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At this writing—a few days before Christmas—I have just returned from a whirlwind trip to New York City to take in the holiday attractions we hear so much about, like the big tree in Rockefeller Center and so forth.
So forth is right; there’s lots to take in any time in New York, but the holiday season is especially intense there. The real miracle on 34th street is that you can get in the door of jam-packed Macy’s department store.
But this is not a travelogue. My role here is to recall Duluth’s near-western neighborhoods, particularly what was once known as the West End, where I grew up. In touring around New York City, though, I couldn’t help but notice that the so-called Big Apple is actually ahead of Duluth as far as outdoor ice skating is concerned, a pastime I once enjoyed at outdoor rinks in my old neighborhood.
Weather permitting, Duluth’s outdoor skating rinks try to get going once December is under way, usually not that-all successfully. They are not open at this writing, for example.
But they’re skating outdoors in the Big Apple—at Rockefeller Center, of course, and at Bryant Park next to the New York Public Library in midtown Manhattan. I suppose they have outdoor artificial ice there and we have to wait for the weather to cooperate.
I couldn’t help but notice, though, that people skating at these high profile rinks are not as adept on the blades as folks generally are around here. Lots of hesitancy and stumbling around. I did my early stumbling around at Lincoln Park rink in the West End, 25th Avenue West between Fifth and Sixth streets.
It was one of two major rinks maintained by the city in that part of town. The other was at Harrison playground on Third Street at 30th Avenue West. I skated there too, at times, but Lincoln rink was my home rink. (For a time—and for the record—the West End also had a pair of small minor rinks—one at 19th Avenue West and First Street and the other adjacent to the former Ensign School, Piedmont Avenue and 11th Street.)
Unlike today—when hockey seems to have all but taken over many of Duluth’s outdoor rinks, with sparse use of so-called pleasure skating areas, when I was a youngster (mainly the early 1950s)—outdoor rinks were packed with skaters just about every night; children and young people going around and around counterclockwise, boys teasing girls by pulling off their babushkas. (Well, they called them scarves, but their function was the same as the babushka.)
The Lincoln Park rink’s warming house was unlike any I have ever visited, and is worth describing here because of its uniqueness. I still don’t know why it was configured this way: The wood-frame structure was long and narrow, and had three partitioned sections that were divided by cyclone fencing, so you could see through the entire building but only enter one section at a time. Girls changed their skates and warmed up in one end, boys on the opposite end, and in the middle was the domain of the omnipotent rink director and his royal court. It was from there that a barrel stove warmed the entire interior.
Strangely, there was absolutely no intermingling of boys and girls in the Lincoln Park warming house. It was like social practices in Pakistan or Afghanistan that segregate males and females. Some older boys and a few adolescent girls were allowed in the middle section, where the rink director reigned, to keep him company.
I never figured out how to be invited into the middle section, but, looking back, I think the secret was to display brashness and coolness on the part of the boys and cuteness, despite babushkas, on the part of the girls. The rink director I knew best—but I doubt he knew lowly me—was a stocky guy called Bud, who ruled his domain with an iron hand. Truly, it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than to enter the sanctum sanctorum middle section of Duluth’s Lincoln Park rink warming house—unless you were brash or beautiful.
When I got a little older, I switched to the Harrison rink, where its sizeable brick warming house was gender integrated. Harrison had had its halcyon days in the 1920s when even adults took to skating for regular recreation—this according to my father, who frequented Harrison after service during World War I and on into the ’20s, which were his 20s. It was still going pretty strong in the mid-1950s when I joined in games of pom-pom pull away after the little kids were sent home after 9 p.m.
Harrison Park no longer has a skating rink, but remains as a fair-weather playground. The Lincoln Park rink has been flooded and maintained in recent winters, but on the occasions when I’ve driven by I rarely saw anyone skating there. The three-section Lincoln warming house was burned down by vandals years ago, replaced with a cement block structure.
So, at this writing, they’re skating outdoors in New York City, but not yet in Duluth, which is regarded as the frozen north by New Yorkers. But we’re better skaters, once we get started.
[Editor’s note: Most of Duluth’s rinks were operational before Christmas, but Lincoln Park’s rink was still not open as of the last weekend in December.] | <urn:uuid:c676a9e1-92c4-4d83-8bcf-e4773a5882c7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://zenithcity.com/a-look-back-at-west-end-skating-rinks/ | 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 | 0.98344 | 1,179 | 1.515625 | 2 |
The author of this book, the dust jacket informs us, is "an eminent physician and psychologist who has had wide experience as a sexologist and marriage counsellor." The main body of the work is devoted to a discussion of the emotional background and factors which underlie sexual deviations, major and minor. He includes in his list of perversions the rejection by women of the maternal role, which he calls "auto-matricide, and states that this is the greatest perversion of all.
In the early chapters he attempts to show how present day attitudes toward sexual relations develop. In the second chapter, entitled "St. Paul, Judaism and Human Relations," he stops to break a lance with St. Paul in a manner not too effectual. He classes him among "the world's most dangerous sex reactionaries" (p. 26), after a rather spotty, one-sided and superficial consideration of his place and influence on present day | <urn:uuid:642b16bd-63a2-47e5-a175-d5f72d068e1d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=285915 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971951 | 192 | 1.765625 | 2 |
Open-label trial with artemether-lumefantrine against uncomplicated Plasmodium falciparum malaria three years after its broad introduction in Jimma Zone, Ethiopia
1 Division of Infectious Diseases and Tropical Medicine, Medical Center of the University of Munich (LMU), Leopoldstrasse 5, 80802, Munich, Germany
2 Department of Medical Laboratory Sciences and Pathology, Jimma University (JU), Jimma, Ethiopia
3 Jimma Zone Health Bureau, Jimma, Ethiopia
4 Department of Internal Medicine, Jimma University (JU), Jimma, Ethiopia
5 Max von Pettenkofer-Institute of Hygiene and Medical Microbiology, Munich, Germany
6 German Centre for Infection Research (DZIF) at LMU, Munich, Germany
Malaria Journal 2012, 11:240 doi:10.1186/1475-2875-11-240Published: 23 July 2012
In Jimma Zone, Ethiopia, the first-line treatment of uncomplicated falciparum malaria has been changed from sulphadoxine-pyrimethamine (SP) to artemether-lumefantrine (AL) in 2006. The objective of this study was to assess the effectiveness of AL in Jimma Zone two to three years after its broad introduction.
An open-label, single-arm, 42-day study of AL against falciparum malaria was conducted in four areas with moderate transmission in Jimma Zone between November 2008 and January 2009 and between August and December 2009. Patients (one-81 years) with uncomplicated Plasmodium falciparum mono-infection were consecutively enrolled. Follow-up visits were at day 2, 3, 7, 28 and 42 or any other day if symptoms reoccurred. Primary and secondary endpoints were PCR-corrected and uncorrected cure rates (molecular differentiation between recrudescence and re-infection) on days 28 and 42. Other secondary endpoints were gametocytaemia at day 7 and day 28, parasitaemia at day 2 and 3, and re-infection rates at day 28 and day 42.
Of 348 enrolled patients, 313 and 301 completed follow-up at day 28 and at day 42, respectively. No early treatment failure occurred. For per protocol analysis, PCR-uncorrected cure rates at day 28 and 42 were 99.1% (95% CI 98.0-100.0) and 91.1% (95% CI 87.9-94.3), respectively. PCR-corrected cure rates at day 28 and 42 were 99.4% (95% CI 98.5-100.0) and 94.7% (95% CI 92.2-97.2), respectively. PCR-corrected cure rate at day 42 for children ≤5 years was 90.6% (95% CI 82.4-98.7) only. Adverse events were in general mild to moderate. Incidence of new infections was 3.4% during 42 days, no new infections with Plasmodium vivax were observed. Microscopically detected gametocytaemia was reduced by 80% between day 0 and day 7.
In general, AL was effective and well tolerated in Jimma Zone, Ethiopia. However, the PCR-corrected recrudescence rate per-protocol at day 42 for children ≤5 years was 9.4%. Therefore, further development should be monitored on a regular basis as recommended by WHO. | <urn:uuid:345a15ad-2ff2-4fcc-be4a-8d912b37fb58> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.malariajournal.com/content/11/1/240/abstract | 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 | 0.949116 | 746 | 1.570313 | 2 |
The Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (Office of Protocol) presents its compliments to Their Excellencies the Heads of Diplomatic Missions and notified Chargés d’affaires, a.i. accredited to Canada, the Permanent Representatives to the International Civil Aviation Organization, and the Heads of International Organizations and other offices established in Canada, and has the honour to provide Their Excellencies with a revised policy regarding traffic and vehicle related offences committed by accredited foreign representatives and their family members who enjoy diplomatic, consular, or other status in Canada1.
The operation of a motor vehicle in by anyone in Canada, including persons with status under the Department, is not a right but a privilege. While the vast majority of foreign representatives and accredited family members observe traffic laws and regulations, those driving practices and violations of traffic laws which endanger public safety remain of serious concern to the Government of Canada. Guided by Article 41(1) of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and Article 55(1) of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, this revised policy is intended to reinforce Canada’s expectations that all foreign representatives and their accredited family members will comply with local traffic laws and vehicle regulations, and that persons so accredited, whether entitled to full or functional immunity, will be responsible for any violations of these laws and regulations. It should be noted that the Government of Canada instructs its own representatives abroad to conduct themselves with the foregoing expectations in mind, and that they are explicitly advised that any immunities conferred on them will not prevent local authorities from issuing infractions where appropriate and supported by evidence.
It is important to note that the special licence plates issued to accredited foreign representatives do not prohibit a police officer from initiating a traffic stop in a manner consistent with normal police procedures. Accredited persons who have been signalled to stop their vehicle by a police officer should do so and be prepared to present identification to the attending officer, including a valid driver’s licence, proof of insurance, and the Office of Protocol Identity Card.
Police forces are encouraged to lay charges where appropriate and inform the Department of instances of major traffic offences, including those covered by the Criminal Code of Canada, such as impaired driving, criminal negligence, and dangerous driving. For indictable offences where the alleged offender enjoys immunity from criminal jurisdiction, the Office of Protocol will request a waiver of immunity from the relevant authority (through the Head of Mission or Organization) to allow the accused individual to appear in a Canadian court of law and to be sentenced in the event that the individual is found guilty. For more information regarding the Department’s impaired driving policy, please refer to circular note XDC-0427 of March 14, 2001 (and any subsequent note on that subject). In the event that the requested waiver of immunity is declined, the Department will seek appropriate, alternative remedies to ensure public safety.
It should be noted that the Department will not intervene in cases where driving privileges have been suspended as a result of accumulated demerit points, for failing to pay a fine, or for other reasons where Canadian authorities have cause to temporarily or indefinitely revoke driving privileges. In keeping with the Department’s general expectations regarding respect for the laws of the receiving state, it is expected that accredited persons who are duly notified of such a suspension will abide by the terms of the notice.
Their Excellencies are asked to observe that none of the details in this note intend to limit or diminish the right of the Government of Canada to request the recall of the offender in the event of a grave offence, or to otherwise intervene in regard to the individual’s continued presence in Canada as an accredited foreign representative.
Police and other officials are encouraged to issue fines for minor traffic and vehicle related offences where the officer has evidence to support such an action, including for moving violations and parking infractions.
As in the past, the Department will not normally intervene in matters of traffic or parking violations. Further, the Department will only review a request for intervention where it has been requested to do so by way of a diplomatic note, signed by the Head of Mission or Organization, which provides a full description of the incident and where there are clearly extenuating circumstances surrounding the infraction which compel the Department to intervene.
In cases where personal vehicles are registered to an official address, it is still important to respond appropriately to correspondence from the relevant Ministry of Transportation, as delays in responding to such notices may lead to the suspension of driving privileges or the invalidation of a licence plate. It should also be noted that the Department will not intervene in cases where such measures have been enacted due to outstanding or accumulated fines.
The Department wishes to confirm that the Government of Canada distinguishes between the immunities conferred by diplomatic and consular status, as per the provisions of Article 43(1) of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. Therefore, persons enjoying a limited degree of immunity, such as consular officers and consular employees, may not be immune from prosecution where criminal charges are laid, or where administrative requirements compel the individual to appear before a court. Further, it is the judiciary in Canada which determines whether a specific act performed by a person with limited immunity and giving rise to legal action occurred in an official capacity.
In cases where an individual who is not subject to the local jurisdiction chooses to contest a ticket before a court or other tribunal, the Department must insist that the relevant mission provide the appropriate waiver of immunity from its Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the Department in writing. The Department does not consider it appropriate for individuals to make claims of immunity for themselves in such a venue.
The Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (Office of Protocol) avails itself of this opportunity to renew to Their Excellencies the Heads of Diplomatic Missions and notified Chargés d’affaires, a.i. accredited to Canada, the Permanent Representatives to the International Civil Aviation Organization, and the Heads of International Organizations and other offices established in Canada, the assurances of its highest consideration.
OTTAWA, May 17, 2012
1 This note updates the Department’s previous circular note XDC-2803 of December 21, 2007, as well as other communications on this subject. Impaired driving allegations will continue to be dealt with in accordance with the policy established in XDC-0427 of March 14, 2001. | <urn:uuid:3aca9385-ff2b-4ed4-b7e1-d92d6127f2c5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.international.gc.ca/protocol-protocole/circular_0821_circulaire.aspx?lang=eng | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947595 | 1,284 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Luke Repass works Tuesday on a 2012 Passat after opening ceremonies for the $1 billion Volkswagen plant. Staff Photo by Angela Lewis/Chattanooga Times Free Press
PATH TO PRODUCTION
* May 2008 - Enterprise South land is cleared to entice Volkswagen to consider Chattanooga site
* July 15, 2008 - Volkswagen picks Chattanooga for its U.S. assembly plant from among 400 competing cities.
* Feb. 3, 2009 - Construction begins on the $1 billion plant
* May 14, 2009 - First wall erected at VW plant
* Feb. 14, 2010 - First robots installed
* June 17, 2010 - First car assembled for test drives
* Sept. 30, 2010 - VW supplier park is opened in adjacent buildings
* January 2011 - Volkswagen debuts Passat at Detroit Motor Show
* April 18, 2011 - First customer car rolls off the line
* May 24, 2011 - Grand opening of plant
Source: Volkswagen of America
BY THE NUMBERS
* 1,700 - Number of employees hired so far toward goal of at least 2,000
* 1,016 - Number of Passat cars assembled so far
* 150,000 - Initial annual vehicle production capacity of plant
* $1 billion - Investment in Volkswagen assembly plant
* 2.5 million - Square feet of footprint by the plant and related supplier park and facilities.
Source: Volkswagen of America
Three years after workers began clearing a forest in an abandoned munitions plant, the Chattanooga site is home to America’s newest automotive plant, which officials said Tuesday is key to Volkswagen’s goal of global leadership.
Volkswagen’s top brass from Germany on Tuesday heralded the $1 billion transformation of the abandoned TNT site, which was used to make munitions to fight the Germans in World War II.
“Our Chattanooga factory is state of the art and is among the world’s most efficient and cleanest plants in the world,” said Michael Macht, Volkswagen’s board member in charge of production.
VW’s 1,400-acre assembly plant in Enterprise South industrial park is capable of making 150,000 vehicles a year and already has produced more than 1,000 of its 2012 Passat cars.
Jonathan Browning, president of Volkswagen of America, said VW decided to return to U.S. vehicle assembly to help build its presence in the world’s richest market. Volkswagen operates 62 plants around the world but abandoned its only previous U.S. plant — a former Chrysler facility near Westmoreland, Pa. — in 1988.
“The Chattanooga plant represents a significant commitment toward our U.S. growth strategy,” Browning said, noting VW wants to sell at least a million VW and Audi brand cars a year in North America by 2018.
The site preparation for the new VW plant began three years ago with some gutsy land clearance by local officials even before VW picked Chattanooga as a production site.
When site selectors said they had a hard time envisioning the car plant on the still wooded, rolling hills near Interstate 75 in Ooltewah, former Hamilton County Mayor Claude Ramsey and Chattanooga Mayor Ron Littlefield directed public works crews to begin clearing the site. The city even used its wireless police camera to show VW officials in Germany via the Internet how site work was progressing.
State and local officials also offered a $577 million incentive package, and by mid-July 2008, Volkswagen decided to locate its plant in Chattanooga.
U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., a former Chattanooga mayor whose Riverview home was used to broker the deal with VW, said Tuesday’s grand opening of the plant was the consummation of a decade-long effort to reclaim the former Volunteer Army Ammunition Plant for a car plant.
“This is a testament to a city that held to its vision,” Corker said.
Another 1,200 acres is being reserved for Volkswagen should the carmaker choose to build another plant. But for now, officials said VW is focused upon successfully building the Passat in Chattanooga before considering other vehicle lines.
Volkswagen Chief Executive Officer Martin Winterkorn said the decision to locate in Chattanooga proved to be the right one even as construction proceeded during the worst recession in 80 years. The auto market is now improving as Volkswagen prepares to begin selling the new Passat by late summer.
“Volkswagen is at home in America like never before as a company, as an employer and as a neighbor and friend,” Winterkorn said to the applause of more than 1,000 plant employees and local supporters during Tuesday’s plant grand opening.
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Volkswagen is investing $4 billion in the North American market, including $1 billion in its Chattanooga plant, where workers are ... | <urn:uuid:1f84a035-ca64-4086-bbb8-05bd39040c52> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2011/may/25/vw-transforms-site/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.942015 | 1,072 | 1.710938 | 2 |
Sedative didn't cause man's death - Not using a seatbelt the likely reason truck driver died, fatality inquiry determines 0
In the written findings of Michael Berggren's fatality inquiry, Judge J. R. McIntosh concluded the death was not the result of a sedative found in the truck driver's system at the time of death in a highway accident, stating it was purely the lack of a seatbelt.
The in-court proceedings occurred late last July in a Fairview courtroom.
The result of those proceedings was released to the public Wednesday.
It was the morning of Dec. 26, 2006, when 55-year-old Berggren was called in to work for what would be his last run at Ponto Water Hauling - his place of employment for the two years.
Berggren did not work the day before and got off early the day before that.
He has been reported by those who encountered him over this stretch to have seemed in good health and good spirits.
Nothing seemed wrong at all in the minds of common-law spouse Anna Tina Miller, his employer or his co-workers.
But at approximately 10:15 a.m. Dec. 26 - just a half hour after leaving on his run to an oil rig near Worsley - Berggren was involved in a single-vehicle rollover on Highway 64, approximately 10 kilometres north of Hines Creek.
He was not wearing a seatbelt at the time and was ejected from the vehicle, which rolled over him and crushed his chest.
The scene responded to by authorities and emergency services was that of a water truck on its side and its driver some 20 feet away, lying in the middle of the road.
Not using a seatbelt is considered an oddity in behaviour for Berggren.
His spouse, employer and co-workers said Berggren habitually wore his seatbelt.
McIntosh stated in his concluding report that Berggren would have, in all likelihood, survived the rollover had he been wearing a seatbelt when the accident occurred.
Found to be in Berggren's system at the time of the accident was 55 micrograms per litre of blood of a potent sedative of the benzodiazepine family - Estazolam - which was attributed to a natural health product called Serenity Pills II Berggren was talking to aid in sleeping.
The pills contained an amount of the sedative.
Estazolam was once marketed legally, but is now classified as a Schedule IV substance not legally available anywhere in North America.
Berggren had been using the product for about three months before the accident.
It is believed he took one before going to bed the night prior. Expert testimony stated it could have caused sedation and impaired his judgment while driving.
McIntosh concluded, however, there are too many variables in this incident to claim the sedative in Berggren's system at the time of the accident was a contributing factor.
He went on to state it was not a contributing factor to the accident, or to the death.
Counsel at the fatality inquiry had requested McIntosh use his concluding report to educate the public with respect to Health Canada's role in registration of natural health products.
Health Canada has been notified of the presence of Estazolam in Serenity Pills II, but McIntosh declined to use his findings and recommendations to any further effect. | <urn:uuid:d508c95d-9b0e-47e5-914b-5fd2fac601f4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.dailyheraldtribune.com/2009/02/05/sedative-didnt-cause-mans-death-not-using-a-seatbelt-the-likely-reason-truck-driver-died-fatality-inquiry-determines | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.986334 | 715 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Have you ever imagined how you would be in the future? Or how about the world? Are you interested to talk about future with friends and collaborators all over the planet? Superstruct may give you the chance.
Superstruct is the world's first massively multiplayer forecasting game developed by Institute for the Future. By playing the game, you'll help us chronicle the world of 2019--and imagine how we might solve the problems we'll face. Because this is about more than just envisioning the future. It's about making the future, inventing new ways to organize the human race and augment our collective human potential.
Q: Why should I play Superstruct?
A: Here are some of our favorite reasons: Because you're curious about the future, because you want to make friends and collaborators all over the planet, because you want to learn how to become a future forecaster, and because you want to change the world.
Q: How do I play Superstruct?
A: Superstruct is played on forums, blogs, videos, wikis, and other familiar online spaces. We show you the world as it might look in 2019. You show us what it's like to live there. Bring what you know and who you know, and we'll all figure out how to make 2019 a world we want to live in.
Q: What should I do first?
To get started, check out our How to Play guide--complete with the seven missions you need to complete to "win" at Superstruct, and the seven secrets that will turn you into an amazing Superstruct player.
Q: Who is making Superstruct?
A: Superstruct is being developed by the Ten-Year Forecast team at the Institute for the Future, a not-for-profit think tank based in Palo Alto, California.
Project leads include TYF director Kathi Vian, scenario director Jamais Cascio, and game director Jane McGonigal.
Our Superthreat Guides are ten amazing futurists, writers, researchers and gamers from around the world--each Superthreat has two guides on hand to help you as you explore the future. And our excellent advisory board is made up of more than twenty-five experts from different industries and countries on all six continents to help inform our global collective forecast. Click here to meet the entire Superstruct team.
Q: When can I play Superstruct?
A: The game starts October 6, 2008, and it will last for six weeks. Top Superstructure Honors will be given out by our celebrity game masters' favorite superstructures at the end of the game, on November 17. Find out who the celebrities are and what honors you can win here!
Q: What happens when the game is over?
A: The Ten Year Forecast team at the Institute for the Future will analyze the player-created game content. We'll prepare an official Superstruct Report featuring our top collective insights about the year 2019, and the best tactics for superstructing society. Highlights from the report will be emailed to all registered Superstruct players in April 2009. Meanwhile, the Superstruct site will stay live and open to the public as an immersive archive, so you can continue to show your friends, family and colleagues the future you helped invent. | <urn:uuid:01ab009e-90e1-4bb8-9bf8-0b723e945e5e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://feature.mmosite.com/content/2008-10-29/20081029223633598.shtml | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941532 | 673 | 1.804688 | 2 |
When I was first learning to do 3D modeling and rendering back in 2007, I decided to try an exercise that many art students are given in their studies: learning by copying the old masters. With sketchbooks and pencils in hand, students visit the world’s great art museums to learn about an artist’s technique by trying to duplicate it themselves.
For my learning exercise, I decided that my “old masters” would be architectural and interior designers whose work I admired. So I gathered a collection of photos from the web, many from Architectural Digest (which is, in my opinion, the best place to see consistently fine examples of both interior and exterior design). I set myself the task of trying to learn something about their design techniques, as well as mastering my own modeling and rendering software tools, by trying to reproduce the photos as 3D renderings. I feel this approach really taught me a lot, and I highly recommend it to anyone wanting to improve their 3D skills.
Now that I’ve been at this for almost 4 years, I still occasionally do this exercise, simply because it provides an excellent insight into a designer’s mind to try to understand why they did things the way they did in the building or room I’m studying.
Recently, instead of tackling a new challenge, I decided to revisit one of my old favorite inspirations, a lovely room created by awesomely talented interior designer Suzanne Lovell in her own townhouse in Chicago. Her home was written up in a 2007 article in AD.
I liked my original rendering so much that I had been using it for years in my portfolio on the CastleView 3D website, despite the fact that it was a very early example and wasn’t actually produced for a real client. But because the rendering software I use now (Kerkythea) is much more sophisticated than what I was using in 2007, I wanted to see how much the image could be improved simply by using the new tool.
I didn’t change my original model except to import it into Chief Architect X3 (to enable VRML export), but instead spent time tweaking the lighting and textures in the imported file within Kerkythea. Below is a comparison of my original image with the most recent one (you’ll need to click to enlarge the images for a decent comparison). You can see that in the 2007 version, the render engine wasn’t able to produce reflections, or even shadows!
Of course I’m much happier with the more recent version, although as I look at the final product there are still things I would like to change in my addictive quest for photorealistic perfection.
Perhaps I’ll work on improving some of my original modeling, and post an update later. But in the meantime, this new image is definitely replacing the old one on my website! | <urn:uuid:27330627-81e6-40ca-b5bc-d6098f830a6b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://castleview3d.com/lifeshouldbe3d/2011/04/05/learning-3d-modeling-by-copying-the-old-masters/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96402 | 593 | 1.773438 | 2 |
Members of the armed forces tend to move a great deal. It is part of the job as assignments change and soldiers or officers are transferred around bases. Some of the time, there is a choice in where the person is relocated to, and other times there is not. The moving can be stressful, and adding in having a family can make it even more so for officers. Some military moving brings officers over seas, as the United States has bases all over the globe. The amount of planning needed to execute a military moving plan can be daunting, particularly in cases where the officer has not done so in the past and has no experience or clue where to begin.
There are military moving services and web sites that aim to help. There are check lists of things that need to be done in order to prepare for the move. Items that need to be thought about or cared for. Where to store your car, if you have one, or how to allow someone else to use it. There are many things that the military helps with, but still the officer needs to take care of many details for themselves during the military moving process. Depending on the specifics of the rank and position of the officer at the new base, housing might have many options. There could be housing that is provided or certain areas on or near base that they may have to relocate to.
Then, there is the challenge represented by transporting personal items. When military moving takes you over seas, the ease and cost of transporting items might be extremely steep. Hence the need for careful planning and research being very much so warranted. Reaching out to those who have experience with military moving can help, as can enlisting the assistance of an expert who specializes in handling military moving needs. | <urn:uuid:01cbbe40-ab91-4913-9983-d0a9bb4ec018> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://savings-lounge.com/category/military-ditty-move/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.97912 | 349 | 1.617188 | 2 |
2010 National Conference
September 25-26, 2010 at Washington Plaza Hotel, D.C.
The 6th Annual National Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Ally Student Career Conference & PRIDE Career Fair took place on September 25-26th in Washington, D.C at the Washington Plaza Hotel. There were over 250 participants in attendance and 20 workshops for participants to attend. There were participants from 40 different Colleges and Universities at the conference. Keynote and guest speakers included Jonathan Capehart, Tim Gunn, Elizabeth Birch, and Amanda Simpson.
Essay Contest Winner:
North Carolina A&T State University
Participating in the OUT for Work conference has been an eye-opening experience that has instilled in me values that I will forever cherish and provided me with tools and resources that I will be sure to take advantage of in order to be my best out-self.
The most important piece of information that I learned is that coming out is something that I will need to do again and again in different situations. For me, this was big news that I'm just now wrapping around my head. I've always thought that as soon as I came out, the worst was over. I would think that everyone knew who I was and I would never again have to establish who I am, but I was mistaken. I finally discerned that not everyone you go, people are going to know who you are.
The HOT List booklet is certainly a tool I will put to use. Having information readily available on how friendly and welcoming companies are of people with different sexual orientations and gender identities makes it easier to weigh that factor when decided where to work. Those who have attended the conference representing various companies and resources that are just under my nose. I can use them to answer questions I otherwise would have to search high and low for an answer such as, "Do you enjoy working there? What's an average day like? What sort of work does this position engage in at your company?"
Transitioning from academia to the workplace are not at all very different. Your fellow students at school are just like your co-workers at your job. Your teacher in school is much like your supervisors at work. The labels "student and co-worker" and "teacher and supervisor" are synonyms for the same type of person but in a different setting. The only true difference between academia and the workplace is that while you are in school. You are setting the foundation for skills you will need to activate in the workplace. That difference is very subtle because even at the workplace you are still learning and growing and adding more bricks to your foundation of skills.
Prior to attending the OUT for Work conference, it wasn't easy for me to speak the words "I'm gay" I wouldn't hide it or deny it, but the words just would not flow off my tongue. All the guest speakers and people I met have given me such awesome inspiration. Above all, I am taking with me "you can't be productive if you're always hiding." OUT for Work has been a monumental experience, now whenever I have to speak those words, smoothly and easily, I can come out naturally.
Essay Contest Quotes – 2010 National Conference – Washington, D.C
Thomas Stockwell | University of Michigan – Flint
"I was fortunate enough to have received a scholarship and I will be sure to share all the information I receive from this event with my LGBT student organization."
Lowell Reade |
Harvey Mudd College
"What Stephanie Hill said was, in my mind, groundbreaking. She said “It’s your attitude, not your aptitude that defines you altitude.” I was inspired to change the way I think about my academics.
The workshops led me to realize that not only will be a great applicant, but being gay sets me aside from the other applicants, in a positive, not a negative way.
I am leaving the conference not as the self-perceived mediocre student I thought I was, one that couldn’t have had a chance at making it with these companies, but rather as a confident, high-altitude student that these companies want to hire.” | <urn:uuid:d2a46475-bf00-4339-825a-ae32dd4afe0a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.outforwork.org/conferences/2010/national/default.asp | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972635 | 859 | 1.71875 | 2 |
Olean General Hospital announced Thursday it mailed letters to 1,915 patients after an internal review raised the possibility that some of them may have received an injection from another patient’s insulin pen.
The issue follows recent news that 716 patients at the Buffalo Veterans Affairs Medical Center may have been exposed to HIV, hepatitis B or hepatitis C because of the inadvertent reuse of insulin pens that were intended to be used only once.
Representatives of some of Buffalo’s largest hospitals said Thursday they have not encountered a similar issue with insulin pens.
Olean General has not identified any patients who received an insulin injection from another patient’s insulin pen during the period November 2009 to Jan. 16 of this year. Nor is there any indication yet that a patient was exposed to possible infection from such blood-borne diseases as HIV, hepatitis B or hepatitis C, officials said.
The notice to the patients recommends that they seek testing for HIV three months after their last insulin pen injection at Olean General and for hepatitis B and hepatitis C six months after their last insulin pen injection at the hospital.
Olean General also established a call center – 375-7590 or (888) 980-1220 – staffed from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. seven days a week to answer patient questions, and the hospital is offering free testing and counseling.
“Recent news stories brought to light problems with the inappropriate reuse of insulin pens at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Buffalo,” said Timothy J. Finan, president and chief executive officer of Upper Allegheny Health System, which includes Olean General.
“This situation prompted Olean General Hospital to initiate its own review and audit of the use of insulin pens at the hospital,” he said. “Interviews with nursing staff indicated that the practice of using one patient’s insulin pen for other patients may have occurred on some patients.”
Reusable insulin pens have never been used at Bradford Regional Medical Center, also a member of Upper Allegheny Health System, and have been removed from Olean General, officials said.
Recently, the inspector general at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs initiated a review of practices at the Buffalo VA Medical Center. Because the hospital was not labeling the insulin pens for use by individual patients, people could have been infected between Oct. 19, 2010, and Nov. 1 of last year, the hospital said.
The faulty practice started despite a 2009 Food and Drug Administration warning against reusing insulin pens, and it continued despite a similar January 2012 alert from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – warnings that hospital officials said they had not seen.
Finan said the practice at Olean General was to label insulin pens for each patient. In addition, he said the pens employ a safety needle that can’t be reused. However, he said interviews with nurses during the hospital’s review indicated that the pens may have been reused with new needles despite the labeling, and that posed a potential problem. “Insulin pens are not designed, and are not safe, for one pen to be used for more than one patient, even if needles are changed between patients, because any blood contamination of the pen reservoir could result in transmission of already existing blood-borne pathogens from the previous user,” the FDA said in its March 2009 alert to health care professionals.
“What we heard from the nurses was very nebulous, and the risk of infection is very low. But we felt we had to be proactive,” Finan said.
A Kaleida Health official said insulin pens are not an issue in the hospital system, which includes Buffalo General, Millard Fillmore Suburban and DeGraff Memorial hospitals.
Buffalo General Medical Center, for example, purchased only 30 insulin pens over the last six months, said spokesman Michael Hughes.
“All of our insulin products are dispensed per patient and are labeled with the patient name and room,” he said.
The Catholic Health hospital system, which includes Mercy and Sisters hospitals, said some types of insulin are dispensed to patients using injectable pens with a sterile needle at the tip, and the pens are labeled for each patient. The practice is to dispose of the needle at the end of the pen and replace it after each use, according to Dr. Brian D’Arcy, president of medical affairs.
He described the hospital system’s practice as follows: The pens are stored in the patient’s medication bin, separate from other insulin. | <urn:uuid:ea1fdd6e-352d-48e3-b461-aa5e300f3025> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20130124/CITYANDREGION/130129583/1065 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954335 | 933 | 1.617188 | 2 |
A look at the upcoming presidential election in Afghanistan by Tamim Ansary, author of Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes.
I have this recurring nightmare in which my life has gone so wrong, I’ve become the president of Afghanistan. I’m hard put to understand, therefore, why forty people are fighting for this job as if their lives depended on it when in fact their lives might not be worth a plugged nickel if they win; yet that is exactly what is happening in a fascinating presidential election now entering its final weeks in Afghanistan.
Fascinating because it’s the country’s first real presidential election. The media will tell you there was another in 2004, when Hamid Karzai won the post he already held that year, but Karzai was running unopposed that time. Even though some twenty other names were on the ballot, everyone knew Karzai would win if the election came off at all. The choice wasn’t Karzai or someone else but election or no-election. Afghans who went to the polls that year were voting for voting itself, and voting won.
They weren’t choosing among candidates, because few even knew who was running. Yes, the candidates’ names were written on the ballots but over 75 % of Afghans can’t read. And even if they had heard of the candidates, few knew what any of them stood for because country had virtually no media beyond rumor then. To be sure, the candidates tried to communicate something of their views with icons placed next to their names on the ballot, but an icon is a crude slogan. One candidate wanted voters to know he was a conservative fundamentalist who stood four-square on the Qur’an, so he chose, as his icon, a book. Another wanted voters to know he was a progressive who fully backed modern education so he chose as his icon—a book. You see the problem.
Besides, most “candidates” of 2004 had no political platform at all. With Karzai’s election a foregone conclusion, the only other notables running were ethnic and tribal leaders, who were essentially gangsters with private armies. What each of them stood for was a share of the spoils.
But that was then. Now Karzai has at least two serious opponents, both running credible campaigns. Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, formerly Karzai’s foreign minister, one-time right-hand man of Tajik war-hero Ahmad Shah Massoud (and an actual doctor—an ophthalmologist, of all things!) has sparked real excitement by traveling around the country making personal appearances, and believe me this guy knows how to heat up a crowd. In 2002, I saw him give an extemporaneous speech in three languages to a mixed audience in Kabul, switching fluently between Dari, Pushto, and English, fielding questions from a motley audience with charismatic confidence—a brilliant performance. He offers a proposal to restructure the country as a (decentralized) parliamentary democracy. The idea may or may not be a good one, but it is at least an idea. If I could vote in this election, Abdullah might be my guy.
Or maybe not: Dr. Ashraf Ghani, formerly Karzai’s finance minister, one-time professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University, once on a short list to be appointed secretary general of the United Nations, may not be much of a politician, but he has gravitas, he has learning, and he has a proposal: to replace the failed top-down strategy of reconstruction in Afghanistan with a new approach that starts at the local level and filters up. It might or might not work, but at least it’s a plan, and it’s one that addresses the most critical piece of the Afghan puzzle. If I could vote in this election, maybe Ghani would be my guy.
Karzai never really had a constituency in Afghanistan. From the start, Afghans saw him as America’s man. In 2004, that was good enough, because back then, the United States enjoyed some luster among Afghans, many of whom felt the United States had helped drive out the Soviets and later (after shamefully abandoning the country to civil war) saved them from the Taliban. In voting for Karzai, Afghans were accepting the Western intervention and expressing optimism about what it might bring.
This year, it’s not such a good thing to be seen as America’s man in Afghanistan. Most Afghans now have about the same view of the American presence as they had of the Soviet occupation in the eighties. This time, therefore, the only actual opposition party of 2004—Talibanist chaos—has come back stronger than ever, its only platform being to sabotage the elections entirely.
Accordingly, Karzai has turned to a different kind of politics: back-room deal-making with power-brokers. He opted out of a televised debate with his rivals and hasn’t appeared in public much, but he has been busy: most of those ethnic and tribal warlords who opposed him in 2004 are now his allies. Their motives are the same now as then: to share in the spoils. They’re lining up with Karzai because they bet that—as America’s man—he’ll still be in power after the election no matter how the vote comes out.
Frankly I can’t blame Karzai for failing to rescue Afghanistan. When a man can’t lift a car, it doesn’t prove he’s weak but rather that cars are heavy. If one of his rivals wins, I’m sure global media will soon be excoriating him as a weak incompetent presiding over a corrupt administration.
Even so, it would be great if the United States and its Western allies publicly abandon Karzai. It would signal that America means to change course in Afghanistan, and American-changing-course is the only thing that can now reverse Afghanistan’s slide toward chaos. In this presidential campaign, it could actually profit America to be associated with one of the losers. It might at least open a slim opportunity to launch a fresh approach. And anyway, when all the warlords of Afghanistan flock to your banner, let’s face it: the time has come to change banners. | <urn:uuid:d1644a74-7a8d-44e9-ae7a-93abd841086d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://therumpus.net/2009/08/real-choice-in-afghanistan/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.972656 | 1,315 | 1.59375 | 2 |
SANTORUM: Well, that section of the book was co-written, if you want to be honest about it, by my wife, who is a nurse and a lawyer. And when she gave up that practice and she gave up, you know, nursing to raise a family, I mean, she felt very much that society was sort of — in many cases, looked down their nose at that decision. And all I’ve said is — and in talking with my wife and others like her — who’ve given up their careers that they should be affirmed in their decision like everybody else and that these are choices, and they’re tough choices.
You know, I grew up in a home where my mom and dad both worked. This was back in the ’50s and ’60s, and — which was very unusual. My mom actually made more money than my dad. So I grew up in a home where that was something that — that was a given, women in the workplace, and something that I obviously accepted.
But I think it’s important that women both outside the home and inside the home are affirmed for their choices they make, that they are, in fact, choices, and society, you know, treats them in a sense equally for whatever decision they make that’s best for them.
STEPHANOPOULOS: You say that now, but you also wrote in the book that radical feminists have been making the pitch that justice demands that men and women be given an equal opportunity to make it to the top in the workplace. Isn’t that something that everyone should value?
SANTORUM: Yeah, I have no problem — I don’t know — that’s a new quote for me. I don’t know what context that was given. But the bottom line is that people should have equal opportunity to rise in the workforce. And, again, if you read the entire section, I don’t think anyone will have a problem with the fact that what I was calling for — very clearly calling for is the treatment of an affirmation of whatever decision women decide to make.
Stephanopoulos is getting at a potential problem for Santorum: His sincerely-held and clearly expressed views on women, family and workplace equality that appealed to social conservatives may now be off-putting in the context of a presidential campaign.
Santorum has been running a shoe-string budget with few advisers. That means he’s had relatively few aides, and I am nearly certain, no one to do the most critical “oppo” research there is, namely research on the candidate himself.
Santorum will have to deal with the words he wrote, and, if his views have evolved, he should say so quickly and definitively. The issue is potentially critical because it goes to his electability and because it makes a positive — his strong social conservative stances — into a negative. It’s time for him, or someone on the campaign, to go back and read the book and figure out what he can live with and what he can’t. He can’t afford to lose women voters as he heads into critical races in Michigan, Arizona and the Super Tuesday states. | <urn:uuid:72d89a12-dfc9-4d84-9026-85501565e30d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/post/sometimes-it-takes-a-book-to-trip-up-a-candidate/2012/02/12/gIQApZK68Q_blog.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.98543 | 675 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Spring 2013 Colloquia
Note: additional events will be added as the Spring Colloquium Series is finalized.
Monday, January 28, 2013 | 12pm - 1pm
‘Low Wage Work and Minimum Wages in Germany’
Gerhard Bosch, University Duisburg-Essen, Director of the Institute for Work, Skills and Training
In international comparisons Germany has long been seen as a country with comparatively narrow wage dispersion and only a limited proportion of low-paid workers. Since the mid-1990s, the low-wage sector has grown considerably and has now almost reached the share seen in the USA. The main reason is the vulnerability of the German system of collective agreements to outside competition. Since there are no binding minimum wage thresholds (as a result of a statutory minimum wage or generally binding collective agreements), it is possible to pay wages below the industry rates by leaving or not joining the employers organizations or outsourcing activities into non-covered companies.The introduction of a statutory national minimum wage has been rejected by the government until now. However, collectively agreed minimum wages at industry level can be declared generally binding in response to an application by the two sides of industry. Until now 15 industries have minimum wages. In eight of these industries, the effects of the minimum wages on employment, competiveness and working conditions have now been evaluated. The eight studies show no disemployment effects, even in East-Germany where the “bite” of the MW’s was high. In Eastern Germany, the minimum wages led to a compression of wages around the minimum wage. In some cases, there were negative ripple effects as a result of relatively slight increases in wages above the minimum wage. The state was successful in monitoring the implementation of the minimum rates but failed when it came to enforcing the higher minimum rates for skilled workers in East-Germany. In some industries, the introduction of minimum wages has revitalised collective bargaining (e.g. for electricians and painters and decorators).
Monday, February 4, 2013 | 12pm - 1pm
‘Are Flexible Workers More Insecure? An Integrated Approach Based on Micro-data’
Matteo Richiardi, University of Turin, Italy
Monday, February 11, 2013 | 12pm - 1pm
‘San Francisco’s Paid Sick Leave Ordinance: Employers’ and Workers’ Views of Its Impact’
Vicky Lovell, Institute for Women's Policy ResearchIn November 2006, San Francisco voters approved an ordinance requiring San Francisco employers to provide paid sick leave to all their workers – the first such mandate in the U.S. This seminar will provide an overview of the campaign for paid sick leave and present survey findings on how San Francisco employers and workers have been affected by the ordinance.
Monday, February 25, 2013 | 12pm - 1pm
‘Enforcement of Labor Standards’
Miranda Dietz, CLRE (Center for Labor Research & Education), IRLE
Monday, March 11, 2013 | 12pm - 1pm
‘When Employers Go Rogue: Unregulated Work and Policies to Raise Standards in the US Labor Market’
Annette Bernhardt, NELP (National Employment Law Project
» Employers Gone Rogue Paper
» The Role of Labor Market Regulation in Rebuilding Economic Opportunity in the U.S.
Monday, March 18, 2013 | 12pm - 1pm
‘The Structure of Hiring Costs in Germany - Evidence from Firm-level Data’
Samuel Muehlemann, Economics, University of Berne
In Germany, hiring costs for filling a vacancy are substantial, ranging on average from 7 to 14 weeks of wage payments. Moreover, the structure of hiring costs is convex, implying that hiring additional workers in a given period becomes increasingly expensive. Labor market institutions also affect hiring costs. While hiring costs in firms with collective bargaining coverage do not significantly differ from other firms, we find that worker representation at the firm level increases hiring costs by more than 30%. The results are also relevant for recent policies aimed at reducing unemployment. In Germany, short-time work (Kurzarbeit) is a widely used policy instrument for preventing firms from firing workers, enabling a firm to employ workers at reduced working hours. Under this program, the government covers part of the wage bill, thereby providing financial incentives for a firm not to lay off employees during a recession. Thus while our findings help to explain why a firm has its own incentives to hoard labor, the results also help to quantify possible benefits of short-time work policies (i.e., saved resources on future hiring costs).
Monday, April 1, 2013 | 12pm - 1pm
‘Apprentice Pay in Metalworking in Britain, Germany and Switzerland: Institutions, Market Forces and Market Power’
Paul Ryan, Economics, University of Cambridge
Trainee pay is central to the economics of work-based training. The pay of metalworking apprentices is high in Britain, middling in Germany, and low in Switzerland, despite the similarity of training programmes in the three countries. This paper analyses these differences in trainee pay using fieldwork evidence and survey data. A range of potential determinants is identified, drawing on both economic and institutionalist theories. Human capital theory focuses on differences in pay in markets for unskilled and skilled labour. Several institutional attributes – including collective bargaining, employer co-ordination, upper-secondary education, and modes of public subsidy – are seen to influence apprentice pay, operating through supply, demand and price setting in markets for training places. Institutional support for apprenticeship training appears to involve important complementarities in both Germany and Switzerland, by contrast to a less coherent and more market-driven approach in Britain.
Monday, April 15, 2013 | 12pm - 1pm
‘Political Parties and Labor Market Outcomes. Evidence from U.S. States’
Louis-Philippe Beland, Economics, University of Montreal, Canada
This paper estimates the causal impact of partisan allegiance (Republican or Democratic) of U.S. governors on labor market outcomes. I match data from gubernatorial elections with data from March Current Population Survey (CPS) for income years 1977 to 2008, and eliminate the endogeneity of election outcomes from labor market conditions by using a regression discontinuity design. I find that Democratic governors are associated with lower average individual earnings. I provide evidence that this is driven by a change in workforce composition following an expansion in employment of workers with low and medium earnings. I also find that Democratic governors cause a reduction in the racial earnings gap between Black and White workers through an increase in the annual hours worked by Blacks relative to Whites. I then explore policies to explain the results. Over a wide range of models, controls and specifications, the estimates are consistent and robust.
Monday, April 22, 2013 | 12pm - 1pm
‘Health and Happiness in Wealthy Democracies: A Comparative Analysis’
Jerome Karabel, Sociology, UC Berkeley
Monday, April 29, 2013 | 12pm - 1pm
‘From Publication to Public Action: Lessons learned from the Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry’
Michael Wilson, Labor Occupational Health Program, School of Public Health
Over the last century, industrial chemicals have become ubiquitous in materials, products, and manufacturing processes used throughout society. Each year, about 34 million metric tons of chemical substances are produced in, or imported into, the United States every day. While the widespread use of industrial chemicals has contributed greatly to economic growth and improvements in life expectancy and living conditions, it has also produced an array of health and environmental problems that are affecting societal sustainability. Over the next 25 years, global chemical production is projected to double, rapidly outpacing the rate of population growth. A deep reorientation of the material basis of society is needed; this approach is captured in the principles of green chemistry.
All events are located at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, 2521 Channing Way, Berkeley, CA.
TO ATTEND AN EVENT, PLEASE R.S.V.P. Myra Armstrong, email@example.com | <urn:uuid:4f85f77c-5fff-485e-8e64-18b1eedeae09> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.irle.berkeley.edu/events/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94079 | 1,672 | 1.671875 | 2 |
Workers’ Liberty brought together spoken-word artists, performance poets, rappers, and other musicians on Saturday 24 November in Kings Cross for the fourth edition of “Beats, Rhymes, & Picket Lines”, an occasional night of music and poetry to raise money for ongoing working-class struggles, as well as AWL itself.
What we do
PART ONE: WHAT THE AWL IS FOR
In the Communist Manifesto Marx defined the purposes of the Communist League as follows:
Solidarity has to do a lot of different jobs.
The Apprentice, Dragon’s Den, classes on “enterprise” in schools... the British establishment is doing its best to push a UK version of the American dream.
Nadine Dorries, the MP who is leading a new campaign to cut abortion time limit, has been suspended from the Tory parliamentary party over her decision to appear on I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here.
AWL members sold several hundred copies of this newspaper on the 20 October TUC demo in central London.
Our new book, Antonio Gramsci: Working-Class Revolutionary, is now available to buy from radical bookstores, online and from local AWL branches.
Looking at the explosive struggles in Greece and Spain, or mass strike victories like the Chicago teachers or Queensland Children’s Hospital construction workers, or at inspiring incipient labour movements like that of the Chinese workers, you could get gloomy about the relatively low levels of struggle in Britain and the lack of strategy from the capitulatory trade union leaders.
On Sunday 9 September, the AWL’s five-a-side football team took part in Feminist Fightback’s “Left Foot Forward” tournament of left groups and campaigns — and won!
The final total raised in our fundraising drive was £18,096. | <urn:uuid:23daedc4-712f-488d-bd1b-1b87acd1c804> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.workersliberty.org/category/awl-labour-and-left/awl/what-we-do?page=2 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93019 | 385 | 1.515625 | 2 |
9 December 2010
A day might be a long time in politics but a year is a mere flick of the eyelid in education systems where change proceed at a pace that makes glaciers look like films on fast forward.
At the end of 2009 the New Zealand Government passed into law some provisions that enabled a radical new intervention for students likely to disengage to be introduced.
This Tertiary High School was to take 15 year old students identified as likely to disengage for education and rather than see them progress into the conventional secondary school programme, hit the wall of disengagement and leave as failures and drop-outs with few or no qualifications, they would enrol at the Tertiary High School, a programme inside a large polytechnic.
In the Tertiary High School the students would work within an integrated programme to complete their secondary school leaving qualifications (the National Certificate in Educational Achievement) as well as complete a two year technical qualification.
The key changes that were passed into law at that time were to allow students under the legal school leaving age of 16 years to attend a tertiary institution rather than a “school”. It diod this by legitimising full dual enrolment in both the secondary school they were leaving and the tertiary institution. The responsibilities of governance for these students were passed to the tertiary institution working on behalf of the school for those students still under the leaving age.
Dual enrolment was essential in making clear the shared nature of responsibility that we must have for students – it is bizarre that a Christmas Holiday (on this side of the world) see responsibility shift from Brand A provider to Brand B provider. At risk students and potential disengagers often slip through this shoddy structural defect in our system.
Dual enrolment also allows for funding from both the compulsory sector and the tertiary sector to be applied to the education of a student for whom that funding is in fact an entitlement. The device of placing the funding under the control of institutions and giving students access to it only on their terms is both quaint and long past its useful shelf-life.
But most importantly the changes to the law legitimised a new kind of programme – one that is both secondary and tertiary and they removed the legal impediments to allow a more flexible transition from secondary into tertiary. In this regard the changes were signalling the way of the future.
One year later. There has been much discussion in New Zealand in the past twelve months about secondary tertiary programmes and their manifestation in trades academies, service academies and so on.
And one year later the Education Ammendment Bill No. 2 nears the end of its passage into New Zealand law and puts into the NZ Education Act provision for a structurally new way of working – the secondary-tertiary programme.
Such a programme is defined by this law as a full-time programme which consists of both a secondary component and a tertiary component and is co-ordinated by a provider group or a lead provider. This is of critical importance in allowing education to be delivered in ways that start to challenge the walled cities of the sectors. No longer will “secondary” end one side of Christmas and “tertiary” start on the other. No longer will a student be considered to be the property of one sector rather than another. No longer will funding on the one hand be frozen into the rigidities of the way schools are resourced on while on the other be wrapped into a tertiary funding regime in which a student needs to borrow money in order to use their entitlement.
The law allows for a provider group to co-ordinate a secondary-tertiary programme by agreement with the Ministry of Education that makes a proper provision for the elements that you would expect to be managed to a high level of excellence. These include organisation and operation, curriculum, courses and qualifications. The selection of students to participate in it can be agreed to and the provision for the welfare and educational performance and the pastoral care and career guidance for participating students is covered in this agreement. Matters such as funding and the way it is sliced for the programme and the maximum number of students that may participate in it are also agreed to in the agreement.
“There it’s done, that didn’t hurt now did it?” as the dentist might say. This piece of legislation will somewhere in the future be seen as the moment when New Zealand put into words something that in the 1980’s was described as a need for a “jagged edge” and in the 1990’s given expression in terms such as “seamless education”.
The Tertiary High School might have opened the curtain a little on a different future for some young people. The latest passage into law of the provisions outlined above now open doors with a guarantee to youth that the future will be one of multiple pathways, not a choice between the high road to success and the low road to failure. | <urn:uuid:fed4952a-a0ce-443e-a125-d92deefaa9cc> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.stuartmiddleton.co.nz/?m=201012 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00009-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967265 | 1,014 | 1.835938 | 2 |
The following is a guest post from the Library’s Director of Communications, Gayle Osterberg.
It has been a busy first two weeks for the Poet Laureate, Natasha Trethewey, who is working this spring from the Library of Congress Poetry and Literature Center – a first for a laureate.
She visited with fellow poet Richard Blanco about his poem “One Today”, which he read at Barack Obama’s second presidential inauguration. She appeared on NPR’s Diane Rehm Show. She met with Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran. And she was profiled beautifully by the Washingtonian’s Sophie Gilbert in the new February issue.
Then on Wednesday, her first reading of the year drew a standing-room-only audience of several hundred to hear her read from “Native Guard”, her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection that she researched and wrote here at the Library. The Washington Post’s Ron Charles describes it here.
It is no wonder Chris Wallace and the Fox News Sunday team decided to spotlight Natasha as this week’s Power Player of the Week. She will be featured on this Sunday’s program, and I hope you and thousands nationwide have a chance to watch her and hear her talk about poetry and its importance as an elegant form of communication that touches the heart as well as the intellect.
She was asked at Wednesday’s reading what her top three priorities are for her laureateship and she replied to applause, “Bring poetry to a wider audience, bring poetry to a wider audience, bring poetry to a wider audience.” I think it is fair to say even after a few days she will absolutely meet those goals. | <urn:uuid:ef5bfb62-68f1-4ce7-ab7d-fc33ac5f48d3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2013/02/the-power-of-poetry-natasha-trethewey-comes-to-the-library/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00007-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.979147 | 353 | 1.703125 | 2 |
The nonprofit's work has paid off, generating projects such as student-run banks and business ideas including all-natural cupcakes and "fun milk" for breakfast on the go. The group, nicknamed "Nifty," will celebrate ten years of student achievement with a gala fundraiser Wednesday at Loyola University Maryland.
"We are most fortunate in our volunteers, who are the foot soldiers of the program," said Tricia Granata Eisner, executive director of NFTE Baltimore.
Lourdes Montes-Greenan, 34, and Christopher K. Nixon, 29, are both city residents and executives at PNC Bank who have made time for the program in their daily schedules.
"Lourdes grasped the concept behind NFTE the first time she saw it," said Eisner. "She comes up with ideas like community banking before I even think of them. She is community-focused. She connects with students and really believes in what NFTE does."
Montes-Greenan connected with NFTE three years ago after she sat in on a high school class and was instantly sold on the project.
"I was impressed when I found students working on a commercial for one of their products," she said. "Not only do they come up with a product, they learn how to market it."
She has since helped several schools establish student-run banks and worked with students on business plans and that ever-ready elevator pitch, "just in case you run into Donald Trump and have a quick minute to sell your idea,' she said.
The students' ideas amaze her, and their products, like a fragrant hand lotion with a student label, tempt her to buy.
"NFTE really tells these students how to make their ideas happen," she said. "It is amazing to see these guys marketing their products."
Nixon's became involved seven years ago as his "way to give back and to get more involved with city school kids," he said. He is still a volunteer and now a board member.
"He never say, 'No' to any task and is a great inspiration to all of us," said Eisner. "He really listens to these kids and then sets the bar high. He has great expectations and makes sure the kids meet them."
Nixon oversees students' bank branch operations, but rarely has to assist the experienced young bankers. He can turn his attention to the marketing course at Carver Vocational-Technical High School, one of nine city schools in NFTE's adopt-a-class program.
"These kids have great, really creative ideas," he said. "Most just need a little fine tuning. A lot learn how to carry on a business and make it a source of income. The program teaches them the value of working hard and gives them the discipline to do it.
"This is something they own and they find that the more time and energy they put into it, the more they will get out of it," he said. "They are motivated and really involved."
Clarice Tate, who teaches marketing essentials and accounting at Carver, said the NFTE program builds leadership, creativity, and problem-solving skills in the students.
"Theirs is a vested commitment and an asset to our program," she said. "These volunteers make sure the students get it — everything from how to price a product and how to figure expenses to determine if they can make a profit."
Both volunteer honorees said they are committed to the program, which Eisner assured them is already preparing for its second decade in Baltimore.
"It makes sense for the students and really catches their attention," said Montes-Greenan. "Some go on to college with their business experience, and some continue working on their business plan."
Nixon said, "I would absolutely recommend other schools look into this program. It is a great way to teach math and economics. Kids will learn a lot more through it than from traditional textbooks."
Doors open at 6 p.m. Wednesday, at McGuire Hall at Loyola University, 4501 N. Charles St. Tickets are $200 per person. Information: 410-630-1305. | <urn:uuid:9725799b-8bcc-43b1-baca-d772d73e0ba5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.baltimoresun.com/features/bs-gl-goodworks-nifty-20120428,0,7251593.story | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.983709 | 862 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Chancellor tours Outer Banks
(Sept. 28, 2001)
The old white Dodge van, flying ECU flags and sporting magnetic purple and gold "Hometown Tour" signs, bounced to a stop alongside a convenience store outside Manteo. A construction worker looked up from his job updating the store to ask" "Are y’all from ECU? We heard about you on the radio."
"Y’all" included Chancellor William Muse and a small entourage who were kicking off the Hometown Tour that is designed to introduce the chancellor to eastern North Carolina.
The first leg on Sept. 27 took Muse to Manteo and Nags Head. Future stops will include Morehead City and Beaufort on Oct. 24, Elizabeth City on Nov. 28 and New Bern on Dec. 11.
On campus, Muse is undertaking a similar getting-to-know-you effort with academic and administrative units. So far, he has met in half-day sessions in various campus locations with the School of Education, the College of Arts and Sciences, the School of Nursing and the Student Life and Administration and Finance Divisions.
In Nags Head, Muse told a luncheon audience that was jammed with civic, business and educational leaders that he opened his tour on the Outer Banks because it gave him a chance to start in the easternmost spot of the state and work back to the west. He also cited ECU Trustee Mike Kelly of Nags Head and state Sen. Marc Basnight of Manteo as reasons to come to the area.
Muse said, "On all these visits, it is more important for me to listen to you than vice versa. ECU is the university of eastern North Carolina, and if it is to successfully carry out its mission of service to the region, it is critical for me to know the people of the region, your hopes and aspirations, your successes and failures, your expectations of our university."
He listed a number of connections between ECU and the Outer Banks, including projects headed by Stan Riggs (Geology) and Hannah Jubran and Jodi Hollnagel (Art).
The Riggs project, partially funded by the U.S. and N.C. Geological Surveys, is mapping the entire Outer Banks and may one day help scientists predict where the most damage from hurricanes will occur. It is vital to provide public and regulatory officials with the information they need to make sound decisions.
Jubran and Hollnagel are working with Glenn Eure, an artist in Nags Head, on a monument that will be built in Kitty Hawk for the centennial anniversary of the historic flight of the Wright Brothers.The centennial date is Dec. 17, 2003.
Muse opened the day by accompanying ECU students Jenna Frey and Jonah Endsley to Manteo High School, where they had graduated in 1999. He visited with the senior administrative staff, the guidance counselors and several classroom teachers.
He also met with the editors of the Coastland Times in Manteo and the Outer Banks Sentinel in Nags Head and did an interview with WITN-TV.
In addition, he toured the Outer Banks Hospital that is under construction in Nags Head. The 73,500-square-foot facility, a joint project of Chesapeake General Hospital in Chesapeake, Va., and University Health Systems of Eastern Carolina, is scheduled for completion next spring.
He ended the day with a reception for ECU alumni and friends at Roanoke Island Festival Park in Manteo. | <urn:uuid:bd2a464b-da67-4cfd-a3e0-af9642de841c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ecu.edu/news/newsstory.cfm?ID=398 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955017 | 727 | 1.59375 | 2 |
To people who've never ridden a motorcycle and want to learn, or who want their children to learn how to ride safely -- Daryl Walter offers some sage advice: Learn how to ride on dirt first.
The sport of motocross -- where riders compete on an off-road course -- offers a softer and less risky surface for the inevitable novice crashes, he said.
"It's a sport, just like football, basketball or any other sport," said Walter, the president of the Jeeps Motorcycle Club, whose track is located on 80 acres in Park City, two miles north of Kansas Coliseum.
"You don't just jump in and become king of the hill in one year," he said. "It takes practice, practice, practice."
Walter is also administrator of the Central Kansas Motocross Series, the largest seasonal motocross racing series in the state.
Commercial motocross tracks aren't exactly plentiful, but they're also not rare across the state. There are five tracks that are part of the Central Kansas series, which runs from March to November. Andrew Hammond, who is working to develop a track west of Salina, is vying to become the sixth.
Hammond's application to the Saline County Commission for a conditional use permit to build the track on land his grandparents own -- the Prairie Harbor Golf Course -- was taken under advisement by the commission after a public hearing in March. On Friday, commissioners toured the site at 2002 N. Halstead.
Hammond's proposed track has run into opposition from those who live nearby who are worried about the traffic, noise and dust from the track. But avid motocross riders say their sport is a good weekend activity for their families and a way of bonding with their children, much like families who travel to area lakes to go camping and/or boating.
A family activity
Clint O'Farrell, of Smolan, started riding dirt bikes when he was 10 years old. Today, his family, which includes his daughter, Libby, 11, and son Chance, 14, and wife, Lydia, travel twice a month, on average, to go to area tracks on their open practice days to ride their bikes. Often they take some neighborhood children with them.
"We probably spend, with fuel and snacks, water and sports drinks and everything, probably $60 to $80 a month," O'Farrell, 40, said.
A used, 250cc (cubic centimeters refers to the size of the engine) cycle, a common motocross model, costs around $2,600. New ones vary generally between $6,000 and $8,000, Walter said. Riders as young as 5 years old can get into the sport riding 50cc bikes in pee wee classes.
Safe riders wear helmets, boots and goggles, and often kneepads, hip pads, chest protectors, elbow guards and even neck braces.
Motocross courses are known for their jumps, which will often range from 20 to 30 feet high. Crashes, and sometimes broken bones, do happen in the sport. Walter, 54, has broken a bone in his foot and four ribs riding in motocross races the past 14, 15 years.
"It really is a young man's sport. It definitely will beat you up," said Bennington resident Marty Miller, who goes to motocross races nearly every weekend during the spring and summer with his two sons, ages 11 and 17.
How much for a helmet?
Miller has been riding for about 13 years -- "I don't race, but I do ride with the boys all the time," he said.
Their spending on entry fees, fuel, food and other expenses to go to the races amounts to about $2,000 a month -- "and that's if no parts break," Miller said. He does all his own mechanical repairs.
His oldest son's riding helmet cost $500.
"You can get a riding suit, from a couple of hundred bucks to a couple of thousand, if you really wanted to spend that much," he said.
The races he goes to "are very family oriented," Miller said. "I'd say 80 percent of racers are kids, probably age 17 and under."
At most tracks on the Central Kansas series race entry fees range from about $25, and there's a gate fee to enter the park that's $10 for adults and $8 for children ages 7 through 13. Children 6 years old and younger are admitted free.
Jeeps Motorcycle Club also sells family memberships to those who want to come out and ride on nonrace days. Memberships are $150, plus a commitment to work four hours as a volunteer for the club, and that gets you a key to the front gate, Walter said.
In motocross, classes of riders are generally divided according to age, bike size and skill level. On most race days at most tracks you can find 20 or more classes of riders, Hammond said. Each race is known as a moto, and riders in each class generally do two motos. The scores from each moto, each of which consists of multiple laps around the track, are added together and the rider with the lowest score wins the event.
Would supervise the track
A point system throughout the racing season determines winners at the seasons' end.
Hammond is planning to closely supervise his track if commissioners approve it.
"Most Saturdays and the one week day I'm open (Wednesdays), I'm only expecting 20 or so people," he said. "For the races, which are Sunday events, we're only approved for one or two races for six months out of the year."
Though the track would have the capacity to entertain crowds of racers and spectators of up to 300, that capacity won't be reached every time the track is open, thus the traffic to and from the track isn't going to be as heavy as some believe, Hammond said.
"People are thinking it's going to be open every day of the week but it'll be open two days a week until 8 p.m. at night," he said. "If I'm not there, the gate will be locked and no one will be out there."
Hammond said he's unemployed, having been laid off at a local motorcycle shop after business slowed due to the weak economy. He's concentrating on obtaining a loan to construct the track and pay for liability insurance.
Hammond, who is married and has a young son, grew up outside of Great Bend and came to love motocross as a boy. He's had surgery on both wrists, his collarbone and a broken femur due to crashes on the course.
"I still love it, I just can't push the limit as much as I used to," he said.
He says he's trying to make enough money off the land his grandparents, Gary and ??? Gleason, own to make the track self-supporting and "pay myself a little bit for my work out there." But just as important, he said, is giving local riders a place close by to go.
Fights not a problem
Juanita Basinger and her husband, Richard, own the 55-acre Dragoon Creek Motocross Park near Lyndon, 20 miles south of Topeka. They've been in business since 1997; the track is open from March to October.
It's expensive to operate a track, Juanita Basinger said. Last season she spent $20,000 just in trophies alone.
"Anything under 100 riders and you're probably not going to make any money," Basinger said. "You can fall below that once or twice a year and still be OK, but (when that happens) you're not making money."
A concern some people have about motocross tracks who aren't familiar with the sport is the idea that fighting or other rowdy behavior is a regular occurrence. Nothing is further from the truth, the participants said.
"I have very rarely seen a fight," Marty Miller said. "When I was a teenager I used to go to speedways and I've seen 10 times more fights there. I've seen more fights at a high school football game than at a motocross track."
Motocross riders share a camaraderie within the sport and so getting in fights "is as likely as me punching a friend in the nose for no reason," O'Farrell said.
"If you're drinking you've got no place being on a bike," he said. "I've not seen that being an issue whatsoever."
The other issues most often mentioned as criticisms of motocross tracks are the noise from the bikes and dust raised during competition. Track supporters say both are exaggerated.
Some law officers agree.
"It's noisy. You get 20 motorcycles going all at once, it gets noisy. But it's not too bad to the point you can't hear," said Marion Police Chief Josh Whitwell, speaking about Green Acres Raceway, operated by the Ron Hardey family, at the north edge of Marion. Whitwell said the noise from the track competes with the noise from big trucks traveling Kansas Highway 56 near the track.
The track is outside the city limits but the road leading to it is inside the limits. Whitwell said his department sometimes gets complaints about drivers speeding on the road to the raceway, but no complaints about noise or dust. Walter said the track has some neighbors living about 1/8 of a mile away.
"People don't think of it as bad noisy. People here are used to having it there," Whitwell said.
Walter said that of the five tracks in the Central Kansas Motocross Series, the closest neighbors live within 1/4 of a mile or closer, and the most living within earshot of a track is probably the Jeeps Club track, which has about seven neighbors.
A recent race at Jeeps featured 310 riders entered, and one race had 34 competitors riding at once. The track has "hundreds of trees" planted at the property line to filter out the dust, Walter said. He also keeps dust down by dousing the track with thousands of gallons of water and mixing in sawdust with the dirt.
"At those five tracks I can't ever remember (complaints) happening," he said. "To me, that (the sound) isn't a valid argument."
n Reporter David Clouston can be reached at 822-1403 or by e-mail at firstname.lastname@example.org. | <urn:uuid:ed76a108-f9be-4ecc-8271-59ff1c3e8f21> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.salina.com/rollingthunderks/story/Families-bond-through-motocross-032410 | 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 | 0.980765 | 2,187 | 1.5625 | 2 |
The power steering pump in your Nissan Frontier is a kind of hydraulic pump that makes the wheel steering easier for you. The pump releases a dampening fluid, which provides a softer steer to the wheel while you are driving on curve roads. But the pump is made of very sensitive components that fail easily due to stress and mechanical vibrations. The moment you experience certain steering pump problems, you should know how to troubleshoot, so you would know what to do to fix them. Here are some tips that you can follow to find the reasons behind power steering pump failure:
This problem usually happens when the Nissan Frontier power steering pump doesn't deliver enough pressure to soften the steering wheel operation. To verify the condition of the pump, you must perform a pressure test. You'll need a device called pressure gauge. It's usually inserted in the area between the pressure line and the pump. Start the test by turning on the engine. Rotate the wheel in one direction. While doing this, observe the pressure readings between 1000 rpm and3000 rpm. Get the difference between the two pressure measurements and compare it with your vehicle's pressure requirement. This information is usually stated on your vehicle owner's manual.
A specific sound points to a specific problem. A clicking or clunking noise is often caused by a broken steering pump vane. A long moaning sound, on the other hand, is due to a missing pump bearing or a damaged input shaft. If the pump is blocked, you'll hear a loud growling noise. To diagnose these problems, you have to do a physical inspection of the pump. Open the hood and check if the tension or serpentine belt is not loose. Adjust the belt if necessary. Also, take a look at the pump vane and observe if it's still securely fixed to its mounting position. If it's completely damaged, replace the pump immediately.
Hydraulic fluid/oil leaks usually happen when the seals or gaskets are removed because the adhesive already came off. A cracked pump casing or fuel reservoir is another common cause. To be sure that the abovementioned culprits are the true reason behind your steering pump problems, inspect the pump for physical damage and fracture. Inspect the hoses and lines too for holes and splinters. | <urn:uuid:672d591a-af8b-4cc2-99f5-ccc0b1bb7fb4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.carparts.com/nissan/frontier/power-steering-pump | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00033-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.946349 | 455 | 1.578125 | 2 |
Rescuers pluck 150 people from floods as Welsh river bursts banks
Weathermen blame Atlantic jet stream for blowing in torrential rain – and warn that more is on the way
Rescue teams winched people to safety yesterday after holiday camps and caravan parks were battered by storms and flooded by overflowing rivers.
More than 1,000 people were moved from camps and villages around Aberystwyth in west Wales after the river Leri burst its banks amid gale force winds and driving rain. At least 150 people in the worst affected areas were sheltering in relief centres last night.
One lifeboat crew helping a stranded disabled man from a flooded caravan had to be pulled to safety itself by an RAF helicopter after the four-man team became trapped.
Some roads were submerged in several feet of water as the region received twice as much rain in 24 hours as normally falls during the whole of June. Four caravan parks were completely evacuated.
Residents described the scenes as "carnage", but said the community had pulled together, providing food and shelter to the vulnerable.
Jenny Evans, 42, of Stafford, who owns a caravan at the Beachside Caravan Park, said: "One of our neighbours, who is known as Nana Dot, had to be rescued from her static caravan. She is in her mid-seventies and had to be taken in the back of a pick-up truck. I've seen it flood before but nothing as bad as this. It's like we've had a month's worth of rain in 36 hours."
Wind speeds were measured at close to 70 miles per hour. Twenty-five homes in the nearby village of Talybont were evacuated in the early hours.
Ellen ap Gwynne, the council leader for the area, said: "Many people's homes have been ruined – some worse than others – so it won't be cleared up overnight, but we'll be working towards that."
Meanwhile, footage filmed onboard RAF rescue helicopters showed just how treacherous the rising waters had become. Winch crews were shown lifting people from a home that appeared to be almost submerged.
Forecasters suggested that summer was on hold for at least two more weeks, with the storms and heavy rain that have soaked Britain since the beginning of June due to last for most of the rest of the month.
Despite the occasional glimpse of sunshine yesterday, there were warnings of torrential downpours on the way over the next two days.
There will be little respite, with the wet weather continuing for the next week and possibly until the end of the month. Winds were measured blowing at up to 62mph in the south of England on Friday. But yesterday, it was Wales that took the brunt of the bad weather.
A spokesman for Environment Agency Wales said five flood warnings were now in place. "We have seen up to five inches of rainfall in 24 hours in this area," he said.
Meteorologists have put the unseasonably bad weather down to the jet stream moving in an abnormal direction. Jet streams are a zone of fast-moving winds, typically flowing around the globe about six miles above the Earth's surface.
At this time of year the Atlantic jet stream would normally take a path past the north-west of Scotland, bringing rain to the North-west and drier weather to the South-east.
However, this summer it is getting stuck in across southern England, bringing with it low-pressure systems that have resulted in the wettest April on record and a miserable June.
Reid Morrison, a Met Office forecaster, said: "The jet stream is heading towards Spain and the Biscay area, further south than usual, so we are in the track for areas of low pressure streaming in from the Atlantic – which is the cause of the bad weather."
He added: "We expect it will remain unsettled for this coming week, with some bright spots in the South. But there will be showers and persistent rain from Monday onwards. The South-east might see more settled weather towards the end of the month, but the North and the East will continue unsettled and can expect more rain."
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£85 - £120 per day: Randstad Education Cheshire: KS2 teacher needed to do PPA ... | <urn:uuid:6b6da3dd-6f5c-4dfb-a146-2bc5ed9d2f6f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/rescuers-pluck-150-people-from-floods-as-welsh-river-bursts-banks-7834239.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977326 | 1,231 | 1.515625 | 2 |
School starts here in just a few weeks.
Never mind that Target and Wal-Mart erected their school supply displays on the day after Fourth of July.
“Mommy, is summer over?” my 7-year-old asked as we strolled by the cases of new pencils, pens and binders on JULY 5th.
For weeks, I’ve resisted going near those aisles. I’m dreading having to dig deep to purchase all new supplies, plus uniforms, shoes, and the 17,000 other accessories that students need to tackle a new academic year.
Unfortunately, I’m going to have to snap out of my denial phase pretty soon.
Sure, my kid needs new school supplies; however, this year I am planning to recycle as many of her old items as possible.
That’s not to say that I will be sending my child to school with a backpack riddled with holes or chewed up pencils sans erasers; rather, my plan is to be prudent and frugal.
For example, my soon-to-be third grader has a perfectly good soft, plastic, insulated Scooby-Doo lunch bag which she used rather sparingly last year. There’s no reason why she can’t use the same bag again this year. Only, Scooby-Doo is soooo 2011, mom, and now she wants one from Old Navy that features a Terrier and some squiggly lines.
I put the kibosh on the new lunch bag.
However, Grandma put the kibosh on my kibosh and now my kid has two lunch bags.
I won’t expound on that transaction, except to say that I was more determined than ever to put lunch bag number one to good use.
Instead of toting turkey sandwiches, Fruit Roll-Ups and chocolate milk to and from school, Scooby-Doo is now housing emergency supplies in our car.
If you have an extra lunch bag or box sitting around the house, put it to good use by creating an emergency car kit or a first-aid kit. Fill it with Kleenex, Band-Aids, Wet Ones, hand sanitizer, sunscreen, bug spray, Neosporin, extra socks, tweezers, extra batteries (for a car flashlight), a little cash and a bottle of water.
Another option is to recycle the lunch bag and make it into an activity container for your kids to take on the road. Use it to store crayons, chalk, mini pads of paper, magnets and other small toys. If you have a metal lunch box, consider sanding down the exterior image and using it to store and play with magnetic doll sets. Finally, insulated lunch bags that have a few small holes or stains in it can be cut down and made into beverage sleeves for coffee cups or soda cans. I’ve even seen some people slice sections from insulated lunch bags and secure them around pipes when the space was too tight for expanded foam.
What other ways can you think of to reuse insulated lunch bags? | <urn:uuid:7e73e64d-1258-44b8-8b22-d9341271f2b4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.families.com/blog/money-saving-mom-moves | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954116 | 650 | 1.703125 | 2 |
Census paints rosy picture for Canberrans
Last year's census shows Canberrans are better paid and better educated compared with the rest of the country.
The ACT recorded the third fastest rate of population growth, just behind the resource rich states of Western Australia and Queensland.
Between the 2006 census and last year's national survey, Canberra welcomed about 33,000 new residents, with the population for 2011 at 357,000 people.
About a quarter of Canberrans are university educated, which is 14 per cent higher than the national average.
Average incomes are much higher too.
The median household earns about $700 a week more than the national average.
But while Canberrans are prosperous, they are facing the highest rents and the second highest mortgage repayments of all capital cities.
More people than ever are now living in apartments and townhouses, as Canberra moves towards higher density suburbs.
The number of people living in separate houses declined 4 per cent from 2006, while the number of Canberrans living in townhouses is much higher than the national average.
But the Treasurer Andrew Barr says that is not just because of housing affordability issues.
"It's a reflection of a combination of factors," he said.
"More people want to live closer to the CBD and to employment areas.
"Also there's been a change in household composition, with more singles and couples without children households changing the sort of housing that's required."
Mr Barr says the census information is helpful for planning Canberra's future.
"It certainly provides useful information to plan for future urban growth," he said.
"We know where the population is growing fastest in the city and which suburbs are undergoing urban renewal."
The number of same sex couples has also increased from about 650 in 2006 to 870.
But Mr Barr says the census has only asked that question for the last few years.
"The census itself and the questions that are asked reflect some of the social change that's occurred in Australia," he said.
"As societal trends change, people feel more comfortable expressing their true living circumstances."
Residents in the ACT were less likely to declare a religion.
Just under 30 per cent of residents didn't tick a religion on the census form, up from 23 per cent in 2006.
Canberrans are also more likely be in a defacto relationship compared to the rest of the country.
The national capital has a younger population, with the median age of 34, three years younger than the average Australian. | <urn:uuid:56b6ede3-9fb5-4871-828e-1bab28674a4e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-06-21/canberrans-better-paid-but-higher-housing-costs/4085068 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.961399 | 516 | 1.75 | 2 |
Profile: Laurence Foley
Laurence Foley was a participant or observer in the following events:
Laurence Foley. [Source: Public domain]US diplomat Laurence Foley, a senior administrator of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), is shot and killed in front of his house in Amman, Jordan. It will later be claimed that his two killers were working for Islamist militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. According to Jordanian court documents, in the summer of 2002 al-Zarqawi began training a small group of fighters in Syria to attack Western and Jewish targets in Jordan. Foley was their first target. The two killers met with al-Zarqawi in Syria and got money for the operation. [Washington Post, 6/8/2006] Al-Zarqawi’s alleged role in this murder will be widely reported in December 2002 and used as further justification for a US invasion of Iraq, since US officials are (incorrectly) arguing at the time that al-Zarqawi is linked to both al-Qaeda and the Iraqi government. For instance, one CNN story about the arrest of Foley’s two killers is titled, “Arrests May Link Al-Qaeda, Iraq.” [CNN, 12/14/2002; CNN, 12/14/2002]
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If you would like to help us with this effort, please contact us. We need help with programming (Java, JDO, mysql, and xml), design, networking, and publicity. If you want to contribute information to this site, click the register link at the top of the page, and start contributing. | <urn:uuid:1e7a45a3-8c7d-43d8-81d7-76bd235fea23> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=laurence_foley_1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699273641/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516101433-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940476 | 388 | 1.789063 | 2 |
Recent federal cases demonstrate the importance of engaging in the interactive process when an employee requests a religious accommodation. Title VII and similar state and local laws not only prohibit religious discrimination in the workplace, but also require that employers make reasonable accommodations for an employee's sincerely held religious beliefs and practices if doing so would not create an undue hardship. Undue hardship is generally defined as more than a de minimis (nominal or minimal) cost or expense. As part of an employer's obligation to accommodate an employee's religious beliefs, it is best practice for an employer to carefully consider all religious accommodation requests by engaging in the interactive process. As part of the interactive process, the employer and employee should discuss potential accommodations and how the conflict between work and religious observance may be eliminated. However, an employer is not obligated to fulfill an employee's request for a religious accommodation if the request is not reasonable or causes an undue burden.
In Latice Porter v. City of Chicago, +700 F.3d 944 (7th Cir. 2012),the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed a religious discrimination claim by Latice Porter (Porter), a senior data entry specialist, against the City of Chicago Police Department (City) because the City had complied with Title VII by engaging in the interactive process and offering Porter a reasonable accommodation. When Porter, an observant Christian, objected to working a Sunday morning shift because she wanted to attend church, her request for a shift change was granted. However, due to the City's business needs, her supervisor reassigned Porter to a Sunday morning shift and advised her that she would be granted an accommodation as soon as an opening in the alternative schedule opened up. When the City offered Porter a Sunday evening shift with the same pay and benefits and that did not conflict with her Sunday morning church services, she refused the offer and failed to show up for work because she wanted all of Sunday off as an accommodation. The court reasoned that the City had complied with Title VII by providing Porter with an accommodation that eliminated the conflict between work and religious observance and that it was not required to grant Porter's requested and preferred accommodation because doing so would cause an undue burden on the City.
Similarly, in EEOC v. Thompson Contracting, Grading, Paving, and Utilities, Inc., No. 11-1897, +2012 U.S. App. LEXIS 25635, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed a religious discrimination claim brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) alleging that Thompson Contracting (Thompson) failed to accommodate the request of Banayah Yisrael (Yisrael), a Jewish dump truck driver, to not work on Saturdays so that he may observe the Jewish Sabbath. Although the EEOC proposed three accommodations, the court determined that the proposed accommodations - hiring a substitute hourly contract driver, creating a pool of substitute drivers from current employees in other positions, and transferring the employee to a different position - were unreasonable because they placed an undue burden and a high cost on the employer. Thompson was not liable for religious discrimination because granting the requested accommodations would result in an undue burden on the employer's business operations.
Advice for Employers
Taken together, these cases highlight the importance of the interactive process and handling requests for religious accommodation. An employer may be able to avoid liability for religious discrimination if it can show that it carefully considered the employee's request and engaged in the interactive process by communicating with the employee and exploring accommodations that eliminate the conflict between work and religious observances. However, as demonstrated above, an employer is not obligated to grant the employee's preferred or requested accommodation if doing so would cause an undue burden on the employer. An employer will fulfill its duty under Title VII and similar state and local laws by showing that it responded in good faith to an employee's request, considered all possible options and attempted to offer a solution to resolve the conflict between the employee's religious practices and work obligations.
Employee Management > EEO - Discrimination
Religious Accommodation Policy
How to Handle an Employee's Request for Religious Accommodation
How to Prevent Religious Discrimination
Religious Accommodation Evaluation Form
Religious Accommodation Response Form
Religious Accommodation Request and Action Form | <urn:uuid:ff2fd12a-94c5-4823-91e5-d05068ea497e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/employers-should-have-faith-in-the-inter-43924/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698207393/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095647-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.952042 | 859 | 1.695313 | 2 |
For the first time in about 30 years, the Fort Independence Paiute Tribe will be hosting a Native American Pow Wow.
The Independence tribe will be sharing its culture, history and heritage through a number of cultural events, including dances, interpretive displays and good old fashioned fellowship this fall, and organizers are hoping to attract local and out-of-the-area visitors to participate.
Pow Wow Co-Chairperson and Tribal Historic Preservation Officer Priscilla Naylor said the event “is a wonderful way to present our cultural heritage to our own Native American community and to our Eastern Sierra neighbors and visitors.”
The pow wow is scheduled for Sept. 20-22 and will feature traditional dance contests for adults and youth, drum groups, interpretive displays, singing, food, vendors and more.
All of the events will be held on Tribal grounds which are located about 2.5 miles north of of Independence on U.S. 395. All the events will be free and open to the public.
“Pow wow gives our neighbors here in Inyo County as well as the traveling public the opportunity to learn more about our heritage and history” said Co-Chairperson John Scruggs. “We hope everyone will stop by to enjoy the activities.”
“Pow wow provides an opportunity to share our historic customs and traditions. It’s an important tool to help keep our ancestral past alive,” Naylor said.
The Fort Independence Paiute Tribe has approximately 140 members and is one of the oldest recognized tribes in the Owens Valley.
The tribe operates a convenience store, truck stop, RV Park and casino just north of Independence and provides employment for about 20 southern Inyo County residents.
For more information contact Priscilla Naylor or John Scruggs at (760) 878-2483. | <urn:uuid:7f89ae2d-cb52-41fb-861e-eadd3342f652> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.inyoregister.com/print/3251?quicktabs_2=1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.932461 | 383 | 1.632813 | 2 |
Assemblyman Clifford W. Crouch (R,I-Guilford) recently announced that $9 million in flood-mitigation grants will be awarded through the NY Works program to 23 counties to help restore and rehabilitate town and county waterways that were severely impacted by Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee. Crouch worked to secure flood-mitigation funding during this year’s budget negotiations.
“I am proud to have worked with Governor Andrew Cuomo and my colleagues to deliver flood assistance for the areas affected by flooding,” said Crouch, the Assembly Minority Conference’s representative on the Joint Budget Conference Committee for Environment, Agriculture and Housing, where he sought funding for the program. “Through the NY Works program, we are able to get the funding to the counties that need it for stream maintenance, stabilization and waterway-rehabilitation projects. This money can help rebuild struggling communities and mitigate future flood issues.”
According to the Governor’s office, New York State is providing an additional $7 million in funding so counties can meet their 25 percent non-federal match requirements for eligible stream-restoration projects through the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). Altogether, $16 million from New York State is expected to generate $44 million in federal and local funding to complete emergency watershed-protection and flood-reduction projects in 26 counties.
The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation conducted a thorough review and evaluation of all applications and their proposed projects in order to determine grant awards. New York State worked with NRCS to determine additional necessary projects in need of non-federal matching funds. The following are rewards each county received that Crouch represents: Broome: $653,032; Chenango: $330,000; Delaware: $673,462; and Ulster: $658,112. | <urn:uuid:bc16b6c6-1d34-4abd-8078-ff96b87ced36> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.assembly.state.ny.us/mem/Clifford-W-Crouch/story/49155/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00013-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947198 | 383 | 1.695313 | 2 |
Nearly 100 million sq. ft. of freshspace hit the market during the first nine months of 2005. Despite that big burst of capacity, there’s no sign of rising vacancies or falling rents. Indeed, the industrial market actually tightened during that period.
Two economic trends — soaring cargo traffic on the west coast and moderate GDP growth — have helped absorb this new supply. Even the 27 million sq. ft. of speculative industrial space that hit the market during the third quarter (up from just 4 million sq. ft. the previous quarter) was easily absorbed. According to a new report by Grubb & Ellis, national industrial vacancy fell to 8.4% at the end of last quarter, or 20 basis points below its midyear level. Only eight of 48 nationalposted vacancy increases during the third quarter, and none of was more than .5%.
“The industrial market is performing much better than the office market, but you don’t hear that too much,” says Bob Bach, director of national research at Grubb & Ellis. Asking rental rates also have budged slightly in favor of landlords. The weighted average rate for warehouse-distribution space was $4.41 per sq. ft. at midyear, up nine cents from the end of the first quarter and 15 cents from midyear 2004.
Ironically, the same forces that have hurt the office market may be working to the advantage of investors in the industrial sector. While the office market depends heavily on job creation, industrial demand can actually be created when firms reduce headcount.
Bach theorizes that many firms arein state-of-the-art facilities as a way to compensate for lost workers. This is not a new trend, but it illustrates how similar economic trends can have varied effects on the property market. “I’d argue that new facilities allow distributors to be more efficient in storing and moving their materials. It’s also my impression that the square-foot per employee ratio has been rising in industrial buildings while it has been falling in office buildings,” says Bach.
There’s also the China syndrome — the demand for space to handle the still-rising tide of goods coming across the Pacific from Chinese factories. Bach points to’s booming Inland Empire market, where roughly 15 million sq. ft. of new industrial space has come to market since the mid 1990’s. Five years ago, industrial vacancy was hovering near 15% southeast of the Los Angeles metro area. By the end of September, however, the region had the lowest vacancy rate in the nation at 2.1%, according to Grubb & Ellis.
“This has become a very vibrant and reflexive market,” says Bach. “It used to be that older warehouse buildings sat idle, but now developers are scraping them down to their foundation and converting them into flexible space.”
Even so, there are some troubling signs in the economy. Consumer confidence is down and retail sales growth is slowing. The there are the travails of the U.S. auto industry, including the bankruptcy filing by parts maker Delphi Corp. So far, there has been little impact: Both Delphi and its former parent, General Motors, own their factories and warehouses. That lessens the risk of a vacancy spike while it may even present an opportunity to developers bent on converting these older properties. On the other hand, suppliers to Delphi stand to lose business when it transfers manufacturing out of the U.S. | <urn:uuid:da6450c0-3de6-48eb-8d3d-3e5e66e1c3aa> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://nreionline.com/news/industrial_third_quarter | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00022-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956679 | 719 | 1.625 | 2 |
Report: GM May Introduce Series-Hybrid Prototype
9 November 2006
AutoWeek reports that General Motors may soon introduce a series-hybrid prototype as a step in its development path to future electric vehicles.
GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz told AutoWeek in an interview that GM executives believe that electric vehicles are the future, and that the company’s work on fuel-cell vehicles may first be realized as a series hybrid. GM CEO Rick Wagoner will reveal “a new step” in GM’s alternative-fuel vehicle programs at the Los Angeles auto show this month.
A series hybrid could run primarily on electricity from lithium-ion batteries, with an engine as backup to replenish batteries, Lutz says. The backup engine could be a diesel or gasoline internal combustion engine. Backup energy also could come from a fuel cell.
Such a vehicle would require “a much smaller fuel cell stack” than a vehicle in which the fuel cell powers an electric engine, Lutz said. It would be less complex than a parallel hybrid system, which constantly shifts between an electric and gasoline engine to power a vehicle.
“Tom Stephens [group vice president of GM Powertrain], Rick Wagoner and I believe in the ultimate electrification of the automobile,” Lutz said...“We believe that’s where it’s going...what started as a fuel cell project is now an electric vehicle project.”
In September, Lutz wrote that GM was not putting all its eggs in the hydrogen basket, and was considering a variety of power sources for electric-drive vehicles, including plug-in hybrids. (Earlier post.)
Lutz expects rapid battery development over the next three to four years will provide more energy storage.
(A hat-tip to Patrick!)
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There is no firm evidence that there were any links between the Masons, Russell and the early Watchtower, although many people have tried.
The reason many have tried is the unusual amount of coincidences in the language and symbolism used in the early years of the movement. A very good example of this are the titles used by Russell for his early publications, “Millenium Dawn”, “Golden Age” all these have Masonic undertones to them.
The early Watchtower used to use a symbol identical to that which the Order of the Knights Templar use
Enlarged view of Watchtower masthead
Knights Templar Badge
Above is the Watchtower Memorial next to Russell’s Grave, and below a version of Russell’s Divine Plan
Above shows the Knights Templar logo.
Russell also used a lot of Masonic terminology in his sermons by making references to “The Grand Master” when referring to the Lord, “Secret Order” when referring to himself and his followers and “Degrees of Knowledge” to name but a few.
I’ll leave this for you to decide. | <urn:uuid:967e1369-3f80-48e0-a629-fa1c00aadf27> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.quotes-watchtower.co.uk/masonic.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959532 | 236 | 1.84375 | 2 |
(Pub. L. 94–553, title I, § 101,Oct. 19, 1976, 90 Stat. 2548; Pub. L. 98–450, § 2,Oct. 4, 1984, 98 Stat. 1727; Pub. L. 100–617, § 2,Nov. 5, 1988, 102 Stat. 3194; Pub. L. 101–650, title VIII, §§ 802,
803,Dec. 1, 1990, 104 Stat. 5134, 5135; Pub. L. 103–465, title V, § 514(b),Dec. 8, 1994, 108 Stat. 4981; Pub. L. 105–80, § 12(a)(5),Nov. 13, 1997, 111 Stat. 1534; Pub. L. 110–403, title II, § 209(a)(1),Oct. 13, 2008, 122 Stat. 4264.)
Historical and Revision Notes
house report no. 94–1476
Effect on Further Disposition of Copy or Phonorecord.Section
restates and confirms the principle that, where the copyright owner has transferred ownership of a particular copy or phonorecord of a work, the person to whom the copy or phonorecord is transferred is entitled to dispose of it by sale, rental, or any other means. Under this principle, which has been established by the court decisions and section 27 of the present law [section 27 of former title 17], the copyright owner’s exclusive right of public distribution would have no effect upon anyone who owns “a particular copy or phonorecord lawfully made under this title” and who wishes to transfer it to someone else or to destroy it.
Thus, for example, the outright sale of an authorized copy of a book frees it from any copyright control over its resale price or other conditions of its future disposition. A library that has acquired ownership of a copy is entitled to lend it under any conditions it chooses to impose. This does not mean that conditions on future disposition of copies or phonorecords, imposed by a contract between their buyer and seller, would be unenforceable between the parties as a breach of contract, but it does mean that they could not be enforced by an action for infringement of copyright. Under section
however, the owner of the physical copy or phonorecord cannot reproduce or perform the copyrighted work publicly without the copyright owner’s consent.
To come within the scope of section
, a copy or phonorecord must have been “lawfully made under this title,” though not necessarily with the copyright owner’s authorization. For example, any resale of an illegally “pirated” phonorecord would be an infringement, but the disposition of a phonorecord legally made under the compulsory licensing provisions of section
Effect on Display of Copy.Subsection (b) ofsection
deals with the scope of the copyright owner’s exclusive right to control the public display of a particular “copy” of a work (including the original or prototype copy in which the work was first fixed). Assuming, for example, that a painter has sold the only copy of an original work of art without restrictions, would it be possible for him to restrain the new owner from displaying it publicly in galleries, shop windows, on a projector, or on television?
adopts the general principle that the lawful owner of a copy of a work should be able to put his copy on public display without the consent of the copyright owner. As in cases arising under section
, this does not mean that contractual restrictions on display between a buyer and seller would be unenforceable as a matter of contract law.
The exclusive right of public display granted by section
would not apply where the owner of a copy wishes to show it directly to the public, as in a gallery or display case, or indirectly, as through an opaque projector. Where the copy itself is intended for projection, as in the case of a photographic slide, negative, or transparency, the public projection of a single image would be permitted as long as the viewers are “present at the place where the copy is located.”
On the other hand, section
takes account of the potentialities of the new communications media, notably television, cable and optical transmission devices, and information storage and retrieval devices, for replacing printed copies with visual images. First of all, the public display of an image of a copyrighted work would not be exempted from copyright control if the copy from which the image was derived were outside the presence of the viewers. In other words, the display of a visual image of a copyrighted work would be an infringement if the image were transmitted by any method (by closed or open circuit television, for example, or by a computer system) from one place to members of the public located elsewhere.
Moreover, the exemption would extend only to public displays that are made “either directly or by the projection of no more than one image at a time.” Thus, even where the copy and the viewers are located at the same place, the simultaneous projection of multiple images of the work would not be exempted. For example, where each person in a lecture hall is supplied with a separate viewing apparatus, the copyright owner’s permission would generally be required in order to project an image of a work on each individual screen at the same time.
The committee’s intention is to preserve the traditional privilege of the owner of a copy to display it directly, but to place reasonable restrictions on the ability to display it indirectly in such a way that the copyright owner’s market for reproduction and distribution of copies would be affected. Unless it constitutes a fair use under section
, or unless one of the special provisions of section
is applicable, projection of more than one image at a time, or transmission of an image to the public over television or other communication channels, would be an infringement for the same reasons that reproduction in copies would be. The concept of “the place where the copy is located” is generally intended to refer to a situation in which the viewers are present in the same physical surroundings as the copy, even though they cannot see the copy directly.
Effect of Mere Possession of Copy or Phonorecord.Subsection (c) ofsection
qualifies the privileges specified in subsections (a) and (b) by making clear that they do not apply to someone who merely possesses a copy or phonorecord without having acquired ownership of it. Acquisition of an object embodying a copyrighted work by rental, lease, loan, or bailment carries with it no privilege to dispose of the copy under section
or to display it publicly under section
. To cite a familiar example, a person who has rented a print of a motion picture from the copyright owner would have no right to rent it to someone else without the owner’s permission.
Burden of Proof in Infringement Actions. During the course of its deliberations on this section, the Committee’s attention was directed to a recent court decision holding that the plaintiff in an infringement action had the burden of establishing that the allegedly infringing copies in the defendant’s possession were not lawfully made or acquired under section 27 of the present law [section 27 of former title 17]. American International Pictures, Inc. v. Foreman, 400 F.Supp. 928 (S.D.Alabama 1975). The Committee believes that the court’s decision, if followed, would place a virtually impossible burden on copyright owners. The decision is also inconsistent with the established legal principle that the burden of proof should not be placed upon a litigant to establish facts particularly within the knowledge of his adversary. The defendant in such actions clearly has the particular knowledge of how possession of the particular copy was acquired, and should have the burden of providing this evidence to the court. It is the intent of the Committee, therefore, that in an action to determine whether a defendant is entitled to the privilege established by section
and (b), the burden of proving whether a particular copy was lawfully made or acquired should rest on the defendant.
References in Text
The date of the enactment of the Computer Software Rental Amendments Act of 1990, referred to in subsec. (b)(2)(B), is the date of enactment of Pub. L. 101–650
, which was approved Dec. 1, 1990.
The first section of the Clayton Act, referred to in subsec. (b)(3), is classified to section
, Commerce and Trade, and section
, Labor. The term “antitrust laws” is defined in section
Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, referred to in subsec. (b)(3), is classified to section
2008—Subsec. (b)(4). Pub. L. 110–403
substituted “and 505” for “505, and 509”.
1997—Subsec. (b)(2)(B). Pub. L. 105–80
substituted “Register of Copyrights considers appropriate” for “Register of Copyright considers appropriate”.
1994—Subsec. (a). Pub. L. 103–465
inserted at end “Notwithstanding the preceding sentence, copies or phonorecords of works subject to restored copyright under section
that are manufactured before the date of restoration of copyright or, with respect to reliance parties, before publication or service of notice under section
, may be sold or otherwise disposed of without the authorization of the owner of the restored copyright for purposes of direct or indirect commercial advantage only during the 12-month period beginning on—
“(1) the date of the publication in the Federal Register of the notice of intent filed with the Copyright Office under section
whichever occurs first.”
“(2) the date of the receipt of actual notice served under section
1990—Subsec. (b)(1). Pub. L. 101–650
, § 802(2), added par. (1) and struck out former par. (1) which read as follows: “Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (a), unless authorized by the owners of copyright in the sound recording and in the musical works embodied therein, the owner of a particular phonorecord may not, for purposes of direct or indirect commercial advantage, dispose of, or authorize the disposal of, the possession of that phonorecord by rental, lease, or lending, or by any other act or practice in the nature of rental, lease, or lending. Nothing in the preceding sentence shall apply to the rental, lease, or lending of a phonorecord for nonprofit purposes by a nonprofit library or nonprofit educational institution.”
Subsec. (b)(2), (3). Pub. L. 101–650
, § 802(1), (2), added par. (2) and redesignated former pars. (2) and (3) as (3) and (4), respectively.
Subsec. (b)(4). Pub. L. 101–650
, § 802(3), added par. (4) and struck out former par. (4) which read as follows: “Any person who distributes a phonorecord in violation of clause (1) is an infringer of copyright under section
of this title and is subject to the remedies set forth in sections
. Such violation shall not be a criminal offense under section
or cause such person to be subject to the criminal penalties set forth in section
Pub. L. 101–650
, § 802(1), redesignated par. (3) as (4).
Subsec. (e). Pub. L. 101–650
, § 803, added subsec. (e).
1988—Subsec. (d). Pub. L. 100–617
substituted “(a) and (c)” for “(a) and (b)” and “copyright” for “coyright”.
1984—Subsecs. (b) to (d). Pub. L. 98–450
added subsec. (b) and redesignated existing subsecs. (b) and (c) as (c) and (d), respectively.
Effective Date of 1990 Amendment
Section 804 of title VIII of Pub. L. 101–650
, as amended by Pub. L. 103–465
, title V, § 511,Dec. 8, 1994, 108 Stat. 4974
, provided that:
“(a) In General.—Subject to subsection (b), this title [amending this section and enacting provisions set out as notes under sections
of this title] and the amendments made in section
[amending this section] shall take effect on the date of the enactment of this Act [Dec. 1, 1990]. The amendment made by section
[amending this section] shall take effect one year after such date of enactment.
“(b) Prospective Application.—Section
, United States Code, as amended by section 802 of this Act, shall not affect the right of a person in possession of a particular copy of a computer program, who acquired such copy before the date of the enactment of this Act [Dec. 1, 1990], to dispose of the possession of that copy on or after such date of enactment in any manner permitted by section
, United States Code, as in effect on the day before such date of enactment.
“(c) Termination.—The amendments made by section
shall not apply to public performances or displays that occur on or after October 1, 1995.”
Effective Date of 1984 Amendment
Section 4 ofPub. L. 98–450
, as amended by Pub. L. 100–617
, § 1,Nov. 5, 1988, 102 Stat. 3194
; Pub. L. 103–182
, title III, § 332,Dec. 8, 1993, 107 Stat. 2114
, provided that:
“(a) The amendments made by this Act [amending this section and section
of this title and enacting provisions set out as a note under section
of this title] shall take effect on the date of the enactment of this Act [Oct. 4, 1984].
“(b) The provisions of section
, United States Code, as added by section 2 of this Act, shall not affect the right of an owner of a particular phonorecord of a sound recording, who acquired such ownership before the date of the enactment of this Act [Oct. 4, 1984], to dispose of the possession of that particular phonorecord on or after such date of enactment in any manner permitted by section
, United States Code, as in effect on the day before the date of the enactment of this Act.”
[Amendment by Pub. L. 103–182
to section 4 ofPub. L. 98–450
, set out above, effective on the date the North American Free Trade Agreement enters into force with respect to the United States [Jan. 1, 1994], see section 335 ofPub. L. 103–182
, set out as an Effective Date of 1993 Amendment note under section
, Commerce and Trade.]
Evaluation of Impact of Copyright Law and Amendments on Electronic Commerce and Technological Development
Pub. L. 105–304
, title I, § 104,Oct. 28, 1998, 112 Stat. 2876
, provided that:
“(a) Evaluation by the Register of Copyrights and the Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information.—The Register of Copyrights and the Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information of the Department of Commerce shall jointly evaluate—
“(1) the effects of the amendments made by this title [enacting chapter
of this title and amending sections
of this title] and the development of electronic commerce and associated technology on the operation of sections
, United States Code; and
“(2) the relationship between existing and emergent technology and the operation of sections
, United States Code.
“(b) Report to Congress.—The Register of Copyrights and the Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information of the Department of Commerce shall, not later than 24 months after the date of the enactment of this Act [Oct. 28, 1998], submit to the Congress a joint report on the evaluation conducted under subsection (a), including any legislative recommendations the Register and the Assistant Secretary may have.” | <urn:uuid:96fa7a06-0d4b-4e13-b2d8-79e90404cd45> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/109 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368699881956/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516102441-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93081 | 3,452 | 1.59375 | 2 |
Mercure Burford Bridge Hotel, Dorking Hotel
Hotel | From £104
Every mellow brick of this ancient gem glows in history. It was at Burford Bridge that Lord Nelson spent secret hours with his great love Emma Hamilton before going off to his last battle of Trafalgar. The Burford Bridge is set at the foot of Box Hill, where an inn has stood since the 13th century. Noble guests have included Keats, Sheridan and Wordsworth. The hotel nestles at the foot of the famous beauty spot, Box Hill, with the river Mole running at the bottom of its gardens. All of the bedrooms are well appointed, for that extra treat why not book an executive room. The hotel is renowned for its restaurant with the 2 AA Rosette Emlyn restaurant overlooking the delightful gardens. Our outdoor heated swimming pool is open from May till the end of September. | <urn:uuid:5458f2bf-2924-4a45-86bf-1a988148ad5c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.yourlocalweb.co.uk/surrey/hotels/hotel/mercure-burford-bridge-hotel-12334/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967878 | 181 | 1.507813 | 2 |
PRELLER, PHYLLIS JOSEPHINE nee BOURKE
Phyllis Josephine Bourke was born in Whenuakura on the 27 June 1908, the first child of Patrick Alexander and Ethel Victoria Bourke nee Chadwick. Her primary schooling was done at Whenuakura, and then she went to Sacred Heart College in Wanganui and later New Plymouth.
Phyllis stayed at home until she was 27, when she went to Napier to do her nursing training, commencing in January 1936 and graduating in December 1939. She resigned from the Napier Hospital in March 1940 and returned to Hawera to nurse there.
In January 1942 the NZ Army Services were in need of nurses to care for the injured overseas so she joined the Army and did her training at the Waiouru Military Camp. Conditions there were tough living in tents during the winter.
Phyllis travelled in the troop ship White Star to North African, and she then served in Cairo, Beirut, Helwaon,Tripoli and Bari, Italy from 1942 to 1945.
Phyllis married Staff Sergeant Wilson Preller of Krugersdorp, Transvaal, South Africa on the 9 December 1944 at Bari, Italy. Wilson was with the South African Medical Corps, and prior to their engagement he returned home and whilst there bought a diamond. Upon his return the couple collected all sorts of gold pieces of jewellery which they melted down to have "just the right setting made for the engagement ring."
At the end of the war Phyllis returned to Patea to collect more possessions for her home in South Africa. Her first Glory Box had accompanied her to the war but "went missing" on a camel train when they were travelling to Cairo. Wilson went on to South Africa to make a home for his new bride. Phyllis, coming from a large family, was daunted about starting life in a strange country, but her bubbly personality soon made her friends. The couple built a home in Krugersdorp where Phyllis nursed again for some years. To begin with as she was unable to speak Afrikaans, Phyllis worked in the native wards.
In 1960 the political situation in South Africa was in shambles and life not easy. With the start of the Sharpville Uprising it was considered time to return to New Zealand. Phyllis and her two daughters arrived in Patea in July, with Wilson following later. Phyllis worked as a sister in the Patea Hospital from late 1960 until June 1973.
Phyllis Josephine Preller died on the 22 October 1986 at Taihape where she had gone to live with her daughters. She is buried at the Patea RSA cemetery.
Dianne McCarthy and Vicki Devane (daughters) | <urn:uuid:cd61e53e-e709-4593-ad38-3664943f26bf> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~sooty/preller.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696382584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092622-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.985831 | 585 | 1.5625 | 2 |
American Metal Market asked Thomas J. Gibson, American Iron and Steel Institute president and chief executive officer, to address some key issues facing the U.S. steel industry as a new year and a new Congress get underway.
What does the new political climate mean for the steel industry as 2011 begins?
Gibson With more than 90 new faces in Congress, our first priority will be to educate the new members on the importance of the American steel industry and its role in strengthening the economy. We saw jobs as the main theme in the midterm elections and we hope the new Congress will implement policies that will promote job growth, not job destruction. We were very vocal in 2010 and will continue in 2011 to push for currency reform legislation, a repeal of the Environmental Protection Agency's regulation of greenhouse gases from stationary sources and a long-term surface transportation act. The new Congress must solve and reduce the nation's 9.8-percent unemployment rate. We know our industry can be part of the solution.
What are your public policy priorities right now, and which of these do you expect to become reality?
Gibson Key public policy priorities for the steel industry in 2011 include
•?Greater congressional oversight of economically damaging government regulations—like those proposed by EPA with respect to greenhouse gases—that will undermine the competitiveness of North American steel producers.
•?Enactment of a new energy policy that promotes development of domestic energy sources and provides incentives for industrial efficiency projects and support for efforts to develop breakthrough technologies that will allow the industry to move to a lower-carbon future.
•?Development of a more-effective U.S. trade policy to level the playing field as well as preserve and strengthen our nation's manufacturing base, in particular by addressing Chinese currency manipulation and other trade-distorting foreign government policies.
•?Passage of a new long-term surface transportation act to fund much-needed investment in transportation infrastructure.
In a recent AMM survey of the metals industry, most respondents said they do not expect the U.S. economy to become fully strengthened until at least 2014. When do you expect to see a robust and lasting recovery take hold?
Gibson That would be impossible for anyone to fully predict. What I do know is that we are seeing gradual, incremental growth in steel demand, increasing demand in particular sectors, such as automotive and energy, and improvement in terms of exports. U.S. steel shipments finished the year at 84 million tons. The outlook for the North American steel industry in 2011 is for a year of gradual progress in comparison to 2010.
The capacity utilization rate hit its all-time low in early 2009 at about 36 percent, then bounced up 24 points by the end of the year and another 10 points by March 2010. Some people were predicting 80 percent or higher, and by mid-year that looked possible, but in the second half it stagnated at between 72 and 67 percent. What's been happening recently, and what do you think can or will push it higher again?
Gibson The average capacity utilization rate for 2010 was 70 percent, which was consistent with our full-year expectations. Despite some variations, which you mention, we are seeing slow but steady improvement in the capacity utilization rate, which directly relates to similar slow but steady improvements we are seeing in steel demand. We expect the areas that will encourage continued improvement will come from the automotive sector, energy markets and exports.
What is your assessment of the current financial strength of U.S. steel companies? What about foreign-owned companies that perform significant manufacturing in America?
Gibson AISI producer member companies are global leaders in terms of efficiency, labor productivity and in overall performance. The Great Recession affected manufacturers worldwide, not just in the United State. At present, there is a sense of cautious optimism in the industry due to gradual, incremental growth in steel demand and because, prior to the recession, the steel industry was poised for growth. During the period between 1998 and 2003, America's steel industry strengthened from within through extensive consolidation, restructuring and capital investment. The new business model that emerged is one that has enabled us to compete effectively with fairly traded steel in the global marketplace. We are a leaner, more efficient and more resilient industry. AISI has a number of producer member companies with significant operations in America that are headquartered in another country. Their American facilities face the same market conditions as producer members do who are headquartered in the United States. All AISI member companies are extremely competitive. Whether headquartered offshore or in North America, our member companies share similar concerns regarding issues such as climate change, fair trade, safety and sustainability.
Which industry is the most important to a fuller steel recovery over the next couple of years—auto, construction, energy, other manufacturing or something else?
Gibson Construction markets represent about 40 percent of total steel shipments and cover sheet, plate and long products. The need to revitalize our infrastructure is urgent, and as soon as Congress sets in motion long-term infrastructure spending this market will begin to rebound.
What does the AISI offer its members—and by extension the industry as a whole—that makes it a good choice for steelmakers in today's climate?
Gibson We offer our members aggressive advocacy on their behalf to influence public policy, educate and shape public opinion in support of a strong, sustainable U.S. and North American steel industry. To do that, we
•?Focus on the advocacy of public policy issues central to the steel industry, issues where AISI can make an impact and issues where there is strong member alignment.
•?Inform and educate opinion leaders about the North American steel industry's strategic importance to national and economic security.
•?Communicate the benefits that the industry's technological advances are making to the health and safety of its work force and to the environment.
•?Collect and provide industry data to policymakers, company personnel and the public regarding steel operations, production, energy efficiency, shipments, import/export levels and consumption.
•?Pursue technology advancements through collaborative research and development.
•?Advance the competitive use of steel in traditional and growth markets.
What's the biggest concern about Chinese steel heading into 2011?
Gibson Slower domestic steel market growth is being forecast for this year, while China continues to have enormous steelmaking overcapacity. Given these factors—along with the state-owned, directed and subsidized nature of the China's steel sector—our biggest concern is the potential for large Chinese export surges of dumped and subsidized steel and steel-containing goods.
What threat do continued finished steel imports pose and what can be done to address it?
Gibson Because of the relative size and openness of the U.S. and Nafta (North American Free Trade Agreement) steel markets, unfairly traded steel imports are always a threat. This threat is of particular concern at a time of significant unused domestic steelmaking capacity in the United States and North America. The best way to address this threat is to preserve and enhance our trade remedy laws and to ensure that these laws are strictly enforced.
How is steel positioned as changes in sustainability emerge in the coming years? Do you believe it is currently a leader among primary metals?
Gibson Steel has lower environmental impacts than aluminum and magnesium, for example, energy use and carbon dioxide emissions, and is therefore the leader among these metals. Steel is 100-percent recyclable and more steel is recycled than aluminum and magnesium. Steel-intensive auto designs provide for the lowest-emitting vehicles because of the combination of light-weighting by using advanced high-strength steels and by the low emissions from making steel—aluminum and magnesium being many times the emissions of steel per ton of production. | <urn:uuid:25c517b2-eb64-4e69-a338-0088b2224c4f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.amm.com/Magazine/2768727/Article/3126686/Article/3150428/Quote.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00032-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954227 | 1,588 | 1.539063 | 2 |
Mayors' Group Urged to Ditch Deal with Soda Industry
CSPI Says Beverage Lobby Wants to Undermine Mayors' Efforts to Reduce Soda Consumption
November 3, 2011
The United States Conference of Mayors should withdraw from a $3 million deal it forged with the soft drink industry’s lobbying arm, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest. The nonprofit health watchdog group says the American Beverage Association is more interested in undermining many mayors’ efforts to reduce soda consumption than in reducing childhood obesity, the ostensible purpose of the program.
In a CSPI letter to USCM executive director Tom Cochran, CSPI said that the soda industry has a long history of using similar grant programs to curry favor with key influencers or to silence potential critics, and that it was unseemly for the mayors’ group to encourage cities to apply for such tainted pots of money. While CSPI says that it would be hard to argue with the stated purpose of the program, “to encourage healthy weight through balanced diet choices and regular physical activity,” the group said the soda industry spends far more heavily to discourage healthy, balanced diets.
“Coke, Pepsi, and their lobbyists at the American Beverage Association are pouring millions of dollars into blocking or reversing much of the good work being done by courageous mayors who are trying to reduce soda consumption in order to fight obesity and reduce health-care costs,” said George Hacker, senior policy advisor for health promotion at CSPI. “This narrowly tailored grant program is specifically designed to exclude meaningful programs to reduce sugary-drink consumption in favor of highlighting unspecified ‘better solutions.’ Cities would be better off taxing soda and using that money to fund effective anti-obesity efforts.”
A press release on the USCM web site states that an independent panel will choose award recipients, but also says the “ABA will work with the conference to develop selection criteria.” Cities that take payments from the program would also be obligated to participate in a promotional press event alongside the ABA, according to the program’s materials.
According to CSPI, the sugary-drink industry often emphasizes “physical activity” in order to deflect attention from the calories in its products. But a new ad campaign from New York City’s health department dramatically shows how much physical activity is required to balance the calories in soda: One would have to walk three miles, or from Union Square to Brooklyn, in the ad’s words, to burn off the calories in one 20-ounce soda. CSPI says that’s the kind of municipal effort that other cities should replicate.
Health departments in Los Angeles and Boston, with the support of Mayors Antonio Villaraigosa and Thomas Menino, respectively, are also running campaigns to reduce sugary drink consumption in those cities. Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter has proposed imposing taxes on sugary drinks, a move bitterly opposed and ultimately defeated by the industry. Nutter also drew praise from health advocates for turning away a $10 million anti-obesity grant that originated from the American Beverage Association.
Over the years, CSPI has documented how the sugary-drink industry has used ostensible philanthropic programs to burnish its image in the eyes of health officials and the public. In 2009, Coca-Cola made a six-figure payment to the American Academy of Family Physicians to underwrite “consumer education content related to beverages and sweeteners.” In 2003, the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry took a $1 million payment from Coca-Cola.
“We would not trust the American Foxes Association to administer a grant program aimed at securing the nation’s henhouses; nor should we trust the American Beverage Association to fund efforts aimed at improving the health of the nation’s children,” said Hacker.
Sugary drinks are the single largest source of calories in the American diet and account for half of all added sugars consumed. Sugary drinks have been shown to have a causal role in promoting obesity: Each additional sugary drink consumed per day increases the likelihood that a child will become obese by about 60 percent, according to one study. The American Heart Association recommends that people limit their intake of sugary drinks to about 450 calories per week, or about three 12-ounce cans. Average consumption is now more than twice that. CSPI and a number of cities and local and national health groups are partnering in a campaign called Life’s Sweeter with Fewer Sugary Drinks, which aims to reduce soda consumption by more than half by 2020. | <urn:uuid:d0ad439e-fa50-4b28-bfbe-f1eba0bf00c4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://cspinet.org/new/201111031.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00010-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954654 | 965 | 1.546875 | 2 |
LISBON, Portugal — LISBON, Portugal (AP) - Portugal's disgruntled Facebook generation, inspired by a pop song, marched in a dozen cities Saturday to vent its frustration at grim career prospects amid an acute economic crisis that shows no sign of abating.
Some 30,000 people, mostly in their 20s and 30s, crammed into Lisbon's main downtown avenue, called onto the streets by a social media campaign that harnessed a broad sense of disaffection. Local media reported thousands more attended simultaneous protests at 10 other cities nationwide.
A banner at the front of the Lisbon march said, "Our country is in dire straits." Another said, "We are the future." The Lisbon march was festive and raucous, featuring brass bands, drum combos and small children with balloons. Middle-aged parents also turned out.
Portugal, western Europe's poorest country, is producing the best-qualified generation in its history, thanks to big investments in education.
But after a decade of feeble economic growth and a huge debt burden that has forced the government to enact crippling austerity measures, Portugal's economy can't deliver the opportunities that trained young people are seeking.
The jobless rate stands at a record 11.2 percent, and half the unemployed are under 35. In the third quarter of last year, 68,500 college graduates were idle - a 6.5 percent increase on the same quarter the previous year, according to the National Statistics Institute.
Like Greece and Ireland, other debt-heavy European countries, analysts say Portugal is on the verge of needing an international bailout that would prevent its financial collapse but doom it to more years of recession.
"People's well-being has taken second place to financial matters," said Luis Santos, a 28-year-old out of work since graduating from Lisbon University three years ago. Most of his old college friends also are finding it hard to get on the career ladder. "It's hard to come across anyone who's happy about their prospects," he said.
Portugal's youth isn't just angry at unemployment but at "underemployment" - low paid, dead-end jobs beneath their levels of qualification - which leaves them stuck at home with their parents into their 30s.
Goncalo Montenegro, 45, was at the Lisbon march with his 14-year-old son. He works as a salesman but said he is worried about his son's future. "We're passing on this mess and our debt to the next generation," he said. "We have to find a different path."
Four college graduates in their 20s were inspired to organize the unprecedented protests after a pop song struck a chord with their despairing generation.
The song, called "What a fool I am" by Portuguese band Deolinda, was an unexpected hit in January, even though it hadn't been released yet. An amateur video of a concert performance of the song posted on YouTube went viral as it set a generation's simmering grievances to music.
The song's lyrics, including the lines "I can't go on like this/This situation's dragged on for too long," built into a battle cry.
Joao Labrincha, a 27-year-old unemployed graduate from Coimbra University, said he and three friends took a spontaneous decision to organize the marches after seeing the video.
"We realized that lots of people are unhappy. It wasn't just us," Labrincha told The AP. Within weeks, thousands had signed up to their Facebook page and commented on their blog.
The protest's manifesto said it wasn't targeting the country's embattled government, though many banners at the Lisbon march chided politicians. The demonstration's aim is to make people aware they have to pull together to change the country's course.
"We are protesting so that all those to blame for our current uncertainty - politicians, employers and even ourselves - might unite and quickly change this situation, which has become intolerable," the manifesto says.
After contracting in 2009, Portugal is forecast to record a double-dip recession this year.
Portugal's current economic plight stems from its inability to generate wealth while amassing massive public and private debt to finance its western European lifestyle. | <urn:uuid:6ba5643d-e499-41c2-a876-18704556701f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.vcstar.com/news/2011/mar/15/amid-crisis-portuguese-youth-takes-to-streets/ | 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 | 0.977807 | 871 | 1.796875 | 2 |
updated 01:05 pm EDT, Tue August 26, 2008
Orange admits 3G speed cap
French cellphone carrier Orange has admitted to imposing artificial limits on its 3G broadband network, reports say. The confession comes after complaints from a number of iPhone 3G owners, who in testing their download capacity discovered that they were limited to a maximum of 400Kbps, as compared to the 1.8Mbps possible on T-Mobile's German network. Most 3G networks are limited to a peak speed of 3.2Mbps, although some may support 7.2Mbps.
Some upset Orange subscribers have been able to get their speeds raised by technicians, who have altered individual accounts to push speeds as high as 3Mbps. Customers have further alleged that the cap may be a violation of Orange's service agreements, and a petition for proper 3G access has been formed online.
An Orange representative contacted by FranceInfo has stated that the cap is actually pegged at 384Kbps, and applies not just to iPhones but all devices on its 3G network. The limit was aimed at "preserving the stability of the network," according to the representative, but Orange has since decided it will raise download speeds slightly; by September 15th, the cap should be 1Mbps. | <urn:uuid:68dff499-4ac3-4a91-bc75-39558dc2ed15> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/08/26/orange.admits.3g.speed.cap/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975408 | 254 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Huntersville students raise money for Susan G. Komen Foundation
The Huntersville students raising money for the Susan G. Komen Foundation March 23 are, from left, Coy Davis, Sydney Minarik, Jacy Madigan and Lacey White. (Will Kastel not picture). (Courtesy of Karen Madigan)
HUNTERSVILLE – Five Huntersville Elementary School fourth-grade students, Sydney Minarik, Jacy Madigan, Lacey White, Coy Davis and Will Kastel, set a goal to raise $1,000 for the Susan G. Komen foundation by selling baked goods.
They are going door-to-door and have already raised over $300.
While they have the support of their parents, they have planned and implemented the majority of their 'campaign' on their own.
The students will sell home-baked goods outside of the Brownlee Jewelers in the NorthCross Shopping Center from 11 a.m.- noon March 23.
Their teacher, Mrs. Jennifer Goonan, sent emails to parents of her homeroom also asking for baked donations.
Kent Davis, father of Coy and a firefighter in the community, has arranged for a fire truck to help create excitement.
Pine Lake Charter seeks prospective teachers
Mooresville – Pine Lake Preparatory Charter School will hold its first K-12 career fair for educators interested in becoming part of a unique educational opportunity.
The career fair will be held from 9 a.m. - 12 p.m. April 13 in the campus Lower School located at 185 Yellow Wood Circle, Mooresville.
Certified teachers at all grade levels, subject areas, and experience levels are encouraged to attend.
Pine Lake has openings in its lower school, middle school, and upper school for the 2013-2014 school year for teachers, an education technology specialist, and a reading specialist.
Registration is not required.
Additional questions regarding the career fair or employment at Pine Lake can be sent to Chris Terrill, Head of School, at firstname.lastname@example.org, Gloria Miller, Head of Lower School, at email@example.com, Amy Sevic, Head of Middle School at firstname.lastname@example.org, or Chris Scholl, Head of Upper School at email@example.com.
Cornelius PD helps dispose of unwanted medicine
CORENLIUS – The Cornelius Police Department will host an Operation Medicine Drop from 10 a.m. - 1 p.m., March 23 in the parking lot of Cornelius Town Hall, 21445 Catawba Avenue.
Operation Medicine Drop is a free event that offers the public a safe and secure way to dispose of their medications.
Residents can dispose of expired, unused prescription drugs or over-the-counter medications and keep them out of the wrong hands.
Cornelius Police will take them safely off your hands, no questions asked.
Community meetings for trail running from Mooresville to Charlotte
CHARLOTTE – The towns of Mooresville, Davidson, Cornelius, Huntersville, the City of Charlotte, and Iredell and Mecklenburg Counties will host a series of community meetings to inform the public about planning for the Mooresville to Charlotte Trail, a 30-mile trail that will provide a corridor for bicycle and pedestrian transportation in the region.
Meeting times are 5 - 7 p.m., April 2, 2013 at the Charles Mack Center, 215 N. Main Street, Mooresville, and 5 - 7 p.m., April 11, at Cornelius Town Hall, 21445 Catawba Avenue, Cornelius.
North Meck Woman’s Club raises money for veterans
HUNTERSVILLE – The North Mecklenburg Woman's Club held a Casino Night to benefit Purple Heart Homes at the Northstone Country Club on March 9.
Purple Heart Homes is provides quality-of-life housing solutions to service connected disabled veterans.
"It was a fantastic evening and the best part is that we will be giving $7,000 to Purple Heart Homes to help a disabled veteran with his/her housing needs." said Lisa Vadnais, President of the North Mecklenburg Woman's Club.
Huntersville girl donates hair to Locks of Love
Amanda Novak, 11, of Huntersville donated her hair to Locks of Love on March 15 at the Great Clips Regency. Amanda is home schooled and made the donation in honor of her great Aunt Oleva Catron who is battling cancer. Amanda’s parents are John and Cheryl Novak and her sister is Katie.
Davidson citizens invited to Arbor Day tree planting
DAVIDSON – To meet the needs of citizens interested in donating and planting a tree in memory of a loved one, the Town of Davidson created a memorial garden at Roosevelt Wilson Park, located at 420 Griffith Street, between Lakeside Avenue and the pond for Arbor Day.
The Davidson Garden Club has donated four trees, each in memory of an individual who has served our community and the club.
Those people are: Silvadean Brannon, Patricia Knox, Ruth Coffey and Mary Stewart Covington.
Citizens are invited to a brief ceremony at 11:00 a.m. on March 22 at Roosevelt Wilson Park to commemorate these initial plantings in the memorial garden.
Planting will occur October through February annually, but donations can be made year-round.
Contact Ron McMillan at 704-940-9638 or firstname.lastname@example.org to donate.
NC 911 Board Holds Series of Meetings for public comment
CORNELIUS — The North Carolina 911 Board is holding public meetings across the state to solicit citizen input.
The next meeting is scheduled for 10 a.m. March 22 at the Cornelius Town Hall, 21445 Catawba Ave., Cornelius.
Board Director Richard Taylor describes the purpose of the meetings as two-fold: to tell the story of how 911 connects with real people to save lives and property; and to ask citizens for their input on their expectations of 911, thoughts about the future of 911 technology, and how 911 should be funded.
Citizens who would like to speak at these meetings should contact Richard Taylor at 919-754-2942 or email Richard.email@example.com.
Those unable to attend but would like to express their thoughts can send comments to firstname.lastname@example.org.
Solid Rock Christian Church hosts clothing “Closet”
HUNTERSVILLE – Solid Rock Christian Church will be opening up a new clothing closet that will cater to boys and men.
This idea was born approximately two years ago when a local clothing vendor donated high-quality male clothing to the church.
That event triggered the idea to start a clothing closet to address a need in the community for those that are re-entering civilian life after being incarcerated, facing financial hardship due to loss of employment or a life setback, single parents and families in need of assistance and returning missionaries in need of clothing.
The “Closet” is immediately after morning worship service at 10 a.m. March 24.
Call 704-947-8898 or visit www.solidrockchristian.org with questions.
Cornelius Fire Department requests new equipment
CORNELIUS – The Cornelius Fire Department presented their operating and capital budget requests for fiscal year 2014 to the Cornelius Town Board on March 18.
The big-ticket item is a “New 2009 - never placed in service” ladder truck for approximately $750,000. A new ladder truck costs about $1 million.
The truck was purchased for a department in Paris, California that lost funding for it’s staffing.
The department uses a third-hand ladder truck at station #1 built in 1988.
The ladder truck passed inspection this year, but due to stress fractures along the rails and bent rungs, the department was told it will not pass its’ annual inspection next year, said Cornelius Deputy Fire Chief Guerry Barbee.
Barbee also said the costs to repair the ladder truck would cost between $650,000 - $700,000.
Cornelius Fire also requested $29,000 for a breathable air compressor that would stop the departments’ need to make trips to Huntersville or Davidson to fill the trucks with air.
They are requesting $395,000 for 50 self-contained breathing apparatus units.
Current SCBA’s were purchased are 14 years old, while the national standard calls for replacement every 10 years and no more than 13 years.
The department is spending between $16,000 - 20,000 per year in repairs for the SCBA’s.
The last capital needs request is for $40,000 for a new operations car or similar type vehicle available on the state contract costing $25,000 and up.
The vehicle would replace the department’s 2004 Dodge Durango with approximately 100k miles.
Funds requested for operating needs are $65,000 to complete the staffing goals, $32,000 to replace 18 sets of gear that are older than 15-years old, $16,500 for training equipment that the town is currently borrowing from Huntersville or Charlotte and $9,900 for uniforms that members are currently having to pay for or do not have. | <urn:uuid:e512d08f-c63a-4c9b-83c8-759e969b2b57> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.huntersvilleherald.com/news/2013/3/21/6658/news-briefs-for-march-21 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938295 | 1,971 | 1.515625 | 2 |
PHARM EXEC SAYS:
» The Vioxx withdrawal and increased focus on persistence and compliance—rather than public discourse and debate over DTC
advertising—will influence companies to start moving away from the blockbuster marketing model. In general, the industry will
struggle to make that transition, but companies and agencies with excellence in integration and marketing insight are more
likely to be successful.
JOANNA BREITSTEIN, SENIOR EDITOR
» James Karis
Chief Executive Officer, Entelos
In 2005, the pharmaceutical industry must finally come to grips with the unsustainable economics of its current research and
development paradigm. It takes too long and costs too much to develop drugs.
For every 13 drugs that start out in animal testing, only one makes it to market, compared with one in eight during 1995.
Fewer drugs and biologics are making it from the lab to the marketplace, which has dramatically pushed up the cost of drug
development. The cost of getting drugs to market has been estimated to be $800 million, and some estimates take it as high
as $1.7 billion when you include commercialization costs.
I believe technology can be the key to reinventing the pharmaceutical R&D process. But if you want to get to the moon, you
can't take a submarine. In other words, achieving significant efficiencies in pharmaceutical research and development will
require the right technology. The industry is going to have to be more willing then ever to borrow from other industries.
One critical step will be embracing technologies that begin to solve the predictability problem inherent in the discovery-to-development
phase of the R&D process. This preclinical phase is the critical point at which targets (and their therapeutic compounds)
are transitioned, or translated, into human in vivo disease states. This preclinical phase can be better characterized as
the predictability gap between in vitro and animal experimentation and human clinical response.
While some believe that simply advancing technology the industry already knows or has (like genomic/proteomic databases, data
mining, or visualization) will close this gap, it will not; the experiences of the last 10 years are evidence of that. What
is required is exactly what FDA has called for in its white paper on innovation: "A new product development toolkit . . .
is urgently needed to improve predictability and efficiency along the critical path."
In 2005, the pharmaceutical industry will have to look at the lessons learned from other R&D intensive industries, such as
telecommunications, aerospace, and automotive. They must use technologies that are developed using disciplines that lie outside
traditional pharmaceutical R&D (i.e., mathematics, physics, and engineering) and use the right technology to close the predictability
gap. So what we learn in discovery is immediately translated into development, and ultimately, into an effective therapy in
Drug development takes too long and costs too much. It’s time to learn from other industries.
PHARM EXEC SAYS:
» Pharma will increasingly target employers with their marketing and educational initiatives as more restrictive formularies
force workers to be more responsible for paying for medicines and, consequently, less likely to take them.
SIBYL SHALO, SENIOR EDITOR | <urn:uuid:37ce2c79-4e50-4e44-86ba-003c47ba0c7b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pharmexec.com/pharmexec/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=140638&sk=&date=&pageID=4 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00028-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.931792 | 673 | 1.765625 | 2 |
Funding, Grants & Awards | News
Facebook Donates $250,000 to U Alabama, Birmingham To Fight Malware
The University of Alabama at Birmingham's Center for Information Assurance and Joint Forensics Research (CIA|JFR) has received $250,000 from Facebook for its efforts to international cybercriminals.
"As a result of numerous collaborations over the years, Facebook recognizes the center as both a partner in fighting Internet abuse, and as a critical player in developing future experts who will become dedicated cybersecurity professionals," said Joe Sullivan, chief security officer at Facebook. "The center has earned this gift for their successes in fighting cybercrime and because of the need for formal cybersecurity education to better secure everyone's data across the world."
Provided by money Facebook has recovered from spammers, the donation was awarded in recognition of efforts by the center to fight Koobface (an anagram of facebook), a worm that used social networks to create a botnet that installed additional malware and answered search queries with advertisements.
On January 17, 2012 Facebook posted a message about Koobface that read, in part, "After more than 3 years and numerous hours of working closely with industry leaders, the security community, and law enforcement, we are pleased to announce that Facebook has been free of infections for over 9 months."
At the end of the statement, the company thanked four people for their work on Koobface, including Brian Tanner, who was then a UAB student, and Gary Warner, director of Research in Computer Forensics at the university.
The funds will be used to expand the center's headquarters, which adds more than 1 million spam emails to its UAB Spam Data Mine each day and "gathers resources from law enforcement, business, government agencies and academia," according to information released by the university.
"Cyberattacks are ever-evolving and multiplying and the well-being of society depends on a highly trained workforce, so we thank Facebook for helping bolster the center as we continue to educate the next generation of cybercrime solvers," said Anthony Skjellum, chair of the UAB Department of Computer and Information Sciences and co-founder of the CIA|JFR. "The Facebook Suite will be the CIA|JFR nerve center. It will be the place where cybervisionaries from around the world will gather to share ideas, discoveries and solutions."
"Cyberattacks are generally perpetrated by sophisticated networks, so we all realized that any successful effort to combat them would likewise require a specialized network that could compete with anything operating in the underworld," said Interim UAB President Richard Marchase. "The center has already assembled an internationally respected team, and now Facebook's generous contribution will help provide us with a state-of-the-art headquarters, positioning UAB at the vanguard of the global fight against cybercrime."
More information about the Center for Information Assurance and Joint Forensics Research is available at thecenter.uab.edu.
Joshua Bolkan is the multimedia editor for Campus Technology and THE Journal. He can be reached at email@example.com. | <urn:uuid:d1d85d7d-1fc8-4ec1-9794-1d1b01aad927> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://campustechnology.com/articles/2012/10/22/facebook-donates-250000-to-u-alabama-birmingham-to-fight-malware.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951194 | 640 | 1.6875 | 2 |
There are other reasons to consider Cuba. It's the safest destination with the lowest crime rate in our hemisphere. It's also the healthiest western nation with the lowest disease rate. The islanders are kind, warm, helpful, and effusive. Cuba’s beaches and architecture are without equal. Cubans take great pride in the fact that one-quarter of the island is ecologically protected, and they've received many United Nations (UNESCO) designations for historical, anthropological, cultural, natural, and architectural importance. The weather is warm and sunny. Latin musicians abound on every corner.
Every participant who joins our programs returns with memories for a lifetime, plus new friends on the island and among their North American tour mates. We have a lineup of people-to-people tours for the holidays and during 2010 illuminating the heart and soul of Cuba -- you see all of the progress mentioned above. Our programs are geared to North American visitors who want to have a great time, see as much as possible, and witness the real Cuba beyond tourist trappings. Come down to Cuba with us now and experience its unequaled charm and beauty.
Note to our American friends: US travel regulations require you to be employed in a profession related to one of our tour themes to visit Cuba. Travel license instructions are explained on our website. We're here for you. Don't hesitate to call or email us. Please do consider sharing this message with your friends who might be keen on visiting Cuba. We have many holiday and spring tours.
# # #
About Cuba Education Tours
Cuba Education Tours has been promoting healthy, entertaining, and ethical travel to Cuba since 2000. The company's website is http://www.canadacuba.ca with http://www.cuba- | <urn:uuid:35639251-ea37-4aac-a9d5-1984edb595af> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.prlog.org/10441234-visit-cuba-while-it-is-still-pristine.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 | 0.939521 | 362 | 1.625 | 2 |
At the same time the final fasteners were being torque down on the 100 millionth small-block Chevy V-8 – a 638-hp supercharged LS9 engine for the Corvette ZR1 – at the Performance Build Center in Wixom, Michigan, the automaker also announced a few details of the upcoming fifth-generation small-block engine.
The new engine will retain the original small-block’s 4.4-inch bore centers (first seen on the 265 cubic inch V-8 of 1955), but will gain direct-injection. GM says that direct-injection will work with a higher compression ratio and other technologies to “build on the architectural and technology legacy of previous generations with greater efficiency, performance and refinement.”
GM promises more power and less fuel consumption than comparably sized versions of the current Gen-IV engine family.
“The Gen-V small block is an all-new, state-of-the-art engine family that will offer more efficiency and refinement than any other small block in its more than half-century of production,” said Jordan Lee, chief engineer, in a press release. “For customers, that will mean cars and trucks that deliver more while using less gas to do it.”
There has been much speculation about what the new engines might bring to the table. Historically, new engine technologies debut in Chevrolet’s flagship Corvette and the next-generation ‘Vette and small-block engine are both expected to arrive before the end of 2012 as 2013 models. Some sources indicate that the current 5.3-liter and 6.2-liter displacements will remain. Others say the base engine in the all-new C7 Corvette will shrink to 5.5 liters, with horsepower climbing to 440 and a bump in fuel economy. Some have speculated a version of the new engine could be as small as 4.0-liters – if true, it would make it the smallest iteration of the small-block to date.
Share with us your thoughts and desires for displacements and configurations for the next-generation small-block Chevy V-8. What displacements would you like to see? How about horsepower and torque ratings? What compression ratios and rpms do you think are possible with direct-injection? Do you think GM will stick with pushrods and two-valves per cylinders? Or, to the horror of the small-block purists, are overhead camshafts and/or multiple valves possible? What kind of fuel economy do you think the new engine family will deliver? | <urn:uuid:b8c34340-8995-4b3b-8b0e-c64c7fc297f5> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://wot.motortrend.com/confirmed-gm-says-gen-v-small-block-v-8-will-have-direct-injection-140791.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.938262 | 535 | 1.6875 | 2 |
Parents, Students Turn Out For ‘Sneak Peek’ At Hugo Schmidt Elementary
Vice Principal Kenneth Gay said the back-to-school gathering at Hugo Schmidt Elementary School benefits students, parents and teachers.
A torrential early evening downpour didn’t stop hundreds of students from turning up at Hugo Schmidt Elementary School in Brandon for a “Sneak Peek" at their classrooms and a chance to meet their new teachers.
With the first day of school less than a week away, teachers greeted their new charges with a smile and words of encouragement as they outlined expectations for the new school year.
“For students today is a chance to meet their new teachers before school starts and it’s also a chance for parents to get to know the teacher and the school. The parents can also get a chance to feel the sense of community here at the school with the PTA here,” said Vice Principal Kenneth Gay.
The event was also important for teachers, Gay said.
“They get a chance to meet parents and their new students today; that initial contact is important for the teachers too.”
The school’s vice principal also encouraged parents to use the school’s website.
“There’s lots of valuable information up there including bus routes, class supply lists and upcoming events,” Gay said.
Jeanne Baldi’s daughter, Lena, is entering fifth grade at Hugo Schmidt and braved the rains to turn out for the Sneak Peek.
“I want her to meet her new teacher and see who else is in her class,” said Baldi.
The Brandon also happily endorsed a new school policy that allowed her daughter to attend a class with only girls.
“I think it’s a great idea. I think the children will be able to speak their minds a little more without worrying about being teased as much. The girls will also be able to learn and talk about subjects they might not be able to in a mixed-gender class.”
Along with all the required subjects, Lena Baldi’s class will study female authors and important women in history this term. “That’s not something they would focus on as much in a mixed class,” said her mom.
“This is a good opportunity to have my two boys meet their new teacher,” said Beth Sangiorgio as she left her son’s new classroom. “We also picked up his supply list and now have a face to put with their new teacher’s names.” | <urn:uuid:ae5ff310-5726-4024-9407-ca272b912f73> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://brandon.patch.com/articles/parents-students-turn-out-for-sneak-peak-at-hugo-schmidt-elementary | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00041-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.975715 | 542 | 1.507813 | 2 |
La Belle et la bÍte (Beauty and the Beast)
Thursday, February 14, 7PM - Classic French Cinema Night (Valentine's Day)
*newly restored 35mm print*
Well before Disney's animated film, Cocteau, with the eye of a poet, created a surreal and stunningly cinematic journey that is one of the most magical films ever made, even in our day of masterful digital effects. Beauty's father, returning home through the woods, leaves the path in search of a rose to give to his daughter and unwittingly enters the Beast's magical chateau. The next morning, he meets the fearsome Beast, who will only let him leave on condition that he sends one of his daughters to the chateau.
Jean Cocteau, 35mm, 96 min, France, 1946 (French) | <urn:uuid:f4e51073-aacb-4f0b-b5b7-e06828abce6f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www4.uwm.edu/cie/frenchfilm/index.cfm?page=beauty | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.940696 | 176 | 1.601563 | 2 |
...Demand only response useless.
Well that's a different slant on things. The Kyoto framework gives the sheiks a free pass. Could we extend this line of argument to...(I'm thinking. This could be fun).
From Finfacts (Ireland):
...Up to now the climate discussion has focused one-sidedly on the reduction of demand for fossil fuel and has neglected the supply side. In his Thuenen Lecture at the conference of the Verein für Socialpolitik, Ifo president, Hans-Werner Sinn, points out that supply and demand together determine how much fossil fuel is extracted and thus also determine the pace with which carbon is released into the atmosphere, creating the greenhouse effect.
The EU's consumption reducing measures are, in his opinion, in vain if the oil sheiks and the other owners of fossil fuels do not cut back their supply. The effect of measures like those of the EU are then not only small but non-existent. As Sinn explains: "With the rigid conduct of the suppliers, the world market price is pushed so far under the level that otherwise would have been achieved so that those countries that do nothing with regard to climate protection will use that much more fossil fuels than that which is saved be the EU. The Chinese continue to step up their CO2-intensive expansion policies and the Americans drive even more SUVs than they used to." | <urn:uuid:9894ec3e-a04b-423e-bd96-4272966f5973> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://climateerinvest.blogspot.com/2007/10/germanys-top-economist-says-its-not.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.944601 | 288 | 1.585938 | 2 |
Situation Report - Haiti earthquake January 18, 2010
Presbyterian Disaster Assistance (PDA) is coordinating its efforts with our ecumenical and international partners in the relief work in Haiti. Carlos Cardenas is on the ground in Port-au-Prince as part of the initial response team. The past few days’ priorities have focused on search and rescue, medical attention for those injured by the earthquake, along with food distribution for the survivors.
Food and fuel supplies are limited and there is urgent need to bring in these most essential resources at this time. Fifteen sites have been identified for distribution of relief items. Distribution of food and clean water are a top priority. It is estimated that 200,000 families, nearly one million people, are without homes and living out in the open air. Temporary shelter is a focus for this next week. PDA and its partners are seeking to bring in 20,000 tents to Port-au-Prince in this next week. There are three to four thousand tents currently on site.
An update on the global humanitarian effort in response to the January 12, 2010, earthquake that devastated Haiti. | <urn:uuid:441894dc-f26d-4ca2-9dce-b07d459041be> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pcusa.org/resource/situation-report-haiti-earthquake-january-18-2010/ | 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 | 0.963047 | 231 | 1.5625 | 2 |
The excerpt below is from an article by Ron Utt.
High-Speed Rail and Livability: Pie-in-the-Sky Transportation Policy
If you wish, you can read the entire Ron Utt article on the web-site. I have extracted only the paragraphs pertaining to high-speed rail and to housing intentions.
Utt talks about the President's Transportation agenda and his commitment to funding HSR. It turns out it's not that straightforward. Obama is not asking for $53 billion for HSR. He includes a number of other projects and programs in that sum.
Over the six year period in this intended authorization, $15 billion is earmarked for Amtak, and $38 billion is for other stuff, as Utt describes it, taking the language from the budget draft. That's the $53 billion total rail package. So, where is HSR? It's tucked away in the following passage: "to advance the President's goal to provide Americans with convenient access to a passenger rail system featuring high-speed rail service." Not to be critical, but for a budget proposal there is a lot of fuzziness and ambiguity in this wording. Ron describes this strange language, picking up on words like "featuring" and "convenient access."
The other part of this legislation touches on the term that LaHood has been using since he assumed the role of Secretary of the Department of Transportation. "Livability." LaHood seeks the function of transit to facilitate "livability." In other words, the Secretary of Transportation is promoting housing and urban development. That's not his business. Our point here is that transit should support where people live and work; not move people arbitrarily to where transit exists or is intended to be built; especially for political reasons.
"Livability" is a promotional code term. Other code terms for that are "smart growth" and the promotion of "transit oriented development." Also, look for "friendly, walkable neighborhoods." What it means is the promotion of high-density, high-rise housing; moving people out of the suburbs and into cities, thereby obliging them to relinquish their cars and use public mass transit.
Ron Utt points out that funds for this agenda will come from from the budget for roads. That's a clear message. The message says that the Department of Transportation does not intend to maintain or expand roads; driving therefore will become more challenging, and people will be expected to abandon their cars to use rail. It's a kind of force or spoon feeding. It's very bad use of public funds.
Is that a major Party platform for the Democrats? Is that one of the reasons for their high-speed rail obsession? So, it's not only about jobs -- mostly construction jobs and massive infrastructure housing development jobs -- but it's about intentionally changing the living patterns and habits of all Americans.
Is this a mis-reading or exaggerating? I really hope so. Because that's top-down social engineering reminiscent of China and it's ability to oblige whole populations to move to or from cities depending upon the executive political committee's needs and agenda. It is coercive.
What should be clear by now is that the battle between Republicans and Democrats is not merely over whether HSR should get further funding or not, but about an underlying social philosophy and ideology between the two parties. To overstate the case, Democrats are the party of tax and spend; Republicans are the party against both. To that end, many good programs will fall under the knife, and bad programs will survive. We can only hope that some bad programs will also be cut.
HSR has become Obama's legacy/vanity project. He has invested a great deal of personal stock in this. He hopes it will carry him into and through the coming elections. But, by the same token, the Republicans oppose this, not because it will pull dollars back into the treasury and reduce the deficit, but because they oppose the ideological pre-disposition of this President and the Democratic Party.
The intention of this blog is to oppose high-speed rail for California and the United States on empirical and rational grounds devoid of any larger ideological context. Whatever the sustaining underlying rationale, it is what it is; a luxury train for the well-to-do. We don't need it. It is not cost effective. We need those vast and endless funds for far more pressing purposes and real problems.
The War on Poverty of the '60s provided massive funding for a program intended to benefit the poor, to give them training and job skills, etc. It was implemented by the Office of Economic Opportunity, OEO. It failed because the funds went not to the poor or even benefited the poor through training and other support. It went to the army of consultants, the companies that were formed to write proposals and receive grants, publish studies, conduct research, and in generate burn through those appropriated dollars until they were gone. The War on Poverty helped mostly those who didn't need help.
That's what this high-speed rail program will achieve; a boondoggle that only helps all those in the business of building and directly benefiting from these rail systems.
And, the people for whom the trains are intended are the well-to-do who don't need the government to create a premium-class rail service. And, the rest of America will be obliged to support this massive pork barrel effort with their tax dollars to build and operate a train most of us will never ride.
"While the President promises high-speed rail (HSR) service (top speeds of at least 150 mph), most of his projects involve signal and track improvements on privately owned freight rail systems that would provide marginal improvements in the Amtrak service sharing those tracks.
Despite his State of the Union proclamation to spend $56 billion on HSR over five years, the President's transportation budget offers no such plan. Of the $8 billion of "HSR" money for FY 2012, "$4 billion ($15 billion over six years) fully funds Amtrak's national network operating, capital, and debt service requirements," while the other $4 billion ($38 billion over six years) "funds competitive grants for development of core express, regional and feeder corridors, to advance the President's goal to provide Americans with convenient access to a passenger rail system featuring high-speed rail service."
The key word here is featuring. What does "convenient access" to something featuring HSR mean? As written, this program could subsidize Washington, D.C.'s deficit-ridden Metro system because it provides "convenient access" to Union Station, where Amtrak's so-called HSR Acela trains run. If so, spending on real HSR will account for (or feature) a relatively minor amount of the $38 billion that the President proposes.
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has been pressing for an expansive and costly "livability" effort and formally defines livability as "being able to take your kids to school, go to work, see a doctor, drop by the grocery or post office, go out to dinner and a movie, and play with your kids in a park, all without having to get in your car." In order to achieve the LaHood vision for America, government must nudge/force/coerce people into buses or trolleys and create tighter living arrangements.
The President proposes a total of $7.8 billion in livability spending for FY 2012 and $48.1 billion over the next six years. More than half of these funds would come from shifting money from roads.
Reflecting how little confidence the Congress has in the U.S. Department of Transportation, the House of Representatives cut a greater percentage from the remaining FY 2011 transportation budget than it cut from any other account. Nor are Republicans the only opponents: In the last Congress, the Democrat-controlled Senate and House Appropriations committees rejected the President's infrastructure bank proposal. Now he is asking for it again, and the price tag is $30 billion over six years. | <urn:uuid:c9bf00b8-05e6-4d2d-88a9-aa0ab68efa2c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://high-speedtraintalk.blogspot.com/2011/03/what-does-budget-battle-over-high-speed.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00036-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.958067 | 1,645 | 1.8125 | 2 |
NGOs urge Obama not to undermine ICAO efforts
Author: Valerie Volcovici
Sixteen environmental groups on Friday urged President Barack Obama not to give into pressure by the U.S. airline industry to file an action under the U.N.'s aviation body to block an EU law requiring all foreign airlines to participate in its carbon trading system.
In their letter to the White House, the groups warned that filing a so-called Article-84 action in the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) to challenge the EU climate change directive would undermine the body's effort to create a global framework to curb greenhouse gas emissions from the aviation sector.
The EU law would require all airlines to pay for the carbon they emit on flights landing at or departing from European airports.
"Filing a formal proceeding to block the directive would be highly inconsistent with your Administration's efforts to reduce carbon pollution from other sources," the groups wrote.
They added that filing the international action "would undermine your administration's stated goal of achieving an agreed framework in ICAO to limit global warming pollution from international aviation."
Earlier this week, a coalition of industry lobby groups urged Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood to go beyond their diplomatic efforts to shepherd a global alternative to the EU's carbon trading system.
They asked the administration to file the Article 84 action to "strongly restate opposition" to the EU's application of its cap-and-trade system to U.S. airlines and warned that too much time has gone by without a resolution to the feud.
But a senior administration official said this week after the conclusion of two days of talks between the U.S. and 16 other countries opposed to the EU law that countries were committed to finding an ICAO solution.
The European Commission has repeatedly said the only grounds for waiving its scheme, which has stirred threats of an international trade war, would be if ICAO could come up with an equally effective world-wide solution to rising airline emissions.
But the environmental groups said that instead of enhancing ICAO's ability to reach a solution by next year, an aggressive Article 84 action would undermine its progress.
"No Article 84 action has ever been resolved through official ICAO channels; if the goal of filing an Article 84 action is to prompt negotiations, it is unnecessary given that such negotiations are already underway," the groups said on Friday.
Meanwhile, lawmakers on Capitol Hill have also put pressure on the Obama administration to take a stronger stance against Europe and its aviation law.
Congressman John Mica, a Democrat who authored a strong bill shielding U.S. airlines from complying with the European law that passed in the House last year, urged his Senate counterparts on Friday to fast-track passage of their version of the legislation before Congress breaks for a month-long summer recess.
The Senate commerce committee approved the bill on Tuesday. Staff of one of the bill's co-sponsors said it plans to ready the bill for a vote on the Senate floor in September.
"The Senate should expedite approval of this bill as soon as possible, and the House and Senate can move forward to complete a final bill to send to the president," Mica said in a statement.
(Reporting by Valerie Volcovici) | <urn:uuid:e4533def-cf85-4650-8ef8-e6c7cf9a7d37> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://planetark.org/enviro-news/item/66130 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.953011 | 674 | 1.570313 | 2 |
NVIDIA talks multi-core CPUs for mobile devices, says quad-core chips are comingAlex Wagner - Senior News Editor
Sure, the LG Star, Motorola Olympus, and all of those upcoming dual-core Tegra 2 phones sound pretty awesome, but how would you like to have a quad-core processor in your handset? According to the folks at NVIDIA, we're not too far off from seeing that very thing. The company released some whitepapers yesterday titled "The Benefits of Multiple CPU Cores in Mobile Devices," and in it NVIDIA explains that they believe that as we head into 2011, dual-core chips will become the norm. Right after that statement, they casually mention that we can expect quad-core processors "in the near future." Before you get the urge to run out a battery bandolier, NVIDIA believes that smartphones and tablets will benefit from multi-core chips, even more than desktops and laptops, "because the battery life benefits are so substantial" with those mobile devices. If you've got some free time and feel like getting into some light reading material, you can find the entire document right here.
While the term "in the near future" is about as vague as it gets, this certainly is good news for those of us with an insatiable need for speed. We should be seeing dual-core handsets infiltrating the market within the next few months, so I don't doubt that they'll become more and more common in the next year. Quad-core chips, though? I have a feeling that it'll be a while before we're seeing them become routine. Still, with the speed at which this industry evolves, I wouldn't be totally shocked to see quad-core phones begin leaking out at the end of 2011 or the beginning of 2012. I just hope that battery tech begins making substantial advancements like these CPUs, and soon. Even if NVIDIA says that the benefits are there, my battery is still trembling at the thought of a quad-core processor.
Via Android and Me, NVIDIA | <urn:uuid:fed8ebc7-d87d-41ae-8279-f768c7fa10ae> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.phonedog.com/2010/12/01/nvidia-talks-multi-core-cpus-for-mobile-devices-says-quad-core-chips-are-coming/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966877 | 412 | 1.734375 | 2 |
The longer I homeschool my children and the more that time goes on and I see other homeschooling families grow and change over time the more convinced I am that what we focus on we succeed at accomplishing.
It is one thing to read about homeschooling success (in a book or on a blog) but to see it happen in real life is so interesting and sometimes phenomenal. I love it when I see in real life, a theory or an idea actually come to fruition. It is interesting to see it with other families that I know, when I know their goals and what they are doing, then see how it works for them (as they are doing different things than our family does, because no two homeschooling families are alike). While all homeschooling families share some common goals most of us have goals with different details or plans and we all do things to achieve them in different ways.
(If you don’t believe yet that every homeschooling family is different I suggest you read the book “Homeschooling: A Patchwork of Days” by Nancy Lande. Each chapter is a story of how a family spends their day, as well as an overview about their family and their homeschooling philosophy. If you like that book and want to read more, including how those same families are five years later, you can read the sequel “Homeschool Open House” (which also contains new families; the book is double the size of the first book). If you are wondering about the content of the book, religion-wise, exactly half the families mention their religion in their story and the other half never mention it.
Most if not all homeschooling families have goals and plans. So long as the work is done to achieve those intentions, then it will happen, whatever the ‘it’ is. We just have to trust the process and do each little step, to keep going and to move forward. It is hard to explain but I will try.
Living the homeschooling lifestyle is so all-encompassing that some of us like to refer to homeschooling not as something we do, not as just lessons that happen between this time of day and that time of day, but we describe it as a lifestyle. Homeschooling is a lifestyle for many of us. Part of that lifestyle is knowing that what we do and how we do it is broken down into such teeny tiny pieces that they are embedded into each minute of our day, and also affects some general decisions we make for our family (no watching that TV show, no video game playing, etc.). Having so much going on, not always busy-ness per se, but having our children with us all the time, and having so many experiences together can make living one day seem very long or endless, sometimes. Each day can seem very long and each day can seem like a lot of little steps. As one day moves to the next and the next, time goes on in a seamless way, blending from one day into another, flowing on and on. Sometimes it seems that time goes by slowly, and other times it seems that time is flying by. Our lives are so rich and full that it can sometimes be hard to gauge the big picture; we are living so much in the micro-environment that is our family’s lives.
When we have our noses to the grindstone of our life (especially for the homeschooling parent, the one who has the majority of the educating and the child care duties), it can be hard for those of us who are so close to our children to know what things look like from the big picture perspective. At times we may not even be able to see our own children through the eyes of others (what the grandparents see, what the store clerk sees). What we know is that they don’t know this certain math fact, or that they keep forgetting to capitalize that word or that they keep leaving their dirty laundry on the floor. We see all the little flaws and those things seem so big in our mind, and dealing with those things is always on the tips of our tongues. Unfortunately sometimes I find that my knowing all of the flaws sometimes prevents me from seeing the good things about my children. Since we have so little exposure to great numbers of children (unless we were formerly classroom teachers), we don’t have much of a measuring stick to measure our children against. Sometimes I think we may make the measuring stick with very high expectations, but that is another thing to ponder on another day.
I found that in this last year of homeschooling, that my children have excelled beyond my expectations in the area of reading ability. I made certain plans and goals and we took steps to arrive there. We didn’t follow those plans exactly as intended, due to the family crises and illnesses that we’ve had, and they had gaps in the formal lessons (forced daily reading practice) due to those things. However this spring we continued homeschooling by using the unschooling method. That led my children to self-initiate reading (after about three weeks of not reading anything because I was not TELLING them to). What they chose to read was Calvin and Hobbes comics, in book format. They read the books over and over and over. They read them in the car, in hospital waiting rooms, at relative’s houses, around the house and in bed until after midnight, sometimes. The result was when I tested their reading ability last month, they are both reading very much ahead of their ‘grade level’. I will withhold the actual test results as it may be perceived by some as bragging. Let’s just say I was blown away (especially since my older son did this same exact test 13 months ago and I can measure apples to apples in a test score format).
My friends and acquaintances in my local homeschooling community have the same experiences about success with what they focus on. This can happen too with schooled children depending on the things that the family chooses to focus on in the after-school hours. Here are some examples:
A family who won’t allow any television, video, movie watching, and no video games, but promotes reading by provides thousands of books in their home library have children read well and often.
A family who is active with their church, lives their religious principals in their home, and who all volunteers their time each year to volunteer work in Mexico has empathy and a fondness for the people of Mexico and Mexico as a place and a strong connection to their church and their spiritual beliefs.
A homeschooling mother who fretted so much about teaching certain subjects hired a private tutor for one school year (for those subjects) and now the children are above grade level in those subjects (and she is befuddled about what to do with them this year).
A family who spends lots of time writing has a child who loves to pen her own stories in her free time.
A child who spends hours preparing for a play excels while acting in the final stage production.
A child who loves to dance and takes many dance classes per week, over many years time, becomes quite good at it and is contemplating a career in dance.
A boy who loves baseball and is put on many baseball teams, continues to grow his skill and abilities over time.
A family who loves to read history together and who spends a lot of time homeschooling history has children who enjoy history and know way more than their same-aged, schooled peers.
A schooled first grade boy attends classes after school to learn Chinese, so he can know the native language of his parents, while most other American children of his age only speak English.
Feeling that American public schools lack math skill teaching, some families send their children to intensive after-school math classes starting at Kindergarten or younger (and continue through high school), and are able to do advanced college level math far before graduating from public high school. (Is it no wonder they are doing advanced math in college and that they have an edge in math and science fields?)
I see this happening over and over. What we concentrate on doing or teaching our children, the children will succeed at doing. This is not to say that every subject taught in the homeschool will be loved or will come easy. Not every subject a child is exposed to will become a passion; just as every sport tried will not become a passion. But what we set goals for, what we make plans to accomplish—if we actually do those plans (and don’t abandon them) ---our children will succeed at.
If you are at a place of worry about accomplishing something in your home school, try not to worry. Just set goals, long term (years ahead of time) and short term (this ‘school year’). Set those goals. Make plans to get there. Then DO WHAT YOU PLANNED.
If things don’t go well or something needs tweaking along the way, then by all means do it.
Just know that the work you do, what you choose to do and what you actually do (versus just thinking about it), will work and it will produce results. Put a process in place, and then trust the process.
The moral of the story is:
Trust the homeschooling process.
And know that:
If you are at all worried about starting to homeschool, I’d like to encourage you to:
Just Do It.
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Sun, May 03, 2009
The Navy Air and Missile Defense Command (NAMDC) was established
April 30 in a ceremony at Naval Support Facility Dahlgren, Va.
Commanded by Rear Adm. Alan B. "Brad" Hicks, NAMDC is the lead
organization for Navy, joint and combined Integrated Air and
Missile Defense (IAMD).
NAMDC serves as the single warfare center of excellence to
synchronize and integrate Navy efforts across the full spectrum of
air and missile defense to include air defense, cruise missile
defense and ballistic missile defense.
"We're on a quest to field a naval
capability that is equally adept servicing national missile defense
of the United States, regional missile defense for our allies and
friends abroad and theater defense for our forward fighting
forces," said Adm. Robert F. Willard, commander, U.S. Pacific
Fleet, who served as guest speaker.
As the lead organization for integrated air and missile defense,
NAMDC will support the chief of naval operations and fleet
component commanders, end-to-end by integrating technologies,
warfighting concepts and command and control. NAMDC will provide
operational support to the fleet and will report Commander, U.S.
IAMD, which includes ballistic missile defense, is a Navy key
warfighting capability for the U.S. maritime strategy, which calls
for credible combat power to be continuously postured to protect
America's vital interests. IAMD provides the ability to use
international waters to defend against established and emergent
threats, which underlies the importance of free and lawful use of
Maneuver Performed Aboard CVN 77 The Navy's X-47B Unmanned Combat Air System Demonstrator (UCAS-D) began touch and go landing operations aboard the aircraft carrier USS George H.W.>[...]
HTF7000 Series Surpasses 1.5 Million Flight Hours With Better Than 99 Percent Dispatch Reliability Honeywell has announced that its HTF7350, the latest engine to join its successfu>[...]
Also: PC-12 Record, Maule Nation, Cockpit Lockout, 34,000 Airliners Needed, Beechcraft Wins Big Contract You know you're having a bad day when a flight goes so bad that you feel yo>[...]
Four Buried As A Group May 2 A Navy Pilot, missing from the Vietnam War, has been accounted-for and was buried with full military honors along with his crew. According to the Depar>[...]
Forest Service Smoke Jumpers Smokejumping was first proposed in 1934 by T.V. Pearson, the Forest Service Intermountain Regional Forester, as a means to quickly provide initial atta>[...] | <urn:uuid:2c2ec439-67a6-40f7-abb2-7358b3c51797> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://aero-news.net/index.cfm?do=main.textpost&id=9c12247f-9a08-400e-9529-db4379d58b22 | 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 | 0.933016 | 577 | 1.765625 | 2 |
The Norwegian prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, says his country will "not be intimidated or threatened" by Friday's terror attacks, which left 76 people dead.
The country would "stand firm in defending our values" and the "open, tolerant and inclusive society", he said. "The Norwegian response to violence is more democracy, more openness and greater political participation."
The "horrific and brutal" attacks were an assault on Norway's "fundamental values", added Stoltenberg. "We have to be very clear to distinguish between extreme views, opinions that it's completely legal, legitimate to have. What is not legitimate is to try to implement those extreme views by using violence," he said.
Earlier, police detonated a cache of explosives at a farm rented by Anders Behring Breivik. Detectives believe the 32-year-old made the bomb that killed eight people in Oslo on Friday using fertiliser he purchased under the guise of being a farmer.
The controlled explosion came after police named four of the victims, including three caught up in the city centre bombing and a 23-year-old shot dead on Utøya island. Police would not reveal the quantity of explosives found at the farm in Rena, about 100 miles north of the capital, Oslo.
As the investigation continues, security officials have cast doubt on Breivik's claims that he has accomplices who are still at large. At his first court appearance in Oslo on Monday, he told a closed courtroom he had links to "two other terror cells".
But Norway's domestic intelligence chief, Janne Kristiansen, said no proof has yet been found to link Breivik to rightwing extremists in the UK or elsewhere. She told the BBC: "I can tell you, at this moment in time, we don't have evidence or we don't have indications that he has been part of a broader movement or that he has been in connection with other cells or that there are other cells."
Kristiansen added that she did not believe the killer was insane, but was calculating and evil, and someone who sought the limelight.
At a press conference in Oslo, Johan Fredrikson, the chief of Oslo police, said that he still had no evidence of an accomplice or network behind the attacks, despite an international investigation involving British police.
On Wednesday morning, Oslo's main station was closed after a suspicious suitcase was discovered on a bus. All train and bus services out of the centre were halted while police investigated the suspect case, which turned out to be harmless.
Oslo police also caused panic by putting out an alert saying they were looking for a "dangerous and unstable" man who claimed a connection with Breivik. But shortly after releasing the alert, police said they had wrongly connected a mentally ill man with Friday's massacre. "This has nothing to do with Friday's case," a police official said. "The news release was sent out in error. This is a routine mission by the police."
The police have been criticised for their failure to reach Utøya sooner on Friday, after Breivik's lawyer revealed that his client was surprised to have reached the island youth camp without being stopped by police – who took 90 minutes to arrive. It has emerged that the nearest police helicopter available was unable to intervene because its pilots were on holiday.
On Wednesday, the leader of Norway's emergency delta force police unit defended its response to the atrocities, claiming the breakdown of the team's boat caused no significant delay in efforts to reach Utøya.
Anders Snortheimsmoen told reporters that even though the assigned boat quickly broke down, the team immediately jumped into another, better boat. He says his team arrived at the harbour at the same time as local police and that the boat mishap caused "no delay".
Norwegian investigators have assigned a whole unit to pore over the 1,500-page manifesto Breivik emailed to more than 1,000 contacts less than 90 minutes before he launched his attacks.
One paragraph in the diatribe describes a detailed "survivor's kit", including weapons, ammunition, nutrition and cash, which he claimed to be preparing in advance to help him break out of prison.
The Norwegian tabloid VG reported how Breivik describes plans for another terrorist attack, should he manage to escape from jail, including a "hit-list" of targets. | <urn:uuid:1ce535c2-fb4a-4db0-bf09-cf764de6553d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jul/27/norway-terror-attacks-prime-minister | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.981907 | 903 | 1.59375 | 2 |
“No experience? No Job!” Have you heard that before? Have you asked yourself the question, “If I can’t get a job how am I supposed to get experience, especially if I need a job to get the experience?”
While you are enrolled at Ball State there will be a lot of opportunities for you to gain experience and be better prepared for the transition to full-time work once you graduate.
You can gain experience and develop leadership skills in many ways, including
• Building Better Communities Fellows
• Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry
• Excellence in Leadership
• Study Abroad
• Post-graduate Fellowships (like the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace)
• Major Scholarships with Help from Honors College
Leadership is just one of the many skills that employers are seeking in new hires. Working as part of a team, global understanding, and the ability to persuade someone to accept your idea are all important skills. Learn more about these and other skills here. | <urn:uuid:6a175b5a-3d64-49fe-a00e-e50334d02c10> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://cms.bsu.edu/about/administrativeoffices/careercenter/explore/internships/leadership | 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 | 0.951693 | 213 | 1.59375 | 2 |
As the school year was winding down - and exams and papers from students piled up - I looked for some light reading to relax with in between bouts of grading and averaging.
At the local Catholic bookstore, I stumbled across The Tripods Attack (Book 1 of "The Young Chesterton Chronicles") by John McNichol.
The book is of the alternative history genre. Chesterton is an American orphan stranded in England who links up with H.G. Wells and Father Brown (!) to fight invaders from Mars.
We also learn that America is five separate countries, and that elements of the British MI 5 assassinated Lincoln. And that Edison flew to Mars! There's also mention of Lewis's Ransom.
Silly? Perhaps. And certainly not Dickens (or even Chesterton), but quite enjoyable.
"A miraculous world"
11 hours ago | <urn:uuid:73af1d5e-d9be-4f30-ae69-cdec8670be4b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://chestertonandfriends.blogspot.com/2008/06/chesterton-novel.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00011-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.954309 | 173 | 1.6875 | 2 |
A reader writes:
We read your book for book-club and I found it boring and reprehensible by turns. Between your endless descriptions and your philosophizing, I caught myself wondering, who would write such things? Who would publish such things? And there should really be a warning of what is to come. The book, which SEEMS at first to be grounded in Christianity, left several of us shocked and offended.
Dear Sheri K:
While I regret that my book was distasteful to you, I make no apologies for it.
This is by design a philosophical novel the point of which was to show that morality does exist if there is no God. The philosophy, therefore, was inescapable. A formal statement of the book’s theme appears in Chapter 33, when Joel says “Philosophy matters.”
“I was under the influence of an incorrect philosophy,” Joel said. “It was an amoral, relativistic philosophy that resulted in nihilism, as such philosophies inevitably do. Moorecroft, if there’s only one thing I want get across, it’s this: philosophy matters. It matters the most. I’ve lived it, and I know what I’m talking about.”
“Tell me exactly what you mean,” Elias said.
“I mean that the ideas a person holds determine precisely, mathematically, the actions that that person will take—and how that person will view those actions and feel about them afterward. Convictions determine actions. Philosophy is the source from which every subsequent thing flows. Whether the idea is scientific, political, aesthetic, technological, or anything else, philosophy is the source. Thoughts shape deeds. Those thoughts spring from the ideas one forms about existence and the universe around us. And that is philosophy.”
To show the good, I felt I had to present the bad as a contrast.
My point, however, was not to glorify a crime, but just the opposite: to condemn it. | <urn:uuid:6f9cd88b-0618-4047-90cb-7cd4d7a61dc8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://journalpulp.com/2012/03/29/haters-and-their-mail/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.964543 | 425 | 1.617188 | 2 |
famously once said, “The writer, when he is also an artist, is someone who admits what others don't dare reveal.” And one could easily argue Kazan’s raison d’être was to go to emotional and psychological places few men dared to tread. While Kazan’s films were often marked by social issues to the outsider, the filmmaker was much more drawn to the pathos of the human condition, the painfully vulnerable, complicated and emotional naked places of the human psyche. And he loved and nurtured the vanity-free actors who were willing and able to facilitate such ends and emotional complex truths. Marlon Brando
, the ne plus ultra of tough but overly sensitive and vulnerable American male, was Kazan’s muse, and the filmmaker loved how he could arouse, cajole and release extraordinary feelings in the actor.
“He was an arch-manipulator of actors' [emotions],” Brando once said of Gadg (Kazan’s nickname), ”And he was extraordinarily talented; perhaps we will never see his like again.” Through the Actors Studio and the Method he and Lee Strasberg
championed, Kazan would dig deep in some fragile and fraught muck, using whatever means necessary to get a good and truthful performance, and by doing so took cinema into some exciting and even scary territories. He was a conductor and conduit for the performer, or as Robert De Niro
once said, a "master of a new kind of psychological and behavioral faith in acting.”
The emotional fabric and texture in the films of Elia Kazan was always intense, raw, painfully naked, unsettling, ugly, and almost always tragic. Failure, shame, regret, disgrace, indignity (often within the family setting; those who know your deepest darkest secrets and fears) and self-aware tortured souls were his stock and trade. Whether it was the anguished cries of Marlon Brando unabashedly sobbing, “Stella!” in “A Streetcar Named Desire
,” James Dean
’s bad son Caleb desperately trying to attain the love of his disapproving father to no avail in “East of Eden
,” or Brando again in the brutally honest “On The Waterfront
” scene of emerging morality as the younger brother, Terry Malloy, confronts his elder brother about being forced to sell himself out all his life in the name of a dishonorable buck. These painful human intersections were where Kazan was most masterful.
Unquestionably one of the great American directors of the 20th century, Kazan has many unassailable classics to his name, including "East Of Eden," “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “A Face In The Crowd
,” the slightly less-watched but well-regarded “Gentleman's Agreement
” (eight Oscar nominations including a Best Picture win), and "On The Waterfront," which receives a beautiful Criterion Collection upgrade this week on DVD/Blu-ray
(which we discussed yesterday
Kazan was nominated for Best Director five times and won twice for "Gentleman's Agreement" and "On The Waterfront." All in all he was nominated seven times by the Academy, and in 1999 was bestowed an Honorary Lifetime Achievement Award by the institution. Collectively, his 16 feature-length films were nominated 55 times, winning 20 times in total (including Best Picture wins for the same two movies he won the directing prize for). A self-avowed outsider, and son of Greek immigrants, Kazan was respected and revered, and yet saw his legacy forever tarnished because of his House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) testimonies (no piece on Kazan is complete without at least some mention of the HUAC). But the art is ultimately what matters.
Clearly you're familiar with his well-known classic films (or should be), and so reading about them is perhaps not overly revelatory. Kazan's canon possesses a great and expansive body of work that encompasses four decades of cinema. With "On The Waterfront" hitting DVD/Blu-ray this week, we thought we'd use the occasion to dig a little deeper into the Kazan oeuvre with five, slightly lesser-known films you may not have seen.
"A Tree Grows In Brooklyn
Based on Betty Smith
’s novel, Kazan’s debut feature-length film is a heartbreaking yet beautiful coming-of-age tale chronicling a bright and precocious young girl who strives for a better life despite her family’s poverty, caused in part by her father’s alcoholism. Set in non-hipstery Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the early 20th century, the drama focuses on the Irish-American Nolan family and their difficult tenement existence; the hardworking housewife (Dorothy McGuire
), the drunken father unable to care for his family (James Dunn
, who won an Oscar for his supporting performance), the free-spirited Aunt Sissy (Joan Blondell
) and of course, 13-year-old Francie (Peggy Ann Garner
). Garner is a wonderful revelation as the clear-eyed pragmatist who still tries to believe in her father, but is invariably disappointed. Deeply moving, heartfelt and wistful, Kazan was dissatisfied with the film, due in part to its Hollywood sets, which he felt robbed the picture of an authenticity he was seeking. But the sensitive innocence lost (and optimistically regained) tale is classic Hollywood, and definitely worth tracking down. [B+]
One of Kazan's most controversial movies and one of his most compulsively watchable, this slice of Southern-fried intrigue (written, at least in part, by Tennessee Williams
, and based on his one-act play), filmed in silky black and white, features Carroll Baker
as the titular Baby Doll, a 19-year-old virgin bride who, at the stroke of her 20th birthday, has to give it up to her slovenly husband Archie (Karl Malden
). Archie's plantation, Fox Tails, is in dire straits, and in a shocking sequence early in the movie he sneaks away in the middle of the night and burns down the cotton gin of a successful local competitor named Vacarro (played by a spry Eli Wallach
). Unable to convince local authorities to investigate Archie, he instead visits the plantation and starts to squeeze Baby Doll for information, with his advances eventually becoming more sexual in nature. "Baby Doll
" is startlingly frank in its depiction of sexuality (or lack thereof – a whole sequence which borders on sexual assault is never actually seen by the camera), with the iconic image of Baker lounging in a crib, in a tiny nightgown (a style that would later be known as the "baby doll"), her thumb shoved in her mouth, just as evocative of youth and sexuality as anything in Stanley Kubrick
's more widely discussed, similarly themed "Lolita
." The Roman Catholic National Legion of Decency condemned the film, which nonetheless was nominated for four Academy Awards and five Golden Globes (Kazan won the Best Director prize). A surprisingly progressive piece that only occasionally veers into outright camp, "Baby Doll" still remains highly influential, particularly in the work of filmmaker Craig Brewer
, whose underrated "Black Snake Moan
" is hugely indebted, tackling young sexuality head on while also weaving in between comedy and drama. [B+] | <urn:uuid:d181f21a-4c1d-4ef4-a914-99d78f8f0a35> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/5-elia-kazan-films-you-may-not-know-america-america-splendor-in-the-grass-a-tree-grows-in-brooklyn-wild-river-baby-doll-20130222?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00024-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.971478 | 1,578 | 1.773438 | 2 |
Zombies are non-player character (NPC) characters on the continent of Chernarus. They feed on players and are able to hear and see them. Getting too close, using a bright light source at night, and making too much noise will draw them to a player.
About 35% of zombies have loot on them. On civilian zombies you can find Canned Food, Soda Cans, rounds for common Weapons like Makarov PM or Lee Enfield or empty cans and bottles. On military zombies you can find ammo for rare weapons, for example AK or STANAG. They also have a chance of dropping HE and Smoke Grenades.
Types of Zombie
- Walkers: These zombies stand upright and walk slowly. They run very fast in zigzags at the player and are often hard to hit. They are the most common zombie type.
- Hoppers: These zombies are crouched and hop towards the player at a medium speed flailing their arms once agroed, they can be hard to see and often blend in with grass on approach.
- Crawlers: These zombies are the rarest and are in prone position, they can be very difficult to see in the grass and are the quickest of zombies when they arn't aggroed. However, this is the slowest zombie when they are aggroed.
- Zombies can spawn inside buildings as well as outside
- Zombies do little damage on their own but often cause Bleeding
- Zombies currently MUST walk when they are indoors
- Zombies can climb ladders, open doors and swim
- Zombies can knock you Unconscious in 1 hit if you're under 9000 blood
- Zombie swarms attacking players in the building may very rarely destroy the building
- Zombies are not socially active, which means that if you agro 1 zombie that doesn't mean that all the others will agro too
- Zombies ALWAYS agro on the closest player. Even if they are already chasing someone, they can change their target
- Zombies will go prone to crawl under fences
- Zombies have a programmed propensity to move towards a nearby player even if they are not moving
- Zombies investigate lighted fireplaces up to 300m from their position during loiter
- Zombies will investigate thrown items and smoke grenades
- Zombies stop chasing when the Player is more than 300m away
- Zombies can be escaped by breaking their line of sight
- Zombies are extremely slow at climbing steep hills, allowing a chance for the player to break line of sight
- If Zombies lose line-of-sight, they will continue to investigate the area
How the Zombie Pathing works
When you first see zombies shambling around town, they are spawned by the server and every client is fed Zed positioning by the server. (unconfirmed if the model is always the same for every player the same way player skins are random when you log in and out etc:)
Once you agro a Zed, your LOCAL machine takes over the Zed pathing and relays the position to the server which then relays that to other players. Because of this mechanic you quite often get Zed lag even if the server is not lagging nor you are from the server.
The best tactic if you find this happening a lot is to obviously kill the zombie before it agros OR when you agro a zed prone to the floor and let your friend/s spam the "lagged zed" with bullets, if you don't have friends you should make some.
This is done to ease the load on the sever as if the server did the Pathing every time a Zed was agroed it would slow down horribly. | <urn:uuid:99befd77-7f01-4e1d-97a7-c38f1ac27bc4> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://dayz.gamepedia.com/index.php?title=Zombies&oldid=8988 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00039-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.959594 | 747 | 1.703125 | 2 |
Stocks sink as debt limit remains unresolvedThe debt showdown in Washington is rattling the stock market again.
NEW YORK (AP) — The debt showdown in Washington is rattling the stock market again.
Stocks fell Monday after congressional leaders and President Barack Obama failed to agree on a deal to raise the U.S. debt limit and avoid default.
Lawmakers hoped to reach a compromise late Sunday, but those talks stalled. President Obama wants to raise revenues by letting tax cuts for wealthy Americans expire. Republicans have pushed for more spending cuts and have rejected higher taxes.
If an agreement is not reached by Aug. 2, the U.S. won't have enough cash to pay all its bills. That could have a catastrophic impact on financial markets. The U.S. would likely lose its coveted triple-A credit rating. Interest rates would rise for millions of consumers. And stocks could fall the way they did during the 2008 financial crisis, analysts say.
Most traders expect the White House and Capitol Hill to come up with a last-minute deal. Yet there are still uncertainties about higher taxes or changes to government spending that could affect corporate profits. Investors also worry that the government may only come up with a short-term fix that could still trigger a credit rating downgrade.
"We're thinking this is going to be resolved," said Rob Lutts, president and chief investment officer of Cabot Money Management. "The question: Is it resolved from a standpoint of a long-term solution or a stop-gap measure?"
The Dow Jones industrial average fell 84 points, or 0.7 percent, to 12,597 in late afternoon trading. The Dow had been down as many as 145 points earlier.
The Standard & Poor's 500 index fell 7, or 0.4 percent, to 1,338. The Nasdaq composite index fell 15, or 0.5 percent, to 2,844.
Stock trading has varied widely in July because of concerns over debt problems in the U.S. and Europe. The Dow has alternated between gains and losses over the past nine trading days. The VIX, a measure of volatility in U.S. stock prices, has risen 16 percent in July.
Many investors are afraid to buy stocks because of concerns about the budget impasse in Washington. Trading volume, or the number of shares bought and sold, has fallen 22 percent on the New York Stock Exchange in July compared with the same month a year ago, according to FactSet. If that continues, July will have the lowest average daily trading volume since December 2007.
Some investors have turned to gold and other precious metals as a place to park money while the U.S. and European debt problems get sorted out. Gold rose $10.70 to $1,612.20 an ounce Monday, while silver rose 24 cents to $40.36 an ounce. Gold has risen 14 percent this year, while silver is up 31 percent.
Even as debt troubles continue in the U.S. and Europe, U.S. companies have been reporting higher profits. David Kelly, chief market strategist at J.P. Morgan Funds, wrote in a note to clients that the per-share earnings of companies in the S&P 500 index are expected to rise to a record in the second quarter. If that happens, it would surpass the previous record set in the second quarter of 2007.
"Corporate America has done very well," said Randy Warren, chief investment officer at Huntington Asset Advisors. "People are looking at these earnings as good indications that there's value in stocks."
Apple Inc. briefly rose to $400 Monday, about a week after the company reported record earnings and revenue on the popularity of its iPhone and iPad.
E-Trade Financial Corp. rose 5 percent, the most of any company in the S&P 500, after The Wall Street Journal reported that larger rival TD Ameritrade is considering a bid for the company. E-Trade's largest shareholder also called on E-Trade to hold a special meeting to consider selling the company.
Lorillard Inc. fell 4 percent. The maker of Newport cigarettes cautioned that it may not be able to sustain its strong earnings growth in the second half of the year.
Tenet Healthcare Corp. fell 4 percent after earnings at its competitor, the hospital chain HCA Inc., were far weaker than analysts expected as patients had fewer costly surgical procedures. HCA fell 15 percent.
Kimberly-Clark fell 2 percent after the maker of Kleenex tissues and Huggies diapers said its profit fell 18 percent because of higher prices for raw materials and a higher tax rate.
BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd. fell 4 percent after the company said it would eliminate 2,000 jobs, or about 10 percent of its work force. The company has had several product delays and is facing tough competition from Apple's Inc.'s iPhone and smartphones that used Google Inc.'s Android operating system. | <urn:uuid:b8315bb7-44f5-4730-8427-86bb9561e53b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thedickinsonpress.com/event/article/id/49837/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00002-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968882 | 1,015 | 1.679688 | 2 |
Mercedes USA has announced a voluntary recall for 432 units of the 2013 SL-Class roadsters due to an air-conditioner refrigerant line that can tear in a severe frontal crash. The vehicles affected were built from from December 19th, 2011 through May 31st, 2012 and are use the R1234yf refrigerant.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, if the refrigerant escapes from the hose, the gas mixture could be released into the engine compartment and cause a fire.
"Daimler AG, the parent company of Mercedes-Benz, conducted product testing of a vehicle not sold in the U.S., but equipped with the same refrigerant. According to Mercedes-Benz, the testing was designed to replicate worst-case conditions expected in a severe frontal crash that would cause a rupture of the air-conditioner refrigerant line. A rupture of a refrigerant line will result in a gaseous mixture of refrigerant being released into the engine compartment. The testing determined that the escaping R1234yf refrigerant may ignite under specific conditions. The resulting fire could spread to additional combustible materials."
Mercedes announced that if someone is driving an affected model, they should address their local dealer who will replace the R1234yf refrigerant with a new, R134a refrigerant. | <urn:uuid:a83ce365-d08d-495b-9b63-59b9cec684b7> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.topspeed.com/cars/car-news/mercedes-recalls-2013-sl-class-ar135982.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706499548/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516121459-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.94736 | 271 | 1.585938 | 2 |
Invader (born 1969) is a street artist who pastes up characters from and inspired by the Space Invaders game, made up of small coloured square tiles that form a mosaic. He does this in cities across the world, then documents this as an "Invasion", with maps of where to find each invader.
He started this project in 1998 with the invasion of Paris - the city where he lives and the most invaded city to date - and then spread the invasion to 35 other cities in the world. Los Angeles, New York City, London, Manchester, Newcastle, Geneva, Tokyo, Prague, Melbourne, Vienna, Bilbao, Bangkok, Darlington, Ljubljana, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Katmandu and even Mombasa are now invaded with his colourful characters in mosaic tiles.
The mosaics depict characters from Space Invaders and other video games from the late 1970s. The images in these games were made with fairly low-resolution graphics, and are therefore suitable for reproduction as mosaics, with tiles representing the pixels. The tiles are difficult to alter and weather-resistant.
Invader installed the first mosaic in the early 1990s in Paris. According to the artist, it was a scout, or sentinel, because it remained the only one for several years. The programme of installations began in earnest in 1998.
The locations for the mosaics are not random, but are chosen according to diverse criteria, which may be aesthetic, strategic or conceptual. Invader favours locations that are frequented by many people, but also likes some more hidden locations. In Montpellier, the locations of mosaics were chosen so that, when placed on a map, they form an image of a space invader character.
The mosaics are built in advance, and Invader travels with them. When he arrives in a city he obtains a map and spends at least a week to install them. They are catalogued, and Invader draws a map indicating their locations within the city. For some time, Invader has employed a professional photographer to take pictures of each mosaic.
One of the more prominent places where the mosaics have been installed is on the Hollywood Sign. The first was placed on the letter D on December 31, 1999. During further trips to Los Angeles, Invader has placed mosaics on other letters of the sign.
Invader also works on another project that he titles "Rubikcubism", which consists making artworks made of Rubik's Cubes. Invader has had solo exhibitions at art galleries in Paris, Osaka, Melbourne, Los Angeles, New York City, and London. | <urn:uuid:27de1ceb-4fad-4755-b325-66a6a91e2a1d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.reference.com/browse/pastes+up | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00042-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.969582 | 539 | 1.617188 | 2 |
MINNEAPOLIS -- District leaders promise the conversation will continue about ways to deal with racial tension at South High School, one day after that tension erupted into a brawl involving hundreds of students.
On Thursday, up to 300 students joined a fight that district leaders now acknowledge was likely due to racial tensions between Somali-American students and other students. At least three students and one staff member were injured in the fight. Police also say charges could be filed.
On Friday, the school remained calm and quiet. The district imposed a "code yellow lockdown," including limited access into and out of the building and additional school resource officers and staff members.
District leaders say they're prepared to deal with what students say was at the heart of Thursday's clash.
"We have a significant amount of students that feel it was racial. We need to deal with that," said Stan Alleyne, spokesman for Minneapolis Public Schools.
Alleyne said the district will be encouraging students to talk through conflicts. The school will also be hosting a community meeting for others interested in weighing in on the issue.
"We know that's going to be part of the healing," Alleyne said.
And already, at least one South High student and his mother, agree.
"My mom said one person cannot affect a whole society. It needs more than one person," said Adnan Farah, 17, about his mother, Ayan.
"You may be different color. You might speak a different language. But we're all human," Adnan added.
Alleyne said 1,750 students attend South High School. Nearly half of those students are people of color. And of those, eight percent are Somali-American students.
Meantime, Somali-American leaders believe Thursday's incident only emphasizes the need for communication between the larger Minnesota community and one sub-community that first started immigrating to Minnesota decades ago.
"We have to do a lot to bridge these cultural differences," said Said Sheik-Abdi, a program manager for the American Refugee Committee.
(Copyright 2013 by KARE. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.) | <urn:uuid:e6e8969e-c1de-49df-8ee4-f23250d3768b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.kare11.com/rss/article/1011352/391/Leaders-promise-ongoing-conversation-after-racial-fight-at-South-High | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704713110/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516114513-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977997 | 446 | 1.773438 | 2 |
Songfacts®: You can leave comments about the song at the bottom of the page.
This song was originally an instrumental by the saxophone player Mike Shapiro, who recorded it as Mike Sharpe. J.R. Cobb, who was the band's lead guitarist, heard this song and added lyrics to it with their producer Buddy Buie. Cobb later formed the Atlanta Rhythm Section along with fellow band member Dean Daughtry and members of a band called The Candymen.
There's been some controversy over who played the sax solo on this song, as different people have claimed to have played it. According to Classics IV's biographer Joe Glickman, it was Mike Shapiro, who wrote and recorded the original instrumental version of the song, who played the sax. Glickman wrote in the Forgotten Hits newsletter: The reason he didn't play on some of the other records (the ones Ray Jarrel played on) was because Mike was a bit hard to work with in the studio. He had a very good concept of how he wanted the solos, which differed from Buddy Buie's ideas of mainstream pop. There's a bit of a tone-break at the end of the solo that Mike insisted on re-recording, but Buddy wouldn't let him. English White was a sax player that was brought in later during the 'Traces' road tour to fill in for the sax. Mike did not tour at all and the band had been playing for a while with Auburn Burrell filling in the sax solos on lead guitar. That was hurting their reception since the sax had a lot to do with their sound."
In 1979, the Atlanta Rhythm Section released a new version that hit #48 in the UK and #17 in the US. Their version doesn't differ greatly from the original, which makes sense as three of this group's members (Robert Nix, James Cobb and Dean Daughtry) played with Classics IV before joining this group. (thanks, Mike - Santa Barbara, CA)
This was one of the first songs to get a lot of airplay on the Album Oriented Rock (AOR) format. FM was relatively new, and AOR was a great format for people who wanted to hear songs on rock albums that weren't necessarily hits.
Other artists to record this song include Dusty Springfield, The Velvet Monkeys and Daniel Ash. Imogen Heap also recorded it for the soundtrack of the movie Just Like Heaven. | <urn:uuid:2b5c2675-7bd4-49a9-8b0d-36d54860ecee> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=3862 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700264179/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516103104-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.99056 | 500 | 1.585938 | 2 |
Good morning. I am delighted to be here to talk about the challenge of managing information in the Directorate of Intelligence. I can't think of many issues that are more important to our future in the DI than the way technology can increase our value-added for our national security customers.
I will confess that I'm a little intimidated to be speaking to a roomful of professionals with so much technical expertise. There is a story about a new personal computer buyer who called the manufacturer's help line to thank them for the handy, retractable "cup holder" that came installed on his new PC. The help line technician was completely baffled by the call. But when I heard this story, I wasn't confused. I understood immediately that the caller was referring to his CD-ROM drive, because I've thought the same thing. It's no wonder that I can't hold a candle to the computer-savvy twenty-somethings we're hiring in the DI today.
I have been asked to give you a perspective on the DI's mission, organization, and information needs. Dr. Ruth David will tell you about how CIA must harness new technologies to meet those needs. To start off, let me be clear about the messages I want to leave with you today:
The DI's information needs are defined by its mission. The basic mission of the DI, and indeed the entire community, is to ensure that our national leaders have the essential knowledge they need to make informed judgments. That means we have to provide policymakers, warfighters, and law enforcement officials with strategic warning and timely, actionable intelligence on a range of foreign and security policy issues.
That is a tall order, and it demands that we concentrate resources where they have the biggest impact. By setting clear priorities, we have a stronger basis for shifting people and funds toward the toughest, most sensitive issues. These issues include what we call "hard target" countries and selected transnational issues identified by the President. Of course, the DI must still have the capability to warn of emerging threats and respond to new developments that engage the attention of the President.
Even in an era of tight budgets, global coverage of all national security issues will remain a hallmark of the DIas it has for five decades. Right now, we are moving ahead on creating a more flexible organizational structure that will facilitate hard target and global coverage.
Let me give you a quick illustration of how our current technologies support us in our global coverage strategy. When the insurgent war erupted in Zaire and Central Africa's Great Lakes region last fall, our analysts were asked to help make sense of a complex and confusing situation. This region is not a hard target, so we try to limit the number of resources dedicated to it on a full-time basis. So we found a core group of Africa experts from around the DI and the community. We then queried our internal DI expertise database to find officers with prior education or experience on African societies, insurgent warfare, and humanitarian ops. We also arranged to have an analyst reporting back to us "ground truth" assessments from Africa in real time.
This group had to help policymakers and military planners make sense of the myriad factions and numbers and conditions of refugees in an evolving humanitarian crisis. Analysts pulled together the best available information in diplomatic and clandestine channels and married it with the mountains of information available from open sources, including the Internet. In this case, Internet proved essential by providing context to evaluate our own unique sources.
CIA received high marks for its support on Africa last fall. We see it as a sort of model for how to deal with many intelligence challenges in the future. Last year, the Directorate of Intelligence issued a strategic plan which established a blueprint to help us get ahead of these challenges. This year we are carrying out the first major reorganization of the DI in fifteen years to streamline our organization and help implement the strategic plan.
Our basic strategic objective for the DI is to create a flatter, leaner, more agile institution that will exploit the most recent advances in technology. It will have the flexibility to shift people, collection, and resources around as the policymaker's priorities change. It will be structured to maintain a highly skilled work force over the long term as issues change and people move around.
The DI will also work more closely with other CIA and Intelligence Community components, like Ruth David's Directorate of Science and Technology, to pool our talents and get the most out of our tight resources. Dr. David and I have done this, for instance, through a new joint Advanced Analytic Tools office that we have set up to address some of the most challenging technological issues facing us. The DI will also support career-long learning by allowing a certain percentage of our work force to go "off line" for training and study. And it will reach out to the private sector and academia to get needed expertise.
Exploiting new advances in technology will be critical to meeting our strategic objectives. We simply can't rely on old methods and processes, even though they have served us well. Will Rogers reminded us that, even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.
What are the new technologies that will keep us moving along the right track? To answer that question, let me spend the remainder of my time with you laying out the challenges that I believe will drive our technology strategy over the next few years.
The first challenge is to ensure the analysts get all the information they need without being overwhelmed with on-line information. Intelligence professionals have always prided themselves on their ability to identify and analyze critical items in the massive amount of information available to them.
But the continuing rise in open source information poses both problems and opportunities for intelligence professionals. With the amount of information available doubling every five years, analysts have a tremondous resource in the Internet and other electronic media. To be relevant, they need to be able to draw fully not only on intelligence community resources but on the world's information database. In our office handling East Asian analysis, we have equipped dozens of analysts with Internet access at their desktops. Legitimate security concerns have forced us to go slow in adopting the Internet as a tool, but we recognize that all DI analysts eventually will need this capability. This modest start has highlighted to us the needs for better tools to find, filter, and organize Internet data.
To help manage the flood of information, we are developing a Corporate Information Retrieval and Storage system, called CIRAS. CIRAS consolidates the diverse cable and all-source traffic into a more cost effective system built on commercially available software. It is the biggest change since 1986 when we introduced SAFE, our electronic cable processing system. We still have a critical need to capitalize on ongoing research and development and improve our search engines to help our analysts isolate, prioritize, and organize the information. But with CIRAS, we have a solid basis for developing a corporate knowledge base. This brings me to our second major challenge.
We need to reorient our production processes, including cross referencing documents and tracking corporate expertise, so that we can build a corporate knowledge base as a natural part of our prodution flow. We are starting to use the web model as a way to capture, preserve, and retrieve our finished intelligence documents. This is essential and we've made important progress in this direction. But we also need to be able to capture unpublished knowledge, and there is a lot more that needs to be done in this area.
In creating a corporate knowledge base, we will build on the experience of the private sector in using the Internet model. All of our data holdings should be accessible over CIAlink, the Agency's intranet. Our philosophy toward data management will be, "if it isn't on the net, it doesn't exist. And if it exists, it should be on the net."
The plan is for appropriate legacy database holdings in the current Lotus Notes system to be interfaced with CIAlink using new tools now under development. Whenever possible, the directorate will focus on 'open' hardware and software solutions. Our objective is for every analyst to be able to integrate classified and unclassified data on the desktop.
All Directorate employees will be made responsible for the preservation of institutional memory, including individual resumes, accessible through CIAlink. This will enhance our organizational flexibility and help us respond more effectively in a crisis by allowing the DI to tap the right people with the right skills just like we did in the Africa case.
The third challenge is to use information and communications technology to narrow the gap between intelligence collectors and intelligence consumers. In order to better serve our customers, the DI has assigned an increasing number of DI experts to policy agencies and to negotiating teams. We now have dozens of DI officers dispersed throughout the policy community. These representatives have proved very popular because they offer policymakers, law enforcement officials, and warfighters "one stop shopping" for intelligence analysis.
In order to work effectively on the front lines of analysis, however, DI experts need to have connectivity to Headquarters. They need access to the classified e-mail system to enable them to transmit taskings and receive intelligence products from Headquarters. They need more advanced tools for communicating and collaborating with their counterparts at Headquarters. This is a work in progress, and we still have a long way to go. But the goal is to link CIA directly to intelligence consumers via the forward-deployed DI expert so that the answer to any intelligence question is just a keystroke away.
We have an example of this kind of support in the Balkan Task Force. Four and one-half years ago, the DI led the way in establishing an interagency Balkan Task Force. It has been a model in driving collection of information and serving the range of key intelligence consumers. With US and allied troops deployed in the region, the military is a primary customer for the intelligence we provide.
We have deployed intelligence support teams in the field to let US troops know about hostile forces and order of battle, terrorist threats, mine fields, terrain, and infrastructure. More and more, we customize data into intelligence relevant to a particular military commander in a specific area doing a narrowly defined job. We aim to give our troops dominant battlefield awareness, which is a real force multiplier.
Back at Headquarters, on a typical day an analyst assigned to our Balkan Task Force might exchange information with military personnel in Bosnia across a classified network. The analysts would consult with analysts from other intelligence agencies and policy counterparts over our classified e-mail and videoconferencing systems. After read military reporting on Intelink at their desktop the analylst might update order of battle spreadsheets. Their analytic papers and memoranda would be automatically routed, archived and indexed for future reference.
CIA is proud of its work on the Balkan Task Force, just like we are proud of our work on the African Great Lakes Task Force. We are proud not only because we've served our customers well, but because these experiences highlight what can be achieved by harnessing technology for intelligence.
In closing, permit me to share with you for a moment what life as an analyst was like back in 1977, when I joined the Agency as a new analyst working on the Caribbean. At that time, information technology was closer to what Benjamin Franklin used than what analysts use today.
I would review stacks of cables, marking relevant sections, and making notes with a number two pencil on a yellow legal pad. My advanced analytic tool box included three-by-five index cards, and that wonderful new invention, the pocket calculator. I would draft my analytic products in long hand and pass them to the secretary to type. There were a few computer terminals scattered about, but I had neither easy access nor the desire to use one.
Advances in information technology since then have turned the intelligence business upside down. It has helped make us faster, more flexible, more efficient, and in many instances more valuable to our customers. In short, technology gives our analytical enterprise the edge in serving customers who have many sources information available to them.
As we strive to incorporate the latest tools available, we should not forget the importance of a stable computing environment, and to keep our tools simple and easy to learn. Intelligence professionals work in a fast paced and competitive environment. Our analysts have neither the time nor the desire to make a large investment in learning complex new applications.
Let me close by saying that I am amazed at the progress we've made and how your tools have given us the ability to stay on top of world events. The continuing challenge will be to develop the tools that keep us on top and enable us to provide service and value to our nation's leaders. | <urn:uuid:6d27e321-67aa-46ed-ada8-b34d25a90ac6> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fas.org/irp/cia/product/ddi_speech_032797.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00021-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.947571 | 2,581 | 1.578125 | 2 |
Spanning across nearly a decade, this sweeping Sensation novel charts the disgraceful downfall and eventual partial redemption of aristocrat Isabel Vane. Left impoverished after her father’s death and at the mercy of her cruel and spiteful aunt, the quiet and timid Isabel accepts the marriage proposal of Thomas Carlyle after they meet again. Mr Carlyle, a humble, albeit a successful and popular, lawyer had earlier purchased the Vanes estate, East Lynne. Isabel, with no other options, marries Mr. Carlyle believing that she will one day learn to love him. Isabel admires and likes Mr. Carlyle enough and he in turn is thoughtful, considerate and deeply in love with Isabel. Although Isabel had believed that coming back to her former home at East Lynne would bring her happiness, Isabel is lonely and dominated in her house by Mr. Carlyle’s older sister, Cornelia, who has moved in with them and leaving Isabel with no say in the running of the domestic. After the birth of their three children, Isabel’s health deteriorates and she is sent to recuperate at the seaside. Despite her pleas for her children to accompany her, Isabel is denied this by the doctor and Cornelia who admonishes her about the expenses.
“The children are not going to the sea-side,” said she [Cornelia]. “They are not ordered there.”
“But they must go with me,” replied Lady Isabel. “Of course they are not expressly ordered to it. Why should they not go?”
“What should they not?” retorted Miss Corny. “Why, on account of the expense, to be sure. I can tell you what it is, Lady Isabel, what with one expense and another, your husband will soon be on the the road to ruin. Your journey with Joyce and Peter will cost enough, ma’am, without taking a van-load of nurses and children.” – p. 209
Left alone at the seaside to recover her health, Isabel bumps into Captain Levison whom she had previously felt attracted to when they were acquainted in their youth. Despite having been warned by Isabel’s uncle that Captain Levison was a bad influence, Isabel can’t deny his allure. Frightened and confused, Isabel flees back to East Lynne but a series of coincidences have Mr. Carlyle invite Captain Levison to stay at East Lynne. While Mr. Carlyle becomes heavily involved in acquitting a falsely condemned man, the brother of a family friend, pretty Barbara Hare, Isabel grows jealous and is swayed under Captain Levison’s influence. One night, both Isabel and Captain Levison disappear.
The hand-writing, his wife’s, swam before the eyes of Mr Carlyle. All, save the disgraceful fact that she had flown – and a horrible suspicion began to dawn upon him with whom – was totally incomprehensible. How had he outrages her? in what manner had he goaded her to it? – p. 281
A year passes and Lady Isabel is hiding in France, deeply regretting having run away with Captain Levison who, as soon as he received what he wanted, treats Isabel badly and leaves her unmarried just as she is about to give birth to their child. Seeking repentance, and missing her other children dreadfully, Isabel begins her journey back to England when she is involved in an accident. Misidentified, the authorities notifies her uncle that Isabel has died and the news travels back to Mr. Carlyle who is now married to Barbara. Isabel, with her face and figure scarred, adopts a disguise and a new name and, again, through twisted coincidences is recommended as a governess to Mr. Carlyle’s family which includes his children with Barbara. And so Lady Isabel returns to East Lynne once more, this time under an eccentric disguise and a new name, Madame Vine, and as a stranger to her children in a house that was once hers.
I quite enjoyed this book, being a huge fan of Sensation fiction. This, along with Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret makes up the core Sensation trilogy. Many of the plot lines were contrived but I quite enjoyed it. It’s like a Victorian soap opera. Isabel remained an elusive character though and while I didn’t despise her, I also didn’t quite warm to her although I did pity her and her tragic circumstances. Unlike other adulteresses in many other Victorian fiction, Isabel is not painted as a ‘scarlet woman’ but merely a woman who made one mistake that ultimately cost her everything. | <urn:uuid:c55d88fa-9e10-4e4d-9adc-abc6a6514a3a> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://madbibliophile.wordpress.com/category/authors/wood-ellen/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.978197 | 992 | 1.804688 | 2 |
BERLIN — What would music be like if every note of every piece were thought up by composers from scratch, the product of purely original creativity? Much impoverished, to be sure. From Renaissance composers, who created imposing masses with popular songs at their cores, to Bach and his contrapuntal masterpieces inspired by chorale tunes, right down to the present, composers have found the prospect of elaborating on the work of their predecessors irresistible. Allusions to other composers enhance many of the Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth’s instrumental works and are sometimes their raison d’être. Her opera “Lost Highway,” based on David Lynch’s film, demonstrates her predilection for reworking nonmusical ideas as well.
With this background, her idea of creating a new opera based on Alban Berg’s 12-tone operatic masterpiece “Lulu” is not as strange as it may seem at first blush. The result, “American Lulu,” now in its world premiere run at the Komische Oper in Berlin, has its problems to be sure, starting with the concept of identifying Lulu with the American civil rights movement and emphasizing the mismatch with loudspeaker readings of texts by the likes of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. While the idea of reincarnating Lulu as a high-class black prostitute is plausible enough, the opera’s newly conceived Act 3, coming after two acts that are essentially condensations of Berg’s, lacks dramatic punch. (You can read the full review here.)
Yet in purely musical terms there is much to keep one engaged and even fascinated. In the first two acts, much of Berg’s music reappears as newly orchestrated by Ms. Neuwirth for wind-dominated orchestra. A chamber-like quality allows Berg’s often intricate musical lines to be heard with appealing clarity. Along with Berg’s music, Ms. Neuwirth gives us a cute song for calliope to establish local color, some frightening sounds from a theater organ and jazzy music for Eleanor (Countess Geschwitz in the original, here a jazz singer). By Act 3, you’re ready to hear what Ms. Neuwirth can do musically on her own, and she does not disappoint. Despite the problems of “American Lulu” as a drama, it makes for a rewarding encounter in which music by one excellent composer confronts music by another and the two nourish each other.
You can find George Loomis’s guide to the fall European opera season here. | <urn:uuid:e04f22f4-418a-42bf-8e65-e1e18133d2f8> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/23/lulu-as-operatic-melting-pot/?emc=rss | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00016-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.956909 | 549 | 1.554688 | 2 |
Re: Proposal for a new PKI model (At least I hope it's new)
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler (lynn_at_garlic.com)
Date: Sat, 06 Sep 2003 15:21:56 GMT
George Ou <firstname.lastname@example.org> writes:
> But I don't want to use just one portal or a wild card. I want to be
> able to issue an unlimited number of hosts and email addresses for my
> domain. I want to be able to use SMTP-AUTH and SMTP-TLS. I want to
> enable secure XML transactions. I don't want to buy just one host
> certificate. I want to buy one master certificate for my root PKI
> server. There is a huge difference.
> Companies buy so few because they can only afford one or two certs.
> Take away the cost factor and watch PKI deployment go up.
majority of the internet are using SSL domain name certificates when
they have trust issues with the domain name infrastructure and they
are doing something of value (certificates represent a patch on
perceived trust shortcomings of the current domain name
infrastructure, as opposed to directly fixing the turst shortcomings
... they are being coated over with SSL domain name certificates).
In the early days of SSL, the original discussions were assuming that
SSL would be used for all shopping related activities going on over
the internet ... until it was determined that there is something like
a five-fold difference between SSL sessions capacity and non-SSL
session capacity. As a result, instead of seeing SSL being default for
everything that went on the internet .... yoo saw it being cut back to
only the phase involving entering the credit card number ... and
frequently the credit card number processing being handed off to a
dedicated credit card processing server (for the ten large guys they
are probably doing their own ... for the small to medium tier sites,
you find many are outsourcing ... where a single processor actually
may handle hundreds of shopping sites). This limited deployment wasn't
because of the cost of the certificates ... which is trivial compared
to the cost of the additional infrastructure for running the actual
SSL operation (and which doesn't go away, even if SSL domain name
certificate costs totally disappear).
So, as I've repeated numerous times before ... if you fix the
underlying domain name infrastructure ... it almost totally eliminates
any possible demands for SSL domain name certificates (of any kind)
... and would still allow SSL type public key sessions ... with
little additional cost. However, the cost issue of operating SSL (or
SSL-like) sessions still appears to dominate.
A current issue is that the domain name infrastructure has to be fixed
in any case (since its difficiencies also put the SSL domain name CA
business at risk). Part of the current CA cost is that they need a
totally different business operation, staff, training, and their own
operation which needs an independent revenue flow is need to support.
Making public key distribution part of the standard domain name
operation eliminates almost all that infrastructure costs and just
merges it into the existing dynmamic, timely information distribution
So there are a couple of infrastructures that have deligated trust of
the type you are proposing (not the technical mechanics ... but the
process that one business will deligate certificate trust operations
to another certification business operation). The scenario is that the
deligated agent has to have processes in place that they follow all of
the business processes followed by the root trust operations (for
establishing the validity of the information being placed in the
certificate) or the resulting sub-certificates don't mean anything.
They require the sub-agent to have totally separated computer
operations in secured facilities and the cost of the deligation
certificate frequently is in the tens of thousands or hundreds of
thousands of dollars.
Another way of looking at this ... is if they don't require such
processes and costs they would be severely diluting their brand name
to the point that it would mean little more than any randomly
self-signed certificate. In effect, the sub-agent signed certificates
would have significantly lower trust unless they implemented all the
processes (and costs). The only thing that such CA operations would
then uniquely have is that they had undergone the costs to have their
root certificate preloaded into major browsers and they would be
franchising out access to that browser pre-loaded root certificate
with possibly little or no control over the franchised operations.
There is nothing stopping any entity from going to the major browswer
venders and going through the necessary steps to get a brand new root
certificate preloaded into browsers ... and establish whatever
business procedures they want to for managing delegated trust.
-- Anne & Lynn Wheeler | http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/ Internet trivia 20th anv http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/rfcietff.htm | <urn:uuid:7a4bca7c-18e2-4951-9ced-4f8c96a33f34> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.derkeiler.com/Newsgroups/sci.crypt/2003-09/0410.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.941886 | 1,062 | 1.523438 | 2 |
I’ve posted before on the modality of reading.
The reason it matters is because if you’re writing persuasive copy, you want to know how it’s affecting your reader. Is it visual because he’s using his eyes to take it in? Is it auditory because she’s repeating the words in her head? Is it kinesthetic because he’s using his hand to follow the lines of copy?
At the last NLP MeetUp group I went to, I asked a couple of the most experienced NLP guys which modality they think reading is. The answer seems obvious now but I’d been missing it.
Modalities are based in the person, not the activity. It’s a matter of how each individual processes the experience.
For example, you’d think receiving verbal directions to get to a restaurant would be verbal, right? Well, not for me. For it to stick, I have to visualize the layout in my head. Otherwise I have a tendency to forget it.
Another example is a professional guitar player I know. We were talking about this and he said playing guitar is like his fingers dancing. He plays “by ear” but processes the experience kinesthetically.
We’re back to the answer being to use a little bit of all of them unless you have information telling you your target audience is predominantly one or the other. The only real way to know that is to test.
To test modalities, instead of doing 25/25/25/25, try something like 30/20/20/30. Don’t go for 100/0/0/0 all at once unless you’re goal is to make a point. Multivariate test small changes until you have the best mix. | <urn:uuid:b7e2e407-4ae6-4808-9cb0-f30e9161a578> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.louisrburns.com/2008/07/08/the-real-reading-modality/ | 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 | 0.967841 | 375 | 1.679688 | 2 |
Since the subject of MLEs has come up quite a bit [in the baseball newsgroups] in the last week, I've decided to print the basic concepts on how to come up with MLEs. There are a few variations of the MLEs, depending on whether you use 1 or 3 year park effects or whether you use actual minor league park effects rather than the estimation of minor league park effects (when Bill James proposed this system in the 1985 Baseball Astract, minor league park effects were difficult to come by due to the unavailablity of home/road data for minor leaguers). However, the differences are small, which is OK. It's what the numbers mean that's important, not what they exactly say. If one person finds the MLE of Joe Schmo to be 253/330/418 and another person finds it to be 258/327/425, they're still saying the same thing.
One thing to remember is that MLEs are not a prediction of what the player will do, just a translation of what the major league equivalence of what the player actually did is. This is useful for predictions however, because like, major league statistics, MLEs have strong predictive value. As strong as major league statistics (which was the goal of this). Bill James stated that MLEs were the most important concept that he had ever come up with.
The normal season-to-season fluctuation in batting average at the major league level is 25 points. I figured the season-to-season changes for every major league player who has had five years or more of 300 at bats, and the average annual change in batting average was between .024 and .025 [...]
Note that this has been tested for batting average, slugging percentage, and on-base percentage over the last few years and the methods still work as well as they did in the early 1980s.
As I go along the simpler version of theprocess that I choose to use (which is usually very close to what STATS comes up with, they don't tell exactly what M factors they use so it's hard to reproduce exactly), I will use two players from different parks in two different leagues: Danny Clyburn and Paul Konerko. First let's look at their raw minor league statistics for 1997. Normally, I come up with also park-adjust the 2B/3B/HR by individual factors rather than one single factor, but it doesn't improve the result all that much in most instances as it really doesn't effect the qualitative results, just the quantitative (I'm more interested in qualitative results).
Here are the raw statistics for the two players I'm using to demonstrate MLEs: Danny Clyburn and Paul Konerko
Player AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI BB SO Clyburn 520 91 156 33 5 20 76 53 107 Konerko 483 97 156 31 1 37 127 64 61 Player BA OBP SLG Clyburn .300 .372 .498 Konerko .323 .407 .621
The first thing we need to do is adjust for the level of league and park. Some players play in hitters' parks/leagues, some play in pitchers' parks/leagues.
Clyburn played in the International League last year in which 9.597 runs per game were scored. Last year, Clyburn played in Rochester, in which run-scoring was deflated by approximately 4% over the last 3 years (unfortunately, I don't have 1 year stats available). So, we'd expect a game between two league average teams at Rochester to score (1.02+[.10*.02])*9.597 runs to score. When we calculate it, we end up finding that Clyburn's production came in a 9.81 run per game context. In the American League last year 9.862 runs per game. The (.10*.02) is used to represent that you can't just use road totals because a league- average player would still get to play some games in Rochester. It's not crucial and if you leave it out, it won't change things that much, so if you prefer, you can find out this number by simply 1.02*9.597
Clyburn: 9.808/9.862 = 1/1.006
We'll call this number PL for park/league adjustment. Clyburn has a PL ratio of 1.006
This indicates that Clyburn's raw statistics won't take a nose dive due to his home park or his league.
Now, we do the same for Konerko. The PCL last year scored 11.532 runs per game. Albuquerque is a pretty darn good hitters' park and increased run scoring by 17%. Once we do what we did for Clyburn, we end up with Konerko's stats being produced in a 12.616. Now, let's match up Clyburn and Konerko's PL ratios side by side. (Konerko 12.616/9.862 = 1/.782
PL Ratios Clyburn 1/1.006 Konerko 1/.782
It's clear that since Konerko played in a park in which runs were easy to come by, that Konerko's raw stats will suffer much more because of the park differences.
Next, we have to adjust for the calibre of competition.
A player ordinarily loses about 18% of his offensive ability relative to the league in moving from AAA to the majors.
When we adjust for this, we get "m"
Clyburn Konerko 1.006 0.782 *0.82 *0.82 ------- ------- 0.825 0.641
This tells us that Clyburn, upon moving to the major leagues, will probably retain about 83% of his offensive punch while Konerko will retain about 64%.
The other thing we need to find is "M". It's merely the square root of "m".
m M Clyburn 0.825 0.908 Konerko 0.641 0.801
Now, we can start to adjust.
RAW Player AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI BB SO Clyburn 520 91 156 33 5 20 76 53 107 Konerko 483 97 156 31 1 37 127 64 61 MLE Player AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI BB SO Clyburn Konerko
Now, all we need to get is the park factors for the major league stadiums. To avoid getting too technical, if a stadium has has a park factor of 104 for something, use the multiplier 1.02 rather than 1.04 (not particularly accurate, but close enough).
Too be consistent, let's use three year factors again. Here are the multipliers. I'm gonna refer to park multipliers as PM. Which PM to use is pretty self explanatory.
R H 2B 3B HR BB SO BAL 0.995 0.98 0.985 0.805 1.05 0.985 1.025 LA 0.895 0.88 0.865 0.745 0.89 0.97 0.995
First, we need to find the MLE hits. To get it, we multiply minor league hits * .98 * M * PM
Then, we need to find the MLE Doubles. To get it, we multiply minor league doubles * M * PM
Then, the MLE triples. To get them, we multiply minor league triples * m * .85 * PM
Then, the MLE homers. To get them, we multiply minor league homers * m * PM
Then, for the RBI and R, we multiply them each by m and then by the PM.
For walks, we do minor league walks * m * PM
For strikeouts, we simply do minor league strikeouts * 1.05 * PM
After we do that, we get this:
MLE Player AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI BB SO Clyburn 75 136 30 3 17 62 52 43 Konerko 55 108 21 0 21 72 40 64
Now for the At-Bats, we have to do something a little differently. First, we need to know how many outs both players made in the minors this year. For this, we just need to find the AB-H for Clyburn and Konerko.
Clyburn: 520 - 156 = 364 Konerko: 483 - 156 = 327
So then, to get the MLE At Bats, we just add the amount of outs they really made to the amount of hits.
Clyburn: 136 + 364 = 500 Konerko: 108 + 327 = 435
So finally, after using the complete stats to calculate batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging percentages, we end up with:
MLE Player AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI BB SO Clyburn 500 75 136 30 3 17 62 52 115 Konerko 435 55 108 21 0 21 72 40 64 Player BA OBP SLG Clyburn .272 .343 .446 Konerko .248 .312 .441
Neither of these differ much from STATS' MLEs. Keep in mind that Konerko would still be easily the better long-term bet. After all, he put up that MLE at age 21 last year while Clyburn was 23. A year or two makes a big difference in minor league development.
My advice is to set up a spreadsheet. :-)
To send comments, critiques, criticisms e-mail Dan Szymborski at email@example.com. | <urn:uuid:8b39703c-79e5-46fe-98a9-a414acf3b05e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.baseballthinkfactory.org/btf/scholars/czerny/articles/calculatingMLEs.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.945939 | 1,984 | 1.820313 | 2 |
Sunday, February 24, 2013
Bulgarian protests for cheaper energy intensify
By Tsvetelia Tsolova
SOFIA (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of people marched in cities across Bulgaria on Sunday, demanding an end to high utility bills and new voting rules after the government was toppled last week.
Public anger with power monopolies in the European Union's poorest member forced right-of-centre Prime Minister Boiko Borisov's cabinet to resign and has put the country on track for an early election by May.
Although Borisov's government managed to maintain fiscal stability since taking power in 2009, belt-tightening has held back growth and driven up unemployment.
His departure has failed to calm voters fed up with low living standards and rampant graft, and his GERB party is now running neck-and-neck with the opposition Socialists ahead of the new election.
The last straw for many was a jump in winter electricity bills that at times exceeded incomes in a country where average salaries are just 400 euros ($530) a month and pensions are less than half that amount.
Much of the anger has been directed at power companies including Czech CEZ and Energo-Pro and Austria's EVN, which bought exclusive rights to distribute energy in specific regions from Bulgaria in 2004.
Waving Bulgarian flags and slogans reading "Fighting for decent life" and "Down with monopolies" over 10,000 Bulgarians marched through downtown Sofia.
"For years and years the politicians failed to impose strict controls over monopolies. This should stop," said 54-year-old Irena Mitova, a shop owner in Sofia.
Demonstrations also took place in around 40 other cities, with some 15,000 people marching in Bulgaria's second and third largest cities Plovdiv and Varna.
Separate, smaller protests were held against an inefficient education system that critics say does not prepare students for the labour market and against high interest charges from retail banks criticised for hurting small businesses.
President Rosen Plevneliev, who will probably appoint a caretaker government and dissolve parliament next week to pave the way for the early election, met protesters and ensured them their voices would be heard.
Protesters' demands ranged from imposing a moratorium on paying electricity bills for December and January until audits are carried out to sweeping changes in the constitution to allow the direct vote for deputies, rather than using party lists.
Some of the protesters demanded parliament continue with its work to adopt laws to ensure strict controls over the energy monopolies. Many want them to be renationalised and say politicians sold firms since the fall of communism in 1989 in a way that hurt public interest and kept living standards low.
Borisov had promised an 8 percent cut in electricity bills as of March - reversing much of a 13 percent rise his government approved last year - and has said the energy regulator would begin the process to revoke CEZ's licence.
The regulator said a possible price decrease could be introduced as of April at the earliest and suggested there was room for compromise with CEZ. [ID:nL6N0BL1TY] ($1 = 0.7598 euros)
(Editing by Michael Winfrey and Alison Williams)
New Bulgarian patriarch enthroned by tarnished Orthodox Church | <urn:uuid:041aa41a-c897-44bf-8c94-0e32766fc64f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2013/2/24/worldupdates/bulgarian-protests-for-cheaper-energy-intensify | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00020-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966445 | 672 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Point & Shoot Cameras
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Item #: 36756
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Learn More about Digital Cameras
I want to buy a digital camera, but don’t know the difference between a DSLR and a point-and-shoot digital camera?
To start, the lines between the two sides are quickly beginning to fade. Some manufacturers produce cameras that seem to behold aspects of both varieties. As with many industries, that of the digital camera advances at a quick rate.
In very general terms, a DSLR (digital single lens reflect) camera offers the option of removable lenses. The lenses have a reflex mirror, which allows the owner to view an intended, captured image through the camera’s lens. The owner can see the image through the view finder, and when the shot is taken, the camera’s mirror pops up allowing the image sensor to capture the intended sight (what you see is what you get).
Point-and-shoot digital cameras are economically-priced, and offer a lot of abilities for a novice photographer as well as those seeking to perform basic camera functions, though lack some abilities compared to a DSLR digital camera.
Let’s consider some advantages and disadvantages of both varieties:
- Allows for large pixel sizes
- Adaptable in many situations regarding multiple lens use, accessory use (flashes and filters), and indoor/outdoor settings
- Great speed time regarding startup, focusing, and shutter lag
- Due to the reflex mirror function, they provide genuine images (what you see is what you get)
- Vast array of ISO settings (determines how sensitive the image sensor is to light)
- Variety and finger convenience of manual controls
- Can be expensive
- Larger in size and come with accessories
- Requires more maintenance (cleaning and care)
- Requires more knowledge of photography
- No ‘LCD’ window, though some DSLR models feature a ‘live view’ option modeled after the LCD window
Point-and-Shoot Digital Camera advantages
- Lightweight and compact (some can fit in pocket)
- Very quiet
- Excellence of auto-mode
- LCD display windows (help with framing)
- Image quality is great for a novice or intermediate, but may be disappointing to professionals or those seeking to produce large prints
- Poor shutter lag time (the time between when the button is pressed and the actual picture is taken) – though this is improving through time
- Poor viewfinder option as opposed to LCD (though most point-and-shoot camera owners only use the LCD window)
- Limitation of manual controls
- Less adaptable in comparison to DSLR accessory capabilities
What’s the lowdown on megapixels?
A digital camera’s associated number of megapixels will improve the quality of the captured image, so a six megapixel camera will capture a crisper image than that of a five megapixel camera. That being said, it is important to ask yourself what the ultimate desire will be regarding your pictures. Are you going to blow up your pictures for printing? If so, then it is recommended to look for as many megapixels as possible (and/or purchase a DSLR camera). If images will be printed or digitally transferred to a computer at normal size, then any digital camera starting at five megapixels will serve you well.
What are some digital camera added accessories?
That is a good question because sometimes a manufacturer’s quoted price only refers to the camera itself; added accessories will cost you extra. Here are some digital camera accessories to think about, which may or may not be included in the original, quoted price:
- Camera case
- Memory cards
- External flashes
An associated tip is to check to see if you have any compatible gear leftover from prior purchases (or ask a friend or family member for theirs). For instance, some memory cards, lenses, flashes, and filters may be interchangeable regarding digital camera models.
What is the difference between ‘optical’ and ‘digital’ zoom?
Both ‘zooms’ make the captured image bigger, but many believe an optical zoom is superior to a digital zoom. The reason being is that a digital zoom, though making an image bigger, only enlarges the pixels, which can make the image appear more pixilated and a bit distorted. Optical zooms, like digital zooms, will increase the size of a captured image, yet maintain better integrity of the image. Most digital cameras offer optical zooms up to 3x the image, while some offer ‘super zooms’ can make the image 12x larger or more.
What kind of memory card should I buy for my digital camera?
This depends on how many pictures you want to store. Many standard digital cameras come with a 16MB (megabyte) card; these memory cards can only maintain a handful of images (less than 10) at once. You can always buy supplemental cards, but be sure cards are compatible with your digital camera model. For instance SDHC (secure digital high capacity) cards exist and have storage capacities of 4 GB (gigabytes), yet are not compatible with standard, SD (secure digital) slots.
What are some extra, digital camera buying tips?
- Ask yourself what you are going to do with the digital camera. Is it for occasional event keepsakes? Sporting events? Freelance work? Shooting landscapes? Addressing this question will help you determine core and extra accessories and your budget.
- Are you an experienced photographer or do you intend to further your camera knowledge? If so, then a more advanced digital camera model may be for you.
- How important is camera size and ease of portability to you? Some digital cameras are very compact, yet those more involved are bigger and come with added accessories.
- Think about what features are most important to you. Write down from most sought-after to least-needed features before beginning the purchase cycle for your digital camera.
- How realistic is your budget? More advanced models can be expensive, so that needs to be realized. In addition, if you’re looking to become more involved in your hobby, then opting for a superior model may better serve you now than deciding on an upgrade a short time from now.
- Many people now shop on the Web due to convenience and variety of selection. It is recommended to take advantage of what both schools of shopping have to offer. Visit camera shops and play around with some cameras to get a sense of how they feel and how their abilities function. Once you narrow your decision down to a few models, come back online and see what kind of deals the Web has to offer. Web suppliers often offer lower prices because they do not have to associate prices with salespeople, rent of brick and mortar stores, and other marketing endeavors.
- Some digital cameras come with auxiliary lights, which will help in dim or indoor settings. If a majority of shots will be taken indoors, look for this option.
- Look for brand-name digital cameras. Samsclub.com offers Canon, Nikon, Kodak, Olympus, Samsung, Fuji and many more! | <urn:uuid:0b5b3ee3-6fd8-4d2c-94bb-bfea0bceb91e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.samsclub.com/sams/point-shoot-digital-cameras/1177.cp?scatId=1177&scatId=1177&navAction=jump&iid=Header%2525257CAll_Products%2525257CPoint%25252520and%25252520Shoot%25252520Cameras&_DARGS=/sams/common/shopFilterFrag.jsp.1_A&_DAV=online&_dynSessConf=2472771772056614 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00026-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.932679 | 1,541 | 1.554688 | 2 |
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From BR Bullpen
John Kinley Tener
- Bats Right, Throws Right
- Height 6' 4", Weight 180 lb.
- Debut June 8, 1885
- Final Game October 4, 1890
- Born July 25, 1863 in County Tyrone, Ireland
- Died May 19, 1946 in Pittsburgh, PA USA
Biographical Information
A man of many talents, John Tener briefly umpired while active in 1889, and entered politics after his playing career ended. He served as a Congressman from 1909 to 1911, was the governor of Pennsylvania from 1911 to 1915, and National League president from 1914 to 1918. For a time, he served as Governor and NL president at the same time. He was replaced as National League president by John Heydler.
Notable Achievements
- 200 Innings Pitched Seasons: 1 (1889) | <urn:uuid:3a64dc7d-6c8b-4f44-b51f-389aa2b1441c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/John%20Tener | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00005-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967335 | 225 | 1.546875 | 2 |
|More gun laws means fewer deaths, 50-state study says
A new 50-state study reveals something many have long known -- that those states with the most gun laws have the fewest gun-related deaths.
|MS Bill to Allow School Boards to Arm Employees
Mississippi is a step closer to arming school employees. The House just passed a bill to let local school boards decide if teachers and other employees can carry concealed weapons. Watch Video
|Mayor, MPD Director Unveil Plan to Reduce Gun Crime
A community center shooting injuring two teens happened just moments before Memphis Mayor A C Wharton and Police Director Toney Armstrong unveiled their new plan to crack down on gun violence in the Bluff City.
|Arkansas House Approves Guns in Church Bill
The Arkansas House overwhelmingly approved a bill that allows concealed handguns in churches.
|Miss. House Votes to Seal Concealed-Carry Gun Info
The Mississippi House has voted to block public access to information about state-issued permits for people to carry concealed weapons.
|Bullets Flying off Shelves Cause National Ammo Shortage
A national ammo shortage is making it difficult to buy rounds for your favorite pistol.
|Obama Taking 23 Actions Aimed at Gun Violence
President Barack Obama is taking 23 executive actions aimed at curbing gun violence that don't require congressional action, including measures to encourage schools to hire police officers, increase research on gun violence and improve efforts to prosecute gun crime. | Read President Obama's 23 Executive Actions (225.7KB)
|Murder Victim's Father Proud of President's Gun Safety Plan
A dad who lost his son to gun violence outside of a Memphis nightclub was glad to hear about the President's gun safety plan. Watch Video
|Gov. Bryant: Mississippi Should Resist Federal Limits on Guns
Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant said Wednesday that he wants the state to resist any presidential order that might restrict gun rights.
|'Gun Appreciation Day' Created to Protest Gun Control
Life, liberty and the pursuit of gun ownership; Saturday, January 19, will be Gun Appreciation Day in America. A media consultant came up with the event as a way to protest President Obama’s call for tougher gun laws.
|New Law Would Privatize Concealed Weapons Permits in Mississippi
Right now, Mississippi's conceal carry records are freely available, so are Tennessee's. But several Mississippi law makers are pushing to change that in the Magnolia State. Watch Video
|Bill to Allow Concealed Guns in Arkansas Churches
Arkansas is one of 10 states where concealed weapons are banned in places of worship. Local church members say extra protection may not be a bad thing. Watch Video
|Memphis Mayor A C Wharton Gets Personal on Gun Issue
Memphis Mayor A C Wharton says when it comes to guns on the streets of the Bluff City, he's had enough. Watch Video | <urn:uuid:6bf15e18-6da7-4df0-b822-2f02a7a9eaa2> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.abc24.com/tags/Gun-Laws/default.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702810651/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516111330-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.93153 | 595 | 1.734375 | 2 |
AFBF analysts: Reports paint
final picture for 2012 crops
Corn and soybean markets continue to be filled with uncertainty due to the lasting effects of the lingering drought, but there is now a high level of certainty about the size of the crops that persevered against the long, dry summer of 2012, according to analysts at the American Farm Bureau Federation.
Those are just a few of the observations made by Todd Davis, AFBF senior economist following the Agriculture Department's release of four major reports on Friday (Jan. 11) - World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates, Crop Production, Grain Stocks and Winter Wheat Seedings.
"This is like Super Bowl Sunday for the grain and oil seed markets," Davis said. "This is the last word on 2012 production. It sets the table on the supply-side for the rest of the marketing year, and it gives farmers some insight as they finalize spring cropping plans."
According to Davis, corn and soybean markets are at tight levels, characterized by higher prices that are both curbing demand and providing competing incentives for farmers to sort through for those two crops this year.
"The lingering drought is of concern to the markets, as average or above average yields are needed in 2013 to allow the market to rebuild stocks to levels that will remove some of the uncertainty in the market," Davis said.
The 2012-13 corn ending stocks are projected at 602 million bushels, which equates to about 20 days of corn available on Sept. 1, 2013. Those tighter stocks are supporting a projected U.S. marketing-year average price of $7.40 per bushel.
The pre-report estimates had expected ending stocks at 675 million bushels, which makes the January report of 602 million bushels bullish for the corn market, according to Davis.
The 2012 U.S. corn yield is projected at 123.4 bushels per acre which is 23.8 bushels less than the 2011 crop, but the yield projection is up 1.1 bushels from the November 2012 projections.
Davis said the increase in projected yield is tempered by a reduction in harvested acres. The January projections reduced harvested acres by 300,000, to 87.4 million harvested acres.
Overall, the 2012 corn crop is projected at 10.78 billion bushels, which is 1.578 billion bushels less than the 2011 crop. Total corn use is projected at 11.267 billion bushels, down 1.26 billion bushels from the 2011-2012 marketing year.
Feed demand is down 98 million bushels from 2011-2012 and is projected at 4.45 billion; exports are 950 million and are the lowest since 1971-72.
Ethanol demand is projected at 4.5 billion and is 511 million less than 2011-12 reflecting the ethanol markets adjustment to higher corn prices.
"Ten percent of the planted corn acres were not harvested for grain, which is a relatively low level of abandonment given the extreme damage caused by the drought," Davis said. "But, the overall smaller crop is reducing demand across the board."
On the soybean side, ending stocks are projected at 135 million bushels, for a stocks-to-use ratio of 4.4 percent, which is only a 16-day supply that would be available on Sept. 1, 2013. Those tight stock levels are supporting projected U.S. prices of $14.25 per bushel.
The 2012 soybean crop is projected at 3.015 billion bushels, 80 million bushels less than the 2011 crop. The 2012 U.S. soybean yield is projected at 39.6 bushels per acre which is 0.3 bushels less than the 2011 crop.
Davis said total soybean use is projected at 3.07 billion bushels, down 85 million bushels from the 2011-12 marketing year. Higher prices, however, are not curbing soybean demand, according to Davis.
Soybeans crush levels are at 1.605 billion bushels, an increase from the December projections. Soybean exports are at 1.345 billion bushels, just 17 million bushels less than the 2011-12 marketing year.
"The series of reports released on Friday provides the last supply information for the 2012 crop," Davis said. "Now, the market will place greater focus on the Southern Hemisphere's corn, soybean and wheat crops."
He said the January report increased projected Brazilian soybean production to 82.5 million metric tons, but reduced Argentine soybean production to 54 million metric tons. If realized, this would be a 28 percent increase in soybean production from last year for those two nations, according to Davis. | <urn:uuid:87ef8cfc-d5dd-4772-9d4c-89441936e202> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wisfarmer.com/news/afbf-analysts-reports-paint----final-picture-for-2012-crops-----jcpg-310087-187309941.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368708142388/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516124222-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.955184 | 979 | 1.671875 | 2 |
(Family Features) - Got fresh greens? Give kids today a bag of fresh-cut salad greens and stand back. Tossing everything short of their iPods into a salad bowl, the savvy younger generation will create a salad to wow your socks off.
Fresh. Nutritious. Healthy. Delicious: Teens are hip to eating fresh, eating green and eating healthfully and deliciously when creating salads. That's what the No. 1 packaged salad maker, Fresh Express, learned recently.
Hundreds of kid-created recipes poured in from teens and tweens across the country in response to the Fresh Express Teens for Greens Amazing Search for Fresh Salad Recipe Challenge. Creativity, healthy choices and good taste lead kids when tossing a salad.
Fresh Express was surprised and impressed with the nutrition and flavor savvy reflected in the teen recipes - showing that a new generation of salad lovers is clearly setting the pace with good taste, outrageously great flavors and an obvious knowledge of fresh, healthy eating.
Take the grand prize-winning recipe created by 10-year-old Tanner Kohn of Greenville, S.C. - Tanner's Shrimpsational Caribbean Salad wowed the judges with its enticing combination of colors and flavors. Showing his savvy for creating a balanced flavor profile in an irresistible main event salad, Tanner won a Salad Bar Makeover for his school and a scholarship to the culinary school of his choice. Appropriately, Tanner's dream is to become a world-class chef.
Judges said that among the entries overall, a knowledge of nutrition - through healthy ingredients - was evident. They also noted the sophisticated flavors and ingredients added to packages of Fresh Express salad blends. Fresh and dried fruits, toasted nuts, crumbled cheeses, herbs, beans were all popular, as were from-scratch healthy vinaigrettes of citrus juice or vinegar and olive oil.
Leave it to the younger generation to lead us to what's hot and fresh in eating. The next time you're hungry for a salad, call in a teen. They're sure to think fresh, go green and tickle your taste buds. | <urn:uuid:758e28fe-8273-4715-a8af-0e6f22c953e3> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.culinary.net/articlesfeatures/FeatureDetail.aspx?ID=1761 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00023-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962063 | 433 | 1.703125 | 2 |
HomoQuotable - Charles Robbins
"I think that the fact that so many young people are so tormented—so ostracized by their family, peers, school, and society in general–that rather than engage and participate in life, they choose to end their life, says a lot about the Christian values that everywhere inform our culture. I think each and every one of us needs to look inside of ourselves, and examine those values for both the good and the harm they’re doing. What I would also very much like Christians to know is that being gay isn’t a choice that anyone makes. It’s not a switch you can turn off and on.
"Gay people were born into creation just like anyone else, and to devalue who they are by insisting God didn’t really make them as they are is to deny them the right to a rich and loving relationship with God–and that’s a terrible, terrible thing to deny anybody. No one should ever use scripture to justify removing another person from the spiritual process. If you’re a Christian—as I am—you should look to Christ for how to live and act toward others. And what does the Great Commandment of Jesus say, but that we’re all supposed to love our neighbors as we love ourselves? I wish more Christians would remember what Jesus himself told them to do." - Trevor Project executive director Charles Robbins, in an interview on the Christian issues site John Shore.
Read the entire interview and the readers' responses. It's encouraging and sadly rare. | <urn:uuid:74a99769-42fc-4654-b795-c88f2a037f2d> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.joemygod.blogspot.com/2010/09/homoquotable-charles-robbins.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368707435344/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516123035-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.974521 | 324 | 1.75 | 2 |
Boeing Insitu on 28 July completed the first flight milestone of the US Navy and US Marine Corps' RQ-21A Integrator unmanned air vehicle, with six months remaining in the development phase of the programme.
The 1h flight test at an Insitu facility in eastern Oregon will allow the Marines to begin operational testing in August, says Col James Rector, programme manager of PMA-263, the office in Naval Air Systems Command managing the small tactical unmanned air systems (STUAS) programme.
The 61kg (135lb), twin-boomed RQ-21A is designed as a follow-on to the Insitu ScanEagle, a 20kg UAS operated by the USMC and USN since 2004. The new aircraft is designed to carry significantly more payload, and to more easily swap out major sensors. The Integrator shares the same catapult launcher and hooking recovery systems.
The was unveiled in August 2007, and beat three challengers for a long-delayed contract award in 2010.
The USMC and the USN now plan to buy a total of 36 STUAS systems, each of which includes five air vehicles. The USN portion of the programme of record includes only four systems, Rector says.
While the programme remains in development, Insitu delivered a commercial version of the Integrator to the Marines for early testing. The first such system was deployed to the service's base at Twentynine Palms, California, about six months ago, Rector says. | <urn:uuid:8648ef14-c4c5-4012-a5e0-92d04b60e16b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/rq-21a-integrator-completes-first-flight-375023/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.935441 | 312 | 1.695313 | 2 |
posted on August 13, 2005 00:00
No Hunting At Circle B This Year
By Del Milligan
LAKELAND -- The Circle B Bar Reserve at Lake Hancock will be closed to duck hunters for the 2005-06 season because of a nine-month project to restore the marsh system to its original state.
"Some of the canals will be filled in so it will be more of a natural sheet flow," said Gaye Sharpe, Environmental Lands Program coordinator for Polk County.
"We want to have the wetlands back in place," added Sharpe, whose office oversees hunting at the preserve.
Dirt-moving work will begin this month to refill drainage ditches on both sides of Banana Creek in the middle of the 450-acre marsh.
"It will be more of a marsh system. It will hold water for longer periods," said Sharpe. "We anticipate levels to be 2 or 3 feet and fluctuate."
Duck hunters have taken green- and blue-winged teal, wood ducks and Florida mallards at the marsh since the county-owned property opened two years ago.
The shallow marsh has also attracted birdwatchers and hikers.
Hunting will resume for the 2006-07 season, Sharpe said.
When the mitigation project is completed in April, the water level will be controlled only by the level of nearby Lake Hancock.
Sharpe said hunters she's spoken with are in favor of the project because deep drainage ditches -- dug by cattle ranchers in the 1940s to drain the marsh and provide more grazing land -- have posed an obstacle for hunters wading throughout the marsh, where boats aren't allowed.
Steve Hendrix, who hunts regularly at the reserve, will have to find another place to hunt this season.
"I'm a little disappointed. We worked really hard to get access to it," said Hendrix, who works at Bartow Ford. "I hate to lose it as a hunting opportunity, especially after the revisions we made after the first year. It was better for hunters, the county regulated it a lot better, and I had nothing but praise for it."
David Cardman of Lakeland, like Hendrix, a member of the local Ducks Unlimited chapter, said he "likes the idea" of restoration.
Native plants and trees will also be replanted during the project, which will be done with heavy equipment.
Returning the marsh to its natural state, more like it may have looked 100 years ago, is also expected to benefit all wildlife and wading birds.
The Florida Department of Transportation is funding the project, which is directed by the Southwest Florida Water Management District in cooperation with Polk County. | <urn:uuid:1c692c55-ec44-421d-acf6-cdd44343d7ca> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.gamebirdhunts.com/Resources/PheasantHuntingNews/tabid/77/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/558/PostComment/default.aspx | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703298047/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112138-00017-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962285 | 551 | 1.515625 | 2 |
Power and Energy Society
Join the 25,000+ members of the IEEE Power and Energy Society (PES) and help to map the future direction of our industry. Topics like Smart Grid and Sustainable Energy have generated a level of excitement not seen in our industry for many years. As a member you will receive cutting-edge information on these subjects as well as the traditional subject areas relating to the planning, design, construction, operation, maintenance and interoperability of generation, transmission, distribution and utilization systems. PES offers world class conferences and publications on every significant subject in the power and energy field, and offers a variety of educational opportunities. You also have the opportunity to join our technical committees and chapters, networking with and learning from the brightest minds in our industry.
Field of Interest (abridged): Planning, R&D, design, construction and operation of apparatus, equipment, structures, materials and systems for the generation, transmission, distribution, measurement and control of electric energy.
Become a member | <urn:uuid:3d6f8add-28d3-4bff-8936-5e4f52659425> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.ieee.org.pr/societies-communities/power-and-energy-society/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368710006682/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516131326-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.936044 | 203 | 1.53125 | 2 |
Trying to put insomnia problems to rest
Millions of Americans doubtless used that extra hour setting our clocks back to get a little extra sleep - an option NOT available to chronic sufferers from insomnia. For them, fiddling around with the clock offers no relief at all. Our Sunday Morning Cover Story is reported now by Susan Spencer of 48 Hours:
Nightfall in Louisville, Kentucky ... weary citizens soon will snuggle up in their nice, warm beds, ready for a restful night's sleep.
Good luck with that!
A new study done by Bert Sperling of ("The Best and Worst Places to Live" fame) names Louisville as the number one city when it comes to sleeplessness.
"People who live here report having an average of nine days monthly without restful sleep," said radio show host Terry Meiners.
It's not a distinction Louisville wants, but it doesn't surprise Meiners: "I drove to work this morning at 5:15 and I saw 30 people out for a run, and a few people sitting on benches. I wasn't intrigued by the people running, but the ones sitting on benches really blew my mind. Why aren't you home in bed?" he laughed. "What, are you waiting for the diner to open? Go back to bed! They'll have pancakes at 7:30."
But WHY is it so hard to sleep here?
Some theories: Louisville has a huge UPS hub, a lot of people work the overnight. THEY'RE obviously not sleeping.
There's a giant construction project blocking a major bridge, forcing commuters to spend hours in traffic - when they should be in bed.
And that's not the only stress: Louisville ranks high in unemployment and divorce.
But then, of course, there are folks like Meiners: "I'm one of those people who does wake up about 3:30 in the morning. I don't know why. But I start tumbling through what I'm going to do the next day."
We've all been there, occasionally. But what if night after night? You put on your jams, get into bed, turn out the lights, but no matter how many sheep you imagine out there, waiting to be counted ... you simply cannot fall sleep.
A Sunday Morning poll found half of all Americans has trouble sleeping at least once a week - and more than a third (33%) more often than that.
"These are people with insomnia, they have the time to sleep but can't sleep - three or more times per week, a month or longer," said psychologist Wendy Troxel of the University of Pittsburgh Sleep and Chronobiology Center. She says 20 to 30 million American adults suffer true insomnia.
"How do they stand it? I mean, there's nothing worse!" said Spencer.
"Yes, we have all experienced this once or twice, or around stressful times," said Troxel. "But when you think about what it's like to experience it nightly over months and months and years and years, it truly is crazy-making."
In one demonstration, doctors at the Center hook people up to monitors and study their brains while they sleep. What they've found is eye-opening:
"If we bring them into the lab, they may say that they didn't sleep at all, but we'll have data to suggest that they DID sleep," said Troxel. "Now this doesn't mean that they're lying, though. It just means that their experience of sleep is part of the problem. Even when we objectively show that they're sleeping, it still doesn't FEEL like sleep."
Troxel's colleague, Dr. Daniel Buysse, says insomniacs' brains are hyper-aroused. So, while the brain of a good sleeper shuts down at night, an insomniac's brain is always ON - no matter what time of day.
"So it could actually be that when people with insomnia report being aware of their environment, being awake all night, they may actually have increased activity in some brain regions despite the electrodes on their head appearing to be asleep," said Buysse.
All that brain activity comes at a price. A recent Harvard study found that insomnia costs the U.S. work force $63.2 billion annually.
"We know that people with insomnia have worse functioning at work," said Buysse. "There have been some studies that show that they have more sick days and have higher health costs. It increases the risk for subsequent conditions like depression, anxiety disorders and even substance use."
It's enough to keep you up at night - and that goes double for women, who are twice as likely as men to have insomnia.
- Dressing down a culture for refusing to dress up
- Work spaces: Past and present
- Buildings: What's new is old
- How design colors the mind
- Jennifer Lopez: A design for living
- A nation of slobs?
- The newest thing in architecture: Something old
- The bells are still ringing, for the last 1,000 years
- Mark Harmon, a hero on-screen and off
- The modern midwifery movement
- Sinkholes: The hole truth
- The evolution of the psychoanalyst's office
- The psychology of design and color
- The benefits of multi-generational homes
- Houses that are for the birds
- The strange, inventive world of wallpaper | <urn:uuid:920489f1-9822-4175-be46-9b8f3856cb68> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-3445_162-57319318/trying-to-put-insomnia-problems-to-rest/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368700958435/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516104238-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.967685 | 1,123 | 1.71875 | 2 |
WAKE UP!! It's yer sort-of-weekly...
The free weekly direct action newsheet published in Brighton since 1994 - Copyleft - Information for Action
After Russia's dubious Duma elections, held amid reports of major electoral fraud, Russians have taken to the streets of all major Russian cities to show their anger. Cracks have even begun to appear in Putin's carefully orchestrated public image For the first time in his rule, Putin has been subjected to the genuine feelings of the people. On the 18th of November Putin appeared at a Mixed Martial Arts fight in Moscow of Russia's Fedor Yemelianenko and his American opponent Jeff Monson. As the prime minister came on stage to share in the victory of the Russian fighter the audience had started to jeer him, whistling and booing. Putin was stunned by that reaction. His supporters later claimed that the booing was for Mr Monson leaving the ring. This explanation doesn't wash however- the booing happened as Putin was giving speech. Russia's state TV layer edited out the booing and inserted cheering in its place.
Despite the vote-stuffing and ballot-rigging, Putin and Medvedev's party, United Russia, has lost a significant number of seats in parliament. Its weak majority means it needs to ally with other parties to change constitutional matters. The rest of the votes have gone to the (Confused) Communist Party of Russia (their main objectives are to get tough on illegal immigration and introduce ethnic stamps in passports), loony right-wing Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (L.D.P.R.) and a centre-right Fair Russia party. As far a voting goes, the Communists play on Soviet nostalgia and their supporters mainly come from the country's elderly demographic. The Fair Russia party and the L.D.P.R. have supported the current regime on a number of issues. The electorate are restricted to vote for parties which are essentially the same, so the way to show dissatisfaction with Putin is to vote for a largely identical party with some other dude at the front, the closest there is to a protest vote against Putin.
The government is not tolerating any outbreaks of demonstrations- they've shown time and time again that their definition of democracy is a (rigged) vote every four years for the dictator of choice. Moscow and St. Petersburg have already witnessed major police brutality and mass arrests, and any future demonstrations will see the same response. On the 5th of November ten thousand protesters have come to Chistye Prudy to hear the speeches of the opposition. After the demo three hundred were arrested, and two hundred fifty of them were in police stations until the morning. A number of alleged opposition leaders were also arrested.
Russian people have plenty of reasons not to be happy with the current regime. Corruption, distrust in politicians, distrust in police, pseudo-pension reforms, unwillingness to deal with discrimination of ethnic and sexual minorities, lack of independent media , a corrupt court system, privatisation of the public sector, human rights abuses, the appointing of regional heads as opposed to electing them, and ongoing instability in the Caucasus region, to name but a few.
The western governments couldn't care less about the plight of Russians. As long as there is a constant supply of cheap fossil fuels going their direction the West's pretence of caring for democracy in the world is limited to the occasional random comment about the lack of freedom in Russia. After the chaos of neo-liberal 'freedom' many, perhaps most, Russians are against Western intervention in their affairs and prefer to see a strong Stalin-like figure (i.e. Putin) defending them against the West.
Further demonstrations against the fraudulent elections are planned in Moscow at Ploshhad' Revolucii (Revolution Square) situated on the northern side of the Kremlin this Saturday at 2pm. Organisers are expecting thousands to attend. Just like their repressive brethren the NYPD did in Zucotti Park, Moscow authorities decided to close the square for "refurbishment" and suggested a different location of Bolotnaya Ploshhad' (Swamp Square) which is situated on an island across the river from the Kremlin. They have "allowed" for a 30 000 strong demo out of harms way in a location tailor-made for kettling. Fearing violence, opposition leaders went along with the Moscow authorities. Moscow's vice-mayor has told citizens that the authorities don't plan on arresting anyone during the demo on the Bolotnaya sq. We'll see.
There is a number of demonstrations planned to take across the whole of Russia, from the Volga to Vladivostok. With the March presidential elections coming ever closer, Putin and his cronies no longer see the elections as a done deal, and will have to pull every trick out of their old KGB manuals if they want to engineer a victory at the polls. Meanwhile, for ordinary Russians, the struggle continues.
Russian anti-fascist unfairly imprisoned under Putin's new house rules.
'Ground the Drones' demo to take place in Lincoln this Saturday as UK expands armed drone programme - and international resistance to the Drone Wars amps up.
Anti-cuts protesters block Lord Freud's Highgate London home and stage "evict a millionaire" demo.
'Non-citizens' take to the streets of Berlin in the latest instalment of the Refugee Strike shaking things up in Germany.
With protestors gearing up for a second round of resistance there could be 'diversions ahead' for the East Sussex County Council and the road backing scum Trinity College in the University of Cambridge.
Recent announcement by Environmental Agency grants permits to EDF aiding the production of nuclear energy at Hinkley Point C.
If the “world leaders” heading to Enniskillen in June were hoping for an easy protest-free ride they were sadly mistaken
National Front demonstration has a poor turn out in Swansea, followed by a Blood & Honour gig in the valleys. | <urn:uuid:379a1517-0614-48b1-9093-697aa517962c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.schnews.org.uk/stories/DIS-PUTIN-THE-ELECTION/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701459211/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105059-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.962763 | 1,226 | 1.640625 | 2 |
Celebrating International Women's Day with Divine Chocolate
Today is International Women's Day! It's a day set aside to honor the hard working, dedicated, compassionate, inspirational women of the world. Here at Fair Trade USA we are proud to celebrate the women of Fair Trade. Whether it be a single mother on a flower farm in Ecuador or a community leader running a cocoa cooperative in Ghana, these are the women who helped make Fair Trade what it is today.
The guest blog below comes to us from Divine Chocolate, a Fair Trade partner that is celebrating International Women's Day in a very special way. Enjoy!
Today marks the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day. In honor of the occasion, Divine Chocolate is celebrating the incredible women cocoa farmers of Kuapa Kokoo. We’re offering chocolate lovers and Fair Traders around the country an exciting opportunity to support our women farmers while enjoying a bar of Divine Chocolate!
Another Reason Women Think Chocolate is Divine
Kuapa Kokoo is a farmer's cooperative of 45,000 members who supply the cocoa for each bar of Divine. The role of women in Kuapa Kokoo is significant- from their participation in all levels of decision making, their advancement in leadership roles (including having a woman president of the union), and Kuapa's commitment to the economic empowerment of women.
The women of Kuapa Kokoo are trained in small business enterprises such as batik and soap making and the raising of crops for sale in the local market. The women can then borrow from the credit union to make their business operational, allowing for additional income to be earned for the family in the off season.
Economic empowerment not only equips women with the resources they need to provide for their families, it increases their influence in their family and communities. As many Kuapa Kokoo women have said, participating in the women's groups gives them a tremendous sense of pride.
Christiana Ohene-Agyare, the National President of Kuapa Kokoo, once told Divine, “being a member of Kuapa Kokoo has taught me that whatever a man can do, a woman can also do and even better.”
$1 Off for You is an Investment in Women Farmers
Beginning today and continuing through the spring, Divine will be offering special $1 off coupons for our delectable chocolate. For every coupon redeemed, Divine will invest an additional amount of money into Kuapa Kokoo's Women's Fund - to help increase the resources available to women cocoa farmers and ensure that even more women's groups can participate.
Be sure to get your coupon and participate in the Divine Chocolate Women’s Campaign by checking out their Facebook page.
Want to hear first-hand about what it’s like to be a woman farmer in Kuapa Kokoo? Check out this video with Kuapa Kokoo's Comfort Kumeah: | <urn:uuid:91f4e8f9-2e0c-428d-a82d-66a56c6e85fd> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.fairtradeusa.org/get-involved/blog/celebrating-international-womens-day-divine-chocolate | 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 | 0.942867 | 588 | 1.796875 | 2 |
- Tell us what you think: Star-rate and review this book
In this scholarly but lively survey of British crime films from the 1940s to the present day, Forshaw tracks down the ways in which the genre has offered "keen insights into the society of the day". Films such as Robert Hamer's It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) present an "unvarnished picture of crime and lives lived in quiet desperation", while the more recent Kidulthood (2005) by Noel Clarke shows that "alienated, disenfranchised youth" remains as central to the genre as in the 50s. From police corruption, dealt with in David Greene's The Strange Affair (1968), to paedophilia – the subject of Cyril Frankel's Never Take Sweets from a Stranger (1960) – crime films have consistently tackled subjects that mainstream film-makers have avoided: it is, argues Forshaw, "the cinema of the unacceptable". He considers class divisions, sexual taboos, censorship, corporate crime and violence, as well as the "grimly urban" settings of many of the films, such as Newcastle in Get Carter (1971). He proves himself to be an expert guide. | <urn:uuid:4f49460f-7be4-4740-81e4-a2ef79a3301c> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/nov/06/british-crime-film-barry-forshaw-review?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+theguardian%2Fbooks%2Frss+%28Books%29 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368701852492/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516105732-00015-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948196 | 245 | 1.6875 | 2 |
Search in Bible [King James Version] for Keyword [bidding], total found time(s).
|1SM:22:14||Then Ahimelech answered the king, and said, And who is so faithful among all thy servants as David, which is the king's son in law, and goeth at thy bidding, and is honourable in thine house? |
|LUK:23:2||And they began to accuse him, saying, We found this fellow perverting the nation, and forbidding to give tribute to Caesar, saying that he himself is Christ a King. |
|ACT:28:31||Preaching the kingdom of God, and teaching those things which concern the Lord Jesus Christ, with all confidence, no man forbidding him. |
|1TS:2:16||Forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they might be saved, to fill up their sins alway: for the wrath is come upon them to the uttermost. |
|1TM:4:3||Forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats, which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving of them which believe and know the truth. | | <urn:uuid:22edd6c2-9421-4eb5-b0e0-7f3a445f85b0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.biblicalproportions.com/bible/search/kw/bidding/1 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697380733/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516094300-00037-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.965794 | 253 | 1.554688 | 2 |
About a month ago my brother-in-law called from Puerto Rico to invite us to join in on an already planned family vacation to Sedona, Arizona. As the month proceeded, more and more family members were added to the impending family extravaganza. In the end, our not-so-little delegation included my mother, father, sister and brother-in-law, two nieces, my sister-in-law's mother, my partner, and me. Traveling in a pack is our specialty!
When the initial invitation was issued, we spent quite a bit of time talking about whether or not we should go to Arizona given the passage of SB1070, one of the most racist anti-immigration laws in the United States. In the past year this hateful law was not only passed, but Arizona has also banned ethnic studies from being taught in its public educational system . Institutional racism and anti-immigrant sentiment run deep in Arizona. We questioned what it would mean for us, as committed social justice organizers, to go to Arizona on a family vacation. We questioned what it meant for us as queer people of color to go to a state that has been at the epicenter of right wing activity.
We eventually decided to go for only one reason: to spend time with family and, in particular, our young nieces who we do not get to see often because of the distance and the cost of flying from Washington, D.C. to Puerto Rico. Given that we happened to have airline vouchers, we were able to fly for free to see them anywhere in the United States except Puerto Rico. With serious reservations, questions, and excitement about spending time with our nieces, we made the trek to Sedona.
And what a trip it was....
It was full of contradiction, including wonderful moments with family mixed with insights about queerness, class, and race. This week-long trip deepened my appreciation of family, broadened my understanding of race and institutional racism, made me grapple with the complexity of queerness, and inspired me to broaden my commitment to all movements and communities working for self determination. Spending a week in a place that is both so beautiful and yet so hostile to communities that I am either a part of or stand in solidarity with challenged me to reflect and connect some important dots.
For example, race was a salient issue throughout the week. When we landed in Phoenix we ended up staying overnight before heading to Sedona. We visited with old family friends from Puerto Rico, who had moved to Phoenix years ago. They tell us over lunch that we should always drive under the speed limit because "the police target Latin@s and other brown people."
As we drive around the state, I am profoundly aware of my light skinned privilege and the accountability I hold if something racist happens during our travels. Even though half the family is light-skinned with blond hair and blue eyes and the other half is dark-skinned, I was the only one in the group that was not Latin@ and did not have an accent. I was the only one that did not "look like" or "sound like" an immigrant (whatever the hell that means). Although I am darker than most of the light-skinned family members, what mattered was that we were in a place where darker-skinned people of color, particularly Latin@s, are systematically targeted simply for being black/brown. In this context I knew that I was probably the least likely to be targeted and that I had a responsibility to use that privilege to interrupt any racism we encountered.
For six days I was constantly aware of the power dynamic around us. I prayed that nothing would happen on our travels and, at the same time, I was prepared to be of service if something did. I was prepared to use my privilege in ways that would interrupt, stop, or challenge racism and racial profiling. Of course, everyone in our family is quite capable of speaking up and out for themselves. Yet, I was aware that having one non Latin@ person in the family might be useful in a difficult situation.Thankfully, my services were not needed this time around.
This trip was all about family, and over the past thirteen years my partner and I have had an incredibly moving experience with her family. Over time, they have come to support and embrace our relationship. We have witnessed a great deal of transformation as it relates to LGBT issues and this has led to more open conversations and direct expressions of support and love. Of course, this has had a major impact on the young people in our family. For example, on the second day of our trip our eight-year-old niece engaged me in a conversation that went exactly like this:
Niece: "Titi Lisa...are you gay with Titi Lisbeth?"
Me: "Yes, for almost the past 14 years."
Niece: "Some people think that is weird."
Me: "So what do you think about that?"
Niece: "I think that everyone should be able to love who they love."
Me: "I couldn't agree with you more mi amor."
After I almost melted over the way she asked the question "Are you gay with Titi Lisbeth," I reflected upon the fact that my nieces only have LGBT aunts and uncles. My sister-in-law's only sibling is a gay man who lives in New York. Queerness is a very intimate and real part of my nieces' lives. It's something they knew even before they could articulate it in words. The best part of this particular conversation is that my niece is now at an age where she is asking questions and expressing her own opinions in very loving and conscious ways.
Homo/bi/transphobia is intolerable to her because she knows that she is deeply loved by the queer people in her life. I am excited by a future full of nieces, including my sister's daughter, who are already demonstrating a radical form of love and openness that has the power to transform hearts and minds.
Speaking of hearts and minds, mine were transformed as I traveled through the many sovereign Nations in Arizona. Arizona is home to over twenty Nations, including the Apache and Navajo Nations. There are more First Nations reservations in Arizona than almost any other state. This allows one to witness both the complexity of First Nations communities and the depth of the appropriation of Indigenous land and cultures.
The revisionist history of "how the West was won" is told and retold consistently from the perspective of colonizing countries and institutions, such as Spain and the U.S. government, who stole indigenous land and claimed it as their own. The narrative systematically leaves out the fact that the land was not only stolen but that an ongoing genocide continues to be waged against First Nations peoples across the Americas.
All over Arizona First Nations cultures and land have been turned into artifacts to be displayed, bought, and sold for profit. Witnessing this hurt my head and heart. It has made me even more committed to engaging in deeper solidarity work with Two Spirit and indigenous people who are not only living with the occupation of their land on a daily basis but also with an LGBT movement that completely ignores issues of sovereignty and self-determination.
As a queer movement, self-determination over one's body and land should be a central tenant of our movement. As queer people, we have a long history of being denied self-determination over our own bodies, love, and desires. Why aren't we standing in solidarity with communities who are also struggling with self-determination in other ways? Why is it that the queer movement isn't connecting all of the ways our LGBT communities need and deserve self-determination?
There was nothing simple about this family vacation other than the wonderful time we spent with our nieces. There is something so direct, clear, and consistent about their love and affection that made the whole trip totally worthwhile. Yet, what was also important about this trip was that I had the opportunity to notice. To really notice queerness, race, class, family dynamics, sovereignty, and cultural appropriation in such profoundly interconnected ways. This vacation reminded me once again that the role of queer activists is to notice and pay attention to the complexity of the world around us and to use that awareness to work for justice.
Image courtesy of Ricardo Levins Morales | <urn:uuid:de2c19ba-cec5-4c74-a021-3771d3937cff> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.bilerico.com/2011/06/queering_up_the_family_vacation.php | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00018-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977499 | 1,708 | 1.6875 | 2 |
OHIO SHOULD EXECUTE CHILD RAPISTS
By Dr. Patrick Jonston
April 19, 2008
The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments this week in a case challenging Louisiana’s law which allows the execution of those who rape children twelve years of age and younger. The popular legislation breezed through the Louisiana legislature in 1995, and was only held up by the debate on whether child rapists should be castrated. In addition to Louisiana, Georgia, Montana, Oklahoma, Texas, and South Carolina also have laws allowing convicted child rapists to be executed.
There are two rapists on death row in Louisiana: Patrick Kennedy, 43 years of age, was convicted of raping his eight-year old stepdaughter. Richard Davis was convicted of repeatedly attacking and raping a five-year-old girl.
Earlier this month, Corey Saunders, 26, was sentence to five years in prison for violating his probation after four years in prison for the attempted rape of a seven-year-old boy. How did he violate his probation? He raped a five-year-old in on January 30 in a public library in Boston. On a video played in court on April 4th, the child said the assault was like being attacked by a “T-rex and an alligator.” The boy described how Saunders lured him between bookshelves at the library’s magazine room, fondled and raped him.
here in Zanesville, Ohio, Randy Dillon was recently convicted for abducting
and raping a fourteen-month old girl. He’s facing a long span
in Ohio’s correctional institutions. Think that will correct him?
Think he will have learned his lesson by the time he is paroled or his
prison sentence is completed?
Who can deny that such utterly despicable crimes merit the death penalty?
When speaking at a church men’s meeting in Coshocton, I asked several men what they thought should be done to child rapists? The most common opinion I heard was that they be castrated. Is this an appropriate penalty for child rape? Does castration provide an adequate disincentive to protect the innocent? The following true story shows that it doesn’t. In 1984, several masked men attacked and castrated Wayne Dumond for raping a 17-year-old girl. Then Arkansas Governor at the time, Mike Huckabee, felt sorry for Mr. Dumond for having been given a life sentence. Governor Huckabee pardoned the rapist in 1999, 25 years before his prison sentence should have ended, despite the pleas of the rape victim that the rapist would attack again. The pardoned rapist did strike again, raping and suffocating a 39-year old woman and raping and murdering a 23-year old pregnant woman within two years of his release from prison. Castration and prison didn’t protect those women from a convicted rapist, did it?
Others have said that child rapists get punished sufficiently in prison by getting raped and assaulted by other prisoners. Is that an appropriate penalty for a convicted child rapist? That notion just seems barbaric to me. How can we justify punishing forcible rape with forcible sodomy? Besides, the stronger child rapists may be the raper in prison, and not the rapee. Is that justice, or is it just another beastly crime? The admission that rapists may be cruelly treated by other prisoners in prison is, to me, an admission that our correctional institutions are grossly inadequate to correct anybody, but are instead criminal training grounds and a colossal waste of sixty billion taxpayer dollars annually.
When rapists are imprisoned, the victims must continue to worry about the possibility of parole or escape. Consider this true story: Joshua Ridings was indicted in January of this year by a federal grand jury in the rape of an eleven-year-old girl in West Virginia. Ridings abducted the girl in West Virginia and violently raped her in Belmont County, Ohio. In February, he escaped from jail. He stole a car to get away from the prison, and abandoned it in the parking lot of a public high school. Can you imagine the fear that the eleven-year-old rape victim and her family felt, knowing that her rapist escaped from prison? Now that he’s back in jail, they must continue to worry about another escape or a parole.
Now the talk in the papers is that we might have to start letting prisoners out early because our prisons are so over-crowded and we cannot afford the growing cost. As if the remedy for the increase in crime is more leniency! Absurd!
A recent study by the bipartisan Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons reported that over the course of a year 13.5 million spend time in prison or jail. Within three years of their release, 67 % of former prisoners are rearrested and 52 % are re-incarcerated. Our correctional facilities desperately need corrected: they are failing the taxpayers, failing the victims, and failing the criminals. Getting put in prison full of sex predators and murderers for the violent crime of rape is more like getting kicked out of class for not paying attention. It prescribes as a remedy more of the disease, prolongs the misery of the victims, and threatens the liberties of those who are forced to pay for these prisons upon pain of fine or prison.
Not just child rape, but all rape was a capital crime in the criminal justice system penned by the hand of the God of the Bible. He prescribed such a penalty for deserving crimes not because he is cruel or unloving, but because he knew that it would provide an adequate disincentive to prevent the crime from taking place at all (Deuteronomy 13:11). God loves the victims so much that he ordered convicted rapists to be put to death, and that quickly (Ecclesiastes 8:11). Delayed justice is injustice. Do you know how many taxpayer dollars are spent feeding, clothing, housing, defending, medicating, and entertaining death row inmates from the day of their conviction to their execution?
It’s not only a waste of taxpayer dollars, it’s a waste of a marvelous disincentive to a grievous crime. If child rapists are executed quickly, there are less rape victims and less rapists as a result - and few executions! What can be more loving to the child victims of rape? What can be a more powerful disincentive to prevent child rape from occurring in the first place? We cannot improve on the wisdom and love of God.
It’s high time that Ohio joins the ranks of states who love children enough to execute those who sodomize and rape them. If anyone deserves a quick execution, it’s these savage beasts.
© 2008 Patrick Johnston - All Rights Reserved | <urn:uuid:c8337965-a8d5-4b5f-a125-c31b6d6ceacb> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://newswithviews.com/Johnston/patrick17.htm | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368706153698/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516120913-00035-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.963423 | 1,392 | 1.710938 | 2 |
Accredited Online College Degrees for International Students
Getting accredited online college degrees from an accredited online school ensures that you are getting an actual diploma, not a fake degree.
There are many advantages to getting an online degree from an accredited college; for one, a student is more likely to earn a higher salary from their place of work because of their higher education. Another bonus, to online schooling is that you can work at your own pace and dedicate a few hours a night to school, while still having a full time day job.
Most people under fifty are somewhat familiar with the Internet that makes getting an online degree all the more easier. Working from a computer is beyond simple; help is just an email away. Any research you need for a paper is directly under your fingertips as you type into Google Scholar or another online library. There is no longer a need to venture out to a stuffy, mildew-smelling library, to talk to a grouchy librarian about a book. There are so many resources online that students can use, peer reviewed research articles, online databases help you find periodicals and research that fits your needs by a keyword search.
Submitting your work online when you are finished is a huge plus. Professors directly address emailed responses to you with praises or criticism is helpful. Email therefore links you and your professor for one on one conversation, and can get you the help that you need. Email can be answered when the professors have time, thereby eliminating appointments and office hours.
Accredited online college degrees are great for parents that want to get a college or graduate degree because they can work from home, thereby omitting the need for a babysitter. Parents get to keep the money that they would have spent for a babysitter in their pocket, because they can still supervise their children while they are typing away at their papers.
Everyone with a television knows the economic crisis the United Sates is in right now and prices for food and gasoline are astronomical. If one chooses to study at an online school from home a lot of expenses are eliminated, you no longer have to cringe every time you fill up your car’s gas tank while driving to school, because you do not have to leave the comfort of your own bed, chair, or couch. Online students do not have to commute anywhere so they can get some extra shuteye because they do not have to jump in their car and worry about traffic. Without a commute, online students have a lot more time to dedicate to their schoolwork. Online students also do not have to worry about clothing choices because nobody is going to judge what you’re wearing, except for maybe your own children.
Completing classwork at your own pace when you have time is a huge advantage. You can work after making dinner while the dishwasher is running, while the laundry is rolling around in the rinse cycle, while the kids are at school, after work, in the wee hours of the morning or after the sun has set. Whenever you have the chance to work you can; whereas, at a regular school you work on their time, sacrificing your schedule and your daily routine and subsequent duties.
International students that want to study at an American college or university can have a difficult time receiving a student visa to go to school here. Immigrating to the United States can be hugely expensive because of air plane fees just to get here, in addition to other necessary living expenses. Said expenses are eradicated if an international student chooses to stay in their native country and get an online degree from an accredited school instead.
One major factor that should be considered when deciding on a school is tuition. Accredited online colleges are vastly cheaper than a regular university’s tuition, plus room and board, meal plans, and travel. National University is one such school that offers accredited online college degrees and has a large amount of international students, equipped with an international student admissions office to help answer prospective students’ questions. This office can assist international students with the entire application process and assist any other needs. However, if an international student decides that immigration is for them as opposed to an online degree, National University has immigration section to help you do that also. | <urn:uuid:f128820c-b915-42c0-98e1-b662e80804ab> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.internationalstudent.com/study_usa/choosing-the-usa/usa-education-system/accredited-online-college-degrees/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704392896/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113952-00034-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.968961 | 854 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Is your workout burning flab—or just burning up your time?
By Amy Rushlow, Posted Date: August 13, 2012
You probably have a friend who looks amazing thanks to an intense workout plan—whether he used series of follow-along DVDs, signed up for boot camp classes, or joined a trendy hard-core fitness group. And that’s not surprising. Work hard, and you’ll see results. Rocket science, right?
But just because something works doesn’t mean it’s your best option. Or even that it’s a good option at all.
These intense workout plans all include a type of training called “metabolic training.” Its goal is, in short, to increase your metabolism. That means you’ll burn fat not only during your workout, but at work, in your car, even while you’re sleeping. (For a fast-paced plan you can do at home, check out Speed Shred, the new follow-along DVD series from Men’s Health DeltaFIT.)
How does it work? In a typical metabolic-style workout, you’ll do resistance exercises at a fast pace, usually with some short rest periods between each move. For example, you’ll perform squats continuously for 20 seconds, rest for 10 seconds, do pushups for 20 seconds, rest for 10 seconds, and repeat that cycle for a total of four minutes.
Only four minutes? That’s right—metabolic workouts are fast. That’s part of their appeal. In a study from Azusa Pacific University, subjects who did a 4-minute routine similar to the one above burned 63 calories during the workout and an additional 297 calories afterward.
There’s a reason this type of training is so popular right now: It works. If you want to lose body fat, it’s the best type of exercise you can do. But metabolic training is a relatively new arrival to the fitness mainstream. And as any first-gen iPhone user knows, it takes a while to work out the kinks. So with the help from the country’s leading metabolic training experts, we’ve busted the top 5 metabolic training myths.
Myth #1: Endless jumping exercises are great for fat loss!
OK, jumping exercises are great for fat loss. “But they’re terrible for your joints,” says B.J. Gaddour, C.S.C.S., the creator of the Speed Shred DVD series. “Take a look at the testimonials for some of the intense workout plans. You see people with bands around their knees from knee injuries.” Instead of jumping on and off a box with your feet together, try this: Jump onto a 12- to 20-inch box with both feet. Then step off the box one foot at a time. “This gives you all the power and fat-loss benefits of a jumping exercise without destroying your joints,” Gaddour says.
Myth #2: You should feel exhausted at the end of every workout.
Go hard or go home? Hardly. “We’ve begun to value how ‘extreme’ a program is more than the results it can produce,” says Martin Rooney, C.S.C.S., author of Warrior Cardio. “But if you’re so sore you can’t move for days, you can’t train and you’ve damaged your body in a way that makes it more difficult to recover.” When you’re done, it should feel like you could do one more set or go for a couple more minutes. Leave some gas in your tank.
Myth #3: You need to work out every day if you’re serious about losing weight.
“You don’t get any results from training,” says Alwyn Cosgrove, C.S.C.S., owner of Results Fitness in San Clarita, California. “You need training plus recovery to get results.” Avoid exercising more than two days in a row. “Two days on, one day off seems to be the perfect recovery for most people,” Cosgrove says.
Myth #4: The faster the move, the better.
A metabolic exercise doesn’t have to make you out of breath to be effective, Gaddour says. Why? Resistance training is a great way to increase your metabolism. One study found that the metabolic boost from a full-body weightlifting session lasted for 72 hours. A must-try move: The hip hinge and row. “It works nearly every pulling muscle in your body, particularly your hips and shoulders, which are the most metabolically active tissues you have,” Gaddour says. Watch the video below to see how to perform this slow, controlled metabolic exercise.
MH Standard Player for WordPress 600x338 Theme: Light
Myth #5: Technical exercises are good additions to a hard workout.
Some popular programs call for high repetitions of technical exercises like cleans, snatches, and overhead squats—even when you’re exhausted. The problem: “With these exercises, your form will fail before you ever get a metabolic response,” Cosgrove says. That’s why Cosgrove likes what he calls self-limiting exercises. These are exercises that, once you’re fatigued, you simply can’t do anymore. Take a pushup. After a certain number of pushups, you won’t be able to raise your body off the floor. Basically, they’re hard to mess up. Planks, pullups, and bottoms-up kettlebell presses are other examples. | <urn:uuid:bedeb3b6-240b-4249-b3d2-4b2f2cc25511> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.menshealth.com/deltafit/5-fat-loss-myths?cm_mmc=Yahoo_Blog-_-Health-_-Clarke_Duncan-_-Fat_Loss_Myths | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00027-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.930556 | 1,212 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Arts Council England
Arts Council England is a core funder of Eastside Educational Trust and supports Eastside's literature development programme and spoken word projects. Eastside has been a client of the Arts Council's Literature Department since 2004 and has been awarded funding as part of Arts Council England’s new National Portfolio of funded organisations, from 2012 - 2015. This is a reflection of the quality and excellence of the work that Eastside is doing with children and young people in London.
Arts Council England is the national development agency for the arts in England and works to get great art to everyone by championing, developing and investing in artistic experiences that enrich people's lives. Arts Council England is government funded and dedicated to promoting the performing, visual and literary arts in England.
A message from Arts Council England:
Engagement with the arts from an early age has a profound impact on improving happiness and wellbeing and gives children a key to increase their knowledge of the arts, a curiosity to explore and to develop taste and realise a talent that will last for the rest of their lives. That’s why the Arts Council wants to ensure that all children and young people experience the richness of the arts both in and outside of schools. We also want to develop a national approach to the development of children and young people’s engagement with the arts.
Achieving Great Art for Everyone - Arts Council England's 10-year framework for the arts. | <urn:uuid:e42c1d0f-80b6-453a-8d42-51ac5167b800> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.eastside.org.uk/support_us/arts_council_england | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00012-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951256 | 295 | 1.828125 | 2 |
October 11, 2011, 2:16 pm ET
Last year, the Obama administration set new records for detaining and deporting immigrants who were inside the country illegally. The government plans to best those numbers in 2011, removing more than 400,000 people. In partnership with American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop, FRONTLINE correspondent Maria Hinojosa takes a penetrating look at Obama’s vastly expanded immigration net, explores the controversial Secure Communities enforcement program and goes inside the hidden world of immigration detention in Lost in Detention, airing Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2011, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS (check local listings).
President Obama, who opposed some strict immigration measures while a candidate in 2008, says that his enforcement programs are part of a strategy to win comprehensive immigration reform, including a path to legalization for some of the nearly 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. But with reform efforts at a standstill, Obama supporters, especially Latino voters, say they are angry about the administration’s approach. “I expected better from him,” says Nena Torres, a former informal adviser to the presidential campaign. “I don’t think I ever contemplated the fact that maybe he would be worse than any other American president of the United States on the issue of immigration.”
FRONTLINE begins its investigation in Obama’s home state of Illinois, where Hinojosa examines the impact of the Secure Communities enforcement program. Secure Communities combines Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) records with those of the FBI and local law enforcement. According to the White House, it’s been a critical tool for targeting criminal aliens for removal, a priority for the administration.
“What DHS (Department of Homeland Security) is doing is prioritizing the folks who present the greatest harm for people, who have committed crimes, who have been convicted of crimes in this country, and not people who were lower priorities,” says Cecilia Muñoz, White House director of intergovernmental affairs.
But FRONTLINE discovers that the program has lost support among political leaders in the state and some in law enforcement. Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn and Sheriff Mark Curran, a Republican from Lake County, Ill., were both supporters of the program when ICE began operating it in the state in 2009. But they say the program has not delivered what it promised and has instead created more problems for the state, and a backlash among immigrants.
“When I deal with the Latino community throughout Lake County,” Curran says, “there is fear that’s running through these communities. They know all about Secure Communities. They know the horror stories of their uncle or their brother that committed the most ticky-tack of offenses and got incarcerated as a result and is now being deported.”
Hinojosa talks to the family of Roxana Garcia, whose five children—all U.S. citizens—have been without their mother since she was stopped for a minor traffic infraction and deported to Mexico after 15 years in the United States. Stories like theirs have spurred Latinos in particular to rally against a policy that they say rips families apart.
Hinojosa tracks the enforcement sweep from the neighborhoods of Illinois to the expansive Willacy Detention Center in south Texas. Immigration detention has become both a vital tool and a lightning rod for the administration’s immigration strategy.
Using a network of 250 detention facilities across the country, ICE is able to ensure that undocumented immigrants will not slip back into the population in a game of “catch and release,” says Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “That’s unacceptable if you’re going to have an immigration system that is taken seriously—seriously by the public or seriously by the illegal immigrants themselves.”
During a yearlong investigation, FRONTLINE uncovered a troubling picture of abuse inside immigration detention facilities, including more than a dozen allegations of sexual abuse at Willacy, as well as alleged cases of beatings, racism and management cover-ups. Dr. Twana Cooks-Allen, former mental health coordinator at Willacy, told Hinojosa that the detainees she saw inside were not the border-crossers who she expected. “They were people who had been established, who had children here, who had businesses, who had attended school.”
Most alarming, Cooks-Allen says, were accounts of physical and sexual abuse. “I knew something was wrong when I started getting women coming in complaining about being harassed by guards for sexual favors.” Hinojosa talks to one former detainee who confided in a female guard that she had been sexually abused and threatened by another guard. The female guard’s advice: Keep quiet. “She said to me,” explains the former detainee, “that if you go to ICE and you complain or you write a report, it’s going to be worse for you.”
The program reveals government documents recently obtained by the ACLU and FRONTLINE that offer the most significant window into sexual abuse in immigration detention. They indicate a more endemic problem for detainees inside detention, who lack the due process and oversight afforded to criminal prisons.
As Obama gears up for the 2012 campaign, political experts say that his immigration policies have done little to win him the support of conservatives or independents, while potentially alienating Latino voters who favored him heavily in 2008. Some analysts say the issue could affect the electoral results in key swing states.
Lost in Detention is a FRONTLINE co-production with the American University School of Communication’s Investigative Reporting Workshop. The producers are Rick Young, Margaret Ebrahim and Catherine Rentz. The writer and director is Rick Young. The correspondent is Maria Hinojosa. The reporter is Andrew Becker of the Center for Investigative Reporting. The executive producer of special projects for FRONTLINE is Michael Sullivan. The series senior producer of FRONTLINE is Raney Aronson-Rath. The executive producer of FRONTLINE is David Fanning.
FRONTLINE is produced by WGBH Boston and is broadcast nationwide on PBS. Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support of PBS viewers and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Major funding for FRONTLINE is provided by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and by Reva and David Logan. Additional funding is provided by the Park Foundation and by the FRONTLINE Journalism Fund. Special thanks to the Carnegie Corporation of New York for providing funding for some original reporting on this topic. FRONTLINE is closed-captioned for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers by the Media Access Group at WGBH. FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of the WGBH Educational Foundation.
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NEXT ON FRONTLINEOutlawed in PakistanMay 28th | <urn:uuid:39e27114-7558-4db8-9981-21ab285f87ac> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/race-multicultural/lost-in-detention/press-release-4/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368698924319/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516100844-00031-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96135 | 1,440 | 1.695313 | 2 |
Curly Seckler (born John Ray Sechler) was best known as the mandolinist and tenor for Flatt & Scruggs' Foggy Mountain Boys, a group that went down in bluegrass history for their Grammy-winning tune "Foggy Mountain Breakdown". He spent much of his career touring and recording with bluegrass legends like Jim & Jesse McReynolds, Mac Wiseman, the Sauceman Brothers, the Stanley Brothers, Charlie Monroe, and Flatt & Scruggs. When the gigs didn't pay enough, Seckler patched together a living as a postal worker and truck driver in order to support his family. Though he never quite reached the level of fame enjoyed by Flatt & Scruggs or Monroe, Seckler proved to be an important figure in his own right. His signature mandolin technique, characterized by a percussive "chop," went on to influence successive generations of mandolinists.
John Ray, the fourth child of Carrie and Calvin Sechler, was born in China Grove, NC, on Christmas Day 1919. He was dubbed "Curly" once his hair came in. The Sechlers were a musically inclined family; Seckler's father played Autoharp, fiddle, and mouth harp, and his mother played the guitar and organ. She taught Seckler and his brothers a few basic guitar chords when they were young, and Seckler learned how to sing in public school. Mr. Sechler passed away when Seckler was nine, leaving behind his wife, six boys, and five girls (three from a previous marriage). The family was strapped for cash, so Seckler and his brothers went to work in a local cotton mill as soon as they were old enough. It was during this time that Seckler picked up a secondhand five-string banjo from a local musician named Happy Trexler. Seckler and his brother Marvin started playing gigs with Trexler, picking tunes for the swimmers who frequented the musician's pond.
It wasn't long before the Sechler brothers starting playing music on their own. Seckler ditched the five-string banjo for a tenor, his brother George took up the fiddle, and his little brother Duard learned some chords on the guitar. In 1935, the four brothers got together as the Yodeling Rangers, playing at various local get-togethers and schools. Their big break came when they snagged a daily radio show on a Salisbury, NC, station, a spot that went on to be simulcast on several radio stations in the surrounding area. They changed their name to the Trail Riders a few years later, and they ranged as far and wide as West Virginia, appearing at small venues throughout the South. It was at this point that Charlie Monroe started showing up in the studio during the Trail Riders' radio broadcasts. The Monroe Brothers had just split up, and Charlie was looking for a tenor for his new project. Monroe took a liking to the 19-year-old Seckler and asked him to go on the road. Seckler was reluctant to leave his brothers, but he gave in when Monroe offered him a salary of $20 a week.
Seckler played with Monroe until 1940, at which point he went back home and joined back up with his brothers. He teamed up with Tommy Scott soon after, holding down a radio spot sponsored by Vim Herb Products. Seckler borrowed $42 from the sponsor and bought his first mandolin. He and Scott toured around the South until WWII broke out, at which point Seckler started working with Leonard Stokes. Seckler and Stokes moved to Knoxville and billed themselves as the Melody Boys. They were drafted by the U.S. Army a few months later but were released from serving due to lung problems. They moved to Columbus, OH, with their families, and Seckler got a job at the post office there.
The following decade found Seckler bouncing from group to group, moving throughout the South in order to work with acts like the Happy Valley Boys, the Smokey Mountaineers, the Sauceman Brothers, the McReynold's Brothers, and Flatt & Scruggs. Seckler met Flatt & Scruggs in the late '40s during his time in Bristol, VA, where he was working on a radio show with Mac Wiseman. Seckler worked with Flatt & Scruggs on and off over the next few years, and he finally settled down with the group once Flatt & Scruggs snagged a sponsorship from Martha White Mills. Seckler moved to Nashville with Flatt & Scruggs in 1953 and continued working with the band over the course of the next nine years. Flatt & Scruggs became members of the Grand Ole Opry in 1956, and they toured all over the South on the strength of their newfound stardom. The group recorded the majority of what would become their most well known material while Seckler was in the band, including 1949's "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" (a track that went on to be included on the soundtrack of 1967's Bonnie & Clyde) and 1957's Foggy Mountain Jamboree (an album that would later be considered canonical by a large number of music critics). When all was said and done, Seckler ended up recording 138 songs with the group, including "Roll In My Sweet Baby's Arms" and "Salty Dog Blues."
Seckler left the group in 1962 and took up trucking. Though he spent the majority of his time driving trucks and supporting his family, he managed to play at various bluegrass festivals over the next few years. County Records offered Seckler a record deal in 1971, and Seckler's first solo album, Curly Seckler Sings Again, was released later that year; he adopted the "Seckler" spelling of his last name beginning with this recording in a bid to prevent mispronunciation. He joined back up with Lester Flatt in 1973 as the tenor for the Nashville Grass. Flatt's health declined over the next six years, and Seckler took over the Nashville Grass when Flatt passed away in the spring of 1979. No Doubt About It, the first album released by Curly Seckler & the Nashville Grass, was released a few months later. Willis Spears joined the group in 1981, and the Nashville Grass, led by Seckler and Spears, continued recording albums and playing shows for the next 13 years. Seckler & the Nashville Grass finally retired in 1994.
Seckler continued to make appearances and recordings here and there over the course of the next decade. He released a solo album, 60 Years of Bluegrass With My Friends, the year after he left the Nashville Grass, and he went on to receive a Distinguished Achievement Award from the IBMA two years later. He was inducted into the IBMA Hall of Honor in 2004. Seckler released his first new album in a decade, Down in Caroline, a year later; it was accompanied by an expanded reissue of his first album, That Old Book of Mine. Another full-length, Bluegrass, Don't You Know, followed in 2006. ~ Margaret Reges, Rovi | <urn:uuid:a48ac334-dfd9-45cf-8265-4144e346d90e> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cmt.com/artists/curly-seckler/biography | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368702448584/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516110728-00030-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.988437 | 1,522 | 1.765625 | 2 |
THE Baillieu government has not issued any truancy fines to parents whose children missed school without a good excuse, despite last year announcing a crackdown on absenteeism.
Education Minister Martin Dixon said in June he would introduce tougher laws to make it easier to fine parents without the need to go through the courts.
Under laws introduced in 2006 that have never been enforced, parents can be fined $140.84 for every day their child wags school without a valid reason. The Coalition has repeatedly insisted it would apply the penalties, despite Parents Victoria and the Australian Education Union warning the fines were punitive and would put further pressure on vulnerable students.
''We think it's very important for children to be at school as much as possible and in some cases parents might be fined,'' Mr Dixon said on the ABC last year.
He said he hoped to have new legislation before Parliament by the end of 2012 to make it easier to penalise repeat offenders. There is still no sign of it, however, and seven years after the former Labor government introduced the truancy penalty under the Education and Training Reform Act 2006 not a single fine has been issued.
When in opposition, Mr Dixon lambasted the former government for being ''too incompetent and lazy'' to enforce the truancy laws.
''Under Labor's soft approach to school discipline, no fines have been issued to the minority of parents who allow their children to miss school and miss out on an education,'' Mr Dixon said in June 2010.
This week a spokesman for Mr Dixon said the government was continuing to refine legislative options to address the ''absurd situation'' left by the former Labor government, where any parent subjected to that part of the act would have to be taken through a full court proceeding.
Parents Victoria executive officer Gail McHardy was relieved no fines had been issued: ''I'd be appalled if any government did it.''
She said threatening families with penalties for absenteeism caused further problems and did nothing to create a supportive environment for students to return to school.
''The government wants to portray this as: 'We want discipline back in schools' [but] it targets people who are the most vulnerable and disadvantaged and puts them in the spotlight rather than being supportive and getting them back on track.''
Ms McHardy said the government should focus on providing more welfare staff in schools to help families.
Opposition education spokesman James Merlino said: ''Since taking office the Baillieu government has in fact cut programs, like the Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning [VCAL] and School Focus Youth Funding, that actually keep at-risk kids engaged and involved in school.'' | <urn:uuid:dab610c8-6f52-4097-a2d9-b0a096c16afe> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.examiner.com.au/story/1237598/not-one-fine-issued-for-truancy/?cs=24 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696383156/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092623-00004-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.977839 | 532 | 1.578125 | 2 |
A North Augusta mother wants to change divorce laws in South Carolina.
Karyn Young, who now goes by her maiden name Grace, is the mother of two young boys who were killed by their father.
Authorities say Terry Young drowned his two boys and then shot himself.
Grace and Young were in the middle of a divorce. Current law requires a couple be separated for one year before the divorce is final.
Now one representative from our area wants to change that, and wonders if the young boys would still be alive today if the law had been different.
"Ms. Young and I feel like if…she had been able to get a divorce earlier, this situation…[would] have been a lot better in long run," says Don Smith, Republican representative for South Carolina House District 83.
Right now, the only grounds for immediate divorce are desertion, infidelity, and physical cruelty. Rep. Smith wants to add mental cruelty.
"That would be what I consider mental abuse if you would. It has nothing to do with physical abuse itself, but the fact that you are perhaps threatened, intimidated or coerced into doing things you don't want to do."
Rep. Smith says Karyn Grace approached him about changing the current South Carolina law.
The bill would be named after her boys.
"Ms. Young feels that would be a good idea, she actually suggested that and we all concur that it would be a great idea," says Rep. Smith.
"Ms. Young is wanting to do this not for anything that happened with her boys, not to gain any spite or anything of that nature, but she simply is trying to set a trail so that this same type of thing won't happen again. Maybe the next family won't have to go through what she's gone through."
Representative Smith will meet with South Carolina governor Mark Sanford in a couple of weeks to talk about the proposed bill.
He hopes to have it passed by the end of this legislative session at the beginning of June. | <urn:uuid:244aac10-7c24-4d8e-9bb8-06f0e50e9587> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.wrdw.com/home/headlines/2377286.html?site=full | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368697974692/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516095254-00014-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.98339 | 413 | 1.5 | 2 |
Tim Smith, an early innovators of shareowner activism in the 1970s, analyzes this year’s proxy season. Smith was head of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility. ICCR practically invented the process of filing shareholder resolutions at companies they invest in raising concern around the environmental, society, and governance — now known as ESG. For years, he attended companies’ general meetings during proxy season when investors vote on shareholder resolutions.
In the early 2000s, when Sea Change Co-Host Bill Baue wrote for SocialFunds.com, he often interviewed Smith, who chaired the Social Investment Forum, the socially responsible investing trade association. Smith remains active in shareowner activism as senior vice president of the ESG group at Walden Asset Management in Boston. Baue caught up with Smith earlier this week in New York City at the Responsible Investing Forum. There, Smith discussed the current batch of shareholder resolutions coming to vote this proxy season. In particular, he discussed a resolution Walden filed at State Street, a Boston-based bank, to review its proxy voting record and guidelines. The resolution was sparked in part by a report Baue co-authored in 2008 for Ceres characterizing State Street as “schizophrenic” for promoting some of its investment products that address climate change but voting against every single climate change resolution in all its holdings. Smith is perplexed at the no-action letter State Street sent to the US Securities and Exchange Commission requesting permission to omit the resolution from its proxy ballot this year.
Disclosure: Sea Change Media is producing podcasts for ICCR.
If you found this post interesting, you might want to explore these topics also:
Climate Change, interfaith center on corporate responsibility, securities and exchange commission, Shareholder Engagement, shareholder resolutions, shareowner activism, Sustainable Public Policy | <urn:uuid:8dfba4f4-385d-4c75-b706-c7ab3460cc27> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.cchange.net/2009/01/14/news-analysis-tim-smith-shareowner-activism/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368705195219/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516115315-00025-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.948984 | 373 | 1.523438 | 2 |
Here’s a serendipitous find from out of today’s wanderings in Die Zeit: Viewers of the new film “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” could find themselves being viewed at certain movie theaters in Germany. “But it’s dark in there during the show!” you might object. No problem: the one or more people down off to the side of the movie-screen (usually private security firm employees) will be using night-vision devices to keep tabs on the audience. It’s not anything like over-passionate canoodling they’re there to stamp out (or for that matter people talking on mobile telephones in the middle of the showing – damn!); it’s those who have brought camcorders or similar devices along and are trying to record the film.
As you could imagine, it’s films that have just been released to theaters that are particular candidates for this treatment, and Die Zeit further notes that this is by no means a new measure, but has been used at least since back in 2005. This time, though, a powerful coalition of Warner Bros., the Society for Prosecuting Copyright Violations (in German, the GVU), the Federation of German Movie Theaters, and the Union of Film Distributors stand behind it; in response to customer complaints, one movie theater-owner could only plead “If we don’t allow it [the night-vision surveillance], we would never get any more films from Warner.” Nonetheless, officials from the Data Privacy Office of Sachsen-Anhalt (one of the federal German states where this practice has been going on) are now investigating whether Warner Bros., by insisting this way, has violated the law. | <urn:uuid:c49f25f2-b9ed-478a-b7b5-8ee5f8b29e37> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.eurosavant.com/tag/harry-potter/ | 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 | 0.950516 | 369 | 1.75 | 2 |
Graphic designers come in all shapes and sizes, freelancers, large design agencies; designers that have just left college and designers with decades of experience. Choosing the right type of designer will play a big part in you getting the right finished result for your project.
You may have a brochure that needs to be re-designed, a banner for an exhibition, maybe it is much larger; an advertising campaign that needs some seriously creative ‘outside the box’ thinking – how do you choose the right designer?
Who do you use for the project?
Are All Graphic Designers The Same?
No, not all graphic designers are the same. All are different, with different design skills, industry experience and creative flair. Some graphic designers focus on packaging, some on brochures, some on outdoor advertising etc. Some designers focus on different ‘themes’ of design such as artwork, industrial, nature, landscape etc. Depending on the sort of project that you have would determine the sort of designer that you need to talk to.
Image credit: Stéphane Giner
Is a Local Graphic Designer Better?
Well, let’s reverse the question; would you be happy working with a graphic designer that is a 4-hour drive away? Or even a plane ride away? What happens if you want to meet up and chat over a new project? The phone is great, and e-mail is also good; however as only 10% of communication is verbal then some points may be missed if the contact is not face to face.
Well, it does depend; some companies are very happy to work with graphic designers that they never see, maybe the graphic designer is in another country. Some businesses will only work with a graphic designer that is in the same town – as they crave that personal contact.
There is a big benefit in having that face to face contact with a graphic designer – as you can both look at and discuss the project in a focused manner. If you deal over the phone/e-mail the designer may be multi tasking your project with others (and not giving yours the 100% focus that is needed).
Long Term or One Off
Depending on what sort of project you are considering, would have an impact on what sort of graphic designer that you choose to work with.
If you have a one off project that is not going to require any follow up, then location may not be as much of a governing factor when it comes to building a relationship and making the project clear to the designer. An example could be a one off brochure or poster – a project that is not going to have repeat work.
If you have a number of projects that do require a certain level of understanding, market research and design synergy, then a meeting would certainly be helpful in conveying this to the designer. An example could be an advertising campaign, which may require continuity with the designs adapting them gradually throughout the campaign to communicate a subtle message.
This then follows on to something else, which also plays a factor in the selection process:
Experience – Does the graphic designer know your product/market/industry?
If you are looking for a design partner (to work on a long term project/campaign), then this will be a factor that will play a key role in how effective the finished result will be – and what results will stem from it.
If you have an important advertising campaign, or a corporate brochure; then having the right design and text is crucial if it is going to prompt the right response.
Designs that work well in one industry may not work well in another; equally the content has to be targeted to specific industry sectors. This can only be done by having experience and knowledge of how that market place works.
Price – Not always the be all and end all.
There is no getting away from it, price is an important factor and all companies are looking to save money where possible.
No-one likes paying too much for something; however quality does come at a cost. Top businesses have great designs due to using top designers. Indeed they may have paid a premium but they did get a great end result.
It is possible to get a great deal, however the problem with getting a cheap design, is that it can look cheap.
We all know that you do get what you pay for, so it is good to compare prices, to ensure that you are not overpaying (but choosing a designer based solely on price is unwise).
I hope that this article has challenged you to think hard about the sort of graphic designer that you choose to work with. There are literary hundreds of thousands of graphic designers around, thousands of good ones, hundreds of great ones, but not many that would be spot on for your project.
This in mind I have collected a few graphic designers that may well be of interest, designers that are highly creative and popular for their creative flair, both large and small, individual or agency:
Siegel+Gale is an international design and branding company that works with some of the worlds top brands offering design services from Europe, Middle East, Asia & USA
The Partners is a design agency with offices in New York and London; they work with a varied list of global brands
Mark is a graphic designer based in Cardiff in the UK; his agency works with clients from all around the world in the areas of graphic and website design.
Landor is a global design and branding company with a history going back decades. Landor has 21 offices in 16 countries and work with some of the world’s most famous brands
Just Creative Design is run by Jacob Cass in Sydney Australia; David has an outstanding reputation and has won many design awards. David works internationally for clients around the world.
Go Media is a creative agency based in Cleveland (USA); a small yet highly creative design agency working with a range of smaller clients.
Veerle Pieters is a Belgian graphic designer based in Bruges (Belgium). Veerle is an international designer offering design services and speaking around the world at events about design related topics.
David is a graphic designers based in Northern Ireland but works for clients all around the world (including many blue chip companies in the US, UK and Japan).
Cameron is a graphic designer from Florida (USA) who also acts as a guest speaker at design events and is a published author.
Agent 8 Design are a bespoke design studio based in the South of England working with a wide cross section of industries within the UK.
300 million is an award winning design and branding agency based in central London (UK); they have a varied client list of prestigious UK clients.
Working with someone local is always good – as it does bring the benefit of being able to build a relationship (and relationships are key in building good business links). Choosing a graphic designer based on their skills and experience is probably more important, as the finished product is likely to be superior and to get the results that you are hoping for. | <urn:uuid:ef93ad38-abb7-406a-839f-888396c9ffd0> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.onextrapixel.com/2011/06/30/tips-for-choosing-a-graphic-designer/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368704132298/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516113532-00008-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.970104 | 1,437 | 1.578125 | 2 |
There are two articles in the Times this week about cross-party marriage — this Modern Love column, and this piece by K.J. Dell’Antonia. Both women are married to men with opposite political views. It’s not obvious from either post who’s the Democrat and who’s the Republican in each relationship, but K.J. (of whom I am a huge fan) drops some hints that she’s probably the Obama supporter in her marriage. Both women conclude that what’s actually important in a marriage is love and mutual respect, and that while political differences are challenging, shared fundamental values are what matter most. And in an increasingly politically polarized country, it’s hard to write the other side off as stupid or heartless when “the other side” is sitting across the dinner table from you. Both women emphasize that they share end political goals with their husbands — expanding health care access, improving the economy — they just disagree about how to get there. Cross-party marriages, K.J. says, are good in part because they model bipartisanship and compromise, which are two virtues our country hungers for.
But I think that’s kind of bullshit.
Obviously people can marry whoever they want, and this is just, like, my opinion man. But don’t marry someone who votes Republican. Don’t even sex someone who votes Republican. Why? Because the Republican party is hostile to women’s humanity. The Republican party is hostile to women having the most fundamental rights to their own bodies. The Republican party is hostile to gay people even existing, let alone enjoying the same rights and privileges as straight citizens. The Republican party campaigns on racism.
Don’t sleep with that guy.
This isn’t “just” politics. This is real peoples’ bodies and real peoples’ rights and real peoples’ lives. It’s easy to forget that, I suspect, when you’re a member of a class who isn’t constantly under attack, and whose body isn’t politicized and fought over as if you were an “issue,” like tax reform, and not bones and skin and blood and breath. Even if someone is socially liberal but fiscally conservative, they’re making a choice — a choice to put their own financial self-interest over the very bones and skin and blood and breath of more than half the population. They’re saying, “My views on taxes and economics are more fundamentally important than your basic right to be treated like a human being.”
And that’s bullshit. That’s not someone I would marry. That’s not someone I would let raise my kids. That’s not a view I would shrug off as “just different” than my own.
Judgmental? Hell yeah. Are there plenty of cross-party marriages and relationships that work? Yeah. And that’s fine — to each their own. But I maintain that any dude who doesn’t think you’re entitled to your own body and a full set of rights — who doesn’t think that all people are entitled to their own bodies and to equal rights — isn’t a person who will ever fully respect you, and isn’t a person who you should be with. | <urn:uuid:0df91447-fb00-439a-a089-688abd17d94f> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2012/11/04/sleeping-with-the-political-enemy/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00038-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.96304 | 711 | 1.757813 | 2 |
Shopping is an extremely expensive form of entertainment.
If you go out shopping simply because you can’t think of something else to do, you’re willingly putting yourself in an environment that’s designed to extract money from your pocket. They use clever displays, sights, sounds, smells, demonstrations, and countless other techniques to get you to buy something. Stores exist to make money and they’re very effective at it – if they weren’t, they wouldn’t remain in business.
Think back and ask yourself how many times you’ve walked into a store without any real purpose in mind and walked out with an item. You went in there without any needs or any real intent to buy, yet you walked out of that store with something you didn’t need but with a lighter wallet.
The first step you can take toward getting your spending under control is to let go of the idea of shopping as entertainment.
Here are a few simple rules to follow if you want to get your unnecessary spending under control.
First, never enter a store of any kind without either a shopping list or one specific item in mind to buy. If you’re going into a store without one of those things, don’t go in. Don’t. If you have to, go out to your car and write a shopping list before you go into the store.
Second, once you’re in the store, buy nothing other than the items on your list. (Don’t add items, either.) Stick to that list, no matter what.
Sure, you might see a great sale on some item you must have. So what? If it was a need, it would be on your list. Let it go.
Sure, you might discover some item that’s just perfect for you or would make a perfect gift. Again, so what?
If an item seems really compelling to you, take note of it. Go home, research it a little, and then add it to your list for the next time you shop there.
Those two steps keep you from shopping for the pure entertainment of it. Shopping isn’t entertainment. It’s a way of either acquiring things you need or losing the money you’ve worked so hard for.
Bored? Want to shop? Focus on finding a hobby instead, one that doesn’t drain your wallet.
Don’t “window shop,” either, unless you truly have no way to buy the items. Leave your credit cards at home if you intend to window shop and stick with just a small amount of cash in your wallet. Leave your cards in the car if need be.
Abandon shopping as a form of entertainment and find something else. Your financial life will be all the better for it.
This post is part of a yearlong series called “365 Ways to Live Cheap (Revisited),” in which I’m revisiting the entries from my book “365 Ways to Live Cheap,” which is available at Amazon and at bookstores everywhere. | <urn:uuid:018c999a-ca75-4bc2-8864-038f6cb46863> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2012/10/29/dont-shop-for-entertainments-sake-302365/ | 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 | 0.946754 | 650 | 1.59375 | 2 |
I would like to introduce to you a whole new twist to fashion in modern day, and that is Armoir Fashion. Firstly, I’d like to introduce you the very talented and founder of Armoir and his name is Sevag Haroutunian. He is Armenian and is raised in Toronto, Canada who is a young and captivating stylist with incredible talent of the art of Fashion. His flavour of fashion is completely fabulous with so many colourful and fresh ideas and adds spice to the studio with his creative thoughts and wisdom which bring his creations to life and inspire many people with his incredible talent. in history his own people were leather masters thousands of years ago, forging the world’s first shoe 3000 years ago out of leather.
Each piece is carefully hand crafted out of cowhide leather and the masters of art are selected with fine designs of historical and ancient manuscripts bringing it to life in modern day fashion. It is made for your comfort each unique piece is hand sanded and softened to avoid irritation and rashes to your skin. It is handmade in the Armenian Highlands of ancient origin and civilization. Each hand crafted material is embossed in unique and different ways and different styles to fit your needs and to what you are interested in.
The return of leather is trending and its designs are compelling, beautiful, and bringing history back to life with these beautiful creations.
*(credit to Armoir)The history of leather work in Armenia is known exclusively through bindings of manuscripts. The practice of protecting a manuscript with boards covered with leather goes back to the very invention of the codex in the first Christian centuries. Before that books were in the form of scrolls or continuous rolls of papyrus. The earliest preserved Armenian leather bindings are from the eleventh century; the earliest binder’s colophons are from the tenth-eleventh centuries. In this period bookbinding had become a specialized and highly developed art in medieval Armenia. Elaborately decorated bindings followed the artistic fashion of the time, for instance borrowing designs used for the ornamentation of memorial cross stones or khach’k'ars. A large variety of geometric forms was used, and later, floral as well as the traditional braided bands were employed. Also typically, Armenian was the affixing of metal studs, often silver, to outline a design. As in all other areas of Armenian art, leather bindings differ from region to region and century to century, but they share the characteristics mentioned above and thereby belong to a single recognizable family.*
*its Peerless collections vary in sizes and shades, Highlighting the human touch in each art piece*
These unique collections can be found in stores in Ontario, Canada in Ma zone, Dana Jordan and Art Gallery of Ontario.
To see visuals, to obtain more information and its beauty please click on this link http://www.armoir.ca
So take and wear a part of history with you today to share with family and friends. Enjoy the masterpiece and when you wear it, I guarantee you will enjoy it and it will catch a lot of eyes and intrigue those who see this beautiful fine art of fashion of Armoir. | <urn:uuid:b4548a30-a51c-4fd9-b6f4-c129273b2050> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://talinorfali.wordpress.com/tag/fashion/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368703682988/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516112802-00003-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.966934 | 644 | 1.726563 | 2 |
This is a subject that would take some time to research. Under the pines is an especially difficult area. Most people I know who've been successful have turned to ground covers such as vinca. Hostas could be OK, too, depending on whether you get any sun at all. If you have sun, some long-blooming perennials that look good in drifts include rudbekia (black-eyed Susan), But off the top of my mind, I'd suggest rudbekia (black-eyed Susan), echinecea (cone-flower; there are lots of different colors now), pygelius (cape fuchsia), hardy fuchsia, gaura and hardy geranium (the true geranium) for the front of the border.
My suggestion, if you can afford it, is to hire a garden designer for a one-hour consultation. Places like Dennis' 7 Dees or Teufel's probably have this service. For sure, you can find someone at the website of the Association of Northwest Landscape Designers: http://www.anld.com/
There is a directory of members, their specialties and contact numbers.
Nurseries should also be able to make suggestions.
>>> "Mike Hatley"
Our daughter, a photographer, recently moved into an old home. She has a
large back yard with 4-5 foot borders and NO plants. Some areas have
scattered large pine trees (anyone need needles). I am looking for colorful
perennials with some height that "drift" well. I would like colorful areas
all summer, as she wants to use the yard for family portraits. I have
offered my help (we have an acre full of flowers and shrubs). I am starting
with hundreds of bulbs. Can you give me some ideas? I am a faithful HFNW
Thank you so much, | <urn:uuid:41b291a0-d4a8-42b2-945d-a902ca93f97b> | CC-MAIN-2013-20 | http://blog.oregonlive.com/kympokorny/2007/09/longblooming_perennials_for_sh.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368709037764/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516125717-00019-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz | en | 0.951414 | 396 | 1.65625 | 2 |
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