased to live but throughout my years of study had led a secret, latent existence.
I met no one that day, and I was glad of it. I took out of my pocket a small edition of Homer which I hadn’t opened since I had left Marseille, reread three lines of the Odyssey, learned them by heart, then, finding enough to nourish me in their rhythm, savoured them at my leisure. I shut the book and sat there trembling, more alive than I thought possible, my spirit drowsy with happiness . . .
– André Gide, The Immoralist
I came back, bent over, found the clot, picked it up with a piece of straw and placed it in my handkerchief. I looked at it. It was a nasty dark colour, almost black, sticky and horrible . . . I thought of Bachir’s beautiful, glistening blood . . . And suddenly I felt a wish, a desire, more pressing and imperious than anything I had ever felt before, to live! I want to live. I want to live. I clenched my teeth, my fists, concentrated my whole being into this wild, desperate drive towards existence.
– André Gide, The Immoralist | <urn:uuid:0b73ed18-9689-403c-854f-d51c64a27983> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thefloatinglibrary.com/tag/quote/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973014 | 3,294 | 1.585938 | 2 |
The Defence Force has rejected claims SAS troops have been sent to Afghanistan to carry out a revenge attack over the deaths of five New Zealand soldiers in August.
The response follows a report by Radio New Zealand's Afghanistan correspondent Jon Stephenson that a group of SAS soldiers had gone to the country to carry out a retaliation attack.
Mr Stephenson said sources from within the US-led coalition in Afghanistan and the New Zealand SAS community had confirmed the attack.
"I've been told that the mission of these troops is not to gather intelligence but to help carry out the strikes or the raids on those insurgents that killed the PRT soldiers in August,'' Mr Stephenson is reported saying.
The Defence Force, Prime Minister and Defence Minster rejected the claim.
"As announced in September by this year the Prime Minister a small number of NZ SAS personnel have been sent to Kabul to help gather intelligence on the insurgents in the Bamiyan region but are not in a combat role,'' said a Defence Force statement.
John Key flatly denied the claim, saying there were no more than "four or so'' SAS personnel in Afghanistan and they were providing non-combat support for other countries' troops.
He said there was no evidence the group had engaged in combat.
"If the chief of Defence Force decided he wanted a change of heart and put them into a combat-orientated role then he would have to get a mandate from the Government and no mandate's's been sought.''
"I think that they're doing exactly what we sent them to do, which is to help with logistics and planning,'' he said.
Mr Key said the Government had been as transparent as it could be about the SAS's involvement in Afghanistan.
Defence Minister Jonathan Coleman echoed Mr Key's comments.
"No group has been deployed to Afghanistan for a combat mission, so what the Prime Minster says is correct,'' said a spokesman for Dr Coleman.
According to the RNZ report, Mr Stephenson said the troops would be in addition to the ones Mr Key said had been sent to gather intelligence.
He said he had been told they would be playing an "active part in the hunt'' for the insurgents responsible for the deaths of Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) members Lance Corporal Jacinda Baker, Private Richard Harris, Corporal Luke Tamatea, and Lance Corporals Rory Malone and Pralli Durrer in two separate incidents.
New Zealand's SAS force of about 70 personnel was withdrawn earlier this year.
- APNZBy Matthew Theunissen Email Matthew, Abby Gillies Email Abby | <urn:uuid:eecb3594-56a7-4545-8ad9-cbc64565483f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10844145 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973226 | 521 | 1.507813 | 2 |
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THERE is agreement – from the president and his cabinet, analysts and politicians to labour federation Cosatu – that youth unemployment is SA’s ticking time bomb of discontent. But there’s no agreement on what to do about it.
This week’s bloody street battles over the youth wage subsidy in Braamfontein, Joburg, represent a clash of power blocs within the tripartite alliance and the opportunistic mission of the DA to broaden its appeal among black voters.
Amid the bricks and blood, corporate SA remained silent. The business sector sits on a reported R520 billion in its bank accounts, rather than investing this money in the domestic economy, skills or employment creation.
And instead of leading the public debate on what is, in fact, its own policy, the government has conceded ground to labour and the opposition. In a recent parliamentary reply President Jacob Zuma insisted the youth wage subsidy would be implemented – once discussions at the National Economic Development and Labour Council (Nedlac) had been finalised and drafted into a final policy proposal for cabinet.
But Nedlac, which brings together labour, the government, business and civil society, has been sitting on the subsidy proposals for a year. The pilot project’s proposed starting date of April 1 has gone by, and discussions continue.
Announced in the president’s 2010 State of the Nation address, the subsidy was allocated R5bn in Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan’s 2011 Budget speech, when he also gave more details of the plan.
It would be a tax credit scheme granted for a maximum of two years, available for those aged between 18 and 29, earning below the income tax level of R60 000 a year.
While the National Treasury estimated 423 000 jobs could be created, it has conceded that tens of thousands of these jobs would open up anyway. The number of jobs created directly through the subsidy would be closer to 178 000, each at a cost of between R28 000 and R37 000.
Cosatu, at Nedlac and elsewhere, has argued the subsidy would lead to the displacement of older workers as businesses keen to save money would take on the subsidised younger workers in their place. Rather than a silver bullet solution, it has called for a fundamental policy shift involving a return to basics to open up the economy through, for example, the infrastructure and community work programmes and the development of industrial zones.
It also urges improvements in the education system, which churns out about 400 000 matriculants annually, with no prospect of further education or employment.
While the two-million-strong labour federation seems to have the government dancing to its tune, its argument is not only protecting its members’ interests, but also those of taxpayers, who would have to fork out for the subsidy for jobs which may have been created anyway.
This comes hot on the heels of Cosatu’s successful campaign to halt the Gauteng e-tolls, which the ANC agreed to put on hold for a month, before a court ruling put a stop to the project anyway.
The cabinet announced on Thursday it would appeal against the interim interdict granted by the North Gauteng High Court pending a court review of the system.
While Cosatu continues to battle for a ban on labour brokers – another policy it says the government has adopted an opposition approach on – it made a significant breakthrough in getting the government to drop several controversial labour law amendments which would have curtailed the right to strike and protest. In so doing, it has shown the government that it is out of step with popular sentiment.
Cosatu has pushed pro-worker and pro-poor policies, but has clashed with the government over economic policies.
This week, Cosatu boss Zwelinzima Vavi called for a return to basics on the policy front, warning the government it was scoring own goals which gave the DA the opportunity to capitalise.
Cosatu spokesman Patrick Craven dismissed concerns the labour federation was acting like a shadow government.
“It’s persuasion. We are trying to convince our alliance partners… We are not elected, but we are a democratic structure. When we speak, we speak for a constituency which in fact is bigger than two million (members), as each member has family members.”
Shortly after Tuesday’s street battles, which spawned front-page pictures of bloodied DA supporters, the party moved to make political hay. On Thursday it announced its plans for mass mobilisation to ensure the subsidy would be implemented. Earlier, DA leader Helen Zille said the youth wage subsidy, a version of which is being implemented by the Western Cape government she heads, was working to get young people into jobs.
The party’s special website, www.youthwagesubsidynow.org, which was launched late last year, makes the point that more than 300 000 young people could have had jobs by now if the subsidy had been implemented.
DA finance spokesman Tim Harris described the subsidy as a “smart” state intervention in the labour market, saying more than 11 000 jobs could be created every month.However, previous government initiatives to boost employment and training through tax and subsidy incentives have had mixed results. For example, the Sectoral Education and Training Authorities (Setas) have been heavily criticised for, among others, sitting on R38bn in bank accounts, while they spent R34bn on training initiatives.
Economist Mike Schussler says the youth wage subsidy is worth a try. It has worked, to different degrees, in other countries. “To make this a political thing is wrong … At the end of the day, should we not try something different?” he asked, adding that almost as many people were unemployed as were in jobs.
Another economist, Dawie Roodt said Cosatu and the DA got it both wrong and right. Cosatu was right in pointing out young workers would replace experienced ones; the DA had it right that the youth wage subsidy would enable youngsters to get experience, thus overcoming a significant obstacle to employment.
But a youth wage subsidy would not fundamentally address SA’s economic challenges, Roodt said.
His suggestion: reduce minimum wages and ease labour regulations so that wages find a lower average, which would be cheaper for the taxpayer than a youth wage subsidy.
Cosatu has fought tooth and nail against a relaxation of the labour laws, arguing workers would be further disadvantaged. It cites statistics to back this up. According to the UN Development Programme, 44 percent of workers live on less than R10 a day and, according to Statistics SA, about 60 percent of workers earn R3 000 or less a month.
“On average, an African man earns in the region of R2 400 a month, while on average a white man earns around R19 000 a month,” Cosatu said in its counter-memorandum to the official opposition this week.
“But the DA will not march against this pathetic situation… The youth wage subsidy will worsen this situation by getting young workers to earn below the already pathetic levels.”
The DA has identified Cosatu as the obstacle to dealing with youth unemployment to score political points. However, since it is the government that makes and implements policies – it is not obliged to await the finalisation of Nedlac discussions – a march to the Union Buildings would have been more appropriate.
The youth wage subsidy goes to the heart of how the government, business, labour, civil society and politicians of all persuasions see themselves contributing to transform one of the world’s most unequal societies. But it has been turned into a political football.
The losers? The three million young people aged 18 to 34, or almost three out of every four, who remain unemployed. | <urn:uuid:eeb42ecb-fd29-4e47-bb77-eb39fdd65a05> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.iol.co.za/saturday-star/youth-unemployment-should-not-become-a-political-football-1.1302237 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965707 | 1,623 | 1.585938 | 2 |
by Jane Brody
New York Times
January 17, 2011
The specter of “death panels” was raised yet again this month, prompting the Obama administration to give in to political pressure a second time in its effort to encourage end-of-life planning.
Of course, the goal of this effort was not to make it easier to “pull the plug on grandma” in order to save the government’s money, as some opponents would have it. The regulation in question, which was withdrawn just days after it took effect on Jan. 1, simply listed “advance care planning” as one of the services that could be offered in the “annual wellness visit” for Medicare beneficiaries.
The widespread misconceptions about the regulation were exemplified in a letter to the editor published Dec. 29 in The New York Times. “Death panels,” the writer said, would have denied her 93-year-old mother colon cancer surgery that has given her the chance to live “several more years.”
But that is not at all what the regulation would have done. Instead, “by providing Medicare coverage for end-of-life planning with a physician, it would have encouraged doctors to talk to their patients about their wishes and made it far easier and more likely for these important conversations to take place,” said Barbara Coombs Lee, president of Compassion & Choices, an organization that helps people negotiate end-of-life problems.
With payment schedules that limit doctor visits to a mere 15 minutes or so, it is unreasonable to expect physicians to spend 30 or more unreimbursed minutes discussing with patients the many decisions that can arise at the end of life.
Encouraging such conversations might indeed save money in the long run. Doctors and hospitals are paid only for treating living patients, so there is always a possibility that financial incentives, conscious or unconscious, would prompt many expensive if futile life-extending measures — efforts that many patients would veto if they could.
In a study of patients with advanced cancer published in March 2009 in Archives of Internal Medicine, the costs of care during the last week of life were 55 percent higher among those who did not have end-of-life discussions with their doctors.
At least as important, the quality of life in their final days was much worse than among those who did have such discussions. Countless studies have shown that extensive medical interventions can make the last weeks of life an excruciating experience for patients and those who care about them.
An Individual Decision
Although talk about end-of-life options has often emphasized avoiding unwanted, intrusive and futile care, that does not mean everyone would or should make that choice. Many patients, especially younger ones, might be inclined to ask that every conceivable measure be taken.
Dr. Josh Steinberg, a primary care physician in Johnson City, N.Y., routinely discusses end-of-life desires with very ill patients. He told me about an AIDS patient who was down to 77 pounds and had no strength, no appetite and failing kidneys. But the man refused hospice care, saying he wanted to go home and live as well as possible for as long as possible.
“Though we didn’t think he’d last more than a day or two, we got lucky,” Dr. Steinberg said. “We stumbled on a new treatment, he rallied, and he’s home doing well right now.”
For other patients, hospice care is the right decision. Studies have found that terminally ill patients are likely to live longer, with a better quality of life, when they choose hospice over aggressive treatment to the bitter end.
The point is that end-of-life care is an individual decision that should be thoroughly discussed with one’s family and physicians. Studies have shown that when doctors don’t know a patient’s wishes, they are inclined to use every possible procedure and medication to try to postpone the inevitable. More often than not, this shortens patients’ lives and prolongs bereavement for the survivors.
In an interview on the syndicated news program “Democracy Now!” on Jan. 5, the writer and surgeon Dr. Atul Gawande said that patients with terminal cancer who discuss end-of-life choices with their doctors “are less likely to die in the intensive care unit, more likely to have a better quality of life and less suffering at the end, do not have a shorter length of life, and six months later their family members are markedly less likely to be depressed.”
Plan While You Still Can
For many more of us these days, the end does not come swiftly via a heart attack or fatal accident, but rather after weeks, months or years battling a chronic illness like cancer, congestive heart failure, emphysema or Alzheimer’s disease. When doctors do not know how you’d want to be treated if your heart stopped, or you were unable to breathe or eat and could not speak for yourself, they are likely (some would say obliged) to do everything in their power to try to keep you alive.
A year ago, my husband was given a diagnosis of Stage 4 cancer. As his designated health care proxy, I had agreed long before he became ill to abide by the instructions in his living will. If he was terminally ill and could not speak for himself, he wanted no extraordinary measures taken to try to keep him alive longer than nature intended.
Knowing this helped me and my family avoid agonizing decisions and discord. We were able to say meaningful goodbyes and spare him unnecessary physical and emotional distress in his final weeks of life.
Preparing these advance directives should not wait until someone develops a potentially fatal disease. Patients in the throes of terminal illness may resist discussions suggesting that death may be imminent, and close family members may be reluctant to imply as much.
Indeed, judging from national studies and people I know (including a 90-year-old aunt), most Americans regardless of age seem reluctant to contemplate the certainty that one day their lives will end, let alone discuss how they’d want to be treated when the end is near.
A study published in January 2009 in The Journal of the American Geriatric Society showed that 40 percent of people questioned had not yet thought about advanced-care planning and 90 percent hadn’t documented their wishes for end-of-life care.
Ideally, everybody over 18 should execute a living will and select a health care proxy — someone to represent you in medical matters.
Compassion & Choices has an excellent free guide and “tool kit” to help people prepare advanced directives. They can be downloaded from the organization’s Web site, www.compassionandchoices.org (select the “care” tab, then “planning for the future”) or call (800) 247-7421 for a free hard copy of the documents. | <urn:uuid:cdd3d0b2-ba0e-4186-89a9-232df8bb16d7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.compassionandchoices.org/tag/advance-care-planning/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969642 | 1,448 | 1.617188 | 2 |
By Trevor Andersen
By Cafe Society
By Patricia Calhoun
By Cafe Society
By Gretchen Kurtz
By Lori Midson
By Jenn Wohletz
100 Favorite Dishes
By Lori Midson
The first step in dealing with an addiction to Thai food is admitting that you have a problem. The second is accepting that there are no more steps -- because who can contemplate a cure that bans curry?Chile peppers can be physically addicting, according to recent medical evidence. The reasons involve a lot of the same things that make drugs, sex and pork rinds such an issue in people's lives: It's all about endorphins. Eating a chile puts capsaicin (pronounced kap-SAY-ih-sin), the stuff that makes chiles hot, up against your pain-sensor nerves, and that in turn triggers the brain to release endorphins, those fabulous natural painkillers, which creates a sense of well-being. Since a sense of well-being isn't easily attained these days, it's not surprising that a subculture of chile addicts, known as chileheads, has formed around these vicious veggies. But the chile is bound for more glory than that, since research is now being done regarding its efficacy as a pain reliever -- work that's being thoroughly exploited by natural-remedies fanatics. (One recipe for chile candy is supposed to soothe chemotherapy mouth sores.) Still, enough of a correlation has been found between capsaicin and pain that the serious scientific community will get years and years of research funding.
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That link could be corroborated by any diner who's ever made a box of Kleenex an impromptu centerpiece at a Thai restaurant. Just one bite of Thai curry is enough to remind you that chile is a big part of the cooking from this Southeast Asian country. But as hot as those curries can be, they weren't always a part of Thai cuisine. The chile was brought to Thailand in the sixteenth century by Portuguese traders; before that, Thai foods were flavored primarily with lemongrass, tamarind, ginger and garlic, with the hottest spicing coming from black pepper. But Thai cooks quickly made up for lost time, incorporating chile as a prominent part of many dishes, especially the curries -- spices mashed into a paste with garlic, peppercorns and ginger. They often did so using a technique they'd picked up from India -- in particular, southern India -- which uses coconut milk to cool a curry's heat.
Coconut milk isn't the juice from a coconut at all, but rather the liquid left over after you've soaked grated coconut in scalded milk or hot water. And while water does nothing to put out chile's fire -- you can't fight the fire in your mouth with water, because it simply spreads the chile molecules around -- any dairy product contains casein, a protein that breaks the bond between the pain receptors and capsaicin.
So you might want to bring a gallon of cow juice along for a meal at Thai Bistro, a six-month-old eatery that took over the spot in a busy Lakewood strip mall that was once home to Rocco's, an unlikely Thai/Italian combo. New owners Lek and Noi Phromthong, brothers from Thailand, don't speak much English -- but they sure know how to wok the talk. They've removed Rocco's excess of plastic plants and put some nice art on the walls; the result is a charming, casual spot for ingesting large amounts of capsaicin in peace and quiet. Like most Thai eateries in the States, Thai Bistro offers all of its dishes done mild, medium, hot or extra hot; it's this last designation that most closely resembles true Thai cooking. In this case, it's cooking from the southern part of Thailand, which also carries the flavors of Malaysia and India. So the curries here are heavily, and deliciously, sweetened with coconut milk, and the spices involve plenty of fenugreek leaves -- one of the primary smells emanating from curry --and cardamom.
The brothers use a lot of fresh ingredients, too. The plates bearing our spring rolls ($1.50 each) and shrimp rolls ($1.50 each) came decorated with freshly grated red and green cabbage and large sprigs of parsley. Even without the benefit of chile peppers, both versions of the rolls were addictive -- oily packages filled with cellophane noodles and teeny bits of cucumber and carrot, with wrappers so crisply fried they crumbled like delicate phyllo as we bit into them. But that just gave us more tidbits to dunk into the homemade plum sauce, a combination of nam pla(fish sauce) and palm sugar. For the steamed dumplings ($2.50), that sauce was made even more appealing, with just enough chile flakes added for oomph without obliterating the delicate flavors of the ground chicken, onion and garlic that filled the dumplings. While another appetizer, the deep-fried tofu ($2.50), didn't come with a sauce per se, it did have a juicy side salad of cucumbers, nam pla, chopped peanuts and shredded carrot.
Thai Bistro really poured on the heat for its entrees. We had ordered our panang curry ($10.95) extra hot, and with chicken. (On any entree dish, you get to choose between beef, pork, chicken or tofu at the same price, or shrimp, calamari or scallops for another $2.) In return, we received an enormous helping of super-tender chicken that had been wok-tossed with green and red bell peppers and fresh basil, with everything held together by a thick, rich concoction of fennel, coriander, lemongrass, galangal (a ginger-like root with its own distinct, savory-sweet flavor) thinned slightly with coconut milk. We chose beef for the stir-fried Thai spice dish ($8.95); the result was another huge portion of soft beef strips mixed with bamboo shoots, basil and a coconut-based curry paste to which extra chiles had been added. We also sweated through a red jungle curry ($8.95) and green curry ($8.95) that were excellent examples of these Thai specialties. The red jungle version had a sour note, courtesy of the lime leaves that balanced out the galangal; the green benefited not just from lime leaves, but also lots of garlic.
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BUFFALO wrote:This is is one of my biggest bitches about philosophy. Think about something for long enough and you can convince yourself (reasonable and logically) of anything. But you'll still have to get up later tonight and have a shit; that's the real world (very Zen). It's ridiculous because it is ridiculous - you and I both know beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is an external world and other minds, and even if you deny it, you still live as if there is, don't you? You have to (unless you are in an asylum right now). No matter what else your imagination might conjure up (God or gods or a sentient universe) you can't escape the reality of every-day existence.
Do you pay attention to what was just said? Descartes pointed out exactly what your position is. I will post it again and break it down some for you, because you already imply that you live in a virtual world or whatever.
Descartes:Just as a prisoner, who was perhaps enjoying an imaginary freedom in his dreams, when he then begins to suspect that he is asleep is afraid of being woken up, and lets himself sink back into his soothing illusions; so I of my own accord slip back into my former opinions, and am scared to awake, for fear that tranquil sleep will give way to laborious hours of waking, which from now on I shall have to spend not in any kind of light, but in the unrelenting darkness of the difficulties just stirred up.”
And I do not know about you, but I am not as trusting as person, especially when it has been found to be false. Once found to be false, you already have shown that it is possible and it can happen again once you know it already happened once. I do not know beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is an external world or other minds. All my experiences are perfectly consistent with either position, so you still "live and act" in both of them. You are just living and acting in different worlds. No difference in actions, just differences in the world. And your talk of as if shows a fictional account. All you have done is brought forth that you believe in a fiction because it works in the "live and act". You have already provided an account of your belief in something false, which is that you have no rational grounds for it either based on logic or experience. Your arguments just come down to hand waving, and every-day experience exists whether others exist or not. Go through your life and act as if other people had thoughts and emotions, and there would be no difference in action but a big difference in the way the world actually is. | <urn:uuid:022a0b8f-973f-4478-a7e4-f60e58f9f81d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?p=2301564 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974645 | 555 | 1.515625 | 2 |
On an internet parenting forum recently there has been a debate about buying Made in China and of course, I had to wade in! I thought I’d share some of my thoughts here.
Since I did Crunchy Chicken’s Buy Nothing Challenge in April, I have avoided buying Made in China (and other similar countries in terms of manufacturing) unless I really can't find an alternative - which is fortunately rare.
Following the challenge, I decided to always try to buy second hand as my first choice , made in NZ as second choice and then fair trade/organic/made in a first world country if I can't do the other two. Children's shoes have been my latest stumbling block - even at the flash stores in town I could only find made in China - every pair!
My reasons for avoiding Made in China are hardly unusual - environmentally poor manufacturing processes, human rights abuses in Tibet and in their own country, appalling labour conditions, concerns about slavery, poor quality control and regulations. I don't believe the 'cheap cheaper cheapest' economy is sustainable for anyone, not for the Chinese people, not for the planet, and not for us.
The argument that I hear a lot is 'isn't it better for them to at least have jobs– if we didn’t buy their cheap goods they wouldn’t eat’I honestly think that its a bit like when people used to say that slavery was OK because otherwise these people would be on the streets, starving etc, so wasn't it better for slaves to be fed and sheltered! I think the economic model the Chinese have created, - which is 'cheap, cheaper, cheapest' is fundamentally unsustainable, for the planet and for their people.
If items were certified fair trade from China, then I would buy them despite China's human rights record - because fair trade programmes are directly helping the people. Even quality goods made in China, unless the factories have fair trade or similar certification, are made by little better than slave labour. So I won't buy them. I won't take advantage of workers that have no real choice, I won't create demand for dirt cheap labour, and I won't support these economic models.
It is really tough to do this - its not like we have money to burn. I do the second hand thing a lot - and of course, some of what I buy second hand was originally made in China. I feel that by creating a market for second hand things is more ethical than creating a market for slave labour. But it is really hard to find things that aren’t made in China – and if you can find alternatives, they are extremely pricey when we are used to buying 10 pairs of socks for $10.So its not something we can do easily.
But I have hope – even my mother in law who is particularly unconcerned by such matters won’t buy food products from China because of the poor regulations there.
Raw Cauliflower Salad
2 years ago | <urn:uuid:e4861a9c-f678-441f-9b92-8898f08dd5b1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://domesticallyblissed.blogspot.com/2008/05/why-not-made-in-china.html | 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 | 0.979033 | 613 | 1.789063 | 2 |
Call me a cynic, but for me, the prototype of all of the “fact-checking” columns in today’s mainstream media was in this piece here:
With the world breathing a collective sigh of relief following the violence-free passage into the year 2000, an international coalition of terrorists issued a reminder Monday that the new millennium does not actually begin until Jan. 1, 2001. “Technically speaking, we are now in the last year of the 20th century,” said Mahmoud al-Habib, a spokesperson for the terrorist organization Hamas. “Since there was no year zero, next New Year’s Eve is the real time to detonate bombs in Times Square and blow commercial airliners out of the sky.” Speaking from a secret bunker in the Kashmir hills, Osama bin Laden agreed. “We were all set to blow up the Eiffel Tower,” bin Laden said, “when one of my suicide bombers pointed out that it should actually be done next Jan. 1, not this one. I suppose we’ll just have to wait.”
Why, of course it’s the Onion. But it spells out the model for so many “fact-checkers” in the industry; a relentless focus on the finding “gotchas”.
The piece spells out a key pitfall in the whole idea of “Fact-Checking” the news; it’s entirely possible to be right about “facts” and still miss, or even detract from, the truth. In the example above? It was, perhaps, a fact that the millennium didn’t begin until 2001, but that missed the point for the fictional terrorists (check the date-stamp on that piece), for whose purposes “crowds on the street” were more the issue than “having the right date”.
And that’s even when the “fact-checker” isn’t being cynical and exploiting the “fact-check” system to serve as a political editorial.
Takeaway: It’s possible for facts to be true and still divert the audience from a larger, more important truth.
Takeaway Question: If a fact (“The Millennium begins in 2001!”) diverts the user from a larger truth (2000 is when all those crowds were out on the street, tempting the terrorists of the day), does it advance or divert from the story?
The answer, of course, is a question; “Is your story about Calendar Trivia, or Terrorism?”
Last week, Jon Cassidy at Human Events wrote as clear an indictment of the “Fact-Checking” system, or at least of as I’ve seen.
And that indictment ran down not only the top-line biases built into “Politifact”, the national über-fact-check organization…
In 2007 [when Politifact was still affiliated with Congressional Quarterly], PolitiFact was checking numbers thrown around in debates, such as whether 300,000 babies annually are born deformed (False: it’s 40,000), or whether Social Security “is solid through about 2040 without any changes whatsoever” (True, in PolitiFact’s view: the system’s not going broke until 2041).
By 2010, PolitiFact was giving False ratings to statements that were true, such as U.S. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky saying that federal workers make an average of $120,000, compared to a private sector average of $60,000. Paul used total compensation figures, which PolitiFact found misleading. The arbiters arbitrarily decided that salary alone is the valid figure, which would be news to the Internal Revenue Service.
By 2012, it was “fact-checking” extremely general statements of personal experience like this one by Paul’s father, Ron Paul, the Texas congressman and GOP presidential candidate: “I had the privilege of practicing medicine in the early ’60s before we had any government” involvement in health care. “It worked rather well, and there was nobody out in the street suffering with no medical care. But Medicare and Medicaid came in and it just expanded.”
Fact-checker Louis Jacobson tried to disprove Ron Paul’s statement, but eventually admitted his limits. It’s the only example we’ve seen of PolitiFact admitting that the truth was too complex or beyond the scope of the Truth-O-Meter treatment.
…as well as the absurdities of its performance once you get into the weeds with specific stories:
If a conservative advocacy group runs an ad saying Obamacare could cost “up to $2 trillion,” an honest fact-checker would look up the government’s own estimate and see that, indeed, the Congressional Budget Office puts the cost at $1.76 trillion for just the first few years…
…The Congressional Budget Office estimates that Obamacare “represents a gross cost to the federal government of $1,762 billion,” or $1.76 trillion, over the next decade, and that the costs will grow over time. Yet PolitiFact still managed to dismiss that bedrock number as something to be dismissed. In critiquing an advertisement that attacked the program’s costs, PolitiFact editor Angie Drobnic Holan wrote that “the $1.76 trillion number itself is extreme cherry-picking. It doesn’t account for the law’s tax increases, spending cuts or other cost-saving measures.” On paper, the Obama administration projects that new taxes and Medicare cuts will offset the new program’s costs for a while. But that doesn’t change the cost of “up to $2 trillion.” That would make the statement True, of course. Incidentally, the CBO’s 10-year cost figures will be closer to $3 trillion in a few years, if current forecasts prove accurate.
Read the whole article. And remember it next time someone waves “Politifact” in your face.
Takeaway: Journalists – really, journalism itself – depend on having some sort of trust from their consumers. It starts with the little things – did they get the who, what, when, where, why and how correct – and in the bigger things, like “not slanting their coverage to suit some other agenda”. See Dan Rather.
Meanwhile, Here At Home
I’ve always had a fair amount of regard for MPR News, which is perhaps counterintuitive for a Minnesota Conservative. While a very close, and admittedly very partisan, listen reveals the odd bit of bias among the reporters and their editorial process, I think it’s fair to say that MPR News makes a game effort at playing the news straight (that is, of course, as distinct from MPR’s and “American Public Media’s” non-news programming, which is designed to afflict the comfortable and comfort the upper-middle-class liberal).
But I have had some questions about MPR News’ “Poligraph” feature this past week (and, let’s be honest, for years). While I think Catherine Richert does a broadly acceptable job of balancing her “fact-checking”, I’ve taken a closer look at some of her pieces this week. And I wrote her to ask some quesitons, which led to an interesting interchange between her and her boss, Mike Mulcahy and I.
Richert (as she herself noted in the comment section yesterday) responded, pointing out “Polograph’s” “about” section (which I also posted yesterday), and adding:
As you’ve probably noticed, we check one Democrat and one Republican every week, and occasionally a member of the IP. Once in a while, we switch the schedule up and check two members of the same party in one week. When that happens, we check two members of the other party the following week.
That was good to learn, actually.
Both the Hernandez and Klobuchar claims from last week meet several of our criteria. Both were “checkable” statements, both were made in debates, which are significant news events, and both are central to major campaign issues.
And that was even better to learn.
And next, we get to the beef:
Hernandez is adamantly opposed to the bank bailout, which highlights the GOP’s broader campaign theme that government has become too intrusive.
That’s correct. We talked about this on Tuesday. I called the fact-check “Obtuse” because while Tony wasn’t literally to-a-point accurate (the bailout didn’t cause unemployment all by itself), he spoke to a larger point that even Richert’s sources agreed with – that government intervention is fouling up the economy.
Question: As in the “Millennium” example: does analyzing Hernandez’ ad-lib as an absolutely literal statement (“did the bailout literally cause our unemployment rate?”) rather than a general statement of economic principle (“did bailouts harm or help the economy”) or political princple (“are bailouts the right thing to do?”) bring us closer to, or farther from, the larger truth? That the results of Obama’s (and Bush’s) interventions in the economy are, even if you’re completely non-partisan, mixed at best?
And Klobuchar has made bipartisanship a cornerstone of her political persona; her claim about how many bills she has sponsored with Republicans underscores that part of her campaign message.
And as I pointed out on Wednesday, that’s true in and of itself; it showed Klobuchar’s “bipartisanship” – according to one measure, at least. It proved that the numbers gave to support her own assertion were in fact correct. So if your question was “does Amy Klobuchar give out correct numbers to prove her assertions”, she passed with flying colors!
But if your question was “Is Klobuchar really bipartisan?”, there was much more to it; her voting record is 94% Democrat (as Richert noted), and in the leftmost third of the Democrat caucus; put another way, she’s the 17th most-liberal Senator out of 100.
Question: Which is the more important question, if the goal of ones’ fact-checking is to inform people about the upcoming election: “Does Amy give out valid numbers?”, or “Is Amy’s contention that she’s bi-partisan accurate?”
I’d maintain that while the latter question’s answers are dependent to some extent on one’s political perspective, that that question is the real story.
As I noted yesterday, my most important question – after learning and noting their “ping-pong” format of hitting a statement by both major parties every week, more or less – is “how does a statement get picked for analysis?” I noted a couple of Betty McCollum statements – one on her views of the Ryan budget, one on the funding for the Stillwater bridge project. Let’s stick to the former for right now. It’d seem this fits Richert’s description of Poligraph’s criteria; it’s “checkable” (I checked it!), it took place at a significant news event (the same debate that Hernandez’ statements came from), and it’s a central part of her campaign (raise taxes, oppose the Ryan budget).
So I asked – why did MPR pick, as the “Democrat” question in the weeks’ ping-pong of statements from both parties, Klobuchar’s self-serving but accurate statement about her bipartisanship, as opposed to McCollum’s completely fact-free statement about the Ryan Budget?
Because that speaks to my second question, way up above – about how a “fact-checker” whose integrity isn’t trusted is just barking in the wind.
Now, it’s entirely possible that MPR News’ management doesn’t see the incongruity; I’ll cop to the fact that my perspective is one that it finely tuned to find bias, and that fine-tuning sometimes warps the perspective. All that’s a given.
But I thought it was a legitimate question: for the single, sole, weekly “fact-check” of a Democrat, by what rationale was a self-serving innocuity like Klobuchar’s statement selected (and a very tightly-focused validation given)) over an out-and-out untruth like McCollum’s?
- the growing, documented tendency of “journalistic” “fact-checking” organizations like Politifact, Factcheck and Snopes to operate from a standpoint of political bias, and…
- the fact that we are in an election where peoples’ votes are going to be swayed by the impressions they get from the news, and the “Journalism 101″-level fact that things like ledes and “MISLEADING” graphics tend to be remembered more than the deep-down details about a story, and that…
- looking at both of the stories from this week’s selection of “Facts” checked at that level would lead one to think “Tony Hernandez lied about the bailout, Amy Klobuchar told the truth about being bipartisan, and there’s apparently no news about Betty McCollum”…
- …while allowing that I’m looking at one week’s worth of Poligraph stories in a near vacuum, focusing on a couple of debates and statements of particular importance to me. I’ll stipulate that that could very well skew my own perception. I’m more than willing to be set straight on this. I say that as a matter of intellectual honesty, not because I necessarily believe I’m wrong.
Question: Did Poligraph’s stories about Hernandez or Klobuchar bring the news consumer closer to the real story – the candidates’ views on the economy and their “bipartisanship”? Or did they answer the questions by asking the wrong questions, thus missing the forest for the trees? Or did they, like the “Terrorists” “fact-checking” at the top of the post, obscure rather than clarify the issue for someone seeking the truth?
Folllow-up question: Does MPR’s choice of “facts’ to “check” make you trust their judgment and perspective on covering political news more, or less? | <urn:uuid:b254ebea-cda3-4cf3-ac8c-1f6e113babf8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.shotinthedark.info/wp/?p=30135 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954138 | 3,191 | 1.5 | 2 |
The Placer Hills Fire District will begin rotating brownouts on Dec. 1.
District officials said the situation is the result a $150,000 budget shortfall.
"It affects us because it increases our response times to the citizens of out area who we serve," said Captain Matt McCarthy of the Placer Hills Fire District.
The district consists of three stations. One is volunteer, the other two are staffed. The staffed stations will now serve the community on a rotation. This means the Meadow Vista Station will stay open for a month while the Weimar station is closed, the following month the Meadow Vista Station will close while the Weimar station is open.
"Station 84 is in Meadow Vista and that about a six- to seven-minute response time to Weimar," said McCarthy.
The Placer Hills fire district protects 12,000 people in Applegate, Clipper Gap, Eden Valley, Meadow Vista and Weimar.
People who live and work in the area tell us they are concerned about what this will mean for them.
"I think it's wrong," said Julia McFarland of Weimar.
"It seems absurd that they would even consider doing it," said David Dickerson of Meadow Vista.
Others fear a slowed response time to a fire could translate to a hit to the wallet. | <urn:uuid:b13f0236-b3d6-4754-9858-ceac132744c9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kcra.com/news/local-news/news-sierra/Placer-Hills-Fire-District-announces-rotating-brownouts/-/12970852/17540372/-/5hoc8x/-/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956808 | 268 | 1.5 | 2 |
CLEVELAND - Even though there was no school over the weekend, class was in session Saturday for some Cleveland youth.
The subject- substance abuse.
Hispanic Urban Minority Alcoholism & Drug Abuse Outreach Program (UMADAOP) held its 1st annual substance abuse fair at the UMADAOP Youth Center at 3115 Scranton Road in Cleveland.
Substance abuse and mental health experts from local hospitals, treatment centers and agencies were on hand to educate youth, parents and families on the dangers of smoking and alcohol and drug abuse.
"As educators, families or parents, if we don't educate our children about the dangers of drugs and what it can lead to, it can really impact your life," said prevention manager Carmen Alvarado.
University Hospitals and Giant Eagle sponsored the event. Refreshments and gifts were passed out to those in attendance. Dave's Supermarket donated five turkeys to be raffled off. Meal tickets for children donated by Hometown Buffet were passed out.
Hispanic UMADAOP is the 1st bilingual/bicultural substance abuse agency in Ohio.
Copyright 2012 Scripps Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Cleveland Police are searching for a suspect after a man was fatally shot in the head early Saturday.
With the Cleveland Marathon now just one day away, professionals at the I-X Center Friday were making sure to provide plenty of last minute tips they say, runners should begin to use Friday night. | <urn:uuid:da04a80b-302b-447a-8fd2-a5436aa33a26> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.newsnet5.com/dpp/news/local_news/cleveland_metro/hispanic-substance-abuse-fair-held-to-educate-youth-parents-and-family | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958284 | 315 | 1.632813 | 2 |
My choices, as a religious ashkenazi, were either:
- dati leumi (national religious), which apparantly means that I believe that the State and the Messiah are one. We were already redeemed, just the guy who was supposed to tell us never showed up.
- Chareidi (ultra orthodox), which apparantly means that I believe the state has no right to exist, I don't work, don't go into the army, leech off of society, and am generally despised by everyone.
It seems to me that there are a lot of religious Jews out there (maybe mostly from midwest America, though one of my readers will claim that in the south there are normal Jews as well, but we just look at them funny and say, "inbred") who do not fit into any of these categories. This leaves us as ill-represented. I moved to Israel because of religious reasons, secular zionistic reasons played a part in it, but religious zionism was not part of the decision process.
I would guess that makes me chareidi. Except when people ask me what kind of Jew I am and I tell them chareidi, they laugh. Apparantly, I don't much look like a chareidi. And I work. I didn't go to the army, but they didn't ask me nicely to go. Also I use a suf when I daven and layn. And I don't know the rambam by heart. I tried going through two of rav kook's sefarim and didn't understand a word.
My children are going to be dati leumi because we moved to a dati leumi community and send them to dati leumi schools. But I'll probably be able to give them a little perspective, which they'll happily ignore. | <urn:uuid:4a71a763-88af-4238-9741-a855f0142867> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://rockofgalilee.blogspot.com/2005/12/israeli-categories.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.989675 | 379 | 1.632813 | 2 |
I remember when our restroom mirror was being replaced, my family decided to snatch mine, until a new one was bought. I didn’t really mind it at the time, I didn’t really use it that much…or so I thought. After they took it away, my life became a little…lopsided. Each morning I would wake up, get dressed, then stand before my dresser looking forward, prepared to tackle the task of wrapping my hijab, and to my dismay, every day, I found myself staring at a rosey pink wall. I was tricked into it each morning, for that week. Every day I would be a little startled when I couldn’t see myself when I wanted to. It doesn’t sound like that big of a deal, since all I had to do was open my bedroom door, head down the hall and into the restroom, to see myself…but surprisingly, it was. It was then, last February, that I realized the true blessing of having a mirror.
This realization has recently expanded to more than just the physical world, about one month ago when I listened to a lecture by sheikh Kamal El-mekki, hafidhahullah. His talk, named Got Manners?, was enough to slap me awake, turn me around, and spark a love in my heart for mirrors all over the world. Sounds materialistic aye? Hardly.
Before I tell you the points that really did it for me, I want you to take a moment and think. Think about a day when you were deprived of any mirror being anywhere near you. Think about what would happen. Think about how you would look when you left the house. Think about how self conscious you would be.
Now reflect. The Prophet, sal Allahu Alayhi wa salam , said “”A believer is a mirror to another believer” (narrated by Abu Huraira—transmitted in Abu Dawud). Now WHY did He say this? Why choose mirror specifically and not just say “they give naseeha (advice) to one another?
- When a mirror shows you something you appreciate it
- Let’s say you are getting ready to go out to an important event and you are wearing black on black. You stand in front of the mirror and you find a big white feather in your hair (in your hijab for sisters ). Do you get angry at the mirror for showing you the flaw? No you appreciate it showing you the flaw because that is what you expect.
- The mirror shows you your true self immediately
- It doesn’t stop and not show you your flaw because you are feeling good at the moment and decides to tell you when you get home so your feelings are not hurt
- The mirror shows you the truthNo exaggerations. It doesn’t show you that you are worse than you actually are NOR better than you actually are.
- You wholeheartedly believe the mirror
- You don’t think “that’s not me” or “the mirror doesn’t know what its talking about”
- The mirror shows you the good and the bad
- It doesn’t just show you the bad. That’s why when you give advice to someone you start with something nice.
- The mirror shows you what you look like in the context of what you are around
- It doesn’t just show you yourself and ignore everything around you.
- The mirror doesn’t wait for you to ask it’s advice
- Some people you have to pull the advice out of them
- This doesn’t, however, mean you call out a brother whenever you feel like it..rather you pull them aside and give them the advice or do it publicly without mentioning names. Ubay ibn fayyadh said “the believer conceals and gives advice while the hypocrite exposes and humiliates”.
- The mirror is always there for you
- Without exception. The mirror never says “sorry, im not in the mood come look at me later.”
- You like coming back to the mirror
- You should like to return to the people who give advice to you
- The mirror will show you what is good. It won’t hit you or beat you. It won’t force you to change rather leave the choice to you.
Now I pose the question, Brother and Sisters: What kind of mirrors do you surround yourself with? What type of mirror are you? | <urn:uuid:a57c3cbf-4b7a-4c2a-84df-7f19c176fd16> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.suhaibwebb.com/personaldvlpt/surrounded-by-mirrors/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959181 | 954 | 1.6875 | 2 |
Three-quarters of Christian women in America, the backbone of most churches, say they are mature in their faith, feel they are making the most of their gifts and potential and believe they are doing meaningful ministry according to Barna Group polls.
Six out of 10 say they have substantial influence in their church and two-thirds feel supported by the men in their lives — husbands and pastors.
That’s a lot of satisfied women — much higher than I would have expected.
True, about a third of women feel a lack of opportunity at church, feel misunderstood or undervalued by their leaders and resigned to low expectations.
That’s 70 million churched adult women who are unhappy in their church roles.
However, contrary to a widely shared perception, Christian women are as likely as Christian men to consider themselves to be leaders, Barna reports. About a third of both genders see themselves as leaders. Further, most women (52 percent) believe the church is receptive to their leadership, while only about 30 percent serve as leaders at work, at home or in their community.
Here is concrete evidence America’s churches are living up to the ideal Paul outlined in Galatians (4:28), “Gone is the distinction between Jew and Greek, slave and free men, male and female — you are all one in Christ Jesus,” as the Phillips translation puts it.
Contrast this genuine equality of the genders and openness to female leadership among Christians with the utter male domination of women in the Muslim world. Muslim females are much less likely to be able to go to school, to work outside the home, or even to be able to drive in some countries such as Saudi Arabia.
It is no accident that countries influenced by Christianity are far more developed economically and politically because women are deemed to be as important as men. America and Europe have prospered in part because we invest in developing the whole human race.
Interestingly, Barna found women more likely to identify themselves as a servant than as a leader, “a label embraced by half of today’s Christian women.” How do they serve? By praying for others, encouraging others, helping the needy, sharing the Gospel and volunteering.
Most Christian women want to do more with their life. Three-quarters of women say they “can and should be doing more to serve God.”
Sincere Christians are genuinely humble.
What’s the source of this commitment of Christian women?
Nearly eight of ten feel spiritually nurtured by their faith. “The vast majority of women claim to have an ‘extremely close’ or a ‘pretty close’ relationship with God,” Barna reports. Half of women surveyed say they take time every day to evaluate the quality of their relationship with God.
Furthermore, three out of four women say their faith is characterized by joy and equal numbers experience a lot of spiritual freedom in their faith. Two-thirds feel fulfilled by their spiritual lives.
However, their spiritual lives are rarely “their most important source of identity. That role is taken up by the strong priority Christian women place on family.”
Fully 53 percent of women say their highest priority is family, vs. only 16 percent who rate their faith as their top priority.
Two-thirds believe their most important role in life is as a mother or parent. Jesus came next, with 13 percent believing their most important role is as a follower of Christ. In third place is their role as a wife (11 percent). Only 3 percent say their work as an employee or executive is their highest priority.
Their most important goal? Raising their children well. However, Barna deduced “their marriages may be suffering from a lack of intentionality, with only 2 percent saying their most important goal in life is to enhance their relationship with their partner.
I disagree. One reason few women cite marriage-related goals is that they are “quite satisfied in their marriages.” Six of ten women are pleased with their marriages v. half who are pleased with their parenting.
Asked what they most struggle with, women cited “disorganization” and “inefficiency” most often. Anger and selfishness ranked third and fourth, with excessive arguing next in line. Only 13 percent said they struggled with envy and 8 percent with lust.
What has been their “biggest disappointment in life?” Three in ten cited the death of a loved one as their biggest concern, 20 percent cited family or children, while 9 percent said a divorce or bad marriage was their biggest disappointment.
However, three-fourths of women are happy in their faith and in using their gifts to serve others.
That’s what matters.
Michael J. McManus, syndicated columnist and president and co-chair of Marriage Savers, can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.org. His column appears each Saturday. | <urn:uuid:155edaf9-e776-4a60-bf8f-92abc00d8a56> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thedailyreporter.com/article/20120826/NEWS/308269997/1017/LIFESTYLE | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981206 | 1,024 | 1.78125 | 2 |
Tens of thousands of people took to the streets in Moscow today, in the largest of more than 70 protests across Russia, to voice their anger at alleged election fraud and to demand that the results of the parliamentary elections be cancelled, a new election be held, and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin resign.
Opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, one of the organizers of the rally, explained the protesters’ demands to ABC News.
“Our demand is to cancel these criminal elections, because Putin stole about 13 million votes. Secondly, to fire Mr. [Vladimir] Churov, who is responsible for the election and to organize a criminal investigation against him. The third point is to register the opposition. For example, I represent the People’s Freedom Party. [Churov] rejected us from registration. Next point, in the next election, freedom for political prisoners. I feel that we have reached a point where people are very angry against corrupt and criminal power,” said Nemtsov.
Posters read, “Crooks and thieves have stolen our votes,” “Putin go away,” “Free and honest elections,” and “We are not mute.”
Police estimated that 20,000 people protested at Bolotnaya Square in downtown Moscow, on an island across from the Kremlin. But organizers claim that more than 100,000 gathered, calling it Russia’s biggest demonstration since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
About 50,000 police and 2,000 paramilitary troops were deployed in Moscow in preparation for the protests. Most rallies across Russia were approved by city authorities in an effort to avoid violence, which was seen as a sign that the Kremlin has started to sense the people’s change of mood.
Aside from the politicians who addressed the crowd were Boris Akunin, one of Russia’s best-selling authors, and writer Dmitry Bykov, as well as TV personality Tatyana Lazareva.
The protests were mostly peaceful, with few clashes and arrests. As people left the square, they said, “Thank you” to the police.
Neither Putin nor President Dmitry Medvedev commented on the demonstrations.
Former Prime Minister and opposition leader Mikhail Kasyanov told ABC News that today was a happy day.
“People are finally waking up. Russia is waking up. I think that it’s the beginning of the end of Putin’s regime today. Today all political groups are here … talking about the same thing,” he said. “These elections were not valid. That’s what our demand is, to announce these elections void and to call for a free election. We need free, fair and credible elections.”
Eugenia Albats, editor in chief of the liberal opposition magazine The New Times, said she was impressed by how many young people turned out for the demonstration.
“I am disgusted with the people in power. … It’s no longer tolerable. I think it’s time to tell Putin, ‘It’s time for you to step down,’” Albats told ABC News. ”We’ve never seen such young faces at the democratic rallies. This is young Russia, the people of this new generation who are telling Putin, ‘Go. Step down. Your time is over; we are not going to tolerate this anymore.’”
The protest was a test of the opposition’s ability to turn public anger into a mass protest movement on the scale of the Arab Spring rebellions that brought down rulers in the Middle East and North Africa.
“This rally shows that Russia is waking up, that the civil society in Russia does exist, that the middle class in Russia does exist. All across Russia, people are ready for the party in power, and most importantly Putin, to step down. He has to go. It is just the very beginning of a very difficult protest to get the country back to the people. It will take not weeks, it will take months,” Albats said. “The whole question is whether Putin decides not to shoot at his own people, or he decides to use power against us. It’s a very likely possibility.”
The protest organizers have given authorities two weeks to implement their demands. If their demands are not realized, they have scheduled a rally for Dec. 24.
“We will be back,” the crowd shouted.
ABC News’ Tanya Stukalova contributed to this report from Moscow. | <urn:uuid:54d377a8-7f79-4739-98f5-8df2d3777309> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2011/12/russia-is-waking-up-former-prime-minister-says-amid-massive-protests/ | 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 | 0.972284 | 954 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Posted // 2012-09-16 -
There are a lot of opportunities for the younger generations to get involved with music through the various "rock schools" in town, but few have expanded their reach to that of a full-fledged facility. But that all changed a few years ago when MusicGarage.org was founded in South Salt Lake, a full-fledged program that allows kids to not only learn how to play music, but learn its history and what goes into making music work behind-the-scenes. Now with a large location along 1700 South that includes its own venue, the program is looking to branch out further than it has and offer opportunities beyond Salt Lake City.
Today, I chat with founder Steve Auerbach about his career in the industry both abroad and in Utah, founding Music Garage and the programs they offer, thoughts on their outreach and a few other topics. (Photos courtesy of Music Garage, some by Weston Hall and Dana Curley)
Gavin: Hey, Steve. First thing, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Steve: I have been in and out of the music business for over 35 years. I grew up in New York in a musical family; started on clarinet, then guitar, blues harp and piano and got into synthesizers big-time. By age 17, I was a bandleader. I was recording and gigging and moved myself to LA by age 19, where my first music friends were Mike Balzary, Jack Irons, Hillel Slovak -- who became Red Hot Chili Peppers -- and Alain Johannes, whose bands included What is This?, Anthym, Them Crooked Vultures and Queens of the Stone Age. We jammed, and while under-aged, we hung out outside clubs trying to pick up girls at closing time but some kid named Anthony got ‘em all. We wore pirate shirts. I eventually got a job a Guitar Center and customers were all kinds of producers and artists who hired me to help them get cool sounds on their recordings. I got a lot of work because I knew how to get the most out synthesizers and I worked for everyone in LA at that time, from Ronnie Dio to Devo, Smokey Robinson to Tito Jackson and Van Halen to Rick James -- right place, right time, right skills.
Gavin: What eventually brought you to Utah, and what made you decide to stay here rather than move back to L.A. or elsewhere?
Steve: By age 24, I had to get out of LA before it killed me, so I came to Utah for a rehab program and started my life over as a college student at the U of U. I had a 10-year career in social work and was a consultant to Courts and Corrections, where I helped keep about 3,000 men and women stay out of prison by providing a new kind of relapse-prevention training that I learned about at the U. I had a paper published by the Utah Psychological Association and promoted the new methods to the clinical, corrections and court communities. I loved that work and was very good at it. SLC County now uses the same technology as a standard relapse-prevention model. I am very proud of that. I stayed out of music for 10 years and then got back into it by sitting in with blues bands and then got into a slew of working bands: Dick & Jane, Control, The Committed, H Street, Ike Willis & Chunga’s Revenge – some of those bands played as many as 150 gigs a year. I was busy and eventually I took over our band’s agency, Planet Agency, and grew that company to international status by recruiting my old LA rockstar friends. In 2002, I launched a record label, Uwanna? Records and produced a compilation CD for a client on the Planet Agency roster -- Ike Wills, of Frank Zappa fame. For Halloween 2001, I was invited to perform at an historic post 9/11 benefit at The Fillmore in NYC. It was a benefit for Sloan-Kettering Institute Prostate Cancer Research in Memory of Frank Zappa and I got to perform with members of Zappa's bands from the' 60s, '70s and '80s. We raised $10,000 for prostate-cancer research, which is what killed Frank Zappa. In 2003, I booked Ike Willis for an all-Frank Zappa music festival in Germany, where he was the headliner and he met Paul Green, who founded School of Rock in Philadelphia. Paul wanted help with his business and Ike referred Paul to me. Paul and I became friends, and by 2005, we opened our first western states branch in SLC just as the documentary about him, Rock School, screened at Sundance. After about 25 hires and fires, I developed a solid School of Rock staff of maybe eight teachers and built SoR branches in SLC, Sandy, Park City and Denver until 2008, when they downsized in Utah prior to selling the company. They were very respectful and actually paid me to leave the company so long as I agreed not to compete with them for 18 months. I agreed after they added another zero to that check.
Gavin: How did you first take an interest in music and what were some early influences?
Steve: My high school jazz director was my biggest musical influence; Bill Ellington was jazz bassist in the Latin Jazz Quintet, a seminal jazz group in the '60s. Bill gave me a chance to play piano in the jazz ensemble, but the HUGE thing that he did for me was to give me a key to a piano practice room, where my friend Mark Plati became a producer and guitarist for David Bowie, Prince and others. My pal David Lewis went on to form the hit R&B group Atlantic Starr in LA. My biggest influences in the music world were mostly keyboard players of all genres -- Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Rick Wakeman, Brian Eno, Joe Sample and George Duke. I was inspired by guitar players like Jeff Beck, George Harrison, Frank Zappa and Al Dimeola, but in my cynical teen years I related to Frank Zappa the most. It was inspired by his defiance of the music industry and social commentary through his art.
Gavin: What was it like for you getting involved early on, and what made you decide to seek a career behind the scenes?
Steve: I became something of an expert at sound design on all synthesizers. I was a certified Roland and Yamaha clinician and word got out quick about me. I even had a pseudonym and business name, "Steve Bach." Producers and artists called me and hired me to program the new synthesizers I sold them. I worked in their homes or at studios. Most times, it was just me, the producer and engineer tweezing the sounds, and when I got it right they more often than not asked me if I could re-cut the track. So I did. No one ever knew and I ended up with my sounds and my playing on quite a lot of famous records. They often paid me double or triple scale -- in cash! With guys like Tito Jackson picking me up to ride to Hollywood recording sessions in his Bentley, it was fine by me. Behind the scenes ruled.
Gavin: You had started your career in Los Angeles working with engineers and producers. How was it for you coming up and learning the ropes?
Steve: I was just lucky. I didn't really learn any ropes, I was just in the right place at the right time with the right skills. Geez, for my last gig in LA, I got hired by a billionaire who was starting a record label with veteran Motown producer Harry Balk. Harry taught me how to make 8-track demos sound like records. He was very old-school and gifted. It was a fantasyland in a galaxy far, far away.
Gavin: You didn't take any formal education for it. Do you ever wish you went through that process or do you prefer the way it worked out?
Steve: Correct. I had been arranging for big bands since I was a kid, so Bill Ellington taught me a lot as a kid. I got myself into the University of Utah Music Department as a teaching assistant to the composer in residence, Vladimir Ussachevsky in the electronic music lab, but ended up in social work instead of music studies. It seemed that I had my run in the music business and I never thought that I could "do better" that I did in LA in the '80s.
Gavin: What was it like for you recording albums with some top musicians at the time, and who were some of the people you got to work with over the years?
Steve: I received mostly cash and checks from Rick James, Teena Marie via Rick James, Tito Jackson, Edward Van Halen, Intercontinental Absurdities -- Frank Zappa, Ronnie James Dio, Kansas, Mark Mothersbaugh --Devo, Kenny Loggins, Alan Silvestri -- his first film, Romancing The Stone, and a lot of others. I received no check from Ray Parker, Jr. who "borrowed" a $12,000 synth from my boss Joe that I programmed called a PPG Wave 2.3. Ray used the damned thing for his Ghostbusters theme-song sessions and used my sounds and it was huge hit. I never minded not getting credit, but the guy never even thanked me -- much less paid me.
Gavin: Why did you choose to be a mobile producer rather than open up your own studio?
Steve: Because I am a very mediocre audio engineer and have not kept up on that stuff. I didn’t get into software audio production until 2008.
Gavin: What was your time like teaching at the U, especially during a time where the industry was growing and the ways of recording music were drastically changing?
Steve: We had old, old gear there -- it was very cool -- crazy, old, glitchy analog equipment, tape decks, as well as some newer digital stuff. But mostly old, old gear and an Otari 8-track tape deck like the one Harry Balk and I used in LA to make some seriously awesome demos of new artists. You can listen at my Myspace page
Gavin: After the U, your career took various turns, including working for a media-tech company, being a member of several bands and even doing jingle writing. How has it been for you exploring different facets of what is essentially the same industry?
Steve: In the late '80s, after rehab while waiting tables to save enough money to go to the U of U, the owner KBER was a regular customer and he offered me a rock radio show – which I did for a year. In the early '90s, I played in tons of great working cover bands with Danny Weldon -- Legendary Porch Pounders -- and John Flanders, who I still play with in my trio with drummer Shawn Thomas -- The Chickens, Afro Omega -- called ATF: Auerbach, Thomas & Flanders. As I may have mentioned, I think that my biggest reward after U of U was Planet Agency in the mid '90s and growing it into an international concern from right here in SLC. I also did some jazz concert production: Bela Fleck at East High School -- City Weekly Concert of the Year 1997!, John McLaughlin at Kingsbury Hall and more. In 1999, I was offered a job working for one of the first media-streaming companies and did that work until I was hired to bring School of Rock to Utah in 2005.
Gavin: How did the idea to start up MusicGarage.Org come about?
Steve: In 2008, after School of Rock shut down two-thirds of the Utah operations and with the economy on the decline, SoR eventually raised its rates and School of Rock became an exclusive club for more affluent families [see editor's note below]. To me, that was not very rock & roll. Besides, the core values taught by Paul Green that attracted me to School of Rock in the first place seemed to get forgotten as the company grew. I had my own ideas about kids and music, so I came up with the idea for MusicGarage.org -- a "musician's resource center" to train kids, serve pros and support/develop locals. Of course, we started with what I was known best for around here -- a youth program that started in a 12 x 12 room! Today, we have almost 5,000 square feet of management, booking and production offices upstairs from the warehouse facility just north of Costco on 300 West. We're a member program of the Utah Arts Alliance, but they do not fund us. My hope is that they write a grant for the underprivileged kids that I presently fund myself. The youth program has zero funding other than revenues from parent fees that are based on a modest $10/hour. For readers who are interested in making a gift to MusicGarage.Org, we accept debit and credit cards both online and by phone at 801-577-2263.
Gavin: How does MusicGarage work for musicians? Considering the climate of the music scene at the time, how vital did you feel it was to have this kind of resource center for musicians in SLC?
Steve: For Utah bands, MusicGarage is SLC’s first "full equipped" hourly or daily rehearsal facility. Not all bands need or want a monthly rental and our facility is a lot nicer than any of the monthly rehearsal facilities in town. Coming in October, for bands that want their own monthly rentals, our new facility, MusicGarage II, will have monthly band rooms for rent. For kids, all proceeds go to the kid programs. For musicians who teach, we're not a music school that competes with private teachers by offering lessons. Instead, MusicGarage.Org supports local musicians who teach by organizing their students into bands to help kids stay in music lessons with private teachers longer. For touring bands, we're a 1,500 sq. ft. rehearsal hall in a warehouse with a stage, lights and sound with a huge parking lot. When the band Taking Back Sunday was here to launch the 2012 Vans Warped Tour, they came for two days of rehearsals. I signed for gear shipments all week and they parked the tour bus overnight before loading up and heading out. Plus, we're the only "laptop friendly" live video/audio digital "capture and go" venue that allows bands to take all the media with them for editing. We will also have audio- and video-editing suites, if needed. But local bands can buy a case of beer for a fan-appreciation party and capture a live show with real production values to look and sound their best on a tiny budget or even for free if their fans donate to a video fund at the door. We're also a private venue for rent. It can be used for showcases, auditions, private dinners, recitals, parties, fashion shows, spoken word, small plays, film screenings, arts shows and more. In 2013, we are expanding our artist development, management, booking and other services. We currently represent Utah’s world-renowned guitar virtuoso Terence Hansen and have had some luck booking him in Europe.
Gavin: What was it like for you getting the youth program off the ground, and what was the first year like for you?
Steve: Honestly, even after three years, we’re still a start-up. So ,it is very difficult, but very rewarding! So funny you ask -- in our first year, two "stage moms" who wanted their kids on every single song tried to sabotage the youth program and take it over to make their kids the "stars." It was crazy! As well, I am sort of competing with my former self -- School of Rock is a mature program that has a great brand name, so it has been hard to find the "right kids" with the "right skills" for this program. That said, I am VERY proud to say that we have very nice, very capable and very-hard-working kids!
Gavin: What was the process for you in compiling your staff and who do you currently have on board?
Steve: Well, for starters, we're a 100% volunteer staff; mostly me and Terence Hansen run things. But that rotates based on gigs and other commitments. Allison Martin --Cavedoll, Bellrave, Juana Ghani -- worked here in 2010-2011, and bassist Ski Nelson has been here for about six months. MusicGarage is a labor of love and a community service that invites local bands to help – it is very rewarding work ... and FUN! This season, we launch our Band Aid program that invites local bands to volunteer a couple of hours a week to coach the rehearsals, get to know the kids and then play a show at our venue with our kids as the opening act. Our kids are plenty good enough to sit in with almost any band, so it is really fun for the bands. Just ask Fat Apollo and The Cellulites! Any bands that want to check it out, hit me up. We've had workshops and "visiting professors" ranging from Paul Richards -- California Guitar Trio, Robert Fripp String Quartet -- Bobby Rock -- Slaughter, Neil Zaza, Doug Johns -- Bass Musician Magazine, Neal Middleton -- Rotal Bliss, Michael Lucarelli and others.
Gavin: How did you eventually come across the location on 1700 South, and what was it like changing it into a fully functional studio?
Steve: It was through Ian Brandt of Cali’s Natural Foods/Sages Cafe/Vertical Diner. Supernatural fame. Ian serves on our UAA board of directors and he had this warehouse that he wasn't using so we took over his lease. You have to come by and see the facility -- it looks like a little night club! But I could never have done it without the musicians, producers and engineers who have volunteered their time and equipment: Bob Abeyta, Ken Critchfield, Michael Ricks, Kent Rigby, Terence Hansen, Ski Nelson, Allison Martin -- they are all saints and I love them all!
Gavin: How has it been for you to see the facilities be used and watch the different works come out of it?
Steve: So cool, Gavin! We've had out-of-town guests like Taking Back Sunday, members of Earth Wind & Fire, Tina Turner and others; As well as bands from all over Utah who needed the space to work out a show for a tour, a festival gig and so forth. Fat Apollo & The Cellulites, The Jordan Soul Experience, Advent Horizon, Brad Stock and The Atomic Clock and others have used the place and I love what is happening at MusicGarage. This place will blow-up in 2013, I am sure of it!
Gavin: You also have a student program, kind of like a “school of rock.” What made you decide to start that program, and how has it been working out for the kids involved?
Steve: Per capita, MusicGarage provides 30 times the performance opportunities for kids that even the busiest youth programs in the world provide. Each of our kids play more shows than any other youth program in the world. That's right, in the w-o-r-l-d! They are happy, their parents are happy, I am happy and we are creating memories that will last a lifetime.
Gavin: What's the long-term goal for Music Garage, and are there any plans in the works to expand?
Steve: I want to enroll 50 kids by January 2013, expand to 100 kids by January 2014 and expand to a full-time staff. We've already had one franchise inquiry for the youth program in another state, but I was not ready for that. Expansion is the plan, especially with the youth program. It is so much more effective and a more generous business model than the music-school model. We're going to try some crowd funding and are starting to look for private equity investors or possibly shareholders upon reorganization in 2013. I met with one 'CFO for hire," but anyone interested in an investment opportunity should call because the opportunities are limited but the possibilities are limitless. Our model is very efficient and the CFO who I met with estimated that if we leave the UAA and go "for profit" we can still keep the rates low and grow the company nationally to a $5-10 million company. To get started on this path, we do not need that much money to expand. We can keep rates low and still make investors very happy. Heck, rates might even drop lower as we expand. Now, wouldn’t that be cool? The truth is that we are expanding to two new facilities: one for bands -- MusicGarage II, and one for visual artists -- ArtGarage. But folks need to hustle to get a space. I am considering bands on a hand-picked basis as tenants for MusicGarage II, but bands need to apply now. For ArtGarage, I am also doing the same. Artists, photographers and movement arts people need to apply now to make it happen. The nice buildings I am finding come and go quickly.
Gavin: What can we expect from you and MusicGarage over the rest of the year?
Steve: After a VERY busy summer outdoor festival season we're getting "back to normal" now. The kids have had as many as three festival sets in one weekend, from Green River to SLC -- but it is all for music and kids, so who minds? Not me, and for the most part, not our "Roccer Moms"!
Gavin: Aside from the obvious, is there anything you'd like to promote or plug?
Steve: Gavin, I am so grateful to you for helping me tell the MusicGarage story and to share my hopes for helping Utah musicians have a place to work, organize, plot and plan, who want to get out and have a career outside of Utah. That is the hardest part. For bands, artists and other creative types -- let me fix you an espresso and come see what we're about. MusicGarage.org is very special; sacred ground because it serves kids, so we do not operate like other venues. We are very deliberate and focused on what we’re doing. SLC is becoming a more mature market every day now and I am looking for booking agents, production gurus, business managers and tour managers in-house, so I want to meet with folks doing this work independently to talk about getting involved in our network. I have a proven formula to help bands get out of Utah and onto the national scene. But it is a lot of work, I cannot do it alone and I will not do it with just anyone. One reason that I work with kids because if just one group of a few of the kids that I train understand how things work and trust me to serve their best interest and they KICK ASS, then I can help them -- a lot. Same for adults, but they are tougher. Remember, I know rock stars.
[Editor's note: Steve Auerbach stated above that after 2008, School of Rock shut down two-thirds of its Utah
operations and raised its
rates. School of Rock's Ben Richards disputed the amount of the increase stated by Auerbach. As a result, the mention of SOR's monthly fee has been removed from the interview.]
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Category: Health Written by CNN
by Gary Morley
(CNN) -- The lactic acid builds up, your muscles are screaming, your body temperature sky-rockets -- trying to stay two shots ahead of your opponent proves impossible as your thoughts fragment into near delirium.
Five hours charging around a tennis court can be sheer hell even when you're winning, but if your body is out of balance then it's an even harder challenge.
Sunday's Australian Open finalists Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray once struggled with their fitness, but both have transformed their tennis careers since discovering a diet secret that is battling for acceptance in the world of mainstream sports science.
The benefits of going gluten free have been extolled for years by alternative health practitioners, but they have been brought to wider attention due to the exploits of high-profile stars such as Djokovic, whose wheat intolerance caused the world No. 1 severe breathing problems.
"I knew from my experience that asthma was not the boy's problem but rather it was reflecting a symptom of something that was going on with his digestion," says Dr. Igor Cetojevic, who worked with Djokovic for a year up until his Wimbledon triumph in 2011.
"It was his sensitivity to gluten that was compromising his lungs," he adds, citing that in Chinese medicine there's believed to be a relationship between the large intestines and the lungs.
Our diet has changed dramatically in the past century, especially in Western countries. It's a trend that's spreading around the world due to the globalization of commerce, and the food industry in particular.
"I believe one of the problems is over consumption of gluten-containing grains, especially wheat, and the fact that it is genetically different from ancient wheat," says naturopathic physician Hamish Everard.
Cutting out wheat-based foods such as bread and pasta could be the best thing you ever do, says one of his clients, tennis coach Pete McCraw, who has helped develop top players such as Maria Sharapova and Jelena Jankovic.
"The energy level that you have is something I've never experienced before. You don't ever have that crash, the high and then the low," McCraw told CNN.
"Those periods of the day when you crave carbs or sugar, feeling drowsy at work or in the car or wherever, you don't have that anymore, it's a completely different thing -- it's sustained, you don't have the foods cravings like I used to.
"It's a completely different energy source that your body's operating from. The ability to maintain a lean athletic figure is effortless."
The problem is not just wheat, but also processed dairy and sugars -- all of which we consume more regularly and in higher quantities than ever before.
"The gluten in food produces certain conditions; dairy, especially when produced conventionally, contributes to other factors to the detriment of our health," says Cetojevic, who is trained in both conventional and alternative medicine.
"Generally, milk is for babies. We don't need dairy products as we get older," he adds, and also warned against the intake of processed sugar.
"The change in food production has increased yields to the point of surplus but has not improved the quality of the food we eat. Often it contains traces of pesticides, hormones, preservatives, artificial colors, flavor enhancers and I won't even begin to talk about genetically modified organisms."
About 18 months ago, McCraw started noticing symptoms of extreme lethargy in young players he was working with.
"They were presenting chronic fatigue symptoms, although they weren't diagnosed in a traditional way, in terms of blood markers -- everything would come back reasonably normal," he said.
"Athletes would be complaining of excessive tiredness, even after light sessions. During a normal daily activity it was fine but then as soon as they began to exercise their blood sugar levels would drop significantly, and that causes concentration-behavior issues, (problems with) focus, emotional control.
"By the normal standards these were healthy teenagers and players in their early 20s, but they weren't healthy."
McCraw, who has held top coaching and development roles in his native Australia, New Zealand, Israel and at the Nick Bollettieri academy, works with players from age grade to elite level.
One of his clients had been seeing Everard to treat his celiac disease -- an autoimmune disorder caused by gluten intolerance that attacks the walls of the small intestine and makes it difficult for the body to absorb and process the nutrients that it requires.
Everard says that while only 1% of people are gluten intolerant, more than half of his clients are sensitive to it -- and 93% of them have seen benefits from eliminating gluten from their diet.
The improvements increase even further when processed sugars such as high-fructose corn syrup are taken out of the equation, says McCraw.
You might think bread and pasta are healthy foods, but essentially they break down into sugars like a chocolate bar does -- and this is not an energy source that human bodies evolved with.
"We're really designed physiologically to burn fat, it's what our body is designed to do. Shifting the major energy systems from sugar to fat is the transition you go through when you take a gluten-free option," McCraw said.
The first step in treating problems with gluten is to stop eating grain-based foods for at least four weeks, says Everard, but not -- especially for high-performance athletes -- to eliminate carbs altogether.
"We educate the patients about consuming gluten-free ancient whole grains. These include amaranth, buckwheat, corn, millet, uncontaminated organic oats, quinoa, sorghum, teff and rice. This gives the gastrointestinal tract (GIT) a chance to start repairing itself."
It needs help, and probiotics will aid restoration of the stomach's healthy bacteria and digestive enzymes, and also protect against further damage, Everard says
"The research and my clinical results have found the GIT is weakened when we are exercising, especially in hot conditions and leaves the body susceptible to illness," he adds.
"The lining of the gut is very sensitive to the intense heat that endurance athletes train under. My patients have often complained of cramping in the gut, diarrhea or nausea and an increase in colds and flus after competitions and intense training.
"As the body heats up, small cracks form in the intestinal wall, allowing bacteria into the blood stream. We monitored our patients and found that when they did extensive exercise 82% showed symptoms of gut discomfort, reduced tolerance to the heat or a decrease in immune function."
In the case of Djokovic, who clinched a record third successive Australian Open title on Sunday, he had to give up childhood staples such as pizza, pasta and pancakes while introducing more vegetables and rice, fruit and sushi for easily digestible protein."At first, it was difficult for him but he was fed up of being stuck in third place and his determination to be the champion combined with his confidence in my knowledge was all the motivation that he needed to change his diet," says Cetojevic.
"I also suggested that he cut down on his consumption of meat, particularly before a match. Coming from Serbia, that was a radical suggestion -- even more so than cutting out gluten!
"Because Novak was in very good condition from his constant training routine, the benefits were apparent almost immediately, which encouraged him to continue. The breathing problem vanished as did the frequent injuries and strains that had been hampering his progress."
McCraw says he has also seen "life-changing" results in his clients.
"Personalities changed, they were much calmer, had more clarity, better grades at school, their relationships with parents have improved, my relationship with them has matured," he said.
"Less sweating on the court, their endurance levels have increased, ability to maintain a leaner figure has improved, ability to build and hold muscle mass has improved. All of the things that an athletic trainer and coach would strive for, I've seen evidence of that on a daily basis."
However, a gluten-free diet might not suit everyone, says Susie Parker-Simmons, a sports scientist who works with the U.S. Olympic Committee as well as women's tennis players on the WTA Tour.
"There is no benefit in avoiding gluten if you do not have celiac disease or gluten intolerance," she told CNN.
"Therefore I would not recommend an athlete try this diet unless diagnosed by a medical professional."
She said that athletes might find it difficult to adhere to such a diet, especially tennis players who have to travel a lot and might have restricted food options.
"Gluten-free standards and labeling differs in each country. Before going overseas WTA players need to gain advice on the best foods to eat in their country of destination and order gluten-free meals on the airlines they are traveling with," she said.
"A large amount of carbohydrate-rich foods contain gluten in them e.g. bread, pasta, sports bars etc. An athlete with celiac disease needs to be very careful when selecting carbohydrate-based foods to ensure they receive their daily requirements."
Another problem is that many foods containing gluten are also important sources of fiber -- which the body needs to keep the intestines clear of toxins.
"Common gluten-free sources of fiber include: vegetables, fruit, brown rice, legumes, nuts and seeds," Parker-Simmons said.
She believes that while research has shown positive links between health improvement and a gluten-free diet, there is little to suggest it helps in terms of injury prevention and recovery.
McCraw, however, said that his players had shown improved ability to bounce back from intense workouts.
"There's always micro trauma in the muscles and joints, and the body has a natural anti-inflammatory response to that after exercise," he said.
"The gluten inhibits that process and therefore the onset of muscle soreness is worse. The general ability to recover and retain that homeostatic state is compromised. Your threshold of work levels is lower and your recovery rate is higher and longer."
Everard would like to see more studies into the effects of gluten, which he believes could be at the heart of many modern illnesses.
"This is a very complex area and not fully understood in mainstream medicine, however there is a huge amount of research and evidence in this field," he said.
"I see the benefits of a gluten-free diet in my patients every day through clinical experience, but there still needs to be more research done so that this can become more mainstream -- especially in the world of sport."
Many studies focus solely on the benefits or otherwise of eliminating gluten, rather than taking into account other dietary elements.
"The question is -- is it actually gluten that is the problem or is it refined grains or grains in general?" says British nutritional therapist Kate Delmar-Morgan.
"Individuals wishing to go down this route should seek proper nutrition advice and be tested if possible."
There is also the issue that many gluten-free products are processed and contain high levels of added sugars and artificial additives.
"People will look at these products and think they are 'healthy' just because they are advertised as gluten-free," Delmar-Morgan says.
"However if people stick to a wholefoods diet -- i.e. fresh fish, meats, vegetables, fruit, nuts and seeds, wholegrains which do not contain gluten, and they try to cook from scratch as much as possible and have limited pre-prepared foods -- they can then avoid this problem."
Last Updated on Thursday, 31 January 2013 09:28
Category: Health Written by Associated Press
CANCER RISK RISING--In this July 20, 2006 file photo, a woman smokes a cigarette during a break from work in downtown Chicago. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez, File)
by Marilyn Marchione
AP Chief Medical Writer
Smoke like a man, die like a man.
U.S. women who smoke today have a much greater risk of dying from lung cancer than they did decades ago, partly because they are starting younger and smoking more — that is, they are lighting up like men, new research shows.
Women also have caught up with men in their risk of dying from smoking-related illnesses. Lung cancer risk leveled off in the 1980s for men but is still rising for women.
"It's a massive failure in prevention," said one study leader, Dr. Michael Thun of the American Cancer Society. And it's likely to repeat itself in places like China and Indonesia where smoking is growing, he said. About 1.3 billion people worldwide smoke.
The research is in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine. It is one of the most comprehensive looks ever at long-term trends in the effects of smoking and includes the first generation of U.S. women who started early in life and continued for decades, long enough for health effects to show up.
The U.S. has more than 35 million smokers — about 20 percent of men and 18 percent of women. The percentage of people who smoke is far lower than it used to be; rates peaked around 1960 in men and two decades later in women.
Researchers wanted to know if smoking is still as deadly as it was in the 1980s, given that cigarettes have changed (less tar), many smokers have quit, and treatments for many smoking-related diseases have improved.
They also wanted to know more about smoking and women. The famous surgeon general's report in 1964 said smoking could cause lung cancer in men, but evidence was lacking in women at the time since relatively few of them had smoked long enough.
One study, led by Dr. Prabhat Jha of the Center for Global Health Research in Toronto, looked at about 217,000 Americans in federal health surveys between 1997 and 2004.
A second study, led by Thun, tracked smoking-related deaths through three periods — 1959-65, 1982-88 and 2000-10 — using seven large population health surveys covering more than 2.2 million people.
Among the findings:
— The risk of dying of lung cancer was more than 25 times higher for female smokers in recent years than for women who never smoked. In the 1960s, it was only three times higher. One reason: After World War II, women started taking up the habit at a younger age and began smoking more.
—A person who never smoked was about twice as likely as a current smoker to live to age 80. For women, the chances of surviving that long were 70 percent for those who never smoked and 38 percent for smokers. In men, the numbers were 61 percent and 26 percent.
—Smokers in the U.S. are three times more likely to die between ages 25 and 79 than non-smokers are. About 60 percent of those deaths are attributable to smoking.
—Women are far less likely to quit smoking than men are. Among people 65 to 69, the ratio of former to current smokers is 4-to-1 for men and 2-to-1 for women.
—Smoking shaves more than 10 years off the average life span, but quitting at any age buys time. Quitting by age 40 avoids nearly all the excess risk of death from smoking. Men and women who quit when they were 25 to 34 years old gained 10 years; stopping at ages 35 to 44 gained 9 years; at ages 45 to 54, six years; at ages 55 to 64, four years.
—The risk of dying from other lung diseases such as emphysema and chronic bronchitis is rising in men and women, and the rise in men is a surprise because their lung cancer risk leveled off in 1980s.
Changes in cigarettes since the 1960s are a "plausible explanation" for the rise in non-cancer lung deaths, researchers write. Most smokers switched to cigarettes that were lower in tar and nicotine as measured by tests with machines, "but smokers inhaled more deeply to get the nicotine they were used to," Thun said. Deeper inhalation is consistent with the kind of lung damage seen in the illnesses that are rising, he said.
Scientists have made scant progress against lung cancer compared with other forms of the disease, and it remains the leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide. More than 160,000 people die of it in the U.S. each year.
The federal government, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the cancer society and several universities paid for the new studies. Thun testified against tobacco companies in class-action lawsuits challenging the supposed benefits of cigarettes with reduced tar and nicotine, but he donated his payment to the cancer society.
Smoking needs more attention as a health hazard, Dr. Steven A. Schroeder of the University of California, San Francisco, wrote in a commentary in the journal.
"More women die of lung cancer than of breast cancer. But there is no 'race for the cure' for lung cancer, no brown ribbon" or high-profile advocacy groups for lung cancer, he wrote.
Kathy DeJoseph, 62, of suburban Atlanta, finally quit smoking after 40 years — to qualify for lung cancer surgery last year.
"I tried everything that came along, I just never could do it," even while having chemotherapy, she said.
It's a powerful addiction, she said: "I still every day have to resist wanting to go buy a pack."
American Cancer Society: http://www.cancer.org
National Cancer Institute: http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/tobacco/smoking and http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/types/lung
Medical journal: http://www.nejm.org
Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP
Last Updated on Friday, 25 January 2013 09:52
Category: Health Written by Courier Newsroom
Sudden cardiac arrest occurs when the heart suddenly, and without warning, stops beating. This event causes hundreds of thousands of deaths in the U.S. every year. Without immediate help, people who have sudden cardiac arrest can die within minutes. According to Clifton W. Callaway, MD, PhD, professor of emergency medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, it affects one person a day in Pittsburgh on average.
Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is the first step in saving the life of someone who has sudden cardiac arrest. From 2000-2005, people in Pittsburgh were taught to give 15 chest compressions and two breaths (15:2). But Dr. Callaway’s research, and that of others, found that every time chest compressions are stopped to give breaths, the blood pressure created by the compressions drops off. Dr. Callaway and his group began preliminary testing and started training local first responders to do 30 compressions and two breaths (30:2). Researchers tracked patient outcomes before and after this change and found that they were more successful at getting pulses back by doing 30:2. Dr. Callaway and his group weren’t the only ones doing research on this, but they had helped Pittsburgh first responders switch to 30:2 well before the CPR guidelines were changed. Now, 30:2 is part of the international CPR guidelines.
One of the questions researchers are studying now is, if 30:2 is better than 15:2, would it be even better not to pause chest compressions at all and just blow some oxygen into the patient every 10 seconds or so? In Pittsburgh, first responders are now being trained to do either 30:2 (pausing to give two breaths) or continuous chest compressions while blowing oxygen. Some ambulances are doing one and some are doing the other. Dr. Callaway and his group are tracking all the outcomes in the region to answer that question.
Because patients can’t give consent to participate in research if they are having an emergency, resuscitation researchers like Dr. Callaway have to follow particular rules. Regulations allow for exceptions from informed consent for research in emergency situations. Researchers are permitted to try things if the study meets certain guidelines set by the Food and Drug Administration, the national Office for Human Research Protections and local institutional review boards. Anyone looking for information about studies going on in the region can go to http://acutecareresearch.org/ or call 412-647-3078.
It’s also important to remember that this is emergency research. It’s taking place in a life-threatening situation. Researchers aren’t studying procedures to see if they would be cheaper or easier. They are only doing things that have a real chance of helping someone stay alive.
According to Dr. Callaway, the best way of preparing for a sudden cardiac event is to learn CPR. People don’t have to go to a class or get certified. They can learn the basics online, at a public event or even from a health care provider. Don’t be afraid to help someone. Know how to activate the emergency system, which begins by calling 911. It’s what stands between you and a bad outcome some rough day.
Last Updated on Friday, 18 January 2013 10:22
Category: Health Written by Debbie Vargus
LINE DANCING IN BRADDOCK
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the most common cause of death in the U.S. Fortunately, the earlier people find out they have CVD, and with the many ways it can be treated, people can live healthier, longer lives. The UPMC Heart and Vascular Institute developed the Community Outreach and Cardiovascular Health (COACH) program to provide education about heart health, screening and treatment for CVD.
COACH has three components. The first is Check Your Heart, a community program that checks people for CVD. The next is FreeCare, a program to provide cardiovascular care to underserved patients who lack medical insurance. The last is the Childhood Health and Nutritional Goals and Education (CHANGE) program, dedicated to helping children be healthy.
Members of the COACH team provide free CVD screenings to adults in the community. Screenings include measures of height, weight, blood pressure, body mass index (BMI), cholesterol levels and blood sugar. Additionally, counseling is available from dietitians and cardiologists.
The FreeCare program runs a free cardiovascular clinic as part of the Birmingham Free Clinic (412-431-4280), located at 44 South 9th Street on Pittsburgh’s South Side. This clinic serves patients who have little to no health care coverage. The free cardiovascular clinic is sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh’s Program for Health Care for Underserved Populations. Cardiovascular services provided include heart-health tests, standard treatments and follow-up visits with doctors.
The CHANGE program was created to reach children. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, childhood obesity has more than tripled in the past 30 years. The goals of CHANGE are to help provide educational services to address the cardiovascular health and physical activity needs of local children. CHANGE emphasizes physical activity, healthy eating and overall wellness.
The CHANGE program works with schools, communities and health care providers to promote heart health. The Urban League of Greater Pittsburgh Charter School has partnered with the CHANGE program to help their students reduce BMI and childhood obesity as important risk factors influencing heart health.
For more information about the COACH program and the UPMC Heart and Vascular Institute, visit UPMC.com/COACH or call toll-free at 1-855-UPMC-HVI (876-2484).
Last Updated on Friday, 18 January 2013 10:24
Category: Health Written by Courier Newsroom
Several research studies (called clinical trials) involving diseased heart valves are currently looking for research participants. These studies involve the use of investigational devices. This means that research studies are required to determine whether these devices are safe and are beneficial to patients. In some cases, these devices might allow patients to undergo less invasive procedures than traditional open-heart surgery (“less invasive procedures” mean not as much cutting into or entering the body with surgical instruments). If you are interested in enrolling in this type of study, you might undergo physical examinations, blood and other tests to make sure that you are eligible. After you complete these tests, results will be reviewed by a committee of doctors to determine whether you are eligible.
Participating in this type of research may benefit others in the future by improving treatment of diseased heart valves. Like all research studies, your participation is completely voluntary. You may withdraw from a study at any time. The study doctor might also end your participation if he or she determines that it is not in the best interest of your health.
If you are interested in learning more about this type of research, please call the HVI Valve Center at 1-877-412-8258.
Last Updated on Friday, 18 January 2013 10:20
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By Robertson Davies
New York: Penguin Books, 1985.
ISBN # 0-14-009711-2
Comments of Bob Corbett
Since I have several reviews of Davies' work I have set up a page to collect my comments and other links to Davies' work
See my comments on Robert Davies' earlier novel THE REBEL ANGELS Which is an earlier story of which the novel below, WHAT'S BRED IN THE BONE, is the sequel.
In the first pages I was delighted to discover that this is sort of a curious sequel to THE REBEL ANGELS which I just read a few months ago, but I had no idea the two novels were connected. In Rebel Angels Frank Cornish dies, leaving a large estate. However, that book is not about Frank and we learn nothing much about him there at all. In this novel three of the same characters reappear and professor Reverend Simon Darcourt has decided to write a biography of Cornish. However, he is convinced that childhood tells most of the story of one’s life and development (thus the title -- WHAT’S BRED IN THE BONE) and he is frustrated that there is simply nothing recorded of Cornish’s early years. He’s been to the village where he grew up in Canada and checked the school for records and so on: simply nothing exists.
Maria, formerly Darcourt’s star student and a specialist in Medieval literature, tells Darcourt of the Medieval notions of a “recording angel.”
"Maria, you astonish me! Weren't your childhood years important? They are the matrix from which a life grows."
"And that's all gone?"
"Gone beyond recovery."
"Unless you can wangle a chat with the Recording Angel."
"I don't think I believe in a Recording Angel. We are all our own Recording Angels."
"Then I am more orthodox than you. I believe in a Recording Angel. I even know his name."
"Pooh, you medievalists have a name for everything. Just somebody's invention."
"Why not somebody's revelation? Don't be so hidebound, Simon. The name of the Recording Angel was Radueriel, and he wasn't just a book- keeper; he was the Angel of Poetry, and Master of the Muses. He also had a staff."
"Wound with serpents, like the caduceus of Hermes, I suppose."
"Not that kind of staff; a civil service staff. One of its important members was the Angel of Biography, and his name was the Lesser Zadkiel. He was the angel who interfered when Abraham was about to sacrifice Isaac, so he is an angel of mercy, though a lot of biographers aren't. The Lesser Zadkiel could give you the lowdown on Francis Cornish."
Darcourt by now was unquestionably drunk. He became lyrical.
"Maria- dear Maria - forgive me for being stupid about the Recording Angel. Of course he exists-exists as a metaphor for all that illimitable history of humanity and inhumanity and inanimate life and everything that has ever been, which must exist some place or else the whole of life is reduced to a stupid file with no beginning and no possible ending. It's wonderful to talk to you, my dearest, because you think medievally. You have a personification or a symbol for everything. You don't talk about ethics: you talk about saints and their protective spheres and their influences. You don't use lettuce juice words like 'extra-terrestrial'; you talk frankly about Heaven and Hell. You don't blether about neuroses; you just say demons."
"Certainly I haven't a scientific vocabulary," said Maria.
"Well, science is the theology of our time, and like the old theology it's a muddle of conflicting assertions. What gripes my gut is that it has such a miserable vocabulary and such a pallid pack of images to offer to us - to the humble laity-for our edification and our faith. The old priest in his black robe gave us things that seemed to have concrete existence; you prayed to the Mother of God and somebody had given you an image that looked just right for the Mother of God. The new priest in his whitish lab-coat gives you nothing at all except a constantly changing vocabulary which he - because he usually doesn't know any Greek- can't pronounce, and you are expected to trust him implicitly because he knows what you are too dumb to comprehend. It's the most overweening, pompous priesthood mankind has ever endured in all its recorded history, and its lack of symbol and metaphor and its zeal for abstraction drive mankind to a barren land of starved imagination. But you, Maria, speak the old language that strikes upon the heart. You talk about the Recording Angel and you talk about his lesser angels, and we both know exactly what you mean. You give comprehensible and attractive names to psychological facts, and God- another effectively named psychological fact- bless you for it.
From this point on in the novel, Darcourt, Maria and her husband Arthur disappear and the story is told by Frank Cornish’s recording angel, the lesser Zadkiel, interspersed with marvelous little dialogues between Zadkiel and his helper.
Author Davies seems to play the recording angel card for a bit of humor as well as a clever device for telling us how Cornish’s life was bred into his bones. It would be just as easy to do it with an all-seeing and knowing narrator, a quite common literary device, but this unusual tool caters to Davies’ taste for the occult, and Medieval and his delight in humor and irony. It’s quite well done allowing Davies to wow us with his arcane knowledge and encourages wonderful intellectual dialogue on art.
The story itself is very improbable, nonetheless is a page-turner, well-told with wit, intelligence, mystery, suspense and charm. I could recount the story in two or three short paragraphs, but that might spoil some of the fun – which is Davis’ masterful telling and astonishing characters and plot complexities.
However, this stylistic device had a very different impact on me than Davies might have thought. I am writing history, the history of my neighborhood, Dogtown. I face the same problem that Darcourt faces: absolute dead ends. No records of any sort known, and “surprise” data turning up only with infrequency. It would seem that much of my story is lost forever, especially since I’m not writing fiction I can’t use the all knowing and seeing narrator, and, as much as I might wish it, I haven’t yet met the “recording angel” for Dogtown.
Here we come to a separation between the historian and the novelist of historical fiction. In novels which purport to take history seriously, but yet fictionalized versions of it, the author must go far beyond the recorded data, and will create dialogues when we really have no idea what was said, and must create many events that are imaginative guesses as to what might have happened. It is an exercise in creative imagination, yet backed by serious scholarship in the better authors.
As I stopped to think of what Davies himself is doing in the name of the recording angel – telling the intimate details of Frank Cornish’s childhood, I realize that Davies must go far far beyond the known. He tells us of the local baker and how bread was baked, for example. To what extent is this baker and his process the creation of Davies’ imagination and to what extent is he just a particular fictional instantiation of a generalized notion of what bakers were LIKE at this time and place in history?
The historian must uncover and remember history. The writer of historical fiction must also uncover and remember a great deal of history – perhaps not as much as the pure historian, but nonetheless a great deal if the novel is to be believed, in addition, the author must create the rest of the details which are told.
I stand in awe of the better writers of historical fiction. I sit in my chair and think of this history of Dogtown. I know a great deal about life in general here and can tell the details. But I don’t seem to have the creative imagination to get inside individual persons (or “characters”) and reveal their thinking and development, giving them reality and identity while making them so believable to the reader that they live. Young Frank Cornish is utterly alive and real for me in these early chapters of Davies book, more so that virtually any historical figure I can think of, more so that my own memories of my own life.
What an astonishing gift. I tip my hat to the better writers of historical fiction. They enrich my world even if they may mix up my history!
This was the second Davies novel I’ve read and I was nearly as delighted with it as I was with The Rebel Angels. I can’t wait to hurry off and find more of Robertson Davies’ books.Bob Corbett firstname.lastname@example.org
Bob Corbett email@example.com | <urn:uuid:229ca9bf-cdbe-4a6e-a27a-fb34d8530ff9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www2.webster.edu/~corbetre/personal/reading/davies-bone.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972701 | 1,932 | 1.640625 | 2 |
The Rise of the Moto-Commuter
Between the wallet-emptying aggravation of driving in the city and the sweaty impracticality of biking to work sits the happy medium of urban commuting: the motorcycle. There's no better moment to make a two-wheeler your daily driver. Find the right bike, the right gear, and the right way to blow through gridlock
Ungridlocked: The Real Reason to Get a Motorcycle
Nothing puts a smirk on your face like slipping past slow-moving traffic by lane-splitting. Technically it's legal only in California, but it's also safer than sitting in the middle of the pack.You want to get past the guy texting in his Tahoe, not hope he doesn't roll over you. Here's how to ride on the dotted line.
1. Speed up: Accelerate to between five and ten miles per hour faster than surrounding traffic.
2. Slide over: Pull between the lanes. Have your left hand poised over the clutch lever and your right foot ready to hit the rear brake. Keep the revs high in case you need to escape quickly.
3. Stay alert: Watch for signs of cars about to cut you off: Look for front wheels turning and drivers' heads twisting in your direction.
4. Wave good-bye: When the coast is clear, get back in a lane. | <urn:uuid:744190e5-f565-4f53-b322-dee693b101da> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.gq.com/cars-gear/cars/201109/motorcycle-bikes-gear-city-commuting?slide=7 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93179 | 283 | 1.75 | 2 |
All things must end. One day, maybe years from now, Blizzard will shut down the last of the World Of Warcraft servers and we will be forced to move from one environment to another. While that does not mean the end of your character, it does mark the end of WoW itself. Between now and then, our characters will participate in thousands of stories: Some will be epic others will be small random RPs. Regardless, they will all end.
When it comes down to it, there are two ways to end a story: You start with then ending and build towards it or it organically develops. Both methods are acceptable. I tend toward the latter; however there appears to be a mystique about the former. “OMG The story was planned that way from the beginning! Genius!”
Ron Moore, discussing the end of Battlestar Galactica mentions it does not matter how the story ends: It will end. Letting a story develop, and the characters influence the story, was his method of choice. BSG wasn’t about the overarching plot: It was about the characters that the fans had a huge emotional investment in. Most of us will have an even greater level of emotional attachment to our WoW characters, therefore, we should allow them, and the stories they participate in, to work towards a satisfying end.
The more proficient writers on WTT:RP can go in-depth on the ideas of story creation. Here are a few ideas I have on ending a story.
- It doesn’t mean “happily ever after” nor does it mean that everyone has to die either.
- It sure as hell does not mean, “and it was all a dream.”
- The ending should provide consequences of the characters actions.
- Not everything plot point needs to be tied up perfectly.
Next week, I will go in depth with part one. I’d like to hear from you: What are some of the best and worst examples of endings you can think of? | <urn:uuid:e2a33e3b-bf6e-408d-8be3-ce1aad446293> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://wttrp.com/2009/03/28/ending-a-story-1/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951935 | 424 | 1.609375 | 2 |
LAKEWOOD - Students were sitting in their classrooms at 9:30 a.m. Monday when the voice of Lakewood High School Co-Principal Mario Jimenez sounded over the intercom.
"Attention please, Lakewood staff and students, we are now on lockdown," he said. "This is a drill."
Teachers quickly shut off lights, closed blinds and locked doors.
Students huddled quietly under their desks.
Each year, the Long Beach Unified School District holds lockdown drills for all of its elementary, K-8, middle and high schools to prepare staff and students in the event of an intruder on campus. The district has practiced these drills for more than a decade, but school officials have been extra vigilant about the practices and
On Jan. 14, the hyper-vigilance was evident when more than 50 Long Beach police officers responded to reports of an armed intruder at Bancroft Middle School in East Long Beach. The school remained on lockdown for nearly two hours as hundreds of frantic parents flooded the campus.
The reports turned out to be false, but many parents said they appreciated the swift response from school officials and law enforcement.
Cathy Coy, manager for the LBUSD's emergency preparedness program, said the district in recent weeks has been reviewing its procedures for school lockdowns to see if any changes
"We want to make sure that our lockdown drills run as smoothly as our fire drills and earthquake drills," Coy said.
The courtyard at Lakewood High was eerily quiet Monday as campus safety officers, school administrators and deputies from the sheriff's Lakewood Station walked through the campus, checking that doors were locked, lights were off and teachers were following the proper procedures.
"We want the community to know that we're doing everything to make sure our kids are safe," Jimenez said.
As part of the lockdown procedure, teachers are required to keep their identification cards on them and use judgement when calling students to the room for shelter in the event that a perpetrator could be posing as a victim. The high school this year also featured special presentations on school safety in all of its English classes.
"We don't want to think about it, but it's something we need to think about," said Lakewood Co-Principal Cheryl Cornejo.
After about 10 minutes, the lockdown was lifted and students soon began pouring out of classrooms. Sophomore Emily Ayon said she and her friends are glad to participate in drills.
"When something scary happens sometimes you can't even think, so I think it's great that we practice this," she said. "If something happens, we'll know what to do."
The district is planning lockdown drills for five more schools on Wednesday. | <urn:uuid:a3653c6a-1960-45e4-8087-0f317ac2594a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.presstelegram.com/columnists/ci_22468976/lakewood-highs-lockdown-drill-wake-school-shootings-part?source=pkg | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981321 | 560 | 1.65625 | 2 |
A Messianic Jewish congregation in Bowling Green, Kentucky recently hosted a most unusual guest speaker - a co-founder of Lebanon's Hizballah terrorist militia, a group dedicated to the destruction of Israel.
Dr. Daniel Shayesteh was a political and military figure in the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran in the 1980s. He is said to have helped with the formation of Hizballah, and with the training and indoctrination of the terrorists who make up its ranks.
While visiting Hope in Messiah, a Messianic congregation headed by Jonathan Sacks, Shayesteh said that faith in Yeshua had transformed him from a man of hate into a man of love.
"It is amazing to me that I was a man preparing young boys and girls with hatred toward Christianity," Shayesteh told local ABC affiliate WBKO.
That statement also revealed an often forgotten aspect of the situation in Lebanon, that Hizballah and the Islamists at work there hate not only Israel, but Lebanon's large Christian population, as well.
Shayesteh is currently touring the US speaking at churches and promoting his books "Christ Above All" and "The House I Left - A journey from Islam to Christ".
[hat tip: Rosh Pina Project] | <urn:uuid:eb5e09fb-3ce2-4a1b-bcad-b1379e170b87> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.israeltoday.co.il/NewsItem/tabid/178/nid/23429/Default.aspx?topic=article_title | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970673 | 264 | 1.734375 | 2 |
We recently sent the following letter to Senator Orrin Hatch about our dilemma and we would like Carbon County to hear our concerns as well by seeing what we sent to him.
Some of us who live in Carbon County Housing, would like you to look into getting us smoke free units to reside in.
We presently have 12 buildings with 4 apartment units in each building. The residents consist mostly of the elderly and handicapped, and are mixed with people who smoke and those who don't.
The smoke comes in the apartments of those who do not smoke. Is there a reason that we who are in ill health with heart trouble and breathing problems, most of whom are on oxygen, can't have, as the rest of the people in Utah have, clean smoke free apartments to live in. This smoke makes most of us ill while we live with these conditions.
Why can't there be designated smoking and non smoking buildings so we can be separated from the smoke and nicotine.
We can't understand why we who need smoke free units cannot have them as do other housing units, hospitals, restaurants, motels, and other public and non-public places? There are proposed bills/legislation banning smoke from parks, clubs, bars, and etc. and we cannot even live in a smoke free apartment which is our home.
Our director did tell me that she cannot do anything it terms of lobbying for this cause because it is part of her contract with HUD. So we are trying to work through Congress and promote legislation for others and ourselves to change this situation.
We hope people who smoke will realize that we think they have the same rights as we do. We are not against smokers; we just want a smoke free home for ourselves, so we would hope that they would fight with us for all, to have a place to be comfortable. Why should we in a place where there are 12 buildings not have the right to have four or five buildings smoke free.
On the other hand we think that government buildings and hospitals, places where people work, should have a comfortable warm room to smoke in. We don't think that they should have to go out into the cold.
This is America and we should all care for one another, smokers and non smokers. Everyone's rights should be taken into consideration. | <urn:uuid:18a38c20-f91f-4bee-8e42-32b7f98c6b27> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sunadvocate.com/print.php?tier=1&article_id=5366 | 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 | 0.98191 | 467 | 1.695313 | 2 |
As the third quarter of 2008 comes to a close, the stock and bond markets continued to dramatically decline. Investors confidence has been shaken to the core as the list of high–quality corporate casualties has shocked both “Wall Street” and “Main Street”. Venerable, heretofore sound companies failed in rapid order leaving investors scrambling for safety. Bear Stearns, Washington Mutual, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, IndyMac, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, AIG Insurance and Wachovia Bank were forced to either merge or fail outright with a devastating impact on their widely held equity securities and similar value destruction in their debt securities. The Lehman and AIG bankruptcies have caused a number of money market funds to “bust the buck” causing many investors to panic. For a time, treasury bills had a NEGATIVE YIELD in the flight to quality. The markets fear a global financial Armageddon. Is this fear overdone?
The credit markets need to heal before order can be restored. The WSJ headline that the credit markets have gone from bad to worse to ugly by quarter-end is right on the mark. In the past 90 days, yield spreads relative to Treasuries have exploded by double or triple the spread that existed at the beginning of the quarter. Even AAA munis were not spared from the carnage as their prices declined to offer yields substantially higher than Treasuries. Yes, these are high quality tax-free bonds yielding more than fully taxable Treasury securities! Government intervention in the form of bailout” legislation, additional doses of liquidity by global central banks, increased consolidation in the financial securities and banking industries, and a healthy dose of time and patience will eventually restore the credit markets to normal function.
Disclaimer: The information in this blog is based on data gathered from sources that we believe are reliable. However, we do not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of this information. This commentary should not be used as the primary basis for investment decisions, nor is it considered to be investment advice meeting the specific investment needs of any investor. | <urn:uuid:a77d7509-1115-4677-b3d0-4f6ce469b418> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.blufftontoday.com/blog-post/2008-10-03/third-quarter-recap | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954945 | 425 | 1.5625 | 2 |
In the last two months, Mark Zuckerberg has had a rude introduction to the capital markets. The founder of Facebook has always seemed fearful of the stock market and tried to avoid the trading hordes as long as possible, but that has turned out to be a huge mistake.
Before taking Facebook public in May, the 28-year-old Zuckerberg had led something of a charmed life. The roadblocks he faced in building the world’s biggest social-networking company were tiny, like an overdramatized civil lawsuit. Now, with Facebook’s stock in free-fall, down more than 40% from its IPO price, Zuckerberg has a big problem.
Zuckerberg did not want to deal with the pressures of being a public company. Like many entrepreneurs these days he viewed the capital markets with suspicion. The view in Silicon Valley, as recently described by Marc Andreessen, co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, is that laws that Congress passed in response to the first Internet bubble, like Sarbanes-Oxley, make it “incredibly difficult to be public today.” So Zuckerberg made a fateful decision, he decided to keep Facebook a privately-held company for much longer than other success stories like Google or Amazon.
But Zuckerberg still needed money. He needed financing for his plans and to compete with the likes of Google or the next dorm room dreamer to come along. He also needed to attract and retain talent. Issuing stock options, or, in this case, restricted stock units, that don’t turn into cash money for years was not enough. To solve this problem, Zuckerberg turned to venture capitalists, hedge fund managers, even a Russian oligarch. But those investors also expected to cash-out and those pesky securities regulation also limited the number of shareholders Facebook could have and still remain a private company. By May 2012, Zuckerberg had no choice but to launch an IPO.
Waiting eight years to conduct an IPO, however, has turned out to be an impossible problem to manage. The hype associated with the hottest company in Silicon Valley had created massive expectations and lots of shareholders with tons of stock looking for an exit. The bankers at Morgan Stanley applied all the lessons of the last 15 years and priced the IPO at $38, which was very aggressive, in an attempt to avoid leaving any money on the table and the embarrassment that a huge IPO pop would represent. David Ebersman, Facebook’s chief financial officer, increased the size of the offering at the last minute to try to mitigate future selling of shares from early investors and employees.
With such a big valuation at IPO time, Facebook had to show some results. But the numbers that Facebook announced on Thursday in its first quarterly earnings report were underwhelming. Zuckerberg, Ebersman and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg did not inspire much confidence about their business model in a conference call. The trading hordes drove Facebook’s stock down by 15% in Friday morning trading. “We’re disappointed about how the stock is traded but the important thing for us is to stay focused on the fact that we’re the same company now as we were before,” Ebersman said.
But that is going to be very hard to do. Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., is not a kibbutz. The employees that joined the company are like all the other creatures in Silicon Valley; they want to get rich. It’s hard to imagine morale at Facebook won’t take a hit that correlates with the loss in value of the shares belonging to the employees. And things don’t look promising for the stock short-term given that the employees, ex-employees, hedge fund managers, venture capitalists and Russian oligarchs that held pre-IPO Facebook stock will be freed from their post-IPO stock lock-ups starting in August. Make no mistake: the early institutional investors are heading for the exits.
The lesson of the Facebook fiasco for Silicon Valley is clear. Start-up entrepreneurs cannot evade the discipline of the capital markets any more than can the prime ministers of Spain and Italy. The markets have a way of focusing the mind. Zuckerberg & Co., might have not been so late to embrace mobile or might have had more urgency to develop a monetizing strategy had Facebook faced the trading hordes earlier. As New York hedge fund manager Dan Loeb recently demonstrated with his intervention at Yahoo!, Wall Street and Silicon Valley need each other. Zuckerberg thought shielding himself from guys like Loeb would help him build a better company, but that is not what tech entrepreneurs will take away from his example. | <urn:uuid:b70707a2-adde-44a1-8c61-b6a35559252b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2012/07/27/mark-zuckerbergs-big-facebook-mistake/?commentId=comment_blogAndPostId/blog/comment/903-5291-2426 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97015 | 949 | 1.757813 | 2 |
Subject: (old wood sailboat)
Date: Wed, 15 Apr 1998
Forgive such a fundamental question but I'm just getting started.
I have an old wooden sail boat (16' Johnson x boat) It's been sitting out for several years. I would like to restore it and I was thinking I would fiberglass it. Then I was told that the glass would not hold (swelling wood problem). Then I read this book about stapling the glass to the hull ?!?!? Another source told me that he had good success by simply putting a flexible epoxy resin on, no glass.
What should I do?
I would like to be able to keep it in the water for extensive periods of time, sometimes not watched for several weeks.
I was also thinking of putting a thin coat of glass on deck in order to get a more durable and more maintenance free surface. Will this add too much weight or cause other problems?
Thanks for your help,
I would not fiberglass the hull. The old boats were constructed in a way
that allowed them to *flex* and rarely will the glass stay on the wood.
It breaks free and water gets underneath, and then you get rot. On deck
it's okay, because you've only got one plane flexing and the glass will
adhere better. I would suggest that on the deck that you use an epoxy
resin rather than polyester. Stronger and more flexible. It will add
very little weight.
As you have observed from your reading, there are various schools of
thought on the matter, but I have rarely seen it work -- and only then
when epoxy resin was used and all the seams between the planks were
*splined* with thin wood wedges epoxy-glued in place. That's a big job!
I'd suggest that you consider coating the exterior of the hull with
Clear Penetrating Epoxy Sealer (CPES). This will consolidate any bad
wood you might have and give the hull some protection from future rot.
Because it's so thin, it does not enclose the wood, which can still flex
and *breathe*.. You'd still need paint and seam compounds (3-M 5200) to
finish things off. We sell the CPES in up to 2-gallon units, and it
would probably take at least one of these units to coat your hull --
maybe more, depending on how porous the wood is.
Keeping it in the water is fine. You just need to prepare the hull for
immersion in the traditional fashion -- caulked seams and paint. | <urn:uuid:88719ae9-22c5-413b-8377-78368b493c96> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.rotdoctor.com/L/BoatL/QA078.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970329 | 552 | 1.742188 | 2 |
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(en) Anarkismo.net: Ireland, Interview with striking bus worker in Belfast by Sean Matthews - WSM
Sat, 18 Aug 2012 23:25:40 +0300
In April this year over 100 bus drivers took successful wildcat action bringing Belfast
city centre to a standstill in solidarity with a work colleague who was wrongly suspended
by management without using the proper procedures. Independent Workers Union and WSM
member Sean Matthews speaks to one anonymous driver from Translink about the action taken,
wider working conditions and the possibility of solidarity and resistance in the future.
---- Standing together in solidarity with your work colleagues showed the company that we
will not be walked over, and each one of us will stand shoulder to shoulder to fight for
what we believe in and that we won't lie down and accept what is thrown at us.’ -- Could
you tell us why bus workers decided to take unofficial strike action that brought Belfast
city centre to a standstill, and what was the response from passengers and fellow colleagues?
The strike was called because a worker was wrongly accused of something in which he did
not do. The management went about it the wrong way, he was suspended before investigation,
and that is why the strike was called by his colleagues who are represented by different
unions and had the support of their union representatives. Fellow colleagues were in
agreement with the strike, as they could also be victimised under the same circumstances.
Regarding the passengers many of them were not happy, but a lot were in support of the
action being taken, as most of them are workers themselves.
Was this over a particular incident or are their wider grievances against management, for
example the relations between the union and senior management?
This was over a particular incident, but the way in which management handled the situation
at this time disgusted drivers, as they too could be a victim of managerial harassment.
This incident was an isolated occurrence, and drivers were regretful that this form of
action had to be taken to let management know that drivers won't lie down and take it, and
they will fight for their rights regardless of management’s threats.
Do you think this part of a wider agenda from our local politicians and the company to
privatise translink services and remove your union?
Personally I think this was a mistake on managements behalf to suspend a driver before an
investigation into the matter, this is a reoccurring problem with management regarding
drivers. Translink does not back up their drivers over certain matters; they take the
public’s perspective on an incident before speaking to the driver in question. In regards
to the politicians seeking to privatise the company and eradicate unions within the work
place only makes for workers within the company fight harder for their human rights.
Given your wildcat strike action got results and provided a glimpse of what is possible if
we act in solidarity, what advice would you have for other workers facing similar issues
and what role can a union such as the IWU play in this?
Standing together in solidarity with your work colleagues showed the company that we will
not be walked over, and each one of us will stand shoulder to shoulder to fight for what
we believe in and that we won't lie down and accept what is thrown at us. We have to fight
for our human rights and that the company needs to take this into consideration when
suspending any driver without an investigation. We will take wildcat action again if needs
be, as the disruption caused by the strike, showed management we are serious when we said
we are willing to stick together. If bus drivers can stand in solidarity with their
colleague I don't see any reason why other people shouldn't take action against their
Meanwhile statistics revealed by the Office for National Statistics highlight that alomost
1.4 million working days were lost in Britain and Northern Ireland through industrial
action last year, the highest total since 1990. There were 149 separate stoppages, with
almost twice as many in the public sector as in private firms.
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A-Infos Information Center | <urn:uuid:e1f686a2-edb5-4fae-afc2-5b2a4fcaa118> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ainfos.ca/ainfos336/ainfos51991.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95713 | 1,052 | 1.554688 | 2 |
As S4C celebrates its 30th anniversary, the Channel broadcasts a powerful drama documentary about Gwynfor Evans' decision to announce a fast until death in the campaign for a Welsh-language channel.
The drama documentary Gwynfor: Y Penderfyniad on Sunday, 4 November is a portrayal through drama, archive and witness accounts of the nationalist leader's decision to make a controversial stand as part of the Welsh-language TV channel campaign.
Gwynfor: Y Penderfyniad (Gwynfor Evans: the Decision), written by the Archdruid T James Jones and produced by Apollo production company, recreates a critical year in the life of Gwynfor Evans. Actor Aneirin Hughes portrays Gwynfor.
In September 1979, the new Conservative Government under Margaret Thatcher announced they wouldn't establish a Welsh-language television channel despite promising to do so in the party's manifesto.
That led to Gwynfor Evans announcing his protest to fast until death and within 12 months, the Government had changed its mind again and decided to establish a Welsh-language channel after all.
Producer Lona Llewelyn Davies said, "It is a warm and sensitive portrayal of a brave man who made a far-reaching decision that could have led to his death. The drama documentary is based strictly on the historical facts but also allows the imagination of author T James Jones to explore the psyche of Gwynfor Evans at the time."
Among those taking part are prominent members of Plaid Cymru at the time, Lord Wigley and Peter Hughes Griffiths; the media commentator, Euryn Ogwen; former chief executive of the Eisteddfod, Emyr Jenkins; Gwynfor Evans' son, Guto Prys ap Gwynfor; his daughter Meinir Ffransis, and her husband, the prominent language activist Fred Ffransis.
Author T James Jones explained that "to convey Gwynfor's thoughts and feelings alone in a drama portrayal was a very special challenge" and that "the script called for a similar treatment to composing a poem."
T James Jones said, "Gwynfor had suffered from depression following 1979 and this Government U-turn was arguably an opportunity for him to redeem himself in some way. I felt compelled to suggest this in as concise a way as possible in the monologue. On the other hand, I admired his courage and hope that will also manifest itself in the drama.
"One of the greatest mysteries was trying to imagine the feelings of his wife and life partner, Rhiannon. The marital relationship is given huge prominence and Rhiannon develops to be the story's heroine."
The 54 year old actor, Aneirin Hughes, originally from Penybontrhydybeddau, Ceredigion, is "a great admirer" of Gwynfor.
"It was a huge honour to be offered the part," said the actor, who lives in Monmouth, "I was aware of the importance of Gwynfor Evans at a young age and at the time admired his courage in making such a stand.
"It was a difficult challenge to portray Gwynfor because he is so well known and a man of a cerebral nature with a somewhat under stated expression. I really enjoyed working on T James Jones' script," said the actor, who portrayed the rugby coach Carwyn James in another S4C drama documentary written by T James Jones several years ago. | <urn:uuid:ace0c538-6227-4b45-9e52-a8ae30dbab50> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.s4c.co.uk/ffeithiol/e_gwynfor_penderfyniad.shtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971786 | 717 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Here’s a scenario for you: Rashid (Raoul or Ray) meets Lori in her office, and both nervously shake hands. Lori notices what feels like a wimpy, limp clasp. Both think to themselves, “Yech, what a shake.” A two-second exchange like that can create unease and discomfort in the relationship from then on. Whose fault is it?
Your thoughts maintain and build, or attack and destroy, the self-esteem of others. Leaders maintain the self-esteem of people around them.
Rejection is inevitable in life, especially if you’re making an effort and putting yourself out there. Here are some thoughts I use to make it less painful when I get it.
You have to pay ransom for your good name.
When you are out of a job and an offer comes in, you tend to overlook some red flags about the offer. Even in a time of near desperation slow down and honestly ask yourself some questions that will help minimize the possibility that you’ll be looking for a job again, in the near future:
Write your autobiography – today. Don’t put it off. Write from day one up to the present. Every six months or so, take a couple of hours and update it. Why put your history on paper? It’s your story, so it’s a good story worth recording. You’re as important as anyone who has written one. It’s a good source for updating your resume, job interviews and promotion evaluations — in managing and leading with a human touch.
If you find yourself job hunting, be sure to take time to search for your values as well as your next job. Stressful work over time can make you forget what’s important to you — what you want in life. All of a sudden two or twenty-two years go by, and you’re not doing satisfying work. View your job elimination in a positive light. Now you can consider what you would truly enjoy doing in your next job – and for the rest of your life.
We’ve seen CEOs attacked for Wall Street greed, questioned by Congressional committees, exposed on “60 Minutes,” and led to prison in handcuffs. How did those businesses’ heads turn into incompetent and/or dishonest crooks and lowlifes? We assume power corrupted them. No. Usually, he (or she) was rotten from the start. He was just under the radar until he got into the visible top job; he didn’t become incompetent but was always incompetent as a business leader. So what happened?
With the global economy sagging, your company tightening its belt, your stock worth dwindling and your children thinking you don’t understand what they are going through, there is a lot of duress and stress in life. To step up as a leader, manage your attitude – don’t leave it to others. Take on and stick with a productive and constructive perspective. Don’t let the press, family, friends or colleagues sway you with a negative and destructive perspective. | <urn:uuid:3d33f672-41e1-4260-8df2-0069678e7d4b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.businessmanagementdaily.com/quiet-power | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963452 | 644 | 1.679688 | 2 |
I was doing some niche local SEO research when I came across an example of how an unoptimized local listing contributes to inaccurate search results.
Searching for “Toronto Lawyer” brings up the local 7-pack with Timothy’s World Coffee ranking towards the end at #5. To make matters worse, when you go on their place page, you’ll see a barrage of reviews for a Toronto based general physician “Dr. Daniel Wong” . Additionally, Timothy’s World Coffee is being categorized as a “General Practice Attorney” instead of coffee shop based categories.
This example clearly indicates the importance of owning your business listing in order to avoid such results. Being a verified owner not only allows you to have full control of the information that is represented on your Google profile page but also gives you added benefits such as local analytics and tracking for your local business listing. | <urn:uuid:3e44f689-921a-4fbb-9967-3d89cda29989> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.shagunvatsa.com/local-seo-fail | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936126 | 185 | 1.648438 | 2 |
Many cultures have ceremonies that mark the transition from boyhood to manhood. But not all include sleep deprivation, circumcision, and a golf hat.
Last week when I arrived in Reyhanli, a Turkish town on the border with Syria, I was met with an air of anxiety, anger and an unsettling chaotic calm. An hour earlier, two car bombs had exploded, resulting in the death of 51 people.
Two COSAT students traveled to China for a chemistry competition. In the process, they learned a lot of lessons — about snow, about perceptions of Africans, and about chopsticks.
Gertrude Nakigudde is an accountant in Kampala, Uganda. I’m a freelance reporter and journalism instructor in Seattle. Angelina Jolie is, well, Angelina Jolie. We’ve all had mastectomies, and we’ve all nursed parents through their final days with breast cancer [...]
Could you hack it at the Centre of Science and Technology? Take this short math quiz to find out.
Five major European clothing retailers have committed to a safety accord for garment factories in Bangladesh. News of the agreement broke during a day-long chat about the garment industry hosted on The World’s Facebook page. The agreement, and widespread concern about the global garment industry, prompted a lively discussion.
The Guatemalan general who led the country through the bloodiest period of its long civil war, Efrain Rios Montt, has been jailed for 80 years for genocide and crimes against humanity in the early 1980s. BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin has been tweeting the trial and its aftermath.
Every year, in the spring, Boston celebrates its vibrant Portuguese culture with the Boston Portuguese Festival. The World’s intern, Adizah Eghan, sat down with this year’s featured artist, José L. Santos, to discuss everything from his Portuguese-American identity to his artwork.
The death toll of the April 24 collapse of a garment factory outside Dhaka, Bangladesh, has passed 1,000 people, making it the worst industrial accident since the 1984 gas leak at a Union Carbide India Limited pesticide plant in Bhopal. Now, a question many shoppers are asking themselves, is whether the clothing they buy is made in a dangerous garment factory.
Earlier this week, reporter Anders Kelto asked a student at COSAT why she had missed class. In perfectly measured tones, she told a truly heart-breaking story, and one that revealed some of the challenges of teaching in Khayelitsha.
A new international study concludes that western countries have the most sleep-deprived children. Parents and teachers: Have you found that your students’ lack of sleep correlates to their performance in the classroom?
At COSAT, as at many urban, township schools, the vast majority of students are Christian. Prayer at school events is the norm. But should it be?
Cemeteries around Massachusetts have said Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev can’t be buried here. And many Americans say he should be sent home.
Some girls at COSAT get sick of all the junk food at their school, and decide to start selling healthy sandwiches. The money starts rolling in, and they decide to spend it in an extremely noble way.
Every day, there seems to be a new story about how cell phone technologies can save the world. I’m skeptical. But a conversation with a COSAT student renews my faith. | <urn:uuid:c71dd56f-d517-4a81-8202-83a2b4ae2333> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.theworld.org/category/blogs/ | 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 | 0.944084 | 728 | 1.703125 | 2 |
Our professional organization, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, recently changed its name from the American Dietetic Association. I was among many who were not in favor of this name change. At the very least I would have preferred that American be used as part of the name. The dietetics profession is worldwide and the new name does not reflect the US. But, the name was changed and we moved forward.
Now another new change has occurred. The Commission on Dietetic Registration has approved optional credentials. Any person who has completed the requirements noted above can now choose to use the credential RD (registered dietitian) or the newer credential RDN (registered dietitian nutritionist). This option is offered to reflect the change in the Academy's name and to demonstrate to the public the wide breath of services and knowledge our profession can offer. The RD and RDN credential have identical meanings and legal trademark definitions, but the practitioner must select only one designation to use. All of this makes sense, except for years our organization has attempted to show a distinction between registered dietitians and nutritionists. Why you wonder?
Dietitian is a legally defined term and you cannot use this designation unless you have completed approved academic learning and clinical experience. Nutritionist has no such foundation. In fact, anyone can use this title if they wish, but this group may not use the new RDN credential. As the president of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics said, "All registered dietitians are nutritionists, but not all nutritionists are registered dietitians." I completely understand that statement as does every other dietitian. But, I doubt seriously if the general public gets this nuanced distinction. The public will be left to sort out the credibility of the practitioner they are using.
I have spent a great deal of my professional life writing - food and nutrition columns for online newsletters and print magazines, along with over 30 books for consumers and college textbooks. I have also spent most of my professional life explaining my RD credential to publishers, editors, copyeditors, fact-checkers and even readers. Granted more and more of the public do recognize the RD credential but there is still a very large portion of the public that does not. Providing two optional credentials for the same profession, I believe, introduces a new layer of confusion to the public.
As someone who sat for the first RD exam ever administered and who distinctly remembers sitting on the curb outside of Columbia University, exhausted, I understand the amount of work that goes into achieving this credential. I also sit on the board of a college dietetics program and I see what the instructors must deal with to maintain their program's accreditation and how hard the students work to complete their course of study. It has been a long, hard struggle to achieve the recognition our profession deserves and to get both state and federal legislators to recognize RDs as the prime providers of nutrition services for Medicare beneficiaries and for private insurance plans.
Will the new optional credential - RD or RDN - hurt or strengthen our position in the health care arena, especially in light of the many health care changes about to occur in this country? Only time will tell. What's that old saying? - "Nothing is more constant than change." Maybe I'm simply a dinosaur who isn't happy with change. In the meantime I will stick with my current RD credential and watch and wait to see what others decide to do.
© NRH Nutrition Consultants, Inc.
The Most Complete Food Counter, 3rd ed., 2013
The Calorie Counter, 6th Ed., 2013
The Complete Food Counter, 4th ed., 2012
The Diabetes Counter, 4th Ed., 2011
The Protein Counter, 3rd Ed., 2011
The Ultimate Carbohydrate Counter, 3rd Ed., 2010
The Fat Counter, 7th ed., 2009
The Healthy Wholefoods Counter, 2008
The Cholesterol Counter, 7th Ed., 2008
Your Complete Food Counter App: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/your-complete-food-counter/id444558777?mt=8
For more information on Jo-Ann and her books, go to: www.TheNutritionExperts.com.
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Nursing B.S.N. Degree
Bachelor of Science
B.S.N. Nursing Degree Overview
The mission of the Crown College Department of Nursing is to provide a strong, biblically based nursing education for the purpose of preparing Christian men and women for service to communities, healthcare systems, the church-at-large, and the world.
The Nursing B.S.N. curriculum includes a Christian Studies core as well as a background in science and the humanities. Clinical nursing experiences are provided with the cooperation of a variety of hospitals and agencies throughout the area. In keeping with the emphasis on missionary nursing, students will participate in a cross-cultural nursing experience. Graduates of the program will be eligible to apply to take the national licensure examination (NCLEX).
This program offers students exceptional fl exibility in the types of courses they can take so that students can tailor a program to meet their specifi c needs. The strong science background also allows students to prepare for careers in other health related areas such as physical therapy, athletic training, and kinesiology.
Courses in the B.S.N. Nursing degree program require students to spend substantial time in off-campus clinical settings such as hospitals, clinics, and public health agencies. Crown has partnered with Ridgeview Hospital in Waconia, MN, as well as area hospitals in Buffalo, Shakopee, and Hutchinson. Crown’s relationships with these hospitals provide great connections for nursing students once they graduate.
The field of nursing is technologically complex. Crown’s state-of-the-art nursing lab gives students the chance to sharpen their skills with the most updated tools prior to heading into the field. Through online assignments and discussions, nursing students will learn to collaborate and have increased access to learning resources. | <urn:uuid:80a13cc0-bca3-4627-9242-ecb0f567a0e3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.crown.edu/campus/majors/nursing/majors/nursing-bsn/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952414 | 371 | 1.679688 | 2 |
January 28, 2013
Credit: Photo Credit: Field Aviation
John Croft Reykjavik, Iceland
“Pilots” at Air Iceland hold true to the nautical origins of the term, even with the best new avionics upgrade money can buy. As Flight FXI 16 approaches the northern Icelandic fishing village of Isafjordur in the pre-dawn hours of Dec. 17 (the Sun rises around noon at this time of year), Capt. George Hanson looks down to the water below to determine the state of turbulence on the inbound leg. We are dropping through 3,500 ft. on a GPS approach that culminates in a horseshoe-shaped counterclockwise descent framed by mountains.
Hanson sees a “line” in the water, a demarcation beyond which experience has taught him will very likely bring moderate to severe turbulence.
Sitting in the jump seat of the Bombardier Q200, TF-JMK, on the 45-min. revenue passenger flight up from Reyjavik, I am able to witness this holistic “clash” of cultures—mixing traditional pilotage techniques with the newest communication, navigation and surveillance equipment available, courtesy of a recent upgrade by Toronto's Field Aviation. Air Iceland has two Q200s with the new cockpit, TF-JMK entered service last March and TF-JMG in June.
Field is the only provider of the STC cockpit upgrade for the three out-of-production Dash 8 models, of which about 560 out of the 672 produced are still active. The company has been performing Dash 8 retrofit work for more than 20 years and has modified more than 30 of the twin turboprops for special-mission use.
“That's where the turbulence is—you can read it on the water,” says Hanson of the border between smooth and choppy surface in the Isafjarardjup fjord as we near the initial approach fix into Isafjordur.
The ground-based localizer approach Air Iceland used before equipping with GPS-threaded arrivals through that turbulence and into an area known for rain showers. With satellite-based navigation, however, the approach fixes can be placed more optimally, “closer to the airport and out of the showers,” says Hanson.
On today's arrival, it turns out, the best avionics available are ultimately not needed, as the stratus clouds and snow showers part just enough for the first officer and pilot-flying, Hjalti “Yalty” Baldursson, to see the coastline and break off from the GPS-based global navigation satellite system (GNSS) instrument approach for a visual arrival. | <urn:uuid:e4e3c654-9327-4a74-8bcb-6c527b98e57b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aviationweek.com/Article.aspx?id=/article-xml/AW_01_28_2013_p40-539457.xml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936551 | 567 | 1.679688 | 2 |
One of the hidden highlights of the UEFA calendar, the UEFA Regions' Cup is Europe's top competition for amateur footballers.
With amateur players making up 95% of those playing in organised matches in Europe, the tournament's aim is to reward excellence among players who have never played professional football at any level. The quality of the play at all the final tournaments has shown that there are plenty of talented players who have always played for love, not money.
A previous tournament for amateurs, the UEFA Amateur Cup, ran every four years between 1966 and 1978 before being abandoned because of a lack of interest from the public and member associations. However, the idea of a pan-European amateur tournament was resurrected in 1996 by the newly formed UEFA Committee for Amateur Football.
The new biennial tournament is open to all 53 of UEFA's member associations, provided they run a domestic championship. Generally, teams are put forward via a domestic qualifying competition on a regional basis – hence the name, Regions' Cup – although smaller associations are allowed to submit a national representative team.
The first UEFA Regions Cup was played in 1999. After a qualifying round involving 32 teams, the eight mini-tournament winners met in Veneto, in northern Italy, where the host team won the trophy by defeating Madrid 3-2 in the final.
The format of the competition has remained relatively stable since then, with a series of qualifying mini-tournaments being held to provide enough teams for an eight-team final round. With rising interest in the tournament, a preliminary round was introduced for the 2005 tournament.
The end result is an eight-team final round which is divided up into two groups. The four teams in each group play each other once in a league format with the teams that finish top of the two tables after the third and final game of the group stage taking each other on in the final.
As with the professional tournaments, if the finals are level after 90 minutes, extra-time and then a penalty shoot-out are used to separate the teams. Only three of the six finals to date have been concluded in normal time - a sign that the game is as competitive at amateur level as at the highest professional levels.
©UEFA.com 1998-2013. All rights reserved. | <urn:uuid:be0f1cb6-ac8f-48c5-b56d-a32d2aecff1f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.uefa.com/regionscup/season=2011/competitionformat/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965999 | 459 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Of project weir at Chattabal and the details thereof
This refers to the article regarding the project weir at Chattabal. It is sad to read that the structure has collapsed after spending so much of tax payers' money to reconstruct the heritage left by Englishmen who originally built it 1910. I had predicted this two years ago while I was on a visit in Kashmir.
I am a structural design engineer presently residing and working in Britain. I got involved with the above project while I was trying to establish a global design centre in Kashmir in May 2008.
I was approached by the Flood & Irrigation department who mentioned to me that they can't get competent contractors to design and construct this project. We had a few meetings to understand the brief from the client (Irrigation department). I then flew back to Britain to further brief the directors of my company regarding the opportunity to design this prestigious project.
Immediately after, we expressed our interest in the project via various letters and emails to the Chief Engineer. We were eventually asked to prepare the bid documents. It is to be noted that we were the only tenderers at the time and further application for tenders was closed. However to our surprise we were notified after a month or so via a letter that they have further entertained two more contractors to bid for the project.
We then did our own research on the competency of the contractors who were our competitors at the time and we were convinced that they did not have the appropriate experience of either designing or constructing such projects which was one of the main requirements laid in the tender document. Meanwhile we were cracking on with the initial design calculations and preparing the bid documents which almost took two months to compile as we had to furnish various requirements one of which was to supply a barge with a electro-mechanical arm to clean the debris from the weir which we proposed and had to import from a company in Michigan USA.
We submitted our technical and price bid documents in July 2008. We were confident that we will win the project and deliver the project as a example showing highest quality of work. However to our surprise we were notified that we were not successful because our price was slightly higher than the other contractor.
We have received confirmation from our sources in Kashmir that the contractor has never been involved with such projects and clearly doesn't have the competency which can be checked from the contractors work history. We have also been told by our sources that the contractor was given some vital technical information which we had produced in our technical bid document. This made things very clear that the departmental engineers were involved in illegally stealing information from our technical bid document and furnishing those to the contractor who won the project
It is saddening that for monetary gains our engineers are indulging in corruption and forgetting the safety of the people. It could have been a major disaster if the weir was loaded at its full capacity and failed which could have created a huge wave of water and could have been fatal for the house boat dwellers living down stream or people living by the banks.
Lastupdate on : Thu, 16 Jun 2011 21:30:00 Makkah time
Lastupdate on : Thu, 16 Jun 2011 18:30:00 GMT
Lastupdate on : Fri, 17 Jun 2011 00:00:00 IST
- MORE FROM LETTERS
Srinagar, June 16: Member Assembly Langate Er. Rashid on Thursday claimed that State Human Rights Commission (SHRC) has indicted forces in the 11 cases of human rights violations filed by him 2-years ago More
- Srinagar City
ASCENT Group to discuss vital issues on June 18
GK NEWS NETWORK
Srinagar, June 16: A social enterprise group is all set to discuss the ‘poor representation of’ the youth from Jammu and Kashmir in the elite civil services and also suggest ways and means to address the More
Jammu, June 16: In order to avoid the man-animal confrontation the Jammu and Kashmir government today asked the Wildlife department to intensify vigil in vulnerable areas. The Minister for Forest More
Ganderbal, June 16: A woman pilgrim, who had come to attend the annual urs at Babanagri in Kangan has been missing for past 5-days, police said on Thursday. A police official said wife of Khadim More
RBI ups interest rate to fight inflation
PRESS TRUST OF INDIA
Mumbai, Jun 16: Rates for home, auto and personal loans are set to go up again as the Reserve Bank today hiked key interest rates by 25 basis points, 10th time in the last 15 months, in its effort to rein More
KC to hold a national conference on Kashmir
NISAR AHMED THOKAR
Islamabad June 16: Chairman of Parliamentary Committee on Kashmir Maulana Fazlur-Rehman on Thursday said that the resolution of the long-pending Kashmir dispute was must to ensure greater peace and prosperity More | <urn:uuid:713c561a-0a10-4d71-8b85-5090dc282bfc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.greaterkashmir.com/news/2011/Jun/17/of-project-weir-at-chattabal-and-the-details-thereof-58.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980341 | 1,015 | 1.710938 | 2 |
Power tool maker The Black & Decker Corporation announced that net earnings from continuing operations for the fourth quarter of 2005 were U.S. $101.8 million, or $1.28 per diluted share. Excluding $51.2 million of incremental tax expense to repatriate foreign earnings under the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, net earnings from continuing operations were $1.93 per diluted share, a 21-percent increase from $1.60 in the fourth quarter of 2004.
For the full year 2005, net earnings from continuing operations were a record $544.0 million, or $6.69 per diluted share. Excluding the incremental tax expense in the fourth quarter and a favorable insurance settlement in the first quarter, net earnings from continuing operations were $6.88 per diluted share, a 27-percent increase from $5.40 in 2004.
Sales from continuing operations increased slightly for the quarter to a record $1.7 billion, including a 1 percent negative impact of foreign currency translation. For the full year, sales increased 21 percent to a record $6.5 billion.
According to Nolan D. Archibald, chairman and CEO, sales in the Power Tools and Accessories segment increased 2 percent for the quarter and 26 percent for the full-year period. The U.S. Industrial Products Group grew sales at a mid single-digit rate, driven by a double-digit growth rate for DEWALT(R) tools and accessories.
For the quarter, sales in the U.S. Black & Decker consumer business decreased slightly, due to order patterns that drove a double-digit rate of increase in the third quarter. European sales decreased at a mid single-digit rate and fell short of our expectations due to a weaker economic environment in the United Kingdom. For the full year, the U.S. businesses posted a double-digit rate of increase for DEWALT and a mid single-digit growth rate in the consumer division. Full-year margins of existing businesses increased significantly in all geographic regions, and exceeded 10 percent in Europe.
Black & Decker said it expects diluted earnings per share from continuing operations in the range of $7.20 to $7.40 for the full year 2006, which includes approximately $0.15 per share of incremental expense associated with adoption of the new accounting standard for stock-based compensation, which was not included in 2005 earnings and is not reflected in several analysts' estimates.
"Despite an earnings per share (EPS) increase exceeding 30 percent in the first half of 2005, we expect to deliver growth again in the first half of 2006 and more than 10 percent EPS growth in the second half," Archibald said. "We consider this a solid increase on top of the exceptional gains of the past 4 years. By executing our proven strategy to consistently grow earnings, we believe we can deliver superior returns to our investors."
to Daily News | <urn:uuid:6601433c-5216-49cb-bf82-4b7a793c96c7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.appliancemagazine.com/news.php?article=9773&zone=0&first=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947292 | 590 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Meri Kahani Meri Zabani, Apr 15, 2012 SAMAA TV 1/4
Meri Kahani Meri Zabani is a reenactment based narration of a harrowing tale in each episode to reveal the extent of inhuman behavior that human beings are capable of.
Each week a tale of trials and tribulations will be narrated by the central protagonist who has lived these hardships to emerge as either a stronger person and sometimes even succumb to them.
These are tales of anguish told by those who live them - expressions reveal a thousand wounds. Fresh: Sunday at 11:05PM. Repeat: Monday 03:05AM and 11:05PM. | <urn:uuid:2bb5ee45-8c46-481d-a1e0-96b0b90f0548> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://urdunewsroom.com/video/Meri-Kahani-Meri-Zabani-Apr-15-2012-SAMAA-TV-14 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951599 | 136 | 1.554688 | 2 |
University assists first responders, area residents after Hurricane Sandy
Posted November 8, 2012; 07:01 a.m.
As Princeton Borough and Princeton Township started recovering from the havoc caused by Hurricane Sandy, about 150 first responders working during the storm were provided with free meals by the University's Dining Services. Local residents whose homes lost power were invited to warm up, recharge phones and other electronic devices and use wireless Internet service at a hospitality center on campus.
The hospitality center, which was opened at the request of the Princeton municipal emergency operations center, "was just one of a number of ways that the University looked to provide resources to the community during the emergency," said Kristin Appelget, the University's director of community and regional affairs.
The University also offered a heavy duty electricity generator for use by Princeton municipal authorities if necessary.
Students affiliated with the University's Pace Center for Civic Engagement also volunteered at a community respite center at the John Witherspoon Middle School, where Princeton residents who lost power during Hurricane Sandy were able to take showers, charge electronic devices, get food and stay overnight.
The University's TigerTransit system provided free shuttle bus service between Princeton Junction station and the Princeton station while the "Dinky" train service was suspended in the aftermath of the storm. The TigerTransit service continued until New Jersey Transit began running shuttle buses on the route.
The University, which also lost power from the public electricity provider, had to shut down many administrative and academic buildings and run critical functions on limited power from the University's independent cogeneration plant for more than 24 hours. The plant can generate 13 megawatts of electricity, which is significantly less than the maximum campus demand when all buildings are fully operational.
However, University buildings that depend solely on electric power from the public grid remained without power for extended periods of time, and power was not restored to some University housing until Monday, Nov. 5.
Due to continued power outages in the Princeton area, several polling stations were relocated to the University’s Computer Science Building on Olden Street and the University's Jadwin Gym, where a large section of the parking area was reserved for voters. More than 3,400 voters from municipal districts 1, 2, 4, 14, 15, 16 and 20 cast their votes on campus on Nov. 6.
The meals for the first responders, students who remained on campus during fall recess and employees on duty were prepared and served by a small team of Dining Services employees who were able to make it to work.
"We always use the phrase, 'it's all about food, mood and attitude,'" said Stu Orefice, executive director of Dining Services. "Despite the challenges that they faced, our staff maintained a positive attitude, and our goal was to share that spirit through our service."
Orefice continued working even though his own house was badly damaged by the storm.
"We were operating with a lean but dedicated team that made literally hundreds of people happy — by serving nearly 9,000 hot and cold meals over five days," he said. "When Frist Campus Center opened its doors on Wednesday, not many restaurants in town were open, so members of the Princeton community started coming in, and we were selling as much as we do when all our students are back."
Elsewhere on campus, hundreds of employees, many of whom were unable to reach their homes, worked in shifts to keep critical University functions running. The storm felled about 110 trees, which blocked roads and damaged vehicles, fences and other property. No injuries were reported.
Throughout the storm the University coordinated its efforts with a joint emergency operations center for Princeton Borough and Princeton Township.
The University's response to the hurricane was coordinated through an emergency operations center on campus, which was staffed by representatives from the Department of Public Safety, Facilities, Dining Services, University Services, Office of Information Technology (OIT), Office of Environmental Health and Safety, University Health Services, Campus Life, Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students, Office of the Dean of the Graduate School, Office of Human Resources, and Office of Communications, among others. | <urn:uuid:2676c7b3-8ffa-44d0-a851-21a47c07f90a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S35/23/41C55/index.xml?from=2008-03-01&to=2008-04-01 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975509 | 847 | 1.625 | 2 |
Last week the American Enterprise Institute said eliminating farm subsidies could save taxpayers $100 billion over 10 years.
That's not a lot in light of the debt this nation has run up. Further, I suspect the actual number is unknowable but I have no doubt we will be better off if actual subsidies are removed.
The group noted "inefficiencies" of crop subsidies and the high cost of farm disaster payments and subsidies to crop insurance, and it said increases in food costs had driven up another major part of the USDA's budget, which is food aid to those in this country classed as poor.
So, getting to my point, I've long been opposed to the way the former food stamps program is run. When I was 15 years old and sacking groceries in the local grocery story I saw the abuses in the program and the poor food choices and I mentally redesigned the program right then and there. Basically what I had in mind then and what I have in mind now is to rebuild the program to be more like Women, Infants and Children, which only allows certain foods deemed of suitable value.
Above that, certainly there are cuts to be made there, yet nothing has been said about that. Meanwhile our nation's social/welfare programs are sinking the budget boat.
The voters don't want to hear about that, however. Their ox is a sacred cow and must not be gored. | <urn:uuid:d80095a8-7cb8-456d-9996-ca6f6f946e13> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://farmprogress.com/blogs-farm-subsidies-neck-stretched-on-chopping-block-2465 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974607 | 286 | 1.578125 | 2 |
We recently attended the launch of Xerox's Innovation Hub in Chennai (a major South Indian city), their first such venture outside the developed world. The initial mission of the Xerox India Innovation Hub is to develop document management solutions that are relevant to emerging market countries and, at the same time, that help innovate solutions and services delivery worldwide.
India, of course, has been a major destination for R&D among Western firms for some time now. Texas Instruments was leader of the pack, opening their R&D center in Bangalore way back in 1985. More multinationals followed suit in the 1990s. In 2000, GE founded the John F. Welch Technology Center in Bangalore, which is now GE's largest lab outside the US. And the story is similar for IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, and many others. Our research shows that Fortune 500 companies currently operate 63 "captive" R&D facilities in India (i.e., "captive" in the sense that these MNCs totally own and control all the physical and human resources available in these labs).
So what took Xerox so long? And are they too late coming to the R&D game in emerging markets?
In fact, what appears like imitation on Xerox's part is really a reframing of innovation in a global context. Indeed, we believe that Xerox is pioneering a whole new way in managing global R&D. Namely: creating lean and nimble innovation hubs in emerging markets which don't take the traditional "captive" route of owning all resources. Instead, these hubs focus on partnering with local universities and start-ups to get scale and speed in taking cutting-edge ideas to market.
While we have written in the past about how companies like GE and Cisco are embracing polycentric innovation (i.e., shifting more R&D responsibilities to emerging markets and using India and China as a launching pad for global solutions), these multinationals are mostly relying on their own in-house R&D talent in India and China. But Xerox is tapping local partners in emerging markets to co-lead its shift to a polycentric innovation model — thus completely bypassing the need to build big, expensive R&D labs in emerging markets.
Let us elaborate a bit on what makes Xerox's own version of polycentric innovation unique among the multinationals we have studied.
At first, Xerox's polycentric innovation approach might seem counterintuitive. Like other multinationals, Xerox could easily have set up a captive R&D lab staffed with an army of low-cost talent, given that India boasts thousands of highly-qualified and inexpensive scientists and engineers.
However, Sophie Vandebroek, Xerox's chief technology officer, realized that India is also home to world-class science and technology universities and a plethora of creative entrepreneurs who might already have developed solutions for problems that Xerox in-house researchers are trying to solve, such as remote document printing using mobile phones. And because these entrepreneurs are deeply embedded in their local communities, they have a greater sense of what end users need; they can thus produce solutions that boast higher market relevance.
Rather than guessing local market needs and reinventing the technology wheel using in-house R&D personnel, Vandebroek therefore decided to set up an Innovation Hub in Chennai that would connect external inventors with in-house development and marketing capabilities to scale up these solutions and roll them out under the Xerox brand. The Hub's goal is to help Xerox achieve greater economies of scale and scope in innovation for both emerging as well as developed markets.
This collaborative approach to doing R&D is called "open innovation" in academic circles. In recent years, multinationals such as Procter & Gamble, Eli Lilly, and Boeing have been practicing open innovation primarily in the US and European markets by building what we call "Innovation Networks" — collaborative ecosystems that leverage the talent, ideas, and capital from local universities, venture capitalists, and startups to co-create new products and services.
To our knowledge, however, this is the first time that a multinational has decided to seed and anchor an Innovation Network in an emerging market and make it the cornerstone of its global R&D strategy. In doing so, Xerox is successfully integrating the well-established open innovation approach with the still-evolving polycentric innovation paradigm.
Xerox's fledging Innovation Network in India already boasts several high-profile knowledge partnerships. For instance, Xerox has partnered with the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras), one of the country's finest engineering institutions, to use cloud computing to improve efficiency of document services delivery. It is also working with IIT Madras's Rural Technology Business Incubator to on solutions that improve workflow at small businesses in rural India. Xerox has joined forces with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) to use machine learning and game theory principles to improve the performance of online service marketplaces. Finally, Xerox is in discussion with venture capitalists and entrepreneurs across India to identify promising startups with cutting-edge technology that could benefit Xerox.
Interestingly, we noticed that almost all the participants at the launch of Xerox's Innovation Hub in India were its local partners. This is a stark contrast with the inauguration of other multinationals' R&D labs, which tend to be packed with hundreds of their newly-recruited in-house scientists and engineers!
In coming decades, as emerging markets like India and China become global engines of economic growth, demand for new products and services is set to explode in these regions. To effectively respond to the rising innovation demand in emerging markets, multinationals must go beyond opening more R&D labs in India and China and shifting decision-making power to those regions. Rather, they must emulate Xerox's polycentric innovation model by building regional Innovation Networks in emerging markets that encompass local universities, government labs, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurs. By leveraging the talent and ideas of these external innovation partners, multinationals will be able to co-develop solutions for both emerging and developed market customers much faster and less expensively. Essentially, they can innovate more for less cost and for more people.
We believe that Xerox's partner-driven polycentric innovation approach is the right strategy for multinationals seeking long-term success in emerging markets. Do you agree? What challenges do you think Xerox will face in implementing this novel approach? Have your own organization tried to deploy similar Innovation Networks in emerging markets? If so, tell us about your experience...
Navi Radjou is Executive Director of the Centre for India & Global Business (CIGB) at Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge where Dr. Jaideep Prabhu is the Jawaharlal Nehru Professor of Indian Business and Enterprise. Dr. Prasad Kaipa is a CEO Coach and advisor; he has worked with over 100 CXOs and 30 Fortune 500 companies in the areas of leadership development and innovation. Dr. Simone Ahuja is the founder of Blood Orange Media. | <urn:uuid:0373b294-a2ab-4a67-92cf-4fbedfe9820e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/08/how_xerox_innovates_with.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947482 | 1,442 | 1.539063 | 2 |
If Vladimir Putin plays his cards right, by the time he has finished ruling Russia, he will have spent more time in power than Leonid Brezhnev, the great bear of the Soviet era. Poised to return as president next March, after a four-year stint as prime minister, Putin would be 71 in 2024 at the conclusion of two six-year terms in the Kremlin. Whether he lasts that long we shall see, but thanks to a recent encounter with a plastic surgeon’s scalpel, we can at least be sure that he will never look as old as his predecessor in the Kremlin. And as he has laid bare his intentions to retake the centre stage, Putin has been rolling back the years in other ways.
This week he has unveiled a grand vision to create a “Eurasian Union” linking old Soviet neighbours, foreseeing a “powerful, supranational union, capable of becoming one of the poles of the modern world”. Coming from a former KGB colonel who described the break-up of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century”, his words could easily prompt fears that he wanted to resurrect the USSR. He stressed that wasn’t the case. “It would be naive to try to restore or copy what was in the past. But time dictates that we should have closer integration based on values, politics and economics,” he wrote. The Eurasian Union could provide an “economically sound and balanced partnership” with the European Union.
So what does Putin want? His idea of a fully functioning revisionist fraternity seems a non-starter. Its success is likely to be as cosmetic as his recent operation. A customs union agreed with Belarus and Kazakhstan in 2009 is still very much a work in progress. Kazakh officials privately admit that they are not doing well out of the deal. It is hard to see who, from the 15 republics that were in the USSR, would welcome Moscow’s entreaties.
The three Baltic states – Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania – are happily independent and tired of Russia’s sneering and cyber-bullying. Ukraine, which would be crucial to any new alignment, wants to join Europe and has not appreciated Russia’s threats to its gas supply. The other “Stans” – Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan – have shown a desire to balance their foreign policy interests between Moscow, China and Washington.
“It is utterly pie in the sky,” says James Nixey, Russia analyst at the Chatham House think tank. “This is Putin living in the past, trying to recreate the supposed glories of his first stint as president. The fact is Russia has no mates, and if you don’t have any real friends this won’t work. The EU may have its problems with the eurozone, but it is still more attractive than something that harks to the past.”
During Putin’s first two terms as president, from 2000 to 2008, Russia recovered from the ignominy of seeing its economy fall apart under Boris Yeltsin. Revolts in the Caucasus were contained and a level of stability was achieved that will be his selling point in the so-called election that will take place in March.
As he prepares to take over from President Dmitry Medvedev, his hand-picked seat-warmer for the past four years, Putin needs to demonstrate that he can live up to the action-man image he has cultivated – hunting bears, flying planes and getting his pecs out for the media at every opportunity. Exerting control over neighbours is an obvious step towards reasserting Russia’s role on the world stage.
“Expect more bellicose rhetoric, more nationalism and other worrying signs,” says Mr Nixey. “Like anyone of his generation or older, Putin is a child of the Soviet Union. Russia doesn’t wield the influence it did then but it is almost inevitable that anyone in power holds ambitions swayed by that era.”
Medvedev, who is 15 years younger than his master, has tried to modernise and liberalise the economy. He adopted a softer tone with the West and cooperated with President Barack Obama’s “reset” policy that followed the 2008 invasion of Georgia. Putin may have been pulling all the strings, but Medvedev showed signs of understanding that Russia was at a crossroads, facing a choice between becoming a semi-Westernised, half-decent democracy with a semblance of the rule of law, or continuing towards a thugocracy where corruption is rampant, exiled critics are fatally poisoned in London hotels, political opponents are either jailed or shunned by the state media, while political clones and clowns are created to present a veneer of democratic choice.
It would be too simplistic to portray the junior partner in the ruling tandem, as it was called, as a champion of reform. He did little to challenge the power of the ruling nexus of politicians, oligarchs, businessmen and security chiefs of which he is a junior member. Mr Putin and his advisers have succeeded in creating a patronage network based primarily on the state-owned hydrocarbon giants Gazprom and Rosneft.
Putin has not pushed as hard as the man he will replace for new technologies, especially when that requires Western investment, and does not express the same awareness that the economy cannot sustain itself as it has for the past decade on high oil and gas prices. “Without very serious changes in the investment climate and economic structure, the Russian economy will not succeed in the medium and long term,” says an adviser to the president. “All the sources of growth that drove the first decade of this century [oil and gas] are almost exhausted. There is growth – from manufacturing and consumers – but it is insufficient to meet our goals.”
The government has touted headline-grabbing projects such as the futuristic Skolkovo business school, designed by the British architect David Adjaye, and the occasional new high-speed rail link. But they mask the fact that barely 100 miles from the designer stores and BMW-clogged streets of Moscow, Russia recedes rapidly into the early 1980s. This is a country that sent the first man to outer space, but has 17 airlines banned from operating in the European Union. Last month, yet another passenger plane crashed, killing an entire professional ice hockey team.
Russia faces an existential dilemma that goes well beyond the characters of its current political protagonists. There is much more nostalgia for the safety nets of the Soviet era than many in the West might expect. Putin’s popularity rating is about 50 per cent, not least because Russians are proud of their country’s size and culture, and appreciate his projection of strength. They also share his ambivalence towards the West. “Russians admire the West but often disdain its lack of social services,” says Dmitry Babich, a commentator with the official Ria Novosti news agency. “And the elite has mixed feelings. It doesn’t hate Europe – look where they educate their children and buy their homes – but they don’t like being dictated to and told how to behave by the West.”
Many Russians loathe the system – and Putin – but shrug and observe the fatalism that accepts that strongmen and corruption will preside over their lives. On a recent visit to Moscow, I met a rare creature, a businessman trying to make his way without political connections. He had turned for help to Rusnano (as in nano-technologies), an organisation set up to encourage new industry. Alexey Korsh, vice president of Optogan, which makes smart lighting, had spent several years in the West before taking his entrepreneurial spirit home. His conclusion: “In the US, 60 per cent of people want to start their own business. In Russia, 60 per cent of people want to work for Gazprom – that’s their ambition,” he said. | <urn:uuid:6be5750f-d641-4d58-ac32-a63cfd6fa4c5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/8808712/Vladimir-Putin-is-trying-to-take-Russia-back-in-time.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976351 | 1,669 | 1.84375 | 2 |
Each January, the Joe Barnhart Scholarship Program brings back to campus former students who are seniors on their respective college campus to share their experiences. And the topic can be anything from bed sheets to time management.
The answers to college life’s questions are found during this event each year and will hopefully help the listening audience make the right choices when it comes their time to choose. And also to recognize light bulb moments – those moments when all the stuff you’ve been hearing from other people finally starts to make sense and you finally get it.
Freddie Rodriguez and Stella Sanchez, two juniors right now at JHS, experienced a few light bulb moments of their own during a session that morning. They really appreciated the financial aid tips and comments on how to use your free time wisely.
“I didn’t know colleges had financial aid offices,” exclaimed Stella. “I’m glad they told us to find and frequent those offices.”
The morning panel, made up of Mikela Lifland, Matt Ortega, Sonia Calica, Eric Soza and Audrey Jones, spoke to upper level English classes in an informal session. The afternoon classes were recipients of the same format, but different a panel – Jordan Gonzales, Mallorie Garcia, Matt Botello, Johnny Dang and Chad Bast.
Most currently attend Texas colleges or universities. Mikela just graduated from LIM College (Laboratory Institute of Merchandising) in New York.
“Do what makes you happy, and school becomes much easier” was one epiphany shared by senior recreation, parks and tourism major Matt Ortega.
Matt was addressing the issue of choosing a college major and was excited to have this opportunity to have a frank discussion with his alma mater. As an entering freshman at Texas A&M University, Matt chose chemical engineering for his major. After a time, he began struggling in some of his classes, and then realized he wasn’t enjoying the learning process anymore.
These graduates are obviously excited to return and share words of wisdom. During a moment between sessions, Mallorie Garcia said matter-of-factly, “We should talk about internships.” And immediately another frenzy of advice would spew forth from the college group. They have a variety of work experiences among them, and were more than happy to pass on the information to the next group.
Mallorie is a senior at St. Edward’s University studying to be an occupational therapist, and she made sure to also mention that “Working on campus helps make connections.”
That was when Matt Ortega let everybody in on how he chose the major he is studying now. During one summer off between college semesters, he had been working a summer camp when it dawned on him that he really liked working with youth and being in a social atmosphere.
“Duh,” whispered his former teacher whose class was listening to him now, “Matt was always involved with everything on campus. He’s a very social person.”
“I am so proud of these kids,” said Gina Latcham, BISD instructor for junior level English. It’s important that our current students hear these stories – hear that there will be setbacks and unpleasant experiences in college; hear that they can overcome them; and hear that there are plenty of good experiences too.
Eric Soza threw in this observation during the morning sessions: These years have the potential to be the best experience of your life.
Brenda DeLaRosa, program administrator and panel moderator for the event, asked each guest to introduce himself or herself to the audience, briefly stating who they were, where they were going to school and when they would graduate, and what their major was. Then she launched into a 45-minute question-and-answer session asking, “Was college everything you thought it was going to be?”
“You have to take care of things for yourself,” offered Johnny Dang after a moment of contemplation. And then continued almost as if to himself only… “You have to buy your food…you have to prepare your food…you have to do your laundry…”
“Learning to mature as a person was probably my biggest adjustment,” answered Chad Bast.
As the students continue to share information, the overall theme seemed not to be just the academics in which these students have gained wisdom but life experiences as well. How to study, how to manage time and why you should talk to college professors began to be interlaced with how to make friends, how to save money, how to be on your own.
“Get a planner!” interjected Audrey Jones, “Oh, and don’t go home every weekend. Make friends. And pick your battles. She marked off these points on her fingers as she talked. Then she just stopped and smiled. This once-reserved young lady, who is also engaged to be married, told the audience dramatically, “Take risks now (referring to exploring interests)! Because later you’ll be worrying about paying for a home, kids….life.” | <urn:uuid:70e81e7a-dfd0-4e99-a24a-0aca30bd5b0f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mysoutex.com/pages/full_story_landing/push?article-Forum+gives+tips+on+college+life+to+high+schoolers%20&id=21442863 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977681 | 1,078 | 1.625 | 2 |
22 November 2010
Designed by George Edmund Street RA in 1868, the Royal Courts of Justice are the last major Victorian Gothic Revival buildings in London. We explore the High Court and Court of Appeal which used an amazing 35 million bricks, have over 1000 rooms and more than three and a half miles of corridor.
This event is also taking place on 28 October 2010. Click here to read more | <urn:uuid:ae22d534-c9f6-40c5-9778-b7c108070f5f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/events/friends-preview-days/royal-courts-of-justice,1391,EV.html?action=com.othermedia.webkit.site.UserPreferenceAction&actionToken=aX-SUuyrd9W_2&preference=user-size-medium | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961114 | 80 | 1.6875 | 2 |
For many children throughout the Arkansas River Valley, that really is the case. Summertime equals days of fun, late nights and sleeping in late, maybe even until noon.
What about the children of working parents? Where and how do they spend their summer days?
Several day cares and preschools in Russellville offer summer programs tailor-made for school age children to accommodate the summer schedule of working parents.
“We’ve offered summer care for school age children for several years,” Tosha Sharp, director of Parkway Daycare and Learning Center, said. “We understand the dilemma parents of school age children face during the summer and we are so glad to be able to staff additional child care workers to accommodate an influx of children in the summer.”
Sharp said the summer program is really an extension of its after-care program during the school year. Several day cares offer pickup from local schools during the school year to assist working parents who cannot pick up children after school.
“We saw a need and added the summer care program,” Sharp said. “We also keep kids during spring break.
“I am a full-time attorney for the state of Arkansas,” Lynn Cox, mother of two school-age boys, said. “I don’t know what I would do if day care wasn’t an option during the summer.”
Cox said her youngest son, Noah, attended Parkway Daycare until entering preschool at Saint John Catholic School, where his older brother Hunter attended kindergarten. She said she began planning for summer child care during the spring, long before school was out.
“I probably texted Tosha (Sharp) twice a week for the two months prior to school letting out to ensure my spot was secure,” Cox said.
Cox said both boys enjoy attending day care during the summer and don’t consider it to be school or day care.
“It’s almost like a day camp,” Cox said. “They do so many fun activities. I think if I had a day off, they would probably still want to attend.”
Happy Campers Preschool and Clubhouse also offers a summer program for school age children. The program is structured similar to Parkway Daycare’s program; both have daily or weekly field trips which provide not only recreation, but learning activities.
“We really offer a variety of activities,” Shelley Johnson, worker for Happy Campers, said. “We go somewhere every day and the kids also have fun recreation activities outside. Inside they play board games and games on the computer and do crafts and other inside activities.”
Johnson and Sharp said the field trips include Tom E. Tiger, swimming at Hickey pool, trips to Skate Station and visits to Lake Dardanelle State Park for the junior naturalist programs.
The children also have opportunities to learn more about the different emergency service personnel who work in Russellville. They learn about fire safety at the city’s four fire stations, and Sharp said the children learned about multiple safety procedures on a visit to the Pope County Ambulance Service.
“We really work hard to make the summer program fun and educational,” Johnson said. “We accept children from kindergarten to the age of 12. That’s quite a big age gap, so it is important to plan age appropriate activities with all the children in mind.”
Parkway Daycare and Learning Center and Happy Campers Preschool and Clubhouse are just two of the day cares in Russellville that offer a summer program for school age children. Prices vary based on number of children and by day care.
Call specific child care centers for additional information. | <urn:uuid:c6956b5e-2820-4d39-8469-afbb77407922> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://couriernews.com/view/full_story/19078295/article-Summer-day-care | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970083 | 780 | 1.539063 | 2 |
SQL Fiddle is a new tool that allows you to experiment with SQL queries without even having a dbms.
Following the footsteps of the online web editor jsFiddle, SQL Fiddle is a web based tool where you create a database by utilizing your schema and choosing an underlying engine amongst MySQL, PostgreSQL, MS SQL Server, Oracle, and SQLite; and then run queries against it.
(Click to enlarge)
As it is web-based, you don’t need to install a dbms, and it also has the advantage of allowing you to compare the syntax of a variety of SQL flavours (although all products follow the standards there are differences in the implementation as well as proprietary features) inherent in these diverse dbms. It enables you to engage with functionality that might exist in one but not in another, so serving as a "product shootout", as well as letting you look at how your query is going to be executed by observing the query execution plans it provides.
This also helps with optimizing and comparing queries. In addition, you can post a link to your fiddle to forums like Stackoverflow when looking for help. | <urn:uuid:bc1ff5f5-185e-4878-9f3a-297fb8ad9c84> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://i-programmer.info/news/84/4388.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953268 | 233 | 1.625 | 2 |
Our youth group started studying the book of Revelation 3 weeks ago. We’re going through the book verse by verse and comparing and contrasting four different viewpoints: Futurist, Preterist, Historic Pre-mill & dispensational (it’s wrong, but it’s also what so many Christians believe today).
Initially, everyone was decidedly in the Futurist camp, with those who had viewed the Left Behind series leaning towards a dispensational understanding. But as we’ve finished up a general overview of the four systems and began looking at the first chapter there seems to be a predominant mix of the Historicist & Preterist view.
The Historicist view looks at the book of Revelation as a commentary on the church age. So in this view each day that passes by in Revelation is equal to a year of time on earth. So various events are reflective of actual church history — the swam of locusts from Revelation 9 was fulfilled with the rising of Islam. The 1260 day (which is really 1260 years) reign of the beast is equated to the Papacy’s control over Europe. This is pretty well out of favor now but it was the view that most Reformers held including John Calvin, John Knox, & Martin Luther as well as later theologians such as Jonathan Edwards and Charles Spurgeon.
The Preterist view looks at the book of Revelation and finds that the majority of the prophecy was fulfilled by the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. Jesus’ prophecy in Mathew 24 that “this generation” would not all die until his coming in judgment is interpreted literally and locally. This view requires accepting an earlier dating of the book of Revelation than many scholars allow for, but not so early that it becomes outlandish.
It’s interesting to see what will come out of this study. We’re doing a point / counterpoint style as we read through the book. The group is doing an admirable job arguing for all the positions as we think it through. They’ve asked a number of times what position I hold with regard to eschatology. My mind is fairly well made up on the issue, but I won’t spill. I want them to think on the issue critically rather than going along with what I say. But… I ask you the same question they’ve asked me. Revelation. What do you think? How come? | <urn:uuid:4e867cfa-fc29-43a4-9acd-8495f2f146ee> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://jonspach.com/tag/historicism/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97394 | 500 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Learning Maya | Character Rigging and Animation
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Customer ReviewsRating: 3 out of 5
needs to explain more precisely..
Many peolple are tolking about this..
Example: On page 69 under Adding Selection handles ... it says, "Select All Components Off selection mask and turn on the Selection Handles selection mask."
what does this mean? where is that selection mask?
can some body tell me what that means?
this book is way to expensive and does not have any explanation
Rating: 5 out of 5
If you're ready for character animation, buy this book
The tutorials in this book will not only teach you everything you need to know to rig and animate characters in Maya, it can also serve as a model for a basic (if slightly heavy) rig that you can refine for your own needs as you get more experience. The Melvin character is easy to build and animate because the instructions are so clear. Also, with the included files on the CD, you can start any chapter independently of any other. If, for example, you want to skip rigging and go right to smooth skinning and weighting, you just open the chapter file and there is the character, ready to bind. I rated this book 5 stars because it's the best book out there for learning how to do Maya rigging and animation, not because it is perfect. There are some topics it does not address. There are some discussions in the Appendix on general issues such as the pros and cons of different IK setups in the legs and how to use Quaternion rotations instead of Euler space rotations, but to be fair, the in-depth discussion of options a rigger faces are somewhat out of the scope of a tutorial book. As noted by others, this is not a book for beginners. It assumes you know the Maya GUI, how to use the manipulation tools, navigate in the viewports, etc. I'd been working with Maya on my own for a year and a half before I bought this book, and I found it to be superb in addressing its subject.
Rating: 4 out of 5
good solid Book
Im sorry but you shouldn't be reading this book if you cant find the "all components off" toggle, this book is made for a user who is beyond a beginner lever and more familiar with Maya and how it works. It lays down a good foundation on how to rig a character properly, for more advanced rigging I suggest a lot of experimenting on your own, there is no sing resource that will give you everything on a silver platter
· Maya Character Animation
· Learning Maya | Dynamics
· The Animator's Survival Kit: A Manual of Methods, Principles, and Formulas for Classical, Computer, Games, Stop Motion, and Internet Animators
· MEL Scripting for Maya Animators
· Learning Maya | Rendering | <urn:uuid:91e0153c-912e-4fd0-96c4-ab8fcffd2fa2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.centrasoft.com/d4/0973005238.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933789 | 636 | 1.5 | 2 |
Votes of area members of Congress on key issues during the week ending Friday.
House bans utility plant finance costs pass-through. In an effort to stop producers of electrical power from passing construction costs on to consumers, the House Feb. 8 passed legislation to prohibit utilities from including in their rate bases the cost of financing new power plants while work on them is in progress. The bill was approved 288-113.
About 10 percent of national electricity sales would be affected if thebill became law.
A Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) regulation that took effect last July allowed federally regulated utility companies to charge customers for up to 50 percent of the interest being paid to finance new plant construction, regardless if a need for a new plant had been demonstrated. Until a decade ago, both federal and state jurisdictions required companies to wait until new plants were operating before factoring their costs into consumer rates.
Backers of the prohibition said the regulation shifts the risks of plant expansion to consumers from utility stockholders. "We have seen in the last 10 years more than 100 power plants cancelled," said Richard L. Ottinger, D- N.Y. "It is highly inequitable that consumers . . . should have to bear those financing costs rather than the shareholders." The sponsors also promised that the bill would save money for ratepayers while encouraging companies to seek alternatives to building new facilities.
The bill's opponents defended the need for utilities to cover their investment costs to assure the nation's future power supply. They warned of "rate shocks" - sudden increases when new plants begin operation
Voting to halt the inclusion of finance costs in utility rates:
N.J. - Roukema (R); Pa. - Yatron (D), Kostmayer (D), McDade (R), Harrison (D).
Voting against: Pa. - Ritter (R).
Senate moves to loosen exclusionary rule. In welcome news for proponents of President Reagan's anti-crime program, the Senate Feb. 7 voted to blunt the Supreme Court's bar of the use of illegally obtained evidence in federal criminal trials. The tally was 63-24.
The so-called "exclusionary rule" originally was intended to discourage police from resorting to unconstitutional methods when gathering evidence. It did so by excluding this evidence from use at trial.
The bill waives the prohibition in cases where it is shown that the police obtained evidence with a good faith belief that their conduct was legal. The modification applies only in federal courts.
Those in favor of moderating the exclusionary rule, backed by state and federal prosecutors, cited a public perception of the judicial system as arbitrary and concerned more with procedure than with guilt and innocence. "(The bill) may not be the perfect legislative measure," said Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., "but it does represent a significant step toward restoring the integrity of our criminal justice system and refocusing the trial upon the search for truth."
Opponents, with support from the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Bar Association, questioned whether Congress had the constitutional authority to diminish the scope of the exclusionary rule. "By placing the guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure in the Bill of Rights," argued Charles McC. Mathias Jr., R-Md., 'our predecessors in the First Congress of the United States made certain that future Congresses could not undo what they had done."
Voting to restrict the exclusionary rule:
N.J. - Bradley (D), Pa. - Heinz (R).
Voting against: N.J. - Lautenberg (D), Pa. - Specter (R).
Senate readies bid to restore death penalty. Resurrecting an old conflict, the Senate Feb. 9 moved to cut off a debate staged by opponents of capital punishment, thereby paving the way for a new federal death penalty bill. The motion to end the filibuster - the use of unlimited debate and delaying tactics - required a three-fifths majority for adoption, and carried 65-26.
As part of the anti-crime package proposed last March by the Reagan administration, the bill would amend the federal criminal code. It establishes procedures consistent with constitutional guidelines expressed by the Supreme Court, including guidelines and review processes intended to assure that sentences are determined without regard to race, color or national origin. It would require the death penalty for a number of federal crimes, including certain cases of homicide, treason, espionage, assassination attempts on the president and other high officials, and the murder of federal corrections officers.
Though final passage in the Senate is expected soon after the February recess, prospects for the bill in the Democratic-controlled House are seen as poor. | <urn:uuid:b99bdace-6683-4e57-ab58-30a09f3d4aa9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.mcall.com/1984-02-12/news/2406078_1_utility-rates-exclusionary-rule-power-plants | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953275 | 957 | 1.710938 | 2 |
The Pedorthic Association of Canada (PAC) launched its first‐ever Clinical Practice Guidelines at its annual symposium in April.
Written by about 60 Canadian pedorthists and reviewed by 33 foot professionals from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, this manual is designed to raise the bar of pedorthic practice in Canada, according to a PAC press release.
“Our primary objective when we started this project in the fall of 2010 was to develop a publication that would help improve patient care—and we have done that,” said PAC President Ryan Robinson, CPed Tech(C), C Ped(C). “I’m confident that our members will see the Clinical Practice Guidelines as an essential resource.”
“We’re also especially proud of our process,” said Mike Forgrave, CPed(C), chair of PAC’s Clinical Practice Guidelines Task Force. “We used a double‐blind review where authors and reviewers were not made known to each other during the review process, and we demanded significant citation where literature existed.”
Every PAC member will receive a free copy of the manual, while non-members may purchase it from PAC.
For more information, visit www.pedorthic.ca | <urn:uuid:bf3e3b54-95ca-48f2-b186-1e87225ae953> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.oandp.com/articles/NEWS_2012-05-14_01.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940282 | 264 | 1.6875 | 2 |
Despite the harsh economic conditions that have plagued Valley businesses this past year, wages and salaries managed to steadily increase, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
The report, released by the department's Bureau of Labor Statistics, said workers received a 4.4 percent jump in earnings during a fiscal year that ended September 2008.
Among the 14 metropolitan areas for which the figures are available, the Phoenix metro area ranks second - behind Philadelphia - for the highest percentage change. Nationwide, wages and salaries grew by an average of only 2.9 percent.
"The Phoenix area is holding its own in compensation when compared to some of the other metro areas," said Todd Johnson, an economist with the Labor Department. "Based on the data, other cities seem to have had more layoffs in better compensated positions."
The bureau's findings were puzzling to many Valley business leaders.
Dennis Doby, research administration senior director for the Arizona Department of Commerce, said Arizona's economy has "endured a number of woes in recent months." His department released an employment report Thursday that said Arizona's jobless claims hit 30,000 in October, the highest it's been in three decades.
"The (wage and salary) increase doesn't make a lot of sense to me considering we just released a study that showed losses in many well-paying industries," he said, pointing to the thousands of construction jobs lost in the past year.
Ann Seiden, spokeswoman for Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said a possible explanation could be that having fewer employees means that there are fewer employees to spread compensation across.
"With a smaller work force and a lack of growth rate, businesses could be adjusting salaries," she said.
In addition to salary jumps, total compensation costs paid by employers, which include health and disability insurance, spiked 4.5 percent in the Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale area.
The increase was well above the 2.8 percent national jump.
Lois Yates, vice chairman for economic development at the Mesa Chamber of Commerce, attributes the percentage surge to an increase in health care costs.
"Chamber members have talked about health care costs as a big ticket item," she said. "Many of them are small business owners. And they're having a tougher time paying off those larger bills."
But as far as an increase in wages and salaries are concerned, Yates is equally as perplexed.
"It's a little strange," she said. "Each community has been hurt pretty badly this past year." | <urn:uuid:89a16b5f-74ec-4373-871d-048fa8736b6e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://eastvalleytribune.com/news/article_1356de4d-0ee4-5fe6-8dff-5a365d51e316.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9775 | 514 | 1.75 | 2 |
Long story... but I'm back.
So I learn from Early Returns that the City of Pittsburgh's euphemism as oversight board, otherwise known as the Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority (ICA), is still
around. Who knew?
They seem to be looking at the city's debt. I need to update my graphic below which is my
calculation of the long term trend in the city's debt when calculated per
household. But then I realized it really is a philosophical question these days what
the city's debt is.
So remember the whole debate over the notional 'asset' the
city's pension fund now counts. A
promise of future parking tax revenue is actuarially monetized to be counted as
an asset. I still want to know ..... if
it is really an 'asset' could the pension board sell it to a third party? Is that almost the definition of 'asset'. OK, skip that, but it has a big corollary that goes like this:
So if the pension board is counting the diverted parking
revenues as an 'asset'.. is it not the case that the same promised revenue
stream is an equally valued debt to the city of Pittsburgh's accounting?
Why ask why?
But if you look at my un-updated graphic below (from this old post) you see the long term trend in city debt when caluclated per resident household in the city of Pittsburgh. What you see is a big jump in the mid/late 1990's when the city of Pittsburgh floated a big Pension Bond to put $$ into the pension fund. So was not this big new and notional asset in the form of parking revenue meant to do the same exact thing? Yes? No? Think about it? The difference between the two capitalizations is that one was at least a bit more honest than the other. Sure seems to me that one side of a ledger got some money that is mostly being ignored on the other. It all might work out if there was a City of Pittsburgh central bank, but otherwise a bit problematic. | <urn:uuid:da985e18-7fa7-4f6a-b9a6-6d004b8f52c7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://nullspace2.blogspot.com/2012/05/nobodys-on-nobodys-side.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962922 | 430 | 1.507813 | 2 |
What follows is a rough overview and summary of the annual meetings since the late 80s. In many ways, the Southwest/Texas PCA/ACA has grown to become the successful group it is today from a grassroots movement of scholars pioneering new forums for the interdisciplinary study of popular and American culture. The purpose of the text is to provide a sense of the dedicated people that have led the organization over the years and a sense of some of the issues that have captured participants’ attention. Peter Rollins and Michael K. Schoenecke drafted much of the original text that has recently been expanded and edited by a team of members including Philip Heldrich, Ken Dvorak and Lacy Landrum.
Locations of Historical Records
From 1987 to the present, the associations gathered papers into a very large document called the Proceedings of the meetings. We advertised the collection to the membership and left a master copy at the Cowboy Copy Center in Stillwater, Oklahoma (home of OSU); a copy was also placed in the collection of the Edmon Low Library at OSU for record purposes. As a capstone of this process, Peter Rollins, Darin Cozzens, and Reed Harp assembled a collection of papers from the Proceedings pool into a special issue of the Journal of American Culture 14 (1991).
Presidents Jeanne Ellinger (Southwest Oklahoma State, Southwest PCA) and Kenneth Davis (Texas Tech, Texas PCA) convened the 1988 meeting of the regionals in the Student Union of Oklahoma State University, a favored location for our meetings over the years – even after separation of the regional sessions from the OSU Filmathon. (The Filmathon had supported the regional meetings fiscally to get them going.)
Innovative topics for the meeting included Textile Arts; Quilts & Weaving; Traditional Games; Religion in the Bible Belt; Texas Fiddlers; Social Images & Definitions of the West; Graffiti, Rituals, & Superstitions; Heroes; and Melodrama. Participants also enjoyed the Western Image Film Festival, which included a gamut of films from Shane (1953) to The Trip to Bountiful, at that time a new film.
As a ”favor“ to Michael K. Schoenecke (Texas Tech), the sturdy local arrangements and program chair for this meeting, Peter Rollins wrote a satirical ad for the local hotel to emphasize the benefits of the meeting. The ad was entitled ”The Paragon of Virtue Inn“ and was dismissed immediately by both Schoenecke and the local hotel manager as being to outré for the clientele. (The document worth investigating is in the organization’s archive at Oklahoma State.) The attempt at humor should perhaps be forgiven since the name of the meeting’s location was The Paragon Hotel. Presidents Jeanne Ellinger (Southwest PCA) and Kenneth Davis (Texas PCA) were both paragons of virtue; thus the hotel name was perhaps more appropriate than the facetious poem allowed.
It was at this meeting that a ”tradition“ of the SWPCA meetings began. Michael K. Schoenecke, the host for the conference, put boldly on the cover of the program the following statement:
All errors in the program should be noted – assiduously – and in writing to Peter C. Rollins.
Ever since, the conference program has contained such a statement up front, with Schoenecke and Rollins alternating responsibilities as receivers of complaints about the other’s work.
Special areas for this meeting beyond the obvious included Sports; Modern Day Fictionalizing of Cultural Myth and Reality; Photography; Family History & Research; Women & the Southwest; and High Tech & Low Tech in Texas. Conference participants toured two wineries in Lubbock, both of which make excellent, red wines from grapes grown south of town among thousands of acres of cotton fields.
Lawrence Clayton (d. 2001) acted as the host for this excellent meeting near one of the
B-1 bomber bases of the U.S. Air Force (Dyess Air Force Base) and the home of Hardin-Simmons University. Clayton, a man fond of a good Stetson and bollo tie, was a special person to this organization because he set an excellent example for us in the area of graduate student support. He worked with the students, developed their presentation skills, and chaired their sessions, assuring that the AV was in place and that the setting was perfect for his hard-working novices. We will all miss Lawrence Clayton. Peter Rollins notes that Clayton ”was an academic counterpart of John Wayne - we will live in the shadow of his memory, and will try to live by his example as a teacher.“
It was at this meeting that the Creative Writing Section really took off. It has been a major contributor to our meetings ever since due to the excellent leadership of Jerry Bradley, (currently the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Lamar) next door to the Spindletop oil field that made Texas legendary. Reed Harp (Oklahoma State) did much to form and schedule poetry for this and subsequent meetings. Other novel areas included War Veterans & Events; Publishing Workshop; Texas-Mexican Religious Folk Art; and Advertising. A flyer for this meeting advertising the area titled ”America’s War Eras“ features a photograph of Peter Rollins among others participating in an amphibious landing at DaNang Harbor in 1965. Other OSU participants taking leadership roles at this meeting were Reed Harp, Darin Cozzens (both of whom helped with the Proceedings), and Kurt Hochenauer. The Kiva Inn was an excellent site for the meeting, and the Seafood Buffet was terrific – given the distance between Abilene and the ocean waters. As was true for so many of our meetings, old friends and good neighbors joined in true, regional fellowship.
(in conjunction with the national meeting)
The regional meeting was held this year in conjunction with the national gathering in San Antonio, Texas. Texas President Robert Wylie (Amarillo College) and Southwest President Harold Hatt (Graduate Seminary, Phillips U of Enid) were assisted in putting out the call for papers by the Newsletter Editor, Mary Gill (West Texas State).
One hour of academic credit at the 4000 level (both graduate and undergraduate) was offered to those who signed up through Oklahoma State and paid for the credit hours. A few books and a log were required components of the credit option; the graduate students were expected to do more writing for the assignment and to demonstrate a higher level of sophistication. Some twenty (20) completed the credit option. We have attempted to offer a credit for meetings ever since.
Areas of study included standard items in literature and film, but some special topics stand out: The Alamo; Cowboys: History & Myth; Language & Dialect; Oilpatch Culture; and Texas Regions.
Under the superb leadership of Diana Cox (Amarillo College), the regional meeting gathered in February at the Ramada Inn with, then to date, the most elaborate and aesthetically produced Conference Program in the associations’ history. A reception at the Quarterhorse Museum in Amarillo added to the flavor of the meeting and its proud cowboy heritage. The car tour of Palo Duro Canyon gave participants an idea of the West Texas beauty that once captured the imagination of Georgia O’Keefe. The Amarillo meeting, mostly due to the wonderful planning of Diana Cox, now Professor Emeritus, had a special Texas flavor which we have never matched. As Peter Rollins has complimented, ”Her ability to lead with a gentle voice will be remembered by all; there can be much charm and strength in a Texas accent.“
This meeting was hosted by Joe Graham (Department of Sociology at Texas A&M-Kingsville) and was the most southerly of our meetings over the years. On the interstate which ran a due-Southerly course toward Mexico, we could see loads of cars being transported as agricultural products headed North toward a U.S. just coming out of the winter. Little did we realize that, later, NAFTA would turn this trickle of commerce into a flood. This campus location allowed the students of folk culture studying under Joe Graham to shine; everyone was impressed by the unique fieldwork and insightful reflections being made by many back-to-school, adult students in Graham's classes. According to Peter Rollins, ”Joe was a much-loved mentor to these wonderful students.“
Our meeting in Waco was enhanced by Baylor University’s proximity to some cultural repositories. On campus was the ”high culture“ display of the Browning Collection, artifacts and manuscripts pertaining to the life and letters of the British poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning. This collection provided a spectacular experience which nearly matched the raucous concert of Sammy Kershaw on Saturday evening in the Waco Convention Center. Many at the meeting took time to visit the Dr. Pepper Museum where we learned the secret formula of this potent elixir, created in the 1920s to compete with Coca-Cola – and fairly successful in that goal in Mid-America. (The secret ingredient is prune juice.)
As was often the case in these years, Michael T. Marsden took time to visit the region and to deliver a message about the place of Popular Culture Studies in the Humanities. His sage observations were appreciated by all as were his efforts to join us in our activities. Marsden did us all a favor by bringing greetings from the national to our frontier door.
The local arrangements chief, Greg Garrett, did a fine job of putting the Waco meeting together. Garrett (graduate of Oklahoma State) has thrived at Baylor and produced award-winning essays on motion pictures and novels as well. He is a real credit to our region and has helped many students to participate in our meetings.
With Hugh Foley as general chair and Peter Rollins as host, this meeting in the Student Union of Oklahoma State ran smoothly and demonstrated that book displays could enhance our regional meetings.
The meeting was once again a decided success with Jack Bender, the artist for the comic strip Alley OOP! giving an overview of the history of comic strips and the evolution of his newspaper comic strip.
The Student Union provided excellent facilities for receptions and supplied an audiovisual staff which was always helpful. The meeting went like clockwork, and the parties were wonderful opportunities to chat, tell stories, and listen to guitar music and song.
Hugh Foley (later, in 2001, to become an Assistant Professor at Rogers State in Claremore, OK) again provided the organization for this meeting while Peter Rollins supervised and took most of the credit.
The luncheon speaker was Brother Paul Somerville, the Dean in Exile of Morningside College in Iowa. Somerville is a gifted observer of the contemporary scene, and his interactive style was appreciated by the members – especially his satirical treatment of political correctness, campus sensitivity crusades, etc. (His daily commentary can be found online, today.)
Ray and Pat Browne were in attendance and added their insights to sessions and receptions. We always appreciate their concern with regional meetings and prize the lines of communication and support they have provided over the years.
(in conjunction with the national meeting)
We met jointly for the second time in our organization's history with the National PCA/ACA groups at the Marriott Rivercenter Hotel in late March. The joint meeting was the largest to date featuring such areas as Native American Studies; Media Bias & Distortion; Slapstick Comedy; Madness in Literature, Southwestern Literature; and more.
Mrs. Browne scheduled us for wonderful rooms at the hotel, and a special luncheon was held for President Mario Herrera in the main dining room. The PCA/ACA also had a special event to honor Marshall Fishwick, one of the founders of the PCA and the recipient of the ACA's Ray and Pat Browne Award. These joint meetings allowed scholars from other regions to sample the subject areas and work of the Southwest/Texas PCA/ACA, and we are thankful for the opportunity.
The Holiday Inn at Lubbock was the location of the annual meeting with hosting shared by Jill Talbot and Lynnea Chapman King and with Michael K. Schoenecke as supervisor. The Texas Tech Press mounted an impressive display of books, banners, and flyers; the journal Film & History was also represented. (See website: www.filmandhistory.org)
Again, the speaker was Brother Paul Somerville whose wit and wisdom are part of the Will Rogers satiric tradition, although Somerville carries considerably more weight in this area than his Oklahoma predecessor.
The Center for the Study of the Vietnam Conflict provided participants with a tour of its (then) new facility – a three-story building next to the university library. Oral history collections, paper collections, relevant books, and films were all shown to those on the tour—including films such as Television’s Vietnam: The Real Story (1984) and Television’s Vietnam: The Impact of Media (1985), generously donated by Peter Rollins. The Center now occupies a larger building on the Texas Tech campus and conducts numerous scholarly conferences during the year. The Vietnam veterans and scholars among us were very impressed by the opportunities provided by the resource center. There is more work to be done there, and the staff is extremely helpful to visitors. (The famous Douglas Pike and his collection of original materials are now at the Center – the documents for study, and Pike for wise counsel and guidance of scholars.)
This was our first of three years at the same conference site. Program Chair for the meeting was Michael K. Schoenecke, and Lynnea Chapman-King served as the conference host. The Sheraton Oldtown Hotel provided a wonderful ”tent“ for the meeting, and the luncheon proved to be a big success because it was included in the registration fee; people therefore felt obliged to attend. We used a Best Western across the street for spill over, but the managers there set up a shuttle bus for participants to get back and forth between the hotels; people staying at the Best Western also received free shuttle service to the airport.
The speaker at this year’s luncheon was detective fiction writer Steve Brewer who writes the ”Bubba Mabry, P.I.“ mystery series. Rudolfo Anaya, hailed as the Godfather of Chicano literature in English, read from Shaman Winter and spent hours talking with interested conference participants. Better than 400 participants from around the world enjoyed the scenic charm and warm temperatures of Albuquerque and its Oldtown Section.
Again, the Sheraton Oldtown was our meeting place, and the numbers jumped radically into the 700 range for participation. Ron Briley, Assistant Principal of a local school, was an enormous help with audiovisual needs and student volunteers. Returning from ”conference“ retirement, Peter Rollins was the Program Chair while Michael K. Schoenecke did all the work, a fine arrangement.
The Creative Writing Sessions were extremely varied and numerous, due to the special efforts of Jerry Bradley. Philip Heldrich began his term as president of the Southwest ACA and presented the Peter C. Rollins Award for the best graduate student paper on a popular culture topics. Topics of novelty included Cultural Geography; Route 66; Law & Culture; Manifest Destiny; Southwest Ranching; Professionalism; and Atomic Culture & the Nuclear Age.
The meeting returned to the Sheraton Oldtown and, during this year, rose to nearly 900 registrants. Local teachers participated with student groups and were admitted at no charge. We also partnered with Ron Briley’s institution, again, with benefits to our organization and the students of Sandia Preparatory School.
Paul Rich and his Universidad de Las Americas (UDLA) contingent participated and contributed a spectacular reception which served over 600 people with a magnificent spread of hors d’oeuvre in the Tex-Mex style. Tex-Mex music was provided by a wonderful group, and the sound level of this reception was so high it was hard to hear the person next to you; paradoxically, this sound level was a sign that people were having a terrific time. Ray Browne, Paul Rich, and Peter Rollins attempted to welcome people and to generate interest in Congress V at UDLA during the fall. (See website: www.udlap.mx/congress)
The luncheon at this meeting was attended by 800 people and was addressed by Alberta Lee, daughter of the nuclear scientist – and accused spy – Wen Ho Lee. Lee spoke from her heart about the agony which she and her family had suffered over the last few years and had pointed remarks about the press and its lack of accurate and professional reporting of her father’s dilemma. Lee’s presentation, which even generated debate among conference participants, was covered by two local television stations, Reuters and the Associated Press. Stories appeared on local television and in the papers of both Albuquerque and Santa Fe. The news stories about Alberta Lee’s talk drew further attention to our presence in the City of Albuquerque. It was a real honor to meet this charming, sincere, and committed woman.
Peter Rollins distinguished himself by contracting pneumonia and being restricted to his room. The meeting was a big success without his presence – a good sign, he thought, for the future. Susan Rollins, Michael K. Schoenecke, Brad Duren, Philip Heldrich, among others filled the gap. Pat Browne, who was an honored guest, took over at the registration table as did Ray Browne. These front line efforts by our traditional leaders were much appreciated!
The organization met again in New Mexico, a central and enjoyed location for many participants, but this time at the Albuquerque Hilton. In the wake of Peter Rollins's heart attack, Michael K. Schoenecke filled in as the substitute Program Chair and Host, as well as contributed his work as complaint chair. Schoenecke's efforts should be applauded for years to come; it's no wonder the National tapped him for its leadership.
Brad Duren aided with audiovisual and Philip Heldrich, Leslie Fife, and Amanda Cobb (with her students) took care of the registration table (and fielded complaints for Schoenecke). Susan Rollins worked behind the scenes to be sure everything went well. She fielded daily phone calls, sometimes numerous calls per hour, from her home command center outside Cleveland, Oklahoma.
Tony Hillerman was our luncheon speaker, who entertained a full ballroom. He spoke largely about the development of his famous literary detective, the Navajo policeman, Jim Chee, and the number books set on the Navajo lands of northeastern Arizona and northwestern New Mexico. Hillerman also discussed his admiration and respect for the Navajo culture.
We met again in a city that seems to have become our home base (and not only because of the wonderful chile). For a second time, the Albuquerque Hilton, served as the conference hotel (the Hilton's staff was especially well organized and helpful, and our organization wishes to thank Patti Salaz for her assistance in coordinating all events with the hotel). Throughout the conference, the nation was under a travel warning due to the high warning levels of the Home Security Advisory Threat scale. While some participants wondered where to obtain duck tape and plastic sheeting, others enjoyed a diversity of offerings.
The Creative Writing Area under the direction of Jerry Bradley and the Motorcycle Culture and Myth Area under the direction of Gary Kieffner were two of the largest areas this year. Friday featured a special presentation – Wushu Theatre: Master Bow Sim Mark and the Use of Traditional Wushu Techniques in Theatre with an introductory paper by Mike Conway, writer, researcher, and member of the Bow Sim Mark Tai Chi Arts Association. Cher Holt-Fortin, Area Chair for Martial Arts, played a key role in arranging for the event.
Our luncheon speaker was Rudolfo Analya, who spoke in part of his trip to Washington where he received the National Medal of Arts. He also addressed the necessity of keeping our spirits uplifted through comedy and humor, even in trying times. Many participants in the full ballroom expressed how much Analya's speech inspired them. Afterwards, he graciously signed books for a long line of admirers.
Leslie Fife served as Conference Scheduler, and Susan Rollins, mentor to the new leadership of Philip Heldrich and Ken Dvorak, served as Conference Host Supervisor. It is also important to note that while the weather was rainy this time in Albuquerque, most of the locals and other Southwesterners gave thanks for the much needed precipitation.
And of special note: Peter C. Rollins and Michael K. Schoenecke officially passed on the core responsibilities to Philip Heldrich (Emporia State) and Ken Dvorak (San Jacinto, TX, Community College District). Rollins, in the wake of a heart attack, had by this time converted to a ”Mr. Moderation“ approach to professional meetings while Schoenecke had been promoted to the job of Secretary/Treasurer of the National PCA/ACA. For quite different reasons, it was most appropriate for both to step back from organizational responsibilities.
At the annual luncheon, Rollins came to the podium and reminded members that, in England, flashlights are called ”torches.“ He then illuminated a white, disposable flashlight, and flashed it about the room. With great mock dignity, Rollins and Schoenecke ”passed the torch“ of responsibility to a younger generation. This ceremony was conducted with a mixture of humor and pathos and was well-received by the luncheon audience.
Philip Heldrich, an Oklahoma State alumnus, is a twice award-winning author in poetry and nonfiction. He is an Associate Professor of English at Emporia State University. Ken Dvorak is a computer whiz in the Houston Community College system and an expert in distance learning; he is also Vice President of the American Culture Association. The combined Southwest/Texas PCA/ACA organization is, as Peter Rollins declared, ”in good hands for the future.“
Executive Director, Phil Heldrich and Secretary/Treasurer, Ken Dvorak began their leadership of the SW/TX PCA/ACA by taking the SW/TX group (by tradition) to meet jointly with the national organization in San Antonio, Texas for their annual meeting, April 7-10, 2004. This Texas-sized event was highlighted by several memorable events. First, Sally Sanchez from Houston, Texas, agreed to become our Program Coordinator replacing Leslie Fife whose tireless efforts working for the SW/TX organization were now devoted to the national. Second, the SW/TX unveiled its electronic online registration system that serves as a gateway for our participants to easily register for the conference in a safe and secure environment. These two events have placed the SW/TX organization on a sound electronic footing streamlining our office procedures allowing us more time to plan the annual SW/TX conference.
During the conference, Phil and Ken honored SW/TX founder, Dr. Peter C. Rollins, with a lifetime achievement award that recognized Peter's leadership establishing and sustaining the SW/TX organization for over thirty years. An exquisite crystal diamond tower was presented to Peter with the caption, ”Excellence is the result of caring more than others think is wise, risking more than others thinks is safe, dreaming more than others think is practical and expecting more than others think is possible.“ Susan Rollins was also thanked for her tireless efforts supporting Peter and for being the ”behind the scenes“ person who, along with Leslie Fife, labored long hours on behalf of the SW/TX PCA/ACA. In honor of the Rollins, Phil and Ken announced the establishment of the ”Susan and Peter C. Rollins SW/TX Endowment Fund,“ which will solidify the organization's financial future.
During the SW/TX area chair/business meeting, Ken announced the successful negotiation of a three-year contract with the Albuquerque, Hyatt Regency Hotel, moving the SW/TX annual meeting downtown closer to its roots along historic Route 66. Adding to the excitement, Ken announced a new graduate student award, the Albuquerque Convention and Visitors Bureau Award for Southwestern Culture. The renewable gift of $500 is to be given annually to a graduate student whose presentation focuses on Southwestern culture. This news was met with rousing cheers from the area chairs who eagerly anticipated returning to Albuquerque with Phil and Ken one year after being handed the ”torch“ by Peter Rollins and Michael K. Schoenecke.
The 26th annual SW/TX meeting was the first to be held in downtown Albuquerque, February 9-12, 2005, and it was an exceptional gathering. The beautiful Hyatt Regency Hotel served as host, and Phil and Ken greeted over 900 participants. Our Program Coordinator, Sally Sanchez, handled her duties, expertly managing the Reservation Desk with the able assistance of Tilly Garcia-Slaten, Lacy Landrum (SW/TX webmaster), and ”volunteers“ recruited by Phil and Ken from the ranks of our area chairs and graduate students. A somber note however reflected the concern of many participants when Phil and Ken announced the absence of Susan and Peter Rollins and Karen Dvorak due to illness.
Conference highlights included film screenings of Strange Fruit and a plenary session discussing the film Guess Whose Coming to Dinner. The keynote speaker, Krista Elrick, captivated the audience with her presentation titled ”Enchanting Light: Historic and Contemporary Photography in New Mexico.“ The Chronicle of Higher Ed's ”Ms. Mentor“ (Emily Toth) paid a visit, regaling her fans with stories from ”When Academics Get Angry: Nasty Letters to Ms. Mentor.“ The conference also featured a journal editors' roundtable hosted by Gary Hoppenstead, Editor, The Journal of Popular Culture, Wheeler Winston Dixon, Editor, The Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Gerald Duchovnay, Founding Editor, Post Script, Deborah Carmichael and James R. Knecht, Associate Editors, Film & History, and Richard Vela, Contributing Editor, Literature/Film Quarterly. Nine graduate students were recognized and given awards for their presentations, including two new awards, The Charles Redd Center Award for Western Studies, and the Albuquerque Convention and Visitors Bureau Award for Southwestern Culture.
During the area chair business meeting, Phil and Ken discussed the need to strengthen our graduate student award program by finding ways to raise money for this important initiative. The area chairs overwhelmingly praised Phil and Ken for their decision to move the annual meeting downtown and gave equal kudus to the Hyatt Regency staff and management for providing such a wonderful venue for the meeting.
For the 27th consecutive year, February 8-11, 2006, the SW/TX PCA/ACA meeting was at the downtown Hyatt Regency Hotel in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Phil and Ken welcomed 1200 participants, many of whom praised the SW/TX staff for organizing such an outstanding event. Due to illness, Sally Sanchez, SW/TX Program Coordinator, was unable to attend, and her absence was duly noted by all. The opening morning saw conference registration lines extending from the Hyatt's second floor down the stairwell onto the first floor. Ken, Phil, Tilly, Karen, and our two volunteers were quickly overwhelmed. ”Retired“ Colonel Karen Dvorak quickly determined what the problem was and ordered Phil and Ken out from behind the conference registration desk. Once the Colonel's orders were obeyed, everything flowed smoothly.
All conferences have a certain amount of ”buzz,“ and this year's meeting was no exception. From the expanded list of academic book vendors, various group receptions, excellent panels, and invited guests, the conference was well attended. The 2006 keynote speaker was Dr. Winston Wheeler Dixon, the James P. Ryan Endowed Professor of Film Studies at the University of Nebraska. He also serves, with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, as Editor-in Chief of Quarterly Review of Film and Video. Dr. Dixon's most recent work Lost in the Fifties: Recovering Phantom Hollywood is the recipient of the 2005 Peter C. Rollins Annual Book Award of the SW/TX PCA/ACA and was the subject of his presentation. During the keynote ceremony, nine graduate students were honored with various awards for their conference presentations.
Additional highlights from the conference included a journal roundtable sessions titled ”Breaking into Print, or what do Editors Really Want or Need?“ The session was chaired by Jim Welsh, Founding Editor, Literature/Film Quarterly. Panelists included Co-Editors Gwendolyn Audrey Foster and Wheeler Winston Dixon, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Gary Hoppenstand, Editor, The Journal of Popular Culture, Gerald Duchovnay, Founding Editor, Post Script, Kathy Merlock-Jackson, Editor, The Journal of American Culture, Deborah Carmichael and James Knecht, Associate Editors, Film & History, Peter C. Rollins, Editor-in-Chief, Film & History, and Richard Vela, Contributing Editor, Literature/Film Quarterly. The Oscar-winning film Crash was discussed in a special Africana Studies session featuring scholars, Sherri Burr, U. of New Mexico, Gerald Butters, Aurora U., Novotny Lawrence, Southern Illinois U.-Carbondale, Jaya Ramesh, U. of Washington, Noliwe M. Rooks, Princeton U., Demetria Shabazz, Oklahoma State U., and Jonathan S. Tomhave, U. of Washington.
The annual area chair/business meeting hosted by Phil and Ken (aka, Martin and Lewis) discussed the current state of the SW/TX organization. Phil praised the hard work of our area chairs and noted the increased number of presenters in 2006 versus 2005. He also noted the six new areas for 2006 and the success their area chairs had in bringing many new individuals to our meeting. Ken reported that the financial health of the organization is strong, and he proposed two items for the area chairs to consider. First, all advertising revenues from book vendors and publishers would go directly to the SW/TX Graduate Student Awards Program, and secondly, all area chair registration dues would benefit the Susan and Peter C. Rollins Endowment Fund. The Endowment Fund began with a balance of $20,000 in 2005, and Ken projected that an additional $5,000 would be placed in the Endowment for 2006. The area chairs voted overwhelmingly to support these measures. The area chairs also recommended that Albuquerque become the ”adopted“ home of the SW/TX organization—a vote that met with resounding approval. The meeting adjourned with great harmony and good cheer.
The land of enchantment continued to work its charm with the SW/TX PCA/ACA when the organization met for the 28th consecutive year as wintry conditions throughout the country delayed arrivals for many of our presenters and guests. From a gloomy, snowy start on Wednesday morning, those in the Hyatt Regency were cheering by late afternoon as the sun gloriously appeared over the city of Albuquerque melting the snow and lifting everyone’s spirits. By Thursday noon a steady stream of tried, travel-weary presenters descended on the conference hotel, swelling our numbers to over 900 at the conclusion of the conference.
Highlights for 2007 included the following:
The first ever ”Fire and Ice“ opening night reception hosted by the Hyatt Regency Hotel, featuring a one-hour ”meet and greet“ that lasted for over two hours.
During the Area Chair meeting hosted by Phil & Ken, a wide range of topics were discussed including moving the conference to another locale, improving our graduate student awards, travel funds for graduate students, and registration rates. By a voice vote, the area chairs re-committed to the city of Albuquerque as the adopted home of the SW/TX PCA/ACA, discussed how our annual conference is one of the best run in the country, and encouraged Phil and Ken to re-examine registration rates, keeping in mind the cost for planning and executing the annual conference so as not to jeopardize the organization's finances. The meeting adjourned with much talk and excitement for celebrating the organization's 30th annual meeting in 2009.
The 29th annual meeting of the Southwest Texas Popular/American Culture Association took place February 13 – 16, 2008 in beautiful Albuquerque, New Mexico hosted by the Hyatt Regency Hotel and Convention Center. The Hyatt Regency rolled out the red carpet for our presenters and guests providing excellent accommodations with an attentive staff and professional AV support. This year the SW/TX partnered with the Hyatt in our first ”Go Green“ initiative featuring recycling bins, hallway beverage containers instead of the standard pitchers of water in each presentation room, and reducing the number of paper products found on the beverage and snack stations.
The Land of Enchantment continues to draw individuals from the United States, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, South America, the Pacific Rim, and Canada. This year the organization set a record for opening day registrations (600) and for total attendance (1200). The annual ”Fire and Ice“ opening night social/mixer set the tone for the conference and for four days people were reported to be engaged in deep conversations, attending standing room only presentations and generally having a good time!. Our keynote speaker, singer/writer/poet/performance artist, Joy Harjo, and Grammy award guitarist, Larry Mitchell, captivated an audience of 500 for over ninety minutes. Throughout Harjo’s performance not one person left the reception hall, no cell phone rang, and no one spoke at their tables at the conclusion of Harjo’s performance there was a standing ovation lasting over ten minutes. On the way back to the registration desk I was approached by one beaming attendee who asked me ”Ken, how are you going to top that performance for your 30th anniversary celebration?“
With that in mind I invite everyone to check out the activities planned for our gala 30th birthday celebration. We look forward to celebrating the successes of the past thirty years and for celebrating the future of the Southwest Texas PCA/ACA led by our Executive Director, Dr. Phil Heldrich, and Dr. Ken Dvorak, Secretary/Treasurer.
Our anniversary theme Reeling in the Years: 30 Years of Film, TV and Popular Culture (1979 - 2009) served as the backdrop for our annual conference held February 25 - 28, 2009 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel and Conference Center. Amid concerns that the national economy and lack of institutional support would play a decisive role in attendance, Phil and Ken, nevertheless were excited to welcome over 900 presenters for this gala event. Our four-day event was highlighted by several changes including our first "English High Tea" (as certified by our English colleagues) that featured as guest speaker former New Mexico governor David Cargo. Celebrating the scholarly contributions of our graduate students a special ceremony hosted by Dr. Katie Mills, the 2008 Peter C. Rollins Book Award winner, discussed at length her research in writing The Road Story and the Rebel: Moving Through Film, Fiction, and Television (Southern Illinois UP, 2006).
The conference featured an excellent mix of panels including special screenings of Rock n' Roll High School (1979); Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North (2008) hosted by James DeWolf Perry; the film Cannibal Holocaust (1979) and Roundtable; and our famous late night sing a-longs, that we understand have become "required" listening, by all Hyatt hotel staff! The 30th anniversary conference ended on a solid note with many individuals providing us valuable feedback with our first pre/post conference survey.
Among the recommendations being implemented this year include our first Rail Runner train journey to Santa Fe, New Mexico (details will be forthcoming) for a one day cultural tour that we hope will provide new cultural exchanges for our presenters/guests. Other changes include a more robust presence on the internet including our very own social networking sites, listing of Area Chair CFP's; and an improved (and easier) online registration process.
Join us, February 10 - 13, 2010 for the 31st edition of the SWTX PCA/ACA annual conference the largest regional conference in the United States.
Be There! We Will! - Phil, Lynnea, Sally, Michele, and Ken
The 32nd annual meeting of the Southwest Texas Popular/American Culture Association took place in the high desert city of Albuquerque, New Mexico, February 10 - 13, 2010. The conference was held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel and Conference Center and our presenters filled the hotel and surrounding venues. This year we had representation from over 20 foreign countries including individuals from Kuwait, Israel, Portugal, India, China, and the United Stats who experienced for the first time the charm and beauty of New Mexico.
The conference was dedicated to Dr. Ray Browne (1922-2009) the founder of the National PCA/ACA, its regional organizations, the inspiration behind the Journal of Popular Culture and the Journal of American Culture, a prolific author and advocate for Popular/American Culture scholars, Ray's influence was felt worldwide. His loss was deeply felt as Pat (his wife) and Ray were an integral part for creating the SWTX PCA/ACA and watching it grow from a small regional meeting to a fledging conference that attracts upwards of 1500 people annually.
Highlights for this meeting included jam packed presentation rooms from the opening night's Fire & Ice social event to the concluding panels on Saturday afternoon. Many of us enjoyed the numerous films debuting at the conference including Brilliant but Canceled Television programs: Pushing Daisies, Firefly, and Dollhouse - hosted by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Area Chairs; panel celebration(s) and criticism of Twilight. Our graduate student award recognition ceremony was hosted by keynote speaker Adilifu Nama the 2009 Peter C. Rollins Book Award recipient who spoke before a packed ballroom audience regarding the importance of public intellectuals in American life. The conference concluded with our first "excursion" to Santa Fe hosted by Executive Director, Phil Heldrich, expertly guiding over 65 individuals through the maze of New Mexico Rail Runner train travel to Santa Fe spiriting them around the city in a highly animated walking tour of Old Town and its surrounding historic/cultural attractions.
Unfortunately, my friend and colleague Phil, passed away due to complications with cancer on November 11, 2010. He leaves behind a rich and honored legacy with the SWTX PCA/ACA, having seen the organization grow in numbers, influence, and recognition as THE Popular/American Culture conference to attend. We will recognize Phil during the joint PCA/ACA - SWTX - PCA/ACA conference in San Antonio, April 20 - 23, 2011. However, our home and part of Phil's heart has always been in Albuquerque. In 2012, given time to grieve his passing, we will honor his legacy in a fitting tribute to his accomplishments as a scholar, mentor, and friend to all who encountered his ready smile, quick wit, and his penchant for burritos.
Ken Dvorak, Co-Interim, SWTX PCA/ACA Executive Director
Lynnea Chapman King, Co-Interim, SWTX PCA/ACA Executive Director
Sally Sanchez, Director, SWTX Conference Planning
Michele Brittany, SWTX Web Master | <urn:uuid:70e34dbe-8eba-404b-b9e8-b855e080299d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://swtxpca.org/documents/52.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957523 | 8,169 | 1.648438 | 2 |
||Have Consumers gone Spineless? Part 1
January 21, 2002 Paul Sullivan
Summary: Are less-than-scrupulous companies and organizations getting away with more than they should? Are we, as consumers, failing to protect our own rights and interests? Paul takes us through Part 1, where he examines the questionable practices endured in the industry.
| Introduction||Page:: ( 1 / 4 )|
Snake Oil Stories
The story is nothing new. For thousands of years, there have been people who are easily swayed into following the masses if for no other reason than a lack of confidence of their own beliefs. And for thousands of years there have been people who’s destiny seems to be to take advantage of these potentially gullible people. It is a kind of social Darwinism where the “weak” are preyed upon by the “strong”.
Think of a snake charmer. The snake is potentially one of the strongest, most confident, most formidable creatures on the face of the earth, yet frail villagers are able to turn them into playthings for their own amusement by distracting and confusing them while sitting only a few inches directly in front of them. They toy with them for the amusement of others even though these venomous creatures are capable of killing them with a single bite from their poisonous, razor sharp fangs.
The handler knows this of course, yet they also know that if they can keep the snake distracted and focused on something other than the obvious, they are likely to get away with whatever they want. Sure, someday they may get caught and the snake may bite them, but they are willing to take the risk. Why? Perhaps because they like the feeling of having power over the snake, or because they get a thrill from living on the edge or taking chances. It also may be because they can endure the bite, take anti-venom and pop up somewhere else to do it all again.
They can make money from the masses who pay to watch and who marvel at the show with glistening, entranced eyes. Oh yes, the show may be good, but with today’s snake charmers, the audience is getting a lot more than they bargained for. That, ladies and gentlemen, is our premise, and the pages beyond will take a look at this phenomenon in a bit more detail about the practices involved. In our next article, we’ll take a closer look at why these companies can get away with what they do, and why we as consumers allow them to do so.
Case In Point: Licensing Restrictions
One of the most overlooked items in computing has been the End User License Agreements, or EULA’s. Over the years companies have taken it upon themselves to sneak more and more restrictive language into them. Some web designer software actually made claims of ownership for anything produced by the program. Some coding software put restrictions on distribution, believe it or not! How horrible would it be to work on an application in your favorite programming language only to find that each person who uses it has to pay a fee? Sounds lame, but they have actually been put in print.
One of the most annoying EULA changes in recent years has been the limit that Microsoft has placed on peer-to-peer connectivity. We are not talking client/server here, but setting up things like LAN parties or small offices that do not have a central server. Why should you not be able to hook ten, twenty or even thirty computers together in a peer to peer configuration for whatever purpose you want? What basis do they have to limit the amount of connections to five or ten at a time? For that matter, why should you have to pay for client access to a server anyway? You get Windows 2000 Server, setup shared partitions and printing devices and have to pay for each client that accesses those shared items? Why should we have to pay for that? You go out and buy a Linksys router and 253 people can get on the net without paying an extra dime. Why should software be any different?
With operating systems like Linux, you have no licensing fees at all, at least in theory. You can set one machine up as a server, have fifty machines accessing it and not pay a dime in licensing fees. It certainly sounds reasonable to me. You don’t have to pay client fees for remote access, web transactions, application hosting, file downloads, etc. No limits on how you can use your own software. You can edit and recompile the kernel, choose which applications to install or not install, you don’t have to worry about audits, you don’t have to worry about much of anything at all. Just install the operating system where you want, when you want and how many times you want and be done with it. Why users would settle for anything less is baffling to me. At the very least you could have a Linux server and Windows clients that you’ve already paid for.
SIDEBAR: People may complain about the cost of software, but old timers like me remember when individual applications retailed for $495 and ended up costing us about $350 each. To build up the apps that comprise the modern Office package, we’d be out some $1,000 per seat. All that cash for a few 5.25” floppy disks. Wow.
| More Computing||Page:: ( 2 / 4 )|
Another annoying limitation on Windows operating software and other Microsoft products like Office is that they try to restrict transfer rights when they are bundled in OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) configurations. As many of us know, Microsoft has built its monopoly in part because of the heinous licensing restrictions they have put on the OEM market. If you are an OEM and you want to include Microsoft software as one of your options, there are some serious limitations on what you can and cannot do. Microsoft has included language in large contracts that gives you price breaks if and only if you agree to include Windows with every single machine you ship out the door. The price breaks were massive, but technically, the decision was not forced, it was an option. But if you did agree, Microsoft wanted to ensure that you played ball, so they actually set up a system where people could turn you in if you failed to follow the agreement to the letter. Even if a client wanted no operating system at all on a computer, they OEM was obligated to bundle it and charge for it or they would be in violation.
As time went on, other methods of ‘coercion’ were used. If you wanted to qualify for pre-retail access to the latest version of Windows, you had to be in full compliance. If you wanted to be able to offer Microsoft Office as an option, you would have to exclude all other office suite bundling options, such as Smart Suite or Corel Office.
Your Rights As A Buyer
Perhaps the most annoying for me, and many others, has been how they word the EULAs that come with these bundles. They state that the OEM, not Microsoft is responsible for all software support, and that the agreement you have is with the OEM only. Further, even though you purchase the system and the software, Microsoft states that you do not have the right to transfer the licenses to another computer you may own if you decide to sell or dispose of that particular system. Confusing? I think so. In 98 SE, they throw in language like the following:
“The SOFTWARE PRODUCT is protected by copyright laws and international copyright treaties, as well as other intellectual property laws and treaties. The SOFTWARE PRODUCT is licensed, not sold. The term "COMPUTER" as used herein shall mean the HARDWARE, if the HARDWARE is a single computer system, or shall mean the computer system with which the HARDWARE operates, if the HARDWARE is a computer system component.”
Then other lines read:
“Single COMPUTER. The SOFTWARE PRODUCT is licensed with the HARDWARE as a single integrated product. The SOFTWARE PRODUCT may only be used with the HARDWARE as set forth in this EULA.”
Yet later in the EULA, there is this:
“Software Product Transfer. You may permanently transfer all of your rights under this EULA only as part of a permanent sale or transfer of the HARDWARE, provided you retain no copies, you transfer all of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT (including all component parts, the media and printed materials, any upgrades, this EULA and, if applicable, the Certificate(s) of Authenticity), and the recipient agrees to the terms of this EULA. If the SOFTWARE PRODUCT is an upgrade, any transfer must also include all prior versions of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT.”
Finally, for purposes of this article, there is this:
“Termination. Without prejudice to any other rights, Manufacturer or MS may terminate this EULA if you fail to comply with the terms and conditions of this EULA. In such event, you must destroy all copies of the SOFTWARE PRODUCT and all of its component parts.”
SIDEBAR: For a company that seeks to avoid any sort of responsibility by insisting the agreement is between you and the company that sold you the computer, they sure throw in a ton of legalese, don’t you think? Looks like they want to have their cake and eat it to, as the old saying goes. Sounds pretty rotten to me.
| Seeking Answers||Page:: ( 3 / 4 )|
Trying To Understand
Believe it or not, the whole thing sounds pretty unclear and contradictory to me. First, if the agreement is between the OEM and me, who is Microsoft to say what we can and cannot agree on? For instance, I’ve called up Dell and other OEM’s, both local and remote, to discuss the issue. I’ve even called Microsoft numerous times to go over the details and what they really mean. In almost every single case, the answers I got were different from one another.
After all of those hours of research, there were some areas of agreement. For instance, there was a general consensus that the definition for the term “Hardware” is up to each OEM. Therefore, each OEM is free to bundle the software any which way they choose. The “Hardware” might be defined by one OEM as an entire computer, for instance. Or, another OEM may decide that the license is tied to the primary boot drive instead. Some vendors simplify things further, by stating that the license is actually tied to a bundle consisting of a genuine Microsoft mouse, the manual for the mouse and the disk and license for the software. As you can see, the thing is getting messy from the very start.
There are a number of areas of conflict and disagreement concerning the language and enforceability of EULA’s. They are often so general and so vague that they end up yielding more questions than answers. How so? For example, let’s assume that you buy a system from Dell with bundled software and you decide to upgrade the machine. Is the software tied to the entire machine or a particular piece of hardware? You call up Dell and they tell you that you are good to go and still legal. What if you end up replacing the hard drive, video card and CD-ROM drives at the same time? Are you still legal? Dell says yes. What if you decide to move all of your new parts to a new case with a 300 watt power supply that happens not to be a Dell case? Do you still have rights to use the software? After all, the only thing original in the case was the floppy drive and the cables, and all you did was move those components to a case that could handle the load. What would the answer be then?
By upgrading your system, you are only doing what any reasonable owner may do, right? Therefore, there is a “Reasonable Person” standard that may apply. If you replace every part in the system except the case and Dell tells you that you are still legal, would a reasonable person infer that the software license was tied to the case? Then, if the case was damaged and needed to be replaced, would you lose your rights to use the software? A reasonable person might assume not, since you replaced a defective component. What if you had been told that the software was tied to the hard drive, and the hard drive physically failed. Would you have the right to replace it with a third party hard drive and still use the software? What if your software came on a “restore disk” instead of a separated copy? Would the fact that none of the internal components match the system or component serial numbers matter when it came to your rights to use the software?
The courts have been examining some of these questions, and have recently leaned towards the consumer in many of these instances. Some have said that if Microsoft wishes to limit the software to specific hardware, then they must detail which exact hardware and what rights consumers have should that hardware be replaced, either by necessity due to failure, or due to advances in hardware capabilities and the desire of the individual to remain current. Others have stated that if the agreement is specified by Microsoft as being between the OEM and the consumer, then they have no rights of enforcement concerning the consumer, but must instead go through the OEM to correct misunderstandings. Yet others have indicated that Microsoft has no rights to summarily terminate the license at all. A recent case actually stated that consumers can reasonably assume that any software they purchase in a forced system bundle will be bound not by the OEM license, but a typical retail license, because after all, they are purchasing a true retail product, of which the software is just a portion. As you can see, it is still a very murky and difficult situation to get a handle on, and the fact that most of the talking is being done by Microsoft and OEM’s does not benefit the consumer in the least.
SIDEBAR: Microsoft recently got in hot water for telling a charity in Australia that it must pay licensing fees for each donated computer with Microsoft software. This was odd given that many of these donated computers came with an OEM EULA stating that the software was supposed to travel with the computers... Double-Dipping?
| Conclusions||Page:: ( 4 / 4 )|
Part 1: Closing Thoughts
One thing that seems to be readily apparent is that many of these EULA’s are making declarations that cannot be legally enforced in all states and territories. Some of them are so absurd that they boggle the mind, yet these companies claim they are indeed enforceable because consumers approve them. However, some courts are ruling that no such wording and consequently tacit approval can be effective in terminating the legal rights of consumers. In other words, just because a EULA says so, doesn’t make it true.
In some ways, this discussion is related to a previous article, Playing Loose With Fair Use that we posted a while back. There are rights and expectations on both sides, but the law is somewhat caught in the middle. Copyright Laws and Patents, for example, were never designed to tackle such complex technological issues. Many of the things we are involved in now were never conceived of back in the day, and as a result, we find there are people taking advantage of things in a very unsavory way.
Just because we consumers have taken certain rights for granted in the past does not mean that they actually apply to modern technologies. Companies are making the case that somehow these new breakthroughs in technology give them rights they never had before. Because it is easier to copy and transfer things, they should have the right to limit consumer actions for the good of the industry.
That is a pretty scary stance when you thing about it, and what we’ve talked about here is only the tip of the iceberg. It is almost like this digital frontier is facing a land rush, and the strong and powerful, those with money and connections, are trying to keep the common folk from having a say ought to be done.
In part two of this article, I plan on taking a look into the consumer entertainment market in addition to some computer related topics not covered here. I’ll give some thoughts on why consumers put up with this treatment and some opinions on what we may be able to do about it if we get off our tails and get involved.
There is much to cover, from product activation and copy protection to limiting our choice for cable and Internet providers. So much is happening so fast that it is hard to get a handle on it all, but hopefully by the end of part two we can bring some of these issues to light and perhaps even get some good ideas of how to fix things.
As always, give us as much feedback as you care to muster, with as much good information you can put together, and we’ll try to address those issues in future articles.
SIDEBAR: Are you worried about End User License Agreements in the slightest? Or do you think it is Much Ado About Nothing? Do you even bother to read and try to adhere to the bundling agreements that come with systems you end up buying?
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Members of staff at Huddersfield Magistrates Court admit to being somewhat shocked by the events which followed the reported sighting by a defendant of a rather large spider in one of their courtrooms.
Baffled by the appearance of such an impressive creepy crawly, staff investigated and discovered that there was an outside chance it may have been a tarantula. It turns out that last autumn a witness reported the theft of a pet tarantula he had taken to the court in a plastic box, like you do...
And, proving that the pluck of the profession is as resolute as ever, according to acting clerk to the justices Michael Wilson, staff took the news that an aggressive tropical spider could be lurking in some dark corner of the courthouse extremely well.
"The truth is that even if there was a tarantula here, it would be more frightened of us than we are of it," said Mr Wilson. Stirring stuff in the face of such adversity.
Nevertheless, Mr Wilson took the precaution of calling in council pest control officers to be on the safe side.
But what has taken everybody by surprise is the media frenzy which followed the news. In fact one headline went as far as bellowing: "Court Terrorised by Killer Spider".
But it seems even B-movie 'killer spiders' meet their match now and then and there have been no sightings of the crawling terror since the courts were sprayed with insecticide. | <urn:uuid:e9114356-af40-4cdd-81e0-9ff7fbce2b28> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thelawyer.com/courtroom-creepies/101764.article | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.98464 | 293 | 1.578125 | 2 |
This report was released by CESNUR at a press conference held in Washington D.C. at the National Press Club on December 1, 1997. ©CESNUR and Dr. Massimo Introvigne, 1997. It is reproduced here in the form it was released on that date, without further updates. The press conference and the report have been covered, inter alia, by the Religion News Service, U.S. Newswire, The Washington Times ("Europeans Move to Curtail Many Religious Groups", December 5, 1997), Deseret News ("2 Groups See 'Dangerous Trends of Religious Intolerance in Europe", December 1-2, 1997), The Salt Lake Tribune ("Religions Experiencing Intolerance in Europe", December 6, 1997), as well as by a number of electronic media.
Religious Liberty in Western Europe
When, in the United States, it is suggested that religious liberty should become an issue in foreign relations, immediate references are to Asian or African countries such as China, North Korea, or Sudan. Former Soviet bloc countries in Eastern Europe, including Russia, have recently been added to the list. Scholars of minority religions, however, know that serious problems also exist in some countries of Western Europe. Some cases are becoming well-known. There are, among others: the inclusion of Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the founder of the Unification Church, and his wife in the so-called Schengen list (preventing persons allegedly dangerous for public order to enter a number of European countries), and the extreme measures advocated in Germany against the Church of Scientology.
These cases, unfortunately, are not simply exceptions to a general rule of religious tolerance. Pentecostal Churches, Roman Catholic organizations, Jewish groups and many other religious minorities face discrimination in a number of Western European countries, including France, Belgium, Austria, Germany and Switzerland. Greece, meanwhile, by keeping in its Constitution a provision that outlaws proselytism on behalf of any religion other than the Greek Orthodox Church, has apparently not yet decided whether, in religious liberty matters, it really wants to belong to the West.
It is certainly true that serious crimes have been perpetrated by certain religious movements in Europe. The suicides and homicides of the Order of the Solar Temple in Switzerland in 1994 and in France in 1995 have caused widespread social concern. Certainly we do not suggest that religious movements guilty of common crimes should not be vigorously prosecuted. However, the Solar Temple incidents have been used as a catalyst in a number of countries to propose actions against literally hundreds of groups lumped together under the label of "cults". In the wake of the Solar Temple a dangerous ideology, hostile to religious minorities in general, seem to be making inroads in political and administrative circles. As scholars, we believe that it is important to understand the main tenets of this ideology (Part I). We then detail some of the results of the ideology in Western Europe, mostly in the form of parliamentary commissions and reports (Part II). After the examination of some examples (Part III), we offer some final suggestions (Part IV). It is important that -- while the European Parliament prepares to vote its own resolution on "cults" -- an international dialogue on religious minorities involve all the interested parties and those who care about religious liberty.
I. The Rise of an Intolerant Worldwiew
1. Redefining "Religion"
Virtually no one in present-day Western Europe, and certainly not governments or parliamentary commissions, would admit to being against religious liberty. The technique used to discriminate against unpopular groups is to redefine the notion of "religion". While most scholars favour a broad definition of religion (for example, as a system of answers to the basic human questions about the origins and destiny of humans), institutional definitions by political and judicial actors are often result-oriented. For instance, in ruling to deny to the Church of Scientology the status of a religion, the Appeals Court of Milan, Italy (December 2, 1996) defined religion as "a system of doctrines centered on the presupposition of the existence of a Supreme Being, who has a relation with humans, the latter having towards him a duty of obedience and reverence". On October 8, 1997 the Italian Supreme Court annulled this decision, castigating its theistic definition of religion as "unacceptable" and a "mistake", because it is "based only on the paradigm of biblical religions" and would exclude a number of mainline religions, including Buddhism.
It is true that theologians, sociologists and historians have proposed different definitions of religion. It is however, difficult to avoid the impression that in some European countries today the selection of a set of criteria among many available is governed by a preliminary feeling whether an organization deserves protection or punishment. Only broad definitions of religion appear to be consistent with the aims of religious liberty embodied in a number of national constitutions and international declarations and conventions.
2. The Myth of Brainwashing and Mind Control
One of the older and most effective rhetorical tools used in order to claim that a number of groups are not "genuine" religions is that they are not joined willingly. The anti-Mormon writer Maria Ward claimed in 1855 (Female Life Among the Mormons, London: Routledge, 1855: 38, 240) that Mormon conversions were obtained only through "a mystical magical influence (...) -- a sort of sorcery that deprived me of the unrestricted exercise of free will". In fact, Ward argued, Mormons used the secret of "Mesmerism", taught to their founder Joseph Smith by "a German peddler". The reference to "magical influence", "sorcery" and a non-existing German Mesmerist allowed anti-Mormons such as Ward to deny Mormonism the status of religion. Since religion is, by rhetorical definition, an exercise of free will, a non-religion may only be joined under some sort of coercion.
The same hypnotic paradigm has been applied, more recently, in order to distinguish between "religions", joined voluntarily, and "cults", joined only because of what was once called brainwashing and now -- since the label has been discredited by mental health scholars -- has been renamed as mind control, mental manipulation, or mental destabilization. In the United States, theories of brainwashing and mind control as applied to religious minorities have been debunked from at least ten years. The American Psychological Association (APA) in 1984 allowed Margaret Singer, the main proponent of anti-cult mind control theories, to create a working group called Task Force on Deceptive and Indirect Methods of Persuasion and Control (DIMPAC). In 1987 the final report of the DIMPAC Committee was submitted to the Board of Social and Ethical Responsibility for Psychology of the APA. On May 11, 1987 the Board rejected the report and concluded that the mind control theories, used in order to distinguish "cults" from religions, are not part of accepted psychological science. The results of this document were devastating for mind control theories.
Starting from the Fishman case (1990) -- in which a defendant who was accused of commercial fraud defended himself on the basis that he was not fully responsible because he was under the mind control of Scientology -- American courts have consistently rejected testimonies about mind control and manipulation, stating that they are not part of accepted mainline science. Anti-cult brainwashing and mind control theories are, indeed, not part of psychological or social science. They lack empirical evidence, and are a mere tool used in order to deny the status of religion to groups perceived as deviant or subversive. (These and other comments in this text apply to brainwashing and mind control theories as normally proposed in the anti-cult literature. Recently, a small minority of social scientists has proposed to use the word "brainwashing" in a different sense, in order to indicate certain techniques allegedly used -- rather than in order to persuade non-members to join -- in order to keep members of religious movements within the fold by maximizing their exit costs. The proponents of these comparatively new theories -- accepted by a tiny minority only of scholars of religion -- agree, at any rate, that they shall not be used in order to distinguish between "religions" and "cults").
In Western Europe, on the other hand, these American developments are not well-known. Although with different nuances, and dismissing the word "brainwashing" as inadequate and old-fashioned, even official documents by parliamentary commissions rely on the faulty model distinguishing between religions and "cults" on the basis of manipulation and mind control.
Mind control theories are part of a rejected knowledge consistently repudiated by the academia, professional associations, and courts of law. It is, however, argued that scholarly objections are less relevant than the "testimony" of "former members" who claim that "cults" are indeed joined because of manipulation and mind control. It is unclear why the accounts of one or another "former member" should be accepted by official political bodies, including parliamentary commissions, as more relevant by definition than scholarly research. Additionally, a misunderstanding about the very notion of "former members" is perpetuated, and plays a key role in the public stigmatization of minority religious movements. While parliamentary reports and sensationalized media accounts claim to rely on the "testimony of former members", we learn invariably that, for each religious movement, only a very limited number of "former members" have been heard by the parliamentary commissions, the courts, or the press.
Sociological research suggests that, among thousands of former members of any large organization (no matter how controversial) only a small minority become "apostates" (a technical, not a derogatory term). Not all former members are apostates. The apostate is the former member who reverses loyalties dramatically, and becomes a professional enemy of the organization he or she has left. Most former members do not become apostates. They remain -- in sociological terms suggested by David Bromley and others -- "defectors" (members who somewhat regret having left an organization they still perceive in largely positive terms), or "ordinary leavetakers" with mixed feelings about their former affiliation. However ordinary leavetakers (and, to some extent, defectors) remain socially invisible, insofar as they do not like or care to discuss their former affiliation. Apostates, being more visible, are mistaken for the genuine representatives of the former members. In fact, quantitative research shows that even in extremely controversial groups apostates normally represent less than 15% of former members.
4. Anti-cult Movements
If apostates are only a minority of former members, why often only apostates are interviewed by parliamentary commissions or the media? The logical answer is that they either volunteer to be heard, or are directed to testify by an opposition coalition. This is, in fact, the role of the so-called anti-cult movement. Modern anti-cult movements (in opposition to older Christian counter -cult coalitions) are defined as primarily secular organizations fighting "cults" based on the brainwashing or mind control paradigm.
The recent lack of institutional and academic support for mind control theories has caused a serious crisis of the American anti-cult movement. In 1996 the largest American anti-cult organization, the Cult Awareness Network (CAN), filed for bankruptcy. An anti-cult movement, however, does continue to exist in the United States, and in fact claims that its accounts, although rejected by most scholars, are validated by "former members" (i.e. apostates). Currently in Western Europe anti-cult movements (particularly ADFI in France, whose offices also serve as European headquarters for FECRIS, a Europe-wide federation of anti-cult movements) experience a degree of institutional support unknown in the United States. These well organized anti-cult movements -- particularly in France, Germany and Belgium -- have successfully introduced the mind control model to the press and to political bodies unfamiliar with the fact that this model has been discredited in the United States. When scholarly criticism of the mind control model is brought to bear agaist to the anti-cult movements, it is dismissed on the basis of the testimony of "former members". In some countries, including France, anti-cult movements have considerable resources and operate with the help of taxpayers' money. They are responsible for spreading misleading information about a number of religious minorities.
Not composed of scholars, the anti-cult organization often -- perhaps in good faith -- offer information that is simply not updated. The consequences, however, may be catastrophic. To mention only some examples, in the early 1990s the international anti-cult coalition instigated in a number of countries police raids against The Family (formerly known as the Children of God), based on practices The Family had in fact discontinued for a number of years. Based on this false information, children were separated from their mothers, and adults and children were kept in custody (inter alia in France and Spain) for weeks and even for months. Later, courts dismissed the charges, recognizing that the information was either inaccurate or not up to date, and castigated the anti-cultists. In Barcelona, Spain, Judge Adolfo Fernando Oubina in his decision of May 22, 1992 went so far to compare the actions against The Family to "the Inquisition" and "the concentration camps". These legal decisions, although important, do not compensate either the adults or the children for what was an unnecessary nightmare.
Another example of how non-updated information may easily mislead authorities concerns Tabitha's Place, the French branch of the Messianic Communities (a communal group originating from the Jesus Movement and headquartered in Island Pond, Vermont). The mother community in Vermont, the Northeast Kingdom Community Church, was raided in 1984, based on rumours of child abuse spread by local anti-cultists. However, no evidence of child abuse was found and the case was dismissed. By 1994, the Vermont community, although maintaining a strict Christian fundamentalist lifestyle, enjoyed a peaceful coexistence with neighbours and authorities.
Unaware that similar charges were dismissed in the U.S. ten years previously, the anti-cult movement in South-Western France started a campaign against Tabitha's Place (a community that, in turn, had existed peacefully near Pau for more than ten years with no incidents). Charges of child abuse were carelessly repeated and the community, continuously harassed by police and tax authorities, struggles for its very existence. In April 1997 a twelve-month-old infant child died for congenital hearth problems. Its parents have been arrested for possible abuse, although a team of twelve doctors who has examined the community's children has concluded that there is no evidence of any abuse. It is possible that the infant's parents were not fully aware of the possibilities of a surgery to remedy their child's condition. However, the criminal case against them is being prosecuted within the framework of a general climate poisoned by rumours spread by anti-cultists on the basis of claims raised and dismissed in the U.S. one decade before the French facts. They also rely on the testimony of only one apostate, who spent just a few days at Tabitha's Place (compare the scholarly study of the Messianic Communities by John M. Bozeman - Susan J. Palmer, "The Northeast Kingdom Community Church of Island Pond, Vermont: Raising Up a People for Yahshua's Return", Journal of Contemporary Religion, 12:2, May 1997: 181-190, with the report of attorney Pierre Pecastaing at CESNUR's 1997 conference in Amsterdam, Holland).
II. The Results
In the United States the Jonestown tragedy of 1978 was the catalyst for an increase of anti-cult activity. The anti-cult wordview (described in Part I above) became widespread, but the activities of the anti-cult movement were ultimately kept in jeopardy by the reactions of the academia, mainline churches, and some of the religious minorities themselves. In Europe, as mentioned earlier, the suicides-homicides of the Order of the Solar Temple, repeated twice in the 1994 and 1995 (and a third time in 1997 -- but only in Quebec), played a similar role to that played by Jonestown in the United States. The anti-cult movements were energized, and authorities started considering them more seriously. Discredited theories such as mind control surfaced again. Parliamentary commissions with a mandate to study the "danger of cults" were established in a number of countries. While not attempting to examine all the results of this activity (we have not completed, for example, a study of the currently proposed Austrian law on religion), we have selected some relevant examples.
A parliamentary commission, composed of Members of the Parliament only, issued after a number of secret hearings (not including any scholar as a witness) a report called Cults in France on January 10, 1996. It included a laundry list of 172 "dangerous cults". It did not recommend new legislation, but suggested a number of administrative actions and the establishment of a national Observatory of Cults (in fact established in 1996, with two extreme anti-cultists as its only "experts").
Although not technically a source of law, the report has already been quoted in court decisions and has led to discrimination against a number of groups. Teachers have been fired from public schools after years of honorable service only because they were members of the Jehovah's Witnesses, one of the most dangerous "cults" according to the report. A Roman Catholic theatrical group, the Office Culturel de Cluny, included in the report as a "dangerous cult" despite letters of protest of a number of French Catholic bishops, is nearly bankrupted due to the refusal of public theatres to air its shows. The city of Lyons has decided not to allow the use of public facilities to any group listed in the report as a "cult". Each French Department has now a "Mr. Cult" employed by the Ministry of Youth and Sport (often well connected with the anti-cult group ADFI) to tell the cultural and sport organizations about the evil of the cults. The anti-cult milieu element advocates actions by the Observatory against groups mentioned in its literature or in the report but not included in the list (particularly the Mormon Church and the Catholic Charismatic Renewal). Other groups are defined as "cults" by the report (including the Baptists), but nevertheless called "benign cults", a contradiction since the report starts by defining a "cult" as a dangerous organization.
Following an intensive anti-cult campaign in the wake of the Solar Temple and the French report, in February 1997 the Canton of Geneva released a report written by four lawyers, after interviewing various individuals (one scholar only). The report is organized in chapters, each signed by one of the lawyers. While, at least in some chapters, the report is written in a more moderate style than the French one, the substantial proposals are even more dangerous, advocating legislation against "mind control" and against hiring members of "dangerous cults" as government officers. The Canton of Geneva Commission released on May 24, 1997 its proposals following up the February report. The most significant are:
- to promote an inter-Canton conference in order to persuade other Cantons to follow the example of Geneva;
- to enact Canton-level legislation in order to fund the anti-cult organizations, inter alia, and allow them to become parties in cult-related trials;
- to create a Cantonal observatory including among others two representatives of anti-cult organizations, two scholars, and two "representatives of cults" (although it is unclear how the latter will be selected);
- to promote Swiss federal legislation making mind control a federal felony.
The Belgian parliamentary commission on cults released its report on April 28, 1997. This document is even more extreme than the French report, including as it is bizarre allegations against many groups including five mainline Catholic groups (among them the Catholic Charismatic Renewal), Quakers, the YWCA (but, for some reasons, not the YMCA), Hasidic Jews, and almost all Buddhists. It also proposes legislation making "mind control" a crime.
Reactions by scholars and mainline Churches have determined some turmoil in the Belgian Parliament and in the end it adopted the report itself but not the list of 189 groups included as an Appendix. This was a symbolic victory for the scholars, but most of what is disturbing is not only in the list, but also in the main body of the report. Following the report, legal actions have been taken against a Tibetan Buddhist group, a Catholic religious congregation called The Work (a Belgian group now headquartered in Rome, not to be confused with Opus Dei, also mentioned in the report) -- notwithstanding vigorous protests by the Vatican and by Belgian bishops. An action has also be initiated to force the dissolution of Sukyo Mahikari, a Japanese Shinto-based religious minority whose branches in countries such as Italy and United States have existed for decades without any trouble for the public order.
Based on apostates' testimony, extreme allegations have been made against dozen of groups. Serious concern has been expressed by scholars, inter alia about the accusation that Satmar Jews (a Hasidic community, based in New York and regarded as a "cult" by the report) "kidnap children and hide them within the international network of the movement". This seems to be based on the Patsy Heymans case, where a Belgian Catholic woman, having obtained custody of her three children, had to recover them from his Satmar ex-husband who was keeping them illegally in the United States. However, the Heymans case is not specifically mentioned in the report. The parliamentary document rather states that kidnapping children "does not seem to be merely occasional" among this group of Hasidic Jews (Belgian report, Vol. I: 359). The inclusion of these general remarks in a parliamentary document may easily add fuel to the fire of anti-semitism, whose continued presence raises concern in a number of European countries.
A parliamentary commission has been established including MPs and experts appointed by the different political parties. They have conducted hearings with scholars, anti-cultists, and members of a number of religious movements. An interim report has been released in June 1997. Although not final (and not including lists) the report raises some serious problems. In the meantime, without consulting the parliamentary commission, the government placed the Church of Scientology under watching of the local secret service. Even groups largely critical of Scientology have criticized the decision as a dangerous precedent, while local anti-cultists have already named the Jehovah's Witnesses as the second group that should eventually be watched by the secret service. Police raids instigated by the same anti-cultists have occurred against small independent Pentecostal churches.
5. European Parliament
The Parliament has entrusted the Committee on Civil Liberties and Internal Affairs with the task of preparing a report. Following criticism of the French and Belgian reports by scholars (inter alia in a seminar organized by CESNUR at the European Parliament in Strasbourg on May 13, 1997), the Committee initially produced a draft with a number of positive features (questioning, inter alia, the usefulness of preparing lists of "cults"). However, following anti-cult pressure, amendments were introduced during the final debate within the Committee, and further amendments may be introduced during the plenary discussion of the European Parliament. Thus, anti-cult ideas, initially rejected by the Committee, may re-enter the document. (The European Parliament should not be confused with the Council of Europe, an institution including more European countries but less authoritative and well-known in Western Europe. Members of the Council of Europe, unlike those of the European Parliament, are not elected directly by the people. The Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe is currently investigating "cults". The minutes of its meeting held on April 8, 1997 in Paris, with "experts" including some of the most extreme French anti-cultists, show a degree of anti-cult extremism rare even in the current, heated European discussion).
III. Case Studies
There are literally hundreds of religious minorities discriminated against or persecuted in Western Europe. They belong to all possible religious and spiritual persuasions. We have selected, as examples, two cases, concerning comparatively small French groups, certainly not well known outside France. They could hardly be more different from each other.
The Evangelical Pentecostal Church of Besançon is an example of how a group whose theology is clearly mainline (and that will be regarded as mainline in most Western countries) is marginalized after an encounter with the anti-cult movement. As mentioned earlier, a number of Catholic, Protestant and Jewish groups have suffered the same fate. The second example -- the Aumist Religion (not to be confused with the Japanese group Aum Shinri-kyo), headquartered at the Mandarom, Southern France -- could hardly be less mainline. Its theological ideas are at the very fringe of the French religious scene. It is not difficult to understand why it has been easy to make the Mandarom extremely unpopular. However, constitutional guarantees are aimed, precisely, at protecting unpopular minorities. And even the most unpopular defendant should be guaranteed due process and a fair trial.
1. The Evangelical Pentecostal Church of Besançon
The Protestant scenario in Western Europe is slowly becoming as diversified as the one in the United States. Large liberal denominations, members of the World Council of Churches (WCC), no longer represent the majority of Protestants in a number of European countries. Literally hundreds of Evangelical and Pentecostal churches, often with a conservative theology, have flourished. The large number of new churches -- and new names - may easily confuse the authorities. As usual, anti-cultists propose very simple solutions. In France CCMM (Center Against the Mental Manipulations, the second largest anti-cult group after ADFI) explicitly claims that all groups not belonging to the WCC, or to its corresponding French organization, the French Protestant Federation, are suspicious and may be "cults".
Word games are easily played. In fact, the derogatory word in French is not "culte" (the literal translation of "cult") but "secte". The latter word may literally be translated as "sect" but rather plays the same role as the English word "cult". In fact, the French word "secte" has today two very different meanings. Books from sociologists of late 19th and early 20th century are still republished, where the word "secte" is used, without any derogatory meaning, simply to identify small denominations or groups that are not (or not yet) regarded as part of the mainline by the majority churches. On the other hand, for the general public "secte" is rather used, in the sense of the 1996 parliamentary commission, to identify a dangerous religious (or, rather, "pseudo-religious") movement using mind control techniques. As the noted historian and sociologist Emile Poulat remarked precisely about the Pentecostal Evangelical Church of Besançon, this church "may be a 'secte' in the sense of Weber [the early German sociologist of religion]; it is certainly not a 'secte' in the popular and parliamentary sense of the term" (E. Poulat, "L'Eglise Evangelique de Pentecôte de Besançon - Eglise ou secte?", Réforme 2733, August 28, 1997). Yet, Evangelical and Pentecostal Churches are easily labelled as "sects" in the popular sense of the term, i.e. -- in plain contemporary English -- "cults".
The Belgian parliamentary report takes quite literally the anti-cult recommendation to target every Christian group not endorsed by the WCC. Its list includes Seventh- day Adventists -- defined, apparently without fear of ridicule, as a form of "Biblical fundamentalism" founded in "May 1963" by "William Miller" (Belgian report, Vol. II, p. 228) --, Amish, the Assemblies of God, Calvary Christian Center, Plymouth Brethren, the "Charismatic Renewal" in general, and a number of small independent Pentecostal Churches. The French report limits itself, among hundreds of independent churches, to a dozen of names. Curiously enough, the French report mentions the Evangelical Pentecostal Church of Besançon (EEPB) and ignores the Evangelical Missionary Federation, founded on the basis of the success of the Besançon church, and now including more than 30 churches. In fact, not unlike other groups, the EEPB seems to have been included in the report for one simple reason. Based on a family conflict between a pastor and his father-in-law, the EEPB has been targeted as a "cult" by the anti-cult movement CCMM, particularly after 1994. Due to the peculiar status of the anti-cult movement in France, the accusations have been spread by the press (in previous years, quite favorable to EEPB) and up to the parliamentary commission. Among hundreds of independent churches with very similar theologies only those specifically targeted (often for very local or personal reasons) by an anti-cult movement have ended up being included in the report.
In fact, the EEPB is just another Evangelical Pentecostal church. Its founder, pastor René Kennel, studied at Nogent-sur-Marne's Institut Biblique and started his career in 1950 as a Mennonite part-time preacher. Soon, he welcomed on his family farm the Pentecostal Gipsy Movement of Pastor Le Cossec (a member of the mainline French Protestant Federation). Impressed by the gypsies' enthusiasm Kennel started a Pentecostal ministry and in 1967 became a full time pastor. In 1975 Kennel joined with other pastors to establish the Evangelical Free Pentecostal Federation (FELP). In 1977, he became the pastor of a Pentecostal independent church in Besançon, the present-day EEPB. In 1986, Kennel abandoned his position as president of FELP in order to oversee the planting of daughter churches of EEPB in the region. These churches are the basis of the Evangelical Missionary Federation (FEM), incorporated under French Law in 1989. The doctrinal statements of the EEPB are quite typical of hundreds of Evangelical Pentecostal churches.
The accusations raised by the CCMM and the media influenced by it -- literal belief in the existence of the Devil, in miracles, speaking in tongues -- could be easily used against countless Pentecostal or Evangelical churches. It is possible that church leaders, unfamiliar with legal matters, made some mistakes when preparing the by-laws and the articles of incorporation, thus exposing the church to potential problems with French tax authorities. On the other hand, it is a fact that the French Revenue Service only took action after the anti-cultists had started targeting EEPB as a "cult". When, in July 1994, an ex-member visibly drunk damaged the furniture of the church belonging to the Evangelical Missionary Federation in Langres, anti-cultists (and a part of the press) quickly took the side of the apostate, presented as just another "victim" of a "cult". Paradoxically, before and after being labeled a "cult" by the parliamentary commission, EEPB has always been able to maintain its pastors, for health and retirement insurance purposes, in the lists of CAMAC-CAMAVIC. (This is the social fund for pastors in France that is largely controlled by the Roman Catholic Church and includes ministers of all the mainline Christian churches).
In the meantime, however, the fact of being in the parliamentary list of "dangerous cults" threatens the very existence of EEPB and of the whole FEM. Not only does media pressure against the "cult" continue but -- following administrative instructions enacted in the wake of the parliamentary report -- the federation's churches have been denied the use of public meeting halls by local authorities, and the French Revenue Service is continuously harassing this struggling minority. The saga of EEPB confirms that in the present French scenario it is not enough to preach a mainline Christian theology in order to avoid the label of a "cult". A minor incident is enough to result in being blacklisted by an anti-cult movement. And, unfortunately, the black lists of the anti-cult movements easily become the black lists of the media and the government.
2. The French Aumist Religion (the Mandarom)
The French Aumist Religion, whose legal structure is called Association of the Triumphant Vajra, headquartered in its holy city of Mandarom (hence the popular nickname of "The Mandarom"), is not only regarded by anti-cultists and by a sizeable part of the French media as a cult. It is the cult, particularly in Southern France. This is in itself an interesting phenomenon, taking into account that the Aumist Religion is not a very large group, with less than one thousand members in France and a smaller constituency in Italy, Quebec, Belgium, Switzerland and Africa. The holy city of the Mandarom -- described as the very epitome of the "danger of the cults", a base threatening a whole country -- does not include more than fifty residing monks.
The Aumist Religion (the name comes from the sacred Eastern sound AUM, the only common element with the Japanese Aum Shinri-kyo) was founded by Mr. Gilbert Bourdin, a native of French Martinique. In 1961 he was initiated by the Indian master Sivananda in Rishikesh (later, he received other initiations, inter alia by the 16th Karmapa) and started gathering followers as an ascetic practising austerities in Southern France. He also became quite well-known as a Yoga teacher and author of some 22 books (some of them translated in several languages). In 1967 he established the Association of the Knights of the Golden Lotus (replaced in 1995 by the current Association of the Triumphant Vajra) and in 1969 he founded the holy city of the Mandarom. Gradually, Bourdin revealed himself as the Messiah: the Lord Hamsah Manarah. In 1990 he was publicly crowned as the Messiah at the Mandarom; some of the ceremonies were open to the media. At that time the movement hoped to crown the existing constructions at the Mandarom (temples representing all the great religions of the world and huge statues) with a larger Temple-Pyramid, a building of great spiritual and cosmic significance for the Aumists.
The public ceremonies of 1990 were interpreted as an arrogant challenge by the anti-cult movement and the media. The Mandarom with its huge constructions was, simply, too visible. Two TV networks, Antenne 2 and TF 1, started a campaign exposing the Mandarom as a "cultic concentration camp". Among the anti-cult activists emerged militant psychiatrist Jean-Marie Abgrall. He went on record on TV commenting, about Aumism, that "notwithstanding what they claim, cults are not religious movements, but rather criminal movements organized by gurus who use brainwashing to manipulate their victims", a nice summary of the anti-cult ideology. The campaign against the Mandarom was largely organized by ADFI, and from 1992 it was joined by an ad hoc ecologist group lead by Mr. Robert Ferrato. The latter claimed that the Mandarom is an offense to the ecological equilibrium of the mountain where it is built and called for its destruction. As mentioned earlier, anti-cult activists are taken more seriously in France than in other countries, and even an extreme character such as Dr. Abgrall managed to become one of the two "experts" in the national Observatory of Cults established in 1996.
The Mandarom was raided repeatedly between 1992-1995 by tax and police officers in a military style. ADFI, Mr. Ferrato, and a reporter for the TV network TF1, Bernard Nicolas, played a key-role in making an apostate, Florence Roncaglia (whose mother is still with the Mandarom), "remember" that she had been molested and raped by Bourdin in the 1980s. A complaint was filed in 1994, just before the expiration of the legal delay. Later, other female apostates also "remembered". Based on Roncaglia's complaint, the Mandarom was raided again on June 12, 1995 and Bourdin was arrested. Coincidentially, at the same date the French Council of State should have rendered its final decision on the question of building permission of the Temple-Pyramid. The decision was finally unfavourable to the Aumist Religion. On June 30, 1995, Mr. Bourdin was released and the proceedings against him are still pending. For the Aumists, the fact that the Temple-Pyramid can no longer be built is extremely serious. They are also concerned with the climate surrounding the prosecution against their leader, most recently manifested in October 1997 in the media comments about the criminal procedure against a local politician, Pierre Rinaldi, for alleged corruption in connection with the building of the road leading to the Mandarom.
The case of the Mandarom raises important questions. There is little doubt that the claims the Aumists make for their founder are quite extreme. Generally speaking, claiming to be the Messiah does not make any religious leader particularly popular. The Aumist literature combines Eastern themes and Western esotericism, and it is difficult to distinguish between actual and symbolic claims. (For example, it is argued that the Messiah has destroyed millions of devils threatening Planet Earth. These and similar claims are routinely quoted by anti-cultists to ridicule the Mandarom). In short, Mr. Bourdin is an unpopular religious leader, and Aumism is an unpopular minority. This circumstance makes Aumism an excellent case to test religious liberty in France. When a group is protected by its own popularity, there is no need for constitutional or international guarantees.
The scholars who have taken the time to study the Mandarom (others are simply scared away by controversy) have raised doubts about the possibility for Bourdin to obtain a fair trial. They certainly do not suggest that sexual abuse by pastors or religious leaders should be condoned. They agree that it should be vigorously investigated and prosecuted. Some comments about the Mandarom case are, however, in order. First, the local judges do not seem to be familiar with doubts raised in the United States and elsewhere about belated memories of sexual abuses surfacing after many years in therapy or within the frame of national controversies. In fact, in the last few years, most cases of so-called "recovered memories" have been dismissed by U.S. courts. It is in fact too easy to accuse public figures of sexual abuses allegedly taking place ten or fifteen years ago. Second, it is questionable that the Court of Digne has regarded it as necessary to appoint an expert to investigate "the doctrines and practices of the Mandarom and their connection, if any, with the facts of the case against Mr. Bourdin". A point confirming the dubious objectivity of this proceeding is that the Court of Digne has appointed Dr. Jean-Marie Abgrall as its expert -- not only a militant anti-cultist but an author who had written in a book that Bourdin is "a fraud" and "a paranoid," and that Aumism is a "clownesque caricature of a cult" (Abgrall, La Mécanique des sectes, 1996, pp. 31, 91). The verdict of a similar "independent expert" has been rendered in advance. Finally, irrespective of the personal problems of Mr. Bourdin, one wonders why, in connection with his prosecution, the Mandarom has been repeatedly raided, Waco-style, by paratroopers, and a number of members of the movement other than Mr. Bourdin have been handcuffed and taken into custody (although no charges were ever filed against any of them).
Scholars are often asked whether there is a risk that groups such as the Mandarom may become involved in violent confrontations with the authorities, or commit mass suicides like the Solar Temple. They normally answer that the Aumist doctrine is firmly against violence and suicides. This is, however, only part of the story. Writing on the situation at the Mandarom, Italian scholar Luigi Berzano (a professor of sociology at the University of Turin and a Roman Catholic priest) mentioned the sociological theories of amplified deviance (Berzano, "La déviance supposée dans le 'phénomène sectaire': l'exemple de la religion aumiste", in Pour en finir avec les sectes. Le débat sur le rapport de la commission parlementaire, Paris: Dervy, 1996: 315-320). According to these theories, the hostile official responses to a movement regarded as deviant may in fact amplify its deviance. In a sense -- as suggested in the U.S. debate by Passas and others -- the movement is "deformed" by official and anti-cult harassment. Excessive reaction against a movement, thus, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and may cause the very evil it is supposed to avoid.
While it is not for scholars to recommend specific policy attitudes, some general suggestions seem to be in order.
1. It should be clear from our report that Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe should not be the only areas of concern when religion liberty risks are evaluated. At least three countries in the European Union (France, Belgium and Germany) should be considered at risk (with the addition of Greece, where the problems are, however, more similar to those prevailing in Eastern Europe).
2. A primary cause of concern is the public sponsorship in these countries of private anti-cult movements. It is abundantly clear that these movements are responsible for spreading misleading and often simply false information about religious minorities, and an intolerant worldview.
3. It should be clarified that disgruntled apostates, no matter who sponsors their claims, are but a minority of the larger population of ex-members of any given religious minority, and should not, without further investigation, be considered as representative of ex-members in general.
4. It is a cause of serious concern that myths discredited and debunked in the United States about brainwashing and mind control, thanks to the promotion by the anti-cult lobby, are still taken seriously in certain European countries. They need to be exposed as pseudo-science.
5. Words are not neutral. Words such as "cults" (or "sectes" in French, or equivalent words in other European languages) are easily used as tools of hate and discrimination, and should be avoided, particularly in official documents. Scholars often use "new religious movements". Although better than "cults", even this language can cause misunderstandings about movements which are new only in the West while they represent a century-old-tradition in the East (such as ISKCON, popularly known as the Hare Krishna movement, or Soka Gakkai, part of the mainline tradition of Japanese Nichiren Buddhism). The most neutral term is "religious minorities". It avoids judgements about whether a group is acceptable, or is connected to an old tradition.
6. Nothing in this report should suggest that laws should not be enforced against criminal actions perpetrated within the frame of old (or not so old) religious movements. The experience shows that there are, in fact, dangerous and even criminal, religious groups. In case of common crimes (a different thing from the imaginary crimes of "belonging to a cult" or "using mind control techniques") the suspects should be investigated and prosecuted as criminal suspects, not as members of religious minorities.
Washington, December 1, 1997
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[Home Page] [About CESNUR] [CESNUR Library] [Texts & Documents] [Book Reviews] [Conferences] | <urn:uuid:392f9097-65e0-4d95-b875-66b4ddd26c26> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cesnur.org/testi/Washington.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963199 | 9,151 | 1.78125 | 2 |
The Evolution Deceit
At the age of 80, the British Professor Antony Flew, the intellectual standard-bearer of atheism, finally announced that he now believed in God. This statement by Flew, formerly a professor of philosophy at Reading University, shocked and stunned the atheists of the world. His statements were covered by such major international publications as the Washington Times. The Turkish daily Vatan told its readers of Flew’s views to the effect that “the complex structure of DNA and research show the existence of a divine presence behind creation".
The report went on to quote Flew’s own words: Biologists" investigation of DNA has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce [life], that intelligence must have been involved... As people have certainly been influenced by me, I want to try and correct the enormous damage I may have done.."* Flew concluded by saying that scientific discoveries proved that there was a divine force behind the creation of the universe.
*Stuart Wavell and Will Iredale, The Sunday Times, “Sorry, Says Atheist-in-Chief, I Do Believe in God After All,” Dec 12, 2004) | <urn:uuid:141ae25f-9c5b-4ddc-bfba-b153e34fc78a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.evolutiondeceit.com/en/works/121035/Atheism | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967644 | 251 | 1.820313 | 2 |
History made: Singapore's first casino opens
At exactly 11.18pm on February 14, 2010, Singapore joined the ranks of other cities such as Macau and Las Vegas when Resorts World Sentosa (RWS) officially opened the nation's first casino.
Together with the Marina Bay Sands -- set to open in the next few months -- the opening of the so-called 'integrated resorts' are aimed at bolstering tourism to the city-state.
Whether by coincidence or intent, this day was the first day of the Lunar Year of the Tiger, as well as being Valentine's Day, making it a double red-letter day for both the country and Resorts World Sentosa.
Possibly due to the significance of the date, there was added excitement. A large crowd turned up, forming a queue before the official opening to grab bragging rights to be the first visitors into the casino complex. (It previously had been hidden away from public eyes and surrounded in a veil of secrecy.)
It has been almost five years in the making. In April 18, 2005, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong announced the cabinet's decision to develop two casinos with attached hotels and malls in Marina South and Sentosa Island. These were subsequently given the euphemism of 'integrated resorts' to lessen the emphasis on gambling and allude to the entertainment and tourism value of the casinos.
At the opening ceremony, chairman of Resorts World Sentosa and the Genting Group, Tan Sri Lim Kok Thay said, "In less than three years since the time we broke ground and commenced construction for Resorts World Sentosa, we have taken our vision from drawing board to reality. This is a significant milestone in Singapore’s business history. We promised to deliver a true integrated resort, and we have not deviated from that."
A traditional lion dance performance marked the official opening, with two pairs of Chinese lions from both Malaysia and Singapore drawing reference to the collaboration between the Genting Group, which is based and operated mainly in Malaysia, and the Singapore government.
At 12.18pm, one hour after the private opening ceremony, RWS welcomed the first public guest into the casino. Despite the steep entrance levy of S$100 for Singapore citizens and permanent residents, the queues started to form as early as 8am that morning. The S$100 levy is a mandatory fee imposed by the authorities as part of the efforts to limit the social impact of casino gambling, which also includes several exclusion schemes regulated by the newly formed National Council on Problem Gambling.
First in the door was Josephine Chan, who joined numerous others that had lined up for the occasion.
Experiencing Resorts World Sentosa
The casino floor itself is vast, stretching over 15,000 square meters, with 530 gaming tables and 1,300 slot machines spread throughout the complex. An estimated 13 million visitors are expected for the first year of operation, and when fully open over 10,000 people will be employed, according to officials. RWS is also looking at different events to attract gamblers and visitors -- poker tournaments and championships high on the list.
The casino opening is part of the initial phased opening for Resorts World, which began on January 20 with the opening of its four hotels (Crockfords Tower, Hotel Michael, Festive Hotel and Hard Rock Hotel Singapore). The FestiveWalk shopping and dining promenade soft-opened on January 30.
For the casino opening, there were a day of festivities -- including the debut of its public attraction, Lake of Dreams, and evening previews at the Universal Studios theme park.
According to Channel NewsAsia, despite the fact that none of the 20 rides and shows at Universal Studios will be ready, the Universal Studio preview tickets have almost been sold out to visitors eager to get a taste of the attractions.
Tan Hee Teck, chief executive Officer of Resorts World Sentosa, said, "We know a lot of Singaporeans are looking forward to the opening of both our major elements, the casino and Universal Studios Singapore. We are ready to soft-open the casino but are still fine-tuning the rides and shows in the theme park, which are still on schedule to open in the first quarter of 2010. However, since it's Chinese New Year, we decided to offer Singaporeans a week long preview of Universal Studios Singapore with a special and unique first-to-see walk-through opportunity. The theme park’s unique restaurants and shopping venues will be open for guests, although rides and shows will not be operational."
For a better look at what Singapore's first casino looks like, check out our image gallery above, or watch the clip of the Chinese lions performing the chai ching (採青) ceremony at the grand opening of Resorts World Sentosa. | <urn:uuid:61842e1c-1cbf-46c4-b209-225c8ad47680> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://travel.cnn.com/singapore/play/official-launch-resorts-world-sentosa-casino-051216 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956017 | 986 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Tue December 20, 2011
Investors Endure Another Disappointing Year
For Americans saving for retirement, 2011 was another lackluster year, filled with lots of risks but few rewards.
Savers who tried to avoid risks by putting money into federally insured savings accounts earned almost no interest. The money just sat there, even as inflation ate away at its value, with consumer prices rising nearly 3.5 percent this year.
And for those who invested in a broad array of U.S. stocks, the results were — at best — mixed.
On Tuesday, stock prices were rising on good news about housing starts. But this bounce is not enough to make 2011 a winning year. Most stock investors have lost money, and probably a lot of sleep, since January. They had to sweat out frightful plunges time again and again.
"It was a year of jitters, with huge swings in sentiment," said J.P. Morgan Asset Management Chief Market Strategist Rebecca Patterson.
The Shadow Over Markets
The poor performance and volatility of financial markets generally reflected uncertainty and disappointment tied to the failure of governments to fix debt problems. In the United States, Congress nearly triggered a Treasury default this summer by delaying legislation to raise the nation's debt ceiling, and in Europe, a number of debt-laden governments teetered on the edge of default.
But while investing generally was a frightening, frustrating experience in 2011, some winners did emerge. Those included people who invested in U.S. Treasury securities at the year's start.
Back in January, the conventional wisdom held that owning bonds, such as 10-year Treasuries, would be a lousy idea. At the time, those government notes were yielding about 3.4 percent.
Experts were predicting interest rates would rise throughout 2011. According to these forecasts, bonds would decline in value as investors spurned the measly 3.4 percent yield to chase after newer, higher-yielding bonds. In such a rising interest rate environment, "everyone thought bond prices would fall," said Paul Edelstein, director of Financial Economics for IHS Global Insight, a forecasting firm.
Bonds, Gold Did Well
But the opposite happened. Interest rates fell dramatically in 2011. Today, newly issued 10-year Treasuries are yielding only about 1.8 percent.
As a result, those old bonds have become much more valuable — making the people who were holding them very happy. The Dow Jones Credit Suisse Index of 10-Year Treasuries shows a gain of roughly 18 percent for the year through Monday.
Another happy group: "the gold bugs — they were right for the better part of the year," Edelstein said. People who bought an ounce of gold in January paid about $1,450. Today, that ounce is worth about $1,600, roughly a 10 percent gain.
For those who did buy stocks, the best picks involved large U.S. corporations. The Dow Jones industrial average, a measure of the stock prices of 30 blue chip U.S. companies, rose about 1.6 percent for the year through Monday's market close. (On Tuesday morning, stocks surged, with the Dow up more than 200 points.)
The big, brand-name companies in that grouping, such as McDonald's, Microsoft and General Electric, paid out dividends to investors this year. So even if stock prices didn't rise much in 2011, the cash paid out to stockholders made blue-chip investments somewhat attractive.
"The well-established companies did well," said Jamie Farmer, executive director of Dow Jones Indexes. "That reflected the flight to safety."
As part of that flight to safety, the U.S. stock market had a better year than many foreign markets. The Dow Jones Global Total Stock Market Index was down more than 13 percent for the year.
"This is still the safest, most liquid market in the world," Patterson said of U.S. financial markets.
What About Next Year?
Predictions for 2012 are difficult to make because of the extreme uncertainty in Europe, where the continuing debt crisis is threatening to trigger a financial meltdown that could spread around the world.
But absent such a catastrophic event, U.S. stock investments are likely to do well because corporate earnings are expected to rise, most analysts say.
"U.S. growth is poised to be stronger in 2012," Edelstein said. "And I would expect interest rates to stay low."
That combination should make for a relatively healthy investing environment. "But analysts are all over the map because no one is certain how the European debt crisis gets resolved," he said. | <urn:uuid:7f04c787-00ed-4cd1-96db-4161c7ae1905> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://kwit.org/post/investors-endure-another-disappointing-year | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972156 | 953 | 1.679688 | 2 |
A hard part of growing up is figuring out where you belong. This can refer to a home, a group of friends, or even a profession. On Dec. 5- 6, future process technology operators from South Plaquemines and Belle Chase high schools toured Nunez Community College’s Industrial Technology program.
Ray Frey, Nunez PTEC instructor and retired process operator, said the tour gave students the opportunity to see what the program and the profession are all about. A majority of the students were seniors who need to decide if they want to attend a two- year college and go right into the workforce or four-year university.
“They should get involved as early as possible to see what is right for them,” he said.
Frey led the tours along with representatives from industry partner, Phillips 66. The students, who participate in their school’s dual-enrollment programs with Nunez, toured the process technology labs and classrooms. After safely donning themselves with hardhats and safety goggles, they toured Nunez’s state-of-the-art distillation training plant with its true-to-life, computerized control panels.
“The big opportunity in this program is that we truly put people to work,” said Frey. With the two-year degree, process operators earn an average annual salary of $58,800. Graduates of the PTEC program at Nunez enjoy an overall graduate placement rate of greater than 70 percent with industry-leading partners such as Valero, Shell Motiva, Phillips 66, Air Products, Domino Sugar, Intralox, Exxon Mobil, Entergy, Targa Resources, Chevron, DOW Chemical, ADM Grain, and SGS Petroleum.
Also, as a result of a recent articulation agreement between Nunez and Nicholls State, Industrial Technology students at Nunez can even transfer credit to Nicholls State University’s Bachelor of Science program in Petroleum Services.
Dominic Henry, South Plaquemines High’s quarterback and a dual-enrollment student, said he is excited about continuing his family tradition of working in process operations in the oil industry. Like several of the visiting students, Henry plans on attending Nunez after high school for the two-year industrial technology program.
Frey said he is “happy to help young people find what they want to do.”
Becca Chapman writes for Chalmette. She can be reached at 504-481-6516 or firstname.lastname@example.org | <urn:uuid:66304611-7eae-479e-9cba-f6fe61a3dfbc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.nola.com/stbernard/2012/12/south_plaquemines_and_belle_ch.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 | 0.958579 | 533 | 1.507813 | 2 |
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INFORMATIONAL LETTER: 35
POLICY CODE: JJC
To: Superintendents, Principals and Art Teachers
From: Susan A. Gendron, Commissioner
Date: October 20, 2003
Re: Student Art Exhibits
As you know, the Department of Education is enjoying newly renovated offices in the Burton M. Cross State Office building. While we have transitioned to cubicle living, our permanent wall spaces have been fitted with wall mounted exhibit frames, allowing us to showcase two-dimensional student artwork. I enthusiastically invite schools to prepare exhibitions of student artwork to be displayed within the Department. This is a great opportunity to recognize all the wonderful talent within our schools and to share this art with the many visitors to the Department of Education. We have hosted several displays to date, which have been very well received and appreciated. The displays have not only contributed significantly to our work environment, but celebrate the high quality of Maine student work and of the teachers and programs that support them. Please consider submitting student artwork from all levels, grades K-12, for exhibition here in the Department. These exhibitions will allow the many student artists within our schools to be recognized by the Governor, Legislature, other State agencies and the public at large who all visit our Department regularly.
Each exhibition will be displayed for a period of 6 weeks, accommodating 24 pieces of art. Attached are the Exhibition Guidelines that set forth specifications and the schedule for exhibitions. If you are interested in displaying your student art, please contact Margaret Harvey at 624-6730 or email at email@example.com
Thank you for supporting your young artists.
Attachment 1: Maine Department of Education Art Exhibition Guidelines | <urn:uuid:3d0f6e22-669b-44b7-bc51-42a1b201353c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.maine.gov/education/edletrs/2004/ilet/04ilet35.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951259 | 355 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Drawn to Colored Pencil
May 24 - July 14, 2013
Bellevue Arts Museum and the Colored Pencil Society of America are pleased to present Drawn to Colored Pencil. In skilled and inspired hands, colored pencils are capable of a remarkably wide range of effects creating rich and complex hues. The participating artists in this display are members of the Seattle District Chapter of the Colored Pencil Society of America.
The Colored Pencil Society of America was founded in 1990 as a nonprofit organization dedicated to artists over 18 years of age working with colored pencil. With about 1,600 members worldwide and over 25 district chapters in the U.S., CPSA provides opportunities for colored pencil artists to network. The Society is run by a governing board consisting of thirteen artists and professionals who volunteer their service to ensure benefits to the membership and the future success of the organization.
OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, June 7, 5:30 - 7:30pm
Free to the public. RVSP online >
Friday, June 7, 11am - 2pm & 4 - 5:30pm
Saturday, June 15, 1 - 3pm
Saturday, July 13, 1 - 3pm
Community Education Gallery
Through BAM's Community Education exhibitions, we celebrate and nurture the community by featuring student work and exhibits that promote educational enrichment and cultural awareness. The Community Education Gallery is open during regular Museum hours and is free to the public. | <urn:uuid:f3d6eaf1-2e19-4f42-885b-52f978475888> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bellevuearts.org/exhibitions/community_gallery.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955236 | 299 | 1.648438 | 2 |
I just got this on Twitter. I've been wondering, too, what would happen if my school closed, as we only have four weeks left. The last week is exams, so that doesn't count. It's the end of the year again, and again I am not where I would want to be in my curriculum. I have a bit of an excuse this year because we switched to a new schedule that makes little logical sense, but actually has many advantages. One of the biggest issues in shifting to the new schedule was that we would lose about two weeks of class time. There are blocks of unscheduled time for students to work at school with their classmates on group projects or with me conferencing about their writing, or just getting homework done earlier in the day. I have seen a tremendous decrease in the number of students posting blogs at midnight, and group projects completed outside of class but during school time have gone well this year. But, I'm still stressed at the end to "get it all done" on time without stressing my students out in return.
I have found, in the past couple of weeks, that I am turning more and more to online learning and discussing as opposed to directing it all from the classroom. To expedite our study of The Glass Menagerie my students created blog posts about characters in class, then revisited them for homework with the direction to 1) add new understanding in the original post and in comments on other characters' posts and 2) use that as the means to study for the upcoming quiz. Tonight students will use a Voice Thread to examine the meanings of symbols throughout the play.
One of the reasons that this works is that we have studied these concepts (character development and symbolism) all year. Now is the time for application, not introduction of ideas. I predict that this will also help as we are beginning to review for the final exam. My expectations of the students are that they will be more independent in their application of the concepts and their use of the online tools, ultimately really testing their understanding more authentically. Understanding does not, and should not, always be tested in a student's participation during class discussions or on quizzes. Using tools to replace some of these traditional real time class activities is beneficial and prevents monotony! | <urn:uuid:d3ba85b5-3657-4ca7-98e8-5514cf13ebac> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://jclarkevans.blogspot.com/2009/05/push-to-online-learning.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978254 | 463 | 1.757813 | 2 |
Subject: Re: Garlic and animals
From: wolflishus.aol.com (Wolflishus)
Date: 14 Aug 1995 13:28:53 -0400
>>I've been feeding my cats and dog a little garlic every other day. Is there any bad side effects that could result from this? So far it's helped rid them of tape worms, and slightly cut back on the fleas.
>I have done the same myself on cats, dogs and even horses. The only side effect was to have one horse break out in hives as an allergic result and we discontinued dosing her.
>In Diane Stein's book The Natural Remedy Book for Dogs & Cats, garlic is highly recommended for its many healing properties. she suggests using 1/4 of the adult (human) dose for cats and 3/4 for a medium sized dog; full dose for large dogs. She claims that since this is a >food, an actual overdose is unlikely. She also suggests using as pure a brand as possible and curshing the tablets or opening the capsules and mixing with food.
Being a vet tech, I have heard every possible "old wive's tale" in reference to animals. I have also found many of them to be true, or at least based in truth! Garlic is one of the true ones. My one comment is that rather than using a tablet or capsule form of the garlic, use fresh.
From the garden grown without the use of pesticides is best, of course, but dried cloves from the grocery is good, too. Many of the healthful properites of the garlic are carried in the natural oils, and when you remove the oils, those properties are rendered less effective. Non ineffective, mind you, just *less* so. I have discovered that most carnivores (dogs, cats) really like the taste of garlic, and a little minced garlic on top of the bowl of food is a great treat. The herbivores don't seem to like it as well, at least the small ones like the hampster, but I don't know about the horses. With the animals you don't really have to be concerned about their breath or body odor, so why use dried odorless garlic when you can give the fresh, which is cheaper, better for them, and a great treat? : ) | <urn:uuid:111d15f6-f58f-47dd-b456-60562e90d4e9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.henriettesherbal.com/archives/best/1995/garlic-pets.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960857 | 482 | 1.703125 | 2 |
In the early 1960's, Joseph Eichler expanded his reach from the suburbs of Northern California to the city of San Francisco.
Joseph Eichlers initial project was in the Diamond Heights neighborhood of San Francisco, where he collaborated with architect Claude Oakland to design and build approximately 100 single-family homes. Unlike the post-and-beam, modern ranch homes Eichler built in the surrounding suburbs, most of these Eichlers were 3 and 4 bedroom, split-level or two-story units. >> Learn more about Diamond Heights Eichlers in San Francisco.
After more than a decade of success building single family homes, Eichler decided to try his hand at multi-unit, residential housing. He aggressively pursued this new and unfamiliar urban market and quickly launched a variety of simultaneous projects including low-rise, high-rise and townhouse projects in San Francisco.
You can learn more about each of these unique developments by clicking on the corresponding link. If you are a prospective home buyer, you can also sign up to receive an automated Eichler Listing Alert anytime Eichlers hit the market in San Francisco! | <urn:uuid:83ef0c05-a2f0-4814-a21f-1d831e5287a0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.eichlerforsale.com/San_Francisco_Eichlers | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955716 | 229 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Appearing before the Education Select Committee this morning, Education Secretary Michael Gove made it clear that he does not agree with calls made by the Welsh Education Minister Leighton Andrews for a GCSE re-grade.
Yesterday Mr Andrews ordered the WJEC exam board to re-grade its English language GCSE after many students were were awarded lower grades than expected.
Michael Gove told MPs on the Education committee that the move was 'irresponsible and mistaken' and was a 'regrettable political intervention'.
He went on to accuse Leighton Andrews of 'attempting to shift blame' from what he claimed was Labour's poor record on education in Wales.
Mr Gove said employers would not be able to count Welsh GCSE results as equal to those in England - and he said that would have long-term effects.
Leighton Andrews has hit back at the criticism, saying that it's Mr Gove who is undermining parental confidence in GCSEs.
Here is his statement in full:
– Leighton Andrews AM, Welsh Education Minister
Michael Gove got a number of basic things wrong today. Clearly it suits him to try and turn the deepening crisis in England into a political spat with Labour in Wales – but we are going to stick to the facts and the core issue at hand. The pupils affected by this mess deserve straight answers, not political game-playing.
The Welsh Government has refused to adopt one of the GCSE qualifications available in England because we don't believe it stretches pupils enough. Separately, the evidence we collected showed more re-sits in England than in Wales, in respect of WJEC English Language.
Michael Gove’s continued unilateral statements over recent months have, potentially irrevocably, damaged the three-country consensus on GCSEs and A levels that had existed for decades. His outbursts devaluing these qualifications have already led the Northern Ireland Examinations body to decide it would no longer offer its qualifications in England. Michael Gove is the person undermining parental confidence in GCSEs.
On GCSE English Language, the bottom line remains the same. Everyone accepts that a cohort of students have been treated unfairly. If Mr Gove and Ofqual are prepared to tolerate this unfairness then that's a matter for them. We have decided to act, on the basis of proper evidence and advice, to ensure that the best interests of Welsh pupils are protected. It is not our fault that the regulatory system in England is in crisis. | <urn:uuid:18c59205-a3e5-424e-9da1-532b5ace6a82> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.itv.com/news/wales/2012-09-12/gcse-re-grade-row-continues/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976771 | 511 | 1.710938 | 2 |
RITE AID CORP. (RAD)
Rite Aid Corporation is the No. 3 drugstore chain in the U.S., with 4,900+ stores across the country. In mid-2007, Rite Aid acquired 1,850+ Brooks and Eckerd drug stores, making a bigger player among the top three. Two-thirds of the company’s sales come from prescription drugs, though its stores also sell health and beauty products, convenience foods, greeting cards, and other items, including about 3,000 private-label products. Rite Aid was founded in 1927 and is based in Camp Hill, PA.
Rite Aid Corp. (RAD) is part of Business Exchange, suggested by Ginny Moore. This topic contains 460 news and 176 blog items. Read updated news, blogs, and resources about Rite Aid Corp. (RAD). Find user-submitted articles and reactions on Rite Aid Corp. (RAD) from like-minded professionals.
Please add new articles to this topic | <urn:uuid:44579785-19ab-4614-895d-7ee115027cb4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bx.businessweek.com/rite-aid-corp-rad/reference/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941529 | 208 | 1.5625 | 2 |
I feel my approach to social media is a lot different than other experts. I strive for a holistic approach. On Mondays I blog about craft to help you guys produce the best “product” possible and, often, on Fridays, I talk about the writer human and give tips for how to develop the character of the professional author. Then, of course, Wednesdays are social media. Yet, these three facets often blend together, and, to me, that is a powerful reflection of the world we now live in.
One of the reasons that traditional marketing doesn’t work well in the Digital Age is that the concept of boundaries has changed. Last week we talked about Personal Space Invaders and how we all resent them, but this week we are going to talk a bit more about that notion of “personal space.” We now live in a world that no longer has the same boundaries. We are steadily becoming the Global Village that Marshall McLuhan envisioned over fifty years ago in his revolutionary work, The Gutenberg Galaxy.
Tribes then Print and then Tribes + Print
If we study the entire history of human communication, we find that Pre-Literate Tribal Human and the Digital Age Human have a lot in common, and the Human of the Typographical Era is fading away. In the Typographical Age (reliant on the written word), humans were highly reliant on official gatekeepers of information. Information flowed one direction, from top-down. So, in much of the 20th century, we relied on the TV-Industrial complex for all of our news, our opinions, and for recommendations about what goods and services to buy (until the Internet changed all of that).
To understand the big picture, we need to go back in time a bit…
The Gutenberg Revolution
With the invention of Gutenberg’s press, literacy exploded and so did human reliance on written information. The written word fractured the tribal communication system of serfdom and transformed society. We no longer had to be in the village square to get the skinny on what was what. Humans began to rely more and more on the printed word now that literacy was no longer a privilege reserved only for the elite. As a consequence, we drifted apart. The tribe had split, and it seemed it had split for good.
But, in the Typographical Age, as I mentioned, there were gatekeepers. Yes, humans, for the first time in history were facing information glut, but we still had those people in power who could tell us what to pay attention to.
Then came social media and the village square is back with renewed fervor.
As Society Changes, So Does Communication
In a tribal system, we don’t rely on newspapers and fliers, we rely on each other. There are people who always have good advice, great recommendations and who know what is what. In a world that is deluged with information, it is just easier for us to ask our peeps (the other villagers) what they think.
For instance, I ignore most of the news. Why? Well if this were the 1800s then the only news I would get would be what was directly relevant to me. I might hear that Santa Ana was no longer honoring the treaty of 1824 and that conflict was imminent. I might hear that wounded Confederate soldiers were in town and needed care. I would hear if a railroad was going through, but almost every shred of information would have been directly relevant to me or to those I knew and loved. Information could only travel as fast as human, horse, train or boat.
These days information comes instantly from every corner of the globe continually. I have to pull away to maintain my sanity. I cannot equally care about the race for the presidency, school shootings in Colorado, a missing girl found dead in Mississippi, villagers slaughtered in Dafur, or the Russians manufacturing thermonuclear Beanie Babies.
Too much information will crater me emotionally and psychologically. I don’t withdraw because I don’t care. I withdraw because I have to to stay sane. Humans were not wired to cared equally about everything in the world all at the same time.
This is one of the reasons that experts who recommend we blast out link after link after link are only tossing gasoline on a fire. People are already on system overload and, if we add to their overload problem, they won’t have warm, fluffy feelings for us.
Age of Instant
When the telegraph was invented, the Typographical Age was living on borrowed time. Information could travel almost instantly from anywhere that had a telegraph. Suddenly people in Georgia could get national news right from D.C., or San Francisco. For the first time, humans could get international news while it was still relevant.
This was right about the time we saw the birth of advertisement and the TV-Industrial complex. This system of gatekeepers worked well because it was communicating to a society still bound by Typography (the written word) and not relationships (the tribe).
At the latter part of the 20th century, one device struck a mortal blow to the TV-Industrial complex—the personal computer. The Internet had already been around for a while (the military had been using it), but the Internet alone didn’t have the power to topple the current system. No, so long as we could only communicate via letters or expensive long-distance phone calls, the TV-Industrial Complex ruled unchallenged.
Once the personal computer became affordable and user-friendly, it’s natural partner was the Internet. At this point, the TV-Industrial complex’s days were numbered because, for the first time since before the Gutenberg revolution, people were able to “talk” to one another easily and for free. We started relying on each other again instead of books, pamphlets papers and official gatekeepers of the TV-Industrial complex.
Brave New World
We can see the first aftershocks of this change. The Western world rippled and stretched with a 10.0 magnitude aftershock that toppled Tower Records. The executives were no longer in control of the musicians, thus they no longer could control the music. Shortly after this, another 8.0 ripple took out Kodak. Kodak no longer could control how people shared images. Now? We are in the 6.0 that is shaking traditional publishing.
Yes, each aftershock is smaller because the groundwork for change is already there. We need less “shaking” for the same amount of change.
These “media quakes,” much like natural earthquakes, are taking out the rigid, old structures. Anything that doesn’t bend and move with the ripples of change is going to fall over. There is also another result of all this shaking and destruction. Old topography is no longer regonizable. We can’t find the streets (paths) that were once so familiar to get us where we wanted to go.
Instead of write a book, query, rejection, repeat 735 times, rewrite 736 times, agent, more rejection, book deal, we have a hundred different pig-trails to take us to our end goal. Yet, the key is we are now far more reliant on each other. We lean on our tribe for emotional support, information, and feedback.
Why did I take you through this brief history of media?
I wanted to give you an idea of how much this world has changed. We can’t use tools that worked in a 1980 world because that world no longer exists. Also, one of the necessary “fallout effects” of all this shaking and global connecting is that boundaries no longer seem to make sense any more. They are no longer clear and this can create problems.
In a 1980 world our boundaries made sense and they had been there for over a hundred years. We didn’t interact with agents all over the country real time. We didn’t talk to other writers all over the world. We weren’t expected to be plugged into a “hive” to “build a platform.” So what’s happened is that we are getting new psychological stress. Humans need boundaries. It stresses us not to know where we stand in relation to others.
When are we being responsible marketers and when are we crossing a line and becoming a personal space invader? How do we set boundaries with ourselves? How do we set boundaries with friends and loved ones who can’t see that writing is working not goofing off?
How do we set boundaries with personal space invaders who want to use our Facebook page to advertise their books? How do we lovingly confront when people get out of line? The upside of social media is we have more access to friends and loved ones. The downside is that toxic people have unprecedented access to us as well, and that can be a nightmare if we are ill-equipped to deal with these types of individuals.
Writers Don’t Exist in a Vacuum
I know that as The Social Media Jedi, I have often served as the Social Media Dear Abby. It is tough to know where we stand and what to confront in the Digital Age. In a world without borders, how do we set boundaries?
I try to be very transparent with you guys and I will admit that I struggled with anger for a long time. I finally realized what the problem was. Yes, I am generally a happy-go-lucky-gal who laughs and smiles all the time, but I wasn’t setting boundaries. When people crossed a line, I told myself and them it was okay when it wasn’t. I wasn’t confronting in love early, so by the time I did confront, I was seeing red. What should have been a “gentle but stern talking to” quickly devolved into a thermonuclear strike followed by salted earth and a curse of seven plagues.
Many of you might fall into the same trap. You are nice, nice, nice, gentle, nice, nice, not-so-gentle, then BOOOOOOM!!!! *screams*
Anyway, I finally realized what was going on and found some helpful tools to handle this growing problem. In the Digital Age, we need to master loving confrontation and the art of setting boundaries. I know we all grew up in a world with clear borders and expectations, but that world is buried under a pile of digital rubble and we need to take up the torch.
I go out of my way to help writers in every area of life, so I’m offering a new class I am calling Good Fences–The Writer’s Guide to Setting Boundaries. I have priced this at only $15 because I hope this class will bless you with better relationships, productivity, and peace of mind.
So what are your difficulties? Where do you struggle with setting boundaries? Does your spouse or family refuse to respect your writing time? Do you have a hard time getting off social media? Do you have tips for keeping boundaries with yourself and others? Do you ignore the news and only pay attention to what you hear from friends and family? Or can you keep up with all of it>
I love hearing from you!
To prove it and show my love, for the month of October, everyone who leaves a comment I will put your name in a hat. If you comment and link back to my blog on your blog, you get your name in the hat twice. If you leave a comment, and link back to my blog, and mention my book We Are Not Alone in your blog…you get your name in the hat THREE times. What do you win? The unvarnished truth from yours truly.
I will pick a winner once a month and it will be a critique of the first 20 pages of your novel, or your query letter, or your synopsis (5 pages or less).
And also, winners have a limited time to claim the prize, because what’s happening is there are actually quite a few people who never claim the critique, so I never know if the spam folder ate it or to look for it and then people miss out. I will also give my corporate e-mail to insure we connect and I will only have a week to return the 20 page edit.
At the end of October I will pick a winner for the monthly prize. Good luck!
I also hope you pick up copies of my best-selling books We Are Not Alone–The Writer’s Guide to Social Media and Are You There, Blog? It’s Me, Writer . And both are recommended by the hottest agents and biggest authors in the biz. My methods teach you how to make building your author platform FUN. Build a platform and still have time left to write great books. | <urn:uuid:92dc9341-0b61-4cb3-bd73-43202ab4dc4a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://warriorwriters.wordpress.com/2012/10/17/good-fences-setting-boundaries-in-a-world-with-no-borders/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964851 | 2,662 | 1.78125 | 2 |
Tourist Information Center:Tourist information center Šentjur (near the bus station)
++386 3 749 25 23
Besides Kozje, the central settlement of Kozjansko area on the extreme south of the Šentjur Municipality is Planina pri Sevnici.
It is 17 km from the centre of Šentjur and was mentioned for the first time as a wine growing settlement already in the year 1190, however, in 1345 it was mentioned as a market town (the copy of the pillory has been preserved until today).
The inscription on the plague memorial testifies that in 1646, a plague demanded the lives of a thousand victims. However, besides that, also frequent peasant risings demanded many victims. In the beginning of the 19th century, the inhabitants were famous for the most beautiful beef cattle which they were selling at fairs, however, some of the inhabitants were also tradesmen.
The wealth of the district has been in its woods which even today are being taken advantage of by the Bohor company. The local company Tajfun invented innovative machinery (forestry winch, power saw). In the woods in the springtime you can admire the protected yellow flower 'Jarica'.
The area was cut off from the most important traffic route - the railway, which at the turn of the 20th century connected the region of Celje with the world and that environment offered only a modest means of survival to the local inhabitants, however, because of that, the nature remained untouched.
Also the German writer of Slovenian origin Anna Wambrechtsammer, who is famous mainly for her novel ‘The Counts of Celje Today and Never Again’ was creative and inspired in that environment. Planina with its ethnologic collection, Castle and preserved Turkish linden is an excellent starting point for walks to the nearby hill Sv. Križ (St. Cross), past the chapels of the Stations of the Cross or along the marked mountain path from Sedlarjevo to Bohor.
However, in the nearby Gothic church of St.Vidus (sv. Vid), Friderik of Celje and Veronika Deseniška supposedly got married. Organised events include a walk along the paths of XIVth Division in February and the traditional Angel Sunday at the beginning of September.
ANNA WABRECHTSAMMER - the writer
Automobiles : from Šentjur turn in the direction of Kozje, and then the way goes straight foward about 15 km.
Bus : The buses drive from Celje to Šentjur and continue to Planina about 5 times a day.
GPS Northing (N) : 46,1043
GPS Easting (E) : 15,4052 | <urn:uuid:3ceef580-c159-4b41-a135-65219208d981> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.slovenia.info/?_ctg_kraji=3726&lng=2&viewscale=30 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961939 | 586 | 1.726563 | 2 |
Every season, we cover New York fashion week — the clothes, the money, the parties, the putative "trends." But we also cover the racial makeup of the casts of models high-profile brands select to walk in their fashion shows.
We do this because the fashion industry continues to have a vexed relationship with race. Some magazines and designers treat skin color as a kind of a fashion trend in itself. Anecdotal evidence and the accounts of numerous models of color suggest that overt racism shows itself in fashion in a way that it doesn't in other industries: because it is acceptable to hire or not hire a model based entirely on her physical appearance, it is also, apparently, acceptable to cancel a model because you "already have" an Asian in the show, or to tell a model, "We're not doing black girls this season."
This season, NYFW was more diverse than it has ever been since we began keeping this data, eight seasons ago. But only very slightly. The good news is that models of color finally topped 20% of the models booked for fashion week shows. In the 141 shows and presentations covered by Style.com this season, designers presented 4,561 individual outfits, or "looks." Of those 4,561 opportunities to use a model, 3,641 went to white models, and 920 — or 20.1% — went to models of color.
The largest single ethnic category, after whites, was Asians. Asian models were used for 402 looks, or 8.8% of the time. Black models were close behind, at 367 looks, or 8%. Non-white Latina models were used 110 times, or 2.4% of the time. Models of other races were used 41 times, or 0.9% of the time.
There were still certain shows that lacked diversity. Calvin Klein, as usual, showed its collection on 32 white models, and one black model. The Olsen twins' attempt at high fashion, The Row, had a 20-look collection — and not a single model of color. Reed Krakoff, the Coach creative director-turned-designer, showed his 30-look collection on an all-white cast. Doo.Ri had only one model of color. Lacoste had two, and no black models. Victoria Beckham had just two non-white models in her show. So did BCBG Max Azria, Derek Lam, and Diesel. What's interesting is that most of these are multinational brands that seem very interested in taking the money not only of minority Americans, but of women in countries like Brazil, India, and China. But it seems that to a lot of fashion brands, white skin is still "aspirational."
Of course, there were some designers who demonstrated that they do value racial diversity. Diane von Furstenberg, 3.1 Phillip Lim, Jason Wu, J. Crew, Suno, Mara Hoffman, Betsey Johnson, Tracy Reese, L'Wren Scott, L.A.M.B.: all of these shows had numerous models of color. So did, to his credit, Tommy Hilfiger, a designer whose shows have not always been terribly diverse. Also this season, Max Azria booked not one but two black models at one of his shows — Hervé Leger by Max Azria. And he had two Asian models in his cast, too; that's the first time he's used four whole entire non-white people to sell his clothing at any runway show since the Spring, 2000, season. Maybe Azria is the king of diversity, after all.
It's difficult to quantify a problem like high fashion's demonstrated preference for white skin. Race is a social construct, not a fact. And our "categories" — black, Asian, non-white Latina, and what we for lack of a better term call "other" — are not (and probably cannot be) perfect. We don't count white women from Latin America in our gerrymandered "Latina" category; though they are as Latina as their darker-complected countrywomen, on the international modeling circuit, the color of their skin is more important than the passports they bear or the cultural heritage they represent, and they have the privilege of competing with other white models for the much larger pool of jobs that are open to white models. So this count comes with some obvious caveats. And for those who are curious, all of our raw data is available at the bottom of this post.
We perform this census, the interns and I, because it's interesting to have a record of just how racially diverse fashion is becoming. People are always arguing that things are getting better, that fashion is on some long, meliorative journey towards post-racial harmony, or whatever. Some people argue that fashion is already there! (To which I have only these words: slave earrings.) In an industry where the criticism and the reporting alike are informed by a certain amount of anecdote and conjecture, it's good to have some hard numbers. (Sometimes you can even catch a major critic calling an 85% white fashion week a shining example of multiethnic celebration.)
So with these numbers, this fashion week represents a step, however small, in the right direction. That's more encouraging than last season. This is news that should be greeted positively, of course, but it bears pointing out that in one of the most diverse cities on the planet, and in an industry that has many people of color in leadership positions (in addition to being historically very tolerant of sexual minorities), a fashion week that is roughly four-fifths white is still only a modest indicator of progress. We have a long way to go before racial diversity starts being the norm in fashion, and not the exception.
Below, Jezebel's model-counting data.
And a special thanks to Madeleine Davies, Chelsea Hoffmann, Doug Barry, and Olivia Fleming for their assistance with this beast of a project. | <urn:uuid:abc37332-0794-4783-9468-879241144eec> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://jezebel.com/5886159/new-york-fashion-week-is-the-most-diverse-in-ages?tag=diversity-in-fashion | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973459 | 1,232 | 1.53125 | 2 |
About Fair Haven Schools
- There are 3 K-12 schools in Fair Haven, NJ, including 2 public schools and 1 private schools. Fair Haven public schools belong to one districts, Fair Haven Borough School District.
- There are 3 Fair Haven elementary schools, 1 Fair Haven middle school and 4 Fair Haven preschool schools.
Contact Education.com with questions or feedback about SchoolFinder.
Please note, if you wish to speak to someone at the school, you must contact the school directly. | <urn:uuid:e624e95b-ab7f-4eff-818b-beaf17959fd3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.education.com/schoolfinder/us/new-jersey/fair-haven/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958531 | 101 | 1.820313 | 2 |
On Technologies and Library Space
ACRLog welcomes a guest post from Maura Seale, Research and Instruction Librarian at Georgetown University Library.
Now that the fall semester instruction rush is over, I have been able to spend some time catching up on my library blog reading as well as my own research. I recently read this post on Academic Librarian about the National Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology 2011. The study basically found that undergraduate students are pretty attached to ‘standard issue’ technologies like computers and printers and recommends that universities and colleges should research what their particular students actually use and use that information to make policy.
This post made me think about the recent photo study I worked on at my own library. I work at Georgetown University’s Lauinger Library, which is the main library on campus. It houses the humanities, social sciences, and business collections, and unlike many campus buildings, is open 24 hours on weekdays during the fall and spring semesters. We’re primarily a residential campus and our building sees a lot of use. We (my department, Research and Instruction, and another department, Access Services) decided to do a photo study of some popular study spaces on the second and third floors of the library after hearing a presentation from Kathleen Webb of the University of Dayton. We knew that the library was heavily used and we were interested in figuring out how to make our spaces even more appealing to our students. On random days throughout the spring 2011 semester, we took photos and did head counts of nine distinct spaces. We analyzed this data over the summer and will be writing up our results shortly, after doing a few comparison dates in the fall 2011 semester.
I’m not going to talk about the conclusions we drew about the spaces themselves, as I’m saving that for the article, but our photos revealed a lot of interesting things about how students use technology. One of the spaces we photographed was our reference computer lab, which is very heavily used. That’s right – our desktop computers and especially printers are consistently used throughout the day. In the afternoons and early evenings, there is often a line at the printers; we even recommended that the library consider purchasing more printers, due to heavy use. Our reference room also has long tables that seat six, but they are usually occupied by four or less students, who use that space to spread out. What are they spreading out? Laptops, notebooks, and books, some of which are obviously library books. In the reading room on the third floor, students use the armchairs to read books and newspapers and the tables to use laptops, notebooks, and books.
It’s not that our students don’t use other technologies; I know that they use smartphones just from sitting at the reference desk and whenever I show a class how they can send a text with the call number and title to their phones, they get excited. But they’re still using that technology to find a print book and they snicker at the idea of Tweeting a call number and title. I really don’t see that many iPads on campus and I don’t know how much use our QR codes have really gotten. Sometimes I think that librarians want to anticipate change so badly, and are so keen on meeting our users’ needs that we jump beyond where our users are. It’s important to keep up on trends, of course, and to be open to technological changes as well as willing to embrace them, but we also need to stay grounded in what our specific users want and need. This photo study was invaluable in this regard and now we have evidence to make our case for more and better printers, as silly as that might seem.
What trends have you noticed in your user population? Are you doing anything to assess how technology is or is not being used on your campus? Have you discovered anything unexpected about your users in your own research? | <urn:uuid:5f6500ab-40fc-4da5-a62f-d67ddaae3574> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://acrlog.org/2011/11/28/on-technologies-and-library-space/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965632 | 808 | 1.84375 | 2 |
Q. At what age and how often does my dog need to be vaccinated against rabies?
A. You are required by law to vaccinate any dog over 4 months of age against rabies every year. If the dog is over 1 year of age you can get a three year rabies vaccination that is good for three years.
Q. What are the fees and how often does my dog need to be registered?
A. The fee for altered dogs for one year is currently $10.00 and is due within 14 days of receiving a one year rabies vaccination. The fee for unaltered dogs receiving a one year rabies vaccination is $25.00. The fee for altered dogs for 3 years is $30.00. The fee for unaltered dogs that receive a three year vaccination is $25.00 per year or $75.00 for three years, this is due within 14 days of receiving the vaccination. If registration payment is not received within 30 days of your vaccination you could receive a Notice to Appear for Court along with a fine. We currently do not require that cats are registered in Henry County.
Q. How can I get a rabies tag for my dog?
A. Rabies tags are sold at many of the veterinarians in Henry County, or they can be purchased at the Henry County Animal Control office. You can receive a replacement tag by calling the Henry County Animal Control and requesting that a new tag be issued to you.
Q. Does my dog have to wear its Rabies tag?
A. We do ask that you attach the rabies tag to your dog’s collar. If your dog is lost and picked up by Animal Control, your local police, or a citizen, we can identify your dog by the number listed on the rabies tag.
Q. Who do I notify if my dog has died or is missing?
A. If your dog has died or is missing you should call the Henry County Animal Control at (309) 937-2266. If your dog is missing you should also notify your veterinarian and any other veterinarians in the vicinity of your home, along with the Henry County Humane Society- Geneseo (309) 944-4868 and the Henry County Humane Society- Kewanee (309) 852-0040. If your dog has died you should notify your veterinarian. The above agencies should also be notified regarding deceased or missing cats.
Q. Who do I call to report Abuse or Neglect?
A. Please call the Henry County Animal Control at (309)937-2266. You can also call your local police department.
Q. Who do I call to report a loose dog or cat to be picked up?
A. If the animal is located within city limits you must call either your town or village hall or your local police department. If the animal is located outside city limits please call the Henry County Animal Control at (309) 937-2266.
Q. Who do I call to adopt a pet?
A. You can call the Henry County Animal Control at (309) 937-2266, the Geneseo Humane Society at (309) 944-4868, Kewanee Humane Society at (309) 852-0040, or you can call your local Animal Control.
Q. What can I do about stray cats in my neighborhood?
A. In most cases you can call a licensed trapper to remove bothersome animals. If a stray cat has bitten a human you must call the Henry County Animal Control immediately, so the cat can be trapped and observed for the required 10 days.
Q. How can I get rid of wild animals in my yard that look sick or are destroying my property?
A. You can call a licensed trapper to have them trapped for a fee, you can also call a private animal control service listed in the yellow pages under Pest Control.
Q. What do I do if my dog or cat has bitten someone?
A. If you have been bitten by a dog please seek medical attention. Contact the police or sheriff’s department, they will fill out an official observation order. The police or sheriff will contact the owner and issue the observation order. Animal Control will receive a copy and contact the owner to verify the terms of the order. If your dog is vaccinated you can keep it in the home for the 10 days, but it MUST be confined. It should not be outside by itself and must be on a leash, it also must be confined from guests in your home. On the 10th day the dog will need to be taken to the vet’s office to be checked, bring the observation order with you, as it will need to be signed by the doctor and sent to the Henry County Animal Control. You CANNOT give your dog away or put it to sleep during this 10 day period, you will be held responsible regardless!
A stray cat should be brought to a veterinarian for observation, a family cat can stay in the home, but must be taken to the veterinarians office on the 10th day.
If you do not follow the above guidelines you will be held responsible. Please contact the Henry County Animal Control or your veterinarian if you have any questions. | <urn:uuid:ba64aea6-ff38-40e2-a2cf-62eeb738773d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.henrycty.com/Departments/AnimalControl/FAQs/tabid/122/Default.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946049 | 1,088 | 1.796875 | 2 |
King Henry has succeeded in suppressing the new Parliament. But the common people of England have come to believe that a new age has begun, a thousand year Era of the Sanctus Spiritus in which kingship and the Church will dissolve and a single world order will arise, led by the elected representatives of the common people. It is believed by many that Simon de Montfort, who gave them their Parliament, is the Angel of the Apocalypse. Simon, intent upon returning to the Holy Land, is lured back from France to see the army gathering to reinstate the Parliament. He agrees to be their leader. | <urn:uuid:b2c52653-b23f-4bc4-a684-57350f42c248> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bragmedallion.com/medallion-honorees/2012/montfort-the-angel-with-the-sword-montfort-series | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972587 | 121 | 1.570313 | 2 |
“All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.”
That’s a line from Francis Thompson’s religious poem, “The Hound of Heaven.” It’s a powerful poem and this one line has been echoing in my head. I want to write about Vesta, I’ve been looking at Juno, but it is Venus cruising through Scorpio that’s got a hold me and won’t let go till I say what she wants me to.
Venus stationed to go retrograde at 13 Scorpio on 7 October, 2010. She moved into Libra on 8 November and stationed to go direct on 27 Libra on 18 November. Do you have any planets on degrees from 27 Libra to 13 Scorpio? If you do, then this would have probably been a memorable retrograde for you. More so if you have planets near 13 Scorpio or 27 Libra, the degrees of her stations.
She’s on 5 Scorpio as I write this, and there are still 10 more days to go before she crosses 13 Scorpio and comes out of the retrograde’s shadow. Since Venus rules both our values and our romances; and she’s intense, jealous and possessive in the sign of the Scorpion, you probably learnt a thing or two about where you stand vis-à-vis these subjects. Sure there are external events, but to get the most out of this intense retrograde, you’ll gain more if you look at the internal events that the world outside causes within you. How do you handle jealousy, possessiveness, betrayal? It isn’t about what someone did to you, it’s about finding out how you deal with what someone else chose to do. Can love thrive under intense possessiveness? Can it survive betrayal? I can hear the Bee Gees asking us all, “How deep is your love?” And if it’s infinitely deep and infinitely painful, is that working for you? Is that what you choose?
When the poet says, “All things betray thee, who betrayest Me,” you’re free to fling this quote at someone else and curse them and walk away forever. But we are only ever betrayed by our willingness to be betrayed. The Buddha said, “Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.” So as Venus traces the path of her recent retrograde, as she walks with downcast eyes in the retrograde’s shadow, perhaps we should do the same. The eyes are downcast because she has turned inwards; she’s looking into her own heart, finding her own truths. Just as we need to find ours. She’s in Scorpio till 6 January, 2011. An intense time, a time of smoldering passions. When you want more, deeper, harder, and starkly honest.
Talking about intense and passionate, I don’t know how it is, but some of the religious poets have written some the most powerful stuff. Here’s something John Donne wrote (addressing God), but it could very well be the tortured Venus in Scorpio talking to her lover:
Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God
Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurped town, to another due,
Labor to admit you, but O, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
but is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed unto your enemy.
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again;
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor even chaste, except you ravish me.
P.S. All dates in this post are for India. If you are in USA, you need to subtract a day from the dates mentioned here. | <urn:uuid:61fda14f-3e11-4531-a5b7-babee1e7d7e1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://astrologyexpressed.wordpress.com/2010/12/10/in-the-shadow-of-venus-retrograde/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937434 | 906 | 1.570313 | 2 |
is making a positive impact. Washington Monthly recently released a list of colleges and universities making the biggest positive impact and UCSD topped the list. Washington Monthly list measures “what colleges are doing for the country” and are based on research, social mobility and commitment to service.
“Public service is integral to our mission,” stated UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla in an announcement. “It is an honor to be recognized three years in a row as the number one university in the nation for our dedication to service, innovative research, and efforts to ensure accessibility and affordability for a diverse student body.”
This year rankings were modified to include the affordability. The social mobility category measured both affordability, the number of students who receive federal grants and graduation rates. UCSD reported that more than 60 percent of its students receive some form of financial aid and 44 percent of students receive the Pell Grant.
–Data provided Washington Monthly | <urn:uuid:034b11a5-1e80-43b3-ab4a-8fb11ae6c67b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://lajolla.patch.com/groups/schools/p/ucsd-ranks-1-in-positive-impact | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960537 | 196 | 1.828125 | 2 |
Think…not easy. Boat is the only option. There are no public ferries currently operating between Sumbawa and Flores that stop at either Komodo Island or Rinca Island. Rinca receives a few more visitors than Komodo because it’s nearest to the port of Labuan Bajo in Flores. Labuan Bajo is the main jumping-off point for trips to Komodo National Park, and I recommend chartering a boat from here rather than Sape; Sape has a reputation for not very sea-worthy boats. You can even do a day trip to Rinca. Your boat will leave Labuan Bajo around 8:00a, sail for two hours to Rinca, and then return via snorkeling spots. The boats hold up to 10 passengers. A day-trip to Komodo Island takes four hours each way, harder to do in one day but still doable. Another option is to take a 7-day cruise from Bali that stops at these islands. Whatever you do, make sure your boat has a radio and lifejackets! These isolated islands are surrounded by some of the worst seas in Indonesia with rip-tides, whirlpools and horrendous storms.
This information is deadly serious. A Bali-based Perama tour boat went down March 28, 2011 near Komodo Island during a big storm; seventeen tourists were aboard along with eight crew. Everyone did survive reporting that, “Most of the lifejackets could not be used. They were knotted, tied together and stuck underneath a mesh cloth that was difficult to open,” and the vessel’s lifeboat was not operational. Let’s talk shades of Titanic minus an ice berg.
A chance to experience a private chartered boat ride through the Komodo archipelago is considered to be a highlight by most tourists. Steve and I would spend one night on board the boat and have all 10 bunk beds to ourselves. A bathroom with western toilet is located on the main deck; there was a cook who would prepare meals; and we were assured that, yes, there were life jackets on the boat and a radio. The captain co-ordinates with the harbor officer at all times for permission to boat. If the harbor officer says the weather is too bad, the trip must be postponed. That would be a real bummer since this trip was specifically arranged to visit the Komodo Dragons in its natural habitat.
We chose April for this visit based on advice from Happy Trails who said dragons mate in May and disappear at this time into the bushes making them harder to locate. (They like to do their mating in private.) Both Komodo and Rinca are hilly and desolate islands, sandwiched between Flores and Sumbawa. This is the only place where one can see the legendary Komodo dragons, the world’s largest lizard.
Komodo National Park includes three major islands: Komodo, Rinca, Padar, and numerous smaller islands. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and you must have a local guide (ranger) accompany you (unless you have a death wish) while trekking on both Komodo and Rinca Islands; guides are available on both islands. It cost 50,000 IDR ($5.00 U.S.) for a ranger, conservation fee of $15.00 U.S./person, entrance fees and camera fees, for a total of $25 U.S. per person a day.
Pray for good weather, non-mating Komodo dragons and let’s go… | <urn:uuid:7b886be1-91db-473e-8f17-7430bcd26b52> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://travelswithsheila.com/how_to_get_to_komodo_national_.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964521 | 742 | 1.6875 | 2 |
2 of 7
Sit with your knees bent and ankles crossed. Place your baby on your ankles facing you. Maintaining a straight back, gently lift her toward the ceiling, keeping your elbows slightly bent
[A](shown). Slowly lower your baby toward your chest and give her a kiss
[B] (next slide). Push her back up into the air. Repeat 5 times, working up to 15.
Strengthens chest, back, arms and shoulders.
Total time: 15 to 20 minutes
Tips: Keep your abs drawn in and your shoulders back and down during each move. Be sure to cradle your baby's head securely, and don't forget to play and talk with her while you exercise. | <urn:uuid:8d0de718-473d-4f2a-8fca-db48cbfd8c7a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fitpregnancy.com/featured-galleries/get-toned?page=2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953931 | 146 | 1.53125 | 2 |
UNESCO to vote on Iran’s 2nd geo-park
Press TV-The UNESCO World Heritage Committee will consider Iran’s second case of geo-park in the country’s northwest for a possible inscription on the World Heritage list, an Iranian official said.
The Iranian geo-park in the Aras free zone, East Azerbaijan Province, is expected to be examined during the committee’s summer meeting (due in September) to be included on the list, ISNA quoted Deputy Head of Aras Free Zone Organization for Cultural, Social and Tourism Affairs Adel Najafzadeh as saying.
The official said the case was planned for consideration a few weeks ago during a meeting in Japan, but it was postponed to the September meeting as there were too many cases and issues for discussion in the meeting.
UNESCO inspectors visited the Aras geo-park earlier this month in a bid to monitor and conduct the final studies. They offered the organization some ideas to improve the area, said Najafzadeh, adding that the Aras organization has begun to make up for the shortcomings.
Geo-parks are regarded as areas where exceptional and rare geological landforms are preserved in pristine natural conditions. Scientific research and educational activities can also be pursued in geo-parks.
Iran’s first geo-park was included on the World Heritage list in 2006. It is located on the Persian Gulf island of Qeshm, south Iran. | <urn:uuid:9e510e14-4458-415a-8649-994a0a025af2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.irdiplomacy.ir/en/page/1902349/UNESCO+to+vote+on+Iran%E2%80%99s+2nd+geopark.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968892 | 301 | 1.789063 | 2 |
Design by Hadi
A bitter bite
A critique of Samira Makhmalbaf's "The Apple"
By Ali Akbar Mahdi
August 4, 1999
"The Apple" looks beautiful. And it has won its young director
artistic acclaim internationally. Samira Makhmalbaf illuminates the tragic
fate of young twin girls in Iran as they confront the ignorance and traditional
values of their parents. Her message is undeniably feminist, highlighting
discrimination against women and girls that is embedded in Iranian culture.
Makhmalbaf conveys her message poignantly and powerfully in the dialogue
between the twins' father and a social case worker. While offering lunch
to the case worker, the father explains that he cannot leave his daughters
unprotected in the neighborhood because boys might defile them when climbing
over the walls to retrieve a ball gone astray during play.
The only actor who gives a sincere performance, the case worker, responds
pointedly: "The problem is that these two are girls. If they were
boys, you would have taken them out with yourself and they might have climbed
someone else's walls too." This exchange succinctly captures the film's
message. Makhmalbaf laments the consequences of denying life opportunities
to young girls.
"This story has been a way for me to understand how important 'the
street,' which is a metaphor for the world, is in a child's integration
into society, " Makhmalbaf was quoted as saying. "In Iran, the
street is where boys are allowed to play and where girls are not admitted."
Makhmalbaf selects "The Apple" as the film's title and as
a recurring motif for two reasons. She noticed that the twins liked this
fruit the most. More importantly, she considers the apple as a symbol of
I appreciate Makhmalbaf's desire to advocate equal respect for the rights
of girls and boys, but I question her the abuse that is evident in her
film. I am not a film critic but a sociologist whose concerns are more
ethical and methodological than aesthetic. Moreover, I am soft-hearted
-- I cry when an innocent person, particularly a child, is harmed.
I credit the young Makhmalbaf and her honorable intentions but I have
a problem with how she defines her film and recruits her cast. She claims
that "The Apple" is neither a documentary nor a full-fledged
drama. She melds the two formats and would like to have it both ways.
"It is documentary," says Makhmalbaf, "in the sense that
everybody is playing themselves and I didn't tell them what to do or say.
And also because everything that happens relates to an element in their
own lives. But it is fiction in that it has a storyline and some of it
comes from our imagination, like the idea of having the social worker lock
the father up." (3)
The lines between reality and fiction become so blurred in the director's
mind that she overlooks the ethical aspects of her work. Surely, there
is a long tradition of documentary films where the line between objective
reality and subjective interpretation or even outright fiction is constantly
blurred. However, the problem here is not just the mixing of fact and fiction,
but also how the director approaches her subjects.
Surely, hidden cameras are placed in stores nowadays, and reporters
frequently exploit ordinary people caught in tragic or scandalous circumstances.
Yet the ubiquity of this practice can not be a justification, particularly
by a film-maker. Film makers must be free to pursue their curiosity, they
must be skeptical of all imposed rules, and they must function in an open
environment where their creativity is received with respect.
Still, these requirements do not free them from their responsibility
to the cast, audience, and society. They must be critical of unethical
or dangerous application of the camera by some of their colleagues. Film
makers, like scientists and other professionals, must respect three rules
when conducting research, producing a documentary, and/or experimenting
with people: Securing the subjects' consent, protecting their privacy,
and insuring that they are not harmed.
If "The Apple" is a documentary, then Makhmalbaf violates
the rights of innocent children and their ignorant parents by displaying
their private pain through her camera's lens. In a drama, the director
chooses a cast member, gaining his/her consent to play a role. The role
may be disturbing, even gruesome. But the performer consciously decides
to play his/her role.
A professional actor grasps what is happening to his/her character in
the drama and why; s/he receives a paycheck for what s/he does. An actor
may even recognize the consequences of his/her performance, which may be
injurious to his/her career and/or to the audience.
In a documentary, by contrast, the camera is an "observer"
with no control over events. Characters are subjects of their own affairs,
doing what they wish to do, and responsible for what they do for or to
themselves. They may agree to appear on film but not to be manipulated
This distinction between the documentary and dramatic forms raises numerous
troubling questions about "The Apple." Does Makhmalbaf have the
parents' and their twins' consent to be filmed?
She acknowledges that "the mother is from Azarbaijan and does not
speak Persian, only Turkish. She is blind and so pessimistic, she does
not want to talk to anybody. The person whose permission I had to get was
the father."She goes to the welfare department and, as the only woman
there, affords the father "a chance to express his motives."
As Makhmalbaf puts it: "I didn't want to judge him; I just wanted
to know what made him do such things. After five minutes I found him talking
with me. I never said, 'We want to shoot a film.' He just took me [to his
house] and started telling me some things." (5)
Makhmalbaf rolls her camera immediately. She acts quickly because she
"... was sure the girls would change very quickly. And over the 11
days of shooting they did develop a lot; you can see it on the screen."
Given the above statements from the director, is it clear what kind
of consent was received from the Naderi family? Was she concerned at all
that the mother was not interested in this project? Wasn't she bothered
that the blind woman cursed throughout the film and was reluctant to go
along with the project? What was Miss Makhmalbaf's purpose in making this
movie? Did she wish to expose the plight of these twins or to exploit their
tragedy to produce a film about a provocative case?
What turned "The Apple" sour for me -- and made me squirm
in my chair as I watched it -- was how Makhmalbaf put this family in difficult
positions for the sake of shooting her movie.
One should remember that the Naderi family members are not just actors
in this film. They are the victims of certain cultural and socio-economic
conditions as well as of their own actions. To depict this reality, Miss
Makhmalbaf not only asks the family members to relive their pain again,
but also manipulates them to elicit the desired performance and, thus,
serve the script.
The young director asserts that she "did not dictate to anybody
what to say, but was fairly sure that, for instance, if [she] showed the
father a newspaper article attacking him, he would become upset."
No wonder Mr. Naderi's anger in the film is so genuine; he is deeply
wounded about an incident that insults his sense of family honor. No wonder
Zahra's face reflects fear when she cannot open the lock to the family
home in which the social worker has imprisoned her father. The little girl
is terrified because she has no clue that Makhmalbaf wants to evoke the
father's reaction to imprisonment and that this scene derives from a premeditated
In some scenes, the director casts a boy to entice the twins with their
desired fruit, the apple, as they chase it around the neighborhood. In
the film's last scene, we see the same mischievous boy bobbing an apple
in front of the blind mother from an upstairs window. The irritated woman,
who has no idea what the boy is putting her through, thinks that her daughters
are touching or playing with her. She reacts to the apple hitting her face
and head by calling her daughters. She seems totally confused and lost
in the street with something brushing her face from the front and back:
"I'm scared. Help me get my children back," says the helpless
In taunting the mother and subjecting her to the audience's laughter,
Makhmalbaf's abuse of a blind woman reaches a new and depressing climax.
I am sure the director wants to imply freedom for the mother, just like
her daughters and husband who escape the house. In fact, she concludes
that when the blind mother reaches the apple, she has also attained "life."
Makhmalbaf offers a nice and self-vindicating conclusion, but at whose
expense? Even more unnerving is that this film is scripted and edited by
the director's father, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, whose international reputation
as a director is unquestionable. Western audiences laud his cinematic innovation,
thoughtfulness, and poetic approach to film-making.
For Iranians, however, he is also known for his questionable ethics
and recruitment techniques. He was insensitive to his actors' rights in
such earlier films as "Nasouh" (Repentance) and "Salam Cinema".
Given the age and experiences of the young Makhmalbaf, one can almost understand
her similar lack of sensitivity to the Naderi family. But what about her
Ali Akbar Mahdi is an associate professor of sociology at Ohio Wesleyan
University. He is the author of Farhang-e
Irani, J'ame'eh-ye Madani, va Daghdaghe-ye Demokr'asi ("Iranian
Culture, Civil Society, and Concern for Democracy, " 1998, Javan Publishing
Co., Toronto) ... TO TOP
(1) Statement made available by Samira Makhmalbaf for 1998 Cannes Film
Festival Official Selection Committee. Distributed by New Yorker Films.
(2) "Quietly ruling the roost," Samira Makhmalbaf's interview
with Sheila Johnston, Sight and Sound (January 1999).
(3) "Quietly ruling the roost," cited in note no. 2.
(4) Statement by S. Makhmalbaf cited in note no. 1.
(5) Samira Makhmalbaf, quoted by Rana Dogar, Newsweek, October 26, 1998.
(6) Statement by S. Makhmalbaf cited in note no. 1.
(7) "Quietly ruling the roost," cited in note no. 2.
- Send a comment for The Iranian letters
- Send a comment to the writer,
Ali Akbar Mahdi | <urn:uuid:9b428a66-9e3b-44a6-9f59-fa2f876f6359> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://iranian.com/Arts/1999/August/Sib/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963529 | 2,423 | 1.835938 | 2 |
December 24, 2005 For most people, tuning a guitar takes three to five minutes and when they have finished, the final result is not very good. These people will love the Transperformance self-tuning guitar which takes less than a second to lock into perfect tune. While most guitars will only ever see standard tuning (EADGBE), a goodly proportion of popular music is played with alternate tunings. Just as each guitar sounds different, musicians will change the tune of a guitar to create the sound they require and that’s one of the reasons you often see a dozen or more guitars on stage at a rock concert. This single guitar can now replace all of those guitars as it can transform into any one of them at the touch of a button. The Transperformance guitar has the additional advantage of being able to change from one custom tuning to another (it holds 240 custom tunings) which can be selected from the face of the guitar or toggled with a foot pedal. As Jimmy Page (the man who wrote and played “Stairway to Heaven”) says of the Performer, “you've just got to witness what it is ... it's accurate, it's fast and it makes people's eyes pop out."
« Back to The Transperformance self-tuning guitar | <urn:uuid:1ad82aa6-cc12-462e-ac17-8ff08683ecda> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.gizmag.com/go/4951/picture/17998/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979632 | 266 | 1.828125 | 2 |
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