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Whether you are traveling by boat, train, plane or car, there are lots of things to think about when you are taking a trip. Get out your notepad and get ready to write these tips down, because we’re about to tell you how you can take a great trip without the headaches.
While traveling to a foreign country is an exciting experience, it can also be risky if you aren’t familiar with its laws and customs. For that purpose, the State Department of the United States created a website (travel.state.gov) that you can visit to find out a wealth of information on the country to which you are traveling, including facts on crime, health conditions and popular attractions.
If you are going to be traveling, you should be sure to contact your banks and other financial institutions to let them know this. This way if they see charges from another location they won’t freeze your accounts. You could be stranded on vacation without any money if you don’t do this.
Double check your reservations. It may seem obvious, but there have been many cases where reservations suddenly disappeared from the databases, leaving you and your family with no place to stay. To prevent this from occurring, check with your hotel several times throughout the process to make sure that your reservation is still right where it should be.
When you make arrangements for wheelchair accessible rooms and other accommodations in your travels, be sure you get the agreement in writing. In this way, if you have problems getting the accommodations you have arranged for and presumably, paid for in advance, you will have some chance of reimbursement and of having your needs accommodated.
Never skip the safety orientations on cruise ships. These are mandatory information sessions that take place onboard major cruise liners before the vessel leaves the port of call. If an emergency happens, it will be too late to familiarize yourself with evacuation procedures and exit routes. After the safety orientation, practice what you have learned by starting in your own cabin and simulating your route in case of an emergency.
When traveling, whether it’s for a day or a month, don’t advertise your absence on social media sites. If you do, this lets people know that you’re going to be away from home and that most likely your house will be empty. This significantly raises your chances of being robbed while you’re out of town.
Traveling long distance in a car with children can be challenging. Take along a variety of activities for the kids to play with such as coloring books, crayons, toys, etc. It is also fun to play games with the kids such as trying to find license plates from all the states, or playing I Spy.
When you are packing up for your trip, be sure to include some clothespins. Clothespins can come in handy when you need to dry your clothes at the hotel. Most hotels will have rules about draping clothes on balcony rails, but you can use the clothespins to drape your clothes on chairs that may be on your balcony.
The region of Sabah in east Borneo is becoming an ever growing destination for travelers visiting Asia. Featuring world renowned attractions like those available at Best Places to Tour its no wonder people keep coming back year after year.
When selecting a destination for your travels, keep abrest of the recent news. Picking locations that are in high levels of turmoil may not be the best idea. However, don’t let over-anxious friends and relatives talk you out of a trip to a safe destination that has recently been the victim of some kind of attack.
When dining out during your travels, take the opportunity to choose one meal completely at random. You may wind up having the best meal of your vacation and you are sure to have a little fun in the process. If you are worried about this technique, try it on a day that you will be visiting multiple restaurants, so you can fill up somewhere else if you don’t like your dish.
You need to keep your passport secure when you travel. There are people who will steal a passport if they see it so that they can sell it to someone illegally. The only way to avoid this type of theft is to keep up with your passport at all times when you are traveling.
When traveling to a foreign country, it is often better to pay for a foreign sim card to make calls than pay the roaming charges of your existing carrier. No matter what you decide, you should definitely check with your carrier before you go on your trip so that you know what to expect.
Hopefully you have now made yourself and checklist or to-do list about traveling. The advice set forth here should serve you well in the future as you travel whether it be for business or for pleasure. Taking a trip should be fun and exciting and now it can be with this information.
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By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
This week marks the final edition of the Weekly Audit. It has been a pleasure compiling the best financial and economic writing in the Media Consortium. Thanks to all the contributors whose work we’ve showcased and to all the loyal readers who have shared in this experience.
Debt Ceiling 101
As the Weekly Audit wraps up, we’re looking ahead to some critical economic issues facing the country. Christen Simeral and Veronica Beebe of The American Prospect explain what the debt ceiling is and why the debate over raising it is shaping up to be the political battle of the year.
In short, the debt ceiling is the maximum amount the government can borrow. The debt ceiling is currently $14.294 trillion. At the current rate of spending, we’re due to hit the wall around May 16, if Congress doesn’t vote to raise it. Usually, raising the debt ceiling is a formality. Congress has voted to raise the debt ceiling 10 times in the last 10 years.
If the debt ceiling isn’t raised, the government can’t take on any new spending commitments. Worse still, the government may not have the cash it needs to pay tax refunds, Social Security payments, and other critical disbursements. Failing to raise the debt ceiling would hurt the U.S.’s credibility in global markets, making it more expensive for us to borrow money in the future.
The war on unions
All across the country, right wingers are trying to turn union workers into scapegoats for the nation’s economic woes.
Right wing media baron Andrew Breitbart tried to frame some labor history instructors at the university of Missouri by deceptively splicing together hours of classroom footage to make it look like the professors were advocating violence and sabotage, Dave Gilson of Mother Jones reports. The unedited video shows that the instructors are discussing the bloody history of the American labor movement, in which violence has overwhelmingly been perpetrated by management against workers.
Multinational corporations are renewing their lobbying push for more NAFTA-like trade deals, Michelle Chen reports for Colorlines.com:
The construction giant Caterpillar is reportedly planning to treat its workers to steaming cups of Colombian coffee in the coming weeks, to warm them to the benefits of doing business with their “partners” in Latin America. While employees enjoy their break, lobbyists will be working hard, in their name, to peddle so-called “open markets” in Colombia, Panama and South Korea.
Chen reports that lobbyists for multinationals are besieging Congress to push for three new accords. The Panama deal is expected to be first on the agenda. Advocates for fair trade have been fighting these deals since the George W. Bush administration.
The push for deregulated international trade is on at the state level, too. The conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is handing out boilerplate resolutions to state representatives urging Congress to approve the trade deals. Chen notes that the Koch Foundation is among the major backers of ALEC.
High gas prices
Gas prices have long been seen as a bellweather of the electorate’s state of mind. When gas is cheap, incumbents rest a little easier. When gas prices rise, challengers start licking their chops. Daniel J. Weiss and Valeri Vasquez report in Campus Progress that rising gas prices are frustrating consumers and enriching speculators:
This year “it’s like déjà vu all over again.” Oil prices are rising to heights not seen since 2008. Oil rose from $85 per barrel to $112 per barrel in a little more than two months—a whopping one-third leap. Gasoline prices have followed along, rising by 70 cents per gallon—or 23 percent—during this same time. As our economy struggles to recover from the Great Recession, Americans are again forced to pinch pennies to afford their commute to work, school, and worship. Meanwhile, oil companies prepare to reap record profits in the first quarter of 2011.
The authors note this combination of rising pump prices and soaring corporate profits looks an awful lot like the oil shock of 2008, which helped push the economy into recession.
Archives from The Weekly Audit can be found here and will remain posted at this site. If you’d like see more top news and headlines from independent media outlets, please follow us on Twitter, or fan The Media Consortium on Facebook.
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There are many inflation tracking websites but I wanted more specific information and found an interesting website I want to share.
This site lets you put in a date and then either choose the quick page or custom page to build a sheet of events and prices for the date you picked. This allows you to put your ancestors in context and keep things in perspective. (It's also a bit shocking)
This website is for US or UK prices and events and here is a sample of what it showed me with the quick page for my grandmother. There is a lot more information but it would not be readable here, if I included it. I tried dates as early as 1800 and there was data.
So, as you peruse those census records or think about the lives of those that went before, add some context to their lives with a time capsule entry or two.
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We all get bored. Tired of the same things day in and day out. Well, apparently this also applies to Gods Of Death or more specifically Shinigami. Ryuk is a Shinigami (Death God). If you put Billy Idol, Jack Skellington, a crazy clown, and a vampire bat all together in a food processor and pressed "chop" whatever you poured out would look something like Ryuk. He has become so complacent that he has decided to drop his notebook (or Death Note) down to the earth’s surface. His purpose in doing this is because he will find it at least mildly entertaining to watch the result of his Death Note in the hands of a human being.
What does it mean to have a Death Note in the hands of a human being? Well, simply put, just as in the world of the Shinigami, if you write someone’s name in the Death Note and you know what they look like they will die. This is, of course, the simple explanation of things. There are rules which govern the use of the Death Note as well.Continue Reading
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May 21st, 2013 World Day for Cultural Diversity May 22nd, 2013 National Maritime Day May 22nd, 2013 World Biological Diversity Day May 25th, 2013 African Liberation Day May 26th, 2013 Trinity Sunday May 27th, 2013 Jefferson Davis Birthday May 27th, 2013 Memorial Day May 29th, 2013 International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers May 30th, 2013 Corpus Christi May 31st, 2013 World No Tobacco Day June 1st, 2013 Statehood Day June 3rd, 2013 Jefferson Davis Birthday June 4th, 2013 World Day for Child Victims of Aggression June 5th, 2013 World Environment Day June 6th, 2013 Isra and Mi'raj June 8th, 2013 World Oceans Day June 11th, 2013 Kamehameha Day June 12th, 2013 World Day Against Child Labour June 14th, 2013 World Blood Donor Day June 14th, 2013 Flag Day June 16th, 2013 Father's Day June 17th, 2013 Bunker Hill Day June 17th, 2013 World Day to Combat Desertification June 19th, 2013 Juneteenth June 20th, 2013 World Refugee Day June 20th, 2013 West Virginia Day June 21st, 2013 June Solstice
Indian/spanish American Wars? Dress Helmet For Sale
This sale is for what I believe is an Indian or Spanish
American war dress helmet with a vertical top spike. The identification inside the
helmet says, “Horstmann Bros.& Co., Philadelphia”.Thereis also a size label "L". There are no wear spotsor defects anywhere on the helmet; it looks almost new inside and out. The two side pins pictured, about
1” in diameter,are artillery(crossed cannons).
The front eagle plaque measures about 4 x 3½”.All
hardware is complete and in excellent condition, including the red trim. The helmet has been stored improperly for a long time, so it is compressed somewhat horizontally (see pics). A form to correct this minor issuecan easily be fabricated. Of the many similar helmets I have offered, this one is easily in the best overall condition. Please contact me with any
questions or if you have any further information regarding this item. Low
starting price and ! All forms of payment accepted.
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Meet the Artist: John Himmelfarb at Illinois State Museum Lockport Gallery
LOCKPORT, IL— On Sunday, December 2, 2012, visitors have the opportunity to meet Illinois artist John Himmelfarb and to listen to a presentation about his work. In addition, John will share insights into the work of his father, artist Samuel Himmelfarb, whose work is also part of the exhibition. Mr. Himmelfarb’s presentation will begin at 2:00 pm and last approximately one hour. This free Meet the Artist event is part of the Illinois State Museum Lockport Gallery’s Sunday Series of programs which accompany our current exhibition Figurism: Narrative and Fantastic Figurative Art from the Illinois State Museum Collection. Reservations are not required to attend this free event, though seating is limited; doors open at noon on Sunday to view the current exhibition.
John Himmelfarb was born in Chicago to artists Samuel and Eleanor Himmelfarb—each of whom attained their own successes—and raised in Winfield, Illinois. His father, Samuel, was very much a role model and the influences of both parents were key to his decision to become an artist. Long known for his independence and originality, John Himmelfarb works with a diverse visual vocabulary to create prints, paintings and drawings that nod to multiple modernist tendencies. Himmelfarb has exhibited nationally since 1968, the year of his graduation from Harvard. He has received many honors and commissions during his over 40 year career and his work is held in numerous public and private collections.
Figurism: Narrative and Fantastic Figurative Art from the Illinois State Museum Collection (thru April 19, 2013) brings together historical and contemporary artwork of more than fifty artists that emphasizes the power and the range of the narrative and expressive figure in Midwest art. The artworks in the exhibition demonstrate the many artistic styles which adhere to representation yet still capture feeling, experience, memory, and time. Many lean towards the fantastic, with a heightened sense of the super-real and super-natural. The work by more than fifty artists represented in Figurism reflect the range of styles, and variety of media, and the richness of figurative art created in the Midwest over the last century.
Three additional public events are scheduled for Sundays during the exhibition, including an opportunity to meet artist Judith Raphael who will present on Sunday, March 3, 2013. On Sunday, January 13, Jennifer Jaskowiak, ISMLG Curator of Art, will present a lecture on “Figuring Women.” And on February 10, 2013, Jim L. Zimmer, ISM Director for Art and History, will speak on “The Figure in New Deal Art.” All events will begin at 2:00 pm and are free to the public. Reservations are not required, but seating is limited. The Illinois State Museum Lockport Gallery is located on the first floor of the historic Norton Building at 201 West 10th Street in Lockport, Illinois, and is fully accessible to all physically challenged individuals. Museum hours: Sunday, noon to 5:00 pm, Monday thru Thursday, 9:00 am until 5:00, closed Fridays, Saturdays and State Holidays. The Museum will be closed Wednesday, November 21 and Thursday, November 22 for Thanksgiving. Please call the Museum regarding hours over the holidays. Admission is free. For information on exhibitions and related programs, becoming a member, directions to the museum, or to schedule a group tour of ten or more, please contact museum staff at (815) 838-7400 or visit the museum online at http://www.museum.state.il.us/ismsites/lockport/. The Illinois State Museum Lockport Gallery is part of the Illinois State Museum system, including sites in Springfield, Rend Lake, Chicago, and Lewistown.
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Back to News & Press.
Illinois State Museum
The Illinois State Museum promotes discovery, learning, and an appreciation of Illinois' natural, cultural, and artistic heritage.
General Information: (217)782-7386
Director's Office: (217)782-7011
Museum Director: Bonnie W. Styles
Press Contact: email@example.com
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Is there anybody who doesn’t love butterflies? Even the most hardened gardener perks up when one of nature’s beauties flutters by. They serve a useful function in the garden, too. They eat flower nectar and thus pollinate plants in the garden, just as bees do.
- Yard Type
- Yard Feature
Member Inspired Landscaping Ideas & Garden Ideas
We all yearn for a room of our own, a little shed located outside, away from the main house. It could be an alluring destination for both practical and passionate endeavors, a place to escape from the demands of daily living, a place to meditate, to create, a place for personal enjoyment.
For many homeowners, having a small waterfall that dribbles gently into a pond or pool is enough to satisfy their need to watch the interaction of water and gravity. But for others, that’s just not enough drama. Some of us like to make more of a splash.
Potted plants make wonderful additions to the yard right through the year—even in winter. With a small army of pots of various sizes tucked away in the garden shed or behind the garage or barn, you can create a moveable garden of potted plants for each season.
There are times when burgers and dogs off the grill just won’t cut it. Maybe it’s a special occasion, maybe it’s a party, or maybe you want to kick off Memorial Day Weekend with a surprise your guests will never expect. This dish from Uruguay is called a matambre, which apparently means “hunger killer.”
Beneficial bugs are nature’s response to the pests that can plague your garden. These insect-friends include lady beetles (formerly ladybugs), green lacewings, assassin bugs, praying mantis, minute pirate bugs, ground beetles, syrphid flies, and predatory stinkbugs.
Trees are a long term landscaping investment. There’s no hardscape feature that can fully replace the natural beauty and shade of a living, “breathing” tree. Unfortunately, the decision about where to plant a tree is often made by the builders or original owners of a home.
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Shedding light on storehouse secrets
Updated: 2013-01-26 08:21
By Lin Qi (China Daily)
It has become a tradition for the National Art Museum of China to celebrate Spring Festival, or the Lunar New Year, by exhibiting part of its immense collection.
This year, it has expanded the scale to fill nine exhibition halls with artworks from not only its storehouse but also from nine other fine art museums around the country.
Selected Collections from 10 Art Museums demonstrates these museums' efforts to enrich and study their collections, so they are better presented to the public.
It particularly marks the Beijing debut of many paintings with a wide range of styles and motifs from seven provincial and city museums. It offers a glimpse of different regions' art heritage, which have developed unique characteristics based on consistent academic reviews.
"Our collections tell how Chinese artists pursued modernism in the first half of the 20th century, and it shows Guangdong province's cultural landscape about 50 years ago," Guangdong Fine Arts Museum's director Luo Yiping says.
The museum brings Realistic oil paintings by those who first introduced Western artistic language to describe their native land and people, and spearheaded modern Chinese art's enlightenment by founding independent art groups. It also displays representative works of the Lingnan Painting School, which injected innovation into Chinese painting.
The Hubei Museum of Arts, the youngest of all participating museums at 5 years old, narrates a different chapter of history. Its selection of 60 prints record New China's industrial construction and factory workers' daily lives.
The museum is located in Hubei's provincial capital Wuhan, an industrial giant in Central China.
"The city's positioning decides our collection with prints featuring the theme of industrial development," museum director Fu Zhongwang says.
"Most print artists were themselves workers, who drew inspiration from laboring in workshops, construction sites and mines."
The exhibition inaugurates NAMOC's series of celebrations of its 50th anniversary. The country's top art museum houses more than 100,000 paintings, sculptures, calligraphic works, photos and folk art items, such as paper-cuts and puppets. Director Fan Di'an says the museum received a donation of 1,200 works in 2012 alone.
Such a tour to the capital might spark interest in regional art traditions and bring donations for local museums.
The Guan Shanyue Art Museum in Guangdong's Shenzhen city exhibits selected posters from a collection of 1,160 graphic designs from home and abroad. That accounts for nearly one-third of its collection.
The museum, which is named after the Lingnan School's pioneer artist Guan Shanyue (1912-2000), also hopes to enlarge its stock of Chinese paintings, particularly of contemporary ink-and-water works.
Museum curator Chen Xiangbo says the recent years' art market boom has elevated this genre's appeal. He believes it will take time for more buyers to share their private collections with the public.
"China's fine art museums are still in their infancy," Central Academy of Fine Arts professor Jin Shangyi says.
"They need to move forward by staging permanent exhibitions where collections can enthrall viewers rather than remain storehouse secrets."
He called upon the academy's teachers to donate about 100 works to museums in the 1990s.
The CAFA Art Museum displays at the exhibition works celebrated artists created when they studied or taught at the academy in their youth.
The Ministry of Culture launched a campaign in 2012 to select public art museums' best collection exhibitions. It encourages more permanent shows to make collections more accessible.
"If we (art museums) only collect things but don't display them, we're merely warehouses - and who'd want to donate to our storage?" Fan says.
The exhibition will run until Feb 26.
(China Daily 01/26/2013 page11)
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Tradition, zest for life, comedy, and sadness all overtook the stage at Westfield High School’s production of "Fiddler on the Roof." The musical was inspired by the stories of Yiddish writer Sholom Aleichem and first hit the stage in 1964. Fiddler contains some of the most popular songs in musical history, has won nine Tony Awards, and was one of the longest running shows on Broadway.
The story focuses on a tightly knit Jewish community in Russia. Many of the elders cling to ancient religious traditions, while the younger generation is yearning for less tradition and more freedom. The plot centers on Tevye, a dairyman, and his family of five daughters. Tevye is continually badgered by his daughters’ insistence on marrying men he doesn’t approve of, while the town’s matchmaker tries to arrange the girls’ marriages with more practical men. At the same time, the Russians are trying to push the Jewish populations out of their beloved homelands.
Barry Armbruster as Tevye was magnificent. His Jewish passion, outstanding charisma, exaggerated facial expressions, and comic timing were delightful to watch. He had a baritone voice that rocked the house, expert dancing talent, and a genuine fatherly presence. Also outstanding was the matchmaker Yente (Michelle Murgia). She had a consistent accent, dramatically comical antics, and an enthusiastic stage presence. Lazar Wolf the butcher (Dallas Sweezey) had a highly developed character and comedic dancing ability.
Tevye’s daughters Tzeitel (Ashley Dillard), Hodel (Carolyn Agan), and Chava (Michelle Polera) displayed an earnest girlish innocence and all had beautiful singing voices. Motel the tailor (Brian Randall) was consistently amusing and charmingly awkward. The entire ensemble had infectiously high energy and the ingenious choreography was consistently interesting.
The orchestra significantly added to the mood of each scene yet didn’t overpower the actors. The set was visually interesting as it combined a detailed kitchen and doorway while also showing all the houses in the village. The costumes were authentically shabby and consistent to the time period. The sound cues were flawless and the lighting was creative. There were stunning colors for each time of day and there were bright or dim lights at just the right time to accentuate the action on-stage.
"Fiddler on the Roof" has a sophisticated sensibility with many cultural nuances, which the entire cast and crew effectively captured. The production was perfectly executed and everyone was highly involved and energetic throughout the show. The story of Jewish displacement is an important story to share with audiences everywhere, and Westfield did the show commendable justice.
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Simple TECHxplanationsBy Danny Davids(13,468)
About Danny Davids(13,468)
Posted Friday, April 18, 2008 (44 days 16 hours ago.)
I've been providing computer support for over 25 years now. Doing anything for a quarter of a century usually gives one a good perspective on how a job should be done. It also provides some practice in determining whether a computer user is "good" or not.
I'm not talking about somebody who is whiz-bang at Excel, or can make Adobe Photoshop do things that professional print shops can't even duplicate. I'm looking at this from the tech's viewpoint. To me, a "good" user is one who knows how to communicate effectively when a problem arises with her computer. She can tell me what's wrong in plain English, helping me to quickly identify what the potential problem is, and enabling me to come up with a resolution in a timely manner. It doesn't require a degree in computer science on the user's part, or years of experience in solving computer issues. It DOES require a willingness to pay attention to detail and being able to convey that detail appropriately and honestly.
Let me give you some classic real-life examples of how "bad" users convey their computer issues to the tech support staff. And pardon me if I get a little gruff in my responses.
My computer stopped working! Really? Did it completely power off? Is it trying to boot up and failing to let you log into the network? Did the program you're working in suddenly do something that you're not used to seeing it do? "Stopped working" can mean anything. Be specific. Let your tech know that everything was working normally until you opened Microsoft Word and then the screen went blank.
This problem has been going on for over two weeks! So maybe you'd like to explain why you waited until you had an important document due this afternoon before you called for assistance? It still amazes me that people think "if I just ignore the problem it'll go away." And then when it doesn't it's the tech's fault. Wrong! When a problem occurs more than once, it's time to call for support.
I was doing this and this and this and this and this and this and then it just blew up! Comments like this tell me the user was doing too much too fast. Maybe he was running multiple programs simultaneously and got confused about what button to click in what window. Or maybe he was on the phone while trying to generate the big monthly report. My guess is between the second and third "this" is when he mis-clicked or mis-keyed or mis-read. If you find yourself saying this frequently when dealing with your support personnel, s-l-o-w d-o-w-n. You can save yourself a lot of grief when you're not accidentally opening a window and clicking "Yes" to erase all the files on your hard drive!
You can probably fix that by _(insert computer-tech-sounding process here)_! If that option was available, and you knew about it, wouldn't you already have tried it and saved yourself the phone call? Face it. You don't know what caused the problem, so you most likely don't know the solution. And after years of hearing this one, I can tell when a user is trying to impress me with his computer knowledge, or when he's BSing me (and believe me, the latter one happens a lot). Report the details of the issue and then step back and let the tech do his job. Unless you want to do it for him--in which case, here's an application, and there's HR.
And finally, my personal favorite:
I don't have this problem on my computer at home! I'm sure you don't. After all, you're only running a modem, cable modem, or DSL line and possibly a router to share the connection among a few computers and a printer. You're NOT running file servers, e-mail servers, DHCP servers, DNS, WINS, firewalls, or VPN connections. You're also not running programs that run on minicomputers or mainframes and using emulation packages to let the different computer systems talk to each other and transfer data effectively. Comparing your home setup to the corporate setup is like comparing amoebas to apes. So don't even think that a fix for home and a fix for work will automatically be the same.
If after seeing these examples you still don't understand why your computer guy frequently walks around the office mumbling angrily to himself, then maybe you need to stop using a computer and go back to paper and pencil (see my blog entry on the Big Chief brigade). And if you approach me requesting help and use one of these examples to let me know what's gone wrong (or how to make it right), I'll get back to you, oh, sometime next month...!
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Posted Friday, April 11, 2008 (51 days 22 hours ago.)
It's time for a new cell phone. My contract with my current provider is nearly up, and cell phone technology has changed enough in two years that I'm having problems with my existing phone. So I've started looking at my options. There are a lot of them, and that's just with my provider. But I do have a question.
WHERE THE HECK ARE THE PHONES?
Remember, I'm a tech geek. I like innovation. I like the new toys. But after looking in-store and on-line at my options, I'm finding I'm viewing not phones with extras, but multimedia devices that happen to have a phone as an option. Which would be okay, if I didn't already own devices that do all those other things. (Remember, I LIKE TOYS!) We've gone from discussing long-distance rates and rollover minutes to memory size and texting included. Seriously, watch any provider's commercials and see what they are promoting!
What are some of the features I can get (but don't want or need) in the latest cell phones?
E-mail. If I was a businessman continally on the go, I could see the logic behind being able to access my e-mail anywhere from my phone. That's why phones like the Blackberry, Blackjack, and Pearl are so popular. But this is for my own personal use. If I have to access personal e-mail 24/7, I need to start getting out more. Oh, and by the way, these phones aren't cheap. Maybe that's why the manufacturers push them so hard, ya think?
Internet access. You're kidding, right? What can I see on the Internet that's going to fit on that low-quality display? "Oh, but I can get the latest weather report and know what the score is for my favorite sports team while the game is going on!" So can I, and on a device where I can actually see the data without having to scroll through myriad screens of two and three words of text at a time. It's called a television. It's cool. You should check it out sometime.
Digital camera. I can choose between a VGA (abyssimal quality) or 1.3 megapixel (low quality) version. Since I already own a 3 megapixel digital camera, the quality of pictures I can take beats out any cell phone on the market. Manufacturers claim that you can snap a picture and immediately send it to anyone with a display on their phone. Why? I can take a photo on my digital camera, take it home, connect it to my computer, and send the photo via e-mail. And golly gee whiz, you'll even be able to identify the items in the picture!
MP3 player. I already own two of these. Why would I want to spend money on a third? Vendors tout the ability to download the latest songs from the Internet and play them immediately. What if you already have the song at home? You're going to pay to get it again? And you're going to hear that music using the same speakers the phone uses. Yeah, that's going to be great quality, either with or without headphones, and a big drain on the phone's battery, reducing its lifetime.
Texting. Unless you've got a device with a full QWERTY keyboard, this is time-consuming, even with the abbreviations. Using it to send a quick message to somebody who's busy, or in a meeting, or in class is one thing. Having an entire conversation? It'd be faster and more efficient to make the phone call.
Bluetooth capability. Okay, this is the one feature I actually DO want and am willing to pay for. Having those headsets so you can talk hands-free is a godsend in the car. And thanks to modern technology, I can use a device that plugs into my computer and lets me transfer my wallpapers and ring tones directly to the phone. In fact, I've already written a blog entry about it.
All of these features and abilities point out that we have become a generation of "now", of immediate gratification. I can send you a grainy, fuzzy picture NOW, or I can wait and give you one that'll last longer than the battery life of your phone. I can download a low-quality MP3 song and play it NOW, or I can wait and buy the album, or download a high-quality version that'll play on a device that has real sound. I can send you a cryptic two-line message that you might not understand NOW, or I can wait and have a real conversation face-to-face where we can avoid confusion and interact. And of course, the phone manufacturers drool all over themselves adding these features and bumping up the prices on their products, which fluff-headed consumers are only too happy to pay.
As for me, all I want is a phone. I want to make phone calls. I might send the occasional text message, but I'm not taking pictures and I'm not listening to music and I'm not accessing the Internet. I want to talk to somebody, not give them a multimedia presentation.
I remember a conversation I had several years ago with a friend of mine, right after the iPAQ came out with a phone option. I predicted that we'd end up with an all-in-one device that played music, took photographs, maintained our data, and let us take phone calls. I was thinking in terms of starting with a PDA as a base, but the industry has decided to work with the cell phone instead. As a result, an item that I use as a convenience now has substandard features that I don't want for an exhorbitant price that I'm not willing to pay--and I will like it! On the other hand, we now have a great visual aid to describe for future generations exactly what government looks like...!
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|Copyright 2008 ProBlogs.com - All rights reserved.|
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The Kombi line is a further development of the supplier’s double-stroke clinching machines. The Kombi line uses solid dies where all moving parts are encapsulated for maximum robustness, meeting the severe operating conditions associated with extreme production rates. The Kombi line workheads are said to have high capacity, up to 24-in (600-mm) bite, and are reportedly safe and inexpensive. They can have C-frames, which are articulated (A-series), or fixed (F-series). The Kombi line is composed of a set of standardized building blocks that can reportedly be combined to make up a SPOT CLINCH® installation, from a simple, foot-pedal operated workhead on a pillar to complete equipment for high-productivity, automated multi-workhead assembly lines. With the company’s new boosters, the Kombi line is said to be as fast as single-stroke machines.
ATTEXOR Tools S.A.
Canon Communications LLC . © 2008
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The Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs within the Department state is the office responsible for managing and promoting the U.S. interests in the region by supporting democracy, trade, and sustainable economic development. The Bureau fosters cooperation on issues such as drug trafficking and crime, poverty reduction, and environmental protection.
The mission of the Bureau is to work with partners in the Americas to generate broad-based growth through freer trade and sound economic policies; to invest in the well-being of people from all walks of life; and to make democracy serve every citizen more effectively and justly.
The objective if the Bureau is to strengthen an Inter-American community formed by:
a. democratic, stable, and prosperous economic partners;
b. friendly neighbors helping to secure the nation against terrorism and illegal drugs; and
c. nations that work together in the world to advance shared political and economic values.
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Theo Bosboom - Backlit grassland
Nature area De Bruuk near Groesbeek is one of the few places in Holland were you can still find the so-called blue grasslands. The area is very beautiful in spring and I always enjoy going there to photograph butterflies or dragonflies. One morning not long after sunrise, I came across one of the meadows and saw that the grass and emerging plants were beautifully lit by the sun behind it. I zoomed in with my 70-200 lens and underexposed a little bit to enhance the effect of the backlit plants.
Location: De Bruuk, Holland
Posted on 11.04.2012
Photo info -
Tags: Blue grassland De Bruuk Holland Netherlands The Theo Bosboom vegetation wildlife photography
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Karsten Strauss, Forbes Staff
Journalist covering entrepreneurs, technology & business.
This is a guest post by Facebook mobile app user, Marjorie Sterne, who found, to her surprise, that the online social network had replaced her profile picture with an advertisement for beer.
Marjorie Sterne is an attorney with a background in intellectual property and contract law, working as a business development and market research consultant for venture capital firms invested in new and emerging technologies, medical devices, IT services and sporting goods. She is an iOS developer and the author of the electronic city guide to Venice, Italy, OG Venice Travel Guide.
**An organization called The Outcast Agency contacted Forbes to explain that Ms. Sterne’s experience was due to a “bug” and not part of a marketing strategy spearheaded by Facebook. According to the agency, “The issue that she experienced was actually an accidental bug, not a plan by Facebook to turn her (or other users’) personal profile picture into an advertisement. Unfortunately, bugs sometimes occur in technology.”**
When I got to my desk this morning I checked my email, then flipped over to Facebook where I clicked to support someone’s rights, checked to see if any of my friends might have discovered something I missed in the morning news and made the all-important, meaningful (or meaningless) witticism about the state of my personal universe. Feeling as though I had accomplished something, and made an impact on the universe by putting it out there for all those I have selected from my friend-lists to see, I switched focus to the obligatory tasks of my day.
An hour or so later, my iPhone and iPad started in with their beeping and dinging about communications wanting attention. Lo and behold, my posting had elicited responses from that most discerning of audiences, my friends on Facebook (NASDAQ:FB). I snatched up my iPhone to make an instant and flippant reply that would show those pedestrians who dared tread where I had invited them to just how deeply they had misunderstood me when…
What?! That’s not ME! That’s my commentary alright, but that picture to the left of my name, in the place where my sweet, healthy, and innocent-looking face from two years ago should be, that’s...*squint* what is that? An ad for the Heineken Jammin’ Festival?! I’m an ad? I’m beer? I’m a music festival sponsored by beer? Oh, the humiliation… although, if you’ve gotta be something… No. That is not me! Does anyone else know about this? Have I been turned into beer the world over?
I immediately opened a browser to the Facebook website where, to my relief, my face had not been changed to a beer ad. Whew…But wait! Back to the phone. Nope. There I was, still beer. I decided to post a status update asking my friends if they’d seen me as beer. “No dear, you’re not beer.” But then they might all think I was crazy. So, back to the phone, take a screenshot of my Facebook Mobile, post it to Facebook, prove to the world that I have, in fact, been changed into beer. Riiiight, that’ll make it better.
I now realize of course that I am among the early victims of Facebook’s attempts to move more advertising onto its mobile apps. Only to the individual user and only on mobile, will your face be replaced by the brands that identify you? Hmmm, what do I think of this? Well, as a publisher of an electronic product myself, I am not one who expects my online services for free. There are prices that must be paid for information and services, be they either money or allowing advertisers a few moments of time with our impressionable minds. But Facebook, this is not the way. If you want to show me an ad then show me an ad. Don’t make me into an ad.
Turning my profile picture into an advertisement that makes it look as though I am the product, and that the product endorses whatever meaningless drivel I’m posting on Facebook is foolish and offensive. It directly attacks my identity by replacing me with an advertisement.
Consumer free will and individual identity aside, this ad is hopelessly ill targeted. It displays the ad only to me and I am already a “fan” of Heineken Jammin’ Festival on Facebook. I was anyway… Showing me, myself, as Heineken will not grow its audience. But, of course, if you had shown anyone else me as a Heineken ad, I would be forced to sue you. Heineken might have been forced to do so as well, depending on what status update of mine it was allegedly endorsing. All in all, this ad and this method of advertising looks like a dangerous loser.
There are other, less offensive and less combative, ways to earn revenues with Facebook’s mobile platforms, ways that will not force me to “Unlike” all of the commercial interests I follow on Facebook just to preserve my self-respect. Feel free to contact me for ideas. And meanwhile, please replace my face.
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Khesht Va Ayeneh (1965) (aka Brick And Mirror)
“Do you see those panes, those windows? Behind each, there is an evil eye, a wicked tongue, a jealous black heart, each detesting the other and all unified to detest each other.”
Ebrahim Golestan’s Brick and Mirror (1965) begins inside a taxi. The man at the wheel changes the radio station and a voice begins to narrate:
“The night had settled over the forest. The hunter trod through the thicket stealthily. Danger throbbed in the dark. Fear filled the forest. And terror sparked the night. The night was hard. The night seemed long. Nothing was reflected in the eye of the owl but anguish. And fear was life’s only sign. The hunter trod stealthily through the night. Beasts were staring. And the eyes of the thousand-eyed perils were wide. It was dark. And in the dark, there was no one to tell the hunter and the hunted who was the hunter and who was the hunted.”
The camera, meanwhile, gazes safely from behind the windshield, the vast city of Tehran. Night has well fallen and all the street lights are up. It seems like thousands of gigantic eyes staring at the camera, hiding behind the darkness, waiting to pounce on the unsuspecting taxi. After a couple of minutes, we cut to the face of the driver – a thirty-ish gentleman resembling De Niro during his prime. Golestan’s composition is immediately striking. The taxi driver, here and throughout the film, is placed at the margin of the frame, with the dark city pushing him to the boundaries. One gets the feeling that this one might just be the (premeditated) Iranian reply to Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976).
Brick and Mirror is unlike anything I have seen from Iran, for it is my introduction to Iranian cinema before the revolution. With the world’s eyes keenly focused on Iran, – politically or otherwise – there prevails a risk of drawing a monolithic portrait of the country. Watching Brick and Mirror, one can see how starkly different the two ages are and how drastic a cultural shift its citizens were subject to after 1979. Golestan’s film, more or less, also testifies the strong relation between France and Iran that prevailed during the Shah’s regime. He, evidently and interestingly, draws inspiration from both Godard and Bresson, apart from incorporating tenets from other famous schools of filmmaking. With complete control over every aspect of the film (writing, directing, editing and producing it by himself), Golestan churns out a film that is clearly Iranian in content, yet could pass of as one of the French New Wave movies.
Brick and Mirror takes place over the course of 24 hours in the life of this taxi driver, whom we come to know as Hashemi (Zackaria Hashemi). That fateful night, a woman in a veil (apparently played by the iconic Forugh Farrokhzad) boards his taxi and leaves behind a baby. Unable to locate the woman, Hashemi is forced to provide shelter to the child for the night. He is helped by his love Taji (Taji Ahmadi), a woman who works at the local pub. But the most important of all characters in the film is the city of Tehran itself. The city is also the most powerful of all characters, devouring mentally and physically one character after another. Never has a metropolis been filmed so beautifully yet menacingly. Using the cinemascope judiciously and employing camera movements that are seldom meaningless, Golestan and cinematographer Soleiman Minassian ensnare their characters, like the city itself, surrounding them and locking them to their environment. And how often do we see a tracking shot that is as pregnant with emotion and significance as the final shot of Taji standing at the end of the long, dark corridor of the hospital?
Hashemi and Taji are two well written characters, who complement each other emotionally and ideologically. He is a thorough fatalist, classifying every outcome as good or bad luck. He prefers to live in the dark, literally and figuratively, away from prying eyes of the society. She, on the other hand, is the quintessential existentialist (Again, a possible influence of contemporary French philosophy), believing strongly that we make our own lives and being too prude is no good. But she is also an extreme romantic, always giving Hashemi hope for a new beginning, who seems to shrug off her philosophies (At one point, Golestan even frames Taji in such a way that she appears as one of the photos on the walls of Hashemi’s house). In an explosive scene shot on the streets, both of them plunge into a heated discussion after he delivers the baby to an orphanage against her wishes. The camera tracks in front of them as they walk arguing with each other. And all of a sudden, in a humbling manner, they break into utter silence after a funeral procession cuts through them, reminding the about the futility of their words and the ever tangible presence of death.
Hashemi does bear a striking resemblance to Schrader’s Travis Bickle, in the sense that both of them are marginal characters who are forced to witness a society that is vigorously dragging itself to doom. But the commonality stops at that. While Bickle is an alien frustrated by what he sees in the rear view mirror, Hashemi is the one in that mirror (In one scene, the driver of the taxi that Hashemi boards cribs about his profession and tells the latter that he is lucky not to be a taxi driver). Moreover, Bickle’s decision to do something about it all is exactly contrary to the borderline-agoraphobic Hashemi, who believes it is better to stay low and go through life unnoticed by anyone. True that he comes to know of all the rotten crevices of the city and the breakdown that it is leading to, but, being the determinist that he is, is satisfied with having posters of heroes in his room rather than becoming one. In fact, it is Taji who is closer to Bickle than Hashemi. Only that her search, here, is for inner peace.
Jonathan Rosenbaum describes the film as being Godardian. I doubt if there is any other way to describe it at all. Take a look at the narrative structure of the film, whose episodic nature and style reminds us of My Life to Live (1962) than any other Godard film. Like the French director, Golestan lets his script freewheel all the way. Characters come and characters go. Their lines are seldom relevant to what is happening. But as always, what they speak is less important than why they speak so. The spirit of the 60s, especially of Paris, seems to show clearly in Tehran too. Intellectualism seems to have taken control over pragmatism and emotionality. People sit all day in pubs philosophizing and indulging themselves with tangential conversations. Consider the scene at the bar where Hashemi arrives, carrying the baby. One of the well dressed gentlemen, out of the blue, begins a monologue about the importance of alphabets in the search for truth and the relation of crossword puzzles to all that (Don’t ask me!). One is reminded immediately of the scene at the pub in Made in U.S.A. (1967), where, too, one of the characters goes on talking about the futility of words and sentences!
Furthermore, Golestan never cares about the progressive coherence of these episodes. He generously shifts gears and tones throughout the film. Hopping regularly between vérité, expressionism, documentary and realism, he concocts something very fresh and unique, even by the New Wave standards. Yes, the jump cuts are there too. Additionally, Golestan’s shot composition shows influence of Bresson also. Golestan breaks down action into atomic parts with no history or future, attaining the same effect that the French master achieved. Also Bressonian, and one that would go on to become the forte of directors like Kiarostami, is Golestan’s use of off-screen space through sounds. Often, we see that the camera is fixated on certain characters, even when they are not the ones talking. When Hashemi and Taji are out in the streets, their voices are regularly consumed by the noise of the city. One scene would perhaps sum up the entire attitude of the film. There is a sequence at an orphanage where Hashemi is trying to admit the child he is holding. There is also a middle-class woman in the room who, at one point, breaks down revealing that she has been feigning pregnancy all the time. This is an intensely melodramatic moment in the script and the natural reaction for a director’s camera would be to gradually zoom in to the crying lady’s face. Surprisingly, Golestan shows us the face of the receptionist of the orphanage, who turns teary-eyed for a reason that might not at all be related to the drama of the instant.
Almost the whole film, both formally and script-wise, never conforms to the popular law of cause and effect. Golestan refuses to explain everything and seems to want us to not understand the city, much like Hashemi himself. Who is that crazy female at the hell-hole that Hashemi meets earlier? No answer. What is the guy, whom one might have called a charlatan earlier in the film, doing on the national channel talking about the ethics of living? No answer. Could that female, whom Hashemi sees the second night be the same lady who left the baby in his car the previous day? May be. But surely, all these aren’t merely confusing or distancing devices. Each of these scenes reveals something about the city and the era, in one way or the other. Each of them has indirectly managed to document history – cultural and cinematic. Consequently, now more than ever, it feels that these seemingly stray events are the very elements that can help us perceive better a country that has been unjustly homogenized using, what Brick and Mirror shows us, a faux identity.
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Dropbox couldn't let the week end without adding another incentive to use its cloud storage service.
At the beginning of the week, Dropbox added a file sharing feature that allows users to link their files and send them to anyone, whether they're a Dropbox member or not. Microsoft followed up by cranking up the capacity for current users to 25 GB while adding three paid plans. Then Google unleashed its own cloud solution, serving up 5 GB and renaming Google Docs to Google Drive.
After all that, the busy cloud-themed week wasn't over, allowing one more shot at consumers before the bell sounds and everyone goes home to play Farmville. Dropbox has taken that end-of-the-week jab, adding an additional 3 GB in 500 MB increments and expanding its automated photo and video upload feature to work on most devices, even cameras.
"Now with Dropbox you can automatically upload from just about any camera, tablet, SD card or smartphone — pretty much anything that takes photos or videos," the company said in a blog. "With the newest version for Mac or Windows, you can just plug your camera, phone, or SD card into your computer and with a few clicks of the mouse all your photos and videos are in your Dropbox!"
"Automatic uploading from the desktop is designed to work perfectly with the Dropbox Android app," the company added. "Your photos are copied from your camera to your Dropbox and uploaded, in full-quality and at their original size, to your private Camera Uploads folder. As your photos upload, you can access them from anywhere and move and share them as you see fit."
According to Dropbox, the company will give users an extra 500 MB of virtual space for the first automatic upload. As users take and upload more photos and videos, the company will grant 500 MB more until the user receives a total of 3 GB on top of their current base capacity of 2 GB.
"On the web, we’ve made the pictures you’ve uploaded shine on our new Photos page, with nice large thumbnails, grouped by month," Dropbox said on Friday. "You can hover over each to find the date, or click to see them full-size and then download or share them with a link."
To get started, download the new version of Dropbox here.
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By Penny Woodward
Diggers' pumpkins, gourds and chillis
We are so lucky to have such a good garden show in Melbourne, and an unsurpassed site in the Carlton Gardens and the Exhibition Building. I was there for four of the five days and don’t think I have seen so many people in previous years. There were some wonderful display gardens, fabulous floral displays and interesting gardening related commercial stands. Read more
All about tomatoes and potatoes, peppers and other relatives, is another excellent book from Diggers and Clive Blazey. Although this small book does have all you need to know for your tomatoes to grow and thrive, it also looks at the history of tomatoes, talks about open-pollinated versus hybrid seed and why we all need to grow and save the free, open-pollinated, non hybridised types. Diggers has done years of research into tomatoes and their yields, colour, texture and flavour. Clive has listed the 60 that they think are the best. With mouth watering beautiful colour photos it’s hard to resist planting them straight away. But there are nearly 5500 heirloom varieties available around the world so maybe you need to try some of those too. The majority of the book is about tomatoes, but there are 8 pages at the back that cover some tomato relatives like potatoes, capsicums, eggplants, pepino and several more. Borrow it from your library, buy it from an independent bookshop or online from Diggers
All About Tomatoes by Clive Blazey, The Diggers Club, Dromana, Australia. Hardcover, 80pages, $24.95
Last weekend saw a celebration of old cultivars and varieties of both fruit and vegetables. At Diggers Heronswood, Dromana it has been the Harvest Festival Weekend with a really beautiful array of pumpkins and squashes, garlic for sale and tomatoes to taste. Nearly all of these are heirloom or open pollinated varieties that are so important both for our gardening history and our future. Heirloom and heritage varieties are an integral part of organic gardening, many are the result of selective breeding over numerous generations so that they show special characteristics.
Turk's Turban, Delicata, Potimarron, Australian Butter, Buttercup and Bohemian are just a few of the heirloom varieties of pumpkins available to grow.
Heirloom varieties of squash, gourds and small pumpkins
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When it comes to who actually owns the content you post online on your favorite social networking sites, the devil is in the details.
I happened across a great blog post from Chris Bucchere, founder and CEO of BDG – the folks behind The Social Collective. In response to a post about Robert Scoble losing his Facebook account because it was mistaken for a spam account, Chris wrote:
If you think there are safer or better places than Facebook to put “your data” on the internet, you’re also mistaken. Take a peek at Google’s TOS. In particular, read section 11, where you hand over all rights to “your” content to them (except basic copyright, which you automatically have any time you produce an original work and put your name on it). You’re basically giving Google a free license to use your content — even for their own commercial gain!
For your reading ease, here’s the part of Google’s TOS in particular that Chris was referencing:
By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive licence [sic] to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.
(Yes, Google’s TOS agreement does indeed include a misspelling of the word license.)
Chris goes on to point out that this is because Google intends to parse the content and make it available to advertisers so that they’ll know what advertisements to display to you. The exact section of Google’s TOS doesn’t indicate that you lose any rights over the content that you enter. You still retain a irrevocable license over it. But it is clear that Google claims a right to reuse it as they need, and to transfer that right to anyone else.
This brings up an interesting scenario, although probably somewhat unlikely. Imagine if you posted some great ideas about a product you were building on Google Docs, and you had no intention of disclosing this information with any of your competitors because it was so fantastic. What would happen if Google either purposefully or accidentally stole that very idea and started building a competing site? This gets into a legal area that I’m totally unfamiliar with, but would love to find an IP lawyer who might be able to work out the possibilities. It would seem, though, that Google could make claim that the work you posted was prior art, making any claim to a patent you might have (or be in the process of filing) void and null.
I’m no fan of software patents, though, but I am curious what might happen.
Oh, and remember that Google promised if they do use your ideas, you’ll at least get a shout-out on their blog.
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Note: To protect the privacy of our members, e-mail addresses have been removed from the archived messages. As a result, some links may be broken.
Sometime ago I promised to write about the AP art course. It's a lazy
Sunday and I'm almost caught up so here are my thoughts.
First I agree with what San D said:
> A word of caution about AP courses. Not all colleges accept AP courses
> credit, especially art schools. They would rather 'retrain' students in their
> way....While they will respect a student who has reached high in AP courses,
> they will not accept the credit.
Although some schools are now accepting the course for an elective credit,
my advice to the kids is not to substitute it. I would never have wanted to
give up any of my art school electives.
Fulfilling the AP portfolio requirements is almost impossible to do in one
year especially if you only have a 45 minute period. I have 2 classes
Advanced (non-weighted) and AP and see the kids for 2 years. If the student
is not committed, this is still not enough time.
As a teacher, it requires stretching visual thinking and paying attention to
individual needs. You need to help students find a multitude of solutions
You also need some kind of organizational work to make sure each student is
on track and maintaining a schedule for completion of the work. Take slides
many times throughout the year rather than waiting until the end.
I select students for the class based on teacher recommendation and
portfolio review, but I can't keep anyone out of the class. By law anyone
can take any class they want. Therefore I always have a few slackers just
there for the weighted grade. And they always bring down the momentum of
As for the Concentration project. Such a project could be compared to a
thesis statement for a writing assignment-- adding content to make a
coherent , meaningful statement. Repetition of a subject does not in and
itself constitute a concentration. Investigation is the key.
Each year the dynamics of my class changes and I adapt to their needs. You
have to think of each individual and not the class as a whole. I often make
assignments specific to the student.
I have a lot of trouble with the AP program in general. Why are we at the
high school level teaching courses acceptable for college credit? It is my
understanding that not only the Art, but many of the other AP courses are
not being accepted by colleges. I use the Ap Studio Art for getting the
kids to do the work required for their portfolios. I don't care if they
pursue the test or not. A couple of years ago I viewed the evaluation
process of the AP portfolios and didn't like what I was seeing. It seemed
the evaluators were looking for "slick" and not seeing potential. I won't
teach to "slick."
The best advice I have for anyone about to teach the AP course is to take
one of the workshops or graduate credit courses offered. You get a lot of
information, ideas, help, and lessons.
One more thing - for those of you about to start teaching the AP Art
History. Be thoroughly prepared. You need to get through all of the
history and will have to teach the kids how to write. Much of the test is
about comparing/contrasting. For a couple of years I have toyed with the
idea of proposing we adapt this class, but after taking the course on
teaching it and watching a couple of my friends go through the first year,
I'm not willing to make the commitment. My best friend started it this year
and she was up every morning at 2AM preparing. If your district doesn't put
up the money for all the resources needed, you will be spending all your
time gathering and making slides.
Good luck to all of you starting AP. I would be happy to answer more
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun May 28 2000 - 13:22:43 PDT
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April 03, 2011
In 1972 comedian George Carlin famously delineated the “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” All seven words dealt with bodily parts or functions at a time when such things were simply not mentioned in polite company. If anything, Carlin was understating the case—back then, I don’t remember anyone on TV even suggesting that nipples existed, much less coming out and saying “tits.”
In the intervening decades, society has not only shed such taboos, it has actively embraced vulgarity. At least on cable TV, one is now allowed—in some cases encouraged—to not only say all seven of those words, but to use them in a single sentence while demonstrating them for the camera. These days we have reality shows about crippled midget meth-smoking stripper Satanist hermaphrodites with AIDS competing against similarly afflicted freaks for cash prizes, and it’s “all good”—even something worth celebrating.
Modern culture has disabused itself of the false notion that the human body and its various functions are unnatural or unspeakable. It has rid itself of most sexual hang-ups, but—since all societies define themselves primarily via taboos—in its stead it has erected a new and equally fraudulent idealized vision of humanity entirely unsupported by science, logic, or evidence. There’s a whole new set of dirty words that didn’t used to be dirty—all of them derogatory terms for people who aren’t white males—and a forbidden set of ideas which one must not permit to seep inside one’s head without risking censure, shunning, verbal abuse, career death, and possible assault.
“The new sacred cows come in new shapes and colors, but they’re still sacred and they’re still fat fucking cows.”
The new sacred cows come in new shapes and colors, but they’re still sacred and they’re still fat fucking cows. The taboos have switched from the sexual to the cultural, but shiver me timbers if they aren’t enforced with the same blind, vengeful, true-believer tenacity as the old taboos. Ironically, these taboos find their deepest roots among a presumably “edgy” demographic—but the detached, ironic smarm so endemic along the Left Bank is only a thin crust atop a molten core of inviolably sacred assumptions and risk-free sanctimony. There is a new prudery afoot, and it’s based entirely on a faulty, illogical, and unsustainable myth of universal human equality.
What follows are not seven dirty words, but seven dirty ideas one cannot espouse or even ponder on television without being kicked in the face by a velvet-covered steel-toed boot. Although others treat these ideas as if they were radioactive, carcinogenic, and poisonous, none of them seems remotely radical or extreme or offensive or controversial to me. Instead, they all seem supremely reasonable. But in a world where what’s deemed “politically incorrect” is so often factually correct, these seven big fat elephants are stinking up the whole room.
1. ALL MEN ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL.
Equality is a concept which nearly everyone believes but no one has bothered to prove. The unassailable notion of blank-slate cognitive and physical equality, despite all contrary evidence, is the fat stump rooted deep in the soil from which all the other modern taboo branches sprout. The sweetest fairy tale ever told is the one where God made everyone equal. It’s such a wholesomely peaceful notion, people will rip your head off your neck if you don’t submit completely to it. But if no two blades of grass are alike, how can any two humans be alike? If anyone thinks all men are created equal, they’ve obviously never been in a locker room or attended an interracial calculus class. All things being equal, there is no such thing as equality.
2. AT BEST, HUMANS SHARE AN EQUAL POTENTIAL TO BE ASSHOLES.
The main problem with “humanism” is that it fails to account for human nature. I look at the world and see a rainbow of people who all suck in different ways. I’ve met noble souls of all colors and screaming assholes of every hue. All tribes, nations, and individuals across this great planet share an equal ability to annoy and disappoint. Every culture, subculture, and counterculture is blindly self-justifying, and, when it achieves sufficient strength, it becomes rapaciously predatory. The best possible world religion, the only one with an outside chance of ensuring global harmony, would consist of a basic agreement that we can all be assholes.
3. IF YOU INSIST ALL HUMANS ARE EQUAL, THEN COUNT THEIR CORPSES EQUALLY.
We need to hear a little less about the fewer than 4,000 black American lynching victims and a little more about the 600,000 or so white peasants who died ostensibly to free them from slavery. A little less about black American slavery and a little more about colonial white indentured servitude and convict labor. A little less about the six million (give or take a few) Jews who perished in WWII and a little more about the 50-65 million other people killed in that war. A little less about white colonialism and a little more about the Mongols, the Moors, and Hannibal. For the sake of balance, let’s see some TV movies about communism’s 100-million-plus pile of cadavers. Let’s see some documentaries about slavery’s historical ubiquity and its persistence in Africa today. Let’s entirely ditch the concept that some dead bodies are more equal than others.
Copyright 2013 TakiMag.com and the author. This copy is for your personal, noncommercial use only. You can order reprints for distribution by contacting us at email@example.com.
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Carol Cone (@CarolCone), also known as “the mother of cause marketing,” is the Global Chair of Edelman Business + Social Purpose and served as the keynote speaker at the 2012 VolunteerMatch Client Summit.
Carol spoke of how corporate purpose is now necessary in a society where consumers are more mindful of the products they consume. But how do you execute a good strategy to promote a cause or purpose? Here are a couple of her take-home points.
Engaging Employees is Essential for Future Growth
Organizations with high employee engagement had a 3.9 times higher earnings per share growth than organizations with low employee engagement, according to a Gallup study. Engaged employees put in 57% more effort and were 87% less likely to leave the organization compared to disengaged employees.
Adapt to the demands of the “Citizen Consumer”
Carol made the point to use the term “Citizen Consumers” to refer to consumers. Consumers are more aware than ever due to technology such as social media. A full 86% of global consumers believe that businesses need to make social issues just as important as making profits. Consumers demand transparency from organizations in order to support them.
Social purpose is also still a significant purchase trigger. Take two products with exactly the same price and function and the consumer will be more likely to choose the product that promotes a cause.
Storytelling is Key
The last point that Carol mentioned in her keynote was that storytelling is a necessary factor in communicating the company’s efforts to the public and increasing brand value. With social media, organizations have many more opportunities and tools to tell your story.
The bottom line? Corporate social responsibility and cause marketing aren’t just nice things to have for your company. They’re fundamental changes you need to make in order to not only increase your brand value, but to survive in a transitioning world becoming dominated by social media, technology, and an increased demand for transparency.
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Thousands Rally for Space Jobs Ahead of Obama Visit
April 12, 2010 -- Thousands of aerospace workers and local politicians gathered in Cocoa on Sunday for a rally to urge the White House to support human spaceflight. The event came four days before President Obama is expected in Brevard County for a major address to outline his vision for space exploration.
Bob Pattison was at Sunday’s rally with his wife and two kids. He’s an engineer for space shuttle contractor United Space Alliance, and he hopes he won’t be one of the 9,000 Kennedy Space Center workers expected to lose their jobs when the shuttle program ends later this year.
He had been angling for a position with NASA’s Constellation program, the project that was supposed to design a new spacecraft to replace the shuttle. Pattison was shocked when President Obama announced in February he wanted to cancel Constellation.
“To not really know what direction to go in now, it makes it very difficult for a professional like myself,” he said. “What is the goal?”
A parade of politicians at the rally called on President Obama to answer that very question when he visits the Space Coast on Thursday. They included Democratic Congresswoman Suzanne Kosmas.
“We need a plan, Mr. President, for space exploration that identifies a destination, a NASA-led vehicle, and a timeline,” Kosmas said, “so our workforce will be focused and ready to do what it is designated that they should do for the next phase of space exploration.”
Mr. Obama says he wants to help private aerospace companies ferry humans to orbit. Just last week, NASA released details of a White House budget proposal that would give Kennedy Space Center $5.8 billion over five years to manage the commercialization effort.
But Republican U.S. Senator George LeMieux said he’s not satisfied with that.
“The private sector is not ready to take a man to the moon,” he said on the sidelines of the rally. “The private sector is not near ready to take a man to Mars. That only can be done by NASA. Look, there’s a lot of things the federal government should not do, but one of the few things that the federal government in this country can only do is NASA and go to the moon and to Mars.”
Not everyone agrees that the Constellation program’s goals of sending humans back to the moon and on to Mars are even the right objectives for NASA. But Senator LeMieux had a further message about President Obama’s plans to cancel Constellation.
“The president can propose these changes, it’s the Congress that has to approve ‘em,” he said, “and the law of the land right now is that we have a Constellation program.”
He's convinced Florida’s Congressional delegation won’t let Constellation fade away.
“We’re not gonna make this change. I can tell you right now there is bipartisan opposition to cancelling human spaceflight. We are not going to do that.”
LeMieux says he is willing to work with President Obama when he visits the Space Coast on Thursday.
Few details have been released about the trip so far. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said last week he expects the President to make a major space policy address and meet privately with some of the members of Congress who will be attending the conference.
Click here to listen to a report on the rally from 90.7's Judith Smelser
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Posted: Sep 21, 2012 12:15 PM by CNN
Updated: Sep 21, 2012 9:31 PM
Mitt Romney made $13.7 million last year and paid $1.94 million in federal income taxes, giving him an effective tax rate of 14.1%, his campaign said Friday.
His effective tax rate was up slightly from the 13.9% rate he paid in 2010.
The majority of the candidate's income last year came from his investments, said Brad Malt, the trustee of Romney's blind trust, in a blog post. Full documents related to Romney's 2011 tax return will be released at 3 p.m ET.
The couple gave just over $4 million to charity.
In addition, the Romney campaign said Romney's tax filings from 1990 to 2009 show that the couple paid 100% of the federal and state income taxes they owed and that their overall average annual effective federal tax rate was 20.2%. Annually they never paid an effective rate below 13.66%.
Romney has been criticized by both Democrats and even some Republicans for not releasing more than two years' worth of tax returns. And he has often gotten flak for having paid a low effective tax rate given his outsized income.
But contrary to popular perception, Romney's effective federal income tax rate is still higher than that of most Americans -- 80% of whom have an effective rate below 15%. That number, however, does not include other federal taxes such as the payroll tax.
Romney's running mate, Paul Ryan, released his final 2011 tax return this summer. He paid $65,000 on $323,416 in income, giving him an effective tax rate of 20%.
The reason Romney's rate is so low -- despite having one of the highest incomes in the country -- is because his income was derived almost entirely from capital gains and dividends from his extensive portfolio of investments. And that form of investment income is typically taxed at just 15%, well below the 35% top tax rate for high earners.
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HOW TO GET YOUR MONEY BACK
by Joe Shea
American Reporter Correspondent
May 7, 2010
BRADENTON, May 7, 2010 -- British Petroleum says the Gulf of Mexico oil spill may ultimately cost them $16 billion. Where does that kind of money come from? Say that BP has a computer genius who is commissioned to hack the stock markets. They figure out how to do it, place buys in street name through 500 different brokers, then make their move. Wham!
Procter & Gamble (P&G) falls from over $60 to $39 and change when BP's brokers make the move. They buy a huge amount of P&G, which at $39 and change has lost $16 billion of market value. Minutes later, P&G is back above $60. Presto! BP's play has made $16 billion in about two minutes.
"Federal officials fielded rumors that the culprit was a single stock, a single institution or execution system, a $16 billion trade that should have been $16 million. But they did not know the truth," the New York Times says Friday morning. That says a lot, to me.
There's more than one way to skin a cat. Regulators have decided to annul all trades between 2:40 PM and 3 PM today in which any of 286 stocks moved more than 60% during that time. So BP would have to give all the money back.
How do we get our money back? You and I, the little guys devastated by the high-stakes gambling of Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, Lehman Bros., Bank of America, Citigroup, AIG, Wachovia Bank, UBS, RBS, HBC and all the rest? Simple. You identify the guilty parties - the people that cost us our homes, our savings, and perhaps our lives - and you liquidate their instruitutions. Then you identify us - we who have lost our homes, our savings, and perhaps our lives - and you divide the income among us.
You say it doesn't sound like something Solomon would do? He'd chop a baby in half to stop a feud between two mothers who claimed the infant. Why wouldn't he chop down some bad trees in the orchard and divide the firewood among the people who owned them? It's not quite making them whole, but it would help.
It was madness today. As I watched CNBC's anchors lose control of their emotions and all of them - Maria Barteromo, Jim Cramer, etc. - start talking at once as the market suddenly fell off a cliff, I saw the confusion, disbelief, awe, revulsion, feigned indifference and other emotions flit across their faces as fast as the numbers changed. I last saw the screen when the Dow was down 964 points as I turned away to my PC to tell our readers.
"Those guys are nuts! They're nuts! They know nothing!" Cramer, who knows all, screamed. He suddenly began to mimic talking to his broker. "$49 and a quarter bid for 50,000 P&G," he shouted.
That price was "available only to the people who were bidding at that moment when the panic hit," he said later on his syndicated tv show. He didn't hit it, either.
It was back to just 600 points down in the space of a minute or so, and back to the upper 400's down a few minutes later; it eventually closed down 347 points and change.
Sotheby's, which deals in the commodities of art and antiques and other collectibles, saw their shares go to $100,000. It's hardly conceivable that anyone bought it at that price; it closed back down in the 30's.
If you were trading Accenture when it fell from over $40 to a penny, for an investment of $10,000 you could have bought a million shares and sold them for $40 million three or four later. If you waited until it came back to $25, and spent $1,000,000 to buy 40,000 shares, you would have made $600,000, which isn't chump change, either. And, anyway, it would have taken that long to enter the order unless you are one of those Wall Street guys who do "high-frequency trading" (HFT) that allows them to buy and sell stocks.
HFT is "the buying and selling of stocks at extremely fast speeds with the help of powerful computers. Using complex algorithms, these computers can scan dozens of public and private marketplaces simultaneously, execute millions of orders a second, and alter strategies in a matter of milliseconds. In the U.S., high-frequency trading firms represent 2.0% of the approximately 20,000 firms operating today, but account for 73.0% of all equity trading volume," the site Wikinvest says.
Millions of orders a second? Powerful computers? Complex algorithms? Dozens of markets simultaneously? And 73% of all trading volume?
The market has gotten away from the little guy. In the name of "free" markets, trading stocks has become extremely expensive for the little guy. He can make one or two trades a minute using his home computer, maybe, presuming the bandwidth is still there when panic buying or selling hits. He can't compete.
BP could. So could all the rest of these bums who run investment houses and banks on Wall Street that inadvertently costs us our jobs and homes and get bailed out so they come back to normal in a couple of months. To do it again? If the ordinary investor had a tidy profit on a "safe" stock like P&G, which he or she was nursing along as it went up after the meltdown last fall and enjoyed the dividends, he or she would probably - remembering last fall - protect himself or herself with a "stop-loss order" that automatically executes a sell order when the stock falls a preselected number of
P&G is nice and safe, so, say the investor bought it at $55 and nursed it along up to $61 as of today. His $6,000 gain made him or her happy, because they lost a lot of money last year. But when the stop-loss order went in, all his or her unrealized gains were wiped out. Their $6,000 evaporated.
But P&G probably has a few powerful computers and all the latest programs. Let's say it trades for its own account. It would have executed millions of buy orders a second when their stock hit $40, and a few minutes later could have sold it again at $61 (it closed at $64). They would have now recovered any losses they had over the past several years. Say you are Accenture and you buy your stock at $0.01, down $40. Five minutes later, your corporation is suddenly debt-free. But in the end, people who work on Wall Street are probably the dumbest anywhere. Look at all the money they lost last year. Look at all the money they lost today. Were they ever smart enough to devise a total game-changer like today's? I don't want to say "no," but I don't really think so. It would take one substantial player, well-armed with big cash, powerful computers, algorithm geniuses, and a vast web of connections. China could do it. BP could do it.
Isn't it a lot like ticket hustlers who put dozens of people on the phones to buy Springsteen concert tickets for Ticketmaster or whomever, beating all the normal fans Springsteen was trying to sell the tickets to? Say there's a giveaway down at the supermarket. Wal-Mart is going to open its doors and give everything away free for five minutes. The guy with the fastest car is going to get there first, is he not? But is that what Wal-Mart intended?
The problem is that the SERC is supposed to make the stock and commodity markets an "even playing field" to the greatest degree it can. So how does it let people who can make a million trades a second compete with day traders who can make one or two or But is that what Wal-Mart intended?
The problem is that the SEC is supposed to make the stock and commodity markets an "even playing field" to the greatest degree it can. So how does it let people who can make a million trades a second compete with day traders who can make one or two or 20? When they are not busy perusing the offerings at sex.com, they're busy making deals with Bernie Madoff. How is the little guy supposed to win sometimes at this supposedly shining gem of the free world, the poorly-regulated stock market?
As you ponder that, ponder this: One of the largest oil companies in the world, with a little cleverness, could have made their entire loss on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill back in cash in the space of three minutes. And if that can happen - and I'm not saying it did or didn't - then, really, what else is going on?
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Posts tagged social commentary
AN acquaintance recently discovered her long-time partner had gone back to smoking and she left him. For many people, that would seem extreme, given seven good years together. But for her it was part of an unspoken system in relationships that I have dubbed EDB: emotional deal breakers.
As with business contracts, it’s the non-negotiable clause. We all nurse a secret rule or set of rules that if broken are not forgivable, and breaking them is considered a breach of verbal or non-verbal contract.
She says it wasn’t the smoking — which she deplores. That would have distressed her because she is a reformed smoker and a health nut. She would also have been peeved about his lack of strength of character. But neither would have been deal breakers. She said it was trust.
He’d created such an elaborate facade around his behaviour that she was horrified. ‘‘If he could lie so effortlessly about such a stupid thing, then what else could or would he lie about?’’ she wondered. He’d rush to the shower after work, and soak his own shirts in the laundry at night. Which prompts the question, was he also unfaithful? She said she contemplated that, too. But she didn’t want to know. ‘‘Deceiving me over a two- year period is enough, regardless of the cause.’’
While her strength is admirable, it’s surprising. I know many women and men who’ve forgiven their partners for far worse: heavy drinking, infidelity, gambling and lies. I know one woman whose husband is so self-destructive and overweight, he has given himself a heart attack and now emphysema. He still won’t take responsibility and she won’t leave.
Why are poor behaviours deal breakers for one per- son and not another? Psychologists say it’s to do with childhood patterns. For instance, studies have shown that women who grew up with violent fathers are more likely to attract and tolerate an abusive partner. Similarly, an unstable, narcissistic mother might prompt a man to be drawn to such women, often with the desire to resolve something unresolvable, or play rescuer.
Such underlying motivations can be classed as repetition compulsion disorder, behaviour akin to pouring water into sand.
There will always be huge discrepancies between people’s deal breakers. But I do issue a sharp warning to the complacent. EDBs change with life experience. One day your partner’s values may suddenly shift. The kids might leave home, or a partner may enter therapy, and something snaps. Finally, it’s enough.
Being clueless about what matters to your partner is dangerous. As he was leaving, the smoker said to his deceived girlfriend: ‘‘I don’t know what all the fuss is about. It was only five to six ciggies a day.’’ I rest my case.
AMONG my peers there was much sadness over the recent death of Sylvia Kristel, star of the 1974 erotic film Emmanuelle — a film we grew up with, and which became so popular that it made soft-core erotic cinema fashionable. The film received widespread prominence in the US when Columbia Pictures agreed to distribute it after noting that its audiences in French cinemas consisted mostly of women, which meant the movie could not be regarded as ‘‘mere pornography’’. (more…)
ABOUT two weeks ago, a woman walking towards me gave me a big grin. I felt immediately self-conscious because I didn’t know what was wrong with me. Were my pants on inside out, was my hair standing up in a strange way? I wondered if maybe I knew her.
As I walked closer she nodded. I stopped and asked: ‘‘I’m sorry, do I know you?’’ She shook her head. ‘‘No, I just thought the colour of your hair looked beautiful in this light.’’
I was taken aback by her friendliness and the nice compliment. And it occurred to me afterwards that having a stranger smile at us in this country is so unusual that we feel thrown. Which contrasts profoundly to life in America. (more…)
“Please missus, please pen,” cries a little boy amidst a throng of children all begging for pens and school books. But I’ve just run out.
I’m in the heart of Africa, in a village in Tanzania. Like many villages it’s wracked by poverty; no running water, no electricity. Malaria is rife. Though many children are now being educated, far too many lack the basics for school such as pens and note paper.
I’ve gone and bought a box of pens to give the kids. It cost me the equivalent of two dollars to buy 50 pens. And yet most parents can’t afford even this. I stand throwing pens into the crowd of anxious faces and clawing hands as my partner snaps photos. Later we will look at the photos in the safety of our hotel room and be shocked by the desperation.
I’m back! Here are the three column blogs I wrote during the break on how to avoid holiday blues.
How to avoid becoming an +++hole. this time of year
It’s that time of year where we all like to make New Year resolutions and atone for crimes big and small we’ve committed during the year. Well, at least I do. It’s a ritual I do each year instead of driving around to bad parties, caught in traffic and feeling unsatisfied. I sit down with those closest to me and write a list of all the things of significance that happened during the year; all the things I’m grateful for; and all the things I want to change. (more…)
IT’s interesting that while people who haven’t got jobs or have been recently laid off tend to despair, actually having a job doesn’t ensure happiness.
A global study reported in The Wall Street Journal claims that almost a quarter of the global workforce is depressed. Apparently, 92 per cent of people surveyed linked the state of their mental health to job performance and only 12 per cent claimed to be optimistic on the work front. The respondents came from a variety of industries, but mainly in the financial and professional areas.
We should respect those who help with sexual problems not condemn them.
I’VE known several sex surrogates and have admired them all, which is why I was so surprised recently to hear that a Melbourne sex therapist had called them glorified prostitutes and called for an end to the practice.
Surrogates are women or men who get paid to provide what crooner Marvin Gaye pined for — ‘‘sexual healing’’. The practice is sex therapy with a touch more, as advocated by sexuality pioneers Masters and Johnson in the 1960s. It’s used in conjunction with traditional therapies to provide help for erectile dysfunctions such as impotence and premature ejaculation, intimacy issues and marriage problems.
Sex surrogacy has a reported 95 per cent success rate in Australia, according to a study presented to the World Congress on Sexual Health in 2007. (more…)
IT’S been a horrible few weeks in the world, and a hard time for sensitive people. The daily news has been so distressing and appalling that if I were not a journalist, I wouldn’t turn on or read the news.
As it is, I can’t read the papers over breakfast, or watch television news over dinner, as what I see often makes my stomach turn and I can’t digest my food.
Last week there were two or three stories that had me feeling ill and powerless, but I soldiered on, feeling dreadful: children hit by cars, abused, murdered, starving; the massacring of animals; revelations of torture. But something snapped one morning after one particular story: I was in the bathroom putting on make-up, then I was suddenly crouched on the floor, crying. My partner tried to comfort me but I said this to him, and I am saying it now.
Olympic swimmer Kenrick Monk, recently broke down crying and admitted he invented a story about being hit by a P-plate driver as he rode his bike to training. Monk, who is 23, faced the media to confess to having made up the elaborate hit-and-run story to hide the fact he hurt himself when he fell from his skateboard.
‘‘I didn’t know what to do. I panicked, I freaked,’’ he said, tearfully explaining that he couldn’t tell the truth because he’d fallen off ‘‘something that a 10-year- old can ride’’. With the Olympic trials coming up in March, he had been too embarrassed to admit he suffered two broken bones in his elbow from such a stupid and irresponsible accident.
‘‘I lied,’’ say the spate of cheating men and women caught with their pants down each week. ‘‘I lied because I was scared, fearful, depressed, anxious, I had a sore tooth, a gammy foot. I lied to save you from having hurt feelings. I lied because it was in my best interests, wasn’t it, and if I didn’t you would have been angry at me. I lied and I will lie again. Everyone does it all the time, so why not me?’’ (more…)
I WAS woken last weekend by a screeching drill across the road. Fair enough if you want to do a bit of home reno but not on a Sunday morning at 7.30.
Due to acoustics, given the height and proximity of terraced houses in our street, even the quietest noise reverberates. A conversation across the road is audible, so it can be presumed the fellow understood the implications of pouring such an unsavoury cacophony into the street. I guess when you gotta drill, you gotta drill. (more…)
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I'm posting a link from the great Biblical Evidence for Catholicism website: Mr. Armstrong's fine page of John Henry Cardinal Newman: Photograph and Portrait Page I, like Fr. Ker, am fond of the sketch by Lady Coleridge- I find the eyes particularly haunting.
I also find one of the quotes very revealing, not so much about the Venerable himself as about the kind of prejudice he and other Catholics in the England of his time had to put up with.
" A man who visited Newman in 1875 describes him:
'. . . very kindly, with a sort of grave sweet simplicity which coming from so old a man, has in it something inexpressibly touching . . . He looks very aged, hair more white than silvery, body stooped, a very large and prominent nose and large chin, brow which seems good, though one can't see it for the tangled hair falling over it; an air of melancholy, as of one who has passed through terrible struggles, yet of serenity, as of one who had found peace. Not a priest in his manner - still an Englishman more than a Roman Catholic. ' (ed. my emphasis) "
"Still an Englishman more than a Roman Catholic"...as if one couldn't be both. As if the Venerable wasn't both. And this was from a friendly source.
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It's a good question. Sometimes we have to do things we don't like much but we have to do them. Certainly productivity and motivation are very different but they are inter-related and when you are both motivated and productive, the happiness factor comes in.
I would suggest to give yourself prizes for partial completion of a long task. Let me give an example:
Suppose you have to write 50 essays or build a software etc. Break them down into smaller milestones and assign a prize (however small they may be - a ticket to a movie, an evening off from work etc.) to each of them depending on the complexity involved. As you complete the milestones, please give the assigned prize to yourself (don't skip that part - it is important).
And give a nice reward to yourself for a tough task. As you continue doing this, you'll see the magic. When you do the same thing but with a prize (given to yourself by yourself) attached, you'll not feel the boredom, instead you'll have the end in mind... and that it how it works.
Please make the prizes attractive to yourself... don't make those small prizes boring one, then the whole thing will not work. Now what prize you give to yourself depends on yourself. If you were wondering about a new movie for a few days, after you complete a milestones... go for that movie... and tell yourself "I deserve it... I worked hard for it"... In fact this will make you work faster too...
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By Bill Garrett
BBC Money Programme
Coca Cola is not a company known for making too many mistakes. Its marketing is slick and Coke is the best-selling soft drink in the world. Few would have predicted that Coke's attempt to launch its Dasani bottled water brand in the UK would prove to be a disaster for such an experienced company.
Yet, in March this year, only five weeks after its multi million pound UK launch, red-faced Coke executives were forced to take Dasani off the shelves in the UK.
In just five weeks, Dasani had come and gone
What went wrong?
Dasani was launched in the USA in 1999 as a bottled, purified water, and had become a huge success there. Taking that same formula and repeating it for the UK market must have looked like a breeze, but that wasn't quite how it turned out.
Unlike most of the bottled water sold in British petrol stations and supermarkets Dasani hadn't come from alpine glaciers or trickled out of a precious natural spring - it had come out of the local tap. True, the company put it through a purification process and added mineral salts, but the source was still tap water.
At its launch on 10 February, some people in the drinks industry already knew Dasani's big "secret". Simon Mowbray of The Grocer magazine had mentioned the source of the water in an article, but didn't think anyone else would pick up on it. Now, he sees it more graphically. "It was a bomb waiting to go off," he says.
The Real Sting
At first, the launch seemed to have go well, and Coke executives thought the public would respond to their new product with its distinctive blue packaging. But everything changed when the Press Association reporter Graham Hiscott saw the reference in the Grocer magazine to the real source of Dasani.
The following day, the story was splashed across the daily papers. Headlines like "The Real Sting" a play on Coke's "The Real Thing" slogan and the more obvious "Coke sells tap water for 95p" could hardly have been worse for Coke and their new baby.
The tabloids drew on the uncanny parallel with the episode in the BBC sitcom "Only Fools and Horses", in which Del Boy and Rodney take ordinary tap water from their Peckham flat and bottle it up to sell as Peckham Spring. The irony couldn't have been worse. Dasani was sourced and bottled in a factory in Sidcup, just a few miles down the road from Peckham! The tabloids continued their onslaught. "Are they taking us for plonkers!" yelled the Daily Star.
Coke could make a comeback in the UK
Despite the pages of negative press coverage, Coke persisted with Dasani. Executives protested that they had been misunderstood and that the drink was not just tap water but in fact the result of a highly sophisticated process to create the purest drinking water you can get. As far as Coke were concerned, Dasani was a lifestyle drink, a drink you would want to be seen with, the source was all but irrelevant.
Then on Thursday 18 March there was even worse news.
The fiasco was complete when Dasani was contaminated
Something had gone wrong at the Dasani factory and a bad batch of minerals had contaminated the water production with a potentially carcinogenic bromate. Coke admitted defeat. Immediately they withdrew all 500,000 bottles of Dasani in circulation. In just five weeks, Dasani had come and gone, arguably providing more in terms of entertainment than refreshment.
The cost to Coke is thought to run into the millions, but behind the financial loss is the possibility of an even more serious problem. After years of heady growth, sales of Coca-Cola are beginning to flatten out. Bottled water, by contrast, is now the fastest-growing of the soft drinks and Coke still need a successful bottled water for the UK and the European market.
An organisation the size of Coke, with the marketing strength that has made it the biggest drinks company in the world, is unlikely to give up easily. Astonishingly, Dasani could make a comeback one day. Asked whether the company has any plans to bring Dasani back, Patricia McNamara, New Beverages Director at coca cola GB says coyly, "we like to think it's a definite maybe".
The Money Programme, Coke's water bomb was broadcast on BBC2 at 1930Wednesday 16 June.
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Whale and Dolphin Watching
"Inis – the energy of the sea" protects Whales and Dolphins..
Apart from our normal commercial activity it is important for us to help to protect the environment and so several years ago we decided to focus our efforts on the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group (IWDG), which is a natural fit due to Inis' connection with the sea; thus we have been an IWDG "core funder" for several years now. We have also been the main sponsor for "Whale Watch Ireland" each year (which normally takes place on a selected date during August) and have pioneered resources in support of this event. We feel that business has a key role to play in promoting awareness of environmental issues and helping to solve them and are really pleased with our long term association with the IWDG which has grown from strength to strength since our collaboration began in 2001.
Padraig. Whooley of the IWDG writes..
"Core funding is really important to charities and Non Governmental Organisations (NGOs) like the IWDG, as these monies provide an essential buffer against an increasing array of hidden costs incurred in running a growing NGO & charity. Although IWDG has been successful in receiving "ring-fenced" funding for specific research projects, it is very difficult to receive funding to cover day to day expenses like:
Insurance, postage, professional fees, administrative expenses and expenses such as travel. Without this support we can not function as effectively as we do. Core funding therefore requires a "leap of faith" by the funder as they don't necessarily get their corporate logo on a high profile piece of equipment, nor are they linked to an important piece of research that makes some earth shattering new finding. Such altruism in corporate circles today is refreshing. Inis' Core Funding support for IWDG since 2006 has been an important part of the IWDG success story.
Parallel to Inis' Core funding support has been their tireless support for "Whale Watch Ireland", which Inis have sponsored each year since 2004. This All-Ireland event is one of the largest events on the Irish wildlife calendar, which each year sees huge numbers of whale and dolphin enthusiasts join IWDG on headlands and cliff tops for guided land-based whale watches thoughout the four provences. This event is free and open to all, and is more than just a data gathering exercise, as it informs and inspires people to become actively involved in local biological. The conservation dividend from this event is immeasurable.
For further information see www.iwdg.ie
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Most of us consider a weekend getaway to be a vacation. However, research suggests that individuals who do not take at least two full weeks off from work each year have an increased risk of heart disease and women, in particular, are more susceptible to depression. All over the world people take vacations spanning from two weeks to two months, but in the United States, it is not uncommon for workers to skip vacations altogether, for fear of job loss or simply because we believe that our colleagues cannot function without us.
Still, deep down we know life would not cease in our absence, but is it really that big of a deal if we do not take a little time off? Just what could we possibly be missing out on by working through our vacations?
Increasing the Strength of Family Relationships.
Too often, family plays second fiddle to our professional lives. A couple of hours in the evening when everyone is in the same room, but absorbed in separate activities does not a happy family make. Spending some time just reconnecting with our partner and children emphasizes what is truly important and can do wonders for the family unit.
We are a society of relentless multitaskers. Sometimes our productivity can completely envelop our lives, resulting in ulcers, anxiety and even heart attacks. Step back and let someone else handle the office for a little while. The world will not stop turning.
Think back to your childhood. It is likely that some of the most memorable experiences occurred during family vacations. Do you really want to deprive your own family of those memories?
A burnt out worker does not do the company any favors by going through the motions of their daily responsibilities like some sort of zombie. After a vacation, you can return rested and ready to tackle challenges with renewed sense of commitment and a fresh outlook.
Overall Health Improvement
Whether it is tension in your back, shoulders and neck, chronic indigestion, a headache that creeps in around the same time everyday, insomnia, fatigue, or any number of other ailments, there is a strong probability that it could be work related. You might be surprised how much better you feel after a vacation.
There are countless benefits a vacation can bring. So, there is really just one question you need to ask yourself: what am I waiting for?
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One of the most widespread beliefs about search engine marketing (SEM) is search engine advertising equals search marketing. If your online marketing firm runs advertising campaigns on Overture, the firm must specialize in SEM, right?
Although this belief is common, it's hardly accurate. Advertising is only one component of the marketing process. Marketing campaigns involve branding, sales, customer service, distribution, trade shows, radio, TV, direct mail, and so forth. And advertising, too. So when hiring an SEM company, be sure it provides a variety of services, not just advertising.
Below, summaries of the different types of SEM services.
Search Engine Advertising
Search engine advertising includes sponsorships, pay-for-placement (PFP) advertising, and contextual advertising. Search engine advertising generally follows a PFP model. Pay and you're guaranteed top placement in a search engine's results both on the search site and within its distribution network.
Successful PFP advertising campaigns depend on five main factors:
Search Engine Optimization
"Natural," or "organic," search engine optimization (SEO) is designing, writing, and HTML-coding a Web site to maximize the chance its pages will appear at the top of spider-based search engine results for selected keywords and phrases.
The fundamental building blocks of a natural SEO campaign include:
For your target audience to find your site on the search engines, pages must contain keyword phrases that match the phrases your target audience types into search queries. Keyword phrases must be carefully selected and placed strategically throughout your site.
All the major search engines emphasize page title, visible HTML text, text placed "above the fold," and text placed in and around hypertext links. Most search engines don't use meta-tag content to determine relevancy.
Search engines must be able to find that text. How pages are linked to each other, and the way sites are linked to other sites, has considerable impact on search engine visibility.
If crawler-based search engines are unable to spider a Web site due to the URL structure or other technical reasons, that site can participate in paid-inclusion programs. With a paid-inclusion program, a URL is guaranteed to be included in the search engine index. The search engine will refresh the content very quickly, generally every two to seven days.
What a paid-inclusion program does not guarantee is placement. Sites submitted through a paid-inclusion program must be properly optimized for high rank.
The last component of a successful SEO campaign is link popularity. That's the number and quality of links that point to your Web site. Link quality (links from popular, highly trafficked and/or respected sites) carries far more weight than link quantity.
Paid Submission and Directory Enhancement
Currently, paid submission applies specifically to human-based search engines, also known as directories. In a paid-submission search marketing program, Web site owners pay to have their sites reviewed by human editors. There's no guarantee the site will be accepted into the directory.
A successful directory enhancement campaign rests on:
Yahoo and Business.com are examples of directories offering a paid-submission program.
If you want your site listed in the Yahoo directory, you'll have to pay an annual fee (currently $299). This fee does not guarantee your site will be listed in the Yahoo directory nor that it will be listed in the category you selected. The fee pays a Yahoo editor, called a surfer, to review your submission.
Directories require Web site owners to select the most appropriate directory categories for their sites. Write descriptions that concisely and accurately describe the content.
Editors will modify a directory listing if the company name, description, or Web address is no longer accurate. Since it's very difficult to modify a directory listing after the initial submission, a professional search engine marketer will always emphasize the importance of getting it right the first time.
Some directories, such as Open Directory and Zeal, still accept free submissions. How long will free submission last? No one knows.
Shopping search engines make it easy for people to find information about products for sale online. DealTime, PriceGrabber.com, Froogle, and Yahoo Shopping are examples.
Shopping search engines commonly provide specialized features that allow people to compare product types, pricing, availability, and online stores across the Web. A successful shopping search campaign depends on the following factors:
Certain e-commerce sites perform better in shopping search engines than others. A computer store, for example, might perform well in a shopping search engine for cost and peripherals.
Many companies don't offer a full range of SEM services. Some firms may specialize in search engine advertising. Others might focus on SEO. Some firms might do both but not offer shopping search services.
To find the SEM firm that's best for your business, analyze your site's needs. If you're unwilling to modify the site design and copy, a search engine advertising campaign is your most viable option. You'll only need to find an SEM firm that specializes in search engine advertising. If you're in the process of redesigning and rewriting your site, a firm that specializes in SEO is probably your best choice. Shop around for the firm that suits the needs of your online presence.
Shari Thurow is the founder and SEO director at Omni Marketing Interactive, a full-service search engine marketing, Web, and graphic design firm. Acknowledged as a leading expert on search engine friendly Web sites worldwide, she is the author of the top-selling marketing book, "Search Engine Visibility," published through Peachpit Press. Shari's areas of expertise include site design, search engine optimization, and usability.
June 5, 2013
1:00pm ET / 10:00am PT
June 20, 2013
1:00pm ET / 10:00am PT
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stories left before being redirected to Clickshare to login or register.
Shaheen touts loan repayment plan
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
MANCHESTER, N.H. (AP) — New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen says workers in lower-paying public service careers such as teaching and nursing will be among those who benefit the most from a new student loan repayment plan.
Shaheen was at UNH Manchester on Tuesday to describe the new Pay as You Earn plan, which caps monthly payments on Federal Direct Student Loans for some borrowers at an affordable amount based on their income. She says the Education Department estimates that as many as 1.6 million students could benefit.
Shaheen says the plan is especially important for public service workers like teachers, nurses or first-responders, and that students should be able to pursue careers based on their passions not by financial concerns.
New Hampshire has the highest average student college debt in the nation.
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Province of the Massachusetts Bay To His Excellency the Governor The Hon[orab]le His Majestys Council and the Honle. House of Reprisentitives in General Court Assembled
Humbly Shews Richard King of Scarborough in the County of Cumberland in Said Province Gentleman That in the Night of the 19th of March AD 1766. a Number of Persons in Disguise with axes Clubbs &c. Broak the windows of the Dwelling House and WairHouse of Your Petitioner, and Entered both Distroyed the kitchen furniture &c. and marred the winscot of the Dwelling House Burnt and Distroyed Robb'd and Carried of from the Dwelling House and WairHouse Great Quantitys of Your Petitioners Papers and writings of Great value among which the Number of Bonds and notes of Hand for money Due which have already Com to Your Petitioners knowlidge togather with the Lawfull Intrest Due on the Same to the Time of the Riot Amount to the Sum of £1104/15/3 lawfull money of said Province Exclusive of other writings of Great value. That in the morning of the second Day after the Riot a writing was found put up at your Petitioners Gate in the name of Sons of Liberty Threatening Your Petitioner and Every other Person in the County that Should be Instrumental of any worrant or Summons to be Served on aney Person on account of the Riot he or they might Depend upon haveing their Houses and Barns Burnt and Consumed and themselves Cut in pices and burnt to Ashes. That in a Short time after another Threatening letter was lodged at the Door of one John Fitts who was a Tenant to Your Petitioner, therein warning him to Depart from that House within twelve Days or he might Expect to be Distroyd for they were Determined to Distroy King and all he had.2
That Eight Days after the Riot upon Complaint a Warrant was Issued by Several Justices of
the County Against such Persons as were Suspected, and Summonses for Such as were Supposed Capable to Prove the Fact. But with little Effect two only of the Persons Suspected Suffering them selves to be taken the others as also the Principal witnesses Either keeping their Doors Shut against the officers Going back into the woods or Going armed avoided being taken or summoned, that while the Justices that were assembled on this Occasion were waiting for the officers to Execute the warrants &c. a Number of the Riotous Party actualy Assembled in order as was Said to Rescue aney Person that might be apprehend, That in May following the House Improved by Fitts above mentioned was Set on fire and had Nigh like to have ben Consumed with the Household Goods therin which so Allaramed him that he soon Quit the Same which House was Soon after almost distroyed by tairing Down the Chimney &c. That Your Petitioner perciveing the Injuerys he had sustained by the Riot appeared to be pointed more at his papers then aney other Part of his Intrest and that maney Persons appeared Determined to take advantage of the Distruction of his Securities for the Discharge of their Debts &c. That sum from whome your Petitioner had Purchised Lands began to threaten a reEntery, upon finding their Deeds were not on Record, alledging for their Justification that your Petitioner had obtained Deeds, Bonds, and Notes by taking the Advantage of People. Wherefore your Petitioner by an Instrument in writing under his hand appointed the Two first Justices in the County togather with a Gentleman of the Law Arbitrators in General between my Selfe and all Persons (if aney there were) who will appear before Said arbitraters within three months and alledge their having Suffered or being lyable to Suffer by means of aney Deed of Sale Deed of mortgage or Bill of Sale Bond note of hand or other Obligation whatsoever, with Three months more to prove the Same was by Your Petitioner fraudelintly Obtained as they alledge.
And if upon a full hearing of the matter aney such fraudes Should appear on the Part of your Petitioner Said Arbitraters were therin Desired to Certifie the same in writing under their Hands which Certificate if refering to a Deed of sale Deed of Mortgage or Bill of Sale Should Intitle the Party to recover the whole Consideration over again or if it referred to aney Bond Note of hand or other obligation whatsoever to be Sufficiant in aney of His Majesty's Courts of record to Barr aney action that might Ever after be brought upon Such obligation respectively, therin also Subjecting himSelfe to pay all Cost and Charge arising by Such Dispuet wherin he Should be found in the wrong which Submission Your Petitioner notified at length in two
the most frequented Taverns in said Town of Scarborough, But no Person Ever appeared, nor Applied for aney redress, That while the officers were Indeviouring to Summon the witnesses to attend the Sup[erio]
r Court in this County June 1766. Seven windows in a Dwelling House belonging to Your Petitioner were broak and Distroyed. That in the month of Augt. following Your Petitioner Suffered the Loss of an Ax Stole out of his Pasture Suposed to have ben Taken by Sum of the riotous Party who Imploied them selves back in the woods to be out of the way of an Officer. That in the Night of the 4th March last the Dwelling House last mentioned (which had ben lately refitted) was attacked the Boards and Clapboards Tore off the Sealing beat in, and the Posts and Studds Cutt off and the House rendered Irepairable. That in the night of the fourteenth of May last being a few Days after the apprehending and Imprissoning one Silas Burbank upon an Inditement for the Riot,3
a Barn belonging to Your Petitioner of more then seventy foot Long and thirty wide Covered and fixed in the best manner togather with a Shedd of Eighty foot Long was burnt and Consumed with sum Hay and most of your Petitioners Utensils for Husbandry. And Two of your Petitioners best Calves Killd and Carried off at the same Time. That your Petitioner has ben at Great Trouble and Expence in Indeviouring to bring those Rioters to Justice that altho a Number were Indited at the Supr. Court in this County June 1766 and warrants against them Given to proper officers and those officers afterwards actualy in Company with Sum of those the warrants were against Yet the same have not ben Executed upon aney Except Burbank above named and not on him till he Grew so Bold as to use the Goalkeepers House as a Tavern, the reason assigned by the officers for not Executing the warrants when both togather were in Companey with Sum that were Indited, was, that they Did not think it safe and were actualy afraid to Execute the same. That During this time the Rioters Party have ben Sending off to Machias and other Places Such as might have ben made use of as Witnesses against them and Greatly Intimidating others So that the obtaining witnesses against them (all Circumstances Considered) must be attended with Great Difficulty if not Impossibility to your Petitioner. That for a Privat man to bring a Great number of Persons to Justice for such Dissorders as first origenated under a Notion of Publick Utility Committed in a Time of General Dissorder and Confusion
while others who were alike Guilty were Exempt from Punishment by act of Government4
is a Burthen too Great and attended with too much Hazerd to be Effected by an Individual at this Time. That as it is Evident the Injuryes Your Petitioner has sustained is by a Detachment of the Spirit of Dissorder above mentioned the other Sufforers by which have ben Since Compensated. Your Petitioner thinks it an unhappiness and Misfortune peculer to him Selfe to be obliged Either to Sell [Sett?
down by his Losses or Go through Such an ardous [ . . . ]
to Repair them as appear more likely to render his Losses Double Such an undertaking as Even Government it Selfe has though[t]
fit to Decline and Yet to be Taxed to the Compensation of others. That Notwithstanding your Petitioner has taken all possible pains to obtain the renewal of the obligations he Lost by the Riot by offering long Credit and Easey Payment, Yet the amount of the Sum that is neither paid nor renewed nor Can be Confided in to be paid renewed, or in aney wise made Good by the respective Debtors is £463/3/51/2 Exclusive of the Intrest on the same Since the Riot. A List whereof togather with the other articals of Loss Sustained by your Petitioner as above is herewith presented to Your Excellency and Honours.
Which Losses and Damages togather with the Exposed Scituation of Your Petitioner Your Petitioner Humbly Supplicats Your Ex[cel]le[nc]y and Honours to take under Your wise and Just Consideration, and that Your Excellency and Honours would be pleased to Compensate and make Good to Your Petitioner the Injureys he has Sustained from the Hands of those Riotus Persons as also that your Excellency and Honours would be pleased to Direct in Such wise with respect to any further Process against them, that the Intrest of your Petitioner may be Secured from any further Distruction at their Hands. All which Your Petitioner Humbly Submitts and Prays.
[signed] Richd. King
Jany. 4th 1768
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The Bell Jar's sexist makeover
The Bell Jar's 1966 cover design by Shirley Tucker.
If you have a love of literature you might want to avert your gaze. If you enjoy elegant design you might want to not click on this link. Hell, I’d go so far as to say if you have a pair of functioning eyes and any semblance of good taste you might want to avoid what I’m about to show you. So now that you’ve been duly warned - behold! The 50th anniversary edition of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. (Or scroll to pic below) And commence retching into the nearest receptacle.
Not surprisingly the entire internet has been giving the side eye to this horrifically ill thought-out, chick lit makeover of Plath’s beloved roman à clef (I own two copies!) Even though publisher Faber’s own website lists the themes of the book as feminism, depression and isolation, on the basis of this cover it seems they were lazily misinterpreted as “Girls like make-up and being pretty”. I’m surprised they didn’t find a way to stick a cupcake and a stiletto on there. It’s just so far off what the book is about that you wonder if the designer or anyone who signed off on this abomination even read The Bell Jar. I can only imagine the discussion going on during the brainstorming session... “So what is this, some sort of sixties The Devil Wears Prada? Just stick a retro-looking lady on there, some whimsical font and let’s call it a day.”
This monstrosity of a cover is made even sadder by the fact that the 1966 cover design by Shirley Tucker was such a clean and striking image that cleverly illustrated protagonist Esther Greenwood’s feelings of being trapped by a society with such rigid expectations of women and her spiralling descent into depression. That cover didn’t feel the need to hammer home that this was a book by a lady author by featuring a picture of a woman (you know, so all the men could make sure not to accidentally pick it up.) To have republished Tucker’s art on the anniversary edition would have been a much smarter decision as the 1966 version was a cover you’d actually be proud to display on your bookshelf.
Chick lit makeover... The 50th anniversary edition of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.
The cover also illustrates a larger problem in how women’s literature is treated. By making the cover so explicitly, narrowly feminine in imagery, it assumes that if a woman writes something it will only be of interest to women and should only be marketed to women, as if somehow women are completely incapable of speaking to the breadth of human experience. Author Jennifer Weiner (who is often pigeonholed as a chick lit author and is not a fan of the term) aptly described this literary sexism in a 2010 interview with The Huffington Post saying, “I think it's a very old and deep-seated double standard that holds that when a man writes about family and feelings, it's literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same topics, it's romance, or a beach book.”
There’s this bizarrely enduring idea that women can’t create “serious” art and this new cover design plays into that by being fluffier than a newborn duckling. The Guardian reports that Hannah Griffiths, Faber’s publisher of paperbacks, said the look was part of a strategy “to keep our backlist writers in the minds and hands of new readers” and that the cover was supposed to help the novel appeal to a reader “who could enjoy its brilliance without knowing anything about the poetry, or the broader context of Plath's work.” Frankly if such a reader exists who is ignorant or intimidated by Plath’s reputation perhaps their reading privileges should be revoked, rather than slavishly pandering to them with a bright, bubbly and thoroughly ugly book cover.
The simple fact is that it’s hard out there for female authors. As Daily Life’s own Kasey Edwards pointed out women writers are still advised to “pretend to be a man”, as if we were living in the downtrodden days of the Brontës penning books as the Bell brothers. Female authors aren’t reviewed or published with anything approaching parity. A glance at almost any greatest books ever list published shows how unwelcome women are in the literary canon. And yet miraculously Plath was able to channel her talent during a far less female-friendly era to write a book that continues to speak to readers decades later and has established itself as a classic that features on high school reading lists the world over. This anniversary edition of The Bell Jar should’ve been a celebration of the enduring appeal of Plath’s work, instead it serves as a reminder that, much as Esther discovered, women still aren’t being taken seriously.
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However, having a handsome husband or boyfriend is no barrier to the couple's success, according to the study.
The phenomenon was spotted by British researchers who were studying whether it is true that we tend to pair up with those who are similarly attractive to ourselves.
Their findings could help explain why Angelina Jolie's marriages to actors Jonny Lee Miller and Billy Bob Thornton barely lasted three years a piece.
In contrast, her relationship with Brad Pitt, one of the world's most handsome celebrities, has already lasted six years, suggesting she has found her match.
The Stirling, Chester and Liverpool university researchers took photos of the men and women in more than 100 couples. Some had been together for just a few months, others for several years. The individual men and women were then rated on their looks.
The analysis revealed having an attractive husband or boyfriend was no barrier to a relationship succeeding. But, if it was the woman who was the one blessed with good looks, the relationships tended to last only a matter of months, the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin reports.
Researcher Rob Burriss said: "This would indicate it is the woman who is in control of whether the relationship continues.
Beautiful women may realize they can afford to pick and choose, he suggests. They may also have the confidence to leave behind relationships that have run their course."
"Attractive women might generally prefer short-term relationships. They're better placed to move on."
It is also possible the relationships end due to jealous behavior from the woman's less photogenic partner.
Conversely, the less attractive women "may have to make do with what they have, hence the longer relationships", he said.
The study also found we tend to pair up with people whose facial features have a similar level of symmetry - a sign of beauty - to our own.
Dr Burriss said: "Are all men trying to go out with Anne Hathaway or Angelina Jolie, or do you really want to be with someone at the same level of attractiveness as yourself? These findings suggest our ideal partner is one on our own kind of level."
Edited by bioforum, 18 March 2011 - 11:09 AM.
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More on the land-use forum
OK, I've finally got some time to pass along some of my notes and thoughts on the Tuesday night land-use forum
. I already covered my introduction speech in the previous post
. Unfortunately, the Powerpoint presentations do not seem to be posted yet, but should show up at some point here
. The Houston Politics blog at the Chronicle had some coverage here
- Titled his talk "Have our cake and eat it too," meaning we can have both new development and neighborhood protection.
- Not for zoning, but for "stakeholder-based negotiated planning" and "sector and corridor form-based plans"
- 2/3 of all the built environment in 2030 will be built between now and then (including replacements of existing structures). By 2040, 600K new housing units built inside the city of Houston (not metro), totaling around $500B.
- Moving towards 75% of our adulthood without children. 88% of growth in households will be without children. This shifts the attractiveness from suburban to urban environments.
- He thinks the solution is to redevelop arterial shopping centers with large parking lots into 4-5 story mixed-use developments - still with plenty of parking spread among streets, garages, and underground.
- In Q&A, he noted that most of the suburban cities around Atlanta essentially ban attached structures (apts, condos, townhomes, etc.), which is very exclusionary. Good that we don't.
- Also in the Q&A, he was asked if the free market was building density anyway, why was a form-based code necessary? Answer: to make it compatible with the neighborhood.
I understand the appeal of mixed-use to residents. It's first-floor retail that's the problem. They need to have convenient parking, or people will just drive down the street to a competitor that does. And the residents themselves are usually not enough to support most retail (except for very basic services, like convenience stores, dry cleaning, maybe a deli, etc.) - it must be able to draw driving customers. Joel tells me that in many places mandating mixed-use in LA, the residential fills right up, but block after block has empty retail space - which means those residents are still pretty much driving everywhere.Wendell Cox
- Basically devastated smart growth approaches, which predicted price decreases because of lower projected infrastructure costs, but have actually created spectacular price increases and unaffordability everywhere it's been applied.
- Showed that the American Dream of suburban homeownership is actually a global aspiration, including all over Europe and Asia.
- Showed a high correlation between high land-use regulation and low job growth.
- A person can save $1 to $1.5 million moving from CA to Houston (house price plus financing costs). I've certainly seen many more CA license plates lately.
- Transit is downtown-centric, which is now <10%>
- Notes all the unsubsidized density being built by the market in Houston, vs. the large subsidies required to get density built in Portland.
- Advocates responsive instead of prescriptive planning. Let the market choose how it wants to live, don't force it.
- In Q&A, he said that planning/regs like DFW and Atlanta would have an unpredictable impact on the dynamic environment in Houston, including the potential of much more unaffordability than has been created in either of those metros (something I've also argued before on this blog).
Mayor Bob Lanier
- Does not advocate zoning or growth boundaries, but believes we do need a plan.
- Carbon and climate change argument for reducing driving. As I've said before, I think the personal vehicle is here to stay, regardless of what energy technology it runs on. And I think that technology will evolve much faster than we could ever rework our cities into dense, transit-focused ones. Plug-in hybrids that use almost no gas are already on their way.
- He disputes that Houston was built around the car. He is technically correct about the very core of the city built in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But the vast bulk of the city, built since WW2, was definitely built around the car.
- Notes that we do have plenty of regulations already, especially Chapter 42 that divides the city into urban (inside the loop) and suburban (outside 610), and that many of these regs don't make much sense these days. We need to allow the choice of dense living without requiring variances. Agreed.
- Showed a map with 55 transit-oriented neighborhoods around the light rail stops.
- Pointed out that our strong mayor is essentially the "chief planner" for the city as it currently stands.
- Pointed out that our infrastructure, including highways, is some of the most fully utilized in the state (i.e. operating closer to capacity).
- Transit usage in Houston has been flat for decades, stuck at around 5% of commuter trips and 1% of all trips. He believes many people have unrealistic expectations of it growing much beyond that.
- Warned against planning out too far, beyond our knowledge of how markets and preferences will shift. He said if you compare the old zoning plans that voters rejected way back with the city today, you'd laugh at how far off those plans were.
- Equated "real quality-of-life" with the basics he worked on like police to reduce crime and basic infrastructure like sidewalks ("neighborhoods to standard" program).
- Government can't effectively tell people what to develop. Government planners are not creative or innovative - a "no mistakes" mentality. Free market = affordability.
- Believes Ashby is a negative outlier in the free market, but that there would be just as many - if not more - issues and problems under a centrally controlled system.
- Believes people are pushing "backdoor zoning" right now, and he is opposed to the "horrible" traffic and curb cut ordinances.
- "People like sprawl."
Overall, it was very cordial, with a lot more agreement than I expected. I like the idea of an alternative to Chapter 42 for areas around the rail stops (mixed-use up against the sidewalk, with less and hidden parking - but I don't think a full-blow form-based code is needed). But I'm not sure it should be required
around those stops - certainly not at all 55 of them. Make it a developer option (no variance required), and see what they build that the market can support. Maybe it could be required at a handful of stops with the most potential, but then we have to monitor how they develop. If those required regs freeze the development market around those stops, then they'll need an overhaul. On the other had, if those stops thrive because of the "increased predictability" for developers and residents, then the requirement could be spread to others relatively quickly. The goal is to create attractive density that doesn't generate as many new car trips. I don't know if that's really possible, but it couldn't hurt to try in a few well-targeted places. Meanwhile, keep letting the rest of the city redevelop as it has been. For the most part, it's been very good, and let's hope it continues despite this national slump.Update
: David's post
, including links to two of the presentations. He doesn't like my characterization. I'll admit I just took notes on the points that jumped out at me over 2 hours, so they're certainly not comprehensive - but I tried to be as fair and accurate as possible in my recollections.
Labels: density, development, growth, home affordability, infrastructure, land-use regulation, mixed-use, perspectives, planning, rail, transit, transit-oriented development, zoning
Intro from the land-use regulation forum
Just got back from the land-use forum
at the GRB downtown. Overall I think it went pretty well. Good turnout too. Maybe 500+? I have a lot of notes I'll try to boil down into my next post, along with links to the presentations when they put them up (should be videos at some point too). But I'm tired and it's late tonight, so I'll just post the core of my intro speech, subtracting out all the "thank yous" and sponsor details. Sorry if it reads a little odd in written form - I wrote it for speech, with my own pauses and emphasis.
Now they asked me to “set the tone” for the evening. If I understood correctly, I think what they’re looking for is something like the “Jerry Springer” TV show… maybe we can even get a little chair-throwing going… Just kidding folks. More seriously, what we’re hoping for is not so much a debate as a civilized dialogue on different approaches to dealing with the tremendous growth happening in our city.
That civilized tone includes laying off the “good-guy/bad-guy” characterizations of either planners or developers. I’ve met a lot of planners, and they’re generally good people with good intentions trying to create good outcomes in the face of conflicting demands and incredible complexity. And let’s not forget that developers are not only building what people want
– and that increased supply in the face of rising demand helps keep our city affordable – but also that the enhanced tax base they generate contributes millions of dollars towards schools, parks, police, libraries, roads, flood control, and other city services and desperately-needed infrastructure renewal. Every dollar they create is a dollar the rest of us don’t have to pay for those amenities.
To set the context of tonight’s discussion, when you hear the term “planning” thrown around, what we’re talking about here is land-use
planning – what owners can and cannot do with their land – not
infrastructure planning like sewers, water, roads, or flood control – which everybody agrees is absolutely necessary. In most cities, land-use planning is accomplished through government-controlled zoning, which Houston voters have rejected several times in our history. Instead, we’ve used voluntary deed restrictions to protect neighborhoods. Both systems have had mixed results of pros and cons. One issue we face is: can deed restrictions be streamlined and improved to address neighborhood concerns, or do we need to pull some or all of that power out of the neighborhoods to some sort of city-wide governing entity?
Other terms you’ll probably hear tossed around tonight include “quality of life,” “quality of place,” and “livability”. Unfortunately, they’re slippery terms. Ask a 100 people what quality of life means to them, and you’ll probably get a 100 different answers. Usually they’re referring to things like parks, open space, clean air, walkable neighborhoods, and aesthetics like trees, landscaping, and attractive development. All good stuff.
Affordability is not
usually part of the definition, but in our Opportunity Urbanism
study, we pointed out that affordability not only enables the American Dream of home ownership for the middle class, but also frees up discretionary income for urban vibrancy and amenities like restaurants, charities, shopping, sports, entertainment, higher education, small business entrepreneurship, museums, arts and culture – all of which not only constitute good “quality of life” for a lot people, but also help attract jobs and talent to our city. A good city has a diverse range of neighborhoods and environments – at all price ranges – so people can find the one that best matches their personal definition of “quality of life.” One-size, in this case, does not
My final point and we’ll move on to the panel. The Center for Houston’s Future recently brought a panel of national experts from the Urban Land Institute to Houston for several days to study our city and make recommendations. It may or may not surprise you to hear they were impressed – impressed to the point of asserting that we’re well on our way towards becoming the fourth great global city in America, after New York, Chicago, and LA. They noted we were achieving that critical mass due to several factors, including our incredible affordability (especially housing), the opportunities of our job growth, our limited constraints on development (they were not
in favor of traditional zoning), and our strong core with people moving in as well as a growing tax base (as opposed to “donut cities” found elsewhere, with a stagnant or weakening core relative to their suburbs).
They even noted the importance of our optimistic spirit and generally positive attitude towards growth, an attitude not found in many other major cities. That attitude makes us more tolerant of the dynamic, eclectic, ever-changing development and density necessary for that growth. Careful preservation and cultivation of that positive attitude will be critical to achieving our potential among the world’s great cities.
Labels: deed restrictions, development, economic strategy, growth, home affordability, land-use regulation, opportunity urbanism, planning, quality of place, zoning
CAL-UAL HQ, planning debate, subsidies, rankings, airport rail, and more
Yet again, I've let the smaller items pile up:
- There will be a dialogue/debate on Houston land-use regulation at the George R. Brown this Tuesday evening Feb 26. David Crossley, Arthur Nelson, Wendell Cox, and Mayor Bob Lanier are participating, and yours truly will be giving the introduction. More info and RSVP here. Hope to see you there.
- NYT on the slowdown in exurb homebuilding in Texas, with a focus on a small town outside Dallas. The state is still booming overall, but the mortgage credit crunch, especially at the low end, is hitting builders on the fringes hard.
- An interesting stat on airport rail from a recent comment by DavidH:
"Regarding recent proposal that Houston needs rail to the airports "because all world-class cities have one", it should be noted according to a study done some time ago that the most heavily used airport rail in the country was Reagan National (Wash DC) where 11% of departures/arrivals used rail. All other cities were under 5%. Nobody except maybe visitors to downtown want to schlep their bags on a 15 mph rail ride to the airports."
I agree, and I've said before that the market here is a niche one plenty well served by buses: young singles who can't get a ride to the airport. Business travelers will almost always rent a car or take a taxi. Families won't schlep their luggage on transit. Most others will have friends or family pick them up or drop them off. And our off-site airport parking is dirt cheap. The ridership drivers just aren't there.
"He believes there are “enormous government subsidies” for driving. In fact, in 2005, the subsidies to the 4.4 trillion passenger miles of driving were $17.9 billion, or less than 0.4 cents per passenger mile. By comparison, the subsidies to the 47 billion passenger miles of transit were $29.4 billion, or 62 cents per passenger mile.
Subsidies to transit have outpaced subsidies to driving for decades, yet transit still makes up only about 1 percent of passenger travel. Somehow, I suspect that if 0.4-cent-per-passenger-mile subsidies had as much influence on American travel habits as Nozzi presumes, then 62-cent-per-passenger-mile subsidies would be even more significant. But they haven’t been."
- If you haven't already gotten this in the emails going around town:
"Please go to this web site and vote for Houston (Children's Memorial Hermann Hospital) to get a new hospital playroom from Colgate. It is an easy process and would benefit so many of our children who spend their time at the hospital. Send it on to all you know and see if we can't win this for the kids. Thank you so much for your help with this."
When I last checked, we were barely in first place, with Detroit coming on strong. You can vote every day, so just keep it open in a browser tab.
I may have mentioned before on this blog that I'm somewhat of an amateur follower of the airline industry. In that vein, I thought I'd throw in some material about the rumored Continental-United merger that is expected to follow a Delta-NWA merger announcement. Some of you may even remember an op-ed I wrote in the Chronicle five years ago calling for exactly this merger when United declared bankruptcy. It's been well covered in the Chronicle, including this story
on the headquarters issue: Houston or Chicago? The Airliners.net forums have discussions on the issue here
, and here.
Most of the sentiment seems to be that Houston will probably win out - not only because of a friendlier and more affordable business climate, but also because Continental's management team is widely considered the stronger of the two (especially by Wall Street): it's easier to cherry-pick the UAL management stars and move them to Houston than try to mass-move CAL management to Chicago. And it probably doesn't hurt that UAL CEO Glenn Tilton has a history in the oil biz.
There's also someone claiming to have inside information that both the Continental brand and Houston headquarters will stay. I know you have to take what you read on the internet with a grain (or a shaker) of salt, but he sounds credible.
I'd like to end with a nice quote from former Continental CEO Gordon Bethune in the Chronicle interview
Q: So what do you think about a combination of Continental and United?
A: If this were a chess game, then ... Continental taking over United would be called checkmate, end of game, home run, it is all over. When you put these two companies together with their route networks, you've got the Pacific, you've got the West Coast, you've got the Midwest, you've got the Southwest, you've got the East Coast, New York, Europe and Latin America. You are all around the world. You are a really good company. You can compete with Lufthansa, British Airways, Singapore Airlines, it doesn't matter. You are a powerhouse. That is what this country needs, is a couple of those. If you are going to compete globally, and Open Skies is going to make it a global marketplace, you better have global reach.
What would be so wrong to have the biggest airline in the world right here?
Labels: aviation, development, economy, headquarters, land-use regulation, mobility strategies, rail, rankings, transit
Making transit free
Future mayoral candidate Bill King's recent op-ed calling
for free transit has generated a flurry of responses from Rad Sallee at the Chronicle
, reader letters
, and a Christof and Carroll Robinson op-ed
. There was some confusion that Bill might be calling for free transit instead
of rail, which he was not (Rad apology here
). I remember pitching something similar to the Berry campaign years ago when I learned how little Metro recovers from the farebox (17% recently).
Here's the essence of the arguments:Pro arguments
- Increase ridership (people love FREE)
- Reduce congestion by getting people out of their cars
- Speed up boardings and therefore trips (less "fumbling for money," although the Q-cards are solving that problem)
- Homeless, "delinquent" and "troublemaker" riders (my solution: clear the bus at each end of the route to discourage "hang out" riders)
- The cost is not what's discouraging riders
- Investing in quality would attract more riders than reducing costs
- New riders are unlikely to be car drivers
- Metro still needs that money
If we could go back in time to before the 2003 rail referendum, I think this option would deserve a healthy debate as an alternative to the rail plan. Imagine if all that rail money had been poured into frequent free bus and shuttle service all over town, helping develop a real "transit culture" in this city. As it is, I think we're pretty locked-in to the rail plan at this point, and Metro will need most of that money to make ends meet. But a more targeted "free" service may make sense.
Metro is a public agency subject to the will of the voters. It started out as subsidized alternative transportation for the poor and disabled. Then people wanted commuting alternatives (the HOV buses). Then they wanted local rail. Now, given the local boom of $100 oil, they'd like to see some freeway congestion reduction by attracting more riders out of their cars.
Metro's downtown commuter service is quite successful, helped by high parking costs and employer subsidies (recently a little too successful: the Park-and-Ride buses are full
). But my impression is that their commuter services to the Med Center, Greenway, and Uptown are less successful, probably due to a combination of less frequent and less convenient service as well as free parking by most of those employers (TMC excepted). On a full-cost basis, including depreciation, commuter buses are a bargain vs. driving. But a lot of people just look at the cost of gas vs. the commuter buses (a few dollars each way), and it looks like a wash - or even cheaper to drive. We need to tilt that equation more strongly towards the HOV commuter buses. I think that means not only more and better service, but maybe lowering the price - potentially all the way to zero. Those three job centers total up to roughly twice as many jobs as downtown, so moving a significant number of those commuters to transit could make a noticeable impact on congestion.
If necessary, we might look at some sort of fee for employers in those districts to partially cover the subsidy costs. Maybe a property tax surcharge, through the special districts, or maybe a per-parking-space tax. I don't know the political feasibility of something like that, but I do believe greater commuter bus subsidies to non-downtown job centers will draw more riders and improve our rapidly deteriorating traffic situation, while costing Metro a lot less than universal free service.
Addendum: Christof recently posted eight excellent common-sense suggestions to improve transit
. A very good read. Let's hope leaders at Metro and elsewhere are paying attention.
Labels: Metro, mobility strategies, transit
A simple rule for high-rise development
The ordinance being developed to target the Ashby high-rise is making no one happy
, so they're looking at a delay of many months to rework it
. In the meantime, the city will pull out a 69-year old driveway permit law
giving a city engineer power to block it. Sheesh. Talk about striking fear and risk into the hearts of developers. Pay big money for land and plan a development, but if important people hassle the mayor enough, a city bureaucrat will find an arcane regulation to shut you down. This is not a healthy situation.
I've stated before
that I think the Ashby situation has been blown way out of proportion by the neighborhood. Plenty of very high-end neighborhoods in Houston have very tall residential towers next to them with no problems at all (including River Oaks). And from the analyses I've heard, it would add less than 1% to Bissonnet traffic
. A weak argument indeed.
That said, there seems to be a general clamoring for "neighborhood protection" from citizens, and for predictability from the developers. This situation needs to be defused before laws with some really bad side effects get passed. And it needs to be simplified and objectified too. Some of the language I've heard proposed for the ordinance is arcane in the extreme, involving detailed calculations and "traffic studies" with plenty of room for bias and subjectivity.
Most people seem to agree high-rise towers don't belong on small streets in single-family neighborhoods. In Houston, we have an arterial grid (roughly) that tends to have commercial on the arterials with residential behind, in the interiors of the arterial blocks. It seems reasonable to restrict anything over 6 stories high (a typical apartment complex, 4 floors on top of 2 levels of parking) to fronting major arterials.
I think "major arterials" could be defined as 4-lanes if two-way, or 2-lanes if one-way (as some feeders are), as well as any road with high-capacity fixed-guideway transit (LRT or BRT). That would eliminate the Ashby high-rise, since Bissonnet is only 2-3 lanes in that area (with a middle turn lane). But it does seem to retroactively allow almost every other high-rise in the city I can think of, as well as allow plenty of density where people seem to want it, like Downtown and Midtown.
Of course, there will be cases where a high-rise may make sense off of one of these arterials (like next to a large park, or inside an office park development), and in those cases developers should be able to apply to the planning commission for a variance just as they do for all sorts of developments today.
This seems to strike the right balance of allowing densificiation and helping maintain affordability through plenty of supply, while protecting off-arterial residential areas. On-arterial single-family residential (such as Beechnut in my neighborhood of Meyerland) is usually deed restricted, so it's already protected.
As always, let me know what you think in the comments.Update
: Chronicle update on Ashby negotiations
Labels: deed restrictions, density, development, land-use regulation
More on the Houston ULI panel
Continuing from my last post
on the CHF-ULI panel on Houston's future, I'd like to cover some more details from the presentation. I'm going to avoid repeating a lot of the detail in their Powerpoint presentation
, such as how the visioning process should work and their other specific recommendations - feel free to review it yourself
. You can also read the Chronicle article here
One of the things they verbalized but did not put in the PowerPoint was our list of strengths and needs. Not a lot of surprises here, but good lists nonetheless.
- Lack of zoning constraints and a robust development market
- Strong industry clusters
- Rapidly achieving critical mass/size to become a global city
- Can-do, entrepreneurial, optimistic spirit
- Feeling that growth is good (often not the case in major cities)
- Array of cooperative regional efforts (GHP, H-GAC, CHF, etc.)
- Growing jobs and tax base
- Multi-centered region
- Strong leadership
- Youthful workforce
- Great arts district
- Geographic gateway to global markets
- People are moving into the core of the city
- Keeping the center core strong; not becoming a "doughnut city" with all growth on the edge and a hollowing core (I've argued before that our extensive investment in freeways has been critical here, since jobs stay in the core only as long as their suburban employees can get to them with a reasonable commute)
- More coordination and communication
- Long-term regional action plan
- More progress on flooding, long commutes, waste water management, and air quality
- Environmental sustainability (protect flood plains, bayous, habitats)
- Rebranding (probably around "opportunity")
- More inclusive decision making
- More development predictability, guidelines, and stability
- More workforce development/education (a priority Joel Kotkin and I identified in our Opportunity Urbanism report)
- More downtown housing (<10%>
I believe they nailed the strengths, and got the needs mostly right, although I might quibble with a few points. For instance, the downtown housing problem is from a lack of demand, not a lack of supply. Most people prefer their own home, townhome, large-scale apartment complex with lots of shared amenities, or a high-rise condo with a view - over a downtown condo facing another building across the street - and a little walkable street life is usually not enough to overcome that preference. For people who do put a very high priority on the pedestrian experience, there seems to be enough residential available downtown to meet that demand. It looks like Discovery Green will spark some more, too.
They put a lot of emphasis on a long-term visioning process. Having been through that process with Blueprint Houston, I'm less enthused. It's fun to "envision utopia," but I don't think it necessarily helps us get there all that much. If we could plan our way to utopia, you'd think we'd see more utopian cities in the world - but I don't see too many. Visioning doesn't get into the hard tradeoffs. That's what markets do, as well as the political process. Both citizens and politicians have to make tough decisions on where to prioritize their resources (police? schools? transportation? parks?).
The other trap visioning processes tend to fall in are a godlike narcissism, not unlike the video game SimCity
. "Yes, I'll make all newcomers live in high-rise apartments downtown, and turn all of the Houston periphery into a giant nature preserve.
" Uh-huh. At least in the video game, you can get negative feedback on your decisions from the "citizens." Not so much with maps, markers, and stickers.
A few criticisms aside, I was impressed overall with the group and most of their insights and recommendations, and I hope their report gets some traction among the key players in our region.Update
: Neal Meyer weighs in
Labels: economic strategy, environment, growth, home affordability, identity, infrastructure, land-use regulation, perspectives, planning, quality of place, zoning
ULI verdict on Houston
The Center For Houston's Future
convened a panel of national Urban Land Institute experts
this week to look at Houston's current situation and coming growth; and, surprisingly, they recommend we do more of what the Center For Houston's Future does (visioning, scenarios, leadership, etc.). Well, ok, maybe the self-promotion was not so surprising. But they actually had a lot of very interesting things to say. So much I'll probably have to spread the content over several posts. This will just be an introductory overview. If you like, you can review their PowerPoint yourself here
Here were my key takeaways:
- They believe we are well on our way to becoming America's fourth global city in addition to NYC, LA, and Chicago. I was surprised they didn't include the SF Bay Area in their list, but that may have something to do with it being a smaller metro with a small core city and low growth.
- They list as our competitors as NYC, LA, Chicago, Sydney, London, Paris, Dubai, and Abu Dhabi.
- They had two new ideas that I want to explore more in future posts:
- H-GAC should competitively award some portion of its transportation funding based on "livability" criteria (i.e. sustainability, walkability, open space, etc.), as LA, DFW, and Atlanta do.
- Development standards should be improved with the creation of a voluntary system (called R-LIDS) loosely modeled on LEED for green buildings, which would certify that developments meet certain standards and "raise the bar" for all developers. (maybe if Roger Galatas is lucky, he'll be the reference point and the system will be measured as "a percentage of The Woodlands", i.e. "this development is certified 50% as cool as The Woodlands" ;-)
- They believe our greatest asset is affordable housing, which attracts the young and educated, and is one of the most intractable problems in competitor cities.
- They were very opposed to zoning, which is too easy to do badly ("no zoning is better than bad zoning") and would put our greatest asset at risk (see previous point on affordability).
- They though we should continue to embrace and improve our unique approach to development.
- They felt Houston should rebrand itself around the key word "opportunity." The speaker even poked mild fun at the archaic 19th-century locomotive on our city seal. Time to join the 21st century. The mayor has used the term "City of Opportunity" forever, and I'm a fan of "Open City of Opportunity," which I think goes beyond branding to our core identity. I'm all for rebranding, and a new city seal to go with it.
More detail on our strengths, weaknesses, issues, and recommended actions will have to wait for another post.
I did get to ask one question in the Q&A period afterward. They recommended rail to the airports, even though they acknowledged the decentralized, distributed, multi-nodal nature of our city elsewhere in the presentation. I asked if that was really the best use limited resources with only 8% of jobs downtown, IAH 23 miles away, and our focus on an express bus lane network instead of commuter rail. They were still very strongly for it, because "every world-class city has rail to the airport," even though they had just finished telling us to embrace our uniqueness and not get too obsessed with how other cities do things.
Another questioner asked how to improve our livability, given that all her friends seem to move away as soon as they can afford to. The answer I wanted to give? I think most people would agree that our biggest livability challenge, by far, is our hot, humid climate half the year. But I'm not aware of any comprehensive planning process that can give us Southern California's weather. It would be awfully nice though...Update
: Chronicle article
and part 2 of this post
Labels: development, economic strategy, environment, growth, home affordability, identity, land-use regulation, perspectives, planning, quality of place, rail, zoning
Finally, a book that truly understands Houston
So, I recently received the Houston It's Worth It (HIWI-The Book)
book as a gift. I loved the web site
, and now I love the book!
The pictures are great at capturing the real essence of Houston. But what I'd like to share with you today are some of my favorite quotes from the book - the ones that say as much about our identity as the pictures.
- "Hot bagels on Sunday, pad thai on Monday, Greek pizza on Tuesday, gnocchi on Wednesday, spring rolls on Thursday, daal on Friday, enchiladas on Saturday...."
- "The rain. Large soak-you-to-the-bone rain drops. Fierce, beautiful lightning. It rains so hard, you can barely see. And it rains often enough to humble you, to show what is really powerful in the world, and to remind you of what matters."
- "The lack of municipal zoning. Where else can you buy a $350,000 home sandwiched in between a chop shop and a seedy nightclub?"
- "Houston is truly unique. To be successful here, you don't need to be born here, be in a certain family, or belong to the right clubs. In Houston, they throw you a uniform and say, 'OK, show us what you got.'"
- "If America is a melting pot, I would say Houston is more like a fruit salad. The many cultures here don't blur together; in fact, they retain what's special about them. But it's that they live happily side-by-side with those unique differences that makes our town great."
- "I've lived in LA, SF, DC, NYC, and Florida, but the nicest people I have ever met are, for some reason I have never understood, right here in Houston."
- "It's a live-and-let-live environment."
- "Houston is a world-class city hidden behind a row of strip malls, like the Scarlet Pimpernel, a hero disguised as an idiot, appreciated by those patient enough to look behind the facade, to take the time to learn to love it."
- "The traffic, the aggressive weather, and the dominant insect population keep all the wussies out of our hair."
- "Because there is no other place in the world where you can drive down a major road, with ditches on either side, pass a honky tonk that could have blown in from the West Texas plains, while off in the distance is the soaring, sparkling masterpiece of a tower by Philip Johnson. Zoning-schmoning. There is a kind of urban anarchy here that gives the city a real punch."
- "Because at the end of the day you actually have some money left over with which to enjoy living in a big city."
- And my #1 favorite quote from the book: "Because it's my home. It's in my blood and my lungs. Because I get lonely for the mercurial chaos and sprawl when I travel to sad, soulless, cookie-cutter towns. Everyone has a chance here; anyone can fit in and find a place of their own. No city in this country offers more diversity and opportunity alongside such friendliness and hospitality as Houston does."
Those are my favorites. If you have your own, by all means add them to the comments.
Extremely highly recommended book
for anyone who loves Houston, or as a gift for anyone you want to love Houston...
Labels: identity, perspectives
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I've recently started thinking that I should spend more money in order to save time. Examples of this include:
- paying to get my laundry done instead of doing it myself
- sometimes taking a taxi instead of taking the subway home
However, I still do find that I constantly spend a lot of time doing things that would take much less time (but at a higher monetary cost). Examples of this include:
- shopping around for 10-15 minutes to find a price a couple dollars lower for something I could immediately buy on amazon.com
- spending hours (probably 10+) cataloging and looking up the value of my old cd collection in order to sell it for a couple hundred dollars when I could have just thrown it out or given it away
It's very contradictory to me (and hard to understand) that I'll often spend a lot of time on something (like the amazon example above) to save a small amount of money, yet I have no problem going out for an expensive dinner or a nice vacation. I'm also at a point in my life where I feel like I don't have nearly enough time (and when I do have free time I'm often exhausted), but I have no financial commitments in the near future so money is relatively plentiful.
- Are there any tips for computing what my time is worth? It would be easy if I was paid by the hour (and could work as many hours as I like), but I'm not. I'd like something better than "gut feel" for knowing when I should spend money to save time (or not).
- Are the ways I can convince myself to spend more money to save time? I know at times I'm definitely working for under minimum wage by spending so much time to save a little money.
- Other than laundry and transportation, are there other common ways to gain more time by spending money?
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By Denise Dunbar
Like most people, I still can’t comprehend what happened in Connecticut on Friday morning. There are places the human mind just can’t fully go, and visualizing a room full of slaughtered 6-year-olds is one of them.
As a parent, my heart aches for those who lost their precious babies that day. Everyone who’s ever loved a child grieves for the little lives cut short. We wonder, as we hear about the heroic adults who died trying to stop the killer and those whose efforts saved other children, would we have been as brave?
Our thoughts then turn closer to home. What about my child? Are the schools that my children attend safe? Or — in reality — is no school that’s not a prison safe from the combination of an insane person bent on malice and weapons intended for mass killings?
Sadly, and terrifyingly, I think it’s the latter. Of all of the horrific rampages involving crazy people and guns in recent years, this is the most shocking. It’s the one that we, collectively, may never fully get over. Is it also the one that finally galvanizes a majority of the American public to take action to prevent this from ever happening again?
The problem is multifaceted, but I think there are two core solutions: First, it needs to be much easier to involuntarily commit severely mentally ill people to institutions, and second, weapons intended for military use should not be sold to the general public.
The gun side of the equation gets most of the attention, but the mental health side is just as important. As often happens in American life, the pendulum has swung too far on this issue. Because there was a time when the insane were horribly mistreated and too easy to lock up people who didn’t need it, the federal government intervened to protect the civil rights of the mentally ill. The movement to stop putting people in mental institutions picked up steam in the 1960s and 70s, and the mentally ill were moved to community-based care, usually on an outpatient basis. The reasons are complex, but the bottom line isn’t: This model simply isn’t working — at least not as it pertains to severely ill, violent young men.
Reform on the gun side of the problem is easier but will be met with fierce resistance from devotees of Second Amendment rights. I think Sandy Hook will ultimately be seen as the final straw on this issue. Yes, hunters should be able to use rifles or shotguns to hunt, and individuals should be able to own handguns for protection. But no civilian needs a gun that fires five rounds per second or to own a civilian version of the military M-16. At this point in time, arguments against restrictions on these weapons — on the basis of not wanting to go down an imaginary slippery slope — just don’t cut it. These guns have to go.
Friday was one of the saddest days in American history. We are left with a melancholy that even the normal joy of Christmas and Hanukkah can’t quite lift. Right now, all we can do is grieve with and pray for the families of those who died. But in the new year, it’s time to tackle the difficult issues of reforming care for the severely mentally ill and finally ridding our country of the plague of assault weapons.
-The writer is the editorial page editor and managing partner of the Alexandria Times.
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Sunday night, before polls had even closed and before all the votes had been collected throughout Mexico, sources were already assuming that Enrique Peña Nieto had won the presidential seat. By the end of the night, it was clear that the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) candidate had most likely won his seat.
Peña Nieto was running against two other candidates, Andrés Manuel López Obrador from the left, and Josefina Vázquez Mota from the National Action Party (PAN). López Obrador has not conceded defeat, waiting until every single vote has been counted in the coming days. Ms. Vázquez Mota did concede defeat, taking the third spot in the presidential race.
López Obrador, along with a strong student and social movement, has accused Peña Nieto of buying off television broadcasters in order to gain the upper hand in the elections. The PRI candidate has been consistently noted for his persona in the media. The student movement has involved many members from the community with vibrant marches and protests over the last few months. They have also accused Peña Nieto of financial corruption in funding his campaign.
Students have demanded more democracy in the political process and for officials to address social issues in the Mexican context. Many fear that with the return of power to the PRI with Peña Nieto, a party that ruled for 71 years in the twentieth century, will herald the decay of democracy. For much of those 71 years the PRI prevailed in politics through a tightly-knit patronage system, until Vicente Fox from the PAN won the presidency in 2000.
The question remains, why have the PRI prevailed in this election if the recent claims that Peña Nieto had an unfair advantage in the media ring false? Reuters quotes Mexico City resident, Raimundo Salazar as saying “Nothing has improved since the PAN got in… The PRI understands how things work here. And it knows how to manage the drug gangs.”
Undoubtedly the violence over the last six years has stayed fresh in residents’ minds. The Wall Street Journal points out that about 55,000 people have been killed in drug related violence over the last six years during current president, Felipe Calderon’s, term. Peña Nieto has vowed to cut down on violent crime across the board.
Many people who support the PRI candidate also feel reassured that he brought down debt and pushed for economic growth during his 2005-2011 term as governor of the State of Mexico.
López Obrador will likely continue to challenge Peña Nieto’s victory in the coming weeks as the final votes are counted. Reuters states that López Obrador challenged Calderon’s victory in 2006 as well after a very close race.
Although Peña Nieto had been leading in the polls for all of June with a clear edge on the other two presidential candidates, many are still unsure about his claims to honesty and success. He claims that he has learned lessons from the old PRI regime, which was corrupt and dictatorial for so many decades.
The challenge will be for Peña Nieto to actually implement changes such as bigger growth in the economy (it has been slowly growing at 2 percent for the last six years) and a decrease in the violent deaths of citizens due to the drug wars sweeping through the country. Although Peña Nieto has been quoted as saying, “Let it be very clear: There will be no deal, no truce with organized crime,” it remains to be seen how he will change the game with organized crime leaders.
López Obrador’s challenges to the victory also remind citizens of Mexico and the world of the often delicate strand of democracy. Most analysts are certain that López Obrador will be hard pressed to find enough evidence to prevail in legal action against Peña Nieto in the coming months so it is more than likely the PRI candidate will be sworn in in December without a hitch, taking over for current president Felipe Calderon.
AP Photo/Christian Palma
Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may
not reflect those of
Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.
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- What problems and resources will physicians want to focus on related to helping patients get appointments and care
when needed and ensuring office staff helpfulness and courtesy?
For many patients, problems getting appointments and care when needed and interactions with physician office staff are bigger concerns than physician-patient communication. In fact on the Clinician/Group CAHPS surveys, physicians and their staffs rate lower on these matters than on communication issues. As noted elsewhere on this website, a 2007 article in The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety stated that "delays for appointments are prevalent, resulting in patient dissatisfaction, higher costs, and possible adverse clinical consequences."
Physicians can affect these aspects of care with decisions on staff hiring and on design of office systems and procedures. Decisions have to be made about how to handle phone calls, about the use of e-mail for communicating with patients, about appointment scheduling systems, and other matters. Medical office management consultants can be helpful in designing and implementing office practices. Other organizations can also help. For example, the American Academy of Family Physicians (www.aafp.org) has various resources that bear on these questions. AAFP's Family Practice Management magazine includes articles on such topics as "Reducing Delays and Waiting Times with Open-Office Scheduling," "Making the Case for Online Physician-Patient Communications," "Same-Day Appointments: Exploding the Access Paradigm," and "Reducing Waits and Delays in the Referral Process." Similarly, the American College of Physicians (www.acponline.org) offers various resources, such as its "Patient Satisfaction Tip Book--Improving Patient Perceptions."
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Though downtrodden world indexes point to deep disquiet among investors, valuations of individual stocks vary widely. Fishing the bottom for low-rated bargains is one way forward. Shareholders may be better served by forking out for higher class equities.
The world’s 200 largest quoted stocks trade at an average of 11.5 times expected forward year earnings, according to Thomson Reuters’ StarMine database. The average hides a broad range, even excluding outliers. BP the U.K. oil giant, trades on a multiple of 6. L’Oréal, the cosmetics company, sits at nearly 18 times earnings estimates looking 12 months forward.
Stocks priced below average are sure to attract the attention of bargain hunters – especially when the averages themselves are modest by historical standards. But Morgan Stanley research published on Oct. 17 supports the ageless wisdom that investors often get what they pay for, and that it is often worth paying premium prices for premium quality.
Often but not always. Morgan looks back to the Nifty Fifty stocks of the 1960s. The companies were supposed to offer high growth and low risk, and enthusiasts argued that the companies – Procter & Gamble, IBM and Polaroid were on the list – were all but certain to grow enough to justify any valuation.
For a while, it all worked out well. From 1964 to 1972, the Nifty Fifty companies produced better earnings growth than U.S. peers and their share prices outperformed the S&P index by 15 per cent a year. But enthusiasm became excess. The Nifty Fifty price-earnings ratio topped 40 at the height of the bull market that preceded the stock market rout of 1973-74. In the later 1970s, Nifty Fifty shares underperformed.
The current market looks more like 1964 than 1972. Of the 200 largest quoted companies around the world, a top-notch group of 50 are on course to deliver an average 20-per-cent increase in earnings in the next 12 months. These shares trade on a forward P/E ratio – calculated by StarMine – of 13. Even if the analysts’ estimates are too optimistic, there appears to be good value in this new generation Nifty Fifty.
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The expression "Cafe Church", covers a range of fresh expressions of church - including churches that meet in the local cafe and churches shaping a service around cafe culture.
Sandra is a network member and attendee at this year's Incarnate House Party. Here, she shares experiences of cafe church services...
Over the last three years I have been helping my church experiment with different ways of presenting a service to make it accessible and relevant for people who claim that church is ‘old-fashioned’ and ‘meaningless’. This is an ongoing process but I would like to share our journey so far, hoping that our story may be helpful to others. There are a few general points to mention before outlining the details.
Firstly, there are a number of people for whom the traditional worship service is very important. I would like to reassure these people that we appreciate their approach and would encourage continued provision of this style of worship. But I would ask them to appreciate that as culture and society moves on it is important to ensure that the church moves onwards too, and that we are allowed space to do this. It may well be necessary to present the same message in different styles by offering a choice of services; to admit that the ‘one size fits all’ theory is not going to work, neither is compromise.
Secondly, we need to differentiate between the underlying principles of the gospel and the ways we have communicated those principles until now. Our aim is not to present answers to questions that were being asked fifty years ago, but to listen to and address issues that are being raised today. Our aim is not to let culture invade the church, but to present the gospel message to the world using the sort of language and media it understands. Our aim is to not to turn people away by using worn out methods, but to turn the hearts of people (who do change) to God (who doesn’t).
Finally, to present the Christian message in a relevant way we need to look at the Bible, to look at the world, and to ask both ourselves and the world how we can accomplish this. Trial and error are essential ingredients. We must expect some successes and some failures. What works in a deprived area of the inner-city is probably not going to work in a comfortable middle-class environment; each church will need to understand the community it serves. Sharing our diverse ideas and resources will enable a quicker progression. Let’s determine that together we can make a difference.
So where did we begin? Cautiously! ‘A Series of Sermons and Talks’ was our sub-heading to a presentation (our own version) of Rick Warren’s ‘Purpose Driven Life’. Using posters and bookmarks to inform of dates and topics, we encouraged the whole church to read the book over a six week period, and structured the topics around this. Designing our own promotional literature proved relevant and effective in our small-seaside-town-on-the-south-coast-community. Our worship leader also introduced the use of a PowerPoint Presentation using pictures as well as words to accompany one of the worship songs each Sunday morning. A few people with visual difficulties did not find this helpful, but the pictures were enjoyed by the majority.
Following this we tried a number of short run Sunday evening sermon series ie four to six weeks, where we provided further visual support to the message using PowerPoint illustrations for the sermons. These had a mixed response. Some people expressed appreciation for the visual element which aided their ability to remember the detail. I think we concluded that this is mostly beneficial for visual learners (that’s me). However, a significant number of people complained that it distracted from the sermon. Perhaps these were the auditory learners? There were also some people who felt that spontaneity during the sermon was impeded by the structure being prepared in advance. Actually, I was operating the computer, and our Pastor always changes things immediately prior to the sermon and during the sermon. I considered spontaneity a priority, so I had appropriate ‘blank’ slides to use when necessary and worked with any changes. But of course this doesn’t show when you sit in the congregation. We incorporated an interactive section when people were asked for responses, using a roving microphone, which we displayed on the screen – this seemed to be appreciated by everyone and extended the interaction considerably.
Noticeably less successful was a series about ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ which we tried on Sunday mornings when the style of worship is much more traditional. The negative comments mentioned above were all significant and we have since avoided being experimental during the morning service and limited PowerPoint during sermons to just a few headings or illustrations. Having confined being more experimental to the evening service has in fact extended our license to continue to explore and develop different approaches. Consequently a number of people have stopped coming to church in the evening, but overall the numbers attending have increased. I wonder if we are seeing the beginnings of two congregations with a few crossovers – a controversial issue I know, but I don’t personally have a problem with people selectively choosing which services suit them.
Last summer we introduced a cafe style; seating people in tables of six or eight to run a series based on the Spring Harvest theme. A fifteen minute time of worship was followed by one or two extracts from the Spring Harvest DVD. We concentrated on a few selected issues for discussion over tea and coffee, followed by collecting feedback using the microphone and drawing the evening to a conclusion with a short talk and a final worship song and closing prayer. The benefits of being relational and interactive created a sense of belonging, although some people found it difficult to share in the groups at first. This proved popular, with an increased attendance and requests for another series. It’s not always easy to find help serving the tea and coffee, but I have yet to receive a single complaint about drinking it during the discussion time! As with sharing a meal, it seems to help gel the group together and encourage conversation. The production of Study Notes extending the theme for private use or for Home Group material is also regularly requested.
We are frequently asked who the services are aimed at. Interestingly, the series we ran in the autumn based on Steve Chalke’s “Intelligent Church” attracted a number of folk on the ‘fringe’ of the church. We produced a sequel in January aimed more at seekers, and the fringe attendance decreased. I am uncertain what this indicates – could it be that seekers prefer the meat to the milk? Another suggestion is that a church trying to change is attractive to those who have rejected the traditional model but are still seeking. A new element was the use of secular songs presented using PowerPoint – a lot of work to produce but enjoyed by most. Additionally we incorporated relevant short DVD clips from contemporary films. I now often have people recommending particular songs or film clips which they think might be of use, so I think this is definitely worth repeating. I have gathered, and trained if necessary, a few people with PowerPoint skills that enjoy helping in this area.
Our latest series of four interactive cafe-style services grew out of the ‘Imagine Project’ from the London Institute of Contemporary Christianity. Aimed at the church, the topics included ‘What are your issues?’, ‘Whole Life Christianity – the Work Place’, ‘Engaging with Culture’ and ‘Discipleship and Mission’. Using the already tested structure we delivered an interesting mix of discussion about how to do church differently whilst actually doing it differently! The ‘Imagine’ DVD is easy to use and there are further notes, suggestions and questions if required. I particularly recommend this material as a way in to new ways of doing church. I was particularly encouraged when three people new to the church asked if they could help. What next? I am waiting for the Lord to guide us on that one. A series on ‘Discipleship’ would be a natural progression - I wonder what the leadership would think about that…
In conclusion, ‘interactive’ has come to mean involving as many people as possible in the presentation of the service. People like to be involved and the more they own the more they benefit. ‘Cafe’ means refreshments, tea, coffee, biscuits and bowls of mints; home made cookies appeared one evening, and sandwiches another! ‘Cafe’ ie sharing a ‘meal’ is also brilliant for confidence building and relationship growing. The word ‘style’ now seems to include ‘expect the unexpected’ and people look for content such as DVD excerpts, music, interviews, etc. What do I consider the signs of success? The fact that when I meet people in the street I get comments such as: “We need more time for discussion!”; “I was talking to my neighbour about that DVD the other night…”, and “An interesting point from Sunday evening was raised in our Home Group last night…”
We are about to begin a series of ‘Choices’ ie evening services which begin with about twenty minutes of worship followed by a number of different workshops from knitting to Bible study. On of these will be loosely based on Mark Green’s Book ‘Let My People Grow’; aiming to develop discussion about discipleship with a focus on relationships and mission.
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Is this yet another example - this time in my hometown of Montreal - of a Sikh student being bullied with no consequences to the bullies?
I am personally breathing a sigh of relief that, as far as I can ascertain, this was not the disrespectful misuse of the kirpan by a school child. However, I think we need to face the possibility, even the probability that some hot-headed Sikh student will be pressed past the point of his/her personal endurance and actually does pull a kirpan on a fellow student, albeit a bully. I remember a time in elementary school when I was bullied, the teachers refused to stop it and my bully ended up with a broken arm, courtesy of me. Fortunately, I was a very cute little girl and the bully was a very mean kid actually known as Billy the Bully; he got in trouble and I was exonerated of any blame. The only weapon I used, however, was my own body and knowledge of how to protect myself.
But considering the use of the kirpan, how should we react? Is there anything we can do proactively as a community to prepare to handle such a situation and protect the legal protection, very hard won, to carry the kirpan?
I will point out that the misuse of the kirpan has precedence. I think of the disgusting, disgraceful display in Punjab a while back, and the equally disturbing disputes in gurdwaras degenerating into violence. These are very bad examples that we adults are setting for our children. Remember, elders, our children are watching and learning from everything we older Sikhs do. We need to look to our own behaviour, as well.
From United Sikhs:
Press Release: 23rd Sept 2008, Tuesday 9th Assu (Samvat 540 Nanakshahi )
Sikh Child Suspended Indefinitely by Montreal School Without Investigation
Independent Eye-Witnesses to Incident Report Sikh Never Touched kirpan; Several Media Outlets Misreporting Incident
Montreal, Quebec, Canada: A thirteen-year-old Sikh boy was suspended from school on September 11th after being accused of threatening another student outside school with his kirpan (a short steel or iron blade that is carried as one of five articles of faith). The school in Le Salle suspended the Sikh student without properly investigating the matter, as it has become apparent that multiple independent eye-witnesses to the incident confirm that the Sikh boy never touched his kirpan. UNITED SIKHS is assisting the family by working with local Montreal Sikh community activists and eminent human-rights lawyer Julius Grey to have the Sikh boy's suspension lifted and also to thwart incorrect media reports which have misreported the incident and are using it to reignite the debate about the kirpan in Montreal schools.
The incident occurred when a few students, including the Sikh boy, left school for lunch. Two boys followed the students and began taunting and bullying the Sikh boy, as they have on numerous occasions in the past. When the Sikh boy was adjusting his loose pants, the bullies notice the boy's kirpan, which was securely wrapped in a long cloth and had multiple rubber-bands around it. Upon returning to school, the Sikh boy and another student reported the bullying incident to their teacher, who responded that she would investigate the matter, but did not have time today. Shortly thereafter, police arrived at the school and began questioning the Sikh boy. It is believed that the bullies reported that the Sikh boy threatened them with his kirpan to their mother, who in turn called the police. The Sikh boy was suspended by the school for an indefinite period of time, and police have yet to file any charges.
Assuming the allegations against the Sikh boy were true, the Montreal Gazette, among other news agencies, reported that the incident "raises questions about [the] court ruling," referring to the Multani decision in which the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the right of Sikh children to wear the kirpan to school in 2006.
Commenting on the school commission's hasty decision to suspend the boy without investigating the incident, Julius Grey, the lawyer representing the family stated, "It appears that there is no substance whatsoever to these claims, and I am shocked at the cavalier way the [Sikh] boy has been treated when in fact independent witnesses confirm these allegations are false. This is an attempt to undo the kirpan case [Multani] without any legitimate reason."
Initially concerned that the allegations were true, UNITED SIKHS contacted the family who were already receiving assistance from local Sikh community activists involved with the Multani case in 2006, including Chattar Singh, Kiranpal Singh, and Hardev Singh. After speaking with those involved and determining that it was necessary to take immediate action, we contacted Julius Grey, who held conference with the family, representatives from the local Sikh community, and UNITED SIKHS on Friday and immediately issued a letter to the school demanding that the Sikh boy be allowed to return to school.
The school, citing formal notice from Sikh student's attorney, cancelled a meeting with the Sikh student's parents and stated that they will need to meet internally about the matter. "What is particularly troublesome about the school's reaction to the bullying incident is that school officials have allowed their prejudices against the kirpan to override their duty to properly investigate this serious matter. The same prejudices are now hindering them from allowing the Sikh student back in school after independent witnesses to the incident have come forward showing that the allegations are false," remarked Jaspreet Singh, Staff Attorney for UNITED SIKHS.
Commenting on the incident, Manjit Singh, Director of Chaplaincy Services, McGill University and one of the advisors to the family stated, "The reason why our community is being treated in such an inconsiderate manner by the school is because the education system in Quebec previously only focused on the Judeo-Christian tradition with the result that those people in decision making roles do not have an understanding of Sikhism. That is our challenge."
The father of the accused, Kamaljeet Singh, expressed distress at his son's suspension stating, "My son's education is suffering because of these false allegations. Wearing the kirpan is taken very seriously and it is preposterous that my son would threaten anyone with this most important article of faith. My son keeps asking me, what did I do to deserve this? I don't have an answer."
You may read a previous press release on a discrimination case assisted by UNITED SIKHS at: http://www.unitedsikhs.org/PressReleases/PRSRLS-11-09-2008-00.html
International Civil and Human Rights Advocacy (ICHRA)
Get Involved!, Click here and Join UNITED SIKHS
To receive forthcoming bulletins join our UNITED SIKHS Yahoo group
To donate go to www.unitedsikhs.org/donate
This Press Release may be read online at: http://www.unitedsikhs.org/PressReleases/PRSRLS-23-09-2008-00.htm
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"Dems Try to Overcome 'Katrina Brain'"
April 25, 2006
Author: Elaine Kamarck, Lecturer in Public Policy
Belfer Center Programs or Projects: International Security
The New Orleans hurricane relief efforts are giving a party stunned by losses a chance to revive.
The news coming from New Orleans last weekend was about the mayoral election, but national politics were playing out there, too.
Several hundred members of the Democratic National Committee changed out of their suits and ties and into their Saturday work clothes and headed out to a variety of cleanup and rebuilding sites. We probably helped New Orleans a little bit during those three days but, considering what this entire disaster has meant for the Democratic Party, we should have stayed a year and rehabbed hundreds of houses.
Not only was Katrina the beginning of the end of George W. Bush's presidency (a year ago his approval ratings were in the high forties; today they are in the low thirties). At great cost, it reminded Americans of something extremely important. When the private sector suffers from incompetent and corrupt leaders, innocent people lose money — think Enron. When the public sector is run by incompetents, innocent people lose lives — think Katrina.
My husband and I spent Saturday at Myra Duchane's house in New Orleans where, along with 10 other volunteers, we helped pull up two layers of moldy linoleum from the floor of a small Victorian that once had held six feet of water courtesy of Hurricane Katrina. You could see where the water had reached by where the mold on the fireplace stopped. Duchane, a former clerical worker for the state, now lives in Alexandria, La. She and her brother come back to the city as often as they can and, with the help of whoever they can find, try to rebuild the house they own. The work is slow. The entire house has to be gutted. Not a shred of furniture survived.
We were lucky in our assignment; Duchane's house was nearly down to the floorboards and framing. Other houses in the city haven't even been emptied. (We were warned never to open a refrigerator in a house that's been sitting untouched since last September because of rancid odors and the possibility of disease.) Very few of the other houses on Duchane's street are inhabited. In fact, very little of New Orleans seems inhabited these days. Even the famously loud and raucous French Quarter, a place that received relatively little damage and where the food and music is as terrific as ever, seems to have a hush over it.
We got to Duchane's house courtesy of a group called Democrats in Jeans, the brainchild of Deborah Langhoff, a local party activist who decided to use the Democratic Party's network throughout the state to organize assistance for hurricane victims. And so, when National Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean decided to bring the group's annual spring meeting to New Orleans, he offered Langhoff a little help. But New Orleans helped the Democrats more than they helped it.
Katrina was one of those "teaching moments" unlike any we've seen since 9/11. For decades now, Democrats have suffered under the political albatross of being the party of big government. But sometimes you actually need the government to work. In New Orleans, it failed spectacularly; the Democrats failed at the local level, the Republicans at the national level.
For six years now, the Democrats have been in a more or less perpetual state of befuddlement. In 2000, they lost an election that they won; in 2002, they were blindsided as the Republicans took a Democratic idea (for a Department of Homeland Security) and used it against them, and in 2004, they sat by, stupefied, as the Republicans savaged their war-hero candidate. You could say we Democrats had a collective case of "Katrina brain" — an expression the New Orleanians use to explain the state of mental exhaustion and overload that causes them to forget the simplest things.
But, for the Democrats who weren't forced to live through it, Katrina had a way of cutting through the fog and lifting the bewilderment. It took the party back to the floorboards and the framing. The Democrats weren't the party of big government. They were the party of government when and where you need it — like when you're standing on a roof waiting for a helicopter rescue or when your private pension goes belly up, and you've got to be able to rely on your Social Security check. Katrina got the Democrats back to the floorboards and, with a little luck, they just might succeed in building a new house after all.
Elaine Kamarck is a lecturer at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and was a senior advisor to former Vice President Al Gore.
For more information about this publication please contact the Belfer Center Communications Office at 617-495-9858.
For Academic Citation:
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One of the best movie lines I’ve heard was from the movie The Social Network. The soon to be ex-girlfriend commented that when you write something on the Internet, you’re writing in pen, not pencil. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve used those words when nagging my teenage kids about their Facebook posts. There is a lot of material out there to gather if you want to find out about a person’s life outside of work, or before they get a job offer.
A book called Auditing Social Media by Peter Scott and Mike Jacka crossed my desk the other day, thanks to my membership in The IIA’s Audit Executive Network. For many of us, our companies are active in social media. Many use social media monitoring tools to gather posts about their companies — feeding this information to the communications team, marketing, and customer service to identify trends that might need to be addressed. Of course in the world of social media, no rules apply and no filter is attached. It’s raw, unedited thought — typos and all. And it can never go away. Remember — pen, not pencil.
Social media policies are common practice today. We have one, and I’m guessing most of your organizations have them too. Basically, they caution you to be careful, not say things that you’ll be sorry for later, and remind you about confidentiality of company information. Good advice. So, who is monitoring the policy for compliance?
Have you launched an audit yet? Is there enough risk in this area to bother putting social media on the audit plan? Perhaps next year? When you do — this book has an audit program in the back that might be helpful to you and your team.
Posted on May 17, 2011 by Kiko Harvey
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I don't know why people are against a single payer health care. This country needs some form of basic health care coverage for it's population. The argument I always hear is taxes. You have these plants in some of these town hall meeting jumping up and down about saying "We pay enough taxes, we don't want to go in debt." Where were these same people when we threw away billions upon billions of dollars at Bush Jr.s War in Iraq? Do they care that we have spent so much of our tax dollars on jet fighters, bombs and other weaponry? These people are the same ones who have their "Tea Parties" in protest over paying taxes and will shout until they're blue in the face about spending money on social welfare programs but don't bat an eye over the tax dollars wasted on the six plus years of our police action in the Middle East.
Another complaint that I hear is "Socialism". "If it has an -ism at the end then you know it's bad". This type of misinformed and backwards thinking is old hat. Is it bad to have a health care plan so people will be able to seek medical treatment, preventive health care and not clog up our Emergency Rooms with minor injuries and illnesses? We have a health crisis amongst our population and giving people basic health care is a step in the right direction. For far too long America has been lagging behind other countries in this department. Medical bills are outrageously astronomical and this keeps a lot of people from seeing a doctor before it's too late because they can't afford health insurance with their ridiculous premiums and high co-pays. No more misleading information either. Basic universal health care should not have to be a right or left political issue but something both sides should agree on.
Politicians lining their pockets on something like health care is shameful. The sweetheart deal the Republicans gave the pharmaceutical companies is a disgrace as well. We need to overhaul the health care system and get rid of the greedy profiteers. A basic universal health care plan is a must for this country of ours.
Conceptually, I'm in favor in providing health care to everyone, however I'm also concerned about the costs associated with such a universal benefit. As part of the cost benefit analysis i started thinking about some new social pressure it could create. Here's what i mean.
We know that living a certain way creates a higher likelyhood that you will be healthy. For example, if you don't smoke and aren't obese the odds are that you will live longer/healthier … more
Obsessed with body cuts? If you are one of the victims who are too obsessed with body cuts, maybe three girls are able to give the message that you are already perfect enough! EH! bring three........Read More
Last night we had dinner with our daughter Elin and her partner Emmanuel: she's just back from teaching at a week-long shindig in Chicago for viola da gamba players. One of the stories she told concerned a fellow gambist from Canada who was recently diagnosed with a leukemia-like disease and who underwent some cutting-edge treatment this spring in Ontario. He was diagnosed and treated in his home city in a timely fashion and is doing well, it seems. But … more
With all due respect Sir, I firmly believe that this time the American people should hold your feet to the fire. During your campaign for President you made a number of promises to us. First and foremost your promised transparency. The days of backroom deals would be over. Bills would be posted on the White House website for at least five days so that the general public would have an opportunity scrutinize them. There would be no earmarks. Your … more
One of the biggest concerns in this country to date is the health care reform and universal health care. Why do countries like Canada, England and Sweden have it AND why do we have millons of Americans who are uninsured and underinsured? These people make such difficult choices as whether to go to a doctor and pay for medicine when sick or buy food, pay utilities, etc. In a country as wealthy and powerful as ours, this should have to be an issue at hand. … more
I am a 65 yr old anesthesiologist/physician-a medical doctor on Medicare and this subject of health care is so complex. Do we have the finest medical care in the world? Not by outcome measurement. Do we have the fattest, laziest, sickest population in the world? Do we spend too much on end-of-life care (money down the drain)? Do we spend too much for insurance company profit? Does everybody want the finest care, the finest physicians, no waiting, nurses on call and somebody else to pay for … more
Universal health care is health care coverage for all eligible residents of a political region and often covers medical, dental and mental health care. These programs vary in their structure and funding mechanisms. Typically, most costs are met via a single-payer health care system or national health insurance, or else by compulsory regulated pluralist insurance (public, private or mutual) meeting certain regulated standards. Universal health care is implemented in all but one of the wealthy, industrialized countries, with the exception being the United States. It is also provided in many developing countries and is the trend worldwide.
Universal health care is a broad concept that has been implemented in several ways. The common denominator for all such programs is some form of government action aimed at extending access to health care as widely as possible and setting minimum standards. Most implement universal health care through legislation, regulation and taxation. Legislation and regulation direct what care must be provided, to whom, and on what basis. Usually some costs are borne by the patient at the time of consumption but the bulk of costs come from a combination of compulsory insurance and tax revenues. Some programs are paid for entirely out of tax revenues. In some cases, government involvement also includes directly managing the health care system, but many countries use mixed public-private systems to deliver universal health care
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However the terms are refined, the main tenets of Calvinism are structured around the five-petaled acronym TULIP. But too often missing in this structure is the “sap of delight,” as Pastor John calls it in his biography of Augustine.
In the following excerpt from that biography, Pastor John explains why we need a delight-drenched theology like that of Augustine.
R. C. Sproul says, “We need an Augustine or a Luther to speak to us anew lest the light of God’s grace be not only overshadowed but be obliterated in our time.”
Yes, we do. But we also need tens of thousands of ordinary pastors, who are ravished with the extraordinary sovereignty of joy that belongs to and comes from God alone. And we need to rediscover Augustine’s peculiar slant — a very biblical slant — on grace as the free gift of sovereign joy in God that frees us from the bondage of sin. We need to rethink our Reformed view of salvation so that every limb and every branch in the tree is coursing with the sap of Augustinian delight.
We need to make plain that [T] total depravity is not just badness, but blindness to beauty and deadness to joy; and [U] unconditional election means that the completeness of our joy in Jesus was planned for us before we ever existed; and that [L] limited atonement is the assurance that indestructible joy in God is infallibly secured for us by the blood of the covenant; and [I] irresistible grace is the commitment and power of God’s love to make sure we don’t hold on to suicidal pleasures, and to set us free by the sovereign power of superior delights; and that the [P] perseverance of the saints is the almighty work of God to keep us, through all affliction and suffering, for an inheritance of pleasures at God’s right hand forever.
This note of sovereign, triumphant joy is a missing element in too much Reformed theology and Reformed worship. And it may be that the question we should pose ourselves is whether this is so because we have not experienced the triumph of sovereign joy in our own lives.*
* Excerpt taken from John Piper’s 1998 biography of Augustine; also published in Piper’s, The Legacy of Sovereign Joy (Crossway, 2006), 73; and published in Piper’s, Taste and See (Multnomah, 2005), 73. See also Piper’s DVD series, TULIP: The Pursuit of God's Glory in Salvation.
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When I set out to put some tomato plants in my garden this afternoon, I didn't expect my 6 yr old to come out and help me. I had an idea of how I was going to put the tomatoes in and wanted the help I was going to ask for.
Doodle had some of his own plans and seemed to think he knew exactly what he was doing. I was content with him just helping me dig. Then he wanted to take the already started plants out of their containers. Well, okay. I showed him how to put his hand over the opening and have his fingers gently around the stem, then to pat on the bottom of the cup.
Then he wanted to move on to his own holes while I was still filling in the hole he'd dug previously. Doodle was on a roll. He knew all about gardening. "Yep, this hole is deep enough. I got the next plant mom." "Alright, that one's done. I'm going to plant the next one here."
I explained to him that plants grow bigger and need room for their leaves & stems. Reminds me, I need to grab my tomato cages. I tried to keep an eye on him as he went on his merry way and I kept myself in check. This happens every year. And every year, he understands a bit more about the gardening process, although I'm still quite the novice.
In the end, I was bright enough to grab my camera before the entire moment was lost to us forever. I wanted to be creative in my photographs, but my brain was 1/2 asleep because all I wanted was a nap. Snapping these photos captured this precious moment with my little Doodle who will be 7 yrs old next week. He's growing like a weed, or a well taken care of tomato plant.
What a blessing.
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Lender Flagstar Bancorp is reportedly considering the sale of $70 billion in mortgage servicing rights. Bloomberg reported on...
Waypoint Homes Realty Trust filed with the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission to raise up to $100 million in an initial public...
Undeniably the world changes, and those who don't change with it end up stuck in the quicksand of history, wondering why they can't move ahead.
For providers of housing – whether homebuilders or landlords – it's imperative to understand that demographics shift from generation to generation along with housing needs.
It's fine to speculate on what someone would like to buy or rent, but the consumer always dictates demand, and it's time to look at just how fragmented the consumer market really is.
You will always have young married couples looking for their first home, retirees looking to downsize and established families looking to upgrade, but one forgotten group is the young and single. Their numbers and nomadic tendencies are growing.
In particular, the demographic identified by the U.S. Census Bureau as young, single and educated (25-39) is described as constantly on the move.
"In 1970, the most mobile group among young people were those who were married and college educated, with 79% reporting that their residences in 1965 and 1970 were different." By 2000, the single, young demographic had a 75% mobility rate, compared to 72% of married couples," the bureau reported.
This group also is more likely to flock to urban areas as other homeowners move away from the city.
The nation had 6 million single, 25- to 39-year-olds in 1970, a number that rose to 24 million in 2000. The report studied the 30-year period stretching from 1970 to 2000.
The number of singles with at least a bachelor's degree grew from 15% in 1970 to 27% in 2000.
Anyone appealing to this market may want to ask whether these people are buyers or long-time renters. Or, would they fit better into a two-year, option-to-buy type of contract?
Perhaps they are lifetime renters, creating a need for national apartment management firms to create stronger relationships that jump from city to city. In other words, if you keep them engaged with your brand today, they may move to a sister property in another city tomorrow.
The report concludes with a telling line: "Because of the group’s human capital, as well as its potential impact on population growth — both for destinations and origins — the group warrants continued study."
If the Census Bureau is taking note of them, the housing industry may want to also.
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“Damn Japanese pop culture for corrupting youth worldwide!”
Imagine hearing this from someone. No wait, imagine hearing this from your father. A father who is Chinese. A Chinese man who lost family and friends to Japanese soldiers when they invaded China in the early part of the 20th century. Hell, you can apply this to any Chinese person born in China and over the age of 50. This is basically what can happen if you are a Chinese otaku and you have family who have been suffered at the hands of the Japanese. It is a very unique situation to be in and one that requires patience and perseverance to weather any political storms that rain down on your passion for Japanese goodies.
A week ago, I was working out while watching Japanese music videos on YouTube via my PS3. I decided to play the official MV for Kylee's “Daisuki Nano ni” (the 2nd OP for Blast of Tempest). My mother made a snarky comment about whether I actually understood what she was singing. I told her that I knew. She then said “You know, the Japanese killed a lot of Chinese.” I said “I know that...” Then my dad goes “They killed our family members and friends!” and he goes on to say the quote stated above. This wasn't the first time he said it, as many years ago while the anime/manga boom in the U.S. was happening, he stated that young people really are ignorant about the “true nature” of the Japanese.
Another scary moment was while I was watching Episode 44 of Naruto SD and I hear Bee rapping “Baka yaro, kono yaro!” My mom asked why he was cursing. That reminded me of what my dad told me a while back. He said that Japanese soldiers kept cursing at his relatives those words while they were being chased. I don't know how I felt since I might have brought up past memories. My mother was alright though. She later me told my aunt went through hell back in the 1940s' as my grandmother and her were hiding from Japanese soldiers. My grandmother was told to leave my aunt behind, but she refused to do so. Both were safe in the end. However, my grandmother suffered injuries that would last until her death.
For those who don't follow Japan's history, Japan and China do not exactly get along very well. From the first Sino-Japanese War in the late 1800s' to the Rape of Nanking back in the 1930s' to the Senkaku Islands incident today, there is a great deal of tension between the two. My mother told me that the biggest problem is that Japan hasn't really apologized for their past actions towards the Chinese. Another issue is that China feels that literally everyone that is Japanese is pretty much a monster. This is why nationalism is a huge problem. It just dilutes one's thinking and just plays to what that person secretly wants to hear. Nationalism preys on the insecurities of the human mind. It's always safe to be in that “comfort zone” of hating something you don't actually like. The China/Japan relationship is a great example of an arranged marriage, something that Asian countries are well-known for.
What's funny is that I feel my dad could have been an otaku if he was born in a different time. He watched an episode of Sailor Moon S on TVB with me and he was in awe of the Moon Sceptre. My dad even said “Wow, that must be really powerful!” The thing is that the number of Chinese otaku is greatly rising. Hell, boys' love is extremely popular in China. Look at what certain fujoshi did with Gintama by making a fanmade otome game! And let's not forget this lovable drink they came up with. The Great Firewall of China hasn't stopped otaku from expressing themselves. Thank their sane minds for not letting politics corrupt them and their creativity.
About three years ago, my family and I went to visit China. My parents decided to re-visit their home village of Guangzhou (where I found some anime stores like the one in the picture above). They later complained about how different it was and absolutely hated the pollution. It didn't really feel like home to them anymore. My parents began to dislike certain things about China. Back to the tense conversation I had with them, I told the two that I don't like everything about Japan. I hate the fact the country is xenophobic, very misogynistic, risk-averse in a world of globalization, and has little opportunities for entrepreneurs. Yes, Japanese pop culture is awesome, but people really need to understand that the actions of a few do not reflect the actions of many.
Maybe the one thing that has kept my parents from not blasting me for loving Japanese pop culture was empathy. They understand why I love it so much. My parents may not like it, but at least they respected my desires to a great degree. I will always respect them for going through so much crap to give me life and a home that was safe and nurturing. I understand why they both still have some resentment towards the Japanese. No one wants unnecessary death to happen around them. I really hate it if someone seriously hurts the people I care about. My parents just wanted me to know that there's always good and bad things about people, places, and things.
So, to anyone who's an Asian otaku and has relatives who have been through tragedy because of Japan in the past, have there been any tense moments between you and your family? How have you handled them? Did they end well? I'm curious to know about your experiences as it doesn't look like the China x Japan ship is going to sail on course for a long time. Sadly, Hetalia is not real life.
I wonder, as Nooj from Final Fantasy X-2 once said, will knowledge of the past, with regards to Japan, be the key to a future where cutural gaps will shorten?
Article Image Thumbnail Source: Thailand-san's Photobucket; Image © Tony Yao.
Tony Yao has been an avid fan of Japanese pop culture since junior high school. He blogs about the psychological aspects of anime/manga/video games at Manga Therapy. In his spare time, he enjoys exercising, watching sports, hanging out with friends, eating, a lot of sleeping, and obsessing over his favorite anime/manga series, Gintama.
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Japan's U-turn points to a new, clear future for uranium sector
Power move: Japan is back in the market for uranium. Photo: Glenn Campbell
AFTER 15 months in the wilderness, a new dawn emerged for the uranium sector this week in the land of the rising sun.
Faced with electricity shortages and the prospect of rationing power supplies through the approaching summer peak, Japan reluctantly returned to nuclear power.
In a decision that went against most popular polling but appeased big corporations, the Japanese government ordered the restart of two nuclear reactors in the heavily populated Kansai province.
For the Australian uranium industry, still bruised and battered from the Fukushima fallout, this was an important day.
The restart of Japanese reactors had long been spruiked by ASX-listed uranium plays as the first of two key steps needed to drag the sector out of the nuclear winter that descended when tsunamis overwhelmed the Fukushima nuclear plants.
Despite Japan continuing to consider a long-term exit from nuclear power, Greg Hall, of the uranium aspirant Toro Energy, said actions spoke louder than words.
''While Japan might review long-term its commitment to nuclear and whether it can phase it out over the long term, they need nuclear power now,'' he said.
With Japan struggling to dig its way out of an economic hole, Mr Hall reckons 40 of Japan's 55 nuclear reactors will be operating again within two years.
''You make these investments in nuclear power for 40 years,'' he says. ''It is very, very hard not to use that investment.''
The second key step the uranium industry has waited for is confirmation from China that its nuclear power expansion plans - placed on pause in the wake of Fukushima - are back under development.
That confirmation is yet to officially emerge, but a regular stream of comments from Chinese officials suggest it is not far away.
JPMorgan analyst Mark Busuttil said that while decisions in China, Korea and Russia were more pivotal to the uranium growth story, this week's Japanese restart was still ''an important symbolic milestone''.
Mr Hall agrees, saying the decision will make it far easier for officials in other countries to follow suit. ''This was a very important psychological event,'' he says. ''If the country that was affected the most by this disaster is restarting plants, then the rest of the world starts to think differently too.'' But markets have a psychology all their own, and the reaction on local trading was hard to interpret.
The news sent shares in such pure-plays as ERA and Paladin Energy surging by more than 10 per cent and 8 per cent respectively on Monday. ERA, which was hosting investors on its site this week, managed to build on those gains, but the enthusiasm faded fast for Paladin, which closed the week at its lowest point in more than a month.
The $1.16 that Paladin was testing yesterday compares with the $5.57 the stock was worth in the weeks before the Fukushima disaster.
Admittedly, both companies have their own specific risks connected with debt and future projects that affect their valuations.
Mr Hall, whose company ended the week with a lower share price than it started, said bearish investor sentiment towards the global economy had overwhelmed any good news that emerged on an industry level.
Indeed, in the week that was supposed to herald a new dawn for uranium, there was evidence that the small end of the industry was close to conceding defeat.
The ASX-listed explorer Thundelarra announced that it would cut staff numbers and reduce the salaries of those to survive.
''Thundelarra is likely to joint-venture or dispose of a number of projects,'' the company said in a frank statement. ''Uranium remains a core asset, but activity will be at tenement maintenance levels until a recovery is apparent in global sentiment for uranium.''
The announcement comes after fellow ASX minnow Deep Yellow announced plans to cut back exploration to rationalise and refocus spending on its priority project.
With a spot uranium price hovering below $US51 ($A50) a pound, and contract prices believed to be closer to $US60 a pound, Mr Busuttil said there was a long way to go before vibrancy returned to the small end of the sector.
''The price that's required to give a 15 per cent return on a typical greenfield uranium project is about $US83 per pound, so at the moment it is unlikely that any of the small uranium explorers would make appropriate returns,'' he said.
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Social Justice and Sustainability: arguments from political theory [Audio]
Speaker(s): Professor Simon Caney, Professor Paul Kelly; Baroness Onora O'Neill | Three distinguished political philosophers examine and discuss how theories of social justice and sustainability can be related to each other.
Majority Judgement: a completely new voting system. Part Three - Majority Judgement Compared with Ot
Speaker(s): Professor Michel Balinski | Balinski argues that, although the new Majority Judgement voting system is not perfect, Approval Voting fails in theory and in practice, and that Majority Judgement is better than Condorcet's and Borda's classical proposals, point-summing methods, first-past-the post and others.
Imagining a Humanist Europe [Audio]
Speaker(s): Francois Bayrou | Frangois Bayrou will address the theme of humanism. He will outline how he believes that Europe needs a new set of values and specially humanism after the failures of capitalism. Frangois Bayrou is the leader of the French centre party called Mouvement Democrate (Democratic Mouvement) and former presidential candidate. Mr Bayrou entered politics in the early 1980s and joined the centre right party called UDF. He served as education minister in centre-right governmen
Progressive Governance: Greece and the New International Order [Audio]
Speaker(s): George Papandreou | George A. Papandreou is president of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) and president of Socialist International. He was minister of foreign affairs from 1999 to 2004, a period that saw inter alia a new rapprochement with Turkey. He has served as minister for national education and religious affairs on two occasions (1988-89; 1994-96).He is the son and grandson of two Greek prime ministers. In 2006 he became president of the Socialist International. The la
The State between Migration and Sojourning: the China difference [Audio]
Speaker(s): Professor Wang Gungwu | At the end of the 19th century, the Qing court described all Chinese living overseas as sojourners. Under the Republic, overseas Chinese were enjoined to be patriotic. After 1949, migration policies changed several times. Why did three different Chinese states pay so much attention to this subject?
Gray's Anatomy: Thoughts on Politics, Religion and the Meaning of life [Audio]
Speaker(s): Professor John Gray | The world has entered a period of crisis and upheaval in which the ideologies of the past give little guidance. How did it reach its present condition? Is there a pattern of thinking that has led governments to make systematic errors? In conversation with Richard Reeves, John Gray will ask what went wrong and what we can expect in future. John Gray is emeritus professor of European thought at the LSE and author of Gray's Anatomy. Richard Reeves is Director of th
Fool's Gold [Audio]
Speaker(s): Gillian Tett | Gillian Tett takes us inside the shadowy world of complex finance and derivatives and explains how the business of slicing and dicing debt led us to the devastating global credit crunch. Gillian Tett has worked as a journalist for the Financial Times for fifteen years. In 2008 she won the British Press Award for the Financial Journalist of the Year. This event marks the publication of her latest book Fool's Gold :How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Glob
Do Tax Havens Cause Poverty? [Audio]
Speaker(s): John Christensen, Felicity Lawrence; Nick Mathiason; Dr Attiya Waris | Defenders of tax havens argue they provide vital financial services for international trade, and that most comply with money-laundering regulations and have juridical co-operation treaties. This panel will explore the issues surrounding tax havens, in particular their impacts on poor people.
The role of the West in Rwanda's Genocide [Audio]
Speaker(s): Linda Melvern | Linda Melvern is an investigative journalist and author. A world expert on the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, she was a consultant to the prosecution team at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in the military one case. She is an Honorary Professor of the Department of International Politics (University of Wales - Aberystwyth).
The Saudi-U.S. Relationship; Past Developments and Future Prospects [Audio]
Speaker(s): Prince Turki Al-Faisal | The Saudi-U.S relationship has always faced challenges that constantly test its strength. However, recent events in the region, such as the Iraq war, the 2006 war in Lebanon and the war in Gaza, have strained this relationship further. Prince Turki Al-Faisal, with his long and extensive experience in this area, gives his personal insight into this important relationship, its historical development and future challenges and prospects.
The Global Financial Crisis Revisited [Audio]
Speaker(s): Will Hutton, Martin Wolf | Journalists Will Hutton and Martin Wolf discuss the global financial crisis. What are its dimensions? Have governments done enough to avoid the worst economic outcomes? And is the global economy teetering on the edge of depression?
How did HIV/AIDS affect rural communities in Africa? The answer to the question [Audio]
Speaker(s): Professor Stefan Dercon, Dr Janet Seeley | The HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa is almost 30 years old yet a number of the worst-case scenarios on the impact of AIDS in Africa have not come to pass. What did happen? The speakers give their answers using data from recent research in Tanzania and Uganda. Stefan Dercon is a quantitative economist, University of Oxford. Janet Seeley is an anthropologist at the School of International Development, University of East Anglia.
The Winning Side of an Image [Audio]
Speaker(s): Adam Broomberg, Oliver Chanarin | Documentary photography is problematic. Without a witness, a victim is alone and de-humanised. We also know that victims are made for, or even by, the camera. In presenting their work produced in Afghanistan, while embedded with the British Army last June, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin attempt to highlight and compensate for these blind spots. In addition to showing The Day Nobody Died, they also present extracts from The Red House, produced in
Darwin and Philosophy [Audio]
Speaker(s): Dr Tim Lewens, Professor David Papineau | The speakers will discuss the importance of Darwin's thinking to central philosophical issues, including creationism, the human mind, and the nature of morality.
LSE Director's Dialogue with Stephen Green [Audio]
Speaker(s): Howard Davies, Stephen Green | As the world's financial order is in a state of flux, how do we align our desire to improve material human wealth, and capitalism, with our spiritual and psychological needs? Do businesses and banks in particular have a duty to society that goes beyond the creation of profit? Does open market capitalism remain our best hope for creating wealth that benefits all of society? Green and Davies discuss history, politics, religion and economics. This event ma
The Museum of the 21st Century [Audio]
Speaker(s): Neil MacGregor, Nicholas Serota | In this 60th anniversary year of publishers Thames & Hudson, Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, and Nicholas Serota, director of Tate, will be in conversation exploring the various roles of national, and other, collections in the 21st century. This rare joint appearance by two of today's most influential figures in the international world of arts and culture promises to provide a stimulating discussion touching on topics of contemporary
Housing Markets and the Global Financial Crisis [Audio]
Speaker(s): Dr André Broome, Professor Herman Schwartz, Professor Leonard Seabrooke, Professor Mat Watson | Residential property is the single largest asset in people's everyday lives and its associated mortgage debt constitutes one of the biggest financial assets in most economies. Yet political economy largely ignores both. We know that the kind of housing people occupy and their level of debt affects their preferences for the level of public spending, taxation, and inflation. Housing is inti
'Responding to the Global Crisis' and 'Climate Change Mitigation and Development' - Launch Lecture o
Speaker(s): Heiner Flassbeck, Radhika Desai, Dr Robert Falkner | Heiner Flassbeck presents The Trade and Development Report 2009, subtitled "Responding to the Global Crisis and Climate Change Mitigation and Development." The worst economic downturn since the Great Depression is having a serious impact on developing countries, and at this point UNCTAD economists estimate that it will be virtually impossible for sub-Saharan African nations to achieve such United Nations Millennium Development Goal
Progressive state reformers v ideological state retrenchers: framing the electoral choice between La
Speaker(s): Lord Mandelson | With less than a year to go before the next general election there is an urgent need for progressive policy debate and discussion in the Labour party to show it has the ideas necessary to meet the social, economic and political challenges of the next decade. Peter Mandelson, one of the government's key figures, will launch Progress's autumn lecture series by setting out how he sees the political divide between the main parties. Lord Mandelson is First Secretary of St
The Ayatollah Begs to Differ - the path to an Islamic Democracy [Audio]
Speaker(s): Hooman Majd | A brief summary of how Iran's political system works, examples of what is most misunderstood about Iran, its leadership and the events leading up to the election (describing some of Hooman's own experiences since he was there). Majd will explain why the election and its aftermath may actually be the best thing to happen to Iran in a very long time, and why the vision of an "Islamic Democracy" which some Iranian leaders have, may come about sooner now than if there had b
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Cedar Key School`s very own Sherie Johns is about to make an extreme career change! She`s traveling all the way to Malaysia to broaden her teaching horizons. Mrs. Sherie has been teaching in Levy County for over 20 years, she was my fourth grade teacher, and now she teaches Read 180.
The country she will be traveling to lies between Thailand and Singapore. Mrs. Sherie will be residing in Kuala-Lumpur, Malaysia. The area is described as "a warm peninsular region with tropical temperatures year round." Mrs. Sherie will be leaving American soil on June 28, 2012 and will be an Expat for one year.
Mrs. Sherie will be teaching first grade students at Mont`Kiara International School. Mrs. Sherie says, "The school follows a North American curriculum and is also a university preparatory school." When asked how she felt about this extraordinary career move, Mrs. Sherie states, "I am very excited about this opportunity. We`ve all read the articles about how the United States educational system compares with other countries. What better way to gain global teaching experiences than to spend a year overseas learning from others."
Being such a dedicated employee of Cedar Key School for such a significant amount of time, I assumed there would be many things she would miss about CKS. When I asked her about what she would miss, this is how she replied: "Teaching at Cedar Key School is not a job. It`s a lifestyle. Teachers at this school spend many personal hours planning and sponsoring student activities. I`ve learned so many life-lessons from colleagues, parents and students. I`ll miss them."
You may wonder how does such a magnificent opportunity become available to a small town teacher? I wondered the same thing! Mrs. Sherie explains, "It`s a long interesting story. I went on a mission trip to Mongolia a few years back. That`s when I knew that I wanted to see more of our world. So, a friend of a friend had applied to teach at an International School. I contacted the agency and submitted a Dossier. That day I received a reply that I was qualified. The next three months were a whirlwind. I ended up in Boston to interview with school directors that were hiring from all over the world. I was offered a few positions but I knew that MKIS was for me. It reminded me a lot of CKS."
Mrs. Sherie claims that she knew immediately that she wanted to take this job. "An opportunity like this is rare. The Director of the school made me feel very qualified for such an opportunity." Mrs. Sherie is most looking forward to learning! She says, "Learning is what I do best. I can`t wait to learn about new cultures!"
Mrs. Sherie will be returning to the states over her Christmas break for a visit and is looking forward to sharing her adventure with others!
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McDonald's misfires in blaming consumers for slowing profitsJuly 26, 2012: 10:53 AM ET
McDonald's cites poor consumer confidence as a reason why it missed profit expectations last quarter, but it may want to redirect some of that blame toward its own strategies.
FORTUNE – For nearly a decade, McDonald's has been wildly successful. Even in the years following the financial crisis when tough economic times weighed on U.S. consumers, the Oak Brook, Il-based fast food hamburger chain rarely let investors down. In 2011, it generated revenue topping $27 billion, higher than the $24 billion it posted the previous year. And as Fortune featured last summer, McDonald's is well positioned, since consumers tend to eat there in good and bad times.
But the chain's golden arches have unexpectedly dimmed. Net income fell 4.5% to $1.35 billion or $1.32 a share during its most recent quarter, from $1.41 billion or $1.35 a year earlier, McDonald's reported Monday. Wall Street analysts had expected earnings of $1.37 per share.
Various factors led to the profit miss: A sharply strong dollar that cut profits; high food prices gnawed on margins; high labor costs abroad. In particular, the chain broadly blamed consumers: "We're seeing more markets that are having consumer confidence issues," CEO Don Thompson said in a conference call with analysts. "It's a little more than a European cold, if you would."
No doubt Europe's worsening debt crisis combined with a sluggish U.S. economy have dampened consumer confidence. And expectations of a slower growing China and India, among other economies, don't help ease investor worries.
MORE: Our Executive Dream Team
But as much as executives focus on general economic weaknesses across the globe, business moves within McDonald's (MCD) headquarters deserve a closer look. The chain has struggled to keep up with competitors, Bank of America analysts have noted. As McDonald's sees softer earnings, other fast-food rivals, including Burger King (BKW) and Taco Bell (YUM) have, enjoyed a rebound in sales. Regional chains, such as Sonic (SONC) and Jack in the Box (JACK), have also enjoyed stronger sales in recent quarters.
McDonald's has done an impressive job turning itself around since 2002, but the latest earnings reflect symptoms of a chain that in recent years has moved further away from its core burgers and fries business – essentially, what's kept customers returning all these years.
Take McDonald's Dollar Menu, says Howard Penney, restaurant industry analyst with the investment research firm Hedgeye and a Fortune contributor. In March, amid higher food costs, executives announced it was removing small drinks and small French fries from its Dollar Menu, replacing those items with fresh baked cookies and ice cream cones. The chain also launched its extra-value menu, which included, among other items, 20-piece chicken McNuggets, double cheeseburgers, chicken snack wraps, Angus snack wraps, medium iced coffees and snack-sized McFlurries. (See McDonald's new menu is about inflation more than value)
Looking back, the move probably wasn't the wisest. The Dollar Menu had been around for years. And it seemed counterintuitive (arguably, perhaps even a little unjust) to take one of the most popular items off its recession-friendly menu.
"You're basically telling a set of customers you don't want them anymore," Penney says.
The latest quarter suggests McDonald's has struggled to upsell the new menu to budget-conscious Americans. Sales at stores open at least 13 months in the U.S., a key measure of business performance, rose 3.6% during the quarter that ended June 30, the slowest growth in five quarters.
McDonald's has also expanded too much into beverages, Penney warned in January 2011. While the chain's focus in specialty coffees (sold at relatively higher prices) has given it considerable success, the returns are uncertain because the operations are more complex. "It takes more to make a latte than to pour a Coke," he said.
A McDonald's spokeswoman says the chain's classic core favorites, as well as new additions to the McCafe beverages in the U.S. have added to the company's performance. And as far as its extra value menu, the company says it "builds on the Dollar Menu favorites by offering affordable meal options."
Andy Barish, senior equities analyst at Jefferies & Company, says much of the downward pressures that McDonald's faces are beyond its control. "They're still running the business really well but things are normalizing," says Barish, pointing out that rivals have followed McDonald's playbook to plant the seeds of their own successes.
He wonders, however, if it might be time for McDonald's to do something markedly different. "It has been doing the same old thing; they haven't done much. Maybe customers are getting a little tired of the same old thing?"
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Recently, the office of the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (a new post under the Obama administration) asked for comments as it puts together its "Joint Strategic Plan" for intellectual property enforcement. Yes, you the public are also invited to comment, and that's what I'm hoping you'll do after you read this. Or during. Or both.
See, the RIAA and the MPAA submitted a joint commentary that the EFF refers to as a "wish list" and, most accurately, a dystopian view of a future in which most government and police resources go toward stopping intellectual property theft and illegal downloading.
This Gizmodo post describing the comments reads like something only hyper-overreactive, FUD-spreading free-stuff-loving Internet types would come up with as a paranoid nightmare: the RIAA and MPAA want spyware installed on your computers that would automatically delete "infringing content." They want network-monitoring software that would halt an illegal download in its tracks. They want to deputize the FBI, Homeland Security, and border crossing guards to examine and seize MP3 players and laptops (something so egregious it even came out of the wildly over-the-top ACTA agreement). Crazy talk, I know.
But read the comments for yourself. It's all in there. And there's more: the MPAA wants blockbuster movie releases to be treated with the same kinds of security measures and law-enforcement mobilization that might occur when, say, a head of state comes to visit.
The comments call for bandwidth throttling and shaping, network filtering and deep-packet inspection (especially on college campuses), and accelerated federal investigations into the theft of "pre-release music and movies...as this is one of the most damaging forms of online copyright theft and requires immediate attention and swift action." Dive in anywhere. It's a minefield of overreaching, unbelievably punitive, alarmist language.
And this is just insult to injury, considering the other things the music and movie industry have either asked for or forced on us over the years, as they become increasingly paranoid about digital piracy and increasingly panicked about their outmoded, pre-Internet business plans. And let's not forget their historic unwillingness to make any sort of actual business changes and instead try to rely on government to keep them in business. Let's review.
Thanks to the DMCA, it is illegal for you to make a digital copy of a DVD that you have actually purchased. That's because, under the law, you are not allowed to break the technological DRM that keeps you from ripping the DVD. It's also because you have no explicit right to fair use with the content or devices you own. The RIAA has spent years flirting with ways to stop you from ripping CDs, hinting that they don't think making digital copies of your own CDs is, in fact, fair use. Several labels briefly issued widely despised copy-protected CDs, until consumer outcry put a stop to it because the crippled CDs frequently wouldn't even play. And of course, when that failed, they resorted to dirty tricks like embedding rootkits in CDs that would essentially break your computer when you ripped one. … Read more
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Two Oregon entrepreneurs, Jake Weatherly and David Shear were having trouble expanding on an huge opportunity selling software to college students. Of the 3.2 million youth age 16 to 24 who graduated from high school between January and October 2010, about 2.2 million or 68.1 percent, are enrolled in colleges and universities. To Weatherly and Shear, these 2.2 million students represent not just today’s software users, they represent the market of tomorrow. Talk to the Gillette or Visa about the power of building brand awareness with college students and you’ll understand the untapped buying power within the 2.2 million U.S. college and university students.
There is one problem though, when your selling to a student online, the ability to verify that someone is a student currently involves faxing a proof of identity, a process that often will bring any online sale to a screeching halt, making student sales a missed opportunity for many companies, and at the very least a very costly, and slow process.
Weatherly and Shear approached me in spring of 2010, to help develop a technical solution, to answer whether someone was enrolled in a college or university. Through some programming kung fu I quickly identified that you could verify students at about 65% of the top 50 universities, by name and email using their public directory forms, with about 1 hour of work per university. Essentially I was able to write a script that would ask the university if a student went there, via their public web site. This type of scraping is a great proof of concept, but by no means a method for building a solid business on top of. Weatherly and Shear needed a more viable way to get reliable enrollment information. After a lot of research they found an existing organization that was already part of the government mandated process of tracking student enrollment for financial aid. This existing organization already provided student enrollment verification, but had not moved into the Internet age, and did not posses the expertise or technology to make their information accessible programmatically across the Internet.
Fast forward two years. Weatherly and Shear have formed SheerID, a student verification system, where they have leveraged their industry connections and delivered the SheerID API that can be used to verify if an individual is enrolled as a student at a college or university. SheerID has identified an existing businesses resource, that hasn’t been brought into the Internet age, and by decoupling it from the established business entity that currently manages the process, they were able to deliver it as a valuable API resource.
SheerID has some work to do, launching a new API developers area, and execute on their strategy making their student verification API available to open and private developers, as well as available on existing platforms like Drupal, Joomla and Magento e-commerce. But the two entrepreneur’s approach to building a business around an established business need, that has not caught up to the Internet age, represents a great model. We’ve seen companies like Twilio take an established utility like SMS, and by exposing them as an API, deploying a developer area around it–that you can build a viable business.
What other proven business resources could be packaged up as a simple RESTful API, allowing someone to build a businesses, where the product is the API–an delivers the next generation of business resources.
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The crescent moon is a day or two early, and it seems strange to me to see lunar movement stop only an hour above the western horizon, here in Mississippi, but it did last night. Instead of overhead at about the midnight hour this was about 7:00 in the far west, and still tracking north of where it should be. Even my wife noticed the lack of movement and commented on it.
- Thus it was in anticipation of a literal day difference between viewing Full Moons, with the Full Moon seeming to arrive that much early, that the chart data was pre-set.
- ZetaTalk: Trend Data
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HAMMOND - Hammond is looking to put the Thousand Island Islands-St. Lawrence River Region on the map as top scenic area in the state.
Town Supervisor Ronald W. Bertram and a committee will work with multiple towns and villages inland and along the river to designate the region as a Scenic Area of Statewide Significance.
The designation, through the Department of the States Office of Communities and Waterfronts, offers protection to scenic landscapes through review of projects requiring state or federal action, including direct actions, permits, or funding.
It wouldnt be like the Adirondack Park Agency; there will be no regulations, Mr. Bertram said. However it will require the state to do some type of project to promote and protect the area.
Mr. Bertram said he became interested in applying for the designation after several residents came forward suggesting the idea.
The big reason to do this give us more name recognition and bring in tourism, Mr. Bertram said. It will allow us to advertise in another avenue and give us an opportunity to promote the area as a whole.
Two other areas that have been selected for SASS include the Hudson Valley region and Long Island. The first application of the states scenic assessment program was in the Hudson River Valley coastal region in 1993. In 2010, nine areas totaling more than 25,000 acres on Long Islands East End within the town and village of East Hampton received the SASS designation.
The areas in both the Hudson Valley and East End encompass unique, highly scenic landscapes accessible to the public and recognized for their outstanding quality, according to the Department of State website.
Mr. Bertram said he and his committee received $75,000 matching from the North Country Regional Economic Development Council, which will go toward the application for the designation. The grant will be split by 10 municipalities, to fund in kind research which will be included in the SASS application packet, Mr. Bertram said.
Local committees will be compensated for their time to research and highlight certain areas of significance which contribute to the overall quality of the area, mostly near the water, Mr. Bertram said. For instance, we have another area islands in Chippewa Bay with turn-of-the-century homes. For those types of things, someone is going to have to do physical inventories, which will be quite a lengthy process. Whoever is chosen, will be billed for their time and other expenses such as boat rental and picture taking.
Mr. Bertram said the town of Hammond will seek help with the application from the villages and towns of Morristown, the village of Alexandria Bay and town of Alexandria, the town and village of Clayton, the town and village of Cape Vincent, and the town of Orleans.
Cape Vincent is on board, and Clayton has offered help, Mr. Bertram said. I will be submitting pledges to each of the municipalities and talking with them individually.
He said he would get each municipality to pass a resolution to join an oversight committee to review sites to be included in the application.
Meanwhile, Mr. Bertram will request proposals for consultants who will put the application together through a contract with the Department of State.
The goal, I think, is to gain name recognition, which will help in our efforts toward economic development, he said. While speaking with some people from Plattsburgh recently, they were not really aware of the where the 1000 Islands Region is. This will hopefully put us on the state website and help promote the area. And people will know they dont have to go very far to visit a great place.
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These findings reaffirm the importance of an MRI measure of the entorhinal cortex as a predictor of progression from MCI to a diagnosis of AD. In every analysis that was performed, the volume of the entorhinal cortex was a better predictor of progression from MCI to AD than any of the other 15 temporoparietal MRI measures. These data are in agreement with a number of previous reports that have concluded that the volume of entorhinal cortex is better at predicting likelihood of progression from MCI to AD than the hippocampus. 46–48
These results also emphasize the value of a volumetric measure of the inferior parietal lobule. This measure, when used in combination with the entorhinal cortex, was the best predictor of time to progress from MCI to AD. Moreover, it remained statistically significant even when the volume of the hippocampus was forced into the model. Prior studies using fluid-registration, cortical thickness and voxel-based morphometry have implicated areas within the lateral parietal cortex to be involved in the earliest stages of AD and as a predictor of progression12–18
but this is the first volumetric study, to our knowledge, to demonstrate the relative importance specifically of the inferior parietal lobule in predicting progression in comparison to the many other brain regions within the temporal and parietal lobes.
This finding is consistent with pathological studies of AD showing that specific laminae in the inferior parietal lobule are preferentially affected in the early stages of the disease. 49–50
Moreover, projections from the inferior parietal lobule target several subfields within the medial temporal lobe 51–53
, suggesting that atrophy in the inferior parietal lobule likely reflects the spread of AD pathology from the temporal lobe to an interconnected region in the parietal lobe.
The analyses presented here also demonstrate that MRI volumetric measures may be useful in identifying the subset of MCI subjects who are at a particularly high risk of progression to AD. Those MCI subjects whose entorhinal and inferior parietal lobule volumes were 1 SD below the mean for the group as a whole at baseline had markedly increased risk of progression to AD than those whose volumetric measures did not fall 1 or more SD below the mean. It is increasingly recognized that MCI subjects from a community volunteer-based cohort generally include a broad range of severity. The present findings suggest that it should be possible to use MRI measures, independent of clinical and neuropsychological measures, to identify the subset of MCI subjects at greatest risk for progression.
These findings also suggest that MRI volumetric data provide information concerning time to progress from MCI to AD that is independent of neuropsychological measures that have previously been shown to be significant predictors of progression. A number of temporoparietal regions, including the entorhinal cortex and inferior parietal lobule, continued to significantly predict time to progression, even after the addition of the neuropsychological variables to the bivariate models. Moreover, the entorhinal cortex was retained as one of the best predictors of conversion in the multivariable model that also included a neuropsychological variable, suggesting that MRI and neuropsychological data may provide complimentary information in relation to prediction of progression from MCI to AD. This finding differs somewhat from a recent report suggesting that once neuropsychological measures are considered, the added value of MRI measures is small.47
The difference between the findings reported here and the previous study may be related to the fact that the earlier study examined subjects that were more mildly impaired than those examined in the present study and additionally did not include a test of executive function, such as that included here.
Correlations between tests of episodic memory function (CVLT and SRT) and volumes of the parahippocampal gyrus, temporal pole, and hippocampus are consistent with the fact that these temporal lobe regions are critical for normal memory function (for a discussion of this topic see reference 41
). Of interest, Trails B, a test of executive function, did not demonstrate any significant correlations with any of the temporoparietal regions but was one of the best predictors in the multivariable model when combined with the MRI volumes. This suggests that regions beyond the temporal and parietal lobes are potentially responsible for executive function and may additionally be significant predictors of progression.
A concern in this study pertains to the difference in APOE-ε4 between the two groups. Since more MCI-Converters were APOE-ε4 positive than the MCI-Nonconverters and the ε4 allele of this gene is overrepresented in AD patients compared with the general population54
, one possibility is that the presence of APOE-ε4 alone can best account for the time to progress from MCI to AD. Prior work from our research group has demonstrated the influence of the ε4 allele on the time to progress from MCI to AD is largely accounted for by neuropsychological measures and assessments of clinical severity41
thus disputing the notion that the presence of this allele can solely account for the time to progress from MCI to AD.
The present study has several strengths. The subjects were followed prospectively and then categorized after their symptoms had evolved by clinicians with no access to the MRI data. The image analysis methods presented here permit a comparison of the relative strengths of prediction for each anatomic region within the temporal and parietal lobe and can be combined with survival analyses to determine which individual or combination of ROIs best predict time to progress from MCI to AD.
One limitation of this study is that only brain regions within the temporal and parietal cortices were examined. It is therefore possible that regions elsewhere in the brain may also be significantly related to time to progression from MCI to AD. In addition, a longer follow-up interval may have resulted in a larger number of subjects progressing to AD; as a result other ROIs, in addition to the ones presented here, may have been identified as significant predictors of time to progress from MCI to AD.
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Three people rob a bank to help a day care center that's in debt. Wolf is captured, Werner identified, police suspect Christa is the third. She and Werner ask Hans, a clergyman, to launder ... See full summary »
Three people rob a bank to help a day care center that's in debt. Wolf is captured, Werner identified, police suspect Christa is the third. She and Werner ask Hans, a clergyman, to launder the money and give it to the kindergarten. He refuses. They try Ingrid, Christa's friend, who tries to help, but the school rejects the money. When tragedy strikes Werner, Hans helps Christa bolt to a collective in Portugal. Ingrid visits her; their relationship makes the collective nervous, so she returns to Germany and ceases living in hiding. The police are still looking for her and so is a witness to the robbery, Lena, a bank clerk. Lena's interest brings Christa's second awakening. Written by
The Second Awakening of Christa Kalges is a great little film about the practical and moral implications of a righteous rebellion. The film is set against the aftermath of a bank robbery perpetrated by three well-meaning people trying to fund a kindergarten--a compelling premise well-executed. The female leads all do solid work, and the writing is subtle and intelligent, slowly revealing the ethical and emotional triggers behind the robbery. Our characters face difficulty not only in avoiding arrest but in routing the money to its proper place; a realistic view of the difficulty inherent in upsetting our systems, no matter how noble one's intentions. Ultimately though, the film is truthful not only in its realist pessimism but in the potential it illustrates for optimism as well: informed, compassionate individuals can unravel the punishing forces above us so long as we recognize our agency and choose not to participate. For its writing, its characters, and above all its ideas, The Second Awakening of Christa Kalges comes recommended highly. -TK 10/18/10
2 of 3 people found this review helpful.
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Montana voters approved an initiative Tuesday stating that “corporations are not entitled to constitutional rights because they are not human beings.”
Voters overwhelmingly approved the initiative 74.9 to 25.1 percent. According to the Billings Gazette, 293,351 Montanans voted for the initiative and 98,300 voted against it.
The measure states:
Ballot initiative I-166 establishes a state policy that corporations are not entitled to constitutional rights because they are not human beings, and charges Montana elected and appointed officials, state and federal, to implement that policy. With this policy, the people of Montana establish that there should be a level playing field in campaign spending, in part by prohibiting corporate campaign contributions and expenditures and by limiting political spending in elections….
The measure, proposed by Stand with Montanans, challenges the January 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The decision eased restrictions on political campaign spending by corporations.
Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority, saying “no sufficient governmental interest justifies limits on the political speech on nonprofit or for-profit corporation.”
In a dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that the ruling “threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the nation.”
The White House criticized the court’s decision and said they would work with Congress “to develop a forceful response to this decision.”
Montana Governor-elect Steve Bullock fiercely defended the state’s century-old Corrupt Practices Act, which banned corporate spending on political campaigns. The Democrat and one-term attorney general successfully defended the act in Montana’s Supreme Court, but it was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court on June 25, 2012. The court found that the act violated the First Amendment.
Stand with Montanans called the June 25 decision “a major blow to democracy” that would promote corruption over fair elections.
Initiative 166 charges Montana’s congressional delegation with proposing an amendment to the U.S. Constitution stating that “corporations are not human beings entitled to constitutional rights.”
Montanans also widely approved initiatives to require parental notification to an abortion for a minor, deny certain government services to illegal immigrants and prohibit government from mandating the purchase of health insurance. A little more than half of Montana voters also favored a law that severely limited the distribution and use of medical marijuana.
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Most casual moviegoers know the late Stanley Kubrick as the exacting auteur behind ambitious widescreen masterpieces such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and Full Metal Jacket. They may also have a vague apprehension that he was British (he lived in the United Kingdom—and rarely set foot outside it—for most of his adult life). But Kubrick was, in fact, an American, born in New York City in 1928, and his career as a director has its roots in that most grittily American genre of all: film noir. The Criterion Collection recently re-released The Killing, Kubrick’s 1956 calling card, in typically pristine DVD and Blu-ray editions. It is a must-see, most especially if you only know Kubrick from his sprawling, glacial later work.
Indeed, you wouldn’t necessarily recognize Kubrick’s hand in the early reels as he introduces Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden, later of Dr. Strangelove), a veteran thief planning a racetrack robbery big enough to retire on, and the various hangers-on and lowlifes he recruits for his audacious plan (a vintage character actors’ hall of fame, including Elisha Cook and Timothy Carey). Behind the cameras, Kubrick enlisted pulp-fiction legend Jim Thompson to help him with the script, and as the details of Clay’s planning are doled out (and the weaknesses of his crew and the potential complications to his scheme hinted at), it begins to dawn on you that The Killing’s storytelling is as clear-eyed and ruthless as Clay’s retirement plan. By the time you start noticing all the slick tracking shots, which would become a Kubrick trademark, the director’s fully formed mastery has you in its grip.
By then, he’s into the robbery itself, and the fractured narrative with its voiceover time codes—he follows each strand of the complex plan individually, backing up and going forward as parallel actions intersect—must have been a mind-blower in 1956. It was still a bit of a mind-blower for many when Quentin Tarantino cadged the concept for Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction more than 35 years later. Nonetheless, each turn of the plot, each gambit, score or fail, is as clear as Lucien Ballard’s steely black-and-white cinematography. But The Killing isn’t just a clockwork masterpiece. Even though Clay never really tips his emotional cards, you’re so wired into his high-stakes gamble that by the time the Treasure of the Sierra Madre climax rolls around, your heart is pounding right along with his. Essential.
Two wounded gangsters fleeing a botched job seek refuge in the home of a not-quite-happily married couple—it’s the sort of rote setup that has fueled any number of noirs and neo-noirs over the years. Polish director Roman Polanski was anything but rote in 1966. Working in English, he took that premise and made Cul-de-sac (in new Criterion Collection DVD and Blu-ray editions), a slightly absurd black comedy/deadpan farce that winds up less interesting than it should be.
The English title suggests a tale of the suburbs; the German title, which translates as When Katelbach Comes, fits better. Polanski’s third feature is set not on a leafy dead end, but on the tiny island of Lindisfarne, off the British coast, a treeless mound topped by an old monastery and periodically joined to and cut off from the mainland by the tide—a Beckettian setting if there ever was one. And the two gangsters are a Mutt-and-Jeff pair of functionaries—hulking American Richard (Lionel Stander, working his honking Bronx accent) and weedy, bespectacled Brit Albie (Jack MacGowarn)—hiding out until the boss can come get them. The married couple complicates the tidy symmetry, in any number of ways. George (a young Donald Pleasence) is a former British Army officer and industrialist who is, it is made painfully clear, an utter milquetoast. Younger French trophy wife Teresa (Françoise Dorléac, a ringer for her younger sister Catherine Deneuve) is introduced lolling topless in the dunes with another, younger man. The stage is thus set for psychosexual good times.
Polanski had already shown himself a keen observer of male/female tensions with Knife in the Water (1962) and adroit with building up implacable moods in Repulsion (1965). Cul-de-sac, by contrast, is all over the place. Polanski seems most interested/invested in Richard. While the director introduces him as a bloodied, shirtless, almost Caliban-like beast man, slurping raw eggs and moving with animal grace (Polanski often cuts to Stander already in motion, as if he’s too quick to see clearly), he becomes more “civilized” as the film goes on, even pretending to be George and Teresa’s butler during a surprise visit from old friends (including a baby Jacqueline Bisset). But the role reversals and plot turns never quite add up to anything. George never really shows the steel you hope and expect he must have in him somewhere, and Teresa is, in her own way, as passive as George. Whatever metaphor resolution or dramatic payoff you’re waiting for never really arrives. Gilbert Taylor’s black-and-white photography looks gorgeous in this new Criterion Collection transfer, and Krzysztof Komeda’s mod soundtrack is a delight, but Cul-de-sac feels like a period curio in ways that Knife in the Water and Repulsion never do.
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Fishing: Of all the mid-winter fishing opportunities now available in the region, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) fish biologist Chris Donley recommends fishing Lake Roosevelt - the huge Columbia River reservoir off Grand Coulee Dam.
"Lake Roosevelt’s kokanee fishery is usually pretty good at this time of year," Donley said. "Large kokanee, measuring 20 inches and more, are caught near the surface by trolling small flies and plugs in four-to-six feet of water. It’s also the start of the lake’s fishing season for walleye , which are starting to stage at the mouth of the Spokane River to make their annual spawning run up the river."
Anglers also continue to pull rainbow trout out of Lake Roosevelt, Donley said. Night fishing for Roosevelt’s three-to-five-pound burbot should be productive, too.
Even bigger burbot, up to 10 pounds, can be caught in Sullivan Lake in Pend Oreille County. Burbot are nocturnal predators, so night fishing is most effective, said Donley, noting that burbot are now gathering to spawn. "If you find one you usually find others," he said.
Depending on temperature fluctuations, ice fishing should remain good at several winter-season or year-round fisheries in the region. Spokane County’s Hog Canyon Lake and Stevens County’s Hatch and Williams lakes should continue to provide rainbow trout catches through the ice. Action at Lincoln County’s Fourth of July Lake seems to have slowed, and ice conditions may be questionable.
Yellow perch fishing through the ice should continue to be good at Spokane County’s year-round Eloika and Silver lakes and Stevens County’s Waitts Lake, which closes Feb. 28.
Sprague Lake might be a good bet for rainbows, but reported "iffy" ice conditions in late January are a reminder that anglers need to be cautious. Look for ice-fishing safety tips at http://wdfw.wa.gov/fishing/ice_fishing/ . Whitman County’s Rock Lake provides open water fishing on rainbow and brown trout for the hearty angler who can brave the wind chill.
Snake River tributaries, like the Grand Ronde, Tucannon, and Touchet rivers, are usually the place to target steelhead in February. Joe Bumgarner, WDFW fish biologist, said the Grand Ronde in particular is improving, although more creel checks will just be getting under way during the month of February to determine actual catch rates.
WDFW fish hatchery crews are gearing up to get catchable rainbow trout stocked this month in waters that open March 1, mostly in the southeast corner of the region.
Wildlife viewing: The 14th annual Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC), Feb. 18-21, is a way for wildlife enthusiasts of all kinds across the continent to help scientists learn more about bird populations, distribution and movements in late winter. Led by the Cornell University Lab of Ornithology, National Audubon Society, and Bird Studies Canada, with sponsorship from Wild Birds Unlimited, GBBC participants count birds anywhere - in backyards or at wildlife refuges - for as little as 15 minutes a day or as long as they wish during the four-day period. They tally the highest number of birds of each species seen together at any one time, and report their counts through an online checklist at http://www.birdsource.org/gbbc/ .
As the count progresses, anyone with Internet access can explore what is being reported from their own towns or anywhere in the United States and Canada. They can also see how this year's numbers compare with those from previous years. The count is conducted in February to provide a snapshot of how birds are surviving the winter and where they are located just before spring migrations begin in March.
One place in the region where waterfowl are usually found during February is on the flooded parts of farm fields in Whitman County and southern Spokane County. Kurt Merg, WDFW wildlife biologist, said these "sheet waters" consistently harbor large groups of migrating pintails, widgeons and other ducks and geese. "These are great places to drive through, and with binoculars or scopes from the roadside, observe early courtship behaviors of these birds," Merg said.
If you don’t know one duck from another, pack a bird field guide or use your mobile online device to check out "Ducks at a Distance" ( http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/resource/birds/duckdist/index.htm ), a U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Guide to Waterfowl Identification.
Other wildlife watching at this time of year can be closer than expected as winter-weary animals seek easier travel corridors or forage. WDFW Wildlife Biologist Woody Myers advises motorists to slow down on roads through deer, elk and moose country and wildlife viewers to maintain respectable distances from animals. "It is still winter throughout the region," Myers said. "Keep your distance from wildlife that are likely experiencing stress from persistent snow cover, cold temperatures and limited forage."
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The Ethnolinguistic Reality – by Ralph D. Winter
I often talk about the mystery of the universe. The scientists are more and more baffled about where it came from or what it is. Every day, it seems like, it’s more complicated than it was before. We live in the era of the befuddled scientists, who are smarter than any scientists who ever lived before, but also more aware of their limitations.The same thing applies to the origin of life and the origin of civilization.Into this puzzling mass of evil and incredible cruelty and depravity and brilliance and evidence of God’s creation and the damage of Satanic fury, the “Reconquest” enters. The Reconquest is the another mystery. Even the Bible refers to it as a mystery. The Jews thought that God was trying to benefit them-only them. That they were supposed to be part of the global Reconquest wasn’t supposed to be a mystery-but it was. Paul refers to it as a mystery in Ephesians 3.
The Reconquest is indeed the main subject of the Bible. We really need to see only one book, not 66. It’s probably very disconcerting for outsiders (people outside of the church) to understand us when we start to talk about 66 books in the Bible. It would be better to say that we have one book with two parts, a single book that has an inspired introduction-which constitutes Genesis 1-11-that gives the backdrop of the good creation, the evil penetration, the hopeless result. Now, that’s a beautiful backdrop for the rest of the redemptive story of the Bible, which essentially is the Reconquest.
Peoples’ Concept Abraham is the key person in that Reconquest: He is called out to be a blessing to the peoples of the world. This is where the term peoples very centrally enters the story of the Bible. It is not a modern invention of sociologists, anthropologists or missiologists, but really a rediscovery of what the Bible was talking about all along.
The mission mandate, starting with the first pages of the Bible, in the minds of a growing number of Hebrew scholars and Old Testament scholars, actually has been covered up in earlier literature in this century by the phrase “Abrahamic Covenant.” However, if we were to go far enough back, we would hear it referred to as the Great Commission again. Somehow, in every era of mission renewal, we rediscover the Bible, write a bunch of books, then forget about them, and then ignore the significance of thing we found and reduce it to phrases like, “the Abrahamic Covenant,” when in actuality it was the Great Commission- the mission mandate of the Bible.
But notice the frequency of the phrase peoples in the Bible. The English translation gives us terms such as nations, families, peoples-different translations use different words. Even the Hebrew uses different words. Now when we’re counting peoples, would we count the mish pa’hah ? For instance, when the people of Israel went into the land of Canaan there were 60 mish pa’hah, rhat’s my list of 60 peoples. But David Barrett insists that there are only 12, but he uses the word goyim. You see, the Bible uses both words.
I personally don’t recall ever opposing the use of other categories of “peoples,” but I have found that many people are very disconcerted if you intimate that the Bible itself, much less anthropology, conceives of peoples within peoples. They get very uncomfortable. They would rather like it to be French, German, Latin, Spanish. They can’t imagine these languages being grouped into phyla and families and so forth. It just really disconcerts many people who want to have it simple. But the Bible itself is not simple, it speaks of of peoples within peoples.
Basically what we’re up against is to determine what is a people? You can diagram peoples in different ways. You could diagram them into subgroups that divide into subgroups. The whole history of science is the progressive revealing of much-resented increased complexity. When my father went to school, atoms were seen to marbles. When I went to school, they were little solar systems with things going around on the outside. When my kids went to school, inside the nucleus there were all kinds of particles. Now they’ve finally discovered the quarks or whatever, and inside these 32 subatomic particles and their symmetry and so forth represent a whole new world-who knows what worlds are even smaller than that-and we’re just beyond ourselves. It seems like the more we know, the less we know! It’s very embarrassing for scientists, of all people, who would like to be able conquer reality.
In my opinion, we need to take a little dose of humility. We so casually speak of unreal categories. For instance if a friend of yours says that their sister is studying to learn to speak Chinese, you wouldn’t bat an eye at that statement. But if she said, “I’m learning to speak European,” you’d laugh at her. However, we don’t realize that both statements are equally foolish. We normally don’t know enough about the Chinese mega-people to realize that Cantonese and Mandarin are as different as Italian and German.
It’s very reassuring for things to be simple, and very discouraging for things to get increasingly complicated. Maybe God has allowed us to gradually uncover the reality bit by bit so that we would be able to learn it along the way, so that this increased complexity doesn’t overwhelm us.
The Mississippi River
Recently I was speaking to a group in England and I was supposed to talk about unreached peoples. I got hold of an atlas of the United States, turned it upside down, and took a piece of paper, and traced off the Mississippi River Valley-all the different rivers, including the Arkansas River, Ohio River, Missouri River, and so forth. Then I threw that on a screen and asked, “Now, what is this? It looks almost like an upside down bush. It all comes down to the top”-which of course is the bottom of the map-of the Mississippi River. I continued: “But now, how many rivers are there? What are their names? Can you give me a list? We’re not going to be able to do the work we need to do if we don’t have a list. Tell me!”
Well, what is a river? When the Mississippi goes north and then forks off into the Missouri River and then continues illogically with the name Mississippi, which is the shorter part of the river (of course, the people who named the river didn’t know that). But what right did they have to name it the “Mississippi” versus the “Missouri”? And they’ve already let the Ohio River peel off.
So what kind of a business is this? Problem is that we’ve simply used the wrong framework of description for the reality which we’re studying. To make a list of the rivers of that basin is inherently illogical. It does not allow us to see the reality. Or it obscures the reality, if we’re serious about any kind of list of rivers. Furthermore, we might ask, “When is a river a stream, or a brook, or a crick, or a creek?” We have all these words, but they are just inadequate to describe the reality we’re studying and want to describe.
The Morocco List
Recently I was in Morocco and I’boned up for the job. I took along with me a list of the peoples of Morocco. I knew in my heart that a list is itself unfaithful to the reality. As soon as one makes a list, the reality is altered. But I took my list, and I showed it to my oldest daughter, who’s a real sharp gal, who majored in linguistics, and who had been there for 15 years. She read through this list of peoples. Then suddenly she burst out laughing. I felt a little bit embarrassed and said “Come on, what’s so funny about this? This is an impressive list.” She said, “Well, Daddy, this one word here refers to the whole group.” The word Shlu (?) is the whole group; this is the word for all Berbers-not even just the Berbers in Morocco.
But then there are other complexities. In Morocco there are three regions- they often talk about the Berbers in the north, the middle, and the south. Then, in each of these three regions there are different dialects. And no one should hold me accountable for the precise number; which is precisely the whole point of this thing. We don’t know- although there is a Wycliffe researcher there who has a far more precise map than any of us. The real point is the structure of ethnography. Those dialects in the three regions break down and subdivide into what is called confederations. These are the words that are commonly used. Then within the confederations there are tribes.
Some of these tribes have very similar languages and cultures, and being so close to each other, like the members of a nuclear family, they kill each other. (As an aside, that’s the most common murder. It happens most frequently within nuclear families, where it’s not a matter of misunderstanding what people say; it’s the very opposite, where you know exactly what is meant.) So missionaries can’t always assume that if you get the Gospel into this or another tribe, that all these others will automatically follow suit.
Sometimes it does happen. For instance, in Nagaland there were 14 different groups. The Ao Nagas heard the Word first. They shared it with the next-over tribe, and it went all through Nagaland that way, from tribe to tribe, with the result that 75% of the Nagas today are Christians.
But it isn’t always that way. Christian Kaiser, the famous German missionary of the early part of this century, went to Papua New Guinea, as it is now called. He went up into one of the lowland tribal groups at the base of a huge, roaring river coming down from these terrifically high mountains, and won these people to Christ. Then he wanted to go up the river to the next one and do the same. Eventough they spoke a language that was very similar (just like in Nagaland), they didn’t like each other (unlike Nagaland). So we can’t predict in either case what would happen-a dominoes effect or no dominoes. It’s like the Hopi and the Navajos who are very similar in many ways-they understand each other perfectly-but they don’t like each other. You have to have Canadians come as missionaries to reach the Hopi because the Navajo can’t.
The Intractable Problem
Wycliffe Bible translators is the largest, most highly-trained, most competent mission agency that has ever existed in Protestant history. They have mastered, through years and years of incredible intellectual endeavor, all kinds of problems with translation and interpretation and much more. The one absolutely intractable problem which causes them more grief than any other single problem is the question of, “How many people will read this Bible if we produce it?” So they have a whole brand new division that is focused on this challenge. They have translators, they have support personnel, and they have surveyors. Their exclusive task is to bump into this intractable problem and decide, for instance in Morocco, where and when and how to put whom to translate the Bible. That’s the reason they’re studying this reality. However, they can’t tell you in advance what will or won’t be a basin of communication for a given tribe or number of tribes. A single translation may bridge three tribes or only one, but they don’t know this in advance.
It’s just like the scientists, I’m sorry to say. We have to take a little measure of humility. We cannot deny the fact that we can’t know in advance all that we would like to know. We need to yield the ground to the reality out there and be content to say, “Look, how many peoples are there in Morocco?… Well, there’s Berbers and there’s Arabs, and a few French. Ah, yes, and a few American tourists.” Well, that’s a fairly good way to describe Morocco, especially if we add that the Berbers outnumber all the rest about three to one. But we might ask, “What about the Berbers?…Yes, there’s the Northern, and the Middle, and Southern, each with their tribes, dialects and confederations.”
It’s much like the Mandarin, which has a marvelously creative breakdown of the 100 or 200 Mandarin languages that are mutually unintelligible to each other. They have, creatively called these the Northwest Mandarin and Northeast Mandarin, and Southwest
Mandarin and Southeast Mandarin. Isn’t that creative? Of course, that’s just a blurry confusion of the complex reality It really is a blurry confusion of what’s out there! The media people are beginning to paste a trade language over the whole of China, and so forth. But that doesn’t mean the people themselves speak that language, because only 14% of China speaks Mandarin in their homes.
These are complex realities that we have to deal with, and we go on fooling ourselves if we insist that we have to have one list that everyone can agree on. Wycliffe can do its work on the confederation level, as I would predict, in most cases. They would assume that all of these tribes would be able to read this New Testament.
Gospel Recordings on the other hand, targeting the ear gate (which is very much more sophisticated than the printed page, which drops out a great percent of the message coding in language),can’t stop at the written level. They have to go to audio level because these people (especially if they kill each other) recognize the dialect on the cassette- obviously not recognizable on the printed page. So for their purposes, Gospel Recordings always has to do a larger number of translations. Wycliffe is doing what it’s doing, for their purposes, with all the intelligence and their competence, while Gospel Recordings is doing what it’s doing, according to their purposes. It’s not that the Gospel Recordings people are wrong or that Wycliffe is wrong. Each is using a different tool targeting different levels of communication. This type of complexity would also apply to church planting, because that would define a different level of reality with a different dynamic.
The second reality has to do with quantifying the necessary minimal accomplishment in church planting frontier mission efforts. Allow me to use an illustration.
Have you ever heard that anybody had a “mild” case of AIDS, or was “mildly” pregnant? No one would say, “Well, we have to find out to what extent they’re pregnant, or to what extent they have AIDS. What is it? Is it 10% of the white cells that have been invaded, or 5%? When it crosses 2%, we’ll call them AIDS patients; otherwise we won’t. “The point is when you’re dealing with a self-generating movement like the Christian movement, quantities are not important. But qualities are what really are counts. There are people who have had brushes with AIDS, and they didn’t really get it. There was a mild invasion and there might have been an embattled reaction, and that dread virus was defeated, or maybe there was some residual pocketing-off of that thing. But once that thing gets going and is implanted, so far as we know now the person is infected-you’ve got it. That is despite the Japan conference on AIDS, which they hoped would clarify things, because it only indicated the problem was more complicated to solve than they thought it was. Scientists of all types always are finding out that things are more complicated than it seems. Like them, we too are finding that out.
When the authentic Gospel of Christ penetrates a society and people understand it in their own language, and they have access to the Bible, and they’re moving ahead in the Lord (it is a growing concern), there are very few cases in history where that type of movement stopped. Knowing this, the mission question is very precise: How to get that quality in there. The quantity- whether it is 5% or 2% is really not that important, and we really need not argue about those things. Rather we know what needs to happen in qualitative terms. I’m afraid we can fritter our time away forever getting gnat’ s-eyelash statistics. It’s fun to work with computers. Everyone who knows me knows I like computers. But you know, the question is simpler (as well as more complex). It seems to me, that we may be answering the wrong questions, and there’s nothing more absurd than answers to wrong question.
At the very first formative meeting AD 2000 plan for Singapore, for the following year in ’89,1 spoke about the number of unreached peoples. You know me. I’ve contrasted my approach with Patrick Johnstone’s; who is a person hoping-for-the-best numbers while mine is a preparing-for-the-worst numbers. So, unless we’re going to print two sets of numbers all the time, we probably would need to say, “Look. Let’s be very conservative. Let’s prepare for the worst.” That is precisely the number series I’ve been using.
Most lists include everybody. The question is, what is the level we need to tangle with especially in frontier missions? We need to be very cautious about statistical monstrosities that are going to tell us all the answers in advance. We’d better get out there and dig in and try to reach these people, and find out when a church-planting movement is going to bump into the barrier, whatever the barrier might be. It isn’t a question of linguistics necessarily. It could be cultural barrier, it could be prejudice, it could even be an economic issue. We have to reach every human being in the world, and we have to penetrate the group in which they would feel at home worshiping our Lord.
Here is another dimension of the complexity. In Papua New Guinea, those groups up the valley, each having 16 slightly different dialects that were warring and killing each other, would eventually come together in a single Lutheran Synod by 1925. We ask, What’s going on now ? We’re ruining our statistics. We’re coalescing groups. But what about the Norwegians and the Swedish? They used to pretend there were two different languages, but in fact, there were dozens of languages among them. Somehow, with a little bit of the love of Christ, those groups merged. All of this indicates that we’re looking at self-generating growing movement. It’s a moving target.
So I’m saying that there are only two basic dimensions of the ethnolinguistic reality which reach beyond the simplicity of our mechanisms of description. I think we need to take that into account. I think if we do, we’re not going to feel pressed to argue about which level is the most important. We have to deal with all of the levels. Each level is “a gateway group” as the Southern Baptists nowadays are calling groups like this. If you get into this group here, maybe you can get into this group also, and so forth, and so one group is a gateway for another. Great!
I think that we need to recognize that to complete this task one of the most important factors is to get out there and to dig in, knowing that we will run into the barriers and complexities when we get there. We’ll have to cope with them at that point on the ground. It’s sort of like invading Haiti-we’re not sure what we’re going to find until we get there.
Dr. Ralph Winter (1924-2009) was the General Director of the U.S. Center for World Mission and President of the William Carey International University in Pasadena, California.
“You do not evaluate a risk by the probability of success but by the worthiness of the goal” – Dr. Ralph D. Winter
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When asked to describe a cricket ball, Vijay Parthasarathy morphs into a dealer at Sotheby's, admiringly pointing out its four-piece leather cover, hand stitched with cotton strands, and the layers of wool thread bundled tightly around the ball's cork center. "This is lovely," says Parthasarathy, staring at a well-worn game ball like it was a precious object. "There is no more fun than this."
For someone who seems content just to hold a cricket ball, the chance to actually play the sport he loves on a regular basis has put Parthasarathy into the stratosphere.
The Indian-born student is the president and founder of the increasingly popular Johns Hopkins University Cricket Club, an enthusiastic and burgeoning group of mostly foreign-born graduate students.
Today, the JHU Cricket Club, a member of the university's Graduate Representative Organization, acts as an organizing entity for recreational tennis ball cricket on the Homewood campus, viewings of professional and World Cup cricket match telecasts and one-day semiformal cricket matches against some of the leading clubs in the Baltimore-Washington area.
The club currently boasts some 80 members, a majority of whom hail from the cricket-playing nations of India, England, Australia and Pakistan.
Parthasarathy, a doctoral candidate in electrical engineering, says that when he arrived here in fall 1999, cricket was considered an undergraduate recreational sport, played mostly on Homewood's upper quad and run by the Student Activities Council. Wanting a more organized and formal structure, Parthasarathy and some friends pursued the creation of a club, which eventually joined the GRO in 2001.
Since then, according to Parthasarathy, cricket at Johns Hopkins has been a whole new ball game.
"My friend Amit Paliwal and I used to dream of these things happening here," says Parthasarathy of the increased membership and the playing of professional level matches. "And now it's all come true."
While the club plays throughout the year, its most prodigious period is the summer. On any given weekday night or weekend afternoon, members gather in the upper quad to practice or play a recreational match.
To protect both people and property, the club uses a tennis ball on campus instead of the stonelike, bruise-inducing cricket ball. The rules for the on-campus version remain roughly the same as formal cricket [see sidebar], with a few idiosyncracies thrown in. In place of one wicket, the club uses a tin can. For boundaries, the club uses campus buildings. For example, if a batted ball skirts past the pillars in front of Mergenthaler and Remsen halls, the batsman gets four runs, six runs if it crosses the pillars in the air.
Depending on the number of participants, the upper quad matches often feature plenty of running around, as the balls, seemingly with a mind of their own, can travel in every direction.
The practice sessions for the club's regular matches are held under the lights at Homewood Field. Typically the team will dress in formal cricket whites and don full protective gear, which consists of chest guards, arm guards, leg pads, helmets and gloves.
In March, the club hosted live telecasts of the International Cricket Council's World Cup matches. Several of the televised matches, which were played in South Africa, drew more than 200 diehard fans to Levering's E-level, some of whom painted their faces in their home country's colors.
The overwhelming majority of the cricket club members come from India, where, they say, the sport borders on "religion." According to club players, the nation's premier batsman, Sachin Tendulkar, is to cricket what David Beckham is to soccer -- and is treated like a god.
"No one grows up in India without at least playing some form of cricket at some point in time," says Pramodsingh Thakur, a graduate student in biomedical engineering and one of the team's best bowlers.
Says Parthasarathy of cricket in India, "It's huge, like soccer is to Brazil."
Amit Paliwal, the club's treasurer and a doctoral candidate in chemical engineering, says that the existence of a formal cricket team at Johns Hopkins fills a void for many international students. He says that even those who don't play like just to come out and watch.
"For me and my friends, [cricket] is a way through which we connect to India," Paliwal says. "It sure feels like home when we are out on the field. For many of us, the club has become family."
Thakur said that when he came to Johns Hopkins in 2000, he heard about the club as most do, simply through word of mouth.
"Back then, it was very small, very informal," he says. "It was just a bunch of people playing mostly tennis-ball cricket on the upper quad, and occasionally playing with the leather ball on the lacrosse field. The club has grown a lot in the past two years, with lots of enthusiastic students joining."
Since 2001, the club has played professional-level exhibition matches, mostly against teams from the 29-year-old Washington Cricket League. To date, the club's list of opponents, who often host the games, includes the Baltimore Cricket Club, the British Officers Cricket Club and the Maryland Cricket Club.
How has Johns Hopkins fared? More than held its own.
In 2002, the club played 10 matches against area teams and won half its contests. So far this year, the team has won three out of five matches and been competitive in each.
Parthasarathy says that the club considered joining a league but realized it would be too difficult to play on the weekends due to the players' academic schedules.
"But we are now trying to get into some tournaments, hopefully some later this year," he says. "This has been a great outlet for people, whether they want to play just for fun on the campus, or semiformally against league teams. And who knows? Maybe someday we'll have club members playing on the U.S National Cricket Team."
The ways some players regularly launch tennis balls over Mergenthaler Hall, he might be right.
For more information about the JHU Cricket Club and a schedule of upcoming games, go to www.cs.jhu.edu/~haridas/JHUCC.
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Christmas is knocking at the door and all of us feel excited to spend this time enjoying and gifting the best and the most precious, in terms of emotional attachment, thing possible which would touch the hearts of our beloved ones. Here's a lovely gift idea for all fashion freaks who love to dress up in style-with-a-difference. It can easily be handcrafted by you at home with some very simple requirements to compile and create this beautiful pair of Snowman Christmas earrings. As it would be your own creation, it would definitely strike a chord of love and adulation in the mind and soul of the receiver of this lovely pair of earrings, especially during the much awaited celebration time of togetherness, during Christmas.
Requirements for making the earrings
1. Scrap wire or special craft wire for shaping the snowman for the earrings.
2. White seed beads and black beads, 80 pieces of white and 6 pieces of black for both the earrings.
3. A jewelry tool known as jewelry pliers to perfectly round off the edges of the earrings in order to impart a perfect finish to the end product. These pliers can be easily found at any nearby craft store.
4. Hooks for the earrings to make them pierce-able in the ear. These hooks can be acquired from a nearby jewelry store or made at home using a wire.
Steps to follow for making a pair of snowman earrings
Cutting and curling the wire for the bottom
To start with, take 12" of wire, be it the craft one or from scrap, for both the earrings. Cut it into half and make it two pieces of equal length. After having finished with this, create the circle for the bottom or the body of the snowman by wrapping it around a fat marker pen to get the accurate circle. Next, till the point of intersection of the wire, string beads on to it. Thus, we have the bottom ready for the earrings.
Making the head of the snowman
Just as the body of the snowman has been created, applying the same rule, formulate the head by wrapping it around a normal size pen, this time to get a smaller circumference of the circle, to shape up the head of the snowman. Again, the beads have to threaded on each side of the wire, thereby completing the head part.
Work on the face
Once the body and the head has been crafted, the next move is to create the face, this time using the darker beads for the same. The wires remaining, after stringing the beads for the head and the body, have to be bent down below the head of the snowman, with beads pierced in each wire using 2 white beads at the two ends and one black bead in the middle. Then, to complete the face, twist the wires just where the beads end.
Finish the body by adding a belly button
To complete the body of the snowman, one wire is curled up to form a circular ring and fixed in a position so that it is easily viewed from both the sides of the loop of the body.
The other remaining wire is threaded with one white and one black bead and its end curled up to form another circle, just as the previous one. This step finishes the little snowman, with a discreet body, head and face, to adorn your ears.
Add an ear hook in the final step
In the final step, in order to slip in the snowman earrings into your ears, attach ear hooks to the top of the snowman's head between two beads. You can get these hooks ready-made from the nearby jewelry store or create by yourself with the help of the same craft wires, used for the body of the snowman.
This makes it for your Christmas snowman earrings absolutely ready to be gift wrapped in an attractive box and gifted to the lucky one.
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WASHINGTON—If Karl Rove or other White House staffers tried to delete sensitive e-mails from their computers, experts said, investigators usually could recover all or most of them.
The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is investigating whether the White House or the Republican National Committee erased "a large volume of e-mails" that may be related to the firings of eight U.S. attorneys.
Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, denied Friday that his client, President Bush's top political adviser, intentionally deleted his e-mails. He said Rove thought they were being stored on other machines as well as on his own.
Deleting a document or e-mail doesn't remove the file from a computer's hard drive or a backup server. The only thing that's erased is the address—known as a "pointer"—indicating where the file is stored.
It's like "removing an index card in a library," said Robert Guinaugh, a senior partner at CyberControls LLC, a data forensic-support company in Barrington, Ill. "You take the card out, but the book is still on the shelf."
Similarly, the bits and bytes—the 0's and 1's of computer language—remain on the computer's hard disk until they're overwritten by another file. Portions of the file also are scattered in various locations on the disk, so some parts may not be overwritten for years, if ever. This is a random process directed by the machine's operating system, over which the user has no control.
"People think they can delete e-mails, but that's not always the case," Guinaugh said. "Two years from now I could still find a file I deleted today."
The only sure way to get rid of the data permanently, he said, is to "scrub" the disk with special software or destroy it.
"You could take the hard drive out and smash it with a hammer," said Ron Ravikoff, a senior partner and expert on deleted e-mails at Zuckerman Spaeder, a Miami law firm.
To find a deleted document or e-mail, investigators create what they call a "bitstream"—a bit-by-bit copy of every 0 or 1 on the computer's hard drive. Using forensic software, they scroll through this mass of data looking for names, addresses, key words, dates, times or phrases that might have come from a deleted file. These segments can be partly, or sometimes completely, reassembled.
"It's a painstaking process," Guinaugh said. "There may be pieces of files scattered around. You have to put it together again."
As an investigator works, he may run across evidence that someone had installed scrubbing software or changed the date and time that a file was created.
"That would be suspicious," Guinaugh said. "It might indicate that something nefarious was going on."
The recovery of a deleted file won a settlement in a famous court case in 1999 that involved a woman who died after taking a combination of diet pills from the A.H. Robins Co., a drug manufacturer in Richmond, Va. Her lawyers found an internal e-mail from one Robins employee to another that read: "Do I have to look forward to spending my waning years writing checks to fat people worried about a silly lung problem?"
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After 54 years on television, “As the World Turns” stopped turning today.
The historic soap opera, which launched the careers of Meg Ryan, Julianne Moore, Steven Weber and Marisa Tomei, ended its long run.
Legendary serial queen Irna Phillips created the ground-breaking drama set in the fictional town of Oakdale, Illinois, which debuted on April 2, 1956, on CBS.
As times changed, so did the show, but the family unit was always at the core of the beloved series.
“ATWT was a trailblazer,” said Emmy-winning writer-producer Jonathan Reiner.
“It was one of the first half-hour shows and used hallmarks and techniques that the genre became famous for, such as the lingering close-up, exposition over coffee, a greater depth of character so that we knew motivations. This was all thanks to Irna Phillips, writer Bill Bell and director Ted Corday.”
ATWT was the first daytime series to introduce a gay male character. The show also dealt with adoption, teenage pregnancy, miscarriage, mid-aged pregnancy, homosexual relationships and of course, life-threatening diseases. And we can’t forget, rising from the dead.
ATWT holds the second-longest continuous run of any daytime network soap opera in American history, surpassed only by Guiding Light.
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Hundreds of residents ordered out of their homes as a massive wildfire advanced on the suburbs of Fort Collins, Colorado, may be allowed to return Wednesday evening, fire officials said.
"We're gaining," said Bill Hahnenberg, the U.S. Forest Service's commander for the team battling the High Park wildfire, which has burned 46,600 acres in northern Colorado. The fire, which has claimed at least one life, is estimated to be 10% contained.
About 100 structures are confirmed lost, but hundreds of families are anxiously waiting to hear whether their homes survived.
"This fire's behavior is starting to diminish, at least in some places, where we can have trained individuals to go in and determine which structures are lost," Hahnenberg said during his Wednesday morning media briefing.
Hundreds of firefighters have arrived from around the United States to help local departments that have been battling the fire, bringing to 1,000 the number of personnel involved in the fight.
The local firefighters, some of whom have lost their own homes, are tired, Hahnenberg said. "We're doing our best and have enough resources on board to rotate in and relieve them."
They've had "some success, some failure" in containing the advance of flames eastward and southward, toward residential areas, he said.
Residents should be able to return to two evacuated neighborhoods later Wednesday and perhaps three areas Thursday, said Nick Christensen of the Larimer County Sheriff's Department.
Mark Engle's family decided not to leave their Colorado home despite the thick smoke billowing through the air outside Tuesday. From a window, he watched deer grazing in his backyard, driven out of the forest by flames that have devoured thousands of acres of land only a few miles away. His children's backpacks were placed by the door, stuffed with their favorite toys.
His family was packed and ready to leave in a hurry, Engle said.
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SPECIAL OFFER: - Limited Time Only!
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Most weekdays, the alarm clock sounds by 6 a.m. for Trish Lipani, a 34-year-old child psychologist based in New York City. Before she heads off to Columbia University Medical Center, where her hours are filled with diagnostic interviews and psychiatric evaluations of children, Lipani hits the gym for weight lifting and MTS resistance band training. On days when she's not strength training, she runs around the Central Park reservoir or takes a Pilates class.
How does Lipani, a former collegiate runner, maintain her ambitious exercise routine? It helps that her husband, Tommy Sheehan, is the director of strength and conditioning for varsity athletics at Columbia University. But it's not just her family's commitment to fitness that keeps Lipani going. She tells FitnessMagazine.com that she's motivated by several other factors: the promise of better health, a reduction of stress, and (never to be discounted) the lure of Sunday brunch.
Partner up: "On Tuesdays and Thursdays I have two workout partners I meet at the gym before work. With my schedule I have to start about 30 minutes before them, but just knowing that they're coming really motivates me to get up and get started."
Banding together: "On the weekends I make exercise part of socializing. My husband Tommy and I work out with another couple on Sundays, lifting weights and doing band-resistance training. It's super motivating, because we really focus while we're working out, and then we go to brunch to catch up."
Pro-health, anti-stress: "Stress relief is the most motivating thing for me. I'm more patient with parents and I handle interruptions better on days when I've worked out. I also think about my heart -- there's heart disease in my family, and I focus on being healthier throughout my childbearing years and beyond."
Preventing back pain: "Keeping my back healthy is another really big motivator. About once a year I've had some kind of stress-related shoulder issue or back issue. Preventing that is definitely what motivates me to do the bands and free weights. I'd rather go for a bike ride some days, but I know that as much as I keep that [strength training] up, I can avoid the chiropractor."
On her plate: "I'm not strict, but I try to eat healthily. My diet probably includes too many nutrition bars and too few fresh vegetables. We're big supporters of [grocery delivery service] FreshDirect. We like to eat freshly prepared desserts but we almost never eat store-bought cookies. Something from the bakery tastes so much better than Oreo cookies, which are not worth the calories."
Java jolt: "In the morning, I sometimes have a few sips of a bottled Starbucks frappuccino to get me going. During the day, I snack on Zone bars and drink tea."
No regrets: "Some days I don't want to wake up, but I just remind myself that I never regret having worked out in the morning. You know how sometimes you regret having that extra drink on Wednesday night? You never regret doing an extra set or pushing yourself to get out of bed and go to the gym."
Originally published on FitnessMagazine.com, June 2007.
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Bodies pile up after quake kills 600-plus in China
Rescue teams fought gusty winds and altitude sickness on Thursday as survivors faced a second night outside in freezing weather after strong earthquakes left more than 600 dead and 9,000 hurt in a mountainous Tibetan area of western China.
Rescuers, tired from the high winds and thin oxygen, pulled survivors and more bodies from the pulverized remains of the town flattened by Wednesday morning’s quake, the largest of which was magnitude 6.9. About 15,000 houses have collapsed.
“We’ve seen too many bodies and now they’re trying to deal with them. The bodies are piled up like a hill. You can see bodies with broken arms and legs and it breaks your heart,” said Dawa Cairen, a Tibetan who works for the Christian group the Amity Foundation and was helping in rescue efforts. “You can see a lot of blood. It’s flowing like a river.”
Xinhua reported that Premier Wen Jiabao arrived in Yushu to check on the rescue work and meet survivors.
Grim pictures emerged from several collapsed schools that were the focus of early rescue efforts. Footage on state television and photos posted online showed bodies laid out near the rubble, and the Xinhua News Agency quoted a local education official as saying 66 children and 10 teachers had died, mostly in three schools.
But as roads were cleared and the nearby airport put into operation, relief operations quickened with more than 10,000 soldiers, police, fire-fighters and medical workers now in Yushu county, where Jiegu is located, said Zou Ming, director of disaster relief with the Ministry of Civil Affairs.
It appeared China was turning down offers of help from foreign rescue teams. Mr. Zou said the affected area was limited. “So we do have enough rescue teams,” he told a news conference in Beijing, adding the offers of help were appreciated.
Mr. Zou said that 617 died in the quake, with 313 missing and more than 9,100 hurt.
The influx of rescue workers was producing unintended effects, taxing the normally scarce resources of remote Yushu, where the altitude averages around 13,000 feet (4,000 meters).
Supplies of food, water, gas and other necessities were running low, said Pierre Deve, a programme director at the Yushu-based community development organization Snowland Service Group. Deve said he waited for hours in a line of some 100 cars at the only open gas station. Most shops in Jiegu remained shut, he said, and local Buddhist monasteries handed out some food while some people scavenged food and other belongings from what was left of their houses.
Mr. Zou said tents, thick quilts, clothing and food were needed, adding that limited transportation options were slowing the delivery of aid to survivors. He said nearly 8,400 tents had arrived by Thursday afternoon, with plans underway to send about 40,000 tents, enough for 100,000 people.
That equals nearly the entire population of Yushu, where the Ministry of Civil Affairs said about 15,000 houses collapsed.
“There are enough tents. The main problem is the lack of transportation capabilities and it will still take time for all these tents to arrive,” Mr. Zou said.
Another problem is the altitude, said Miao Chonggang, deputy director emergency response under the China Earthquake Administration.
“Lots of our rescue workers are suffering from different degrees of altitude sickness. The effectiveness and capabilities of the sniffer dogs have also been affected,” he told the same news conference in Beijing.
Dozens of monks were either dead or missing at the Thrangu monastery, about 6 miles (10 kilometers) outside Jiegu, when all but its main hall collapsed, said Danzeng Qiujiang, a senior cleric at the Xiuma monastery far to the north of town.
“Only seven or eight of the monks are left alive. All the rest have gone missing. The rescuers either can’t find them or found their bodies. I’m not sure how many deaths have been confirmed yet. But 60 of 70 of them have all gone missing,” the cleric said.
Wednesday morning’s quakes - the worst of which measured magnitude 6.9 by the U.S. Geological Survey and 7.1 by China’s earthquake administration - were the worst to hit the region since the massive Sichuan earthquake two years ago left 90,000 dead or missing.
TXu Lai, a spokesman for the Qinghai-based educational NGO Gesanghua, said rescue crews focused on recovering children buried underneath the rubble at the Yushu No. 3 Primary School, which has more than 3,000 students.
“Most of the collapsed buildings were the first and third grade classrooms at Yushu No. 3 Primary School because they were fragile structures made from mud rather than brick and cement,” Mr. Xu said.
“I am not sure how many bodies were pulled out and how many still remain. Communication with the area still remains difficult and we trying to find out what happened to some of the other schools,” Mr. Xu said.
He said local workers are going to the homes of families to ask if they are missing children.
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Evictions are driving long-time renters out of their homes -- and out of SF. Here are the stories of several people being evicted
In his State of the City address last week, Mayor Ed Lee cheerfully characterized San Francisco as "the new gravitational center of Silicon Valley." He touted tech-sector job creation. "We have truly become the innovation capital of the world," Lee said, "home to 1,800 tech companies with more than 42,000 employees — and growing every day."
From a purely economic standpoint, San Francisco is on a steady climb. But not all residents share the mayor's rosy outlook. Shortly after Lee's speech, renowned local author Rebecca Solnit published her own view of San Francisco's condition in the London Review of Books. Zeroing in on the Google Bus as a symbol of the city's housing affordability crisis, she linked the influx of high-salaried tech workers to soaring housing costs. With rents trending skyward, she pointed out, the dearth of affordable housing is escalating a shift in the city's cultural fabric.
"All this is changing the character of what was once a great city of refuge for dissidents, queers, pacifists and experimentalists," Solnit wrote. "It has become increasingly unaffordable over the past quarter-century, but still has a host of writers, artists, activists, environmentalists, eccentrics and others who don't work sixty-hour weeks for corporations — though we may be a relic population."
The issue of housing in San Francisco is highly emotional, and there is perhaps no greater flashpoint in the charged debate than Ellis Act evictions.
When the housing market bounces upward, Ellis Act evictions tend to hit long-term tenants whose monthly payments, protected by rent control, are a comparative bargain. Even if they've submitted every payment on time and upheld every lease obligation for 20 years, these renters can find themselves in the bind of being forced out.
And they don't just lose their homes; often they lose their community. San Francisco has become so expensive that many Ellis Act victims are tossed out of this city for good.
Enacted in 1986, the state law allows a landlord to stop renting units, evict all tenants, and sell the building for another purpose. Originally construed as a way for landlords to "go out of business" and move into their properties, the Ellis Act instead gained notoriety as a driving force behind a wave of evictions that slammed San Francisco during the tech boom of the late 90s. Between 1986 and 1995, just 29 Ellis evictions were filed with the San Francisco Rent Board; in the 1999-2000 fiscal year alone, that number ballooned to a staggering 440.
Under the current tech heyday, there are indications that Ellis Act evictions are gaining fresh momentum. The San Francisco Rent Board recorded 81 this past fiscal year, more than double that of the previous year, and there appears to be an upward trend.
Buildings cleared via the Ellis Act are typically repackaged as tenancies-in-common (TIC), where several buyers jointly purchase a multi-unit residence and each occupy one unit. Realtors often market TICs as a path to homeownership for moderate-income individuals, creating an incentive for buyers to enter into risky, high-interest shared mortgages in hopes of later converting to condos with more attractive financing.
The divide between TIC owners and renters came into sharp focus at a contentious Jan. 28 hearing, when a Board of Supervisors committee met to consider legislation that would allow some 2,000 TIC units to immediately convert to condos without having to wait their turn in a requisite lottery system.
One TIC owner said he was financially burdened, but had only entered into the arrangement because "I wanted to stay here and raise my family, but we couldn't afford a single family home." Yet tenants brought their own set of concerns to the table, saying the temptation to create TICs was putting a major dent in the city's finite stock of rent-controlled units — the single greatest source of affordable housing in San Francisco.
"My feeling is, let's stop doing TICs," Tommi Avicolli Mecca, a tenants right activist with the Housing Rights Committee, told the Guardian following the hearing. "The city has to just start making sure that the condos that are built are the kind of thing [TIC buyers] can afford. Instead, we cannibalize our rental stock? That's a reasonable way? You evict one group of people to house another: How does that make sense?"
The grueling five-hour hearing illustrated the sad fact that San Franciscans in a slightly better economic position were being pitted against economically disadvantaged renters. The two groups were bitterly divided, and all seemed weary, furious, and frustrated by their housing situations.
The condo-conversion legislation, co-sponsored by Sups. Scott Wiener and Mark Farrell, did not move forward that day. Instead, Board President David Chiu made a motion to table the discussion until Feb. 25, to provide time for "an intensive negotiation process." Chiu, who rents his home, added: "While I myself would like to become a homeowner someday ... I do not support the legislation in its current form."
Sup. Jane Kim sought to appeal to the tenants as well as the TIC owners. "It's very tragic that we have set up a situation where [TICs and renters] are pitted against one another," she said. She hinted at what a possible alternative to might look like. "We should be looking at a ban of scale," she said. "If we allow 1,800 potential units to go thru this year, are we willing to do a freeze for the next 8 to 10 years?"
It's unclear what will happen in the next few weeks, but if this legislation makes it back to the full board in some form, the swing votes are expected to be Sups. London Breed, Malia Cohen and Norman Yee.
CASH OR EVICTION?
New protections were enacted following the late-90s frenzy to discourage real-estate speculators from using the Ellis Act to turn a profit on the backs of vulnerable seniors or disabled tenants. Yet a new wave of investors has discovered they can persuade tenants to leave voluntarily, simply by offering buyouts while simultaneously wielding the threat of an Ellis Act eviction. "The process got more sophisticated," explains San Francisco Rent Board Deputy Director Robert Collins.
Once a tenant has accepted a check in lieu of eviction, rent-controlled units can be converted to market rate, or refurbished and sold as pricey condos, without the legal hindrances of an eviction blemish. Buyouts aren't recorded with the Rent Board, and the agency has no real guidance for residents faced with this particular dilemma. "We don't have the true number on buyouts," says Mecca. "We don't know how many people have left due to intimidation."
Identity-wise, renters impacted by the Ellis Act defy categorization. A contingent of monolingual Chinese residents rallied outside City Hall recently to oppose legislation they believed would give rise to evictions; in the Mission, many targeted tenants are Latinos who primarily speak Spanish. From working immigrants, to aging queer activists, to disabled seniors, to idealists banding together in collective houses, the affected tenants do have one thing in common. When landlords or real-estate speculators perceive that their homes are more valuable unoccupied, their lives are susceptible to being upended by forces beyond their control.
The upshot of San Francisco's affordability crisis is a cultural blow for a city traditionally regarded as tolerant, forward thinking, and progressive. In the words of Rose Eger, a musician who faces an Ellis Act eviction from her apartment of 19 years, "it changes the face of who San Francisco is.
Out of the Castro
You can't get much more Castro than Jeremy Mykaels. The 62-year old moved to the neighborhood in the early 1970s, fleeing raids at gay bars in Denver. He played in a rock band, worked at the old Jaguar Books, watched the rise of Harvey Milk, saw the neighborhood transform and made it his home.
He's lived in a modest apartment on Noe Street for 17 years, and for the past 11 has been living with AIDS. Rent control has made it possible for Mykaels, who survives on disability payments, to remain in this city, in his community, close to the doctors at Davis Hospital who, he believes, have saved his life.
And now he's going to have to leave.
In the spring of 2011, his longtime landlords sold the building to a real-estate investment group based in Union City — and the new owners immediately sought to get rid of all the tenants. Two renters fled, knowing what was coming; Mykaels stuck around. In September of 2012, he was served with an eviction notice, filed under the state's Ellis Act.
He's a senior, he's disabled, his friends are mostly dead and his life is in his community — but none of that matters. The Ellis Act has no exceptions.
Mykaels spent a fair amount of his life savings fixing up his place. The walls are beige, decorated with nice art. Dickens the cat, who is chocolate brown but looks black, wanders in and out of the small bedroom. Mykaels has been happy there and never wanted to leave; "this," he told me, "is where I thought I would live the rest of my life."
There's no place in the Castro, or even the rest of the city, where he can afford to move. Small studios start at $2,500 a month, which would eat up all of his income. There is, quite literally, nowhere left for him to go.
"A lot of my friends have died, or moved to Palm Springs," he said. "But this is where my doctors are and where I'm comfortable. I'm not going to find a support system like this anywhere else in the world."
Mykaels is the face of San Francisco, 2013, a resident who is not part of the mayor's grand vision for bringing development and high-paying jobs into the city. As far as City Hall is concerned, he's collateral damage, someone whose life will have to be upended in the name of progress.
But Mykaels isn't going easily. The former web designer has created a site — ellishurtsseniors.org — that lists not only his address (460 Noe) and the names of the new owners (Cuong Mai, William H. Young and John H. Du) but the addresses of dozens of other properties that are facing Ellis Act evictions. His message to potential buyers: Boycott.
"Do not buy properties where seniors or the disabled have been evicted for profit by real estate speculators using the Ellis Act," the website states.
Mykaels is a demon researcher — his site is a guide to 31 properties with 94 units where seniors or disabled people are being evicted under the Ellis Act. In some cases, individuals or couples are filing the eviction papers, but at least 14 properties are owned by corporations or trusts.
Mai told me that he knew a disabled senior was living in the building when he and his two partners bought it, but he said his plan all along was to evict all the tenants and turn the three-unit place into a single-family house. He said he hasn't decided yet whether to sell building; "I might decide to live there myself." (Of course, if he wanted to live there himself, he wouldn't need the Ellis Act.)
Mai said he "felt bad about the whole situation," and he had offered to buy Mykaels out. The offer, however, wouldn't have covered more than a few months of market rent anyplace else in the Castro.
By law, Mykaels can stay in his apartment until September. If he can't stave off the eviction by then, San Francisco will lose another longtime member of the city community.
Dark days in the Inner Sunset
The living room in Rose and Willie Eger's Inner Sunset apartment is where Rose composes her songs and Willie unwinds after playing baseball in Golden Gate Park. Faded Beatles memorabilia and 45 records adorn the walls, and a prominently displayed poster of Jimi Hendrix looms above a row of guitar cases and an expansive record collection.
It's a little worn and drafty, but the couple has called this 10th Ave. apartment home for 19 years. Now their lives are about to change. On Jan. 5, all the tenants in their eight-unit building received notice that an Ellis Act eviction proceeding had been filed against them.
"The music that I do is about social and political things," explains Rose, dressed from head-to-toe in hot pink with a gray braid swinging down her back. Determined to derive inspiration from this whole eviction nightmare, she's composing a song that plays with the phrase "tenants-in-common."
Cindy Huff, the Egers' upstairs neighbor, says she began worrying about the prospect of eviction when the property changed hands last summer. Realtor Elba Borgen, described as a "serial evictor" in online news stories because she's used the Ellis Act to clear several other properties, purchased the apartment building last August, through a limited liability corporation. The notice of eviction landed in the mailbox less than six months later. (Borgen did not return Guardian calls seeking comment.)
"With the [average] rent being three times what most of us pay, there's no way we can stay in the city," Huff says. "The only option we would have is to move out of San Francisco." She retired last year following a 33-year stint with UCSF's human resources department. Now, facing the prospect of moving when she and her partner are on fixed incomes, she's scouring job listings for part-time work.
The initial notice stated that every tenant had to vacate within 120 days, but several residents are working with advocates from the Housing Rights Committee in hopes of qualifying for extensions. Huff and the Egers are all in their fifties, but some tenants are seniors—including a 90-year-old Cuban woman who lives with her daughter, and has Alzheimer's disease.
Willie works two days a week, and Rose is doing her best to get by with earnings from musical gigs. Both originally from New York City, they've lived in the city 35 years. When they first moved to the Sunset, it resembled something more like a working-class neighborhood, where families could raise kids. The recent tech boom has ushered in a transformation, one that Rose believes "changes the face of who San Francisco is." Willie doesn't mince words about the mess this eviction has landed them in. "I call it 'Scam-Francisco,'" he says.
The trio recently joined tenant advocates in visiting Sup. Norman Yee, their district supervisor, to tell their stories. Yee, who is expected to be one of the swing votes on an upcoming debate about condo-conversion legislation vehemently opposed by tenant activists, reportedly listened politely but didn't say much.
As for what the next few months have in store for the Egers? "I can't really visualize the outcome," Rose says. "I can only visualize the day-to-day fight. And that's scary."
Fighting for a home in the Mission
Eleven years ago, Olga Pizarro fell in love with Ocean Beach. A native of Peru who was living in Canada, she visited the Bay Area, saw the water and decided she would never leave.
Fast forward to today and she's built a home in the Mission, renting a small room in a basement flat on Folsom Street. The 55-year-old has lived in the building for eight years; polio has left her wearing a leg brace and she can't climb stairs very well, but she still rides her bike to work at the Golden Gate Regional Center. She's a sociologist by training; the walls in her room are lined with bookshelves, with hundreds of books in Spanish and English.
The place isn't fancy, and it needs work, but it's hard to find a ground-floor apartment in the Mission that's affordable on a nonprofit worker's salary. Since 2011, when she moved in, she and her three housemates have been protected by rent control. And Pizarro's been happy; "I love the neighborhood," she told me.
The letter warning of a pending eviction arrived Jan. 16. A new owner of the building wants to turn the place into tenancies in common and is prepared to throw everyone out under the Ellis Act. There's no place else in town for Pizarro to go.
"I've looked and looked," she said. "The cheapest places are $2,500 a month or more. Maybe I'll have to move out of the city."
Pizarro's building is owned by Wai Ahead, LLC, a San Francisco partnership registered to Carol Wai and Sean Lundy. I couldn't reach Wai or Lundy, but their attorney, Robert Sheppard, had plenty to say. "San Francisco is going the way of New York," he told me. "Manhattan is full of co-ops that used to be rentals, and lower-income people are moving to Brooklyn and Queens. That's happening here with Oakland and further out." He argued that TICs, like co-ops, provide home-ownership opportunities for former renters.
Sheppard, who for years represented tenants in eviction cases, said the Ellis Act is law, and America is a capitalist country, and "as long as there is a private housing market, there will be shifts of people as the housing market shifts." He agreed that it's not good for lower-income people to lose their homes, but "the poor will always be hurt by a changing economy. It's called evolution."
Pizarro told me she's shocked at how expensive housing has become in the Mission. "It's gotten so gentrified," she said. "People show up in their BMWs. It's starting to feel very isolated."
She's fighting the eviction. "I didn't intend it to be this way," she explained. "I just want to live here." Lacking any family in the area, the Mission has become her community — "and I'm frustrated by the violence of how expensive it is."
Affordability goes out of style
Hester Michael is a fashion designer, and her home doubles as a project space for creating patterns, sewing custom clothing, weaving cloth, and painting. She's lived in her Outer Sunset two-bedroom unit for almost two decades, but now she faces an Ellis Act eviction. Michael says she initially received notice last June. The timing was awful -– that same month, her husband passed away after a long battle with terminal illness.
"I've been here 25 years. My friends are here, and my business. I don't know where else to go, or what else to do," she says. "I just couldn't picture myself anywhere else."
Michael rents the upstairs unit of a split single-family home, a kind of residence that normally isn't protected by rent control. Yet she leased the property in 1994, getting in under the wire before that exemption took effect. Since she pays below-market-rate rent in a home that could be sold vacant for top dollar, a target was essentially inscribed on her back when the property changed hands in 2004. That's about when her long battle with the landlords began, she says.
From the get-go, her landlords indicated that she should look for a new place, Michael says, yet she chose to remain. The years that followed brought things falling into disrepair, she says, and a string of events that caused her feel intimidated and to fear eviction. Finally, she consulted with tenant advocates and hired an attorney. A complaint filed in superior court alleges that the property owners "harassed and retaliated [Michael] when she complained about the defective and dangerous conditions ...telling [her] to move out of the property if she did not like the dangerous conditions thereat ... repeatedly making improper entries into [the] property, and wrongfully accusing [her] of causing problems."
Records show that Angela Ng serves as attorney in fact for the property owner, Ringo Chung Wai Lee. Steven Adair MacDonald, an attorney who represents both landlords and tenants in San Francisco housing disputes, represents the owners. "An owner of a single family home where the rent is controlled and a fraction of market has virtually no other choice but to terminate the tenancy," MacDonald said when the Guardian reached him by phone. "They've got to empty it, and the only way to empty it is the Ellis Act."
While Michael received an extension that allows her to remain until June 5, she fears her custom sewing business, Hester's Designs, will suffer if she has to move. There's the issue of space. "I have so much stuff in this house," she says. And most of her clients are currently located close by, so she doesn't know where her business would come from if she had to relocate. "A lot of my clients don't have cars," she says, "so if I live in some suburb in the East Bay, forget it. I'll lose my business."
The prospect of eviction has created a major dilemma for Michael, who first moved to San Francisco in 1987. While moving to the East Bay seems untenable, she says renting in San Francisco feels out of reach. "People are renting out small, tiny bedrooms for the same price as I pay here," she says. With a wry laugh, she adds: "I don't think there's any vacant apartments in San Francisco -– unless you're a tech dude and make seven grand a month."
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This is the first of a series of six classical music documentaries featuring Kent Nagano and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. This one features commentary about and rehearsal footage as well as a concert performance of Mozart's Symphony No. 41 in C Major, K. 551, the 'Jupiter' Symphony. The complete series will consist of similar documentaries about and performances of:
1. Mozart: Symphony No. 41, 'Jupiter'
2. Beethoven: Symphony No. 3, 'Eroica
3. Schumann: Symphony No. 3, 'Rhenish'
4. Brahms: Symphony No. 4
5. Bruckner: Symphony No. 8 (2nd version)
6. Strauss: Alpine Symphony
Nagano makes elaborate historical and technical comments about the work and this elaborated by rehearsal clips with illustrations of the music. There is also commentary from individual members of the DSO. In addition there are clever well-done animated segments featuring Mozart, Haydn and others speaking words found in the letters of Mozart and his contemporaries, a nice touch. The documentary is then followed by a complete performance of the symphony, filmed in the lovely Philharmonie in Berlin. The performance is on modern instruments, a somewhat reduced number of players, and modern ideas about historically informed practice are utilized. This is particularly noticeable in the recurring fugue theme in the last movement, as it is played with absolutely no vibrato which emphasizes its almost archaic sound and makes it stand out at each appearance. The recorded sound is simply magnificent -- among the best I've encountered on DVD -- and I can't speak highly enough of the visuals, both in terms of the masterful camera movements and intercutting and the crisp detail.
I can easily imagine this DVD and its successors being collected by libraries, schools and individual music-lovers. Their educational potential, particularly for those who are only casually familiar with classical music, is immense.
Strongly recommended for its intended audience.
Produced in 2006 in Berlin. Narration is in English with subtitles in French, Spanish, Italian and Japanese. In those segments with the Berlin musicians speaking in German, English subtitles are added. Sound formats: DD 5.1, DTS 5.1, PCM Stereo. Picture format: 16:9. Running time: Performance 41 mins; Documentary 52 mins; TT 93 mins. DVD9 NTSC.
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Superheroes — and supervillains — have always been problematic. They are usually all but impossible to kill, but have a single vulnerability that everyone seems to know about, and to aim for, a tradition that goes all the way back to Achilles (who was invulnerable because he was dipped in the River Styx as a baby — except for the ankle by which his mother held him when doing the dipping). Even after death, they always seem to come back in some form or another; Superman, for instance, has been resurrected quite a few times (though losing him led nearly 20 years ago to one of the best graphic novels ever written, World Without a Superman). Because they are so superhumanly strong, they sometimes appear ludicrous, fighting off impossible task after incredible burden after outrageous situation. No wonder authors have sometimes taken their creations in odd directions, as Alan Moore did in Watchmen — another one of the best graphic novels out there.
In Masked, superheroes and supervillains move off the illustrated page and into the realm of pure prose. Sometimes this works beautifully, and sometimes it doesn’t work at all, making this anthology uneven. The best stories are those in which the notion of super beings is taken with the utmost seriousness; the weakest are those that seem to mock the tradition.
One of the best stories in this anthology is “Where Their Worm Dieth Not” by James Maxey. Despite a beginning that makes various oddly-powered superheroes look rather silly, the story takes a deeply serious turn. The existential ending will make you shudder, and maybe even bring forth a tear or two. It somehow brings to mind Grant Morrison’s take on Animal Man, when that character realizes that he is fictional and confronts his maker. It’s amazing what a skilled writer can do with costumed men and women when he or she brings philosophy into the picture.
Another exceptional story is “Vacuum Lad,” by Stephen Baxter. This story takes a strict science fictional approach to the whole idea of superheroes, suggesting that perhaps the powers enjoyed by the titular character were deliberately developed in a laboratory, and not for that character alone. This picture of a world dealing with climate change through various scientific endeavors is nicely drawn. The particulars of Vacuum Lad’s abilities make sense in the context carefully developed by Baxter, who fully lives up to his reputation as a writer of hard science fiction.
Ian McDonald contributes “Tonight We Fly,” the story of a superhero grown old. What do you do with your powers when you’re retired and aging? When the public health nurse comes around and insists on giving you a flu shot despite the fact that you never get the flu — and that no needle can pierce your skin? When those kids next door just won’t be quiet, but insist on kicking a ball against your garage door over and over and over until your head is ringing — how do you get them to stop without hurting someone? It’s a beautiful picture of the impotence of old age, and the struggle to remain vital even as the years pile up.
“Head Cases,” by Peter and Kathleen David, is an example of one of the less successful stories. It attempts to be humorous by making fun of superheroes, but fails. The authors try to make their costumed characters appear to be mental and emotional teenagers playing dress-up in a way reminiscent of an Adam Sandler movie, full of attempts at cheap laughs and without any real point. This sort of knowing tone just doesn’t work. Nor does Daryl Gregory’s story, “Message from the Bubblegum Factory,” manage to entertain with a similar tone. Superheroes and supervillains are ludicrous on their face; pointing that out in prose is superfluous.
Still, the ratio of good stories to bad stories is high. Even so, the stories started to seem repetitive to me after I’d read 200 pages, and I was still only halfway through the book. There are only so many things you can say about these fictional beings, and most of them have already been said in comic form. It’s hard to see that this book of prose really adds anything to what one can find in illustrated form from DC or Marvel.
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occasionally, driving schoolbuses
They wear green baseball caps the right way
so that their faces are shaded
when they drive.
They curve one dollar bills
so that the green bits of money stay flat in their shirt pockets.
They chew gum and spit it out in trash cans.
They think of adjectives for 'great' as the school
looms into view like a great brick dog, waiting for
flashing lights of yellow bones.
They soak in all the conversation and when
winter salts the earth with snow before it takes a bite
they spit the words back out.
They are unspeakably tired
and they have leaden eyes and square glasses with round corners.
Sometimes they are very quiet.
Other times they are silent.
They have cardboard boxes as hands
to carry paperwork on CB radios
and their windshield wipers always dance when it rains.
They yell at us when we touch red or black.
They are immortal and they never leave and
once in a while one of them will have
magnets stuck to the overhanging metal bars.
They hand us back our belongings when,
smiling, we forget to stop magic eight balls
and instead shoot bullets that say
"yes" or maybe "no", "next time", "maybe", "confusion"
Somewhere along the lines they become old.
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Program Notes: Ride the High Country (1962)
But “Bloody Sam,” as he came to be known, wasn’t all macho swagger and bursting blood bags.
In 1962, with only his second movie (after a decade in TV), Peckinpah proved himself a master of the lyrical oater with Ride the High Country, a Western that tapped two of the screen’s venerable cowboy stars and showed him to be a director of tremendous insight and sensitivity.
With a screenplay credited to N.B. Stone Jr. (though several others, including Peckinpah, had a go at it), High Country established themes that would follow Peckinpah throughout his career.
First, it’s about the death of the frontier and what happens to a certain breed of man when the world he has known and flourished in no longer exists.
Secondly, it’s about honor, about remaining true to a code even if (as in The Wild Bunch) it’s the code of the outlaw.
In Ride the High Country that code is embodied in Steve Judd (Joel McCrea), a graying former lawman now fallen on hard times. The film is set in the early years of the 20th century when the Wild West already has become a myth.
Judd suggests they team up to guard a shipment of gold from a distant mining camp. Several times in recent months the gold shipments have been robbed, and this will be a chance for Judd and Westrum to relive a bit of their old glory.
Judd is unaware that Westrum and his young protégé (Ron Starr) have other ideas. They’re going to steal the gold for themselves.
Hoping to get Judd on board with his plan, Westrum spends much of the ride up the mountain carping about how the people who actually tamed this country have been discarded and ignored. Judd answers that he was never in it for the money.
“Partner,” Westrum tells Judd, “you know what’s on the back of a poor man when he dies? The clothes of pride. And they’re not a bit warmer to him dead than they were when he was alive. Is that all you want, Steve?”
At this point Judd halts his horse, considers Westrum’s comments, and answers: “All I want is to enter my house justified.”
In other words, all he cares is about is dying with dignity and a clear conscience. Peckinpah wrote that line for McCrea, explaining that it paraphrased a Bible verse his father used to quote him.
On their journey the two old lawmen pick up a girl, Elsa (Mariette Hartley), who is fleeing her religiously obsessed father (R.G. Armstrong). She hopes to elope with Billy Hammond (James Drury), a resident of the mining camp along with his skuzzy brothers.
The feral Hammonds become the film’s comic heavies. They follow Judd, Westrum, and company down the mountain, intent on both grabbing the gold for themselves and retrieving Elsa, who is now running away from her disastrous marriage to Billy.
As with many a Peckinpah film, a climactic gunfight ensues. In its use of rapid editing and quick cuts, this sequence introduces cinematic ideas that would come to fruition in The Wild Bunch.
Budgeted at only $800,000, High Country was considered small potatoes by the studio (MGM), freeing Peckinpah to assemble his own dream cast and crew.
The movie got one public preview screening. Of the 255 persons who attended, 201 rated Ride the High Country as very good or outstanding.
Yet the MGM brass didn’t like the picture. They wanted more gunplay and less character development.
High Country was dumped in theaters in May 1962 at the bottom of a double feature with The Tartars, a stillborn period epic shot in Europe with Orson Welles and Victor Mature. And that should have been the end of it.
Except that the New York critics saw the picture and started writing rave reviews in which they upbraided MGM for not recognizing what a gem it had on its hands. The day after opening theater owners redid their marquees so that Peckinpah’s film got top billing.
Newsweek called High Country the best film of the year. It was on Time’s Top Ten list. It won the Paris critics award, Sweden’s Silver Leaf, the Grand Prix at the Belgium International Film Festival (beating Fellini’s 8 1/2). It won Mexico’s Diosa de Plata award for best foreign film.
And Sam Peckinpah’s movie career was off and running. Of course it was a checkered career marked by furious feuds with the suits in the studios’ front offices.
But it produced films like The Wild Bunch, The Ballad of Cable Hogue, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Straw Dogs, Junior Bonner, The Getaway, and the wonderfully titled Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.
Other films in the series “Hollywood Homers”
Saturdays at 1:30 p.m.:
- July 7: The Music Man (1962) Not Rated
- July 14: That Touch of Mink (1962) Not Rated
- July 21: Ride the High Country (1962) Not Rated
- July 28: Birdman of Alcatraz (1962) Not Rated
Admission to these films is free.
About the Author
Robert W. Butler is a lifelong Kansas City area resident, a graduate of Shawnee Mission East High School and the William Allen White School of Journalism at the University of Kansas. For several decades he was the movie editor of the Kansas City Star; he now writes a movie-themed blog at butlerscinemascene.com. He joined the Library's Public Affairs team in 2012.
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The Congress recognizes that the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress has for some time occupied a position of prominence in the life of the Nation, has spoken effectively for literary causes, and has occasionally performed duties and functions sometimes associated with the position of poet laureate in other nations and societies. Individuals are appointed to the position of Consultant in Poetry by the Librarian of Congress for one- or two-year terms solely on the basis of literary merit, and are compensated from endowment funds administered by the Library of Congress Trust Fund Board. The Congress further recognizes this position is equivalent to that of Poet Laureate of the United States.
(1) There is established in the Library of Congress the position of Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. The Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry shall be appointed by the Librarian of Congress pursuant to the same procedures of appointment as established on December 20, 1985, for the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.
(2) Each department and office of the Federal Government is encouraged to make use of the services of the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for ceremonial and other occasions of celebration under such procedures as the Librarian of Congress shall approve designed to assure that participation under this paragraph does not impair the continuation of the work of the individual chosen to fill the position of Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry.
(1) The Chairperson of the National Endowment for the Arts, with the advice of the National Council on the Arts, shall annually sponsor a program at which the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry will present a major work or the work of other distinguished poets.
(2) There are authorized to be appropriated to the National Endowment for the Arts $10,000 for the fiscal year 1987 and for each succeeding fiscal year ending prior to October 1, 1990, for the purpose of carrying out this subsection.
(Pub. L. 99–194, title VI, §601, Dec. 20, 1985, 99 Stat. 1347.)
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Your education should prepare you for more than a successful career. It should help you develop a sense of purpose and offer you the chance to put your gifts to work for others. At Drake, you can start down this path right away, through many opportunities to get involved in community service and grow as a leader.
Developing your potential as a leader can happen in more ways than you might imagine. Yes, you can run for a Student Senate position and play an important part in campus life. But you can also step forward as a leader of the Drake Disc Golf Club, the Dance Team, or the Bass Fishing Club. Or you can become a leader on the playing field, in the residence hall system, or in your fraternity or sorority. Or, you can have a great idea and help launch a whole new organization or event.
In addition, Drake offers you several opportunities specially focused on leadership development. One is an academic concentration in Leadership, a program open to students in every major that combines theoretical understanding with hands-on experience.
Our Donald V. Adams Leadership Institute also offers leadership training, focusing on everything from what it means to be a leader to strategies for promoting inter-cultural conflict resolution. Highlights include the Emerging Leaders Program for first-year students, the Adams Academy, which offers yearlong leadership opportunities for sophomores through seniors, and the Lila and Richard Sussman leadership workshops and conferences.
Another great way to bring a sense of purpose to your education is through service-learning. At Drake, service is a way of life, something every fraternity and sorority, many volunteer student organizations and religious groups, and lots of individual students dedicate themselves to every term.
Campus organizations dedicated to service range from Big Brothers Big Sisters to Habitat for Humanity and from Meals for the Heartland to Collegians Against Cancer. Opportunities to volunteer include everything from tutoring local school kids to taking environmental action or partnering with developmentally disabled buddies.
Not sure where to start? Try Feel Good Fridays, a campus event that will introduce you to a new volunteer activity each week.
One of the best rewards of a commitment to leadership and service is the sense of satisfaction you will feel. However, that’s not the only reward. Every opportunity you seize to pitch in and to take the lead is also an opportunity to build your resume. The experience you gain means a lot to employers and to admissions committees at law schools, medical schools, and graduate programs. Just ask any of the advisers in Drake’s career center.
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There are hundreds of books out there about investing, most filled with stock market tips. Now local financial planner Amy Jo Lauber is out with a new book, "Living Inspired and Financially Empowered," designed to inspire people to align their spiritual and material lives.
Lauber is the president of Lauber Financial Planning, a local financial services firm. She has worked in financial services for 19 years. And for the past decade, she's thought of writing the book on her approach to finances, that involves self help skills, love, faith, values and more, to help people understand and improve their relationship with money.
"This is pretty high level stuff. Not over your head, but it is deep," she said. "It challenges you to take stock, no pun intended, take stock of what's really important to you and are you living that with the decisions you are making."
Lauber says those decisions can be made using wisdom from several spiritual and religious teachings. She says the book helps you understand where your financial behavior comes from. That is often an issue with couples who have conflicting views on money management and it's one of Lauber's specialties.
You can find the book at Dog Ears Bookstore on Abbott Road in South Buffalo, or online at wkbw.com under News Links.
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Photo: Mining protestors in Peru
A man wounded two days ago during protests against a massive mining project in northwestern Peru died Thursday, bringing the death toll from the disturbances to five.
Jose Antonio Sanchez Huaman, 29, had been in a coma since he was shot Tuesday in the city of Celendin, a spokesman for the Cajamarca regional health department told Canal N television.
Cajamarca President Gregorio Santos, a leader of opposition to the Conga gold mine project, went on Twitter to announce Sanchez’s death and to blame the national government for the fatalities.
“The victims of the government of OH (Peruvian President Ollanta Humala) are five,” Santos said.
Tuesday’s clash in Celendin left three people dead and a score of others wounded, while another person was killed the following day amid protests in the town of Bambamarca.
Humala gave the green light for the controversial Conga project in April, but only on condition the mine operators meet conditions aimed at mitigating its environmental impact.
Humala said the Minera Yanacocha consortium - led by Colorado-based Newmont Mining - will have to ensure the availability and quality of water supplies in the area surrounding Conga.
Activists in Cajamarca said the conditions laid down by Lima are not sufficient to avert irreparable environmental damage.
Plans for the $4.8 billion project include draining four alpine lakes to develop subsoil gold deposits and replacing them with artificial reservoirs, a process that is scheduled to get under way soon.
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For Immediate Release PRESS RELEASE CONTACT: 612-276-3456 NEW REPORT ARGUES FOR A RENEWABLE ENERGY POLICY THAT PUTS RURAL COMMUNITIES FIRST Minneapolis, MN—(September 8, 2008). The next 20 years could generate as much as $1 trillion in new renewable energy investment in rural America. But as a new Ford Foundation-sponsored study by the Institute for… Continue reading
Viewing all Articles Page 147 of 228
Updating a pathbreaking 2003 report, ILSR’s March 2008 report, Driving Our Way to Energy Independence, describes how commercially available technologies today could transform our petroleum powered transportation system into one powered by electricity and biofuels. Provisions in the recently passed Energy Act could accelerate that transformation. Continue reading
For years, chain retailers have exploited a loophole present in the tax laws of about half the states to escape paying billions of dollars in state income taxes. Efforts to close these loopholes have faced an uphill struggle, but the momentum may finally be shifting, thanks to research that has exposed the extent of the problem and its primary corporate beneficiaries, as well as new activism by independent business owners, who are breaking rank with powerful business groups to call for tax fairness. Continue reading
Minneapolis, Minn.– (March 5, 2008). The Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) congratulates the 25 Vermont towns that have voted to join the East Central Vermont Community Fiber Network. These rural towns have rejected dependency on outside providers in order to build the infrastructure they need.
At least nine of the towns were unanimous in their support of the publicly owned fiber network. Many of the other towns still registered over 90% support for the measure.
Too many cities in California are stuck with slow (or no) broadband access. As the United States continues to dip in international broadband rankings, individual communities have a choice: build their own broadband network or hope someone else does it for them.
Broadbandmay be comparatively new, but these difficult questions of infrastructure have been with us for far longer. One hundred years ago, communities were told electricity was too complicated for municipal meddling and they should wait for private companies to electrify them. Thousands of communities realized that a community cannot wait for essential infrastructure. They accepted responsibility for their future and wired their towns. How little has changed since then.
The success of the Powell Mercantile has inspired at least half a dozen other towns in Wyoming, Montana, and Nevada—all too small and remote to interest national or regional chains—to open their own department stores. The concept is now spreading to the much more populous Northeast, where local residents are seeking community-focused alternatives to big-box retailers. Continue reading
Sales of gift card are soaring, but most of the spending on gift cards is flowing to chain retailers. A growing number of independent retailers are offering their own giftcards now too, but the key to shifting a substantial share of this activity to the local economy may lie in developing gift cards that work at many local businesses, rather than just one. Continue reading
A new policy brief from Institute for Local Self Reliance criticizes the authors of two recent studies published in Science for advancing a conclusion not supported by their own studies. ILSR’s paper notes that the vast majority of today’s ethanol production comes from corn cultivated on land that has been in corn production for generations. Continue reading
Last month the Internal Revenue Service today announced 312 projects that are now eligible to be financed with tax-credit bonds under the Clean Renewable Energy Bonds (CREB) program. Approximately, $477 million was available for this round of applications. The CREB program was created by the Energy Tax Incentives Act of 2005 and expanded under the Tax Relief and Health Care Act of 2006.
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announced earlier this week that EA has invested over $80 million in the
development of BioWare's first MMO "Star Wars: The Old
Wars: The Old Republic" is a new massively multiplayer online (MMO) game
that is currently under development by BioWare and LucasArts. The game takes
place 300 years after the events of "Star Wars: Knights of the Old
Republic" and thousands of years before Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, which is a
fairly unexplored era of "Star Wars" chronology.
will be able to choose from many different character roles such as Jedi or
Sith, and give context to their personal story with the option to follow the
light or the dark side of the Force. In addition, players can join friends
through the game's battles.
has reported that its total investment in the "Star Wars" MMO has
reached $80 million in development alone.
contribution from the 'Star Wars' MMO is significant,"
said Michael Pachter, Wedbush Securities analyst. "Under the terms of its
deals with LucasArts, EA is required to pay a royalty, but was required to
front all of the development, marketing and distribution costs, as well as the
costs of building out servers for the game. We estimate that LucasArts’ share
is 33 percent of revenues, after EA recoups its investment in game development.
Given that the game was in development for over four years, with an estimated
200 full-time developers working on it, we estimate that EA's investment exceeds $80 million.
for investors, the company expenses R&D spending, meaning that its revenues
on sales of the 'Star Wars' MMO DVD will be pure profit. EA will be required to
spend marketing dollars on the game, and we estimate total manufacturing,
marketing and distribution spending will total around $20 million, meaning that
at two million units sold, EA will generate $60 million of operating profit on
the DVD sales."
also noted that EA will not need a certain number of subscribers for "Star
Wars: The Old Republic" to make a profit.
estimate that EA will cover its direct
operating costs and break even at 500,000 subscribers (actual number
is closer to 350,000 subscribers), meaning that with 1.5 million paying
subscribers, EA will have 1 million profitable subs," said Pachter.
"We estimate that the incremental operating cost for each subscriber above
break even is around $5 per month, so if the revenue split is 33 percent to
LucasArts ($5 per subscriber per month), EA will be left with $5 per subscriber
per month in operating profit. At 1 million profitable subscribers over the last
six months of its fiscal year, EA should generate $30 million in operating
profit from subscribers."
announced this week that the launch of "Star Wars: The Old Republic"
may be delayed until January 2012.
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- Evening, Weekend & Online Programs
- ALUMNI RELATIONS
- GIVING TO LAKELAND
- ABOUT LAKELAND
Following a three-week course her junior year in the rainforest of Belize, Sarah Newman knew that science was her career calling. "I was taken completely out of my comfort zone and literally dropped into the jungle to do research and field work,"
Newman said. "I loved every minute of it. That motivated me to get serious about graduate school."
In addition, Newman spent two summers in the Lakeland Undergraduate Research Experiences program, an intense Student as Practitioner program that pays students a stipend to conduct original research alongside a faculty member. Her research centered on the study of prions, self-aggregating proteins which are responsible for a variety of diseases including Creutzfeld-Jacob's disease (CJD) in humans, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) "mad cow" in cows and Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) in deer and elk. She analyzed prion proteins from two different species of yeast and created chimeric protein. She then tested their ability to cause or prevent protein aggregation in each species. She presented her findings regionally and nationally.
Newman also participated in the college's Honors Program, and her project combined her two passions: she focused on the prevention of performance injuries in instrumentalists by creating a brochure that educates instrumental music students about the causes and preventions of performance injuries.
Greg Smith, associate professor of biology, said Newman took full advantage of Lakeland's applied liberal arts curriculum. "I have had a handful of students with similar levels of innate intelligence and I have had several students who showed similar dedication to their studies, but Sarah is the best combination of ability and effort I have encountered," Smith said. "Sarah is a superb writer, precisely and concisely conveying scientific concepts and showing a depth of understanding which is truly uncanny in an undergraduate student."
This fall, she will begin the Ph.D. program in cell and molecular biology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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On January 25–four days after President Barack Obama was inaugurated President for the second time–political columnist Mark Shields assessed the electoral dangers facing the Republican party.
“The Republicans want to blame Mitt Romney. That’s fine. But Mitt Romney is more popular than the Republican Party. I mean, he got 47%. The Republicans are dead in the water right now.
“So you know they’re going through a difficult period. And they have got to try and figure out.
“They can’t talk to Latinos, the fastest growing group in the country. They’re basically not conversational with younger voters. They are–Asians have left them in droves.
“You know, they have just–they’re an aging white party, and in a country that is not–is less white each year.”
After Ronald Reagan defeated President Jimmy Carter in 1980 and defeated the Democrats’ nominee, Walter Mondale, in 1984, Democrats went through a similar time of torment.
“And Democrats said, geez, Ronald Reagan is good on television,” said Shields. “If we can get somebody as good on TV as he is–instead of that moment of introspection and saying people found the other side…our opponents, to be more relevant, more real and more plausible to our lives and their lives than they found us.
“And that’s–it’s a terrible thing to live with rejection, but a losing party has to say, what is it? And what you can’t do is blame the voters. And I have heard echoes of that on the other side. The voters, that’s the 47% of takers, you know. No wonder we can’t win if they are all just parasites and worse.”
Mitt Romney–and other Republican candidates–lost bigtime on November 6 for a wide range of reasons:
1. He was not simply an opportunist; he was widely recognized as one. He was despised by those on the Right as well as those on the Left, and for the same reason: He would take any position on any issue–even if this meant contradicting his previous position on it.
2. He was not only rich, he made it clear that this was the only group he truly cared about. His public comments shouted this:
- “I have friends who are owners of NASCAR Teams.”
- “Ann drives a couple of Cadillacs.”
- “Corporations are people, my friend.”
- “Forty-seven percent are dependent upon government.”
Yet it is possible to be wealthy and trusted by those who aren’t–like Robert F. Kennedy, who identified with the poor and oppressed.
3. Republicans enraged and alienated Latinos by their constant anti-immigrant rhetoric.
4. Republicans enraged and alienated blacks by their constant hateful, racist attacks on President Obama. Clint Eastwood’s empty chair ”comedy” act at the Republican convention pleased his fascistic audience. But it outraged many non-fascists–especially blacks.
5. Republicans angered and alienated women–by constantly talking about
- gutting Planned Parenthood
- outlawing abortion
- “legitimate rape”
- banning birth control.
6. Republicans enraged and alienated voters generally and minorities in particular by their blatant efforts to suppress the voting rights of their fellow citizens.
Republicans falsely claimed widespread voter fraud in areas where there was absolutely no evidence for it–such as Pennsylvania. And when voter fraud was discovered, the culprit was a get-out-the-vote consulting firm hired by Republicans.
7. Republicans allowed their party to be represented by slimeballs like Donald Trump and Rush Limbaugh.
When Trump claimed he could prove that Obama wasn’t an American citizen, Romney refused to distance himself from him, let alone say, “I don’t want support from a hateful idiot.”
And he similarly refused to condemn Rush Limbaugh for calling Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute.” The reason: She had testified before Congress on the need to have insurance companies cover contraceptives.
Romney didn’t dare condemn Limbaugh. He was too scared of losing Limbaugh’s endorsement–and thus the support of his aptly-named “dittohead” audience.
8. Republicans ultimately depended for their success on a voting group that’s constantly shrinking–aging white males. Having alienated blacks, gays, women, Latinos and youths, the Republicans found themselves with no other sources of support.
9. Republicans–and especially Romney–put out so many blatant lies that they came home to hurt them:
- Romney initially opposed the President’s bailout of General Motors. But when that resurrected the American auto industry, Romney changed his tune and said he had always been for the bailout.
- During his second campaign debate with the President, Romney charged that he had not called the September 11, 2012 assault on the American consulate in Libya a “terrorist attack.” But Candy Crowley, the moderator, immediately pointed out that Obama had called it an “act of terror” just two days later.
- Summing up Romney’s attitude toward the truth: ”We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers,” said Neil Newhouse, a Romney pollster.
In the end, Americans came to know the truth, and the truth made them free–of Romney and the Republican agenda.
Only when Republicans accept that millions of Americans permanently reject much of their agenda will they be able to hope for a return to power.
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Art Historian. Lorella Brocklesby specializes in the cultural, architectural, and design history of America and Europe. She has been teaching at Parsons The New School for Design for over fourteen years. Her courses include: The History of Interior Design, parts one and two: and Connections, an inter disciplinary course which examines the stylistic developments of interiors, decorative arts, fashion and fine art. She is an Adjunct Professor of Humanities at New York University and has received an Award for Teaching Excellence from NYU. Has lectured frequently at many museums in the Tri State area, including the Metropolitan Museum. Has also lectured throughout Europe and in Australia. Is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
architectural history,art history,cultural studies,design history,fashion history
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Church Resources for Hearing Loss
Do you have difficulty participating in Church meetings because of hearing loss? Depending on how long you’ve experienced diminished hearing, you may not be aware of Church resources available to you. Many Latter-day Saint meetinghouses are equipped with listening devices (small remote receivers connected to the speaker system). They allow you to sit anywhere you desire and still hear the speaker. Contact a member of the bishopric if you would like to use them. If you are having trouble hearing in classes, see if the teacher will use a microphone. To further assist you, Church videos and satellite broadcasts are available with closed captioning. Also, closed captioning is available at many temples. Simply call ahead to inquire and make arrangements.
, Orchard Fifth Ward, Bountiful Utah Orchard Stake
Sharing Family History
I joined the Church more than 30 years ago, but to date only immediate family members have also been baptized. My extended family provides me with many missionary opportunities, and the most well-received approach has involved family history. Here are two ideas that I have found helpful:
Scrapbooks. After I married, I showed my extended family our wedding album. It proved to be a useful tool for sharing my beliefs about the importance of temple marriage. One family member commented, “I like the phrase ‘for time and all eternity.’” Sharing photo journals that highlight milestones such as baptisms and missions is a way to share beliefs. You might send duplicate pictures or an annual family letter with the photos to extended family members.
Family history information. At family reunions, ask who is also doing research and offer to share findings. Suggest using a family history center in their area or offer personal assistance. If you have a laptop computer, show them how they can organize their records on Personal Ancestral File. Even without a laptop, you can still tell them about this and other free resources at www.familysearch.org.
, Sego Lily Ward, Sandy Utah Granite South Stake
Scripture Study with an Ancestor
If you are fortunate enough to inherit a family Bible that belonged to your ancestors, look for any scriptures they may have marked. My paternal grandfather loved writing small notations in the margins: “I have finished the N.T. This is the 5th time I have read the N.T.” Sometimes he counseled his sons: “So read it, my sons. It will give life and joy to you.” Reading his notes has prompted me to do the same in my own set of scriptures.
Of course, some family Bibles contain valuable family history information or other mementos, such as antique bookmarkers, a favorite poem, or photos. So don’t let an old family Bible continue to collect dust on an unforgotten shelf. Peruse its pages to discover treasured information for your family today.
, Pellissippi Ward, Knoxville Tennessee Stake
Our Mission Mats
As my husband and I were preparing to serve a mission, I realized that I would miss my friends and family very much—especially my children and grandchildren. I knew that mealtimes on certain occasions would especially remind us of family back home. Since I knew I could not pack many extras to remind me of my loved ones, I decided to make some picture place mats. Two of my daughters-in-law helped me gather some of my favorite photos, both recent and old. They then copied the images in color, cut them, and glued them to durable place-mat size paper, available at craft or paper goods stores. We then laminated them for durability and easy cleanup.
At packing time, my set of 10 place mats fit neatly into the bottom of my suitcase without taking up much space. During our mission, we had dinner with our family, although we were nearly halfway around the world! Those who visited our apartment enjoyed seeing our collection of photos. Now that we have returned home, we are making another set featuring our wonderful brothers and sisters in the Philippines.
, West Point 12th Ward, West Point Utah Stake
Family Home Evening Helps: Picture a Song
When our children were small, we often taught them songs from the Children’s Songbook for family home evening. We would first explain a song, then invite the children to illustrate the lyrics. After learning several songs this way, our children soon had their own illustrated versions of the songbook. Even our smallest children who couldn’t yet read could easily follow and understand the songs because of the pictures they’d made. As a family, we enjoyed singing the songs around the house or while traveling. When our children hum or sing Church songs, we feel blessed that they are choosing to “seek the Lord early while in [their] youth.” Our hope is that as they grow older, “He will help [them] to know the truth” (“Seek the Lord Early,” Children’s Songbook, 108).
and , Grays Harbor Ward, Elma Washington Stake
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Read the Original Article at http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=240143797
The companies will partner to use game-like behavior reinforcement and rewards to accelerate digital transformation in major organizations by engaging, rewarding and motivating employees and customers. The focus of the deal is on applying Badgeville's software as a service gamification platform to drive behaviors within the enterprise, rather than on consumer websites.
Kevin Akeroyd, senior VP of field operations at Badgeville, said this is the sort of endorsement that should quiet the naysayers arguing that gamification is overhyped. "Having the number two IT consulting firm in the world announce that they're forming a practice in their digital transformation group around gamification is going to deliver a lot of much-needed credibility," he said.
[ Read 7 Examples: Put Gamification To Work. ]
Badgeville promotes its offering as a platform for modeling and influencing behavior, rather than a more narrow application for influencing specific behaviors such as sales force productivity. At the same time, it integrates with popular application platforms such as the Salesforce.com cloud.
Maggie Buggie, VP of digital transformation at Capgemini, said her firm's embrace of gamification is part of a broader strategy for using digital engagement to drive corporate performance.
"People have been interpreting it as a magic bullet. It is not," she said. "If you don't have a clear business strategy, there's no point in developing a game to address something." Capgemini's role will be to help its clients develop that digital business strategy, with gamification as one important tool.
Why bother? Buggie pointed to a report Capgemini sponsored through the MIT Center for Digital Business on The Digital Advantage: How digital leaders outperform their peers in every industry. As summarized by lead author George Westerman, the research showed that "The digirati -- the 25% of firms that are most digitally mature -- are 26% more profitable, gain 9% more revenue from their physical assets, and earn 12% higher market valuations than their industry competitors." Beyond investing in technologies and social media, that maturity is defined as a strong capability to manage organizational transformation. The study tries to identify the "digital DNA" that makes those firms special.
Besides gamification, there are lots of other things digital businesses must do right, from strategy and management communication to the coordinated implementation of other technologies. However, Capgemini is identifying gamification as one of the things that can help make digital transformation successful, she said. "It's part of a suite of capabilities, where we must be doing all of these things well," she said.
Capgemini's choice of Badgeville was influenced by analyst reports from Gartner and Forrester Research as well as its own evaluation of Badgeville's core technology, Buggie said. Badgeville and Capgemini had been working together for nine months prior to formalizing the relationship, she said.
Akeroyd said Badgeville had previously established partnerships with other consulting and integration firms, primarily those focused on integration with specific social, collaboration, and cloud platforms such as Salesforce.com, Jive, SharePoint, and Zendesk. "This is our first relationship with a large global player that's in the top five, like Capgemini. Some of that is just an indication of how much our industry has grown up in the last year," he said.
Social media make the customer more powerful than ever. Here's how to listen and react. Also in the new, all-digital The Customer Really Comes First issue of The BrainYard: The right tools can help smooth over the rough edges in your social business architecture. (Free registration required.)
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June 30, 2012
My daughter has a really fun time learning about different aspects of science while conducting experiments and recording subsequent data along with other girls her own age. She enjoys herself so much she doesn't realize the education she receiving. I think it is so important that girls are exposed to science at an early age so that as they grow, it is their right and their due as students of life.
How would you describe the help you got from this organization?
How likely are you to recommend this organization to a friend?
How do you feel you were treated by this organization?
When was your last experience with this nonprofit?
MY ROLE:Client Served
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Google has agreed to change some of its business practices, in an agreement made with the Federal Trade Commission that will end the U.S. agency's antitrust probe of the search and technology company.
In the terms of the deal, Google agrees not to appropriate content such as users' reviews from other sites for use in its search and mobile offerings. The company also pledged to make it easier for advertisers to compare the value of running ad campaigns through Google compared to advertising on rivals Yahoo and Microsoft.
FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz, who announced the long-awaited deal Thursday, says Google will end "the most troubling of its business practices related to Internet search and search advertising," particularly the "scraping" of other sites for content.
Update at 1:55 p.m. ET: Google's Take On Agreement.
Saying that "We've always accepted that with success comes regulatory scrutiny," Google senior vice president and chief legal officer David Drummond says that companies "can now remove content (for example reviews) from specialized search results pages, such as local, travel and shopping."
As for the patent aspects of the deal, Drummond writes, "This agreement establishes clear rules of the road for standards essential patents going forward."
If you'd like to read the agreement for yourself, it's on the FTC's site.
Our original post continues:
The agreement closes the FTC's antitrust investigation of Google that began in June of 2011, after many of Google's competitors complained that the company was using its dominant spot in the search market to funnel business to its offerings in other areas, as well. The consumer review website Yelp and online shopping engine Expedia have been among those calling for Google to change its ways.
The agreement also requires Google to ease the process for other companies to license "essential" patented mobile and wireless technology that was once widely available under terms set by Motorola years ago. Google acquired Motorola for nearly $13 billion last year, in part to gain control of its more than 24,000 patents.
The change, Leibowitz says, "will also relieve companies of hoarding patents for defensive purposes."
While Google agreed to make those changes, it is not being required to alter its essential search practices. The company has previously been accused of configuring its algorithms to privilege its own products — something its rivals call "search bias."
On its website, the agency says that "the FTC concluded that the introduction of Universal Search, as well as additional changes made to Google's search algorithms - even those that may have had the effect of harming individual competitors - could be plausibly justified as innovations that improved Google's product and the experience of its users. It therefore has chosen to close the investigation."
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The CLIMATE CHAMPION 2008 programme is aimed at finding 20 young ‘Climate Champions’ from all over India who have what it takes to communicate about climate change in India.
The 20 Indian Climate Champions selected from all India will receive a citation and a prize which would include a collection of books, DVDs and an excursion weekend ‘Climate Camp’.
Out of the 20 Indian Climate Champions, the final 3 will get a chance to represent India at meetings in London, in March 2008, and in Kobe, Japan, in May 2008 where the Environment Ministers from the G8+5 countries are meeting to discuss climate change.
The competition is open between 1 January to 4 February 2008 only, to all young people aged between 16 and 18 as on 4 February 2008, who are permanent residents of India except employees of British Council and key partner organisations, families, agents and anyone professionally associated with this promotion. Closing date for receipt of entries is 4 February 2008
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Marketing and promotion strategies have also been overhauled. While tradition has it that Girl Scouts go door-to-door taking orders in their community and later hand-deliver the goods, tech trends have now made it possible for customers to seek out their sweet treat suppliers. The Girl Scout Cookie Finder App, available on iPhone and Android devices, provides GPS coordinates for the nearest cookie sales location.
Additionally, in step with recent food world trends, local troops teamed up with Sweetery NYC, a New York City food truck and mobile bakery, to create the National Girl Scout Cookie Day Truck. On Feb. 8, girls from all across the tri-state area rolled up to four different locations at designated intervals throughout the day. The snowstorm raged. The Girl Scouts sold on, securing canopy poles and credit card transactions.
That's right -- the Girl Scouts now accept plastic. Friday marked the introduction of the new sales method.
On average, Girl Scout troops participating in the program raise over $790 million a year and GSUSA doesn't have plans to slow down anytime soon. Neither do the girls, themselves.
Girl Scouts in the Greater Northeast last week were not only in competition with each other -- they were battling the elements. As a blizzard rocked the region, sugar-starved adults trudged through sharp hail and strong winds to get their hands on those famous green boxes.
Maribel Sabino, a 14-year-old Senior Girl Scout taking a break from sales to seek shelter from the cold, sat with her family at a café in midtown Manhattan. "We are here selling Girl Scout Cookies to inform people that Girl Scouts is not only about selling cookies and camping, but it is about how Girl Scouts is the No. 1 girl-led business in the world," she said.
Maribel's 12-year-old sister Rachel, a Cadette, didn't mind the weather all that much. "It's really a voluntary thing, but it teaches girls about life skills."
Their youngest sister Olivia, a 9-year-old Junior Girl Scout, agreed. "I use decision-making every day," she explained. "I have to decide what time I'm going to wake up for school; I have to decide what the Girl Scout money is going to be used for. It not only helps us in the future but it helps us every day."
Girl Scouts of the USA serves girls ranging from five to seventeen years of age. Troops exist in every zip code in America and 92 countries across the world. The organization now boasts 3.2 million young and adult members worldwide.
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The public is invited to stop by the ARH Cancer Center, a part of the UK Markey Cancer Center affiliate network, and located at 110 Medical Center Drive in Hazard, between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. this Friday, July 11 for a day dedicated to cancer awareness and prevention.
During the event, the ARH Cancer Center will offer:
•Free skin screenings
•Free breast and cervical exams
•Free tests for PSA
•Free screenings for cholesterol, blood sugar and blood pressure.
Fasting is suggested for 12 hours before PSA and cholesterol tests.
Another highlight of the health fair will be a stop by the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Action Network’s Fight Back Express ---a national traveling tour to emphasize the government’s role as a critical partner in the fight against cancer --- which will visit the ARH Cancer Center during the event as part of its journey to make cancer a national priority –one mile at a time.
The bus will arrive at the cancer center at 12:30 p.m. The public is encouraged to come out to show their support. Share their story. Join the fight against cancer. For more information about the ACS CAN Fight Back Express, visit www.acscan.org.
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This Monday’s dramatic transit debate at city council looked positively dignified next to the spectacle that unfolded the next day in the provincial legislature at Queen’s Park. In a partisan exchange that should give second thoughts to anyone who wants to bring party politics to the civic arena, MPPs traded jibes, struck poses and did their best to blame the other side for all transit sins.
The issue was who should decide Toronto’s transit future. Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak said that instead of waiting for Toronto to make up its mind over what kind of transit it wants, Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty should simply ignore the views of the city government and push ahead with the only worthwhile form of transit: subways. The government counters that it has no choice but to respect Toronto’s views.
It is hard to know which leader is on weaker moral ground. The “subways or bust” stand is a bit rich coming from Mr. Hudak. It was a Conservative government under premier Mike Harris that cancelled the Eglinton subway project in 1995 and filled in the tunnel – an enduring symbol of the city’s transit failures. As former mayor David Miller was quick to point out, it was also the Harris Conservatives that cut operating subsidies to the Toronto Transit Commission. The TTC has been behind the eight ball ever since.
If Mr. Hudak is now pushing subways, the motives look nakedly political. His party has been shut out of Toronto for years. It suits his purpose to accuse the Liberals of denying suburban voters their God-given right to have subways just like downtowners. This is the political strategy – stoking suburban anger – being pushed by Doug Ford, brother of the mayor. Mr. Hudak seems fully on board.
Mr. Hudak risks looking two-faced, as well, when he tells the Premier to override local decision-makers. After all, he argues that the province should leave it up to local governments whether to allow wind farms. “I’ve always believed in local decision-making,” he says on that issue. How is it different for rail lines?
As for the Liberals, don’t forget that their decision to hold back $4-billion in funding for the Transit City light-rail network pulled the first thread in the unravelling of the project. And it was Mr. McGuinty who signed a deal with Mayor Rob Ford last year to kill Transit City altogether and to build an all-underground line on Eglinton in its place. Only a belated revolt on city council against Mr. Ford has laid the ground for returning to a version of Transit City.
Former transportation minister Kathleen Wynne, now Minister of Municipal Affairs, tried to argue in the legislature on Tuesday that Queen’s Park has always insisted that the transit deal with Mr. Ford would have to go to city council for a decision eventually.
True, but the Liberal government proceeded as if it was a done deal. Its tame transit agency, Metrolinx, went along with the new plan for an all-underground Eglinton line. Mr. McGuinty argued at that time that he could not ignore the will of the city – by which he meant the mayor. Facing an election and trailing in the polls, he clearly did not want a fight with the newly elected Mr. Ford.
Now that city council is leaning toward light rail, Mr. McGuinty can hardly turn around and say the province is going ahead and building subways, regardless of the city’s opinion. For one thing, it is bad policy to pour all of the $8.4-billion of provincial funding into a single underground line when the same amount could build so much more transit with a blended system of partly underground, partly above-ground light rail.
For another, simply to tell Toronto the way things are going to be would set back the city’s attempt to stand on its own. As the sixth largest government in Canada, Toronto has been trying to grow up and take responsibility for its own affairs. Queen’s Park has encouraged it in that ambition, handing it wider powers of taxation and self-government. To make a unilateral provincial decision on a huge project that will shape Toronto’s transit future would put the city right back in the position of being a ward of the province.
Though neither Mr. Hudak nor Mr. McGuinty is in a position to boast about how they have handled the transit issue, the Premier is in the right on this one.
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Programmer engineer doing a PhD in Computer science and Student at Theology.
More about me
The wisest man in the World was Solomon and he didn't study at Harvard or Yale or Oxford, not that this studying is bad. He prayed to God for wisdom. In my understanding praying for wisdom should not hurt anybody so it is probably a great idea to be done.
Also Jesus is truth and praying to God to find the truth about all religions and denominations can not hurt also. To be sure we can pray also for whatever we will learn to be useful.
So far, the people that I learn about that prayed to go to best religion and denomination arrived at Eastern Orthodoxy. For people that do not believe this, please pray to be moved to best religion and denomination in the eyes of God and then wait. There are miracles where people of different religions asked God for best religion and answer was Christianity. There are miracles where people of different christian denominations asked God for best denomination and answer was Eastern Orthodoxy.
- -if Creations in trouble can go back to a state without sin
- -understanding salvation individual and in groups and what are the ways to go to Heaven and back in this life and in after life
- -understanding why even if God's power is infinite and people can access infinite power of God through prayer, there is still evil on the planet and evil is no thoroughly defeated
- goal of religions, best religion and denomination in the eyes of God , classification of religions http://www.topix.com/forum/religion/orthodox/T1M29J2ACSAET0923
- miracles https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WazsqUNFo5Y&playnext=1&list=PL581B6B34BF34AE03&feature=results_main
- Wise man:Think that you need to play football with World dream team and you have to win.
- Man:And who is in my team?
- Wise man:Whomever you want including your neighbors.
- Man:Well, maybe I will lose.
- Wise Man:What about if you would need to play against a team that is 1 billion times more powerful than the World Dream Team? A team of angels. What if when you lose, you can lose the quality of your life.
- Man:How can I win against angels? What kind of contest is this?Is it real?
- Wise Man:Well , you may be right now in such a contest for your salvation. Against you may be the sick angels.
- Man:Well, if I lose the quality of after life can degrade quickly.
- Wise man:Well, what if not all the rules of the contest are known or understood right?
- Man:Hard contest is this, how can one win?
- Wise man:The solution is to ask God with infinite power to be on your side. You can do this through prayer: Dear God, please force me and as many people as possible to salvation. Give to me and to as many people as possible the knowing of all religions and denominations the way you know them and please send me and as many people as possible to the best religion and denomination in your eyes. Please give to me and to as many people as possible what you know we need for all eternities. Amen.
So, if you can win with a world dream team or with a team of angels, put your strength and hope not in your power, however in infinite power of God.
- Man:My child is a good learner.
- The wise man put 0 on a paper, 0.
- Man:My child is smart.
- The wise man put another 0 on a paper 00.
- Man:My child is a good child and listens to me.
- The wise man put another 0 on the paper, 000.
- And this continued for a while with many zero's on the paper.
- Man:My child is Eastern orthodox Christian.
- Then the wise man put a 1 in front of all zeros , 1000....000 saying: Without life, all the characteristics you have told about are zeros including being smart and listening. What is the use of being smart and without life? As an Eastern Orthodox Christian, having eternal life through Holy Communion, all the other characteristics become important.
- Wise man: You see , doctor can give you maybe 120 years to live. Going to Eastern orthodox Church you can get immortality or eternal life John 6:53-54.
So, by not going to Eastern Orthodox Church, one may miss something important, the one in front of zeros.
Stories about who people met in after life: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbwmhwC-rgQ Interesting fact is that people coming from death tell that while on death they saw Jesus as God.
When people that I know about ask about best religion and denominations, EOC is answer.
Wise man:One Emperor put a box and asked his people to guess what is in the box. If the answer was right they would go to a great place, if the answer was bad, they can go to a bad place and some people are returned after guessing even if they had a good or bad answer. What would you do then? Man:I would try to guess what is in the box? Wise man:Could you guess? Man:There would be very hard. Wise man:Why would you not ask the people that went before you and returned or why would you not ask the emperor? Man:Can I do that? Wise man:Yes. Man:If I can do that then would be easy? How is this in life? Wise man:Right now you have to choose a religion. Religions and denominations are different and choosing one or another may make a great difference. The people that come from death speak that the God that comes to them in death is Jesus http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbwmhwC-rgQ or here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=babKPGNqlOs.
You know best religion and denomination in the World, God knows better so ask God about best religion and denomination in his eyes.
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Pittcon Roundup in Chemical & Engineering News
April 2, 2012 - Washington, DC
by A. Maureen Rouhi
Pittcon is a signature event for the instrumentation and analytical chemistry communities. C&EN’s comprehensive coverage of Pittcon 2012 begins on page 32, reported by Senior Editor Celia Arnaud, Deputy Assistant Managing Editor Stu Borman, and Senior Correspondent Marc Reisch.
Despite some questions about the exhibition (C&EN, March 19, page 3), Pittcon offers not only a terrific overview of the breadth of instrumentation innovations and offerings, but also historical perspective in the form of the annual Pittcon Heritage Award. I attended the meeting’s plenary lecture and was delighted with the accessibility of the lecturer’s talk. Most of all, I enjoyed the conversations with visitors at C&EN’s booth.
The opening session featured the presentation of the first-ever posthumous Pittcon Heritage Award, to Genzo Shimadzu, Sr. and Jr., father and son founders of the Japanese instrumentation company that bears their name. Shimadzu Chairman of the Board Shigehiko Hattori accepted the award from Chemical Heritage Foundation President and CEO Thomas R. Tritton and Pittcon President Jon Peace.
Genzo, Sr., was a maker of Buddhist altars before he became an inventor of instruments. When Western powers forced Japan to open its ports to international trade in 1868, the nation also opened its eyes to Western technology. At the Physics & Chemistry Research Institute in Kyoto, the elder Shimadzu learned to repair and maintain foreign equipment. In 1875, he began manufacturing distillation and other devices for use in Japanese schools. After Genzo, Sr., died in 1894, control of the business went to his eldest son, Umejiro, who changed his name to Genzo. . . .
Link to C&EN
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- Wendell Berry
04 March 2011
"We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it."
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His family has been around Hudson for five generations, since before Pasco was created out of Hernando County.
"The local history is my family's history, too," said Cannon, author of "Images of America: Hudson," which traces his family's heritage through text and about 200 photographs.
Cannon recently organized the Pasco County Historical Preservation Society, Inc., a nonprofit organization that will endeavor to preserve historical sites and old cemeteries. He hopes to work with existing historical societies around the county to identify areas that need to be cleaned, preserved or restored.
He said the group has about 15 volunteers and that he is in the process of gaining tax-exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service. He has already done restoration work at cemeteries in Elfers, Hudson and Trilby.
"I got started in cemetery preservation while looking for my great-great-grandfather's (grave), but you can't find where he's buried," Cannon said. "The property where he lived has now been developed, and we believe he may be buried on the homestead. Through grass-roots efforts, maybe we can save some of these burial sites from the same fate."
He said the historical society endeavors to help any people, private organizations, businesses, or governmental agencies restore, preserve and document Pasco's history and historic sites.
Cannon said he wants to take over work once done by the county's own historical preservation committee, which was essentially disbanded due to budget cuts.
"I'm trying to fill a gap," he said. "Historical preservation should continue regardless of funding. These sites are in the community and belong to the community. We'll aggressively pursue grants that we can apply to historic preservation."
Cannon said he is sending letters to other historical societies around the county in an attempt to join forces.
Bob Hubach, president of the West Pasco Historical Society, said another group could only enhance preservation efforts in the county.
"I don't think there's anything competitive at all," Hubach said. Cannon "is a member of our society and has come in three or four times to give presentations. We even sent some volunteers to him to do some work at the Hudson cemetery."
Cannon said he is completing an "online cemetery database" that has more than 27,000 identified burials in Pasco cemeteries. When it's completed the database will be searchable by name and cemetery.
"I'm just trying to get the word out for when we coordinate clean-up projects and need volunteers," Cannon said. "I'm trying to involve the community. Anything people want to
donate - money or materials - goes into the work."
For information about the Pasco County Historical Preservation Society, visit www .pascocemeteries.org or e-mail info@pasco cemeteries.org.
It really isn't too surprising that Jeff Cannon would have a deep passion for the history of Pasco County, and of Hudson in particular. While most people around here are from somewhere else, Cannon's roots run deep.
He isn't just a native son − he's a native great-great-grandson.
"I'm fifth generation from Hudson. My family's been here since the late 1870s," Cannon said. "Through marriage, I'm related to the Hudson family."
A few years ago, Cannon began devoting himself more fully to his interest in local history as a member of the West Pasco Historical Society, in New Port Richey, and the Pioneer Florida Museum Association, in Dade City; as president of the West Elfers Cemetery Preservation Association and operator of the Pasco Cemeteries website, and as a historical researcher and writer.
It is in that last capacity that The Sea Pine Civic Association, 7817 Gulf Way, will welcome Cannon for a "meet the author" night 7 p.m. this Wednesday, April 21.
Cannon is the author of "Hudson," an entry in Arcadia Publishing's popular "Images of America" series. These table-top books tell the stories of individual communities' beginnings through the use of hundreds of historical photographs and carefully researched captions.
Since its debut in 1993, the format, with its familiar sepia-toned cover, has presented the histories of thousands of communities.
Cannon said he contacted Arcadia and submitted a proposal to do a book on Hudson after he saw the local reception for Adam Carozza's 2004 release of "Images of America: New Port Richey." It was easy to convince the publishers that the Hudson area also had a story to tell and that he was the right man to tell it.
Once Arcadia gave him the green light, it would take him about a year to compile the book, but that was based on years of previous professional and personal background research.
"A lot of that's connected to family research − It all kind of merges together," Cannon said. "The history of the town is kind of my family's history, too."
On Monday, Cannon stood at the Hudson Cemetery. Because it is on a small lot at the busy intersection of U.S. 19 and Hudson Avenue, the cemetery often goes unnoticed by drivers zipping past.
It's hard amid the midday traffic to imagine the cemetery used to be nestled in secluded woods.
"Up through the 1950s, U.S. 19 wasn't here," Cannon said. Even then, at first it was only a two-lane road.
While Hudson was first settled around 1872, the community's namesakes, the family of Isaac Washington Hudson Sr., did not permanently move here until 1878. That same year, the cemetery got its first resident, Hudson's 16-year-old daughter, Ida Melissa. Cannon pointed out her headstone. Many of his own ancestors are buried here, too.
The cemetery is one of the few remaining physical remnants of those early years, Cannon said.
Most have given way to progress, though he is happy to note that Isaac Hudson's original house still stands, near the intersection of Pine Road and Harbor Drive.
"It's kind of had modern siding put on it, but the historic value of that structure is still the same," he said.
What do remain in greater quantity are photographs and documents, and Cannon uses them to great effect in his "Hudson" book. Along with his own collection, Cannon contacted the descendents of many of Hudson's founding families and found artifacts that help provide a portrait of the area's early decades.
One of his favorite finds is the book's cover photo, which he determined shows a survey crew at Hudson Spring. It is known the town was platted in 1883, which would make this one of the earliest photos of Hudson known to exist.
He has also found, much to his pleasure, that the public holds a great deal of curiosity about the area's history. Debuting in November in time for the holidays, "Images of America: Hudson" sold about 750 copies in its first two months − not bad for a locally themed book, Cannon said.
He's also found people have no end of questions at events like the upcoming book signing.
For those who cannot attend, "Images of America: Hudson" retails for $21.95, and can be found at area bookstores, independent retailers and online retailers, or through Arcadia Publishing at 888-313-2665 or its website.
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Daily News, Sunday, December 5, 1999
By Lisa L. Colangelo, with Mary Sisson
Stunt a dung deal for mayor's critics
Once was not enough for Maria Mancini.
Twice she stuck a rubber gloved hand into a vat of "elephant dung," patted it into a ball and tossed it at a giant portrait of Mayor Giuliani.
"I made sure I took good aim and got him right in the puss," said the actress, who lives in Tribeca. "It felt good. It was better than booing him at the parade. I have been so furious at him for so long."
She joined hundreds of people who gathered in Washington Square Park yesterday for a chance to vent their frustrations and donate to charity.
For just $1, people were invited to hurl a handful of "dung" (more likely grass and dirt) at the portrait. Joey Skaggs said all proceeds would be given to Housing Works, a not-for-profit organization that provides services to homeless New Yorkers with HIV and AIDS.
The portrait was modeled after the controversial "Holy Virgin Mary" painting on display at the Brooklyn Museum. Giuliani vociferously protested the painting and unsuccessfully tried to strip the museum of its funding.
Like many of the other dung tossers, Jessica Radke, 26, and Alexis Mazon, 25, both law students at New York University, said they are angry with the mayor for his policies regarding the homeless.
It just felt so right," Mazon said, laughing, after she took aim at the portrait.
Stephen Powers, the artist who created the Giuliani portrait, held up one side, trying to dodge the flying piles of dirt.
Late last week, police raided his SoHo apartment as part of an anti-graffiti crackdown and seized videotapes, photographs, art supplies, sketches and undeveloped rolls of film.
They also seized a set of decorative brass knuckles and charged Powers with possession of a weapon. He suspects they were looking for the portrait, which was hidden elsewhere.
Powers' attorney, Ron Kuby, said he plans to fight the search in court.
"This is a new level of abusive power by the mayor." he said. "He is using the Police Department as his private art and morality police."
Cops beefed up their presence at Washington Square Park yesterday but watched the dung tossing from a distance.
"We're really happy the police allowed this to happen today; we are sort of shocked," he said. "We are leaving before the police lose their patience."
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"First Minute First Round Muhammad Ali vs. Sonny Liston 25th May 1965"
One of the most famous moments in sporting history! Despite defeating Sonny Liston in Miami in 1964 and becoming champion for the first time, the former Cassius Clay was still being afforded little respect by the establishment. He was ridiculed upon joining the Nation of Islam and changing his name to Muhammad Ali. But once the rematch began, there was no doubt who was The Greatest! Within one minute, Ali knocked out the former champ, and retained his title. The passion of the young, toned, budding legend was perfectly captured for the first time as he stood over Liston, yelling in derision, asking him to get up so he can pound him some more. The image appeared on the cover of Life Magazine, cementing Ali's place as a legitimate sporting hero and a larger-than-life personality.
This spectacular poster gives you a beautiful enlargement of that legendary moment. From the tangled body of Liston on the mat, to the perfectly-toned body of Ali, to the photographers capturing the stunning moment for the morning papers, to the Lewiston crowd sitting in stunned silence - it's all here in this amazing print! A black-and-white classic for your wall - a must for any serious fan.
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From the July 2, 2009 EurasiaNet Online
July 2, 2009
by Richard Weitz
The main topic of the July 6-8 summit meeting in Moscow between US President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev will be settling the main elements of an agreement to replace the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START). The current arms control pact expires in early December.
On June 23-24, Russian and American negotiating teams completed their last formal session before the summit. By mutual agreement, the two sides have avoided publicly commenting on the specific proposals under discussion. Even so, their general statements and various media leaks have shed light on areas of broad agreement, as well as on unresolved issues that might require presidential intervention in Moscow.
US officials have already made several major concessions since negotiations began in April. For example, American negotiators have announced they would not require reductions in the number of short-range nuclear weapons in the next treaty. Russia has many more of these tactical nuclear weapons than the United States, and sees them as potentially valuable tools for fighting regional wars in Eurasia. Furthermore, US officials have agreed to limit strategic delivery vehicles (long-range ballistic missiles and strategic bombers) as well as nuclear warheads. Russian analysts have worried about the US ability to simply return any warheads removed from these carriers during a crisis, so they have insisted on constraining both.
In return, Russian negotiators are apparently no longer trying to impose direct restrictions on the number of nuclear warheads both countries retain outside their operational forces. No previous arms control agreement has sought to limit warheads in storage or in "reserve" (e.g., as spares) since attempting to do so would require very intrusive on-site inspections to determine their number and condition.
Against the background of these mutual concessions, Medvedev and other Russian leaders have expressed a willingness to accept further modest reductions in both countries' nuclear arsenals, but only if the United States addresses three major Russian concerns.
In fact, the Obama administration has shown flexibility in all three areas, suggesting that a deal might well be achievable this year unless disrupted by external events -- such as another war in Georgia. Thus far, the two sides have indicated they will simply agree to disagree on Georgia, and on the other Eurasian security issues that divide them. But keeping major disputes from negatively affecting arms control negotiations is often difficult, as seen in the current stalemate over the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty.
In recent weeks, Russian officials have indicated their willingness to reduce nuclear forces below the limits established by two earlier Russian-American strategic arms control treaties. Specifically, they have said that Russia could reduce its operationally deployed nuclear warheads total below the 2,200 ceiling provided for in the 2002 Moscow Treaty. They have also confirmed that Russia would accept a much lower limit on the number of strategic delivery vehicles than the 1,600 figure established by START.
In return, they insist on resolving three issues separate from the weapons totals. First, they want to preserve START provisions prohibiting the stationing of strategic offensive weapons outside a country's national territory. Since Russian negotiators have not indicated they seek to restrict the patrols of strategic nuclear submarines and strategic bombers, this limit would presumably exclude the basing of long-range ballistic missiles in foreign countries or in outer space. Given that the Obama administration has no plans for such deployments, meeting this requirement should not be difficult.
Second, Russian officials have demanded that the next address the so-called "prompt global strike" program developed by the George H. W. Bush administration. This Bush program would equip long-range ballistic missiles with conventional warheads in order to rapidly attack hard-to-reach targets, such as terrorists in Central Asia or Pakistan who have seized a nuclear weapon. Although Russian officials would like to prohibit this option because of the difficulties of determining whether an ICBM in flight has a conventional rather than a nuclear warhead, US negotiators have indicated they could accept the Russian fall-back position to count all warheads, whether nuclear or conventional, under a common ceiling in the next treaty.
Third, Russian leaders have demanded that the United States address Russia's concerns that US ballistic missile defense programs (BMD) could threaten Russia's nuclear forces. In recent statements, Medvedev did not explicitly demand that the United States cancel the BMD systems planned for deployment in Poland and the Czech Republic. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive]. Instead, the Russian president simply insisted that Washington acknowledge in the next treaty the inter-relationship between strategic offense and strategic defense.
While still expressing alarm at the improving missile capabilities of Iran, the Obama administration has indicated that the favored response of the Bush administration -- deploying 10 interceptor missiles in Poland and an advanced missile defense radar in the Czech Republic -- represents only one option for dealing with that threat. In recent congressional testimony, several Defense Department officials have stressed that the administration was considering how cooperating with Russia might dissuade Iran from ever threatening Europe with nuclear-armed missiles.
US policymakers are reassessing offers made two years ago by then-president Vladimir Putin to share data with Washington from the Russian-operated early warning radars located at Gabala in Azerbaijan and Armavir in Russia's North Caucasus. Azerbaijani officials seem open to such collaboration, but Russian officials have recently said they would collaborate with the United States on Eurasian missile defenses only if Washington abandons its BMD plans for Poland and the Czech Republic.
The Obama administration has a choice. One option for Washington would be to cancel or defer the Polish and Czech deployments and pursue a joint Eurasian missile defense program with Russia. Alternately, the United States could proceed with the deployments, but include in the treaty the language Medvedev recently proposed to acknowledge the difference between offensive and defensive nuclear weapons. US officials might then want to reassure Russia by adopting various confidence-building measures, such as limiting the number of missile interceptors in Poland and allowing Russians to monitor the Czech radar to see that it is focused southward rather than on Russia's strategic systems.
Richard Weitz is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for Political-Military Analysis at Hudson Institute.
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