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Season of Mists and Mellow Fruitfulness
by Esmerelda Weatherwax (Nov. 2008)
It is autumn which is my favourite time of the year. October is my favourite month but November is not far behind.
Summer (I don’t like the heat) is over and Christmas is coming. Meanwhile it is
“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” and lovable for its own sake.
I have a tub of blackberries frozen that we picked from the bushes that grow alongside the footpaths but not so many as previous years. With the wet summer they ripened later and due to family illness we didn’t get out to pick them until the week they were past their best. But my neighbour’s apple tree did well and he was very generous to me with his produce. If we have less blackberry and apple pies and more apple and cinnamon, apple and clove and apple and sultana pies next year we are still very lucky.
The squirrels in the forest and the churchyard are very lively and seem quite plump. I know some people call them tree-rats, vermin with good PR, and accuse them of killing our native red squirrel but if Beatrix Potter was happy to write about Timmy and Goody Tiptoes as well as Squirrel Nutkin that is good enough for me. They never really hibernate in England; they just sleep for a week or so at a time then pop out for a quick reccie on mild days before another short kip. But they still need to collect and store nuts, or in our churchyard acorns, of which we have plenty. Red squirrels can’t digest acorns well apparently so are dependent on a habitat with plenty of other nuts, like hazel. There is a school of thought that believes that red squirrels were in decline in some areas years before grey squirrels arrived there and that loss of habitat is more of a factor.
I love the smell of autumn. There is a tinge of bonfire to it but mainly it is leaves and wet earth and crisp air mingled. The leaves fall down around you like so much copper confetti. Then I shuffle through the piles on the path kicking them up into the air.
Picture by E Weatherwax October 2008 Somewhere in England.
I love that line in the 60s hit by Noel Harrison, “And the autumn leaves are turning to the colour of her hair” in Windmills of Your Mind. Does anybody other than me remember him in The Girl from Uncle? And the Kinks sang Autumn Almanac.
I like shiny conkers and conker fights. Mushrooms and fungi springing up literally overnight.
The trees may be losing their leaves and the summer flowers appear to be dieing back but now is the time to plant bulbs for the spring. I am trying hyacinths in bowls again this year to give as Christmas presents. I bought the bulbs at the Ely District Horticultural Society sale at the end of August, along with several bags of daffodils. I have put them round the trunk of a deceased cherry tree in my garden, in tubs and on my parent’s grave. Then tulips in the front garden, which I have not planted for years but for some reason I am optimistic of a good show next spring. The bluebells are well naturalised and I have given up on snowdrops. Good slug food. Since my unexpected retirement I have had time for gardening – that and the work of a colleague who has turned professional gardener as a second career.
My chrysanthemums are starting to flower and their smell, both leaves and flowers, is evocative of everything I have already written. They were a recent gift from another neighbour who had a surplus and I can see that they will be the bronze colour I particularly like. You can buy cut chrysanthemums all year round but this shade of bronze is only available in genuine autumn. I will buy cut white or yellow chrysanthemums in summer if that is the best available in the shop but they don’t smell quite the same.
Soon I must take my geranium pots into safety from early morning frost.
The RSPB reserve reports that the summer birds are on their way south. Others are on their way here from the Arctic of Siberia for the winter. I remember standing on the Norfolk coast one October and watching great flocks wheeling overhead one after the other all heading south but unable to recognise anything other than that some were geese, probably Brent geese, heading for the river estuaries of Essex. The Canada goose is breeding and thriving in England to the point of being a nuisance (cf grey squirrel above) but the smaller Brent geese are autumn visitors.
Then there are the festivals that take place in the autumn. Harvest festival (that’s late summer really), Sukkot, Diwali, Halloween and Bonfire night. Remembrance Sunday on the nearest Sunday to 11th November after which I will allow preparations for Christmas to begin in earnest. The Chinese have a moon festival around the time of the autumn equinox but I have no experience of how it is celebrated other than the eating of mooncakes. Trust me to know about cake.
I expect preparations for Diwali and Sukkot are tinged with the sights, sounds and smells of autumn in India and elsewhere. Harvest festival in Australia and New Zealand will be in March or possibly April. And their Christmas preparations shortly will have a summer air, of heat and the barbie on the beach.
But what of Ramadan and Eid which took place earlier this month? On the lunar calendar which rolls round the solar year in a 33 year cycle the scent of leaves and moss, or daffodils, or frost, or the changes of the season doesn’t herald the festival for the season for Islam, local traditions like Persian New Year and Spring in Egypt notwithstanding. Presumably the changes of the season have only their own personal significance to a Muslim, and Ramadan and the Eids have their own flavour separate to the weather or season.
“For everything its season, and for every activity under heaven its time” Ecclesiastes 3:1.
The Byrds' folk song, "Turn, Turn, Turn" is a little hackneyed but the words are true. I like the seasons and I like the cycle of the year.
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Esmerelda Weatherwax is a regular contributor to the Iconoclast our community blog. To view her entries please click here.
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If you enjoyed this piece and would like to read more by Esmerelda Weatherwax, please click here. | <urn:uuid:f2cab133-bf82-4ee3-a4d1-aa8eef03c171> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.newenglishreview.org/print.cfm?pg=custpage&frm=27988&sec_id=27988 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968653 | 1,422 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Using search engines such as Google are great for find information but EMT-Links are reviewed links by me which may provide a bit more useful information. Many links reported back from Google are not that useful to you since your search criterion was too broad. Theselinks are more directed and contain information not found elsewhere on this site.
Go to the CPR information page EMT Education Your EMT Education is very important. Finding a school that is both good, close-by and inexpensive is very important to your education. This section will list schools that have published web pages.
Many of these schools and institutions offer initial courses, recertification course and continuing education course. | <urn:uuid:94075146-990a-4cfc-bf44-b4e17d411c09> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.emt-resources.com/EMT-Links.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975188 | 135 | 1.664063 | 2 |
Most people attribute Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as vital to the success of an online business. However, very few people even know about Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), let alone do they realise how important this is. I am not saying that SEO is not important. SEO enables a website to be found. But it is ultimately Conversion Rate Optimization that converts the users who find your site into customers.
Conversion Rate Optimization can be defined as the method of creating an experience for a website or landing page visitor with the goal of increasing the percentage of visitors that convert into customers (Source). This essentially means that first someone visits your website and is convinced by what you have to offer; then he or she chooses to make a purchase through you. This process means that they will have been converted into an actual customer from a mere website visitor.
Factors Which Influence Conversion Rates
In order to simplify our discussion, let us take an e-commerce website as an example. Some of the most important factors that would influence conversion rates on an e-commerce website would be:
- Website Navigation: If your website navigation systems are unclear, slow loading, or labelled with ambiguous titles, your website visitors will simply leave your website with a strong feeling of frustration. The key to website success is to keep it simple! You need to guide people through your website easily while showing them where they are currently located within the site hierarchy. At the same time, it is important that your visitors do not have to guess where to find the products or information they are looking for. Your font size, colour and styles must be readable also. Some websites go over the top with over-designed fonts and menus, ambiguous names for their shop sections and flamboyant colour schemes. Very often, this strategy is chosen by the site designers in order to stand out and as a consequence attract custom because of this. Unfortunately, they are actually more likely to lose custom. While it is true that in certain specific scenarios, this strategy can work in a real-life shop setting where customers can see and touch products and speak face to face with staff, in an online world where your competitors are a click away, you have to gain customers trust. Very often than not, the clearer your site is the better.
- Clear Photography: Photography is the only way a customer can see and judge a product. If a site has pixelated images, or images which show a product from disadvantageous angles, then it is unlikely a customer will opt to make a purchase. Think of the composition of your photographs, the quality, and the visual perspectives from where they are taken. The more images you can provide of the product, the better. It is also advisable to provide thumbnail versions of products with the option to click on them to see the larger versions.
- Homepage Design: You homepage provides the first impression of your business. Thus, it must be smart and well designed. It also needs to engage your visitors and attract them to explore your website further. More importantly you need to lead them into your online shop so they are tempted to make a purchase. Therefore your homepage should display a well-thought selection of your products, and link to these products within your online shop. There should also be a tag line or a few sentences which sums up what your business is, and what it does.
- Checkout System: The checkout is the point where many e-commerce websites lose customers. If a visitor has browsed through your website and added a few items to their basket, they are very likely to go ahead and make a purchase rather than simply window-shopping. Your website must guide your customer trough a simple purchasing process. Use clearly-labelled buttons to help your customer navigate through each stage of the checkout, and place those vital security logos throughout it so your customer knows it is safe to purchase through your website. Outline any important information they will need to know such as delivery costs and timings, returns information so any doubt for them not to purchase is addressed. Very often, a simple FAQ will do the trick but do consider adding live tech support. It all depends on the type of e-commerce site that you have, the products that you are selling and your sales volume. Make use of your website analytics software to notice browsing patterns of your users, how many are abandoning your site and from which pages they are doing this.
- Grammar: Even something as small as a spelling mistake can put a customer off from making a purchase. Make sure you spell check your site, and ask family members, or, better still hire proofreading services. It is very easy to make a grammatical mistake. By pending most of the time maintaining your site, it is very likely that you will be the person who will miss even the most obvious mistakes. Needless to say, if a mistake is spotted, change it immediately. | <urn:uuid:ab208a2b-9505-4e06-877b-7d755f2f94b8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://usabilitygeek.com/introduction-to-conversion-rate-optimiation/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957081 | 993 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Interesting article in the Globe:
From the jungles of Papua New Guinea to the deserts of Libya, some of the wildest and most dangerous corners of the world have one thing in common these days: Chinese workers.
They are the front-line soldiers in China’s new commercial empire. But as Beijing’s global investment rises dramatically, reaching about $60-billion today, its foreign workers …
Although this is not a direct analogy, it is clear that China treats its foreign citizens much better than the U.S. treats its foreign citizens. Every country except the U.S. views its citizens abroad as ambassadors. This is one more reason why the U.S. is on the decline. | <urn:uuid:03b40f14-f339-42e7-9349-15a4fe033ba9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://isaacbrocksociety.ca/2012/02/10/chinese-workers-front-line-soldiers-in-chinas-new-commercial-empire/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954481 | 147 | 1.78125 | 2 |
06/05/2012 - Allan Coukell, deputy director of the Medical Safety Portfolio of the Pew Health Group, appeared on C-SPAN to talk about drug safety. Recently, the House passed the Food and Drug Administration Reform Act of 2012 by a vote of 387-5. This legislation gives the FDA the funding it needs to approve new drugs and medical devices more quickly and improves inspection. The Senate passed a similar bill and a final draft of legislation is expected early the next month. Mr. Coukell responded to telephone calls and electronic communications. | <urn:uuid:be8b92e3-001b-41f2-b6a7-747f7ac45c6e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pewtrusts.org/news_room_detail.aspx?id=85899401346&WT.rss_ev=f&WT.rss_f=Medical%20Device%20Initiative&WT.rss_a=Pew | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931747 | 111 | 1.554688 | 2 |
I've been checking out various Burnham and Story genealogies lately. None get the parentage of my ancestress Mary (Burnham) Story correct. She was the daughter of Thomas2-1 and Mary (Lawrence) Burnham. [START GRANDPA MODE] Back in the day, one used a unique genealogical tool called AGBI (American Genealogical & Biographical Index). It is an immense set (hundreds of volumes) that indexed an amazing set of documents including the 1790 census, vital records, revolutionary war service papers, etc. One thing they also indexed was the genealogical column in The Boston Evening Transcript. In the December 12, 1927 issue, item #6418, it reads:
"What became of the Mary (3) Burnham, daughter of Lt. Thomas (2) [Thomas (1)] Burnham? It would seem that she must be the Mary published Ipswich, 1710 to Samuel Story and later removed to Norwich, Conn. Three of the sons of Lt. Thomas (2) Burnham settled or lived in Norwich at various times." | <urn:uuid:b325a5fa-4097-43ee-b097-47d2f7b1326c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mhollick.typepad.com/slovakyankee/2009/09/mary-burnham-story-1685after-1748.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943244 | 229 | 1.648438 | 2 |
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Expressions of different emotions are usually overlapping and hard to distinguish. Besides, the amounts of feature patterns are usually imbalanced in the overlapping emotional expressions, and most conventional classifiers tend to prefer lager classes for archiving a better overall recognition rate. This drawback is also encountered in the Multi-layer perception (MLP) models frequently proposed for emotion recognition due to its superior classification capability and performance. However, MLP and most recognition techniques only refer to a mean square error and an overall error rate. Furthermore, using MLP has another disadvantage that needs to search a suitable network structure. In this paper, a novel objective function to optimize the MLP neural networks is proposed for solving these problems. This function considers the criteria of mean square error, classification error rate, and distances between the examples and the classification boundary, to optimize the network parameters and prune the links between neurons. Besides, the sigmoid and Gaussian transfer functions are adopted in our method to construct suitable classification boundaries. An artificial data set and the Danish emotional speech database are used to verify the MLP-based classifier with the novel objective function. The experimental results show that the proposed model has better performance than conventional MLPs.
Date of Conference: 15-17 Dec. 2010 | <urn:uuid:717a19fa-38cc-4b06-a9c4-7e51bdbd9e36> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?reload=true&arnumber=5716361&contentType=Conference+Publications | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937585 | 258 | 1.78125 | 2 |
Toy Shop Owner Saves Similar Small Businesses
Six-month old Ellie Marshall loves going to work with her dad. You would too if "work" was a toy store.
Dan Marshall's business is booming this year. Black Friday sales were up 25% from last year and he's a big reason why. Marshall leads a group called the Handmade Toy Alliance.
The Alliance got federal regulations on small toy manufacturers changed last year, exempting them from certain tests that only large corporations can afford.
"Up to this point, the federal law has made it so burdensome for small toy manufacturers to get access to lead testing, and to be able to stay in the market," said Kiddywampus owner, Amy Saldanha.
"The thing is, they still have to meet the standards. They just don't have to do this expensive third party testing," said Marshall.
And, in turn, it keeps the toys flying off the shelves. Saldanha says business is up 17% from last year.
"It's just fun to focus on a growing business as opposed to keeping things so lean and trim," she said.
The toy industry association says toy testing added at least ten-percent to the cost for toy manufacturers across the board, no matter how small the business.
"For smaller companies, they just don't sell enough to pay for it," said Marshall. "They were just going out of business."
So thanks to her dad, Ellie can sleep soundly tonight knowing her toys, and her family's income, are both safe. | <urn:uuid:8e374461-0096-442a-b921-d54a06578e9c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://kstp.com/news/stories/s2872848.shtml?cat=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.984743 | 324 | 1.703125 | 2 |
We regularly hear from officers from the Local Authority, fellow Governors and national speakers on topical issues and matters that Governors themselves have expressed an interest in. Meetings also provide an opportunity for Governors to meet and talk and share good practice or to voice their opinions and concerns over current issues.
The Forum has representatives on committees such as Schools Forum, Overview and Scrutiny Committee and Governor Support and Development Working Group. This gives Governors a direct voice and vote on educational issues and decisions.
Schools that subscribe to the Forum, for a nominal £20 per year, can name the members of the Governing Body that would like to receive the notice of any meetings. This can be one or all members of your Governing Body. Any member of the Governing Body is welcome to attend meetings at any time.
We also have an Executive Panel that meet regularly to plan and discuss the future development of the Forum. | <urn:uuid:d8e43b0d-9c58-43fe-82f9-4537a492bcbd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wigan.gov.uk/WiganCouncilCMS/Templates/GeneralTwoColumn.aspx?NRMODE=Published&NRNODEGUID=%7B7A32165E-B1CC-487B-B837-2B00CB87AFAC%7D&NRORIGINALURL=%2FServices%2FEducationLearning%2FSchools%2FGovernors%2FWiganGovernorsForum.htm&NRCACHEHINT=NoModifyGuest&TextSize=XL | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967921 | 184 | 1.703125 | 2 |
Qwirkle has gone 3-D! Families that love the award-winning original will be fascinated with the game's new added dimension - literally! Now players can roll and re-roll the cube until they get the shape they need to complete their pattern, and they can see opponent's shapes to help them strategize. Dr. Toy Award Winner. Major Fun Award Winner.
For ages 6 and up.
• Qwirkle has gone 3-D! • Roll and re-roll the cube until they get the shape they need
Award Winner • Dr.Toy Award Winner • Major Fun Award Winner
Comments about Product: played two games with three adults. none of us had ever played this game or the original version. gameplay is not overly complicated, but I wouldn't recommend it for a 6 year old unless you omit some of the rules. cubes are painted wood and seem very durable. great addition to our game stash.
Comments about Product: We love Quirkle so when we saw the Cubes we had to have it. Unlike the tiles, the cubes tend to rock and tip when you use them so that the faces change. If you can't remember what they were when you put them down, and they tip or roll as you are putting youcubes next to them. it is hard to keep the continuity of the game. We have played both Quirkel and Quirkle Cubes with children and adults and we all favor the original game. | <urn:uuid:8f0c0e4d-02b3-4c81-a63d-3eca94b23c8b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hearthsong.com/Toys-and-Games-on-Sale/3-D-Qwirkle-Game-Cubes.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980488 | 302 | 1.617188 | 2 |
More than 1,500 New Yorkers gathered today in Manhattan to mourn the death of a 32 year-old gay man, who was shot down on Friday just blocks away from the historic Stonewall Inn in an apparent act of anti-gay bias.
NOM Documents Reveal Plot to Divide LGBT, Black and Latino Communities
Official documents from the National Organization for Marriage, uncovered by the Human Rights Campaign, reveal that the anti-LGBT group has been actively interested in – as they say – "fanning the hostility" (p.12) between the LGBT community and the black community.
These documents, unsealed as part of a court case NOM is fighting in Maine, also reveal that the group has been attempting to turn Latino families against marriage equality by framing the LGBT movement as part of – in their words – “assimilation.”
NOM is the most well-represented group on GLAAD’s Commentator Accountability Project (#glaadCAP), with five associated figures (Brian Brown, Maggie Gallagher, Christopher Plante, Jennifer Roback Morse, Robert George) among those anti-LGBT activists with profiles. It is now clear that distinction is well deserved.
Via HRC’s NOM Exposed project, here are two passages from the 2008-09 report to the NOM Board of Directors:
“The strategic goal of this project is to drive a wedge between gays and blacks—two key Democratic constituencies. Find, equip, energize and connect African American spokespeople for marriage, develop a media campaign around their objections to gay marriage as a civil right; provoke the gay marriage base into responding by denouncing these spokesmen and women as bigots…”
"The Latino vote in America is a key swing vote, and will be so even more so in the future, both because of demographic growth and inherent uncertainty: Will the process of assimilation to the dominant Anglo culture lead Hispanics to abandon traditional family values? We must interrupt this process of assimilation by making support for marriage a key badge of Latino identity - a symbol of resistance to inappropriate assimilation."
These documents reveal a critical context to so much of the media work that NOM has done over the past several years.
Why did NOM’s Maggie Gallagher refer to California Attorney General Jerry Brown as a “White Liberal” in this 2008 statement? Now we know that it was part of their divisive strategy to create hostility between the LGBT community and black community.
Why did NOM RI’s Chris Plante and CBN focus so much of this interview on the opposition to marriage from “the Hispanic Churches?” Now we know it was an attempt to paint marriage equallity supporters as being dangerous "assimilators."
“While the rest of the country is focusing on the values of fairness and justice for everyone, NOM is trying to tear our communities apart, or 'drive a wedge' as they call it,” said Herndon Graddick, GLAAD’s Vice President of Programs and Communications. “That’s un-American. Kudos to HRC for uncovering NOM's cynical attempt to exploit communities of color in order to further its goal to deprive equal protections to LGBT Americans."
Former NAACP Chairman Julian Bond also weighed in on the controversay saying:
"NOM's underhanded attempts to divide will not succeed if Black Americans remember their own history of discrimination," said the statement from Bond, a former chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. "Pitting bigotry's victims against other victims is reprehensible; the defenders of justice must stand together."
Every single statement that NOM has ever made – and will ever make from this point forward – regarding marriage and the Latino community, marriage and the African American community, or marriage and any other community now needs to be seen in a very different light. NOM has spent several years purposely trying to “(fan) the hostility” towards the LGBT community from these communities and vice versa without being held accountable.
The documents also revealed that NOM has been looking for celebrities who are glamorous, but (in NOM's own words) "Non-Cognitive" to represent their side. Read more about that revelation here.
Thanks to these documents, all of the communities impacted by these insidious and divisive tricks know exactly who they’re dealing with. Now it’s the media’s responsibility to hold NOM accountable. | <urn:uuid:184043d8-59d3-4ee0-b134-5902623cff73> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.glaad.org/blog/nom-documents-reveal-plot-divide-lgbt-black-and-latino-communities?page=12 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95806 | 920 | 1.710938 | 2 |
Where Your Dreams Become Reality
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Poster: Billy the Kid
Subject: RE: Wisconsin father found guilty in prayer death case
this is not true. subatomic particles behave randomly and their position can only be predicted with some level of probability.[/quote]
Fair enough. It is true that I simplified earlier.
However, the fact that there is a probabilistic component to the future paths of particles does not seem to really impact the core issue raised. That is, the notion that anyone has any such thing as a free will, that there are free choices made, etc is all 100% illusory. All of it, everyone, and again every thought and action taken are determined by physical laws (including the random events at the subatomic level).
In particular we (the posters here) each have no real choice in this discussion - every keystroke is determined by physical laws and randomness. Indeed "we" don't really exist in the commonly understood sense of beings possessing a free will.
I would posit that no one ( not 'Noone' :D ) is truly capable of believing this about themselves.
Hit the submit button below if you want us to review the post. If you feel this is urgent or want a reply, email us at firstname.lastname@example.org about the post and please include a link to the thread the post is on and what page number/post on that page it is | <urn:uuid:8ed7d8db-a44b-4c1d-8500-8afe777124fe> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.letsrun.com/forum/report.php?board=1&id=3150224&thread=3145708&page=5 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95005 | 311 | 1.539063 | 2 |
Social media and the fall of Osama Bin Laden
The world has been abuzz over the last few days with the news of the demise of Al Qaeda founder Osama Bin Laden. Born in Saudi Arabia into a wealthy family Bin Laden has over the course of the last fifteen years either taken credit for or been associated with a string of terrorist attacks, particularly on foreign based US utilities, federal facilities and of course the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington.
In the early hours of May 2nd a team of US Navy special forces raided a mansion in the small Pakistani city of Abbottabad, located in the north east of the country around 100km from the Afghan border. During a fire fight with insurgent forces it is reported that Osama Bin Laden was shot and killed and after recovering his body the corpse was buried at sea by US naval officials from the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson.
Although controversy and conspiracy continue to cloud the exact details of the operation, code named ‘Neptune Spear’, one of the most intriguing insights to arise from the event was however not the incident itself, but the medium through which the news was broken to an unsuspecting world.
Hours before President Barak Obama’s now famous address, the raid on Bin Laden’s $250,000 mansion had been unwittingly ‘liveblogged’ by an Abbottabad resident. Sohaib Athar (Twitter username @ReallyVirtual) roused by the unusual noise of a helicopter flying over head at 1am Pakistani Standard Time originally issued one seemingly commonplace tweet, observing that, ‘Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).’
The tweets which continued on for several hours catalogued a series of explosions and supposition that a helicopter had been shot down. After reporting that apparently one person had been killed in a helicopter crash Mr Athar who studied for an MBA at the University of Central Lancashire further in a tweet that, ‘I think the helicopter crash in Abbottabad, Pakistan and the President Obama breaking news address are connected.’
By now of course this was only one of a fury of microblogs being sent all across the globe in what was later revealed to be the highest sustained rate of tweeting in the service’s history which over a three and a half hour period preceding and following President Obama’s address averaged at over 3,000 tweets per second. The news itself was actually revealed by former chief of staff to Donald Rumsfeld, Keith Urbahn who a further hour before the President’s official statement tweeted that, ‘So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn.’
Although many questions still remain over the validity of Twitter as a journalistic or even commercial resource the power of live-feed news it seems is undeniable and the impact of having access to an exclusive insight can be tremendous, just ask Sohaib Athar whose Twitter followers jumped from a respectable 751 on April 30th to 101,526 two days later! Although this was of course a unique scenario it does demonstrate the growing influence of live-feed news and in an age where presidential candidates are announced over Facebook and Royal engagements revealed in a Tweet the growing impact of social media even, or perhaps especially, upon the most official and governmentally sensitive aspects of our culture is undeniable.Tweet | <urn:uuid:20c1a02c-c8c2-4b88-b03c-f31e533d2dec> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wmps.com/blog/online-marketing/social-media/social-media-and-the-fall-of-osama-bin-laden/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96582 | 691 | 1.6875 | 2 |
The whole world is subject to the global economic crisis which means you are probably inclined to stash your cash under a mattress, because hey let’s be honest, where is it now safe to keep your money and valuables? Even more – where does one invest your money these days? Certainly not in the property market or stock market. It is now best to keep your money safe with you. That is why I recommend investing in a quality safe and keep your cash safe until the global financial crisis has recovered to normal. A safe can protect both your valuables from fire and burglary and your cash from faulty investments.
Vice President of Boston Lock and Safe has stated that with bank failures and economic disturbances people are thinking more about buying residential safes.
The safes traditionally found at office supply stores are meant to protect documents like wills and birth certificates, and are not nearly sufficient to provide protection against fire and water damage. They are also very small and not strong enough to protect it against burglars, especially skilled burglars who won’t have a second’s problem breaking into them.
A good burglary resistant safe will have strong hinges and a strong door as well as a locking devise that has proved and tested to be resistant against burglary. You can either choose a locking device that is electronic or mechanical. If you want to protect valuables such as jewelry, cash, and other important documentation I would definitely advise getting a jewelry safe and media safe that is both fire resistant and waterproof. I would recommend getting a safe that has a TL rating of 15 or 30 as they are much heavier, have thicker walls and heavier hinges; all important features that will make breaking into them extremely difficult.
Need advise on which safe to purchase for your valuables contact the safe specialist in Canada at www.adanacsecurity.com | <urn:uuid:5bed9cfb-e755-4ad9-bfe7-342bb0554138> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.adanacsecurity.com/articles/how-safe-are-your-valuables-corporate-security-products-canada | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970832 | 372 | 1.78125 | 2 |
Cayetano was right to veto school billsGovernor Cayetano's veto of three education-related bills did not diminish innovation or accountability in our public schools:
A BOE policy currently allows schools within schools to be established through school/community-based management. The vetoed bill addressed a problem at a single school. Legislation is not needed for that level of problem solving.
The vetoed budgeting bill would have placed an additional workload burden on each school and other state agencies. The BOE is already exploring an improved budget accounting system. Again, no law is needed.
The bill for an educational accountability panel within the office of the state auditor was vetoed because it would have created another bureaucratic entity, expanding government and further confusing lines of accountability. New schools Superintendent Paul LeMahieu has expertise in this field, and deserves the opportunity to direct the improvements.
Governor Cayetano has rightly recognized that these matters are policy responsibilities of the BOE.
Board of Education
Anti-drug campaign is a waste of moneyDoesn't it just make you weep? Last year, the cure-all for youth problems was the Philadelphia Volunteer Summit. The new flavor is the anti-drug media blitz -- $195 million per year, projected over five years. Wow!
The real problem, however, isn't drugs. It's the need for the drugs in the first place. Parents come in all shapes, sizes and shades. Some don't have any idea where their children are, because they don't even know where they are. Some are too busy working to make money and have things. Some are immigrants who have difficulty even talking to their kids.
Clearly, there are parents who are incompetent to be parents. To plead for them to become responsible is to spit in the wind. Who helps the children of these parents? And who helps parents develop competency?
You can fill newspapers and airwaves with advertising until the Second Coming, and it won't help. By the way, $195 million can buy some serious programs.
Sidney M. Rosen
Chief Executive Officer
Adult Friends for Youth
Kalihi is proud to be good place to do businessOur association appreciates the comment, "Being in Kalihi is so cool," made by Republican Party representatives in a July 14 Political File column. Businesses in Kalihi feel the same way.
This year, our KBA theme is "Kalihi Happens!" We are not trying to gloss over the economic hardships that all businesses face, but are trying to emphasize that Kalihi is a good place to do business, and that the businesses in Kalihi contribute a significant amount to our state economy. We need our voices heard.
Kalihi Business Association
Rude behavior is leading to shortage of refereesPat Bigold's July 7 column brought out various reasons for having the girls and boys basketball seasons played at the same time. However, one point was not addressed: The potential shortage of qualified officials for such a large number of games.
Basketball, as with most sports, is having difficulty recruiting and retaining young, quality officials. This is the result of actions by a small minority of coaches and parents, especially at youth levels, who continue to harass, berate, threaten and sometimes assault game officials.
Many referees/umpires enjoy officiating but feel these types of experiences are just not worth the hassle. Someday, games may not be played at all because no one will want to officiate and subject themselves to such negative and unsportsmanlike conduct.
Liu brings experience to Republican ticketWhich lieutenant governor candidate should you choose to join Linda Lingle? There's only one person running with the right experience for the job: Mike Liu.
In the 1978 Con Con, Liu voted for initiative, referendum and recall, budget reforms and school improvements. As minority leader in the House, he teamed with Fred Hemmings to lead the opposition against bloated Waihee budgets and programs -- the same ones that later bankrupted the state.
In 1990, when USDA bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., were mired in problems, President Bush called on Liu to rewrite the rules and get that agency working again. He got the job done, and returned to Hawaii to accept a vice president's position with a Fortune 500 company, Bank of America.
His integrity and courage are a matter of public record. That's why Mike Liu is my choice for lieutenant governor on the Republican ticket.
Senior Vice President
Market City Shopping Center
State leaders deserve security protectionRegarding J. Dolder's July 16 letter complaining about our lieutenant governor's security following her while she jogs: Give us citizens of Hawaii a break, already. I jog with our athletic Mazie and am proud that this woman takes time out in the morning to sort out her day with aerobic activity.
Would Dolder prefer our chief executives to be without bodyguards? Those gentlemen who follow Hirono are risking their lives to secure our state government, whether it is led by Republicans or Democrats.
As we all know, there are disturbed people out there who are apolitical.
Michael E. Powers
Death rate by firearms is very low in JapanRegarding Reid Seino's July 8 letter, I think he must have misunderstood the number of deaths by firearms in Japan or there was a typographical error. His letter said, "Japan's death rate by firearms hovers around 1,000-2,000 annually."
However, the number of deaths by firearms in Japan last year was 22.
Consul, Consulate General of Japan
Cartoon on Roy Rogers was in very poor tasteRegarding the July 14 editorial cartoon on the late Roy Rogers by Mike Luckovich of the Atlanta Constitution: Luckovich is a sick puppy who needs help. The Atlanta Constitution and Star-Bulletin should review their standards that allowed this crass, humorless trash to be published.
R.W. Molyneux Jr.
Don't make a big deal about decline in spendingWhy is it that, every time our local media report about a decline in per-day spending by the Japanese visitor, it is presented as "bad news?" True, the numbers are probably correct, but why all the doom and gloom?
If per-day spending in dollars is declining due to a sliding yen and a sick Japanese economy, there is absolutely nothing we can do about that. Why do we continue to bemoan our dependence on a currency that is so foreign to us in the first place?
Frankly speaking, we blew it. The lack of market diversification in our visitor base exposed the islands to this risk. So let's not blame the Japanese for spending fewer dollars per day, because they are actually spending more of their hard-earned money, in yen, per day than before and are receiving less back.
As this trend continues, will this mean more doom and gloom? Give us a break! Look at the bright side and smell the plumerias. Believe it or not, Waikiki is slowly recovering!
Dow Corning is trying to shirk responsibilityOn July 8, in Bay City, Mich., Dow Corning agreed to a $3.2-billion bankruptcy plan. Its actions fall short, considering the pain and suffering most of us have endured and will continue to endure until we die from silicone-related disease.
In September 1998, we are expected to vote for and sign a non-negotiable settlement plan. No figures of compensation will be provided. The amount of each claim will be filled in at a later date at the sole discretion of Dow Corning.
Isn't it time we all support the women, men and children affected by silicone-related disease?
The Human Coalition
Mainland right-wingers won't be voting in electionKiyoshi Matsuda's July 4 letter shows his deep opposition to the upcoming vote on the amendment to limit marriage to couples of the opposite sex. He rails against "religious fundamentalists from the mainland" imposing "their moralism on Hawaii residents."
Maybe he doesn't realize it, but "mainland fundamentalists" are not the ones who will be doing the voting.
This sounds like a desperate attempt to prevent the majority from getting its hands on this issue and doing what needs to be done.
Write aWant to write a letter to the editor? Let all Star-Bulletin readers know what you think. Please keep your letter to about 200 words. You can send it by e-mail to firstname.lastname@example.org or you can fill in the online form for a faster response. Or print it and mail it to: Letters to the Editor, P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, Hawaii 96802. Or fax it to: 523-8509. Always be sure to include your daytime phone number.
Letter to the Editor | <urn:uuid:a4ebe0c6-f622-4a53-9fd5-f8d0d46ba8e6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://archives.starbulletin.com/98/07/20/editorial/letters.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960644 | 1,814 | 1.515625 | 2 |
- Swivel.com is the Flickr equivalent for statistics. One finds all kinds of charts and rankings, data and graphs, sorted by fields (Economics, Entertainment, Health, Politics, Science, Society, Sports, Technology, Miscellaneous). Usually with sources, though the graphics aren't always that great. E.g. here we have physics publications, USA in contrast to 'all other' . You can also find evidence that Tuesdays and Fridays are the worst days to drive in LA, that the divorce rate in the USA is more than twice as high as in the EU, and the beginning terrorist can learn fatalities by tactic.
Besides the general entertainment value the site offers rankings and options for discussion which I find nice. However, right now the database seems to be rather small, but this could become a pretty useful source of information.
- Have your towels ready! Userfriendly explains the dark void! For more info, see here. (Thanks to Andi).
- Checking which Google searches lead visitors to this blog always gives me the giggles. My favorite from the last week was 'Energy of the average fart' (which leads here).
- A couple of weeks ago I've signed up for Google Analytics, which has some more features than SiteMeter. Among other things, it ranks the amount of visitors who came via Google search by the search tag. Most come here searching for 'Backreaction' (good), the second rank is hold by 'First day of fall' (weird), the third rank is 'Lee Smolin', directly followed by 'Peter Woit' (no comment).
- The results of the Back-Reaction poll (the first!) from Aug 17 "I read science blogs because...": A total of 149 people (to date) voted. Most of them checked the option "because I am interested and learn a lot" (42.3 %), followed after a gap by "for news and gossip" (28.2 %) and "for the general entertainment value" (12. 1 %). As little as 3 people admitted on reading science blogs mainly to distribute their own believes. And nobody who ended up here by accident stayed long enough to vote.
Overall, I think this test-poll went fairly well, though some more participants would have been nice. Maybe I should try to come up with a more interesting question.
- Quotation of the week:
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." | <urn:uuid:716680a6-e571-4505-b104-09a84177dfb0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2007/08/links-and-things.html?showComment=1188286680000 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948197 | 514 | 1.578125 | 2 |
In recent weeks, conservative media have declared that Obama isn't to blame for the response to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill while simultaneously attacking his response to it.
Having it both ways: It's "unfair" to blame Obama for spill, conservatives say, but it "serves him right"
George Will: President Obama "is being unfairly blamed" for oil spill response, "and it sort of serves him right." On the May 30 edition of ABC's This Week, Will said of Obama's response to the oil spill: "He is being unfairly blamed and it sort of serves him right." He added: "Progressive politics from Wilson to Obama have said, 'Concentrate power in Washington, concentrate Washington power in the executive branch, concentrate within the executive branch lots of experts, and there's no telling what wonders government can do.' This just strikes at the narrative at competence that all of this depends on."
Ace of Spades: It's "childish ... to believe the President can fix" the oil spill, but conservatives should "demagogue the hell out of" the oil spill anyway. In a May 29 Ace of Spades post, blogger Ace wrote that while "the President is not all-powerful, and ... sometimes things are simply beyond his control," the right should "demagogue the hell out of" the oil spill because "Democrats and media forced a certain rule on Bush (even against our objections) ... and that precedent applies equally (if vindictively) to President Present":
There's an interesting and useful debate among conservatives about whether to maintain their own intellectual consistency or demagogue the hell out of this, as liberals have done and will continue doing until the end of time.
Should we note that the President is not all-powerful, and that sometimes things are simply beyond his control, and that it's a childish view of the world to believe the President can fix serious problems simply by thinking real hard about them, being smart, and barking out orders in a clipped and authoritative voice?
Anyone can probably guess my own reaction: I am in favor of the sort of intellectual consistency that says if the Democrats and media forced a certain rule on Bush (even against our objections), then they won that debate, and they established a precedent, and that precedent applies equally (if vindictively) to President Present.
I believe in a politics that abides by the judicial notion of precedent. If a court establishes a rule, then that is the rule to be followed in the future. It doesn't matter if we (the judges in the minority) argued for a different rule and objected to the rule that prevailed. We lost. A rule was established, and that rule should be followed.
We cannot and should not allow a vindictive rule to be pressed against our favorites, over our objections, and then, when our opponents are caught in the brutal operation of that rule, argue again against precedent to reassert the rule we wanted initially and let our opponent off the hook.
Nope, not for me. This is the rule you wanted; this is the rule you shall have.
Krauthammer: It "will be unfair" to make the oil spill "Obama's Katrina," but it's Obama's fault for not being "modest about his own powers." In his May 28 syndicated column, Charles Krauthammer wrote:
In the end, speeches will make no difference. If BP can cap the well in time to prevent an absolute calamity in the Gulf, the president will escape politically. If it doesn't -- if the gusher isn't stopped before the relief wells are completed in August -- it will become Obama's Katrina.
That will be unfair, because Obama is no more responsible for the damage caused by this than Bush was for the damage caused by Katrina. But that's the nature of American politics and its presidential cult of personality: We expect our presidents to play Superman. Helplessness, however undeniable, is no defense.
Moreover, Obama has never been overly modest about his own powers. Two years ago next week, he declared that history will mark his ascent to the presidency as the moment when "our planet began to heal" and "the rise of the oceans began to slow."
Well, when you anoint yourself King Canute, you mustn't be surprised when your subjects expect you to command the tides.
Krauthammer: The "reality" is this leak has "never happened before," but Obama "anoint[ed]" himself King Knut" and "people expect you to command the tides." Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer said on the May 24 edition of Fox News' Special Report:
KRAUTHAMMER: Look, you've got the reality here, and you've got the politics. The reality is we've never had a leak at this depth. It's a mile down, it's never happened before, and everything that's being done is experimental. There's a lot of attacks on BP, obviously, for the blow-out and also on the administration for the waiving of the permitting and all of that that preceded it. But once it already happened, I can't imagine why BP would not be doing -- I mean, it is doing everything it can. It's in its interest. It going to be losing billions of dollars as a result of this, it could be losing its reputation, it could lose its existence. Of course, it's trying to stop it, but this is new technology. And when Salazar said earlier when he said, I think, over the weekend, "If BP won't stop this, we're going to push them out of way," well, the admirable -- admirable -- well, it has affected my brain, apparently. Admiral Allen, who's head of the Coast Guard, has said if you push them out of way, who's left? There's nobody who has the expertise and the assets to do this. And I think that's right. We are joined at the hip. The politics of it, however -- Obama will get the blame as it continues. We imagine the president as Superman and he should stop all bad things that are happening. And the president hasn't helped that. Remember when he was nominated, he said his succession to the presidency would mark the day in which the earth began to heal and the oceans recede. Well, when you anoint yourself King Knut, you can't be surprised when the people expect you to command the tides, and obviously he can't.
Ace of Spades: People "overestimate" president's ability to stop spill, but Obama is "pretend[ing] he's been all over this from the start." After accusing Obama of engaging in a "conspiracy" to "take credit" for plugging the spill in a May 27 post, Ace of Spades blogger DrewM admits "[t]his is BP's mess," and "people overestimate the ability of a President to 'Do Something,' " but he's "not above scoring a few political points":
"Top Kill" Seems To Be Working In Gulf Oil Spill
Clearly it's part of a conspiracy so that Obama can take credit during his news conference this afternoon.
Obama has a press conference scheduled for I think 12:45 eastern. He's going to try and pretend he's been all over this from the start. Most people, including some Democrats, aren't buying it.
I'm somewhat conflicted on this. I think in these cases people overestimate the ability of a President to "Do Something".
This is BPs mess and they and others in the industry are best suited to deal with the immediate problem. The best thing the government can do in these cases is get out of the way (in terms of regulations and permit processes) and not overly micro-manage the situation.
As for the politics...I get the need for any President to be seen doing something and honestly I'm not above scoring a few political points. I just think it's dangerous in the long term for conservatives to be seen saying, "Oh my, something terrible happened. Where are the feds? Why aren't the feds doing more?"
Added: Just to be clear, the double standard is as infuriating as it is predictable. Someone on Twitter asked last week when this officially becomes Obama's Katrina. My response was I don't think Katrina was Bush's Katrina but a single standard would be nice. | <urn:uuid:63f7434e-7be8-4738-a214-a889b8fe7abd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mediamatters.org/research/2010/06/02/updated-conservatives-obama-isnt-to-blame-for-o/165665 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976494 | 1,733 | 1.546875 | 2 |
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Robert Casey of Stokesdale, NC, owned what many carwash owners would consider an ideal piece of carwash property.
- There were no other carwashes within 7-10 miles of his site; and
- The surrounding area had significantly grown in the past several years.
However, in 2003, when Casey was ready to get started with his business, B & G Carwash, a major problem emerged: the site had no municipal sewer access.
That's when my business, Carwash Concepts, Thomasville, NC, was called to help provide a total reclaim solution to his site.
Casey's property was in an ideal location for a self-serve and in-bay touch-free carwash, and we realized we needed to step up to the plate on this one because more and more of the sites that we consider for our customers were rural and without municipal sewer or water access.Jumping over hurdles
When Casey contacted the state's Department of Environmental and Natural Resources Division of Water Quality (DENR) to request a permit that would allow his wash to use a septic system and drain field in conjunction with a reclaim system for wastewater disposal,
DENR rejected the idea stating that the division was not issuing permits for this type of use due to the large number of failures, specifically in carwash applications.
The main failures included:
- Standing water due to excessive use;
- Undersized systems; and
- Environmental contamination.
Luckily, Eric Wu, of URS Corporation in Charlotte, NC, ended up being the project's savior. Wu and URS Corporation had an extensive background in developing wastewater treatment facilities up to and beyond 10 million gallons-per-day.Alternatives considered
Any option would be costly — on both the equipment side and ongoing operational cost. In addition, any system chosen would require a reclaim system to reduce the amount of wastewater, which would also add to the price tag.
After months of deliberation, Wu recommended the following options:1) Drip or spray irrigation
This option required lots of additional land area to effectively remove all of the water generated by the carwash — even after the reduction by the reclaim system.
Also mandatory were stringent tests of the discharge water to assure the state that the water had no harmful effects on the environment. The permitting process was long and carried no guarantee that it would be a success.2) Evaporation
This option did not require the same stringent test as drip or spray. In addition, the permitting process was much shorter than the irrigation permit.
However, the ongoing operation expenses were too cost-prohibitive to even consider this option.3) Deionization
This option involved a non-discharge permit from the state so the wash could store any wastewater on-site, then treat and reuse most of this water.
However, deionization requires an outside, environmental disposal company to process the water, which could be costly for an owner who is willing to purchase the equipment and handle the often dangerous chemicals necessary to clean the system.Choosing a new alternative
At this point, Dean Taylor with CATEC water recovery systems in Sarasota, FL, joined the building team after he spoke with me about the reclaim system need for this project.
While discussing the obstacles facing this site, Dean indicated that he had a prototype system he was currently using in tunnel washes with success.
After several conference calls involving all members, a rinse water system was chosen largely because it would work with the reclaim system.Scrutinizing the system
Complying with a non-discharge water permit was a new effort on our part so the carwash team was not prepared for the scrutiny placed upon the project.
First, Wu needed to evaluate the complete system and all of its calculations before he could give it his engineer's stamp of approval.
Next, the permit application for the state of North Carolina was prepared. In preparing the permit, the group was required to present water samples of before and after the system to determine the water quality.
At this point we developed extensive water calculations, car counts, flow diagrams, and descriptions of all parts of the system and the role played within the system.
In addition, two monitored 1500-gallon tanks were placed in the ground for backup should any systems fail. If water began to fill these tanks, the monitoring system had to notify two people.
This requirement was met by working with Corona, CA-based Imagine Innovations which provided the facility with a complete remote video and monitoring system able to check levels and pressures in the reclaim and overflow tanks.Permit perfection
The permit application was then completed and submitted to the state. Requests for more information ensued and several months passed before the project's fate was learned.
Finally, in November of 2004, the Division of Water Quality granted the permit. The building and zoning permits had already been obtained so it was time to build.
Construction was completed in six months and the equipment was installed and tested. Final inspection and receiving the Certificate of Occupancy was all that was left on the checklist.
At this point Wu signed off on the project as an independent engineer ordered to confirm that the system was installed as called for by local requirements, then the state sent its own engineer to the site to verify all systems were operational and the monitoring system was in place.
The county performed the final inspection and awarded the Certificate of Occupancy which allowed Casey to operate his wash and offer a grand opening to the public.
Jimmy Sisk is vice president of Car Wash Concepts, Inc. in Thomasville, NC, a manufacturer and distributor of carwash equipment as well as a builder of carwash structures in the Southeastern US. To contact him, e-mail email@example.com. | <urn:uuid:6cc108a3-a66a-41e6-afed-30c9413f7084> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.carwash.com/articles/total-reclaim-2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973255 | 1,200 | 1.601563 | 2 |
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexican regulators have levied a $28 million fine against the Mexico subsidiary of London-based HSBC bank for failing to prevent money laundering through accounts at the bank.
Mexico's National Securities and Banking Commission said Wednesday that HSBC has paid the fines, equivalent to 379 million pesos, or about half of the subsidiary's 2011 annual profits.
The commission, and a report by a U.S. senate investigative committee, found the bank failed to control suspicious flows of billions of dollars through its accounts and didn't respond promptly after being warned about a huge swell in dollar cash transactions at the bank.
Guillermo Babatz, president of the banking commission, said that at its peak in the mid-2000s, HSBC had become the main shipper of dollar cash transfers from Mexico to the United States, accounting for about half of the total flow, even though it wasn't then among the country's largest banks.
Babatz said that regulators detected the swell of suspicious transactions and warned local management in 2007 and 2008, but got little response. He said regulators then took the unusual step of contacting top management of the bank's central offices. "When we contacted the head offices, it was because we were very worried and didn't get a response" from local management, who he said "minimized the risks."
The commission said Wednesday the violations began in the early 2000s.
A U.S. Senate investigative committee said that in 2007 and 2008 HSBC Mexico sent north about $7 billion in cash. "Bulk cash shipments could reach that volume only if they included illegal drug proceeds," the committee concluded in a report.
HSBC Mexico acknowledged in a statement that it failed to report 39 suspicious transactions and had been late in reporting 1,729 others.
"HSBC Mexico recognizes it failed to strictly comply with banking regulations, and with the standards that regulators and clients expect of our institution," the bank said.
The banking commission said the bank began to respond with "drastic and assertive" corrective measures in late 2008. HSBC noted that in 2009, it became the first Mexican bank to completely stop handling cash dollar transactions.
In 2010, the government imposed strict limits on cash transactions in U.S. dollars at all Mexican banks, limiting tourists and residents who don't have accounts at Mexican banks to exchanging $1,500 a month or less.
HSBC said it had implemented all the regulators' recommendations, such as reporting suspicious transactions, getting more information on clients and refusing to do business with clients who appeared dodgy.
"HSBC regrets that actions in the past, which have been corrected, affect the bank's image today," the bank said.
Babatz said that in the past HSBC had appealed fines that regulators had levied in the courts. It was unclear whether the Wednesday announcement marked a change in that policy.
The banking commission president said details of the scandal first emerged in the U.S. Senate committee report because Mexico's "extremely restrictive" legal framework doesn't allow regulators to announce investigations or fines until all appeals are exhausted.
He said banks in Mexico had used intensive lobbying to get favorable regulatory rules, and said those rules should be changed because they favor financial institutions and put regulators at a disadvantage. | <urn:uuid:87458c13-3021-481e-b8db-4f499b78359a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://news.yahoo.com/mexico-fines-hsbc-28-million-laundering-case-152542240--finance.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976449 | 664 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Obama's State of the Union Speech Paul Losch's Community Blog, posted by Paul Losch, a resident of Palo Alto, on Jan 28, 2010 at 4:26 pm Paul Losch is a member (registered user) of Palo Alto Online
The State of the Union address by our Presidents of late is purely theater.
Perhaps actor and great communicator President Reagan made it that way. I donít recall his predecessors presenting the type of drama to the event that he did. In fact, one year, Richard Nixon sent a written message to Congress, did not address them on the Congressional dais.
The Democrats stood up and applauded President Obama too many times this year. The Republicans kept their butts glued to their chairs. Two years ago, the same could be said, just change the names of the parties, in terms of behavior as President Bush addressed the same body as the Constitution requires.
It may have some importance for some of the American public. President Obama was poised, thoughtful and even though I am a fan of his, largely ineffectual to this member of the American public.
Lyndon Johnson was a horrible President in terms of how he came across to the American public. I had the opportunity to visit his Presidential Library in Austin in late 2008, and was very impressed with how effective and strong he was behind the scenes, based on recordings and documents that are part of the public record there. (Go visit if you are in Austin, it is interesting!) Admittedly, all Presidential Librarie on the public side have the role of being cheerleaders of a sort for the particular POTUS, but one can visit them and think with a critical mind about what is presented and come to some conclusions. LBJ knew how to work people.
Major things that were accomplished during Johnsonís time in office were not visible to us mere citizens until he had them crafted with the key leaders from both sides of the aisle on Capitol Hill. This includes Viet Nam, which was his downfall, but also includes major civil rights and such social services as Medicare. Agree or disagree with the policies and laws he got passed, the guy made an impact and got things done. And much of it was in public until it was a done deal.
This President is too smart for his own good, just as his immediate predecessor was too dumb for the public good. Both have Harvard degrees, as do I. (Go figureói.e. a Harvard degree donít necessarily mean squat, certainly true in my case.)
The journalist Lou Cannon covered Ronald Reagan from his time in Sacramento as California Governor through RRís tenure as President. Cannon nailed it, in my opinionóPresident Reagan was emotionally intelligent in terms of how he dealt with people. He may not have been the brightest bulb on the tree on other measures, and he had the presence of mind to surround himself with people who shined brighter in their roles as they worked for Mr. Reagan.
Being POTUS is a tough job, and I prefer someone who has the various intellectual capacities sitting in that chair than someone who lacks them.
What I think was first called ďThe Bully PulpitĒ by Theodore Roosevelt just over 100 years ago is not enough.
You also have to be an SOB with the folks down Pennsylvania Avenue. And that is not an intellectual exercise. Or an eloquently presented speech.
Being smart helps a great deal. Emotionally smart.
Posted by Paul (no relation), a resident of the Downtown North neighborhood, on Jan 28, 2010 at 5:23 pm
"Here is the acid test: Let him propose a new program to push nuclear energy, and get substantial Republican support in doing so."
That would be a very effective way to kill nuclear energy for good. The Party of NO! is reflexively opposed to anything Obama. And don't expect Repub support even in the unlikely event president McCain had advocated nucular; nuclear plant licensing reached its peak under Carter and did a dive under Reagan.
I think the theater in the State of the Union is no more than a reflection of our culture. People want entertainment, not edification. That's also why the Iraq war became unpopular - there were no more images of Saddam statues going down, nor of presidents strutting across aircraft carrier decks in harbor.
Posted by Greg, a resident of the Southgate neighborhood, on Jan 28, 2010 at 5:30 pm
Paul, well, Obama could smoke out the Republicans, if he did it (nuclear power), right? However, the people that will be smoked out are the Democrats, because they are responsible for nixing nukes. What's the harm in Obama doing what he says he wants? I fully support him in doing so. Are you?
It won't happen, becasue it was just another throw-away line.
Posted by Paul (no relation), a resident of the Downtown North neighborhood, on Jan 28, 2010 at 6:27 pm
Facts, Greg, Facts. You are way short in the facts department.
I already told you that nuclear plant licensing peaked under Carter (a Democrat) and nuke power took its dive under Reagan (a Republican, I believe). You can easily verify all that if you care to, including the political affiliations.
Then consider this: The Repubs controlled the White House and Congress from 2000 to 2006. You'd think they'd have gotten new nukes going in every state, right? But what did they do for nuke plants during their reign? Nothing. Big...Fat...Nothing. How much did they try to do? Nothing. Big...Fat...Nothing.
Posted by Greg, a resident of the Southgate neighborhood, on Jan 28, 2010 at 6:47 pm
Paul, your "facts" are not facts. Reagan was a strong supporter of nuclear power. Republicans, generally, have been big supporters. The nixers of nukes have been anti-nuclear activists, mostly of the liberal bent, thus Democratic persuasion. Reagan got caught up on the activist anti-nuke hysteria, and was barely able to get nuke plants supported, since so many regulations had been put in place that suppressed nuclear power. Now, Obama has called for nukes. Do you support his call, Paul? Do the Democrats in Congress? The Republicans do, and almost certainly would support him, as long as it is not tied into something else...just a simple up or down on nuclear power.
The real deal is that Obama will not support nukes. He is so flim flam, that even he doesn't know what he believes. He might offer it up as a sacrificial lamb, in order to get single payer health care, or something of the kind. However he will not support nuclear power, because he does have the spine to take on his base.
Posted by nuke'em, a resident of Stanford, on Jan 28, 2010 at 6:48 pm
If the Republicans are so desperate to get more nuclear plants, why don't they volunteer one of their districts to house a national nuclear waste dump? Obama says he is interested in "safe nuclear power", but nuclear power is not going to be safe until there is a safe and secure storage facility for all the radioactive waste.
No such facility exists in the USA right now. Think of all the jobs that would be created in building and maintaining such a facility. Come on, Republicans. Volunteer your district to house the waste, then we can talk about building more nuclear plants.
Posted by Greg, a resident of the Southgate neighborhood, on Jan 28, 2010 at 7:30 pm
Nuclear "waste" is actually a resource. Too complicated to explain right now. We do have a safe place to store this resource. It is called Yucca Mountian, in NV. However, one of the first things that Obama's anti-nuke forces did was to put this off the table.
Obama thinks he is being cute by spouting throw-away lines, but his failure to have a substantial belief in anything will always sink him into oblivion. I hope he proves me wrong, and makes a strong play for nuclear power. We need it. We badly need it.
Posted by Sharon, a resident of the Midtown neighborhood, on Jan 28, 2010 at 8:01 pm
They key events last night were when the audience laughed at Obama re his global warming gaffe, they did not laugh with him, they laughed at him-- a narcissist is devastated by ridicule and his masked slipped.
The other was Alitos version of " You Lie", Alito has life tenure, Obama has 4 years.
Obama knows he lost last night that is why he has just done a 180 on the 911 terrorist trial in NYC, he is on defense.
He will start firing key advisers soon, who will be first after the NYC 911 reversal ?
Posted by Greg, a resident of the Southgate neighborhood, on Jan 28, 2010 at 9:30 pm
I think your read on Reagan is not quite correct. Reagan was not an intellectual, in the classical sense, but he was actually smarter than the intellectuals that surrounded him. Those intellects that surrounded him were stuck in old ways, including containment of the Soviet Union. He refused to accept their antiquated thinking. He wanted the Soviet Union to be defeated. His thinking was based on his deeply felt understanding of the glory of individual freedom, a notion that was not popular in his days in power, even among his own party members. He won, they lost.
Obama is very thin, probably because he does not have a 'there', there. He has often been criticized for his lack of an inner strength, and his SOTU was more of the same. Reagan brought forth themes with deep conviction, and follow through. Yes, they were both theatrical, but not all performances are equal.
Posted by Disagree, a resident of the Greenmeadow neighborhood, on Jan 29, 2010 at 6:02 am
I was willing to read your post, Paul, until I got to the "its Reagan's fault" part.
One of my favorite Reagan quotes is "Itís not that liberals arenít smart, itís just that so much of what they know isnít soĒ
We need to always remember that "education" does not a good person or good leader necessarily make. A long list of "elite educated" evil-doers we have seen in this world can prove that point, starting with Pol Pot's education in France and going through the world to come to Dr. Mengele.
In fact, I have come to the conclusion that the more "educated" and "Awarded" a person, the less I should trust him or her, because they come to believe they "know better" what is good for me than I do...sorry, a PhD or MD in whatever subject, or a prize/award by some small group, does not give anyone the ability or right to take over my life or my will.
And I believe that is pretty much a majority opinion in the USA..we fundamentally, regardless of political affiliation and beliefs, don't like to be told what to do, except for that appalling numbers of people that, out of the kindness of our hearts and generosity of our spirits, we have crippled, and continue to cripple, through creating huge dependency issues.
I believe that is at the root of the disaffection of many, if not most, people who voted for Obama. The root conflict with what is American has been exposed, and it is the ruling elite of the Dem Party ( the ruling elite attitudes of the Repub party have been made a minority nationally, and within the party itself..and those left are continuing to be voted out)...
I look forward to the "I know what is best for you" attitude being voted out in both parties, so we can get back to govt by the people, not over the people.
Posted by The Real Sharon, a resident of the Midtown neighborhood, on Jan 29, 2010 at 8:10 am
My, my, the unabated denigration of President Obama continues from Sharon, Is anyone surprised by her comments?
"They key events last night were when the audience laughed at Obama re his global warming gaffe, they did not laugh with him, they laughed at him-- a narcissist is devastated by ridicule and his masked slipped."
ANd you know they were laughing at him how? Not sure what you are actually referring to, but you must have imagined something to make the above comment.
I actually wonder who the narcissit is.
"The other was Alitos version of " You Lie", Alito has life tenure, Obama has 4 years."
Looks like you imagined something else there. I thought you were against activist judges, Sharon. Or is it just Democratic judges who may be activists--go back and read your comments about SOtomayor.
"Obama knows he lost last night that is why he has just done a 180 on the 911 terrorist trial in NYC, he is on defense."
Listening to advise and making changes based on other's input and concerns is considered a loss? Looks like you are adhering to much to the Bush/Cheney school of thought.
"He will start firing key advisers soon, who will be first after the NYC 911 reversal ?"
I don't know, why don't you tell us. Do you have this information from internal sources or is it just your imagination again?
Posted by Paul (no relation), a resident of the Downtown North neighborhood, on Jan 29, 2010 at 2:21 pm
Flip: "Let him propose a new program to push nuclear energy, and get substantial Republican support in doing so."
Flop: "Obama thinks he is being cute by spouting throw-away lines"
So which should we believe, Greg, your flip or your flop? I think your flop is your real position; in fact, it will be the Republican line. They aren't going to support anything Obama proposes, no matter how good an idea it is, and your flop will be one of their many custom-made excuses.
"Reagan got caught up on the activist anti-nuke hysteria"
As I pointed out, many more nuke plant licenses were issued under Carter than under Reagan. We must therefore conclude that Carter was much better than Reagan at resisting activist anti-nuke pressures. Reagan seems a wimp in comparison.
Same with Republicans: The Repubs controlled the White House and Congress from 2000 to 2006. You'd think they'd have gotten new nukes going in every state, right? But what did they do for nukes during their reign? Nothing. Big...Fat...Nothing. How much did they try to do? Nothing. Big...Fat...Nothing. How much did Bush 43 propose? Yeah. Those activist anti-nuke pressures musta had 'em all quaking.
Reagan defeated the Soviet Union? Hah! The CCCP went out of business in December 1991, 3/4 ways through Bush 41's term. All Reagan did was pal around with Gorby and Raisa.
BTW, thanks to my namesake for starting and protecting this thread. It's like the good old days again.
Posted by Greg, a resident of the Southgate neighborhood, on Jan 29, 2010 at 2:41 pm
I am always hopeful that major politicians will come to realize that nuclear power is essential. I don't think Obama is sincere about his throw-away line, but I hope I am wrong. Just today I was listening to NPR, and the new leader of the Sierra Club was on. He was typically anti-nuclear AND a big Obama supporter. I think there is a snowball's chance in hell that Obama will propose something serious, stand alone, in favor of nukes. I also hope I am wrong. If that makes me a flip-flopper, so be it.
I will leave you to your own distorted thinking about Reagan, who was a big supporter of nukes.
Posted by To Sharon, a resident of the Leland Manor/Garland Drive neighborhood, on Jan 30, 2010 at 7:16 am
I love the way the Brits put their President up on the podium, then grill him/her from the equivalent of their Congress, with questions and answers flying back and forth freely...no teleprompter, on public view.
Did that happen here and I missed it?
What was it called? Was it a good, intelligent exchange? Did the Repubs refresh his memory on all the proposals from Repubs that he has completely ignored over the last year? ( His right to do so, of course, and I am frankly delighted he did, since America sees the results of an unmitigated far left agenda on all aspects of our country, and the world).
I actually hope he keeps dissing and ignoring the majority of Americans. I don't want him to listen to the Repubs, actually, cuz then most Americans, when things start improving, will think it is the ideas of Dem party and Obama that are making things better. Then we have a Clinton situation where all that went better was because of "Clinton" and all that got worse was because of "Repub Congress" when, in fact, it was the opposite. No thanks. I want the American people to learn what is Republican, unmasked, and what is Democrat, unmasked, then vote accordingly with real-life data and real-life effects fresh on their minds in the voting booth.
So, keep it up Dems/Obama/Reid/Pelosi/Frank!!! Keep it up until only 30% of the nation is confused up what is up and what is down. Right now about 40% are, but I want a stronger base so we can reach the tipping point in our political discourse and tilt back upright.
Posted by Anon, a resident of the Barron Park neighborhood, on Feb 1, 2010 at 11:13 pm
This SOTU was theater, just like all the others by all presidents since Woodrow Wilson. Brave of President Obama to challenge the Supreme Court though. The current court majority seems to have a religious conviction that corporations are people-- only people who are more equal than us mere mortals.
Posted by Um..yes, Corps ARE People, a resident of the Leland Manor/Garland Drive neighborhood, on Feb 2, 2010 at 6:01 am
Anon, in the real world, corporations ARE people. Who works for them? Who owns them? They pay taxes like "people", they are regulated like "people" and they are fined/jailed like "people". They go broke like "people" and they earn money like "people"...What else do you think a corporation is?
Posted by R Wray, a resident of the Palo Verde neighborhood, on Feb 2, 2010 at 9:21 am
Re Sharon's post above about Obama declaring in his State of the Union address that the evidence on climate change is overwhelming, see the short clip below. As one blogger said: "First the audience laughs, then Pelosi, next Biden and finally Obama himself smirks at the insanity of his remark." | <urn:uuid:d50acb34-e85e-41a0-beb9-b85fefb14ee6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://paloaltoonline.com/square/index.php?i=3&d=&t=10532 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981269 | 3,977 | 1.804688 | 2 |
9/14/2011 2:09 PM ET|
Income for life, guaranteed (sort of)
For many retirees, reeling in a check that's reliable and sufficiently large to pay the bills is beginning to seem like an impossible dream. Here's a playbook for today's reality.
"Your check is in the mail."
American investors have seldom seemed more eager to hear those words -- especially when it comes to locking in income for their older years. Ever since the 2008 crash, when Joe and Mary Mainstreet lost faith in the stock market, millions of people have poured their savings into investments that return some kind of regular paycheck, whether bonds, annuities or (for the bold) stocks that pay dividends.
And the hunt for income has only become more intense as the enormous baby boomer demographic bulge reaches retirement age, with some 10,000 boomers turning 65 each day.
Indeed, converting savings into a living has become "the holy grail of every working stiff," says Dan Culloton, the associate director of fund analysis for Morningstar.
And yet, in one of the biggest frustrations facing retirees today, reeling in a check that's both reliable and big enough to pay the bills has begun to seem like a pipe dream. Increasingly, alarmed investors are finding that "guaranteed" payouts offer only penny-ante 1% and 2% returns -- or involve unpalatable risks.
It's hard to fathom, but not that long ago, a soon-to-be-retired couple could scoop up safe Treasury and corporate bonds that paid 7% or 8%. Today, it takes a gambler's heart and a taste for junk bonds to come close to that.
Dividend stocks? On average, they pay barely half of what they did in the 1990s. As for annuities, some widely advertised products pay nothing until the buyer turns 85. And as we all learned this summer, even Social Security, the once untouchable retirement-backup plan, is now in play, a bargaining chip in the ongoing political wrangle over government spending.
Of course, retirement investments have always gone through cycles, and the conditions that are making things so harsh today could change quickly. But advisers say they can't remember a time that was quite so tough for cash-flow hunters -- and it only got tougher after this summer's market gyrations. After all, even the most prudent income-generator can't get far in retirement if his portfolio gets whacked.
Instead, the pros say, a generation whose parents retired on a low-maintenance cushion of bonds and bank CDs needs a new playbook for today's reality.
Bonds and dividend stocks
When it came to turning savings into income, generations of retirees relied on two main pillars: bonds, which gave them a stream of interest payments from loans to governments and corporations, and stock dividends, a share of the revenue of solid, cash-rich companies.
Bonds were seen as an almost-sure thing, because corporations virtually never defaulted or missed a payment (since 1981, the default rate on corporate bonds is under 2%), while the likelihood of a government default was even more remote. As for dividends, they were a staple of stock investing for most of the 20th century, and since 1926 they've accounted for 42% of the total returns from stocks, according to research firm Ibbotson Associates.
The good news is that those sure-thing payments are still flowing; even a nasty bout of political brinkmanship over the debt ceiling couldn't shut off the Treasury stream.
The problem is, the paychecks these days amount to bupkes. Bond interest -- or "yield" -- has skirted record lows, driven down by heavy demand from safety-seeking investors. And dividends have dropped steadily in recent years as well.
Right now, the dividend yield of the Standard & Poor's 500 Index ($INX) sits at 2.2%, barely half its historical average. Though corporate profits have rebounded, many companies are guarding their cash for another rainy day or using it for acquisitions. All that shrinkage has created a painful contrast for retirees. If a couple had retired in 1991 and put $1 million in 10-year Treasury bonds, they would have received annual payouts of around $84,000. A couple trying the same maneuver this summer would reap only $22,400 a year.
That same million invested in the S&P 500 would have generated about $57,000 in dividends in 1982; today it's more like $22,000. Factor in taxes and inflation, and investors in either scenario could be effectively losing money.
"You're getting your pocket picked," says Mark Kiesel, the global head of corporate bonds at investment giant Pimco.
Interest-rate increases in the United States could actually help some income investors, by giving them a chance to buy new bonds with higher yields. But with the economy rocky, that seems unlikely to happen soon, so many investors are looking abroad to find bonds that are less stingy.
William Larkin, a fixed-income portfolio manager for Cabot Money Management, likes inflation-protected bonds issued by foreign governments. The exchange-traded fund SPDR DB International Government Inflation-Protected Bond (WIP) invests in bonds from countries like Brazil and France, and typically yields between 4% and 5%; its yield will go up if inflation rises near São Paulo or the Seine.
In the dividend universe, the average yield for emerging-market stocks sits at a shareholder-friendly 2.6%. For those who'd rather invest onshore, sector strategist Nicholas Bohnsack, of investment advisory firm Strategas Research Partners, likes cash-rich U.S. companies that have signaled plans to increase their dividends, including tech stalwarts Cisco Systems (CSCO, news) and Microsoft (MSFT, news). (Microsoft is the publisher of MSN Money.)
Build a ladder: Investors can help protect their bond income from inflation by setting up a "bond ladder" -- essentially, a portfolio of short-term bonds that lets them gradually replace low-yielding bonds with higher-paying ones if interest rates rise. Advisers warn, however, that the strategy tends to work only with portfolios of six figures or more, and that the frequent trading involved can generate high transaction fees.
Don't take every TIP: Inflation-protected bonds, whose yields rise when inflation climbs, were designed to help investors weather rising rates. But rates are so low in the United States that some TIPS -- the Treasury Department's version of the bonds -- currently have negative yields. For now, some advisers are steering assets toward inflation-protected bonds issued by foreign governments; these days, some of them yield more than 5%.
VIDEO ON MSN MONEY
I paid into SS for over 40 years...
Wish our government had not replaced Our SS money with an IOU..stolen..?
Also don't think Illegal's in the USA should be able to get a dime of it....
Why are Illegal's in America..?...thats breaking United States laws....?
j j m ciny: I have read your post, found it to be very interesting ! However I do not agree with your thoughts.
So you think the " baby boomers" are the generation to blame for the mess bestowed upon this great nation, so what about the greatest years of progress this nation has seen, ( in the years of the baby boomers) what about the fourty- fifty
years of work and paid income taxes, state taxes,,sales taxes, property taxes medicare and S.S. taxes and so on. Does that not matter now that we may be retired ? We have paid our dues into the system for many years, and now you say we are asking for handouts.
You are inept in your assestment that the "boomer" is at blame and the people you are referring to is the middle and lower class workers, not the billionaires,millionaires,big corporations, big banks, bail-outs- which we will never get back and overspending of the government that you have elected in the pass four terms.
That ( my friend) is why our economy is in shambles and our jobs have been shipped over seas!
If you voted in the election of one or more of the past and present governments then you can share the blame. Do not put all the blame on "boomers" though we share the blame.
So the baby boomers inherit worlds greatest economy and in 20 years ruin it by moving all the production offshore to save money and now this writer is suggesting that these same people take whatever they have left and invest it in foreign companies and nations to make a higher yield on their retirement savings.
I hope you people realize what a mess you've left for your children and grandchildren. You've left them with a bankrupt government, a bankrupt retirement system that your expecting us to carry, a health care system that is in shambles, a collegiate system that forces a young man or women into great indebtedness to obtain a degree that often has little value and no factories left to support us.
We've now had three baby boomer presidents who all have a less than stellar track record and the congress, primarily made up this same generation, is in near total gridlock.
The generation that came before you was entitled by someone the "greatest generation" . My guess is history will not look nearly as kindly on the Boomers.
there is no such thing as "articles".these are glorified advertisements...as is ALL of the content on these so called news websites..its all data mining, tracking, sucking up to the ad dollars
this is yet another shill piece.....just to pacify their advertisers......scotttrade.e-trade.etc
ANNUITY IS NOTHING BUT A RIP OFF FOR THE INSURANCE COMPANIES THAT SELL THEM.
WHY WOULD SOMEBODY SAVE THEIR MONEY FOR MOST OF THEIR LIFE AND TURN AROUND AND GIVE IT TO AN NSURANCE COMPANY TO GIVE IT BACK TO THEM IN BITS & PIECES. ITS LIKE COOK YOUR FOOD & THEN ASK SOME BODY TO SPOONE FEED YOU WITH YOUR OWEN FOOD.,
I have found that one's own business, if it is normally successful, can provide income well into retirement. No one should sell a good business just to retire. Get a partner to do the work if you can, and let them buy you out over time. Stocks are still the best investment, provided you pick the right ones. Market swings can be hedged by you if you have two investment accounts, one dormant until it's short time in a down market. This will minimize losses in the long account when you don't have time to stop out right away. Options work too, but you should develop that skill solidly before trying it.
I think what the article is saying is diversify your income sources. If you have a pension, great, but don't rely on it completely. If you're getting SS, great, but same caveat. I read a study that tracked how to finance your retirement with the least chance of running out of money at some point and it was a mix of pension/SS, annuity, and stocks/bonds. Don't have just one.
Social Secutity could work, the biggest mistake was to allow the politicians to stick their hands in the pot, with promises of payback. Now there is no money to pay back and there is nobody to be responsible for the money they took or how it was spent. Many people became rich with that money but for the ones who paid there is just one thing to say "we are sorry"
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The major averages saw little change during morning action, but afternoon buying interest helped lift the indices to session highs. Most cyclical sectors (with the exception of materials and technology) finished among the leaders, but the defensively-geared health care sector settled atop the leaderboard as biotechnology outperformed. ... More
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How today’s local search and social local websites fail to cater my needs and how to solve the problems and win the race.
I’ve learned in quite some years working in and for the Internet industry that it is always a good idea to check whatever you are going to do against the real life scenario that closest matches your online venture.
For instance if you want to build an online shop and make it successful then go out there visit the brick and mortar shops and have a good look around.
Dig deep till you know what makes them successful and try to port that to the online world.
The things that you might recognize are good customer service, good location, skilled sales people and so on and so forth.
Now looking at what social local websites are trying to mimic or replace is the way we go about decision making for questions like.
- Where do I take my girlfriend for dinner
- Which plumber do I call to fix my dripping pipes
The social local websites – learn from others
Social local websites like Yelp or Qype do have a lot of followers and users. These sites allow you to write reviews and comment on businesses and places so that you can share your experiences with others.
Here you can learn from other peoples experiences about a new and great restaurant or an awesome plumber. And it may also help you to avoid making the same mistake that another person who hired an electrician that was just pricey and incompetent had made before.
Now that’s a great improvement to the old school yellow pages scenario – one might think – where the one business with the biggest ad, who simply paid the most or the one with the catchiest name that happened to be on the top spot of the page would always make the race.
But does all that really help us to make decisions and even more important to make better decisions?
Lets try and compare that with the real life scenario and see what we can learn.
In real life how do we really go about choosing the right handyman or the best restaurant for a posh night out?We will ask our friends and more generally people we know and trust to give us advice and suggest a solution to our “problem”
Everything else aside I see two big problems with this approach.
One is the problem with too much choice and information overflow.
I’ve been to San Francisco and a friend had booked a table in a restaurant. Being curios of what the place might be like I checked it out on the web and came across the yelp reviews of the place.
There are more than 460 reviews to that place on Yelp.
Reading this amount of information in the real world would mean that your friend would talk for approx 2.5 hours about this place and I reckon you would be confused and dizzy afterwards.
If I had had to choose the restaurant the dilemma would have even been bigger.
A search for a French restaurant near the union square in San Francisco returns 80 places to choose from with an average of more than 100 reviews each. So I could be ending up spending days to figure out which one might be the best for me.
How is that supposed to help me make a decision?
This is adding to my dilemma and not solving the question of where should I go.
That’s when I give up and go and ask the concierge of the hotel I’m staying for advice.
(Note: Barry Schwartz has done a great talk about the on how too much choice is a bad thing. Really worth the time to watch)
Imagine you go to a big drugstore and you want to buy toothpaste – they will have dozens of different ones to choose from. The Yelp approach to solve the problem of finding the right one is to read the information printed on the package and learn as much as possible to make the right choice – or better an educated guess.
You would still be left unsure if your decision is going to be the right one.
So in reality what has happened is that you loose time.
What we are all looking for – and that might be an illusion – is one answer to our question and only one.
And the same goes for all these social local websites. They might help you to make better choices but at a significant cost. Your time! – and quite a lot of it.
Just search to solve the problem!
So another way to try and solve my problem with the restaurant in San Francisco is to go and try a search for the answer.
And guess what Google Maps does provide me with more than 2.500 answers to my question not to mention the 220.000 that the web search does delight me with.
The experience with Yahoo! is similar – web search informs me about 1.2 million results and our local search has more than 190 answers to my question.
Even worse is that here the way to narrow down the results for both Google and Yahoo! is far less adequate and will hardly help me with getting to a more “digestible” amount of information.
So that failed for me as well. Why?
Well for local search there are a number of problems that lead to a rather poor user experience – well lets say felt user experience.
1. The data basis to base the algorithm on for local search is poor in comparison to e.g. web search
- The core data set.
In a core business data set you will only have a business name a category and after geocoding long and lat to the business location.
- The enhanced data set.
For richer data sets you will have additional data like opening hours, price range and availability of parking areas.
- User generated content
UGC ratings and reviews of the business.
The only comprehensive set of data being the core listings there is very little information to base the answer on.
Compare that with all the factors that are taken into account for ranking websites and you see where I’m coming from.
2. The lack of data is more visible than in web search
In web search the user assumption is “if it is not in there it doesn’t exist”. Which is fair enough cause that’s what we teach them.
In local search a user will often realize that Bobs Pizza place is not listed – even so it definitely exists.
So users will get that bad feeling of not getting all the information – and without the full story how are they to be convinced to find the right answer?
So how would the ideal website answer my question?
Well the same way a friend would do.
In a short conversation we would define the criteria the business would need to match and then I would get a maximum of 3 suggestions to choose from which would be ranked in a subjective manner.
DONE and I’m happy and good to go. | <urn:uuid:f1704d83-478a-404e-ba92-1f2395277dc9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.locallytype.com/2007/12/09/why-today-local-search-fails-and-how-to-fix-it/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957125 | 1,410 | 1.640625 | 2 |
The suit, filed earlier this month in a U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Texas, is on behalf of a company called SmartPhone Technologies LLC, based in Frisco, Texas. It accuses Apple of violating six patents owned by the company covering a range of topics, including Bluetooth connectivity, e-mail syncing, bandwidth conservation and general smartphone functionality.
The suit alleges that Apple and its iPhone are liable for infringement of the patents and have caused damage to SmartPhone Technologies. In addition to Apple, a number of prominent smartphone companies and mobile operators are named as defendants, including RIM, AT&T, Samsung, Sanyo, LG, and Motorola.
The suit asks the court to find all of the named parties in violation of their respective patents, and seeks damages, costs and expenses from all of them. SmartPhone did not specify damages, but requested a jury trial in the Eastern District of Texas, where patent lawsuits are often filed in hopes of a favorable outcome.
The six patents specifically aimed at Apple are:
Patent No. 6,950,645: "Power Conserving Intuitive Device Discovery Technique in a Bluetooth Environment."
Patent No. 7,076,275: "Method and System for Single-Step Enablement of Telephony Functionality for a Portable Computer System."
Patent No. 7,506,064: "Handheld Computer System that Attempts to Establish an Alternative Network Link Upon Failing to Establish a Requested Network Link."
Patent No. 7,533,342: "System and Method of a Personal Computer Device Providing Telephone Capability."
Patent No. 6,711,609: "Method and Apparatus for Synchronizing an Email Client on a Portable Computer System with an Email Client on a Desktop Computer."
Patent No. RE40,459: "Method and Apparatus for Communicating Information Over Low Bandwidth Communications Networks."
The suit also includes a seventh patent of which Apple is not accused of violating. However, Motorola, Samsung and RIM are accused over U.S. Patent No. 5,742,095, entitled "Personal Communications Internetworking."
Apple and its iPhone are the frequent targets of patent-related lawsuits. Some of the most recent and prominent cases involve a lawsuit from Finnish phone maker Nokia and camera maker Kodak.
In its annual Form 10-K filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission last October, Apple said it was then defending itself from more than 47 patent infringement cases, 27 of which were filed during the 2009 fiscal year. Those suits prove costly to defend, and sometimes Apple comes out on the losing end of a large payout. Last year, a Texas patent suit resulted in a 21.7 million ruling against Apple. | <urn:uuid:c1761810-8cc1-4806-a72f-8cffa94bf552> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/107686/apple-iphone-targeted-in-patent-lawsuit-over-sync-bluetooth | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935286 | 575 | 1.617188 | 2 |
What's New- More Words
- Faster Interface
- Better Graphics
App DescriptionSAT Flash Cards Collections consists of more then 5000 words which appear on almost all the wordlists available out there. This app will help you ace the words no matter if you are preparing for SAT or any other test containing Verbal Examination.
This app is designed as per a student requirement and has been tested by a group of students preparing for SAT - It turned out a pretty cool tool and hence now we would like to share this publicly.
The main feature of the application is that it helps users to go through the list and organize word based on their skill level. If any word is way too much difficult to remember it can be classified as an Insane word and can be revisited again and again until it can be classified as an easy word. This turned out to be the most important feature of the app.
You can always reset your customization settings if need be or if you are planning to give it a fresh start.
We have provided 2 different options - Random and Alphabetical - If you like surprises go for Random and if you are one who like to go in a predefined order go for the alphabetical list.
Let us know how you like this list and if anything can be added or modified for your convenience.
March 01, 2013 Price Decrease: $4.99 -> FREE!
February 22, 2013 Price Decrease: $4.99 -> FREE!
February 15, 2013 Price Decrease: $4.99 -> FREE!
February 22, 2012 Initial Release | <urn:uuid:3fadb6c0-ab79-4338-b8e2-06a32ab78361> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.148apps.com/app/503474699 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930631 | 322 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Patil will soon return to Pakistan to embark on the ‘umrah’, a pilgrimage to Mecca, which is being sponsored by the PML(N) government of the Punjab province. She has also secured a share in her husband’s property and the promise of a Pakistani citizenship.
This is news. The Pakistani government has on earlier occasions reacted with much suspicion about such cross border alliances and now when her husband and first child are dead, they are offering her all possible help. It couldn’t merely be her acceptance of Islam or the promise to make her son (she is expecting a baby and it is assumed it will be a boy) into a ‘Hafiz-e-Koran’, one who memorises the Holy Book in its entirety.
I do understand that she may have attachment to the place where her spouse and child are buried, but I do not understand a political party getting into the act to ensure her personal beliefs and desires are fulfilled.
How many Pakistani women can claim rights over property? How many single women are assisted in their attempts to undertake a pilgrimage? How many women are given the assurance that the government will step in if they are harassed by their in-laws?
I find the case getting curiouser and curiouser.
- - -
Criticising the UP police once again for their alleged irresponsible handling of the Aarushi murder case, Union minister for women and child development Renuka Choudhary said that the family should sue the police. “The family should sue the state police and those responsible for bungling the case must be suspended,’’ she said.
This isn’t mere concern about how the case was handled and the character assassination of Aarushi’s father Dr. Rajesh Talwar. It is about party politics.
This is a way to make the Mayawati government accountable.
It is true the police was most shabby in how they went about getting evidence, but why did the Talwars not mention their compounder Krishna’s name right then? Now he is the prime suspect. The question also remains as to where the parents were when the murder took place and how soon did they inform the police.
And just for the information of the minister, it wasn’t merely the cops who tarnished Aarushi’s name; the media went haywire. There was no need to report all that and no need to show all those teachers and students certifying the girl’s reputation. All this only draws attention to something that may be untrue but gives enough scope for rumours.
- - -
A Las Vegas man who devised a “Men on a Mission” calendar that features shirtless Mormon missionaries is facing a disciplinary hearing and possible excommunication because of his “conduct unbecoming a member of the church.”
“I wondered what would happen if we took that perfect Disneyland image that the church spends millions of dollars cultivating each year and shook it up a little bit,” Hardy said.
Interestingly, the ‘models’ have not faced any action. I have no clue as to why they did it, but is it possible more people will go to church now?
Our sadhus go nude often, of course they are doing some sort of bhakti. Mullahs will not do this sort of thing publicly, though Osama (no mullah but at least a wannabe) baring his torso would make a greater impact in all those videos he sends to Al Jazeera. | <urn:uuid:8f2dd704-2f0c-4973-8dc8-fd435f41befc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://farzana-versey.blogspot.com/2008/07/news-meeows-16.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972606 | 734 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Tuesday, March 23 2010 - Legal Response to 9/11
Judge orders freedom for alleged 9/11 plotter tortured on Rumsfeld’s orders
>March 22, 2010
by Stephen C. Webster
A terror war prisoner, once considered of such high value by the Bush administration that former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ordered he be tortured, has taken his first step toward freedom thanks to a federal district court judge, who ordered the government to free him after nearly 10 years of imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay.
Though 39-year-old Mohamedou Slahi, an alleged 9/11 conspirator, won his habeas corpus appeal before U.S. District Judge James Robertson on Monday, he likely does not know it yet. That's because the judge's decision was classified, according to published reports.
"After the [9/11] attacks, he was fingered by a senior al Qaeda operative for helping assemble the so-called Hamburg cell, which included the hijacker who piloted United 175 into the South Tower," The Wall Street Journal reported in 2007.
After being captured and imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, he was repeatedly subjected to torture by his American captors, with Rumsfeld himself ordering "special" interrogation tactics be set aside for Slahi.
Sunday, March 21 2010 - 9/11 A/V Galleries
Atlanta WAC & Pink Elephant Collective Get Creative with Promoting Truth
March 21, 2010
Sunday, March 21 2010 - First Responders/Health Effects
Judge Rejects 9/11 Health Settlement
Orders Renegotiation of Settlement for People Sickened by Dust from World Trade Center; Says $657M Insufficient
March 19, 2010
A federal judge on Friday rejected a legal settlement of more than a half-billion
dollars for people sickened by ash and dust from the World Trade Center, saying
the deal to compensate 10,000 police officers, firefighters and other laborers
didn't contain enough money for the workers.
Sunday, March 21 2010 - Resistance
Protests Held Across Nation as Wars Continue on 7th Anniversary of Iraq War's 'Shock and Awe'
March 20, 2010
from Debra Sweet, World Can't Wait
Racist bigots with the "Tea Party Movement" aren't the only ones in the streets, as we proved today with coast to coast protests against the wars and torture the U.S. is still carrying out.
You can read my speech here. After the march, several protesters were arrested in front of the White House, including Cindy Sheehan, Elaine Brower, and Matthis Chiroux. They are sitting in jail tonight and we are told they won't be arraigned until Tuesday.
Saturday, March 20 2010 - 9/11 A/V Galleries
A True 'All-American' - Betsy Metz Exposes 'Treason in America'
A Visibility 9-11 Podcast
Interview by John Bursill
March 20, 2010
In this motivating interview I talk to organiser, activist and philanthropist Betsy Metz. We ask Betsy about the highly successful conference she organised and facilitated this month. The March 2010 "Treason in America: 9/11, the Wars & Our Broken Constitution" Conference was a milestone in the history of the 9/11 Truth Movement. For the first time in America, Peace Activists, Government Whistleblowers, Journalists and 9/11 Truth Activists explored recent American history together with open minds and hearts, searching for the shocking truth. See: www.treasoninamericaconference.com
So who is Betsy Metz?
Betsy Metz is the quintessential all-American gal! She is a well-educated and fiercely patriotic mother of four and a devoted and loving wife of her husband for 26 happy years. Her husband is also the all-American, being a college quarterback and a former Marine Corps Officer. Together as a family they want for nothing and by any standard have had an excellent and prosperous life. This life would be impossible in nearly any other country in the world and it is fair to say they are living the "American Dream"!
Thursday, March 18 2010 - 9/11 A/V Galleries
Cindy Sheehan invites 9/11 Truth to Camp OUT NOW in DC
March 17, 2010
"I know a lot of truthers will join me at Camp OUT NOW in Washington, D.C., and they're welcome".
For more information on Camp OUT NOW click on this banner.
Thursday, March 18 2010 - 9/11 A/V Galleries
Revealed: Ashcroft, Tenet, Rumsfeld warned 9/11 Commission about 'line' it 'should not cross'
RELATED: WashingtonsBlog.com has posted an excellent article putting about this. S/he says: "This essay does not raise any 9/11 conspiracy theories. It does not question who planned or carried out the 9/11 attacks. It simply gives context to a breaking news story." Read that story here.
By Sahil Kapur
Wednesday, March 17th, 2010
Senior Bush administration officials sternly cautioned the 9/11 Commission against probing too deeply into the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, according to a document recently obtained by the ACLU.
The notification came in a letter dated January 6, 2004, addressed by Attorney General John Ashcroft, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and CIA Director George J. Tenet. The ACLU described it as a fax sent by David Addington, then-counsel to former vice president Dick Cheney.
In the message, the officials denied the bipartisan commission's request to question terrorist detainees, informing its two senior-most members that doing so would "cross" a "line" and obstruct the administration's ability to protect the nation.
"In response to the Commission's expansive requests for access to secrets, the executive branch has provided such access in full cooperation," the letter read. "There is, however, a line that the Commission should not cross -- the line separating the Commission's proper inquiry into the September 11, 2001 attacks from interference with the Government's ability to safeguard the national security, including protection of Americans from future terrorist attacks."
Thursday, March 18 2010 - 9/11 Commission
Colleen Rowley: Minders Ensured She Didn't Say Anything About 9/11 the FBI Didn't WANT Told, Even to Government Officials With Top Security Clearance
March 16, 2010
FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley was interviewed by Scott Horton, professor at Columbia Law School and Contributing Editor of Harper's Magazine.
Rowley said that in her testimony to the Joint Intelligence Committee regarding 9/11, she was "minded". Specifically, she said that "FBI minders" listened to her every word, to trail her and make sure that she didn't tell government personnel with top secret clearance even higher than her own anything which the FBI did not want to be told.
While this might sound fantastic, it is nothing new.
Rowley said the same had happened to Daniel Ellsberg went to members of Congress with the Pentagon papers.
As I wrote a year ago:
Tuesday, March 16 2010 - Anthrax
In Bizarre, Soviet-Style Move, White House Threatens to Veto Intelligence Budget Unless FBI's Anthrax Frame Up Is Accepted
March 15, 2010
In a bizarre, Soviet-style move, the White House has threatened to veto the intelligence budget unless everyone accepts the FBI frame up of Dr. Bruce Ivins.
As Bloomberg writes:
Given that an FBI investigation into a specific crime has nothing to do with the budget or any of OMB's other core responsibilities, it seems that Orszag simply drew the short straw for this little assignment.
Monday, March 15 2010 - Research/Evidence
Sibel Edmonds Speaks Out on Whistleblower 'Protections'
by James Corbett
The Corbett Report
15 March, 2010
FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds joined The Corbett Report last Friday to discuss the deplorable state of whistleblower "protections" in the United States, including S.372, a bill making its way through the Senate that would allow the FBI and other "national security" agencies to dismiss whistleblowers' claims without any form of oversight.
Monday, March 15 2010 - Civil Liberties-Police State
A Detention Bill You Ought to Read More Carefully - S.3081, Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010
"...introduced by Sens. John McCain and Joseph Lieberman..." 'Nuff said? Reminiscent of the Violent Extremist and Homegrown Terrorist Act, passed nearly unanimously in the House but shut down in Senate committee by the outcry of citizens?
As of March 14 11pm, NO "news" agencies have reported on this bill... Read and track this bill at OpenCongress.org. See also, H.R.4648 - Keep Terrorists at Bay Act of 2010 (seriously...) introduced by Rep. Lamar Smith and 7 cosponsors... Oh, and no mention of ending the occupation of other people's sovereign nations as a possible remedy, in case you were wondering...
by Marc Ambinder
March 5 2010
Why is the national security community treating the "Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010," introduced by Sens. John McCain and Joseph Lieberman on Thursday as a standard proposal, as a simple response to the administration's choices in the aftermath of the Christmas Day bombing attempt? A close reading of the bill suggests it would allow the U.S. military to detain U.S. citizens without trial indefinitely in the U.S. based on suspected activity. Read the bill here, and then read the summarized points after the jump.According to the summary, the bill sets out a comprehensive policy for the detention, interrogation and trial of suspected enemy belligerents who are believed to have engaged in hostilities against the United States by requiring these individuals to be held in military custody, interrogated for their intelligence value and not provided with a Miranda warning.
(There is no distinction between U.S. persons--visa holders or citizens--and non-U.S. persons.)
Monday, March 15 2010 - Truth Movement News
Cynthia Mckinney and Dr. Nafeez Ahmed discuss 9/11 in UK Parliment
March 14, 2010
Posted at 911blogger.com - Watch this blog for more.
On the 8th of March 2010 Cynthia McKinney (a former US Congresswoman and 2008 Green Party Presidential nominee) and Dr. Nafeez Ahmed (best selling author and political scientist) address a meeting of Members of Parliament on the subject of the need for an independent investigation into the events of September 11th 2001.
Click 'Read More' for video and a press release from Reinvestigate911.org which hosted Rep. McKinney and Dr. Ahmed.
Monday, March 15 2010 - Other Important News
Did the CIA test LSD in the New York City subway system?
By Philip Messing
March 14, 2010
New York Post
On Nov. 28, 1953, Frank Olson, a bland, seemingly innocuous 42-year-old government scientist, plunged to his death from room 1018A in New York’s Statler Hotel, landing on a Seventh Avenue sidewalk just opposite Penn Station.
Olson’s ignominious end was written off as an unremarkable suicide of a depressed government bureaucrat who came to New York City seeking psychiatric treatment, so it attracted scant attention at the time.
But 22 years later, the Rockefeller Commission report was released, detailing a litany of domestic abuses committed by the CIA. The ugly truth emerged: Olson’s death was the result of his having been surreptitiously dosed with LSD days earlier by his colleagues.
The shocking disclosure led to President Gerald Ford’s apology to Olson’s widow and his three children, who accepted a $750,000 civil payment for his wrongful death.
Monday, March 15 2010 - Open Letters
Peace of the Action: Open Letters from Bob McIlvaine, father of Bobby McIlvaine and Jon Gold
As many of you may already know, Cindy Sheehan and Jon Gold are in Washington protesting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They, along with many other anti-war activists, are camping out at the Washington Monument.
It surely is not easy to “keep the flame of protest’ when the media and special interest groups fight us at every juncture. But, as Cindy and I both know all too well, life is precious and we have lost too, too many young lives already.
Cindy and Jon, I cannot be with you, but I am truly there in spirit. May God keep you safe.
Father of Bobby McIlvaine
[Read More to continue with Jon's letter]
Saturday, March 13 2010 - First Responders/Health Effects
Hurdles Still Remain for Ground Zero Settlement
Oh, great ... "Judge Hellerstein said he would take a week to review the terms of the agreement and convene again next Friday to give his 'initial impressions' and to hear from interested parties, including plaintiffs. He also scheduled a formal "fairness hearing" on the agreement for April 12.
Lawyers from both sides have said that the settlement does not require the judge's approval."
Anyone who's watched the developments at 911truth.org and related sites knows the battles lost by one 9/11 victim's family after another in trying to get their case heard by Judge Alvin Hellerstein. A search on "Hellerstein" at 911truth.org brings up just a bit of this outrageous history, for further reading.
By Mireya Navarro
March 12, 2010
New York Times
Sgt. Dawn Sorrento says she looks on the years since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as a blur of doctor's visits, ambushes by illnesses she had never heard of and growing resentment toward the city that challenged her injury claims.
Yet on Friday, Sergeant Sorrento, a police officer who is among some 10,000 rescue and cleanup workers at ground zero who sued the city for health damages, felt a grim sort of satisfaction. She had expected her case to be among the first to go to trial this spring; instead, both sides announced a legal settlement of up to $657.5 million Thursday night.
"It's nice that someone took responsibility, finally," said Sergeant Sorrento, 43, who helped coordinate the movement of cranes, dignitaries and cadaver-hunting dogs in and out of ground zero in September 2001. "The city finally acknowledges that 9/11 diseases do exist and that people are suffering."
Officials cast the settlement as righting a historic wrong on Friday and predicted that it would assure speedy and just compensation to the workers, who have waited more than six years for a legal resolution. But significant hurdles remain.
Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein, of the United States District Court in Manhattan, has made clear that he intends to play a role in assuring that individuals are compensated fairly.
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I am 12 years old and on a school day I probably play for about 6 hours or so. So that times 5 = 30 hours spent gaming. Then on the weekend it's probably about 12 hours, so that times 2 = 24. 30 plus 24 = 54 hours spent gaming/weekly. 54 hours/ 168 hours of my life spent gaming. That's about 1 third of my life/8 hours a day. So then you have the 2 week holidays every 10 weeks and then every 4th week a 7 week holiday. I hate people who constantly say, ''You have no life all you do is play video games''. This is not true. I am having plenty of fun playing video games and that is the type of person I am. There is nothing you can change about that. I really don't enjoy playing sports or going out in general. That doesn't mean I have ''No life''. I get really good grades ( A in both Maths and English), all the people at my school think I'm funny and no-one hates me. You make friends with someone when they like the same stuff as you do, and have the same sense of humour. Another thing people always say is ''Gaming makes you really anti social and getting involved in sports takes far more communication then playing video games. This is definitely not true. Every time I'm on the Xbox I'm talking to someone or a friend on the xbox, discussing strategy or just having fun talking in general. I am pretty much talking all the time, but sometimes I just like to go into a lobby and unplug my mic and sit back, relax and have some fun. You don't need to be talking to someone 24/7. So I really only have one good friend, but the others and really my best friends. People really need stop hating on gamers. You don't know who I am and what I like. That's what makes everyone unique. Not liking the same stuff. Otherwise the world would be a really boring and dull place. When I get older I think I'm going to cut back on the gaming a bit to get a good job and girlfriend ;). But I'm still going to play video game, as It is really fun and it is what I enjoy doing.
Annual survey shows gamers averaging 13 hours of playtime a week; PCs and consoles being used more as portable popularity wanes.
Gamers are spending more and more time with their home consoles and less on their portable systems, according to the market research firm NPD Group.
A survey conducted by the firm concluded that gamers over the age of 2 in the United States spent over 13 hours playing video games each week, up from 12.3 hours per week for the previous year. The uptick is based on a January 2010 online survey that garnered 18,872 responses.
The study also found that hours spent playing console games spiked the most dramatically, with the average time spent playing vaulting 9 percent from the year prior. Time spent with PC games rose 6 percent, and portable gaming dropped double digits, down 16 percent from 2009. Additionally, the study concluded that the age of the average gamer rose to 32 years old from 31.
According to the survey, the "extreme gamer" classification saw its weekly average hours spent playing games rise from nearly 40 to more than 48. The firm did not detail what criteria it used to include respondents in the "extreme" group, but did note that it makes up just 4 percent of the market.
To all those with responsibilities continue to handle your bizzness on and off the sticks. Had my first child almost a year ago which destroyed my long gaming nights after putting my wife to sleep but i never lost my love for gaming. I don't do the social sites like myface and twitbook or watch much tv so when ever im not working spending time with my family or my online classes i have a controller in my hands. Like a real gamer
I hate the fact that society has such a tainted view on video games and thinks gamers are lifeless etc., but it's unfortunately because of extreme gamers who prioritise games over real life responsabilities that the average person has a generalized view on gamers and thinks we're all the same. And I have seen some of those who are actually proud to make their life almost solely out of gaming.
Guess I'm not really in the extreme group - 48h is quite a lot, really - but I'm waaaaaaaay above average. I'd say I play about 20~30h a week, depending on college assignments or something else to do on the weekend. And I have been letting go of my DS and PSP (especially of the DS) since I got my PS3. Got quite a few DS games bought that I haven't touched yet. So I see what the survey means.
@ eutsgueden, I completely agree. I hate all these "gamers are lifeless and/or brainless geeks" stereotypes. Even though I have seen the amount of them decrease since the Wii's success (thank you Nintendo!), these "video games are bad" stereotypes still get on my nerves.
Unfortunately, that 4% in the "extreme" group represent us all to the media and the non-gamer public...
When I first started working at my job, I'd play PSP on the train ride home. But nowadays, my brain is too fried from staring at a computer screen for 8 hours at work, so I got tired of the PSP :-P
I think the huge success of the iphone/touch gaming comes from the fact that it offers games that are truly "pick-up and play" and you can stop playing them anytime, DS and PSP games try too hard to be console-like experiences on a portable, and most people already have bought huge tvs and sound systems for their actual home consoles...portable gaming needs to be simple and to the point. Nintendo seems to get that idea better than Sony, though.
I prefer to spend a lot of time on games than on a girlfriend, it's actually cheaper, today girls want you to spend much more money from what I was told, there's nothing about to spend it on a date but today girls want jewerly and more expensive just to keep a relationship, I know this because that's what I live in high school...sorry, i think I wrote too much but without all of that, some or everybody could have disagree without letting me give a reason (Sorry for bad English)
It only makes sense. Games are becoming more popular, TV is having less impact on society (gone are the days of Seinfeld-era sitcoms where everybody was tuning in) and games last hundreds of hours longer than movies.
I have real world responsibilities, but I MAKE time for gaming. I don't drink or socialize, so I don't feel the need to go out partying or what have you. Like alot of us here, I started gaming back in the 80s with Atari 2600 and Collecovision, later moving on to my very own NES in '89. Depending on what I'm playing, I can easily be considered an "extreme" gamer.
@ch_ris127 Hey me too. I use my PSP at the gym for listening to music and haven't actually played a game on it in ages. It's a bit bulky but you know what else it is? already bought.
I agree, but the DS does have some good games that have been released that are still worth buying. Mario Kart DS, Advanced wars days of ruin, Zelda Spirit Tracks, Soulsilver/heartgold, 30 or so others. But yeah, nothing new, Crime Scene looked really good but the bugs dissapointed.
They just don't have any great potable games coming out, if they made The World Ends With You 2, a new Jump! Stars game, or a Monster Hunter that we don't have to wait another year for portables would move up again. Instead the DS has a bunch of dumb games that aren't worth their boxart let alone $30. and the PSP has nothing really mentionable at all.
I haven't even touched my ds for the past two months, let alone my psp; which is becoming my new music device, not gaming. On the other hand, alot of new games (and fun ones) are coming to consoles, there're even games dating back to last year that I still need playing. No wonder the statistics are going bonkers.
Well for me gaming has probably been DOWN this past year since I've gone back to college. :P Kinda hard to keep up with all the new titles when you have big projects due.
i can't even fathom how much money I've wasted buying a game and trading it in game-stop and getting it for LESS than half price. Good times lol. Gaming has always been apart of my life always will BE
No real AAA titles on the handhelds for some time now. Releasing the same system over and over with minor improvements is old now. Can't wait to see what Nintendo and the 3DS is all about. It's suppose to be a new system all together. Now if Sony or Microsoft could come out with a new all together system I'd imagine handheld market would go back up. I've often wondered why Microsoft never tried the handheld market. They've been around a while now as far as gaming hardware and pretty much know what would or wouldn't work, but still no handheld? go figure.
The reason portable gaming is dropping is because there hasn't been a real new portable in how many years now? Nothing but rehashed DSes and now the PSP Go...Yea when you make something new and exciting you will see portable gaming increase. Stop rehashing your old systems nintendo and Sony. IF it looks like milking and it acts like milking...ITS MILKING! I guess gamers have been getting tired of being milked and getting the same system...
Wow im part of the 4 percent crowd.. I can average between about 50 to 60 hours a week so that would make me super extreme :)
i actualy spend like 2-3 houers play on ps3 nds and wii (im still waiting 360 to come with natal ready on the box) but when a new game comes out i play like 5-6 h/day so im not very surpized about the time,but im surpized about the age......i was aspecting like 27-28 Oo p.s they didnt mnention the facebook games coz the average will go like 6-7 h/d for person :P
Who cares? Its not like I am going to set off a stopwatch before I play and turn it off when I am done. Why does it really need to be examined? As long as nobody thinks you are playing too much and you are still going to work and fulfilling all your roles and expectations I say game on, fill that free time up. People who can not make that free time for themselves aren't very efficient and usually end up being unhappy. I have friends who get a job and a gf (both of which I have) and then their hobbies disappear; Cause they are lazy and they would rather let the things they love doing slip away.
@RadView Actually, even people like Gallup can do very high quality surveys with low numbers. It is more about who are being surveyed than the actual number. There are actually basic formulas to gauge the number of people one should survey in order to gain X percentage of accuracy. Kind of crazy how some of that works.
Handhelds suck, poor graphics small screens and no blockbuster titles. Sony needs a BRAND NEW handheld and Microsoft need to develop one.
I barely touch my DS and am always playing my Xbox 360, so the exodus from handheld gaming to console gaming is not terribly surprising to me.
Why would I spend money going to a theatre that would last 3 hours buying poopcorn, drinks, etc to end up costing 40, or even more $, when I can just pop in Red dead Redemption and game for endless amounts of fun?
If you're in school/university or have a job, it's not good to go over 8 hours of gaming on a regular week because then either you're not studying enough or you have no social life on the weekends lol.
@Gorilla97 Agreed. While I don't game as much as I used to, I still game because it's "affordable fun". But with gaming costs growing more expensive, I've become a shrewd judge of COST-TO-VALUE ratio. Hense my love of the DS and my fondness of older PC games.
I think the average age gamer is far less. The older gamers tend to read these types of articles and participate in surveys where younger ones are playing the games mindless of what goes on behind these games. I personally am one of these type. 29 now and only done 1 or 2 surveys recently in my life so that would bring the age average up if i said i was 28 then 29 in the next survey. AAA games sell by the millions so 18,000 surveyed gamers is a fraction, the stats could change drastically if far more were surveyd, but like i said above they're to busy enjoying the games. As for average hours played daily, weekly, etc. that would change the older you are because of real world responsiblities getting in the way of good game time. I used to put in 10+ hrs some days no food, piss break here and there in FF games that would suck up good homework time...goodtimes ! Now a full time job, family, and other duties around the house im racking in 2 hrs a day if I can and thats usually only when my online friends are able to join in too. But I won't stop playing until the end of time as long as awesome games are being released. So in the next 20 years when average gamers are 50+ ill see you all there.
Feels like I've been gaming forever yet I'm only 26 years old. Started out with an Intellivision, then NES, Genesis, N64, PSone, PS2, Xbox, Xbox 360, Wii, PS3. Then there's GameBoy, GameBoy Color, GameBoy Advance, DS. I already knew the average gamer is over 30, which is why I've always been annoyed by parents/politicians who complain about the violence in games. I wonder which group of gamers I would fall into. I can't even begin to think of the hours I've spent gaming. Nowadays I think I play probably 2-4 hours a day during the week, and waaaay more on weekends if I can manage to convince the gf.
Wow, 32 is the average gamer age now? Back when I did my first study 4 years ago it was 24. At this rate, they're going to have to start making games with much bigger fonts to read and slower controls in the next 10 years.
I started gaming in 1986 and have been playing more as the games and systems keep getting better...It is and always has been my preferred way to relax. I could go to the movies, but I built my living room nicer than most theaters and enjoy gaming and movies at home much more
I'm a college student and I play video games on my consoles about 5+ hours a day and that's a whole lot less than what I was playing back in my old middle school days which was almost 9+ hours a day, Also my handhelds are always used for on-the-go purposes.
/ "extreme" gamer here, and I do not play handhelds at all anymore unless I'm actually out and about, and the times that I can do that are few and far between (can't very well play a PSP when I'm driving to work, can I?) When I'm out, I'd rather be spending time with my friends than playing a portable game.
games dont keep me as hooked anymore, seems like ive spent my fair share of time gaming, now i just dont..its weird
@Gorilla97 That is an excellent point. It's ludicrous when you pay nine dollars for a movie (which I'll pay if the movie is good) but spend more than that on a single tub of popcorn and a drink, which is not an exaggeration at my theatre.
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Germany's Federal Constitutional Court has ruled that the German military will be allowed to use its weapons on German streets in extreme situations. The caveat: this applies only if Germany is being assaulted in an event of "catastrophic proportions", reports the BBC.
The decision to deploy the troops must be made by the federal government and public demonstrations do not apply. In the minds of the judges during this decision was the possibility of a large scale public terrorist attack with the capability of inflicting mass casualties. The decision does nothing to change a 2006 ruling that prohibited shooting down a hijacked plane, saying it would go against the right of life of the passengers and crew, reports UKPA.
Germany's military restrictions, which allow them to only provide fire if attacked, have been gradually relaxed, as they take a larger militaristic role in NATO operations abroad. | <urn:uuid:00512241-edf3-4287-bf43-bb615282bdba> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.businessinsider.com/german-court-extends-militarys-internal-defense-role-2012-8 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970692 | 168 | 1.632813 | 2 |
By GlobeTrotter | November 30, 2011
Do you want to go for a vacation to a place that has been less explored? Well, if you do wish to do so, then you should pack your bags for Maui. Maui is the second largest island in Hawaii and you can be rest assured that the virgin beauty of this place will take your breath away! Maui is all about unexploited scenic beauty and God’s creation at its best. The blue waters, the sun kissed beaches and the soothing air of Maui will appeal to your sense and sensibilities and you would want to go back there as many times as you can. There are a plethora of things that you can do in Maui, but one thing that you absolutely cannot miss is whale watching.
From mid December to mid May, Maui plays home to humpback whales that come to the island to breed. These whales swim a distance of 3,500 miles, down from the waters of Alaska and come to Maui for the birth of their calves. These beautiful whales make a wonderful sight and the thrill that you will get from watching these beautiful creatures will be one of your best vacation memories ever. So, do you want to know how you can go about watching whales in Maui? Read on.
One of the best ways of whale watching in Maui is to take one of the many whale watching cruises from the Maalaea Harbor of Maui. On these cruises you can watch the whales play in the blue waters from the time of sunrise to the setting of the sun. All you have to do is find out about each of these cruises, when they leave the seaport and how much they charge. Though the law states that the boats have to stop at least 100 yards away from the whales they however actually swim towards the boats. So, if you want, you can actually touch and caress the humpback whales.
If you want to watch the whales up close, you can get in touch with the Institute of Maui, Island Marine. If the institute is sending out a research team, then seek permission to join their team. You will be glad to know that getting permission is not that difficult. And once you are a part of the research team, you can watch the whales do what they do best to your heart’s content. If you want to especially watch the baby whales then you can go to the Maalaea Bay which is in the Maalaea Harbor. However, this place is a specified calving area and you have to stop your boat 300 yards away from the whales.
If you are in Maui with your friends and want to go whale watching on your own and not on a cruise, you can paddle a kayak and see the whales playing around from a distance. However, if you are not too keen of going into the water but want to watch the whales you can drive a car along the Pali Highway. This highway has great overlooking areas and you can watch whales from there. You can also watch the humpback whales from the nearby hillsides. | <urn:uuid:4ff4948a-043d-4a03-beb6-d62041d8e94a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.trotterbud.com/watch-whales-play-around/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968175 | 631 | 1.796875 | 2 |
This Scene Could Really Use a Man-Eating Jellyfish
How I wrote Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.
Elinor and Marianne are sisters looking for love. Elinor is reserved and sensible, Marianne headstrong and sensitive. Unfortunately, thanks to Britain's cruel, patriarchal inheritance laws, they've been booted from their ancestral estate and, what's worse, left without dowries sufficient to attract good and handsome husbands. Then, just when the sisters' prospects are at their lowest ebb, a gigantic man-eating jellyfish drags its gelatinous body from the surf and tries to dissolve them in its corrosive stomach acid.
This story may sound familiar—kind of. It's the beloved Jane Austen novel Sense and Sensibility,except for the part about the jellyfish, which appears in Chapter 11 of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, my parody of the Regency classic, published today.
Quirk Books, a small Philadelphia-based publishing house, had an unexpected hit earlier this year with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,conceived by Quirk editorial director Jason Rekulak and written by Seth Grahame-Smith. As Zombies sales mounted and Quirk anxiously anticipated imitators rushing to press (correctly, as it turned out), they knew they needed a follow-up, and fast. By the time Rekulak called me, the publisher had considered and rejected hundreds of possible sequels (A Farewell to Arms and Legs, Jurassic Mansfield Park). Everyone was expecting vampires, which meant it couldn't be vampires. Everyone was expecting Quirk to make a different writer its next victim—but Austen had worked so well the first time around.
Next thing I knew, I was dog-earing my Barnes & Nobles classics edition of Sense and Sensibility, writing cryptic phrases like "secretly a merman?" in the margins.
My job was to introduce a B-movie action/adventure plot while preserving Austen's original story and most of her text. I was allowed to add new words, sentences, and paragraphs and to delete Austen's words where necessary, for logic and length. Zombies and Sea Monsters are widely referred to as "mashups," a useful but not entirely accurate description; strictly speaking, a mashup (like DJ Danger Mouse's The Grey Album)combines elements from two pre-existing works (the Beatles' White Album and Jay-Z's Black Album). These "Quirk Classics" instead place one pre-existing work in an entirely new context—meaning, for my book, the creepy, there's-something-beneath-the-surface, the-ocean-will-swallow-us-all context that's been a staple of Western culture from The Odyssey through Jaws.
My first step was to steep myself in these fish tales. I found in Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea not only some first-rate scenes of sea-creature-vs.-man violence but page upon page of lovingly described undersea flora, some of which I borrowed to decorate the world of the Dashwood sisters. Robert Louis Stevenson was also a big help, when pirates made their inevitable appearance in my story. And, God bless his bizarro soul, H.P. Lovecraft: In his classic "weird tales," I found hidden underground civilizations, strange worlds on the fringes of known reality, and I knew I had to get that stuff into Regency England.
As I began writing, it was immediately clear that the original settings would need to be reconsidered. Devonshire is lovely and all, but this isn't Sense and Sensibility and Lake Monsters. (And yes, I know, there is a great Austen novel set on the water, but Persuasionisn't as ripe a target for satire as Sense and Sensibility. Also, Persuasion and Sea Monsters doesn't quite have the right ring to it.) In Austen's original, the Dashwoods, upon their disinheritance, are invited to live in what is essentially the guest house of a wealthy relation, Sir John Middleton. In my version, their move is to Pestilent Isle, part of a vast archipelago controlled by Sir John—now an elusive explorer/collector with a beard "as white as the snows of Kilimanjaro" and a necklace of human ears.
The long, central portion of Sense and Sensibility takes place in London, a bustling cosmopolitan capital in Austen's time as in ours. I needed to transfer that big hunk of story to a location that could represent all that London represented for the Dashwoods and also be beset on all sides by hideous sea monsters. My answer was Sub-Marine Station Beta, a great domed city planted on the floor of the ocean, "the greatest engineering triumph of human history since the Roman aqueducts."
(I had room to describe Sub-Marine Station Beta at considerable length, by the way, thanks to one significant difference between my book and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. In that work, Grahame-Smith wrote 15 percent of the final text; the rest was Austen. The readers who gobbled up Zombies reported back to Quirk that as much as they loved the Jane Austen stuff, they wanted a little less of it. So my mandate on Sea Monsters was to deliver a book that was 60 percent Austen and 40 percent me. Which made my life easier: I don't know if you've ever tried to describe a city built entirely underwater, where wealthy Britons attend costume balls dressed as pirates and government scientists conduct ill-advised experiments whereby fish organs are transplanted into men, but it takes a few paragraphs.)
One of the most consistent creative challenges of writing the book was on the basic level of vocabulary. For the conceit to work, the new material would need to sound as much like Austen's marvelous and precise early-19th century diction as possible. So how to find the right vocab words to describe stuff that Austen never would have described in a million years? I borrowed a lot from my sources. From Verne, I got great fish-describing words like cartilaginous and bioluminescence. From Stevenson, great deserted-island words like miry and marish, not to mention nautical words like cockleshell and flying jib. I also turned frequently to the thesaurus. Poring through my Roget's, I arrived at the appropriately eloquent and disgusting phrase to describe the slimy stomach of an oversize hermit crab just before it smothers someone to death: mucocutaneous undercarriage.
Throughout this project, I found that Jane Austen and I collaborated best when I used the monsters and other interpolations not to replace but to accentuate what was already there in Austen's novel. She made Col. Brandon a bit too old for Marianne so she would have to struggle to see his goodness; all I did by giving him an octopus face was make her struggle a little harder. Whenever possible, I coordinated monster attacks with the moments of high emotional peril that Austen had already created—the Devonshire Fang-Beast pounces just as Elinor learns the truth of Edward Ferrars' past; Marianne's heartbreak at Willoughby's betrayal is heightened by the march of the death lobsters.
I will not hazard a guess as to whether Jane Austen is spinning in her grave over all this. I will say only that part of what makes her such a great novelist is how funny she is. Mr. Palmer trying to read the newspaper while his wife prattles on; Mrs. Jennings' endless gossip and insinuation; the vast gulf between Edward's mild ambition and his family's lofty plans for him: All of these story lines—and the sly sense of humor behind them—remain in the book she and I have written together. I've just made them a bit more mucocutaneous. | <urn:uuid:f3f0b482-688a-43e7-9df5-18ce4828c87a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2009/09/this_scene_could_really_use_a_maneating_jellyfish.single.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967549 | 1,664 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Baking cookies, most cookies anyway, is supposed to be easy. There aren’t too many things that can go wrong with making cookie dough, forming it into cookie-sized portions, and baking the cookies. That is to say, not much can go wrong if the recipe actually works. Last week, I grabbed a book off the shelf that I knew had some interesting options for peanut butter cookies. I didn’t imagine anything could possibly go wrong as I picked a peanut butter cookie recipe that I’d never before tried. As I made the dough, it seemed a little soft, the amounts of both butter and sugar seemed off to me, and the dough tasted like it needed more salt. Like a fool, I was sure I was wrong and went ahead and baked the cookies. The suggested oven temperature was lower than usual, and the baking time was only eight minutes, but I proceeded. When the cookies were not baked through, I gave them more time. It didn’t matter. The cookies were soft, crumbly messes. They fell apart easily and didn’t taste great, and this was a big problem. Some friends were coming to town, and I intended to put some cookies in a welcome basket for them. The rest of the cookies were going to be mailed off as a birthday present. I needed good cookies. Rather than fiddling with a recipe that didn’t work and trying to change it for a second attempt, I ran directly back to the source that has never disappointed. I started over with these chunky peanut, chocolate, and cinnamon cookies from Martha Stewart’s Cookies. The texture of the dough was right, the flavor was good, the baking temperature and time were correct, and the whole process was as easy as baking cookies is supposed to be.
Butter and peanut butter were creamed together in a mixer. Brown sugar and granulated sugar were added followed by eggs. The dry ingredients were mixed together in a separate bowl, and those included flour, baking soda, the right amount of salt, and some ground cinnamon. Those sifted together dry ingredients were then added to the butter mixture, and then chocolate chips, salted peanuts, and vanilla were folded into the dough. I used a mix of bittersweet and milk chocolate chips. The finished dough was chilled while the oven was heated. Balls of dough were placed on baking sheets and flattened slightly before baking long enough to be crisp on the edges and tender in the center.
It could be that I especially liked these cookies because I’d just experienced ones that weren’t nearly as good, but I think you would really like them too. The cinnamon was a nice addition to the chocolate and peanut butter flavors, and the ratio of chunkiness of chips and nuts to cookie was just right. Sometimes, recipes seem weird but actually work, and sometimes, a trusted source saves the day. | <urn:uuid:f6a09ac1-0de0-4453-9090-bb3b6dea0bc7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://lisaiscooking.blogspot.com/2011/05/chunky-peanut-chocolate-and-cinnamon.html?showComment=1305605821074 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.990196 | 593 | 1.609375 | 2 |
The Better To-Do List
Slate readers collaborate to help you manage your life.
Click here for more Lifehacking tips.
At Eunice Shriver's funeral, her daughter Maria Shriver told a story about her mother picking her up from school wearing a to-do list. She emerged from a blue Lincoln convertible wearing a sweater with little pieces of paper pinned to it. On each scrap she'd written one of the tasks she needed to complete by the end of the day.
The above is one of many submissions contributed by Slate readers in response to our call for great to-do-list techniques. One person leaves notes or items he must attend to on his bed. One woman endorses staying single because men get in the way of living a productive life. On the other end of the spectrum is a man who finds the whole pursuit ridiculous. He just gets his wife to do stuff. Any time he must do something, he has his wife leave him a reminder. (Apparently you can post to the Internet from the 1950s.)
Many of the submissions are highly detailed. There are too many to print in full, but they all share a common set of core principles: Keep multiple lists (at least one personal and one job related), break down tasks into manageable bites, and review your lists regularly.
There is variety, however, in the details. Among our readers, there are box-checkers and crosser-outers. One person suggests that coloring in a little box next to a completed item gives a greater sense of accomplishment than a simple X. One woman writes long-term projects on the back pages of a notebook and immediate ones on the front pages. Several respondents use colored pens and different symbols to denote importance. One pins index cards to a wall. Some rely on digital devices. Others are so anti-technology, we're just thankful they were willing to type e-mails.
What follows is a list of tools. Readers insist that these—in various combinations—can help you do whatever needs doing. They are listed in order of popularity:
Omni Note, an iPhone application
Remember the Milk
Notify Me, an iPhone application
Action Method Online
RescueTime (This last was suggested as a reverse to-do list. Instead of listing what you need to do, it tracks what you've actually done. Theoretically, this should help you set realistic goals.)
Most people keep personal lists in their back pocket. A lot use their iPhone or other PDA, but the majority prefer old-fashioned notebooks and pads of paper. Favorites: | <urn:uuid:9600bb6c-554a-42e2-aaf3-c4d182f90550> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/lifehacking/2009/10/the_better_todo_list.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953283 | 533 | 1.84375 | 2 |
ROCHESTER — With a new year under way, the Relay for Life of Rochester is gearing up for another successful season.
The Relay for Life initiative began in May 1985, when Dr. Gordy Klatt, a Tacoma, Washington, colorectal surgeon, walked and ran for 24 hours around a track and raised $27,000 for the American Cancer Society. The next year, 340 supporters joined the overnight event and it has since grown. The Relay For Life campaign has grown into a worldwide phenomenon, according to the national website, with more than $4 billion raised to “fight cancer.”
The local relay’s kick off event is scheduled for Feb. 7 with the actual event scheduled for June 22 at Spaulding High School. According to the national Relay for Life website, 40 teams with 156 participants in Rochester have raised $10,848.70.
Tara Dickey, community executive for income development with the American Cancer Society, said the Rochester Relay for Lifers are some of the most enthused participants in the area. They are the 20th highest fundraiser in the ‘Top 25’ listing for New England, out of some 400 relays and last year, Rochester was the highest grossing team in New Hampshire.
“It is one of the largest events in town,” Dickey added.
She noted the event is open to anyone interested, of any age, though she described the event as a “homecoming” for those who have bonded through many years of participation.
“We have babies in their carriages and we have ages all the way up to people in their wheelchairs really,” she said. “I have some kids that are graduating high school that have been doing relay their entire lives. It’s like a homecoming every year. Everyone gets together and you can see how much everyone has grown up.”
Dickey added she is hopeful this year will be one of the best years ever for fundraising.
“We want to blow last year’s totals out of the water,” she said. “We want to have more people. What’s even more important is having people there … The more people we can spread the word to, the more fun the event is going to be.”
The Relay for Life of Rochester will launch its 2013 season with an “Event Kick Off” on Thursday, Feb. 7, at 6:30 p.m. in the Frisbie Memorial Hospital Conference Center. For more information, visit www.relayforlife.org/rochesternh. | <urn:uuid:fb4e967f-b806-409d-b152-904883acaff9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://fosters.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130125/GJNEWS_01/130129494/-1/ROCNEWS01&template=RochesterRegion&CSProduct=fosters&CSProduct=fosters | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965845 | 554 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Friday, April 20, 2012
Read Something (printable word art)
On 4-23-12, my son, daughter and I are going out for World Book Night to hand out copies of The Stand by Stephen King. World Book Night is a literacy project with a focus on encouraging adults to read fiction for pleasure. They offered a list of 30 books including lots of wonderful titles, you picked 3 that you had read and enjoyed. They tried to give everyone their first picks. I chose The Stand because it's my husband's favorite book. One he picks up time and time again, and knows so well he'll open it at random and start reading from there. It is an "old friend" book.
While working with ideas for a teeshirt to make for my kids and I, one of my rejected ideas was a bunch of quotes about reading. The reason I rejected it is because the quotes are too small for a teeshirt, but I think you might enjoy it to print and hang. PDF format- READ SOMETHING!
Here are some of the quotes in it.
Wear the old coat and buy the new book. - Austin Phelps
The ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.- Malcolm X
He that loves a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counselor, a cheerful companion, an effectual comforter. By study, by reading, by thinking, one may innocently divert and pleasantly entertain himself, as in all weathers, as in all fortunes.-Barrow
Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books. - Bell Hooks
All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality -- the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape. - Arthur Christopher Benson
The habit of reading is the only enjoyment in which there is no alloy; it lasts when all other pleasures fade. - Anthony Trollope
Books are incredibly important to me. I read a lot, both the books reviewed here and fiction.
My favorite writer is Robert Heinlein. His books are my "old friend" books, the ones I grew up with and know so well that I can open them to any page.
My favorite fiction release this year is Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway. It's absurd and clever and I laughed almost all the way through it.
If you have tweens or teens, I recommend Rick Riordan's books, like the Harry Potter books, my whole family read the Percy Jackson books and discussed them. My daughter is a big fan who is very excited he's coming up to do a book signing next month.
If you like fantasy and fairies, you might like Tam Lin by Pamela Dean, set in a small liberal arts college in Minnesota in the early to mid 70s, it's a beautifully written modern retelling of the ballad of Tam Lin, with lots of Shakespearean references.
My family's tastes run strongly to science fiction and fantasy. | <urn:uuid:b7825d52-6722-40df-bc69-1555c2de030d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.donteatthepaste.com/2012/04/read-something-printable-word-art.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963615 | 625 | 1.703125 | 2 |
509th Operations Group
||This article needs additional citations for verification. (January 2013)|
|509th Operations Group|
Emblem of the 509th Operations Group
|Branch||United States Air Force|
|Type||Wing Operations Group|
|Role||B-2 Combat and Training Operations|
|Part of||Air Force Global Strike Command|
|Garrison/HQ||Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri|
|Motto||Defensor Vindex- Defender Avenger (Approved 10 July 1952)|
The 509th Operations Group (509 OG) is the flying component of the United States Air Force 509th Bomb Wing (509 BW), assigned to Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri. It is equipped with all 20 of the USAF's B-2 Spirit stealth bombers. Its 394th CTS also uses T-38 Talon trainers.
Redesignated the 509th Bombardment Group, Very Heavy in 1946, the group was one of the original ten bombardment groups of Strategic Air Command. The unit was also the host organization at Roswell Army Airfield, New Mexico in July 1947 during the alleged Roswell UFO Incident.
The 509th Bombardment Group was inactivated in 1952. In 1993, the unit was reactivated as the 509 OG, as part of the Objective Wing organization implementation of the 509th Bomb Wing.
The 509th OG consists of four component squadrons:
- Originally activated as the 325th Bomb Squadron on 6 January 1998. Re-designated the 13th BS ("Grim Reapers") on 23 September 2005, when that unit, flying B-1 Lancers as part of the 7th Operations Group, was inactivated.
- The 393rd BS ("Tigers"), a traditional squadron of the 509th, was activated as a B-2 squadron on 27 August 1993.
- A Flying Training Unit (FTU), the 394th CTS conducts all flying training connected with the B-2.
- A non-flying squadron, the 509th OSS ("Hawks") controls all airfield activities at Whiteman.
In addition to its official insignia, during B-2 stealth bomber test flights, some members of the 509th Bomb Wing procured an unofficial insignia involving an alien, the legend To Serve Man (referring to a famous Twilight Zone episode), and the inscription Gustatus Similis Pullus (Dog Latin for "Tastes Like Chicken"). A second variation carried the term "Classified Test Flight" instead of the Twilight Zone reference, and both harkened to the 509th's connection to the "Roswell UFO incident".
- For additional history and lineage, see 509th Bomb Wing
World War II
The historical roots of the 509th OG begin on 17 December 1944 when the 509th Composite Group was formed at Wendover Field, Utah under Second Air Force. The 509th was formed with one mission in mind: to drop the Atomic Bomb.
The group deployed to the Western Pacific in May 1945 and was assigned to the Twentieth Air Force 313th Bombardment Wing, stationed at North Field, Tinian, in the Mariana Islands. Operations of the group, however, were controlled by Headquarters, USAAF with the 313th Bomb Wing providing logistical support.
The 509th CG made history on 6 August 1945, when the B-29 Superfortress "Enola Gay," piloted by Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, Jr., dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. The B-29 "Bockscar," piloted by Major Charles Sweeney visited the Japanese mainland on 9 August 1945 and dropped the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki.
In November 1945, the group returned to the United States and was assigned to Roswell Army Air Base, New Mexico. For a brief period of time from January to March 1946 the 509th was assigned to the 58th Bomb Wing at Fort Worth AAF, Texas, before returning to Roswell. The Group was assigned to Strategic Air Command on 21 March 1946, being one of the first eleven organizations assigned to SAC. At the time SAC was formed, the 509th Composite Group was the only unit to have experience with nuclear weapons and thus is regarded by many historians as the foundation on which SAC was built. In April 1946 many of the group's aircraft deployed to Kwajalein as part of Operation Crossroads, a series of atomic bomb tests. The remainder became the core of two new squadrons activated as part of the group, the 715th Bomb Squadron and the 830th Bomb Squadron.
On 10 July 1946, the group was renamed the 509th Bombardment Group (Very Heavy) and the 320th TCS was disbanded. With the creation of the United States Air Force as a separate service, the group became the combat component of the 509th Bomb Wing on 17 November 1947, although it was not operational until 14 September 1948, when Col. John D. Ryan was named commander. As a result of postwar reductions only the 509th was equipped for the delivery of atomic bombs.
The group was redesignated as a medium bomb group in 1948 as part of the Strategic Air Command, and acquired an aerial refueling mission with the assignment of KB-29s. Its 27 operational Silverplate B-29s (the 309th had ultimately received 53 of the 65 produced) were transferred in 1949 to the 97th Bomb Wing at Biggs Air Force Base, El Paso, Texas, when the group converted to B-50D Superfortresses. The B-50D was the last derivative of the B-29 family and designed specifically for the atomic bombing mission. It was one of the last piston-engined bombers built, having a top speed just short of 400 mph (644 km/h), faster than many World War II-era propeller-powered fighters still in service at the time.
During the Korean War, the 509th remained in the United States as President Harry S. Truman wasn't willing to risk extensive use of the USAF strategic bomber force, which was being used as a deterrent for possible Soviet aggression in Europe.
Its squadrons were removed on 1 February 1951, and assigned directly to the wing, effectively ending its operations. The 509th was inactivated on 16 June 1952 as part of a SAC (and later Air Force-wide) phase-out of groups with the adoption of the Tri-Deputate organization.
The 509th Bomb Group was redesignated as the 509th Operations Group and activated on 12 March 1993 as part of the 509th Bomb Wing's reorganization under the USAF Objective Wing plan. All flying squadrons, as well as an Operational Support Squadron (OSS) were assigned to the 509th OG. The first B-2 Spirit stealth bomber arrived and was assigned to the 509th on 17 December 1993 (the date was the 49th anniversary of the activation of the 509th Composite Group and the 90th of the Wright brothers' flight).
On 17 September 1996, three 509th B-2s dropped three inert GBU-36 weapons, the highly accurate Global Positioning System-Aided Munitions (GAM) which used the GPS-Aided Targeting System (GATS). The B-2s made the drops at the Nellis AFB, Nevada, bombing range. Range officials, inspecting the area after the releases, were astonished to find that the GBU-36s had fallen seven, four, and four feet, respectively, from the target. A month later, the 509th repeated this impressive feat—only this time, they used live weapons. On 8 October 1996, three B-2s revisited the Nellis range and released 16 2,000 lb. class GBU-36 bombs from an altitude of 40,000 feet. Again, amazed range personnel discovered all sixteen projectiles hit close enough to their targets to be confirmed as 16 kills. The results so impressed USAF Chief of Staff General Ronald Fogleman that he announced at a mid-December press conference the 509th and the B-2 would reach limited (conventional) operational capability on 1 January 1997.
Operation Allied Force
The B-2 first saw combat 23 March 1999, during NATO operations in Serbia and Kosovo, the first sustained offensive combat air offensive conducted solely from U.S. soil. Over a period of two months, the 509th generated 49 B-2 sorties flown roundtrip from Missouri to targets in Southeastern Europe.
Although the B-2s accounted for only 1 percent of all NATO sorties, the aircraft's all-weather, precision capability allowed it to deliver 11 percent of the munitions used in the air campaign. The missions lasted an average of 29 hours, demonstrating the global reach of the B-2.
On the night of 7–8 May 1999, during the Kosovo War B-2s flying out of Whiteman attacked the Belgrade embassy of the People's Republic of China, killing three and causing heavy damage. Although a strike was authorized against a target called 'Belgrade Warehouse 1', the CIA-provided coordinates pinpointed the embassy's location. Neither the aircrew nor the US Air Force were found to have any responsibility for the affair.
Operation Enduring Freedom
Following the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. on 11 September 2001, the 509th quickly transitioned to a wartime mode by joining forces with the 314th Airlift Wing, Little Rock AFB, Arkansas, and the Missouri Air National Guard's 139th Airlift Wing, St. Joseph, Missouri, to send Missouri Task Force-1 to assist rescue efforts at the World Trade Center.
In October 2001, the B-2 led America's strike force in Afghanistan, hitting the first targets in the country to "kick down the door" for the air campaign which followed. The bombers again flew from Missouri to their targets before landing at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean to exchange crews while the engines continued to run. The combat missions lasted more than 40 hours, with the aircraft operating continuously for more than 70 hours without incident before returning to Whiteman.
After twice proving its ability to fly combat missions from Missouri, the wing stepped up efforts to deploy the B-2 from forward locations. By late 2002, the Air Force had completed special shelters for the aircraft at Diego Garcia. The shelters provided a controlled climate similar to the facilities at Whiteman for specialized work on the aircraft skin in order to maintain its stealth characteristics. This ability to sustain operations from a forward location added a new dimension of flexibility to potential air campaigns.
Operation Iraqi Freedom
The new shelters were put to use when the B-2 bombers again led a coalition air strike against the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein, on 21 March 2003. The famous "shock and awe" campaign saw unprecedented use of precision-guided munitions by the B-2 in an effort to minimize collateral damage and destroy key targets. The campaign also marked another milestone for the 509th, as B-2s flew combat missions from both Whiteman and a forward deployed location simultaneously.
Only a decade after delivery, the B-2 was now a proven weapons system, a veteran of three campaigns and first-ever forward deployment. In recognition of the maturity of the system and the unit, the Air Force declared the B-2 fully operational capable.
Since 2003, the B-2's forward presence has become a reality and proved the aircraft can deliver combat airpower, any time and any place. The deployment to Guam, which began in February 2005, provided a continuous bomber presence in the Asia Pacific region and augmented Pacific Command's establishment of a deterrent force. The 80-day tour, the longest in the bomber's 13-year history, also marked the first B-2 deployment since the aircraft was declared fully operational.
- Established as 509 Composite Group on 9 December 1944
- Activated on 17 December 1944
- Redesignated: 509 Bombardment Group, Very Heavy, on 10 July 1946
- Redesignated: 509 Bombardment Group, Medium, on 2 July 1948
- Inactivated on 16 June 1952
- Redesignated 509 Operations Group on 12 March 1993
- Activated on 15 July 1993
- Second Air Force, 17 December 1944
- 315th Bombardment Wing, 18 December 1944
- 313th Bombardment Wing, c. June 1945
- Second Air Force, 10 October 1945
- 58th Bombardment Wing, 17 January 1946
- Fifteenth Air Force, 31 March 1946
- Eighth Air Force, 1 November 1946
- 509th Bombardment Wing, 17 November 1947 – 16 June 1952
- 509th Bomb Wing, 15 July 1993–present
- 13th Bomb Squadron: 9 September 2005–present
- 320th Troop Carrier Squadron: 17 December 1944 – 19 August 1946
- 325th Bomb (later, 325th Weapons) Squadron: 6 January 1998 – 9 September 2005
- 393d Bombardment (later 393 Bomb) Squadron: 17 December 1944 – 16 June 1952 (detached 17 November 1947-14 September 1948 and 1 February 1951 – 16 June 1952); 27 August 1993–present
- 394th Bombardment (later, 394 Combat Training) Squadron: 6 November 1996–
- 509th Air Refueling Squadron: 19 July 1948 – 16 June 1952 (detached 19 July – 14 September 1948 and 1 February 1951 – 16 June 1952)
- 715th Bombardment Squadron: 6 May 1946 – 16 June 1952 (detached 17 November 1947-14 September 1948 and 1 February 1951 – 16 June 1952)
- 830th Bombardment Squadron: 6 May 1946 – 16 June 1952 (detached 17 November 1947-14 September 1948 and 1 February 1951 – 16 June 1952)
- Wendover Field, Utah, 17 December 1944 – 26 April 1945
- North Field, Tinian, Mariana Islands, 29 May – 17 October 1945
- Roswell AAFld (later, Walker AFB), New Mexico, 6 November 1945 – 16 June 1952
- Whiteman AFB, Missouri, 15 July 1993–present
- "509 Bomb Wing Organization". 509th Bomb Wing. Archived from the original on 22 July 2006. Retrieved 28 July 2006.
- Esprit de Corps, New York Times, 2 April 2008
- "509th Bomb Wing Insignia", by Dennis G. Balthaser, 2 February 2004
- Bock, Frederick (ed). 509th Composite Group: 50th Anniversary Reunion, Albuquerque NM, 5 August to 10. 1995 (Revised and Corrected Edition 1997).
- Bowers, Peter M. Boeing B-29 Superfortress. Stillwater, Minnesota: Voyageur Press, 1999. ISBN 0-933424-79-5.
- Campbell, Richard H. The Silverplate Bombers: A History and Registry of the Enola Gay and Other B-29s Configured to Carry Atomic Bombs. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2005. ISBN 0-7864-2139-8.
- Hess, William N. Great American Bombers of WW II. St. Paul, Minnesota: Motorbooks International, 1999. ISBN 0-7603-0650-8.
- Krauss, Robert and Amelia Krauss. The 509th Remembered: A History of the 509th Composite Group as Told by the Veterans Themselves, 509th Anniversary Reunion, Wichita, Kansas 7–10 October 2004. 509th Press., 2005. ISBN 0-923568-66-2.
- LeMay Curtis and Bill Yenne. Super Fortress. London: Berkley Books, 1988. ISBN 0-425-11880-0.
- Mann, Robert A. The B-29 Superfortress: A Comprehensive Registry of the Planes and Their Missions. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2004. ISBN 0-7864-1787-0.
- Marx, Joseph L. Seven Hours to Zero. New York: G.P. Putnam Son's, 1967.
- Ossip, Jerome J. (ed). 509th Composite Group History – 509th Pictorial Album. Chicago, Illinois: Rogers Printing Company, 1946.
- Pace, Steve. Boeing B-29 Superfortress. Ramsbury, Marlborough, Wiltshire, United Kingdom: Crowood Press, 2003. ISBN 1-86126-581-6.
- Rhodes, Richard. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Simon & Schuster, 1986. ISBN 0-684-81378-5.
- Thomas, Gordon and Max Morgan Witts. Enola Gay. New York: Stein & Day Publishing, 1977. ISBN 0-8128-2150-5.
- Thomas, Gordon and Max Morgan Witts. Ruin from the Air: The Enola Gay's Atomic Mission to Hiroshima. London: Hamilton, 1977. (republished in 1990 by Scarborough House)
- Tibbets, Paul W. Flight of the Enola Gay. Reynoldsburg, Ohio: Buckeye Aviation Book Company, 1989. ISBN 0-942397-11-8.
- Wheeler, Keith. Bombers over Japan. Virginia Beach, Virginia: Time-Life Books, 1982. ISBN 0-8094-3429-6. | <urn:uuid:38af38ab-27ff-4d1c-8ef2-fe310362fb7b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/509th_Operations_Group | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936395 | 3,625 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Handing political organizations known as 527s a big victory heading into the 2012 election, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the groups should not be limited in how much money they may accept from donors if their political advertisements don't include so-called magic words such as "vote for" or "elect."
Ads that simply state a candidate's position on an issue or that include flattering — or not-so flattering — things about a candidate but don't include the "magic words" established in an earlier U.S. Supreme Court ruling are considered free speech, the unanimous court found.
Attorney Mario Nicolais, who argued before the court on behalf of the Senate Majority Fund and the Colorado Leadership Fund, called the case "a complete victory for the defendants and free speech."
The ruling also means Colorado voters will continue to see a steady stream of political advertisements this election season.
The case stems from the 2008 election, when the Senate Majority Fund and the Colorado Leadership Fund paid for ads supporting Republican candidates. The ads all identified a candidate and his or her positions, summarized their qualifications and key issues he or she supports and mentioned what the candidate would do if elected. They also invited the voter to contact the candidate and say thank you.
The organizations, known as 527s for a provision of the federal tax code, are not limited in how much money they may raise or spend.
Under state law, however, if a campaign expenditure "expressly advocates" for a candidate or ballot measure, the group is considered a political committee. Colorado election law limits the amount of money that committees may accept from any person to $550 every two years.
Colorado Ethics Watch, a government-watchdog group, filed a complaint against the 527s in September 2008, arguing that the ads expressly advocated for specific candidates and therefore the groups should be considered political committees and subject to financial limits.
Arguing before the Supreme Court in October, Ethics Watch executive director Luis Toro compared the ads to those for McDonald's. While the fast food giant's advertising campaign states "I'm lovin' it," and not something more explicit such as "Go buy McDonald's food," the intent and impact are the same, he said.
Lawyers for the Senate Majority Fund and the Colorado Leadership Fund countered that under state and federal law, to expressly advocate for a candidate, the ads must include one or more of the "magic words" — which none of their ads did. Those words include "vote for," "reject," "defeat," "elect" and "cast your ballot for."
In an opinion written by Chief Justice Michael Bender, the high court agreed, saying that the "magic words" standard was in place when voters passed a campaign finance and regulation provision known as Amendment 27 in 2002. The court also said the standard Ethics Watch suggested could be considered overly vague, and therefore a violation of free speech.
"Voters clearly wanted a bright line as to when expressing their opinion about issues of the day crosses into regulated political speech," said attorney Jason Dunn, who represents the Colorado Leadership Fund. "To do otherwise would chill political speech, resulting in everyday citizens being unable to know when simply expressing their opinion on issues of the day becomes regulated speech subject to the complex world of campaign-finance law and its penalties for any misstep."
Toro, meanwhile, pledged that Ethics Watch's "fight against secret money in Colorado elections will continue."
"We are clearly disappointed and still believe that voters who passed Amendment 27 meant to strengthen Colorado disclosure and contribution limits," Toro said.
Sara Burnett: 303-954-1661 or firstname.lastname@example.org | <urn:uuid:949db058-9741-4953-a320-77f6abb7f310> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_20015492 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96802 | 747 | 1.585938 | 2 |
Social Media is Work Not Magic
Every time I talk to someone interested in leveraging social media to build up their brand, be it personal or corporate, they always ask what the tricks are. Everyone wants short cuts, but the issue is that social media requires the social part more than the media part of its name. You can’t force socialization. It’s not some social media slight-of-hand card trick, it takes work and practice.
Take a real life scenario like going to a party. You don’t know anyone there, but you are hoping to build your business. Do you walk across the room, tell someone to like you, and then shove your business card in their face?
It is time that people joining the social media space understand the work that goes into it. Building a huge follower list isn’t as impressive as building a list of people that are willing to support you, and help you with your goals and aspirations.
In one of my previous positions, the person responsible for social media decided to automate nearly everything, and in doing so, he was able to amass a large following in social media. The growth of the accounts made his position within the company secure, but the issue that no one saw was that the huge number of followers wasn’t providing any real value.
People always talk about the value of social media, some shying away from an answer, but I have always believed that the value comes from action. If you are able to connect with people in a way that either makes their life or your life better then that’s where value lies. Businesses don’t always need to convert in social media if they are building their brand identity, creating conversation, teaching others to be brand ambassadors through their interactions, and working hard to support customers. All of these can be seen by companies as marketing expenditures that will pay themselves back in full over the course of time through brand loyalty, word of mouth, and growth in market share.
If you are trying to build your own personal brand online, the same rules apply. Conversation, communication, and consideration, are all great words to keep in mind as you try to grow your lists. Social media isn’t some magical formula. There isn’t anyone that can tell you the rules, but common sense and hard work can help you achieve your goals. | <urn:uuid:265b657b-d579-4581-a19d-db5aa7c3987d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.deepripples.com/blog/social-media-is-work-not-magic/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971185 | 488 | 1.546875 | 2 |
MSU Denver Faculty and Staff
We teach Colorado.
MSU Denver faculty and staff are some of the hardest working in the state. That’s because they see their role as shaping the futures of the people who will recharge our state.
That means you!
Teaching is numero uno!
MSU Denver is a “teaching” university. That means professors are evaluated based on how well they teach. It also means that you won’t be taking classes from graduate teaching assistants. You’ll be studying with professors—many who have professional experience in their fields—in classes small enough so you can get extra help and develop professional relationships with your teachers and other students.
Just because we’re a teaching university doesn’t mean we don’t have an active undergraduate research program. We do! If you’re hoping your education will include a research project you can sink your teeth into, you’ll find any number of opportunities, from forensic DNA recovery to inequality in Chinese society to the affect ski lifts have on the vegetation that moose eat. In other words, your professors will extend their classrooms into the city and throughout Colorado.
Here are some ways MSU Denver faculty go above and beyond their office hours:
- Shawn Worthy’s dedication to his students means he considers early mornings and late nights part of his office hours.
- Christy Carello brings students into the Colorado wilderness to study the effect of skiing on wildlife.
- Carmen Sanjurjo helps future urban teachers acquire the savvy and credentials necessary to teach urban youth.
- Jose Lopez teaches students about space by helping them launch high-altitude balloons into the stratosphere.
- Carlos Fresquez shows Latino and non-Latino students what it’s like to be a successful, working artist.
Did you know…
Average class size: 22
Student/faculty ratio: 21 to 1
540 full-time faculty
913 affiliate faculty
22 percent of full-time faculty are people of color
73 percent of full-time faculty hold doctorate or terminal degrees
Staff teach too!
At MSU Denver, you’ll discover that you’ll learn a lot from the more than 500 employees who support the University’s academic mission. Whether you have a job on campus or need help in the computer lab, you’ll find that MSU Denver staff members are as willing to help you succeed as your professors.
Good teaching matters
“[MSU Denver] is an institution where the faculty actually teach. This is our primary job. Many [MSU Denver] professors put in a lot of time outside of the classroom working with students. Most professors also have real-world experience that informs the lessons they are teaching. This is a big advantage for our students.”—Shawn Worthy, Ph.D., associate professor of human services | <urn:uuid:916f389e-2780-4d02-9d60-03fb8d91dbc4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mscd.edu/futurestudent/facultyandstaff/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952794 | 605 | 1.539063 | 2 |
[Diagnostic criteria and clinical evaluation of tricuspid aortic valve asymmetry].
ABSTRACT To investigate size of the aortal root and its valves in young patients and correlation between tricuspid aortal valve (TAV) asymmetry and connective tissue dysplasia (CTD).
TAV symmetry was studied in young patients. Morphological examination consisted in phenotypic study of 34 corpses of young people who had died of noncardiological causes with a focus to internal signs of CTD signs and measurements of TAV and each cusp. Echocardiographic examination comprised phenotypic, clinical and echocardiographic studies of 144 young patients.
Echocardiographic diagnostic criteria of TAV asymmetry were specified. They consisted in eccentricity of the line of diastolic closure of aortal cusp (M-mode echocardiography) > 1.2; distinct differences in the size of the cusps (two-dimentional study), shift of at least one of the comissures by I hour at the "clock-face". A close correlation was detected between TA V asymmetry, external and clinical manifestations of CTD. The morphological criterion of TA V asymmetry--a more than 38% increase in the ratio of cusp area to sectional area of aortal root.
TAV asymmetry is detected in 20% young people. It is closely related to external signs and clinical manifestations of CTD, other minor heart anomalies and may be accompanied with aortal regurgitation. | <urn:uuid:543260d5-ae13-47da-a725-1e607403560f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.researchgate.net/publication/6510167_Diagnostic_criteria_and_clinical_evaluation_of_tricuspid_aortic_valve_asymmetry | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.932802 | 322 | 1.507813 | 2 |
March 4, 2013
Now that politicians and the establishment media have intertwined mental health and proposed gun laws, the top cop in Houston wants to change Texas law to make it legal for police to seize guns from citizens they determine are mentally ill.
A proposed law will amend the mental health code of Texas and allow police to confiscate a weapon taken from a person they determine is “experiencing a mental health crisis and has been found to be a danger to himself or others and is being transported by police for an emergency mental health evaluation,” according to the Associated Press.
Houston Police Chief Charles McClelland wants the Legislature to require a judge to decide if citizens referred for mental health treatment are qualified to exercise the Second Amendment. McClelland has teamed up with Republican state Rep. Allen Fletcher who is drafting a bill to keep firearms confiscated from citizens by the police in a property room until a judge decides if it should be returned.
“I’m not trying to take guns from citizens in this country, but there should be an additional judicial review,” McClelland told the AP. “Someone, other than the police, should have to review that case or that incident requiring that mental evaluation, to tell me if this person is still qualified to own or carry a firearm” and have it returned.
McClelland said police need the ability to confiscate a firearm prior to a determination by the state.
“Whenever that person’s (mental) evaluation is completed, because of HIPAA laws and medical privacy issues, I have no way of knowing if this person still qualifies to carry or have a firearm,” McClelland said. “But when they show up at the property room, I have no choice but to give it back. And I want to give it back if they still qualify.”
San Antonio’s top cop supports McClelland’s effort. “My stance on gun laws is not a political one,” San Antonio Police Chief Bill McManus said in a statement. “I am a proponent of any law that keeps guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them and any law which enhances public safety and officer safety.”
During his anti-Second Amendment address in January, Obama conflated firearm ownership and mental illness when he signed nearly two dozen unconstitutional executive actions. According to the establishment media, “mental health emerged as a core feature of the president’s plan to prevent further tragedies like the Dec. 14 shooting in Newtown, Conn.”
However, according to Paul Appelbaum, a professor of psychiatry, medicine and law at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York, only between 3 and 5 percent of violent crime is due to mental illness.
New York’s recently passed gun law requiring mental health professionals to report people they consider potentially violent will not prevent gun violence. “We’re not likely to catch very many potentially violent people” with laws like the one in New York, Barry Rosenfeld, a professor of psychology at Fordham University in The Bronx, told NPR in January. Laws like the one ushered in by New York’s Democrat governor “cast a very large net that will probably restrict a lot of people’s behavior unnecessarily,” Rosenfeld said.
This article was posted: Monday, March 4, 2013 at 5:31 pm | <urn:uuid:39af8e7f-b1d3-4b8e-98e3-6f7d2ff2d262> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.prisonplanet.com/houston-cops-push-for-law-to-grab-guns-from-citizens.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962835 | 716 | 1.539063 | 2 |
In a ruling that's setting a new precedent and giving hope to gay families for equal treatment under the law, a separating lesbian couple in Florida has been granted equal parental rights of their eight-year-old child.
This wasn't always the case for the couple, who actually separated when their baby was two. A circuit judge in Brevard County, Florida
originally ruled in accordance with Florida law that the woman who had physically given birth to the child was the legal mother, although he wrote that it "broke his heart" to say so. In an appeal to that ruling, though, it was decided that "state law has not kept up with the times." The case is unique in that both women are biological parents -- one partner donated eggs, which were carried to term by the other. Sperm was donated anonymously, and the donor waived all rights. After their split, the partner who was originally granted full parental rights took their child and disappeared; the other mom eventually tracked her down in Queensland, Australia. Now the 5th District Court of Appeals has decided that the mother who donated her eggs is also owed parental access and rights according to both Florida's and the nation's constitutions, making for a fairly landmark decision in a state that doesn't necessarily have a stellar track record
on rights for gay families. (Although the state's ban on adoption for same-sex families is now over.
It's clear from the statements made by the court that this ruling was in large part because of the fact that both parents had a biological link to their child, which isn't the case most of the time. But regardless of how unique this family's situation was, this decision is still being hailed as having big implications
for same-sex families everywhere.
Camilla Taylor, a family lawyer with LAMBDA Legal Defense and Educational Fund, a nonprofit group that works on behalf of gays and lesbians, praised the ruling. "I think it's clear the court reached the correct result, and courts are moving toward greater protections for families that involve either varying kinds of biological connections to their children or who have no biological connection but have functioned as parents in a child's life," she said.
Right now, the question the courts have actually responded to is, as the LA Times puts it, "Does a woman in a lesbian relationship who gives her egg to her partner have no legal rights to the child it produces?" The answer appears to be yes, although that doesn't necessarily legally address the situation of lesbian mothers who don't have biological ties to their children. But Nancy Polikoff of American University told the LA Times that "any ruling that supports the right of a same-sex couple … is important for its willingness to recognize that these families exist," and she's right. Combined with the fact that DOMA will probably be repealed
in our lifetimes, it bodes well for our right to love each other sort of like straight people do -- with the knowledge that everything might go irreparably wrong and our lives might fall apart completely, but we have at least some legal protections and safeguards for putting them back together. Or in this case, that even when it feels like our families are breaking into a million pieces, we're able to keep them together where it counts. Part of having your relationships and your family recognized by the world at large is being able to rely on the same systems that the rest of the world does, even if your relationship ends; it's the right to have things still be sort of okay when they're not okay. Conservative pundits are always concerned, especially when it comes to gay marriage, about a child's being able to grow up with "two loving parents" -- with rulings like this, we get closer to a world where every child has that option. | <urn:uuid:731a6f9a-fad5-432d-b4f1-8d157a8e1dbd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.autostraddle.com/two-lesbian-moms-awarded-parental-rights-almost-as-if-both-are-actually-parents-126824/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.98348 | 768 | 1.828125 | 2 |
THE US Senate Finance Committee has been pressing the nation's wealthiest colleges and universities: With your tax-exempt endowments growing at double-digit rates, why do you keep raising tuition? So far, the reaction by some schools has been to increase (modestly) their scholarship aid - and to cite evidence of how inclusive and democratic they are.
In doing so, they have put some numbers on the table - but not always with a full explanation of what the numbers mean. So, for three kinds of numbers that some of the schools have set forth, here's an effort to do so.
The tuition number. This is the total yearly cost for a student to go to one of these schools. To put this number into perspective, we can put it next to the most recent figure for the nation's median household income. The median income is the income at the midpoint of the distribution. Half of US households take in less than the median, half of them take in more.
The tuition number is about $45,000. The nation's median income is $48,200. So the price of a year's education at these schools is just $3,200 shy of the yearly income of the typical American household. And it is $3,900 higher than $41,100, the median income of households in Montana, the home state of Max Baucus, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.
The number for the best-off beneficiaries. As schools have increased scholarships, they have also begun to extend them to students who don't fit the familiar profile of a scholarship student: talented and hard-working, but threadbare. At Yale University, students will get automatic scholarships even if their family incomes are as high as $200,000. This number identifies Yale's best-off beneficiaries. To put it into perspective: A family with an income of $200,000 ranks in the top 5 percent of the household income distribution. At Harvard, the number is $180,000. If you've liked your Bush tax cuts, you'll like these numbers, too.
The first-generation number. This is the share of a school's students who are first-generation. That is, they come from households where no adult holds a four-year degree. A school where a large percentage of the students are first-generation is more inclusive and more democratic than a school where a small percentage of the students are first-generation.
In a recent letter to The
Some perspective: The share of the nation's 18-year-olds who are from households where no adult holds a four-year degree is 60 percent. If Princeton looked like America, its first-generation number would be 60, not 11. Its number is about one-fifth of a representative number. Blacks make up 12 percent of America. If Princeton's enrollment represented one-fifth of black America, the black share of its students would be under 2 percent. If it did the same for women, the female share of its students would be under 10 percent.
A passage in "The Big Test," Nicholas Lemann's book on the SATs, helps to explain why these various numbers must be put into perspective: "Here is what American society looks like today. A thick line runs through the country, with people who have been to college on one side of it and people who haven't on the other. This line gets brighter all the time." As it does, upward economic mobility decreases and economic polarization increases.
In American higher education, the schools that form its academic and financial elite exert a lot of influence on the rest of the four-year schools. Thus, how the elite schools address the thick bright line influences how other schools address it. And others are also raising tuition, conferring scholarships on well-off students, and short-changing first-generation students.
Thus, a way for elite schools to respond to the Finance Committee, rather than just react to it, is to lead all of America's four-year schools in an effort to jumpstart upward mobility and narrow economic division by vastly increasing the number of people who get a chance to rise above the college versus noncollege line, before it gets even thicker and brighter.
Ralph Whitehead Jr., a guest columnist, is a professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. | <urn:uuid:5543711f-4909-4368-8806-7268eedbe380> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/02/04/colleges_and_the_numbers_game/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968342 | 885 | 1.828125 | 2 |
IP settings dont match
I have recently installed DSLinux, i have very little knowledge of the operating system but i cannot connect to the internet i found that..
I find that my DNS and IP address dont match my actual settings as on windows, but i cannot edit them to my settings.
Im pretty sure this will solve my problem. Does anybody have any suggestions as to how i edit the settings or is there another way?
I thought linux was to automatically detect Internet settings? Will i constantly have to change my ip settings every couple of days each time it address expires?
In terminal, type:
it will try to find DHCP server, and if successful, it will setup networking automatically.
thanks mate, i have security on my wireless internet though. how do i go about entering it?
I thought you were talking about wired connection. I don't know if DSL has wireless drivers installed that would work with your NIC. Try using Ubuntu CD if you need wireless connection.
ahhh thanks mate, ill get right on it. | <urn:uuid:afef58f0-535f-4c9d-8d07-ffb01db50245> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/wireless-internet/ip-settings-dont-match-print-106309.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947535 | 213 | 1.71875 | 2 |
From its start in a fourth floor apartment (no elevator) in Paris in early 2011 to its final release on Steam on July 4th 2012, Endless Space was both a work of passion and an unexpected adventure for our small team.
The entity now known as Amplitude Studios was the brainchild of Mathieu Girard and Romain de Waubert. Unhappy at the existing crop of space-based 4X games and desiring more creative freedom than they had as executive producers at Ubisoft, the two of them decided to strike out on their own. As Romain later said, he wanted to "...fill bookshelves at home with all the games I wanted to play that were never developed." The only way to do that, they agreed, was to go it alone.
When we first got together, we used "Star Empire" as the working title. Star Empire would be a space-based 4X game, using some of the classic mechanics from games like Civilization and Master of Orion. The 4X genre might be a strange niche to start with, but we felt that it would play to our strengths and minimize our weaknesses.
4X games are challenging to design, but we had an experienced team and believed that this would not be a problem. In addition, the genre also has lower requirements for production of expensive elements like animation and art, and budget was definitely a concern.
We also had to think about what we could do to make the game stand out in an increasingly crowded market:
In order to maximize the reach and potential customer base, the game needed to be PC and Mac-based, with ideally the possibility of being able to port it elsewhere. We looked at a number of game engines (Gamebryo, Unreal, open source tools, etc.) and ended up choosing Unity for a few reasons:
- Multi-platform (PC, Mac, iOS, browser)
- Free trial copy, permitting a quick prototype of the game, upgradeable to a Pro version, which included high-end game engine features
- Level tools adapted to an open sandbox game (unlike e.g. Unreal)
- Ease of use of the C# coding language
- Instantaneous compiling for test and workflow
We felt that most space-based games had mediocre graphics. Stars, spaceships, aliens, and galaxies should be way cooler and more modern than the simplified, comic strip look of many previous games.
Following on to that, the influence of movies and series like Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica radically changed the idea of what was "cool" in a space battle. There was a strong desire to give that sort of powerful, cinematic feel to the battles.
Finally, the backgrounds and universes of most science fiction-based games often seem tacked-on and poorly developed. For Star Empire, we wanted a universe that felt deep, real, and consistent; a universe that had a past and a future in which Star Empire portrayed just one particular era.
The name Star Empire lasted almost through the end of the project; even though it was a working title it was devilishly difficult to agree on something else. The naming process consisted of Max and me in a room, each of us coming up with names that the other one didn't like. Then we'd take our best ones to the team, and they wouldn't like them either. The process at least had the advantage of being predictable. In fact, it was only when the first article went to press (an interview we did in March 2012) that we finally managed to agree on "Endless Space."
But that was far in the future. To make the game, get the team together, and find the money, the first thing we had to do was found a studio.
"Hive Mind" was the original name for the studio, based on the feeling that it indicated a lot of smart brains working toward a common goal. We decided to change it, and after an insanely long and complicated and time-consuming series of arguments and discussions we narrowed it down to a shortlist. This list was problematic because most of the names had both strong supporters and strong detractors -- whatever was chosen, somebody would be unhappy. In the end the team went with Amplitude, because it seemed to suggest most of the key values:
...and, besides, no one hated it.
The next step was to figure out who, and how many, and for how long, and all those other questions that involve talent, cash flow and financing. Mathieu and Romain shanghaied a friend who would become the unofficial CFO, and together they developed the first business plans.
The initial plan was for €1.5 million in development costs. After a few cold showers in front of banks and business angels, the number was brought down below €1 million. This required cutting a few things that hurt -- intro and endgame cinematics, the number of ships per faction, and the number of types of ships. But we knew that we would have to let some things go if we wanted a realistic -- and profitable -- project, and we figured that we could still maintain the core gameplay mechanics and the game's depth. While the project and goal were ambitious, recent changes in the game industry meant that this kind of project was very realistic. In particular, the fact we could avoid selling through the traditional retail channels.
In retail, a game studio would be lucky to receive 20 percent of the retail price of a game after costs (publisher, manufacturer, distributor etc.) were taken out. With online storefronts, that number is closer to 50 percent. In other words, it had become 2 1/2 times easier to hit break-even. Even so, given the world economic situation it was a worrying time to be going around asking for money. What came through in the end was a large round of financing from friends and family. While it is not much fun, administratively speaking, to manage more than forty shareholders under French business law, we all figured that the extra hassle was worth the price of trying to fulfill a dream.
Amplitude was also fortunate to be contacted by a number of distributors and publishers who were interested in the team and the project. Late in the dev cycle we ended up partnering with Iceberg Interactive, a Dutch company that was a good fit internationally as well as being familiar with strategy games and that market niche. Iceberg was happy to handle retail and non-Steam online sales, freeing our team to focus on development and the Steam relationship.
But of course, it takes more than money to build great games; you also need a team.
Before we get to that, though, here's how our financing broke down:
Financing model pros and cons:
- Find a publisher
PRO: Someone else carries financial risk.
CON: Loss of IP control, loss of creative control, loss of schedule control
PRO: Trendy, fast, wide-reaching
CON: 'One-off' with the community/fans, project stops if you don't hit the target, no one on the team was a rock star
PRO: Control, independence, long-term relationships with fans
CON: Someone has to find the money...
Final Decision: Self-financed
- Final Funding Sources:
- Team: 16 percent
- Friends and Family: 49 percent
- Private/Gov′t support: 26 percent
- Loans: 9 percent | <urn:uuid:3f5c7eb2-c569-4076-a5d0-d528b1b2383e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://gamasutra.com/view/feature/182470/endless_space_when_triplea_.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974945 | 1,525 | 1.617188 | 2 |
News Release - September 25, 2007
SASKATCHEWAN LITERACY COMMISSION PROVIDES OVER $684,000 FOR COMMUNITY LITERACY PROGRAMS
With the support of over $684,000 from the SaskSmart Innovations Fund, 12 communities will engage in community literacy programming this year. This funding will allow new innovative family and workplace literacy programs across Saskatchewan to begin this fall.
"Funding recipients will have a greater opportunity to address their communities' literacy needs," Minister responsible for Literacy Deb Higgins said. "Grassroots literacy programs make it possible for people to gain the skills they need to participate fully in the labour market and to create a better quality of life for themselves and their families."
Recipients of SaskSmart funding are community partnerships that have collaborated to design literacy plans which address local needs and build on local resources. Proposals were submitted to the Saskatchewan Literacy Commission in May. In this second year of the SaskSmart Innovations Fund program, literacy partnerships will receive amounts ranging from $25,000 to $70,000 to implement community-based literacy programs.
"Developing strong literacy skills is essential to individual success at home, at work and in the community," Higgins said. "The SaskSmart Innovations Fund is one more way that we are making Saskatchewan the best place to live, work and raise a family."
The SaskSmart Innovations Fund is also providing nine communities with Expressions of Interest grants of $7,500 each, to develop plans that address local literacy needs.
The Saskatchewan Literacy Commission works closely with community partners to co-ordinate resources dedicated to literacy in the province.
For more information, contact:
CLP backgrounder.pdf (15 KB) | <urn:uuid:ab47fcb2-8765-4e91-b343-0d624c6b3e6c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.gov.sk.ca/news?newsId=678c615f-2c63-40bf-b663-4c7113fbb628 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.933269 | 356 | 1.609375 | 2 |
World economies I get: currency, trading, deficits, surpluses... World politics is another story. I follow what happens: summits, policy changes, elections: but what does it mean for energy markets, potential threats, actual relations between countries? These situations define our future - financial and otherwise.
Today I'm sending you a piece from STRATFOR on the relationship between Iran and Brazil - and what it means for energy, trade, U.S. sanctions, and this rising power in the South. STRATFOR is my go-to source for all things geopolitical. The great thing about it is that it's not just available to government agencies, Fortune 500 corporations and financial advisers such as myself. Rather, you too can access their content. Sign up here for STRATFOR's free weekly intelligence reports. I highly recommend it for investors at any level.
Editor, Outside the Box
Brazil, Iran: A Troublesome Relationship for the U.S.
Stratfor Today » February 26, 2010
EVARISTO SA/AFP/Getty Images
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (R) and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva shake hands in Brasilia on Nov. 23, 2009
U.S. Undersecretary of State William Burns traveled to Brasilia on Feb. 25 in advance of a trip by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Brazil on March 3. The diplomatic preparation work in which Burns is involved centers on Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva's intensifying long-distance relationship with Iran. For now, the Iranian-Brazilian love affair does not stretch far beyond rhetoric, but Washington sees a growing need to keep Lula's foreign policy adventurism in check, particularly when it comes to Brazil forging nuclear and banking ties with Iran.
U.S. Undersecretary of State William Burns, the State Department's point man on Iran, traveled to Brasilia on Feb. 25 to lay the groundwork for U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's visit to Brazil on March 3. Usually, such a visit would not require extensive prep work by an undersecretary, but from Washington's point of view, Brazil has moved up in the list of diplomatic priorities. The reason? Iran.
Getting Keen on Iran
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva has been getting cozy with Iran as of late. On Feb. 24, da Silva came to Iran's defense, asserting that "peace in the world does not mean isolating someone." He also defended his decision to follow through with a scheduled visit to Iran on May 15 in spite of Iran's continued flouting of international calls to curb uranium-enrichment activity and enter serious negotiations on its nuclear program. He scoffed at the notion that his trip had turned into a scandal and said when he travels to the Persian Gulf, he is "going to negotiate with Iran and sell things to Iran so that Iran can also buy things from Brazil."
The basic question running around Washington in regards to da Silva's behavior is, "What gives?" The United States has long considered da Silva a crucial ally and bridge to the Latin American left. Sharing a common vision with da Silva for business-friendly policies, Washington has relied on the charismatic Brazilian leader to help balance against the more antagonistic, anti-imperialist agenda espoused by leaders like Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. This is not to say that da Silva was a card-carrying member of the pro-United States camp, but he would take extra care to walk a fine diplomatic line between the United States and its adversaries, like Cuba and Venezuela.
Lately, however, da Silva and his Cabinet appear to be going out of their way to telegraph to the world that Iranian-Brazilian relations are blossoming, putting Brazil within firing range of one of Washington's biggest foreign policy imperatives. Brazilian officials reacted warmly to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's controversial victory in the June 2009 presidential election and were quick to roll out the red carpet for the Iranian president when he paid a state visit to Brazil in November 2009.
Tehran is more than happy to receive such positive attention from Brasilia. Brazil holds a nonpermanent seat on the U.N. Security Council, and U.N. sanctions against Iran require the support of at least 9 of the 15 council members. In addition to having to deal with potential Russian and Chinese vetoes among permanent members, the United States also has to take into account that it will not have the vote of Brazil, which is not satisfied with its temporary seat and is using its foreign policy credentials to seek global support for a permanent seat. Even rhetorical support from an emerging power like Brazil helps Iran in gathering diplomatic fodder to try to prevent a sanctions coalition from amalgamating.
Brasilia's Global Emergence
Da Silva has several strategic motives for publicly playing defense for Iran, most of which have very little to do with Iran itself.
Though Brazil has existed in isolation for much of its post-colonial history with most of its attention occupied by internal political and economic turmoil, the country now finds itself, uniquely, in a stable enough position to start reaching abroad and developing a more assertive foreign policy. Brazil has the political and economic heft to declare itself the regional hegemon, regardless of whether the states in Brazil's immediate abroad are prepared to accept such a reality. In addition to boasting a rapidly modernizing military and a burgeoning energy sector that will place the country among the world's top energy producers within a decade, Brazil has membership in practically every internal grouping that it can find membership in. As da Silva famously said earlier this month, "Brazil is part of the G-20, G-7, G-8, G-3. In short, any G they make they have to call Brazil. We are the most prepared country in the world to find the G-spot."
With an ambitious foreign policy agenda being charted out in Brasilia, da Silva apparently sees some diplomatic benefit in promoting a more contrarian view to the United States. In addition to getting close to Iran, da Silva made a point recently of staunchly defending Chavez's government as a democracy (while referring to his own country as a "hyper-democracy"), and he continues to press the United States to lift its trade embargo against Cuba. By carving out a more controversial position for itself in the international arena, the Brazilian government is looking to gain some credibility in places like Tehran and Caracas to promote itself as a mediator in their thorny dealings with the United States.
Taking Risks at Home
Despite the overabundance of mediators in the Middle East and Brazil's glaring lack of leverage in the region, da Silva remains fixated on the Iran portfolio. This policy does not come without political risks for da Silva. Within Brazil, many are puzzled and uncomfortable with the idea of Brasilia publicly aligning itself with Tehran when even countries like Russia and China (who, unlike Brazil, actually have substantial relations with Iran) are taking care to diplomatically distance themselves every time the regime flouts the West's demands to show some level of cooperation on the enrichment issue.
Indeed, da Silva's decision to politically embrace Ahmadinejad when he came to visit Brazil last year had a polarizing effect on the Brazilian political scene. Da Silva is in the last year of his term and his popularity is still soaring, but his Iran policy could be problematic for his chosen candidate, Brazilian Cabinet Chief Dilma Rousseff, in the run-up to the October presidential election.
When Israeli President Shimon Peres arrived in Brazil to get a pulse on da Silva and his Iran agenda prior to Ahmadinejad's visit in late 2009, Sao Paulo state Governor Jose Serra, Brazil's main opposition leader, took the opportunity to invite Peres to his state, where he made a pro-Israeli speech and later condemned da Silva's reception of Ahmadinejad. Serra is already leading Rousseff in polls by 11 percentage points. Conscious of Brazil's percentage of Jewish population (less than 1 percent of total population) and a sizable number of Brazilians growing leery of da Silva's foreign policy adventurism with Iran, Serra can be expected to hone in on this issue in his campaign. It remains to be seen whether domestic politics in Brazil will lead da Silva to back off his Iran outreach should it prove detrimental to Rousseff's campaign.
The Brazilian business community has not yet reacted strongly to da Silva's diplomatic flirtations with Tehran, but the further da Silva goes in this Iran initiative, the more problems he could create for Brazilian traders who are heavily integrated with the West. Along this vein, it will be important to watch for signs that the United States will seek to retaliate where it hurts Brazil most: In its pocketbook. There already has been talk of restricting access to U.S. financing in the oil and natural gas sector in Washington; and at a time when Brazil has high hopes for the sector, alienating the United States and its high-technology firms could develop into a serious roadblock.
Not Ready to Throw Caution to the Wind?
So far, Washington and others can find comfort in the fact that Brazil and Iran currently do not have much to boast of beyond the diplomatic fanfare. Although Brazil is Iran's largest trading partner in Latin America, the total annual trade between the two remains small at roughly $1.3 billion (with Brazil making up most of this trade through meat and sugar exports). And since Brazil is already self-sufficient in oil, the country simply does not have a big appetite for Iranian energy exports to support a major boost in this trade relationship.
Although Da Silva may see the strategic benefit for now in promoting himself as an advocate of the Iranian regime, he also seems to be conscious of when to take a step back. Much to Washington's discontent, Brazil made a foray into the Iranian energy market in 2003 when state-owned Petrobras obtained exploration and drilling rights in the Caspian Sea under a $34 million agreement. Petrobras, however, said in November 2009 that it was pursuing an end to its activities in Iran, claiming that their technical evaluation concluded that the project was no longer commercially viable. Though Petrobras insisted the decision to leave was not made under political pressure, the announcement came as the United States was gearing up sanctions against Iran's energy sector, perhaps shedding a ray of light on Brazil's pragmatism in handling the Iranian portfolio.
Da Silva's Cabinet also has shown similar restraint in dealing with Iran's nuclear controversy. Brazil has a modest nuclear power program — complete with two nuclear power plants in operation and one under construction, enrichment facilities and a small reprocessing plant. Iran has tried to claim in the past that Brazil has offered to enrich uranium on Iran's behalf (similar to how it exaggerates Japan's willingness to ensnare itself in Iran's nuclear program); however, Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Morim and local technicians have denied that they would do so, claiming that Brazil does not have sufficient technology to take part in such a deal.
But Washington is not taking chances on Brazil's newfound interest in Iran — hence the U.S. diplomatic entourage that is now making its way to Brasilia. In a tone reminiscent of a parent lecturing a teenager coming of age, U.S. State Department spokesperson Philip Crowley said Feb. 25, "Clearly Brazil is an emerging power with growing influence in the region and around the world, and we believe that with that influence comes responsibility."
How Far Will Da Silva Go?
While most of the Iran-Brazil relationship consists of diplomatic theater, there are two areas of potential cooperation that could be game changers for the United States: banking and nuclear energy. Iran is facing escalating sanctions pressure over its nuclear program. One of the many ways Iran has tried to circumvent this threat is by setting up money-laundering operations abroad to keep Iranian assets safe and trade flowing. In Venezuela, where Chavez will more readily take on an opportunity to stick it to Washington, and in Panama, where banking transparency is an ongoing concern, Iran has forged ties between local banks and Banco Internacional de Desarrollo CA, a subsidiary of Export Development Bank of Iran (EDBI), to give Iran indirect access to the U.S. financial system. EDBI already has been blacklisted by the U.S. Treasury Department for directly supporting Iran's nuclear weapons program and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The blacklist affords the United States both the ability for sanctions on Americans dealing with these banks and a pressure lever against foreign firms interested in keeping their U.S. assets safe.
Iran has tried a similar banking tactic in Brazil. When Ahmadinejad paid a visit to Brazil in May 2009, Iranian EDBI and Brazilian banking officials drafted a memorandum of understanding that was on the surface a mere agreement to facilitate trade between the two countries. But facilitating banking cooperation could mean a lot of things, including the establishment of Iranian banks in Brazil to evade the U.S. sanctions dragnet. Brazil already is believed to direct most of its trade with Iran through the United Arab Emirates to avoid attracting negative attention, but Iranian banks on Brazilian soil would not be easy to hide and would not be ignored by the United States.
Then there is the ever-controversial nuclear issue. Reports also emerged in the Brazilian press Feb. 26 that Brazil's Office of Institutional Security, which answers to the president, has begun consultations with technicians in Brazil's nuclear program to establish what points can be included in a possible nuclear deal with Iran that could be signed during da Silva's visit to Iran in May. The O Globo report does not specify what points of cooperation are being discussed, but Brazil reportedly is working on a new uranium-refining technique called magnetic levitation, which is being developed by the navy at the Aramar lab in Sao Paulo. The news follows a Brazilian announcement from early 2009 that the country is pursuing uranium enrichment on an industrial scale, with a goal to produce 12 tons of enriched uranium for nuclear power supply.
Brazil not only is working toward self-sufficiency in nuclear power but also may be positioning itself to become a supplier of nuclear fuel for the global market. Such a move could boost Brazil's mediation credentials in dealing with countries like Iran, but would draw ire from the United States and Israel, which do not want to see Iran acquiring additional nuclear fuel unless Tehran first makes concrete guarantees on curbing the Iranian enrichment program. Adding to these nuclear tensions is Brazil's continued refusal to sign an additional International Atomic Energy Agency protocol for strengthened safeguards in the lead-up to a Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty review conference scheduled for May. Brazil maintains that it has enough legal mechanisms to prove the peaceful nature of its program, which Iran will echo in defense of its own nuclear activities.
Da Silva has yet to finalize who all will be accompanying him to Tehran this May as the first Brazilian president to visit the Islamic republic. With da Silva pushing the envelope, STRATFOR will be watching closely to see whether discussions among Iran and Brazilian banking and nuclear officials could transform a relationship resting mostly on paper and rhetoric into a real threat to U.S. interests.
John Mauldin is president of Millennium Wave Advisors, LLC, a registered investment advisor. All material presented herein is believed to be reliable but we cannot attest to its accuracy. Investment recommendations may change and readers are urged to check with their investment counselors before making any investment decisions.
Opinions expressed in these reports may change without prior notice. John Mauldin and/or the staffs at Millennium Wave Advisors, LLC and InvestorsInsight Publishing, Inc. (InvestorsInsight) may or may not have investments in any funds, programs or companies cited above.
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03-04-2010 8:43 AM | <urn:uuid:9c51c6e2-e5a4-4b95-9f4b-ce6445af2c8a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.investorsinsight.com/blogs/john_mauldins_outside_the_box/archive/2010/03/04/brazil-iran-a-troublesome-relationship-for-the-u-s.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953337 | 3,601 | 1.59375 | 2 |
In the last couple days, the invite feature for Google+ has stayed open, which means we could start seeing an influx of people wondering what this new social network is about. We all want to connect with friends.
One great way to do that is through Google Hangout. We can talk with up to 9 others on a single session, which is a lot of fun. However, sometimes it can be a painful experience if someone in the group is moving around a lot or not being courteous to others. So how can we all make our hangouts a great experience?
Let’s give you 10 ideas.
Create a comfortable environment to Hangout in
You might be on a hangout for an hour or more. The longest hangout I was on so far was around 3 hours. Therefore, finding a great place to personally hang out is key to making your experience a better one. A comfortable chair and a good table or other surface can give you a comfortable setting.
Hanging out with your Laptop on your Lap – the Webcam is on
There was one hangout where 2 women were present. One of them had her laptop on her lap. Several times she had to move around, causing the webcam to move into akward spots. Let’s just say that she gave us a great view of things at times.
During the hangout, the webcam is on the whole time. You can choose to let hangout switch between cams, or you can manually select. Therefore, people can watch as you move, scratch, pick or do something else.
Type, type, type goes the keyboard
To you, it doesn’t sound that bad, but a keyboard on a laptop can sound like you are taking a sledgehammer to your keyboard. Even using the mouse and clicking the mouse has a definite sound.
There are two ways to counter that sound. 1. Get an external keyboard and mouse. 2. Get a headset microphone. That way you can still type away and surf the internet without the sound travelling through others ears.
External USB headsets are nice.
I would suggest you get one – USB over one that you plug into your microphone-in jack. I have had more success with good audio over a USB headset and if you are in Windows7, you can set the levels to that microphone so people aren’t hearing your impression of Darth Vader. When you unplug the USB mic, the settings change back to normal.
Need an external microphone? Check out some USB Headsets.
Turn off the Microphone Boost
I am not sure why Windows used this feature. Nine times out of ten, the audio boost option has caused more problems than naught. What’s even more interesting is Google Hangout has a feature to reduce sounds, so you are basically causing your computer to work harder.
- Go into audio properties
- Choose the “Recording” tab
- Select the microphone and choose “Configure”
- Choose the “Levels” tab and adjust.
The mute button is there and you are not talking. Use it. Just mute yourself. You will see a mute icon on your video image saying you did so. Of course, when you do start talking, you need to un-mute it.
Be a Good Moderator
If you start your own hangout, own the hangout. If you pass through the images on the bottom, you can see their names. Simply choose someone and ask – “So what do you think about…”
Let them speak
Unless they are making a mockery of the Hangout, let them finish what they have to say. If each person gets a chance, your hangout can be really productive and talked about. If you are planning to run several hangouts for promotion or more information, then working on the listening skills is a very important part.
One note that may be weird to those who haven’t done video chatting. You hear others through your speakers or headphones, but when you talk, you hear nothing through your speakers. That can be a little distracting at first. I notice that some people will start their sentence, then have to start again.
A good light is actually pretty easy. I use a lamp with a 20 watt incandescent bulb that gives 100 watts soft light. The lamp has a white shade around it, so it can really fill out the room.
If you want less light, it’s possible to still have a good picture. However, your computer does work harder in less light, therefore you might have connection issues. When my machine flips between webcams, a camera that focuses fast will come up fast.
Make em smile, make em smile.
In this new concept to communicate on the web, we see everything you do. Start with a smile, make them feel at home and they’ll be back when you do future hangouts. Even though it doesn’t switch to you on the screen, people see you on their screens.
These are some pretty simple ideas to help you with your Google Hangout. The more you hangout, the more you’ll get used to it. The cooler you are in hangout, the less you’ll get banned. You might even get invited to a few hangouts in the future. | <urn:uuid:61360340-6c00-474d-8479-2b8086682f3f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.geekazine.com/news/10-ways-to-make-google-hangout-a-better-experience-for-all/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954725 | 1,107 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Energy minister Greg Barker has called for gas and electricity prices to be made clearer so people are aware of exactly what they are paying for.
Speaking to consumer group Which? at this week's conservative party conference in Manchester, Mr Barker stated the government is strongly encouraging the energy regulator to tackle any barriers to competition and ensure consumers have access to the best energy deals.
He said: "The Ofgem proposals aimed at reducing tariff complexity and improving comparability should make it easier for consumers to navigate the market and find the best deal."
The minister added it is important the Big Six suppliers face healthy competition in order to keep gas and electricity prices under control and said that radical reforms are needed to allow for greater use of energy sources such as renewables and nuclear power.
This could be essential if gas and electricity prices are to be kept at a sustainable level for the years to come, he added.
Make sure you're not paying too much for your energy - compare gas and electricity prices now at energyhelpline.com or call 0800 074 0745 | <urn:uuid:002b3912-ee45-4d8f-9c8b-ac81dc38b7ca> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.energyhelpline.com/fri/fri/domesticenergy/news/video/40003750 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953483 | 213 | 1.671875 | 2 |
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Thu October 14, 2010
Michigan foreclosure rate stable, but still higher than last year
Michigan’s home foreclosure rate has stabilized, but is still much higher than the national rate. One out of every 98 homes in the state is in the foreclosure process.
Daren Bloomquist is a spokeman for RealtyTrac, a company that tracks foreclosures.
“In Michigan I would say the number one issue is unemployment. It's still there and so that's still pushing people into foreclosure. Until we solve that problem, you're still going to see an elevated level of foreclosures in Michigan," Bloomquist said.
The national foreclosure rate is actually down one-percent over the same time last year, while Michigan’s is up 25%. Bloomquist thinks state efforts to keep people in their homes last year pushed some foreclosures off to this year.
He bets more delays are on the way as some banks stop foreclosures to make sure they’re doing the paperwork right.
“The market does not like uncertainty and this really adds a huge element of uncertainty - if these properties that have been foreclose on, if there's some question about whether they were legitimately foreclosed on or not," Bloomquist said.
Bloomquist says if the delay is too drawn out it could force housing prices to go down even more. | <urn:uuid:dcefe779-b6ac-4fa4-8e8e-6ae0bf105bca> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.michiganradio.org/post/michigan-foreclosure-rate-stable-still-higher-last-year | 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 | 0.965293 | 292 | 1.828125 | 2 |
Jimmy Carter: Follow Christ’s Teaching, End The Death Penalty
Last Friday, the former President again called for an end to the death penalty in an editorial for the Associated Baptist Press.
Deploring the United States’ “fascination with the death penalty,” Carter listed out what he called “the overwhelming ethical, financial, and religious reasons to abolish the death penalty.” Carter noted that the death penalty has been unsuccessful in deterring violent crime, decimated states’ budgets and been applied unjustly across racial lines.
Chief among Carter’s concerns, however, is how the death penalty violates the teachings of Jesus Christ. He wrote:
Some devout Christians are among the most fervent advocates of the death penalty, contradicting Jesus Christ and misinterpreting Holy Scriptures and numerous examples of mercy. We remember God’s forgiveness of Cain, who killed Abel, and the adulterer King David, who had Bathsheba’s husband killed. Jesus forgave an adulterous woman sentenced to be stoned to death and explained away the “eye for an eye” scripture.
Sadly, Carter stands in a league of his own. He is the only American President in modern history to advocate for the repeal of the death penalty. | <urn:uuid:2e90407f-7088-4dcb-b31d-9174faeb303e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.faithinpubliclife.org/blog/jimmy-carter-follow-christs-teaching-end-the-death-penalty/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944745 | 266 | 1.820313 | 2 |
Western Nebraska Sights
www.WillhiteWeb.com: Your online resource for hiking, climbing and travel
Not exactly the destination place for traveling but many find themselves traveling across Nebraska while crossing the United States. Here are a few sights to consider visiting while passing through.
Chimney Rock National Historic Sight
You're not the first to make the trek across Nebraska, since the days of the Oregon Trail, California Trail, Mormon Pioneer Trail and the Pony Express....they all passed by Chimney Rock. The rock spire could be seen well out into the plains and was the first sign of the upcoming mountain terrain. Chimney Rock has been referenced in hundreds of early travelers journals.
Scotts Bluff National Monument
Not far west of Chimney Rock was the next landmark travelers passed, Scotts Bluff. These 500 foot rock towers must have been quite a sight for the early pioneers. Today a great road travels to the top of the bluff on a road carved into the mountain (through several tunnels). The summit has a great view, the north overlook has the highest point and benchmark (a 3 minute walk from the car). There is a visitors center with several hiking trails, one which goes up to the summit if you would rather walk up.
This is a free sight put up by the city of Alliance Chamber of Commerce to attract visitors. Imagine Stonehenge but with cars and you've got Carhenge. It makes for some interesting pictures.
Nebraska State Highpoint
Only a short detour off I-80, you can visit the highest point in Nebraska.
Some took a wagon, I took an Accord
On the trail to Scotts Bluff....now paved
Wagon near the visitors center
Trails near the visitors center
Trails on top of Scotts Bluff
Chimney Rock from the Visitors Center
One of several tunnels going up Scotts Bluff
View from Scotts Bluff | <urn:uuid:faf19ee4-cfba-4cb0-8896-0be0a089a54e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.willhiteweb.com/nebraska_travel/western_nebraska_sights_173.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942434 | 396 | 1.789063 | 2 |
tiltbillings wrote:while Dogen obviously did not use the Agama sutras, he certainly did reference and was very well versed in the Mahayana Sutras and the Tendai interpretation of them.
surely. but today his writings have largely replaced sutra reference in the soto school. instead of referencing meditation instructions from a sutra, many soto practitioners and teachers will reference dogen's fukan zazenji or another writing of his and so on with other specifics of the school. similar things have come about in many other schools, zen and others. for example nichiren buddhism, which may have been a better example but his complete and utter reinterpretation of the dharma is not the best comparison for the counterpart idea i'm looking for in the theravada school.
that's really beside the point, just an example. perhaps i should have worded this differently.
do you know of a theravada master whose school and teachings (specifically writings by his/her own hand) stand almost or totally independent from the pali canon? particularly on a large scale? | <urn:uuid:650f31ae-9dba-4424-b1b9-e4115e1a7387> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dhammawheel.com/viewtopic.php?p=232965 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972701 | 234 | 1.679688 | 2 |
In Britain, complaining is patriotic
It really is, you know. It’s how we show our love. Sarcasm, grumbling, and saying everything with one eyebrow raised is basically how we get our jollies in this country. Well, that, and eating chips – although not Macdonalds fries, because they, whilst largely considered to be perfectly tasty, are not what any self-respecting Brit would consider a chip. Fries are what Americans eat with their cheeseburgers. Chips are big chunky yummy things you eat in the pub with a pint while you’re sheltering from the rain because your umbrella turned inside out in the wind and hit you in the eye while you were waiting for a bus.
If cynical moaning offends you, then you’re living in the wrong country.
Even so, our esteemed Mayor of London Boris has joined the growing list of voices insisting that we must, we must, we absolutely bloody well must on all accounts have a good time during the Olympics, and if we don’t like it we can belt up and stop our “whingeing.”
Does he know what country he’s in? This is not America. They do enthusiasm on tap extremely well. Neither is this France or Italy. We don’t get passionate, we don’t show our emotions. Well, unless we’re drunk and someone cuts ahead of us in the queue for a kebab and chips. (If you’re coming for the Olympics, by the way, you might like to note, that fries, rather than proper chunky chips, are acceptable under these debauched desperate circumstances. They have a greater surface area and therefore a greater potential for oil and grease, which is how we make up for the fact that we don’t really ever put any seasoning or flavouring besides salt on any of our foods. That’s right! There’s method in the madness!)
Ed West wrote in the Daily Telegraph today about the Olympics, calling for us to give the whole thing a “big British welcome.” West is something of an expert on American culture but we are British, and, well, what does he think we’re doing? This is how we welcome people in Britain. We sneer, mock, deride and complain. At ourselves, of course, not at the people coming here; they are all absolutely welcome. We’re just a bit baffled about why they’re bothering, and, because we’re actually a rather considerate nation (despite our best efforts to pretend otherwise to ourselves and the rest of the world), we think it’s fair to make sure everyone has reasonable expectations of what Britain is like before they experience their first rail replacement service. So, tourists: it will rain. The tube will break at least once. You won’t meet the Queen. You won’t meet Prince Harry. You won’t see any bowler hats. We don’t talk like Hugh Grant. Most of us talk in sounds rather than clear words, usually with our mouths full of beer-battered cod, as well. But we’re nice, and we are, in spite of all appearances, genuinely rather flattered that you’re coming.
In fact, as whingeing goes, we’ve been remarkably low level about it, considering that there are a lot of things to whinge about, and how much we love to do it.
I mean, corporate sponsorship isn’t exactly the decline of moral civilisation as we know it but when we read that Adidas are allowed to place subliminal advertising in primary schools, presented to look like an official instruction, for a state event, while at the same time reading about a local butchers which is facing legal action after depicting sausages shaped like Olympic rings on a poster, we can’t help but smell the foul scent of killjoy corporatism.
And when LOCOG basically demand that no-one links them online if they’re saying anything negative, they can’t be surprised if people get riled up and irritated. It’s like the episode of The Office where David Brent demands that the staff come and “have a laugh” in the pub with him then gets upset when he finds out that no-one likes him. Brits are not all grumpy, we’re not miserable, we’re not joyless. Look how well we coped with the riots. (By we, I mean the hundreds of Londoners who cleaned up London and made tea for the coppers, obviously; I don’t mean our elected leaders, several of whom were off on their holidays and loathe to come back.) In fact most of us are perfectly cheerful and perfectly humorous. We just don’t like being told when to be cheerful, or which powerful figures we’re allowed to make fun of.
But it’s not just a matter of being treated like children by the Olympic authorities. Being treated like a child is annoying and a bit humiliating, but we can live with it. On the other hand, being treated like a potential criminal every time you walk through London Bridge station is actually a little tiny bit frightening. It’s not something we’re used to in Britain, having these armed police with enormous machine guns standing around, giving us suspicious glances if we curse, cry or blink at the wrong time during our daily commute. (Commutes are stressful. I’m a fairly peaceful person but I can’t account for the numbers that would be slain in my wake by now if I’d had a gun at my fingertips during every tube journey at rush hour.)
It doesn’t help to see the results of the Ian Tomlinson case in the news this week, either. If that’s what is considered acceptable policing in the middle of a rather standard, reasonably peaceful, protest, what will be considered acceptable levels of force during an event like the Olympics? What will happen if some hapless man is wandering around in the wrong place at the wrong time again? This is not America. They trust guns in America. They shoot terrorists, they shoot animals, and they shoot each other. But this is Britain. We have riots where looters stand in queues to steal bottles of water. Guns are alien to us.
Some people would say that all this is astonishingly unBritish. Some people would say that there is another word for using the powers of the state to promote corporate interests and vice versa. It’s an ugly word, and it begins with F.
Obviously fascism is a ridiculously hyperbolic and silly word to use in conjunction with Britain in any context and all things considered I’m still actually quite excited about the Olympics; the new faces around London, the inspirational role models for young people, the boost for human aspiration, the tourism revenues, the whole caboodle. Buckle me up, I’m ready and buzzing. But when I see state sponsored corporate advertising, and corporations telling children what to wear in order to attend a state event that politicians tell you not to criticise, when I see local butchers being told how to arrange their sausage posters and soldiers being brought in to do the work of security services after police jobs have been cut and a heap of public money has been spent on outsourcing that work to the private sector which fumbled it like a bad penalty, well, sorry to disappoint Boris but I’m afraid that if I feel like “whingeing” about any or all of that, then you know what? I bloody well will do.
Perhaps this is why Len McLuskey called upon everyone to engage in mass civil disobedience to disrupt the event. Is it really British to use primary schools for subliminal advertising? Is it British to attempt a ban on authentic English chips? Is it British to draft professional soldiers in to protect the Olympic park and then make them pay £1 for a shower? Is it British to tell local butchers how to arrange their sausages? I don’t think so. Brits understand fair play, queuing, irreverence and irony. We mock things to show that we embrace them as ours.
It’s not just the Olympics. We mock the Royal Family. We mock our sports stars, even when they do brilliantly. We even mock fish and chips. If we mock the games, it’s a compliment. You’re up there with fish and chips in our hearts. Global companies with special tax exemptions, and detached, wealthy politicians who enjoy a decidedly different lifestyle from most of the rest of us, well, perhaps they don’t get this, but the reason people are disappointed by the handling of the Olympics is because it’s actually become a thoroughly unBritish affair. It’s not just a matter of being po-faced about the games. On the contrary, people are sad because something that hundreds and hundreds of Brits have been genuinely excited about for a really long time is turning into an oppressive, killjoy, taxpayer-funded binge of corporate advertising, with diktats, and an authoritarian instruction to Have Fun on Command by the State.
Frankly, Boris is the one who should stop whingeing. In fact, he should count himself lucky that all we’re bothering to complain about, in the midst of all this, is the weather and the transport. But then, that’s what you’d expect from us. After all, we’re British. | <urn:uuid:8a6e01d1-bec4-4f35-9acf-8ebb46e77269> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://lefteyerighteye.wordpress.com/2012/07/20/2-minute-rant-in-britain-complaining-is-patriotic/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958233 | 2,007 | 1.523438 | 2 |
The White House presented its 2012 budget Monday. A $3.8 trillion proposal which includes $1.43 trillion in new taxes on households whose incomes meet or exceed $250,000 (note: this is the new “progressive” definition of millionaires and billionaires), a fourth straight year of $1 trillion-plus deficit spending (which will require yet more borrowing), and new mandatory spending intended for the Education and Energy Departments.
As has been the case for the past three years, the White House pays lip service to calls for reduced spending. There are no efforts made to reform “entitlement” programs, which make up a sizeable majority of federal spending and will, if continuously ignored, bankrupt the country. The “spending cuts” found in this budget are largely figments of the imagination. Since America’s military is already out of Iraq, and the date for withdrawal from Afghanistan has already been announced, saying that “were the United States armed forces to remain deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan at full troop and equipment levels through 2018” would cost X amount of money, and therefore not spending that money now constitutes spending cut is at best disingenuous. It’s like announcing that a household’s spending has been reduced by $50,000 over the next five years because they didn’t take out a 60-month loan on a new car. Within a $3.8 trillion budget, claims that reducing the Environmental Protection Agency’s spending to $8.34 billion amounts to meaningful reduction is like saying someone changes the world’s sea level by pouring a glass of water into the Pacific Ocean.
That this budget is part of a campaign strategy is both painfully obvious and not especially noteworthy, especially to voters who are aware of the obvious media bias in America. Those who have actively sought out stories that somehow managed to “escape” coverage by the “mainstream” media have seen this one coming since last year’s announcement that occupy Oval Office is running for re-election. Submitting a budget certain to garner no legislative support intentionally creates an environment which allows the current White House occupant to rail against a “do nothing” Congress. Refusals by Congress to raise taxes on “millionaires and billionaires” (that’s those who make $250,000 a year) means they’re helping the “most fortunate among us” avoid paying “their fair share”. This proposal by the White House sets up one campaign theme after another.
The budget is so bad that, like last year, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell plans to introduce it to a Democratically controlled Senate that hasn’t passed a budget in a thousand days (talk about “do nothing”).
There seems to be no satisfying this administration’s appetite for spending. The underlying misconception that government spending stimulates long term economic growth merely stimulates the need for increased taxes to pay for the big government bureaucracies required to process the inefficient, wasteful spending. Since the day this administration took office, they have intentionally driven up spending with borrowed money. Now, they are attempting to institutionalize the spending increases with tax hikes. By stealing money under the threat of fine and/or imprisonment from the private sector that creates the wealth, they are making real economic growth more difficult.
Once again, “progressives” are calling for real; immediate tax increases in exchange for proposed, future spending cut. This is the same deal offered to Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. In both instances, the tax hikes happened, but not the spending cuts. In each case, the tax hikes did nothing to reduce deficits because the spending continued unabated.
“progressives” fondly reminisce about the good old days when Bill Clinton was President. Those were the days when the budget was balanced. Remember those days? That was when tax rates were higher. What “progressive” Democrats selectively fail to remember is that along with those higher tax rates, a Conservative House and a Conservative Senate legislated cut spending to go along with the higher tax rates.
Unless and until there are real, immediate, meaningful spending cuts as part of a budget deal, there should be no tax increases, period. | <urn:uuid:221b83a1-8a4f-491b-8caa-c5aea5aa2c2c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.conservativedailynews.com/2012/02/obamas-budget-more-tax-borrow-and-spend-2/ | 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 | 0.963236 | 881 | 1.835938 | 2 |
September 25, 2008
We can continue to make a difference in Darfur
The beginning of a new year is always filled with hope, potential and opportunity for growth and change. The year we are putting behind us has not been an easy one. Our economy has entered perilous waters, with many people losing their jobs -- and their homes. The war in Iraq is now in its fifth year. A series of hurricanes have ravaged our coasts. In our own lives, each of us has faced personal challenges that have tested our strength and resolve.
Amid all these issues, from the local to the global, it's understandable that we should feel a sense of vertigo. We tell ourselves the situation is too complex. We ask ourselves if our efforts truly make a difference. We question which issues deserve the most attention.
Some have called this feeling "compassion fatigue."
I'll be honest with you. I've spoken about Darfur for five years straight now, and sometimes I get tired of talking about the genocide that has claimed 450,000 lives, just as I'm sure people get tired of listening to me talk about it. Yet for me, as for many other Jews, there is simply no choice in the matter. This is because as Jews, we know what it is like to have the world forget and to have the world fail to act.
But if we choose to not to raise our voices about Darfur now, what will our children and grandchildren say about us? The approaching High Holy Days draw questions like these to the forefront.
Many of us have answered by taking action on Darfur. Yet, now in the fifth year of this grueling genocide, some are also asking, "Did the letter I wrote to my senator help? Did taking part in that rally have an impact?"
The answer is yes. We may not be able to place a precise number on the lives saved as a result of our efforts. But we can say our activism has contributed to 27 states adopting divestment policies for Sudan. We know that we have made Darfur a foreign policy priority for elected officials, as well as the presidential candidates. And we have ensured that humanitarian aid continues to go where it is most needed.
Here's what we can do now to help end the bloodshed: Push for expanding and enforcing an arms embargo to the region and pressure China, the biggest small arms dealer to Sudan, to stop the flow of weapons there. Let your senators know that you want the United States to support the embargo as a member of the U.N. Security Council. Tell them you want the U.S. government to use its influence to pressure China to stop underwriting the genocide with arms sales.
Now is not the time to diminish our resolve. Khartoum continues to deploy deadly air attacks. Last month, more than 30 civilians were killed when Sudanese government forces, armed with machine guns and automatic weapons of the kind sent by China, attacked one of Darfur's largest camps for displaced people.
As Yom Kippur approaches, I am mindful of this passage from the Book of Isaiah: "Is not this the fast I look for? To unlock the shackles of injustice? To undo the fetters of bondage? To let the oppressed go free and to break every cruel chain?"
Nowhere have I been brought more closely in touch with the meaning of these words than when I sat with Darfuris in a refugee camp in eastern Chad, welcoming the new year. The High Holy Day is meant to stir us, to shake us to our core. It is meant to reconfirm our values and strengthen our resolve to live by them. Because at the heart of the holiday experience is this enduring ethic: We cannot allow ourselves to succumb to inaction. For Jews, life is about deeds.
When the shofar is sounded on the new year, it is to awaken us from our slumber to the need in this world. Let the shofar's blast be a clarion call for each of us to remember that we can make a difference, and that each of us has a role to play to stop the killing in Darfur.
The action you take today or tomorrow on behalf of this cause likely won't be the last. But it will be the right act, the necessary act at this moment in time. The people of Darfur are waiting for the world to hear their cries.
We must answer their call.
Rabbi Lee T. Bycel is executive director of the American Jewish World Service Western Region. | <urn:uuid:fd795f0c-32d1-4c7e-add2-2ff62549b25e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.jewishjournal.com/articles/print/we_can_continue_to_make_a_difference_in_darfur_20080924 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96704 | 924 | 1.835938 | 2 |
Crude palm oil (CPO) is expected to trade between RM2,500 and RM3,200 a tonne in 2013, on the back of continuous demand for the commodity.
Malaysian Palm Oil Council (MPOC) Chief Executive officer Tan Sri Dr Yusof Basiron said palm oil continued to be an attractive long term commodity for producers and consumers.
He said China, the European Union and India will continue to be "chronic" net importers of oils and fats through 10 million tonnes annually, with Malaysia and Indonesia, the two biggest palm oil producers, being net exporters.
However, Yusof said at present, the palm oil price was affected by a temporary oversupply, and supply rationalisation is needed to stabilise the market.
He said the temporary supply imbalance is wrongly speculated as having reduced demand which might affect price stability.
"Demand is easy to forecast. But we have had to manage the extraordinary palm oil supply that occurred over three or four months of last year, and which led to a price drop, low prices and even reduced our projected price from RM3,000 to RM2,700 a tonne for 2012," he said in his address, "Market Challenges and Opportunities for Palm Oil in 2013 and Beyond".
He was speaking at the two-day Palm & Lauric Oils Conference & Exhibition which began here today.
Yusof said the needed supply rationalisation includes building more tanks to cater for peak months, and more ships for shipment during peak production periods.
"The supply rationalisation issue must be addressed both in Malaysia and Indonesia, as the biodiesel programmes in both countries can stabilise palm oil prices," he added.
Meanwhile, Yusof pointed out several challenges in the global palm oil industry, namely the ideology threat, growth in world population versus food security, scarcity of land and global warming.
He said the global population is projected to grow to nine billion by 2043 from seven billion in 2011, and food production must meet this rate of increase.
"This alone is sufficient to exert pressure on commodity prices," he added.-- Bernama | <urn:uuid:1896a541-0dc2-404d-bce8-6be4742ee682> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.btimes.com.my/articles/20130305150643/Article/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969835 | 432 | 1.578125 | 2 |
Some damn fine data visualization (interactive data visualization, at that!) by the folks at the Institue for Health Metrics and evaluation.
Here are some snap-judgements:
All Causes (males pictured above)
A downward trend in the combined causes accounted for. True for males and females alike.
Not much of an issue in the U.S. anymore. (Though it's a very different story for the rest of the world.)
I'm confused... are these victims of poisoning (as in, they were poisoned intentionally by someone else) or accidental poisonings (self-inflicted or otherwise)? Either way: WHAT'S WITH THE POISON BOOM??
One of the few causes of death where probabilities in women are markedly higher than those in men. Things have gotten better, but not by much. Kind of the case for a lot of cancers, actually.
Much more to explore over at IHME. | <urn:uuid:0371f714-8b9d-4afc-a40d-5d5547b71e5f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://io9.com/5970299/charting-causes-of-death-in-america-between-1970-and-2006?tag=data-visualization | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939253 | 193 | 1.539063 | 2 |
Waves began in October 1992 with the introduction of the first audio plugin, the Q10 Paragraphic equalizer. The Q10 broke new ground in three major areas. First, it was the debut of the audio signal processor plugin, a tool commonly used today. Second, its graphic user interface gave users unprecedented control and eliminated the requirement for a DSP engineering background since it automated the filter coefficient calculations. Finally, the revolutionary Q10 offered sound quality equal to or better than many of its hardware counterparts.
Another highlight of Waves’ first decade of success was the development of the L1 Ultramximizer™, which established a new benchmark for dynamic controls. Still considered innovative over a decade later, countless L1s are an integral part of studios all over the world. Propelled by an increasingly comprehensive product line, Waves quickly became a favorite of engineers worldwide and the choice of recognized audio masters. | <urn:uuid:d71ea2da-5493-4e05-8526-109c453c61c0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://soundwrx.net/digitalmusicreviewsblog/waves-audio | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952428 | 184 | 1.671875 | 2 |
Written by Jeff Mackey
In the triumphant finale to a long, hard legal struggle
over a suit filed by PETA and citizens of Guayama, Puerto Rico, the Puerto
Rican Supreme Court upheld the decisions of the lower courts that the monkey-breeding facility built
in Guayama by Bioculture, Inc., was constructed illegally and therefore cannot be
opened for business!
The court also denied Bioculture's motion to reconsider the
ruling. So, as
Kathy Guillermo, PETA's vice president of laboratory investigations, put it, "The
final nail is now in Bioculture's coffin, and the 4,000 monkeys and generations
of their offspring who would have suffered and died for the company's profit
have been officially spared."
Muchas gracias to
everyone who helped put a stop to Bioculture's plan to capture monkeys from their
homes in the wild, imprison them in cages, and then sell their offspring for
use in painful and deadly
at notorious facilities such as Shin Nippon Biomedical Laboratories, Charles River Laboratories,
Now, let's put another nail in the nasty
monkey-pimping-and-torture coffin. Click here to urge airlines that still transport nonhuman
primates to U.S. laboratories for cruel experiments to cut out the monkey
you have a general question for PETA and would like a response, please e-mail Info@peta.org. If you need to report cruelty to
an animal, please click
here. If you are reporting an animal in imminent danger and know where to find the
animal and if the abuse is taking place right now, please call your local
police department. If the police are unresponsive, please call PETA
immediately at 757-622-7382 and press 2.
Follow PETA on Twitter!
Almost all of us grew up eating meat, wearing leather, and going to circuses and zoos. We never considered the impact of these actions on the animals involved. For whatever reason, you are now asking the question: Why should animals have rights? Read more. | <urn:uuid:df27b020-1143-47de-9803-f7dcec4bf8ee> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.peta.org/b/thepetafiles/archive/2012/01/19/victory-supreme-court-nixes-monkey-farm.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94703 | 447 | 1.5625 | 2 |
When Vodafone approached DMD Advocates to handle its case against the Income Tax Department in the Supreme Court, partner Fereshte Sethna knew she would need to put her life on hold for at least two years. Vodafone had just let go ALMT Legal, the firm that lost its case in the Mumbai High Court, and was looking to start with a clean slate. Starting from scratch, moving between Mumbai, Delhi and London, Sethna, her partner Anuradha Dutt and independent counsel Harish Salve finally procured a judgement that saves Vodafone Rs 11,000 crore and sets an abiding precedent.
There's still a review petition and a PIL to contend with, but Sethna is taking some time out to savour the moment. "I would say to you, there is a clear trend of global players accessing the legal system of the country. The Indian judiciary is seen as independent. It may not always be so in every day life, but our system is efficient where it really matters," she says.
India is not an overly litigious society where citizens are prone to suing each other. Most disputes tend to be settled bilaterally and only the most contentious go to court. The one exception here seems to be the government.
Under pressure to increase tax revenues in a slowdown, in a quandary over the interpretation of new laws it has enacted and often pulled into litigation by political compulsions, the government is currently corporate India's biggest adversary. Ask Ajit Gulabchand, chairman and managing director of Hindustan Construction Company, which operates in a naturally litigious industry.
"90% of our litigation is with arms of the government," he says. "They create badly framed regulations and when questions of interpretation arise, they want the courts to decide. Worse, if a decision goes against them, they won't stop. They will keep challenging it in higher courts."
From Reliance ADAG and Vedanta to the Tatas and Essar, every major corporate house today has cases pending against the government in court. And as more and more corporates prepare to do battle, top law firms are being put on retainership, if only to ensure that the best lawyers don't work for the other side if it comes to a crunch.
This is good news for Indian law firms, though it means many of them will have to change direction. Through the past decade, the younger firms have grown through 'non-contentious' work, which is mostly about drafting watertight contracts than strive to ensure that corporates never have to go court. That era seems to over as the realisation dawns that there's just no getting away from contentious work.
At JSA (formerly Jyoti Sagar Associates), Somasekhar Sundaresan looks after a booming Securities Regulatory Practice, which fights cases against the likes of SEBI - such as that of investment banker Enam Securities, which has gone to court over a penalty imposed by the market regulator for not mentioning the fact that Rabo is the promoter of Yes Bank at the time of the bank's IPO. "Litigation has increased because of a steady increase in regulation," he says. "Controls that were thrown out have crept back in as regulations. Every time there's a problem, there's a new law. So India Inc is litigating against regulators."
One of the reasons law firms eschewed adversarial work was because it takes far more time and is less remunerative than contract work. A single private equity transaction, for example, earns JSA the same amount as five regulatory litigations.
But Sundaresan is now reconciled to that, saying, "Litigation is an invaluable learning experience. Yes, its a jealous mistress that takes up all your attention, leaving room for nothing else, but the time spent is an investment. The experience gives you insights that make you better at contractual law."
If the civil litigation that goes with commercial law is engaging, the litigation that goes with criminal law is intense. Most Indian industrialists have had to contend with criminal cases against them sometime or the other in their career, and it can be a harrowing experience, requiring them to make personal appearance before the court and in some extreme cases, face arrest. Three years ago, Zulfiquar Memon, managing partner of MZM Legal, arranged bail for the managing director of India Infoline when he was arrested on the basis of a criminal complaint by a lady who accused the brokerage of misappropriating her money.
More recently, MZM has taken up the case of senior exectives of MTS, who have been arrested by the DCB, CID and the Central Intelligence Unit for allegedly tampering with some customer authentication forms in order to facilitate unregistered numbers and internet cards to unknown people. "These things can come out of the blue," says Memon. "Someone can register an FIR against a CEO or a CFO, who is totally unaware of it until a magistrate issues an arrest warrant against them. It could be anything from fraud to sexual harassment." | <urn:uuid:228a3662-77c0-42ec-8fa4-623ae8ff6270> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-03-02/news/31116919_1_law-firms-almt-legal-jyoti-sagar-associates | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972554 | 1,042 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Everyone does online presentations of one sort or another today. But do you always question the people who are sitting through them to make sure they’re getting the message?
You might want to start, especially if you’re doing any sort of training or tutorials for employees or customers. Teachers, and those who study learning, have known for a long time that people are much more likely to process and retain information if they’re tested on it — and a well-known 2007 study at Washington University proved it. And testing gives trainers, teachers and marketers a chance to see what’s getting through to whom and to adjust accordingly on the fly.
Of course, you probably don’t have a professional educator on your staff to design effective test questions and immediately evaluate each response so that presentation-watchers can be matched instantly to the right follow-up material and questions. What you want is to have all that happen automatically. But how do you build that sort of interactive testing into a PowerPoint presentation or online tutorial?
It’s not an idle question for some small businesses. Take DBS Financial in Akron, Ohio. DBS, which provides car loans to consumers, has three types of training it deems crucial for its 30 employees: how to handle customer collections, how to stay in compliance with the extensive regulation of the collections business (protecting consumer privacy and so forth) and how to stay in compliance with company human resources policy, which covers everything from phone use to avoiding falling on company property during the icy Ohio winters.
“We’d show videos, or have people come in to do classroom training, but it was a huge pain,” said Sam Snellenberger, who runs the company. “We’d have to cycle in employees in three different groups to make sure there was adequate customer coverage, and by the time we were through it took up most of a day. You could see people’s minds wandering during the presentations. And then supervisors would have to work with individual employees to make sure everyone understood everything.”
So DBS started paying $160 a month to use a sort of PowerPoint-like Web-based service called MindFlash that makes it easy for people without much background in training to develop presentations with multiple-response questions. “Everyone does the training now at different times, whenever it’s easiest to free the time up,” Mr. Snellenberger said. “We know everyone’s getting through the material, and we can see who’s having trouble with the questions so we can follow up with them.”
He adds that besides improving the quality of the training, the new approach also reduces the company’s liability if an employee runs into trouble, because it can prove the employee got the training and passed the test. (MindFlash pricing varies with the number of test-takers, and new users will pay a bit more than DBS because of a price increase. Also, bear in mind that if you cancel the service you lose access to past test data.)
I found MindFlash pretty easy to use — I didn’t even bother to take the company’s tutorial or read any help documents, I just plunged right in. You can prepare any documents or presentations or videos using whatever software or services you normally do and then upload them to MindFlash as “slides.” Then you stick in quizzes wherever you want — MindFlash guides you through the process of setting up different types of questions, and gives you plenty of simple options for how to deal with right and wrong responses. It took me about an hour to put together a micro-course on brewing beer at home, complete with quizzes. Feel free to give it a try. And here’s a more extensive demo about training new hires that MindFlash put together for this post. (You have to register with MindFlash to take my course but not to see MindFlash’s.)
MindFlash isn’t the only online training tool out there — another is eLeaP (and PowerPoint does, in fact, let you add a very bare-bones interactivity to a presentation, but it’s not as easy to incorporate as with these dedicated tools, and it doesn’t leave you with user data). One of the big advantages to this sort of interactive question-and-response capability is that what users see during a presentation can be tailored to their responses to questions as they go along. Not only does that make this sort of tool great for training, but I could imagine it being terrific for customer support — and possibly even for marketing, because it offers an effective means for qualifying customers based on their responses.
I couldn’t find anyone using these kinds of training-presentation tools for marketing (MindFlash told me it’s trying to find out), or any marketing tools that allow for this sort of powerful and easy interactivity, but I’d be curious if anyone out there is doing something along these lines. Let me know! | <urn:uuid:b5d7fbf8-f139-4811-8f68-4380a05dcfc4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/a-tech-tool-that-puts-employees-and-customers-to-the-test/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95594 | 1,042 | 1.757813 | 2 |
Banks And Solicitors Are Overcharging The Dead
By Claire West
Final Duties, the UK's first independent probate broker, estimates that tens of thousands of people are being systematically overcharged for probate work, by banks and solicitors, often because of decisions that were made by the deceased many years ago.
Adam Walker, founder and managing director of Final Duties, said: "For probate work the scale of overcharging is quite staggering. Currently the average estate value is £137,000. Solicitors typically charge a fee of around 2% of the value of the estate for probate work. Banks charge even more, typically 4% of the value of the estate. This is grossly unfair, as the value of the estate does not determine how much work is required."
Probate is usually required when assets worth £5000 or more were in the deceased's sole name. Banks, building societies and financial institutions holding these assets usually ask for a Grant of Probate to be produced before they release the funds. These legal processes apply regardless of whether there is a Will or not. Probate can be very complex and involved so it is usually left to an expert. HM Courts Service recorded 286,038 Grants of Probate last year, of which 181,940 were lodged by banks or solicitors.
Walker adds, [i]"Our research shows that in the aftermath of a death very few people think to ask for a detailed quotation for probate work. Even fewer people obtain more than one quotation. This has meant that banks and solicitors have been able to overcharge for far too long. We are encouraging everyone to obtain a quotation for probate work from an independent source before they proceed. The savings can be significant. The most expensive quotation is often up to five times more expensive than the cheapest.
At Final Duties we recently had a case involving a large and complex estate where a bank had quoted £113,000 for probate work and we obtained a quote for the same work for under £26,000. | <urn:uuid:ab946309-a84f-4189-8c58-2244c99e30a3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.freshbusinessthinking.com/news.php?CID=0&NID=1296&Title=Banks+And+Solicitors+Are+Overcharging+The+Dead | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973474 | 418 | 1.609375 | 2 |
Now president of the Mockingbirds, Themis Academy's underground justice society, Alex Patrick investigates a student prescription-drug ring.
The drug in question is Anderin, a fictitious ADHD medication that works “like steroids for the brain.” The student body votes that cheating is a crime against all students, and Alex and the organization follow a set of contradictory leads. Although the original Mockingbirds (2010) presented the underground group's procedures as a wondrously comprehensive set of checks and balances, the sequel sees Alex floundering both practically and ethically. Believably, the stigma and doubt from previous year's rape trial still cling to Alex, and both her internal struggle and other students' hostility are portrayed with compassion and nuance. The story is ultimately driven by plot, and the author effectively shuttles readers through the twists, turns and double-crosses of the investigation as well as the ups and downs of a romance. Under scrutiny, however, little holds up. Alex asks herself repeatedly if the ends (catching cheaters) justify the means (snooping through other students' belongings), but a tidy resolution despite Alex's snooping undermines the question. The premise that school administrators refuse to acknowledge student wrongdoing remains hard to swallow: Why on Earth aren't the administrators afraid of parental lawsuits?
Slick, but, like a student on Anderin, less impressive when the effect wears off. (Fiction. 14 & up) | <urn:uuid:74f73d0c-5df9-41d6-871c-3c74275a3b74> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/daisy-whitney/rivals-whitney/print/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948922 | 298 | 1.523438 | 2 |
The information here is about the Excell family, initially in Sussex and Wiltshire in England, then in Australia - mainly in Victoria. There is some information about Robertson and King and associated families, who went from Scotland to New Zealand.
The ancestor chart and descendant books linked below all come from a database held in Family Origins. There is some overlap between the different books.
Ancestors of Barbara Hawgood (maiden name Excell) as a pedigree chart, 6 generations
Barbara Hawgood was born in New Zealand, daughter of Athol Frederick Excell (1897 - 1986) and Lorna Airini Robertson (1899 - 1989).
Descendants of Hezekiah Excell (book format) (4 generations to Athol Frederick Excell etc).
Hezekiah EXCELL was born about 1750. He bought land in Chichester, Sussex, England in 1786, and died there in 1803.
Descendants of John Weller (book format)
John WELLER was born about 1730 in Sussex, England. He was a farmer from 1780 in Lancing, Sussex and died there in 1797. His daughter Ann Weller (1760 - 1852) married Hezekiah Excell in 1791 in Chichester, Sussex.
Descendants of James Blackmore (book format)
James BLACKMORE was born about 1799 in Somerset, England. He died in 1890 in Melbourne, Australia. His daughter Mary Ann Blackmore married William Henry Excell in 1860 in Australia.
Descendants of Henry Banwell (book format)
Henry Banwell was born in England, married in Axbridge, Somerset, and emigrated to Australia. His daughter Mary Ann Banwell married Isaac Barclay (1851 - 1928) - see family above.
Descendants of Robert Brodribb of Clutton, Somerset (book format)(seven generations)
Information on the descendants of Robert Brodribb of Clutton,
Somerset. Information about family in England, and William Adams
Brodribb who went to Australia, is mainly from a booklet
published by that family in Australia in 1916. Information about
siblings and ancestors of Malcolm Hebden Brodribb, born 1873 in
Ararat, Victoria, Australia, is from Australian Vital Records.
Information about his descendants is from family sources.
Please note I have no information not already on these pages.
Descendants of William Hughes (book format) (2 generations)
William Hughes had a son Thomas Hughes who married Clara Ann Last in Southwark, Surrey, England in 1841. Their daughter Clara Ann Hughes emigrated to New Zealand and married William Campbell King.
Family of John Barkley (book format)
John Barkley was a Scot. His son Walter was born in Kircudbrightshire and moved to England, and in 1851 to Australia. His son Isaac BARCLAY was born in 1851 in the East End of London, England, and died on 12 Apr 1928 in Windsor, Victoria, Australia. His daughter Ruth Gertrude Excell married Melbourne Frederick William Excell, in Australia.
William King married Mary Thomson Campbell in Paisley, Scotland in 1845. They emigrated to Australia about 1855, and on to New Zealand about 1861. The pages here show King families in Scotland and New Zealand, Campbell and Thomson families in Scotland. Much of the information comes from one King family tree prepared in 1914 in New Zealand - we are not sure of the accuracy of earlier parts.
Descendants of Alexander King (book format) (5 generations)
Descendants of Hugh Campbell (book format) (3 generations)
Descendants of John Thomson (book format) (2 generations)
John Robertson married Euphemia Guthrie in Scotland in 1862, and they emigrated to New Zealand. These pages show their families in Scotland, and some descendants in New Zealand
Descendants of Robert Guthrie (book format) (three generations)
Descendants of John Robertson (book format) (three generations)
Descendants of Robert Breckinridge (book format) (two generations)
Descendants of James Winteridge (book format - three generations). James Winteridge was born in Hampshire, England in 1800; his ancestors were from the Isle of Wight. His grand-daughter Angelina Sarah Winteridge was married in 1902 in London to William Edmund King - who was born in New Zealand, and returned with Angelina to New Zealand where they raised a family.
Page by David Hawgood, amended 10 Apr 2010
Home page of David Hawgood | <urn:uuid:739dfc3c-45cf-49d6-85df-a565b218f064> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hawgood.co.uk/excell/index.htm | 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 | 0.953317 | 948 | 1.679688 | 2 |
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Pinkwashing Turns on Itself with Breast Cancer Awareness Gun
October was Breast Cancer Awareness month, and the group Breast Cancer Action seized on the opportunity to promote its Think Before you Pink campaign to raise awareness of how companies are increasingly exploiting breast cancer as a marketing device to sell products -- some of which are actually harmful to women's health. Pink ribbon campaigns are offering up some bizarre, albeit benign products like a breast cancer awareness toaster and a breast cancer awareness floating Beer Pong table. But the most bizarre item yet to have a pink ribbon slapped on it must be Smith & Wesson's Pink Breast Cancer Awareness 9 mm Pistol, promoted by a woman named Julie Goloski, Smith and Wesson's Consumer Program Manager and a sharpshooter herself. Goloski is promoting S&W's breast cancer awareness pistol on her Facebook page, saying "October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month and Breast Cancer Awareness M&P’s are shipping to dealers. I am thrilled to have my name associated with such a worthy cause and one of my favorite firearms." According to a 2008 report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, firearms are the second most common cause of violent deaths of women, accounting for 29.2% of all violent deaths among females in the U.S. in 2008. | <urn:uuid:3a6bdf8c-c60d-4360-b128-a27e5e7ddb5e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.prwatch.org/spin/2009/11/8671/pinkwashing-turns-itself-breast-cancer-awareness-gun | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931114 | 281 | 1.804688 | 2 |
Voices of WEMU
Tue November 29, 2011
In Texas, Keeping Kids In School And Out Of Court
Originally published on Wed November 30, 2011 5:56 pm
The sort of offenses that might land a student in the principal's office in other states often send kids in Texas to court with misdemeanor charges. Some schools have started rethinking the way they punish students for bad behavior after watching many of them drop out or land in prison because of tough disciplinary policies.
In a downtown Houston municipal court, Judge David Fraga has presided over thousands of cases involving students "ticketed" by school police. His docket is still relatively small at the moment, with only 45 to 65 cases per night.
"I suspect probably when school is in full bloom, probably we'll have between 125 [and] 150," Fraga says.
He isn't referring to cases involving adults ticketed for driving under the influence or suspended licenses, but rather young people ticketed by school police for fighting, disrupting class, or using profanity — all Class C misdemeanors. In other words, these infractions are the equivalent of crimes like insurance fraud and criminal mischief.
Erlin Zavala is making his second court appearance for skipping school. The gangly 13-year-old has jet black hair combed back with gel. He listens quietly to questions Fraga asks him, with his tired-looking mom at his side.
Fraga is a true believer in second chances. He won't decide Erlin's fate today, but he usually recommends community service just to keep kids' mistakes from becoming part of their permanent record.
"I mean you gotta show these young people that there's hope," Fraga says.
Winding up in a courtroom for skipping school might seem a bit excessive, but beginning in the mid 1990s, most states adopted rigid, "zero tolerance" policies in response to school shootings and gang violence. Schools in Texas went further by ticketing things like truancy, tardiness, dress code violations and the use of profanity at school.
Deborah Fowler, legal director for Texas Appleseed, a public interest law firm, says schools "criminalized kids' misdeeds, no matter how small.
"What we are seeing now are hundreds of thousands of Class C misdemeanor tickets being issued to juveniles in Texas [who are] being processed for those tickets through what is really an adult criminal justice court system," she says.
This summer, an exhaustive study by the Council of State Governments found that by 12th grade, more than half of all 14- to 15-year-olds in Texas are ticketed, expelled or suspended at least once. After they're ticketed, sent to court and fined hundreds of dollars, students aren't always allowed to go back to their home school. Instead, they're sent to an alternative school, a holding pen of sorts where kids are supposed to "learn their lesson."
Learning Their Lesson
Thomesha Turner, 18, is a senior in the Waco independent school district. She was a good student and had never been in trouble before a verbal altercation with a teacher.
She says the teacher pointed a finger in her face and called her a little girl.
"I told her to get out of my face 'cause I wasn't a little girl, and I cussed [her] out. I said, Miss, 'You get out of my face or I'll beat your bitch ass up.' There's a different way I could've handled it," Turner says, "but I didn't handle it in a more mature way."
Danielle Delgado, 12, is a diminutive girl with a hair-trigger temper. She's at the Waco Alternative School Campus for fighting with another student.
Delgado recalls, "She told me I have some big feet. I said you got a big face. She swung but she missed and so that's when we started fighting in the hallway. And security got me and then security took her to the vice principal's office."
Delgado has been suspended three times. The first time she was only 8 and in third grade.
Turmoil In Young Lives
At Waco's only alternative school, absolute obedience and compliance with the rules is mandatory. School uniforms are a must and students can't speak in the hallways. Seventy students are referred to this school every day, and they're all expected to change for the better.
But the more these kids open up, the more it becomes apparent that their behavior has a lot to do with the turmoil in their young lives.
Karen McPhetridge, 14, says she's been in foster care since she was 3.
"I got back with my mom like three years ago and then my dad abandoned me," McPhetridge says, "I've been angry with him, and I've been angry with my sister, because as soon as she graduated she became a stripper and now she's like all strung out on drugs."
McPhetridge was expelled for smoking marijuana on school grounds. Kids like her have gotten in to trouble, but until now, schools have had no way to deal with the root causes of their bad behavior. Neglect, abuse and family problems are issues that students like Saul Cornejo, 16, bring to school every day.
"Teachers at school, they don't understand it," he says. "They just dismiss you, put you off instead of like, really trying to get to the real problem which, most of the time originates at home and stuff."
Cornejo has been suspended several times for fighting. He lives with his older brother but is pretty much on his own. His principal says he's really bright, but Cornejo is facing felony charges for burglary and won't be allowed to return to his home school.
Schools give up on kids like Cornejo all too often, says John Hudson, the director of attendance, truancy and dropout recovery in the Waco alternative school.
Hudson says, "When you look at the numbers of times students are disciplined in school, suspended, separated from school, placed in disciplinary alternative education placement, the unintended consequence is that their education suffers to the point where it puts them farther and farther away from graduating."
Hudson thinks these unintended consequences prove that the schools' disciplinary policies are not working. This seems to be the growing consensus in Texas, but it's going to take a lot of work to undo the damage the harsh disciplinary policies have caused.
For the past two years, Waco had the second-highest suspension and expulsion rates in Texas. Today, administrators and teachers are trying to turn that around by being less punitive. The district has even started a tiny pilot program that teaches parents how to help their kids control their behavior.
For Delgado, Turner and McPhetridge it may be too late. They say they feel labeled and stigmatized.
McPhetridge says, "This will go on my record and it worries me, like what kind of colleges would want to accept someone who was put in alternative school."
Turner has similar concerns. "When they see alternative on your background, they look at you different because they're like, alternative? That's for bad kids."
Already a mother of two with another child on the way, Turner is determined to graduate next spring. Delgado isn't so sure.
"I'm pretty sure I'll do fine," she says, but then adds in a whisper, "I'll be back here. ... I'm a bad child."
The Waco schools superintendent, Bonnie Cain, took over two years ago. She says a few teachers and administrators may still think some kids will always be trouble, but from now on, the district's disciplinary policy will assume that deep down, even the toughest students can change and are worth rescuing.
"Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, 'You know what? I'm going to make everybody mad today. I'm going to get expelled,' " Cain says. "We need to take that child where they are and work with them to get them on the right track, because if we don't do it, who will?"
With more state lawmakers now supporting this view, school districts in Texas are rethinking their disciplinary policies. Researchers hope Texas will be a model for other states to do the same.
This story was produced for broadcast by Marisa Peñaloza. | <urn:uuid:e6c7c8ce-c57c-418b-a295-068a2817bd2d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wemu.org/post/texas-keeping-kids-school-and-out-court | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.982466 | 1,751 | 1.796875 | 2 |
Cisco has made a big push into the smart grid industry recently, first with two pieces of substation gear for utilities and now with a home energy display that allows users to monitor power use. The Home Energy Controller--Cisco's first piece of equipment for smart meter-equipped homes--will be tested this summer with Duke Energy customers in Charlotte, North Carolina and Cincinnati, Ohio.
Cisco's controller is, essentially, a command center for home energy management. The device acts like a hub for all networked devices in the home, including air conditioners, computers, TVs, and even plug-in electric cars. Any non-networked appliances can be connected to the device using either two-way thermostats or smart plugs that talk to Cisco's device via the Zigbee wireless protocol.
In addition to monitoring energy use, the Home Energy Controller also allows customers to set up policies that automate energy consumption based on the time of day. They can also participate in utility pricing incentive programs (i.e. a program where a utility might cut energy costs at off-peak hours).
The Home Energy Controller is far from the first device of its kind (we recently covered Tendril 's slick IDEO-designed display, for example) but Cisco has a distinct advantage because of its big name. Many other entrants in the smart grid industry are startups with little brand recognition.
There is plenty of room for competition--a recent survey from Parks Associates found that two-thirds of respondents are interested in home energy monitoring systems, and between 3,100 and 3,200 utilities in the U.S. are in varying stages of transitioning to a "Smart Grid." But it only makes sense that a networking giant like Cisco gets a big piece of the newest industry to embrace wireless communication. | <urn:uuid:4519bc02-da52-4d0d-9a4a-66a84dca4a34> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fastcompany.com/print/1665072 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935641 | 363 | 1.765625 | 2 |
From TODD WALTON
Under The Table
“Conventional education makes independent thinking almost impossible. Conformity leads to mediocrity. Conventional education puts an end to spontaneity and breeds fear.” Krishnamurti
I spent my two of years in college at the University of California, Santa Cruz from 1967 to 1969 when the school was considered an experimental college because professors were supposed to write evaluations of students rather than give grades, and students were invited to invent their own programs of independent study.
One guy in my dorm did an independent study entitled Surfing Poems. He went surfing for ten weeks and wrote poems about his experience. Another fellow (he loved to play his guitar in our resonant dorm bathroom) did an independent study entitled Songs From My Life for which he wrote three songs melodically indistinguishable from Bob Dylan’s Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right. And a young woman in the dorm across from ours did an independent study called Pill Parables resulting in a twenty-five-page monologue about birth control pills and their impact on her sex life.
I proposed several independent study projects, but could never convince any professors to endorse and oversee my endeavors. My proposal to read the complete works of Nikos Kazantzakis and then write a dissertation was turned down by five different professors, all of whom said Kazantzakis was of no literary importance, though I suspect the real reason they turned me down was that none of them were familiar with Kazantzakis’s writing. My proposal to write and produce an existentialist play entitled Food Fight, based on the several food fights that erupted in response to the execrable food served in the Stevenson College cafeteria, was rejected by two English professors, a professor of Drama, and my Anthropology advisor. And my proposal to take a daily photograph of the same naked person standing in front of the same redwood tree at the same time of day for ten weeks was turned down by no less than three professors in the Art department.
Thus, unquestionably, the four best things about my university experience were playing basketball, playing Frisbee, courting beautiful young women, and seeing, admission free and in the most intimate of venues, the likes of Segovia, Bola Sete, Charles Lloyd, Keith Jarrett, The Sons of Champlin, and Krishnamurti.
I would not have gone to see Krishnamurti (since I didn’t know who or what he was) had not my Philosophy professor Robert Goff urged his students to go; and Goff would not have been my Philosophy professor had I been accepted into a Creative Writing seminar. But my prose and poetry submissions failed to win the favor of the Creative Writing professors, and their last-minute rejection of me necessitated my quickly finding a class that was still accepting students, such classes being rare in those days of sudden and severe budget constraints (thank you, Ronald Reagan.)
I remember hurrying up the hill to the lecture hall on a chilly Tuesday morning in October and finding the place packed with a hundred and fifty other undergrads, most as desperate as I to get into one more class to complete their course loads. Goff’s introductory Philosophy course was one of the few classes still accepting students, perhaps because it was widely rumored that Goff actually required his students to do some work.
Promptly at nine, Goff entered the hall and walked sedately to the podium—a handsome man with black hair and a subtle goatee, his brown suit impeccably tailored. “I will require at least one essay a week from each of you,” he intoned forebodingly, “and you will be expected to read all the books and articles on the syllabus in order to be prepared for the rigorous final exam.”
Then he bowed his head and waited patiently as the vast majority of the assembled host fled the hall.
“Good,” said Goff, gazing at those of us who remained. “I look forward to seeing how many of you return on Thursday.”
Eighteen returned; and though I enjoyed Goff’s lectures and the challenge of writing essays in response to Descartes and Kant and Hume, the only thing I clearly remember about the course was Goff recounting his wonderful experience with Krishnamurti. However, before I tell you Goff’s Krishnamurti story, I will tell you mine.
So…every evening for a week in November of that year, Krishnamurti sat in a throne-like chair on the stage of the Cowell College dining hall, speaking about spiritual matters and answering questions from the audience. He wore an elegant suit and tie and a white turban that seemed too large for his slender face—small potted palm trees to his right and left. I attended two of his lectures and had an impossible time understanding anything he said. That is, I knew the meanings of the individual words he spoke, but I couldn’t make them add up to anything that made any sense to my nineteen-year-old brain. Yet I enjoyed him immensely and got great mileage out of doing shamefully misleading imitations of him for my friends, speaking in a high sing song voice with a stereotypical Indian accent.
And there was one thing Krishnamurti said that I understood perfectly well—his words the answer to a question I asked myself every day: should I drop out of college or stay in? I cannot remember his exact words, but I vividly remember the gist of his advice, which was that you must be your own teacher or you might as well be a parrot.
“All authority of any kind, especially in the field of thought and understanding, is the most destructive and evil thing. Leaders destroy the followers. You have to be your own teacher and own disciple. You have to question everything that man has accepted as valuable and necessary.” Krishnamurti
On the Tuesday morning following the week of Krishnamurti’s visit, as Goff stood before the dozen of us gathered for his lecture, someone called out, “Nice tie, Mr. Goff.”
“Oh, this,” he said, looking down at his colorful silk tie. “Funny story about this. As you know, I spent quite a bit of time with Krishnamurti while he was here, and during lunch on his last day I complimented him on his beautiful tie, and the next day a package arrived in the mail. He’d sent me his tie, and here it is.” Goff paused momentously. “I wish I’d known he was in the habit of doing things like that because he drives a fabulous Jaguar XKE and I would have showered him with compliments about his gorgeous car.”
“Intelligent revolt comes through self knowledge, through the awareness of one’s own thought and feeling…this highly awakened intelligence is intuition, the only true guide in life.” Krishnamurti
Fast-forward thirty years to a dinner party in Berkeley at which I recounted the story of Goff’s tie and Krishnamurti’s XKE, to which a bearded fellow with a twinkle in his eye responded, “I doubt very much that Krishnamurti owned the XKE. It was probably a loaner from one of his wealthy admirers. He didn’t actually own much of anything.”
“How do you know?” I asked, ever curious about how people know things about famous people.
“I lived in Ojai for five years,” the bearded fellow replied. “I moved there to attend Krishnamurti’s talks. I had been severely depressed for several years when I heard a recording of Krishnamurti and his voice and words obliterated my depression. I was half-dead and he brought me back to life. So I moved to Ojai to sit at his feet. Literally.”
“What was that like?” someone asked.
“Wonderful,” said the bearded fellow, warming to his tale. “After I’d been to several of his talks, he began to acknowledge me as a regular and would often whisper to me, ‘You again? When will you ever learn?’ and pretend to be dismayed that I kept coming back, until one evening, after years of this little routine, I replied, ‘No, it’s not me again. I only seem to be the same person. I’m actually always someone else.’ And he laughed and smiled one of his lightning smiles and I’ve been happy ever since.”
“What made you so happy?” I asked, imagining I would be happy, too, if Krishnamurti appreciated something I said.
“I felt anointed,” said the bearded fellow, his smiling eyes brimming with tears. “Equal.”
(This article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser August 2012, and was inspired by a remembrance of Krishnamurti written by William Edelen and recently posted on Dave Smith’s stellar community forum Ukiah Blog Live.) | <urn:uuid:16349b19-20f5-4ace-b5b0-def8b887b9e9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ukiahcommunityblog.wordpress.com/2012/08/10/todd-walton-goff-krishnamurti/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.98252 | 1,927 | 1.5 | 2 |
No Copyright on this story so I'll post it here on CombatCarry.
It's a nice firearm related article & a pleasant read.
A good time killer tale.
Feel free to post your comments on it though. All comments always welcome!
I'll post it in bold to make it easy on your eyes.
LIFE IS TOO SHORT TO SPEND IT WITH AN UGLY GUN!
Theodore Roosevelt had one. General George S. Patton had one. Even Pancho Villa had one. All of these men had one thing in common. The sixguns preferred for fighting were also fancy. With Roosevelt it was a 7 1/2" Colt Single Action Army .44-40 with full engraving, nickel plating, and ivory grips with TR carved into them. Carried in an equally fancy carved cross draw holster, the .44-40 was his constant companion on his ranch in the Dakota Badlands in the 1880's.
Young Lieutenant Patton chose a special sixgun before he joined Black Jack Pershing to pursue Pancho Villa in 1916. That sixgun was a Colt Single Action Army .45 with the 'Gunfighter' length 4 3/4" barrel also fully engraved carrying ivory grips with the initials GSP etched into them. This sixgun, carried in a Myres Border Patrol holster, became his authority symbol in World War II. Contrary to popular belief, Patton did not have a pair of Colts. His second sixgun, also packed in a Myres holster and sometimes packed in tandem with the Colt, was an ivory stocked Smith & Wesson 4" .357 Magnum, one of the first out of the factory as Patton bought his in Hawaii in 1935.
Pancho Villa? What else but a Colt Single Action .45 again with the 4 3/4" barrel length and full nickel plating with extra fancy ivory grips that carried a carved steer head with gold horns and ruby eyes.
Texas Rangers routinely carried fancy sixguns and semi-automatics. The early years of GUNS magazine often featured articles highlighting such Rangers as Clint Peoples and Bob Crowder both of whom packed a pair of engraved and ivory stocked 1911 .45's. Rangers Charlie Miller and Lone Wolf Gonzaullas both preferred fancy sidearms as badges of authority. Gonzaullas' engraved and ivory stocked 1911 .45 also had the trigger guard cut away for speed handlin'.
Frank Hamer, the Ranger who came out of retirement to stop Bonnie and Clyde, is most known for his carrying of a plain vanilla .45 Colt Single Action that he called 'Old Lucky'. But Hamer also had his fancy sixgun, a fully engraved and ivory stocked Colt Single Action .45. Tom Threepersons, who designed the famous holster that still bears his name, packed a nickel plated Colt Single Action .45 with pearl grips bearing the Colt factory medallion and a carved steerhead.
A look through any museum or book of Colt firearms will reveal dozens of fancy firearms carried by peace officers and outlaws alike especially in the Southwestern part of the country. It goes without saying that the stars of the 'B' movies of the 1930's and 1940's such as Tom Mix, Buck Jones, and Tim McCoy, all packed fancy sixguns across the silver screen. Even John Wayne, who also starred in 'B' movies at the beginning of his long career, died in his final movie, "The Shootist", packing a fully engraved .45 Single Action.
My good friend and fellow writer, Jim Wilson just retired as Sheriff of the largest county in Texas, Crockett County. As a modern peace officer, Wilson never carried an ugly gun. Two of his favorites, both engraved and ivory stocked, are .45's, one a Colt Single Action .45 Colt and the other a .45 ACP 1911.
We have seemingly entered the period of the ugly gun with the most revered fighting handguns also vying to see which can have the least aesthetic and soul stirring qualities. Plastic and rubber abound instead of the steel and ivory preferred by these fighting men of a bygone age.
Most of today's semi-automatics are highly efficient like computers and claw hammers and just about as exciting. It hasn't always been so. Even the U.S. Military, until very recently, adopted good lookin' guns that were also efficient at least for each particular time period.
Consider the 1851 Navy Colt, the 1860 Army, the Colt Single Action Army, the S&W Schofield, the 1911 Government Model, the 1917 Smith & Wesson and Colt .45 ACP sixguns, all with classic lines to go with their performance as first class fightin' handguns. With rifles, the soldiers of yesteryear, went through the .45-70 Trap Door Springfield, the .30-40 Krag, the 1903 Springfield and M-1 Garand, all of steel and walnut and good looks. Today both the handguns and rifles of the military are highly efficient tools but that is all they are. Tools. There is nothing good looking about them. There is nothing there to stir the soul or make the heart beat faster.
Call me a throwback if you will, but I for one am fighting the ugly gun syndrome. Not only am I fighting it, I have had three very special handguns made up that will go to three very special people when I no longer use them. Those three special to be men are my grandsons John Christopher, age 10; Jason Michael, age 9; and Brian John, age 5. As they grow older, they will be shooting these sixguns and know that each of them will eventually receive one for their own. That it is, in fact, their gun and I am just using it for awhile. I pray to God that they will all grow to be the kind of men that will appreciate fine guns and also know how to use them and when to use them. As fathers, and grandfathers, mothers and grandmothers for that matter, we all have a great deal of hard work to do to counteract the many negative aspects of society that bombards kids daily. I work full time at being a grandfather, much harder than I did the first time around. The times require it.
When I began to really become interested in sixguns as a teenager in the 1950's, Elmer Keith was the handgun writer. His book "Sixguns" was published in 1955, and my dog eared copy opens almost automatically to the page with his #5, a completely custom Colt Single Action .44 Special that Keith had built up in the 1920's. This was a sixgun! Chambered in the top caliber of the day, it was fully engraved and ivory stocked. I located an old copy of the American Rifleman from April 1929 and read the firsthand account of the building of the #5 SA, as Keith called it. The picture of the fully engraved sixgun in the article was even better than that found in the book and I dreamed of the day when I might have such a sixgun.
In the back pages of "Sixguns", Keith devoted an entire chapter to fancy guns, engraved and specially stocked sixguns and semi-automatics. I studied that chapter over and over and over again. Some day...
In 1956, Smith & Wesson brought forth the first .44 Magnum with a barrel length of 6 1/2" on the original guns. Keith almost immediately had one cut to 4 1/2" and engraved and ivory stocked by the Gun Reblue Company. This magnificent sixgun was pictured in the 1958 "Gun Digest" as Keith wrote of the .44 Magnum one year later. I dreamed again of an engraved sixgun. Sometime between the assembling of "Sixguns" and the advent of the .44 Magnum, Keith had his favorite sixgun of the time, a 4" 1950 Target .44 Special also engraved and ivory stocked by the Gun Reblue Company. Little did I know at the time that someday I would actually get to handle all of these fancy sixguns of Keith's; for then I was happy just to see the pictures.
Shortly after the 1958 "Gun Digest" hit the stands in the early fall of 1957, I came very close to having my first engraved sixgun. The local gun shop had a fully engraved Colt Single Action .45 with adjustable sights added for only $150. Now that seems like a pittance and, of course, I wished I had bought it. But that was over three weeks pay in those days. So I passed, much to my eternal regret. Marriage came, then kids, and the decision to go to college. Putting myself through college while raising a family of three kids and a wife who stayed home with them left little money for anything so frivolous as an engraved sixgun.
As it so often happens, time passed ever so quickly. The kids grew and were soon out on their own and I dreamed of that engraved sixgun once again. Finally my wife said enough is enough, do it and stop talking about it. So, finally, 30 years after the dream started, I contacted Jim Riggs about engraving a sixgun. Now the problem was which sixgun to choose. It did not stay a problem very long as the most natural thing was to do a sixgun that Keith would like--a Smith & Wesson 4" .44 Magnum.
My 4" Model 29 from the early 1960's was sent off to Riggs and he was given carte blanche to "make me a fancy sixgun". When it came back I could not have been more pleased. Riggs had executed scrollwork on more than 75% of the .44 Magnum and then had it satin nickeled to better show off the engraving. I recommend this subtle finish highly for both protection and good looks.
To complement Riggs' work I commissioned the late Deacon Deason to make a pair of his Skeeter Skelton Style BearHug Grips worthy of the fancy forty-four. Deason delivered a pair of beautifully grained rosewood stocks but I wanted something just a mite more special for the special sixgun. Up to this point all of Deason's work had been with wood; I wanted ivory micarta. He finally relented and came up with a pair of Skeeter Skelton stocks of ivory micarta that blend exceptionally well with the engraved satin nickel finish.
At the time Deason said he would never make another pair of stocks from micarta, which I believe is a compressed paper product from the electrical industry that looks like ivory, ages like ivory, and is infinitely tougher and about one-fourth the cost. He did make one more pair for me before his untimely death and I am proud and pleased to have the only two pair of ivory micarta Skeeter Skelton style stocks from Bear Hug in existence.
I was so pleased with the first engraved sixgun that I wanted to do another one. Again time got away. Finally this past year it was decided to have a second sixgun done to picture on the cover of my book "Big Bore Sixguns" along with the original engraved Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum by Jim Riggs.
This time a Colt Single Action Army, also from the 1960's, was chosen. I already had a 4 3/4" .45 Colt with ivory grips by Charles Able that I had selected years earlier for engraving. This sixgun, as the Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum, would be a shooter not a piece to hide away, so I made sure it shot to point of aim with a favorite .45 Colt load. It took a slight bit of filing on the front sight to get the point of impact to point of aim and then the blued Colt with a case hardened frame was also sent south to Boerne Texas to be engraved by Jim Riggs. On this sixgun Riggs used a style that looks very much like pictures I have seen of sixguns that were engraved in the frontier period. The Scroll work is more subdued than that found on the Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum and a sunburst effect graces the loading gate and recoil shield.
My name is also engraved on the backstrap so this sixgun will, in all probability, eventually go to the oldest grandson who also bears my name. With its satin nickel finish and ivory stocks the overall effect of this Colt Single Action Army is one that either Buck Jones, Hopalong Cassidy or even General Patton would approve of.
There are three truly classic handguns: the Colt Single Action Army, the Smith & Wesson Model 29 .44 Magnum, and the Colt 1911 Government Model. A single action. A double action. A semi-automatic. Two bases were covered. Two of the three grandsons were provided for. It was time to do provide the third leg of the tripod.
Enter Ed Delorge. Ed is both a full blown gunsmith and gun engraver from Louisiana. We first made contact early this year and I asked him to send some pictures of his work. He went one step further. Not only did I get pictures of several handguns he had engraved, he also sent a picture of himself with his family. A man who is proud of his family immediately gains points with me! The decision was made to send him a Colt MK IV Series '70 .45 ACP to be given the fancy treatment. This is not just an ordinary run of the mill .45 as it shoots extra ordinarily well. With target loads it will cut a cloverleaf at 25 yards one-handed, standing on my two legs, shooting off-hand, or I should say it would 25 years ago when my hold was steadier and my eye was keener. I can't do it quite as well anymore but the .45 still will in the right hands.
Over the years this .45 was fitted with an ambidextrous safety, beavertail grip safety, Colt Commander hammer, and high visibility fixed sights consisting of a blade notch rear and a post front sight. The beavertail and Commander hammer solved the problem of the fleshy part of my hand getting bit by the standard hammer as the Colt cocked itself upon firing. This was definitely a gun worthy of engraving.
Off this gun went to Delorge who was also given carte blanche as the expert with only one stipulation. I wanted the finish to be satin nickel to match the Smith .44 and Colt .45 Single Action. The contours of the Government Model are quite different than either the Smith & Wesson or Colt Single Action revolver. Working with flat surfaces for the most part, Delorge executed a smaller scrollwork and leaf pattern than found on the two sixguns. The result is stunning to say the least. The scrolls and leaves are perfectly executed and set off by a very subtle stippled background. Delorge covered the slide, frame, even both sides of the ambidextrous thumb safety with his pattern.
Finish is satin nickel as requested and was carried out by Encoat International. It sets off and displays the engraving much better than a blue finish would plus the .45 is protected as it is carried in a holster and used. When these engraved handguns are all passed on to my grandsons, the finish will still be intact. Finally, a pair of Sambar stag grips from Ajax Custom Grips were added to complete this third special handgun. The mottled brown and bone look of the stag stocks set off the engraving and satin nickel finish perfectly.
Do not make the mistake of thinking the cost of engraving is out of reach. Of course we are not talking museum high-grade presentation pieces here. I see no practical use for a sixgun that has taken hundreds, perhaps even thousands of hours to complete and is replete with 100% coverage of very intricate patterns. A sixgun such as this is highly valuable, strictly for show, and only for the rich.
My fancy guns are working guns. Fancy working guns, but working guns nevertheless. They are carried in quality leather, they are used, they are shot routinely. A gun that isn't for shooting has no value for me. I do have two very limited run sixguns that are collector's items not for shooting. However, these have been given to my wife to put away as an investment for her golden years.
Both Jim Riggs and Ed Delorge are very reasonable and will provide an engraved piece worthy of great pride of ownership. For less than the cost of a new sixgun, one can have a truly personal engraved firearm. It will look great and also still be a true working sidearm.
My paternal grandfather was killed three months before my father was born. Grandma continued with the plans to come to America and made the trip on her own carrying my father with four other youngsters in tow. Twenty-seven years later, my father was killed before I was a year old. I have nothing that belonged to my grandfather and precious little, other than a broken pocket watch and a belt buckle that belonged to my father. When he was killed his brothers confiscated his .22 rifle and 12 gauge shotgun for their own. They weren't worth much but they should have been put away for me. They were not.
For the past two decades I have been putting 'things' away for my grandsons. Interesting books, special pictures, copies of my articles, ... These sixguns are more than fancy firearms that fulfill a whim. They are my legacy to the future generations. What is yours?
....Courtesy of AMERICAN HANDGUNNER | <urn:uuid:eadf1428-e6a8-4c6b-9212-d80d88b02c80> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.defensivecarry.com/forum/defensive-carry-guns/11608-life-2-short-2-spend-w-fugly-gun.html | 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 | 0.976274 | 3,627 | 1.507813 | 2 |
The south west is preparing for a four day celebration of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee. Parties, concerts and religious services will be taking place - as the south west salutes sixty years since the Queen's ascension took the throne.
Thousands turned out in Somerset, Devon and Dorset last month when she visited on her Jubilee tour - suggesting support for her here remains as strong as ever.
Over the next four days hundreds of street parties will be taking place across the region, from the small community events to large scale parties.
On Monday night across the south-west between ten and ten thirty beacons will be lit, as part of a network of 4000 around the country. There are more beacons being lit in Devon than any other county.
And a huge range of other celebrations are happening too - including a river pageant in Dartmouth on Saturday and a Big lunch in Truro. | <urn:uuid:bdc7c822-4285-4a4d-8a90-1d9a040f0e3c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.itv.com/news/westcountry/update/2012-06-01/south-west-prepares-for-four-day-jubilee-celebrations/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961987 | 181 | 1.664063 | 2 |
Chances are very good that the energy bills for your house are too high. There are many low-cost projects you can have done to reduce your bills, and even more for the do-it-yourselfer. As a professional home inspector for the past 25 years, I have a few tips to help lower them this winter.
First, the obvious: Lower your thermostat. For every degree you lower your thermostat, you save 3 percent on your fuel bill. Most people are very comfortable with the thermostat set at 68 degrees. At night, you should turn it down even more. | <urn:uuid:f46c77b5-ca18-4ddc-843b-97368d708215> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/regionals/south/2012/12/30/home-inspector-offers-few-simple-tips-lower-energy-bills/zpOJAWgYOc2MCKbQy4T9xM/comments.html | 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 | 0.971562 | 125 | 1.78125 | 2 |
Barring the Imperial Palace, there are very few places left in Tokyo which are reminiscent of an old era. (Let's add the Yakotori alley to that list (will put up its picture some other day)). Most of old Tokyo was wiped out during the WWII. What you get to see in Tokyo now are structures which are not older than say 40-50 years (at least in the major part of Tokyo AFAIK).
Although Japan still has the King and the Queen, they are just that in name. They do not have any say in political matters as such. They still live in a palace, which is in the middle of Tokyo surrounded by lovely open spaces and greenery. I just loved the sound while walking on the pebbly, gravel-ly path that lead upto the Imperial palace gates.
This is the only frame where i could manage to capture the contrast of the old against the new (one of my favourite things whenever i am in any city. There is just something about the era gone past. The Golden Age syndrome some call it, of which i am a surefire victim). | <urn:uuid:3a0b20b4-f629-4623-978f-12e6fdf17fb9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://shutterbugged.blogspot.com/2012/11/intl-saturdays-16-juxtaposition-in-tokyo.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971997 | 227 | 1.679688 | 2 |
Results tagged ‘ Elizabeth H. Berger ’
Yankees manager Joe Girardi joined the Alliance for Downtown New York Tuesday to unveil a new granite sidewalk marker in the Canyon of Heroes commemorating the November 2009 ticker-tape parade honoring the team’s unprecedented 27th World Series championship.
“The iconic corridor of lower Broadway has provided a dramatic setting for 204 parades, and we’re thrilled to count the 2009 world champion Yankees among the heroes who have been showered with ticker tape and confetti,” Downtown Alliance president Elizabeth H. Berger said. “This marker will remind New Yorkers for generations to come of the Yankees’ magical run in 2009 – their first world championship in the new Yankee Stadium.”
“Last year was an incredible year for our team,” Girardi said. “I’m proud to be here to commemorate our 2009 World Series championship. There are almost no words to describe the energy and excitement that was in the air on that special day we all shared last November up the Canyon of Heroes. We are so grateful that each and every member of our team was able to share that feeling with our fans and the great people of the city of New York.”
Girardi and Berger were joined at the ceremony by members of the Downtown Little League Yankees.
For nearly a century and a quarter, some of history’s most notable individuals and sports teams have been honored with ticker-tape parades up Broadway’s Canyon of Heroes – from Battery Park to City Hall. The first parade, on October 28, 1886, celebrated the dedication of the Statue of Liberty. Eight parades have been held for Yankees and Mets World Series wins, and one was held before the 1954 World Series for the New York Giants, who went on to sweep the Cleveland Indians.
The Downtown Alliance launched New York City’s version of the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2003 to commemorate the Canyon of Heroes’ parades with a series of black granite strips set into the sidewalks of Broadway. The strips commemorate the parades for every ticker-tape honoree – a group that includes pioneers of air and space travel, soldiers, sailors and sea captains, heads of state, politicians, fire-fighters, journalists, athletes and even a virtuoso pianist. The Yankees’ latest marker will join 178 plaques currently embedded along lower Broadway.
An additional 25 markers will be re-installed following completion of the Fulton Street Transit Center.
Yankees manager Joe Girardi will represent the 2009 World Series champions at 11 a.m. Tuesday at the unveiling of a granite strip commemorating last fall’s ticker-tape parade down the Canyon of Heroes.
The skipper will join Elizabeth H. Berger, president of the Alliance for Downtown New York, and a dozen members of the Downtown Little League Yankees at the ceremony at 233 Broadway on the west side of the street in front of the historic Woolworth Building.
The Downtown Alliance, the business improvement district serving lower Manhattan south of Chambers Street, has embedded a strip for each of the 204 parades that have run along the famed Canyon of Heroes parade route on lower Broadway. Downtown Alliance chairman Robert R. Douglass will also attend the ceremony. | <urn:uuid:62310656-aaa2-42e0-961d-ade508aee744> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://cutoffman.mlblogs.com/tag/elizabeth-h-berger/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930788 | 674 | 1.507813 | 2 |
'Submarine' sets sail along Leeds-Liverpool canal
A man has turned his canal barge into a replica of a submarine to mark his 50th birthday.
Richard Williams said the work cost almost £60,000 and took about three months to complete.
The barge cannot be submerged but does sail along the Leeds-Liverpool canal, with Mr Williams often welcoming people on board.
He lives on his "submarine" with his wife, Laurel, and their three dogs. | <urn:uuid:32ee47c3-05d3-477e-8c72-6265e143248a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-14662402 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.990953 | 99 | 1.507813 | 2 |
Pilot Level Specialties
For more information about the Specialty, please click on the heading.
Conversion to APPI Paramotor Pilot in 10 day course.
Cross Country Pilots are pilots who want who have better skills in thermaling and performance. Both APPI Advanced and Solo Pilots can participate in this course, targets are different upon to the instructor’s supervision and students level. During the Cross Country Pilot course, students learn about thermals and flying techniques in long distance flights, expeditions and practices.
Performance Pilots are pilots who want to have better paragliding skills, combining performance in flight, distance, speed and safety. During the Performance Pilot course, students have training and preparation for competitions. Both APPI Advanced and Solo Pilots can participate in this course. The goals vary, according to the instructor’s supervision and student’s level.
SIV Pilots are solo pilots which have the skills for action and surprises in the sky, safety from turbulence, collapses, stall fast descents manoeuvre, etc… SEE Progression Form The pilot learns how to control the wing in all required situation stages, and has experience of safe general emergency procedures. Over the water, the SIV Pilot course, the pilot develops basic techniques which are pre-requisites to become an APPI XC and Perfo. Pilot.
During the Advanced SIV Pilot course, the pilot develops basic techniques which are pre-requisites to become an APPI Advanced and Acro. Pilot, and to go Pro.
APPI Acro Pilots are Advanced SIV Pilots who intend to learn and progress in special techniques of acrobatic flights. During the course, the pilot learns many manoeuvres, has acro training and practice in security, over the water, in fundamental progression and safety conditions.
APPI D-BAG Pilots are Advanced Pilots with Acro certification who intend to learn and practice deployment techniques with secure processes. The pilot learns the deployment over the water, during a tandem flight, and how to open his glider in the air. The objective of this course is to learn how to have a secure deployment process in safety conditions.
Share the sky and Save the Vultures! Have you ever dreamed of flying like a bird, to share the sky and be a part of their world? Well now you can! What is Parahawking? Parahawking is paragliding with a trained bird of prey, it’s a new concept in paragliding.
Rescue Packing Provider are APPI Advanced Pilots or Instructors with higher rating, who have completed the Specialty Rescue Packing Course and are able to recognize, control, pack and install all different models of rescue and in any paragliding harness, following APPI Security International Rules.
Go to Professional courses | <urn:uuid:821d53fa-ebb3-4dff-aca0-13d25ae77a20> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://appifly.org/?-Pilot-level-specialties,13- | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930913 | 586 | 1.773438 | 2 |
- Shikshaa’s robust E-learning platform seamlessly integrates with classroom coaching to provide wholesome educational experience to the students.
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- Shikshaa provides for e-bulletin boards for discussion with peer groups, which promote active and healthy interaction between the students. Shikshaa also provides for another e-bulletin board where students can post questions to faculty. These queries shall be responded to by the faculty and shall be visible to all the students.
- Shikshaa has a large Question Bank of about 10000 questions with solutions to enable students to have exclusive practice at the convenience of their home.
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Our courses will ensure you are equipped with the right skills to crack entrance examinations.
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"Former President and CEO of HCL BPO, has founded Shikshaa Edutech Ltd. with a vision to provide wholesome education and prepare the students for a lifelong career of excellence."
Register here and our executives will give you a call back | <urn:uuid:160e03e9-deba-473c-ac3b-46573faac0ab> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.shikshaaedutech.com/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938824 | 385 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Here you can find the texts for our Business English podcasts and improve your language skills.
The conversation at the Carolina Ale House in Fayetteville is usually dominated at this time of year by the "March Madness" college basketball tournament, but this week the sport had to compete with news about Sergeant Robert Bales and a massacre in Afghanistan.
Just as the mainly military patrons were starting to watch the game on Thursday night, they began to discover that the American soldier was to face 17 separate charges of murder, after he allegedly slaughtered the members of an Afghan village near his base two weeks ago, including nine children.
"It is still unbelievable what he did," said David Bond, an army veteran who was visiting Fayetteville, the small North Carolina city dominated by the huge Fort Bragg military base. "It is like my buddy was saying," motioning towards a message he had just received on his phone. "This was supposed to be the good war."
Coming at a time when the war appears to be floundering on many fronts, the alleged rampage in southern Afghanistan has set off a powerful set of reactions - from Afghan outrage to a growing number of American politicians wanting to pull-out. But military communities such as Fayetteville have their own form of indignation, the resentment that comes from seeing the personal sacrifices of a decade-long war called into question.
If nothing else, the tale of Sgt Bales has proved captivating. The 38-year-old father of two may have signed up for the military shortly after 9/11, but in the week since his name was made public, America has come to see a person who represents so many of the ways in which the country has gone awry in recent years.
The Bales family, it turns out, had been caught up in the property market crash. Just days before the massacre, his wife tried to put their house near Tacoma, Washington up for sale for 20 per cent less than they had paid for it. Another property they owned in a nearby town was near-derelict, with used car parts left out front.
Before enlisting, Sgt Bales had a chequered career in finance. He worked for several small penny-stock brokerages which were caught up in allegations of market manipulation. After co-founding his own firm, he was ruled by an arbitration panel in Ohio to have defrauded a retired couple and ordered to repay USD1.5m - money they never received.
Joining the army was not just about striking back against al-Qaeda, it was also a way of running from reality.
As the scale of his alleged crimes has started to sink in, there has been plenty of discussion about possible circumstances that would lead him to "snap". Senator Patty Murray of Washington has raised questions about the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at Fort Lewis-McChord, Sgt Bale's home military base.
His three tours of duty in Iraq before going to Afghanistan have also focused attention on the strains that more than a decade of war have placed on the serving military and their families. Since 2001, 2.2m members of the American military have been deployed in either Iraq or Afghanistan.
Yet curiously it is in military communities such as Fayetteville where these rationalisations get short shrift. It is a matter of professional pride among many soldiers to push back against the idea that war reduces them to broken shells.
Sitting in his wheelchair outside the town's veterans hospital, a five-storey building that is one of the biggest in Fayetteville, one soldier who asked not to be named said: "There can never be any excuse for that."
When he ran for president in 2008, Barack Obama encouraged the notion of Afghanistan as the "good war" and that idea has retained some currency in the military. While service in Iraq was coloured by the deceptions and blunders that surrounded the war, Afghanistan remains the place from which the 9/11 attacks were launched.
Yet as the war has ground on and commanders have struggled to define its objectives, the Afghan conflict has also lost much of its allure - a process that has accelerated in the last fortnight.
"As a chaplain, I have wondered about possible PTSD, but around here there is no sympathy for him [Sgt Bales] at all, just a feeling that he has done a terrible, terrible thing," says Larry McCarty, pastor at the First Baptist church in Spring Lake, on the edge of Fort Bragg.
Mr McCarty was a Southern Baptist pastor in Florida and an Army reservist when he was called up after 9/11. He spent the next nine years either at Fort Bragg or in Iraq, before moving recently to the Spring Lake church. In his last two years with the army, he conducted 75 military funerals.
"This is a resilient, patriotic community," he says of his largely military congregation. "But it has been a very, very long war and many people are tired and weary." | <urn:uuid:9d3ee921-b73d-406a-a281-2a68bda71fef> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ftd.de/karriere/business-english/:business-english-afghan-massacre-taints-notion-of-good-war/70031047.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.98932 | 1,027 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Do megabanks threaten the economy?
JPMorgan's hit from a single trade may reach $9 billion, casting doubt on its CEO's claims that the financial giant is safe and sound.
This week, The New York Times reported that JPMorgan Chase (JPM) could lose up to $9 billion on a single trade, a huge escalation from the already-massive $2 billion that CEO Jamie Dimon had initially estimated. When the botched trade was first disclosed in May, it stoked fears that Wall Street banks were engaging in the type of casino-style risk-taking that brought the financial system to its knees in 2008. But Dimon insisted -- notably during two congressional hearings -- that the trade was an isolated incident and that Main Street had nothing to fear.
The latest report from The Times casts doubt on that claim, with one former banking regulator telling the paper, "Essentially, JPMorgan has been operating a hedge fund" with the money in its customers' checking accounts. Is this proof that JPMorgan is a threat to the economy?
Yes. JPMorgan is a disaster waiting to happen. JPMorgan's swelling loss underscores the fact that "the banking industry has become its own worst enemy," says Doug Kass at The Street. JPMorgan has engaged in a "relentless abuse of power and the aggressive use of client deposits in risk-taking strategies" that can only be curbed by tough government regulation. A financial industry that has "grown too influential by virtue (or lack thereof) of its nearly unlimited powers" could be deadly to the economy.
Clearly, mega-banks need more conservative approaches. JPMorgan and the "big Wall Street banks are all opaque black boxes" that could be exposed to huge amounts of risk, says Paul R. La Monica at CNNMoney. Banks these days are "insanely complex," and it's easy to imagine them getting burned in this "still murky world of credit default swaps and derivatives," particularly if they have investments in troubled European banks. "Call me a traditionalist, but I like it when banks simply loan money and take deposits." It certainly "beats billion-dollar losses any day of the week."
And Jamie Dimon should be fired. Dimon ought to be "picked up by the seat of the pants and scruff of the neck and thrown out of his corner office," says Marek Fuchs at The Street. "Slick Jamie" has been getting by on a "nearly inexplicable sense of invincibility," charming "the pants off of the media, traders, and politicians in Washington testimony." With this new $9 billion estimate, it's doubtful that Dimon "has been forthright or, worse, even aware" of what's going on at JPMorgan. "That calls into question his future leadership."
More from The Week
So yes, my own feeling, (and I am not alone), is that the current state of affairs at our most-major investment banks is such that a foreign economic crash could very well bankrupt 95% of us almost overnight because we have allowed these banks unregulated access to foreign markets. Since when should it be legal for a single large US investment bank to carry more foreign derivatives on its books than our entire Federal budget is including our own debt service???
Anyone who thinks otherwise should look-up Paul Craig Roberts "Collapse at Hand" piece that is not yet a month old. If he is right, and he is a senior economist, we are all in very big trouble.
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Producers stand to benefit as farmers make up lost ground in corn fields.
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Top Stocks provides analysis about the most noteworthy stocks in the market each day, combining some of the best content from around the MSN Money site and the rest of the Web.
Contributors include professional investors and journalists affiliated with MSN Money.
Follow us on Twitter @topstocksmsn. | <urn:uuid:e53ba469-6a2c-4a97-9628-4d48bdd4dc23> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://money.msn.com/top-stocks/post.aspx?post=29271c7d-33f2-4b8b-bc15-8e1943e2277d | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95363 | 926 | 1.726563 | 2 |
CLEVELAND (AP) -- Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia banned broadcast media from his speech Wednesday at an appearance where he received an award for supporting free speech. [...]
Scalia made the same demand on John Carroll University, where he spoke Tuesday night. He talked mostly about the constitutional protection of religions, but also said that government has room to scale back individual rights during wartime without violating the Constitution.
``The Constitution just sets minimums,'' Scalia said. ``Most of the rights that you enjoy go way beyond what the Constitution requires.''
Justice Scalia Bans Media From Speech
Current Music: Halou -- Clip ♬ | <urn:uuid:1a7db0c8-4746-4d27-ad79-50f3540283d4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.jwz.org/blog/2003/03/oh-these-post-ironic-times/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944743 | 126 | 1.507813 | 2 |
========[ Invite a Friend - http://www.ganoksin.com/invite.htm ]========
> They are also have less tensile strength than annealed wrought
> silver. The crystal structure is large and dendritic there also
> can be porosity that makes sections
Thanks so much. This is what I was wondering. I stretched a ring on
my ring stretcher and I wanted to see how far I could push it. It
cracked and seemed more porous than what I am tradationally use to.
It had almost no resistance and then it cracked. With my forged
rings they seem to have resistance you can feel right away even if
annealed. It is just a slight difference in 'feeling' the metal
stretch. (Does that make any sense?) I will tumble all of these
rings and I am assuming that will work harden them slightly and
reduce some of that porosity but is it ever the same as a forged
Thanks again. I love science so I always want to know what is going
on that I can't 'see.' | <urn:uuid:710ba2bd-15b5-4ccb-a48b-3c4e44213d80> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ganoksin.com/orchid/archive/201105/msg00009.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963721 | 231 | 1.6875 | 2 |
Updated Jun 15, 2012 - 3:18 pm
New immigration policy is the right decision
The decision by Homeland Security is a proper decision.
We have argued this point before. The President says if an illegal immigrant was in America prior to 16 years old and not yet 30, they are home free.
NO criminal record, NO national security risk, NO deportation.
The big add that I have insisted upon, NO CITIZENSHIP.
These young people were brought here by parents who did not ask their 3-year-old if he or she wanted to go to America.
They have been here living in the shadows, fearing arrest and deportation. That's over now. They can continue working, going to school and serving in the armed forces of this country.
The immigration laws should not remove productive young people who know no country but this one as their home.
I know many of you have disagreed with me on this issue.
This will absolutely drive the "WHAT DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND ABOUT ILLEGAL" folks among us into a frenzy.
My real regret is that it was introduced by Barak Obama and not Mitt Romney.
This will have a giant affect on Latino voters.
Jay Lawrence, Show Host | <urn:uuid:cbdef23c-a61f-44b6-8db2-0621ba878223> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://ktar.com/91/1553453/New-immigration-policy-is-the-right-decision | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972816 | 257 | 1.625 | 2 |
I just finished reading the personal diaries of Eve and Adam - you know, the original humans. It would appear that Mark Twain discovered the original manuscripts and succeeded to translate the ancient hieroglyphs somehow (perhaps he used a top hat) and published them to the world. I will be the first to say…Continue
The passage on the mark of Cain. Genesis 4:8-16 (KJV):
8And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.
9And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper?
10And he said, What… | <urn:uuid:ea0667e4-3c4e-44b8-a044-4e427afa4eca> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://atheistuniverse.net/profiles/blog/list?tag=mark | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958653 | 158 | 1.609375 | 2 |
U.S. Military Wants Drones that Detect ‘Adversarial Intent’
Army Tracking Plan: Drones That Never Forget a Face
By Noah Shachtman
September 28, 2011
Perhaps the idea of spy drones already makes your nervous. Maybe you’re uncomfortable with the notion of an unblinking, robotic eye in the sky that can watch your every move. If so, you may want to click away now. Because if the Army has its way, drones won’t just be able to look at what you do. They’ll be able to recognize your face — and track you, based on how you look. If the military machines assemble enough information, they might just be able to peer into your heart.
The Pentagon has tried all sort of tricks to keep tabs on its foes as they move around: tiny transmitters, lingering scents, even “human thermal fingerprints.” The military calls the effort “Tagging, Tracking, and Locating,” or “TTL.” And, as the strategy in places like Afghanistan has shifted from rebuilding societies to taking out individual insurgents, TTL has become increasingly central to the American effort. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been devoted to it.
The current technologies have their limits, however. Transmitters can be discovered, and discarded. Scents eventually waft away. Even the tagged can get lost in a crowd.
But there are some things that can’t be so easily discarded. Like the shape of your face. Or the feelings you keep inside. That’s why the Army just handed out a half-dozen contracts to firms to find faces from above, track targets, and even spot “adversarial intent.”
“If this works out, we’ll have the ability to track people persistently across wide areas,” says Tim Faltemier, the lead biometrics researcher at Progeny Systems Corporation, which recently won one of the Army contracts. “A guy can go under a bridge or inside a house. But when he comes out, we’ll know it was the same guy that went in.”
Progeny just started work on their drone-mounted, “Long Range, Non-cooperative, Biometric Tagging, Tracking and Location” system. | <urn:uuid:4090f384-2e70-4547-9d31-3c9523b977e0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://revolutionradio.org/?p=20411 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956166 | 490 | 1.726563 | 2 |
Syrian President Bashar al Assad says his government has a duty to "eliminate terrorists" to protect its people, ruling any solution to the crisis imposed from outside the country.
Assad's rare one-hour interview coincided with a marked escalation of violence inside Syria and a flurry of diplomatic activity ahead of a planned meeting in Geneva in an effort to end spiralling violence.
Diplomats said the talks involving UN Security Council members and key regional countries would focus on a proposed transition plan to open the way for a unity government.
"The responsibility of the Syrian government is to protect all of our residents. You have a responsibility to eliminate terrorists in any corner of the country," Assad told Iranian state television.
"When you eliminate a terrorist, it's possible that you are saving the lives of tens, hundreds, or even thousands."
The besieged Syrian leader rejected any solution imposed from outside the country.
"We will not accept any non-Syrian, non-national model, whether it comes from big countries or friendly countries. No one knows how to solve Syria's problems as well as we do."
Assad said he did not believe the crisis would result in military action in Syria, saying that what took place in Libya was "not a solution to be copied because it took Libya from one situation into a much worse one. We all now see how the Libyan people are paying the price"
Assad also criticised Syria's neighbour Turkey, relations with which have worsened following the shooting down of one of its military planes by Syrian forces last Friday.
"What we see now shows the stance of some Turkish officials but not all," he said. "The policies of the Turkish officials lead to the killing and bloodshed of the Syrian people."
While the United States and its allies have called for Assad to step aside, Iran and Russia have continued to support the Syrian leader and criticised what they say is foreign interference the country.
In recent years Iran's Shiite theocracy has strengthened its alignment with Syria's nationalist secular government to further its opposition to Israel and as a counterweight against Sunni powers in the region such as Saudi Arabia.
Western diplomats say that in recent months Tehran has boosted its support for Assad through training, weapons and communications expertise to assist Syrian forces in fighting rebel groups.
Assad was scornful of such reports that Iranian forces and fighters from Lebanon's militant Hezbollah resistance movement were helping to direct Syrian army operations.
"This is a joke that we hear many times in order to show that a rift has been created within the army and that therefore there is not an army."
The Syrian leader thanked Iran for being such a loyal friend and said Damascus would repay such loyalty.
"We are on the same front and the name of this front is being independent and making national decisions."
Rebel forces attacked Syria's main court in central Damascus overnight , as Turkey deployed troops and anti-aircraft rocket launchers to the Syrian border.
There was a loud explosion and a column of black smoke rose over Damascus, an Assad stronghold that until the last few days had seemed largely beyond the reach of rebels. State television described it as a "terrorist" blast.
Dozens of wrecked and burning cars were strewn over a car park used by lawyers and judges. State news agency SANA said three people were wounded by the bomb hidden in one of the cars.
The guerrilla attack in Damascus coincided with a Turkish military build-up on its border to the north and a growing sense of urgency in Western- and Arab-backed diplomatic efforts to forge a unity government and end 16 months of bloodshed.
Turkish military convoys moved slowly towards the Syrian frontier, reacting to Syria's shooting down of the Turkish warplane over the Mediterranean. A Turkish official said they were reinforcing air defences.
A first substantial convoy of about 30 military vehicles, including trucks loaded with anti-aircraft missile batteries dispatched from Turkey's coastal town of Iskenderun, was moving slowly towards the Syrian border 50 km away.
A Reuters reporter near the town of Antakya saw the convoy moving out of the hills and through small towns on a narrow highway escorted by police.
Early on Thursday, another convoy left a base at Gaziantep and headed for Kilis province, the site of a large camp for Syrian refugees. Video from the DHA agency showed the convoy, of about 12 trucks and transporters, filing through the gates of the base past the hanging Turkish red flag with white crescent moon and star.
David Hartwell, Middle East analyst at IHS Jane's called the Turkish action a 'pragmatic, rational response' after the shooting down of the Turkish aircraft, that Syria insists was flying low and fast in Syrian air space. "Damascus has been warned once. I doubt there will be a second warning."
Turkey, in the front line of Western efforts to press Assad from power, hosts over 33,000 Syrian refugees on its south-eastern border as well as units of the rebel Free Syria Army (FSA). | <urn:uuid:0b381f8c-f370-4518-8560-8cb593b399d4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/middle-east/7190145/Syria-will-eliminate-terrorists-Assad | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973359 | 1,016 | 1.71875 | 2 |
The Rio Llancahue located on the southeastern slope of Volcan Villarica is reached via Conaripe. It is roughly an hour and a half drive from Pucon. It is easily found by following signs to the famous hot springs “Termas Geometricas”. The upper section is a well known classic class 4-5 creek run that was first descented by John Foss and Zack Cowan in 1995. The upper section is most frequented by boaters and is a warm up run compared to what lurks downstream.
The middle section, contains some unrun rapids and is usually skipped for an easier take out option for the upper section located where the road is first visable from the river, after the “class 5″ rapid, often portaged river right during high water due to a must make eddy at the bottom. Anyone who has run the middle section usually parked their car at the Termas Vergara, there is an unrun rapid you want to get out above. The middle is considered a “park n huck” to the daring ones with intentions of running the biggest drop on the river which also marks the end of the middle section… or now… maybe the beginning of the lower section, and is arguably the most bad ass 60′ waterfall in Chile. The drop is called “Gerd’s drop”, first descented by Gerd Serrasolses in 2006. It has since been run by only 6 other huckers. Immediately following this monster drop is one of the cleanest 30′ waterfalls in Chile, called the “Suavemente” or the “Purty Thirty”. In the past when boaters would run this drop they would climb back out of the gorge in fear of what may be around the corner due to a diffucult to scout gorge that appeared to be unrunnable. Numerous groups throughout the years peered into the canyon through dense brush and steep cliffed walls, but no one ever mustered up the courage to drop in to this unknown.
Until, December 23rd 2011 a group of 5 brave kayakers, Jared Seiler, Evan Garcia, Ian Garcia, 3 of the 7 who have run Gerd’s drop, Jonny Meyers, and Anton Immler decided it was time to drop in for the first descent of the Lower section. Before dropping in the crew researched the section with Google Earth and found the run to be 9 km to Puente Llancahue, with the steepest part of the run being in the first 3km, in total dropping over 400 meters of gradient. Roughly 200Fpm, with the steepest 1km at probably around 400fpm. They figured if they could get through the first 1 km they could expect a gradual tapering off of the steep gradient. The day before the mission a crew led by Jared Seiler scouted most of the first 1 km after the “Purty thirty” which proved the findings from Google Earth to be the steepest and most continuous section. What the crew found was very promisingly runnable looking slides and waterfalls stacked between tiny catchable eddies and a potentially portageable left bank at a seemingly perfect water level. Jared informed the boys of the epicness of the run and made plans to drop in the next day. Coming from Pucon in the morning the crew put on below Gerd’s drop at 2 in the afternoon on a bright sunny day. Starting with the “Purty Thirty” they got out to scout on the left. A runnable 15′ first slide to autoboof put them in a must make eddy before a very continuous looking section. On the 2nd descent a boater missed this eddy and was forced to run the succeeding drops blind…The boys spent about an hour scouting an approximately 200′ long slide with a technical 2 part lead in rapid. After much debate Jared Seiler decided to go for it and ran the entire slide cleanly until spinning around backwards and flipping in the last 20′ of the slide. After a quick roll and celebration he caught the small must make eddy on the right at the bottom before another long slide. After a thumbs up, Evan Garcia and Anton Immler followed Seiler’s line with a little carnage of their own, but mostly cleaned it. Ian and Jonny opted for a seal launch half way down the slide which slightly tamed the rowdy beast. The lead in drops to this slide become worse at lower levels and a boater was badly pinned on a separate descent a week later in the lip of the first drop for over 20 minutes before he could be rescued. The entire slide can be portaged on the left. Seiler decided to call the slide “La Longaniza”.
Graham Seiler running the bottom half of “La Longaniza”
The crew briefly scouted the next slide which they ran down a left channel where the river is split by an island with both left and right channels looking runnable and the crew chose the left which ended in a 15′ waterfall. The line turned out to be pretty stout and was named “Survivor slide” aka “fight club”. The right channel has been run since and is equally challenging. Immediately following the 15′ waterfall the crew caught an eddy on the left above the last slide of the steepest section where their shuttle driver awaited with a rope in case someone was swept into the last slide that ended with a heinous hydraulic and boxed in walls. The crew called this one “the Gambler”. This drop has since been run. A short pool led to the start of a section later named, the “Quality and Quantity” section which begins with a 6′ boof run down the middle then a series of 2 class 4 boogie water sections broken up by a calm section and proceeds into another continuous rapid which Evan nearly ran blind before catching a small eddy to have a look. Good thing because this rapid had one of the ugliest siphons on the run followed immediately by a 6′ weir hole. Evan ran a clean line down the left and boofed the hole in the middle. The siphon on river right was later named “cancha tomate” and the following weir hole “wachito culiado”. Best scouted and portaged on the right. Small eddies on either sides afterwards allowed a set up to run the next 6′ horseshoe hole boofing right of center named “puta la wea”. Continuing mostly down the left through class 4 boogie you come to a drop run left under two big old growth logs perched in an A-frame position. Another half a km brought the crew to a narrow slot boof into a fairly large pool marking the end of the “QQ” section. Continuing roughly a half a kilometer you come to a rapid where the water ramps off the left wall through a fluffy hole. More boogie arrives at a manky slot rapid portaged on the right. Potentially run right. More boogie gradually mellowing out brought the group to 2 stout looking converging channels dropping into a big hole partially backed by a boulder on the right. Scout and portaged left. This drop was later run on the 2nd descent down the left channel and was named “the shitter” upon finding a toilet seat lid at the bottom The river continues at a fun pace and gradually goes flat. At this point the 1st crew thought they were finished with the run, but 4 more 15′ drops awaited downstream along with a landslide that diverted the river through a forest! The first 15′ after the “false run out”was only run by Evan on the first descent where a bad line on the left through a manky pile of rocks coined the name “ass banger”. Jared ran the drop on the 2nd descent with a more thought out line that turned out better off the middle clearing the rocks in the landing zone. More boogie water leads quickly into the 2nd of the last four 15′. Called “el nombre de mi polola” or “La Pacha Mama” one of the best drops on the run. A stout lead in down the left splits two directions with both 15′ drops on either side proved runnable. Big logs piled in the middle between the two falls characterizes the drop. This drop is difficult to see coming and is best scouted by scraping over a far right channel into a small eddy on the right. This drop may be mandatory, but if you feel the need to portage you probably shouldn’t be on the run. Wood could be an issue in this drop in which case a throw and go portage from the logs could be done or maybe hellish bush whacking through the woods on the right would be the best option. Soon after this falls is the landslide forest. Run cautiously through a maze of trees and strainers on the left. More boogie…seriously very little flat water on this run, brings you to a super gnar 15′ falls into a tunnel like siphon on the right, run only by scraping down the FAR LEFT, as far from this potential boater swallowing siphon as possible, one of the nastiest siphons I’ve seen! More boogie water leads to the last drop, 15′ down the middle boof with a possible plug line on the left. Dubbed the 4.20 drop. Finally, finishing off with 2 km of shallow run out to Puente Llancahue. A gauge for the run can be judged by the middle bridge embutment 3 inches showing on the river right corner of the lowest concrete slab is optimal. If water is over this the run will become very dangerous due to washed out eddies. The first descent was done in a very low water year in late December. During a regular season I would imagine this section will be runnable in late January. The river holds water very well and if you think it may be too high don’t go!!! (I believe higher water descents will be possible in the future- but not unless you know the run very well-as you will not be able to stop in some of the steep sections). You can also judge the flow at the put-in by looking at the lip of Gerd’s drop. If water is spilling over a right channel at the lip it is probably too high. This run requires class 5+ skill level with exceptional eddy catching skills. Arguably, the stoutest steep creek run in Chile! Cuidado mother F@*&er$!!!
photos taken by Andraz Krpic | <urn:uuid:267f8458-d602-4f5b-88a9-160170843e20> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://riversofchile.com/lower-llancahue/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953987 | 2,229 | 1.554688 | 2 |
| July 11, 2005|
For Immediate Release
Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory Opens Norfolk Office To Support Joint Forces Command
A new field office for The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory has now opened in Norfolk to support the U.S. Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) in its mission to better integrate the war fighting capabilities of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines.
Located near JFCOM headquarters, the field office — with five offices and a conference room that will accommodate 45 people — will strengthen communications between APL and JFCOM personnel working on common projects. The Laboratory's role has been to help the Command anticipate and address some of its greatest challenges, including evaluating technologies that could solve pressing military challenges and improve battlefield situational awareness.
APL's main campus is located in Laurel, Md., but it operates more than a dozen field offices across the country to provide immediate and continual support for its military sponsors. The Norfolk office opened its doors in February 2005. A joint APL/JFCOM ribbon-cutting ceremony and reception will be held on July 18, 2005.
New Phase of Ongoing Relationship
APL has had on-site support at JFCOM for about five years. Equally important to that "on-scene presence" has been the JFCOM work conducted at the Lab, says Robin Holliday, APL's JFCOM account and program manager. "We have a great deal of expertise at the Lab that directly applies to JFCOM's missions. This new office will provide an effective way of connecting the Laboratory with JFCOM, enabling a free flow of ideas and information to address JFCOM's specific needs."
As a trusted agent for JFCOM's Joint Requirements and Integration Directorate, the Lab works with combatant commanders, joint staff, the services, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and others to improve the speed and precision of planning, collaboration, and joint military command and control capabilities.
Past APL activities have included providing an end-to-end systems perspective of available tracking technologies that supported JFCOM's report to Congress on technologies that could improve battlefield situational awareness and reduce fratricide, or "friendly fire" casualties.
The Lab also helped develop an assessment plan for JFCOM's Joint Battle Management Command and Control (JBMC2) to improve the way the Department of Defense organizes, trains and equips joint battle management command and control capabilities.
"We have a very professional relationship with APL, with a very open exchange of academic and systems engineering ideas," says JBMC2 Director Alex Urrutia. "It's a partnership that helps JFCOM achieve not only the products we seek, but the processes that will support them. We can talk about issues with APL and get candid and frank advice on those issues. There is an intellectual partnership."
New Challenges on the Horizon
An emerging requirement of JFCOM's role in the Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration (ACTD) program will be to determine the military utility of the Epidemic Outbreak Surveillance (EOS) system designed to rapidly detect and identify a wide range of pathogens. "This technology will support the ability of the war fighter to maintain his capabilities and readiness in biologically hostile domains," says Ann Arnold, APL's JFCOM ACTD program manager.
APL also is providing the military utility assessment for Multi-Sensor Aerospace-Ground Joint Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) Interoperability Coalition (MAJIIC), a new technology that aims to speed intelligence to front-line troops and help coalition partners exchange information. "This effort directly addresses lessons learned from Operation Iraqi Freedom with the hope that it will allow intelligence information to be shared among coalition partners and improve the usefulness of that data.
The Lab is offering JFCOM's Joint Prototype Pathway Office APL concepts and prototypes on advanced data fusion, locating difficult-to-find targets and Net-Centric concepts. "These prototypes address war fighting requirements as documented in JFCOM's compilation of lessons learned from Operation Iraqi Freedom," Holliday says.
In addition, APL is supporting JFCOM's use of modeling and simulation used to define and assess these and other advanced concepts needed for today's and tomorrow's war fighting needs.
For more information about the Norfolk field office and its support of JFCOM programs, contact Holliday at 240-228-0738.
The Applied Physics Laboratory, a division of The Johns Hopkins University, meets critical national challenges through the innovative application of science and technology. For information, visit www.jhuapl.edu. | <urn:uuid:7da0972d-5852-4d90-b186-d4a0328eba7b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.jhuapl.edu/newscenter/pressreleases/2005/050711.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931141 | 946 | 1.664063 | 2 |
I read this book with fascination. That’s what’s so great about the autobiography - you can step into the life of someone who’s entirely different from you, and step back out, unscathed.
Knapp was an outwardly successful woman. A journalist with a university education, and an upper-middle class background, she nevertheless became a “raging drunk”. What I loved most about this book is that it opened my eyes to the reality of alcoholism. It is not a disease that strikes only the poor, weak, or immoral. It’s a disease that can ruin the life of just about anyone, and for vastly different reasons.
I’m the kind of person who can stop drinking when I choose. Knapp couldn’t. She just couldn’t – until she had no other choice but to quit, and enter rehab. Drinking chronicles Knapp’s life, from the days when she first started drinking, through her university years and beyond, and finally through rehab and towards sobriety.
With insight and honesty, Knapp shares her observations about how childhood, family life, emotions, and self-perception can lead one to take refuge in alcohol.
After reading this book, I’m much more aware of the reasons why it’s nearly impossible for so many people to “just stop” drinking.
Visit your local library today! Whether you’re looking for autobiographies or any other genre, we’re happy to assist you and to make suggestions. We also have a wide variety of materials about alcohol and alcohol abuse. If you need more assistance, information desk staff can give you contact information for local AA chapters. | <urn:uuid:0afece5e-7541-48f3-84f6-020ff35c0c8d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.calgarypubliclibrary.com/blogs/library-connect?m=201105 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938046 | 358 | 1.734375 | 2 |
Ten years ago today, I bought myself a birthday present. It was a Brenthaven Backpack.
At the tender age of 18, I coveted few things. But among the web designers and programmers whose blogs I read regularly and whom I looked up to, this backpack was the ultimate in durability and functionality.
It featured a padded, hardened laptop sleeve that could sustain even a dead drop from ten or fifteen feet. It had padded, adjustable shoulder straps. It was made from a seemingly indestructible material. It had hidden pockets everywhere.
At the time, I didn’t have a laptop — just a desktop computer. It ran Windows and Linux, and I used it mostly for web design and Macromedia Flash programming. Adobe hadn’t bought Macromedia yet.
Notebook computers were generally clunky and underpowered devices — not meant for doing “real work”. But my Dad purchased me a used MacBook Titanium from a friend of his — and I knew this was a true luxury.
I was that kid who always built his desktop PC from spare commodity parts and used items on eBay. I had a Linux server running in my basement. I was the only person I knew who had a “personal website” with its own dot-com domain. This laptop and my move to NYU for college was a transition from a tethered to a mobile world, and I wanted to embrace — and protect — that investment.
My backpack went everywhere with me, and so did my laptop. In Philosphy class, it held books by Kant and Nietzche, and a disk drive filled with reflections on the limits of knowledge, the essence of being, and the our moral impulses. For Computer Science class, it contained operating systems textbooks, a tattered copy of K&R’s The C Programming Language, and text buffers filled with some of the worst code I’ve ever written.
During my first summer internship, I built a web application for a non-profit, an application that is still in use today. During that summer, my backpack contained my first non-software artifacts. I would lug my laptop back and forth from home to the city and meet with my client. My backpack carried use case diagrams. Hand-drawn wireframes. Entity-relationship diagrams. Release plans. And the first chunks of code of which I was truly proud.
Eventually the Macbook Titanium went away — I switched back to Linux and commodity PCs in 2004. I needed x86 so that I could more easily work on operating system kernels. CPUs were slower back then, virtualization software more buggy, so doing raw assembly and C programming worked better when you had a real x86 machine and ran Linux straight on it. But, the backpack stayed with me. The awesome padded sleeve was just the right size for my new Linux laptops. All through NYU, that sturdy backpack stayed with me.
My first 18 months at Morgan Stanley, my backpack gathered some dust in my bedroom closet. At that company, software engineers were forced to work from bland desktop computers pre-loaded with Windows XP. I had a Linux laptop — a Thinkpad T43, the last manufactured by IBM — but only hacked on it during the weekends.
I should have known. My backpack was laying at home, unused. Much like my ideas and passion, which were kept bottled up in the corporate world.
The most observant of my corporate colleagues could date when my mind started to drift away from a career on Wall Street to when I started to appear at the office with my old Brenthaven backpack. It was at that point that I started to spruce up my Python development environment again and hack on small web app projects in cafes during my lunch hour. In a way, the backpack allowed me to bring my hacker mentality to work, rather than leaving it at home.
When I quit Morgan Stanley (2009) to start Parse.ly, my backpack again became my portable office. At the Dreamit Philly incubator, I lugged it back and forth between the “startup house” where I hacked by night, and the Dreamit office in University City Science Center, where I hacked by day.
When Dreamit ended and Sachin and I moved back to New York City, it remained my portable office. Astoria. Brooklyn. Manhattan. I could get work done anywhere, though we often struggled to find a Wifi hotspot.
That was 2010, when Parse.ly really started growing. The NYC startup community started taking shape. People started leaving Wall Street for startups in droves. Ten NYC-based startup accelerators popped up within a year. There was real excitement and optimism in the air.
John Frankel at ff Venture Capital was kind enough to notice our hacking and hustling out of cafes and offer us free space at his office in midtown, where he was building up his early stage investment fund. At that point, I lugged the backpack with my laptop with Parse.ly’s earliest codebases back and forth to our new office, for one of our periods of most intense productivity.
Then, in 2011, we raised money, grew revenue, gradually hired an awesome team, and launched Parse.ly Dash. And today, in 2012, we are working with an awesome set of customers, and innovating daily.
Ten years ago today, at age 18, I bought myself a backpack. It’s a bit tattered at this point, held together with rubberbands and string at certain parts.
I could easily order a new backpack online. Instead, I brought it to a local tailor today, who gave me a quote — $22 — to fix it up. I said, “Sure — that’s $22 well spent”.
Good things. Built to last.
Here’s to the next ten years. | <urn:uuid:38a7d38d-e4fe-474a-8a14-03c870b09a58> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pixelmonkey.org/2012/08/30/my-old-backpack | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968108 | 1,211 | 1.5625 | 2 |
By Tom Bartlett - Originally Published September 1979
Nine million Americans served in Vietnam; 46,616 lost their lives and another 10,000 died of war-related wounds. More than 448,000 Marines served there, and they did far more than fight a war....
"When Johnny comes marching home again, hurrah, hurrah;
"We'll give him a hearty welcome then, hurrah, hurrah..."
But it wasn't that way at all. I came "marching home" four times. My mom was happy to see me, and my father had tears in his eyes. The dog wagged, but that was about it.
The Vietnam War lasted from August 5, 1964 to May 7, 1975.
During that span of time, I served in Vietnam in 1965, 1966, 1968, 1969, and 1970. I wasn't there for the entire 12 months of each year, and some of the years overlapped, but I made the trip four times. I didn't see a single "Welcome Home" sign or banner, even at the military installations where we landed on our return.
And then, just like leap year, I read where there was a "Vietnam Veterans' Week" from May 28 to June 3, 1979. June 3rd is my birthday, so that's a date I don't forget. And there's another date in there that'll always remind me of service in Vietnam...Memorial Day.
As a combat correspondent in Vietnam, I met many Marines. I've forgotten the names of some, but I still correspond with others. And, because I work for Leatherneck, I still run into a few I met over there. They're older now and not as tanned. Their hair is thinning or turning gray, and they've gained rank, or, if out of the Corps, they've gained weight.
Some of these Marines left some of themselves behind in that country. Arms, legs, eyes.... I've done stories on them, also.
For others who returned physically whole, they left something behind, too. Like a year of their life, which will never be returned to them.
Or a close friend.
To this day, when I hear a firecracker, a backfire or a hunter shoot his weapon, I'll jump, feeling my gut tighten into a knot. If anyone is around me, my expression must be entertaining, because they often laugh at my reaction. I smile in embarrassment, but I can't help myself.
And I get flashbacks of Operation Star Lite and the young Marine next to me who was hit in the stomach and screaming for a drink of water. Or I hear the Marine on Operation Hastings who cried because his right leg hurt. He didn't know that the leg was gone.
And when I was sent south of Marble Mountain to a Combined Action Platoon near An Hoa/Hoi An to take photos of the young Marines who had been tortured, their bodies mutilated even in death....
And I remember an interview with LtCol Joe Muir of the Third Marines. I'd been with that unit before and during Star Lite, and I knew many of the young men who had been wounded or killed in that battle. As I interviewed the colonel after the memorial services held on the beach, he wept unashamedly over the deaths of his teen-aged Marines. Two weeks later, I wept. Joe Muir was killed along with his sergeant major, by a booby trap.
I wept, and I'm not ashamed to admit it, as the result of an act performed by General Lew Walt. Those who served with the former Commanding General of the III MAF, or those who remember him as Assistant Commandant, will recall that he is all man. He earned the Navy Cross; he's a former Marine Raider; and he's seen his share of killing and' hurt.
He was at the Da Nang airstrip, talking with wounded Marines who were returning to hospitals Stateside. One young Marine was bandaged across the top of his head. He literally wore a turban of bandages, ending at the bridge of his nose. Therefore, he couldn't see who was talking to him.
"How are you doing, Marine?" General Walt asked.
"Just fine, thanks."
"They treating you okay?"
"Who are you with?"
"How old are you?"
"Just turned 19."
"Got all your gear together for your flight back home?"
"The unit is going to ship it back for me," the young Marine said. "All except my eye."
Another voice from behind General Walt was heard. "This young corporal is being recommended for the Silver Star, general. He went out under heavy fire to bring in a wounded radioman."
And with that, General Walt undid his own ribbons, removed the Silver Star from his personal decorations, and pressed it into the young Marine's hand. "Here," the general said, tears running down his cheek, "you deserve it more than I do..."
The general asked his aide to get the name, rank and address of the Marine to ensure that the medal would be forthcoming.
"Hard" is a term I've heard to describe General Walt. "The Brute" was a term used to describe retired Lieutenant General Victor H. Krulak.
But I remember "The Brute" when he wasn't quite so hard....
I was at a medical aid station. Marine casualties and body bags were being ferried in by helicopter. It was like M*A*S*H without "Hotlips," and there wasn't any joking. The wounds, pain and bleeding were all very real.
The doctors and corpsmen were working under canvas tents, and it was very hot. The medical people had been working for hours in the heat.
Someone came through, saying that General Krulak was in the area, and that the doctors and corpsmen should try to square away a little.
I remember one doctor who had been operating in his scivvies. Remember, it was very hot, and there were no females around, anyway. Finishing with the operation, he turned to leave the tent to get some pants on and to change out of his bloodied T-shirt.
Outside, he was blinded by the sun, and he stopped to rub his eyes and wipe the sweat off his forehead.
A hand went to the doctor's shoulder and a voice said, "You guys are doing one hell of a job. I want you to know that I appreciate all you are doing for these Marines..."
The doctor turned and stared at three stars. It was "The Brute."
Anyone who has been to Vietnam has memories; some good, some not so good. We all remember the heat and the rains; we remember the sand and the cactus. Those stationed in the south remember the fear of booby traps; those up north knew the frustration of watching the enemy boogie into Cambodia or Laos, knowing the Marines couldn't (most of the time) continue the chase.
Or the violations of Tet or Christmas "truces..."
Or 11- and 12-year-old sappers coming through the wire, spraying Marines and their aircraft with homemade grenades or AK's.
But some memories are of Stateside. "How many babies did you kill over there?"
Rocks thrown through recruiters' windows. Obscene phone calls.
But there is more; much more. There are nine million Vietnam Vets. These men and women will remember that America extended amnesty to those who fled to Canada and Sweden before recognizing those who served....
Max Cleland is head of the Veterans Administration, and he is a Viet Vet. "They served with bravery fully equal to that of Americans who served in other wars. Yet, they are a different group of veterans...one beset by lingering problems and by an uncertainty that their service was just."
Of those nine million who served, 46,616 were killed in action and another 10,000 died from "war related causes."
Mistakes were made; cruel acts were performed by both sides. These were publicized, especially when Americans made the errors.
But there was so much good accomplished by so many individuals and units.
Unfortunately, the American press had little time or space for the good....
In November 1964, Marine helicopters of HMH-365 evacuated some 1,700 Vietnamese flood victims. HMH-162 delivered 900 tons of emergency supplies to stricken areas.
And the 1st Battalion, Ninth Marines, initiated its "Golden Fleece" program in the Marble Mountain area, south of Da Nang. LtCol Verle Ludwig was the battalion commander at the time.
Vietnamese villagers came to his area, pleading for the Marines to protect their rice from being stolen by the enemy. The battalion of Marines, backed by armor of the 1st Amtrac Battalion, protected the farmers while they reaped their harvest.
In 1965, the United States shipped 110,000 tons of rice to the Republic of Vietnam, and in 1966, another 110,000 tons of rice was sent.
How many kids were helped at the Hoa Khanh Children's Hospital at Red Beach by the members of the Force Logistics Command; how many orphans at the Nam-O, China Beach, or the Catholic and Buddhist orphanages in Hoi An received medical or educational benefits through efforts of Marines, Sailors and Seabees?
And few know about the efforts of the Marine Corps Reserve Civic Action Fund which worked through CARE in providing medicines, soaps, self-help kits (such as metalworking kits, agricultural and hand tool kits; carpentry kits; needle trade kits; elementary school kits; blacksmith kits; masonry kits and barber kits).
Then, under the direction of Col Donald R. Kenneth, California Reserve units got together and began their own project. Along with the help of Maj Grover Knowles and LtCol John Benelli, a million dollars in aid and pharmaceutical supplies was realized, and some 75 tons of medicines were shipped to South Vietnam.
And what about the school at Thu Duc, the pig farms, fish ponds, bridges, or the wells provided by 1st MP's, FLC, III MAF and engineers...?
And the doctors and corpsmen who conducted "MedCaps" outside the gates of bases or in the various villages?
Of the 448,000 Marines who served in Vietnam from 1965 until the final withdrawal, 41,000 were black. Five black Marines earned Medals of Honor.
Nearly 18,000 corpsmen served in Vietnam; three received Medals of Honor. Two were posthumous awards.
Bi-monthly, MedCap teams traveled to the Crescent Beach Orphanage and nearby Leprosarium. For the medical teams, it meant vaccinations and treatment of infections. To the dental teams, it usually meant tooth extractions.
More than 650 Navy chaplains served in Vietnam, and many were with the Marines. Thirty-five Navy chaplains received 38 Purple Hearts for service in Vietnam. Three died in combat there.
Lt Vincent R. Capodanno was posthumously awarded this nation's highest decoration, the Medal of Honor. Navy Lt Raymond Johnson was decorated four times, including the Silver Star Medal, for heroism in Vietnam.
In the summer of 1969, the dedication and involvement of Navy chaplains became obvious when word was officially released that the Third Marine Division was returning to Okinawa. Of the 16 Navy chaplains eligible, 14 requested transfer to other units of the III Marine Amphibious Force so they could remain with combat Marine units in Vietnam.
There was one hell of a lot more to Vietnam for the Marines, doctors, corpsmen, dentists and chaplains than helping to fight a war.
The Third Marine Division's Memorial Children's Hospital at Quang Tri or the Hoa Khanh Children's Hospital were more like Stateside hospitals than most in Vietnam.
And never before had Marines been asked to rebuild a country as they secured it. During the Pacific island campaigns of World War II, Marines fixed bayonets, charged, scored a victory and moved on to another island, leaving the mopping up to other allied units.
In Vietnam, during an 18-month period, nearly two million South Vietnamese received free medical and dental care offered through a variety of medical civic action programs.
A brick factory operated by the 7th Marines Engineers obtained raw material from CARE and employed refugee labor to make bricks, which were then supplied, without cost, to hamlets in the area for schools.
Among projects designed specifically to increase the level of education was the General Walt Scholarship Program established in 1967 to assist needy students showing potential. The program grew from 465 elementary and high school scholarships to over a thousand. Financial support was provided by the Marine Corps Reserve Civic Action Fund.
Additionally, there were more than 70,000 members of Free World forces who served in Vietnam, with the Republic of Korea represented by 50,000 troops. Australia, New Zealand, Republic of the Philippines, Thailand, Nationalist China, Spain.... And there were more.
West Germany was represented by teams of medical personnel and a hospital ship; Brazil, Belgium, Denmark, Greece, Guatemala, Iran, Israel, Italy, Liberia, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Great Britain all sent medical help.
Nearly 3,500 members of Free World forces (excluding Americans) died while serving in the Republic of Vietnam.
Australians first came to the aid of Vietnam in 1962. In addition to 7,500 men and the guided missile destroyer Hobart, Australia was also committed to many economic and social assistance projects.
New Zealand provided two rifle companies, an artillery battery, a tri-service medical team and special air service troops from their First Ranger Squadron, totaling 600 men.
The Republic of the Philippines was represented by 1,000 engineers and 1,000 security troops based at Tay Ninh, scene of one of the largest and most successful operations of the war, "Junction City."
Thailand had more than 12,000 men of the Black Panther Division and a variety of air force and naval units, including river patrol boats.
Marine Corps redeployment in Vietnam began in September 1968. Following the activation of the Fifth Marine Division in March 1966, Regimental Landing Team 26 arrived in Vietnam and later received a Presidential Unit Citation for action at Khe Sanh.
The 27th Marines, following a 48-hour notice, shipped out of Camp Pendleton, arriving in Vietnam during the height of the 1968 Tet Offensive. Part of the unit went to the Da Nang "rocket belt," and the remainder went north to help mop up Hue City. They returned to the States in September 1968.
Most of the Fifth Marine Division was deactivated on October 15, 1969. The final ceremony was held November 26, 1969, at Camp Pendleton.
The Third Marine Division was next, and as the word spread, Marines on Dong Ha Mountain and Mutter's Ridge smiled from the fog, the slime and the clay.
They were manning the northernmost positions. As Marines were replaced by American Army and ARVN units, they'd move south for ships to Okinawa. "Lima"/3/4 was last to leave.
The Ninth Marines, first to land in Vietnam, was the first major unit pulled out of the war zone, and by late August 1969, it was training on Okinawa.
Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron-165 bundled up its Sea Knights and loaded aboard the LPH Valley Forge in mid-'69, also heading for Okinawa. Fixed-wing aircraft squadrons followed, most going to Iwakuni, Japan.
Perhaps the most enviable redeployment for Marines in Vietnam was made by the 1st Light Anti-Aircraft Missile Battalion. Its 692 men went all the way back to Marine Corps Base, Twentynine Palms, Calif.
Armed with HAWK missiles, the unit had arrived in Da Nang in February 1965, even prior to the landing of the Ninth Marines. The 1st LAAM never fired in anger, but the threat posed to the enemy probably had something to do with his never flying south of the DMZ.
The Marine Corps began returning to the pre-Vietnam posture. Early outs were granted many Marines in time for Christmas 1969, and others were timed to benefit those enrolling in college.
In Vietnam, American casualty figures dropped and units of the First Marine Division began turning areas of responsibility over to Vietnamese units.
Marines landed at Vietnam's Red Beach on March 8, 1965. From that date, through 1969, 417 large Marine unit operations were conducted. Thousands of patrols and ambushes were run.
President Jimmy Carter's proclamation stated that Vietnam Veterans Week is to honor those who served and "to recognize with appropriate ceremonies and activities yesterday's service and today's contributions of Vietnam era veterans."
For many, the war has not ended.
There is no end to the nightmares; anyone who has served in combat, from the trenches at Belleau Wood to the ash at Iwo; to the freezing cold of the Chosin.... The war never ends.
It may be difficult for those who weren't there to understand the bitter taste in the mouths of some Viet Vets.
"The decade now drawing to a close began in the midst of a war that was the longest and most expensive in our history, and most costly in human lives and suffering. Because it was a divisive and painful period for all Americans, we are tempted to want to put the Vietnam war out of our minds. But it is important that we remember-honestly, realistically, with humility..." the proclamation states.
"It is important, too, that we remember those who answered their Nation's call in that war with the full measure of their valor and loyalty, that we pay full tribute at last to all Americans who served in our Armed Forces in Southeast Asia. Their courage and sacrifices in that tragic conflict were made doubly difficult by the Nation's lack of agreement as to what constituted the highest duty. Instead of glory, they were too often met with our embarrassment or ignored when they returned."
There were many good men who served. They were told to go; they went. They were told to fight; they fought.
They've been back four years, but we just thought we'd say it again -"Welcome home..." | <urn:uuid:328e715b-0773-495b-a946-e1da47bfafab> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mca-marines.org/leatherneck/welcome-home | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.98199 | 3,808 | 1.828125 | 2 |
Manned by a pair of trained officers, a large private security jeep moves slowly past the high walls lining a residential street in the suburbs of Johannesburg, South Africa.
Heavily armed and alert, the officers scan the designated area, looking for any suspicious activity.
They work for CSS Tactical, a private security company hired by local residents to patrol their area and protect them from any potential criminals.
"To be proactive, we need to be noticed," says Ricky Croock, managing director of CSS Tactical. "We need people to say 'hold on, there is a dedicated tactical vehicle.'
"A tactical vehicle is a bigger vehicle -- it is more aggressive, it's a deterrent. So the first point is we want to deter as opposed to catch crime."
The security officers are well armed. They carry semi-automatic weapons and hand guns and they're trained in how and when to use them. And while only the police have the power of random stop and search in public places, security companies also stop people they regard as suspicious.
From April 2011 to March 2012 there were 15,609 murders in South Africa, as well as 64,514 sexual offenses and 101,203 cases of aggravated robbery.
According to the country's latest "Victims of crime survey," 57% of respondents felt that housebreaking/burglary was the crime most feared in their area of residence.
In recent years, South Africa has stepped up efforts to tackle crime, one of the country's worst social ills. Last September, the South African Police Service said that serious crime in the country had been reduced by 31.8% from 2004/5 to 2011/12. But 2011 to 2012 saw a reduction in serious crime of just 1.9%.
"We only have the official crime statistics to go by," says Rudolph Zinn of the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa. "If you look at what the police would report annually in September of every year, we see over the last three or four years that crime has leveled off.
"The more concerning factor is the high percentage of so-called violent or contact crime, which is about a third of all the crime reported to the South African Police Service."
And that's what has fueled the boom in the country's private security industry, crime experts say. There are nearly 9,000 companies and 400,000 registered active private security guards. That's more than the police and army combined, according to South African officials.
"The security industry is bigger than what it has ever been in South Africa," says Zinn. "I think the growth in the industry is definitely attributed to the fact that, let's call it a weak policing or ineffective policing, and it created the opportunity for private individuals to move into the market."
Some of those individuals have a military background. Waal de Waal, chief operating officer at South African-owned Protea Coin, spent 18 years in the special forces and military intelligence before joining the private security sector a decade ago.
He is today one of the 17,000 people employed by Protea Coin. Part of the multi-million dollar company's work is dealing with small-scale crime, like recovering fuel stolen from a petrol station.
The company, which also provides security at many of South Africa's mines and has been kept busy by the recent strikes in the sector, offers a range of services, including 24-hour property monitoring and protection against organized criminal syndicates.
"The role of private security companies is distinctively different to that of the police," says Petrus Van Niekerk, the chief executive of Protea Coin. "We view our role as private security to really aid and support the police."
But what happens when private security companies take matters into their own hands?
The South African government claims that it's an industry that threatens national security and is determined to tighten its regulation. "A very dangerous situation arises if you have a security industry that outstrips both your police and your army and there is completely no regulation of that industry," says Jenni Irish-Qhobosheane, the head of the Civilian Secretariat for Police.
"I think the public can find themselves in situations where, basically, they are put at the mercy of private security companies who are unprofessional," she adds.
One measure considered by the country's government is that private security firms must be owned by South Africans.
"This type of move is going to frighten away foreign direct investment and I think that is a danger," says Hanes Venter, sales director at the South African arm of G4S, a London-listed global security giant. "Foreign direct investment is already down year on year but this is a worry from that perspective for me."
Whatever regulations the South African government eventually introduces, it seems unlikely the demand for private securities companies will diminish amid high unemployment rates, as well as widespread poverty and simmering industrial tensions. | <urn:uuid:da8b36ec-c83c-4905-ac52-8ad67e48f1f8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kjct8.com/news/money/South-Africa-s-other-army/-/194312/18463020/-/5x45u/-/index.html | 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 | 0.974578 | 1,016 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Join us for the next VICNetwork Webinar:
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
11:00 am – 12:00 noon Pacific / 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm Eastern
Community Partnership: An Investment That Will Deliver Your Message
Building collaborative relationships with community partners can make all the difference in successfully promoting public health campaigns and messages. Join the next VICNetwork webinar to learn about how partnerships developed with state and local organizations is a worthwhile investment that will help maximize your ability to share information and build support.
Objectives for this course:
- Identify three ways communication specialists can partner with local, state and national organizations to reach diverse communities
- Understand how community partnerships can assist public health communicators in disseminating important health messages during routine and emergency situations
- Understand how to maintain partnerships between community organizations and public health agencies.
Debbie McCune Davis, Executive Director with The Arizona Partnership (TAPI)
Ms. Davis has served as the Executive Director for The Arizona Partnership for Immunization, better known as TAPI, since February 1996. She developed her knowledge of the community and her skills in collation development as an elected member of the Arizona House of Representatives and Arizona Senate, serving from 1979 until 1994 and again from January 2003 to the present. Debbie holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Sociology from Arizona State University.
Jennifer Tinney, Program Director with The Arizona Partnership (TAPI)
Jennifer Tinney is the Program Director for The Arizona Partnership for Immunizations and has been working in immunization education for 10 years. She specializes in provider education programs, vaccine financing, public health billing systems and partner development. Her background is in Microbiology and Social Work – a quirky mix of tracking disease behavior and human behavior.
Jeanene Fowler, Public Information Officer with Maricopa County, Arizona
Jeanene Fowler is currently the Public Information Supervisor for Maricopa County Department of Public Health in Phoenix, Ariz. In this capacity, she is responsible for all day to day marketing communications activities on behalf of the department including responding to media requests, drafting risk communications plans, advising senior management, building community partnership and participating in all emergency response activities. Prior to this, Jeanene worked with several public relations agencies in the Phoenix market managing public relations activities for clients such as casinos, banks and the state health department. When asked why she left the private sector to work with the government, her response was simple, “Marketing and public relations is just not fulfilling to me unless I know that everyday I have the potential to make an impact in someone’s life.” Jeanene has served on the boards of the National Public Health Information Coalition and the Arizona Public Health Association. Jeanene graduated with a Bachelor’s of Science degree in marketing and public relations from Syracuse University in Syracuse, NY.
Machrina Leach, Nurse Program Manager with Maricopa County, Arizona
Machrina Leach is the Nurse Program Manager for the Office of Community Health Nursing at the Maricopa County Department of Public Health in Phoenix, Arizona. She has been working in immunizations for over 23 years. She oversees three clinics and multiple outreach immunization events immunizing over 40,000 children a year. She works closely with partners to provide immunization education programs, community immunization events and immunization promotion. Machrina is a graduate of the University of Arizona College of Nursing. After working three years in a pediatric hospital caring for ill children she wanted to focus her nursing career on keeping children healthy.
Carlos Velázquez, CDC Flu Disparities Project
Carlos Velázquez has been in the health field for more than 20 years designing and implementing national and local prevention programs in the US and abroad. His work in health disparities has touched upon issues related to HIV/AIDS, tobacco control, food insecurity, and immunization. Mr. Velázquez is the Vice President of Community Engagement for HMA Associates, in Washington, DC and he currently oversees the CDC’s communications initiative for grassroots social marketing to promote influenza immunization to disparate populations. He has developed partnerships in 45 target markets to coordinate media events, orchestrate flu vaccine clinics, and broaden the campaign message reach through social media platforms. | <urn:uuid:1d53150f-6d7b-40ea-beff-a24d242f9299> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.vicnetwork.org/category/blogs/vicnetwork-blog/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945212 | 863 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Seeing Michael Phelps’s Gold Medal Situation
Posted by The Situationist Staff on August 19, 2008
Sam Sommers has another excellent (situationist) post, titled “The Greatest Ever? Not So Fast . . .” over at Psychology Today Blog. Sommers’s post is worth reading in its entirety (here), but here are a few particularly situationist excerpts.
* * *
U.S. Swimmer Michael Phelps just won his 8th gold medal of the Beijing Olympics tonight, the 14th gold of his career. These are feats that have never been accomplished before, and it’s hard to argue with the conclusion that his is the greatest Olympic performance of all time. Some in the sporting world (and beyond) are also calling Phelps the greatest athlete of all time. But not so fast—a number of psychological considerations suggest that the pundits (and public) are likely getting a bit carried away.
Before I go any further, let me make one thing clear for the record. What Phelps has done is extraordinary and unprecedented. . . .
* * *
But why would I suggest that Phelps might not truly be the “greatest athlete” ever . . . ? . . . . I can think of at least three relevant psychological issues:
First, there’s good reason to believe that a variation of the availability heuristic is at play here. This just happened. . . .
So if I ask you to name great athletes, whose name is readily available to you at the moment? Phelps, of course. More generally, even beyond the domain of sports, I’d argue that people are typically lousy at judging “the greatest ever” in any area, due to the availability heuristic among other factors. . . .
Second, in addition to availability, there’s also a self-motivated reason for us to see Phelps deemed the greatest ever. Because we were able to watch Phelps’ triumph and because we’ll have stories to tell about what we saw in these Olympics, we’re able to perceive a personal connection to what he’s done that goes so far as to make us feel good about ourselves.
* * *
Finally, I think there’s also a compelling argument to be made that those who would call Phelps the greatest ever are doing what we humans often do in perceiving the world, namely not giving sufficient weight to the situational factors at play. . . .
[T]his debate is being pitched in largely dispositional terms (i.e., is he the greatest *athlete* ever, as opposed to is this the greatest athletic *performance* ever). And what I really mean to suggest is along the lines of the argument I made in a previous post, namely that important aspects of situations in daily life often escape our attention. In the case of Phelps, he has certainly had a terrific Olympics (now, that might be the greatest understatement of the century). But he also competes in a sport that presents its elite competitors with the opportunity to rack up multiple medals. Swimmers can compete in races of varying distances. There are races in 4 different strokes, as well as individual medleys combining strokes. Then there are relays as well. Is Mark Spitz the second-greatest athlete of all time?
The greatest of basketball and water polo players have a chance at 1 medal in an Olympics. Same with boxers and wrestlers. Track and field stars have more, but still not as many as swimmers. Consider Carl Lewis’ 1984 performance, when he won gold in the 100m, 200m, 4 x 100m relay, and long jump. Was Phelps’ 2008 demonstrably better than that? It’s hard to say. I’m quite sure this last argument will annoy the swimming fans out there, but what if Lewis had been afforded the same opportunities as Phelps to cover different distances in different ways? Swimmers have races in backstroke, breaststroke, butterfly, and freestyle; how many medals could Lewis have won if he could’ve entered the 100m gallop, the 100m skip, and the 100m crabwalk?
OK, so you might resist that last analogy. But the crabwalk would be pretty fun to watch, wouldn’t it? And the bigger point is that Phelps’ historical milestone was attributable to a number of factors: his phenomenal training regimen, his unsurpassed drive to win, his genetic gifts, and more. But he also owes at least part of his title as greatest Olympian ever to the current set-up of the Games, which affords swimmers more opportunities to medal than most other athletes. To ignore this fact and crown Phelps greater than Lewis, Jesse Owens, Eric Heiden, Sonja Henie, Al Oerter, and others seems impulsive. Not to mention, of course, all the non-Olympic athletes who certainly merit consideration for the title of greatest ever.
* * *
To read the entire post, which may well be the greatest post ever, click here.
For a sample related posts discussing the tendency to dispositionalize accomplishments that are largely situational, see “Promoting Dispostionism through Entertainment – Part III,” “Randomness, Luck, and other Situational Sources of Success and Failure,” ““Situation” Trumps “Disposition”- Part II,” “What’s Eating David Ortiz?,” and “David Vitter, Eliot Spitzer, and Now John Edwards: The Disposition Is Weaker than the Situation.”
For archives of all situationist sports posts, click here.
This entry was posted on August 19, 2008 at 4:00 pm and is filed under Behavioral Economics, Blogroll, Choice Myth, Situationist Sports, Social Psychology. Tagged: availability, fundamental attribution error, Michael Phelps, motivated reasoning, olympics gold medals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. | <urn:uuid:a0f58a90-6d3d-4a42-b549-db7c0fede129> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thesituationist.wordpress.com/2008/08/19/seeing-michael-phelpss-gold-medal-situation/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960671 | 1,274 | 1.773438 | 2 |
Ford promotes German engineer Schamel to global role
Ford Motor Co. is strengthening Europe's role in the company's engine development with the appointment of Andreas Schamel as its first European-based director of global powertrain, research and advanced engineering.
Schamel is promoted to the post from his previous job as Ford of Europe's chief engineer for powertrain, research and advanced engineering.
Schamel will report to Paul Mascarenas, Ford's chief technical officer. He succeeds Dan Kapp, who is based in the United States and is retiring after six years in the role.
Ford says Schamel will continue to play a leading role in developing green engine technology at the automaker.
A Ford spokewoman said Schamel played the leading role in the development of the company's Ecoboost engines and his new role will help the company meet its goals to downsize engines, reduced CO2 emissions and cut fuel consumption.
Schamel, a German national, joined Ford in 1987. He has held senior engineering roles for the automaker in Europe and the United States. | <urn:uuid:a63e5986-6632-4f72-b38c-47b966f8a50f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://europe.autonews.com/article/20121005/ANE/121009929/ford-promotes-german-engineer-schamel-to-global-role | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971104 | 218 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Guest Commentary by Laurence Cloney
Marco Community Bank closed recently due to improper capitalization. It reopened the same day under the ownership of Mutual of Omaha care of the FDIC. This closure highlights the prevalence of poor judgment and absence of fiscal responsibility locally and nationally. While all the facts are not yet in, the economic downturn seems to be only part of the story.
Lending practices have led to losses of $19.4 million in 2008/2009. Richard Storm CEO of Marco Community Bancorp, in a letter to shareholders wrote the bank was “critically undercapitalized” and that if capital was not raised soon the bank could fail. “With our prolonged loan losses over the past several years, we now find ourselves with diminished capital levels that do not meet regulatory standards” Storm wrote.
I posit that inappropriate and possibly predatory lending and FDIC insurance itself have led to bank failures and a decrease in the FDIC’s own reserves. While the FDIC is funded by bank’s premiums, the reserves are less than 2% of total backed bank assets. If banks fail, they are backed by the” full faith and credit of the US Government” otherwise known as you and me. The lack of sufficient oversight from state and federal regulators contributed to these practices multiplying.
Loans should only be granted to those with adequate income, and a history of responsible credit. In the past a 15 to 20% down payment was common. These standards precluded those least likely to be able to repay the loan. These were prudent benchmarks for success and losses due to “bad debt” were generally low.
In 1989 the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act was passed. This act gave Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae additional responsibility to support mortgages for low- and moderate-income families. While at the time these seemed like prudent steps, it seems these two agencies have also been victimized by improper administration of loans to what I would call at best speculative risks.
The FDIC was created to instill a sense of security amongst the public after the great depression. It was needed then to “guarantee” depositors accounts, but its very existence now allows loans to be made of a speculative nature that if they payoff, yield the bank and its investors more wealth, but if they default are the FDIC’s loss and possibly all of ours.
FDIC Insurance requires banks follow certain liquidity and reserve requirements. Banks are classified by their risk-based capital ratio: Well capitalized (10% or higher) down to Critically undercapitalized (less than 2%) An undercapitalized bank receives an FDIC warning. When the bank becomes critically undercapitalized the FDIC declares the bank insolvent and can take over its management.
All banks should be required to operate in the “well capitalized” range for their own good as well as ours. The fact that this may lead to less operating banks, well so be it. Banks should be self sufficient and serve the public interest not the other way around.
While many now want less government in our lives, regulatory oversight of financial institutions is one area where we can’t “afford” less. We should enforce the laws on the books and ensure banking officials, auditors, and regulators are held accountable to the highest standards of fiduciary responsibility and face severe punishment when they belie the public’s trust.
Laurence holds a BA in Economics from S.U.N.Y Stony Brook and an M.P.A from Columbia University. | <urn:uuid:8e6c61ba-6fc9-4d3c-83aa-a50b6aa205ed> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.coastalbreezenews.com/2010/03/28/victim-of-short-sighted-behavior-and-political-policy/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969277 | 739 | 1.664063 | 2 |
Book Review: The Key to Rondo
The Key to Rondo
by Emily Rodda
It all started when Leo inherited Aunt Bethany's music box. The music box is beautifully painted with tiny, detailed scenes that Leo loves examining with a magnifying glass. It also comes with rules: never wind the box more than three times; never turn the key while the music is playing; never pick up the box while the music is playing; and never close the lid until the music has stopped. Aunt Bethany left the box to Leo because she knew that Leo is the responsible type who will follow the rules. But when Leo's obnoxious cousin Mimi Langlander comes to stay, the rules get broken and the unexpected happens.
Mimi and Leo discover that the music box is the gateway to the land of Rondo, and together they travel to Rondo to rescue Mimi's dog Mutt, who has been kidnapped by the evil Blue Queen. Leo doesn't even want to be in Rondo. He doesn't want to risk his life to help Mimi find her annoying dog. But Mimi is determined to rescue Mutt, and Leo can't just abandon her. But what Leo learns in Rondo convinces him to stay; he realizes that they must do more than just rescue Mutt. Rondo needs their help, and Leo isn't leaving until they do what needs to be done.
Accomplishing this won't be easy. Leo and Mimi are in an unfamiliar land, and knowing whom to trust is as difficult as navigating the dangers of Rondo. But the two children find friends and help in unexpected places, and, more importantly, learn to trust and care for each other.
The Key to Rondo uses many standard fantasy elements, but it's saved from being cliché by the imaginative way that Rodda develops those elements. The land of Rondo is beautifully detailed and peopled with interesting characters who sometimes turn out to be more than they seem. There are many imaginative details that make the book a delight to read, from the cameo appearances by fairy tale characters, to the infestation of "dots," a pest species in Rondo that look exactly like Aunt Bethany's gingerbread men. (Although I loved this latter detail, I admit to also being annoyed that it wasn't more fully developed; I wanted to know how this obviously invasive species was introduced to Rondo, and if they were indeed related to Aunt Bethany's gingerbread).
Sophisticated readers may find that The Key to Rondo doesn't have enough depth to hold their interest. However, it's a gentle fantasy that's perfect for younger readers, especially those who find many YA, and even middle-grade, fantasies too intense. There's enough tension and conflict in The Key to Rondo to keep it interesting, without being overly frightening or violent. | <urn:uuid:b754a1ae-af79-4669-a6c2-3cd838318e38> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wandsandworlds.com/blog1/2008/03/book-review-key-to-rondo.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973421 | 586 | 1.578125 | 2 |
Many newer chiropractors seem to believe that merely outfitting an office in a highly-trafficked location, hanging up a sign and doing a great job is all that is needed to be successful. That may have been almost true in the 1980s when everyone had insurance with $100 deductibles. But today, that is merely the admission ticket into the arena of professional practice.
What so many chiropractors seem to overlook is that chiropractic is a personality-based small business. Naturally, if you don’t have one, it can be a handicap.
If you don’t tend to be outgoing, leaning toward the introverted side things and generally shun social settings in which you’ll encounter strangers, a busy, successful practice is more difficult to achieve. Not impossible, but difficult. Because patients see you “living in your head.” It can prompt one or more unhelpful patient perceptions that can thwart your practice.
Tragically, chiropractic colleges, living hand-to-mouth on student tuition dollars are either unaware how certain personality styles can handicap a graduate’s practice, or are not motivated to warn students how their introversion may constrain their careers. Based on my experience working with students at several of the top chiropractic colleges, dissuading students who are academically and financial able to take on the curriculum, yet lacking the social skills that patients find reassuring, would put a considerable dent in what are already depressed enrollment figures.
“Why should we rain on their parade and be a dream stealer?” rationalizes the Admissions Department.
Why? Because withholding this information produces untold suffering years later. The unwarned graduate exhausts mom and dad’s retirement nest egg, defaults on their student loans and blemishes the reputation of the profession as one more practice closes its doors after a mere six or nine months of emotionally-wrenching struggle.
What are some of the patient perceptions of chiropractors who live in their heads? As a patient myself, I know of at least these three:
Uncertainty. Like the first time you drove a car, inexperience can produce a type of awkwardness as every intellectual and physical faculty is brought to bear on the task at hand. Showing up distant and uncommunicative can lead to patients question your skills and confidence.
Aloofness. Long periods of silence and was seen as a withdrawn indifference can suggest to patients that you are not present. Chiropractors with the tendency to worry about their debt, ruminate over an argument with their spouse or who multiply the number of patients on the book by their fees are often seen in this light.
Judgment. This one can get assigned to chiropractors who may have expressed even the slightest disappointment over a patient’s unwillingness to quit smoking, lose weight or make other lifestyle changes. As patients try to make meaning of your reserved, tight-lipped demeanor, they may assume they’ve disappointed or let you down.
Does this mean you should show up as a Chatty Kathy and dominate patient encounters with a constant self-indulgent commentary? Of course not. That would be equally unhelpful, just at the opposite extreme!
If you have the ear of someone within one of the chiropractic colleges how about…
…encouraging them to administer a basic personality test and help new students become aware of their introversion tendencies?
…inspiring these students to acquire public speaking skills while still in college?
…directing them to practice being “aggressively friendly” and studying the social skills of busy chiropractors?
…reminding them that their talent for test taking will be almost valueless in the real world of private practice?
And if you’re one of those successful, outgoing chiropractors, how about…
…donating money, property or your estate to your chiropractic Alma matter so they can establish an endowment and reduce their direct dependency on tuition dollars? | <urn:uuid:2167d489-ed3f-4f82-b6fe-0f87fa770596> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.patientmedia.com/blog/2011/06/living_in_your_head.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948601 | 831 | 1.6875 | 2 |
NTSB Identification: ERA09CA225
14 CFR Part 91: General Aviation
Accident occurred Sunday, March 29, 2009 in Brunswick, GA
Probable Cause Approval Date: 07/28/2009
Aircraft: CESSNA 150L, registration: N1505Q
Injuries: 1 Uninjured.
NTSB investigators used data provided by various entities, including, but not limited to, the Federal Aviation Administration and/or the operator and did not travel in support of this investigation to prepare this aircraft accident report.
The student pilot stated that he was conducting a solo flight to practice landings and remained in the traffic pattern for Runway 22. Prior to his initial takeoff, he obtained a weather report that specified a wind speed of 8 knots. After two touch-and-gos, he obtained another weather advisory, which reported the wind from 270 degrees at 17 knots, gusting to 25 knots. He set up for his third landing, making his approach at 85 knots to account for the gust factor. After touching down at approximately 55 knots, a gust of wind lifted the airplane 10 to 15 feet in the air. The airplane then stalled and the recovery was not successful from that low of an altitude. The airplane contacted the runway in a nose-low attitude, damaging the firewall and propeller, and collapsing the nose landing gear. The student pilot's logbook was endorsed for solo flight with the limitation that flights be conducted in crosswind conditions not to exceed 10 knots.
The National Transportation Safety Board determines the probable cause(s) of this accident to be: The student pilot's failure to maintain aircraft control while landing in gusting crosswinds. Full narrative available
Index for Mar2009 | Index of months | <urn:uuid:41a7cf1a-ca17-46ba-a05e-82b5c0d9c6ec> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ntsb.gov/aviationquery/brief.aspx?ev_id=20090401X92902&key=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941872 | 356 | 1.585938 | 2 |
SEARCH-LOGSPsychic analysis of AOL users
and their search logs
|Here is search logs of 650,000 AOL users. It's very interesting to view search history of particular person and analyze his personality. Let's do it together! Read more about AOL search database scandal or view research papers on web searching.|
Weights are exercise equipment use for strength training. The term is typically used as a shortened form of the term free weights, but it can also refer to any exercise machine that uses weighted plates to generate the major opposing force. | <urn:uuid:5ad0677a-ac2e-4da0-88e9-26c0d2e4761b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://search-logs.com/k/weights | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953778 | 113 | 1.5625 | 2 |
A ReFill is a kind of component package for Reason that can contain patches, samples, REX files and Song files. On your computer, ReFills appear as large files with the extension ".rfl". Storing audio samples in a Refill will significantly reduce the size of the files, with no loss of audio quality. The advantages of ReFills are obvious; third party manufacturers can produce downloadable sample collections for Reason for example, and it simplifies exchanging samples in general.
Samples (Wave and AIFF files) are compressed to about half their original file size when stored in ReFills. With ReFill Packer, you can "pack" patches, samples, Song files etc., into one self-contained file. In Reason, you can use the browser to list and access the embedded sounds and other components within the ReFills. just as if the ReFills were folders on your hard disk.
This is a collection of premium ReFills made to expand the Reason user's sonic palette. Using the Propellerhead Software sampling method, these ReFills have been praised for innovation and quality.
These are ReFills created by top producers, artists, musicians and sound designers from all over the globe, all with their own unique style. Created specifically for Reason, they contain sounds that make full use of Reason's features and functions.
Our ReFill download section offers free ReFills from the Reason user community and demos for the multitude of commercial ReFill products available.
Reason owners can download the ReFill Packer utility to create their own ReFills to share with friends or the global Reason user community. | <urn:uuid:8b650b20-6f6a-4417-954a-3b4f563273fb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.propellerheads.se/products/reason/index.cfm?fuseaction=get_article&article=refills | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934345 | 336 | 1.585938 | 2 |
Unemployment slides lower again in NW Kansas
By MIKE CORN
In see-saw fashion, unemployment rates in northwest Kansas retreated slightly in December after bumping higher a month earlier.
In either case, northwest Kansas continued with its low-employment ways, averaging 3.16 percent in the 20 counties making up the region. In November, that average stood at 3.28 percent.
Nine of the northwest Kansas counties were in the top 20 as far as the lowest counties in the state.
Yet again, Sheridan County -- with a 2.8 percent unemployment rate in December -- had the state's lowest unemployment rate. Following close behind were Rawlins and Gove counties.
By comparison, the state's seasonally adjusted unemployment rate was 5.4 percent.
Ironically, the state's unemployment rate was unchanged from November, even though December was considered the "strongest month of job growth since January," according to an economist with the Kansas Department of Labor.
The unadjusted rate in December was 5.3 percent, up slightly from a month earlier, but down from 6 percent a year earlier.
In northwest Kansas, December's labor pool was slightly larger but the number of people out of work was smaller than in November.
Fifteen counties in Kansas had unemployment rates of less than 3 percent. In northwest Kansas, those counties were Sheridan, Rawlins, Gove, Ness, Sherman, Ellis and Graham. Cheyenne and Logan counties had even 3 percent rates.
Only Rooks and Rush counties had rates of 4 percent or more.
Unemployment rates for most northwest Kansas counties were down from a year earlier, except for Ellis, but it stood at only 2.9 percent, up a tenth of 1 percent.
During the past year in Kansas, nearly 27,000 jobs have been added, the KDOL said in its latest report.
In December, 2,400 private-sector jobs were added but 700 nonfarm jobs were lost. KDOL said after the numbers were adjusted for seasonal factors, the numbers are significant gains.
"December marks the strongest month of job growth since January and ends 2012 on a strong note," labor economist Tyler Tenbrink said. "This increase made up for the losses in the prior three months, putting the state back on the longer term trend of positive but slow job growth."
Unemployment didn't move, however, because both the labor force and employment increased. December was the third month the labor force increased after months of declines.
"There are many positive signs in this labor report including the continued increase in employment and the private sector job gains," Labor Secretary Lana Gordon said in the statement. "We hope that the pace of this economic growth accelerates in the new year."
In Kansas, six of the state's 11 main industries showed job gains over a month earlier. Trade, transportation and utilities increased by 3,100 jobs, professional and business services added 2,300 jobs and financial activities gained 600 jobs.
Six of the industries reported job gains from a year earlier. Profession and business services added 9,700 jobs, manufacturing added 3,900 jobs and education and health services added another 3,000.
Initial and continued unemployment insurance claims increased compared to November but were down for the year. | <urn:uuid:f6d32c31-ec77-42b3-b33a-230e224a32d0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hdnews.net/printstory/unemployment012113 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981558 | 664 | 1.507813 | 2 |
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