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Born in 1856, Sir Henry Rider Haggard KBE was a prolific writer of adventure novels set in exotic locations, predominantly Africa. He was also involved in agricultural reform around the British Empire. His stories, situated at the lighter end of Victorian literature, continue to be popular and influential to this day. He died in 1925.
|Paperback||9780955960284||0955960282||2009-10-01||320||0.00 x 4.90 x 7.70 in||$15.55| | <urn:uuid:e7ba80c2-f6f9-4488-bd35-879f0a8715a8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.midpointtrade.com/book_detail.php?book_id=7555 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931406 | 109 | 1.546875 | 2 |
On Election Day, the whole world will be watching Ohio, and especially Cleveland, to see if we can vote without a hitch. In 2004 and 2006, we screwed up. How our voting system has gotten better, what could still go wrong — and how you can protect your vote.
Used to be, we just voted. We didn’t worry about whether our votes were counted. We assumed they were.
Then came Florida in 2000: butterfly ballots, lawyers, the woman with the bad makeup, the bug-eyed guy with a magnifying glass inspecting a chad. After that, we started thinking unnatural, un-American thoughts: suspicion of the sweet, elderly lady handing us our ballot, fear of what happens to ballots once they’re inside the box.
But the real scandal was how the friendly poll worker got abandoned, as confused as your grandmother if she tried to order off a small-plates menu. She got handed new, complex rules to follow, sometimes right on Election Day. Lines at the polls grew longer than ever, voting machines scarce. She had to set up new computer voting stations after only a little training. When she called downtown for help, busy signals mocked her.
Meanwhile, oblivious officials insisted the elections went great. With the authorities in denial, nutty amateurs and sloppy dilettantes stepped into the void, obsessing over Ohio, seeing a Republican conspiracy everywhere, eyeballing Election Day numbers through glasses tinted with distrust.
Post-Florida, weare Florida. It’s unbelievable we aren’t more pissed off about that. If our elections office were a business, it’d be Enron. If it were a sports team, we would’ve given its failures a two-word nickname (“The Bumble”).
So, last year, all of Cuyahoga County’s top elections officials lost their jobs. Cleveland just switched to its fourth voting system in four years. We know now that big cities in big swing states — that means us — have to count on our quirky laws and sleepy elections offices getting poked, critiqued, televised, demonized and blogged about for every mistake.
If the 2008 election goes into a brutal overtime, if it all comes down to swing-state Ohio again, and if Obama and McCain come to Cleveland to prod, investigate and sue, will Cleveland’s system fall apart, or hold up?
Here is some good news — or, at least, reason for cautious optimism. Like a turnaround team cleaning house after a disgraced CEO resigns, our new elections officials have proven more competent, careful, thorough and cooperative than those they replaced.
They aren’t always brilliant, wise or frugal: They’ve made hasty moves, clashed over every big change and cost us plenty of tax money. But they ended up choosing what looks like the best possible voting method for the presidential election.
It helps to have people with a clue in charge. But the last few years have taught Ohio not to trust the government with an election. The best defense of our right to vote is an informed voter. So we’re not only letting you know what others are doing to protect your vote — we’re also telling you what you can do, before and on Election Day, to be entirely sure it counts. | <urn:uuid:60083568-c392-47e3-984b-a889002efd4b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.clevelandmagazine.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?nm=&type=Publishing&mod=Publications%3A%3AArticle&mid=1578600D80804596A222593669321019&tier=4&id=28E253FCEC914713B604E5D927B195B1 | 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 | 0.951918 | 691 | 1.695313 | 2 |
[Dead link changed 27th November 2012]
Most of us have been in Estonia for the past few days for a couple of conferences. You may hear more about that later, when Normal Service is resumed. One thing I wanted to remark on now, though (partly because it relates directly to some presentations I've been doing) is a spike in the use of VirusTotal as a tool for comparing detection performance. This is a topic we (and the guys at VirusTotal/Hispasec themselves, who are a really good bunch) are rather sensitive about.
I'll probably come back to this in the near future, but the gist of the problem is this. VirusTotal is a tool many people find very useful as a shortcut to checking a possibly malicious file, but it isn't a detection test. Most importantly, it submits the files you submit to a battery of command-line scanners. This gives you a good chance of identifying a known malicious program, but the fact that a scanner doesn't identify a file as malware does not mean it isn't malicious, obviously. However, if a file is identified as malicious by one group of scanners but not another, it doesn't necessarily mean that the second group is less competent at detection, either. Scanners that use sophisticated behaviour analysis, active heuristics and so on are disadvantaged by this misuse as a comparative test tool, since there is no behaviour to analyse. Generally, command-line scanners simply look at the code passively, rather than running it in a safe environment to see what it does in practice, so products that are heavily dependent on signature detection may seem to do better than products with advanced heuristics. In the real world, however, where on-access scanning is the first line of defence for most people, the advantage tends to swing the other way.
You might want to check out what Hispasec/VirusTotal have to say themselves at https://www.virustotal.com/about in the section "BAD IDEA: VirusTotal for antivirus/URL scanner testing".
Alas, I'm sure I'll be back to this topic sooner rather than later, and in appreciably more detail.
David Harley BA CISSP FBCS CITP
Director of Malware Intelligence | <urn:uuid:9ed5068d-7c83-4966-a818-51aa6d3b7858> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.welivesecurity.com/2008/09/12/virustotal-is-not-a-comparative-analysis-tool/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96688 | 466 | 1.601563 | 2 |
"I" refers to the reflections of light waves in the mirror following the principals of quantum physics.
A prefix for all items spawned by Apple. Includes I-pods, I-macs, I-rons, I-rans and carrots.
- 1. Someone who smashes up their television when American Idol is shown.
- 2. A linux snob who wipes away your desktop and replaces it with a command line screen.
Icthyopathy is the power to communicate (via some psychic or magical means) with Icthyologists, and or the fish that they study. Interestingly, this also frequently includes the power to speak the language of the Mythical Pixies of Shining Glen, provided you have taken enough LSD to see them.
To think about or dream about 1) New flavours of ice-cream or 2) Eating ice-cream.
Tropical peninsula of Maine known for its large Ben and Jerry's factory. Originally home to the Village people - later featured in the blogbuster hit Planet of the Apes. People from Iceland wear hats with large horns, grunt a lot and should not be taken very seriously.
Chain of shops in the UK marketed at people scrounging off the state to buy MRM based food products to assist them in achieving their obesity goal, advertised by iconic celebrities (usually famed for procreating and being arrested for drug related incidents) marketed at previous said demographic who frequent 'daytime TV' for the bodily challenged viewer.
A fossilized computer analyst who prefers the beauty of code lines rather than crappy little pictures that are supposed to represent something. HA !
- 1.A member of an unfunny comedy trio - Id, Ego and Super-Ego. Part of Sigmund Freud's Freaky Touring Circus .
- 2. A city in New York State twinned with Oz.
- Pertaining to teeth
Teeth marks on a breast.
Ideology is a difficult word.
The word was allegedly invented by a French leftist professor in the 18th century, and it was taken over later on by Karl Marx. It means " a set of beliefs and values you adhere to" (mostly because of your socio-economic position).
The only goal when using the term is to mystify English Labour voters. Because one day, politicians and academics believe, Labour voters will agree to the fact that they are not intelligent enough to understand why the hell they want to buy a TV.
Motive for murder; something annoying or queer that someone does which makes you want to kill them.
The study of idiots.
Morons who do not know how to use email properly. Forwarding spam, opening strange attachments in Outlook, and in general doing everything that is completely stupid that anyone with any net savvy would avoid doing.
anybody reading this right now, actually, for anyone who frequents this website
Any person who has ever said "It's peanut butter jelly time".
Anybody reading this right now, actually, for anyone who frequents this website
A lover of idiots and their ways. Not to be confused with an Idiotphobe who will want them dead.
To obsess over the questionable singing talent of amateur performers for six months out of the year. (See American Idol)
edit I don't give a flying fuck!
A declarative statement that conveys the speaker's inability or unwillingness to partake in sexual intercourse on an aircraft
An Apple product that is made to stream music directly into your eyeball.
A simple word used exclusively by sports fans, in relation to their team's fortunes, and what might have been. Usually used after a defeat. Also can be used with the extended whine 'If Only We Hadn't Bought....' etc etc.
An Eskimo's dwelling without a rest room.
edit "I gotta take a dump"
At Koshkonong High school.December 7, 2007. Bradd Brotherton got onto the school intercom and announced "I GOTTA TAKE A DUMP". The whole school (including the elementry) heard this announcment. He was charged with three days of full ISS(In school suspension)
An ancient medieval system of torture containing five parts.
- A maze where whatever you need is always hidden behind large, slow-moving groups of families
- You have to name household objects in a tongue unknown to man
- A line in the USA or a queue in Britain that lengthens as you get closer to the end
- You are then given a random set of pieces of wood that fail to fit together in a recognisable pattern
- A help line that is charged at high rate where you are put on hold with the message "Your call is important to us"
Most victims of this torture never see their loved-ones again.
edit Illegaladj "I'lee gal`"
- The quality of an activity or action that makes it exceedingly entertaining to oneself and others;
- A condition that exists for a given activity only when that activity is observed (for example, "Jonathan cannot see me having sexual relations with his children, therefore it is not illegal.")
- A nickname for super cool fun.
- A sick bird.
- A Latino.
- A secret society of sick bright sadists.
- Italian light bulb
“Dazed and confused, I'm living a life of illusion, confusion.”
(__) (oo) /-------\/ | || || * ||----|| ^^ ^^
Now you see a cow..
Now you don't. MOO-HA-HA!
IMHo' is cyberweb shorthand for "In My Ho", used in online conversations. It is sometimes used to explain a short absence from the computer, as in: "Please excuse me, I am with a prostitute presently". This is not to be confused with IMO.
edit In Situ
Latin for You're in the shit sunbeam.
To cause someone to need false teeth.
Another word for non-Muslim.
A pre-pubescent Dell laptop.
edit In Flagrante Delicto
Latin for 'You Lazy shit. I told you to lock the door first.'
- acronym found on the crucifix of Jesus Christ, which stands for I'm Nailed Right In.
- Your current mental state.
- A river running through Paris, named after INRIFrance's main culture.
- It's crazy out there guys, stay insane!
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz... huh? The one where you sleep badly...zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...
edit Institutional tealinstitutional red). Institutional teal concealed dirt well, and nobody seemed to object to its mind-sapping blandness. Eventually this color went the way of electroconvulsive therapy and Nurse Ratched as more modern interior designers realized that this shade of teal was more evocative of despair than it was soothing.
Enjoyable, as in "Everything pleasant is either illegal, immoral or fattening."
edit Impeach Algorithm
The Impeach algorithm ensures the fair allocation of imps to members of a group. In the trivial case, n imps are to be distributed amongst n people; thus, they get an imp each.
A little place where spam lives, stuck in the cracks between the boss's letters, and your random Internet news letters. An 'inbox' is a breeding ground for the species of spam called 'pr0n'. pr0n is any kind of Viagra and supplement spam that is made by a geeky kid in high school.
Inbox is also a term for a cardboard box that is currently in fashion. It is much more popular than the 'so last summer' box. Many people have got into trouble over the years for putting things into their in-box that really shouldn't be there, like over-sized cucumbers, watermelons and office swivel chairs.
Fungus or mould that grows on the inside of a tin
see discapable or uncapable
edit Incapacity benefit
The special power or powers resulting from lack of presence or function of the limbs. The portions of the brain usually used to control the limbs are instead redeployed as tools of mind control, extra-sensory perception and telekinesis.
- Best. Sex. Ever.
- ^This persons from Nannup
- ^This persons from Tasmania.
- A game the whole family can play.
What a French prostitute says to an English client for confirmation of commencement.
1. Displaying a lack of consistency
- Not capable of being made consistent or harmonious
3. Not in agreement or otherwise discrepant
- Somewhere to go for your holidays
- Long range missile
Despite many long international, bipartisan, and bisexual conferences, the meaning of this term has yet to be decided upon.
Computing term, often used for comparisons of different sections of code. Two sections of code are considered to be indentical if they have exactly the same indentation. What the code actually does is not important.
A state of happy being. Ebriate is fantasy world for drunks where everyone else laughs at the sober sods.
The act of expunging the nonsense out of an abbreviation, by completely abstracting it to what it would say if you were very awake and trying to say it very slowly, and expanding as many of the l33tsp3@k sounds as possible.
1. Very Much Very Right. -> VMVR
- is 'vee mover', which is much like a remover, and also much like saying 'we are the movers'.
2. Ultimately Looking Upwards With A Smile -> ULUWAS
- is 'you lu was', which i'll leave as an excercise for the class.
Opposite of Ert
Infact is the dinner from two nights ago that was left untouched due to the Soul being kept from you and your putrid kind.
Infamy is a small town near the coast in the state of Confusion. It is unknown for the most part by people who have not stumbled across it when attempting to find the closest Fred Meyers. Infamy is most well known for being a place to which bad things are banished. One such example is December Seventh, 1941. Due to the poor sales records of all the souvenir shops in Pearl Harbor that day, it was proclaimed to be a day that would live in Infamy, and thus forgotten, so that no one would have to write it down in their tax records.
Anything that is fun to abandon in a dumpster on the south side. Usually punted into said dumpster.
Inferior was long believed to be the exact opposite to superior, until a nit-picking grammar-geek declared that inferior was the exact opposite to outferior. A worldwide contest was announced 2004 in order to decide what outferior means. Due to some problems with the Grammoborg who will act as judge the winner is however yet to be declared. Inferior's relationship with ferior is unknown.
edit Infinite Loop
See Unending Loop
.redro raluger 'lo doog gnitcepxe erew ohw sredaer yonna ot ylerup esrever ni gnihtyna gnitirw fo ecitcarp ehT
Gleefully mislead, often used for workplace and governmental communication. e.g. The president informed the people of his intentions regarding the war on terror.
Derived from the word automatic which of course means the act in which a vehicle loses control and flies off a cliff killing the driver and passenger instantly. Even before they hit the ground. This phenomenon was first discovered by Albert Einstein and Michael Jackson when they were vacationing in Ethiopia for business.
An orderly arrangement.
From the latin "Ingruver", or to pose, to ingratiate is to be a total wannabe and act all cool to be accepted. For example, a middle schooler might ingratiate himself into the cool kids by talking about Family Guy, but unfortunately this never works.
Stuff you put in a printer (unless it's a laser printer, dur). All ink is obtained from sqeezing freshly-peeled octopus and comes in red, green, blue or black, depending on the species. The ink from just one of these fascinating creatures will be enough to print four billion pages of text or nine photo-quality prints. Squid ink is inferior and only comes in black. Its main use is for printing tabloid newspapers and the menus in very cheap cafes.
A quick shag at the local inn.
Innocent, derived from "in one cent", describes something really cheap. The objective of war is to kill as many innocent bystanders as possible. 12 extra points for women and children. 10 points for that man on a bicycle. For bonus points, multiply the base points by the number of yards they fly.
Innovation - Verb. The state of being in Novation, a small country in southern modern day slovakia. As used in a sentence: "We were innovation for our Festivus break from school."
Insanitarianism- noun. A religion devoted to the Demon Prince of Madness, Sheogeroth. Rites include the "Trial of The Smiley and Frowney Faces," "The Feast of a Billion Orangutangs," and "the Festival of Madness." This church is devoted to driving the world insane.
The state of being completely, totally and usually sickly, in love with someone. Often used by teenagers in the same sentence as eternity. ie: I am insatiated with her and will be for eternity. See Eternity.
edit Inspector Gadget
edit Inspector String With Two Plastic Cups Attached
A mythical inspector in the British police force with an unusual line in solving crimes. He imprisons a lot of little old ladies with nothing to do but harrass him for not catching the Acid Test Tube Baby Mangler.
Noun. Someone who is really a bit stupid and crap, and has a crap superhero name, e.g. "Dictionary Girl", or "Illiterate Boy". Not like Grammar Boy, now there's a fine figure of a fellow...
A fashionable method of standing.
- Any American who knows what an intellectual is.
- One who deems hypertrophy of the mind just compensation for constipation of the soul.
(En-ter-Cors) n. Meaning to engage in polite dinner conversation with the opposite (or in Oscar Wilde's case, same) gender, with the intention of wasting enough time as to intoxicate them so they will be more willing to engage in sexual activity
edit Intergalactic booze hall
Intergalactic booze halls are carefully placed locations around the Milky Way galaxy where any sort of traveller can quench his thirst with drinks such as human urine, ox testicles, antifreeze,The Pan-Galactic Garrgleblaster the effects of which a simialar to being hit in the head with a lemon wraped around a large gold brick, and (of course) the acquired taste of marklar.
The first such tavern was founded in the year 578 BC by Zaphod Beeblebrox. It was called Milliways, and is more commonly known as the "Restaurant at the End of the Universe".
More recently, it was in an intergalactic booze hall that the last survivor from planet Earth, King Biffo II, died in a tragic and stupid manner.
edit International Apathy Day
International Apathy Day was created... oh whatever, I don't care.
"Internets" were once free roaming creatures with the magical ability to conect electronic devices. One day a man named Billiam gates captured one of these "Internets" and foced it to connect millions of electronic machines called "Pee-Cees". Unfortunatly these "Internets" could only focus their power through telephone cable, and by doing so they would cut off the ability to use the phone. However one day Billiam, along with a few other people discovered that the "Internets" had been using only a small amount of their power and that they didn't have to use telophone cable. So after much torture, Anal Rape and floggings the "Internets" Complied and made DSL Available and allowed people to "surf" through them and onto "web pages".
edit Interstate Biddness Monkeysheens
Invented the BBS, the Selectric and Web-page frames. Founded by the Bunker-Selectric family.
edit International Pancake Day
"International Pancake Day" is a holiday to honour and worship pancakes and their holiness, as well as The Pancake Man. The holiday was created in 1997, and is celebrated yearly on September 24. On this day the pancakes also start their migration south for the winter. To celebrate, people usually eat pancakes, and rob banks in the honour of pancakes. Pancake Day is celebrated in 82 countries worldwide.
edit International miscreant
A cologne surreptitiously produced and distributed by Mennen and preferred by members of intercontinental crime syndicates and terrorist networks. It's scent has been described as "lurid" and "rapscallious", and is said to resemble the avuncular musk of U.S. Envoy to the U.N. nominee John Bolton. Recently, it has gained notoriety amongst entertainment industry "journalists" who have detected the unusual aroma at numerous parties hosted by the insular celebrity elite, whom they so envy and despise.
See rubbish bin or trashcan. The Internet is used by kind permission of Google.
Like a porn store, but without having to be seen entering or leaving it.
The museum of the present.
A TOOL USED BY POOR SAD INTROVERTS TO ABUSE ONE ANOTHER, BUNCH OF WANKERS!!!
The Communist version of the Internet.
Buried in excrement.
When you are cut off in the middle of something that isn't in any way related to-
edit Interstate 80
The best thing to come out of Iowa.
The INUIT, or the International Nameless Union of Intelligent Tuna, is a global coalition of sentient fish whose goals include world domination, and getting a Starbucks open at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. While generally peaceful, the largest school or "clan" of the INUIT, known as the Michael Moore Fan Club, has been known to kidnap dolphins to keep on a leash, hoping to inspire guilt and win their freedom when swept up into a seine net. They have no connection to the Innuit, an aboriginal tribe of Brett Favre Bean farmers in the Pacific Southeast.
Scientific term for an Iron, e.g. what you iron your shirt with. (Scientific language was invented to confuse regular people and make everybody think we need scientists). In science fiction the ion cannon is a deadly weapon which disables all ships this is because all the men on board thought they had left ironing behind when they entered space. This causes mass panic and a total break down in the chain of command. Plus irons really do hurt have you ever dropped one no your foot?
An expensive piece of jewelery worn primarily to show the the owner of said device is "down", "hip", or just wants to be mugged.
iPod, youPod, weallPod for iPod!
edit iPod Nando
A) A peri-peri spiced chicken flavoured iPod. Hmmm peri-peri. B) A musical box, property of Fernando. The name is Fer-Nando. Fernando Calrissian. Yes, he IS a Wookie.
edit iPod Shuffle
An inherently malevolent robot with an innate ability to search through an entire music library and play the exact song you really can't be arsed to listen to.
A branch of the IRS that were set up in Ireland to upset the English with explosive tax demands.
An adjective meaning to be angry or upset. Derived from the Spanish word group, Irater, irate, irata, meaning to be married.
One of Irish, African, and Canadian descent. Irish-Blackanadians are deeply troubled folk, as their heritage offers them the conflicting traits of shortness, tallness, angriness, passiveness, and fake-Frenchitude. Irish-Blackanadians are devout Catholics, but as per their cultural traditions they are baptized in alcohol rather than holy water (the way they see it, one is synonymous with the other). Famous Irish-Blackanadians include Dr. Phil and Junichiro Koizumi.
edit Irish Premier League
edit Irish Roulette
Predecessor of Russian Roulette dating back to 1630 in which participants used single shot flintlock pistols.
A verb used to describe how much the character Erkel annoys you.
edit Iron Chef
A mechanical chef made of iron from Japan. Manufactured by Useless Crap Inc. the Iron Chef was invented as a time saving device. It is programmed to make dishes you normally wouldn't pay 10 cents for. The Cult group Fark owns 45 Iron Chefs that are used to prepare the 12 pound hams that are consumed in one sitting by new members.
The strange taste of certain metals when placed on your tongue.
The application of Irony to something.
To make something taste of metal.
1This whole fucking website
2yes, completely agree. wtf is this? and who would waste their time on it? im amazed i came across it. irrevelant, and damned ridiculous
1. (adj.) Specifically and overtly anti-religious in manor. eg: Pope Benedict's opinion of Protestantism is irreligious in nature.
2. (adj.) Religious and irrelevant. eg: The Bible is irreligious
edit Irritable Bowel Syndrome
- Condition describing the irritability of ones bowels. Can often be induced by prolonged ingestion of samurai swords. Prolonged exposure to Chuck Norris (See Chuck Norris) has also been known to spontaneously cause this condition.
The meaning of "is" was removed from the dictionary following the landmark impeachment case of former moral leader and father of abstinence Bill Clinton (The 69th president of the United States of America and governor* of the 22nd state Canada). Bill Clinton brilliantly and successfully challenged the use of the word "is" in court of law and proved that it could never be used as evidence within the US judicial system without severe criminal penalties.
*Much like a governator, but accenting the steroids and foreign accent.
A backcronyn that originally stood for nothing. However, it now means I'm Smart Because I Use Acronyms. The known GNISBIUSAAs that implement ISBIUAs are C++, WYSIWYG, and TTHTMAFPCW. (If you didn't know already, GNISBIUAA is a recursive acronyn which stands for "GNISBIUAA is Not an 'I'm Smart Because I Use Acronyms' Acronym.")
- 1. Where the hobbits are being taken.
- 2. Aftershave for Orcs.
IT stands for Ignorant Talk, formally known as Data Processing. It was found that many computer workers were ignorant and liked to talk a lot, so it was changed in 1989 to Ignorant Talk. IT jobs are usually given to people called IT workers, because nobody else wants to work those jobs.
UPDATE! Apple computers has just announced that there will be a new certification for Macintosh technicians call the "mac"matician certification. This will provide new jobs for the millions of IT workers that are currently unemployed. This certification will cost $48,354 for U.S. citizens and will be offered at no cost to those residing in India and Panama. Apple is proud of the new certification as it teaches people fundamental terminology to throw out there in order to confuse their enemies. "mac"maticians will be a potent foe to deal with. Not only will they be well versed in MacOs they will also be well aware of the latest fashion trends in San Fransico. These new IT workers will be a whole new breed of ButtJunkies.
edit Itchy Fanny
Early Japanese model of motorcycle
edit Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka-dot Bikini
Advances in scanning electron microscopy have allowed us to once and for all see inside the atom to the particles within. New Scientist Magazine reported this month that quarks have been found to be composed each of three Itsy Bitsy, Teeny Weeny, Yellow Polka-dot Bikinis of varying colours. Each IBTWYPDB (pronounced 'ibby twip duh buh') can be coloured in up to two different shades of colour. Sadly, due to the small size of the transmitting particle, these colours are invisible to the human eye. | <urn:uuid:31b8d283-de9e-4447-a649-2f9b159b1ebc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Undictionary:I?diff=cur&oldid=5574109 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943565 | 5,239 | 1.710938 | 2 |
Peter Watt joint report published by Operation Yewtree investigation
The Metropolitan Police Service and the NSPCC have today published their joint report into sexual allegations made against Jimmy Savile
11 January 2013
The report, 'Giving Victims a Voice', details the work of Operation Yewtree based on the accounts of the hundreds of victims who have come forward since Jimmy Savile was exposed as a sex offender in October 2012.
Police and the NSPCC have concluded that Savile was a prolific, predatory sex offender and the scale of his abuse is believed to be unprecedented in the UK. It is believed Savile was able, through his celebrity status, to 'hide in plain sight' while abusing children and adults over six decades.
'It paints a stark picture emphasising the tragic consequences of when vulnerability and power collide,' said Commander Peter Spindler head of the MPS Specialist Crime Investigations.
'Savile's offending footprint was vast, predatory and opportunistic. He cannot face justice today but we hope this report gives some comfort to his hundreds of victims, they have been listened to and taken seriously. We must use the learning from these shocking events to prevent other children and vulnerable adults being abused in the future. They will get a voice'
Peter Watt, NSPCC Director of Child Protection Advice and Awareness, who co-authored the report with the Detective Superintendent David Gray, Operation Yewtree's Senior Investigating Officer, said that the scale of Savile's abuse as "simply beggared belief".
"We know from the huge increase in calls to the NSPCC helpline about sexual abuse that the problem did not die with Savile,' said Mr Watt. 'Since the Savile scandal broke we have seen a surge in contacts about child abuse, both past and present, with many victims speaking out for the first time.
"Almost 800 additional children have been protected from abuse because the publicity around this case prompted people to contact our helpline. We are optimistic that this signals a watershed moment for child protection in this country. We must seize the opportunity if we are to make a lasting change."
Victims of abuse who have not come forward but who wish to do so can contact the NSPCC Helpline on 0808 800 5000.
Notes to editors
Key figures from the report:
Approximately 600 people came forward to provide information, 450 relating to Jimmy Savile. From this, 214 criminal offences have been formally recorded across 28 police forces.
There are now recorded offences naming Savile as the suspect from 1955 to 2009 and the locations where victims report being abused include 14 medical establishments (hospitals, mental care establishments and a hospice). Of his victims 73% were children (under 18 years old) and 27% adults. | <urn:uuid:b1d9cc0a-c20b-472b-9782-0772f7088a4a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nspcc.org.uk/news-and-views/media-centre/press-releases/2013/operation-yewtree-report/operation-yewtree-report_wdn93653.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961989 | 565 | 1.742188 | 2 |
The Last Jump: Chapter 64
Chapter Sixty-Four Bastogne, Belgium – December 19, 1944
“The merit of the action lies in finishing it to the end.” Genghis Khan (AD 1162 – 1227)
Dawn broke nearly invisible on the morning of 19 December. Only the shift of color to a paler gray gave a hint the sun had risen beyond the impenetrable blanket of fog enveloping the eastern sky. The overnight trip from Mourmelon took place under a misty rain with the temperature hovering at forty degrees. The Screaming Eagles were transported packed tightly together in open trailers. If they slept at all, it was standing upright.
After dismounting, the paratroopers formed up in a bivouac area immediately outside of Bastogne as their senior officers rushed into VIII Corps Headquarters to receive orders. The unexpected warmth of the previous evening gave way to a crisp northwest breeze that blew steadily through the low man-made canyons of the town. The wind foretold the return to colder temperatures with a subtle promise of snow. When the officers returned, the entire division was rousted from snatches of fitful sleep and formed up on the main road into town. Thundering cannon fire testified that battles were still raging and men were still dying east of the city.
The long lines of Screaming Eagles, exhausted from the long trip and their short naps, began streaming into town on both sides of the main road. Despite being cold, wet and hungry, they walked with a confidence and a swagger that bordered on arrogance. Each face sported a mean and ugly disposition. The unspoken message seemed to be the paratroopers have arrived and the situation would soon be under control. They had won the race to the obscure farming town of Bastogne by the slimmest of margins.
The 506th PIR followed the 501st into Bastogne. They marched past the buildings, small storefronts and an occasional church that lined the main road. The morning wore on and the sky brightened slightly. Out of the misty fog, like ghosts coming to life, troops and vehicles began moving in the opposite direction between the two files of paratroopers. The Screaming Eagles strutted taller as these soldiers retreated toward the rear. But this group was not the expected ragtag wounded and dispirited gaggle of men retreating from a lost battle. They were cleanly dressed, well armed and traveling in good order. Abruptly, the paratrooper column came to a halt.
“What outfit?” Jake asked a GI as he walked past.
“Corps Headquarters,” the embarrassed soldier answered. “We got orders to set up our HQ in the rear.” The young soldier, probably a clerk, seemed uncomfortable as he watched other men head into the firestorm he was walking away from.
“Got any extra ammo?” Johnny asked as he walked up.
The soldier slipped off a bandolier of .30-caliber ammo and tossed it to Johnny.
“Thanks, Mac,” Johnny waved. The soldier lowered his head and kept walking.
All along the line paratroopers were scrounging weapons and ammo from the withdrawing soldiers. The men with the white on blue VIII Corps shoulder patches had been ordered to the rear. Some 10th Armored Division HQ personnel were mixed in and they all willingly parted with ammo or medical supplies as they passed.
“I could sure use some forty-five ammo,” Jake intoned.
“Don’t worry, we’ll get some,” Johnny assured.
“I’m not worried,” Jake answered staring into the eastern sky.
“You know, Jake,” Johnny spoke to the back of his head. “This is a suicide mission.”
Jake turned around. “Johnny, every mission we go on is a suicide mission. It never bothered you before.”
Johnny nodded and pulled an envelope from his pocket. “If anything happens to me, you need to give this letter to Rose. Promise me!”
Jake turned his back on his friend. “Nothing is going to happen to you.”
“No, I’m not taking it.”
“Look, Jake, I’ve sworn into all your blood pacts and you know you can count on me. I know I can count on you, too. That’s why I’m giving this to you. So, take it.”
Jake turned around and faced Johnny. “All right. But I’m giving it back once we get out of this shit.” He reached for the crumbled envelope but Johnny pulled it back.
“No, you need to hold it. This goes to Rose if anything happens to me no matter when. And you have to do it in person!”
Jake nodded impatiently and took the envelope from Johnny’s hand. “Sure, sure, but Jeez, you have to rewrite the damn thing once we get out of here. This looks like a mess!”
Johnny smiled. “Okay.”
Jake stuffed the letter into his battle blouse pocket and buttoned it.
“And don’t read it,” Johnny pointedly admonished.
They heard the distinctive sound of a deuce-and-a-half before they saw it. It crawled forward between the files of paratroopers. When it passed, Johnny pointed to the officers hanging out the back. They were wearing “pinks and greens”, their dress uniforms. They were nabbed from leave and were being rushed up to their unit. The truck proceeded eastward until it disappeared into the fog. They had not seen any transport come this far into town and assumed the officers were of sufficiently high rank to warrant risking the vehicle.
They marched through town for ten or fifteen more minutes and were ordered to stop. Suddenly, through the fog, came a ghostly procession of soldiers in various states of disarray. Some were without helmets or without jackets or overcoats. Others wore bloody bandages and were being helped along by a buddy. Some ambled along slowly, dragging their feet zombie-like. There was the “thousand yard stare” from the hollowed out eyes of blank expressions. Some faces showed abject fear, while others appeared shocked and vacant of any emotion. A few were murmuring cries of despair. “They got tanks”, we can’t stop them, we’re all gonna die”. This small army of the damned appeared hopeless beyond redemption.
Johnny noticed the red keystone patch of the 28th Infantry Division. That Pennsylvania National Guard unit had been involved in some of the most brutal fighting of the War, which had earned their patch the nickname “Bloody Bucket”. Mixed in with them were GIs from the 106th Infantry Division with their distinctive Golden Lion patches along with the Checkerboard patches of the 99th Infantry Division. Other patches from various tank destroyer units, artillery units and armored formations were too numerous to count. It was a slovenly, dispirited group that straggled through the two lines of paratroopers who continued to beg for weapons and ammo with mixed results. Some retreating soldiers gave up their rifles easily and therefore felt relieved from their obligation to fight. Others hung on with stubborn determination, refusing to give up any supplies.
Johnny stepped in front of a technical sergeant from the 28th Division who was carrying a Thompson. He was hoping to scavenge some ammo for Jake.
“Tell me Sarge, what’s going on up there?”
The sergeant was a big man with a course beard and bushy eyebrows. His field jacket was ripped and tattered and dirt and grime covered his clothes and smeared his face. His expression was more of exhaustion than fear. “Got any water?”
Johnny handed over his canteen. “Here, Sarge.”
The sergeant splashed a little on his face and poured some into his mouth without putting his lips on the canteen. “Thanks, Mac.”
“Will you be needing that weapon and ammo?” Jake asked
The sergeant clutched his sling tighter. “I got no ammo but damn fucking right I’m keeping my weapon! Right now I’m going for a hot and a cot and then join Operation Snafu.”
“What’s that?” Johnny asked.
“Some colonel, I think his name is Roberts, is forming a company of us guys who got separated or got our asses kicked and came back through the lines. We’re going to stay here in Bastogne and help defend the place.”
“Glad to have you,” Jake quipped. “Join the party.”
“So what’s going on out there?” Johnny asked.
The sergeant paused and took a deep breath. “They caught us with our pants down, is what’s going on.” He leaned in closer so as not to be overheard. “The fucking geniuses who put us in front of three German divisions ought to be shot. We were here to rest after getting chopped up in the Hurtgen Forest and before we could absorb our replacements, the Krauts mauled us.”
“Where were you?” Johnny was curious.
“My outfit, Headquarters Company of the Hundred and tenth Infantry, were surrounded in a château in Clervaux about fifteen miles from here. It was like the Alamo. We were inside this old stone fortress, with a drawbridge and all, and the Krauts were outside trying to get in. We made them pay. They brought in Tigers and pounded the crap out of the place. That’s when my CO decided to surrender, yesterday around noon. Fuck that! I wasn’t about to surrender. I slipped out into the woods with some guys and we made our way back here.”
“Good for you, Sarge,” Jake added.
“So don’t get the wrong idea. The only reason you guys beat the Krauts to Bastogne was because my boys fought like hell against those bastards. We bought you the time. We killed a lot of Krauts and we held them up in the Clerf River valley for two days until we ran out of damn ammo. We made them pay for every inch of ground. It was only after they killed most of us that they got past us. We didn’t bug out!” Tears of exhaustion began to form in the sergeant’s eyes.
“No one said you did, Sarge,” Johnny answered him.
The burly sergeant nodded and with a grunt continued on his way. He could be heard repeating, “We didn’t bug out!”
“Chrissake, Jake. I figured all these guys retreating were cowards. I couldn’t have been more wrong! Most of these guys are damn heroes!”
Jake nodded and reached out to the next infantryman walking by, a private. He had a handsome face except for his harelip. His uniform was still clean and tidy, making him appear woefully out of place.
“Got any spare ammo or grenades?” Jake asked.
The soldier stopped. “No. I’m staying in Bastogne.”
“Operation Snafu?” Johnny asked.
“Right, I’m Tom English,” he held out his hand. Both boys shook it.
“Going to a dance,” Jake pointed to the tie.
“I’m with the Four hundred twenty-third Regiment, Hundred and sixth Division. General Jones makes us wear these damn ties. Division regs,” English explained. He didn’t look particularly fatigued and didn’t appear wounded. He just looked scared.
“Good luck.” Johnny attempted to speed him on his way so they could accost the next soldier for supplies.
“I’m gonna be a paratrooper, too,” he said nervously. “I volunteered.”
“Good for you, Tom,” Johnny was humoring him. He couldn’t have cared less.
“I mean it. I’m serious. I volunteered. Got accepted. Just have to make my three jumps.”
The demand for replacements was so severe the airborne had recently relaxed its standards for qualification. The jump schools in the States were not producing enough trained paratroopers to replace the enormous losses the airborne divisions were suffering. To remedy this deficit, the airborne brass decided to qualify parachutists in theatre. They would learn the ropes in an accelerated class and make three jumps in one day. Since the airborne had priority on transfer requests and many young men saw this as an easier back door to becoming a paratrooper, with its extra pay and glory, there was no scarcity of volunteers. This whole new replacement program did not sit well with the majority of veteran paratroopers.
“Yeah,” Jake agreed. “We just can’t wait for you one-day wonders to join up with us veterans. How could we ever survive without you?”
English sensed the sarcasm and reacted to the slight. “You guys think you’re so damn tough? Big, bad paratroopers! I can do what you do! You’re not so tough!”
Jake’s temper was about to kick in when Johnny stepped between them. “Good luck, Tom.” Johnny gently moved him toward the rear and Tom resumed walking. Suddenly, the column of paratroopers started to move.
After some time, they stopped again. The fog lifted and Johnny could see the sign for the Hotel Lebrun on the Rue de Marche just off the main square. Along the side of the street was a conference of officers. Johnny recognized Colonel Sink, CO of the 506th PIR and Colonel Robert L. Strayer, CO of the 2nd Battalion of the 506th. There was also a colonel from the 10th Armored Division. The high-ranking officers were leaning over a map draped on the hood of a staff car. Captain West was within earshot and listened intently.
When the conference broke up, West addressed his company. “First Battalion is moving up to Noville to reinforce some of our guys up there. They’ve been fighting a Kraut armored spearhead most of the night and need infantry support. The rest of us will be moving up to Foy.”
While West was speaking, a jeep drove up from the direction they were headed. It had wooden boxes stacked up on the rear seats with ammo of all kinds. Upon seeing the paratroopers, the young second lieutenant pulled up between the columns and began unloading the boxes onto the roadway. A few paratroopers helped him unload the cases of .30-caliber ammunition and fragmentation grenades. Captain West walked over. The officer spoke first.
“I’m Lieutenant George Rice, Tenth Armored, Supply Officer for Team Desobry.”
“Thanks for the supplies, Lieutenant. Any more where that came from?”
“Plenty,” Rice answered. “I have all my supply trucks on the road to Noville and we’re passing out ammo to the paratroopers heading up that way. If I had more transport I could really help you out.” Rice looked mockingly at his jeep.
Just then the deuce-and-a half that brought the airborne officers forward was coming back on the return trip. West stepped out on the road and stopped the empty truck.
“Driver! We need this truck to make a few supply runs for us.” West tried to sound as authoritative as possible.
“Can’t do it, sir,” the black driver answered.
“We only need this truck for a short time, soldier,” West insisted. Hearing the exchange, Colonels Sink and Strayer approached.
“I got my orders from Ike.” The driver pulled out a piece of paper from his pocket. The colonels didn’t need to see it. They knew what it said. All transport was dedicated to moving troops into the Ardennes and no one had authority to change those standing orders. They were about to let the truck go when Johnny stepped forward.
“Let me try, sir,” he asked permission from West.
West shrugged his shoulders. Johnny jumped up on the running board. “Remember me?”
Lincoln looked at Johnny, a glint of recognition in his eyes. “Yeah, I remember you, ‘Kilroy was here’. I remember you but I still got my orders.”
“Look Lincoln, we’re going to make a stand here but the army forgot to give us enough ammo! A few miles up the road is all the stuff we need. It’ll only take a few minutes to scoot up there, load up and drop the supplies right back here. Two trips at most. Who’s to know? Half an hour and then you’ll be on your way. What d’ya say?”
Lincoln stared straight ahead without answering
Johnny looked past Lincoln to Chauncy Gibbons. His eyes were pleading for help. Chauncy slapped Lincoln’s arm with the back of his left hand and startled him. “Just a few trips, Linc. Right up the road and back. We can do this and nobody needs to know.”
“Goddamn it,” Lincoln shook his head. “All right.” He looked at Johnny, agitated. “Get us some help.” He turned to Chauncy. “I hated that I owed this white boy a favor. This cleans the slate.” Chauncy just smiled back at him. Lincoln looked out the window. “I’m serious Kilroy! This makes us even.”
Lieutenant Rice pointed out the location of the supply trucks on the map and Johnny and Jake jumped onto the truck’s running boards.
“Follow the jeep.” Johnny instructed Lincoln. The truck made a wide turn and followed the jeep north. West gave the boys a big thumbs-up.
The fog limited visibility to a few dozen yards. The two-vehicle convoy made decent time as it quickly traversed the few miles between Bastogne and the village of Foy. They slowed as they went through the deserted little village and picked up speed again on the other side of town. Noville was only a few more miles north and the men could hear the battle raging in and around the hamlet. A high ridge on the left side of the road gave way to a rolling pasture on the right side. A mile outside of Foy they saw the trucks.
There were ten two-and-a-half-ton trucks, five on each side of the road, parked with their open backs to the highway. Soldiers and drivers were busily milling around. The tail end of the 1st Battalion just cleared the supply trucks having acquired all the grenades and ammo they could carry. Beyond the trucks on the right side of the road was an M16 Gun Motor Carriage, called a halftrack. It had four .50-caliber machine guns arranged on a gun mount, pointing toward the sky. The GIs called the weapon the ‘Meat Chopper’. The crew wasn’t expecting enemy aircraft because of the fog so they helped with the unloading.
Lieutenant Rice barked some orders and the supply soldiers began moving ammo and weapons into the empty truck. Jake, Johnny, Lincoln and Chauncy lent a hand and in a few minutes the truck was bulging with guns, ammo and medical supplies. Rice left orders to provide the paratroopers with as much as they required and then, saying his farewell, headed north to Noville. The four GIs headed back to Bastogne and were back in less than twenty minutes.
Chauncy drove the truck back through the columns of paratroopers. He U-turned the vehicle and pointed it back north. The four men jumped into the rear and began handing down boxes into the waiting arms of the desperate paratroopers.
Lincoln looked at Jake’s nametag as they manhandled the boxes and crates over the tailgate. “Another Kilroy?”
When the truck was empty Johnny looked at Lincoln. “One more trip?” he pleaded.
“Last trip,” Lincoln looked at both paratroopers for agreement.
Lincoln hopped into the cab and started driving slowly out of town. The fog seemed to thicken as they worked their way through Foy. They crept along slowly since visibility was reduced to just a few yards. When they reached the supply trucks they were shocked. Nobody was there. The trucks had been abandoned. Where a few minutes before there was a beehive of activity it was eerily quiet as the four men walked along the road between the trucks. Jake pointed to a fresh set of tank tracks across the road. The supply detail had been run off or captured.
Johnny spoke first. “There’s no way the four of us will be able to load the truck. Let’s all take a truck back. Check for keys.”
“We have to take our own truck back,” Chauncy explained. “We’re responsible for it.”
Johnny nodded. “Okay, we’ll spread out, find the trucks with the thirty cal and the grenades and drive them back.” They began searching the trucks.
Chauncy turned his truck around and slowly headed back south into the fog while the other three worked from truck to truck to check the load and look for keys.
“Found one!” Jake called out.
The second truck pulled out of formation and followed Chauncy back toward Bastogne. Both trucks disappeared into the fog.
“Hey Kilroy,” Lincoln whispered loudly. “Listen!”
Suddenly, a German flakwagon came over the ridge to the west. It had dual .20-millimeter cannons mounted on a light tank chassis. It stood there ominously for a few moments before opening up with a stream of tracers at the remaining trucks. The two Americans dove for cover behind the halftrack. After a moment the guns fell silent.
“Hey, Kilroy,” Lincoln whispered. “Kraut flakwagon. We’re screwed now.”
“They don’t even know we’re here. We’ll surprise them when they get closer.”
At that moment a German Mark V Panther tank crawled to the top of the ridge from the opposite side. Its gun ranged from side to side, taking in the spectacle of partially laden American supply trucks arrayed defenseless before it. The German tank did not open fire on the vulnerable trucks, revealing the need to capture supplies. However, the armored halftrack represented a potential threat so the high velocity .75-millimeter gun swung over and zeroed in on the exposed vehicle.
“Can you drive this damn thing?”
“I’m a Red Ball driver. I can drive any fucking thing in this man’s army.”
“Then let’s get the hell out of here.”
The German tank fired. The shot was high and went over the top of the halftrack. It ripped into the ground with an explosive roar. Dirt and debris banged off their helmets, ripped into their faces and covered their clothing.
“Kilroy! Your face is bleeding!” Lincoln jumped into the cab and started the engine.
“It’s nothing. Let’s go, go, go!” he said as he jumped into the rear compartment.
Suddenly an incoming round landed near the Panther tank. An American Tank Destroyer had heard the distinctive sound of the German high-velocity cannon and fired a round in the general direction. While it was well wide of the mark, the Panther cautiously retreated to the opposite slope giving the M16 a brief opening to make a break. Lincoln punched the gas and the vehicle lurched ahead toppling the paratrooper to the floor. The German flakwagon came over the rise firing both cannons but lost the M16 in the fog.
“Pull over, Lincoln.”
“What for? It won’t find us in this fog. We need to keep going.” The M16 hit a bump and both men were thrown in the air.
“Jeez, Lincoln. Pull up! Let me take care of this.” The paratrooper pulled the charging handles of the four .50-caliber machine guns and strapped himself into the small seat in the Maxson turret of the M45 quad mount. Lincoln shut off the engine. The noisy diesel engine of the flakwagon could now be clearly heard not far behind them. The deadly accurate .20-millimeter cannons fired explosive shells. The Americans would be outgunned and had to make their first shots count.
Lincoln slumped on the floor of the driver compartment. “Don’t miss, Kilroy!”
“Shh,” he turned his head to pick up the sound of the flakwagon. The German vehicle moved closer and slowed to a crawl. The occupants were speaking loudly enough to be heard over the sound of the engine.
“What the hell are they saying?” Lincoln whispered harshly.
“Heck if I know,” came the answer as he fingered the electrical traverse mechanism. The sound of the turret moving would give away their position. He would have to swing the turret around, get the guns on target and fire in one smooth, fast motion.
Lincoln peered out from the passenger side of the M16. If he could see the vehicle first, maybe he could help. His heart was pounding. He could feel it through his chest. His mouth was dry and his body was shaking. So this is what combat is like?
The high-pitched mechanical whine of the M16 turret startled him. The quad-fifty mount swung into position and opened fire. The entire halftrack shook with the recoil and the noise was deafening. Armor-piercing bullets were flung at the German vehicle at the rate of thirty-six rounds per second from the four synchronized machine guns. Lincoln heard glass shatter, metal rip and saw rubber and canvas pieces flying in all directions. The bodies of the four German crewmen were flung from the vehicle riddled with bullet holes. The vehicle caught fire and ammo began to explode. In less than ten seconds over 300 rounds were poured into the target, ripping flesh and metal alike. A smoking, twisted and charred pile of junk was all that was left.
Lincoln jumped up in the driver seat and started the engine. “Which way?”
“Head west. I don’t remember the map. If we head toward our lines, we might make it back to Bastogne.”
Lincoln turned the M16 and headed west through the fields. They traveled for a few minutes when they heard the frightening sound of squeaking bogey wheels off to their right. Lincoln instinctively turned the wheel to the left to avoid the perceived threat. Visibility was still poor but they were certain the tank they heard was not American. The Germans bypassed Noville and were about to encircle it.
Lincoln guided the M16 through the fog trying to avoid any ditches or sharp changes in the ground elevation. Both men strained their eyes to see in the mist. The sound of the tank faded off to their right, probably holding to the main road and advancing cautiously.
The M16 moved slowly and vigilantly. An opening in the fog revealed a small stone farmhouse in a bowl-like depression straight ahead.
“What do you think, Kilroy?”
“Looks abandoned. Pull in the back.”
There was an empty open shed with a slanted roof directly behind the structure. It was just big enough for the M16 and Lincoln guided the halftrack into it just as the fog closed in again.
“I’ll check the house,” Lincoln announced and went in the back door.
He exited a few minutes later to see the rear of the M16 hidden by a stack of hay bales, covering everything below the quad-fifty mount.
“Good work, Kilroy. The house is empty.”
The paratrooper waved Lincoln into the back of the M16. “We need to stay here until we can see better and know what’s going on. Out there we’re sitting ducks for the Krauts.”
Lincoln nodded. “Just what I needed. Stuck out here with Whitey surrounded by Jerry.”
“Give it a rest,” he almost said ‘boy’ but caught himself. “You want to get out of this alive, we gotta work together.”
Lincoln nodded again. “Okay, so what’s the plan, Kilroy?”
“I got no plan. If they attack we got this quad fifty.” He slapped the ammo canister. “And we got this other fifty mounted behind the driver’s seat. That’s yours.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“Also we got these.” He opened both cargo box compartments. “One Thompson. You can have that too.” He flipped the submachine gun to Lincoln. “One .30-caliber M1903 Springfield rifle with sniper scope, three carbines and a box of thirty-six grenades. We got what looks like ten thousand rounds of fifty-cal ammo and a couple of cans of gas. Thank God they loaded this halftrack up!”
“Great! Custer’s Last Stand!”
“C’mon, Lincoln. We got no choice! What would you have us do?”
“We can hide. There’s a crawl space under the house and we can squirrel ourselves away in there until the Krauts leave.”
“No way. They could be here for days and I’m not going to get myself cooped up like that. Besides, we need to be able to move and fight. And one more thing, I’m not surrendering.”
“And what if the tanks come, ‘Sergeant York’?”
“You get in the driver’s seat and we go like hell and make a break for our lines.”
Lincoln shook his head. He had a splitting headache and was trying to gather himself after the adrenaline rush of obliterating the flakwagon. “Not my idea of a good plan but I guess we’re stuck with each other. For now! Anything to eat, Kilroy?”
The paratrooper kicked around some more boxes. “Nothing here but a pair of binoculars and a medical kit. Let’s look in the house.”
The two men scoured the small farmhouse and came up with a jar of preserves and a stale loaf of bread. They stood watch at the windows while they ate in silence even though the ground fog limited their visibility to just a few yards. Lincoln watched his cohort bandage his forehead to stop the bleeding from a grazing wound. He easily resisted the fleeting temptation to help while he picked a small piece of shrapnel from his bleeding leg. He didn’t want to be there and he wanted no part of this crazy, ballsy white paratrooper.
The deep rumbling sounds coming from Noville told of a fierce battle still raging. The booming sound of cannon fire could be heard echoing off the hills. Both German and American ordnance were identifiable to the trained ear. The battle raged on through the afternoon as the two Americans moved from window to window in a fruitless effort to observe their surroundings. Late in the day, gunfire erupted from near the town of Foy. That battle raged furiously for hours. There were Germans engaged in battles all around them. They were penned in with no place to go and would certainly be discovered in short order when the interminable fog finally lifted.
“We just gonna stay here?” Lincoln finally blurted out after long hours of silence. The waiting was wearing away his resolve.
“For now. There’s no place to go until we can see.”
“And what if they find us here?”
“We fight our way out. That halftrack out there moves along pretty good.”
“You a fucking crazy-ass cracker, you know that?”
“Drop the chip on your shoulder for once. Your attitude sucks. No wonder why they don’t let you people fight!”
“You people? Oh, yeah. You try being a colored boy in this man’s army and then tell me about motivation,” Lincoln said through an angry grimace.
“If it’s sympathy you want, go see the Chaplain or look it up in the dictionary next to syphilis. I ain’t got none for you!”
“Fuck you, Whitey!”
“Right. Now it’s ‘fuck you, Whitey’. Back in London it wasn’t our fight but we saved your ass anyway and now it’s ‘fuck you, Whitey’.” He pushed his webbed steel helmet up and back on his head. “You need to aim all that anger at the Krauts.”
“I got enough to spread around pretty good.”
The paratrooper wouldn’t back down. “All I hear is how you boys are all pissed off they make you drive trucks, dig graves, and never let you fight. Well, ever since we’ve been together you’ve shown no willingness to fight. You complain but when you get the chance to prove yourselves, you got no balls!”
Lincoln took a step closer. “That’s ‘cause we’re surrounded man and it’s hopeless!”
“Get this once and for all, soldier.” He took a step toward Lincoln. “I’m airborne. We’re always surrounded. But we’re not surrendering. And I didn’t make the damn rules in this man’s army. I’m not the one who says what colored troops can and can’t do. I follow orders just like everybody else so don’t take your damn shit out on me!”
Lincoln turned away but Kilroy continued. “Maybe they were right not letting you boys into combat if this is how you plan on fighting. What the hell’s the point if you’re ready to give up as soon as it gets rough?”
The Red Ball driver wheeled around and was about to say something when he was interrupted. “You think I want to be here, Lincoln? You think I’m not scared? If you want to surrender, go hide in the cellar and wait for me to get myself killed. Then you can wave a white flag and do whatever the hell you want!”
A strange calm came over Lincoln. He regained control of himself and smiled. “Go hide in the cellar? Like my granddaddy did when he hid from the Klan?” He reflected on the frightening stories his father told him when he was just a young boy. “If it’s all the same to you, Kilroy, my people are done hiding in cellars. I’ll fight with you!” | <urn:uuid:86d726e1-868a-4f0f-835e-e4c13d26ad46> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.humanevents.com/2012/09/11/the-last-jump-chapter-64/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973988 | 7,755 | 1.671875 | 2 |
be happy for the moment. this moment is your life.
the future belongs to those who belive in the beauty of their dreams.
И ещё более десяти цитат.
Life is too important to be taken seriously!
Life does not put thing in front of that you are unable to handle.
Always make new mistakes.
We do not remember days… we remember moments.
The only normal people are the ones you don’t know very well!
Nothing is worth more than the day.
some people walk in the rain. others just get wet!
Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.
the purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.
whether or not it is clear to you. no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
this too shall pass.
yesterday is history. tomorrow is mystery. today is a gift.
too much of a good thing can be wonderful!
trust yourself. you know more than you think you do.
whatever you are, be a good one.
what lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.
whether you think you can, or think you can’t. You’re right. | <urn:uuid:87383dca-9ff9-4d17-8f06-dae15782596a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://sunniest.ru/2008/12/16/think-positive-ch2/ | 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 | 0.932608 | 307 | 1.609375 | 2 |
“Everything is set up for a right-hand world,” she said.
For a while, Kimmel gave up on art, but then decided to teach herself how to paint left-handed.
“My writing with my left hand is not wonderful,” she said. “I can paint and do calligraphy.”
Her first art project was to sponge paint her kitchen cabinets. Then she did a pencil drawing of her daughter.
“I thought, ‘Well if you can do this, let’s take it to another level,’” she said.
Her new hobby: restoring old spring horses for children.
“I always loved horses and I used to ask for one every Christmas,” she said.
She has restored about 13 horses, having a friend spray a base coat so she can get to work. She has given about eight away to family and friends.
“Something you make, more goes into it - it’s a little piece of my heart,” she said.
She acquires most of the horses for free or for a minimal cost. Her first horse came from a yard sale. Price tag: free.
“It just looked so sad,” she said. “You could tell someone enjoyed it for years. So I took the rusty old thing, gave it a new life and gave it to my nephew.”
Kimmel can sit on the floor or lean the horse in her lap to be able to paint. It takes her about a month to finish a horse.
“First is the eyes,” she said. “My daughter says they have no life until I do their eyes.”
Other art projects Kimmel undertakes are personalizing tray tables and resorting old washboards.
“I go through phases,” she said. “And yard sale season is just starting.”
Her next endeavor is trying stained glass. Being able to express herself through art was a great feeling for Kimmel.
While her artistic void was met, she still missed her students. To fill that void, she volunteers with the Boys and Girls Club of Somerset County. She does art projects with the kids.
“That just filled my need,” she said. “I needed them. And the Boys and Girls Club needs volunteers, so it worked out both ways.”
Barbara Knecht, interim chief professional officer/program director, said Kimmel provides art instruction twice a month.
“The kids absolutely love her,” she said.
The kids are always willing to lend a helping hand to Kimmel.
“They are quick to help and she is totally fine with accepting that help when she’s here,” she said. “They are really learning to step up and offer help to somebody.”
Knecht said Kimmel’s contributions to the organization are tremendous.
“She has a talent I certainly don’t have,” she said. “She brings that talent to the club and can really help some of our budding artists.”
Emma Guardarrama, an AmeriCorps working at the club, said Kimmel’s ability to overcome her disability is inspiring.
“In spite of her disability, the kids still look at her as normal,” she said. “Even thought she has a disability that doesn’t stop her from anything. That can be inspiring to people who feel they can’t do anything.”
Kimmel has found help from the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. She said they have material on a multitude of topics, from talking about the disease with family members to different therapies and alternative medicines. Also, workers from the local United Cerebral Palsy help Kimmel with daily chores and personal needs she cannot do herself.
“They are not only my helpers, they are my friends,” she said.
She suggests if someone is diagnosed with MS that they talk to someone who has been living with the disease.
“Life as you know it is now different,” she said. “There is no reason to be embarrassed, no reason to feel sorry for yourself. You just go on and do what you can do.”
Kimmel’s MS is progressive, which means her condition will get worse.
“I am going to fight it every step of the way,” she said.
For more information about the disease, visit www.nationalmssociety.org.
(Michelle Ganassi can be reached at email@example.com. Comment on this story online at dailyamerican.com.) | <urn:uuid:7fe1fa67-554f-4549-895a-8b146048cf2c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.dailyamerican.com/2009-06-14/news/26292912_1_horses-art-teacher-yard-sale | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972277 | 996 | 1.679688 | 2 |
OPEC May Consider Boost In Oil Output Wednesday
OPEC's big Gulf producers are keeping the door open for higher oil exports when the group meets Wednesday in Abu Dhabi.
Led by Saudi Arabia, core Gulf members are worried that high prices may be exacerbating a downturn in global economic growth, led by a slowdown in the world's biggest oil importer, the United States.
"We think we're producing enough oil now to build stocks but we're worried that prices are too high," said a senior delegate in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries ahead of Wednesday's meeting.
"We may have to send a signal to the market that we're serious about bringing down prices and the only way we can do that it is with an increase, maybe a modest increase."
Saudi and its allies the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait face a tough task in persuading others to support a production increase after a price slide from record highs.
US light, sweet crude for January delivery ended down more than $1 a barrel on Tuesday, just above $88, falling from a record $99.29 set on Nov. 21.
Influential Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi has been careful not to show his hand. "All options are open," is all he would say.
Price hawks Venezuela and Iran, backed by Libya, are arguing for no change in policy.
"There is no need to do anything now...the market is well supplied," said Iran's governor to OPEC Hossein Kazempour Ardebili.
Arguments for Output Boost
Only minor producer Indonesia, marginal in terms of its influence on policy, has come out in favor of higher output.
"We will support an increase in production if it is needed to lower the price," OPEC governor Maizar Rahman told Reuters. "Our target is only $60-$70 (a barrel). Developing countries suffer with a higher price."
Importing nations want OPEC to help ease the burden of inflated energy costs.
"I've always encouraged them to keep markets well-supplied," said U.S. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman.
Some in OPEC feel its interests are best served by a further price decline that would support the world economy as a 5-year growth spurt slows.
Others would prefer to keep prices high, arguing that strong growth in recent years is proof the economy can cope with increasing fuel bills.
"OPEC can either roll over and speculators will take the price up again before it comes down when reality hits," said another OPEC delegate. "Or they can increase, a gesture of 500,000 barrels per day, in order to remove OPEC's name for being a reason for increased high oil prices."
When OPEC last met in September it signaled an output increase ahead of the meeting only for prices to rise sharply when it agreed a modest 500,000 barrel-a-day, 2 percent, increment.
While OPEC routinely blames speculators for high prices and says it has no sway over the market, analysts here think the cartel still has the muscle to influence prices.
"The perception of a shortage of supply is driving the market," said John Hall of John Hall Associates. "If they don't raise output I think the price could go back up to $100 a barrel and we could see $100 before the end of the year."
"If OPEC doesn't take action that results in actual barrels being delivered to the market the risk is that prices will resume their uptrend," said Michael Rothman, head of oil research at U.S. broker-dealer ISI Group. | <urn:uuid:c16e3d33-4894-4fd1-9bad-62758d86165a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cnbc.com/id/22100954 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962595 | 735 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Today the Senate passed the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) of 2013 by a vote of 83 to 14. This legislation will ensure the continued investment in our coastal and inland waterways.
It’s no secret that our nation’s aging system of inland waterways and ports are in need of modernization. The lack of investment is catching up to us. Our inland waterways system averages 52 service disruptions per day throughout the system. Manufacturers rely on these waterways to move commodities, finished products and inputs vital to their supply chains. Continued disruptions in the system drive up costs and makes manufacturers less competitive.
The WRDA bill passed by the Senate includes important reforms to improve project delivery and streamline the environmental review process for infrastructure projects sponsored by the Army Corps of Engineers. The legislation also includes a Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (WIFIA) pilot program which will help to leverage investments in critical water infrastructure projects. And importantly the bill assesses the critical issue of under-investment in our ports and harbors by increasing authorized funding from the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund for harbor maintenance dredging.
The National Association of Manufacturers sent a Key Vote letter to Senators yesterday urging them to support this important bill. We strongly urge the House to take up and pass a WRDA bill as soon as possible. America’s infrastructure is in great need of investment and WRDA provides us an opportunity to start making investments no in our waterways and ports. | <urn:uuid:afdbdeea-b7b5-4df2-a4cb-9087d78c1c9b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.shopfloor.org/page/2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943058 | 292 | 1.75 | 2 |
What is EEDC?
Edmonton Economic Development Corporation (EEDC) is an organization strategically focused on Edmonton's economic future. Its purpose is to increase the prosperity and quality of life in Greater Edmonton by providing leadership in economic development, marketing Edmonton as a tourist destination and by managing the Shaw Conference Centre (SCC) and Edmonton Research Park (ERP).
What is the role of the EEDC Board?
The volunteer board is comprised of 15 local business leaders appointed by the City of Edmonton. This body guides EEDC's business plans and oversees expenditures. Since EEDC is wholly owned by the City of Edmonton, it must present audited yearly financial statements to City Council, which acts as the sole shareholder on behalf of all Edmontonians.
How is EEDC funded?
EEDC receives its base funding from the City of Edmonton tax levy. In 2008, EEDC received just under $12.5 million from the City of Edmonton. Funding contributions for specific initiatives are also garnered from other public and private partners. Substantial revenues are generated through the SCC and ERP.
How is EEDC structured?
EEDC is structured to provide coherence and leadership for economic development in Greater Edmonton. Since each division serves a similar function, aligning goals under one direction increases the measurable achievements for the region. Significant cost efficiencies are also achieved by having each division under one company umbrella.
Each division of EEDC plays an important role in transforming Edmonton's future economy. EEDC is working to expand knowledge-based industries in the region, such as in the finance, health, and education sectors. The ERP provides incubation services for innovative Edmonton companies working to commercialize their products. The tourism and film industries showcase Edmonton to the world and bring millions of dollars into the local economy each year. The SCC also profiles Edmonton to an international audience and attracts an enormous amount of revenue to the region every year.
Has EEDC always managed the Shaw Conference Centre?
Built as an economic development tool for the region, The Edmonton Convention Centre was renamed Shaw Conference Centre in 1997. This was part of a new corporate sponsorship between EEDC and Shaw Communications. The renaming was part of a 20-year, $5.5 million agreement, which included $500,000 in facility upgrades. In 2008, SCC generated over $44.2 million of economic activity through expenditures by out-of-town guests utilizing the facility, restaurants, hotels, and other local amenities. Because SCC's mandate is to generate new economic activity, its role is complementary to the work of EEDC. Synergies are achieved in the marketing of SCC through Economic and Tourism Development's efforts to increase business travel to the city.
How many people work for EEDC?
About 211 people have permanent full-time positions with EEDC. That includes SCC and ERP management, Economic and Tourism Development Services, administration and support personnel. As well, 95 full-time equivalents work at SCC, providing world-class conference and culinary services.
How does Edmonton benefit from EEDC?
All major cities have an economic development agency. EEDC is focused on creating additional value in Greater Edmonton's economy. A knowledge-based economy protects Edmontonians from the fluctuations of the resource industries and also increases wages and standards of living in Edmonton. EEDC also markets the attributes and attractions of Greater Edmonton to the world, which enhances the city's global stature and recognition.
How does EEDC promote Edmonton?
EEDC takes its role of promoting Edmonton very seriously and is committed to ensuring Edmonton becomes recognized as one of the world's leading mid-sized cities by 2020. Each division of EEDC plays a role in marketing Edmonton as a desirable place to live and do business. For example, the tourism and film industries can reach a broad audience in promoting Edmonton globally. EEDC's integrated marketing, communication and media strategies are aimed at changing attitudes, perceptions, and opinions locally while also exposing Edmonton to the world.
How does EEDC promote economic development?
EEDC strives to be a leader in developing Greater Edmonton's regional economy. The Economic and Tourism Development Division focuses on increasing Edmonton's dynamic labour attraction and productivity improvement initiatives, developing a long-term innovation strategy, and building the foundational supports for a future knowledge-based economy.
For more information please call 780.424.9191, call toll free 1.800.661.6965 or email all enquires to Info@edmonton.com | <urn:uuid:289ac5d7-6381-4245-9891-7e4bd5a86ae1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.edmonton.com/faqs.aspx | 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 | 0.944452 | 931 | 1.679688 | 2 |
Dillon V. Champion Jogbra
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Assignment #4 – Dillon v. Champion Jogbra
Business Employment Law - HRM 510
Dr. Zelphia A. Brown, SPHR, Instructor
Assignment #4 – Dillon V. Champion Jogbra
1. What is the legal issue in this case? Linda Dillon appealed her case against her employer, Champion Jogbra, on the grounds of wrongful termination. The company’s progressive policy for disciplinary action was not applied. Therefore, Dillon makes her claim that her at will status was modified according to the employee handbook and practices. Employee’s handbook should be written clearly and reviewed by legal experts (Walsh, 2010). Champion Jogbra countered that Dillon was an at-will employee and she could be terminated at any time. Dillon also, argues against that the summary of promissory estoppels is incorrect. Champion pointed out that the policies and procedures contained in the manual are for guideline purposes only, not contractual. The policies and procedures are not any part of a contract or a commitment to employees. The courts decided the disclaimer in the handbook could create an implied contract to the employees, even though the disclaimer statements states otherwise. The disciplinary system as outline in the employee handbook was inconsistent with the at-will language relationship, disclaimer statement and the companies progressive discipline policies. Handbooks when originally devised the method to counter labor union efforts, they have “become much more legally binding” as courts have found parts to be, in effect, promises or contracts. As stated by, Allen Weitzman, with Proskauer Rose Law Firm in Florida, “That’s why every word counts,” (SHRM). When issuing employee handbooks employers should ensure every word that is in the handbook count and they are not conflicting in nature.
2. Explain what the implied contract was in the case. In this case the implied contract that Champion Jogbra faulted on was the written statements in the employee handbook that were conflicting with at-will... | <urn:uuid:80d5d05a-116b-44f2-9775-3e7e26229330> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bignerds.com/papers/97017/Dillon-V-Champion-Jogbra/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946943 | 428 | 1.695313 | 2 |
Pairing with the Reds
Red wines get most of their color during fermentation, when the natural heat generated by the fermenting process extracts the color from the grape skin. As a result, red wines almost always have some degree of tannin in them, which makes them a harder match for cheese. When aged in oak barrels, red wines will have rounder, more subtle tastes. When aged in stainless steel vats, the flavors will be steelier, more fruity and simpler.
The name Merlot, rolls off your tongue almost like the word mellow, and that's exactly what it is: a mellow, friendly sort of wine. The grapes are dark blue and relatively thin skinned, which means they contain low levels of tannin, and ripen early. Merlots are low in acidity and have tones of plum, black cherry, currant, violet, and rose (some say Merlot smells like fruitcake). Merlots have a soft, almost velvety mouthfeel, and usually have medium-high levels of alcohol.
Sheep's-milk cheeses, with their high fat and mellow nutty flavors, work well with Merlots. Try Ossau Iraty, Manchego, or Roncal. A particularly fruity Merlot pairs well with a mild Cheddar such as Lancashire, or Cheshire.
The main difference between a red and a rose is the length of time the skins ferment with the juice. For roses, that time is very short, resulting in lower tannin, less fruitiness, and a brisker mouthfeel. Pair roses with lighter cheeses that don't have much fruitiness, like Jarlsberg or fresh Asiago, or a young Gouda such as Vlaskaas.
The Pinot Noir grape is thin skinned and delicate, requiring a long, cool growing season to ripen. The payoff is in the texture, which is full and light at the same time, almost like liquid silk. High in alcohol, without being too acidic or tannic, Pinots can be wonderful matches for many different types of cheese.
Play off the Pinot Noir's aromas of raspberries, cherries, and subtle bits of smoke when pairing Pinot Noirs with cheese. Go for medium levels of complexity to full complexity, and lean slightly to the sweet end of things. Antique Gruyere, Redwood Hill Bucheret, Piave, and Alsacian Muenster are all worth a try.
Syrahs come from black, thick-skinned grapes that thrive both in cool climates and on sunny slopes. Young Syrahs are deeply colored, tannic, and have a distinct spiciness. Aged Syrahs are fruitier than they are spicy, with blackberry and plum tones, and often have a bit of smokiness about them. They tend to have medium acidity and high alcohol, which leaves a clean but round feel in your mouth. Pair Syrahs with flavorful, fruity, and creamy cheese, such as Beaufort, Comte, and aged Goudas.
If you're looking for tannin and acidity look no further than Sangiovese, but know that good vintners working with this grape balance its tannic acidity by bringing out whole orchards of fruit. You'll find deep cherry tones, raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries in this wine. Sangioveses have medium to high alcohol, and are relatively dry. This is a traditional wine of Italy. Try pairing it with some of Italy's favorite cheeses: Taleggio, Pecorino Renero, and Piave.
Wine tannin makes your mouth pucker and feel stripped of all its moisture. Salt accentuates this effect, which is why cheese (most of which is high in salt) rarely pairs well with high-tannin wines. Grape skins and seeds ferment with red wine (and are later skimmed off), giving red wine its color and tannin.
Cabernet grapes are small, black, and very tough skinned, and they produce some of the most tannic wine. They are rarely intended to be drunk as young wines; instead, the best Cabernet Sauvignons are aged until their tannin mellows out, which allows deeper flavors to emerge. In youth, a Cabernet Sauvignon will have tones of black currants, bell peppers, chocolate, and spice, and be very acidic and tannic. As it ages, hints of tobacco, blackberries, and other, deeper flavors emerge.
The high tannin of a Cabernet makes pairing cheese difficult, and a matter of individual taste and experimentation. But the complexity of this wine means you can pair it with some of your favorite, most complex cheeses. Try robust, sweet, glossy sorts of cheese like Black Foil Appenzeller, a medium-aged Epoisse (too aged, and the salt will clash with the tannin), Roquefort, or Zamorano.
Zinfandel comes from the Primitivo grape and varies considerably depending on the objectives of the winemaker. The results can be light and almost simple in taste, with high acids and tannins, or complex, fruity, and spicy. Most Zinfandels are high in both acid and alcohol.
Zinfandels are big wines that need to be paired with flavorful, robust cheeses. Try antique Gruyere, Ossau Iraty, Roncal, Montgomery's Cheddar, and Garrotxa. | <urn:uuid:d55361d0-3edd-486f-ae72-644044677085> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.netplaces.com/cheese/cheese-and-wine/pairing-with-the-reds.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934937 | 1,174 | 1.648438 | 2 |
President Obama is a smart guy. I reckon he is exponentially smarter than me.
When I saw last week that he was delaying a decision on the Keystone XL Pipeline I was more than a little disappointed. The party line for explaining the delay on the decision was:
“Because this permit decision could affect the health and safety of the American people as well as the environment, and because a number of concerns have been raised through a public process, we should take the time to ensure that all questions are properly addressed and all the potential impacts are properly understood.”
Right. More study is needed so that we can understand the impact that an oil pipeline might have. Because an oil pipeline is something entirely new to the United States.
Actually you might be surprised to find out that the United States has 55,000 miles of crude oil trunk lines and another 35,000 miles of crude oil gathering lines.
Maybe I’m stepping out on a limb, but I’m pretty sure that the Obama administration has a good idea of the risks involved in adding another oil pipeline.
This lack of a decision (in my opinion) is the Obama administration putting their own reelection interests ahead the best interests of a country by avoiding making an unpopular call. Many of the most ardent Obama supporters are environmentalists who are obviously opposed to anything related to oil. At this point in the election cycle it is much easier for team Obama to defer on making an decision that might alienate them.
When Obama was elected I was certainly optimistic that maybe for once a country would have a leader more interested in making a difference than anything else. This decision has sapped the last bit of optimism out of me.
What are two huge problems facing the United States today? One is a high level of unemployment. Another is a lack of energy security. By not sucking it up and approving this pipeline the Obama administration delays (or kills) 20,000 high paying jobs that would have been created for Americans and risks alienating a vital future source of energy for the United States.
I appreciate the environmental concerns over fossil fuel burning as much as anyone. But the reality is that we are going to need those fossil fuels badly for the next few decades. And for a country like the United States that has to import a huge portion of its energy supply from unfriendly regimes, access to a source of energy from a country like Canada is critical.
In my book, this punt on the Keystone Pipeline is a very selfish decision. Mr. Obama and his team know very well what the right thing to do was.
The Importance of This Pipeline May Become Clear Very Soon
I’ve been bullish on oil for a number of years. But even I am very surprised that with weak American and European economies we face a global oil price well north of $100. Can you imagine what the oil price might currently be if we hadn’t had a giant recession induced by a huge credit collapse?
I read recently an article that detailed the current thinking of the Goldman Sachs analyst Arjun Murti who presciently forecast the oil spike in 2008. Long story short, the market is getting tight and Murti thinks very similar to late 2007.
Murti’s opinion is based on observations of the actual oil inventory situation globally:
"The latest inventory data from Europe, the U.S. and Japan suggests total inventories are now 31 million barrels below their five-year seasonal average, and in absolute terms crude inventories are back at their 2006 levels," Murti said, adding stocks would be even lower if it were not for the International Energy Agency's emergency fuel release over the summer.
"This reflects a global market in deficit despite Saudi producing the highest amount of crude since the 1980s and shows stark similarities to the 2007 bull market that led to demand rationing prices."
Environmental concerns over fossil fuel production are no laughing matter. But if we get an oil spike in 2012 that goes to $150 or $175 there is going to be a lot of public support for approving the Keystone Pipeline. This self preservation move by Obama could end up backfiring if the entire country is paying $4.50 per gallon heading up to election in 2012.
What should be more concerning is that this delay is likely to push Canada to start making commitments to ship a portion of its oil production to the oil thirsty Chinese. Canadians would much rather sell their oil to their friends south of the border. But if the United States doesn’t want it, we will sell it to someone else.
Dirty oil is not an ideal solution for an energy source. But not having oil is even worse.
Disclosure: I have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions within the next 72 hours. | <urn:uuid:73945b5d-5b39-402a-a14c-9a35cf7641d3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://seekingalpha.com/article/308313-obama-s-punt-on-keystone-pipeline-shows-re-election-bid-more-important-than-energy-security | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968039 | 979 | 1.539063 | 2 |
From pets to ‘recess’: High school stress relief
MOUNT PROSPECT (AP) – The four-legged member of the counseling team at the high school in suburban Chicago waits patiently, as a crush of students fills the hallways. Her tail wags with the first pat on the head, then another and another.
“Puppy! Ohhh, puppy dog!” one teenager croons, as he affectionately tousles the ears of the 18-month-old golden retriever. Junie began her role as a therapy dog at Prospect High School less than 4 months ago.
It’s just one of a number of ways high schools across the country are trying to address what some call an epidemic of stressed-out, overwhelmed students.
If you have any technical difficulties, either with your username and password or with the payment options, please contact us by e-mail at email@example.com | <urn:uuid:bfc7ca8c-8e77-4ef2-83fa-931a1a38bffb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.saukvalley.com/2013/01/31/from-pets-to-recess-high-school-stress-relief/aj6b2si/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939277 | 199 | 1.734375 | 2 |
SC Johnson - the maker of household products such as Windex, Glade, Pledge and Raid - says it has signed a power purchase agreement (PPA) with Comision Federal de Electricidad (CFE), Mexico's government-run grid operator, that will enable SC Johnson to increase its use of renewable energy at its Toluca, Mexico, facility to an estimated 86%.
Under the PPA, SC Johnson will purchase wind energy produced by turbines located in Mexico's Oaxaca region beginning in the middle of this year. The wind turbines were constructed by Enel, in partnership with CFE.
This is not SC Johnson's first wind energy initiative: Last year, the company installed two wind turbines at Waxdale, its Mt. Pleasant, Wis.-based global manufacturing plant. In 2010, the company installed three mini-wind turbines at its Racine, Wis.-based corporate headquarters, and in 2009, the company erected a wind turbine to help power its European manufacturing facility in the Netherlands. | <urn:uuid:c2a9fdfe-718d-40f1-92b8-43b568360dd5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nawindpower.com/naw/e107_plugins/content/content.php?content.11107 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956408 | 202 | 1.71875 | 2 |
In Response To Japanese "Antagonism" Over Senkaku Islands, China Dispatches Two Patrol Ships
Yesterday, in a rather paradoxical development, the Japanese Cabinet formally announced that the government will purchase several disputed islands that China also claims — a move that Beijing said would bring "serious consequences." The issue at hand is that China and Taiwan also claim the islands, which are part of what Japan calls the Senkakus and China the Diaoyu group. It is paradoxical because the last thing Japan, and its statutory deflationary and demographic collapse needs right now is to "antagonize" the world's fastest growing economy, and its neighbor to the west with whom it had a rather violent give or take as recently as 1945. Japan spin was naive: Chief Cabinet Secretary Osamu Fujimura repeated that the islands are part of Japan's territory and should not cause any friction with other countries or regions. "We certainly do not wish the issue to affect our diplomatic relations with China and it is important to resolve any misunderstanding or miscommunication." Turns out quite a bit of friction was caused as a result, as well as a substantial amount of misunderstanding and miscommunication. As Globe and Mail reports, "China has dispatched two patrol ships to the East China Sea in a show of naval strength and antagonism toward Japan after Tokyo said it had purchased a group of disputed islands from their private owners. China’s aggressive response ratcheted up tensions in a long-standing conflict between the two countries over claims to the territory."
It is now Japan's turn to explain just why China has it all wrong when it says Japan "stole" these islands from China, or else send a few patrol ships of its own, as the most unexpected rivalry suddenly escalates to much needed distraction levels. After all recall that none other than PM Noda promised two days ago to achieve 1% inflation in 1 year. For a country which has been mired in deflation for over 30 years, there may be just one way to achieve this goal, and it may just involve China in one capacity or another.
Japan’s central government said it had purchased the islands for 2.05 billion yen ($26-million U.S.) from the Japanese family it recognizes as the owner. The acquisition was intended to calm China’s concerns after the nationalist governor of Tokyo had proposed buying the Senkaku Islands and developing them.
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in a statement, said the purchase “cannot alter the fact the Japanese side stole the islands from China.”
“If Japan insists on going its own way, it will bear all the serious consequences that follow,” the ministry added.
Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency and mouthpiece for the ruling Communist Party, said the dispatching of ships by the China Marine Surveillance Agency was part of a broader plan to safeguard China’s sovereignty over the islands.
The nationalist fervour whipped up by Xinhua and other state media over the contested territory comes as the Chinese Communist Party is preparing for a once-in a-decade leadership transition in November. The fact that Chinese President Hu Jintao’s expected successor, Xi Jinping, has cancelled a series of diplomatic meetings and has not been seen in public for a week, has not been reported in the media in China. Regardless, some have questioned whether the Chinese government is engaging in “wag the dog” tactics and diverting attention from what now seems a wobbly leadership transition.
And since the foreplay between Israel and Iran is now entering its third year and everyone is bored out of their wits waiting for the inevitable strike to occur, perhaps it is only fitting that the next armed conflict will come, literally, out of the far left-field. Next, cue Hillary Clinton claiming that it was Syria's fault all along.
A brief history on the Senkaku conflict:
For those who need a refresh on the various geopolitical tensions in the far east, and relative military strenght, we present it again below. | <urn:uuid:5245a9e4-fd31-4162-b07d-98e7bc16405a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.zerohedge.com/news/response-japanese-antagonism-over-senkaku-islands-china-dispatches-two-war-ships | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96505 | 838 | 1.828125 | 2 |
WILLIAMSBURG, Ky. – Thursday, students at University of the Cumberlands celebrated the 100th birthday of Mahan Hall with free food and drinks. The men’s dormitory was built in 1906, when the university was known as Williamsburg Institute. The building was originally Felix Hall, named after Board of Trustees member Dr. W. H. Felix of Lexington. Its name was changed to Mahan Hall in 1954 to honor the service of E. C. Mahan to the school. It was renovated in 1984. | <urn:uuid:075a4daa-60b3-4c17-934d-189253c205a6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ucumberlands.edu/media/release.php?rk=239 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.983948 | 112 | 1.734375 | 2 |
Tuesday, June 26, 2012 | Categories: |
In part one of this episode. Junior high school boys often get their information about sex and relationships from their friends and increasingly the internet. And some of it is, to say the least ,neither positive or accurate. But a new program in one Calgary junior high is finding out that sex ed can be upfront and healthy. Wise Guyz is run by the Calgary Sexual Health Centre. | <urn:uuid:687c6591-be00-41a9-a960-9511a6d8698e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cbc.ca/inthefield/2012/06/26/teaching-boys-respect-june-26/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948688 | 88 | 1.6875 | 2 |
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OSP Reminds Drivers “Drive Sober Or Get Pulled Over”
Oregon State Police urge everyone to support efforts to apprehend drunk and drugged drivers this weekend through the Christmas holiday while also remembering those affected by an impaired driver whenever you see headlights on vehicles during daytime hours Friday.
Every year since 1991 on the weekend preceding Christmas, the International Association of Chiefs of Police have organized “National Holiday Lifesaver Weekend”, an effort to heighten public awareness. Drivers are asked to turn on their headlights Friday, December 21, for “National Lights on for Life” day, in remembrance of those who have been affected by an impaired driver. To help save lives on our roadways this holiday season, OSP and local law enforcement partners have been involved in a special “Drive Sober or Get Pulled Over” crackdown to stop impaired drivers beginning December 12, through January 1st. Starting at 12:01am, Friday, December 21, through 11:59pm, Tuesday, December 25, police officers nationwide and in Oregon will be stepping up these enforcement efforts for “National Holiday Lifesaver Weekend” through the Christmas holiday period.
Last year in Oregon during the Christmas holiday 78-hour reporting period two people died in 2 separate fatal traffic crashes on Oregon roads. OSP troopers reported 50 DUII arrests during last year’s “National Holiday Lifesaver Weekend” and 28 DUII arrests during the Christmas holiday period. More than half of last year’s DUII arrests by OSP troopers during the Christmas holiday reporting period occurred Christmas Eve, December 24.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration , this year’s holiday enforcement crackdown is being supported by more than $7 million in national TV and radio advertising featuring the “Drive Sober or Get Pulled Over” campaign. The ads, which first premiered last summer, feature “invisible” law enforcement officers observing alcohol-impaired individuals and then apprehending them when they attempt to drive their vehicles. The ads are designed to raise awareness and support law enforcement activities in every state in an effort to reduce drunk driving deaths. | <urn:uuid:a0ee6504-900f-4a83-94f9-ea8b91d5bf65> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://kdcq.com/2012/12/osp-reminds-drivers-drive-sober-or-get-pulled-over/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954744 | 456 | 1.5 | 2 |
Just reading over this thread has got me wondering.
What if we took the number of white crew people with speaking parts and considered the fraction of them who got killed versus the number of black crew people with speaking parts and considered the fraction of them who got killed.
What would the results be? In other words, among the crew, would the black people who spoke be more likely to die than the white people who spoke?
(I'm restricting this question to speaking parts just so that we don't have to sift through all the extras walking through the background.) | <urn:uuid:1386ad18-df68-4688-84b1-77f26ae7a2ba> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.trekbbs.com/showpost.php?p=7724947&postcount=11 | 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 | 0.976458 | 115 | 1.546875 | 2 |
a company known for diminutive displays
destined for duty as electronic view finders
in camcorders and digicams. At E3 this year
, the company's subsidiary Forth Dimensions Displays has unveiled a new use for its teeny tiny screens -- virtual reality. Called Replicating Reality, it uses two .8-inch 1280 x 1024 LCD panels and head tracking to place you in a 3D virtual world. We got to test the system through a racing game, and found that it works pretty darn well. Graphics were of console quality, with nary a hint of image distortion from the system's magnification lenses and pixel pitch was imperceptible to our eyes. Basically, there was no indication that the screens our gaze was fixed upon were less than an inch across. The sharp picture combined with the system's head tracking -- which let us look around while taking turns and weaving through traffic -- to create quite an immersive experience. Of course, it still looked like a game, but there's a pixel packed 2048 x 1536 panel in the works that the company claims can deliver visuals nigh-indistinguishable from the real world. We were told that prototypes of these QXGA screens will be ready in ten months, and they'll be suitable for public consumption in a year. So, the real question is: will your eyeballs be prepared to handle such prodigious pixel density by then?
Replicating Reality VR demo system
See all photos | <urn:uuid:ab02d556-5f6a-4260-a6cb-08a0309b79df> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/08/replicating-reality-demos-3d-virtual-reality-system-powered-by-p/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964825 | 296 | 1.8125 | 2 |
So far this year, investors have plowed a record $49 billion into U.S. high-yield bond mutual funds and exchange-traded funds, more than twice as much as the previous record of $21 billion, set in 2009, according to fund flow tracking firm EPFR Global.
"That alone is indicative of an overheating type of market," said George Rusnak, director of fixed income at Wells Fargo, adding that he trimmed his clients' exposure to high-yield corporate bonds last month to neutral from overweight.
"In a year, we earned a 20% return on our high-yield corporate bond investments, but we've been starting to see more signs of a bubble-like phenomenon," Rusnak said. And as the Federal Reserve sticks to its low-rate monetary policy, and investors keep reaching for yield, Rusnak expects the high yield market to get even more bloated.
Frenzied buying has pushed yields on junk bonds to record lows of about 6%. In 2009, the average yield of bonds included in the Bank of America Merrill Lynch High Yield Master II Index stood at a whopping 19.5%.
Experts are also worried that investors are taking on more risk than they intend to, as weaker companies that don't typically have access to the $1.3 trillion high-yield bond market have been able to issue bonds because of the increased demand.
"Up until recently, bond issues were of good quality and purpose, though arguably a bit over-priced in certain circumstances," said Tim Gramatovich, chief investment officer at Peritus Asset Management. "This is beginning to change."
For example, Gramatovich noted that Alpha Natural Resources (Fortune 500) recently issued bonds with a decent rating and a 10% yield, which would seem like a "tremendous value," but is far from that when considering the tepid outlook for the coal industry. ,
Gramatovich, who also manages the Peritus High Yield ETF (, notes that companies, such as Petco and Jo-Ann Stores, are issuing more so-called PIK-Toggle notes. The PIK stands for "pay in kind" and allows a company to pay bondholders with more bonds rather than cash. )
"If the company can't afford to pay me in cash, then why would I want more bonds they can't pay?" asked Gramatovich. "It is amazing how quickly investors lose their discipline and composure."
While the default rate for U.S. high-yield bonds is expected to end 2012 unchanged from the previous year's rate of around 3.5% according to Moody's Investor Services, Gramatovich says investors should be prudent and choose companies that can still pay their bills if the economy turns sour.
"We are not drinking any growth Kool-Aid and continue to believe that the world remains mired in a no growth, recessionary mode for the foreseeable future," he said. "It does appear this conservatism is warranted."
Gramatovich said that for his fund, which has a robust yield of 9%, he's finding the best values in smaller companies, such as nuclear waste firm EnergySolutions ( and propane gas distributor )Ferrellgas Partners (. His fund also includes bonds issued by )Supervalu (Fortune 500) and , Navistar (Fortune 500). ,
"Smaller companies don't necessarily mean more risk," said Gramatovich. "The primary risk in the high-yield bond market is default, so the most important thing is that a company is performing well, and I believe I'm likely to keep getting paid."
Meanwhile, Rusnak of Wells Fargo has been finding opportunity in high-yield bonds outside of corporate issues, with floating rate bonds that protect against rising interest rates, as well as high-yield municipal bonds.
|The Winklevoss twins are Bitcoin bulls|
|Bernanke's advice for college grads|
|Signs of new housing bubble in several areas|
|Bloomberg's lazy Apple bias|
|Stocks finish higher for fourth straight week|
|Overnight Avg Rate||Latest||Change||Last Week|
|30 yr fixed||3.66%||3.58%|
|15 yr fixed||2.79%||2.72%|
|30 yr refi||3.64%||3.57%|
|15 yr refi||2.79%||2.72%|
Today's featured rates: | <urn:uuid:d177d255-9412-4f1d-838c-7b0002272de7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://money.cnn.com/2012/10/28/investing/junk-bond-bubble/index.html?section=money_markets | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957775 | 937 | 1.65625 | 2 |
12-Sep-2004 -- This is the 14th out of 29 confluences on our tour from Germany to China, the story continues from 30N 71E.
On the twenty-second day of our tour we started at 7 a.m. in Multan and headed for Lahore near the Indian border. As usual, I had a hard time convincing Guang and our Swiss fellow traveller Joko to visit a confluence. They may like confluencing in general, but they both are not so keen on making detours as I am. But at least I was able to talk them into one confluence visit a day.
At a town named Pattoki we turned off from the main road towards Cunian. In Cunian, we turned northward towards Bhai Pheru. In the village Gurmukh Singhwala at a distance of 3.1 km we tried to find a track to the confluence. Our first trial did not succeed at all – after 1 km we ended up at a dead end with the people looking suspiciously at us. After we returned the main road, we tried another track. This time we succeeded, but at a distance of 616 m we had to leave our Toyota behind due to severe road conditions. With Joko's Jeep we made it to the point, after going down a steep grade onto a former floodplain; now it is a dried out salt lake. At the confluence we saw some mysterious plough furrows. They looked a little too unmotivated to be useful for farming.
On our way back, we lost our way, but somehow we made it to Lahore. The big city of Lahore appeared to us not as the cleanest and safest place. While walking through the crooked alleys of the ancient town, people had fun throwing firecrackers at us. At that day, there was a festival (one of the Imam's wives' birthday) and the habit of lighting firecrackers happens to be normal on days like this one.
CP visit details:
- Time at the CP: 12:40 a.m.
- Duration: 1 h (until we were back on our route)
- Distance of car parking: 0 m
- GPS height: 190 m
- Description: Dried out lake bed, white salt all around. In 500 m distance to the north is a steep slope. Scattered grass is the only vegetation.
- Given Name: The Salt Lake Confluence
Story continues at 31N 76E. | <urn:uuid:19ba25d8-c988-49d4-b386-107e203c4d17> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.confluence.org/confluence.php?id=10617 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964646 | 519 | 1.539063 | 2 |
When the news first broke of the mass shooting on a crowded street in front of the Empire State Building last month, the first thought that went through most people’s heads was that another act of terror had occurred in Manhattan. Turns out though, it was an incident of workplace violence: Jeffrey Johnson, 58, who had been laid off by Hazan Imports, fatally shot an executive at Hazan, Steve Ercolino, against whom Johnson had earlier filed a harassment complaint. (Eleven bystanders were wounded by police gunfire when two officers shot Johnson, who reportedly turned and pointed his gun at them.)
It was the latest spasm of work-related violence in a country that all too often sees workplace disputes end in gunfire.
Actually, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics, overall work-related homicides declined 50% between 1994 and 2010. But workplace violence nonetheless remains among the top four causes of on-the-job fatalities when suicide is included. (At the same time, robberies are the No. 1 cause of homicides in the workplace by an overwhelming margin.)
Ed Foulke, a partner in the Atlanta-based law firm Fisher & Phillips who also served as head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration during the George W. Bush administration, says he has seen workplace violence rising recently and attributes this to the continuing economic slump.
“In the past, when people got laid off, they just went out and got another job,” says Foulke, pictured above. “Now it’s not that easy to do.” The tight job market can also mean people stay on in a bad situation—for example, when they are being harassed by another employee or a supervisor—until they “snap,” he says.
Add to that the fact that financially strapped companies may not have the resources to provide as much in the way of support services and severance benefits for employees who are let go, and the stage is set for problems.
Philip Deming, an HR security consultant and principal of Philip Deming & Associates in King of Prussia, Pa., agrees that the risk of workplace violence may be on the rise again and says companies need to be proactive to avoid trouble.
“The key is to make sure you have all the components in place both to prevent violence, and to respond when a threat occurs,” Deming says. “That means you need HR, your legal team, security and communications people, as well as your top executives, all on board and prepared with an emergency action plan when there’s a threat.”
Foulke goes further, arguing that preventing and preparing for workplace violence incidents requires a full program. His recommendations:
1) Establish a zero-tolerance policy for threats, harassment and acts of violence.
2) Update interview processes to include background investigations, checking for a history of violent behavior.
3) Prepare and use release forms for new hires, and then get records from past employers, training programs, etc.
4) Update the employee handbook to explain the company’s zero-tolerance policy.
5) Review what temp agencies are doing to check out the record of the workers they provide. “If they’re not screening their people, you have to do it,” Foulke warns.
6) Conduct an audit and risk assessment of your workplace that includes asking employees if they have been harassed or threatened. Look at security at the workplace. Are there places where someone could hide out until late at night to attack a target?
7) Have a crisis management plan for any act of workplace violence, just as you would have for a fire or a tornado.
8) Select and train management officials in crisis management and conflict resolution. “If an executive is terminating an employee and he pulls a knife or a gun, that executive needs to have the skill to try and defuse the situation,” Foulke says.
9) Instruct managers on how to spot and deal with early warning signs: Are people saying they hear voices? Do they have a have a fascination with guns? Did someone’s performance suddenly drop dramatically?
10) Publicize employee assistance programs, whether offered by the employer or outside agencies.
11) Investigate immediately all harassment and threats of violence.
12) Review and publicize the company’s policy of dealing with problems, and encourage employees who feel threatened or harassed to go to a supervisor, HR or elsewhere to report it.
Foulke warns that OSHA has begun to take action against employers where there are incidents of workplace violence. He says the best defense against those actions is to have a policy to prevent violence and protect employees against it, to show it is being implemented, and to show that employees and managers know about it.
For more on this topic, see Workplace Homicides Drop Steadily Since Mid-’90s and Understanding and Managing the Potential Risks of Workplace Violence. | <urn:uuid:2a405d27-d4a1-4624-ba79-90fcf8a8013c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.treasuryandrisk.com/2012/09/04/bracing-for-workplace-violence?ref=hp&page=2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967439 | 1,028 | 1.765625 | 2 |
We are working on a new Futurelab website. This means our current one may have hiccups. We apologize for any poor experience or layout.
by Alain Thys on 3 September, 2012 - 22:18
In 1999, I attempted to launch a content production venture called Transmedia Productions. Its vision was to develop and market narratives, which would span various media (yes even internet!). It also aimed to somehow engage audiences in “co”-telling the story.
Even when being kind to myself I can only describe the project as an outright disaster. My artistically inclined friends thought the idea to be "kinda cool". But anyone "with money" wouldn't touch it with a stick.
In hindsight, the money guys were probably right. Only today, transmedia is starting to get some traction, and even then only among a small group of aficionado. The majority of mainstream media are still locked into their single-medium paradigm. Business models, contracts and personal interests are bound to keep it that way for a little while.
Still, at the risk of being considered avant-garde, I maintain that brands which want to navigate the multi-channel communication reality, must embrace a transmedia way of storytelling.
To help me make my point, I decided to connect to Twitter-friend and like-minded spirit Andrea Phillips in New York. As a transmedia writer, game designer and author, she's been involved in some really cool projects like The Maester's Path, America 2049 and Perplex City.
She also just published A Creator's Guide to Transmedia Storytelling which is a great way to become incredibly well-read on the topic in 3 hours (if you want a free sample chapter click here).
Her challenge - in three questions - is to convince you why you and your brand (or agency) should get serious about transmedia.
As most of the marketing population didn't yet get the transmedia memo, could you describe in a few words what the field is about?
The three-word answer is "intertextuality across platforms." What that means is using different media together in the interests of telling a single, cohesive story, where each piece is made better by the contributions of each other piece. You can use each piece to add layers of meaning to the others, and provide deeper, richer narratives than would fit in only one medium.
That's a really abstract academic answer, though, and doesn't get to the heart of WHY it's so exciting. Transmedia storytelling is all about building in extra payoffs -- giving a joke an extra punch line with a viral video, like How I Met Your Mother Does. Or giving the audience the feeling that they're a part of the story, like The Dark Knight's Why So Serious campaign did. Giving the audience a character to interact with and foster a real human relationship with, like the Old Spice Guy. When you use transmedia tools to tell a story, it can turn into an amazing, social, emotional experience that you simply can't replicate with one piece of flat media.
Now many marketers and brands I know say they're already "transmedia" storytellers. After all, they tell stories across multiple media. So what's the big deal?
The marketer's idea of a story is not everyone else's idea of a story. Marketers think of story in terms of emotional imagery more than of plot, character, pacing. And it's extraordinarily rare for a consumer to get more out of watching two ads than they would out of watching only one ad in the same campaign. There's not a lot of greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts design in marketing. Now, marketers do have some amazing skills at evoking emotion, and that's going to get more and more valuable… but they're also going to need to become more familiar with the basics of classic storytelling, as well.
We're living in an age of convergence and disruption, and one of the things being heavily disrupted is the passive role of the consumer to receive an ad message. It's dead easy to simply ignore, block, filter ads at this point. So in order to thrive, advertisers have to go into the culture-making business -- making original content that is so compelling that audiences seek it out.
One way to do that is overt storytelling -- something far beyond a bunch of beautiful people sizing each other up around a pool to sell alcohol. There's no narrative tension there. But there is some flat-out amazing storytelling in advertising already. There's a powerful Nike ad going around right now, basically about a fat kid running, and it's incredibly inspiring. That's the right direction. Building on an emotional dynamic to tell a story that makes people feel and seek out more, that's what transmedia is all about.
So if I were a marketing or advertising executive wanting to explore "real" transmedia storytelling for my brand, where would I start? What should I do? What should I avoid?
The most basic step is to look at everything you're making and ask yourself, 'Why would people want to spend their time looking at this?' If you're counting on a captive audience at this point, you're doing it wrong. And think about adding additional pieces to your campaigns one by one, to make them more layered, or more interactive, or more emotional. Think about how to make someone's experience with you better and better.
The biggest mistake I see these days, though, is some poor soul thinks, 'transmedia is so hot right now, so I need a Twitter and a microsite and an app.' So they go out and make all of these pieces… but none of them are related, or add anything to a core experience. At the end of the day, each piece you create has to add value to the story for your audience. Every piece has a function. If you're adding media on and you don't know why, that's a red flag that you're on the wrong track, and you should probably step back and rethink your strategy.
This blog reflects the personal opinions of individual contributors and does not represent the views of Futurelab, Futurelab's clients, or the contributors' respective employers or clients. | <urn:uuid:4f79ab66-c2e6-4b51-9539-6f82730cfd00> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.futurelab.net/blogs/marketing-strategy-innovation/2012/09/why_marketers_should_care_abou.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960244 | 1,280 | 1.664063 | 2 |
Battling the bureaucracy for veteransWritten by Colby Dunn
David Gifford proudly stood as a congressman presented him with medals for meritorious service in the Air Force and the Army. The assembled crowd applauded as the representative gave a short speech. Photos were snapped and a news camera rolled.
And Gifford, 61, beamed. He was not at the White House or a formal military ceremony, but in his humble backyard in Waynesville, surrounded by family and standing in front of a small banner emblazoned with the mantra Support Our Troops, finally receiving his accolades nearly 40 years after he earned them.
This intimate ceremony was the culmination of years of work by his wife, Kim, who was told that to get her husband’s medals for his service in Vietnam, she’d have to pay for them.
Unable to do so, she eventually enlisted the help of U.S. Rep. Heath Shuler, D-Waynesville, who threw his weight around to get the military awards free of charge.
Gifford’s story is far from unique among veterans, even though rewards recognizing bravery and service are promised for free to GIs coming home. They’re even supposed to get one replacement for every award without paying for it.
But that doesn’t always happen. Brandon Wilson knows that very well, as the veterans’ services officer for Haywood County.
“Most veterans’ services officers help widows or veterans themselves get medals,” said Wilson, because when the vets or their families try to do it on their own, they’re often stymied by red tape or get lost in the bowels of massive, draconian bureaucracy that is the U.S. military.
Or, in the cash-strapped recession economy, the particular branch of military may not have the right medals in stock or the money to order them. And what can and can’t be done is likely to change with every call, depending on who you talk to.
“It’s supposed to be free. That’s supposed to be what happens,” said Wilson. “But I’m supposed to be six feet tall and beautiful and worth half a million dollars.”
In his one-year tenure as Haywood’s veterans officer, he’s helped around 20 vets and their spouses get the medals owed to them, some dating as far back as World War I.
Each branch of service deals with its own medals and awards internally, and getting them depends largely on the diligence of a commanding officer to file the right paperwork and follow through with it. If they don’t, people like Gifford fall through the cracks.
“When you get the medal and you’ve earned the medal, right then they’re supposed to have an awards ceremony to give that Marine, soldier, sailor that medal on the spot. But it all depends on the command,” said Wilson. “Some commands do it when you get home, some do it on the field, some forget to do it altogether.”
Gifford spent seven years on active duty with the Air Force and another 14 with the Army. Two of those years were served in Vietnam, on a detail that he called “suicide jockey.”
“I drove a fuel tanker that was traffic yellow,” said Gifford.
In Vietnam and after, he said he was repeatedly promised medals for risking his life almost daily, but when he returned to U.S. soil, they never materialized.
“When we got home, the only thing we got was spit at and garbage thrown at us,” said Gifford.
His wife went around and around with the Army for years afterwards, trying to get them on his behalf.
“I’ve been fighting the VA (Veterans’ Affairs) for 18 years,” said Kim Gifford. “They kept telling me that his medals, he had to pay for them.”
It’s not so much that medals are in short supply. There are companies around the country that will supply you with nearly any U.S. military medal imaginable, for a price, of course.
Should you want to buy yourself a pair of military dress blues online and order a few dozen medals from an outfit like Medals of America, you too can appear to be a decorated serviceman in a matter of days, though it’s a felony if you didn’t earn them.
In fact, Medals of America is where the military itself refers veterans when they don’t have the resources to hand out their own medals.
They’re not inordinately expensive; a Purple Heart would set you back $34.95 plus tax.
“But if you can get a Purple Heart medal from the United States Marine Corps for free, why would you want to pay $35 for it?” asks Wilson. “I mean hell, you already paid for it, it’s yours.”
When even he can’t cut through the bureaucratic quagmire to get the medals gratis for veterans, Wilson and his compatriots — there’s a veterans’ services officer in every county — often turn to heavyweights like Rep. Shuler, whose clout is more effective at red-tape cutting.
“These men and women have made invaluable contributions to our nation and fought to defend the values of freedom and democracy that all Americans hold dear, and it is important that they receive the medals and awards they earned and deserve,” said Shuler, who said he’s long had a close relationship with vets and the VA in Western North Carolina.
But for those without access to a congressman, there is Veterans’ Legacy, a group that popped up in North Carolina last year to help vets get the recognition they’re owed.
John Elskamp is a retired Air Force veteran, and when he was on active duty, tracking down medals for service members was part of his job. After getting out, he and some friends just kept going with it.
Ten years later, they’ve found the demand to be so great that they set up a nonprofit to help deal with the requests, and Veterans’ Legacy was born.
Elskamp said that while yes, it’s possible for a veteran or their family to pursue an unawarded medal, or even get recognized for service that was never awarded a medal but should have been — a much larger task — it’s hard for a layperson to manage alone.
“They have to do all the work, they have to go through a member of Congress to submit it, and that’s a tall order for most veterans,” said Elskamp, who is based in a small community just west of Ft. Bragg.
“Even if it was already awarded, (the veteran) just wants replacement medals, that’s something fairly simple, but something that requires a lot of research for the veterans’ services officer to do.”
Elskamp and his colleagues are part detective, part paper pushers, poring through old files in forgotten archival warehouses, tracking down platoon leaders and commanding officers and funneling it all through the administrative processes of the military.
They take the hard cases, and those can take anywhere from 30 to 40 days for the easier ones to several years for the trickiest.
The group offers their service free of charge, because, said Elskamp, they can relate to the importance veterans attach to these medals.
“I mean, I’m a military man so I know what I did in the military is important to me and my family, and the same goes for other veterans,” said Elskamp. “It’s something that you want to leave behind.” Which is why the group is called Veterans’ Legacy.
Though most of the work they do is for veterans of long-past wars, newer cases are finding their way into the groups’ caseload. And with new veterans coming back all the time, Elskamp doesn’t see his service becoming obsolete, even in the digital age.
“I think we’ll always be needed, because even though everything’s on the Internet, people just don’t know what questions to ask,” he said, which is often a good chunk of the battle.
In WNC, Rep. Shuler is pretty active in the field, working to get medals for war widows and vets across the region. Next on the docket is a war widow in Macon County.
Wilson, too, is busy working on new cases himself, trying to get a service medal to one of the last remaining WWI wives in the region. He’s also recently been able to return a Purple Heart to its rightful owner in Bryson City and get long overdue World War II medals for his own grandfather.
Although this work is really just a footnote to the main portion of his job, he sees it as an important part of supporting veterans.
“What I’m majorly here for is to improve the quality of life of these people, and at least I’ve done something for them to make them feel good about themselves or feel positive about themselves.” | <urn:uuid:aeb1f7cc-1cbd-47e3-962f-8ec10f5acb5d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://smokymountainnews.com/outdoors/item/5226-battling-the-bureaucracy-for-veterans | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974396 | 1,977 | 1.632813 | 2 |
English : Fantabulous
What does Fantabulous mean?
By Mr. Ramabadran, Sri Lanka – 23rd June-2007
It's a combination of fantastic and fabulous. It means excellent or superb.It is a Portmanteau Word. A Portmanteau Word is the one that blend the sounds and the meanings of two words. The word Portmanteau is derived from the French word portmanteau, combined from porter (to carry) and manteau(mantle).
While these Words originated in 16th century, Lewis Carroll is credited with coining this word (in Through the Looking Glass) based on the fact that portmanteau bag is one that opens into two equal parts. The meanings of all such words are apparent from the combination.
Most of these words will not be found in standard dictionaries. But, the readers can use their grey cells in putting the meanings of the two and two together to deduce the meaning of these words. ( Brunch = breakfast + lunch ) & ( Email= electronic + mail )
• I saw a fantabulous dining table yesterday. I think I will buy it.
• The new restaurant is supposed to be fantabulous.
However, many such Words catch on and latch on to the lexicon. Others do not and simply fade away into silent sunsets, having enjoyed their 15 minutes of glory.
Here is the complete list of Portmanteau words that the visitors could use in their communication. The visitors are welcome to send in the Portmanteau words that they come across to us so that we will add those words in this list and will acknowledge the sender.
This site in general and this page in particular will certainly help the visitors to increase their knowledge of vocabulary in an exhaustive way. Whilst browsing through this list, at one full swoop you will pick up many words with the same or a related and the opposite meaning.
Reading this list is a great fun, while expanding your vocabulary at the same time. It is meant to help to improve the vocabulary of the visitors, the students (who are preparing for various examinations), the authors, journalists, literati and all other people who are interested in improving their language skills.
Synonyms and Antonyms
From Fantabulous to HOME PAGE | <urn:uuid:7af822b7-3046-4380-a8e0-78fd6062bcad> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.english-for-students.com/Fantabulous.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944919 | 474 | 1.804688 | 2 |
Twitter released an explanation and apology for the service outage on Thursday.
The company said the root of the problem was a failure of two parallel systems at its data center.
Twitter released this statement on its blog:
We are sorry. Many of you came to Twitter earlier today expecting, well, Twitter. Instead, between around and , users around the world got zilch from us. By about , people who came to Twitter finally got what they expected: Twitter.
The cause of today's outage came from within our data centers. Data centers are designed to be redundant: when one system fails (as everything does at one time or another), a parallel system takes over. What was noteworthy about today's outage was the coincidental failure of two parallel systems at nearly the same time.
I wish I could say that today's outage could be explained by the Olympics or even a cascading bug. Instead, it was due to this infrastructural double-whammy. We are investing aggressively in our systems to avoid this situation in the future. | <urn:uuid:2cb23586-99a9-4e28-bed6-2d3c4e4b8bcd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ozarksfirst.com/fulltext?nxd_id=679852 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978667 | 213 | 1.601563 | 2 |
A month into his Presidency, Obama knew there was a big problem he needed to address. Via.
For many, the most nerve-wracking conversation for both the employer and employee is a discussion about a salary raise. Nationally, employees will receive an average 3 percent wage increase this year. With this in mind, employers must carefully decide who gets a raise and when, while employees must perfect the art of salary negotiation. Consult this guide to become fully versed in the ins and outs of the salary raise. (Via: MindFlash. H/T: Tagged.com)
How much money do you need to be rich? It seems that like beauty, wealth is in the eye of the beholder. A recent Gallup poll found that Americans’ perceptions of what it means to be “rich” vary by demographic group. Click “Launch Infographic” to see a visual guide on how other Americans define wealth. (Via: Tagged.com. H/T: Fife Nissan Dealers).
Therapists are expensive. If you’re going to spend the money, you might as well get a gadget or a new pair of shoes out of it, right? That’s the theory, at least, behind “Retail Therapy”. Click to enlarge.
For years, tuition rates have far out-paced the rate of inflation. College students are now borrowing twice as much as they did just a decade ago. This year the total amount of student loan debt will exceed $1 trillion, the highest amount ever. This steep rise comes at a time of stubbornly high unemployment and economic frailty, creating a perfect storm. The combination of record student loan debt and high unemployment has put a severe burden on millions of young people. So, how can new college-bound debtors fight back? By choosing the degrees that are most likely to lead to jobs with high entry-level salaries. Click to enlarge.
Surviving the holidays is a feat — but surviving the holidays debt-free is something to be truly proud of. During the holiday season, retailers try to squeeze every last dime from our pocket books and credit cards. But if we know what to watch out for, we could (easily or not) survive debt-free. The infographic below will help you navigate — and survive — the typical obstacle course that retailers and credit card issuers set for their customers, during the holiday season and beyond. Good luck! (Via: Credit Sesame. H/T: Conservative Haven)
From September to November, shoppers head to stores in droves to pick up their favorite electronics, sporting goods, and more. But not all businesses thrive this time of year. Below, we examine what retail sectors get the biggest fall boost and what sectors fall flat. Via. | <urn:uuid:97fd06d1-5fb0-4c22-9ab6-c786bd3490ca> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.buzzfeed.com/economics | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949382 | 575 | 1.835938 | 2 |
Meet Lyme Research Alliance’s Person of the Month:
Investigative Reporter MARY BETH PFEIFFER
Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for her series about Lyme and tick-borne diseases, “No Small Thing,” the most comprehensive treatment of the subject ever undertaken by a newspaper, Mary Beth says she hadn’t realized that Lyme disease was “such a controversial can of worms.”
Shortly after Poughkeepsie Journal (NY) investigative reporter Mary Beth Pfeiffer returned from vacation this month, she spent more than three hours downloading emails from Lyme sufferers who had written in support of her nomination by her newspaper for a Pulitzer Prize.
“It was so gratifying for me to realize how many people were helped by my work,” Pfeiffer said after reading the countless emails of support from around the nation.
While it may have surprised Pfeiffer, for months Lyme experts have buzzed about the excellence of her ongoing series of articles about Lyme disease called “No Small Thing.” In her eight long and meticulously reported articles, Pfeiffer delves into such topics as why it’s so difficult for Lyme sufferers to get diagnosed and treated, how and why testing for Lyme is so problematic, the imprecise way Lyme cases are counted, and why treatment guidelines for Lyme disease are so flawed.
In recognition of her outstanding reporting, Lyme Research Alliance (LRA) has named Pfeiffer as its first “Person of the Month” for 2013. “Mary Beth's work has served not only to validate what so many Lyme sufferers have experienced”, said Peter Wild, LRA’s executive director, “but the quality of her reporting has contributed a credible body of work toward what must be the eventual re-examination of how Lyme disease is treated by health professionals and regulated by lawmakers.”
An award-winning investigative journalist for more than 20 years, Pfeiffer’s penchant for investigative reporting has led to articles that consistently champion the disenfranchised. Her examination of the criminalization of mentally ill Americans by law enforcement and government bureaucracies won her numerous state and national awards from 2001-2006. Before launching her Lyme series last year, she had dedicated much of her time to reporting on the soaring use of Tasers by New York State police agencies.
When Pfeiffer decided to report on Lyme disease, she didn’t think it would amount to more than “a typical” trend story, she said. “We knew we had a problem in this area (New York State’s Dutchess County), but we were surprised where we stood in terms of national rankings. We have the nation’s second highest rates of Lyme disease.”
As she delved deeper into the subject, Pfeiffer, who lives in rural Ulster County, quickly discovered that Lyme disease was “a much bigger story than I anticipated. We didn’t know this topic was such a controversial can of worms.”
“Untold numbers of people are not diagnosed or are misdiagnosed and therefore suffer needlessly,” she said. “I’d love to see a better test for Lyme and I would like to see the Centers for Disease Control acknowledge flaws in the two tier test and to revisit the issue of the IDSA guidelines in light of emerging research.”
Pfeiffer plans to continue her Lyme reporting throughout 2013, whether or not she wins any awards. She said she was flattered by LRA naming her its Person of the Month and praised the organization for “all the great work it is doing.”
As for the Pulitzer Prize, which will be announced in April, she said, “it’s every reporter’s ambition” to win it. However Pfeiffer insists she would be “equally pleased” to receive the honor because it would amplify attention to Lyme disease and serve a public good.”
To read the entire "No Small Thing" series go to www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/lyme. | <urn:uuid:180bad7f-6f82-45c7-9d99-d38b5bb9ff9d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.lymeresearchalliance.org/index_PFEIFFER.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978654 | 867 | 1.625 | 2 |
Loulé - Algarve - Portugal
Welcome to Loulé Uncovered! Your Loulé holiday guide!
Welcome to Loulé Uncovered! Your guide to holidays in Loulé, in central Algarve on the south coast of Portugal. For tourist information about Loulé, its hotels, nearby beaches, restaurants, bars, shopping, things to do and in fact, all things Loulé Uncovered!
The beginnings of Loulé are uncertain, some historians putting it as far back as 400BC, but others say it's origins are Roman. It is a fact that when the Arabs invaded the Algarve in 715, Loulé was already an important town. It has been a part of Portugal since 1249 after the Algarve was recaptured from the Moors and in 1291 King Dom Dinis established the Algarve's only medieval fair in Loulé, a sign of the wealth of the region.
Loulé is an interesting town some 16km to the north of Faro. The landmark church of Nossa Senhora da Piedade - a modern dome shaped building reminiscent of a space ship - can easily be seen on a hill, just to the west of the town, from the A22 motorway. It is a large town with all the usual amenities you would expect to find - a great selection of shops, numerous banks, art galleries, swimming pools and sports pavilion to name but a few!
Loulé is famous for it's Saturday morning gipsy market (at the end of Rua da nossa Senhora da Piedade) and there are trips available from most resorts in the Algarve if you don't have a car. It also has a really good daily market in the Arabian style market hall on Praça da República (open every morning except Sunday).
Although it is quite a big town, all the areas that visitors will probably want to see are in a relatively compact area. It is a good idea to use a map as on a first visit (from experience!) it is easy to turn down the wrong street and walk a lot further than you may want to!
Entering Loulé from the south west there is a roundabout with a statue of 2 cyclists - turn to the left and the road will go past a Modelo supermarket and on towards the Nossa Senhora da Piedade Church. The road to the right leads to the centre and as it goes up the hill, just before traffic lights at the top, there is an archway through the old walls on the left which leads through to Largo da Matriz.
In the middle of this small square is the main church of Loulé, Igreja de S.Clemente and to the left of the square is a small, peaceful garden, Jardim dos Amuados (Garden of Sulks), which is an ancient Arab cemetery
From the back of the church follow Rua Matriz, turn left and you will arrive at the market building - you can't miss it! Make sure you get here in a morning, while it's open as the selection of produce is excellent - there are all sorts of treats to tempt you apart from all the fresh fruit and veg!
Loulé castle (13th/14th century) built on an area previously settled by the Romans, is just a short distance down the road from the market on the left hand side. From this approach it isn't very obvious that it is the castle as, through the arched gateway, you see the whitewashed walls of the 'alcaidaria' ( which was the living quarters for the castle commander and his garrison) surrounding a small courtyard and no visible signs of the castle walls. Across the courtyard lies the municipal museum, next door to which are some steps leading up to the remaining section of the castle walls.
The three remaining grey stone towers and short walkway between them are well preserved and apart from getting a great view of Loulé does also give a taste of the historical heritage of the Algarve. (There is a small charge for visiting the castle)
A little further along the street from the castle is the Convent of Espírito Santo which also houses the municipal art gallery.
Apart from the historical points of interest, there are also lots of cafés and shops in the criss-crossing network of cobbled alleys and streets and plenty of places to sit in the sunshine and watch the world go by!
The main avenida (José da Costa Mealha) is a bustle of cars and people going about their daily business on either side of the central gardens with benches under the trees and kiosks for refreshments along it's length.
Loulé Carnival is one of the biggest Events in Loulé and is famous across the Algarve. It takes places in February (over 3 days, the 3rd day being Shrove Tuesday) and is a truly colourful affair with music and dancing and general partying; reminiscent of Brasilian carnivals, when people come from all over the Algarve to watch the processions and join in with the party as everyone takes to the streets! The centre of Loulé (Avenida José da Costa Mealha) is shut off for the carnival and it costs a few euros for entrance
It is worth arriving early- the procession starts at 3.00pm- to find parking, especially if you haven't been to the town before. If you decide to leave the enclosed area you will have to pay again to get back in, so if you want to explore the rest of Loulé, do it first! It is also traditional at carnival time across the Algarve for people to throw 'water bombs' and eggs- so be warned!
At Easter time there is a religious 'Festival of the Sovereign Mother', patron saint of Loulé, which again attracts people from all over the country. | <urn:uuid:f64f1fdc-3b1e-4f37-8c47-7777c33d1c20> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.louleuncovered.com/home.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96251 | 1,245 | 1.5 | 2 |
Posted on 22 July, 2007 in category: Interviews
The following interview between Colin McLarty and David Corfield was conducted on July 22, 2007. The interview as it appears here was transcribed and edited only slightly for clarity.
Corfield: That’s the title of the book, isn’t it? Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. They are rivals in that they embody different notions of rationality. One timelessly seeks timeless principles, another seeks something timeless but achieves this recognizing its historical situatedness, and the last one recognizes nothing timeless, seeing everything as necessarily historically situated.
McLarty: But do these have to be rivals?
Corfield: Encyclopaedic history gives a fairly smooth, glossed-over picture of the progress to the present, where the past is really just a prelude to the present. To the extent that there was any obstacle in the past, you raise it just to point to the way people behaving rationally overcame it.
McLarty: Well in history as in mathematics, sometimes they didn’t think of stuff yet. It’s not that there was an obstacle, it is just that things hadn’t gotten done yet.
Corfield: Typically when talking about why somebody’s contribution doesn’t get recognised, this history has that flavour to it that it is only an irrationality that was standing in the way. There is no notion that actually you have to have spent a long time living in a tradition to be able to understand somebody’s step as something progressive.
McLarty: But, for example, Lagrange can tell a lot about the roots of a polynomial even when he cannot actually find them, but he does not think of the Galois group yet. Most people do not want to say some failure of rationality stopped him. He just did not get that far. Galois did.
Corfield: No, but if you carry the story on you want to explain why Galois is not received very quickly when he does introduce the groups. Could we say that Galois himself is in a tradition or that he is trying to begin a tradition?
McLarty: Oh, he sees himself in a tradition.
Corfield: So, those not following him, to what extent are they thoroughly immersed in the tradition that he sees himself to be part of?
McLarty: He feels the people that don’t follow him are failing that tradition. They should have understood what he showed them. Cauchy out of pride refuses to recognize Galois’s contribution, even though it is in exactly the tradition. So there is an obstacle. An obstacle of pride. These people are unwilling of recognising a valuable new idea.
Corfield: This seems quite compatible with tradition-based history. One needs the notion of the virtues and Cauchy is failing according to one of the virtues, so he is not a good member of the tradition in one sense.
McLarty: It also fits with an encyclopaedic enquiry. I don’t believe Galois’ version of it exactly, but if you did then it would fit with an encyclopaedia enquiry.
Corfield: Just because you can tell two rather similar stories that means we might not have been able to split those two versions of inquiry in that case, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t find cases that wouldn’t split them later on.
McLarty: They are different, but I am asking, do they need to be rivals? Now clearly, the logical positivists think theirs are rivals to any Nietzschean kind of explanation. They certainly say if they’re right then he’s wrong. And of course, like you said, their epistemology makes him wrong.
Corfield: There are occasions when MacIntyre is going to invoke a genealogical history. For him there was never an actual defeat of Aristotelianism. Rather the Aristotelians failed in some sense, failed to follow their tradition. So he gives a genealogical explanation of why alternative forms of moral thinking have arisen in its place, right up to emotivism in the early twentieth century.
McLarty: Is he also happy to give or at least to draw on encyclopaedic versions?
Corfield: Is he being unfair in a way? He is allowed to avail himself of genealogical history when it supplements his. But he has the idea that the genealogists can’t avail themselves of anything like the tradition-based notion of history because they will always see aspects of tradition as a masking of power relations. But is that fair to them?
McLarty: Well if you want to say it of Nietzsche you are going to have to say he was kidding himself when he wrote on Uses and Abuses of History, because he says there are these different uses. There is memorial history, where you really are memorialising the great achievements of the past, but not necessarily as depicting them leading to us now. We may have fallen away from them but they are the great achievements of the past. And surely he must have some kind of concept of a dry history which is just going to tell you what actually happened.
Corfield: Collingwood calls this chronicling.
McLarty: Then a genealogical conception where you undercut things by discovering where they really came from.
Corfield: But then does he have any sense that the one can tell a story of progress as understood within some kind of body of thinking?
McLarty: Well this is what makes it a pressing question to me because it appears to me that Nietzsche finally doesn’t believe the memorialising history. He depicts it as one function that history can have, but he doesn’t in fact respect it at all. He really does only respect this deconstructing genealogical extreme. Yet, he depicts four uses which all exist.
Corfield: But no-one’s claiming they don’t exist.
McLarty: But did he have to also take this extremely invidious position that only one is the right one? On the face of what I would like to say well of course they are not rivals, “Let one hundred flowers bloom”, but on the other hand the positivists did consider themselves enemies of phenomenology and Nietzscheanism.
Corfield: Is it philosophically possible to claim that there are good histories? What do we mean by “good” at that point. What is a good history?
McLarty: Well I wouldn’t like to try to do the history of twentieth century math without Dieudonné’s books. On a first reading they’re fairly encyclopaedic, but then they arrive at this telos of Grothendieck, so are aiming at one polemic purpose.
Corfield: Well that would be encyclopaedic if it is dismissive of the past as something we cannot learn from. Is he saying we have everything we need now by following Grothendieck?
McLarty: He is very happy with all of twentieth century topology and algebraic geometry. Each of his histories comes up to Grothendieck and stops there, and says we’re not going to get to this. The history of differential and algebraic topology is a history of wonderful ideas we still use, but it’s encyclopedic.
Corfield: Does he believe you must be trained to some extent to appreciate that these are good ideas? I mean it is not something open to any rational person, is it?
McLarty: The thought is you should be able to train yourself by reading it, and then you’ll be someone who will be able to judge this history. This is the classical encyclopedic understanding that you can train yourself by reading it.
Corfield: The Encyclopaedia Britannica is a great example of precisely this idea of aiming at the common man, or at least the rational man. You may distinguish people by class, or perhaps by gender, those who can and those who cannot achieve this level of rationality, but there is a large audience.
McLarty: So professional historians like to dislike Dieudonné’s histories because they are too dry, too progressivist. And yet, who would want to be a historian of twentieth century mathematics without those books to go look at?
Corfield: To a large extent historians of mathematics, especially genealogical ones, haven’t gone for the twentieth century. I know one historian who was interested in how they were going to depict Wiles. The idea he came up with was to question the represention of Wiles as the lonely hero in his garret and unmask it, but not to include anything of what he was thinking.
Leo Corry has moved to the twentieth century, hasn’t he, with his book on structures. Now how would we want to think of that?
McLarty: To me what he achieves in that book is fairly encyclopaedic but that’s not the only vision Leo has for the history of mathematics.
Corfield: Does he suggest that there is almost an irrationality in Bourbaki’s reluctance to accept category theory?
McLarty: Yes, and he is critical of some people being too quick to take an image for the body of mathematics. People should have been able to see in the first place that this was just an image which wasn’t going to work as body.
Corfield: And yet he was the one at the last conference who was wanting to make a big distinction between the historians’ history, people who didn’t see any forms of necessity in the course of events, and mathematicians’ stories. These he ran together with mathematical fiction, such as Uncle Petros, writings we don’t judge critically for accuracy, where generally we don’t suspend disbelief. We don’t go reading Uncle Petros and say of some event that it couldn’t possibly have happened, because we’re engaging with a work of fiction. He said that you should approach the mathematicians’ stories in just the same way. He took us back to Aristotle’s ideas of how there is a story-telling where one gets away from the nitty gritty details of what actually did happen and one tells a tale of what should have happened. This is something the modern historian is trying to get away from, these Whiggish histories. It was as though he was presenting himself within the genealogical line.
McLarty: In the Structures book he does constantly distinguish between what the mathematicians are doing in the bare sense of what they are doing and how we should think about that. On the other hand, I would still say that the real achievement of the book is fairly encyclopaedic because it is entering into a vacuum that needed at least an encyclopaedia as a start. Maybe I am just projecting my own values onto it but I don’t see how you can begin to do a twentieth century math if you don’t at least have an encyclopaedic history, and then you can proceed to be more critical and evaluative.
Corfield: Perhaps issues are clearer when you look at histories of moral thinking. You see different schools and they seem so far apart. It is not hard to believe that if you are not, say, an Aristotelian then there is a lot of baggage you have to learn if you are to understand their way of thinking. MacIntyre gives the example of the English when they come to Ireland bring along with them their long history of property rights. Their legal system confronts an Irish culture which doesn’t have these concepts. There is no neutral standpoint from which you can assess things. You are either in one camp or you are in the other. These two cultures are so far apart that they can’t understand each other – they’re incommensurable. Perhaps in mathematics instead of talking about different languages we should say they use different dialects.
McLarty: Certainly within the twentieth century you don’t have schools of mathematics that flatly can’t understand each other. In a way though I wonder if we are dealing with a kind of thing that Kuhn talks about sometimes. When the English come to Ireland neither the English nor the Irish, at least not the leaders of these communities, are deeply immersed in the studying of conceptions of property. But when we look at the Princeton topologists they are deeply immersed in the study of topological theorems. They have discussed this to the limit of their ability already, that’s how they got where they are. The English had not discussed conception of property. They were not interested in discussing conceptions of property.
Corfield: But then they would have reported back cases to be heard to the experts back in England who would then settle the dispute.
McLarty: But even those experts are going to be subject to massive practical pressure, leading to mistakes on understanding conceptions of property. For example who will have the property? Who is going to get to eat what grows on that field? Whereas in math we are dealing with people that have already argued the issues out, a lot. I am not saying that any debate has ever really exhausted all the possibilities but they have been debating exactly these issues a lot. So a disagreement that remains after both sides have been working on the same problem for a while is a hard disagreement to settle.
Corfield: Yes. MacIntyre certainly doesn’t believe that necessarily there is going to be a resolution, by any means. But one ought to be very aware of the conceptual problems within one’s own field and be at least aware of the fact that the other camp may be able to have an insight into it too, and make sense of it in their own terms.
But, as we were saying, in mathematics perhaps we are just talking across dialects rather than whole conceptual systems. In my book, in the discussion on groupoids, there are not exactly schools involved, but there are individuals who are saying “Groups are fine. They capture symmetry. I don’t like what you’re doing – it’s not giving me anything new. Groupoids are an unnecessary elaboration”. There is clearly a frustration on the side of those who are proposing groupoids, like Ronnie Brown. “For years and years we have been banging on about the good things we can do with groupoids and it is never ever enough for these people on the other side”. Grudgingly they might admit that something might be useful or convenient, but it doesn’t go to the essence of the matter. There is no neutral court where we can say “You’ve satisfied this and this criteria so you’ve won and you haven’t won”.
It’s not as sharp as the Irish- English kind of difference, which from the native Irish perspective must have seemed bizarre. The same with Native American Indians when the Europeans came and imposed this completely foreign system. How on earth could they understand what was going on?
McLarty: Maybe that’s one way of putting things – the ease of considering alternatives. You talked earlier about ways other things could have happened. I have not really absorbed everything the Princeton school thought about topology. And I sure don’t feel in a very good position to find some other way it could have been done. I am supposed to invent an alternative to early twentieth century topology, as a historian considering it could have gone some other way? Whereas it is terribly easy to think of other conceptions of property besides the English and the Irish in that situation. Partly because neither of those groups had it as one of their major projects to come up with conceptions of property. So it’s not hard for us to think of alternatives. But could Poincaré have done something else than Analysis Situs to solve his problems? Am I supposed to come up with a plausible alternative?
Corfield: The genealogists say things could have been otherwise, but I suppose it is not up to them to come up with the alternatives.
McLarty: But in issues like the property debate it is terribly easy to come up with those alternatives, whereas in mathematics it is hard to come up with alternatives as to what happened.
Corfield: So let’s think what do they appeal to? The Bloor school were interested in the Intuitionism debate. Brouwer could have won. Mathematics might have opted for a different logic. Maybe that’s easy just to say that someone could have won.
McLarty: Yes, but then how do you explain that in his lectures in the fifties Brouwer is saying that he really doesn’t have an adequate proof of the fundamental theorem of intuitionist analysis. Brouwer evidently didn’t find this alternative way. But you can ignore that and just say that there was an alternative way.
Corfield: Right. Bloor goes right back to two plus two equals four. How could that have gone differently? Lakatos gave the example of adding things in containers, so that when you add two containers it makes a difference to the sum.
McLarty: Chemists certainly know this kind of thing. You add two gallons of alcohol to two of water and you get maybe 3.5 gallons of liquid. This is a perfectly clear well known fact. We don’t normally consider it an alternative to two plus two equals four. So you could say that it is an alternative to two plus two equals four, but it would sound silly to most people.
Corfield: And yet they think they’ve got an easier task in mathematics than in something like science. One would imagine that the world is a big constraint on science. Could physics have gone very differently? It is hard to imagine. Whereas in mathematics there is an emphasis on freedom. If Cantor had been shot when he was 5, would we have any thing like Cantorian set theory?
McLarty: Yes, because of Dedekind.
Corfield: It would have looked a little bit different.
McLarty: Yes, but Cantor set theory was different from Zermelo’s.
Corfield: It’s a funny game to play. What about geometry?
McLarty: Aristotle asks what could we do if we didn’t have the assumption on the parallels. He says we could not prove the diagonal of the square is not commensurable without the assumption on the parallels. Well that didn’t mean that anybody ever developed a geometry without it at that time. It’s not clear whether Aristotle meant you could actually do geometry without that, or that you would fail to do enough geometry if you had not thought of the parallel postulate.
Corfield: I noticed in a history and philosophy of science department I was working in that the historians were always surprised that the philosophers asked counterfactual questions of history. What if such and such had happened, would something have been different. The historians would express amazement that one could think that way, because what happened happened. There is a certain historian who doesn’t play this game of ‘things could have gone differently’. This is a straightforward historian who is just trying to illuminate the times in which certain developments took place. But I think that there is that brand of historian that has a more philosophical mission behind what they are doing.
McLarty: Well, Shapin and Shaffer, they declare we are going to see how this science could have gone otherwise.
Corfield: It’s all determined by what’s going on politically in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
McLarty: So I’m left really wondering how rival these things are. On the one hand, I have an impulse, why can’t we do them both? But then the practitioners think that they can’t do both. The logical positivists were intolerant of the existing genealogical account in the Nietzsche – Heidegger tradition.
Corfield: But we don’t have any examples of people that do straddle these different versions, do we?
McLarty: Well, on a lower level, surely. Shapin and Schaffer had immersed themselves in works of many historians who disliked Shapin and Schaffer’s approach. And I hope they felt that some of that was profitably. They are going to value those works of history whose methodology they don’t share. Just in the lower level empirical sense that they read it and valued it.
Corfield: So that’s the meta-question you want to put them. So we’re hearing how histories are much better now. In history of science they’ve learned the mistakes from the past. They re much more subtle. But what does it mean to say they are doing better history? How do you construe that notion of ‘good’ or ‘better’ unless you yourself have a notion that you belong to a tradition that is improving and you’ve overcome the obstacles of the historians of the past. Otherwise, why can’t we ask what they are trying to do, what they are trying to achieve? Just some dominance in the field of the history of science? They must have some sense that they are doing something better.
McLarty: Another thing I was wondering out of the paper and the talk. You know everybody is against Platonism.
Corfield: Yes, whatever that means.
McLarty: How much of that is because of this Aristotelian alternative? How much of this is because they like Aristotle more than Plato because of the virtues in Aristotle that MacIntyre has in fact talked about. It is not just that the nominalists are against Platonism and the structuralists are against Platonism and the modalists areagainst Platonism. Everybody is against Platonism.
Corfield: Apart from Penelope Maddy in her early days. But we can ask whether this is the Platonism of Plato, as you discussed in your paper that Glaucon is in fact closer to modern Platonism.
McLarty: Can we explain this wave of dissatisfaction with Platonism, not by attributing it to those people having learned Thomistic Aristotelianism, because they haven’t, but can we explain it in fact against their will by saying they are recognizing the flaws that Aristotelian Thomism has articulated?
Corfield: So invoking notions of the adequacy of the mind to its objects.
McLarty: And certainly you could take that reading of Benacerraf’s paper about we can’t know mathematical objects. Precisely he is pointing out that the mind can’t be adequate to the kind of mathematical objects that he believes Platonists are describing. He wouldn’t describe it in terms of adequacy of mind but we can say that is exactly what he is complaining about.
Corfield: Behind this MacIntyrean notion there is some form of realism, of the virtues, not as eternal objects but as something one’s mind can become more adequate to. Is that option really available to the people that are unhappy with Platonism?
McLarty: But we as Thomists want to absorb the thoughts of all these other groups.
Corfield: We should want to explain the frustrations they are feeling. And to show them their lack of resources. Their only alternatives in the form of realism are abstract objects or things existing spatio-temporally. But, if abstract, how do we have contact with them? If spatio-temporal, where are they? Their alternatives derive from causal theories of knowledge and these are not Aristotelian notions.
There you go. Aristotle provides you with more resources because he has a richer notion of cause, some parts of have been abandoned. This is precisely the sort of exercise we should be engaging on. Does analytic philosophy of mathematics recognise it has a problem or is it happy with its account? Are your Hales and Wrights happy?
McLarty: Well they certainly recognise they have problems. One of their books is about seven successive attempts to explain what proper names are and they find problems with each one. So they are aware of problems. But it is perhaps not the awareness of the problem that you or I might think they should have.
Corfield: Right, so we can set ourselves the task of showing that we have the resources to explain the frustrations that they are experiencing, and this doesn’t mean that we think that they should recognise our explanation of their failures. But after a time, when their frustrations are never released, they will have to think about the ways other people view their story, and whether they have the resources to explain their problems.
McLarty: So each field of analytic philosophy certainly recognises that it has problems. But you have this Aristotelian Thomistic view that we actually know something more systematic about these problems. They are not local to each field.
Corfield: There is a large distance between their way of thinking and ours. Don’t you feel that frustration all the time? You want to say “Surely you can see that things aren’t going very well for you. Look at the questions you’ve been led to ask. You must be missing something.” But yes, to be consistent in this line of thinking, one ought to do just what you say and explain the pattern of their failures.
McLarty: Well there is this MacIntyrean project to engage with all those alternatives, at least to your own satisfaction, if not to theirs.
Corfield: It may be a long process, not an easy process. Perhaps I’ve been guilt of employing encyclopaedic thinking myself, imaging that they would see what I see as obvious, believing that any rational person should recognise that they are going wrong because they are not dealing with any content of mathematics.
McLarty: Well that brings me to the content of mathematics. Are there objects that mathematicians can conform their minds to?
Corfield: How to treat the notion of object? In moral thinking when the mind is becoming more adequate to its objects, we include things such as the virtues. They’re certainly not like tables. It is clear from the way the mathematicians describe their experience, it feels to all intents and purposes as though they are getting hold of something, they perhaps do not have at the moment. Their minds are not adequate, they know there are questions they do not understand about certain situations and they expect that some time in the future they will be able to tell us the story of a field that will make sense of the problems they felt before.
One has to be careful about the question of object there. I like this idea that Michael Harris had. Hacking had this notion that in science there is no question that particles exist. Not quite like tables do, you can’t buy them from Ikea, but by the time you get to be able to control them, you can use them to do other things, in experiments you can shoot them at balls of niobium and look to see the charge you put on these balls, and see where you’ve got fractional charges.
McLarty: Some of them can be shot. Others, like mesons, almost never exist except virtually.
Corfield: Right that is a further twist to the thing, isn’t it? For Hacking, “If you can spray them, they’re real” was the famous statement. But as you said there is a lot more to be said about particle existence. But Michael Harris’s point was “Look at mathematical ideas, you can steal them, so they must exist.” What happens when somebody writes a paper and you say you just used my idea. What does that mean to say “that’s my idea you used”? A tricky question, and yet there is quite a robust sense of what that means.
So maybe one should approach this notion of object through the grammar of the way you talk about the thing. It doesn’t have the same grammar as for tables. If I walk off with the table it’s not there for you, but if I walk off with your mathematical idea you still have it. There’s clearly a difference.
McLarty: One approach which attracts me sometimes is to say “Sure there are objects in mathematics, they are space and number”. They are not groupoids. Groupoids are an attempt to become adequate to those objects, which turn out to have a lot more in them that you might think. You think space is only three dimensional. Yes, but there are also sets of five particles in space. And in the most naive sense the space of their configurations is fifteen dimensional. We are not talking about some alternative universe. So that the objects really are just space and number.
Corfield: That is Pierre Marquis’ line in one paper, isn’t it? That mathematics can be divided between the machines and the objects. Algebraic machinery that is going to do the measuring, like a homology theory which measures aspects of a space. And that seems like a neat picture, but then you go and do tricky things like collect these algebraic objects into their own spaces, and start investigating them as spatial things. It becomes rather less clear what exactly is the thing studied by something else, and what is the thing itself. You can get this reversal effect sometimes where you start studying the machinery as a mathematical entity. It’s not clear that the status is a permanent one.
McLarty: But he is interested in a different division. I am suggesting that really just space and number are the objects and all the rest is a means of becoming adequate to them. Whereas he wants to draw a divide where a lot of the objects are the things to study and some of the others are the tools to do so.
Corfield: He certainly has space in the things to study.
McLarty: But even there, I don’t think he means just the space around us.
Corfield: I see, so you literally mean the space around us.
McLarty: Now, this space has in it surfaces. It has families of surfaces. Now we have an infinite dimensional space which we have discovered in the three dimensional space. But those infinite dimensional spaces are the mind’s attempt to become adequate. Those aren’t the objects.
Corfield: So you think all mathematics can be phrased as some attempt to grasp space and number. So what is number then in this sense? Number is something to do with discrete entities? And then what is an imaginary number?
McLarty: Well we have this whole history of making our minds adequate to space and number, and you can see imaginary numbers arising in that.
Corfield: As tools to make our mind more adequate, not things to be studied.
McLarty: To me what are imaginary numbers? Well Feynman tells us what the unit imaginaries are. They are positions of a clock hand. Of course they are. We see this all the time.
Corfield: And if minus one is understood in terms of half a turn, then the square root of minus one is a quarter turn.
McLarty: Yes, we see clock hands make half a turn. We see electric waves go half way through an entire phase. It just happens all the time. And these are complex numbers.
Corfield: We can clearly make visual pictures of large chunks of mathematics, but I remember someone trying to teach me Borel sets. And when asked how he pictured Borel sets, he said, “I don’t really”.
McLarty: Some people won’t. But Borel sets come out of Fourier’s attempts to describe temperature.
Corfield: Right, for anything you are always going to be able to tell a story that leads up to it.
McLarty: A true one! Take the standard conjectures. Here’s Grothendieck saying, “you’ve given up on a simple vision and if you had not given up on it you might have achieved it”.
Corfield: So you haven’t fully allowed your mind to become adequate.
McLarty: Yes. We would now have a far simpler proof of the Weil conjectures if only people had had faith that they could prove the standard conjectures. Grothendieck is saying they didn’t make their minds adequate. Because they didn’t look for enough simplicity.
Corfield: Ok , but does that tie to the space and number idea?
McLarty: A lot of the time it’s not that there are objects the mind has got to conform itself to. The mind creates these things. Like the way we invented radio but also the way we invented the Dewey decimal system to classify books.
Corfield: But isn’t that more arbitrary? There it could have gone a hundred different ways, couldn’t it?
McLarty: Yes, but you see this with group versus groupoids. Of course anything you can do with groupoids you could have done with groups. But that doesn’t make it arbitrary these arguments that this problem really does need groupoids.
Corfield: But then nobody is going to say of two library systems that one is the good, the right way of classifying books. One may be better, but do people think they are approaching the best form of classification system?
McLarty: Well it’s a lot more complicated a problem. To take a simpler problem than groupoids, whether we should use matrices, it was a big question in the late nineteenth century. People said “I’m not going to use matrices because it’s really just these equations”. Clearly you have a free choice to do it either way.
Corfield: There are some people, like Alan Connes, who are ‘realist’ about these things. You can tell you are on the right track because amazing and surprising things will happen if you follow a better path, and if you don’t follow the path you won’t meet these amazingly unexpected effects.
McLarty: But this realism to me it doesn’t make the decisive issue on matrices. Nobody said you can’t use matrices and nobody had any application of matrices that you couldn’t have done without using them.
Corfield: But won’t there come a point when the explosion happens, so that if you hadn’t gone down the path of using matrices, something would be blocked off to you? It would come to a point where you can’t follow those who did go down the path of matrices.
McLarty: There won’t come a point where absolutely you can’t follow, because we know a translation. And then yes the opponents of matrices will say that conceptually you couldn’t have taken that path without matrices which means you shouldn’t have taken that approach. The history of math is full of this – “Sure they’ve proved this theorem but they don’t really understand it because they proved it with tools I don’t like”.
Corfield: Sure, but how do we judge that comment? Aren’t you being judgemental about that line? Aren’t you’re thinking they were wrong to say that?
McLarty: I was putting it that way when I said it, but surely you can be right or wrong about saying that a certain concept is good or not. But on the level of the question we are talking about now, it isn’t that there were objects the mind had to conform to. The mind is conforming better to itself, by using this method. The object is no more a matrix than an abstract linear map or a bunch of equations. The mind becomes more adequate to itself by thinking of this problem in matrices and this one in linear transformations.
Corfield: Can we tell a similar story about the virtues, that our minds are not becoming adequate to pre-existing objects?
McLarty: Hegel certainly would say increasing understanding of the virtues isn’t getting better and better at understanding something that was in the world without thought. Of course, for Hegel there is nothing in the world without thought. It is a matter of coming better and better to understand yourself.
Corfield: By objects is not necessarily meant things that existed independently. You don’t have to limit yourself to these by any means.
McLarty: But except, when you talk of your mind having objects to conform themselves to, that makes it sound like the objects were there before your mind set about conforming itself. And now it is up to your mind to conform itself to them.
Corfield: When we look back in time and see the trail the mathematicians took, you want to say that there was a kind of reality that they were engaging with, that we actually have a better grasp on now. And we can see them grappling with this problem and we start to see some of their thinking becoming what looks to us more adequate to some kind of structural possibility.
McLarty: But to some extent when I do that kind of exercise, it’s not that there is this reality that they are grappling with, it is that they’ve brought a conceptual apparatus to bear, and they’re grappling with their conceptual apparatus. Wonderfully. I am not saying that they messed up, but that that’s what mathematics is about. It is about dealing with its own address to these problems. And sometimes dealing with tremendous skill. And sometimes failing of that to some extent.
Corfield: One big issue is this notion of perfected understanding. What is one to make of that?
McLarty: And what role does that play for MacIntyre?
Corfield: It’s not something one can know one has achieved. Here I am now and I think that my understanding is better than someone’s twenty years ago. And I don’t just think this from my own perspective, but in some objective, timeless sense. So, what do I mean by that? I can’t just mean that the people in the future will look back and say there is a story we can tell which takes us from the original person, through me now, on to us in the future. I can’t think that and then think that some time further in the future than that, people will reverse their opinion and think that that wasn’t the correct order in terms of seeing an improvement of understanding. At any point there are some aspects of partiality in anyone’s understanding. Later on the understanding of a particular point will be considered inadequate. I am not saying this just about the understanding of a piece of mathematics, but also about the understanding of previous understandings that they were in some sense inadequate. But unless one has this regulative ideal of perfected understanding then what can it mean to think that one has an improved understanding?
McLarty: So does MacIntyre talk about particular cases of perfected understanding?
Corfield: No, he says that people at some point thought they had achieved perfected understanding and were proved to have been wrong.
McLarty: Well this is the state of projective geometry after Veblen and Young. There were these various problems that people had been addressing for 60 years. Veblen and Young write a two volume book, and they settle some open problems, substantially all the open questions, without creating any new questions. And the subject in fact withered for a little while. What brought it back was doing it over finite fields, a radically new context.
Corfield: So that raises the question, is it the same when it’s taken to this new context?
McLarty: But also you could say our understanding of classical projective geometry really has not moved much beyond Veblen and Young. They really produced a pretty perfect understanding of those problems. Now we’ve found some allied problems.
Corfield: We can’t say that we know they have achieved this, but we have an understanding of what it would be to show that they didn’t have a perfected understanding. The understanding of that changes in time. Because one may think one can’t conceive at the moment of any way of showing that they are partial but in the future people have a better understanding of that partiality. So we’re far from that principle of some analytic philosophers that if you know something, then you know that you know it.
McLarty: Yes, certainly that kind of thinking isn’t going to help with this.
Corfield: The question here is can one have this theory, this tradition-based theory of rationality, without this regulative ideal of a perfected understanding.
McLarty: Well I am not against this idea, I just don’t have it yet.
Corfield: Again our understanding of what it would be would clearly change in time. Generically, all you are going to say is in contrast to this notion of being shown to be partial. And with the understanding that what it is to show something as partial can change. We know examples from the past of people who believed themselves close to something perfect, for instance those trying to remove the blemish in Euclidean geometry – if we had a clear fifth postulate we would have perfected geometry. We now see from Hilbert’s perspective, that even if they had succeeded, they would still have a partial view in some sense. So we certainly have a conception of people discovering that people in the past who had some notion of perfection in fact failed.
McLarty: I am not supposing that MacIntyre some silly naïve idea here.
Corfield: There is an old Thomistic account of the understanding, but then that takes us to theology, and I am not sure where I want to go with that, where we discuss the angels’ understanding. For Aquinas this is different from humans’ understanding, and in another way from God’s understanding.
McLarty: I suppose in Aquinas that’s not something we can use in any way. We just would have no contact with angels’ understanding, I would guess.
Corfield: We certainly can never have a perfected understanding of angels’ understanding, but we can talk a bit about it. There is a rich theory there, but I don’t know how much of a risk it is to buy into MacIntyre, and what the costs are of adopting his resources to help us here. How much of Thomism must we adopt if these resources help us to a philosophy of mathematics where we are paying more attention to the content of what mathematicians think, studying how their thinking has changed and yet we don’t get taken down some relativist genealogical line? What resources do we have, which philosophical framework provides us with this opportunity to do what we think we ought to be doing, which is studying the changes in mathematical thinking? I don’t know who else can help us here, but as I said, possibly it leads us to some sort of metaphysical theology. Are we going to be taken down that line?
McLarty: I was thinking of Hilbert’s endorsement of I forget, he says some French mathematician, who says a mathematical theory isn’t complete until you can explain it to the first man you meet in the street. So in that sense Veblen and Young produced an angels’ understanding of projective geometry. Maths professors they still couldn’t explain it. Well if they were on the street they would need a good bit of patience.
Corfield: Do you think that was the motivation for some of his writings, when he writes with Cohn-Vossen.
McLarty: Yes, his book Geometry and the Imagination. And he does projective geometry in it. At least the point-plane duality and the projective theory of conics. Again you know if I walked down the street here most people would probably lose interest, but he takes great results and makes them really transparently available.
Corfield: Of course if somebody doesn’t have the desire to learn then they can resist.
McLarty: I think MacIntyre gives access to that kind of thing. I think he raised some issues that you do well bringing them into mathematics. I think this is a very good framework. But so that makes me want to see a pursued much more concretely.
Corfield: I think by bringing MacIntyre into philosophy of mathematics it could help us make contact with philosophers who haven’t even thought that mathematics could be of any interest to them whatsoever. They might think that there are some technical problems that people are trying to sort out which have no bearing on what they’re doing. But there are some moral theorists, interested in virtue ethics, we could make contact with.
McLarty: What is this comparison with virtues ethics?
Corfield: Very similarly to the case of mathematics, with theories of meaning which analyse statements with logical tools, then unless you rewrite moral statements, it looks like you are going to be committed to what they refer to. So if you want to say, for example, “Murder is wrong” or “Courage is required of us”, if your notion of reality doesn’t allow such things as courage to exist, then you are going to have to do some rewriting. There is a dissatisfaction with this approach and a desire to revive a richer discourse of the virtues.
McLarty: What I know of virtue ethics is from Nussbaum’s Fragility of Goodness where the point is not to defend the claim that courage is required of us. The point is to depict virtue and courage in such a way that people will want them. The point of virtue for her, as I take it, is not a bunch of claims of what you ought to do. It is depictions of things that when you have seen them you will want to do.
Corfield: And to go back to Aristotle, to be in a position to see that they are desirable takes a certain upbringing and moral environment.
McLarty: Yes, you cannot teach ethics to men who have not been brought up well.
Corfield: So there is a flavour of that when MacIntyre suggests with the notion of tradition in science, that one must have been brought up in a certain way to understand what the problems are in science. This resembles the Kuhnian idea of the profound transformation that takes place in you as you go from a young person to the trained scientist. There’s a heck of a lot of baggage and ways of seeing the world that you’re taking onboard, to be able to parse scientific activities.
McLarty: Does that mean that there can’t be philosophy of these things, because there can only be philosophy by the people who are in these traditions?
Corfield: Like, as a moral philosopher, one must be part of a moral community.
McLarty: And this is what Penelope Maddy says in her current book. The second philosopher pursues questions of methodology and mathematics because she is pursuing mathematics and would not otherwise. It is only because she is in this community. So now we’ve got that Maddy and MacIntyre agree.
Corfield: For Maddy, they are just trying to distill methodological principles out of the practice, aren’t they? She doesn’t want to use the word ‘philosophy’.
McLarty: In her new book Second Philosophy she wants to not back off the word ‘philosophy’.
Corfield: But is there still the idea that you’ve almost got to help the mathematician out, who is inclined to go off on some foggy metaphysical quest?
McLarty: Well, you should be a mathematician yourself if you are asking these questions, and you should approach them from the point of view of efficacy towards your goals. The way we choose correct method in mathematics is by being mathematicians, and asking what will help us achieve our goals.
Corfield: Right, but she made the point in her previous book that mathematicians themselves sometimes become first philosophers, and so one has to help them by showing them there is a lot of gas going on there, and that they should stick to mathematical reasons.
McLarty: As I look at it in the current book she is less interested in helping out those people. Those people are fine by her if they are proving theorems, she’ll learn their theorems, insofar as she is a mathematician. But when she is trying to answer questions of methodology her standard is which method will advance my goals.
Corfield: In the previous book she talked about the goals as not being up for question, which seemed a rather bizarre point of view. I got the impression she was saying that once they are established, it wasn’t the methodologist job to question them. She argued against the axiom V = L in set theory by relying on some pre-determined goals and showing us that V = L doesn’t help us towards those goals. But it wasn’t clear to me from her earlier work how the goals were established.
McLarty: But how could you approach that from MacIntyre’s point of view? She is here referring to a community of set theorists, a tradition of set theory. And this community will change its goals from time to time to some extent. But not by stepping outside and saying whether this is a good goal or not.
Corfield: But for MacIntyre there ought to be the possibility that, because of some form of partiality of view, even if they are modifying their goals, they will still experience frustration. And it is possible this may be explicable in the terms of another group. Take someone like Angus MacIntyre who claims that there are limitations within the set-theoretic viewpoint, that it’s not going anywhere. It’s run out of steam.
McLarty: It’s not that he is saying you shouldn’t base model theory on Zermelo-Frankel set theory. He is saying you shouldn’t conduct you work in model theory with a lot of concern for set-theoretic issues. You should be looking at higher level issues of, the way I would put it, mapping and symmetry, things suggested by algebraic geometry in particular.
Corfield: So, if there are some people who are constraining themselves from his point of view, there is a claim of partiality. Now, they don’t have to recognise Angus MacIntyre’s claim, do they? But from the other MacIntyre’s point of view, his approach should start to achieve important new things.
McLarty: Well Angus feels that his approach does achieve the goals of current model theorists. The field has moved in this direction. He is not against the goals these people had. He does feel to some extent that some people are sticking with older methods where they shouldn’t be.
Corfield: Oh, but they agree on goals?
McLarty: Yes, largely. There is differences in detail. How important is it to classify all the models of a given theory? There is plenty of disagreement over this among plenty of model theorists. Of course it is nice to have classification theorems, it’s not nice to waste your time. So how much effort do you put into which problems? And in particular, MacIntyre feels that model theoretic techniques of a kind that grow out of the honest history of model theory might help us understand Weil cohomologies and for example address the standard conjectures. But this is going to be a much higher level model theory not much concerned with set theoretic questions about these models. It is going to be concerned definability questions, symmetry questions.
Corfield: But I am wondering whether the resources provided by the other MacIntyre help us understand what is going on there.
McLarty: I’m drawn to say that we can understand this question you had about Maddy, what enables these standards sometimes to change and sometimes not. Well Maddy says the mathematicians in that field, it is not much of a gloss to say the community pursuing that subject. That maybe her phrase ‘the people working in this field’ we should understand in Alasdair MacIntyre’s terms of ‘the craft community’.
Corfield: Is it possible to say that Angus MacIntyre perceives a group of people who maybe are stuck in one place? Who aren’t coming fully his way.
McLarty: Yes, he is published.
Corfield: In which terms can he understand that they’re stuck?
McLarty: Well, he does it historically. He looks at Tarski’s work and he says everybody agrees that these are great theorems, but MacIntyre argues that what really matters about the decidibility of elementary geometry is not quantifier elimination per se. It’s the special feature of that theory that led to that like o-minimality. So we should look at aspects of that theorem which are underappreciated and say those are the ones that we need to continue expanding. But he certainly wants to say that o-minimality very directly is a part of the heritage of Tarski’s work. He wants to say “Don’t look at completeness. Look at the very simple classification of the definable objects that let him proved that completeness or decidability”.
Corfield: So he can from his perspective tell a very good story of how we get from Tarski to where he wants to take us now.
Corfield: I just wonder what he thinks about someone who doesn’t quite buy into his story.
McLarty: Much of that story is fairly straightforward factual history. Indeed these are things that they were successively proved. Then there is the value component. And you talked about that. You said it is not just a matter of stories because you get into value judgements. And then he wants to say that what is underappreciated is that this is the value of that old Tarski result. Everyone agrees that this did happen and everyone agrees that the result is valuable but they don’t see that this is why.
Corfield: Right, but I am intrigued in that “they don’t see”.
McLarty: Or don’t sufficiently understand.
Corfield: Can we see this in a tradition-based light? I mean you’re not going to adopt the encyclopaedic view and say “You irrational people over there for not seeing what I can see”. But you might say “I think you can be brought to see what I can see”, but not instantly. I could start explaining some of the frustrations you’re actually feeling over there.
McLarty: Yes, and one of the kinds of opposition that I think he runs into is not people saying, “oh you’re wrong about my frustrations, I wouldn’t like to prove the standard conjectures”, it’s “I am not sure you will prove the standard conjectures”. No doubt a lot of my frustrations would be relieved if that worked. I am just not sure that that’s going to work.
Corfield: This is a nice case study.
McLarty: But this is what I would like to see, more of really applying these MacIntyrean ideas very specifically to issues. It’s a problem I’ve often had with Maddy, I read some of her earlier work as saying that philosophy of mathematics shouldn’t be interested how concepts change in mathematics. But then philosophy of mathematics can’t address Saunders Mac Lane because most of his career was about concept change. Well, Maddy did not agree with my evaluation. But certainly there is a problem there with Maddy, at least to me and to you, of where does she get the idea that set theorists want this. Where does the ‘this’ come from? One way to address that would be to understand set theorists as a tradition and say “If we’re not sure how she explains how they got to their goals, let’s see if we can.” And draw on a lot of her comments and say “Right, her arguments of how they got there make sense to me, because if I look if I look at this as a community in MacIntyre’s sense, that is what I would expect.”
Corfield: And we ought to try to observe whether she is experiencing frustration herself in her role as methodologist.
McLarty: I like that way of putting it, because my take is that she really could have relieved some of her frustrations by looking more broadly, instead of looking at set theorists as a community. That’s not to say she thinks that set theory is all that matters in mathematics. But don’t just look at set theorists as a specific community, look more broadly. Of course, they are a community in a transparent sense, they have meetings.
Corfield: She’d be a very useful person to consider. Because who else after all is there who works in this way? What else has she worked on? The articulation of goals in nineteenth century geometry.
McLarty: Yes, she is interested in comparing V = L to the parallel posture, or maybe to some denial of it. People say that since Cohen we know that V = L is independent. When we found out the parallel posture was independent we said, “Well, there are three geometries”. You’ve got the parallel posture, you’ve got denial of non-intersecting lines and you’ve got lots of non-intersecting lines. Now, we’ve got two set theories. One with V = L and one without. She wants to say “No. When you understand the goals of the two communities, you see that the goals of the geometers were well met by saying that there are three axiomatic geometries, whereas the goals of set theorists will not be met that way.”
Corfield: So we could wonder where she has got the goals of geometers.
McLarty: Although she doesn’t use this terminology of tradition, we can understand her account that way, even if we don’t like what we understand. One of the criticisms I would make there is that she is looking at a very sweeping picture of geometry and a very detailed picture of set theory.
I think this gets to a kind of thinking you were talking about that MacIntyre wants to give inquiry a historical but not a relativist idea of the goals. Well, Maddy is clearly interested in historical accounts of the goals because she writes historical accounts, and Maddy is explicitly not interested in relativist ideas of these goals.
Angus MacIntyre is a nice allied case, because Angus is close to the set theorists, but he has explicitly said that the set theoretic phase of model theory should be giving away faster than it is to a more geometrical phase. It’s is not about foundations. It is not about whether or not to use Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory.
Corfield: It’s hard to think of any other philosopher of mathematics than Maddy who would be useful to test MacIntyre’s theory.
McLarty: Well, the structuralists like to say they are talking about trends in recent mathematics. Mathematicians today have these structural methods. Not perhaps the ones expounded here.
Corfield: There is one limitation in this point of view. They say that mathematicians treat entities up to isomorphism, but there are times when they don’t do that.
McLarty: You can say it is all up to isomorphism depending on which category the isomorphism is in. Nobody looks at the complex numbers up to field automorphism, but you often look at the complex numbers up to real algebra automorphism. You take the real line as fixed and you look at conjugation as the only automorphism they have as a real algebra. And periodically you look at them as an oriented field, and do distinguish i from –i. When you’re doing complex analysis you distinguish holomorphic from antiholomprphic maps. You do not allow conjugation as an automorphism.
Corfield: So it would be quite easy for us to show a partiality of the point of view of these structuralists. They are fairly explicit when they talk about the need to capture mathematical practice.
McLarty: Yes but when they say “up to isomorphism”, they forgot to say which isomorphism. By isomorphism do you mean a holomorphic isomorphism, do you mean a real algebra isomorphism, do you mean a field isomorphism? Different parts of mathematics in fact look at these different forms of isomophism.
Corfield: Then there’s the further thought that at times you shouldn’t treat something up to isimorphism at all, such as when you treat a category up to equivalence. So it wouldn’t be very hard to show their partiality, but then how can this map onto the frustrations that they themselves are feeling?
McLarty: Well the question is why do we want a structural account? There’s no hope of judging our structural account unless we know why we want it. If we want a structural account because Benacerraf asks for one, then we just have to read Benacerraf’s paper to understand how good a given candidate for it is. But if we want a structural account because, as Resnik often says, this is how mathematicians do mathematics, then you have another standard for judging it. Let’s go and see. And here those mathematicians that do this, this is a tradition. And maybe that way of looking at it will help us connect a given candidate theory to the mathematicians.
Corfield: Do they perceive a problem in what they are doing?
McLarty: Well they certainly perceive research problems in structuralism.
Corfield: Can we get at the problems they perceive themselves to have and explain those problems?
McLarty: Resnik does want an account that matches fairly closely to how mathematicians do things.
Corfield: But if he carries on being oblivious to the fact that he is not matching what mathematicians do?
McLarty: Well, I wouldn’t say he’s oblivious. The question is how much accuracy is feasible and worth striving for. And here is one place where the craft tradition may help. We are not asking for a philosophical theory that reproduces what mathematicians do, because we can go to the library and find what mathematicians did. We are asking for one that is adequate to it in some way. So what we are asking is not what Lang wrote in his algebra, but what is traditional in that. What is important to the community in that. Not just the specifics. Can we match what is important to the community in that? And here I am trying to use MacIntyre to explicate how we should be evaluating these theories.
Corfield: Right. From our perspective it’s clear that the structuralist account is not adequate. I was just wondering how much they belong to their own tradition. Can we think about how they perceive themselves?
McLarty: Structuralism is a pretty small to count as a tradition.
Corfield: Shapiro, Resnik, Hellman. And they have rather different accounts, haven’t they?
McLarty: Yes, but they don’t want to consider themselves as an isolated tradition. They want to be part of some larger philosophic tradition
Corfield: Which certainly appeals back to Benacerraf. But even larger than that do you think?
McLarty: Benacerraf certainly saw himself as a part of a larger tradition. He was part of analytic philosophy. Now I don’t think that a lot of people today identify with analytic philosophy as a movement, although a lot are clearly descended from analytic philosophy, and have a lot of the same goals, and respects and disrespects.
And maybe this concept of tradition will help us, because it is a constant problem I run into, for example with that MacLane article – The Last Mathematician out of Hilbert’s Göttingen: Saunders Mac Lane as as a philosopher of mathematics – the referees come back and say “Now, this apparently talks about structuralist theories of mathematics. But it is not clear what goals this article has for structuralist theories of mathematics”. So you need to be clear about what structuralists are trying to do.
I contrast Mac Lane to structuralist philosophers of mathematics today. And the referee asks what are the goals of this structuralism. And one way to articulate these goals is to say everyone wants somehow to be referring to mathematical practice. What is mathematical practice? We could try to articulate it in MacIntyre’s way and say “Ok, here’s how to approach these goals”. Because the goal clearly can’t be to reproduce the statements of what mathematicians say. But it should somehow capture something about the statements they make, it should not have to do with the statements they make.
Corfield: Absolutely. Maybe even our concept of a philosophy of mathematics is a bit strange in a way. I’m intrigued to know when the term was first used. It is a strange idea that that is all you do. Presumably to the extent that the notion of tradition plays itself out in different fields, it will realise itself in different ways in different fields, but we may still learn something by the way it is applied to mathematics that will actually change the way we think about tradition. And this may be useful and helpful when we take it to other fields.
McLarty: I believe the mission statement for the philosophy department at Case Western Reserve in 1970 included the idea that philosophy should be philosophy of various sciences. Philosophers should be in contact with those things. Which from another perspective tends to look narrow and technocist. But the explicit intention of that time was to be involved. And yet it risks, as you said, becoming narrow.
Corfield: It seems that the philosophy of physics has gone that way, where the philosophers are more the physicist than the physicists. When there are surely things they can be learning as philosophers about physics which they should bring back to the mother ship of philosophy. I was stuck by one philosopher of physics who was telling me that he was talking to a metaphysician, and was shocked that this metaphysician had been talking about notions of space, “Of course all notions of space have a notion of distance attached to them”. Why isn’t part of what they should be doing to bring conceptions that they learn as philosophers of physics and challenge metaphysicians. Metaphysicians play this pseudo-scientific game, talking about space-time slices to wonder whether Tibbles the cat is completely there at any moment, or just a slice of him. It is not a serious engagement with what physics could provide to metaphysics.
McLarty: And this is how Howard Stein has argued in a lot of papers that we ought to understand that scientists of our time are the metaphysicians. The leading metaphysician of Newton’s time was Newton. And don’t worry that some other metaphysician didn’t agree with him. You might study them, but you must understand that the leading metaphysician of this time was Newton.
Corfield: This is Collingwood’s perspective. Metaphysics as the study of changes in the fundamental presuppositions of fields.
McLarty: Because if philosophy is ‘philosophy of …’ that doesn’t mean that a particular person is a ‘philosopher of …’. I would be interesting to see a history of ‘philosophy of …’
Corfield: But it really has become like that. You are labelled as being a philosopher of mathematics, as though that’s all you are. So it’s surprising to some people when I talk about MacIntyre and Bernard Williams. Things have become so horribly segregated.
McLarty: In France you can be epistemologue, which is like our philosopher of science. But the term is used precisely to indicate that this isn’t a specialized philosophy of science. This is epistemology.
Corfield: Yes, when you look at the Wikipedia articles on epistemology and epistemologie, they are completely different! It’s wonderful.
McLarty: So if MacIntyre becomes a way of healing this.
Corfield: These meetings with titles – Towards a new philosophy of mathematics – I don’t get any sense that they imagine their study of mathematics could transform philosophy. And yet if you look back through the history of philosophy, changes in the conceptions of mathematics have made such profound changes to the course of philosophy. It seems as though people can’t imagine that this can happen again.
Had we better get back to narrative?
McLarty: Well, what is the relation of community to narrative? If it turns out it’s a close relation then we had been talking about narrative.
Corfield: If the way the community constitutes itself is via a form of narrative, storytelling constitutes the community then clearly there’s a relation. And the retelling of stories. It’s not just a single telling of the story, it is also the way the telling of the story changes.
McLarty: So how far can you understand community that way? It needn’t be that the community constitutes itself by telling stories. It could be that we can understand community in the term that we understand narrative. Not so much that they were telling stories but that we would understand their constitution in the terms we understand narrative.
Corfield: Part of the story that we will tell of that community will involve the stories that they tell. There is always that dimension, isn’t there? It is the story of changing stories in some sense. One question for me is how historians delineate pieces of mathematics. How do you isolate a stretch of time as a whole contiguous entity? What is a suitable piece of mathematics to write a history about?
McLarty: Alexander was right on that point today. I mean he claims to find pieces, these images of mathematics. But he doesn’t see those as constituting communities of mathematicians particularly.
Corfield: No, they are just resources, aren’t they? Externally provided resources in order for you to conceive yourself.
McLarty: Yes, or for other people to conceive you. He certainly wants to say that the mathematics produced by these loners, these misunderstood geniuses, is a different mathematics than what was produced by the explorers.
Corfield: Is there a causal relationship going over there? This understanding causes a new type of mathematics?
McLarty: I don’t know which direction the cause goes but they certainly cohere, these disaffected loners produce a pure mathematics uncontaminated by the world. And mathematics that’s not drawn for physics. Maybe it can answer some questions but it’s not drawn from it.
Corfield: And there is some kind of correlation going on but it is not clear whether there’s a causal direction of influence between the image and the mathematics. But, typically, what are the topics historians of mathematics focus on, to the extent that they moved away from large scale history. There was a shift towards institutions, wasn’t there? For example, to look at Göttingen at a certain time, or to look at Bourbaki.
McLarty: I would guess that professional historians of mathematics would tend to aim for the biographical. Certainly there’s been a lot of good biography.
Corfield: So you can focus on an individual, you can focus on a community of some sort. Leo Corry has recently been working on algebra from 1890 to 1930 by looking at the Jahrbuch, and seeing the way the classification of branches has changed. And the Structures book.
McLarty: Which stretches back to Dedekind and Weber. He’s right there’s an appalling or interesting ambiguity here. We hear about structure, but it turns out that structure has meant a whole lot of different things to different people. A structure to Birkhoff is a lattice. The structure of a group is its lattice of subgroups.
Corfield: We are talking about the notion of community and how they identify themselves. Has that already gone beyond the level of community to take us from Dedekind to Bourbaki? Although Bourbaki must conceive of themselves in some sense as being the inheritors of what was done by people like Dedekind.
McLarty: Well famously as failed inheritors to what was done by the French. It’s constitutive of Bourbaki’s identity that French mathematics was destroyed by a failure to protect the promising scientists in World War I. They did not inherit the kind of tradition that they should have inherited. So they have to start from scratch. They go to Germany to learn, and then they are going to write the Elements to reconstitute French mathematics. Their initial goal was a text book that would change French mathematics instruction, but very quickly by the time it became the Elements of mathematics it was to change the world conception.
Corfield: Amir asked me about conceiving of all of mathematics at any time as part of a tradition. It’s not an easy thing to do to carve up a large range of activity and say this tradition is going on here and that tradition there. It is far more nebulous than that, isn’t it?
McLarty: But the question is are these valuable terms to do it in, and how close is it to the understanding of narrative. And I think yes these are valuable terms and it seems likely enough that you are going to understand a tradition this way. It’s not that you want to say that they used a narrative. The structure of a tradition is the structure of a narrative. It has characters for a start. A tradition certainly has characters. And they have roles in it.
Corfield: And they make pronouncements which are part of the narrative that we tell now about them as tradition.
McLarty: So in a way maybe we can take this as a definition of a tradition. A tradition is not just anything that you can write a chronicle of. You can write a chronicle of anything. A tradition is something that you can write a narrative of.
Corfield: But then when Leo writes his narrative that is contained in the book that you mentioned before, there’s a narrative going from Dedekind up to Bourbaki? And yet we don’t want to call it one tradition.
McLarty: Well we don’t have to. We are not committed to saying his book is one narrative.
Corfield: That would be the way out, to suggest it’s a sequence of narratives. Although, one can see a continuity between them.
McLarty: Yes, you might want to say on a larger scale yes, but not on a smaller scale. One candidate for what makes a narrative: one narrative has one beginning, one middle and one end. Whereas his account of conceptions of structures has a bunch of beginnings each of which has a middle, and most of which have an end. Some peter out without quite ending, and one hasn’t ended yet.
Corfield: I am not sure MacIntyre gives much of an account of what he takes a narrative to be. What other recourses we can appeal to there? There are the resources of the narratologists.
McLarty: How does MacIntyre decides what is a tradition?
Corfield: That is a good question. You only see him do it from moral philosophy. They are the only histories he ever gives you. And he can certainly say there are many Aristotelianisms.
McLarty: But from what I know from his work it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to say the reason he says there are many Aristotelianisms is because he can give an account of each one. A narrative of each one. And this fits into a larger narrative of Aristotelianism. But he doesn’t say by what criteria he individuated tradition. And we might want to use narratological criteria.
Corfield: As far as I am aware there are no technical resources to pick out a tradition. So, a beginning, a middle and an end?
McLarty: It’s what little I know of narratology. And I learned it from Aristotle in The Poetics. I believe it’s a tragedy that has a beginning, a middle and an end. Aristotle’s work on comedy is famously missing.
Corfield: Oh, so they ought to have been resources MacIntyre could have been using then. So it would be interesting to think about the history of theories of narrative. Traditions in the theories of narrative.
McLarty: I was wondering who are the characters. If we are going to talk about Bourbaki’s conception of structure, certainly some people are characters in that and some are not. Riemann is not really a character in Bourbaki’s conception of structure. He is a figure of conception of structure for a lot of people.
Corfield: As some sort of ancestor or origin figure?
McLarty: The example people go most to is his approach to complex analysis. And he wants to say, well to put it very coarsely, we are not going to do complex analysis by looking at series and functions. We are going to do it by looking at these surfaces and relations between surfaces.
Corfield: So a tradition has a beginning, a middle and an end, but often the beginning refers back to some ancestor. But one needn’t count that figure as the beginning of the tradition. It’s just some figure in the past.
McLarty: But every historical narrative can be put in some larger historical narrative. But we can tell the story of Bourbaki that is a story of Bourbaki. And that story doesn’t include Riemann.
Corfield: Although it’ll include their accounts of Riemann.
McLarty: Well, not prominently because they don’t give prominant accounts of Riemann. Whereas for a larger conception of structure, a lot of historians are now interested in saying modern mathematics descends from Riemann. In this ‘modern’ is a lot like ‘structural’. And Corry’s narrative of Bourbaki doesn’t really end. He gets this from Pierre Cartier and I’m very sympathetic to it.
It runs up against the failure of their structure theory and the fact that there was a better alternative right there that they didn’t take. Or better in some ways.
Corfield: Why doesn’t that mark an end?
McLarty: Oh, it peters out instead of ending. There is no outcome. There’s only dissatisfaction.
Corfield: Does the end have to be a more decisive kind of outcome? Cartier talks about the perception that there is no need for Bourbaki at the moment.
McLarty: Cartier wants to say Bourbaki died in the fifties. The continued existence of the Bourbaki seminar is a lovely thing, don’t fail to go to it when you are in Paris. But it is not Bourbaki.
Corfield: How do we construe that in terms of community? There is his story then of Bourbaki as a community, and it’s a plausible story. But there are more contemporary people who would want to perceive themselves as Bourbaki.
McLarty: Well if a narrative recounts an approach to a goal, then I think this is a good way to understand Cartier and Bourbaki. The goal, which they stopped pursuing in the fifties, was to present one wholly unified account of mathematics founded on their structure theory. Their structure theory failed and they couldn’t use it.
Corfield: You can have a continuity where there is a slight change in goals. This is a radical giving up of a goal.
McLarty: This is not slight!
Corfield: So shouldn’t we agree with Cartier?
McLarty: I like to look at their book on homological algebra which took something like twenty five years to write because the original conception in 1956 was already out of date. So it took them 25 years to finish because it was not a Bourbaki project. Their book on integration led the field. Their book of homological algebra was out of date when they conceived it, and worse by the time it appeared.
Corfield: There has been a theme through the conference about whether you can call mathematical concepts characters, an idea I find a bit dodgy myself. I am much happier thinking of people as characters. People with goals and responsibilities. That would fit a lot more neatly with a MacIntyrean account.
Corfield: So we agree that we can happily reject notions or visions or concepts or whatever as being characters?
McLarty: Yes. I have been leaning on goals here, but as you said the methods changed and they stopped having the Bourbaki congresses of the kind they had. They stopped shouting at each other. Cartier points out they stopped having Jean Dieudonné write all the final drafts. On a lot of levels, they just stopped being Bourbaki. He talks about the unity of consciousness there. Up until Dieudonné retired, you could turn to him and ask “What was our result on such and such?” . He would go to the shelf, pull off the book and go the exact page and show you. Once he retired nobody could do that.
Corfield: So Bourbaki presents a rather neat case, doesn’t it? So do we find other similar communities or things are a bit more nebulous elsewhere. There’s nothing quite like Bourbaki for having a strict sense of what it wants to achieve and an idea of how to go about doing things. Are we going to find that elsewhere?
McLarty: The Noether School. The founding of modern algebra.
Corfield: I can imagine us finding a lot of good examples, but does every mathematician have to belong to a tradition or community? Is there not something good about being self-consciously organised as a community and a tradition Is it not better, healthier, more rational to organize yourself in that way as some kind of school? Are conceptions of encyclopaedic rationality infecting, if you like, certain people, certain mathematicians so they are acting in a rather individualistic way? And something is lost by their not belonging to some form of fairly delineated community. In the Bourbaki case. Who benefited most? The members. Imagine having all these incredible mathematicians around to talk to in an intense way. What a wonderful thing. Or the Göttingen School. MacIntyre’s point is that that kind of social organisation is a good thing to try to achieve. One can say that bits of mathematical activity don’t really take place in this kind of framework.
McLarty: Did Grothendieck’s seminar have esprit de corps or did they have cultishness? Doesn’t this description depend on whether you approve of it or not.
You know an interesting case – Erdös. Erdös does want to claim that he is in a Hungarian tradition. But Erdös is a visibly isolated individual.
Corfield: But why is Erdös the one chosen to have the number with? It proves the point that he is isolated in a way. You use him as the reference point to see how far away are you from him. He is the metric of how far away you are from someone else.
McLarty: He does stand out as going against the trend. He does particular problems. He does problems.
Corfield: You know Tim Gower’s article on the Two Cultures of Mathematics? He puts together on one side algebraic geometry, algebraic number theory, Langlands, Grothendieck, etc. And on the other side, combinatorial, graph theoretic, Ramsey theory kind of work. There is almost as apology going on within it. To people outside it seem as though the problems are trivial. There is a justification for what they are doing in that behind these apparently trivial problems, there is something unified. It is not a body of theory, and he calls the Grothendiecks and Langlands theory builders. But his side is deriving a body of technique. He knows that to make any advances in Ramsey theory, that some extraordinary idea will be necessary. It won’t be expressible in that big theoretic way within a grand framework. It won’t justify itself through its realization in that particular problem. It will then be useful in some quite subtle way in an apparently quite distant field, possibly. Something like arithmetic progressions amongst the primes.
McLarty: And when I looked at it I liked that he says that he’s talking about different kinds of mathematicians, not different periods of mathematics or something. What I don’t like is people who want to say mathematics used to be problem oriented then it got theory oriented. Because nobody can identify which period was which. Is the Langlands program a pursuit of a problem, functoriality, or of a theory?
Corfield: But this work is quite divorced. He’s not using any like category theory, for example. But there is a body of understanding that is applicable in a range of situations. We had a discussion about it on our blog. We were speculating as to what it would be like to do something that would be relevant to both ways of reasoning and we really couldn’t make much of a bridge. If you were to draw a graph theoretic network, representing the mathematical activity of the present, you find some parts almost cut off from others. It is not hard to go all the way from Alan Connes to the Riemann hypothesis to Langlands. With various steps and hopping about, you can cover a huge area.
McLarty: If you took one of the most famous tiny equations that we wanted to understand better, the Fermat equation, and ask, how did we answer that question you would find yourself in the Langlands program. That is not a bunch of hopping about.
Corfield: Yes, I don’t think that you can get from Fermat’s Last Theorem to what Gowers is doing. They are disconnected. Maybe that is too extreme. But with the lines of communications as such, if there are any, they are quite thin.
McLarty: If you want to solve problems in combinatorics, say the numbers of solutions to polynomials in the two element field, but that is also looking at algebraic extensions. Let’s solve the Weil conjectures. You’re on the doorstep of the creation of the Topos theory. On the doorstep of. You are engaged in the creation of derived functor cohomology.
Corfield: Can you get from that to what Gowers is doing?
McLarty: I don’t know Gowers’ work. Ok but how do we understand the problem orientation. Do we say that it is only a problem orientation if it doesn’t contact theory?
Corfield: Well I don’t think it was a sensible terminological distinction. I think it was a bad choice. But he could have said the two bodies of theory, they don’t make much contact with each other.
McLarty: But traditionally there is this concept of problem-oriented mathematics that should be about little identifiable problems you want to solve. Surely the Fermat’s last theorem is one. The Weil conjectures were one.
Corfield: I agree with you it’s not a sensible way to make a distinction. But we were interested in Erdös and his successors, and actually they do have a sense of tradition, of which Erdös is an important part. You can tell a story that takes us up to Gowers now and we can construe it as a tradition. And even if its original conception in as going against the tide, that’s just an initial founding act.
The MacIntyrean question, though, was whether it is better to be part of a tradition. Erdös almost constitutes himself as someone outside the tradition. And in the act he forms a tradition.
McLarty: Well he insists that there has always been a Hungarian problem oriented tradition.
Corfield: Ok, so he has already identified himself in that sense.
McLarty: Not so much von Neumann, although he also comes out of Hungary. But he can legitimately say that von Neumann does a very different kind of mathematics than the central members of the Hilbert School. And this is because he is Hungarian. I would be willing to give an account of von Neumann as a Göttingen mathematician who was not shaped in Göttingen but in Hungary.
Corfield: So there’s a blend going on? He does a whole host of amazing things, which you know get developed by a whole range of people, but von Neumann doesn’t seem to generate a school. Poincaré, we mentioned before, doesn’t create a school around himself. So this is the point I was trying to drive at, is there some failure in that? Has he failed in some sense?
McLarty: Well he hasn’t failed to locate himself in a narrative. He has this huge body of work that is really about locating himself in a narrative.
Corfield: Right, but he hasn’t developed the people that will carry on his tradition. So in some sense he has failed at some level.
McLarty: Yes, but it would have been a much more drastic failure if Solomon Lefschetz hadn’t in fact continued him without ever actually meeting the man.
Corfield: But that was by luck rather than by design.
McLarty: Well he designed the merits of his ideas.
Corfield: Ok, but he didn’t do all he could have done to assure the survival of his outlook.
McLarty: No, he seems to have done nothing to help students. We can say that that is a weakness in Poincaré. When you look at Poincaré and Hilbert you might ask which is the greater mathematician. Hard to know. Which had the greater impact on their profession? No comparison. Because Hilbert could work with people and he did.
Corfield: So that’s something you could bring to contemporary mathematicians. Go organize yourself in schools. It is an interesting insight that one could bring as a philosopher to the subject. In Göttingen, the survey writing of Hilbert and Klein was intended self-consciously for school building. Whereas the genealogists might worry about schools because they are going to be instruments of power…
McLarty: That famous Göttingen nostrification, where they would take credit for what other people had proved because they had restated them.
Corfield: So, more generally, to what extent can we use this notion of the importance of the virtues for the health of some mathematical community. Perhaps Poincaré has lacked some virtue in a sense.
McLarty: Poincaré was aware of this, at least according to Hermite. He knew the work he sent out was far from done. But he thought other people would be better at finishing and he would be better at having more new ideas.
Corfield: Which brings us to the case of Thurston, and his realisation, according to his story anyway, that this was not the way to proceed and all he would end up doing would be to leave a dead area behind him. There comes a point where he has to stop, go back and pick up people to bring along behind him. There is something Aristotelian or MacIntyrean about his reply to Jaffe and Quinn –“we must give credit to other types of mathematical activity”. And Rota makes a similar point that not enough credit is given for good exposition, and Hilbert’s Zahlbericht, his number theory, is something that he is very much remembered for. It shows you the importance of that kind of activity.
McLarty: But of course in the Zahlbericht he comes up with substantial theorems as well.
Corfield: And what do we mean by exposition? Can we wonder about the percentage of how much is reformulation of what has been done and how much of it is new material?
McLarty: And if we want to pursue that then we could use ideas of narratology because Hilbert’s position is clear that: “I was told to explain current results in number theory. And I did that. But the explanation of those results was a group of substantially new theorems. I didn’t just go further. What I did further was to explain.”
So now if we want to ask: Is this a fair judgment? Was he really explaining or was he breaking new ground? Surely we’ll want to use tools of narratology to distinguish explanation from further idea. Is he telling the story of those results or is he giving new results?
Corfield: But how are the tools of narrarotology going to help us with that distinction? How can one decide?
McLarty: One narratological attempt I’ll offer here: Is he assigning those theorems roles in one story or is he proving new theorems? Well surely he is proving new theorems, but is the force of that to assign these roles or is it just new stuff? And I think he did say, “Yes, I am showing you the roles these things actually have in a better understanding than anybody did have. People didn’t see these roles, but these were the roles they had. And I have made that explicit.”
Corfield: I was talking to Barry a lot yesterday about explanation. Nobody that I have ever read has suggested that narratology has got anything to say about that. But that is an interesting thought. I mean there is a vast philosophy of science literature, isn’t there, on explanation which has absolutely nothing to do with that kind of historical story-telling.
McLarty: And there are two kinds of explanation. There is explaining particular facts. but there is also explaining a body of knowledge as a body of knowledge, and that is closer to narrative.
Corfield: Right, the classic distinction in philosophy of science is between the unification and a kind of causal mechanism, which are both forms of story-telling in a way. Like the example of Salmon’s, when you are in an aeroplane and you are taking off down the runway, and you are holding a helium balloon, which way is it going to tilt as you accelerate? Well, it tilts forward, and there are two ways to see this. One way is to invoke general relativity: accelerating is the same as being in a gravitational field, and if you were lying on your back you would expect the balloon to go upwards. Whereas a causal explanation the other would want to talk about air molecules and pressure differentials and so on. So they are forms of story-telling.
McLarty: But Hilbert does not explain the various theories of number theory at that time in the sense of telling you why they are true. He is explaining them in the sense of putting them in a context. It is just a different sense of explanation?
Corfield: But are the philosophy of science categories useful for us? Is there some sort of unification going on there?
McLarty: Yes, there certainly is.
Corfield: But you don’t think it is the whole story.
McLarty: Yes. It is the right unification. It is an explanatory unification. Because it shows you the roles of these theorems compared to each other.
Corfield: Is that something to do with the ordering of concepts? The proper organisation of the field? And you are thinking that narratology could help us there by understanding what that would mean – The proper organisation?
McLarty: Yes, proper in a very rich sense. When the German mathematical union would assign these things to people they assigned lots of them. What they were expecting was a clear summary of which are the important results. But they weren’t expecting what Hilbert produced, which was to reconstitute the whole field. And yet it is the reconstitution of that same field, I want to argue. Well this is to say that the characters of this reconstitution are the characters that were in that field.
Corfield: What do you mean by characters?
McLarty: The things that have roles.
Corfield: Because I thought before we were hoping to restrict characters to people.
McLarty: No, you were!
Corfield: Oh, I thought you happily agreed with me when we mentioned the characters in the Bourbaki narrative we meant the people.
McLarty: I agree with you about that. But that is not the only way we could use it.
Corfield: Although there are narratologists who were not so happy with the thought of mathematical entities as being characters.
McLarty: Well I am not sure I am thrilled with it either, but I’m using it here. Well they talk about characters as data types. The characters in computer role playing game are data types in a fairly straightforward sense.
Corfield: One of the narratologists said that certain members of the data type count as characters but not the data type itself.
McLarty: But when you buy a SIMS game it comes with data types that can be made into characters if you want to say that.
Corfield: They are templates you put particular features on, set various values on the template.
McLarty: If you say a wizard is a character in Dungeons and Dragons, then well a wizard is a different data type than a warrior. Wizards come with different attributes. All wizards have different parameters for the same attributes. Warriors have different parameter values for a differnt set of attributes.
Corfield: Sure, but there are differences between the wizards. They have some differences.
McLarty: When people talk about Bollywood movies there are characters. There is the father, the mother, the young man, the young woman. The character in that sense is rather like a data type.
Corfield: Well I think Chris would have wanted to say the particular instantiation in a particular film can be a character. They wouldn’t want to say the role is a character.
McLarty: What I want to say is that the role of the father in a Bollywood movie is a lot like a data type. Laurence Olivier’s performances of Hamlet is not much like a data type.
Corfield: Ok, I think they wanted another word for this. So what do we have in the Zahlbericht. Things like ideals appear as the main players?
McLarty: No, I am thinking of theorems. He is going to organise whole kinds of result.
Corfield: As some sort of template? So that is more like wizard or father in a Bollywood movie.
McLarty: Well, like the quadratic reciprocity theorem. There are lots of reciprocity theorems. The Zahlbericht made them instances of ‘reciprocity theorem’.
Corfield: So, more like Barry’s template. But the question was does narratology help us? Probably we can avoid its terms. We could say Hilbert is template forming. There are things that appear to be different, and he’s putting them under the same rubric. They’re instantiations of the same template.
McLarty: I’m happier saying that narratology is going to explain what we mean by tradition.
Corfield: Well there is a lot of work for us to do there!
McLarty: Which is good. How else would it constitute a tradition? What do you have to say about heritage versus history.
Corfield: So Grattan-Guinness’s distinction. The historian really is doing something very different. They’re not at any moment going to gaze into the future to see how something will be understood.
McLarty: Which is exactly the opposite of what Barry said. He said that when historians of mathematics write about mathematics they have a position, they have a stake.
Corfield: That’s not the way historians view themselves.
McLarty: No. Their pretence is that they have no position.
Corfield: Did you mean ‘pretence’ as not true or just as claim?
McLarty: I meant it in the French way. Maybe with some suggestion of the other, as it has in French. We say in English the Pretender to the throne. Very few Pretenders to the throne are just about to be crowned when they’re called that. There’s a hint that there’s some gap between you and the throne. It doesn’t mean you are not legitimately the heir.
Corfield: What worries me is that it is possible that the historians with their strict sense of history are going to deny themselves access to something about the truth of mathematics. There is a growing wariness of any thought that one needs to take into account what the mathematics of any moment will have become. That future perfect tense. How can we do justice to a particular mathematician, say Poincaré, thinking at a particular moment without taking into account what his thinking will have become later on? Can one really have grasped his thought without taking into account what it will become in time. And I think you are going to miss something of the truth of what he was thinking unless you do.
McLarty: In my experience, there’s even just a practical point. Poincaré in his Analysis Situs proves things about the homology of surfaces which I could not have learned from him if I had not read later accounts of the homology of surfaces. No one did learn it from Poincaré until decades of folks had hammered on it.
Corfield: Right, if you ever want to talk about some of the people you see as the most brilliant mathematicians, how unlikely is it going to be that you can do this just using current public language, without even his private language in which he’s talking to himself in some sense? Why should the resources of that period’s public language be enough to allow you to understand what’s going on?
McLarty: Nobody else at the time was capable of thinking like Euler, why should I be able to?
Corfield: So how do historians cope with this problem? Are they really relying on later understanding? Or do they avoid working on what the leading matheamticians were thinking?
McLarty: They tend to say they’re using the concepts of the time. As if anybody but Euler had the prerequisites. Grattan-Guinness works by staying pretty close to the text.
Corfield: Does he miss something then in his histories? Does he capture the ‘truth’ of mathematical thought?
McLarty: I wouldn’t try and read that history without reading a modern account. Or else I would be missing something. I would not try to understand Euler on what we now call calculus of variations without brushing up on my calculus of variations.
Corfield: Are they denying themselves access to something of the truth of mathematics? That’s the question.
McLarty: I think so.
Corfield: So we should be worried about his distinction. There could be collaborations between mathematicians and historians, rather than a ‘two state solution’ where one is doing heritage and the other history. There are two forms of anachronism. Mathematicians’ accounts can feel pretty anachronistic. Arnold reading back topology in Newton?
McLarty: I found some of that quite persuasive.
Corfield: Ok, but there are some examples of mathematicians’ anachronism where things have gone too far, and historians are right to criticise. But is there a kind of anachronism the other way, where by denying yourself the use of things that emerged into the public language later than a certain date, you misunderstand a mathematician?
McLarty: It’s like trying to read Plato as a typical man of his times. As Stanley Rosen says we don’t do this. Why would it be Plato we read?
Corfield: But does that then explain why the historians wanted to move away from the individual ‘genius’? That is not their role to tell us the history of the thinking of the genius. And instead look to much broader considerations. The social context of what is going on in say French politics.
McLarty: Well, there have been different phases. There is obviously a lovely account, I am persuaded by it, that an important event in the whole history of French mathematics is when Napoleon sets up the Ecole Polytechnic, or a version of it. And puts people in there and sets them work on their own stuff. That the conception of the Ecole Polytechnic produced for example Lagrange’s work on the foundations of calculus. So I think there is a social explanation to be given there. But we also have to look at this in terms of periods because right now biography is the main mode of the history of mathematics. Although there is a question of whether these are historians’ histories. These are histories published by Birkhäuser, often written by mathematicians.
Corfield: What or you actually doing in your paper when you sort out a more adequate history of Gordon? What are you doing by that?
McLarty: I am trying to share his values, and Hilbert’s to a lesser extent.
Corfield: But have you become a historian?
McLarty: People say this.
Corfield: Is it that you as a philosopher are drawn to do this kind of history? As philosophical work?
McLarty: Yes. If I want to know the nature of mathematics, I want to know the nature of existing mathematics.
Corfield: So is writing the proper history of mathematics necessarily a philosophical venture?
McLarty: Absolutely. To put it in narrative terms: you cannot have a narrative continuity of a direction towards a goal, without having a conception of the goal. Conceiving goals is philosophy, as for example Saunders MacLane would have it. Saunders has no interest in mathematics versus philosophy. Mathematics is a love of wisdom for Saunders. And the largest questions about the direction of mathematics, do set yourself the task of trying to tell what they are.
Corfield: How many people think like that? It seems a quite rare way of thinking.
McLarty: I think Jeremy Gray believes that one source of important history is philosophy. That it directs you to certain problems. Goal setting.
Corfield: He certainly sees some mathematicians as philosophers. Do you consider him a philosopher?
McLarty: I consider his work important to the philosophy of mathematics. When people say I’m a historian. Well my pay cheque comes from a philosophy department.
Corfield: I don’t know if you have noticed that history and philosophy of science departments are splitting. We’ve left behind the days when each thought the other necessary for their work. But the divide has always been clearer in mathematics.
McLarty: Why is it so much harder in mathematics than in other sciences? Is it right to call them other sciences? Instead of the sciences.
Corfield: Is it not linked to the founding act of analytical philosophy?
McLarty: That’s a compelling way to look at it. Precisely, our conception of history of mathematics is linked to a philosophy of mathematics. And it’s a hostile linkage between the philosophers of math and the historians of mathematics. But the reason historians of math don’t look like historians of physics and chemistry is because of a one-time philosophy of mathematics.
David Rowe. He tries to do history of math that will look like history of physics. And he does some nice stuff. And Leo Corry. But an awful lot of the people who show up at the history of math meetings are responding to a one time philosophy of mathematics.
Corfield: My supervisor Donald Gillies was in Harvard for a year and he found affinities with the historians of science. He met up with people like Peter Galison and Anne Harrington and he’d say “Those are fascinating histories you’re writing, what can we gain philosophically from what you are doing”. And they would deny that it did have a philosophical importance. From Donald’s perspective that couldn’t be true.
In Galison’s Image and Logic, from my point of view there is a clear expression of a philosophical viewpoint on science. It is a vision that goes against Kuhn, and his carving up of science into periods interrupted by revolutions. There is an interweaving of threads of different subcommunities of science, which by breaking at different times makes science stronger. To my mind this is a philosophical kind of thought.
McLarty: Any philosopher of science who thinks that How Experiments End isn’t philosophy of science, it is because they are not even interested in refuting SSK (the sociology of scientific knowledge). They think SSK is so obviously not what they do that they are not even interested in arguments against it. I wouldn’t be interested in a philosophy of science that couldn’t include what Galison does. But I don’t engage much with philosophers of science. I engage with mathematicians and historians of mathematics. And I engage with philosophers of mathematics.
Corfield: There’s still a huge job of work to be done pulling it all together. | <urn:uuid:c4698e6f-c189-4a12-88a1-b4a1dccc3b79> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thalesandfriends.org/2007/07/22/mclarty-corfield/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970472 | 23,489 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Fire investigators close Holmes Beach case
|Not child's play|
Novelty lighters encourage children to play with fire, according to West Manatee Fire Rescue Deputy Fire Marshal Kurt Lathrop. The toys are the focus of National Arson Awareness Week, which takes place through May 10. Islander Photo: Courtesy Oregon State Fire Marshal Office
|Photo by Arthur Valadie|
A hired investigator has concluded his review of the fire that destroyed a home on 58th Street in Holmes Beach April 17.
“It was an accident,” said Dave Kessinger of HSA Engineers and Science. His firm was hired by the insurance company to review the fire at the home of Kent and Pa Davis.
“We deal with claims throughout the state,” he said. “Our job was to go in and do an origin-of-cause investigation.”
The fire was reported at 2:19 a.m. April 17. Pa and Kent Davis escaped without injury to stand in their cul-de-sac as the blaze destroyed their bayfront home and their possessions, including a rare and antique book collection.
Kessinger’s investigation concluded with the same results as the investigation conducted by Kurt Lathrop, the deputy fire marshal with the West Manatee Fire Rescue District.
Lathrop determined in the hours after the fire that a rag soaked with linseed oil and used to treat furniture the night before was placed in a trash can, where it generated enough heat to start a fire. He estimated the damage at hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“It did involve the linseed oil,” Kessinger said. “What happened is spontaneous combustion. It generated its own heat.”
With combustible materials such as linseed oil, reactions can generate heat more rapidly than it can be dissipated, with a resulting temperature increase in the material. In order for spontaneous ignition to occur, there must be a source of oxygen — enough for the heat-generating reaction to take place but not enough draft so that the heat is quickly carried away.
Kessinger said during the course of his investigation he was able to identify in the debris the plastic trash can that had contained the rag.
“The bottoms don’t burn up,” he said. “Amazing. I found it adjacent to a piece of rug.”
Kessinger is a retired firefighter from St. Petersburg’s department and spent about five to six hours at the Davis home.
“When we go to the scene, we do the whole entire structure that’s involved,” Kessinger said. “We consider everything. And then we determine the cause.”
Kessinger said he conducts an objective investigation: “When I go in to do a fire, I don’t want to see the fire department report. I don’t even want to talk to the people in the house. I want to investigate the fire.”
He concluded that the fire “took a long time to ignite,” but once it “got to ignition temperature, the fire took off. The heat radiated. This was a very fast fire.”
Kessinger praised the Davises for having installed smoke detectors in the home and stressed that if residents do two things to protect themselves from fire, they should install detectors and keep the batteries charged.
“Smoke detectors won’t do nothing but save lives,” Kessinger said. “Once this fire took off, it went. You can imagine, these people get up in their bedclothes in just enough time to get out with their lives.”
“I’ve had to investigate 75 [fire deaths],” Kessinger continued. “I had to go in and determine why these people died and I cannot put enough emphasis on putting in operating smoke detectors.” | <urn:uuid:487755a5-ff51-44fa-afe2-c9f247c7057d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.islander.org/7-5-08/hb_fire.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970352 | 828 | 1.585938 | 2 |
The IPPR has accused the Government of 'gaming' UK immigration figures to make a costly drop in international student numbers appear a politicial success.
15 May 2012
Think-tank accuses Government of 'gaming' UK immigration figures
A report by the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) think-tank has claimed that the Government is 'gaming' UK immigration figures by including student numbers to make it appear as though immigration rates are falling.
The coalition Government has repeatedly stated their intention to cut net UK immigration figures from current rates of approximately 240,000 to the 'tens of thousands' by the next election.
As part of these efforts, UK visa regulations have been tightened, student visa rules have become much stricter, overseas workers have been reclassified as prospective migrants and the right of appeal for rejected visa applicants has been removed.
However, critics have labelled the Government's efforts as heavy handed and now the IPPR has accused the Government of including student figures which make their efforts appear to have had a more substantial effect.
The UK, along with the US, Canada and Australia, is a world leader in the international education market yet unlike its competitors is the only country to classify international students as long-term migrants as opposed to 'non-immigrant' admissions.
The IPPR claims this means that a drop in student numbers due to tighter regulations intended to cut net migration can be portrayed as a political success, when in actual fact the harsher entrance requirements are persuading international students to study elsewhere at a cost of between £4 and 6 billion a year.
'The decisive reason the why the UK government is sticking with the current method of measuring student migration flows is not a genuine concern with long-term net migration but a desire to 'game' its own net migration target by banking large apparent reductions in 2013 and 2014 which reflect the limitations of the current method of measurement rather than real change in long-term net migration trends,' reads the report.
The IPPR argues that only 15% of overseas students remain in Britain once their studies have concluded and as such, student figures should be removed from net migration figures altogether.
'The government needs to take international students out of the immigration 'numbers game', which is damaging our universities and colleges, our economy and our international standing,' concludes the report.
Immigration Minister Damian Green has responded to the report's findings by insisting that as 13% of foreign nationals granted the right to settle in the UK in 2009 had entered the country as students, a significant enough number of overseas students remain in the UK to classify them as migrants.
"Under longstanding international measures, students and others who come to the UK for more than a year are counted as migrants. I agree that not all students remain permanently but significant numbers do."
However, the IPPR, who have previously contended that the Government's efforts to tackle immigration are not working, contends that the Government is merely pursuing a headline accomplishment rather than long-term change.
"If the Government ignores these arguments and persists with the current method of measuring students for the purposes of meetings its net migration target in 2015, and therefore continues to regard a dramatic reduction in international students as an objective in its own right, it must admit that it is placing short-term political considerations above a genuine concern with long-term net migration," said IPPR Associate Director Sarah Mulley.
The UK Visa Bureau is an independent immigration consultancy specialising in helping people prepare for their UK Ancestry Visa application. | <urn:uuid:40fab145-0e1d-4946-92d7-1c05129e3c11> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.visabureau.com/uk/news/15-05-2012/think-tank-accuses-government-of-gaming-uk-immigration-figures.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967671 | 706 | 1.648438 | 2 |
Chicago Rallies For Trayvon Martin
Marchers chanted “What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now!” as they traversed the city. One of the marchers, Ed Davis, said, “It has gone on too many times, too many years now you know this has come to a head and it is time for us all to speak out not just black people but everybody.”
Despite the evidence against him, Trayvon’s shooter has not been arrested and both the lack of an arrest and what is perceived as inadequate handling of the case, has spurred nationwide protests, with demonstrators donning hoodies and forcing a national discourse on racism and the necessity of justice.
The reason Zimmerman has not been charged with murder is that it is “difficult to arrest and prosecute homicide suspects who claim self-defense” under Florida’s Sand Your Ground Law, according to ABC.
Public outrage has grown recently, and in response President Obama spoke out Friday, saying, “If I had son, he’d look like Trayvon. I think [his parents] are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness that it deserves.”
Throughout the demonstrations held in the interest of justice for Trayvon Martin, there is a sentiment of universality – the child that was shot could have been anyone’s child, and the issue therefore is not just a local one. Velma Henderson, one of the Chicagoan marchers, said:
“We thought that we had arrived when we got Dr. King and he made way for us, so we just stopped marching…Now people do stuff to us and we just say, ‘Oh, it ain't my problem, it ain't my son, it ain't my daughter.’ But it's all our kids.” | <urn:uuid:89f4bad4-6c95-47c4-a652-214b698789a1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.neontommy.com/news/2012/03/chicago-rallies-trayvon-martin | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976754 | 388 | 1.585938 | 2 |
At all levels, people will do as they are measured.
This principle underlies the purpose of a pipeline meeting.
A group under the pressure of identifying and presenting changes in the status of prospective clients will likely increase sales activity.
What is a sales pipeline?
A sales pipeline is a report that is recorded and published by the participant for review among colleagues and superiors. The real concept is that, if sales progression is written or saved for examination, there will be more sales and business development activity.
What do we measure?
Many firms struggle with determining what, exactly, they will measure with the pipeline. The pipeline report can be based on an accepted, formal business development process. Or it can be a self-designed process based on the firm’s own recognized categories for development of a prospect through the sales process.
The important factor is consistency and regularity of reporting from meeting to meeting. As the individual prospect is compared to other prospects and moves through the development process, the expectation is that the firm’s responsible individual will do what is required to make the sale.
The process starts by tracking basic information on the targeted prospect, including:
- Prospect name
- Decision maker(s)
- Contact numbers
Also recorded and presented should be a definition of the status of the effort. It may include selling stages such as:
- Qualified prospect
- Specific need identification
- Solution presentation
- Concern resolution
The pipeline meeting should include a discussion of future activity needed to move the prospect through the selling stages. Closing is a final category, but once the sale is closed, the prospect should be removed from the pipeline because they are now a client and will be tracked in another effort.
How often do we meet?
Meeting regularity is an important factor in successful pipeline meetings. Whether the meetings are held weekly, biweekly, or even monthly is less significant than that they are being conducted on a regular basis.
Participants should know they will be expected to show the advancement of their prospective clients throughout the process. Whether the pressure is from superiors, colleagues, or even “self-inflicted,” the key is to meet a regular deadline with new activity.
What do you do with the information?
Results from the pipeline meeting should be available to all those who participate in the meeting.
This can be accomplished using a formal software program, a simple spreadsheet, paper reports, or even a “scoreboard” on a wall. It may be appropriate to have the “scoreboard” available in a private office or in a location that will be seen by more employees.
While sales prospects are certainly intellectual property within the firm, the pipeline meeting should not usually be a confidential effort in the office.
This regular exercise can bring out the competitive spirit in your team while keeping them informed of the development process at the firm.
Alan Deichler is the president of CPAmerica International and oversees the association’s growth and development. Prior to being named CPAmerica president, Deichler was most recently chief marketing officer at talent management software provider HRsmart in Richardson, Texas, where he headed worldwide sales and marketing efforts. Deichler has more than 35 years of corporate experience, having held previous management and executive positions with Capital Formation Counselors, Inc., IBM and Ernst & Young, LLP. | <urn:uuid:ce547d05-13d4-4e6d-883c-053e323f556e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.cpamerica.org/2012/08/23/how-to-build-a-firmwide-pipeline-meeting/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949337 | 690 | 1.617188 | 2 |
April 1975 | Volume 26, Issue 3
Americans used to take their dinners seriously. The preposterous social arbiter Ward McAllister proclaimed in 1890 that “a dinner invitation, once accepted, is a sacred obligation. If you die before the dinner takes place, your executor must attend the dinner.” In that era there were dinners at the Waldorf that cost a hundred and twenty dollars a setting at which guests were served as many as twelve courses. Nor did this sort of gaudy consumption seem to sit ill with the fledgling social consciousness of the day; in fact, after one such bacchanal the Atlantic Monthly congratulated the participants, pointing with pride to the fact that America produced men whose eating capacities were equal to those of Homer’s heroes, men whose “stomachs were as heroic as their hearts, their bowels as magnanimous.” In this sort of atmosphere it is hardly surprising that a minor but elegant art form grew up around the formal banquet. Any such affair, especially one honoring a dignitary or a head of state, had to be accompanied with a carefully designed and scrupulously printed menu. Some of them, as the examples shown here attest, were elegant indeed. The ones on these two pages were printed by the classy firm of Dempsey & Carroll, whose less colorful productions included calling cards and stationery. The meals themselves were, of course, every bit as opulent as the menus suggest. The ebullient cover on the preceding page is from a menu for a dinner given in honor of Teddy Roosevelt in 1903. Roosevelt liked to eat big meals but preferred simpler fare to the predominantly Gallic viands favored at these banquets. President Taft, however, had no such Yankee skepticism about foreign kickshaws. He was the guest of honor at the Automobile Club banquet (above). Though he loved that kind offcast, it always represented a setback in his endless battle to keep his weight under three hundred pounds. The other menu covers are shown with the menus open below them. Our thanks to Joseph Devorkin for bringing them to our attention. | <urn:uuid:476614a7-0d37-4cd7-9ee0-d3eae40ba5f1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.americanheritage.com/print/53259 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982828 | 430 | 1.742188 | 2 |
We’ve seen an increase in companies that are returning to use direct mail as an integral part of their B-to-B lead generation campaigns. More and more, companies are realizing that email is becoming white noise and that to break through the clutter, organizations need to invest more in understanding their audience and how they reach them. In three recent campaigns with multiple clients, we’ve seen a 12 percent lift in response rates by incorporating the use of letters and other mailers to supplement our email communications
More Suggested Content:
B-to-B Marketing Mythbusting, Redux
November 5, 2012
From Ruth P. Stevens
With a tip of the hat to Bob Bly, whose June article in Target Marketing
magazine dispelled seven B-to-B marketing myths, I'd like to tackle some mythbusting of my own. Myth No. 1: Lead generation is the top job of B-to-B marketers. There is overwhelming evidence that B-to-B marketers consider lead generation their most important contribution. So why, you may rightly wonder, am I calling this a myth?
B-to-B Insights : The Death of the BRC
From Target Marketing
When I was starting out in marketing in the late 1970s, the standard response device in direct marketing was the business reply card (BRC). With the advent of PURLs (personalized URLs), use of the BRC declined dramatically. Many argued that the BRC was an unnecessary component of a direct mail package. Why waste a piece of card stock when the prospect could just go to a URL? | <urn:uuid:d9589d31-d5f2-4fd6-a682-709624ba35a5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.targetmarketingmag.com/aggregatedcontent/effectively-using-direct-mail-within-your-b-to-b-lead-generation-marketing-strategies | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9529 | 331 | 1.601563 | 2 |
Among the major cities that are located in India, Hyderabad is also one. It was possible only because of existence of major giants like Information as well as biotechnology industries, since more than a decade. The credit certainly goes to these duo-sectors. As one of the onlooker, the city of Hyderabad has also got outstanding growth in the sector of real estate business. The retail industry has also seen better growth in the recent years and business deals. To have much information about Hyderabad plots , the online browser can look into propertykhazana.com. A flat/plots price structure can be observed in some area of the city of Hyderabad with respect to real estate field mainly because many number of multiplexes have been constructed in connection with the growth in retail business and even though lack of overall growth. As a result, prices of business industries in the city of Hyderabad are very less compare to metro cities.
In order to support infrastructure for the business establishments and to provide better housing comforts, some of initiatives are taking part in and around the Madhapur area, in which private property organizations have built a number of multi-storied buildings. To implement the business possibilities, a housing board undertaken by the government of Andhra Pradesh has tie-up with private partners of Malaysia and Singapore in order to develop incorporated townships as per the demand in this sector | <urn:uuid:0372d910-a083-4142-93d5-472c2b8ca1ab> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.propertykhazana.com/hyderabad-land.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97776 | 279 | 1.617188 | 2 |
||This article needs additional citations for verification. (September 2012)|
Horace Silver by Dmitri Savitski, 1989.
|Birth name||Horace Ward Martin Tavares Silva|
September 2, 1928 |
Norwalk, Connecticut, United States
|Genres||Jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, mainstream jazz, soul jazz, jazz fusion, post-bop|
|Occupations||Pianist, composer, bandleader|
|Associated acts||Art Blakey, Miles Davis, Stan Getz, Art Farmer, Gigi Gryce, Milt Jackson, Hank Mobley, Lee Morgan, Junior Cook, Blue Mitchell, Woody Shaw, Joe Henderson, Bob Cranshaw, Michael Brecker, Randy Brecker, Mickey Roker|
Silver is known for his distinctive humorous and funky playing style and for his pioneering compositional contributions to hard bop. He was influenced by a wide range of musical styles, notably gospel music, African music, and Latin American music and sometimes ventured into the soul jazz genre.
Early life and career
Silver began his career as a tenor saxophonist but later switched to piano. His tenor saxophone playing was highly influenced by Lester Young, and his piano style by Bud Powell. Silver was discovered in the Sundown Club in Hartford, Connecticut in 1950 by saxophonist Stan Getz. Getz was playing as a guest star at the club with Silver’s trio backing him up. Getz liked Silver’s band and brought them on the road, eventually recording three of Silver’s compositions. It was with Getz that Silver made his recording debut.
He moved to New York City in 1951, where he worked at the jazz club Birdland on Monday nights, when different musicians would come together and informally jam. During that year he met the executives of the label Blue Note while working as a sideman. He eventually signed with them where he remained until 1980. It was in New York that he formed The Jazz Messengers, a co-operatively run group with Art Blakey.
In 1952 and 1953 he recorded three sessions with his own trio, featuring Blakey on drums and Gene Ramey, Curly Russell and Percy Heath on bass. The drummer-pianist team lasted for four years; during this time, Silver and Blakey recorded at Birdland (A Night at Birdland Vol. 1) with Russell, Clifford Brown and Lou Donaldson, at the Bohemia with Kenny Dorham and Hank Mobley, and also in the studios. He was also a member of the Miles Davis All Stars, recording the influential Walkin' in 1954.
Blue Note years
From 1956 onwards, Silver recorded exclusively for the Blue Note label, eventually becoming close to label boss Alfred Lion who allowed him greater input on aspects of album production than was usual at the time. During his years with Blue Note, Silver helped to create the rhythmically forceful branch of jazz known as "hard bop", which combined elements of rhythm-and-blues and gospel music with jazz. Gospel elements are particularly prominent on one of his biggest hits, "The Preacher", which Lion thought corny, but Silver persuaded him to record it.
While Silver's compositions at this time featured surprising tempo shifts and a range of melodic ideas, they caught the attention of a wide audience. Silver's own piano playing easily shifted from aggressively percussive to lushly romantic within just a few bars. At the same time, his sharp use of repetition was funky even before that word could be used in polite company. Along with Silver's own work, his bands often featured such rising jazz stars as saxophonists Junior Cook and Hank Mobley, trumpeter Blue Mitchell, and drummer Louis Hayes. Some of his key albums from this period included Horace Silver Trio (1953), Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers (1955), 6 Pieces of Silver (1956) and Blowin' the Blues Away (1959), which includes his famous, "Sister Sadie." He also combined jazz with a sassy take on pop through the 1961 hit, "Filthy McNasty".
Silver tended not to play up that he was proficient in Portuguese, nor draw directly on his rich Lusophone musical upbringing. His 1965 hit, "Cape Verdean Blues," is the only clear rhythmic reference to his childhood home where his father and friends jammed, with traditional Capeverdean morna and coladeira as the main fare. In the interview for the liner notes to 1964's Song for My Father (Cantiga Para Meu Pai), however, Silver remarked of the title track, "This tune is an original of mine, but it has a flavor of it that makes me think of my childhood days. Some of the family, including my father and my uncle, used to have musical parties with three or four stringed instruments; my father played violin and guitar. Those were happy, informal sessions." Silver melded additional Lusophone influences into his music directly after his February 1964 tour of Brazil. Referring to "Song for My Father," Silver said, "I was very much impressed by the authentic bossa nova beat. Not just the monotonous tick-tick-tick, tick-tick, the way it's usually done, but the real bossa nova feeling, which I've tried to incorporate into this number."
His early influences included the styles of boogie-woogie and the blues. It includes but is not limited to Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson, Nat “King” Cole, and Thelonious Monk. He liked to quote other musicians within his own work and would often recreate famous solos in his original pieces as something of a tribute to the greats who influenced him.
During Silver's time with Blakey he rarely recorded as a leader, but after splitting with him in 1956, formed his own hard bop quintet at first featuring the same line-up as Blakey's Jazz Messengers with 18-year-old Louis Hayes replacing Blakey. The quintet's more enduring line-up featured Blue Mitchell and Junior Cook.
In 1963 Silver created a new group featuring Joe Henderson on tenor saxophone and Carmell Jones on trumpet; this quintet recorded most of Silver's best-known album Song for My Father. When Jones left to settle in Europe, the trumpet chair was filled by a young Woody Shaw and Tyrone Washington replaced Henderson.
Silver's compositions, catchy and very strong harmonically, gained popularity while his band gradually switched to funk and soul. This change of style was not readily accepted by many long-time fans. The quality of several albums of this era, such as The United States of Mind (on which Silver himself provided vocals on several tracks), is to this day contested by fans of the genre. Silver's spirituality displayed on these albums also has a mixed reputation. However, many of these later albums featured many interesting musicians (such as Randy Brecker). Silver was the last musician to be signed to Blue Note in the 1970s before it went into temporary hiatus. In 1981 he formed his own short-lived labels, Silveto and Emerald.
Later years
After Silver's long tenure with Blue Note ended, he continued to create vital music. The 1985 album, Continuity of Spirit (Silveto), features his unique orchestral collaborations. In the 1990s, Silver directly answered the urban popular music that had been largely built from his influence on It's Got To Be Funky (Columbia, 1993). Now living surrounded by a devoted family in California, Silver has received much of the recognition due a venerable jazz icon. In 2005, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) gave him its President's Merit Award. The SFJazz Collective focused on Horace Silver's music for their 2010 season.
Silver's music has been a major force in modern jazz. He was one of the first pioneers of the style known as hard bop, influencing such pianists as Bobby Timmons, Les McCann, and Ramsey Lewis. Second, the instrumentation of his quintet (trumpet, tenor sax, piano, double bass, and drums) served as a model for small jazz groups from the mid-1950s until the late 1960s. Further, Silver's ensembles provided an important training ground for young players, many of whom (such as Donald Byrd, Art Farmer, Blue Mitchell, Woody Shaw, Junior Cook, and Joe Henderson) later led similar groups of their own.
Silver's talent did not go unnoticed among rock musicians who bore jazz influences, either; Steely Dan sent Silver into the Top 40 in the early 1970s when they crafted their biggest hit single, "Rikki, Don't Lose That Number," off the bass riff that opens "Song for My Father."
As social and cultural upheavals shook the nation during the late 1960s and early 1970s, Silver responded to these changes through music. He commented directly on the new scene through a trio of records called United States of Mind (1970–1972) that featured the spirited vocals of Andy Bey. The composer got deeper into cosmic philosophy as his group, Silver 'N Strings, recorded Silver 'N Strings Play The Music of the Spheres (1979).
As leader
- 1955: Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers
- 1956: 6 Pieces of Silver
- 1957: The Stylings of Silver
- 1958: Further Explorations
- 1958: Live at Newport '58
- 1959: Finger Poppin'
- 1959: Blowin' the Blues Away
- 1960: Horace-Scope
- 1961: Doin' the Thing
- 1962: The Tokyo Blues
- 1963: Silver's Serenade
- 1964: Song for My Father
- 1965: The Cape Verdean Blues
- 1966: The Jody Grind
- 1968: Serenade to a Soul Sister
- 1969: You Gotta Take a Little Love
- 1970: That Healin' Feelin'
- 1971: Total Response
- 1972: All
- 1972: In Pursuit of the 27th Man
- 1975: Silver 'n Brass
- 1976: Silver 'n Wood
- 1977: Silver 'n Voices
- 1978: Silver 'n Percussion
- 1979: Silver 'n Strings Play the Music of the Spheres
- Silverto Records/Emerald Records
- 1964: Live 1964
- 1965: The Natives are Restless Tonight
- 1981: Guides to Growing Up
- 1983: Spiritualizing the Senses
- 1984: There's No Need to Struggle
- 1985: The Continuity of Spirit
- 1988: Music to Ease Your Disease
- Other labels
- 1962: Paris Blues (Pablo)
- 1991: Rockin' with Rachmaninoff (Bop City)
- 1999: Jazz Has a Sense of Humor (Verve)
As sideman
with Nat Adderley :
with Art Blakey :
- A Night at Birdland Vol. 1 (1954, Blue Note)
- A Night at Birdland Vol. 2 (1954, Blue Note)
- A Night at Birdland Vol. 3 (1954, Blue Note)
- At the Cafe Bohemia, Vol. 1 (1955, Blue Note)
- At the Cafe Bohemia, Vol. 2 (1955, Blue Note)
- Art Blakey with the Original Jazz Messengers (1956, Columbia)
- Originally (1956, Columbia)
with Dee Dee Bridgewater :
with Kenny Burrell :
with Donald Byrd :
with Paul Chambers :
with Kenny Clarke :
with Al Cohn :
with Miles Davis :
- Miles Davis Volume 1 (1954, Blue Note Records)
- Blue Haze (1954, Prestige Records)
- Walkin' (1954, Prestige Records)
- Bags' Groove (1954, Prestige Records)
with Kenny Dorham :
with Lou Donaldson :
with Art Farmer :
with Leonard Feather :
- Cats vs. Chicks (1954, MGM)
with Stan Getz :
With Giants of Jazz
- Giants of Jazz (1955, Mercury Records)
with Terry Gibbs :
with Gigi Gryce :
with Coleman Hawkins :
with J. J. Johnson :
with Milt Jackson :
- Milt Jackson Quartet/Quintet (1954, Prestige Records)
- Milt Jackson Quartet (1955, Prestige Records)
- Plenty, Plenty Soul (1957, Atlantic)
- Blowing in from Chicago (1957, Blue Note)
with Howard McGhee :
with Hank Mobley :
- Hank Mobley Quartet (1955, Blue Note)
- The Jazz Message of Hank Mobley (1956, Savoy)
- Hank Mobley Sextet (1956, Blue Note)
- Hank Mobley and his All Stars (1957, Blue Note)
- Hank Mobley Quintet (1957, Blue Note)
with J. R. Monterose :
with Lee Morgan :
with Rita Reys :
with Sonny Rollins :
with Sonny Stitt :
With Clark Terry:
- Clark Terry (EmArcy, 1955)
with Phil Urso :
with Lester Young :
- "Distinguished Americans & Canadians of Portuguese Descent". Archived from the original on 2007-12-12. Retrieved 2008-01-09.
- Du Noyer, Paul (2003). The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Music (1st ed.). Fulham, London: Flame Tree Publishing. p. 140. ISBN 1-904041-96-5.
- Feather, Leonard. In New Faces - New Sounds [LP liner notes].
- [dead link]
- Official site
- Horace Silver Discography at the Hard Bop Home Page
- Horace Silver entry at the Jazz Discography Project
- Listening In: An Interview with Horace Silver by Bob Rosenbaum, Los Angeles, December 1981 (PDF file)
- "The Dozens: Twelve Essential Horace Silver Recordings" by Bill Kirchner (Jazz.com) | <urn:uuid:b4ba30b9-c5b3-413f-a443-714302e7d278> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Silver | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937475 | 2,971 | 1.617188 | 2 |
“It’s a chance to get parents out of the school setting and provide them with a day of enjoyment and fun,” said Brian Akers, Family Resource and Youth Services Center coordinator for Betsy Layne. “It’s not as structured as the meetings held at the schools, but there’s still a lot of information. It’s a real enjoyable day for the parents.”
The day featured an address by Supt. Henry Webb, followed by a question-and-answer session, a presentation titled “Accidental Dealer” by Sharon Collins, Youth Services coordinator for Allen Central High School, and Lola Ratliff, with Floyd County Schools, entertainment by Ron Cole, a presentation from Misty Ward, with Kentucky PIRC, titled “Parenting for Fitness and Nutrition, and a humorous presentation from Lola Ratliff that focused on parenting styles.
A catered lunch was provided and door prizes were also awarded.
According to Akers, the next big event sponsored by the Family Resource and Youth Services Centers will be a fun fair for new and expectant parents.
“It’s going to be like a county-wide baby shower,” Akers said.
More information about the events can be found by visiting or calling any of the Family Resource and Youth Service Centers in Floyd County. | <urn:uuid:552b045b-96f9-4836-a607-5ede8e299788> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://floydcountytimes.com/view/full_story/12803898/article-Parents-get-a-%E2%80%98break%E2%80%99-Thursday-at-MAC | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947888 | 283 | 1.539063 | 2 |
Hope Dies at Guantánamo
The tragic case of Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif hit a dead end when the US Supreme Court issued an order refusing to hear his case last week. Latif, a Yemeni man, has been imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay since January 2002, after being detained while traveling to seek medical treatment.
Latif had suffered serious head injuries as the result of a car accident in 1994, and the Yemeni government paid for him to receive treatment in Jordan at that time. But his medical problems persisted, and in 1999 Yemen's Ministry of Public Health recommended that Latif undergo tests, therapy and surgical procedures at his own expense. Unable to afford it, Latif said he left Yemen in 2001 with the help of a charitable worker to seek free medical treatment in Pakistan. When he was picked up in Afghanistan — on his way to Pakistan — and transferred to US custody in December 2001, Latif had his medical records with him.
After a kangaroo court proceeding, a Combatant Status Review Tribunal at Guantanamo declared Latif to be an "enemy combatant." He was not allowed to attend the hearing, nor was he permitted to see the evidence against him. Instead of a lawyer, he was given a "Personal Representative" — a military officer who did not represent Latif's interests.
Four years ago, the Supreme Court rejected the Bush administration's argument that the detainees at Guantanamo had no right to contest the legality of their confinement in US courts. In Boumediene v. Bush, the Court upheld the habeas corpus rights of the detainees, saying they must be given "a meaningful opportunity" to challenge their detention.
Latif petitioned a federal district court for a writ of habeas corpus. The Obama administration opposed the petition, relying on information from an interrogation report. Large sections of the report were blacked out, so it is difficult to know exactly what the report says. But we do know that, according to the report, Latif admitted to being recruited for jihad, receiving weapons training from the Taliban and serving on the front line with other Taliban troops. Latif said his interrogators garbled his words so that their summary bears no relation to what he actually said.
In the US District Court for the District of Columbia, Judge Henry Kennedy granted Latif's habeas petition, concluding that it could not "credit the information [in the Report] because there is serious question as to whether the [Report] accurately reflects Latif's words, the incriminating facts in the [Report] are not corroborated, and Latif has presented a plausible alternative story to explain his travel." It troubled Judge Kennedy that, "[n]o other detainee saw Latif at a training camp or in battle. No other detainee told interrogators that he fled from Afghanistan to Pakistan, from Tora Bora or any other location, with Latif. No other type of evidence links Latif to Al Qaeda, the Taliban, a guest house, or a training camp."
Particularly significant to Judge Kennedy was that the "fundamentals [of Latif's story] have remained the same." More than a dozen interrogation summaries and statements contained "[Latif's] adamant denials of any involvement with al Qaida [sic] or the Taliban; his serious head injury from a car accident in Yemen; his inability to pay for the necessary medical treatment; and his expectation and hope that [the charitable worker] would get him free medical care."
Judge Kennedy also reasoned that errors in the report support "an inference that poor translation, sloppy note taking . . . [blacked out] . . . or some combination of those factors resulted in an incorrect summary of Latif's words." The fact that Latif was found in possession of his medical papers when seized, according to the judge, "corroborat[ed]" Latif's "plausible" story.
The government appealed the district court ruling to the conservative US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which reversed the grant of habeas corpus. The appellate court admitted that the interrogation report was "prepared in stressful and chaotic conditions, filtered through interpreters, subject to transcription errors, and heavily redacted [parts blacked out] for national security purposes." But for the first time, the DC Circuit held that government reports must be accorded a "presumption of regularity." That means they will be presumed to be true unless the detainee can rebut that presumption.
Judge Janice Rogers Brown, who wrote the opinion for the two judges in the majority on the three-judge appellate panel, twisted Boumediene's statement that "innovation" could be used in habeas corpus proceedings into a "presumption of regularity" in government reports. Judge Brown criticized "Boumediene's airy suppositions."
The dissenting appellate judge, David S. Tatel, noted that, in practice, the presumption of regularity will compel courts to rubber-stamp government detentions because "it suggest[s] that whatever the government says must be true." He concluded that the report in Latif's case was inherently unreliable because "it contain[s] multiple layers of hearsay." Judge Tatel accused the majority of denying Latif the "meaningful opportunity" to contest the lawfulness of his detention that Boumediene guarantees.
When seven detainees whose petitions had been denied by the DC Circuit, including Latif, took their cases to the Supreme Court, they hoped the high court would do justice. During the Bush administration, the Court had struck down illegal and unjust executive policies. These included the denial of habeas corpus rights to Guantanamo detainees, the refusal to afford due process to US citizens caught in the "war on terror" and the holding of military commissions because they violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Conventions.
But hope for justice died last week when the Court refused to even consider the propriety of the appellate court's denial of habeas corpus to those seven detainees. Henceforth, detainees who lose in the DC Circuit cannot expect the Supreme Court to give them relief. Their last stop will be at one of the most right-wing circuits in the country, which overturns or delays all release orders by federal judges if the government objects.
The Supreme Court's refusal to review the appellate court decisions in these cases has rendered Boumedienea dead letter. Since 2008, two-thirds of detainees who have filed habeas corpus petitions have won at the district court level, yet not one of them has been released by judicial order. Judge Tatel wrote that "it is hard to see what is left of the Supreme Court's command in Boumediene that habeas review be 'meaningful.'"
Like many men at Guantanamo, Latif went on a hunger strike to assert the only power he had in the face of utter hopelessness — the power to refuse food. He was force-fed for three months, which, he says, "is like having a dagger shoved down your throat." As attorney Marc D. Falkoff writes in his chapter about Latif in The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration, and Abuse, "[t]he United Nations Commission on Human Rights calls this torture."
Of the 800 men and boys held at Guantanamo since 2002, 169 remain. Of those prisoners, 87 have had their release approved by military review boards established during the Bush administration, and later by the Guantanamo Review Task Force established by President Obama in 2009. Yet they continue to languish in the prison camp.
In her opinion, Judge Brown wrote, "Luckily, this is a shrinking category of cases. The ranks of Guantanamo detainees will not be replenished." Indeed, Obama has sent only one new prisoner to Guantanamo. His strategy is to assassinate "suspected militants" or people present in "suspicious areas" with drones, obviating the necessity of incarcerating them and dealing with their detention in court. As Judge Brown ominously observed, "Boumediene's logic is compelling: take no prisoners. Point taken."
Marjorie Cohn is a Professor of Law at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and past president of the National Lawyers Guild. She is editor of The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration, and Abuse, released earlier this year in paperback by NYU Press. | <urn:uuid:251ccca7-4ed1-4698-9431-dbcdf99da686> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.zcommunications.org/hope-dies-at-guant-namo-by-marjorie-cohn | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96214 | 1,711 | 1.828125 | 2 |
PSE’s Dustin Jones on Trail Cameras
By Dustin Jones
Setting out trail cameras is a way to keep hunting even when the season comes to a close. To me it is just as exciting setting one out and coming back a couple weeks later to see what it has captured. I’m like a kid on Christmas as I sit and wait in anticipation. I wanted to share with you some tips to help make sure you are getting decent pictures.
The first thing is finding a spot to put the camera. Find a well-used trail, a food plot, water hole, or just a spot that looks like it has lots of activity. There are sometimes that I have set up a trail camera on what I thought to be an awesome spot and came to find out that it was used very seldom. Look for fresh sign with lots of recent activity.
Don’t point the camera at 90° angle to the trail unless you are using a mineral lick, scrape, or bait. Majority of hunters setting out their trail camera place it on the nearest tree to the trail and set it perpendicular to the trail. This causes frustration when you go and pick up your camera because more than likely you are going to get blank pictures or partial pictures of animals. When you point the camera at a 45° angle down the trail you increase your odds of getting a shot of the entire animal versus a partial shot.
Remove any obstructions. I know that you want to hide your camera but if there are any obstructions in the way there are several things that can happen. First you will get pictures of nothing because that obstruction may be moving in the wind causing the camera to be set off. Second, whatever is obstructing the camera will be lit up by the flash whether it is an LED or white flash. The best thing to do if you don’t want people to mess with your trail camera is to invest in a security case for the camera. The last thing you want to do is spend money on the camera just to have it stolen a couple weeks later.
Lastly, pay attention to the sun. When at all possible make sure that when you set up the trail camera not to have it be pointing in the sun. Whether it is in the morning or the evening, try to make sure that the sun rises and sets behind your trail camera. This will help reduce blank images as well as wash out images. When the trail camera is facing the sun and it takes a picture, you will have an extremely white washed out image. The best thing to remember is to have your camera point to the north. The sun’s path will be slightly to the south of the trail camera if you do so and this will greatly reduce washed out images.
One thing that is always promising yet frustrating at the same time is setting up trail cameras. The promising thing is that you are able to see if there is anything moving through that area while you hunt. The frustrating part about it as well is you get to see some of the animals that come by and with my luck I’m either there a day late or a day early. But all in all it is a great way to monitor where you are hunting and it helps you try and pattern the animals. So get out there and have some fun setting up your trail camera.
Keep your eye out for the #elktour DVD over on huntography.com! Watch PSE’s Emily Anderson and Dustin Jones hunt elk DIY style on our amazing public lands in the Western United States. Huntography also films a deer hunting DVD called #deertour which you will be able to watch PSE’s Will Jenkins hunt whitetails. Huntography…filming America’s hunters, one at a time! | <urn:uuid:dae11385-d928-41ca-9f85-fac9109a577f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.pse-archery.com/2012/12/21/pses-dustin-jones-on-trail-cameras/?like=1&source=post_flair&_wpnonce=27cac980df | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953093 | 771 | 1.65625 | 2 |
In an exclusive live interview, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon tells CNN’s Christiane Amanpour there is no plan B for stopping violence in Syria.
Amanpour.airs weekdays on CNN International at 3:00pm with a replay at 5:00pm Eastern in the U.S. and at 21:00 CET, with a replay at 23:00 CET.
Full transcript after the jump.
May 24, 2012
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN HOST: Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the program. I'm Christiane Amanpour. Syria will recover from its present crisis. That is this week's declaration by the Syrian president Bashar Assad.
My brief tonight: but how? We have an exclusive interview with the Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations, the organization trying to find a solution. And later in the program, dramatically scaled back expectations for peace and success in Afghanistan. I'll speak exclusively with General John Allen, who commands all U.S. and NATO forces there, even as the Taliban ups the ante.
But first to the question, how does Assad plan to have Syria recover after 15 months of terror and death that the state has rained down on what began as a peaceful uprising by Syrians who were just demanding the same kind of democratic right that we see and they see Egyptians exercising today?
How, since Assad himself shows no sign of any kind of political engagement or reform, and how after more than 9,000 deaths according to the United Nations? And now that this dangerous vacuum is being filled by militants and terrorists with their own separate agendas against the Assad regime?
The U.N. has sent in a few hundred unarmed monitors, but for weeks they were trapped in their hotel, and now they're making small inroads, but it's like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon. And just today the U.N. investigative report presents another grim catalog of atrocities. It says they're being committed by all sides, but the vast majority, they say, by the Assad regime.
So how will Syria recover since no country, not the United States, not Europe or neighboring Turkey has shown the slightest will to take tough action to stop the carnage? The U.N. blames this inertia on splits within the Security Council, notably Russia and China, which have vetoed stronger measures against Damascus as well as on a fractured Syrian opposition.
So let me turn right now to the man at the very center of this impasse, the U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
Mr. Secretary-General, welcome. Thanks for being on the program.
BAN KI-MOON, SECRETARY-GENERAL, UNITED NATIONS: It's a great pleasure to see you again.
AMANPOUR: Thank you.
BAN: Thank you.
AMANPOUR: Let me go straight to this investigative report that the U.N. Human Rights Council has put out. It is called now increasing atrocities in Syria. Describe for me where you see those atrocities being committed.
BAN: I read this report on by international independent commission of inquiry. They said that there were many cases of cross-violation of human rights, including arbitrary detention, extrajudiciary killings and tortures. Those are totally unacceptable violation of human rights. The perpetrators must be held accountable by the - in the name of justice.
I believe that the Human Rights Council of the United Nations will take up this matter very seriously and for the course of actions on this matter, for addressing this issue.
At the same time, United Nations with the deployment of 300 monitors are doing all possible efforts to stop violence.
AMANPOUR: So let me just go back to this. The U.N. doesn't normally come out and say one side is doing more than the other. But in this case, they have said that the opposition is becoming increasingly militarized and there have been atrocities committed, such as tortures. Is that correct?
BAN: That's right.
AMANPOUR: And what has it said, though, about the Assad regime? This report seems to say that the majority of the blame is at the seat of the Assad regime.
BAN: Of course, during the last 15 months, Assad and his regime authorities have been killing many month 9,000. I believe that this number will have increased much more now. And there were huge violation of human rights. This is totally unacceptable, intolerable situation. Too many people of Syria have suffered and they have been too many people have been killed.
AMANPOUR: So you say it's unacceptable, and many ambassadors do as well. But what is the plan B? How to take up this matter, as you said? What will be the absolute solution to stopping this carnage?
BAN: At this time, we don't have any plan B. The joint special envoy Kofi Annan has proposed six peace proposals, among which the complete cessation of violence is number one. Unfortunately, this has not been implemented while with the deployment of monitoring missions, we have seen some dampening effect.
The number of violence has reduced, but we were not able to complete the (inaudible) of violence.
AMANPOUR: So there are not enough, are there?
AMANPOUR: Not enough (inaudible) monitors?
BAN: Of course it's not a matter of a number of monitors. We have almost 300 (inaudible) number of monitors. It will be just a matter of one or two days where we will have a full monitors –
AMANPOUR: This was a picture of the monitors. We'll hear some of them, I think, but we've got some pictures of these monitors in Syria. We've seen some of them either at headquarters or on the street. But what are they actually doing, if they're unarmed and, as you say, there's actually no plan B? So what are these guys tasked with doing?
BAN: They are deployed in seven cities, including Damascus, like Homs, Hama, Idlib, Aleppo. They are patrolling every day wherever possible. They try their best to cease this violence. (Inaudible) strong political will at the level of President Assad and also it requires full cooperation by the opposition forces.
There are so many spoilers at this time which really make the situation very difficult. We have not been able to commence a political dialogue.
AMANPOUR: Well, as you say, first and foremost, strong political will by President Assad, do you see any further likelihood that he is going to engage and make the kind of reforms - and not just the Security Council but also the Russians have said that he will do?
BAN: When Security Council is united, we can see much difference.
Unfortunately, Security Council at the beginning of this crisis were not united and now recently they have shown one voice, a united voice. That is why we were able to deploy these monitors.
And I have spoken yesterday with Joint Special Envoy Kofi Annan, and we discussed a future course of actions. And as was already announced, he's going to visit Syria soon. The date has not yet been fixed because of this confidentiality. And he will also try to visit some neighboring countries.
AMANPOUR: But let me read this to you, Secretary-General. The Amnesty International has just put out its latest report, and it's basically saying that failure of leadership is rendering the U.N. Security Council irrelevant. I mean, here you are, telling me that there's no plan B. You've admitted that, for a long, long time, the Security Council is divided. What is there to put any pressure to make this stop?
BAN: I'm going to report to the Security Council soon and there will be Security Council discussions next Wednesday. And I'm going to make a report based on the assessment of the situation on the ground. My undersecretary-general for peacekeeping operations, Mr. Ladsous was on the ground and he returned. And I had got discussions on the assessment of the situation.
AMANPOUR: Do you think that there might be another Security Council vote? The Italian foreign minister said to us that maybe they'll give it another four to five weeks. I mean, I get the impression that the Annan mission is kind of to buy time, because there is no plan B and nobody really knows what to do next.
BAN: We have Annan plan comprising of six point. But it requires the full cooperation from President Assad and also it - from the opposition forces. And unfortunately and surprisingly, we have seen some elements,
(inaudible) elements now (inaudible) walking on the ground –
AMANPOUR: Third (ph) elements, you say? Do you mean like Al Qaeda or
– do you mean like Al Qaeda?
BAN: We do not have any clear evidence whether Al Qaeda was behind but –
AMANPOUR: - suicide bombs?
BAN: - considering the scale and sophistication of the terrorist attacks, it seems to be clear that there are certain organization and group, (inaudible) organization and clear (ph) political intent.
AMANPOUR: Let me show you some pictures that we're going to put in our table here. These are pictures inside Lebanon. This is the spillover of what's happening in Syria. This was Shiites in Lebanon, protecting the kidnapping of Shiites in Syria. Do you worry that this is going to spread regionally?
BAN: This is exactly what I said we are entering into a pivotal moment when it comes to situation in Syria. We were very much worried about this kind of a spillover effect. We have seen in Tripoli, Lebanon, already disturbances between - fighting between the ethnic groups.
We have to prevent this one. That is why the cessation of violence must be realized and immediately commence a political dialogue for political resolution of this issue, reflecting the will of the Syrian people.
AMANPOUR: Well, the last time this kind of thing was stopped was a U.N. resolution that enabled much tougher intervention , for instance, in Libya. Do you have any feeling that this is on the cards at all for Syria?
BAN: I'm going to urge the members of the Security Council as we have seen in the case of Syria and also most recently by united decision to deploy monitoring mission in Syria. The Security Council members, when they are united, they can make a huge impact to maintaining peace and security of the international community.
AMANPOUR: And how personally do you feel, A, about the disunity in the Security Council, the Russian and Chinese vetoes, and the carnage that we see on the television or on the ground every day?
BAN: At this time, China and Russia, they are in full support of Kofi Annan's peace plans.
AMANPOUR: How do you feel about, when you see that carnage?
BAN: It's very sad. The Syrian people have suffered too long. Too many people have been killed. These atrocities must be stopped at any cost. Therefore, the international community must be united in speaking in one voice. The violence must stop by all the sides. This is a very important one. That's the starting point.
That's why United Nations has sent monitoring team. These monitoring teams are coming from more than 40 countries. That much the whole international community are really wanting to see the end of this violence.
That's why they are contributing their soldiers under these very difficult and dangerous decisions (ph).
AMANPOUR: Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations, thank you very much for joining us.
BAN: Thank you very much.
AMANPOUR: And we will be right back after a break.
AMANPOUR: Welcome back. And now to Afghanistan, where the United States is scaling back both troops and expectations. The man in charge of the war there, General John Allen, has just confirmed specifics of the drawdown, a quarter of American surge troops will be home by the end of September. That's 23,000. But he did say he'll need strong combat forces for the foreseeable future.
And when I sat down with him at the Pentagon, he also took strong exception to the way the situation in Afghanistan going forward is being described in the White House as "Afghan good enough."
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
AMANPOUR: General Allen, thank you very much for joining me.
GEN. JOHN ALLEN, USMC, ISAF COMMANDER: It's a pleasure to be with you this morning.
AMANPOUR: Senator Feinstein and Representative Rodgers, both from their respective intelligence committees, came to Afghanistan. And when they came out, they told us that the Taliban was stronger since the surge.
Would you agree with that assessment?
ALLEN: I don't think that we're out of agreement on this. I don't think that there's a difference of opinion. I think the difference really is whether the Taliban think they will succeed or not, and we need to persuade them that there is no alternative to peace.
They cannot win this fight kinetically. They cannot win this fight violently. The success for them will be a peaceful outcome, not a violent outcome.
AMANPOUR: But at the moment, there are no talks of any consequence with the Taliban. I mean, a quote I read sort of sums up the shift of power.
Five years ago, the United States was refusing to talk to the Taliban.
Now the Taliban is refusing to talk. They see you leaving. Does that not make it more difficult for you to persuade them to come in?
ALLEN: No, I don't think so. I think that the unambiguous international support for Afghanistan has been a very powerful message.
You know, that was the message that came out of the NATO summit. We will not abandon Afghanistan. The international community's role here over the long term is good for the region.
So we are not leaving. And the narrative for the Taliban that they can wait us out is a flawed narrative.
AMANPOUR: You say we're not leaving, but we are leaving. The president has said it, 2014 is the date, 2013 is the date when all combat is going to stop, according to the President of the United States. So we are leaving. And they know it.
ALLEN: Well, let me calibrate your question, which I think is important. The president did not say there would be no combat after 2013.
What he said is that the ANSF move into the lead for combat operations and we will support them.
ALLEN: The second issue with regard to the forces after this drawdown of the surge, I have told the president, through my chain of command, that I owe him analysis following the successful drawdown of the 23,000 troops on what we think we'll need in 2013.
That analysis will include an analysis of the state of the Taliban, the insurgency, how the Afghan National Security Forces are doing, what we anticipate the operational environment being in 2013 and the result of that analysis, the aggregation of those will be a recommendation from me to him on what I think both the U.S. and the international combat power will be needed in 2013.
AMANPOUR: And that assessment, you anticipate making when and delivering when?
ALLEN: Before the end of the year. My anticipation would be it would be in November or early December.
AMANPOUR: If you had to make that assessment now in the middle of this fighting season, which seemed quite fierce, what would you say?
ALLEN: Well, I've been clear that we need sufficient combat power to ensure that the ANSF do not fail. I don't anticipate they will, and I think that the conversation is wide open right now.
It's a very important strategic conversation, and it is one that is not predicated around a number. It is one that's predicated around a requirement. And I've got to build that requirement for the president, and clearly express it to him in the analysis of - that I'll do for him.
AMANPOUR: In that case, how do you assess Afghan good enough? That seems to be the mantra coming out of the White House.
And Afghan good enough, I've got sheafs (sic) of papers, of quotes here. It's such a scaling back of expectations for Afghanistan. The national security advisors said publicly that our goal is to provide a modicum of stability for Afghanistan, a modicum of stability, when years before it was to defeat, it was to prevent, it was to have a real secure Afghanistan. How do you assess that?
ALLEN: Well, I - you know, first, I don't use the term "Afghan good enough," because we're all sacrificing way too much for something that's "Afghan good enough." I think that term understates or undersells the commitment that we've all made to this.
Afghanistan is an important country in an important region. And the outcome of our investment, this global investment of 50 nations and ISAF and many other nations who've been involved for a long period of time with great generosity is not about being good enough.
It's about creating stability that is enduring in Afghanistan, preventing the Taliban from overthrowing the Afghan government, and in so doing creating a platform yet again where Al Qaeda or similarly motivated groups might be willing to launch attacks upon the United States or the capitals or the population centers of many of our allies.
AMANPOUR: I hear what you say, that we've worked way too hard, we've sacrificed way too much and we had very good goals. So my question then to you is why the surge? Why the surge? Why send more and more people into this if the president was going to pull them out, win or lose? He's already said that the Pentagon didn't get - the goal was not to defeat the Taliban.
Does that worry you, the fact that all these men and women went into the field for a goal that was, we're coming out, win or lose?
ALLEN: Well, I think the goal was very clear. The goal was to reverse the momentum of the Taliban, and the Taliban in '08 and '09 were building significant momentum. And remember that the Afghan National Security Forces were immature at the time.
AMANPOUR: But you've just said the Taliban are coming back.
ALLEN: Well –
AMANPOUR: So you still have a –
ALLEN: - the Taliban believe that they are - they have the capability of winning. But we don't believe that.
AMANPOUR: So, the Afghan National Security Forces are basically the insurance policy. If NATO is going to withdraw, then there must be indigenous force -
ALLEN: That is correct.
AMANPOUR: - to take over, that is correct?
ALLEN: That is correct.
AMANPOUR: And you have put a huge amount of training, money, blood, sweat and tears into getting them up and running.
ALLEN: That's correct.
AMANPOUR: And many people say they're doing a lot better than expected.
ALLEN: Yes. They are.
AMANPOUR: You would agree with that?
ALLEN: We would, yes.
AMANPOUR: Then how do you assess the latest news, which is that according to the Strategic Partnership Agreement, these forces are going to be built up, some 350,000 or so, and then they're going to be built down by another 100,000, get rid of them.
And again, not conditions-based. based on, apparently, according to the defense secretary, the amount of funds on the table. What kind of a signal is that, and does that worry you?
ALLEN: We still haven't recruited the full force. We still haven't fielded the full force. That will occur in '13. We'll continue with that plateau for a couple of years. During that period of time, as the commander, I will be required to assess their capabilities every six months.
And the outcome of that assessment will ultimately determine what the final size, state and composition of the ANSF will be as the drawdown ultimately approaches. For now, we have a target. And that's what we're planning for is that target. But if those operational assumptions change dramatically, that target could change.
AMANPOUR: When you say that, I hear you saying what any good military commander would say, that it's going to be conditions-based. But that's not what they're saying at the White House or in the capitals around Europe.
ALLEN: No, I think that one of the outcomes of the NATO summit was a very clear signal by the international community that it is supportive of a long-term support to the Afghan National Security Forces. That's an important outcome.
And the lesson that we learned was in the post-Soviet era in Afghanistan. The force that was left behind by the Soviet era ultimately failed because it was under-resourced. And we learned that as a very hard lesson in a direct-line relationship, it generated what happened on the 11th of September in 2001.
AMANPOUR: Do you have that commitment?
ALLEN: Oh, yes.
AMANPOUR: That the commanders on the ground will be able to make that assessment?
ALLEN: Yes, oh yes. That is a commitment. It's part of the mission that I have now.
AMANPOUR: One of the things we've been reading a lot about recently is Afghan forces, who you have all trained up, some of them attacking NATO forces. How big a problem is that right now?
ALLEN: Well, any attack is a blow, and we are very, very conscious of this. It is a tragedy every time it occurs. We should not be surprised that the Taliban seek to infiltrate the ANSF. But fewer than 50 percent of those attacks are actually infiltration. Some of those are self- radicalized individuals who have elected to manifest that radicalization by attacking their mentors or their advisors.
AMANPOUR: That's a worrying development.
ALLEN: Well, it is, but it's not – we're not surprised by it. We anticipate that in counterinsurgencies, this sort of thing will occur. Now
the Afghans have embraced this. They're working very, very hard to reduce
the possibility of this occurring in the future. Any one is a tragedy.
But they have taken steps with the employment of Afghan counterintelligence entities.
They've taken steps in the vetting of the Afghan troops and police that are coming into the service, a far more thorough vetting to reduce the possibility that radicals or extremists are inducted into the forces or to reduce the possibility that the insurgency can recruit inside the forces.
And it's not well known, but in the last several months since they've really embraced this, they've made over 160 arrests out of the security forces of those who might be plotting or might be considering attacking ISAF forces.
But every one of those is a tragedy. And it's important to say that, even though each one is a tragedy, there are tens of thousands of interactions every single day across Afghanistan between the Afghan troops and ISAF forces. And every one of those is successful. And most of those, every single day continue to deepen and broaden the relationship that we seek to have with them.
AMANPOUR: General Allen, thank you very much indeed.
ALLEN: Thank you, ma'am. It's wonderful to see you.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
AMANPOUR: And as he heads back to Afghanistan, it was fascinating to see in that interview the resolve of soldiers on the ground epitomized by General Allen and the race for the exits led by the White House. We'll be back in a moment.
But first, check out our Facebook page, where you can watch a report about the troubling Taliban effort to take control of rural schools in Afghanistan. That's at amanpour.com/Facebook. Stay with us.
AMANPOUR: And finally, as we close tonight, let's not forget that Egyptians, unlike their brothers and sisters in Syria, are exercising their democratic right for the very first time. Egypt's historic election is in its second day with more long lines at those polling booths.
And lots of those purple fingers being waved by proud Egyptian voters.
The results won't be known until the weekend and a runoff between the top two finishers is scheduled for mid-June. But it appears that Egypt's experiment with democracy is proceeding.
That's it for tonight's program. Thank you for watching and goodbye from New York.
Y mera (ph). We answer. | <urn:uuid:348c6461-2bca-4e76-9cb4-0eac930699ad> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2012/05/24/un-secretary-general-ban-ki-moon-on-syria-at-this-time-we-dont-have-any-plan-b/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973224 | 5,228 | 1.507813 | 2 |
The Bush Administration’s Oft-Repeated (and Now Challenged) Waterboarding Claims
For many years, Bush administration officials have said that the CIA waterboarded only three terror suspects. Despite nearly endless revelations and investigations about the U.S.'s treatment of detainees, there has never been evidence contradicting those claims. But that changed earlier this month.
Human Rights Watch recently released a report detailing the accounts of 14 Libyan men who claim they were detained and, in some cases, subject to harsh interrogations by the U.S. before being transferred back to Libyan prisons, where they also faced abuse.
One man, Mohammed Al-Shoreoiya, provided a detailed account of being waterboarded “many times” while in U.S. custody in an Afghan prison between 2003 and 2004. Another man described a similar form of water torture, conducted without a board.
None of the men's accounts could be confirmed, but as the New York Times noted, the detainees did not seek out Human Rights Watch, and their descriptions of their treatment, including waterboarding, are consistent with CIA procedural documents that have been made public.
The CIA first confirmed waterboarding in February 2008, when then-CIA director Michael Hayden told a Senate committee that “only three detainees” had been waterboarded — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zabaydah, and Abd Al Rahim al-Nashiri. No one, he said, had been subjected to the process since 2003. That claim has been repeated by former President George W. Bush and top officials from his administration. Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has also noted that the military did not waterboard.
A spokesman for the CIA told ProPublica that “the Agency has been on the record that there are three substantiated cases in which detainees were subjected to the waterboarding technique under the program.”
Here are top Bush administration officials stating, again and again, only three detainees were waterboarded [emphasis added]:
George W. Bush
Of the thousands of terrorists we captured in the years after 9/11, about a hundred were placed into the CIA program. About a third of those were questioned using enhanced techniques. Three were waterboarded.
– November 2010, in his memoir, Decision Points.
Dick Cheney, former vice president
It is a fact that only detainees of the highest intelligence value were ever subjected to enhanced interrogation. You've heard endlessly about waterboarding. It happened to three terrorists.
-- May 21, 2009: Dick Cheney, in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute.
Donald Rumsfeld, former defense secretary
[Michael Hayden] looked at all the evidence and concluded that a major fraction of the intelligence in our country on al Qaeda came from individuals, the three, only three people who were waterboarded... no one was waterboarded at Guantanamo by the U.S. military. In fact, no one was waterboarded at Guantanamo, period.Three people were waterboarded by the CIA, away from Guantanamo and then later brought to Guantanamo.
-- May 3, 2011, in an interview with Fox News.
Michael Hayden, former CIA director
Let me make it very clear and to state so officially in front of this committee that waterboarding has been used on only three detainees. It was used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, it was used on Abu Zubaydah, and it was used on Nashiri. The CIA has not used waterboarding for almost five years. We used it against these three high-value detainees because of the circumstances of the time.
–Feb. 5, 2008, in testimony to a Senate committee.
John Yoo, former Justice Department official
Waterboarding we think is torture, but it happened to three people. The scale of magnitude is different....We've done it three times.
--June 1, 2008, in an interview with Esquire Magazine.
Yoo also said three people had been waterboarded in a June 2008 congressional hearing.
Karl Rove, senior adviser to Bush
[Coercive techniques] were used against some thirty hard-core terrorist detainees who had successfully resisted other forms of interrogation. Only three were waterboarded.
–March 2010, in his memoir, Courage and Consequences.
Michael Mukasey, former attorney general
The fact is that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding — he was one of three people who were waterboarded — did disclose the name — the nickname actually, which was the name that this courier actually used — in the course of the questioning that took place after enhanced interrogation techniques.
--May 17, 2011, in remarks at the American Enterprise Institute.
Jose Rodriguez Jr., former director of the National Clandestine Service at the CIA
In fact, only three detainees: Mohammed, Zubaydah and one other were ever waterboarded, the last one more than nine years ago.
-- May 10, 2012: Jose Rodriguez Jr., in an op-ed on CNN.com
Bill Harlow, who co-authored Rodriguez' book on interrogations, said that Rodriguez stands by his statement. “These procedures were not done without extensive documentation and authorization, as part of an officially approved program, and all the documentation there shows three individuals,” Harlow said.
The other officials we've cited did not respond to requests for comment.
President Obama came into office proclaiming a ban on torture, stating that waterboarding was unequivocally a form of torture, and making the infamous “torture memos” public. But the administration has said no one would be prosecuted for waterboarding or other interrogation methods previously sanctioned by the government, and announced last month it would close the last two investigations into CIA abuse.
A Justice Department spokesman would not comment on whether the government ever investigated the Libyan cases. Laura Pitter, the author of the Human Rights Watch report, said that none of the men she interviewed said they had been contacted by U.S. investigators about their detention.
The CIA spokesman said that he could not comment on specific allegations, but that “the Department of Justice has exhaustively reviewed the treatment of more than 100 detainees in the post-9/11 period — including allegations involving unauthorized interrogation techniques — and it declined prosecution in every case.” | <urn:uuid:a88af20a-a566-4cf9-a949-b0b683e38605> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nationofchange.org/bush-administration-s-oft-repeated-and-now-challenged-waterboarding-claims-1347975320 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977975 | 1,302 | 1.796875 | 2 |
Public Services Reform (Scotland ) Act 2010
Historic Scotland expenditure
Payments with a value in excess of £25,000
The publication of a report showing individual payments over £25,000 is a significant step by the Agency in complying with the Scottish Government's commitment to further openness and transparency, following the introduction of the Public Services Reform (Scotland) Act 2010.
The report reflects the business of Historic Scotland and in particular payments to companies and other organisations who provide supplies and services under contract to the Agency in furtherance of our principal activities to protect , present and promote Scotland’s historic environment which includes ancient monuments and archaeological sites historic buildings , parks and gardens , and designed landscapes . Payments cover a wide spectrum from payments for archaeology , major projects , utilities , grants as well as payments to contractors for capital expenditure.
The report provides details of all payments made over £25,000 in chronological order by Business area for the relevant period and records:
- payee name
- the amount paid ( including VAT – whether or not recoverable )
- payment date
- expenditure type
- the Historic Scotland Business Area that initiated the payment
Feedback from the public would be welcome in relation to the way in which information has been set-out and any improvements that can be made.
The report records payments made under the organisation structure in place during the period . It is anticipated this approach provides the appropriate transparency required by the Agency under Section 31(3) of the Public Services Reform ( Scotland)Act 2010 It should be noted that the reporting of payments differs from the way in which Historic Scotland accounts for expenditure in our published annual accounts. Following the disciplines of accruals based accounting expenditure is recorded in the financial year the goods and services are delivered / received rather than when paid.
How to request further information
If you have an enquiry or if you wish to source further information on any payment line then you should email Historic Scotland at email@example.com
Please provide your name, an address for correspondence and if possible a telephone number.
How should you word your request?
In the subject line of your email you should clearly state the subject as Publication of Payments with a value in excess of £25,000 as well as the date on which the payment your request relates has been made You should also add the Historic Scotland Business Area detailed in the final column of the published report. For example, a clear and concise subject line would read:
"Publication of payments with a value in excess of £25,000 : 30 November 2010 Meadowside St Paul’s Church, Dundee £ 33,150.00
The more information you provide will allow staff to be able to direct your request to the right person and this will ensure that it is dealt with in a prompt and timely manner. Payments with a value in excess of £25,000 1st April 2010 - 31st March 2011 [pdf, 95kb] | <urn:uuid:4065e55b-7c04-40bf-ba8b-714f5ec80e0a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.historic-scotland.gov.uk/gd/largetext/publicservicesreformact | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951064 | 610 | 1.625 | 2 |
The other day, I got snookered.
On Aug. 30, I tweeted: “Happy birthday, email! 30 years old today!”
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(Whereupon a fellow Twitterite, @bschorr, responded: “Little known fact: the 2nd e-mail sent 30 years ago started: ‘Dear friend, I am Humabli Kiprotich from Nigeria…’”)
I tweeted my message because I’d received a press release about it. “Today, August 30th, marks the 30th anniversary of email,” it said. “While the technology that we live by has come a long way since it was first copyrighted, we are still using the same To: From: Cc: Subject: Reply, Forward fields.” The press release went on to plug an e-mail service.
I did a quick check — I found this confirmation on what looked like Politico — and then tweeted.
But then I got the most intriguing note from Thomas Haigh, a technology historian, chairman of a professional group dedicated to information technology history, and “career academic”— via e-mail. It went like this:
A colleague sent me a copy of your tweet, “Happy birthday to EMAIL! 30 years old today!” I’m afraid that you’ve inadvertently endorsed the propaganda campaign of V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, who has been mounting a vigorous but quixotic effort to convince the world that he invented email as a schoolboy between 1978 and 1982. He mounts his case at www.inventorofemail.com. However, his claims have been almost universally rejected by technology experts and historians, on the simple basis that you can’t invent something during (or after) 1978 that was already in widespread use by that time.
Email, or electronic mail, is actually at least 40 years old, and the NY Times itself has documented its use in 1965 (47 years ago). Hence, collecting endorsements for the “30 year anniversary” claim, i.e. 1982 as the origin date for email, is an key strategy for Ayyadurai.
Ayyadurai is determined, wealthy, and an expert on internet publicity. He has assembled a network of websites and send out a series of press releases. The site you link to, Politico.biz, seems to be some kind of low-rent content farm, recycling stories and press releases such as Ayyadurai’s, rather than a real news organization. He has misled a number of journalists on the lifestyle technology beat, including bloggers Emi Kolawole at The Washington Post and Doug Aamoth at Time. He was dismissed from his part-time teaching position at M.I.T. as a result of the embarrassment he caused the institution. Sometimes I wonder if the whole thing is some kind of postmodern performance art project, designed to show up the shortcomings of digital-age journalism!
I have a thorough treatment of his claims, based on an article commissioned by the Washington Post after its ombudsman realized the paper had published a deeply inaccurate story.
You’ve been around the technology world a long time, so I’m sure you would not have been misled for longer than it took to tweet. But Ayyadurai collects endorsements aggressively (he’s very proud of convincing Noam Chomsky!) so I wonder if there is any way for you to tweet or blog a correction making clear that you are not endorsing his claims.
Yes, Tom, I’m happy to do so.
As the Gizmodo article puts it, “Shiva Ayyadurai didn’t invent e-mail — he created ‘EMAIL,’ an electronic mail system implemented at the University of Medicine and Dentistry in Newark, New Jersey. It’s doubtful he realized it as a little teen, but laying claim to the name of a product that’s the generic term for a universal technology gives you acres of weasel room. But creating a type of airplane named AIRPLANE doesn’t make you Wilbur Wright.”
Anyway — what a weird, whacked-out story. It’s so delicious, in fact, that I’m not even sorry I posted that bogus tweet in the first place.
And I wish e-mail the happiest of anniversaries — whenever it truly comes around. | <urn:uuid:4b27daab-d486-41c8-9374-8cb2397427be> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/06/e-mail-birthday-intrigue/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943645 | 969 | 1.703125 | 2 |
By Dan Levine
SAN JOSE, Calif (Reuters) - Internal emails show that executives at tech companies such as Apple and Google believed that an agreement to refrain from poaching each other's workers would bring real financial benefits, a U.S. judge said on Thursday.
Five former employees of various tech companies have filed a civil lawsuit against Apple Inc, Google Inc, Intel Corp and others, alleging an illegal conspiracy to eliminate competition for each other's employees.
At a hearing in San Jose, California federal court on Thursday, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh also ordered Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook to be questioned by plaintiff attorneys for four hours.
Koh must decide whether the lawsuit can proceed as a class action, which would give the plaintiffs more leverage to extract a large settlement. Koh said that at the time the no-poaching agreements were forged, top executives felt a collective approach toward hiring was more efficient than dealing with employees individually.
"That, I think, is the biggest problem for the defendants," said Koh, who did not identify the executives. However, Koh also closely questioned a key economic analysis commissioned by the plaintiffs, which the judge said had "holes."
Koh did not rule on the class action issue during the hearing on Thursday.
In 2010, Google, Apple, Adobe Systems Inc, Intel, Intuit Inc and Walt Disney Co's Pixar unit agreed to a settlement of a U.S. Justice Department probe that bars them from agreeing to refrain from poaching each other's employees.
The Justice Department and California state antitrust regulators then sued eBay Inc late last year over an alleged no-poaching deal with Intuit. [ID:nL1E8MGCSL] eBay said the government is wrong, and has not been named as a defendant in the civil lawsuit.
Plaintiff attorneys have estimated that civil damages potentially could run into hundreds of millions of dollars.
In court on Thursday, Adobe attorney Robert Mittelstaedt said the plaintiffs had no evidence that employees were actually impacted by the no-cold call deals.
"It's not in the data," Mittelstaedt said.
In 2007, Apple's Steve Jobs asked former Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt to stop trying to recruit an Apple engineer, a transgression that threatened one junior Google employee's job, according to a court filing last year. At the time, Schmidt was an Apple board member.
Koh on Thursday criticized attorneys for the tech companies for being too slow to schedule depositions of top executives. Apple attorney George Riley attempted to spare Cook from a deposition, saying that when Cook was chief operating officer (COO) of the company before succeeding Jobs in 2011, Cook had no role in any of the no-hire agreements.
"I find it hard to believe a COO would have no say over salary and compensation for all employees," Koh responded.
Additionally, Google attorneys agreed that Schmidt, now Google's executive chairman, could be questioned by plaintiffs' lawyers on February 20. Executives from several other companies were also scheduled for depositions, including Intel chief executive Paul Otellini.
The case in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California is In Re: High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation, 11-cv-2509.
(Reporting by Dan Levine; Editing by Lisa Shumaker) | <urn:uuid:e49f6d0d-132a-4020-b5d6-d6b74ce1cb18> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://wdez.com/news/articles/2013/jan/18/company-emails-are-key-in-apple-google-hiring-case-judge-says/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970312 | 685 | 1.601563 | 2 |
THE BIFURCATORS: GANG OF 2
Live recordings of ensemble works for instruments, computers, and other electronics by PHILIP PERKINS and SCOTT FRASER, with guest artists Doug Carroll, Tim Perkis, and Bonnie Barnett
the bifurcators generally use a mix of traditional and electronic instruments, digital signal processors, and computer timing and performance controls to find new links between pre-conceived ideas and serendipitous intuition in their live ensemble works.
Like the soundtrack to a very memorable dream. - OPTION Magazine
THE ROSE WINDOW (12 min.) LIGHT ON A WALL 1. LIGHT (8 min.) 2. DARK (8 min.) A NEW WORK (12:28 min. ) WHITE EAGLES (15:12 min. )
THE ROSE WINDOW (1992, 12 min.)
* Philip Perkins: Computer-controlled synths and sampler, pre-recorded materials, MIDI performance controls, signal processing, electronic noise-makers, radios. * Scott Fraser: Electric and electronic guitars.
The concept for this work arose during several days spent watching the north Rose Window at the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. Inspired by an idea of the window as a vast visual chord, our thought in this work was to take a linear work of art, like a piece of music, and "turn the staff sideways" 90 degrees, thus allowing all the sounds in the work to be available all the time and the composers proceeding by finding new affinities among these materials within an equality of means.
Here more than 30 note-rows are available to the players as triggerable MIDI sequences sent to various electronic instruments, which are also "listening" (via computer software) to both Fraser's guitar and various reflections and refractions of that guitar, and then making complimentary pitches to accompany it. Recorded live to 2 track at Scott Fraser's studio, Los Angeles.
LIGHT ON A WALL (1994, 16 min.) Part 1: LIGHT (8 min.) Part 2: DARK (8 min.)
* Scott Fraser: Electric guitar. * Philip Perkins: Computer-controlled synths and signal processing, MIDI performance controls. * Doug Carroll: Electronic cello. * Tim Perkis: Computer-driven synthesizer.
In LIGHT ON A WALL players try to incorporate ideas of slowness (just this side of motionlessness), inexorability, inevitability, and "sun-time" into their playing. Mental images include the angularity of light hitting the wall, various wall textures as the light plays and cascades over them; shadows and shapes created by the sun on the wall; interruptions in the sunlight (clouds, trees etc.); all of the above but with the ability to speed up and slow down the sun's movement, as in a time-lapse film shot; and the reverie that observing all these phenomena often produces.
Each player has a "shadow instrument", an electronic instrument that listens to his or her note output and responds in a very specific way. The MIDI note stream is first examined by a piece of computer software which has been programmed with a sequence of scales that follow the time line of the work. These scales form "legal" note sets that the shadow instrument will play in that time period. When a player plays one of these notes, the shadow instrument will sound that note also. Notes outside of the current note-set are ignored by the shadow instrument, thus the player decides how much he or she wishes to "go along" with the direction of the work at any given moment.
The note sets change approximately every minute or so, moving from a group of 3 to 9 available notes by the end of each of the two sections. The note groupings are the same for each player, and follow the same progression. In addition, a fourth player (Perkins) plays a software instrument on which the player can choose when to play a note (or chord) but the computer decides which notes of the current "legal" set will be sounded. This version of the piece was recorded live at Paul Dresher's studio in Berkeley, and mixed at Scott Fraser's studio in Los Angeles.
A NEW WORK (1992, 12:28 min.)
* Philip Perkins: Computer-controlled synths and sampler, pre- recorded materials, MIDI performance controls, signal processing, electronic noise-makers, radios, mix, script. * Scott Fraser: Electronic noise-makers, signal processing, electronic guitar, edit. * Bonnie Barnett: Voice (pre-recorded).
A NEW WORK was presented as a live improvised performance transmitted over telephone lines from Philip Perkins' studio in Albany, CA to The Electronic Cafe International in Santa Monica, CA on January 11th, 1992. The audio was designed to accompany a slow-scan video/computer graphic work performed live by Tim Perkis and transmitted to Santa Monica at the same time. A script was read and recorded by Bonnie Barnett, and this recording became the audio that drove a system of synths, samplers, and other electronic devices under computer control in a highly interactive and fairly unpredictable manner. This version of A NEW WORK is an edit of the original 45 minute live broadcast. The original performance was co-produced by Kit Galloway.
WHITE EAGLES (1993, 15:12 min)
* Scott Fraser: Electric and electronic guitars. * Philip Perkins: MIDI performance controls, synths and sampler, pre-recorded materials, bowed electric bass.
WHITE EAGLES is as simple and direct a memorial to the Bosnian War dead as we could muster. The work is intended to be dark and elegiac, with perhaps a trace of hope within the bitterness. We wanted the piece to be a lamentation for the work and victims of "irregular" bands the world over, but in the end we were overwhelmed by the images of the destruction of Sarajevo and her sister cities-these were the pictures that were in our minds as we performed. The title of the piece is the name of one particularly brutal Serbian "ethnic cleansing" unit. Recorded live to 2 track at Scott Fraser's studio, Los Angeles. The work is in three sections, separated by short silences. _________________________________________________________________
Composed, realized, produced and engineered by The Bifurcators. Architecture BMI & PhilipPerkinsMusic BMI. Philip Perkins & Scott Fraser 1995
Extreme thanks to Doug Carroll and Tim Perkis for their contributions to LIGHT ON A WALL and to Bonnie Barnett for her contributions to A NEW WORK.
Lots o' thanks also to Nancy, Liz, Zach, Roxie and Edison.
Most of the works on this CD would have been impossible to realize without the computer program MAX by Miller Puckette and David Zicarelli, and the Bifurcators thank them for it.
Numerous other albums by Scott Fraser and Philip Perkins are available from:
Fun Music 735 Spokane Avenue Albany, California 94706 USA
PHILIP PERKINS has been involved in experimental music since the mid-1960's and has performed or collaborated with all manner of musicians, filmmakers, bands, ensembles and dance companies including "Blue" Gene Tyranny, The Residents, The Hub, Rotodoti, Bonnie Barnett, Carl Stone, John Bischoff, Doug Carroll and Tim Perkis. He has released 12 albums of his own work on the FUN MUSIC label, and is currently working with Scott Fraser as The Bifurctors, with a new CD just out on the Artifact label: GANG OF TWO.
In the 1970's Perkins made several award-winning short films and collaborated with Scott Fraser on several more. His own works tread the line between music and "sound art" and often explore relationships between the pre-determined and the serendipitous in computer-driven electronic music. Perkins works as a motion-picture sound designer/sound supervisor (member, Cinema Audio Society) and was nominated for an Emmy twice for the sound track of the WONDERS OF NATURE series on the Disney Channel. He has worked on numerous feature and documentary productions mixing both production and post-production sound as well as designing sound effects. At present he and Scott Fraser (The Bifurcators) are preparing a solo piano-plus-interactive computer-driven accompaniment work for piano virtuoso/composer "Blue" Gene Tyranny.
SCOTT FRASER has played amplified and electronic instruments since 1966 and began composing on audio tape in 1972. His pieces utilize 'musique concrete' techniques combined with acoustic instruments and analog and digital synthesis, while recent work concentrates on extending the tonal vocabulary of the electric guitar. He has released three solo albums on the Fun Music label and performed numerous concerts in addition to composing for theatre, dance, poetry and film. As a free-lance sound designer/producer/mixer he has recorded over one hundred albums of classical, folk, jazz and avant-garde music and has mixed over a thousand concerts during extensive national and international touring. He is currently touring as audio engineer with the Kronos Quartet. ScotFraser@aol.com
[jim horton, editor of these history files, disagrees with the early 90s anti-serb propaganda media campaign run by the cia and its allies in the balkans.] | <urn:uuid:a44aa943-425c-484b-a469-4cf1bec47c24> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.o-art.org/history/Computer/Arifact/Bifurcators.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940272 | 1,934 | 1.78125 | 2 |
Because anubias as so slow growing they seem to be a target for algae. I find I usually get diatoms on mine, even in tanks with only natural or ambient lighting.
Try cutting down on your photo period (do you know the K rating and wattage of your lights?) but if that doesn't do anything, you may just have to just gently wipe the diatoms off during your regular tank maintenance.
Diatoms are fairly common in new set-ups and may also be caused by excess silicates. I always have diatoms of some form in most of my set-ups. It is unsightly, but easily removed with my hand or a piece of filter sponge. | <urn:uuid:737b83ad-c5a0-40f9-8be1-29a30c9da414> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bettafish.com/showthread.php?t=116609 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975267 | 145 | 1.578125 | 2 |
Q-My legs are crisscrossed with many unsightly varicose veins, which I have in both legs. I understand that a treatment is available that does not require surgery for the removal of the veins. Do you know of any such treatment?
A-I think you`re alluding to a type of treatment called ``compression sclerotherapy,`` which is useful for treating superficial varicose veins. A sclerosing solution (used to thicken walls of the vein and obliterate it by causing it to collapse) of 3 percent sodium tetradecyl sulfate is injected into the veins. From three to 10 injections can be made into each leg. After the injections, the leg is tightly bandaged. These bandages are removed after the medication has had a chance to act.
If the varicose veins are small and not too prominent, many people can be satisfied with the results obtained from surgical elastic stockings that can control many cases of varicose veins. Using these stockings properly, putting them on each morning while still in bed, when the veins have diminished during the night, and wearing them faithfully all day every day may be just enough to allow the veins to return to normal size and function. These stockings are frequently used after most types of treatments for varicose veins, to help in healing and maintaining good results.
Even with surgical stripping, where varicose veins are actually removed, between 33 and 45 percent of all patients will need additional treatment using compressive sclerotherapy for residual or recurrent varicose veins.
Q-I suffer from dry eyes that bother me most after I`ve been asleep and try to open them. There are no crusts and my eyes don`t appear red or inflamed. Is there anything you can tell me to help?
A-You should see your physician, but here is my guess as to what will happen. He or she will probably prescribe eye drops to help decrease the dryness, but also should measure your tear production to check for a chronic inflammatory disorder called Sjogren`s syndrome. A dry mouth is the other common sign.
For some people with Sjogren`s, these are the only mucous membranes involved, while for others there is dryness at various other sites on the body. Another common characteristic of the disorder is arthritis or joint inflammation, occurring in about one-third of patients.
Dr. Bruckheim will answer questions of general interest in his column. Write to him, c/o Box 119, Orlando, Fla. 32802-0119. | <urn:uuid:ec450d6e-ac7b-4e25-a8b4-99d074060c87> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1990-01-15/features/9001040644_1_varicose-veins-sclerotherapy-sclerosing-solution | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957446 | 533 | 1.8125 | 2 |
TORONTO - The battle over a Japanese macaque known as the Ikea monkey is heating up, with a primate sanctuary alleging his owners strangled the animal, hit him with a wooden spoon and planned to have his teeth removed.
The monkey named Darwin has resided at Story Book Farm Primate Sanctuary in Sunderland, Ont., since he was found in December wandering in the parking lot of a Toronto Ikea, wearing a little shearling coat.
The sanctuary is trying to block efforts by Yasmin Nakhuda, the woman who owned Darwin, to get him back, and it’s now alleging in court documents filed Friday in Ontario Superior Court in Oshawa, Ont., that she abused him.
Nakhuda has said that a breeder gave Darwin to her as a gift in July, though she hasn’t identified the breeder publicly or in the court proceedings. But the sanctuary alleges Nakhuda, a real estate lawyer, was introduced to an illegal exotic animal dealer by a client.
Nakhuda tried to return Darwin after a few days and balked at the $10,000 price tag, but she decided to pay and to keep Darwin after the dealer showed her how to abuse the monkey so he behaved, the sanctuary alleges.
The whole family, including Nakhuda’s husband and her 11-year-old and 16-year-old sons, have abused Darwin since then, the sanctuary alleges.
They have strangled Darwin, hit him in the head and face, used a wooden spoon to hit him, forced him to live in a small dog crate, failed to change his diaper for up to three days and failed to comply with standards of care for captive primates, the sanctuary alleges.
Ted Charney, Nakhuda’s lawyer, said in a statement Sunday that the strangulation allegation may relate to a technique for bathing the monkey.
“She holds him by the neck to keep him still or above water,” he said. “The defence calls this strangulation. (Sanctuary founder Sherri) Delaney has extreme views about people owning a monkey. What the community considers normal pet handling, she considers abuse.”
Anything can be claimed in such court documents, “no matter how ridiculous or untrue,” Charney said.
“We believe this pleading is designed to shock the public and discredit Yasmin so as to intimidate her into dropping the lawsuit,” Charney said in the statement. “The allegations against the children are particularly disturbing.”
Darwin was biting the family to protect himself, which prompted them to make plans to have his teeth removed, the sanctuary alleges. The sanctuary suggests animal cruelty laws were broken.
In advance of a Jan. 31 court hearing, Charney recently interviewed the two animal control officers who got Nakhuda to surrender Darwin and said neither reported signs of abuse.
“When Yasmin was allowed to see him at animal services he was extremely happy to see her and she was very helpful by changing his diaper and washing him,” Charney said the officers testified under oath.
Nakhuda maintains that she signed a surrender form at animal services because she was told if she did she would not face criminal charges for owning an illegal animal.
She has said that she has cared for Darwin like her child and was his mother figure. Photos of Nakhuda and Darwin entered as evidence in court show the monkey swaddled like a baby asleep in bed with Nakhuda and curled up asleep on her younger son’s lap. She has posted videos of Darwin brushing his teeth with her and climbing a door at her office.
“There are many YouTube videos which show Darwin with the family looking just fine and reveal a loving relationship,” Charney said. “Not one person has come forward to say they witnessed abuse.”
Nakhuda has posted more videos this weekend, filmed when she still had possession of him, including one in which she demonstrates how to change his diaper.
An Ontario Superior Court judge has agreed to hear full arguments in January on where Darwin should stay until the case can come to a trial, but ruled at an interim hearing on Dec. 21 that at least until then, the monkey will stay at the sanctuary.
The judge ruled that Nakhuda should be able to visit Darwin in the meantime, but she refused to accept the sanctuary’s conditions of a supervised visit during which she would remain outside Darwin’s enclosure.
She said it would be too traumatic for the monkey to see her in those circumstances, but the sanctuary alleges that Nakhuda won’t agree to a supervised visit because she is afraid of staff witnessing Darwin’s “potentially negative reaction to seeing his primary abuser.” | <urn:uuid:c62b8128-619b-47f1-bbf3-fdee93f05004> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.guelphmercury.com/news/canada/article/868879--sanctuary-alleges-ikea-monkey-was-strangled-and-hit-with-a-wooden-spoon | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.985209 | 987 | 1.523438 | 2 |
September 4, 2008
Jack Hamann ’80 Receives Excellence in Legal Journalism Award
The Washington State Bar Association has announced that it will honor Jack Hamann ’80 with its 2008 Excellence in Legal Journalism Award. WSBA will present the award at its Annual Awards Dinner, to be held September 18, 2008 in Seattle.
Mr. Hamann wrote On American Soil: How Justice Became a Casualty of WWII, an investigation into details surrounding a 1944 riot and lynching at the U.S. Army’s Fort Lawton, located in Seattle. The incident received widespread attention at the time, and resulted in 43 African-American soldiers being charged with various crimes. Twenty-eight soldiers went to prison. The book uncovered deep flaws during the court martial proceedings, prompting Congress to order the U.S. Army to reopen the case more than 60 years after its initial conclusion. Following its investigation, the U.S. Army Board for Correction of Military Records overturned the verdicts, and on July 26, 2008, formally apologized to the soldiers’ families. Mr. Hamann’s wife, Leslie, also worked on the book as a researcher. | <urn:uuid:5945aa6b-a2b2-4cad-8f75-fc2b642b696e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://law.uoregon.edu/2008/09/04/jack-hamann-80-receives-excellence-in-legal-journalism-award/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969117 | 238 | 1.617188 | 2 |
It's a chill morning, the light is thin, the air sweet and the crowd lively as 15,000 of us set off down a country lane lined with old stone walls and houses with Halloween ghosts in the front yard. Survivors wear pink T shirts; a team called Wendy's Warriors wears black ones with F*#! CANCER on the back. It's a beautiful day to walk together for a little while, just five miles, not so much really, except that in the time it takes to finish, 35 more women will learn they have breast cancer--an average of one every three minutes--and eight more will have died.
I'm walking with Team Sue Harmon in this year's American Cancer Society Making Strides Against Breast Cancer campaign in Purchase, N.Y., and we walk with purpose. Sue is the second biggest fund raiser in the country, locked in a fierce, friendly rivalry with Stacy Matseas of San Diego to see who can raise the most. Sue set her goal at $100,000 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of her diagnosis. I didn't know her back then, when she was 32, a first-grade teacher with a 6-month-old and a 3-year-old and a disease that came out of nowhere. The doctors' advice was clear and aggressive: a lumpectomy, followed by six months of chemotherapy, then radiation, then five years of tamoxifen. Her ovaries came out because the tumors were estrogen-positive. And the minute she was able, she and her husband Dave and their girls began reaching out and fighting back.
Sue turned out to be a demon fund raiser. Friends designed her a website (Teamsueharmon.com) she gave speeches, did interviews. The world was her classroom. Everyone from kindergartners with birthday parties to high school girls marking sweet 16 asked that in place of presents, guests donate to Team Sue Harmon. This fall a 7-year-old handed over a zip-top bag with $51.87 from a summer lemonade stand. People know to give out Sue's number; she gets calls from friends of friends across the country and around the world, women who need someone to cry with or yell at, women whose mammogram "found something" and need to talk.
"What's the first thing you tell them?" I ask her before the walk. "Breathe," she says. It's easy to forget to do when your life has been knocked out from under you.
When she began her outreach, she says, "I thought, I'm one of the lucky ones; I have to be there for the next person." Well, now she's the next person all over again. She was on the school playground a few weeks ago when she got the call: That lump she had felt a few days before? Not good.
Even after 10 years without a recurrence, she knew better than to ask, Why me? But I couldn't help wondering. She did everything she was supposed to. She has a mental attitude so positive, you could sell shares in it and retire. She runs at least five miles several times a week and had regular tests and scans. This just feels all wrong.
But Sue seems to understand what Maya Angelou once observed: that bitterness, like cancer, eats its host. "But anger is like fire," Angelou notes. "It burns it all clean." Recalling the day she got the news, Sue says, "I swore a lot." Eight days after the tumor was found, she was back on the operating table for a double mastectomy. In a few weeks she'll find out what comes next. But she's already back in the fight. She hated missing the walk this year, so we e-mailed and texted and sent pictures to her all along the route. I'm counting on her to lead us next year.
None of us know how our days will be numbered. We think nothing can touch us--the car that swerves, the lightning strike, the cells that go insane and start setting fires. So we skip along, stopping to complain about lesser things: plans that fail and doors that stick and people who don't know yield from merge.
I've heard people talk about cancer as a wake-up call, even a blessing in disguise. Sue was born wide awake. She's like sunshine with skin. Her friends learn by watching her. Courage is said to be the virtue that makes other virtues possible; maybe joy is the gift that makes other gifts possible, the compliment that doubt pays to hope.
You may not know my Sue, but if you're lucky, you have one of your own. Someone who lifts you up because she lives above the waterline of distractions and temptations that drown out things that matter more. I found when we went off on spring break last year that Sue is a skilled shell hunter; her grandfather taught her. You have to see through the debris the waves bring in, so much random waste, so carelessly tossed aside. She walks that beach with her eyes sharp, and she finds treasures, and gathers them, and brings them home.
6 months ago | <urn:uuid:69c818dd-26ac-457f-8f34-05995cba2492> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://spoonfeedin.blogspot.com/2008/10/personality-sue-harmonbreast-cancers.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978484 | 1,062 | 1.53125 | 2 |
May 18, 2003
Amanda R. Rittenhouse
Phone: (504) 865-5210
I must admit that I was a bit skeptical. Why do I need to take a bicycle safety course? I already know the basics. Wear a helmet. Ride with traffic. Know the hand signals. What else is there? At the time, I didn't realize that I had much to learn. But despite my ignorance, I did agree that if I was going to be on the newly established Bicycle Advisory Committee, I needed to learn as much as I could.
The committee formed in February after the Office of Environmental Affairs and the New Orleans Regional Planning Commission received a $50,000 grant from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to promote bicycle safety.
Liz Davey, Tulane's environmental coordinator, facilitates the committee, which comprises staff, faculty and students from various university departments and offices. Since the committee represents a range of cycling experience, the idea of taking a safety course met with mixed reactions.
While some were asking, "Which of my three bikes should I bring?" I was thinking, "Where can I get a bike?" So with some uncertainty, I began part one of the course taught by Stanley Cosper, Tulane Public Safety officer and committee member. Eight of us met one Thursday afternoon in the committee's usual monthly meeting place, 201 Alcee Fortier Hall.
Cosper began with "Effective Cycling," a 45-minute video. I quickly realized I didn't know half as much about bicycle safety as I thought. There's a big difference between knowing how to ride a bike and knowing how to handle one. By the end of the video, I knew when to yield to cross traffic, how to change lanes, where to position myself at an intersection and, most import-antly, that cyclists fare best when they act and are treated the same as drivers of other vehicles.
Cosper then focused on safety issues specific to New Orleans. For instance, to avoid drivers who run red lights, it's safer to wait a few seconds after the light turns green before entering the intersection. He discussed how to maneuver around potholes, streetcar tracks and other obstacles in the road and emphasized knowing your route.
Audrey Warren, a graduate student at the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, also a bicycle mechanic and committee member, ended the session with a review of bike maintenance and a safety checklist. Are the handlebars securely attached to the bike? Do the tires have enough air? Are the brakes functioning correctly?
With checklist in hand, I went home and looked over the bike I would ride the next day during part two of the course. I was amazed at how comfortable I felt with the bike and its many parts. I knew that if there were any problems, my training would help me to spot them. By the end of my inspection, I was secure in knowing this bike could safely take me from point A to point B. The next afternoon our group met at the Office of Public Safety in the Diboll Complex.
Our session began at the top of the parking garage where Cosper showed us def-ensive riding techniques to avoid collisions with pedestrians, other cyclists and cars. We continued on to Weinmann Road, where we learned to jump curbs for times when we may need to get out of the road quickly or in Cosper's case, pursue a suspect.
But the true test of the course came when we rode our bikes down St. Charles Avenue and on through neighborhood streets to the Jackson/ Gretna Ferry on Tchoupitoulas. I had been quite nervous about the prospect of riding alongside cars. But when we actually merged into traffic, I had more confidence than I ever thought I would. I knew the rules of the road and how to handle my bike.
Riding down St. Charles I thought, "You just haven't seen New Orleans until you've seen it from a bike." It was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. I truly felt like "the king of the world."
The committee is considering a streamlined version of the course for the Tulane community and also monthly rides. If you are interested in learning more about bicycle safety and gaining confidence on your bike, e-mail Cosper or Davey at email@example.com.
For more information about where to ride in New Orleans, you can pick up the Bicycle Map of New Orleans at the Tulane University Bookstore. Test your knowledge of bike safety at http://green.tulane.edu/bike/.
Amanda R. Rittenhouse can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.org.
Tulane University, New Orleans, LA 70118 504-865-5000 email@example.com | <urn:uuid:ad8eadb4-ae15-499f-af13-12e4ed8709ac> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://tulane.edu/news/releases/archive/2003/along_for_the_ride.cfm?RenderForPrint=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970291 | 976 | 1.773438 | 2 |
Evan, at five pounds, can now suck, swallow, and breathe with the best of babies, and has passed every test required for graduation. As soon as he gains seven ounces, enough for hernia surgery, he will spring this joint.
Both babies should be heading home by week's end, perhaps even on the same day - fitting, after all this time.
These "micro-preemies" were born at the gestational ages of 23 weeks and five days for Eliahna, and 23 weeks and three days for Evan. A normal pregnancy is 40 weeks.
At birth, their chance of survival was one in five, doctors say. Half of such babies that do survive, studies show, suffer lifelong disabilities, from retardation to blindness to lung and digestive problems.
Doctors say that Evan and Eliahna have run the gauntlet comparatively well, surely in the healthier half, and that there's nothing to indicate they can't lead happy and healthy lives. Only time will tell.
Doctors also say Evan's and Eliahna's chances of doing well are better than they would have been five years ago, maybe even five months ago, because of changes in neonatal intensive care.
Andrea Silva grew up in the Philadelphia area and earned her doctorate in exercise science and physiology in Utah, where she met her husband. She was a professor in Wisconsin when she got pregnant.
They had just decided to move back to the Philadelphia area because Josh, a consultant, was in Philadelphia all the time working with Comcast on Hispanic sports marketing. Andrea was visiting her mother in Doylestown for a week in March when her water broke at 18 weeks.
Doctors told her she'd almost surely miscarry and there wasn't much they could do. She just had to hope she could hold off delivery to 24 weeks, the edge of viability.
She and Josh prayed.
When their daughter arrived, they named her Eliahna - Hebrew for "God has answered."
She was 11 1/2 inches - the length of a Barbie doll. "Her skin was so thin, it was translucent," said Andrea. "You could literally see her heart beating through her skin."
Karrie and Ed Obert-Thorn are fifth-grade teachers living in Levittown. She had what is known as an incompetent cervix. At 20 weeks, she was ordered to bed rest. Three weeks later, she went into labor and delivered by caesarian section.
Immediately, like Eliahna, her son was put on a breathing machine, with IVs running through his stomach, a feeding tube down his throat. He was wrapped in plastic because at that age and size, the body can't generate or maintain enough heat to survive.
Karrie and Ed named him Evan, which means, according to a baby book they found in the maternity ward, "young warrior."
"When Eliahna was born," said Gerard Cleary, a doctor in Abington's neonatal intensive care unit, "if her lung were a tree, an upside-down tree, she had the big trunk, she had the branches, she had the little branches, but she had no leaves. We breathe in our leaves. Our leaves are what move the gas in and out.
"So we had to use the little tiny branches to exchange the gas, and when you do that, you can hurt the lung. Or, if you do it wrong, or do it too long, you can create lung problems that last her whole life. If you drive gas into the lung the wrong way, it can perpetually injure the lung."
Doctors and nurses walk a tightrope between helping babies grow and harming them with their interventions.
"Delivering perfect care day to day is how you grind out a good outcome in the NICU," said Cleary. "Eliahna is going to be here until she's about four months old. An adult in an intensive care unit that long almost never lives. But babies in intensive care units that long almost always live. And it's the day-to-day grind of delivering perfection that gets you there in the best shape.
"So then, if you zoom in on the day to day," he added, "how do you make the day to day perfect?"
Cleary thinks one answer is to improve the flow of information to the bedside.
Put a computer screen at the bedside, one that can collect and display information from all the monitors and machines around the baby and beyond.
Let data from the ventilator, incubator, and heart monitor flow right onto that computer screen. Let X-rays, physician orders and lab results be available, too, along with the baby's medical history.
Graphs of key measurements like weight and temperature will be displayed, making it easier to spot slight changes or trends over days and weeks. All with just a click or two.
The theory is to free the nurse from tracking down information elsewhere, from working as a scribe filling out flowsheets, from using a computer across the room.
Let the nurse focus more on direct care, on catching warning signs even earlier. The ICU nurse is the baby's best defense against a bad outcome.
"Imagine it as a cockpit," said Cleary, "where the pilot doesn't have to float around the plane to get all his data. It flows into him so he can operate the plane safely. . . . That's the idea. You can't be scattered and fly a plane."
The system took a year to put in place and is still imperfect, but Cleary hopes that over time, results will show babies do slightly better because of it.
Evan's and Eliahna's cribs - high-tech incubators known as isolettes - were side by side from Day One.
And the babies went through so many of the same things. They had heart-valve surgery days apart. They had laser eye surgery the same day, and their retina problems were so similar, the surgeon thought they were twins.
(Not twins, betrothed!)
"They're almost like mirror images," said Houlihan, the nurse who has spent the most time caring for Eliahna.
On June 29, Evan had a minor setback. He had to go off his oxygen canula and back on the CPAP oxygen mask, which covered his face and pushed oxygen into his lungs. Karrie wrote in her journal on the Caring Bridge website: "Evan continues to grow and they try to motivate him by telling him that 'your girlfriend won't stand for a guy on the CPAP.' Even the nurses refer to them as boyfriend and girlfriend!! We are blessed to have this family in our lives as well."
The feeling was mutual. Evan had his heart surgery a few days before Eliahna. Seeing how well he did made it easier for her parents.
"It's truly amazing how God puts people in your lives at just the right time," Josh wrote on their Caring Bridge site.
Evan's and Eliahna's paths have not been identical. Eliahna moved out of the covered isolette to an open crib a few days before Evan.
"The NICU broke them up for a while," said Karrie.
"They didn't want them to get too serious, too soon," joked Andrea.
On July 5, Karrie wrote in her journal, "We know Evan is excited because his girlfriend, Eliahna, also moved and they are now in the same pod again."
About 5,000 babies are born every year at Abington, from 15 to 20 the size of Evan and Eliahna. No one in the NICU has ever seen two arrive on the same day and follow such similar paths.
Babies leaving the NICU today tend to have slightly higher weights than those of 10 years ago, and the circumference of their heads tends to be a little bigger - indications that they are leaving in slightly better condition and might fare better in years to come, according to Eddie Chang, another neonatologist caring for Eliahna and Evan.
One explanation, he said, is better nutrition and a change in feeding strategies.
Babies are getting more breastmilk, first through feeding tubes and then with bottles. In addition, "we let kids eat sooner," said Chang.
He meant that doctors are more likely now to feed less through intravenous methods and more through a tube into the stomach.
There is also more physical therapy. Once Evan and Eliahna were stable, "we actually have them do gentle exercises," Chang said. The other day, for example, a therapist turned Eliahna onto her stomach and tucked her knees in, which encouraged her to lift her head.
"Stop showing off," the therapist said.
Babies also spend less time today on ventilators, and this appears to make their lungs a little stronger.
"Five to 10 years ago," Chang said, "if a baby looked like he or she wasn't breathing perfectly, there's a high likelihood that we'd actually put a breathing tube in. Now we let babies be slightly imperfect in the way they breathe. So babies will have apneas or events where they ring off, their breathing stops, their heart rate drops, their saturations drop a little bit. And that's perfectly fine, as long as they recover from it or we can make them recover from it."
Neither Cleary nor Chang had any idea how much it has cost to care for Eliahna or Evan. But both believe that the better the care, the fewer setbacks a baby experiences, and the less time micro-preemies will spend in the NICU - at savings to all.
Evan and Eliahna, coincidentally but hardly surprisingly, have the same insurance coverage from Blue Cross, which is expected to pay Abington about $2,000 per day for each baby - close to $250,000 each by the time they leave.
With that reimbursement, said chief financial officer Michael Walsh, Abington will just about break even on the cost of caring for Evan and Eliahna. Every insurance company negotiates its own rate of payment with the hospital, and how any hospital performs financially depends a great deal on its payer mix. If Evan and Eliahna had no insurance and their bills were paid by Medicaid, the reimbursement would be about half, Walsh said.
These babies' parents experience moments most others do not.
One example: On May 28, Karrie wrote: "Without the tubing down his throat, we had another first. . . . I heard Evan cry for the first time. I waited 40 days to hear him cry and it was the sweetest sound I've heard. I'm sure as he gets bigger and his cry becomes louder I'll deny that I ever said that! Our son's strength and fight is an inspiration. We are so proud of him. He is a true warrior!"
Another, July 30, from Andrea: "I sat for a long time just watching her this afternoon while she was sleeping in my arms. She must have been dreaming of something happy because she kept smiling and making funny faces. A few weeks ago I could barely see Eliahna's face with all her breathing tubes and now all she has is clear canula tubes and I can see her face so clearly. I love looking at her rosy, chubby little cheeks and am grateful and awe-inspired of how far she has come. I can literally sit there for hours just staring at her and loving her."
Both mothers are beginning to fret as the day of discharge approaches.
They know their favorite nurses can't go with them. There will be no heart, respiratory, and blood-oxygen-level monitors at home.
But for all four parents, their sense of relief, gratitude, and joy can't be overstated.
Once they leave the hospital, Evan and Eliahna won't see each other for a while. Each must stay close to home.
So the Silvas and the Obert-Thorns went out to dinner Saturday night to celebrate the end of their long journey together.
And to plan the wedding.
To read previous articles in this series, go to
Contact staff writer Michael Vitez at 215-854-5639 or email@example.com. | <urn:uuid:88cf6549-b575-4b89-a007-f33370ab4721> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.philly.com/2010-08-10/news/24971326_1_doctors-philadelphia-area-babies | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982622 | 2,554 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Land issued a statement Nov. 2 with Paul de Vries, president of the New York Divinity School and Joseph Potasnik, executive vice president of the New York Board of Rabbis. The men called for economic sanctions that would specifically target banks working even indirectly with Iranian financial institutions, firms and governments that export refined petroleum to Iran.
They hope the steps will encourage diplomacy and the human rights efforts of Iranians living under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's regime.
"We stand in solidarity with all people of goodwill both in the region and around the world in seeking to stop a nuclear Iran from grievously imperiling Israel, the Middle East and the world's peace," Land explained.
He said: "Jesus commanded His followers to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world. In seeking meaningful sanctions against the current Iranian regime, we are attempting to be salt in preserving Israel and the entire region from bloody conflict and terrible loss of life.
"We are seeking to be light by expressing our commitment to the intrinsic value and invaluable worth of all of our fellow human beings, both inside and outside Iran, whose lives and liberties are in peril by the dangerous rogue regime which presently oppresses the Iranian people."
Recent Public Opinion Strategies polls reveal that 72 percent of American voters polled believe it is "unlikely" that Iran will live up to the type of nuclear agreement being discussed, while only 27 percent think it is "likely" they will.
A full 39 percent say it is "not at all likely" that Iran will abide by the type of nuclear agreement being discussed in Vienna.
Land is one of more than 50 signers of a letter sent to Congress by Christian Leaders for a Nuclear-Free Iran last month, calling for urgent action to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
The letter urged a total arms embargo and a cut off of exports of refined petroleum products, including gasoline, as a firm yet peaceful measure against the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism.
(Pictured: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) | <urn:uuid:a389dbad-6bdf-498b-b1a1-52bd66146314> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.charismamag.com/blogs/standing-with-israel/7264-southern-baptist-leader-calls-for-immediate-sanctions-on-iran | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941009 | 412 | 1.578125 | 2 |
Having passed the effective date, July 1, 2006, for many changes brought about by the Higher Education Reconciliation Act of 2005 (HERA), we present the following highlights and have identified some additional resources to help you stay current on the topic.
This summary represents some of the major school and borrower provisions.
Annual Stafford Loan Limits
- The Department of Education changed the trigger event on loan limits from:
- Loans certified (FFEL) or originated (DL) on or after July 1, 2007, to
- Loans disbursed on or after July 1, 2007.
- Federal Register Vol. 71, No. 211 published on November 1, 2006 provided regulations for the HERA changes and gave the updated trigger event for the loan limits.
- Because the trigger event is loans that are disbursed, schools will be able to certify loans according to the increased limits earlier than July 1, 2007, but Stafford loans for these limits cannot be disbursed until on or after July 1, 2007.
- Effective for loans certified on or after July 1, 2006, the PLUS loan program has expanded to allow graduate and professional students to borrow a PLUS loan. These loans will be made under the same terms and conditions that apply to parents in the existing PLUS program.
- PLUS graduate/professional borrowers must complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), and schools must certify the maximum amount for which the student is eligible in Stafford loans. However, the borrower need not apply for, and the school must not require the student receive, any Stafford loan in order to be eligible for the PLUS loan.
- The HERA refrained from interfering with the scheduled switch to fixed rates for both Stafford and PLUS loans (6.8% and 7.9%, respectively); however, HERA increased the fixed PLUS loan interest rate to 8.5% for FFELP PLUS loans. Interest rate provisions are effective for all new Stafford and PLUS loans disbursed on or after July 1, 2006.
Federal Default Fee
- Effective for loans guaranteed on or after July 1, 2006, guarantors are required to deposit a 1% Federal Default Fee (previously Guarantee Fee), which may be deducted from the loan proceeds or paid by non-federal sources (e.g., lenders).
Borrower Origination Fee
- Beginning with loans first disbursed on or after July 1, 2006, the maximum origination fee dropped from 3% to 2%. Each year thereafter, the maximum percentage declines until the origination fee is eliminated in 2010.
- PLUS borrowers (parents and graduate/professional students) must still be charged a 3% origination fee.
School as Lender (SAL)
- Effective July 1, 2006, SAL provisions changed as follows:
- Cohort Default Rate cannot exceed 10% (used to be 15%).
- Schools must submit an annual SAL compliance audit.
- All earnings, including those from special allowance, interest payments, and any proceeds from the sale of loans – except for reasonable reimbursement of direct administrative expenses – must be used for need-based grant programs.
- Note: A Federal Register published November 1, 2006, contains a full page of commentary by the Department which outlines expectations. Reference page 64390 of the November 1, 2006 Federal Register document.
- SALs can only make subsidized and unsubsidized Stafford loans to graduate or professional students enrolled at the school (i.e., no PLUS loans or loans to undergraduates).
- The SAL must offer loans with origination fees, interest rates, or both that are lower than those authorized to be charged under the Higher Education Act.
- SALs must award contracts for financing, servicing, or administration on a competitive basis.
- Effective for any disbursement made on or after February 8, 2006, waivers of the multiple disbursement requirement and the 30-day delayed delivery requirement for first-time, first-year students are available to schools with a cohort default rate of less than 10% for the three most recent fiscal years.
- Foreign schools must have low cohort default rates to qualify for the waivers, effective for loans with loan periods beginning on or after July 1, 2006.
Other Useful Resources | <urn:uuid:86c47985-615d-4462-b750-83d975399b34> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nelnet.net/media/newsletters/schoolnews/HERA_update.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 | 0.942637 | 868 | 1.570313 | 2 |
... and don't remove the 3rd finger until you play the thumb on the second octave, etc...
Chopin is saying don't worry about that, just get the movements smooth.
That's a contradiction for almost all hands except for Chopin who had the most supple of fingers. The poster said that he/she can't predictably play arpeggios fast on white keys beyond the 2nd octave. That leads me to indicate a consistency issue in technique because the stretch is more wider on all white keys, it's more difficult to play an arpeggio more smoothly.
If you don't worry about holding the 3rd finger at all, or remove the 3rd finger too soon, not only you'll get a hiccup, but you'll miss the note because your hand is already in motion, and you might slide pass the note and hit a crack in a multi-octave passage. There is no way to play an arpeggio fast, smoothly, and consistently, both dynamically and rhythmically, if one doesn't try to at least "think legato" in execution. And if you hop from the 3rd to the 1st finger, one is unintentionally liable to play an triplet of ascending chord triads; Even worse, to get a quartet of 16th notes rhythmically now becomes more difficult.
Surely one's not going to hold the 3rd finger in position as long as the 1st or 2nd finger, but just enough to have the thumb either on or very near the position of the right note; Treat it like a pivot without rotation to stabilize the hand in position to transition the 3rd finger to the thumb. This all happens very fast and what I am saying is in super slow-motion.
Every millimeter in motion will make a difference, and I believe the secret lies in the pulling the thumb under the fingers as much as possible toward the intended note without disrupting the transition between the notes both dynamically and rhythmically. | <urn:uuid:3bc32479-d9d4-4a70-8279-cd4c30848fee> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://pianosociety.com/new/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=42501 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962136 | 409 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Eagle-eyed readers of this blog will no doubt have realised by now that, regardless of my wishes, my name is James Ward.
I am not the first person to be called James Ward. My dad’s brother was called James Ward. There was an eighteenth century painter of animals called James Ward whose painting of a horse was used on the cover of Bryan Ferry’s 1994 solo album Mamouna. There was a psychologist in the nineteenth century called James Ward who defended a philosophy of personalistic panpsychism based on his research in physiology and psychology which he defined as a “spiritualistic monism”.
There is also a tennis player called James Ward.
A couple of days ago, James Ward the tennis player was playing at Wimbledon. As I have already mentioned, my name is James Ward and James Ward the tennis player is also called James Ward, and so as a sort of joke, some people on Twitter sent me tweets saying “Good luck at Wimbledon!”
What they didn’t realise is that I happen to work in Wimbledon, so I was able to take their messages of goodwill at face value. These people had intended to make a joke, but were actually wishing me well against their will. I didn’t bother to correct them. Instead, I kept their messages of accidental kindness like a sort of positivity thief. A spiritual mugger. A happiness bandit.
As a result of all the people coming to see the tennis, Wimbledon station has been a lot busier than normal for the last week or so.
After leaving work on Friday, I went to the station, but when I got there, I saw several people standing around, each holding a newspaper of some sort:
This is a massively unhelpful photo. It doesn’t really show you anything, but what I’ve found is that if you don’t include some sort of image in a blog post, then people stop reading.
I’ve highlighted the people with the newspapers using green circles below:
an illustrated religious magazine, published semi-monthly in 195 languages by Jehovah’s Witnesses via the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania and printed in various branch offices around the world.
I don’t really know a great deal about Jehovah’s Witnesses – although I remember that someone I used to work with wasn’t a huge fan, as his wife (who had been raised as a Jehovah’s Witness) had been shunned by her entire family when she decided it wasn’t for her. I wanted to find out more.
But there was a problem.
Even though there were several people standing around holding copies of The Watchtower, they didn’t seem to be making much effort to give them to people. In fact, they were making no effort whatsoever to give them to anyone. I stood less than five feet away from two of them for over fifteen minutes and at no point was I offered a copy of their magazine.
I waited and I waited and I waited.
And it wasn’t just me. During the whole fifteen minutes, they didn’t give a single copy of their magazine to anyone. Not one fucking copy. There were half a dozen of them standing there and they did nothing. They just waved the magazines around like they were a prize on the worst ever episode of Wheel Of Fortune. Perhaps the magazines weren’t free and were for sale, but they still didn’t make any fucking effort.
I tried catching the eye of one of them, that didn’t work. I tried avoiding the eye of one of them, that didn’t work.
The more I stood there, the angrier I got. It felt like bad customer service. It made me think of all the time I’ve spent standing in Topman or Office, holding a size 42 Chelsea boot, waiting for someone to come over and acknowledge me. It reminded me of all the time I’ve spent in Currys or PC World or Dixons, hoping someone would be kind enough to sell me a fucking printer.
According to Wikipedia, The Watchtower is “is the most widely circulated magazine in the world, with an average print run of over 42,000,000 copies per month”.
I suppose I could have gone over and asked for a copy of the Watchtower, but shouldn’t they have been the proactive ones here? They’re meant to be evangelical. I can’t be expected to knock on their door. That’s their job. | <urn:uuid:1e9322c6-e107-4f56-bce9-a71708b17a48> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://iamjamesward.com/tag/customer-service/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982589 | 963 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Posted: Mar 6, 2013 2:49 PM
Updated: Mar 6, 2013 2:49 PM
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) Texas water planners facing mounting scrutiny from lawmakers have privately ranked a list of projects as priorities to address the state's growing water crisis.
The Associated Press obtained the list compiled by the Texas Water Development Board through an open records request for the agency's emails.
The list focusing on $8 billion in projects serving large urban areas was quietly sent last month to top Republicans, including Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and Sen. Troy Fraser.
Water board chairman Billy Bradford says the agency is not "terribly comfortable" with the request to draw up the list. He says it's not the agency's job to prioritize the more than 500 projects in the state's water plan.
Water is a priority for the Legislature this session after a historic drought in 2011. | <urn:uuid:6dba97f3-3f77-4728-bbc9-d964b329809b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.krgv.com/news/apnewsbreak-texas-board-lists-top-water-projects-370404 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943 | 183 | 1.75 | 2 |
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Different Signs and Their Uses
There is a wide range of signs available, all in different sizes and with different features. Some signs are better suited to certain purposes than others, although by and large, LED signs and LED writing boards can be adapted to suit a number of applications. Here are a few examples of the different types of signs available and their potential applications.
Exhibition Boards – These large, easily portable and very durable flashing LED boards are perfect for trade shows and business grande openings. They include 12 different flashing setting and will alternate the colours of the lights with each flash. This makes for an eye-catching, but elegant look, which will be sure to attract attention and custom! Like many models of boards, these exhibition boards can run on rechargeable battery power, making them 100% portable.
Double Sided Writing Boards – These durable, scratch resistant, but lightweight LED writing boards are ideally suited to restaurants, bars and cafes. The two sided writing surface makes them perfect for writing menus, and these boards can be hung safely above a bar. This can really help to increase sales, as customers will be very likely to notice it and might well go on to order something that, otherwise, they might not have thought to buy.
Logo Light Box Writing Boards – Again, ideally suited to restaurants and bars, these logo boards have a light box at the top, which can advertise a product sold by your business, or can be silk screen printed with the name or logo of your own business. These signs include a very strong metal mounting system on the back, meaning they can be securely attached to a wall or other flat surface.
Multi-color Frameless LED Board – These smaller boards can be displayed either hanging or on a stand. This feature makes them perfect for hotels and similar businesses. The bright colours, boldness of the LED light and different flashing settings, mean that the sign can be read from a long distance. They are very lightweight and easy to move and transport, but make of highest quality PMMA, which is incredibly scratch resistant.
LED, by nature, is an incredibly bright but efficient light source. Because there is minimal reflected, or lost, light emitted from the diode, LED signs do not contribute to light pollution in the same way as many other types of lighted signs. Furthermore, the efficiency of the light means that the signs are always clear, bold and easy to read even from long distances. Customers often want clarity from a business and an LED sign of any type will certainly provide this. It is fair to say that whichever model of sign you decide to purchase; you will see an increase in custom to your business as the sign grabs attention so easily. With all writing boards, you can change and update information on them and in this way, you are completely in control of how you choose to publicise your business and advertise your services. All models of LED boards really let you take control. | <urn:uuid:cf17790d-bad4-4bad-886e-4612319dd90f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://flashingboards.com/Different-Signs-and-Their-Uses-nd-410.html | 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 | 0.960102 | 602 | 1.710938 | 2 |
Former Ms. World Canada turned internationally respected human rights activist
When former Miss Canada NAZANIN AFSHIN-JAM learned that a young girl in Iran was on death row for stabbing a man who attacked her, she knew she had to take action. Two years of lobbying and 350,000 signatures culminated in the girl's release - but Nazanin's work was not done there. She expanded her campaign and started a larger effort to put an end to the execution of minors with Stop Child Executions. The organization is run entirely by volunteers who tirelessly work to gather information and lobby governments to put pressure on the countries where child executions are still practiced. Nazanin passionately addresses human rights abuses, particularly for women and children in Iran, and has dedicated herself to being a voice for the voiceless. | <urn:uuid:d326ab2b-a37c-489b-b00e-99de9ffd9dc3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.getinvolved.ca/givideos/nazanin-afshin-jam/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972009 | 163 | 1.671875 | 2 |
More good news! Tangle has been purchased by the Tuch + Technik Textilmuseum in Neumuenster, Germany to be part of their permanent collection. The Museum was the last stop on the Color Improvisations exhibit itinerary. That exhibit has now been dismantled and the unsold quilts returned to the artists. Tangle has found a new, permanent home abroad!
Along the road between Jaipur and Agra we stopped to visit Fatehpur Sikri. This palace/fort was built by the Mughal Emperor Akbar in 1571. It was the Mughal capital for 14 years. The architecture is a blend of Hindu and Islamic styles. The signature style seems to be the elaborate stone carving, from walls to floors, ceilings, posts, and even rooftops.
Here's another day in Jaipur. We were told that the Hawa Mahal, Palace of Winds, below is the most photographed building in Jaipur. It was being renovated the few days that we were there. The building is 5 stories high but only one room deep. It was built in 1799. The elaborate system of balconies and screens kept the women of the court hidden while they surveyed action on the street below.
Here is the back side of the Hawa Mahal.
The Chandra Mahal and the City Palace Museum make up a great courtyard in central Jaipur.
Pat and I spent an afternoon shopping around the intersection in the photo above. Pat bought some handmade scissors from the gentleman below.
I had my hand henna'd.
This man ran a sewing business right on the sidewalk. He's making shorts.
A good place for a nap.
Street scenes around Jaipur.
We took the tour bus from Jaipur to Agra the next day. We came upon this camel driver along the way.
Here are some scenes from the bus during the drive from Delhi to Jaipur.
Our main destination, on the outskirts of Jaipur, was the Amber Fort. The Fort was established in 1592 by Man Singh I . It was built on the remains of an 11th fort. The central buildings of the fort were added by Jai Singh I from 1621-1667.
We rode elephants into the Fort.
The main plaza, Jaleb Chowk.
The Ganesh Pol, gateway to the private apartments, built in 1640.
Sattais Katcheri, where the revenue records were written.
Sheesh Mahal, with its mirrored ceiling.
Done for the day.
Jal Mahal, the water palace. Built in mid-1700's by Madho Singh I. It was later used as a duck-hunting lodge. | <urn:uuid:32013a78-2756-42fd-b51f-b1dfbf9aba30> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.handwerktextiles.blogspot.com/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97795 | 567 | 1.601563 | 2 |
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This guide takes you through everything you need to know to use the camera and take good pictures successfully. Everything from the basic controls of the camera to the best ways to use white balance and other such controls are covered, it also tells you what accessories will work best and why.
The book is easy to follow and understand, the text is large and split into easy-to-follow sections and the images that accompany it are well captioned.
The index can help you find what you're looking for and the glossary explains terms you may not know or thought about before.
Overall, it's a good guide perfect for both the beginner or more advanced camera user. | <urn:uuid:6ededb84-4f28-489e-b1f5-3c2f8f208436> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ephotozine.com/book-review/canon-eos-7d-digital-field-guide-338 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944852 | 165 | 1.679688 | 2 |
A book entitled "Creative writing for personal growth" had been irresistible as I browsed the Library shelves. Taking time to read through I selected the exercises that appealed to me in some way, and I began to write about one of the rooms of my childhood home. I chose the rather unimaginatively named "Front room". This was in contrast to the room to the rear, the kitchen warmed by the Rayburn, in front of which we bathed in the steel bath.
The "front room" was kept clean and tidy, and was for watching the Black and White Minstrel Show on Saturday evenings; for doing homework at the large oak table; for Mum to play her favourite sheet music on the upright piano, and particularly Carols such as "Little Donkey" at Christmas time. Later on a succession of boyfriends would be welcomed by the family in our front room.
As I revisited this room in my memory, I became aware that Mum liked to arrange things in pairs, as indeed I still do; A pair of photographs on top of the piano; a pair of china figurines wearing blue and pink crinoline skirts on the sideboard; and matching green and pink metallic fish either side of the mantelpiece- a gift from one of her three children.
In my mind I was drawn to something under the dining table, a somewhat battered Noah's ark painted in red and green. Missing part of its original hinged roof, due to years of play, it housed a selection of now equally worn wooden animals. The paint had faded, and some parts were missing altogether. Few of them now had their original pair completely intact, but they still provided hours of enjoyment. I once had the desire to see the set repaired, with a complete roof, repaired bodies and fresh paint, but this has remained wishful thinking.
As I centred on this room and all its memories, I was drawn to the electric fire, with its flame effect. Inside plastic moulded coal, were two bulbs. These generated sufficient heat to spin thin metal disks to create the living coal effect so popular in 1950's Britain. The problem was that more often than not, only one of theses bulbs worked. I would watch as only half the amount of light and moving coal effect were generated, whilst the other half remained in darkness, without warmth or movement.
This sight often generated in me a deep sadness, and as I grew to understand what was needed to remedy the situation, I would long for the defective bulb to be replaced. On occasion when it was, I loved the effect of the light and movement of the two in combination. This deep fascination with the fire and its bulbs, seemed to to connect with my own story and the loss of my twin through a miscarriage.
In this room where Mum arranged everything in pairs, where we played with pairs of animals housed in the wooden Noah's Ark, and the fire with the lifeless bulb, all connected with the sense of loneliness and grief at living life without my twin. For a while I belonged to the "Lone Twin Network" a UK based support group for those who have lost twins at any age and in any circumstance. Here I was able to share how I felt living as a sole twin, without having known what he or she, with whom I had shared a womb was like.
Grief and loneliness, and a perpetual search for that other, in the hope of finding myself too, have been some of the resulting difficulties to be resolved. I have alternately felt angry with my twin for leaving, and almost jealous that he or she had it so easy going straight to Heaven!. I do believe in some deep sense God meant me to survive against the odds, and has a ministry for me to do. I am also convinced that my twin has been ministering in ways that I will not understand until we meet in heaven.
Returning to our "Front room", to peer at the electric fire, one bulb radiating warmth with its living flame, and the other cold, dark and lifeless, helped me to address this loss, and be reconciled to these events.
I live in the UK, and attend an evangelical Church of England, where I am training as a Reader, (lay preacher). I support the work of a Christian Healing Centre, and enjoy writing, particularly poetry.
Article Source: http://www.faithwriters.com
If you died today, are you absolutely certain that you would go to heaven? You can be! TRUST JESUS NOW
JOIN US at FaithWriters for Free. Grow as a Writer and Spread the Gospel. | <urn:uuid:4355f49d-9f6a-496d-ae8c-fd9f523c97c4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.faithwriters.com/reprint-article-details.php?article=7319 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979774 | 943 | 1.515625 | 2 |
March 15, 2002
In what experts said was the first criminal charge ever brought against a major accounting firm, Arthur Andersen has been indicted on a single count of obstruction of justice for destroying thousands of documents related to the Enron investigation, the Justice Department announced on Thursday. The indictment, handed up by a grand jury last week and unsealed on Thursday, describes a concerted effort by Andersen to shred records related to Enron in four of the firm's offices in Houston, Chicago, London and Portland, Ore. It was the first charge in the government's investigation of Enron's collapse in December.
March 11, 2002
Arthur Andersen, facing the defection of employees and clients as it struggles under the weight of a potential criminal indictment, is in negotiations to sell itself to another Big Five accounting firm, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, and an announcement of a deal could come as soon as this week, according to people involved in the discussions. The negotiations between the two accounting giants were said to have begun in earnest last week, about the time Andersen learned that it faced potential indictment on charges of obstruction of justice in the Enron investigation as a result of the large-scale destruction of documents last fall in its Houston offices.
May 2, 1988
The School of Accounting at Florida Atlantic University has obtained a Graduate Tax Research Collection made possible by a grant of $25,000 from Arthur Andersen & Co. All 22 of the FAU alumni who work for Arthur Andersen contriburted to the tax collection. The grant, spread over a two-year period, will be used to acquire current tax literature, tax research volumes, a computerized data base called Lexis, an IBM personal computer and office furniture.
August 20, 2002
What happened to all the money Congress allocated to bail out the airlines, now that US Airways has filed for bankruptcy? Did this go into the CEO's pocket, too? Who's keeping track of these monies -- Arthur Andersen? Art Zerger Tamarac
June 11, 2003
First we had Enron and Kenneth Lay, then we had WorldCom and Mr. Sullivan, then we learn creative bookkeeping from Arthur Andersen. Now we have baseball, Sammy Sosa and corked bats. What happened to integrity in America? Is it gone forever?
April 9, 2002
Lou Dobbs of CNN is the latest person to ask the government to take back the indictment, of the Arthur Andersen accounting firm. Andersen, of course, was indicted for the shredding of the Enron documents. Dobbs' argument is that "thousands of innocent Andersen employees will suffer" because of the government action. I strongly disagree. Let's have one last "boo hoo" for the accounting employees, and then let the government do its job. First of all, Arthur Andersen was pretty much toast before the government action. | <urn:uuid:9f314e87-5620-4209-9181-5902ecbbafda> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/keyword/arthur-andersen | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955284 | 582 | 1.65625 | 2 |
He is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and served as Principal Chief from 1975-1985 when he resigned to accept the position of Assistant Secretary - Indian Affairs with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a bureau within the U.S. Department of the Interior. Wilma Mankiller, Deputy Chief of the Cherokee Nation succeeded Swimmer as Chief of the Cherokees.
A member of the Cherokee Nation, Swimmer served as president of the Cherokee Group, L.L.C., from 1995 until 2001. The Group is a consulting firm that represents Indian clients engaged in government issues at the state and federal level, and supports the development of businesses on Indian lands. He was also Of Counsel to the Tulsa, Oklahoma, based law firm of Hall Estill, where his wife Margaret is a Partner.
On November 26, 2001, he became Director of the Office of Indian Trust Transition, which is a Department of Interior office that is attempting to bring the Indian Trust accounting process up to minimum court-ordered standards (Cobell v. Kempthorne). | <urn:uuid:71f13124-dbcc-441b-99e4-df7db307e19b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.reference.com/browse/Ross+Swimmer | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975276 | 214 | 1.78125 | 2 |
Sat October 27, 2012
Week In Tech: Microsoft's Big Gamble
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Big week for Microsoft. The company introduced Windows 8, its new operating system, and entered the ever-expanding tablet market. These are major steps for a company that has been perceived as lagging behind Apple and Google in innovation. We're joined now by NPR's Steve Henn in Silicon Valley.
Steve, thanks for being with us.
STEVE HENN, BYLINE: Oh, my pleasure.
SIMON: Why is Windows 8 considered such a defining moment for Microsoft?
HENN: Well, this operating system is really very different from anything else Windows users have seen before. It doesn't look or feel like the operating system that most of us use at work. The other thing that's really important for the company, is this is Microsoft's attempt to move into the tablet market and move into this era of mobile computing, which has really left them behind. It's been almost three years since Apple introduced the iPad and Microsoft is, just now, finally introducing software that will really work with tablets.
SIMON: Now, the company on Friday introduced its Surface tablet. What was the impression?
HENN: The Surface tablet is a beautifully designed machine. There's a lot of attention to detail. It's sort of Apple-esque in that way. There's a really neat cover that folds down and actually works as a keyboard. So a lot of the hardware was very, very well thought out, and works really nicely, which is unusual, because Microsoft is really a software company.
The thing that could be problematic is that it uses a different kind of chip. Because of that, a lot of the software you'd expect to run on a Microsoft machine won't work. And even some websites you'd expect to work, don't. And so many people I've talked to are expecting consumers to be somewhat unsatisfied when they get this home and take it out of the box.
SIMON: Since you've been the one man I know who's been able to use them both, what about the iPad mini, which came out this week?
HENN: Well, you know, the iPad mini is thin and light. My colleague Laura Sydell described it as a wafer-thin mint, which I think is, kind of, great. And it is designed to work with all of the apps that have already been built for the bigger iPads. So it has a huge library of content that already exists.
What's interesting about the iPad mini to me, is that this device was really designed by Apple in response to its competition, building something to compete with Amazon's HD Fire tablet and a tablet put out by Google called the Google Nexus 7, which are both smaller. In many ways, it's smaller, it's thinner, it's lighter, it has a bigger screen. It's better.
But the one thing Apple wasn't able to compete on was price. The iPad mini starts at more than $300. The other two competitors cost less than $200. And so, you know, Wall Street and financial analysts are a little concerned that it's not going to sell that well. That may be one of the reasons that Apple's stock fell below 600 for the first time, I think, since July.
SIMON: NPR's Steve Henn. Thanks so much.
HENN: Oh, thank you.
SIMON: This is NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio. | <urn:uuid:8930dd8e-f573-48dc-885f-4f1490557478> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wdiy.org/post/week-tech-microsofts-big-gamble | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978581 | 728 | 1.804688 | 2 |
3 Things You Should Know About Small Business: March 19
NEW YORK (MainStreet) -- What's happening in small business today?
1. Businesses in Austin are complaining about SXSW 2012. South by Southwest, the annual music, film and technology festival, isn't getting rave reviews from some local Austin businesses, says the Huffington Post, citing local TV station KVUE.
Some business owners say they actually lose money when the high-profile festival comes to town, given the blocked-off roads and locals who want to avoid the area. A few are finding it's more profitable to close shop altogether for the week.
2. Here are 10 tools to help business owners get free online publicity. Small businesses don't have a lot of money to put into advertising, so The Miami Herald's BizBytes columnist, Tasha Cunningham, put together a list of free resources allowing businesses to get more exposure for less cost, leading to more customers.
Topping the list is LinkedIn(LNKD) Search, "a highly effective way of finding journalists who may be interested in writing about your products or services," the article says. Business owners should also check out Regator, a site that aggregates blog posts from around the Web, to find posts about topics related to your business and reach out to the authors to pitch your company. MuckRack is a Twitter director tracking journalists, while iNewswire allows you to distribute press releases for free. | <urn:uuid:0842c4f4-1b13-46ae-9072-3941878dfea3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://business-news.thestreet.com/jobsinME/story/3-things-you-should-know-about-small-business-march-19/11460990 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950142 | 298 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Aid: distinguishing true from false
Ukraine's abrupt decision to levy heavy taxes on humanitarian aid at the beginning of the new year caused no small amount of consternation, including within our community. Many of our religious and civic organizations are directly involved in organizing and raising funds for humanitarian relief to Ukraine. Fortunately, the consternation was short-lived; Ukraine suspended its tax decision after seven weeks.
As we reported last week, there is no reason to believe that the government's decision to tax humanitarian aid was anything other than a decisive attempt to control the substantial flow into the country of taxable, expensive, definitely non-humanitarian goods that were masquerading as "assistance for the needy."
In gathering information for our report, we heard a great deal of anecdotal information about the types of goods that were being sneaked into Ukraine tax-free, as aid: slabs of marble destined to replace "unsanitary" wooden hospital floors (uh, huh ... sure), slinky stiletto-heeled shoes (as women know, these types of shoes do not keep your feet warm); and stories of a businessman who sent money out of the country to buy medicine at bulk/wholesale prices, then sent the medicine back to Ukraine tax-free as "humanitarian aid" to a sham foundation that then sold the medicine at a very profitable mark-up.
Not only does this type of activity deprive the government of legitimate revenue from imports, but it gets to the core of the definition of corruption: "act, or actions, that subvert the original intent or process; dishonesty."
Ukraine also receives a lot of junk masquerading as humanitarian aid that is useless or dangerous and for the disposal of which the government has to pay. Why would anyone bother to send junk? Good question. Since no one would admit to actually sending useless goods, we only got speculative answers. The reasons cited for other people sending junk were: ego ("I organized 50 tons of aid"), ignorance (electronic equipment without transformers), carelessness or stupidity (instruments without operating instructions; equipment with defects.)
For Ukrainian government officials who review customs declarations, listen to reports of border guards, etc., it was obvious that there was corruption in the process. Of the goods entering the country listed as humanitarian aid, a disproportionate amount were listed fraudulently. Other NIS countries had, and have, similar problems with their borders and also have tried to tax, assess and stop shipments as solutions.
The problem that confronts the government of Ukraine is that, while it obviously does not want to discourage genuine aid, it also wants to ensure that taxable goods get taxed, and not sneaked in. Import duties are a legitimate source of revenue for governments worldwide. Somehow the government has to control, without being too controlling.
It seems Ukrainian officials are still often surprised that anyone pays Ukraine any mind and are unprepared for international public outcry over something that they felt was pretty much their business. With a legitimate concern about government revenue and reducing corruption, officials acted quickly, in what they were sure was a decisive manner. Apparently the Verkhovna Rada has been discussing this issue for some time, therefore this crackdown to stop fraudulent humanitarian aid was no surprise for them.
However, as is often the case, it is not what you say, but how you say it. Basically Ukraine has international support for its attempt to control the goods that cross its borders, but the severity and abruptness of the solution caught most people off guard and made them angry. Fortunately, Ukraine's Parliament will begin consideration of new legislation pertaining to humanitarian aid this month.
Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, March 9, 1997, No. 10, Vol. LXV
| Home Page | | <urn:uuid:d06a263a-f0d4-499e-91d0-f071df567a8b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ukrweekly.com/old/archive/1997/109715.shtml | 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 | 0.971235 | 761 | 1.601563 | 2 |
jded_101148 on Family Tree Circles
Journals and Posts
Known already to positively have had 4 wives I now have verbal info from living relative that Denis Fitzsimmons DUNBAR (1903-1966) had a 1st wife described as a "European Princess". I suspect that the marriage occurred in India between abt 1922-1927 & that the bride was of "White Russian" descent. Denis went to South Australia in 1928 & remarried the same year. Can anyone help?
Family stories have Percy Fitzwilliam OWEN b. Kennington, Surrey, Eng. in 1826 being involved in the tradic death of his "Eurasian Princess wife" - ? India. Thought to have then married Jane Magee in 1850 in Eden, Twofold Bay, NSW then residing Braidwood area NSW. All info sort.
Percy's parents were William OWEN and Elizabeth Ann BREWER & he had 7 brothers - two of whom resided in the Indigo/Chiltern area of Victoria, Australia from abt.1854. Another 3 lived longtime in India.
Do these liasons in India circa mid 1800s-1950 ring a bell?
1. Robert DUNBAR
2. William Denis or Denis William DUNBAR and Sarah Ann FITZSIMMONS (1847-1912) m. abt 1870s
3. Mary Josephine DUNBAR (1873-1946) m. Patrick MACKAY (b. 1858 - father James Patrick) m. in 1890
4. Robert Ellesmere DUNBAR (1876-1932)
m. (i) Lena Helen Mabel ROBERTSON in 1903
(ii) Hester Caroline MADDEN in abt 1910
wives were 1st cousins - ROBERTSON Grandparents
Particularly interested in info re Nos.1,2 & 3.
Owen Family - is anyone connected to the following brothers who were the sons of William Owen and Elizabeth Ann Brewer who married Lambeth, middlesex in 1816?
Sons were William George Owen b. 1817, Henry Norris Owen, Frederick Charles Owen, Arthur Walshman Owen, Stanley Fairfax Owen, Herbert Parker Owen, Percy Fitxwilliam Owen. Some had carrers in India, 2-3 went to Australia.
I am researching a Dunbar ancestor who went to India sometime before 1870. Could have been quite early and have no idea of his occupation. The first of my Dunbar ancestors was William Dennis and/or Dennis William Dunbar who married SarahAnne Fitzsimmons
abt. 1872 possibly in Lucknow, Bengal India. His father was Robert Dunbar but don't know from where or where he was when Dennis William was born.
Dennis married Sarah about 1872.
Dennis and Sarah had 2 known children: Mary Josephine b. 28 Feb 1873 in Lahore Punjab India (Pakistan) and Robert Ellesmere Dunbar b. 16 July 1876 in Murree, India ( my grandfather).
Mary Josephine went on to marry Patrick Mackay (father James patrick) in 1890 and Robert Ellesmere Dunbar 1st married Lena Helen Mabel Robertson in 20 August 1902 in Lucknow, India [ having son Denis Fitzsimmons Dunbar, my father, in 1903] and then started a new family with Hesther Caroline Madden in 1911.
Lena Helen Mabel married Lewis Edward Lancaster (a widower in 1913).
What is strange is that Robert Ellesmere and his 2nd family were close and stayed in India until about the 1950s and although he, a longtime journalist and sub-editor in Calcutta, I caanot get a line on the family.
Also strange is that I cannot get information on Denis Fitzsimmons Dunbar, the 1st son , even though he played hockey for the Calcutta Rangers in the 1920s and later wrote a Hockey traning manuel published in Australia in abt 1940 & 1952 with a special edition published in India in 1945. Denis was apparently educated in England from abt. 1911-1920, returned to Calcutta, then was in Australia from 1927 to 1944, in India again 1944-1947, Australia 1947-until he died in Melbourne, Victoria 1966. Whilst in Australia Denis coached the Western Australian University Hockey team 1937-1940 and then later, from 1952, coached Tasmanian Hockey teams. He also reproduced his book (copy held in National library). The latest info suggests that he was Anglo Indian but don't know where that may have occurred.
Can any one help? All the Anglo Indian sites appear too be social only and the newspapers ("Englishman" archives and "the Statesman" in India do not answer queries.
- Displaying 1-5 of 5 Journals | <urn:uuid:607e53c0-db05-4053-a76f-32ca0f51c11b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.familytreecircles.com/u/jded_101148/?next=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954333 | 1,004 | 1.84375 | 2 |
Published in Law and Health Weekly, June 10th, 2006
This trend article about British Columbia Cancer Agency is an immediate alert from LawRx to identify developing directions of research.
Study 1: Organized breast screening programs in Canada were assessed.
According to a recently published report, investigators in Canada conducted a study "to examine retrospectively the relationship between radiologist screening program reading volumes and interpretation results. This research project was reviewed by the University of British Columbia Research Ethics Board."
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Learn more about a six-week, no-risk free trial of Law and Health Weekly
NewsRx also is available at LexisNexis, Gale, ProQuest, Factiva, Dialog, Thomson Reuters, NewsEdge, and Dow Jones. | <urn:uuid:942b6b2b-5d6c-4eb6-8b0e-5311c2d43294> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.newsrx.com/newsletters/Law-and-Health-Weekly/2006-06-10/06072006333343LH.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934611 | 166 | 1.8125 | 2 |
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“Do we get paid to take part in a study? Do we have to pay for study treatments? Will our insurance pay?” Taking part in research can raise financial questions for families. Patients and families usually do not get paid for participating in research at Seattle Children’s. In phase I and II studies testing drugs, the drugs are typically provided to the patient at no charge. If your child has health insurance, the benefits may apply to other costs related to your child’s care. Our staff is experienced at working with families and insurers to advocate for coverage. We can help you find out what your insurance will cover. You may also pay for care yourself or apply for financial assistance. Our social workers can also connect you to organizations that offer support to help offset the financial costs of care.
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Most of the time, patients need to receive study treatments at Children’s. Sometimes treatments — or at least some aspects of treatment — can be safely delivered by a patient’s doctor or oncologist at home. We are happy to talk with you and your local doctor or oncologist about whether this might be an option for your child.
We have worked with many families from around the country and the world, and have in place many services to help support you if you’re coming from elsewhere. These include housing options through Ronald McDonald House and special arrangements with local hotels and motels; transportation guidance, support groups and other resources through our Family Resource Center; school services so your children can continue their education in Seattle; and interpreter services.
Seattle Children’s provides healthcare for the special needs of children regardless
of race, sex, creed, ethnicity or disability. Financial assistance for medically
necessary services is based on family income and hospital resources and is provided
to children under age 21 whose primary residence is in Washington, Alaska, Montana
Seattle Children’s Hospital, Research
Magnet Nursing Excellence | <urn:uuid:cd4562f5-a37e-4b35-bb22-30a712fdb8f6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.seattlechildrens.org/clinics-programs/cancer/research-and-advances/clinical-trials-faq/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955481 | 403 | 1.75 | 2 |
New York State Senator Kemp Hannon recently selected Dr. Roberta A. Gerold as one of the women to represent the 6th Senate District in the New York State Senate 2004 "Women of Distinction" program. Dr. Gerold, the superintendent of the Farmingdale School District, received the honor with Joanne Meyer-Jendras of Garden City.
Dr. Roberta A. Gerold
"I am proud to recognize Roberta Gerold and Joanne Meyer-Jendras as Women of Distinction and prouder still of the recognition they have earned from there neighbors, colleagues and friends for their achievements on behalf of our community," Hannon said.
The senator selected Dr. Gerold as a "Woman of Distinction" because of her excellence in service as the superintendent of schools for the Farmingdale School District, a position she has held since July 2001. As a founding member of the Farmingdale Community Summit Council, she has helped events such as the Summit Expo and Health Fair and Farmingdale Reads, a celebration of literacy, become part of the community's annual calendar.
Prior to her appointment of Farmingdale Superintendency, she was the superintendent of the Miller Place Schools (1996-2001), the assistant superintendent for instruction in Levittown Schools (1993-1996) and the assistant for curriculum and student services in the West Babylon School District (1987-1993). Dr. Gerold was also named by the Suffolk County Martin Luther King Jr. Commission as a recipient of the 2004 Community Service Award.
"Joanne and Roberta are success stories that we can proudly share with our neighbors and who will serve as examples for achievement and excellence for our entire community," Hannon said. "Their names now join that of other women whose accomplishments, sacrifices and deeds on behalf of others are deserving of special honor."
Gerold and Meyer-Jendras are to be honored June 8 at an Albany reception, where their photographs and biographies will be displayed in a special exhibit at the Legislative Office Building.
The Senate's "Women of Distinction" program was created in 1998 to honor women across the state who exemplify personal excellence, or whose personal selflessness or achievements serve as an example to all New Yorkers. Since the Program was started Senator Hannon has recognized the following women from his district: Jeanine Bondi-Steinman and Mairead Barrett in 1998; Maureen Clancy in 1999; Ann Irvin and Delores Kershaw in 2000; Abby Kenigsberg and Pat Hieronymus in 2001; and Dr. Greta Rainsford and Friedrika Conway in 2002; and Jean Kelly and Gladys Serrano in 2003. | <urn:uuid:2edc7ec6-1bc3-4f1c-bbb6-ad937fdb0c25> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.antonnews.com/farmingdaleobserver/2004/06/04/news/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958741 | 543 | 1.601563 | 2 |
Find basic information about your insurance company, search for Medical Loss Ratio rebate information, and find details about any rate increases your company has filed for.
In this section you’ll find information that will help you with health insurance, whether you need coverage or already have it. It also includes specific information for people with Medicare, those who need free or low-cost care, large and small employers, and the self-employed.
Get help with questions and issues from your state’s Consumer Assistance Program, or from a list of helpful resources. Also, learn about what to do if you’ve been rejected for insurance or need to appeal an insurer’s decision about a claim.
Read a consumer’s guide to the Affordable Care Act and the health insurance marketplace, plus a list of all your coverage options, both public and private. Learn about your rights and protections under the Affordable Care Act.
Learn about Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and community health centers that provide free and low-cost care in your area. All of these programs are being improved under the Affordable Care Act.
Find information about the Affordable Care Act and Medicare, a program that serves people over 65, some people with disabilities, and everyone with end-stage renal disease. Plus: Information on long-term care options.
Get information on the Affordable Care Act for small businesses, big businesses, and self-employed people. | <urn:uuid:a70bb815-84d5-4e50-8158-aa065057a3f0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.healthcare.gov/using-insurance/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936617 | 297 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Grandmother Medicine: The Legacy of Juliette de Bairacli Levy
Juliette de Bairacli Levy’s contribution to modern herbalism has been enormous and her work has inspired and informed countless herbalists, not least Rosemary Gladstar and Susun Weed. In a time period when herbalism was being shunned as old fashioned and ineffective in the United States, Juliette was reviving and introducing important healing knowledge from all over the world, including Turkey, North Africa, Israel, Germany and Greece. Her time learning from and living with the Romani (Gypsy) is especially notable. I so wish I’d been able to meet Juliette in person before she passed away to personally thank her for sharing her experiences, knowledge and wisdom.
Often called the grandmother of American herbalism, Juliette’s contribution to our current herbal community is invaluable, the knowledge and inspiration she continues to provide to generations of herbalists is remarkable and certainly worthy of celebration. Her books were some of the very first I read about herbal medicine and the rambling stories, wise insights and straight common sense have stuck with me throughout my practice and I appreciate them more and more over the passing years. The generous and unpretentious approach she took to healing inspires me every day, as does her alliance with common, weedy plants that she found around here wherever she traveled during her often nomadic life.
Not only a fascinating example of a multi-cultural, place-based approach to folk herbalism, her persistent love for animals, children and plants is as valuable as it is endearing and resulted in a body of work oftentimes specific to animals and children in a way not often found in modern writing. Her tales of simple, joyful meals and wild adventures blended with her knowledge of herbs and healing are a joy to read. My ten year old daughter Rhiannon becomes completely absorbed in the narratives and I’ve found the books a great way to give her a different perspective on place, history and herbalism.
I especially admire her willingness to jump into difficult situations where she was often unable to speak more than a few words of the language in order to learn or understand more. Stubborn, independent and able to navigate complex cultural situations while still tending her young children and caring for those around her, Juliette’s legacy is ever more relevant to herbalists, homesteaders and travelers today. I’m pretty certain that most of my readers will love her books if you haven’t read them already. They’re perfect not only for learning from but for staying focused and immersed in earthy, simple ways and for introducing friends and family, especially children, to the stories of our the art we each practice as herbalists.
Susun Weed is doing us all the great service of keeping these books in print so that we can continue to enjoy and learn from them. Not only that, but she’s also offering a number of discounts or gifts to anyone who buys any of the three re-released books. The series started off with Summer in Galilee, A Gypsy in New York is the newest installment and coming up August 15th is Spanish Mountain Life | <urn:uuid:ea3fbf36-93a0-4602-89de-be13ee5c3f6d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bearmedicineherbals.com/grandmothermedicine.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964534 | 651 | 1.765625 | 2 |
The Biggest Little Black Lie of 2012
The Biggest Little Black Lie of 2012
In a culture awash in bullshit, it’s no easy task to identify the Little Black Lie of the Year. It’s like choosing the most beautiful butterfly or the most violent criminal. There are just so many to choose from, and who’s to say?
Still, it behooves us to try, so I solicited input from people who pay attention to such things. There were numerous contenders. In a deceit of geologic magnitude, Enbridge erased 1,000 square kilometres of islands from the Douglas Channel to make the tanker route out of Kitimat Harbour look much safer than it really is.
Then there’s the patently misleading claim by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, almost a year to the day after Canada’s outspokenly belligerent Minister of Natural Resources Joe Oliver said “we are supportive of the [Northern] Gateway [pipeline] project,” that “the government doesn’t choose particular projects.”
South of the border, the ever-dubious Fox News reported that the Keystone XL pipeline would create “a million new high-paying jobs,” when the reality is no more like 4,600 temporary constructions jobs and just 50 permanent jobs.
There were dozens of others; the competition was stiff. But the New Year brought the release of a new scientific study that sets one Little Black Lie above – or below, depending on your perspective – them all.
For years, the Alberta government and the oil industry have maintained that tar sands mines and bitumen upgraders were not polluting the land and water in northern Alberta, that development was being conducted in a “clean, responsible and sustainable” manner. Despite research published by David Schindler and his colleagues in 2009 and 2010 that found elevated levels of a variety of toxic chemicals in the snowpack and waterways around the mines, and despite numerous studies that found the monitoring program in the tar sands region to be egregiously flawed, the Alberta government’s messaging remained the same: any and all pollution found in the area was from “natural” sources.
Today, and every day in 2012, the government’s “oil sands” website reads: “Monitoring stations downstream of mine sites show industrial contribution cannot be detected against historically consistent readings of naturally occurring compounds in the Athabasca River.”
But now the cat’s out of the bag, and this Little Black Lie has been exposed once and for all.
Research funded by Environment Canada and conducted (in part) by Environment Canada scientists has confirmed what Schindler and his colleagues discovered three years ago – and it’s much worse than even they found. Some of the results were presented at a science conference late last year, but now that the study has been published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the results are publicly available. And they are damning.
In a New York Times article titled “Oil Sands Industry in Canada Tied to Higher Carcinogen Levels,” the project’s lead scientist, Professor John Smol said, “Now we have the smoking gun.”
Smol and his colleagues found that tar sands development has been contributing dangerous, carcinogenic pollutants to the watershed since large-scale oil sands production began in 1978, and they are steadily rising. Samples from one test site now show 2.5 to 23 times more polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in recent lake sediments than in layers dating back to around 1960. Smol said that wilderness lakes in the region are now as polluted as lakes in urban centres, and the most heavily contaminated lake has been exceeding Canada’s interim sediment quality guidelines for PAHs since the mid-1980s.
“Industry’s role as a decades-long contributor of PAHs to oilsands lake ecosystems is now clearly evident,” Smol and his colleagues wrote in their study. And as industrial activity continues and expands, he said, it’s only going to get worse.
Why is this Little Black Lie more pernicious than the others? Because of what it tells us about the foxes guarding the henhouse. In order to maintain the façade of no industrial pollution, the Alberta government, in cahoots with the oil industry, failed to implement a monitoring system that could detect pollution, even though the technology and expertise to do so has been available for at least twenty years. Even when Schindler and his colleagues found evidence of pollution three years ago, the Alberta government chose to deny and then ignore the results in favour of repeating the mantra, ad nauseum, that the tar sands are being developed in a “clean, responsible and sustainable manner.” All the while, approving new tar sands development as fast as humanly possible.
These studies tell us more than just what’s in the water. They illustrate just how incompetent, how downright sneaky and impervious to factual information, the ideologues in the Alberta legislature (and many corporate boardrooms) really are. They indicate that these people cannot be trusted to manage the tar sands in the responsible manner Canadians demand. | <urn:uuid:2bcb9cfc-a59f-4408-b5e0-fc4e84180f20> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.desmogblog.com/2013/01/11/biggest-little-black-lie-2012 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956203 | 1,089 | 1.726563 | 2 |
— The Anniston Star on the proper way to legislate:
Legislation often is proposed because lawmakers want to draw attention to themselves, puff-up their reputation or challenge their opponents and dare them to oppose their idea.
In other words, politics.
So it’s refreshing to see legislation being written the way legislation should be.
Alabama law enforcement had a problem. Under state law, second-degree burglary is committed “when a person unlawfully enters a lawfully occupied residence with intent to commit a theft or felony inside.” Well, that should be illegal.
The problem, however, is that “lawfully occupied” is interpreted to mean the homeowner is home. So burglars wait until the homeowner leaves and then breaks in. If the burglar is caught, the crime is considered third-degree burglary and the punishment is considerably less harsh. The milder the penalty, the more willing burglars are to take the chance.
The Alabama Fraternal Order of Police legislative committee recognized the problem and came up with a plan to change the law so that it would read that if someone “enters a livable dwelling-house whether occupied or not with intent to commit a theft or a felony therein,” it would be second-degree burglary. The committee asked Rep. Randy Wood, R-Anniston, to review their idea and prepare a bill that would address the problem.
Wood did just that, and the bill will be introduced in the Legislature soon.
This page urges our representatives and senators to support the measure.
This page also commends the Fraternal Order of Police and Wood for showing us, once again, how our legislative system is supposed to work. Little fanfare or hype. A problem recognized and a problem addressed.
This is how it should be done. | <urn:uuid:bc55acac-af4c-41b3-bdb6-03de0f87a9e1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://enewscourier.com/opinion/x503853572/Fraternal-Order-of-Police-should-be-cheered-on-law | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966256 | 372 | 1.773438 | 2 |
Robert Mondavi was to California wine what Julia Child was to French food in the United States. He turned on generations of thirsty North Americans to the possibilities wine has to offer. And while it took a movie starring Meryl Streep to make Child a truly global name, it was Mondavi's unceasing work over the decades to foster and promote California wine, most notably at the helm of his eponymous winery, that made him known the world over.
"Dad shook things up," says Timothy Mondavi, who now heads a small artisan winery, Continuum Estate, with his sister, Marcia Mondavi Borger. "He was never satisfied with things as they were. It was always about how to make things better. There was a curiosity about food and wine that permeated everything we did."
Food and wine — sounds like a no-brainer — go-together, right? But a half-century ago most Americans didn't drink wine.
"When people thought about wine in the 1930s or '40s or '50s, it was rot-gut wine," says Julia Flynn Siler, author of "The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty."
"Robert Mondavi burst into the industry and recognized the possibility that California wine could be much better than it was," says the journalist, who lives in Ross, Calif. "He put Napa Valley on the map. He changed the face of the American wine industry. He shook it by the lapels and said, 'We can do a lot better.'"
Tim Mondavi says his father had a willingness to discover, experiment and share the results with others in the wine community. So open was he to helping others that the son described his father's winery as the "University of Mondavi for fine wine."
Robert Mondavi began working in the Napa Valley in the mid-1930s. He was manager of Sunny St. Helena Winery; then the Charles Krug Winery, which his father purchased at his urging in 1943; and then, in 1966, his own winery.
He built his career on his own terms, says Elin McCoy, an author and Bloomberg News columnist. She noted that when the winemaker famously joined forces with Baron Philippe de Rothschild of France's Chateau Mouton Rothschild in the late 1970s to create Opus One in Napa, the Californian and the Bordelais met on equal footing. And so it was with other Mondavi partnerships in Europe and South America.
The Robert Mondavi Winery made its reputation with some extraordinary wines, but Siler maintains that the founder's real genius lay in the marketing of wine. "He was very successful in convincing other winemakers and consumers that wine should be a part of the good life," she says.
As with the world's top winemakers, Robert Mondavi forged ties with the world's top chefs and restaurateurs, inviting them to come to his winery to cook and teach. Mondavi was a co-founder of the American Institute of Wine & Food to promote gastronomy; pushed hard for the creation in Napa of COPIA: The American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts, which later closed; and gave a $25 million gift in 2001 to the University of California at Davis for creation of the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science.
All of these efforts were part of Mondavi's energetic campaign to counter neo-prohibitionists, celebrate the unique cultural and culinary role wine has enjoyed for centuries and promote wine drinking in moderation.
By the time Robert Mondavi died in May 2008 at the age of 94, he was arguably America's most famous winemaker.
His long life had the drama of a prime-time television series, punctuated by sweet victories, sharp defeat and strained family relations all around. In 2004, he even had to endure the sale of his winery to Constellation Brands. But, characteristically, he joined his children, Tim and Marcia, in launching Continuum Estate. The first bottles, with a label created by one of his granddaughters, were released shortly before he died.
In his 1999 book "California Wine," James Laube describes Robert Mondavi as "the single greatest influence on modern California wine." Laube sees no need to revise that view today.
"He set forth a vision that has been largely fulfilled," the senior editor of Wine Spectator magazine says today.
"He defined California wine and then he was able through his experiences, his travel particularly, to take California wine where it needed to go. He focused on quality."
Mondavi: A life that wine built
1913: Born in Minnesota to Cesare and Rosa Mondavi.
1919: Cesare Mondavi begins a wholesale business in Lodi, Calif., buying and shipping grapes to home winemakers as Prohibition begins. The family follows him there in 1923.
1933: Cesare Mondavi buys a share in the Sunny St. Helena Winery. Robert begins working in the Napa Valley winery in 1936 after graduating from Stanford University. | <urn:uuid:ddf8680d-8d31-426c-8484-65c6e7d69037> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.portlandscw32.com/shows/nwcooks/sc-food-0914-giant-mondavi-20120919,0,2345455.column?page=1 | 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 | 0.98619 | 1,055 | 1.6875 | 2 |
This June's full moon of Gemini is the Christ's Festival. Christ's Festival occurs after the full moon of the Buddha, Wesak Festival, and during the full moon of Gemini. The Gemini energies characterize our world of duality in which the two selves of matter and spirit exist at first separate. They are separated by awareness. The awareness is the Soul and as the duality is resolved via fusion and synthesis of spirit and matter, light is created. This is the light of awareness and it is via this light that the apparent separation is resolved. So in essence, the light of awareness that is the Soul, the Christ, is both the effect and the cause of the synthesis of matter and spirit. The aspirant becomes aware of these paradoxes of duality and unity as he or she enters into lighted spiritual awareness. The laws of the spirit are not the same as material laws and it is the ability and facility to be aware and work with both the laws and forces of matter and the laws and energy of spirit that the aspirant who is standing in lighted awareness develops.
This work of building lighted awareness is the synthesis of the higher and lower selves. That lighted awareness is a literal body of light that exists within the body of flesh and also is inclusive of the higher spiritual self with its awareness of spiritual laws and energies. This inner light is what begins to be seen and known by the mystic who gradually becomes aware of the inner spiritual worlds. This light is a literal event and has been testified to by the mystics of all the various religious traditions. It is of interest that many spiritual events are interpreted as allegory or metaphor until the inner faculties of the light body are evolved and developed enough for awareness of the literal events that are occurring on the subjective and more subtle planes of spiritual being to be seen and known. The testimonies of those walking the path of spiritual development of the light body becomes like signposts. These signposts are not signs of the destination, but are more like signposts of being on the right road. They are not indications to stop and marvel at the sign or the landscape, mistaking the path for the goal, but are indications of where one is on the path. Thus the admonition to the spiritual aspirant to continue steadily, to persist in the work detached from the results, to not get glamoured by spiritual awareness and phenomena along the way, which are merely the effects of the developing inner body of lighted awareness and spiritual faculties, becomes significant to steady and continued progress.
The inner spiritual body of light has a profound and radical purpose in the evolution and destiny of the planet. It is through this body as a whole, the One Soul, that the entire world is being synthesized into one spiritual entity that knows itself and lives in complete fusion and harmony, held together by the gravity of love and wisdom. Then the lion and the lamb lay down together and heaven comes to earth. The reality is that the spiritual Self and inner subjective worlds do and have existed all along, but the body and faculties of light are being evolved. It is this world task that all the aspirants are steadily involved in. It is through this lighted awareness that humanity becomes increasingly evolved into higher spiritual values and faculties thus enabling full conscious cooperation in bringing about harmony, love, and right relations. The work is, therefore, one of continuing to become aware of and create lighted love within humanity. Those aspirants who get glamoured by their own individual light and faculties are stuck in an interim phase of evolution and development of the group lighted body that is the One Soul and stop contributing to its conscious construction. It is in this stage of evolution and potential mis-interpretation that the group disciples now work. It is within this needed turning point that the energy of Aquarius with its group qualities is available for the group of disciples to use and embody. It is for this evolving group awareness that the group of aspirants works.
There are particular turning points along the path of conscious spiritual evolution. It is at these turning points that the leading initiates and disciples of the time create new and more significant signposts. It is during these times that greater vigilance and effort is required of the bridging group, that is, those individuals that are aware of both the higher and the lower selves and whom have the "eyes to see and ears to hear". The turning point that we now stand is one of utmost significance for the planetary evolution into true group awareness. It is why the aspirants are now called on to themselves develop the group awareness and work as a group. The consciousness that is the evolving soul awareness must be turned from the individual focus and identification into the group awareness and direction. The new ideal is not the mystic with evolving faculties to see and know the spiritual self with all its phenomenal glamours. That is the old signpost. The new signpost is the realization that the light body is one, the Soul is One, and that evolution occurs together. It is the ideal of realizing that a group consciousness not only exists and can be developed and that it is the next step in the evolution of the consciousness of the race of humanity and evolutionary leap that leads to the recognition that this step is also the solution for all the current cleavages and ills of the race and the planet. It is the pragmatic reality and expression of this group consciousness that the world disciples must develop.
Using the analogy of Alan Watts and the "Dance of Lila" — all of life is the play and dance of God. One can look out on the cacophony of the nations and see the mistakes and lack of grace and cooperation that exists. But, one can also imagine the beauty of a dance that occurs perfectly choreographed, aligned, and in step-both vertically involving matter and spirit and horizontally involving all the nations and groups within humanity. Like a line dance where everyone has finally learned the steps, the individuals can move closer together without fearing to tread on one another or inadvertently assault one another. The moves of the physical become fluid and the inner flow and harmony becomes palpable. As the inner light body develops and encompasses all individual lights — conscious awareness, this flow and harmony becomes the new reality.
It is the embodied Christ that creates the dance steps for the vehicles of expression, the bodies of flesh and matter, to be able move in perfect step, but the body of lighted awareness is needed for humanity to perform perfectly within the Plans laid out by the Master Choreographer — The Christ.
The group of disciples waits sometimes impatiently for the return of The Christ, while The Christ waits patiently for the group of disciples to create the body of light.
It is into this body of light that the Light that is Christ will return and be seen and known. These faculties of the developing light body are essential for the group disciples to see and know the Christ Light and to function within and cooperate as One Awareness, as the light synthesized with all light. This is a literal event and not a metaphor for something else. This is the work of the group disciple. Look for the light within oneself and others. See the light as group phenomena fusing matter and spirit. Build and strengthen the light that is love. Create the channels for this light to be carried to everyone and to all creatures. Help the planetary life awaken to itself and enlighten the whole world and all beings. Be the bridge of light. So Be It.
Let us work now not with individual desire for spiritual achievement but with spiritual inspiration and vision. Let us fuse ourselves with The Christ light and see the light as one. | <urn:uuid:2e427bd4-ea2a-47b2-a5ce-c13ac17c68d0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.worldservicegroup.com/archives/mp-gemini-2012.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 | 0.959249 | 1,539 | 1.5625 | 2 |
If you want to make homemade pumpkin puree or pumpkin pie ahead of time, it is alright as long as you use the proper storage method. Also, leftover homemade pumpkin pie needs to be stored properly to keep it fresh as long as possible. See when to refrigerate and when to freeze.
This traditional homemade pumpkin pie is made from scratch with homemade puree. Homemade pumpkin puree can also be used in any pumpkin recipe calling for canned pumpkin. To substitute homemade puree, use 1 3/4 cups of pumpkin puree in place of a 15 oz. can of pumpkin.
Bread Making Demonstration:Quick Bread
Banana bread is a popular quick bread that is usually flavored with bananas that have been mashed. Most often, the best bananas to use for banana bread are ones that are overripe and may not be very palatable when eaten as is.
There is nothing like a homemade pumpkin pie to share with family and friends. Learning the proper steps on how to make pumpkin pie from scratch is well worth the effort, for no shortcut method can match the flavor and texture of homemade pumpkin pie. | <urn:uuid:61c859fe-4bca-435f-8931-cfa4e98a2f9f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.recipetips.com/recipe-cards/t--114550/quick-easy-cheeseburger-pie.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933214 | 227 | 1.664063 | 2 |
Hello world -
I’ve spent the last several months graduating from law school and moving instead of posting to Whoselaw. I hope to start posting regularly here again soon.
My first “welcome back” post is going to be this link to this lovely piece on fraud against the elderly, recently published in the Elder Law Journal (link to SSRN) and featured in the Situationist Blog. The article examines many of the cognitive biases that financial scammers exploit when they target elderly individuals and argues that education-based interventions against financial crime will be ineffective because they fail to address these biases.
This has become a personal issue for me because scammers (and also telemarketers) have been recently targeting my grandmother. Like the individuals discussed in Barnard’s piece, she is financially savvy and fiercely independent – not the type to want to listen to an educational program (“what, do you think I’m an idiot?”). Still, she talks at length to telemarketers and has been repeatedly baffled by lottery fraud letters she receives, telling her that she has won some well-known sweepstakes but must first pay “taxes” before receiving her prize.
Aside from increased enforcement, I wonder if education-based interventions would work better if senior citizens like my grandmother could envision themselves as not potential victims but rather potential law enforcers. Few people targeted by scams are the only ones at risk from those scams, so alerting the police even when you receive a solicitation for a fraudulent scheme is likely to protect other people (as long as the police actually act on this information, which I’ll discuss in a bit). My grandmother (like a lot of people) does not like to see herself as someone who needs to be protected, but will respond well if she thinks she’s protecting others less competent than herself. Framing educational programs, at least in part, as about catching criminals and protecting others is likely to attract a lot more of the independent, financially savvy types who, ironically, are the most likely to themselves be the victims of fraud. And, of course, vigilant and engaged citizens make law enforcement easier.
That said, such a program would have to be backed up with serious resources toward enforcing laws against fraud. An enforcement system that relied primarily on fines, or that only prosecuted cases of completed, big-dollar fraud, would give senior citizens an inadequate incentive to report attempted fraud. Would-be crimefighters need to believe that the police will act on their tips, and that as a result, a criminal will be “taken off the street” or otherwise prevented from victimizing others in the future.
The lottery scammers who targeted my grandmother are a good example of this: these people were conducting their scheme through the mails (from Canada, it turns out), and had indicated a return address to which “taxes” should be sent. It would not be too difficult for police to simply stake out the post office box indicated in the letter and arrest anyone who came to check it. This type of technique is routinely used for drug traffickers; why not use it on people who try to steal from our parents and grandparents? Is it simply because we think that with all the educational programs there are out there, anyone who falls for this type of thing is “stupid” enough to deserve it? | <urn:uuid:287ec662-43f4-46fd-9105-fc3018f7261c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://whoselaw.wordpress.com/2009/06/21/fraud-against-the-elderly/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971044 | 693 | 1.828125 | 2 |
I suppose I should perhaps first begin with a more general view as to what is a ‘Marseille-style’ deck, especially as this one, as so many others, do not originate from Marseille itself. The term ‘Marseille’ seems to have been applied to the style of deck by Paul Marteau, who in the early parts of the 20th century owned one of the most successful card-making businesses in Europe, and hence, at the time, the world. Since then, of course, it should perhaps be mentioned that the style has become, and remains, the most important and foundational style of Tarot in the world.
There certainly were card-makers in Marseille itself producing decks in this style. Basically, however, the style tends to apply to decks that were originally made from woodcut blocks, generally between the 17th and 18th century, and mostly in the regions of Paris, Lyon, Avignon, and Marseille regions.
There were, of course, other decks that had immense similarities. For example the Besanzon style decks (except that they substituted the Papess and Pope for Junon and Jupiter), and other similar decks some more nothernly (around the lowland countries) and more easternly and southernly (Switzerland and Italy, for example).
If one looks at the earliest extant Marseille-style decks, three stand out as designs that have come to form the foundation of the style: the Noblet from Paris circa 1650, the Dodal from Lyon circa 1701, and the Conver from Marseille circa 1760. Other decks between these dates also abound, and I will shortly also mention another that is of significance. Suffice it to say, at this stage, that I will focus on neither the earlier nor the last of these three, but focus exclusively on the Dodal and its cognates.
The Dodal is strange, in that with the sheer volume of written information thereon, one would expect to find a date in one of the usual places: either on the two of Coins, or the two Cups. Yet neither has the detail. It is only by other researchers having looked through records and registers that Dodal appears to have been active in Lyons between 1701 and 1715. From this, the deck has variously been dated.
Another feature of the deck is that it was intended and made for, clearly, an export market. One even wonders if any of the decks were to be in any manner used locally, and personally suspect that this is not the case – perhaps from an agreement with another card-maker who was in some relation with Jean Dodal, as I shall mention again a little later.
Some have argued that the Marseille was designed solely for card play. With this I cannot personally agree. Apart from this being against the normal way of thinking and reflecting on or about imagery at the time, it also seems counter to the rich symbolic significance of many of the cards. Also, and importantly, there are clues left in the Dodal and in the Payen decks that suggest otherwise.
The Fool – Jean Dodal Tarot
The Fool – Jean Payen Tarot
Since I have mentioned the Payen, allow me a few paragraphs to also talk of this deck – or, rather, those decks. The Payen and the Dodal decks are so similar that a number amongst those interested have suggested that they were carved by the same hand, or at least in the same workshop. As far as I am aware, Jean-Claude Flornoy was the first to put this in print in quite precise terms. When Robert Mealing and I looked at the decks, however, what became apparent is that even more precise information could be suggested: Jean Payen was very likely, I would claim, the person whose workshop designed the Jean Dodal.
There are a number of clues left. Obviously, the similarity of construction of each of the cards: the images are so similar that one is left with the impression that one was the model for the other. Also, whereas Jean Payen was in Avignon in the late 1600s, Dodal was in Lyon in the early 1700s, with Jean-Pierre Payen (possibly the descendent of the elder Payen) again in Avignon in the early to mid 1700s (one of his decks is dated 1713).
But two striking features bring the possibility to mind. The first is that the Dodal is ‘smothered’ with inclusions which state that is is ‘made for export’ (‘Fait pour L’Etrange’). Not only does this appear in initials on the two Cups (F.P.E.), but it is on the Valet of Batons, XI Strength, and XXI the World… as well as, perhaps significantly, on each and every of the knights!
The second feature is one I have announced before: upon the Moon card, below the right-hand dog’s tail, on the dark green background above the waters, are clearly the initials of Jean Payen (I.P.).
The Moon – Jean Dodal Tarot
The Moon – Jean Dodal Tarot – Detail
Between the close similarity of the decks, and this ‘hidden’ inscription, perhaps placed there for simple protection equivalent to modern copyright, there is little doubt to my mind that Jean Payen is creator of the Dodal deck, specifically made for the export market.
The Dodal, however, has other interesting details worth further reflection. One of these is the unexpected naming of card II (called clearly ‘La Papesse’ in the Payen decks): on the Dodal retitled ‘La Pances’. Why, this still remains a mystery. A few years ago, I suggested that perhaps (though unlikely in a deck made for export) this was a play by homophony on the French for ‘reflection’ or ‘thought’ (‘PensÄe’). The word used is not a well-used word in even early 18th century France, though appearing on occasions. It simply refers to the ‘belly’, meaning both ‘womb’, and ‘stomach’ in the more everyday use of the word. A kangaroo’s pounch, by the way, would also have been referred to as ‘pances’.
Symbolically, it could refer from anything from announcing that this card depicts Mariam imagery to Pope Joan – and certainly avoiding the term ‘Papess’ on a deck destined, perhaps, for northern Italian regions by wisely altering a title that by that stage may cause more trade difficulties than need be.
Let’s also go back to the Knights for another brief investigation. It may be worth noting that in French the title is not ‘Knight’, which by default implies a particular status, but rather ‘Cavalier’. This term has both the connotation and meaning of ‘knight’, but also simply ‘horseman’, and would suggest that the images be looked at with the latter meaning in mind. Here, then, are travellers bringing their ware to distant lands (whether these be merely five or five hundred kilometres!) by means of the most common mode of transport available to those who could afford such: the horse.
What absolutely clear card to accurately have thereon ‘made for export’ or, more correctly, ‘made for the foreign land’. But let me expand on this a little to make more sense of it in a direction that may be unexpected.
For this, it may also be worth having a look at the earlier court, that of the ‘Valet’. As I mentioned in a recent post on Aeclectic’s tarotforum, I was recently doing some research for a paper I am preparing for a Masonic conference, and came across, without any mention of cards, of course, that there were three ‘classes’ of craftsmen in the thirteenth century: that of apprentice, that of VALET, and that of master. The Valet was effectively the craftsman who had completed his apprenticeship (and I am using the male pronoun, even though I should specifically mention that cases of women were also noted in some professions, and in some others – though not cardmaking – there was a predominance of women). Having completed an apprenticeship, in many professions the option was still to continue to work for the same Master… unless one was able to establish oneself elsewhere – and here is where the horseman comes in: an accomplished craftsman going out to the ‘etranger’ to establish his own workshop.
Later, and certainly by the time we are considering, the term ‘Valet’ was only more rarely used, being replaced by that on ‘compagnon’, a further intermediary position that required that the person who had completed an apprenticeship make a ‘tour de France’ and visit sufficient other worksites in order to gain sufficient further knowledge from a variety of masters prior to establishing himself as one. Again, a good description of the ‘horseman’.
In the building arts, whether carpenter or mason, there were many sites and a masonic network which has since, of course, also been well researched due principally to its Freemasonic connection. In the world of the cardmaker, however, there simply has not been the equivalent research undertaken. Yet snippets of suggestive and important information is there.
For example, and of high significance, is an association formed, according to Amberlain in Le Martinisme (1946) (and others before him, by the way), during the early Renaissance, ‘bringing together apprentices, compagnons and masters from guilds connected with books, which included librarians, engravers, stationers, book-binders, illustrators, and card makers’. Even more interestingly, the association, though spanning from Paris to Venice and Toulouse, had its centre in Lyon.
Further, and here we shall come back to our Payen/Dodal cards, the masters within this association incorporated within their glyph or sigil the symbol ‘4’ – usually incorporated with other pertinent detail.
In terms of our deck, it suddenly gives light to the consistent usage of such a ‘4’ otherwise remaining inexplicable: both the Payen and the Dodal decks have it, showing, to my eyes, further evidence that not only was the master carver part of this important society, but further made it evident for those who could recognise the symbol for what it was.
A deck, indeed, full of hidden mysteries, well worth further and meticulous studies! | <urn:uuid:afef8cf1-5f39-4c50-aa75-a1644272ad90> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://newsletter.tarotstudies.org/2005/08/jean-dodal-1701-tarot/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97677 | 2,250 | 1.734375 | 2 |
There is one change that the United States could make in response to the terrorism threat that is never discussed. That is to consider the part U.S. policies have played in creating and sustaining it.
I understand that we are not supposed to say this, as if discussing why we are hated justifies the unjustifiable: the targeting of innocent Americans because of the perceived sins of their government.
But nothing justifies terrorism. Period. That does not mean that nothing causes it.
Acts of terror do not come at us out of the blue. Nor are they directed at us, as President George W. Bush famously said, because the terrorists “hate our freedom.” If that was the case, terrorists would be equally or more inclined to hit countries at least as free as the United States, those in northern Europe, for instance.
No, terrorists (in this case Muslim terrorists) target the United States because they perceive us as their enemy.
And with good reason.
We have been at war with the people of various Muslim countries for decades, since perhaps as early as 1953 when we engineered Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh’s overthrow in Iran after he nationalized the oil industry.
Since then the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, on a pretext that was shown to be phony, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. That war came after over a decade of U.S.-sponsored sanctions that resulted in the deaths of over a million Iraqis, including more than a half million children due to malnutrition and diseases caused by the lack of clean water and medicine .
Then there are the current sanctions against Iran, ostensibly to deter its government from developing nuclear weapons but, in practice, punishing the Iranian people by degrading their quality of life as well as their health. (Just one example: the Iranian civilian airline has experienced a major spike in air crash deaths since sanctions have prevented it frompurchasing parts needed to replace worn and outmoded machinery).
Then there are the drone attacks. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee,said in February that, as of then, U.S. drone attacks had killed 4700 men, women and children (including, he notes, “innocent people”) in Afghanistan, Yemen and Pakistan.
And, of course, our Israel policy is based on the premise, so often stated by Vice President Joe Biden, that there must be “no daylight, no daylight” between Israeli policies and our own. That statement has proven true on matters large and small – from Congressional promises to join Israel if it decides to attack Iran to destroy its nuclear reactor, to supporting Israel’s policies on the West Bank and Gaza, to opposing any form of Palestinian representation at the United Nations. Muslims do not imagine that we view the Middle East almost entirely through Israeli eyes. We do.
In short, the aphorism often used to describe the effect of drone attacks can be applied to U.S. policy in the Muslim world in general: for every enemy we kill, we create dozens or hundreds more. And some of those enemies turn up here as terrorists.
So my question is this: why can’t the likelihood of blow-back be part of the calculation when policymakers decide to take a particular action or make a particular statement relating to the Middle East or the Muslim world in general?
Obviously the United States is not going to consider this factor as it decides on policies unambiguously affecting the fundamental security of the American people. No one would argue that we should not take out a terrorist cell poised to attack American targets out of fear of inflaming its members’ friends or sympathizers.
But few of the actions that so enrage (and radicalize) people in the Middle East are directly connected to the security of Americans at all: not the excessive number of drone attacks or Iran sanctions or our backing of the post-1967 Israeli occupation. Looking back at the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, it is difficult to argue that they did more to enhance the security of Americans than they did to damage it.
This is not to say that the United States should not have responded with force to the heinous 9/11 attacks. The successful effort to degrade the capabilities of Al Qaeda has, no doubt, made us safer.
And some of our enemies hate us not because of anything we do but because they are driven by religious or political zealotry. Some are just monsters. But not all, and not most.
But not every threat is Al Qaeda. In fact, not every group we deem as terrorist is an enemy of the United States at all. Some are engaged in local wars or insurgencies that have nothing to do with us, at least not before we jump in to assume the role 1960′s folk singer Phil Ochs referred to as “cops of the world.”
Because if this is what we are going to be, we are going to feel it here, not only in the form of terrorism but in the form of the loss of our own freedoms. At the rate we are going, the restrictions we have become accustomed to when trying to board an airplane will become a metaphor for the loss of the freedom we once thought of as encapsulating the American way of life.
The next threat to that freedom looms as the Obama administration considers whether it will permit (or even back) an Israeli attack on Iran. During his trip to Israel this week, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel told the Israelis that the United States believes that “in dealing with Iran, every option must be on the table.” That “every option” formulation, of course, refers to the possibility of war.
Can anyone doubt that an Israeli attack on Iran backed by the United States would have terrible repercussions here at home and that they would continue for a long, long time? Is that what we want? Is that something we can even tolerate?
With the Boston Marathon horror still fresh in our memory, I think it is safe to say that we cannot. Nor should we. But it’s our decision. Pursuing policies that enrage much of the world endangers Americans here. In Boston, New York, Washington and, ultimately, elsewhere as well.
Is it too much to ask that policy makers keep that in mind when making their calculations about where next to show the flag? Their primary responsibility is to protect Americans. It is time for them to stop endangering them.
MJ Rosenberg is Special Correspondent for Washington Spectator where this originally appeared. | <urn:uuid:3c9b624d-e51b-4662-8817-f6a75c897947> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mjayrosenberg.com/author/mjayrosenberg/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966076 | 1,348 | 1.734375 | 2 |
Mystics are masters of life and death. In addition to keeping people alive with powerful methods of healing, Mystics can enter a deep trance to enhance their healing abilities, and walk the plane of undeath to use deadly words of power to smite their enemies.
Trance is a stance Mystic can use to supercharge their healing actions. When the Mystic Trances, they attune themselves to the power of Essence greatly improving the power of their healing spells. However, this comes at the cost of offensive power by reducing the effect of their Wrath actions.
Deathwalk allows the Mystic to slip into a state of undeath. While in this state the Mystic becomes very durable and difficult for opponents to affect. Additionally their power with Wrath based actions is increased. Walking the plane of undeath comes at a price, as the Mystic's effectiveness with healing actions is greatly reduced.
Words of Power are a variety of actions with lasting effects. These Words can be anything from reinforcing buffs that the Mystic places on allies to crippling curses use to devastate foes. Although many Words can be used freely, some Words will prevent the Mystic from using other Word actions for a time due to their significant drain placed on the speaker.
Touches of Power are a variety of actions with short term effects. These Touches can instantly infuse an ally with health or deliver retribution on an enemy. Touches usually only affect the immediate target of the Mystic, but always have significant impact.
A Mystic is a master of healing and life, and a powerful adversary on the battlefield. A Mystic can use his own natural essence to breathe life into their allies, and his wrath to reign destruction on his foes.
A Mystic specializing in Empowerment will find themselves the masters of fate and healers of many. This specialization allows the Mystic fortify their party and provides healing boosts to their Embraces, allowing the Mystic to stop the inevitable harm coming to their allies.
A specializing in Divination is the ultimate damage mitigation ally. Their healing on a single target is without parallel and their ability to shield their friends and stop incoming damage altogether makes them ideally suited to the role of a primary healer.
A Mystic specializing in Spellfury will find themselves the harbingers of death itself. This specialization greatly improves the effect of damaging Words and Touches, and also improves the Deathwalk state by adding benefits and removing penalties.
Mystics are able to use maces, daggers, staves, and wands. They are restricted to light armor and may not use shields. | <urn:uuid:c6e898d7-b2c5-43e6-adf8-b266bd50144d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.myalganon.com/library/classes/mystic | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958569 | 519 | 1.601563 | 2 |
[dateline] Amstm. 25th July 1781
We regret that your Ladyship's letter of 25th April1
should not have Came to our hands soon enough to have prevented our executing your orders p[er]
the Ship Juno, in Lieu of that of our good friends Messrs. N. & T. Tracey (the Minerva) as a freight of 12 ½ PCt. is an object worth saving. But they were Shipped as early as the 25 May, and we were in hopes you would have received them before now, but the ship on board which they are, having waited for the
Convoy of a Large Frigate going to your Continent, prevented its departure till now.2
We are very Sencible of what America must expect from us, and feel too much for its disappointment at our tardiness in Seeking revenge for Such attrocious Insults, and Injuries. It has been a Subject of wonder to Europe, also, and to ourselves a Cause of painfull Sensation though we are Still persuaded we shall see our nation fully avenged. The Slowness of measures here having been more owing to the banefull influence of a Court, then to a want of proper Spirit in the nation, who on the Contrary gave us to dread from their resentment against Some Leaders, the most dreadful Consequences. True patriotism however Seems to gain the ascendancy with us, from which we hope the happiest effects will result, and finally that Iniquitous and haughty power (in Lieu of bringing the world at her feet to unconditional Submission) be punished for the wickedness of her measures.
It now is in the State of a ruined Gamester throwing its last Stake Neck or nothing: All in the East Indies is in as forlorn a State as in America. In short their Situation in all quarters is so deplorable that tho' an honest Brittain Cannot behold it without weeping he sees no Safety for himself or posterity from being enslaved but by further disgrace and ruin to their arms in hopes the remaining virtue left amongst them will at Last from despair unite in attempting to drag from the Seat of power the wretches who have perverted it, to their ruin, by every Corruption. May the good genius of your rising States ward them from every kind of it, and preserve their virtue and may our former one be restored to us, that we may be the more worthy of that union we so earnestly wish for, and to which we direct all our Labours. We flatter ourselves it is not far off. Tho' it will not add to our attachment or devotion to America, we believe it will to the energy of our assurances of that respect with which we have the honor to be most respectfully, Your Ladyships Most obt. hume. servts.,
[signed] John de Neufville & Son | <urn:uuid:da307601-32d0-4da0-97cd-2b2be5265344> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.masshist.org/publications/apde/portia.php?mode=p&id=AFC04p188A | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973171 | 593 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Low-graphic news index |
Saturday, November 3, 2012 - Page updated at 10:30 p.m.
Strong quake shakes Philippines, but no injuries
The Associated Press
A strong earthquake rattled the southern Philippine island of Mindanao early Saturday, but there were no reports of any injuries or damage and no tsunami warnings were issued.
The quake, which hit at 2:17 a.m., had a magnitude of 6.4, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology measured the magnitude at 6.5.
The institute said the quake's epicenter was 22 kilometers (13 miles) northeast of southern Tandag city, and 832 kilometers (517 miles) southeast of Manila, the capital. It hit at a depth of 78 kilometers (48 miles).
"There was no damage, no casualties," Civil Defense chief Benito Ramos said hours after the temblor hit. "The earthquake was strong, but its source was deep and far."
The institute recorded several aftershocks, but Ramos said they were hardly felt in the area. He said no tsunami warnings were issued.
Surigao del Sur provincial administrator Efren Rivas said about 1,000 Tandag residents fled to the elevated grounds of the provincial capitol when the quake struck but returned to their homes shortly after.
The Philippine archipelago is located in the Pacific "Ring of Fire," where earthquakes and volcanic activity are common. A magnitude-7.7 quake killed nearly 2,000 people on the northern island of Luzon in 1990.
Copyright © The Seattle Times Company
Low-graphic news index
Graphic-enabled home page | <urn:uuid:01b87e29-e202-441e-ab02-aaee566df04e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://seattletimes.com/text/2019588247.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957944 | 352 | 1.601563 | 2 |
Everybody is distressingly attractive. I mean, attractive according to mainstream beauty standards (but which I will hereafter refer to as just “attractive”).
The writerly side of me has been a little bit fascinated, and the adolescent side of me has been pretty self-conscious for a month and a half. Meanwhile, the sociological side of me has been pondering: how exactly does this happen to a city? Do communities of attractive people tend to gravitate towards each other, unconsciously excluding less-beautiful people? Or does the population here simply live a certain type of lifestyle (outdoorsy, physically active) that creates a fitter, tanner populace?
I was keeping this observation under wraps, not wanting to seem judgmental, until I browsed through the Boulder Craigslist job listings the other day and found that 75% of the “gigs” are in fact “modeling gigs.” Coincidence? I think not.
Then, I was at the farmers market buying some delicious Noosa yogurt, when I overheard the woman next to me asking whether it was low-fat. (….No, lady, it’s um, actually yogurt. You’re not shoppin’ at Whole Foods here)
A friend of mine who was born and raised here talks about her parents generation having all moved out here in the 70′s and 80′s, looking for a healthier life and healthier community. Fair enough– that explains the homogeneity of the populace. It also explains why there are no old people here…
In Which She Gets A Bit Critical
But the crucial thing to realize about a population of attractive people is that it is directly related to how wealthy that population is. Where I’m from (the area somewhere between the South and Appalachia), people are not mainstream attractive, because they can’t afford to be. They don’t have access to healthy diets, so obesity is rampant; the unavailability of health care means that it’s not unusual to see people with missing teeth, bad teeth, deformities and skin cancer… the list goes on.
In academic discussions, we refer to this as “marking” bodies with poverty: it’s the way that a person’s economic status becomes literally visible in his or her appearance. Structures in our society, like health care or welfare, contribute to this visible distinction between poor and rich by preventing poor people from achieving standards of beauty (which, from healthy food to well-tailored clothing to teeth whitening, require money).
Don’t get me wrong– I’m not saying that any person or institution is doing this on purpose. But keeping these economic distinctions visible does benefit those in power, because it discourages interaction between different economic classes. Think about it– when was the last time that you had small talk with a person that clearly looked below your economic status? And as a result, there is a serious lack of empathy (and activism) in general for the experience of poverty… and therefore little change.
Two years ago, I almost titled this blog “Blogging for Dialogue” because I wanted to write about the importance of healthy dialogue across differences– especially in the hearing, and the telling, of stories. Clearly I went for a vaguer theme (um, fruit), but this sort of thing is still on my mind. | <urn:uuid:5e3615c5-b13a-4a94-b827-64978cc08457> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://colewardell.wordpress.com/tag/beautiful-people/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959249 | 706 | 1.765625 | 2 |
Indiana Senate OKs Internet, Direct Mail Cigarette BillThe Indiana Senate approved a bill yesterday to regulate cigarette sales over the Internet and through direct mail, according to news reports.
The bill would require merchants who sell cigarettes over the Internet or through direct mail to verify that Indiana customers are at least 18 years old. They would have to get written statements of the buyer's address and age and verify the information.
They could do that by checking against government or private databases, including those used for driver's licenses or voter registrations. Buyers also could send in photocopies of identification.
The bill also requires merchants to either pay state sales taxes on the cigarettes or provide statements to both the customer and the Indiana Department of Revenue that state the customer's tax liability. The bill now goes to Gov. Frank O'Bannon. | <urn:uuid:7684ccf8-ff08-44eb-8776-01e7477b925e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dmnews.com/indiana-senate-oks-internet-direct-mail-cigarette-bill/article/80659/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945321 | 167 | 1.5 | 2 |
Facing mounting criticism about the lackluster nature of its response to Hurricane Sandy in New York and elsewhere, the American Red Cross has doubled down on defensiveness–last week, the president and CEO of the organization called the organization’s relief efforts “near flawless,” despite attacks from sources as far flung as Occupy Sandy and Republican Staten Island Borough President James Molinaro.
And now, in a new article from Fast Company, Red Cross social strategy director Wendy Harman is touting a new web-savvy effort to placate people living in fear after the storm: sending out “digital hugs” via Twitter. From Fast Co.:
It’s not the same as being there in person, Harman says, but it does align with the humanitarian organization’s emphasis on hope amid struggle. They give an assuring, informative “digital hug”: If someone tweets that they’re scared of a tornado impact, the social engagement team can reach out and say “here are the three best things that you can do in this moment and keep in touch, we hope you stay safe, hugs from the Red Cross.” The Red Cross has given about 1,500 digital hugs–one of them by Honorary Chair Barack Obama.
Never mind food, water, and shelter–what the displaced, powerless people in the Rockaways, Breezy Point, and Red Hook really need is a cutesy social media reminder that the Red Cross really cares.
ANIMAL reached out to Red Cross media relations director Anne Marie Borrego, who said she didn’t think the “hugs” were patronizing at all. “We want to reach people in any way we can,” she said. “Even if we can’t be physically in front of someone, we want to convey that message of hopefulness in any way we can.”
As far as the organization’s “near flawless” hurricane relief efforts, Borrego said that “given the magnitude of the storm, we are very proud of our response,” noting that this is the Red Cross’s largest disaster relief operation in five years. “No disaster response is perfect, and we understand the frustration that people feel,” she added, “but with 6,000 volunteers delivering millions of meals, and hundreds of thousands of supplies, we are reaching more people and more neighborhoods than ever.” | <urn:uuid:ec04de16-eebf-4c11-8b13-f0333d9bf339> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.animalnewyork.com/2012/red-cross-gives-cold-hungry-powerless-sandy-victims-just-what-they-need-digital-hugs/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948189 | 512 | 1.71875 | 2 |
As the Alberta economy remains softer than it was a year ago, companies need to reduce costs and improve their operational effectiveness. A business that takes advantage of this opportunity now will face the upturn lean and fit.
The tendency in a slowdown or recession is to cut operations overhead and slash costs, head into the bunker, and ride out the storm. This is a mistake, according to Ian Kane, a director in PwC's Advisory practice in Calgary. In spite of any short-term relief this approach might offer, the long-term impact to a company's operations can be even more damaging.
"Often what happens in this environment, when you have a downturn, is that people start scurrying in all different directions and become very reactive," he says. "And this reactive environment actually causes more problems and more turbulence."
Companies can weather this period by acting quickly and decisively, and making the hard decisions early on. By aggressively managing costs and eliminating inefficiency within their operations, they can improve overall financial performance and actually gain a competitive advantage. During past economic slowdowns, leading organizations maintained their focus on operational efficiency and large transformations. This has much to do with the importance of keeping cash in their operations as it does without sacrificing the future for short-term savings.
"Operational effectiveness is anything that impacts on the day-to-day operations of the business," explains Karen Watson, a director in the Advisory practice in Edmonton. "There's certainly an opportunity to increase the level of operational effectiveness across industry and government in Alberta."
For most private and public sector organizations, it is possible to trim the fat from operations and get rid of wasteful spending. Successful operations reviews are founded on agility, decisive action and transparency of communication. Taking an inclusive view of finance, information technology, operations and workforce issues will help manage operational costs in a downturn and enact valuable change that will stick for long-term profitability and resilience.
Companies that have seized this opportunity to become leaner and more efficient will be among the first to thrive in both good times and bad. To build a culture of operational effectiveness, here are four steps to consider:
As budgets become tighter and spending is reduced, the opportunity for private companies and the public sector to reduce inefficiencies is important, according to James McLean, a director in the Advisory practice in Alberta. "We definitely view there's an opportunity to both save money and improve service and productivity across the board in Alberta." | <urn:uuid:76a36c7a-8bdb-4559-ac52-3c82cad0f197> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pwc.com/ca/en/doing-business-in-alberta/trim-fat-not-muscle-improving-operational-effectiveness.jhtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963357 | 498 | 1.6875 | 2 |
A pleasant companion cat, the Chartreaux is a good match for single people as he plays in spurts and is comfortable by himself or with his owner.
Chartreaux At a glance
Male: large: >12 lbs.
Female: large: >12 lbs.
Gold, Copper, Orange
Longevity Range: 8-13 yrs.
Social/Attention Needs: Moderate
Tendency to Shed: Moderate
Less Allergenic: No
Overall Grooming Needs: Moderate
Cat Association Recognition:
The Chartreaux requires daily brushing to avoid knots, especially when seasons are changing.
The Chartreaux is a medium-sized cat. The cat is heavily muscled and has heavy boning. He has a thick, rounded appearance. Males are larger than females.
As a powerful cat, all components should be well developed. He has a broad chest, a muscular neck, strong jaws, and a well developed muzzle. The legs are relatively thin but strong. The cat looks like what it originally was, a cat to keep rodents out of the barn and the house.
The coat of the Chartreaux is thick and dense. It becomes much longer and thicker during the winter. The texture of the coat is relatively hard as it is protection for the cat.
The Chartreaux is a pleasant cat to have as a companion. He is easy going and placid. The Chartreaux is a fiercely loyal, loving cat and will attach himself to every member of his family.
While the Chartreaux will play, he actually doesn't need hourly attention. If the cat is in the mood to play, he will bring a toy to someone. The Chartreaux also plays well by himself. He is a good companion for single people as he plays in spurts and is comfortable by himself or with his owner.
The Chartreaux is a thick, muscular cat, so his nutrition must be carefully controlled. Despite the heavy boning and musculature of the cat, a proper weight must be kept and he should not get out of condition.
The Chartreaux will play when he wants to, and will find a toy or create one out of anything he finds if a cat toy is not available. Interactive play may be necessary to keep the cat in good shape and make certain that he gets adequate exercise. The Chartreaux likes hunting games where he can show his heritage.
A daily brushing is important for the Chartreaux, especially during the change of seasons when the coat is thickening or thinning. Even this shorthair cat can get knots in his coat if he isn't brushed regularly.
The Chartreaux has a religious background. This beautiful blue cat was probably brought to France from the mid-east in the 1500s. The Chartreaux were actively bred by Carthusian monks near Paris, and were probably working cats.
A methodical Chartreaux breeding program was started in France in the late 1920s, which resulted in a strong, healthy Shorthaired Blue cat with a lovely face and a powerful body. The Chartreaux was imported to Britain, not only to be bred as its own breed, but also to enhance the body, coat type and coat color of the British Shorthair.
During World War II, the Chartreaux was almost lost. Through the work of dedicated breeders, it has been brought back as a viable, healthy breed, although it is still relatively rare.
Discover how pets benefit
daily from Hill’s Food Shelter
& LoveTM program. | <urn:uuid:57123a61-7dae-4e91-8ee1-16ad85de2928> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hillspet.com/cat-breeds/chartreaux.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96984 | 732 | 1.625 | 2 |
Here is a good book on inorganic and applied chemistry. You can download it freely and can enjoy the knowledge inside the book. This book is for students of first year to University level. And again you need not to invest your pocket money to purchase bunch of books. Simply download and enjoy this gift from bookboon.com This book is equally important for candidates those who are going to appear in IIT JEE and other medical entrance examinations as a reference. As the concepts are written in simple language and standardized. Along with it you may also find some knowledge about interesting companies. Perhaps you may make your career after passing out IITs, MITs or any top University of the world. | <urn:uuid:57d62cbb-cb88-42c3-a352-fed9052fd158> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.educationjelly.com/2010/01/free-pdf-book-on-inorganic-and-applied-chemistry/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966083 | 140 | 1.742188 | 2 |
NOUMINREN Youth held its 20th conference in Tokyo on February 11thand 12th this year. Approximately 100 people participated in the conference (the largest ever). For NOUMINREN, this conference was probably its most important in last 20 years as it was the first conference after 3.11 earthquake, tsunami and the nuclear plant accidents. All participants were eager to share and reflect on what they underwent after 3.11 and to use these understandings to overcome their concerns.
On the first day, a forum was held to discuss the issue Why we must continue farming on Japanese soil: Understanding how nuclear power plants and the Trans-Pacific Partnership will destroy us. In this forum, five panelists (three farmers, one food researcher, and one local community activist) presented their commitment to protect agriculture and food sovereignty of Japan. | <urn:uuid:ec25f07b-2eb1-41db-ba52-3a5efb80e8c3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://osdeducation.tumblr.com/tagged/radioactive | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97331 | 170 | 1.695313 | 2 |
County schools gathers info for feeding program
Published: Tuesday, January 22, 2013 at 5:12 p.m.
Last Modified: Tuesday, January 22, 2013 at 5:12 p.m.
The beginning stages of a feeding program is in the works for Davidson County Schools to possibly start this summer.
Lisa Nelson, child nutrition director, said information has been sent home with parents in order to obtain numbers on participating parties.
The program would provide nutritious meals for students to ensure they are receiving food when school is not in session. Nelson noted she has been speaking with the nutrition departments at Lexington and Thomasville city schools to gather information and develop ideas.
The plan is to serve free meals for children aged 18 years old and younger. Children do not have to be enrolled in school to receive the meal. For a fee of $3.25, adults would be able to purchase the food.
The county school system has to apply for a waiver with the National Lunch Program that’s part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture to provide the free lunches.
Dr. Fred Mock, superintendent, said they have many children in the system who only receive nutritious meals during their time at school. He said they are concerned for those students during the summer months.
“Hunger is an issue in our community today,” he said. “By the survey we will determine which schools are best suitable for the program.”
Parents will be responsible for transporting their children to the designated school site between 11:15 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. Nelson said the system doesn’t have the means to transport meals into the community. Children will be able to go through the serving line to receive the meal, eat and then leave.
Once the need is determined, Nelson said, they will decide where and how many programs to start this summer. She would like to have feeder locations at each of the six areas — Central, East, North, South, West and Ledford — located throughout Davidson County, however they need to see how many people are interested.
Feedback will give the system a clearer idea of how many students would be able to take advantage of the program because school officials are hoping to reach as many children as possible, Nelson said. The memo that parents received just asked for the student’s school name and how many children will participate.
She said they might not be able to have a feeder site at all possible locations, but they’re hoping at least to start at one or two locations. Nelson said the next step will be approaching churches and other places that may be able to serve as host sites.
More information will come at a later date, Nelson said. She said they just wanted to go ahead and start the process with specific information being released later.
She mentioned the system does not receive any money from the program.
“The bottom line is feeding hungry children. I know there’s a need out there for it, so we’re working on it,” Nelson said.
Deneesha Edwards can be reached at 249-3981, ext. 213, or at firstname.lastname@example.org.
Reader comments posted to this article may be published in our print edition. All rights reserved. This copyrighted material may not be re-published without permission. Links are encouraged. | <urn:uuid:af7f0853-c07b-49e9-9567-917ed7afcdc7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.the-dispatch.com/article/20130122/NEWS/130129986/1004/deneesha.edwards@the-dispatch.com?Title=County-schools-gathers-info-for-feeding-program | 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 | 0.976402 | 707 | 1.820313 | 2 |
Work re-starts at NEC's Colton coal minePUBLISHED: 20 Jan 2011 11:21:45 | UPDATED: 21 Jan 2011 10:04:08PRINT EDITION: 20 Jan 2011
Northern Energy Corporation has re-started exploration at its Maryborough hard coking coal project in Queensland, after heavy rain forced an early halt to work in the week before Christmas.
NEC says two tracked drilling rigs began operating on Wednesday with more due rigs to start work on Thursday.
NEC expects to commence production of half a million tonnes per annum of hard coking coal from the Colton mine near Maryborough by mid-2012.
Managing director Keith Barker said the use of tracked drilling rigs, all weather access off-road vehicles and extra preparatory work on access roads made drilling possible during the traditional wet season down period. | <urn:uuid:945a734f-b1cb-48b1-9dce-692695306158> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.afr.com/p/business/companies/work_re_starts_at_nec_colton_coal_n2DKWsiZzWEIlgfim317EI | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934008 | 175 | 1.601563 | 2 |
Snapshots from Prague: 10 Must-Eat Foods
Prague tends to inspire wistful remembrances—of its beauty, its incredible history, its famous beer, its majestic spires, and its graceful bridges. But what many people don't often talk about is how great Czech cuisine is. Drawing heavily from nearby Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Austria, it suffered greatly from four decades of communist dictatorship. As a result, good Czech restaurants using fresh ingredients all but disappeared.
Although the situation has improved, many Czechs will still tell you they don't like Czech food unless it's prepared at home.
But fear not! On a recent trip to Prague, I was pleasantly surprised by the offerings. It's true there's a lot of meat and where there's meat, there's nearly always gravy and houskové knedlíky, the spongy steamed bread dumplings that people seem to love or hate. They also, of course, pour the freshest pilsner on the planet and have an ever-growing craft beer scene.
Just be warned: like other heavily touristed cities, food quality varies widely among restaurants, particularly in the dime-a-dozen Old Town tourist traps. Here are 10 must-eat foods that you should track down while in Prague.
10 Must-Eat Foods in Prague
About the author: Laura Siciliano-Rosen is the co-founder of food-travel website Eat Your World, an original guide to regional foods and drinks from different cities (including Prague) around the globe, to which users can also contribute. | <urn:uuid:71c395c0-f646-4dd4-8f40-bd728ec74f11> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.seriouseats.com/2012/03/snapshots-from-prague-food-czech-republic.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960423 | 327 | 1.617188 | 2 |
(ST. LOUIS, Mo.) News4 -- Detective James Gorman from the Town & Country Police Department lists his top ten factors for becoming a victim of crime in the Metro East this holiday season.
1. Unlocked doors
·Over 90% of crimes involving theft from a home or vehicle is a direct result of unlocked doors.
2. Inactive alarm systems
·If you have an alarm system installed, use it.
3. Packages on the front porch
·Houses with packages on the front porch are prime targets. Make arrangements to have a neighbor to accept it for you or have the package placed at the rear of the home.
4. French doors
·French doors are some of the easiest to force open, make sure yours are equipped with floor and header sliding bolts.
5. Failure to conduct good background on household workers
·Before you hire anyone to work in your home, check the person out as thoroughly as you can.
6. Advertising your purchases
·Career criminals do their homework. Make sure the boxes from your big ticket holiday items are cut up and folded on trash day.
7. Leaving for vacation without requesting a neighbor, family member or police check on your home
·If a friend or family member isn’t available, ask your local police department for a free “vacation check.”
8. Not reporting suspicious people, vehicles and/or incidents to police right away
·If you see someone or something that does not look right, immediately call the police. Doing so is very effective in deterring crime
9. Not belonging to your police department’s crime preventions and safety network
·Free email program offered by many area police departments
10. Thinking “It won’t happen to me."
·Wrong. Thinking it can’t or won’t happen to you is the wrong approach. Take steps to safeguard your home | <urn:uuid:e678ce55-42c2-42c6-b68f-e2a239ca5d89> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kmov.com/news/local/Dont-become-a-target-Top-10-holiday-crime-factors--184836581.html?ref=next | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942053 | 402 | 1.5625 | 2 |
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