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Alvarez VS Chandler Fight Video? \|Alvarez VS Chandler Fight Video?\| Anyone got a link to the video? Heard it was a fight of the year candidate. Found it, here it is if anyone interested, DON'T SLEEP! \|11-22-2011, 07:17 AM\|\|away - #2\| Great fight. Seeing as Bellator(owned by Viacom) is the only organization that has a chance to compete with UFC I see this fight league getting much better and don't see them selling out their origination like the others. \|11-22-2011, 08:33 AM\|\|away - #3\| The champions have dumb dumb dumb contracts. Keep the tourney but they have to tweak there model a bit. \|01-17-2012, 10:39 AM\|\|away - #4\| i'm kind of dispaointed, heard a lot about Eddie Alvarez, and from what i've seen he's not that great...definitely good, but not one of the greatests like i've read somewhere... \|01-17-2012, 05:06 PM\|\|away - #5\| the fight was great but it happened the same weekend or night as hendo vs shogun so it got eclipsed by that monster i think what made this fight so good was seeing someone who was supposed to be top 10 in the world lose to a lesser name chandler was beast thru the tourny tho. beating patricky pitbull is serious and proves to me that beating alvarez was no fluke \| BOX Espn Reporting: Manny Pacquiao In Financial Trouble \| New reply 35 seconds ago - 87 comments - by TRILL SH1T \| NBA Greg Oden Looking "unbelievable" On Comeback... \| New reply 9 minutes ago - 66 comments - by Dee Grande \| No More Fruit Loops For Me \| New reply 1 minute ago - 87 comments - by blaznfor20 \| Dc Vs Marvel (battle) Examples \| New reply 18 minutes ago - 99 comments - by Gmengfx \| The Gifted (photoshop Thread) \| New reply 4 minutes ago - 239 comments - by ucantseeme004 \| The 25 Most Violent Rap Songs Of All Time (complex) \| New reply 25 minutes ago - 53 comments - by genocidecutter \| NBA Oh Gawd.. Just Thinking About It Makes Me Sick To My ... \| New reply 6 minutes ago - 53 comments - by ralph lauren \| 13-year-old Rapper Lil Mouse Accused Of Threatening Th... \| New reply 31 minutes ago - 66 comments - by C-Stylez \|Join us on Facebook. Check out the BX fan page and hit the Like button.\|\|Follow BX on Twitter to get instant hot topic alerts.\|\|Enter your email address below and receive a daily hot topic newsletter.\| \|5,303 fans of BX and 1 new today\|\|4,282 following \| none new today\|
2 Meetup Groups match “Smart growth” near Miami, FL What’s your dream? Freedom of time? Unlimited resources to travel the world? Whatever it may be, CASHFLOW 101 teaches you how to get out of the Rat Race and onto the Fast Track, how to make your money work for you - not the other way around. CASHFLOW 101 is an educational board game that simulates real life financial strategies and situations. As a simulation, you learn valuable lessons and gain priceless insights into personal finance and investing without having to put your actual money at ris … There are no upcoming Meetups. This is a group for anyone interested in building a successful network of individuals, focused on powerful information , to help you get started in smart investing of your TIME. Building the Bridges that take you from employee to controlling your financial destiny. Get an alert email when new Meetup Groups like this start near you. You'll get advice, help finding members, and tools to make running a Meetup Group easier.
In my next few blogs, I will provide an overview of Voltage Source Converter (VSC) HVDC technology and its suitability for Smart Grids operation and control discussed. VSC HVDC is based upon transistor technology and was developed in the 1990′s. The switching element is the Insulated Gate Bipolar Thyristor (IGBT), which can be switched on and off by applying a suitable voltage to the gate (steering electrode). Because of the more switching operations, and the nature of the semiconductor devices itself, the converter losses are generally higher than those of HVDC classic converters. VSC HVDC is commonly used with underground or submarine cables with a transfer capacity in the range of 10 – 1000 MW, and is suitable to serve as a connection to a wind farm or supply a remote load. VSC HVDC technology has very fast steer and control functionality and is suitable for meshed networks. It is characterised by compactness of the converter stations, due to the reduced need for AC harmonic filters and reactive power compensation. Power flow reversal in VSC systems is achieved by reversal of the current, whereas in HVDC classic systems the voltage polarity has to change. An important consequence of this voltage source behavior is the ability to use cheaper and easier to install XLPE cables, instead of the mass-impregnated cables that are needed for HVDC classic. Currently, only twelve VSC HVDC projects are in service. A few examples include: Estlink, which connects Estonia to Finland (350 MW), and BorWin1, connecting an offshore wind farm to Northern Germany (400 MW). Both are equipped with ±150 kV submarine cables, and the Trans Bay project in California (400 MW) that consists of 90 km ±200 kV submarine cable. Most projects have submarine cable, but some projects include long lengths of underground cable, such as Murraylink (220 MW, 177 km underground cable), and Nord E.On 1 (400 MW, 75km underground cable). The 500 MW East-West interconnector between Ireland and Great Britain, operating at ±200 kV, is scheduled to go into service in 2012. A 2000 MW 65 km cable interconnector ±320kV as part of the Trans European Network—between Spain and France—is scheduled for commissioning in 2013, and will represent the highest power rating for a VSC HVDC system installed at this time. Make sure to check back next Tuesday for my next blog on the comparison between HVDC classic and VSC HVDC. By: Peter Vaessen
The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade cannot advise on the specific requirements which may need to be met in order for a marriage to be legal in a particular country. However, as a general guide only, the following information may be of assistance. Certificates of No Impediment to Marriage Certificates of No Impediment to Marriage are issued by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade through overseas missions and state and territory offices to Australian citizens seeking to marry overseas. Some foreign countries require foreign nationals to present a Certificate of No Impediment before they are able to legally marry in that country. Certificates of No Impediment to Marriage are not a requirement of Australian law. Some countries will only accept Certificates of No Impediment issued by the local Australian Embassy or Consulate in the country in which the marriage is to take place. However, if authorities of the country in which the marriage is to take place have advised that they will accept a Certificate of No Impediment issued in Australia, you should complete the applicable application form for a Certificate of No Impediment to Marriage and return it to your state or territory office of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The Consular fee for a Certificate of No Impediment to Marriage is $90. - Application form for Certificates of No Impediment to Marriage for use in Poland, Portugal and Turkey [PDF 22 KB] - Application form for all other countries [PDF 21 KB] The forms are also available from any state or territory office of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Please ensure that you bring your passport when presenting the Certificate of No Impediment to be witnessed by us. We may need to sight documentary evidence of your date of birth, nationality and Australian residency. Issue of Certificates of No Impediment to same sex couples The Attorney-General has announced that from 1 February 2012 Australians seeking to enter into a same-sex marriage overseas will be able to apply for a Certificate of No Impediment to Marriage. The issuing of a Certificate of No Impediment will allow same-sex couples to take part in a marriage ceremony overseas and to be recognised as being married according to the laws of that overseas country. Same-sex marriages conducted overseas are not recognised as a marriage in Australia, but may be evidence of a de facto relationship for the purposes of Commonwealth, State and Territory laws. In addition to the Certificate of No Impediment to Marriage, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade can provide general advice on the requirements which may need to be met in order for a marriage to be legal in a particular country. For exact details of what requirements will need to be met, persons wishing to marry overseas should contact the embassy or consulate of the country in which they would like to marry. The following general information may be of assistance. Overseas marriage authorities often require evidence that the party is free to marry. Such evidence may be a statement from the Australian State or Territory Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages that there is no record of the person having been previously married. Authorities may also require divorce papers/death certificate of a former spouse in the case of being divorced or widowed. Overseas marriage authorities generally will also want to sight an original birth certificate and the person’s passport. Foreign marriage authorities may have further additional requirements e.g. a requirement to reside for a length of time in a country prior to a marriage taking place in that country. Recognition of overseas marriages The Attorney-General’s Department has responsibility for developing policy about issues relating to family law and marriage, including who can get married, who can solemenise marriages and the validity of overseas marriages. The rules governing whether or not a marriage is valid under Australian law are to be found in the Marriage Act 1961 (Cth). There are currently no Australian diplomatic or consular officers appointed to solemenise marriages overseas under Australian law. Marriages entered into overseas are generally recognised as valid in Australia - if the marriage was recognised as valid under the law of the country in which it was entered into, at the time when it was entered into, and - providing the marriage would have been recognised as valid under Australian law if the marriage had taken place in Australia. There is no requirement to register a marriage in Australia which takes place overseas. The foreign marriage certificate is prima facie evidence in Australia of the occurrence and validity of the marriage. Marriage to an Australian citizen does not automatically guarantee entry of a citizen of another country to Australia. The Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC) can advise on immigration to Australia. You should consult a legal practitioner if you need advice on whether a marriage which has taken place overseas is recognised as valid in Australia. The basic rule of foreign marriages generally being recognised as valid in Australia is subject to the following exceptions: - where one of the parties was already married to someone else; - where one of the parties was, at the time of the marriage, domiciled in Australia and either of the parties was not 18 years old; - where neither of the parties was, at the time of marriage, domiciled in Australia, the marriage shall not be recognised as valid in Australia until one of the parties is 16 years old; - where the parties are too closely related under Australian law (including relationships traced through adoption or an adoption that has ceased to have effect) i.e. either as ancestor and descendant, or as brother and sister (including half-brother and half-sister); - where the parties to the marriage are both of the same sex, or; - where the consent of one of the parties was not real consent due to duress or fraud, a mistake as to the identity of the other party or as to the nature of the ceremony performed, or mental incapacity. Where can I return my application form? - Adelaide, South Australia - Brisbane, Queensland - Canberra, Australian Capital Territory - Darwin, Northern Territory - Hobart, Tasmania - Melbourne, Victoria - Perth, Western Australia - Sydney Passport Office, New South Wales
On July 25, 2012, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced proposed rules as a result of changes in the America Invents Act (AIA) converting the U.S. patent system from a first to invent to a first to file system. These changes will take place on March 16, 2013. The proposed rules are intended to promote consistency caused by the changes in the AIA for pending applications, and to implement the AIA for future applications. Comments on the proposed rules are open until October 5, 2012. Below is a summary of significant elements of the proposed rules. The proposed rules will treat commonly owned or joint research agreement patents and patent application publications as having the same inventive entity for the purposes of 35 U.S.C. §§ 102 and 103 as required under 35 U.S.C. § 102(c) of the AIA. 35 U.S.C. §102(c) of the AIA essentially broadens the current 35 U.S.C. §§ 103(c) by making these provisions usable for novelty. The broadened use of this exclusion should be beneficial to holders of large families of patents. Since new 35 U.S.C. §102(b) provides exceptions to 35 U.S.C. §102(a) based upon prior disclosure by the inventor, the rule changes also allow the submission of affidavits or declarations to show that a disclosure upon which a claim rejection is based was made by an inventor, joint inventor, or someone who obtained the disclosed subject matter from the inventor or a joint inventor. These provisions will also allow the submission of affidavits to show that there was a prior public disclosure by an inventor, joint inventor, or someone who obtained the disclosed subject matter from the inventor or a joint inventor. This will be codified in 37 CFR §§ 1.104, 1.130, and 1.131. Another change being implemented relates to using the effective dates of foreign priority applications against third party patents. In order to ensure that the foreign priority documents are received in time for publication and use, the USPTO is now requiring that the certified copy be received within the deadline now only required for submitting the priority claim: the later of four months from the filing date or sixteen months from the foreign priority date. The claim must also be included in an Application Data Sheet. While these changes are likely not an issue where the applicant is able to retrieve priority documents using the priority document exchange (PDX) system, this timing will be an issue for all other applications. Therefore, applicants need to ensure that the certified copies are provided as soon as possible in the prosecution process or be required to file a Petition for late acceptance. The last major change in this round of AIA rulemaking is relate to the transitional period between first to invent and first to file, and probably will have the greatest short term impact on patent practitioners. In order to ensure that the USPTO can properly evaluate which set of rules to apply when faced with priority claims for applications filed prior to March 16, 2013, the USPTO is requiring the applicants identify which rules will apply. Specifically, where the application is filed after March 16, 2013, but claims the benefit of a foreign, provisional, or nonprovisional application having an effective filing date prior to March 16, 2013, the applicant will need to provide a statement whether the claims in the application are entitled to the earlier effective filing date. Also, if the nonprovisional application that claims such benefit does not contain a claim to a claimed invention that has an effective filing date on or after March 16, 2013, but discloses subject matter not also disclosed in the prior application, the applicant must provide a statement to that effect. For example, under proposed 37 C.F.R. 1.55, where the application claims priority to a foreign application filed prior to March 16, 2013, the applicant will need to specify if there is new matter in the application, and whether the claims are supported by the foreign priority date. Examples of such statements include “upon reasonable belief, this application contains subject matter not disclosed in the foreign application” or “upon reasonable belief, this application contains at least one claim that has an effective filing date subject matter on or after March 16, 2013”. These statements will have to be filed within the later of four months from the actual filing date of the later application, four months from the date of entry into the national stage in an international application, or sixteen months from the filing date of the prior filed application, or the date that a first claim to a claimed invention that has an effective filing date on or after March 16, 2013 is presented in the application. Failure to make such a statement after these deadlines will require a Petition, and any changes will result in the Examiner issuing a Request for Information under 37 CFR 1.105 to require the applicant to prove by line and element number where support is found. For continuations, divisionals, and continuation in part applications, this requirement will be codified in 37 CFR § 1.78. As these rules are still only being proposed, applicants and the legal community are reviewing the proposed changes and preparing comments. While many of the changes seem consistent with the requirements of the AIA, the transitional requirement for identifying whether disclosures and claims can have an effective filing date in a prior application are likely the most controversial and the most likely to cause significant problems for applicants having families of patents. Therefore, as a short term solution, in order to avoid these potential issues should the USPTO not retract this provision, applicants should ensure that they file applications prior to March 16, 2013 if any priority claim is going to be made to an application filed prior to March 16, 2013.
Graced with a quick, sometimes sung delivery, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony burst out of the Midwest in the mid-'90s with a pair of massive hits ("Thuggish Ruggish Bone" and "Tha Crossroads") along with a great album (E 1999 Eternal) and then quickly unraveled. Eazy-E signed the group — initially comprised of Krayzie Bone, Wish Bone, Flesh-N-Bone, Layzie Bone, and Bizzy Bone — to Ruthless Records and released a debut EP, Creepin on ah Come Up (1994). The EP boasted "Thuggish Ruggish Bone," a conventional G-funk song with an unconventional array of Bone Thug rappers that became an overnight summer anthem, especially throughout the Midwest. Amid the fervor, the Cleveland rap group entered the studio immediately and emerged with a remarkable album, E 1999 Eternal (1995). The album topped the charts and spawned a pair of popular singles, "1st of the Month" and "Tha Crossroads," the latter a Grammy Award recipient. It was all downhill from here for Bone, unfortunately. As was in vogue at the time, the group members pursued respective solo careers and also a Mo Thugs Family spinoff group; none of these ventures was fruitful. At this point, the onetime cohesive group, who specialized in interwoven, harmonious singing as well as rapping, became conflicted and failed to collaborate well, particularly after their ambitious double-disc Art of War (1997) sold poorly. A second round of solo albums sold even more poorly, and Bone became somewhat of a has-been. Occasional reunions such as BTNHResurrection (2000) and Thug World Order (2002) produced occasional moments of glory, but these were brief and few and far between. In 2005 the band reunited again minus Bizzy Bone. In September of that year the Internet-only release Bone 4 Life appeared. Then in 2006, it was announced that Bone had signed to Swizz Beatz's Full Surface Records, which was distributed by Interscope. Their first album for the label, Strength & Loyalty, appeared in the spring of 2007 with guest spots from the Game, Mariah Carey, Akon, Bow Wow, and Twista.
So, now that i'm free from the tyranny that is University HOPEFULLY i can pretty much work on my art on a daily basis (until my parents make me get a job, ahaha).. My main goals: - Get faster - Learn to colour - Keep Moving Forward I'm going to be doing lots of Rainbow Dash and hopefully some TwiDash as it's been so bloody long since I've done that.. I will then be moving onto Promised Art Trades and Promised pictures based on peoples stories. My art's hopefully going to change slightly; I want to try new eyes, new hair/mane styles and most importantly improve my sodding terrible ass colouring! Grrr.. I know a lot of people have been inquiring about commissions and I keep saying sometime in July.. Hopefully this is still the plan but i'm still unsure at the moment.. The trouble is pictures take me around 15-20hrs to complete and the last thing I want to be doing is spending that amount of time on a picture i'm not really interested in and no one but the commissioner is interested in (OC's).. Hopefully , all going well, this month will allow me to get faster and if i can get it down to around 10hrs per picture then I'll be more willing to accept several commissions. I will warn in advance though: - I WILL draw OC's - I WILL do SFW/NSFW - I WILL NOT ship or NSFW your OC with the mane 6 or other main characters and good background ponies like Vinyl Scratch In regards to pricing, i'm unsure at the moment.. I shall do research on that.Finally when I decide to accept commissions I'll make a new journal/post on tumblr! Ok.. That's cleared that. On the Final note; I don't know how that last Rainbow Dash picture exploded in notes/favourites/popularity/rage .. Either way! Thanks for that :3 I do try to read all your comments! Sorry I don't comment to every single one!
Peace Love & Joy letterpress cards Peace Love & Joy letterpress fold, 6pk $16.00, box of 6 cards + envelopes letterpress cards are 3.31 x 5.44 (folded) / 4D11T cards: sustainably letterpressed on bamboo paper. envelopes: patterned, made from bamboo paper or 100% post-consumer recycled, fsc certified paper. made with love in upstate New York. packaged in a crystal clear, 50% post-consumer polyester box. polyester is a #1 recyclable plastic, one of the easiest plastics to recycle.
Charlotte company seeks approval for $25 million student complex in Forest HillsWritten by Quintin Ellison A Charlotte company wants to invest $25 million in a 400-person housing development for Western Carolina University students who are looking for the finer things in life. Monarch Ventures has asked the Village of Forest Hills, a tiny incorporated community next to WCU, to allow it to use what’s known as the 19.5-acre Valhalla tract. Monarch Ventures wants to buy the tract, located on North Country Club Drive, from owner Catamount Hollow LLC. Town leaders are expected to discuss the request, and residents’ reactions that were gathered via a community survey, on Friday during a board retreat. Shannon King of Monarch Ventures said this would be a “premier” student housing complex, offering amenities that aren’t currently available, including a clubhouse, pool, tanning beds, exercise programs and more. “There’s a need for quality housing at Western Carolina University,” King said. “And this could be a recruitment and retention tool for the university.” WCU has experienced significant growth in the past decade. Spokesman Bill Studenc said as the university continues growing enrollment — a stated goal of new Chancellor David Belcher, who has noted state funding is tied to those numbers — there is a corresponding need to house those students. “I know that right now we are at capacity,” Studenc said. King has assured Village leaders that Monarch Ventures is “sensitive to concerns about noise and traffic,” and would provide “on-site, 24-7 management for safety.” The group also offers programs for students living with the complex. King said rental rates would be comparable to residential dorm rates at WCU. Monarch Ventures has just broken ground on a similar project at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, S.C. Kolleen Begley, who lives in Forest Hills and serves as the community’s finance officer, welcomes the prospect of upscale housing in the small residential village. “Not everyone in the Village thinks students are a nuisance,” Begley said. “The Village is a municipality, not a retirement community. I have more faith in our young adults attending college than what has been depicted at monthly meetings from the only people who have time to attend. I support the university we chose to move across from. WCU is vital to our local economy. So are jobs and tax money.” Forest Hills incorporated in 1997 for one primary purpose: keeping student housing out. The 350 to 400 people living in the Village of Forest Hills were clear at that time on not wanting students taking over their community. The newly sworn town board’s first act after the referendum to incorporate passed? Adopting a building moratorium on everything but single-family, site-built, residential houses with at least 2,000 feet of heated space. The board was confident there weren’t many students who could afford that kind of housing. King said ideally construction would start in November, but that she believes Monarch Ventures — if town leaders give the OK — would start phasing-in the project beginning next year. Mark Teague, zoning administrator for Forest Hills, said that the development group would need a use permit and perhaps a variance from the town. “They’ve got their ducks in a row,” he said, “and I think this is the No. 1 spot where they want to do it.”
“How many times do you get to open a dead park and bring it back?” said Cordier, Ghost Town’s general manager, whose resume includes time at Water Country USA and Wet ‘n Wild Emerald Pointe. “I was also impressed with Ghost Town’s history, and what it means to this community.” Cordier also is struck by the possibilities. He and others in the park’s leadership are discussing expansion even before the Friday, May 25, reopening of the Wild West theme park. The plan is to stoke the excitement generated by Ghost Town’s rebirth by adding at least one new attraction each year. Their talks have included these possibilities: • A Western-themed hotel. • Horse-riding trails. • An indoor-outdoor water park. • An outdoor skating rink. • Adding lights and staging night events, such as a “haunted” Ghost Town. “The potential is huge — we are limited only by how many people I can get up that mountain,” Cordier said. And, even that might not prove limiting. There’s room for another chairlift, he said, which would add 40 percent more capacity. There’s also road access to the peak of the 4,600-foot mountain that towers above Maggie Valley, though turning two-lane Rich Cove Road — the steepest state-maintained road in North Carolina — into a visitor viaduct could prove challenging. Nostalgia key to new Ghost Town Two hundred thousand people are expected to visit Ghost Town this year. Cordier expects that number to increase rapidly, ultimately hitting the park’s 400,000-person capacity limit and matching visitation numbers posted during the halcyon years of the 1960s-built theme park. To ensure success, Ghost Town has embarked on an aggressive marketing campaign. Advertising — print, radio and television, plus billboards — has been purchased throughout a 200-mile radius. The theme park has partnered with Ingles Markets and is selling season passes through the company’s grocery stores. Additionally, four salespeople were hired to cold-call 7,200 businesses in a 100-mile radius of the park and talk about the re-opening. The target audience is parents or grandparents and children, not the older teen looking for high-thrill rides, Cordier said. Ghost Town lands squarely between those amusement parks geared toward rides and those geared toward entertainment, offering an array of both. And the Wild West theme is expected to play well with parents who enjoyed westerns such as Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, Gunsmoke and Wagon Train, and are eager to share those experiences with their children. “As the baby boomers age, there’s nostalgia to go back to when they were kids,” Cordier said. “The more that population grows, the more viable Ghost Town will continue to be.” One key to pushing the visitation numbers will be attracting groups, said David King, the sales and marketing manager. “I believe that is what will make our success,” said King, who previously worked for the Asheville Tourists baseball team. Groups targeted include Boy Scout troops, school children and home-schooled children, via “days” dedicated to each one. “We’re being very proactive,” King said. The marketing manager said the most significant challenge facing the theme park is helping people forget the slow decay that took place before it permanently closed in 2003. “It’s the perception. People remember coming here and the rides not working,” King said. Multiple breakdowns of the chairlift in 2001 and 2002 left tourists stranded on the mountainside and required rescues with ropes and harnesses, and the state finally revoked Ghost Town’s chairlift permit. The loss of that permit essentially sealed the fate of Ghost Town, the brainchild of R.B. Coburn, who also developed Frontierland in Cherokee. Russell Pearson of Kansas was Ghost Town’s designer. ‘A huge undertaking’ Work on the theme park started on Sept. 1, 1960, when three bulldozers shaved 45 feet off the top of Buck Mountain, according to a historical pamphlet, “The Story of Western Carolina’s Ghost Town in the Sky,” published by the theme park in the 1960s. The construction of the incline railway is described as a “spectacular, daredevil feat for the bulldozer operators who carved out the 50-feet wide, 3,364-feet long roadbed ... the 25-ton bulldozer was manipulated like a yo-yo, moving up and down the face of the peak on a 4-inch cable. The other end of the cable was anchored to a winch on another bulldozer on top of the mountain.” Coburn went to great lengths to create his western town, to offer “all the atmosphere and spirit of the romantic, robust days when men were men and bullets were law,” the historical pamphlet noted. The chairlift was ordered from Italy. About 200 local workers were hired to build 40 structures, which the historical account noted the effort required 300,000 feet of lumber, 200,000 feet of plywood and about 20,000 pounds of nails. More than 20,000 feet of underground electrical wire was installed. When the time came to refurbish the park, little had changed from those earliest days. The original electrical wire and fuses had to be replaced with about five miles of modern wire, and crews also labored to restore the rundown replica buildings. All but three rides were saved, Cordier said. About 160 entertainers auditioned and 50 were hired, and workers for other parts of the theme park also were brought on board. A total of 250 to 300 people will eventually be hired to work at the theme park, and an estimated 15 to 20 percent of those are former workers for Coburn. Buying and refitting the park has cost about $17 million, said King, the marketing manager. “This has been a huge undertaking. It’s a brand new park with 40 years of history,” he said.
Titan, one of the premier basketball suppliers in the Philippines, has just stocked a 2013 Nike model which will hopefully be hitting the States soon. The Zoom Hyperdisruptor is the latest in the ‘Hyper’ family and brings a few innovations to the table. Most notably, at 10.2oz, it’s the lightest non-signature basketball sneaker from Nike yet. A re-tooled Hyperfuse upper contains plenty of ventilation, as the outer skin seems to be used minimally. Meanwhile, Zoom Air is present in both the forefoot and heel, adding some explosive cushioning to this already lightweight package. Finally, the heel is equipped with a molded heel cup for a proper fit and reduced slipping. Previewed in two colorways, the Hyperdisruptor can be picked up from Titan’s online shop today. However, to ensure the best value, it’s probably better to wait for these to make their way across the Pacific. As always, Sneaker Report will keep you updated on their confirmed release.
For all of the celebrating in the nation’s capital and around the country as the nation’s first black president was sworn in, Juanita Nelson’s reaction was, well, reserved. The 85-year-old African-American woman, who has been active throughout her life in civil rights, anti-war, tax refusal and other social justice movements, has a skeptical outlook on the Obama presidency as a watershed “I think it’s interesting, but it doesn’t necessarily warm the cockles of my heart,” said Nelson. “He’s going to be presiding over something that’s the same old, same old. He’s only one person.” Nelson says she didn’t even vote for Obama — or for anyone else, in fact. The only election in which she’s cast a ballot, for that matter, was for Franklin Delano Roosevelt in . The same holds true for her late husband, Wally, who died in at the age of 93, and who[m] she had first met as a newspaper reporter covering his imprisonment as a conscientious objector — he’d walked out of a Civilian Public Service Camp that felt like “slave labor.” “There’s not anything to vote for,” said Nelson. “I vote with what I do or don’t do. I have to do what I believe in, you have to do what you believe in.” What a rare and heartwarming surprise it is to hear Thoreauvian echoes in the hills this cold . is approaching, and so you’re probably starting to get those W2s and 1099s and such in the mail, showing any money you brought in in the above-ground economy, and how much taxes were withheld. And so you can probably get started in making some back-of-the-envelope calculations of how much you gave Uncle Sam last year, how much you still owe (or maybe you overpaid like so many do and you’re looking forward to getting some back). At least you’ve got a ballpark figure, right? Wouldn’t it be nice to know what that money went for? You worked hard for it. Those dollars represent hours of your time. I noted that struggling farmers in Argentina were organizing and engaging in nonviolent direct action campaigns such as strikes and The latest news suggests that they may be adding tax resistance to their arsenal (excerpts translated by me, and my Spanish isn’t all that hot so caveat emptor): Leaders from the Córdoba district of the Argentinian Agrarial Federation felt the concern of numerous rural producers from throughout the province in launching a tax rebellion to start in . So, with all of this forcefulness, Agustín Pizzichini, head of the FAA’s Córdoba district, explained to La Voz del Interior that the proposal to halt national and provincial tax payments was launched by independent producers in various locations in the province during a meeting that took place on at the federation’s headquarters. The meeting also took stock of the presence of the future head of the provincial council of Coninagro, Marco The revolt is a reaction to the lack of “concrete measures” from the national government to confront the drought in the affected regions, the fall in profitability, and the increased tax burden from provincial mandates. The drastic situation will be conveyed for consideration by the central council of the FAA on in Rosario. While a group of directors of Agrarian Federation subsidiaries held a meeting in Oncativo, the head of the Pilar subsidiary, Juan Pivetta, said, as for himself as regards to the decision of a tax revolt, “not participating.” However, he indicated that producers are willing to engage in other methods of protest, like a suspension of sales. “The situation today is more serious; it is one thing to have problems, volatile prices, and it is another not to have a harvest; it will motivate a different reaction,” he argued. Leonardo Ferrero, a producer and contractor from Hernando, said that the idea of halting tax payments “is what you hear from people who are desperate. The credits (that the government announced) only work if the productive economy is well,” he argued. Find Out More! For more information on the topic or topics below (organized as “topic → sub-subtopic”), click on any of the ♦ symbols to see other pages on this site that cover the topic. Or browse the site’s topic index at the “Outline” page.
UPDATE: We obtained photos of Brenda. via Anarchist News dot Org: "From April 2009 until July 2010, two undercover police officers infiltrated activist groups in Guelph, Kitchener and Toronto, Ontario. They are members of the “Joint Intelligence Group (JIG)” that focuses on extremism and terrorism. Its specific mandate has been for the Vancouver Olympics and Torch Relay, and the G8/G20 summits. It is an RCMP (National Police) led group that includes police forces collaborating from across Southern Ontario including Guelph, Hamilton, Toronto, Ottawa, Barrie, Kitchener/Waterloo and the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP). The names the two undercover intelligence police officers used were “Brenda Dougherty” and “Khalid Mohammad”. Brenda Dougherty = Filthy Rat Goof Pig “Brenda” is in her early 40’s, white, 5’3” tall, with short white and blonde hair, glasses, and an English accent and a Canadian flag tattoo (on her back?). Her story was that she had a job with flexible hours as a home caretaker. She said she was born in Victoria, Canada and lived in England for most of her childhood and adult life. She said that she moved back because she was in an abusive relationship/marriage. She said she moved to Guelph because she had a friend who could get her a job here. She also said that she got accepted to the university of Guelph and began doing part time courses. She said she didn’t talk to her family. Her apartment appeared pre-furnished, and didn’t really look lived-in. She occasionally appeared at events with her “boyfriend”, “John”, a 5’7 or 5’8 beefy native dude with brown hair who wore sunglasses and a hat. He had a US Marine Corps tattoo on one of his biceps that read USMC and had numbers under it. “Brenda” appeared in Guelph in April 2009 at an info-session at the University of Guelph for people interested in getting involved with the Guelph Union for Tenants and Supporters (GUTS). The primary activity of GUTS at this time was free food servings in the downtown each week. “Brenda” began cooking these dinners, usually at anarchist/punk houses. She attended almost every anti-authoritarian/anarchist public event and tried to get involved in as many groups as she could (which is not many, since there aren’t really any other public groups in Guelph). She spent some time at the Hanlon Creek anti-development occupation in Guelph in summer 2009, and always offered people rides to events and meetings. “Brenda” moved into an activist house in Guelph in spring 2010. She was always willing and able to do grunt work; she didn’t bring up ideas for projects but rather helped people with tasks. She didn’t act sketchy for quite some time; in fact she seemed fairly innocent and genuinely interested. Most people were not suspicious of “Brenda” as a cop. She was related to as a periphery friend to cook dinner with, a sympathetic neighbor, and a pleasant, charming person to be around. Brenda was very active in organizing against the G20 summit with Southern Ontario Anarchist Resistance (SOAR) and Toronto Community Mobilization Network (TCMN). Leading up to the G8/G20, it has been reported that “Brenda” tried to convince people to go to SOAR meetings. It is difficult to give any details of her involvement with G20 organizing, as seventeen people are facing serious allegations and conspiracy charges because of these pigs. “Brenda” disappeared the evening before the confrontational protests on Saturday, June 26. It has since been 100% confirmed that “Brenda” is actually an undercover intelligence officer. Fuck that bitch. PS. “Brenda,” we found your dildo. You should come here and get it so you can go fuck yourself. An account of “Khalid’s” infiltration will be posted soon online." SnitchWire would be interested in obtaining photos of the mentioned informants as well as first-hand accounts and testimonials of individuals that interacted with these pigs. Please send relevant information to firstname.lastname@example.org. Remember, please don't reveal incriminating information that could be used against accused individuals being held or tried by the State. It is likely, in the opinion of SnitchWire, that one of these undercovers may have been the person present at an alleged organizing meeting for G20 demonstrations in which an audio wiretap was employed, and exposing these rats to the public is paramount to further resistance as with any snitch or undercover.
When push comes to shove, punish everything in your path. In case you were wondering, yes, we do make the best park binding in the world. By adding the cradle-like grip of the NEW Hammock to this beast, we’ve created heel hold previously unseen in binding design. Add the uninterrupted flex and enhanced feel of Re:Flex™ and the transfer of power between board and binding has never been smoother. To put it bluntly, the Malavita hits the park harder than a bum with a tall boy. Ridden by: Mark Sollors - BASEPLATE: NEW Single-Component Park Blend Short-Glass/Nylon Composite Re:Flex - HI-BACK: NEW Canted Living Hinge™ Zero-Lean Hi-Back with DialFLAD™ and NEW Heel Hammock - STRAPS: Asym Superstrap™ and Gettagrip Capstrap™ - BUCKLES: Dual-Component Smooth Glide™ Buckles - CUSHIONING: NEW Re:Flex AutoCANT FullBED Cushioning System with B3 Gel and Under-Baseplate Dampening Pad - Features Re-Ground Materials in Baseplate and Hi-Back to Reduce Waste Colorways: Violent, Sulfur, Stone, Black Sizes: S, M, L
The Operations Layer defines the operational processes and procedures necessary to deliver Information Technology (IT) as a Service. This layer leverages IT Service Management concepts that can be found in prevailing best practices such as ITIL and MOF. The main focus of the Operations Layer is to execute the business requirements defined at the Service Delivery Layer. Cloud-like service attributes cannot be achieved through technology alone and require a high level of IT Service Management maturity. Change Management process is responsible for controlling the life cycle of all changes. The primary objective of Change Management is to eliminate or at least minimize disruption while desired changes are made to services. Change Management focuses on understanding and balancing the cost and risk of making the change versus the benefit of the change to either the business or the service. Driving predictability and minimizing human involvement are the core principles for achieving a mature Service Management process and ensuring changes can be made without impacting the perception of continuous availability. Standard (Automated) Change Non-Standard (Mechanized) Change It is important to note that a record of all changes must be maintained, including Standard Changes that have been automated. The automated process for Standard Changes should include the creation and population of the change record per standard policy in order to make sure auditability. Automating changes also enables other key principles such as: The Service Asset and Configuration Management process is responsible for maintaining information on the assets, components, and infrastructure needed to provide a service. Critical configuration data for each component, and its relationship to other components, must be accurately captured and maintained. This configuration data should include past and current states and future-state forecasts, and be easily available to those who need it. Mature Service Asset and Configuration Management processes are necessary for achieving predictability. A virtualized infrastructure adds complexity to the management of Configuration Items (CIs) due to the transient nature of the relationship between guests and hosts in the infrastructure. How is the relationship between CIs maintained in an environment that is potentially changing very frequently? A service comprises software, platform, and infrastructure layers. Each layer provides a level of abstraction that is dependent on the layer beneath it. This abstraction hides the implementation and composition details of the layer. Access to the layer is provided through an interface and as long as the fabric is available, the actual physical location of a hosted VM is irrelevant. To provide Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), the configuration and relationship of the components within the fabric must be understood, whereas the details of the configuration within the VMs hosted by the fabric are irrelevant. The Configuration Management System (CMS) will need to be partitioned, at a minimum, into physical and logical CI layers. Two Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs) might be used; one to manage the physical CIs of the fabric (facilities, network, storage, hardware, and hypervisor) and the other to manage the logical CIs (everything else). The CMS can be further partitioned by layer, with separate management of the infrastructure, platform, and software layers. The benefits and trade-offs of each approach are summarized below. CMS Partitioned by Layer CMS Partitioned into Physical and Logical Table 2: Configuration Management System Options Partitioning logical and physical CI information allows for greater stability within the CMS, because CIs will need to be changed less frequently. This means less effort will need to be expended to accurately maintain the information. During normal operations, mapping a VM to its physical host is irrelevant. If historical records of a VM’s location are needed, (for example, for auditing or Root Cause Analysis) they can be traced through change logs. The physical or fabric CMDB will need to include a mapping of fault domains, upgrade domains, and Live Migration domains. The relationship of these patterns to the infrastructure CIs will provide critical information to the Fabric Management System. The Release and Deployment Management processes are responsible for making sure that approved changes to a service can be built, tested, and deployed to meet specifications with minimal disruption to the service and production environment. Where Change Management is based on the approval mechanism (determining what will be changed and why), Release and Deployment Management will determine how those changes will be implemented. The primary focus of Release and Deployment Management is to protect the production environment. The less variation is found in the environment, the greater the level of predictability – and, therefore, the lower the risk of causing harm when new elements are introduced. The concept of homogenization of physical infrastructure is derived from this predictability principle. If the physical infrastructure is completely homogenized, there is much greater predictability in the release and deployment process. While complete homogenization is the ideal, it may not be achievable in the real world. Homogenization is a continuum. The closer an environment gets to complete homogeneity, the more predictable it becomes and the fewer the risks. Full homogeneity means not only that identical hardware models are used, but all hardware configuration is identical as well. When complete hardware homogeneity is not feasible, strive for configuration homogeneity wherever possible. Figure 2: Homogenization Continuum The Scale Unit concept drives predictability in Capacity Planning and agility in the release and deployment of physical infrastructure. The hardware specifications and configurations have been pre-defined and tested, allowing for a more rapid deployment cycle than in a traditional data center. Similarly, known quantities of resources are added to the data center when the Capacity Plan is triggered. However, when the Scale Unit itself must change (for example, when a vendor retires a hardware model), a new risk is introduced to the private cloud. There will likely be a period where both n and n-1 versions of the Scale Unit exist in the infrastructure, but steps can be taken to minimize the risk this creates. Work with hardware vendors to understand the life cycle of their products and coordinate changes from multiple vendors to minimize iterations of the Scale Unit change. Also, upgrading to the new version of the Scale Unit should take place one Fault Domain at a time wherever possible. This will make sure that if an incident occurs with the new version, it can be isolated to a single Fault Domain. Homogenization of the physical infrastructure means consistency and predictability for the VMs regardless of which physical host they reside on. This concept can be extended beyond the production environment. The fabric can be partitioned into development, test, and pre-production environments as well. Eliminating variability between environments enables developers to more easily optimize applications for a private cloud and gives testers more confidence that the results reflect the realities of production, which in turn should greatly improve testing efficiency. The virtualized infrastructure enables workloads to be transferred more easily between environments. All VMs should be built from a common set of component templates housed in a library, which is used across all environments. This shared library includes templates for all components approved for production, such as VM images, the gold OS image, server role templates, and platform templates. These component templates are downloaded from the shared library and become the building blocks of the development environment. From development, these components are packaged together to create a test candidate package (in the form of a virtual hard disk (VHD) that is uploaded to the library. This test candidate package can then be deployed by booting the VHD in the test environment. When testing is complete, the package can again be uploaded to the library as a release candidate package – for deployment into the pre-production environment, and ultimately into the production environment. Since workloads are deployed by booting a VM from a VHD, the Release Management process occurs very quickly through the transfer of VHD packages to different environments. This also allows for rapid rollback should the deployment fail; the current release can be deleted and the VM can be booted off the previous VHD. Virtualization and the use of standard VM templates allow us to rethink software updates and patch management. As there is minimal variation in the production environment and all services in production are built with a common set of component templates, patches need not be applied in production. Instead, they should be applied to the templates in the shared library. Any services in production using that template will require a new version release. The release package is then rebuilt, tested, and redeployed, as shown below. Figure 3: The Release Process This may seem counter-intuitive for a critical patch scenario, such as when an exploitable vulnerability is exposed. But with virtualization technologies and automated test scripts, a new version of a service can be built, tested, and deployed quite rapidly. Variation can also be reduced through standardized, automated test scenarios. While not every test scenario can or should be automated, tests that are automated will improve predictability and facilitate more rapid test and deployment timelines. Test scenarios that are common for all applications, or the ones that might be shared by certain application patterns, are key candidates for automation. These automated test scripts may be required for all release candidates prior to deployment and would make sure further reduction in variation in the production environment. Knowledge Management is the process of gathering, analyzing, storing, and sharing knowledge and information within an organization. The goal of Knowledge Management is to make sure that the right people have access to the information they need to maintain a private cloud. As operational knowledge expands and matures, the ability to intelligently automate operational tasks improves, providing for an increasingly dynamic environment. An immature approach to Knowledge Management costs organizations in terms of slower, less-efficient problem solving. Every problem or new situation that arises becomes a crisis that must be solved. A few people may have the prior experience to resolve the problem quickly and calmly, but their knowledge is not shared. Immature knowledge management creates greater stress for the operations staff and usually results in user dissatisfaction with frequent and lengthy unexpected outages. Mature Knowledge Management processes are necessary for achieving a service provider’s approach to delivering infrastructure. Past knowledge and experience is documented, communicated, and readily available when needed. Operating teams are no longer crisis-driven as service-impacting events grow less frequent and are quickly resolves when they do occur. When designing a private cloud, development of the Health Model will drive much of the information needed for Knowledge Management. The Health Model defines the ideal states for each infrastructure component and the daily, weekly, monthly, and as-needed tasks required to maintain this state. The Health Model also defines unhealthy states for each infrastructure component and actions to be taken to restore their health. This information will form the foundation of the Knowledge Management database. Aligning the Health Model with alerts allows these alerts to contain links to the Knowledge Management database describing the specific steps to be taken in response to the alert. This will help drive predictability as a consistent, proven set of actions will be taken in response to each alert. The final step toward achieving a private cloud is the automation of responses to each alert as defined in the Knowledge Management database. Once these responses are proven successful, they should be automated to the fullest extent possible. It is important to note, though, that automating responses to alerts does not make them invisible and forgotten. Even when alerts generate a fully automated response they must be captured in the Service Management system. If the alert indicates the need for a change, the change record should be logged. Similarly, if the alert is in response to an incident, an incident record should be created. These automated workflows must be reviewed regularly by Operations staff to make sure the automated action achieves the expected result. Finally, as the environment changes over time, or as new knowledge is gained, the Knowledge Management database must be updated along with the automated workflows that are based on that knowledge. The goal of Incident Management is to resolve events that are impacting, or threaten to impact, services as quickly as possible with minimal disruption. The goal of Problem Management is to identify and resolve root causes of incidents that have occurred as well as identify and prevent or minimize the impact of incidents that may occur. Pinpointing the root cause of an incident can become more challenging when workloads are abstracted from the infrastructure and their physical location changes frequently. Additionally, incident response teams may be unfamiliar with virtualization technologies (at least initially) which could also lead to delays in incident resolution. Finally, applications may have neither a robust Health Model nor expose all of the health information required for a proactive response. All of this may lead to an increase in reactive (user initiated) incidents which will likely increase the Mean-Time-to-Restore-Service (MTRS) and customer dissatisfaction. This may seem to go against the resiliency principle, but note that virtualization alone will not achieve the desired resiliency unless accompanied by highly mature IT Service Management (ITSM) maturity and a robust automated health monitoring system. The drive for resiliency requires a different approach to troubleshooting incidents. Extensive troubleshooting of incidents in production negatively impacts resiliency. Therefore, if an incident cannot be quickly resolved, the service can be rolled back to the previous version, as described under Release and Deployment. Further troubleshooting can be done in a test environment without impacting the production environment. Troubleshooting in the production environment may be limited to moving the service to different hosts (ruling out infrastructure as the cause) and rebooting the VMs. If these steps do not resolve the issue, the rollback scenario could be initiated. Minimizing human involvement in incident management is critical for achieving resiliency. The troubleshooting scenarios described earlier could be automated, which will allow for identification and possible resolution of the root much more quickly than non-automated processes. But automation may mask the root cause of the incident. Careful consideration should be given to determining which troubleshooting steps should be automated and which require human analysis. Human Analysis of Troubleshooting If a compute resource fails, it is no longer necessary to treat the failure as an incident that must be fixed immediately. It may be more efficient and cost effective to treat the failure as part of the decay of the Resource Pool. Rather than treat a failed server as an incident that requires immediate resolution, treat it as a natural candidate for replacement on a regular maintenance schedule, or when the Resource Pool reaches a certain threshold of decay. Each organization must balance cost, efficiency, and risk as it determines an acceptable decay threshold – and choose among these courses of action: The benefits and trade-off of each of the options are listed below: Option 4 is the least desirable, as it does not take advantage of the resiliency and cost reduction benefits of a private cloud. A well-planned Resource Pool and Reserve Capacity strategy will account for Resource Decay. Option 1 is the most recommended approach. A predictable maintenance schedule allows for better procurement planning and can help avoid conflicts with other maintenance activities, such as software upgrades. Again, a well-planned Resource Pool and Reserve Capacity strategy will account for Resource Decay and minimize the risk of exceeding critical thresholds before the scheduled maintenance. Option 3 will likely be the only option for self-contained Scale Unit scenarios, as the container must be replaced as a single Scale Unit when the decay threshold is reached. The goal of Request Fulfillment is to manage requests for service from users. Users should have a clear understanding of the process they need to initiate to request service and IT should have a consistent approach for managing these requests. Much like any service provider, IT should clearly define the types of requests available to users in the service catalog. The service catalog should include an SLA on when the request will be completed, as well as the cost of fulfilling the request, if any. The types of requests available and their associated costs should reflect the actual cost of completing the request and this cost should be easily understood. For example, if a user requests an additional VM, its daily cost should be noted on the request form, which should also be exposed to the organization or person responsible for paying the bill. It is relatively easy to see the need for adding resources, but more difficult to see when a resource is no longer needed. A process for identifying and removing unused VMs should be put into place. There are a number of strategies to do this, depending on the needs of a given organization, such as: The benefits and trade-offs of each of these approaches are detailed below: Option 4 affords the greatest flexibility, while still working to minimize server sprawl. When a user requests a VM, they have the option of setting an expiration date with no reminder (for example, if they know they will only be using the workload for one week). They could set an expiration deadline with a reminder (for example, a reminder that the VM will expire after 90 days unless they wish to renew). Lastly, the user may request no expiration date if they expect the workload will always be needed. If the last option is chosen, it is likely that underutilized VMs will still be monitored and owners notified. Finally, self-provisioning should be considered, if appropriate, when evaluating request fulfillment options to drive towards minimal human involvement. Self-provisioning allows great agility and user empowerment, but it can also introduce risks depending on the nature of the environment in which these VMs are introduced. For an enterprise organization, the risk of bypassing formal build, stabilize, and deploy processes may or may not outweigh the agility benefits gained from the self-provisioning option. Without strong governance to make sure each VM has an end-of-life strategy, the fabric may become congested with VM server sprawl. The pros and cons of self-provisioning options are listed in the next diagram: The primary decision point for determining whether to use self-provisioning is the nature of the environment. Allowing developers to self-provision into the development environment greatly facilitates agile development, and allows the enterprise to maintain release management controls as these workloads are moved out of development and into test and production environments. A user-led community environment isolated from enterprise mission-critical applications may also be a good candidate for self-provisioning. As long as user actions are isolated and cannot impact mission critical applications, the agility and user empowerment may justify the risk of giving up control of release management. Again, it is essential that in such a scenario, expiration timers are included to prevent server sprawl. The goal of Access Management is to make sure authorized users have access to the services they need while preventing access by unauthorized users. Access Management is the implementation of security policies defined by Information Security Management at the Service Delivery Layer. Maintaining access for authorized users is critical for achieving the perception of continuous availability. Besides allowing access, Access Management defines users who are allowed to use, configure, or administer objects in the Management Layer. From a provider’s perspective, it answers questions like: From a consumer’s perspective, it answers questions such as: Access Management is implemented at several levels and can include physical barriers to systems such as requiring access smartcards at the data center, or virtual barriers such as network and Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN) separation, firewalling, and access to storage and applications. Taking a service provider’s approach to Access Management will also make sure that resource segmentation and multi-tenancy is addressed. Resource Pools may need to be segmented to address security concerns around confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Some tenants may not wish to share infrastructure resources to keep their environment isolated from others. Access Management of shared infrastructure requires logical access control mechanisms such as encryption, access control rights, user groupings, and permissions. Dedicated infrastructure also relies on physical access control mechanisms, where infrastructure is not physically connected, but is effectively isolated through a firewall or other mechanisms. The goal of systems administration is to make sure that the daily, weekly, monthly, and as-needed tasks required to keep a system healthy are being performed. Regularly performing ongoing systems administration tasks is critical for achieving predictability. As the organization matures and the Knowledge Management database becomes more robust and increasingly automated, systems administration tasks is no longer part of the job role function. It is important to keep this in mind as an organization moves to a private cloud. Staff once responsible for systems administration should refocus on automation and scripting skills – and on monitoring the fabric to identify patterns that indicate possibilities for ongoing improvement of existing automated workflows.
Is it a woman's world now? The reports of women's ascendency in today's world at the expense of men have been greatly exaggerated.provides the facts. A FLURRY of books and articles in recent months, with titles like The End of Men and The Richer Sex, have sounded the alarm--watch out, fellas, women have you on the run. According to these publications, women are surpassing men on any number of fronts, but especially jobs and wages. They cite various pieces of evidence--from employment levels in the U.S., to polls about whether male or female offspring are preferred in South Korea, to interviews with men who feel they're being replaced--to back up their claims. Well, you could have fooled me. It's not just that many of the statistics used are misleading, and sometimes incorrect, but they get in the way of a serious examination of the day-to-day reality for most working-class women. On top of that, the claims about women passing up men mask the deteriorating conditions and living standards that working-class women and men are both facing--while a select few men and and an even select fewer women are doing better than ever. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ACCORDING TO Hanna Rosin, author of The End of Men, women are on their way to making as much, if not more, than men--and could soon take men's place as the main "breadwinner" in conventional families. "Our vast and struggling middle class, where the disparities are the greatest, is slowly turning into a matriarchy," writes Rosin, "with men increasingly absent from the workforce and from home, and women making all the decisions." Is there any truth to this picture? Since the 1960s, women's earnings have increased relative to men's overall. But women still make less than men--on average, 77 cents to every dollar a man made as of 2011, according to government statistics. According to the most recent Census Bureau figures, women are still more likely to be poor, too. More women are filling jobs that were dominated by men in the past, but it's still the case that certain fields remain "women's work"--and along with gender segregation in employment comes lower pay for female-dominated jobs. And historically, as women have made gains in a new field, wages decrease compared to jobs that continue to be male-dominated. What we are seeing is a convergence in economic fortunes, not female ascendance. Between 2010 and 2011, men and women working full time year-round both experienced a 2.5 percent decline in income. Men suffered roughly 80 percent of the job losses at the beginning of the 2007 recession. But the ripple effect of the recession then led to cutbacks in government jobs that hit women disproportionately. As of June 2012, men had regained 46.2 percent of the jobs they lost in the recession, while women had regained 38.7 percent of their lost jobs. Working-class women aren't eclipsing working-class men. At most, women are meeting men on the way down, which isn't exactly good news for either one. While some journalists might be happy to muse about women's new position as the "breadwinners" in families, what they're ignoring is the fact that most families as a whole are getting by on less. According to University of Maryland sociologist Philip Cohen, there has been a significant increase in the frequency of wives earning more than their husbands. But this was true for only 28 percent of married heterogamous couples in 2010--and in the most common scenario, women didn't earn that much more than their spouse. If some women now have the lead role in bringing home the bacon, the reality is that the meat is sliced very thin all around. So how is it anyone can claim that women are taking over? The question begs another: Which women? A small number of women have made it to the top and now wield power in the worlds of business and politics where men once ruled alone. Hillary Clinton, for instance, was a successful attorney before she took her latest job as Secretary of State, one of the most powerful political positions in the world. Forty-five women made the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans this year. Of course, this small group doesn't represent the majority of women--and in many cases, the women who achieved great wealth or political power contribute more to other women's suffering than success. Alice Walton, one of the richest people in the world thanks to being born into the family that owns Wal-Mart, comes to mind. For the majority of women--those who don't own any companies, but have to work for them--there hasn't been any meteoric rise to the top, just like for the men they work alongside. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - IN ADDITION to the misleading statistics about jobs and wages, books like the The End of Men offer additional pieces of "evidence" for women's supposed ascendancy--that more women are deciding not to marry or pursue the sex lives of their choice than in the past, and that more men are sharing in work inside the home, like cooking, cleaning and child-rearing. Rosin also offers some other facts that venture into the head-scratching realm--for example, that women are committing more murders than ever before. I'll set aside the "more likely to get into a bar fight" measure of women's changing role in society for now, and focus on some of her other points. It is indeed the case that women have greater freedoms than they had in the past, in the areas of jobs and reproductive freedom and family choices. The first thing to say is that's a good thing. But End of Men spends some pages contemplating the ramifications of women frittering away their "erotic capital" by having sex too freely. For most women, however, there's no debate about whether it's liberating to be freer in making decisions about their sex lives. It's also no small improvement that women are part of the workforce in a way that was unimaginable just 40 years ago. The social movements of the 1960s and '70s--when women were inspired by the African American struggle for civil rights and Black Power to organize around their own demands--made these changes possible. That's what transformed U.S. society from a place where a woman could be legally raped by her husband to one where women had the right to legal abortion. Instead of recognizing the role of political and social activism, books like The End of Men try to associate changes in women's lives with supposed unchanging differences between men and women. Rosin's conception is of "Cardboard Man" and "Plastic Woman"--with women possessing the ability to adapt and transform themselves to new work situations while men stagnate in their old unbending role. Women's successes, like men's failures, are, in the end, the product of the natural differences between the sexes. Thus, Rosin asked, in an article written for the Atlantic: What if the modern, postindustrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men? For a long time, evolutionary psychologists have claimed that we are all imprinted with adaptive imperatives from a distant past: men are faster and stronger and hardwired to fight for scarce resources, and that shows up now as a drive to win on Wall Street; women are programmed to find good providers and to care for their offspring, and that is manifested in more nurturing and more flexible behavior, ordaining them to domesticity. This kind of thinking frames our sense of the natural order. But what if men and women were fulfilling not biological imperatives, but social roles, based on what was more efficient throughout a long era of human history? What if that era has now come to an end? More to the point, what if the economics of the new era are better suited to women? Women's supposed natural advantages in the modern world come down to being flexible and--believe it or not--their ability to sit still. "The postindustrial economy is indifferent to men's size and strength," Rosin writes. "The attributes that are most valuable today--social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus--are, at a minimum, not predominantly male." First of all, this just isn't true--I know plenty of women who can't sit still. But the whole proposition makes a mockery of the reality of inequality, whether in the past, present or future. Sexism and discrimination do exist. Maybe it sells books to portray it all as a good-natured "battle of the sexes," where the question is who hunts and who nests, who's from Mars and who's from Venus. But there is a much more serious dynamic at play. Real discrimination and real sexism are a part of day-to-day life--and their roots lie not in any fundamental differences between men and women, but in the structure of our society. It isn't a coincidence of biology that women are unequal to men. It's part of the fabric of a capitalist society, where workers are pitted against one another in a multitude of ways. Gender is one of those ways, and that's what keeps women in a subservient role. If conditions and opportunities for women have improved at all, it's because there was a struggle to improve them--and that struggle was only possible when sexism and discrimination were acknowledged, faced and confronted. The fake men vs. women debate blurs the reality that working-class women and men have a common interest in improving their conditions of life together. Tucked away in The End of Men are a few important stories of men who have lost their jobs during the economic crisis and are struggling for a way forward. The lesson should be that the futures of working-class men and women are intertwined--and depend on a common struggle for a better life.
Facebook. Twitter. MySpace. These social networking websites have become ever pervasive in modern life. They allow us to keep up with friends and family, as well as keep tabs onformer classmates and co-workers. They also serve many psychological functions such as providing a sense of being connected to others (however difficult it may be to establish the meaningfulness of these online relationships), a social comparison function, and bolstering one’s sense of identity (in that we can see ourselves through what others post about us or in response to us.) Despite the positive functions of these sites we may be exposing ourselves to an undesirable loss of privacy and even public scrutiny regarding the content we post online. Rusty DePass, a South Carolina Republican activist, wrote a private message to a friend that included a racist remark targeted at First Lady Michelle Obama. A local political blogger saw this message and now DePass’s comments are public fodder. While DePass’s case may not be the most sympathetic it does call into question the protections in place for content we would like to keep to ourselves or among close friends. Robin Wauters, a blogger for TechCrunch, recently wrote about FBHive a website which will allow anyone to take advantage of a security loophole to view private profile information. The fun innocuous image of sites like Facebook give users an apparently unwarranted sense of safety regarding the security of their “private” thoughts, feelings, and images. Internet and Popular Culture Online Social Networking
In January we wrote about CNNMoney.com’s big traffic gains in 2008, specifically when it comes to video. The site had 235 million global streams last year, according to Nielsen Video Census. CNNMoney.com was the #1 site in the sector in total streams — three times the amount of #2 site MSN Money. So, this morning we paid a visit to the fifth floor newsroom at Time Warner Center where writers, editors and producers all collaborate providing content across multiple platforms, including Money and Fortune magazines, CNN and HLN on cable, and CNN.com, CNN.com Live and, of course, CNNMoney.com on the Web. And it’s all led by editor and VP Chris Peacock who showed us some of the site’s six new shows which launched today: The CNNMoney.com newsroom has a set with two HD cameras and a nearby control room, for assembling the shows — insertion of video and incorporating live remotes, video, and graphics. Producers also have access to CNN video, remotes and interviews. CNNMoney.com ramped up its original video production slate in January 2008. Why? Because there is money to be made in Web video. The Wall Street Journal reports Web video is the fastest-growing ad medium. eMarketer estimates that ad spending on online video will hit $850 million this year, up 45% from last year. CNNMoney’s competitors say the site’s streaming numbers are inflated because some videos play automatically when users log on. Peacock tells WebNewser while the videos do auto-play, there are several other modules on the homepage which update information constantly and automatically, without adding page views.
Olbermann tweeted through his @FOKNewsChannel account: “Proud to announce: Coming very very soon – your FOKNewsChannel website…” So where will it be? The early signs point to FOKNewsChannel.com, which was registered the same day as Olbermann created the @FOKNewsChannel Twitter account. The site was registered anonymously, using the same registrar that purchased TheKeithOlbrmannShow.com a few days before Olbermann announced his departure from MSNBC. Still, Olbermann’s tweet raises questions: Will Current TV manage or operate the site? Or will it be independently owned and operated by Olbermann? What sort of content will it have? Will it be aggregated stories about Olbermann, or general political news and commentary? Finally, will FOX News Channel have anything to say about it? The mock logo Olbermann uses for his Twitter handle very closely resembles the logo of the cable network.
I am on a tight budget this week as far as meals go. Hence $2-3 entrees from Trader Joe’s are my savior. After a long day at work and the lovely trek back to my room [the staircase next to my door won't open from inside the stair well..GO FIGURE] so I walk all the way around the building. Extra cardio, though, right?..[disgruntled noise]. Back to dinner, my stocks were rather low. So I decided it was finally time to use the can of black beans I’ve been staring at all summer. ~ Sweet & Spicy Black Bean Salad ~ + sweet corn [yum] ~ spices ~ My latest department store deal. I found this bottle of gold at a Marshals…maybe a Ross, definitely a store of a similar nature It is so good! and you can spray it on almost anything. The finished product. I love the red specs of the cayenne pepper! Just toss everything together and serve. Quick. Affordable. Easy. This is a very versatile dish, if I had more ingredients I would have added fresh lime juice and cilantro and served over a bed of lettuce Afterwards was another Almond Butter Coconut Ball. I swear these things taste better and better the longer they sit in the freezer. Yes I am going backwards , thought I’d start with what was most recently on my mind. Breakfast today was a quick pomegranate spinach smoothie. Just some frozen pomegranate kefir, 1/2 frozen banana, 1 tbsp chia seeds, cinnamon, and the rest of a bag of spinach. Blended. Cold perfection With an ABC Ball [of course] possible new addiction? >:) Trader Joe’s has ceased to please. Never have I enjoyed a frozen meal as much as the ones at TJ’s. The freshness and flavor are the same if not better then eating at a restaurant. Promise. Today I tried the shrimp green curry on jasmine rice. It. Was. Out. Of. This. World. Look at this ingredients list! In my book I don’t want Thai food without all the authentic spices and this dish lived it up in the authentic flavor department. Thai eggplant and peas, umm AMAZING. Some more fellow bloggers giveaways!: QUESTION: What do you do for meals when your on a tight budget? I tend to resort to the famous PB & J
God the Father and Embryo Advent suggests so many mysteries of God's patience. One rarely commented case is God as Father and embryo. It is extra Biblical so imagination can only begin to tell the bizarre tale. Gabriel's annunciation and appearance to Joseph begins the period of waiting and soul searching, but a remarkable gap exists in the Advent story. Luke 1:56 makes this cursory remark as though it would suffice: Take Action on This Issue Mary stayed with Elizabeth for about three months and then returned home. Presumably the second trimester of Mary's pregnancy is treated with a passing reference. If we simply take the divine conception of Jesus at face value, there was a moment in human history where God existed as Father in the heavens and embryo in Mary's uterus. Paradox of paradoxes. The Creator in utero. Luke does not give us what we need so desperately to peer into this divine mystery. Our innate curiosities explode with anticipation of any insight and insider information. Daily changes in the body of a young girl, budding woman, happened with virtually no commentary. I find this equally disturbing as Father God choosing Mary as the mother of a divinely human being. If such a tale should be at least give us some gory details, right? However, God the Eternal Spirit grew as a material embryo, and the record is mute. Could it be that Mary had a 'normal' pregnancy? Preposterous. Such an assumption assaults our over saturated imaginations. We see the depiction of God the Father resting a globe on his knee as imagined by Pieter de Grebber as very plausible and expected. In the full painting, God the Father invites Christ to sit next to him on the throne in Heaven following the Ascension of Christ. This makes sense to most of us Christians. The majesty of the 'old man in the sky' is familiar. Long white beard. Golden cloak and white robe. God the Father must be such. However, this presumed God of all might and capability took a young child, made her a woman and subjected her to a natural pregnancy. The mysterious embryo God indwells or inhabits known as Jesus, the one to shake the Heavens and to redeem the Earth, exists as a feeble and frail cluster of cells growing ever so quietly. Is it possible God the embryo grew like any other? Risking the possibility of miscarriage? Venturing into the plausible realm of complications of a natural birth? Mary's stomach ever-so-slowly demonstrated signs of the most ridiculous birth tale in human history. Hips widening to bear the weight of the immaterial God. Breasts developing milk for the nourishment of the nourisher. Life giver seeking life support from a young child mother. A tragic tale of early pregnancy would set the stage for this most wonderfully awkward narrative we Christians extol. This is the God we celebrate at Advent. Such an Advent moment waiting for the embryonic God overwhelms my sensibilities. The illogical and improbable, the absurd and ludicrous, the natural and expected? Surely God as Father would make a grand entrance into the world? There should be no pain, no labor, no normalcy. Sustained through the blood of a young girl. The signs we seek are so often unrequited with silence and a glaring command to wait and be patient. God must not rely on such weakness and expected means. How could an all powerful God do such a ridiculous thing as to make a divinely human conceived being be so base and common? The patience and mystery of God the Father using his own natural means of procreation to reach us all is a powerful demonstration of the degree we must wait and anticipate His coming in our lives. If an embryonic God did not burst forth from Mary's uterus, what makes us think God will do the same in the wombs of our dilemma's? If this God would use natural processes to perform the most extravagant of supernatural appearances, why can't Father God do the same for us today? Through the naturally supernatural environments we inhabit each moment. Advent teaches us that we can experience God in the waiting of mundane life. God the embryo lives in us, through us, when we open ourselves to birth of God's Spirit. The possibility is just as unlikely and feeble when we encounter such moments of nascent divinity inside. But these moments of love, joy and peace; patience, kindness and goodness; faithfulness, gentleness and self-control resemble the methods of the embryonic God of this Advent story. Photo: Joseph and Mary travel to Bethlehem, ©
A joint special event during the Delhi Sustainable Development Summit 2009 (DSDS 2009) Congress "Localisation on Environmental Business and Supply Base in India". Dr Rajendra Pachauri is the Patron Dow Jones Indexes, a leading global index provider, and the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), the world’s first and North America’s only voluntary, legally binding integrated greenhouse gas emissions reduction, registry and trading system, today announced the launch of the Dow Jones/CCX European Carbon Index and Dow Jones/CCX Certified Emissions Reductions (CER) Index, which serve as benchmarks for participants seeking exposure to the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme and Kyoto Protocol Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), respectively. Renewable Energy Stocks Green Investor Audio Interview With Ezra Green, CEO and Chairman of Clear Skies Solar, Inc. (OTCBB: CSKH) Patented XTRAXR Technology Estimated at $500 Million Plans are underway for the third national conference on New Ideas in Educating a Workforce in Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency. This event will be held in the fall of 2009 in Albany, New York. The NABCEP PV Study Guide Committee is please to announce version 4.0 of the NABCEP PV Study Guide, which is “substantively reorganized from the earlier version” according to Bill Brooks, Chair of the Committee. The Florida Public Service Commission (PSC) voted last week to terminate Florida Power & Light Company’s (FPL) Sunshine Energy Program and place any future customer contributions to the program into an escrow account. PSC Commissioners further directed its staff to continue to pursue an audit of how the funds were utilized by Green Mountain Energy Company, a third party renewable contractor. The results of this audit will be considered in a future PSC meeting. Following a two year period of research and planning, NexPower Technology Corporation, a subsidiary of United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC), has decided to establish a new solar cell manufacturing plant in Taiwan through a contract with ULVAC. Our utility is not in the sunny Southwest. Does it still make sense to create solar programs for our customers? — Larry T., Walla Walla, WA Oregon Public Utility Commission Gives a Green Light to Third-Party Ownership of On-Site Solar and Wind Facilities On July 31, 2008, the Oregon Public Utility Commission (“the OPUC”) issued an Order that paves the way for developers to build and operate solar and wind facilities on property that belongs to utility customers. The Order comes less than two months after Honeywell International, Inc., Honeywell Global Finance, LLC, and PacifiCorp filed a joint petition with the OPUC seeking a declaratory ruling to resolve questions about how Oregon law and OPUC regulations would apply to solar facilities that are installed on a utility customer’s property but are owned by a third-party developer. See In re Honeywell et al., Docket No. DR 40, Order No. 08-388 (OPUC July 31, 2008). Chief Administrative Law Judge Michael Grant reduced the questions down to two key issues: (1) whether a customer is eligible for net metering under such an arrangement, and (2) whether the developer is subject to regulation by the OPUC. The Solar Electric Power Association (SEPA) and the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), the two non-profits that have presented the Solar Power Conference and Expo since 2004, have announced that effective immediately, the event will be renamed Solar Power International.
This page contains a list of user images about Jaggesh which are relevant to the point and besides images, you can also use the tabs in the bottom to browse Jaggesh news, videos, wiki information, tweets, documents and weblinks. Music video by Rihanna performing Take A Bow. YouTube view counts pre-VEVO: 66288884. (C) 2008 The Island Def Jam Music Group. WATCH BLOOPERS & MORE: http://bit.ly/ZELDAxtras DOWNLOAD THE SONG: http://smo.sh/13NrBp8 DOWNLOAD UNCENSORED SONG: http://smo.sh/WMYpsf GET LEGEND OF SMOSH T... Watch judges' comments at http://itv.com/XFactor (UK ONLY) Watch James Arthur sing Impossible by Shontelle Sweeeeet! As potential Winner's Singles go, this o... BLOOPERS: http://bit.ly/FiretruckBloopers GET THE SONG: http://smo.sh/WMZv7l MILKSHAKE MUSIC VIDEO: http://bit.ly/MilkyMilkshake CHECK OUT THIS FIRETRUCK TEE... Jimmy Kimmel Live - Celebrities Read Mean Tweets #2 Jimmy Kimmel Live's YouTube channel features clips and recaps of every episode from the late night TV sho... Watch Season 1 of Mortal Kombat Legacy here: http://www.youtube.com/channel/SWVkIoQKmEa4I The Mortal Kombat Legacy continues in Season 2 as Liu Kang, Kung La... So i was pretty hesitant to make this video... but after all of your request, here is my Draw My Life video! Check out my 2nd Channel for more vlogs: http://... Music video by Adele performing Rolling In The Deep. (C) 2010 XL Recordings Ltd. #VEVOCertified on July 25, 2011. http://www.vevo.com/certified http://www.yo... YOLO is available on iTunes now! http://smarturl.it/lonelyIslandYolo New album coming soon... Check out the awesome band the music in YOLO is sampled from Th... Jimmy Kimmel Live - Celebrities Read Mean Tweets #3 Jimmy Kimmel Live's YouTube channel features clips and recaps of every episode from the late night TV sho... Don't be these people. Mapoti See Bloopers and Behind-The-Scenes Here!: http://youtu.be/dfpo7uXwJnM Huge thank you and shout out to Dtrix: http://www.youtube... Buy the track here: http://atlr.ec/TZ8yBf Directed by Tony T. Datis. \|\|This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. (September 2010)\| March 17, 1963 Mayasandra, Turvekere, Tumkur, Karnataka \|Other names\|\|Navarasa Nayaka\| \|Notable work(s)\|\|Tharle Nan Maga, Super Nan Maga, Rani Maharani, Mata, Eddelu Manjunatha\| \|Political party\|\|Bharatiya Janata Party\| Jaggesh (Kannada: ಜಗ್ಗೇಶ್; born on 17 March 1963) is an Indian actor, politician and a director who has predominantly worked in Kannada film industry and is best known for the comedy roles he portrays in his movies. He has acted in movies such as Banda Nana Ganda, Super Nan Maga and Tharle Nan Maga. Jaggesh has a big fan following and is popularly referred to by his fans as Navarasa Nayaka. He made his debut as a small time actor in the mid-1980s and got his big break as a hero in Banda Nanna Ganda produced by his brother in Law N. Srinivas, and has been very popular since then. Jaggesh made his cinema debut as an Assistant Director to "K.V.Raju" in the year 1986 and then moved on to acting in small roles gradually working up the ladder to being a popular character artist.After a lot of struggle he started a movie called "Tharle nan Maga " directed by Superstar "Upendra " which was shelved for unknown reasons.Later Jaggesh made his debut in his Brother in Law "N.Srinivas" movie called "Banda nana Ganda " as a Hero,which turned out to be one of the biggest hit of the year,after which his shelved movie "Tharle nana Maga " resumed production and was released since then there has been no turning back for the actor. Jaggesh is originally from Mayasandra (Jadeya Mayasandra) of Turuvekere Taluk in Tumkur district. His political affiliation was with the Congress party. He ran in the Turuvekere constituency, and won with a healthy margin but resigned from the Legislative Assembly to join the Bharatiya Janata Party later. Currently he is a sitting Member of Legislative Council and holds the cabinet rank as the vice-chairman of the Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation (K.S.R.T.C.). TV shows \|1\|\|2012\|\|Kaiyalli Koti, Helbittu Hoderi \|\|Host\|\|Udaya TV\|\|This is his first show hosted by jaggesh. Ready for launch.\| Personal life Jaggesh was born to Shivalingappa and Nanjamma. He has 2 brothers and 2 sisters out of which his brother "Komal" is also a noted actor and his brother in law "N.Srinivas" is a noted producer. One of his sisters is a Doctor and the other brother is a Mute and has been taken care by the actor himself. Jaggesh married Parimala and theirs was the first marriage case from south India to reach the Supreme Court. It was a love marriage where the bride was underage and the Honorable Chief Justice Bhagwati allowed for the marriage to be recognized on a humanitarian basis. Jaggesh has two sons - Guru Raj and Yathi Raj. Guru Raj has written the script for their home production Make Up. He has completed successfully his training from the famed Kishore Namit Kapoor Acting Institute, in Mumbai and is lined up for a launch in February 2009. Yathi Raj is a well established child artiste with close to 15 movies to his credit, including his touching performance in the movie "Deadly Soma", directed by Ravi Srivathsa. Parimala Jaggesh and son Guru Raj Jaggesh are also known for their interest in cars, drag racing and rally. Jaggesh is known for his unique style of acting and at one point of time was the highest paid actor amongst non-lead roles in Kannada film industry, He is still considered as a reference for comedy by lot of Kannada actors. \|1\|\|1985\|\|Shwetha Gulabi\|\|Debut film\| \|1\|\|1989\|\|Manmatha Raja\|\|Acted along with Kashinath, Sudha rani\| \|6\|\|1992\|\|Tharle Nan Maga\|\|Santosh\|\|Lead role\| \|7\|\|1992\|\|Alli Brahmachari Illi Ramachari\| \|8\|\|1992\|\|Bhanda Nanna Ganda\| \|13\|\|1993\|\|Super Nan Maga\|\|Lead role\| \|18\|\|1994\|\|Beda Krishna Ranginaata\|\|Krishna\| \|19\|\|1994\|\|Indrana Gedda Narendra\|\|Narendra\| \|20\|\|1995\|\|Bal Nan Maga\| \|21\|\|1997\|\|Bhanda Alla Bahaddur\| \|24\|\|1998\|\|Maari Kannu Hori Myage\| \|25\|\|1998\|\|Yaare Neenu Cheluve\|\|Guest Appearance\| \|31\|\|2000\|\|Mundaithe Oora Habba\| \|32\|\|2001\|\|Jipuna Nanna Ganda\| \|37\|\|2003\|\|Huchana Maduveli Undone Jaana\| \|38\|\|2003\|\|Yaardo Duddu Yallammana Jathre\|\|Gowda\| \|50\|\|2008\|\|Nee Tata Naa Birla\| \|51\|\|2008\|\|Kodagana Koli Nungitha\|\|Balasubramanya\| \|58\|\|2011\|\|Allide Nammane Illi Bande Summane\|\|Guest Appearance\| \|60\|\|2012\|\|Manjunatha BA LLB\|\|Manjunatha\| \|2012\|\|Guru\|\|Gururaj, Yathiraj, Rashmi Gautham\| - "Jaggesh quits Congress for BJP". The Hindu. 11 July 2008. Retrieved 8 December 2010. - "`I played the hero'". The Hindu. 13 October 2006. Retrieved 8 December 2010. - "`Lift Kodla'".
Motorola’s been a bit cagey about its whole "project" for the Motorola Xoom, but it seems its finally time to roll back the curtain to reveal, get this, a big ole pile of Ice Cream Sandwich. The handset maker has begun rolling out the mobile OS to a select group of Xoom owners — both the WiFi and 4G Dish Network’s curious Blockbuster project appears to be sputtering a bit, now that the company has confirmed that it will shutter more stores than originally anticipated. Speaking to Reuters at CES today, Dish Network CEO Joe Clayton confirmed that his company plans to close all Blockbuster shops that Pico projectors have become a well-established category in their own right, much to the delight of road warriors and those who want a lot of bang for their buck when it comes to display size. With Velocity Micro’s latest effort in the category, there may be a lot more bang in the near future. Their Not satisfied with iOS? No problem, OnLive has a hefty helping of Windows waiting for you in the iTunes app store. Palo Alto announced the streaming Office app earlier this week, touting it as a no-compromise enterprise experience. The free app is fairly basic, giving iPad users hungry for a dose of At our meeting this week with Intel’s Mark Miller and John Wallace, we spoke primarily about mobile, and as the conversation moved beyond smartphones and tablets and laptops came up, it was the word Netbook that got our attention. What Miller had to say about the Netbook as it stands today is not Blogging is still a relatively young part of the media industry. But already there are a cadre of professional reporters who cut their teeth blogging, who are used to the pace and get an adrenaline rush from covering events as they unfold. Anthony Ha is one of them, and I am very pleased to announce Late in the week on the fourth full day of CES 2012, we got the opportunity to sit down with Intel’s Mark Miller to speak about Medfield, Clover Trail, and the future of mobile computing in the Intel environment. What Intel intends on bringing to the market is not just powerful devices such as When it comes to TVs this year, there’s only two that float to the top: the dueling 55-inch OLED models from Samsung and LG. We’ve already spent some quality time with the Samsung “Super OLED” television, and we made the trek to LG’s booth today to check out their version. Intel knows a thing or two about technology and innovation. Hey, that’s why they hired Will.i.am as "director of creative innovation". (Wink.) Really, in the same way that it’s catalyzed change in the computing industry (and helped bring modern microprocessing to life), in December Intel launched a La profesora del MIT Neri Oxman desarrolla nuevas técnicas de diseño que aprovechan las ventajas de la “fabricación aditiva”.
Tuesday, April 26th, 2011 at 7:30 PM 2 years ago Brighton Concorde 2 Comments from other Shows Gogol Bordello with Skindred Thu 3/13 @ Warfield Can't believe I had to spend the whole concert on the fucking balcony with boring sitting people. Argh... This show was awesome LOUD That's lovely. GB is just not that sort of event you'd want to stand still at. front of the balcony at the warfield is actually kinda rad. My ticket is for balcony. That's so sad... I am so Going !!!! okay im not freaking missing these guys again Oh joy, I think I managed to do it. Now waiting for the mail. Oh no, my card crapped out on me and I Warfield don't seem to have any box offices at all. Would anyone kindly sell me a ticket? Pretty please, I'm desperate. I missed them last time and was so pissed. But scored some nice upstairs seats. And only a 36% "we're awesome" surcharge from TicketMaster! What a deal! Ugh, the place was closed today, the box office sales probably start tomorrow. Add artists to your Wishlist to find out about local shows. Other Local Venues Great Escape Festival More Local Shows... Added December 31st, 2010 Use of this site is subject to express Terms of Service . By using SonicLiving's service, you agree to abide by these terms.
Small silvertone hoop earrings by Lane Bryant Comfortable and Stylish! I love these earings. I can dress them up or down. Love that they are not heavy and comfortable on my earlobe. They have lasted me around 3 years and they have not tarnished like some of my other pieces I have bough from LB. I love these. March 2, 2013
Lexington Sweater Jacket Watch The Sizing I bought a 5x thinking it would allow me to easily layer without feeling bulky. I could have gone down a size and still have room. BUT ... I love it. It's surprisingly warmer than I had thought it would be. easy to carry since it is light weight (as compared to a regular coat) and it's stylish. I have to double up the cuffs but I don't know if that is because of my size choice. It's a welcomed addition to my wardrobe. November 12, 2012
Transparent design provides quick content identification, offers maximum organization and facilitates today's security procedures. Pack more in less space by compressing bulky items with this 3-pack of reusable pouches. Ideal for travel, clothing and blanket storage, diapers, etc. Great for dirty or wet clothes, and protects against dirt, insects, moisture and odors. Stow in luggage, gym bag, briefcase, luggage or drawer. Easy to use - simply pack, zip and roll! Air expels through one-way valve. Wipes clean easily.
Let and be two differentiable functions. We will say that and are proportional if and only if there exists a constant C such that . Clearly any function is proportional to the zero-function. If the constant C is not important in nature and we are only interested into the proportionality of the two functions, then we would like to come up with an equivalent criteria. The following statements are equivalent: Therefore, we have the following: Define the Wronskian of and to be , that is The following formula is very useful (see reduction of order technique): Remark: Proportionality of two functions is equivalent to their linear dependence. Following the above discussion, we may use the Wronskian to determine the dependence or independence of two functions. In fact, the above discussion cannot be reproduced as is for more than two functions while the Wronskian does....
It's placed on all five Arts & Faith 100 lists. It's Tarkovsky. Love it or hate it - and most folks are pretty much one or the other - it's Tarkovsky. Four showings only, some nights double-featured with BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN. Russi-o-rama. dir. Andrei Tarkovsky Wed Sep 14, Fri 16 \| 7pm Sat 17, Sun 18 \| 8pm IMPORTED 35mm PRINT! Tarkovsky’s brilliantly dense, breathtakingly textured Stalker suggests a fantastical confluence of in-the-Gulag Solzhenitsyn and post-apocalyptic science fiction, and could be an elaborate, allegorical, otherworldly illustration of that old maxim, “Be careful what you wish for ...” Guardian critic Philip French likens it to “The Wizard of Oz adapted by a disciple of Dostoevsky and Kafka” and calls it “possibly Tarkovsky’s finest work.” In a devastated post-industrial police state, two men, a writer and a scientist, engage the special mystic skills of a Stalker to guide them through the forbidden Zone, a damp, fecund, overgrown wasteland where the rules of nature no longer apply. At the centre of the Zone, it is reputed, is the Room, a place where the deepest desires of one’s heart are said to come true. The amazing journey there will test the limits and adequacy of the way each of the three protagonists makes sense of the world: through art, through science, and through faith. Distinguished by a remarkable sense of tactility, composed of stunning sepia images, and offering layer upon layer of meaning, Stalker is a haunting and unforgettable work from a visionary director whose too-few films are quite unlike anything else in world cinema. “A masterpiece ... Not an easy film, but most certainly a great one” (Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader). B&W and colour, 35mm, in Russian with English subtitles. 163 mins. "Tarkovsky conjures images like you've never seen before; and as a journey to the heart of darkness, it's a good deal more persuasive than Coppola's." "Visually unforgettable and possibly Tarkovsky's finest work." "A vast prose-poem on celluloid whose forms and ideas were to be borrowed by moviemakers like Lynch and Spielberg."
This year the pre-Homecoming party was out at Joel Fenniker’s parents’ farm, west beyond the highway, across the harvested acres. There was always a Bonfire on the Friday before Homecoming — Bonfire on Friday, game on Saturday, the dance Saturday night. The voting for King and Queen had all been done in homeroom classes on Wednesday and although the coronation didn’t come until the actual dance, the Bonfire — unsanctioned by the school — was where the royalty was initially, informally, anointed. A long walk. Wesley headed down the hill away from the high school lot, past the junior high that was now emptying too, hearing behind him the high wails and the masculine muttering beneath it of cops frustrated at the lack of a murder weapon. The weight of his pack pressed him on while he walked, down past the practice field below the junior high where the younger boys with peach-fuzzed chins and bad skin shunted a soccer ball around, back and forth, back and forth, upwind and unaware of twelfth-grade death. Wesley didn’t so much step into the wood as dissolve in, feeling the shredded autumn canopy muffle out the cries and calls and street noise behind him. From the dryness of the paved lots he strode across dampened piles of leaves degrading back to soil, and his lungs billowed in and out the flowering smell of clean rot. The cool here etched a flat blade between his skin and his clothes to pimple his chest and arms. He was wearing just a dark t-shirt, jeans and a flannel overshirt. His papers and textbooks dug into his lumbar while he walked and he shifted the pack higher. The revolver slid around near the top of the pack and Wesley wondered if the safety was on. He had no idea of the distance to Fenniker’s, nor how much light he had left. It was early in the afternoon but the sun prismed into faintness in the yellowed treetops and seemed to be in mourning. I’ll marry her once we’re gone from here, Jimmy had been saying back in the car. People pass in hallways and on corners every second but never look each other in the eye to recognize sister souls. She and I, we’re bound that way, now until the trumpets call, in the sight of heaven. I’ll dance at the wedding, Wesley had replied with a leaden throat. My heels will meet in midair. I’ll carry the ring and raise the toast and have sex with the maid of honor in the bathroom of the VFW hall. Godspeed you, compadre. And then Jimmy had turned toward his approaching woman and put forth a hand and started an exhalation that had no ending. Over the brusking of leaves beneath his hightops the highway noise came to him, like TV static. Early navigators through this wooded Illinois lowland had hearkened for streams and rivers, but all the world could offer Wesley Fager on the last unpaved deertrails was the road singing like the sound of piss. He’d heard it in his bedroom at night but never so clear as now. Had his car not been impounded, he would have taken that highway and turned off three miles south to make it to Fenniker’s. His shoes were not cutting it. On the shifting slime of leaves they twisted sideways when they should have braced his ankles up, and his foot misjudged the contours of the land beneath it. When he came down from the last hillock and pushed through the low-hanging boughs of ash and pin oak and stood at the embankment leading up to the highway itself, he was grateful suddenly for asphalt. He was starting up the hill toward the road with his shoes sliding uncooperatively when the cough came echoing out of the wash drainpipe, at the foot of the slope. He saw suddenly the rusted grocery cart parked at the lip of the old pipe, one front wheel askew from its brothers, an American flag flying from a car antenna lashed with wire to the cart’s ribs. The basket of the cart was filled high with old coverless books. The phone directory propped up the Aa-Be volume of the Britannica, a thesaurus leaned in sadness against Moby-Dick and the collected works of Yeats, all stripped of their exteriors with pages bared to the weather. Wesley stopped his upward floundering and let his shoes slide him naturally back to the hill’s base. Inside the ringed pipe it was just large enough for a man to fit, and a man had, curled embryonically within and looking out at the woods balefully like a damp chick chafing at the smallness of its egg. “The daylight’s too brief to go hiding from in autumn, grandfather,” he called. “Not brief enough when all it does is plague my old flesh,” the man said, and canted his head closer to the pipe’s aperture. Around the tanned and hairless crown of his head ropy white hair trailed near to his shoulders, and his scalp was crocheted with the ridges and scars of melanoma lesions. His eyes flared a vindictive eagle-gray for a moment and then his face retreated into shadow. “Me, I walk against nightfall,” Wesley said. “Beyond this road lie the fields I must reach, carrying my message with me. Have you got a car I could borrow?” “My stride is my only vehicle,” the old man said, words buzzing through the phlegm at the base of his lungs. “Then I must scale the crown of this bank and hoist a thumb toward heaven at the roadside.” “Pray, what could better delay a messenger boy than the dependence on others, more surely than the long odds of a hitchhike?” All Wesley could see inside the pipe was the old man’s bearded chin in the downward slant of light, the angle of its point wobbling with each word like the enameled jaw of a German nutcracker. “There’s no surety his choice of ride would not steer with the wrong bearing, or that he’ll meet a ride at all. The way between places is faster far than the way across.” “Through the pipe, you mean,” Wesley said. “Messenger boy, through this portal you’ll cut away not mere yards, but perhaps hours.” The old man’s hand, mapped with gray veins and crusted with humus in its creases, came out with its palm up. “But have you the knowledge to pay as a toll?” Wesley looked at the shopping cart with its payload of literature, then shrugged out of his backpack and opened it. The air that gusted up from the pack smelled like violets and spent firecrackers, the combined scents of Eliza’s handkerchief and her gun. He kept the pistol concealed beneath the flap and fished out his biology textbook, passing it over. The old man took it with a surprising grip whose strength translated to Wesley through the bookspine and drew it into his bolthole. There was a sticky rip of old industrial glue giving way and then the book’s blue cover, with its illustrative microscope photo of cellular mitosis, spun out of the pipe to fall away in the forest brush. “To better judge the book,” the old man said. The hand came out again, gestured for more. “To whom does your message go?” Up from the pack Wesley brought his sociology text, reasoning he’d just photocopy Paul Derning’s pages, and finally passed over his algebra book. “There’s a blond-haired girl beyond these woods shall receive my words,” he said. “Known a few of those,” the shadowed man said. Away with a stiff tug came the jackets that braced up the reason of hidden numbers and the glory of human cultures, and Wesley’s backpack was considerably lighter. The old man’s voice came again, hollowing and ringing as he seemed to retreat farther into the pipe. “Pass, and beware of blond women with dark eyebrows. They carry all the coldest seasons inside them.” Wesley sealed the pack and threw it across his shoulders, braced one foot against a root and pulled himself into the dark opening. His hands and knees landed in something slipperier than water, and numbed. He crawled across the grooves of the pipe and breathed through his mouth to damp the smell of yellowed sweat and mulchy runoff from the land. Something bobbed painfully against the stitches in his eyebrow and he yelped, bringing his hand up to swat the obstruction away. It swung back at him, revealing itself in the gloom as a loose-tongued tennis shoe riveted by its gray laces to the roof of the pipe. “Touch not the tokens,” the old man said, somewhere far ahead in the tunnel. “Gifts given by others who passed this way and had no pages to yield up for me.” Wesley found the mate of the tennis shoe just ahead, its fabric marked with spots of rust color. Beyond it came others, a tan boot, a laceless loafer hung through its heel by a bent nail. A cold breeze hummed through the channel and set them to swinging, barely limned by the pinhole of outside light far ahead. Wesley lowered his head to protect his scar and bumped through the hanging garden of footwear, shivering slightly when he passed under a pair of toddler’s sneakers. Fattened on phosphates from cornfield runoff, the algae in the ribs of the pipeway had bloomed into sponges of moss. When Wesley set a hand or knee into one it liquefied and burst with a smell like fucking. He felt himself move by the old man, heard the pulpy dredging of his breath in the passageway, but did not see or brush him. Curled in a crosspipe, perhaps, hidden in deepest shadow. “Messenger boy,” the voice came from very close. “What message might you have for me?” Wesley raised his head again into the oncoming breeze to blow away the odor of flesh and fungus and pressed ahead, shrugging aside a dangling pair of girls’ soccer cleats. The rings of the pipe cut into his knees. Pulling his right leg along he felt a vague tugging and heard a scratch at his heel, as of fingernails raking the rubber sole of his shoe. But the tug did not come again, and as he closed his eyes and dragged on the wave of wet man-smell dropped notch by notch. He felt the light strengthening against the pores of his face, and his stitched forehead throbbed in response. He opened his eyes and he was within a body’s length of the pipe’s end, smelling fresher water and yellowed leaves. His mole’s blindness would not let him see anything but a palette of undifferentiated gold. But hanging at the channel’s very end he could distinguish — through long hours of suiting up and stretching out and studying his own feet — a set of running shoes, sole curved as if for terrain rather than track. He put out a hand and closed it around the laces of both, pulled hard, and felt the laces snap free of whatever tacked them to the ceiling. The roaring that arose behind him was that of perdition, and he pulled himself hard out of the pipe to tumble forward and fall flat on his back in a muddied creekbed. For moments he could do nothing but lie there, blinking with pain at the graying sky between treetops and feeling the damp soaking into the seat of his jeans. Then the smell blasted again from the pipe’s mouth like a vomiting, and he was on his feet and splashing up the wash with his lightened pack, deeper into these new woods. He felt more winded than he should have when he finally stopped, leaning against a fallen treetrunk that bridged the waterway. His hightops were sodden and torn, his clothes wet and soiled down the back. The cold glued itself to his spine and he wished for the jacket he’d left in his locker. He unlaced his worthless hightops, pitched them away up the bank and slid into the captured shoes. Each heel carried a stylish swoosh in red and they squeezed tight and proper at the key points of ankle, ball and arch. The crow landed on the fallen log while Wesley flexed his foot and tugged at the seat of his jeans, trying to air and dry them. The bird had the body of a football and it landed like one, striking down on the brittled bark and rising once before its talons got purchase. It folded its wings untidily and high-stepped once toward Wesley, and turned the profile of its arrowed skull toward him to keep him in the sight of one amber eye. “Brother of the air,” Wesley said. He propped one foot on the log and leaned into it, lengthening his tendons against a cramp. “The feeding for your kind is better in the fields yonder, and in the driveways and gutters of the town back behind me.” By its lazy preening the crow spoke of meals already eaten, seed and refuse nibbled up from hacked-over cornrows and unlidded trashbins. It glanced up to the sky and Wesley followed its gaze through the thin branches to the half-moon sitting lopsided at high autumn noon, almost due south from the sky’s midpoint. The sunlight was being chased away to the southwest, and the feeding was done. “My time in the tunnel and the dash from its exit have spun me around sideways.” Wesley stood, bent and brought his wounded forehead almost to his kneecaps. Muscle and joints popped in their sockets with the release. “I could better know the land had I your windborne view of it.” The crow fanned its silk-black wings, hunched toward the surface of the log and cacked, expelling a wet tuft of straw. At Bonfire the tradition was one of effigy-burning, with seniors of the Edenton ranks crafting a straw man in the likeness of the enemy’s players. This year the Homecoming opposition was the Hadderfield team. By its vomiting the crow implied its presence at the making of the sacrifice, at the Fenniker farm, and guilt of plucking away of this bit of stuffing. “Then the way you came is well and true,” Wesley said. “A great kindness.” He dug the toe of one new shoe into the bank of the wash and began to climb up, in the direction the bird had come from. Beyond the rise he could see where the wood at last thinned into open land, and he walked for the treeline’s edge. Behind him, the crow watched and did not blink, then leaned and pecked back up its expectoration, eschewing waste, though the straw was just straw and in truth the crow had not told its origin. At the wood’s perimeter, Wesley cursed his jeans. The damp fabric would chafe with running, he knew, and the cut of the thighs would shorten his stride. Ahead the fields were stained violet with declining southwestern sun and stubbled with the harvested, untilled stalks of corn. The land was flat, then rolling, then flat again, no rise greater than its neighbor. The breaths he drew here were dustier than in the trees, less rotted but also less savory. Out there the wind was hardier, but his way would be straight now rather than twisted by topography. Limbered, hoping to warm himself further by effort, he began to run. (Read Part 3.)
Published May 2008 Properly located digital signage in high traffic areas on school campuses provides students and faculty with a convenient resource to stay up to date about the latest school news and activities. Signage in Education By Anthony D. Coppedge Technology gets high marks. Digital media and communications have come to play a vital role in people’s everyday lives, and a visit to the local K-12 school, college or university campus quickly illustrates the many ways in which individuals rely on audio and visual technologies each day. The shift from analog media to digital, represented by milestones ranging from the replacement of the Walkman by the MP3 player to the DTV transition currently enabling broadcasts beyond the home to mobile devices, has redefined the options that larger institutions, including those in our educational system, have for sharing information across the campus and facilities. Flexible And Efficient Digital signage, in particular, is proving to be a flexible and efficient tool for delivering specific and up-to-date information within the educational environment. As a high-resolution, high-impact medium, it lives up to the now-widespread expectation that visual media be crisp and clear, displayed on a large screen. Although the appeal of implementing digital signage networks does stem, in part, from plummeting screen prices and sophisticated content delivery systems, what’s equally or more important is that digital signage provides valuable information to the people who need it, when and where they need it. On school campuses—whether preschool, elementary, high school or post-secondary institutions—it does so effectively, for both educational purposes and for the security and safety of staff, administration and the student body as a whole. School campuses have begun leveraging digital signage technology in addition to, or in place of, printed material, such as course schedules, content and location; time-sensitive school news and updates; maps and directions; welcome messages for visitors and applicants; and event schedules. Digital signage simplifies creation and delivery of multiple channels of targeted content to different displays on the network. Although a display in the college admissions office might provide prospective students with a glimpse into student life, for example, another display outside a lab or seminar room might present the courses or lectures scheduled for that space throughout the day. This model of a distribution concept illustrates a school distributing educational content over a public TV broadcast network. At the K-12 level, digital signage makes it easy to deliver information such as team or band practice schedules, or to post the cafeteria menu and give students information encouraging sound food choices. Digital signage in the preschool and daycare setting makes it easy for teachers and caregivers to share targeted educational programming with their classes. Among the most striking benefits of communicating through digital signage is the quality of the pictures and the flexibility with which images, text and video can be combined in one or more windows to convey information. Studies have shown that dynamic signage is noticed significantly more often than are static displays and, furthermore, that viewers are more likely to remember that dynamic content. Though most regularly updated digital signage content tends to be text-based, digital signage networks also have the capacity to enable the live campus-wide broadcast of key events: a speech by a visiting dignitary, the basketball team’s first trip to the state or national tournament, or even the proceedings at commencement and graduation. When time is short, it’s impractical to gather the entire student body in one place or there simply isn’t the time or means to deliver the live message in any other way. The ability to share critical information to the entire school community, clearly and without delay, has made digital signage valuable as a tool for emergency response and communications. Parents, administrators, teachers and students today can’t help but be concerned about the school’s ability to respond quickly and effectively to a dangerous situation, whether the threat be from another person, an environmental hazard, an unpredictable weather system or some other menace. Digital signage screens installed across a school campus can be updated immediately to warn students and staff of the danger, and to provide unambiguous instructions for seeking shelter or safety: where to go and what to do. Although early digital signage systems relied on IP-based networks and point-to-point connections between a player and each display, current solutions operate on far less costly and much more scalable platforms. Broadcast-based digital signage models allow content to be distributed remotely from a single data source via transport media, such as digital television broadcast, satellite, broadband and WiMAX. The staff member responsible for maintaining the digital signage network can use popular content creation toolsets to populate both dynamic and static displays. This content is uploaded to a server that, in turn, feeds the digital signage network via broadcast, much like datacasting, to the receive site for playout. By slotting specific content into predefined display templates, each section with its own playlist, the administrator can schedule display of multiple elements simultaneously or a single-window static, video or animated display. The playlist enables delivery of the correct elements to the targeted display both at the scheduled time and in the appropriate layout. In networks with multicast-enabled routers, the administrator can schedule unique content for displays in different locations. In the case of delivering emergency preparedness or response information across a campus, content can be created through the same back-office software used for day-to-day digital signage displays. Within the broadcast-based model, three components ensure the smooth delivery of content to each display. A transmission component serves as a content hub, allocating bandwidth and inserting content into the broadcast stream based on the schedule dictated by the network’s content management component. Content is encapsulated into IP packets that, in turn, are encapsulated into MPEG2 packets for delivery. Generic content distribution model for digital signage solution. The content management component of the digital signage network provides for organization and scheduling of content, as well as targeting of that content to specific receivers. Flexibility in managing the digital signage system enables distribution of the same emergency message across all receivers and associated displays, or the delivery of select messages to particular displays within the larger network. With tight control over the message being distributed, school administrators can immediately provide the information that students and staff in different parts of the campus need to maintain the safest possible environment. Receivers can be set to confirm receipt of content, in turn assuring administrative and emergency personnel that their communications are, in fact, being conveyed as intended. On the receiving end, the third component of the system, content, is extracted from the digital broadcast stream and fed to the display screen. The relationships that many colleges and universities share with public TV stations provide an excellent opportunity for establishing a digital signage network. Today, the deployed base of broadcast-based content distribution systems in public TV stations is capable of reaching 50% of the US population. These stations’ DTV bandwidth is used not only for television programming, but also to generate new revenues and aggressively support public charters by providing efficient delivery of multimedia content for education, homeland security and other public services. Educational institutions affiliated with such broadcasters already have the technology, and much of the necessary infrastructure, in place to launch a digital signage network. In taking advantage of the public broadcaster’s content delivery system, the college or university also can tap into the station’s existing links with area emergency response agencies. As digital signage technology continues to evolve, educational institutions will be able to extend both urgent alerts and more mundane daily communications over text and email messaging. Smart content distribution systems will push consistent information to screens of all sizes, providing messages not only to displays, but also to the cell phones and PDAs so ubiquitous in US schools. The continued evolution of MPH technology will support this enhancement in delivery of messages directly to each student. MPH in-band mobile DTV technology leverages ATSC DTV broadcasts to enable extensions of digital signage and broadcast content directly to personal devices, whether stationary or on the move. Rather than rely on numerous unrelated systems, such as ringing bells, written memos and intercom announcements, schools can unify messaging and its delivery, in turn reducing the redundancy involved in maintaining communications with the student body. An effective digital signage network provides day-to-day benefits for an elementary school, high school, college or university while providing invaluable emergency communications capabilities that increasingly are considered a necessity, irrespective of whether they get put to the test. The selection of an appropriate digital signage model depends, of course, on the needs of the organization. Educational institutions share many of the same concerns held by counterparts in the corporate world, and key among those concerns is the simple matter of getting long-term value and use out of their technical investments. However, before even addressing the type of content the school wishes to create and distribute, the systems integrator, consultant or other AV and media professional should work with the eventual operators of the digital signage network to identify and map out the existing workflow. Once the system designer, integrator or installer has evaluated how staff currently work in an emergency to distribute information, he then can adjust established processes and adapt them to the digital signage model. The administrative staff who will be expected to update or import schedules to the digital signage system will have a much lower threshold of acceptance for a workflow that is completely unfamiliar or at odds with all their previous experience. An intuitive, easy-to-use system is more likely to be used in an emergency if it has become familiar in everyday practice. Turnkey digital signage solutions provide end-to-end functionality without forcing users and integrators to work with multiple systems and interfaces. The key in selecting a vendor lies in ensuring that they share the same vision and are moving in the same direction as the end user. In addition to providing ease of use, digital signage solutions for the education market also must provide a high level of built-in security, preventing abuse or misuse by hackers, or by those without the knowledge, experience or authority to distribute content over the network. Because the network is a conduit for emergency messaging, its integrity must be protected. So, the installer must not only identify the number of screens to be used and where, but also determine who gets access to the system and how that access remains secure. Scalable systems that can grow in number of displays or accommodate infrastructure improvements and distribution of higher-bandwidth content will provide the long-term utility that makes the investment worthwhile. By going into the project with an understanding of existing infrastructure, such as cabling, firewalls, etc., and the client’s goals, the professional is equipped to advise the customer as to the necessity, options and costs for enhancing or improving on that infrastructure. As with any other significant deployment of AV technology, the installation of a digital signage network also requires knowledge of the site, local building codes, the availability of power and so forth. Ralph Bachofen, senior director of Product Management and Marketing, Triveni Digital, has more than 15 years of experience in voice and multimedia over Internet Protocol (IP), telecommunications and the semiconductor business. The infrastructure requirements of a school in deploying a digital signage network will vary, depending on the type of content being delivered through the system. HD and streaming content clearly are bandwidth hogs, whereas tickers and other text-based messages put a low demand on bandwidth. Most facilities today are equipped with Gigabit Ethernet networks that can handle the demands of live video delivery and lighter content. However, even bandwidth-heavy video can be delivered by less robust networks, as larger clips can be “trickled” over time to the site, as long as storage on the unit is adequate. There is no set standard for the bandwidth required, just as there is no single way to use a digital signage solution. It all depends on how the system will be used, and that’s an important detail to address up front. Most digital signage solutions feature built-in content-creation tools and accept content from third-party applications, as well. Staff members who oversee the system thus can use familiar applications to create up-to-date content for the school’s digital signage network. This continuity in workflow adds to the value and efficiency of the network in everyday use, reducing the administrative burden while serving as a safeguard in the event of an emergency. For educational institutions, the enormous potential of the digital signage network can open new doors for communicating with students and staff, but only if it is put to use effectively. Comprehensive digital signage solutions offer ease of use to administration, deliver clear and useful messaging on ordinary days and during crises, and feature robust design and underlying technology that supports continual use well into the future.
Need a gift for a gifted musician? The SoundCloud Premium accounts also come as virtual gifts and it takes only two minutes to get one. Head over to our Gift page and check out the different Premium accounts starting at only €29 per year. Audio Elite (UK) M-Vitamine Records (Italy) Hooked Music (Tunis) Perfection Records (Bulgaria) Support : SPARTAQUE,Min&Mal,SANDER KLEINENBERG, Egoism, Jack Rock & Balthazar, Dualitik, DoubleWave A.K.O., Antonio Forester, Mad Raf & Tom Zenith., M.I.D.I., Steve Butch Jones, DIBBY DOUGHERTY, D-Trax, Louie Cut, Luca Terzini, and other...
Download the full EP at Ubiquity Records. http://bit.ly/uyMRjM The Echocentrics return with a new EP called Echoland. The EP is a tribute to hip-hop producer, Timbaland, featuring live instrumental reinterpretations (with one vocal tune from Tita Lima) of classic Timbo tracks. Working on the follow up to Sunshadows, Echocentrics leader Adrian Quesada, found himself occasionally hitting walls and struggling to make creative progress. What began as a couple of "exercises" to get the creative juices flowing, dissecting the minimalistic genius of Timbaland turned into this EP. Why Timbaland? Well, because he's dope. Release/catalogue number: UR296 Release date: Dec 6, 2011
Zedd – Stars Come Out So lately Zedd has been pumping out bangers like its nobody’s business. He released his first dubstep track “Scorpion Move” a few days ago and now the electro-house tune “Stars Come Out”. It features the super sexy vocals of Heather Bright as well as all the electro-glitch one could hope for in a Zedd track. Buy it and bump it.
May 13, 2007 Bruce Guthrie Wasted Our Time Remember how Bruce Guthrie indicated he was investing his life's savings into playing a significant role in last year's U.S. Senate race? Remember how that earned him a prominent place in the televised debate on KING 5? It was a sham. Digging through the FEC reports from the campaign, one can see Guthrie loaned his campaign $1,180,700 in a report filed 10/26/06 (see page 3, #13). That money "qualified" him for the debate according to the formula established by KING 5. Yet a report filed 12/4/06 (see page 5, #19), shows Guthrie's campaign repaid him $1,174,700 of that money; nearly all of it. Not exactly a serious effort to "change the dynamic of the race." KING 5 set qualifications for the debate so that only serious candidates would participate in what was a regrettably paltry debate schedule. Voters of the state tuning into a televised debate deserve to see candidates who are mounting serious campaigns for statewide office, not people simply willing to play accounting games to give themselves some airtime. We've got some time until similar such opportunities for debates between statewide office seekers occur again. Let's hope future debate organizers can establish more rigorous rules so that limited time for substantive debates is itself limited to hearing from candidates actually serious about running for office. Voters of all parties deserve that. Posted by Eric Earling at May 13, 2007 07:07 PM \| Email This 1. I wouldn't say he wasted our time. He did what any other candidate would do and took advantage of an opportunity to present himself and his message to the voters. 2. Bruce Guthrie was a disinguenuous, self-promoting, Libertarian schmuck who bamboozled the easily bamboozled Libertarians into thinking he was serious about something other than shooting his mouth off on TV. 3. Was anyone surprised by this. Only a fool would blow his life savings on an impossible campaign, and few fools have a million dollars. 4. If Bruce Guthrie was a real fool, he would run for Governor and lend his campaign one million dollars. Especially since state law severely limits what he could pay himself back -- to something less than $10,000 in any event. Of course, federal law doesn't seem to have such restrictions, and Guthrie pulled a brilliant accounting trick. The only thing it showed was that he can liquidate one million in cash assets, and has some brains and a big pair of cajones. 5. I fail to see how presenting an alternative to slick packaged party candidates is a waste of my time. If it takes a little trick to get this done, good for Guthrie. But woe on us for creating and supporting a system that makes such a trick necessary. Guthrie opening his mouth at the debate opened my eyes on this "Libertarian" and the party. And it was a butt-ugly view. No way is this small-government guy buying into any of that Libertarian crap. Thank you Bruce for enlightening me about your party. Bruce Guthrie was a disinguenuous, self-promoting, Libertarian schmuck who bamboozled the easily bamboozled Libertarians -- murtz on May 13, 2007 08:48 PM Uh-huh. That's kind fo what the folks over at Goldy's blog say about eveyone on this blog and the entire Republican Party. 8. Your goofy implication is mistaken: As the linked story says clearly, he loaned the money to his campaign. He thus hoped to get it back through donations, and he did, as does any candidate major or minor. That's an impressive feat, actually, for a minor candidate, and THAT'S the dynamic change. 9. The guy got about 50 cents in donations, BB, except when he hocked his house to get on TV, which he then botched for himself and the Libertarian party. I actually appreciated that Bruce was: a) So clever b) So committed to getting his Libertarian message out to the Public. The 2 major Parties desperately need competition. They have developed so many laws to make it difficult for any opposition....even in the Primary System. Are all of you SP'ers really comfortable with "business as usual"??? Are you really comfortable with Neo-Cons like Bush who pretends to be a Conservative will signing a massive spending Budget filled with Pork and keeping the printing presses churning at full blast. Bravo to Bruce Guthrie. I feel our Country needs a multitude of opinions...mainly to force the Republican Party back to it's Conservative roots. It is filled with wimps & RINO's in Washington State. Clean up our house folks! Look at France. Conservative eventually triumphs....even in Washington State....someday soon. Obviously I am not good at getting my thoughts out there. Mr. Cynical's first two comments were two of the things I noticed. While I don't like the local R internecine warfare, Guthrie's message really turned me off. BIG TIME!! If only 'Libertarian' were the true voice of that party and not Guthrie, swatter muses. And so, Mr. Cynical, while I would like another option, Libertarian, I found out, isn't my cup of tea. Too bad there isn't a 3rd party out there, but after Perot, I don't think I will ever vote 3rd party again. And add Jesse to that poor message, too. And why do you want a 3rd party when the Rs do a good job eating and fighting among themselves? David Postman at The Times makes mention of this conversation. Here's what I posted on his blog: As much as I hate to admit it while at the same time disagreeing with Stefan, I have to say, yeah...he wasted our time. It was a vanity exercise along the same lines as self-publishing your memoirs or that book of poetry Random House wouldn't touch on a bet, except here Guthrie got the best of both worlds: he got published, and then he got his money back. In newspapers it's routine to see opinion pieces with unconscionably long and unreadable paragraphs printed in a tiny font advocating some position or the other. These screeds are always clearly outlined in a box and at the top and bottom appears in parenthesis the words "paid advertisement." Guthrie ran a journalistic and political shell game: a paid advertisement for which his money was cheerfully refunded...less $6K shipping and handling. While the size of a war chest is a legitimate indicia of the viability of a campaign, it isn't the only one. Maybe a look-see at what a candidate has actually done with the money in the war chest is something to consider. Otherwise, every rich gadfly and ne'r-do-well can buy himself or herself a place at on the debate stage to promote his or her personal POV, sensible or not. I mean...do you really want Paris Hilton, a recent convert to the cause of sentencing and prison reform, to buy a place at the table? 13. He didn't get 50 cents in donations, he got more than a million; like mainstream candidates regularly do, he financed himself with only a hope of getting his money back if he could show others his stuff, and he did. Why or why do I think the hypocrites posting here today would approve of this if had been done by a Republican - and of course it has. Eric, I disagree. Maybe what Guthrie did was a sham -- although it's not like he was pretending he had a "right" to be there, as he basically admitted to gaming the system by using his own money in the first place -- but I think he should have been included in the debate. I think that generally speaking, if a candidate has a literal chance to win the election, they should be included in the debates. The question of "chance" is one that should be defined as liberally as possible, that the voters have as much chance as possible to evaluate the choices before them. Of course, I am also in favor of having far more debates, with greater length and substance. This would make having more candidates simpler. I voted for Harry Browne in 1996 specifically because of Bob Dole's disingenuous attempts to exclude Ross Perot (he said Perot should be excluded because he had no chance, as shown by the polls; later when asked why he thought he would win despite Clinton have a huge lead in the polls, he said the only polls that matter are on election day). I decided that I couldn't vote for Perot or Clinton, so I picked Door #4. [Of course, I lived in Massachusetts at the time, and there was no chance Dole could win Massachusetts. If Dole actually had a chance to win the state, I still would have voted for him.] Now, granted, that was a Presidential debate, and the standards there are much easier: in order to be able to win, you have to be on enough ballots to win enough electoral college votes to win. That's Hard. Nader and Perot, I believe, are the only two third-party candidates to do it in recent years. My basic point here is that we should have relatively lax standards, not strict standards. Let everyone be heard. If we had actually good debates, this would, of course, be easier. Every other week, for 2-3 months, with each debate being a couple of hours and on a single subject. Another option would be to have the candidates debate each other one-on-one, in a round-robin format. So Guthrie and McGavick square off, then McGavick and Cantwell, then Cantwell and Guthrie. etc. There's lots of ways to do it, but they should all be focused on giving the voters more useful information, not less. PUDGE, go ahead and watch the presidential "debates" on TV now. Totally worthless for a "debate". A debate is between two people, not a hodge-podge. And this debate format diminishes my guys, especially when you got a yo-yo like Chris Matthews or Brian Williams asking questions. Hey Bigguy, at least you got me to do some research before I called BS. Try http://images.nictusa.com/cgi-bin/fecgifpdf/ . So now, BS. For others, this is the results of total contributions for after the general election by one Bruce Guthrie. While it wasn't 50 cents, it was almost 50 cents. Bill Bigguy, you wrote: He didn't get 50 cents in donations, he got more than a million; like mainstream candidates regularly do, he financed himself with only a hope of getting his money back if he could show others his stuff, and he did. Well, no. The report clearly shows he did not get nearly that much in donations: his campaign received in donations tens of thousands, not over a million, not even hundreds of thousands. They spent about the same amount. The loan money was never spent, except to pay back the loan. Indeed, it's even worse than you may think. His campaign's income apart from the loan was merely $69,151.77, and $12,634.70 of that was from Guthrie himself: nearly one-fifth of all contributions to his campaign came from himself. And that is not even including the $6,000 that the campaign (to the point of this report) never repaid from the original loan of $1,180,700.00. The loan was 94.5% of all campaign income, and its repayment 94.5% of all disbursements. Again, I don't have a problem with any of this. I think Guthrie should have been in the debate, and I actually liked that he not only exploited the (to my mind) silly rules to get in, but that he fully copped to it at the time. swatter: did you read my whole comment? I already noted I dislike the format, and pretty clearly implied that the current format does not work with a lot of candidates. I offered two alternative formats that would work better, and there are many more ideas. I think looking for a debate format that helps "your guys" is precisely the wrong way to go about it. Not sure if that was your implication. But I want a debate format that helps the voters learn more about the candidates and positions. Again, clearly, the current format doesn't do that. I have watched almost every Presidential debate, including party nominating debates, for many years. And I've gone back and watched and read many debates prior to that. I read the Lincoln-Douglas debates just for fun. I love a good debate, and the current debate format popularized by the bipartisan CPD is the worst format I've ever seen. I do concede that the current debate format gets less useful with a lot more candidates, but it's terrible already. Also, the difference between three or four candidates and 10 is a lot greater than the difference between two and three or four; comparing last year's Senate debate to the party nomination debates is a bit off. With three candidates, you can still have a great two-hour Lincoln-Douglas style debate, with minor modifications. That won't work well with 10 candidates. You should look into OpenDebates.org. They don't agree with me on having those very lax standards, but they do fight for reform in debate format, and in having more obejctive standards (since the CPD has a history of devising standards with the obvious intention of excluding third-party candidates, regardless of popularity level). Even two candidates make for a rotten presidential debate; however, they may be okay for a couple of them to face off for the primary. My guys are any candidate that has a snowball in hell chance of making it. One debate that I thought was telling was the Rossi-Gregoire. I only saw snippets and was quite impressed. Oh, Eric, one more thing. I noted that we knew he was gaming the system to begin with. From the article in October you linked to: He admitted he might not spend much of it, saying: "This is a loan, and I do intend to get most of it back. If the fundraising doesn't go well, I might not spend most of it. If the fundraising does go well, I might spend most of it." It didn't go well. He didn't spend most of it. So again, it's not like we didn't know he was going to repay himself. 20. Right on Pudge. Just as swatter exaggerated the 50 cents in contribution, I exaggerated the other way - and in fact his loan was a contribution, so it's accurate to count that in. Bottom line, the candidate made no attempt to mislead from the get-go. That's why I said, and say again, the premise for this post was wrong to begin with, and the hypocrites took the bait. That's still $6000 to be on some crappy local debate. 22. 50 cents is a lot closer to what the guy got in contributions than what he would have needed to run a credible campaign. 60 grand is chump change for a congressional office. I agree with several critical posters here. The original post was mean-spirited and was an awful late hit, way after the buzzer. Hooray for the very inspirational Bruce Guthrie, who is truly into small government and was opposed to a tax-and-spend project to make over another country in our image that would have been wrong even if it hadn't run into such difficulty. Thanks all, newleftconservative#1 Piper Scott wrote that my getting in to the KING 5 debates was an act of personal vanity. I assure you it was not and here is why: in a world full of envy and "soak the rich" liberals, it does NOT pay to come out of the closet as a millionaire, even as the poorest millionaire in the debates... My goal has always been to be rich and obscure, not rich and famous. By "coming out of the closet" about my assets, I was actually taking another "hit" for the cause of liberty and limited government, even beyond the $8 grand and five months the campaign wound up costing me. If I could have avoided telling the world I had some money, and still done as well to promote my campaign and the cause of freedom, I would have. Do you have any idea how much terror and stress there is being on statewide TV with no script? It was no fun, I'll tell you that, and certainly not worth the fame that I didn't even want! Those of you who think I got in to the debates for personal vanity don't know me very well. I volunteer in High School citizenship and AP US History classes about 20 times per year to get the message out. I go to County Fairs and give people The World's Smallest Political Quiz http://www.theadvocates.org/quiz.html in order to educate people about the philosophy of the American founders and the LP. I talk politics everywhere I go. Getting in to the debates was all about getting the message out, not my personal fame, which I had hoped was already long-faded until I read Mr. Earling's post. Oh, and the net cost to my campaign of doing the debates was less than $2 grand. Pretty good deal for that much air-time, don't you think? I ran to get my message out. I ran to remind Cantwell supporters that she supported the Iraq war, the PATRIOT Act, and was weak on marriage equality. I wanted to put more pressure on her to change these views, and D primary challengers like Hong Tran and Mark Wilson could not do this in the general election. I ran to give almost 30,000 Washington voters a choice they could feel good about. If you think that's wasting your time, I'm sorry you feel that way. My campaign manager, Travis Wright is a genius and deserves a lot of credit, as does Libertarian Gov. Candidate Ruth Bennett, who sued KING 5 after being excluded from the Gregoire/Rossi debates... That's how the rules were changed to allow such a gambit in the first place... I find it hilarious that conservatives and Republicans are unhappy I got in to the debates, given that I "took" more votes from Cantwell than from McGavick. Remember, my top three issues were getting out of Iraq, gay marriage equality, and repealing the unconstitutional parts of the USA PATRIOT Act. If you check my county vote totals, you will see that I tended to do better in the same counties that Cantwell did better in, and worse where McGavick did better. This indicates I was disproportionately competing for the same voters as Cantwell, not McGavick. Even the McGavick campaign saw this, and mentioned Dixon (Green) and me in a televised ad, in order to tell potential Cantwell voters that they had anti-war choices! You see, Libertarians can choose whether they run as fiscal conservatives, or as tolerant, social liberals, depending on the issues they choose to emphasize in their campaigns. The Greens are stuck taking votes only from D's. But in very close races, we L's can tip the balance towards the lesser of two evils D or R. At the beginning of the race, it looked like it was close. Then McGavick crashed and burned, mostly due to the Iraq war and the national wave of backlash against all R's. Not my fault. Many other Libertarians choose to emphasize the fiscal conservative issues. And we can do this while remaining totally honest and true to our values. You McGavick supporters are lucky I got into the debates. By the way, without Ruth Bennett in the Gov. race, Rossi would not even have been close to Gregoire... We Libertarians ALMOST changed the outcome of that race. Intentionally. If you are concerned about the spoiler effect, you need to support Instant Runoff Voting or Ranked Choice Voting. Pierce County now has this (as a result of Libertarian Kelly Haughton getting on the Pierce County Charter Review Commission) and the cool thing about it is that it has the potential to eliminate the despised pick-a-party primary! With IRV, you pick your first, second and third (or more) choices. If I had been your first choice, your vote would have wound up going to your second choice. No spoiler effect, and you get to vote your conscience! It eliminates the primary, and you can vote for one party in one race, and another in another! Support IRV in a Charter County (King, Whatcom...) near you! I really wish more R's were fiscal conservatives, for limited government, less government spending, and returned to their traditional roles as foreign non-interventionists. I wish more of them cared about the Constitution, and defending our equal, individual rights to life, liberty and property instead of selling out to the highest special interest bidder the way many of the D's do. (Remember: power corrupts.) That would save me a heck of a lot of trouble supporting America's third largest party... Then I could just join the R's! That would be much easier. Dixon (G) and even Adair (I) should have been in the debates as well. I think that the electorate is smart enough to tell who the serious candidates are. Why allow some elite to decide for you? The REAL shame is that the electorate allowed Cantwell to get away with so little debate time. Calling it a debate is really a misnomer. It was really just serial sound bites. That's all the format really affords, and unfortunately, it is probably what the customers of the mainstream media really want. Sound Politics readers are more discerning. But that's the format I was stuck with. I had to take advantage of it as best I could. Again, not my fault. Those who want to continue excluding candidates other than D's and R's are limiting freedom of choice and free speech. Not very American in my book. There is a chicken and egg problem: we can't win elections because we can't get as much media attention. We can't get much media attention because of the perception that we can't win elections. Debate access is an attempt to break that vicious cycle and give Americans another choice, and Americans are screaming for another choice, don't you think? I think I showed people they had an alternative. I'll bet I was the second choice of a majority of voters. Both D's and R's would have placed me second on their lists. Do you really think that was wasting people's time? As posters above have noted, I never lied to anyone. So why is Eric Earling picking on the little guy now? And thanks for sticking up for me, Stefan! :) Bruce: I am unconcerned with where you "take" votes. Votes don't belong to any candidates. I also am unconvinced Bennett almost helped give Rossi the victory, and that you "took" more votes from Cantwell (and she from Gregoire). Your analysis is uncompelling. You wrote: I tended to do better in the same counties that Cantwell did better in, and worse where McGavick did better. This indicates I was disproportionately competing for the same voters as Cantwell, not McGavick. Or, it could suggest that potential McGavick voters who voted for you were more likely to come from the same counties where Cantwell did better (and vice versa). That is, maybe you got mostly socially liberal, fiscally conservative voters who were most likely to vote for McGavick otherwise, and who are more likely to live in the left-leaning districts where Cantwell did well, and less likely to live in the districts where McGavick did well. There's really no way to know without IRV, Condorcet, and the like, which I think are terrible ideas, and I will fight against them if they come to the state or Snohomish County. I won't get into it the details now, but I have studied all these alternative forms of voting over the years, and I despise them all as, in my view, they are essentially undemocratic. Obviously you disagree. That's a discussion for another time, perhaps. I do agree with you about letting Dixon and Adair in. If someone can come up with some rational, objective measurement that shows someone is not a serious candidate, fine: but so far, I've not seen such a thing. Money and poll numbers are not such measurements: just because someone's chance of winning is not strong, does not mean the person is not a serious candidate that the people deserve a chance to learn about. The argument that really angers me the most is the idea that letting them (incl. you) in the debate is somehow "giving" you "free air time." It is not about YOU. If this were about YOU, I would say, of course, don't let him in. OK, maybe not, but I don't really know, because it is NOT about YOU. It's about the voters. The goal is to inform the voters, not to decide which candidates are worthy of being "given" something. It's all backward. One more thing, Bruce: I don't know your heart or mind, so I won't judge them. But it troubles me when you say you are a Libertarian because there are not "more R's [who are] fiscal conservatives, for limited government, less government spending, and returned to their traditional roles as foreign non-interventionists," who "cared about the Constitution, and defending our equal, individual rights to life, liberty and property." Setting aside Iraq etc. for a moment, the Republican Party in WA has a huge number of people who are for all of that (though we may disagree about what are those rights to "liberty" on various social issues), and we Republicans would have a much better chance at actually accomplishing those goals if more people like you helped us out. I was, for a short time, a member of the LP myself. I disagree with the LP on a few things (e.g., abortion), as I do with the GOP (e.g., civil unions). I switched back to the GOP, though, for one reason: because I actually wanted to get things accomplished. I joined the Republican Town Committee in MA, and when I moved to WA became a PCO, and then LD chair. Because I want to accomplish as many of my goals as possible, not just pontificate on The Way Things Should Be. I do that too, of course. :-) Granted, the entire GOP is not as devoted to its bedrock platform principles of limited government and fiscal responsibility (along with civil liberties) as the entire LP is. But it's a big tent party: any party who can be a majority will be more ideologically diverse. It's logically necessary. So if you are implying you want ideological purity, then you're conceding failure. And if you're saying you don't want purity, but just want more Republicans to act that way, well, you certainly have some of the means to accomplish that, by working with the GOP yourself. Again, I don't know what is in your mind, and you may feel you can accomplish the most positive change in the GOP by attacking it from the outside instead of working on it from the inside. I don't know. But I do know that the only way to make the GOP more (little l) libertarian is for more (little l) libertarians to become active in the party. You are right, of course. Votes belong to voters, not to candidates. I will change my word usage in this regard. Sorry you don't see that Ruth Bennett and I tipped our races just slightly in favor of the R. It was pretty obvious to me and my strategists. Oh, and Rossi, Cantwell and McGavick were pretty convinced of it as well... Love to hear why IRV is so bad... It seems to me to have no downside at all. It even saves money on election administration! I also agree that hearing from all the candidates is a benefit for the voters. You are right; this is the most important consideration. Voters should be allowed to decide for themselves, and NOT have some elite in a smoke-filled room decide which candidates are fit for them to see. To decide otherwise is to patronize and devalue the voters. On the other hand, from my own perspective, getting into the debates was definitely a step in the direction of my goals at the time... That's all I meant to be saying. Sorry you are a "fallen away libertarian." We will welcome you back in to our party any time! We need smart activists like you. But we small "l" libertarians face a tough choice: do we fight it out as members of a disenfranchised minority party, or do we join the R's and remain disenfranchised as a minority within a party that loses pretty consistently in our state? Every fan of Hayek has to answer this question for him or herself, and the fact is that we need BOTH! Libertarians outside of the R's keep the R's honest. Small "l" libertarians within the party work to influence the party. Both enhance public debate. (I guess one really cool strategy would be for a small "l" libertarian to run as a fiscally conservative Democrat!!! This would really throw people for a loop. It would be incredibly electable in WA, west of the cascades...) For me, it came down to the issue of fun. I decided that it would be more fun to lead a party of principle, than to follow as a principled member of a party with few, if any coherant principles. Perhaps "fun" is not the right word. I guess I decided that I would act with more genuine passion under the partisan Libertarian banner than I would be able to muster under the socially conservative, foreign interventionist Republican banner. I have absolutely no regrets! :) I'm also just repelled by the social conservatives and the saber-rattlers. I feel as alienated from them as I do from the socialists within the D's. Perhaps you are a more tolerant person than I. But I respect your principles and your decision. I long for the day when you can reform the R's enough that I would consider joining. But I'm not holding my breath, and until you do, I support your efforts towards a freeer America! :) But my main point was that my getting into the debates was NOT an act of personal vanity, and that allowing people more choices on ballotts and in televised debates is not wasting their time. Earling's attacks are without merit, and even a little mean-spirited. They are even against his own interests as an R. 27. Bruce - I think you've got the wrong take on my view. The little guy is welcome in our electoral process. I just don't think general election debates for any serious race should include candidates mired deep in the single digits. It turns such events into spectacles rather than providing the voter with a substantive level of information about the choices from which they will most likely choose. Bruce, I'd love to discuss IRV sometime, but not now. It's too big a discussion, and I am spread too thin. :-) And yes, I agree, it's your decision. I think you could accomplish more of your political goals as a Republican, but it's your decision. And yes, I am a very tolerant person, apparently. That's what my wife and other people tell me. Although in the heat of debate, I am often told precisely the opposite. :-D But I have good friends all over the political spectrum. A coworker of mine, that I've become good friends with over the seven years we've worked together, is a gay vegan liberal atheist. I'm a hetero meat-eating conservative Christian. We get along, and (usually) agree to disagree. Sometimes tempers rise, but that happens. I also have many friends who are quite to my "right" on various issues social issues. Sometimes I engage them in debate, sometimes I don't. And sometimes I cringe when they say things I disagree with. But I always remember two things: first, and foremost, that this country was designed to work pluralistically, and it can work no other way; and second, any majority must operate as a big tent. And I believe in majorities. I realize, of course, that's a little bit of question-begging: maybe a Canadian-style system would be better, with a handful of parties, and coalitions. I am open to that as a possibility, but I don't think it can really work for us. And of course, right now, it's not how it does work. Anyway, I do not consider myself a "fallen away Libertarian." I still am a "libertarian," and I was never very comfortable as a "Libertarian" for the short time I was one. For example, on abortion, I find the Libertarian viewpoint to be entirely inconsistent, because they offer no compelling reason for me to think that the life in the womb should not have the same right to life as other homo sapiens. And (although this was not an issue at the time I was a Libertarian), while I respect their view on foreign policy, I don't believe that whether or not a particular conflict is in our national interests is as clear as they want us to think. It's a complicated issue, and I am not saying that they should agree Iraq was the right thing to do, only that they try to make it seem like the choice not to invade should have been an easy one based on principle, and I don't accept that. And so on. Thanks for your response. Cheers! Pudge, the LP is still divided on abortion and Iraq. You would find many of our activists disagree on these divisive issues. I suspect you agree more with us than you do the R's! But keep fighting on the inside; it's a beautiful thing! You mention that you believe in majorities. Well, I do NOT believe in majorities, at least not where there is no better alternative. I believe in our equal, individual rights to life, liberty and property. Democracy, as Ben Franklin pointed out, is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is one well-armed sheep contesting the results. The tyranny of the majority violates liberty just as much as a dictatorship. We fall back on majority rule only because we have no better way to elect representatives, but the OATH of those representatives is to preserve our rights via the Constitution. Sorry, pet issue of mine... Eric, I suspect your REAL issue with my debate appearance was not my wasting time for the voters, but the perception that I took air time from your favorite candidate, McGavick. You knew the party faithful were going to vote for him, so you were unhappy I reduced McGavick's exposure to swing voters. But McGavick got all his sound bites out. He weighed in on all the issues. I took nothing from him. And I think there is a good chance that the net result of my running was to narrow the gap about 1/2 of a percent between Cantwell and McGavick. That might have been 10,000 votes, and though that's not a lot, it's a lot greater influence on the outcome than most individuals had. And had the election been as close as Gregoire and Rossi's, it might have changed the outcome in YOUR favor, just like Ruth Bennett almost did. I suspect that you have miscalculated where your own interests lie on this issue. And why do you equivocate in your post #27 above? First you say you are not against the little guy, and then you say that little guys shouldn't be in the debates? Sounds contradictory to me. Bruce: no, when I mean majorities, I don't mean democracies. cf. Madison in Federalist 10: Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. By "majorities" I meant majority parties. That is, I think that the American system works best with a majority party, rather than multiple minority parties that form a majority coalition. It could be altered -- there's nothing inherent in the American system requiring it to work that way -- but for now, that is how it works. There's a difference between "the little guy" having access to the ballot and having access to a major TV debate. Moreover, McGavick was well on his way to getting destroyed long before you found a way to enter the debate. I hold this view of streamlining debates for all major races, Senator, Governor, you name it. For example, I now currently favor reducing the Republican field in the Presidential debates to at least six or seven. Sorry, your assessment of my motives is incorrect. Eric, I do not question your motives at all. I still believe that the public is better served if other people don't make the decision for them of who they get to see on that stage. The most egregious example I remember -- doesn't really have to do with the situation at hand, but it's a fun story -- was the GOP primary debates in '96. Alan Keyes had not done well in the NH primary, and a TV station in Atlanta, GA based who it would invite to its debate on the NH primary results. In this case, voters from New Hampshire were deciding who Georgia voters would get to see on the stage. Utterly nutty. You may recall that Keyes tried to get into the debate anyway (if I remember the story, he had been invited originally, then disinvited when he fared poorly in NH), and he got arrested for it. Wow, that makes Keyes sound more like a Green than a Republican! (Aaron Dixon (G) got arrested trying to push his way into the 2006 King 5 Senate debates...) Eric, you assert that my guess about your motivations is incorrect, but you do not explain why it is incorrect. Why do you really care so much about wasting the voters' time? I still think you just resented the time I "took" from McGavick. Why shouldn't the little guy, who has jumped through all the hurdles the D's and R's put in his way and qualified for the ballott, be allowed to debate the leaders of the race? I had to get about 2,000 signatures and fill out all that obnoxious privacy-destroying paperwork. I'm still dealing with the danged FEC today. Then there is all the work and money I put into the campaign, and the stress of actually debating on short notice. (I had one week, the others had months...) I think the hurdles are too high, not too low! Here is one more great reason to include the little guy: if he is reasonably sure he can't win, then he has less disincentive to bring up unpopular truths and force the leaders, who are all trying to preserve their leads by playing it safe, to deal with them. You will see that this is a lot of what I did in the senate race. Little guys can change the topics of debate, and point out the flaws in the incumbent, without worrying that "going negative" will cost him the race. Without my being in the race, the drug war, the PATRIOT Act and marriage equality probably would never have even come up. I'll bet that even the Iraq war would have come up less, because Cantwell supported it, and McGavick was worried that his position on the war would cost him. Yet the war was by far the most important issue to voters. I'm not saying the media could have let them get away with not talking about it, but that it would have come up less had little guys like Dixon, Hong Tran, Mark Wilson and I not been in the race. Little guys perform a big public service. Leave them out of the debates and you entrench the oligopoly of the two big parties. The result is worse public leadership. And what do we little guys get in return? Criticism from non-candidates or from big party partisans who say we're wasting their time. You should be thanking us. It's called open debate, or the free exchange of ideas. Learn to deal with it. But don't call it a clean and open debate when only those approved by the elite may participate. Some random thoughts on this thread: One writer said that Guthrie's entry into the TV debates was "a journalistic and political shell game: a paid advertisement for which his money was cheerfully refunded" --- Uh, lessee, neither Cantwell nor McGavick "paid" for the TV air time either. Their war chests went to everything else. Does anybody really think that primary elections are anything but the expenditure of public funds for the private purposes of the Ds and Rs? --- and free advertising too boot? Another asserted, "RV, Condorcet, and the like, ... are essentially undemocratic." --- And, of course, first-past-the-post single member districts are SOOOO democratic! --- as if forced choice is more democratic. So, I've just hidden your car keys and you get to stay the night. Do you want the red toothbrush or the blue one? Another said, "I guess one really cool strategy would be for a small "l" libertarian to run as a fiscally conservative Democrat!!!" --- Why do you think the Ds took the lead to kill the blanket primary? They HATE Tim Shelton. It is nearly certain that when the dust settles in that fracas that strategy will not be available. And another, "I think that the American system works best with a majority party, rather than multiple minority parties that form a majority coalition." --- The problem is there is no way to tell whether that hypothesis is true or not, except to the extent we can draw on the experiences of the 19th century. The "progressive movement" brought radical changes to the American system of elections, which had the largely unintended result of making the Ds and Rs virtual gatekeepers to partisan office. Even as early as 1911 Helen Keller saw the consequence. "We are asked to vote for Tweedledom and Tweedledee," she wrote to a friend. Most current ballot access law is relatively recent, and came mostly from litigation, not the benevolence of legislatures dominated by Ds and Rs. The current regime for 3rd parties and independents is nothing but table scraps to provide the patina of constitutionality to a system that protects the dominant parties. Do some research on Duverger's Law sometime, and then notice how conveniently nearly all election systems are designed to take full benefit of the principles involved. Bruce: do you know Eric? I know him a little, and it seems to me that you have no reason to think he is being dishonest. Just because he does not fully explain it to your satisfaction doesn't mean he's not telling you what he really thinks. I disagree with him on this issue, but I wouldn't dare even think he was being dishonest about his motivations (either with you, or with himself) unless I had exceptionally good reason. And I see none. Criticize his views if you must, but I think your criticisms of his motives are out of line. (There I go, being tolerant again ...) We simply place differing values on the existence of 3rd parties in our political process. If ours was a parliamentary from of government I might share your view. I simply don't believe they're as meaningful in our system as you believe, and rarely do 3rd parties candidates have a truly substantive impact on a race, let alone win. Meanwhile, I would similarly object if Aaron Dixon had made the same choice you did. And I would object to a 3rd party candidate of similar low-profile and of any idealogical persuasion interjecting themselves into a debate between, say, Gregoire and Rossi. You say you took something away from McGavick. I think you took time from away from both he and Cantwell. They were actually running serious campaigns with a chance of winning. With all due respect, you weren't doing that and didn't deserve to be on the stage. "I think [Bruce] took time from away from both [McGavick] and Cantwell. They were actually running serious campaigns with a chance of winning. With all due respect, you weren't doing that and didn't deserve to be on the stage." What an odd thing to say today. Now, with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, we know for certain that McGavick had no chance of winning. I mean, he lost. So, we now know he was going to lose. The only person with a chance of winning was Cantwell. Frankly, McGavick's appearance in the debate was a complete waste of everyone's time because his candidacy isn't going to significantly affect politics. Guthrie at least may have helped grow the L party. The fallicy in the perspective that only candidates with a so-called "chance of winning" deserve to get air time is in believing that this year's election matters. It does not. Here's my prediction for 2009 (after the '08 elections): Home prices in Puget Sound will be somewhat higher than they are today. If you have a job, you'll be earning slightly more. Overall taxes will be a little higher, and the size, intrusiveness, and cost of both federal and state government will be 5-8% higher than now. Gasoline will be around $3 a gallon. The war will be winding down because of political pressure, but still thousands of American service personnel will be deployed to the Middle East. I predict that all this will be true whether you cast your ballot for a D, R, L, Green or Constitution Party candidate in '08. Why? Because politics is a long-term project. To affect politics, you need millions of votes; to get millions of votes, you have to get hundreds of thousands, and to get hundreds of thousands, you need to find a way to get started on thousands. Like trying to turn a supertanker in Puget Sound with a small tugboat, it doesn't happen instantaneously; it takes a long time working diligently. If you never start, you never, ever get the tanker turned. So, Bruce's appearance was a start. It exposed millions of voters to the L party. Whether he was likely to win in '06 is irrelevant. If voters are never exposed to alternatives, then we're stuck with Ds and Rs as our only choice forever. Bruce's appearance was one of many small efforts to change the political landscape over the long-haul. And, it's that long-haul that really counts. You (D's & R's) gripe and moan and complain about how corrupt the poltical system is, but the first moment a new candidate comes to the table with fresh ideas, you attack him for wasting your precious time. Where's the logic in allowing fellow competitors to decide who gets to play on the field with you? Of course they will vote to exclude all new-comers. Heck, if they thought they could get away with it, they'd vote to exclude everyone but themselves. Who wouldn't? ...given the chance. I agree with J. Mills that it takes baby steps for any type of political change to occur. To allow the entrenched parties the power to snuff out new voices flies in the face of what a democratic republic is supposed to be. To claim that having more than two candidates on a stage is a waste of time and/or is confusing is a reflection on your inability to follow a story for more than thirty seconds. Don't push your attention deficit disorder onto me. I, unlike you, can assess multiple viewpoints at the same time. R's and D's have become two sides of the same coin. As Einstein said, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. How do you imagine we'll every fix our political problems if we keep electing the same people back to office time and time again? We need fresh voices and different viewpoints to shake things up. The only way we'll ever be exposed to either of those will be to allow multiple parties to come and debate the issues.
October 25, 2012 Tomorrow we host a three year old’s birthday party. There is a Peppa Pig cake, they’ll be party games and I’m fairly convinced after about 20 mins I’ll be desperately trying to encourage them to play an elongated game of sleeping lions. I get one privilege at the kids birthday parties, one domain which is mine and mine only: Music. That’s right people, I DJ for toddler birthday parties. Yep, you thought that small children like nursery rhymes and the Wiggles, no, no they don’t. They like The Clash, I have proven this. So, with a party looming I’ve been scouting the interwebs looking for kid friendly songs, and by ‘kid friendly’ I mean no audible swearing and only oblique references to drugs, sex or other misdemeanours. Whilst on the search I stumbled across one of my fav music blogs, yvynyl who introduced me to the quite superb Leapling. They’ve recently signed to Father / Daughter records and have released the perfectly paced Seventeen: © 2013 SGTMT \| Theme by Eleven Themes
Here they are, my top 10 life lessons boiled down. I regularly ask people I know for their 10 best lessons in life. Everybody has lessons to share whether it’s about their best skill or it’s their life lessons learned. I figured since I regularly ask people for their best lessons, I might share some of mine. This particular set is the result of me thinking really hard for 10 minutes (at which point I had to send my email), so they are likely to change as I give them more thought. As you’ll see below, there’s an important lesson I learned that helped me settle for these 10 lessons as “good enough for now”, with the idea that I can revisit later. My Top 10 Lessons Here is a summary of my top 10 lessons learned in life: - Lesson 1. Model the best. - Lesson 2. Be YOUR best. - Lesson 3. Set boundaries. - Lesson 4. Life’s not static. - Lesson 5. Follow the growth. - Lesson 6. Focus on one pitch at a time. - Lesson 7. Version your perfection. - Lesson 8. It’s what you know and who you know. - Lesson 9. Use metaphors to shape your experience. - Lesson 10. Structure your success. Lesson 1. Model the Best. If you want to be great at something, learn from the best. Find the best of the best. When I studied martial arts, I studied Bill Superfoot Wallace. He set a bar I never would have imagined possible. That’s what heroes do. They inspire and they prove a path. I learn from everyone around me. I find their super skill, and they are usually more than happy to share what they know. Lesson 2. Be Your Best. You can’t always be THE best, but you can always be YOUR best. You can’t ask yourself for more than that. Because I always modeled from the best, I always felt like I missed the mark. I had to learn 3 things: 1) When you’re just starting out, you’re the sapling. The might oak took time. 2) Enjoy the journey. 3) Your best is not the same as somebody else’s. I remember John Wooden saying in an interview once that the key to his peace of mind was knowing that he gave his best. I think the key to giving your best, is knowing where you have your best to give, and playing to your strengths. The thing that always keeps me going here is I remember that giving up is easy. Forgiving yourself is not. I don’t want to be on the rocking chair thinking, what if I gave just a little more. Lesson 3. Set Boundaries. Sure, set boundaries says the guy who regularly worked 100+ hours. That’s what playing to your strengths and following your passion can do to you. I didn’t burn out. Passion fueled me. I just didn’t know when to stop. I also didn’t know that limits are your friend. I have a simple frame now for setting boundaries, and I invest in my life hot spots: mind, body, emotions, career, financial, relationships, and fun. Another key to boundaries is knowing your values. This is especially true if you’re a people pleaser. You can aim to please, but don’t lose yourself in the process. Lesson 4. Life’s Not Static. When I was younger, I thought I would make a lot of money and then live off of it. I was thinking like a static lake instead of a flowing river. Things flow in and things flow out. People flow in and people flow out. Your body changes. Your skills change over time. I’m regularly surprised by how people have made something more of themselves or how they’ve let themselves go. It’s also a reminder to find a sustainable path in life. Seasons change, and there are cycles to everything. It’s the ebb and flow, along with the waxing and waning. Lesson 5. Follow the Growth. This goes hand-in-hand with life’s not static. When you get on your surfboard of life, follow the growth. Find the waves, and when there’s no wave make one. I pick projects that grow me. I find people that grow me. I look to the market and I find the growth. Related to this, it’s important to know when to quit. Cut your losses. Quitting the right things and sticking with the right things is an art and science. It means knowing yourself and working on your anticipation skills. I regularly look to the future, find the trends, and figure out where to put my time and energy for the best waves. Life’s not static. You’re growing or dying, climbing or sliding. Don’t merely be a shadow of your former self. Become the mighty Oak. Lesson 6. Focus on One Pitch at a Time. Focus on one pitch at a time, but check the scoreboard now and then. Your brain works better when it’s in the zone. Your get in the zone by being in the moment. When I catch myself focusing too much on the scoreboard, I remind myself to keep my eye on the ball. This improves my focus, and it helps me find my flow. I make a time to check the scoreboard, but I don’t let it disrupt my focus or rattle my cage. It’s the key to how I knock the ball out of the park. Lesson 7. Version Your Perfection. When you try to be your best and you model from excellence, it can be tough to set the right bar at a given point in time. There’s never enough time and you can never be too good. Surprisingly, I didn’t learn one of my most important lessons until I joined Microsoft. version your perfection. Focus on “good enough for now” and improve with each release. Getting incrementally better over time is better than never being good enough, or never being ready. I get from idea to done quickly, and then I improve. Feedback is your friend. It’s a learning loop. I’d rather get the learnings and results from 20 dry runs, than one perfect run, that falls short. Good enough for today, means I’ll be back in the batters box, swinging better tomorrow. It’s this very lesson that let me have 10 life lessons for now, while I can refine again later, and this is a key concept behind my You 2.0 guide. Lesson 8. It’s What You Know and Who You Know Just when you thought being good enough, was good enough. Unfortunately, in my experience, it’s never been the case. The people in your life can create or limit opportunities. If you keep bumping into glass ceilings, you might be trying to go it alone. Life’s a team sport and it’s better together. You’re the sum of your network, and in today’s landscape, your network will open or close doors for you. Life’s not static and neither is your network. Tune it and prune it like a Bonzai tree. Add the catalysts to your life, and limit the time you spend with the drains. Life’s too short, not to stack yourself for success. Lesson 9. Use Metaphors to Shape Your Experience The metaphors you use can bring you down, or lift you up. Is your life a tragedy or a comedy or a drama? Are you nose to the grindstone or unleashing your best? Connect your metaphors to your values and you light up your life. Adventure is one of my values. I found this out at one of my recent leadership trainings. Suddenly thinks make so much more sense. It runs deep. I always thought I was going to be Indiana Jones (but with Numchucks instead of a whip.) I’ve got a lust for the open road, whether I’m on my motorcycle or in my Jeep with the top down. When I first joined Microsoft, the words “Go West young man!” echoed through my mind. Whenever I lead a project, I make it an epic adventure. When life’s an adventure, you deal with the pitfalls. Figure out what your metaphors are and if they aren’t working for you, swap them out. Lesson 10. Structure Your Success The most effective people I know set themselves up for success. They have personal success patterns for thinking, feeling, and doing. They have checklists, mantras, and metaphors that remind them of what works, and they throw away what doesn’t. I’ve made success a journey and I continuously learn and refine patterns and practices for mind, body, emotions, career, financial, relationships and fun. This helps me deal with the set backs and always find a way forward. I’ve learned coping strategies for some of life’s worst scenarios. I’ve adopted some simple practices for weekly results, such as my Monday Vision, Daily Outcomes, and Friday Reflection pattern that help me get back on my horse, when I get knocked down. It’s more than just at the personal level. I also structure success at the social and environment level. Who I hang with and the container I’m in is an important influence. Your container limits or enables you. Your personal development helps you succeed, but your container helps you amplify your results, and your support network can help you get back on your feet when you need it most. I’ll have more for another day. I think it’s about time for me to compile my best of the best life lessons learned. Consider this a starter set and version 1.0. How about you? What’s your top life lessons learned? Photo by Official Star Wars Blog.
The South Norfolk Guest House offers a warm and friendly welcome to individuals, families and groups within this former village school. With 9 comfortable en-suite bedrooms (4 ground floor), we cater for both short and long term stays. There is a local shop, the neighbouring Fox and Hounds country pub (01379 677506), cycle routes and plenty of walks within the area. Evening meals are also available on a pre-booked basis. Located centrally between Norwich and Diss, access to South Norfolk's numerous market towns such as Wymondham, Harleston, Loddon, Hingham, Bungay, Beccles and Attleborough are all found within a small radius. So whether guests are visiting friends, on holiday in the county, working in the area, visiting the region's famous steam museums, driving/spectating at the new Snetterton 300 race circuit, attending the auctions rooms at the nearby market towns... a comfortable stay is guaranteed whatever the reason. Beyond this people can relax and witness the world famous Norfolk Broads (Wroxham, Hoveton, Horning, Hickling, Coltishall, Beccles) with its 125 miles of navigable waterways and precious wildlife. Or they can go to Norwich and discover its fine heritage, with a buzzing cultural scene, superb restaurants, and voted as one of the UK's top ten shopping places! For those seeking the sea, then the coastal towns of Southwold, Lowestoft, Great Yarmouth, Cromer and Sheringham will not disappoint. We accept credit/debit cards without charge, and pets by prior arrangement. Downstairs rooms are available for the less able bodied.
Tuesday’s lineup features Alejandro De Aza leading off and playing center, followed by third baseman Brent Morel in the two-hole. Adam Dunn bats third as the DH in front of first baseman Paul Konerko and catcher A.J. Pierzynski. Right fielder Alex Rios bats sixth, with Alexei Ramirez playing short and batting seventh, followed by left fielder Dayan Viciedo and second baseman Gordon Beckham rounding out the order.”It’s not guaranteed to be the Opening Day one,” Ventura said of the lineup. “That’s one of the things that I’ve messed with throughout the spring, is putting guys in different spots.” While Dunn might be a bit of a surprise after hitting .159 in 2011, his .255 (13-for-51) pace in the Cactus League, with five homers and 14 RBIs, has him looking like a middle-of-the-lineup man again. Dunn also posted a .415 on-base percentage this spring. “He gets on base a lot,” Ventura said. “Even though he might strike out a little bit, he does walk a lot. To me that’s a good thing right in front of Paul.” Good to hear a White Sox manager not dismissing walking. Other White Sox links: - James looks at the final roster cuts, and the Conor Jackson signing. - J.J. wonders if the Sox can afford to lose a starting pitcher, and previews the White Sox infield. He, also, has a hilarious 30 second video of Kenny Williams taking Batting Practice. - Fangraphs’ Chris Cwik looks at the closer competition.
NASA will soon announce that Glenn Research Center Director Ray Lugo and Johnson Space Center Director Mike Coats are leaving their respective positions. All-hands meetings have reportedly been scheduled for tomorrow (Friday) at JSC and GRC. As was reported on NASAWatch in August, these departures, which will be described as "retirement", are part of a larger attempt by NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden to rearrange field center management at NASA. Bolden is still attempting to replace several other NASA field center directors including Ames Research Center Director Pete Worden - despite repeated pressure on Bolden from the White House and Congress not to do so. Bolden Seeks To Replace Multiple Center Directors, earlier post
Reviewed by Tifffany P. (age 8) I really enjoyed reading this book because it made me feel like a spy or detective. My favorite part of the book was the V.F.D. conversation because I got to act it out with friends at lunch! This book was really puzzling. I felt puzzled when I read this book because each answer lead to another question! I thought this book was like nothing I read before! I think Lemony Snicket is an interesting character in this book because he tries to puzzle the reader. I think you would like this book if you like being a detective because this book has lots of clues that are very challenging to solve. All the clues are not written and you might learn something and reading this book! Read this book if you like mysteries and being a detective.
You should have arrived from Deb W.'s blog, and now you're visiting me (Suzanne Bier)! If you arrived directly onto my blog and want to start at the beginning, just visit the DeNami blog for the full list of hop participants! Our theme for this month's hop is SUMMER! Don't forget to leave comments for ALL the participants as you hop along...TWO lucky commenters will each win a $20 mini shopping spree on the DeNami Designs web site! For this hop, I customized a tutorial that I found online to make a smaller version that fits on a water bottle! It has a little pocket on the front, which is the perfect size to store drink mix packets for a picnic or other summertime fun! \|DeNami stamps used: Surfer Chickie, Umbrella Garnish, Party Time Stamp Set.\| The sentiment used on this card is from another manufacturer...I stamped it to show placement on this example. (This size could fit four regular bottle drink packets...unfortunately, I didn't have any of those, so I used the 2-quart size for my example!) Don't forget...you have until Monday, July 9, 2012, 11:59 pm PST, to leave comments on all the blogs (to be eligible for one of the two $20 DeNami mini shopping sprees). Thanks so much for stopping by! I hope you enjoy the rest of the hop!
Joe the Plumber versus the elite consensus that would shut him up. Joe Wurzelbacher probably didn’t intend to draw the wrath of the elite when he gave an interview to Christianity Today. But the fiery thunderbolts hurled from our cultural Olympus are crashing all around Joe the Plumber now. “I’ve had some friends that are actually homosexual,” Wurzelbacher said. “And, I mean, they know where I stand, and they know that I wouldn’t have them anywhere near my children.” In a free country, we are told, everybody has a right to their own opinion. Wurzelbacher is quickly learning that, according to the American elite, what you actually have a right to is their opinion. There are certain subjects – and homosexuality is certainly one of them – where the elite have reached a consensus about the limits of permissible discourse, and no one who aspires to influence in American society can be allowed to contradict that consensus. The suggestion that homosexuals might be a harmful influence on children is an opinion so at odds with the elite consensus that Joe the Plumber could not have inspired more furious denunciation if he had quoted Mein Kampf. Yet it is a fact that the Boy Scouts do not accept gay scoutmasters, and it is a fact that — despite the Pentagon’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy — homosexual behavior is still prohibited under the Universal Code of Military Justice. Four decades after the Stonewall riot in New York that is generally cited as the spark that ignited the gay-rights movement, attitudes like Joe’s remain far more widespread than you might realize if all you knew of American opinion was what you’ve seen in the news media. Despite the elite consensus – which is so influential in New York, Hollywood and Washington, D.C. – the average resident of Lucas County, Ohio, probably agrees with Wurzelbacher. Joe the Plumber is an Ordinary American, someone whose existence is lived outside the world where elite opinion is ubiquitous and omnipotent. The Ordinary American is not a journalist, a movie producer, an academic or a politician. News media, entertainment, education and politics are endeavors that shape public attitudes, and for this reason the elite have striven for decades to exclude from those fields anyone who might dispute their consensus. Everyone jokes about “political correctness,” but humor aside – and the PC commissars can be frighteningly humorless about such things – those who contradict the consensus in elite professions risk career suicide. Just ask Larry Summers, whose mild dissent from feminist dogma made him persona non grata at Harvard University. Because of his long record of accomplishment and his status as a liberal Democrat in good standing, Summers had other opportunities beyond Harvard. Imagine, however, if Summers had been a mere graduate student, or an untenured faculty member. The elite feminists made an example of Summers, to inspire terror in the hearts of any upstart academic who might have considered questioning their consensus. Torquemada at the height of the Inquisition could not have more effectively intimidated heretics. Of course, it’s not just gay rights or feminism. It’s also everything from religion to economics to race relations to global warming. On any subject that interests the elite, there is a consensus — and, make no mistake, it is an identifiably liberal or “progressive” consensus — against which one argues at peril of destruction. Why doesn’t the Ordinary American endorse the consensus? Or, perhaps more accurately, why does the Ordinary American (whatever his personal opinion on such issues) not become furiously angry when he encounters dissent from the consensus? Well, if you’re a plumber — or an accountant or a truck driver or a small business owner — your ability to fulfill your hopes and ambitions is not dependent on the approval of the elite. For most people in Toledo, Ohio, getting hired or getting promoted has nothing to do with their willingness to parrot the “correct” opinion on tax cuts or foreign policy. The nurse or construction worker in Toledo (or Tucson or Tulsa) may have very strong and well-informed opinions on political issues, but nobody really cares about their opinions except maybe at election time. A man of faith in a godless age is hitting Americans where it hurts. Mr. and Mrs. American Spectator Reader, let P.J. O’Rourke talk sense to your kids. In Britain, defending your property can get you life. The debacle of this president’s administration is both a cause and a symptom of the decline of American values. Unless Congress impeaches him, that decline will go on unchecked. An eminent jurist surveys the damage and assesses the chances for the recovery of our culture. It won’t take long for conservatives to scratch this presidential wannabe off their 2008 scorecard. The American Christmas, like the songs that celebrate it, makes room for everybody under the rainbow. Is that why so many people seem to be hostile to it? Was the President done in by the economy, or by the politics of the economy?
How We Found the Missing Memristor The memristor--the functional equivalent of a synapse--could revolutionize circuit design Image: Bryan Christie Design THINKING MACHINE This artist's conception of a memristor shows a stack of multiple crossbar arrays, the fundamental structure of R. Stanley Williams's device. Because memristors behave functionally like synapses, replacing a few transistors in a circuit with memristors could lead to analog circuits that can think like a human brain. It’s time to stop shrinking. Moore’s Law, the semiconductor industry’s obsession with the shrinking of transistors and their commensurate steady doubling on a chip about every two years, has been the source of a 50-year technical and economic revolution. Whether this scaling paradigm lasts for five more years or 15, it will eventually come to an end. The emphasis in electronics design will have to shift to devices that are not just increasingly infinitesimal but increasingly capable. Earlier this year, I and my colleagues at Hewlett-Packard Labs, in Palo Alto, Calif., surprised the electronics community with a fascinating candidate for such a device: the memristor. It had been theorized nearly 40 years ago, but because no one had managed to build one, it had long since become an esoteric curiosity. That all changed on 1 May, when my group published the details of the memristor in Nature. Combined with transistors in a hybrid chip, memristors could radically improve the performance of digital circuits without shrinking transistors. Using transistors more efficiently could in turn give us another decade, at least, of Moore’s Law performance improvement, without requiring the costly and increasingly difficult doublings of transistor density on chips. In the end, memristors might even become the cornerstone of new analog circuits that compute using an architecture much like that of the brain. For nearly 150 years, the known fundamental passive circuit elements were limited to the capacitor (discovered in 1745), the resistor (1827), and the inductor (1831). Then, in a brilliant but underappreciated 1971 paper, Leon Chua, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, predicted the existence of a fourth fundamental device, which he called a memristor. He proved that memristor behavior could not be duplicated by any circuit built using only the other three elements, which is why the memristor is truly fundamental. Memristor is a contraction of ”memory resistor,” because that is exactly its function: to remember its history. A memristor is a two-terminal device whose resistance depends on the magnitude and polarity of the voltage applied to it and the length of time that voltage has been applied. When you turn off the voltage, the memristor remembers its most recent resistance until the next time you turn it on, whether that happens a day later or a year later. Think of a resistor as a pipe through which water flows. The water is electric charge. The resistor’s obstruction of the flow of charge is comparable to the diameter of the pipe: the narrower the pipe, the greater the resistance. For the history of circuit design, resistors have had a fixed pipe diameter. But a memristor is a pipe that changes diameter with the amount and direction of water that flows through it. If water flows through this pipe in one direction, it expands (becoming less resistive). But send the water in the opposite direction and the pipe shrinks (becoming more resistive). Further, the memristor remembers its diameter when water last went through. Turn off the flow and the diameter of the pipe ”freezes” until the water is turned back on. That freezing property suits memristors brilliantly for computer memory. The ability to indefinitely store resistance values means that a memristor can be used as a nonvolatile memory. That might not sound like very much, but go ahead and pop the battery out of your laptop, right now—no saving, no quitting, nothing. You’d lose your work, of course. But if your laptop were built using a memory based on memristors, when you popped the battery back in, your screen would return to life with everything exactly as you left it: no lengthy reboot, no half-dozen auto-recovered files. But the memristor’s potential goes far beyond instant-on computers to embrace one of the grandest technology challenges: mimicking the functions of a brain. Within a decade, memristors could let us emulate, instead of merely simulate, networks of neurons and synapses. Many research groups have been working toward a brain in silico: IBM’s Blue Brain project, Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm, and Harvard’s Center for Brain Science are just three. However, even a mouse brain simulation in real time involves solving an astronomical number of coupled partial differential equations. A digital computer capable of coping with this staggering workload would need to be the size of a small city, and powering it would require several dedicated nuclear power plants. Memristors can be made extremely small, and they function like synapses. Using them, we will be able to build analog electronic circuits that could fit in a shoebox and function according to the same physical principles as a brain. A hybrid circuit—containing many connected memristors and transistors—could help us research actual brain function and disorders. Such a circuit might even lead to machines that can recognize patterns the way humans can, in those critical ways computers can’t—for example, picking a particular face out of a crowd even if it has changed significantly since our last memory of it. The story of the memristor is truly one for the history books. When Leon Chua, now an IEEE Fellow, wrote his seminal paper predicting the memristor, he was a newly minted and rapidly rising professor at UC Berkeley. Chua had been fighting for years against what he considered the arbitrary restriction of electronic circuit theory to linear systems. He was convinced that nonlinear electronics had much more potential than the linear circuits that dominate electronics technology to this day. Chua discovered a missing link in the pairwise mathematical equations that relate the four circuit quantities—charge, current, voltage, and magnetic flux—to one another. These can be related in six ways. Two are connected through the basic physical laws of electricity and magnetism, and three are related by the known circuit elements: resistors connect voltage and current, inductors connect flux and current, and capacitors connect voltage and charge. But one equation is missing from this group: the relationship between charge moving through a circuit and the magnetic flux surrounded by that circuit—or more subtly, a mathematical doppelgänger defined by Faraday’s Law as the time integral of the voltage across the circuit. This distinction is the crux of a raging Internet debate about the legitimacy of our memristor [see sidebar, ”Resistance to Memristance ”]. Chua’s memristor was a purely mathematical construct that had more than one physical realization. What does that mean? Consider a battery and a transformer. Both provide identical voltages—for example, 12 volts of direct current—but they do so by entirely different mechanisms: the battery by a chemical reaction going on inside the cell and the transformer by taking a 110â¿¿V ac input, stepping that down to 12 V ac, and then transforming that into 12 V dc. The end result is mathematically identical—both will run an electric shaver or a cellphone, but the physical source of that 12 V is completely different. Conceptually, it was easy to grasp how electric charge could couple to magnetic flux, but there was no obvious physical interaction between charge and the integral over the voltage. Chua demonstrated mathematically that his hypothetical device would provide a relationship between flux and charge similar to what a nonlinear resistor provides between voltage and current. In practice, that would mean the device’s resistance would vary according to the amount of charge that passed through it. And it would remember that resistance value even after the current was turned off. He also noticed something else—that this behavior reminded him of the way synapses function in a brain. Even before Chua had his eureka moment, however, many researchers were reporting what they called ”anomalous” current-voltage behavior in the micrometer-scale devices they had built out of unconventional materials, like polymers and metal oxides. But the idiosyncrasies were usually ascribed to some mystery electrochemical reaction, electrical breakdown, or other spurious phenomenon attributed to the high voltages that researchers were applying to their devices. As it turns out, a great many of these reports were unrecognized examples of memristance. After Chua theorized the memristor out of the mathematical ether, it took another 35 years for us to intentionally build the device at HP Labs, and we only really understood the device about two years ago. So what took us so long? It’s all about scale. We now know that memristance is an intrinsic property of any electronic circuit. Its existence could have been deduced by Gustav Kirchhoff or by James Clerk Maxwell, if either had considered nonlinear circuits in the 1800s. But the scales at which electronic devices have been built for most of the past two centuries have prevented experimental observation of the effect. It turns out that the influence of memristance obeys an inverse square law: memristance is a million times as important at the nanometer scale as it is at the micrometer scale, and it’s essentially unobservable at the millimeter scale and larger. As we build smaller and smaller devices, memristance is becoming more noticeable and in some cases dominant. That’s what accounts for all those strange results researchers have described. Memristance has been hidden in plain sight all along. But in spite of all the clues, our finding the memristor was completely serendipitous. In 1995, I was recruited to HP Labs to start up a fundamental research group that had been proposed by David Packard. He decided that the company had become large enough to dedicate a research group to long-term projects that would be protected from the immediate needs of the business units. Packard had an altruistic vision that HP should ”return knowledge to the well of fundamental science from which HP had been withdrawing for so long.” At the same time, he understood that long-term research could be the strategic basis for technologies and inventions that would directly benefit HP in the future. HP gave me a budget and four researchers. But beyond the comment that ”molecular-scale electronics” would be interesting and that we should try to have something useful in about 10 years, I was given carte blanche to pursue any topic we wanted. We decided to take on Moore’s Law. At the time, the dot-com bubble was still rapidly inflating its way toward a resounding pop, and the existing semiconductor road map didn’t extend past 2010. The critical feature size for the transistors on an integrated circuit was 350 nanometers; we had a long way to go before atomic sizes would become a limitation. And yet, the eventual end of Moore’s Law was obvious. Someday semiconductor researchers would have to confront physics-based limits to their relentless descent into the infinitesimal, if for no other reason than that a transistor cannot be smaller than an atom. (Today the smallest components of transistors on integrated circuits are roughly 45 nm wide, or about 220 silicon atoms.) That’s when we started to hang out with Phil Kuekes, the creative force behind the Teramac (tera-operation-per-second multiarchitecture computer)—an experimental supercomputer built at HP Labs primarily from defective parts, just to show it could be done. He gave us the idea to build an architecture that would work even if a substantial number of the individual devices in the circuit were dead on arrival. We didn’t know what those devices would be, but our goal was electronics that would keep improving even after the devices got so small that defective ones would become common. We ate a lot of pizza washed down with appropriate amounts of beer and speculated about what this mystery nanodevice would be. We were designing something that wouldn’t even be relevant for another 10 to 15 years. It was possible that by then devices would have shrunk down to the molecular scale envisioned by David Packard or perhaps even be molecules. We could think of no better way to anticipate this than by mimicking the Teramac at the nanoscale. We decided that the simplest abstraction of the Teramac architecture was the crossbar, which has since become the de facto standard for nanoscale circuits because of its simplicity, adaptability, and redundancy. The crossbar is an array of perpendicular wires. Anywhere two wires cross, they are connected by a switch. To connect a horizontal wire to a vertical wire at any point on the grid, you must close the switch between them. Our idea was to open and close these switches by applying voltages to the ends of the wires. Note that a crossbar array is basically a storage system, with an open switch representing a zero and a closed switch representing a one. You read the data by probing the switch with a small voltage. Like everything else at the nanoscale, the switches and wires of a crossbar are bound to be plagued by at least some nonfunctional components. These components will be only a few atoms wide, and the second law of thermodynamics ensures that we will not be able to completely specify the position of every atom. However, a crossbar architecture builds in redundancy by allowing you to route around any parts of the circuit that don’t work. Because of their simplicity, crossbar arrays have a much higher density of switches than a comparable integrated circuit based on transistors. But implementing such a storage system was easier said than done. Many research groups were working on such a cross-point memory—and had been since the 1950s. Even after 40 years of research, they had no product on the market. Still, that didn’t stop them from trying. That’s because the potential for a truly nanoscale crossbar memory is staggering; picture carrying around the entire Library of Congress on a thumb drive. One of the major impediments for prior crossbar memory research was the small off-to-on resistance ratio of the switches (40 years of research had never produced anything surpassing a factor of 2 or 3). By comparison, modern transistors have an off-to-on resistance ratio of 10 000 to 1. We calculated that to get a high-performance memory, we had to make switches with a resistance ratio of at least 1000 to 1. In other words, in its off state, a switch had to be 1000 times as resistive to the flow of current as it was in its on state. What mechanism could possibly give a nanometer-scale device a three-orders-of-magnitude resistance ratio? We found the answer in scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), an area of research I had been pursuing for a decade. A tunneling microscope generates atomic-resolution images by scanning a very sharp needle across a surface and measuring the electric current that flows between the atoms at the tip of the needle and the surface the needle is probing. The general rule of thumb in STM is that moving that tip 0.1 nm closer to a surface increases the tunneling current by one order of magnitude. We needed some similar mechanism by which we could change the effective spacing between two wires in our crossbar by 0.3 nm. If we could do that, we would have the 1000:1 electrical switching ratio we needed. Our constraints were getting ridiculous. Where would we find a material that could change its physical dimensions like that? That is how we found ourselves in the realm of molecular electronics. Conceptually, our device was like a tiny sandwich. Two platinum electrodes (the intersecting wires of the crossbar junction) functioned as the ”bread” on either end of the device. We oxidized the surface of the bottom platinum wire to make an extremely thin layer of platinum dioxide, which is highly conducting. Next, we assembled a dense film, only one molecule thick, of specially designed switching molecules. Over this ”monolayer” we deposited a 2- to 3-nm layer of titanium metal, which bonds strongly to the molecules and was intended to glue them together. The final layer was the top platinum electrode. The molecules were supposed to be the actual switches. We built an enormous number of these devices, experimenting with a wide variety of exotic molecules and configurations, including rotaxanes, special switching molecules designed by James Heath and Fraser Stoddart at the University of California, Los Angeles. The rotaxane is like a bead on a string, and with the right voltage, the bead slides from one end of the string to the other, causing the electrical resistance of the molecule to rise or fall, depending on the direction it moves. Heath and Stoddart’s devices used silicon electrodes, and they worked, but not well enough for technological applications: the off-to-on resistance ratio was only a factor of 10, the switching was slow, and the devices tended to switch themselves off after 15 minutes. Our platinum devices yielded results that were nothing less than frustrating. When a switch worked, it was spectacular: our off-to-on resistance ratios shot past the 1000 mark, the devices switched too fast for us to even measure, and having switched, the device’s resistance state remained stable for years (we still have some early devices we test every now and then, and we have never seen a significant change in resistance). But our fantastic results were inconsistent. Worse yet, the success or failure of a device never seemed to depend on the same thing. We had no physical model for how these devices worked. Instead of rational engineering, we were reduced to performing huge numbers of Edisonian experiments, varying one parameter at a time and attempting to hold all the rest constant. Even our switching molecules were betraying us; it seemed like we could use anything at all. In our desperation, we even turned to long-chain fatty acids—essentially soap—as the molecules in our devices. There’s nothing in soap that should switch, and yet some of the soap devices switched phenomenally. We also made control devices with no molecule monolayers at all. None of them switched. We were frustrated and burned out. Here we were, in late 2002, six years into our research. We had something that worked, but we couldn’t figure out why, we couldn’t model it, and we sure couldn’t engineer it. That’s when Greg Snider, who had worked with Kuekes on the Teramac, brought me the Chua memristor paper from the September 1971 IEEE Transactions on Circuits Theory. ”I don’t know what you guys are building,” he told me, ”but this is what I want.” To this day, I have no idea how Greg happened to come across that paper. Few people had read it, fewer had understood it, and fewer still had cited it. At that point, the paper was 31 years old and apparently headed for the proverbial dustbin of history. I wish I could say I took one look and yelled, ”Eureka!” But in fact, the paper sat on my desk for months before I even tried to read it. When I did study it, I found the concepts and the equations unfamiliar and hard to follow. But I kept at it because something had caught my eye, as it had Greg’s: Chua had included a graph that looked suspiciously similar to the experimental data we were collecting. The graph described the current-voltage (I-V) characteristics that Chua had plotted for his memristor. Chua had called them ”pinched-hysteresis loops”; we called our I-V characteristics ”bow ties.” A pinched hysteresis loop looks like a diagonal infinity symbol with the center at the zero axis, when plotted on a graph of current against voltage. The voltage is first increased from zero to a positive maximum value, then decreased to a minimum negative value and finally returned to zero. The bow ties on our graphs were nearly identical [see graphic, ”Bow Ties”]. That’s not all. The total change in the resistance we had measured in our devices also depended on how long we applied the voltage: the longer we applied a positive voltage, the lower the resistance until it reached a minimum value. And the longer we applied a negative voltage, the higher the resistance became until it reached a maximum limiting value. When we stopped applying the voltage, whatever resistance characterized the device was frozen in place, until we reset it by once again applying a voltage. The loop in the I-V curve is called hysteresis, and this behavior is startlingly similar to how synapses operate: synaptic connections between neurons can be made stronger or weaker depending on the polarity, strength, and length of a chemical or electrical signal. That’s not the kind of behavior you find in today’s circuits. Looking at Chua’s graphs was maddening. We now had a big clue that memristance had something to do with our switches. But how? Why should our molecular junctions have anything to do with the relationship between charge and magnetic flux? I couldn’t make the connection. Two years went by. Every once in a while I would idly pick up Chua’s paper, read it, and each time I understood the concepts a little more. But our experiments were still pretty much trial and error. The best we could do was to make a lot of devices and find the ones that worked. But our frustration wasn’t for nothing: by 2004, we had figured out how to do a little surgery on our little sandwiches. We built a gadget that ripped the tiny devices open so that we could peer inside them and do some forensics. When we pried them apart, the little sandwiches separated at their weakest point: the molecule layer. For the first time, we could get a good look at what was going on inside. We were in for a shock. What we had was not what we had built. Recall that we had built a sandwich with two platinum electrodes as the bread and filled with three layers: the platinum dioxide, the monolayer film of switching molecules, and the film of titanium. But that’s not what we found. Under the molecular layer, instead of platinum dioxide, there was only pure platinum. Above the molecular layer, instead of titanium, we found an unexpected and unusual layer of titanium dioxide. The titanium had sucked the oxygen right out of the platinum dioxide! The oxygen atoms had somehow migrated through the molecules and been consumed by the titanium. This was especially surprising because the switching molecules had not been significantly perturbed by this event—they were intact and well ordered, which convinced us that they must be doing something important in the device. The chemical structure of our devices was not at all what we had thought it was. The titanium dioxide—a stable compound found in sunscreen and white paint—was not just regular titanium dioxide. It had split itself up into two chemically different layers. Adjacent to the molecules, the oxide was stoichiometric TiO 2 , meaning the ratio of oxygen to titanium was perfect, exactly 2 to 1. But closer to the top platinum electrode, the titanium dioxide was missing a tiny amount of its oxygen, between 2 and 3 percent. We called this oxygen-deficient titanium dioxide TiO 2-x , where x is about 0.05. Because of this misunderstanding, we had been performing the experiment backward. Every time I had tried to create a switching model, I had reversed the switching polarity. In other words, I had predicted that a positive voltage would switch the device off and a negative voltage would switch it on. In fact, exactly the opposite was true. It was time to get to know titanium dioxide a lot better. They say three weeks in the lab will save you a day in the library every time. In August of 2006 I did a literature search and found about 300 relevant papers on titanium dioxide. I saw that each of the many different communities researching titanium dioxide had its own way of describing the compound. By the end of the month, the pieces had fallen into place. I finally knew how our device worked. I knew why we had a memristor. The exotic molecule monolayer in the middle of our sandwich had nothing to do with the actual switching. Instead, what it did was control the flow of oxygen from the platinum dioxide into the titanium to produce the fairly uniform layers of TiO 2 and TiO 2-x . The key to the switching was this bilayer of the two different titanium dioxide species [see diagram, ”How Memristance Works”]. The TiO 2 is electrically insulating (actually a semiconductor), but the TiO 2-x is conductive, because its oxygen vacancies are donors of electrons, which makes the vacancies themselves positively charged. The vacancies can be thought of like bubbles in a glass of beer, except that they don’t pop—they can be pushed up and down at will in the titanium dioxide material because they are electrically charged. Now I was able to predict the switching polarity of the device. If a positive voltage is applied to the top electrode of the device, it will repel the (also positive) oxygen vacancies in the TiO 2-x layer down into the pure TiO 2 layer. That turns the TiO 2 layer into TiO 2-x and makes it conductive, thus turning the device on. A negative voltage has the opposite effect: the vacancies are attracted upward and back out of the TiO 2 , and thus the thickness of the TiO 2 layer increases and the device turns off. This switching polarity is what we had been seeing for years but had been unable to explain. On 20 August 2006, I solved the two most important equations of my career—one equation detailing the relationship between current and voltage for this equivalent circuit, and another equation describing how the application of the voltage causes the vacancies to move—thereby writing down, for the first time, an equation for memristance in terms of the physical properties of a material. This provided a unique insight. Memristance arises in a semiconductor when both electrons and charged dopants are forced to move simultaneously by applying a voltage to the system. The memristance did not actually involve magnetism in this case; the integral over the voltage reflected how far the dopants had moved and thus how much the resistance of the device had changed. We finally had a model we could use to engineer our switches, which we had by now positively identified as memristors. Now we could use all the theoretical machinery Chua had created to help us design new circuits with our devices. Triumphantly, I showed the group my results and immediately declared that we had to take the molecule monolayers out of our devices. Skeptical after years of false starts and failed hypotheses, my team reminded me that we had run control samples without molecule layers for every device we had ever made and that those devices had never switched. And getting the recipe right turned out to be tricky indeed. We needed to find the exact amounts of titanium and oxygen to get the two layers to do their respective jobs. By that point we were all getting impatient. In fact, it took so long to get the first working device that in my discouragement I nearly decided to put the molecule layers back in. A month later, it worked. We not only had working devices, but we were also able to improve and change their characteristics at will. But here is the real triumph. The resistance of these devices stayed constant whether we turned off the voltage or just read their states (interrogating them with a voltage so small it left the resistance unchanged). The oxygen vacancies didn’t roam around; they remained absolutely immobile until we again applied a positive or negative voltage. That’s memristance: the devices remembered their current history. We had coaxed Chua’s mythical memristor off the page and into being. Emulating the behavior of a single memristor, Chua showed, requires a circuit with at least 15 transistors and other passive elements. The implications are extraordinary: just imagine how many kinds of circuits could be supercharged by replacing a handful of transistors with one single memristor. The most obvious benefit is to memories. In its initial state, a crossbar memory has only open switches, and no information is stored. But once you start closing switches, you can store vast amounts of information compactly and efficiently. Because memristors remember their state, they can store data indefinitely, using energy only when you toggle or read the state of a switch, unlike the capacitors in conventional DRAM, which will lose their stored charge if the power to the chip is turned off. Furthermore, the wires and switches can be made very small: we should eventually get down to a width of around 4 nm, and then multiple crossbars could be stacked on top of each other to create a ridiculously high density of stored bits. Greg Snider and I published a paper last year showing that memristors could vastly improve one type of processing circuit, called a field-programmable gate array, or FPGA. By replacing several specific transistors with a crossbar of memristors, we showed that the circuit could be shrunk by nearly a factor of 10 in area and improved in terms of its speed relative to power-consumption performance. Right now, we are testing a prototype of this circuit in our lab. And memristors are by no means hard to fabricate. The titanium dioxide structure can be made in any semiconductor fab currently in existence. (In fact, our hybrid circuit was built in an HP fab used for making inkjet cartridges.) The primary limitation to manufacturing hybrid chips with memristors is that today only a small number of people on Earth have any idea of how to design circuits containing memristors. I must emphasize here that memristors will never eliminate the need for transistors: passive devices and circuits require active devices like transistors to supply energy. The potential of the memristor goes far beyond juicing a few FPGAs. I have referred several times to the similarity of memristor behavior to that of synapses. Right now, Greg is designing new circuits that mimic aspects of the brain. The neurons are implemented with transistors, the axons are the nanowires in the crossbar, and the synapses are the memristors at the cross points. A circuit like this could perform real-time data analysis for multiple sensors. Think about it: an intelligent physical infrastructure that could provide structural assessment monitoring for bridges. How much money—and how many lives—could be saved? I’m convinced that eventually the memristor will change circuit design in the 21st century as radically as the transistor changed it in the 20th. Don’t forget that the transistor was lounging around as a mainly academic curiosity for a decade until 1956, when a killer app—the hearing aid—brought it into the marketplace. My guess is that the real killer app for memristors will be invented by a curious student who is now just deciding what EE courses to take next year. About the Author R. STANLEY WILLIAMS, a senior fellow at Hewlett-Packard Labs, wrote this month’s cover story, ”How We Found the Missing Memristor.” Earlier this year, he and his colleagues shook up the electrical engineering community by introducing a fourth fundamental circuit design element. The existence of this element, the memristor, was first predicted in 1971 by IEEE Fellow Leon Chua, of the University of California, Berkeley, but it took Williams 12 years to build an actual device.
Almost four months after a number of vote tabulating computer cards were discovered missing from the West Bloomfield Township Clerk’s Office, the township Police Department is still actively investigating the matter. “We’ve made preliminary interviews of several staff members in (Town Hall) and the next course is to expand even further the number of people that will be interviewed,” West Bloomfield Police Chief Michael Patton said. “There’s no indication of anyone outside of township services being identified as a suspect and there are no current suspects in or out of Town Hall.” The computer cards were discovered missing on the morning of July 11 after they were being tested the previous day in the same secured location from which they disappeared. On Aug. 2, the township’s Election Commission held a public accuracy test of random voting machines with new vote tabulating computer cards. West Bloomfield residents then went to the polls for the Aug. 7 primary election, with no major issues reported. Township Clerk Cathy Shaughnessy has said that if stolen cards were tampered with and used in vote tabulating machines, procedures are in place that would have uncovered the tampering. Patton also said that there was no sign of forced entry into the Clerk’s Office and added that detectives are looking at security camera footage. “A review of any footage to confirm statements made in our interviews will be done,” Patton said. He added that no township Board of Trustees members have yet been interviewed regarding the missing cards, but that if it were necessary, an outside agency would be considered to conduct those interviews. Patton said that the investigation into the missing voting cards was also sidetracked as the department dealt with the murder of Officer Patrick O’Rourke, who died on Sept. 8 after a fatal shooting that took place at a township residence involving a barricaded gunman who eventually took his own life. He added that the vote tabulator card investigation is back on track, but said there is no timetable as to when there could be a breakthrough or a resolution to it. “All we know is that (the cards) are gone and in a situation such as this, you want to make sure that the victims are making sure that something like this doesn’t happen again,” Patton said. “So far, the Clerk’s Office is taking these recommendations to heart.”
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Historic Sites in Journalism Postmark deadline for nominations: March 20 Download nomination form Click here to download the nomination form. Complete List of Historic Sites The Silverton Standard & the Miner Read press release White Hall, Eastern Kentucky University University of Mississippi Hubbard Broadcasting and KSTP-TV Denver, Co., Denver Press Club Milwaukee , WI., Milwaukee Press Club, oldest continuously operating press club in the Americas. Los Angeles, Calif., KTLA, leading radio news in the Los Angels community since becoming the first commercially licensed station in LA. Washington, D.C., American News Womens Club Chicago, Chicago Bee Building Tombstone, Ariz., The Tombstone Epitaph Indianapolis, the Indianapolis Recorder. Montpelier - Lancaster, Pennsylvania Washington, D.C., The Senate Press Gallery in honor of Anne N. Royall(1769-1854), the first Capitol Hill news woman New York City, the Algonquin Hotel, initial site of the Overseas Press Club, a meeting place for foreign correspondents. San Francisco, awarded to the San Francisco Chronicle in honor of the founders Michel H. de Young and Charles de Young. The brothers founded the Daily Dramatic Chronicle which appeared as the Chronicle in 1868. Memphis, Tenn., at the Beale Street Baptist Church, in honor of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, editor of the Memphis Free Speech, a Black newspaper. New York City, to The Amsterdam News, the oldest Black newspaper in New York City. Edited by James L. Hicks, first Black journalist accredited to cover the Korean War and the United Nations. Montpelier, VA., the Virginia estate of James Madison. Baltimore, The Sun, in honor of one of the newspapers founders, A. S. Abell. Greenville, Ohio, birthplace of Lowell Thomas, radio and television broadcaster Mississippi State University, Starkville, Miss., marks the site of the personal and professional papers of William Turner Catledge, late editor of The New York Times. New York City, accepted by the Magazine Publishers Association and the American Society of Magazine Editors in honor of Ida Tarbell, muckraking journalist of the turn of the century. Washington, D.C., National Press Club, site of many world news events. Red Wing, Minn., upon occasion of 100th anniversary of founding of National Newspaper Association. Annapolis, Md., at site of Revolutionary War newspaper, Maryland Gazette, published by Jonas Green and his wife, Catherine Hoof Green. New York City, Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971), one of Americas best-known photojournalists. Kansas City, Mo., the Roy Wilkins site at the Kansas City Call, marked by the Kansas City Professional Chapter in recognition of Roy Wilkins editorship there between 1923 and 1931. The Kansas City Association of Black Journalists was a co-sponsor of the dedication. Washington, D.C., United Press International, upon its 75th.anniversary. New York City, Freedoms Journal, the first Black newspaper published in America. Akron, Ohio, Akron Beacon Journal, in honor of John S. Knight, builder of the Knight-Ridder Newspapers Company. Philadelphia, Richard Harding Davis, one of the most adventurous war correspondents of his time who was known for his colorful reportage during six wars. Boston, The Christian Science Monitor, founder Mary Baker Eddy and long-time editor Erwin D. Canham. Newburyport, Mass., William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the Liberator, anti-slavery journal. Atlanta, W. A. Scott II, founder of the Atlanta Daily World, oldest continuing Black owned and controlled daily newspaper in the United States. Charleston, S.C., Elizabeth Timothy, first woman publisher of an American newspaper. Milwaukee, Christopher Latham Sholes, chief inventor of the first practical typewriter. Memphis, Tenn., the Christian Index, the second oldest Black religious newspaper in the nation. Philadelphia, Cyrus H. K. Curtis, who played a major role in consolidating Philadelphia newspapers and founded the Ladies Home Journal. Toledo, Ohio, David Ross Locke (Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby), who created the Nasby Letters and was a forerunner of the muckrakers. Milwaukee, H. V. Kaltenborn, pioneer radio news analyst who was known for his analysis of World War II. New York City, The Wall Street Journal. Richmond, Va., John Mitchell, one of the Souths leading Black reform journalists and editor of the Richmond Planet. Philadelphia, The Pennsylvania Packet or the General Advertiser, the first successful daily newspaper in the United States and first to publish the Declaration of Independence and the U. S. Constitution. Rochester, N.Y., Frederick Douglass, founder in 1847 of the North Star, which with its successor newspapers under Douglasss direction was the leading Black journal in the United States in the antebellum period. Canton, Ohio, Donald Ring Mellett, publisher of the Canton Daily News, who was gunned down in front of his home after editorializing against Cantons lawless elements and city officials ineptness. Worcester, Mass., Isaiah Thomas, American revolutionary editor, printer, pioneer press historian and co-founder and first president of American Antiquarian Society. New York City, The Nation, oldest opinion magazine in the United States. Pittsburgh, John Scull, first editor to transport type and a press across the Alleghenies to establish journalism west of the peaks; founder of Pittsburgh Gazette in 1786. University of Alabama, Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black, eloquent and effective for the principle of a free and untrammeled press. Chicago, the Chicago Defender, for pioneering and continuous leadership and strength in the Black press. Gathland State Park, Md., Townsends War Correspondents Arch, a memorial to Civil War correspondents of the North and the South. Augusta, Ga., the Augusta Chronicle, the Souths oldest newspaper presently publishing. Chicago, the Chicago Tribune. Oologah, Okla., the Will Rogers Home, birthplace of Will Rogers. Philadelphia, Sarah Josepha Hale and Godeys Ladys Book, first major womans magazine of mass circulation published from 1830-1882. Baraboo, Wis., Ansel N. Kellogg and the first newspaper syndicate developed in 1861. Chillicothe, Ohio, the Chillicothe Gazette, oldest newspaper in continuous publication west of the Allegheny Mountains, published since 1800. Chicago, the Chicago Daily News and the nations oldest foreign news service operated by a newspaper. San Francisco, William Randolph Hearst and the San Francisco Examiner. Calhoun, Ga., the Cherokee Phoenix, the Indian-language newspaper of the Cherokee Nation. Sacramento, Calif., the Sacramento Union, oldest daily in the West, founded in 1851. Madison, Wis., the Wisconsin Press Association, oldest continuing state press association in the nation, existing since the 1830s. Des Moines, Iowa, J. N. (Ding) Darling and the Des Moines Register and Tribune. Darlings cartoons catapulted him into national prominence and were a factor in enhancing the great prestige of his newspaper in the first half of the 20th century. Hannibal, Mo., 206 Hill Street, boyhood home of Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) and site of the Hannibal Journal, which started Twain on the way to fame as one of Americas great writers. Lexington, Va., Reid Hall, the journalism building on the campus of Washington and Lee University. Here the first formal instruction in journalism in the history of education was initiated by General Robert E. Lee in 1869. Atlanta, Henry Woodfin Grady (1850-1889), and the Atlanta Constitution, leaders in creating a more comprehensive, interpretative journalism in the South. Gunston Hall, Va., home of George Mason, author of Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776), which gave the first expression of a free press its binding, legal form. Boston, James Franklins New England Courant, first newspaper published in the United States without license or authority. Washington, D.C., the Washington Globe (1831-1845), published by Francis Preston Blair and John C. Rives. Cincinnati, The Centinel of the North-Western Territory, marking the 175th. anniversary of the first newspaper in the Northwest Territory, published in 1793. Philadelphia, and Baltimore, Richard Hoe and Ottmar Mergenthaler, for invention of the rotary press in 1847 and the linotype machine in 1886, respectively. New York City and Washington, D.C., the Associated Press. Establishment of the worlds first private, leased wire for news transmission (1875). Carmel, Calif., Lincoln Steffans (1866-1936), foremost exponent of journalistic crusaders known as muckrakers, whose exposes of corruption and injustice aroused the public conscience. Greencastle, Ind., DePauw University, where Sigma Delta Chi was founded, April 17, 1909. Little Rock, Ark., John N. Heiskell and the Arkansas Gazette, oldest newspaper west of the Mississippi. New York City, News department, Columbia Broadcasting System. Leadership in founding independent radio news system; distinguished reporting and interpretation exemplified by H. V. Kaltenborn and Edward R. Murrow. Washington, D.C., National Intelligencer (1800-1865). Vital force in nations political force and set high standards of journalistic responsibility. New York City, Adolph S. Ochs, largely responsible for the revival of The New York Times. Louisville, Ky., Henry Watterson, outstanding editorialist. Kansas City, Mo., William Rockhill Nelson, founder, Kansas City Star. Hartford, Conn., the Hartford Courant, oldest newspaper of continuous publication in the United States. New York City, James Gordon Bennett. New York City, Horace Greeley, one of the most influential newspaper editors in American history. Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin, statesman and newspaperman. Charlottesville, Va., Thomas Jefferson. Cleveland, Edward Wyllis Scripps and the Cleveland Press. Publisher, founder of the Cleveland Press and chain of newspapers, plus United Press and Newspaper Enterprise Association. New York City, the trial of John Peter Zenger. Baltimore, H. L. Mencken, author and newspaperman. Columbia, Mo., Walter Williams and the University of Missouri School of Journalism. First school of journalism in the nation. Pittsburgh, Radio Station KDKA. Reported Hardings election in 1920. First radio coverage of a national event. New York City, Henry J. Raymond, co-founder and the first editor, The New York Times. Bloomington, Ind., Ernie Pyle, editor, columnist, war correspondent for Scripps-Howard newspapers. Alton, Ill., Elijah Parish Lovejoy, editor, The Observer, and a militant abolitionist assassinated by his enemies. New Orleans, George Wilkins Kendall, co-founder of the New Orleans Picayune, first war correspondent to achieve fame as a regular reporter of military actions. Boston, Mass., The Boston Gazette, second regularly-published paper in the nation. Emporia, Kan., William Allen White, editor and publisher, the Emporia Gazette. Montgomery, Ala., Grover Cleveland Hall, editor, the Montgomery Advertiser. He fought the Ku Klux Klan. St. Louis, Mo., Joseph Pulitzer, founder, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. San Francisco, Calif., James King of William, founder, editor and publisher, the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin. He fought corruption in municipal government and was assassinated by a politician after many threats on his life. A contribution was made to Peter Zenger Memorial Fund. Bennington, Vt., Anthony Haswell, editor and publisher, the Vermont Gazette. He was jailed for fighting the Sedition Act. The Societys Historic Sites in Journalism program honors the people and places that have played important roles in American journalistic history. The program dates back to 1942. The sites were originally marked with a bronze marker, and some honorees include: World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle; Benjamin Franklin; William Randolph Hearst; The Associated Press offices in Washington and New York City; Freedoms Journal, the first Black newspaper published in the United States; and Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. Nominations are open. Self-nominations are permitted. Nomination form should be accompanied by a letter(s) of recommendation that reflects the nominees national historic significance in journalism and why the nominee is deserving of this national recognition. Submit all nomination materials unbound on 8 1/2 x 11 paper. Additional supporting materials are welcomed and should be limited to 10 pages. Nominations should also include an indication of the specific location (i.e. building, street address, inside or outside installation) where a bronze plaque would be placed and the name of a person to be contacted to supply additional information if necessary. Nominators should contact the rightful authorities (such as owner of the building) to ensure that they are amenable to placement of a plaque. Only one historic site may be chosen each year. However, if one of the nominated sites is not selected, it may be resubmitted for future consideration. Winner Announcement and Presentation Honorees will be announced and honored at a special celebration event. A bronze plaque is displayed at the location marking it as a Historic Site in Journalism. Nominations must be postmarked on or before March 20. Nominations should be mailed, faxed or e-mailed to: Historic Sites in Journalism Society of Professional Journalists 3909 N. Meridian St. Indianapolis, IN 46208 For More Information Contact the Director of Awards at 317/927-8000 or email@example.com
These tried and tested old favorites still bring excitement and hours of delight! From ball games to tag and relay races, find an activity that will inspire your kids to go outside and play! Bring old school style back with these 10 awesome playground games and activities Find games and activities that are great for burning energy and having fun with friends. Bring the thrill of the gridiron to your living room wall with this pigskin version of Pin the Tail on the Donkey. A variation on checkers that's a deceptively simple strategy game. Four projects to mark African-American history month A close relation to musical chairs, this game uses towels in place of the classic game's seats. Starting with its amusing name -- Dumb Crambo -- this old game of rhyme and mime,or silent charades, offers lots of laughs. Ring in the new year with this silly game in which players act out notable events of the past 12 months. For a quick after-school or before-dinner activity, try a round of this fun game for two, played on an easy-to-craft homemade game board. Turn a spot in your yard into a giant version of the classic paper-and-pencil game tic-tac-toe. These tried and tested old favorites still bring excitement and hours of delight and nostalgia.
Kids can test their aim and douse their opponent at the same time with this water balloon game of throwing and blocking skills. Fill the buckets to the brim and line them up. Divide into 2 teams (throwers and receivers). The throwers line up several yards away from the buckets and try to toss water balloons into the buckets. Each successful toss is worth 1 point. Each member of the receiving team sits (or kneels) behind a bucket and holds a plastic bat ready to defend his or her bucket by blocking the incoming water balloons. Be sure the buckets are far enough apart that batters won't hit each other. Each thrower tosses 2 balloons, the score is tallied, and then the receivers get a chance to be the throwers and earn points. The teams continue to alternate throwing and blocking. The team with the highest score at the end of 3 rounds wins.
Times are hard right now for lots of people, and many people have heard that the Internet could be a good way to earn a little extra money. The fact is that the Internet is a good way to earn some extra money, but only if you find the right programs. You have to remember that there are plenty of dishonest individuals and they figured out that they can make money by scamming other individuals. Precisely what these individuals do is create a program that looks remarkable but when you get it, it really is worth almost nothing. Right here you will learn how to find the real programs and steer clear of the scams. You’ve got to watch out for those programs which offer you thousands of dollars instantly. You have to have seen those individuals who inform you that you can generate $5,000 your very first day. These kinds of programs are only trying to get your money. And you need to ask yourself, if you had a program that could make you rich overnight would you tell everybody about it? Any individual making ridiculous promises like this, first ought to be shot, but since that’s illegal, you ought to just avoid them like the plague. The programs that sound reasonable are programs you need to begin looking into. Like programs which tell you right off the bat you won’t get rich but you can produce a decent income. A program that produces those claims is actually a reasonable sort of program. But if they also explain how you will not have to do anything because they created a software to do it all for you, run away. While you can find software to help you none of the software programs can do everything for you. If you want to earn money online you will have to put in hard work. Any person or any system that tells you differently, is just plain lying to you. Whenever you see past customer testimonials on any website you should merely pass them by. You may not believe this however loads of individuals will place made up testimonials from others on their sites simply to lure you in. You may, once in a while find a program that would seem to not fall into any of those categories listed above, when that happens, before you join perform a search online for that program and look for reviews. If you are able to find previous customers try to look for their email address and ask them about the program. This is a fantastic way to avoid a scam, even if it doesn’t seem like a scam. Finding a forum that talks about online business programs may also be a great way to check out a program. You can use the forum to obtain real answers from people who have already acquired the program. You may get both positive and negative feedback, however, ask the people who respond if they actually bought the program or if they are just going by whatever they believe or have heard. You can find yourself saving lots of money if you remember to observe the suggestions above. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea though, as there are programs that can help you to earn money online.
Key freshmen among Vols arrested Safety Janzen Jackson and receiver Nu'Keese Richardson, two of coach Lane Kiffin's most prized signees from his first recruiting class, were among three Tennessee football players arrested early Thursday morning in Knoxville on charges of attempted armed robbery. The third player arrested is also a freshman, defensive back Mike Edwards. It was not immediately clear if the players have attorneys. The Herd with Colin Cowherd ESPN's Joe Schad gives us the latest on the three Tennessee players charged in an armed robbery. Schad thinks Charlie Weis needs to win the rest of the games to keep his job. According to a Knoxville City Police report, the arrests stemmed from an attempted robbery outside a convenience store near campus. A powered pellet gun was recovered in the players' car after they were stopped by police near the Gibbs Hall dormitory on campus, where the Vols' freshman football players live. At least one of the players arrested was wearing some type of Tennessee gear during the attempted robbery, according to police. A fourth suspect, a woman alleged to have been driving a car with the three players as passengers, was also arrested. "At this time we are currently evaluating the circumstances surrounding an incident involving Mike Edwards, Janzen Jackson and Nu'Keese Richardson," Tennessee athletic director Mike Hamilton said in a prepared statement. "Any decisions or comments regarding their status will not be made until the evaluations are complete." Don Bosch, an attorney representing Jackson, said his client has been released from jail and maintains his innocence. "As of this afternoon his bond has been reduced from $15,000 to being released on his recognizance," Bosch told WBIR-TV in Knoxville. "Mr. Jackson vehemently asserts his innocence. And we hope that this will become apparent in the next 24 to 48 hours." Richardson was being held Thursday afternoon on a $19,500 bond. Edwards was released on a $19,500 bond. Kiffin discussed the players' arrest after Thursday afternoon's practice. "We've got to get the information in, so we're not going to make any judgments until we have all that information," Kiffin said. "Then we'll go from there once we get it." Kiffin declined to comment specifically about the players' status for Saturday's game at Ole Miss. As recently as Wednesday, during the SEC coaches teleconference, Kiffin had praised his team for not having any off-the-field problems during his tenure and had repeated several times this year that the Vols had been free of any such incidents. Jackson had started in all but two games this season for the Vols and had emerged as one of the better freshman players in the SEC. He was suspended for last week's Memphis game for what Kiffin said was a violation of team rules. According to two sources, that suspension came on the heels of a failed drug test. There was some speculation a week ago that Richardson might be considering a transfer when he wasn't at a practice, but Kiffin said there were no issues and that everything was fine. Richardson scored a touchdown in the Vols' 56-28 win over Memphis last week. Richardson, of Pahokee, Fla., was at the center of Kiffin's dustup with Florida coach Urban Meyer last February. Richardson had been committed to Florida for some time, but switched to Tennessee on signing day. The next day, at a Tennessee recruiting breakfast, Kiffin made his comments alleging Meyer cheated to get Richardson and still wasn't able to sign him. Kiffin was reprimanded by the SEC for those comments. According to the police report, the victims of the robbery were in their car outside a Pilot convenience store, parked next to a Toyota Prius, when a black male approached wearing a hooded sweatshirt, brandishing what appeared to be a handgun, opened the driver's side door and said "Give me everything you have." A second black male also wearing a hooded sweatshirt then came around to the passenger side of the victims' car, opened it and said, "Give us everything you've got." But when the victims opened their wallets and showed they had no money, a third black male approached the other two and said "we've got to go," and all three got into the Prius and drove away, according to the police report. Police said when they pulled over the Prius, they found a black air-powered pellet gun and a pair of hooded sweatshirts. Police also said they found a marijuana grinder, which the driver, Marie Montmarquet, said belonged to her, and a baggie containing what appeared to be marijuana in Montmarquet's jacket. According to police, the victims later identified Edwards and Richardson as the men who had approached them. Chris Low covers SEC football for ESPN.com. Information from The Associated Press was used in this report. More information and video is available from VolunteerTV.com MORE COLLEGE FOOTBALL HEADLINES - Sources: Oklahoma St. limits QB Lunt's options - For Irish, may be BCS or bust for bowl spot - Saban: 'Devil' words 'terribly disappointing' - Running back Richardson will leave Virginia
Soccer betting odds After Schalke slipped to a 2-1 loss to Stuttgart last week, Freiburg know that a fourth straight Bundesliga win at the Mage Solar Stadion will see them pip the Miners to a Champions League spot. Real Sociedad's next stop in their challenge for Spain's final Champions League place is at the Ramón Sánchez Pizjuán. Can the Basque country side stay ahead of Valencia with victory over Sevilla? A win for Spurs against Sunderland will ensure fourth place and secure the riches of Champions League football next season - but only if chief rivals Arsenal drop points against Newcastle. Can Freiburg claim a third straight victory over Schalke?... Sevilla clash with Sociedad in the race for fourth spot... Can Tottenham secure a fourth-place finish?... - Goal Rush Coupon - Premier League Matches - Championship Playoff Final - French Matches - Spanish Matches - Scottish Matches - Italian Matches - 2014 World Cup - Winner
Tennis Betting odds French Open champion Rafael Nadal has been out of action since Wimbledon. However, he is a master on the clay in Paris. Can the Spaniard regain his best form and defend the only Grand Slam title he won in 2012? Andy Murray came agonisingly close to ending Great Britain's 77-year wait for a Wimbledon champion last year but it was Roger Federer which stood in his way. Can the Scot go one step further in SW19 this year? Will Rafael Nadal reign supreme on the clay again?... Can Murray end Britain's wait for a SW19 champion?... - Popular Markets - Outright Markets - Set Markets - Total Games - Total games - Odd/Even - 1st Set - Total Games - 1st player to serve a game to love - Player 1 - 1st Service Game to Deuce - First service game - Player 1 - Player 1 - Score in 1st Service Game - Player 2 - 1st Service Game to Deuce - First service game - Player 2 - Player 2 - Score in 1st Service Game - Who will break serve first? - 2nd Set - Total Games - Handicap Markets - Other Markets
Zajac, who missed all but 15 regular-season games in 2011-12 before returning and playing a role in the Devils' run to the Stanley Cup Final, will earn $46 million over the next 8 years, according to Nick Kypreos. “During his time in New Jersey, Travis Zajac has become a solid, all-situation player and one of the core leaders of our hockey club,” said Lou Lamoriello in the Devils' statement, and obviously, Zajac's prominence in said core saw a major bump when Zach Parise, the leader of it, jumped ship in the summer. Zajac's deal is almost like an object lesson for the new CBA. It's a long-term deal, but unlike the long-term deals we've grown accustomed to, it's within reason, both in terms of term and annual salary. If you've slept through the last six months, you might be rubbing your eyes and wondering what the Hell is going on. As you'll recall, the terms of the new CBA limit contracts to 7 years, unless the player is re-signing with his current team, in which case, they can entice him to stay with the offer an eighth year. (I can imagine agents the league over petitioning clubs to "make it eight".) Obviously, New Jersey offered the full eight. The other big change is in terms of variance from year to year. The difference between two consecutive years of a deal cannot be more than 35 percent, and the variance of any year in the contract must be within 50 percent of the highest year. Hence, Zajac's annual payouts are fairly close together: he'll make $3.5M in the first year, $5M in the second year, $6.5M for the third year through the sixth, and $5.75M in the last two years. That final number is also the cap hit. Pierre Lebrun notes that the deal comes with a full no-trade clause, and wonders if that low first-year might have something to do with escrow. Or maybe it's because the Devils expect to be a little less broke in two years? Obviously, there's no longer anything for us to freak out over or judge, which is a little disappointing. (Unless you think Zajac is overpaid and won't be as good without Parise, which might be true, but what else are you going to do, run the risk of leaving Ilya Kovalchuk without a centre?) But Zajac's contract is evidence that one of the former CBA's great loopholes is officially closed. And the new one has yet to be found.
Yahoo! Contributor Network This article was created on the Yahoo! Contributor Network, where users like you are published on Yahoo! every day. Learn more »Yahoo! Contributor Network Top Six Sexiest Yoga Poses for Couples Partner yoga is a great way for couples to gain flexibility, strength and trust. This type of yoga is great for date nights, Valentine's Day or any time. When looking for the most intimate, sexy poses (asanas) to perform with your partner, try one of these top six sexiest yoga poses for couples. #1 Double Plow (Halasana) The double plow pose looks sexy; however, that is not the only benefit of this asana made for two. The double plow allows couples to rest their legs on one another rather than having the toes touch the floor as they do when performing the regular plow pose. #2 Bow Pose (Dhanurasana) To perform the bow pose for two, couples will turn away from each other as they get into the pose, interlinking their legs like a chain. #3 Seated Bow This sexy asana allows one person to perform the bow pose while the other person sits on the feet of the person engaged in the pose. The seated person will gently rest their hands on their partner's shoulders. The butterfly pose and the forward bend combine to create a match made in heaven. The partner on the bottom performs the butterfly pose while leaning as far forward as they can. Meanwhile, the other person gets into the forward bend pose and rests their head on their partner's upper back. #5 Supported Heron Pose Variation (Krounchasana) The Heron pose becomes a supported pose as each person rests one leg on the other person's shoulder. This asana becomes modified because the leg isn't brought straight up as it is in the original heron pose. Hold this sexy pose for several seconds before switching legs. #6 Camel Pose (Ustrasana) To perform the couples camel pose, face your partner and allow your bodies to touch. Next, hold on to each others arms and gently arch the back. The lower legs should still be touching, and you will not take hold of your ankles as you would in the regular camel pose. Remember to switch legs, arms and positions so muscles are stretched and strengthened equally. Enhance intimacy by adding candles, dimmed lighting and romantic music. Fireplaces, black lights and smoke machines can also add interest to the atmosphere. Practice partner yoga regularly for increased flexibility, toning and trust. More from Rebecca Bardelli: Rebecca completed courses in Medical Terminology, Administrative Medical Assisting, and Coding and Billing. She is recognized by the National Healthcareer Association as a Certified Billing and Coding Specialist (CBCS) and Medical Administrative Assistant (CMAA). In addition, Rebecca is a former gymnast and is avid about yoga, swimming and other athletic activities. Note: This article was written by a Yahoo! contributor. Sign up here to start publishing your own sports content.
Up to 1 man to curb violence after another night marred by dirty play NHLPA boss Donald Fehr must place priority on player safety in summer CBA talks Eight players have been suspended for dangerous actions during the playoffs Raffi Torres put Marian Hossa in a hospital and is likely done for the playoffs It's been difficult to nail down all the key issues that will dominate when the Collective Bargaining Agreement is renegotiated this summer. The revenue split, of course. It's always money. Olympic participation in Sochi and beyond. Holding on to salary in player swaps. There'll be plenty to talk about. But if NHL Players' Association boss Donald Fehr has any real interest in his post beyond proving he can outduel Gary Bettman at high noon, he needs to place a very high priority on the issue that the league has all but abdicated. Eight of Fehr's bosses already have been suspended for dangerous actions that injured or threatened the safety of eight other bosses in just the first week of the playoffs. Last year, the total for the entire postseason was seven -- and even given the heightened competitive drive at this time of year, doesn't that number seem high? But if the cumulative carnage of the last seven days hadn't convinced Fehr of his obligation, the claiming of yet another victim by serial headhunter Raffi Torres on Tuesday night should do the trick. This time he targeted Chicago's supremely skilled Marian Hossa. The assault left Hossa motionless on the ice and ultimately required a stretcher and immediate relocation to a nearby hospital. It was the sort of play that, sadly, has come to define the career of Torres, a player once so highly regarded that he was drafted fifth overall in 2000. The latest blow he inflicted was as nasty as any of those. You can argue it was only borderline late -- and no doubt, his supporters in Phoenix will engage in all sorts of moral relativism as they do just that. What you can't argue is that he traveled a great distance and launched himself off the ice before contact with an opponent who was completely vulnerable. This wasn't a hockey play, and it wasn't a good hit. Good hits hurt. Good hits whittle away at an opponent's will to compete. Good hits don't come with the risk of ending a career. But that's what might have happened here. And thanks to another missed call (and hasn't this been a miserable week for the NHL's beleaguered officials?), Torres never missed a shift while Hossa -- a dangerous player in the best sense of the word -- was viciously cut from a game Chicago ultimately lost in overtime, 3-2. It's clear that suspensions and fines have done little to curb Torres' aberrant behavior. Absent the skill that made him a 43-goal scorer in juniors he's now little more than a predator, trading on malevolence and the potential for chaos to maintain his job. But it's an act that already had worn thin with the Islanders, Oilers, Blue Jackets, Sabres and Canucks. It's hard to imagine he'll remain with the Coyotes after his contract expires next summer unless he manages to follow the path wisely chosen by reformed thugs like Matt Cooke or Colby Armstrong. He'll certainly have time to consider his options. One never knows what whim will guide NHL disciplinarian Brendan Shanahan (who again was the butt on online japery last night after suspending Pittsburgh's Arron Asham for four games while giving Washington's Nicklas Backstrom one for very similar infractions), but it seems likely Torres will be the ninth player suspended this spring. And given his history, it's unlikely that Phoenix should count on his "services" for the rest of these playoffs, and possibly well beyond. Of course Torres is just a symptom of the bigger problem, and that's where Fehr comes in. When the league's own website features news of four suspensions simultaneously, it's clear that its confusingly inconsistent attempts to legislate respect are failing. It's going to take a different approach. The PA needs to negotiate for a more active role in the disciplinary process. Not just a seat at the table, but perhaps two on a three-man committee that metes out the sort of justice that leaves no room for interpretation: clean up your act, or shop your limited skills elsewhere. Maybe it's something bolder, like reducing rosters by one in exchange for other concessions. But before he even sits down with the league, the players have to be on the same page. They have to truly understand what's at stake. And Fehr is the only one who can get them in a room make that happen. Tuesday was a night filled with real hockey stories. Another 40-plus-save performance in Detroit from Pekka Rinne as the Predators pushed the Red Wings to the brink of elimination. A remarkable comeback by the Florida Panthers, who fell behind 3-0 barely six minutes into the game, switched goalies, and then stole Game 3 from the Devils in front of a stunned Prudential Center crowd. A remarkable game from future star Oliver Ekman-Larsson and an unimaginably soft goal allowed by Corey Crawford in overtime that tilted the series in Phoenix's favor. And how many people will be talking those points this morning? By taking a stand, by representing the true best interests of his constituency, Fehr can change the direction of the game. Maybe just in time. Crosby hat trick leads Penguins over Senators in Game 2 Grizzlies and Spurs: Battle of the 'Big 3's'
I am not sure what is scarier - the “death row” eyes or the “pit bull” shifting jaws. crazy cool cover designs from NBA Italia. May 17, 1970 - Hank Aaron is best known as home run hitter, but the he was also a consistent .300 hitter throughout his 23-year major league... Army Lieutenant Colonel William T. Adams returns home to his daughter, after a year of Active Duty, at the Boston/Tampa Bay game (x) A T-shirt all fans of Rex and his tat would be proud to show off. NY Daily News Please fire that man.. Rex is just playing media to heat off team.
Oakland (3-6) at Ohio University (6-2) The Sports Network DATE & TIME: Saturday, December 8, 2 p.m. (et) FACTS & STATS: Site: Convocation Center (13,168) -- Athens, Ohio. Television: None. Home Record: Oakland 2-0, Ohio 6-0. Away Record: Oakland 1-6, Ohio 0-2. Neutral Record: Oakland 0-0, Ohio 0-0. Conference Record: Oakland 0-0, Ohio 0-0. Series Record: Ohio University leads, 3-1. GAME NOTES: The Ohio University Bobcats look to bounce back as they return home to host the Oakland Golden Grizzlies for a non-conference tilt at the Convocation Center. Although the Golden Grizzlies are coming off an 88-77 win over NAIA foe Rochester, they still have only three wins in their first nine outings. The victory snapped a three-game losing slide that consisted of road setbacks to Michigan State (70-52), Tennessee (77-50), and Western Michigan (76-72). Oakland's schedule has not been favorable so far, as seven of its games have been away from home. Its only win over a Division I opponent came on Nov. 20 when it took down Texas Southern by two points in a thriller in Houston. Coach Greg Kampe's squad has some positives to reflect on, such as its Summit League leading total of 76 steals. However, Oakland was held under 40 percent shooting and averaged just 58 ppg in its most recent losing slide. Ohio suffered its second loss in a row on Wednesday as it was trounced 84-58 by Memphis at FedExForum. The Bobcats will be happy to return to the Convocation Center, where they have won 15 games in a row dating back to last season. Coach Jim Christian's squad still has a decent 6-2 record due to its season opening six-game winning streak that included impressive routs of Portland (81-52), UNC-Wilmington (85-47), and Richmond (73-48). Although it scored a season-low 58 points last time out, Ohio is averaging 73.8 ppg, which is 11.8 points more than its opposition. This will be the fifth meeting in history on the hardwood between these schools. Ohio holds a 3-1 advantage in the all-time series, but Oakland picked up a 78-66 decision on Nov. 15, 2010, which was its last visit to the Convocation Center. Oakland, which averaged over 80 ppg each of the past three seasons, finally looked to be in rhythm on the offensive end versus Rochester as it connected on 53.8 percent of its field goal attempts and added 25 points at the foul line. The Golden Grizzlies led by 28 points in the second half before RC cut the deficit to 11 points near the end of the contest. Junior guard Travis Bader led the way with 32 points on 9-of-12 shooting including six makes from beyond the arc in the contest. Bader is averaging a team-high 19 ppg. The team's second leading scorer, Corey Petros, added 23 points in the game to raise his season average to 15.3 points per contest. The sophomore center is also grabbing a team-high 7.2 boards per game. Junior guard Duke Mondy only netted six points his last time out, but he is still producing 14 ppg. The Bobcats began their matchup with Memphis on a good note and held a 20-16 lead with 7:21 left in the first half, but the Tigers closed out the opening period on a 20-8 run to take full control. Ohio converted only 37.5 percent of its field goals including just 6-of-25 from distance. It also committed 17 turnovers in the loss. Senior D.J. Cooper scored a team-high 19 points, but the star point guard had four assists to five turnovers. Junior forward Jon Smith scored 12 points in the contest while Ivo Baltic, Walter Offutt, and Nick Kellogg all struggled. Cooper is leading the team with 15.3 ppg while Offutt (11.9 ppg) and Baltic (10.8) ranked second and third on the team's scoring leaderboard, respectively. While Ohio may have shown it is not quite ready to challenge the elite programs in the nation, it should be able to fend off the Golden Grizzlies. Cooper is one of the top floor generals in the country and he rarely gets caught in slumps. The Bobcats' role players should be able to find more success against Oakland's suspect defense. Sports Network Predicted Outcome: Ohio University 79, Oakland 62 12/08 10:33:12 ET
The Iraqi Football Association will ask FIFA to lift the ban on home international matches at stadiums across the country. Officials will travel to Zurich this month to meet with FIFA executives. "The delegation will seek approval to lift the ban on holding official matches in our stadiums," federation member Abdul-Khaliq Massoud said Monday. "We hope that the FIFA officials will reply positively to our request." Massoud said they will present FIFA with evidence that Iraq is safe and capable of hosting international matches. Read more: http://espn.go.com/sports/soccer/sto...n-home-matches
REMCO KROES by Paul van der Linde Photography Remco underwent a remarkable body transformation when he decided to work out and eat healthy. PACO MORALES by Luis Rafael LEE STRAM for 2wink Australia Photo: Ron Reagan PARKER HURLEY by Anthony Meyer Josh B. by Chicago based photographer Allan SPIERS Allan is looking for models. Sign up. Adam von ROTHFELDER by Rick Day Hottest gay content at www.wetlust.tumblr.com Scaffold theme by Mike Harding.
Store: DVD & VHS: Richard Witteman on DVD DVDs are $15 per talk. All DVDs are region free. September 2005 Retreat - Racial hatred, religious hatred: inflagrations sparked by the flimsiest ideas. - Yet we imagine self-hatred as a god-like voice of wisdom. - Self-hatred getting entangled with "kill the ego"? - Questioning stories: "Is this true? Is this me?" - Curiosity turns to what's seeing, to presence itself. - What is this?" Not knowing any answer.
Photography by Michelle Dupont \| give i’m an origami person btw. :D i love the idea of using musical scores! :3 Ask a Question Centennial Theme by Each & Every. Powered by Tumblr Disclaimer: Some images featured on my tumblr blog belong to others, of these images I have linked back to the original owner/site.
Today’s lead Globe story begins with a dishonest choice of words under the headline “Democrats shift strategy on Iraq debate”: Lacking the votes to end the war, Democratic leaders said yesterday they will try to make the US troop surge in Iraq "irrelevant" by shifting the war debate away from the impact of the recent US offensive and instead make the case that the price paid in lives, treasure, and military readiness was not worth it. For the word “impact” above, substitute the word “success”. It is more accurate but apparently unpalatable to the Globe newsroom and, sadly, to Democratic party leaders. On the local front, Deval Patrick’s $1.35M book deal will be giving gifts to his opponents for months or years to come. From today’s Globe: The 65-page pitch letter that led to his $1.35 million…details a strategy to sell at least 150,000 copies through a "vigorous media campaign," a nationwide book-signing tour, multiple speaking engagements, and efforts to persuade big corporations to buy the book by the carton, activities that promise to pull Patrick away from Massachusetts and the State House during the last year of his term. During his rocky early months, Patrick's blunders - the Cadillac, the drapes, the in-hopelessly-over-their-heads top staffers, the phone call to A certain self-absorption, Scott? Speak plainly! The appropriate word is arrogance.
● What program do you draw with? I draw, color, and ink in Paint Tool SAI and use CS6 for editing, adding texture, typography and graphic design work. ● What kind of tablet do you use? I currently use a 10X6.25 monoprice tablet. Highly recommended for those on a budget, I love it! ● Do you take commissions? Sometimes. Right now I am closed indefinitely, any and all announcements regarding commission openings will be made on my journal or art blog. ● I'm want a commission but you're closed, can I reserve a slot? I cannot reserve slots, no exceptions. Sorry! ● Do you accept trades or requests? Nope, sorry folks. Not enough time in the day. ● What are your brush settings? My ink settings can be seen here! ● Where do you get your textures? I get them from just about everywhere I can, but CG textures, Texture King, and dA's very own texture category are good places to start looking. ● Can you give advice or teach me how to draw? If I have time, I’m fine with sharing quick tips, but I cannot dedicate the time to teach you how to draw or use a program. ● Can I reference/edit/share/etc your art? You are free to use my art in any non-commercial way, provided you link back to my website, dA page, or the original work itself. ● Why didn't you respond to my note/comment? I simply do not always have the time or anything to say in response. I will try my best to answer any question that has not been covered here, though. If it's something important, e-mail is the best way to contact me.
\|Canto 10: The Summum Bonum\|\|Chapter 30: The Gopīs Search for Kṛṣṇa\| Bhaktivedanta VedaBase: Śrīmad Bhāgavatam 10.30.18 āhūya dūra-gā yadvat kṛṣṇas tam anuvartatīm veṇuḿ kvaṇantīḿ krīḍantīm anyāḥ śaḿsanti sādhv iti āhūya — calling; dūra — who were far away; gāḥ — the cows; yadvat — just as; kṛṣṇaḥ — Kṛṣṇa; tam — him; anuvartatīm — one gopī who was imitating; veṇum — the flute; kvaṇantīm — vibrating; krīḍantīm — playing games; anyāḥ — the other gopīs; śaḿsanti — praised; sādhu iti — "excellent!" When one gopī perfectly imitated how Kṛṣṇa would call the cows who had wandered far away, how He would play His flute and how He would engage in various sports, the others congratulated her with exclamations of "Well done! Well done!" Copyright © The Bhaktivedanta Book Trust International, Inc. His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda, Founder Ācārya of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness His Holiness Hrdayananda dasa Goswami Gopiparanadhana dasa Adhikari Dravida dasa Brahmacari
- Spring 2013 Anthropology class schedule - Summer 2013 Anthropology class schedule - Fall 2013 Anthropology class schedule ♦ Syllabi The current courses taught by individual faculty members as well as copies of their syllabi are listed on that faculty member’s home page. ♦ ANTH 590 Internship ♦ ANTH 596 Independent Study ♦ ANTH 686 Preliminary Exam For students who want to know the details on taking the ANTH 686 Preliminary Examination. ♦ Graduate Assistantship For students who are interested in applying for anthropology graduate assistantship funding. ♦ Graduate Travel or Research Funding For those anthropology graduate students interested in applying for funding (up to $500) to assist with a research project or to present a paper or poster at a conference. ♦ Anthropology Courses and Descriptions The Office of the Registrar hosts the complete list of graduate anthropology courses and their descriptions offered at Boise State University. ♦ Final Exam Schedules ♦ Distance/Online Courses For more information on non-traditional anthropology course offerings, such as workshops, go to the Distance Education website at Distance and Online courses. ♦ Graduate Catalog The Graduate Catalog can be found on the Office of the Registrar’s site. The catalog will give you information on the academic calendar (registration deadlines, adding and dropping classes, and withdrawals), Boise State University policies, admissions information, grades, tuition and fees, financial aid, student services, etc.
Can No Key request limit to 1000 for a certain amount of time? Temporarily, May be 1 week or 2 weeks? I think you should register a Key. Quoting the Key documentation: I would also check this question: Is it appropriate to register for a “Dev” app key?
Freelance Consultant Java / iOS / Web Developer in Belfast, Northern Ireland Since discovering them in the 1980’s, I’ve been obsessed with programming computers. It’s what I do. I’ve never been much good at anything else, but I’m good at that. I think. I’ve built assembly language games on 8-bit micros and Java e-commerce systems that handle thousands of customers and millions of pounds, and I’m on my third technology startup. I pursue elegance, simplicity and efficiency, seasoned with pragmatism. And I'm here to help :)
In GHCI prelude> using :t for finding the types of functions: (.) :: (b -> c) -> (a -> b) -> a -> c (:) :: a -> [a] -> [a] ((.)(:)) :: (a -> b) -> a -> [b] -> [b] -- (what happened here?) I understand the result of the single functions, but when partially applied I do not. what is the type of map map ? I found an answer on this page, how to do this algebraically. But I have a problem applying the same method on the What is the method when you want to know the type of ((.)(:))? Is there a way of thinking that can be used for any partial application of a function? Thanks in advance.
I need to loop through all n-bit integers which has at most k bits ON (bits 1), where 0 < n <= 32 and 0 <= k <= n. For example, if n = 4 and k = 2 then these numbers are (in binary digits): 0000, 0001, 0010, 0100, 1000, 0011, 0101, 0110, 1001, 1010, 1100. The order in which these numbers are looped through is not important, but each is visited only once. Currently I am using this straightforward algorithm: for x = 0 to (2^n - 1) count number of bits 1 in x if count <= k do something with x end if end for I think this algorithm is inefficient because it has to loop through too many numbers. For example, if n = 32 and k = 2 then it has to loop through 2^32 numbers to find only 529 numbers (which have <= 2 bits 1). My question is: is there any more efficient algorithm to do this?
There are several commands that have esoteric options that I don't use often. For example, git has 'check-attr'. I use 'git checkout' very often, however, so I'd like, git ch to complete to git checkout or show a menu without check-attr in it. I can do this with zstyle ... ignored-patterns. However, I'd still like to complete 'git check-attr' if nothing else matches (if I actually do want to run check-attr). It seems that the 'hidden' zstyle is for me, but how can I specify a value (not just a tag) in the completion context? I.e. I'd like something like, zstyle ':completion:::git::' hidden-patterns 'check-attr' Is that possible?
Igor Ch.less info \|visits\|\|member for\|\|1 year, 9 months\| Institute of Space and Information Technology Siberian Federal University student, major in Calculating machines, complexes, systems and networks. - routing and switching; - C, C++, C#, Python; 0 Votes Cast This user has not cast any votes
•Don't forget you can sell almost any item under £100 for FREE •Sell your car from just £35 DisclaimerThis site is hosted and managed by Staffordshire Sentinel News & Media Group Ltd. While Staffordshire Sentinel News & Media Group Ltd makes every effort to ensure that information it places on this web site is accurate it does not give any warranty or representations, express or implied, about its accuracy, completeness, or appropriateness for a particular purpose. It is a condition of Staffordshire Sentinel News & Media Group Ltd allowing you, the reader, access to this web site that you assume full responsibility for using the information on this web site, and that you accept that Staffordshire Sentinel News & Media Group Ltd will not be liable for any action you take in reliance on information on this web site. 2. 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Bayesian Fisher's discriminantThis page describes how to use the so-called Bayesian Fisher Discriminant (BFD) software, which is available for download here. Please note that in the subsequent discussion we will be using these references: Current release is 0.12 Release 0.12 was used for the experiments presented in . The code was written with flexibility in mind so probably there is room to make improvements in terms of efficiency of computation. Release 0.11 corresponds to the results presented in . The BFD software requires some functions, written by Neil D. Lawrence, that have been put together in form of the NDLUTIL toolbox. You may access this toolbox with the username and password you are given when you register for the BFD toolbox. There are many versions of this toolbox but we recommend only a few of them in order to obatin the results of . To obtain the classification results for benchmark data it will be necessary to download Gunnar Rätsch's data, available at . You will also need the function normal, written by Ian T. Nabney. Note: this function does not belong to the Netlab toolbox, but is rather a worked example. Please give a read to the readme.txt file that comes in this distribution to have more details about the installation procedure. The experiments with synthetic data, presented in , can be recreated by using the function Given the inputs and we have implemented the RBF prior in the following way, where the parameter vector . The ARD-composed kernel is defined as with a vector of parameters given by . This kernel is composed of four parts: RBF-ARD, LINEAR-ARD, BIAS and NOISE parts, thus giving its name of `composed'. Just run the following commands from Matlab's command prompt For each dataset ( Classification of synthetic datasets using an RBF kernel. Two classes are shown as pluses and circles. The separating line, in blue, was obtained by projecting test data over a grid. The dotted line indicates points at 1/4 of the distance, as measured in projected space, from the decision boundary to the class mean. The blue line was obtained after training a BFD model by maximising the marginal log-likelihood, L. Left: Spiral data, with bound after training L=658.6107. Right: Overlap data with final bound L=638.5258. In both problems the parameters were initialised to . Left: Bumpy data with final bound L=609.0547. Right: Relevance data, with bound L=895.7308. For both problems the initial parameters were set to . In order to run experiments with the ARD-composed kernel, it is necessary to use a different value for the variable The script should produce the plots shown below. Left: Spiral data, with final L=674.2042. In this experiment we initialised and the rest of parameters Right: Overlap data, with final L=650.0908. This experiment used as initial parameters . Left: Bumpy data, with final L=636.8442. Right: Relevance data, with final L=998.9992. In both problems we used an initial. Generating ROC curves and computing AUC's There are several demos included in this distribution and two of them were specifically written to obtain some of the results presented in Table 1 of reference . More specifically, these demos generate ROC curves for either banana or breast-cancer data and then obtain statistics related to the AUC's (area under ROC curves). The first demo can be run from the command-line as shown below After execution, a file The second demo does the analogue process for breast-cancer. Hence it is required to run Note on ROC curves During execution of either of the scripts ( Some ROC curves of the test instances of banana. Left: First instance. Right: Second instance. Some ROC curves of the test instances of breast-cancer. Left: First instance. Right: Second instance. Additional ROC-AUC demo An extra script obtains ROC curves (and additional statistics) for the heart dataset; this time according to the results of Table 2 of reference . Again, it is only a matter of running a script. The result file should look as follows. Generating histograms of projected data The histograms presented in Figure 10 of reference can be created by running two scripts. The first script will display and save on file the histograms of twonorm projected data. All files related the histograms of twonorm will be stored in a directory Left: Histogram of projected data for training instances of twonorm Right: Histogram of projected data for test instances of twonorm. The batch of histograms of waveform are obtained by running the script which generates plots like the following ones. Left: Histogram of projected data for training instances of waveform Right: Histogram of projected data for test instances of waveform Other experimentsFurther experiments can be carried out by modifying the scripts previously mentioned of by using the functions Tonatiuh Pena Centeno 2006-02-11
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.
I am a philatelist and have become aware of increasing offers of fake, forged and fraudulent items on internet auction sites such as ebay. Many buyers are being deceived without their knowledge. The sellers have become aware that ebay takes no serious action, and happily continue. ACCC does not seem to want to know unless someone has actually been defrauded. Consumer Affairs likewise, and the Police are too busy with more important things. These sellers need to be prosecuted to protect innocent buyers who are being defrauded ... not just deregistered on ebay. They just re-register with a new name and start over. It has become a significant problem within the on-line industry component of the hobby. When I detect such a fraudulent listing (often many by the same seller), to whom should I make a report with some hope of being taken seriously? Thank you for your email of 19 May 2012 to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) regarding your concerns with fraudulent retailers of stamps online.Your reference number for this matter is 08111. We unreservedly apologise for the delay in providing you with a response. The ACCC is responsible for administering the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 which incorporates the Australian Consumer Law (ACL) in Schedule 2 of that Act. The ACL is a single national law which aims to protect consumers and ensure fair trading in Australia. Under the ACL, consumers have the same protections, and businesses have the same obligations and responsibilities across Australia. Under section 29 of the ACL a person must not, in trade or commerce, make false or misleading representations in connection with the supply or possible supply of goods or services or in connection with the promotion by any means of the supply or use of goods or services. This includes misrepresentations that goods are of a particular standard, quality, value, grade, composition, style or model or have had a particular history or particular previous use. Additionally section 18 of the ACL prohibits a person, in trade or commerce, engaging in conduct which is misleading or deceptive, or which is likely to mislead or deceive. It is these sections of the ACL under which such instances of potentially fraudulent conduct of the type raised in your email could be taken action against. I note that you are primarily concerned with the fact that there has been an absence of action taken against individual fraudulent sellers, and are inquiring about the best avenue for ensuring action is taken against these sellers. One issue for our office is that the ACCC does not offer an individual dispute resolution service, but instead makes decisions on which matters will be investigated further based on the ACCC‚Äôs Compliance and Enforcement policy. A number of factors are weighed including whether conduct raises national or international issues, involves significant consumer detriment or a blatant disregard of the law. We certainly appreciate your assistance in bringing this issue to our attention, and your complaint has been recorded and will be used in monitoring whether there is a level of conduct by individual fraudulent traders or a pattern within the online stamp retailing industry which may raise concerns sufficient to warrant intervention by the ACCC. However, individual instances of loss or damage as a result of misleading or deceptive conduct or false representation are best pursued ‚Äď where such matters are unable to be resolved with these traders through either verbal or written communications ‚Äď through Consumer Affairs agencies such as Consumer Affairs Victoria (1300 558 181; www.consumer.vic.gov.au ). Local fair trading or consumer affairs agencies can suggest a range of strategies that you may wish to explore to resolve your concerns. They can also provide information on how to make a claim through the small claims court or tribunal should this become necessary. In these matters, it is also recommended that eBay be notified of these fraudulent sellers; as you are aware, however, the capacity for various government agencies to enforce the ACL or the pertinent fraud sections of state and criminal law is limited by the relative anonymity afforded by internet retailing, and the ease with which fraudulent online retailers can create new user profiles. Whilst individual complaints also form the basis of investigations, it must be noted that the ACCC does not comment on matters we may or may not be investigating and the ACCC is unable to provide you with further information of any action we may or may not be taking in relation to your complaint. Please also note that the ACCC will only contact you again in relation to your complaint if we require further information or evidence to assist in our enquiries. Thank you for bringing this matter to the attention of the ACCC. I trust this information is of assistance. Not much help I'm afraid. Perhaps if they get enough similar queries they may think it serious enough to investigate?
Sunday, 6 November 2011 Postcard from Slovakia no. 7 View Larger Map Here's a postcard we sent ourselves from a visit to the town of Medzilaborce (pop. approx. 6,600) in northeastern Slovakia, one of its most remote and undiscovered regions. Medzilaborce is now famous for its museum of Andy Warhol whose parents came from the vicinity of the town. There is also a Jewish cemetery and a large white Orthodox Church. The stamp from 2008 shows a portrait of Slovak poetess Masa Halamova. The T1 100g denomination has been used in the period when Slovakia was leaving its koruna and accepting euro. Now almost all of the new stamps bear only euro denomination. The 1 koruna definitives are from 1993, part of the long series showing the coats of arms of Slovak towns. And talking of Andy Warhol I found in my collection of postcards this night skyline view of Corpus Christi in Texas, with the Andy Warhol stamp from 2002, along with a sad-looking dog on a neuter spay stamp from the same year, what a crazy combination of looks...
MMI graduate Tyler Breznitsky scored 11 of his 13 points in the first quarter, but Wilkes University fell 71-62 to King's College to complete its season and Breznitsky's collegiate career. Wilkes finished 11-13 overall and 4-10 in Freedom Conference play. Former Crestwood standout Adam Fazzini dropped in eight points and grabbed a team-high six rebounds in Stonehill College's 74-59 loss to Saint Michael's College in Northeast-10 Conference action. Hazleton Area standouts Brianna Dudeck and Alyssa Flanagan combined to score 12 points and lead Bloomsburg University to a 64-54 victory over West Chester University in a PSAC Eastern Division contest. Dudeck came off the bench to score 10 points and also had four steals, three rebounds, one assist and one block. Flanagan netted two points and added three steals, three assists and two rebounds.
Mercury in the Morning The planet Mercury -- the planet closest to the Sun -- is just peeking into view in the east at dawn the next few days. It looks like a fairly bright star. It's so low in the sky, though, that you need a clear horizon to spot it, and binoculars wouldn't hurt. Mercury is a bit of a puzzle. It has a big core that's made mainly of iron, so it's quite dense. Because Mercury is so small, the core long ago should've cooled enough to form a solid ball. Yet the planet generates a weak magnetic field, hinting that the core is still at least partially molten. The solution to this puzzle may involve an iron "snow" deep within the core. The iron in the core is probably mixed with sulfur, which has a lower melting temperature than iron. Recent models suggest that the sulfur may have kept the outer part of the core from solidifying -- it's still a hot, thick liquid. As this mixture cools, though, the iron "freezes" before the sulfur does. Small bits of solid iron fall toward the center of the planet. This creates convection currents -- like a pot of boiling water. The motion is enough to create a "dynamo" effect. Like a generator, it produces electrical currents, which in turn create a magnetic field around the planet. Observations earlier this year by the Messenger spacecraft seem to support that idea. But Messenger will provide much better readings of what's going on inside Mercury when it enters orbit around the planet in 2011. Script by Damond Benningfield, Copyright 2008 For more skywatching tips, astronomy news, and much more, read StarDate magazine.
Author: Stan Tekiela Paperback: 345 pages (4.5 x 6 in.) • 145 species (only Arizona birds!) • No need to look through dozens of photos of birds that don't live in Arizona. • Easy-to-use color guide. See a yellow bird and don't know what it is? Go to the yellow section! • Fact-filled, containing the information you want to know. • Compare feature. Not sure which woodpecker you're seeing? This feature helps you decide! • Contains range maps showing where in Arizona you'll find the birds in summer, winter, all year or during migration. • Full-page photos with corresponding full-page descriptions. •Stan's Notes include naturalist information and interesting gee-whiz facts.
Nightscape CCD camera combines the simplicity of a one-shot color imaging camera with the sophisticated features and software of more expensive astronomical imaging systems. Using a Kodak 10.7MP Color Sensor and regulated TEC cooling system, Nightscape can give you instant results in just a single exposure. Coupled with the internal mechanical shutter and control software you can also automatically combine multiple images and dark frames to create images comparable to those taken with professional grade cameras costing thousands more. With Nightscape you get: With compact 4.75 micron x 4.75 micron pixels and 2x2 and 4x4 binning, the Nightscape is perfectly matched for optimal resolution at multiple F-numbers. With an F/10 system and 2x2 binning, Nightscape gives you a large image scale while still providing sub-arc second image sampling; ideal for bringing out fine detail in planets and compact deep-sky objects. Or take advantage of the high resolution 4.75 micron x 4.75 micron pixels at f/2 with HyperStar to capture your favorite wide field objects while maintaining resolution better than your "seeing" conditions. Nightscape gives you the versatility to match all the configurations of your EdgeHD, SCT or other optical system. The Kodak KAI-10100 Color Sensor offers both light sensitivity and a balanced spectral response for capturing true color fidelity in a fraction of the time as with a color filter wheel. Regulated Thermoelectric Cooling (TEC) and variable fan control provides a vibration free laminar air flow to dramatically reduce thermal noise inherent in all imaging sensors. Compact four inch diameter design provides minimal obstruction needed for HyperStar f/2 imaging. The round symmetrical aluminum cast body resembles the obstruction of the secondary mirror of a Cassegrain telescope ensuring round star with minimal light diffraction. Additionally the spacing to sensor is the same distance as most DSLR cameras allowing compatibility with most standard DSLR t-adapters. Celestron AstroFX software takes you step-by-step from taking images to processing the final result. AstroFX gives you full control of your camera from temperature regulation, exposure control as well as computer assisted focusing for easy image acquisition. AstroFX knows just what to do with your images and calibration frames to create a final master image that's been stacked, stretched, sharpened, saturated and ready to share with your friends in a snap. - Processor – Pentium™ or equivalent, or higher - Windows XP™, Windows Vista™, or Windows 7™ (or higher), 32-bit or 64-bit - 1 GB RAM - Disk Space – 20 MB for program installation - Video Display minimum 1024 x 768, 16-bit color or higher Included with your Nightscape is Celestron's innovative AstroFX software. AstroFx takes you step-by-step from snapping an image to processing the final result. AstroFX gives you full control of your camera from temperature regulation, exposure control as well as computer assisted focusing for easy image acquisition. AstroFX knows just what to do with your images and calibration frames to create a final master image that's been stacked, stretched, sharpened, saturated and ready to share with your friends in a snap. NightScape CCD Camera - General Features - One shot color imaging using 10.7 MP CCD sensor - No filter wheels or color combining needed - 4.75 micron x 4.75 micron pixels - Small pixels and 2x2 and 4x4 binning allows for optimal resolution at multiple F-numbers - Thermoelectric cooling (TEC) - Regulated TEC and adjustable fan to dramatically reduce thermal noise - Internal Mechanical Shutter - makes acquiring dark frames easy - AstroFX software - takes you step-by-step from taking images to processing the final result - Full-frame image buffer allows you to take images even while downloading - Camera Resolution: 10.7 MP (3760x2840) - Sensor Size: 17.9 mm x 13.5 mm (22.5 mm diagonal) - Pixel Size: 4.75 micron square - Imaging Sensor: Kodak KAI-10100 Color Sensor - Exposure Range: .001 sec to 24hrs (2x2, 4x4 Bin); .01sec to 24hrs (1x1 binning) - Binning: 2x2, 4x4 - Cooling: Regulated Thermoelectric w/ Fan - Shutter: Internal Mechanical - Cooling Range: 20C° below ambient - Operating Environment: 40C° to -40C° (104F to -40F) - A/D Conversion: 16 bit - Full Well Capacity: 25,000 e- - Read Noise (RMS): 13 e- - Dark Signal (at 0° C): 2e-/pixel/second - Quantum Efficiency: 32%@630 nm; 42%@550 nm; 40%@470 nm - Dynamic Range: 64 dB - Mounting: 2" barrel and t-thread - Back Focus: 55 mm w/ 2" barrel; 26 mm w/o barrel - Download Time: 20 sec or less for full-frame image - Software Compatibility: AstroFX, MaxinDL, ASCOM Driver - USB Cable: High-Speed 2.0, 10' cable length - Sub-Framing: Full, Half, Quarter, selectable - Optical Window: High transmission Schott B270 glass - Optical Coatings: IR cutoff and anti-reflection multi-coatings - Power Requirements: 12VDC 2.5Amp, tip positive - Weight: 2 lbs (0.91 kg)
Your web-browser is very outdated, and as such, this website may not display properly. Please consider upgrading to a modern, faster and more secure browser. Click here to do so. can i get an andromeda fandom here on tumblr is that too much to ask 3 notes Tags: my art drawings sketches andromeda rommie gene roddenberry's andromeda
Other Submissions by ozwalled I wanted to do some "fake screenshots" of Mother 3 (see here) and felt bad that I'd have to resort to TANI's M3 sprites, so I made my own. If you want to use these for whatever, all I ask for is credit. Also, I'm pretty sure I have more kicking around, so if you might use them, PM me. \|ozwalled\|\|Mach Pizza Girl\|\| Mach Pizza Girl Insane. Evil. Giygas. A grey guy from Ness's Magicant.
You currently have one tutor selected. \|Date Joined\|\|2 year ago\| \|Age Range\|\|21 to 25\| \|Rank\|\|428 (Top 10%)\| \|+ Experience Rating\|\|2\| \|+ Feedback Rating\|\|2.0\| \|= Total Rating\|\|7.0\| Qualifications and Experience 2008 GCE A (Jurong Junior College) H1 General Paper, H1 Economics (A), H2 Mathematics (A), H2 Physics, H2 Chemistry (A) 2007 GCE A (Jurong Junior College) H1 Chinese Language, H1 Chinese Language, H1 Project Work (B) 2006 GCE O (Gan Eng Seng School) English Language, Combined Humanities (A2), Mathematics (A1), Additional Mathematics (A1), Physics (A1), Chemistry (A2), Chinese Language (B3), Chinese Language (Oral/Aural) (Merit) \|Experience\|\|I have close to two years of teaching experience. Best in teaching chemistry and mathematics due to to having strong background and possessing strong passion for them. I have conducted both group and home tuition. First teaching experience was back in 2007 where i taught three of my juniors chemistry and mathematics under peer tutoring programme organised by my school. To facilitate their learning process, i use visual illustration for chemistry to ensure that they will understand and not memorise the concepts as i believe that memory work spoil the learning curve of the student. As for mathematics, it requires a lot of practices. Thus, i let them practiced through a series of questions and make them present on the spot. By presenting, it will allow them to organise their thoughts and think critically. If there is any mistake, i will correct them and make them do a different question but using the same approach to tackle them so that they will not memorise question but know when and how to apply their concepts to different situations. After the whole course of tuition, two of them got A1 for both Additional Mathematics and Chemistry and the other got A2 for chemistry but A1 for Additional Mathematics. I also give English tuition to primary school and international students. First of all, i went through with them the use of grammar since grammatical error is a prevalent mistakes made by most people. Secondly, i made them practise their oral presentation skills as this \|Commitment\|\|I am able to commence tutoring asap.\|\| Activities with us Preferred Area, Subjects and Schedule
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\|Chronological and political information\| - «Galaxy = needs T7 + Jedi // T7 = ready for next mission» T7-O1, known affectionately as Teeseven or T7, was a T7-series astromech droid active during the Great Galactic War, the Cold War, and the renewed war between the Galactic Republic and the Sith Empire. Manufactured by Duwani Mechanical Products sometime before 3,837 BBY, the astromech droid did not undergo a memory wipe during his entire lifetime, allowing him to develop a strong personality and preserve the memories of the dozen or so partners he worked with throughout the years. Originally a repair and pilot droid, Teeseven began working with the Jedi Order in the years before the Great Galactic War as the partner of Jedi Master Ven Zallow, and he went undercover for the Jedi and the Republic Strategic Information Service on multiple occasions during the conflict. Surviving the Sacking of Coruscant and the fall of the Jedi Temple at the end of the war, Teeseven served as a reconnaissance droid for the Order on their homeworld of Tython for much of the Cold War before teaming up with a young Jedi who was the former apprentice of Jedi Master Orgus Din. Alongside his friend and the Jedi's apprentice Kira Carsen, Teeseven played a pivotal role in halting the plot of the Sith Lord Darth Angral to assault the Republic using stolen superweapons, and after the Knight received the title of Hero of Tython the droid continued to travel the galaxy with his partners. Teeseven's service with the Hero of Tython eventually culminated in a plan to capture the Sith Emperor himself, and the droid accompanied the Hero of Tython during an assault on the Sith capital of Dromund Kaas. The two managed to gain entry to the Emperor's throne room and defeated the Emperor in a fierce confrontation. Afterwards, Teeseven and the rest of the Hero of Tython's companions were awarded the Cross of Glory for their pivotal role in ending the threat of the Sith Empire. - "T7! Prep the ion cannons!" - ―Nico Okarr to T7-O1 A T7-series astromech droid produced by Duwani Mechanical Products, T7-O1 was constructed sometime before 3,837 BBY as a standard factory-spec astromech. Over the next century and a half, Teeseven passed from owner to owner—whom the droid referred to as "partners"—without ever undergoing a memory wipe. This led Teeseven to develop a personality and preserved the droid's memories of all of his former partners. Approximately one hundred years after his creation, Teeseven was assigned as a Senate legislation analyst under Senator Oodora of Manaan. Oodora promoted the astromech after his first year, and Teeseven soon became the Senator's campaign manager and speech writer throughout Oodora's four consecutive terms. When the Senator retired after twenty years of working with Teeseven, the droid began working with a Rodian named Shafu—who, unbeknownst to Teeseven, was a slaver. Teeseven served Shafu faithfully as a navigator, piloting the Rodian's ship and never entering the cargo hold. However, Shafu was eventually captured by a Jedi named Ven Zallow, who convinced Shafu to turn over a new leaf instead of turning him over to the authorities. At Zallow's request, Shafu became a confidential informant for the Order, and in gratitude the Rodian gave Teeseven to the Jedi. By 3,681 BBY, Zallow had sent Teeseven undercover to work with the smuggler Nico Okarr, and the droid served as the human's mechanic and aide on his XS stock light freighter Redshifter. While attempting to smuggle Sith artifacts off the planet, Okarr and Teeseven were captured by Republic forces over the Sith homeworld of Korriban, and the Republic arrested Okarr and impounded the smuggler's ship with Teeseven aboard the Republic space station in the Horuset system. However, Okarr's transfer to a holding cell was interrupted by the arrival of the Sith Empire. A massive fleet arrived in-system and launched an offensive against the station, intending to retake their homeworld. As the smuggler's ship was the only one fast enough to escape the Sith fighters, Jedi Knight Satele Shan and her master decided to use it to escape in order to warn the Republic. Teeseven had been on-board the ship performing maintenance as the hangar came under assault by Sith forces, and the smuggler instructed him to prepare the ship's weapons in preparation for their escape. The smuggler and his passengers, including Teeseven, were ultimately able to escape their pursuers and bring word to the Republic of the oncoming Sith threat. Leaving Okarr's service sometime after Korriban and returning to Master Zallow, Teeseven worked with the Jedi Order throughout much of the Great Galactic War. By that time, he had worked with a total of eleven partners, including Zallow, Oodora, a doctor, mechanic, Shafu, a Senatorial aide, and Okarr. Around 3,663 BBY, Zallow lent Teeseven to the Republic Strategic Information Service for a single mission. The intelligence agency sent the droid undercover to protect a Muun ambassador from the secretive bounty hunter guild known as the GenoHaradan. During the assignment, Teeseven was successfully able to detect the assassin in the crowd and discharged a stun bolt, but the assassin escaped into the crowd. The ambassador retired in fear, leaving Teeseven depressed and believing that he never truly completed his mission. Service to the OrderEdit The fall of CoruscantEdit "You know this astromech?" "It was Master Zallow's droid." - ―Aryn Leneer and Zeerid Korr In 3,653 BBY, Teeseven was present on the Republic's capital planet of Coruscant with Ven Zallow when the Jedi Temple was attacked by a Sith strike force under the leadership of the Sith Lord Darth Malgus. Zallow ordered his astromech companion to stay hidden and record the battle in case of a Jedi defeat, though the droid emerged briefly to warn the Jedi Master of Darth Malgus' approach during the fighting. Teeseven returned to his hiding place and watched as Zallow was slain in battle with Malgus, and he escaped into the tunnels beneath the Temple as the battle turned against the Jedi. Teeseven attempted to return to Zallow's body after the fighting ended and managed to recover his lightsaber, but the Sith planted explosives and the droid was forced to retreat deeper into the lower levels of Coruscant as the Temple was brought down. A damaged Teeseven remained there for quite some time before he encountered Zallow's former apprentice Aryn Leneer and the smuggler Zeerid Korr, who were attempting to find out who had killed Zallow. After explaining what had transpired at the Temple, Teeseven accompanied the pair to the Temple's backup surveillance station, and he was able to restore power to the systems in order to show Leneer recordings of the Temple's fall. He paused and resumed the recording as per Leneer's instructions, allowing her to discover the identity of Zallow's killer, and he copied the recording for Leneer to peruse later when the trio departed. T7 and the two Humans hid in an abandoned apartment building after leaving the Temple ruins, and he stayed with Leneer while Korr scouted the nearby Liston Spaceport. Leneer departed during the night despite T7's protests, and the droid later followed the Jedi Knight to the Temple with Korr when the smuggler returned. There, the two found Darth Malgus and Leneer embroiled in a fierce duel, but Korr interrupted the fight in fear of her falling to the dark side and helped Leneer escape. Leneer then decided to pursue Malgus' Twi'lek lover, Eleena Daru, in her quest for revenge, and as part of her plan the trio fell from their speeder onto the top of the spaceport. Leneer slowed T7's descent with the Force, and the droid hacked into the spaceport's systems and triggered the facility's fire suppression and safety systems with a false signal that tricked the network's sensors into detecting a fuel gas leak. As a result, evacuation alarms were triggered in Landing Bay 16-B—the hangar used by the shuttles belonging to Daru and her team—and the hangar's launch doors openned, allowing Leneer to enter and attack Daru. At Korr's orders, T7 hacked into the Dragonfly-class dropship Razor in the landing bay, but the droid decided to remain behind with Leneer after she decided not to kill Daru. Teeseven hid in the shadows of the hangar while the Knight confronted Malgus, and the two departed Coruscant aboard Daru's shuttle after Leneer threatened the Twi'lek to ensured her own safety. The Tython uprisingEdit While Leneer left the Order and traveled to the planet Dantooine to live with Korr, Teeseven returned to the Order's service, and when the Jedi Order left Coruscant in 3,650 BBY, Teeseven accompanied them to the Order's long-lost homeworld of Tython. Teeseven served as a reconnaissance droid for the Order over the next few years, scouting Tython's wilderness and identifying hazards. In 3,643 BBY, Teeseven was sent out along with nineteen other droids as long-range probes, but he was captured by a group of Flesh Raiders, a violent species native to Tython, near the Flesh Raider-controlled Tythos Ridge region. Locked inside a weapons cache in the Upper Hollows cave system, Teeseven faked deactivation and recorded a meeting between the Dark Jedi Callef and a hooded figure whom Callef called Master. When the apprentice of Jedi Master Orgus Din raided the weapons cache for the Pilgrims of Kalikori Village, the Padawan freed T7 and removed the restraining bolt that the Flesh Raiders had attached to the droid. In thanks, T7 showed the Jedi the recording it had secretly made while pretending to be deactivated: a hooded figure, giving orders to the Dark Jedi Callef—whom the Padawan had defeated earlier—and the Flesh Raiders. Callef referred to the figure as his master, and the pair seemed determined to destroy the Jedi Order. Having discovered the source of the Flesh Raiders' sudden increase in violence, the Padawan and the other Jedi set out to stop Bengel Morr and prevent further casualties. T7's later accompanied the Padawan in rescuing Orgus Din after the latter was lured into a trap and captured by Bengel Morr. Morr revealed himself as Orgus Din's former apprentice and was assumed to have been killed during the Sacking of Coruscant, and his rage at his perceived weakness of the Jedi left him seeking vengeance on the Order. Before he could slay Orgus Din, the Padawan and T7 intervened, defeating Morr and saving the Jedi Master. The Padawan was then elevated to the rank of Knight for the Jedi's role in ending the Flesh Raider threat, and T7 looked on as the newly promoted Knight constructed their first lightsaber. When the Knight was then dispatched to the capital of Coruscant to aid Jedi Master Bela Kiwiiks and her Padawan in dealing with a new threat, T7-O1 decided to remain with the Knight as the droid felt they were a formidable team. Partners and heroesEdit On Coruscant, T7-O1, the Knight and Orgus Din were brought up to speed on the situation by Master Kiwiiks. They were introduced to Republic scientist Eli Tarnis and General Var Suthra, who informed them that the plans for a Republic superweapon known as the Planet Prison had been stolen, and the Jedi had been called in to help retrieve them. Working with Kira Carsen and Agent Galen of the Republic Strategic Information Service, T7-O1 and the Knight tracked the stolen plans first to a Rodian slicer then to the Black Sun criminial syndicate. The mission then became more complicated as the two learned that Tarnis had been kidnapped by Black Sun. After one failed attempt to rescue Tarnis, T7-O1 and the Knight were informed by General Suthra that the stolen plans had also contained information about every Republic superweapon in development, not just the Planet Prison. Masters Din and Kiwiiks, as well as Agent Galen then departed Coruscant to secure the sites of the compromised superweapons while the Knight and T7-O1 launched an assault on the headquarters of Black Sun in order to rescue Tarnis. With the aid of the Coruscant Security Force, T7-O1 and the Knight fought their way to the Black Sun command center, where they found the Black Sun leader in a holocall with Tarnis, who revealed himself to be a Sith Lord. After defeating Salarr, T7-O1 and the Knight were told by Carsen that Tarnis had stolen the Planet Prison prototype and intended to use it on Coruscant. The three then pursued the Sith Lord first to the Justicars' Sector, where they found the murdered engineering team behind the Planet Prison, then to the ruins of the Jedi Temple, where they found Tarnis in a call with four Sith Lords, including his father, Darth Angral. Tarnis was slain by the Knight in combat and the activation of the Planet Prison was narrowly averted. Infuriated by his son's death, Angral promised to have vengeance on the Republic and the Knight in particular. Upon reporting in to General Suthra and Grand Master Satele Shan, the Knight was told that Din, Kiwiiks and Galen had all failed to report in, and General Suthra feared that Angral had already seized control of the superweapons. The general then gave the Knight a Defender-class light corvette for use as their personal starship as well as the location of one of Angral's bases on the planet of Ord Mantell, and asked the Knight to look into it. With Kira Carsen in tow as the Knight's new Padawan, the group then departed Coruscant for Ord Mantell. Upon arriving on Ord Mantell, T7-O1 and the Knight made their way to Angral's hidden base and fought their way into the command center of the facility. With the base's defenders dealt with, T7-O1 accessed the facility's databanks and found files indicating that Angral was planning to combine aspects of several Republic superweapon programs into a single project, which was codenamed the "Desolator." The files additionally contained intelligence indicating that Angral had sent agents to various worlds to where Republic superweapons were under development. With this information in hand, T7-O1 continued to accompany the Knight as they traveled to the worlds of Taris, Nar Shaddaa, Tatooine and Alderaan in order to chase down Angral's agents and secure the superweapons. As a result of these travels the Knight and his companions rescued Doctor Nasan Godera , a former Republic weapons designer and destroyed the prototypes of the Power Guard Project, the Shock Drum and the Death Mark, each of which was a Republic superweapon seized by Angral's forces, rescuing Agent Galen and Masters Kiwiiks and Din in the process. Unfortunately the Knight and his companions learned from General Var Suthra that Angral had already succeeded in combining the superweapons technology into the Desolator, which he had mounted on his flagship. The Knight and his companions pursued Angral to the Republic agriworld Uphrades but arrived to find that the world had already been devastated by Angral's superweapon. Personality and programmingEdit Equipment and descriptionEdit Behind the scenesEdit T7-O1 is a companion character for the Jedi Knight class of Star Wars: The Old Republic, a MMORPG released by BioWare on December 20, 2011. He first appeared in the Deceived cinematic trailer for the game, briefly warning Ven Zallow of the approach of Darth Malgus, and also appears in the related novel Star Wars: The Old Republic: Deceived, which is set directly following the trailer. T7 would also appear in the third and final trailer for the game, Return, in the service of Nico Okarr. Like all other pages on the site, T7-O1's HoloNet page on the official Star Wars: The Old Republic website features three phrases written in Aurebesh. The first, "accidental slaver", refers to T7-O1's work with the slaver Shahtfu before the Rodian's change of heart, and the second, "Flesh Raider collectable", is an allusion to how T7-O1 is captured by Flesh Raiders just before the player encounters him in the mission "High-Tech Savages". The last phrase, "The Exploding Starships Conspiracy", refers to the work of the bounty hunter Terrin Sandafar, who killed Shafu and the Alderaanian noble Eckhorn Baliss by setting their ships to explode at the orders of Senator Verre Sydia's husband. T7-O1 also appears as a minifigure in a LEGO set; namely 9497 Republic Striker Starfighter, a set composed of a Talon-class Republic starfighter as well as a Republic trooper and Satele Shan as she appears in the Hope cinematic trailer. - Star Wars: The Old Republic: Deceived - Deceived (First appearance) - Star Wars: The Old Republic - Star Wars: The Old Republic: Rise of the Hutt Cartel - "Exploring The Old Republic"—Star Wars Insider 121 - The Art and Making of Star Wars: The Old Republic - The Journal of Master Gnost-Dural - Star Wars: The Old Republic Encyclopedia Notes and referencesEdit - ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 Star Wars: The Old Republic Encyclopedia - ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 Star Wars: The Old Republic: Deceived - ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 Deceived cinematic trailer - ↑ Using a cutscene where T7-O1 is next to a Jawa, a species whose average height is 1 meter, a ratio of approximately 1 to 1.15 was found for the heights of the Jawa and the droid. The Jawa is the same height as all other Jawas found in Star Wars: The Old Republic. - ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 Star Wars: The Old Republic—Jedi Knight Mission: "High-Tech Savages" on Tython - ↑ Star Wars: The Old Republic—T7-O1 Ability: "Weapons Proficiencies" - ↑ Star Wars: The Old Republic—T7-O1 Ability: "Frag Grenade" - ↑ Star Wars: The Old Republic—T7-O1 Ability: "Flameguard" - ↑ Star Wars: The Old Republic—T7-O1 Ability: "EMP Blast" - ↑ Star Wars: The Old Republic—T7-O1 Ability: "Deploy Shields" - ↑ Star Wars: The Old Republic—Jedi Knight Mission: "The Shock Drum" on Tatooine - ↑ Star Wars: The Old Republic—T7-O1 Ability: "Flare Gun" - ↑ Star Wars: The Old Republic—T7-O1 Ability: "Intercept" - ↑ 14.0 14.1 14.2 - ↑ 15.0 15.1 Star Wars: The Old Republic—Conversation with T7-O1: "The Assassination" - ↑ 16.0 16.1 16.2 Star Wars: The Old Republic—Conversation with T7-O1: "Slaver's Redemption" - ↑ 17.0 17.1 Star Wars: The Old Republic—Conversation with T7-O1: "The Traitor" - ↑ 18.0 18.1 18.2 Return (cinematic trailer) - ↑ Using comments and information from Star Wars: The Old Republic 8: The Lost Suns, Part 2, The Last Battle of Colonel Jace Malcom, and Star Wars: The Old Republic: Annihilation, it is possible to place the events of the Prologue and Act I for the Jedi Knight, Smuggler, and Trooper classes in Star Wars: The Old Republic in 3,643 BBY, the general events of Act II in 3,642 BBY, and the events of Act III for all classes in 3,641 BBY. Subtracting 20 years from 3,643 BBY results in a date of 3,663 BBY. - ↑ The Journal of Master Gnost-Dural - ↑ Using comments and information from Star Wars: The Old Republic 8: The Lost Suns, Part 2, The Last Battle of Colonel Jace Malcom, and Star Wars: The Old Republic: Annihilation, it is possible to place the events of the Prologue and Act I for the Jedi Knight, Smuggler, and Trooper classes in Star Wars: The Old Republic in 3,643 BBY, the general events of Act II in 3,642 BBY, and the events of Act III for all classes in 3,641 BBY. - ↑ Star Wars: The Old Republic—Jedi Knight Mission: "Attack of the Flesh Raiders" on Tython - ↑ Star Wars: The Old Republic—Jedi Knight Mission: "The Face of the Enemy" on Tython - ↑ Star Wars: The Old Republic—Jedi Knight Mission: "The Jedi Envoy" on Coruscant - ↑ Star Wars: The Old Republic—Jedi Knight Mission: "Stolen Secrets" on Coruscant - ↑ 26.0 26.1 Star Wars: The Old Republic—Jedi Knight Mission: "Kidnapped!" on Coruscant - ↑ Star Wars: The Old Republic—Jedi Knight Mission: "Tracking Down the Traitor" on Coruscant - ↑ Star Wars: The Old Republic—Jedi Knight Mission: "New Intelligence" on Ord Mantell - ↑ Star Wars: The Old Republic—Jedi Knight Mission: "The Architect of Annihilation" on Taris - ↑ Star Wars: The Old Republic—Jedi Knight Mission: "The Search for Agent Galen" on Nar Shaddaa - ↑ Star Wars: The Old Republic—Jedi Knight Mission: "The Shock Drum" on Tatooine - ↑ Star Wars: The Old Republic—Jedi Knight Mission: "The Death Mark" on Alderaan - ↑ Star Wars: The Old Republic—Jedi Knight Mission: "Showdown with Lord Sadic" on Nar Shaddaa - ↑ Star Wars: The Old Republic—Jedi Knight Mission: "The Sand Demon's Lair" on Tatooine - ↑ Star Wars: The Old Republic—Jedi Knight Mission: "Siege Mentality" on Alderaan - ↑ Star Wars: The Old Republic—Jedi Knight Mission: "Uphrades" on Uphrades
Learning a new framework is not always straight forward. In this section, we (the Spring Data team) tried to provide, what we think is, an easy to follow guide for starting with Spring Data Key Value module. Of course, feel free to create your own learning 'path' as you see fit and, if possible, please report back any improvements to the documentation that can help others. As explained in Chapter 1, Why Spring Data Redis?, Spring Data Redis (SDR) provides integration between Spring framework and the Redis key value store. Thus, it is important to become acquainted with both of these frameworks (storages or environments depending on how you want to name them). Throughout the SDR documentation, each section provides links to resources relevant however, it is best to become familiar with these topics beforehand. Spring Data uses heavily Spring framework's core functionality, such as the IoC container, resource abstract or AOP infrastructure. While it is not important to know the Spring APIs, understanding the concepts behind them is. At a minimum, the idea behind IoC should be familiar. These being said, the more knowledge one has about the Spring, the faster she will pick Spring Data Key Value. Besides the very comprehensive (and sometimes disarming) documentation that explains in detail the Spring Framework, there are a lot of articles, blog entries and books on the matter - take a look at the Spring framework home page for more information. In general, this should be the starting point for developers wanting to try Spring DKV. NoSQL stores have taken the storage world by storm. It is a vast domain with a plethora of solutions, terms and patterns (to make things worth even the term itself has multiple meanings). While some of the principles are common, it is crucial that the user is familiar to some degree with the stores supported by SDKV. The best way to get acquainted to this solutions is to read their documentation and follow their examples - it usually doesn't take more then 5-10 minutes to go through them and if you are coming from an RDMBS-only background many times these exercises can be an eye opener. One can find various samples for key value stores in the dedicated example repo, at http://github.com/SpringSource/spring-data-keyvalue-examples. For Spring Redis, of interest is the retwisj sample, a Twitter-clone built on top of Redis which can be run locally or be deployed into the cloud. See its documentation, the following blog entry or the live instance for more information. If you encounter issues or you are just looking for an advice, feel free to use one of the links below: The Spring Data forum is a message board for all Spring Data (not just Key Value) users to share information and help each other. Note that registration is needed only for posting. Professional, from-the-source support, with guaranteed response time, is available from SpringSource, the company behind Spring Data and Spring. For information on the Spring Data source code repository, nightly builds and snapshot artifacts please see the Spring Data home page. You can help make Spring Data best serve the needs of the Spring community by interacting with developers through the Spring Community forums. If you encounter a bug or want to suggest an improvement, please create a ticket on the Spring Data issue tracker. To stay up to date with the latest news and announcements in the Spring eco system, subscribe to the Spring Community Portal.
Statistics Iceland publishes Statistical Series with 14 topical categories (see below). The publications are accessible in a pdf-format on the web but exclusive paper publications can be purchased for a small fee. The price of each issue varies according to size, ranging from ISK 900 (EUR 7) to ISK 1,800 (EUR 16). At least one issue is published in each category per year, and in some categories up to 12 issues are published annually. On average one issue is released every week all year round. Texts are in Icelandic, but each issue has an English summary and all tables and graphs are in English. Customers can buy single issues and/or subscribe to individual categories. Subscribers are billed in advance and get 5% discount.
Employer costs for defined benefit and defined contribution retirement plans December 26, 2012 Private industry employers now spend more per employee hour worked for defined contribution retirement plans (retirement plans that specify the level of employer contributions and place those contributions into individual employee accounts) than for defined benefit retirement plans (plans that provide employees with guaranteed retirement benefits that are based on a benefit formula). March 2012 private industry employer costs for defined contribution plans were 60 cents per employee hour worker, compared to 43 cents for defined benefit plans. \|Characteristics\|\|Employer costs per employee hour worked\| \|Defined benefit\|\|Defined contribution\| \|$ 0.43\|\|$ 0.60\| Management, professional, and related Sales and office Natural resources, construction, and maintenance Production, transportation, and material moving 1 to 99 workers 100 to 499 workers 500 workers or more Employer costs for defined benefit plans were higher for natural resource, construction, and maintenance employees ($1.10) than for workers in other major occupational categories. Employer cost of defined benefit plans for union workers ($2.00) is approximately 7 times higher than the cost for nonunion workers (26 cents). Employers with 500 or more workers have defined benefit costs (99 cents) that are approximately four times higher than the defined benefit cost for employers that have 1 to 99 employees (23 cents). These data are from the National Compensation Survey - Benefits program. To learn more, see "Retirement costs for defined benefit plans higher than for defined contribution plans" (HTML) (PDF), Beyond the Numbers, December 2012. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, The Editor's Desk, Employer costs for defined benefit and defined contribution retirement plans on the Internet at http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2012/ted_20121226.htm (visited May 18, 2013). Spotlight on Statistics: Productivity This edition of Spotlight on Statistics examines labor productivity trends from 2000 through 2010 for selected industries and sectors within the nonfarm business sector of the U.S. economy. Read more »
\|NCAA Tournament Home\|\|\|\|\|Scoreboard\|\|\|\|\|Standings\|\|\|\|\|Teams\|\|\|\|\|Leaders\|\|\|\|\|Polls\|\|\|\|\|Home\| By JOE KAY CINCINNATI (AP) The city's storied basketball rivalry is back in a very different format. When Xavier and Cincinnati played last season, their annual crosstown game ended with punches and punishments - four players from each team suspended. The small Catholic school and large public school, separated by only 2 1/2 miles, spent the rest of the season dealing with the black mark on their reputations and one of the city's marquee sporting events. The overriding question: Should the rivalry end? It'll be renewed on Wednesday night in a different setting. The game has been moved away from the campuses, bringing fans of both schools together in the stands at a downtown arena. The mood is different, too. There's been no trash talking between Xavier (7-2) and No. 11 Cincinnati (10-0). Both teams are avoiding talk of the brawl as well, wishing they could move beyond it. A good, clean game on Wednesday night would go a long way. "It was a regrettable moment," Xavier coach Chris Mack said. "We lived that a year ago. As an educator, someone who mentors players, the message has been that we need to learn from what happened a year ago. And I think our kids have." The two schools and basketball fans around the city have learned what it's like when a sporting event gets out of hand. Xavier was unbeaten and ranked No. 8 when it beat the Bearcats 76-53 on the Musketeers' home court last season. With 9.4 seconds left, words were exchanged, the basketball was flung and fists started flying - the darkest moment in the rivalry's 79-game history. Four players from each team were suspended for up to six games. Coaches and players gave emotional apologies. The schools talked about whether to skip the rivalry game for a year. With its top two front-line players suspended, Cincinnati went to a three-guard offense and took off, reaching the NCAA tournament's round of 16. Xavier fell apart and didn't regroup until the closing weeks of the season, also reaching the round of 16. Both teams had to answer questions about the fight's lingering effects the rest of the way. Eventually, they agreed to keep the rivalry going, but wanted to remove its nasty edge. The game was moved to a downtown arena for the next two seasons. The name was changed from the Crosstown Shootout to the Crosstown Classic. The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center became a partner. Students and players from both schools toured the center together. Five of the eight suspended players have moved on, including four who started last year. There's been no boasting, no turning the game into a referendum on which program is better - a notable break from the past. "Everyone on their team is very talented and very good as well," Cincinnati guard Sean Kilpatrick said. "Their starters are as good as our starters and their bench can be as good as our bench. We don't know how it's going to be, but it will be a great matchup." Part of the rivalry's edge comes from proximity. The players face each other during summer league games in Cincinnati. Fans from both schools work side-by-side during the week. They relish their once-a-year bragging rights event. "The animosity that people outside the region perceived is not the case," Mack said. "And we have to make sure that's highlighted when we play on Wednesday night. It's going to be a hard-played game, it always is. But it's got to be one that's played the way it was played in the past, and it will be." The officials are likely to call it close, which could benefit the Bearcats, who have a much deeper bench. The Bearcats also are more familiar with the downtown U.S. Bank Arena, where Cincinnati plays more regularly and has won it last 17 games. Xavier hasn't played at the arena since 2007-08. The schools played their rivalry there 10 times from 1976-87 before moving it on campus. Cincinnati coach Mick Cronin thinks the neutral site will be helpful to both teams. "It readies your team for postseason because that's where the NCAA tournament is," Cronin said. "They're played at big arenas, downtown arenas at neutral sites. I think it's great for the city that we're playing down at U.S. Bank Arena, but at the same time I think it'll be advantageous for both of us come March to have a game like this at a neutral site." For the coaches, it's a challenge to get their teams through a game that has so much buildup and tends to linger. That part hasn't changed. "I think it's incredibly important to the community," Mack said. "It's a tough game. It's one game. There are a lot of eyes on the game nationally, locally, you name it, heightened this year a little bit. "But at the same time when Wednesday comes and goes, both teams have to be able to turn the page. Cincinnati did that a year ago - they went on an incredible run. We didn't." Follow Joe Kay on Twitter: http://twitter.com/apjoekay Updated December 18, 2012
\|NCAA Tournament Home\|\|\|\|\|Scoreboard\|\|\|\|\|Standings\|\|\|\|\|Teams\|\|\|\|\|Leaders\|\|\|\|\|Polls\|\|\|\|\|Home\| No. 23 Huskies rally to beat Wake Forest 77-71 It all added up to another win for No. 23 Connecticut and new coach Kevin Ollie. Napier scored all 16 of his points in the final 10 minutes and Ryan Boatright also scored 16 to lead UConn to a 77-71 victory over Wake Forest in the Paradise Jam on Friday night. Napier scored 10 points during a 12-0 run that put the Huskies ahead for good midway through the second half. UConn (3-0) took a 65-55 lead on DeAndre Daniels' driving layup with 6:18 remaining. Wake Forest (1-1) pulled to 73-69 on Travis McKie's 3-pointer with 53 seconds left, but Napier knocked down four free throws over the final 28 seconds to clinch it for UConn. "Shabazz finally showed up for us those last (10) minutes," said Ollie, who replaced retired Huskies coach Jim Calhoun this season. "I'm glad he did." Enosch Wolf and Daniels each added 12 points for the Huskies, while Wolf, a 7-foot-1 junior, had six rebounds. "Enosch was huge," said Ollie. "He did a wonderful job. It seemed like we had a big presence, a big fella down there. That felt good, coming down the stretch. He wanted the ball down the post. I liked his confidence." Wolf played 25 minutes, nearly doubling his previous career high of 13, thanks largely to foul trouble incurred by starting forward Tyler Olander. "I've worked hard for this, I got a chance," said Wolf. "I've got to show what I can do and keep going from here." Codi Miller-McIntyre led the Demon Deacons with 21 points, C.J. Harris added 17 and McKie had 16. In a back-and-forth affair that saw eight lead changes and two ties, UConn made five of its final six shots in the first half to take a 36-32 lead into halftime. Daniels had 10 points at the break. Wake Forest went on a 10-0 run, highlighted by consecutive 3-pointers from McKie and Arnaud William Adala Moto, to take a 50-46 lead with 12:08 left. Napier hit a driving layup to bring the Huskies within one, then Wolf's 17-foot jumper from the wing put UConn ahead for good, 53-52. "It was a great game, a hard-fought victory," said Ollie. "We stayed within our game plan. Defensively, I thought we made the key stops when we needed them. That's something we pride ourselves on." Boatright, a 6-foot guard, led UConn with seven rebounds. The Huskies shot just 3 for 18 from 3-point range but made 80 percent (24 for 30) of their free throws. Wake Forest went just 55 percent (12 for 22) from the foul line and turned the ball over 18 times. McKie grabbed eight rebounds for the Demon Deacons and Devin Thomas had seven. Basketball's a game of runs," said McKie. "The first half was kind of evenly matched. The second half we came out and attacked. They had a late run, and we never recovered from that. They're a very good team. We have several freshmen, it's a great game for us to build on. We have another game tomorrow." UConn, which won the Paradise Jam in its last appearance at the event in 2008, will now face either Iona or Quinnipiac on Sunday night. Wake Forest will face the loser of tonight's Iona-Quinnipiac game on Saturday. Updated November 16, 2012
Paternos: Late coach didn't cover up at Penn State By GENARO C. ARMAS STATE COLLEGE, Pa. (AP) Former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno didn't cover up for retired defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky when he was accused of molesting boys and didn't act to hinder an investigation of him, Paterno's family said Tuesday. Paterno's family also called Sandusky, who was convicted last month of sexually abusing 10 boys, some on campus, a "master deceiver" in a lengthy statement released after former FBI director Louis Freeh announced he would unveil the findings of his investigation into the scandal on Thursday. Freeh was hired to investigate by the Penn State trustees, who ousted Paterno days after Sandusky was arrested in November. Sandusky is awaiting sentencing after being convicted last month of 45 criminal counts. He maintains his innocence. Paterno's family said Paterno "did not know that Jerry Sandusky was a pedophile." "Joe Paterno did not act in any way to prevent a proper investigation of Jerry Sandusky," the family said. "To claim otherwise is a distortion of the truth." Paterno's family said the Freeh team declined its offer to respond to recent news leaks after the family asked to review the findings. The Hall of Fame coach supported the trustees' decision to hire Freeh to conduct a thorough investigation, but the recent leaks raised questions about fairness and confidentiality, the family said. Paterno had issued in December a statement that said he relayed graduate assistant Mike McQueary's report in 2001 of seeing Sandusky with a boy in the team shower to athletic director Tim Curley and "that was the last time the matter was brought to my attention." CNN reported last week on an excerpted email from Curley in which he indicated he changed his mind about going to child welfare authorities after speaking with Paterno. The report led to renewed public scrutiny on whether the longtime coach took a more active role in the decision than what he described. The family said the "media spin that this is proof of some sort of cover up is completely false." "When the facts come out," the family said, "it will be clear that Joe Paterno never gave Tim Curley any instructions to protect Sandusky or limit any investigation of his actions." Paterno, his family said, never got a chance to present his case to the university before he died in January of lung cancer at age 85. The coach had described the abuse scandal as one of the great sorrows of his life. Just before his firing, he acknowledged he wished he had done more after hearing about the allegations against Sandusky. His family said he is the only person to publicly acknowledge that sentiment. Curley and retired Penn State vice president Gary Schultz are awaiting trial on charges they failed to properly report suspected child abuse and lied to a grand jury in the Sandusky case. They deny the allegations against them and have sought to have the charges dismissed. Updated July 10, 2012
\|National Football League\| \|Apr. 4 12:42 PM PT1:42 PM MT2:42 PM CT3:42 PM ET19:42 GMT3:42 AM 北京时间12:42 PM MST2:42 PM EST2:42 PM CT23:42 UAE15:42 ET18:42 - Hanson is retiring after 21 seasons. The 42-year-old Hanson announced his decision Thursday. He said he gave serious consideration to returning, but problems with his heel prompted him to call it a career. Analysis: Hanson became the first player to play 300 games with one franchise, finishing with 327. He also set an NFL record last year when he played his 21st season with the same team. Hanson made a record 52 field goals from at least 50 yards. He's third on the career scoring list at 2,150 points and third in field goals with 495.
\|National Football League\| \|Jan. 20 7:14 PM PT8:14 PM MT9:14 PM CT10:14 PM ET3:14 GMT11:14 AM 北京时间8:14 PM MST10:14 PM EST9:14 PM CT7:14 UAE (+1)22:14 1:14 - Reece will replace Baltimore's Vonta Leach on the AFC's Pro Bowl roster after the Ravens earned a trip to the Super Bowl on Sunday. Analysis: Reece had been selected as a first alternate for the NFL's all-star game, which will be played at Honolulu's Aloha Stadium next Sunday. Reece played in all 16 games with 14 starts - 10 at fullback and four at running back. He had a career-high 59 rushing attempts for 271 yards, averaging 4.6 yards per carry. \|Nov. 19 2:33 PM PT3:33 PM MT4:33 PM CT5:33 PM ET22:33 GMT6:33 AM 北京时间3:33 PM MST5:33 PM EST4:33 PM CT2:33 UAE (+1)17:33 20:33 - Reece had a career day while filling in for the injured Darren McFadden and Mike Goodson at halfback but the Raiders lost 38-17 to New Orleans on Sunday. Analysis: Reece rushed for 103 yards, 55 more than in any other game, and had four catches for 90 yards. It's unknown if he'll get to try to repeat those efforts Sunday in Cincinnati or if McFadden or Goodson will return from their sprained ankles. \|Nov. 12 1:53 PM PT2:53 PM MT3:53 PM CT4:53 PM ET21:53 GMT5:53 AM 北京时间2:53 PM MST4:53 PM EST3:53 PM CT1:53 UAE (+1)16:53 19:53 - Reece ran 13 times for 48 yards while also grabbing seven receptions for 56 yards on Sunday against the Ravens. Analysis: Reece, a viable running back or flex fill-in for desperate fantasy netted 104 yards on 20 total touches in his first start for the injured Darren McFadden. \|Nov. 5 1:15 PM PT2:15 PM MT3:15 PM CT4:15 PM ET21:15 GMT5:15 AM 北京时间2:15 PM MST4:15 PM EST3:15 PM CT1:15 UAE (+1)16:15 19:15 - Reece had eight receptions for 95 yards and a TD in Sunday's 42-32 loss to the Bucs. Analysis: Reece is sixth on the team with 34 targets and fourth with 26 receptions.
Clippers topple Trail Blazers 96-83 By JOE RESNICK Griffin had 23 points and nine assists, helping the Clippers beat the Portland Trail Blazers 96-83 on Sunday night and get even for a one-point loss to the Trail Blazers a day earlier. "It's everybody's job on this team to step up, and that's what I've tried to do," Griffin said. "Chris is a huge part of our team and he directs the game from the point guard spot. He has the ball in his hands during 85 percent of our offense. So when he goes out, our whole dynamic changes. But other guys have stepped up. Eric Bledsoe's done a great job." Bledsoe had 10 points, five assists and five rebounds in his seventh start, while Chris Paul missed his fourth straight game and seventh in the past nine because of a bruised right kneecap. Bledsoe played 36 minutes without committing a turnover. "I just played more aggressive and didn't worry about it," Bledsoe said. "My last couple of games I was playing kind of passive, but tonight I did a good job of just staying aggressive. My teammates just told me to just stay in attack mode, and everybody else on the team played great. At the end of the day, turnovers are going to happen. You can't play every game without having a turnover." Griffin powered the Clippers to a 55-50 halftime lead with 15 points, including a fast break dunk off a long pass from DeAndre Jordan just before intermission. "Our lead assist guy is not around, so we have to run some more things through Blake at the elbow and let him make plays for us," coach Vinny Del Negro said. "He draws so much attention, but he's unselfish and he's making the good basketball plays and making other players better. That's what All-Stars do in this league." Griffin didn't get his first rebound in this game until after his sixth assist. "Blake sharing the basketball made the game easier for everybody," Del Negro said. "He was kind of like a `point forward' for us tonight. We had 33 assists and shot the ball well, which we haven't been doing. We were unselfish in a lot of areas." The Clippers have the third-best record in the NBA at 33-13 and are 2 1/2 games behind San Antonio in the Western Conference. Lamar Odom had eight points, 13 rebounds and six assists. "We needed any kind of a win right now," Del Negro said. "We're trying to accumulate as many as we can, and then we'll count them up at the end of the year and see where we're at. "We obviously executed a little bit better and got solid production from several guys. I liked our intensity in the second half, and we did a better job guarding the 3-pointers. But more so, our activity defensively was the difference in the game." LaMarcus Aldridge led the Trail Blazers with 21 points and 11 rebounds. It was Portland's seventh loss in nine games. "It's hard to beat the same team two times in a row, especially on back-to-back said," rookie Damian Lillard said. "They're a really good team. Last night I think we did a lot better job controlling their transition and not giving up as many easy plays." Portland never led in the second half on Sunday, falling behind 74-59 after a driving layup by Bledsoe with 3:15 left in the third quarter. Griffin didn't play after going to the bench with 10 seconds left in the third quarter and the Clippers leading 78-62. But they built the margin to as many as 19 points on a layup by reserve forward Ronny Turiaf with 6:23 remaining. "We didn't take care of the ball and we had turnovers in the second half," Aldridge said. "I thought they had some easy breakouts that opened the game up. Griffin did a good job of finding guys and making good reads. But we didn't play as well as we did last night, and some of the guys were a little tired." NOTES: The Blazers finished with 28 assists on their 29 field goals. ... Los Angeles outscored Portland 56-24 in the paint. ... The Clippers head out on a seven-game road trip. ... The Clippers shot 51.2 percent, and are 14-1 when shooting at least 50 percent. ... Los Angeles was leading 46-40 when Butler's fadeaway 3-pointer from in front of the Clippers' bench was disallowed because of an offensive foul called against him with 4:31 remaining in the second quarter. Butler picked up his third foul just 14 seconds later, but remained in the game until he was removed by Del Negro with 3:16 left in the half. Updated January 28, 2013
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—(1) Every company shall keep a register of its members and enter therein — the names and addresses of the members, and in the case of a company having a share capital a statement of the shares held by each member, distinguishing each share by its number, if any, or by the number, if any, of the certificate evidencing the member’s holding and of the amount paid or agreed to be considered as paid on the shares of each member; the date at which the name of each person was entered in the register as a member; the date at which any person who ceased to be a member during the previous 7 years so ceased to be a member; and in the case of a company having a share capital, the date of every allotment of shares to members and the number of shares comprised in each allotment. (2) Notwithstanding anything in subsection (1), where the company has converted any of its shares into stock and given notice of the conversion to the Registrar, the company shall alter the register to show the amount of stock or number of stock units held by each member instead of the number of shares and the particulars relating to shares specified in subsection (1)(a). (2A) Where a company purchases one or more of its own shares or stocks in circumstances in which section 76H applies — the requirements of subsections (1)(a), (b) and (c) and (2) shall be complied with unless the company cancels all of the shares or stocks immediately after the purchase in accordance with section 76K(1); but any share or stock which is so cancelled shall be disregarded for the purposes of subsections (1)(a) and (2). (3) Notwithstanding anything in subsection (1), a company may keep the names and particulars relating to persons who have ceased to be members of the company separately and the names and particulars relating to former members need not be supplied to any person who applies for a copy of the register unless he specifically requests the names and particulars of former members. (4) The register of members shall be prima facie evidence of any matters inserted therein as required or authorised by this Act. (5) Every company having more than 50 members shall, unless the register of members is in such a form as to constitute in itself an index, keep an index in convenient form of the names of the members and shall, within 14 days after the date on which any alteration is made in the register of members, make any necessary alteration in the index. (6) The index shall in respect of each member contain a sufficient indication to enable the account of that member in the register to be readily found. (7) If default is made in complying with this section, the company and every officer of the company who is in default shall be guilty of an offence and shall be liable on conviction to a fine not exceeding $1,000 and also to a default penalty. [UK, 1948, ss. 110, 118; UK, Treasury Shares, Sch., para. 18; Aust., 1961, s. 151]
Members of the Detroit Tigers visited the state-of-the-art Ground Systems Power and Energy Lab at TACOM in Warren and met with soldiers and civilian employees during the annual team's annual Winter Caravan. Members of the Detroit Tigers on Thursday visited the men and women at TACOM in Warren who test and pioneer many of the items used by the U.S. Army around the world. Prince Fielder, Miguel Cabrera and Phil Coke were among the Tigers on the team's Winter Caravan which stopped in Macomb County and allowed the players to see the M-1 Abrams up close and tour the Ground Systems Power and Energy Lab (GSPEL). The facility includes unique labs that test equipment before it is sent to the battlefield. Afterward, the American League Champions participated in a question-and-answer session with personnel at the facility. Questions included:
Well I figured that i should try and give at least ONE of my reserve club teas a try. I figure if i can hit one a week, then each month i’ll actually get around to trying all 4 that i receive. Though they’ll be some overlap since canada delivery means i don’t get my order until halfway through the month. That being said, i still have january and february to get through lol So i’m 98% certain i’ve never had a sheng before. I’m also fairly certain that my gaiwan skills can use a little honing. However, practice makes perfect! This tea not only smells like “up north” but the first tasting of this reminds me of liking a cedar chest. Not that i’ve done that before, but it tastes like i imagine doing that would. It’s a delicious mellow flavour that is a pleasure to drink. Edit: really enjoying the steeps of this one as they progress. A wonderful afternoon tea for some reflection.

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