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More Common Ground
Published: Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Updated: Tuesday, February 26, 2013 01:02
Professors are often an untapped resource on campus. While listening to their lectures or participating in their classroom discussions are certainly enriching in their own right, there is an added benefit to one-on-one interactions. Such person-to-person engagement with a faculty member can lead to enhanced learning, more substantive breakthroughs and greater insight.
Yet between juggling a full course load and extracurricular commitments, finding time to meet with a professor and develop a relationship can be difficult. Some — especially those younger and newer to the Hilltop — can find the idea of approaching a professor intimidating.
One program that helps students meet professors is the Midnight MUG office hours program, in which participating faculty members who set up shop for office hours on Lau 2 are rewarded with a free drink credit for themselves and their students. While the financial incentive is definitely a bonus, the location itself — a student hub, rather than the austere innards of a professor’s tiny office — is the true draw. The university apparently recognizes this importance, serving as benefactor for the program.
The casual atmosphere provides a sort of "neutral territory" where students can feel more comfortable. What would otherwise be a stiff question-and-answer session becomes a friendly conversation. The program should be expanded to other on-campus locations, such as Sellinger Lounge or the third floor of Regents Halls by the Einstein Bros. Bagels kiosk. More professors should be encouraged to participate in the program, which would not necessarily lead to professors having to provide more office hours. Perhaps a system could be created in which their current hours could be split between their offices and other, more student-friendly locations.
All Georgetown professors are required to hold office hours. Conducting at least some of them on student turf would help ensure that a greater number of students are encouraged to engage with one of Georgetown’s greatest assets: its faculty. | <urn:uuid:4e55ba43-9ae0-4afd-8b20-4307b9974e48> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thehoya.com/opinion/more-common-ground-1.2998929 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961483 | 413 | 1.585938 | 2 |
NOAA Teacher at Sea: Karen Rasmussen
Ship: R/V Tattoosh
Geographical area of the cruise: Olympic Coast NMS
Date: June 27, 2011
Cruise to: Port Angeles Harbor
Crew: Nathan Witherly, Karen Rasmussen
Time: Start 10:30 – End 12:2
The first part of mission is to conduct Multibeam mapping and to collect ground-truthings at the LaPush/Teahwhit areas of the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary. We will also service the OCNM buoy, Cape Alava 42 (CA42). The second week of this mission is to explore the Teahwhit Head moorings, ChaBa and sunken ships, and North and South moorings.
Science and Technology Log
We began this morning at 8:00 a.m. Tatoosh had been dry docked at the Port of Port Angeles to have the multibeam fixed. This mission was to have started last week but had to be postponed because of a small leak in the multibeam. This morning the Tatoosh was lowered into the water to take the measurements in order to check the accuracy of the multibeam. Nathan drove the boat to Hollywood Beach (Port Angeles, WA) so we could help take readings. Rick and Nancy stayed onshore and used a surveyor’s tripod with an optical level. I held the surveyor’s rod and we completed a dynamic draft measurement of the Tatoosh. Rick took 3 readings from each position the Tatoosh was in over approximately two hours. Later Nancy and I entered their data into the Hypack software program. I read the data as she typed it in. We finished and found that our computer software programs are not interfacing with each other.
The HYPAK Program Inc. is Windows-based software created for the hydrographic
and dredging industries. It includes ways to complete surveys, collect data, process it, and generate final products. It can be used on small or large vessels and is also used to collect environmental data.
HYSWEEP is a module of HYPACK and is used with multibeam and side scan sonar. It gives on-the-spot information about the ocean’s bottom condition and data quality from your multibeam devise.
- Depth – Nadir beam depth in survey units (ten units to one foot)
- Time (Event)
- Tide Corrections
- Draft Correction
- Heave (in survey units, positive upward)
- Roll – port side
- Pitch – bow up
- Easting/Northing (Like XY coordination, X= Easting, Y=Northing)
My learning curve is tremendous today and I am extremely tired. Last night I stayed at the Red Lion in Port Angeles. I was up until almost 4 a.m. Apparently, they are having teenager issues. Lots of horn blowing, yelling, and fighting all night long. I am hoping that tonight will be better.
I really enjoyed being part of the team today. Nancy, Rick, and Nathan have been wonderful with answering all of my questions. Some of the questions I’ve been asking must seem so obvious to them, but my knowledge of underwater geography is so limited. Every aspect of this day has been interesting. I am truly amazed at what these people are doing with the limited and older materials they are using. | <urn:uuid:508da8f8-cfe2-42af-8d43-7c8d773e7e0f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://teacheratsea.wordpress.com/tag/sanctuary/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952397 | 705 | 1.734375 | 2 |
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March 26, 1911: “A 13-year-old girl hung for three minutes by her fingertips to the sill of a 10th-floor window. A tongue of flame licked at her fingers and she dropped into a life net held by firemen. Two women fell into the net at almost the same moment. The strands parted and the two were added to the death list.
“A girl threw her pocketbook, then her hat, then her furs from a 10th-floor window. A moment later her body came whirling after them to death."
Last Survivor of 1911 Sweatshop Fire Dies | <urn:uuid:b1272786-033d-47a2-b0a7-96ba04ac720d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/thedailymirror/2011/03/the-triangle-shirtwaist-fire.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964174 | 143 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Majestic in vastness, with a storied past and astonishingly diverse landscapes, Canada is a fascinating travel destination. Via Rail, Canada's national passenger train service, makes touring and visiting this breathtaking country a truly memorable experience.
This wonderful guide to rail travel in Canada covers a wide range of topics: an opening section describes the many facets of the country, useful for foreign travelers. Another section describes the historical roots of Canadian railways. Sections titled "Train Classes and Services", "Train Travel Tips" and "Canadian Railway 101" enhance an understanding of railways and rail travel. There's even a section on 'railway yoga' for anyone needing a good stretch along the way!
Most interesting, though, are the route guides which comprise the bulk of the material. Each region of Canada, from BC to the Atlantic, is detailed as a potential rail trip. Mile by mile descriptions of what one will see from the train are fascinating and accompanied by interesting sidebars relating to local aspects of geography, history and culture. In addition to to this information is an abundance of full colour photos (over 500) which illustrate everything from the sleeping accommodations on board to various types of trains and scenery along each route.
Both authors are expert: Chris Hanus has worked for Via Rail for over 10 years and is currently the Product Specialist in their Marketing department. John Shaske owns and operates his own rail tour company and has been a railway enthusiast all his life. Both authors live in the Vancouver area of BC. | <urn:uuid:e880ec10-cdd4-48fb-b8b3-3d1782f322c9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sandhillbooks.com/cgi-bin/sandhillbooks/00249.html?imgsize=480x300&mv_action=go | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950269 | 304 | 1.632813 | 2 |
PLEASANTON, Calif. — The Safeway Foundation announced is giving $2 million to community health programs and hospitals to launch grass-roots projects for the prevention and treatment of childhood obesity.
"Our commitment is to strengthen communities, create pioneering programs, expand services and implement new strategies to support the health of children and teens," said Larree Renda, Safeway EVP and chair of the Safeway Foundation. "These funds will allow doctors, researchers and others in the medical and healthcare communities to launch effective new programs and evaluate the effectiveness of existing ones with the goal of helping children live happier, healthier lives."
The Safeway Foundation's partner in this effort is Children's Hospital & Research Center Oakland in Northern California. In early 2012, the partners invited organizations to apply for grants of up to $100,000 for grass-roots childhood obesity projects in the geographic areas served by Safeway, Vons, Pavilions, Tom Thumb, Randalls, Carrs and Dominick's stores. Specifically, they looked to promote collaborations between the medical community and local community-based agencies to help children become more physically active, improve food choices and create better access to healthy foods. More than 150 organizations applied for funding. | <urn:uuid:bc41146d-e59c-4fcc-a647-6099a00e779f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.retailingtoday.com/print/310571 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940215 | 248 | 1.828125 | 2 |
The Catholic Transcript - June 1999
`Priests for Life' director inspires
By Rita Reali
WETHERSFIELD -As he trod along the shore in
Florida - having given a pro-life sermon at a church across the street -
Father Frank A. Pavone noticed a large sign that warned beach-goers not to
disturb the giant sea turtles or their eggs.
In Florida, giant sea turtles and their eggs are protected by
local, state and federal law. Unborn humans are not.
Father Pavone, national director of the New York City-based
Priests For Life, pointed out the disparity in concern for the sanctity of life
at Sacred Heart and Corpus Christi churches April 10 and 11.
"If in this country we don't have the right to choose to
smash the egg of a sea turtle, why do we have the right to choose to smash a
baby?" he asked, gazing out into a sea of faces. "Isn't there something wrong
Calling Christians "the people of life," Father Pavone urged
an end to abortion. He said the so-called "safe and legal" procedure takes more
lives each year than the total number of lives lost during every war in which
the United States of America has ever been involved.
Abortion kills 4,400 babies each day in the United States -
which translates to one every 20 seconds.
"There's no -crime, no disease, no natural disaster, no war
that claims more lives than abortion does," he said.
He brings a positive message to the pulpit, starting by outlining the
alternatives to abortion and urging reconciliation for women who have had
"There is a very strong emphasis on forgiveness for those who have been
involved in this but who want to find healing and peace," he told The
Many Catholics underestimate the effectiveness of the
greatest tool in the pro-life arsenal.
"As Catholics, the best weapon is the Eucharist," he said.
Priests For Life was founded in 1990 by Father Lee
Kaylor of San Francisco. Its founders set out to defend life, focusing mainly on
abortion and euthanasia.
"These two issues are [the] flash points of the battle of the
culture of death," Father Pavone said. He said Priests For Life defends life
across the board.
"If human life is sacred under one set of circumstances, it's
sacred under another as well," he said.
The group has 5,300 members in the United States and Canada, with offices in
Dallas, Washington D.C., St. Paul, Milwaukee and Rome.
Father Pavone became national director of Priests For Life in 1993. He
spends 90 percent of his time traveling as far as Australia, New Zealand, the
Philippines, Poland, India and the United Kingdom.
"I get enough invitations to be on the road 100 percent of the time if I wanted
to," he said. Three other member priests also work full-time. "We get enough
invitations to keep them busy, too. ... There is a real thirst for the pro-life
In late May a Connecticut superior court judge ruled that in Connecticut, a man
charged with fatally stabbing a pregnant woman can be charged with murder. The
baby, delivered by cesarean section after the mother's death, lived six weeks.
"Even [when states] formulate a law which would protect unborn children from
circumstances like this, they would put an exception in there for abortion," he
said, "some statement like, 'It is understood that this law does not apply in
cases of abortion.'"
He said he wants to give people confidence that they can work
together to end abortion.
"The message of Priests For Life ... is, 'Yes, we are making
progress and there is something you can do about it,' " he said, "and we want to
encourage people to have the sense that we are making progress."
For more information on Priests for Life, call
(888) PFL-3448, write to P. 0. Box 141172, Staten Island, N.Y. 10314
or visit www.priestsforlife.org, their website.
Priests for Life in | <urn:uuid:ca43d630-0b68-4273-b4af-8b458fa64ca5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.priestsforlife.org/clippings/99-06catholictranscript.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950323 | 904 | 1.65625 | 2 |
101 Money Saving Tips to Help Reduce Debt and Build Wealth was created to help the 95% of the population that is retiring broke find more money to use to get out of debt before it's too late. Approximately only 5% of the world's population can retire financially secure. I created this book to help individuals apply simple techniques to find money that may be leaking out of their lives without them knowing it. It only takes a mind-shift and dedication to a simple plan to get out of debt as quickly as possible. The earlier you decide to start this system the more money you may be able to accumulate in your lifetime. Start today to take your life back and achieve financial prosperity and a stress free life. Stay tuned for the next book in this series where I will go into more detail as to how to get out of debt using your new found money.
©2012 IMT, LLC. (P)2013 IMT, LLC.
Best bit of advice in the book that we all know, but need to stick to is ‘live below your means’. This book is excellent for people who have just left home and want some tips on their grocery bill or how to get the most boring, uptight dinner outing. If you can’t afford to purchase what is on a menu, then don’t go out…simple! I was disappointed with this book, as I was hoping on some real advise, helpful tips like instead of buying expensive cleaners, use 2 tablespoons of vinegar diluted in 500mls of water as a glass cleaner etc., but sadly no, this book was filled with collect coupons, use coupons, ask for coupons, blah, blah, blah. I know the author said she wanted to help with her readers getting out of debt, but I believe I would have helped myself better by saving my $5. Was there 101 tips? No!
Report Inappropriate Content | <urn:uuid:d8427bef-a36b-48c9-b0e1-c870b4a8e34b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.audible.com/pd/ref=cat_2?asin=B00BBZ2Q78 | 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 | 0.969209 | 386 | 1.515625 | 2 |
8 Reasons Why Your Child Hates Nike Free Studying
Are you currently troubled by your kid's disinterest in Nike Free studying
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How did it come to this Why does your child dislike Nike Free studying
Basically, it arrives right down to one factor: the love for reading was never
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to advertise thinking but make certain it stays Enjoyable. Do not flip it into a
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Look at your tongue and stay away from derogatory remarks including "Can't you
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Wood Stone Corp., Bellingham, Wash., learns valuable lessons as a result
September 30, 2008
What kind of a difference did an automated fabricating system make for Wood Stone Corp., Bellingham, Wash.? Before the system, the company actually had more people in the shop, and they were working 10 hour days for about 4-6 months to make fewer products than are produced today.
The test kitchen at Wood Stone Corp., Bellingham, Wash., showcases most of the commercial kitchen appliances the company fabricates.
Scuzza me, but you see, back in old Bellingham, that's automation. That slight variation of the old Dean Martin tune makes a lot of sense for Wood Stone Corp., Bellingham Wash. The maker of wood-fired ovens has experienced dramatic growth since it first began making its own version of a wood-fired stone hearth oven that could stand up to the rigors of U.S. commercial kitchens in 1990. The company's technologically advanced ceramics and engineer expertise have helped its products grab considerable market share and earn their places in restaurants such as Carrabba's Italian Grill, California Pizza Kitchen, and Wolfgang Puck's many establishments.
Over the years the product line has expanded as well. Wood Stone now makes rotisseries, charbroilers, and tandoor ovens. By the end of 2008, company management expects to have in excess of 8,000 installations in more than 60 countries.
Keith Carpenter is a quick study. After all, he was inspired to chase the dream of making wood-fired ovens in 1989 after only one customer asked him about the availability of such products. As a manufacturer's representative for 12 companies in the commercial kitchen industry, he couldn't think of any. That led him to contact Harry Hegarty, who at the time was building large-scale, high-temperature ceramic incinerators for the forest products industry, and the result was the burgeoning commercial appliance-making company.
Another result was a company that didn't do much of its own fabrication. Wood Stone did some punching and welding of angle iron, but contract manufacturers in Canada and Washington did all of the sheet metal fabrication.
Sheet delivery and parts removal are automatic
on the servo-electric EBe Express Bender.
"We would engineer the ovens, have our vendors fabricate the parts, and then assemble the final products at our facility. In our early years, we concentrated our investments in ceramic engineering and manufacturing equipment," Carpenter said.
As Wood Stone grew in sales over the years, the dollar amount for outsourced fabricated products grew to nearly $4 million per year. That spurred the company to look at ways to reduce manufacturing costs, while simultaneously improving delivery times and boosting quality efforts.
The opportunity to jump into metal fabrication presented itself in 2007 when the company doubled its facility size from 60,000 square feet to 120,000 sq. ft. The search for automated sheet metal fabrication equipment began.
Keith Carpenter (left) and Harry Hegarty founded Wood Stone in 1990.
"We purchased a 4-foot shear and a press brake to get our feet wet, but concentrated our search on automated systems," Carpenter said. "The plan was to visit five different shops with equipment from various manufacturers."
Wood Stone's first stop was Nu-Way Industries, a contract manufacturer in Des Plaines, Ill. It was also the last stop.
Nu-Way had a fully automated fabrication system with a giant automated storage and retrieval system for sheet metal, manufactured by Finn-Power International Inc. "I knew that we had to do what Nu-Way was doing because anything short of that would be going backwards," Carpenter said.
That's the first lesson Carpenter learned about automating fabrication processes. He learned others after placing his order in December 2007 for a Laser Brilliance® with a loading/stacker robot; Night Train FMS® material management system; EBe automated bender; and three servo-electric E press brakes, one of which was manned by a robot. Wood Stone began fabricating metal parts in the beginning of 2008.
A robot easily handles larger parts that used to require two men to set up in the press brake.
The Laser Brilliance combines a 30-station, 33-ton turret punch press with a slab CO2 laser capable of generating 2,500 W of power. The combination machine gives Wood Stone the ability to use the turret punch press for repetitious parts or when speed is needed, and the laser when intricate cuts are needed. The machine also can handle a variety of sheet metal thicknesses—up to 0.312-inch carbon steel and 0.250-in. aluminum.
The machine has a 250-in.-long X traverse, four clamps, and high positioning capabilities, which make forming and tapping possible. Because of linear-drive technology behind the punching and laser cutting head, good positioning accuracy and, consequently, repeatability in each work stage are maintained.
A loading/unloading robot ensures material is always ready to be put in place for punching and laser cutting once the finished parts are removed. The automated material handling movement helps reduce production time by 30 percent to 60 percent when compared to traditional manufacturing systems without automation, according to Finn-Power officials.
A robot removes a part on the combination laser/punch machine.
The centerpiece of the automated sheet processing system is the Night Train FMS, which is the inventory and material transporting center. The system not only supplies raw material, but also removes and stores work-in-process.
"There have been CNC lasers and punch presses around for a long time, but tying them together with the Night Train makes them all one big machine," Carpenter explained.
Daric Nellis, a Wood Stone manufacturing engineer with extensive experience with Finn-Power and other fabrication equipment, said this type of automation reduces labor costs dramatically while also improving quality.
"We can run the Finn-Power system with four people. We would need 30 people to fabricate the same volume of product that we can produce on the automated system," he said.
"None of these employees had prior sheet metal fabrication experience before joining us. The software and the ease of interface between the person and the machine allows this to happen. We are programming offline, so the experience that is needed is taken care of in the office," Nellis said.
One person who has all the years of experience and knowledge doesn't have to handle every single part in order to get a quality part out, Nellis added.
The software also gives the front office a picture of the production process. Company management can see what material is in the material management system and what parts are in process.
Wood Stone's pizza ovens are found in restaurants all over the world.
The servo-electric EBe Express Bender completely automates the bending operation, from the loading of flat parts to unloading of the components. It is designed to handle parts as long as 100 in.; as wide as 60 in.; and as thick as 11 gauge for carbon steel, 13 gauge for stainless steel, and 9 gauge for aluminum.
The bending cell has a maximum bending length of 100 in. and a maximum opening height of 8 in. Instead of hydraulic cylinders, NC servo axes control the actuations of the bending blade—both vertical and horizontal—and upper tool movements.
On the outskirts of the Night Train material management system, the robotic E press brake handles parts that have flanges more than 7.9 in. and are thicker than the EBe's capacity. A patented, mechatronic drive, based on the pulley principle, is designed to deliver an even distribution of forces in the top beam, high accuracy, increased productivity, and decreased energy consumption. The press brake's frame concept makes it possible to utilize the backgauge system across the entire working length. Because a robot mans the press brake, two-man operation for heavy components is eliminated.
"We outsourced $4 million of parts with subcontractors in 2007," Carpenter said. "This year we produced half of these parts in-house. By the end of 2008 we should be doing 90 percent in-house. In five months, we are halfway to having the system pay for itself."
Savings are coming in other ways as well:
According to Wood Stone management, the Finn-Power automated system has changed the manufacturing philosophy of the company.
"Finn-Power has taken us from a laterally integrated company—which outsourced most of our fabrication—to an emerging vertically integrated company," Carpenter said. "We are still getting there.
"We have this huge capability with the Finn-Power system," he continued. "But that is not the reason we purchased it. We bought the system for custom work. Everything we do is custom … You don't have to run it lights-out to be profitable."
Wood Stone company officials believe that it can run its automated fabricating system at 10 percent to 15 percent capacity and still be profitable because the custom parts it makes are priced at a premium—unable to be made efficiently by competitors who don't have the same automation or a clue about making pizza ovens.
Finn-Power International Inc., 555 W. Algonquin Road, Arlington Heights, IL 60005, 847-952-6500, www.finnpower.com.
Wood Stone Corp., 1801 W. Bakerview Road, Bellingham, WA 98226, 360-650-1111, www.woodstone-corp.com. | <urn:uuid:c08af160-16e8-4423-a33e-933d82a06604> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thefabricator.com/article/prima-finn-power-north-america-inc/automation-helps-ovenmaker-cook-up-profits | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95166 | 1,960 | 1.570313 | 2 |
Valérie Buess: Paper Sculptures
Valérie Buess is a swiss artist who lives in Germany. For the last twenty years she has worked primarily with paper creating intricate sculptures that often resemble urchins, coral and other underwater life.
Check her website for more work.
Paper Sculptures by Lauren Clay
Behold the beautiful work of Lauren Clay, a New York based artist who works with brightly coloured card and paper to make these magical sculptures. She describes the works as 3D realisations of her large scale drawings, which are also incredible and can be seen on her website.
Cut on Yupo (Synthetic Paper), glue
5 1/8(H) x 6 11/16(W) x 5 15/16(D) inches
13(H) x 17(W) x 15(D) cm
NORIKO AMBE : LINEAR-ACTIONS CUTTING PROJECT
Started in ‘99, this is Noriko’s work. She individually cut single sheets of paper by free-hand and stack them together. The work consists of positive or negative shapes. Noriko is trying to embody relationships among humans, time and nature. | <urn:uuid:d2d91000-caea-4e53-8ff5-247893a405d9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://studiojomeesters.tumblr.com/tagged/paper | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942349 | 252 | 1.71875 | 2 |
The last duality seminar by Steve Shenker was about
Steve is a captivating speaker so we could not miss this one. He brought us some fresh air from the West Coast, including the West Coast thinking where everything is fine, everything goes, just as required by the anthropic principle, and moreover the metric tensor signature is (+---).
One of the dreams of modern, high-energy alchemists was to create a Universe in the bottle. Imagine that there is a scalar field whose potential energy has a local minimum somewhere above our minimum. You prepare a scattering process and try to raise the value of the scalar field to the higher minimum in a large enough region of space inside your bottle. This small seed can start to inflate: it may begin to grow exponentially while its boundary may remain small. A large new Universe with billions of stars may eventually appear inside your bottle.
Is it possible? Although this picture uses physical concepts that are widely believed by theoretical physicists to be correct, the ultimate answer is No. Today we may argue that such a Universe in the bottle violates the entropy bounds and the holographic principle: the entropy and the number of degrees of freedom in a region (inside the bottle) should not exceed the surface area of the region (the bottle).
More materially, Guth and Farhi have proved years ago - using the classical methods of general relativity and the theorems about the existence of singularities - that a few moments or minutes before the inflation starts, the spacetime must develop a singularity. If you want a Universe in the bottle, you must sacrifice all your history except for the last few minutes, pretend that the Big Bang occured five minutes ago, and as you can agree, this is far too high a price to pay. Farhi, Guth, and Guven did not want to give up and they proposed a new way to start the local inflation - using quantum tunneling.
Steve reviewed these things - and he drew the Penrose diagrams in various situations sketched above (for example, an air-conditioning inflating box attached to the filled anti de Sitter cylinder) as he participated in intense debates whether the tunneling breaks the analyticity of various quantities. But his intent was more modern. Today we have alternative definitions of theories of quantum gravity, especially the AdS/CFT correspondence. Can they tell us something new about inflation? While I don't know the answer to this question, Steve could still manage to say some interesting things.
Don't get me wrong: the conclusion remains that the Universe in the bottle is impossible, even if you use quantum tunneling.
But the exact explanation why it is so is somewhat interesting albeit controversial. Steve essentially argued that if there is an inflating region inside anti de Sitter space, it must be described by a mixed state in the full theory. Because pure states can't evolve into mixed states, the evolution that initiates inflation is impossible.
I don't understand the assumptions of this argument (although I agree, of course, with the impossibility to evolve into mixed states) and Steve's answers to my questions confirmed my expectation that I won't ever understand it because it contradicts my understanding of some basic notions of quantum mechanics. We can't ever say that the world is objectively described by a mixed state. A mixed state or a density matrix is nothing else than the quantum counterpart of the classical uncertainty, the classical probability distributions. A mixed state is a mixture of matrices constructed from pure states that is a useful description of reality whenever we only know some features of the pure states (such as some macroscopic or low-energy quantities) but not all of them.
But a representative pure state included in the mixed state must always have the same macroscopic properties as the mixed state itself. And we must always be free to imagine that our system is in a particular pure state - we just don't know which one. If you consider a thermal density matrix, surely you don't think that you can't find particular pure states that behave in the same way. The description of the macroscopic physics in terms of a thermal mixed state may be more convenient than any calculation you could do with any particular pure state that looks thermal, but it is just a matter of convenience, not a matter of the truth.
Moreover, when you derive by some semiclassical methods that a CFT description of your inflating region is traced over some degrees of freedom and it therefore looks as a mixed state, it does not mean that the mixed state is the exact answer. By the same semiclassical methods, you might argue that a black hole is a pure state that has no entropy. That would be, of course, wrong. The opposite case - in which the semiclassical approximation overestimates the entropy - is unlikely because the semiclassical degrees of freedom are subset of all degrees of freedom and an inequality should therefore hold. However, I did not see how one can isolate the "many" degrees of freedom on the boundary that describe the CFT, so I don't see a sharp contradiction with the entropy argument.
At any rate, one can never objectively say whether the Universe is found in a pure state or a mixed state: this question is a subjective question about our complete vs. incomplete knowledge of the physical system. The density matrix is not the same as a classical state of a classical system. And no physically measurable quantities or questions can depend on the answer to this philosophical question about the purity of our Universe because that would be in contradiction with the postulates of quantum mechanics, I think.
Steve was telling me that these basic ideas of "mine" break down in quantum gravity but I don't understand what they have to do with gravity which is why I cannot fully reproduce their argument here. | <urn:uuid:aa6cad1c-5475-436b-9265-32ef6e3ebe5a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://motls.blogspot.com/2006/03/steve-shenker-inflation-in-adscft.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947264 | 1,178 | 1.820313 | 2 |
Award-winning cartoonist Hope Larson worked on her latest graphic novel for a long time. In taking on the enviable challenge of adapting Madeleine L'Engle's classic children's novel "A Wrinkle In Time" for Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Released last week as part of the 50th Anniversary celebration for that beloved text, Larson's take on heroine Meg Murry's journey through a world of science fiction, fantasy and family is an intensely faithful adaptation, and as such, it took many years and nearly 400 pages to put the whole story together.
Larson has been working on the book so long, in fact, that CBR spoke with her about its progress at the 2011 (yes, that's right) WonderCon in San Francisco. Below, she explains what the process of bringing a classic to comics as well as her incoming magical girl graphic novel "Whois AC?" with art from Tintin Pantoja set for release this April.
On knowing who your audience is: If you think too hard about how many people are seeing the book and what they're background is – if they know comics or if they don't know comics – it just kind of cripples you. So I've tried to approach it as much like one of my own books as possible.
On turning the novel's heady ideas into visuals: Most of the ideas are in the dialogue, and most of the dialogue is in the comic. There were a few things that ended up being represented visually. Like, the thing with the ants? The wrinkle in time? Everybody remembers the little illustration [of that] from the actual novel, so I have a little bit of fun with that. And the math is in there, but she explains it in very visual terms. It's like things getting cubed...and you can draw that as a cube. [Laughs] So it works out very well.
On the influences of "Whois AC?": The problem is that I started referring to the book in public as "the magical girl book" and now I feel like if I use the title, people won't know what I'm talking about. So the title is "Whois AC?" And "Whois" is one word like internet slang. So that's what it's called, and it's kind of like "Sailor Moon." And I could actually not get into [the "Sailor Moon"] manga. I've watched the show, and I'm working through Season 2 of "Sailor Moon" right now, but the manga is kind of insane. Her cartooning is really messed up, and it's kind of hard to follow. It's really confusing and not very intuitive. And I read a lot of manga, so it's not just a manga issue. I feel like it's her specifically, though her art is gorgeous. | <urn:uuid:456f1ff9-714d-465b-8b9c-0a0dd3a65b92> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=41507 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978306 | 589 | 1.75 | 2 |
”Face to Face: Portraits from Two Continents,” a new show at F Street Gallery that opens July 6 and runs through Aug. 31, resonates with “twos.”
Located upstairs at Swanlund's Camera, 527 F St. in Eureka, the show features the work of two local photographers with hyphenated names -- Ellen Land-Weber and Lorraine Miller-Wolf -- who are showcasing recent work featuring people on two “central” continents: Central Asia and Central America. Their personalities are revealed by how each photographer portrays strangers in foreign lands.
Miller-Wolf, a professional portrait photographer for 30 years, challenged herself to create a new portrait photograph every day of her 60th year. A trip to Central America during that year allowed her to experience a new milieu for the project, enriching it with her portraits of people from the diverse ethnic backgrounds that comprise society in Belize.
Land-Weber is a professor emeritus of the art department at Humboldt State University where she taught photography for close to 30 years. According to an artist's statement, her focus now is on photography and travel, two activities that are closely connected in her life. The lure of experiencing different cultures and people led her to travel to Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Iran where she made the photographs in the current F Street Gallery show.
”The most common genres of photography from its earliest days in the 19th century are
Miller-Wolf regards portrait photography as “an agreement, a pact, between subject and photographer, each giving something to the other, even if words are not exchanged. It's an endlessly fascinating interaction, never the same twice, and also habit-forming.”
Her favorite quote on the subject is by Susan Sonntag, who wrote, “To photograph is to confer importance. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability.”
Miller-Wolf and Land-Weber agree that the crucial third factor in the relationship between subject and photographer is the viewer's reaction to the resulting image. | <urn:uuid:2c138d5f-09a2-4b3f-9cad-e0f28a65c738> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.times-standard.com/lifestyle/ci_20970961/two-photographers-come-face-face | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95797 | 437 | 1.539063 | 2 |
ATHENS, Greece — European leaders insist they want to keep Greece in the eurozone, but are putting off any agreement on how they hope to accomplish that. Greece says it, too, wants to stay in the eurozone, but until after elections, it's uncertain whether it can implement the austerity that Europe has set as a condition for doing so.
Essentially, both are playing for time — about a month. The question is whether financial markets will wait or force their hand.
Concerns that European leaders lack the political will — and wherewithal — to tackle the continent's economic problems have worried the markets for weeks. Among the 17 countries that use the euro, seven are in recession. Business confidence is under pressure, and banks are feeling the squeeze. The biggest fear is that if Greece cannot be kept in the euro, other larger economies — such as Spain or Portugal — might face the same fate.
"The breakup of the eurozone will be a disaster. Greece could leave, and others could leave, and this would be a huge financial tsunami," said Dariusz Kowalczyk, senior economist at Credit Agricole CIB in Hong Kong. "Europe is not doing enough, and the market may not wait for them."
Greece has gone through round after round of massive spending cuts and tax hikes to slash its deficit and rein in its debt in exchange for the international bailout loans that help it pay the bills. But the country is now in its fifth year of recession, and many argue it cannot hope for a recovery if it sticks to the deal. And Greeks — though still keen to remain in the single currency club — are calling for better terms or, at least, for the pace of austerity to be slowed down.
In a general election this month, neither of Greece's two main parties, both of which support the bailout deal, fared well. Instead, minor parties that are threatening to renege on those commitments saw their popularity surge. A new round of elections is set for June 17.
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The Federal Budget and Appropriations for Fiscal Year 2013: Democracy, Governance, and Human Rights in the Middle East & North Africa
Project on Middle East Democracy, July 2012.
by Stephen McInerney
Click here for information on the panel held on July 19, 2012, in conjunction with the report’s release.
This spring, President Obama submitted his annual budget request to Congress for Fiscal Year 2013, the final such budget of his current four-year term of office. It is always worth- while to examine annual budgets for signals of policy priorities and changes, but this year’s budget takes on extra importance, as this is the first annual budget request that takes in to account the historic changes that have swept the region since early 2011.
President Obama set a high bar for the U.S. response to these changes, promising in May 2011 that the U.S. would support democratic principles with “all of the diplomatic, economic and strategic tools at our disposal,” and that this support would not be secondary to other strategic interests. More than a year later, it is difficult to argue that the administration’s policies and engagement with the Middle East have lived up to such lofty pronouncements, and changes to foreign assistance and support for democracy and governance programming reflect that. Nonetheless, the administration does deserve credit for intensifying its focus on support for democracy, governance, and human rights in some instances.
- The response of the U.S. administration to the dramatic political changes in the region, in terms of funding and foreign assistance, has been uneven and has not demonstrated a clear vision or strategy. While the U.S. has shown a determination to be helpful and supportive of democratic transitions in some countries, in many others the U.S. approach has not changed noticeably in the past 18 months, and in still others, the interest in and support for democratic reform appears to have diminished.
- U.S. support for the political transitions currently underway remains strong, especially in Tunisia. The administration has made support for Tunisia’s transition a real priority and has demonstrated impressive agility and creativity in providing much- needed support through a wide variety of mechanisms. The U.S. has also provided significant support to Libya, although the U.S. role there is more muted and limited than in Tunisia for a variety of reasons. Strong U.S. support for Yemen’s transition has come more slowly than in Tunisia or Libya.
- The U.S. administration has proposed a bold, impressive new assistance initiative, the Middle East and North Africa Incentive Fund, as the centerpiece of its response to the uprisings, but the actual establishment of the fund is endangered by the appropriations schedule and the 2012 U.S. elections. The request of $700 million in new funds from Congress would establish this incentive fund as the Obama administration’s signature foreign assistance initiative in the region, which could provide much- needed support for political and economic reform in transitioning countries as well as countries that have not yet undergone dramatic uprisings or political upheavals.
- The future of U.S. assistance to Egypt is more uncertain than it has been in decades. The past year has seen a dramatic escalation of tensions between the U.S. and Egypt, driven in large part by Egyptian government attacks on NGOs including the criminal prosecution of employees of American democracy promotion organizations. As a result, the future of U.S.-funded democracy programming is very much in doubt. Likewise, growing frustration in Congress with the reluctance of Egypt’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) to hand over power casts some doubt on the future of Egypt’s longstanding military aid package.
- The appetite of the U.S. administration for supporting serious democracy and governance programming in much of the region appears to have decreased. Despite pronouncements from President Obama and Secretary Clinton that support for democratic reform will be a top priority across the entire region, U.S. support for democratic reform in the GCC states, Lebanon, and the West Bank and Gaza appears to have diminished.
- The structure of military aid to the region is excessively rigid and inflexible, making any adjustments or rebalancing between military aid and economic aid extremely difficult. While the Arab uprisings have sparked some discussion among key actors regarding potentially shifting to a greater proportion of U.S. assistance for economic aid as opposed to military aid, that process is greatly impeded by long-term agreements on military aid and by the influence of U.S. defense manufacturing companies.
- The constrained domestic U.S. budget environment continues to considerably restrict the administration’s ability to react to developments in the region. Even in the countries that are a top priority for the administration, U.S. officials encounter difficulty in finding the necessary funds to respond as they would like, especially against a backdrop of large overall cuts by Congress to international affairs budgets.
Click here to view or download the full publication as a pdf.
About the Author:
Stephen McInerney (stephen.mcinerney@ | <urn:uuid:1dc69c68-5dca-4488-8d40-4f2941feb465> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://pomed.org/the-federal-budget-and-appropriations-for-fiscal-year-2013-democracy-governance-and-human-rights-in-the-middle-east-2/?wpmp_switcher=mobile | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00029-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960824 | 1,040 | 1.695313 | 2 |
Lars Strogny: The state of meta programming in PHP
Lars Strojny has written up a new post about the current state of metaprogramming (software that writes other software) and how it sits in today's PHP functionality including some current features to make it happen.
Metaprogramming is quite an interesting sub-discipline and knowing about certain techniques and tools allows you to cut corners quite dramatically for certain tasks. As always, don't overdo but to find out when you are overdoing, first start doing, get excited, overdo, find out the right dose. Let's have a look at what kind of tools you have available in PHP to solve typical meta programming problems.
He starts by defining what kinds of things metaprogramming can and can't do (like type introspection, lower level syntax inspection and metadata management) and gets into what you can use in/with PHP for each. He mentions several tools, some internal to PHP - like the Reflection API and the Tokenizer extension - as well as external projects like the PHP-Parser, AOP in PECL and annotation support from the doctrine-common package. | <urn:uuid:680caf34-4d23-4193-be0d-a7553223f0ca> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.phpriot.com/news/lars-strogny-the-state-of-meta-programming-in-php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934236 | 239 | 1.625 | 2 |
The aim of Botox® Cosmetic is to eliminate wrinkle lines by temporarily relaxing the underlying muscles.
Botox® Cosmetic is the purified form of Botulinum toxin Type A that is produced by the bacteria Clostridium botulinum. When small doses of this material are injected into a muscle so as to temporarily relax it, there is interference in the action of the muscle, making folds and wrinkles become much less noticeable.
This product is simple to administer with minimal discomfort to the patient. Maximal results are usually seen between three to six days after injection.
Botox® Cosmetic has a usual duration of action of three to four months.
What is a Wrinkle?
Wrinkles (Hyperdynamic Lines) Wrinkles are the most common and usually the first indicator of an aging face. Wrinkles, however, are not a problem confined to older patients. Wrinkles can be due to either skin laxity with loss of tone or over-activity of the underlying muscles. Many factors have been found to compound wrinkling of the facial skin; these include sun exposure, smoking, and poor skin care. These are, of course, additive to the uncontrollable effects of gravity and genetics. Many products and habits can help in reducing these wrinkles. These include good skin care products, the use of sun blocks, and smoking cessation. These, however, cannot stop the activity of the underlying muscles producing the deep wrinkles and folds.
What is a glabellar furrow?
There are multiple muscles in the forehead and around the eyes that function to give the upper one third of the face character and appearance. These muscles are oftentimes overly active and produce deep furrows (or folds). In the region between the eyebrows, lies a pair of muscles called the corrugator supercilii muscles. These muscles primarily work to lower the inner brows to give the appearance of anger, solemn, or inquisitiveness. These muscles are responsible for the vertical lines that you see in the region between the eyebrows. Botox is the only FDA approved injectable medication used to treat the furrows that are due to over activity of this muscle.
Arrows indicating both glabellar furrows (black arrows) and orbital lines (white lines). Before Botox® Cosmetic (A) and after treatment (B).
Before we go any further:
Find a mirror and look into it closely. You will find that at rest, you have few, if any, wrinkles and that your facial skin may actually look good. Now raise your eyebrows or frown, or smile, or squint your eyes. You now see that there are lines developing that you may not have known existed. These are lines that we like to call hyperdynamic lines, meaning that they only occur with facial movement. These lines were once completely unnoticeable when we were young, but with repeated action, have left permanent marks on the skin. There are two solutions to the problem of thin wrinkles in terms of injectable materials. Botox® Cosmetic is a substance that relaxes the muscles that cause hyperdynamic lines while the filler materials such as Juvederm® and Radiesse™ “fill in” those wrinkles and flatten their appearance.
What can I expect on the day of my injection?
When you come in for your injection, you will be seen only by a Double Board Certified Facial Plastic Surgeon. Photographs will be taken and you will visit with Dr. Garcia so that you may have ample time to discuss with him your areas of concern and what you expect from your botox treatment.
Dr. Garcia will have you make several facial animations to properly decipher where the major animation lines are located.
A topical anesthetic is placed on the skin to minimize any discomfort that you would have from the injections.
Several tiny injections of Botox® Cosmetic will be injected into the small muscles of the forehead and around the eyes that are making those deep lines pronounced.
A cold pack is placed directly on the injection sites to help with any discomfort and redness. You can actually return to work right after your treatment!
You may notice a scant amount of redness at the sites of injection, but this will subside by the time you return home.
The whole process takes less than 30 minutes from the time you walk into the consult room!
When Can I begin to see the Results?
You can expect to see some results by the 4th or 5th day after your injections. You will notice a gradual improvement and by one week, what you will see the most is how open your eyes appear to be. Friends and family may comment that you have done something different with your hair or that you are wearing different makeup…
Will I be able to make normal facial expressions?
Botox® Cosmetic does not change the way your face looks at all. To dispell a common misconception, it does not “freeze” your face. It simply prevents certain muscle groups from over acting and thus creating folds in the upper thirds of the face.
How do I know if Botox® Cosmetic is right for me?
The areas that we will address are outlined above. If you are tired of looking tired and do not want to invest neither the time nor the money in a surgical procedure, then this non-surgical, no downtime procedure is just right for you.
A word on who is NOT a candidate:
- Known allergies to Botox® Cosmetic or any of its preservatives
- Pregnant women
- Lactating women
- Eaton-Lambert Syndrome
- Myesthenia-Gravis Syndrome
Before and Afters
Request An Appointment
We are Proud to Offer Medical Grade Treatments Without Sacrificing Indulgence! Click or Call Now to Schedule and Appointment! | <urn:uuid:3a277f82-0902-4667-b562-815fdda89ccb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.garciareviva.com/botox/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94676 | 1,193 | 1.757813 | 2 |
“We’re not meant to be passive people of faith, we’re meant to use our gifts for God.” Lila Rose, Founder of Live Action
If I sat up late trying to think of a definition of the universal call to vocation that goes out to every Christian, I could do no better than Lila Rose’s statement above.
We are, all of us, every single one of us, called to use our talents for God. That does not necessarily mean jumping publicly into the mouth of a policy volcano like abortion. That’s what Lila Rose did, and she’s had quite an impact with her work.
Every Christian vocation, if it is based on a surrender of our self to God and lived out fully, will contribute its part to bringing the Kingdom. I’ve often said that the mother sitting in the bathroom with a croupy baby while the shower runs is closer to Jesus than any of the splashier Christians out there. I believe this.
Every man and woman who has children should never forget that they already have a vocation that is more important than any other. There is no higher vocation than raising your own children.
Even that is not our first vocation. The first vocation of every Christian is to be loved by God. He does not love us for what we can do for Him. He loves us for ourselves. Christian vocation should begin with that. If you don’t understand that, you can not succeed as a Christian, no matter how hard you work at it, for the simple reason that you will inevitably come around to believing that the results of your efforts are your responsibility and that they are how you can “earn” God’s love.
The failure to understand that He loves us for ourselves alone and that the results of our work for Him are not our province leads to many evils. I believe it is part of what entices so many Christians who get into politics to ultimately give in to the pressures and begin to do evil in order to try to achieve good. They’ve forgotten that they don’t need to earn His love, that, in fact, they can’t earn it. They don’t remember that they are not called to succeed. They are called to be faithful.
Our first vocation is to let God love us. Our second vocation is to do whatever tasks are put in front of us for the Lord. If you are a nurse, remember that your patients’ father is the Lord. If you teach school, teach your students as if they were His children. If you are a father or mother, care for those little ones as if they were God’s children, as well as yours.
Because, in fact, they are, you are, we all are. We were made to love, and we need to do our daily tasks with that understanding.
Christian vocation is the leaven, the mustard seed, the Kingdom-bringing work that God has entrusted to us for our time in this life. It isn’t something we do to get Him to love us. It isn’t a way of earning bigger rewards from our heavenly Daddy in hopes He’ll love us best. Christian vocation is just one way of loving Him back.
We are, in the words of Lila Rose, not meant to be passive people of faith. We are not meant to bury our gifts in a tight little world of private piety. Our calling is to live our lives and do our work as if we were doing it for the Lord, and by that, to change the world.
A CNA article describing Lila Rose’s speech to the Catholic Information Center says in part:
Washington D.C., Jan 19, 2013 / 06:02 am (CNA).- Prayer, trust and a willingness to be used by God are among the most important tools in working to defend the dignity of every human life, said Lila Rose, founder of the pro-life organization Live Action.
“When we say ‘yes’ to His will, it will take us on an adventure that we could have never imagined,” Rose said in the Jan. 17 talk at the Catholic Information Center in Washington, D.C.
A 24-year-old Catholic convert, Rose was raised in a large, pro-life family. She discovered the truth about abortion at age 9, when she found a book about the procedure in her parents’ house.
The experience stuck with her, and as she learned more about the scourge of abortion through the words of Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta, she “couldn’t think of a greater injustice” facing the world.
Feeling called by Christ to care for the “least of these,” especially, “our unborn brothers and sisters,” Rose turned to God, asking Him to “use me somehow to save some lives.”
“We’re not meant to be passive people of faith,” Rose said, explaining that “we’re meant to use our gifts for God.”
A combination of prayer and surrender to the will of God led Rose to start what would become Live Action – a group dedicated to exposing the abuses and lies of the abortion industry – at age 15 with a group of friends in her parents’ living room.
When Rose went to UCLA for her undergraduate degree, she took Live Action with her. Finding few resources for pregnant women on campus, she conducted her first undercover operation, pretending to be pregnant to see whether the university health clinic would be supportive of her having a baby.
The clinic workers pushed strongly for abortion, while telling her that she may not receive any support if she chose to keep her baby. Rose wrote about this experience in “The Advocate,” a publication that she founded, which now has a national collegiate circulation of more than 200,000 readers.
Rose then went undercover at her local Planned Parenthood, posing as a young teenager who was the victim of statutory rape. She secretly filmed the visit, in which clinic employees agreed to help cover up the rape. (Read more here.)
Click here throughout the Year of Faith, as the Catholic Channel at Patheos.com invites Catholics of every age and stripe to share what they are gleaning and carrying away from this gift of timely focus. | <urn:uuid:9d9de7ce-1589-4798-b420-2ab4dae73968> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.patheos.com/blogs/publiccatholic/tag/vocation-week/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972525 | 1,339 | 1.632813 | 2 |
9 March 2006 - Westman Wind Power Company announced Wednesday that it is developing eight wind power projects in Manitoba with a total value of approximately $1.5bn. The eight projects will have an initial capacity of approximately 700 MW and a potential maximum capacity of more than 1400 MW.
"Wind is the fastest growing source of power generation in the world" said Westman partner Paul Edwards, a Winnipeg lawyer and businessman, "and we think Manitoba can be a world leader in the development of wind power."
CFI Group (CFI) has been engaged to arrange financing to develop the wind farm projects. CFI Group specializes in providing customized medium and long-term structured and infrastructure debt and equity financing solutions for private and public corporations. The Company is owned by management and Canada Life, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Great West Life. More information about CFI Group can be found at www.corpfinance.ca
"CFI has obtained significant funding commitments from the investors in its equity fund, including Manitoba Teachers' Retirement Allowances Fund and Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, for the purpose of investing in energy and infrastructure projects across Canada," said Chris Ball, Executive Vice- President of CFI Group. "The Manitoba government's continued strong support of wind energy is essential to ensure this Manitoba-developed project comes to fruition. We are confident that the Westman team has the right combination of development experience and local knowledge to successfully execute these important energy projects."
Westman is a Manitoba wind power developer based in Winnipeg. The company was formed in 2004 to develop wind projects within the province while also maximizing the economic, environmental and social benefits to Manitobans. Along with Edwards, the principals of Westman include David Martin, a Winnipeg businessman, Neil Duboff, a Winnipeg lawyer, and Dave Courtney, a renewable energy expert based in Kenora.
Westman is developing the projects with technical support and assistance from Wardrop Engineering, one of the largest engineering firms based in Manitoba, and two other wind power developers, Padoma Wind Power and Gale Force Energy.
In selecting site locations, the Westman team relied on Helimax Energy, Canada's leading wind energy consultant. Helimax used historical weather data and computer-based modeling to determine the windiest spots in the province | <urn:uuid:bdd1b81c-cfc7-466b-b984-32b0a36906ae> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.power-eng.com/articles/2006/03/westman-wind-power-announces-15bn-manitoba-wind-projects.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943915 | 461 | 1.742188 | 2 |
Here are some interesting tidbits from the U.S. Census Bureau and the National Association of Homebuilders:
The living space of new houses being built in the U.S. has increased from about 1,500 square feet 30 years ago to more than 2,200 square feet today. Now they are decreasing in size.
Last year, the midpoint size for new homes in the U.S. was 2,219 square feet, compared to 2,277 the previous year. In the second quarter of this year it was 2,019 square feet.
Two possible reasons are an increase in first-time buyers seeking a federal tax credit and empty-nester baby boomers looking for less maintenance.
The percentage of new houses with four bedrooms or more shrank slightly, from 41 percent in 2007 to 40 percent in 2008, while the number of new houses with two bedrooms edged up from 11 to 12 percent during the year. New houses with three-bedrooms held steady at 28 percent, according to the data. | <urn:uuid:3f0f7163-c567-4abb-bfd1-8ec3395357f3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.bellinghamherald.com/business/new-homes-getting-smaller/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966091 | 208 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Parvez Sharma's new documentary, A Jihad for Love, is a remarkable exploration, six years in the making, of the lives and struggles of gays and lesbians in the Islamic world today. From a pair of Sufi lesbians in Turkey to a religious instructor in South Africa to young men in Iran and Egypt who have been jailed for their sexual orientation, to India, France, and Canada, the film casts an unblinking eye on the queer underground. Documentary has the power of one person, telling the story of an individual we can get to know, deeply, and to identify with. This is not political posturing or abstract statistics. It is a journey of pain and suffering, and ultimately hope.
Sharma has done something quite brilliant with this project. It is not a story that is outside of Islam, not an attack on Islam. For the most part, the principals in the story are observant, devoted believers. They ask the simple question, does not God, who made me, have a place for me? Far from being anti-Islamic, the film rescues Islam from charges of narrowness by showing the range of beliefs within the faith.
That is the real meaning of this Jihad -- a struggle to know God, a God of love. Parvez Sharma recently related this in an interview on Democracy Now:
"'Jihad' is almost an English-language word now. And this whole idea of the Jihad al-Nafs, which is the struggle with the self, and the greater jihad within Islam is rarely spoken about. I feel there is a major movement right now in Islamic thought for progressive Muslim voices to take back some of the discussions that have been taken away from us. So this whole idea of taking jihad, a much contested word, and putting it right next to love, I think is very powerful."
The West is often pleased to congratulate itself on its open, liberal culture. And authors have been pleased to flatter our narcissism by presenting us as the pinnacle of civilization. Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran and Dai Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress suggest that others want only this, to be more like us.
But Sharma's documentary asks us a deeper question -- for the story can be told and retold in many cultures. Just as Sandi DuBowski (a producer of this film) did in his documentary, Trembling before G-d, he is asking us to examine our core religious structures. DuBowski's film is about the journey of Orthodox Jews, lesbians and gay men, who also seek to stay within the faith, to accept themselves and gain acceptance. There are many, many films and books of Christian LGBT people struggling to stay in the church. And a beautiful account of a Hindu Tamil gay youth in Sri Lanka is found in Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai.
Clearly there is a contested notion of God, within all communities of faith. On the one side there is the authoritarian, punishing, intolerant God. This is the belief for people who love to follow rules and, when presented with a new commandment or rule they had not heard about, they gladly incorporate it into their list of "don'ts." They are tied to their religion by a hatred of the "other," and indeed their leaders need to conjure up frightening pictures of the other in order to keep the faithful fervent and to keep the cash flowing in.
On the other side, there is the God of compassion, of the real lives of people at the base. Far from sneering at humanity in all its complexity, this God declares that humans are made in his/her image and so the flame of the spirit dwells within each person. The struggle is not about the enlightened West vs. the backwards Muslims. It is instead a struggle between the authoritarian fundamentalists on one side and the democratic ethicists on the other.
To take a recent case in Christianity as an example, just look at the scandals of molestation of male and female children by Catholic Church authorities in recent years. Does anyone really believe this is something that just happened, an explosion of violations that popped up in the past generation? Of course not. This is in the nature of authoritarian religions -- and goes back thousands of years. When you have an institution that couples authoritarian power with repression of sexuality, you have a ready-made formula for domination, rape, and abuse. Those who preach repression, under the guise of whatever religion, are the ones who are masking these disgusting transgressions.
In the end, Sharma is challenging us to understand God as all knowing and God as love. Such a spiritual commitment, disarming in its simplicity, would bring crashing down religious bullies and murderers all over the world. | <urn:uuid:b21e8c1e-1131-42b6-91b2-dfeb10d33bc4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rick-ayers-/gay-muslims-make-a-famili_b_105363.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964881 | 974 | 1.796875 | 2 |
"It usually horrifies us to hear that in some countries such
as China and South Korea people cook and eat dogs and cats.
We love these animals and know they have individual
personalities but there is no difference between this and
what we in the UK do to equally smart, sensitive pigs."
"Society has advanced by questioning oppression such as
sexism and racism. But most of us still take part in the
largest and most violent form: speciesism,
discriminating against others for belonging to a
different species... SIMPLY FOR NOT BEING HUMAN."
"Animal Equality is an international non-profit
organisation dedicated to achieving equal consideration
and respect for animals and promotes a vegan lifestyle."
"Male chicks in the egg industry are shredded alive,
"free-range" hens are packed into huge warehouses and
killed after little more than a year, pigs and sheep in
organic Soil Association-approved slaughterhouses
have been films being kicked, hit and forcibly thrown." | <urn:uuid:1a813047-cdff-4e21-bf80-a69db7bcc1af> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://animalequality.net/leaflets | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941957 | 211 | 1.648438 | 2 |
May 20 2013 Latest news:
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Brentford goalkeeper Richard Lee’s book ‘Graduation’ is a unique book, combining football and how to train your mind to improving you as a person.
Lee opens his soul about his relationship with football over the past 12 months, conceding there were times when he hated the game and the focus on the psychological aspect of the game could provide an appealing aspect to readers for Brentford and non-Bees fans alike.
Lee suffered from acute mental anxiety and would "succumb to chronic nerves before games" and serious injuries led to him "consider what I do many times over the years before carrying on."
Lee invites you into his mind and how he worked through these situations and refers strongly to needing a 'Why'.
From being dropped after the first pre-season friendly where he conceded five goals against Fulham and looking destined for the Brentford scrapheap, to becoming the hero against Everton in the Carling Cup victory, making important stops in normal and extra-time as well as saving Jermaine Beckford's penalty, ensuring his place back in the first-team before sustaining a career threatening injury which ruled him out of a Wembley final.
Hypnotherapy played a role in his turnaround at Griffin Park and he describes hypnotist Dave Sabat as a "mentor" and Lee writes that "Dave had made a suggestion for saving a hypothetical Jermaine Beckford penalty," which turned out to be more of a premonition.
There are some romantic descriptions; a goal-post is referred to as a "cylindrical object" and Lee describes himself as "dripping with arrogance" after saving two penalties in a row in the Johnstone's Paint Trophy Area Semi-Final shoot-out against Charlton (he also saved the next penalty).
This was a book which was hard to put down and made complicated theories about the mind easy by using the football analogies. | <urn:uuid:e2eac487-561d-4042-a7f8-16a1d629b197> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.eastlondonadvertiser.co.uk/football/book_review_graduation_by_brentford_goalkeeper_richard_lee_1_1182135 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978977 | 405 | 1.671875 | 2 |
Transcribed from A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans, written and compiled by William E. Connelley, Secretary of the Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka. Chicago: Lewis Publishing Company, copyright 1918
J. CLARK HICKS. When 600 live and progressive business men of such a city as Fort Scott, all members of the Fort Scott Chamber of Commerce, choose one of their number as president, the choice is in the nature of one of the highest compliments and honors that could be paid, and is a responsibility which any man would appreciate. Recently the Chamber elected as president Mr. J. Clark Hicks, who is by no means one of the oldest business men of the city, but who by hard work and progressive methods has built up what is appropriately considered one of the largest and most complete exclusive furniture houses in Southeastern Kansas.
Mr. Hicks spent his early life on a farm in Bourbon County. His opportunities he largely made for himself. He began his commercial career in the humble role of a clerk. No hours were too long for him to work, and no problem that arose was too difficult for him to solve. He has made a success by conscientious performance of those duties which lie nearest and which are the important things in the life of any man.
Mr. Hicks was born at Lena in Stephenson County, Illinois, October 13, 1876. His parents Edward L. and Clementine (Weary) Hicks, were also born in the same county and were married there. They lived on a farm until they removed to Bourbon County, Kansas, and here the senior Mr. Hicks has since successfully followed farming. Some years ago he became associated with his son Clark in the furniture business at Fort Scott. He is a stanch republican and he and his wife are members of the Methodist Church. Their children are: Minnie, wife of Louis Gwinn of Kansas City, Missouri; J. Clark; and Edward Bailey Hicks, who is employed in the furniture business of his brother.
J. Clark Hicks gained his early education in the Bourbon County schools and in the old Kansas State Normal. At nineteen he left the farm and found place as a clerk in the furniture store of Requa & Sons at Fort Scott. He remained with that one house, steadily employed and advancing to larger responsibilities, for a period of ten years. During that time he had not only thoroughly learned the furniture business in every detail, but he had also carefully saved something from his earnings, and what was even more important had gained a confidence which established his credit. Then in 1908 he started out in a modest way as a furniture dealer on his own account, and every year since then has seen some increase or enlargement to his business. He has made it practically an exclusive furniture house, and it is now one which would do credit to any larger city. He has a fine location on Main Street, and his store has 15,000 square feet of space devoted to the show and storage of his complete stock. A staff of eight or ten people find employment in this store.
It was this ability to build up a successful business of his own and the spirit of enterprise which has always characterized him that caused his fellow associates in business affairs to elect him president of the Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber has its headquarters in the newest and most modern office building in Fort Scott, and a paid secretary and stenographer are employed to handle the business of the organization. This Chamber is doing a great deal for the city, and the membership is loyally devoted to the best interests of the community. Mr. Hicks is a member of the republican party, belongs to the Order of Elks and is a member of the Episcopal Church.
On March 3, 1908, at Fort Scott he married Miss Nellie Mitchell, daughter of Charles W. and Mary (Graff) Mitchell. The Mitchell family came to Fort Scott in the early '60s and were among the pioneers. Charles W. Mitchell for over twenty years has been clerk of the school board of Fort Scott, and has been a leader in all local educational affairs. Mrs. Hicks takes an active part in the Episcopal Church. They are the parents of one child, Marion, born at Fort Scott December 4, 1908.
Transcribed from volume 4, page 1950 of A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans, written and compiled by William E. Connelley, Secretary of the Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka. Chicago: Lewis Publishing Company, copyright 1918; originally transcribed 1998, modified 2003 by Carolyn Ward.
| Tom & Carolyn Ward
Home Page for Kansas
Search all of Blue Skyways
The KSGenWeb Project | <urn:uuid:82ff8d13-2fde-48b1-9824-388fd62cdeca> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://skyways.lib.ks.us/genweb/archives/1918ks/bioh/hicksjc.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.987992 | 947 | 1.820313 | 2 |
Fix It: Episode III - The episodic thing makes me feel like I am writing the next Harry Potter or something. OK, enough fantasizing. On to the real stuff.
Energy: The “fix” for our energy problems is actually one of the simpler ones. And, the reason it is simple is not because of any action of Congress or the President. It is not even because of our founding fathers. It comes from God.
This country is blessed with enormous natural resources. We have more coal than any other country on earth. We can make electricity from coal. We also have enough natural gas, by some estimates, to last us for a century. We make electricity from natural gas. We have a number of nuclear plants that generate electricity and we can build more. And, we have rivers to create hydroelectric power which can be harnessed to create more power should we need it. I have just described four sources that currently create more than 90% of all the electricity in this country. And, we can expand them all if we want or need to without importing anything from any other country.
But, you say, you haven’t mentioned anything about our primary transportation fuel: oil. Currently, we import about half of all the oil used in the United States. But, we don’t have to.
Last year, the National Petroleum Council (NPC) released a study showing that there are now enough proven oil reserves in the U.S., Canada and Mexico to meet all the projected oil use in those 3 countries for the next 30 years, at least. That means we can use all the oil we need without importing a drop from Saudi Arabia, Russia or anyplace else outside of North America. Now, some of you will assume that NPC is some front organization for evil oil companies. Sorry. It was formed by the U.S. Department of Energy to keep the Energy Secretary informed about petroleum reserves in the country and its membership includes several environmental groups. And, NPC is not the only organization reaching this conclusion.
Back in the 1920s, as more and more cars were being built, President Calvin Coolidge wrestled with the predictions that the world would run out of oil in 1935. But, technological improvements found more and more oil. My father was a petroleum geologist working in Kern County, California in those days, and he used the latest innovations of the time to find that oil. This same scenario is playing out again. New technologies have developed new ways to economically extract oil that previously either could not be found or could not be extracted. We have new proven reserves in the Dakotas, in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and many other states, including even California and New York. We have the ability as a country to be completely energy independent. This is a tremendous national asset. The Germans can’t do this. The Japanese can’t. Even the Chinese can’t. We are the only country on earth that has energy resources that we are choosing not to use, opting to import that energy instead. Why?
Unfortunately, various groups with political influence use “environmental” reasons to block U.S. energy development. But, the “environmental” arguments are just a smoke screen for people who are against any growth in human activity at all. I can refute every supposed environmental argument to the development of our own U.S. energy resources, but it would take the next 4 episodes of this epistle to do so. Suffice it to say, for example, that developing all the available oil in Alaska would impact only the land equivalent to a postage stamp on a football field. Slant drilling will enable the extraction of much of our offshore oil without ever penetrating the ocean floor. And even if this were not the case, is it better to buy the oil from foreign countries whose environmental regulations contain none of the protections that ours do?
But, let’s assume that I am wrong and that there are environmental impacts. Those must be weighed against the benefits of developing our own oil. Let’s assess what those benefits are: (1) Jobs – The states with the lowest unemployment in the country today are generally the energy producing states like Oklahoma and Texas. We can have a lot more of those. And, the jobs produced are good paying jobs and often union jobs. (2) Trade Deficit - We can vastly reduce the trade deficit if we don’t have to import so much oil. (3) Security - Some of you probably believe that we entered the Persian Gulf War to protect Kuwait as a source of oil. If we didn’t have to import oil from there, (or other non-North American countries), our foreign policy towards such countries could be completely different. And, I think it is unlikely we will be attacking Canada any time soon. (4) Price – There is a world price of oil. But, we can have a great deal more control over what we pay at the pump if we are domestically sourcing our own oil. So, what are we giving up in exchange for the weak environmental arguments? Jobs, lower deficits, security and lower prices against…….no real argument at all.
So, you ask, where is the bipartisanship here? When we have voted to complete the Keystone pipeline, nearly one third of Democrats in the House joined every Republican in support, in spite of heavy, heavy pressure from the White House on Democrats to oppose. Without that pressure, an overwhelming majority of both the House and the Senate will support an initiative to develop all of our domestic energy. Unfortunately, President Obama has become a captive of a small, fringe element of his support base that opposes all growth. That is not where most Democrats are. That is not where most people are. No other country on earth has the ability to be energy independent and chooses to import it instead.
You may also ask why I have not talked about the oft-discussed wind and solar options. I have nothing against wind and solar. But, they can never be anything but supplemental for any number of reasons because the wind does not always blow and the sun does not always shine. Solar might be more effective in the future if there is a breakthrough technology. But, the interests promoting wind and solar are doing so precisely because they know that reliance on these sources will make energy scarce and expensive. In the end, that is what they want because it will stifle growth. I think about this when I drive past the windmill farms near Palm Springs. How can that huge blight on an otherwise beautiful desert landscape that produces so little energy can be considered environmentally sound? With much less environmental impact, for less money and without potentially killing birds, we can produce so much more energy in so many other ways. I think wind is one of our least environmentally-friendly energy sources.
As far as I am concerned, this discussion is not about using more oil or burning more gas. The car I drive most of the time in California is an electric car (more about that and electric cars in general in a future laptop). We have a number of energy choices to power our future and we should let technology and the market decide which energy source is best. But whatever that source is, we can make it here. We don’t have to import it from outside our continent or be dependent on some unstable or unfriendly government to get it. And, we can add a lot of jobs, economic growth and, yes, tax revenue along the way. This is truly a no-brainer element of fixing the American economy.
Random Thought of the Day: Last week, we voted on several alternative budgets to the Paul Ryan budget, which was the budget we ultimately passed. One of them was President Obama’s budget. The President’s budget failed by a vote of 0 – 414. You read that correctly. Not one member of the House of Representatives, Republican or Democrat, could bring themselves to vote for the Obama budget. Is that some indication of just how bad the Obama budget is? Just as this vote was finished up on the House floor, I heard another congressman quip, “Well, Obama said he was going to bring us all together and unite us. And, he has finally done that!”
Until Episode IV, have a Happy Easter and Blessed Passover. | <urn:uuid:7834efb4-42f6-44b9-87b0-8ef95cab9738> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.flashreport.org/blog/2012/04/02/fix-it-episode-iii/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962781 | 1,707 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Moody’s announcement last week that Germany was at risk of losing its AAA credit rating should have come as no surprise. The slow-motion eurozone train wreck leaves no “good” outcome for Germany.
If Germany acquiesces to bailouts of the size and scope that are needed to restore market confidence, government debt is going to rise to uncomfortable levels. But if Germany refuses, it is hard to see the eurozone remaining intact. And the economic dislocations, collapse of trade and deep recession that would follow also would mean that Germany’s sovereign debt load would rise to uncomfortable levels.
But lest you start to feel bad for ol’ Deutschland, keep in mind that German indecision and intransigence have been major drivers of the loss of investor confidence in the eurozone. More than anything, markets hate uncertainty, and Germany’s aloofness has created uncertainty in spades.
We have reached a point where the single-most important factor in determining the direction of the market on a given day was what German Chancellor Angela Merkel had for breakfast that morning. Still, the German position appears to be shifting into something a little more coherent.
European Central Bank Governor Mario Draghi sent world markets soaring last week by pledging that the ECB would do “whatever it takes” to preserve the euro, and adding with a touch of machismo that “believe me, it will be enough.”
Draghi would not have made those statements unless he believed he had political cover from Germany. And indeed, shortly after Draghi’s comments, Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande appeared in a joint press conference to announce that “European institutions must fulfill their obligations,” which — in the Delphic ambiguity of euro leader statements — was taken to mean that the ECB had the green light to act aggressively to support Spanish and Italian bond prices.
The other “institution” expected to step in to the rescue is the European Stability Mechanism. The hope — based on comments from ECB governing council member Ewald Nowotny — is that the ESM is granted a banking license that would enable it to borrow funds far in excess of its current capital.
Of course, it would be downright un-German to fully commit to anything. Following the Draghi announcement, the German Bundesbank reiterated its opposition to additional ECB bond buying or to the issuing of a banking license to the ESM.
So we return to the central question: What’s next for Germany? Will Germany commit itself to saving the eurozone? Or will the country continue to equivocate?
Angela Merkel needs an easy win to keep her disgruntled base happy and to appease the credit rating agencies. And the likely candidate is Greece.
Both the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund have indicated in the past week that they have grown weary of extending Greece a perpetual lifeline. A strong statement from Merkel in favor of cutting Greece off from additional funds might buy Merkel the political points she needs to secure German support for more aggressive ECB action to rescue Spain and Italy.
All of this is conjecture, of course. And the experience of the past two years has taught us to take policy pronouncements from European leaders with a large grain of salt.
So for now, all we can do is watch and wait.
Charles Lewis Sizemore, CFA, is the editor of the Sizemore Investment Letter, and the chief investment officer of investments firm Sizemore Capital Management. As of this writing, he did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities. Sign up for a FREE copy of his new special report: “Top 3 ETFs for Dividend-Hungry Investors.” | <urn:uuid:e17f1364-d054-4a4b-af32-c0746443c71a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://investorplace.com/2012/07/what-is-germany-next-move-angela-merkel/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963018 | 768 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Would you give up your ability to truly understand other people for a wrinkle-free face?
Many women are saying “yes” to this question, and choosing to inject Botox into their faces... nevermind the fact that it impairs the ability to process emotion.
When you are in a bad mood, the last thing you probably want to be told is: “SMILE.” However, recent studies have proven that the physical act of smiling actually does make you happier. The body’s actions have a great effect on the mind, even if our egos wouldn’t like to think so.
So what happens if you have deadened your smile muscles with Botox? Will you not feel as happy? And what if you have deadened your frown lines with Botox? Will you not feel as sad?
The short answer is: yes.
Having a forehead and face as smooth as a baby’s bottom when you are 50 years old comes with a price, and that price is that you will not be able to feel as deeply, or to understand sadness and happiness as well as you did before you paralyzed your face muscles with Botox. You will not be able to understand other people’s emotions as well as you once did, because your face cannot mimic theirs and you have lost the number one tool for creating empathy that humans have been given. All for a weapon in the battle against aging - and I think we all know how the battle will end.
Our bodies inform our spirit more than our modern culture likes to admit, and your face was made to smile deeply when you are genuinely happy, to form crinkles around your eyes and deep caverns of laughter by the sides of your mouth. When your body stops doing this because you have injected poison into your face, your subconscious brain can’t differentiate between you not smiling deeply because you aren’t truly that happy, and you not smiling deeply because you have paralyzed your smile muscles.
While the idea that beauty is power in our society is a fact and one that many women exploit (as they should), beauty is not the only power available to females. What is more powerful that beauty? Knowledge, love and hope, to name a few. Let's face it: Those who glow with love will always be more beautiful than those with a face full of Botox.
Are you a Botox addict? Give it a rest for awhile, and see how your emotions react.
Thinking about getting Botox? Don’t buy into the bullshit. Save your money and visit an orphanage in Peru (or LA!) instead, and spend some time teaching poor children how to paint, dance or blow up balloons. This kind of experience makes you glow from within, and when you return no doubt everyone will tell you how great you look – because you will actually be a more beautiful person.
Too many women try to fight aging like it is something to be “beaten” instead of handled gracefully. But the term “anti-aging” is a myth at best and a lie at worst. If you are lucky not to die young, you will get old and your body will be wrinkled and you will slow down. You will start eating bland foods and you will turn down the music. You will look in the mirror at your wrinkles and see a million smiles, a thousand happy moments, an infinite number of laughs. You will look at these marks of character and time and know that you have truly lived. | <urn:uuid:bb3d6280-8860-4331-ae2f-38d7549b15e1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.organicauthority.com/health/botox-and-your-emotions.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959306 | 727 | 1.59375 | 2 |
The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.
Quick Pitch: WhoIsLive lets you see who is viewing the same webpage as you and start conversations with them.
Genius Idea: Making every web page instantly social, with or without the participation of its publisher
What if every web page you visited became an instant chat room? Startup WhoIsLive is launching a browser plugin Tuesday that could become one way to find out.
The Internet Explorer and Firefox plugin creates a browser sidebar that shows you other users who are looking at the same web page. Using the sidebar, you can set a status message that everyone else on the page can see, or you can chat with people individually.
Theoretically, the tool can show you who is viewing your Facebook profile, allow you to ask for guidance from other shoppers on an ecommerce site or be used as a real-time discussion tool on blogs and news sites. The websites' publishers don't need to install anything for the plugin chat room to work on their sites.
But there is one rather huge caveat: Users can only see each other, not web browsers who haven't installed the plugin — which means that a critical mass of users needs to be reached before the tool is useful. And before you can see who is viewing your Facebook profile, you'll need to make yourself visible to people who might be monitoring their profiles with the same tool.
"It's like anything else that is related to social," explains co-founder Elad Natanson. "It's a give and take. "
The idea behind WhoIsLive is a great one. Companies like Marginize have long been aiming to build a social layer on the web that is based on what you care about instead of who you know, and enabling people on the same page to connect is a smart way to do it. If the tool gains widespread adoption, then Natanson's prediction that WhoIsLive will "change the way that people use the Internet" isn't unreasonable.
Getting to that critical mass, however, is the startup's biggest hurdle. If it pulls it off, Natanson says WhoIsLive will sell a premium product to site owners that designates them as such in the chat list. Many services like WebsiteAlive and Livezilla offer similar live-chat customer service tools, but site visitors can only chat with the site owner. The premium product would also offer site owners personalized analytics.
"You always see the numbers," Natanson says. "But in this case you can actually see who your visitors are ... You can connect with them."
Photo courtesy of istockphoto, ChristopherBernard
Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark
The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today. | <urn:uuid:5589cf66-91b0-416d-abbd-bd15e3455e0b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://mashable.com/2011/07/26/whoislive/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952929 | 670 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Today’s Share From My Ohio Garden
The ‘big ones’ always scared me when I would see them in the garden centers but today I grow them in my own garden fearlessly.
I shared these bulbs I purchased back in April on Twitter
If you ever thought you could never grow a dahlia think again. This is year 2 of being totally addicted to growing dahlias. I feel in love with them after following @Cocoxochitl on Twitter.
A few tips about growing the dahlia from zone 5b :
- Pick a sunny location … these blooms love it hot at least six hours a day. I don’t usually see a bloom until July and after the heat has kicked in for the summer.
- Protect the plant from wind. I use bamboo stakes on the bigger varieties ( Dinner Plate and ones that claim to have at least 4″ blooms) so they stand straight and don’t flop over onto the mulch.
- Let a light frost hit them in the landscape in the Autumn before digging them up for the winter.
With these simple tips in mind let the growing begin. Judging by the weather patterns in the past few years I don’t think it would be too late to grab some of these dahlia tubers from the clearance rack at your local garden center and get them growing in your garden NOW!
Follow me this summer at @BG_Garden where I’ll be share my 20+ dahlias growing in my home garden. | <urn:uuid:d8ce5d04-0981-4a40-b98b-e5c8e1915167> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bggarden.com/blog/2012/07/06/dahlia/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.943038 | 320 | 1.601563 | 2 |
Here is a photo of an Xbox motherboard that I received as a failed mod attempt. Prior to fixing the traces the box would attempt to boot three times and then go to the flashing red and green led. The orange line in the upper center is where a conductive pen was used to attempt to re-connect a lifted trace.
NOTE: Always use a 15-20 Watt soldering iron for work on a motherboard. You can pick one up for $7.00 at Radio Shack. I cannot stress this enough, if you think it can be done with a 30-40 watt iron you are making a $200.00 mistake. Sadly this happens way too often and it can all be prevented for $7.00.
Also, not so obvious is that the pad above it was lifted and is not connected.
to resolve this problem the goal is to reconnect both the originating point an the terminating point with a length of wire. Cut 30AWG insulated wire (buy it here) to length as appropriate, strip and tin the ends.
As you can see the lower blue one is tough to get at, without heating up the orange component with the iron.
Using a 15-20 Watt soldering iron, tin the points and the ends of the wires with solder. All you need to do is make contact, don't focus on getting a large amount of solder, a wire that stays in place is all you need there will never be any stress on the wires and it is not a race, take your time. Use an X-Acto knife to scrape off any green board material away from the solder points. For this fix I needed to solder two wires, I started with the hardest one first (the blue one), I spent about 20 minutes trying to attach to the trace itself and gave up and decided to try to solder at the termination point next to the orange component you see in the pics. This took about another 20 minutes to get a good connection. The second wire is easily accessible and took less than 30 seconds to complete.
I did not get a finished pic, I didn't expect the first wire to be connected properly so I assumed I would be re-assembling, what do you know it boots up with no problems! | <urn:uuid:70537052-258d-46cb-805b-a383202d3647> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://llamma.com/xbox/Repairs/repairing_traces_and_lifted_pads.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969189 | 457 | 1.664063 | 2 |
I write my own songs. I love my songs. But my songs are nothing without lyrics. The music is beautiful but the words set to that music make it truly beautiful. Singing goes along with songwriting but what if you don’t have a beautiful voice?
I definitely don’t have a beautiful voice. My voice is ugly - or so I think. You don’t need a great voice to be a good performer. I always think to myself that because my voice is awful people won’t like my songs. The opposite is true. People really do like my songs. I once had a guy yell out “Hey man, you’re really good! Keep going!” just as I was about to end a set. This happened during a performance I didn’t think was very good at all. Everyone hates their voice when they hear it played back to them. But your voice may not be as bad as you may think.
The important thing about singing is to stay on key and to hit the right notes. This isn’t as hard as its made out to be. It just takes practice. You didn’t become a great guitar or piano player over night did you? Same goes for your voice. People have this idea that you are either born with a good voice or not. This simply isn’t the case. I think this false belief comes from the fact that as humans we use our voices all day long.
The first thing you need to do is find your range. The easiest way to do this is to find a piano or keyboard of some kind and goes through all the keys starting with the lowest. Match your voice to each note in every key. You may not be able to hit the low notes or the high notes. You may fall somewhere in the middle. Once you’d identified your range you need to practice singing in each key. Go through your Do Re Mi’s until you can go through every note in every key of your range without using the keyboard to match your pitch.
Once you can Do Re Mi your way through your range without the help of a keyboard to match pitch you’re ready to move on to keys outside of your range. If you can’t sing in more higher keys than lower keys I’d advise you to practice the high notes you can’t grasp and vice versa. Go through the same process for all the keys out of your range and you should start to become a much better singer in no time. You may not be able to extend your range much from your initial starting point and thats fine. The fact that you’ve practiced and can now hold any note in your range without using a pitch matching tool like the keyboard is reason enough to celebrate.
You may still not like your voice though. This is something that will never change unfortunately. But mastering your range will give you the confidence to sing in front of anyone anyway. A few tips though:
- At first write songs that stay within your range. When you move on to the higher or lower keys out of your range you should definitely write songs in them as part of your practice
- Once you know what your range is and you know what keys you will never be able to sing (knowing this takes a long time) then you know what keys you can write your songs in
You no longer have to feel embarrassed to perform your songs anymore. You won’t have to hire a singer either. Everyone has a range and as long you practice singing in that range you will never sound bad. Take Billy Corgan for instance. He has a voice only a mother could love but his songs don’t sound bad because of it. He hits the notes he needs to hit and his songs are now hits (I know, I know, it was lame of me to use ‘hit’ so many times like that). The Smashing Pumpkins are my favorite band and I sometimes joke that my voice is ugly because Billy Corgan taught me to sing.
Projection is a big part of making this work but this post isn’t about the details of singing because although I took voice lessons for two semesters at Columbia I’m no expert when it comes to singing. What I do know is that following these basic guidelines will vastly improve your skill and confidence. Happy performing. | <urn:uuid:e49151ad-ab43-4fa3-bb24-797bdfb2ed47> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://leftofbill.comyr.com/music/blog/?tag=billy-corgan | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974459 | 904 | 1.703125 | 2 |
Daly may have spent the last 20 years researching things like shyness in people. But in a lecture hall of 300 restless college students, shy he is not.
“Teaching is, at its best seduction,” Daly has said. “ Your goal is to have students leave each class thinking what you are teaching is the most important topic in the world.”
Daly came to UT in 1977 because of its extraordinary reputation and his desire to “be a part of something great.” Little did he know over the course of 30-odd years he, too, would build an extraordinary reputation with those he taught.
“Most professors with his credentials are standoffish and aloof,” says Allie Medack, a senior Plan II and Middle Eastern Studies major. “But he was one of the friendliest professors I have ever had. He was fun and easygoing, and he encouraged his students to work hard and really learn the material.”
Daly’s honors and achievements are many. At UT he has received 11 teaching awards, and he is one of fewer than 60 scholars in the world who can boast they are Fellows of the International Communication Association. But a framed piece of paper, many of which are stacked in piles in Daly’s cluttered office, does not make Daly the teacher he is in the classroom.
“The big thing is that good teachers transform people’s lives, and the University is filled with great teachers who care about making students smarter, making them better at what they’re already good at,” Daley says. “I’m lucky enough to teach both small and large classes, and every so often I get to know a student well enough that I think my class changes his or her life in a very good way.”
Interesting perspective, as always, Tim. It's been an interesting week indeed. T...
Let me commend you for your article about Chairman Powell's "Fo...
well, we kill fire ants so often that they are weker now so the "crazy ants" can...
Regarding that new logo: I live in the Washington, DC area, and I wonder how man...
Yes he had 5 years. I wonder what he scored on his ACT when he was a senior in H... | <urn:uuid:8f01f4df-fcdc-4849-8517-f9fc609e859b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://alcalde.texasexes.org/2011/05/john-daly-communications-studies/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979845 | 486 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Alex has now been ketotic for more than 2 1/2 months, and there is not doubt about it – it is helping him enormously. Granted, I am also doing GcMAF at the moment. However, last spring when I first tried GcMAF – and Alex was off SCD – he was doing nothing but regressing. The change in diet is the only thing new that I am doing. I do believe the GcMAF is helping…but I think that without the diet, he’d be too sick for me to see that.
A quick summary of the changes so far:
a. Most importantly, Alex’s mood has stabilized. He has very few tantrums now, and when he has one, they are very short and not nearly as severe. There has been a very big improvement in the last two weeks on this front. That alone would make all the effort worth it!
b. He has lost 10 pounds (which was needed) and looks great.
c. His acne is clearing up. His skin is 100 times better than it was just 2 months ago.
d. His nails are starting to grow more normally. The perpetual peeling (below the nail line) has dramatically improved.
e. Almost the most exciting…he is sleeping! 8 hours a night, with no help (supplements or medication).
On September 16, 2 1/2 months ago, an article was published entitled, “Impaired Carbohydrate Digestion and Transport and Mucosal Dysbiosis in the Intestines of Children with Autism and Gastrointestinal Disturbances.” Its authors include, among others, Dr. Tim Buie (GI at Harvard), Mady Hornig (well-known researcher at Columbia), and Margaret Bauman (one of the foremost researchers in the world on the autistic brain).
The paper rocked my world.
To sum up very briefly, the paper confirms Dr. Horvath’s findings of a decade ago – that children with autism and GI issues have low levels of disaccharidases (enzymes from the brush border of the small intestine that complete carbohydrate digestion), hampering their abililty to properly break down carbs. But it went much further: these researchers also found that these children have low levels of mono-saccharide transporters in the enterocytes. What does that mean? Glucose is a single molecule of sugar that feeds every cell in our bodies. To get it from the intestines (from food) into the blood stream, the cells on the villi of the small intestine have proteins on their surface known as transporters, that bring the glucose into the cell, and then out the back side into the blood. The children tested had low levels of these transport proteins meaning that even if they manage to break the carbs down into absorbable glucose, they can’t move the glucose out of the intestines properly. And as Elaine Gottschall would say, this leaves all kinds of sugars in the intestine which feeds all sorts of bacteria, leading to a monster dysbiosis issue…exactly what these researchers found. | <urn:uuid:474642b3-f6cc-468c-8cfa-6eca23f43928> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.newstarnutrition.com/1/category/ketogenic%20diet/1.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706890813/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516122130-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967007 | 648 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Residents in Rocky Mount are seeing orange. And it's only partly from the sun. Officials with the North Carolina Department of Environmental Resources raised the ozone forecast for the city of Rocky Mount from yellow to orange. Air quality officials say the raised level is a combination of the intense sunlight and air pollutants. A level of orange recommends people of high sensitivity such as the elderly stay indoors. | <urn:uuid:66b7e462-2f75-498e-ad2a-ee470844c7e1> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.witn.com/news/headlines/1739082.html | 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 | 0.930481 | 75 | 1.789063 | 2 |
The Help, first published in 2009, is the (rather impressive, in our humble opinion) debut novel by American writer Kathryn Stockett. Apparently, others are fans as well – by our count The Help spent an impressive two years on the New York Times Best Sellers list. In case that isn't enough for you, it was also a huge hit on the silver screen, exploding box offices in 2011. So yeah, we'd say she fared well with her first novel.
Set in racially segregated Jackson, Mississippi (Stockett's hometown), in the early stages of the Civil Rights Movement, The Help begins in August 1962 and ends in late 1964. Three women – two black, one white – narrate the novel in alternating chapters. They come together to publish a book of anonymously written stories about the experiences of black women working as maids for white families in Jackson.
OK, we admit that a book about a book about housework and taking care of kids doesn't sound like the most exciting thing on the shelf. But that's part of the brilliance of this novel – it takes housework and, yes, talking and writing about housework, to high levels of humor, danger, love, intrigue, and suspense. Oh, and do keep the box of tissues handy, because tears will be jerked. There are some agonizingly sad moments here. In fact, Stockett began writing The Help as a way to cope with her own loneliness and sadness. She says,
I started writing it the day after Sept. 11. I was living in New York City. We didn't have any phone service and we didn't have any mail. Like a lot of writers do, I started to write in a voice that I missed. I was really homesick – I couldn't even call my family and tell them I was fine. So I started writing in the voice of Demetrie, the maid I had growing up. (source)
So let's learn a little about Demetrie, then. Demetrie was like "the help" featured in the Stockett's novel, a black woman working in a white family's household. She was employed by Stockett's grandparents first, taking care of our author's father and uncle (source). She was a huge source of stability for Stockett growing up, boosting her self-esteem and standing by her when life was hard. When Demetrie died in 1986 (Stockett was sixteen), she was still employed by the family (source). This was well before Stockett began to really think about life from Demetrie's point of view. She writes,
I am ashamed to admit that it took me 20 years to realise the irony of that relationship. I'm sure that's why I wrote my novel, The Help – to find answers to my questions, to soothe my own mind about Demetrie. (source)
At times mischievous, at times wickedly ironic, at times heartbreaking, this novel argues that story writing and storytelling have the power to effect positive change for individuals and their communities. As Stockett's above quote suggests, this novel shows us that these are also tools we can use to deal with painful parts of our pasts. Oh, and in case you need a little comic relief in the midst of all this serious discussion, there're enough poo-jokes to fuel at least one episode of South Park. When this book gets hold of you, it'll have you laughing, crying, and hanging on to the edge of your e-reader, all at the same time.
We hear a lot these days about "transparent society" – a phrase taken from the title of David Brin's 1998 non-fiction book that explores the positive and potential negative impacts of technology, privacy, and freedom. Advocates of a transparent society (like controversial WikiLeaks founder Julian Asange) are most concerned with exposing abuses of power in order to safeguard the privacy of individuals. For others, transparent society means an Orwellian nightmare from which there is no escape. For some media outlets, transparent society means working overtime to satisfy the public's hunger for the secret lives of celebrities and politicians. And, hey, we just can't get enough reality TV.
The point is, we love (and, yeah, sometimes don't love) reality TV because it gives us glimpses into the lives of people we ordinarily wouldn't get to meet. We are fascinated by them in part because we see the people in them (in the case of, say, Jersey Shore) making public what were once private acts – like Snookie's manhunts and seductions, or ordinary things like using the bathroom, throwing up, having hangovers, brawling, and the like. Reality TV comes in just about every flavor we can imagine. With video cameras built right into our phones and computers, we all have the potential to be reality TV stars.
Archeologists, historians, and, yes, writers of historical fiction work to make the past more transparent too. Southern writers are known for shedding light on the highly-guarded secrets of that region. Ultra-famous Mississippi writer William Faulkner often did so by representing the haziness and confusion of southern life after the Civil War, through complicated narrative and grammatical structures and experiments with language, as in The Sound and the Fury. By contrast, Stockett's The Help reads more like reality TV. We are given glimpses into the secret lives of the white and black families of Jackson in the early 1960s, through the camera-like eyes of the black maids as they work on a book bringing their true, day-to-day, even intimate experiences to the public eye.
By diving into perspectives not frequently explored in popular literature, Stockett widens our perspective on the American historical past and might just inspire us to look around our own communities with new eyes. After reading The Help, who knows, you might find yourself inspired to grab that camera, keypad, or good old-fashioned pen, and begin your own chronicle. | <urn:uuid:72af0157-ec5b-4c78-8534-fa0a54243722> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.shmoop.com/the-help/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971794 | 1,233 | 1.757813 | 2 |
Matthew Denholm is accused of a double shooting that killed 25-year-old Zachary Flower and injured his roommate, Kevin Price. The pair was shot inside their Berea apartment on Monday Morning.
In a domestic violence petition from last May, Denholm's wife alleges her husband came home drunk and tried to choke her while she nursed their baby. It also says he threatened to break her jawbone and pushed his knee into the baby's back.
Denholm's wife asked the court that he complete a drug or alcohol treatment program through the VA. She also wanted her husband, an Army veteran, to be treated for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD.
NEWSFIRST talked to a Lexington expert on the symptoms of PTSD and the help that's available.
"It can trigger substance abuse," says Cynthia Dunn, coordinator of the Lexington VA's PTSD team. "It can trigger lots of relationship problems."
Symptoms include nightmares, flashbacks, feeling numb, becoming depressed, feeling irritated and having a hard time relating or getting along with family. Those symptoms can lead to harmful acts.
Dunn says treatment starts with education. Confronting painful memories is also part of treatment.
"You don't want to avoid things that serve as reminders because when people do that, their life starts getting very narrow."
Dunn says for those suffering from PTSD it's not rehabilitation. It's recovery from traumatic events they've witnessed and lived and there's help available.
If you live in Kentucky, there's a hotline you can call to get help for PTSD. It is 1-800-273-TALK | <urn:uuid:e64aa4ae-0558-4791-8572-dfadca8bb411> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wkyt.com/yourtown/locations/lexington/headlines/Coping_wiith_Post-Traumatic_Stress_Disorder_134299248.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.980718 | 331 | 1.671875 | 2 |
State law affects cost of drivers ed
By GREG ALLMAIN
Federal Way Mirror reporter
January 11, 2013 · Updated 10:02 AM
Parents enrolling their students in Federal Way Public Schools (FWPS) traffic safety program may notice a slight bump in cost from previous years.
Now with a price tag of $450, the new fee is a $50 increase. The reason for this, according to traffic safety program manager Mike Grady, is because of a new state law that allows such programs to administer both the written and driving portions of the licensing test.
FWPS’ traffic safety program is now the largest public-school-run program in the state. Last year, more than 800 students graduated from the program, according to Grady.
Last spring, the state Legislature passed a bill called House Bill 1635.
“Basically, it involved the Department of Licensing, where apparently there’d been a lot of complaints about the long lines at the Department of Licensing,” Grady said. “So to solve that problem, they decided to pass this bill, enabling public schools, or private businesses, to give out the knowledge test, otherwise known as the written test, and the skills test, otherwise known as the on-road test, to get their license.”
Grady explained that the slight increase in cost comes from the new ability to give the test.
For Grady and FWPS, this is a positive thing because of the convenience it will provide students and parents.
“We don’t want them to be shocked that our price went from $400 to $450 for drivers ed, because now the price at $450 includes the opportunity for their student to get their licensing examinations at their high school,” he said.
“So all of that is now rolled into one. We’re thinking positive here, that if they’re successful in drivers ed, they can do everything at their high school. And when they’re done with our program they can just show up at the Department of Licensing, pay their fee, and pick up their license.”
Grady also mentioned that FWPS students who enroll in the district program have an added benefit of convenience with an online scheduling program.
Grady attributed the program’s success on the fact that most of the program is taken care of internally, from maintenance to other fees. The program’s only goal is meet its costs.
“We’re not trying to make money, we’re trying to make costs. We’re not in it for a business, but we want to make sure we can still provide this service,” he said. “We’re not sitting here getting rich off of our students. Our knowledge test is free because it’s just a test. You go to the private vendors, they charge $25 to take the test.”
Grady emphasized that FWPS traffic safety program is only open to students within the district. Even with the new law, adult drivers who need to take their licensing exam, or students who live outside the district, cannot take advantage of the licensing tests offered by FWPS’ program.
Mostly, this comes from insurance considerations, Grady said.
“We’re very confident, and very excited to provide this for our students and our parents, because now, they can do everything at one site,” Grady said. “We just feel this is another service we can provide in this day and age, when things are tough, all the way around. Especially financially.”
To learn more about FWPS’ Traffic Safety program, visit www.fwps.org/dept/traffic.
Contact Federal Way Mirror reporter Greg Allmain at email@example.com or 253-925-5565 ext. 5054. | <urn:uuid:db72ee4d-1039-4117-8eef-e6f04b6b9254> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.federalwaymirror.com/news/186396711.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955135 | 816 | 1.578125 | 2 |
If you were to ask anyone in New York City if they pay a lot for auto insurance they most likely would tell you they do. It makes sense since it’s the largest city in the US with common congested traffic and risky cab drivers. But surprisingly, New York does not even show up on the top 20 states with high auto insurance rates. According to the article “The States With the Highest & Lowest Auto Insurance Rates” by James Zol on TheAutoInsurance.com, Louisiana takes the top spot as the state with the highest auto insurance rates.
Based on a study completed by Insure.com, Louisiana has the highest auto insurance rates primarily due to their law structure. According to MSN News, Louisiana allows for some of the highest out of court settlements in the US. Because of this auto insurance companies charge Louisiana residents more to make up for this potential expense.
Maine takes the number one spot for the state with the lowest auto insurance rates. This is mostly due to the low population which translates to less accidents and fewer lawsuits. Many Maine residents tend to resolve auto accident situations without even contacting the insurance companies. This translates to lower rates across the board in Maine. This is something other states may want to consider before filing frivolous claims. You may make some money in the short run, but in the long run everyone pays through higher auto insurance quotes. | <urn:uuid:2831b608-7e97-4acb-accb-b12cafe07409> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.smartautoinsurance.com/blog/category/maine-auto-insurance/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953562 | 282 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Nieces, Know Your Worth
Written By Savvy Auntie Staff Writers
By Maëlis Mittig, francisfinancial.com
Maëlis is a proud Savvy Auntie who moved to New York City from Philadelphia, PA, and joined the Francis Financial team in 2011. Since her move to New York City, Maëlis has become actively engaged in the not-for-profit sector and joined the membership committee for Step Up Women’s Network, an organization inspiring women and girls to fulfill their potential through mentorship and networking opportunities. She is also working on a project with The Ben Appelbaum Foundation where she is helping a small nonprofit, Gifted Hands, with branding, PR, and general growth strategy.
“There’s a special place in hell for women who don't help other women.”—Margaret Thatcher
As women, we know how much harder it is to climb up the corporate ladder, demand equal pay, and stay true to our ultimate dreams. Let's face it; we live in a “man’s world.” After watching the documentary, “MissRepresentation,” and learning about the effects of the media on young girls, I became inspired to search for the best pieces of advice I could give my nieces as they grow up. What can I do to help them dream big without being discouraged by social norms? The ultimate lesson we can teach our lovely nieces, is to know their worth. Here are a few pieces of advice on doing just that.
Finding Their Passion
It’s only right to start out with the basics. During a Step Up Women’s Network power breakfast with Jane Wurwand, CEO of Dermalogica, I asked Jane if she had any advice on how to find your dream job, your true passion. She looked at me said, “Think about what you wanted to be when you were 10 years old, when your dreams weren’t clouded by societal norms. Go with that.” As we grow up, as women, we get discouraged by the idea that some professions are reserved for men. Seeing that a mere 3% of women represent Fortune 500 CEOs and about 17% of the US political office, our nieces might find it discouraging from the start to aim high and truly go for their dreams.
1. Get a feel for their talents and interests.
When speaking with my nieces a few months ago, I realized that they weren’t quite sure what they wanted to do with their lives—normal, as they are in their early teens. I tried to start a conversation to find the areas of the workforce that made them light up with excitement. I asked, “What would make your life easier? What would help others? Where is the void? What skills do you have to make a change in the world?”
2. Get them excited.
If you see a spark of interest for a specific industry, I recommend that you fuel that spark, and help them understand what it is they’re interested in. Using examples of women who have achieved great things is a wonderful way to go about it. Read them stories. Help them explore. Find clubs, shadowing opportunities, and mentors in the field that can lead them the right way. If you have these women in your network, introduce them. If it’s fashion, PR or Marketing, talk about women like Karen Chan, the founder of Shecky’s, who created an entire industry that ignites women over drinks, shopping, and networking. If it’s politics, talk about women like Hilary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, or Sonia Sotomayor. You can even bring up women who have a career in Politics but are a bit out of the norm, like Mika Brzezinski, co-anchor on the popular political talk show, “Morning Joe.” These women have paved the way for us, as women, to become what we want to become. Read their biographies, and gift your nieces their books. Inspire them, and let them know that it is possible.
3. Teach them to think outside the box.
Use rhetorical questions. If your niece has a philanthropic heart, teach her about starting not-for-profits. A few weeks ago, I asked my 16-year-old brother, who has been in and out of Juvenile detention for the last few years, what he wanted to do with his life. I asked him the same questions I asked my nieces, “What would make your life easier? What would help others? Where is the void? What experiences do you have to make a change in the world?” Someone came up with Post-Its, right? (Maybe not philanthropic—but useful!) He admitted that a focus on sports would have been helpful in leading him on the right path. Okay, so sports help young adults stay out of trouble. How about a not-for-profit that enlists the help of pro athletes to come in to juvenile centers and teach boys about sports? How about creating a policy in public schools that mandates all teens partake in at least one sport and focus on it for the entirety of their high school years? How about creating more sports programs in Juvenile detention centers and making them more exciting? Using rewards? Teach them to think outside the box, to develop their ideas and help them create a plan of action.
Our nieces, amongst most women, often struggle with the idea that appearance directly impacts their chances at success. It’s easy for young girls to get caught up in society’s burden to look a certain way. Help them understand that it’s not about their appearance, but more about their presentation. Mika Brzezinski, author of the New York Times best seller, All Things At Once, advises that “[it’s] not about your appearance; it’s about presentation. If you are wasting time worrying in front of the mirror, you are going about it the wrong way. When you walk in the room, the visual of you should send this message and this message only: Oh, She has her act together.” Teach them confidence. Help them become excellent public speakers, to learn everything they can about their industry and to know that preparation equals confidence.
As we know, media has a powerful impact on our nieces. It’s important that we educate them on understanding that movies, magazines, and TV misrepresent the female population. It’s quite rare to find an educated, successful, and kind female role model in movies. So, do your research. As simple as it sounds, reiterate the fact that what we see on TV is not representative of the real world. Actresses are often airbrushed, and women are often demeaned to sexual objects. Help them understand what a real female role model looks like—one who is educated, respected, kind, and driven.
Be the change you wish to see in the world. Teach them kindness and compassion. Teach them to treat others the way they want to be treated, and to stay out of the inevitable teen drama. Help them stand for what's right. It’s important not to fall for stereotypes and to befriend everyone around you. Let them know that kindness will lead them much further than anything else they learn in school. Being open-minded and having the ability to empathize is an indispensable trait to have. Take them to volunteering opportunities, and help them step out of their comfort zones.
Published: December 19, 2012 | <urn:uuid:21a13065-cfd7-4973-831e-77704fef3825> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://savvyauntie.com/expertisedetails.aspx?id=3270&GroupID=118&Name=Nieces,%20Know%20Your%20Worth | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971929 | 1,581 | 1.710938 | 2 |
Texas House recognizes AgriLife Extension's Yolanda Morado
Resolution honors 34 years of exemplary service to Texas-Mexico border
The Texas House of Representatives has passed a resolution honoring Yolanda Morado for 34 years of service to one of the most impoverished areas of the country.
State Rep. Ryan Guillen of Rio Grande City authored House Resolution 1829 to recognize Morado's life of service to South Texas as a Texas AgriLife Extension Service county agent in Starr County.
The resolution also honored her for having received the 2008 Regents Fellow Service Award from the Texas A&M Board of Regents in December.
In presenting the resolution to the House for their consideration, Guillen described Morado as "my Extension agent when I was growing up, my 4-H leader and my mentor."
Among her many accomplishments, Guillen noted her work in Starr County directing the Better Living for Texans program that teaches nutrition, food safety, wellness and financial management to more than 8,000 people.
"Besides teaching diabetes health care courses herself," Guillen said, "Ms. Morado has trained over 1,500 volunteers to educate South Texans about health, financial security, parenting, literacy and environmental stewardship issues."
He also praised her work in increasing awareness and knowledge of issues along both sides of the Texas-Mexico border, helping entrepreneurs start their own businesses, and hosting annual child care conferences to provide professional training and continuing education for women pursuing child-care careers.
"I ask you all to please help me in recognizing, congratulating and welcoming Ms. Yolanda Morado to these chambers," he said, as fellow House members turned to and applauded Morado.
Seated with Morado and also recognized by Guillen were Dr. Ed Smith, director of AgriLife Extension, and Dr. Ruben Saldana, the AgriLife Extension District 12 administrator in Weslaco.
Saldana said Morado's accolades are a first for South Texas.
"This is the first time anyone from South Texas has been named as a regents fellow by the Texas A&M System Board of Regents," he said. "We are grateful to Rep. Guillen for initiating the resolution and to his staff for their effort in making it a reality."
After the ceremonies, Morado, a native of neighboring Hidalgo County, noted that as a young girl she'd always liked visiting Starr County and even then thought it would be a great place to work.
"I love being an Extension agent because there is little in life that is as fulfilling as working with families in Starr County," she said. "These are families who welcome you into their homes and embrace educational opportunities, and that has made my work so gratifying."
Morado noted that her AgriLife Extension work has been far more than a career.
"It is my passion and my mission in life," she said. "I had many opportunities to leave Starr County and lots of job offers, but I never felt I could leave because there was always so much to be done."
Guillen also noted that Morado had done an admirable job of raising her daughter, Melissa, and sons, including Victor, a noted columnist and author in the Rio Grande Valley.
My other son, Monchito, who passed away in 2001, used to say I was the only person he knew who would make excuses to go to work," she recalled. "But my Extension families are what make coming to work every day so very special, and together we hope and dream and work at improving our communities and our lives." | <urn:uuid:d5e7ad90-1733-4ecd-8864-b03f97456706> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.hpj.com/archives/2009/jun09/jun1/TexasHouserecognizesAgriLif.cfm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.976425 | 745 | 1.617188 | 2 |
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Science & Medicine
[LESS INFO] 18 VIEWS | ADDED 21:00:00 01/27/13
The internet is in a fury over Beyonce's alleged lip syncing at Obama's inauguration. If she did lip sync, it feels like a huge betrayal...a huge lie. Why is this? Afterall, the public has been okay with lip-syncing in the past. Trace explains why this time is so different.
[LESS INFO] 4 VIEWS | ADDED 14:00:00 01/27/13
It looks like women won't be the only ones tasked with the burden of birth control, as men now have a way of their own.
[LESS INFO] 1 VIEWS | ADDED 21:00:00 01/26/13
The King of the Lens Flare (aka JJ Abrams) is set to direct Star Trek VII. But what are lens flares they exactly and how are they made? And how do filmmakers like Abrams use them to their advantage? Anthony goes behind the lens for answers.
[LESS INFO] 1 VIEWS | ADDED 14:00:00 01/25/13
Using DNA as a hard drive? Its not as crazy as it sounds! Scientists at the European Bioinformatics Institute over in the UK, have actually done it and the results have been impressive. Will this ever become something you can do at home? Anthony has the details!
[LESS INFO] 2 VIEWS | ADDED 22:30:00 01/24/13
Housecats are destroying New Zealand's natural habitat! They are an invasive species and a threat to indigenous wildlife. At least that's what Gareth Morgan says, the man behind a radical cat eradication campaign in New Zealand. But as Anthony asks, is removing felines the answer? And what might happen once they're gone?
[LESS INFO] 7 VIEWS | ADDED 14:00:00 01/24/13
If death was imminent, would you consider cryogenically freezing yourself, with the hopes that one day future technology would bring you back to life? Battling with brain cancer, thats what 22 year old Kim Suozzi did, and there are others just like her! But does this have any basis in science? Trace has the answers!
[LESS INFO] 3 VIEWS | ADDED 00:00:00 01/24/13
Puppies so cute that you want to squeeze 'em, eat them even! Turns out, we do have a physical reaction to cuteness--literally, we want to care for it, and if we can't care for it, we want to do something with it. Anthony reports on how cuteness draws out our playful aggression.
[LESS INFO] 3 VIEWS | ADDED 14:00:00 01/23/13
Assisted suicide is still a hotly debated topic, but with two deaf twins in Belgium choosing to end their lives on their own, perhaps we should be reconsidering our views on the issue.
[LESS INFO] 1 VIEWS | ADDED 23:15:00 01/22/13
Manti Te'o's dead girlfriend was a hoax. She was made up, which is more common than you think. Laci Green looks at the trend of making up fake people, and its psychological roots.
[LESS INFO] 6 VIEWS | ADDED 21:00:00 01/21/13
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Laci Green reflects on racial injustice in the United States.
[LESS INFO] 4 VIEWS | ADDED 14:00:00 01/20/13
From thermostats to crosswalks and even elevator buttons, we are apparently conditioned to pressing placebo buttons. Why though do we do this? Anthony explains. | <urn:uuid:496128eb-bb47-4ba1-afd4-b6cb16575803> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.channels.com/feeds/show/841/Polar-Bears-Forced-to-Swim-Longer-Distances?page=6 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947926 | 781 | 1.59375 | 2 |
August 31st, 2012
09:03 PM ET
By Livia Borghese, for CNN
Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, a prominent Vatican figure and one of the more progressive voices in the Catholic Church, died Friday at age 85, the Archdiocese of Milan announced.
Martini suffered from Parkinson's disease and died at his residence in Milan, where he had lived since 2008, when the disease forced him to leave Jerusalem, the archdiocese said.
A public viewing was scheduled for Saturday at Milan Cathedral and the funeral for Monday.
Pope Benedict XVI sent his condolences to the archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Angelo Scola, remembering his "beloved brother that served with generosity the Gospels and the Church."
The Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, called Martini "an expert and passionate in the Holy Scripture."
Pope John Paul II appointed him archbishop of Milan in 1979 and proclaimed him cardinal in 1983. In 2002, at the retirement age of 75, Martini moved to Jerusalem to dedicate himself to Biblical studies, according to his official Vatican biography.
Martini was known for his progressive position on some of the Church's most controversial issues, including priestly celibacy, the use of condoms, euthanasia and homosexuality.
Even after his retirement, Martini raised "subtle though crucial objections" to the Church's opposition to all cases of assisted fertility, distribution of condoms to AIDS victims, and so-called right-to-die cases, Time magazine reported in 2007.
He "politely challenged" the pope's strong condemnation of an Italian government proposal to legalize civil unions for homosexual partners and voiced support for the ordination of women as deacons, Time reported.
Italian President Giorgio Napolitano remembered Martini's "innovative paths in the inter-religious dialogue," as well as the "enlightening and concrete suggestions" he received from the prelate in each of their many encounters, especially on social themes like immigration.
Martini was one of the "papabili," or papal contenders, at the 2005 Conclave that elected the current pope.
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About this blog
The CNN Belief Blog covers the faith angles of the day's biggest stories, from breaking news to politics to entertainment, fostering a global conversation about the role of religion and belief in readers' lives. It's edited by CNN's Daniel Burke and Eric Marrapodi with daily contributions from CNN's worldwide newsgathering team and frequent posts from religion scholar and author Stephen Prothero. | <urn:uuid:22a9e163-05a4-4b3a-92cd-d5ede079e93a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/31/cardinal-carlo-maria-martini-prominent-vatican-figure-dies-at-85/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962803 | 527 | 1.820313 | 2 |
Create successful relay teams with average sprinters! Legendary Coach Clyde Hart shares his secrets to flawless relay technique.
Coach Hart describes why his techniques and strategies have been so successful and how you can implement his methods with your team. These methods can be applied at any level; youth, high school, college, or elite.
Hart shares his ideas in a simple lecture series, sharing why his techniques and strategies have been so successful. Hart takes these philosophies to the track and shows you how to take average sprinters and develop championship relay teams with proper technique. Hart highlights several of his techniques using demonstrators to teach his major points of emphasis.
In breaking down the 4x100 relay, Coach Hart emphasizes that whatever method is used-sell it to your athletes. He explains a step-by-step method for passing the baton through the zone, and includes a discussion on the acceleration zone, the marks needed for the outgoing runner so that he is at top speed when receiving the baton and the placement of the hands.
Coach Hart then touches on the 4x200 and 4x400 relay by adding the minor differences needed for these relays. You'll also get Coach Hart's thoughts on the use of the blocks, proper block placement on the track, the start, the exchange, and drills using the baton.
Get the drills and techniques that have made Baylor one of the top relays schools in the nation.
145 minutes (2 DVDs). 2012.
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The PGA Grand Slam of Golf Trophy
The stunning trophy, first presented in 1992, is made up of 5 crystals in graduating sizes, representing the 4 Majors that qualify players to compete in tournament, culminating in the Grand Slam of Golf. The winners name each year is inscribed on the trophy which appropriately depicts golfs most difficult event to earn an entry place.
The trophy measures 27 inches (68.5cm) in height, and weighs in at 50 pounds (22.7kg). The four-sided base measures 16 inches (40.5cm) on each side. Panels bearing the emblems of each of the four qualifying Majors appear on each side. | <urn:uuid:dd892714-cdae-4b78-a673-aabdb367e2b7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.imaginegolfclub.com/port-royal-grand-slam/trophy.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954243 | 137 | 1.625 | 2 |
Britain is the home of the classic shaving brush. Even today there are a lot of brands that have survived the lean years when horrible aerosol lathers nearly killed them off. I have put the word British in inverted commas for two reasons. Firstly because by far the biggest manufacturer of these brushes is Progress Vulfix who are on the Isle of Man in the middle of the Irish sea, which is not part of Great Britain. Secondly because a lot of what goes into these brushes nowadays is Chinese.
All the badger hair in all the British brushes comes from China. It is still from Meles meles, the same badger that we have in Europe. In China this animal is vermin which is culled annually and the meat is eaten whilst the hair goes to the brush industry. Whereas in Europe the badger is protected, though there is probably going to be a cull in Wales early next year as a measure against tuberculosis. The Chinese don’t just sell the hair, they take advantage of their cheap labour to make the hair up into knots, in fact the vast majority of all badger knots are now made in China, some by hand and some machine made. And of course the Chinese make the handles, some by moulding and some by machining.
So we have the situation where it is possible to buy a knot and a handle from China, glue them together in Britain and then write “Made in England” on the brush!
Here are some of the brands:
Bonds of Oxford Street. A London tobacconist who sells a lot on eBay offer the Vulfix range of brushes with their own name printed on them. You can buy the same brushes elsewhere for less.
Coate’s. The Brush company was founded in London in 1875. They shared premises in Somerset with Simpson’s from 1941 and amalgamated with them in 1990. Nowadays more famous for their shaving soaps but you can still buy new old stock Coate’s Fitzwilliam brushes made by Simpson’s which look very nice indeed.
Cyril R Salter.
Geo. F. Trumper
Morris & Forndran
Taylor of Old Bond Street
Truefitt & Hill
Woods of Windsor
Due to being brainwashed by marketing there are tens of millions of men in the world who use multibladed system razors with patent protected cartridges that you can only buy from the one monopoly supplier. This is very expensive, does not give the best shave and ends up being a chore. Yet there is the fantastic alternative of traditional shaving where you can buy 100 blades for as little as £10, and enjoy a shave that is not only better but which is also an enjoyable and luxurious experience.
So why don’t more men throw away the absurdly expensive system razor and move over to something far better in every way? The answer is partially that they have been brainwashed by billions of dollars worth of advertising featuring famous sports stars. Then there is the fact that most know nothing about traditional shaving. And finally those that do can often be intimidated by the change to new equipment. So I thought I would write a road map to enable people who have trepidations to escape the dark side and enter a new world where everything is better!
Step 1. Throw away all those aerosol cans that you get your lather out of and replace them with a lather you make yourself with a brush (keep using the system razor for the moment). This sort of lather has several advantages:
The brushing action lifts the stubble into the lather making it easier for the blade to cut.
The brushing action exfoliates your face, helping your complexion.
You can use far more luxurious soaps and creams.
More active ingredient goes on your face.
The quality of ingredients is usually much higher.
The time taken to brush the lather on softens your stubble by as much as 80%.
Then you have the option of a cream or a soap. Basically a cream is just a soap with water already mixed into it to make it easier to use, so a soap is better because it is more concentrated. The soaps I would recommend are Palmolive shaving sticks, Mitchell’s Wool Fat and, my favourite, Otoko Organics. If you must go down the cream route then Taylor’s of Old Bond Street have a great range, their Avocado being particularly lush.
Only once you are settled into and happy with this new regime should you consider moving to step 2.
Step 2. Move to two pass shaving. So lather up as normal and shave with your multibladed system razor. Then lather up a second time and shave with a Wilkinson Sword Classic or a Weishi razor from eBay (do not try anything else) and a razor blade from the supermarket. Watch the Mantic59 videos on YouTube first to get a leap up the learning curve. Both these low cost razors are incredible mild and are less likely to bite than a multibladed system razor, so you will come to no harm as you learn to use no pressure and to get the angle right using short strokes.
Now you are enjoying the better shave that a DE razor gives you whilst getting used to the idea of multiple passes. Your significant other will also be enjoying your smoother face.
Once again get settled into this before moving on.
Step 3. Now is the time to upgrade your double edged razor for something far more effective, whilst still using the multibladed system razor for the first pass. You need to buy an Edwin Jagger razor (do not try anything else) for about £20, or sometimes £15 on Amazon. The model I have is the DE89L. This is a fantastic piece of kit and all that you really need for shaving for the rest of your life. It is very easy to use and will not bite unless you really abuse it, which by now you will know how not to. And it is mightily effective at chomping through the stubble.
This will not take you very long to adapt to, so soon you will be ready for the next step.
Step 4. Now throw away your multibladed system razor and use the Edwin Jagger for the first pass. You can go to a two pass or a three pass shave, whatever gives you the result that you want. And one very good trick is to use the Wilkinson Sword Classic or Weishi for the last pass, being milder it can shave closer.
So now you are set for life, you are having really enjoyable shaves whilst saving yourself a lot of money. But there is more!
Regular readers here will know that I have a penchant for horse hair shaving brushes. Once most brushes were made of this hair, until there was an anthrax scare (which is no longer a problem). Using a horse hair brush is different, interesting and very good. You know straight away that you are not using badger or boar and the combination of softness and backbone may be better than both of those for some people.
Another source of horse hair brushes is Vie Long in Spain. These are available as large wood and metal handled barber brushes with undyed and unbleached hair, intended for professional barber shop use these are good value at about $8 to $10. Also there are a huge range of normal consumer shaving brushes with a very wide range of handles in various materials using bleached and dyed hair. And finally there are brushes of mixed horse and badger hair and also mixed horse hair and boar bristle.
There is a current fashion for ridiculously large wrist watches, you are not a real man without half a pound of steel strapped to your wrist, yet I remember when the manufacturers were competing against each other to make the thinnest watches. The same is true of mobile phones, it is not so long since smaller was better, now big is the order of the day.
Which brings us neatly to shaving brushes, the current fashion is for far bigger brushes than our fathers and their fathers used. Unencumbered by fashion previous generations used brushes that were the right size for the job, which we would now regard as being small brushes.
Part of what is going on must be conspicuous consumption. A Simpson’s Duke D3 costs about 50% more than a Duke D1 so it must be about 50% better, right? Well, not really, it just means that it cost about 50% more to make. Followed to it’s logical conclusion we would all be using Polo PL 14s, they cost the most so they must be the best.
Instead of looking at the cost of the brush lets look at what we use it for, building a lather and distributing that lather on our faces. We only need so much lather and even a Wee Scot can carry enough for three passes, so what is the point of having a massive brush and then making enough lather for a soccer team? It seems to me that the main result is a lot of wasted shaving cream/soap going down the plughole.
And when it comes to using the brush on your face the large brush lacks precision, so you end up painting your ears and your nose as well as the stubble areas. A correctly sized brush is a delight to use precisely because it enables you to do a better job, to place the lather exactly where it is needed. And to only use the right amount of shaving cream/soap to shave one person.
Simpson's Commodore X1 and Beaufort B1
It is because of the innate rightness of a perfectly formed brush that I find myself using my Simpson’s Commodore X1 and Beaufort B1 more and more. Admittedly I am face lathering and I have to say that these are just about perfect tools for the job. They might take a little longer to paint your face but they make up for it by being far quicker to load up and to rinse. A further joy is that you can use the same brush at home and for travel, all you need is a standard brush tube.
So if you are a big brush user why not give a small brush a try for a while. Once you have got over the learning curve you might be pleasantly surprised.
Now there are nearly 200 articles on here about traditional shaving it represents a considerable body of work. Easily as much as a book would contain. If you use the search box on the right you can reference all this knowledge to find what you want.
As you can see the fakes are extremely believable except for the writing on the sides, where they are presumably trying to avoid the wrath of Procter & Gamble and of course the simple fact that the product quality is only a fraction of that of the real thing.
Fake Iridium razor blades. Says Betersburg Products International etc
Real Iridium razor blades. Says Petersburg Products International etc
Usually a company is very happy to get product information out to their customers, it is called marketing communications and they have special staff whose job it is to do this. The lady doing this job at PPI is Galina Petrenko. I sent her the following email:
from Bruce Everiss
date 19 January 2011 08:02
subject For Galina Petrenko re Double edged blades
19 Jan (14 days ago)
I run the traditional shaving blog Bruce on Shaving http://www.bruceonshaving.com/ and the Pogonotomy forum http://pogonotomy.proboards.com/index.cgi so have a very keen interest in traditional shaving using double edged blades. PPI make what are widely considered to be the best double edged blades that can be bought so there is a lot of interest in what you are doing. I personally have many of the different sorts of blade that you make. However there is a great lack of information about what PPI are doing with double edged blades.
I was wondering if you could be so kind as to answer just a few simple questions about PPI. Your answers would be of great interest to many traditional shavers around the world.
1) You produce many different brands of blades. These include Astra, Sputnik, Permasharp, Polsilver, Rotbart, Nacet, Minora and the several different variations of the Gillette brand. Is it possible to have a definitive list from you of your DE brands?
2) Are all these different blades engineered the same in terms of steel, grind, coatings etc. Or are they all different to one another? Or do you have a small number of variations that are packaged under different brand names for different markets? If so which blades are the same?
3) The stainless razor steel you use is excellent, it will hold a good edge for a long time. Is this Swedish steel? If not what nationality is it?
4) There is a huge resurgence in interest in double edged shaving in the West. The number of enthusiasts is growing rapidly. Is PPI aware of this and does it have plans to look after such enthusiasts?
5) The Iridium blade was a favourite amongst double edged shaving enthusiasts in the West. However it is currently unavailable for us to buy. When will it be available again?
Thank you very much in advance for your time and trouble in answering this,
And the response, after two weeks, is a big fat zero. Now Galina might be on her annual vacation, which would be skiing at this time of year. Or maybe it is taking her time to collate the information. But I doubt both of these, I think that they just don’t want to talk to me. And you can see why, to them DE blades must be a low margin commodity compared with their highly priced and high profit margin cartridge razors where they have a patent protected monopoly. So why give publicity to something they have openly said that they are trying to replace? It was just wishful thinking to expect them to actually give answers.
The NEW razor was short lived and made way for the razors that most people know Gillette for: the One-Piece. Debuting in 1934, the Aristocrat was a model name used twice already that now carried a newly unveiled design. Using a twister knob at the bottom, engineers at Gillette were able to develop a razor model that could accommodate a double edge blade in a concise, one-piece style. One of the most interesting aspects of this consolidated design however was all of the marketing and gimmicks that sprung up around it.
The initial advertisements played up the convenience while using catch-phrases such as: “A Twist! It’s open, A Twist! It’s closed.” The ads promoted the idea that you no longer had loose parts or trouble loading a blade, basically evoking the premise of convenience and ease. Later into the 1940’s Gillette even put out a new blade dispenser to work in combination with their razors. At first, they were simply telling consumers to remove the blade and place it into the opened razor bay, but later modified the actual razor to allow the blade to hook onto the notched center bar. This scheme of a the disposable product being closer affiliated with the “Freebie” product increased customer loyalty of razor owners choosing genuine Gillette blades and not using third-party or off brand competitors.
Even while Gillette was producing this great new design, they still continued on with 3 piece style razors all the way into the 1960’s. They never phased out these inexpensive models because they were always after blade sales. However people would buy their razor blades, Gillette sold them a razor to do so. The idea of having a product range that all drove the same revenue-generating profit center (razor blades) is a marketing and business model that not only is successful, but also wide-spread in our modern day and age.
The vanity of the world’s women leads them to spend billions of dollars every year for grease to put on their faces (and other bits of their bodies). They will happily pay out $30 dollars for a small pot of grease that costs cents to produce in the belief that it has some sort of magic effect on their appearance. A woman and her money are easily parted when you employ the vanity mechanism.
The profits on this grease are so vast that the manufacturers can pay for ridiculous amounts of advertising. We are bombarded with it. And this advertising promises women the world. Often falsely. National advertising standards are kept very busy trying to discipline these claims and punish the very many instances where they owe more to fiction than to fact. | <urn:uuid:b45be0fb-08e1-4326-a0b0-1e7b684ea871> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bruceonshaving.com/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960017 | 3,449 | 1.648438 | 2 |
1 Janry 1777
Your Favour of the 30 Nov came to hand last Evening for which I most sincerely thank you. I wrote to you the 15: Nov. which I hope you have received.2
Your Observations of the Necessity of establishing a respectable Army are in my Judgment
Very Proper. Congress have impowered Genl. Washington to raise 16 Battalions in Addition to those Already granted and 3,000 Cavalry. Also have given the General a Power for six Months to Conduct at his Discretion the Operations of the War, establish Magazines, call upon the Militia when Necessary, regulate every Department in the Army, Displace and Appoint any Officer below the Rank of Brigadier General &c. In a Word the Whole of the Military Department is put into his Hand for six Months.3
Upon this that the Preservation of the Civil Liberties of the People, at the present Time, depends upon the full Exertion of the Military Power. An Embargo for six Months is laid upon fatted Provisions.4
For other Matters of publick Intelligence referr you to the enclosed. I hope We may Obtain further advantages against the Enemy in the Jersys.5
The Express is this Moment going off. I have only to say, that We must have an Army, to carry on a War without one is a New Peice of Business. That they ought to be provided for in the best Manner, and that without Discipline they will not be serviceable. And that I think if We can once bring one into the Feild, that they will be much better provided for disciplined and governed than they have hitherto been, in a Word I beleive if We can get an Army it will be a good one—more happy themselves and more Beneficial to the Publick than any We have yet had.
Great Complaints are made that the Assemblys have Appointed great Numbers of Very insufficient Officers and have neglected the most Apparent Merit.
Your kindness for me particularly exacts my Gratitude, I wish I was less sensible of the Injury I have received.6
Any but those who have exercised Power to Answer sinister Purposes to my Injury I can easily forgive, but those Men I hope may deserve not only my Forgiveness but that of their Maker. I am at no Loss as to what they deserve. But God forbid that this Villany shall ever induce Me to relax my Endeavours to serve my Country as far as I am able. I saw the Baseness of those Men's Design and the Effect of my own Undertaking in a good Degree contrary to my own Opinion. I undertook and therefore ought to suffer. I am generally tho't to be pritty inflexible in my own Opinion. I certainly will study to be more so.
[salute] My Compliments to Mrs. Adams, and with Candor Accept this hasty Sketch from Sir your Most Obedient humble Servant
[signed] Oliver Wolcott
; docketed in an unknown hand: “Col: Wolcotts Letter”; in another hand: “1 Jany 1777 S.” Enclosure not found.
1. On 12 Dec. the congress resolved to move to Baltimore because of the threatening military situation. The first meeting was held there on 20 Dec. (
2. Neither letter has been found.
3. These powers were voted on 27 Dec. (same, 6:1045–1046).
4. Anticipating shortages for the army of “bacon, salted beef, pork, soap, tallow and candles,” the congress on 30 Dec. 1776 prohibited the export of these articles from 6 Jan. until 1 Nov. 1777 (same, 6:1054).
5. On Christmas Day, Washington's forces captured 918 prisoners at Trenton (Freeman, Washington
6. As an Indian commissioner for the Northern Department, Wolcott had participated with Gen. Schuyler, Col. Turbutt Francis, and others in a conference in August 1775. At the end, and wholly unexpectedly, a sachem brought up the contested land claims between Pennsylvania and Connecticut along the Susquehanna River, declaring that the land had been sold to Gov. John Penn. When commissioners Schuyler, Wolcott, and two others, but not Francis, held an inquiry into this surprising departure from the purpose of the Indian conference, they found evidence that Francis, a Pennsylvania land claimant, had offered a bribe to have the speech made. It was decided that the matter should be reported to the congress; but although a letter was drafted and signed, it apparently was never presented. Out of delicacy as a Connecticut man and thus an interested party, Wolcott did not sign this letter. Francis did not find out about the investigation until months later, when Wolcott told him about it as a matter of honor. A misunderstanding followed, with Francis blaming his fellow commissioners for going into matters not of their concern and keeping their investigation secret. Acting the injured party, Francis demanded an investigation by the congress, which was never completed because Indian witnesses would not testify. Schuyler apparently resented Wolcott's having revealed the findings, but Wolcott felt that he had acted uprightly in every respect. Just why these animosities should have been festering in the fall of 1776 when Francis' effort at a congressional inquiry had failed as long ago as June is not clear. But Wolcott wrote in detail to Timothy Edwards about the whole affair on 29 Nov., and it seems that JA wrote in support of Wolcott on the 30th (Julian P. Boyd and Robert J. Taylor, eds., The Susquehannah Company Papers, 11 vols., Ithaca, 1962–1971, 6:348–349, 416–420; 7:11–12, 24–28). | <urn:uuid:01c9b02a-30f9-4068-a201-15adde7eeddd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.masshist.org/publications/apde/portia.php?mode=p&id=PJA05p57 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963162 | 1,216 | 1.664063 | 2 |
Thursday, November 19, 2009
This post is a follow up to my post yesterday on TIPS valuations. The purpose of this chart is to show that real yields on TIPS are largely determined/driven by changing expectations for Fed monetary policy. The red line represents the real yield on 5-year TIPS, and the blue line is the market's one-year forward expectation for 3-mo. Libor (as determined by the fourth eurodollar futures contract), minus the current year over year change in the Core PCE deflator. Thus the blue line is a proxy for what the market expects the real Fed funds rate to be in one year.
It is expectations of future Fed tightening or easing that drive TIPS yields, and the logic is simple. If you expect the Fed to be reducing the real Fed funds rate in the future, then your desire to own TIPS increases, because an easier monetary policy increases the risk of rising inflation, and thus increases the demand for TIPS. In the past month or so, the market has sharply reduced its expectation of where the Fed funds rate will be at the end of next year, and this has almost exactly corresponded to a sharp decline in the yield on TIPS. At the same time (though not shown on this chart) the market's 5-year, 5-year forward expectation of inflation has risen sharply. It all ties together.
As a thought experiment, assume that the Fed were to raise the funds rate unexpectedly tomorrow. This would likely cause the market to shift upwards its expectation for the level of the funds rate in one year. According to my model, that would in turn result in a sharp increase in the yield on TIPS, as well as a decline in the market's breakeven inflation expectations. The implications for the Treasury market would be a rise in both nominal and real yields, but with real yields rising more than nominal yields.
Posted by Scott Grannis at 12:07 PM | <urn:uuid:e4ae2d09-dbab-460a-8f6c-1af48854167a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://scottgrannis.blogspot.com/2009/11/tips-valuation-update-2.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.950879 | 399 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Pakistan is marking "Malala Day" as part of a global day of support for the teenager shot by the Taliban for promoting girls' education.
Demonstrations backing Malala Yousafzai were held in Islamabad, Karachi, the eastern city of Lahore, and Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-administered Kashmir.
Pakistani Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf also saluted her courage.
Earlier this week, the office of the UN special envoy for education declared November 10 a "global day of action" for the teenage Pakistani rights activist.
The day comes one month after Yousafzai was shot in the head and neck by a Taliban gunman in Pakistan's northwestern Swat Valley.
RFE/RL’s Radio Mashaal spoke with Shazia Manzoor, who was also injured in the Swat Valley attack.
“Today is Malala’s day, so at the same time we are happy, but sad too," Manzoor said. "Happy, because on Malala’s day, parents will send their children to school to fulfill Malala’s dream. On the other hand, we are sad because if Malala was with us, it would be great fun. My message to Malala is: I wish you a quick recovery so you can go to school with us.”
The 15-year-old is receiving treatment by specialists in a Birmingham hospital after being airlifted from Pakistan.
People around the world are expected to hold vigils and demonstrations honoring Malala and calling for the 32 million girls worldwide who are denied education to be allowed to go to school.
Malala 'Grateful, Amazed'
The UN education envoy, former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, has visited Islamabad to discuss ways of getting Pakistani girls who are not being schooled involved in the education system.
Brown has presented Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari with a million-signature petition supporting Yousafzai.
In Britain, thousands of people have even signed an online petition supporting Yousafzai for the Nobel Peace Prize and calling on Prime Minister David Cameron to recommend her for the award.
In Birmingham, Yousafzai’s father released a statement through Queen Elizabeth Hospital saying how “grateful” and “amazed” Yousafzai is that people around the world are interested in her well-being.
The statement said, "We deeply feel the heart-touching good wishes of the people across the world of all caste, color and creed.”
The Pakistani Taliban have said Yousafzai was targeted because of her pioneering role in urging education for girls in Pakistan. The Islamist militants are opposed to secular schooling.
According to the United Nations, 5 million children do not go to school in Pakistan, where the official literacy rate is less than 60 percent, and less than half of Pakistani women are estimated to have learned to read and write.
With reporting by AFP, Reuters, and dpa | <urn:uuid:7e7339d9-f64f-4f5b-ba22-880b8e3189f2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.rferl.org/content/malala-global-day-of-action-pakistan/24766193.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964059 | 622 | 1.8125 | 2 |
Central Consolidated, Farmington, and Aztec school districts saw their rates increase. Bloomfield lost ground.
Central Consolidated topped the local districts with the highest average graduation rate, 71.7 percent, according to a report from the New Mexico Public Education Department released in late January. Central Consolidated received their results last week.
The report recorded the five-year graduation rates of all the school districts in the state.
Central Consolidated district's rate jumped by 8.8 percent since 2011, and 18.6 percent since 2008. It is the first time that the district has achieved the top ranking for graduation rates in the county.
Farmington had the second highest rate with 70.5 percent of its students graduating in 2012. The state's rate was not far behind at 70.3 percent, which also was up slightly from 2011.
Both Central Consolidated and Farmington districts' overall rates were helped by having the top performing high schools in the county.
Kirtland Central High School had the highest rate in the county with a rate of 80.7. Piedra Vista High School had the second highest graduation rate in the county with 76.4 percent. Newcomb High School was not far behind with 74.6 percent.
"GEAR UP," a statewide program that pushes seniors to graduate and pursue education or careers after they graduate high school, may have had
"This is the year that the students in (GEAR UP) all have graduated," said Robert Emerson, the Farmington district's assistant superintendent for technology, assessment and accountability.
Aztec had a graduation rate of 67.3 percent, up 2.4 percent since 2011.
Bloomfield's rate was 64.2 percent, down 1.7 percent since last year. While it saw a drop from last year, its rate has risen more than any other district's in the past five years.
Its low rate in 2012 was weighed down by the lower than usual rate of Charlie Y. Brown High School, an alternative high school in Bloomfield. The graduation rate was 21.1 percent, half of what it was in 2011.
"One of the things we have to take into account is the different population of students," said Joe Rasor, Bloomfield district superintendent.
This past year's senior class simply did not have the same performance as others, though it's not to say they lacked the potential, Rasor said.
The district is looking at different ways to better student performance, particularly by increasing attendance, Rasor said. | <urn:uuid:4ac62355-d479-4821-adad-10ad2d68eab3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.daily-times.com/farmington-news/ci_22570264/area-school-districts-see-graduation-rates-rise-and?source=most_viewed | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9824 | 516 | 1.539063 | 2 |
A giant tidal wave levelling the city of New York. Ice creeping up the Empire State Building. A house crumbling off the side of a cliff in a hurricane. It wasn’t long ago that visual effects were only peppered through a movie, added here and there to give extra punch to a scene, but now with movies likes Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow, they are more than supplements to a movie, they have become the movie.
There is no denying the appetite audiences have for bigger, better, and more visual effects, nor Winston Fan‘s appreciation for the role of effects in cinema. Once an engineer in Taipei, Taiwan, Winston left his job to come to the 3D Animation Program.
“I really love movies with cool special effects,” says Fan. “You see a lot of effects out there but they’re so subtle you don’t even really see them. To me, these are best ones, so good you hardly notice.”
Effects for Animation
After graduating in the summer of 2004, Fan was hired by Mainframe Entertainment, a leading animation company, as a Junior Effects Artist. For Fan, who has worked on the feature Hot Wheels which recently aired on the Cartoon Network, this involves working on lightning, energy blasts, explosions, dust and smoke.
Effects for animation are constructed during post-production using software such as Maya, SoftImage: XSI, and AfterEffects. Fan helps construct the effects, and then composites them into shots to make them look more believable. Compositing is the process of integrating layers, such as a fire or smoke effect, with a pre-existing environment.
The final stage of Fan’s effects work is rendering – the process of translating three-dimensional scenes into two-dimensional images. For an animated feature like Shrek or The Incredibles, it can take hundreds of computers working continuously for months to render all the frames.
From School to Studio
Having jumped right into production on his first day at Mainframe, Fan describes the work environment as fast paced, and deadline-focused. Fan recalls with a certain nostalgia the 15-17 hour days he routinely put in as a VFS student. The experience was intense, but terrific preparation for the demands of the professional world.
“We have to make effects look good but also be able to do this in a very short time,” says Fan. “At Mainframe, it’s all about working smartly, overworking hardly. I love it! I’m always working on something different and how often do you get to say that you make cartoons for a living?” | <urn:uuid:55ff18a1-11aa-4fad-bf6e-7d2db67f0085> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.vfs.com/2005/12/01/riding-high-as-an-effects-artist/ | 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 | 0.95464 | 550 | 1.804688 | 2 |
MOUNT VERNON — Of the hundreds of custody cases heard in the Knox County Court of Common Pleas Domestic Relations Division, many are mediated — confidentially and free of charge — by the court mediator and attorney, Carrie Tenschert.
“The goals of the program are for people to make decisions themselves about their families,” Tenschert explained.
Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of articles examining the different roles the court, mediators, and law enforcement can have in settling child custody disputes. Thursday, the News examines the role of the court in such matters. In Friday’s edition, a court mediator explains the role of her office. Saturday’s edition will look at the role law enforcement can and cannot play in custody issues.
“People are happier having control of the outcome, without the court making the decisions for them,” she said.
Tenschert, who has been a mediator since 2005, said when couples first sit down with her to have their court-mandated assessments, emotions can run quite high. The parties typically meet with Tenschert individually, and then attend a mediation together.
“Sometimes it’s difficult, and there are a lot of emotions, but the goal is to keep a calm environment to make decisions,” Tenschert explained.
If it appears mediation is possible, the couples meet with Tenschert, usually without their attorneys present, until an agreement can be hammered out between the two individuals.
“It can take anywhere from two to four sessions, and generally the attorneys choose not to be there,” Tenschert said. “But the attorneys can review anything before the parties sign it.”
The process of mediation itself, can sometimes turn couples from a path of constant fighting, to one of working together toward a common goal — the best interest of their children.
“If they’re able to work together, it helps them go from an adversarial to a cooperative process,” Tenschert said.
So far this year, Tenschert has worked on 28 mediation cases, with a caseload that is increasing. She said while some mediators have a background in psychology, she chose to attend law school, with the goal of performing mediation work.
The court does not charge a fee for the mediation service, and Tenschert said what happens in the mediation room is confidential, not even to be shared with the judge or magistrate on the case, in most instances.
“There are only certain things I can report to the magistrate about, such as attendance, whether or not a mediation occurred, and whether or not there’s been an agreement reached,” Tenschert explained.
“I can’t talk to them about the details of the case, with only a few exceptions, including to report child abuse,” she said.
With the high cost of battling a case out in court with attorneys’ fees on both sides, mediating a case can save both parties a considerable amount of money, and the court a great deal of time on the docket.
But the ultimate goal Tenschert and the courts work toward, is a better outcome for families, with less conflict and more cooperation.
“If the parents can come out of the conflict sooner, and get out of the adversarial, the better it is for the kids because the conflict isn’t good for them,” said Tenschert. | <urn:uuid:f77bf3e4-bc55-43f9-a43f-a3dd9ce7a909> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.mountvernonnews.com/local/10/08/06/hope-found-in-mediation | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951649 | 734 | 1.648438 | 2 |
Martin Bryant painting causes controversy
Rodney Pople: 'It is an eerie landscape, possessed not by the visible but by the invisible.'
Awarding a $35,000 art prize for a painting that shows Port Arthur gunman Martin Bryant is causing a stir in Tasmania.
Sydney-based artist Rodney Pople has won the Glover Prize for landscape painting with his work Port Arthur, which includes the figure of Bryant holding a gun in the grounds of the convict settlement.
I am not in any way glorifying Martin Bryant but to ignore it is looking in the wrong way as well.
Launceston-born Mr Pople accepted the award in northern Tasmania yesterday after the competition’s three judges agreed it was the outstanding work.
But the decision to award the prize to Mr Pople has been criticised by a former police officer who was at the scene of Bryant’s rampage, which resulted in the deaths of 35 people in 1996.
‘‘I can’t comprehend how someone can be so insensitive to all the victims and people who have been scarred for life,’’ former inspector John Warren told Hobart newspaper The Mercury.
‘‘They would be outraged and so am I.’’
Mr Pople said the role of an artist was to challenge viewers and he was in no way glorifying Bryant’s killing spree.
‘‘He is very small (in the painting) and he’s in there because he is part of the framework and footprint of the landscape but only in a very small scale,’’ Mr Pople said.
‘‘I am not in any way glorifying Martin Bryant but to ignore it is looking in the wrong way as well.’’
Judges praised the work for its connections with 19th century Tasmanian painting and its depiction of the history of the Port Arthur site. | <urn:uuid:57e72be1-3c9c-4c3e-8d8f-a63aa1cdae5d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/martin-bryant-painting-causes-controversy-20120310-1uqvi.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975577 | 398 | 1.6875 | 2 |
By Mayra Montero
Translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman
New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1997
ISBN: 0-06-018703-4. (hard bound) $21.00
Reviewed by Bob Corbett
Mayra Montero weaves a strange and very dark tale of hopelessness, magic, love lost, sex, eroticism and frogs. Actually frogs are at the center of this eerie tale set in Haiti in 1992 and 1993, but ranging over the years in flashbacks.
Victor Grigg, an American herpetologist has come to Haiti to search for a frog, The blood frog, (grenouille du sang), perhaps the last of this species on earth. He hires Thierry Adrien, son of a zombie hunter from the area of Jeremie. In a series of flashbacks were learn much of the lives of both Grigg and Adrien, and see how their own sad lives mirror the hopelessness of the dying frogs species around the globe. All of it suggests that Haiti, lost in its own violence and history, is dying as well.
Nothing is really said or claimed. It's much more mysterious, symbolic, mystical. There's not much of a story in the normal sense. The herpetologist comes to Haiti in November of 1992, hunts for his frog, and the story ends by February 1993. Four months of real time. The novel is in the flashbacks. Grigg's life and marriage are on the rocks. His wife has taken a woman lover and openly scorns him. He's a herpetologist and species of frogs are dying out all over the globe. Each of the many chapters begins with a news-like story of another species of frog mysteriously disappearing. The author clearly rejects ecological arguments for these species dying off, claiming that such explanations can't work in the particulars to explain the extinction of the frogs. They just have decided it is their time to die. Thierry's life is even harsher. His father deserts his mother for Frou-Frou, who later becomes Theirry's lover, "like a son having sex with his mother." He has children with several different women (but not with Frou-Frou), and they all die young, a couple violently.
The book weighs heavily on us. No theory here. Just lives. Told by Montero with power, pulling us into her web and making the hard times of Haiti in 92-93 live for us in the agonizing lives of these people. More and more as the book moves on, one senses the pending doom, but we realize that she's not really talking about frogs, or herpetologists or Haitian guides. It is Haiti that is dying, not destroyed by it's environment, but in some gruesome magical way, by history itself. It's just time for it to cease to be.
I read the book between Christmas and New Year's! For me a happy time of family, relaxation, a period of break from my normal routines, filled with lots of Christmas music. But this book weighed me down. I knew only 15-20 pages into to it that it was not for now, and I couldn't put it down. Whatever I think of Montero's vision, it was not thought that dominated in the experience of reading this novel. It's what she made me feel that frightened me so. There's a sense in which I utterly detested this novel, and another, stronger sense in which I think it's one of the best pieces of fiction I've ever read about Haiti.
Mayra Montero was born in Havana in 1952. She has published four novels and a short story collection, but this is the first of her novels translated into English.
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Tampa, Florida - The game is described as a cross between hockey and soccer and it may soon be coming to Hillsborough schools as a sanctioned sport. The game is Lacrosse. During a school board workshop Thursday, the board decided to move ahead and vote to add Lacrosse to two schools at next week's school board meeting.
Currently the game is offered in 8 schools as a club sport but it's not considered a sanctioned sport in Hillsborough. Due to its growing popularity, the school board agreed last spring to explore a pilot program for this year.
The school board and HALAX the Hillsborough Area Lacrosse Alliance hashed out the numbers and who will be paying for what. HALAX would raise 140-thousand dollars. The district would possibly pay around 50-thousand and students would pay as well. It's a pay to play game and students would pay about 300 dollars. Lacrosse proponents say the sport offers students many opportunities.
Jonathan Levy, the President of HALAX, said the sport offers students many opportunities. "It's the fastest growing sport in the US right now. It's a great game, the benefits are tremendous and there are scholarship opportunities for both college and junior college." Levy said students who play Lacrosse also tend to have better grades.
The School Board will vote at Tuesday's School Board meeting. The two schools that may start offering Lacrosse are Jefferson High School and Tampa Bay Vocational Technical School. If approved, the first season begins in January. | <urn:uuid:abc0a9d4-8269-4f70-b344-e56256e6b551> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wtsp.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=281709 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978603 | 304 | 1.757813 | 2 |
Rapid Prototyping (MCAD Modeling Column)1 Feb, 2007 By: IDSA ,Mike Hudspeth
When you absolutely gotta have it fast!
Time to market is critical. Today's modern firms move heaven and earth to be the first, and it's not easy. The pressure is enormous. Design takes time. Tooling is a challenge. Marketing wants everything now. And the CEO is watching you.
Other than buying stock in an antacid company, how do you handle it all? Some available tools can make the process a whole lot easier for you. So, sit back, put up your feet, pop the top on a cold Mylanta and read on.
Designing for the Masses
You need 3D physical models for many reasons. Perhaps you recall the story I like to tell about showing 3D shaded images to a customer and so impressing him that he wanted parts shipped overnight. After explaining that the product existed only digitally, he was very disappointed. We kept the job, and it was a successful product, but it taught me a lesson.
I learned this same lesson other times. My colleagues and I designed a handheld product, and the image on the screen looked cooler than we'd imagined. It was going to sell big-time, we told ourselves. We sent the data to our model shop and within a week those master wizards turned out the full-scale model. When we got it in our hot little hands, we discovered that the grip was all wrong. It didn't feel right at all: for one thing, it was too heavy. We had to redesign the whole thing, which didn't make us happy.
Another time we designed a part and sent it out to the shop. When it came back it was almost microscopic. The machinists hadn't made an error; 3D models just look huge on screen. We had no idea the model was going to turn out so tiny. Suffice it to say, we could've saved ourselves a lot of time if we'd have invested in some RP (rapid prototyping) muscle. I have many examples of how RP could've saved my bacon, but they're too embarrassing to mention.
RP models are a great return on investment pretty much any way you look at them. You can sell an idea better if you show someone a model of it. It's really hard for someone to say, "That won't work" if a physical version is sitting in front of him or her. RP models are fast to produce, fairly cheap and usually fairly accurate. They can tell you when there's a problem you haven't caught, and that ability saves all sorts of trouble. But there is a bewildering number of competing RP technologies available. How do you choose which one is right for you? You have to get familiar with the technology and what it can do for you. Let's take a look at a few of the most common examples.
STL (stereolithography) was the first true RP technology. It works by curing a light-sensitive resin in layers. Your computer model is split into multiple layers and each is traced on the surface of the resin. An elevator in the vat of resin lowers and more resin flows over the partially hardened layer. When the next layer is traced the elevator lowers again. Over time, your part is built up to its finished dimensions. This process allows you to build parts that are impossible to create using traditional machining methods, such as a completely enclosed but hollow sphere (although you need to allow whatever support material to drain). You can make snap features with huge undercuts very easily. But you're going to have to be very careful what you do. Unless you are going into production with the STL part directly, the production part will have to rely on the traditional limitations of the toolmaker. Just because you can model it and make an STL part doesn't mean it can be mass-produced or produced at all.
STL is relatively fast compared with traditional machining. A part that might be machined by a skilled machinist in a day might only take a few hours to build on an STL machine. Of course, complexity counts against the machinist. But accuracy and resolution go against the STL machine. Because the process is layer-based, a natural stairstepping effect occurs on the finished part. It can actually look pretty cool (figure 1), but most often it's unacceptable. You will need to swallow some of your time savings by going back and manually sanding and finishing your part. Also, resolution is an issue for low-cost machines. The going standard for STL is approximately ± .003"–.005". Some machines on the market now have resolutions as small as 16 micrometers. They're very impressive and fast, but they're not cheap.
Figure 1. Look closely and you can see the stairstepping between layers of even the most accurate STL part. The small support features are .020" diameter.
Another thing to consider when looking at STL technologies is the material you can use for your models. Remember, you are dealing with UV curing resins. They tend to be fragile, though they're better than those in days past. You can perform some functional testing on the STL parts, but they aren't going to be as strong as an injection-molded part. Another factor is the environment. STL machines typically need a controlled environment because the resins are hydrophilic. They suck water right out of the air, which means that the parts will distort on a really muggy day. They won't tie themselves into knots or anything, but the few percent length or width change may be a problem in some designs. And finally, you will need to knock off the support structures that carry the part's weight while it's building. This step will mean some extra finishing work and a bit of risk of damage to your part. You also usually need to bake the STL parts for awhile to finish the curing process.
Some flexible materials available for STL machines sweetly simulate rubber. But even the best of these will degrade and eventually break over time and use. I have found STL to be just the ticket for small, highly detailed parts.
Selective Laser Sintering
Close on the heels of STL is SLS (selective laser sintering). This technology works almost identically to STL but uses powdered materials in place of liquids. Your model is laser drawn atop a thin layer of plastic powder, which fuses, or sinters, the particles to one another. The elevator moves down, and the first layer is buried under another layer of powder, which is in turn fused and so on and so forth, until your part is finished. The surface finish on an SLS part is somewhat grainy because there really isn't a good way to control the flow front edges on the melting plastic. An advantage is the ability to create multicolored models, which is a major selling point (figure 2).
Figure 2. The ability to mold in different colors in the same model enables a lot of design capability. If you can model it or wrap an image around it, it's doable. The surface finish can be an issue, though.
The parts aren't super-rugged, so they are mostly for touchy-feely applications. If they sell your designs, however, these machines are worth their weight in gold! SLS machines aren't what you'd want for creating extremely tiny parts.
Fused Deposition Modeling
FDM (fused deposition modeling) is another additive process that competes with STL. It works by extruding a tiny molten bead of plastic and drawing the layers of your model. The process is not unlike caulking your bathtub. FDM machines start with the STL file format to input the 3D model. Cleanup is easier, and the machine's environment isn't as big an issue. The materials are actual engineering materials. The downside is that the finished part is very porous. It won't have the same density as an injection molded part. You can perform some functional testing with FDM parts, but they won't be as hearty as production parts.
Generally, FDM machines are very fast. Because FDM parts are made of actual engineering materials, they don't need postcuring. When the machine switches off, the parts are ready to be handled. FDM machines use two different materials when building parts: the modeling material and the support material. You can get water-soluble support materials that come off very easily in a heated water bath. Some FDM machines even produce metal parts (figure 3). Tiny parts can be an issue for FDM, but as long as you keep your expectations reasonable, FDM units are great RP machines!
Figure 3. FDM allows you to use more actual engineering plastics than STL. Some FDM machines even let you build in metal.
Laminated Object Modeling
LOM (laminated object modeling) is an older technology. I always mention it in the hope that this technology will see a revival. I just like it—even with its inherent problems. LOM works by laminating large sheets of paper and cutting the model's layers out of each layer. No supports are necessary, but the cut-out material must be removed before the next layer is adhered, which means that LOM isn't the fastest RP process. Why do I like it so much? It's well suited for larger parts such as the housing of a piece of exercise equipment. The finished part has the characteristics of wood. It is surprisingly strong but obviously vulnerable to moisture. You can paint it for protection or finish.
Computer Numerical Control
What can you say about CNC (computer numerical control)? Unlike all of the preceding technologies, it's a subtractive modeling method. You start with a solid block of whatever material you want and mill away what you don't. It's been around forever. It can produce and reproduce identical parts all day long with a surface finish that's hard to beat (figure 4).
Figure 4. You just can't seem to beat a machined part for surface finish. Accuracy also is a CNC strong point.
Tool changers and other options on some of the newer machines let you "set it and forget it." Obviously, you can create production tooling or even parts with a CNC machine. It excels at fine detail, but you're limited by what cutters you have and what the machine can see of your part. If you try to make undercuts, you may have to get creative.
RP is a great technology to have at your disposal. Before you buy such capability, though, you need to avail yourself of service bureaus to learn what to expect. Look into RP. It's worth your time. You'll find it one of the best modern design tools you'll ever see.
Mike Hudspeth, IDSA, is an industrial designer, artist and author based in St. Louis, Missouri.
Autodesk Technical Evangelist Lynn Allen guides you through a different AutoCAD feature in every edition of her popular "Circles and Lines" tutorial series. For even more AutoCAD how-to, check out Lynn's quick tips in the Cadalyst Video Gallery. Subscribe to Cadalyst's Tips & Tricks Tuesdays free e-newsletter and we'll notify you every time a new video tip is available. All exclusively from Cadalyst!
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When Physical Prototypes Aren’t an Option 21 May, 2013
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Koehler and Eisenstein say that in the trajectory of human evolution, we have been locked in the selfish adolescent phase for a long, long time, just seeking to take what we need from our Earth mother, without thought of giving much in return, or of the reality of finite limits.
When we fall in love, Eisenstein says, “perfect selfishness falls apart as the self expands to include the beloved within its bounds.”
I remember falling in love like that as an adolescent, and as a young adult too.
It’s true that when you’re in love, the boundaries between the self and other dissolve, and you exist in a harmonious utopia of mutual beneficence.
But at least for most of us fallen humans, that kind of all-encompassing love doesn’t last forever.
It can’t. It’s too intense. Eventually the first ecstatic glow fades and the angelic beloved assumes normal, human proportions, with all the associated warts and odors and quirks of behavior and thought that our human bodies and minds possess.
What happens to love then?
If we are compatible for the longterm, the initial heady crush transforms into a much more solid platform of respect, shared interests, and deep concern for each other. We care about each other, we enjoy being together no matter what we’re doing, and we respect each other’s views, goals, and talents.
We become partners in the truest sense of the word.
Is it necessary to go through the romantic, boundary-dissolving “falling in love” stage to get to the mature relationship of partnership?
In our culture, we believe it to be. Our young people, tutored by every aspect of media and pop culture, assume that being swept away with love is a pre-requisite to successful marriage.
And yet how many of their parents, who followed that same script, ended up in bitter divorce fights?
Although I understand the intent behind Koehler’s and Eisenstein’s valorization of “falling in love” as a model for the depth of passion needed to fuel successful environmental action on behalf of the Earth, I am not convinced that this is the right message to be sending.
Young people today may still harbor romantic dreams, but they live day-to-day in a casual hook-up culture that prides itself on separating sexual enjoyment from commitment.
Fifty percent of their parents have made the journey from early romance to disillusioned divorce.
Another 25% or so of adults are either unhappily married, or unhappily single.
The “falling in love” model thus hits home with too few Americans to be effective as a rallying call for environmental action, and it is too limited a metaphor for the depth and breadth of passion that we must summon now to be effective Earth stewards and activists.
Instead we must love with the unconditional devotion of a mother for her child, with the sincere, selfless wish to see that new life grow and prosper and move forward beyond us.
We must love the Earth with the intensity of devotion that recognizes that for her to thrive, it may be necessary for us to part.
Earth has loved us with this kind of pure altruism all these many years of human emergence. Now, as in the terrifying story of The Giving Tree, she has given so much that she has practically sacrificed herself entirely.
Nothing we can do to the Earth will wreck her forever. Forever is a long, long time, in geologic terms.
But there is still time to shift from heedless destruction to the kind of loving tending that the Earth herself has modeled for us all these years.
There is still time to develop the kind of deeply caring reciprocal partnership that will last a lifetime, and beyond. | <urn:uuid:9d1cf805-c434-44ec-842c-b825d0f22bc4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://bethechange2012.wordpress.com/tag/falling-in-love/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.934902 | 801 | 1.734375 | 2 |
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1At that time—oracle of the LORD—
I will be the God of all the families of Israel,
and they shall be my people.a
2* Thus says the LORD:
The people who escaped the sword
find favor in the wilderness.
As Israel comes forward to receive rest,
3from afar the LORD appears:
With age-old love I have loved you;
so I have kept my mercy toward you.b
4Again I will build you, and you shall stay built,
Carrying your festive tambourines,
you shall go forth dancing with merrymakers.
5You shall again plant vineyards
on the mountains of Samaria;
those who plant them shall enjoy their fruits.c
6Yes, a day will come when the watchmen
call out on Mount Ephraim:
“Come, let us go up to Zion,
to the LORD, our God.”d
7For thus says the LORD:
Shout with joy for Jacob,
exult at the head of the nations;
proclaim your praise and say:
The LORD has saved his people,
the remnant of Israel.e
8Look! I will bring them back
from the land of the north;
I will gather them from the ends of the earth,
the blind and the lame in their midst,
Pregnant women, together with those in labor—
an immense throng—they shall return.f
9With weeping they shall come,
but with compassion I will guide them;
I will lead them to streams of water,
on a level road, without stumbling.
For I am a father to Israel,
Ephraim is my firstborn.g
10Hear the word of the LORD, you nations,
proclaim it on distant coasts, and say:
The One who scattered Israel, now gathers them;
he guards them as a shepherd his flock.
11The LORD shall ransom Jacob,
he shall redeem him from a hand too strong for him.h
12Shouting, they shall mount the heights of Zion,
they shall come streaming to the LORD’s blessings:
The grain, the wine, and the oil,
flocks of sheep and cattle;
They themselves shall be like watered gardens,
never again neglected.i
13Then young women shall make merry and dance,
young men and old as well.
I will turn their mourning into joy,
I will show them compassion and have them rejoice after their sorrows.
14I will lavish choice portions on the priests,
and my people shall be filled with my blessings—
oracle of the LORD.
15Thus says the LORD:
In Ramah* is heard the sound of sobbing,
Rachel mourns for her children,
she refuses to be consoled
for her children—they are no more!j
16Thus says the LORD:
Cease your cries of weeping,
hold back your tears!
There is compensation for your labor—
oracle of the LORD—
they shall return from the enemy’s land.
17There is hope for your future—oracle of the LORD—
your children shall return to their own territory.k
18Indeed, I heard Ephraim rocking in grief:
You chastised me, and I was chastised;
I was like an untamed calf.
Bring me back, let me come back,
for you are the LORD, my God.l
19For after I turned away, I repented;
after I came to myself, I struck my thigh;*
I was ashamed, even humiliated,
because I bore the disgrace of my youth.m
20Is Ephraim not my favored son,
the child in whom I delight?
Even though I threaten him,
I must still remember him!
My heart stirs for him,
I must show him compassion!—oracle of the LORD.n
21Set up road markers,
put up signposts;
Turn your attention to the highway,
the road you walked.
Turn back, virgin Israel,
turn back to these your cities.
22How long will you continue to hesitate,
The LORD has created a new thing upon the earth:
woman encompasses man.*
23Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: When I restore their fortunes in the land of Judah and in its cities, they shall again use this greeting: “May the LORD bless you, Tent of Justice, Holy Mountain!”o 24Judah and all its cities, the farmers and those who lead the flock shall dwell there together. 25For I will slake the thirst of the faint; the appetite of all the weary I will satisfy. 26At this I awoke and opened my eyes; my sleep was satisfying.*
27See, days are coming—oracle of the LORD—when I will sow the house of Israel and the house of Judah with the seed of human beings and the seed of animals. 28As I once watched over them to uproot and tear down, to demolish, to destroy, and to harm, so I will watch over them to build and to plant—oracle of the LORD.p 29In those days they shall no longer say,
“The parents ate unripe grapes,q
and the children’s teeth are set on edge,”*
The New Covenant.* 31See, days are coming—oracle of the LORD—when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.r 32It will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors the day I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt. They broke my covenant, though I was their master—oracle of the LORD.s 33But this is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days—oracle of the LORD. I will place my law within them, and write it upon their hearts; I will be their God, and they shall be my people.t 34They will no longer teach their friends and relatives, “Know the LORD!” Everyone, from least to greatest, shall know me—oracle of the LORD—for I will forgive their iniquity and no longer remember their sin.u
35Thus says the LORD,
Who gives the sun to light the day,
moon and stars to light the night;
Who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar,
whose name is LORD of hosts:v
36If ever this fixed order gives way
before me—oracle of the LORD—
Then would the offspring of Israel cease
as a people before me forever.w
37Thus says the LORD:
If the heavens on high could be measured,
or the foundations below the earth be explored,
Then would I reject all the offspring of Israel
because of all they have done—oracle of the LORD.
Jerusalem Rebuilt.* 38See, days are coming—oracle of the LORD—when the city shall be rebuilt as the LORD’s,x from the Tower of Hananel to the Corner Gate. 39A measuring line shall be stretched from there straight to the hill Gareb and then turn to Goah. 40The whole valley of corpses and ashes, all the terraced slopes toward the Wadi Kidron, as far as the corner of the Horse Gate at the east, shall be holy to the LORD. Never again shall the city be uprooted or demolished.
* [31:2–3] Jeremiah describes the exiles of the Northern Kingdom on their way home from the nations where the Assyrians had resettled them (722/721 B.C.). The favor they discover in the wilderness is the appearance of the Lord (v. 3) coming to guide them to Jerusalem. Implicit in these verses is the presentation of the people’s return from captivity as a second exodus, a unifying theme in Second Isaiah (chaps. 40–55).
* [31:15] Ramah: a village about five miles north of Jerusalem, where one tradition locates Rachel’s tomb (1 Sm 10:2). The wife of Jacob/Israel, Rachel is the matriarchal ancestor of Ephraim, chief among the northern tribes. She personified Israel as a mother whose grief for her lost children is especially poignant because she had to wait a long time to bear them. Mt 2:18 applies this verse to Herod’s slaughter of the innocents.
* [31:22] No satisfactory explanation has been given for this text. Jerome, for example, saw the image as a reference to the infant Jesus enclosed in Mary’s womb. Since Jeremiah often uses marital imagery in his description of a restored Israel, the phrase may refer to a wedding custom, perhaps women circling the groom in a dance. It may also be a metaphor describing the security of a new Israel, a security so complete that it defies the imagination and must be expressed as hyperbolic role reversal: any danger will be so insignificant that women can protect their men.
* [31:26] I awoke…satisfying: an intrusive comment.
* [31:29] “The parents…on edge”: Jeremiah’s opponents use this proverb to complain that they are being punished for sins of their ancestors. Jeremiah, however, insists that the Lord knows the depth of their wickedness and holds them accountable for their actions.
* [31:31–34] The new covenant is an occasional prophetic theme, beginning with Hosea. According to Jeremiah, (a) it lasts forever; (b) its law (torah) is written in human hearts; (c) it gives everyone true knowledge of God, making additional instruction (torah) unnecessary. The Dead Sea Scroll community claimed they were partners in a “new covenant.” The New Testament presents the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth as inaugurating a new covenant open to anyone who professes faith in Jesus the Christ. Cf. Lk 22:20; 1 Cor 11:25; Heb 8:8–12. Know the LORD: cf. note on 22:15–16.
* [31:38–40] The landmarks in these verses outline the borders of Jerusalem during the time of Nehemiah: the Tower of Hananel (Neh 3:1; 12:39) in the northeast and the Corner Gate (2 Kgs 14:13) in the northwest; Goah in the southeast and Gareb Hill in the southwest; the Valley of Ben-hinnom (“the Valley of corpses and ashes”), which met the Wadi Kidron in the southeast, and the Horse Gate in the eastern wall at the southeast corner of the Temple area.
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The Steenbras River Gorge and Crystal Pools Hiking Trail in Gordon’s Bay, Western Cape, was closed in May 2011 due to fire damage, soil erosion, vegetation degradation, uncontrolled access and visitor safety issues. The good news is that it will reopen on 1 November 2012.
The area has been given an opportunity to recover and the reserve management will introduce a new management system to ensure the area is not negatively impacted by those visiting it.
A new set of rules according to the new management system will come into effect with the reopening. A maximum capacity of 50 people will be allowed to enter the area each day and visitors must be in possession of a pre-booked and paid permit in order to enter the area. Permits, at a cost of R 60 a person, are currently only available at the Helderberg Nature Reserve main gate during operating hours.
The hike to Crystal Pools on Steenbras River outside Gordon’s Bay offers large doses of natural beauty at a splendid spot with a series of five deep natural pools in a rocky gorge fed by waterfalls. It’s about a one-hour walk up a rocky path to the first deep pool, fed by a waterfall tumbling over the surrounding rocky cliffs. This hike is popular with students from the University of Stellenbosch at weekends. Follow the red markers as it’s easy to get confused by the many side paths – one gentleman I met had lost his wife on the way. As you scramble up the gorge, each pool seems more stunning than the last, and a refreshing swim is all but mandatory. The last pool is difficult to reach as the path peters out among large boulders. After the return hike, cool off in the Steenbras River estuary if the tide is high enough.
Read a blog about doing the Crystal Pools hike here.
Photos by Fatima Jakoet
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Next post by Kerry Peers:10 of the best places to celebrate Halloween around the world » | <urn:uuid:3712c77a-4207-4bb3-8fdd-4328224dc4ee> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.getaway.co.za/activities/crystal-pools-hiking-trail-reopens/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956295 | 430 | 1.6875 | 2 |
Have you heard of the websites that offer payment in lieu of taking online surveys? Yes this is true. Anyone who has recently browsed the avenues of work-at-home jobs must have seen such alluring ads. It must have made you wonder— how online surveys can make you money. I am here to explain you all that. So, keep reading.
In fact, the online surveys include the whole process that claims to help people to earn money. For that, first you need to register with the website and then file out for consumer surveys. Whether you can earn money out of them or not, is altogether a different story.
The Internet these days is full of such websites that offer to pay their visitors for filling the surveys. As you register on the website, they ask you to fill out a questionnaire that lists your individual “consumer preferences” and “interests”. Once you are through with it, you will be requested to wait till they make contact with you for the apt survey.
Do companies actually pay money to know your favorite brand of dog biscuits or how much time you spend viewing a particular television programme? According to the grapevine however, the money doesn’t come to you always. The company that seeks for consumer information will directly pay the survey company
, who will pile up the survey details and statistics. A very little amount out of it, if it is any thing, is transferred to the persons who had filled out the online surveys.
If you seriously want to make money through online surveys, you really need to invest your time and money to search for the companies who actually pay money. The legitimate online surveys from genuine companies take quite a long time. They make you think and then give valid answers to fill out the form. The companies do advertise boastfully, but most of them actually end up not paying.
There will also be some companies who will offer you points for incurring their online surveys. You can save up these points for the exchange of money. Imagine the little mouse of your computer could be worth more than 500 points! But the reality of the situation is also that you may get just two to three points per survey.
Some companies enter the survey fillers in a drawing after they complete the survey. The chances of anyone winning these drawings enough number of times or earning part time or full time income are actually very slim. If you will spend your worthy hours filling the online surveys and get a little sum of money as compensation, do you think it is fair?
In your search for the genuine companies, beware of those companies who may require you to give money to get a list of the online survey websites who really pay. If any website asks you for money to let you take online surveys, it can instantly be considered as a scam. You must avoid such sites at all the costs.
Online surveys can get you fun and money both but only when they are genuine. If you consider the online surveys as a source of good income or employment, honey better get a career switch! | <urn:uuid:f0bcd596-61df-4456-af7d-4c12ef02a026> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.aptsoft.net/category/internet | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961359 | 619 | 1.601563 | 2 |
The section features our deployees and their personal stories, medal awardees and media coverage.
Serving Those Who Serve
To date, more than 4,500 Exchange associates—many more than once—have deployed to dangerous places around the world. Those associates who deploy are true heroes, dedicated to proudly “serving those who serve.” This page is dedicated to those men and women who have left home and comfort to stand alongside our brave service members in mud and sand. They slept in tents, ate the same MREs and faced some of the same perils as the troops.
Defense of Freedom Medal
The Defense of Freedom medal is the civilian equivalent of the military's Purple Heart. The first recipients who were honored were those Defense Department civilians injured or killed as a result of the terrorist attack on the Pentagon.
The medal itself consists of a gold circle framing a bald eagle holding a shield. The shield exemplifies the principles of freedom and defense of those freedoms upon which our nation was founded. The reverse of the medal is inscribed with “On Behalf of a Grateful Nation” with a space for the recipient's name. The laurel wreath represents honor and high achievement.
The ribbon is the red, white and blue. The red stripes commemorate valor and sacrifice. The wide blue stripe represents strength. The white stripes symbolize liberty as represented in our national flag. The number of red stripes represents the four terrorist attacks using hijacked airplanes and the single blue stripe represents the terrorist attack on the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
As of 2010, five living Exchange employees have been awarded the Defense of Freedom Medals: Sarah Briggs, Brian Sonntag, Bety Desil, Rebecca Pember and Maria Marek. Darren Braswell, the only Exchange associate from the U.S. killed in the line of duty, was awarded the Defense of Freedom medal posthumously.
Download Adobe Acrobat to view pdf documents.
These stories represent a sampling of the more than 4,500 deployees and their experiences downrange. If you are a deployee and would like to add your deployment history, please contact us. | <urn:uuid:addc8306-6f4a-4d1e-9f4f-746266b06e01> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.shopmyexchange.com/AboutExchange/History/deployees.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93992 | 436 | 1.726563 | 2 |
The big news in the Big Apple this week may be what didn't happen.
There was not a single reported slaying, stabbing, shooting or knifing in any of the five boroughs on Monday, according to the New York Police Department.
"It is unusual in a city of 8 million people, but we never read that much into one day," said Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Browne, who said it was the "first time in memory" that the city had had such a lull in violent crime.
The violence-free stretch spanned 36 hours, starting Sunday evening when a man was shot in the head and lasted until Tuesday morning with another shooting, police said.
For a city that once suffered from high crime rates, Monday's feat fits into a broader trend of dropping homicide rates, police say.
"The city hopes to finish out the year with the lowest homicide rate sine 1960," said Browne.
In 1990, police say the city tallied just under 2,300 homicides. By 2002, that number had dropped below 600.
So far in 2012, police say that number is 366.
"If you think back to how bad things were in the 1970s and '80s, you were lucky if you had a few hours go by where you didn't have a violent crime, nevermind a whole day," said NYPD historian Michael Cronin.
Nationwide, there were 14,612 murders in 2011, on average one every 36 minutes, the FBI reported.
That's a small decline from 14,722 in 2010.
In October, the FBI said violent crime across the nation fell for the fifth consecutive year in 2011 with murder, rape and robbery all declining, but it noted that violent crime remains a serious problem in many urban areas.
The FBI crime statistics differed from a telephone crime survey released in October by the Justice Department. That report showed crime increasing last year but attributed the change to a jump in simple assaults.
James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston, said many of those assaults described to interviewers were pushing-and-shoving incidents with no injuries and were not reported to any law enforcement agencies. | <urn:uuid:a5553598-7b2a-4881-8a5b-1ce2ab1f4c2a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wfmz.com/news/Police-New-York-City-s-murder-free-Monday/-/121458/17584288/-/funx4h/-/index.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979919 | 444 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Tehran displays ECO Bismillah calligraphy works
A number of calligraphy works by veteran artists from member states of Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) have been showcased during an exhibition held in the Iranian capital, Tehran.
Over one hundred exquisite works in different styles of calligraphy and calligraphic paintings inspired by the Arabic word, Bismillah (In the Name of God) are being displayed at the Diplomatic Gallery of the ECO Cultural Institute (ECI) in Tehran.
Gholam-Hossein Amirkhani, Mohammad Salahshour, Hamid Ajami, Nasrollah Afjei, Sedaqat Jabbari, Ahmad Pilehchi and Hassan Ahangaran are among the masters whose works are on show.
Last year, Tehran mounted similar exhibition of calligraphy works titled The Land of the Sun created by a group of artists from ECO member states.
A number of unique Qur’anic manuscripts of Islamic countries and ECO member states were also put on display at Iran's National Library and Document Center’s pavilion at the 2012 Qur’an International Exhibition in Tehran.
ECI through holding these exhibitions aims to foster understanding among ECO member states and preserve their rich cultural heritage through common projects in the field of media, literature, arts, philosophy, sport and education.
ECO Bismillah calligraphy exhibition will be running until September 28, 2012. | <urn:uuid:3ab5892f-d9bd-4267-a7a8-ef9b4be550fa> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://english.khabaronline.ir/detail/182748/Tehran-Islamic-Culture--/Culture/Culture | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.937863 | 298 | 1.59375 | 2 |
An Online Artist's Coop for Artists who Paint on Location
The undeniable strength of Plein Air being realist or figurative rather than abstract or non-figurative art is obviously the paint in ‘front of the subject’ power it gives the communication rather than no interface with subject at all. Plein air thus fosters and relies on nurturing the expertise we value enormously for capturing truer subject integrity by virtue of being at the subject, seeing it honestly building abilities and the craft of painting for a far more truthful portrayal; draftsmanship, perspective, colour, tonal relationships, deft handling required of limited time at subject, for some; confidently conveying the alla prima wet into wet look, many things including also the essential personal unique vision that only being there can avail us; creativeness inspired by being personally involved. But why make composition subservient to all the attributes we admire and rightly follow as plein air artists, when it should be just as, even more utilised in plein air work as in any picture making. Plein air’s strength can also be its weakness – if not careful a complete homage to it; striving to depict the subject truthfully can sabotage good composition, the most important ingredient of great painting.
Composition the ‘lifeblood’ of painting - seeing the abstract pattern before us to hang the subject on, creating, changing the work to reinforce not detract from the communication using all the elements of painting design, are undeniably the highest objective for great picture making. I am not denying the great traits we value and love of plein air to assist better realist picture making, but we should be more aware of integrating and not neglecting good composition into the on-site work and especially admire good plein air composition because of its increased challenges over studio work. Many place over emphasis on the craft of depiction or having the forte of seeing the subject for realistic beautiful rendition or portrayal. But it’s a balance for equally undeniable is the paramount importance of good composition in any painting for no matter how well you paint and portray your subject, if any picture is poorly composed it more than anything else destroys the effort and spoils the communication. At the cornerstone of being an artist is the objective first of producing great pictures; this requires changing, exaggerating, pattern making within a border, this is what painting is about. Because of the inevitable attributes of plein air as opposed say of studio work; constraints placed by short time at subject, the over valuing of painting technique in depicting and seeking deft handling expertise, emphasis of these effects many a time is at the expense of good composition which is far more essential ingredient to great picture making. My point is great picture making is like painting itself, it’s a tension, a balance, between achieving plein air subject truthfulness without being a slave to it which almost always detracts and destroys good picture making; the art of reinforcing the quality and portrayal of the subject, not excluding or detracting from it by destroying the communication to onlooker with poor composition. | <urn:uuid:5c9d0b88-e1fc-4c17-99d7-ec9355f3b58f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://pleinairartists.ning.com/profiles/blogs/importance-of-good-composition | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939931 | 624 | 1.664063 | 2 |
Christiane has an exclusive interview with President Thein Sein about Myanmar's fast-changing relations with the world.
By Samuel Burke, CNN
In the only interview that President Hamid Karzai granted while he was in the United States, he expressed confidence to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that the Afghan people will accept the United States’ demand for immunity for American troops left in place there after the 2014 withdrawal.
In a joint press conference with President Obama on Friday, Karzai had stated that he would take the issue to his people, but now he has said that immunity is likely to become a reality.
“I can tell you with relatively good confidence that they will say ‘alright, let’s do it,” Karzai told Amanpour about selling the issue to Afghans. “And I’m sure that they will understand.”
At the press conference, President Obama said that he had stressed to Karzai that “the United States already has arrangements like this with countries all around the world, and nowhere does the U.S. have any kind of security agreement with a country without immunity for our troops.”
In the final stages of the U.S. intervention in Iraq, President Obama was unable to obtain a similar agreement, propelling him to withdraw all U.S. forces from that country in December 2011.
Karzai rejected the notion that has been floated that the U.S. might leave “zero troops” in Afghanistan after the pullout is completed at the end of 2014.
He told Amanpour that Afghans need some type of U.S. presence for “broader security and stability” after the withdrawal. For that reason, Karzai believes Afghans will have to grant the U.S. troops left there immunity.
“The United States will need to have a limited number of forces in Afghanistan,” he said, but was unwilling to give an exact number. “That’s not for us to decide. It is for the United States to decide what number of troops they will be keeping in Afghanistan and what strength of equipment those troops will have.”
Karzai said that Afghanistan has turned the corner in terms of battling the Taliban. He does not believe those Islamic fundamentalists will ever regain the strength to enforce their radical agenda again – the closing of girls’ schools and subjugation of women.
“Having experienced the growth of Afghanistan – the creation of a critical mass in Afghanistan that is necessary for turning the corner from bad towards better – I think we have turned the corner,” he said. “I think there is now a critical mass in Afghanistan of the educated – of the Afghan people who want a future of progress and stability. And I think, also, that the Taliban have recognized the corner has been turned – the majority of them.”
CNN’s Juliet Fuisz produced this piece for television. | <urn:uuid:5d0e5b91-794f-4de3-8487-0f5755603651> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://amanpour.blogs.cnn.com/2013/01/12/karzai-confident-he-can-get-u-s-troops-immunity/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970259 | 610 | 1.78125 | 2 |
The Ten Worst Teaching Mistakes
Tomorrow's Professor Blog has a great article listing the worst mistakes teachers can make in the classroom. It's an insightful (and research-driven) article. We talk often at Luther about some of the big-picture mistakes, like not having learning-objectives in mind in course design. Yet (from both a former student and a learning design point-of-view) I found some of the "smaller" listings here helpful as well, especially on a day-to-day teaching level.
"Mistake #10. When you ask a question in class, immediately call for volunteers. You know what happens when you do that. Most of the students avoid eye contact, and either you get a response from one of the two or three who always volunteer or you answer your own question. Few students even bother to think about the question, since they know that eventually someone else will provide the answer." | <urn:uuid:12f26d86-640f-4724-9d5c-fce92bb68419> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.luthersem.edu/technology/freerangelearning.aspx?m=3725&post=263 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970861 | 190 | 1.84375 | 2 |
Iran denies launching cyberattacks on U.S. banks
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Iran is being accused of launching cyberattacks against U.S.-based banks that include Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, an accusation that yesterday was firmly rejected by the head of Iran's Civil Defense Organization.
Over the weekend, a Reuters article, based on unnamed sources, made the claim that Iranian hackers have struck the three large banks mainly through denial-of-service (DoS) attacks targeting the banks' websites and corporate networks. According to the Reuters article, the attacks originated in Iran over the past year, and it's not known whether they are state-sponsored, groups working on behalf of the government or something else unrelated. NBC News also carried a report to that effect.
IN THE NEWS: Mass riots erupt in Foxconn factory in China
Yesterday, The Fars News Agency in Iran, in its English version, rejected the "western media reports," and included a statement from the head of Iran's Civil Defense Organization, Gholam Reza Jalali, saying, "Iran has not hacked the U.S. banks."
Jalali is quoted as saying that "these reports are aimed at demonizing Iran in cyberspace to portray the country as a global threat to cyber security and justify the U.S. and Israeli cyber attacks on Iran."
That reference was apparently made to the cyberweapon Stuxnet, the malware that is now known to have been developed by the U.S. and Israel and was used under direct command of President Obama to attack Iran in a covert action at an Iranian facility to try and stop what's widely suspected to be Iran's effort to develop a nuclear weapon.
Ellen Messmer is senior editor at Network World, an IDG publication and website, where she covers news and technology trends related to information security. Twitter: @MessmerE. Email: email@example.com.
Read more about wide area network in Network World's Wide Area Network section. | <urn:uuid:1433cb28-7999-44b0-8602-fc755f469669> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/security/iran-denies-launching-cyberattacks-on-us-banks | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.960386 | 445 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Some years back, government ministries and a number of public institutions, signed documents committing themselves to improved services to the public.
Known as client service charters, the documents laid out strategies to foster timely delivery of service with improved quality to support the larger effort of improving the economy.
The documents, many signed with great fanfare, gave the public hope that there would be change not only in the way the services were being delivered, but also the time it took to deliver them.
One such charter drawn up by the Prime Minister’s Office states clearly: “We commit to giving you quality services by providing clear, accurate, and timely information and advice; consulting widely before making decisions, being effective and efficient in the delivery of our services.”
The charter continues:”[We will] monitor our performance and look for ways to improve our services; act honestly, ethically and professionally; be polite, courteous and helpful; communicate clearly and in plain language.”
“[We will] endeavor to achieve the highest standard in the work we do;
apply relevant legislation, policy, and procedures impartially and consistently, and respond to correspondence promptly and handle telephone and personal inquiries immediately. If a complete response is not practical within the timeframe, you will be told when and by whom it will be provided.”
Broadly then the client service charters were aimed at changing the way the larger public was served.
Sadly some of the institutions which signed the charters have failed to live up to their commitments of ensuring that the documents became living proof better service to the public.
The other day, transport minister, Dr Harrison Mwakyembe was forced to remind the Tanzania Airports Authority (TAA) to look into complaints by passengers over humiliating treatment at airports during inspections.
He reminded them to follow rules and regulations when executing their duties, adding that a number of passengers and airline staffs using both the Julius Nyerere International Airport and other airports in the country have complained that they are humiliated by security officers’ in-charge during the inspections.
Said Dr Mwakyembe: “While strengthening security at the airports…you should also work on grievances raised by clients so as to improve service delivery as determined in the international civil navigation standards.”
Sadly TAA is not alone in deficiencies in service delivery. The reminder should be taken as a wake-up call by most public institutions, which signed those documents, but have fallen far short of the stated objectives and targets.
We commend those who have tried hard to meet the commitments in their charters, but also note with disappointment that others have hardly tried.
Thus the mismanagement and waste uncovered by the CAG, clearly showing that there is a huge gap between stated commitments and practice. The public cannot be efficiently served where resources are mismanaged and wasted with impunity.
The charters are about discipline, diligence, efficiency, courtesy and honesty in the delivery of public services. How many can stand up and vouch having achieved these?
We believe that there is need for serious postmortems on why some institutions have fallen so short on their written promises. | <urn:uuid:33f3ed1f-f014-46b8-90ef-2ba519166e5f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ippmedia.com/frontend/index.php/oi.poc/wwwaripoti.coatopenx/pl/catppe/wwwo/ipcottopenx/pl/?l=42105 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964815 | 648 | 1.5 | 2 |
Temple Beth Shalom service at the historic fortress
in Old San Juan.
Harry A. and Barbara Tasch Ezratty are both past presidents of Temple Beth Shalom. Harry is also author of 500 Years in the Jewish Caribbean
; Barbara is a food writer and book publisher.
What excites tourists about Puerto Rico?
The island’s public beaches are popular destinations for snorkeling, scuba diving, boating, swimming, sunbathing, and kayaking. Fishing for Blue Marlin in the Atlantic Trench, at 28,000 feet the deepest part of the Atlantic, is a year-round sport that also attracts deep-sea fishermen worldwide for the fall’s big-game tournament. Big draws are professionally designed golf courses and hiking in El Yunque Rainforest, Puerto Rico’s highest mountain range (3,500 feet). Zip-lining—hurtling above the tree-lines from a looped line stretched from one mountainside to another—has become a hot new sport, and the Caves of Camuy, one of the world’s three largest cave systems, are breathtakingly, expansively beautiful.
What are the cuisine options?
Puerto Rico is known as “The Culinary Capital of the Caribbean.” You can enjoy American, Asian, Brazilian, Caribbean, Cuban, French, Italian, Mexican, Middle Eastern, Peruvian, Puerto Rican, Spanish—and more. Tables Magazine: Puerto Rico's Guide to Great Dining can help you navigate 700 of the plentiful options.
The basic island food derives from a combination of the old Caribbean Taino Indian and Spanish influences. The indigenous Caribbean pineapples were on the island before Columbus and are still sweeter than those enjoyed by statesiders. Other basic foodstuffs, such as root vegetables, rice, and seafood, are available today in old-style and updated versions reflecting the influx of myriad cultures on the island’s cuisine.
Temple Beth Shalom has published its own Spanish-English cookbook, What’s Cooking/Que Se Cocina, which is still in print and available from the synagogue. Here is a tropical-tasting recipe by long-time member Edna Friedes, who died in October 2012 at age 105½:
Pineapple Chicken Salad
3 chicken breast halves, skinless and boneless
1⁄2 cup pineapple chunks, reserving 1⁄2 cup juice
1⁄4 cup seedless green grapes
1⁄2 tsp. curry powder
1 Tbs. mayonnaise
Salt and pepper to taste
Bake the chicken until done. Cool. Cut the chicken into cubes. Add curry powder, salt, and pepper and mix well. Add pineapple chunks and grapes. Toss to mix. To make the dressing, combine the reserved pineapple juice and mayo. Mix well.
What are your top travel tips?
The sun in Puerto Rico is seriously stronger than stateside (being closer to the equator), so use lots of sunblock.
And because Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory, Americans do not need to bring their passports.
What are the Jewish sites of interest?
In San Juan, three synagogues serve the population of approximately 2,000 Jews. The Conservative congregation has about 215 families, many of whom descend from Cuban immigrants in the early days of the Castro regime. The Chabad congregation is the smallest, with about 20 families. And the Reform congregation, Temple Beth Shalom (TBS), has about 60 families—some of them descendants of Jews who emigrated from the States to the island in the 1950s and 60s and formed the congregation in 1967.
All three congregations join together for community events, such as the recent dedication of the Holocaust Memorial across from the Capital in Old San Juan; and the three cooperate with the Chabad movement’s “Jewish Welcome Center,” which opened in 2012 in Old San Juan and offers tours of Jewish interest.
What are services like at Temple Beth Shalom?
We’re very proud of being a “singing” congregation. Without a full-time cantor, our congregants have learned both old and new melodies for weekly and holiday services from visiting vocalists. We participate not as “audience members” but fully—very vocally—in weekly services.
On Friday nights, services are mostly in English and Hebrew, using Gates of Prayer; on Saturday mornings, services are mainly in Spanish and Hebrew, utilizing a Spanish/Hebrew prayer book. This meets the whole congregation’s needs—the majority of whom are English-speakers and approximately 30% for whom Spanish is their first language. Fifteen years ago, TBS was all English-speaking, but as trained locals began to replace stateside middle-management personnel in island jobs and the resident Puerto Ricans started exploring Judaism, a number of Spanish speakers converted and found their Jewish home here. Many of these new Jews-by-choice came from anusim, families who knew or suspected their forbearers included secret Jews. To this day, visiting rabbis offer training to them, and we hope more anusim will join us.
The TBS attire is very casual (except no shorts or beach clothes are allowed). Although we began as an almost Classical Reform congregation, like the rest of the Reform Movement, we have moved towards traditionalism in ritual observance; today most men wear kippot, and prayer shawls are prevalent. Part-time visiting rabbis, who stay for one or more months during the winter season, represent varying degrees of tradition on the bimah, all of which are welcomed.
Do you have unique celebrations?
Taschlich services are held on the Caribbean beach, two blocks from TBS—often surprising bathing-suit clad tourists.
We invite visitors to join us for weekly services. You’ll not only meet our friendly members, but people from other island congregations, cruise ship passengers, businesspeople staying at nearby hotels, and local university students—and become part of Reform Judaism’s family in sunny San Juan. | <urn:uuid:e7d9ee21-d578-45e3-b1f1-bdff5df37b0a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://reformjudaismmag.org/Articles/index.cfm?id=3198 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944439 | 1,272 | 1.6875 | 2 |
BISD is "Moving Forward"
Welcome to our district website and welcome to Bastrop ISD. We hope you find this website to be a resource for information and guidance, as you seek to find out more about our district, our schools and our community. We are always looking for ways to improve this website and if you have suggestions regarding the type of information needed (if not already available) or have some great ideas from other sites you have seen or may have access to, please let us know. We want to constantly update the site for your benefit.
The term, "Moving Forward" sounds simple enough. We all pretty much know what that means. However, in Bastrop, Texas and in Bastrop ISD - "Moving Forward" has taken on a whole different set of meanings and possibilities. Last year, we (both the town and the district) proclaimed our collective pride in simply saying, "WE are Bastrop / Bastrop ISD". The district started the year off with that unifying message (not knowing how prophetic and unifying it would become) and the community shouted it loud and proud as we all worked together to recover, restore and rebuild following the most historic wild fires in Texas history. Here we are almost a full year later and look how much has been accomplished. The community and the school district are indeed - Moving Forward! If you look up the words in Webster's (I still tend to refer to the bound version at my desk even with all the technological applications available) - when one is "Moving" they are, "Changing or able to change position" or "Causing or producing motion or action", or a different, yet fitting and appropriate slant - "Deeply affecting the emotions". And with regard to "Forward", Webster's tells us that we are "Ardently inclined" and looking "toward the future". How appropriate for us (the community and district) as we continue to lean on each other and work together to not only recover and revitalize, but to forge ahead and be better than ever before!
As always, we invite you to become a partner with us as we travel this journey toward continuous improvement and academic excellence. We are expanding our Partners in Education program and are seeking parents, businesses, our wonderful church families and other interested patrons as mentors for students at all 14 of our campuses. Our mentors can be an extremely valuable partner for personal development for students, as well as for career-related guidance and motivation. We invite you to speak with us about the safety and security processes, training and related services we are putting in place for our student mentors and other volunteers.
While those that were here on September 4, 2011 and the weeks and months that followed will certainly never forget the tragic circumstances, heroic deeds and giving spirit of so many - we want to be defined by how we have responded and are looking ahead, rather than by the fires and the destruction. The Bastrop community and the Bastrop Independent School District are "Moving Forward" together. We look forward to the start of an outstanding 2012-2013 school year. Sincerely,
Superintendent of Schools | <urn:uuid:3e693e20-a693-4b16-9a9a-b10ee93c6d01> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bisdtx.org/default.aspx?name=dis.super.welcome | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967899 | 635 | 1.554688 | 2 |
US construction hiring jumps as housing rebounds
During last year's housing recovery a question loomed: Where are all the construction jobs?
The answer arrived Friday in a government report that showed the best hiring for the U.S. building industry since the peak of the housing boom.
Construction firms added 28,000 jobs last month, according to the January employment report. And the industry has created 98,000 jobs since September, according to annual revisions that were released with the report. The last time construction contributed that many jobs to the economy was in the spring of 2006 - right before the market went bust.
"The construction job recovery has clearly arrived," said Jed Kolko, chief economist at Trulia, a real estate data analysis firm.
Economists had known for months that the industry was turning around. Homebuilders broke ground on 780,000 homes in 2012, a 28 percent increase from the previous year. Spending on residential construction projects has risen in every month since April.
But until Friday, there were few signs of steady growth in construction employment.
The Labor Department shed some light on that with its revisions, which showed 25,000 more construction jobs added in the final three months of 2012 than initially estimated.
The gains have made the sector one of the leading job creators for the economy. Only a couple have added more: Retailers added 166,000 jobs in the past four months and education and health care added 123,000.
Hotels, restaurants and entertainment companies have gained roughly the same number as construction.
Most other sectors have lagged. Manufacturing has added only 25,000 jobs in that stretch. Financial services gained only 31,000. Transportation and warehousing added 62,000
Economists expect construction firms will keep adding jobs in 2013 as the housing recovery strengthens.
Kolko notes that a single-family home can take up to six months to build, while an apartment building can take more than a year. Many of those projects will require more workers as construction progresses.
And demand for new homes and apartments will keep rising, especially if supplies remain low. More Americans are moving out on their own after doubling up with friends or relatives during the recession.
Pat Newport, a housing economist at IHS Global Insight, forecasts that builders will start work on 970,000 homes in 2013, a 24 percent increase from last year. He expects hiring will grow, as well.
Housing has been a leading driver of past recoveries. But the bursting of the housing bubble pushed a flood of foreclosed homes on the market at low prices. That made it hard for builders to compete. And a collapse in home prices left millions of homeowners owing more on their mortgages than their houses were worth. That made it difficult to sell.
Now, six years after the bubble burst, those barriers are fading. Joseph LaVorgna, an economist at Deutsche Bank, estimates that greater construction could add a half-point to economic growth this year.
And higher home prices can make consumers feel wealthier and spend more. That could boost growth by another half-point this year, LaVorgna says. | <urn:uuid:6f0ea1e2-c8e5-49c3-8648-ecfea2bc8540> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cortezjournal.com/article/20130201/APW/1302010968/US-construction-hiring-jumps-as-housing-rebounds | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.973414 | 634 | 1.648438 | 2 |
YAPHANK, NY (WCBS 880) - Yaphank fire commissioner Bill Peters says he’s pushing for a cell tower to be installed even though the proposal is unpopular with many in the community.
WCBS 880′s Sophia Hall On The Story
Peters says the proposed tower behind the Main Street firehouse would dramatically improve the department’s ability to communicate and respond to fires.
“Somebody gets trapped in the house, the radio system just isn’t going through, you know. I guess it would be life or death,” he told WCBS 880 reporter Sophia Hall.
However, historic district’s advisory committee has twice voted against the cell tower being constructed because it would visually damage the historic district.
Peters said the fire department is willing to work with the community to get this tower installed.
How do you feel about a cell tower behind Yaphank’s Main Street firehouse? Sound off in the comments section below. | <urn:uuid:1ad30397-f86e-4f83-86b9-f4c663e5dcda> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2011/11/16/fire-department-at-odds-with-historic-committee-over-cell-tower-in-yaphank/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00006-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955066 | 208 | 1.804688 | 2 |
Our Passive House in the Woods is part of an article in today’s Wall Street Journal on zero energy homes. The article is called “Stealthy Green Homes“.
I finally uploaded the most recent Passive House primer to Youtube.
Today’s mail brought us the official EnerPHit wall plaque for the MinnePHit House project. This building is officially one of the highest-performing retrofit buildings in a cold climate anywhere.
The MinnePHit House received the Passivhaus Institute’s EnerPHit certification—making it the first cold-climate retrofit they ever certified. We were fortunate to partner with the PHI on this pilot project, which leverages their brand new retrofit certification program. We are excited about this milestone, and the fact that EnerPHit works in US climate zone 6 for a home that is over 80 years old. The results are truly amazing.
I’ll be lecturing about the Passive House building energy standard at the University of Minnesota’s school of architecture on Tuesday, March 5. Details below.
Introduction to the Passive House Building Energy Standard
3/5/2013: 2.30 – 3.45 PM
Room 31 in the basement of the old wing of the architecture building.
I was invited to speak at this month’s Citizens For Community Resilience and Sustainability meeting in St. Anthony Village on Saturday, February 16th, at 3PM in the St. Anthony Village Community Center Council Chambers. My talk will center around high-performance new homes and retrofits—highlighting the potential and approach. The event is free and open to the public.
Recently we were interviewed by Remodeling Magazine about our EnerPHit project in South Minneapolis. This project is a pilot EnerPHit project our office designed. Certification is in progress with the Passivhaus Institute in Darmstadt, Germany.
You can read the entire article here.
I discussed financing with my credit union. It seems the practical constraint is the value that the neighborhood can support.
Please Join Us For Two Upcoming Events
TE Studio is a co-founder and proud supporter of the local Passive House Alliance chapter. This month we are involved in a couple of upcoming events. Please join us for an opportunity to learn about and experience Passive House—the World’s most comfortable and energy effcient building standard.
2012 International Passive House Days
The Passive House in the Woods in Hudson, WI will be open to the public this Sunday, November 11th, from 10.45 AM to Noon for a tour with homeowner Gary Konkol and Passive House Designer Tim Eian. Tim will be offering insights into the performance of the home in its first two years of operation. 908 Kirkwood Way North, Hudson, WI 54016.
Passive House Alliance MSP
Fall Lecture Series #3
Air Tightness And Its Importance in High-Performance Buildings | <urn:uuid:50b8a69c-7e5a-4a29-ba77-db9560011781> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.timeian.com/blog/ | 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 | 0.9315 | 610 | 1.757813 | 2 |
Putting milk permeate in perspective – by guest expert Glenn Cardwell APDExpert Examiner — By Emma Stirling on August 13, 2012 at 4:38 pm
When my mother-in-law arrived on the weekend with a paella pan for my birthday and some hard hitting questions about milk, I could feel the next blog post coming on. No, not a Spanish recipe. Be patient. Recipe Redux comes next week. But rather clear and sensible answers to her questions about a staple product she’s been drinking for 75 years. Should she now buy permeate-free milk? Is it really better? To sort out if the grass is really greener we asked one of the most experienced and respected Australian dietitians for his expert opinion.
About our expert: Glenn Cardwell has 33 years experience in clinical and public health nutrition, including 10 years as consultant dietitian to the National Heart Foundation. He was one of the original sports dietitians to establish Sports Dietitians Australia in 1996. Glenn has written four books, Diet Addiction, Gold Medal Nutrition (five editions), Getting Your Kids to Eat Well and the Top Blokes Food Manual.
Very recently we learned that humans in sub-Saharan Africa were drinking milk around 7000 years ago through clever analysis of pottery found at an archaeological site 1. In other parts of Africa, through the Arab nations, east to India north throughout Europe, humans have relied on milk as a food source for at least 5000 years. That means we have been enjoying milk for its nutritional benefits long before tea and coffee helped wake us up in the morning.
Nowadays there are all types of milk on the market, from low-fat to vitamin and mineral fortified. When PURA, the makers of the milk I have on my cereal, asked me to comment on permeate-free milk, I realised very few people had heard of permeate. I was unsure myself. So let’s take a look at together.
Milk is a nutritious fluid composed of protein, fat, carbohydrate (lactose in this case), vitamin and minerals. When milk is processed to make cheese, the protein and fat are used, and in making yogurt most of the protein, fat and lactose is used. In both cases, the processing leaves a fluid with some lactose, minerals and vitamins. This fluid is called permeate. What milk suppliers can do is add this permeate back to milk. Why? Because the composition of milk naturally fluctuates depending upon the season, breed of cow and the type of feed given to the cow. Adding permeate allows the milk to be standardised for its protein content, so milk composition doesn’t change throughout the year.
As you can see, there is nothing wrong with permeate. It’s natural and perfectly safe to add back to milk. When the manufacturers Dairy Farmers and PURA asked consumers about milk, they were told that they preferred milk as close as possible to how the cow made it and they would be happier if the permeate was left out, even though it was legal and safe 2,3,4 . Some people see adding permeate as “diluting” milk. The manufacturers decided that from July 2012 they would be changing to permeate-free milk. Dairy Farmers in NSW and Queensland and PURA milk in WA, SA, Victoria and Tasmania. If you live in WA then you have had permeate-free milk from PURA since January 2012 (although it was not mentioned on the label until July).
If you are unable to view this video please jump back to the blog to see it.
So what do you really need to know? First, be aware that milk was always a great drink and a wonderful source of protein, calcium and riboflavin. The permeate was added just to make milk standardised throughout the year. Now, with permeate-free milk there will be a natural seasonal variation in the protein content of milk, although this variation will not be large (between 3.0 – 3.5 g per 100mL) and it is very unlikely that you will be able to taste the difference. Not adding permeate makes milk manufacturing easier and closer to what you get from the farm.
1 Dunne J et al. Nature 2012; 486: 390-394; 2 Online survey conducted by TNS from 27-29th April 2012 amongst 1346 Australians aged 16-64 years; 3 Hartman Group – Looking Ahead. Food Culture 2012 Pages 13, 29, 53; 4 Innova Market Insights – Top Ten Trends in Food for 2012.
Thanks Glenn it’s so wonderful to have you on Scoop. I certainly have heard a lot of fuss about permeate lately and when a 75 year old asks questions, you know it’s hit mainstream. Some people I talk to are skeptical about the marketing motives behind the change. I am one of those consumers blissfully unaware that I was even drinking the stuff? And I’ve heard others say permeate is safe and the change makes no difference to the health properties of milk. But at the end of the long milking line, whether a clever marketing manager came up with idea in his big city office, or not, it did grow from a fresh approach. And that’s from a growing movement of people demanding a cleaner, minimally processed food supply. If we can still bring nutritious milk to the masses in a purer way, I’m all for it. How about you lovely readers? | <urn:uuid:97f50d92-f8e7-44b1-99f1-8291a5aa74bf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.scoopnutrition.com/2012/08/putting-milk-permeate-in-perspective-by-guest-expert-glenn-cardwell-apd/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964884 | 1,132 | 1.71875 | 2 |
God’s plan for our lives by way of ‘the scenic route’
After writing about the subject of faith last week in my column, a dear friend sent me this quote: “Faith is the bridge between where I am and the place God is taking me.”
I believe that to be true. Christians are depicted in many writings and sermons as being “on a journey.” Going back as far as “Pilgrim’s Progress,” one of the first Christian books I ever read, the journey is mentioned often, and we meet various people and obstacles along the way in the allegory. John Bunyan (1628-1688), an English Christian writer and preacher, wrote “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” Bunyan was a Reformed Baptist but is also remembered by the Church of England with a Lesser Festival on Aug. 30, and on liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church (US) on Aug. 29.
“The Pilgrim’s Progress” has been printed in more than 200 languages and has never been out of print since its first presentation. The allegory was first printed in February 1678 and was initially distributed in two main sections.
My dear Uncle Donald Baughcum of Atlanta, Ga., was always noted in our family for helping to ensure that all of us children saw the sights available to be seen when we were with him in the car, that we visited all of the unusual or interesting places in the area, and attended the various plays, games, presentations and events that time and finances would allow. Often, we would spend an entire afternoon walking in the woods discovering leaves, trees, sometimes small animals, or simply enjoy a flowing little creek or stream.
One of the things that nearly drove our Aunt Minnie over the edge was that when one traveled with Uncle Donald, you seldom, if ever, took the same route twice. We could be going to the grocery story and travel to and from on completely different roads. Only when we saw our street or sometimes the house itself did we know we were nearing home. He loved adventure and learning until the day he died. Many of the family members joked that traveling with Uncle Donald always meant you’d take “the scenic route.” In other words, you would not necessarily know where you were, but you could bet your bottom dollar you’d have fun and see something you’d likely never seen before.
And of course, choosing the scenic route or the road less traveled often took much more gasoline, sometimes purchased food, and always time. I never remember one time his stopping to ask for directions. We would just wind around until where we got where he wanted us to be and then finally home. But the things we saw and learned are still with me today, even after Uncle Donald has gone on to heaven.
Our Christian journey often involves taking “the scenic route,” too. We may not get where we are going in a direct line, from point to point or as the crow flies. God has designed this journey for each of us, and I find great delight in knowing that He often deems it necessary for us to take “the scenic route,” but look at what we’ve seen, the people we’ve met, and the fun we’ve had along the way. I would not have it any other way, even if I could.
The secret is to realize early on that our Guide knows the way He has chosen, the paths He has perfected, and the pitfalls we will face. We are promised that He will be with us every step of the way. Some days it is easier to forget that He is in charge than others.
If we had the time and space to interview dozens of Christians who are trying to live for the Lord on a daily basis, I would surmise that the one thing we would all have in common is that we did not get to where God led us by a direct route. More often than not, God chooses to lead us by way of a scenic route. There are often detours, broken roads, and indirect diversions.
When we start out to serve the Lord in any venture, whether it is teaching a child’s Sunday school class, working in an Awana program, serving as a camp counselor, or even taking on the heavy duties of filling a pulpit, we most likely experienced detours that took us off course, sent us an entirely different direction, or caused us time-consuming delays. Perhaps we fretted about each of them along the way. Only now in my life do I realize more fully that God had a plan for me the entire time. He has one for you, too, so enjoy the journey as we travel by faith to where He is leading us each day.Brenda Cannon Henley can be reached at (409) 781-8788 or at brendacannonhenley [at] yahoo [dot] com. | <urn:uuid:d0f80d1a-dc47-42cc-87ab-6e84c036c1b7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://theexaminer.com/features/commentary/god%E2%80%99s-plan-our-lives-way-%E2%80%98-scenic-route%E2%80%99?page=1&quicktabs_1=1 | 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 | 0.983004 | 1,036 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Since we launched on July 21st 2011, we’ve heard directly from consumers about the challenges they face in the marketplace, brought their concerns to the attention of financial institutions, and helped address their complaints. Accepting, resolving, and analyzing consumer complaints is an integral part of our work.
Periodically, we’ll feature stories from consumers who we have helped, and who have agreed to let the CFPB make their stories public.
Julio, a 31-year-old waiter from Florida struggled to pay his private student loans from a for-profit college after his payments shot up.
When Julio left Puerto Rico to pursue his dream of studying to be an artist, he chose a for-profit college that he says advertised itself as a top ranking school. But after accruing $110,000 in debt and graduating with only an Associate’s Degree, not the Bachelor’s he wanted, he couldn’t find a job in his field. The college was not competitive, he was told.
Like many other students, Julio says the school steered him into taking on expensive private loans before exhausting his federal loan options. For more than a year, he promptly paid $700 a month to the private student loan lender. But when his federal loan kicked in, his payments increased to $1,100 a month and he could no longer make ends meet. He called his private student lender and asked to work out a deal for lower, extended payments. The company refused, he said.
After Julio contacted the CFPB, the loan provider discovered that Julio was eligible for a reduced-payment program. Julio’s private student loan payments were cut back to $407 a month for the next year. Julio is still working out a plan for to reduce his payments for the federal loans. | <urn:uuid:2831f5ec-40a8-489b-b5ec-b4df7c5e71f5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.consumerfinance.gov/blog/meet-julio-from-florida/ | 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 | 0.98611 | 372 | 1.5625 | 2 |
Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, who led his nation through decades of communism
A new plan by a California lawmaker would allow schools to be used to promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, and let teachers in public district classrooms “inculcate in the mind of any pupil a preference for communism,” according to a traditional values advocacy organization.
“Just when we thought the indoctrination in California’s public schools couldn’t get any worse, state lawmakers introduce bills that will further brainwash innocent children,” said a statement from
Capitol Resource Institute, a traditional values and family advocacy organization based in California.
“We’re in California. Of course it has a chance of succeeding,” CRI spokeswoman Karen England told WND. “These people get bolder and bolder every year.”
Her organization, along with several others, already has been battling over lawmakers’ orders, already placed in law, that public schools in the state teach nothing but positive messages about homosexuality, transsexuality, bisexuality and other alternative lifestyles.
Those plans are being challenged in court, by citizens’ attempts to place the issue on the 2008 election ballot and by family advocates who say the best option is for families to abandon public schools for private schools or other alternatives.
Now comes the plan, SB 1322, from state Sen. Alan Lowenthal, a Democrat elected from the state’s 27th District, including the towns of Artesia, Avalon, Bellflower, Cerritos, Downey, Lakewood, Long Beach, Lynwood, Paramount, Signal Hill, South Gate and others.
“This bill would actually allow the promotion of communism in public schools,” CRI said.
That’s because the state’s Civic Center Act already requires a school district to grant the use of school property, when an alternative isn’t available, to nonprofit groups, clubs or associations set up for youth and school activities.
“But the law also states that the property may not be used by anyone intent on overthrowing the government,” CRI said. Now, the group said, “SB 1322 would delete the requirement that an individual or organization wanting to use the school property is not a Communist action organization or Communist front organization.
“This bill would also strike the law that a public school or community college employee may be fired if he or she is a member of the Communist Party,” the group said.
Worse yet, the group said, “the bill would also strike the law that prohibits a teacher giving instruction in a school or on public school property from teaching communism with the intent to indoctrinate or to inculcate in the mind of any pupil a preference for communism,” CRI said.
“SB 1322 is simply shocking,” said Meredith Turney, legislative liaison for the affiliated Capitol Resource Family Impact. “The socialist members of the legislature are now advocating that communism, one of the most brutal forms of government in history, be taught favorably to government school students. Anyone espousing communism, which does advocate for the violent overthrow of existing government, will be permitted to not only use government property, but work in schools and colleges, and teach their freedom-hating propaganda to impressionable young people.”
“Less than 20 years after the fall of the communist Soviet Union, California lawmakers are eager to once again begin advancing a political ideology responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent people,” England said. “Instead of promoting communism in our schools, lawmakers should be focused on actually teaching students to read, write and think for themselves.”
On a blog on the Red County website, Mike Spence concluded: “I know there is plenty of indoctrination goin’ on already but I gues (sic) they won’t be staisfied (sic) until all school children are gay loving (SB777) and Communist. If only they could all read at grade level.”
The bill itself explains that it would delete provisions “regarding a person
who intends to use school property on behalf of an organization to
deliver a statement, signed under penalty of perjury, that the
organization is not a Communist action organization or Communist
front organization required to be registered with the Attorney
General of the United States or does not, to the best of that person’s knowledge, advocate the overthrow of the government of the United
States or of the State of California by force, violence, or other
The plan also outlines it would drop provisions that school and college employees could be dismissed for being a part of the Communist Party and drop a ban on “teaching communism with the intent to indoctrinate or to inculcate in the mind of any pupil a preference for communism.”
The proposal itself noted that the teaching about the facts of communism was allowed, and the previous requirement banned teaching “for the purpose of undermining patriotism for, and the belief in, the government of the United States and of this state.” However, the new plan drops that.
Also deleted was: “For the purposes of this section, communism is the political theory that the presently existing form of government of the United States or of this state should be changed, by force, violence, or other unconstitutional means, to a totalitarian dictatorship which is based on the principles of communism as expounded by Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.”
Also deleted was the conclusion from the California Legislature other nations already had fallen into totalitarian dictatorships through the establishment of communism as well as the recognition that “the successful establishment of totalitarian dictatorships has consistently been aided, accompanied, or accomplished by repeated acts of treachery, deceit, teaching of false doctrines, teaching untruth, together with organized confusion, insubordination, and disloyalty, fostered, directed, instigated, or employed by communist organizations and their members…”
Also tossed out of California law was the recognition that communism even presents “a clear and present danger.”
The earlier school indoctrination into alternative sexual lifestyles has prompted creation of Rescue Your Child a coalition of various groups encouraging parents to withdraw their children from the state’s public school system.
That’s the result of the California Legislature and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who wrote and signed into law Senate Bill 777 and Assembly Bill 394 as law, plans that institutionalize the promotion of homosexuality, bisexuality, transgenderism and other alternative lifestyle choices.
The Discover Christian Schools website reports getting thousands of hits daily from parents and others seeking information about alternatives to California’s public schools.
The new law itself technically bans in any school texts, events, class or activities any discriminatory bias against those who have chosen alternative sexual lifestyles, said Turney. But there are no similar protections for students with traditional or conservative lifestyles and beliefs, however. Offenders will face the wrath of the state Department of Education, up to and including lawsuits.
“SB 777 will result in reverse discrimination against students with religious and traditional family values. These students have lost their voice as the direct result of Gov. Schwarzenegger’s unbelievable decision. The terms ‘mom and dad’ or ‘husband and wife’ could promote discrimination against homosexuals if a same-sex couple is not also featured,” she said.
England told WND that the law is not a list of banned words, including “mom” and “dad.” But she said the requirement is that the law bans discriminatory bias and the effect will be to ban such terminology.
“Having ‘mom’ and ‘dad’ promotes a discriminatory bias. You have to either get rid of ‘mom’ and ‘dad’ or include everything when talking about [parental issues],” she said. “They [promoters of sexual alternative lifestyles] do consider that discriminatory.” | <urn:uuid:7ddda058-7f4e-4854-b42b-51580a899458> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wnd.com/2008/03/58061/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953421 | 1,659 | 1.515625 | 2 |
THE TROUBLE WITH STANDARDS IN PUBLIC LIFE
Most people believe there should be set standards for those in public life to abide by – not just in terms of corruption but in their general behaviour too.
Dr David Hine, director of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Government at Oxford University says the Committee on Standards in Public Life is doing what it can to promote the best standards but things still seem to go wrong all too often.
He offers three key reasons why the issue of standards continues to trouble the public sector.
» Read more | <urn:uuid:167fb869-e7d8-49cd-8c33-598ef60b0ce5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.publicservice.co.uk/ | 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 | 0.948562 | 111 | 1.523438 | 2 |
I spent the morning calling small high schools in East County, asking if our state-budget debacle has affected their sports programs. This led me to Calexico, California, the person of principal Dan Plough, and his paycheck, Aurora High School.
“We’re an extremely small continuation high school,” Plough says. “Our sports program is small, so [the budget impasse] hasn’t affected us that much. But, if you wanted to do a great story, you could do it on alternative education and CIF sports.” (California Interscholastic Federation runs California high school sports. There are ten sections; Aurora High is in the San Diego section.) “I think I’m the only continuation school, probably, in Southern California that offers CIF sports.”
“Okay, let’s talk. Which sports do you offer?”
Plough says, “Soccer, baseball, softball.”
“How many students?”
“Two-hundred twenty-five. When you get high-risk kids participating, it’s pretty cool.”
Plough and his wife attended San Diego State in the ’70s. They taught traditional ed. for two decades. Plough took the Aurora High School job ten years ago. I inquire about money.
Plough says, “My coaches don’t get any help from the [Calexico Unified School] district. We generate all the money. Other schools get budgeted for their athletic programs. I get my coaches paid for, and that’s about it.”
“Do you have fundraisers?”
“The kids do a few, helps offset the cost of transportation. We’ve gotten some donations for uniforms. We’re in the Frontier League, San Diego CIF, and compete against small private schools like High Tech High.”
“The commute over the hill must be fun.”
“It’s two hours each way. I don’t come back every night. I live in Ramona.”
“Do you have a gym and showers?”
“No, but I have a nice-sized field on campus that the kids can practice on and play soccer. When baseball season comes, we have to scrounge around to find a place to practice and play our games. Soccer, we sometimes get cooperation from Calexico High School — which is our feeder school — and use their fields.”
“How many continuation schools are there in San Diego County?”
“There are 521 in the state,” Plough says. “One of the things people don’t realize about alternative ed. — that includes continuation schools, community day schools, et cetera — is that they affect 500,000 kids a year.”
I am one of those people. “Let’s get back to your sports.”
“One boy ran cross-country this year.”
I laugh, “That’s great.” The Box offers sincere congratulations to that noble runner.
“It’s easy for us to be folded into cross-country meets because it’s just one extra kid running. We also have boys’ and girls’ soccer.”
“How’s that going?”
“It’s going fairly well. We went to a tournament in Yuma, and they placed third. They’re just getting ready for league play now. I think we have a soccer game on the 25th or 26th.” (Daily San Diego Soccer News projects the Aurora High School boys’ soccer team as finishing third in the six-team Frontier League. Aurora finished 2007 at 12-4.)
I say, “That sense of being a winner must be pretty thrilling for them.”
“Well, it is. The part that is shocking for folks — we didn’t [win] this year, but the last two years we won the Sportsmanship Award at the Yuma Tournament, which is put on by the Catholic school over there. These kids are supposed to be pains in the butts, but if you can get them to understand the dynamics of athletics, you can get them to take a different view on how to behave.”
“How do the other schools treat you? Do you get any, ‘Gads, we’re playing hoodlums.’?”
“No. Some of the private schools we play in San Diego are your rich kids. Their first thought is, Oh. And then they see our kids and they look like teenagers. They’re not thugs, and they play a good game of soccer. Athletes forget all that other stuff.”
“How do you recruit coaches? You only have a couple paid coaches, right?”
“Right. I got one of my young teachers to start the soccer program a few years back. We have a teacher that comes in and does a drug-and-alcohol program. That gentleman has volunteered to take over the baseball program.
“The kids would love to have a basketball team. I haven’t found anyone who wants to jump out and say they want to coach. We’re working on it.”
Something still bothers me. I ask, “Where do they shower and change clothes after practice?”
“They change in the classroom. They shower when the get home.”
Readers wishing to coach basketball can reach Dan Plough at 760-768-3940. | <urn:uuid:00c01b72-69cb-4260-93ac-2ff56651bf25> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2009/jan/14/continuation-school-sports/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962183 | 1,223 | 1.679688 | 2 |
21 Feb 2012 by Jim Fickett.
Part of the Greek bailout deal agreed today was a restructuring of debt held by private parties. Although this was described as “voluntary”, it was really, of course, a partial default. Since many other nations have unsustainable debt, it is worth seeing how this potential precedent was structured. The Financial Times reports:
the [face value] haircut investors will have to take was increased from 50 to 53.5 per cent in the early hours of Tuesday morning after more than 12 hours of negotiations. …
The latest official debt sustainability study on Greece assumes 95 per cent of investors will participate in what is being sold as a “voluntary deal”.
In private, large bondholders say the take-up is likely to be high, if only because the alternative of a full-blown Greek default is so bad. But none are willing to guarantee a participation rate, which will depend on Greece’s ability to squeeze investor holdouts through collective action clauses.
These allow the decision of a supermajority, often about 70 per cent, to be imposed on all other investors.
“This deal is clearly at the absolute limit of what can be called voluntary,” said one large European bondholder. …
The bond swap would eliminate €100bn in Greek debt if all of the estimated €200bn in private holdings takes part in the deal, due to close in mid-March ahead of a large Greek bond redemption on March 20.
Bondholders will receive new debt with substantially lower interest rates of 2 per cent for the first three years, 3 per cent for the next five, and 4.2 per cent after that. Analysts estimate the net present value loss for investors will be close to 75 per cent.
But some investors are playing up parts of the deal that would allow them to benefit from any recovery in Greece.
Mr Dallara [chief negotiator], talking about growth trackers that would pay higher interest rates in the case of stronger growth, said: “I may be in the minority but I think Greece can pull it round. No sovereign has had €100bn lifted off its back in a couple of weeks and this has just happened.”
So investors are having their arms twisted to participate, and will lose, through a combination of writedowns in face value and below-market interest rates, about 75%. Keep that in mind as other sovereign debt dramas unfold. | <urn:uuid:36d92ae9-642e-4c86-a91c-576deb0e1659> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.clearonmoney.com/dw/doku.php?id=investment:commentary:2012:02:21-the_nature_of_today_s_greek_default | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964752 | 505 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Scrubbing the verbs
Russell Roberts, a Professor of Economics at George Mason University, has, in his words, “cleaned up” the first part of this Associated Press story of “opinions and overwrought verbs.” His words are in bold. And obviously, it would be wonderful if reporters stopped editorializing in news story about the fiscal situation.
Recession-battered employers eliminated 598,000 jobs in January, the most since the end of 1974,
and catapultedincreasing the unemployment rate to 7.6 percent. The grim figures were further proof that the nation’s job climate is deteriorating at an alarming clip with no end in sight.
The Labor Department’s report, released Friday, showed the
terribletoll the drawn-outrecession is having on workers and companies. It also puts even more pressure on Congress and President Barack Obama’s administration to try to revive the economy through a stimulus package and a revamped financial bailout plan, both of which aremay be nearing completion.
The latest net total of job losses was
farworse than the 524,000 that economists expected. Job reductions in November and December also were deeper than previously reported.
With cost-cutting employers in no mood to hire, the unemployment rate
boltedincreased to 7.6 percent in January, the highest since September 1992. The increase in the jobless rate from 7.2 percent in December also was worse than the 7.5 percent rate economists expected though the tenth of a percentage point difference could be treated as negligible.
All told, the economy has lost
a staggering3.6 million jobs since the recession began in December 2007. About half of this decline occurred in the past three months.
“Companies are in survival mode and are really cutting to the bone,” said economist Ken Mayland, president of ClearView Economics. “They are cutting and cutting hard now out of fear of an uncertain future.”
slashedcut 207,000 jobs in January, the largest one-month drop since October 1982, partly reflecting heavy losses at plants making autos and related parts. Construction companies got rid of 111,000 jobs. Professional and business services chopped 121,000 positions. Retailers eliminated 45,000 jobs. Leisure and hospitality axed 28,000 slots.
Those reductions swamped employment gains in education and health services, as well as in the government but I won’t bother telling you the size of these increases.
To repeat what was said a few paragraphs earlier in a trivially different way: Just in the 12 months ending January, an astonishing 3.5 million jobs have vanished, the most on record going back to 1939, although the total number of jobs has grown significantly since then which is just a confusing way of saying that as a percentage of the work force, it’s nothing close to 1939. | <urn:uuid:475ea496-4459-42ce-97de-b3fe4b6e0dd9> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.denverpost.com/thespot/2009/02/06/scrubbing-the-verbs/1652/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96583 | 598 | 1.546875 | 2 |
Please visit www.ablenews.com for the latest news on taxi accessibility.
Legislation to allow livery cabs to pick up street hails in the outer boroughs and increase the number of accessible medallions has been stalled.
The legislation was passed in June but Governor Andrew Cuomo said he will not sign the bill until several issues have been resolved, including wheelchair accessibility.
Talks fell apart in a December 7th meeting where no deal was reached. According to the New York Daily News, Cuomo wants all of the new medallions – now increased to 2,000 – to be wheelchair accessible before signing the bill.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been pushing for approval of the bill since announcing the proposal in his State of the City address in January. He expressed disappointment over its stagnation.
Edith Prentiss, chair of the Taxis For All Campaign released a statement saying, “Our understanding is that the current version of the legislation would add 15,000 non-accessible street-hail taxis, along with 2,000 accessible street-hail taxis. The result would be a completely new system that retains the unfair, illegal discrimination that wheelchair users face every day. Only one in 8.5 of street hail vehicles would be accessible. Under this plan, whether you're in Midtown Manhattan or Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, taxi after taxi would pass you by if you’re in a wheelchair.”
“Governor Cuomo must not miss this historic opportunity to make sure wheelchair users finally can get around in our city's taxis and liveries. He must stand up to those – whether in the Capitol or in City Hall – who do not believe in equal treatment for all,” Prentiss added.
Activists are awaiting a court decision from U.S. District Court Judge George B. Daniels in a class action discrimination lawsuit calling on the Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) to make all new cabs accessible. That decision is expected by late December.
The U.S. Department of Justice issued a Statement of Interest in favor of the plaintiffs. Iowa Senator Tom Harkin has also weighed in, elevating the debate to a national issue by holding a transit accessibility hearing November 17th.
“The current situation in New York City with regard to taxicab accessibility is a good illustration of the barriers and outdated attitudes that people with mobility disabilities continue to face,” Harkin said.
“I am concerned that if we allow people with disabilities to continue to be treated like second-class citizens when it comes to transportation access, we will not achieve the goals of the [Americans with Disabilities Act] and we will not open the doors to employment to everyone who can work,” he added.
The TLC has released a Request for Proposals for an accessible taxi dispatch service and plans to have the program running by March 2012. A public hearing has been scheduled for December 15th.
This article was published in the January 2012 issue of Able News. | <urn:uuid:1db6ab80-1984-41ba-ade3-047ce21adc12> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.emilyfkeller.com/portfolio/2012/01/outer-borough-taxi-plan-with-accessible-medallions-on-hold.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963063 | 620 | 1.625 | 2 |
Yesterday a motley coalition of left-wing groups operating under the name Stand For Freedom marched in New York City, ostensibly to support voting rights. A large number of groups were represented, almost more organizations than people: the NAACP, the ACLU, SEIU, CAIR, the Communist Party, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, the Hispanic Federation, the United Federation of Teachers, the Action Network, NOW, several Democratic politicians, and many more. Despite the event’s wide-ranging sponsorship, only 1,000 to 2,000 people showed up to march.
The event began with speeches outside the New York offices of Koch Industries and continued to the United Nations Plaza, where there were more speeches. Why Koch Industries? Neither the company nor its owners has taken any position on laws relating to voting procedures, and the company issued a statement pointing out that the Kochs have supported voter registration campaigns and donated to numerous civil rights organizations. No matter. The Left needs its narrative. Then, too, one could ask: why did the marchers address their appeal to the United Nations? How many of the U.N.’s member states respect their citizens’ voting rights?
A more basic question is, what are these groups complaining about? They have several grievances: the efforts on the part of more than 30 states to prevent voter fraud by requiring identification at the polls; the fact that in many states felons can’t vote; adjustments that various states are making to early voting procedures, etc.; and, apparently, the fact that voters are supposed to be citizens. Hysteria ran deep; if you didn’t know better, you would think that millions of people are being barred from the polls by policemen with truncheons and dogs. Al Sharpton, to take just one example, was his usual demagogic self:
Of course, few of the speakers acknowledged the reason why two-thirds of the states have enacted or are considering measures to counter voter fraud, and none attempted to deal with the fraud issue. They simply took it for granted that no one opposes voter fraud, or thinks that felons shouldn’t vote, for any reason other than racial animus. Some speakers went further. Here, Lilian Rodriguez Lopez, the President of the Hispanic Federation, makes the remarkable claim that there are 54 million Latinos in the U.S.–a figure well in excess of the Census Bureau’s estimate, which includes illegals–all of whom, apparently, will be voting if Ms. Lopez has her way.
The Communist Party was a welcome participant in yesterday’s march, as seems always to be the case at liberal events:
If any of the Democrats at the rally recognized the absurdity of Communists demonstrating on behalf of voting rights, they kept it to themselves. Likewise with the delegation from CAIR. Of the foreign countries from which most or all of CAIR’s financial support comes, how many permit free elections? None, I believe.
But the labor unions who provided much of the support and, one suspects, most of the meagre manpower for yesterday’s march are no less hypocritical. SEIU’s banners were prominently displayed, and representatives of SEIU and the United Federation of Teachers spoke at the rally. SEIU’s spokeswoman said:
Voting rights are being challenged all across the United States. People have died for the right to vote. We can’t just sit by and let our rights be taken from us.
This is rich, coming from an organization whose number one legislative priority is card check–abolishing the worker’s right to a secret ballot in union certification elections, so that coercion and intimidation can replace free elections. If there is a single organization in the United States as corrupt and hypocritical as our labor unions, I can’t think what it could be. | <urn:uuid:1e9b2bbe-ec37-4e23-b7d4-a697de7ecf79> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/12/voting-rights-it-all-depends.php?tsize=large&tsize=small | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708766848/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125246-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968727 | 795 | 1.65625 | 2 |
Top 7 Ways People Struggling with Anger Management Use Denial
In my experience, anger management problems are almost like an addiction in that people are very creative in finding all sorts of rationales for why they don’t At times, it can almost appear as if they are in denial about their anger management issues. Part of the reason for this is that the way our behavior looks to us on the inside can look a whole lot different to someone on the receiving end of things.
I was in denial about my anger management problem, thinking that other people were too sensitive and that it was more their problem than mine. Sometimes people are too sensitive, but when you think that pretty much everyone in your life is too sensitive (as I did), you may be in denial about the need for anger management classes.
Two things happened that shook me out of my blindness to my anger management problem. The first occurred about 15 years ago when I was doing marriage counseling and all of a sudden the wife just went off on her husband. It was just like looking at myself – she used the same tone of voice, the same language, had the same look in her eyes and the same body language that I used and I was absolutely shocked at how forceful and frightening her reaction was. But that wasn’t enough for me to realize that I had an anger management problem.
A couple of days later I was talking on the phone with a friend of mine and I raised my voice, not because I was upset, but just because of the story I was telling him. All of a sudden my dog jumped down off the chair and ran under the bed. It was then that I realized I had an anger management problem. I mean if your own dog is scared of you things are pretty bad.
So, with that in mind, lets quickly review some of the stories people with anger management problems tell themselves to minimize or justify their anger.
Anger Management Myths
1) Venting, or taking it out on others, decreases rage. This actually reinforces the neural networks associated with the anger response. Becoming angry actually makes one more likely to get angry again.
2) Strong words are necessary to get people to listen to me. Do you like it when others treat you with contempt? While someone may go along with you in the short term just to get you off their back in the long run anger management problems breed resentment and rebellion.
3) If I don’t get angry, I don’t care. Becoming upset certainly shows that you are paying attention. But does enraged really get the job done any quicker or make someone else feel like you care about them? Care can be shown with patient, disciplined attention as well as by firmness and giving of time. You can be firm without having anger management issues.
4) Someone who makes me angry is worthless and deserves what they have coming to them. When you make mistakes do you feel like you deserve to get both barrels? Dehumanizing someone just makes it easier for you not to feel bad about hurting someone’s feelings.
5) Showing less annoyance means I think the other person is right. Or, using anger management means that you are learning ways to deal with offenders more coolly, effectively, and constructively. Again, who do you respect more – someone who blasts you or someone who treats you with respect?
6) Every day brings all sorts of problems for me to deal with. This is true for all of us. Every day also brings a lot of good things too. The problem is not as much the world’s imperfections as it is what we focus on and what we tell ourselves about it that causes anger management problems.
7) Depression is anger turned inward. Actually for many depression is anger turned outward. Depressed people often show higher levels of anger and anxiety. They often struggle with anger management because its just so uncomfortable to be in their skin or because their coping resources are so depleted all they are capable of doing when stressed is lash out in anger. People struggling with anger management issues are two to three times more likely to have a psychiatric illness such as depression than those who do not struggle with anger management.
Take a different look at anger and denial by checking out our free anger management introductory class. | <urn:uuid:18b11d38-f44f-4142-9100-21a7c6c3c532> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://angermanagement.net/denial-in-anger-management-problems | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705953421/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120553-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977567 | 877 | 1.734375 | 2 |
Google Pours Chrome Into Android
Google has created a version of its Chrome Web browser specifically for the Android platform. Chrome for Android has synchronization features for sharing tabs and bookmarks across devices. However, it's only available for Android phones running Ice Cream Sandwich, and the majority of Android phones now in circulation run older versions of the software.
Google has brought its Chrome Web browser to the Android Market.
A beta edition of the browser is available from the app shop now for free, but since its operation is restricted to the latest version of the mobile operating system , Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich), only about 1 percent of Android's millions of users will be able to take the software for a test drive.
Making the browser a downloadable app means users don't have to wait for phone makers to install the browser on their hardware. On the other hand, they still have to wait for those phone makers to upgrade their handsets to Ice Cream Sandwich.
In addition to speed and simplicity, Chrome for Android beta has synchronization features that allow the user to seamlessly access tabs and bookmarks across devices. For instance, a tab open in desktop Chome can be accessed in Android Chrome. However, because that feature has privacy implications, it's turned off by default.
Privacy in the browser isn't an afterthought, but something considered by its design team from the start of the project, Google Senior Vice President for Chrome and Apps Sundar Pichai explained. Like its desktop alter ego, mobile Chrome has a private browsing mode, called "Incognito," and the ability to fine-tune privacy options.
Built From Scratch
Chrome for Android was built from scratch to accommodate the limitations of the small screen and to take advantage of the technological advances in the architecture of Ice Cream Sandwich.
The design team reimagined tabs so they fit naturally on a small-screen phone, Pichai noted. Flipping or swiping between an unlimited number of tabs was also designed to be intuitive.
The browser also tackles the annoyance of tapping links on a small screen. It has a Link Preview feature that zooms in on links and makes choosing the right one easier.
Double-Duty Address Bar
As in desktop Chrome, the address bar in the mobile browser doubles as a search bar. This not only saves on real estate, but it can also help cut down on typing because the browser makes recommendations -- gleaned from a variety of sources, including your browser cache -- as you type.
Mobile Chrome also has strong support for HTML5, including video delivered that way. That's important because the browser doesn't support Adobe Flash for mobile. HTML5 also contributes to the browser's faster performance , removing minute delays between finger flicks and screen actions.
In addition, Google is introducing in the browser debugging tools that it hopes will simplify the creation of interactive Web content and the debugging of mobile websites.
'Latest and Greatest'
The arrival of Chrome on Android is another sign that Google intends to use Android as a platform for all of its products, according to Yankee Group Research Director Carl Howe.
Aiming Chrome at Ice Cream Sandwich users makes sense to Howe. "It's a practical decision," he told LinuxInsider. "They're looking to use their latest and greatest code, not their oldest."
"Besides," he added, "Google's not the sort of company that looks back and asks, 'What about our legacy customers?'"
Mobile Chrome is also a way for Google to ready itself for the post-PC era characterized by the growth of smartphone and tablet usage, observed ABI Research Mobile Devices Analyst Michael Morgan. "They're using this browser to bridge the gaps between desktop, smartphone and tablet," he told LinuxInsider.
Users are a big winner in this new release, observed Rob Enderle, president and principal analyst for the Enderle Group. "Users want one browser experience," he told LinuxWorld. "The don't want multiple browser experiences on different devices."
"From a user perspective, this announcement is all goodness," he said. "They get a better browser." | <urn:uuid:7006ff3c-3deb-4ab1-9b09-e06dec4ca7da> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.technewsworld.com/story/74375.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948372 | 836 | 1.726563 | 2 |
Trident Literacy Association seeking families to participate in its new comprehensive literacy program
Nina and Ronald Clayton picked out crayons and helped their 3-year-old son, Jaquan, color a picture.
Who: For any primary caregiver with a preschool-age child who needs to earn a GED or WorkKeys certificate. Those who complete the program get $100.
When: Participants must commit to attending 9 a.m. until 1 p.m. Monday through Thursday, and they’re encouraged to bring their children.
More info: To participate, donate or volunteer, call Sandra Fraser at 576-9136.
They spend about an hour most days doing various activities to help them improve as their child’s first teacher.
That time is one piece of a four-hour program, four days a week during which parents work on their GEDs and WorkKeys certificates and preschool children are taught social and academic skills.
This kind of program should have a waiting list, with only 20 available spots and hundreds of eligible families. But only four families are attending regularly.
“We cannot get people to continue to come,” said Eileen Chepenik, executive director of Trident Literacy Association. “I don’t want to lose this wonderful opportunity.”
Trident Literacy Association won a $65,000 competitive, national grant from the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy. That funding enabled the North Charleston nonprofit to launch this new comprehensive literacy program in August, and it runs through May.
The grant will be automatically renewed if the association meets certain requirements, such as serving 20 families. Seventeen families enrolled in the program, but only two were present at the North Charleston site on Thursday.
Sandra Fraser, the early childhood education program director, said some families have struggled to find transportation, while others have been evicted and are trying to meet their basic life needs. Some don’t see the value, she said.
Those who have made time for the program are reaping the benefits, she said. “They’re creating a completely different path for their children for the future,” she said.
Ronald Clayton works an overnight shift at Walmart until 7 a.m., comes home to sleep for a few hours, then goes to the North Charleston site with his wife at 9 a.m. to work on his GED. He dropped out years ago, but he’s determined to improve his life now by furthering his education and getting a better job, he said. “We want our kids to know that dropping out of school is not the best course of action,” he said.
Their four older children are in public schools, and the preschool for Jaquan means both Nina and Ronald can study alongside each other. Without the grant, Trident Literacy Association couldn’t afford to offer that kind of preschool program.
When they spent time in Jaquan’s class, Nina crouched beside him and Ronald stood behind both. Jaquan used a touchscreen computer to play a memory game that required him to match pictures and letters. His parents encouraged him and clapped when he got the right answer, and they all shared high-fives.
The grant provided enough money to cover adults’ GED books, as well as materials for the preschool classroom. It also allowed Chepenik to pay for three tutors for adults, two preschool teachers and a preschool assistant. Parents also receive health and financial lessons.
Chepenik has met with community leaders to recruit participants and has gone door to door with fliers. She’s not sure what to do next.
“(The program) is so fabulous, I can’t even begin to tell you,” she said. “There are so many people who could benefit from this, but it’s just not on their radar screen.” | <urn:uuid:14f65028-6d36-43f4-8021-f98a1e63a33c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20121130/PC16/121139954/1165/trident-literacy-association-seeking-families-to-participate-in-its-new-comprehensive-literacy-program | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.9644 | 818 | 1.554688 | 2 |
The bell sounds and East Valley Middle School floods with adolescent chaos — with pre-teen murmurs, slammed lockers, playful punches.
Seventh-grader Hannah Smith finds middle school fun but isn’t a fan of the social drama, the verbal bullying and the glares. For sixth-grader Drew Ness, the transition to middle school was “confusing” — what with all the choices and new students.
“When you first come here, you’re the smallest,” eighth-grader Ian Spendlove says.
“You’re terrified.” Within a few months, though, he loved it.
But soon, “middle school” — as a location, as a concept — will be eliminated from the East Valley School District.
After a whirlwind year, the school board has mandated the closure of East Valley Middle School and Mountain View Middle School. In a few years, East Valley elementary schools will stretch from preschool all the way through eighth grade.
To improve education, Superintendent John Glenewinkel believes, East Valley needed a seismic change. And a seismic change he got, with all the loud, earthshaking, community-fracturing tremors that come with it.
MAKING HIS CASE
Glenewinkel has only been superintendent for three years, but already he’s made enemies. “They see me as a bully,” he says of some of his critics, as he sits in his office. On his desk is a copy of the book Switch: How to Change When Change is Hard. “They see me, frankly, as tilting at windmills. ‘Give him time and he’ll burn himself out.’” It’s not hard to imagine how some could be intimidated by the East Valley superintendent — a large, bearded Texas native.
But others, he says, see him as demonstrating “enormous courage and fortitude.” Glenewinkel freely hands out his home phone number. He engages his opponents with lengthy e-mails and personal meetings.
Yeah, change is hard. But in a July newsletter, Glenewinkel laid out the statistical case for a major change: Only 76 percent of East Valley students graduate, only 53 percent go to college and — eight years after graduation — only about 25 percent had a college degree. Worse, Glenewinkel believes that number is trending downward.
True, East Valley’s standardized test scores are solid in writing, and improving in science. But East Valley Middle School has failed the last three years to achieve the federally required “adequate yearly progress” on its standardized math tests.
Last year, only about 36 percent of East Valley 10th-grade students met the state standard for math.
Meanwhile, the past four East Valley school bonds have failed. Blame declining enrollment, or 1999’s Kaiser layoffs, but the community hasn’t approved a bond since 1996. The state said six out of eight East Valley schools were in need of major renovation — four years ago.
But with East Valley’s educational struggles, “it makes no sense to ask voters for a new building to do the same thing,” Glenewinkel says. He needed to offer them change.
To decide what that change would look like, Glenewinkel created three advisory committees last February: one for high school, one for middle school, and one for elementary. At the very first meeting, Glenewinkel asked the middle school “re-visioning” committee, “Do we need middle school?” The leap from elementary to middle school is one of the riskiest moments in a student’s academic career, Glenewinkel argues.
A National Association of School Psychologists study reports dangers of decreased academic self-esteem, social confidence and parent involvement in middle school. That’s precisely the time when the close community of an elementary school could help, Glenewinkel says. Fewer kids would fall between the cracks, in other words, if there were fewer cracks.
Nationwide, there are only about 5,000 K-8 schools, but they’ve become one of the hottest new educational trends. Schools in New York, Chicago and Philadelphia are switching over. While comparisons can be inexact, one study found that freshman students who had attended middle schools received grades that were, on average, two full points lower than those who had attended K-8 schools.
Yet research shows that smaller schools — while they have fewer electives — improve graduation rates, attendance and teacher collaboration. And restructuring East Valley’s elementary schools would actually add 216 news students to each. (Glenewinkel argues that the size of the new schools would be optimal.)
In June 2010, the middle school committee refused, by a 3-7 vote, to recommend ditching middle school for a pre-K-8 model. But the elementary committee supported it, and the school board officially mandated the pre-K-8 model at a school board meeting on Jan. 4.
TEACHERS ARE UNCERTAIN
East Valley’s high school and middle school principals support the changes. But opinion among faculty is mixed. A union survey of 106 teachers found 55 percent wanted the district to “abandon re-visioning,” and 53 percent did not trust that the outcome would be positive for students.
Some of the anonymous survey comments accused the survey of bias. Others comments indicated bitter division.
From one anonymous teacher: “They are going to do what they want regardless. What is the point of ‘re-vision’ when the ones in power are blind?” For some, there have been consequences. A secretary was suspended for two days and required to write a formal retraction after she accused the board, in a Facebook post, of illegal activity.
But Norma Woodward, a second-grade teacher at East Falls elementary, says things have calmed down lately.
“I commend [Glenewinkel] for wanting to at least try something and get a good outcome,” Woodward says. She thinks the changes will bring about a crucial shift in atmosphere for students in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades.
East Valley Middle School language-arts teacher Julie Scott, however, worries that if the restructuring is a failure — and she believes it will be — it will be almost impossible to roll back.
“If he thinks this is the model to go to, then pilot it,” Scott says. She suggests changing only a few schools to pre-K-8, and leaving one middle school. But Glenewinkel says the idea was too complicated, logistically, for allocating resources and assigning students.
“It’s pitting parents against administration. Teachers against parents. Principals against parents,” says parent Stacy Montoya.
But this article may be the first some East Valley parents have heard about the plans. Scott points out that the district never mailed out any informative postcards. (In an e-mail to an opponent of restructuring, Glenewinkel said mailing information to all 10,000 voters in the district was deemed too expensive.) Instead, Scott says, handouts were sent home with students, who likely wadded them up in the bottoms of their backpacks and never showed them to parents.
“It’s pitting parents against administration. Teachers against parents. Principals against parents.”
Many parents who have heard about the plan are nervous about the impact older kids would have on younger ones.
“My [middle school-age] kids came home shocked about what they were hearing in school,” says Montoya. “Having a third grader … I can’t imagine them with the older kids.”
Similarly, the five students we talked to at East Valley Middle School all separately expressed the same concern: Some middle school kids cuss. They bully. They do drugs. Should little kids be exposed to that?
But parent Lynette Romney argues these troubled older kids will be influenced in positive ways by the younger ones.
“I’ve worked with the alternative middle school kids at the community garden. There was a girl who could not go three minutes without using the F-bomb,” she says. But then she gave that girl the responsibility to help out younger kids and immediately her behavior improved.
There is a loyal contingent of supportive parents — Glenewinkel says he recently went to a PTA meeting at which attendees wholeheartedly supported the idea. Then there are the frustrated parents, the ones who flood the “East Valley — Citizens for Accountable Education” Facebook Group with multiple posts a day, arguing against restructuring.
Sure enough, at the Jan. 4 school board meeting, they were there, waving protest signs. Glenewinkel says one community member left the meeting feeling frightened for her safety and her kids. He reports whispers of recall petitions to remove board members, of a pledge of $5,000 dollars for a campaign to challenge the $33-million school bond needed to ready the schools for K-8.
Glenewinkel agrees that the vote on the upcoming bond can give insight into how many people support his changes. But even if the bond doesn’t pass, he says, the reform will still go through — to the chagrin of some parents.
“We’re going to see about that,” Montoya says. “Groups like us are going to have to grow in such huge numbers they’re going to have to listen to us.”
But the district is out of options, Glenewinkel says, and there’s no doubt in his mind that, with this reform, he’s right. Still, he knows it may cost him his job.“Superintendents and educators are always talking about the hill they’re willing to die on, but they never seem to find it,” Glenewinkel says. “This is the hill I’m sorta willing to die on.” | <urn:uuid:1b8759b9-f1b5-43cb-92e7-3205064f6efb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.inlander.com/spokane/article-16063-schools-out-forever.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.95946 | 2,124 | 1.59375 | 2 |
| February 03, 2011
Terex glider reman
What it takes to turn an aging front discharge concrete mixer into a good-as-new machine
By Tom Jackson
In the current construction economy, some ready mix producers are reluctant to buy new mixer trucks at full price. But, as their fleet ages, it requires more and more repairs, suffers more downtime and ultimately produces less income for the owner. What’s the producer to do?
One solution is to look into the reman programs being offered by some OEMs. In these programs the dealer or OEM takes your used machine and rebuilds the critical components to good-as-new-condition for a cost that’s considerably less than new – up to 40 percent less than a new machine. You get almost all the productivity and life of a new machine and eliminate the frequent disruption and cost of unscheduled repairs.
To get a better idea of how these programs work we talked with Jim Aslin, an equipment specialist with the Terex concrete producer group. Aslin walked us through the process of ‘glidering’ a front discharge mixer truck.
“The ideal candidate is a donor truck in the 10- to 12-year-old category,” Aslin says. “The reasoning is that we are going to get a second round out of the major components, say another eight to nine years, and at that point, more than likely, the major components will reach their point of being obsolete and be ready for retirement.”
Another significant economic advantage of glider trucks vs. new is the avoidance of Federal Excise Tax if the process is managed within defined guidelines. For example, the cost of the glider must be less than 75 percent of the cost of a similarly specified new truck. This cost savings often exceeds $10,000.
“In all cases, we must re-use the original tandem driving axles,” Aslin says. “Also, we must re-use either the original transmission and/or the original engine. One of those two major components may be a reman but not both. The reman component cannot go back in time. It must be equal in year of manufacture to that of the donor truck or a newer upgrade. The other component can be rebuilt.”
The typical glider truck is rebuilt on the same factory line where the new trucks are built in Fort Wayne, Indiana; however, ready mix producers with sufficient facilities and mechanics may opt to do the teardown or rebuilds themselves. The most commonly reused components include the engine, transmission, transfer case, drive axles, wheels and tires, drum drive transmission and hydrostatic pump and motor for the drum.
Aslin says customers can send them most any brand of mixer truck and the factory will use those components to create a Terex glider truck.
Here’s a checklist of the typical components sought for the Terex glider and their criteria:
• Engine. Look for horsepower to equal the rest of your fleet.
• Transmission. Automatic is preferred but manuals can be upgraded to automatic.
• Tandem axles. Requires a 46,000-pound rating, but you can reuse 40,000-pound axles in a limited number of configurations.
• Front axle. Requires a currently manufactured axle with a minimum rating of 21,000 pounds with S-cam brakes.
• Mixer drum. This is replaced with a new drum.
• Hydraulics. The main pump and motor may be reused or upgraded to new depending on condition. All other hydraulic components will be new.
• Air system. Replaced with all new components with the exception of a customer supplied engine air compressor. A reman or rebuilt engine will have a reman compressor.
• Drum drive. Can be reused as is, exchanged for a factory rebuilt or purchased new with no core necessary.
• Frame. This will be built new to engineering specs that coincide with the axle configuration.
• Wiring. All new.
• Suspensions. All new. (Aslin emphasizes that while some customers want to re-use tandem axle suspensions, Terex cautions against it.)
• Wheels and tires. The best choice is hub piloted wheel rims. Dayton cast spoke open center are acceptable. Stud piloted are the least desirable. Customer supplied tires are fine.
• Transfer case. Terex suggests reusing, but the customer may elect to purchase new.
• Auxiliary axles. New and included in the price. Customer may elect to supply his own wheels and tires for the auxiliary axles.
• Additional components. New drivelines, steering box and steering pump, new cooling package including radiator, transmission cooler and charge air cooler if applicable.
Evaluation and disassembly
Terex gives the customer the option of doing the disassembly or having the factory do the work. If the customer does the work, Terex supplies the teardown instructions. “The customer knows the component history best and must be the judge as to determining the use of major components,” Aslin says. The components will be inspected again at the factory.
Customers can also opt to do their own reassembly with a kit supplied by the factory. The basic glider kit includes a plumbed box frame drilled to accept auxiliary axles, dressed cab, steering gear with new front suspension and a roller pedestal with rollers.
Aslin cautions that there is a steep learning curve to rebuilding one of these mixers. You need dedicated shop personnel with a high level of skills, overhead lifting capability and a sufficiently sized spray booth and painting equipment. Only about 10 percent of ready mix producers opt for the kit route.
When the Terex factory handles all the work it takes about six weeks for tear down, parts inventory, cleaning and inspection in preparation to go onto the assembly line, Aslin says. Subject to the availability of a production line slot, it will take another four weeks for assembly, testing, paint and final inspection.
The customer can drive the truck to the factory, have it sent on a lowbed trailer, or disassemble it and send the donor components only. The warranty is one year, bumper to bumper, with the exception of any customer supplied components.
Emissions and retrofits
Since new trucks as of last year are required to have expensive diesel emissions systems on them, the cost difference between a glider truck and new is even greater. Compared to new trucks with the EPA 2010 compliant engines, the typical glider truck will range in cost at 50 to 65 percent of a new truck, Aslin says.
Glider trucks aside, engine repowers have been done on some types of trucks and off-road equipment in areas of the country where air pollution restrictions call for it. But, putting a diesel engine with selective catalytic reduction (SCR) technology into an older truck is impractical. “That integration involves additional fuel tanks, pumps, heated fuel lines and additional computer ECU upgrades that would be cost prohibitive,” Aslin says.
Aftermarket exhaust filtration devices such as diesel oxidation catalysts (DOCs) and diesel particulate filters (DPFs), however, can be added to a glider truck to help meet local emissions regulations. EW | <urn:uuid:1ba10042-e095-468f-ab8b-cca283bec09e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.equipmentworld.com/rebuilt-machinery/?pg=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936851 | 1,515 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Swiss Institute Spins Out Human mAb Therapeutics Firm
Humabs will exploit discovery platforms to generate drugs for infectious and inflammatory diseases.
Monoclonal antibody therapeutics firm Humabs has been officially spun out out from the Institute for Research in Biomedicine in Bellinzona, Switzerland. The new firm aims to exploit its antibody discovery platforms to generate a pipeline of fully human mAbs targeting infectious and inflammatory disease.
Humabs was founded to further develop two antibody platforms aimed at rapidly and efficiently isolating high affinity, fully human mAbs from memory B cells and plasma cells. The platform involves the screening of cells from high responders to identify those that produce antibodies with unique specificity. Humab says the platforms have already generated a bank of over 500 antibody-producing cells.
The firm’s preclinical pipeline includes over 200 antibodies that have demonstrated strong efficacy both in vitro and in vivo against viruses including cytomegalovirus, HIV, influenza, Dengue virus, heptiatis B and C, and rabies. A paper published in Science last month by Humab researchers described the isolation of a neutralizing mAb, designated F16, which targets all 16 hemagglutinin subtypes of influenza A.
Humab is currently in discussions with potential partners for F16 and has already licensed out its cytomegalovirus antibodies. Additional R&D collaborations with industry partners are in place. The firm has established its laboratories close to the IRB and will continue to maintain close links with the Institute to support its scientific expertise and access to facilities. | <urn:uuid:3c7030f3-724f-4a40-bafe-b288d823962c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.genengnews.com/keywordsandtools/print/4/24312/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00040-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.939948 | 322 | 1.726563 | 2 |
The Romulan Astrophysical Academy was an institution within the Romulan Star Empire.
It was highest ranking Romulan institution of academic and scholarly pursuits within the Star Empire. The academy was formed a thousand years ago as the Imperial College of Sciences and served as the state's research as well as development facility which trained future generations of scientists. A network of other institutions were linked to the academy and coordinated their studies from genetics and medicine to geology and even other disciplines. Despite this being the case, the astrophysical sciences were the mainstay of Romulan scientific endeavors. By use of the academy, D'era was given a scientific forum and provided a means through which the Romulans could achieve their aims.
The Academy was located in a heavily fortified space station in orbit around Romulus and was one of the more secretive institutions within the Empire. Only individuals that possessed the highest clearance were allowed to visit or work at the Academy due to the fact that most of its work was classified. Anyone that divulged experiments from the Academy committed an act of treason which was punishable by death. Whilst the Academy was located in orbit, there were a number of satelitte campuses and laboratories that were located on the planet Romulis itself and handled instructions as well as more public operations.
Due to the nature of its work, the Academy often worked closely with the military where they provided the technology that was needed to matain as well as expand the Empire. The Academicians were constantly developing, examining and even testing technology from cloaking devices, alternate methods of achieving warp power as well as a number of weapons from hand held ones to ship variants. All these developments meant that the Academy was closely guarded from threats of Federation, Klingon or even Taurhai spies. (Last Unicorn RPG module: The Way of D'era: The Romulan Star Empire)
Several researchers from the Astrophysical Academy were placed at Memory Alpha who made regular reports to Exploration Command of the Romulan Star Navy and even sent information to the Tal Shiar. (Decipher RPG module: Worlds)
|This article or section is incomplete|
|This article is marked as lacking essential detail, and needs attention. Information regarding expansion requirements may be found on the article's talk page. Feel free to edit this page to assist with this expansion.| | <urn:uuid:907269e4-ec47-4584-ae7c-6ef7fd08cfc2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/Romulan_Astrophysical_Academy | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.983831 | 475 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Look at this guy, Opanin Gyaami, right here: he's a dentist, he's 71 years old, and he's still repaying his student loans, from the 1980s! When you see a wacky case like this, it's natural to ask yourself, "Ignoring the fact that Mr. Gyaami is a bad example because his debt is largely due to the fact that he ignored repayment notices for an extended period of time, can we use this wacky story as a 'news hook' to humanize a larger, newsworthy trend?" The answer is: "Yes we can." The trend is that your parents are probably broke, thanks to you.
The government has released some new, heartstring-tugging info on the old parents who believed in you enough to take out huge loans to finance your college education, only to find out that you did not grow up to be rich and famous, probably because of poor parenting. Roll that nut graf, New York Times:
In the first three months of this year, the number of borrowers of student loans age 60 and older was 2.2 million, a figure that has tripled since 2005. That makes them the fastest-growing age group for college debt. All told, those borrowers owed $43 billion, up from $8 billion seven years ago, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
And hundreds of thousands of those old borrowers can't afford to pay those loans back. Imagine the guilt. Just imagine it. Your loving parent, laid financially low by their very belief in your future. And, perhaps, by our nation's spigot of all too easy student debt. (For two varieties of "examples to personalize this abstract story," see here and here.) When the student loan mafia comes for your mom, remember: this is, ultimately, your fault. | <urn:uuid:5cdca8ca-fe10-4f97-b13c-5ec5e1b9a8a5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://gawker.com/5959726/your-parents-took-out-loans-for-your-education-and-now-theyre-broke | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970669 | 383 | 1.765625 | 2 |
Recent rises in interest rates have left their mark on the bond mutual funds in which Americans invest and choices in the home mortgage market.
The impact of rates is extensive.
Many tax-exempt municipal bond funds have seen more than 10 percent of their total fund assets pulled out by nervous investors. That`s because rising interest rates sent the value of investor holdings in such funds skidding. Higher rates mean older low-interest bonds held in the funds are now worth less.
``Over the past several years, municipal bond funds have been going like gangbusters in a hot bond market,`` explained Robert Zubak, manager of the top-performing Van Kampen Merritt Tax-Free High Income Fund, which has suffered fewer redemptions than most. ``Some investors started thinking of them like money-market funds, but the recent panic points out that long-term bond funds can be volatile, and investor principal is directly affected by interest rates.``
A number of lending institutions, their mortgage rates up a full percentage point to the double-digit level, are seeing homebuyers look more favorably at adjustable-rate mortgages of less than 8 percent. These loans, which are adjusted annually, didn`t look as good when fixed-rate 30-year mortgages were less than 9 percent. Adjustables are best for buyers who don`t expect to stay in the home for too many years. They`re not for senior citizens who can`t handle the risk of increased mortgage payments.
``We expect mortgage rates to ease downward, though only a fraction and not to a level as low as in early March,`` predicted Mark Obrinsky, economist with the U.S. League of Savings Institutions. ``We then see a slow pattern of gradual increases in rates, for the economy isn`t really strong enough to sustain any truly major rise.``
There`s little need to worry if you`re seeking a mortgage, Obrinsky said, since rates aren`t likely to move up all that fast or that far.
In regard to popular municipal bond funds, the fund companies say investors pulling out money are frequently switching into the more stable tax- exempt money-market funds or less aggressive, shorter-term municipal bond funds. The municipal funds that had been the strongest performers in the last several years have been hammered the hardest in the rate rise, since they hold long-term bonds with durations of 20 years or more.
``We`d been expecting higher interest rates in 1987 and anticipate them to possibly slip a bit before moving higher by yearend,`` said William T. Reynolds, manager of the T. Rowe Price Tax-Free High-Yield Fund. ``Since bond investments will be volatile, at this point investors fearful of volatility should consider shifting some of their money into shorter-term funds.``
Recent rate movement points out that investors should remain diversified in their holdings, with some money in short-term instruments and the rest in more aggressive long-term choices, advised Zubak of Van Kampen Merritt. Investors who put money into aggressive municipal bond funds toward the end of last year have probably lost money in terms of asset value, since most funds saw asset values slip 6 percent or more as interest rates took a jump.
``The current income exempt from federal tax is still strong with these funds,`` Zubak noted. ``You must simply consider the fact that, while the bond market has been the hot hand in funds in the 1980s, it now perhaps is time for stock funds to be the hot hand.``
The top five municipal bond funds in ``total return`` of both interest and bond value over the last 12 months (through the first quarter of this year, prior to recent declines in value), according to Lipper Analytical Services, were:
Van Kampen Merritt Tax-Free High Income, Naperville, Ill., a ``load`` fund requiring initial sales charge, up 13.96 percent; United Municipal High Income Fund, Kansas City, Mo., load, up 13.30 percent; T. Rowe Price Tax-Free High- Yield Fund, no-load, Baltimore, up 13.10 percent; Vanguard Municipal Bond FundHigh Yield, Valley Forge, Pa., no-load, up 12.29 percent; and Fidelity Aggressive Tax-Free Fund, Boston, no-load, up 12.15 percent. | <urn:uuid:83e3e6f7-e46a-4d35-b6b6-1262e08984f4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1987-05-05/business/8701280796_1_municipal-bond-funds-shorter-term-funds-money-market-funds | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942718 | 899 | 1.585938 | 2 |
REVELO, Ky. — Some of the best loop hikes Adam Brimer and I have profiled for this column over the past four years have been in the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area, a 120,000-acre tract in Tennessee and Kentucky that protects some of the most dramatic scenery on the Cumberland Plateau.We've already hiked the Honey Creek Loop and the Twin Arches Loop — two of the most park's most popular trails — and for this month's hike, we did the 6.4-mile Blue Heron Loop on the Kentucky side of the Big South Fork.
Without question, this was one of the most interesting and enjoyable hikes we've done. The loop features two of the Big South Fork's best river gorge overlooks, and, in addition, the trail passes through the Blue Heron visitor complex, a coal mining exhibit inside the park that serves as the terminus for the Big South Fork Scenic Railway.
The Blue Heron Loop has numerous access points, but the trail head we recommend is the first parking area on the road leading to the Devil's Jump and Blue Heron overlooks. This moderately difficult hike is well-marked both with signs and with green, plastic trail blazes tacked to the trees.
From the parking lot a short path enters the woods and descends just a few yards before connecting to the main loop trail. To hike the Blue Heron Loop counterclockwise, bear right at the sign. In .7 miles the hiking trail joins a paved walkway that leads to the Devil's Jump overlook. Approximately 600 feet below the overlook is the Big South Fork of the Cumberland River, the park's main river artery. Across the gorge you'll see sandstone bluffs towering above the river, and below you'll hear the rushing water of Devil's Jump, a Class IV whitewater rapid.
Howard Duncan, long-time ranger with the Big South Fork, said he believed the name Devil's Jump harks back to the early logging days when log rafts were floated down river during high water. The men who piloted the rafts were called "raft devils," and when they came to the treacherous narrows, they often jumped ship.
One-half mile from the Devil's Jump overlook is the Blue Heron overlook. The overlook is located at the end of a 775-foot spur trail that ascends to the right off the main trail. Four years ago the wooden pavilion near the bluff was struck by lightning and burned to the ground, but the overlook's basic infrastructure remains intact.
From the Blue Heron Overlook the loop trail starts to descend from the ridge to the bottom of the river gorge. A wooden step ladder takes you down through a notch in the bluff, and a short way farther (1.4 miles from the trailhead), the trail reaches an enormous cleft in the sandstone caprock called Crack-in-the-Rock. Inside the cave-like passage is a set of stairs that crosses a boulder pile. At the apex of the steps, take time to gaze up at the sky framed by the narrow opening overhead.
After Crack-in-the-Rock, the trail continues to drop into the main river gorge. Just under two miles into the hike the trail reaches the mining community of Blue Heron, one of two areas in the Big South Fork that have undergone major development. Blue Heron — also known as Mine 18 — was operated by the Stearns Coal and Lumber Company from 1937 to 1962. Back then, hundreds of people lived and worked in this isolated community along the banks of the Big South Fork River. Today, the only intact structure is the abandoned coal tipple that cost a whopping $250,000 in its day. Elsewhere, the original buildings are represented as metal shells — called ghost structures — accompanied by photographs, household items from the mining community, and audio recordings of the residents describing daily life in a remote mining camp.
From Blue Heron, it's another 4.5 miles to complete the 6.4-mile loop.
At the edge of the mining community the trail turns from pavement to dirt as it passes by the canoe launch. At this point you'll be hiking through a forest of big beech and hemlock trees beside the same stretch of river you observed from the overlooks earlier in the hike.
At mile 2.8 the trail crosses a flat, scrubby area along the river where the Stearns Coal and Lumber Company dumped the shale left over from the coal mining. After climbing several switchbacks, the trail reaches a set of log steps. Take a right at the top of the steps. This segment of the hiking trail overlaps a horse trail along an old narrow-gauge electric tramway bed that accessed a series of coal mines upriver from Blue Heron. The coal seam and collapsed mine openings will be at the base of the cliff face on your left. In 2011 the National Park Service closed the mines for safety reasons. In some places, you'll see how they rigged steel gates across the mine openings to let bats come and go.
After hiking .2 miles on the tram road, bear right at the sign to get back on the hiking-only trail. This segment of the hike rejoins the Big South Fork River, which is studded with huge boulders. After .9 miles the hiking trail merges with the horse trail. To continue the Blue Heron Loop, turn left and climb the steps to begin a series of switchbacks that climb out of the gorge.
At 4.8 miles into the loop the trail forks at a trail sign, where you bear left (the right fork leads to the Blue Heron Campground). From here, it's 1.6 miles back to the trailhead parking area.
Directions from Knoxville: Drive to Oneida, Tenn., via I-75 north, State Rt. 63, and U.S. Highway 27. Fourteen miles north of Oneida is Pine Knot, Ky., where you'll turn left at the pedestrian bridge over the highway onto KY 1651. After a quarter-mile, bear right to stay on KY 1651. After three miles, turn left at the Revelo, Ky., post office onto KY 742 following the National Park Service sign to Blue Heron. After 5.7 miles, bear left onto the road to the Blue Heron overlook. The trailhead parking area is .4 miles on the left. | <urn:uuid:708ee738-92eb-4e46-923c-2a476a317acc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2012/nov/01/hike-of-the-month-blue-heron-loop-offers-both/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.949422 | 1,329 | 1.632813 | 2 |
By ADAM ENTOUS
The Obama administration is set to notify Congress of plans to offer advanced aircraft to Saudi Arabia worth up to $60 billion, the largest U.S. arms deal ever, and is in talks with the kingdom about potential naval and missile-defense upgrades that could be worth tens of billions of dollars more.
The administration plans to tout the $60 billion package as a major job creator—supporting at least 75,000 jobs, according to company estimates—and sees the sale of advanced fighter jets and military helicopters to key Middle Eastern ally Riyadh as part of a broader policy aimed at shoring up Arab allies against Iran.
The talks between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia have been widely known for months, but many new details are only now coming into focus. These include the number and type of aircraft involved, how much the Saudis intend to spend in an initial installment, and the ongoing negotiations to also upgrade the kingdom's navy and missile defenses.
The $60 billion in fighter jets and helicopters is the top-line amount requested by the Saudis, even though the kingdom is likely to commit initially to buying only about half that amount.
In a notification to Congress, expected to be submitted this week or next, the administration will authorize the Saudis to buy as many as 84 new F-15 fighters, upgrade 70 more, and purchase three types of helicopters—70 Apaches, 72 Black Hawks and 36 Little Birds, officials said.
The notification triggers a congressional review. Lawmakers could push for changes or seek to impose conditions, and potentially block the deal, though that is not expected.
On top of the $60 billion package of fighter jets and helicopters, U.S. officials are discussing a potential $30 billion package to upgrade Saudi Arabia's naval forces. An official described these as "discreet, bilateral conversations" in which no agreement has yet been reached. That deal could include littoral combat ships, surface vessels intended for operations close to shore, the official said.
Talks are also underway to expand Saudi Arabia's ballistic-missile defenses. The U.S. is encouraging the Saudis to buy systems known as THAAD—Terminal High Altitude Defense—and to upgrade its Patriot missiles to reduce the threat from Iranian rockets. U.S. officials said it was unclear how much this package would be worth.
Made on Main St.
Companies that produce systems or key components in the proposed Saudi arms sale:
- AH-64D Apache Longbow helicopter
Boeing (Mesa, Ariz.)
Northrop Grumman (Linthicum, Md.)
Lockheed Martin (Oswego, N.Y.)
- UH-60 Black Hawk
United Technologies (Stratford, Conn.)
General Electric (Lynn, Mass.)
Boeing (St. Louis, Mo.)
U.S. Army; Boeing fact sheet
The U.S. has sought to build up missile defense across the region, and the Saudi package could be similar to one in the United Arab Emirates, officials said. THAAD is built by Lockheed Martin Corp. and Raytheon Co. supplies the system's radar. THAAD is the first system designed to defend against short- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles both inside and outside the Earth's atmosphere. It complements the lower-aimed Patriot missile defense system, providing a layered defense.
Lockheed officials have stated that they see serious export potential for the system in the Middle East, where a major concern exists about Iran's ballistic missile development.
The prospect for job growth could help build support in Congress for the $60 billion package, officials said. "It's a big economic sale for the U.S. and the argument is that it is better to create jobs here than in Europe," said one person close to the talks.
Boeing Co., which makes the F-15s, the Apaches and the Little Birds, believes the Saudi package would directly or indirectly support 77,000 jobs across 44 states. It is unclear how many jobs, if any, would be supported by the Saudi purchase of Black Hawks, made by Sikorsky. Production levels are already high at Sikorsky, which is owned by United Technologies Co.
The Saudis in recent years have broadened their acquisitions to include more European- and Russian-made weaponry. That thinking was partially behind Riyadh's 2007 deal to purchase dozens of Eurofighter fighter planes from BAE Systems PLC, Saudi officials said.
Pro-Israel lawmakers have voiced concerns in the past about arms sales to Saudi Arabia that they say may undercut Israel's military edge and provide support to a government with a poor human rights record.
U.S. officials say the Israelis are increasingly comfortable with the Saudi sale because the planes won't have certain long-range weapons systems. Also, the Israelis are in line to buy a more advanced fighter, the F-35, and should begin to receive them around the same time the Saudis are expected to start getting the F-15s. "We appreciate the administration's efforts to maintain Israel's qualitative military edge, and we expect to continue to discuss our concerns with the administration about the issues," said Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the U.S.
The senior U.S. defense official said it was unclear what pieces of equipment in the $60 billion package the Saudis may decide not to purchase, but he described the F-15s as a priority item. "It's conceivable that the Saudis could come back for the whole $60 billion," the official said, but added, "They're balancing their own defense priorities."
The $60 billion deal will be stretched out over five to 10 years, depending on production schedules, training, and infrastructure improvements, officials said.
Anthony Cordesman, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the deal is so large and so complex, that changes are inevitable.
"The actual contract often is renegotiated because the Saudis are always going to push, we're always going to push, the Congress is going to push, the manufacturer is going to push. This is not the kind of negotiation where you've really agreed on the final details until you actually have put the final contract out," he said.—Nathan Hodge contributed to this article. | <urn:uuid:7060da4e-9e18-455c-842b-b43f86a04614> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704621204575488361149625050.html?mod=europe_home | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.957845 | 1,296 | 1.546875 | 2 |
By Michael Goldstein
By Dennis Romero
By Sarah Fenske
By Matthew Mullins
By Patrick Range McDonald
By LA Weekly
By Dennis Romero
By Simone Wilson
THE RUMOR IS THAT UPON seeing proposed designs for downtown’s long-awaited Civic Park, Eli Broad — the developer who made billions of dollars smothering miles of open space with Kaufman and Broad tract homes — said, “Can’t it just be grass?”
(Click to enlarge)
$30 million in housing money for the poor is being diverted to jam the new park with cement and bizarre, man-made shade.
Can’t it be grass, indeed.
When Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, County Supervisor Gloria Molina and other powerful local leaders faced the delicate task of convincing Angelenos that the private Grand Avenue luxury hotel and shopping complex deserved $95 million in public subsidies, the biggest selling point was this: The project included the very first open, green public park in L.A.’s cluttered, crammed and uninviting Civic Center.
Today, any public gathering must take place on the cramped South Lawn of City Hall. There’s no fine stretch of greenery like New York’s Bryant Park. Instead, the Civic Center is several blocks of courthouses, government office buildings, police headquarters, the L.A. Times and City Hall.
As a result, L.A. has emerged as a much-criticized, asphalted example of a major world city without a “central park.”
But the mayor, the board of supervisors and Broad himself were promising to change all that. To the delight of many, land was found for just such a central park smack in the middle of downtown: 16 acres of badly utilized property beginning nearly at the foot of the western staircase to City Hall on Spring Street, rolling westward four blocks to Grand Avenue, and ending a stone’s throw from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.
The often-bickering city and county governments managed to work together, agreeing to wipe away the hodgepodge that occupied the 16 acres, removing an ugly parking lot, moving three of seven huge cement ramps that funnel cars to vast underground parking near the County Hall of Administration, and, to the dismay of some, wiping out the venerable El Paseo de los Pobladores de Los Angeles, a plaza with extensive tropical gardens next to the Superior Court, which is a popular spot for lunching workers.
The Times gushed over the notion that open space would be laid like a beautiful green carpet along four blocks paralleling First Street — directly across from the Times.
The strategy of using the park as the selling point to taxpayers worked like a charm. The Los Angeles City Council and the Board of Supervisors touted the park as its excuse to funnel huge public subsidies to the luxury project on Grand controlled by Related Companies and the fabulously rich royal family of Dubai.
But now, the promise of a central park is turning into simply more concrete development. In April, private developers and the Grand Avenue Committee released “renderings” that depict few trees, little grass — and vast amounts of cement and obvious areas for commercialization. And the plans show a series of big, arching metal arms that hold up a ceiling of colored panels — “sunscreens” — rather than a canopy of trees and open sky that the millions of dollars could buy instead.
“It just doesn’t seem like a park,” notes Planaria Price. Price and her husband, Murray Burns, spent decades carefully renovating more than 35 homes in historic Angeleno Heights near downtown.
Reacting to the Civic Park plan, Burns says, “We don’t need another mall-like entertainment [venue]. It looks like something you might find at the Grove.”
Marcia Hanscom, an environmentalist who helped save much of the Ballona Wetlands from the Playa Vista development, reviewed the color drawings and concluded, “We desperately need more connections with nature in the city, but these renderings do not show that the developers or the decision makers understand this concept.”
Artist Joey Terrill, who lives downtown and attended the glitzy rollout for the park design, says he appreciates the challenges faced by the landscape architects, Rios Clementi Hale, but he envisioned unfettered expanses. Instead, the design is filled with “little sections, little projects.
“I believe that if you put a grove of trees and lawn, people will make their own activities — they don’t have to be directed,” he says. “They don’t need to be told, ‘This is where you sit and eat, this is where you listen to music.’”
“I believe that [Grand Avenue Committee Director] Martha Welborne and her team do ‘get it’ about the community’s desire for greenery,” says Marc Porter Zasada, who, as a former editor of the Downtown News, covered the Pershing Square design debacle, in which Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta created one of the most unpopular and unusable spaces in the city.
But, Zasada says, “At the April presentation ... the renderings were still ambiguous. I was personally concerned by the idea of these large metal or fiberglass ‘sunshades,’ which might work against everyone’s desire for green space. Like everyone, I am nervous. Again and again, we keep getting overbuilt public spaces like Pershing Square, Nokia Plaza, California Plaza’s ‘water court’ and Caltrans Plaza.”
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Check out the hottest list of places and things to do around your city | <urn:uuid:998c2577-f0af-4beb-bbee-47741178a816> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.laweekly.com/2008-07-24/news/rolling-out-l-a-39-s-cement-carpet/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931334 | 1,243 | 1.625 | 2 |
"There is no evidence that standards and tests improve school achievement. The money budgeted for standards and tests to enforce the standards should be used to protect children from the effects of poverty." — Professor Stephen Krashen
The following is my edited commentary in response to comments by a CCSS supporter on the Professor Ravitch post: A Teacher of Latin Writes In Defense of Fiction.
Kaye Thompson Peters, I've grown weary of the trite "apple and oranges" device that you employ everywhere in your stalwart defense of Corporate Core. You even used it in a gushing apology for Common Core State Standards (CCSS) on Hoover's fringe-right EdNext. While you might not be uncomfortable that Pearson Education, Inc. has been promoting your writings on CCSS, it does cause some of us consternation. When discussing CCSS in relation to NCLB and RTTT, we're not conflating apples and oranges, we're discussing a bushel of rotten apples foisted on us by a bunch of billionaires suffering from the Shoe Button Complex.
To be sure, the revenue minded corporate overlords who coined Corporate Core have never considered high-stakes standardized testing a separate issue from their imposition of CCSS. They are one in the same and they serve the same set of goals in the neoliberal project of privatizing public schools. The Gates Foundation and the Duncan led Department of Education (my apologies for that redundancy) have been quite effective in convincing surrogates (some even in the AFT and NEA, sadly) to crow that they aren't inextricably linked. Such propaganda is so transparent that astute people see right through it. Ms. Peters, CCSS isn't a solution to, but instead it is a deliberate doubling down of, the vile policies of NCLB and RTTT.
Privatizer Dr. Catherine Thome's explanation for the impetus of Corporate Core tells us all we need to know about who stands to gain from CCSS:
"All students must be prepared to compete with not only their American peers in the next state, but with students around the world."
David Coleman's contempt for literature in English classes (at least for working class children) reflects both his corporate pedigree and that of his plutocrat handlers. It is no "red herring" to point out this glaring fault of CCSS, but I do agree with Mr. Heller that there are other fundamental flaws to this nationally imposed corporate curriculum. We need far more "Grapes of Wrath" and far less "FedViews" in this society. Sandra Stotsky does an excellent job taking on Coleman's corporate aims in her piece reproduced on the Parents Across America site.
Ultimately we must resist CCSS. Susan Ohanian, Professor Stephen Krashen, and the Schools Matter camp are leading the way on this. My recent short on Schools Matter has some great resource links for fighting CCSS. | <urn:uuid:eb1076f5-83b7-4618-bd75-584695cf0d1d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2012/12/continuing-skirmishes-with-ccss.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705559639/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115919-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945197 | 597 | 1.710938 | 2 |
Lucy the Elephant: This 65 foot tall, wooden elephant was built in 1881 by inventor and engineer, James Vincent de Paul Lafferty, Jr. She served as a summer home in 1902 and later as a tavern. She was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1976 and has since been fully restored. Exit 36.
We enjoy working with our clients to create solutions for their IT needs. Our portfolio is organized by the types of services we provide and by industry. Select a portfolio at right or below. | <urn:uuid:f16b19fc-6f10-4b59-8ef0-5cdecf18df46> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cyberxdesigns.com/portfolio.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.985119 | 104 | 1.523438 | 2 |
I had vaguely heard the term B-girl mentioned in the past. Whether it was from some early film noir cinema or pulp fiction I cannot recall. The 1940 Pulitzer Prize winning William Saroyan play The Time of Your Life was made into a film in 1948 and was recently shown on Turner Classic Movies and I watched it for the odd turn of tough guy Jimmy Cagney playing a philosophical bar patron. It is an uneven movie, but what was interesting was Jeanne Cagney’s (yes – Jimmy’s sister) portrayal of Kitty Duval and the referral of her character as possibly being a B-girl.
So what exactly is a B-Girl?
First thought – Hays code vernacular for a bar prostitute.
Looking the term up in Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary it is slang for a ‘bar girl’ - a woman who entertains bar patrons and encourages them to spend freely. Online other meanings emerged – it could also mean a prostitute that hangs around in bars. Either way it was not a compliment. | <urn:uuid:4771646c-9cc3-4ad5-8837-8a485028ba6d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://stuffnobodycaresabout.com/2011/02/21/the-b-girl/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368711005985/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516133005-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965401 | 220 | 1.5625 | 2 |
The Community College of Rhode Island Flanagan Campus Art Gallery presents “ARTicles,” mixed media welded sculpture and other convoluted objects by Warwick resident Richard Boudreau, through Sept. 24.
Boudreau said he learned to weld 40 years ago at a shipyard and began creating metal sculptures about 35 years ago. The sculptures vary in size and themes, many times created as a result of the kinds of scrap metal he acquires.
“Many of my sculptures are created by metal that ordinarily would be discarded or thrown away into landfills so, indirectly, my sculptures are environmentally friendly,” he said.
The gallery is in Room 2420 on the first floor of the campus, located at 1762 Louisquisset Pike in Lincoln. Gallery hours are from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays and from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Thursdays. Admission to the reception and exhibition are free, and the gallery is handicapped accessible. For information, email email@example.com. | <urn:uuid:1c7bf5a0-e044-4d38-9a39-686fe842576e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://warwickonline.com/stories/Former-ship-welder-turns-scrap-iron-into-art,75003?category_id=4&list_type=most_commented&town_id=1&sub_type=stories | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956528 | 227 | 1.585938 | 2 |
Weight training is an important part of any exercise program however, this week I will be focusing on the benefits that weight training holds for women.
Many of the common issues women face can be addressed thought lifting weights: Body fat, stress, weakness, insomnia, osteoporosis, poor balance, etc.
You really don't need a lot of fancy equipment or expensive gym memberships to train with weights. All you really need are a couple pair of hand weights to get you started. It will most likely take you a couple times to figure out what size weights you should be using for each exercise, but you want to make sure the weight is heavy enough and not too easy. The object is to lift weights heavy enough to build muscle, which in turn will speed up your metabolism and burn more fat. Weight training is a weight bearing activity which with consistency over time (at least six months) you will begin to increase your bone density which helps to prevent osteoporosis. Many women report after weight training they get a better night sleep. It can also be a great stress reliever taking your mind off other things while you are focusing on breathing, proper form, and technique. I have seen the confidence level in many of my women clients improve immensely even after a couple weeks of weight training three times a week.
When it comes to weight loss, or rather, fat loss, there is a lot more to it than just weight training or cardio exercise alone. Women On Weights is now offering unique classes to teach you everything you need to know to get results. Classes are small, to offer more individualized attention. It is actually more like a small group personal training session. You will be given the tools you need to see the results you want. | <urn:uuid:4bf41694-9e7a-4642-a2ec-30129fe405fd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.denpubs.com/news/2010/nov/17/strength-training-for-women/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967886 | 354 | 1.84375 | 2 |
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