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I'm not sure how long this has been posted on the foundation's website but it is a pretty good overview of the 'Big Ideas' FSU is working on as part of the billion dollar campaign. I'm sure that once the campaign enters it's public phase, these ideas will be more detailed. I'd love to see a short YouTube video for each with pretty pictures, flashy lights, you know...the whole shebang.
The best bet for FSU to gain headway as an academically strong university is to start tackling nationally relevant issues.
I am happy to see that they are linking leadership, business, and STEM together within this initiative.
It's going to be VERY crucial at the national level, within the next couple of months, that they tout these "foci".
Sure, the "means" (money) for supporting the listed activities is a concern.
FSU must show it can be self-sustainable in funding these efforts.
I think they won't need the flashy lights or pretty pictures if they can show it AT LEAST makes sense to support these activities in the current economic climate. (Which isn't really hard to do, IMHO)
6/7 12:17 PM | IP: Logged
Here is a very nice booklet that will be used for the billion dollar campaign. Plenty of info to chew on.
I think there is something for everyone to support so watch these closely as we move into the public phase of the campaign, probably sometime in the new year. And be ready to open your address books and wallets.
What do you like best? What do you think should be changed or re-focused?
This post was edited on 12/1 1:12 AM by epiphany10
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At a technical level GreenNet members operate as a network of ‘client’ computers all connected to a central server that lets them communicate with each other, and prompt actions in different points on the network.
But the tag cloud below gives a more interesting perspective on the voices and issues that are connected through the services we provide. Click on the tags to journey through the network of resources, projects, stories and campaigns from throughout the GreenNet community of people working for peace, the environment, gender equality and human rights. You’ll find alternative news headlines from the archives as well as interactive spaces to post events and job vacancies.
Alternatively, if you know the name of the organisation you’re looking for, you can browse through the full alphabetical list of members
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Cynthia loves doing genealogy research because, "Genealogy is discovering the decades I should have been born in." Cynthia got started in genealogy because her husband’s family has such an interesting past. She wanted to discover more and more of this family’s history. Her most exciting find was with her ancestor, William Shaw. Family lore said that William was a doctor. He supposedly was killed when he and his horse were struck by lightning. Using our resource books, Abstracts from the Perryville Weekly Union and the Perry County Sun newspapers, Cynthia discovered that William was a doctor who was "wholly uneducated, but possessed quite a fund of practical knowledge, and did considerable practice." Corroborating this family story was a definite high point in her genealogy research.
Cynthia loves searching for answers using the great print resources (books) here at the Midwest Genealogy Center. Her favorite MCPL database is Heritage Quest (http://www.heritagequestonline.com/hqoweb/library/do/index). Using the advanced search, she has been able to narrow her search parameters, which has helped her find some elusive ancestors.
Another love of Cynthia’s is searching the web. She often recommends helpful genealogy websites to fellow staff members. One of her most recent finds is an animated atlas of American History (http://www.animatedatlas.com/index.html). Cynthia loves the historical timeline on this website because it breaks history into categories and color codes these categories. This is an easy to use website. “The video, Growth of a Nation, is definitely worth the ten minutes it will take you to view!”
Charlotte M. & Cynthia S.
Midwest Genealogy Center
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At 22, Billy Merrell is the youngest author to date published by the Push Imprint of Scholastic Inc. Merrell, who grew up in Jacksonville, Florida, began writing poetry around eighth grade. He had a better grasp of rhyme and meter than the other students in his classes, and as a result, the teacher began giving him more challenging poetry assignments rather than less expressive work. It wasn’t until his sophomore year of high school that Merrell began to write about his own feelings, and recognized writing poetry as a liberating activity.
Merrell is recent graduate of the University of Florida with a B.A. in English. One summer earlier in his college career, Merrell was hired as the first PUSH Writing Intern. During this summer internship, Merrell came to New York City and began work on his first book. The culmination of his work with PUSH is talking in the dark, a memoir composed of poetry that documents a story of growing up, coming out and exploring love. As a gay man himself, Merrell sought to write a book that he felt could have been of use to him as a teenage boy coming out. It is “an affecting memoir told in verse, this work launches a promising young poet..., [Merrell’s] sophisticated verse and compelling story will capture attention as it stirs compassion.” —School Library Journal
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Governor proposes merit pay for educators
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced this morning a special legislative session focusing on education that he hopes will establish merit pay for teachers, allow students at low-performing schools to transfer to other campuses and use data to track students and educators.
The governor also wants the legislature to abolish a law that bars the use of student test scores in teacher evaluations. Under federal guidelines, states that prohibit the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers cannot apply for $4.35 billion in education stimulus money known as Race to the Top funding.
Some California educational leaders have said federal officials are misinterpreting state law, but Schwarzenegger vowed to do everything necessary to make sure California qualifies for the federal funding.
"This is an incredible opportunity for our students and our schools," he said at a press conference in Sacramento.
Not all of Schwarzenegger's proposals apparently would have to be passed by the Legislature to be implemented, but the governor said he hoped state lawmakers could finish their work by early October so the state could meet the deadline to apply for federal funds.
Several other states, including Illinois and Indiana, have changed their laws or policies to qualify for Race to the Top funding.
The announcement could kick off a contentious fight with the state's powerful teachers unions. Union leaders have already said they are against a state-wide merit pay system and using test score data to evaluate educators.
The reforms could also be difficult to implement.
"They are absolutely sweeping," said Brad Strong, education director for Children Now, a national advocacy group. "But there are political realities and logistical issues ... We need substantially more resources for these to really take hold and be effective. Unless that's part of the conversation, the state will be hard pressed to make much progress."
-- Jason Song and Jason Felch
Photo: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Credit: Bob Chamberlin / Los Angeles Times
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The latest European bailout is blowing up.
Two days after the European Union revealed a €10 billion rescue for Cyprus, the tiny island nation said its banks would not reopen at least until Thursday to give it more time to win the backing of parliament for a controversial tax on deposits.
The unprecedented tax on bank deposits led to a run on cash machines in Cyprus over the weekend. It also spooked investors, who feared that other weak eurozone states could eventually be forced down the same path, despite EU statements to the contrary.
Shares across the region fell Monday, and banks were hit particularly hard. The prices of government bonds across southern Europe also fell, pushing up yields. There were no signs of bank runs in other European countries, including Italy and Spain.
"The contagion from Cyprus is fairly limited but there is a tail risk that this measure could backfire," wrote Berenberg Bank analysts in a note.
As part of the plan to rescue Cyprus' outsized banking sector and head off national default, the EU said deposits of more than €100,000 would be subject to a one-off levy of 9.9%. Smaller depositors would be subject to a levy of 6.75%.
It was the first time that the EU has insisted on such terms for bank depositors as part of a bailout. The EU's bailouts of other nations, such as Greece, have been accompanied by strict budget restrictions and led to losses for bond holders and shareholders.
Parliament had been due to vote on the plan Monday -- a bank holiday in Cyprus -- with the tax due to take effect Tuesday. But officials were working on changes to the proposals to force richer savers to bear a bigger share of the cost, reducing the burden on those with less than €100,000 in deposits.
The speaker of the parliament confirmed that the debate had been delayed until Tuesday, with a vote tentatively scheduled for midday ET.
After an emergency meeting on Monday, eurozone officials generally stuck to their guns. The reform plan approved on Saturday "is the best guarantee for a more prosperous future for Cyprus and its citizens," EU officials said.
The EU officials also said they would endorse a change to the original bailout plan that shielded small bank customers more than the proposal.
Either way, analysts said the levy set a dangerous precedent and could undermine depositors' belief that their savings are safe.
"The Cyprus deal may prompt Europeans to question that," wrote financial markets analyst and blogger Louise Cooper. "A fundamental safeguard to Europe's banking industry has been compromised for a tiny country costing 10-20 billion euros to bailout -- not a good trade."
The bailout, while small compared to the emergency loans supporting other troubled European nations like Greece, represents more than half the size of the €18 billion Cyprus economy. Cyprus is the third smallest economy in the eurozone, bigger only than Malta and Estonia.
The problem is its banking sector, which is several times the size of the economy. The country made a formal request for help last June after its banks were decimated by losses on Greek debt -- losses that caused lending to stall and sent the economy into a deep recession.
Negotiations on a bailout stalled last year after a previous government objected to the conditions that international lenders were looking to attach. They restarted following the election of President Nicos Anastasiades last month.
EU concerns about money laundering also hampered progress on a bailout. Cypriot banks have large volumes of international deposits, with Russian businesses believed to hold about $19 billion, according to ratings agency Moody's. As part of the bailout deal, Cyprus has agreed to an international anti-money laundering audit.
Russia has come to Cyprus' aid in the past, providing a €2.5 billion loan in 2011 to shore up government finances, but its participation in the new rescue was looking uncertain Monday after President Vladimir Putin attacked the tax on bank deposits.
"If such a decision was made, it would be unfair, unprofessional and dangerous," Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quoted as saying.
In addition, a finance ministry spokesman said Russia was reviewing its position after not being consulted on the decision to impose the levy.
The International Monetary Fund was expected to contribute to the deal as it has in others. Christine Lagarde, the fund's managing director, said Saturday that she supports the terms and would recommend that the IMF help provide financing for it.
In addition to the tax on bank deposits, other conditions for the bailout loans include an overhaul of the financial sector and an increase in corporate taxes.
Cyprus is the fourth of 17 eurozone states to be granted a bailout by its EU partners and the IMF, after Greece, Ireland and Portugal. Spain has been given EU assistance to rescue its banks, but has so far avoided asking for a full sovereign bailout.
-- CNN's Elinda Labropoulou and Charlie Charalambous contributed to this article.
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Grab your car keys and head to Pasadena. This is a good day to visit Caltech and get on the waiting list for seats to this afternoon's public lecture by Richard Dawkins, who is at once one of the most revered and despised scientists of our time.
Dawkins is the evolutionary biologist who wrote such acclaimed books as "The Selfish Gene" and "The Blind Watchmaker." He's also widely known for trumpeting the role of science and rationalism while savaging people's beliefs in religion.
HEATED WORDS: Richard Dawkins' book "The God Delusion" has raised tensions.
We want to hear from you
Dawkins' speech – and an ongoing flow of magazine pieces like the one in Wired – led me to wonder what Orange County Register readers think of a couple of questions. They are:
1. Do you believe that scientists are trying to undermine the public's belief in the existence of God or a higher being? If so, how and why?
2. Can a person simultaneously believe in God and in the findings of science? Are there inherent contradictions?
Please e-mail your thoughts to email@example.com. You also can reach me at 714-796-7970, or write a letter to: Gary Robbins, science editor, Orange County Register, 625 N. Grand Ave., Santa Ana, CA., 92701. Include your full name and what city you live in. If you're a member of the clergy or a scientist, please say so.
What is it?
Readers had fits identifying the person in last week's mystery photo. I received answers ranging from Fred Rogers to Robert Oppenheimer to Stanley Milgram. The correct answer came from Gene Tabatabai of Costa Mesa, who knew the photo showed Claude Shannon, the so-called father of information theory. We've shaken things up today, asking readers to identify what chemical the symbols shown here represent. The first with the right answer wins Bob Woodward's book, "State of Denial." E-mail answers to firstname.lastname@example.org
I want to know what you think about Dawkins and scientists who share his viewpoint. But more about that in a minute.
Dawkins has just published a controversial new book that will stoke the long-standing debate about whether many scientists are anti-God and anti-religion, especially those in the life sciences. The book is called "The God Delusion" and it drew a mixed reaction from Publisher's Weekly, which says in a review:
"For a scientist who criticizes religion for its intolerance, Dawkins has written a surprisingly intolerant book, full of scorn for religion and those who believe.
"But Dawkins, who gave us the selfish gene, anticipates this criticism. He says it's the scientist and humanist in him that makes him hostile to religions - fundamentalist Christianity and Islam come in for the most opprobrium - that close people's minds to scientific truth, oppress women and abuse children psychologically with the notion of eternal damnation."
Dawkins is also featured in the current issue of Wired magazine, which headlined its cover story: "The New Atheism: No Heaven. No Hell. Just Science."
The Skeptics Society persuaded Dawkins to discuss his views at 2 p.m. today in Caltech's Beckman Hall. The event is sold out. But there are usually cancellations, and this is a rare opportunity to see Dawkins. So it's worth the drive to Pasadena.
CHEMICALS AT HOME:This is the last day of National Chemistry Week. To celebrate, we're posting a "Chemicals at Home" quiz posted online by the American Chemical Society. You'll find the answers below.
1. Sodium chloride is a flavorful addition to many foods. What is the common name?
B. Baking soda
D. Lemon juice
2. Hypochlorous acid helps get the laundry white and bright. What is the common name?
C. Baking soda
3. Sodium hydrogen carbonate gives a nice lift to biscuits. What is the common name?
A. Baking soda
C. Baking power
4. Acetylsalicylic acid helps cure aches, pains, and fever. What is the common name?
Answers to chemistry quiz:1. Salt; 2. Bleach; 3. Baking soda; 4. Aspirin
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AARP last week sent a letter to Congressional leaders asking them to approve emergency one-time payments of $250 to seniors. The reasons are plain enough. The recession continues to make things tough for everyone. And, due to low inflation, seniors will not be getting a cost-of-living increase next year (and, likely, in 2011 as well) in Social Security payments. Although overall inflation is modest, healthcare costs continue to rise. This will raise insurance premiums and out-of-pocket costs for people on Medicare. The U.S. House of Representatives has already passed a measure to keep a lid on premiums for the portion of Medicare that covers doctors fees and other non-hospital expenses. But this will only address a small component of the typical senior's healthcare expenses.
[See Double-Digit Medical Expense Trend to Continue.]
AARP's pitch is to be expected from an organization based on representing the interests of older consumers. The price tag for the payments is estimated at $8 billion to $14 billion, it says, with the range presumably reflecting income and other eligibility decisions that Congress would make. In the context of a $780-billion overall stimulus program, it's a small number.
The economic recovery is very slow and modest, and appears to be occurring without creating new jobs. So, it's pretty clear there will be a growing line of people and groups making strong cases for more government help. Extended unemployment benefits? Continued subsidies for COBRA health-insurance premiums? Food stamps? Rent subsidies? They all make sense when the holes in the safety net threaten to get larger, not smaller.
"The economic security of millions of Americans, particularly retirees who have significantly less time to make up substantial 401(k) and stock market losses, has drastically changed since 2008," Cristina Martin Firvida, AARP's director of financial security, said in a statement. "It will soon be 2010 and seniors are in need of real relief as they are particularly facing the skyrocketing costs of healthcare, prescription drugs and other necessities."
The U.S. Census Bureau recently reported that seniors fared better last year than other age groups. Their incomes actually increased. Their poverty rate remained unchanged, and was the lowest among major age groups. AARP says the Census poverty measures are flawed and that older people are hurting much more than the official statistics suggest. There is an alternative measure used by the bureau that includes the cost of out-of-pocket medical expenses, which are a big cost item for seniors but much less so for other groups. Once those items are included, the poverty rate for seniors nearly doubles to about 19 percent.
A Census Bureau official says the alternative measure probably does a more accurate job of reflecting real-world poverty conditions for seniors, although he said the year-to-year gains in senior income remain an accurate reading, and thus supports the idea that the safety net has performed better for seniors than other groups. Arloc Sherman, a senior researcher and poverty expert for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, notes the alternative measures actually may paint too negative a picture of senior poverty. These measures do not, he said, reflect the fact that many seniors own their own homes and thus have lower housing costs than other groups. "All that aside, many of the elderly certainly live close to the poverty line -- whether just above or just below -- and live on tight budgets," Sherman said.
To date, there has not been an ugly intergenerational component to the economic recovery. We remain a rich country. Helping all needy groups remains a priority. But the national lifeboat is leaking, and there may just not be enough life preservers to go around.
Who should get them?
[See Poor Social Security Knowledge Has Big Costs.]
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Exposing a rift with Israel,
President Barack Obama on Sunday insisted that the United States has not "given anything away" in new talks with Iran
as he defended his continued push for a diplomatic resolution to the dispute over Tehran's nuclear ambitions.
Obama said he refused to let the talks turn into a "stalling process," but believed there was still time for diplomacy.
His assessment, delivered at the close of a Latin American summit in Colombia, came after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on
Sunday had said the US and world powers gave Tehran a "freebie"
by agreeing to hold more talks next month.
Obama shot back: "The notion that somehow we've given something away or a 'freebie' would indicate Iran has gotten something. In fact, they've got some of the toughest sanctions that they're going to be facing coming up in just a few months if they don't take advantage of these talks."
Ashton and Jalili in Istanbul (Photo: MCT)
Still, in a news conference here, Obama warned to Iran, "The clock's ticking."
Winding down his three-day trip in the port city of Cartagena, Obama also sought to offer hope for fresh start with Cuba, saying the US would welcome the communist-run island's transition to democracy. There could be an opportunity for such a shift in the coming years, Obama said.
As Obama met with Latin American leaders, negotiators from the US and five other world powers were in Turkey for a fresh round of nuclear talks with Iran.
While previous talks have done little to dissuade Iran from moving forward on its nuclear program, diplomats called the latest negotiations constructive and useful. Both sides agreed to hold more talks in Baghdad at the end of May.
On Saturday, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili said
Tehran needed to enrich uranium to 20 percent purity for peaceful purposes.
"Any right which is indicated in the Non-Proliferation Treaty should be respected," Jalili told a news conference after his country's first talks with six world powers in more than a year.
"Enrichment of uranium is one of these rights that every individual member state should benefit from and enjoy for peaceful purposes," he said.
"The next talks should be based on confidence-building measures, which would build the confidence of Iranians," Jalili said, adding an Iranian request for lifting of sanctions should be one of the issues included.
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Archive for the ‘White’ tag
Outside of the greater Detroit area, automobile production concentrated in several areas: Buffalo, New York; Auburn, Indiana; Kenosha, Wisconsin. Perhaps none of those areas, however, can lay claim to as many automobile companies as the greater Cleveland area, a metropolis known for its industrial strength. Honoring all the various Cleveland-built cars thus falls naturally to the Glenmoor Gathering of Significant Automobiles, which takes place every year in nearby Canton, Ohio.
Such Cleveland-built cars as the Peerless, White, Winton, Stearns-Knight, Chandler and Jordan will be on display September 17-19 at the Glenmoor Gathering, which this year will also feature the cars of Giotto Bizzarini, Duesenbergs and Italian superbikes. Aside from the concours and countryside tour, the weekend’s events will also include an auction by Classic Motorcar Auctions on the grounds of the Glenmoor Country Club and a panel discussion chaired by Keith Martin on various topics related to the direction of the classic car marketplace.
Tickets for the Glenmoor Gathering are $20, though children under the age of 12 are admitted free.
It appears I was mistaken when I said last week that I’d plumbed the depths of military vehicles for sale on Hemmings.com. Jeremy, our in-house web dude, located a few others, starting with this 1943 White M3A1 halftrack, for sale out of Yardley, Pennsylvania. The seller writes:
restored, top speed 45 mph, new rubber track, repainted Jan 2008, all it needs is gas and you go to war.
So whom should the buyer go to war with?
I have but one bone to pick with Keith Marvin’s article from SIA #56, April 1980: At the end, he argues that the day of the custom car was restricted only to the pre-Depression era. Not so at all, as the Internet has so solidly elucidated us over the last decade or so. One-off cars, both factory-built and eccentric-built, span automotive history, from the first horseless carriage to today. Still, Marvin highlights several unusual and noteworthy vehicles from a variety of sources.
By the way, anybody who’s been to Hershey the last few years has seen the 1936 White mentioned in the article. Are any of the others still around?
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The claim that the current Administration and their supporters trend to ‘socialism’. My co-blogger at Stones Cry Out wonders if this is an appropriate phrase and as well if the term is being abused to the point of being meaningless. Freydrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom might be read as a clarion call not specifically warning against socialism itself but a more general tendency highlighted in Chapter 2 of Chantal Delsol’s The Unlearned Lessons Of the Twentieth Century essay which I’m in the process of blogging my way through. Many of the tendencies and hopes (for change?) that the movement which propelled Mr Obama to the White House are in fact identified by Ms Delsol in her essay (and Ms Delsol being first of all a French national, a philosopher, and writing an essay that pre-dates Mr Obama’s run to the Presidency should be noted). Utopian dreams and the totalitarian consequences is the real danger. It should also be noted that many themes in this chapter resonate well this week as the abortion ethical question returns to the surface propelled by the killing of Mr Tiller.
A recurring theme of Ms Delsol’s is that the crux of the unlearned lessons lie in the continued acceptence of the fatal flawed that lie as the basis of the 20th century utopian totalitarian projects which were so very costly in human life and dignity. While we reject specifics of those projects we accept very many of their premises and therefore lie likely (easy?) prey for finding new ways to explore life in a totalitarian dystopia.
Ms Delsol begins chapter two, which is entitled The insularity of the human species.
Totalitarianism, of whatever persuasion, emerges when we get caught up in the belief that “everything is possible.” It might be worth recalling just how difficult it was to have this idea accepted, or, for instance, to remember how reluctantly the thought of Hannah Arendt was received in France. To deny that “everything is possible,” to make the postulate of unlimited possibility the cornerstone of the errors of the twentieth century, was, it was said, to equate terror and utopia, or to liken the perversities of man’s annihilation to ideals about reshaping human nature. To do this was unthinkable as long as ideological dreams were still persuasive.
Several decades of perseverant reflection, however, finally made it possible to state openly that the idea of that “everything is possible” represents the birth of the twentieth century. This little phrase, which was to reveal itself to be so terrible, essentially means two things. “Everything is possible” is a way of determining who is human: one can then arbitrarily set a boundary here or there between humans and “subhumans” and declare a particular category to be nonhuman, which is what Nazism did. “Everything is possible” is also a way of determining what it is to be human: one can then arbitrarily decree that humans can or should live without authority, without personal secrets, without family, or without gods, which is what communism did. In fact, communism ended up adding the first consequence of “everything is possible” to the second and denied the humanity of those who made no effort to become other than they were.
The essential defense against “everything is possible” is the axiomatic ontological insistence on the irreducible dignity of the human being, which must be and remain a foundational certainty. Human dignity in this context implies two important things. First that man may not be treated as a thing. This contitutes a ontological distinction between man and the rest of nature. Second, that there is therefore an essential bond between all men.
The modern secular (and many liberal deist) thought continues the project of defining man by his attributes and denying his essential axiomatic dignity. Discoveries (and the rise of scientism … see the quote excerpted Sunday), have blurred the biological and neurological differences between man and the animal world. Medical and biological capabilities have expanded our understanding of man’s development and our ability to affect this.
The Kantian was hoped would deflect the necessity of ontological axiomatic dignity. Kant argued persuasively that man deserves respect by virtue of being endowed with moral autonomy. This results however in the tempting substitution replacing “It is not man who has dignity, but man insofar as he is autonomous. [emphasis mine]” One characteristic is not sufficient to defend man. Thus the newborn, the dying, the handicapped become less than human. As our abilities at genetic screening expand, the fine tuning of our exclusion from the ‘truly human’ can narrow.
At the beginning of the twentieth century it was felt that the rise of reason and our understanding of the physical world would do away with the need for religion. But, especially inasmuch as religion provides a framework in which to base the necessary axiomatic irreducible dignity of man the reverse is true. The necessity and place for religion, instead of being done away with, is ever more needed and required as a bastion holding a multitude of totalitarian dystopias at bay.
A final note which may connect to the currently vogue resurgence of the abortion question in the light of current events.
Prudential wisdom consists precisely in acting within shadowy areas, where bearings have a tendency to disappear. but prudence is not a form of pragmatism; it is a virtue. It may dispense with overly strict principles on the condition that its eyes remain fixed upon points of reference that lie above those principles: there is an immense difference between allowing someone to die and decreeing that all the dying who have reached a certain point are no longer persons.
Dying and fetus I’d offer might be exchanged in the above.
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Why the state wants your children
“An American child who has been educated at home by her Christian mother has been ordered to attend a Government-run school so she can learn about other belief systems.
“The court conceded that the New Hampshire ten-year-old is bright, sociable and academically advanced for her age, but decided she should no longer be home schooled.
“The reason, says her mother’s attorney, is simply that the girl’s “religious beliefs are a bit too sincerely held” and need to be “mixed among other worldviews”.
She must not be allowed to develop as a Christian.
She should be taught “different points of view at a time when she must begin to critically evaluate multiple systems of belief”, the guardian ad litem argued.
The UK Government now wants the authority to check up on all home-schooled children for much the same reasons:
Some evangelical parents need monitoring by the state because they may ‘intimidate’ their children with ideas about God, sin and hell, a BBC radio host has said.
The Government’s Schools Minister replied by saying this is part of the reason for conducting a review of the rules on home education.
I believe that the main purpose of mass immigration, and especially of Muslims, is to cause friction by demanding that every religion is treated equally. It is not good enough that our society has thrived on our Judeo-Christian customs and values and that it suits most people. Everything must change to ensure ‘equality’ and children must therefore be conditioned into complying.
People living their own lives and being responsible for their own children are a danger to control-freak governments. Imagine children being raised in a faith and being taught right from wrong – the real right from wrong and not New Labour’s version. Growing up to be responsible, hardworking, decent people. How will the ‘authorities’ ever be able to monitor them properly?
If they are taught about spiritual things and to value their bodies, they might not need to go through the ’sexual health’ system that is promoted so much, which means they will be less likely to need mental health services. If they are intelligent and hardworking then they will be less likely to be dragged through the benefits system and if the family is not dysfunctional, no social workers need be involved.
This means they must be criminalised to be assessed by the State.
Our masters are terrified of Christianity because it is the complete opposite of their ‘values’. One promotes family life and the other ‘educates’ and legislates to destroy it so they can run everyone’s lives.
I wonder what the EU will do about it? Actually, I don’t think we need to wonder too much; this is the situation in Germany.
Homeschool Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) is supporting a first-of-its kind application for political asylum by a German homeschooling family. Uwe and Hannelore Romeike left their home in Bissingen, Germany to escape government persecution directed at them because they homeschool.
You have to wonder if the Nazis didn’t win the War after all.
According to Staff Attorney Michael P. Donnelly, HSLDA’s contact attorney for Germany, “German homeschoolers, of which there are few because of the persecution, are fined thousands of dollars, sent to prison or have the custody of their children taken away. Many of these families have fled Germany when threatened with the custody of their children. Some have told me that they are willing to go to jail for their beliefs if they have to, but they will not allow the state to take their children. This year alone nearly a dozen families have fled this in the face of this harsh persecution.”
All I can say is this: resist the tyranny.
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New book about high cost of a bargain, “Cheap,” lauds Wegmans
And what about those Swedish meatballs?: This provocatively titled review ("Why Ikea is as bad as Wal-Mart") of Ellen Ruppel Shell's new book, "Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture," isn't really about food, although one could argue that cheap food is the most obvious symptom of a toxic cycle of consumption. "Cheap" covers our relationship to cheap goods, and the companies (and in the case of China, whole countries) that eagerly produce them for us, and shows how our pursuit of a bargain "threatens the very nature of meaningful work, work we can take pride in and build a career on — or even at which we can just make a living." While Shell doesn't offer many solutions, according to the review, she does cite one example of a company that treats its empoloyees and the community as if they have value: the East Coast supermarket chain Wegmans, which offers job-training programs, health insurance, and retirement benefits to employees, and has long bought much of its produce from small, local farmers. (Salon)
No related posts.
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Scientists have long wondered whether infidelity can be predicted by what’s in our genes. But a new survey suggests it may come down to what’s in our garage.
In polling 3,600 people seeking or participating in extramarital affairs, Canadian company AshleyMadison.com found cheaters defy the flashy car stereotype, instead favouring less conspicuous rides. Twenty-one percent of stray husbands drive Toyotas, followed distantly by Ford (12 per cent) and Chevy (10 per cent); as for wayward wives, 22 per cent own a Honda, followed by Ford (13 per cent) and Toyota (10 per cent).
But if consumer preferences are part of the infidelity puzzle, experts say they’re just that: one piece of a byzantine picture that includes everything from biology to opportunity.
“Everybody is complex,” says Kristen Mark, a sex researcher at the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University. “And you’re not going to necessarily have somebody that carries all the (infidelity-predictive) characteristics who’s a super-cheater. It doesn’t work like that.”
Rounding out the Top 10 automakers among unfaithful North American men were Honda, BMW, Dodge, Nissan, Jeep, GMC and Mercedes; for women, Chevy, Mercedes, Nissan, Chrysler, Dodge, BMW and Volkswagen were among the most popular. On both lists, luxury brands drew a minimum 2.9 and maximum 6.6 per cent of market share.
Noel Biderman, CEO of AshleyMadison, describes his company as an accidental “sociology experiment on steroids,” having provided university researchers with infidelity insights for years.
But when it comes to explaining the commonalities between site members, he can only speculate – not least when it comes to cheaters favouring Japanese cars. (Within the general U.S. population, 2012 sales as of March show General Motors and Ford as top picks, with Toyota, Chrysler and Honda following).
“Are people predisposed to buying more reliable cars if they’re less reliable in their personal lives?” muses Biderman. “We put it to others to argue nature versus nurture.”
Indiana University’s Mark, an expert on infidelity, has yet to see any peer-reviewed research linking transportation tastes with monkey business. But she confirms that interpersonal and personality traits appear to play a role.
Among the qualities shown to predict infidelity in a monogamous relationship are: lack of overall satisfaction with the primary relationship, particularly among women; sexual dissatisfaction, particularly among men; boredom; low levels of commitment; and a peer group in which cheating is overlooked or prevalent.
Also correlated with affairs are personality traits such as being disagreeable, extroverted, highly neurotic and, in the case of men, feeling a sense of powerlessness or social isolation. Nevertheless, none of these things guarantee someone will stray.
“If you’re in a really happy relationship, you could have a whole bunch of the characteristics that predict infidelity and still not engage in infidelity,” says Mark.
Notably, U.K. company IllicitEncounters.com – which shares rival AshleyMadison’s mandate in matchmaking adulterers – found the luxury car cliche held true, with one in five members reportedly driving BMWs and the rest trending toward Audi, Mercedes, Jaguar and Land Rover.
Site spokeswoman Rosie Freeman-Jones connects the dots, noting that top-tier cars require wealth, wealth is often acquired through risk-taking, and risk-takers are more prone to cheating.
Canada’s Biderman, however, is skeptical of the numbers.
“Affluence doesn’t equal adultery,” he says, arguing that infidelity is a function of discord at home meeting opportunity away from it.
“People who do a lot of business travel and have the resources to have someone on the side will often have affairs. But make no mistake about it, affairs cross every socioeconomic class, both genders, every ethnicity. There really is nobody who’s immune.”
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One of the most piercing of all sounds emitted by government is the collective shriek of the workforce at the Nevada System of Higher Education. They claim they’re actually having to take pay cuts as a result of Nevada’s shrinking population (and tax revenue).
While someday it might be true, it doesn’t appear to be true heading into the spring of 2010.
Most everyone agrees that the professors and teaching staff are enjoying a healthy increase in their income this year. It’s the “classified” staff that’s gaining sympathy through doe-eyed looks and cooked books. As it turns out, they generally get an automatic annual pay hike that exceeds any proposed cost of furlough.
- 2009-2010 Employer Pay (employer pays 100% of retirement contribution)
- 2008-2009 Employer Pay
- 2009-2010 Employee/Employer Pay (Employee pays half of retirement contribution)
- 2008-2009 Employee/Employer Pay
- Classified Employee Informational PowerPoint: [BCN - TMCC] [UNR] [WNC]
- Archive: Recorded Furlough Informational Session at UNR
- How will the unpaid leave be calculated and affect my paycheck?
A: Your gross earnings will be reduced by either 2.3% or 4.6% depending on your election. Your base salary and retirement contributions will remain the same.
The Classified Salary step increases (the pay increase for being there an extra year, excluding increases for promotions and CPI increases) range from a low of 3.3% to a high of 4.6% per annual step. For some reason the highest paid get the biggest percentage step increases. The furlough plan reduced pay by 2.3% per year and the schedule reflects a very small pay decrease (about 0.5%).
The good news for the employees, then, is that they don’t have to work as much and their base pay is not affected; after the furlough is over pay pops right back where it was. The employees can elect to take the furlough at 2.3% a year for FY 10 and FY 11 or get full pay in FY 10 and take 4.6% furlough in FY11. So the furlough offsets most of the classified step pay increases. If someone was at the top of the salary scale, then they wouldn’t get a step increase so for those few employees there would be a small pay reduction (2.3%) to compensate for the fewer hours worked.
Secondly, as previously stated none of the tenured professors were required to take any furlough and thus saw zero pay reduction. The employee’s benefits are also not reduced, just their hours of work.
For an example, picking someone in the middle of the schedule (step 40-1) where the employer pays the full retirement: They were making $51,364.80 in 7/1/08. In 7/1/09 their salary would be $53,452.80 (having moved a step by being there another year). As a result of the furlough, they get approx. an extra hour off a week (taken as a periodic day off without pay). This would reduce the employee’s $53,453 salary by 2.3% to compensate for the time off, reducing her pay to $52,223.
The bottom line for this employee? She is making about $858 a year more than he was the previous year and had to work 2.3% less. This is not ideal, but I find it hard to see how it is some kind of tragedy – certainly not by private industry standards. The tenured profs naturally fair much better than this.
Note that this example is before the special session so it is possible (but not certain) the changes implemented by the Board of Regents following the session will result in a small pay decrease for this employee.
So while a few NSHE employees will see a very slight drop in pay in direct relation to not having to work as much, most will see an increase in pay for not having to work as much.
This is in direct contrast to the biased pablum served to us each day by our TV stations and newspapers. They see the taxpaying private companies as under-taxed and believe increases are needed to pay the public employees what they believe they are due, so they present their viewpoint as fact.
In defense of NSHE classified employees, they correctly point out that their increases over the past decade have trailed those of other government workers. Does that make them poorly treated, or their richer employees of other branches and agencies shameless pillagers of the public trough?
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Judging a Book By Its Cover – Mere Christianity by CS Lewis
Written by Gillian Ramos
I have returned! And let me tell you, this gainful employment thing has really cut into my reading time.
In all seriousness, having less time to read during the day isn’t the only reason I feel like this book took a lifetime to read. This is a book about a man’s deeply held faith, and I wanted to make sure I was reading carefully and with an open mind. As a non-religious person, it would have been easy to skim a chapter or two and decide that this was all a bunch of hooey I didn’t believe in anyway, so why bother?
But you can’t go through life like that, automatically rejecting the things you don’t agree with or understand. The truth is, even though I’m not a religious person myself, I think people have interesting things to say about their religion. I went through a phase a couple of years ago where I read a lot of writing from people who had very conflicted relationships with the faith they were raised in; some of these people were able to work through their misgivings and find a belief system that works for them, and others abandoned religion entirely.
Now, I’m more curious about how people arrived at their faith later in life, how it fits in with every other piece of information they’ve picked up along the way.
Clive Staples Lewis is best known for The Chronicles of Narnia, but also spoke and wrote frequently about his struggles with Christianity as a teenager, and his eventual return to the faith as a member of the Church of England.
Mere Christianity began as a series of radio addresses commissioned by the BBC between 1942 and 1944. The main goal of the addresses was to remind the audience that they have a great deal in common and ought to celebrate the goodness of that common ground in the face of all the hatred and violence of World War II. Lewis argues that regardless of denomination, Christians share a set of core beliefs that are meant to unite all believers; this set of core beliefs is what he labels as “mere Christianity,” with all the divisions among the denominations coming from minor philosophical differences rather than large fundamental ones.
Some years later, Lewis compiled and edited the addresses to make them more readable as essays. The final product has consistently been ranked as one of the most influential modern texts on Christianity.
When I originally came across the book, I was left with the impression that it was more about how Lewis reconciles being a Christian with being a public intellectual. Historically, there’s been this battle of either/or, with various religious organizations being at odds with science and art, so I was looking forward to reading about how these things can come together harmoniously.
I think I’m going to have to find that in some other book. In Mere Christianity, Lewis sets out to make a rational case for Christianity, applying sound Philosophy 101 logic to the tenets of the faith. This approach works early on, in explaining morality and the social contract – Lewis’ use of logic serves to show that these tenets exist across religious denominations and national borders, that good, moral people can exist anywhere you go. So far, so good. Given the historical context of the radio addresses, I think this is an important message to reinforce.
Admittedly, I don’t subscribe to the idea of some unseen being judging everything we do throughout our lives. I can get behind a social contract, though, because we see one another all the time and can hold one another accountable for our actions. See? Mr. Lewis and I have found common ground already, just with a few minor philosophical differences. This is supposed to be his point, that we can all agree on some core principles by which to govern ourselves. If you want to call those principles God-given, fine. If you don’t want to call them that, that’s fine, too.
Once Lewis gets into the specifics of what Christians believe, I start feeling like we’re on a one-way trip to WTFsville. The chapters I found flat-out odious pertained to sexual morality and marriage. In his introduction, Lewis claimed that he was going to avoid certain topics due to his lack of experience in those areas, including women taking birth control and marriage in general, having not been married himself. (Lewis was married later in life, but such was his stance at the time of publication). So, what do you suppose pops up about halfway through the book? Sex and marriage, of course!
The content of those chapters is exactly what you’d expect – that we shouldn’t be having sex and idolizing sexuality because we’re supposed to have control over our appetites (because, naturally, we don’t fetishize food and we would think it was really weird if other people did) and that the key to a successful marriage is getting over all notions of romantic love and accept that men should be the head of the household because women are too busy doing things like fretting over the children to make productive decisions.
I’m paraphrasing a little, but that’s only because we’ve all heard this shit before. What annoys me more than this shit is the fact that on one page, Lewis says he wouldn’t touch these topics with a ten foot pole…and touches them anyway. But he also has very little respect for people who spout nonsense on topics they know nothing about, even though he’s just done essentially the same thing.
From this point on, I found it hard to take the book seriously. It became less rational over time, and more like the same tired smelling-faintly-of-moral-superiority stuff we heard from Rick Santorum during the Republican primary, minus the sweater vests.
Maybe it’s a matter of this book being 60-something years old, and we’ve evolved in our thinking in that time. I would love to know if Lewis changed his antiquated views after getting married, but it’s safe to assume that he didn’t because he would have wanted a woman who held the same beliefs.
Overall, I was disappointed by this book. I felt as though the more specific Lewis got about the tenets of Christianity, the less interested he became in appealing to a non-Christian audience. There are only so many times you can say, “Feel free to skip over this part because it’ll confuse you if you’re a non-believer” and still insist that you’re being inclusive.
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Itinerary Allow four days of hiking for the 40-mile route, and spend at least one full day in Nazareth before you start. Go in spring or fall. Accommodations It’s possible to camp along the Jesus Trail, but you’ll get more out of the experience (and can carry a light pack) by staying in towns. Most guesthouses have bunkroom accommodations for as little as 100 NIS (about $25 in new Israeli shekels) per night. Guidebook/map/info Obtain everything—including lodging reservations, shuttles for you and/or gear, GPS data, and more—at jesustrail.com. Order Landis and Dintaman’s guidebook, Hiking the Jesus Trail ($25), on the site, and get a 25-percent discount by using the code "Backpacker.”
Every pilgrim trail, by definition, steers hikers to specific holy sites. And the Jesus Trail is no different when it comes to places like Cana. But it also forces you off the well-worn pilgrim’s path, into obscure parts of the Galilee where there are still discoveries to be made.
On day two, we walk through a pine forest—rare in the Mediterranean climate—to Illaniya, a Jewish farming community that’s definitely not on the Lonely Planet tour. The houses aren’t old. The cropland is not remarkably different from cropland elsewhere. But a 15-minute walk from the goat farm where we stay, on a hillside green with mallow and knee-high grass, a local woman, Esther Yankelevitch, shows us a Jewish burial cave that dates from the Roman era. It hasn’t been officially excavated, and nothing marks the entrance; it’s located on private land that belongs to a dentist. “You can see the steps leading down to a ritual bath here,” she says, pointing to a depression outside the cavelike opening. I duck my head to climb through, and descend a rocky chute into the crypt, which is dark in midafternoon. I stand up straight—the arched ceiling is high overhead—and use my headlamp to illuminate a faint menorah painted on the naked rock.
Places like these transform a hike on the Jesus Trail into a kind of treasure hunt. Elsewhere, we come upon a first-century synagogue that’s recently been found. Archaeologists’ flags on the heart-shaped columns show a dig still in progress. And across the valley from the Menorah Cave (see it by staying at the Yarok AZ Ecological Farm and asking for a guide; yarokaz.co.il), Yankelevitch points out an ancient olive press that lies half-buried in a field; you could literally trip over it. Nearby, we descend into a well with an arched roof and stone walls; it’s not as old as the olive press, but one large block, four feet long with a cross etched into it, is a recycled piece of Roman work. “No one throws away a good cut stone,” she says.
The next day, a few miles east, we follow the Jesus Trail to the remains of a Roman road hidden in plain sight, in a field that slopes up the last big hill before we get a glimpse of the Sea of Galilee. The raised roadbed, 15 feet wide and embedded with rocks, once connected the coast to the inland sea. It’s the one place on the entire route that Jesus almost certainly walked on his journey to Capernaum. Yellow mustard grows between the rocks, some of which are missing or cracked. I wonder what it was like to hike for miles on a road like this, with just thin sandals on your feet. Or nothing. It was no small request when Jesus told his apostles to go forth without so much as a staff.
After the Roman road fades, we climb through waist-high wheat, thistles, and mustard to the Horns of Hittim, a double-peaked hill about 1,000 feet high, where Saladin defeated the Crusaders in 1187. It’s a popular dayhike with locals (in fact, this is the first place we see other hikers, on day three). A singletrack trail leads up the rocky ridge to the broad, flat summit, where the view stretches to the Sea of Galilee and the Golan Heights, and we can see most of the terrain we’ve covered, as well as the terrain to come. “I didn’t know about this spot until I scouted the route for the first time,” says Landis. “I arrived here about an hour before sunset, in the fall, and everything was golden. At that moment, I knew the trail was going to be a success.”
While the marquee sites along the trail, like Sepphoris and Capernaum, are impressive, I find myself most captivated by the places in between. It’s where the scenery is the most beautiful, to be sure, and the trail most like a trail. But it’s also where you get an intimate view of the conflict that modern travelers can’t—and shouldn’t—ignore.
I’ve resided on a kibbutz with bomb shelters that had seen regular use, and I’ve picked tomatoes with Palestinians from Gaza. I’m not oblivious to the complexities of the dispute. But elsewhere in Israel, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the polarized perspectives coming out of Jerusalem and the Palestinian territories. The Galilee offers a different take.
On the descent from the Horn of Hittim, we stop at the ruins of the mosque of Hittim, where a village was located until the 1948 war. On the grounds of the crumbling mosque, an extended family has laid out a picnic. Skewers of marinated meat sizzle on a small charcoal grill. Abud, a 60-something Arab-Israeli, insists on sharing their stuffed pitas. It’s the kind of hospitality I encounter at every step, from an invite to a Sabbath dinner to the Muslim teens who offer a swig from their bottle of arak. Abud tells me that he comes here frequently to check on the mosque, in order to prevent vandalism and preserve what he can. He does this because of a shared history with the local Muslims, he says, but he himself is Christian. I ask how he feels about being uprooted by the violence following the creation of Israel.
“I live in Tiberias now, on the Sea of Galilee, and I’m happy,” he says. “My children are happy. One son volunteered for the Israeli Army.” Talk about turning the other cheek.
But while the conflict seems less intense in the Galilee, Arabs and Jews still live in separate towns, choosing separate-but-peaceful. For most, the fundamental divide is too great. “I have friends who are Arab,” one Jewish farmer tells me. “We have people on both sides who want peace. But the problem isn’t politics or land. It’s our culture, our mentality. We’re raised differently as kids.”
But along the Jesus Trail, in small ways, you can see the mistrust eroding. And it’s happening because of the trail. Exhibit A: the Fauzi Azar Inn, a 200-year-old Ottoman mansion that’s been converted into a guesthouse, and serves as info hub and launching pad for the trail. It was established by a partnership between Inon, the Jewish cofounder of the trail, and the building’s Arab owners. This type of collaboration is so rare, says Inon, that it took some time for locals to believe it was a legit business. “There were rumors I was bringing in settlers,” he says. “Then they thought it was a brothel.”
Inon and his partners are not alone. Suad and Sami Bellan, a retired Arab couple that recently opened the Cana Wedding Guesthouse, traveled to the more-established Arbel Guesthouse (in a Jewish community where we stay on night three) to get advice on their operation from owner Sara Shavit, who returned the visit. Now the two guesthouses send travelers each other’s way.
Breakthrough? It’s something, when you consider how little has changed in 2,000 years; back then, the actors were different but the fighting no less intense. “Jesus was a radical,” says Landis. “When you see how hard it is to break down cultural barriers—even in the relatively peaceful Galilee—it makes his egalitarian message even more powerful. ‘Love thy neighbor’ was revolutionary in the first century.” And still is today.
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Anosognosia and the mind-body problem (literally)
Via the NYTimes comes news of this study (Pubmed link) showing that damage to the supplementary motor cortex (see simplified diagram at bottom of post) causes a fascinating syndrome called "anosognosia" in which patients are paralyzed but persistently deny the paralysis, often coming up with elaborate confabulations to explain away why they cannot move their arm:
Dr. Anna Berti sits facing a patient whose paralyzed left arm rests in her lap next to her good right arm. "Can you raise your left arm?" Dr. Berti asks.The NYTimes does a fairly good job of explaining the theory behind why damage to the premotor cortex would create this strange perception in anosognosic patients, so I won't rehash it. (It's very interesting, so do read the article!) What I want to address is this bit:
"Yes," the patient says. The arm remains motionless. Dr. Berti tries again. "Are you raising your left arm?" she asks.
"Yes," the patient says. But the arm still does not move. ... If prodded for hours, patients will make up stories to explain their lack of action, Dr. Berti said.
One man said his motionless arm did not belong to him. When it was placed in his right visual field, he insisted it was not his. "Whose arm is it?" Dr. Berti asked.
"Yours," he said. "Are you sure?" Dr. Berti persisted. "Look here, I only have two hands."
The patient replied: "What can I say? You have three wrists. You should have three hands."
This denial, Dr. Berti said, was long thought to be purely a psychological problem. "It was a reaction to a stroke: I am paralyzed, it is so horrible, I will deny it," she said.This is a false distinction. All psychological phenomena are rooted in neurology, because the mind is the product of the brain. Now, it is meaningful to talk of some phenomena as being "higher-order" and others as "lower-order" in terms of how easily they can be explained by the biology. In this case, we could distinguish the kind of denial caused by crude brain damage (anosognosia) and the kind of denial caused by, say, a traumatic childhood (or whatever; I'm not up on my psychoanalysis). But it is not meaningful to talk of mental phenomena as if they existed in a separate plane from biological phenomena. Even denial caused by a trauamtic childhood (or whatever) would still be implemented as a neurobiological level by neurons, synapses, and so on. It is nonsensical to talk about something as being "purely" a psychological problem.
But in a new study, Dr. Berti and her colleagues have shown that denial is not a problem of the mind. Rather, it is a neurological condition that occurs when specific brain regions are knocked out by a stroke.
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The New Populism in Congress
And what it means for business
December 26, 2006
by Irwin Stelzer
EARLY IN JANUARY victorious congressional Democrats will swarm into the offices from which they have evicted their Republican foes. Republicans who have lost their seats will find reasons to get work as Washington lobbyists, rather than return to the hometowns they have always said they love. Republicans who have retained their seats will be moving to the smaller offices to which they had consigned the Democrats when they controlled office assignments. And made to make do with shrunken staffs. I was about to say, "And now on to the serious business of governing," but that would diminish the importance that congressman attach to office and staff size.
Still, after unpacking, Congress will turn to legislating as a frightened business community braces itself for a flood of hostile legislation, and nerve-jangling investigations.
The president has already announced his support for an increase in the federal minimum wage from $5.15 per hour, the level set a decade ago, to $7.25 by the spring of 2009. Congress wants to catch up with the many states that have put in place minima that exceed the federal level. Democrats also want to catch the populist wave that is rising in America. Voters feel that the middle class, or the average worker, has not shared in the economic growth of recent years. Wages have not risen as fast as profits, and the recent spate of multi-million dollar Wall Street bonuses has caused many workers to figure that some financial high flyers make as much in an hour as they make in a year. Throw in tales of rigged corporate compensation through pervasive backdating of options, and you have a political atmosphere in which a rise from $5.15 an hour to $7.25 over almost two years doesn't sound particularly generous.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth, a labor market expert and colleague of mine at the Hudson Institute, reckons that the rise will directly affect 8 percent of America's 152 million workers: the 2 million who now earn the $5.15 hourly minimum, and another 11 million earning between $5.15 and $7.25 per hour. Add fringes, and the effective minimum cost faced by employers will come to about $8, meaning, says Furchtgott-Roth, that "those who produce under $8 just won't get hired." Since 60 percent of workers now earning the minimum are employed in the restaurant industry, I asked a leading operator of food franchises what the effect of the rise might be. He responded that he plans to accelerate the introduction of new labor-displacing technology. Not good news for the many students he otherwise would employ.
The Democrats will next turn to the voters' annoyance with rising healthcare costs, more and more of which are being passed from employers to employees. Never mind that the prescription drug bill pushed through by the president already subsidizes purchases to the tune of billions of dollars; voters think drug costs are too high and the Democrats think they know what to do about it. They will pass a bill giving the federal government the power to negotiate with the pharmaceutical companies to buy drugs in large volumes at knock-down prices. "Goodbye profits and goodbye research on new cures," say lobbyists for Big Pharma. But they seem less certain than they once were that they can kill the bill in the Senate, or failing that, persuade the president to veto it.
Then there is what the president won't get. He won't get an extension of his tax cuts, which don't expire until 2010. Democrats see those as gifts to the rich and any vote for renewal as ignoring the new populist groundswell. They are unimpressed with the argument that business and individuals need to plan investments now based on the tax code as it will be in 2010 and beyond, and want to go to the country as opponents of the super-rich, who are providing grist for the mill of the leftish press by snapping up multimillion flats and the modern art with which to decorate them, and by splashing out for the expensive cars, clothes, and bling that have sent high-end retailers' profits soaring this Christmas season. For those for whom high-end isn't high enough, we have reported gifts of $1 million worth of flight time on private jets and, for the wife who has everything, a $20,000 face lift.
Proponents of free trade will also find life less pleasant. Treasury Secretary Paulson might think it progress to get the Chinese engaged in a long-term "dialogue," but he doesn't have to stand for election in 2008, by which time he will have lined up his next Wall Street gig. Congressmen facing pressure from trade unions will demand that any new trade agreements require our trading partners to adopt U.S.-style labor and environmental standards. Never mind that such a requirement will reduce the advantages of trade and slow the phenomenal improvements in overall living standards that have been associated with it. Congressmen are more concerned with short-term political gain than longer-term economic advances in living standards.
Not all of the action will be on the legislative front. Congress is lining up a series of investigations designed to emphasize big business abuses. BP CEO Lord Browne will be hauled in to explain the fatal fire in BP's Texas refinery and the allegedly sieve-like condition of the company's Alaska pipeline. That testimony will be under oath, creating the danger of perjury indictments should the BP CEO's memory slip on some minor detail he is asked about by Henry Waxman and/or John Dingell.
There is more. Drug companies will be called upon to defend the prices that the Democrats hope to reduce if they can get their legislation past the president; oil companies will have to explain why they need tax breaks to swell their already swollen coffers even more; and contractors will have to confront tales of misuse of federal funds from Iraq to New Orleans.
Not exactly a prescription for a happy New Year for the business community, reaping the harvest it sowed by increasing its financial support for Democratic candidates.
Let me take this opportunity to wish all of those who have waded through these sometimes arcane descriptions of economic life a wonderful Christmas and a Happy New Year.
This article orginally appeared in the Weekly Standard online on December 26, 2006
Irwin Stelzer is a Senior Fellow and Director of Economic Policy Studies for the Hudson Institute. He is also the U.S. economist and political columnist for The Sunday Times (London) and The Courier Mail (Australia), a columnist for The New York Post, and an honorary fellow of the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies for Wolfson College at Oxford University. He is the founder and former president of National Economic Research Associates and a consultant to several U.S. and United Kingdom industries on a variety of commercial and policy issues. He has a doctorate in economics from Cornell University and has taught at institutions such as Cornell, the University of Connecticut, New York University, and Nuffield College, Oxford.
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The WEG World Championship Combined Driving Event is competed for by four-in-hand drivers only. This means that each driver drives a team of four horses throughout the three competitions of the event. The three competitions are Driven Dressage, Marathon and Obstacle Cones Driving.
In Driven Dressage as in ridden dressage, all competitors drive the same test and are judged on the qualities of “freedom, regularity of paces, harmony, impulsion, suppleness, lightness, and ease of movement and the correct bending of the horses on the move. The competitors are also judged on style, accuracy, and general control of their horses and also on their dress, condition of the harness and vehicle and the presentation of the whole turnout.”
The exciting Marathon competition requires the Driver to drive a course across country, to test the fitness, stamina and training of the Horses, and the Driving skill, judgment of pace and general horsemanship of the competitor. The course is divided into three sections, with a maximum allowed distance of 18 km. The final section includes eight marked obstacles. Exceeding the optimum time for the entire course and the time taken in each of the obstacles incurs penalties.
The final competition the Obstacle -Cone competition, is to test the fitness, obedience and suppleness of the horses after the Marathon and the skill and competence of the Competitors. The competition requires the competitor to drive his team through a twisting course of cones set close together with balls balanced on top. Going off-course, knocking off a ball or exceeding the time allowed on the course incurs penalties. Final placings are determined by the team with the lowest number of penalties, throughout all three competitions.
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This Act does not bind the Crown in any capacity.
This Act does not affect the operation of the Native Title Act 1993 of the Commonwealth or the Native Title (New South Wales) Act 1994 in respect of the recognition of native title rights and interests within the meaning of the Commonwealth Act or in any other respect.
A person must not release a game animal into the wild for the purpose of hunting the animal or its descendants.
Maximum penalty: 50 penalty units.
Proceedings for an offence under this Act or the regulations may be dealt with summarily before a Local Court constituted by a Magistrate sitting alone.
(1) An authorised officer may serve a penalty notice on a person if it appears to the officer that the person has committed an offence under this Act or the regulations, being an offence prescribed by the regulations.(2) A penalty notice is a notice to the effect that, if the person served does not wish to have the matter dealt with by a court, the person may pay, within the time and to the person specified in the notice, the amount of penalty prescribed by the regulations for the offence if dealt with under this section.(3) A penalty notice may be served personally or by post.(4) If the amount of penalty prescribed for an alleged offence is paid under this section, no person is liable to any further proceedings for the alleged offence.(5) Payment under this section is not to be regarded as an admission of liability for the purpose of, nor in any way as affecting or prejudicing, any civil claim, action or proceedings arising out of the same occurrence.(6) The regulations may:(a) prescribe an offence for the purposes of this section by specifying the offence or by referring to the provision creating the offence, and(b) prescribe the amount of penalty payable for the offence if dealt with under this section, and(c) prescribe different amounts of penalties for different offences or classes of offences.(7) The amount of a penalty prescribed under this section for an offence must not exceed the maximum amount of penalty which could be imposed for the offence by a court.(8) This section does not limit the operation of any other provision of, or made under, this or any other Act relating to proceedings which may be taken in respect of offences.(9) In this section:
authorised officer means:(a) an inspector, or(b) a person declared by the regulations to be an authorised officer for the purposes of this section.
In a prosecution for an offence against this Act or the regulations, a statement, purporting to be signed by the chief executive officer of the Game Council or other prescribed person, relating to:(a) a licence issued under this Act, or(b) any other prescribed matter contained in a prescribed official document relating to the administration of this Act,and certifying that the contents of the statement are in accordance with the particulars contained in the document, is admissible in any proceedings and is evidence of the matters contained in the statement without proof of the signature of the person by whom the statement purports to have been signed.
In any proceedings for an offence against a provision of this Act or the regulations, the onus of proving that a person had a reasonable excuse (as referred to in the provision) lies with the defendant.
(1) The Governor may make regulations, not inconsistent with this Act, for or with respect to any matter that by this Act is required or permitted to be prescribed or that is necessary or convenient to be prescribed for carrying out or giving effect to this Act.(2) The regulations may apply, adopt or incorporate any publication as in force at a particular time or from time to time.(3) The regulations may create offences punishable by a penalty not exceeding 10 penalty units.
Notes in the text of this Act do not form part of this Act.
Schedule 4 has effect.
(1) The Minister is to review this Act to determine whether the policy objectives of the Act remain valid and whether the terms of the Act remain appropriate for securing those objectives.(2) The review is to be undertaken as soon as possible after the period of 5 years from the date of assent to this Act.(3) A report on the outcome of the review is to be tabled in each House of Parliament within 12 months after the end of the period of 5 years.
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"So we formed the Le Leche League. It grew and grew. We had seven or eight leaders with meetings all around. Now we have lactation consultants, which is fabulous.
"In 1974, I got a call from Connie Mooney. Roe v. Wade had just happened, and she said we really needed to do something about having abortion services in West Virginia. She wondered if I would consider it.
"Birth control was one thing. Abortion was something else. I spent about three months studying the issues. The thing that won me over was that women needed a safe place to have an abortion. They were getting abortions that were costing huge amounts of money and they were unsafe.
"Women I knew had suffered complications from illegal abortions. A good friend took her 16-year-old to New York. They could afford that. What about women who could not afford it?
"I talked with a priest and a couple of ministers. The priest said it is murder. But then, I wasn't going to perform abortions myself. A lot of the ministers here had formed an organization to provide counsel and referral for abortion services around the state. I met with several of them. That helped open my eyes.
"When I was in college in Kansas City, the Jesuits would come to our girls' school and teach philosophy and ethics and religion and logic. My eyes were opened initially then to really think and question. So I'm very thankful for my Catholic education for leading me to where I am now.
"The first Women's Health Center was across from CAMC in Kanawha City. I was the first director. We set it up from scratch. We had birth control, a birth center, adoption service and health education and reproductive health services. One thing people really loved was pre-adolescent sex education. So we were doing a lot of things besides abortion.
"We had some bad times. It was hard to get physicians. They were putting themselves on the line. There were two who said they firmly believed that women had a right to abortion, and they were both extremely well respected.
"There were a lot of protests. One year, they brought people in from out of state to picket. They were there 18 months. Employees would come to work, and there would be people screaming horrible things at them. Their intent was to make us fearful, and we were afraid.
"Every day, volunteers would stand at the front door and go out and escort the women into the clinic to protect them from the picketers who were so violent.
"After 11 years there, I was ready to move on. I wanted to have an influence on state policy. You can have an influence. I learned from my parents to take an active role if you firmly believe in something and see what kind of effect you can have.
"That's when Dr. David Heydinger hired me to come to the state Health Department where I was over community health services. I was there 11 years. Apparently, every 11 years I make a change.
"The Perinatal Partnership started because of the Benedum Foundation. They came to me and said, 'What is happening to infant mortality and women's health in West Virginia? We are sliding back.' We had good rates all through the '80s and '90s, then other states were making progress and we weren't.
"They said we needed to do something. Separate entities -- WVU, Marshall, the state, professional associations -- weren't making any progress on their own.
"We believed if you put them all together in a partnership and identified major problems and the policy changes that would impact them, we could make some progress. And that's exactly how we functioned. We started in 2006.
"We've made tremendous progress, but drug use in pregnancy is still a major issue. We're trying to put the maternity people together with the psychiatric people to treat drug abuse.
"If you look at West Virginia maternal data, the biggest problem is teen pregnancy. Teenagers have the worst outcomes for their babies of any age group except women over 40, and the mothers are having a lot of complications.
"A study is being completed now on what each county can do about teaching reproductive health. If a teenager is going to become pregnant, she needs enough information to have a healthy baby.
"I'm going to Florida and staying about two months. I never took that much time off. I've got travel plans for the next couple of years.
"About six years ago, I was going to retire. I was easing up on work. Then my husband got sick. After he passed away, I was so thrilled I still had this work.
"The biggest answer to making a difference on everything I've been involved in is collaboration. If I didn't have the support of a lot of other people, none of it would have happened."Reach Sandy Wells at san...@wvgazette.com or 304-348-5173.
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The "Fort Worth Star-Telegram" reports Deshotel filed a bill this week that would pay high school students at low-performing schools up to $50 for good grades through a pilot program.
Money would come from the estimated $6 billion in stimulus funds that Texas is expected to get for education.
If the pilot program proves effective after a few years, the state can then decide whether to create a permanent program.
Schools rated academically unacceptable would be selected through a lottery to participate in the pilot. The incentives mirror programs created in Chicago, Baltimore, New York, Tucson, and Washington, D.C.
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The financial hub New York
New York is known for the Statue of Liberty and the busy financial district. But did you know the Sons of Liberty were established in New York in the 1760’s? On the 9 July 1776 New York claimed Declaration of Independence and in August 1776 saw the Battle of Long Island.
Due to the rise in population, canals were built in the early 1900’s to make travelling around the city easier and the Statue of Liberty was a gift from France in October 1886.
New York has also become popularly known for Broadway and the amazing productions which are put on there, some of the most famous actors join in Broadway shows and if you can, you really shouldn’t miss out on the opportunity to see one while you are in the city.
Travelling around New York is easy with its massive subway infrastructure, which enables you to get to anywhere in the city that you want to visit. Hailing a cab is just as easy as they drive the streets in abundance.
There are a few places you have to see while visiting this booming city; you can’t go home without seeing Times Square, the Statue of Liberty, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art.
If you want a great day out visit the Time Warner Center with the fourth floor dedicated to some of the most amazing restaurants in the city.
Other places of interest include Central Park, Ground Zero Museum and the Rockafeller Center.
If it’s arts you enjoy then the Metropolitan Opera House, Radio City Music Hall and Carnegie Hall are places you must visit before you leave.
The Intrepid Sea Air Space Museum is a fabulous place to visit if you are travelling with children, as is the Bronx Zoo, the Children’s Museum of Manhattan and Brooklyn’s Children’s Museum.
No holiday would be the same without a visit to the New York Aquarium or a tour of NBC Studios.
Take a movie tour for the day and visit all the location from your favorite TV shows such as Friends or Seinfeld or the latest Spiderman movie.
While New York is a very business orientated city that is fast paced and constantly on the go, it is a wonderful place for a holiday, especially if you want to see some great shows, get some shopping done and visit some of the most amazing museums and buildings.
Although a bustling city, there are great holiday accommodation deals available to make your holiday a memorable one. The On The Ave Hotel is a four star establishment close to the New York Historical Society, Central Park, Times Square and Broadway. It offers air-conditioned rooms and a restaurant. This hotel is conveniently situated close to all the sites, enabling you to hop on a subway and go out for the day without any hassle.
The Radisson Lexington Hotel New York is close to the Chrysler Building, Grand Central Terminal and St Patrick’s Cathedral. This hotel offers a restaurant, lounge bar and fitness facility.
Empire Hotel is close to the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Carnegie Hall and Broadway. This four star hotel offers a restaurant, bar and fitness facility.
If you are looking for affordable accommodation, then maybe the Hotel Carter will suit your needs. Situated close to Madam Tussauds Wax Museum, the Empire State Building and Times Square this hotel completed its renovation in January 2010. The updated hotel offers a coffee shop and lounge bar.
There is the perfect accommodation offer for anyone wanting to visit the area from two star hotels to five star luxury. Each hotel is conveniently located to make your stay as enjoyable as possible.
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A couple of years ago, I was asked by a group of people to write a small Ramayana script for their children's Dipavali programme. I wrote it with great happiness because it's like a blessing to have the chance to retell a punya katha, that too, for children. Nothing came of it because nobody wanted their child to play Ravan, most odd, when Ravan was given total moksh by dying at the hands of the Lord.
In fact, this is a powerful and exalted role to play in our re-enactments of the cosmic lila. That's why only the strongest, tallest dancers with the most impressive physiques are chosen to play Totsakan (Dashanan) in the Thai 'Ramakien'. It is paying the Lord a compliment to pit a big opponent against Him. How special then to play Ravan, what a responsibility placed on that actor or dancer to not demean Sri Rama with a feeble enactment. That's what I'd want to tell any child who was asked to play Ravan, that it's an honourable duty to give the role everything one has, because to refuse is to dishonour the lila of the Lila.
This might make many remember that old story about the 'bhrasht yogi' or almost-liberated soul who by virtue of his good deeds was given a choice: moksh in three births as the Lord's own opponent or seven births as the Lord's well-behaved devotee. Impatient to go home to God, the yogi chose the shorter term and the three births he took were as Hiranyakashyap (killed by the Narsimh avatar), Ravan (killed by Sri Ram) and Sishupal (killed by Sri Krishna).
This story does not lessen their misdeeds in those births or glorify them. Instead, doesn't it seem like its purpose is to tell us to win our inner battles by engaging our dark side against our best better self? To pit our inner Ravan against our Ram and give our better self a proper fighting chance?
Renuka Narayanan writes on religion and culture
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The following is a press release from the Santa Monica Police Department:
Santa Monica Police to Combat Roadway Deaths and Injuries with DUI Checkpoints
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
The Santa Monica Police Department has been awarded a new traffic safety grant for an anti-DUI program aimed at preventing deaths and injuries on our roadways. Additional enforcement measures to combat impaired driving are coming as a result of a recent $43,200.00 grant awarded to Santa Monica by the California Office of Traffic Safety (OTS). The Santa Monica Police Department is dedicated to keeping our streets safe through both enforcement and education.
Captain Carolin Larson of the Santa Monica Police Department states that the DUI Checkpoint Grant from the California Office of Traffic Safety will enable the police department to apprehend people driving while impaired and to provide education to the community through these checkpoints.
The special DUI Checkpoint Grant is to assist in efforts to reduce the number of persons killed and injured in alcohol- and other drug-related collisions in the community. The grant activities will specifically target offenders who drive impaired, as well as educate the public on the dangers of impaired driving through the use of DUI/driver’s license checkpoints. When possible, specially trained officers will be available to evaluate those suspected of drug-impaired driving.
Drunk and drugged driving is among America’s deadliest crimes. In 2010, 791 people were killed and over 24,000 injured in alcohol- and drug-impaired crashes in California. Crashes involving alcohol drop by an average of 20 percent when well-publicized checkpoints are conducted often enough. Checkpoints have proven to be the most effective of any of the DUI enforcement strategies, while yielding considerable cost savings of $6 for every $1 spent.
“DUI checkpoints have been an essential part of the phenomenal reduction in DUI deaths that we witnessed from 2006 to 2010 in California,” said Christopher J. Murphy, Director of the Office of Traffic Safety. “But since the tragedy of DUI accounts for nearly one third of traffic fatalities, Santa Monica needs the high visibility enforcement and public awareness that this grant will provide.”
Funding for this program is from the California Office of Traffic Safety through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
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Following are a few remarks delivered this morning to kick off the finale’ of WebJunction’s Project Compass program, funded since 2010 by IMLS. There are great stories here about the impacts that libraries have on unemployed in their communities, and I thought those who could not be there might also like to hear them as well. I am so proud of the team that pulled this entire project together, and worked collaboratively with libraries across the U.S. to bring workforce development to the core of library service.
It’s my absolute pleasure to welcome you all to the Project Compass National Convening, where – over the next two days – we’ll celebrate and advance the work that public libraries do every day to develop our national workforce. I’d like to open our proceedings with a little trip around the county – and share with you a few stories from the project compass workshop participants we’ve met along the way.
We’ll start here on the east coast. Tom is a skilled professional in his mid-50s living in the CT/NYC job-market. He’s a husband and father of two, has bachelors and masters degrees, and impressive experience over the course of his career in technical instructional design. Tom loves his job as the Chief Information Officer for a local training company, who he’s been with for more than five years. But this is late 2010; the company has held on for as long as they can; Tom gets laid off, along with several colleagues.
Seven months later, on the advice of a friend, Tom visits his local library; he’s been steadily looking for work since his layoff, but can’t seem to get an interview. He starts to attend the library’s weekly job search seminars, joins a networking group led by a volunteer social worker, starts using the continuing education databases, learns how to research companies more thoroughly, and meets with an onsite career counselor regularly.
Over the course of several weeks, Tom begins to open up to the staff and other job-seekers in his networking group. Why isn’t he getting any interviews? Are his skills too specific? Is it age discrimination? And while his family is supportive, Tom shares that he’s also starting to feel the pressure to consider ANY job, just to bring home a paycheck. Library staff begin to understand that Tom’s self-esteem has really suffered; he’s under-valuing his own skills and expertise, and applying for jobs he’s over-qualified for. And that’s why he’s not getting the interviews!
Encouraged by the support he finds in the program, Tom starts to apply what he’s learning at the library. He reworks his resume and cover letter, joins a professional training and development association – and gets involved in a committee within the association. All this leads to further networking, and then to a new job opportunity – a contract position in an area hospital that’s implementing a new software system. But the software system isn’t just new to the hospital, it’s new to the industry. After multiple, rigorous interviews, Tom is offered a short-term contract. Now certified in the new technology, Tom’s working in a new industry that’s ripe with opportunity – and his new skills will easily transfer to other health care facilities, even if this contract ends.
Moving on to the mid-west, we find Alex, who’s 43. Right out of high school, Alex takes a job as an office assistant in a roofing company. Eventually, he works his way up to Office Manager, where he spends the next 13 years. But when the economy falters, and the company goes out of business, Alex’s income goes from $54k a year to unemployment insurance alone.
Like so many others, Alex has never prepared a resume, and doesn’t know how to begin searching for work in a new economy. Alex does have basic computer skills – he has an email account and knows how to search the Internet - but he spends his allotted internet time at the library searching a single job site – the one he’s most familiar with, to no avail.
One day, Alex asks library staff for help. Over time, they get to know each other better, and library staff show Alex new resources to improve his job search. But more than that, they listen.
Unexpectedly, and in the course of casual conversation, Alex mentions that he’s going to have to give up his car - the payments are too high, and he needs to trade down for a car that’s more affordable. The library staff have heard this sort of thing before, but Alex is more distressed than most. As it turns out, driving is his passion; Alex shares how he often just drives for hours with no destination, just because it’s something he loves to do.
This leads to a conversation about the possibility of a whole new career – what about driving for a living? But this didn’t just come out of the blue. The library’s ties with Illinois WorkNet had provided a list of careers that still had potential for new-comers, even in a difficult economy, and this was one of them. But when library staff mention this to Alex, they learn that he has already looked into the required training, but has written it off because he doesn’t have the money required to enroll. Ah, but the library staff also knows through their partnership with WorkNet that Alex might be eligible for a grant to complete the training! The phone calls begin …
The full application takes two months to complete, but Alex and the library staff work together through the whole process. Alex receives a grant for $4800 to complete his training at the College of Du Page. Several weeks later, the library receives a single text message from Alex that reads “I now bleed orange. Thank you.” Alex has accepted a full time job with Schneider National Trucking, driving one of those big orange trucks you often see along the highway. Now each of the library staff has a binder filled with unemployment support, tools and resources, and on the outside of each one is the phrase “I bleed orange” – its become a mantra for local library staff still supporting countless others.
And finally, let’s head west, where 45 year old Meg works at a well-established company she’s been in for 8 years. She’s put in a lot of overtime, and like Alex, seemed to be moving up. But then, with just one day’s notice, she too is laid off. And Meg has a mortgage she can’t expect to keep up with if she can’t find a new job soon.
In a panic, Meg goes to her local public library to look at job ads on the Internet. She learns that many of today’s openings require an online application too. She spends about half an hour working through the application for a promising position. When she’s almost done, she tries to save her work on a jump drive, but at the same time, hits a wrong key and wipes out the whole document. Frustrated, she gets up to leave.
But this is where Carol steps in; Carol’s the librarian on duty, finds out what the problem is and says, “That application form can’t be smarter than both of us!” She sits down with Meg and works through it to the end. While it’s being transmitted, Carol goes to the stacks and comes back with some books about interviewing. “I think you’re going to get that interview,” she says. “And here are some resources to help you get prepared.”
A week later, Meg comes back to the library. “You taught me something,” she tells Carol. “You showed me how not to give up. I did get that interview, and thanks to you, I also got the job.”
How many of you could relay, from your personal experience, or the experience of someone you know, a story much like these that I’ve shared with you today? (Almost all of you.)
Then you also know that these stories all illustrate that libraries are no longer about books, databases, or other content. Libraries and their staff offer the empathy, support, service, and space – where today’s job seekers find the expert networks and the community they need to be successful in their new endeavors. Whether it’s supporting people writing resumes and applying for jobs, or helping people launch their own businesses or grow new careers, libraries power economic recovery. And when the library does that for one American, and then another, and then another – we deliver and I do not say this lightly on the American promise of equal opportunity for all.
Let’s be honest: transforming individuals and communities in the midst of prolonged economic challenges has also required a transformation in some of our libraries. We’ve had to embrace an enormous shift in our collections and service models, and do so under incredible budget strain. And librarians, many of us, have been called on to move beyond the reasons that we originally came to this work, and focus on new and entirely unexpected community needs.
Over the next two days – the incredibly talented and passionately committed Project Compass team will take us through a schedule chock-full of celebration, support, and community for those of us actively engaged in this work.Change is hard! We need to celebrate what we’ve accomplished and get some support for moving forward.
Joining us are more than 220 public and state library colleagues from 45 states and the district of Columbia. Esteemed guests…
- Susan Hildreth & Mary Chute from IMLS
- Terri Bergman from the National Association of Workforce Boards
- Jane Oates from the Department of Labor
- Ron Carlee from the International City/County Management Association
- futurist Garry Golden and author Marilyn Johnson
…will share their expertise and their encouragement for taking us even farther.
As you attend these sessions, I encourage you to reflect on your own path through the incredible transformations we are all now a part of. I can tell you that, personally, devising this project with the library community (especially Jennifer at North Carolina and Kevin at IMLS), and then following it through to implementation across the nation, has been one of the highlights of my entire career. You, the library staff and partners we’ve worked with, and the patrons you’ve served, inspire me daily with your courage, tenacity, and hope.
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By Tedd Arnold
Dial Books for Young Readers, $16.99, 32 pages
Walter’s room is nearly at the top of a tall apartment building. While he gets ready for bed, his father reminds him there is no jumping on the bed. He warns that if Walter keeps it up, he and his bed might punch right through the floor and crash into the apartment below. Walter says good night, and in his dark, quiet room, the only sound is thumping from above — his neighbor Delbert, jumping on his bed! Walter says, “If Delbert can jump on his bed, so can I!” So Walter starts to jump … and jump … higher … and higher. And then it happens — Walter and his bed crash through the floor. He lands in Miss Hattie’s spaghetti, but it is just the beginning. He keeps on crashing through to the next floor where Mr. Matty lives, along with Miss Hattie and Walter’s bed going along. And so it goes. Or is it just a dream?
“Walter’s bedroom was directly above Miss Hattie’s dining room. She was quite surprised when Walter landed in her spaghetti and meatballs.”
This 25th anniversary edition of Tedd Arnold’s book is updated with all new artwork in his well-known style. It’s a great edition, one youngsters will love, because it is silly and funny and the pictures make it more so.
Reviewed by Rosi Hollinbeck
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Iran nuclear talks: Stand-off continues
Political pressure brought all sides to Baghdad. Ecological pressure kept them there.
The six world powers had planned to hold a single day of talks with Iran. But Baghdad's sandstorms closed the city's airport.
So negotiators were forced to spend an entire second day sequestered in the grounds of Baghdad's fortified former Green Zone.
Thanks to the weather then, this round of talks turned into the most extensive negotiations between the P5+1 and Iran for more than two years.
During the talks there were occasional reminders of the Iraqi capital's continuing unrest.
Shortly after midday on the second day, a loud explosion was heard in the distance. The police later confirmed that this was a mortar attack on the other side of the river. One person was killed in the explosion.
For Iran's chief negotiator Saeed Jalili, the strike in the distance may have provoked a few memories of Iraqi explosions. He lost his lower right leg while fighting in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s (he now walks with a noticeable limp)."No intention'
The negotiations were held in this city at the request of Mr Jalili and his delegation.
No-one expected any final agreements to come out of this particular round. That may be just as well, because it looks like the negotiators didn't come anywhere near to getting one.
Two days of intensive negotiations appear to demonstrate Iran and the world powers remain far apart on the most significant issue dividing them: uranium enrichment.
Several UN Security Council resolutions have called on Iran to halt all uranium enrichment while concern remains over the country's activities and intentions.
But Tehran has continued to process low-enriched uranium. And in February 2010 it began processing medium-enriched uranium - a procedure also known as 20% enrichment.
It's the processing of medium-enriched uranium that so concerns the West.
20% enrichment does have civilian uses. But it's also a technically significant step towards the potential production of weapons-grade uranium.
But Iran insists that it has no intention of stopping any of its enrichment work. It says its processing is not designed for weapons.
"Enrichment for peaceful purposes is one of the irrefutable rights of the Islamic Republic of Iran," Mr Jalili said during his closing remarks in Baghdad. This was a point that he repeated several times.IAEA visit
Iran's tactic appears to be to hold out for an acceptance by the P5+1 of its right to enrich.
But at these talks, it would appear that the world powers maintained their position that all enrichment work must stop. The gulf remains.
Both sides agreed to continue talking over the next few weeks. Contacts may be led by the chief negotiators' respective deputies: Helga Schmid for the P5+1 and Ali Bagheri for Iran.
The talks will run in parallel with the recent activities of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Earlier this week, the agency's head, Yukiya Amano, travelled to Tehran in order to persuade the Iranian government to allow better access for his inspectors.
He appears to have won agreement for more inspections. Progress between Iran and the IAEA will be closely monitored by the nuclear negotiators.Compromise venue
As fits the rather curious custom of this series of nuclear talks, diplomats picked a new venue for the next round - Moscow.
Discussion over venues appears to take up a disproportionate amount of negotiating time.
Western diplomats suggest privately that they would rather pick a single venue such as Geneva and stick with it.
But Iran suggests that it feels more comfortable negotiating in non-Western cities - ideally in countries which do not support sanctions against Tehran.
Iran's preference for alternative venues has turned the nuclear negotiating process into an unusual world tour.
Russia takes part in this series of talks on the side of the world powers - but it has also expressed its public concern about unilateral Western measures against Iran.
This would appear to make it a suitable compromise host for the next set of talks. At least the sand won't be a problem in Moscow.
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Mayor Wants to Overturn Stand Your Ground Laws
Wednesday, April 11, 2012 - 03:20 PM
Mayor Michael Bloomberg backed a national effort to overturn so-called "stand your ground" laws Wednesday, saying the law at the heart of the Trayvon Martin case promotes vigilantism.
The mayor was in Washington, D.C., to announce a national campaign to overturn the laws, which exist in 25 states.
"These laws have undermined the integrity of the justice system and done real harm to public safety," Bloomberg said.
Bloomberg said many states that've passed such laws have seen an increase in so-called justifiable homicides. He noted in Florida, the average number of those cases rose from 12 to 36, after the law was passed.
"These shoot-first laws have nothing to do with that, or with the exercise of second amendment rights," Bloomberg said. "Instead, they justify civilian gunplay and invite vigilante justice and retribution with disastrous results."
A call placed to the NRA for comment was not returned.
Trayvon Martin, an unarmed, black teenager, was shot dead in February at the hands of a neighborhood watch volunteer who says he was acting in self-defense.
Bloomberg said George Zimmerman, who had previous arrests for assaulting a police officer and domestic violence, never should have had a gun in the first place.
Separately, a law enforcement official says that charges are being filed in the shooting death of Martin later Wednesday.
Annmarie Fertoli and the Associated Press contributed reporting.
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Editor's note: To read this story in Arabic, click here.
(CNN) -- World outrage grew Saturday as details emerged about an attack in the Syrian village of Houla, which left more than 90 people dead, including nearly three dozen children, according to the United Nations.
U.N. observers went to Houla and viewed the bodies, a day after opposition activists reported a massacre there at the hands of the Syrian regime. The activists said entire families were killed.
"Whoever started, whoever responded and whoever took part in this deplorable act of violence should be held responsible," Maj. Gen. Robert Mood, the head of the U.N. Supervision Mission in Syria, said in a statement.
Thirty-two children under the age of 10 and more than 60 adults were killed Friday, the statement read. Circumstances that led to the deaths are unclear, he said.
Later, Mood told CNN that observers counted 85 bodies and that 34 of the dead were children under the age of 10. The discrepancy with the earlier number could not immediately be explained.
Observers confirmed the use of artillery and tank shells, Mood said.
"This indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force is unacceptable and unforgivable. The killing of innocent children and civilians needs to stop," said the major general.
He stressed that unarmed U.N. observers are just "one small ingredient" in the effort to end the ongoing violence in Syria.
"At some point, obviously, there will be a discussion about other alternatives and other ways forward, but that is a discussion that has to be within the context of the U.N. Security Council and the key stakeholders to all of this," Mood told CNN.
Syrian state media reported the observers' visits Saturday to several towns and cities and blamed al Qaeda-linked groups for the deaths in Houla.
State TV broadcast Houla images filmed by opposition activists and reported that "more than 50 children were killed ... by criminals and killers who aim to hurt Syria."
The government has consistently blamed "armed terrorists" for violence in Syria.
Rebels leaders interpreted the latest massacre as evidence that a United Nations cease-fire and peace plan aren't working and called for retaliatory attacks.
"We call on our fighters, the soldiers and the revolutionaries, to conduct organized and planned military strikes against Assad battalions and regime members," Brig. Gen. Mustafa Al-Sheikh, a top leader in the rebel group, said in a video statement posted on YouTube.
A network of Syrian opposition activists, the Local Coordination Committees of Syria, blamed "forces and armed militias" of the Syrian government for "a new massacre" in Houla.
"This barbaric act was preceded by the regime's mortar shelling in the town," the LCC said in a statement. "The campaign ended when the armed militias slaughtered entire families in cold blood."
Graphic video posted on YouTube purportedly shows the lifeless bodies of small children killed in Houla. They are spread on the floor amid blankets, caked in blood. One child is turned to reveal a head wound.
CNN could not independently confirm the authenticity of the video, nor can it confirm reports from within the country because the government strictly limits access by foreign journalists.
In a joint statement with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, joint special envoy to Syria Kofi Annan said he is contacting Syrian authorities "to convey in the clearest terms the expectations of the international community."
"This appalling and brutal crime involving indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force is a flagrant violation of international law and of the commitments of the Syrian government to cease the use of heavy weapons in population centers and violence in all its forms," the joint statement said. "Those responsible for perpetrating this crime must be held to account."
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemned the Houla killings.
"Those who perpetrated this atrocity must be identified and held to account," Clinton said in a statement. "And the United States will work with the international community to intensify our pressure on (Syrian President Bashar al-Assad) and his cronies, whose rule by murder and fear must come to an end."
Lt. Bassim al-Khaled, a spokesman of the rebel Free Syrian Movement, said more bloodshed is forthcoming. The al-Assad government is using the cease-fire and peace plan "to kill more people and is trying to crush the uprising," al-Khaled said.
"So the only language this regime is going to understand is the language of the gun. Wait and see, we will make them pay for each drop of blood which was shed," al-Khaled said.
Britain also condemned the massacre, calling Saturday for an urgent session of the U.N. Security Council and a full account of the "appalling crime."
More regime attacks Saturday killed 60 people across the country, including 25 in Homs, just south of Houla, according to the Local Coordination Committees.
The Local Coordination Committees earlier Saturday decried the world's "apparent blindness" to the violence in Syria.
Months of U.N. Security Council attempts to resolve the crisis have failed to have any effect.
Ban said Friday the full cadre of 300 U.N. observers authorized by the Council will be in Syria in the coming days.
Ban issued a sobering report Friday on the Syrian crisis, detailing "continuing reports of a stepped-up security crackdown by the authorities that has led to massive violations of humans rights ... including arbitrary arrests, torture, enforced disappearance and summary execution of activists, opponents and defectors."
In a letter to the head of the U.N. Security Council, obtained by CNN, Ban said he is deeply concerned that the Syrian violence has not stopped despite the presence of the monitors and the agreement by both sides to a peace plan.
U.N. officials say more than 9,000 people, mostly civilians, have died and tens of thousands have been uprooted since the uprising began in March 2011. Opposition groups report a death toll of more than 11,000 people. Since al-Assad's government and opposition forces accepted Annan's peace plan in March, at least 1,635 people have been killed, the LCC said Saturday.
Following the reported massacre in Houla on Friday, the rebel Free Syrian Army implored members of the international "Friends of Syria" group to form a military coalition to launch airstrikes against al-Assad forces.
Meanwhile, the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) said that "al-Qaeda-linked terrorist groups" massacred a couple and their six sons and a father and son in the rural village of al-Shumariyeh village in the Homs province.
The agency also said similar terrorist groups massacred a family of seven, including three children, in the same province's rural town of Taldo. The groups also burned houses and crops and blamed the army for bombarding the area, SANA reported. The terror group also sabotaged the National Hospital in the area and attacked a law enforcement headquarters, SANA said.
CNN's Mohammed Jamjoom in Beirut, Omar Al Muqdad in Turkey, Elizabeth Joseph, Richard Roth, Saad Abedine, Holly Yan, Karen Smith, Yousuf Basil and Michael Martinez contributed to this report.
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We have charges of cronyism and betrayal on one side and counter charges of elitism and sexism on the other. Meanwhile the the "loyal" opposition seems rather self satisfied, in hope of a "meltdown", while their point-men and self-aggrandizing agents spout their seeming support for the nomination of, Ms Miers, with all the believability and sincerity of a used car salesman.
There is just one point I would like to address.
In this instance, are we not all guilty of elitism?
Why do we put so much faith in the legal profession, why should a Justice of the Supreme Court be required judicial experience, why should a law degree be of paramount importance for this position? I could understand if the SOCUS performed only its Constitutional duties, but it has usurped the roll of arbiter of the Constitutional and performs little of its original roll.
Originally, the Supreme Court was solely the court of final appeal and you cannot find anything in the Constitution that gives it the power to interpret the Constitution outside of its roll as final court of recourse.
THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION
Clause 1: The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority;--to all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls;--to all Cases of admiralty and maritime Jurisdiction;--to Controversies to which the United States shall be a Party;--to Controversies between two or more States;--between a State and Citizens of another State;--between Citizens of different States, --between Citizens of the same State claiming Lands under Grants of different States, and between a State, or the Citizens thereof, and foreign States, Citizens or Subjects.
Clause 2: In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.
Clause 3: The Trial of all Crimes, except in Cases of Impeachment, shall be by Jury; and such Trial shall be held in the State where the said Crimes shall have been committed; but when not committed within any State, the Trial shall be at such Place or Places as the Congress may by Law have directed.
If you read, "Clause 2" (above), you will see that it is subject to the exceptions and regulations of Congress. I can only assume the Supreme court has usurped its present "authority" with the tacit approval of Congress. In effect we have a new branch of government as it seems to hear cases of Constitutional "importance".
I find this troublesome. We have, in effect, a branch of government, created by lawyers. A group that makes its living seeking to "bend" the law and rules for monetary consideration and notoriety.
If the SOCUS is the final "interpretor" of the Constitution, then may only lawyers be capable of understanding it?
Somehow, I don't believe that to be the case. I know that was not the intent of the founders. They meant for the Constitution to be understandable to any moderately intelligent person. A wealth of information about the thought that went into the Constitution can be read in the Anti-Federalist and Federalist papers.
Some important points to ponder:
The Constitution, by its nature, is a conservative document. It is not meant to be easily changed.
The meaning of the Constitution can be derived by historical context and examination, that context is available and readily understandable.
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NEW VIDEO ABOUT RUSSIA
THE COLD WAR IS OVER! SEE RUSSIA TODAY ON VIDEO.
Notes from Russia: A Young Womans Video Journal (1999) 28 min.
See Russia today as it exists at the end of the 20th century. This is the worlds most current video about Russia as seen from a young American womans point of view of the sights and sounds of contemporary Russia. Shot in cinema verite style, you will see places that most Americans will not be able to visit : inside a Russian home, the overnight train to St. Petersburg, the bus and subway system, Gorky Park, Moscows TV tower Ostenkino, Chemical Lyceum and Moscow University. This is not a video of a tour, but a video journal of a ten day visit with Russian nationals.
A major production company would never have been able to make this video! Russian officials would have taken the cameras away. The producer was able to get these shots because of her small digital camera.
View such traditional sites as: St. Basils Cathedral, the Kremlin, Red Square, Lenins Crypt (outside view), the Bolshoi Theater (outside view), the Russian Circus, and pictures of the real Russian people, both rich and poor.
But theres more! You will also see the legendary St. Petersburg, home of the Winter Palace of the Czars and the world-famous Hermitage art museum, and a special sequence of high school science students singing an Elvis Presley song in English.
This video was written, videotaped, edited, and directed by Sarah McConnell, a young Special Interest Video Producer who has produced a six volume series on the real France. Sarahs goal is to show the world from the point of view of realism and cinema verite. Her videos have no sets or created scenes. Everything happened as she shows it.
The Cold War is over. See Russia as it exists today. Public performance rights included. Purchase orders accepted. VISA/MC/AMEX.
Robert McConnell Productions
E-mail: firstname.lastname@example.org. Web: http://www.parlez-vous.com.
$49.95 + $10 S & H = $59.95 total.
Read more about this video in BEHIND THE SCENES (click here)
VIDEOS ABOUT FRANCE
Presenting a triumvirate of videos: The Real France, Christmas in France and Noel en France. These three videos were produced by an American student of French with the help of native French students and are indispensible to every French teachers classroom. Plus now theres a new video, Dining in France, which shows and tells all about French dining habits and table manners. And the newest videos of all are Richard's School Day and its French twin , Un Jour d'Ecole avec Richard. These two videos follow a real French student through his day at school.
THE REAL FRANCE (30 min)
The first video, The Real France, was produced by Sarah McConnell, an Honors Graduate in French & English who spent Junior Year abroad in a French University. While there, she shot video of what she saw and what she did as an American Student in a French University. Her video follows the venerable French tradition of Realism and Cinema Verite, both respected literary and cinematic genres invented by the French. This video is not inspired by either Hollywood or the French Tourist Bureau. Rather it is the honest and true record of a real American student's view of France for a year. The finished video is 30 minutes long and includes scenes from Paris, the French countryside, the French Alps, St. Etienne and the Provincial French University where she studied. Hickman High School Teacher Annie Wetzel said, The kids enjoyed it and our French foreign exchange student put his stamp of approval on it as The Real France.
$39.95 + $10 S & H $49.95 TOTAL
CHRISTMAS IN FRANCE (18 min)
Christmas in France is a collaboration between Sarah McConnell, and Christophe Andre, a student the University of Jean-Monnet, located in St Etienne, France. Also involved was Albane Nouailhac, a Parisian student and holder of a French Masters degree. The video shows and tells how the French celebrate Christmas and how their traditions differ from the American way of celebrating the holiday. The video includes many original pictures from Christmas in both the big city of Paris and the small village of St. Bonnet le Chateau near Lyon. It includes actual interviews with French students talking about what Christmas means to them. The English version Christmas in France is translated with sub-titles in English.
$29.95 + $10 S & H $39.95 TOTAL
NOEL EN FRANCE (18 min)
The French version, Noel en France is left entirely in French. This version is hosted and narrated by a native French speaker Christophe Andre.
Mooresville High School Teacher Kim Peters writes, The music in the video is absolutely beautiful...My students loved seeing the windows of Parisian shops decorated for Christmas.
$29.95 + $10 S & H $39.95 TOTAL
We are giving you the option of either purchasing one or all three of these videos outright with a 30 day money-back guarantee. You can preview one, two or three of the videos for a small shipping and handling charge of $10 for each video payable in advance. If you decide to purchase one, two or all three of these videos, we will give you credit for the preview fee already paid.
The price of these two exciting and new Christmas in France videos is $29.95 + $10 S & H for each or $49.95 + $10 S & H for both, $39.95 + $10 S & H for The Real France, or get all three for the Special Sale Price of $89.95 + $10 S & H. $99.95 total.
The videos also come with FREE video viewsheets in English and French by French Teacher LoAnna Chance. These viewsheets will help your students pay attention and learn something from the videos. And the video Noel en France comes with a script in French for the Advanced students to follow.
These videos will appeal to both children and adults. Students will benefit by seeing and hearing real French students talking in their native French, what it's like to be a student there, about what Christmas means to them and how they celebrate it. They will see both the similarities and the differences between Christmas in the US and France. So don't delay. Order one, two or all three of these exciting, new videos made by a young woman especially for the young people of today. Sarah McConnell has been awarded a combined Masters Degree in Romantic Literature, philosophy, history and art history from the University of York, England.
New Release! Hot off the editing machine!
DINING IN FRANCE (35 min)
Dining is France was produced by Sarah McConnell, the producer of the 3 successful videos Christmas in France, Noel en France and The Real France. The video was shot on location in the sidewalk cafes of Paris, in a village near St. Etienne in Southern France, and at the actual French homes of some real French people. Some of the information presented in Dining in France is based on an actual reference book about French table manners Simple Etiquette in France by Marie Therese Byram. The rest of the video shows documentary style how the French prepare a meal and how they actually eat. Included in the video are a French Barbecue, a French Sunday lunch and a French formal dinner. There is also a segment about the sidewalk cafes of Paris and their colorful literary history. Finally, there is a short French cooking show at the end which demonstrates how to prepare a French meal. The video also comes with a printed booklet of French recipes that you can prepare for yourself..
This video is shot and edited in cinema verite style, appropriately so because cinema verite was invented in France.. There are no actors, no sets, no props, nothing artificial. This shows the reality of how Dining in France is actually done by the real Frenchmen.
HERE ARE SOME OF THE TOPICS COVERED IN THE VIDEO
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Everyone who works a fast paced nine to five job will give anything up to stay at home all day, and if necessary, work from home. The allure of staying in bed late, working on your laptop while still in your pajamas and choosing to put your feet up on the table while speaking over the phone is too hard to resist. But sometimes, being home can be boring, stifling and annoying. For those who love meeting new people, creating new life experiences outside or outdoors and separating home from work, working from home can be a nightmare. But in some cases, working from home can be a real life saver! We’re talking about those moments when you may have to temporarily stay home due to an illness, injury or to provide care for another sick/injured/young family member.
I’m sure there are a lot of exciting work from home options already out there. There are many clever, talented and resourceful people who create their own opportunities, by buying and re-selling products and services, or making their own. If you are looking for a more steady option, however, something that involves minimal risk and investment from your end, and a chance to be a part of a bigger system, there are work from home opportunities in the healthcare industry that can still be a lot of fun.
MT: Medical transcription is the art of converting recordings made by healthcare professionals into reports, documents and other written correspondence pieces that can be filed away under the patient’s record. It’s fun for those people who love putting together pieces of information that may be sparse or disconnected and connecting it all together in one completely correct, proofed, edited and referenced document. These days, it’s not uncommon to find even MTs use voice recognition software. Does this mean that being an MT is now obsolete? Absolutely not. Software cannot make intuitive, non- obvious deductions especially if information is lacking. It cannot edit proof or reference on its own. And it cannot make changes and corrections based on knowledge or training. Most MTs will need at least vocational training in order to work at this job.
MB&C: Medical Billing & Coding requires you to review patient medical records and assign codes to the tests, treatments, diagnoses, and procedures performed so the facility can bill insurance and other third-party payers (such as Medicare or Medicaid) as well as the patient. You can be either an inpatient or outpatient coder, but you may need some medical billing and coding training in order to be AHIMA approved.
AA: As an administrative assistant, you won’t necessarily have to work in the healthcare industry, but it’s a great option for those who want to provide offsite customer service or administrative assistance to a larger network, organization or group of companies. There are many job portals online where you can make some money providing desk support with a PC and a land line connection. You may not always need administrative assistant training, but if you’ve never had the practice or exposure to the inside of an office before, getting some training will bode well for you. Vocational schools also host such training programs.
Vocational training, as it’s commonly called, prepares you for a career that is trade or craft oriented, imparting practical advice that helps develop expertise in a specific vocation or occupation. Several schools have begun to use the vocational education model, teaching procedural knowledge and paying emphasis on apprentice-style learning rather than theory-based or concept-based courses. It’s a great option for work from home jobs that require basic level skills, and is quite affordable. So if you’re looking to have more fun while working from home, check out the options we’ve covered and let us know if they’ve helped!
Nancy is a 36-year old stay at home mom of two. She worked as a medical assistant for five years before taking a break to be with her children. Her experience as a medical assistant gave her valuable insights in to the medical transcription industry, which she likes to share with others through her writing. Medical transcription training often finds mention in her writings. Being an SAHM, Nancy is a huge exponent of vocational training programs that provide women like her the power to be their own boss. Her other interests include gardening and baking. She stays with her husband and two daughters.
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Adele Sings, Attorney General Sweeps, & Everybody Needs A Remote Flusher
I’ve been lobbying for a gig as a political cartoonist. I always think the best approach is simply to show someone what you can do.
I did 10 cartoons (Monday-Friday) during the 2-week period ending June 22, 2012. I checked news headlines each day, picked a topic, roughed out an idea, scanned in the finish, and added text and shading in Photoshop. Political cartoons require a very fast turnaround, so I worked as quickly as I could. Each cartoon took between 2-3 hours, start to finish.
Here are the three cartoons I liked the best.
The first one was inspired by two separate news items: 1) an Adele song was credited with bringing a little British girl out of a coma, and 2) back on June 8th, President Obama told a news conference that the private sector was “doing fine,” a remark he was later at pains to qualify.
Operation Fast and Furious was a “gunwalking” operation in which a U.S. federal law enforcement agency allowed suspected arms traffickers to purchase guns on behalf of Mexican drug cartels. The ultimate objective: to trace the guns, make arrests, and disrupt the cartels. Instead, guns were lost and used in violent crimes, including the murder of a U.S. border patrol agent. The operation was mounted without informing Mexican officials.
A Congressional committee is investigating the failed operation. The committee has voted to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt for not turning over all subpoenaed documents in the case. Holder asked President Obama to invoke executive privilege to prevent certain documents from being released. Obama has done so– the first time he has asserted executive privilege during his presidency.
The U.S. presidential election is more than four months away, but here in New Hampshire, a swing state, we are already being bombarded with television campaign commercials. The Obama campaign bashes Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, and vice versa.
FactCheck.org tries to monitor the accuracy of political TV ads and related assertions. It took issue with a number of claims in a recent Obama ad, including the assertion that as governor of Massachusetts, Romney “outsourced call center jobs to India.”
What Romney actually did was veto a bill that would have prevented the state from doing business with contractors who outsourced jobs, a practice which saved taxpayers money. Democrats controlled the state legislature at the time and could have overridden Romney’s veto. They did not.
When I watch any political ad, I find myself wishing for a certain kind of remote.
What do you think? Has politics been completely co-opted by the entertainment industry? Are political cartoons just part of the noise, no different than YouTube clips
and late night comedians? Hope you’ll leave a comment.
If you enjoyed this post, I invite you to subscribe. You can leave a comment and click the box that says Notify me of new posts via email, click the Subscribe button below the Portfolio Thumbnails, or just click + Follow in the blog menu bar.
Other Posts You Might Enjoy:
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La. taxpayers spend $40 million a year to clean up litter
Published: Friday, November 5, 2010 at 8:47 p.m.
Last Modified: Friday, November 5, 2010 at 8:47 p.m.
BATON ROUGE — The executive director of Keep Louisiana Beautiful says state and local governments pay $40 million a year to pick up and haul away litter, from cigarette butts to discarded furniture and appliances.
Leigh Harris told the House Committee on Natural Resources and Environment on Thursday that the $40 million for litter cleanup could be used on other programs such as health care and education.
The Advocate reports the panel is looking at the merits of a proposal to impose a nickel deposit on bottles as a way to battle litter.
Rep. Eddie Lambert of Prairieville had a similar bill last year. Lambert said he probably will bring back a similar bill when the Legislature starts its April session.
Reader comments posted to this article may be published in our print edition. All rights reserved. This copyrighted material may not be re-published without permission. Links are encouraged.
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An American novelist, essayist, poet, professor, cultural critic and farmer.. American man of letters academic cultural and economic critic and farmer
Do not be ashamed
You will be walking some night
in the comfortable dark of your yard
and suddenly a great light will shine
round about you, and behind you
will be a wall you never saw before.
It will be clear to you suddenly
that you were about to escape,
and that you are guilty: you misread
the complex instructions, you are not
a member, you lost your card
or never had one. And you will know
that they have been there all along,
their eyes on your letters and books,
their hands in your pockets,
their ears wired to your bed.
Though you have done nothing shameful,
they will want you to be ashamed.
They will want you to kneel and weep
and say you should have been like them.
And once you say you are ashamed,
reading the page they hold out to you,
then such light as you have made
in your history will leave you.
They will no longer need to pursue you.
You will pursue them, begging forgiveness.
They will not forgive you.
There is no power against them.
It is only candor that is aloof from them,
only an inward clarity, unashamed,
that they cannot reach. Be ready.
When their light has picked you out
and their questions are asked, say to them:
"I am not ashamed." A sure horizon
will come around you. The heron will begin
his evening flight from the hilltop.
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|by Howard W. Hewitt • March 17, 2005|
Most immersion learning trips feature intellectual insight, great food, and fantastic sights. Many of the trips also have those human moments the participants will remember just as much as the educational benefit.
Students studying the European Union over Spring Break saw and learned a lot but also dealt with a sick professor and five of their classmates missing a train during a short stop-over in Luxemburg.
Professor of Political Science Melissa Butler and Professor of Economics Kay Widdows led a group of Wabash men through visits of Strasbourg, France, and Brussels, Belgium.
Widdows fell ill late in the trip but returned to her Baxter office Tuesday. During a train trip, five of the students didn’t get back to the train during a 15-minute stop, but quickly realized another train was departing in less than 10 minutes.
"I was pretty relaxed when losing students in Luxemburg," Butler joked, "because I have led 40 students through a bazaar in India. And after that, nothing rattles you very much."
Butler, a bit of a veteran at immersion learning, reflected on the trip noting that little replaces hands-on learning.
"I think that actually walking the halls of the institutions and meeting with people who work in the field is invaluable," Butler said. "The students also learn how to ask a question. At the beginning of the week that is not something they’re all that sophisticated at but by the end of the week – every place we went the folks would say 'what a good group’ and that they asked questions far more sophisticated than presenters usually get."
"We were able to see firsthand the consequences of the great leaps forward that have characterized the growth of the European Union," sophomore Gabe Smith said. "For example, when we were in the Council meeting room, we saw there were only 10 translation booths when in fact there are now 20 official languages."
The immersion experience brings concepts and principles to life.
"I think it pays off in enthusiasm and a level of appreciation for reality that there really are people for who the policies of the European Union make a difference and it’s not just a chapter in the book," said Butler. And to see people whose daily lives are actually impacted by what they’re studying."
Butler also believes there is some advantage to taking students on Immersion Trips who have done such learning before.
"Immersion learning is interesting in that it’s not something our students naturally know how to do," she explained. "It takes a little bit of growth and practice to get good at it. The nice thing is we have enough trips that there are usually some students on a trip who have had some previous experience with immersion learning and are able to share that and talk to the other students."
Leo Priemer '06 said some the EU remains an abstract concept to many of its own citizens. "We talked to a lot of Europeans who really didn’t care at all about the European Union. It didn’t seem to affect their lives at all."
Butler and Widdows get their share of good natured barbs about two female professors leading a group of young men around Europe. Butler agreed the oversight is not much different than parenting.
"The first time we went out we did not set out a lot of rules and we were fairly loose," she said. "What we found out is you can’t tighten things up after they’ve been loose. We’ve found out subsequently that you can loosen things up after they’ve been tightened.
"What we’ve done is to let the students spend the first couple of days earning our trust and they always earn our trust. Then we praise them and we let them go."
The students will be spending most of the next 6-7 weeks working on research papers, perhaps inspired by issues they learned more about while traveling. Butler said the immersion trip would hopefully help the students maintain enthusiasm for their research projects.
Hewitt is Wabash College's Director of New Media and Web Content Editor.
Top right: Jane Hardy, Richard Widdows, Saad Tahir, Jon Koerner, Michael Matsey, Abhi Shah, Kaizad Daruwala, Adam Hawkins, Gabe Smith, Zach Mulholland, Matt Schulz, and Leo Priemer stop for a group shot in front of the European Union Headquarters in Brusells.
Lower left: Daruwala, Smith and Priemer enter the EU offices.
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|President Obama Visiting Solyndra, May 2010 (Solyndra)|
Despite this guarantee, which some sources say was almost completely drawn down, and hundreds of millions of private capital from such stalwarts as Madrone Capital, RockPort Capital, the George Kaiser Family Foundation, CMEA Capital, Redpoint Ventures, US Venture Partners, and Virgin Green Fund, Solyndra has filed for bankruptcy and laid off over 1,000 workers.
A gleaming, spotless new factory, a revolutionary new type of solar panel, and a government handout was not enough to keep Solyndra alive. Neither was more capital infusion by some of the initial investors last spring.
Monday morning quarterbacks are second-guessing this investment in a company with an expensive new technology that was built on two big bets: that the commodity used to manufacturer its competition's solar panels – silicon -- would soar and stay high, and that their first-mover advantage in flat-roof installation would cover roofs all over the country with their technology.
Both bets were lost.
Silicon prices have fallen, causing the price of traditional photovoltaic panels to fall. This was good for consumers, if not manufacturers, and it certainly wasn't good for a company like Solyndra with a more expensive technology solving a problem that had just gone away. Oh, and the other problem they were solving? That was being met by cheaper solutions from competitors.
Over the years, I've talked to many investors who shy away from companies with big, new technology risks. Risks are risky. They can also be expensive – and the more cutting edge the technology, the more capital-intensive it can be. It's very hard to pick the winning horse in such a race.
Such bets are even harder to make if the technology has unique manufacturing requirements, raw materials, or R&D needs.
In the case of Solyndra, apparently, they had all three.
And some are questioning why the government took such a strong interest in backing this particular company. I'll leave that to the pundits
I'm not saying the government should have seen this perfect storm coming with a company like Solyndra. After all, the private investors don't seem to have seen it either.
But the skeptic in me can't help questioning whether the government should even be in the business of picking winners or anointing companies. Rather, shouldn't they just make it easier for the market to sort them out?
This, by the way, is exactly what happened with Solyndra.
The market sorted. It did its job. Solyndra lost. Its investors did too. That's their job. They make bets and lose more often than they win. But what a shame that taxpayers have to lose along with them.
There will be a lot of lessons learned from the Solyndra failure. I hope one of them – for government and entrepreneurs alike – is that government sticks to making the playing field open for business and getting out of the way.
That seems a lot better than throwing a lot of our tax money away on a horse race.
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The amount of electronic information that can be delivered is dizzying — electronic medical records, test results, imaging. But one company believes it has found a way to deliver this information in the context of educational materials to ease patients into a better understanding of a newly diagnosed or updated condition to ensure they process it at a pace that’s manageable. Irish company Lincor Solutions seeks to capitalize on the growing digital footprint patient carry around with them thinks the bedside is a good place to start to help hospitals manage the dissemination of that information.
Edison Ventures in Lawrenceville, New Jersey pumped $9.5 million into Lincor Solutions so the nine-year old company can expand its platform across the US. It will locate its US headquarters in Nashville, TN and maintain research, development and sales offices in Cork, Ireland. The funds will also be used to to support product development, and to provide liquidity for existing shareholders.
Lincor’s MEDIVista platform has secure image archiving, integration to communication, medical records and hospital management systems for hospitals and providers. The company offers patients multimedia entertainment, education and communications services.
“A big challenge in healthcare is data integration,” noted Edison Ventures Principal Lenard Marcus in a phone interview. “What Lincor does is act as a point of consolidation with one window [through] which patients can receive firsthand data and learn more about their disease state and condition and enable physicians and nurses to have bedside conversations with them. In my view…it enables you to have a point of consolidation and the bedside is an ideal place.”
Marcus added that Lincor’s tool can also help boost reimbursement for providers because it can improve adherence, engage patients and reduce the likelihood of needless readmission. Lincor’s products are currently deployed in over 100 hospitals around the world.
Health IT has been a big priority for Edison Ventures in recent years and marks its 30th investment in health IT companies. Health IT businesses that currently number among Edison Ventures’ portfolio companies include pharmaceutical interactive marketing business Cadient, Web-based life science education company ClearPoint, customer data integration provider Health Market Science, Life science contract solutions iContracts, cost management business PHX and Verilogue — a physian patient communication business.
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(UK 1940 68m) DVD2
A carrion crow sat on a tree…
p George King, Odette King d George King w Edward Dryhurst, Frederick Hayward, H.F.Maltby novel “The Woman in White” by Wilkie Collins ph Hone Glendenning ed Jack Harris m Jack Beaver art Bernard Robinson
Tod Slaughter (Sir Percival Glyde, impostor), Sylvia Marriott (Anne Catherick/Laura Fairlie), Hilary Eaves (Marion Hairlie), Hay Petrie (Dr Isidor Fosco), Geoffrey Wardwell (Paul Hartwright), Margaret Yarde (Mrs Bullen), Rita Grant (Jessica, the maid), David Horne (Frederick Fairlie), David Keir (Merriman), Elsie Wagstaff (Mrs Catherick),
To say that Tod Slaughter is an acquired taste is one of the biggest understatements one could ever make. He’s like cinematic marmite and for many just as difficult to swallow. His films, if seen in the cold light of day, are archaic fossils, transcriptions of old blood-curdling melodramas that were popular on the boards of amateur theatrical houses in the Victorian and Edwardian era. While the upper classes went to see Henry Irving, Edward Gordon Craig and Ellen Terry, the masses came to see the predecessors of Tod Slaughter chew the scenery in productions with all the refinement of a tavern wench’s cleavage.
Slaughter’s peak period was from the mid 1930s to 1940, and included such lip-smacking nonsense as Sweeney Todd – The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Maria Marten, The Crimes of Stephen Hawke, Sexton Blake and the Hooded Terror and the hamtastic The Face at the Window. If one had to nominate a favourite, however, it has to be Crimes at the Dark House, which dared even to literary pretensions as a rough adaptation of Wilkie Collins’ famous chiller The Woman in White. In it Slaughter plays a scoundrel whose name we don’t know, but who adopts the name of Sir Percival Glyde after he murders him out in Australia and takes his family ring and a letter advising him to come home and take up the role of baronet because his father had died. On his arrival, he finds out that the old baronet died leaving debts of 15,782 pounds, 18 shillings and five pence. His only way out is to marry the daughter of one of the old baronet’s late friends, Laura Fairlie. She will bring a fortune, which he can then take control of.
It’s utterly ridiculous stuff, not least Slaughter playing a man who hasn’t even reached forty when he looks every year of his 55 years, but that’s part of the creaky charm. One recalls Charles Laughton saying, in response to the incestuous subtext to his performance as Edward Moulton Barrett in The Barretts of Wimpole Street that “they can’t censor the gleam in my eye.” With Slaughter it’s not so much a gleam as a lecherous dart. On hearing of his prospective bride his first words are “the lady is young and comely, I hope.” While he’s waiting, he finds a buxom maid and orders her to come to him for “certain instructions” and, one blink later and she has a bun in her oven and Slaughter has to turn off the gas by strangling her and tossing her body into the lake. Other bodies of snoops who get too close to the truth follow her, and he despatches them with equal relish, with a laugh rather like Dwight Frye’s Renfield gibbering in the hold of the Demeter.
Everything really comes to a head in the final act, with his accomplice, a crooked doctor from an asylum (the splendidly nasty Hay Petrie) coming a cropper in spectacular style, knocked out and then hanged by a bell rope in the old parish church. His bride’s sister, Marion, then gets threatened with rape – or “breaking in a mare” as he calls it – before he’s finally trapped in his own conflagration, dying with all the thespian subtlety with which Charles Laughton’s Henry VIII ate capons and chickens. It’s utter trash, but taken in context absolutely hilarious stuff, right from the opening scene of Slaughter murdering the real Sir Percival by hammering a tent peg into his eardrum, broad enough to make the later Gainsborough costume cycle of gypsies and orphans seem like Jane Austen in comparison (even with Maggie Lockwood’s heaving cleavage). Nothing can match Slaughter threatening Petrie with “I’ll feed your entrails to the pigs” or scrapping away while Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony gets murdered. You’ll swear you can smell grilled gammon as the closing credits roll.
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This Saturday January 19th, a record number of teens from Orange County high schools will travel to Vail Lake Resort in Temecula to test their fitness and bike handling skills on the trails of the SoCalEndurance race course.
It's like a word problem in math class:
Q: "If 19 students and 6 coaches from 4 local high schools raced on mountain bikes for 12 hours, solve for X".
A: X = 2 have fun, 2 eat, 2 socialize and 2 warm up for the upcoming race season of the SoCal High School Cycling League.
Five years ago, there were only six OC area students participating in the high school league. In 2013, more than forty teens are expected to toe the start line at the first race. This exponential growth has fueled increased participation in local cycling events like the SoCalEndurance series.
The nineteen that are racing this Saturday are certainly doing some extra credit up front. Thanks to a relay race format, each teen can ride from 1 to 5 laps on the 8 mile off-road course. Each lap involves over 1200 feet of climbing up desert hills and ridges - not exactly an easy A!
And the hardiest of these young cyclists will attach lights to their helmets and handlebars and take to the trails after sundown. Talk about staying after school!
Class is in session!
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On Friday, President Obama appointed General Electric’s chief executive, Jeff Immelt — an advocate for carbon cap-and-trade — chairman of his panel of outside economic advisors, the newly branded Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.
This council was formerly known as PERAB (the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board). Immelt was a founding member, and takes the chairman reigns from Paul Volcker.
GE is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of clean energy and related technologies. The company makes everything from large wind turbines, to electric vehicle charging stations, to good old lights and appliances.
Could the rising political influence of Jeff Immelt (image, below) be a good thing for green innovators in the U.S.? Could clean tech newcomers, small businesses and competitors suffer from policy endorsed by the CEO of the established giant?
The Christian Science Monitor’s Mark Trumbull reported:
“[Immelt's selection] opens the door to potential conflicts of interest. GE’s future profits are intertwined with government policies in the US and elsewhere. It makes equipment used in energy, infrastructure, health care, and defense. On Wednesday, when Obama sang the praises of export-related contracts that US firms have won in China recently, GE deals figured prominently. [While] economists say growing exports – for GE and other firms – are one vital way for the US to grow jobs…Even in a best-case scenario for exports, America will need lots of other jobs, as well.
Some business leaders worry that an expected move by the Environmental Protection Agency to limit carbon emissions could impose damaging costs on the economy.”
Noting GE’s plans to develop a net-zero home with solar and wind power, its competition for clean tech startups and inventors, Ecomagination, and its recent efforts to put small wind turbines in homes and businesses, CleanTechnica contributor Tina Casey saw Immelt’s role as a good thing for all that’s green and clean in the U.S. She even defended his company’s earlier habit of outsourcing jobs, copiously:
“The initial reaction to President Obama’s announcement has been mixed, mainly due to GE’s past record of outsourcing jobs. However [since] 2009 you’ll find Immelt admitting that too much outsourcing… hurt the U.S. economy, and calling for a domestic manufacturing revival to get us out of the doldrums. That puts him squarely in line with Obama’s call for an economy ‘fueled by what we invent and what we build…’”
President Obama gushed about Immelt in a weekly address on Saturday:
“…GE’s CEO [is] one of the most imaginative and visionary business leaders in America. [He] has agreed to head up our new Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. The purpose of this council is to help us find ways to grow our economy by investing in our businesses here at home. And under Jeff’s leadership, I’m confident that they’ll generate good ideas about how we can spur hiring, educate our workers to compete in the 21st century, and attract the best jobs and businesses to America rather than seeing them spring up overseas.”
Check out the rest of the president’s remarks on Immelt, and let us know if you think he’s the right man for the job(s) and a good thing for green sector innovation.
Images via: Whitehouse.gov
The General Electric Company, or GE, is an American multinational conglomerate corporation incorporated in the State of New York. In 2009, Forbes ranked GE as the world’s largest company. The company has 304,000 employees around the world. GE is a diversified infrastructure, finance and media company taking on the world’s toughest challenges. From aircraft engines and power generation to financial services, medical imaging, and television programming, GE operates in more than 100 countries and employs about 300,000 people worldwide. GE has...
Jeffrey R. Immelt is the CEO and ninth chairman of GE, a post he has held since September 7, 2001. Mr. Immelt has held several global leadership positions since coming to GE in 1982, including roles in GE’s Plastics, Appliance, and Medical businesses. In 1989 he became an officer of GE and joined the GE Capital Board in 1997. A couple years later, in 2000, Mr. Immelt was appointed president and chief executive officer. Mr. Immelt has been named one of...
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I've been calling these creations my 'twine balls,' but for the post title I decided that 'Jute Spheres' sounded much more chic. I think that I originally saw something like these in a Pottery Barn Catalog and I figured there had to be a tutorial somewhere on the internet so that I could make my own! As it turns out, there are A LOT of tutorials on how to do this. I followed the one on Homemaker in Heels.
Yesterday I had a vision of an even bigger twine ball made of a thicker hemp rope, so I got to work.
Unfortunately, I popped the balloon and my ball deflated. :( I think it may have needed a gluier (totally a word) mixture and more time to dry. Oh well. The thin jute that I originally used worked really well, so I might just need to stick with that for future balls. I've also seen some neat ones using yarn! So many ideas!
If you want to make your own, here's what I did:
-Twine/jute/string of some kind
-Balloon (I suggest a large sized balloon so when you blow it up, it is round and not balloon shaped)
-Glue (mix about 1/2 and 1/2 with water)
1. Blow up a balloon to the size you want your ball to be.
2. Unroll the string you're using and start dipping it in the glue mixture. It helps to do a lot at one time so you can just keep wrapping.
3. Wrap around the balloon. Keep going until it looks good to you. Make sure you leave a hole big enough to pull the balloon out.
4. Let dry overnight. Pop balloon- it will pull away from the string and make some strange noises! As long as the string is dry, it will hold its shape.
Linking up to:
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A bill pre-filed in the State Senate would eliminate the 20 solid waste management districts in the state, and lower the landfill fees that fund them.
The management districts, most of which cover multiple counties, help local entities get grants to help pay for recycling programs or other efforts to divert material from landfills.
This story on the American beef industry is part of a special reporting series from Harvest Public Media. Check out the rest of their stories at harvestpublicmedia.org.
You think you deal with a lot of bull crap? Allan Sents needs a front-end loader and a dump truck to deal with all the cattle manure he’s up against. Literally.
April means spring cleaning for many Columbia residents. To the city of Columbia, that means lots of hazardous waste.
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Marketing’s Oldest Old Wives’ TaleFebruary 7, 2013
by Bob Hoffman (@adcontrarian), San Francisco Bay There a few themes that keep popping up in this column. They are:
1. Misconceptions about “branding” and how brands are built
2. The folly of listening to “marketing experts”
3. The over-promise of online advertising
4. The over-promise of social media
5. The “death of advertising,” “death of TV,” and “death of marketing” nonsense
6. The chronic, silly belief in “the thing that will change everything”
7. The foolishness of marketers’ obsession with young people
Over the past few weeks I’ve written a number of posts about #7. But I haven’t really dealt with the main thesis that drives marketers to focus on young people when every trend in demographics and economics points to people over 50 as the drivers of consumer spending.
In case you haven’t been paying attention, here are the key facts:
- Over 70% of the wealth in the U.S. is controlled by people over 50.
- Half of all consumer spending is done by people over 50.
- People over 50 have an average net worth 3 times that of younger generations
- They account for 55% of consumer packaged goods sales and dominate 94% of CPG categories
- Baby boomers spend an average of $650/month on technology, more than either Gen X or Gen Y
- Younger boomers outspend younger adults in every major category
- Baby boomers are the Internet’s largest constituency
- Between now and 2030, the population over 50 will grow at about three times the rate of people 18-49
- They buy over 60% of all new cars
- They are the target for 5% of all advertising.
So the question is, if people over 50 are so economically dominant, how can it be that, as Forbes says, they are “the most neglected wealthy people in the history of marketing.”
There are a number of reasons. In a recent post entitled The Invincible Blindness Of Advertisers, I mentioned a few of the fictitious beliefs that drive this, including:
- People over 50 are already too brand loyal to convert
- People over 50 are too price-conscious
- People over 50 don’t spend much
- There is a “lifetime value” in targeting young people
It’s all nonsense. But perhaps the largest delusion about people over 50 is that they want to be like young people.
Do they want to feel young? Yes. Do they want to be like young people? No. This is a distinction that seems to be completely lost on marketers.
The baby boom is Barack Obama and Tom Hanks. It is Bruce Springsteen and Condoleezza Rice and Yo-Yo Ma and Steve Jobs. It’s Stephen Spielberg and Magic Johnson and Jonathan Franzen and Oprah Winfrey and Jerry Seinfeld.
The idea that these people and their contemporaries want to be like a 25-year old barista or a doofus college frat boy is absurd. The belief that they aspire to be like the knuckleheads who inhabit Bud Light, or Taco Bell, or KFC ads is beyond ridiculous.
The marketing industry does not understand this. They think of baby boomers as grandma and grandpa. They are not. They invented the personal computer. They grew up listening to the Rolling Stones and smoking weed. They didn’t invent sex, but they invented the sexual revolution.
And yet, the idea that people over 50 want to be like young people is the hopelessly out-of-date fiction that the advertising and marketing industry clings to while they waste hundreds of millions of dollars pandering to people who don’t and won’t buy their products.
- The Ad Contrarian is Bob Hoffman, ceo of Hoffman/Lewis advertising in San Francisco and St. Louis. Hoffman is the author of The Ad Contrarian and 101 Contrarian Ideas About Advertising. Reprinted from his blog The Ad Contrarian.
- Industry profiles you’ll make time for. Sign up for our free newsletter!
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Remarks by Senator John Edwards
St. Anselm’s College, Manchester, New Hamphshire
October 29, 2007
Many of you know that I am the son of a mill worker – that I rose from modest means and have been blessed in so many ways in life. Elizabeth and I have so much to be grateful for.
And all of you know about some of the challenges we have faced in my family. But there came a time, a few months ago, when Elizabeth and I had to decide, in the quiet of a hospital room, after many hours of tests and getting pretty bad news – what we were going to do with our lives.
And we made our decision. That we were not going to go quietly into the night – that we were going to stand and fight for what we believe in.
As Elizabeth and I have campaigned across America, I’ve come to a better understanding of what that decision really meant – and why we made it.
Earlier this year, I spoke at Riverside Church in New York, where, forty years ago, Martin Luther King gave a historic speech. I talked about that speech then, and I want to talk about it today. Dr. King was tormented by the way he had kept silent for two years about the Vietnam War.
He was told that if he spoke out he would hurt the civil rights movement and all that he had worked for – but he could not take it any more – instead of decrying the silence of others – he spoke the truth about himself.
"Over the past two years" he said, "I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silence and speak from the burning of my own heart."
I am not holier than thou. I am not perfect by any means. But there are events in life that you learn from, and which remind you what this is really all about. Maybe I have been freed from the system and the fear that holds back politicians because I have learned there are much more important things in life than winning elections at the cost of selling your soul.
Especially right now, when our country requires so much more of us, and needs to hear the truth from its leaders.
And, although I have spent my entire life taking on the big powerful interests and winning – which is why I have never taken a dime from Washington lobbyists or political action committees – I too have been guilty of my own silence – but no more.
It’s time to tell the truth. And the truth is the system in Washington is corrupt. It is rigged by the powerful special interests to benefit they very few at the expense of the many. And as a result, the American people have lost faith in our broken system in Washington, and believe it no longer works for ordinary Americans. They’re right.
As I look across the political landscape of both parties today – what I see are politicians too afraid to tell the truth – good people caught in a bad system that overwhelms their good intentions and requires them to chase millions of dollars in campaign contributions in order to perpetuate their careers and continue their climb to higher office.
This presidential campaign is a perfect example of how our politics is awash with money. I have raised more money up to this point than any Democratic candidate raised last time in the presidential campaign – $30 million. And, I did it without taking a dime from any Washington lobbyist or any special interest PAC.
I saw the chase for campaign money at any cost by the frontrunner in this race – and I did not join it – because the cost to our nation and our children is not worth the hollow victory of any candidate. Being called president while powerful interests really run things is not the same as being free to lead this nation as president of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
If protecting the current established structure in Washington is in your interest, then I am not your candidate. I ran for president four years ago – yes, in part out of personal ambition – but also with a deep desire to stand for working people like my father and mother – who no matter how hard things were for our family, always worked even harder to make things better for us.
But the more Elizabeth and I campaigned this year, the more we talked to the American people, the more we met people just like my father, and hard working people like James Lowe. James is a decent and honest man who had to live for 50 years with no voice in the richest country in the world because he didn’t have health care. The more people like him that I met, the more I realized something much bigger was stirring in the American people. And it has stirred in each of us for far too long.
Last month Ken Burns – who made the great Civil War documentary – launched his newest epic on World War II on PBS – and what a story it tells.
At the cost of great suffering, blood and enormous sacrifice, within four years after Pearl Harbor it is incredible what this nation achieved. America built the arsenal of democracy worthy of our great history. We launched the greatest invasion armada in the history of warfare against Hitler’s fortress Europe, and, with our allies, we freed a continent of suffering humanity.
At the same time on the other side of the globe we crossed 10,000 miles of ocean and liberated another hemisphere of humanity – islands and nations freed from the grip of Japanese militarists. While at the same time succeeding in the greatest scientific endeavor ever undertaken – the Manhattan project – and topped it off with building the Pentagon, one of the largest buildings in the world in a little over a year.
It is incredible what America has accomplished. Because no matter what extraordinary challenges we have been faced with, we did exactly what America has always done in our history – we rose to the challenge.
And, now, as I travel across America and listen to people, I hear real concern about what’s going on. For the first time in our nation’s history, people are worried that we’re going to be the first generation of Americans not to pass on a better life to our children.
And it’s not the fault of the American people. The American people have not changed. The American people are still the strong, courageous people they have always been. The problem is what our government has become. And, it is up to us to do something about it.
Because Washington may not see it, but we are facing a moral crisis as great as any that has ever challenged us. And, it is this test – this moral test – that I have come to understand is at the heart of this campaign.
Just look at what has happened in Iraq. What was the response of the American people to the challenge at hand? Our men and women in uniform have been heroes. They’ve done everything that’s been asked of them and more. But what about our government? Four years after invading Iraq, we cannot even keep the lights on in Baghdad.
When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the American people were at their best. They donated their time and their money in record numbers. There was an outpouring of support. I took 700 college kids down to help – young people who gave up their spring break. But what about our government? Three years after hurricane Katrina thousands of our fellow Americans, our brothers and sisters, are still housed in trailers waiting to go home.
There’s no better example of the bravery and goodness of the American people than the response to the attacks of 9/11: firefighters and first responders risking and too often giving their lives to save others, charging up the stairs while everyone else was coming down; record bloodbank donations; and the list goes on. But what about our government? Six years after 9/11, at Ground Zero there sits only a black hole that tortures our conscience and scars our hearts.
In every instance we see an American people who are good, decent, compassionate and undeterred. And, American people who are better than the government that is supposed to serve and represent them.
And what has happened to the American "can do" spirit? I will tell you what has happened: all of this is the result of the bitter poisoned fruit of corruption and the bankruptcy of our political leadership.
It is not an accident that the government of the United States cannot function on behalf of its people, because it is no longer our people’s government – and we the people know it.
This corruption did not begin yesterday – and it did not even begin with George Bush – it has been building for decades – until it now threatens literally the life of our democracy.
While the American people personally rose to the occasion with an enormous outpouring of support and donations to both the victims of Katrina and 9/11– we all saw our government’s neglect. And we saw greed and incompetence at work. Out of more than 700 contracts valued at $500,000 or greater, at least half were given without full competition or, according to news sources, with vague or open ended terms, and many of these contracts went to companies with deep political connections such as a subsidiary of Haliburton, Bechtel Corp., and AshBritt Inc.
And in Iraq – while our nation’s brave sons and daughters put their lives on the line for our country – we now have mercenaries under their own law while their bosses sit at home raking in millions.
We have squandered millions on building Olympic size swimming pools and buildings that have never been used. We have weapons and ammunition unaccounted for that may now be being used against our own soldiers. We literally have billions wasted or misspent – while our troops and their families continue to sacrifice. And the politically connected lobby for more. What’s their great sacrifice – higher profits.
It goes on every minute of every day.
Corporate executives at United Airlines and US Airways receive millions in compensation for taking their companies into bankruptcy, while their employees are forced to take cuts in pay.
Companies like Wal-Mart lobby against inspecting containers entering our nation’s ports, even though expert after expert agrees that the likeliest way for a dirty bomb to enter the United States is through a container, because they believe their profits are more important than our safety. What has become of America when America’s largest company lobbies against protecting America?
Trade deals cost of millions of jobs. What do we get in return? Millions of dangerous Chinese toys in our children’s cribs laden with lead. This is the price we are made to pay when trade agreements are decided based on how much they pad the profits for multinational corporations instead of what is best for America’s workers or the safety of America’s consumers.
We have even gotten to the point where our children’s safety is potentially at risk because nearly half of the apple juice consumed by our children comes from apples grown in China. And Americans are kept in the dark because the corporate lobbyists have pushed back country of origin labeling laws again and again.
This is not the America I believe in.
The hubris of greed knows no bounds. Days after the homeland security bill passed, staffers from the homeland security department resigned and became homeland security consultants trying to cash in. And, where was the outrage? There was none, because that’s how it works in Washington now It is not a Republican revolving door or a Democratic revolving door – it is just the way it’s done.
Someone called it a government reconnaissance mission to figure out how to get rich when you leave the government.
Recently, I was dismayed to see headlines in the Wall Street Journal stating that Senate Democrats were backing down to lobbyists for hedge funds who have opposed efforts to make millionaire and billionaire hedge fund managers pay the same tax rate as every hard-working American. Now, tax loopholes the wealthy hedge fund managers do not need or deserve are not going to be closed, all because Democrats – our party – wanted their campaign money.
And a few weeks ago, around the sixth anniversary of 9/11, a leading presidential candidate held a fundraiser that was billed as a Homeland Security themed event in Washington, D.C. targeted to homeland security lobbyists and contractors for $1,000 a plate. These lobbyists, for the price of a ticket, would get a special "treat" – the opportunity to participate in small, hour long breakout sessions with key Democratic lawmakers, many of whom chair important sub committees of the homeland security committee. That presidential candidate was Senator Clinton.
Senator Clinton’s road to the middle class takes a major detour right through the deep canyon of corporate lobbyists and the hidden bidding of K Street in Washington – and history tells us that when that bus stops there it is the middle class that loses.
When I asked Hillary Clinton to join me in not taking money from Washington lobbyists – she refused. Not only did she say that she would continue to take their money, she defended them.
Today Hillary Clinton has taken more money from Washington lobbyists than any candidate from either party – more money than any Republican candidate.
She has taken more money from the defense industry than any other candidate from either party as well.
She took more money from Wall Street last quarter than Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and Barack Obama combined.
The long slow slide of our democracy into the corporate abyss continues unabated regardless of party, regardless of the best interests of America.
We have a duty – a duty to end this.
I believe you cannot be for change and take money from the lobbyists who prevent change. You cannot take on the entrenched interests in Washington if you choose to defend the broken system. It will not work. And I believe that, if Americans have a choice, and candidate who takes their money – Democrat or Republican – will lose this election.
For us to continue down this path all we have to do is suspend all that we believe in. As Democrats, we continue down this path only if we believe the party of the people is no more.
As Americans, we continue down this path only if we fail to heed Lincoln’s warning to us all.
"At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected," he asked, "if it ever reaches us it must spring up amongst us. It can not come from abroad. If destruction be our lot – we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we must live through all time or die by suicide."
America lives because 20 generations have honored the one moral commandment that makes us Americans.
To give our children a better future than we received.
I stand here today the son of Wallace and Bobbie Edwards. The father of Wade, Cate, Emma Claire and Jack – and I know, as well as you, that we must not be the first generation that fails to live up to our moral challenge and keep the promise of America.
That would be an abomination.
There is a dream that is America. It is what makes us American. And I will not stand by while that dream is at risk.
I am not perfect – far from it – but I do understand that this is not a political issue – it is the moral test of our generation.
Our nation’s founders knew that this moment would come – that at some point the power of greed and its influence over officials in our government might strain and threaten the very America they hoped would last as an ideal in the minds of all people, and as a beacon of hope for all time.
That is why they made the people sovereign. And this is why it is your responsibility to redeem the promise of America for our children and their future.
It will not be easy – sacrifice will be required of us – but it was never easy for our ancestors, and their sacrifices were far greater than any that will fall on our shoulders.
Yet, the responsibility is ours.
We, you and I, are the guardians of what America is and what it will be.
The choice is ours.
Down one path, we trade corporate Democrats for corporate Republicans; our cronies for their cronies; one political dynasty for another dynasty; and all we are left with is a Democratic version of the Republican corruption machine.
It is the easier path. It is the path of the status quo. But, it is a path that perpetuates a corrupt system that has not only failed to deliver the change the American people demand, but has divided America into two – one America for the very greedy, and one America for everybody else.
And it is that divided America – the direct result of this corrupt system – which may very well lead to the suicide Lincoln warned us of – the poison that continues to seep into our system while none notice.
Or we can choose a different path. The path that generations of Americans command us to take. And be the guardians that kept the faith.
I run for president for my father who worked in a mill his entire life and never got to go to college the way I did.
I run for president for all those who worked in that mill with my father.
I run for president for all those who lost their jobs when that mill was shut down.
I run for president for all the women who have come up to Elizabeth and me and told us the like Elizabeth they had breast cancer – but unlike Elizabeth they did not have health care.
I run for president for twenty generations of Americans who made sure that their children had a better life than they did.
As Americans we are blessed -- for our ancestors are not dead, they occupy the corridors of our conscience. And, as long we keep the faith -- they live. And so too the America of idealism and hope that was their gift to us.
I carry the promise of America in my heart, where my parents placed it. Like them, like you, I believe in people, hard work, and the sacred obligation of each generation to the next.
This is our time now. It falls to use to redeem our democracy, reclaim our government and relight the promise of America for our children.
Let us blaze a new path together, grounded in the values from which America was forged, still reaching toward the greatness of our ideals. We can do it. We can cast aside the bankrupt ways of Washington and replace them with the timeless values of the American people. We can liberate our government from the shackles of corporate money that bind it to corporate will, and restore the voices of our people to its halls.
This is the cause of my life. This is the cause of our time. Join me. Together, we cannot fail.
We will keep faith with those who have gone before us, strong and proud in the knowledge that we too rose up to guard the promise of America in our day, and that, because we did, America’s best days still lie ahead.
If you ever wondered why the news' coverage of John Edwards always discusses the nonsense of his campaign, like haircuts and good ole' boys, this is why. They're part of the corruption he's referring to, and they don't want that to change. The large corporations that run the news, both in print and broadcast form, hate people like this, and they'll ignore them and what they really stand for as long as they can. Then they'll try to dismiss them as not worthy of consideration by serious people.
So, here's what I say - if you like the speech, pass it on. You're not going to be seeing any of it on TV, I can guarantee you.
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During the Prop 23 vs AB-32 debate conservative bloggers warned the once the subsidies ran out the corporate interest in wind and solar would decline and than vanish. This morning P. Gosslin at The NoTricksZone blog has a English tranlation of a German language article in the German Technology Review.
The article starts with this introduction:
Companies of the finance-intense sector of renewable energy are getting their supply of cash cut off. Investors are opting for lower risk projects.
Gosslin's post continues:
Almost everywhere globally governments are scaling back programs that support renewable energies.”
And so it’s only normal that venture capital companies are now opting out. Investment strategies are changing. Technology Review writes:
Germany, Italy and Spain are reducing subsidies, in America the money from the 2009 stimulus package is slowly running out.”
According to Technology Review, people want quicker returns and less risk. Well who doesn’t? Technology Review writes:
During the last years many finance companies began, however, to invest in long-term projects with high capital requirements. That only worked mainly because they were able to expect subsidies from the state. Thus hundreds of millions flowed into start-ups in solar technology, which first had to build expensive plants to get the technology ripe for the market. The profits came later, if at all.”
Now the state subsidies are shrinking and new startups will have little chance of competing against the already established companies – too risky. The bubble has nowhere to go but to implode. So watch the politicians soon scramble and start blaming “speculators” and “greedy finance companies” for the mess they themselves created, and then start calling for more financial regulation.
It is no wonder that Al Gore has "gone postal" his dream of huge profits have collapsed along with the flight of investors. We warned this would happend, but the proponents of AB-32 assured voters that it would not happen. Now what? Obama is killing coal power, the EPA is trying to stop the development of shale gas with the banning of proven drilling techniques, and now investors are running from renewables. One has to ask, What Now?
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Money is both the great equalizer and the great divider. The latter is particularly true when it comes to family and friends, whether it's parent-child, siblings, old pals, husband and wife. Our special report, 'Love & Money' has plenty of tips on how to handle your money and your relationships.
If you want your marriage to last, you should also make time for an open and honest heart to heart over your financial future together. So answer these nine questions.
Love is one thing; money quite another. Marriages these days resemble financial partnerships more than outright mergers. No surprise then that the number of prenuptial agreements is soaring . “People are much more protective than before.” says one attorney.
Whether it is best intentions or bad habits, the way parents approach money can make a lasting impression on the children. So try a little tough love and self control.
If your kids are making their own dinner reservations for Valentine’s Day, it’s probably time to discuss their financial independence. Once they reach college or turn 19, how you form relationships with your children can have fiscal consequences both good and bad.
Match.com, eHarmony and other traditional online dating may have rivals looking to capture their audience. After all, dating has always been a social activity.
Ever hid cash from your spouse or partner? How about a bill? Maybe lie about debt or income? If so, you have plenty of company in modern America. Along with love and money, apparently come secrecy and deception. Now, here's how to avoid it.
Life insurance policies can be complicated at best, unintelligible at worst. Bottom line: There are two basic types of life insurance: term and whole. A useful analogy to explain the difference is buying versus renting. With term life insurance, you’re renting
Surviving on a single salary, after you’ve built a life on two, takes planning, discipline and above all else, a willingness to make tough choices.
Lending money to family members and good friends is always risky, but if you must follow these guidelines to make it rational, reasonable and legal.
With financial struggle more the rule than the exception these day, many financially stable parents are looking for ways to help their newly married children alleviate some of the burden. Here's some tips.
There are a host of financial and legal scenarios for which you need to be prepared--in some case simply by leaving your home state.
Talking about money with family can be extremely stressful, but it is possible to do it and do it well, if you remember some simple rules: Do it early, build the relationship, and have empathy.
Congress recently revised the estate tax law, setting the tax-free threshold at $5 million. The terms, however, will apply for just two years, requiring another act of Congress. Tell us what you think the level should be?
Valentine's Day is about money as much as love. Take our quiz to find out what you know about both.
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|With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, Hans Rosling debunks a few myths about the "developing" world. Rosling is professor of international health at Sweden's world-renowned Karolinska Institute, and founder of Gapminder, a non-profit that brings vital global data to life. (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 20:35) - More TEDTalks at http://www.ted.com|
Go play with the tool, it's free! http://www.gapminder.org
Sunday, December 24, 2006
Thursday, December 14, 2006
The New Ventures program of the World Resources Institute supports sustainable small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) creation in emerging economies. The program accelerates the transfer of venture capital and management expertise to outstanding investment opportunities in fast-growth, environmental sectors such as ecotourism, non-timber forest products and certified wood, organic foods and fibers, renewable energy, sustainable fisheries management, and clean technologies. This page contains research and interviews produced exclusively by the New Ventures team.
The 2007 National Idea-to-Product (I2P) Competition for EPICS and Social Entrepreneurship is currently seeking three social entrepreneurship projects to be showcased at their March 24, 2007 Competition. This is the second year for the I2P "on the road" competition which will be hosted by Princeton University.
An Idea-to-Product competition is a product feasibility competition, not a business plan competition. The showcase teams will be allotted ten minutes for presentation and 15 minutes for questions and answers. The team must have a product, prototype or well defined concept to be eligible. In the event a product is too large to transport to Princeton N.J., a poster and/or video presentation may be substituted for a live product demo.
To help support further success of the project, each showcase team will receive a participation award of $1,000.
Provide information on your program, mission and product by December 31, 2006. The I2P Team will review the information and choose 3 projects.
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Acumen is a leader in the fast-emerging hybrid sector that straddles private industry and nonprofits. Technically a nonprofit, it invests in enterprises in developing countries with the strategy and discipline of a Silicon Valley venture-capital firm.
Acumen's founder is Jacqueline Novogratz, a former banker with an infectious magnetism and a melodic voice that delivers a constant call to action. Under her leadership, the fund manages $20 million in investments that fall within three portfolios: health, water, and housing. But Acumen's goal is far larger than successful companies. Says Novogratz: "We're creating an overall design for how you provide goods and services to poor people."
Saturday, December 9, 2006
Found this on Thinkcycle (who knew people were still using Thinkcycle!?)
The website reads,
Practical Action was founded in 1966, as ITDG (the Intermediate Technology Development Group), by the radical economist Dr EF Schumacher to prove that his philosophy of 'Small is Beautiful' could bring real and sustainable improvements to people's lives.
They have lots of projects and technologies deployed. No medical devices that I can see, nevertheless, some interesting ones:
The most popular downloads last month:
1. Recycling of plastics
2. Dyeing textiles
4. Wind for electricity generation
5. Oil extraction
6. Solar distillation
7. Cashew nut processing
8. Packaging materials
10. Hydraulic ram pumps
Two linked trolleys, on pulleys, run on separate 10mm diameter steel wires which are suspended from towers: as the full trolley comes down, pulled by the weight of its load, it pulls the empty one up, ready for the next load. The trolleys' progress is controlled by another, 8mm wire, looped over a flywheel. A wooden drum brake, with bearing and bracket, governs their speed.
BoingBoing reports that
"Mohammed Bah Abba of Nigeria won a Rolex award for his "pot-in-pot refrigerator. It consists of a smaller clay pot inside a larger clay pot. The gap is filled with damp sand. As the sand water evaporates, the inner pot cools. Food that used to spoil in a few days now stays fresh for weeks. Second-order effects are already being noticed -- for one thing, girls who had to skip school to sell food at markets can now attend classes."
More at WorldChangers
Update: These guys are 4 years late in reporting. Our trusty folks at Scientific American covered this in 2000. Their Science and the Citizen section is great.
The trend to a physical device model in open source design (see BusinessWeek article) has been tepid. Projects like Thinkcycle are one way to go. Recently, I ran into the The Open Prosthetic Project. It is one of the most interesting ideas I have run into in a long time. Wired magazine wrote about them a while back
Founded last year, the nonprofit Open Prosthetics Project applies the ethical and intellectual property foundation of open-source software to the task of building better artificial limbs. The project releases its experimental designs to its website in the public domain, free for anyone to use, forever. Anyone can download the STL files, tinker with them in CAD software, and submit them to a rapid manufacturer, such as a prototyping 3-D printing company.
This lets anyone turn out a customized prosthetic device without incurring tens of thousands of dollars in production costs. A user with a few hundred dollars to spend can be holding the physical reality within a week, though the post processing would still require some expertise...
Open Prosthetics' experimental design incorporates both modes in one hook, using a pin/spring/cam set-up controlled by the intensity of the wearer's shrug: A limited shrug momentarily opens or closes the hook, just like the traditional design, while a full shrug acts as a toggle, reversing the hook from open to closed, or visa versa, and leaving it there until the next actuation.
They've built and rebuilt two versions of this positional hook, and they have a working prototype of the entire limb made from LEGO Technic parts. (This video demonstrates the strength difference of the two modes in picking up a small object.)
and in the same project, an inspiring story of a father who made a prosthetic fishing rod for his son:
Man makes prosthetic fishing rod for son
Robert Haag has put together an amazing Spiderman fishing pole / prosthetic arm for his young son. It's part of the "Open Prosthetics Project," which aims to share ideas and inventions for prosthetic devices. Link | Video of kid practicing with the rod
Some thought provokers:
Applications include, of course, war veterans and civilian victims. For developing countries, given the high amount of manual labor involved in many jobs, what types of tools can be attached to a prosthetic that gives that person newfound ways to earn a living?
Spray paint cans
Watering and planting tools?
A must read.
Rx for Survival profiles a series of health initiatives around the world, giving upstart social entrepreneurs and innovators opportunities to make a difference. David Bornstein, who previously wrote the story of Grameen Bank, has an excellent volume in How to Change the World. I particularly liked the story of Brazil's Fabio Rosa who introduced monophase electricity in rural areas, standing up against the powerful and centralized lobby of the national electric company who opposed his project.
In the hallways and over cocktails and dinners -- all paid for by the foundation -- virologists and neurologists talked with plant biologists and nanoparticle physicists, sometimes finding ways to help one another. For example, a scientist with plans to improve vitamin-fortified ''golden rice'' asked the designer of a hand-held laboratory to test blood for pathogens whether it could be modified to test blood for iron and vitamins.
Also lab on a chip type of stuff
[Dr. Paul Yager's] prototype, will test a finger-stick drop of blood for flu, malaria, typhoid, dengue, measles, rickettsia, salmonella and other fever-causing infections -- a tall order, because the infecting agents range from minuscule viruses to relatively immense parasites.
Ideally, the blood will be dripped into a well in a 30-layered piece of disposable plastic the size of a thick credit card, divided and sucked down 16 hair-narrow channels, mixing with reagents stored dry in tiny pits on the cards.
The need to cut costs is persuading US and Western European firms to seek alternative destinations such as China and India for clinical trials. Another factor in this decision is that India and China have joined the World Trade Organization (WTO), which has invigorated both countries� economies. As a result, clinical trials conducted in these countries are no longer confined to evaluating new medicines for their own markets. India and China have opened up new opportunities for US and Western European firms to expand their pharmaceutical and biotechnology product markets substantially. In 2006, the global clinical trials sector is estimated to be about $10 billion and has the potential for considerable growth over the next few years.Wired Magazine has a more somber outlook, their article, A Nation of Guinea Pigs is worth looking into
Kalantri is uneasy about his clinical success. "Patients here are very passive," he reflects. "They will almost never question their doctor." Indeed, one woman who joined the trial six months ago sits patiently for more than an hour while Kalantri translates my questions, before revealing that she is suffering from aches and fever that are likely malaria. Such deference is hard to imagine in US patients - a querulous lot - and it makes Kalantri's position tricky. "Nine out of 10 times," he says, "the patient will just ask me to make the decision about the trial for him. So what role do I play? Am I a physician, concentrating on what's best for the patient? Or am I a researcher interested in recruiting patients? I try to balance the two sides, but ..." He shrugs. "It's a dichotomy." Kalantri began worrying
And more recently they reported that
Companies are attracted to India not only because of the huge patient pool and skilled workers, but also because many potential study volunteers are "treatment naïve," meaning they have not been exposed to the wide array of biomedical drugs that most Western patients have, said Stefan Ecks, a lecturer in social anthropology at the School of Social and Political Studies in Edinburgh who recently published a paper on the marketing of antidepressants in India.Our humble experience note: We actually spoke with some industry figures in Boston while they were on a trade mission from the state of Gujarat. According to them, the press is naturally going to blow a lof of the outlier claims out of proportion. Perhaps this is an opportunity for India to participate in cutting edge research and have a population that can benefit from promising drugs. Hey, while we they are at it---we don't mind the oversight!
And for the conspiracy theorists
Wired: Graphic Facilitation
Tired: PowerPoint Presentation
Expired: Overhead slides
I saw one of the these at a consulting company a year ago, and I thought they looked so neat. An excellent way to show complex concept that pop up and move away from PowerPoint syndrome.
Click on the picture for a bigger version.
Friday, December 8, 2006
Design that Matters has a wonderful project called the Kinkajou---a low cost microfilm projector intended to help people go to school at night (since many parts of the world require that the work during the day). Their value proposition is amazing. They took a creative approach to building the device, and of course, a major requirement was price. The result is a a projector that currently costs around $200 but if enough units are produced, they aim to lower that to around $50.
Our own little device that could, the SafePilot, was able to replicate the same model. The assistive device for the blind creates similiar features that a laser cane (retail price $250) provides, but for a lot less $$$. Price is not yet set, but we're hoping for a sub-$100 model in 2007. Stay tuned.
Also featured is something called PlayPumps---I'm absolutely fascinated by the idea.
Read the rest of the article
It's also something I saw in the book Gaviotas.
See-saw pump“In the open-air Gaviotas preschool, the children’s see-saw is actually a pump in disguise. As they rise and descend, water gushes from a vertical pipe into an open cement tank. Over the years Gaviotas technicians have installed these in thousands of school yards, using kid power to provide villages with clean water. This simple, inexpensive pump has revolutionised rural life across Colombia for people who used to haul their water in buckets from muddy tropical rivers.”
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Leader, Bloc Québécois
Gilles Duceppe was the first politician ever elected to the House of
Commons on a sovereigntist platform. He won a 1990 byelection
in the Montreal riding of Laurier-Sainte Marie, running as an Independent.
An informal group of former Tory and Liberal MPs enraged by
the defeat of the Meech Lake accord became an official party a few months
later under Duceppe's mentor, Lucien Bouchard. And the Bloc Québécois
||Duceppe in Montreal, May 2004 (CP photo)
After Bouchard resigned in late 1995 to become leader of the Parti Québécois
and premier of Quebec, Michel Gauthier spent a year as leader, struggling
to control an unruly caucus. When Gauthier resigned, Duceppe won 52.8
per cent of the party's support at a leadership convention in March 1997.
That length of service as party leader gives him a six-year head start
on the other three federal party chiefs testing their mettle in this campaign.
The 58-year-old son of revered Quebec actor Jean Duceppe and Hélène
Rowley, Duceppe has said he developed an early distaste for anglophones, even though his maternal grandfather, John James Rowley, was British
Duceppe's English-speaking Grade 6 teacher slapped him for complaining when the
French students had to stand in the aisles on a school bus, and he slapped
her back. "If you're talking about social justice, that event marked
me," he told the Ottawa Citizen years later.
|Theatre company founder Jean Duceppe and his four children. Gilles is the eldest, sitting at the left.
Politics surrounded him growing up. His father worked on Montreal Mayor
Jean Drapeau's 1954 campaign and was one of the federal NDP's
founding members in 1961.
Duceppe became a separatist at the age of 20 in Canada's centennial
year, inspired by René Lévesque's founding of the Mouvement
souveraineté-association in late 1967. Later he spent three years
in the Marxist-Leninist Communist Workers' Party; he has since called
that membership a mistake, based on a youthful search for absolute answers.
The official parliamentary website lists his occupation as "labour organizer,"
but he also was the general manager of the Université de Montréal
newspaper Quartier Latin while he was a student there and worked the night
shift as a medical orderly for five years in the 1970s.
Duceppe married Yolande Brunelle in 1978. They have two children,
Amelie and Alexis.
In his role as BQ leader, Duceppe is known for his eloquent speeches that take the future independence
of Quebec as a given, and for his well-aimed attacks against the government
in question period.
|A young Gilles sits under a portrait of his father, actor Jean Duceppe.
Rejecting the idea that a sovereign Quebec would face economic barriers
when trying to do business with the rest of Canada, Duceppe once said:
"Tell Western farmers they will have to eat all their beef or watch
the carcasses rot, instead of selling them to Quebec. Go to Oshawa and
explain to workers in the automobile industry that they will have to go
on unemployment insurance out of patriotism, because Canada cannot sell
any more cars to those poor Quebecers."
Duceppe loves the media spotlight, tightly controls his caucus, and
can deliver a blistering tongue-lashing with the help of
his piercing blue eyes, say those who have been on the receiving
As Quebecers' interest in pushing ahead with sovereignty waned in the late 1990s, Duceppe led his party to successively smaller showings in the House of Commons. Though it had earned 54 of 295 seats and official opposition status under former leader Lucien Bouchard in 1993, the party took only 44 of 301 seats in the 1997 election. Duceppe was widely mocked then for wearing an odd looking hairnet while campaigning at a cheese factory. The party's standings sank in 2000, with Bloc members elected in just 38 ridings. However it rebounded in the 2004 election, when the party took 54 of the 75 Quebec seats.
||Gilles Duceppe played both football and basketball during his high school days.
"Somebody always emerges to take a leadership when it's vacant, but it's hard to imagine much of a battle to replace Duceppe if he just gave up the struggle and went home," said a Montreal Gazette editorial February 2003, pointing out that five MPs had left the Bloc caucus since the 2000 election. "We wish he'd do just that, and take the rest of the Bloc MPs with him."
But that didn't seem likely.
In the spring of 2005, because of his popularity, Duceppe was pressured to leave the federal party in order to lead the provincial Parti Québécois after the departure of Bernard Landry. But Duceppe felt he would be more useful in Ottawa, given that another election was likely to happen within the year.
Polls suggest the party and Duceppe have enjoyed increased support since the sponsorship scandal. Just prior to the election call, some polls put the Bloc at over 50 per cent support in Quebec. In October 2005, Duceppe won almost 97 per cent of the vote in a confidence motion at the party convention.
Question d'Identite, by Gilles Duceppe, published in 2000 by Lanctot
The Bloc, by Manon Cornellier, published in 1995 by James Lorimer & Company.
Fighting for Canada, by Diane Francis, published in 1996 by Key Porter.
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A friend saw a garden art frog prince during a garden tour and asked me to make one. She didn't have a photo, so all I had to go by was 'it's round, green, funny, and wears a crown'.
Okay. I can make one of those! I confess, it's not my usual style of garden art, but I was up for the challenge.
This project is suitable for a somewhat experienced crafter or anyone who is willing to experiment and adapt. When you work with repurposed/used materials, each frog will be unique-which is wonderful, really-but does require a bit of patience and imagination.
I used a sturdy glas lamp globe for the body. An old bowling ball would work very well too.
Full instructions, materials, and frog dress-up ideas are on my blog here: http://www.empressofdirt.net/frogprincetutor...
I don't know how it happened or when it happened but one day when I looked down at my kitchen sink faucet there was grime and hard water deposits that had accumulated from the past 10
years! One day there was nothing and the next day bam it was there! It was disgusting and I wanted it gone ASAP so I broke out the big guns and with ease was able to remove 10 years of hard water deposits in 15 mintues! Check out the before and after pictures and find out what tools you need to remove hardwater deposits like this. http://decoratedchaos.blogspot.com/2013/04/r...
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California sees fewer teachers as enrollment trends up
Published: Saturday, December 8, 2012 at 2:15 p.m.
Last Modified: Saturday, December 8, 2012 at 2:15 p.m.
LOS ANGELES — Years of pink slips have taken a toll on California's teachers to be sure, but the dim job market has also had an impact on people wanting to become teachers at a time when the state's population of children reaching school age is rising.
While the numbers do not yet signal an outright teacher shortage, officials say they point to a worrisome trend of a graying workforce and fewer entrants into what has traditionally been one of the bulwark professions of the middle class.
"We've been worrying about this for a while," said Juliet Tiffany-Morales, research analyst for SRI International who has studied education trends. "A shortage could materialize. There's definitely a smaller pool of people going into teaching."
So far, the profession is holding its own because school districts have increased class sizes to cope with teacher layoffs, and the number of retiring teachers has more or less equaled the number of new teachers, Tiffany-Morales said. Both figure in the 15,000 to 20,000 range.
But a pinch could arise with a predicted steady rise of 1.4 percent in the state's population of school-age children over the next decade, a new transitional kindergarten grade for 4-year-olds that went into effect this fall and the introduction of national curriculum standards which will require retraining that some older teachers may not opt for.
"It's definitely something that people are keeping an eye on," said Holly Jacobson, director of the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning at WestEd, which tracks teacher supply trends. "There are a lot of variables at play so it's hard to predict, but we're seeing a shift in teachers."
The biggest factor driving teacher demand is demographics. The state Department of Finance projects more than 87,000 more children will be entering school from the 2011-12 school year to 2021-22 — about 60,000 of them elementary schoolers with the Inland Empire counties seeing the biggest increases.
Meanwhile, teacher preparation programs are losing enrollment. At California State University, which trains half of the state's teachers, the dropoff has been huge: from more than 31,000 teaching students in 2002-03 to just 11,000 in 2010-11.
Statewide, teacher credentials have dropped from more than 27,000 issued in 2003-04 to 18,700 in 2010-11, according to the Commission on Teacher Credentialing.
"Probably the biggest factor has been the job market," said Beverly Young, CSU assistant vice chancellor of teacher education and public school programs.
The teacher workforce lost more than 23,000 teachers from 2008 to 2011, mostly due to layoffs caused by state funding cuts although there has also been a big increase in retirements, some through incentive programs, according to a report "Status of the Teaching Profession 2011" by the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning.
Most of the laid off teachers were those newer to the profession in accordance with the state's last-hired-first-fired layoff policy, which has had a chilling effect on students contemplating teaching careers, Young said. "If you're a college student, you're seeing that happening," she said.
But Jacobson noted that while teaching has fewer new entrants, a shortage is likely not imminent. Thousands of laid off teachers are available for open positions should they arise. Some laid off teachers may move into other fields, but many continue to work as substitutes and are waiting to be called from rehiring lists, she said.
While much has been made of a wave of baby-boomer retirements, California's unstable economy has spurred many older teachers hang on longer, creating fewer openings. According to the 2011 report, 57 percent of teachers have more than 10 years of experience in 2010-11, up from 46 percent five years earlier.
While they will eventually retire, some more experienced teachers could be spurred to move on sooner with the introduction of the Common Core State Standards, a national curriculum that will require teachers to undergo retraining. "That could weed out some older people," Jacobson said.
Experts note there are still teaching jobs available in fields that have longstanding shortages — math, science, bilingual and special education teachers have always been highly sought after, and some laid off teachers are going back to school to earn credentials in those areas. Inner-city and outlying rural schools also have high turnover.
Still, outside of those specialized areas, jobs are hard to come by.
Olga Rubio, professor and coordinator of bilingual authorizations at Cal State Long Beach, said it's even hard to place student teachers with school districts, despite the fact that there are fewer students. "We squeeze by, but it really takes work and negotiating to get these student teachers placed," she said.
In the past, student teachers would usually get hired by the district, but these days they are more likely to only find work as substitutes. "People who want to be teachers are deeply committed so they just do it and hope that sooner or later there'll be a job," she said. "It's discouraging for them."
Damon Brodowski, who is studying at Cal State Long Beach to earn his credential to teach middle and high school English, said he's sticking with his career goal although he knows current job prospects are weak when he graduates in the spring.
To give the employment market time to bounce back, he's planning on pursuing a master's degree instead of job-hunting right away. He hopes that will make him a more attractive job candidate, as well as boost his pay, when schools start hiring again. He said he remains optimistic.
"I was kind of worried that there aren't going to be any jobs when I get out of school, but there's going to be a big need for educators again," he said. "Teaching is just something I really enjoy. Seeing students progress and achieve their goals, that's rewarding."
Contact the reporter at http://twitter.com/ChristinaHoag.
All rights reserved. This copyrighted material may not be re-published without permission. Links are encouraged.
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I feel like I'm waking up. I feel an incredible joy inside of me. I can't feel it with my real feelings. I can just feel the pressure welling up inside of me. For years now. Its dates back so subtle. I feel peoples emotions. Sadness, fear, loneliness. I can't watch movies anymore. The emotions movies are meant to evoke bombard me. I feel really anxious for hours after wards. I have a few exceptions. bank robbing movies. Where the bank robbers win.
The world seems crazy. We live in these communities together. Struggle together struggle to find meaning in our lives. And yet we don't take care of one another. Why don't we take care of each others basic needs so we can live and experience this beautiful world. Why do we allow our neighbors to slave away the best 25 years of their life to pay for a place to live. Surely we can find a simpler local way to build small comfortable homes. Every culture on the planet has been able to. Don't even get me started about what our leaders are doing to other people on the other side of the plant, on our behalf. Why can't we just create a culture where we look out for one another.
So here I am in this crazy crazy world of drive, work, eat, sleep, pay, and yet the world seems like this incredible place. Staggering in complexity and wonderment. Planet earth. What an incredible holiday that could be. I can just see the bill board. "Planet Earth - more ecosystems than any other planet in the galaxy. Realism beyond your wildest dreams. So real you'll forget where you came from!"
And yet we destroy this world and ignore each others basic needs. And the more I wake up and feel the joy inside of me pushing to get out, the more I feel the pain of what we are doing to this world and each other.
I still function. Work, pay my bills etc., but I feel like a robot sometimes though. This is hard to describe. I see the wonderment of nature and people all around me, but I can't quite feel it, not like I should, not like the joy it should obviously bring me, and yet I ignore the sorrow I see all around me because it is too painful, and to an extent I feel powerless to assist. So often I think I feel nothing, except this light trying to push out from inside of me.
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Posts Tagged ‘Africa’
Is it South Africa that is there in your mind as you are thinking of your upcoming vacation? The places of tourist attractions are scattered all over South Africa! Hence you need to orient yourself rightly as you are opting for South Africa holidays!
South Africa holidays draw people of varied interests and tastes to this country of diverse culture, ethnicities and geography. The country has an interesting history as well. Whether you are in mood for a safari, or in a mood for a city experience or you are looking for a desert experience or a mountain adventure, South Africa offers it all to you! South Africa holidays packages consist of visually incredible land of vast plains, great mountains, golden beaches and deserts. A versatile country with maximum potential of giving you the finest break of your life!
If you are planning South Africa holidays, you will be surprised to know that this country his home to eight world heritage sites, which are the spots of immense tourist attractions.
Then, of course, South Africa is known for dense forests, great coasts, interesting cities, and gigantic mountains! National Botanical Gardens in South Africa are marvellous. The Garden Route is a coastal corridor on the western coast of South Africa that gives you an astonishing feel of nature as it has ancient forests, rivers, wetlands, dunes, long beaches, lakes and picturesque mountains. South Africa has a large collection of wildlife regions and game parks. These games and nature reserves have each doable landscape, from desserts to forests, from mountains to coasts, which is abode for various wildlife species, including Africa’s huge five: leopard, lion, buffalo, elephant and rhinoceros. South Africa holidays let you experience each shade of nature, from arid deserts to lush coastal forests, from majestic mountains to bush field. South Africa’s cities are also enormously varied in language, culture, landscape and vegetation. Hustling Johannesburg is at the heart of South Africa, and the cosmopolitan Cape Town is at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. South Africa vacations have it all, from expedition lands to quaint towns breaking up the Karoo wilderness and the seaside fun of Durban to scatterings of coastal resorts line and the pretty southern Garden Route.
To pamper your spirit and soul in the grand manner, opt for tourist attractions! Of course, you deserve a grand pass for yourself!
Africa is more than just an exotic travel destination. Its a world apart and one of the most one-of-a-kind and special travel experiences you will ever have. The continent has so much to offer and with the rich and diverse natural beauty you are bound to end up in some rural parts that is not always as innocuous as what you might be used to in a first world country. There are a lot of things you need to be careful of when traveling to Africa and even though there is no need to be paranoid, being cautious is very important to ensure a innocuous and enjoyable trip.
Here are 3 things that you must pay particular attention to.
1. Medical Precautions
Before you travel to any part of Africa you need to check which pills you need to drink before you leave. Malaria is a very real and present danger all through the continent and if you are traveling to certain parts you are required to finish certain courses of prescription pills well in advance of your travel.
This is crucial to keep you innocuous from the treat of diseases that can be life threatening.
2. Personal Security
In Africa, local police and security is not at all what it is elsewhere in the world. There is a lot of issues with tourists being targeted for petty crimes and sometimes even more serious attacks. In most cities you will be fine, but when you go off the beaten track into more rural areas you need to pay particular attention to never achievement alone – especially in deserted areas. Always check with your local embassy on the current political climate of any region you are traveling to and make sure that you refrain areas where there is conflict.
When it comes to security at airports and hotels, then you’d be surprised at some of the stories.
At certain airports and in certain countries airfield individualized routinely raid passenger’s luggage and help themselves to whatever they feel like. Its really important that you have sufficient insurance – especially for stuff like cameras, laptops and other valuables. Its also good practice to keep your travel documents on you at all times and try and carry as tiny cash on you as possible. Keep valuable jewelery at home as it will only attract pick pockets.
Read more about Kenya vacations at http://kenyavacationsite.com.
An Africa cruise holiday is a one-of-a-kind experience for anyone. There is no superior way to experience the mystique of the African hidden tribes and open plains than on board a cruise ship. That is why you need to make sure that your Africa cruise holiday is perfectly planned. The nominal charge for Africa cruises can be anywhere between US$500 and US$1000 depending on the occupancy and season of travel. For instance, the charges for New Year, Christmas and Easter Africa cruise holiday packages is usually on the higher side. Cruise packages nearly always include accommodation at ports of call and other activities.
The ideal part is, you do not have to run around to book your Africa cruise holiday. You can book Africa cruises from your own home. You do not have to go through the long procedures for finding availability and prices. Everything you need to know is acquirable online. All you need to select your preferred cruise destination and cruise line if you have one in mind. You will get a list of all the acquirable cruises and their details. Different cruise lines have different programmes and so you need to make sure your Africa cruises suite your preference and needs.
Cruise holidays are fast gaining popularity and it is no wonder why. With extensive services and amenities all integrated in one ship with a luxury that has to be felt to be believed, cruises are the first choice for any tourist or traveller looking for a soothing break. What more could you ask for? This luxury of cruise ships added to the mystery and beauty of a land like Africa makes for a perfect holiday. Not only do you bask in the comfort and luxury of the highest quality, you also get to experience a whole new world of history, culture, wildlife and nature.
South Africa was a gay travel destination long before it became the first country in the world with a constitution outlawing discrimination based on sexual orientation and the fifth country to legalize same-sex marriage. With the start of apartheid and these two historic gay rights events, the allure of here has increased substantially among both straight and gay travelers. From the glorious beaches of the Western Cape to the fast-paced excitement of Gauteng, South Africa is the gay-friendliest country on the continent and is an saint location for a gay vacation.
Cape Town, Johannesburg and Pretoria are favourite stops during gay vacations and apiece offers a variety of gay-friendly and gay-centered activities, establishments and events. Gay men who enjoy the scene will be particularly pleased with the vast array of establishments that cater exclusively to gay men, such as luxury guest houses that wage lodgings exclusively to gay men, the famous bathhouses found in Cape Town and the private, all-male nude bar, Camp David, in Pretoria.
Gay culture in South Africa revolves largely around the gay male community; however family travelers and lesbians will also find a plethora of exciting opportunities for gay vacations in this country that is rich in history, culture and beautiful landscapes, including several organized tours that are gay-friendly or cater specifically to the gay and lesbian community.
September is gay pride month in South Africa, making this a great time to visit for gay men and lesbians looking for a gay pass that includes pride parties and a variety of other events, such as the Out in Africa South African Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, which takes place in both Johannesburg and Cape Town and draws over 16,000 international attendees. Cape Town is also the home of the annual Mom City Queer Project costume celebration that brings over 10,000 international visitors to South Africa apiece December. Of course, Cape Town is also home to Clifton’s Third Beach and nearby Sandy Bay nudist beach, both of which are extremely favourite hangouts for gay men, and also has a gay village offering many gay-owned and gay-friendly establishments in Green Point. Picking up a copy of local gay publications like Exit and Outright will keep travelers up on what is going on during their stay and wage additional information about the ideal places to hang out or grab a bite to take in a gay-friendly restaurant.
No gay pass to South Africa would be complete without experiencing trusty South African cuisine and taking the opportunity to dine in some of South Africa’s many welcoming restaurants. When visiting Johannesburg, travelers will not want to miss Bellgables Country Restaurant offering delicious meals in a renovated farmhouse sitting on 21 acres of farmland. In Cape Town there are many dining options, including Lola’s, a gay-owned vegetarian restaurant, and Emily’s an honor winning fine dining restaurant featuring South African cuisine, a wine bar and a beer bar.
To ensure a great gay travel experience in South Africa, enlist the assistance of a professional travel bureau when planning your trip. Travel agents that regularly organize gay vacations to South Africa will have up-to-date information about the ideal places to stay, take and play, as well as country tips for exploring in areas that might not be as accepting.
Find More Travel Tips Articles
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Reported Speech and Survivor Identity in On‐Line Bone Marrow Transplantation Narratives
ABSTRACT This paper investigates the language choices made by contributors to an electronic discussion list on bone marrow transplantation, called SupportBMT, and relates these to the construction of these contributors’ identities as survivors rather than as victims of a life-threatening disease and/or of a life-threatening medical treatment. Specifically, it examines the use of 142 instances of reported speech within 61 narratives posted to SupportBMT that recount conflict within a past medical encounter. Analyses of the illocutionary acts of these instances of reported speech, as well as the alternation between direct and indirect reported speech in these narratives, portray the patient as a strong self-advocate and the physician as contributing to that positive image of the patient, either directly or indirectly. Findings suggest that survivors’ use of reported speech within such narratives provides a socialization model for newcomers to the community of those with such illnesses.
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RICHMOND, Va. -- In a move that proponents say will better fund upkeep of Virginia roads and highways, Governor Bob McDonnell last week proposed a five-year, $3.1 billion package that will drop the state's gasoline tax in favor of a bump in sales tax by about a penny on the dollar.
Citing the effects of inflation and greater fuel efficiency in motor vehicles, McDonnell said that the current gasoline tax is no longer a sustainable source of revenue to maintain roads and build new infrastructure.
If lawmakers approve the proposal, Virginia would be the first state to drop its gasoline tax, said officials.
The governor's 2013 Transportation Plan proposes these changes:
Bob McDonnellState officials said the plan that would provide more than $3.1 billion in transportation funding for the Commonwealth over the next five years, "tying transportation funding to economic growth and replacing the state's outdated gas tax revenue model with a 0.8% increase in the state's sales tax dedicated to transportation."
McDonnell said, "My 2013 transportation funding and reform package is intended to address the short- and long-term transportation funding needs of the Commonwealth. Declining funds for infrastructure maintenance, stagnant motor fuels tax revenues, increased demand for transit and passenger rail, and the growing cost of major infrastructure projects necessitate enhancing and restructuring the Commonwealth's transportation program and the way it is funded. We simply cannot continue to do what we have always done and expect this problem to go away."
Unfortunately, retailers across the country will be seeing such legislation cropping up, said Bubba Lange, senior vice president of solution engineering for FuelQuest Inc., Houston. He said the current excise tax model built on cents per gallon fails to take into account inflation and the growing cost of materials and building expenses.
"It's an issue that's not going away," Lange told CSP Daily News. "Our road system is in need of repair, and the only way is with taxes."
Lange said that as ideas such as the Virginia proposal are "bantered around, each state will have its version or some twist. The c-store industry needs to be setting foundation for its IT and automated reporting so it can easily adapt to change."
McDonnell concluded, "Market forces clearly dictate that we have to change how we fund transportation. This is a math problem. The current revenues numbers do not add up to a safe, efficient and sustainable transportation network. The time is now for an innovative and sustainable plan to meet our transportation needs and grow Virginia's economy."
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Slip-cases for books
As an avid reader and collector of illustrated books, it was natural for Ruth to combine her loves of books and embroidery in making bespoke slip-cases, for special gifts or as display pieces.
The slip-cases shown here were created for a range of books, both newly published and from the 'golden age' of book illustration.
Click on an image to find out more, or
contact Ruth to discuss commissioning some unique embroidered art.
Inspired by the design and spirit of the book – a graphic novel retelling of the story of the battle of Thermopylae – this slip case uses tones of sepia brown and blood red, while the helmet reflects ancient Greek coins.
This slip case takes its inspiration from one of Williams’ illustrations in the book, that of a hare in a tangle of wild roses. The design renders this in a more stylised form, laid out as a mandala.
Entirely hand embroidered and assembled, this slip case is directly inspired by the cover of the book itself, and is an interpretation of Williams’ design in a variety of embroidery techniques.
The front of the slip case uses the incense burner design used on both the boards of the book and its dust wrapper. The terracotta silk dupion was also chosen to reflect the colour of the boards.
This slip case is inspired by the book itself. The boards and end papers are in an early Art Deco style, and the design for the slip case is intended to echo this without copying it.
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On Friday, we had a most interesting and well-attended discussion at the European Policy Center in Brussels on the lessons of war and peace of the war in Bosnia.
A more detailed account of the rich discussion will follow, but in the meantime this newswire from AFP gives at the least a summary of the discussion.
BRUSSELS, Nov 25 (AFP) – Europe must learn the tough lessons from the war in Bosnia or be doomed to repeat them elsewhere, senior diplomats involved in the Balkan conflict 10 years ago warned on Friday.
A decade after a war that claimed some 200,000 lives and left more than two million homeless, the diplomats emphasised the need for focused diplomacy backed by force, then robust peacekeeping and concerted rebuilding efforts.
”There are new challenges around the corner of the same nature waiting for us,” Carl Bildt, EU special representative to the region in 1995, told experts, reporters and other participants at a conference in Brussels on Bosnia’s 1992-1995 war.
”From Bihac (Bosnia) in the northwest down to Basra (Iraq) in the southeast, the struggle between the forces of integration and the forces of disintegration goes on, that might be Kosovo or it might be Kurdistan,” he said.
Bildt, talking at the invitation of the European Policy Centre, with EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana and former EU peace negotiator Lord Owen, said politicians had badly under-estimated the horror the war would bring.
”This was a fundamental, a tragic mistake of historic proportions,” he said. ”Always do everything that can be done to avoid war breaking out, because when it breaks out you are out of control.”
”We need to learn the lessons from Bosnia: be very assertive in preventing the conflicts from breaking out, looking at the underlying currents, trying to settle with reasonable political deals, and the possibility to deploy military force to support diplomacy,” he went on.
”Then have the resources, the commitment, the patience and the time that is going to be needed for the state-building projects … all through this period.”
Owen, speaking as Bosnia marks the 10th anniversary of the Dayton Peace Accords, agreed on November 21, 1995 and signed that December 14, said Europe must not allow itself to be insulted by people like former Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic.
”If you are serious … you can’t allow a warlord to cock a snook at you. We didn’t learn that in Somalia, and now we are seeing it in Darfur,” he said.
Mladic and former Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic have been indicted for war crimes and still remain at large, 10 years on, which Owen described as ”a disgrace”.
The former British foreign secretary said that ”hard peacekeeping” — in which a robust military presence enforces peace and exits quickly to be replaced by traditional peacekeepeers — was also vital in dealing with conflicts.
”Hard peacekeeping must be done when you’re really serious and I doubt that it’s something for the EU or for the UN. I believe that is really going to be done by NATO or other regional military alliances,” he said.
Solana, who was Spanish foreign minister at the time and later led NATO, said that politicians need to act together closely with the military as soon as a potential conflict is identified.
”A clear lesson from the Balkan dramas is that when the European Union, the United States and NATO are united and work together, they can achieve great things,” he said.
He said the fact that this was done so late in Bosnia resulted in tens of thousands of needless deaths.
”The price of nationalism and our collective failure to end the fighting was very high,” he said. ”We got peace, yes, and ended the nightmare, yes, but a peace that came late and was full of painful compromises.”
And on the day that Bosnia begins talks on a stabilisation accord with the EU, a first step on the long road to joining the bloc, he said hopes for membership had been a decisive factor.
”The prospect of eventual European Union membership has been no doubt the overwhelming transformational force in Bosnia,” he said.
In the end though, Bildt said, prevention is far better than a cure.
”In retrospect the number one lesson of the Bosnian war is that we should have done more in order to prevent it from starting at all,” he said.
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Thursday, March 10, 2011
Discovery crafting in Guild Wars 2
A reader alerted me to a description of crafting for Guild Wars 2:
When the correct items for crafting an item are added to the interface, the resulting item can be crafted. If you haven’t previously crafted that item, you discover the recipe for that item, allowing you to easily view the correct combination to recreate the item. Some basic recipes are automatically learned by characters, but the recipes for most items must be discovered by the crafter.Unbeknownst to ArenaNet somebody already developed a sneaky technology which is designed to thwart this sort of game design. It is called "the internet". The kind of puzzle that is finding all valid combinations of a limited number of resources is best solved by brute force, and is done fastest by crowdsourcing, many players working together on a Wiki. Before Guild Wars 2 is even released, all possible recipes will be already available on some such site. Thus every character with that crafting discipline will be the same. Objective failed!
We decided to go with a discovery system for learning recipes so as to allow crafters to distinguish themselves. When there is a static list of recipes learned from a trainer, every character with that crafting discipline is the same. However, with a discovery system, players that spend time and effort on their crafting disciplines have a way to distinguish themselves.
So what could ArenaNet do instead? One system that can't be killed by some internet database is recipes being discovered randomly while crafting other items. Every time you craft an item of level n, you have an X% chance to randomly discover a recipe for an item of level n+1, and so on. If you want every crafter to be unique, you have a cap of how many recipes of every level can be discovered, while having at least twice that many recipes in the game. Thus every crafter has a different random set of recipes in the end. Of course that means that some people will be luckier than others, and get more desirable recipes, but that is the price you pay for not every crafter being the same.
Theoretically one could make a game in which random recipes that are different for every crafter are combined with the kind of combination style puzzle ArenaNet is planning. Two people using the same combination would get different results. But given a limited number of recipes that would also mean that two people crafting the same item would use different resources, and thus have different costs. Not a good basis for a player-run economy.
The game which solved crafter differentiation by far the best is Star Wars Galaxies. Everybody had the same recipes, but the quality of the items produced depended on the quality of the resources used. The difficulty was thus in finding the most high quality resources, the location of which randomly changed every week.
But sorry ArenaNet, a system which is based on combination puzzles to uncover hidden information doesn't work well when players can exchange that hidden information. You have to do better than that.
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From: (no name) (no email)
Date: Sat Feb 07 2004 - 06:25:39 EST
this may be deemed off topic - if so apologies in advance. however i respect many of the opinions i see here so thought i would take a chance and ask.
we are a stub network, injesting about 30k emails daily. about a year ago we implemented a spam filtering product. it works well. recently we turned on the knob to enable it to do reverse lookups. only the mild version, a reverse is made on the ptr rr for the ip address sending the email. if it fails the spam filter issues a 421 and closes the connection. unfortunately, we have 6 sites thus far that are legitimately trying to communicate with us but don't have ptr's associated with the ip address sending emails. since it obviously isn't a requirement to have one is it generally accepted to do so? any sense for how many end networks do and don't?
thanks in advance.
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Target Area: Transfer Pricing
The pharma industry's profitability has caught the IRS' attention—and made it a target. But what really puts the industry
at risk is the global nature of the business. There are very large differentials in tax rates between countries, and this
can create opportunities for improper tax reporting.
In its enforcement efforts, the IRS has placed transfer-pricing violations—the ability to shift reported income between affiliated
companies—high on its enforcement agenda. Transfer-pricing laws require that intercompany transactions, particularly between
foreign and domestic affiliates, are valued at "arm's length," so that company revenues are appropriately allocated between
foreign and domestic entities. Misallocation of revenues may shift income that is taxable in the United States to a related
foreign affiliate that is taxed in lower-rate jurisdictions. Billions of dollars in US taxes are lost to such transfer-pricing
The complexity of many intercompany transactions and their relative lack of transparency make transfer-pricing compliance
and enforcement particularly challenging—but the reward makes it a worthy pursuit. For example, GlaxoSmithKline paid $3.4
billion in September 2006 to settle a long-running transfer-pricing dispute with the Internal Revenue Service and agreed to
abandon a refund claim for $1.8 billion. The controversy concerned intercompany transactions over the previous 17 years and
charges that GlaxoSmithKline shifted profits from its US to its UK affiliate. The IRS contended that this resulted in the
substantial underpayment of US taxes.
"We have consistently said that transfer pricing is one of the most significant challenges for us in the area of corporate
tax administration," said Commissioner of Internal Revenue Mark Everson when he announced the Glaxo settlement.
Although the GlaxoSmithKline settlement predates the new tax whistle-blower law, the law's powerful financial incentives are
likely to expose similar large underpayments or fraud schemes.
That was the case last February, when Merck paid $2.3 billion to settle its battles with the IRS over taxes relating to minority
equity interest financing transactions and loans from a foreign subsidiary to Merck. The Wall Street Journal reported that Merck transferred valuable patents to a subsidiary in tax-favorable Bermuda, and then paid its subsidiary for
use of the patents. This resulted in a reduction of $1.5 billion in US taxes over a 10-year period.
Among many other questionable practices are schemes involving mischaracterization of taxable gains in connection with asset
sales or other divestiture transactions, abusive schemes involving the misuse of net operating losses, and mischaracterization
of US source income of taxable entities.
Pharmaceutical companies may want to consider taking steps to minimize the potential whistle-blowers' need to go outside the
company to report questionable tax practices. In many cases, whistle-blowers report the fraud to the government only after
they've tried going through their supervisors and managers to stop the practices and have been retaliated against or fired
for their efforts.
Ensuring a vigorous and meaningful compliance structure specifically for tax compliance that covers the corporate parent and
all foreign subsidiaries might be beneficial. This would include integrating measures that would allow for anonymous or confidential
internal reporting and real guarantees by employers of nonretaliation. Independent board oversight of this internal reporting
function at pharmaceutical companies could be important to ensure that tax compliance receives due consideration throughout
The new law is set to expose hidden tax-avoidance practices by corporate America—and pharma companies are high on the target
list. In fact, the promise of big rewards has already persuaded industry insiders to provide information to the IRS that exposes
"They're coming in with big, fat piles of paper, and they have, at least on the surface...some credibility about the information
they're bringing to us," said Stephen Whitlock, director of the new IRS whistle-blower office, in an interview last year.
Erika A. Kelton is a lawyer with Phillips & Cohen LLP. She can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.org
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Indiana District Revamps Data Management
Carmel Clay Schools of Carmel, IN, is moving to GlobalScholar's Pinnacle Insight as its data management system in an ongoing effort to improve data-driven decision making in the district.
Geared toward heavy users of data for educational planning and related needs, the system's features include capabilities for reporting on class and student trends, as well as key indices of performance and progress.
"Our past data warehouse and reporting system experiences never fulfilled our district's vision of how data could be used. Only power users had the background knowledge to extract needed data," said Christi Cloud, technology specialist for CCS. "After implementing Pinnacle Insight, we immediately saw an increase in usage of data throughout the district." She added that educators, administrators, and counselors with a vast range of data-related needs began using the system to monitor student progress.
Pinnacle Insight offers features that allow for customization of data access and reporting according to individual users' needs. It enables administrators to create and modify onscreen "dashboards" that allow them to give provide access to the data and tools fulfill the individual requirements of each end-user. In addition, it offers the company's proprietary "data cloud" technology, which allows users to modify the components and presentation of a report without having to modify the data structure or reporting process. "Our users were empowered and eager to see data in new ways to make better instructional decisions," said Cloud.
The district said it also plans to extend access to Pinnacle Insight to educators and parents for such purposes as monitoring student progress and determining necessary changes in long-term educational planning.
Scott Aronowitz is a freelance writer based in Las Vegas. He has covered the technology, advertising, and entertainment sectors for seven years. He can be reached here.
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Our Purpose and Commitment Can Intertwine
YOU CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE!
How? Because you want to be active, engaged and world-changing. Often, a donor talks of wanting his or her gift to make an impact. Your gift will instantly impact multiple lives and real people. We are a College of first-generation college students that fights to remain accessible and affordable so that all may benefit from a personal liberal arts education. Much as we tell freshmen and transfers that we expect them to step right into leadership roles here, because of our size, we ask you to take the bold step of assisting us in our world-changing vision and mission. Indeed, because we are small the impact of your gift is immediate and transformational for the people of Eureka College. Eureka is all about the people and that will never change because, much as teachers and students need top-notch facilities, the ivy of EC is indeed constituted by its family members, its people…….the EC family. You join this chain of ivy when you choose to support The Ivy Project.
Besides Bricks and Mortar You Will Be Building Leaders
Deep Roots of Servant Leadership
Since 1855, Eureka College has been an institution rooted in service. The values and commitment that come with being founded by abolitionists and equal rights advocates has created a culture that balances learning, leadership, and character. Eureka College continues to fulfill its mission of delivering a quality education that enables its graduates to be true leaders in their professions and communities. Service is a responsibility around here. The learning experience at Eureka extends throughout the world. It's the liberal arts in practice. We give our students daily opportunities to apply their intellect by analyzing, comparing, evaluating and reasoning through abstract concepts. We also encourage communication, which is accented by our small student/faculty ratio; the large majority of those faculty members hold a Ph.D. or other advanced degree and become mentors to students. More important, they travel the world learning and serving too!
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U.S., Philippine Troops Fight Insurgent Bomb Threat
By Army Sgt. 1st Class Michael J. Carden
American Forces Press Service
COTABATO, Philippines, Feb. 23, 2010 Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Joseph Stutzke looked over the rock quarry from a distance as three explosions boomed. Gathered around him was a team of Philippine army explosive ordnance disposal soldiers gleaming with pride from their work that briefly charred the clear afternoon sky.
Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Joseph Stutzke, right, shows Philippine explosive ordnance disposal soldiers how to prepare dynamite for a controlled detonation during a training event Feb. 20, 2010, in Cotabato, Philippines. DoD photo by Army Sgt. 1st Class Michael J. Carden
(Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available.
Just minutes before, Stutzke completed a training session for his Philippine counterparts and some U.S. Army soldiers on how to properly prepare dynamite for an electrically charged remote detonation. For the Philippine troops, the Feb. 20 exercise was an opportunity to conduct hands-on training with real explosives and basic EOD tools.
The Philippine troops train frequently to learn new techniques to dispose of roadside bombs and unexploded ordnance, despite not always having the resources to do so as effectively as they would like, Stutzke said.
However, the Philippine troops that Stutzke and his fellow sailors have worked with are very knowledgeable and motivated about their profession, he said. This is especially true for the EOD teams, as they are among the busiest and most at-risk soldiers in their force.
Forgotten ordnances -- or remnants of war, as U.S. troops from Joint Special Operations Task Force Philippines here describe them -- are abundant after years of terrorist actions and past wars on Philippine soil. For this reason, competent and properly trained EOD troops are vital to the nation’s decades-long counterinsurgency fight.
Philippine EOD teams have found terrorist cache sites of explosives used for roadside, motorcycle and car bombs. Two U.S. Army Special Operations soldiers lost their lives to a roadside bomb in September, which was the deadliest attack on the American military here since 2002. Philippine troops are targeted on a weekly basis, however, often resulting in injuries or death.
“[Improvised explosive devices] are a significant threat, because they’re easy to make,” Stutzke said. “And training [the Philippine EOD soldiers] is very important, because there’s so much ordnance available in the region for insurgents to get their hands on. The best way to get rid of that threat is through joint training and disposals.”
U.S. EOD troops spend as much time as possible assisting and training their Philippine counterparts, and often lend them equipment such as metal detectors, which has led to some recent successes in the area.
Both militaries also work together educating the local populace on how to identify and report bombs and unexploded ordnance, said Stutzke, a native of Midland, Ga.
Stutzke recalled a recent situation that could have been fatal to the Philippine EOD troops. A grenade was reported in a public building, and the Philippine soldiers disarmed and disposed of it without a bomb suit or protective gear.
“They went up and did their job, and that’s how good they are,” he said. “That’s one thing not a lot of people realize: They’re very confident and efficient, and they have the knowledge.”
Philippine army Capt. Francis Senoron explained that the reason he and his troops are so effective is their dedication to support the national police and army here. Their experience goes a long way in making the streets safer for the populace, he said.
“We encountered our first car bomb in 2007, and we have dealt with motorcycle bombs and now command-wire detonated IEDs,” he explained. “Even though terrorists are training and doing new things, we’re still ahead of them and their technology and equipment.”
Senoron and his troops have encountered more than 100 bombs and unexploded ordnance since 2008, he said. He and many of his comrades have been injured multiple times, he said, but he added that security and protecting innocent civilians is more important than his own safety.
“The local populace is very supportive to our efforts,” he said. “We’ve conducted awareness programs for our civilians, so they know what to do if they find an IED. Because of our civilians, we’re able to accomplish our mission, and I hope this will continue in the future.”
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Inchworms and caterpillars still seem the overwhelming hot topic of conversation around town this week. It was on the agenda at the weekly selectmen's meeting last Wednesday. Their Honors invited guest was West Tisbury Tree Warden, Jeremiah Brown. Jeremiah gave a report on the types of caterpillars, an assessment of damage around town, and a list of possible measures to take next year to ward off further damage. It is too late to do much this year except to keep trees well watered. Interestingly, he said not to feed the trees, as that would add to their stress. Ever-practical Skip Manter suggested we figure out how to train the caterpillars to eat poison ivy.
If you are curious, Abigail Higgins wrote an excellent article in the Calendar section of last week's Times about the different types of caterpillars infesting our yards. I also read about winter moths in Carol Stocker's new book, "New England Gardening Almanac" (pp.18-19) published by the Boston Globe.
Mike, Murphy, and the truck are still coming home covered with the miserable things, so I guess the heavy downpours of the past week were unable to wash them all away. I have found winter moth and fall cankerworm caterpillars feasting on my daylily and hosta leaves. It has been small satisfaction to pick them off, throw them on the ground and step on them, but this morning I found only a couple, so maybe it's working. Many of the roadsides and neighbors' yards look like mid-winter.
The selectmen also appointed interested residents to the Space Needs Committee. As more than the specified (at the Annual Town Meeting) seven people were interested, Joe Eldredge offered to give his advice without being a voting member. Sue Hruby was appointed to be an alternate member, as she will be away in August. The seven appointees are: Kent Healy, Robert Schwartz, Les Cutler, Kathy Logue, Bea Phear, Chuck Hodgkinson, and me. We plan to start meeting soon and to prepare a report for a Special Town meeting in November. Meetings will be posted at the town hall for anyone who would like to attend.
Vineyard Gardens will continue their lecture series this Saturday morning on the topic, "Gardening with Perennials." Different types of perennials, their bloom sequence, and care requirements will be discussed. The lecture begins at 11 am and is free.
And don't forget the Strawberry Festival will be held this Saturday at the First Congregational Church of West Tisbury. Their strawberry shortcakes are the best.
Marjory Potts will be celebrating her birthday this coming Monday, June 19. I wish her a good day in her garden and dinner provided by Robert.
Happy birthday to our niece, Laura Kimball, who will be 17 on June 20, with love from Uncle Mike and me.
The library is ready for the Summer Reading Program to begin. By a wonderfully serendipitous meeting, our design for this year's tee shirts and book bags is by illustrator Peter Sis. He was visiting the Island and admired sculpture by Jay Lagemann of Chilmark. Jay and Marianne Neill's daughter, Jenny Christie (Library Director in Aquinnah), were invited by her parents to meet Peter Sis, and Jenny asked him if he would do a drawing for the Island libraries. He said yes, and he did. The tee shirts are an electric lime green with the drawing in black. The book bags are printed red on a natural canvas bag. I'm sure they will begin to appear all around the Island as children and adults complete their lists of books.
If you don't know Peter Sis's work, check out some of his books at the library. My favorite is "The Dragons Are Singing Tonight," in which he illustrated deliciously imaginative poems by children's author, Jack Prelutsky.
West Tisbury poet, Dan Waters, will be reading a selection of his work next Thursday evening, June 22, at the Oak Bluffs Library. The event is free and will begin at 7 pm.
Somehow, between the worms and the rain, the Farmer's Market began as scheduled last Saturday morning with a surprising array of plants, bouquets, and produce on display. People were lined up for rugelach and rye bread at the Biga Bakery stand. Linda and Glenn Hearn had beautiful herb plants, and Victoria Phillips had a selection of huge perennials. I lined up to replenish my supply of Zinfandel jam from Linda Alley. (Spread on crackers with a slice of Brie, it makes an easy hors d'oeuvre.) There was an amazing variety of early vegetables: spinach and gleaming red radishes, thick asparagus stalks, big bags of arugula and baby lettuces. The flowers were bundled in artistic and abundant bouquets. It was, for me, the real start of the summer season.
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Life insurance is included in several important things that one should have. This is true, because, again, we are living in world of uncertainty. Anything can happen to us; even a very small matter may takes us to bigger lost. Therefore, it is not impossible for us to get a great loss especially in finance. Thus, insuring ourselves for the worst thing that may happen is pretty recommended as the guarantee. However, the expensive life insurance does not always offer the best product or policy. There are not few people who are trapped in, even though it is true that the prices influence the quality of product.
Therefore, to get the most reasonable prices of particular product of insurance, we should compare it. Related to it, there have been several site that provide the service of comparing the life insurance quotes. One of them can be reached by following the link given above. There, you just need to enter your zip code to get the most valid information about life insurance. By use the link, you will be able to get the best price for the best insurance policy. Thus, you will get the appropriate prices of your safety. Start from now, it will be better for you to consider purchasing line insurance.
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Vigilance in the Defense of Liberty and Freedom
Related Case or Issue:
(New York) – Today a federal court in Washington, DC, prevented Louisiana from continuing to utilize a discriminatory formula as part of the federally-funded “Road Home” Program, which was designed by the Louisiana Recovery Authority and approved by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (“HUD”) to aid homeowners in their efforts to rebuild in the wake of devastating damage resulting from Hurricanes Rita and Katrina.
With $11 billion in federal funds, the Road Home Program awards grants to Louisiana homeowners whose homes were damaged by the storms in 2005 using one of two formulas: either the pre-storm value of the home in question, or the cost of repairs, whichever is lower. In today’s ruling, the Court determined that using the pre-storm value of the home to calculate grant awards likely creates a discriminatory impact on African-American homeowners, as black homeowners’ grants are far more likely to be based on the lower, pre-storm value of their homes rather than the cost of repairing the damage to their homes – even when the damage sustained and the cost of repair is the same. This disparity means that African-American homeowners are likely to have bigger gaps in the resources necessary to rebuild their homes. In its order, the Court granted the plaintiffs’ request to prevent Louisiana officials from using pre-storm value to calculate any future Road Home grant awards.
“It is our hope that this is the first step in truly getting folks on the road home. Today’s ruling is a rebuke of HUD and Louisiana. The flawed Road Home Program is part of the reason why the pace of recovery has been so slow five years after the storms ravaged the Gulf Coast,” said John Payton, LDF President and Director-Counsel.
Last month the plaintiffs filed a separate motion for preliminary injunction asking for a freeze in spending surplus Road Home funds until the conclusion of the pending lawsuit, so that the surplus funds could be used to make up the difference to those families who suffered discrimination. The Court denied that motion but found a “strong inference” of discrimination. Today’s decision does not address those who already received funding under the program, but prevents the discriminatory formula from being applied to future grants.
The plaintiffs in the case are the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, the National Fair Housing Alliance, and individual homeowners representing others who suffered discrimination. Lawyers from the law firms of Cohen, Milstein Sellers & Toll and WilmerHale are co-counsel.
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(I'm writing this post so I can link to it later!)
1. If you might have more than one child, and you'd like your children's names to go well together, think ahead of time about sibling names. This makes things harder for you NOW, when it's hard to even come up with ONE name---but will make things easier for you later. Most people like a name or two from almost any style category, but like big clumps of names from one or two style categories. It's easy to inadvertently choose one of the outlier names, and then find nothing else you like goes with that style. Paul and I came very close to giving ourselves a problem with this: our first child was a boy, but if he'd been a girl our top choice was Emerson. We didn't realize at the time that Emerson was an outlier for us: a single name we like from one style, when our main style is quite different.
I like The Baby Name Wizard for this: because she separates names into style categories, it's easy to go through and find which categories you're drawn to. You might see two names you like in one category, but another category you might think "OOOOoooooo, I like so MANY of these!" Choose from the second type of category, and you're likely to find it easier to choose sibling names later on.
2. If possible, don't choose the middle name first. Sometimes the particular middle name is so crucial, it MUST be carved in stone before the first name is chosen---but this is unusual, and it severely restricts first-name options. So, if possible, concentrate on choosing the first name FIRST, and THEN turn your attention to the middle name options. I don't like to even CONSIDER middle names until the first name finalist list is solid, because I don't want to get attached to a certain middle name and then find myself stuck.
3. Keep in mind that almost all self-imposed restrictions ("Has to start with an E," "Can't start with an E," "Has to have three syllables," "Can't start with the same letter as our surname," "Has to go with William as the middle name," "Can't be anything starting with Em because my sister's daughter is Emma and anything starting with Em would be too close," "Can't be the name of anyone we've ever known," "Can't be the name of any child I've ever had in class," "Can't be in the Top 100," etc.) are PREFERENCES---preferences you can elect not to satisfy. It's up to you: you're the one making the rules, so you're the one who can change them. It's easy to start letting the restrictions pile up until NO name can possibly meet them---and then to continue to quest for it anyway until you drive yourself insane. If choosing the name starts to seem like a puzzle that's impossible to solve, look over the preferences list and ask yourself which of them really must be honored and which ones can be scratched off the list. (See also: Preferences vs. Requirements.)
4. Every name rules out a batch of other names for future siblings. (This concept blew my mind when I first read about it in Beyond Jennifer and Jason.) This will depend on your own preferences, but includes things such as the idea that if you use the name Rose, you won't later want to use Lily or Violet. Or if you use Ethan, maybe that rules out Evan and Ian. Or if you use a unisex girl name, maybe that rules out frilly girl names. Or maybe you don't want to repeat initials within the sibling group, so using Ethan rules out Evelyn and Elizabeth and Edward.
Whatever your preferences are, look carefully ahead of time and make sure you're choosing the name you want most from the Elimination Group. If you only want one flower name, look at ALL the flower names and choose your favorite. If you only want one biblical name, look at ALL the biblical names and make sure you have the one you like best. If you don't want to repeat initials, look at ALL the other names with the initials of your finalists and make sure you're choosing your favorite NOW. (This ties in to #3, too: remember that many of these things are preferences and CAN be waived if you find a name you love to the point of despair. A family with a Rose AND a Lily will be fine; a family with an Ethan and an Edward will be fine. When possible, let the beloved name outrank the self-imposed preference.)
5. There is no One Perfect Fated Name. Some people have the lightning bolt reaction to a name ("That's IT!!!"), but most people make a list of finalists they're both okay with, and then one finalist gradually rises to the top until the parents say "This? Yeah, I guess it's this! Okay, let's use this!" Lack of lightning bolt doesn't mean it's the wrong choice. Sometimes for parents who are having a lot of trouble agreeing, there is only The Best Possible Choice---and that is good enough. Perspective is important here: choosing a name is an important responsibility and we shouldn't take it lightly---but on the other hand, in the Universal Scheme of Things it's a minor event. It's tempting, I think, to think of it as if the child already has a name and that it's our job to holy-grail-quest until we find it---but there's likely a large group of names that would all work well for the child, and it's a matter only of choosing the one you think is probably best.
6. Imagine a baby in your arms. Think of cooing the name to the child. Does it seem like Your Baby? Many of us (especially baby-name hobbyists!) have huge lists of names we love---but a much, much smaller list of names that would be right for our own families. Finding a name that seems like My Baby doesn't necessarily mean it's the right name---but finding a name that DOESN'T seem like My Baby can help narrow down the list.
7. Imagine the name on a minister, a receptionist, a lawyer, a Target clerk, someone who's plump and wears glasses. Imagine someone introducing themselves to you with that name. Imagine introducing yourself to someone, if it was your name. Does the name WORK?
Possibly related topics:
How to Decide Between Two Finalists
The Top Ten is Not Necessarily the Kiss of Death
Gift ideas for an 8-year-old, part 1 of 2 - I have TWO 8-year-olds to buy for, so I’m going to split it up into two posts. Today will be the things we’re getting for Edward. I dislike saying “Gift id...
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My friend, a Roman Catholic priest, surprised me.
“In the Bible it says, There is no God! Go ahead, look it up!”
I did, and of course my friend Father Daly was right. Here’s the full quote from Psalms: “The fool has said in his heart ‘There is no God.’”
My intention here is not to suggest that atheists are fools. Atheists and others who choose no religious affiliation now make up twenty percent of the U.S. population. The Dalai Lama is an “atheist.” Some of my best friends are atheists. I’m not writing here about atheism. I’m writing about prefatory clauses.
As with Psalm 53:2, a prefatory clause opens the Second Amendment. I often see gun rights advocates quote the Second Amendment as “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” But the full quote is “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed.”
In their dissent to the landmark 2008 decision District of Columbia v. Heller, four of the nine Supreme Court justices read that prefatory clause as meaning that the right to bear arms was a collective right, not an individual right. “The ‘right to bear arms,’” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, “protects only a right to possess and use firearms in connection with service in a state-organized militia.” Justices Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer agreed and joined his dissent. But four justices joined Justice Antonin Scalia in declaring the right to bear arms an individual right. That’s how close it was (indeed, how many other landmark cases have been as close?). But absent legislative action, individual right is now settled law.
What I would hope is that folks who were on both sides of that debate could now agree on the following…
Let’s keep guns out of schools. In the same majority decision quoted above Justice Scalia took pains to note that “the Second Amendment right is not unlimited…The Court’s opinion [the majority opinion that the right to bear arms is an individual right] should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions… laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools…”
As the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association said in a joint statement last Thursday “Guns have no place in our schools. Period.” Armed law enforcement officers (there were two of them) got off a few shots but could not stop the 1999 Columbine massacre; nor could armed personnel stop the massacre at Virginia Tech. As Mother Jones Magazine has reported regarding the 62 mass-murders over 30 years they examined recently, most of the killers got their guns legally, and not one was stopped by an armed civilian. And let’s not forget Fort Hood, where there were 13 killed and 29 wounded… on an army base filled with armed soldiers.
Would more guns have saved the firefighters who were ambushed and shot to death in Webster, New York this past Monday? Or the victims of the sniper attacks that paralyzed Washington, DC in 2002? In the words of PATCH blogger Robert Herbst “It’s the guns…!”
We should recognize NRA chief Wayne LaPierre's call for more guns for what it is: in the words of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, “a shameful evasion of the crisis facing our country… a paranoid, dystopian vision.” The New York Times called it a “mendacious, delusional, almost deranged rant.” For those who have been following LaPierre’s career this should come as no surprise. Read "LaPierre's NRA was already so crazy back in 1995 that George H. W. Bush resigned his membership." The full text of President Bush’s letter was published in the New York Times on May 11, 1995.
Let’s ban assault weapons and high capacity magazines. The Supreme Court - in the same majority decision quoted above - took pains to support the “historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons.” There is no reason we cannot outlaw such weapons, and we should. A buy-back program would be needed to get these dangerous weapons out of folks’ hands. It’s been accomplished elsewhere, notably in Australia (domestic municipal buy-back programs include Los Angeles and San Diego) and we should push to do it here. And we need to ban the on-line sale of ammunition. This would be a good thing; because whatever you may have heard about decreasing gun deaths, according to the Violence Poverty Center using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, while gun deaths remained relatively flat from 2000 to 2008, the total number of people shot went up nearly 20 percent since 2001. “States with low gun ownership rates and strong gun laws,” they found, “have the lowest rates of gun death.”
Let’s close the gun-show loophole. The loop-hole defeats any attempt to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill. We need to push for longer purchase times, and to end “instant” purchase time.
Let’s come back together. Proposals put forth by the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre last week – one calling on the federal government to “create an active national database of the mentally ill,” another asking why “with all the money in the federal budget, we can't afford to put a police officer in every school?” - are so-called “big government” or “tax and spend” responses which would cost billions of dollars. While I deeply disagree with LaPierre on these specific proposals I wonder if there might not perhaps be a glimmer of hope here: Is it possible that a new conservative-liberal consensus on government taxing and spending for the public weal is aborning?
If so - while we’d need to be clear that autism is not a mental illness but a neurological development disorder; and while we’d be wrong to blame autism for the Sandy Hook massacre, and while armed guards in schools is a terrible idea - perhaps this newly dawning realization that indeed “it takes a village” will focus us on the need to fight rampant de-funding of programs for those with neurological and psychiatric disabilities, and children’s programs which are already in existence; and to support additional funding for new programs to aid the most vulnerable members of our society.
And as the NRA has now come out in favor of a national database to keep track of folks who have never committed a crime, perhaps they can be persuaded to drop their powerful efforts to thwart legislative attempts to create a much needed federal registry of gun transactions, also by people who have never committed a crime, for use in criminal investigations when gun crimes do occur.
Is this possible? Well, there’s reason to believe that a shift in attitudes is underway. A just released poll indicates that a bare majority of Americans “now favor major restrictions on owning guns or an outright ban on gun ownership by ordinary citizens and more than six in ten favor a ban on semi-automatic assault rifles.” Indeed, the fact that a new grass-roots anti-gun violence movement called “Newtown United” has taken off in the town where the massacre took place – a traditionally strongly pro-gun area where “dozens of gun dealers, gun instructors, gun repair shops and shooting ranges do a brisk business,” and “regular people... have an arsenal in their basement" - gives us hope that out of tragedy may come a new understanding.
Finally, let’s have a national discussion on the 2nd Amendment. Let me hasten to underscore that the few gun owners I know personally are all decent, law-abiding folks. Let’s not make matters worse by demonizing each other, whichever side of the issue we’re on. And I understand that suggesting a national discussion on the 2nd Amendment is more controversial than any of the above proposals. But following the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007 we saw the beginning of calls – from the Harvard Crimson, from Salon's Washington Bureau Chief Walter Shapiro, from Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution and others - for repeal of the 2nd Amendment. And now, following the Sandy Hook massacre we have former Seattle policeman Norm Stamper, former Colorado lawmaker Bryan Jameson, Dr. Jeff Clawson, Professor Robert Klose, and the magazine The Economist again calling for repeal or consideration of repeal. We should educate ourselves about these arguments, pro and con. Maybe upon consideration legislative action to repeal the 2nd Amendment is something we will wish to support.
In the meantime…
Please purchase a “We Are Newtown” bumper sticker, proceeds to go toward a memorial to the victims.
Please read my previous post on gun control.
Your comments are welcome.
Rabbi Mark Sameth is the spiritual leader of Joyful Judaism: Pleasantville Community Synagogue an inclusive, progressive synagogue – with members from twenty towns, villages and cities all across Westchester and “A Hebrew School Your Kids Can Love.” Read The New York Times article. Follow Rabbi Mark on Twitter . Weekly meditation at the synagogue every Saturday morning at 9 am is open to the public; everyone – without exception - is welcome and warmly invited. OUR MEMBERSHIP DRIVE IS ON. See “Top Ten Reasons to Join PCS” - as well as service times and events - at www.ShalomPCS.com.
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The Adolescent Children's Trust is a registered charity that provides child-centred services to Local Authorities throughout the UK.
Our aim is to help children of all ages and all ethnic groups, to grow and mature as unique and confident individuals through the continued creative development of appropriate child-centred services.
At its heart, TACT has a dedicated team of well-trained, experienced staff and foster carers. They are able to provide appropriate family placements for all age groups and time-scales.
On this site you will find information about the services we provide, the training and support our carers receive, as well as how we are able to achieve high standards in the field of child-care provision.
Together we are creating a world where every young person is raised by people who care; where communities flourish because we help young people build lives full of opportunity and choice.
We are harnessing the strength of families, communities and organisations to unconditionally support and encourage children and young people to achieve their full potential.
. Aspirational - by helping others to grow, we grow ourselves
. Passionate - we are determined to keep improving what we do. We will ambitiously pursue the best outcomes for everyone we work with.
. Engaged - we want to listen well and respond quickly to the people we work with - children and young people, their birth families, carers, our staff and supporters.
. Fair and Equitable - we will be open and transparent, communicating what we do and why we do it, based on equality and respect for all
. Beyond Profit - we will make every decision based on what is best for children and young people. We will deliver excellent services as efficiently as possible in order to continually invest in the people we work with.
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THE COMING OF SLIPPY MCGEE
On a cold gray morning in December two members of my flock, Poles who spoke but little English and that little very badly, were on their way to their daily toil in the canning factory. It is a long walk from the Poles’ quarters to the factory, and the workpeople must start early, for one is fined half an hour’s time if one is five minutes late. The short-cut is down the railroad tracks that run through the mill district—for which cause we bury a yearly toll of the children of the poor.
Just beyond the freight sheds, signal tower, and water tank, is a grade crossing where so many terrible things have happened that the colored people call that place Dead Man’s Crossin’ and warn you not to go by there of nights because the signal tower is haunted and Things lurk in the rank growth behind the water tank, coming out to show themselves after dark. If you must pass it then you would better turn your coat inside out, pull down your sleeves over your hands, and be very careful to keep three fingers twisted for a Sign. This is a specific against most ha’nts, though by no means able to scare away all of them. Those at Dead Man’s Crossin’ are peculiarly malignant and hard to scare. Maum Jinkey Delette saw one there once, coming down the track faster than an express train, bigger than a cow, and waving both his legs in his hands. Poor old Maum Jinkey was so scared that she chattered her new false teeth out of her mouth, and she never found those teeth to the day of her death, but had to mumble along as best she could without them.
Hurrying by Dead Man’s Crossin’, the workmen stumbled over a man lying beside the tracks; his clothing was torn to shreds, he was wet with the heavy night dew and covered with dirt, cinders, and partly congealed blood, for his right leg had been ground to pulp. Peering at this horrible object in the wan dusk of the early morning, they thought he was dead like most of the others found there.
For a moment the men hesitated, wondering whether it wouldn’t be better to leave him there to be found and removed by folks with more time at their disposal. One doesn’t like to lose time and be consequently fined, on account of stopping to pick up a dead tramp; particularly when Christmas is drawing near and money so much needed that every penny counts.
The thing on the ground, regaining for a fraction of a second a glint of half-consciousness, quivered, moaned feebly, and lay still again. Humanity prevailing, the Poles looked about for help, but as yet the place was quite deserted. Grumbling, they wrenched a shutter off the Agent’s window, lifted the mangled tramp upon it, and made straight for the Parish House; when accidents such as this happened to men such as this, weren’t the victims incontinently turned over to the Parish House people? Indeed, there wasn’t any place else for them, unless one excepted the rough room at the jail; and the average small town jail—ours wasn’t any exception to the rule—is a place where a decent veterinary would scruple to put a sick cur. With him the Poles brought his sole luggage, a package tied up in oilskin, which they had found lying partly under him.
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D207 Freshmen Outperform Older Students
Ninth-graders at Maine East, South were tested when they arrived in September, and have higher scores than the district's sophomores, juniors and seniors.
Freshmen in Maine Township High School District 207 did better, on average, than previous classes on the ACT’s Explore test.
The Explore test is generally given as the first is a series of tests culminating with the ACT college entrance exam.
All Illinois public high school juniors take the ACT as part of the Prairie State Achievement Exam.
The scores, which were presented in a report at a recent school board meeting, showed that the composite Explore score for District 207’s class of 2015 was 17. That's 0.4 points above the average of the composite scores of the last three years, according to the report from Barbara Dill-Varga, the assistant superintendent for curriculum.
“In every instance in which the Class of 2015 differed from the previous three classes, it was by outperforming them,” Dill-Varga said “The freshman classes at Maine East and Maine South scored significantly higher than previous classes in English, math and science. Maine East also scored significantly higher in reading. The Maine West Class of 2015 scored similarly to the previous three classes in all areas.”
The biggest gains came at Maine East, where the composite score increased by 0.6 points over the average of the past three years, and at Maine South, where the composite score increased by 0.3 points over the average of the past three years. The composite score at Maine West High School increased by 0.1 point over the average of the last three years, a difference that Dill-Varga said was not statistically significant.
Because the tests were administered in September, shortly after the school year started, the scores do not represent the result of students' education in District 207; rather they are a baseline for further comparisons, she said.
Want more local news? Like Patch on Facebook.
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"These are pseudo secular leaders wearing the hat of secularism to suit their convenience", BJP leader and Animal Husbandry Minister Giriraj Singh told PTI without naming the chief minister.
"These leaders become secular when they don't need support of the BJP, but conveniently forget their secular credentials when the party's help is needed", asserted Singh.
He cited as examples LJP president Ramvilas Paswan and RJD supremo Lalu Prasad.
Singh said Paswan enjoyed power during the NDA government headed by then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, but once he moved away he became a 'secular leader'.
Similarly, he said, the RJD supremo had sought support of then BJP state unit president Kailashpati Mishra for forming the government in Bihar in 1990.
Earlier in 1977 the then Jan Sangh was part of the Janata Party government in Bihar in which Prasad was also an entity in the state, Singh said.
He further said that the 'so-called' secular parties such as the Congress, Communists and RJD were accusing the RSS and the Jan Sangh as 'communal forces' and 'killers of Mahatma Gandhi', but it was the people of the country who elected the BJP-led NDA to power under the prime ministership of Vajpayee in 1996.
This time, too, the people of the country would decide the next prime minister and not 'pseudo secular leaders' and parties, Singh said.
Referring to Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, the BJP leader said that he did not preach, but practised secularism and his government has given due share of development and welfare to Muslims who have allegedly "been used elsewhere in the country by various political parties as mere vote banks".
Patna: Bihar Chief Minister and JD(U) leader Nitish Kumar's call to the NDA to project a 'secular' leader as the prime ministerial candidate in the 2014 parliamentary polls today drew flak from a BJP minister who dubbed him 'pseudo secular'.
First Published: Tuesday, June 19, 2012, 16:03
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Ever since the Atkins revolution, everyone seems to be confused about carbs. I’m going to try to help out with that. Here are some important facts to remember when deciding ...
Many people view cravings as weakness, which I hope to rectify with this post. Instead, they are important messages meant to assist you in maintaining balance. When your body is deficient in a nutrient, it sends an alert – sometimes a full-on alarm – to inform you of the problem. This “alert” can manifest in […]
So often my clients, friends, and family complain to me that they do not have time to workout, and I bet you feel the same way. Sure, you calculate the amount of time it takes to get to the gym, do your full workout, shower, and get back to work/home. Surprise!: Just 10-20 minutes a […]
Getting children to eat a healthy diet is a battle that every parent faces. But have no fear! Here are a few easy concepts that you can implement to get your kids eating healthier in no time: 1. Add the Good Stuff In, Crowd the Bad Stuff Out: If you are concerned that your child […]
I’ve been reading the book Wheat Belly and have been thinking about how the agricultural evolutions during the last decade have contributed to the state of health/weight in America. AND how I could break it down to share with our readers. Then, this morning, I received an email from Hungry for Change with a link […]
It’s happened to everyone: that guilt that creeps in the morning after we do something “bad.” Let’s face it: this time of year, it’s usually to do with too many cookies, potatoes, pies, or just servings! The simple fact is, letting yourself get wrapped up in the feelings of regret over falling off the wagon […]
I happened upon this article about aspartame by Food Matters, and thought it was worth sharing. Aspartame is one of the most-argued-about substances when it comes to the general public. What do you think about it? Do you believe all the arguments against it? Do you consume it anyway? From Food Matters: Aspartame, more commonly […]
Hello Flu Fighters! I ran across this list of ways to avoid illness this winter: the natural way! Thanks to Meghan Telpner! Vaccinations are a hot, hot, and very heated topic. We all want to be healthy and we all want to do our best for ourselves and our family to maintain great health throughout […]
It’s the day after Halloween, and parents across the country are faced with a problem: How to keep my kids from eating too much candy! while we, of course, encourage an honest discussion with your children about why eating too much candy is bad, sometimes other tactics must be employed… Here are some ideas to […]
I was emailed this awesome list of ways to clean up your body and your life! It was sent from the people from Hungry For Change and written by the ever-inspiring Kris Carr! Check it out!
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In the wake of Google's decision to retire its PowerMeter application, industry insiders showed little surprise. But the episode illustrates how the bar has been raised in the nascent home energy management area.
Google on Friday said that it decided to retire PowerMeter, a Web application that displays how much electricity a home is using. Company executives had hopes of expanding the product into a broad set of features, but customer uptake was not as strong as hoped, Google said in a company blog.
For the many smart-grid companies actively working in home energy management, Google's departure reflects how difficult it is to make money in the field of energy efficiency and control. From a product standpoint, the move is a reminder that simply surfacing energy data is not enough to get consumers en masse to care about energy.
"[PowerMeter] really suffered from a fundamental flaw in its operating assumption that people are interested in monitoring their energy usage at a 15-minute level of granularity, or in real time. They are not. People lead extremely busy lives and studying a line chart showing their hourly energy consumption is simply not going to make anyone's priority list," said Ogi Kavazovic, the vice president of marketing and strategy at Opower, a home energy efficiency company.
Dozens of companies have built applications or gadgets called in-home dashboards that show detailed electricity usage with the idea that more information will provide clues on how to conserve energy. For example, showing people that a pool pump is a big energy consumer could lead them to run it on a schedule rather than all the time.
What's more challenging, though, is motivating consumers to stick with energy-saving efforts, according to energy efficiency professionals. To reach a large number of users, information should be presented in a variety of channels--whether it's a Web portal, handheld device, e-mail, or paper--and focus on consumer behavior as much as the technology, they said.
Opower, now a well-recognized company in the field, made its mark with paper reports that show customers how efficient one home is compared to people in similar homes and communities. It focuses on simple presentation of information online and offline and the social psychology around efficiency. For example, its reports have a smiley face to indicate how well people are doing compared to peers on efficiency. … Read more
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Following the Dreamers: Some Other Observations
Following the Dreamers: Some Other Observations
More observations based on Parts II and III of the Washington Post series.
My previous post based on Part I the Washington Post's "Following the Dreamers" series described how the article demonstrates why we are so far from an education system in which everyone matters. Here are some more observations based on reading Parts II and III of the series.
1) 'College tuition as investment' is a naive, simplistic notion. Consider this quote from the WaPo series (Part II):
"Pollin and Cohen had invested $325,000 in the class and would end up spending far more than that on transportation, tutors, field trips and camps. Both men were accustomed to getting returns on their investments, and what they were seeing from the Seat Pleasant 59 wasn’t enough. They became impatient when they learned of low grades and chronic absences. They would ask: Why are we spending so much money if the kids aren’t showing up?
"Proctor tried to massage expectations, theirs and his own. The help they were giving the Dreamers was making a difference, he told them. But it didn’t mean that the kids would be able to transcend circumstances that were often beyond their control."
Apparently, Pollin and Cohen started with the notion that their investment of $325K would buy them a high yield of college degrees. Along the way, they seemed to have learned that things were not nearly so simple. The interesting question for us now IMO is, why then does this simplistic thinking endure, for example in the Obama Administration's emphasis on increasing college degree completions so that the U.S. is again "#1"? If anything, the Seat Pleasant Dreamers stories should tell us that the process of bringing disadvantaged children into society is a lot more complicated and involved than simply providing college tuition money and turning out degree holders.
2) Make it (more) real.
"Jeffery Norris says they were too young to appreciate what Pollin and Cohen were offering. 'You can’t just throw money. It came too soon,' he says."
"Several of his friends were expelled. With them gone, Darone’s grades began to improve. He visited Bowie State University with Proctor and a group of Dreamers, and he liked the big lecture halls, the plush lounge areas, the pretty girls. For the first time, he got a sense of what he could do after high school. He could be like the uncles his mother had always told him about, the ones who went to college."
These quotes show the value of making it real. The article's most highly touted success story (Darone Robinson) didn't really catch on until he was given a glimpse of what was out there to catch on to - uncles going to college are an abstraction without a hook; a firsthand look at the attractions of college can make it real. How many disadvantaged kids never really consider college because it is not real for them?
3) Provide alternative paths to success.
"What Proctor learned, he says, is that Dreamers’ achievements cannot be defined by a diploma, an attitude that he says Pollin and Cohen eventually embraced. The doctor and the pharmacist are successes, for sure. But so are the UPS driver and the Prince George’s police officer. They may not have college degrees, Proctor says, but they have a sense of purpose and ambition.
Ultimately, Proctor argues, the program’s enduring value lies in the relationships he and his students cultivated over time. His mission, he says, was not to bemoan their failures, but to help his students find alternate paths to success."
As my previous post noted, more of the students graduated from trade school (12) than from college (11). Trade school was not even on the radar of the benefactors when they started the program. Sound familiar? It should - because American society still suffers from the same myopia when it comes to providing alternatives to college degrees. College should be for anyone - but not necessarily for everyone. And college-level learning can be made accessible later in life, not just for traditional-age students.
Perhaps I'm especially sensitive to this because I live in a city (DC) where affluent parents are totally focused on college paths for their children and where there's a shortage of tradespeople. As I type this, I'm waiting for the plumber to arrive "sometime this afternoon" - this after the plumbing company I normally use failed to respond to a second email request posted on their web site over two weeks ago. There seems to be plenty of demand and opportunity for skilled tradespeople in this town - so why wouldn't trade school be at least as much of a successful outcome? The current policy discussion and initiatives reflect a lot of confusion about this - perhaps the WaPo article will shed some useful light on this effort.
4) Making a society where everyone's education matters requires both a lot of money and a lot of connection and engagement.
This is why I believe that the Dreamers initiative was an important and promising initiative, despite my previous criticisms of the shortcomings of the "Dreamer" approach. As this quote from Part III of the WaPo series illustrates:
"He knew a couple of millionaires, he says, and what did he get from it? A few minutes later, he answers his own question. 'I’d be dead without the Dreamers,' he says."
Interestingly, Part III of the WaPo series also alludes to two other Dreamer classes which were supported, but there is no mention of what happened to them. We know from the WaPo series that what happened to some of the Dreamers was not good even with support, so we can imagine that what happens to all the classes of disadvantaged kids who go through life without such support is likely to be considerably worse.
So how can we create a society where everyone's education matters? The Dreamers initiative demonstrates that college tuition money helps a lot, but it's not nearly enough; what's also needed is a lot of mentoring, support, making college and future alternatives real. In fact, the Dreamers initiative demonstrates both the value of free market intervention into education and also its severe limitations. Because the Dreamer initiative is arguably not scalable, it also illustrates how it is an inadequate response to create a society where everyone's education matters. That will take money, involvement, making connections and enabling engagement on a scale which we haven't figured out how to do yet...
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A digest of important news from sources selected by our local editors. Delivered weekday mornings.
When people travel for holidays, All Seas Wholesale sells oodles of fish.
"Big travel days are good selling days for fish," said Peggy Howse, president and CEO of All Seas Wholesale in San Francisco. "People treat themselves."
The company sells fish to airlines, restaurants and other customers.
All Seas does well during the holiday season, distributing fish throughout the Bay Area. "December is our biggest month," said Howse, who in 1985 co-founded the company that will grow 10 percent to $11 million in sales this year. Atlantic salmon and prawns sell the most, together accounting for about half of sales.
Every morning, 3,000 to 5,000 pounds of frozen fish arrive. All Seas sells local king salmon until the fish hit the rivers to spawn. "We get local petrale sole, rock cod and flounder unless it’s stormy and windy," Howse said.
She buys fish from Oregon, Washington and Canada.
Restaurants are fun as customers because chefs like variety. "If we get something quirky, they’re interested," Howse said, such as a single ono.
Airlines will not buy fish unless it’s in cycle, Howse said; they buy large quantities at once.
Howse has five filleters on a staff of 30.
"They’re like Olympic athletes," Howse said. "They make it look easy."
"Just pick up the gill, take a knife, put it against the backbone and slide it down," Howse said. "How hard is that? Flip it over, grab the skin, put the knife between the skin and the meat and push it along. How hard is that? You try. It’s all the angle of the knife, how sharp it is, is the knife thin or thick?"
Howse has a knack for using a thanksgiving spirit to motivate workers all year.
James Dunn is a senior editor at the San Francisco Business Times.
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And in many jurisdictions that would be a crime unless you are a licensed electrician.
You are assuming it is a more accurate record of mistakes. This history is being kept by private companies and government agencies. The rich and powerful are still able to cover up their mistakes. The rest not so much.
If I copy a file from your share to my share, there is no reason to download the file, decrypt it, encrypt it with my key, and reupload it. Instead, I just need to reencrypt the file's key with my own and upload that, pointing to the same big encrypted blob.
Here we go. Should really search first
Of course, for this you need a government to allow banks to issue secure yet untracable digital cash. I can't imagine it would survive the first round of 'funding terrorism' charges.
No, you just need sufficiently advanced maths. You need a system where you can create a signature one time anonymously, the signature providing enough information for a merchant to prove it is valid. However, if you create a signature two or more times with the same key enough information is revealed to destroy your anonymity making the fraud traceable.
My understanding is that at least one system like this had been written up well over a decade ago, but I have no idea if the crypto has survived peer review and cannot cite anything. Anyone know details of a system such as I described?
Considering the gnome-do like application launcher and the newer keyboard driven replacement for menus landing in the new version, I certainly wouldn't consider Unity 'intended for tablets and phones'. Unity is indented to be a common GUI across all form factors. I'm not sure who else it seriously attempting this. Maybe Google trying from the other end with Android? Or are they focusing on ChromeOS for the laptop and desktop form factors?
The fundamental problem is that the user needs a trusted channel between themselves and the authentication provider. The only common & cross platform communication channel is a web browser. Native apps work around this by embedding a web browser, which is insecure in that they might be stealing your password. But the user experience is sucky, and most opinions seem to be that the existing systems have sacrificed too much usability for security.
Now it is supported by Google & Facebook, XMPP might be an alternative way of communicating with the end user that would work better for native applications, at least on the desktop. I suspect mobile devices would suck a bit here.
They have shipped in a number of European countries and are selling well... too well, causing supply issues.
No, their business model depends of displaying adverts to their users. Want to display ads to Google users? You have to give money to Google. If Google sold that information, they would be cutting their own throats for short term gains because people would only pay for the information once.
If you have a draft decent enough that it could be picked up by a traditional publisher, you have a draft decent enough to get an editor for a share of the profits. No need for cash up front. I think this will become a common model. And the end result will be a well edited book, unlike stuff that goes through the big publishing houses which certainly is not - if it is midlist they don't want to spend the money for more than basic copy editing (and its obvious they often don't even bother with paying a starving student to do even that!).
America's air force is developing a range of them based on a type of radar called an active electronically scanned array (AESA). When acting as a normal radar, an AESA broadcasts its microwaves over a wide area. At the touch of a button, however, all of its energy can be focused onto a single point. If that point coincides with an incoming missile or aircraft, the target's electronics will be zapped. BAE Systems, a British defence firm, is building a ship-mounted electromagnetic gun. The High-Powered Microwave, as it is called, is reported by Aviation Week to be powerful enough to disable all of the motors in a swarm of up to 30 speedboats.Disabling communications and destroying missiles is one thing. Using heat-rays on the enemy might look bad in the newspapers, and put civilians off their breakfast.
To every action there is, of course, an equal and opposite reaction, and researchers are just as busy designing ways of foiling electromagnetic weapons as they are developing them.
PRK: I can't wait to buy that issue of MAKE!"
Link to Original Source
Brilliance or lunacy?"
Link to Original Source
Could this be the beginning of dismounting the legacy system of exclusive distribution rights awarded to one company in one state?"
Link to Original Source
Anonymity also inspires people to act in ethical ways. Remember this the next time you are following a revolution on Twitter, where your anonymity means your life. Or will you be too busy engaging in heated kernel architecture debates and looking at lolcats?
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A celebration of the bonds that have united us
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The Gathering Ireland 2013 – What is it?
The Gathering is aimed at inviting new or reconnecting with people abroad who have Irish ancestry which is said to be over 70 million people worldwide to showcase all the amazing things Ireland has to offer from old traditions to newer ones. There are numerous Gatherings already organised and a quick visit to www.thegatheringireland.com will tell you all you need to know. You may even decide on joining in on one, they vary from Family Reunions, Clan Gatherings to Sports Fixtures.
The Gathering is not one simple party or festival it is a year-long celebration of all things Irish and reconnecting with communities abroad and at home. The idea of The Gathering emerged in 2009 and is being successfully championed by the Irish Government, Failte Ireland www.failteireland.ie and Tourism Ireland to name but a few.
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GRAYSON CO, TX - Texas farmers and ranchers may soon have an insurance fund to protect their assets.
The Grayson County farm bureau has set up an insurance fund to protect local grain producers. This fund comes in response to the Dorchester grain elevator went bankrupt costing many local grain producers.
The fund won't cost tax payers anything though. It will be filled by charging 1 cent on every bushel produced.
"If you never have another grain elevator go bankrupt, you'll never see a penny out of it. But since the Dorchester one had gone out, there have been 5 more in the state of Texas that have gone out," said Ben Wible, President of the Grayson County Farm Bureau.
The bureau will count the votes for the fund on December 17 and if the fund gets two thirds of the vote it needs to pass, it will take a effect in February of 2013. Ballots are due December 7th.
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Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, Democrat and senior member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, is battling against the National Security Administration for answers into how many Americans' phone calls, text messages, E-mails, and other communications are under surveillance by government agencies.
Wyden, who has earned a reputation as an aggressive advocate for privacy, is pushing NSA as the Senate debates the reauthorization of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, a bill that allows the government to wiretap individuals outside of the U.S. and any communication they might have, even if they engage with American citizens.
But NSA says it cannot reveal how many Americans might be affected because the effort would be too great an undertaking. [Big Cuts to Food Stamps in 2012 Farm Bill.]
"Obtaining such an estimate was beyond the capacity of [the] office and dedicating sufficient additional resources would likely impede the NSA's mission," the inspector general of the intelligence community told Wyden in a Monday letter.
The NSA inspector general also concluded that revealing even an estimate of the number of Americans under surveillance would "violate the privacy of U.S. persons."
"It is very disappointing that all of these inspector generals are responding this way," Wyden told U.S. News and World Report. "It would be one thing if we were asking for an extremely precise count of how many of these searches [were happening.]"
"All we get back is 'this is going to be the end of western civilization, we are going to have to do so much work,' " Wyden says.
But Robert Litt, general counsel for the office of the Director for National Intelligence, says this is not the first time Wyden has asked these questions.
"He keeps getting the same answer, and he keeps not believing it," Litt says.
"There is substantial oversight of this collection that is exercised not only by the court but by the Congress and by other branches of the U.S. government," Litt says, "This is in fact a statute that does strike an appropriate balance between the needs to protect the nation and to protect the privacy and civil liberties of U.S. persons."
The White House has requested that Congress moves swiftly to reauthorize the bill without any changes before it expires in December. But Wyden and Democrat Sen. Mark Udall of Colorado warn there are hidden civil liberties issues within the bill that need to be discussed.
While Wyden says he is interested in the scope of FISA's wiretapping provision, which remains shrouded in secrecy, the senator also says he is increasingly concerned about the law's "back-door search loopholes," a side effect of the legislation that he says allows the government to spy on U.S. citizens without a warrant.
Litt says Wyden's concerns are unfounded and that there is substantial oversight on the classified program.
Litt adds most people recognize that this is a statute that strikes the appropriate balance between the need to protect the nation and privacy.
But that isn't enough for Wyden, who in a rare move last week, pledged to force a debate of the legislation on the Senate floor.
"I just think it is unacceptable to ignore this back-door searches loophole," Wyden says. "We are going to pull out all the stops to close it before FISA is renewed."
Wyden says he's got the backing of other lawmakers, but he declined to name any.
House Intelligence Committee staff say they are optimistic their version of the legislation will move smoothly out of committee.
Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, applauds Wyden's efforts and is optimistic that FISA will be changed.
"This is the first sunset, so this is probably the best chance for reform," Richardson says. "We are still optimistic, and we are going to still keep fighting on it."
Richardson says she understands that some information about the program must remain classified, but says that NSA's efforts to keep the overall number of Americans that have been wire tapped under wraps could be "because [they] are embarrassed by how many Americans [they] have been wiretapping."
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"Terror at Beslan," by John Giduck, published by Archangel Group
Reading this book reminded me of how I felt when I viewed the film "United 93." I knew going in how it would end but, as they say, "The devil's in the details."
And "Terror at Beslan" has more details about this atrocity than you will find in any other account. Author John Giduck, through his extensive personal contacts with Russian special forces, was able to actually go to Beslan while the school was still smoking and bodies were being removed.
But "Terror at Beslan" doesn't just give you the details of the siege and assault. The first part of the book is an excellent background review of Chechen terrorism as well as a history of the special forces units of the Russian military. This background information lays the groundwork for the collision of the terrorists and the special forces units in Beslan.
The second part of the book lays out in painstaking detail how the attack unfolded, how the terrorists took over the school, and how Russian authorities responded. Giduck expertly dissects the siege and discusses the terrorists' plan as well as the government response and the aftermath of the events.
As history has taught us, terrorist attacks are not isolated events. A school siege such as the one in Beslan will happen again. There are many lessons for American law enforcement in Giduck's book.
Giduck devotes a section of his book to discuss preparing America's schools, preparing America's law enforcement, and preparing a tactical response. He makes the point of how police, military, and all parts of American society must come together to prepare for this threat.
Another item that makes this book special is that the foreword is written by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, an author known to most operators in the law enforcement and elite military field. "Terror at Beslan" is an excellent book and while there are many good things I could say about it, I think Dave Grossman says it best in the foreward when he wrote "Just don't read this book, study it. Study it and apply it. Be like the firefighter: put the risk in perspective, pray that it would never happen, know that it could happen, and work with all your heart and soul to prevent it from happening. It could be you child's life that you save.
All law enforcement personnel as well as all school officials should read this book, which was reviewed by Elliott E. Grollman.
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Switzerland has reinforced its opposition to unilateral sanctions imposed on Iran outside the framework of the United Nations. The assertion comes in defiance of such unilateral sanctions imposed by Israel, the United States (U.S.) and the European Union (EU).
Switzerland’s Foreign Minister Didier Burkhalter has said in Moscow his country will never back sanctions, imposed by any alliance, outside the U.N. Security Council framework. “As a rule, we don’t support such sanctions”, said Mr. Burkhalter after talks with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov.
Not being a member of the European Union (EU), Switzerland is not bound by the decisions of the 27-nation grouping, which has recently imposed fresh curbs, including a ban on Iranian gas imports. Last month, Swiss President Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf slammed unilateral Western sanctions against Iran by calling them “unacceptable”.
She stressed that Switzerland would continue its economic engagement with Iran within the framework of U.N. decisions.
Switzerland is a major global centre for oil trading, and is host to an office of the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC).
Pro-Israel organisations have viciously attacked Bern after a disclosure in September that Vitol — a Switzerland-based company — had traded in millions of barrels of Iranian oil. Josh Block, a former Clinton administration official and until recently the CEO of The Israel Project, a Washington based pro-Israel organisation, told The Jerusalem Post: “It is truly shameful that the Swiss government continues to help Iran evade EU sanctions as the regime in Tehran continues its march toward nuclear weapons, denies the Holocaust, threatens its neighbours and oppresses its people.”
An AFP report citing local media said western economic sanctions have hit around six million patients in Iran, because of the difficulties in importing medicine.
Fatemeh Hashemi, head of the Charity Foundation For Special Diseases (CFFSD), said though there is no explicit ban on importing medicines and medical equipment, the imposition of banking sanctions has “severely affected” import of medicines required for treating complex illnesses.
“We feel the shortage primarily for cancer and multiple sclerosis drugs. Of course, Thalassemia and dialysis patients are also the targets of these hardships”, she was quoted as saying.
“The price of domestically produced drugs has increased 15 to 20 per cent during the past three months, and that of imported supplements by 20 to 80 per cent”, pharmacist Mohammad Hossein Hariri recently told the Iranian Students’ News Agency (ISNA).
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Controversy continues concerning the choice of rhythm control vs rate control treatment strategies for atrial fibrillation (AF). A recent clinical trial showed no difference in 5-year mortality between the 2 treatments. We aimed to determine whether the 2 strategies have similar effectiveness when applied to a general population of patients with AF with longer follow-up.
We used population-based administrative databases from Quebec, Canada, from 1999 to 2007 to select patients 66 years or older hospitalized with an AF diagnosis who did not have AF-related drug prescriptions in the year before the admission but received a prescription within 7 days of discharge. Patients were followed until death or administrative censoring. Mortality was analyzed by multivariable Cox regression.
Among 26 130 patients followed for a mean (SD) period of 3.1 years (2.3 years), there were 13 237 deaths (49.5%). After adjusting for covariates, we found that the effect of rhythm vs rate control drugs changed over time: after a small increase in mortality for patients treated with rhythm control in the 6 months following treatment initiation (hazard ratio [HR], 1.07; 95% CI, 1.01-1.14), the mortality was similar between the 2 groups until year 4 but decreased steadily in the rhythm control group after year 5 (HR, 0.89; 95% CI, 0.81-0.96; and HR, 0.77; 95% CI, 0.62-0.95, after 5 and 8 years, respectively).
In this population-based sample of patients with AF, we found little difference in mortality within 4 years of treatment initiation between patients with AF initiating rhythm control therapy vs those initiating rate control therapy. However, rhythm control therapy seems to be superior in the long-term.
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- Story Ideas
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TRENTON — Fifteen people have been killed in the capital city this year, and starting today The Trentonian will be bringing you a new way to look at those killings and the lives that have been lost.
“There have been over 100 shots fired in the city so far,” Trenton Police Director Ralph Rivera Jr. said in a recent interview. “An increase in shootings means more people will be shot, which will eventually mean more people are going to die.”
Homicide Watch Trenton, a partnership between Trentonian.com and Homicide Watch DC, is officially launching today as the place where you can follow our coverage of these tragic events from the moment of the killing through the court system and beyond.
The site’s motto states its mission clearly: Mark every death. Remember every victim. Follow every case.
The police department has said the majority of gunfire has been between acquaintances. “Over 90 percent of the killings in the city this year have been the result of personal disputes, over issues like drugs and dice games,” Rivera said.
Through our partnership with Homicide Watch, we’ll be bringing you comprehensive coverage with text, photos, videos, maps, a searchable database and more. The aim is to provide context in our coverage that could shed light on the motivations, causes and effects of the killings, while examining the response to the violence by the police, the courts and lawmakers.
Authorities in Trenton have been wary of making a correlation between violent crimes and the loss of manpower on the force that stemmed from budget problems. More than 100 officers, one- third of the department’s ranks, were laid off in September 2011.
But at the same time, administrators do say they hope the recent re-hiring of 15 officers and the reinstatement of 14 supervisors will help reduce the number of violent crimes in the city.
“The more visible officers we have on the street, (the more it) would lessen the number of street-level narcotic types of crime or any type of crime which affects a citizen’s quality of life,” said Detective Edelmiro Gozalez Jr.
This year, 13 of 15 homicides were committed with a gun. There was one stabbing death, while the other victim, a 5-year-old girl, died after she was allegedly beaten in her home.
• The first homicide victim, I’Kime Melvin, 32, was a paraplegic confined to a wheelchair. He was stabbed to death in his Clearfield Avenue apartment in the city’s island section on Jan. 16.
• The year’s second homicide victim, Jose de Jesus Rodriguez, was shot multiple times after getting into an argument with another man. The 20-year-old died on Jan. 18. Willie Y. Figueroa, 19, was arrested and charged in Rodriguez’ death.
• Daquan Dowling’s death made front page news when the 23-year-old appeared to be a victim of mistaken identity. On Jan. 30, he was driving on Route 29 near the Statehouse when his car was hit with gunfire. According to authorities, Dowling, who was killed instantly, was not the target of the shooting. The target was his passenger, who was the owner of the car, but the tinted windows on their vehicle prevented the shooters from seeing that Dowling was driving at the time. Two men, Anthony Marks and William Mitchell, were arrested in June in the killing.
• William Emanuel was picked up by a motorist at the corner of Perry and Southard streets, where he was found riddled with bullets and wandering in the darkness. He was taken to Capital Health Regional Medical Center’s trauma unit, where he died March 29.
• Irvin E. Jackson Jr., 22, died April 9 after he was shot in an alley off North Hermitage Avenue in broad daylight.
• Wilfredo Rivera, himself a convicted killer, was the victim of a fatal ambush in which he was shot multiple times outside the Roger Garden Apartments on Eisenhower Avenue on June 23. Douglas Battle was arrested in connection of the homicide.
• The 5-year-old daughter of Dominique Smith, 22, and Masceo Emanuel, 25, of the 100 block of Passaic Street is on the list of the city’s 2012 homicide victims. Smith and Emanuel told police they had given the girl asthma medication on July 10 and allowed her to sleep in the living room. When they checked on her later and found she was not breathing, they called 911 and had her taken to the hospital, where she died shortly after midnight on July 11. Capital Health employees noticed healing wounds on the little girl’s body and fresh wounds to her face, officials said. After an autopsy revealed the child may have died from being severely beaten, the Mercer County prosecutor’s office charged both parents with the murder of their daughter.
• David Lewis III was shot multiple times behind a home on East Paul Avenue on July 19. Police said the 23-year-old city resident died after a dice game among friends turned into an argument. Kevin Boone was arrested on July 25 and with Davis’ killing.
• Semaj Kelly, 25, was the victim of a shooting near the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Ingham Avenue, on July 29.
• Malique Potter, of Morrisville, Pa., was shot dead Aug. 21. Potter was standing in the first block of Oak Street at 9:54 p.m. when two men approached and said they wanted to buy marijuana, police said. The two men began to walk away but then one turned and shot Potter in the chest.
• On Sept. 4, Neemias Reyes-Gonzalez was shot dead along a stretch of South Clinton Avenue that was the subject of police raids earlier in the summer. Reyes-Gonzalez himself was arrested in those raids and charged with promoting prostitution. On the night of the shooting, multiple gunmen burst into 803 S. Clinton Ave. and began firing, hitting the 37-year-old multiple times in the chest.
• Orlando Sanchez, a resident of the first block of Elm Street, was shot on Sept. 8 near an alley off Chestnut Avenue. The 28-year-old city man was gunned down in broad daylight.
• A 66-year-old man was found shot to death near City Hall just before the rush-hour commute into the city on Sept. 11. James Harris was shot in the chest. He was found unresponsive just after 5 a.m. near the intersection of North Stockton and East State streets, across from City Hall.
• Nineteen-year-old Tre Lane was shot in the chest on Saturday around 3 a.m. on New Willow Street along with three others. Lane ran for cover at a nearby home on Kirkbride Avenue where he died. The other male and two females, were wounded.
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Canadian employers unexpectedly cut jobs in January while home builders slowed the pace of new construction to the least since 2009, suggesting a languid start to the new year for the country’s economy.
Employment fell by 21,900 in January on declines in manufacturing and education, Statistics Canada reported today. It also reported exports and imports fell in December. Separately, Canada’s housing agency reported the annual pace of home starts plunged 19% in January from a month earlier. Doug Porter of BMO Capital Markets said the data marked “a day of infamy for Canadian economic stats.”
The world’s 11th-largest economy probably had its worst six-month performance since the end of the 2009 recession in the second half of last year, as exports declined and concerns about the global expansion prompted businesses to curb spending, leading economists and policy makers to scale back their expectations for 2013. The Bank of Canada, alone among Group of Seven central banks with a tightening bias, said on Jan. 23 that the need to raise rates is less urgent.
“Domestically, we’ve had a spate of weaker-than-expected numbers,” said Mark Chandler, chief fixed-income strategist at Royal Bank of Canada in Toronto. “We’re definitely lagging the improvement we’re seeing elsewhere” in the world.
The Canadian dollar depreciated 0.5% to C$1.0011 per U.S. dollar at 10:30 a.m. in Toronto, weakening through parity. Canadian 10-year bond yields fell to 1.98% from 1.99% yesterday.
Trading in overnight index swaps shows investors are pricing in a 1.3 basis point increase in the Bank of Canda’s benchmark rate by October. That’s the least in six months.
Today’s reports mirror other recent signs of weaknesses. Canada’s inflation rate was 0.8% in December and November, a three-year low that is beneath the bottom of the central bank’s target bank for price increases. The Citigroup Economic Surprise Index for Canada fell to its lowest since Sept. 27 today.
Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney pared his 2013 growth forecast to 2% on Jan. 23 from an October prediction of 2.3%. The economy will reach full output in the second half of 2014 instead of the end of 2013, he said, as growth accelerates to 2.7% next year.
Statistics Canada said today full-time employment fell by 20,600 in January and part-time positions by 1,400.
The labor force shrank by 57,500 in January, the largest drop since April 1995, and the participation rate fell to 66.6% from 66.8%.
The biggest job losses by industry were a 30,900 drop in education and 21,600 in manufacturing. The losses were partly offset by gains of 17,100 new jobs in construction and 17,200 in professional, scientific and technical services.
Private companies cut 18,800 workers and public-sector employment dropped by 27,000 in January. The federal government has been reducing its workforce as part of efforts to eliminate its budget deficit. The data ends a five-month string of job gains which saw employment increase by 184,000.
“I was more surprised by the resilience of the labor market and anticipated as we turned to this year the employment numbers were going to catch up with the rest of the economy,” said David Watt, chief economist at HSBC Bank Canada.
Canada’s statistics agency also reported the country’s deficit narrowed to C$901 million ($900 million) in December from C$1.67 billion in November. The decline was due to a 2.8% drop in imports, which outpaced a 0.9% fall in exports.
Separately, Canada Mortgage & Housing Corp. reported the annual pace of home starts fell to 160,577 in January, the slowest since July 2009.
Multiple-unit starts in urban areas fell 29% to 78,816 in January from 110,927 in December. Single-detached home starts fell 11%. Urban housing starts in Ontario plunged 44%, and were down 30% in Quebec.
“Combined with the steep drop in housing starts as well as the still-wide trade deficit, the jobs report rounds out a day of infamy for Canadian economic stats,” Porter, chief economist at BMO Capital Markets in Toronto, said in a note to investors.
“With housing softening notably, and consumers and governments not in much mood or ability to spend, the economy will need a major helping hand from a stronger U.S. performance in the year ahead to help generate renewed job gains,” Porter said.
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In the world of high finance, where billion-dollar deals can be struck between cocktails and dessert, the hottest play these days is a once obscure transaction known as the leveraged buyout. In such operations, corporate officers are turning publicly held firms into private businesses that are free from the demands of short-term investors and the unwanted attention of corporate raiders. In the process many of them are making vast profits for shareholders and themselves.
All that is needed to play this lucrative game is mountains of borrowed money--or leverage, in financial jargon--which lenders seem eager to provide. A record $10.8 billion was spent to take companies private in 1984, vs. just $636 million in 1979. This year's pace is even more furious.
One of the largest and most ambitious buyouts yet was proposed last week by executives of R.H. Macy & Co. (fiscal 1985 sales: $4.4 billion), the eleventh-biggest U.S. retailer. Led by Chairman Edward Finkelstein, a group of top officers offered $70 a share, or $3.58 billion, for Macy's stock that had been selling for about $50 a share. The Macy's executives were working last week with the Wall Street firm of Goldman Sachs to line up virtually all that money. The high buyout price, apparently designed to repel rival offers and avoid a bidding war for the company, drove up the value of other retailing issues as investors speculated that a wave of buyouts was about to break over the department-store industry.
Indeed, merchandising firms are much in vogue with acquisition-minded managers. One day after the Macy's announcement, officers of Household International agreed to pay $700 million for the Chicago-based conglomerate's retailing units, which include Coast-to-Coast hardware and the Ben Franklin variety chain. Even small Wieboldt Stores, a 102-year-old Chicago concern, last week announced a $37.4 million deal that turned the firm into a private company.
Consumer-product companies have been going private as well. Mary Kay Ash, chairman of Mary Kay Cosmetics, last May began a $300 million buyout of her company. In August, San Francisco-based Levi Strauss, the largest brand-name clothing maker in the U.S., was acquired for $1.48 billion by a group headed by corporate executives and descendants of the company's founder.
Some skittish firms turn to buyouts to escape unwelcome suitors. "Management has often used them as a weapon to defend against hostile takeovers," says Burton Malkiel, dean of the Yale School of Organization and Management. Directors of Storer Communications, a major cable-TV operator, voted last summer to take the company private for $93.50 a share, rather than accept a $95-to-$96 bid from Comcast, a smaller cable company. Revlon pursued a similar path last month when it arranged a complex $1.8 billion transaction that would break up the cosmetics firm but keep it out of the hands of Pantry Pride, a Florida retailer. Revlon suffered a setback last week when a court struck down its plan to sell two divisions for a bargain price of $525 million as part of the proposed deal. The ruling allowed Pantry Pride to continue its take-over effort.
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This is a syndicated post from CNA Daily News. [Read the original article...]
Vatican City, Mar 14, 2013 / 12:23 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The day after he was elected, Pope Francis emphasized that every believer – including bishops, cardinals and Popes – must proclaim Jesus crucified to be true Christians.
“We can build so many things but if we don’t confess Jesus Christ, then something is wrong. We will become a pitiful NGO, but not the Church, spouse of Christ,” Pope Francis said in his March 14 homily.
“He who doesn't pray to God prays to the Devil,” the Pope added in an apparent quote.
Pope Francis made his remarks at the Mass to close the conclave on Thursday evening in the Sistine Chapel with all of the cardinal electors present.
He asserted that the common theme to all three of today’s Scripture readings “is movement: the first reading, the movement of walking; the second reading, the movement of building; and the third, the Gospel, is in confession. To walk, to build, to confess.”
“But, it's not such an easy thing,” he noted.
“In walking, in building, in confession, sometimes there are shocks, there are movements, moments that are not proper to our journey. They are movements that drag us backwards.”
Pope Francis then turned his thoughts to the Gospel reading from Matthew in which Peter confesses Jesus is the Christ.
“This is the same Peter who confesses to Christ, who says ‘you are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God. I will follow you, but let's not speak of crosses! This has nothing to do with it. I will follow you with other possibilities, without the Cross,’” he said, characterizing Peter’s reaction.
“And, if we walk without the Cross, how much do we build without the Cross? And, when we confess Christ without the Cross, then we are not disciples of the Lord.”
The Pope then applied his words to himself and his brother cardinals, saying, “We might be bishops, priests, cardinals and Popes, but we are not disciples of the Lord” if we leave the Cross behind.
“I would like all of us, after these days of grace, to have the courage, precisely the courage, to walk in the presence of the Lord, with the cross of the Lord, to edify the Church in the blood of the Lord poured out on the cross and to confess the only glory, that of Christ crucified. And, in this way, the Church will move forward,” he said as he finished his homily.
Pope Francis’ next event will be a congratulatory meeting with all of the cardinals, both those who are retired and those who are still active, at 1:00 p.m. in the Vatican’s Clementine Hall.
On Saturday morning, he will hold an audience with journalists and media personnel in the Paul VI Hall, as his predecessors did.
Pope Francis will pray the Angelus and make remarks from the window of his apartment at noon on Sunday.
He will be installed as Pope on March 19 at 9:30 a.m. in St. Peter’s Square.
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At TCI, we know that parents are the constant in a child’s life. We work to support families through education, training and other programs.
Our Family Workshop Series is designed to provide parents with the tools to effectively address the needs of children with autism in the home and community to enhance their development. TCI’s staff and other leading professionals in the field of autism provide training on evidence-based best practices such as: managing challenging behavior in the home and increasing independence in the home and community. CLICK HERE for a calendar of topics this year. Many of our workshops are open to the public and the professional community.Our In-Home Parent Training Program provides opportunities for TCI’s professional staff to work directly with families and caregivers in the home. We provide training in specific interventions and strategies to manage their child’s behavior in the home or in the community. Extended family, caregivers and other therapists working in the home are encouraged to take part in these trainings.
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One program that drives computer sales is Microsoft Office. It is the standard software suite used on business computers around the world. Microsoft, the makers of Windows operating systems, has made Office available for both Windows PCs and Macs for many years. The latest version, Office 2011, is coming to Mac OS X next month.
The current version of Office for the Mac is 2008 so it has been a few years. The version before this one was 2004. While the Mac versions of Office could read and write documents that were compatible with the Office for Windows, the programs looked and felt quite different than the PC versions. This is about to change.
Office 2008 is popular but not loved. When Office 2007 for the PC was released it included a radical departure to the user interface, at least for Office. When 2008 came out for the Mac, it too had a new user interface, which was a bit different than 2004. However, it did not look anything like the PC version, which had a new interface called the 'ribbon'. The ribbon allows you to easily customize your copy of Office with the commands and functions you use regularly.
The other problem with Office for Mac was the difference in E-mail software. PCs have Outlook, which combines E-mail, contacts, calendars, tasks, and notes. Macs have Entourage, which essentially does the same thing as Outlook, but it is not Outlook. For the corporate crowd, having Outlook for Mac is an important step toward acceptance of the Mac platform. Office 2011 for Mac swaps Entourage for a Mac version of Outlook. For the first time ever, a Mac OS version of Outlook.
Office 2011 for the Mac will be available in two versions. There is a 'home' version and a 'business' version. Each version is available as a single license or with multiple licenses - for a slightly higher price.
Like the versions before, there is the Home and Student version that excludes Outlook with a street price under $120. It will also be available as a Family Pack for under $150. With a Family Pack you can install Office on up to three Macs.
The Home and Business version will be priced around $200. It will include the full suite Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Messenger. For $80 more you get a second license, which allows you to install it on either another desktop Mac, or most likely, your Mac laptop. Gone are the days of running the same copy on multiple machines, which you could do as long as you didn't run them at the same time.
There are a few important notes to make. First are the requirements. Office 2011 will only run on Intel based Macs. Those running G5s or, heaven help you, G4s are out of luck (sorry, it is getting time to think upgrade). It also needs OS X 10.5.8 or better, at least 1GB of RAM, 2GB of space on the hard drive, and a DVD drive for installation (otherwise you could install over a network).
I am sure there are a few out there that love Entourage. I don't have any problem running Entourage. Unfortunately, Office 2008 is the last place you will see it. Outlook is a PC staple and since there are so many PC users out there, some of which have switched to the Mac, Microsoft has listened and brought it over.
You are now probably wondering if you should upgrade your version of Office for Mac. If you are running Office v.X or 2004 it is probably time to really consider it. While the version you have may work just fine for you, the main question is compatibility. Are you getting more documents in your e-mail that you cannot open? If so, it's time to upgrade. If you are running 2008, the main question is whether you need Outlook. Office 2008 is new enough that you shouldn't have too many document mismatches. I'm pretty sure that Microsoft will come out with any add-ons to 2008 that allow it to read documents created by 2011.
Office 2011 for just over a hundred bucks is a great deal, even if it doesn't include Outlook. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are the true meat-and-potatoes in Office anyways. If you have multiple Macs, the 3-computer Family Pack is an even better bargain at $150. If you are new to Office, or have skipped a version or two, Office 2011 should be in your future.
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TwoUp and SizeUp organize multiple windows
In my day-to-day Mac work, I frequently find myself positioning windows next to each other on the screen. For example, I often drag files between two or three Finder windows, and I frequently position two word-processing document windows—or BBEdit’s document window and Web preview window—side-by-side so I can compare their contents.
TwoUp and SizeUp are sibling utilities that aim to make such window arranging easier. The free TwoUp is designed to let you arrange two windows, each taking up half the screen, either next to each other or above and below each other. To use TwoUp, you select the first window and then use TwoUp’s systemwide menu or keyboard shortcuts to send that window to the top, bottom, left, or right half your screen. Then you choose the second window—which doesn’t have to in the same program—and send it to the opposite half of the screen. The two windows are perfectly aligned to fill the screen.
TwoUp works well for this basic task, although the program doesn’t support multiple displays. For that feature, and many others, you need to move up to SizeUp, which offers much more functionality.
SizeUp adds keyboard shortcuts and menu commands for quarter-screen windows, moving windows between multiple displays, and moving windows between workspaces in OS X’s Spaces feature. You can also easily make a window fill the screen, or center the window with particular dimensions.
If you don’t want windows to be pushed right up against each other or against the edges of your displays, SizeUp also lets you set custom margins—areas the windows won’t cover—both on the edges of the screen and in between windows. Finally, you can choose special options for handling window drawers as well as windows that might resize behind the Dock or offscreen.
One limitation of both TwoUp and SizeUp is that they don’t work properly with programs that don’t use standard Mac OS X window types—for example, Microsoft Office 2004 applications—as well as windows that don’t allow resizing or that have locked aspect ratios. But I’ve found that most programs I use work fine with TwoUp and SizeUp, and each can improve your productivity if you frequently work with multiple windows simultaneously.
Pricing note: Irradiated Software lists SizeUp’s price as “Name Your Price,” which means you’re supposed to pay what you think the software is worth to you. However, the developer suggests $13, “based on the cost of time, effort, and resources that went into developing SizeUp,” so that is the price we list here.
Want to stay up to date with the latest Gems? Sign up for the Mac Gems newsletter for a weekly e-mail summary of Gems reviews sent directly to your Inbox.
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The Los Angeles Times has an excellent article detailing Paul Ryan's Catholic faith as it relates to social issues such as abortion and social justice issues such as poverty. Catholics will no doubt be grappling with these issues as the November election draws near. The article specifically contrasts the Catholicism of Paul Ryan with that of Vice President Joe Biden. In so doing, the article also contrasts the divide between conservative and liberal Catholics. Fundamentally, the question becomes whether one should vote on the basis of social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage or social justice issues such as poverty and providing a safety net for the poor.
It is important to note that both Ryan and Biden are Catholic. This is true despite the fact that sometimes conservative and liberal Catholics act as if they are the only real Catholics. Often it is felt, again by both sides, that the hierarchy agrees with the Paul Ryan perspective and supports the idea that we need to be single-issue voters. In this view, abortion is the only issue that really matters. The nuns have served as a counter-balance to that thrust, focusing on social justice issues, and as a result have come under fire from the Vatican. Yet the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has itself questioned Paul Ryan's commitment to the poor in a statement issued last spring, when Congress was voting on Ryan's budget.
There can be no doubt, then, that both abortion and a preference for the poor are core elements of Catholic teaching. How does one resolve this "quandary" as a practicing Catholic? I think it's pretty clear that individual Catholics are going to resolve it in different ways. This is why Catholics do not vote as a bloc. Fortunately or unfortunately, the split will fall roughly along conservative and liberal lines. Those who believe that nothing but abortion matters will side with Paul Ryan's vision of Catholicism, and those who care about safeguards for the poor will side with the Joe Biden argument.
If you've been reading my blog in the past few weeks, you have little doubt which side of the divide I stand on. But I think of couple of points are important here. The only real danger for Catholics in this election is that one side of the argument demonizes the other. I believe the statement from our own bishops highlights the concerns that exist over Ryan's budget and his vision for the country. The church's position on abortion is well-known. As was mentioned in my last blog entry, we are all searching for the direction the Spirit chooses to take us.
The next few months hold many opportunities to argue about the merits of various policies. Paul Ryan's connection to Ayn Rand and the contrast with the Jesus of the Gospels comes to mind. Other issues -- such as the direction of our foreign policy, an energy policy and our approach to the environment -- also need to be considered. Most important, however, this debate needs to unfold without coercion or intimidation. Each Catholic as well as every other voter deserves the religious liberty to choose the candidate they believe holds the best promise for the future of America.
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Who is responsible
Similar issue for test & quality: if test coverage is only limited, bugs are seldomly found during testing, or tests themselves are faulty, then you could finger point to testers and developers. However, it is your job as an architect to deal with quality. Don't try to escape your responsibility in this area. Test First Design makes it very clear that testing requires the different roles to cooperate.
What about business aspects? I know, you got this product manager who is in charge of all business aspects. But software architects are responsible in helping develop the technology roadmap, identifying patents, estimating the business implication of architecture decisions. Even more, architects must base every architectural decision on requirements and business needs.
Hmmh, what about project management? Of course, an architect should not be forced to also act as a project manager. These two rules are very difficult to live at the same time in the same project. But what if project management needs to estimate costs and resources? Here the software architect needs to provide support. What skills do developers need? How many developers and how much time are necessary to develop subsystem A.
I don't claim that architects shuld be jack of all trades but masters of none. Their main focus should be on software architecture. However, they cannot ignore what is happening on the boundaries between software architecture and the rest of the project. They should feel responsible for project success.
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Sunday Snow Makes Way For Sunny Monday
Sunny and warm forecast predicted
The light dusting of snow that fell over the area early Saturday morning could be the only precipitation we see this week, according to the National Weather Service.
This week looks to be a lot of sunshine and warm days with chilly nights in between. The high temperature for today looks to be around 44 degrees before dropping down to 27.
Tuesday's forecast is much of the same with a high of 45 before a low of 28 tomorrow night. The middle of the week has the warmest predicted high so far with a high of 52 on a mostly sunny day before dropping back to 31 degrees on Wednesday night.
Thursday the high will fall back to near 46 degrees with a low of 35 in the evening. The National Weather Service also predicts a 40 percent chance of rain Thursday night that could carry through to Friday night.
Even with the rain the high for Friday is expected to be near 50 with a low of 37 at night.
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Despite the imprecations of every billboard and magazine cover, I cannot bring myself to see Les Mis. The story has punctuated my life, the songs a soundtrack to my rites of passage.
The first pivotal encounter was at the final show of my drama school, a hideous meat-market where eager students have 95 seconds on a West End stage to impress an agent sufficiently to kick-start their career. To demonstrate our musical talents we were required to stand in the street welcoming our prospective employers with a medley of Les Mis greatest hits.
And so in the movie when the revolutionaries angrily demand, “Do you hear the people sing? Singing the songs of angry men?” I will be forced to stand up in the aisles and answer, “No! All I hear is the cry of young actors desperate for representation…”
My next encounter was with the novel. I was living in Los Angeles pursuing a man who was patently uninterested in me, but I was so blinded by love that I was prepared to do anything just to spend time in his company. Over coffee, he confided in me that his beloved godfather was dying of a terrible wasting disease. The condition was so advanced that this learned bibliophile was no longer able to hold a book. Before the days of electronic tablets and talking books, the object of my affection had undertaken to read on tape his godfather’s favourite novel.
And so he and I spent every day of a month reading alternate chapters, all 531,000 words, of Les Miserables into a dictating machine in locations around Los Angeles, from the beach at Point Dume to the French café on Doheny Drive. Thus the sewers of Paris and the camaraderie of the barricades are inextricably linked in my mind to the Pacific at sunset and the queasy pleasure of unrequited love.
The third Les Mis moment occurred in early motherhood, finding a song that persuaded my child to sleep AND eat up her greens. Before becoming a parent, I never had much time for Cosette’s song, Castle on a Cloud. It held all of the quease and none of the pleasure of sentimentality, but I sang it in desperation through some of the sleepless nights… “There is a lady all in white, holds me and sings a lullaby,” always seemed more Nurse Ratched than Mother Teresa. The lady might be “nice to see and soft to touch”, but the song never brought a tear to my eye until my daughter spontaneously completed the line: “She says, Courgette, I love you very much…”
Agent-anxiety, lost love and Nurse Ratched making inappropriate overtures to a courgette. There are just too many painful associations.
Follow Seven magazine on Twitter: @TelegraphSeven
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An award letter is a list of all the aid a student could potentially receive, and provides instructions or links to information that explains what you must do to check eligibility for the individual types of aid. Changes can occur regularly, so students should check their ASIST account often.
Students should look at each item listed on the award letter and follow instructions listed to do to secure the funds the student would like to receive.
None of the amounts are guaranteed. They are calculated based on the information from the FAFSA. If any of the information changes (grade level, Financial Aid Satisfactory Academic Progress, etc.), students should expect a new award letter that reflects changes in eligibility.
Some items on the award letter require additional action, such as filling out an application for a scholarship.
Yes, log into ASIST to see the current award letter.
A budget is established to help determine the maximum amount of aid necessary to fund educational expenses. Calculations include, but are not limited to accounting for residence, degree programs, enrollment levels and other criteria.
A budget designates the maximum amount of aid that can be received from all potential sources (scholarships, grants, loans, etc).
Proration of costs based on enrollment changes when students move from at least half-time to less than half-time and vice-versa. This change will adjust the cost of enrollment and therefore directly affects the budget.
Budgets are adjusted annually to reflect cost-of-living increases, tuition, room and board, etc.
No. Once your enrollment level reaches full-time in your program of study, you automatically have the maximum budget possible for your degree.
No. A disbursement is once the funds are sent from the lender to Liberty University. Please see the definitions for disbursement and refund in the Glossary of Terms. Also, students can review the "How Disbursements Work" webpage for more details.
A refund is sent to Higher One if a credit exists after all charges have been paid on the student's account. Please visit the Student Accounts refund homepage for more information.
ASIST will show a projected disbursement date for all federal loans. These are not guaranteed dates since many accounts are at different stages in the financial aid process.
Students can complete a Loan Change Request Form and submit it to the Financial Aid Office if the request is submitted prior to 14 days after the disbursement is on the student's account at Liberty. After the aid has been on the student's Liberty account or refunded more than 14 days, it is the student's responsibility to return any unwanted loan aid.
FAFSA is the Free Application for Federal Student Aid and can be completed easily on the web at www.fafsa.ed.gov. The application is maintained by the U.S. Department of Education and will evaluate each family's ability to help in paying for educational costs and determine federal aid eligibility. Students must complete a FAFSA annually prior to being eligible for any federal or institutional aid.
The fastest and easiest way to apply is online at www.fafsa.ed.gov. Use the IRS Data Retrieval Tool online to make filling out the FAFSA easier, faster, and more accurate. Be sure to have your tax information and PIN number accessible. For step-by-step assistance with the IRS Data Retrieval Tool process, click here!
A PIN is a personal identification number that serves as a legal electronic signature and should only be used by the specific individual. Parents of dependent students will need a PIN number as well to sign the FAFSA electronically. To secure a PIN, go to www.pin.ed.gov.
Students will sign-in with some personal information, including their PIN, on www.fafsa.ed.gov. Follow the steps to fill out basic demographic information, and then submit financial information using the IRS Data Retrieval Tool or from the previous year's taxes and W2s. Add Liberty's school code (010392). Once this is completed, submit the form by signing with the PIN. The FAFSA will be sent to Liberty University automatically. For more information about the IRS Data Retrieval Tool, visit this link.
No. Grandparents, foster parents and legal guardians are not considered parents on this form unless they have legally adopted the student.
The U.S. Department of Education provides information in assisting with special family situations at www.fafsa.ed.gov.
The Financial Aid Office processes FAFSAs daily, year-round. New FAFSAs arrive at Liberty electronically approximately one to two weeks after they have been completed.
The dependent and independent categories are defined by the U.S. Department of Education and influence aid and eligibility amounts. Check out this helpful link from the U.S. Department of Education.
An ISIR Reject is a FAFSA application that the U.S. Department of Education considers incomplete or incorrect. Common reject reasons:
A C-Code reflects there is an issue with a student's FAFSA data. Some C-Codes can be solved by students correcting basic FAFSA questions. Other C-Codes require the student to send documentation to Liberty. Common C-Codes relate to citizenship, Selective Service Registration, aggregate loan issues, etc. The necessary documents requested will display on ASIST.
It is a process during which the student commits to attending Liberty University by entering into a financial agreement. Visit Student Account's Financial Check-In page for more information.
Committing to coming reserves your spot at Liberty, reserves your spot in the classes you registered for, and, subsequently, lets you submit housing and meal-plan choices for resident students. For Liberty University Online students, completing Financial Check-In by the deadline will ensure you maintain your registered schedule each term.
The U.S. Department of Education offers various grants to assist students in paying for a post-secondary education. All students must have a complete FAFSA on file to be considered for federal grants and once Liberty receives the FAFSA, eligibility will be assessed. Liberty University also processes state grants, which are noted below. Details on each of these can be reviewed here.
|Award||Qualifying EFC Range||Dollar Amount per Academic Year|
Note: It is in the best interest of every student to borrow as little as absolutely necessary. All loans must be repaid and generally will have interest as well. For additional tools for smart borrowing, visit this link.
Federal loan eligibility is determined by a number of factors including, but not limited to the FAFSA, cost of attendance, and previous borrowing history. Estimated loan amounts are listed on the award letter and in ASIST.
Please visit this link for a comprehensive list of factors that can affect loan and other financial aid eligibility.
Loan applications will include a loan disclosure statement with repayment information. Every student should read the entire disclosure prior to finishing the loan application because it may include repayment rates, terms and conditions. Borrowers should contact their lender for additional information on loan repayment.
Students planning to attend Fall/Spring only should submit a Loan Change Request Form to have all aid adjusted. The completed and signed form can be emailed, faxed, mailed, or brought to Financial Aid in person.
NOTE: Reducing terms to Fall/Spring only does NOT necessarily increase loan amounts/eligibility.
This information is tracked by the National Student Loan Data System.
SAP stands for Satisfactory Academic Progress. It is the evaluation Liberty's Financial Aid Office runs at the end of every term to ensure students are maintaining financial aid satisfactory academic progress and determine federal/institutional aid eligibility.
Federal and institutional aid is automatically cancelled for all students on financial aid suspension.
Students seeking an appeal to financial aid suspension must complete a Financial Aid SAP Appeal Form and submit professional third-party documentation. Third-party documentation cannot come from friends, family, or Liberty University staff/faculty.
Appeals are reviewed once weekly on Friday. Appeals submitted by Tuesday of each week will be reviewed Friday of the same week. All others will be reviewed the following Friday.
Financial Aid will email every student on the outcome of the financial aid appeal. Students can also check ASIST under 'Financial Aid' - 'Eligibility' - 'Academic Progress' for a real-time status.
The U.S. Department of Education designates minimum financial aid academic progress guidelines. Institutional Academic Suspension is assessed by Liberty University’s academic departments. Resident students should contact CASAS and Liberty University Online students should contact online advising for institutional academic suspension reviews.
If an appeal is granted, the Financial Aid Office automatically reinstates aid within two to three weeks. Students can check ASIST for updates.
Students should utilize search engines like Google to find outside scholarships. Every student and parent should be very careful to avoid scholarships scams. Students with outside scholarships must notify the Financial Aid Office.
Verification is a process in which the U.S. Department of Education has each selected student confirm the information submitted on the FAFSA with Liberty University. Approximately 30-percent of all students who complete the FAFSA are federally selected for Verification. Click here to read the Verification Q&A for 2012-2013! If you want step-by-step assistance with the IRS Data Retrieval Tool for the FAFSA, click here!
Students selected for Verification should submit signed copies of each document requested from Financial Aid, including a signed and completed Independent or Dependent Verification Form. Students can check the status of sent documents in ASIST as well. If you did not utilize the IRS Data Retrieval Tool when filling out the FAFSA due to recently filing your taxes or for any other reason but you are still eligible to use it, please go back and use the IRS Data Retrieval Tool to expedite your Verification review. For more information about this process, please select this link.
Verification must be completed to receive any federal or institutional aid. Students not completing Verification are not eligible for federal or institutional aid.
For the 2012-2013 aid year, jointly filed accounts will need to complete the 2012-2013 Independent Verification Form and use the IRS Data Retrieval Tool or submit a copy of their 2011 joint IRS Tax Return Transcript.
Once all requested documentation is showing as received, the account will be reviewed. Students should check ASIST and their email account to verify the status of Verification.
A complete withdrawal is when a student ceases attendance from all enrolled courses after attending the courses.
A partial withdrawal is when a student ceases attendance from one or more, but not all, of the courses enrolled during any term after attending the course/s.
Courses from which a student ceases attendance or receives a grade of incomplete will not be considered as satisfactorily completed. The courses, which will be considered courses attempted but not completed, may negatively affect eligibility for the next term. Additionally, they will factor into the measurement for the maximum time frame in financial aid satisfactory academic progress calculations.
For Financial Aid purposes, students can only drop a course prior to the course beginning. Once the course has begun, the change would be considered a withdrawal.
Information from the FAFSA determines eligibility for federal work study. Students must indicate they are interested in federal work study on the FAFSA.
Students that are considered eligible for federal work study have an opportunity to work in this program while in school. For additional details, visit the Federal Work Study homepage.
If an approved student is interested in federal work study, they must submit an application with Human Resources. Students can view a list of available positions at www.liberty.edu/hr. If a hiring supervisor hires the student, Financial Aid will process the request and aid will pay as it is earned.
Students who indicated interest in federal work study on the FAFSA, but do not see it on the award letter are either ineligible or the limited funding from the U.S. Department of Education has been exhausted for the year.
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Kathi Inman Berens storified some nice media elements relating to the 2013 electronic literature exhibit and reading at the MLA Convention.
I discuss the history and context of electronic literature in this article about the new digital novel The Silent History. The article, by Eugenia Williamson, appears in Saturday’s print edition of the Boston Globe.
The Silent History certainly looks like a compelling project.
Another just-released digital novel which is also quite compelling, although it doesn’t have the same PR apparatus behind it, is Queerskins by Illya Szilak, designed by Cyril Tsiboulski. Although I’ve not read a great deal of this new novel yet, I’m impressed by its multimedia and literary engagement with a difficult aspect of recent American experience.
Queerskins explores the nature of love and justice through the story of a young gay physician from a rural Midwestern Catholic family who dies of AIDS at the start of the epidemic. Queerskins’ interface consists of layers of sound, text, and image that users can navigate at random or experience as a series of multimedia collages. Images of the mythic and the everyday, the sacred and the profane, from banal vacation footage to vintage burlesque, interact rhizomatically with text and audio monologues to subvert preconceived notions of gender, sexuality, and morality.
Queerskins can be read online for free, and it can be reading using free software; an iPad is not required. Although I’m a fan of location-based and other innovation and respect those working on all sorts of platforms, what I’d like for the future of literature is for it to be like this – fully accessible on even a public library computer and Internet-connected laptops throughout the world.
Kurt Reinhard of the Zurich University of Applied Sciences and Arts has posted a 10-part video series about storytelling in our networked, digital age. The first part (“Change of Storytelling”) includes comments by:
- Ian Condry (MIT)
- Joshua Green (UCSB)
- Dean Jansen (Participatory Culture Foundation)
- Henry Jenkins (USC)
- Joe Lambert (Center for Digital Storytelling)
- Nick Montfort (MIT)
- Clay Shirky (NYU)
I also appear in part 7 (“Risks of Social Media”) and part 10 (“Bits and Pieces”). Besides the august company listed above, you can see that the videos get to some of the critical issues in storytelling today: fans attired as stormtroopers and “Charlie Bit My Finger – Again!”
The Electronic Literature Organization‘s conference at Brown University has new concluded – the workshops, performances, screenings, exhibits, and sessions all went very well, as did the coffee breaks and other times for informal conversation. Many thanks to the organizer of ELO_AI (Archive & Innovate), John Cayley!
The conference was a celebration of and for Robert Coover, co-founder of the Electronic Literature Organization and major American novelist, whose teaching and promotion of electronic literature has been essential to the field. Robert Coover was toasted and at least lightly roasted, heard papers presented on his work, and did a reading of the “recently renovated Hypertext Hotel” – a famous early project by students which did indeed turn out to have some recent renovations.
ELO_AI began on Thursday with an array of workshops by Damon Loren Baker, John Cayley, Jeremy Douglass, Daniel Howe, and Deena Larsen. Deena Larsen was later part of a great roundtable on archiving with Will Hansen, Marjorie Luesebrink, and Stephanie Strickland; the group discussed Duke University’s work with Stephanie Strickland’s papers (and digital works), the Deena Larsen Collection at the University of Maryland, and the efforts that the ELO made in the Preservation, Archiving, and Dissemination project. On the first day of the conference, Mark Marino organized a great panel with four undergraduate presenters. And, there was an opening reception at the Westminster Street gallery where an excellent show of digital literary work has been put together. While there was an array of work (in the screenings, performances, gallery, and sessions) from people who were presenting at an ELO conference for the first time, I was also glad to see many of the people who were instrumental in creating and publishing literary work on the computer more than a decade ago.
Without trying to enumerate every session of the conference, I’ll mention the Sunday 10am plenary to try to get across how wide-ranging the presentations and presenters were. In this session, George Landow, author of the famous Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (1992), told the tragicomical tale of hypertext’s use in education at Brown. Angela Chang and Peggy Chi described two interactive projects for very young readers, projects that used my Curveship system and the Open Mind Common Sense project from Henry Lieberman’s MIT Media Lab group. Lawrence Giffin used the not-very-democratic framework of the salon to consider the important avant-garde site Ubuweb. And finally, Paola Pizzichini and Mauro Carassai looked into the Italian edition of Michael Joyce’s Afternoon and its almost total absence from Italian libraries. Certainly, some sessions were more focused – very focused in the case of the one on William Poundstone’s digital writing work; at least with a theme of process intensity, in the case of the session were I presented my work on Adventure in Style. But we had a genuinely diverse group of presenters, and sessions like this one on Sunday revealed this, while also showing that we do have cross-cutting interests and that we can have valuable conversations.
A special area if interest for me, interactive fiction, was represented by Aaron Reed, who did a reading of his Blue Lacuna in which he deftly showed both interactive sessions and the underlying Inform 7 code while a volunteer interactor spoke commands. Aaron Reed also gave a paper on that large-scale piece, explaining his concept of interface and his work on developing a non-player character who ranged across different spaces without being a simple opponent or companion character. In the same performance session and paper session, I got to see and learn more about Fox Harrell’s Living Liberia Fabric, a piece produced in affiliation with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Liberia, incorporating video testimony, and employing Fox Harrell’s GRIOT system for poetic conceptual blending.
We welcomed new ELO board members and officers. Joining the ELO board are Fox Harrell, Caroly Guertin, and Jason Nelson. Dene Grigar took office as vice president, and Joe Tabbi completed his term as president, handing that role over to me.
During the sessions, we heard critical perspectives on many particular electronic literature work and some on the ELO itself, which will help us think about the challenges the Organization faces and how we can better serve readers and writers beyond American universities. The ELO has had ten years of growth and learning by now, and while there will be more of each to do, our four main projects are now well enough established that all of them are past 1.0:
- The Electronic Literature Collection, the second volume of which has been edited and produced by an independent editorial collective and will be published soon.
- The Electronic Literature Directory, which in its new manifestation offers community-written descriptions as well as metadata.
- Our conference – this most recent one at Brown was our fourth international gathering.
- Our site and our online communications, which offer information about the ELO and an introduction to electronic literature.
I’m glad to be starting my service as president of the ELO at a time when the organization has just had a very successful conference and has these other effective projects rolling. Thanks to Joe Tabbi and other past presidents and directors of the Organization for bringing us to this point – and, again, to John Cayley for bringing us all together at Brown.
Proceedings of the Digital Arts and Culture Conference, 2009 are now online. The conference was a great success; DAC continued to lead the way in the culturally engaged study of digital art and media. Many thanks go to Simon Penny, who was director of the conference, and others at UIC: Ward Smith, Liz Losh, and Sean Voisen. The theme leaders for this conference put together very strong series of papers that were both focused and relevant. I hope those of you who didn’t make it to Irvine will visit the proceedings and see a bit of what happened at the latest instance of this extraordinarily rich series of gatherings, where the study of video games, digital art, digital literature, performance, and the cultural aspects of online and computing experience have been explored so well over the years.
Ian Bogost and I just gave our talk “Platform Studies: Frequently Questioned Answers” here at Digital Arts and Culture in Irvine, California. There were three other talks – fascinating ones – in this day’s opening plenary session. Garnet Hertz took us into circuit bending, tactical media, and the artistic recycling and reuse of electronic waste. Jason Farman spoke on locative media with a focus on geocaching as technologically-enabled, embodied, proprioceptive play. Conor McGarrigle explored, in detail and with reference to several specific projects, the relationship between the practices of the Situationist International and contemporary locative media work.
Ian and I addressed six misconceptions about platform studies (the concept, the focus) which we’ve already heard a few times. Our talk was an attempt to better invite people to participate in the project and in the book series. In brief, the six misconceptions, and our responses, are:
#1 Platform studies entails technological determinism. Platform studies is opposed to “hard” determinism and invites us to continue to open the black box of technology in productive ways. #2 Platform studies is all about hardware. Platform studies includes software platforms as well. #3 Platform studies is all about video games. Platform studies extends to all computing platforms on which interesting creative work has been done. #4 Everything these days [in the Web 2.0 era] is a platform. We invite a focus on computational platforms, the basis for digital media work. #5 Platform studies is about technical details, not culture. Platform studies connects technical details to culture. #6 Platform studies means that everyone in digital media will have to get computer science training or leave the field. Platform studies shows how technical understanding can lead to new sorts of insights, but will not evict the many other important sorts of scholars from digital media.
The full paper is online, too. Since the beginning of the project, we’ve insisted on the embedding of the platform level in culture and other non-technical contexts, and we’re tried to draw connections between the way computing systems work and culture, history, and society. Others, we’re sure, will have new ways to do that; please, join us in taking up the platform as an focus for digital media studies.
I have one other collaborative paper today, which will be presented by Alex Mitchell: “”Shaping Stories and Building Worlds on Interactive Fiction Platforms.” Then I’ll present “The ppg256 Series of Minimal Poetry Generators.” Finally, I’ll be part of the DAC Literary Arts Extravaganza with a reading called “Five Uneasy Pieces.” I’m looking forward to it all, but I’m sure I’ll be glad to be looking back on it when the day’s done.
You can search Tweetland for #DAC2009 to see what the cool kids are saying about the conference.
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- The more we age, the more opportunities we find to become jaded.
- When start ups grow into big companies, they can lose a je ne c’est quoi in the transition.
- When events become so big and crowded, there’s a tendency to become overwhelmed, to stick with the one we came with.
- When communities get really big, they feel less like a community and more like a city, losing their small town feel.
- When a city’s population doubles and triples, the city can feel cold or outgrow it’s infrastructure.
- When a social networking platform becomes so big it is being referred to as a monopoly, the attraction may eventually disappear.
Certainly not a universal law, but if history is anything to go by, I think we may find that small becomes the new big – that smaller velvet rope networks gain in popularity and our attraction to yesterday’s brands may evolve into a love affair for tomorrow’s.
by the way – if you are wondering what I’m on about… check this out: It’s a Facebook world after all…
Well? Am I missing the boat… if you have any thoughts or ideas, please, share.
Although the fundamentals are the same, the way social technology manifests depends on where your efforts are focused.
For the business – create the right message in the right places that generates the pull that delivers the talent, investors and attention that you need to move the needle. Think: Recruitment. Investors. Media.
Inside the business – facilitate a culture of change that reduces overhead costs, increases employee retention rates and makes business more efficient. Think: Management. Employees. Operations.
Outside the business – consistently deliver relevant moments of truth that make your customers not only fall in love with you, but tell their communities about you. Think: Existing Customers. New Customers.
Roping in Social Technology at the point of purchase can work although I am a fan of leveraging social technology holistically. Taking advantage of its benefits and efficiencies from start to finish. My experience has been that this typically makes for far better and more consistent moments of truth for your customer and by default, your shareholders.
In layman’s terms: facebook is no longer in the business of connecting people. They are in the business of connecting people to places, objects and services. The ramification of which could be significant. What’s happening?
In April, Facebook announced several major initiatives that will see Facebook weave it self into and across the web. Facebook’ has a host of social plug ins for you to use within your website that marries your site with Facebook enabling your visitors to see who in their network of friends:
1. is a member of this site too
2. likes the content
3. is tweeting commenting or being active on it right here, right now.
4. is recommended as a pretty cool person to know
All with the intention of further personalizing your web experience and perhaps taking your likes and lumping them into common categories. The evolution from connecting people to connecting people’s worlds has been talked about for several years. It is inevitable and a natural progression, only I didn’t expect it would come to be through an attempted monopoly.
If Facebook offers:
1. Live streaming of updates and activity – what does that mean for twitter?
2. Integration between recruitment sites and your network on facebook – what does that mean for linkedin?
3. geo- location services and apps where you can check in – what does that mean for foursquare?
This makes me wonder: what do facebook users think of facebook – I mean really?
1. Do we really care what all 350 of our friends are liking, doing, and commenting on?
2. When we like something – do we like it because we like it, or are we doing it to support a friend? in a moment of weakness? Do we return to that page we liked? do we engage it?
3. Is being part of a country sized network all it’s cracked up to be? Perhaps.
4. Why are we there? How many people do we really engage with on FB? How many of our friends are purely profile candy?
Then I wonder… what’s the opportunity here? Is it more niche networks? We already have 10 million of those. Is it to further build on what Facebook is already doing? Developers, although conflicted, may agree. Does the company or brand zero in on Facebook only? What about advertising being noise? being intrusive? being unwanted? How do they best use this new world of Facebook effectively?
We could very well see a replay of Beacon. Or we could see this continue for the next 12 months and evolve into Facebook schools, Facebook airlines, Facebook auctions and whatever else it mops up.
It will be interesting to not only monitor, but evolve with. More to come on this later.
photo credit: http://roughwriter.yc.edu
I’ve managed to book a flight to London Heathrow via Chicago April 29th but have been advised that this may need to be rescheduled should things continue as they are. So nothing new there.
My additional 9 days will probably be spent bouncing between friends and hotels! HAH! I’m just grateful I won’t be sleeping on the floor of Lester B. Pearson ;)
One thing that’s evident in situations like these is how resourceful people can be… not to mention how useful social technology is.
Volcanoes and Social Technology:
- Twitter has a variety of hashtags to organize related conversations and tweets pertaining to the volcanic ash fiasco: #AshTag, #GetMeHome, #RoadSharing – you’ll have to try search.twitter.com yourself.. twitter has been acting up non stop for me ;(
- Sites such as roadsharing.com are being used to find creative options to get back and forth.
- Tod (at) TodBrilliant (dot) com has created a Facebook page offering a survival guide for stranded travelers – smart!
- And Denise Balkissoon from the Toronto Star has been using social to secure interviews with people stranded as a result of said fiasco.
Alas, there is not much one can do but sit tight or… perhaps explore a route via Tangiers Morocco (Canadians do not require a visa) where you can get a boat to Gibralta Spain and then continue your journey by train, bus or taxi. Or vice versa.
It’s not the one size fits all solution. Social Media can’t fix your lousy product, your bad network that consistently drops my calls, nor can it fix the absolutely wretched customer service your company insists on spewing out.
You should know that I am currently breaking my 24hr rule. The rule that says, “when made upset, I must not open my gob about it for 24hrs. If after 24hrs I feel so inclined, then so be it.”
When a business takes money in exchange for a product or service, there is a perceived value for the exchange. If the balance is off, the model breaks down. When a company takes money in exchange for a mediocre product and appalling customer service… the customer has a decision to make:
1. Return everything and go somewhere else (provided the business accomodates that sort of service),
2. Put up and shut up (confiding in ten different friends later that day over dinner about the horrible experience)
3. Go social on that company’s brand.
Assuming it really is far more cost effective to keep a customer than find a new one, why are we so hell bent on throwing money after bad money on marketing and BOGO promotions to get new customers when our existing customers would return, bring friends and go up in value if we’d just get a few home basics right. Eg. Give them a little love.
- Hire people who actually like people.
- Incent your team to meet customer service targets.
- Use an infrastructure conducive to meeting the needs of your customers – Eg. a phone tree 8 layers deep is not conducive to keeping customers happy.
- I’d even settle for someone who can smile and remain borderline pleasant at “hello” (this applies to London England… the standard would be much, much higher in North America)
Isn’t it amazing how sometimes the most obvious is the last to be seen.
I’ve been processing this post for several days now. I wasn’t quite sure what I was on about. I knew I was seeing a lot of unnecessary errors and bandwagons headed for a crash but I wasn’t quite sure how to articulate it. I think I just figured it out.
The social space is becoming overcrowded and far too noisy with good intentioned but severely misled individuals and brands. The result? A whole lot of noise. For most this isn’t a big deal, simply unfollow or look elsewhere. I have that tendency to slow down, lend a hand or an opportunity for some banter to see how to improve the situation – when I feel so inclined.
What’s the core underlying problem?
- Zero strategy. If you have no online consumer research or market understanding to identify a key insight from to then build a strategy… you are just making noise. And by default, developing a strategy usually means you need some solid understanding of marketing basics.
- Complete disregard for the future. Sometimes you have to start with your Exit Strategy. Or at least start from where you want to be a year from now, sometimes it makes sense to look four years out. Knowing the end result allows you to work backwards effectively calculating where you start.
- Perception that SoMe is a FB profile or a series of tweets. It’s anything but that. (deep sigh) The get rick quick mentality needs to go. It doesn’t work for diets, money or in this space either. Facebook Fan Page with x number of fans is not an objective without a clearly defined purpose and reason.
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Washington • President Barack Obama launched his second term Monday with a call for incremental yet meaningful progress toward an America more equal for all, and a step away from the partisan brinkmanship that dominated his first four years in office.
Before a crowd numbered in the hundreds of thousands, the president made a forceful case for gay marriage and a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, for less federal debt and more assistance to the poor, and for a government response to climate change and gun violence.
Progress, the president added, is contingent on compromise.
"We cannot mistake absolutism for principle, or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate," Obama said. "We must act, knowing that our work will be imperfect. We must act, knowing that today’s victories will be only partial, and that it will be up to those who stand here in four years, and 40 years, and 400 years hence to advance the timeless spirit once conferred to us in a spare Philadelphia hall."
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, said Obama’s point was accurate, and the Utah Republican took it as a sign that the president respects principle — even that of detractors.
Still, Lee said, the president steered off his own talk of cooperation when he started hammering home some points of his agenda.
"I really like the message at the beginning of the speech; it was very much a unifying, rallying call for all Americans," Lee said. "There were certainly moments later in his speech in which he got off the unifying track."
Lee’s Senate colleague, Orrin Hatch, who donned a white Stetson cowboy hat and sat just off to the president’s right, said what he got out of the speech was, "Let’s work together."
"If he’s open [and] just not saying my way or the highway, there’s a lot we can do together," Hatch said. "We’ve had some bad polarization on both sides back here. The Democrats have gone way left and some on the Republican side have gone way right extreme. We’ve got to find some way to bring people together."
On the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr., Obama, the first black president, made his most direct connection to the late civil-rights leader as his words echoed down the National Mall to the Lincoln Memorial where King delivered his famous "I have a dream" speech five decades prior.
"We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths — that all of us are created equal — is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall," Obama said, referring to sites of famous demonstrations for equal rights for women, blacks and gays. "Just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth."
The journey begun by those who fought for fairness is not finished, Obama said, until "our gay brothers and sisters" are treated the same as anyone under the law, until all voters have the same, unhindered access to the polls, until women are paid the same as men in the same jobs and until children are safe from gun violence.
"Our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia, to the quiet lanes of Newtown, [Conn.] know that they are cared for and cherished and always safe from harm," Obama said.
While Obama’s first inauguration drew upwards of 1.8 million people, organizers reportedly said the crowd this time around was around 700,000. But the masses still stretched from the Capitol steps to the Washington Monument, and tens of thousands more stood on the parade route waiting for a glimpse of the presidential motorcade. Many of the attendees huddling together for warmth in temperatures hovering just above freezing.
While not mentioning the day’s weather, the president did address something he rarely has addressed since his first few months in office: climate change.
"Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires and crippling drought and more powerful storms," he said, promising a response to the threat.
The president also used his 19-minute address to rebut arguments made by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney during the general election about the number of Americans reliant on federal assistance and the need to reduce federal spending by scaling back the scope of the social safety net.
"The commitments we make to each other — through Medicare, and Medicaid, and Social Security — these things do not sap our initiative; they strengthen us," Obama said. "They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great."
The president, who took office during the Great Recession, with wars grinding on in Iraq and Afghanistan, said the nation is poised for better times.
"This generation of Americans has been tested by crises that steeled our resolve and proved our resilience," Obama said. "A decade of war is now ending. An economic recovery has begun. America’s possibilities are limitless, for we possess all the qualities that this world without boundaries demands: youth and drive; diversity and openness; an endless capacity for risk and a gift for reinvention."
"My fellow Americans, we are made for this moment," the president declared, "and we will seize it — so long as we seize it together."
Copyright 2013 The Salt Lake Tribune. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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