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Preventing and controlling cancer are two key elements in eradicating it. Studies have shown that with the right approaches, a third of the most common cancers could be prevented. Prevention is also the most cost-effective and sustainable way of reducing the global cancer burden long term. Other cancers can be detected early in their development, treated and cured. Even with late-stage cancer, the pain can be reduced, the progression of the cancer slowed and patients and their families helped to cope. The Cancer Prevention and Control (CPC) research program at VCU Massey Cancer Center brings together a diverse group of health services and behavioral scientists with clinicians to study behavioral, policy, organizational and environmental factors that affect cancer risk, diagnosis, treatment and survival.
The CPC program is currently leading many community- and patient-based initiatives aimed at educating and raising awareness to prevent and control cancer. The following are a few recent examples.
Interactive audiovisual tool developed to educate communities about cancer screenings
Despite continued advances in cancer research, detection and treatment, there are still significant disparities in patient knowledge of healthy behaviors, screening guidelines and resources available. The Community Engagement Educational Program (CEEP), led by VCU Massey CPC researcher Arpita Aggarwal, M.S., M.D., recognized those disparities in the Piedmont and Mount Rogers health districts of Virginia and identified a need for community-based resources for preventive health education.
CEEP developed an educational program, in partnership with the two districts, to test a culturally and linguistically appropriate computer-based interactive audiovisual tool for recommended preventative cancer screening that will be used by community facilitators. The tool includes tutorials on cancer risk behaviors and recommended screening guidelines for cervical, breast, colorectal, prostate and skin cancers. The audio-visual component was designed to benefit participants with limited health literacy and reading or visual problems. The interactive tool is currently being tested in over 400 participants in 20 towns of the two health districts.
“In addition to increasing health awareness in our partnering communities,” said Aggarwal, “our long-term goal is to build community capacity and sustainability by developing local leaders and training community facilitators. This community-academic partnership has been designed to serve as a model for other institutions on how to build and sustain a community that can address its own health needs and concerns, especially in the underserved and disparate populations.”
Project LIFE! puts faith in churches to influence healthy behavior
In early 2013, the American Cancer Society released a report revealing that cancer death rates are significantly higher among African Americans than Caucasians. Decreasing this disparity was one of the objectives behind Project LIFE! (Lord, Intimate relationships, Fitness, and Early detection), which utilizes the power and influence of the African-American church to become a partner in addressing this major health concern.
“Our goal is to evaluate the impact on the behaviors of congregants when their church adopts a ‘health and wholeness’ pledge to practice and promote healthy behaviors,” said project lead and VCU Massey CPC researcher Maghboeba Mosavel, M.A., Ph.D.
Project LIFE! is currently active in three churches in Danville and Pittsylvania, Virginia. Eleven congregants were trained to serve as LIFE! coaches to spread health promotion messages and host tailored activities aimed at increasing healthy behaviors and promoting early detection for cancer.
LIFE! coach, Linda Kelly, from the Shockoe Missionary Baptist Church said, “As a Project LIFE! coach, I myself have changed a lot…Because of Project LIFE!, I pushed my husband to have a repeat colonoscopy and guess what they found? A precancerous polyp was found, that if left unattended could have developed into cancer. The doctor said it was the type of polyp that can become cancerous. So, thank God for my spirituality and for Project LIFE!”
“Once Project LIFE! is complete, the expected outcome is that there will be an increased knowledge of cancer screening resources; increase in screening; and more integration of healthy practices within the church,” said Mosavel.
Instructional videos teach patients about their cancer treatments
Cancer treatments, such as radiation therapy (RT), can be overwhelming and hard to understand. With that in mind, VCU Massey CPC researcher Robin K. Matsuyama, Ph.D., and Massey Radiation Biology and Oncology researcher Drew Moghanaki, M.P.H., M.D., developed a short video explaining the process of RT in simple terms in hopes of making the patients more knowledgeable and, in turn, more comfortable.
The researchers conducted a pilot study with cancer patients who had not yet received an initial RT consultation. Patient knowledge of cancer and treatment were assessed before and after viewing the video using surveys like the Rapid Estimate of Adult Literacy in Medicine, a screening instrument used to assess an adult patient’s ability to read common medical words.
The researchers found that awareness of RT was very poor before viewing the video, regardless of sociodemographic factors (such as age, gender, ethnicity, income and education), with more than 78 percent of patients having little to no basic knowledge of RT.
After viewing the film “Guide to Radiation Therapy,” which combines educational material with patient narratives, knowledge of RT significantly improved.
“While patients may ultimately learn about RT during their course of treatment, we advocate for tools that can improve patient knowledge at the time of initial consultation, as this is typically the time they are asked to provide informed consent for treatment,” explained Matsuyama.
Matsuyama and her team are continuing to develop a series of cancer patient education films, including instructional videos about stem cell transplants and breast reconstruction. | <urn:uuid:e930b489-b1f5-43ad-b6b6-8e8c6ba7de8e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://wp.vcu.edu/masseynews/tag/instructional-videos/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00069-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9537 | 1,197 | 3.140625 | 3 |
Volunteer in Kenya
Helping Kenya is a responsible and meaningful volunteering agency, who specialise in matching volunteers to projects where they can make the most difference. Helping Kenya is run by a Kenyan conservationist and his British wife, who have both experienced and built up close relationships with the projects in Africa. Here, at Helping Kenya, we have many different projects that would suit many different volunteers.
Some projects included are aimed at assisting the community. Volunteers can work with children in after school clubs and sports coaching, helping them to realise their full potential and educating the youths of the dangers of HIV/AIDS and substance abuse. Other community projects include recycling, waste management, environmental education and sustainable business development and training for the locals. Helping Kenya also has community projects which are focused on medical and rehabilitation programmes. Either by working in a hospital, or working along-side drug addicts, volunteers are needed for educating the local community on the dangers of HIV/AIDS, counselling ex-addicts, helping to run family planning clinics as well as many other duties. These projects allow for a close interaction with the local people, and really allow an insight into the real Kenya.
Other projects that Helping Kenya supports are conservation projects which are all about protecting the environment and raising awareness of some of Kenya’s endangered animals. Projects include whale shark conservation which is a project all about education and research of the sea’s severely endangered gentle giant. There is also a dolphin and ecotourism conservation project which looks into the behavioural aspects of the dolphins, as well as educating the locals on these animals and other marine issues. Colobus Monkey conservation is another of Helping Kenya’s projects, which looks into the conservation of these animals, through orphan care, veterinary assistance and responding to emergency calls for injured monkeys. Helping Kenya also has a sea turtle project which looks at the protection of the turtles, along with local conservation and education to the locals of these animals. These projects allow volunteers to get close to some of nature’s most beautiful animals, and help to protect them and their habitats.
Finally, Helping Kenya has projects which include different orphanages and schools that are not only in need of volunteers to help with the day to day running and caring for the children, but for some of the orphanages, builders, plumbers and electricians are needed to help with the maintenance of the buildings. These projects range in their resources, with some orphanages having very few facilities, to other orphanages that are well resourced and funded. Volunteers will therefore be able to choose how 'basic' they would like to go. As the government does not fund schools or orphanages, these places and children really rely on donations and funding from elsewhere.
All of Helping Kenya’s projects are worthwhile, and are not only a great experience which will stay with a volunteer for a life-time, but through a wide range of skills that volunteers will be using, will also look great on a CV. Helping Kenya wants to send out volunteers to projects where they can make the most difference, not only through their help and interaction with the projects, but where their funding will be the most beneficial.
accommodation, food, airport pickup | <urn:uuid:36fa5b43-b734-4de4-a294-ada24167536e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.gapyear.com/volunteering/electives/african/volunteer-in-kenya/176526/176526/product | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00057-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97438 | 661 | 1.734375 | 2 |
Welcome to One Thing Thursday, where I share one thing you can do to boost your child’s development.
Do you ever look at your child’s toy box and think, “We really need some new toys”?
Yep, been there.
I know it’s tempting to put all the toys out there and give them lots of things to play with. But what’s the problem? The toys get old. Your child gets bored with them. You get bored with them. And from a learning standpoint, your child’s brain kinda stops being challenged after engaging with the same toys over and over again. Practice is good, but too much of the same means their brain doesn’t have to create new “motor plans” in order to figure out how to engage with a new or unfamiliar toy.
So try this one thing: Divide your child’s toys into two or three groups and rotate them every week or two. This will keep your child’s brain stimulated and it will keep you from feeling like you need to go to the toy store and load up on new stuff for your little one.
While there are certainly times when new toys are necessary (like when they are ready to move from infant to toddler toys, or they have graduated to preschool toys), many of your child’s toys can last for longer than you think. And you know what happens when you bring out that box of toys that you’ve been hiding for the past few weeks or months? It’s like Christmas…for you and for them!
So try picking out some toys for the week, and switch things up on a regular basis. You might find that you get more creative with what you offer as “toys” (like bowls, mixing spoons, strainers, and other things around the house). It will be good for both you and your child! | <urn:uuid:ac70f710-e6d9-40f5-ac0e-0054655f0f1f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mamaot.com/2012/11/08/2246/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959022 | 399 | 1.992188 | 2 |
YouTube is all about the video so perhaps it's understandable that most people forget about something equally important, the audio. Most viewers will put up with choppy and poor quality video as long as the audio track is good or at least not horrible.
Awkward silence, pops, loud noise and so on will make people close your video a lot faster than poor video quality.
This is hardly a secret and YouTube has been offering a way of improving the audio part of a video, that goes well with its video editor, and now it's updating the tools as well as offering more music to add to your video.
"We introduced AudioSwap to let you replace a video’s soundtrack for free with a song from our library of thousands of tracks. With more of you using AudioSwap and giving us lots of feedback, we have some cool improvements to share today in YouTube Audio Editing," YouTube announced
One immediately noticeable improvement is the amount of music available, YouTube boasts that there are 150,000 tracks now and more are being added. With so many of them, finding the right one can be tricky, but the categories should help and YouTube's featured tracks for each category are a good place to start.
There are also more options when adding the music to your videos, you can have it played in the background, barely audible, or have it completely replace the original audio track.
The Audio Editing section has been revamped as well to make it easier to understand and use.
Along with the video editor, this feature is a great tool for improving the quality of the vast majority of videos on YouTube, which are shot with phones or cheap cameras by regular people with no experience with either video editing or filmmaking. | <urn:uuid:ff62d119-6cfe-4ed8-8c34-256940dfc41e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://news.softpedia.com/news/YouTube-Revamps-Its-Audio-Track-Editor-and-Mixer-265286.shtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964557 | 348 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Sala's Gift: My Mother's Holocaust Story
Ann Kirschner always knew that her mother, Sala, was a Holocaust
survivor. She was aware of the bare facts of her mother's story:
that she had lived in Poland and that most of her family had been
killed in the camps. But Sala did not talk much about her
experiences or share the details of her story. Ann learned growing
up that some survivors felt the need to talk at great length about
what they lived through while others rarely spoke of the trauma, if
at all. She learned to respect Sala's silence.
Then, before Sala went into the hospital for surgery, she gave Ann
a box of letters and journal entries chronicling her life, and the
lives of many other Jews, during the war. Ann learned that her
mother had been a slave in one of the labor camps, and it was her
hard work that enabled her to survive. The stories of Jewish slave
labor during World War II traditionally has received less attention
than life in the ghettos and concentration camps. But in SALA'S
GIFT, Ann Kirschner, using those letters, tells her mother's story
and of other men and women forced into labor under the Nazis.
Sala Garncarz, the youngest of Rabbi Garncarz's 11 children, grew
up in Sosnowiec. In 1940, when she was just 16, the family
received a letter stating that Sala's older sister, the studious
Raizel, was being called up for six weeks of mandatory
labor. Sala, the stronger, more adventurous sibling, offered
to go in Raizel's place. After much discussion, the family agreed
to let her go. Sala was sent to Geppersdorf, a labor camp
supporting the construction of Hitler's autobahn in Germany. Sala
was assigned work as a seamstress. And soon it became clear that
she would not be allowed to return home after the promised six
Luckily, even before she leaves on the train for Geppersdorf, Sala
is befriended by an elegant and kind woman named Ala Gertner. Ala
takes Sala under her wing and tries to protect her both physically
and emotionally from the harshness of life in the labor camp.
Conditions were awful and many laborers became quite sick. However,
unlike Jewish prisoners in other types of camps, the labor camp
inmates were allowed to send and receive mail.
And it is Sala's collection of received letters, kept and hidden at
considerable risk, that tells the real story of Jewish life under
Nazi tyranny. The majority of the letters is from Sala's older
sister Raizel, who tries to encourage Sala, especially in matters
of religious faith, while protecting her from the truth of what is
happening back home. Other letters are from girlfriends left behind
in Sosnowiec; Ala, after she is moved to another position outside
Geppersdorf; and male admirers and beaus Sala had in the camp. All
paint the picture of misery and violence, tinged with hope and
Sala lives and works in various labor camps for five years,
ironically contributing to the Nazi destruction of Jews and other
people. After liberation at the end of the war, she travels through
Europe with friends searching for family members and trying to
determine where she will make her home. Of her immediate family,
only she and two sisters have survived. Sala falls in love with an
American soldier, and it is her marriage to him that brings her to
the United States and gives her the chance to put her brutal past
behind her. Safe from harm's way, Sala raises her three children,
only later revealing her remarkable tale of survival.
Ann Kirschner's treatment of Sala's story is kind, the work of a
loving daughter, but also thorough in that it is well researched.
Many of the characters we meet in SALA'S GIFT are difficult to
understand --- from the Jewish Elders who had little choice but to
work assisting the Nazis, to some of the people Sala came to rely
on, such as Ala, who were not always who they seemed to be.
Kirschner does an excellent job balancing Sala's biography with
history. She not only pays tribute to her mother (and so many
others) but contextualizes the story successfully.
SALA'S GIFT is a unique and moving contribution not only to
Holocaust literature but to biographical and historical literature
Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman on January 23, 2011 | <urn:uuid:a24622df-c98b-4775-919e-8346873125a1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bookreporter.com/reviews/salas-gift-my-mothers-holocaust-story | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00046-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974552 | 999 | 2.90625 | 3 |
From Kärcher to Kalashnikov
While he was still minister of the interior, Nicolas Sarkozy promised he would clean up the ghetto of Seine-Saint-Denis with a power-cleaner, known as a "Kärcher". This phrase become a household expression overnight, and he became known as a "tough cop".
Naive or misled voters put him in office on grounds he would attempt to clean up crime. Today these voters have to acknowledge that the never-used "Kärcher" has been replaced by a Kalashnikov rifle (AK-47), turned on the very police entrusted with the thankless job of protecting the population, including the immigrants who commit the crimes. An incident that occurred on May 16-17, in the notorious project of La Courneuve is the subject of this article from Marianne2:
In the ghettoes the important thing is what tools you utilize. Nicolas Sarkozy, a long time ago, chose the Kärcher. The problem is that he never allocated sufficient funds to actually use it. If he had, he would have been able to offer the inhabitants of La Courneuve, in addition, what he had promised them: elevators as clean as a newly minted penny.
Across the way, the little dealers of the neighborhood have grown up. Now they are adults. They saved their profits and got enough money together to buy the tool they had been dreaming of: assault rifles. Not to put behind glass in the family living-room, but to use. At first they drew their guns to kill a few rivals. But last weekend was unprecedented: they used their rifles to attack a police van. The tool gave them satisfaction even though they did not attain their objective: to liberate their two comrades in the van who were under arrest.
The president of the Republic cannot help but admit the damage done: if he stayed at the level of rhetoric, the thugs, for their part, kept their promises: each new generation displays a determination superior to the preceding one. (...)
A royalist blog called La Faute à Rousseau reports these statements from various police unions:
"Our colleagues are worried about the trends and the violence that is on the rise in Seine-Saint-Denis," declared Thierry Mazé, a representative from Alliance, the second largest police union. He tells how the police who went to La Courneuve "fell into a veritable trap set by individuals with war weapons." In La Courneuve inscriptions on the walls warned the police that violence "would be used against them" after several previous incidents.
Questioned by France Info, a colleague of Thierry Mazé said she heard these heartening comments: "A good policeman is a dead policeman..." "We'll raid the police headquarters...", "We'll burn police headquarters...", etc...
For UNSA, the largest police union, it is "urgent" that the "judicial police possess the necessary means to put the caïds out of business." The SGP-FO police union stressed in a communiqué that "to shoot the police is no longer a taboo," and spoke of an "event of exceptional seriousness... troubling... in a context of urban violence."
Note: In France the judicial police is the branch of the national police in charge of criminal investigations.
The author closes by suggesting that all foreigners who commit crimes be expelled immediately, and that those with French nationality be stripped of their nationality and expelled as well.
The Minister of the Interior Michèle Alliot-Marie paid a surprise visit to La Courneuve late Tuesday night, to express her support for the police and to announce a plan called "opération coup de poing", roughly translated as "operation punch". In French a "coup de poing" is a punch in the face. Here it refers to the sudden police raids she is hoping will stop these criminals. A comical if not pathetic solution to the serious problem of immigration, and to the frightening level of danger that prevails in Seine-Saint-Denis. Already one such raid took place in Orly, south of Paris. One hundred fifty police, plus dogs, did not find any drugs or weapons, only five stolen bicycles.
Jean-Marie Le Pen issued this pertinent communiqué:
It has been known for a long time that war weapons existed in the lawless zones, of which the project called La Courneuve is one of the most typical.
It is quite evident, with all due respect to the ostriches that are governing us, that these weapons are not meant to serve as decorations in your basement.
The attack on a van transporting a "young person" who had himself used lead shot against the forces of law and order is but the start of a new escalation of violence in the ghettoes.
Remember that in 2002, seven years ago, Monsieur Sarkozy became minister of the interior and boasted that he was going to take action to restore security. Seven years later, Monsieur Sarkozy is president of the Republic. He still boasts, but it is the thugs who act, and insecurity has crossed yet another limit.
The Kalashnikovs of La Courneuve demonstrate the extent to which the French people have been dupes.
I have already reported on the existence of war weapons here.
Highly recommended too is this post from December 2007 about a French judge's warning...
The beautiful black and white photo, taken by Arnaud Schelstraete, of La Courneuve Park is from Libération. I believe the buildings are part of a project, but in this photo they look almost surreal. In some other photos I've seen they are depressing, nondescript structures lacking in character. | <urn:uuid:d09fad5d-9d84-40c5-aad2-ce7ed0e817ae> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://galliawatch.blogspot.com/2009/05/from-karcher-to-kalashnikov.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96835 | 1,192 | 1.859375 | 2 |
Editor's note: Sound off on how the oil spill is being handled on iReport.
Washington (CNN) -- President Barack Obama used his first Oval Office address to the nation Tuesday to say 90 percent of the oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico will be captured within weeks, and to call for a new clean energy policy to end U.S. dependence on fossil fuels.
The 18-minute speech, televised nationally, described what happened in the April 20 explosion and fire on a Gulf of Mexico oil rig that led to what Obama called "the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced." He compared the millions of gallons of oil leaking into the ocean to an epidemic "we will be fighting for months and even years."
Obama meets Wednesday with the chairman of oil giant BP, which owns the broken well at the bottom of the Gulf, and the president made clear he expects BP to pay all clean-up costs and damages from the massive leak.
He said he will tell BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg to "set aside whatever resources are required to compensate the workers and business owners who have been harmed as a result of his company's recklessness."
"This fund will not be controlled by BP," Obama said. "In order to ensure that all legitimate claims are paid out in a fair and timely manner, the account must and will be administered by an independent, third party."
In response to Obama's speech, a BP spokesperson said the company shared the president's goals of "shutting off the well as quickly as possible, cleaning up the oil and mitigating the impact on the people and environment of the Gulf Coast," and looked forward to Wednesday's meeting "for a constructive discussion about how best to achieve these mutual goals."
Earlier, senior administration officials told reporters that negotiations on the BP fund were continuing, with one major unresolved issue being whether workers who lose their jobs due to the government's six-month moratorium on offshore drilling will be eligible to file damage claims.
Republican critics have complained the moratorium is eliminating badly needed jobs as the nation recovers from economic recession, but Obama said the government must ensure the safety of such deep-water operations before allowing them to continue.
Obama said he knows the moratorium "creates difficulty for the people who work on these rigs."
"But for the sake of their safety, and for the sake of the entire region, we need to know the facts before we allow deep-water drilling to continue," he said.
Obama also called the Gulf oil disaster "the most painful and powerful reminder yet that the time to embrace a clean energy future is now." The United States must end its dependence on fossil fuels, he said, calling for Congress to rise above partisan politics to take on the challenge of passing energy reform legislation that will lead the way to development of a clean energy economy.
In an attempt to counter complaints of a sluggish government response to the oil disaster, Obama noted cited resources have poured into the region including nearly 30,000 people working in four states to contain and clean up the oil, along with "thousands of ships and other vessels." He said he had authorized deployment of more than 17,000 National Guard members along the coast to be used as needed by state governors.
Republican responses, some distributed to reporters before the speech began, criticized Obama for using the oil disaster to push his energy reform policies, which GOP critics say will increase energy prices and eliminate jobs.
"Every day seems to bring more bad news about the size and scope of this crisis, and reversing that trend should be the president's priority," said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky.
"The White House may view this oil spill as an opportunity to push its agenda in Washington, but Americans are more concerned about what it plans to do to solve the crisis at hand," McConnell said.
He complained the energy reform legislation supported by Obama also is endorsed by BP and will "raise energy prices for every American family and business" but "won't end our dependence on foreign oil or protect the coastline and marshes of the Gulf coast."
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, said the administration's focus should be on stopping the leak, not pushing Obama's policies.
"I am concerned the administration is attempting to capitalize on public outrage over the spill in order to push through a cap-and-trade bill that will significantly raise energy prices for all Americans and add more burdens on businesses," Hutchison said in a statement. "Right now, the president's number one priority needs to be keeping the jobs in the energy sector from going overseas and restoring the Gulf of Mexico."
Environmentalists supported Obama's call for Congress to pass energy reform legislation, with former Vice President Al Gore, now chairman of the Alliance for Climate Protection, saying that "in the midst of the greatest environmental disaster in our country's history, there is no excuse to do otherwise."
Ultimately, Gore said in statement, "the only way to prevent this type of tragedy from happening again is to fundamentally change how we power our economy."
Earlier Tuesday, Obama named Michael Bromwich to direct the federal government's efforts to regulate offshore oil drilling. Bromwich, who was a Justice Department inspector general in the Clinton administration, will oversee the reorganized agencies that formerly comprised the Minerals Management Service in the Department of Interior.
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told ABC News on Tuesday morning that Obama's goal is to "restore the Gulf, not just the way it was the day the rig exploded, but years ago."
Presidents have tackled a variety of topics in Oval Office speeches -- from the Challenger disaster in 1986 to the attacks of September 11, 2001. Energy was last a topic in 1979, when Jimmy Carter spoke about America's inability to overcome the energy crisis.
While Obama has dealt with major issues including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a major economic downturn since taking office in January 2009, he had never spoken to the public from the Oval Office until now.
CNN's Dana Bash, Anderson Cooper, Suzanne Malveaux, Ed Henry, Ed Hornick and Tom Cohen contributed to this report. | <urn:uuid:88cbceb5-11e2-4eaa-be93-ddfa400cf1e5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/06/15/obama.speech/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00049-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961818 | 1,245 | 1.898438 | 2 |
Directed by: Andrew Davis
Starring: Shia Laboeuf, Khleo Thomas, Jon Voight, Sigourney Weaver, Eartha Kitt, Patricia Arquette
Holes is as rare as treasure found buried in the desert -- a movie made for kids that adults can thoroughly enjoy. Thanks go partly to Andrew Davis, a dynamic director who usually applies his talents to big action flicks (such as 1993's The Fugitive, one of my favorite movies of all time). The book's author, Louis Sachar, also wrote the screenplay -- a rare happenstance of creative continuity. Holes, winner of the 1999 Newberry Award (the most prestigious award in children's literature), has become, in some circles, as popular as the Harry Potter franchise. (When I last checked, Barnes & Noble had copies of Sachar's book on their shelves.)
What makes the movie so good are the same things that have made all those English teachers around the country so keen on assigning it: a complex yet accessible feel-good, feel-proud contemporary story interwoven with two historical tales; kooky, likeable characters (both among the good guys and the bad); a totally weird setting (a dry lake bed with concrete-hard soil and endless sun and dust); and an intellectually satisfying grab-bag of themes ranging from racial diversity to family solidarity all the way to justice.
Although Holes is at times annoying (one character's rattlesnake-venom nail polish) and preposterous (two kids without water climbing a mesa in 100-degree heat), it's mostly touching, funny, meaningful and, to use an old-fashioned word that seems to have gone out of favor lately, it is, most importantly, entertaining.
Stanley Yelnats IV (Shia LaBoeuf, TV's Even Stevens) is an insecure Adam Sandler-type of kid from a family whose men routinely blame their bad luck on their "no-good, rotten, pig-stealing great-great-grandfather," Stanley Yelnats The First. It seems the original Stanley, as a young farmer in Latvia, failed to complete a task given him by a gypsy seer, Madame Zerone (the ubiquitous Eartha Kitt), who cursed him and all his male progeny. After immigrating to the U.S., he achieved legendary status after being held up by infamous Texas stagecoach robber Kissin' Kate Barlow (Patricia Arquette, Little Nicky), and living to tell about it.
Though today's Stanley revels in these stories of old, he seems not to be the stuff of legends. Blamed falsely for stealing a pair of shoes from a homeless-center fund-raiser, Stanley is sentenced to 18 months servitude at a bad-boys reformatory. Camp Green Lake, which has neither water in it nor anything remotely resembling greenery within 100 miles is a detention center of Dickensian drudgery where a hapless lot of teenage boys must every day dig holes (5 feet wide and 5 feet deep) under a searing, cloudless sky. Their keeper is Mr. Sir, Jon Voight (Ali, and here wearing padding and a brunette pompadour), having entirely too much fun hamming it up as a Texas cowboy gone bad. Sigourney Weaver (Aliens) also has too much fun playing the wicked witch of the West, the nasty "Warden," who forces the compulsive digging of holes on worthless land that was once the valuable lake owned by her great grandfather.
Zero, the runt of the reformatory litter (Kleho Thomas, numerous TV commercials), who actually likes digging, bargains with Stanley to dig his hole in exchange for Stanley's teaching him to read. But, uh oh, this causes big trouble with the rotten adults, and Zero flees across the desert to the distant mountains. Stanley, compelled by friendship, risks his own life to venture into the wasteland to find and save Zero. Little does Stanley IV know he is journeying to destiny, and that along the way, he will find a secret crop of giant onions, a satchel of treasure, a den of deadly lizards, the cure for stinky sneakers, true courage and the antidote to the family curse.
As I said, this is one entertaining movie. | <urn:uuid:ccb490d2-af60-425d-bd00-0a3e64e9e0a0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mountainx.com/movies/review/holes.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9506 | 892 | 1.5625 | 2 |
The AXIA A108 is the world's smallest PDA phone on the Microsoft Windows CE .NET Operating System. But size doesn't matter these days, it has all the standard phone functions, plus everything else you would expect in a PDA. User will appreciate the large 2.2", brilliantly sharpe display which produces crisp, clear visuals. While its alpha-numeric keypad is specially designed for one-handed operation, making it ultra convenient for text messaging.
Check out its specification... it uses Freescale processor..
Why Freescale ?
Because it has a manufacturing plant in Malaysia by the road side of Federal Highway. Malaysia Boleh!
AXIA is created by Malaysian... Malaysian Boleh! The company main concept is to build a phone with a lot and ample built-in applications for its user. Hardware design is done by Singaporean expert while manufacturing plant located at Sungai Petani, Kedah Malaysia.
The inventor focuses on concept, branding and applications. Thus they are not counting on the fact that some company will help them to develop a SDK(Software Development Kit) at low cost so that it can be shipped alongside the packaging, which would otherwise be expensive. If so, programmers around the world would make use of the SDK to develop applications and either sell it to AXIA user or upload it for free in AXIA homepage or other URL. Thus, this is not really a good idea because the development of SDK is not going to be cheap. If you engage company like Axiomatic Solutions S/B, development cost would be around RM500K without royalty.
Thus, the second solution is to hope that someone would go and purchase Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and develop applications for it. Then either upload it to AXIA homepage or other URL for either free download or purchase with credit card or Mobile Money.
But Microsoft Visual Studio .NET cost RM 1500.00 (unless you are talking about pirated)
Thus nobody would be very keen on that too.
The Java factor:
Another way is to install Java into the device. You need to install a JVM into Windows CE.NET. You may find the listing here. There are two types of JVM:
1. CDC (512KB +)
2. CLDC (512KB -)
based on AXIA specification, it has 64MB Flash ROM. Windows CE can be as small as 200KB for a minimal configuration. Thus on the average, it is about the size of JVM too. Therefore, to include Windows CE and JVM into the device is not a big problem for 64MB of disk space (Flash ROM)
Then, programmers can make use of J2ME to develop applications for AXIA 108 and either upload it to AXIA homepage or other URL and then either make it a freeware or shareware or buyware.
However, since they already chosen Microsoft as the platform, might as well forget about Java.
The Right Way:
Thus the right way for them to have a cost effective sales is to hire 2-3 programmers and using Microsoft Visual Studio .NET to develop as many applications as possible and make it built-into the device.
They need to do this because the USP (unique selling proposition) of AXIA is to provide rich built-in applications to its user. Compare to other brand like Blueberry, O2 and etc have difference focuses. Therefore, this is to drive the sales.
To achieve cost saving, they just need to hire few programmers in Malaysia and pay them like RM 3-5K monthly and force them to develop as many applications as possible using RM1500 Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. Let's assume that they hire 3 programmers and cost them RM15K monthly, RM 500K would provide them(programmer) with 33.3 months of employment; that is like around 2 years duration. On top of providing job employment for people, they also become owner of the Intellectual Property(IP) and able to change the source code anytime and anyway they wish. Thus, of course this is smart and a good deal. Malaysia Boleh!
The following are applications available..
- AXIA launcher
- INFOMate - Weather Forecast, World News, EPL News, and AXIA bulletin
- TextMaker - Microsoft Word document editor
- PlanMaker - Microsoft Excel document editor
- AXIA Email with support to download attachments
- Jettayu MMS
- Jettayu WAP browser
- STR (SIM Tool kit)
- AXIA calendar
- AXIA notes
- AXIA Task
- AXIA Phone Book
- AXIA MPEG 4 player
- AXIA photo album
- AXIA Group list
- AXIA Flash Backup
- Astraware Games - Cubis, Dynomite, RoketMania and Bejeweled.
- AXIA Desktop Application for managing data and PC backup
- Synchronizing PIM and email with Microsoft Outlook
Isn't it fantastic, I will never use most of them anyway.Facing problems?
It is actually a GSM phone with GPRS, IrDA and USB support. Oopss.. thus it means that they are in problem now.. becoz 3G is coming.
Since they outsourced the hardware design and manufacturing, it would cost them another fortune to design a 3G hardware from scratch. Thus, they need to sell it really well now and before 3G really gets the going tough for them.
But not to worry so much because they have conquered the European market very well. 3G will still take some time for adoption and by that time, they should have earn enough fortune to produce another 3G device with even more applications.
To find out more about embedded system...
To see this book's discounted price | <urn:uuid:7e800945-255e-4ac5-9998-2db5a3547bf1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.it-sideways.com/2005_09_01_archive.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931262 | 1,197 | 1.804688 | 2 |
Of all the dumb legislation and regulations related to housing market, a bill being proposed John Isaacson (R-GA) and Michael Bennet (D-CO) ranks right up there with the dumbest. The bill is called the Sensible Accounting to Value Energy Act.
These two mental midgets are proposing that banks considering the monthly utility costs of a home when underwriting mortgages for a potential borrowers. Their thinking is that utility costs are a significant burden on home owners and therefore should be considered as part of the underwriting process for government sponsored mortgages (Fannie/Freddie/FHA). There are some obvious reasons as to why it makes no sense to try to include utility costs in mortgage underwriting. The most notable being that different families have different utility needs and usage. For instance, some families may blast air conditioning/heating all year long while others may enjoy natural ventilitation or using fireplaces. Utility costs are extremely variable depending on the owner of the home.
The second issue is that counting utilities adds yet another layer of complexity to an already overly complicated underwriting process. The debt ratios that banks use have been developed over many
decades and already reflect that there are some unaccounted costs when it comes to home affordability. To require specific documentation is simply not necessary. In addition, one has to ask when enough is enough. For example, some people probably spend more each month on gas for their cars than they do for utility bills for their home. Should we also require require borrowers to disclose what type of car they drive and their weekly commute to better gauge how much they spend on gas for their cars?
The third issue is that a responsible homeowners should know how to budget for their own utility costs. Dare I say if a homeowner can’t afford their utilities, they can’t afford the house. Secondly, if they can’t figure out that they have to consider the miscellaneous upkeep associated with owning a home, maybe they aren’t quite smart enough to be a home owner. As we found out during the housing bubble, home ownership is not meant for everyone.
Finally, there may be other motives associated with this piece of legislation. When you read between the lines of the bill and look at who is supporting the legislation you get a clearer picture as to what the real intent of the legislation might actually be – creating supposed “green jobs.” The LA Times reports:
“Dozens of housing, energy and environmental groups have endorsed the new legislation including appraisers, large home builders, the U.S. Green Building Council, the Natural Resources Defense Council, green-designated real estate brokers, the Institute for Market Transformation and the National Assn. of State Energy Officials, among others.
Business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are backing the legislation because they see it as an employment generator that requires no federal budget outlays and no new taxes or programs. A joint study by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy and the Institute for Market Transformation estimated that 83,000 new jobs in the construction, renovation and manufacturing industries could be created by the legislation if the new underwriting rules were phased in over a period of years.”
When I read that quote, my transalation is that some how this legislation or future legislation is going to force homeowners to make energy efficient upgrades to their homes. By tying the utility costs to mortgages, homeowners who do not make these upgrades will be a significant disadvantage in the market place if borrowers cannot get mortgages to finance their property.
I’ll let you know how this legislation is progressing in future posts. | <urn:uuid:a33ef3d5-63d2-432c-a325-bc162334a24c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://smartmortgageadvice.com/?p=940 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00069-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965257 | 742 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Gov. Bobby Jindal is meeting for the first time with the families displaced since August by a massive sinkhole in Assumption Parish.
Jindal planned a Tuesday afternoon visit with residents and local officials in the Bayou Corne area, a sparsely populated swampland about 40 miles south of Baton Rouge.
Scientists say the sinkhole formed after the collapse of an underground salt cavern operated by Houston-based Texas Brine.
The governor had been largely absent from the public response to the sinkhole until last week. Displaced residents had criticized his absence and local media highlighted it.
About 350 people living in the area have been under an evacuation order for more than seven months. Texas Brine officials say they were beginning to contact residents Monday to discuss buyouts and settlement offers.
Previous story:Sinkhole grows as buyout conversations begin | <urn:uuid:9911fb9c-7892-4320-a854-e1c05ac7e598> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wdsu.com/news/local-news/new-orleans/Jindal-visiting-sinkhole-area-for-first-time/-/9853400/19379044/-/7xs1clz/-/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966284 | 172 | 1.976563 | 2 |
Here’s the difference. If a self employed man left his business for a year or more, he would likely come back to a closed up store front.
If a business owner, on the other hand, left for a year or more, he or she would likely return to a still thriving business that may even have become more profitable.
the difference can be summed up in the wording of this question:
“how can you turn $10 into $40?” versus “How can your $10 multiply itself?”
I’ll go ahead and give you the answers. for the first question ”how can you turn $10 into $40?” you simply need to buy $10 worth of product, add value, scarcity or convenience then resell that product for $40! It’s the basis for product based businesses.
Now, as for “how can your $10 multiply itself?” that requires an automated system.
Let’s delve into the seedy underworld of selling candy bars for an example.
for the first question, I’ll buy 20 candy bars for $.50 a piece, find a place that has no candy bars, add value through scarcity and convenience and sell them for $2 each. Repeat until your rich!
For the second question I’ll need a slightly more complex system. I’ll find someone who needs money and after drafting the necessary legal agreements, I’ll give him my $10 with the instructions to buy 20 candy bars for $.50 a piece, find a place that has no candy bars, add value through scarcity or convenience and sell them for $2 each. He’ll then get to keep $5 of the $40 then reinvest the remaining $35 and buy more candy bars and repeat the process keeping 12.5% of the profit each time.
In 5 days, I’ll have $10,503.75 and he’ll have $2,074.25! This is a hypothetical example of geometric growth!
If I just did it myself, and IF I had the selling skills, reinvesting the total amount, I would have a few thousand more, minus the cost of gas and minus the hours spent finding and attracting customers, buying and selling and dealing with customer service, complaints supplier issues, etc.
but I wouldn’t have spent that week with my family and friends or on vacation or creating other business systems or even sick at home. I would personally prefer to not work and still be getting a thousand times my investment back in just 5 days.
Now, that I have Capital I can cut the same deal with 7 other people in 7 other markets. Now in 5 more days I’ll have $73,526.25. Not bad for 10 days, a $10 investment and almost zero work! Now add 2 or 3 zero’s to my initial investment, add a marketing and training manager, incorporate, add in a corporate tax rate, hire someone to run the whole thing and you have the basic structure of a 7 figure asset.
I know what you’re thinking but, It is that easy! Here’s why; all of the legal stuff, the taxes, the corporate structure, the vendor problems are all unconditional. I mean you have to do this stuff or hire someone to do this stuff for you so its a foregone conclusion that it will get done. You just have to keep your eye on your intended outcome, wealth.
Now wealth is not a dollar amount. The definition of wealth is: the number of days you can survive without working or anyone else in your household working while maintaining your standard of living. You see, wealth is measured in time not cash.
For example, if your income from assets is greater than your expenses, you can live indefinitely without having to physically work for another dollar. The goal of this training series is to kickstart you on your way to true wealth. | <urn:uuid:237a98e4-b1e4-4249-a4ab-e5b7a0bea3c4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.brickandmortarmanifesto.com/2012/03/how-to-turn-10-into-10000.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00049-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95377 | 825 | 2.03125 | 2 |
Al Gore had so wanted to nab the Capitol. He had planned all along on making Washington, DC a key link in the Live Earth concert chain, starting hours after Sydney, right after London, right before New York. Around the world, 2 billion viewers - including many of those mythical millions who, Billy Crystal or Whoopi Goldberg inform us, dutifully watch every year's Oscars - would watch carbon-conscious rock stars shatter their amps in view of the massive Capitol dome.
And then Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, a global warming skeptic, put the brakes on it. Organizers were shocked: not even an Oscar and a clutch of Huffington Post essays could override the power of a duly-elected pain-in-the-ass. The concert was scrapped until Friday, when the Smithsonian offered up the grounds of the Museum of the American Indian. The word went out online, Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood booked their plane tickets, and on Saturday the Mall's newest taxpayer-funded field trip destination hosted a pathetically small crowd in front of, well, basically, nothing. Look ahead and you could see the stage. Crane your neck and you could spot some grass and footpaths and some perplexed tourists. Gore, looking far less imposing than the holographic Gore that beamed into in Tokyo, put his sunniest spin on the new location. "It wasn't the cavalry that came to our rescue," he said. "It was the American Indians."
Sure, fine, but everybody knows the truth: Gore really needed that Capitol in the background. He needed a display of power and there is no greater display of power than shaking your fist in front of a giant crowd as the vast legislative house of the world's superpower looms behind you. American troops are in Iraq because of a decision made inside that building. A wall along the U.S.-Mexico border that would immediately become the longest and largest in history has been funded, and may be built, because of a decision made inside of there. A rally in the view of that dome has the imprimatur of the American empire. That's what you want those 2 billion people to see.
Just don't count Cullen Murphy, the longtime Atlantic managing editor, among the billions. In Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America he envisions a happy day when Al Gore and Jim Inhofe won't be brawling over concert licenses. "I doubt I'm the only person," he writes, "who has trod, with lofty step, the sculpted gardens of the Capitol and been seized with a vision of how the city might appear as a ruin."
Murphy hardly writes about anything without treading through it. When he was a boy he toured Rome "walk[ing] alone in the early morning with a sketchbook." He's visited every important outpost of the Roman Empire and some of the key sites of Pax Americana, like Bagram Air Base. As an editor he published some of the glummest predictive journalism ever written, some of it (like James Fallows' The Fifty-first State?) depressingly prescient. His brief book has the feel of a life's work, much like Gore's post-politics output. Both men plunder the past to predict the future, Gore with his ancient glacier data and wind patterns, Murphy with the Rome collection at the Boston Aethenaeum.
And Murphy has the easier case to prove. Is America the new Roman Empire? Yes, obviously it is. America dominates the planet militarily, economically, culturally, as much or more than Rome ever did. Americas know their position and their superiority as surely as the Romans did. The Capitol, like every other ruin-to-be in Washington, was modeled in the Roman image, and half of it is named for the Roman Senate. Our confidence leads us to make the same kinds of military blunders as the Romans, and the only argument is whether Iraq is our Teutoburg Forest or our Adrianople - if we've learned our lesson and will stop pushing outside our boundaries, or if we've used up all of our get-out-of-jail cards and are primed for a fall.
Americans started comparing ourselves to the Romans long before we had an empire to worry about - shortly before we were Americans at all. Before the Revolution, as Murphy points out, Americans performed Joseph Addison's Cato: A Tragedy in Five Acts and walked to the wrap parties ready to trade life for liberty. When George Washington declined absolute power and when he walked away from the presidency after two terms, Americans reached back to a Roman hero to pay their tribute: Washington was Cincinattus. The statue of a toga-clad Washington handing back his sword to the masses now sits in the Smithsonian, although Murphy worries that the "reference is probably lost on most visitors: Washington looks like a man in a sauna reaching for a towel."
Our cognizance of Rome and of her downfall is an insurance policy. A culture that tells and re-tells the Roman epic everywhere from the founding to HBO series to the second Star Wars trilogy has obviously paid its attention to history. Not enough, says Murphy: We don't realize that an empire that's going to last has to start acting with an eye on the future. So we need a "hundred-year workout plan" to correct our short-sightedness, and we need to stop privatizing government services. "Yes, it takes some imagination to see how corrosive privatized government will prove to be many decades down the road," Murphy argues. "Start thinking in centuries."
Does that sound like a stretch? Well, it is. The rest of Murphy's problems that threaten to turn the Capitol into a new Coliseum are problems of centralization, power, overconfidence; we can protect our culture with a border wall, we can remake Mesopotamia if we clap a little louder. Privatization leaps almost out of nowhere, out of Murphy's anger at political corruption and out of documents that reveal powerful Romans trading favors for cash. So he argues points like "as in Rome, privatization still includes turning over government departments to incompetent cronies, empowering private individuals at the expense of public intentions." His example? Michael Brown at FEMA.
Mull that one over. If you're looking for an example of the ills of privatization, of shrinking government, does anyone disprove your point like Michael Brown? He was the man at the top of an organization of Laurel-and-Hardy-level screw-ups, which had been folded into the Department of Homeland Security, a font of even greater screw-ups. His pivotal moment, his own Teutoburg Forest, was the evacuation and clean-up of New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina. While Brown was blowing it, what organization was shoveling supplies to survivors with epic efficiency? That's right: Wal-Mart.
But that's merely more fuel for Murphy's nightmare. He sees three bleak possible future for Pax Americana. In one, the borders are locked off and the security state peeks into every bedroom. In another, America's megalopolises break off into city-states: Cosimo di Medici, meet Michael Bloomberg. In his grimmest scenario the breakdown of controlling authority and the sense of "in-this-togetherness" that government provides leads to "the rise of corporate feudalism on a global scale."
Sounds bleak, but is that a scenario where the American empire falls and snooty Chinese tourists snap photos standing aside the rubble of old Washington? No; it's a scenario where America has basically won. Commerce has won out. Culture has won out. If you believe that spreading American cultural norms around the world is more important than planting the flag or christening some new military camp, what's there to fear from a future where government controls less and less and business governs the affairs of man more than nationalism?
Again, that's Murphy's worst nightmare. His other predictions of doom are cut down by his optimism about America's ability to adapt, to absorb immigrants, to trade, to tolerate. "America's powerfully absorptive and transformative domestic culture" is "more than a match for any challenge and doesn't need to be ‘run' by bureaucrats or told what to do." This isn't a prediction that American hegemony will go on and on and on like some propaganda poem commissioned by Augustus. It won't, obviously. But it would be folly to try and preserve American power (or American culture) by locking down the demographics and the bureaucracy that we have today and refusing to experiment for fear of wrecking everything. Not only does that flout the very reason Pax America has been so successful, it indulges the habit that so irritates Inhofe about Al Gore: working from pessimism and drawing a straight black line from the present into the infinite, ominous future.
David Weigel is an associate editor of reason. | <urn:uuid:4bb53c41-cdd6-4d1a-a9bd-50f5c56c52db> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://reason.com/archives/2007/07/09/quo-vadimus | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958853 | 1,837 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Our testers can veto releases at work, but we have an allied tradition that half a loaf is better than none. We may not get everything we want from an update, but if it makes some things better and no things worse, we go live. We can add the rest in a future update.
A gaming example comes from GW2 crafting. At launch, crafting could use items only from your character’s inventory. Soon after, you could craft from the vault but discovery was still inventory only. Now both check character inventory and the entire vault.
This is easier in my work than in gaming because our users are not competing with each other. If we can implement new functionality for one interface but need another month to accommodate the rest of our users, bonus for the users with the easy update. If your FPS added rocket launchers for PC players but needed another month to add it to the Mac client, forums would explode, especially if PC and Mac players were on the same servers. You can see this in games that are gradually rebalancing one class at a time rather than all at once. The relative values of classes are having large swings each month. LotRO had “the month of the [class],” TF2 had class-specific updates, and other games have similarly revamped single classes. See also City of Heroes gradually adding heroes’ passive archetype abilities over time, so there were months in which only half the classes had them.
Sometimes half a loaf is worse than none. Beyond the cases where it distorts your competitive balance, a function that only half-works can make some things worse and no things better. Adding something that only works for a known half of the users is inconsistent but reliable, which can be okay; adding something that works for everyone a seemingly random half of the time is inconsistent and unreliable, which is bad. The new functionality must work as expected, even if only under additional assumptions, and those assumptions must not cause other problems. Half a loaf is better than a whole loaf with gravel scattered through it. | <urn:uuid:e363e498-5268-4b12-a6f4-573e1df2e187> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.killtenrats.com/category/cohv/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963941 | 415 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Certain complex salts, notably ferro‐ and ferricyanides, have susceptibilities much lower than those predicted by the Bose‐Stoner ``spin only'' formula. The first interpretation was that given by Pauling on the basis of (I) directed wave functions. In the present paper it is shown that alternative explanations are possible with (II) the crystalline potential model of Schlapp and Penney, or with (III) Mulliken's method of molecular orbitals. In any of the theories, the interatomic forces, if sufficiently large, will disrupt the Russell‐Saunders coupling, and make the deepest state have a smaller spin, and hence smaller susceptibility, than that given by the Hund rule. This situation is not to be confused with that in normal paramagnetic salts, such as sulphates or fluorides, where only the spin‐orbit coupling is destroyed. The similarity of the predictions with all three theories is comforting, since any one method in valence usually involves rather questionable approximations. Because of this similarity, a preference between the theories cannot be established merely from ability to interpret the anomalously low magnetism of the cyanides. Covalent bonds, as in cyanides, seem to be more effective in suppressing magnetism than are ionic ones, as in fluorides, but so far the evidence to this effect is empirical rather than theoretical. | <urn:uuid:e060aee4-8ca4-4d12-a321-ef9f6aad420e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://jcp.aip.org/resource/1/jcpsa6/v3 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943214 | 279 | 2.53125 | 3 |
Legendary Pitcairn, last refuge of HMS Bounty's mutinous crew, is the remotest populated place in the South Pacific.
This tiny colony, founded in 1790 by nine fugitive Englishmen and 19 Polynesians, is presently more than 200 years old.
It's one of the ironies of history that Pitcairn, born out of treason to the British crown, was the first Pacific island to become a British colony (in 1838) and remains today the last remnant of that empire in the Pacific.
The four Pitcairn Islands are between Tahiti and Easter Island, 490 km southeast of Mangareva Island.
Pitcairn is an hour ahead of Mangareva Island (GMT minus 8 hours).
Intriguing Anglo-Tahitian history, the most remote Pacific territory.
All access is by sea, with tours from Mangareva and occasional cruise ship visits.
Well under a hundred people live on Pitcairn, including temporary contract workers. | <urn:uuid:ded8ab4d-d9be-42f5-9960-98c9b1a45a99> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pitcairn.southpacific.org/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.932322 | 205 | 3.296875 | 3 |
West High PTSA Parent Ed Night - How are our teens doing?
by Karen McKelvey
November 12, 2012
West High PTSA presents:
Wednesday, December 5, 7:00pm in the West High School Library.
This is an important panel discussion for all parents to attend to learn how to improve communication with your teen, understand the online world of your teen, and how to implement stress reduction skills for your family.
Please take the time to get informed on what is going on with our teens. Many of the parents who attended last year’s Parent/Student Education night felt the information they received was valuable. High school students are welcome to join this presentation. All attendees will have a chance to win prizes! | <urn:uuid:92b04d0f-9d07-4f90-8fb4-cc90249e232a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.whs.tusd.org/vnews/display.v/ART/4d91e86fbeab0 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960645 | 151 | 1.773438 | 2 |
Life Insurance News in Category "Bupa"
Are you going to look after your heart this Valentine’s Day? Looking after your health is the best way to keep your heart healthy.
A recent report published by Bupa outlines the best ways to look after your heart.
- physical activity
- stopping smoking
- moderate drinking
- healthy eating
- maintaining a healthy weight
- reducing your cholesterol levels
- high blood pressure
Getting into a routing of 30 minutes moderate intensity activity on five or more days of the week halves your chance of developing heart disease
Giving up smoking reduces your risk heart disease; it also reduces the risk of many other serious illnesses, like cancer and emphysema
Drinking too much damages your heart; causes high blood pressure, damage to your heart muscle and abnormal heart rhythms.
Binge drinking is really bad for your heart. Don't assume it's safe to drink 21 units (for men) or 14 units (for women) at the weekend if you have not had a drink all week!
A healthy balanced diet can help prevent heart disease. Limit the amount of salt, sugar and fat in your diet.
Maintaining a healthy weight
Being overweight increases your chances of developing heart disease and can mean your life insurance is more expensive.
Reducing your cholesterol levels
Reducing cholesterol levels in your blood can help you prevent heart disease. Eat a healthy, low-fat diet.
Diabetes puts your heart at risk. Diabetes can also increase the effect of other risk factors for heart disease, such as smoking and being overweight.
High blood pressure
High blood pressure (hypertension) increases your risk of heart disease. Make sure that if you are over 40 – make sure that you have it checked by your GP or a nurse as you may not know you have it. Search the NHS Directory for more information.
If you are at all concerned about your Heart this Valentine’s please contact your local GP. Please click here to see the full Bupa report.
Key Man Insurance
Key man insurance (or key person insurance as it is sometimes called) is fundamental to protecting a business that relies on a key person for the ongoing profitability of the company.
New research by Scottish Widows has found that 81 per cent of small-business people who have key people in their businesses are not covered for the loss in profit or cost of replacing those people. This is despite the fact that four in five sole traders believe they have at least one person whose loss through death, critical illness or serious accident would undermine the survival of the business.
In today's financial climate most businesses are too concerned about not spending money, so vital key man insurance gets overlooked. Life or critical illness insurance for a business fundamentally operates in the same way as it would for personal insurance. The policy can be tailored to fit the requirements of the company; for example critical illness cover can be taken out alone or as part of a bundled package, and the income from an income protection policy on a key man can be used to pay for any temporary replacement staff.
Working out how much cover you should have for the key person is a bit tricky, but as a guide there are two common methods; five times net profit the key person brings into the company, or two times gross profit, and also using a multiple of the key person's salary, such as up to 10 times gross income of that person.
Key man or person insurance is taken out by a company to cover someone who is considered to be vital to the business; the key is to establish the insurance correctly. The ownership of the policy is vital and you can either see a financial adviser and pay full commission or visit some of the major insurance company websites to get more information. Aegon have a dedicated key man insurance section on their website that is publicly available. It is worth downloading the guideline documents to see what is involved. If you need advice you must see a financial adviser, or if you just want some free information and discounted key man insurance quotes contact Lifebroker.
Posted under : Zurich, UNUM, Friends Provident, Key Man Insurance, Fortis Life, LV=, Liverpool Victoria, Income Protection Quote, Income Protection, Critical Illness Cover, Legal & General, PruProtect, Level Term Life Insurance, Life Insurance Broker, Personal Insurance, Life Insurance Quote, Life Insurance Comparison, Insurance Products, Canada Life, Business Protection, Bupa, Bright Grey, Aviva, Ageas Protect, AegonKnow more
Lifebroker is an innovative online life insurance broker that thinks differently about the insurance world. James Markwick at Lifebroker recently came up with the idea of promoting income protection to groups of cyclists. Mr Markwick said “this idea came out of an accident that I had towards the end of 2009. I commute to work on a bike and was knocked off by a bus in London. I was not too hurt thankfully but my bike was ruined and I had to get a new one. It got me thinking what would I have done if I had to get a new bike but did not have the immediate funds? This is when I spoke to my colleagues at Lifebroker and we came up with the idea of providing the funds ourselves to anyone that makes a valid claim.”
According to the Department for London there were 115 pedal cyclist fatalities and 2,450 reported seriously injured casualties (in 2008) with the number killed or seriously injured increasing in the last 4 years.
The majority of reported pedal cycle accidents happened in urban areas; these accidents account for 75 per cent of all pedal cyclist killed or seriously injured. This is explained by the fact that 77 per cent of cycle traffic was on urban roads in 2008. In comparison, 64 per cent of all accidents and 53 per cent of all KSI casualties occurred in urban areas.
Lifebroker have pledged to provide up to £1,000 to replace your bicycle if you make a valid claim on your income protection bought through Lifebroker due to being injured in a traffic accident on your bicycle. It is crucial that if you are an active cyclist that you have something in place to replace your income if you are ever caught up in a traffic accident, and with the added benefit of having your mode of transport replaced then getting a quote from Lifebroker for Protection has to be a must. Visit the Lifebroker today and get a quote.
Posted under : UNUM, Friends Provident, Fortis Life, LV=, Liverpool Victoria, Income Protection Quote, Income Protection, Legal & General, PruProtect, Life Insurance Broker, Personal Insurance, Life Insurance Comparison, Insurance Products, Canada Life, Bupa, Bright Grey, Aviva, Ageas Protect, Aegon, ZurichKnow more
Life Insurance is set up to financially provide for your loved ones in the event of death. But what are the drivers that instigate the search for life insurance?
Lifebroker finds that there are three main reasons for taking out cover;
- Taking out a mortgage or other type of loan
- Having a baby
- Someone close has just suffered from a serious illness or died
Lifebroker offers a full range of life cover that can suit most people's needs but points out that it is usually more obvious to protect the main earner as their lost income would have a huge financial impact, however a mistake that is often made is not insuring the partner that stays at home to look after the children. Although this person may not earn an income directly, they still add considerably to the family. If the non employed partner were to pass away the surviving partner has to adapt to ensure that children are taken care of. This process can prove to be very costly.
Lifebroker has listed the main reasons that their clients seek to get life cover:
1. Taking out a Mortgage or increasing an existing one
2. Becoming a parent
3. Someone close has suffered a serious illness or died
4. Income level change
6. Providing financial security for loved ones
7. Existing policy expired
8. Inheritance Tax Liability
Contact Lifebroker if you need help with getting the best quote.
Looking to compare life insurance quotes?
Posted under : Zurich, UNUM, Friends Provident, Key Man Insurance, Fortis Life, LV=, Liverpool Victoria, Legal & General, Mortgage Protection, Inheritance Tax Planning & Trusts, PruProtect, Level Term Life Insurance, Life Insurance Broker, Personal Insurance, Life Insurance Quote, Life Insurance Comparison, Insurance Products, Canada Life, Bupa, Bright Grey, Aviva, Ageas Protect, AegonKnow more
Comparison websites are everywhere - even the major supermarkets in the UK are launching their own comparison sites with ASDA being the latest. Lifebroker actually specializes in life insurance products (life, critical illness and income protection) and feels that it is better to specialize with the end result to be the best and not just 'one of the others.' James Markwick, Managing Director of Lifebroker said "when we launched Lifebroker in the UK it was clear that we had to specialize. There are too many comparison sites that sell pretty much anything from utilities to credit cards. I think that it is too confusing."
Lifebroker is pleased to only offer life, critical illness cover and income protection and feel that this is easier. Mr Markwick adds "as Lifebroker does not offer financial advice and it is really important that we promote clear and concise information throughout our website. We are not one of those sites that bombard visitors with other products or unwanted advertising."
At present the Lifebroker site uses a rebate structure to make their premiums lower and they are looking to enhance their customer experience by adding research to the site that will allow clients to choose their insurance based not only on cost but also on the fundamental features of the product. Mr Markwick says "this is something that I have seen in overseas markets. Clients will consider buying a slightly higher priced product due to the fact that it may be superior in quality. This will help them see more value."
Comparison sites in the UK are based mainly on price and Lifebroker want to change this.
Posted under : Zurich, UNUM, Friends Provident, Fortis Life, LV=, Liverpool Victoria, Critical Illness Cover, Legal & General, Mortgage Protection, PruProtect, Level Term Life Insurance, Life Insurance Broker, Personal Insurance, Life Insurance Quote, Life Insurance Comparison, Insurance Products, Canada Life, Bupa, Bright Grey, Aviva, Ageas Protect, AegonKnow more
Lifebroker welcomes the news that the Income Protection Task force is running Roadshows across the UK (Moneymarketing March 18 2010) to make Financial Advisers more aware of the need for this key insurance. Do Financial Advisers need to be educated about the need to provide Income Protection or do the public need to be made aware of the range of income protection products?
Lifebroker is not sure why so few income protection policies are purchased in the UK but they think that they may have an idea.
One thing is for sure though and that is that there is too much confusion in the market. With most protection sales being made via websites there is too many grey areas in defining exactly what income protection is. James Markwick from Lifebroker thinks that there needs to be some clarity in advertising income protection products. Mr Markwick said "when using search engines to get an income protection quote you will find that some companies are actually promoting Mortgage Payment Protection, others Accident Sickness & Unemployment cover, and other websites display it as longer term income protection (traditionally Permanent Health Insurance)." Lifebroker prefers the latter as it is more comprehensive.
Mr Markwick explains further what this means to the purchaser. "For me it is chaotic, definitions need to be put in place so that people know what they are being quoted." Having worked overseas for Lifebroker's Australian office Mr Markwick makes it clear that this confusion does not need to exist; he says "In Australia there is only really one type of income protection and that is of the longer term nature. In the UK I am continually told website sales of income protection are low due to the fact that it has to be an advised sale. I completely disagree with this as I know that many Australians buy the product from the Lifebroker Australia site in the same way. If it is an advised sale why are the advisers not selling it?"
Lifebroker are going to be improving this part of the site to reflect the Income Protection Taskforce's initiative by making it simpler and easier to understand.
Posted under : Zurich, UNUM, Friends Provident, Fortis Life, LV=, Income Protection Quote, Income Protection, Legal & General, Life Insurance Broker, Personal Insurance, Insurance Products, Canada Life, Bupa, Bright Grey, Aviva, Ageas Protect, AegonKnow more
National Non Smoking day is in its 27th year and is making progress
It is three years ago that the UK Government banned smoking in the workplace. The current smoking rate is 20%, however in the last 10 years it has steadily reduced. According to the Office of National Statistics the smoking rate in 2000 was 26%, by 2007 it had dropped to 22% and the latest figures for 2008/2009 show that it is sitting at 22%.
The Government wants to reduce the smoking rate to 10% by 2020 - they have some work to do. They have an new initiative that will concentrate on young people and preventing them from starting in the first place.
On top of the obvious health improvement of giving up there is also huge savings to be made. According to Lifebroker a 35 year old male who smokes will pay £29.23 per month for £250,000 level life cover over the next 25 years. For a non smoker the same policy would cost £15.56 per month, almost half the price.
Bettina Richen, Sales & Marketing Manager at Lifebroker said "not only are there the obvious health benefits that can be made from stopping smoking, but also there is a financial one that is two fold; saving you money from not buying cigarettes and also your insurance premiums dramatically reducing". Ms Richen states that you must be careful when looking at the definition of a non smoker as it means that you must not have had a cigarette in the last 12 months or used any other form of nicotine product. Ms Richen said "Make sure that you read the small print as some insurers include nicotine patches or even gum as part of the smoking status question. You must have not used nicotine products for 12 months. Be aware that some providers also have random checks to ensure that you are still a non smoker or you have not lied on your application."
Once you have not smoked for 12 months please contact Lifebroker as we will ensure that you get the best non smoker life insurance policy.
Posted under : Aegon, Ageas Protect, Aviva, Bright Grey, Bupa, Canada Life, Insurance Products, Life Insurance Comparison, Life Insurance Quote, Personal Insurance, Life Insurance Broker, Life Insurance Research, Level Term Life Insurance, PruProtect, Mortgage Protection, Legal & General, Critical Illness Cover, Liverpool Victoria, LV=, Fortis Life, Friends Provident, UNUM, ZurichKnow more
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64-66 Wingate Square
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Our business hours are:
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+44 (0)20 7501 1930 | <urn:uuid:3fefcb26-7732-408a-8daf-170083156fc6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.lifebroker.co.uk/news/c/bupa | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931917 | 3,737 | 1.96875 | 2 |
All of the Library's electronic resources are accessible from any computer in the Yale-New Haven Hospital including the Long Wharf and Shoreline locations. Identification of authorized users for ebooks, ejournals and other electronic resources is accomplished by "IP validation". Passwords are used only in a few special cases.
Affiliates of the Yale School of Medicine, Yale University or Yale-New Haven Hospital can access online resources through one of several remote access method. Remote access options and specific considerations/limitations on using Yale Library resources from some major offsite clinical locations are described below.
The Yale-New Haven Hospital Clinical Workstations
Clinical Workstations are located throughout Yale-New Haven Hospital as well as at some remote clinical sites. The Clinical Workstation computers are specially configured with software to access YNHH's clinical systems. Selected links to information resources are on the Clinical Workstation's Homepage. To ensure you are using the most current links, we recommend you access e-resources from links on the Medical Library's Website even when on the Clinical Workstations. All e-books, e-journals and databases available through the Yale Library system should be accessible from any computer on the Yale-New Haven Hospital network. Because of the particular configuration of the Clinical Workstations, there are some access problems from these computers. Journals from the Nature Publishing Group are currently NOT available from the Clinical Workstations although they can be accessed by other computers on the YNHH network or from your own device on the WiFi network.
WiFi connections at Yale-New Haven Hospital - both YNHH_Public and the secure HSC network - provides access to all library information resources. The HSC network requires login with your YNHH credentials (same as your EPIC login).
Saint Raphael Campus of Yale-New Haven Hospital - On June 1, 2013 the Saint Raphael campus network is scheduled to be merged with the rest of the Yale-New Haven Hospital network. Until that date, users on that campus should generally continue to access resources purchased through the former Hospital of Saint Raphael Library
USING THE PROXY SERVER OR VPN FROM OTHER LOCATIONS
The Medical Library Proxy Server and the Yale University VPNs are the primary remote access options for Yale University and Yale-New Haven Hospital affiliates seeking access to restricted Library resources. Firewalls, network restrictions and locked down computers makes using the proxy server or the VPN difficult or even impossible at some institutions. Some institutions specifically noted below allow proxy traffic to Yale while blocking VPN connections. The security features of the VPN increases the amount of Internet bandwidth used, resulting in a noticable decrease in speed when on an already slow Internet connection. That is another scenario where the proxy server may be preferred. Hopefully at least one of the available methods will work for you. If you are unable to use the proxy server or VPN from an offsite location due to technical reasons, contact us and we will do our best to find a technical solution for you.
Users should never share their passwords nor should they save passwords on computers that others use. Furthermore, if you configure a Web browser to use the proxy server, make sure that you "turn off" the proxy so that others are prompted to login. The result may be that others are unable to do anything on the computer.
MAJOR OFFSITE CLINICAL LOCATIONS
- West Haven VA Hospital
Computers in the clinical areas at the VA do not allow the configuration of proxy or VPN access and can not be used to access Yale-licensed resources. The VA Healthcare system subscribes to a number of electronic resources including UpToDate, Micromedex and ClinicalKey and these are available from VA clinical workstations. Access to Yale University resources is available from three computers located in the VA Medical Library. A Yale NetID is required to logon to the computers labeled "Yale School of Medicine Research Workstation". These computers includes Microsoft Office and EndNote. The VA Medical Library is located on the 2nd floor Building One. There are other locations on the VA campus with Yale computers including one outside the Medicine Chief Resident's office on the 5th floor of Building One. Contact Mark Gentry (firstname.lastname@example.org, 203 785-2163) or the Library Information Desk (203 737-4065) if you have problems logging into the computers with your NetID.
- Waterbury Hospital
The Waterbury Hospital Medical Library offers a solid collection of clinically-oriented print books and journals. Additionally, they have OVID Medline, Micromedex along with a core collection of electronic textbooks and journals. VPN access is not possible from the Waterbury Hospital network. Yale affiliates (faculty, house staff, medical/PA students) can access Yale resources while on rotations in Waterbury by using the Medical Library Proxy Server. Selected computers in areas including the residents' room on Pomeroy 4 are configured to use the Medical Library proxy server. Tablet PCs in the Chase Outpatient Clinic have the Firefox browser configured to use the proxy. When connecting through the proxy, always use links from the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library's home page.
- St. Mary's Hospital
The Finkelstein Library at Waterbury's St. Mary's Hospital has over 250 clinically-oriented journals and a core collection of books. If you are on the St. Mary's Hospital network, this link will take you to their electronic resources - Internal Access to St. Mary's Library Resources
You can access Yale Medical Library e-resources from St. Mary's by following the instructions on the attached sheet - Accessing Yale Library Resources from St. Mary's Hospital (Adobe Acrobat Reader required for this document).
Make sure you have applied for and received your proxy password before trying to access Yale resources from this or any other location configured for proxy server connectivity.
- Bridgeport Hospital
Bridgeport's Reeves Health Sciences Library has a solid collection of print resources and electronic resources including Micromedex, UpToDate OVID databases, e-journals and MDConsult's FirstConsult. Currently there is no option for accessing Yale Library resources from publicly accessible computers at Bridgeport Hospital. Network security measures do not permit users to modify browser settings or install VPN software on their hospital computers with IS department intervention. Yale Clinical Faculty based at Bridgeport Hospital should go through their Hospital Information Services to request that their computer be configured for VPN or proxy access.
- Connecticut Mental Health Center
The Connecticut Mental Health Center located behind on Park St. in New Haven is a major clinical site for Yale Psychiatry residents and many Yale-affiliated mental health professionals. We have worked with the state of Connecticut's Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services to allow Medical Library proxy access from this segment of their network. VPN access from the State of Connecticut network is not premitted.
- Community Health Centers
Fairhaven Community Health Center has computers available for clinicians can use to access the Medical Library through the proxy server. At Fairhaven, all computers in the charting room have a icon labeled "Yale Medical Library". Click on this to open a Web browser configured to automatically prompt for a proxy password and go to the Library's home page.
OTHER REMOTE ACCESS OPTIONS
- Central Campus Proxy Server
There is also a proxy server on the central campus. The Remote Authentication Proxy Server will provide access virtually identical to what the medical library proxy server provides. This service uses different software and requires university NETID authentication.
- Remote Access to Yale-New Haven Hospital Clinical Systems
None of the remote access methods offered by the Yale School of Medicine will allow you to reach YNHH clinical systems. Yale-New Haven Hospital's primary remote access solution for clinical and administrative patient data is "MDLink". Although you can access library resources through MDLink, it is easier and faster to use either the Medical Library proxy server or the Yale VPN. For more information about MDlink, call 688-2610 or E-mail the MDlink support staff at email@example.com. Some access is availble through the YNHH VPN service. For information on access to hospital systems, see the ITS page on Yale-New Haven Hospital software and information.
If you are still having problems, contact:
Clinical Support Librarian | <urn:uuid:0382d003-8309-4657-88fa-8432e8b6dbda> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://phlibrary.medicine.yale.edu/services/computing/offsite | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.901546 | 1,697 | 1.890625 | 2 |
A previous post (Sept. 3) said "You must link with the lapack library, before the mkl library, if you require functions from it."
My question is, "What is the lapack libraries and mkl libraries?"
The mkl directory has many libraries, most all of which I don't know what they do. And what is an "explicit" link?
My thought would be something like:
to "explicitly" link to mkl, since one of the libraries in the directory is libmkl.so . Or is an explicit link simply a path to the mkl directory
Would an "explicit" link lapack be:
The Fortran compiler's guide lists 7 default libraries the compiler always specifies (begining of Libraries chapter). But if there is a -L to the directory doesn't the linker searches all the libraries in some way that satisfies all the external appropriately? Why do I need to "explicitly" link.
Sorry for such a basic question. But shouldn't Intel put a paragraph about this in their Fortran compiler's guide somewhere? (Also, I am not a moocher. Our department has bought at least a dozen Intel licenses and one year support packages recently as we begin transitioning to Linux. It's just taking awhile for me to get our IT people to give me one of them.) | <urn:uuid:3e7f2984-9dc5-4363-8e64-08a7b87104dc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://software.intel.com/it-it/forums/topic/310872 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00044-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.927247 | 282 | 2.0625 | 2 |
“Are you sure you want to donate this?” I asked the intern. “This” was a slightly-used Smartphone, in perfect working condition. The intern, Rebecca Bacheller, was, indeed, willing to donate it. She heard that the Time and Navigation team wanted to disassemble one and showcase the current state of geolocation devices, enabled by the Global Positioning System and other advanced electronics. Our plan was to label the phone’s circuits, and show how they correspond to classical methods of navigation that had been practiced for centuries. Becky was excited that she would be credited in the label; she also had another motive: namely a reason to trade up to the newest version of the popular phone. (This is a never-ending treadmill: once you get on, it is impossible to get off.)
I prepared myself for the transfer by going on-line and special-ordering tools to disassemble it: a “pentalobe” screwdriver, a plastic pry-bar, and a tiny Phillips-head screwdriver. I also downloaded instructions on how to disassemble the phone, and I borrowed a head-mounted magnifier. When the day arrived, fellow curator Andy Johnston and I got to work, surrounded by a few sidewalk superintendants from the Space History Division.
Before describing what we found, I want to mention an important part of the new gallery. One of the centerpieces of Time and Navigation is a “SINS” guidance system, removed from the nuclear-powered submarine USS Alabama. “SINS” stands for “Submarine Inertial Navigation System,” and it was responsible for telling the sub where it was without having to surface to take a fix on stars or otherwise reveal its location. Hence the “inertial” components: a set of gyroscopes and accelerometers that, as its developer Charles Stark Draper called it, was like practicing “astronomy in a closet.” It was not perfect: the gyros had a tendency to drift, so periodically the sub would come near the surface to receive navigation signals from a Transit satellite orbiting overhead. (An engineering backup of a Transit will also be on display in the gallery.) A refrigerator-sized digital computer combined data from these inputs, corrected the gyros’ drift, and computed the sub’s position. The whole ensemble is rather bulky and heavy, and as Heidi Eitel mentioned in an earlier blog post, getting everything to fit in the gallery is quite a challenge.
So what does this have to do with the cell phone? As we disassembled it, Andy and I realized that almost every component of the SINS was present, even if you need a high-power magnifier to see it. A three-axis accelerometer? Check. Gyroscopes? Yes. A radio to receive satellite navigation signals? Yes, although the phone receives signals from GPS, not Transit satellites. A computer? Of course—the phone uses an “A4” processor supplied by the company ARM. It has more processing power than the CRAY-1 that used to be on display in the Beyond the Limits gallery. A keyboard and display to give and receive commands? Yes–the phone’s touch screen even replicates the old-fashioned “QWERTY” keyboard of the electric typewriter used on the submarine. A radio to communicate with the rest of the world? The phone has several, covering the major cellular frequencies in the UHF region. (The sub communicated by trailing a long wire behind it and receiving “Very-Low-Frequency” (VLF) radio signals—far below the standard AM broadcast band– chosen because they could penetrate water.) The Smartphone even has a magnetic compass.
The difference in size between the two systems is breathtaking, but there is another difference that may be even more significant. The SINS was designed to allow the submarine to navigate without anyone, other than the crew, knowing where it was. By contrast, a Smartphone has all kinds of circuits and software on board to let the world know where its owner is, and what he or she is doing. Submariners might be uncomfortable carrying one of these around.
It is going to be a challenge to show this disassembled object to our visitors and convey the magnitude of what they are looking at. Many visitors carry these devices with them and hardly give them a second thought. The gallery opens next spring, and we’ll see how this exhibit works.
Paul Ceruzzi is chair of the Space History Division at the National Air and Space Museum. | <urn:uuid:488f39a1-0817-484a-bce6-2b12dcc66850> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.nasm.si.edu/exhibitions/are-you-sure-you-want-to-donate-this/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00057-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958392 | 959 | 2.296875 | 2 |
In March 2007, Lee Carson, of the Black Gay Men’s Leadership Council, and Tyrone Smith and Kevin Jones, of the Archivists Society, sat down to speak to the mother of Joseph Beam, Ms. Dorothy Beam.
Joseph F. Beam (12/30/54-12/27/88) was born in Philadelphia, PA. A noted author and activists, he edited In the Life, the first Black gay anthology (published by Allyson Press in 1986).
According to the mother of Joseph Beam:
“There is some kind of fear in the black population that says they have to hide their gay sons. Religion frowns on this, but this is YOUR child… They ask: ‘Well how can you be so expressive and your son was gay?’ How can I not be? He’s my son!”
“…When Essex (Hemphill) came over to finish the book, he stayed at my house and got himself a job and an apartment… Essex wanted to finish the book because he loved Joe…one of the things Joe wanted was for gay people to be gay people. Joe’s books speak for themselves. When he wrote his books, there weren’t that many black gay books out. He would have written more but God called him to glory. But I thank Essex for coming over to finish it.”
“They say to pray for the gay sons. I don’t have to pray for God to change my son because that’s how he made him. If I’m going to pray for anything, I’m going to pray for God to change me into a white woman with blond hair.”
March 24, 2007 | <urn:uuid:1d6b4fe6-075a-451d-af50-85141ac22a37> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://archivistssociety.wordpress.com/tag/essex-hemphill/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973978 | 364 | 1.742188 | 2 |
The governing members of the Tibetan Freedom Movement convened its preliminary General Assembly in Dharamsala on July 30, 1972. One of the landmark decision was the tabling and passage of a resolution pertaining to the procedures for payment of Chatrel, a monthly voluntary contribution to the Central Tibetan Administration by all Tibetans.
It was resolved during the meeting that to look after the present and future welfare of Tibetan people, a firm and stable government was a must and that this would only be possible if a regular source of finance could be arranged. Therefore, meeting delegates resolved that beginning from August 1, 1972 every Tibetan above the age of six would be required to make annual contributions in the form of Chatrel as per rate stipulated.Those who are employed is required to pay additional chatrel based on a certain percentage of monthly salary. Meeting delegates also viewed the payment of annual Chatrel as signifying the recognition of Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) as the legitimate representative of all Tibetans.
On the basis of the resolution passed in the July 30, 1972 meeting of the Tibetan Freedom Movement, the 11th Assembly of Tibetan People’s Deputy formally adopted a law on the Chatrel in its April 1, 1992 meeting. The payment of Chatrel is a responsibility of all Tibetans as enshrined in article 13 of the Charter of the Tibetans in exile.
Tibetans contributing Chatrel are issued a Green Book. This book has over the years in effect become the passport of the exiled Tibetans to claim their rights from the CTA. Also in future it will become a base to claim Tibetan citizenship. Today, it is used for school admission, school or university scholarship, and employment within the exiled community. Payment of the voluntary contribution is a condition to gain voting rights in parliamentary elections.
Goals and Needs:
The existence of Chatrel symbolizes the Tibetan people’s recognition of CTA as their legitimate representative. Chatrel payment exhibits Tibetan people’s support for CTA’s financial needs until Tibet regains freedom. Chatrel funds is an important source of revenue for CTA and it goes towards supporting various projects and activities benefiting the exiled Tibetan community.
Residents of India, Nepal and Bhutan
|6 to 14 years||IRS 12|
|15 to 17 years||IRS 48|
|18 and above||IRS 58|
All other Residents
|6 to 17 years||US$36|
|Students and Unemployed||US$46|
|18 plus and employed||US$96|
|GB Application||Main Guidelines (Nov. 5, 2008)|
|GB Correction||Guidelines for Issuing New GB (Jun 15, 2007)|
|GB Lost||Guidelines for non-Tibetan spouses (Aug. 17, 2005)|
|What if you have lost your GB? (Dec. 23, 2010)| | <urn:uuid:e8bd590c-0b33-409d-9800-825d2581ef97> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://tibet.net/support-tibet/pay-green-book/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943743 | 591 | 2.453125 | 2 |
Japan never ceases to surprise.
Well shielded from superficial observations, the true nature of this country reveals itself in the small traditional neighborhoods and restaurants tucked away in the backstreets of Tokyo’s mix of contemporary and eclectic skyscrapers, in the cobblestone alleyways of old Kyoto and in the dim light of early evening in Nara’s 1,000 year old temples.
Let JapanQuest Journeys expertly lead you on an unforgettable and compelling trip full of intimate discoveries through the real Japan, through the seasons of a country traditional yet modern, and rich in scenic beauty and cultural heritage.
In spring the air is thick with the sweet scent of cherry blossoms that pervade every corner of Kyoto, Japan’s ancient capital. The ocean of pink blooms covering the slopes of the Eastern Hills lightly sway in the cool breeze enthralling passers-by with their transient beauty, and inviting them to follow the trail of the blossoms through countless weather-beaten temple gates and the beautiful gardens of royal villas hidden behind tall walls.
The trickling sound of water from a nearby well soon opens your senses to the realm of the mysterious beauty of a rock garden. Holding your gaze, it makes you forget the time, holding tight onto the secrets of its creator. The muffled murmur of Buddhist priests chanting sutras and the faint gong of the temple bell lets you slip into a dream of days long past when powerful samurai wooed beautiful ladies with a poem written in big bold strokes yet carrying ever so subtle a meaning.
Blink your eyes and you are back in the here and now of the old Zen temple that oozes the hundreds of years of history it has seen come and go. The samurai’s calligraphy is still there for you to admire and an ageless priest whom until now went unnoticed will politely enquire as to whether he may explain the meaning behind this priceless piece of art unassumingly decorating the otherwise barren halls.
The chirping of cicadas in a small bamboo grove announces summer has arrived, and Tokyoites seek respite from the heat in the cooler air of the mountain resort of Hakone whose hills and lakes offer a range of perfect vantage points for gazing at the majestic Mt. Fuji, Japan’s most holy of peaks, which itself seems only a stone’s throw from the nearby ocean. In Japan, the mountains and the sea keep each other company, never far apart, like lovers in a romantic haiku poem.
Small villages and towns scattered in the countryside, the old castle town of Kanazawa and the living museums of the old merchant quarters of Kurashiki and Takayama invite you to take a taste of Japan’s countryside where centuries–old traditions have braved the unforgiving crucible of modernity.
Farmers still work their paddy fields in the early morning hours as they have done for eternity, and celebrated masters of the old “ways” such as tea and brush teach their eager young disciples the patience that sees generations working to perfect their chosen art.
When the thunderous crack of fireworks echo through the night, Obon has arrived and cheerful summer festivals are held up and down the country in honor of ancestral spirits. The deep don-don of taiko drums resonates in the air making your heart beat faster and in unison with this country. Men and women, children and grandparents, all dressed in traditional summer kimono dance themselves into a trance of carefree happiness that embraces everyone watching them.
Autumn arrives in but the blink of an eyelid to transform the foliage on mountain slopes into a blaze of red, orange and yellow, a celebration of colors that easily rivals the beautiful costumes on a Kabuki stage.
Nature is the setting for the mysterious beauty of Miyajima Island in Hiroshima Bay and the picturesque old farmhouses in the remote mountain village of Shirakawa, a UNESCO Heritage Site that ranks among the best in the world.
What better way to experience the warm hospitality of Japan’s beautiful countryside, its exquisite cuisine and open-hearted people, than to enjoy a stay in a traditional inn. The simple yet sophisticated ikebana arrangement in the alcove of your tatami room perfectly mirrors the season as does the food, the freshest local fare prepared to the highest culinary standards, all tastefully arranged in many small bowls and dishes of delightfully crafted tableware. Each dish is a sophisticated work of art that pleases your eyes and regales your palate.
Winter approaches fast and its chilly winds draw you to the warmth of an old sake bar advertised by no more than a red lantern beside its door. The few locals in the tiny counter-only space welcome you like an old friend and sip by sip the hot sake warms your body and inspires you to try out a few words of Japanese with the friendly chef as you watch him prepare some morsels of unknown delicacies, each more delicious than the last.
Tokyo’s busy districts and bustling shopping streets are ablaze with the lights of elaborate illuminations making you feel excited and stimulated all at once on these foreign shores. Follow fashionable young couples strolling down the Ginza or along Omotesando where Japan’s exclusive department stores and chic boutiques tempt you to follow the sweet calls of a welcoming irraishaimase that invite you to step inside and experience Japan’s service culture at its finest.
Cold winter days are the perfect time to wander through the warm halls of Tokyo’s first-rate museums holding invaluable collections of Japanese and world art. Immerse yourself in decoding the intricate gestures of antique images of the Buddha or admire the superb artistic expression and craftsmanship of rare Edo-era treasures.
Towards the end of the year the atmospheric hustle and bustle found in the shitamachi area’s old shopping streets, with hawkers’ stalls stockpiled with seasonal foods and traditional Shinto decorations, precedes the country’s New Year’s celebrations when the chiming of temple bells across the city calls worshipers to their local shrine or temple for an auspicious first visit.
With our deep insider knowledge gained through decades of first-hand experience and with our extensive network of personally selected experts and guides, JapanQuest Journeys gives you unsurpassed access by leading you to the hidden spots of authentic Japan elusive to all but the locals. We will show you the most exciting and timeless places that remain off well-trodden paths, and offer you the chance to explore Japan’s mysteries and delights undisturbed and in-depth, unlocking thousand year-old secrets one by one throughout your journey. | <urn:uuid:f00d56a4-bccf-4c41-9cce-3ffbc964abea> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.japanquestjourneys.com/why-japan/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.921052 | 1,379 | 1.789063 | 2 |
November is National Hospice Month and the Sheridan Veterans Administration Medical Center operates an inpatient hospice program for veterans at the hospital. The hospice at the VA is a relatively recent addition in the last several years and the facility has used former medical patient rooms to serve hospice needs. Doctor John Carmen is the Chairman of the VA Hospice Committee.
Hospice Nurse Elizabeth Goodyear says it’s a different focus when it comes to treatment.
Many people hesitate to use hospice services because of the association with death. However many of the families say they wish they had made use of the service sooner after the patient has passed. In addition to providing patient care, the VA Hospice also offers up to 18 months of bereavement services for veterans families who are left behind. | <urn:uuid:955086e0-1105-4413-aca9-1fde00d9a377> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sheridanmedia.com/news/va-hospice-helps-patients-and-families5403?page=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00046-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967903 | 159 | 1.578125 | 2 |
nick at ccl4
Jul 26, 2012, 8:02 AM
Post #9 of 9
On Mon, Jul 16, 2012 at 12:31:01PM -0700, Klaus wrote:
> On 16 juil, 13:49, faw...@gmail.com (Leon Timmermans) wrote:
> > On Sun, Jul 15, 2012 at 4:27 AM, Uri Guttman <u...@stemsystems.com> wrote:
> > > ok, here is a brainstorm (or fart). it is a very rough idea for a better
> > > given/when syntax
> > >
> > > flames and plaudits are welcome.
> > I'm not seeing the point of this. The current semantics have many
> > flaws, but does one thing right: it's extensible on CPAN. You can
> > already do all of this and more, and IMHO with less ambiguity than in
> > this proposal.
> I very much agree with that, actions speak louder than words.
> I would very much like to write a CPAN module with what I believe
> would be the right extension for given/when, so my question is:
> I am just an average Perl programmer with a little knowledge of C, but
> no knowledge of XS, is there any documentation (perldoc, blogs,
> documents on the internet, etc...) that help me to write a given/when
> extension on CPAN ? (I prefer a pure perl aproach, but I am willing to
> learn XS if needed).
So, no-one answered.
I'm not aware of any documentation that specifically describes what one
would need to do to write a given/when extension on CPAN.
I don't even know which modules currently on CPAN do things related to
smartmatch, but I'd guess the way to go from here is to find them, look
at what they do (and can't do), and where it's not obvious what's going on,
ask the relevant authors specific questions, or (if it's messy XS code) ask | <urn:uuid:957fd52f-1d49-4d17-a520-1b278d222c0d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/perl/porters/281424 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00052-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.923003 | 458 | 1.921875 | 2 |
Many have said, “The kitchen is the heart of the home.” What every kitchen needs is stylish design, that make it not only a fully functional space, but a space in which people will love to spend time. After all, in most homes, the kitchen really is the most important room in the house.
- A Well-Sized Island
The social center of the kitchen, be sure to include a well-sized island.
- The Perfect Sink
Every cook knows what works for his or her prep and clean-up style.
- Integrated Refrigeration
Author Mick De Giulio says, “Creating cabinet facades to hide refrigeration units gives me a tremendous amount of design freedom. By eliminating a large, boxy element, I can make a kitchen feel more room-like.”
Look around your kitchen and consider which elements might be a bit lacking when it comes to both form and function. And if you find quite a bit that you are not happy with, take heart: there’s no need for a top to bottom remodel; just target a few specific elements and presto: a “new” kitchen is born!
For example, if your cabinetry works fine but looks dated, you will be amazed at what some new cabinet hardware can do — visit Klaff’s Home Design Store to see a huge cabinet hardware selection. And consider switching out just one or two appliances, such as the range and dishwasher, for a matching new pair. If your fridge is either black or white, go stainless with the others. And last? Fill your kitchen with visual texture and bright light!
If you live in the South Norwalk, Westport, and Danbury, Connecticut; or Scarsdale, New York area, you can come on in to a nearby Klaff’s Home Design showrooms to see beautiful and fashionable full-scale kitchen designs. You may contact the New England Klaff’s for more information by calling 1-800-552-3371 or by visiting the Klaff’s Home Design Stores website. | <urn:uuid:dee3676b-f3cb-4a52-85a3-18de8a4adf7f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.klaffs.com/featured/essentials-for-the-heart-of-the-home-connecticut-kitchen/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.924079 | 435 | 1.515625 | 2 |
Neuropsychological Performance 10 Years After Immunization in Infancy With Thimerosal-Containing Vaccines
PEDIATRICS Vol. 123 No. 2 February 2009, pp. 475-482
OBJECTIVE. Thimerosal, a mercury compound used as a preservative in vaccines administered during infancy, has been suspected to affect neuropsychological development. We compared the neuropsychological performance, 10 years after vaccination, of 2 groups of children exposed randomly to different amounts of thimerosal through immunization.
METHODS. Children who were enrolled in an efficacy trial of pertussis vaccines in 1992–1993 were contacted in 2003. Two groups of children were identified, according to thimerosal content in vaccines assigned randomly in the first year of life (cumulative ethylmercury intake of 62.5 or 137.5 µg), and were compared with respect to neuropsychological outcomes. Eleven standardized neuropsychological tests, for a total of 24 outcomes, were administered to children during school hours. Mean scores of neuropsychological tests in the domains of memory and learning, attention, executive functions, visuospatial functions, language, and motor skills were compared according to thimerosal exposure and gender. Standard regression coefficients obtained through multivariate linear regression analyses were used as a measure of effect.
RESULTS. Nearly 70% of the invited subjects participated in the neuropsychological assessment (N = 1403). Among the 24 neuropsychological outcomes that were evaluated, only 2 were significantly associated with thimerosal exposure. Girls with higher thimerosal intake had lower mean scores in the finger-tapping test with the dominant hand and in the Boston Naming Test.
CONCLUSIONS. Given the large number of statistical comparisons performed, the few associations found between thimerosal exposure and neuropsychological development might be attributable to chance. The associations found, although statistically significant, were based on small differences in mean test scores, and their clinical relevance remains to be determined. | <urn:uuid:7d57997a-562c-465e-8770-b042909ebee9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://explorevaccines.wordpress.com/2009/01/30/neuropsychological-performance-10-years-after-immunization-in-infancy-with-thimerosal-containing-vaccines/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956626 | 404 | 2.6875 | 3 |
The Barack Obama administration has begun to conduct secret contacts with Iranian leaders. Obama wants to convince Iran, by using diplomacy, that developing nuclear weapons is unacceptable, both regionally and internationally. Iran’s economy is deteriorating under the weight of stifling sanctions and it is possible that the country, under the rule of leaders who dream of exercising hegemony in the region and intervening everywhere possible, will begin thinking about accepting a suspension of its nuclear military program in exchange for getting the United States to lift sanctions.
However, suspending the Iranian nuclear program does not mean that Iran will not be able to quickly acquire nuclear weapons. A Canadian nuclear scientist told Al-Hayat that if a country can achieve uranium enrichment level of five percent, it has the technology to quickly build a nuclear weapon. Obama is interested in diplomacy, and not a war with Iran. However, the problem is that Iran is interested in wars, and intervening in its neighbors’ affairs, and dominating all of the countries in which it has proxies, from Lebanon to Iraq and Bahrain and the Gulf. American dialogue with Iran, which is being urged by some American media, will be a dialogue of the deaf, since the Iranians only understand the language of force, which they use with their people, just like the Syrian regime. Roger Cohen, the American columnist, asks, “What do we want from Iran? Open up all its nuclear facilities, get rid of 20 percent of its enriched uranium, end all threats to Israel, stop rampant human rights abuses, changed policies on Hamas and Hezbollah, a constructive approach to Syria.
What can we offer? Lift some sanctions, stop a range of covert actions, take regime change off the table, put the right to limited enrichment (up to 5 percent) on the table, and address the regional role of Iran.” Cohen enumerates the American conditions for a successful dialogue with Iran; in reality this involves asking for a change in the type of regime in Tehran, which will be unable to do what the columnist is suggesting. Even during the era of the Shah, Iran’s history has been about hegemony by force in the region. The Khamenei regime is using force to help the Syrian regime, which will fall sooner or later, as it sends weapons and fighters to that country.
This is because Tehran knows that if Syrian President Bashar Assad falls, Iran’s access to its allies in Lebanon will be cut off, while the country will be weakened regionally. Why should Khamenei abandon Hezbollah, its domination of Syria and Iraq and its interference in Lebanon, in exchange for the lifting of sanctions? Khamenei is not affected by sanctions; his people are the ones who are suffering, while the Iranian leadership has enough money and means to help its allies. Creative diplomacy, which Cohen is calling for with Iran, is ineffective with a government that sees no benefits other than by exercising hegemony and interfering in other countries, unconcerned with the interest of its own people. The Iranian leadership, despite its economic and financial difficulties, will not abandon its policy of paying money in Lebanon and Syria, while its policies impoverish the Iranian people. Creative diplomacy, as Cohen is calling for, cannot create a new regime, because Khamenei and his people do not understand the language of diplomacy. But the problem is that the language of war is very dangerous for the region.
The alternative of diplomacy involves taking a hard-line stance on Iran’s actions, to pressure the regime until it collapses, since hope has been lost when it comes to the Tehran leadership. Iran is a big country and its educated people have a long history, but the current regime has impoverished them and gradually distanced them from their historical culture, which has distinguished them. An Israeli strike against Iran will be very dangerous and is not the solution, just as bilateral Iranian-US diplomacy will not solve the problem – on the contrary. A hard-line stance, the isolation of Iran and its weakening in economic terms could have an impact over the long term on a regime that should disappear. Otherwise, establishing creative diplomacy with Iran gives it legitimacy, because it might understand this as American weakness.
(Randa Takieddine is a writer for Dar al-Hayat where this article was published on Nov. 15, 2012) | <urn:uuid:b2c20ccf-f2a1-4b70-b4a9-7c3f5e862667> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://english.alarabiya.net/views/2012/11/16/249881.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00052-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967349 | 864 | 2.046875 | 2 |
Helpful Advice for the Grieving Person
No one else will grieve in exactly the same way you do. When you turn to
others for help, don't allow them to tell what you "should" or "should not" be feeling.
Talk about your grief . . .
Talking about your grief will help you heal. Seek out others who will allow you to talk as
much as you want, as often as you want, about your grief.
You will feel a multitude of emotions . . .
Confusion, disorientation, fears, guilt and relief are just a few of the emotions you might
feel. Others may try to tell you that feeling angry, or guilty, for example, is "wrong."
Don't take these judgmental responses to heart. Instead, find listeners who will accept your
feelings without condition.
Be tolerant of your physical and emotional limits . . .
Your feelings of loss and sadness will probably leave you feeling fatigued. Respect what
your body and mind are telling you. Get daily rest. Eat balanced meals. Don't push
yourself, and don't let others push you, into doing things you don't feel ready to do.
You will experience grief attacks . . .
Sometimes, out of nowhere, a powerful surge of grief may overcome you. This can be
frightening, but is normal and natural. Find someone who understands and will let you talk
Make use of ritual . . .
The funeral ritual does more than acknowledge the death of someone loved. It helps provide
you with the support of caring people. More important, the funeral is a way for you to
mourn. Other rituals can be designed to help you structure the passage of milestones such as
anniversaries and holidays. Rituals are not unnecessary.
Embrace your spirituality . . .
If faith is a part of your life, express it in ways that seem appropriate to you. Allow
yourself to be around people who understand and support your religious beliefs. If you feel
angry with God, find someone to talk with who won't be critical of your feelings of hurt and
Search for meaning . . .
Ask, Why did he or she die? Why this way? Why now? Some of your questions may have
answers, but some may not. Comments like, "it was God's will" or "think of what you have to
be thankful for" are not helpful and you do not have to accept them.
Treasure your memories . . .
Memories are one of the best legacies that exist after the death of someone loved. You will
always remember. Instead of ignoring your memories, find others with whom you can share
Move toward your grief and heal . . .
Reconciling your grief will not happen quickly. Remember, grief is a process, not an event. Be
patient and tolerant with yourself and avoid people who are impatient and intolerant with
you. Neither you nor those around you must forget that the death of someone loved changes
your life forever. | <urn:uuid:5cfb70e2-37c3-4fa2-aeab-c58bd771ae08> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hospiceofmorongobasin.org/advice.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943451 | 637 | 2.34375 | 2 |
Significant work has been done to change the single SCSI command queue used in lk 2.2 to one command queue per device. To make the SCSI subsystem more SMP friendly the granularity of the locks is much finer grained. In lk 2.2 the whole subsystem essentially used one lock.
Even though it is not part of the SCSI subsystem, the inclusion of devfs solves many SCSI device addressing problems that existed in the past. Associated with devfs but very useful even in its absence is the "scsihosts" kernel boot time (and module load time) option. This option allows users to have some control over the ordering of multiple SCSI hosts.
This appendix is difficult to maintain since features and drivers that have proven useful in lk 2.4 (and its development tree) have tended to be back ported into the higher release numbers of the lk 2.2 series.
Currently (lk 2.4.2) support for MO devices is broken. Old DOS file systems with a block size of 2048 bytes also have been reported as broken. The problem seems to arise with media that have a physical block size larger than the 1 KB logical block size used by the block subsystem. Only the sd driver has this problem (luckily not the sr driver in which 2048 byte sectors are the norm). | <urn:uuid:8d6cd1bc-8959-455b-8489-7fcd8215629e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/SCSI-2.4-HOWTO/changes.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00061-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940894 | 276 | 1.539063 | 2 |
June 12, 2008
No excuse not to wear a life jacket on the water
This year is shaping up to be a deadly one on South Carolina waters. As of mid-June this year there have been 13 boating fatalities. This compares to a total of 16 boating fatalities in 2007.
"We consider twelve of the thirteen fatal fatalities so far this year as preventable because people were not wearing a personal flotation device (PFD)," says Col. Alvin Taylor, head of S.C. Department of Natural Resources (DNR) Law Enforcement. "Put on your life jacket before you board your boat and don't take it off until the voyage is over, because the bottom line is PFDs save lives." The National Safe Boating Council estimates 90 percent of all drownings are the result of a person not wearing a life jacket or PFD.
Boating accidents can and often do occur at terrifying speeds. Finding your PFD and attempting to put it on after the accident is almost impossible. Life jackets are of little use if you are not wearing them and save lives only if they are worn. PFDs need to be readily accessible and are not classified as such if stowed in compartments or under equipment. This can result in a citation from DNR Law Enforcement or the U.S. Coast Guard.
The boat operator is responsible for having a proper fitting U.S. Coast Guard approved life jacket for all passengers on board. Throwable devices, such as flotation cushions, are required in addition to wearable devices on boats 16 feet and longer. Life jackets must be serviceable without tears, holes or other damage or wear that would decrease the effectiveness of the device.
Any person younger than 12 years old, in a boat less than 16 feet long, must wear a PFD. It is especially important to check the size and fit of life jacket for children.
Anyone on a personal watercraft, which includes Jet Skis, Sea-Doos, WaveRunners and others, must also wear a Coast Guard-approved flotation device.
Find out more about PFDs and take a free DNR boating course.
DNR protects and manages South Carolina's natural resources by making wise and balanced decisions for the benefit of the state's natural resources and its people. | <urn:uuid:2d8ccaa9-5657-4faf-908a-0b664a6f86fd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://dnr.sc.gov/news/yr2008/june16/june16_pfd.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00071-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955656 | 471 | 2.609375 | 3 |
It is a very proud thing to be a samurai in Japan. It means a perfect warrior, a man who can give his life in a single moment, he will not hesitate. For him, life and death are just a game.
He said, “I am a samurai, I am a leader of samurais, and the emperor pays respect to me.”
Hakuin laughed and said, “You, a samurai? You look like a beggar!”
The samurai’s pride was hurt, his ego hammered. He forgot for what he had come. He took out his sword, he was just going to kill this Hakuin. He forgot that he had come to this master to ask where the gate of heaven is, and where the gate of hell is. Then Hakuin laughed and said, “This is the gate of hell. With this sword, this anger, this ego, here opens the gate.” This is what a warrior can understand. Immediately he understood: This is the gate. He put his sword back in its sheath. And Hakuin said, “Here opens the gate of heaven.”
Hell and heaven are within you, both gates are within you. When you are unconscious, behaving unconsciously, there is the gate of hell; when you become alert and conscious there is the gate of heaven.
What happened to this samurai? When he was just going to kill Hakuin, was he conscious? Was he conscious of what he was about to do? Was he conscious of what he had come for? All consciousness had disappeared. When ego takes over, you cannot be alert. Ego is the drug, the intoxicant that makes you completely unconscious. You act, but the act comes from the unconscious, not from your consciousness. And whenever any act comes from the unconscious, the door of hell is open. Whatsoever you do, if you do it in a way that you are not aware of what you are doing…unawareness is the gate of hell. Immediately the samurai became alert. When Hakuin said, “This is the gate, you have already opened it,” suddenly the very situation must have created alertness.
Just imagine what would have happened to you if you had been the warrior, if you had been the samurai, sword in hand, just going to kill. A single moment more and Hakuin’s head would have been cut, separated from the body – a single moment more. Sword in hand…and Hakuin says, “This is the gate of hell.” This is not a philosophical answer; no master answers in a philosophical way. Philosophy exists only for mediocre, unenlightened minds. A master responds. A response is not verbal, it is total. Hakuin is playing with danger. This man may have killed him. But that is not the point. “Even if you kill me and it makes you alert, it is worth it” – Hakuin played the game. A single moment lost and this man would have killed him. In the right moment Hakuin said, “This is the gate.” | <urn:uuid:a5a91f3a-731c-4d58-ab7b-bd57cd15abd3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.osho.com/library/online-library-samurai-hakuin-gate-7d8bd107-d0a.aspx?p=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982699 | 650 | 2.1875 | 2 |
Swan urges young people on welfare to get a job
Treasurer Wayne Swan has urged young welfare-dependent Australians to get a job, and said the federal budget should help.
Mr Swan said the number of young Australians on welfare was unacceptable.
He was spruiking the budget at a business lunch in Melbourne yesterday.
He said that despite Australia's unemployment rate being almost half that of other developed countries, 10 per cent of 15-to-24-year-olds were not working or studying.
''That's about 320,000 young Australians … that's just not acceptable in a country like ours,'' Mr Swan said.
The Treasurer said the mining boom, set to inject billions of dollars into government coffers in coming years, would gear the unemployed for work.
He said $3 billion would be spent over six years on reforming Australia's training system and $143 million would ensure the jobless attained basic literary and numeracy skills.
''We have the fourth highest proportion of jobless families in the developed world and around half of our very long-term unemployed have only achieved year 11 equivalent or lower.
''To spread the benefits of the [mining] boom means we have really got to lift the workforce participation rates of some groups in the community.
A bigger workforce means that our key industries won't have to compete so harshly with the mining sector for labour.''
Business leaders including media mogul Kerry Stokes, Westfield Group's Steven Lowy and Westpac chief executive Gail Kelly have rejected the need to be prescriptive about achieving a budget surplus.
Mr Stokes said that in the next 10 years the government would be ''awash with so much money it can't even spend it'', while Ms Kelly said many things were outside a government's ability to influence the budget result. | <urn:uuid:07b6eb28-4596-4766-a272-3de4394b9201> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.watoday.com.au/national/swan-urges-young-people-on-welfare-to-get-a-job-20110517-1erfs.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00058-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966358 | 369 | 1.851563 | 2 |
And then, as my own reflected image emerges dimly from the "ooze," a question dawns on me: Is Stinnett making a Darwinian statement with her photographic installation? To view "Squirrel," along with six other photographic images of animal forms a rabbit, deer, lion, owl, weasel and raccoon is to be jarred into a visually poetic confrontation with biomorphic evolution as we understand it or imagine it.
This is a remarkable feat because Stinnett's photographic subject matter and technical approach are deceptively simple. But her craftsmanship is so perfect, her design sense so elegant and her aesthetic focus so pure that a visit to the installation, "Of Matter and Breath," is a sublime experience.
Now a catch: Stinnett didn't actually aim her camera at any animals to make these pictures. She uses simple and smooth taxidermist armatures as her points of departure. In most of the photographs she merely shoots the untreated off-white forms. In "Raccoon," however, the surface has been treated with overlays of warm amber paint or stain to heighten the sense of violence in the open-mouthed creature. In "Lion," the armature has been painted in marbled black and purple tones.
And not all of the images read necessarily as animals. "Lion," for instance, is slightly erotic as well as art-historical. The form suggests animal buttocks or testicles. It is no stretch that it might also pay homage to "Venus of Willendorf," the celebrated prehistoric object found in Austria that every first-year art history student would attest is a fertility talisman.
Stinnett also references indirectly the history of photography. In the mid-19th century, many people believed that the role of the camera was to replace sketching or drawing, to serve as the artist's notebook, to be a way of recording scientific data. That sense of recording phenomena of the natural world is suggested here.
But finally, Stinnett is a modernist. She has taken the familiar if taxidermist armatures can be called the familiar and ratcheted the images to heroic proportions. She provides viewers just enough information to grab their interest, but not too much: Meanings must evolve from the mind of the beholder. But oh, what information threatening, playful, beautiful, ugly, elegant, common, wondrous just like life itself. S"Of Matter and Breath: Photographic Installation by Georgianne Stinnett" runs through April 1 at the Flippo Gallery, Randolph-Macon College, Ashland.
Letters to the editor may be sent to: email@example.com | <urn:uuid:cb1cd3c4-6e9a-49f6-b4f8-98fb1521266c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.styleweekly.com/richmond/natural-history/Content?oid=1366524 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960512 | 551 | 1.8125 | 2 |
Tales of the Taoist Immortals
By Eva Wong. 6" x 9", 168 pages, paperback. The tales collected here are of famous characters in Chinese history and myth: a hero's battle with the lords of evil, the founder of the Ming dynasty's treacherous betrayal of his friends, a young girl who saves her town by imitating rooster calls. Entertaining and often provocative, these tales usually include a moral. The immortals are role models of spiritual attainment in Chinese culture. Their names are household words. | <urn:uuid:772acae7-047c-464c-9354-128884577568> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.qi-journal.com/store.asp?-token.K=Daoism&-token.S=Philosophy&-KeyValue=2292 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952861 | 108 | 1.84375 | 2 |
It’s a truism on the right that conservatives give more to charity than liberals. Looking at the 2004 electoral map and General Social Survey research by Arthur Brooks, Richard Land wrote:
Brooks found that 24 of the 25 states that were above average in family charitable giving voted for Bush in 2004, and 17 of the 25 states below average in giving voted for Kerry. Brooks concluded, “The electoral map and the charity map are remarkably similar.”
Why? A clue may be found in the 1996 General Social Survey, which asked Americans whether they agreed that “the government has a responsibility to reduce income inequality.” People who “disagreed strongly” with that statement gave 12 times more money to charity per year than those who “agreed strongly” with the statement. One’s values, beliefs and political philosophies seem to impact how much one shares of one’s own income with the less fortunate in society.
The trend recurred in the 2008 election cycle as well. Politico reported:
The eight states with residents who gave the highest share of their income to charity supported Sen. John McCain in 2008, while the seven states with the least generous residents went for President Barack Obama, the Chronicle of Philanthropy found in its new survey of tax data from the IRS for 2008.
The eight states whose residents gave the highest share of their income — Utah, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina, Idaho, Arkansas and Georgia — all backed McCain in 2008. Utah leads charitable giving, with 10.6 percent of income given.
In the current Washingtonian magazine, there’s a revealing feature on the lifestyle and income contrasts between the District and its surrounding counties in Maryland and Virginia. A graphic on charitable giving, in particular, caught my attention. According to data compiled by the Chronicle of Philanthropy, the D.C. area’s “poorer jurisdictions give a greater share of their income to charity than do the rich.” Inner-city Anacostia gives 20 percent of median household discretionary income to charity. Maryland’s Prince George’s County gives 14 percent. Comparatively wealthy locales such as Bethesda, Md., and McLean, Va., gave 5 percent. And Arlington County, Va., where I live, gives a mere 4 percent.
A clarification is in order: it’s not a liberal-conservative divide. It’s a religious-secular divide. (I don’t want to make this out to be a newsflash; liberals are aware of the distinction, and snarkily downplay tithing.)
What I want to get at is this: at a minimum, the sacrificial giving of low-income religious blacks seriously complicates the either/or theory advanced by Paul Ryan yesterday in his “Civil Society” speech. “We’re still trying to measure compassion by how much government spends, not by how many people we help escape from poverty,” Ryan said at Cleveland State University. He cited the example of an Elyria, Ohio, man who opened a homeless shelter into which he moved with his wife and child. “What’s really at work here is the Spirit of the Lord,” he said, according to a Washington Post report.
And yet the kind of citizens whom Ryan would no doubt characterize as the most government-dependent happen also to be among the most personally generous. I’m going to take a wild guess here and assume that the charitable residents of PG County and Anacostia are faithful believers in the Spirit of the Lord. In Paul Ryan? Not so much.
A few commenters have noticed that an earlier version of this post was missing the word “In” from the sentence “In Paul Ryan? Not so much.” This was a typo, not a statement about Ryan’s religious commitments. — Ed | <urn:uuid:a3da328a-c681-4c7e-8816-9b0fa7670385> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-giving-gap-is-not-ideological-its-theological/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953491 | 809 | 1.890625 | 2 |
Shelby County's outlying municipalities escaped serious damage in last week's tornadoes, but fire officials hope the devastation elsewhere encourages citizens to prepare for such events.
Several suburbs are offering Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) courses in the coming weeks to teach residents how to help themselves and neighbors in an emergency.
"This will wake some folks up," Germantown Deputy Fire Chief Edgar Babian said of the tornadoes.
"This is a perfect example of why we have the CERT classes -- so the general public can be self-sufficient for a couple of days," Bartlett Assistant Fire Chief Danny Baxter said.
Most departments offer the classes for free. Bartlett charges $15 for supplies and materials.
In disasters, residents can be isolated for several days because of downed trees, difficulty leaving their homes or by emergency personnel spread thin by other duties, such as rescues. Baxter noted the blocked road in Northeast Shelby County could have hindered first responders making their way to victims.
"They had trees down on roads," Baxter said, adding that in those situations, "it could be several hours or a few days before official help gets in there."
The 20-hour CERT course is spread over several days and prepares participants for dealing with initial needs ranging from fighting fires to containing hazardous material to conducting light search and rescue until professional teams arrive.
Babian noted that the Germantown area endures some sort of disaster -- be it windstorms, tornadoes or ice storms -- about every three to five years. In a local disaster such as the November 1994 tornado, surrounding emergency personnel will descend on the area to help. The bigger problem comes from a regional event that requires other jurisdictions to deal with their own issues.
"There's no help then," Babian said. "That's what people need to prepare for."
But unless there's a disaster fresh on people's minds, the classes can suffer from a lack of interest.
Lt. Ted Dent of the Millington Fire Department said as many as a dozen people may sign up for a class, but when only a handful actually attend, classes get canceled.
Several departments said the tornadoes last week led to inquiries about CERT classes. Sherrye Rhea, Germantown neighborhood coordinator, said some residents who have completed the class called to see if they were needed to assist crews. Germantown was spared damage and the volunteers were not needed.
Germantown has held classes for businesses and neighborhood groups in addition to the community-wide sessions. The more people trained in assisting their neighbors or taking care of other matters while waiting for emergency personnel to arrive, the more people can deal with the delay.
"People want to help, but unless there is someone to funnel them in the right direction on what to do, they have no purpose," Babian said. "They are looking for things to do, something to help, but they don't understand what to do."
An investment of 20 hours can help people be ready.
"The whole purpose of the CERT program is for you to be self-sufficient," Dent said.
"Yes, help will come, but it could take a few days."
-- Clay Bailey: 529-2393 | <urn:uuid:ea0d12c6-91e1-418c-b631-ce8ab902b094> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2008/feb/10/cert-prepares-citizens-to-help/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972151 | 665 | 2.296875 | 2 |
Do you use percussion in your recordings?
You may think I’m talking about something like congas, which certainly qualify as percussion, but I almost never use congas in my recordings. However, I DO use a lot of percussion.
Mainly I use:
- Hand claps
- Finger snapping (yes, I did this on one song on my album)
- Cymbal swells
I’ll use one (or even ALL) of these on just about every song I record. Why? Because they add an extra layer to the song that you just can’t achieve by throwing on another guitar track. Oftentimes these simple little elements can be the missing piece that takes that song to the next level.
Is percussion obvious in my mixes? Nope. If you use percussion right, it will sit in the mix, and you won’t even notice it unless you’re specifically listening for it…but you’ll miss it if it’s not there.
As much as software companies try to create realistic-sounding percussion samples, I’ve found it’s easier/better to just record them yourself. Go out and buy a tambourine and a shaker…and USE them.
Cymbal swells, however, aren’t quite as easy to record. For one thing, you’ve got to buy the cymbals, stands, sticks, etc. Unless you’re a drummer, you’re probably never gonna buy them JUST for cymbal swells.
That’s where my free gift comes in. A few years ago I had the pleasure of recording a professional percussionist in a pro studio. I had him record a bunch of cymbal swells for a track I was working on. They sound awesome, and they make a HUGE difference in every song I use them on.
They make transitions from one section to the next SO much smoother.
Here, take a listen:
This is a clip from “Treading Water” off of my album Out of Indiana. In this clip you can hear THREE different types of percussion being used: shaker, tambourine, and cymbal swells.
I’ve taken those same cymbal swells I recorded YEARS ago and used them on countless other songs…and you can, too!!
I’m giving these away for free. Download them here:
It’s a zip file with two separate (stereo) takes from that percussion session. Consider it my early Christmas present to you. Just drag and drop them into one of your sessions, chop ‘em up, and put the cymbal swells in key places throughout the song…and enjoy!
In the comments below, answer one of these questions:
Do you use percussion? (If so, how do you use it?)
How are you going to use these samples in your next recording?
[Photo by vxla] | <urn:uuid:c187d67c-fa66-4302-a4da-c89f52befcab> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.homestudiocorner.com/percussion/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00068-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948491 | 630 | 1.671875 | 2 |
Minolta cameras were born from a partnership between German optical engineers and Japanese manufacturing experts. The business was initially established by Kazuo Tashima in 1928 as the Nichi-Doku Shashinki Shoten, roughly translated as the Japan-Germany Camera Company. In 1931, the company adopted its current name, an acronym for “Mechansim, Instruments, Optics, and Lenses by Tashima.”
Minolta produced its first camera, called the Nifcalette, in 1929. The Nifcalette was a folding roll-film camera using a lens and diaphragm shutter made in Germany. By 1933, the company was producing cameras entirely in its Japanese facilities. Minolta was quick to promote many new photographic developments in Japan, manufacturing the country’s first twin-lens reflex (TLR) camera in 1937 and the first Japanese-made color film in 1940.
During the 1950s, Minolta became the first Japanese camera maker to send a group of marketers to the U.S. in order to promote its cameras. By 1956, it had established a full-fledged American subsidiary in Philadelphia...
When John Glenn manned the first NASA spacecraft to orbit the earth in 1962, he was accompanied by a modified Minolta Hi-Matic camera. Glenn’s version was altered to be used upside down, and had a large protruding handle and folding viewfinder.
Minolta began collaborating with the venerable German camera company Leica in the early 1970s, eventually manufacturing a line of lighter, cheaper cameras sold under the Leica name but produced at Minolta’s factories in Japan. Minolta would later release the C35EF model as the world’s first 35mm camera with built-in flash; shortly after, its C35AF became the first with compact autofocus.
Possibly the most distinctive Minolta design is the Pocket Autopak, a series of cameras that premiered in the late 1970s. The flat, rectangular Autopak contains a bright, high-quality viewfinder and self-contained flash, making it a popular point-and-shoot camera for average family photographers.
Interviews & Articles
How did I start collecting cameras? Actually, I had an interest in photography as a kid and owned a darkroom by the age of 12 or 1… [more]
We both come from families that had collections and we both had collections as children. Jack lost his when his grandmother threw … [more] | <urn:uuid:1e878b38-90ec-494a-bf3d-c8ac6d8d0fff> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.collectorsweekly.com/cameras/minolta | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977346 | 518 | 2.6875 | 3 |
This coming Spring Break we are planning on taking on more trips than we did last year. We're hoping on being able to field 5 trips to locations around the US:
1. San Francisco, CALIFORNIA - $650
Issue: Poverty and at-risk populations (homeless youth, chronically ill, and seniors)
Organizations: Glide Foundation, St. Anthony’s Foundation, Project Open Hand, SF Food Bank, SF Suicide Prevention, Faithful Fools Street Retreat
Project: Volunteer as a group of 8-10 at a number of organizations (work with different organization every day) that focus on helping homeless, chronically ill, and disadvantaged populations. Reflective guided tour (street retreat) of San Francisco and its disadvantaged districts on the last day.
2. New York, NEW YORK - $200
Organization: NY Sun Works (http://nysunworks.org/thesciencebarge): A sustainable urban farm and environmental education center on the Hudson river
Project: Build a new roof for the greenhouse, help maintain the solar and wind energy systems and education kids on sustainability and green energy
Volunteering on the Science Barge which is a floating Hydroponic Farm. . We would also help educate kids on sustainibility and green energy.
3. St. Louis, MISSOURI - $350
Issue: Special Education
Organization: Epworth Schools (http://www.epworth.org/programs/school.php): An organization that provides special education services for adolescents diagnosed with severe learning disabilities, emotional disorders and/or behavioral disorders to help them successfully complete their education.
Project: Work with different classrooms throughout the week.
4. Sunrise, FLORIDA - $350
Issue: Healthy Lifestyles
Organization: FLIPANY (http://flipany.org/): An organization that works to combat obesity and promote healthy lifestyles
Project: Healthy Lifestyles Camp for disadvantaged kids (ages 8-14) that involves mountain biking, sports, healthy eating and making healthy snacks, leadership skills, environmental education, and more!
5. Eureka Springs, ARKANSAS - $600
Issue: Wildlife Protection
Organization: Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge (http://www.turpentinecreek.org/): An organization that provides a lifetime refuge for abandoned, abused, and neglected "Big Cats"
Project: Working with the wildlife refuge to help take care of the animals and building a new enclosure to protect the big cats. | <urn:uuid:76b949f1-c3d4-49d8-87fa-0c1e02f02c3e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://asb.mit.edu/trips.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.909101 | 521 | 1.53125 | 2 |
School Counselors' activities are all designed to keep students in school and to help them be successful. Their primary objective is to promote and enhance student learning. Counselors play a valuable role in all dropout prevention programs. They provide consultation in defining and identifying at-risk students. Counselors work as members of a team with other school personnel to provide essential services. The goal is to identify and intervene before students move through a continuum of self-destructive behavior.
Any student may at any time be at risk with respect to dropping out of school, becoming truant, performing below academic potential, contemplating suicide or using drugs. Underlying reasons for these behaviors often deal with personal and social concerns such as poor self-esteem, family problems, pregnancy, unresolved grief, neglect or abuse. School counseling programs promote school success for all students through a focus on academic achievement, prevention and intervention activities, advocacy, social/emotional issues, and career development. All these areas lead to the development of the "whole person" where students may be successful members of society upon exiting the school environment. | <urn:uuid:09200f75-9fb8-4b87-8bbb-0ebc449318dd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mde.k12.ms.us/dropout-prevention-and-compulsory-school-attendance/school-counseling | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957226 | 219 | 3.328125 | 3 |
The Carry On films spanned a number of years between the late 1950 and into the 1970s. They were a series of comedy films that were very 'tongue in cheek' and had a fairly sexual content for the time. The main actors were Kenneth William, Joan Sims and Barbara Windsor to name just a few and much of the cast were returning members. The early films were shot in black and white though this changed to colour during the 1960s which was the most popular era for the films.
One of the key actors was Kenneth Williams who was born and lived in London until his death in 1988. He was very close to his mother Louisa but not to his father, Stanley, who worked as a barber. At the age of 18 he joined the army and worked in Bombay with the Royal Engineers where he discovered a passion for being on the stage. He started out on the radio comedy show and acted in several TV and films as well as being well known for the carry on films. He was, jointly with Billy Connelly, the person to appear most on Michael Parkinson's chat show, having appeared 8 times.
The british comedy is loved for its quirky and tongue in cheek, unique humour and popular comedy films have included 'Four Weddings and a Funeral' and 'St Trinians', which has recently been remade.
The act of laughing has been shown to be good for our health, working leg, back and stomach muscles as well as de-stressing us and making a heart attack less likely! There are three main theories about why and what we find funny.
For more information on these subjects continue onto the rest of the website... | <urn:uuid:795a364f-cd83-4727-9b1f-d5de25b1d5ec> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.carryonlaughing.co.uk/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00066-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.994298 | 341 | 1.554688 | 2 |
China pension fund gap to top 80 pct of 2011 GDP by 2050
The book titled "Research into China's state balance sheet" is co-authored by Deutsche Bank chief China economist Ma Jun and Xiao Mingzhi, a researcher at Accenture, one of the world's leading management consulting, technology and outsourcing companies.
They reckoned that by 2050 the funding shortfall will be equivalent to 83 percent of China's gross domestic product in 2011. Though the book did not give an absolute figure for the size of the expected shortfall, China's GDP was 47.16 trillion yuan ($7.5 trillion)in 2011.
"Under the baseline scenario, assuming there is no reform taken in the future, China's pension system will encounter a big funding gap and will not be sustainable," they wrote.
Their estimate covers pension accounts of both urban enterprise employees and civil servants in government and public institutions, a wider measure than Ma cited in earlier research published in June.
Back then, he estimated the funding gap for corporate pensioners alone at 75 percent of 2011 GDP.
The funding deficit would be even larger if pension obligations in China's vast rural areas were included.
China has a multi-layer pension system, which covers 12 million retired employees from government and public institutions, 70 million corporate retirees and tens of millions of other rural and urban people above the age of 60.
But due to a
Be the first to comment. | <urn:uuid:0f229993-6443-4341-a4e2-7c8f76608889> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.financialexpress.com/news/china-pension-fund-gap-to-top-80-pct-of-2011-gdp-by-2050/1044855 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00060-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941238 | 288 | 1.734375 | 2 |
So we obviously will not be checking in with Laura Lockwood from Weather Eye while I am filling in for Amy Linnett.
But even though we are not speaking for 2 weeks, Laura is still trying to push her crazy weather lady and astrological views on us.
After my spam filter did not block her last e-mail, I took time to read it under dourest. This is pretty cool however.
The full moon occurs once every 29.53 days; in August we saw the 1st (known as the Sturgeon Moon) and a second we will see on the 31st (known as the Blue Moon). The next Blue Moon will occur in July of 2015.
The Blue Moon makes an appearance every 2.72 years on average, but you can get two Blue Moons in a single year. This happened in 1999 in January and in March. The next time this will be possible will be in 2018.
The definition of what is and is not a Blue Moon has morphed over the years. In the New England area in the 1930's the term "Blue Moon" was used to describe the third full moon in season with four (instead of the usual three). In recent years more people have embraced the term "Blue Moon" to describe a second full moon in a given month.
The second full moon, or Blue Moon will be August 31st at 8:58am CDT.
Thanks Laura. Now back to your telescope.
Have a great Tuesday. | <urn:uuid:adab9a04-9286-44e5-93b5-45c06b1704c2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wrjo.com/8-28-12/9326380?pid=261735&archive=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970001 | 303 | 2.390625 | 2 |
New York Times
“Jaws,” an ode to humans’ fear of the sea, is still a cultural icon. Yet, slowly but surely, cultural attitudes toward sharks are changing, and changing thanks to a genuinely ecological view of their role in the ocean.
The truth is that humans are far more dangerous to sharks than they are to us. More than 70 million die each year, killed for their fins, which end up in soup. At that rate, nearly a third of all shark species may soon be threatened with extinction. The loss of those predators would have an enormous effect all the way down the marine food chain.
Read the full editorial A Growing Movement to Protect Sharks by visiting the New York Times website. | <urn:uuid:ed182829-1cb1-4947-8d09-2a30836efee3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pewenvironment.org/news-room/media-coverage/editorial-a-growing-movement-to-protect-sharks-85899364934 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00067-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949902 | 150 | 2.8125 | 3 |
One of the most neglected parts of the face just happens to be the most abused. The lips can really take a beating during the course of a day. The mouth is exposed to a multitude of environmental assailants in addition to having to put up with hot foods, spicy foods and other irritants. To make matters worse, while we often remember to use sun protection on the rest of our faces, our lips often go forgotten even though they are especially vulnerable to burning. The Philosophy kiss me line is dedicated just to the specialized needs of the lips. You may be experiencing chapping, flaking and cracking. The nourishing and conditioning formulas can get your lips back on track. Philosophy kiss me can also provide glossy shine and even flirtatious color if you so choose.
You may rely on regular exfoliation of the face to keep your skin smooth and polished but you may not have thought of this regular treatment for the lips. Philosophy kiss me has an exfoliator just for your mouth area. This helps to reduce flaking as well as those dreaded lip lines. Sun protection just for the lips can be found in the Philosophy kiss me collection as well. After all, the best way to guard against damage is to prevent it from happening in the first place.
International Customers - Philosophy products cannot be shipped to the U.K.
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Philosophy Kiss Me Tonight is a unique, intense lip treatment that restores moisture to dry, chapped lips. Philosophy Kiss Me Tonight softens lip lines that can form from dehydration and the effects of aging. It encourages a healthy lip contour and encourages a rosy color. As the lips regain their health and strength, they look more youthful.
Philosophy Kiss Me Exfoliating Lip Scrub is an exfoliating product made specifically for the lips. Most women know about the importance of exfoliating to remove dead skin cells from the face. This step is just as important for the lips. Dead skin build up can result in tired, wrinkled lips and prevent the penetration of moisturizing treatments. Philosophy Kiss Me Exfoliating Lip Scrub leaves the lips soft and smooth.
After the exfoliation process, the lips are more receptive than ever to receive a moisturizing treatment. Without the dead skin cell build up, the moisture is allowed to penetrate deeply, rehydrating dry lips. Philosophy Kiss Me SPF 20 Lip Balm - Red is a lip ointment that’s rich in hydrators like kiwi and almond oil with nourishing Vitamin E to recondition damaged lips. The sheer gloss contains a subtle red tint that adds some fun without leaving a full makeup look. Philosophy Kiss Me SPF 20 Lip Balm – Red contains a sun protection factor of 20 to prevent the lips from burning in the sun. | <urn:uuid:f79af945-be06-4bb2-bb2b-43e94e99f58d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.skinstore.com/philosophy-kiss-me.aspx?avs=Line%7Cphilosophy+kiss+me&avnr=Price%7C10%7C12.49%7C%3C%3D++%3C%3D&as=Newness+(Descending) | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.929962 | 640 | 1.585938 | 2 |
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All four forces—lift, thrust, drag, and weight—interact continuously in flight and are in turn affected by such things as the torque effect of the propeller, centrifugal force in turns, and other elements, but all are made subject to the pilot by means of the controls.
A helicopter has four controls: collective pitch control, throttle control, antitorque control, and cyclic pitch control.
What made you want to look up "flight control"? Please share what surprised you most... | <urn:uuid:9d8d394f-e11a-4596-9902-263832bae2bf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/210192/flight-control | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.92464 | 139 | 3.40625 | 3 |
The US is presently facing a fungal meningitis outbreak, which so far has caused as many as 35 people spread across six states to become ill. Of these, 5 have already died. Moreover, it is expected that others will soon begin to display the symptoms for this disease.
report that most of the cases of fungal meningitis have been reported in Tennessee, where 25 people came to the hospital in need of medical assistance and 3 eventually died in spite of treatment.
Other cases have been reported in Virginia (4), Maryland (2), Florida (2), North Carolina (1), and Indiana (1). The other 2 people who passed away were from Virginia and Maryland, respectively.
Although for the time being no official announcements have been made with respect to what caused this outbreak, it seems that both the CDC (the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and the FDA (the United States Food and Drug Administration) believe that the most likely cause is a contaminated batch of injectable steroid.
Apparently, FDA employees are presently investigating a fungus found in a sealed vial of preservative-free methylprednisolone acetate marketed by the New England Compounding Center in Massachusetts, and said pharmaceutical company has agreed to halt all marketing and production activities until a conclusion is reached.
As well as this, the three lots presumed to be contaminated with this fungus have been recalled, and doctors are urged to avoid using them.
Commenting on this outbreak, Benjamin Park, the CDC medical officer, made a case of how, “Unfortunately, despite the current recall, we expect to see additional cases as this investigation unfolds.”
Furthermore, “However, it is possible that if patients are identified soon and started on appropriate antifungal therapy, some of the unfortunate consequences may be averted.”
All of the people who became ill were given spinal shots intended to alleviate lower back pains, and several days later displayed symptoms such as headaches, dizziness, weakness, sensory deficit and fever.
Hoping to get control of the situation before things get any worse, health personnel is presently busy contacting all those who might have become infected whilst being treated with said spinal shots. | <urn:uuid:4d148195-8796-47eb-8d77-675bd310d7ea> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://news.softpedia.com/news/At-Least-5-People-Die-Following-a-Fungal-Meningitis-Outbreak-297102.shtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977574 | 448 | 2.40625 | 2 |
News & Updates
Potential magazine informs readers about the latest institute news and advances in research, patient care, special education, and community programs.
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Resource Finder at Kennedy Krieger Institute
A free resource that provides access to information and support for individuals and families living with developmental disabilities.
Tuberous Sclerosis Clinic
Kennedy Krieger Institute • 801 North Broadway • Baltimore, Maryland 21205
Tanjala T. Gipson, MD
About Our Program:
The Tuberous Sclerosis Clinic at Kennedy Krieger Institute is one of about 25 clinics in the United States dedicated specifically to the care of individuals affected by tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC) and their families. Occurring in an estimated one in 6,000 live births worldwide, TSC is a genetic disorder that causes non-cancerous tumors to form in many different organs, including the brain, eyes, heart, kidney, skin, and lungs. Signs and symptoms of the condition vary from person to person. As a result, TSC may be unrecognized or misdiagnosed for years.
Who We Serve:
We provide expert care for children, adolescents, and adults who experience conditions associated with TSC. Although we place special emphasis on the identification and treatment of autism, intellectual disability, anxiety, ADHD, self-injury, and aggression in individuals with TSC, our clinic treats anyone with the disorder, as well as their families.
TSC varies dramatically in severity, so our treatment model emphasizes unique care regimens tailored to each patient.
When patients first arrive in our clinic, they receive an initial evaluation by our expert physicians and therapists. In some cases, additional testing may be required to determine the extent of the condition. These tests may include:
- CT scan/MRI of the head
- Genetic testing
- Ultrasound of the kidney
- Ultraviolet light examination of the skin
Depending on individual need, further care may include medical or rehabilitation services offered at Kennedy Krieger, or referral for surgical intervention. Follow-up care typically occurs every three to six months.
Although there is no cure for TSC, quality care from experts who understand the condition is key to helping individuals successfully manage symptoms, overcome obstacles, and unlock their potential to succeed in family, school, and community life.
Our clinic includes an interdisciplinary team of health care professionals who are trained and experienced in treating and managing patients with TSC. This interdisciplinary approach is specifically designed to care for TSC patients with multiple medical needs and complexities.
We provide a comprehensive evaluation to ensure a thorough examination of each patient's unique needs. Our interdisciplinary specialists include the following disciplines:
- Assistive Technology
- Behavior Psychology
- Child Neurology
- Child Psychiatry
- Educational Services
- Epilepsy (Surgery)
- Genetic Counseling
- Occupational Therapy
- Pediatric Cardiology
- Pediatric Dermatology
- Pediatric Epileptology
- Pediatric Nephrology
- Pediatric Neuro-Oncology
- Pediatric Ophthalmology
- Physical Therapy
- Social Work
- Speech Language Pathology
Research and Collaborations:
The Institute's clinical care is driven by its ongoing research, which ensures that patients receive the most innovative therapies available. Physicians in the Institute's Tuberous Sclerosis Clinic are committed to improving the lives of patients and families with TSC through designing and participating in existing research studies, both clinical and pre-clinical. Current research efforts are aimed at using MRI technology and biomarkers to determine why some individuals with TSC experience severe symptoms, while others experience only mild symptoms.
|The Tuberous Sclerosis Clinic at Kennedy Krieger Institute is a member of the Tuberous Sclerosis Alliance.|
Contact our Care Management Office:
Local Referral: (443) 923-9400
Toll-Free Referral: (888) 554-2080
TTY: (443) 923-2645
Maryland Relay: 711
Health care professionals wishing to refer a patient should call our Physician Referral Line at (443) 923-9403. | <urn:uuid:9950c498-6831-4bc6-8595-b3b7638c3dd6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kennedykrieger.org/patient-care/patient-care-programs/outpatient-programs/tuberous-sclerosis-clinic | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.903283 | 860 | 2.015625 | 2 |
Rutland supplies a complete array of metal roll formers or roll forming machines including single panel and double panel roll formers, decoilers (metal roll uncoilers), slitters (metal slitting machines) and embossers (metal embossing machines). Roll forming is a continuous forming or shaping process in which a long sheet of metal or metal coil roll is fed through a series of metal rollers, each only incrementally performing the forming until the metal reaches it's final shape or cross-section profile when it passes the last rollers. When metal needs to be formed into an exact profile in either large quantities or in long lengths, roll former machines accomplish this task in an ideal fashion. Roll formed metal has an advantage over metal extrusions of similar shape with roll formed sections typically being much stronger and lighter with the cold metal having been work hardened. Metal passed through and shaped in roll forming machinery can also be pre-finished or painted saving an additional fabrication step and labor. Finishing labor is greatly reduced with the high volume capability of roll forming. Roll formed metal is used for many architectural or construction purposes including metal roof panels, metal roofing tile, metal wall panels or siding, metal purlins or wall studs, metal door frames, metal shutters, metal floors or decking, guardrails and many other applications.
Roll Former - Metal Roll Forming Machine
A decoiler, also known as an uncoiler, is a spindle type uncoiling machine which feeds the metal coils used in roll forming operation at an exact rate to the roll former. These metal coils can be rather large and very heavy and the large decoilers are often provided with hydraulic operation. Metal coils come in many assorted widths and lengths and also in a variety of metals including aluminum, copper, galvanized steel, galvalume, stainless steel and zinc. The metals may be in a raw state or unfinished, especially in the case for your green materials like copper, zinc and stainless steel and sometimes even galvalume which are more resistant to corrosion. Metals which are more subject to corrosive effects such as aluminum, galvanized steel and galvalume may be pre-finished or painted before passing through the roll former without the finish being damaged. The precisely shaped metal exiting the roll former machines is usually cut to pre-determined lengths by the machine. The pre-cut metal panels can then be transported to the job site and installed.
Decoiler - Metal Roll Uncoiler
An embosser or metal embossing machine can emboss or impress one of many attractive patterns into the metal and used as is or fed into roll forming machines, providing additional architectural interest to wall panels, roof panels or flooring decks. The embossed patterns can also add strength or rigidity to the metal material. Usually a decoiler is situated at both the feeding and receiving ends of the embosser machine for volume operation.
Embosser - Metal Embossing Machine
Metal Embossing Samples
A slitter or metal slitting machine cuts sheets or rolls of metal coil into exact widths when the metal material needs to be trimmed to size before being fed into roll forming machines. Decoiler machines positioned before and after the slitter can both feed and receive the metal material when long lengths are cut to size.
Slitter - Metal Slitting machine
Roof panel, wall panel and floor deck profiles or shapes which are formed into the metal material by the roll formers provide added strength, rigidity and architectural interest. The metal panels formed can be shaped to interlock with each other and an attractive roof tile look can also created by metal roll former machines.
Roofing Tile Sample Profile - Roof Panel Sample Profile
See more on the different types of roll forming machinery, samples of various wall and roof panel profiles and samples of metal embossing patterns including pictures, videos, detailed information and specifications available at Rutland's Roll Formers website. | <urn:uuid:3591c25e-355b-4f7c-b4bb-8ac942722c7a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.rutlandguttersupply.com/blog/CategoryView,category,roofPanel.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.91927 | 810 | 2.5625 | 3 |
District Attorney John DeRosier, from left, Justinian Etienne, with grandson Brayden Sinagal, Missy Amidon and Chip Arnould in front of the new greenhouse at the Lake Charles Charter Academy. (Nichole Osinski / American Press)
Last Modified: Saturday, February 16, 2013 8:09 PM
The Lake Charles Charter Academy has taken its first step toward a greener environment for its students. The Green House Effect Project — an agricultural program — begins with a new greenhouse with plans for gardening expansions.
“This is a project to engage children in learning through green activities,” said Ronald J. Blanchard, the school’s parent liaison. “We’re going to have other community-minded people involved. We have a wealth of grandparents, parents to make this a more family-oriented project.”
The project was the brainchild of teachers and parents who wanted to form stronger bonds between families, educators and students.
Parents and guardians are already required to spend at least 20 hours a year committed to some form of school involvement. Educators thought providing a place to grow vegetables and fruits would encourage family as well as community participation. Students will partake in school board meetings to propel the progress of the greenhouse while also getting advice from local farmers and volunteers with agriculture experience.
Justinian Etienne, whose grandson attends the school, said he is looking forward to getting involved with the project and encouraging his grandson in the venture. As a former 4-H member, Etienne has had experience in judging and choosing produce, and is ready to help the students.
“Participation with the family in the school systems is a pretty key element to nurturing the kids along,” he said. “We want to try to have everything that can be consumed; it’s not going to be a wasted space, and we’re going to utilize the products.”
The project has been backed by Entergy, Citgo and Calcasieu District Attorney John DeRosier. Nearly $10,000 has been donated to get it up and running.
Chip Arnould, Entergy customer service manager, said the greenhouse will teach responsibility and help students learn the importance of environmental stewardship.
DeRosier said he was presented with the idea for the greenhouse about five months ago. This project was something he believed the community should be a part of and helped find additional funding to make the project final.
“There were many people who were very willing to cooperate and help,” he said. “Anything that helps children, the general public generally in Calcasieu Parish has been a good community for that.”
Blanchard said the school hopes to extend the environmentally friendly initiative with solar panels in the greenhouse to save energy, as well as start a garden on the premises. The construction of a second greenhouse for the Southwest Louisiana Charter Academy is being planned.
Blanchard expects the greenhouse to be fully furnished with shelves and stocked with fruits and vegetables at the end of the month. He said the students will start off with quick-growing plants such as with tomatoes, carrots and radishes.
“We took a look at the program and thought it was something we would like to fund,” said Missy Amidon, Citgo public affairs coordinator. “Not only is it an educational component, it’s helping the kids, it’s helping the parents and it’s involving the full community in a sustainable-type venture.” | <urn:uuid:f0b5f481-dbca-4d37-98df-4a18a2875f52> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.americanpress.com/Taking-green-initiatives-into-the-school | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964183 | 729 | 2.046875 | 2 |
Mrs. Claus tells us about the time Santa had a bad cold and decided to take a vacation from Christmas. Two of his elves, Jingle Bells and Jangle Bells decided to go out (with Vixen) to find... See full summary »
Bitter and hateful, the Grinch is irritated at the thought of the nearby village having a happy time celebrating Christmas. So disguised as Santa Claus, with his dog made to look like a reindeer, he raids the village to steal all the Christmas things. The village is sure to have a sad Christmas this year. Written by
The mountain top changes between shots. See more »
Every Who down in Whoville liked Christmas a lot, but the Grinch, who lived just north of Whoville - did not. The Grinch hated Christmas - the whole Christmas season. Now, please don't ask why; no one quite knows the reason. It could be, perhaps, that his shoes were too tight. Or it could be that his head wasn't screwed on just right. But I think that the most likely reason of all... may have been that his heart was two sizes too small. But, whatever the reason, his heart or his ...
See more »
You're a great one, Dr. Seuss/You're the king of children's books/They always are the best/In the east and in the west, Dr. Seuss!
"How the Grinch Stole Christmas!" is a wonderful flick/with some truly great lines, it isn't a trick/It could only have come from the great Dr. Seuss/otherwise, the whole thing would've been loose/Narrated by Karloff and directed by Jones/this Grinch is one who elicits no groans/It's the story of one weird Christmas-hating man/who one Christmas Eve, came up with a plan/He'd steal the presents and everything else/where does this plan go? I cannot tell/You must watch the movie, and then you will know/why this cartoon's still a tradition in the two-zero-Os/And one more thing that I should remind/avoid the live action, which I heard was unkind/They fouled it up, they fouled it down/every part of the story just came unwound/But this classic is always something to love/whether you're down below, or way up above!
26 of 28 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful to you? | <urn:uuid:adfb5681-4db4-498f-afa8-bace508fbef3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060345/?_encoding=UTF8&ref_=amzn_dp_dvd | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00054-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978866 | 517 | 1.914063 | 2 |
USDA DESIGNATES 20 BIOBASED ITEMS FOR FEDERAL PROCUREMENT
WASHINGTON, Aug. 17, 2006 - Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns today announced two proposed rules under the Federal Biobased Products Preferred Procurement Program, which designate 20 items that must receive special consideration by all federal agencies when making purchases.
"The designation of these 20 biobased items is a major step in advancing the federal preferred procurement program for biobased products," said Johanns. "When finalized, 1,500 biobased products will be given procurement preference by federal agencies, generating new economic opportunities for biobased product producers and U.S. farmers and ranchers, while providing new choices for U.S. consumers."
The Federal Biobased Products Preferred Procurement Program is authorized under Section 9002 of the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002. USDA published the first final rule designating six items for preferred procurement in March 2006. Federal agencies must give preference to designated biobased products in government purchases within one year of publication of the final designation rule.
The two proposed rules to be published in the Aug. 17, 2006 Federal Register designate 20 items, which are generic groupings of biobased products. The new items include: adhesive and mastic removers, insulating foam for wall construction, hand cleaners and sanitizers, composite panels, fluid-filled transformers, biodegradable containers, fertilizers, metalworking fluids, sorbents, graffiti and grease removers, two-cycle engine oils, lipcare products, biodegradable films, stationary equipment hydraulic fluids, biodegradable cutlery, glass cleaners, greases, dust suppressants, carpets, and carpet and upholstery cleaners.
Technical information to support each proposed rule is available at the web site for the Federal Biobased Products Preferred Procurement Program at www.biobased.oce.usda.gov. USDA encourages interested parties to submit comments on the proposed rules during the 60-day public comment period following their publication. The web site also contains a catalog listing the qualifying biobased products that manufacturers have posted under each designated grouping of products.
The two proposed rules announced today are part of a series of rules that will be issued designating biobased items. USDA has identified about 170 items for which it is collecting test data needed for the additional designations of items that will extend preferred procurement status to include all qualifying biobased products.
USDA has previously issued final guidelines for the biobased procurement program and developed a model procurement program of training and education to help Federal procurement officials and users of biobased products identify and purchase qualifying biobased products. Information on the guidelines and the model program are available at http://www.usda.gov/biobased.
Additional information on the final rule and the program may be obtained by contacting: Marvin Duncan, USDA, Office of the Chief Economist, Office of Energy Policy and New Uses, Room 4059, South Building, 1400 Independence Avenue SW., MS-3815, Washington, DC 20250-3815 or by e- mailto:email@example.com. | <urn:uuid:79e5942a-9a63-4969-b97f-b019d5cb1b9b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usda/usdahome?contentidonly=true&contentid=2006/08/0304.xml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.91811 | 661 | 1.734375 | 2 |
11. A bystander effect was found in co-cultured malignant trophoblast Jeg3 cells after 5 Gy X-rays using activation of p53 as endpoint
Record Control Number:
Quality Validation Date:
Abstract: To study bystander effects, co-culture protocols were applied to examine the development of G2-arrest and the activation of p53 in a number of cell lines that were extensively characterized in term of their ability to establish gap juctional intercellular communication. A detailed set of experiments carried out with bEnd3 cells did not demonstrate bystander responses when either p53 activation or G2 arrest were used as endpoints. Measurements were carried out at several time points up to 24h after irradiation and co-culture. Because bystander responses are more robust after exposure of cells to high LET radiation, we also tested neutron irradiation using the same cell line. Here again no evidence for bystander responses could be obtained despite the outstanding capability of these cells to develop intercellular communication. Because bystander effects are known to be cell line specific, we tested additional cell lines using the same experimental protocols. For these experiments, cell lines were selected that were previously shown using different experimental approaches to elicit clear bystander effects.
In this set of experiments, Jeg3, A549, AG1522, T98G, EA-Hy926 as well as the repair deficient cell line xrs-5 were tested. Bystander responses could not be demonstrated in any of the cell lines. Similar experiments with Jeg3 cells carried out by the group at the Department of Anatomy provided evidence for the development of bystander effects that did not depend on gap junctional intercellular communication. The differences observed between the two groups in Essen in the development of bystander effects are not understood at present. They may reflect slight differences in the physiological conditions of the cells employed in the experiments (different sera and possibly slight differences in manipulation). They can also derive from differences between the two sorting instruments used. More work will be required to establish the source of these differences. Although the majority of the results obtained in these investigations are negative in terms of eliciting a bystander response, we believe that they are important in the field, as they allow narrowing down the conditions under which their development occurs.
Our observations when contrasted with reports of robust bystander responses using the same cell lines using different experimental approaches suggest that their development in the co-culture experiments may be prevented by the required manipulations such as trypsinization. In addition, they suggest that only a small fraction of the population responds to such signals making thus detection in the whole population difficult. To address some of the above issues we designed experiments using inserts in cell culture vessel that allow co-culture of two populations under conditions that allow free exchange of macromolecultes while preventing the mixing of the cell populations. In these experiments we used micronucleus formation as an end point for bystander response in the non-irradiated component of the culture. The preliminary results obtained in the experiments conduced with this system did not provide evidence for bystander response.
We investigated the expression of Caspase 3, an effector caspase at the end of the apoptotic cascade, as a further endpoint marker for bystander effects. Western blot analysis of activated Caspase-3 in irradiated Jeg3 cells showed no expression of activated Caspase 3 24 hours after irradiation. We conclude that activated Caspase 3 could not be used as an endpoint marker in Jeg3 cells for analysing bystander effects after X-ray irradiation.
Subject Descriptors: Radiation biology
Subject Index Codes: Life Sciences
Collaboration Sought: Information exchange/Training
Sources of Support: CEC
Remarks: Result eTIP
ILIAKIS, George (Professor)
UNIVERSITY OF DUISBURG-ESSEN
Essen, Kreisfreie Stadt | <urn:uuid:7cb5986b-76c2-4e6a-9020-c4c7f0095f29> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://cordis.europa.eu/fetch?CALLER=NEW_RESU_TM&ACTION=D&DOC=11&CAT=RESU&QUERY=013835708a18:c943:25f7aed5&RCN=44730 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.924263 | 819 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Prayer Before Reading Holy Scripture
O Master Who loves mankind, illuminate our hearts with the pure light of Your divine knowledge and open the eyes of our mind to understand the teachings of Your Gospel. Instill in us also the fear of Your blessed commandments, that we may overcome all carnal desires, entering upon a spiritual life and understanding and acting in all things according to Your holy will. For You are the enlightenment of our souls and bodies, O Christ God, and to You we give glory together with Your eternal Father and Your all-holy, gracious and life-giving Spirit, now and ever and forever. Amen.
Matins Gospel Reading: Luke 24:13-35
At that time, two of them were going to a village named Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, and talking with each other about all these things that had happened. While they were talking and discussing together, Jesus himself drew near and went with them. But their eyes were kept from recognizing him. And he said to them, "What is this conversation which you are holding with each other as you walk?" And they stood still looking sad. Then one of them, named Cleopas, answered him, "Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?" And he said to them, "What things?" And they said to him, "Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, and how our chief priests and rulers delivered him up to be condemned to death, and crucified him. But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since this happened. Moreover, some women of our company amazed us. They were at the tomb early in the morning and did not find his body; and they came back saying that they had even seen a vision of angels, who said that he was alive. Some of those who were with us went to the tomb, and found it just as the women had said; but him they did not see." And he said to them, "O foolish men, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?" And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.
So they drew near to the village to which they were going. He appeared to be going further, but they constrained him, saying, "Stay with us, for it is toward evening and the day is now far spent." So he went in to stay with them. When he was at table with them, he took the bread and blessed, and broke it, and gave it to them. And their eyes were opened and they recognized him; and he vanished out of their sight. They said to each other, "Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the scriptures?" And they rose that same hour and returned to Jerusalem; and they found the eleven gathered together and those who were with them, who said, "The Lord has risen indeed, and has appeared to Simon!" Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he was known to them in the breaking of the bread.
Epistle Reading: St. Paul's Letter to the Galatians 4:22-27
BRETHREN, Abraham had two sons, one by a slave and one by a free woman. But the son of the slave was born according to the flesh, the son of the free woman through promise. Now this is an allegory: these women are two covenants. One is from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery; she is Hagar. Now Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia; she corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother. For it is written, "Rejoice, O barren one who does not bear; break forth and shout, you who are not in travail; for the children of the desolate one are many more than the children of her that is married."
Gospel Reading: Luke 5:1-11
At that time, Jesus was standing by the lake of Gennesaret. And he saw two boats by the lake; but the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. Getting into one of the boats, which was Simon's, he asked him to put out a little from the land. And he sat down and taught the people from the boat. And when he had ceased speaking, he said to Simon, "Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch." And Simon answered, "Master, we toiled all night and took nothing! But at your word I will let down the nets." And when they had done this, they enclosed a great shoal of fish; and as their nets were breaking, they beckoned to their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both the boats, so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord." For he was astonished, and all who were with him, at the catch of fish which they had taken; and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. And Jesus said to Simon, "Do not be afraid; henceforth you will be catching men." And when they had brought their boats to land, they left everything and followed him.
Saints and Feasts
1st Sunday of Luke; The Conception of St. John the Baptist; Xanthippe & Polyxene the Righteous; John the New Martyr of Epiros; Nicholas the New Martyr | <urn:uuid:b4bfccb8-7908-4af8-8e87-45bfde480b8e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.acrod.org/prayercorner/todaysreadings?type=epistle&code=212&pc_display=text&acrod_pc_cal=new&date=9/23/2012 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00068-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.991096 | 1,229 | 1.75 | 2 |
There is no doubt that SQL databases play an important role in modern applications. In an ideal world, a single database can handle hundreds of incoming connections from multiple clients and scale to accommodate the related transactions. However the world is not ideal and databases are often a cause of major headaches when applications need to scale to accommodate more connections, transactions, or both.
In order to overcome scaling issues, application developers often resort to administrative acrobatics, also known as database sharding. Sharding helps to improve application performance and throughput by splitting the database into two or more shards. Unfortunately, this practice also requires application developers to code transactional consistency into their applications. Getting transactional consistency across multiple SQL database shards can prove to be very difficult.
Sharding requires developers to think about things like rollbacks, constraints, and referential integrity across tables within their applications when these types of concerns are best handled by the database. It also makes other common operations such as joins, searches, and memory management very difficult. In short, the very solution implemented to overcome throughput issues becomes a bottleneck in and of itself.
What if database sharding was no longer required to scale your application? Let me explain. For the past several months I have been following and writing about NuoDB, a hot new SQL database technology out of Cambridge, MA. NuoDB is officially out of beta and they have recently released their first release candidate so I decided to dig into the database in a little more detail. Their architecture is very interesting and exciting because it completely eliminates the need to shard a database to achieve higher throughput.
Each NuoDB database consists of at least three or more processes that enable a single database to run across multiple hosts. These processes include a Broker, a Transaction Engine and a Storage Manager. Brokers are responsible for connecting client applications to Transaction Engines and maintain a global view of the network to keep track of the multiple Transaction Engines available at any time. Transaction Engines are in-memory processes that client applications connect to for processing SQL transactions. Storage Managers are responsible for persisting data to disk and serving up records to the Transaction Managers if they don’t exist in memory.
The secret to NuoDB’s approach to solving the sharding problem is that it is a truly distributed, peer-to-peer, SQL database. Each of its processes can be deployed across multiple hosts. When client applications need to connect to a Transaction Engine, the Broker will automatically route the request to the most available process. Since multiple Transaction Engines and Storage Managers running across multiple host machines represent a single logical database, you never have to resort to sharding to get the throughput your application requires.
NuoDB is a new pioneer in the SQL database world. They are making database scalability simple by eliminating the need for acrobatics such as sharding, and they are also making general administration of the database simpler as well. Their distributed database appears to you as a user like a single SQL Server database. With their RC1 release they have also provided a web based administrative console that they call NuoConsole. This tool makes it extremely easy to deploy and manage NuoDB processes across one or multiple hosts with the click of a mouse button. See for yourself by downloading NuoDB here.
Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) | <urn:uuid:e1c17811-9cb8-4b1f-8918-62a858023743> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.sqlauthority.com/2012/11/27/sql-server-shard-no-more-an-innovative-look-at-distributed-peer-to-peer-sql-database/?like=1&source=post_flair&_wpnonce=9916d21231 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00047-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943722 | 689 | 1.554688 | 2 |
|Action & Reaction - April 1997|
We are grateful for this opportunity to set the record straight. Well-known geologist, Dr. S. Warren Carey has published a book1 containing a chapter devoted to The Age of the Earth . It describes how, in the years from 1862 through 1868, Lord Kelvin calculated the age of the Earth using three different methods. In the late 19th century, Kelvin was one of the hottest scientists around. He was so hot, they named a temperature scale after him. It is not surprising that with his interest in thermodynamics, two of his methods involved heat. The first had to do with the heat generated by the sun. It was his conclusion that the Sun must be less than 100 million years old, so therefore the Earth must be less than 100 million years old. His second method was based on how fast the core of the Earth is losing heat. His maximum and minimum assumptions led him to conclude that the Earth must be at least 20 million years old, but no more than 400 million years old. His third method, based on the slowing of the Earth's rotation due to tidal friction, led Kelvin to conclude that the Earth must be less than 100 million years old. During this same time, Van Helmholz came up with an age of 22 million years (based on gravitational condensation of the Sun), and Buffon concluded that the Earth was 75 thousand years old (based on the rate of cooling of the Earth). So, there was a wide spread of ages, from 75,000 years to 400 million years, with various levels of acceptance in the 1860's. Most of them, however, were less than 100 million years, and I would say that 62.5 million years is in the ball park.
In 1913, Arthur Holms (professor of geology at Durham) published a booklet entitled, "The Age of the Earth", in which he proposed an age of 500 million years.
I went to high school and college in the 1960's, and like the old professor in the cartoon, I was taught that the world was 2 billion years old.
The conventional wisdom (for about the past 10 years) has been that the Earth is 4.6 billion years old. If you compare these "known" ages with the equation AGE = 62.5x106 e(YEAR - 1860)/(28,8539 YEARS) , whose values at 20 year intervals are shown in the table, you can see that the "known" age of the Earth has generally followed that exponentially increasing age curve.
Near the middle of his chapter on the age of the Earth, at the bottom of page 72, Dr. Carey makes this significant observation: "It is an amusing fact that when a scientist knows the answer believed to be correct, that is the result that comes out of the data." This seems to imply that he believes there might be some connection between the age of the Earth required by the theory of evolution and the results of the scientific studies to determine the Earth's actual age.
|Quick links to|
|Science Against Evolution
|Back issues of
of the Month
Carey, Theories of the Earth and Universe (A History of Dogma
in the Earth Sciences) 1989, Stanford University Press. | <urn:uuid:2d04c238-f1e5-45e6-8318-2562f1be29d6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://scienceagainstevolution.org/v1i7r.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969514 | 668 | 3.578125 | 4 |
“Stoop, villain, stoop, stoop” (Tamburlaine, Part 1, 4.2.22-23). Marlowe liked the sound of the vowel in “stoop” so much that he wanted to hear Tamburlaine say it three times. Then he wanted to hear it again in Faustus: “Saxon Bruno, stoop” (Doctor Faustus, B-Text, 3.1.89). But this was not enough! Adrian says the word another time — a fifth repetition — just seventy lines later: “Then thou and he and all the world shall stoop” (3.1.158).
Maybe it was the final “p,” the only sound that “stoop” doesn’t share with “stool,” that Marlowe really wanted to hear. In any case, the frequent returns of the simple command to stoop suggest a frustration of someone’s desire. No matter how many times you indulge this desire, it’s still not enough. Maybe the command simply isn’t working except as a sound effect. (You might say that Tamburlaine has to give the command a third time because Bajazeth hasn’t carried it out after the second.)
The fact that Tamburlaine is talking at all is somewhat gratuitous. The entire exchange could be replaced by a short stage direction: “Bajazeth kneels before the throne. Tamburlaine steps on his back and climbs into the seat.” The scene doesn't go like that. Instead, they command, reply, curse, and wrangle, for thirty-two lines. Marlowe wanted to hear all of the words. The king and the footstool have to be talking the entire time. | <urn:uuid:7f141bc7-7093-4338-a17f-1641794e2604> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://jacket2.org/category/commentary-tags/harry-levin | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00060-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936951 | 387 | 2.59375 | 3 |
This is a book for readers interested in a recitation of the number of buildings destroyed in a given locality in Europe, the number of people displaced, and general acknowledgements that the war really disrupted people's lives. While the book sprinkles in quotes from people saying that the destruction was terrible, they weren't given enough context to care about them at all.
No. I prefer books that tell a story through the eyes of its participants.
I have listened to the Ken Follett books narrated by John Lee and enjoyed his narration but this book was a terrible fit for him. The book is simply boring and having a very dramatic narrator like Mr. Lee is absolutely jarring.
Disappointment and frustration.
I have read many books about the civil war and it becomes harder and harder to find books that address the period from a new prospective. This book, written from the southern point of view felt wholly new and fresh, and did a excellent job of describing the complex and varying viewpoints of its different constituencies. The narrator did a wonderful job of conveying these voices.
I've read a lot of history books and memoirs about the holocaust, and this memoir written and narrated by the son of survivors saved by their musical talent is a beautiful, very loving and respectful tribute to the author's parents. At the same time, the author conveys a very honest human story of their lives that does not gloss over questionable decisions and complicated motivations.
The author's narration was fine, but because of his distinctive voice and long service as the host of Performance Today, National Public Radio's daily classical music program, I kept expecting him to break from the story and introduce us to a Beethoven symphony. But that is a very small price to pay for such a beautiful story.
This unusual novel is DEFINITELY not for everyone. It is a story, written in first person, of the son of wannabe holocaust survivor who (the son, not his mother) discovers Anne Frank (now an old lady) living in his attic. It is written as a bit of a "shticky" monologue that is hilarious at times, but often over the top as in: was it over the top? Why did I say it was over the top? I don't really know. Sometimes I think I liked it but other times I was't so sure. And how could I be expected to know..... and so on.
This is a book about Catherine Hooper (the girlfriend of Bernard Madoff's son Andrew), her incredible brilliance, resourcefulness, and all around "fabulousness". The narrator reads the story with the breathiness appropriate for a romance novel when talking anything Catherine. Her tone changes to one of utter disgust whenever discussing Mark (Bernard Madoff's other son who committed suicide) or Mark's widow Stephanie. I guess the narrator was directed to do so because Catherine's doesn't like them (?) but it is very disconcerting. Do not buy this book if you are looking for insight into the Madoff scandal or the Madoff family (as I was). I stuck with the book to the end hoping to find a bit, but it provides none whatsoever. On the other hand if you are interested in learning about how wonderful Catherine Hooper is, this is the book for you.
Great story which more than stands on its own. No need for the annoyingly exaggerated rendition of the character's voices.
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If you find this review inappropriate and think it should be removed from our site, let us know. This report will be reviewed by Audible and we will take appropriate action. | <urn:uuid:12feaf89-694a-422a-9a63-6e84217e4492> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.audible.com/listener/A3BSTXP7AEYR0B/Savage-Continent/ref=pd_seeReview_1_2?asin=B009CYJ4C0 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00074-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975837 | 741 | 1.804688 | 2 |
<!-- This article is a part of WikiProject Aircraft
. Please see WikiProject Aircraft/page content
for recommended layout. -->The Pemberton-Billing P.B.25
was a First World War British
single-seat scout aircraft built by Pemberton-Billing Limited
, later Supermarine Aviation Works Limited.
Design and development
was designed in 1915
as a single-seat biplane scout. The fuselage nacelle was strut-mounted between the wings. The nacelle had an open cockpit for the pilot at the front and at the rear a 80 hp (60 kW) Le Rhone engine driving a pusher propeller. Twin fins and rudders were mounted on a wide-span tailplane, with an elevator attached, and all connected to the wings structure with four tailbooms, The P.B.23 failed to gain an order after it first flew in September 1915
. Twenty of an improved version, the P.B.25
, were ordered by the Royal Naval Air Service
. The P.B.25 had swept-back wings, a modified landing gear and a revised fuselage nacelle. Although originally powered by a 110 hp (82 kW) Clerget rotary engine, the 20 RNAS aircraft were fitted with Gnome Monosoupape
rotary piston engines.
The aircraft, which were not used operationally, were based at RNAS Stations at Hornchurch and Hendon; they were probably used in the training role. | <urn:uuid:7b449764-09f4-4738-9124-ed40f282fe68> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://pages.rediff.com/pemberton-billing-p-b-25/1442895 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961174 | 314 | 2.734375 | 3 |
YUCAIPA - When Richelle Solis watches a student at the whiteboard struggling, or attempting to turn invisible as she prepares to call on someone for an answer, she knows exactly how they feel.
"I wasn't a great student. I didn't get good grades. That's what drives me as a teacher," said Solis, a sixth-grade teacher at Chapman Heights Elementary School. "I know exactly what they're thinking. ... I'm not going to stand up there and assume (they're getting it)."
She wasn't a natural student and, unlike many teachers, she never felt drawn to the profession.
"I hated waking up early when I was a kid and I swore I would never be a teacher, so I could wake up late."
She majored in marine biology, with an eye toward becoming a shark expert. But while she struggled in college - Solis still wasn't a natural student, even then - she'd hear her sister come home from work as a kindergarten teacher, raving about her job.
"She loved what she was doing."
Solis volunteered in her sister's class and discovered she loved it as well.
"I could just see myself in that environment."
Today, she's in her 16th year of teaching, and was just named one of San Bernardino County's four teachers of the year, following being recognized as the Yucaipa-Calimesa Joint Unified School District teacher of the year.
"Do you want a hard one, or an easy one?" she asked, giving her students one more pre-algebra problem before they leave for physical education.
"Hard," "hard," "hard" came the chorus of answers.
"I'll give you
Those early struggles as a student inform Solis' education approach today.
"Learning can be a struggle for many students. It is heartbreaking to see how hard a child is trying to understand, only to be rewarded with confusion. As someone who has suffered through that experience as a fifth grader, I am sympathetic of my students and use every available tool and strategy to teach difficult concepts," she wrote in an application essay when applying for the county teacher of the year recognition. "When I was unable to solve the (fraction) problem because I did not understand what to do, my teacher told me to try harder, stop crying (yes, I was crying) and to pay attention, as he had already demonstrated a similar problem."
She also knows she can't do it alone: In the past six years, Solis has undergone a philosophical shift, she said, and has sought to make her classroom more transparent and collaborative with her students' parents.
In recent years, Solis has moved from teaching younger elementary students to older grades. Although the subject matter changes, the principles of teaching remain the same, she said.
"There's not a lot of difference between a first grade learner and a sixth grade learner, other than the sixth grader can tie their shoes."
In addition to her teaching responsibilities, Solis has also helped the district update its elementary English language arts curriculum.
"She would regularly go and do demonstration lectures (for other grade levels) in other classrooms during her lunch period," principal Andy Anderson said. "She's very refreshing to have on staff, because she makes those around her better."
But her first priority remains those struggling students.
"I am sure that my fifth grade teacher probably thought that I would not amount to much academically, and it took many people along the way to convince me otherwise. I want to be the kind of teacher that pushes each child as far as they can go with support and expects them to believe in their abilities," Solis' essay reads in part. "My students are aware of their main priority, which is to learn something new each day and to work to the best of their ability."
"They're in a good place when they're in Ms. Solis' class," Anderson said.
Reach Beau via email, call him at 909-386-3826, or find him on Twitter @InlandEd. | <urn:uuid:26018259-918b-4223-be13-d3b2f52c88f3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sbsun.com/opinions/ci_22164347/school-didnt-come-easy-yucaipa-calimesa-teacher-year | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.98847 | 851 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Just when the failed policy ensemble called ‘good governance’ had run through its course nationally both under the NDA and the UPA, Mr Nitish Kumar’s NDA government in Bihar breathed new life into it. Seven years into sushasan, there are gaping holes in this faith based lore.
Barmeshwar Mukhiya, the self-proclaimed chief of Ranvir Sena, is a free man now. How does it reconcile with the rhetoric of Nitish Kumar? This post analyses the class-caste basis of Nitish-led coalition and attempts to reach an answer.
The Bihar assembly election results have to be seen in Nitish Kumar’s careful moblilization of several caste groups and formation of a coalition of ‘extremes’. Added to the above mobilization, have been his attempts in initiating some welfare schemes in the state. The result needs to be seen in terms of these two broad factors and any attempt to ‘disproportionally’ ascertain the importance of the second factor over the first is to miss the history of politics in the state of Bihar over the years.
A blog post on the perception of good governance and "anti-crime" NDA government led by Nitish Kumar in Bihar
A district and sessions court in Patna has finally pronounced a verdict in the infamous Laxmanpur- Bathe carnage almost thirteen years after 58 Dalits (including 27 women and 10 children) were brutally killed by the Ranvir Sena (the now-almost-defunct caste army belonging to Bhumihar landlords) on December 1, 1997. While giving death sentence for 16 convicts and life imprisonment and Rs. 50,000 fine for 10 others, the court also noted that the massacre was a ‘stigma on civil society and rarest of rare cases of brutality’.
''Bihar is often viewed as a lost battle in policy as well as academia. In a quite real manner, Bihar tends to become the Indian Sudan which sells attractively in the media-market, where the feudal-bourgeois classes can overcome their guilt-conscience and get back to their business. However, none of these methods are a remedy for the state of Bihar which actually needs more politics: democratic and progressive politics. Only a political movement aimed at transcendence from the current form of social and economic organisation can save Bihar. Anything less is likely to be a failure.''-argues Awanish Kumar in EPW
Poor material conditions, the shifts in national politics and a common agenda against neoliberalism result in the formation of a new United Left Bloc featuring the three largest communist parties in Bihar. The dichotomy between the “social justice” agenda and the economic struggle has blurred in a conjuncture in which the electoral battle and the political struggles of the three left parties have finally found a meeting point to cement the material basis of the ULB in Bihar – a scenario that had been impossible less than four years ago.-Argues Chirashree Dasgupta in an article in EPW,March 7, 2009
Floods are a perennial problem in Bihar. The very same water source that acts as the life-blood for the agriculture-dependent population in the state, turns into an avalanche of death and misery every year. And every year, as this natural disaster strikes, it evokes temporary attention to the plight of the victims and soon to be forgotten government commissions and helicopter visits by the bourgeois polity. But once the shock value of the images fades away, all is forgotten even if misery is compounded and the people are made to brace up for the next year's natural fury. Such is the case of floods in Bihar. The Kosi river- a dynamic, sediment carrying water body is particularly driven to course-changes and therefore to put paid any plans to tame the river (through the embankment strategy that has been adopted for years). That the fact that this river originates across national borders in Nepal makes the problem even more complicated. Four experts - whose intros are provided in the post- with substantial understanding of the problem through different forms of expertise weigh on the Kosi tragedy and the perennial woes of river management and floods. They even venture to offer solutions. Pragoti hosts the links to these articles published in the Economic and Political Weekly.
An emancipatory politics cannot liberate unless it confronts the patriarchy within. | <urn:uuid:c702e962-f4cc-40be-b958-8bcbb8915082> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pragoti.in/ta/taxonomy/term/783 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00047-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956743 | 899 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Step foot in a new destination -- and leave behind a smaller carbon footprint. Green air travel is making strides, including several advancements made just this week.
United was the first U.S. domestic carrier to use biofuel (made partially from algae) in a commercial flight, from Houston to Chicago. Then Alaska Airlines and its affiliate Horizon Air introduced a biofuel blend, made from used cooking oil, to be used on 75 flights from Seattle to Washington, D.C., and Portland by the end of the year.
International carriers KLM, Lufthansa and Air China have already introduced biofuel use into their daily flight schedules, and more airlines are expected to use their own biofuel blends in 2012.
Changes aren’t just happening in tanks, however. United-Continental is arming pilots with iPads to cut down on the weight of in-flight manuals, and flight attendants debuted new lighter carts.
Participating airlines say these changes are just the start in their sustainability efforts and programs aimed to cut down on environmental impacts.
Find flights on these carriers on Fly.com. | <urn:uuid:23310a0e-c89b-47dc-be08-3953289b8e5a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.travelzoo.com/from-the-deal-experts/advancements-in-green-air-travel/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945156 | 224 | 2.515625 | 3 |
Brain Tumor Patient Community Delivers Priorities to Congress: Invest in Research and Ensure Access to Oral Chemotherapy
Washington, D.C. – May 7, 2012 - As Brain Tumor Awareness Month begins, the National Brain Tumor Society and Accelerate Brain Cancer Cure will rally staff, family members, patients and advocates to urge Members of Congress to increase funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and support the Cancer Drug Coverage Parity Act (HR 2746) tomorrow. In a time of heated debate over the budget and significant changes to the healthcare system, the Group hopes to put a face to these issues and acquire the support of Congress to unite against brain tumors, one of the most deadly forms of cancer and one with very few approved medicines.
“An increasing number of brain tumor patients are reporting higher co-pays or co-insurance costs to access temozolomide, an oral chemotherapy medicine. Oral temozolomide is often part of the standard of care and is one of the few options – patients must have access to this medicine to stay alive,” said Paul TonThat, Executive Director, National Brain Tumor Society. “It’s unacceptable for obstacles in health insurance to exist which deter or prevent patients from accessing brain cancer medication,” concluded TonThat. The Cancer Drug Coverage Parity Act would require health insurance plans that already cover oral, IV and injectable chemotherapy to cover oral chemotherapy on an equal out-of-pocket cost basis as traditional IV and injectable chemotherapy.
Max Wallace, Chief Executive Officer, Accelerate Brain Cancer Cure addressed the need to increase funding for the National Institutes of Health by stating “Congress should really step up its support of NIH research, as funding is critical to accelerating discovery which can lead to new treatments for brain tumor patients. Science is developing so rapidly that any cuts can set back research progress by many years.”
BethAnn Telford, a brain tumor survivor said it best “We have to do better as a country to help patients survive and to find cures. Congress should do its part by ensuring access to oral chemotherapy and increased funding for the NIH.” | <urn:uuid:0c59a29b-3aa8-45f9-ba8c-63c2bcc60644> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.braintumor.org/news/latest-nbts-news/brain-tumor-community-unites.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940307 | 448 | 1.515625 | 2 |
The plant names written in Latin are so confusing. Why don’t you just call everything by its regular English name?
There are several good reasons for using botanical nomenclature when identifying plants. For one, scientific names are an international language, so each species of plant (or other living creature) is identified by the same name throughout the world. Scientific names also reveal relationships among plants by grouping those with similar characteristics and evolutionary paths into the same order, family, or genus. The two-word name given to a species, such as Vinca minor or Ginkgo biloba, is called a binomial or scientific name. It’s often written in italics with the first of the two words capitalized.
In contrast, common names of plants can be imprecise. “Snowball bush” can refer to several types of viburnum or hydrangea; “bluebell” can be the English bulb of meadows, the wildflower of North American woodlands, or any of several summer-blooming perennials. The plant I call beebalm (Monarda didyma) you may know as Oswego tea or wild bergamot.
There’s nothing wrong with using common names, but knowing the scientific name of a plant will help you to search for more information about it online or to find a retailer that sells it. If you are unsure of how to pronounce those Latinized names, do what a botany professor told me years ago: Whether you know the correct pronunciation or not, always say scientific names in a strong and authoritative voice, and everyone else will think they’ve been saying them wrong. —Doug Hall | <urn:uuid:cfb042eb-31ae-4d80-846d-9709f92c6f92> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://organicgardening.com/blogs/dougsorganicsolutions/tag/nomenclature/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00066-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93267 | 353 | 3.453125 | 3 |
Stalin has not had a great press, although I have suggested once or twice that the man was a little more ambivalent than the standard accounts would have it. So something more to add to the mix. It comes from a book called Towards a New Socialism by W. Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell.
They argue quite persuasively that the full implementation of a communist economic system happened under Stalin. Through the five year plans beginning in the late 1920s the capitalist mode of extracting surplus value was replaced by a planned economy, in which surplus was controlled and allocated by the planning mechanism.
Under Soviet planning, the division between the necessary and surplus portions of the social product was the result of political decisions. For the most part, goods and labour were physically allocated to enterprises by the planning authorities, who would always ensure that the enterprises had enough money to ‘pay for’ the real goods allocated to them. If an enterprise made monetary ‘losses’, and therefore had to have its money balances topped up with ‘subsidies’, that was no matter. On the other hand, possession of money as such was no guarantee of being able to get hold of real goods. By the same token, the resources going into production of consumer goods were centrally allocated. Suppose the workers won higher ruble wages: by itself this would achieve nothing, since the flow of production of consumer goods was not responsive to the monetary amount of consumer spending. Higher wages would simply mean higher prices or shortages in the shops. The rate of production of a surplus was fixed when the planners allocated resources to investment in heavy industry and to the production of consumer goods respectively (pp. 4-5).
The key to this momentous shift was the old issue of compulsion: how do you encourage workers and peasants to engage in the new system? Under the circumstances of such rapid change and in the face of a sustained threat from international capitalism, that compulsion took the form of carrot and stick. Genuine revolutionary fervour characterised much of the effort, but for those less inclined to engage, forced labour, exile and ‘terror’ were deployed. Crucial to this process was the personality cult of Stalin, who embodied the sheer grit (thereby making up for what he lacked in oratorical skill) of the revolutionary ‘miracle’ required to adopt such a radically new economic system. Stalin was thereby able both to promote a deep sense of ‘participation in a great historic endeavour’, but he was also the ‘stern and utterly ruthless liquidator of any who failed so to participate’. I would add that this combination, along with the deep strength of the communist economic system, enabled the extraordinary recovery during the Second World War and the eventual victory by the USSR over Germany and fascism. Interesting bloke, our Stalin. | <urn:uuid:6324410e-d333-42ce-8c3e-f866275d89fc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://stalinsmoustache.wordpress.com/tag/communism/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00045-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976176 | 583 | 2.328125 | 2 |
Last week, Joel Rose wrote about the compact disc on its 30th anniversary, but it could have been an obituary. In the last decade, CD sales in the United States have dropped by more than two thirds, fulfilling a cycle that dates back to wax cylinders and 78 rpm discs: the 20 to 30 year lifespan of a format, followed by the rise of a new technology. So we decided to look at the format that usurped the CD's place in music listener's ears and hard drives, if not always hearts.
The MP3's history is one of innovation and betrayal. Invented in the 1990s by engineers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology in Germany, it took years of work to create, but its widespread adoption as the CD's successor was triggered by an act of theft. Jonathan Sterne, a professor at McGill University in Montreal, dives into that history in his book MP3: The Meaning of a Format. The MP3 a format that so many of us now play through technology embedded in our mobile phones stands on the shoulders of research that began as a way of limiting the sonic reproduction of the human voice over telephone lines nearly a century ago.
As Sterne follows the developments that led from that innovation, he takes into account two factors that intersect at a different point on each new format: (A) how we experience the playback of a format (what he calls its "sensual dimension") and (B) the standards of technology and infrastructure that enable it to reach an audience. In the late 1990s, the CD was a high-quality format and the music industry was built around its distribution. CD players were portable, programmable and cheap. Early MP3s, by comparison, sounded terrible and there was virtually nowhere to get them legally. So how did the the upstart come to dominate the marketplace?
NPR: Why do you think the MP3 overtook the CD?
Jonathan Sterne: "Well, there's so many reasons. It's smaller. It's the whole 10,000 songs in the palm of your hand kind of sell that Apple does. So it's much, much easier to maintain and organize a collection. It's much more portable than a compact disc. And it's much easier to share and exchange. MP3s are very convivial technology. They're not copy protected, mostly. And because they depend on a particular configuration of the Internet that there's this big infrastructure where we can easily send stuff back and forth. People say they're children of the digitization of music and the compact disc, because if you didn't have that, you couldn't have MP3s, and that's true. But even more so, I think that they're sort of children of high speed internet, especially in the U.S. and Canada, although you'd find very different MP3 economies on the streets of major cities including New York, but also in places like Africa where people are selling memory sticks or CDs that are basically unauthorized copies of whole artists' collections.
"So MP3s are much easier to share, much more portable, all these technologies have been built around them and so they're very successful that way. And so by 1997, MP3 actually surpasses pornography as the most searched for item on the internet. That's in part because people could also get the means to encode and decode the format for free. And very quickly thereafter Apple and Microsoft and people start signing deals with Fraunhofer, the people who own the rights to what was then finally called MP3. And then all of a sudden it was this incredibly valuable property, but at the same time something you and I don't pay for as users. We pay for the hardware to play it back and maybe we pay for the recordings."
NPR: About a year ago, we had a conversation with Karlheinz Brandenburg, one of the guys at Fraunhofer who helped to invent the MPEG Layer 3 encoding process. One of things he told us is that the MP3 has a birthday. July 14, 1995 is the day that they decided on ".mp3" as the file extension. So we can say that the MP3 is 17 years old, but from your perspective, where it its lifespan is the format right now?
JS: "If you go with [the theory that] every format has a 30 year lifespan, it's definitely mid-life. It is the most common form of recorded audio in the world, so that's not going to go away overnight. It's compatible with not only the devices that people use but the ways in which they use music in their lives. And the format itself has been hugely improved since 1995, so the encoding protocols are different. People generally encode at a higher bit rate. People have come up with some pretty good tricks for encoding audio that make it sound better than it once did. I mean, there are all these other competitor formats out there like AAC which Brandenburg and his people developed afterwards and OGG which is open source. So there are competitors, but none of them have what economists and technological historians call the level of path dependency that MP3 has. In other words, if your entire music collection or a large portion of it is coded as MP3, when you buy a new device to play it back, you're going to want that device to play MP3s. It's been widely adopted. People know what it is, they know how to use it and using it is part of the expectations that they bring to, say, buying a new audio system. So plenty of people will buy audio playback equipment that can't play records, but very few people will buy audio playback equipment that cannot play MP3s."
NPR: In the book, you use the terms "channel efficiency" and "aesthetic experience" to describe two criteria by which you can judge the success of each format. I think of those criteria, in basic terms, as convenience of access and sound quality.
JS: "But quality defined in a certain way. So from an engineering point of view, people talk about it very similar to how close it is to reality in terms of definition. One of the most profound things that psychophysicists have shown over and over again is that the human senses aren't actually 100 percent high definition in the way that a microphone or a speaker might be."
NPR: And that's actually hugely important to the process of encoding MP3s.
JS: "One of the things that's so fascinating about this technology is precisely that it presupposes the limitations of the human senses. Although as it turns out and this is sort of what I discovered in writing the book many of the major communications developments over the past century have been built specifically, like explicitly on this assumption and operation wise in order to produce channel efficiency. Every format balances this and makes decisions and a lot of that is situational as well in terms of how it's going to be used and how it's going to be engaged with. But over time, those decisions come to matter less and less, and the look and sound and feel of the format actually becomes culturally iconic in and of itself. So there's a whole generation of, not only music fans, but musicians who believe well they don't believe, they feel if you listen to drums recorded to tape, they sound right; if you listen to drums recorded to digital they sound wrong. So there are all these adaptations for digital recording systems to make drums sound more like they were recorded to tape for that reason. So we come to things that would've been, in the time, considered imperfections. We think about the use of vinyl noise in hip hop music even today as a sort of aesthetic thing. So these imperfections or compromises actually become part of the sound and something people expect to hear."
NPR: The subtitle of your book is "The Meaning of a Format." What is a format? It's not just the means by which I listen to music; it's not an iPhone, right?
JS: "Right. Format is ... I call it the intersection between the sensual dimensions of a medium and standard protocols and operating routines. Think about the differences between what's called standard definition and high definition TV. It's not just an aesthetic experience, although that's a huge part of it, right? The 'Oh my God, I can see the blades of grass on the golf course' or 'I can see the puck move' or whatever. But it's also what part of the spectrum broadcasters are broadcasting on. It's what hardware you use and how that hardware interfaces with other hardware.
"The reason I'm interested in the MP3 specifically as a format is because I think a lot of the important historical changes in media are now happening in the sort of spaces between hardware and user experience things sort of below the threshold of your average consumer's perception, like it's not something people pay attention to. They pay attention to the new iPhone. They don't necessarily pay attention to the format in which they receive the music except inasmuch as they want their devices to be compatible with each other. So if you want to actually tell the story of media as devices that produce sort of sensory experiences for people, or with people you could say, and also as sort of economic and technical and cultural institutions, then I think looking at formats is one really good way to do that."
NPR: So explain the MP3 then, in those terms.
JS: "The MP3 is a set of technologies that have a set of assumptions about perception that are really interesting. Let's use the song as our unit, which is like a track on a compact disc. An MP3 is important because it's so much smaller, in terms of the amount of hard drive space or bandwidth it takes up, than the same track on a compact disc. That means it's easier to store, it's easier to transmit. It achieved this smallness through some decisions that are made in the encoding of an MP3. It takes the music thousands of times a second. It says 'What parts of the sound is a person not going to hear?' It removes those parts of the frequencies and then encodes it. So it's actually taking out part of the file that it thinks will be inaudible to you. Now a lot of people listen to MP3s and say they don't sound as good or whatever, but in fact the problems that they hear with them are often not the missing audio, but rather sort of artifacts of the format itself. You could say the equivalent of clicks and pops and scratches on a record. And you know, they don't like that, just as people who were inventing the CD didn't like the clicks and pops and scratches on a record, which of course, now we all think is wonderful and fascinating. So it has this sensuous dimension to it.
"And what's amazing is not that MP3s are perfect they're not it's that they work as well as they do, and part of that is because of how people listen to music. If you think about my commute to work today: I get on the metro in my neighborhood and then I get off the metro at school. If I'm listening to music, I'm listening to it on these very cheap ear buds off a device in very noisy environment. Even if I'm listening to the highest possible definition audio, I'm not going to hear most of it. And most people now listen to most music in these sort of imperfect situations in a state of distraction. And in a way, the MP3 actually accounts for it in its code. So that's the sensual part of it.
"But then the standards part of it is really interesting too because MP3s are the most common recorded audio in the world for the moment. Any device that plays back digital sound pretty much is expected to be able to play MP3s, and so it's a way of perpetuating particular institutional arrangements in the consumer electronics industry. My favorite story about this is actually in 2001, Sony, the conglomerate, did two things that seemed to contradict each other. Sony Records joined a suit against Napster for, you know, Napster promoting the sharing of music files. And Sony Consumer Electronics released a CD player that played back MP3s, so people who did have MP3s that at that point they had probably acquired either by ripping their own collection or by downloading through services like Napster, they could play them back."
NPR: Looking at the MP3 compared to other dominant formats, if you're thinking about both convenience and quality, where how does this format compare?
JS: "I think it depends on what kind of music you listen to. So at like a knee jerk level, I find MP3s vastly superior to cassettes in terms of sound quality. But I know that there are whole labels dedicated to releasing music on cassette now and are building around that sound, so they would probably disagree with me. MP3s probably can reproduce lower bass than a lot records can. Are we talking about like a $50,000 audio file system or something that somebody's going to have in their dorm room? Again, it's a variable thing.
"What I would say is every medium makes compromises. So people always talk about the arbitrary especially with digital; They say 'Well it's so arbitrary, it doesn't reproduce sound below 20Hz or above 20kHz' and those are arbitrary limits. But you could say the same thing about the RIAA curve that's applied to records, which is also a way of compensating for some of the physical limitations of the medium. So yeah, the thing about them is they sound pretty good. If you're listening on expensive speakers and paying attention, the CD version or the lossless version of something could well sound better than the MP3 version, but you also might not be able to tell, especially if you don't know what to listen for. There's a great quote and I don't remember if it was Brandenburg or it was Heinz Gerhuser or one of the other Fraunhofer people who wrote this but they're setting the standard and somebody says, 'Well you know, it's like when you buy a new house and you look out the living room window and at first you're really impressed with the view, and then time passes and suddenly you notice that there's a big crack in the window.' People don't necessarily, at first, if they're not paying attention and some people never learn or care to pay attention notice that crack in the window. And it's the same thing with the MP3. They may never notice issues in the stereo imaging or how it deals with certain kinds of transients or things like that. Those things may completely be irrelevant to their enjoyment of music."
NPR: But the MP3 can get pretty close to CD quality, too, depending on how you encode. And in terms of channel efficiency ...
JS: "In terms of channel efficiency, it's way, way, way better. For one thing, it's much smaller. It's so small you can't hold one in your hand in the way you can hold thousands of them in your hand inside a hard drive or inside flash memory but you can't hold just one, whereas a CD you can't hold thousands in your hand. In fact, holding hundreds is bad for your back. So in terms of channel efficiency, there's no contest."
NPR: It's like having a house that's enormous so enormous and has so many windows that the crack is less meaningful.
JS: "Yes. But again, it matters to users because some people who listen to music want channel inefficiency. They don't want efficiency. Think about someone who deliberately chooses to listen to records today. That is an aesthetic decision. I'm going to shop for music in different places. I've got to flip it every 15 to 20 minutes. So people actually do choose channel efficiency. As with definition, it's not an unmitigated good. People come to love the inefficiencies just as they come to love the distortions in a format and that can be an important part of the listening experience too. So while our MP3s are, without question, more efficient in their use of storage space and bandwidth and much more portable than compact discs, the efficiency just as the definition may not be the value that the music listener is pursuing."
NPR: Why isn't the MP3 already a thing of the past?
JS: "I think the main thing is path dependence. People say there are new higher quality formats. You can basically stream CD quality audio now in the form of lossless files, but I think there's a lot of resistance to it. For one thing, anybody with a large MP3 collection probably still didn't pay for a large proportion of that music. Second, MP3s are just so completely common. It's the most obvious thing: It's the format you're most likely to get digital music in and it is the format that any digital device is most likely to be able to play. So as long as those two conditions obtain, it is unlikely that MP3s will go away.
"I think to challenge them, it's not just a matter of improving the quality of sound reproduction or whatever when you look at the changes from one format to another. It's always about changing context of use, changing ways of dealing with users by companies, and then struggles among industries and sometimes regulators about how to shape media and how to distribute music I guess. So you know people often say to me 'Well we can play much better quality audio even over the internet, why are we still using MP3?' And the answer is because it was never about just ever increasing technical standards or higher and higher definition. It's always about all these others things at once. And if that's not enough, a couple of people have done some not very well documented but interesting studies of university undergraduates where they play the same song in many different formats, and not surprisingly, the undergrads tend to think that the MP3 sounds more like music is supposed to sound, just as your baby boomer is going to say music should sound like it sounds on records."
Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/. | <urn:uuid:7cfffa56-9d39-44a6-88f2-743494fb54bf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.gpb.org/news/2012/10/11/taking-stock-of-the-mp3-at-mid-life | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97728 | 3,759 | 2.546875 | 3 |
Survey on the success and impact of coastal fisheries during the summer 2009
In late summer 2009 the Directorate of Fisheries on behalf of the Ministry of Fisheries contacted the University Centre of the Westfjords with the request of conducting a survey on the outcome of this pilot project. Sigríður Ólafsdóttir, then program director of the Coastal and Marine Management master's program, overviewed the project. A part of the survey, mostly data collection, was conducted in cooperation with five research centres in other parts of the country. One of the Coastal and marine management program's master's students, Gísli Halldórsson, took part in this work and used the data for his master's thesis.
The survey was published in January 2010 and can be downloaded here (only in Icelandic)
Gísli Halldórson's Master's thesis has been available on the internet since spring 2010 here (in Icelandic). | <urn:uuid:4904b053-6681-4ec4-b31c-b7add5478390> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hsvest.is/research/survey_on_coastal_fisheries_2009/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964358 | 194 | 1.945313 | 2 |
By BOB DAVIS And AARON BACK
Inflation jitters spread through emerging markets on Tuesday, prompting China's central bank to raise interest rates for the third time in four months amid worries that a drought threatening the country's wheat crop will put further pressure on global food prices.
With fireworks still echoing from China's Lunar New Year holiday, its central bank said it is raising rates by one-quarter percentage point. It was just the latest move by an emerging-market government—several of which are deploying a panoply of policies to battle inflation fueled by rising food and commodity prices and growth that is threatening to outstrip their productive capacity.
In Brazil, Latin America's largest economy, the government reported Tuesday that inflation is accelerating, leading markets to expect its central bank to increase its overnight rate, already at 11.25%.
Few emerging-market countries have a firm grip on the inflation problem. Just last week, John Lipsky, the International Monetary Fund's No. 2, said many emerging economies are running out of excess capacity "and yet most of them still have in place the expansionary…monetary and budgetary policies." The cure is clear, he said. "Everybody is going to need to tighten monetary policy, reduce budgetary stimulus and continue with the process of structural reforms."
In contrast to emerging markets, inflation in the U.S. remains low—below the Federal Reserve's informal 2% target—despite rising commodity prices. But an improving growth outlook for the U.S. and the risk that rising food and energy prices will spill over into other goods and services have bond markets pushing up long-term rates and moving up their expectations for a Federal Reserve rate increase. Yields on U.S. Treasurys have been rising, and on Tuesday hit 3.721%, the highest since April.
Trading in futures markets indicates that the market, listening carefully to the latest words of Fed bank presidents, now puts the odds of a Fed rate increase in December at close to 100%, up from just 25% a week ago. The Fed has been holding short-term rates near zero since December 2008 and hasn't finished a $600 billion bond-buying effort aimed at keeping long-term rates down.
Further central bank rate hikes in emerging markets are widely anticipated. Those expectations—along with a flood of money fleeing low interest rates in the U.S., Europe and Japan—are contributing to upward pressure on emerging-market currencies. Several currencies have rallied to multiyear highs. Authorities in South Korea and Malaysia recently have intervened in foreign-exchange markets to slow the appreciation of their currencies.
Inflation fears intensified Tuesday after the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said drought in the five Chinese provinces that account for two-thirds of China's wheat production is endangering this year's crop. U.S. wheat futures surged Tuesday to a fresh 30-month high on fears of further strains on global supplies. The current wheat contract rose 1.8% to $8.7425 a bushel in Chicago, up 81.3% from a year ago.
In Brazil, higher bus fares and food prices boosted inflation in January. The government said Tuesday that its main consumer-price index in January was 5.99% above year-earlier levels, well above the official year-end 2011 target of 4.5%. The data add to pressure on Brazil's central bank to raise rates.
Inflation is up in the U.K. and price acceleration in Europe is now running ahead of central bankers' targets. But in the U.S., inflation remains below the Fed's informal target despite rising food and energy prices, in part because businesses haven't been able to pass along rising costs and because still-high unemployment is holding down wages. While some saw last Friday's Labor Department report that wages spurted 0.4% in January as a danger signal, the Fed and many private forecasters see little risk of a worrisome rise in wages and prices while unemployment remains high.
China raised interest rates in an effort to stem inflation, which has been fueled by growth in its money supply and other factors. Click to enlarge graphic.
The People's Bank of China said Tuesday evening, as many businesses prepared to open after a weeklong holiday, that it would lift its benchmark lending and deposit rates by 0.25 percentage point. That would bring the one-year yuan lending rate to 6.06% from 5.81%, and the one-year yuan deposit rate to 3% from 2.75%, effective Wednesday.
The rate on deposits remains well below inflation rates, which does little to encourage Chinese households to put their money in banks rather than more speculative investments like real estate. The lending rate is only slightly above anticipated inflation.
The Chinese also have been working hard to limit overall growth of credit in the economy. After expanding at a nearly 30% clip last year, the money supply is now rising at around 19%. While that's slower than last year's peak, the rate has been accelerating lately. The more money flowing in the economy, the more inflation may rise.
Qu Hongbin, co-head of Asian economics research at HSBC, said he expects another quarter-point rate increase in China and "at least" another 1.5 percentage-point increase in bank-reserve requirements—the share of deposits banks set aside and thus cannot lend—by the end of June.
Marc Ostwald, an analyst at London-based Monument Securities, said that while the rate increase may lead to temporary jitters that growth will be slowed in China and other emerging economies, underlying momentum for those economies remains strong. "While equity markets may continue to correct, at some stage it will dawn on many investors that their worst fears for developing-market assets due to policy tightening are not being realized," he said.
So far the tightening hasn't hurt China's growth much. The country's economy grew by 10.3% in 2010, although there are some signs that growth is beginning to slow from recent torrid levels. Credit Suisse estimates that China will grow at a still-impressive 9.2% in 2011, even with further tightening of credit by the central bank.
Shortly before the Lunar New Year break that began last Wednesday, PBOC Gov. Zhou Xiaochuan said the central bank would focus on inflation. In a Jan. 30 interview, he noted that while the pace of Chinese price inflation slowed slightly in December, it was faster than many had forecast.
In recent days, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs economist have warned that China's inflation—4.6% year-over-year in December—was likely to top 5% in January, largely because of rising food and housing prices. Some analysts expect inflation may reach 6% in the first half of 2011, compared to year-earlier levels.
With the government reluctant to allow a sharp increase in the value of its currency, the yuan—which would tend to brake the economy and reduce the price of imported goods and thus dampen inflation—the PBOC relies mainly on two anti-inflationary tools: interest rates and bank reserve requirements. Since the start of last year, China has lifted reserve requirements seven times to a level of 19%. More increases are expected in coming months.
Because China relies less on markets than some other emerging economies, PBOC rate changes tend to have less impact than in other big emerging markets. Some China experts say China's government relies too heavily on its ability to control the banking sector—almost all of which is state-owned.
Interest rates do play an important symbolic role in China. "They are an important signal of the government's intentions but do not have a significant practical effect, especially when inflation-adjusted lending rates are so low," said Eswar Prasad, a China scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington. That's because much lending is done to large state-owned enterprises, which aren't especially sensitive to changes in interest rates, he said, and small firms can't get much lending from banks anyway.
Despite exhortations from the U.S., Europe, Brazil and others that it let the yuan move higher faster, Chinese officials are reluctant. They worry that too rapid a rise could undermine the country's export sector and be destabilizing. On Wednesday, the central bank set the yuan's reference rate for daily trading at a new high of 6.5850 per dollar. It has now gained more than 3.5% since June—a much slower pace than Washington and others have urged.—Paulo Prada, Ian Talley and David Wessel contributed to this article. | <urn:uuid:21ca3a22-0235-4370-a16c-b8648241d4fc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704364004576131670845358208.html?mod=djemalertNEWS | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960751 | 1,764 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Art Tatum: No Greater Art
Talkin’ Tatum with Hank Jones, Billy Taylor, Dick Hyman, Adam Makowicz
Today, Art Tatum would have been 88. His music survives and continues to astound.
This weekend, after working my way through his Solo and Group Masterpieces on Pablo, which included such collaborators as Roy Eldridge, Lionel Hampton and Ben Webster, I’m listening to a Verve reissue, 20th Century Piano Genius, recorded live at several Beverly Hills parties in the ’50s. I flash on such accolades as “Tatum—no one can imitatum” and “No one can overratum.” A bit trite perhaps, but they do have the ring of truth.
Although a number of his keyboard cousins have also possessed superior technique, Tatum continues to amaze 42 years after his untimely passing. Few have been able to duplicate his dazzling right-hand runs, often executed at seemingly impossible speeds while his left hand offered his own distinctive stride beat, his boundless invention or the beauty of his harmonic tapestries. What a concept—elaborate fill-ins, dazzling arpeggios, sumptuous chording and a predilection for sudden changes of key and tempo. These uniquely distinct manifestations of Tatum’s artistry elevated standards to sovereign status.
Back in the ’30s and ’40s, when 52nd Street was at its zenith, Art Tatum, who was legally blind, was one of its most consistent drawing cards at clubs like the Downbeat and the Three Deuces. As the story goes, Fats Waller was working the Yacht Club as the featured performer one night and he spotted Tatum in the audience. “I just play the piano,” Waller announced. “But God is in the house tonight.” Even classical piano virtuosi Vladimir Horowitz and Sergei Rachmaninoff visited “The Street” to check out Tatum and left astounded and bemused by his pyrotechnical skills.
Club engagements were just the start of a night for Tatum, who thrived in after hours clubs, jam sessions and cutting contests. Many observers feel that Tatum did his best playing in these situations when, because he wasn’t being paid for his services, he was able to play for as long and late as he pleased. He also seemed to feast on competition. Another legend tells of a Harlem keyboard joust where Tatum bested an imperious Bud Powell by using his left hand to play everything Bud was playing on his right, immediately after Bud had played it.
Born in Toledo, Ohio, Tatum arrived in 1932 backing singer Adelaide Hall and found New York to his liking, quickly becoming one of “The Street”’s highest paid stars. He lived as he played, prodigiously, drinking everything in one gulp yet never seeming to get drunk. Tatum would also stay awake for days on end, playing almost non-stop and maintaining his energy through catnaps, but he’d also sleep in long stretches, as well, awakening instantly when one of hands was touched.
Art Tatum died of uremic poisoning in 1956 at the age of 47 but his playing is still the subject of awe among pianists worldwide. To get more insight into Tatum, I spoke with four pianists who have been deeply touched by him: Dick Hyman, Hank Jones, Adam Makowicz and Billy Taylor. Hyman heard Tatum a number of times and, along with Billy Taylor, was cited by Tatum as one of his favorites among “young” pianists. Jones first heard Tatum on the radio in his native Detroit and was instantly hooked. Makowicz grew up in Poland and was ready to be a classical pianist until he heard Tatum on one of Willis Conover’s Voice of America broadcasts. More than 30 years later, he played at the Kennedy Center’s Tatum series and has recently released a exceptional solo piano encomium, A Tribute to Art Tatum, on VWC.” Taylor served as Tatum’s protégé and amanuensis when he came to New York in 1945.
“Every young pianist of my generation had a powerful moment when he first heard Art Tatum and wondered how it was possible for somebody to play that way. Like everyone else, I had his records early on; I must have been 10 or 11. A little later on, I got to play on the same bill with him at a club called Cafe Society. I was playing in Tony Scott’s Quartet and for a week or so, Tatum was the featured act. That was marvelous time also. Was I awestruck? I should say so.
“What was it about Tatum? It was everything, not just his technique, although that was enough to boggle the mind right there. It was his sense of harmony, his voice leading, his time, his touch, his ideas, it was his integration of his well known runs and figures with lines which were at least as complex as what Bird would do a few years later.
“At first, I did try to emulate him but I didn’t exactly transcribe his solos. I tried to learn his runs and incorporate what I could, but that’s a very tall order. I still haven’t done it.
“As pianists, we all do what we can to follow in Tatum’s footsteps but some people have gone entirely in a different direction because they’ve give up trying, they’ve seen how pointless it is to make that turn. In my case, I’ve tried to get as much as I could through the years and by now, I know a fair amount but I would never say that I do it perfectly.”
“I saw Tatum in person many many times. I used to work at a club in Buffalo, New York, the Anchor Bar. Whenever Tatum was in town, he’d be working at another club across town called McVans. We’d go over and catch his last set and then after he finished his last set, he would usually go to an after hours spot or to somebody’s home who had invited him to come and play. He would just play for hours after he finished work. I guess that’s how he practiced. He never stopped playing. It seemed that he played all of his waking hours. I think this is probably how he perfected his technique and maintained it. He had an endless flow of ideas and an unbelievable technique with both hands. He put it all together. I believe that Tatum was the greatest pianist of this century.
“When I first heard him, it was a radio broadcast before he came to New York. I listened to what I thought was two or three pianists playing together on these unbelievable arrangements. I thought to myself, they must have rehearsed this stuff a lot because these guys couldn’t play this way unless they spend a lot of time working. I was amazed when I discovered that it was only one man playing. I couldn’t believe it. That was my first introduction.
“When finally met him and got a chance to hear him play in person, it seemed as if he wasn’t really exerting much effort, he had an effortless way of playing. It was deceptive. You’d watch him and you couldn’t believe what was coming out, what was reaching your ears. He didn’t have that much motion at the piano. He didn’t make a big show of moving around and waving his hands and going through all sorts of physical gyrations to produce the music that he produced, so that in itself is amazing. There had to be intense concentration there, but you couldn’t tell by just looking at him play.
“Tatum completely mastered the jazz idiom. His harmonic conception was far advanced. In fact, he was using harmonic concepts that bebop players adapted years later. Of course his technique was flawless and with both hands too. I believe that anything he could conceive in his mind, he could execute and his mind must have moved at lightening speed, otherwise he couldn’t have done the things that he did. What else is there? He did everything possible on the piano. I’ve heard people try to imitate Tatum. The imitators can only go so far. Maybe they can approach the technique but how can they approach the creativity and the ideas, nobody’s done that. You can sit down and transcribe one of his solos and I suppose that if somebody practiced for 20 or 25 years, they could probably play one of his solos note for note, but that’s not the same thing as creating the music. Tatum created this and that’s what made him unique.”
“The greatest pianist who ever lived! I first heard him in the mid-’50s, back in Poland, when I was studying classical music and was able to play fast runs. I’d heard some jazz pianists, but nothing like Tatum. I was 14 or 15 and was thinking seriously about a career in classical music. Then I heard this pianist on the radio who kept me listening to trying to figure out who he was and wondering where I could get some records. At that time in Poland, it was very hard to get western recordings, particularly from the U.S. I used to listen regularly to Music USA, Willis Conover’s jazz program on the Voice of America, where I heard Tatum. Overnight, I decided to go and play jazz because it was too beautiful not to touch this music and play it. Tatum made me play jazz.
“I was impressed with the flavor and color of his runs. I’m not talking about single notes, which were so fast, but his arpeggios. These runs made particular colors in my imagination. At the time, I didn’t know much about jazz and what it was all about, but I knew of course how to follow melody lines and I knew what Tatum was improvising. Rhythmically, it was too complicated for me. Not knowing the rhythms, I couldn’t tap when he played but I knew that this was right, that this was music that would swing with vitality, something that classical music didn’t have. It was such a beautiful feeling to hear these bouncing notes and precise time in such colorful lines and the sounds of the piano so enriched and so beautiful, so tasteful. I was in heaven listening to this music and even today, when I listen to Tatum I still have the same kind of feeling.
“There’s a story about Horowitz, when he heard Tatum he wanted to play like him but when he met Tatum, he told him, I could play as fast as you or even faster but I couldn’t play the right time like you play, and I couldn’t play all your runs.”
“I try and emulate his spirit because even after years of practicing, you can’t play like him, it’s impossible. I try to emulate his taste, with every note in the right place.
“I never tried to transcribe and learn, note by note, never ever, this is not fun. I wanted to improvise music like he did. From Tatum I learned that this music has to be something that comes from your soul, your brain, your whole body. It’s something you create right now, in this moment. Tatum was my guideline and the most sophisticated and difficult guideline in piano music. That title, ‘20th Century Piano Genius,’ it fits. Every pianist who loves jazz should have that set.
“What I find disturbing, though, is that it’s so hard to find Tatum on the radio today. There are a lot of great musicians who are living, and should be played, but still, people today are not exposed to him enough.”
“He was my biggest influence, even before I got to NY. My uncle was a pianist who gave me my first Fats Waller record and when I kept bugging him and telling him that I wanted to play that style, he finally said, listen to this and figure it out. He gave me The Shout, by Art Tatum. What I wanted to know was, who were those two guys?
“When I got to New York,I was extremely lucky. I will never get over the fact that I came to New York on a Friday and by Sunday, I had a gig. I went to Minton’s, hung around all night and got to play on the last set. Another my idols, Ben Webster, came in, and by that time, there were so many guys on the bandstand taking solos, that’s all I could do was comp. But luckily for me, that’s what Ben was interested in. He came back, stood by the piano and listened to be and said, what’s your name kid? I told him and he said, what are you doing? I said I just got to town and he said, I’m looking for a piano player. Come down to the Three Deuces, I’d really like to hear you play, I can’t hear you tonight like this. Sunday night I went down to the Three Deuces on 52nd Street to play with Ben, and Art Tatum was the headliner. That was when I first met him. It was wonderful to be in my first dream job, opposite the most important influence on my playing.
“Art was also one of the nicest human beings I’ve ever met. He was very sensitive. And he really loved sports, especially baseball. He was very up on statistics. He knew everybody’s batting average, he had a head for stats, he would argue. We used to go to a bar up in Harlem called Hollywood. The guy who owned it was his good friend and man they’d get into some arm wrestling arguments about who did what and why. He would swear that Art was wrong and Art would say, go get the paper, go get the almanac, that’s the right statistic, he hit .217 that year.
“There’s no doubt that Art was a genius, but he was a natural musician as well. He studied European classical music when he was a kid and he was always studying for musicians and incorporating a lot of different things. The way that he studied was by listening to people whose work he liked. He played Chopin, he played Bach and he used the information that he got from the European piano masters in his own work. The thing that always excited me was the fact that he spent a lot of time in hotel rooms and would always find a classical station. The funny part about it was he would stay up all night, and listen to classical for a while, then go to sleep at ten or 11, after listening to the classical music.
“I was his protégé for three years. I got to take him to a lot of nightclubs and after hours places. He was legally blind, he couldn’t maneuver around, especially at night, as he would like, but he was very very independent. He didn’t want you to lead him but he needed someone to accompany him to wherever it was he wanted to go. And, he liked the company. Art was gregarious. He liked to have specific people around him.
“While I was working opposite with Tatum, Dizzy brought the first bebop band ever to 52nd Street that featured Don Byas, Oscar Pettiford and Max Roach. Guys like Coleman Hawkins and Tatum recognized that they were the source of a lot of this new music. Like Roy Eldridge was the source of the stuff that Dizzy was building. Hawk and Roy and Tatum recognized that bebop was something special and were anxious to incorporate it into what they were doing. They didn’t want to play bebop but they did want to use that information in their own way. And so Tatum was a big source of influence to Charlie Parker in particular because Bird loved what he did. One of the things that Bird liked about my playing was that I used some of those harmonies. I once played something and he said to me, ‘Oh man, just like Tatum.’ I told him, ‘Oh yeah, that’s where I got it from!’”
Originally published in January/February 1998 | <urn:uuid:15d65b84-bc07-4beb-892f-64f5d63ec9ac> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://jazztimes.com/articles/21296-art-tatum-no-greater-art | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.991425 | 3,530 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Lowell receives Target, Raising a Reader resources
Lowell Elementary celebrated the start of school with Target and Raising a Reader activities and donations for the library, students and parents. See the video.
Target employees read aloud to kindergartners in the Lowell library.
Target's remarkable relationship with Lowell Elementary has blossomed since the corporation funded a complete library makeover, worth more than $100,000, in October 2009.
This month, Target sponsored a back-to-school event that featured backpacks filled with school supplies for every student at an all school assembly.
After the assembly, kindergartners attended a read-aloud party in the library with Target volunteers.
The kindergartners will also benefit from Raising a Reader book bags and books funded by Target. Each bag contains four books. They will rotate from home to home so parents can read four new books with their kindergartners each week.
RAR, a national nonprofit organization, partners with Target to engage children and parents in a model program that improves literacy skills and reading proficiency.
Target presented Sandi Kuhn, Lowell principal, a $15,000 grant that will fund new nonfiction and informational books for the library. The materials support the achievement of the state's new Common Core Standards in English language arts.
"Our community is truly blessed to receive these generous donations from Target. Words can't express our gratitude for the company's kindness and generosity," Kuhn said.
Partner Spotlight: Raising a Reader and Target
READesign: Lowell library's 2009 makeover | <urn:uuid:052c9876-385c-4ef3-9750-07f23e989434> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mpsaz.org/news/articles/21022?ref=fs | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940296 | 321 | 2.125 | 2 |
Powerful, expressive, and compelling! Now you can see what it takes to be a stronger, more elegant dancer. Featuring over 200 full-color illustrations, Dance Anatomy visually depicts the unique relationship between muscle development and aesthetic movement as never before.
Dance Anatomy features 82 of the most effective dance, movement, and performance exercises, each designed to promote perfect alignment, improved placement, proper breathing, and prevention of common injuries. In stunning detail, the accompanying illustration captures the dancer in motion and highlights the active muscles associated with each movement.
You’ll learn how to modify exercises to target specific areas to enhance flexibility and reduce muscle tension. You’ll also learn to put it all together to personalize a program based on your style of dance, level of expertise, and individual needs and goals.
Whether you seek to optimize performance, add a new movement to your repertoire, or minimize muscle fatigue, stress, and injury, Dance Anatomy is your perfect partner. | <urn:uuid:43d96114-bcda-41e6-9ab3-ccc3c28374b0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.americanpoems.com/store/1052-1000-0736081933-Dance_Anatomy_Sports_Anatomy.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.924337 | 199 | 1.78125 | 2 |
Educational & Environmental
The First Trees
Christmas Trees haven't always been a Christmas Tradition. No one really knows who put up the first Christmas tree, but some historians believe that even the Egyptians and Romans used some form of an evergreen to decorate their homes in late December.
It is generally agreed that the first use of a tree as part of the Christian Christmas celebration was started over 500 years ago by the Germans.
The Christmas tree was brought to America by the Hessian mercenaries that were paid to fight for the British during the Revolutionary War. In 1804, soldiers stationed at a fort near Chicago hauled trees to their barracks during Christmas.
In 1842, a German named Charles Minnegerode introduced the custom of decorated Christmas trees in Williamsburg, Virginia homes. His tree was described as being "splendidly decorated" with strings of popcorn, nuts, and lighted candles.
By 1900, one in five American families decorated trees during Christmas and by 1930, the tree had become a nearly universal part of the American Christmas. | <urn:uuid:a565fd8a-3674-4f9d-be92-fd118f5ffccc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ncchristmastrees.com/the-first-trees.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00062-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978699 | 213 | 3.265625 | 3 |
FPInnovations' Value-added Wood Products Research Program covers all
aspects of the supply chain from the resource through manufacturing
to market access. More specifically, these areas are:
- Value-added Product Development to develop/improve/evaluate
product designs (structural and appearance) matching customer
needs with wood attributes, to develop products from wood residues,
and to develop/enhance wood-based composite products.
- Wood Species Assessment to identify opportunities to
extract higher value products from the available Canadian timber
resource, based on the attributes of each species.
- Optimisation of Manufacturing Processes, to develop new/improved
processes to manufacture value-added wood products.
- Studies on Market Access and Potential, to investigate
the competitive advantage of value-added wood products manufactured
in Canada, and to facilitate their international acceptance.
- Program for Northern Ontario value-added wood sector
In recent years, FPInnovations has also increased its efforts to meet
the specific needs of the hardwood industry towards value-added
production, notably through the creation, in 2001, of the "Hardwood
Product Manufacturing Group".
For our members, the 2008-2009 Value-added Program Summary and a description of its current
research projects is available. A list of relevant publications is offered within
our sections Newsletter
(Publications Update) and Technotes.
Based on knowledge and technology developed through this Program
as well as through the Value
to Wood Program funded by natural Resources Canada, Forintek's
value-added specialists are able to offer hands-on technology transfer
in-plant problem solving (emphasis on productivity improvement),
and technical support on raw material characteristics, tooling,
manufacturing technology and process as well as product performance
standards. This technical support is also offered through specific
provincial initiatives in British
Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Québec. For specific
needs, we also offer contract
services with strict confidentiality guidelines.
Of special interest is the Technology
Road Map for Lumber and Value-added Products completed in 2000.
This document presents the current technologies as well as those
which need to be developed, in the short to medium terms, to sustain
the industry's competitiveness. | <urn:uuid:48f7c46b-51a3-4568-b8df-b4bd79ab5484> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.forintek.ca/public/Eng/E3-R&D_Program/4.value_added.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.90665 | 467 | 1.6875 | 2 |
National Park Service Seeking Comments on Mule Operations and Stock Use in Grand Canyon National Park
Contact: Shannan Marcak, 928-638-7958
Grand Canyon, Ariz. – The National Park Service (NPS) is now accepting comments on mule operations and stock use in Grand Canyon National Park as the agency begins to develop an environmental assessment (EA). The presence and use of mules in and around the canyon is a long-standing tradition and one that the park would like to continue. The NPS is also interested in continuing to provide opportunities for stock use in a manner that is sustainable. This planning effort will address the following management objective identified in the park’s 1995 General Management Plan: “Where livestock and visitors share the same trails and areas, minimize conflicts and resource impacts, and enhance safety.”
The planning process will consider the following:
· Commercial and private stock use (including horses, mules, and burros) throughout the park.
· Appropriate levels of stock use on park trails.
· Appropriate locations for stock use in the park, which may include:
Ø keeping commercial stock use on the North Kaibab Trail down to Supai Tunnel
Ø moving stock use to one of the South Rim corridor trails (Bright Angel or South Kaibab)
Ø keeping stock use on the Uncle Jim Trail, Whitmore Trail, and select corridor trails
Ø initiation of a new concession operated day ride on the South Rim
· The need for new stock facilities or modification to existing facilities on the North and South Rim including compliance with laws and regulations for mule health and safety.
The NPS encourages public participation through the National Environmental Policy Act (commonly known as NEPA) process during which the public has two opportunities to formally comment on the project – once during initial project scoping and again following release of the EA which is expected in fall 2009. The NPS is currently in the scoping phase of this project and invites the public to submit their comments in a variety of ways. Comments will be accepted for 30 days.
Three open house meetings are scheduled in June 2009 where Grand Canyon National Park staff will be available to answer questions and take comments on stock use in the park. Meeting dates and locations are as follows:
June 2, 4-7 PM (Arizona Time) –Flagstaff Public Library, 300 W Aspen Avenue, Flagstaff, Arizona
June 3, 4-6 PM (Arizona Time) –Community Building, Room B, South Rim Village, Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona
June 4, 4-7 PM (Utah Time) – Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument Kanab Visitor’s Center, 745 East Highway 89, Kanab, Utah
Written comments may be submitted at http://parkplanning.nps.gov/document.cfm?parkID=65&projectId=26166&documentID=27469, by clicking on “Comment on document” or mailed to: Steve Martin, Superintendent, Grand Canyon National Park, Attn: Mule Operations and Stock Use EA, P.O. Box 129 (1 Village Loop for express mail), Grand Canyon, AZ 86023 by June 22, 2009. The park expects to prepare an EA this summer, with a decision document for this project anticipated in December, 2009. Additional information about this project can be found at http://parkplanning.nps.gov/grca, or by contacting Rachel Stanton, Project Planning Lead, at (928) 774-9612.
To download this news release in .pdf format, CLICK HERE.
Did You Know?
The Cambrian seas of the Grand Canyon were home to several kinds of trilobite, whose closest living relative is the modern horsehoe crab. They left their fossil record in the mud of the Bright Angel Shale over 500 million years ago. | <urn:uuid:228775dc-bbd1-4b74-9965-84bec3eff3d9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.nps.gov/grca/parknews/news-2009-05-22-stock.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.914089 | 809 | 1.578125 | 2 |
New school swim policy to soften hardline stance
The ACT Government is set to relax its school swimming policy. Photo: Elesa Lee
School students will no longer need competency tests to take part in structured swimming events after the ACT government softened a controversial swimming policy, but one swimming pool operator says the changes have come too late.
The first version of a new, hardline swimming carnival policy was introduced in November last year, forcing students to pass an individual competency test before they were allowed to take part in school swimming activities.
But after a backlash, which included water safety campaigner Laurie Lawrence labelling the rules “mad”, Education and Training Minister Joy Burch launched a re-worked policy on Thursday morning, which means students will no longer need to be tested to take part in structured events.
“There was some concern that the first version of this policy limited and perhaps did not encourage participation of kids to be involved in swimming and to get into the water and become water-aware and water safe. That was not the intention at all,” Ms Burch said.
Ms Burch said under the revised policy, which has been co-badged by Royal Life Saving, proficiency testing would still be required for unstructured swimming events where children would be in water above waist height – such as free time in the pool.
Royal Life Saving chief executive Sean Hodges said the policy made it clear that an unstructured activity was when there was “no direct instruction” given to students.
“Free-swimming is the risky area, and kids participating in free swimming need to have a level of swimming ability,” Mr Hodges said.
“We’re encouraging schools to try and structure their activities, try to have some sort direction there, so there really should be no need for a lot of schools to do actually do the proficiency test.”
But manager of Phillip Swimming and Ice Skating Centre John Raut said the changes have come too late, and it will take a long time for the local swimming pool industry to recover.
“I think it’s all come a little bit late. I think it doesn’t matter what is announced today – teachers and principals, they’re already on alert … they’ll probably stick with the policy that’s been put in place. I can’t see them changing all of a sudden,” Mr Raut said.
“It’d be hard to break it down, it’ll take a while for people to think it’s ok again for kids to come and swim.”
Mr Raut said the Phillip pool lost thousands of dollars as schools cancelled their end-of-year fun days, and failed to book swimming carnivals at the start of the year. He said they had a total of 10 carnivals booked for the first term, when in previous years the pool has had a carnival booked in every day.
Mr Raut said more emphasis should be put on teaching children to swim as part of general school activities, and encouraging fun in the water.
“I think the only big thing they should do is put a lot more effort into learn to swim, and then the whole thing comes good on its own,” he said. “It’s all about kids enjoying the water and that’s how they become competent.”
But the Minister denied long-term reputation of the swimming pools had been damaged, and said the revised policy’s key aim was to encourage schools and students to participate in structured swimming programs.
“The Royal Life Saving society, through Sean, will be very active in that encouragement to principals,” Ms Burch said.
“Even with that free-time, if you put some structure around it … then that’s a structured activity, but still a lot of fun.”
Ms Burch said a working group for the revised policy included representation by a swimming pool operator.
The owner of Big Splash Water Park Ron Watkins had earlier told Fairfax Media he was concerned at the lack of communication from the ACT government over the issue.
Mr Watkins said he wouldn’t comment on the changes to the policy until he had more information.
“I’d like to wait and see what they say,” he said.
Swimming safety advocate Laurie Lawrence told Fairfax Media swimming policies should be based on common sense, rather than hardline rules.
“Sometimes we lose focus in our drive to be politically correct,” he said. “Common sense is if you’re taking a fun day out for the kids, then you need to make sure there are lifeguards available at the centre that you’re at, you need to make sure that the water depth that you’ve taken the kids to, they can stand up in it.”
Mr Lawrence acknowledged that it was a “huge responsibility” taking children to aquatic events, and that the rules should be different for well-structured swimming carnivals compared to free-for-all fun days.
The tough swimming policy was brought into effect following the near-drowning of a year 6 Forrest Primary student in March.
with Christopher Knaus | <urn:uuid:57557e1a-e026-4b23-a1df-32e172d51c4b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/new-school-swim-policy-to-soften-hardline-stance-20130207-2dzmh.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00050-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978683 | 1,102 | 1.515625 | 2 |
Being a Princess is not about having a Queen or King for a parent (although that can be a fun role for the parents to play!) Rather it is all about attitude, manners, poise, and grace. These are things anyone can have, with a little practice. So our Princess party games will center around using these skills – make practice acting like a Princess a part of your Royal Whispers game.
So what about the game? Well I’m glad you asked. Royal Whispers is game of Princess tea party whispers. You may remember a similar game called Chinese whispers.
Sit your Princesses down at the Royal table, encouraging them to practice their tea party skills. Firstly their Princess voices, which should be measured, slow and articulate. Naturally one will talk in the third person! Another fun tip is to hold their cups while extending the pinkie (or little finger) in a very obvious manner. Once they’ve had a short time to practice these – the Princesses are ready to start the game.
To start a game of Royal whispers you need a message - suitably royal, of course. Use a message like : “Princess [party girl's name] requests the pleasure of your company on tuesday next at the Royal Pony Club.” Of course you may write whatever you want in the message, but do keep it as Royal as possible, this is a Princess party game after all. This message is then passed down the line, from one Princess to the next via a whisper, so no-one else can hear it.
At the end of the line the final Princess speaks the message out loud as it has arrived, in the style of a Royal proclamation. The rest of the Princesses are to reply “Yes, your Highness” – no matter how strange the message may sound! As soon as this happens, the Princesses will want to discover who heard what and just how the message was changed as it passed down the line, which is where the real fun lies.
So there you have it – Royal whispers is one of those Princess party games that you can pull out with a moment’s notice. Best of all it needs no setup or equipment at all!
Enjoy the party! | <urn:uuid:ad78b7db-8435-40b4-b064-3cbb74331236> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://princesspartygames.net/princess-party-games/princess-party-games-royal-whispers | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954684 | 460 | 1.78125 | 2 |
Everyone loves low maintenance plants. So much that they even like the fake ones. But a recent trend is taking advantage of live plants that are about as low maintenance as you can get: succulents.
This term refers to a group of plants that have the ability to store water in their parts in order to survive drought. This means that they can grow in basically any condition, and don’t need to be watered as often as your typical houseplant.
Succulents include cacti, jade plants, sedums, aloes, hens and hens-and-chicks to name some of the more popular varieties. Generally succulents have unusual leaf shapes and foliage colors. In recent years, they have become wildly popular as décor for the home, as gifts, and in vertical gardens.
Once you have chosen the succulents you want for your home, there are a few ways to plant them to be sure they will be happiest. You will want to get some sort of shallow saucer or dish, soil and pebbles. The dish itself doesn’t actually need to have a drainage hole, which means you can use almost anything. The number of succulent plants you need depends on the size of the dish you are using to plant them in. Generally you can plant them fairly close together, so sometimes it’s best to bring the dish with you when shopping for plants.
When you go to plant the succulents, be sure to get a potting soil that is for succulents. This potting soil is formulated for good drainage, but you could always add perlite or sand to your soil to give it better drainage. Mound the soil in your dish and plant the succulents around the mound. That mound will, again, encourage the drainage.
Use pebbles, or other decorative pieces like colored glass, to put on top of the soil. This will dress up the dish for your home. Give the succulents a few tablespoons of water every few weeks, more so in the summer than in the winter when they are dormant. This planter should be large enough for the succulents for about a year, then it will need to be re-potted.
While succulents do not need a lot of care, they do have some requirements to ensure healthy, thriving plants. Succulents prefer bright light, so placing them in a south-facing window when indoors is best. The leaves of the plant will be able to tell you if the plat is getting too much or too little light. The leaves will turn brown or white if the plant is being scorched by the sun. If the plant is not getting enough sun, the plant will begin to stretch to reach the light. So watch for elongated stems, widely spaced leaves.
Succulents can also tell you if they are getting too much or too little water. While the succulents need to be watered more often in the summer, it is best to let the soil dry between waterings. During the winter, while the plants are dormant, cut back to watering the plants to once a month. If the plant is overwatered, the plants are soft and discolored. The leaves will start to lost their color, and often this is the first sign that the plant is rotting from too much water. If the plant has not been watered enough, the plant will stop growing and begin to shed its leaves. They can also develop brown spots on the leaves.
As far as fertilizing succulents, only fertilize the plants during the summer growing season. You can use a general fertilizer, like a 20-20-20, but stop fertilizing entirely during the winter.
With unusual beauty and very minimal care needs, succulents are becoming everyone’s new favorite houseplant. They can survive a novice or neglectful gardener, as well as keep pace with our busy lifestyles, making them great gifts for the holidays. | <urn:uuid:688b5c99-6431-4c1f-92bf-6db460617d69> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://hinsdale.patch.com/blog_posts/succulents-great-houseplants-great-gifts | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968472 | 820 | 2.515625 | 3 |
What NOT To Post On Facebook: 13 Things You Shouldn't Tell Your Facebook Friends
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According to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the company's unofficial mission is to make "the world more open and connected." But there are limits to how open you should be on Facebook and while you might enjoy sharing photos and status updates, there are some pieces of information you would do well never to share.
Who's watching your moves on Facebook? Employers, stalkers, federal agents, and even insurance companies have been known to scan Facebook profiles for information. Just as troubling are reports of Facebook account hackers, who put users at risk for identity fraud. Even if you safeguard personal information with a "Friends Only" setting, there is a chance you've friended someone whom you barely know or have never met.
What details would you do well never to tell? View our slideshow (below) for tips about what to leave out of your Facebook life. Then, check out Facebook posts that got people fired, and Facebook SNAFUs that lead to arrests.
We want to know what you think about safety on Facebook. Let us know in the comments below. Want to suggest a Facebook safety tip? Email us at firstname.lastname@example.org or click "Add a slide" below. | <urn:uuid:1632dbbe-44d1-47df-8245-980959d23b80> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/01/what-not-to-post-on-facebook_n_764338.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937854 | 265 | 1.78125 | 2 |
Social Measurement Best Practices
The Value of Social Media Measurement
According to Forrester, 82% of US online adults use social tools, with an increasing number shifting their use from listening to participation and contribution. As a result of trends like these, social media continues to gain mindshare with marketing, sales, and customer service organizations at brands of all sizes.
With that comes an urgent and growing need for managers to understand the nature of the conversations swirling around their brands across the social media landscape:
- What is being said about a brand online?
- Who is saying it, where, and how often?
- Is it negative or positive?
- Who is really paying attention?
- Are their actions making an impact?
Adding to the challenge is the sheer scale of the available tools and sites. As the Web becomes increasingly social and fluid, comments affecting a brand’s reputation rapidly jump between blogs, forums, tweets, videos, podcasts, social networks, fan pages, review sites, and beyond. New channels emerge to extend or displace existing ones almost daily. At any given time, hundreds or even thousands of conversations about a brand may be happening throughout this maze.
To gain a clearer understanding of the social media landscape, and their brand’s role within it, smart managers are seeking out metrics, analysis models, and tools to help them listen,learn, and engage in the conversation.
A practical first step for a social media manager involves developing trackable, relevant, and actionable metrics that align with an organization’s business priorities. While companies continue to explore key performance indicators that reflect value in social media rather than just activity, several useful and accepted listening metrics related to reach, influence and impact have emerged.
Foundation Metrics for Social Media Measurement
As outlined above, social media can quickly overwhelm: With millions of potential voices across dozens of major channels, a listening system can generate massive amounts of raw data feeding endless activity metrics. If not properly filtered, these can rapidly distract social media marketers and practitioners from developing a solid measurement foundation that cuts through the noise, surfacing metrics that are clear, relevant, and most importantly, actionable.
Creating that foundation can help your brand both listen and learn from social media. It hinges on five primary measures which, taken together, begin to paint a useful picture of impact:
- Volume: The raw number of aggregate mentions of your brand across all social media channels. How many times are your key URLs, products, executives, and campaigns tweeted and blogged about?
- Frequency: The pace of references to your brand, helping you understand if clusters form around specific events such as conferences and product launches, or if a steadier, more broad-based buzz exists.
- Influence: The potential impact, often tracked in terms of followers, subscribers, and qualitative measures of trust, of the individuals and groups driving the conversation. Who are they and what level of real sway does their perspective have on their communities?
- Reach: The penetration of your brand and engagement efforts into your target customer audiences and influencer groups. Is your brand being talked about by the right people?
- Sentiment: The tone of influencer reactions to your brand. Is the conversation positive, negative, or neutral, and how is that changing over time?
A related data point should also be collected, of equal importance: Where are the conversation clusters forming around the brand? Are they in isolated blogs, heavily trafficked groups on social networks and fan forums, or forming around popular #hashtags on Twitter?
Properly developed, these foundational metrics are useful for both point-in-time snapshots as well as trend analysis. With listening tools such as Visible Intelligence®, brands can develop an audit of their current position across multiple channels while compiling trend data to track direction as well as the impact of their own engagement efforts.
Listening and Learning feed Engagement, on the Path to ROI
An effective foundation of smart metrics, coupled with a willingness by brands to consistently listen and learn from them, sets the stage for that engagement. These metrics, tracked over time, can help identify key influencers, conversation clusters, and hot topics that matter to customers, partners, and the audience as a whole.
Armed with this knowledge, marketers can craft plans for engaging the right people through the right channels and with effective stories and messages. Impact can then be tracked over time by measuring changes in the foundation metrics, laying the groundwork for a clearer understanding of real Return on Investment (ROI) for all social media activities.
Social Media is Difficult to Track…
- 68% of social marketers believe that it is difficult to compare the results of various social marketing campaigns.
- Only 30% of social marketers feel they are able to accurately compare their social marketing results with those of other marketing channels. (Emily Riley Senior Analyst, Forrester Research March 2009)
…So Many Companies Just Don’t Do It
- 70% of respondents don’t believe their company adequately measures their own social media initiatives.
- 30% of respondents feel a lack of dedicated resources is a hurdle to social media measurement; 25% feel there is a lack of understanding of what to measure. (MarketingProfs poll data June 2009, Social Media ROI Success Stories)
Xerox: Understanding the Buzz
With the launch of ColorQube, a game-changing new product, Xerox expected substantial feedback from users, reviewers, and commentators from across the social media landscape. They needed a plan and toolset in place to monitor and track these reactions, one they could get up and running quickly without a major investment of staff time and could rapidly scale across the enterprise.
Xerox turned to Visible Intelligence from Visible Technologies®. Visible Intelligence enabled Xerox to rapidly process a vast array of posts, tweets, and comments. They tracked foundational metrics to measure overall sentiment, calculate volume, pull, and reach of each response, and identify highly influential sites and individuals, setting the stage for future engagement efforts.
Microsoft: Engaging with Focus and Scale
Microsoft has spent years cultivating a thriving community of over 20 million IT professionals, a community the Springboard team at Microsoft needed to start preparing for the launch of Windows 7. The first step was to identify hot topics and influential voices across a myriad of sites and tools, to lay the groundwork for engagement programs. Microsoft turned to Visible Intelligence from Visible Technologies as the foundation for these efforts.
Using Visible Intelligence’s filtering and sentiment scoring features, the Springboard team was able to quickly develop a sustainable, highly scalable engagement program that had a direct and measurable impact on the IT professional community. The Springboard team ultimately identified 250 influential subject matter experts in 29 countries, scaled up their engagements from dozens to hundreds each week, and reduced the time needed to identify and respond to highly relevant posts from hours to minutes. | <urn:uuid:692a9d56-ce97-4f43-ae68-75ec2192ec84> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.visibletechnologies.com/resources/best-practices/social-measurement/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00069-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.929304 | 1,416 | 1.851563 | 2 |
This focus area directly supports the Adjutant General’s first priority: To provide a competent, ready force for our state and nation. Mentorship in our NCO ranks is critical to maintaining the high level of competence, professionalism, and commitment required of our Soldiers and Airmen today. We must capitalize on the experience of our senior NCOs, ensuring that discipline, standards and training goals are achieved as the force prepares for the next challenge. Communication, participation, and continuous improvement will secure our success as the backbone of the Army and Air Force.
Soldier / Airmen Care
This focus area also supports the Adjutant General’s first priority: To provide a competent ready force for our state and nation. Resiliency is a key factor in maintaining readiness in our force, as well as in maintaining strong Soldiers, Airmen, families and communities. An essential role of the NCO will be to promote and strengthen this capacity in our force. Employment for our Soldiers and Airmen is a critical piece, contributing to the well being of our force and community, and will require a combined effort between civilian agencies, educational entities and the MNNG to effectively address.
Diversity awareness and integration
This focus area directly supports the Adjutant General’s fifth priority: To diversify our military force. Aside from simply being the right thing to do, diversity is a strategic imperative for the MNNG. When we diversify our force we increase the talent pool, ensuring that we are tapping into every skill set available as we prepare for unknown threats in an uncertain future. The flexibility and agility afforded by this force multiplier is a decisive advantage, one that is fundamental to our future success as an organization.
Command Sgt. Major Cynthia Kallberg
Senior Enlisted Advisor to the Adjutant General
Minnesota National Guard
The Role of the Non-Commissioned Officer (NCO)
in the Discipline of the Force
In today’s military, there are many challenges; everything from the transformation of a warfighting organization into an operational reserve, assisting our Servicemembers in building resilience and combating suicide across the force, and even issues like increasing the diversity of our formations. With ever-increasing mission sets, coupled with ever shrinking budgets, there is one thing that is clear: engaged leadership and leader presence will make all the difference.
That leadership starts at the Squad Leader level and extends to the Senior Mission Leadership. Our Servicemembers want to know the standards, and they want to know that the standard is being enforced. They want accountability for themselves but even more importantly they want leader accountability. What this means to every NCO in the force is that you need to "walk the walk" not just "talk the talk." Set high standards, but make them achievable. Provide your expectations and guidance and then follow up and lead the way in accountability with your actions.
We have to know our Servicemembers. There is an almost universal lack of leader books at the team and squad level, and this is the foundation to knowing and caring for your subordinates. The most effective NCOs are those who are getting back to basic tasks and processes in their formations. Leader accountability for disciplined units is evident in these great mentors.
In his recent address, Sergeant Major of the Army Chandler directed a continued focus on leader accountability and discipline in units, and recommended that the Army profession pillars of Trust, Trustworthiness, Honorable Service and Stewardship of the Profession be the anchors for each of these areas.
In fact, this year Character and Commitment are the SMA's focus areas. Review FM 6-22 and the Army's doctrine on character and commitment.
CSM Burch (former Army National Guard Bureau CSM) agreed, stating that “Standards and Discipline are key components to everything we do as senior NCOs.”
According to the SMA: “The Army of 2020 will be a leaner more agile force. The agility will depend significantly on the character and commitment of our Soldiers/Leaders.”
General Norman Schwarzkopf summed it up nicely, when he said, “Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character; but if you must be without one, be without strategy”. | <urn:uuid:f42aa4a5-101b-4be2-b29d-bab50e3180e5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.minnesotanationalguard.org/csmscorner/index.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945149 | 886 | 1.617188 | 2 |
Jim Hill: From the Archives
Page 1 of 5
LaughingPlace.com continues its publishing of "Jim Hill: From the Archives" with this article, originally published in September 2000.
The Long Story Behind the Emperor's
In spite of years of production problems, Disney may have a hit on its hands with "The Emperor's New Groove." But animation insiders ask: Did the Mouse sacrifice a better movie to make way for a gag- filled cartoon?
Part One: A Three Year Trip Down the Wrong Road
You've undoubtedly heard the stories.
One director let go. Six songs by an Grammy winning artist cut from the score. Three years worth of work tossed aside, millions upon millions of dollars of finished footage left on the cutting room floor -- all in an attempt to save a troubled animated feature from the scrap heap.
But -- as "The Emperor's New Groove" enters the final phase of its production -- the mood inside Disney Feature Animation is actually pretty upbeat. Mind you, no one's saying that the creation of this animated film was anything less than an ordeal. (There were veteran Disney artists who actually left town, bailing out of Burbank, rather than spend another minute working on this movie.) But -- buoyed by the better- than- expected response of test audiences who've actually seen the work-in-progress version of "Groove" -- it looks like all the protracted agony that's been associated with this production may have finally been worth it. The end result appears to be Disney's funniest animated film since 1992's "Aladdin."
Mind you, not everyone's laughing. There are still folks at Feature Animation who believe that Disney made a serious mistake by opting to go with "Groove" director Mark Dindal's comic take on the tale. They feel that if the studio had just stuck with director Roger Aller's original vision for this film, it could have been an animated masterpiece.
Still others at the Mouse House wonder why Feature Animation had to go through all this agony in the first place. They worry that Disney's toon development process has become severely compromised, thanks to mindless micro-management of studio executives who are so afraid of losing their jobs that they constantly second guess themselves.
Believe you me. As exciting as "The Emperor's New Groove" may turn out to be, the real heart- pounding drama took place behind-the-scenes on this film.
Right from the start, there were people at Disney who were concerned about about "Kingdom of the Sun" (One of several different titles this film had during its four years in production). These folks worried that "Kingdom" 's story (which was basically a loose remake of Mark Twain's classic, "The Prince and the Pauper." Only this time, the story was set among the ancient Incas) was somewhat shopworn. Overly familiar to modern audiences.
Why were Disney executives so certain that Allers could fix whatever was wrong with "Kingdom of the Sun"? Well, you have to understand that -- as production was initially getting underway on this project -- Roger Allers had achieved almost mythic status on the Disney lot. After all, wasn't he (along with his co-director, Rob Minkoff ) the guy who had ridden herd on Disney's most troubled animated film to date, "The Lion King"?
Even so, Disney executives had complete confidence in Roger Allers. They were certain that he could take this tired old idea and turn it into box office gold.
No one at Disney Studios could ever recall an animated motion picture that had as many story problems as "Lion King" had. During that film's first phase of development, the project (which was then called "King of the Jungle") showed such little promise that Disney had trouble convincing its top animators to work on the production. Most of Disney's top toon talent opted instead to work on "Pocahontas," which -- at the time -- appeared to be the stronger of the two films.
Allers spent months straightening out "Lion King"'s problematic script. Characters were tossed out. Whole scenes and storylines fell by the wayside, as Roger did whatever he had to to pull a compelling plot out of the movie's muddled storyline.
The end result I'm sure you know about. Released in the summer of 1994, Disney's "The Lion King" became a phenomenon. Crowds flocked to see this movie again and again, which produced record box office numbers. "The Lion King" currently holds the record for the highest grossing animation film in motion picture history. The movie made $312 million for Disney during its domestic release. Nearly double that when "Lion King" was released overseas. | <urn:uuid:469fd11d-86da-4eca-9124-4e372865bc37> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.laughingplace.com/News-ID115140.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976202 | 975 | 1.617188 | 2 |
Photo by Joel Sternfeld; the unrenovated High Line, April 2000, New York, NY
“The park should, as far as possible, complement the town. Openness is the one thing you cannot get in buildings. Picturesqueness you can get. Let your buildings be as picturesque as your artists can make them. This is the beauty of a town. Consequently, the beauty of a park should be the other.”
Frederick Law Olmsted, “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns” (1870)
In Frederick Law Olmsted’s writings about parks, one can hear the sweat of his brow. We’ve become so accustomed to the Olmsted style of park: open greenswards, thickets of trees with curving walks, rambles of greater “wildness,” that they just seem natural. But they are as constructed, and as theorized, as any building. It was his genius to make them seem easy, and thus to allow the masses to move at their ease through his additions to the urban landscape. His parks (the most famous designed with British architect Calvert Vaux) had an agenda, one which derived directly from the idea of the park as a complement to, but ever different from, the town.
The High Line
in Manhattan, whose first section opened Monday, would seem to be Olmsted’s nightmare. Built atop an abandoned railroad trestle, it is long and narrow. There is no room for a lawn, the soil is too shallow for big trees, and the city presses in, sometimes closely, sometimes from afar, at every point. There is nowhere to forget where you are, who you are, where you have come from, in the way Olmsted hoped Central Park would (a thought borrowed from A. J. Downing), wiping away class distinctions with fresh air and free admission. The High Line goes against all Olmsted’s principles, and yet reveals what we take for granted in larger more pastoral parks. The extreme compression of the trestle makes the choices of landscape architects James Corner Field Operations
, the team leader, with architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro
, and planting specialist Piet Oudolf
, obvious and unavoidable. Each element, whether path, street furniture, flower bed, has to function in multiple ways to keep the landscape from getting cluttered. To put it another way, the High Line is a park as designed object — emphasis on object, since all parks are designed. The parts of the High Line, as well as the whole, are all as carefully considered as a tool that has to fit in your hand.
Photo by Will Femia; the High Line planks and integrated plants
One example: the planks that make up the walkway. For a park that is really all path, the surface of that path is extremely important. Central Park can have dirt and gravel and hexagonal pavers, but things so common and assorted would have looked messy here. The architects needed something beautiful in itself, since sometimes the whole High Line is path; something that could blend in to the plants as the original tracks did (and, reinstalled, do); something that could eliminate the need for keep-off-the-grass barriers. As Olmsted said, “A great object of all that is done in a park, of all the art of a park, is to influence the mind of men through their imagination, and the influence of iron hurdles can never be good.” So they came up with a custom concrete plank, polished to show its aggregate, tapered at the ends to merge into the beds, bumped up at the sides and ends to indicate, like a rumble strip, when you’ve gone too far. Of course, they are also a tripping hazard, but so is a curb. And unfortunately, they have decided to add signs, at least for the time being.
The long strips of the plank also draw your eye into the distance, providing the openness Olmsted prized at least in one direction. In the original wild photos of the High Line the glimmer of the tracks under the weeds had the same effect. In places in the park those tracks have been preserved, but they’ve lost the romance of the railroad, stretching off into infinity. My toddler could identify the tracks’ origins with the “choo-choo” but they are more like museum pieces.
The path is primary, and its meander slows you down as Olmsted’s curved roads in central park were meant to. The railroad tracks may have been straight, as are the streets below, but the planks don’t follow the grid. You can’t race along this sidewalk, it suggests the unusual pace of a stroll. This is the most contemporary park in the city in design, yet the most old-fashioned in ideals, since what it truly is, is a shaded walk, away from the bustle, and without the possibility of greater impinging activity — carriage race or the perpetual Hudson River Park marathon. The lounges in the park north of 14th Street suggest a similar polite repose (though they also seem like an ideal cruising spot); by Wednesday they had already attracted a set of lunchtime readers with appropriate paperbacks by Haruki Murakami and Eric Larson.
Photo by i'mjustsayin; the High Line benches at 16th Street and 10th Avenue
Another example: the ipê
benches, which rise like pointer fingers from the concrete (and at 16th Street, wood) deck. Like the planks, the benches had to be different from those at other city parks. The typical wrought-iron model would have looked even more Victorian than usual in this setting. Again, the architects made them long and lean, emphasizing the direction in which the park expands. And they made them multi-functioning, with lights below to illuminate the path at night, but not distract you from the urban stars in the surrounding buildings.
Photo by i'mjustsayin; the old High Line tracks in the new park
In interviews, Field Operations principal James Corner has sometimes contrasted himself with Olmsted, wanting the artificiality of his (Corner’s) parks made plain. I’ve always thought that his renderings undercut this intellectual position, since in competition after competition, he’s created gorgeous, swelling, mysterious and various environments. But New York City has given him two opportunities (here and at Fresh Kills
) to create natural beauty that is defiantly and necessarily artificial, thus having it both ways. At Fresh Kills, you will always have the uneasy sense that the ground beneath your feet is garbage. At the High Line, the paucity of space allows the park to borrow the picturesqueness of architecture for its own ends.
Olmsted wanted the park to give the impression of nature, and to blot out the buildings, but also to be the lungs in an overbuilt city. Each tree served two, sometimes three purposes, as he planned the upper part of Central Park as an educational arboretum of native American trees. It is hard to romanticize the thickets of trees in the upper park when you realize every one was trucked in and located on a plan. The plants themselves have their roles in a natural park, as surely as the fixtures.
On the High Line, of course, the buildings can never be blotted out. But the change in perspective the height of the trestle gives, lifting you above the cars if not the buildings, turns them into something stranger, and indeed more picturesque, than they might otherwise be. Other critics have already noted the panoply of starchitecture along the park, but that’s not even providing the best moments. Passing through the Chelsea Market Building can feel like a moment in a copse, when all the other information of the park is blotted out. An artwork by Spencer Finch — new glass panes in the building’s old frame, their blues sampled from the light on the Hudson River — is like glimmers from a pond. In another place, an old building with peeling siding presses in like a thicket of trees. (Real trees only appear at the park’s southernmost point, a polite and gridded stand.) Or the ivy growing wildly up the side of a warehouse reinforces the green of a planting bed.
The buildings act as foliage, but there is also foliage — native plants, now all the rage, another way in which Olmsted was avant la lettre
, return, now obviously planted by human hand. These are no perennial borders, but a rich and sometimes strange assortment of ferns, grasses, wildflowers, vines, in shades from pale green to russet to purple. I particularly liked a creeper with flat reddish leaves the color of fall maples. They range from high to low, stick up oddly and sometimes cover the tapered ends of the planks. They are always defiantly bordered by those planks, by the edge of the trestle, at one point just running smack into a building. The plants aren’t multi-functioning but designed to do just one thing, rather than the usual covering up, edging out, and artificial proximities of the garden. They evoke but do not imitate those lovely weeds above our heads, seen in Joel Sternfeld’s photos
, that inspired the whole enterprise.
Many things about the High Line remain to be seen, after the initial sightseeing and obsessive picture-taking wears off. What will its hours be? A 6 p.m. passeggiata or an 8:30 a.m. walk to work? Is it only a path, or will points along the way gather a sense of place? Will the buildings blot out the plants, or vice versa? And with all its starry patrons, even whether it fulfils Downing and Olmsted’s democratic ideals remains to be seen. The Friends of the High Line are at pains to make sure the park doesn’t seem exclusive, but it could come to be seen as the backyard of The Standard, et. al. despite the zoning against this fate. For it to fulfil the idea of a park as complement to the town, it has to be a place that appeals to almost everyone, and allow the fussy considerations of urban life to all fall away.
Alexandra Lange is a journalist and architectural historian based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in The Architect's Newspaper, Metropolis, New York Magazine and The New York Times, and she teaches architecture criticism at the Design Criticism MFA Program at the School of Visual Arts. | <urn:uuid:ce897ea6-2710-4297-946e-67ea83754287> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://observatory.designobserver.com/feature/the-beauty-of-a-park/8747/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966489 | 2,238 | 2.265625 | 2 |
So how are those New Year’s Resolutions coming along? Getting lean? Eating clean? Reducing, reusing and recycling? Managing the stress caused by not keeping your New Year’s Resolutions?
If only it were as easy to keep them as it is to make them. Although I have been known to say “I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions,” there are actually some lurking around the depths of my psyche collecting cobwebs. Most of them I do not care to share, in order to preserve my sanitized image, but there is one resolution I would love to tackle: I want to be a morning person.
I have come to accept that some people are early birds and some people are night owls. I’m a night owl who wants to get in touch with my inner early bird. Morning people seem to have more patience, are less stressed out, and are more productive. They seem more cheerful too. Maybe it’s because they absorb all of the available sunlight. Try as I might, I can’t seem to make it out of the dark side. I have no excuse as to why I can’t because I know how to set attainable goals. I do it with my students all the time with great success.
Right after my students go back to school after winter break and before mid-term exams, we work on goal setting. This year I had them make “Goal Posts.” This consisted of setting three academic goals, one extracurricular goal, and one personal goal. Once the goals were in place, we hunted through my enormous mountain of old magazines for visual representations of their goals. On a poster board, the students glued their pictures and wrote out their goals and hung them in their bedrooms. Now they have a fun, daily visual reminder to keep them on track.
After the Goal Posts are made, students pick one goal to work on. Take the ever popular, “write in planner everyday” for instance. A student who never writes in her planner is going to suddenly produce a detailed account of all her assignments on a daily basis. That’s where SMART goals come into play. A SMART goal is kind of a template for successful goal setting.
S-specific - answer who, what when, where, and why; break into smaller steps
M-measurable - establish concrete criteria for measuring progress toward the goal
A-attainable - plan your steps and establish a reasonable time frame
R-realistic - a goal must represent something you are both willing and able to do
T-timely or time bound - set within a time frame to create a sense of urgency
To use my early-bird goal as an example, instead of setting my goal as “getting up earlier,” which I know won’t work, I would try this:
Goal: Be out of bed by 6:45 every weekday. I will work toward this goal by getting up 15 minutes earlier each week for six weeks. Each time I add 15 minutes, I will also go to bed 15 minutes earlier in order to get enough rest.
For the student who wants to write in her planner:
Goal: Write all homework in planner every day by spring break. First, begin with a more attainable goal of writing in planner 3x a week for two weeks, then increasing to 4x a week, etc. Create a memory cue or reminder to write in planner, such as setting the phone alarm (on vibrate) when there are 5 minutes left of class.
Do you have any resolutions you want to be SMART about? Give this technique a try and let me know how it goes. | <urn:uuid:678bda5b-a983-4418-b933-33fa254668d9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://easthampton-ct.patch.com/groups/opinion/p/make-your-goals-smart-specific-measurable-attainable-e115f6cd01 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974474 | 774 | 1.898438 | 2 |
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As you now have experienced how straightforward it is to find the strategies to give your house, not just added attractiveness, but additional worth, it really is time to get going on that redecorating project. The sensible recommendations from this article will provde the information that you need for achievement. | <urn:uuid:3a350dd0-a9b7-4c9f-b016-ca11c750489a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.iamsport.org/pg/blog/gianniclayto49/read/6602130/want-to-enhance-your-home-try-using-some-of-this-advice | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947504 | 626 | 1.5625 | 2 |
|LCT10 Open Chalklands||
LCA10F Andover Chalk Downland
Andover Chalk Downland is a gently undulating and rolling area of chalk downland, with small hills located to the east eg. Tinker’s Hill, and sloping down to the west with a series of dry valleys towards the River Anton and Test Valley.
It features open areas of arable land, separated by areas of settlement, infrastructure and large farms creating a fragmented character area of Downland. A number of isolated woodlands are seen within the open arable areas, often demarcating old disused pits. Other small woodlands are located on non-productive land as seen around the A303 (T) and also on the small scarp face at Wallis Bottom. Shelter belts or thick hedgerows are also a feature, with a high density found towards the south, linking and providing areas of enclosure between the wooded landscape type to the north and the river valley to the south.
Urban fringe recreation activities exist with the golf course east of Goodworth Clatford and Finkley Down Farm Park to the north of the railway line. Other urban fringe landuses include pylons and the sewage works.
Ribbon development along the radiating roads out of Andover has caused urbanization of this area of Downland, as seen along the B3400. Two golf courses are present within this area close by Goodworth Clatford and on the southern edge of Andover.
The western edge of Andover Chalk Downland is defined by the built up edge of Andover and the River Anton valley. The northern edge runs from East Anton, south of Smannell and Ridges Copse. The eastern boundary follows the Borough boundary, with the southern boundary bordering the northern edge of Harewood Forest.
Local Physical Influences
Geology and soils: Upper Chalk with two small areas of Valley Gravels running into Andover.
Landform: Gentle undulating landform with higher ground at Andover Down. Southern area falls more steeply to the Lower River Anton.
Drainage: A well drained area, draining into the River Anton.
Local Biodiversity and Vegetation Pattern
The character area is typical of the character type.
Local Historical Influences
The majority of this landscape has been enclosed by acts of parliament during the later 18th and 19th centuries which has produced a characteristic regularity within the landscape with large open fields, straight field boundaries and trackways.
A small element of pre-1810 Harewood Forest extends northward into this area close to Andover Farm. A small portion of downland to the east of Romsey Road is to be found at the southern limit of this area overlooking the valley of the river Anton.
Two Roman Roads extend through this area; the Portway (aligned north east - south west) and the Icknield Way (aligned north west – south east). The Icknield Way does not appear to appreciably survive as either earthworks, road alignments or within field boundaries although it does form the north eastern boundary to some modern development at Andover. The Portway survives in field boundaries to the south west of East Anton and within the line of Finkley Road.
The only settlement with an appreciable historic core straddles the banks of the River Anton. This settlement is Goodworth Clatford and is focused upon an historic crossing point over the river with the majority of settlement development on the western bank. The church and historic core within Andover Chalk Downland is smaller and has only relatively limited 19th and 20th century development.
Several modern settlements are present within this area (Picket Piece and Andover Down) and these are clearly associated with settlement drift away from Andover and to the east. Picket Piece is unusual and is not typical of a settlement within the downlands evolving from ribbon style development, with properties having extensive gardens behind. The settlement of Andover Down, is also the result of ribbon style development, with intermittent clusters of housing and buildings grouped along the London Road, again providing a rather sprawling character.
The farmsteads within this character area are well spaced outlying with a network of large, open and straight-sided fields.
The more major medieval roads largely linking principal settlements such as Winchester Road and Romsey Road continued to follow the contours along the valley floor of the river Anton. Roads within this LCA radiate towards Andover, traversing the lie of the land. The major roads are the A303(T) and the A3093, with its junction forming a major feature within this generally open landscape.
Local Settlements and Features of Built Form
Picket Piece: Chalk Downland. Dry Valley Settlement Type.
Andover Down Chalk Downland. Dry Valley Settlement Type.
Traditional building styles include brick and brick with flint walls with clay tiled roofs.
The main concern in this area is the expansion of Andover. There is also concern that the fields are becoming larger and more open, with the loss and damage to hedgerows and extensive areas of one crop. There are comments that the farmland around Andover is becoming disused and derelict or poorly maintained, farms and farm cottages are becoming rundown and are being reused for general housing, and barns are being converted as a result of the change in farming needs.
The village of Wherwell, a small part of which lies within LCA10F, is a popular attraction and is considered particularly scenic.
Remoteness and Tranquillity
The impact of suburban elements has resulted in the loss of remoteness and tranquillity. Further more the open nature of this landscape, further extends the negative impact of urban fringe land uses.
Fragmented area of chalk downland
Small woodlands conceal old disused pits
Settlements resulting from ribbon development at Andover Down and Picket Piece
Urban fringe activities are visible within this open area of downland
Largely a landscape dominated by 19th century parliamentary enclosure
Two Roman Roads, the Ickneild Way and Portway extend through this area
Local Natural and Cultural LandscapeIssues
Expansion of Andover
Numerous lines of communication across the landscape (roads, railway line, pylons)
Poorly managed and maintained farmland
Erosion and further fragmentation of the landscape structure.
North Wessex Downs AONB: Small area east of Smannell
12 SINCs, mostly agriculturally unimproved grassland, some ancient semi-natural woodland and a site supporting notable species | <urn:uuid:7013c8f5-6655-46ff-90b6-4b792a948e75> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.testvalley.gov.uk/tvlcp/vol1_lca10f.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94316 | 1,364 | 2.46875 | 2 |
A Laptop Can Save a Life. Really.
- 6:21 AM
Sunday is Veterans’ Day. Which means you’ve got a ready-made excuse to reach into your wallets, and give to charities that help out wounded warriors. My personal favorite: Project Valour-IT, which has given out more than 1600 voice-activated laptops to veterans with hand injuries and other traumas.
It may not seem like the biggest deal. But, for some injured soldiers, it is an absolute life-saver.
Captain Chuck Ziegenfuss woke up in a military hospital in the summer of ’05, unable to use his hands after being hit by an IED — and feeling humiliated, broken. " Being fed, bathed, taken care of like an infant” not exactly a fitting role for a tank company commander (and blogger) who’s used to being the one who helps others. It sure as hell wasn’t a role that I wanted," he noted.
But that began to change, when the Soldiers’ Angels charity provided him with a laptop, and a buddy got him voice-controlled software to operate it. Suddenly, he was able to connect to the outside world. He was able to take up his blog again, too. And from that, he was able to muster the self-esteem and internal strength to begin his recovery.
So now is you’re chance to give that gift to others. Donate now.
UPDATE: Still not convinced? Check out some of the stories linked here. | <urn:uuid:a278125e-39a4-4262-9ca1-c68b720afa02> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2007/11/military-charit/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973243 | 324 | 1.796875 | 2 |
Listening to anyone who lives to be 100 is bound to inspire reverent concentration. Listening to a woman who is a brilliant pianist, Holocaust survivor and exceptionally lucid student of the human condition is an experience so intense that it’s impossible to return to the banalities of everyday life unchanged. Perhaps that’s why director Christopher Nupent’s new film Everything in the Present: The Wonder and Grace of Alice Sommer Herz is so relentlessly spare: he wants to leave us room to sort out our belongings.
Although technically a documentary, the film lacks the techniques we’ve come to associate with the genre in the age of Ken Burns and A&E’s Biography. It would have been simple to have paired Sommer Herz’s words with images of the people and places she describes or interspersed her present-day commentary with footage of the concert performances she was still giving into her nineties. Indeed, that sort of media-rich environment has become so prevalent that its absence here is viscerally apparent. It’s as if Nupen wants us to understand that this sort of testimony can only be diminished by technological enhancement.
To be sure, Sommer Herz exerts a commanding presence despite the mediation of the television or computer. Watching the film, I repeatedly had the same deep thrill that would flood me when my grandparents would tell me about their lives, that shiver that arcs through the spine in the moments when we feel most alive. Despite the fact that many of Sommer Herz’s stories are “schrecklich” and “fürchtbar” – she usually switches from English to German when describing her years of persecution by the Nazis – I experienced this sensation as pleasure. She testifies too powerfully to the limitless potential of the human spirit to come away from the film frightened or depressed.
In a film that resolutely avoids tricks of the documentary trade, Nupen only breaks with the “talking head” format for short interludes that show a close-up of Sommer Herz’s hands while she plays piano. This formal choice aligns perfectly with the content of her testimony. She explains that music literally provided her the sustenance she needed to stay alive when she didn’t have enough to eat. At the “model” concentration camp in Terezin where she was interned, she adds, it was the musicians who managed to stay healthiest. “Wenn wir gespielt haben,” Sommer Herz declares, “war es wie ein Gottesdienst”: playing in the camps was like a religious service. In the hell of the KZ, music provided a glimpse of paradise. That’s why she states, “Nature and music: this is my religion.”
Coupled with her passionate defense of German culture, including Richard Wagner, this assertion marks Sommer Herz as someone who stubbornly adheres to the values of the highly educated Middle-European Jews who strived for assimilation even when it was against their own self-interest. Describing the tense days prior to her deportation to Theresienstadt, she tells the story of the Nazi officer who lived in her building who let it be known that he greatly enjoyed hearing her piano playing through the floor. On the day when she was finally forced to leave, her Czech neighbors came to rummage through her possessions without regard for her family’s feelings. But the Nazi officer stopped by to offer a polite farewell, fervently stating his wish that she survive the war in good health.
Those who have no patience for such tales of the “good German” may have a harder time with Sommer Herz’s testimony than other viewers. Although she emigrated to Israel after the war, performing and teaching for decades, it’s clear that her heart never left pre-war Prague, a place where it was possible to believe in the virtues of a proto-multiculturalism. She makes it clear that Czech, German and Jewish culture were in competition with each other, but still seems to believe that they should be appreciated together.
Then again, when a person experienced that world as she did growing up – tagging along to the weekly meetings of Franz Kafka’s writing group, being friendly with Gustav Mahler’s family, having Sigmund Freud visit her house – her impulse to redeem the promise of late Habsburg Prague is easy to understand. And, as the film makes clear, it is not the product of delusion. She acknowledges the limits of that society, its failure to protect many of its most talented inhabitants. But she finds it more productive to acknowledge the capacity for good and evil in all human beings than to stereotype them on the basis of their heritage.
This attitude, also reflected in Nupen’s 2004 film We Want the Light, about the fraught musical relationship between Jews and Germans, is what makes Sommer Herz such a profound inspiration. “To be thankful,” she concludes, is the chief lesson she has learned in her long life. “Everything is a present. This I learned, to be thankful for everything.” For those who spend their lives filled with resentment and fear despite never having to go through what she did, this insight serves as a powerful rebuke, but one whose sting is softened by the depth of her magnanimity and the brilliance of playing.
It’s interesting, in this light, that no mention is made of one of the key aspects of her musicianship. Because sheet music was so difficult to come by, she learned to play her favorite pieces from memory. The concerts she gave in Theresienstadt, which she often repeated on request, burned the notes into her brain to such a degree that the music became, in essence, a part of her body. Watching her aged hands move up and down the keys, this quality is something we are made to feel without words.
Others have played the music featured in the film better from a technical standpoint. Sommer Herz surely did herself, in her younger days. But it’s hard to imagine the soul of the music being more effectively communicated than it is in the excerpts filmed for Everything Is a Present. Her conviction that music is the highest expression of human capability and, what is more, the way to stay alive resonates through every note.
Maybe this is why Nupen chose to isolate her hands, allowing us to focus on what matters most to her. For me, though, the decision paid more specific dividends. My maternal grandmother, born three years after Sommer Herz, was a talented concert pianist – she once defeated future composer Samuel Barber in a competition – who was unable to pursue a musical career because her family refused to support what they deemed to be an unladylike career.
Although she went on to become a teacher, her affair with the piano was only requited in the claustrophobic privacy of her own home. It was one of the things that made her bitter, a woman smarter than her circumstances, acerbic to a fault. Yet when she sat down at her baby grand and started to play her favorite Chopin pieces from memory, the burden of her personal history temporarily melted away.
I used to watch her wrinkled fingers when I was small and marvel at the change in her, one that I measured by the permission she always gave me afterwards to peck away at the keys myself, her possessiveness towards the piano temporarily muted. Watching Sommer Herz’s hands in Everything Is a Present, I periodically found myself transported back in time to those times when my grandmother stopped being the tense woman I was rather wary of and turned into a giant.
When Nupen decided to film all of his piano shots in close-up, he may have merely wished to highlight the remarkable passion and proficiency that Sommer Herz still displayed at age 98, when the sequences were filmed. But he ended up facilitating an identification with the film that goes beyond its historical content. Or, to put that another way, he made it possible for viewers like myself to feel their own personal history in the telling of hers.
While that aspect of the film may seem to distract from its main purpose – this is the testimony of a Holocaust survivor, after all – I think that Sommer Herz would approve. Over and over again, she indicates that music saved her in Theresienstadt because it had the capacity to free her temporarily from the indescribably terrible reality of her day-to-day existence. The transcendence it offers, though, isn’t just available under such appalling conditions. Whenever we let ourselves be fully absorbed in the music, as she obviously is when playing the excerpts featured in the film, we are partaking, in effect, in a “Gottesdienst.”
Those who are fascinated by Sommer Herz’s story will want to watch We Want the Light and read the book A Garden of Eden in Hell, which appeared in English translation in 2008. But the directness and simplicity of Everything Is a Present is a wonder not to be missed. This is a case where less is truly more. Whether as a complement to other Holocaust testimony, an oral history of a storied time and place or as a testament to the resources of the human spirit, Nupen’s film belongs in every public library and plenty of private ones as well.
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ZEEK is presented by The Jewish Daily Forward | Maintained by SimonAbramson.com | <urn:uuid:8519bf0a-b9b3-4578-84d2-a442211ee89f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://zeek.forward.com/articles/116676/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00061-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970853 | 1,981 | 1.703125 | 2 |
DatePNG is a PHP class can be used to generate a PNG image with a given time. It opens a template image in PNG format and renders text with a time in one or more formats. The font, size, position, angle, and color of the text are configurable parameters. The resulting image is generated in the PNG format as the current script output.
SVGpage is an application that will render PNG images as SVG files or convert an SVG file to a PNG image. It uses an internal version of Autotrace. This is not a straight conversion to SVG (as there really is no such converter) but it does a fairly literal job with simple shapes, and renders a "painterly" effect for more photographic-style images.
Animmerger stitches 2D images together into either a static image or an animation, while attempting to preserve a global frame of reference (static background). That is, for a movie that follows an actor around (and the background scrolls to follow them), it creates a movie that has a fixed background, and the camera moves around in the scene. The most obvious application of animmerger is in automatic map stitching for 2D video games, but there are many general purposes for which the program can be used. Its color quantization and dithering algorithm set is particularly advanced. | <urn:uuid:2e83e425-264c-4a9a-82c0-c86a80d3a9ff> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://freecode.com/tags/png?page=1&with=2751&without= | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00064-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.909916 | 269 | 2.25 | 2 |
Holography to See Through Smoke and FireCategory: Science & Technology
Posted: February 27, 2013 12:11PM
A fairly common lesson to teach children is to not play with fire and just about any time someone does in view of a child, they tell them to not try whatever they are doing at home. This is obviously because fire can be very dangerous, which is why firefighters exist. Now, thanks to some research published in the Optical Society of America's journal, Optics Express, firefighters may get a new tool to see and safely move through a burning building.
For some people the idea of holograms brings into mind the holodecks of Star Trek, but sadly real holograms are not so sophisticated. Instead of projecting a 3D form into free-space, they are a means to store 3D information in a 2D media by using optical interference. To create a hologram a laser beam is split into a reference and object beam. The object beam strikes the object being imaged, which affects its phase so when it recombines with the reference beam they create an interference pattern that stores the 3D data.
By using an infrared laser, the researchers have developed an infrared holographic camera that can see through smoke and flame, but not through people and objects. That means a firefighter armed with this technology would be able to safely see persons trapped by flames and hidden by smoke. The researchers are now working to make the camera portable so it can be used in the field.
Source: Optical Society of America | <urn:uuid:a2e5d36c-1583-4ea9-804d-02682afd2f3a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.overclockersclub.com/news/33766/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00050-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946973 | 312 | 3.046875 | 3 |
High school students interested in exploring engineering as a field of study are invited to attend a free, one-day program Oct. 13 at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
The CU Engineering Sampler will be held from 8:15 a.m. to 3:45 p.m. at the Engineering Center on the CU-Boulder campus. The program is open to high school juniors and seniors, as well as parents and guidance counselors.
Registered participants will receive an overview of engineering majors and careers, along with information on financial aid, scholarships and residence halls at CU-Boulder. They also will have the opportunity to visit their choice of laboratories for technology demonstrations, tour the CU-Boulder campus and engineering facilities, and attend panel discussions featuring current students and faculty.
Registration is requested by Oct. 5. For more information call (303) 735-2440 or go to engineering.colorado.edu/prospective/open_house.htm. | <urn:uuid:1228a2ea-6fa1-4914-9bab-7dce46c395b9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.colorado.edu/news/releases/2007/09/25/cu-boulder-offers-engineering-sampler-high-school-juniors-seniors-oct-13?qt-main=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00055-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952982 | 198 | 1.742188 | 2 |
On June 19, 1865 -- two-and-a-half years after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and two months after General Robert E. Lee's surrender -- Major General Gordon Granger's Union troops landed at Galveston, Texas, to announce that slaves were finally free. Since then, Juneteenth ("June" plus "nineteenth") has been celebrated in Texas, where it was named a state holiday in 1980, and increasingly across the country. Memphis' 13th-annual Juneteenth Freedom and Heritage Festival will take place this weekend at Douglass Park.
There will be more than 60 musical acts, activities for the kids, several educational presentations, and more. Friday will be dedicated to kids and seniors. Saturday will feature performances by Lacee, J. Blackfoot (pictured), and others. Sunday will include a Father's Day tribute, along with music by Katrina evacuees the New Orleans Jazz Ramblers and former American Idol contestant Equoia.
This year's theme is "... but by the content of their character: A Salute to the Civil Rights Movement." The festival will honor local and national civil rights leaders, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King, Rosa Parks, Rev. Samuel Billy Kyles, and others.
Glynn Reed is the founder and executive producer of the local Juneteenth celebration. "We are a cultural event," she says, "but we're also educational in terms of black culture."
Juneteenth Freedom and Heritage Festival, Friday-Sunday, June 16th-18th, Douglass Park. For more information, go to juneteenthmemphis.org. | <urn:uuid:1934ce0f-0129-4d4a-b8bb-e0341fafbbfb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.memphisflyer.com/memphis/for-free/Content?oid=1127181 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95372 | 334 | 2.515625 | 3 |
But has the Harrier really proven its unique value in countering insurgencies, etc? The Harrier has surely been a large part of Marine aviation since 9/11, but its STOVL characteristics were rarely, if ever, critical to the conduct of operations. If anything, the capability was a liability when it came to the requirement for long on-station times, multiple ordnance options, and tedious scanning of compounds and cities with targeting pods in support of troops on the ground. Marines often refer to the plane by saying "one man, one bomb, one hour." It is not that the Harrier has been incapable or has failed in its support of Marines on the ground. However, the STOVL capability forces a tradeoff in terms on-station time and weapons carriage. The F/A-18, especially in the two-seat D version, is far more capable of staying on station longer, conducting better scans using targeting pods, and carrying more weapons to give the ground units more options in these fights where one might need to level a building or might need to take out a small group of insurgents not far from a civilian-inhabited compound.
While Harriers have conducted some forward rearming and refueling at shorter strips, these were more driven by the Harrier's limitations and the desire to validate its expeditionary capability than a value added to the fight. That is, while a Harrier was rearming and refueling, a Hornet would be overhead, sensor still on target, refueling from a KC-130, more weapons still on the wing.
So, when the program hits a rough spot again, which history suggests is very possible, and when the budget adjusters come knocking, the Marine Corps needs to be honest about how much STOVL capability it really needs to maintain its close air support capability aboard amphibious shipping, how soon unmanned aerial systems can fill that gap, and what the best option is for the rest of our close air support needs. | <urn:uuid:d0827bc2-d701-4a84-be80-0681dd5650df> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mcgazette.blogspot.com/2012/01/getting-serious-about-stovl.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00048-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971975 | 403 | 2.0625 | 2 |
- Nymphoides peltata is an herbaceous, perennial, aquatic plant that has stout, branching stems up to 0.1 in. (2-3 mm) thick. It is often found rooted in the mud of still bodies of water.
- The leaves, which arise from rhizomes and are usually opposite and unequal, subtend the umbel. The leaves are cordate to subrotund in shape measuring 2-6 in. (5-15 cm) long and wide.
- The bright yellow flowers of Nymphoides peltata have five petals, and measure 1-1.5 in. (3-4 cm) in diameter when fully open. There is one to several flowers on each stalk. The edges of the petals are fringed. This plant flowers from June to September.
- The seeds of are contained in beaked capsules that measure 0.5-1 in. (1.2-2.5 cm) in length. The seeds themselves are flat and oval in shape, and have ciliate margins that measure 0.1 in. (3.5 mm) in length.
- Ecological Threat
- Although Nymphoides peltata has not yet become a major problem in New England, it has the potential to shade and crowd out native aquatic plants. In warmer areas it has formed large stands that can block waterways. It is still commonly sold as a plant for water gardens, and can be carelessly disposed of into local waterbodies. It prefers the still waters found in lakes and ponds. It is often found in water gardens, which are the source of many of its introductions.
Images from Bugwood.org | <urn:uuid:de80b337-bfc0-436a-b6c5-68c6dd3f7ebf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://wiki.bugwood.org/Nymphoides_peltata | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00069-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965418 | 349 | 3.5625 | 4 |
Why is FREE! the world's best-selling noun, verb, adjective and adverb, yet so hard to credit as a foundation for business in the Internet Age? And what will happen when business folk finally grok the abundant opportunities that FREE! provides?
Dictionary.com lists 49 meanings for the word free. Here in the World of Linux, there are two main ones: 1) the presence of liberty, 2) the absence of price. Or, as Richard M. Stallman drew the distinction, free-as-in-freedom and free-as-in-beer. Both kinds contributed enormously to the development not only of free and open source code, but to the Internet — the place where most of that code was written and on which most of it runs.
Within the Net's vast environment is an abundance of free and open building materials, all growing in number and quality. There is plenty of infrastructure you can pay for here, of course (with most of the money going to your cable or phone company), but the Net's nature is essentially one of abundant liberty and minimal cost.
Still, a decade and a half have passed since the first graphical browsers appeared, and most of us still barely understand what all this freedom and abundance does -- and can do -- for our economy.
The Internet itself could hardly be more widely used yet less well-understood. Here we have a form of infrastructure that embodies both free-as-in-freedom and free-as-in-beer, that has much in common with the purely public goods we call gravity, sunlight and atmosphere, and is still seen by those who bill us for it as a valved "service", on par with call waiting and premium TV channels.
Way back in the Web's Paleozoic, I wrote my first piece for Linux Journal (actually for its short-lived sister/insert, WEBsmith). It was titled "A Bulldozer Through The Intersection". The title played off a Newt Gingrich line: "The key to a monopoly is to get in the middle of an intersection and charge rent." Today no sentiment could hardly be more Old Skool. Yet the New Skool is barely in session. Urges to valve abundance and package it as scarcities still run strong. In some cases this makes sense. It really does cost money, for example, to connect homes and businesses to the Net's backbones, and ways must be found to pay for that. (Not saying the carriers have found the right ways, just that they have capex and opex, both of which need to be covered, somehow.) In other cases, such as with free and open source software, no "business model" is required. Yet the absence of one is still hard for many to grok.
For example, all of us encounter folks in business who understand the warm and fuzzy reasons why developers write free and open code — for the esteem of peers, for example — while missing the plain practical purposes, and their cumulative effects.
This is why a mountain of free and open code has grown in our midst, and people can still say they don't understand how you can make money with it. They miss the central point: that you make money because of it. Your business is not selling software. Your business is something else that is made possible by software produced in liberty and free for the taking. (And for you to improve, if you like.)
Several years ago Steve Larsen of Krugle (a code search engine) told me there were already more than half a million open source code bases in the world. I asked Steve recently what the number is today. He said he had no idea. The sum is beyond estimation.
So we have an ecosystem of abundant code and scarce imagination about how to make money on top of it. If that imagination were not scarce, we wouldn't need Nicholas Carr to explain utilities in clouds with The Big Switch, or Jeff Jarvis to explain how big companies get clues, in What Would Google Do?
So, to help close that same gap, we here at Linux Journal came up with an idea for a panel at SXSW in Austin, which starts tomorrow. The title is Rebuilding the World with Free Everything, and it'll happen at 3:30 next Tuesday, following a keynote conversation between Guy Kawasaki and Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired, and author of both The Long Tail and (most significantly for our purposes) Free: The Future of a Radical Price. I first met Chris many years ago when he was an editor for The Economist. Since then I've come to know him as an economist who gets tech, a techie who gets economics, and an original thinker who breaks both molds.
Chris will be joining our panel, along with Katherine Druckman (webmistress here at LinuxJournal), William Hurley of Invisisoft (and much more), Dave Taylor (of FilmBuzz, Linux Journal and intuitive.com), and yours truly, who will serve as the moderator. Also joining us will be everybody in the group we used to call "the audience". And you: Readers here who can get a jump on the conversation.
Here are a few questions to help get us started...
- Why is it that people find "free" so hard to understand?
- What are the connections between free code and free beer?
- What are the advantages, in a crashing economy, to free?
- Yes, it's not "free everything", but it's still free lots-of-stuff. How do we decide which forms of free we take advantage of?
- How is the abundance of both free-as-in-freedom and free-as-in-beer changing the field of economics?
- What, if any, investors out there understand the opportunities with free?
- What does all this do both to the concept of "intellectual property" and what wisely can be done with it?
- Where are the engineers (besides Google's founders) who have leveraged understanding both free-as-in-freedom and free-as-in-beer into big-as-in-business?
- What are some of the Big Business opportunities that are yet to be exploited by those who know the real value of free?
- Chris's The Economics of Abundance
- Mike Masnick's The Grand Unified Theory On The Economics Of Free, which also includes a long list of other posts on the subject.
- Chris and Mike's The FREE! Summit.
- Dave Winer's How I made over $2 million with this blog
- JP Rangaswami's Random musings on open source and The Economics of the Customer, plus this interview.
- In Linux Journal:
Look forward to seeing you there — in spirit if not in the flesh.
Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal
|Non-Linux FOSS: libnotify, OS X Style||Jun 18, 2013|
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|Introduction to MapReduce with Hadoop on Linux||Jun 05, 2013|
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There has been a lot of enthusiasm from train enthusiasts over the announcement of £9Bn investment over the next several years 'providing a modern railway for the 21st century'. I think what they really mean is 'forcing a continuation of a 20th century railway into the mid 21st century. It is an opportunity missed. I think the money could be much better spent.When I look at railways, I see a direct analogy with the telecomms network. In the old days, when you made a call, you had a wire for yourself, all the way from your phone to the other one. It was expensive, essentially because it need a lot of wires to provide the capacity.
When time division multiplexing came in, you started sharing the wire with other people. The signal from your voice was packetised, greatly compressed in time and sent with many others along the same wire. Later systems managed even more multiplexing. The result is that today, fixed line telecomms is almost free by comparison to prices back then and even mobile comms is very cheap.
On today's regional railway, a train goes past maybe every 15 minutes, giving occupancy of around 0.4%. The primitive signalling system, combined with human drivers, means that the line is blocked for other trains for a considerable time either side of its passing, making for a system not unlike the old telecomms circuit switched network. It is no wonder tickets are expensive when the line is so underused.
We need packetisation and asynchronous time division multiplexing on rail too. An asynchronous packet switched network can run at 80% load before congestion even starts to show. Doing something similar same to the rail network as has been done in telecomms could greatly increase capacity, reduce journey times and decrease prices.
The first change needed is to replace the long, heavy trains that hold 1000 people with light, short pods that hold maybe six. These would be the 'packets' compared to the circuit switched traditional trains. Because only a few passengers are needed for each to fill, an individual passenger would only wait a short time before a pod would be available to go to their destination, instead of waiting for a rigid timetable. Obviously, there would need to be a maximum wait, even if the passenger has to leave alone.
Secondly, they would replace drivers by computers that can talk directly to those driving other pods and coordinate traffic efficiently. There is no need for an expensive signalling system, simple wireless direct connections could work ok. They would be cheap to make and very many of them could run centimetres apart, giving up to 200 times the capacity of today's rail. They could even form virtual trains that could mix with conventional ones on an old style network during a long upgrade period. But each pod would be going to a different destination and peel off at a station sideline to drop its passengers.
Thirdly, just as wireless electricity is being demonstrated for home appliances, why not apply this on rail, with inductive pads now and again instead of the expensive and clumsy overhead, to top up super-capacitors or small batteries in each pod. Since pods can run happily in direct contact with each other, any pod breaking down could easily be pushed to the next station for repair.
A very similar system could be developed for road users too. Self driving cars have been well proven already, and it would increase road capacity if we did this on roads too. Electric self-driving cars could be the basis of a replacement for public transport, which could provide end-to-end taxi-like service at very low cost, more socially inclusive since people wouldn't have to walk to bus stops, and it would extend far beyond existing bus routes.
If roads have inductive pads to recharge the pods frequently, then we only need small batteries for the short trips on local roads at each end of a journey. And then, linking the road and rail systems, there is no reason why the same pods could not work on both rail and road. In fact, if we ripped up the actual rail and recycle the materials, future rail could be replaced by roads that have far higher capacity.
The pods can easily guide themselves along the same path without the rails. So without the heavy trains of yesterday, we won't need rails at all. The technologies need developing, but are entirely feasible, and this region has much of the expertise needed to make it work. It would work far better and be far cheaper than what is being proposed. We need to develop small batteries or super-capacitors, inductive charging systems, the protocols, and the pods. But we would really end up with a modern railway for the 21st century, not some patched up Victorian system. | <urn:uuid:a3ee25dd-8b32-46be-9852-9b9f5b2acc18> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://businessweekly.co.uk/blog/futuretech-with-ian-pearson-of-futurizon/14305-a-modern-railway-for-the-21st-century-really | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972635 | 959 | 2.25 | 2 |
Paul describes the body after the resurrection as a spiritual body (soma psuchikon) and contrasts it with the natural (psychical body, soma pneumatikon, 1 Corinthians 15:44). Our present natural body has for its life-principle the soul (psuche) but the resurrection body is adapted and subordinated to the spirit (pneuma). See PSYCHOLOGY. The apostle does not argue for a literal and material identity of that future body with the present one, but thinks of it as the counterpart of the present animal organism so conditioned as to be adapted to a state of existence which lies wholly within the sphere of the spirit. Against his Corinthian readers he argues that the resurrection cannot be succeeded by a state of non-existence, nor is he willing to admit a mere etherealized state. There must be a body, but between it and our present body there is a similar difference to that between the first and second Adam. The present body and the first Adam were alike dominated by the soul (psuche); but as the second Adam became a life-giving spirit, so will the resurrection body be a spiritual one. Christ became a life-giving spirit through the resurrection (Meyer on 1 Corinthians 15:45); and since we are to bear His image (1 Corinthians 15:49), it becomes evident that Christ's resurrection-body is the nearest possible approach to a sensible representation of the spiritual body. For this Paul argues more directly when he affirms that our resurrection-body shall be transformed according to the body of His glory (Philippians 3:21; compare 1 John 3:2). The body of Christ after the resurrection was conformed in many respects to the body of His earthly life, yet with some marked differences. He ate (Luke 24:42,43); He breathed (John 20:22); possessed flesh and bones (Luke 24:39), and could be apprehended by the bodily senses (Luke 24:40; John 20:27). His body possessed characteristics which differentiated it entirely from the popular fancy of ghosts or apparitions (Luke 24:36-43). Yet His body was superior to the usual barriers which restrict human movements. Barred doors and distances did not impede His going (John 20:19-26; Luke 24:31-36). The context shows that the purpose of His eating was to convince the disciples that it was really He (Luke 24:41-43), and not to sustain life which His body was probably capable of maintaining in other ways. John speaks of His appearances after His resurrection as "manifestations" (John 21:1-). A change in His person and appearance had certainly taken place, for those who knew Him best did not at once recognize Him (Luke 24:16; John 20:14). It is evident therefore that the post-resurrection-body of Jesus was one that had the power of materializing itself to natural senses, or withdrawing itself at will. It was this same body which was taken into the heavens at the ascension, and which remains in heaven (Acts 1:11; 3:21). There is no hint that it underwent any change in its removal from earth. Hence, the spiritual body of which Paul speaks is not to be unlike the body which Jesus possessed after His resurrection. There is to be an absence of the desires and passions which belong naturally to the present bodily existence (Matthew 22:30; Luke 20:35,36).
William Charles Morro
These files are public domain. | <urn:uuid:9bee4c31-8cf0-494a-bd3a-ab7189f5b81a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.biblestudytools.com/dictionary/body-spiritual/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958802 | 723 | 2.40625 | 2 |
- Full Description
This long-awaited title provides a clear introduction to game programming for you, C# programmers! Microsoft insiders have written an easy-to-read guide, so you can start programming games quickly. This book even includes an introduction to Managed DirectX 9, and other advanced .NET features, like animation and sounds.
Code examples are actually complete games, and include .Nettrix, .Netterpillars, River Pla.NET, Magic KindergarteN, D-iNfEcT, Nettrix II (for the Pocket PC), and a version of the classic game, Spacewars.
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If you think that you've found an error in this book, please let us know about it. You will find any confirmed erratum below, so you can check if your concern has already been addressed.No errata are currently published | <urn:uuid:a8e3dad6-8e9f-45a3-a75d-9890c95ddc23> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.apress.com/microsoft/c/9781590593196 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00049-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.91412 | 186 | 2.28125 | 2 |
ON VALVATA WOODWARDI, N.SP., AND SPH^RIUM BULLENI,
N.SP., FROM THE CROMERIAN (FOREST BED) OF WEST
By A. S. Kennaed, F.G.S.
Bead 10th March, 1911.
DoKiNG the past few years a large quantity of material from the
Cromerian (Forest Bed) of West Runton, Norfolk, has been placed
at my disposal by M. A. C. Hinton, and 1 myself have also collected
from the same deposit. A close study of this has revealed the necessity
for a revision of the published lists of species, and considerable progress
has been made. Since, however, it is unlikely that this will be
finished for some little time I have considered it advisable to publish
descriptions of these two new species, since it is necessary to quote
them. The molluscan remains have been obtained from two distinct
layers just east of West Runton Gap. The uppermost bed is a sandy
gravel full of shells. It is about 8 inches thick and about 5 feet
above the level of the beach. There can be no doubt that this is the
bed described by Mr. Clement Reid ^ as — " Near West Runton Gap the
bed is a loamy sand full of Corhicula fliiminalis and Paludina gibba^
As a matter of fact Corbicula fluminalis does not occur, the shell which
has been mistaken for it being Sphc^rmm rwicola, Leach. The other
bed is one apparently older, and is a silty peat occurring on the
foreshore, more to the eastward. Mr. Hinton informs me that,
judging from the fossil Rodentia, there is considerable difference in
age between the two, the palseontological evidence supporting the
stratigrapliical. Both the new species were verj^ common in the upper
bed, though not so abundant in the lower.
Valvata Woodwaedi, n.sp.
Shell conical, solid, rather glossy, closely and finely striate in the
lines of growth ; whorls 4|-5, convex ; body-whorl verj-large ; apex
somewhat sharply pointed ; suture oblique, shallow ; mouth oval,
angulated above ; umbilical chink narrow ; operculum unknown.
Height 9, breadth 7 mm.
Locality/ and Formation. — West Runton, Norfolk : Cromerian
^ Pliocene Deposits of Britain (Mem. Geol. Survey), 1890, p. 156. | <urn:uuid:194bd8e0-d1b2-4eaa-8d07-b125f91de156> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://biostor.org/reference/104054 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.904965 | 585 | 1.9375 | 2 |