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Network Working Group Bernard P. Cosell Request For Comments # 386 David C. Walden NIC # 11358 Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. Categories: August 16, 1972 Updates: Obsoletes: LETTER TO TIP USERS -- 2 This is the second letter to TIP users. The first was RFC #365. There will be more letters to TIP users as they seem to us to be a good way to keep you informed about what's going on. We suggest you keep these letters with your TIP User's Guide (TUG) as we will use the letters to provide documentation of TIP system changes which are made before we can get TUG revisions printed and distributed. (It is almost inevitable that the TUG revisions follow actual system changes. Further- more, these letters will allow us more discussion of new commands than in TUG.) Some of the changes we will be making to the TIP have been suggested by TIP users. We won't bother with acknowledg- ments. The @PROTOCOL TO LOGIN and @PROTOCOL TO CLOSE BOTH commands will be removed very soon. We presume no one uses these commands any more since they have been replaced by @LOGIN and @CLOSE. As we warned in TIP Letter 1, the @LOGIN command will be given a parameter soon, the Host number up to now given with the @HOST command. At the same time, @HOST will be changed so it does a simultaneous @RECEIVE FROM HOST and @SEND TO HOST. Presently, @HOST is the same as @SEND TO HOST. Several changes will be made to the @TRANSMIT commands very soon. First @TRANSMIT ON NO CHARACTERS and @TRANSMIT ON EVERY CHARACTER will be removed. Their functions will be covered by the other @TRANSMIT commands. @TRANSMIT NOW will continue to function as at present; it will cause the one message presently being accumulated to be sent as soon as possible. @TRANSMIT ON LINEFEED and @TRANSMIT ON MESSAGE-END will continue to cause the message being accumulated to be sent on linefeed and CONTROL-S. However, they will additionally cause the message being accumulated to be sent when the character buffer is almost full. Thus, it will no longer be necessary to give a @TRANSMIT EVERY with @TRANSMIT ON LINEFEED and @TRANSMIT ON MESSAGE-END. @TRANSMIT EVERY # will continue to cause the message being accumulated to be sent as near as possible to every #th character. However, values of # which are bigger than the size of the [Page 1] RFC # 386 NIC #11358 input buffer will cause transmission when the buffer is almost full; and a value of 0 for # will reset the terminal to its initial setting -- TRANSMIT-ON-LINEFEED mode off, TRANSMIT ON MESSAGE- END mode off, and transmitting every character. Thus, TRANSMIT EVERY 0 has the effect of the removed @TRANSMIT ON NO CHARACTER command, and @TRANSMIT EVERY 1 has the effect of the removed @TRANSMIT ON EVERY CHARACTER command. There are two ways outside of letters and the telephone to communicate your suggestions and complaints to us: log into BBN-TENEX and SNDMSG to WALDEN or use the NIC Journal system to send a message to DCW3. Dave likes letters best, incidentally. We are going to remove the "NEWS" herald from the TIP's HELLO message. The problem is that we don't know when everybody has read the latest news so that we can turn off the herald. Therefore, we can't turn it off. Therefore, it is useless. Check the NEWS every time you use the TIP. If once the news begins printing you discover you have already seen it, you can stop it by typing @CLOSE _LF_ (on a 2741 hit "attention" first). A new TIP message will have been added by the time you get this letter, the message TIP GOING DOWN. This message will be printed on every TIP terminal shortly before the TIP is taken down for preventive maintenance, new software releases, etc. (see RFC #381 for further discussion of this topic). When this message is printed, all TIP users should cleanly stop what they are doing with a Host. Eventually, this message will include information on how long until the TIP will go down, for how long it will be down, and why. While we are on the subject of TIP messages, let us mention that we will be adding a number of new messages which we believe will remove some of the present confusion about what the TIP is doing. Unfortunately, we don't have the space to store the message text strings, so, we will use numbers for the new messages. The format of these messages will probably be something like M46 for message 46. Perhaps when the TIPs get more core we can replace the number-messages by text-messages. We are thinking of changing all the TIP LOGIN commands to OPEN commands which would be more opposite to the CLOSE commands and not so liable to confusion with Host LOGIN. On page 12 of the TUG is a description of how Hosts can send commands to a TIP terminal. Be warned, if you decide to use this facility, that we are changing the TIP command language slowly and we will not be constrained in these changes by the fact that some Hosts are sending TIP commands. Therefore, if a Host is going to send a [Page 2] RFC # 386 NIC #11358 command to a TIP it ought to implement this in a manner that can be changed easily. Some TIP users have been seeing the following problem. They are communicating with a Host when suddenly they get the message DEAD. If they try to LOGIN to the Host again they do not get the DEAD message, but the Host refuses to allow the LOGIN by either doing nothing, closing, or refusing. The problem was that occasionally the network partitioned briefly; for instance, one of the two cross-country lines was down and the other got flaky for a few seconds. If, during a period when the network is partitioned, a TIP user sends a message to a Host which cannot be reached, the TIP types DEAD and closes the connection to the Host. The Host, on the other hand, may not have been trying to send to the TIP when the network partitioned; in that case it might not have noticed that the network partitioned and therefore still thinks it has an open connection to the TIP. When the TIP then tries to re-LOGIN to the Host, the Host refuses because it already has an open connection with that particular TIP device. Now that we have three independent cross-country paths we do not expect this problem to occur often, but if it does we see no short-term solution. We can't just let a CLOSE reset the connection since the user's immediately preceeding LOGIN destroyed the Host supplied socket numbers. One can get out of this state by executing the Host/Host protocol command from the TIP which resets _all_ TIP users at the given TIP talking to the given Host; but this is a little gross. What is maybe needed is a Host/Host protocol command to reset the Host's connections with a particular user (TIP) socket; we will try to understand the ramifications of such a command and perhaps undertake promotion of a Host/Host protocol change. In the meantime, frequently when the above problem happens some other TIP terminal can still LOGIN to the Host and then halt the hung terminal's job from the Host side. If it is not possible to get through on another connection, a telephone call to the Host, asking them to log the job out, may be necessary. Or, if there is really no other user talking to the particular Host, the reset command can be executed -- this command is not documented but we will tell a responsible person at each TIP site how to execute the command. There is a problem related to the above problem which some TIP users have seen. Occasionally, an IMP crashes somewhere in the network and takes a packet of a message along with it. Eventually, the source of the message gets an incomplete transmission message from the network. When the TIP gets this message, it closes the connection and calls the destination dead. This is what most other Hosts do also, we understand. A more reasonable thing to do might be to retransmit the message or to tell the user and then let him continue; we would like to do one of these. But before retransmission or letting the user [Page 3] RFC # 386 NIC #11358 continue, the TIP and Host's allocate counters must be resynchronized. However, there is no Host/Host protocol way to synchronize simple enough for the TIP to use. What may be needed is a simple Host/Host protocol reset allocate command. We will try to understand this issue and, again, perhaps undertake promotion of a Host/Host protocol change. The above two problems explain part of the "lost allocates" but not all. We have now instrumented the TIP program in a manner which we hope will help us find the rest of the lost allocate problem soon. The TIP's logger (opener?) has been causing users some problems. Upon examination, the problems were seen to originate from basic design assumptions within the logger which we are working on changing. In the short term, however, we think that a discussion of what the logger is doing and how it works will alleviate some of the grief. For the user, opening proceeds in three phases. In the first, the user is queued up waiting to "get" the TIP's logger. In the second, the user has gotten the TIP's logger and is beginning the login sequence. In the third, the user has completed the login sequence and is waiting for the Host to open up the actual data connections. Many of the problems stem from the fact that _only_one_user_ may be proceeding through phase 2 at a time. Hence the need for the queue of phase 1. Any single user may tie up phase 2 for at most about 1 minute. This is the canonical "timeout" in the logger. Notice that this does not include the times in either the first or third phases. Thus, the actual delay before you get a "timeout" after you type @L can be 1 minute, 2 minutes, 3 minutes...depending on how many other people are having difficulty logging in at the same time. Abort Login (@A L) does three different things depending on which phase of logging in the user is in. In phase 2 it resets the timer to be close to overflowing so that it is responded to with a "timeout" shortly after the command is given. In phase 3 it does nothing at all, and in phase 1 it merely removes the user (silently) from the logging queue. We will, medium term, have the TIP type out something like "YOUR LOGGER" when you get off the queue and the logger begins trying to open your connections. This will at least alleviate user uncertainty as to whether he is in phase 1 or phase 2. Long term, we will probably make the logging process reentrant so that users will not interact with one another quite so destructively. In the short term, here is a small "cookbook" on how to undo a login that seems to not be working. When you have waited as long as you would like to for the login to take place, you may type "@A L". If the TIP responds with "TIMEOUT" in a few second and has not typed T OPEN or R OPEN, then you [Page 4] RFC # 386 NIC #11358 are aborted and may attempt logging in again. If it types "TIMEOUT" but has typed out T OPEN or R OPEN then you should type @C and wait for that to be responded to (You _must_ wait.) If you get no response at all to @A L, and the TIP has typed that one or the other connection is open, you should type @C and wait, as above. Finally, if the TIP makes no response and has not opened any connection, than you are free to proceed. From now on the name of the DEVICE CODE EXECUPORT command will be DEVICE CODE EXTRA-PADDING, since there are a number of other terminals which require this feature. The latest to be added to the list is the DATAPOINT 3300. [ This RFC was put into machine readable form for entry ] [ into the online RFC archives by BBN Corp. under the ] [ direction of Alex McKenzie. 1/97 ] [Page 5] | <urn:uuid:fbce327d-d71d-4abe-8645-38191437b666> | http://www6.frugalware.org/rfc/rfc0386 | en | 0.943283 | 0.031043 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Torrent's details
USA Jock - Hard Bare Fucks 2
hunkmusclestudhairytattoointerraciallatino3 waypierced cockbig dickoraldouble oraldeepthroatbutch bloomchad brockdylan hydejames roscoekamrunmatt sizemoresebastian riotober brandtanalpoundingbreedingass lickingface sittingbreedingcum filledmp4
Big hairy muscle man Tober Brandt comes back to fuck hung bareback bottom Dylan Hyde. Tober shows no mercy on Dylan's boy holes, starting first by shoving his big dick down his throat and making him gag on that thick man meat. And Dylan is such a pig that he thoroughly enjoys getting Tober's cock all sloppy and wet and ready for his hungry fuckhole. Tober returns the favor and eats out Dylan's ass, priming him with plenty of spit. Tober then bends Dylan over a chair and slides his shaft up that hungry hole bareback, power fucking the slut hole deep and hard. It doesn't take Tober long to figure out Dylan's already been fucked but that turns Tober on even more. That's when he really gives it to the cock whore, including his load!
Chad is really having a hay day with all these hot boys I am pairing him up with, let me tell you. This time hairy bottom boy James Roscoe was a perfect match for this hairy daddy. He didn't waste time shoving his face into Chad's bushy cock and taking it all down his throat to get it nice and hard for his hairy slut hole. Which of course Chad couldn't wait to get into and start eating out and smell that boy hole and get it ready to be barebacked like it was meant to be. Watching his cock slide in that slut hole bareback was just too hot to see as the hairy on that slut hole was slick with gun oil lube and he stretched that hole with each thrust of his hips. Yea we know who is gonna get the load this time!
How about two flavors of cock and one big black booty? Sebastian Rio's fat uncut Latino cock, together with Matt Sizemore's huge cut 9-incher, pair up to fill Kamrun's sweet black hole. Kamrun starts with a cock buffet and is so hungry he doesn't know which one to suck first. So the cock slut sucks them both, one at a time, then two at the same time! Sebastian and Matt then bend Kamrun over a barrel so one can fuck his face while the other eats his ass out. But Sebastian, being the greedy one, barebacks Kamrun and opens him up for Matt's throbbing man meat. Kamrun's hole ends up sloppy, stretched, and cummy by the time these two big dicked guys have their way with him and breed his slutty hole!
Like a hot hairy hole? Wanna see it get barebacked? Butch Bloom wanted to show me his topping skills so I put him with bareback hairy bottom James Roscoe. These two were like little puppies jumping around all over the place shoving their cocks in each other holes. It was wild! They started making out with heavy kissing and lots of tongue then before you knew it Butch was sliding his boy cock into James' hairy hole and started ramming it in deep making sure he felt every inch of it. In fact it was so hot a scene Butch almost cum seeded his slut hole twice!
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1 file | <urn:uuid:68fa74a1-d44f-410d-ac55-35302e517dab> | https://gay-torrents.org/details.php?id=8858a83d1747fd0858e33ed1ecca5fac31691eb8 | en | 0.97014 | 0.024353 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Ancient Greek Olympics Lesson Plan
Instructor: Christopher Sailus
In this lesson, our students learn about the ancient Greek Olympics with the help of a text lesson. The students also do group research to investigate one ancient Olympic event in particular and then compare it to modern events.
Learning Objectives
After this lesson, students will be able to:
• Explain the genesis of the ancient Greek Olympics and how they changed over time
• Detail specifics of ancient Olympic events
• Identify similarities and differences between the ancient and modern Olympics
2 hours
Key Vocabulary
At the conclusion of this lesson, students should be able to identify and define the following vocabulary terms:
• Olympics
• Zeus
• Olympia
• Polytheistic
• Stadion
Curriculum Standards
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.1
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.9-10.4
• Have students read the lesson The Olympic Games in Ancient Greece.
• Ask students to stop reading when they reach the 'Events' heading. Hold a short discussion on the material thus far to ensure students understand the core concepts of the lesson. Some example questions include:
• Who did the ancient Olympics honor? Where did they take place?
• How were participants chosen? How did they compete?
• Have students read the rest of the lesson.
• Have students take the quiz, then review the answers as a class.
Activity 1
• Break your students up into four groups. Assign each group one of the traditional ancient Greek Olympic event categories (equestrian, pentathlon, running, boxing).
• Together, groups should use the internet or other text resources to research their individual event and how it changed over time in ancient Greece. Students' research should attempt to answer certain questions (it may be helpful to write them on the board) such as:
• How many events were part of your category when it was first included in the ancient Olympic games? Did this change over time?
• How were your events contested in the ancient games? Were there any notable winners?
• Once complete, have each group designate a spokesperson to present their findings to the rest of the class.
• Have each group give a short 2-3 minutes presentation on the details of their sport.
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Create an account | <urn:uuid:b53cc4e8-26de-4181-a661-c295d9f52b8f> | https://study.com/academy/lesson/ancient-greek-olympics-lesson-plan.html | en | 0.92184 | 0.094047 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
How soon should I talk to my employer about my disability?
It is entirely up to you whether to talk to your employer about your disability, and if so, at what stage you do this, who you choose to communicate with at work, and how you go about it. It is a good idea to keep a written record.
Remember, however, that if your employer doesn’t know about your disability, you will lose the benefit of any reasonable adjustments your employer would have had to make to your working conditions under the Equality Act 2010, as well as the other important protections the Act has to offer. It will also be much harder to access support services such as Access to Work.
Many specialist charities and not-for-profit organisations offer advice on how and when to talk to your employer about your disability.
You can choose to disclose information about your disability to your employer in such a way that the nature of your condition remains confidential to all except those who need to know. For example, all that your line manager needs to know is that reasonable adjustments are required, and not why they are needed.
You are not obliged to disclose information about your disability when you apply for a new job. Under the Equality Act 2010, with some narrow exceptions it is against the law for an employer to ask job applicants questions such as whether they have a disability and their previous sickness record before offering them a job.
There are some exceptions. For example, an employer can ask you whether you have a disability in order to make appropriate adjustments to the interview arrangements.
The ban on asking questions about sickness and disabilities extends to third parties such as recruitment agencies and assessment centres. The Equality and Human Rights Commission has prepared some guidance (PDF) on the ban.
| <urn:uuid:b162413e-f92a-43e1-a1c3-b447b7171ef1> | https://worksmart.org.uk/work-rights/discrimination/disability-discrimination/how-soon-should-i-talk-my-employer-about-my | en | 0.972246 | 0.03835 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
The Scientific Revolution.
Isaiah S. 6th period
What was the change???
The Scientific Revolution changed the way people see Physics, Astronomy, Biology, and Anotomy between the 1550's and 1700.
Who were the people associated with the change ?
How did the change impact society during that period ?
At first it was hard for people to believe that there theories were wrong in the beganing. When Galileo introduced his corrections and theories the church punished him for trying to correct Aristotles. The church didnt want to except the change but the theories were still used instead of being changed.
How did it change today's society ?
Ever since the corrections and theories of Galileo and Isaac we actually sticked with them because they are true. Since our technology has been improving since their time period we were able to support them. We now know more about gravity and the universe, if Galileo and Isaac didn't do their research we could still be wrong about our theories today. | <urn:uuid:e470d751-9aa0-4a8e-a112-9045190021d7> | https://www.smore.com/egzx | en | 0.988803 | 0.992721 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Project ROSE Is Arresting Sex Workers in Arizona to Save Their Souls
A moralistic program in Phoenix arrests sex workers in massive raids and brings them to a church, where they are held extrajudicially and offered alternative sentences without lawyers, judges, or due process.
Feb 26 2014, 3:56pm
Illustration by Molly Crabapple
In May 2013, Monica Jones, a student and sex-work activist, was arrested for "manifesting prostitution" by the Phoenix police.
Hers was one of more than 350 arrests carried out by Project ROSE in conjunction with Phoenix police since the program's inception in 2011.
Project ROSE is a Phoenix city program that arrests sex workers in the name of saving them. In five two-day stings, more than 100 police officers targeted alleged sex workers on the street and online. They brought them in handcuffs to the Bethany Bible Church. There, the sex workers were forced to meet with prosecutors, detectives, and representatives of Project ROSE, who offered a diversion program to those who qualified. Those who did not may face months or years in jail.
In the Bethany Bible Church, those arrested were not allowed to speak to lawyers. Despite the handcuffs, they were not officially "arrested" at all.
In law enforcement, language goes through the looking glass. Lieutenant James Gallagher, the former head of the Phoenix Vice Department, told me that Project ROSE raids were "programs." The arrests were "contact." And the sex workers who told Al Jazeera that they had been kidnapped in those windowless church rooms—they were "lawfully detained."
"Project ROSE is a service opportunity for a population involved in a very complex problem," Lieutenant Gallagher wrote to me in an email. Sex workers were criminals and victims at once. They were fair game to imprison, as long as they were getting "help."
Project ROSE is the creation of Dr. Dominique Roe-Sepowitz. She is the director of the Office of Sex Trafficking Intervention Research and a tenured professor at Arizona State University, where Monica Jones is a student. Once, she and Monica had even debated Project ROSE.
According to Project ROSE's website, most costs are absorbed by taxpayers, who pay the salaries of the officers carrying out the raids. Fifteen-hundred dollars more per day goes to the Bethany Bible Church. Volunteers, including students from Arizona State University, fill in the gaps. SWOP-Phoenix, an activist organization by and for sex workers, is filing freedom-of-information requests to discover ROSE's other sources of funding.
At first, Project ROSE may seem similar to the many diversion programs in the United States, in which judges sentence offenders to education, rehab, or community service rather than giving them a criminal record. What makes ROSE different is that it doesn't work with the convicted. Rather, its raids funnel hundreds of people into the criminal justice system. Denied access to lawyers, many of these people are coerced into ROSE's program without being convicted of any crime. Project ROSE may not seem constitutional, but to Roe-Sepowitz, "rescue" is more important than rights.
In November 2013, Roe-Sepowitz told Al Jazeera: "Once you've prostituted you can never not have prostituted... Having that many body parts in your body parts, having that many body fluids near you and doing things that are freaky and weird really messes up your ideas of what a relationship looks like, and intimacy."
"As a social worker, you're supposed to see your clients as human beings," Monica told me. "But her way of thinking is that once you're a sex worker, you can never not be a sex worker."
To the best of Google's knowledge, Roe-Sepowitz has not spoken to any press since Al Jazeera. She ignored my repeated requests for comment, and she has only been willing to engage sex workers if they risked their freedom by speaking to her class alongside members of the police.
Monica is a proud activist. Days ago she spoke to USA Today, comparing struggles against Arizona's SB 1062 bill (which permits businesses to discriminate against LGBT individuals) to those her family fought for their civil rights. On her third year of a social-work degree, Monica volunteers with battered women, works at a needle exchange, and passes out condoms to sex workers. She is a member of SWOP-Phoenix. She describes herself as "homemaker at heart," a girl who loves to cook, dance, and party, but also as an "advocate."
Monica fears she was targeted for this advocacy.
On the day cops dragged Monica to Bethany Bible Church, she had posted on, an advertising service used by sex workers, to warn them of a coming sting. The day before, she had spoken against Project ROSE at a SWOP rally.
Monica told me she had accepted a ride home from her favorite bar the night of her arrest. Once inside the car, undercover officers handcuffed her. They were rude, she said, calling her "he" and "it" (Monica is trans, but her ID lists her as a female). They threatened to take her to jail. Like many incarcerated trans women, Monica had previously been imprisoned with men. Frightened, Monica agreed for them to take her to the church.
Ineligible for Project ROSE's diversion program because of previous prostitution convictions, Monica now faces months in jail and worries incarceration will hamper her pursuit of a degree. She has been questioned on the street three times since her arrest. Once, police handcuffed her for 15 minutes.
"Because I was very outspoken about the diversion program, being out there protesting and also being a student of ASU School of Social Work, I feel like the police knew about me," Monica said. "I was very loud, so they could pick me out of the crowd."
Monica was arrested for "manifesting prostitution," a statute in the Phoenix municipal code that takes everything from starting conversations with passersby to asking if someone is an undercover cop as proof that you're selling sex. In the state where Sheriff Joe Arpaio lost massive lawsuits for racially profiling Latinos, "manifesting prostitution" is another way to discriminate. The main victims are trans women of color like Monica, who are seen as sex workers even if they're buying milk.
Some might say Project ROSE is harmless. After all, those eligible for diversion can have their charges dropped if they're among the 30 percent who manage to complete the program. But many of the hundreds arrested in Project ROSE's raids are not eligible, either because cops find drugs or weapons on them or because they've been charged with prositution before.
"All persons found to be participating in prostitution activity are breaking the law, regardless of motive," says the fact sheet Project ROSE gives the media. Those not eligible are criminals. Their freedom is a small price to pay for forcing others into a program that might remove them from "the life."
To effect this rescue, Project ROSE offers a buffet of services, including emergency housing, detox, and counseling. All these services are available without being arrested, Jaclyn Dairman, an activist with SWOP-Phoenix, told me.
But at ROSE's heart is DIGNITY Diversion, 36 hours of classroom time run by Catholic Charities.
Catholic Charities' website boasts a photo of a white girl, a tear running down her cheek. Who could resist opening their wallets before such innocence destroyed? Catholic Charities offers walking tours of the sketchy parts of town. Tender-hearted folk can gawk at sex workers. These excursions are like the slum tours beloved by Victorians. Popular enough in the 1890s to be listed in guidebooks, these tours of impoverished London neighborhoods gave a philanthropic gloss to the thrill of mingling with the poor in brothels, bars, and boarding houses. Then and now, participants got the self-satisfaction of pity mixed with the frisson of proximity to vice.
This cocktail may be why sex trafficking, as opposed to trafficking in maids or construction workers or farm labor, is always a fashionable cause.
Monica is a graduate of DIGNITY Diversion. Forced into this program by another prostitution arrest, Monica sat in a classroom from 8 AM to 4 PM, without food, while vice cops described girls overdosing on heroin. Jail was held over the heads of attendees until they finished the program, though many were going broke from their loss of sex-work income. Monica described the class as having the religious overtones of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. In keeping with the program's Catholicism, no condoms were provided. Neither was child care.
"I wasn't ashamed about being a sex worker. I kept bringing this up during the diversion program," Monica told me. "Girls would ask me why I didn't feel this way. Well, 'cause I don't. I have the right to my own body."
Catholic Charities requested that Monica leave early, fearing her influence on others.
Monica's trial is in March. The prisons she may be sentenced to are brutal. Arizona is the home of the notorious Tent City, an outdoor complex of bunks and razor wire, where prisoners' shoes melt from the relentless heat.
In 2009, Marcia Powell, a sex worker serving two years for agreeing to a $20 blowjob, was left in an open cage in the maximum-security yard of Perryville Prison Complex for four hours. Guards ignored her pleas for water. Under the pitiless sun, her organs failed her. Her corpse was covered with burns.
No guard has ever been charged for Marcia Powell's death.
"There is no gray. It's illegal behavior," Dominique Roe-Sepowtitz said, speaking about prostitution to Al Jazeera.
Like Catholic Charities' hooker tours, her attitude is Victorian. To those like Roe-Sepowitz, there are God's poor and the Devil's poor. There are victims Project ROSE can save, and there are repeat offenders, unrepentant whores. They can be locked in cages and dismissed.
When the police brought Monica to the Bethany Baptist Church, she saw Dominique Roe-Sepowitz. "She refused to talk to me," Monica said. "She wanted nothing to do with me."
Why would she? It's easier to speak for people if you pretend they have no voice.
Follow Molly on Twiiter @MollyCrabapple
Vice Channels | <urn:uuid:c860317f-c484-44cb-985d-5edb3d66cb9d> | https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/av4eyb/in-arizona-project-rose-is-arresting-sex-workers-to-save-them | en | 0.976242 | 0.035555 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Air Rifles 101
NavyT02 Uncategorized 0 Comments
Are you a bit intimidated by traditional firearms, but still want to protect your home? Or maybe the cost of a conventional firearm is too high for you. If that is the case, an air rifle may be the ideal option for you. An air rifle is even great for enthusiasts that happen to be searching for a unique alternative to the firearms that they currently have within their home, while still getting a good price.
Air-Rifles-101You will need to keep in mind that air rifles are not as powerful as traditional firearms, but they remain a viable option for hobbyists and hunters. This allows for the option of using a gun minus the general problems that accompany firearms.
The ammunition used in air rifles is different from traditional firearm ammunition. This is due to the fact that air rifle projectiles are powered via compressed air, therefore they lack the propellant that generally accompany traditional firearms. With that being said, air rifle ammunition is referred to as “pellets” as opposed to “bullets”.
Given the fact that the pellets are propelled via compressed air, the ammunition can be varied. There are pellets that take on the shape of a standard bullet, while others the form of a round projectile that closely resembles what was previously utilized in early rifles and muskets. Additionally, there is ammunition that are darts, bolts and arrows and they can also be easily loaded into air rifles.
Types of Air Rifles
There is actually a great deal of types of air rifles to choose from. Each of them work differently while all making good use of compressed air in order to achieve an effect that is quite similar to that of a traditional firearm. The following are some of the types that you will likely be able to find while looking for the ideal air rifle for you.
Do keep in mind that one common issue that arises with air rifles is their tendency to have a powerful recoil. This can make is difficult to control during multiple fires.
CO2 Powered Air Rifles
Winchester Model M 14 CO2 Air Rifle
The most common variant of an air rifle is the CO2 gun which utilizes carbon dioxide in order to propel ammunition towards its intended target. These are some of the handiest of guns due to how well they are generally put together as compared to other variants of air rifles. The cartridges that are used for these rifles are simply CO2 tanks that have been pressurized and fire ammunition.
Spring Powered
069 air rifles - spring piston
The spring piston of the rifle is able to make use of a simplistic mechanical spring in order to propel pellets towards a target. These pistons are quite accurate and powerful and are quite ideal for the purpose of hunting. The ammunition for a spring powered air rifle is capable of breaking the sound barrier and is known to be devastating to anything on the receiving end of its capabilities.
Crosman M4-177 Pneumatic Pump Air Rifle (.177)
This type of rifle solely relies on air pressure to propel pellets towards it targets. This is a type that is not handy in situations that are more hectic given that you will need time to prepare it. They are able to be primed with the use of a hand pump or the rifle can come with a cylinder (this is recommended) to deliver the needed air pressure.
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Wednesday, September 4, 2013
Wear Your Booties Now!
Itching for Fall? Yeah, me too. I wore my booties today, and my ankles were sweating so bad in the 90 degree heet. It'll eventually get here though, but until then, clammy ankles and all, I want to wear my adorable ankle boots. I put together a little guide to help you transition yours! They're great with dresses right now, like I've paired them below. You definitely wanna make sure they don't hit you in a weird spot on your leg though. Always keep in mind that you should still be able to see the smallest part of your lower leg when your boot is on.
Other random notes: That sunscreen is my favorite cheap face sunscreen I've ever used. It doesn't feel like you are wearing a Halloween mask when you put it on--it is light as a feather. That denim vest? Is just the best ever to throw over any sort of sundress going into Fall to make it feel just slightly more seasonally appropriate. OK, that's all. Wear your booties!
The Boot: Jeffrey Campbell Hanger Suede Raw Booties, $165
1. Dress, Zara, $89 // 2. Bag, Lucky Brand, $198 // 3. Denim Vest, Madewell, $88 // 4. Hat, Topshop, $20 // 5. Loreal Sublime Sun, $10.99 // 6. Fiona Paxton Steel Bracelet, Urban Outfitters, $285
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Currency trading, even with a somewhat straightforward process and technique, still requires investors to commit time and research into the process and specifics. Really anyone, however, with the level of knowledge and time commitment can learn the foreign currency trade and see its benefits.
One other important benefit of foreign currency trading is that there is no requirement of investing on large scale at starting as even someone with a few hundred dollars can begin trading, on a small scale to be sure.
Nearly every foreign currency is traded on the currency trading and exchange market, however, the most commonly traded currencies are those that are most valued.
These most popular currencies are the Euro, U. S. Dollar, Japanese yen, British pound, and the Swiss franc. Everything from wars, job statistics, and even weather patterns can affect the fluctuation in a currencie's value.
You will find a large number of people around the world who are looking to buy Dinar. This is a common currency that has witnessed a lot of activity on the foreign exchange markets from past years. If you are thinking about dinar investment you can buy dinar via similar websites.
The overall objective of trading, is to make a profit from selling or trading a money when it grows in value in relation to a different predetermined money. What is interesting is that no actual physical money is being purchased or sold, it is only speculative. Any earnings or losses which happen, are reflected on the trader's individual or corporate account. | <urn:uuid:bbe40f63-939c-4f2b-bcf6-13288732dd43> | http://cebuhouse.us/business-and-management/benefit-of-foreign-currency-trading/ | en | 0.960961 | 0.083573 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Who is more susceptible to dementia - men or women?
in Medication Info on .
Scientists have proved that every three seconds there is a new patient with dementia. To date, this is approximately five percent of older people. According to new calculations, the number of people with this diagnosis by the year 2050 will grow in 2.5 times, that is, 132 million people. Previously, another figure was predicted - 112 million people. Scientists noted that it is often identified with Alzheimer's disease. In fact, it arises as a consequence even before the Alzheimer's disease that has arisen in a person, in 60-70% of cases it becomes a factor in the development of dementia, in other cases the cause of it can be another violation, for example, a stroke.
Lonely people are more susceptible to depression and cardiovascular diseases, so they have more risk factors for the development of this ailment. And as the number of lonely people in the world is constantly growing, the number of those who will develop senile dementia will also grow. Studies on a 10-year follow-up period showed that unmarried patients living alone can represent a risk group.
Who is more susceptible to dementia - men or women? What is the cause?
Statistics vary depending on the type of dementia. For example, Alzheimer's disease is more spread in women, dementia with Levi bodies - for men. A person, who begins to develop this ailment, starts several times a day to shave, collect some items, and ask the same questions. The reason is the extinction of brain cells. At the same time, external factors can be both a prerequisite for the described symptoms, and an intensifying element. Depression, by the way, is also a symptom of dementia. Changes in mood, change in character, apathy, lethargy, confusion, problems with orientation in space, loss of thread of conversation - all these are also alarming symptoms.
Is the disease transmitted from parents to children?
Inheritance plays an important role in the development of front-temporal dementia. Alzheimer's diagnosis with an early onset (up to 65 years) has a high incidence of inheritance, because it is usually associated with a mutation in three genes. If your close relative is ill with this disease with a late onset, the chances of developing this problem in you grow compared to a person who does not have close relatives with such diagnosis. However, this does not mean that the disease is inevitable for you.
How does this disease develop and manifest itself?
It belongs to the list of diseases that cause behavioral disorders. The defeat of logical and abstract thinking does not allow patients to perform daily duties and makes their self-service impossible. In the beginning it leads to drawbacks, which at first glance seem physical - a decrease in mobility, difficulties in using objects of everyday life. Cognitive and physical insolvency of patients deprives them of their ability to live independently and makes them dependent on extraneous care. One of the most difficult moments associated with disease dementia is a variety of behavioral disorders: wandering, repeated questions, walking after, aggression, apathy, sleep disturbance, resistance to help in daily activities. Very often unpredictable actions of patients become the cause of accidents. This behavior leads to a heavy burden of burns for the sick, despair of caretakers and depression, excessive fatigue and exhaustion. Patients have problems with words (understanding, choice of words), and with the formation of concepts, there are also difficulties with language, communication, with simple computing operations, with planning and with motor skills, memory worsens dramatically. The gradual loss of the ability to memorize complicates the relationship and the opportunity to communicate with other people: the patient forgets about the appointments, does not recognize the interlocutors, cannot orientate in a newly familiar environment, and cannot find the right words. At the beginnig communication with the patient becomes a kind of test. Interlocutors often find it difficult to understand what patients are doing and what they are talking about. Aggression, crying, excessive desire to move, and even passive detachment and depressive behavior can all be an attempt to express an emotional need or desire for communication. During the conversation, the patient is often unable to understand the meaning of what was heard and create concepts due to disruption of associative connections. Because of this, patients have special semantic concepts, different from the real content, difficulties with logical thinking in making decisions.
Often, patients with dementia do not recognize their children, but remember their parents. Why is that?
The first to forget the recent events of the patient's life, in the future, memory begins to suffer from long-standing events. With the progression of the disease, the process ends with a general amnesia. The patient reproduces well the memories of childhood and youth and at the same time cannot remember what he/she ate for breakfast. It happens that the patient did not forget the event, but it was "incorrectly recorded" in the memory. Recent events, reinforcement of vivid and strong emotions, both negative and positive, are stored in memory and reproduced.
Is it possible to completely treat people with such diagnosis? How does the disease affect life expectancy?
Unfortunately, now there are no effective medicines that can cure or at least stop the progression of dementia. Over the past ten years, a large number of clinical studies have been carried out, but no remedy has been found but there are drugs that can alleviate the symptoms and slow down progress of the disease. They are needed by the patient, even if there is no chance of a cure. Medicines can temporarily remove a number of symptoms or slow their development. If we talk about symptoms in the cognitive sphere (memory, speech, thinking), then the delay in the disorders caused by drugs can prolong communication with the patient for years. Is this communicate worth of the money spent on medicine, it's up to you. As for behavioral symptoms, then from their manifestation, close people suffer no less than the patient himself (insomnia, aggression ...). Although doctors do not recommend abusing these drugs, sometimes their reception is the only way to fix an unfavorable situation.
Related Article | <urn:uuid:a99a0030-979e-49b5-bd9c-a6b49be2769b> | http://drugsmonitoring.com/blog/who-is-more-susceptible-to-dementia-men-or-women.html | en | 0.956528 | 0.202939 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Chromosomal Polymorphism in Thracian Populations of Rattus rattus (Linnaeus, 1758) (Rodentia: Muridae)
Abstract: The black rat (Rattus rattus L.) from Thrace is an Oceanian type (2n = 38). Chromosomal analyses show that a polymorphism occurs in chromosome pairs no. 9, 10, and 13 due to pericentric inversions. In the studied populations, the frequencies of homozygous and heterozygous individuals did not differ from the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium for chromosome pair no. 13. In both Gelibolu and Pınarhisar populations of R. rattus, a polymorphism due to the supernumerary B-chromosome was found. The R. rattus karyotype with supernumerary chromosomes is reported here for the first time in Turkey. The number of diploid chromosomes are 2n = 38, 2n = 38 + B, and 2n = 38 + 2B. The chromosomal differences were recorded in the number of autosomal arms (NFa), ranging from 58 to 62. The supernumerary metacentric chromosomes were similar in morphology and size to the small metacentric chromosomes of the standard complement of 2n = 38 chromosomes.
Keywords: Rattus rattus, karyology, polymorphism, Thrace
Full Text: PDF | <urn:uuid:1872773a-4969-485c-97b5-fd69bfd12cc7> | http://journals.tubitak.gov.tr/zoology/abstract.htm?id=8373 | en | 0.837962 | 0.409777 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Diamond Nectar
A natural organic bio-stimulator
Despite the low level of nutrients found in natural soil-based environments, plant growth nevertheless occurs because the smallest humic acids channel available nutrients directly into nearby vegetation. By accelerating nutrient absorption at the root boundary zone where minerals enter the plant, small particle sized humic and fulvic acids optimize nutrient uptake in fast growing vegetation.
Diamond Nectar is a mix of these acids with mostly fulvic but quite a bit of humic too, which gives it this slightly brownish colour.
diversity of these bio-active plant compounds.
Millions of years ago prehistoric plants and animals were consumed in the ecological cycle of life. Buried thousands of feet deep and converted to carbon, some of these deposits produced “Diamond”.Others were pushed to the surface during the ice ages and became what is known as “Leonardite”
Beneath some ancient lands in New Mexico, an extraordinary Leonardite deposit was formed. It contains the riches of natural organic matter composted for millennia and freely available to growing plants. This deposit is carefully mined and natural compounds called “Humates” are extracted.
Soluble Humates (the humic and fulvic acids family) contain a myriad of natural plant growth promoting compounds plus nutrient enhancing ingredients.
Fulvic acid enhances plant growth and yield:
• It improves uptake and utilisation of nutrients and minerals by growing plants.
• It transports nutrients to all plant parts: roots, stems, foliage, flowers and fruit.
• It affords growers the benefits of natural organic mater in a liquid form.
• In hydroponics and soilless cultivation, it helps create an environment closer to soil conditions.
Diamond Nectar is not a fertiliser. It is an additive to be used in combination with comprehensive nutrients like Flora-series and One Part. Combined with a conventional nutrition program, it leads to earlier harvests, healthier disease resistant plants and enhanced qualities of flavour, fragrance, essential oils, plus significantly higher yields.
Apply Diamond Nectar to all cultivated plants, including ornamentals, culinary and aromatics, fruit and vegetables, trees, etc. It is adapted to hydroponics and soil. Pour directly into the reservoir or use as a foliar spray.
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Diamond Nectar
• Product Code: Diamond Nectar
• Availability: 100
Available Options | <urn:uuid:11cf6cb7-5074-4b93-adb4-2a2a8d528727> | http://www.grow-world.co.uk/growth-promoters-additives/general-hydoponics-additives/diamond-nectar | en | 0.907768 | 0.057632 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Now with HEPA Filter!
The Resp-O-Rator has no straps, weighs only 7 ounces, makes no noise and can be worn with safety goggles, face shields, beards and hearing protectors without interference. To put it on, pull the tube out of one side of the front, slip it over your head and slip the tube back together. The two filters are located behind the user where the air is cleaner to begin with and remove 99.97% of particles down to 0.3 microns! The mouthpiece fits comfortably between the lips and teeth. When you exhale the exhaust is directed downward so goggles or a face shield being worn will not fog. A nose clip is included for those who want to completely remove the possibility of inhaling through the nose. It will protect the wearer from particulate dust without the usual drawbacks of dust masks.
The Resp-o-rator Jr. is a smaller, less expensive version of the Resp-o-rator that is great for lower intensity situations involving nuisance dust. It uses one filter to remove 97% of particles down to 0.3 microns in size. The mouthpiece is held between your lips and teeth and the nose clip is used like one for swimming, The Resp-o-rator Jr is great for sanding and when using woods that create more dust than shavings. It is also great for use outside while weed eating and mowing the lawn for people with allergies. The Resp-o-rator Jr. uses the same replacement mouth pieces and filters as the original Resp-o-rator.
Code Name Price
196690 Resp-O-Rator $49.95
196691 Resp-O-Rator Repl. Filters (pair) $12.95
196692 Resp-O-Rator Replacement Mouthpieces (pair) $6.95
196693 Model 100 Resp-O-Rator Jr $16.95
We accept Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and American Express
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Conrunner Logo
by Anne Page
When I took on the task of organising the Masquerade, Masked Ball and other events for Worldcon I thought I was prepared for all the myriad problems that I might face. I had reckoned without the "Nutty Neo"! Now I've met some irritating and exasperating fans before (for example, the editor of this 'ere fanzine!), but here was a prince among prats. I was forcibly introduced to his existence by the intrusion into my life of Missive Number One, hand inscribed in mid January, viz:
"Dear Madam, Please can you send me further information, forms, etc, about the Masquerade, including what is it all about? Apparently one day of Conspiracy '87 will be spent dressed up in an unusual costume. Do we have to send in rough designs of our costumes? Where can we obtain badges from past TV/film science fiction e.g. the round badge seen on the sleeve of a colonial warrior in "Battlestar Galactica", therefore I'm not after items concerned with NASA and I'm not interested in badges that have the film title on them.
Can't we obtain science fiction costumes ready made? Do we have to make our costumes?
A suggestion : how about building a cardboard maze for the masqueraders to explore in individually, where each person may or may not fire toy, non-projectile weapons at each other?
I look forward to your reply,
P.S. What are gophers?"
Ho, hum, I thought, and as the Masquerade forms were still at the printers I put the letter with other requests for forms and went to the kitchen for a strong cup of Irn Bru!
Just over three weeks later, when the forms were printed and awaiting collation and mailing, Missive Number Two arrived with a dull thud on the mat. I put the dull thud aside to read later, and opened "Nutty Neo's" new note. It began thusly, in type,:
"At this time of writing, I have not heard from you at all, which is why I am writing to you again."
That figures, I thought! The rest of the letter was much the same as the first, but he now also wanted to know if toy laser pistols were allowed. He was still looking forward to my reply! I collated a set of Masquerade forms and sent them to him. That should do the trick, I thought, all the information he could ever need on weapons policy, making your costumes etc. is there before his very eyes.
I reckoned without our hero - he had more aces up his sleeves. Missive Number Three attacked the hall carpet exactly one week later. I cautiously investigated the contents with a sinking heart and the merest suspicion of a nervous twitch. Having obviously decided his typing was a major force in his favour he began,
"Dear Anne Page, Thank you for sending me the forms and details for the Masquerade. But some of my questions remain unanswered.
1. Firstly, what exactly is the Masquerade, in the case of Conspiracy '87? Is it a costume competition? If so, what is the prize?
2. Does everyone who wants to dress up in a costume e.g. for the Masked Ball, have to enter the Masquerade?
3. What is a gopher?
4. Does the Masquerade actually take place on August 29th?
5. What exactly are you supposed to do, in costume, once you're on stage? Do you have to do more than just walk up and down showing off your costume?
6. Are battery operated toy laser pistols/rattle guns allowed?
7. Are you given help if you want stage props e.g. can you get someone, with advanced request, to build you a small, cardboard maze, or do you have to make it yourself and bring it to the convention? What I mean is, can you get someone to build you something ready-made, during the convention, prior to the Masquerade?
8. Is it all right to ask someone e.g. the BBC, to "construct" your soundtrack? Can you recommend someone who can do this, or is it too expensive?
9. Can you tell me, please, where I may find science fiction badges and masks/headgear? Or do I have to make them myself? I am particularly after badges worn on film/TV costumes - or is that disallowed?
10. Is it all right to present the costume and design it, all by yourself?
11. What does M.C. stand for?
12. Do you have to mention everyone who helped you make the costume?
13. Can you speak, on stage, without a microphone, if you do not intend to address the audience, but wish to speak as part of your presentation?
14. No live microphones. Does that mean you have to bring your own? Do you have to have microphones?
15. Any copyright laws broken if you do the following: use material, in costume or tape, based upon, or directly from established TV/film, book etc? Use music without prior permission from artist?
16. Will Rostler says "No name tags on costumes". Does that apply to name badges e.g. like on the Ghostbusters overalls/NASA space uniforms?
I will be grateful if you could please answer all my questions as I have never been to a science fiction convention before, so I don't know what goes on in these things; particularly masquerades.
I wondered if I had accidently sent him blank forms by mistake. I wondered if cardboard mazes were some secret sexual fetish I had not discovered yet (and if not, why not!) I answered it all sensibly and carefully - well, he can't help being a neo, and we must be kind to neos, mustn't we? Privately I envisaged answering SOME questions very differently viz:
a) did you bother reading your PRs and forms at all?
d) see answer to a)
e) see answer to a) and d)
f) see answer to a),d),and e)
g) of course you may have a small cardboard maze - at the end of the pier!
h) the B.B.C. spend all their time doing contract work of this nature, ring up and ask for the Director General - he's already helped forty entrants with their sound tapes to date.
i) I do wish you'd stop badgering me about this!
k) What does M.C. stand for? Just about everything, sunshine, including people writing innumerable letters full of interminable questions!
m) and n) May I be so bold as to tell you exactly what to do with your microphone?
q) Aaaaaarrrgghhh!!!
I sent off the polite answers only, with a delicate hint that as a newcomer to such things he might find it easier to watch the Masquerade rather than enter, and went into the kitchen to find the two litre bottle of Irn Bru. After the second litre the carbon dioxide had restored my sanity. I hoped I had heard the last of our hero, but this guy was made of sterner stuff.
Missive Number Four left the carpet alone, but attempted to eat the cats. I put on oven gloves and opened it. My face resumed its nervous contortions.
"Dear Anne Page, Thank you for your letter of the 2nd March. You have more or less persuaded me not to enter the Masquerade, so I shall take your advice and just watch the event - which is free to see I presume?
If you could spare the time however, could you please answer just a few more questions, as I am considering to go to the Masked Ball.
1. Is it likely that more than half of the party-goers, in the Masked Ball, will be in costume? If so, is it likely that all the costumes will be of a science fiction/fantasy nature?
2. Do the Masquerade rules apply to costumes to be worn outside the event, and costumes to be worn at the Masked Ball, e.g. if you're just going to the Masked Ball, are you allowed to buy bits of/for your costume, or even buy/hire a complete costume?
3. Are battery operated toy pistols/rattle guns stll not permitted in the Masked Ball, or outside the Masquerade? If so, why are they disallowed, since these toys do not fire projectiles of any kind (unless there is of course concern for the noise factor)? Are deactivated toy pistols allowed (pistols that will not fire projectiles, nor make any noise, nor produce any light effects)? are pistols that produce light effects also disallowed, and if so, why? I am willing to make a model weapon, if I cannot use or carry a commercial toy or models.
4. If I am allowed to buy bits for a costume, or buy/hire a costume could you please tell me:
1. Where in London can I purchase badges, as worn on the costumes of science fiction television/film, which do not carry the film/TV logo?
2. Where in London, can you hire or buy, a science fiction costume e.g. space costumes as used in science fiction television/film - and how much could it cost?
5. You mention that there are some people who make quite superb masks; can you please send me one or two addresses of people who make masks of a science fiction/fantasy nature?
6. A Masked Ball sounds like something out of Cinderella. But in contrast, will the Ball be a disco affair most of the time, or will there be some "civilised or classical" music played on electronic keyboards. (There's a suggestion in this question)?
I do hope that you will be able to find time to answer most of my questions, particularly the latter four. Just in case you didn't get the message, please could you reserve a ticket for me, for the Masked Ball?
I look forward to your reply.
He was still looking forward to my reply! Well, I wasn't!
My reply was rather brief and answered some necessary points, but suggested he might like to do the same as the several thousand other attendees, and use his free time to seek out and gather his own costume together. What I would LIKE to have said would have gone as follows (you will have to imagine the steam rising in a red cloud from my typewriter as you read this)
1) What a bloody silly question.
2) For Ghod's sake, read your PR properly. It's all there in simple words.
3) If you utter one more word about bloody battery operated toy pistols, I shall find you at the convention and personally stuff one of the aforesaid pistols down your throat! So there, frog-face! And I don't see why I should have to explain every rule to a half-wit who can't read properly!
4) I do not believe this....this person with enough time to write all these letters, who lives about thirty miles from London, wants me, in Glasgow, to find him suppliers for his....... badges and costume bits. What next - would he like spoon-feeding at meals perhaps? I have, of course, little else to do all day!
6) Of course we will have civilised classical music at the Masked Ball, there's nothing like "getting down and boogieing" to a fugue in D minor, now is there?
"Aaaaaarrrggghhh! Mummy, Mummy, I don't want to work on Worldcon any more. I'm not feeling well. I think it's all the Irn Bru." "Hush dear, you're not alone, for all the rest of the committee are getting letters from him too!"
This page updated on 09 July 1999 | <urn:uuid:b8756037-0a2e-48e1-a0f2-56149acb3053> | http://www.smof.com/newsmof/conrunner/C6AnnePage.htm | en | 0.965454 | 0.391561 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
People enter works in different ways, and there is no right or wrong way to do so. There is no single way to interpret art. It's all very personal.
The work of Edward Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier explores the impact of human activity on Earth in a new multimedia exhibition.
Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School, features in a thoughtful exhibition where he emerges as an internationally connected artist. | <urn:uuid:d64acb42-f1c5-409a-9120-5cc312165095> | https://www.gallery.ca/collection/magazine | en | 0.915794 | 0.019554 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Shrek Forever After
Shrek Forever After
Written by Jeremy Duff on 7/2/2010 for 360
More On: Shrek Forever After
If there is one lesson that we have still yet to learn as a society regarding the entertainment industry, it is that a successful movie does not necessarily mean that it will automatically translate to be a successful video game. If I were to ask you to count the names of huge blockbuster films that landed on the gaming side of things with a huge flop, you could go on and on… and on. This doesn’t mean that every title that has made the conversion ends up being a failure; there are plenty of exceptions to the rule(s). EA had a nice string of games that came out of the Lord of the Rings movies and the Spiderman games weren’t “that” bad. The Shrek series is a perfect example of how bad movies turned into video games can be. With the fourth movie recently hitting theaters, yet another game conversion has also launched courtesy of Activision.
Shrek Forever After will mark the eleventh video game released based on Dreamwork’s big, green ogre. There have been ten previous video game outings over the past 9 years and it would be an understatement to call them all “less than stellar.” This time should be different though as this is based on Shrek’s farewell film (Shrek Forever After has been labeled as the last in the Shrek series); surely Activision and developer XPEC won’t let the fairy tale crew go out on a bad note. Don’t worry, they don’t. The latest Shrek video game may be the best one released in the series to date. While this title won’t be up for any game of the year nominations, it will provide fans of the series with an enjoyable romp through Far Far Away.
Shrek Forever After for the Xbox 360 presents the storyline of the current theatrical film in an action-adventure shell. Players will take control of the series’ four main characters (Shrek, Fiona, Donkey and Puss-in-Boots) and guide them across a wide variety of stages throughout the land of Far Far Away. You can feel free to journey through the adventure by yourself but the game encourages cooperative play for up to four players. Playing with your friends has to be done locally though as Activision, unfortunately, did not include online play in the game. Perhaps the best way to describe the game would to call it a severely watered down version of the Marvel Ultimate Alliance games, which isn’t a bad thing. Gameplay is focused around the individual abilities of the different characters in the game and you are not only encouraged, but often forced, to use different characters at differing times in your adventure in order to proceed. This isn’t an original formula, but it works.
That may be one of the smartest moves that the development team made with this game: sticking to the mold of the genre. The game hits pretty much all of the bullet points of the “team oriented action adventure” genre. Multiple characters with different skills and abilities: check. Cooperative puzzles requiring said powers: check. Witty conversation injected into the action between said characters: check. XPEC doesn’t try to do anything new with it and let’s be honest, why should they? This is, after all, a port of a movie and the story and structure of the overall tale is already set in stone. It just so happens that the given genre fits the setting of the title perfectly, so why not utilize a tried-and-true mold for your game and focus on the polish of the final product. I think this works well in the sense that Shrek Forever After is intended to be a family oriented game, one that should be played and experienced by a group of players, young and old alike. With this sort of game, the developers have to walk a very fine line. You don’t want it to be too hard for the younger gamers, but then again you don’t want it to be too easy that it bores the older ones. There is a middle level that needed to be found and the devs have done a great job at finding it.
As I mentioned, the gameplay of Shrek Forever After focuses on the strengths and weaknesses of its characters along with straight-forward battles against various villains from the movies. From the battle standpoint, the game has a simple beatem’ up mechanic where players simply need to pound on the attack button to string together combos and eliminate opponents. Each character also has a special ability, which can be upgraded in terms of its effectiveness over time. This ability serves to stun your opponents momentarily and allow you to score some free hits. It isn’t the most effective tactic but it provides a nice buffer if the action gets to be a little too overwhelming, which may happen to the younger players at times. As you defeat opponents, both big and small, you are awarded with coins / currency which can be used to purchase things throughout the game such as character and attack upgrades as well as hints and information from non-playable characters.
During the course of your battles, the characters have a combo meter located on the side of the screen that fills as you defeat enemies in rapid succession. As the meter fills, enemies will drop more effective power-ups that enhance both your offensive and defensive abilities. This works well in theory, but the game doesn’t really give you a chance to let up on the attacks before the meter’s progress stalls and it starts to decline. Unfortunately, you usually need to fill the meter up faster than the game spawns opponents, which almost defeats its own purpose. The more mature crowd will likely find the gameplay of the fighting somewhat repetitive by the end of the game, but younger players should enjoy it immensely. I played the game cooperatively with my young niece and she was having a blast long after the appeal wore off on me. I must say that there is an aspect to the battling that will put a smile on your face and that is the use of the game’s licensed soundtrack. Every time that a battle sequence is initiated, the game begins playing one of the tracks from the soundtrack. I couldn’t stop laughing the first time that I had to battle an onslaught of enemies to the beat of “Walking on Sunshine”. I cannot help it, it made me smile every single time.In addition to the fighting, the four main characters of the story each have their own individual abilities which will aid your party in their journey. Each character serves a specific purpose on the squad. Shrek is the brute of the bunch and his strength will be required to move large objects out of your way like boulders or crates. Fiona is the cunning warrior in the party and her knowledge of battle allows her to light and trigger various explosives in the environment. Puss, being the feline of the bunch, is agile and nimble, allowing him to reach places in the world not accessible to the others. Finally, there is Donkey, who is a (excuse the irony) a donkey and can mule-kick objects to either destroy or reposition them as needed. In addition to their specific abilities, some actions require a certain character for no reason in particular. It doesn’t really make sense, but only Puss can trigger the firing mechanism of a catapult and only Donkey can rotate an object in place. You will run across numerous examples like this throughout the game and often find yourself scratching your head and asking why. The only reason this sort of gameplay exists is to push the focus on the cooperative gameplay; it doesn’t make sense but it perpetuates the gameplay focus of the journey.
Throughout your adventure you will be presented with a wide assortment of puzzles which will challenge you to find and use the right combination of character powers in order to proceed. These puzzles will range from being ridiculously simple to occasionally being downright frustrating. The players’ hands are held through most of the process as the game constantly tells you which characters are necessary as you stand in front of various objects in the game’s environment. If Donkey is needed, he will appear in a thought cloud above your current playable character. This hand-holding may be a bit much for the older crowd, but it helps to move the game along for the younger crowd. In order to help with the more difficult challenges the game offers a hint system via the Three Blind Mice. These little guys appear occasionally and allow the player to spend their earned coins for three levels of hints. Each hint gives a little more information regarding what the player(s) must specifically do in order to proceed and costs a little more than the one before it. The final and most expensive hint from the Third Mouse pretty much spells out exactly what the player needs to do. I will have to admit, I used them at least once or twice in the game though half of the fun is figuring it out on your own.
Perhaps you don’t have anyone to play through the game with. If you happen to be playing by yourself, you can actively switch between the characters at any given time by simply pressing a direction on the d-pad. Your ability to change to another character is limited by the amount of people that you have playing; if you are playing with 3 friends, you will each control a single character throughout your adventure, but if there is a spot open in the roster, participating gamers can opt to switch to the character(s) that may not be in use at any given moment using the directional pad. All of the puzzle solving and fighting occurs at a pretty swift pace throughout the course of the game. There is always an arrow in the top right-hand corner of the screen that directs the player(s) to their next checkpoint; rarely are you ever left in a position where it isn’t explicitly spelled out where you need to go next. Following in that straight forward mold of the genre, each stage conclude with a boss battle that usually requires you to combine both your fisticuffs and your intellectual skill. It is a nice balance that will keep multiplayer games focused on its participants functioning as a team.
All of this comes together and is presented in a great graphical style. The gameplay occurs from a top-down perspective and looks rather nice. The environments are lush, colorful, detailed and represent the source movie well. Occasionally, the gameplay is interrupted with either short cut-scenes using the game’s in-game engine or actual film clips from the feature length movie. Both look as good as you would expect a game on the current generation of consoles to look. The in-game engine looks highly polished and is arguably comparable to the quality of the Hollywood production(s). The same things can be said for the sound aspect of the game; the game utilizes the Hollywood voice actors and the actual licensed soundtrack to give a highly accurate representation of the film. Kids and adults alike will have no doubt, visibly or audibly, that this is in fact Shrek Forever After.
You pretty much know that you are getting into when you throw Shrek Forever after into your Xbox. It is a family oriented action game that sticks to the mold of the genre from beginning to end. The younger gamers will thoroughly enjoy the adventure and older gamers won’t be completely annoyed by having to either watch or play along. It is a solid game with a level of polish often missing by numerous movie-games but is ultimately limited by its own source material. You will play it, finish it, and likely never look back. Thankfully though, you will probably do so without regret. I have to admit, I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected to going in.
Rating: 7.9 Above Average
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In Brief
24 June 2009
Transplant drug turns traitor to tackle viruses
IT’S the biological equivalent of a turncoat. A drug used to stop immune cells from gobbling up transplanted organs and bone marrow has been caught boosting the immune response to a virus in mice and monkeys. It might now be used to enhance vaccines against cancer and other diseases.
Transplant recipients take rapamycin because it blocks the production of a range of different immune cells. But when Rafi Ahmed and colleagues at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia, gave the drug to mice infected with a virus, to probe its effects on specific parts of the immune …
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[Verse 1] Babylon, your time has come Babylon has fallen, her kingdom is gone. A true hell on earth, her reigns on this planet have been removed. This city, now chokes on her entrails from her deprived womb, in the back of her throat. She can no longer birth forth murderers, fornicators, or drunkards to this earth she once owned. The nation still fights as she falls to the ground. Visible in her eyes, her hope is gone now. She lies in protest as she’s tied on all sides. Her throat, hands, and feet all are tied tight. The nations around her that lust for her power begin to pull. She slowly comes apart, her true fate has come. The great nation Babylon now falls.
[Chorus] Murder, fornication, sins of death. Plagued the earth while Babylon slept. Her nation grew weary of everyday lives, and began sticking spears in each others sides. Blood and murder of children and adults ran wild. While Babylon's courts slept in denial. Unaware of the infants being stuffed and stuck into fire ovens. Children of Babylon became a sinful delight, to feast on when hungry in the dark of the night.
[Verse 2] Now my child, don't grow tired. Pray to our gods that tonight you are not devoured. Run from strangers that reach from the shadows. Pray that your soul be spared. From the hands that appear from thin air. Your corpse would be carried through the streets. While your parents and family all sleep. Rise and shine a new day has begun, but now you must live without your firstborn son. Days and night pass and they won’t forget. Their children in the night, in a cage must be kept. Into the cage, for their own good. So they survive the night while the cannibals are afoot. Oh weary is Babylon, her enslaving, fornicating people. Pray to the God you've always denied. That your souls be spared from the fire of hell, the home where your town was built.
[repeat chorus]
[Bridge] Si litus dormiunt in stagnum ignis. (You shall slumber on the lake of fires shore.) The fire of hell will be the last place you lay your head. The people of Babylon will burn in a fire of death. You may think you end in a 6 ft hole. But you’ll burn in hell, forever a tormented soul. | <urn:uuid:f69ef322-f217-4ad1-9aa8-352d26a4d58f> | https://www.reddit.com/r/EdwardDickhands/ | en | 0.950109 | 0.022871 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Baker’s Banter—17 April 2018
Anyone using the roads and/or public transport in our part of the world is aware of the need for some serious investment.
The reality is that whilst we have some way to go in terms of modern trains, single seat journeys and more regular services, what we have is significantly better than what used to exist as recently as five years ago.
Similarly, the willingness of people to use public transport is not as evident as the willingness to complain about the very congestion they are adding to. The answer it seems from a political perspective is to introduce increased or new fuel taxes. The Mayor got in first with his proposal for a regional fuel tax, followed recently by the Government who are favouring a national increase, on top of our regional one. I have never been a fan of the fuel tax as I believe it is too blunt as a tool.
The only things I see going for it are, it is quick to implement and will not require any capital expenditure to introduce or consequential operational expenditure to maintain which as would be the case for the likes of road tolls. I have yet to see any detail as to how our non-road using fuel users (farmers, earth-movers, boaties) will be able to simply differentiate what their fuel is used for.
It is going to open up a whole lot of issues, in my view, in regard to trust, responsible and accurate claims. It will become another bureaucracy to monitor the probable huge increase in such subsidy claims. Maybe this is a cunning way of achieving greater public transport use or walking and cycling. Make it so expensive to use fuel, abandon new roading projects to smash the resolve of those attached at the backside to their cars. Finally pushing them to breaking point where they must change their habits. I am all in favour of people changing their habits and in terms of exchanging cars for public transport there is probably a need to use a stick a little bit more.
However in the absence of any detail and the statements from central and some council politicians, what is being proposed are very much urban based, nice to have solutions, that ignore the needs of those feeding into the isthmus area from its extremities or from the rest of the country. In my view the balance is way, way out of kilter.
The isthmus of Auckland is the region’s heart, but like any heart, if the things feeding the lifeblood are congested, not only does that heart start to fail but the first to degrade are the extremities. What is needed is commitment to upgraded public transport options such as extra rail lines, bus and heavy transport lanes. Along with new roads like Mill Road with a funding mechanism that will not take the most from those likely to see the least benefit. A balanced mix of roading, PT and other modes to address needs.
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| <urn:uuid:a06e9073-02a4-4d5f-97f2-5275864f48f8> | https://www.thepost.nz/articles/bakers-banter-17-april-2018/ | en | 0.972729 | 0.035039 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
CES 2018: Blackout in Vegas - TvTechnology
CES 2018: Blackout in Vegas
How many tech companies does it take to turn the lights on?
Publish date:
LAS VEGAS—On the first day of CES, Tuesday, a record 1.33 inches of rain fell, the wettest one-day downpour since the Weather Service began keeping records in 1937.
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On the second day of CES, at about 11:15 am, the lights flickered and went out in the massive Central Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center where the sprawling booths of Samsung, LG, Sony, Intel and hundreds more exhibits went dark. Thousands of visitors pulled out mobile handsets, hit the “flashlight” app, and edged out of the building; authorities said there were no injuries. Parts of the connector between Central and South Halls were also affected.
Initial reports indicated that Tuesday’s downpour affected the LVCC transformers and also the back-up generators; officials continue to investigate the cause for the blackout. Others shrugged at the streak of bad luck in Vegas—rain and a blackout—wondering what might happen next.
Many attendees admitted immediately that when the lights went off with a small pop, their first thought was terrorism, while others discussed the irony of a high-tech exposition knocked low by fundamental electrical technology. A few wise-guys conjectured that it happened because someone said, “Alexa, turn off the lights.”
By the time, power returned at about 1 p.m., the crowds jamming the building’s periphery exploded in applause. But some exhibitors—such as Samsung—barricaded their booths for at least another hour while they rebooted devices (rather than have visitors see non-working products). | <urn:uuid:2b6ee61b-ee9c-45d2-9ed7-f337651508bb> | https://www.tvtechnology.com/show-news/ces-2018-blackout-in-vegas | en | 0.945356 | 0.033887 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Garbage Ghazal
the street stunk like a gingko berry blossomed
an asshole. the source: a squirrel corpse beneath a bag of trash
my hands have held have thrown have undone
a made thing, relocated it renamed it trash
the squirrel’s mouth still spackled w/ teeth—its body yellow & slowly
missing like a banana peel underneath a bag of factory excrement
I open my mouth: tires screws cereal boxes chewed pen caps w/e
else pool underneath my body. I am belly-up naked & asleep on an island of plastic excrement
the reek the bile the vomit the shed hair
I do not rename them outside of my body why are they not also called trash
I avoid assigning similes to a body—a body in likeness is an act of de-personifying. except
there are no other words. a corpse like a banana peel. its body a stank, a self-trash
& what happens when trash does exactly what is against our law of it—
instead of other there. instead of its reek slushes the stomach—it becomes the stomach
Eurydice tells me what it’s like to die
(She spits out a mint that falls into a pillbox
She looks at herself in the mirror
The pink lipstick smeared & juiced her chin
She stares at the stain as she drums her finger on her bottom lip
She opens one of the drawers to her vanity & pulls out
a Diet Coke & an egg. She cracks
it & inside is
some brown sugar & a listerine yolk.
She turns around, her back to the mirror &
her back in the mirror grammared
with black-blue moles & aged mirror stains)
What kind
trauma do you think
you’re looking for
Kristen Brida‘s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Whiskey Island, Hobart, Bone Bouquet, DUM DUM Zine, and elsewhere. She is currently the Editor in Chief of So to Speak, an intersectional feminist literary journal. She tweets @kristenbrida | <urn:uuid:1aae0681-aac7-4bd8-b89e-1f7882c95c3b> | http://ndrmag.org/poetry/2017/04/two-poems-6/ | en | 0.921998 | 0.057092 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
18 Aug
• By Vanisha May
Sexual education – what happens when you educate a girl?
Sexual education improves the lives, dignity and knowledge for every single person in the world. Sexual education helps define healthy/unhealthy relationships, consent, safety and human rights which is vital knowledge for absolutely everyone. Right?
It’s no shocker that caught up in all the wrongs of the world are our young girls and women who are most at risks of HIV, aids, unwanted and unsafe pregnancies and abortions, STD’s, sexual assault and exploitation. This is especially unsurprising when 120 million girls don’t even have a basic education yet alone a sexual education.
Travelling is amazing and opens your eyes to many differences around the world including some of my main interests such as sex in society, prostitution, trafficking and how the women and girls of the world fit into all of this. It’s apparent that sexual education, knowledge and awareness is sometimes non-existent in many countries around the world.
This means that some girls around the world have their monthly periods and have no idea why they’re bleeding, if it’s normal, if it’s natural and what their body is even doing. It means that for some girls they are locked in their homes during these times, stopped from going to school and forced to using unsanitary solutions in shame.
This means that 125 million girls and women alive today have undergone various forms of female genital mutilation without the knowledge as to why they’re being mutilated, what their rights are, and even the full knowledge of why they have genitals in the first place.
This means that people are unaware of their right to consent and safety and are fully exploited by people who see dollar signs all over their female flesh. This means that people visiting brothels whether they’re in Amsterdam, India or London are usually unaware or don’t care that the human being who is there to ‘give them a good time’ is more than likely to be there not out of choice, but out of force, bribery, slavery, trafficking and fully stripped from their rights, safety and voice.
There are approximately 20-30 million slaves in the world today. 80% of these humans are sexually exploited. 80% of these humans are women and girls. Still not shocked?
Conversations with a friend in Peru brought to light the situation of women and contraception in the country. He explained how it’s mostly women prostitutes who are on the pill which completely took me back as a young woman on the pill herself. In the UK, most women I know are on some form of contraception and for so many different reasons. It shocked me that perhaps the knowledge and availability of contraception might not be accessible or encouraged for all females, and not just sex workers.
This also reminded me of my experience with a man in Indonesia who hosted me and a friend and allowed us to attend a double circumsion ceremony for two boys aged 11 and 7. The conversations that followed will always be with me. He spoke about how his wife every month has bloody clothes but was unsure why. Especially surprising as they had two children together including a daughter who had also undergone FGM. Yet, he had no knowledge about the female body, what happened at his children’s births, why his wife has bloody clothes every month, and also how sex can be for pleasure and not just for reproduction. The knowledge and tradition that he did possess was that the female genital is actually seen to be ‘unclean’ in his community and is in a much better state once cut or mutilated.
As a woman who has grown up in a country where sex education may be basic but still teaches all the essentials, where I freely and openly talk about my body, health, sex and sexuality with my friend, family, nurses and teachers, where my further studies have opened my eyes to the dangers surrounding the female body regarding rape, FGM, assault, and inequalities, it never crossed my mind that these girls I want to protect and the men who live beside them might not even know how to have sex, or what a period even is.
“If an 11-year-old girl arrives in hospital pregnant, nobody says anything,” says Alvaro Serrano, director of the region for the UN Population Fund (UNFPA). “Women and girls are dying because of poor sex education.” – The Guardian
It’s a pretty deep topic but further conversations with some European backpackers about their experiences with prostitutes, their ridiculous expectations and their absolute disrespect and disregard for the humans interacting with them spurred me on to further research, share my stories and help raise awareness on the importance of sexual education for everyone worldwide. Sexual education should not be based around fear, shame, religion or tradition but around health, dignity, humanity and for all those most affected, especially our women and girls.
What are your thoughts on sexual education? Is it helpful for young people? Are there any alternatives? Do you have any experiences that you want to share or talk about?
Feel free to drop me a message! (Find out how in the bio below)|
Thanks for reading guys!
My list of used resources and helpful websites…
On menstruation:
On sex ed:
On trafficking and the rest:
img_1413Vanisha May is a criminology and sociology graduate from London. She has a passion for international development and issues related to education, crisis for refugees, conflict and gender inequalities. Her dream is to travel the world while understanding, learning and resolving inequalities faced for the affected people across the globe.
Find out more about Vanisha: | <urn:uuid:8767b622-c2f0-445c-802a-96a36d5fbc19> | http://ripplezoo.com/2017/08/18/sexual-education-what-happens-when-you-educate-a-girl/ | en | 0.961362 | 0.174913 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
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• Research article
• Open Access
• Open Peer Review
Are low birth weight neonates at risk for suboptimal renal growth and function during infancy?
• 1Email author,
• 2,
• 3,
• 3,
• 4 and
• 5
BMC NephrologyBMC series – open, inclusive and trusted201617:100
• Received: 22 December 2015
• Accepted: 19 July 2016
• Published:
Open Peer Review reports
To assess the renal growth and function of neonates during infancy in relation to birth weight and gestational age.
A longitudinal study was conducted at a tertiary hospital in South India from June 2010 to August 2014. Low birth weight neonates (LBW) were further sub-classified based on gestational age and compared with normal birth weight (NBW) full term neonates at birth, 6 months and 18-24months of age. The renal volume was measured by ultrasound and renal function by Cystatin C- derived glomerular filtration rate (CysGFR) at the three time points during the dynamic phase of renal maturation in infancy.
We recruited 100 LBW and 66 NBW term neonates. Thirty five percent of the LBW neonates were SGA. Among the AGA neonates, 39 % were LBW neonates. The mean height and weight of the LBW neonates were significantly lower compared to NBW neonates throughout infancy. The increment in kidney volume was in accordance with the change in body size, being lower in LBW compared to NBW infants. The combined kidney volume was significantly lower in LBW and SGA neonates across all three time points (p < 0.001). CysGFR in the LBW and SGA infants, despite having low kidney volumes, were comparable to the GFRs of NBW and AGA neonates at the end of infancy.
This study highlights the fact that both birth weight and gestational age influence kidney growth and function in infancy. At the end of infancy, despite a significant difference in kidney volumes and age at last follow up, the glomerular filtration rate was comparable between LBW and NBW infants. Though not statistically significant, there was a trend towards higher urine microalbumin in LBW compared to NBW in infancy.
• Low birth weight
• Small for gestational age
• Renal volume
• Cystatin C-derived glomerular filtration rate
India is the cradle for 40 % of all low birth weight babies in the developing world [1]. LBW has been identified as an independent risk factor for progression of renal diseases, hypertension and diabetes mellitus in adult life [25]. Studies on neonates suggest that Indian babies are born smaller but are relatively fatter compared to Caucasian babies and are referred to as the” thin fat Indian baby” [6]. This thin fat phenotype persists in childhood and is a forerunner of diabetes and metabolic problems in adulthood [6, 7]. From the developing world, landmark studies have affirmed the associations between birth size and later risk of disease [8, 9]. The increase in burden of cardiovascular disease in India, especially affecting people between ages 25-69years is alarming [10]. With a population of >1 billion, the age adjusted incidence rate of ESRD in India is 232 per million population with >275,000 patients reach ESRD annually, with a majority remaining un- dialysed [11].
LBW babies have a lower nephron mass [12]. Fetal kidney development begins at nine weeks and is completed by thirty six weeks. No new nephrons are formed after birth at term gestation. Risk factors for low nephron mass and /or kidney dysfunction are low birth weight, prematurity, low kidney mass and volume and gene polymorphisms [13]. The clinical correlation of low nephron mass with increased risk of hypertension and renal disease is known. Renal mass and glomerular number correlate significantly in normal adults and infants [13]. Renal volume is proportional to renal mass and therefore this has been used as an in vivo surrogate for the estimation of renal mass and therefore of glomerular number [14]. This renal volume may be measured by ultrasound in children including in neonates [15]. A small kidney on ultrasound may imply low nephron mass but an increase in kidney size cannot distinguish between normal growth and hypertrophy.
LBW could be secondary to intrauterine growth restriction (SGA) or due to prematurity(AGA). It is well established that weight for gestational age is an important independent determinant of kidney size at birth and early infancy [16]. There is data on LBW neonates, achieving similar glomerular filtration rates(GFR) compared to normal weight neonates despite 25 % smaller kidney volumes in the first week of life [17]. South Asian babies seem to have smaller kidneys compared to British babies even after adjusting to confounding factors influencing birth weight [18]. However, there is scanty information on the relationship between kidney function and kidney volume in LBW infants from birth to late infancy, which is the crucial and dynamic phase of renal functional maturity. There is a need to focus on the critical issue of nephron protection at birth, emphasising the importance of regular monitoring of GFR in high risk infants based on critical factors such as birth weight and gestational age [19].
Though nephron number is a non-modifiable factor, for the clinician increased awareness may lead to changes in practice that could have far reaching consequences. Therefore, evaluating the renal function and growth in LBW infants becomes vital during the dynamic phase of renal growth and maturity of infancy.
The objective of this study was to primarily assess renal growth and function in LBW neonates compared to NBW neonates during infancy and secondarily to compare the renal growth and function in SGA and AGA newborns based on gestational age.
This longitudinal study was conducted at St. Johns Medical college hospital, Bangalore from June 2010 to August 2014. Approval from the Institutional Ethical Review Board was obtained. Informed consent was taken from either of the parents of the newborn babies. NBW babies born at full term served as controls. LBW babies, born both intramural and extramural were included. The LBW babies consisted of term SGA, preterm SGA and preterm AGA. LBW was defined as a birth weight of < 2500 g. Prematurity was defined as any baby born before 37 completed weeks of gestation. Gestational age [20] was determined by a first trimester ultrasound or by New Ballard Score (done before 7 days of life). Babies were classified as SGA and AGA based on Lubchencos charts.
Babies with congenital anomalies of kidneys, syndromic associations, birth weight <1000gms (extremely low birth neonates), serum creatinine >1 mg/dl, hypertension, single kidney and abdominal pathology that made ultrasonography difficult to perform were excluded from recruitment. Weight was checked on a digital weighing machine to the nearest 5 g, length was measured on a kidimeter to the nearest 0.1 cm. Weight, length renal function and renal volumes were measured at birth, 6 months and between 18–24 months.
Kidney volume assessment [21]
Kidney size was determined by ultrasonography (digital Sonoline G20 system) using a 5 MHz sector probe by an experienced ultrasonographer. The kidneys were identified in the sagital plane along the longitudinal axis. An average of the maximal length, transverse and anterior-posterior diameter was measured at the level of renal hilum to the nearest 0.1cms in both kidneys. Each measurement was made three times and averaged to minimize measurement error. The inter-observer and intra-observer interclass coefficients were 0.98(0.91-0.99) and 0.99(0.98-0.99) respectively. The renal sinus was eliminated to record accurately the dimensions of the renal parenchyma. Renal volume was calculated using an equation of an ellipsoid: Length x transverse diameter x anterior-posterior diameter x 0.523 (cm3). The combined renal volumes was obtained by adding the left and right renal volumes. The relative kidney volume was calculated as combined renal volume corrected to BSA to eliminate the birth weight as a confounding factor.
Glomerular filtration rate (GFR) calculation [22, 23]
Serum cystatin C is a better measure of GFR than serum creatinine in infants, since serum creatinine is influenced by infant’s muscle mass and hydration status. Cystatin C was measured using the N Latex cystatin kit (Dade Behring) by nephelometric assay with reference range of 0.53 to 0.95 mg/l.GFR was estimated from cystatin C levels (CysGFR) using the prediction equation (log cystatin GFR = 1.962+ (1.123 X Log (1/cystatin C).
Urine microalbumin
The microalbumin was measured using a Flex reagent cartridge is based on a particle –enhanced turbidometric inhibition immunoassay (PETINIA) adapted to Dimension clinical chemistry system which allows direct quantification of albumin in urine samples. The analytical measurement range is 1.3 -100 mg/l.
Statistical methods
Descriptive statistics were reported using mean and standard deviation. Assumption of normality was checked. Figures are presented as box plots and scatter plots. The independent t-test was used to compare the continuous variables such as body weight, body surface area, serum cystatin C, CysGFR and combined renal volumes between LBW and NBW neonates at birth. Pearson or Spearman’s Rho correlation was used to assess the relationship between clinical variables for each time point. In order to predict the expected growth of kidney volume and function in LBW and NBW babies, multiple regression analysis was performed and regression coefficients (the average change in the dependent variable for every unit change in the independent variable) are reported. Mixed model analysis was performed to compare the mean kidney volume and function overtime separately between LBW and NBW neonates, considering study group (LBW/NBW and SGA/AGA) and time (at birth, 6 and 18 months) as factors adjusting for sex, BSA (for kidney volume) and kidney volume (for CysGFR). An alpha level of less than 0.05 was set as statistical significance. All analyses were carried out using SPSS version 21(IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows, Version 22.0. Armonk, NY: IBM Corp).
We screened 142 low birth weight babies. Of these, 100 met inclusion criteria and agreed to come for follow up (42 had developed illness needing neonatal intensive care). The controls consisted of 66 normal weight term neonates. All these babies recruited at birth were followed at 6 months and 18–24 months. Of the 166 neonates, 53 % were males. The mean age of infants at last follow up varied between the LBW and NBW neonates (LBW: 17.84 ± 4.6Vs NBW: 23.5 ± 2.7 months p < 0.01) but was not significantly different between SGA and AGA neonates (SGA: 17.3 ± 5.0 Vs AGA: 19.5 ± 5.1 months p > 0.05). Gender distribution was comparable between LBW and NBW groups.
Overall, the mean age of the mothers and the gestational age of the babies were 24 ± 4 years, and 36 ± 3 weeks respectively. The mean age of the mothers were comparable between LBW and NBW groups (LBW: 24.2 ± 3.5yrsvs. NBW: 23.7 ± 3.6 yrs). Thirty five percent of the LBW neonates were small for gestational age. Among the AGA neonates, 39 % were LBW.
The mean height and weight of the LBW neonates were significantly lower compared to NBW neonates over time. The profile of body weight, body surface area, serum cystatin C, CysGFR, combined renal volumes and urine microalbumin are depicted in Tables 1 and 2 over three time points in both NBW and LBW neonates and SGA versus AGA neonates respectively. The combined kidney volume was significantly lower in LBW at all three time points (p < 0.001) (Fig. 1a). The kidney volumes were also higher among AGA compared with SGA babies at all three time points (p < 0.001) as shown in (Fig. 1b). NBW neonates had a higher kidney volume compared to LBW neonates even after correcting for the body surface area (p < 0.001). There was a significant increase in kidney volumes in both groups over time (Fig. 1c as shown in the Additional file 1). The increment of renal growth was higher in NBW neonates (β coefficient of 0.57) compared to LBW neonates (β coefficient of 0.31). Similarly, increment in the renal growth was higher in AGA babies (β coefficient 0.95) and SGA babies (β coefficient 0.57). The relative growth rates of kidneys in LBW and SGA babies over time were slower than their counterparts.
Table 1
Comparison of anthropometry, kidney growth and function between LBW and NBW neonates
LBW (n =100)
NBW /Controls (n = 66)
Weight (kg)
1.65 ± 0.38
2.96* ± 0.38
6 months
5.76 ± 1.19(n = 66)
7.53* ± 1.54(n = 28)
18-24 months
9.31 ± 1.11(n = 46)
10.7* ± 1.56(n = 19)
BSA (m2)
0.14 ± 0.02 (100)
0.20* ± 0.02 (64)
6 months
0.31 ± 0.07 (66)
0.38 * ± 0.06 (28)
18-24 months
0.41 ± 0.10 (46)
0.48 * ± 0.08 (17)
Combined renal volume (cm3)
13.29 ± 3.38 (99)
20.58* ± 4.59 (65)
6 months
30.16 ± 8.19 (66)
40.27* ± 7.97 (32)
18-24 months
45.83 ± 13.26 (45)
69.61* ± 13.12 (19)
Cystatin GFR (ml/m2/min)
51.63 ± 14.14 (95)
48.48 ± 8.29 (36)
6 months
64.98 ± 14.47 (66)
75.34* ± 12.56 (31)
18-24 months
75.80 ± 18.31 (45)
86.38 ± 15.61 (16)
Urine microalbumin†(mg/l)
6 months
11.3 (4.9, 16.3)
11.2 (5.8, 14.0)
18-24 months
11.8 (5.8, 14.0)
10.1 (5.6, 12.5)
Reported as mean ± SD; † reported as median (25th and 75th percentiles)
*p <0.05, using an independent t test between LBW and NBW neonates
Table 2
Comparison of kidney growth and function between SGA and AGA neonates
Combined renal volume (cm3)
13.25 ± 3.54 (n = 58)
18.14 ± 5.31* (n = 106)
6 months
30.11 ± 7.92 (37)
35.19 ± 9.93* (61)
18- 24 months
45.58 ± 13.16 (24)
57.83 ± 16.07* (40)
Cystatin GFR (ml/m2/min)
50.21 ± 6.73 (55)
78.39 ± 30.27* (75)
6 months
62.96 ± 12.63 (38)
71.67 ± 14.97 *(58)
18- 24 months
77.58 ± 16.24 (21)
79.47 ± 19.39 (*33)
Micro albuminuria (mg/L)†
6 months
12.84 ± 10.35 (37)
12.73 ± 10.80 (55)
18- 24 months
12.56 ± 6.03 (21)
9.29 ± 5.24 (36)
Reported as mean ± SD; *p < 0.05, using an independent t test between SGA and AGA groups
† − comparison of microalbuminuria was done using Mann–Whitney U test
Fig. 1
Fig. 1
a: Kidney volume at 0,6 and 18–24 months in LBW and NBW neonates at all 3 time points. b: Kidney volume at 0,6 and 18–24 months in SGA and AGA neonates at all 3 time points. c: Rate of growth of kidney volumes over 18-24months in LBW and NBW neonates
The CysGFR (ml/min/m2) at birth were 51.4 ± 14 and 48.5 ± 8.4 in LBW and NBW neonates respectively. CysGFR in LBW neonates were comparable to NBW neonates at the end of infancy (Fig. 2a) despite having lower kidney volumes. Similarly CysGFR was comparable between AGA and SGA at the end of infancy (Fig. 2b). Correlating kidney volumes and kidney function (Fig. 3), overall, there was a significant increment in the CysGFR in both LBW and NBW overtime, and however there was no significant group and interaction effect observed after adjusting for kidney volume.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
a: Cystatin C derived GFR between LBW and NBW neonates at all 3 time points. b: Cystatin C derived GFR between SGA and AGA neonates at all 3 time points
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Correlation of kidney volume and kidney function in LBW and NBW during infancy
There was no significant gender difference in any of the parameters between groups. Although the mean microalbuminuria at 18 months among LBW (11.0 ± 5.8 mg/l) and SGA (12. ± 6 mg/l) babies were higher than NBW (9.3 ± 5.3 mg/l) and AGA (9.2 ± 5.2 mg/l) babies, this was statistically not significant (Table 1 and 2). No infant in either group had pathological albuminuria above 30 mg/l.
Over the last 20 years, numerous studies have confirmed the association between low nephron number and renal disease [2, 12, 24]. After birth, GFR increases rapidly relative to kidney weight, body size and surface area until the GFR, corrected for body surface area reaches adult values by 2 years [25]. We therefore studied kidney growth and change in GFR during this dynamic period in a cohort of South Indian infants. Kidneys in LBW and SGA infants remained small and grew more slowly when compared to kidneys of NBW or AGA infants during the first two years of life. GFRs were however comparable by 18–24 months, suggesting relative hyperfiltration in the smaller kidneys which may be a precursor of adult disease.
Kidney growth
Few studies have tracked kidney growth from early fatal life or birth to late infancy. The Generation R study prospectively studied kidney growth from fetal life until late infancy, and found that fetal biometrics and maternal anthropometrics were associated with kidney size at 2 years of age [26]. A large prospective study of NBW healthy infants, from fetal life to 2 years post-natal age found that kidney size was influenced by age and gender [27]. Kidney growth from 0–18 months of age was studied in 178 children born pre- or post-mature and/or small or large for gestational age, comparing them to 717 term AGA children. Relative kidney growth was positively correlated with weight for gestational age in this study [14]. Twenty years after birth,51 individuals born preterm, either SGA or AGA were compared with 30 full term controls. Both absolute and relative left kidney length and volume were significantly lower in SGA and AGA individuals, more notably in women [28]. Consistent with the literature therefore, tracking the kidney growth from birth to late infancy, our observations reveal that kidney size and volume are influenced by both birth weight and gestational age in Indian cohort infants from birth to 2 years. Importantly, the rate of change in kidney volume (β co-efficient) was lower in infants born with LBW and SGA, suggesting relatively less catch-up in renal size compared with body growth.
Kidney function
In a retrospective study of normal children, a strong correlation was reported between renal function based on creatinine and renal mass [29]. However, in early childhood, when GFR was estimated using creatinine, a clear and consistent difference between AGA(n27) and SGA(n 39) infants was not found [30]. Vanpee et al. found that GFR was not different between LBW and NBW children at the age of 8 years, whereas, other studies have observed a lower GFR and poorer tubular function in LBW children aged6 -12 yrs [3133]. In LBW infants and malnourished children, cystatin C was found to reflect GFR better than creatinine [34, 35]. We used the cysGFR to evaluate renal function in our cohort to avoid limitations with serum creatinine in this high risk group of neonates. Our results show that renal function at age 18–24 months was independent of renal size, birth weight or gestational age. Although kidneys were smaller in LBW and SGA infants, GFRs were not consistently different, suggesting that renal size is not the only determining factor for renal function. The variability in GFR measurements between studies may also reflect differences in the source population studied, i.e. ethnic, geographic, socioeconomic and dietary components, or may reflect hyperfiltration in a smaller kidney.
Renal growth and Renal function
In a study [36] undertaken by us in 2006,comparing a cohort of babies from Canada (n =47) and India(n = 46),despite no significant difference in birth weights, the mean combined renal volume, corrected to body surface area, of Indian babies at 1 month of age was significantly (p < 0.001) smaller than that of Canadian babies. Focusing on the relationship between glomerular filtration rate and kidney volume in LBW neonates in early post- natal period, Kandaswamy et al. reported that within 6 days of birth, LBW infants, though small in number (n = 13) achieved a similar GFR to NBW infants (n = 36), despite 25 % smaller kidney volumes [17]. We also found no difference in GFRs between LBW and NBW groups at birth. In our cohort, although GFRs were significantly lower among LBW infants at 6 months, this difference was no longer evident at 18–24 months, suggesting possible development of compensatory hyperfiltration over time as the renal size relative to body size remained lower in the LBW group. Studies have shown evidence of hyperfiltration based on presence of urine microalbumin in early adulthood rather than in childhood [13, 37]. This surrogate marker of single nephron GFR or hyperfiltration in the form of microalbuminuria, though not statistically significant in our study, showed a higher trend in LBW/SGA compared to NBW/AGA babies at the end of infancy.
We analyzed the rate of growth of renal volume per time for NBW and LBW. The rate of growth was greater in NBW neonates at both 6 and 18 months as compared to LBW neonates. Mixed model analysis was performed and we found that the rate of growth was significantly different between NBW and LBW neonates (β coefficient for LBW = −10.4; 95 %: −15.8 to −4.9). However, we are cautious in interpreting these findings due to the drop outs that resulted in small sample size and the different ages at final kidney size measurement.
Our study has several limitations. Over time, drop out of patients resulted in smaller numbers in the later age groups, which may have confounded our results. Because of the smaller numbers at later time points we could not further stratify by gestational age within the two birth weight groups. The ages at study were somewhat variable with birth parameters being measured between birth and 14 days and the latest parameters measured between 18 and 24 months of age. We observed that the parents of LBW/SGA infants were sensitized to report on time or earlier for follow up compared to NBW babies in late infancy. It is possible that the lower age at last measurement in the LBW group may have contributed to the smaller kidney size in this group, however our regression analysis over time show a consistently reduced rate of renal growth in the LBW group which would support smaller final kidney sizes. Importantly also, despite there being a difference in the mean ages at last follow up between 18–24 months in LBW and NBW babies, the CysGFR was not different between the two groups at this time point. We did not have data on other factors that may have influenced infant renal growth and function such as maternal factors, nutrition and genetic predisposition, and therefore other potential confounders could not be controlled for.
Strengths of our study include the relatively large subject numbers, as well as the fact that this study was embedded within our day to day practice and therefore is likely generalizable to our population. In addition the repeated measurements over time and consistencies of trends underscore the validity of our findings as compared to single cross-sectional measurements. Our use of CysGFR is an important strength in that it reduces potential confounders introduced by serum creatinine and is one of only a few studies in neonates that use cysGFR estimation. The variability of findings in the literature especially with respect to GFR in LBW compared with NBW children demonstrates the challenges in studying GFR in these infants, where true GFR measurements as mentioned in literature [38] may not be considered ethical purely for study purposes. Our findings therefore add to the richness of this data, but more studies are required in Indian population to assess potential additional factors impacting GFR in infancy.
Our study focuses on a high risk group of neonates with LBW and SGA, which is of great relevance in developing nations. Our assessment of renal growth and function during the dynamic phase of body growth and glomerular functional maturation in infancy, demonstrates that renal growth, in accordance with body growth, is suboptimal in LBW and SGA neonates compared to NBW and AGA neonates during infancy. Renal function however was comparable between LBW and NBW neonates and similarly between SGA and AGA neonates in late infancy. This catch up in glomerular filtration rate despite having lower kidney volumes may reflect early glomerular hyperfiltration and therefore emphasises the need for long term follow up of LBW and SGA infants.
AGA, appropriate for gestational age (babies’ whose birth weight is between the 10th and 90th centile for that gestational age); cycGFR, Cystatin C derived glomerular filtration rate; GFR, glomerular filtration rate; LBW, low birth weight (birth weight < 2500 g); NBW, normal birth weight; SGA, small for gestational age (babies’ whose birth weight is < 10th centile for that gestational age)
International Society of Nephrology Clinical Research Prevention Program for the Grant that supported this study.
Availability of data and materials
All the data supporting our findings has been submitted.
Authors’ contribution
AI was the principal investigator,responsible for the designing, implementation and funding for the study. SN worked towards recruiting and following up the neonates. NS and AG were the radiologists who did the renal ultrasound studies. SS provided statistical and analytical content and VL guided the principal investigator with intellectual inputs, interpretations and manuscript preparation. All the authors have read and approve of the final version of the manuscript.
Author’s information
Dr Arpana Iyengar(AI) is a Professor and Head of Pediatric Nephrology at St John’s medical college hospital and has been a recipient of the ISN RP grant for this study in 2010. She is presently a core member of the South Asian regional board and the Research prevention committee of the ISN. Dr ValrieLuyckx (VL) has been a mentor for this study considering her vast experience in the field and is the chair of the Global outreach postings of the ISN.
Competing interests
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Consent for publication
Not applicable.
Ethics approval and consent to participate
Approval from the Institutional Ethical Review Board of St. Johns Medical College Hospital, Bangalore (IERB Study Ref no.107/2010 dated 6th July 2010) was obtained. Informed consent was taken from either of the parents of the newborn babies.
Authors’ Affiliations
Department of Pediatric Nephrology, St John’s Medical College Hospital, Bangalore, India
Department of Neonatology, St John’s Medical College Hospital, Bangalore, India
Department of Radiology, St John’s Medical College Hospital, Bangalore, India
St John’s Research Institute, St John’s Medical College Hospital, Bangalore, India
Institute of Biomedical Ethics, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
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EVE Online theorycrafting and history
Alliance Tournament participation and prize levels
CCP Fozzie recently made it public that they had a less than full signup for Alliance Tournament 12 — only sixty-three teams registered, so there will be no need for the typical lottery followed by silent auction that has been a mainstay of previous ATs. A few bloggers have turned this into the usual “Eve is dying” screed; in my case, though, I’m actually quite happy. It means that many alliances have started to figure out one of the nasty truths of AT: participating in the Alliance Tournament is generally nothing more than really expensive advertising.
This probably sounds strange, given that I run a tournament (the SCL) and I’ve been involved in every AT to date in some way. But bear with me; I’ll explain!
Problem 1: The Prize Structure
The root problem with the AT is that it has a very strange prize structure: Only the first and second place finishes get prizes, in the form of BPCs for limited-edition tournament ships. (And, in some cases, the prizes don’t really reflect the challenge; in all but one case, the tournament frigates have been in higher demand than the cruisers.)
Dear reader, imagine that we lived in an alternate universe where the AT was held on Singularity; all ships/setups were free, and that the sole cost of participation was the 5 PLEX for the entry fee. Even under those conditions, the AT would still be a poor proposition for most alliances:
• You pay 5 PLEX (~3.6B ISK) to enter into the tournament.
• You spend 1-2 months of spare-time evenings practicing for this tournament.
• When the tournament actually starts, you dedicate four weekends in a row, waking up early and spending most of the day playing Eve. (Especially for players in the Americas, where the first matches of each day can be as early as 6am.)
• The top two teams (~25 people) get massive prizes, and the other 60 teams (~750 people) in the tournament will get nothing and lose their entry fee. At best, they might get an alliance commercial to run on the stream between matches, and if they reach the top eight, they might get a bit of buzz to help recruiting.
Definitely not a good return on time investment, nor money. For contrast, most tournaments for other video games have no entry fee, and offer prizes for at least the top four or eight players, plus occasional smaller prizes — for example, the Fragbite SC2 tournaments allow spectators to vote on a “play of the day” that won a small prize. AT doesn’t even give you a damned participation ribbon.
Besides being inherently discouraging, this prize structure also causes massive problems with talent migration.
Problem 2: Talent Migration
Speaking bluntly, I can tell you the outcome of AT12 without having to look at the rules in any way:
• First place: Hydra Reloaded.
• Second place: Either Pandemic Legion or Camel Empire(My money’s on Camel.)
In most cases, the third place team ends up being whoever Hydra’s practice partner was.
The vast majority of world-class, tournament-level players will quickly learn after an AT run or two that they cannot carry a lower-tier team into the top two finishes by themselves. If they’re going to invest time and energy into practicing and participating in a tournament, they want a return on their investment, and the only way to do that… is to move to an alliance that’s also full of world-class players.
I’ve seen it happen with my own eyes: Rote Kapelle had most of its competent tournament guys leave for Hydra Reloaded shortly before AT11, and I don’t blame them at all. Talent migration would be a problem even if the tournament was free to participate in… which it is not. This problem is unique to Eve in eSports; you don’t see the same players (or the same teams) winning SC2/LoL/DOTA tourneys over and over.
These two issues, by far, are the biggest factors that discourage people from participating in AT. Imagine what the World Series of Poker would look like if there were no side events, and the main event had no prizes for anything other than the final table, and that the final table would be nearly guaranteed to contain both Hellmuth and Nguyen.
However, there’s a third issue: On top of the entry fee, AT also requires you to pay for your ships.
Problem 3: Costs of Participation
A competent AT team not only needs to stockpile ships/modules/hardwires for the 12-man fleet compositions they’ll be flying, but they actually need to have multiple compositions ready to go at any given time, due to the banning mechanics. (Or, at the minimum, compositions with interchangeable parts.) These have to be stockpiled before-hand: depending on where you are in the bracket, you’ll have less than 15 minutes between matches, and you will not have time to run to Jita and buy new ships. (And this is assuming that Jita has the parts you need; it’s not uncommon for people to buy Jita out entirely of certain drones, hardwires, and ships leading up to an AT.)
The consequence is that you need to have a fairly large bankroll at the start of the run to fund ship and module purchases. Then, after the tournament is completed, you’ll recoup some of that bankroll by selling the ships that weren’t destroyed during matches. With the current AT12 rules, a serious contender team needs ~30B ISK in initial bankroll, plus any extra optional costs for faction/officer modules for their flagship. (I arrived at that number after some debate with members of Hydra and Camel.) You’ll recoup 60-70% of that 30B expenditure after the tournament ends, by selling off the ships and modules that didn’t explode; however, you still need the initial amount up front, in order to have a serious shot at first or second place.
That’s a lot of money — and some teams choose to spend far, far more than that. Pandemic Legion was famous in AT10 for bringing 100B ISK worth of ships and modules in just a single match alone… a match which they ended up losing.
Ironically, it’s also less money than it used to be. In previous tournaments, CCP allowed players to use +5% and +6% hardwirings, which cost hundreds of millions each. The Rote budget for our entire run in AT10 was 90B, and 40% of that was spent on hardwirings.
Summary: Blech.
Someone who previously participated in the SCL came up to me a few days ago and asked if they should consider participating in AT. I told them to save their money and do it next year, and stick to submitting a player commercial.
If CCP wants to see wider player interest in AT, they have to start with reforming the prize structure. At a minimum, ensure that anyone who wins at least one match will recoup their entry fee; ideally, getting into the top 16 in either bracket will let them recoup some of the cost of ships. Spreading out the availability of tournament ships between 1/2 (and maybe even 3rd, or 4th-8th) is another worthwhile activity as well, as Suitonia suggests in this excellent post. Get some minor prizes out there too; there’s a ton of possibilities for them:
• A prize for the team who wins a match with the fewest ships on field.
• A prize for the team who wins a match with the fewest points on field.
• A prize for the team who wins a match with the cheapest setup (ISK-wise) on field.
• A prize for the player who gets to the lowest HP during the match and survives.
• etc.
There’s also room for handing out little trinkets that aren’t clear prizes — for example, the New Eden Open gives all participants an in-game tshirt for their player avatar, and these have become collectors items over time.
Until there’s actual incentive for smaller alliances and lower-tier teams to compete, it simply doesn’t make sense for anyone to sink months of practice and effort into AT, unless you’re in Hydra or Camel. This situation also doesn’t make for exciting video for CCP’s stream; as Tyrus Tenebros recently put it, the typical AT stream consists of three days of cripple fights, two days of actual close matches, followed by three days of the eventual 1st-4th placers mopping up.
The data’s staring you in the face, CCP — and you’ve got a new guard in charge of AT as well. It’s time to shake things up!
Footnote: Why This Matters
A quick footnote here that I’m opting to add after the initial publication:
Yes, despite all of the above, tournaments can be fun to participate in; that’s why I continue to run the SCL, and why I’ve done the AT every year in non-Hydra/PL teams. It’s spaceships exploding, it’s theorycrafting, it’s sitting with your fellow competitors on Mumble, and it’s the shaking hands that everyone gets before every match. Competition is fun, and it sharpens your PvP skills and makes you a more effective player.
However, as it stands today, the group of AT participants is a tiny subset of the group of people who participate in PvP in Eve.
I want to see Alliance Tournaments become something accessible and interesting to a wider audience of PvPers; I want to see more players competing, and more players watching that competition. That won’t happen if a watcher can predict the outcome easily, and it won’t happen when there’s no clear benefit for new players to get involved, other than a promise of “it’ll be fun, I swear.”
Adding incentives for smaller and less experienced/successful teams to play is a good first step towards making AT appeal to more players.
Addendum 2, 12jun2014: Fozzie mentions that prize changes may be coming for AT12.
Comments are closed. | <urn:uuid:6f2490c0-5b72-45dd-82d2-159deb1dc40a> | https://namamai.wordpress.com/2014/06/11/alliance-tournament-participation-and-prize-levels/ | en | 0.949374 | 0.020865 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Do you need a VPN? (blog.mozilla.org)
969 points by thesumofall 11 months ago | hide | past | web | favorite | 479 comments
Grew up in China (moved to Australia since early 2008) where GFW is in place and getting overwhelmingly powerful, I've been through multiple stages to cross the `great wall`, SSH Dynamic Forwarding, PPTP, OpenVPN and now IPsec (strongSwan). The GFW has evolved so much (capable of massive scale MITM attack, DNS spoofing, traffic sniffing etc. you'll be amazed how capable the GFW is - of course courtesy of the team behind it) that it makes increasingly more difficult for people to access the real Internet.
I've ditched PPTP (not safe any more) and shifted to IPsec (IKEv2 + RSA with X509, IKEv1 + PSK + XAUTH) as it is being used by a lot of MNCs - can't killall. The GFW has developed technique to detect OpenVPN well and it is easily blocked so I don't use it at all. Over the past few years many home brewed protocols emerge - e.g. shadowsocks and variants and many others (I've never used any of them).
The best thing to do with VPN is that to understand the basics of the VPN solution of choice, try to install and configure from scratch on VPS and use that as your main protection (encapsulation) while using public Wi-Fi or untrusted network. There's been many good discussions on how to do this on HN.
NOTE: I am maintaining around 10 strongSwan powered IPsec VPN and 2 OpenVPN to help family members and close friends to access the real Internet (have to keep a low-profile though). Funny though, my networking skills evolved with GFW.
I was in China this year and found it surprising that it's as powerful as it is. Consequently, I also found out how powerful not having the entire internet is. The amount of information/sites I wasn't able to access due to it not being accessible at all; or "accessible" but never fully downloadable (i.e. javascript not able to download fully, other assets blocking actual content from being loaded) was staggering.
Coupled with the official cable TV service, which is amusingly abbreviated CCTV[1], and other state-controlled media, it's an eye-opening thing to see (more blatant) information control in action.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Central_Television
Can you read Chinese? I ask because if not, the experience of people who can might be very different.
I'm completely against the censorship; I just wonder how effectively they implement it.
Not OP, but I suppose that people only reading Chinese in China won't notice this much, because most (all?) of what they find is inside the Great Firewall and thus under control (direct or indirect) of the Chinese government. But that's exactly as intended.
Because GFW (maybe accidentally) blocked quite a few CDNs, that influenced many other 'not-on-list' sites overseas to download their assets properly.
VPN and SSH or other public (detectable) protocols are goner for very long time now. I don't understand why you guys still trying to use it.
In China, you may need to use one (Or multiple) of following:
https://github.com/shadowsocks https://github.com/v2ray https://github.com/XX-net https://github.com/ginuerzh/gost
And +https://github.com/gfwlist/gfwlist for automatic proxy switch.
Those applications may require a dedicated server or VPS to run. Once you set it up, it will act like a relay between you and the host you want to access (So that server or VPS must located outside GFW's shadow. And you better set it up and get it well tested before you move to China).
If you don't want to setup a server all by yourself, you can use Lantern or Psiphon, but they are considered not safe as you don't have any control once data leaves your machine.
I personally use Shadowsocks + my own one made with Golang. Both of them works very good for me. Some people may had problem with Shadowsocks but cause of those problems remain a myth.
I was in China a couple months ago and ExpressVPN worked fine for me, are they actually using their own custom protocol?
ExpressVPN is the only one afaik that is allowed by the Chinese government. You can assume that it is actually not "private".
When I was in China last April, SSTP worked fine (though long-lived connections tend to become slower over time, and then need a few minutes of cool down before being usable again). Most Chinese people I met were using shadowsocks.
Many friends indicated Express was down almost an entire week surrounding the big meetings. Not as reliable as it once was. Or so they say
Doesn't matter if it's not "private" if you have certified encryption though, right?
I think his assertion is that as it is "allowed" by China's government that they somehow have access to the keys (or the VPN provider is keeping a buffer of the traffic and has an arrangement to provide it to relevant government agencies upon request).
I have no experience with ExpressVPN, so I can't help you with that.
But in a vlog I've watched on Youtube, the host of that vlog said "Over the last coupe of days, ALL the VPN is been very difficult to use". So, I guess that includes ExpressVPN.
Here is the video if you interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuEdYvQmVFg (5:20)
Im in china at the moment using expressvpn (been using it for a year by now) and since about two weeks only three server locations work well (Hong Kong, Tokyo, Los Angeles). Some others work off an on. Before that most locations worked and some of them, Taiwan for example, used to be very fast. Its still usable for streaming and surfing but I'm afraid the end is near. I think sometime in the future one will have to go with shadow socks and or similar protocols/solutions but until then expressvpn is quite convenient (mobile client, router with expressvpn client).
Maybe. Vypr VPN has an own "Chameleon" protocol. Maybe Express has it's own
Hijacking the top comment to link to something I wrote recently.
As someone who owns and works and knows the ins and outs of an ISP and had the 'pleasure' to deal with many 3-word government organization, I can't help but feel that many people think privacy exist in some form and using VPN somehow makes you immune.
Please learn to understand double-speak. If the FBI says they are having a hard time cracking smart-phones or some kind of encryption, understand that they actually want you to use that security because they have figured out how to get around it.
I may sound like an alarmist, but it isn't intentional - because the government is much much more powerful in terms of resources they can throw at a problem - if they can't crack something they will find a way to intimidate someone to install a backdoor for them while completely denying it in public. This happens ALL the time. Most of us just don't know about it.
Do you have any evidence, or is this just speculation? I can buy that governments have access to zero-day exploits; I don't buy that every form of encryption they complain about has been secretly been broken.
Infosec 101: if it truly is a problem for you, you don't tell anyone.
I just went to Shanghai, bought a local SIM card and installed any VPN app from the App Store on my phone (I used "HexaTech"). Had no problems at all with it, even with the free tier. I was kind of surprised how easy it was to get through the GFW
Being in China now, I can say that just because it works doesn't mean that it's great. I think the government has demonstrated multiple times that they can block and throttle VPN connections at the flick of a switch. If one works, it's because of the government's mercy, not because of some circumvention team's ingenuity. That's my final conclusion. Yes, new methods might break through those times the switch gets turned on to block, but those new methods get blocked eventually too. It's an arms race where one side has near unlimited funding.
The most terrible fact about GFW is that it makes people forget they have a chance to access the other part of internet. Most netizens here don't even have a idea to cross it.
Remember that Chinese people who do it are subject to attracting negative government attention; they face much more risk, even it works.
The amount of censorship varies by province; I wouldn't be surprised if it is easier in Shanghai than in other parts of China.
I'm in Beijing. After ExpressVPN was down a friend of mine recommended to give a try for NordVPN as Astrill looks like China's government VPN which logs everything. And I was surprised - Nord works significantly and costs just over 3 bucks.
When I was in China for 6 months I just wrapped my OpenVPN in a regular TCP tunnel with stunnel https://www.stunnel.org/index.html
Was slow, but it worked.
I will be traveling to China in a couple of days and was ignorantly hoping my OpenVPN-based VPN would work.
Do you recommend that I set up strongSwan?
Another option is roaming on a foreign SIM card - this usually bypasses the GFW quite effectively; roaming is effectively a VPN back to the home provider, and there seems to be some whitelist for these roaming tunnels. The providers probably provide surveillance access to the Chinese govt, but you will not have trouble accessing Google and other blocked sites, and any VPN you like should work fine through a roaming SIM.
Whether you can find one with reasonable data rates in China is probably the main question.
Two that I have used with great success are Kyivstar from Ukraine and China Unicom HK (note it must be HK, not mainland China). Others may be listed at [0].
[0] http://prepaid-data-sim-card.wikia.com/
I can confirm that the foreign SIM card override works from my experience a couple of years ago.
My T-Mobile had free international roaming baked in at 2G speeds. Unlike the US however, most foreign carriers in developed Asian nations (China/Korea) don't support 2G fallback, so I had free 3G everywhere.
It was pretty much like using the American internet.
Try to change the default port 1194 to something else (e.g. 443) - this may not help as the GFW has the ability to detect OpenVPN specific traffic.
If it is only for yourself and traffic is very little, it may survive the period of your stay in China. Nobody I know in mainland runs OpenVPN any more so I cannot really prove that, sigh...
That trick no longer works at all, to my knowledge. The GFW is wise to it.
That's why Tor had to implement HTTPS-like fake traffic padding in its obfsproxy modules, which also need to keep evolving...
I used PIA with relative success. The caveats being:
1. DNS resolution may not work, so you'll need to find a way to resolve the domain name (i.e. hk.privateinternetaccess.com) to IPs for your config.
2. Even if you get an IP it may not work all the time. You will have to keep resolving the domain name for another IP (or maybe just look at all the DNS records?).
EDIT: I should mention I used PIA's PPTP (yes, it's discouraged but it worked for my purposes) and L2TP configurations just fine.
Set up Shadowsocks. (OpenVPN won't work regardless of port and choice of udp/tcp, unless you tunnel it through obfsproxy or similar.)
A few months ago, I went to Shanghai. Before going to China, I setup the Shadownsock on my server. My 4G network is roaming SIM card. I can surf on Google Map over my SIM card without any proxy or VPN. To prevent from sniffing, I always connect to the network via OpenVPN with non default port.
In hotel, the Wi-Fi network cannot connect to many sites. Sometimes, I can connect the Internet via OpenVPN, but, Shadowsocks is more stable.
Just use Psiphon or ShadowsocksR, you will be fine, don't use a cliche old VPN.
If your VPN server is used by many users it tends to be detected and blocked by GFW. In case you found managing shadowsocks servers cumbersome, you may want to check out https://foxshadowsocks.com They manage shadowsocks servers for you and allow you to move servers across regions (to get a new IP).
I still believe some of the loopholes are intentional left alone by the government.
With China being such a manufacturing powerhouse, I can imagine loopholes are essential to keep international business and trade in order.
International companies can apply for VPN which allows them to legally use one. They need to attest that it will be used for business purposes; this should sensibly part of the negotiation process when investing and establishing a presence.
I'm not sure about VPNs? As I understand, it's corporate lines to overseas that's allowed. That's what we use, we lease bandwidth on a major submarine cable that goes to California and sign a contract that says we won't be using it to break laws, and Vvv we tell our employees to only use it for work.
The data has to get from office to submarine cable, VPN is needed. When logging in from home, I need to select the end-point of the VPN, so I'm pretty sure it is a VPN. This is common with any country - connecting to the corporate network must be via VPN (unless the corporate is crazy and in violation of many laws disclosing customer data).
Nope, ISP gives us fiber that goes from our PoP in Shenzhen to Guangzhou to Hong Kong (roundabout way because they have no fiber direct from Shenzhen to Hong Kong), and somewhere down the line, it hooks up with the submarine cable. No VPN at all.
It is not encrypted?
If it is a loophole it is not legitimate. To keep business and trade IN ORDER it would be legal. I think some of the loopholes are “honeypot” just to capture potential intelligence.
Can you use SSH? If so, can you SSH tunnel?
Furthermore, if ExpressVPN is allowed, could you connect to that and inner-tunnel to your own VPN?
SSH Dynamic forwarding (ssh -D) to do application-level port forwarding and configure browser to use remote host to do DNS lookup was 1 of the earliest techniques to bypass the GFW and was countered by the GFW long time ago. The wall can easily detect non-administrative SSH traffic and block it. So I won't recommend using it, it is not reliable.
When evaluating a VPN service for trustworthiness, I always look at what their webpage loads in terms of tracking scripts.
Basically, if you offer me the service to protect my IP address and don't even have the decency to let me inform myself about your offering without handing over my IP address to Google et al., then I'm not using your service.
Unfortunately, VPN providers collectively don't seem to be aware of this presentation layer, so it's neigh impossible to find one which doesn't violate privacy here.
So far, I've found exactly two: azirevpn.com and airvpn.org
They load in Piwik, which I'm okay with.
These two providers also check a lot of other boxes for me, but yeah, it's still just two providers after hours of research, so if anyone knows any other VPN providers with privacy-respecting webpages, please do tell.
> I always look at what their webpage loads in terms of tracking scripts.
Note that this is also one of the criteria in the Vpn comparison chart: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1L72gHJ5bTq0Djljz0P-N...
by https://thatoneprivacysite.net/
Which itself is hosted on Google Docs. Does not compute, does it?
I mean, sorry if I sound rude and thanks for trying to help, but yeah, I'm not clicking on that link.
Fully aware that I sounded like a dick there. I even apologized for it.
As for sorting out my threat vectors, I think you should sort out your threat vectors, if you don't consider the biggest data broker on the planet to be part of that.
But even if you yourself are entirely unaware of Google being a threat vector, I do think I made it abundantly clear in my initial comment that I don't want my IP address shared with Google, so then linking me to a Google webpage has got to either be a bad joke or so incredibly oblivious that I very much do think, it warrants a dick response.
First of all, your apology still made you sound like a dick. Secondly, enlighten me, what is the threat in reading an open spreadsheet on Google detailing pros and cons of different VPN vendors?
I don't know. Not a scooby.
What I know is that Google will store that data point indefinitely and will correlate it with a near-infinite number of other data points to generate conclusions about me. Whether those conclusions are right or wrong doesn't even matter.
They'll also make these data points and conclusions available to intelligence agencies around the world. Which might use it to damage me as part of the ongoing cyber war or if it's my own country's intelligence agency, then they might use it against me, in case I'm unpleasant for the reigning government.
I consider something safe when I know that it's safe, not when I don't know it to be unsafe.
It is the first time I have ever encounter a philosophy close to mine about this subject.
Check out my VPN service, DataBuster[0]. I made the VPN only for myself at the beginning but my friends requested the features and it became a viable product.
The only "tracking" I do on the main page is a passive analysis of Apache logs made with Piwik, so there is no visible JS tracking code or third-party tracker.
[0] https://databuster.net
That’s fantastic! My only suggestion would be to not require JavaScript for the page to load any text at all.
I’m interested in the technology behind the service; any details you can provide?
Yes, I provide some details in a blog article: https://stan.sh/posts/building-a-distributed-vpn-service
The underlying technology used is from Algo VPN, a well-acclaimed open source VPN solution. https://github.com/trailofbits/algo
Loyal customer of AIRvpn here. No complaints here
Been using it for about a year now and I am quite happy with it! Recommended it to a few friends, works great on Linux.
Why does this matter for anyone not doing something that would attract the attention of a government agency? If you're running illegal weapons, sure. But if you're just trying to connect to your company's server or prevent Comcast from seeing your search history, this shouldn't matter. It reminds me of the recent uproar over Facebook supposedly listening though the mic at all times. It sounds like a severe lack of appreciation for how much data we leak at any given moment.
What I mean is that just by reading this thread, we've all been added to whatever VPN user list the (insert bad guy name here) has set up. From there it's just simple data mining. One of the easiest ways to link user to VPN service might be through tracking scripts, but that's not specific to the VPN sites. Presumably your're researching which VPN and then reading more on specific VPNs as you narrow down your choice. Then you want to be "anonymous" so you search for bitcoin info. Then you suddenly stop searching for bitcoin and VPN info. So, you have the data from all those searches (specific breadcrumbs), the length of time searched (length of time correlated to how serious and educated you are about the topic), the time the searches stopped (correlated to VPN subscription start), your previous un-anonymized topics of interest that led to the search for VPNs, the exit nodes of the VPN you probably chose, etc. That's on top of all the physical variables - when you're likely to be awake, schedule of connections, location, etc.
I would argue that just having a tracking script on the VPN provider's website is a drop in the bucket, even from a legal perspective - it's better to have a preponderance of evidence. You're not giving 'them' any more information than they'd already need for a search warrant, which is the real danger threshold for this conversation.
It's conflating an annoyance with a threat.
ProtonVPN (same team as ProtonMail) appears to load no external trackers.
I'm itching to set one up as a side project...
Be cautious of the potential legal headaches, register it as a limited liability company, and host away from your place of residence (so police don't raid your home).
Even if you're entirely above board your users may not. Child porn, illegal substances, gambling, stalking/bullying, fake emergency calls, bomb threats, and so on. Your users are just waiting in the wings to place you into law enforcement's crosshairs.
If I opened a VPN I'd spend 10% on equipment and the other 90% on lawyers, fraud prevention, and liability insurance.
This is good advice. I had to deal with crap like this just from running a high traffic message board. Not OP, but I want to do this as a side project just for myself though.
IVPN loads only typekit.net in Linux/Firefox.
windscribe.com is another one.
Windscribe.com appears to be behind Cloudflare, which means that they allow a third party to MITM https connections to their site. I would not trust their service.
I always ask this on the VPN threads here, and don't feel like I get a solid answer (I'm not particularly well-versed on the topic so I'm genuinely curious and would love to be corrected).
If I go to Bob's website on my computer without any VPN, and Bob wants to find me, all he would need to do is get my IP, call my ISP with a warrant, and then get my information.
If I go to Bob's website while logged in with a VPN, and Bob wants to find me, he first sees that he's getting tons of hits from this IP because thousands of users are sharing this same VPN. So then he uses some kind of fingerprint to figure out my unique user sessions. Then he calls the VPN company, and asks them to associate the IP and specific browser sessions with me. In that case a) the VPN really does store logs even though they advertise they don't, so they're able to associate me with my activity, or b) they really don't store logs and have no idea which one of its thousands of users logged into his website with that IP.
It seems in the latter case, even with a malicious VPN, it's one additional (maybe trivial step) to associate me. But it's still better than just using your own ISP. Isn't that why people use VPNs to avoid DMCA letters from their ISP?
So what is the downside to using a VPN if you're aware that they aren't foolproof vs not using a VPN at all?
If you roll your own VPN on AWS or the like, don't you lose the benefit of sharing the VPN with thousands of users? Wouldn't it be easier for Bob to call AWS with a warrant and get your account info than mess with some offshore VPN provider?
The downside in a nutshell: "Researchers recently tested 300 free VPN apps on Google Play and found that nearly 40 percent installed malware or malvertising on users’ machines."
"Bob" very likely doesn't know you even exist and doesn't care. The downside of VPNs is that many VPN hosting companies are even less trustworthy than "Bob" and do care who you are. An unscrupulous VPN provider can MitM your connections, harvest anything you give the VPN's app privilege to see (probably a lot), etc.
Step one of security is to understand the threat you want to defend against and make sure your defense against that is (a) adequate, (b) appropriate, and (c) not compromising you in other ways.
Well, never use free VPNs!
Also, don't choose a VPN based on some online review. Most of those are basically paid advertising. Either "pay if you want a good review" or "pay more for highter rank", or stuff by independent affiliates, who get paid for referrals.
Better, choose VPNs that have been recommended by consensus in relevant communities. Torrent users. Wilders. Me ;) And by the way, I do consult for IVPN, but my opinions are otherwise unbiased.
And then you have stuff like AV companies' VPNs for which you pay AND your data gets sold.
(Basically, all AV companies listed on stock market sell your data.)
well, I've suspected that. But can you point to evidence?
I wrote a post last summer for IVPN's blog. Bottom line, AhnLab and Emsisoft seemed to be the only commercial ones that don't share data.
AhnLab: “AhnLab will not collect any personal information other than [data collected during software use] and will not disclose such data to any third party.”
Emsisoft: “Any information we collect from you is only used by us to serve you better. Your information is never given to a third party.”
What is your opinion on PrivateInternetAccess?
They've been recommended by a lot because they recently backed up their claims of no logging (FBI asked them for data, and they couldn't provide it). You'll see that they are ranked pretty high on this list, where there are some breakdowns. They are pretty cheap and popular too. Popular helps by making associations more difficult. That is seeing a VPN server accessed page X and that you were accessing the VPN server at said time. A college student was connected to a bomb threat by this method, being he was the only one on campus to be using TOR at the time the bomb threat was made (from TOR). You'll be fine with any VPN that is relatively popular and doesn't do any tracking.
A relevant detail to that story is that he admitted his guilt under questioning. Had he continued to deny any involvement, they would not have been able to prove that he was sending the bomb threat, as it could have been from someone who wasn't on campus.
Very true. But there have been several instances of cases like this. And this thing doesn't matter if your VPN logs or not[+]. But what I was trying to point out is that these types of access collisions are important to understand. And why I don't think people should roll their own VPN.
[+] I'm not trying advocate crime here or advising how to avoid it. Just trying to bring to light a vulnerability.
> And why I don't think people should roll their own VPN.
People who are interested in not being identified probably shouldn't. But there are good security reasons to potentially do so.
Criminals are great examples, because their OPSEC failures are often detailed in court records, reported in the media, and discussed online. One of my articles on IVPN's website uses several such OPSEC failures (Silk Road, Sheep Marketplace, etc) as examples.
It's also worth noting that PIA supports several free software projects.
Or, to phrase it differently: PIA outright bought a great number of previously community-run projects, and is concentrating power.
Freenode and Snoonet, two major IRC networks, are now owned by them.
Enough. You do this on every mention of PIA and you have been told to stop or get banned [0]. I don't know why you are on this crusade when there is not even the slightest hint of wrongdoing [1] so please, easy on the conspiracy theories.
Disclaimer: Happy PIA customer.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14911509
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14911915
It's not about conspiracy theories, but about concentration of power.
If control of PIA — for whatever reason, and be it that Andrew Lee dies and his heirs sell it, or that he can't finance it anymore, or that a three-letter agency forces him to — ends up in the wrong hands, then also all of Freenode and Snoonet end up under control of that entity.
It's not that I don't trust PIA, but that I fear that PIA itself may end up in the wrong hands.
And I'm not on a crusade against PIA — I won't complain about their donations without requirement to advertise in return to projects such as KDE, with a transparent funding process.
But I am on a crusade against centralizing any services, be it killing XMPP federation (thanks, Google), be it pushing a "secure" Messenger that is bound to a single social graph and server infrastructure controlled by one group in the US (thanks, Moxie), or be it a single compsny gaining significant control over several major IRC networks, clients, libraries, and over Matrix at the same time.
No matter the intentions, how good they may be.
Wow, what's going on there? :/ Case of sour grapes for that user?
My only beef is I thought PIA would be a kickass gig to work at. Alas, never heard back from my resume. They post in the monthly thread.
Still interested, if any of you PIA people are watching :D
(not the person you were responding to)
To be honest, my only problem with them is their customer service. And their phone app. My connection is half speed on my phone. :( They also have some strange problems with the linux app (which I wish they would open source). Otherwise I'm really happy with them.
Have you tried using a standard OpenVPN client (on your phone, on Linux, etc.) with PIA profiles?
I actually haven't. I will try later and report back. But I have a 60/30 connection (down/up) and am getting 26/5, after messing with settings (which strangely is using TCP instead of UDP). And yes, this is under 5G, and I've tried multiple servers.
As for the Linux side, their app just needed some better instructions on their site, and then works fine. So I'm not really upset on that, just had to argue with tech support for awhile to get transferred to somebody that knew what I was talking about.
Just discovered - you can get a 63% off a 2-year subscription in (presumably) the next 24 hours https://stacksocial.com/sales/private-internet-access-vpn-2-...
Ha ha ... that's an affiliate link ;)
Oops, sorry :(
Yes, and interestingly, the Freenode staff had previously disabled Tor access to the Freenode network for over a year or so because of "attacks" which they claimed they could not handle. This was a pretty flimsy excuse once I finally found someone that knew the technical details, and though I chased the "right" people down several times to ask why Tor access had not been enabled, I never got a good answer. Cue PIA taking over Freenode, and within a couple of weeks, Tor access to Freenode was once more enabled. I've been a happy PIA customer for some years now, but that left such a huge and positive impression on me. I'm not completely sure the two things are simply correlated, but after talking to all those Freenode staffers over the years about it, I can't imagine it wasn't pushed by PIA.
I was actually primarily talking about their donation to the Krita Foundation [1], but yeah, it's good to be aware of the above, even if thus far I haven't seen anything nefarious from them.
[1] - https://krita.org/en/item/krita-foundation-update
"A college student was connected to a bomb threat by this method"
This is why we can't have nice things...
I'd use them. They're among the least expensive. And they don't seem to retain logs or detailed access records, based on testimony to a US court. But that was about an exit in the US, where there's no legal requirement for VPNs to log. Where there are such legal requirements, maybe they (or any other VPN) would retain and produce logs.
When I checked in mid 2016, their custom Windows client leaked while the VPN was reconnecting after uplink interruption. But then, only six of the 29 VPNs that I tested didn't leak: AirVPN, FrootVPN, IVPN, Mullvad, Perfect Privacy and SlickVPN. Strangely, FrootVPN didn't leak using open-source OpenVPN, suggesting that they're doing something unusual at the networking level. PIA's OS X client didn't leak, however.
They do tend to oversell their servers, however. So you'll often get less throughput than with AirVPN, IVPN or Mullvad.
I've been very happy with PIA. It's cheap with minimal impact to my bandwidth. The concern is that, like all VPNs, we are trusting them not to keep logs. PIA claims that they proved in court that they do not keep logs because they provided no useful data to an FBI request. There's a debate over whether this proves they don't keep logs or not here:
Is this semantics? I am uncertain. I do think that it's in PIA's best commercial interests not to keep logs. It's the core of their business model. The moment a PIA customer's identity is revealed through them is the moment they lose all business.
I think they're good, but there are some downsides. Sometimes traffic can really slow down because they're _too_ big.
Another issue is, all their IPs are well known. When browsing while connected to them, you can run into a lot of issues: captchas, blocked sites, etc.
The other day I was accidentally connected and made a purchase. What a giant headache. My purchase was flagged and blocked and it took a lot of my time to call the company and get it cleared up.
A few weeks back I ran in to the same issue with accidentally making a purchase while connected to PIA. Mine was also flagged and I had to jump through several hoops to prove I made the purchase. It was a pain but I completely understand why that happened and I'm still very happy with PIA.
I will mention that while it doesn't magically fix slow speed issues, they have the ability to report a slow server through the app (on Windows, I can't attest to any others). You just right click the icon in the notification tray and click "Send Slow Speed Complaint." They do add more servers in areas that are overloaded.
I've used PrivateInternetAccess, they are trustworthy, but US based so count on them rolling on you if someone has a good reason to be interested in you.
Well, they apparently didn't roll for a US court, in a case involving harassment, as I recall. Would they roll for the NSA? How would they handle a NSL? I have no clue. Their founder has said that, although he lives in the US, none of their server admins do.
I don't use PIA, but one advantage of them is you can use a Starbucks or Target gift card to pay. Buy the gift card with cash then there is no trail.
>"Buy the gift card with cash then there is no trail."
Until it's important-enough for them to track down the card, figure out when it was bought, go over the security footage of who was buying at the time, extract footage of you buying it. They can then extract your face and match against a DB. Or perhaps see what car you enter into, and extract its license-plate.
Heck, even if they don't have that, they can ask the cell-phone companies to see which phone-numbers were connecting to the nearest tower during that period. That already narrows down the list to say, 1000 people?
We're almost there. All the technology is already in place, and the only thing stopping it from happening is consolidation.
I have been pleased with their service. It wasn't much hassle to set up, particularly. Was certainly a little trickier on my linux machine.
I find the speed has almost been completely acceptable. I have had only a handful of times where it seemed sluggish and bogged down.
I know there is a some question of whether they can truly be trusted? Do they truly not keep logs? And they are US based which are all things to consider. I weighed those factors against the customer reviews, price, and simplicity of their service, and I think my choice has served me well. Their rates are dirt cheap for what seems to be a reliable service.
Would you recommend IVPN?
Well, of course I would! They're one of the oldest. Except for the the first generation, anyway, such as Anonymizer (now basically owned by the CIA) and Cryptohippie (still very cool, but very expensive).
And they have great clients for Windows, OS X and iOS. I've found a few others that are just as leak-free.[0] However, the data there are old, and just about all VPN services have improved their clients. What's most relevant about the site is the testing protocol. There's more about that in an IVPN guide.[1]
I also recommend AirVPN, Mullvad and PIA. But not necessarily for their clients. I mean, IVPN doesn't have a custom Linux client. So in many cases, you need firewall rules. And you need to make sure that you're not using an ISP-assigned DNS server with the VPN.
0) https://vpntesting.info/
1) https://www.ivpn.net/privacy-guides/how-to-perform-a-vpn-lea...
The great thing about Mullvad is you can use OpenVPN instead of their client if you want. And those guys really know what they are doing.
Even better, with Mullvad you can now use WireGuard instead of OpenVPN, for considerably better performance and possibly better security. I've configured my EdgeRouter Lite to route all wifi traffic on my default home network through WireGuard for a couple of weeks and it has worked very well.
You can use open-source OpenVPN with any VPN service that offers OpenVPN connectivity. You can also use AirVPN's client Eddie, which has a pretty decent built-in firewall.
Just adding another vote for Mullvad. Tried a few others, have had the best luck with Mullvad (bandwidth, # of servers, rock-solid connection, etc.)
I use OpenVPN to connect to PIA both on my Linux machines and Android.
Same applies to IVPN, FWIW.
My VPN activities run on a old Windows box, and I did not want to trust the VPN clients to not fail and blast my data in the open for a day or two before I noticed. I ended up writing a SafeVPN Windows service that kills processes within 30 seconds of VPN failure.
I used PIA for a couple of years without issue, but then it went into some kind of decline for me, always driving network traffic to zero after a few hours. After changing hardware and reinstalling the OS with no effect, I finally tried AirVPN and things went back to normal. AirVPN is a bit more expensive, but their client is light years ahead of the PIA client.
It's better to use Windows Firewall, because blocking is virtually instant. Basically, you set LAN as a private network, and the VPN as a public network. For LAN, you allow connections only to the VPN server(s) that you use, plus a DNS server that's not associated with your ISP. You can also allow connections to other LAN devices, if you like. For the VPN, you allow all output, but only input for established connections.
Can you point to a writeup of how to do this?
The only step beyond this that I have seen is a recommendation to use OpenBSD as a firewall in a virtual machine.
No, sorry. I used to know a URL, but ... And most of your search hits will feature application-level blocking, which seems silly to me. Also, I don't use Windows much anymore. And I've forgotten the specifics.
But. It's basically what I described. For public VPN network, just use the default (all output, only established input). For private LAN, deny all output and input, and allow output to selected IP addresses (VPN and DNS servers).
Thanks for taking the time to reply. It seems like this would be worth a write-up!
Perhaps something like this can be scripted; if it becomes polished enough it could be recommended as a part of every VPN setup.
Interesting feature of Windows firewall, thanks. As the AirVPN client connects, it checks several hundred servers for the lightest load, so for that default behavior, I don't know which IPs to configure locally.
Well, the AirVPN client in Windows has its own firewall, which I didn't manage to make leak.
Various sites on the internet (e.g. Reddit, piracy sites, etc) will recommend either PIA and/or Torguard over anything else.
That's because PIA and Torguard are willing to outbid others to get that ranking :) Or so I've heard.
That's why you generally ignore online reviews.
Well my Torguard license is expiring soon. Who would you personally recommend instead?
AirVPN, IVPN, Mullvad or PIA. They've all been around for several years, and focus on privacy. And I've never heard anything bad about any of them. PIA is the least expensive, and IVPN costs the most. AirVPN and IVPN are probably the fastest. IVPN and Mullvad probably have the best technical expertise.
Or just DIY if you're just a regular Joe or Jane, it's quick, cheap, and easier than most assume.
I’m curious about your DIY solution and what that involves.
Algo is quite easy to install and run
Why do you think that just because a VPN isn't free, it won't ALSO sell you out on the other side?
Basically how much they have to lose.
Say for instance there are two vpn services. Both have a 100,000 users. One makes $1,000 a year off of advertising, and the other makes $1,000,000 a year($9/month). Now both are approached by a nefarious gentleman who offers them $20,000 a year to harvest their user's information. But every year there is a 25% chance people find out and your service is shut down.
Who takes the deal? Maybe the free guy, but very few people would risk a 1M/year revenue stream to make a little extra cash, but someone might risks a much smaller revenue stream for a comparatively bigger payoff.
That's not what was said. "Free VPNs are not to be trusted" does not imply "All paid VPNs can be trusted".
But to flip that around, what about adding payment into the mix has any bearing at all on the trustworthiness of a VPN provider?
Payment means there may be a viable business model other than sharing private information. Realistically I don't know how you can ever be sure, but I'd absolutely never trust a free VPN service.
It's not so much that they couldn't sell you out, but that if word got around that they had, it would be bad for business.
Everytime you turn around we heart of another free VPN selling data. How else do they stay in business.
Why not just use a trusted solution like openvpn and only use providers who provide openvpn servers? That immediately gets rid of one half of your problem; and as for the other half, vpn services that allow for connections via openvpn are likely to be more trustworthy. In addition, the vpn company can't MitM connections which are already on an encrypted channel outside of the vpn conneciton.
> use providers who provide openvpn servers
how can you prove what the provider is using? people can lie
This suggestion is intended to solve the "free VPN app installs malware" problem and not solve the "VPN provider who actually logs/is in league with govt/MPAA/etc" problem.
Indeed. Threat models are crucial here.
OpenVPN is a protocol. If the VPN provider supports it, you set it up in your own client that supports OpenVPN. Using a VPN provider that requires you use some proprietary app is madness.
I recently signed up for such a service, in order to get my Nintendo Switch online for multiplayer gaming. My home internet connections sub-let from the landlord and could be considered semi-hostile -- not able to connect to peers on the Switch due to triple NAT, and I suspect some QoS throttling as well. The VPN solves my routing problems, but if anyone has a suggestion for another option here I'm all ears.
It is irrelevant what software the provider is using as long as they use the openvpn protocol. This will be obvious to anyone who tries to connect using openvpn.
Can you explain further, how can you be sure things weren't aded to the software?
When you use a VPN service that supports openvpn, you:
a) Install OpenVPN yourself (open source)
b) Download an OpenVPN profile from the VPN company
c) Configure OpenVPN with the profile
Specifically, you don't have to install any binary software from the company itself.
To the client side or the server side? On the client side, you should download the code from a location you trust. On the server side, it is irrelevant if something is added to the software for the attack we are discussing.
You can use your own OpenVPN client.
Isn't openvpn kind of a hack and a IKEv2/IPSEC based strongswan solution to prefer?
It's arguably no more a "hack" than TLS is one. Right?
Re OpenVPN vs IKEv2/IPSec, this IVPN FAQ seems accurate.[0] But then, I helped edit it, so I'm biased. Still, if anyone can point to inaccuracies, I'll recommend fixing them :) The major weakness is pre-shared IKE keys.
On the other hand, I get from IVPN that the IPSEC implementation in iOS is very secure.
0) https://www.ivpn.net/knowledgebase/160/Is-using-L2TPorIPSec-...
Don't see why you're getting downvoted. From a user standpoint, IKEv2 doesn't require a secondary client and integrates with most major OS better.
For example: It's way easier for a client to install a mobileconfig to ios that supports on demand VPN than it is to have them download and configure openvpn. Fairly set and forget.
IKE is a nightmare to admin, only for Cisco level bureaucracies.
OpenVPN protocol is sorta weird (I wrote a clean room client and server impl). But IPSec stuff is such a pain to deal with that it is not worth it despite it having better OS integration.
Rarely addressed: VPN CLIENT ISOLATION.
The majority of us sit behind a NAT'd address range provided by our physical router, thus isolating our machines via a hardware router / firewall from our ISP. When you connect via a VPN, you are not automatically isolated from other client-peers on that VPN and must implicitly trust the VPN provider has properly configured client isolation. You can do testing, like firing up Wireshark and listening for broadcast traffic or simply by trying to nmap other hosts on the network, however, whatever you find could change with a configuration setting at any time.
Exactly my thoughts;
One way to further "secure" this would be to run the VPN client on a hardware router like pfSense (instead of directly on your laptop) and block all incoming connections on the vpn client tunnel interface?
A disadvantage of this method would be that the WIFI signal from your Laptop to the router is no longer secured by the Vpn...
That's how I do VPN. I have my ISP connected router, then a DMZ network with my test servers & three routers: 1) guest, 2) main, 3) VPN. I then use a virtual LAN from (2) to (3) over a virtual interface on (2) to connect to (3) which is NAT'd. Honestly though, the whole advice of "get a VPN to be secure" is ridiculous because it can end up exposing you far more than what you were previously, especially if you are running a VPN client on a host that is running a media client / server like Plex, Kodi, WinAmp, iTunes (Bonjour), etc. If you are a developer and using The Fiddler, Charles Proxy, or the Burp Suite, then there's an easy route to the rest of your internal network. I know the first time I was on a VPN and saw someone on the VPN come through my interception proxy it freaked me out enough to instantly understand the dangers of VPN services.
It's more effective to block what you want on your host firewall and not rely on the the network to keep you safe.
"Processing in hardware", meaning application specific hardware acceleration, is a not a plus in security related things: it's not safer, and it doesn't exist in most boxes, and it's often impossible to field upgrade when bugs are found. It's done to speed things up/lower cost at large scale, but that's irrelevant for consumer/small office gear.
I agree and am a big fan of host firewalls and host intrusion prevention systems, however, they must of course cover the VPN tunnel in their scope. In many cases they do not.
It is a configuration option, for sure. But I've never even heard of a VPN service that put multiple clients on the same subnet. It'd be a security nightmare. And I can't imagine what the advantage to the provider would be.
Another downside:
Recently the Federal Government sent out a malware to certain persona of interest. That malware played a higher pitch sound than can be heard by the human ear. They were able to track that person and identify them because they heard the sound on the computer's microphone. TOR or VPN can stop this.
Without a source to corroborate, the tinfoil hat factor is extremely high with this one
I slightly agree. However, these days it seems more and more that "thing elite spy agency does to track terrorist" is on about a 6 months to 1 year lead on "thing startup does to target ads."
Wouldn’t even surprise me if it was the other way around either.
Some of the brightest minds of this generation are working on ad tech.
Angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, indeed.
Interesting thanks
Sorry here is the source:
It appears to have happened already
Wow, now 44.1kHz sound cards should be very desirable
> A team of researchers from the Brunswick Technical University in Germany discovered [234] Android apps that employ ultrasonic tracking beacons to track users and their nearby environment.
My tinfoil hat is spinning!
Ability and motive...
Are they able to do this? Yes, for sure.
Are they willing to this? For terrorists or maffia bosses, no doubt. For smaller fish? Maybe they can't be bothered. Or maybe they can.
Once it's productized, it's probably easy to reuse.
Technically, but maybe not bureaucratically.
Here is a source, but no „malware“ but ads, the line gets more and more blurry
I'm surprised a computer speaker has the frequency response to play an inaudible tone.
Tested my kids - they could hear an alleged 21khz tone out of laptop speakers. The actual level of the tone doesn't matter - it was above my level of hearing. Wasn't a double blind, but they told me when it started and stopped based on a bash script with random intervals.
I'm 20 but I can still hear 20 khz, albeit not very well.
I could when I was 20, did a proper hearing test when I joined my company. 15.625khz was very noticeable - I scoffed at the old timers who couldn't hear it.
I can no longer hear it. Still I can hear 1khz, so that's what's important.
Most wouldn’t, I’d imagine OP is referring to a mobile device, look at Androids dev docs they recommend sticking to 44.1khz, which we know does fail into the range of human hearing with its 22khz reproduction, albeit fewer people. I’d suspect the person being spied on would become suspicious upon many children they encounter and even more dogs fleeing from their direction.
If they were able to gain access to a person's microphone doesn't that mean they are already compromised?
> TOR or VPN can stop this.
You're saying that the persons of interest in this case were identified and targeted only based on an IP address and not based on some other aspect of their online activity?
Wasn't this how they caught the Silk Road guy? Ross Ulbricht? They played a loud noise from his computer in a public area, as I recall.
that is not how they caught him. They used a correlation attack. He was stupid and posted something using his personal email on stackoverflow about setting up tor website and processing bitcoin transactions. He then used a linked account to advertise silk road a few times. This made him a prime suspect. They followed him for weeks and watched that every time dread pirate roberts logged in and posted on silk road he was sitting in a cafe or library on his computer connected to a vpn. This was enough for them to get a search warrant and they found all the other evidence they needed to convict him on his laptop
Do you have a source for that? I've never heard it before.
Nevermind, they chatted with him, but that was to ensure that he was logged in to SR before grabbing his laptop in an unencrypted state, not to identify him: https://www.wired.co/2015/01/silk-road-trial-undercover-dhs-...
> That malware played a higher pitch sound than can be heard by the human ear.
That should be "... can not be heard ..." right?
Also, do you have a link with more details.
No, it's right as-is.
Ah I think I read the "higher" as "high" and misunderstood it.
That still doesn't really make sense. I think you misread "than" as "that".
"a higher sound than can be heard" or "played a sound, which cannot be heard due to its pitch"
would both work, but your interpretation isn't correct.
Not really an answer to any of the questions you asked, but I'll provide my perspective.
I don't use a VPN to hide my identity from the websites I'm connecting to. I use a VPN to hide the websites I'm connecting to from my ISP.
Residential ISPs in the UK are supposed to log a bunch of internet stuff (not clear exactly what), which is then made available warrant-free to over 40 government departments, including for purposes obviously unrelated to "national security" (not that that would make it OK), e.g. HMRC and the Food Standards Agency
Additionally, I use a DigitalOcean VM and run OpenVPN myself, I don't get a service from a VPN company.
> I use a DigitalOcean VM and run OpenVPN
I've been looking to do the same recently, do you use Digital Ocean Droplets? If so, how have you found the experience?
I've been using DO for my VPN needs and it's been a very good experience. You can start a 5$ Ubuntu droplet, which is more than enough to host OpenVPN, and then configure your VPN manually. Check here :
Or you can do it the easy way (but you won't learn as much) and run a bash script to configure everything automagically :
I just tried that but on my VPS the 'tun' device was not enabled and the automagic script died. Seems that is not easy to fix on a VPS depending on your provider. Thanks for the tip though.
Not the OP and I don't use DO specifically, but I've found using a VPS provider to be a more or less painless VPN experience. Providers like DO, OVH, and Vultr have scripts for easy one-click OpenVPN setup, or you can roll your own if you don't trust their scripts (though if that's the case maybe you don't trust the VPS provider at all...)
That said, always verify that the tunnel is operating correctly before assuming it is and taking off. I've found on more than one instance that the OpenVPN client was misconfigured and seemed to connect, yet my IP was still being reported as my ISP's.
I did notice the Vultr OpenVPN deploy has license restrictions of two clients.
I think that's an OpenVPN restriction, not a Vultr specific restriction. You have to pay for a commercial license if you want multiple connections with OpenVPN.
It's a bit trickier (and more time consuming) to set up than I initially imagined but not at all undoable. A lot of tutorials are bit out of date or conflicting so it wasn't quite as easy as just following a recipe.
I didn't use DO but an even cheaper host and set up VPN at router using DD-WRT.
Occasionally I have to turn it off at router as certain sites/ services recognize the datacenter IP but not all that often.
Main reason I set it up is I use a small local ISP and know the owners and no need to have them watching net traffic.
The settings on both ends have to match perfectly. Don't forget to set DNS for openVPN also.
Unfortunatly, you lose access to certain sites, like Netflix, who block cloud IP ranges.
NordVPN works mostly reliably with Netflix.
Add to that many shopping sites (Best Buy for instance), deal sites, ticket buying sites, hotel/airline sites, heck, even my state's offender tracking system blocks the handful of VPS services I've tried.
You lose those with any VPN provider I've tried.
airVPN has this problem, unfortunately.
I have a device through which I netflix on which I do not do other personal browsing.
Quite a shame though, but nothing netflix can do about that. :-(
They could use billing address or something else to establish your location instead of your ip.
VPNs aren't a defense against subpoenas or warrants, they're a defense against ISPs scraping your connections and selling them to advertisers.
No advertiser is going to come after your VPN provider asking for logs, and even if they did your VPN provider is going to tell them to get fucked anyway. Again, unless the advertiser in question happens to be the federal government and they have a subpoena or a warrant, no VPN provider is going to give you logs to help you associate a user, I have no idea why you would even think that.
If you don't want traffic from users on the VPN you are free to block them (Netflix does this) but nobody is going to give logs over to a random webmaster to help deanonymize users.
If you want to remove the VPN provider from the question entirely (many of them are on the shady side), you can use Algo to automatically deploy a Digital Ocean droplet or Linode instance to relay your connections for you. However this doesn't fundamentally change anything - if someone comes after you with a warrant or a subpoena, then Digital Ocean/Linode is going to give you up.
This is not exactly a difficult concept to understand so if you have asked this question repeatedly and still aren't satisfied with the answer, perhaps you should look inward.
>VPNs aren't a defense against subpoenas or warrants
They absolutely are for a huge number of people. Why do you think so many VPN's advertise the fact that they don't keep logs? I imagine far (_far_) more people use VPN services as a way to evade copyright holders than as a mechanism to avoid marketers (most people don't give two craps about the latter issue.)
BTW, was the snarky bit at the end really necessary?
Some VPNs imply this when they claim they don't keep logs on their users.
> they're a defense against ISPs scraping your connections and selling them to advertisers.
isn't SSL supposed to do that? At most an ISP ought to only be able to sniff the domain.
> ISPs scraping your connections and selling them to advertisers.
Sell what exactly?, the domains you visit because with SSL that is all what they know.
There are lots of problems you see in practice which are not discussed often....
* Inability to send mail though a mail program
* Daily disconnections of VPN service
* Captchas and other verification/friction when using services (eg youtube, amazon etc)
* Some services may believe you are in a different country incorrectly, meaning you have to force them to use the right location, or be happy with it being wrong
* Some services will not work at all (for example purchasing through apple)
* Paid streaming services – like netflix, hbo go and amazon streaming will likely not work at all
* You may not be able to port tunnel traffic inside the VPN
And of course you have to trust the provider. For example PureVPN claims 'no logs' but it seems that isn't the case...
There is a lot of friction in using a VPN. Which makes the idea, often proposed by technical people that if you are worried about privacy - 'just get a VPN' either naive or disingenuous. That said even with the friction it is worth the cost and hassle IMHO.
In practice you have to have a way to flip on and off VPN on some machines/devices.
There is more discussion on this here...
(edit: fix formatting)
Sure, adversaries could pressure VPN providers for logs, account information, help tracing traffic, etc. So you pick VPN services that have been in business for several years, are well known and recommended in relevant communities, and have no history of giving up their customers. There's a recent relevant thread on Wilders: https://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/purevpn-keeping-logs...
Even so, it's prudent to assume that your VPN provider logs, works with your adversaries, etc. Just like the Tor project assumes that any particular relay may be malicious. So Tor clients create three-relay circuits, to distribute the risk. And one can do the same with VPN services. I'm currently working through a nested VPN chain, using servers from multiple providers. I use pfSense VMs as VPN gateways, and workstation VMs. It's also easy to add Whonix to the mix, so I can use Tor through nested VPN chains.
You're assuming that private parties have the ability to get warrants or subpoenas to get information from your ISP. They do not.
If "Bob" wants to know who you are when you visit his website, he doesn't have any options to get that information. If "Bob" thinks you are violating his copyright rights, he can file a DMCA complaint against you. If "Bob" doesn't want people from Iceland to access his site, he can try to filter based on IP range.
VPNs do three things: 1. obscure your identity 2. obscure your location 3. prevent local inspection of your network traffic.
How effective that "obscurity" is depends on who wants to know and why.
Speed, in terms of bandwidth and latency. I consistently get slower speeds using a VPN. Granted, I'm using Google Fiber so I have symmetric gigabit, but there is a downside to it, depending on your use case.
I'm in the same boat as well. I'm not in the US but I do have symmetric gigabit as well. I've been using EC2/DO boxes to setup VPNs for me, but they hardly ever come close to my home speed.
This is usually due to the ec2/do instances being the cheapest or second cheapest with bad CPUs and overcrowding.
You're also only guaranteed gigabit speeds on the higher tier instances. I'd be interested in what you get using iperf3 between EC2 and your home connection.
Did you try HMA? I had amazing speed with them.
Tried them out yesterday and they give about 10% of my Internet speed on any server. So my 400 Mpbs connection slowed down to 40 Mbps, which is a pretty rough drop. And I haven't been able to find an OpenVPN connection that could handle more than that 40 Mbps.
No, I was using PIA, I might try them out though, thanks.
PIA is cool because it works seemlessly with your phone as well. It used to be you had to have some special access to get it to work with a provider like Verizon, but it works flawlessly now.
Was there any point to this comment other than humblebragging about your fiber connection?
It's a legitimate point to consider. I've set up my home router with Tomato by Shibby, which allows routing all traffic over a VPN link. I was finding the router couldn't keep up with a 50 Mbps link. Granted, these routers aren't designed with that use case in mind. But, running a VPN link all the time on mobile devices kills battery very quickly, so setting up the link on the router is preferable. Consequently, I don't route all traffic over the VPN, which is suboptimal.
I put a 2nd router behind my regular router and switch the gateway, on devices I want to use the VPN, to this 2nd router. Benefits: 1. allow devices to use non-vpn friendly sites 2. Keeps everyone on the same subnet so the VPN is not in the way for local file transfers. 3. main router not overburdened by VPN software
Tomato allows selective routing, both by destination and by device, so that's helpful. Your setup definitely avoids some of the overhead mine has. But, really, I'd just like the little ARM processor in my R7000 to be able to keep up so I can saturate my link. I'm not familiar with ARM's ISA all that much, but it seems an AES-NI equivalent would be really nice to have.
There's no catching him, he's behind 80 proxies.
VPNs protect you from snooping by 3rd parties on the way to Bob's site, such as your ISP, anyone on your network, or anyone on any of the intervening nodes between you and Bob's.
If you don't want Bob to identify you then yeah you need more than just VPN such as ad blockers, disabling cookies, and more.
Depends on what you mean by VPN but the let-me-bittorrent ones don't get you confidentiality (or integrity) to web sites you visit, past your immediate ISP.
1. VPN Overview https://thatoneprivacysite.net/
2. oVPN.to is probably a good idea, as long as you are not based in China
3. Pay anonymously for the VPN. If it need to be really secure, only access VPN via TOR.
I've been using one pretty consistently ever since the legislation passed allowing ISPs to sell your browsing history. I generally don't have any problems with it, but that isn't to say it is not problematic:
* Connection issues are really annoying. At home it is manageable, but reconnecting to a different wifi network with a phone introduces a delay that sometimes lasts minutes before it becomes functional again
* Some websites make you enter captchas in order to use them, probably due to VPN abuse by malicious users. Others outright block traffic to any detectable VPN traffic.
* It is slower in general, but the worst case slowness seems much worse and more common. Unavoidable really, you're introducing another potential point of failure.
* Useful LAN functions (like *.local domains) become non-functional
> Useful LAN functions (like .local domains) become non-functional
Is that true if you 1. disable the "force all DNS traffic over VPN" setting, but then 2. have a local resolver (e.g. dnsmasq) that resolves LAN domains but forwards all other traffic to a DNS server on an IP that will end up routed through the VPN?
I'm not sure if your methods would fix the issue but you can get around it if your router supports acting as a VPN client. After you configure the connection it becomes invisible to all your lan clients and you can use all of your local network goodies.
Do you happen to have a link to the legislation you mention?
Congress removed FCC regs. that would have prevented it. ISPs have been claiming both the regulation is unneeded but that they won't sell your data.
Googling this gives you lots of links: "isp sell browsing history"
Here's arstechnica: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/how-i...
I'm not sure how you made this jump. If the provider doesn't have logs, Bob can't find you. The end.
No-log providers can still very likely be compelled to start logging by a combination of the All Writs Act and NSLs.
I also couldn't understand his reasoning here, and I'm surprised you're the only one that pointed this out in this thread.
Is Bob a cop? Does he have probable cause that you were involved in criminal activity. I don't think you can just handwave "call my ISP with a warrant".
Chief on my mind would be the issue of trust. Your traffic is coming out of the VPN node unencrypted. They could snoop you, MITM you, basically anything. So, who do you trust more? Your ISP or a mysterious VPN service probably in Russia that you learned about yesterday?
I figure my ISP is quite likely to sell my data and do other unfriendly things. But I figure they are quite unlikely to attack my traffic and do other illegal things.
So I know of normal people using VPNs in the the UK for some or all of the reasons below:
1. They're blocking lots of torrent websites, using a VPN circumvents this
2. They're sending out letters to people saying "you're torrenting, stop". VPN stops this
3. Some ISPs throttle traffic to certain services and streaming sites, VPNs circumvent this
Think about it this way: What if your VPN operates in another country? It becomes an international issue if Bob wants your VPN to tell them who you are.
On the other hand, if your VPN operates in another country, some websites within your country may block you due to content licensing issues.
My favorite formula, in constructing nested VPN chains:
1) First VPN, that only my ISP and second VPN see: I choose one that's popular where I live, and commonly used for torrenting, and I have a torrent client up 24/7.
2) Second VPN, that only the first and third VPNs know about: I choose one that does business from a jurisdiction that isn't very friendly with my government and its friends.
3) Third VPN ...
4) Final exit VPN, that only the previous VPN and websites see: I choose one that doesn't attract too much attention. For Mirimir, that's IVPN, because I'm already so associated with it.
What is your favorite way to create VPN chains in Windows/Linux/OSX?
I mostly use VirtualBox, or VMware in Windows. pfSense VMs make great VPN gateways. VPN and pf setup are pretty easy with their webGUI. Debian VMs also make great VPN gateways, but setup is harder, and their disk footprint is greater.
I've thought about doing it all in one OS, with iptables or pf to control routing. It'd be lots lighter, but more fragile.
Another option, if you want more security against exploits, is Qubes. But the hardware requirements are far more restrictive, and the learning curve is steeper.
If the VPN is malicious or self-hosted.
If the servers and the company headquarters are located in a country not part of the "14 Eyes", and most importantly, host a lot of other traffic that is not you, there is obfuscation, legal barriers, and plausible deniability that you did not do what "they" are claiming you did.
Every TCP connection is uniquely represented by (src ip, src port, dst ip, dst port). Bob can provide all four of these, and a timestamp, to the VPN provider. The VPN provider can then resolve that to a specific user if they are logging connections.
in which case, if you can't trust 1 VPN, can't you jerry-rig a better VPN by daisy chaining several together, so that each VPN will have to be asked to sort through traffic?
Isn't that what TOR is all about?
You will sometimes face hassle authenticating with certain sites. Your VPN will trigger two-factor auth verification, or sometimes trigger an account lock-out or force password resets, etc.
Your VPN provider might not log. Or it might log and sell your internet activity. Of course, the same is true of your ISP, so you have to see who you trust more.
I believe there is the alternate option of setting up your own VPN .
Instead of using AWS, you could set it up on an additional router or on your PC/pi wherein you'd lose the advantage of anonymity amongst other users but your information is still encrypted to be acceptably safe.
Such a VPN that did keep logs would lose their entire business model if it broke that they kept logs - even if they kept logs (and why should they? That might always leak and kill their business) why should they help a third-party to them?
For me it’s not bob I don’t trust, it’s my ISP.
Verifiably VPN providers lie when they say they don't log:
Whether it's through negligence or ignorance or intentional lying, it's nearly impossible to not log user activity in some way.
And really, think about this: Even if you try really hard not to log, as a provider you're competing with thousands of forensic scientists who do nothing all day but figure out how to associate activity with the people who committed that activity.
And once a federal agency has identified your VPN traffic, every single thing you've done through that VPN provider is all wrapped up in one neat bundle for them to peruse.
Think of SSH as the secure networking swiss pocket knife but that it is free for everybody to use, learn and script with. Now think how someone could make money out of it. They can't. So they start creating an alternative, that is so complex and hard to understand, that no person alone can manage it, and even the best solutions are unreliable, expensive and corporate. This is something you can sell and argue well that you need a shitload of engineers to maintain. This is VPN.
What should you use if you're smart enough to come to HN for reading? SSH of course.
Do you mean you can use SSH for anonymous browsing? I genuinely don’t know how that works out, isn’t that just transfer the risk to the server you ssh into, so you end up having to trust the server? Do you have some links for reference?
SSH has a Socks compliant proxy built in. That said, you are right, you are basically shifting responsibility to the SSH server you are connecting to so you have to trust it the same way you would a VPN provider. As such, it’s essentially the exact same and so GP was clearly misguided.
You can provide the ssh server yourself. Which is not so hard. And security is something different than avoiding tracking. Avoiding tracking is very simply done by not using a centralized proxy which is maintained by someone else (like in VPN). When you are really under attack it's very different and in that case you couldn't trust VPN either. Even the VPN client would be a danger.
Though this can provide an extra level of defense against MITM, if you trust your personal connection to the internet less than the server's connection to the internet.
All SSH does is move your traffic to a different computer.
When it leaves that computer it's no longer encrypted.
It's not hard to look at unencrypted traffic leaving the computer you've SSH'd into and associate the traffic with the computer you've SSH'd in through.
> All SSH does is move your traffic to a different computer.
And browsing the internet over a VPN is different... how, exactly?
Not to mention incredibly limited IP support. You can forward a few specific ports, or use SOCKS, but that's about it.
Why is SOCKS limited? Just make whatever you want to send your traffic through proxy it through the SOCKS.
Indeed, ssh -D {port} is something I use heavily (to create a SOCKS5 connection to a remote server, effectively a VPN)
This assumes 'whatever you want to send traffic through' speaks SOCKS.. most things dont. Web yes, but not most other things.
> most things don’t
That’s entirely not true. If you’d said “some”, you’d be right, but “most” is categorically incorrect.
I guess you’ve never heard of TUN/TAP support in SSH?
Hm, do DNS queries go through an SSH tunnel?
Presumably so; when I've tried the SOCKS support built in to Firefox, I've noticed that sites that I have blackholed via my hosts file begin working again.
And VPN encrypts your traffic directly to Facebook? No. At some point it also leaves the VPN's network.
Umm. No.
Want to connect 2 lan's together and have full protocol binding and internal DNS support without mucking with 65535*N-nodes port forwardings?
not to mention 'vpn' isn't a product..
so your entire notion of 'making money out of it' makes no sense.
as for commercial: OpenVPN is great, free, and fairly simple to use.
While it’s not the right tool for the job, it is possible to connect two networks together using SSH as the secure transport. Many (most?) good network folks will recoil in horror though about tunneling TCP inside TCP.
Re Full network: How?, without additional software e.g. ppp+socat+ssh along with TUN/TAP or similar, or running a non standard SSH client/server and having various nonstandard utilities on both ends, which imho obviates OP's claim of SSH 'simplicity'/'ubiquity'..
TCP/TCP is another point.. and a good one, yes.
> Re Full network: How?
These articles explain the concept, but it takes nothing but SSH & Linux (albeit it can work on macOS too with additional software):
I've seen it done before where it was fully transparent to both networks. This required the tunnel to be setup on the default gateway for both networks. Again, as mentioned before and you agreed too, this is not a solution I would ever want to see in production for a company I was at.
> which imho obviates OP's claim of SSH 'simplicity'/'ubiquity'
Which I agree, it isn't simple, but I was replying to someone saying it wasn't possible, not that it is easy to do.
| <urn:uuid:40379b90-7d03-4c91-ada7-dd2fca5a0da9> | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15585769 | en | 0.964979 | 0.452236 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
No Direction at all: A Slices of Life discussion
British boy group One Direction has just been sued by a California-based rock band for copyright infringement. US 1D claims that they’ve been using the name since 2009 and in a nutshell: they want something for that. They’re asking for 1 million in damages and a cut out of the band’s profits. They also want Brit 1D to change their name.
Before I go on, let me just say now that I’m a fan of these guys. But to avoid any form of bias on my part, I’d like to approach my analysis of this situation in a non-emotional, non-fangirl manner, and I hope my point-by-point analysis will disprove whatever bias people plan to throw against me.
*Why is it that they’ve only emerged now?
Brit 1D has been alive since 2010, and during their duration on X Factor, they’ve probably released a few in-show singles then, right? So why is it that this Cali-based band only decided to sue now, when One Direction UK has become a worldwide sensation? Are they intentionally trying to make themselves look bad?
*Why is it that they feel as though they’re entitled to three times the profit made by the band?
(claim clipped from a news article online)
Let’s face it: Brit 1D did not become famous because of their name. They became famous because of their singles, their live performances and their Brit good looks. They didn’t make this money because of their name, and fans don’t remember them solely because of their name, so what right does US 1D have in saying that they’re entitled to the profit that the band made? As far as profits from music go, they deserve nothing.
*Specifics, please! How can US 1D claim that Mr. Cowell’s record label ‘realized’ that both US and UK groups had the same name and blatantly ignored the said request?
They need to specify this. They need to. Because the label under UK 1D could probably have no idea about California 1D even existing (I know I don’t). They need to back up a claim like this with concrete claims that can prove Sony-Syco knew of their existence.
*Why have they included the members of the band in their suit?
Unless Liam Payne, Niall Horan, Harry Styles, Zayn Malik and Louis Tomlinson were directly involved in conceptualizing the name ‘One Direction’, they have absolutely no fault in the matter, and should not at all have been included.
*According to the article of BBC UK, the Cali 1D claims that they’re suffering ‘substantial confusion and substantial damage’ because of UK 1D? Is it because their British counterparts have made chart history in the US, in the same way that the Beatles did back in the 60’s?
Again, specifics. That’s all I ask.
Anyways, that’s about it. Thank you, WordPress, for satisfying my verbal cravings and letting me vent. >:D<
“I’m sorry how things e…
“I’m sorry how things ended…. but know this: no matter how far we go, I’ll never forget what we had. Even if there wasn’t anything… because I know how to treasure moments I know were meant to last.”
Fresher than ever: Slices of Life [American Idol]
I may not be watching much news recently (thank you hot day that makes me bum), but I’m in the mood for something… and that something is a little bit of verbal therapy. Today: we talk Idol.
First of all, I’m a very very proud girl/woman, but I find the pink-ness of Star World rather annoying. [Sorry]. Secondly, the word gorgeous is starting to annoy as well. I have absolutely no idea what has happened to this once badass channel, but I’m not liking it one bit. What the execs at Star World should realize is that you don’t get a female audience by painting your channel Barbie pink and having ghostly women drive convertibles through false cityscapes. It isn’t appealing at all (at least, in my opinion).
But let’s get to the point here.
Season 8 was Idol’s last great season. It’s also the last season of Idol that made standing ovations seem as rare as meteor showers or comets passing through the skies. These days, the standard has clearly dwindled ever since Simon’s exit. The show’s execs decided to downsize on quality and instead guarantee viewership by employing judges with the gloss but not the ‘tech’ factor. Jennifer Lopez and Steven Tyler are two names in the music business who are well-known. In fact, well-known is a bit of an understatement. Tyler’s pedigree music-wise far exceeds Jen’s, but it’s her entrepreneurial skills and her million-dollar empire that makes her a formidable name: singing talent aside. Some would consider the move a great money maker, and it’s what keeps the show afloat. People want to see Jennifer’s next clothing choice and Tyler’s antics, and it makes for a great show.
Unfortunately, the judges don’t seem to offer the critique needed, and lucky for us some of the show’s execs decided to bring in an upgraded (and older) version of Randy Jackson to give the much-needed Cowell factor. Jimmy Iovine is a good addition to the show. As chairman of Interscope records, he’s definitely the person for the job when it comes to dishing it straight out the way Simon used to. Yet in the same way that Simon had conflicts with his fellow judges in the past, Jimmy’s straight up critiques end up irking the judges as well (yet not in the same degree as Simon, of course).
Hopefully Jimmy manages to help America decide objectively when voting the same way Simon brought out future superstars like Carrie Underwood in seasons past. They shouldn’t take the standing ovations at face value and make voting a decision that’s based not just on endless praise poured from millionaire mouths. These guys are indeed successful and legendary in their own right, yet they don’t always seem to give the constructive criticism that the contestants need to improve themselves and succeed in the music business. Rare moments of clear critique are there, but it does nothing to alleviate the image of the judges in Idol today. Last week’s standing ovations barrage killed the significance of the standing ovation in the Idol world, considering the judges were giving them out like free samples at a supermarket {well, not exactly}. If we remember right, the last standing ovation that made headlines was given to runner-up Adam Lambert’s haunting rendition of ‘Mad World’ and that was it. The judges only gave ovations during the finale, and no where else. Yet that’s not the case anymore. Randy Jackson, Steven Tyler and Jennifer Lopez stood up five times during last week’s show, and now it seems to me if they stand up again in the near future, it won’t be as significant anymore. Who’ll give a crap if someone gives a genuinely haunting performance of a song and the three stand up? No one. Suddenly the standard slips, and we have them to blame. But then.. they could be right. Are season eleven’s contestants truly deserving of the ovations some of them received last week? Are they really that talented? Maybe. No one is born a pitch-perfect singer. Some of us are born with talent, and it’s shows like Idol that are supposed to help these natural talents hone what they have so they can succeed in the music business. If they just praise, praise and praise: these kids will not end up more successful, they’ll end up with big heads, and that won’t really be a big help if they want to become big stars in the future. Don’t get me wrong, though: Idol does manage to find some great singers. Case in point: Jessica Sanchez.
Let’s just hope that they continue having Jimmy Iovine mentor the contestants, and that America doesn’t get carried away by the praise. Plus, they should stop booing criticisms and give their bets a chance to improve by actually getting to hear whatever the judges say. Yet, these are my predictions.
AI is a juggernaut, yet just as stars rise, they fall.
The Voice will slowly take the throne.
Their objective and sinfully sexy band of judges can easily topple the three sitting on the Idol desk.
They better keep their act together and continue improvements if they have any intention of reaching season twenty. Let’s hope, for their sake, that they do.
–chervs 🙂
“I’m sorry if I wanted …
“I’m sorry if I wanted to forget you. I just couldn’t bear missing you… knowing that I won’t see you again everyday… like I used to. I know you’ll be happy. I know you’ll meet someone better than me…I know you’ll love her, and she’ll love you, and you’ll end up together, and you’ll forget me.” | <urn:uuid:577c5afe-8be9-46c8-a7c9-6f2102f2fe0e> | https://opinion8ated.wordpress.com/2012/04/ | en | 0.956824 | 0.065083 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Silver Sprig Earrings
These charming little silver plated stud earrings feature a tiny sprig of leaves, in a simple modern outline. The surface of the gold sprigs has a very slight brushed texture. The earrings are silver plated brass and measure 12mm at their longest points. There is a picture of the gold version of these earrings (in my shop!) being held to give a better idea of their size. | <urn:uuid:bba03cf1-778d-4807-88a0-5b89244b3aae> | https://silkpursesowsear.com/products/silver-sprig-earrings | en | 0.959284 | 0.02468 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
On Everybody
On Da Reality Show
Young Dro Da Reality Show
Despite being at the epicenter of rap for well over a decade, and both launching and enduring major changes in the genre, the narrative of Atlanta hasn’t changed. In the collective mind, Atlanta is a land of constant succession, a place where artists build brands not legacies, where the moment an artist can afford a coupe is the same moment that artist is dethroned by a coup. In Atlanta, rappers are hitmakers, nothing else, the myth goes.
While this myth has some merit (e.g., Freak Nasty, Youngbloodz, K.P. & Envyi, Yung Joc), it is often more prescriptive than descriptive, resulting in Atlanta artists being filed away just because the myth and its believers prefer a pre-packaged narrative to messy facts. Some of these artists accept the myth, strategically cashing in and then cashing out once the spotlight recedes. Other artists retreat to their original bases, the streets, and churn out mixtapes ad infinitum until that mythmaking spotlight finally shines on them again. Young Dro is one of the latter kinds of artists, but even within that group he’s in the minority.
Da Reality Show, Young Dro’s third studio album, isn’t an event album, a swaggering red carpet catwalk like Ma$e’s Welcome Back. For Dro, this album is just his latest project. “Round 3,” Dro mechanically announces before his brief verse on “Black History,” unenthused. This album isn’t a glorious return to the ring because Dro never left. His gloves are still laced, his arms are still taut, and Grand Hustle is still in his corner.
Of course, longevity isn’t stasis. There have certainly been some major changes to Dro’s style since 2006. Dro’s famous swag talk is much more punctuated. His verses and songs are shorter and punchier and his cartoonish obsessions with Polo and multi-color cars have been dialed back in exchange for menacing lines about crime and vice. On “Dead,” a sluggish track that creeps along on stilts of scratchy percussion and muted keys, Dro runs through the pricing for contract killings: “I sell knees for 20/Ankles for 30/Wrists for 25/and 50 for the whole nigga, fuck it I’mma kill him.” This kind of gutter talk has always lurked in Dro’s music, but it hits harder in the absence of references to M&Ms and Tropicana.
When Dro actually does opt for swag talk, he tends to let the instrumentals do the heavy lifting. “We In Da City,” the album’s lead single, features Dro squeezing himself in between airy synths and a lively organ like cheese passing through a grater. Likewise, “Ugh” features in-the-pocket verses surrounded by a lush instrumental courtesy of Zaytoven that flutters between a chirping flute and crashing bass. The result is “Maybach music” as spoken by the Maybach itself instead of the rapper, swagger being evoked rather than insisted upon.
There are moments where Dro is a bit too insistent. The album tends to falter when Dro becomes overly sentimental. The last 3 tracks of the brief album (12 songs, 36 minutes) are cloyingly confessional, clumsily attempting to resolve Dro’s flirtations with crime and vice like a reality show settling an episode-long conflict in a two-minute scene before the credits.
But even as Young Dro aims for resolution, his own stubbornness holds him back. “Feeling Myself” is Dro’s version of “T.I. vs T.I.P.” (the song, not the album), an internal war between career-minded rapper and inveterate knucklehead dopeboy. While T.I. chose compromise, Dro firmly chooses to be a dopeboy, his final verse ending with a boast: “I’m realer than fucking real/ The hoodest nigga on BET, still.”
This choice to remain in the streets, in obscurity, likely won’t land Dro back “on MTV with Green Day,” as he boasted on “Gangsta” from Best Thang Smokin’. But this is probably a good thing. While the bird’s-eye-view of Atlanta rap continues to focus on emerging stars, Dro can flourish in the periphery, busting the myth of Atlanta, one album, one mixtape, one ongoing career at a time.
Please Return to Sender (Dear White People Review)
Racism’s greatest power is its ability to drastically simplify the world. Through racism, literally all things – clothing, behaviors, desires, needs, potentials, friendships – become ordered and recognizable, “obvious” and apparent. Racism provides answers by making the world unquestionable.
Given this alarming power, the fundamental task of all anti-racist work is to deny this contrived simplicity and undermine it, exposing the unrelenting complexity of the world and refusing to accept anything less, anything simple. There are many ways to oppose racism – after all, it does impact everything – but no matter the anti-racist technique or strategy, the goal is always to re-complicate the world. Thus, the rudimentary starting point for any fight against racism is to not accept its simplified, basic terms.
Dear White People, a movie about racism on a fictional college campus, does not do this. It is basic. Despite its expansive cast and bold ambitions, Dear White People wholeheartedly accepts the readymade conventions of racism. Both the main cast and the secondary characters are developed into overwhelmingly lame, straightforward caricatures. Sam is a biracial black woman struggling between two lovers, one black, the other white (ugh). Troy, a preppy black guy, is a pawn in his black father’s multi-generational conflict with his school’s president, a white man. Coco is an upwardly mobile black woman from the south side of Chicago who wants to rise above her background. Lionel is a gay black man who is ostracized by both the black and white communities on campus.
None of these characters are necessarily predisposed towards flatness. In fact, they are all potentially interesting, especially Lionel (I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie that cared about the college experiences of gay black dudes), but the film corrals each of them, and the secondary characters that they are connected to, onto either side of a very poorly-conceived racial divide: black vs white. There is nothing wrong with establishing factions and seeing how their ambitions collide, but the factions in Dear White People are never truly embroiled.
The characters each engage in their own racialized skirmish, but their actions are always predetermined by their position on the divide, their race. All the white characters are unrepentant or accidental racists; all of the black characters inevitably affirm their blackness. The only person who doesn’t get any resolution is Sam, but even her struggle is predictable: she is biracial so of course she cannot pick a side. (It was hard not to laugh when Sam decided to move off campus while the other black main characters all stayed at the black dorm)
The inevitability of all the characters’ outcomes and decisions is ultimately self-defeating. The film’s climax, a confrontation at a racist Halloween party, makes this most apparent. The white people are universally offensive and the black people are universally shocked and appalled. The outcome is so unsurprising that its narrative value is completely drained. Seeing the racist party after having already watched over an hour of dry conflict feels like walking around a haunted house with a copy of the floor plan. This isn’t to say that surprise is a necessary element of good filmmaking. Rather, it just felt strange for a movie that traffics in exploring inflexible racial destinies to treat an event it foresaw as something spectacular. It probably would have been more effective to highlight the banality of the party. For instance, I would have been much more horrified if I had seen two white students at the party using “nigger” in a conversation about Tolstoy.
The only particularly interesting thing about the scene is the presence of Asian and Latino students who allied with the black students to shut the party down. Their mere presence hints at more complex race relations on campus. Nevertheless, their presence also highlights their relative absence throughout the rest of the film. They appear only to advance the plot, which is kind of racist. Even within the film, it is not clear why they form this alliance. The film seems to imply that they ally with the black students simply because they are Asian and Latino. It was inevitable, I guess?
All in all, Dear White People is pretty weak. Though it is nice to see a movie that cares about black people and our experiences, mere care is a condescendingly weak threshold for a good movie or for a good perspective on race. Anybody can care, but what marginalized people need is people who care responsibly, intelligently, complexly. There are definitely sides in racial conflict, but they are absolutely not predetermined by race, and to think so is to buy directly into the simplifying logic of racism, no matter which side of the conflict you are on. Dear White People is clearly on the side of anti-racism, but it ultimately fails because it conflates allegiance, disposition, with action, decision. Anti-racism requires more than a sarcastically endearing address – “Dear White People.” More importantly, it requires acknowledging that those people and your relation to them, is much more complex than your sarcasm belies.
On Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop
Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop and I have a strange history. Four years ago, I bought it as a birthday present for a friend. He read it, thought it was blah and then shelved it. Three years later, he cleaned out his library and offered me some books he didn’t want to keep. WWKLHH was in the pile. After reading it, I can see why he wasn’t reluctant to part with it.
Seeking to explain why white kids love hip-hop beyond typical inane explanations such as, “They want to take hip-hop the same way they take everything else!” author Bakari Kitwana takes us on an odd adventure through hip-hop history. Using interviews and analyses of films, television shows, magazines, and songs, he attempts to make the case that “Generation X” and the “millennium generation” have ushered in a “new racial politics” (Kitwana xiv). This new racial politics is “marked by nuance, complexity, the effects of commerce and commercialism and a sort of fluidity between cultures” (xv). Kitwana argues that it differs from the “old racial politics,” which is characterized by “adherences to stark differences – cultural, personal and political – between Black and White” (xiv).
This idea of new racial politics fascinates me because it makes no sense, especially in regard to hip-hop. Right off the bat, I can think of dozens of examples of “the old racial politics” surfacing in hip-hop:
Kanye West : “You know white people! Get money don’t spend it./ Or maybe they get money, buy a business.” – “Clique,” 2012.
Plies: “I don’t wear skinny jeans like the white boys! But I do get wasted like the white
boys!” – “Wasted,” 2009.
Azealia Banks: “Oh la la la, flirted with a cool French dude named Antoine/ Wanna taste the pastry, chocolate croissant/ Ce soir with ya bitch, cafe au lait.” – “1991,” 2012.
This entire song!:
I could list examples forever, but I think you get the point: there is nothing particularly novel about the way hip-hop uses race to explain stark differences in peoples’ behaviors and experiences. As a genre, hip-hop perhaps encourages the use of race to explain the world. After all, it is one of the few thriving genres overtly concerned with the lives of black people. Nevertheless, hip-hop is preceded by and accompanied by soul and funk and disco and jazz and even gospel, genres that have/had very similar concerns as far as the conditions and circumstances of blacks in America. If anything, rather than supplanting these preceding genres’ concerns, hip-hop reinvigorates those concerns (and maybe even those genres through sampling!). In other words, with hip-hop the significance of the “old racial politics” is heightened because not much has changed, meaning we probably need those politics now more than ever.*
Even more distressing than Kitwana’s patently wrong distinction between old and new racial politics is the one particular “fact” that he cites as the source of the new racial politics: “[Generation X and the millennium generation] are the first Americans to live their entire lives free of de facto segregation” (Kitwana xii). Where is he getting this data? In 3.5 years of attendance, my high school, North Clayton High School, had 3 white people, and one of them was a Black Republican. My graduating class had 0 white people. After our first semesters away at college, one friend from high school joked that he hadn’t seen that many white people in person since he went to a symphony. Beyond my personal anecdotes, de facto segregation is typical. Look at this demographic map of New York City by Eric Fischer. Each dot represents 25 people of a particular race:
By Eric Fischer
By Eric Fischer
Even in one of America’s most diverse cities, segregation persists, almost aggressively. Look at how concentrated those colors are! If New York City were integrated, the colors would be sparse, dull.
Beyond New York City, the pattern is the same across the nation (http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/sets/72157626354149574/detail/) and has been since 2000 and earlier. This is clearly de facto segregration, but Kitwana is so committed to making a distinction between the past and the present that he overlooks their stark similarity.
Because this distinction between old and racial politics underpins the entire of argument of the book, most of the book is ultimately useless. The only chapter I found of worth was “Erasing Blackness,” a chapter in which Kitwana challenges the narrative that white kids are hip-hop’s primary consumer base. His argument is very compelling. Citing the absence of reliable statistics on who purchases albums and the absence of any statistics of who acquires mixtapes, he argues that there’s no conclusive evidence on whether white kids are actually hip-hop’s core audience. I buy that argument and commend Kitwana for doing the work. If better stats are ever available, maybe we actually can draw some conclusions.
In the meantime, I still don’t know why white kids love hip-hop. If you yourself want to know, reading this book is definitely not a recommended first step. That being said, if you want, I’ll send it to you. I could use the shelf space.
* Note
When I uphold “old racial politics,” I’m not using Kitwana’s caricatured definition of them. Progressive racial politics of any era are complex and nuanced and fluid.
Kitwana, Bakari. Why White Kids Love Hip Hop. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2005. Print. | <urn:uuid:b463b313-8eb7-41ee-90e4-efbf2aeb1455> | https://theblacktongue.net/tag/review/ | en | 0.95101 | 0.045729 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Do You Really Need a Smart Scale?
Do You Really Need a Smart Scale?
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Lately, it seems like new technology that makes our lives “smarter” has been hitting the market every day. Amid this seemingly endless evolution of advanced appliances comes the latest fitness home device: the smart scale.
Smart scales promise to help you optimize your weight loss by providing much more than just pounds and ounces. But are they worth the money?
Does weighing yourself help you lose weight?
smart scaleMore than perhaps any other, the question of whether weighing yourself aids weight loss has firmly divided the fitness world for decades. There are two clear camps on this issue. On one side are the people who say weighing themselves makes them obsess over every ounce, eventually sabotaging their weight loss efforts when arbitrary numbers take precedence over feeling good. Those same folks argue that you can track your weight without relying on a scale by gauging how your clothes fit and being mindful of your diet and appearance. In the other camp are the folks who argue that if they don’t weigh themselves, they don’t hold themselves accountable. That lack of accountability, they argue, quickly turns into a runaway train.
But what does science say? “Behavior science suggests it’s important to record weight to evaluate progress, identify patterns and reverse small weight gains before they become problems,” says Graham Thomas, an associate professor at the Brown University Weight Control Center in Providence. A two-year Cornell study backed up Thomas’ claims. In the study, participants were instructed to lose 1% of their body weight while stepping on a scale daily. Using a spreadsheet or a graph to track their weight, participants were able to maintain weight loss from the first year into the second year.
Since studies have shown that 40% of weight lost is regained within one year and almost 100% of weight lost is regained within five years, retention is vital to a dieter’s overall success. The act of stepping on a scale seemed to strengthen the participants’ other fitness-related behavior, like food portioning and dietary control.
The emergence of smart scales
Smart scales are fairly intuitive appliances, and they look almost identical to their analog counterparts. Despite the similar displays, though, smart scales give you a lot more than just your body weight. They’ll tell you anything from your body composition with muscle and body fat percentages to your body mass index, bone density and water percentage. Not all smart scales possess every one of those features, but even a few affordable models come with nearly all of them.
Whereas a regular scale registers muscle gain as only an increase in your overall weight, a smart scale typically tracks the holistic makeup of your body. Smart scales can either be Bluetooth or Wifi enabled, and they track your progress by syncing up to your phone. While most of the larger brands come with their own apps that don’t play well with alternative software, lesser-known brands are often more compatible with the fitness app of your choosing.
Smart scales to consider
Smart scales range from $30 to well over $100. Nearly $100 can separate smart scales that feature very similar perks, but a specific option might make that splurge worth it for certain exercise enthusiasts. If you’re going all in on a smart scale, consider these models—and their wide range of price tags—as a starting point.
• The Eufy BodySense scale and Weight Gurus Bluetooth Smart Scale stand on the budget-friendly end of the spectrum, with both costing less than $50. Both possess the impressive features of pricier models, measuring muscle mass and bone density as well as syncing up to various health apps on your phone through Bluetooth. The Weight Gurus Smart Scale also has an internal memory for when your phone is unavailable, plus the capacity for up to eight users.
• The Withings Body Cardio tops out at $180. But in addition to measuring your entire body composition, this smart scale also measures pulse wave velocity and cardiovascular health.
• The Fitbit Aria comes from a recognizable, trusted brand and supports up to 350 pounds. However, it lacks the water percentage measuring feature and is only compatible with FitBit app, as opposed to lesser known brands that work well with Google Fit, Apple Health and FitBit. At $130, it doesn’t quite tip the scale, but it’s still one of the pricier options on the market.
• Any smart scale choice is an investment that should enhance your health through multiple life stages, which is what makes the pricy, futuristic-looking Qardio Base 2 stand out. The scale earned the PC Magazine Editor’s Choice award, thanks in part to its unique pregnancy mode.
Weighing yourself has been part of fitness since our spear-throwing ancestors invented the simplest technology to determine their weight. As technology has become more powerful and nuanced, smart scales are providing the customized data that satisfies today’s techie fitness scene. But what model, and price tag, fits your needs is a choice as personal as the number on the scale itself.
| <urn:uuid:53251d48-4d61-4325-a972-a543b3a12de5> | https://thesupplementreviews.org/general-health/do-you-really-need-a-smart-scale/ | en | 0.94558 | 0.039079 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Boys are from Mars; Girls are from my Uterus
ultrasoundEver since the day I whizzed on a stick and sealed my fate, I have been concerned with one thing: what gender will my baby be? I am the type to read the endings of books (magazines, pamphlets, sometimes even paragraphs) first, because the anticipation drives me insane. I need to know how things will go down, immediately.
People always ask if we have a gender preference. They expect us to say “no, as long as it’s healthy.” Both my husband and I think “no, as long as it’s a healthy girl.” We already have a daughter, so it would be kinda nice to reuse the clothes (at least the ones we didn’t have to cut off her body due to explosive poop). We also liked the idea of giving our daughter a little sister. But the idea of having a boy is tempting, too. One of each. A matching set. Boys love their mothers. But whenever I think of raising a boy, I remember when my friend brought her twins to our apartment. Her five-year old boy ran around the place like a Gremlin fed after midnight, literally tearing stuff up, while her daughter sat quietly in the corner and played with a crayon for two hours. While there’s the novelty of a boy, I’ve never been eaten by a Bengal tiger and yet I still know that I would prefer not to get eaten by a Bengal tiger.
Of course, having a gender preference definitely meant our baby would be the opposite. I did what any curious mom-to-be would do: I went online and took the Chinese gender predictor test. I did not like the outcome. I took it again, randomly changing my age, due date, and the lunar calendar, just to see. Same outcome. And since the Internet is never wrong (except when Web MDs said I had meningitis when I really just had a head cold), I guess we were having a boy.
Forget morning sickness or heartburn: true suffering is being kept in gender suspense until the 20-week anatomy scan. A routine check-up that measures all your baby’s vitals, it was the first legit glimpse I got of my fetus’ naughty bits. First, we had to sit through countless images of barely-identifiable baby parts, each one looking like the telltale gender clue.
“Ooh, what’s that?”
“That’s your baby’s femur.”
“Ohhhh. I thought it was…well anyways. What’s that giant thing between the legs?”
“That is the umbilical cord.”
And we kept staring at the screen, pretending to be interested in the skull circumference, while secretly wondering if he will end up looking like the gelatinous mummy he appeared to be. The technician switched the screen to measure blood flow, (or to show us how our baby would look if viewed by Predator).
Finally, our technician offhandedly remarked, “And that’s your daughter.”
Our what, now? All ten Chinese gender predictor tests can’t be wrong.
“Are you sure?”
She got snappy. “Listen, I know what I’m looking for, and I don’t see it.” The tech pointed to a random gelatinous blob. “There. That hamburger shape shows it’s a girl.”
While I wasn’t thrilled with my daughter’s lady parts being compared to fast food, it was still thrilling to have another piece of the puzzle revealed to us. High-fives, all around. My husband and I gave each other credit.
“Good job, hon. It was your X chromosome that made this happen.”
“Well, it was your idea to watch ‘My Little Pony’ while you ovulated.”
And on the ride home, as I grew relieved that our next-born would never pee in my face, play professional football, or be named “Thor,” my mind drifted to training bras, awkward dating talks, and the Kardashians. Suddenly a boy didn’t seem like a bad option.
Why I Never Plan to Give Birth
milestonesPeople like to hear stories about milestones.
What’s the story? How did you two meet? I love that bar. Well, it’s a good thing they didn’t cut you off. How did he propose? He put the ring at the bottom of the breadstick basket at the Olive Garden? So romantic. Where did you get married? I know that place; my neighbor’s orthodontist’s son got married there. I’ve never been, but I hear it’s nice, if you like things that cost money. How did you find out that you were pregnant? You barfed during a Dave Matthews concert? But how did you know it was the pregnancy?
People like to hear stories about milestones.
No one wants to hear your childbirth story.
No one cares how many hours you were in labor, or if you remembered your breathing techniques, or what color your amniotic fluid was. If you even mention the word “episiotomy,” women’s reproductive organs shrivel up and die. The only people who will ask about it are other mothers who want to one-up your story with their own traumatic tales, or the mothers who then demur about how they only had to push for ten pain-free minutes.
Now, most of my knowledge about childbirth comes from television. I know that I need to have my hair and make-up done before entering the hospital in case my doctor looks like an A-list actor. I know that labor only lasts as long as a Queen song. I know that my baby will come out squeaky-clean, and approximately the size of a six month old.
One night, I was painfully set straight when I hung out with my friend Lori and her group of new mothers. The topic inevitably turned to childbirth, and the night became “Survivor: Pregnancy Edition”. Each tale was more gruesome and incredible than the last, with mothers emerging as triumphant battle-scarred warriors.
“I had to push for three days. The pain was excruciating,” a mother of a 6-month old shared.
“Um, could you have gotten an epidural?” I asked innocently. She looked at me as if I had suggested that she should smoke crack during labor. My friend Lori, who had had an epidural, remained quiet. When pressed, she insisted that it was administered “against the wishes of her birth plan,” which I know is false, since her birth plan included the phrase “knock me out and wake me when it’s over,” as well as a request for Roy Rogers fried chicken to be fed to her immediately after the cord was cut.
Another woman piped in: “I know someone who had an epidural, and her labor lasted for two weeks.” This definitely seemed unlikely, but it awed the group into silence, each woman thinking that she would never get an epidural (except for me, since two weeks of pain-free labor sounded better than two days of wishing I was born a man).
As stories emerged involving vacuum suctions, giving birth during a pilates class, pincers, and pots of boiling water, I realized that there was no good way to have a baby. Considering women have been going through this since the time Eve found herself eating apples for three, I am astounded that technology and science have not found a way to make this less traumatic for us. No matter what method we use to have this baby extracted from our insides, we all share the common bond of not enjoying childbirth. At all. And wanting to relay that story to the college kid sitting next to us on the bus.
So I am hoping that when my time comes, I will push for ten pain-free minutes, my amniotic fluid will be rainbow-colored, and my doctor will be played by George Clooney, circa 1995.
Does This Muumuu Come in My Size?
pregnancy-styles2I am not one of those cute pregnant women who, from behind, you can’t even tell are pregnant. I am one of those women who got asked when I’m due three months before I actually conceived. Neighbors I’d meet in my elevator would ask my due date, look me up and down, and then remark in horror “But that’s still four months away!” My friends suggested that perhaps dressing like an actual expecting woman would make me feel better.
I had reached a point where the only clothes that fit me were my Patrick Swayze “Double Deuce” t-shirt (which my husband requested I stop wearing to bed because it made his dreams uncomfortable) and a shirt my sister-in-law got me that says “Does This Baby Make Me Look Fat?” Neither option is appropriate to wear to work. Or a social event. It was time to explore my options.
I find it very hard to spend money on things I will only use for a short amount of time (snack foods and gym membership notwithstanding). Ideally I’d love to purchase cute non-maternity clothes that I could continue to wear post-baby. And considering my pre-baby style could best be described as “casual casualness,” how hard could it be?
In a fit of self-denial, I stumbled in to Forever 21. This place had some nice maxi-dresses that, on me, made excellent maternity t-shirts. However, I was starting to feel like a bull in a china shop. I needed to head to a more welcoming place, a place with crackers and water, and the only free bathroom in Midtown…
Destination: Maternity! After prolonging the inevitable, it was time to buy maternity pants. For the past few weeks, I’d been pulling a move called the “Thanksgiving” (leaving my pants unbuttoned and wearing a long t-shirt over it), and the one pair of maternity pants I had from my previous pregnancy was worn down in the thighs (my husband informed me that, contrary to popular belief, crotchless maternity pants were not hot).
The dressing rooms came equipped with a fake pregnancy bump to simulate the fit of pants when you’re farther along (although I preferred putting the fake bump under my chin to see how clothes would fit me if I had a goiter). The 22-year old male dressing room attendant informed me the $300 jeans I was trying on made me look “fabulous in all the right ways,” which I interpreted to mean “25 lbs lighter and a head-turner at the local discothèque.” On further inspection, I think he was definitely trying to up-sell me. So I purchased the $30 jeans, which had the designer’s signature stitched over the back pocket, Cabbage-Patch style, and ended two inches above my socks.
Armed with my new purchases and a new confidence, I walked past the Rosie Pope line, and the heels-clad Heidi Klum cut-out. I ignored the skinny jeans with tummy panels, the empire-waisted halter tops, and the wide-toed stiletto boots. I returned home, put on my jogging pants and my husband’s Superman hoodie, and headed out for a night on the town.
Old Questions from Confused Men
rookie-mistakesThe Most Ridiculous Questions That Men Ask Expecting Women
Q: Why do women want babies?
A: The answer to that question is threefold: To have someone to take care of us when we’re old and incontinent. To have someone to wear our clothes when they suddenly come back in style in 20 years. And to clean the chimney. It’s a narrow space, and we’re too damn big to fit up there.
Q: Why do you have to wait three months before telling people about the pregnancy?
A: It is standard to wait three months so that the woman can enjoy an occasional beer at a barbecue without being shamed.
Q: Does taking a giant dump feel the same as delivering a baby?
A: Yes it does. Especially if your bowel movement is surgically removed through a hole in your abdomen.
Q: Will your boobs get bigger when you get pregnant?
A: Yes, they will. But then they will get small again when they are drained by a hungry succubus.
Q: How can you get a baby to stop crying?
A: If you find out the answer to this question, please let me know. It is 3am, and I am running out of animals that Old MacDonald has on his farm. | <urn:uuid:55ff11fa-c6e0-4259-ae16-8af5a188508a> | https://wiggleroomblog.com/2014/01/ | en | 0.958663 | 0.042472 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
What Shapes Are Things In Outer Space?
It's an orgy of geometry, here on Earth. You got all kinds of shapes: Squares, trapezoids, even the occasional rhombus. Apples, desk-chairs, and dandelions - just an abundance of shape-having stuff. Outer space, in contrast, is minimally decorated: asteroids, stars, planets, galaxies. Big-picture stuff. We know the Earth is round - or, at least, most of us do - but what about the other stuff? What shapes are twirling around up there, and why do they look like that?
For this week's Giz Asks, we posed those questions to a number of physicists and astronomers, who detailed the handful of shapes that exist in space and explained how, exactly, those shapes took form. There are really two processes at play here: one, the massive rotations, collisions and collapses that, over millions of years, have given form to outer space; and, two, the brief history of our efforts to understand and label them.
Alyssa A. Goodman
Robert Wheeler Willson Professor of Applied Astronomy and Co-Director for Science at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University
There are basically three important shapes that objects take in space. One is round, like a ball. One is a disc, like a frisbee - a very flat, round thing. And then the other one is generally a mess - not a regular shape, like a pyramid or a cube or something like that. A comet is good example of a mess.
The older something is, the more likely it is to have a distinct shape. In other words, a sphere or a disc takes a long time to format. One of the reasons that comets are so irregular is that they're relatively new. Some part of them might be very old, but they get hit a lot as they form - they form out of sticking things together, little tiny dust particles, which themselves are irregular.
Fred Whipple has this great expression where he calls comets "dirty snowballs." If you imagine a kid making a really bad snowball, that's the shape of a comet - dirt and rocks and little pieces of asphalt. You don't usually wind up making an absolutely perfect sphere unless you work on it for a while.
Planets are things that have forms due to something that came from a disc - when a star forms, the material that doesn't go into the star forms into a frisbee-like disc, or more accurately a pancake-like disc.
The reason that you see those kinds of discs so often - the disc that's going to form planets around a star, and also disc-like galaxies — has to do with angular momentum. When you have something spinning, there are forces on it that make it want to pull out to the sides and expand. The analogy that is usually used is the figure skater. The figure skater's arms want to fly out to the side - that's centrifugal force on her arms. Or think of an amusement park ride, where you stick to the sides of a very fast moving cylinder. That kind of centrifugal force makes things want to move outwards perpendicular to the axis around which something is spinning.
Even the Earth is not a perfect sphere. The Earth is a slightly smushed sphere: its diameter at its equator is slightly bigger than its diameter through the north and south pole. But what I'm talking about is something very, very extreme — if you spin really fast, and you don't have any kind of structure stability from stuff like rock, which the Earth does, you make things into a pretty flat disc as they try to collapse. The same way we're held to the Earth by gravity, any stuff can be held to any other stuff by gravity, so those things have a center of mass, and they want to move towards [that] mass.
So if you're not spinning very much, then that would result in a sphere, because that force is [symmetric] to a point, which is the center of mass. But if you spin very fast, then there's competition between the outward force from the spin - centrifugal force - the outward spin force and then the inward gravity and the spin one is just [plain] perpendicular to the rotation and the gravity is symmetric, so you wind up with disc. So that's why a lot of galaxies look like discs, and a lot of material around forming stars look like discs.
Instability can make those discs into interesting patterns. Some of them turn into spiral galaxies, some of them fragment or break up in other ways.
Planets tend to be spherical, so why they're not themselves discs is a very good question. In some cases we know the answer to that and in other cases we don't. But they're not spinning so fast that they would be crushed into discs. The Earth would have to be spinning really really fast in order for it to be more than just a tiny bit squished by its own rotations. There's an outside crust that's hard to smush. Gaseous planets like Jupiter or Saturn are spherical, but that's because there's a lot of pressure from the gas that makes them up. There's a competition between various forces. Basically, if spin wins, you wind up with a disc. And if other things win, you wind up with a sphere. And if you haven't had a lot of time, you wind up with something that wants to be a sphere but it's a mess.
There's a kind of galaxy called an elliptical galaxy, which are not spheres, but they're not discs or messes, either. They're kind of like an egg. And that happens from mergers from other galaxies coming together and adding up to almost a mess but not quite. They kind of try to become a sphere. You could almost say that an elliptical galaxy, if you left it alone for the longest possible time, might become something like a sphere, but many of them are already practically the age of the universe, so we don't have enough time to know what would happen to them.
Pioneer 11, launched 45 years ago on April 5, 1973, became the first human-made object to fly past Saturn.
Meredith Hughes
Assistant Professor, Astronomy, Wesleyan University
Planetary systems like ours are flat, with planets orbiting around in concentric orbits all going the same direction rather than buzzing around like bees in a hive.
Star and planet formation happens when dense pieces of molecular clouds collapse under the influence of gravity — essentially, when they become dense enough that gravity can overcome the cloud's natural pressure. Molecular clouds are wreathing, smoky mixtures of gas and dust spread throughout our galaxy, and the collapse isolates one part of the cloud and shrinks it down to a relatively tiny size. That process of taking something that is slowly wreathing on large scales and shrinking it is exactly like what happens when a figure skater starts a slow spin and then pulls in her arms: the closer her arms get to her body, the faster she spins. The smaller the cloud gets, the faster it spins.
At that point, you have gravity being sticky and pulling things together, and you have angular momentum causing a major spin. Another situation in which you have a sticky substance that starts to spin is something you have probably done in your own kitchen: making a pizza. In a collapsing cloud, just like when you spin sticky pizza dough, the combination of spin and stickiness flattens the material into a disk- or pizza-like shape. We call these disks of leftover cloud material orbiting around young stars "protoplanetary disks," because that leftover material from the cloud forms the building blocks for planets that will eventually orbit the star. Since the material starts off in a disk, which has a preferred plane and spin direction, the planets that form out of the disk generally retain that flat shape and the same spin direction - both in terms of which way they orbit around the star, and in terms of how they orbit on their axis. That's why, when you look at orbits in the Solar System, all of the planets are located in a fairly flat plane, they all orbit the Sun in the same direction, and almost all of them rotate on their axes in the same direction (Venus and Uranus are the two exceptions - we think they got smacked by some other large body shortly after they formed that knocked them a bit off-kilter). This is an old idea, dating back to Kant and Laplace, but it's one of the fundamental insights that forms the basis of our modern-day understanding of the planet formation process.
Richard Townsend
Associate Professor, Astronomy, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Most things in space - in particular, stars, planets, black holes and large asteroids - are spherical in shape, like a basketball. This is because the dominant force at the immense scales in space is gravity. For any sufficiently massive object, self-gravity - the gravitational pull of each part of the object on the other parts of the same object — tends to mould the object into the most compact form, and that happens to be a sphere. There are a couple of exceptions to this rule, however. If the mass of the object is not big enough to generate significant self-gravity, then other forces - for instance, structural forces arising from the rigid nature of solid matter - can counteract the gravity and produce a more complex shape. This is the reason why smaller asteroids, and also comets, are often not spherical; an example here is comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which was revealed by the Rosetta probe to have a peculiar rubber-duck shape. It's also the reason why humans are not spherical!
Another exception arises if the object is rapidly spinning. Then, inertial effects from the rotation (what we think of as the 'centrifugal force' in everyday life) counteract the gravitational force in directions perpendicular to the rotation axis. This often results in an 'oblate spheroid' shape similar to M&M candy, or a disk-like shape. We can see the former in our own solar system: Jupiter and Saturn both spin rapidly with a rotation period close to 10 hours, and both are oblate spheroids rather than spheres. Likewise, the latter can be seen in the structure of many galaxies, including our own Milky Way (the appearance of the Milky Way, as a band of diffuse light on the night sky, is because we're embedded inside the disk).
Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko via the Rosetta probe, and its weird shape.
Jonathan Levine
Associate Professor, Physics, Colgate University
Many objects in space, like stars and planets, are quite nearly spheres. The sphere is the shape with the greatest symmetry; it's no different in one direction than any other. Stars take this shape because the gravity pulling themselves together finds an equilibrium with the pressure of their hot gas pushing themselves outward. Both gravity and pressure are isotropic, meaning that they too are symmetric, and have no reason to prefer one direction over another. The sphere's symmetry is demanded by the symmetry of the two balanced symmetric forces.
Earth is almost a sphere as well, but in Earth's case the gravity that would tend to compact it is opposed by the strength of rock and water, rather than the pressure of hot gas as in the Sun. Still, the material strength of Earth's constituents are nearly isotropic as well, so our planet is quite nearly spherical.
I say "almost" and "quite nearly" because many objects in space, from planets to galaxies, are partly flattened because of their rotation. Earth spins on its axis every day, so in addition to gravity and material strength, there is also a tendency for material to be flung outward, away from the spin axis, and to accumulate in the body's equator plane. For this reason, Earth is about a dozen miles wider at the hips than it is tall. For Saturn, with its lower density and faster spin, the difference between its width and height is more like 15%. The Milky Way, for its part, is nearly 100 times wider than it is tall. In all cases, the spin breaks the symmetry between one direction (the axis of rotation) and all others.
Pedants might quibble about my saying that material tends to be flung outward while spinning, since this statement smacks of centrifugal forces, which their physics teachers assured them did not exist. However, these people can thank me (and centrifugal force) next time they eat pizza, rather than a saucy cheesy dough-ball.
Leslie Rogers
Assistant Professor, Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of Chicago
If an asteroid, moon, or planet is sufficiently massive, the force of its own gravity will be large enough to overcome the strength of the material from which the body is made, and the asteroid/moon/planet will be pulled into a rounded, nearly-spherical shape. Bodies made of rocky material will be gravitationally rounded if they're larger than about ~450km in radius, while bodies made of weaker icy material will be pulled into a rounded shape if they're larger than about ~200km in radius. Mimas, the "Death Star lookalike" moon of Saturn, is the smallest known gravitationally rounded body in the Solar System, having a radius of 198 km.
In fact, one of the requirements for a body in the Solar System to be defined a planet (according to the 2006 International Astronomical Union definition) is that it has sufficient mass to assume hydrostatic equilibrium (a nearly round shape).
Gravity would cause an isolated, non-rotating massive body to take on the shape of sphere. If the asteroid/moon/planet is rotating, it will take on the shape of an oblate ellipsoid that is flattened along the poles and bulges out at the equator. Due to rotational flattening, the radius of the Earth at the Equator is 21km larger than the radius of the Earth at the poles. Saturn is the most oblate planet in the Solar System, with its equatorial and polar radii differing by nearly 10%.
The presence of another mass (e.g., a star or a satellite) can also distort the shape of a planetary body due to tides. Because the force of gravity is stronger the closer one gets to a gravitating mass, the side of a planet that is closest to the other mass will feel a stronger gravitational pull than the most distant side. This has the effect of stretching the planet along the direction toward the other mass (star or satellite). It is tidal bulges on the Earth induced by the gravitational pull of the Moon that lead to the twice daily rise and fall of the ocean tides (which are especially prominent in the Bay of Fundy, near my hometown in Nova Scotia).
Pauline Bamby
Associate Professor, Physics and Astronomy, Western University
The shapes of things in space are due to competition between gravity, which wants to bring matter together; pressure, which wants to push matter apart, and rotation, which causes special directions within an object to be important.
Planets and stars are close to being spheres. All the matter within them exerts a gravitational pull on all the other matter, and the most efficient way to get the stuff as close together as possible is to arrange it in a sphere. Why doesn't the gravity pull so hard that stars and planets collapse into smaller and smaller spheres and become a black hole? Because when the atoms within get close enough together, they push back against each other. That push back is another one reason planets aren't quite spherical - the Earth isn't perfectly smooth because the crust sticks together or folds up to make continents. The other reason planets and stars aren't quite spherical is that they rotate: this squashes them a little so that they are fatter around the equator. For the Earth this results in a tiny difference between its radius at the poles and at the equator of about 0.2%; for other planets and some stars this difference can be much larger - about 10% for Saturn.
One of the ways we define an object as a planet is that its gravity pulls it into a sphere. The largest asteroids, like Vesta and Ceres, are also nearly-spherical. But smaller, "minor planets," can be quite oddly-shaped, like anything from potatoes to footballs to dog bones. These shapes can depend on what the asteroid is made of and whether it has collided with other asteroids.
Galaxies are a slightly different story from stars and planets. Galaxies are so big that, unlike the atoms in a star, the stars inside a galaxy don't generally get very close to one another. Gravity and the orbits of stars determine galaxies' shapes, but getting to a final shape takes a very long time because the distances are so large. Left to their own devices, galaxies can be nearly-spherical, like planets and stars, or highly-flattened due to rotation - our Milky Way is one of these flattened spiral galaxies. Because they are so big, galaxies are more likely than stars or planets to collide! When galaxies get close to each other, their mutual gravity can pull out long tails or shells of stars and gas from their outskirts. If the galaxies are moving slowly enough to eventually merge, their shapes become quite lumpy and distorted - we affectionately call these "train wrecks" - until millions of years pass and gravity smooths everything out.
An illustration of 'Oumuamua, the first object we've ever seen pass through our own solar system that has interstellar origins.
Rachel Bezanson
Observational Astronomer, University of Pittsburgh
Galaxies in the nearby Universe come in two basic types: flattened disk-like spirals, like our Milky Way, and rounder, more spherical, elliptical galaxies. Spiral galaxies will often have a nearly spherical bulge in the center such that their overall shapes would closely resemble two sunny-side up eggs pasted together on their flat edges. If you rank-order galaxies by the ratio of bulge to disk size, eventually you start to find galaxies with no obvious disk at all — which we call elliptical galaxies. These galaxies are rarely perfectly spherical, but are often "oblate spheroids," or hamburger-shaped, with one axis slightly shorter than the others.
Of course, when we see galaxies in the sky, we see them projected onto 2-dimensions, so depending on the angle from which we are looking, we can see spiral galaxies as anything from very narrow lines, possibly with a round bulge, if we see them edge-on to perfectly circular if they are face-on. Elliptical galaxies will also exhibit a range of projected elongations (from fairly narrow ellipses to circles), but will be rounder on average than spiral galaxies.
In general, the shapes of galaxies reflect the orbits of the stars racing around inside of them. If you have many stars orbiting in an ordered fashion in the same plane, their paths will trace out a thin disk, like the disks found in spiral galaxies. Any time you have significant populations of stars that trace out orbits in a different plane those random motions will start to create rounder, more spherical shapes in three dimensions. These random or non-planar orbits are found in the round bulges of spiral galaxies and in elliptical galaxies. We think that most stars in the Universe form in disk-like structures, therefore all random orbits - and therefore rounder shapes - that we observe are caused by galaxy interactions and collisions. Therefore determining the shape of galaxies and the nature of their stellar orbits are instrumental to understanding their cosmic history.
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Logic and Order: Ontologic Effective Management for Learning and Creativity
Logic and Order: Ontologic Effective Management for Learning and Creativity
Rodolfo A. Fiorini (Politecnico Di Milano University, Italy)
Copyright: © 2018 |Pages: 69
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-2443-4.ch011
Traditional human representation is unable to conserve complete information. Therefore ignorance, uncertainty, ambiguity to mankind's best conceivable worldview are even more amplified. To minimize this problem, we need to develop a reliable and effective ontological uncertainty management (OUM) approach. To reach this goal requires starting from traditional mankind worldview to arrive at a convenient OUM framework. Learning from neuroscience helps to develop neuromorphic systems able to overcome previous representation limitations by appropriate OUM solution. Furthermore, according to CICT (computational information conservation theory), the information content of any symbolic representation emerges from the capturing of two fundamental coupled components, i.e. the linear one (unfolded) and the nonlinear one (folded), interacting with their environment. Thanks to its intrinsic self-scaling properties, this system approach can be applied at any system scale, from single quantum system application to full system governance strategic assessment policies and beyond. A detailed OUM application example, taking advantage of the well-known EPM (elementary pragmatic model) by De Giacomo & Silvestri, to achieve full information extraction and conservation, is presented. This chapter is a relevant contribution to effective OUM solution development framework for learning and creativity, emerging from a Post-Bertalanffy General Theory of Systems.
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The Human Worldview, Interpretation, And Creativity
Mankind’s best conceivable worldview is at most a representation, a partial picture of the real world, an interpretation centered on man. We inevitably see the universe from a human point of view and communicate in terms shaped by the exigencies of human life in a natural uncertain environment.
The discovery of Nature as a reality prior to and in many ways escaping human purposes begins from the story even of the sign. The story of the sign, in short, is of a piece within the story of philosophy itself, and begins, all unknowingly, where philosophy itself begins, though not as philosophy. Even if we do not have to explore every theme of that history, we must yet explain all those themes that pertain to the presupposition of the sign’s being and activity, in order to arrive at that being and activity with sufficient intellectual tools to make full sense of it as a theme in its own right. And those themes turn out to be nothing less or other than the very themes of ontology and epistemology forged presemiotically, as we might say, in that laboratory for discovering the consequences of ideas that we call the history of philosophy (Deely, 2001, pp.19-20). If the discovery of the sign began, as a matter of fact, unconsciously with the discovery of Nature, then the beginning of semiotics was first the beginning of philosophy, for only as philosophy are the foundations of semiotics possible, even if semiotics is what philosophy must eventually become.
Ontology was once understood to be the philosophical inquiry into the structure of reality: the analysis and categorization of “what there is”, the theory of being. Ontology asks and tries to answer three related questions. What are the categories of the world? What are the laws that govern these categories? And why? Recently, however, a field called “ontology” has become part of the rapidly growing research industry in information technology. Despite their different languages and their different points of departure in knowledge engineering (ontology as technology) and in philosophy (ontology as categorical analysis), they have numerous problems in common and they seek to answer similar questions. The two fields have more in common than just their name (Poli & Seibt, 2010).
In contemporary philosophy, “formal ontology”, introduced by German philosopher Edmund Husserl (b.1859–d.1938), has been developed in two principal ways (Husserl, 1900/1913). The first approach has been to study formal ontology as a part of ontology, and to analyze it using the tools and approach of formal logic. From this point of view, formal ontology examines the logical features of predication and of the various theories of universals. The use of the specific paradigm of set theory applied to predication, moreover, conditions its interpretation. The second line of development returns to its Husserlian origins and analyses the fundamental categories of object, state of affairs, part, whole, and so forth, as well as the relations between parts and the whole and their laws of dependence, once all material concepts have been replaced by their correlative form concepts relative to the pure “something”. This kind of analysis does not deal with the problem of the relationship between “formal ontology” and “material ontology”.
Certainly, pure philosophical ontology is different from applied scientific ontology, and ontology in the applied scientific sense can be understood either as a discipline or a domain. Ontology as a discipline is a method or activity of enquiry into philosophical problems about the concept or facts of existence. Ontology as a domain is the outcome or subject matter of ontology as a discipline. Applied scientific ontology construed as an existence domain can be further subdivided into, either as the theoretical commitment to a preferred choice of existent entities, or to the real existent entities themselves, including the actual world considered as a whole, also known as the “extant domain”. Ontology as a theoretical domain is thus a description or inventory of the things that are supposed to exist according to a particular theory, which might, but need not, be true. Ontology as an extant domain, in contrast, is the actual world of all real existent entities, whatever these turn out to be, identified by a true complete applied ontological theory (Jacquette, 2002, pp.2-3).
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Monday, May 19, 2008
What's going on -
nothing. We're stuck in some weirdo limbo.
We've had tornadoes, downpours, thunderstorms and snow flurries in the air (yes, snow) all within a few days.
My WS jugs are just sitting there doing nothing. I don't blame them. It's 37 degrees F right now and will only hover in the 40's F today.
This week is going to be total crap - cold, wind and rain. Nothing is really growing, more like biding their time. Even the cole crops have pretty much quit.
At this rate it will be July before I can get my veg hardened off enough to get them into the garden.
Nothing will get done this week . . . again.
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By Richie Unterberger
Although We Five were most famous for recording one of the first and biggest folk-rock hits, "You Were on My Mind," the styles they investigated on their albums had always encompassed much more than folk-rock. Even back on their first LP, they'd covered show tunes, "Cast Your Fate to the Wind," and the Elvis Presley hit "Can't Help Falling in Love." By the time of their fourth album, 1970's Catch the Wind, they were recording not only folk-rock, but also country music, upbeat pop-rock, blues, and the Beatles. As happy as they were with the record, however, it did not get the exposure they wished, with label and distribution problems conspiring to make it largely unavailable shortly after its initial release.
To understand how they ended up recording Catch the Wind for the Vault label, it's necessary to backtrack a bit to the end of the group's stay at A&M, the company that had taken "You Were on My Mind" all the way to #3 back in 1965. After the "You Were on My Mind" lineup of We Five broke up in April 1967, remembers guitarist Jerry Burgan, producer Frank Werber "said if Debbie will join the band, then he would continue recording us." Debbie Burgan, Jerry's wife, was a natural replacement for departing singer Bev Bivens, having already filled in when Bivens was ill. Bassist Pete Fullerton was also willing to continue with the group, though a couple of other original members, guitarists Mike Stewart and Bob Jones, bowed out of the act. "But Frank and A&M couldn't get together on what should be done with us," resumes Jerry. "So we just got fed up. Peter and Debbie and I went in the studio as the Tricycle, and started recording some stuff. One of the cuts wound up on our Return [of We Five] album" -- their third LP, recorded for A&M as We Five after the Burgans and Fullerton bought the name from the rest of the members.
"We were going into the studio with Tommy LiPuma, a pretty well-known producer," elaborates Burgan. "Had he produced our third album, we'd probably be having a different conversation right now. But he was in an accident, and his eye got messed up; I think a dog bit him or some such thing. And so they turned us over to a producer named Jerry Riopelle. He didn't really like us. He couldn't relate to the music, he couldn't relate to what we were all about. And so our third album was kind of a sampler -- here's a song, here's a song, here's a song. But it's not produced. It's almost self-produced, and we really didn't know how to produce a record at that time. It had some good material on it; 'All of the Time' probably should have been a hit. But for whatever reason, A&M chose to put out 'It Really Doesn't Matter' and an unfinished version of 'Walk on By.' The vocals are there, the rhythm track's there, but we never finished putting the horns and stuff on it. The album, it went out, sold a few, but it was not a hit album.
"After that, we were signed with [a manager who] felt that we needed to get off of A&M, so his first order of business was to get us off of A&M. His next order of business was going to be to have Bones Howe [then hot as producer of the Turtles, the 5th Dimension, and the Association] produce it, and Bones was too busy to do it. So we floundered for another year trying to get the band re-signed. Mike Stewart, during this time, had been playing with various groups, and had gone to Nashville with West [a band who put out a late-'60s LP on Epic]. He met a guy named Jackie Mills, [who] produced Bobby Sherman and people like that. He really liked Michael, and Michael's abilities. He said, 'Michael, you should be a producer. Who do you want to produce?' And Michael said, 'We Five.' That's how that album came into existence." With the group now off A&M, the LP would be issued by the relatively small Vault label.
While Michael Stewart was back in the fold, though as a producer rather than band member, the record would not be cut like previous We Five LPs had. "Jackie Mills told Michael he could produce anybody he wanted," explains Burgan. "But the rule was that he had to do it live in the studio. The reason is 'cause Michael could conceive of a finished album and then execute it, rather than figuring out what it was as he went along. And if we wanted to get really good vocals, the only way we were going to accomplish that was to just sing and have somebody else play. So that album was pretty much recorded live at the studio, with some of the best studio players in L.A., like [bassist] Joe Osborne, [guitarist] James Burton, [keyboardist] Glen D. Hardin. 'Milkcow Blues,' Earl Palmer played the drums on that. In fact, 'Milkcow''s the only song Peter and I played on, 'cause it's Debbie's solo, and we didn't have to sing.
"The energy that you get from being in the presence of people who play really well and give themselves the luxury, the freedom, to play -- and the way it feeds off of one another -- it's something we had always wanted to do. 'Cause we never got to play with a big band or anything like that live, and it's the closest we were ever gonna get to doing it. I've never experienced anything like it in my life. It's right there up with when you got 15,000 people screaming because they love you, only instead of the feedback from the audience, it just comes from this internal vibe that is indescribable. And a lot of fun."
Although Stewart did play a bit of guitar on the album, clarifies Jerry, "Basically, Michael was in the booth, we were in the vocal booth, and we had killer musicians in the room. And Michael, Peter, Debbie, and I conceived of the songs. We would work out arrangements, and then we'd get together with Michael and give him rough arrangements of the songs, the vocals. Then he figured out who he wanted to have play on it. The ones that had horns, we brought in [orchestrator] Al Capps to add horns. So it's very much a collaborative process. We'd always worked that way." Also handling orchestration, on the tracks "One Last Time" and "Oh Lonesome Me," was Frank Denson, who "was a guy we met through Frank Werber in San Francisco when we were working as the Tricycle; he was with us on the Return album."
While Burgan did contribute a couple of originals in "Belong Beside You" and "One Last Time," most of the album was devoted to cover material from a wide assortment of sources. "Here Comes the Sun" had just been a highlight of the Beatles' Abbey Road album; "Early Mornin' Rain" and "For Lovin' Me" were two of Gordon Lightfoot's most popular early songs; "Catch the Wind" was Donovan's first hit; and "Oh Lonesome Me" had been a Top Ten country-pop crossover smash for Don Gibson back in 1958. Two of the other songs originated closer to home, "Never Goin' Back" (with banjo by Doug Dillard) having been penned by Mike Stewart's brother John Stewart, who recorded it on his second album, California Bloodlines. In addition, one of the four writers of "Come and Sit Down Beside Me" was original We Five guitarist Bob Jones. It found its way to the new lineup, recalls Burgan, after "Michael had run into Bob, and Bob played him the song. Michael said, 'You know, We Five can do this song. Is that all right?' Bob said, 'Sure.' That's the only song on the album that Michael brought to us."
One of the more unusual selections on the LP was Bob Dylan's "Tomorrow Is a Long Time," which Dylan had written and performed live back in his early years, but never issued on any of his official 1960s recordings. Prior to We Five cover, the song had been done by a number of other artists, including Ian & Sylvia (who'd put out the original version of "You Were on My Mind"), Judy Collins, and, more surprisingly, Elvis Presley. As it turns out, however, We Five learned in not from Ian & Sylvia or Elvis, but from a more obscure source. "I was always a Travis Edmonson freak," declares Burgan. "And Travis Edmonson [a folk singer who recorded both on his own and as part of the duo Bud & Travis] put it on an album that he did live at the [Los Angeles Club] the Troubadour. Pretty bad record, but cool song. I used to sing it just 'cause I liked the song, and then Peter and Debbie said, 'You know, we could do an R&B version of this, and it would be a killer.' I had never heard the song by anybody until I heard it [by] Travis. One of the things We Five has always really been into, is [to] say, 'Okay, a good song is a good song, and it can probably be done more than one way'. And that was one of those: 'What can we do with this that hasn't been done? There's more here than a folk song.' One of the reasons Dylan is who Dylan is, is because he writes these things that sound like simple folk songs that have musical complexity, if you want to look a little, that's sometimes amazing. He's done two or three things that are like that. Peter, the part he sang on 'Tomorrow Is a Long Time,' I get goose bumps still when I listen to it."
Similarly, "Milkcow Blues" had been done by a number of famous artists, including Elvis Presley (who'd put it on one of his first singles in the mid-'50s) and the Kinks (who'd covered it in the mid-'60s), as well as bluesman Kokomo Arnold, who'd cut it in the 1930s. We Five didn't learn it from any of those versions, however, or even from a record. "We learned it from Debbie's dad, who passed away last year," reveals Burgan. "He's very much a Jimmie Rodgers yodeling brakeman and Bob Wills -- kind of a cross between the two. He was born in a log cabin in Arkansas, learned to play guitar when he was a kid, and would sit in with bands when they would come through town. His whole life, he'd been a musician. Just a remarkable man, a wonderful character in his voice. He could easily have been a star on the Grand Ole Opry had he not been working on a farm in Arkansas. Anyway, we learned the song from him because he loved that tune and would play it any time he got the chance. Put a microphone in front of him, he would play 'Milkcow Blues.' So we told Michael about it, and he liked it, and said, 'Okay, cool, let's put it on. Who wrote it?' And I said, 'I don't know, we learned it from Debbie's dad. It's probably public domain. Let's stick his name on it.' When the label went to do the research on it, of course [it] found out that Kokomo Arnold had the copyright."
The fiddle part on "Milkcow Blues," incidentally, came about through Doug Dillard, who'd brought Byron Berline along when he did the banjo part on "Never Goin' Back." As Jerry tells it, "We were mixing down 'Milkcow Blues,' and Doug said, 'You really need Byron to play fiddle on this tune.' To which we said, 'Well, we've only got one track open.' And he says, 'Well, that's alright.' So Byron Berline went out into the studio and while they were running it down, he was just kind of noodling around. When the solo came, Michael said, 'Push "record."' That was the first and only take of Byron's learning the song. He'd never heard us do it. He hadn't heard anything else. He just heard the whole, jumped in, started to play, and at the end he stopped. It's miraculous. It just blew us all away. And he says, 'Okay, I'm ready.' And Michael said, 'No, you're done.'" This was around the same time, as a side note, that Berline made a particularly famous session appearance on the Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed, playing fiddle on "Country Honk."
On the whole, the material on the album was so diverse that it made We Five hard to classify in any subgenre or another. "Yes, but that's who we are, unfortunately," notes Burgan. "Conceptually, We Five really was always about that. We always looked around and tried to find songs that we liked, and then say, 'Alright, this is a cool song. How would We Five do this?' In this particular album, we looked for songs that we liked, and it didn't matter who wrote them. I wrote some of them, but it didn't really matter, that wasn't the point. It was to find things that we liked, and then to execute them in a fashion that we were comfortable with. And at that particular time, we were in the process of becoming a country-rock band. I'd say there's two or three songs on this album that still hold up that you can probably put out in country today, and be hits. 'Cause structurally they're sound, the musicianship is good, and country hasn't gone away."
The Catch the Wind album itself, however, would go away quickly, owing to circumstances beyond We Five's control. "It got really good reviews," says Jerry. "What I recall them saying is that it had energy, the vocals were great, great selection of material, it was going someplace We Five had never gone before, and definitely worth a listen. We did Bandstand just as soon as it came out; Dick Clark had always been a fan of ours, 'cause we worked for him a lot. And it started selling, it was moving. Then the guy who owned Vault died, and he also owned a big independent distribution company. People were nervous about what was gonna happen, and probably 60-70% of the Vault material got returned so that people weren't stuck with material in case the company went belly-up. I'd say in a matter of three weeks, that went from being a really well-reviewed album to -- you couldn't buy it. And it never came back. They melted them all down during the gas shortage [in the early 70s]."
Putting the blow in further context, adds Burgan, "It was devastating when it happened, 'cause we really thought that this was an album that was finally gonna let us break free. This album represented a way for what we knew was the good stuff to get out, and it was frustrating when the plug got pulled. The Return album got mixed reviews. Basically, people said, 'There's some interesting stuff, but there's no cohesiveness.' But Catch the Wind was very cohesive. It had a mood, it had a character, and everything was really well executed. And had we continued doing that, we'd probably be big country stars, or big old, retired country stars," he laughs.
The lineup that recorded Catch the Wind wouldn't last much longer, as Pete Fullerton left the group shortly after the album (today he heads the San Francisco Bay Area charity Truck of Love). We Five (with Terry Rangno replacing Fullerton) did record some more sessions with Michael Stewart as producer, but those were ill-fated since, as Jerry notes, "It was one of those deals where an independent studio owner tried a power play and wouldn't release the master tapes to our manager. After hearing the recordings and realizing they were really good, he tried to change the arrangement from reimbursement for studio time to half ownership in the project. A couple of the songs were later re-recorded for the Take Each Day As It Comes album, recorded in the early 1970s and released through AVI/ MGM." The band stopped traveling on a full-time basis as We Five in the mid- 1970s, though they continue to do some shows to the present day.
With this CD reissue, Catch the Wind will be available for We Five fans to hear for the first time since it ran into distribution problems shortly after its release, which has made it difficult to find ever since 1970. Jerry and Debbie Burgan, both of whom perform in the current We Five lineup, are each happy to see the record finally restored to print. "My answer to what's so cool about this was the experience of getting to do it live in the studio," summarizes Jerry. "She would tell you that something very worthwhile is finally going to get to the market, and she'll be able to point to it and say, 'You know what, this is good. It was well done.'" -- Richie Unterberger
contents copyright Richie Unterberger , 2000-2010
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Thornton Holding Court.jpg
Thornton Hall
The Revolution Will Be Kuhnian.
Imagine Writing A History of The Reformation And Not Mentioning Gutenberg!
The present moment in time is down to many factors. Chief among them, I believe, is the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1965. As Democrats became the party of black people, an enormous prize was left on the table: Southern Whites.
Could Republicans have rejected the Southern Strategy? The party certainly contained folks who might have preferred to. John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky was a key player in getting the Civil Rights Act passed. Jacob Javits, a liberal Jew originally from the Lower East Side of Manhattan, was a GOP Senator until 1981.
But all it took was just a little dog whistle racism, just a little, and the votes of Southern Whites started going to the GOP. So easy. It would have been political malpractice not to race bait, no?
Then came Ronald Reagan, whose First Inaugural was white supremacy wedded to anti-Communist saber rattling. The New York Times ignored the references to George Wallace and called it a call for "National Renewal."
What would Joseph Pulitzer have called it? What about William Randolph Hearst? Would they have ignored the race-baiting? Would they have credulously repeated the nonsense idea that cutting taxes could raise revenue? That people were poor because we taxed the rich? That inflation was caused by overzealous regulators?
So much nonsense, printed daily by the press. What was their excuse? That the truth was unknowable. That all they could do was repeat what Reagan said along with quotes from Democrats that disagreed.
Was government really "THE problem?" Journalists could not say. To say, "no, government is not making poor people poorer" would have been unfair. To say that Art Laffer was a well known crank would have been unbalanced. To point out Reagan's clear use of white nationalist rhetoric would have been bad journalistic practice.
So now comes Trump, and journos and political scientists are baffled. Are the rules broken? How did this happen? It must be the fault of Hillary Clinton, surely! Or maybe all the Democrats? Is it voters' and their economic anxiety? Or is it their racism.
Whatever it is, it certainly isn't the press. Because what could be better than college educated white people in New York and D.C. doing their best? What could be better than a balanced and fair approach that tells two sides of every story? What could be better than a business model based on regional monopolies dominating the advertising market as long as they didn't offend advertisers? What could be wrong about always attacking government as terrible because that's "speaking truth to power"?
I beg to disagree.
From "RovingYouthPastor"
By James L. Baughman, April 20, 2011
The more objective, detached journalists that Bleyer favored may have done their jobtoo well. By examining politicians too closely, Thomas C. Leonard suggests, the press left the voter feeling helpless, even cynical, regarding the electoral process. Why bother? The percentage of voters turning out for elections dropped sharply in the 20thcentury, that is, once most newspapers ceased being party organs.[vii]An average of about 60 percent voted in the last three presidential elections.[viii]
Equilibrium is a concept from physical science; The status of "women's work" is not physical science.
Example of replacing Newtonian thinking with Darwinian | <urn:uuid:cbb5b3ec-0e5f-41ec-b9cb-dbbde2e9f5fa> | http://thorntonhalldesign.com/philosophy/2017/8/22/imagine-writing-a-history-of-the-reformation-and-not-mentioning-gutenberg | en | 0.968146 | 0.534542 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Friday, November 13, 2009
Give a Mother a Break
Circumstances conspired to make me think a lot about our judgmental culture today. First, at the very end of AskMoxie's post on how to shift from a work mind set to a mommy mind set, someone posting as millay wrote a nice comment saying how encouraged she was to read all the other comments from mothers who liked their jobs enough to need tricks for switching off their work brains at the end of the day. She's been feeling guilty for enjoying her work now that she has a baby.
I, of course, had to pipe in with the fact that I am a happy working mom, and the fact that I think there are a lot of us happy working moms out here. As I said in my comment at Moxie's, I think there are many different types of good mother. Some good moms like to work outside the home. Some good moms don't like to work outside but have to in order to provide important things for their children, so do it anyway. Some good moms want to stay at home with their kids. All types of moms can be good moms, and no one should make anyone feel guilty for her choices in this regard.
Then, I went to the breastfeeding support group run by the hospital where I gave birth. This support group pretty much saved my sanity when Pumpkin was born, so I've been going since Petunia was born. I am less likely to be falling to pieces this time (although I still have questions and concerns), but I remember how helpful it was to have moms in that group who had made it through those first difficult weeks and could demonstrate that indeed, it did get easier. So I go even when I don't have questions or concerns, to tell some other mother what I needed to hear in my early days as a mother: It is really hard now, but it gets easier. You're doing a great job. It is worth it. Yes, you will figure out how to feel like a well-rounded person again. Etc., etc.
Today, there was a mom there who was having a really hard time. It is not my story to tell, so I will just say that her baby has reflux (now being treated), and is growing slowly, and is probably high needs as well. She was in tears telling us how her friends keep trying to get her to meet for lunch or coffee, but how she didn't want to go out because she was afraid her baby would meltdown and when that happens people look at her and ask her what's wrong with your baby? and she feels so judged.
Oh, how I remember that feeling. I was afraid to go places with Pumpkin for the same reason. She could go from happy to screaming in 0.5 seconds, and sometimes it seemed that nothing I did could stop the screaming. And I would feel people's eyes on me, and feel so judged. (In retrospect, probably only a small minority of onlookers were actually judging me. But in those early days of motherhood I had little confidence in my mothering ability and was prone to feeling very judged.)
I am much less worried about that this time around, although Petunia is also capable of throwing a good meltdown now and then, and sometimes the only way I can calm her is to sing loudly into her ear while doing a bouncing, swaying motion that would no doubt look like the geekiest dance on the planet. (Well, maybe not as geeky as Matt's dance....) I just am less likely to feel judged this time.
Then this poor mom told us about her sister-in-law, who has a much easier baby, and who tells her that she just needs to get over it and go out. And again I recognized a common problem of parents who have fussy babies- even other parents may not really get it. Until you've had a child who is "high needs", it is easy to think that the reason your child is not so fussy/sleeps well/eats well/cured cancer is that you are an excellent parent. Now, these parents may in fact be excellent parents. They probably are. But so are the parents of the fussy, reluctant to sleep and eat kids. Some kids are just harder to parent than others. Being the parent of a child who is not a great sleeper has taught me a great deal of parenting humility. I try very hard not judge how other parents are dealing with their own parenting challenges.
It is not that I think the rest of us should just butt out and ignore the parenting going on in our midst. That would be very isolating for parents, and would deprive new parents of the chance to get ideas and support from the other parents around them. But surely we can strive to be supportive, and not judgmental? It seems that we are all a little too quick to cluck our tongues and shake our heads at the actions mothers take, and a little too slow to offer encouragement and actual help to mothers- particularly new mothers- who might need it.
So, to all those of you out there who take the time to tell a struggling mom "you're doing a great job" or "it gets easier": thank you. I always appreciate hearing that, even now that I know from personal experience that it gets easier.
To those of you who think you know how to solve whatever parenting problem I'm dealing with in public: maybe you do and maybe you don't. But I guarantee, I don't want to hear about it from some random stranger in a parking lot. And I can't think of anyone outside my family whose opinion on whether or not I work matters at all.
1. I sometimes wonder if our attitude towards advice is part of the problem. I mean, obviously there's assvice, which just sucks. But sometimes I will see someone having trouble, and I know what worked for *me*, and I have no idea if they've heard of my suggestion or not. And my motivation in wanting to give advice is not to be a know-it-all, but if I can give them one tiny piece of information that could make their life easier, or better...except that coming from a strange we hear criticism, not compassion. When someone says to you, "hey, your baby isn't sleeping, have you tried X?" I think it stems from a deep desire to help that most people have. Or that imagine they have. And yet I totally get where you're coming from. I know precisely how frustrating it is explaining to someone, yet again, that I've tried every single sleep solution and they just don't work.
2. @Today Wendy- I think you're right. I know that in my case, at least some of the judgment I felt during those early days of motherhood was primarily in my head, not in the head of the person giving me advice! I think some new moms are just really sensitive to any perceived criticism, because we feel like we aren't doing a good job. I wonder if this correlates with having a particularly fussy baby, or a baby who behaves differently from how we think babies are "supposed" to behave (for instance, sleeping less than the books say babies sleep...)?
However, even in those early days, I never minded respectfully given advice from people I actually knew. In fact, some of my Mom's advice was really, really helpful. (It still is!)
It is the probably well-meaning strangers telling me that my baby was crying because she was hot/cold/hungry/tired that weren't very helpful, and were in fact hurtful, because they only deepened my insecurities as a new mom.
3. Amen, amen and amen!
Thank goodness that I am confident in my parenting abilities and in understand my particular spirited child, as well as starting to learn the differences with the baby. I'm sure I would have had a complete breakdown if I wasn't... oh wait, I did have a bit of a breakdown with PPD.
Anywho... I usually don't mind getting advice, but I can do with the judgment from people who have no idea what it is like to parent a kid like mine. You know this came up recently, and I just don't get it. Parenting most kids is hard in a lot of different ways. I just don't get why we all aren't simply supportive of and helpful with each other!
4. Wow. I want to comment on ALL OF THIS.
First, I love working my job. I LOVE being a professor. I'm so gald to be able to do this and to be a mother, too. Loving one doesn't mean I don't love the other.
Second, fussy babies. The second part of your post made me tear up. Munchkin was a very fussy baby, andI never left the house and I cried a lot when she cried a lot. She was hard to parent. You know what I needed instead of people telling me to get over myself, or telling me how their babies never acted like that? I needed them to offer to take over for 20 minutes, five minutes, anything.
So that's what I do now: you got a fussy baby? Hand her over, go for a coffee. She's rotten, but I can handle it. Go!
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Resolved A Blackberry lost by one, and found by another - morality?
Discussion in 'Community Discussion' started by iphonepiephone, Jul 3, 2011.
1. iphonepiephone, Jul 3, 2011
Last edited: Jul 4, 2011
iphonepiephone macrumors regular
Oct 9, 2009
I want to ask of you, a question of ethics and morality. I know someone who found a lost BlackBerry in the street, who says it was barred (and it was) at the time of discovery. Said person who found BB, kept it for 1.5 months, and then sold it to another person, with NO sim card, NO personal data on it, nothing!
Herein lies the question; it was obviously a contract handset, and the case being that the phone had been barred for over 1.5 months (ish), surely service provider of said BB would have issued a new one, under insurance, so is it immoral that the person who bought it, bought it as barred, and empty, and without SIM?
IMHO, I see no immorality nor harm in buyer keeping it, as it is now useless, and contains nothing from the original owner - how about you?
Thank you :)
2. callmemike20 macrumors 6502a
Aug 21, 2007
If your pet is missing for 1 months and I find it in my yard one day, it's mine to keep (or sell)
3. Phil A. Moderator
Phil A.
Staff Member
Apr 2, 2006
Shropshire, UK
If it was replaced under insurance, then the original belongs to the insurance company (legally and morally), so, yes, I do see a problem with it
4. samiwas macrumors 68000
Aug 26, 2006
Atlanta, GA
An interesting conundrum. Since it's "barred", which I guess means locked and wiped, there is no way to figure out who it belongs to, so what do you do with it? If there is any way to figure out who it belongs to, I would absolutely say that is the first priority.
I left my iPad on a plane a few weeks ago. I didn't realize it until the next day. I thought that it was gone for sure...I mean, how often does something get returned from a plane??? Almost never. Anyway, I called the airline, but never expected to hear anything back. Well, what do you know? Three days later, I get a call from the airline, in a different region than I had been traveling in, and they had found my iPad. It was returned to me in a few days.
The employee who was tasked with figuring out whose it was turned it on and was able to track me down by looking through it. Violation of privacy to some, but not to me...and it got me my iPad back. Obviously, you can't do that with a locked and wiped unit, so I don't really know what the ethics would be here. I guess, in that case, you'd either turn it into the police if you were really moral, keep it if you were average, or sell it for huge bucks if you were a little more unethical.
5. r1ch4rd macrumors 6502a
Aug 5, 2005
Manchester UK
I would have no problem with someone selling something that they found as long as they put some effort into trying to return it first. Really, your friend should have handed the phone into the police who would have let him keep the phone if the owner couldn't be found.
You have stated in your post that an assumption has been made, that the phone was insured. It is entirely possible that it wasn't. Let's say I lose my phone and it contains personal information about me and my work email. Let's also say that I don't have insurance. First thing I would do is have it locked - having to buy a new phone is a pain but the alternative (losing your data to an unknown) is worse. I would still want the phone back. Obviously, as your friend was able to sell it, the phone has some value.
As for the buyer - I have no problem. Do they even know the back story?
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Airports after Brussels
Brussels image
Airport/metro attack in Brussels
A sad, sad day.
FAA: no more emergency oxygen in airplane bathrooms
Now this is scary:
By order of the FAA, U.S. airlines have removed the emergency oxygen generators on all U.S. airplanes. Here’s the story I worked on today today for msnbc.com: FAA: No more oxygen in airplane lavatories.
Citing security concerns, the federal government in secrecy last month ordered every airline in the United States to remove emergency oxygen in every lavatory on all 6,000 domestic commercial aircraft.
Under Air Worthiness Directive 2011-04-09, made public this week, the Federal Aviation Administration directed all airlines to disable the lavatory oxygen generators to “eliminate a potential safety and security vulnerability.”
That means that if there’s a sudden loss of cabin pressure, now only those passengers at their seats will have oxygen flowing to the masks that drop down from the ceiling.
“I’m in shock,” said Kate Hanni, executive director of Flyersrights.org, a nonprofit airline passengers’ rights organization. “We get reports of mid-air decompression events all the time. So now going to the bathroom on a commercial flight can kill you? I’m panicking just thinking about this.”
Although rapid decompression is rare, it does happen. In October, for example, oxygen masks were deployed on an American Airlines flight enroute from Miami to Boston after the cabin lost pressure when a two-foot hole tore open in the plane’s fuselage . The crew declared an emergency, and the plane safely returned to Miami. Passengers were panicked, but no one was injured.
But under the FAA’s new directive, any passengers who happen to be in the airplane restroom should such an event occur would no longer have immediate access to oxygen.
According to the FAA, the airlines completed disabling the oxygen generators in the lavatories of all 6,000 U.S. aircraft on March 4. The FAA said in a statement released Thursday that it delayed informing the public about this action because it was concerned about keeping travelers “as safe and secure as possible.”
The agency told NBC News that the action was done proactively in response not to a specific threat but to general concerns that a terrorist could use the lavatory oxygen to start a fire or ignite a bomb.
“Had the FAA publicized the existence of this security vulnerability prior to airlines fixing it, thousands of planes across the U.S. and the safety of passengers could have been at risk,” the FAA stated.
The agency noted that it is working with aircraft manufacturers “to design, certify, and install a new lavatory oxygen system” on all aircraft, adding that “if there is a sudden loss of cabin pressure, pilots are already trained to guide the aircraft to a safe, breathable altitude as quickly as possible. Flight attendants are also already trained to assist passengers to quickly access oxygen — including those in the lavatories.”
Sara Keagle, a flight attendant who blogs at TheFlyingPinto.com, said flight attendants had not yet received training on the new directive but added that they already have access to portable oxygen bottles that could be used to assist any passengers in a lavatory.
“If a decompression should occur, flight attendants are trained to get on oxygen immediately,” she said. “Once it is safe, we would don a portable oxygen bottle and check the cabin, including the lavs, to make sure everyone was OK.”
But Arthur Alan Wolk, an aviation safety expert and licensed jet pilot, said: “Part of the idea of the oxygen mask dropping from the ceiling during loss of cabin pressure is to keep the occupants of the main cabin alive until an airplane gets down to a breathable altitude. By eliminating the source of oxygen for the unlucky souls in the bathroom, you’ve just killed those people.”
Airlines were expected to begin informing passengers about the lack of lavatory oxygen generators on seatback briefing cards, during the verbal passenger safety briefing presentation and on signs posted in airplane bathrooms. | <urn:uuid:b8588da1-1816-4cb9-9514-e8ea9f78fcd5> | https://stuckattheairport.com/tag/terrorism-2/ | en | 0.95218 | 0.060187 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Introduction to a Simple Multiplayer Example
Checked with version: 5.3
Difficulty: Intermediate
Multiplayer Networking is inherently detailed and complex. There are particular issues and difficulties associated with synchronizing and communicating between multiple instances of a project which are often running on different machines that could be in different and distant parts of the world.
With Unity’s built-in Multiplayer Networking and the associated High Level API (HLAPI), we hope to make creating Multiplayer projects easier to use.
With this simple Multiplayer Networking Example, we will show how to set up a Networked Multiplayer project from scratch using the simplest of assets and scripts. With this example, we hope to give you a quick introduction to the most important aspects of the built-in Multiplayer Networking system and its High Level API.
This document is a step-by-step assignment showing how to set up a new Multiplayer Networking project from scratch using Unity’s built-in Multiplayer Networking system and its HLAPI. The steps in this lesson are relatively generic and are designed to convey the basic concepts behind the Multiplayer Networking system and can be customized for many different types of Networked Multiplayer games. By the time we are done, we should have an example that has two players controlling their own Player GameObjects in two different instances of the project with an authoritative Server controlling and synchronizing the action. The players should be able to shoot each other, defeat other players and static enemies, and finally respawn if they are defeated.
This lesson is targeted at Intermediate users. It is best to have read the section of the manual on Multiplayer Networking, particularly the pages on Networking Overview and The High Level API and it's child pages, including Network System Concepts.
To get started:
• Create a new empty 3D project in Unity.
• Save the default scene as “Main”.
Related documentation | <urn:uuid:19219822-7d4e-4fb6-9975-0fbd3a82c677> | https://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/topics/multiplayer-networking/introduction-simple-multiplayer-example?playlist=29690 | en | 0.93573 | 0.0184 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Genetic code
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to navigation Jump to search
The genetic code is the set of rules used by living cells to translate information encoded within genetic material (DNA or mRNA sequences) into proteins. Translation is accomplished by the ribosome, which links amino acids in an order specified by messenger RNA (mRNA), using transfer RNA (tRNA) molecules to carry amino acids and to read the mRNA three nucleotides at a time. The genetic code is highly similar among all organisms and can be expressed in a simple table with 64 entries.[1]
The code defines how sequences of nucleotide triplets, called codons, specify which amino acid will be added next during protein synthesis. With some exceptions,[2] a three-nucleotide codon in a nucleic acid sequence specifies a single amino acid. The vast majority of genes are encoded with a single scheme (see the RNA codon table). That scheme is often referred to as the canonical or standard genetic code, or simply the genetic code, though variant codes (such as in human mitochondria) exist.
While the "genetic code" determines a protein's amino acid sequence, other genomic regions determine when and where these proteins are produced according to various "gene regulatory codes".
The genetic code
Efforts to understand how proteins are encoded began after DNA's structure was discovered in 1953. George Gamow postulated that sets of three bases must be employed to encode the 20 standard amino acids used by living cells to build proteins, which would allow a maximum of 43 = 64 amino acids.[3]
The Crick, Brenner, Barnett and Watts-Tobin experiment first demonstrated that codons consist of three DNA bases. Marshall Nirenberg and Heinrich J. Matthaei were the first to reveal the nature of a codon in 1961.
They used a cell-free system to translate a poly-uracil RNA sequence (i.e., UUUUU...) and discovered that the polypeptide that they had synthesized consisted of only the amino acid phenylalanine.[4] They thereby deduced that the codon UUU specified the amino acid phenylalanine.
This was followed by experiments in Severo Ochoa's laboratory that demonstrated that the poly-adenine RNA sequence (AAAAA...) coded for the polypeptide poly-lysine[5] and that the poly-cytosine RNA sequence (CCCCC...) coded for the polypeptide poly-proline.[6] Therefore, the codon AAA specified the amino acid lysine, and the codon CCC specified the amino acid proline. Using various copolymers most of the remaining codons were then determined.
Subsequent work by Har Gobind Khorana identified the rest of the genetic code. Shortly thereafter, Robert W. Holley determined the structure of transfer RNA (tRNA), the adapter molecule that facilitates the process of translating RNA into protein. This work was based upon Ochoa's earlier studies, yielding the latter the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1959 for work on the enzymology of RNA synthesis.[7]
Extending this work, Nirenberg and Philip Leder revealed the code's triplet nature and deciphered its codons. In these experiments, various combinations of mRNA were passed through a filter that contained ribosomes, the components of cells that translate RNA into protein. Unique triplets promoted the binding of specific tRNAs to the ribosome. Leder and Nirenberg were able to determine the sequences of 54 out of 64 codons in their experiments.[8] Khorana, Holley and Nirenberg received the 1968 Nobel for their work.[9]
The three stop codons were named by discoverers Richard Epstein and Charles Steinberg. "Amber" was named after their friend Harris Bernstein, whose last name means "amber" in German.[10] The other two stop codons were named "ochre" and "opal" in order to keep the "color names" theme.
Expanded genetic codes (synthetic biology)[edit]
In a broad academic audience, the concept of the evolution of the genetic code from the original and ambiguous genetic code to a well-defined ("frozen") code with the repertoire of 20 (+2) canonical amino acids is widely accepted.[11] However, there are different opinions, concepts, approaches and ideas, which is the best way to change it experimentally. Even models are proposed that predict "entry points" for synthetic amino acid invasion of the genetic code.[12]
H. Murakami and M. Sisido extended some codons to have four and five bases. Steven A. Benner constructed a functional 65th (in vivo) codon.[15]
In 2015 N. Budisa, D. Söll and co-workers reported the full substitution of all 20,899 tryptophan residues (UGG codons) with unnatural thienopyrrole-alanine in the genetic code of the bacterium Escherichia coli.[16]
In 2016 the first stable semisynthetic organism was created. It was a (single cell) bacterium with two synthetic bases (called X and Y). The bases survived cell division.[17][18]
In 2017, researchers in South Korea reported that they had engineered a mouse with an extended genetic code that can produce proteins with unnatural amino acids.[19]
Reading frames in the DNA sequence of a region of the human mitochondrial genome coding for the genes MT-ATP8 and MT-ATP6 (in black: positions 8,525 to 8,580 in the sequence accession NC_012920[20]). There are three possible reading frames in the 5' → 3' forward direction, starting on the first (+1), second (+2) and third position (+3). For each codon (square brackets), the amino acid is given by the vertebrate mitochondrial code, either in the +1 frame for MT-ATP8 (in red) or in the +3 frame for MT-ATP6 (in blue). The MT-ATP8 genes terminates with the TAG stop codon (red dot) in the +1 frame. The MT-ATP6 gene starts with the ATG codon (blue circle for the M amino acid) in the +3 frame.
Reading frame[edit]
A reading frame is defined by the initial triplet of nucleotides from which translation starts. It sets the frame for a run of successive, non-overlapping codons, which is known as an "open reading frame" (ORF). For example, the string 5'-AAATGAACG-3' (see figure), if read from the first position, contains the codons AAA, TGA, and ACG ; if read from the second position, it contains the codons AAT and GAA ; and if read from the third position, it contains the codons ATG and AAC. Every sequence can, thus, be read in its 5' → 3' direction in three reading frames, each producing a possibly distinct amino acid sequence: in the given example, Lys (K)-Trp (W)-Thr (T), Asn (N)-Glu (E), or Met (M)-Asn (N), respectively (when translating with the vertebrate mitochondrial code). When DNA is double-stranded, six possible reading frames are defined, three in the forward orientation on one strand and three reverse on the opposite strand.[21]:330 Protein-coding frames are defined by a start codon, usually the first AUG (ATG) codon in the RNA (DNA) sequence.
In eukaryotes, ORFs in exons are often interrupted by introns.
Start/stop codons[edit]
The three stop codons have names: UAG is amber, UGA is opal (sometimes also called umber), and UAA is ochre. Stop codons are also called "termination" or "nonsense" codons. They signal release of the nascent polypeptide from the ribosome because no cognate tRNA has anticodons complementary to these stop signals, allowing a release factor to bind to the ribosome instead.[23]
Effect of mutations[edit]
Examples of notable mutations that can occur in humans.[24]
During the process of DNA replication, errors occasionally occur in the polymerization of the second strand. These errors, mutations, can affect an organism's phenotype, especially if they occur within the protein coding sequence of a gene. Error rates are typically 1 error in every 10–100 million bases—due to the "proofreading" ability of DNA polymerases.[25][26]
Missense mutations and nonsense mutations are examples of point mutations that can cause genetic diseases such as sickle-cell disease and thalassemia respectively.[27][28][29] Clinically important missense mutations generally change the properties of the coded amino acid residue among basic, acidic, polar or non-polar states, whereas nonsense mutations result in a stop codon.[21]:266
Mutations that disrupt the reading frame sequence by indels (insertions or deletions) of a non-multiple of 3 nucleotide bases are known as frameshift mutations. These mutations usually result in a completely different translation from the original, and likely cause a stop codon to be read, which truncates the protein.[30] These mutations may impair the protein's function and are thus rare in in vivo protein-coding sequences. One reason inheritance of frameshift mutations is rare is that, if the protein being translated is essential for growth under the selective pressures the organism faces, absence of a functional protein may cause death before the organism becomes viable.[31] Frameshift mutations may result in severe genetic diseases such as Tay-Sachs disease.[32]
Although most mutations that change protein sequences are harmful or neutral, some mutations have benefits.[33] These mutations may enable the mutant organism to withstand particular environmental stresses better than wild type organisms, or reproduce more quickly. In these cases a mutation will tend to become more common in a population through natural selection.[34] Viruses that use RNA as their genetic material have rapid mutation rates,[35] which can be an advantage, since these viruses thereby evolve rapidly, and thus evade the immune system defensive responses.[36] In large populations of asexually reproducing organisms, for example, E. coli, multiple beneficial mutations may co-occur. This phenomenon is called clonal interference and causes competition among the mutations.[37]
Degeneracy is the redundancy of the genetic code. This term was given by Bernfield and Nirenberg. The genetic code has redundancy but no ambiguity (see the codon tables below for the full correlation). For example, although codons GAA and GAG both specify glutamic acid (redundancy), neither specifies another amino acid (no ambiguity). The codons encoding one amino acid may differ in any of their three positions. For example, the amino acid leucine is specified by YUR or CUN (UUA, UUG, CUU, CUC, CUA, or CUG) codons (difference in the first or third position indicated using IUPAC notation), while the amino acid serine is specified by UCN or AGY (UCA, UCG, UCC, UCU, AGU, or AGC) codons (difference in the first, second, or third position).[38]:102–117 :521–522 A practical consequence of redundancy is that errors in the third position of the triplet codon cause only a silent mutation or an error that would not affect the protein because the hydrophilicity or hydrophobicity is maintained by equivalent substitution of amino acids; for example, a codon of NUN (where N = any nucleotide) tends to code for hydrophobic amino acids. NCN yields amino acid residues that are small in size and moderate in hydropathy; NAN encodes average size hydrophilic residues. The genetic code is so well-structured for hydropathy that a mathematical analysis (Singular Value Decomposition) of 12 variables (4 nucleotides x 3 positions) yields a remarkable correlation (C = 0.95) for predicting the hydropathy of the encoded amino acid directly from the triplet nucleotide sequence, without translation.[39][40] Note in the table, below, eight amino acids are not affected at all by mutations at the third position of the codon, whereas in the figure above, a mutation at the second position is likely to cause a radical change in the physicochemical properties of the encoded amino acid. Nevertheless, changes in the first position of the codons are more important than changes in the second position on a global scale.[41] The reason may be that charge reversal (from a positive to a negative charge or vice versa) can only occur upon mutations in the first position, but never upon changes in the second position of a codon. Such charge reversal may have dramatic consequences for the structure or function of a protein. This aspect may have been largely underestimated by previous studies.
Grouping of codons by amino acid residue molar volume and hydropathy. A more detailed version is available.
Codon usage bias[edit]
The frequency of codons, also known as codon usage bias, can vary from species to species with functional implications for the control of translation. The following codon usage table is for the human genome.[42]
Human genome codon frequency table
Human genome codon frequency
Codon AA[A] Fraction[B] Freq [C] Number[D] Codon AA Fraction Freq Number Codon AA Fraction Freq Number Codon AA Fraction Freq Number
UUU F 0.46 17.6 714,298 UCU S 0.19 15.2 618,711 UAU Y 0.44 12.2 495,699 UGU C 0.46 10.6 430,311
UUC F 0.54 20.3 824,692 UCC S 0.22 17.7 718,892 UAC Y 0.56 15.3 622,407 UGC C 0.54 12.6 513,028
UUA L 0.08 7.7 311,881 UCA S 0.15 12.2 496,448 UAA * 0.30 1.0 40,285 UGA * 0.47 1.6 63,237
UUG L 0.13 12.9 525,688 UCG S 0.05 4.4 179,419 UAG * 0.24 0.8 32,109 UGG W 1.00 13.2 535,595
CUU L 0.13 13.2 536,515 CCU P 0.29 17.5 713,233 CAU H 0.42 10.9 441,711 CGU R 0.08 4.5 184,609
CUC L 0.20 19.6 796,638 CCC P 0.32 19.8 804,620 CAC H 0.58 15.1 613,713 CGC R 0.18 10.4 423,516
CUA L 0.07 7.2 290,751 CCA P 0.28 16.9 688,038 CAA Q 0.27 12.3 501,911 CGA R 0.11 6.2 250,760
CUG L 0.40 39.6 1,611,801 CCG P 0.11 6.9 281,570 CAG Q 0.73 34.2 1,391,973 CGG R 0.20 11.4 464,485
AUU I 0.36 16.0 650,473 ACU T 0.25 13.1 533,609 AAU N 0.47 17.0 689,701 AGU S 0.15 12.1 493,429
AUC I 0.47 20.8 846,466 ACC T 0.36 18.9 768,147 AAC N 0.53 19.1 776,603 AGC S 0.24 19.5 791,383
AUA I 0.17 7.5 304,565 ACA T 0.28 15.1 614,523 AAA K 0.43 24.4 993,621 AGA R 0.21 12.2 494,682
AUG M 1.00 22.0 896,005 ACG T 0.11 6.1 246,105 AAG K 0.57 31.9 1,295,568 AGG R 0.21 12.0 486,463
GUU V 0.18 11.0 448,607 GCU A 0.27 18.4 750,096 GAU D 0.46 21.8 885,429 GGU G 0.16 10.8 437,126
GUC V 0.24 14.5 588,138 GCC A 0.40 27.7 1,127,679 GAC D 0.54 25.1 1,020,595 GGC G 0.34 22.2 903,565
GUA V 0.12 7.1 287,712 GCA A 0.23 15.8 643,471 GAA E 0.42 29.0 1,177,632 GGA G 0.25 16.5 669,873
GUG V 0.46 28.1 1,143,534 GCG A 0.11 7.4 299,495 GAG E 0.58 39.6 1,609,975 GGG G 0.25 16.5 669,768
A Amino acid. B Fraction of each codon among all those specifying a given amino acid. C Frequency among 40,662,582 codons of 93,487 coding sequences. D Number.
Standard codon tables[edit]
RNA codon table[edit]
Amino acids biochemical properties nonpolar polar basic acidic Termination: stop codon
Standard genetic code
2nd base 3rd
UUA (Leu/L) Leucine UCA UAA[B] Stop (Ochre) UGA[B] Stop (Opal) A
UUG UCG UAG[B] Stop (Amber) UGG (Trp/W) Tryptophan G
CUA CCA CAA (Gln/Q) Glutamine CGA A
GUA GCA GAA (Glu/E) Glutamic acid GGA A
B ^ ^ ^ The historical basis for designating the stop codons as amber, ochre and opal is described in an autobiography by Sydney Brenner[44] and in a historical article by Bob Edgar.[45]
Inverse table for the standard genetic code (compressed using IUPAC notation)
Amino acid Codons Compressed Amino acid Codons Compressed
Asn / N AAU, AAC AAY Met / M AUG
DNA codon table[edit]
Alternative genetic codes[edit]
Non-standard amino acids[edit]
In some proteins, non-standard amino acids are substituted for standard stop codons, depending on associated signal sequences in the messenger RNA. For example, UGA can code for selenocysteine and UAG can code for pyrrolysine. Selenocysteine became to be seen as the 21st amino acid, and pyrrolysine as the 22nd.[46] Unlike selenocysteine, pyrrolysine-encoded UAG is translated with the participation of a dedicated aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase.[47] Both selenocysteine and pyrrolysine may be present in the same organism.[48] Although the genetic code is normally fixed in an organism, the achaeal prokaryote Acetohalobium arabaticum can expand its genetic code from 20 to 21 amino acids (by including pyrrolysine) under different conditions of growth.[49]
Variations on the standard code were predicted in the 1970s.[50] The first was discovered in 1979, by researchers studying human mitochondrial genes.[51] Many slight variants were discovered thereafter,[46] including various alternative mitochondrial codes.[52] Small variants such as translation of the codon UGA as tryptophan in Mycoplasma species, and translation of CUG as a serine rather than leucine in yeasts of the "CTG clade" (such as Candida albicans).[53][54][55] Because viruses must use the same genetic code as their hosts, modifications to the standard genetic code could interfere with viral protein synthesis or functioning.[56] However, viruses such as totiviruses adapted to the host's genetic code modification.[57] In bacteria and archaea, GUG and UUG are common start codons. In rare cases, certain proteins may use alternative start codons.[46] Surprisingly, variations in the interpretation of the genetic code exist also in human nuclear-encoded genes: In 2016, researchers studying the translation of malate dehydrogenase found that in about 4% of the mRNAs encoding this enzyme the stop codon is naturally used to encode the amino acids tryptophan and arginine.[58] This type of recoding is induced by a high-readthrough stop codon context[59] and it is referred to as functional translational readthrough.[60]
Variant genetic codes used by an organism can be inferred by identifying highly conserved genes encoded in that genome, and comparing its codon usage to the amino acids in homologous proteins of other organisms. For example, the program FACIL[61] infers a genetic code by searching which amino acids in homologous protein domains are most often aligned to every codon. The resulting amino acid probabilities for each codon are displayed in a genetic code logo, that also shows the support for a stop codon.
Despite these differences, all known naturally occurring codes are very similar. The coding mechanism is the same for all organisms: three-base codons, tRNA, ribosomes, single direction reading and translating single codons into single amino acids.[62]
List of alternative codons[edit]
List of alternative codons
Amino acids biochemical properties nonpolar polar basic acidic Termination: stop codon
Comparison between codon translations with alternative and standard genetic codes
Code Translation
DNA codon involved RNA codon involved Translation
with this code
Standard translation Notes
Standard 1 Includes translation table 8 (plant chloroplasts).
AGG AGG Ter (*) Arg (R)
ATA AUA Met (M) Ile (I)
TGA UGA Trp (W) Ter (*)
CTT CUU Thr (T) Leu (L)
CTC CUC Thr (T) Leu (L)
CTA CUA Thr (T) Leu (L)
CTG CUG Thr (T) Leu (L)
TGA UGA Trp (W) Ter (*)
CGA CGA absent Arg (R)
CGC CGC absent Arg (R)
Mold, protozoan, and coelenterate mitochondrial + Mycoplasma / Spiroplasma 4 TGA UGA Trp (W) Ter (*) Includes the translation table 7 (kinetoplasts).
AGG AGG Ser (S) Arg (R)
ATA AUA Met (M) Ile (I)
TGA UGA Trp (W) Ter (*)
Ciliate, dasycladacean and Hexamita nuclear 6 TAA UAA Gln (Q) Ter (*)
TAG UAG Gln (Q) Ter (*)
AGA AGA Ser (S) Arg (R)
AGG AGG Ser (S) Arg (R)
TGA UGA Trp (W) Ter (*)
Euplotid nuclear 10 TGA UGA Cys (C) Ter (*)
Bacterial, archaeal and plant plastid 11 See translation table 1.
Alternative yeast nuclear 12 CTG CUG Ser (S) Leu (L)
AGG AGG Gly (G) Arg (R)
ATA AUA Met (M) Ile (I)
TGA UGA Trp (W) Ter (*)
AGA AGA Ser (S) Arg (R)
AGG AGG Ser (S) Arg (R)
TAA UAA Tyr (Y) Ter (*)
TGA UGA Trp (W) Ter (*)
Blepharisma nuclear 15 TAG UAG Gln (Q) Ter (*) As of Nov. 18, 2016: absent from the NCBI update.
ATA AUA Met (M) Ile (I)
AGA AGA Ser (S) Arg (R)
AGG AGG Ser (S) Arg (R)
AAA AAA Asn (N) Lys (K)
TAG UAG Leu (L) Ter (*)
Thraustochytrium mitochondrial 23 TTA UUA Ter (*) Leu (L) Similar to translation table 11.
AGG AGG Lys (K) Arg (R)
TGA UGA Trp (W) Ter (*)
Candidate division SR1 and Gracilibacteria 25 TGA UGA Gly (G) Ter (*)
Pachysolen tannophilus nuclear 26 CTG CUG Ala (A) Leu (L)
Karyorelict nuclear 27 TAA UAA Gln (Q) Ter (*)
TAG UAG Gln (Q) Ter (*)
TGA UGA Ter (*) or Trp (W) Ter (*)
Condylostoma nuclear 28 TAA UAA Ter (*) or Gln (Q) Ter (*)
TAG UAG Ter (*) or Gln (Q) Ter (*)
Mesodinium nuclear 29 TAA UAA Tyr (Y) Ter (*)
TAG UAG Tyr (Y) Ter (*)
Peritrich nuclear 30 TAA UAA Glu (E) Ter (*)
TAG UAG Glu (E) Ter (*)
Blastocrithidia nuclear 31 TAA UAA Ter (*) or Gln (Q) Ter (*)
TGA UGA Trp (W) Ter (*)
The genetic code is a key part of the story of life, according to which self-replicating RNA molecules preceded life as we know it. The main hypothesis for life's origin is the RNA world hypothesis. Any model for the emergence of genetic code is intimately related to a model of the transfer from ribozymes (RNA enzymes) to proteins as the principal enzymes in cells. In line with the RNA world hypothesis, transfer RNA molecules appear to have evolved before modern aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases, so the latter cannot be part of the explanation of its patterns.[63]
A hypothetical randomly evolved genetic code further motivates a biochemical or evolutionary model for its origin. If amino acids were randomly assigned to triplet codons, there would be 1.5 × 1084 possible genetic codes.[64]:163 This number is found by calculating the number of ways that 21 items (20 amino acids plus one stop) can be placed in 64 bins, wherein each item is used at least once.[65] However, the distribution of codon assignments in the genetic code is nonrandom.[66] In particular, the genetic code clusters certain amino acid assignments.
Amino acids that share the same biosynthetic pathway tend to have the same first base in their codons. This could be an evolutionary relic of an early, simpler genetic code with fewer amino acids that later evolved to code a larger set of amino acids.[67] It could also reflect steric and chemical properties that had another effect on the codon during its evolution. Amino acids with similar physical properties also tend to have similar codons,[68][69] reducing the problems caused by point mutations and mistranslations.[66]
Given the non-random genetic triplet coding scheme, a tenable hypothesis for the origin of genetic code could address multiple aspects of the codon table, such as absence of codons for D-amino acids, secondary codon patterns for some amino acids, confinement of synonymous positions to third position, the small set of only 20 amino acids (instead of a number approaching 64), and the relation of stop codon patterns to amino acid coding patterns.[70]
Three main hypotheses address the origin of the genetic code. Many models belong to one of them or to a hybrid:[71]
• Random freeze: the genetic code was randomly created. For example, early tRNA-like ribozymes may have had different affinities for amino acids, with codons emerging from another part of the ribozyme that exhibited random variability. Once enough peptides were coded for, any major random change in the genetic code would have been lethal; hence it became "frozen".[72]
• Stereochemical affinity: the genetic code is a result of a high affinity between each amino acid and its codon or anti-codon; the latter option implies that pre-tRNA molecules matched their corresponding amino acids by this affinity. Later during evolution, this matching was gradually replaced with matching by aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases.[70][73][74]
• Optimality: the genetic code continued to evolve after its initial creation, so that the current code maximizes some fitness function, usually some kind of error minimization.[70][71]
Hypotheses have addressed a variety of scenarios:[75]
• Chemical principles govern specific RNA interaction with amino acids. Experiments with aptamers showed that some amino acids have a selective chemical affinity for their codons.[76] Experiments showed that of 8 amino acids tested, 6 show some RNA triplet-amino acid association.[64][74]
• Biosynthetic expansion. The genetic code grew from a simpler earlier code through a process of "biosynthetic expansion". Primordial life "discovered" new amino acids (for example, as by-products of metabolism) and later incorporated some of these into the machinery of genetic coding.[77] Although much circumstantial evidence has been found to suggest that fewer amino acid types were used in the past,[78] precise and detailed hypotheses about which amino acids entered the code in what order are controversial.[79][80]
• Natural selection has led to codon assignments of the genetic code that minimize the effects of mutations.[81] A recent hypothesis[82] suggests that the triplet code was derived from codes that used longer than triplet codons (such as quadruplet codons). Longer than triplet decoding would increase codon redundancy and would be more error resistant. This feature could allow accurate decoding absent complex translational machinery such as the ribosome, such as before cells began making ribosomes.
• Information channels: Information-theoretic approaches model the process of translating the genetic code into corresponding amino acids as an error-prone information channel.[83] The inherent noise (that is, the error) in the channel poses the organism with a fundamental question: how can a genetic code be constructed to withstand noise[84] while accurately and efficiently translating information? These "rate-distortion" models[85] suggest that the genetic code originated as a result of the interplay of the three conflicting evolutionary forces: the needs for diverse amino acids,[86] for error-tolerance[81] and for minimal resource cost. The code emerges at a transition when the mapping of codons to amino acids becomes nonrandom. The code's emergence is governed by the topology defined by the probable errors and is related to the map coloring problem.[87]
• Game theory: Models based on signaling games combine elements of game theory, natural selection and information channels. Such models have been used to suggest that the first polypeptides were likely short and had non-enzymatic function. Game theoretic models suggested that the organization of RNA strings into cells may have been necessary to prevent "deceptive" use of the genetic code, i.e. preventing the ancient equivalent of viruses from overwhelming the RNA world.[88]
• Stop codons: Codons for translational stops are also an interesting aspect to the problem of the origin of the genetic code. As an example for addressing stop codon evolution, it has been suggested that the stop codons are such that they are most likely to terminate translation early in the case of a frame shift error.[89] In contrast, some stereochemical molecular models explain the origin of stop codons as "unassignable".[70]
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74. ^ a b Yarus M, Widmann JJ, Knight R (Nov 2009). "RNA-amino acid binding: a stereochemical era for the genetic code". Journal of Molecular Evolution. 69 (5): 406–29. Bibcode:2009JMolE..69..406Y. doi:10.1007/s00239-009-9270-1. PMID 19795157.
75. ^ Knight RD, Freeland SJ, Landweber LF (Jun 1999). "Selection, history and chemistry: the three faces of the genetic code" (PDF). Trends in Biochemical Sciences. 24 (6): 241–7. doi:10.1016/S0968-0004(99)01392-4. PMID 10366854.
76. ^ Knight RD, Landweber LF (Sep 1998). "Rhyme or reason: RNA-arginine interactions and the genetic code". Chemistry & Biology. 5 (9): R215–20. doi:10.1016/S1074-5521(98)90001-1. PMID 9751648.
77. ^ Sengupta S, Higgs PG (2015). "Pathways of genetic code evolution in ancient and modern organisms". Journal of Molecular Evolution. 80 (5–6): 229–243. Bibcode:2015JMolE..80..229S. doi:10.1007/s00239-015-9686-8. PMID 26054480.
78. ^ Brooks DJ, Fresco JR, Lesk AM, Singh M (Oct 2002). "Evolution of amino acid frequencies in proteins over deep time: inferred order of introduction of amino acids into the genetic code". Molecular Biology and Evolution. 19 (10): 1645–55. doi:10.1093/oxfordjournals.molbev.a003988. PMID 12270892.
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Further reading[edit]
External links[edit] | <urn:uuid:cd361499-8a03-4566-b83a-d04418715fb6> | https://wikivisually.com/wiki/Genetic_code | en | 0.722207 | 0.246724 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
When S&P 500 implied volatility is already low there’s not much room for a further drop. That was the case going into this past week and as seen below with the S&P 500 climbing all four of the S&P 500 related volatility indexes were lower, but not by much.
VVIX in the mid 80’s remains high, but believe it or not that may reflect VIX Put buying instead of VIX Call purchasing. Demand for puts on any VIX strength or to take advantage of steep contango resulted in some large purchases last week. SKEW is also pretty high, but may be more of a function of lower IV for SPX options with strike prices that are not as far out of the money on the put side.
VXX Table
SVXY continues to march higher, benefiting from contango and low VIX. What’s good for SVXY is bad for the other two funds on this chart as VXX lost about 6.5% and UVXY was down over 13% last week. As a quick reminder VXX and VXZ prices will be higher on Monday as they undergo a 4 for 1 reverse split.
Finally, in the rest of the volatility world, developed market risk (excluding North America) was much higher last week with VXEFA climbing over 23%, although off a low base. AAPL volatility rose as well, despite earnings just having been announced. I believe there’s a product announcement in the future and there was some other news impacting AAPL shares last week. Finally, in the spirit of the Olympics, Brazil volatility gets the Bronze rising about 5% last week.
Vol Index Prices | <urn:uuid:dc1a4c50-0c45-4ce3-8053-0b1cff138f44> | https://www.cboe.com/blogs/options-hub/2016/08/06/weekend-review-volatility-indexes-etps-81-85 | en | 0.950771 | 0.025865 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
call money
Definition of call money
: money loaned or ready to be loaned on call
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call money
Financial Definition of call money
What It Is
Call money is a very short-term bank loan that does not contain regular principal and interest payments. It is often used by brokerage firms to finance margin accounts.
How It Works
Let's assume that Broker XYZ is a brokerage firm that is going to purchase several thousand shares of Company ABC on behalf of a large client. The client wants to purchase the shares on margin. The shares cost $2.5 million, and the client agrees to pay Broker XYZ for the shares in 28 days.
Because Broker XYZ believes the client will pay the money back as planned, Broker XYZ borrows $2.5 million in call money from BigBank so that Broker XYZ and its client can buy the shares now. BigBank does not establish a payment schedule for Broker XYZ because Broker XYZ expects to complete the transaction relatively quickly. However, BigBank reserves the right to call the loan (i.e., require Broker XYZ to repay the $2.5 million immediately) at any time.
BigBank sets the call money rate at LIBOR + 0.15%. If the bank chooses to call the loan before the 28 days is up, Broker XYZ can issue a margin call to its client, thereby requiring the client to repay the $2.5 million immediately as well.
Why It Matters
Call money is a way for brokerage firms to finance margin accounts or trade for their own accounts. Because call loans are unsecured and callable, they are in some ways riskier than other loans, but they also provide short-term liquidity that lubricates markets.
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| <urn:uuid:89d03586-e2c4-41c5-af9f-929ec16ebe74> | https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/call%20money | en | 0.902089 | 0.027285 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Time: D H M S
The only confusing thing about South Carolina's 2019 rate filings is that I'm not sure whether the "BlueChoice Health Plan" should be rolled in with the main Blue Cross Blue Shield of SC population. Carriers often have multiple listings in the same state for different policy lines, but they're generally listed under the same official corporate name. In this case, "BlueChoice" (which is clearly still part of BCBS) has a completely seaparate listing.
The BCBS filing clearly states the number of enrollees as around 203,000 people. The BlueChoice listing doesn't give a membership number, but appears to be roughly 6,800 people based on the full premium dollars they received in all of 2017 ($53.5 million divided by 12 months, divided by the statewide average of $654/month this year). This doesn't really make much difference, however, since BCBS still holds nearly 99% of the market anyway.
Assuming an 11.5% #ACASabotage factor (mandate repeal + shortassplans), this translates into unsubsidized enrollees having to pay an extra $900 than they'd otherwise have to (a 9.2% rate increase instead of a 2.3% rate drop).
Oklahoma is pretty clear cut: BCBSOK holds nearly all of the ACA-compliant market share, with CommunityCare HMO having a small number of off-exchange enrollees (the numbers are estimates based on last year's figures).
The Urban Institute projected an 18.4% rate increase due to #MandateRepeal and #ShortAssPlans. BCBSOK doesn't go into specifics about the impact, but does list both of these as significant factors. Knocking 1/3 off this projection gives around 12.4%.
Unsubsidized Oklahoma enrollees are paying an average of $694/month in 2018. Without ACA sabotage, they'd likely see this drop to around $595; instead, they're likely looking at paying roughly $681/month, or an additional $1,033 apiece.
North Dakota was one of only two states (the other one was Vermont) which didn't allow their insurance carriers to add any additional premium load into their 2018 rates to account for Donald Trump's cut-off of Cost Sharing Reduction (CSR) reimbursement payments.
In direct response to this, Medica Health Plans dropped out of the ND on-exchange individual market this year to avoid taking the CSR hit. They hung around the off-exchange market, however, and therefore still have about 600 enrollees in the state.
As a result of this, my estimated impact of ACA sabotage efforts by the Trump Administration and Congressional Republicans has to include the factors from both 2017 and 2018: Cost-Sharing Reduction cut-off (9%) as well as Mandate Repeal and Short-Term Plan expansion (13.8%).
New Hampshire is perhaps the most striking example of both insurance carriers significantly overshooting the mark for 2018 premiums while also proving my point that just because premiums are dropping next year, #ACASabotage is still causing unsubsidized enrollees to pay a lot more than they'd have to otherwise.
All three of the carriers offering ACA policies on New Hampshire's individual market are reducing their 2019 premiums, by anywhere from 7.4% for Harvard Pilgrim to a whopping 15.2% in the case of Ambetter/Celtic.
THe enrollee market share numbers come from the monthly report from the New Hampshire insurance department (I'd love it if every state required one of includes both on and off-exchange enrollees). The "PAP" column refers to NH residents enrolled in their "private option" Medicaid expansion program...but those are still part of the same risk pool as the other enrollees, so they still have to be factored into the market share formula.
Nebraska is about as simple as it gets--there's only one carrier offering ACA individual market plans. Unfortunately, they've redacted the combined average rate change request between their two plan entries, so all I can do is split the difference and assume around a 1% average increase.
The Urban Institute projected that Nebraska rates would see a whopping 20.4 percentage point increase due to #MandateRepeal and #ShortAssPlans, which are both referenced in Medica's filing. Since they don't get more specific than that, I'm assuming 2/3 of Urban's estimate, or a 13.6% increase.
Unsubsidized Nebraska enrollees are currently paying an average of $854/month, so if accurate, that's a difference of around $116/month or nearly $1,400 for the year. Ouch.
Mississippi is pretty easy: Only two carriers. I have no idea what their relative market share is (the enrollment data along with a lot of other stuff is redacted in their filings), but in this case it really doesn't matter because both of the carriers are requesting nearly identical rate changes anyway...which is to say, just about no change whatsoever.
The Urban Institute projected that #MandateRepeal and #ShortAssPlans would add a 17.2 percentage point rate hike factor in Mississippi. I generally knock 1/3 off of their estimates to err on the side of caution (11.4%), but given Ambetter specifically stating that they didn't add any increase to account for #ShortAssPlans (why?? interesting!), I'm shaving off a bit more and assuming a flat 10% impact.
This means that unsubsidized Mississippi enrollees would likely have saved a good $800 apiece next year without Trump/GOP efforts to undermine the ACA this year.
Kansas is pretty frustrating. There's only three carriers offering ACA individual market policies, but two of the three have heavily redacted actuarial memos, so I don't know what their market share is...and the same two were new (or "semi-new") to the exchange this year so I can't even use last year's effectuated enrollment as a guideline. In light of that, I had to split the estimate right down the middle to get an estimated overall market share.
In addition, Medica is the only one of the three to specifally mention mandate repeal and/or #ShortAssPlans as a contributing factor; that's also redacted in the filings for the other two. Therefore, instead of assuming 2/3 of the Urban Institute's sabotage projection, I'm being extra-cautious and assuming just half (9.6% instead of 19.2%). This gives a rough statewide average increase of around 6.1%, which would likely be closer to a 3.5% premium reduction without mandate repeal and short-term plan expansion.
Illinois has the same four ACA indy market carriers participating next year as they do this year. All four rate filings specificlaly call out Mandate Repeal and #ShortAssPlans as significant factors in their rate requests, but none of them break out the actual amount, so I'm relying on my standard assumption of 2/3 of the Urban Institute's projections.
In Illinois' case, that's 2/3 of 19.4%, or around a 12.9% #ACASabotage premium increase for unsubsidized enrollees.
I should also note that only one of the four carriers (Health Alliance) specifies just how many enrollees they have; for the other three I'm basing my estimates on last year's numbers for now. The two carriers with what I assume are still the largest market share (BCBS and Celtic) are basically keeping rates flat year over year, while the other two are 7.5% and 10% apiece, for an average rate increase of just 0.7% statewide.
Unsubsidized Illinois residents are currently paying $644/month on average, so a 12.9% sabotage effect means that each of them will have to pay nearly $1,000 extra next year. Ouch.
Idaho's insurance department website displays their annual rate filing summaries in a unique way--they don't publish the actual enrollment numbers, but they do post breakouts of the rate hikes for different metal levels (handy!) as well as the premiums brought in and claims paid out, which gives some refreshing insight into just how profitable (or not) some fo the carriers are (if I'm reading the screenshot correctly, it looks to me like BCBS and Mountain Health did just fine last year, but the other three carriers ended up in the hole (especially SelectHealth...ouch).
The state website also claims the overall weighted averge rate increase being requested in 8% even though my own spreadsheet brings it in at 9.4%. This could be due to my misestimating SelectHealth's enrollment number, or it could be because Regence Blue Shield cays they're raising rates 3.9% but the state claims it's 7% (although that should actually result in a higher average from the state, not lower...)
Delaware is pretty cut & dried: There's only one carrier, Highmark, offering ACA policies in the state. They're requesting a 13.0% average rate increase for 2019, and yes, they call out both the individual mandate being repealed and #ShortAssPlans being expanded by Trump and the GOP.
Unfortunately, they've redacted the specific percentages caused by those factors. The Urban Institute pegs it at 19.9%, but I err on the side of caution and only assume 2/3 of that amount, or right around...13%. If accurate, that means Highmark BCBSD would be keeping rates pretty much flat next year if those changes hadn't been made.
Arkansas has three carriers offering ACA individual market policies, but one of them is kind of/sort of split into two separate entities (QualChoice and QCA). Unfortunately, most of the key actuarial memo content has been redacted, so I'm missing data on market share for three of the four entries--Ambetter/Celtic is the only one which states outright their current enrollment number. For the other three I had to estimate based on last years data. For QCA and USAble (which is actually Blue Cross Blue Shield, for some reason), I had to sort of split the difference between the different entries to get the overall requested rate increases.
In terms of #MandateRepeal & #ShortAssPlans, the Urban Institute projected an 18.8 percentage point impact. 2/3 of that is 12.5%, so I'm estimating that without those factors, average unsubsidized Arkansas rates would be dropping by around 8% next year.
Only limited portions of Louisiana's actual rate filings are actually publicly available at either the SERFF database or the Rate Review site, making it difficult to get a bead on the weighted averages. Fortunately, this article in The Advocate does the work for me:
Obamacare premiums to drop in Louisiana in 2019 after years of rate hikes
After seeing years of rate hikes, Louisiana residents getting health insurance through the Affordable Care Act’s individual exchange will see premiums drop in 2019 by an average of 6.4 percent.
The direction is an abrupt turnaround for the individual exchange, created under the ACA —commonly known as Obamacare — to offer insurance to people who don’t receive it through their jobs or other means. Until now, Louisiana’s individual market has weathered years of rising premiums, including a jump of 18.5 percent on average for 2018.
Alaska has only a single insurance carrier offering ACA-compliant individual market plans, so it should be a piece of cake to calculate their average premium change, since I don't have to calculate the relative market share.
Unfortunately, some carriers submit multiple filings for different lines of business even if they both use the same "Actuarial Memorandum" to justify the incresae...and often times the memo itself is redacted, with the critical data (covered lives, percent increases, dollar amounts, etc.) blocked out, making it kind of useless for my purposes. Such is the case with Premera Blue Cross Blue Shield, the sole ACA market carrier in Alaska. Thanks in large part to the state's successful reinsurance program, they're dropping rates by 7% on most of their policies, and by 10.3% on the rest...but I don't know the relative portion of each, so I can't be sure what the weighted average of the two is. The second listing is for Health Savings Account plans only, so I'm assuming the bulk of their enrollees have the first types of policies, which suggests roughly an 8% overall premium drop.
(see update below)
Last year Alabama had only a single insurance carrier, Blue Cross Blue Shield, offering individual market policies anywhere in the state. For 2018, a new carrier, Bright Health Insurance, jumped into the AL market. For 2019, both companies are lowering rates--BCBSAL is only dropping theirs slightly, but Bright clearly way overshot the mark out of the gate and is lowering their prices by 15.5% overall next year.
Unfortunately, neither of the filings clarifies just how many enrollees either has, so I don't know what the relative market share is; I'm going to assume that BCBS held onto about 90% of the total given their monopoly hold last year and the fact that Bright is a new/unknown player in the market (not to mention the fact that Bright seems to have overpriced their first year). Obviously I'll have to change this if I receive hard numbers to the contrary. | <urn:uuid:64230f47-bcc3-4e76-b875-b99eaeaabb5e> | http://acasignups.org/tags/shortassplans?page=3 | en | 0.956619 | 0.154869 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Bbq, bhc involved in ugly legal tussle skirt steak tacos marinade
By nam hyun-woo korea’s second- and third-largest chicken franchise chains are locked in an ugly legal tussle, which stems in large part from growing corporate espionage allegations. Each side is asking for compensation, benefiting legal attorneys as the estimated total compensation over lawsuits exceeds 300 billion won ($277 million). According to industry sources on monday, no. 2 BHC and no. 3 genesis BBQ have continued expanding their legal actions since 2013. The total number of lawsuits filed during the period stands at 11 while five are pending. The most recent one was filed on feb. 27, in which BHC claimed it suffered losses when BBQ unilaterally canceled a contract on providing logistics service and demanded BBQ compensate some of the losses worth 53.7 billion won.Rohatyn group BBQ claimed, “adding that, the amount of compensation sought now reaches 300 billion won and this seems to be a strategy to shake BBQ.” “as soon as BHC’s sale was completed, it started to challenge the contract, and the relations between the two companies have worsened as much as they can,” BBQ said in a statement.
“under such circumstances how can we maintain the contract? And the cause for these litigations seems suspicious.” the saga started in 2013. BHC was a child company of genesis BBQ. BBQ initially attempted to put BHC up for an initial public offering, but sold it in june 2013 to rohatyn group, a U.S.-based investment fund management company, for 113 billion won.Filed complaint upon BHC’s sale, BBQ included its logistics center in gwangju and a food factory in gyeonggi province in the deal to raise the price. Then, the two signed the contract in which BHC would provide logistics services, sauces and other ingredients to BBQ for 10 years. A year later, rohatyn group filed a complaint with the international chamber of commerce claiming BBQ exaggerated the number of BHC franchises in the deal. After several years, BBQ was ordered to pay 9.6 billion won to rohatyn group, but still questions the complaint, on the grounds that “BHC head park hyun-jong led the deal for BBQ when he was a senior official at BBQ. How can he question the deal led by himself?” as BBQ payed only a part of the compensation, BHC filed a lawsuit with the seoul eastern district court and the court ordered a collection on BBQ.Rohatyn group BBQ countered by terminating the contract last april, saying it has to protect the secrets of its new recipes. BHC immediately filed a compensation suit, demanding 13.5 billion won and increasing the amount to 236 billion won in october. BBQ claims BHC is exaggerating the losses, saying they remain around 20 billion won. BHC said of these, “the point is BBQ has breached the contract and there would be no reason for us to file litigation.” along with the two major issues, both BBQ and BHC have exchanged fire over these cases. In 2014, BHC won a suit after claiming BBQ dumped due compensation to franchise owners after BHC’s sale. BBQ also sued a BHC employee citing differences in the inventories on the books and in actual storage.Head park in 2015, BHC sued a BBQ employee on charges of stealing the secret of its new sauce, while BBQ filed a complaint with the prosecutors. In july last year, BBQ filed a criminal suit against current and former senior officials at BHC, claiming they made unauthorized access to BBQ’s intranet and stole its new menu, business plans and marketing data. BBQ continued last november, accusing BHC head park of breach of trust and fraud, claiming park miscalculated the number of franchises during the acquisition deal but caused BBQ to compensate for the losses. | <urn:uuid:6ebcde39-1297-4717-b0e3-26197ece6130> | http://goodrecipes.50r.in/bbq-bhc-involved-in-ugly-legal-tussle-skirt-steak | en | 0.973445 | 0.040139 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
History's HEROES? 1780 - 1845
Elizabeth Fry
What she did
Her legacy
As a result of Elizabeth Fry's work, Ladies' Committees were set up as support groups for 'sisters inside' all over Europe. Some still exist today, as far away as Canada.
In her own time, she saw the number of crimes for which a person could be hanged reduced, from over 200 to just 5, and improvements to conditions for all prisoners. Her ideas became unfashionable during the mid 19th century but found favour again from the late 19th century onwards and still underpin many of the rehabilitation programmes today.
Terms and Conditions | <urn:uuid:cac0f8bf-667e-40a9-bef9-a0c70fde48fc> | http://historysheroes.e2bn.org/hero/achievements/108 | en | 0.962818 | 0.332286 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Friday, March 9, 2018
Language and Empathy in Cambodia
As published at OpEd News, Smirking Chimp, Unz Review, TruthSeeker, Intrepid Report and LewRockwell, 3/9/18:
Cambodia makes good, cheap beer, so I was sitting in some lunch place with yet another can of Angkor, after having polished off a plate of fatty pork with rice. Two tables away, a girl sat, doing her homework. She had a machine that sang out, “Old McDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O!” and so on. Suddenly, it switched to, “and girls… just want to have fun!” It’s all good, for it was all in English, and this girl needed a constant fix of the world’s master language, if she wanted to get ahead, that is, but what if English should wane as the lingua franca during her lifetime? It won’t matter much, as long as she can make a few bucks from her English skills.
Her ancestors built the greatest city in the world, Angkor, under a king, Jayavarman II, who declared himself “The Universal Monarch.” Now, the Cambodians are sneered at by even the Vietnamese, who never managed to build anything distinctive in wood, much less stone, but that’s history for you, for over time, all elephants will become dogs, to riff on a Vietnamese proverb.
Seven centuries from now, which American ruins will attract tourists? Maybe none. There will be a plaque, “Here existed the world’s most inveterate generator of illusions,” and in smaller type, “Big or small screen, soft or hard core, real or implant, they sure kicked ass! For a century, they mesmerized the world with Marilyn Monroe, Micky Mouse, Sylvester Stalone, Madonna and Black Panther, the last undoubtedly their most iconic contribution to Western civilization.”
Phnom Penh is even more ovenlike than Saigon, so during my many long treks, with my shirt soaked in sweat, I would stop at a coffee stand for one or two iced latte or lemon tea. Often, the menu would also be in English, even in neighborhoods that saw almost no foreigners, and though most baristas couldn’t speak English, they could readily understand “espresso,” “cappuccino” or “hot chocolate,” etc.
Perched on a stool, I was asked by the guy next to me, “Are you from Siem Reap?”
“From Siem Reap?! No, I came from Saigon.” I’m sure he meant, Had I visited Angkor Wat, near Siem Reap. Dark, with short hair, wearing chinos and a golf shirt, he was in his late 20’s.
“Saigon!” With so few words, one must exclaim. Across the street, four monks in saffron robes walked under yellow umbrellas, with a canopy behind them advertising Coca Cola.
“Yes, I’m Vietnamese, but I spent many years in the US.” To make myself easily understood, I detached each syllable, I noticed, so my speech became staccato. I was exclaiming, too. Unwittingly, I was ruining both my English and his.
Exhausted from the linguistic exertion, he returned to his tablet and ignored me for the several minutes, then, “Do you like soccer?” He pointed to a replay from the last World Cup.
“Yes.” I peered at the running figures. “That’s Brazil and Germany, no?” Spontaneously, I had suppressed “versus,” for I thought he would not know it.
“Yes, Brazil!”
Putting his tablet away, he turned to some thin book and started to mark it.
Noticing the roman script, I asked, “Are you studying English?”
“No, Spanish!”
“Yes,” and he brought his text closer. It was a Spanish guide to Angkor Wat, marked all over by a blue pen, red pen and yellow marker, with notations in both English and Khmer.
“Wow! This is incredible!” I staccatoed.
“I want to be tour guide,” he explained.
“Are you taking classes?”
“No classes?”
“There is no class!”
“No Spanish class in all of Phnom Penh?!”
“No class!”
“No way. There must be! So how do you study?”
“Like this.”
“Do you have anyone to talk to?”
“So no Spanish conversations?!”
“No. I contact Cuba! Embassy!”
“To do what?!”
“Help me!”
“Did they respond?!”
As for the Spanish-speaking tourists, he hadn’t been able to befriend any, not that they would likely want to waste their precious vacation time chatting with a Spanish language beginner.
On my first evening in Phnom Penh, I met a woman from Valencia. Planning on a quick Cambodia visit, she had to stay on because a man on a motorbike had snatched her backpack, which contained her passport, but that’s what she got for leaving it in the front basket of her rented bike. Muy estúpido. Julia was anxious to move on to Thailand, then Vietnam.
Thinking about my new friend’s predicament, I said, “You know, there are two Mexican restaurants, right around here. There’s one in that alley,” I pointed, “and one down the street. It’s called Cocina! Cartel! I don’t know if they are Spanish speakers, but you should go and find out.” It can’t be more desperate than reaching out to an embassy.
Hearing him read a few passages, it was clear his pronunciation was a mess, so his boldness and persistence may yield no cash, for there’s no reason why anyone should hire this man instead of just buying a guide book, I thought. Plus, a tour guide must be able to answer questions.
Online, though, I found this tidbit, “Un guía hispano-hablante cobra como mínimo 50 dólares el día, mientras que un guía en inglés puede cobrar 20 dólares. En dicho sentido, muchos guías camboyanos quieren aprender lenguas como el español y el italiano, para poder obtener mejores beneficios,” so there are already Spanish-speaking Cambodian tour guides.
A visitor gushed over one Mot Thon, “Todo fue de maravilla, habla correctamente en español, tiene mucho conocimiento de la historia del lugar, y nos respondía a todas nuestras preguntas con amplias explicaciones.”
Another is praised, “El guía Son fue excelente, muy recomendable […] Hispano hablante a la perfección, totalmente claro y dinámico. Una historia impresionante!!!!”
One more, “Kay is the best! What a renaissance man Kay is. He speaks English, Spanish and his native Cambodia as well of bits and pieces of Portuguese, Russian and French.”
One afternoon, I met a 48-year-old restaurant manager with the same aptitude. Born in Phnom Penh, she escaped to Thailand, with her family, at age five, then at age eight, emigrated to Singapore and stayed for 21 years. There, she studied Vietnamese for three months, “It was so easy. Vietnamese is like French, but with all the accent marks,” which is patently nonsense, but still, she spoke Vietnamese to me just like a native.
“I know seven languages.”
“Yes, I can also speak English, French, Russian and Japanese,” on top of Cambodian, Mandarin and Vietnamese.
“That’s not possible!”
“I have the gift,” she smiled. “And now, I’m studying Thai. When I was in Thailand as a child, I didn’t like Thai people, but now, I love them! I go to Thailand all the time.”
I have a friend, Niccolo Brachelente, whom I confirm can comfortably speak and write English, Spanish, French and Japanese, on top of his native Italian. Two years ago, Niccolo asked me to proof his resume so he could apply for a job in Taipei, so maybe he had picked up some Mandarin also. Oh, and he knows basic German.
One night, I ate at Pyongyang, a North Korean restaurant. There are 130 of these, but most are in China, with none outside Asia. The attraction is not the food, but the performing waitresses. They play instruments, sing and dance. The drummer was trying to channel Neil Peart, I’m sure. Drawing the loudest applause of the night, a beauty balanced a heavy jar on her head and spun around, I don’t know, thirty times? Wowed diners handed her seven plastic bouquets, available from the house for a fee. For one number, they actually sang “You Raise Me Up,” so even Kim Jong-un, one of America’s favorite villains, is instructing his women to sing in English. Depending on who came in, a waitress would speak in Cambodian, Chinese, English or, of course, Korean.
The point here is not that Cambodians, or anyone else, are linguistic geniuses, but as soon as you step outside the US, you’ll find many people who are quite eager to learn at least one foreign language, English, with some capable of acquiring one, two or three more, even in countries with embarrassingly low IQ. Even when they fail, the effort alone sharpens their minds and widens their orientation.
Since Americans already know English, so to speak, most don’t feel the need to bother with any language. Just hanging out and texting, they’ve mastered valley girl, Ebonics, death metal, double-wide or snark in ALL CAPS. Why think outside the continent-sized box when you’re already inside the belly of the beast?
In 2015, the Atlantic pointed out, “Less than 1 percent of American adults today are proficient in a foreign language that they studied in a U.S. classroom,” and 95% of the languages they do learn are European. Learning how someone speaks, one begins to understand how he sees and thinks, and the difficulties this entails also encourage humility.
Linh Dinh said...
Chuck Nafziger comments at OpEd News:
"Years back, while having a coffee in an airport lounge in Japan, from the nearby bar I heard a Japanese fellow trying to hit on an American young lady. He spoke perfect English and claimed to speak five languages. He quizzed her, "What do you call a person who speaks five languages?----polyglot. What do you call a person who speaks two languages?----bi-lingual. What do you call a person who speaks only one language?----American!"
"As an American, I sadly laughed."
grimychaz said...
Sooner than most think, the Chinese will be the world's administrative overlords, but they will be speaking English. In the meantime it may help to learn Mandarin to curry favor with the new bosses in town.
About Me
| <urn:uuid:9e44ecae-57f3-4329-b93b-d2497d427f18> | http://linhdinhphotos.blogspot.com/2018/03/language-and-empathy-in-cambodia.html | en | 0.904636 | 0.019073 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
I’m sure a lot of people seeing this will hate me for asking this on a Friday, but I’m wondering who consistently gets Sunday evening blues?
You know when the feeling of basking in the warm embrace of freedom and doing whatever you want for two days is gradually replaced by a hint of dread which reaches a climax on Sunday night. You try as hard as you can to keep the feeling at bay. But it hits back stronger.
Is that you?
If so, maybe it’s time to at least allow yourself to reflect on why things have got to this stage, and think about what you can do to change that feeling. I don’t mean just grumble about your work. I mean reflect on what action you can take to deal with the main issue(s) that makes you feel that way.
That doesn’t necessarily mean quit your job. Rather it is about being honest with yourself. Really honest with yourself.
Three key questions that constantly come up with clients when talking about their jobs are:
1) What is it about work that you dread? Is it the work itself? Your team? The environment? The hours? The stress? The way your energy drains over the course of the week? Not having time do anything else? Try and pin down the top 2 or 3 factors so you can be clear about what exactly is ruining your Sunday
2) What’s your role in this? Any psychologist will tell you that it isn’t a situation or circumstances that create an emotion or feeling. It’s our cognitive response to that situation. So as hard as the work might be, or as corrosive the atmosphere might be, its important to become clearer about why something bothers you. For example, if it’s the hours or work environment, what is it inside of you that makes you respond with a feeling of dread?
3) What can you do to tackle this? Consider this. There are 52 weeks in a year. If you take, say, 5 weeks of annual leave per year, that means you have 47 Sunday’s you don’t enjoy because you feel that constant dread and 47 Monday’s where you’re depressed because you’re back at work. That’s 94 days a year, or maybe a few less due to public and bank holidays. Either way, that’s nearly a quarter of the year spent feeling not great at all – which really is a waste. So ask yourself, what can you do to change this? Quitting your job is obviously the nuclear option (although one more and more people are taking). Can you tackle somehow the specific thing(s) that make you dread work? Can you change and reframe how you perceive these situations? Can you schedule in things during the week to look forward to? Do you have something on the side you enjoy doing (for me it was my Coaching business)? Just something to help change the energy. In my experience working with many successful Professionals, the negative energy around work drains them when it comes to other areas of life. So if you want to at least feel better for 90 days a year, it’s time to do something about it.
These are important steps to take when it comes come to changing things in a way where you don’t simply repeat the same mistakes. If you’re not quite sure how to go about answering the above questions, come and speak to me and I’ll help you.
I hope you enjoy your weekend – including Sunday. | <urn:uuid:5c77e4e8-fb91-4577-a5dd-b60fd637784e> | http://osmansabir.com/blog/1008/sunday-evening-blues-snap-out-of-it/ | en | 0.9668 | 0.148007 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Stopping Google app from downloading?
Discussion in 'Droid X Tech Support' started by drunkclever, Mar 21, 2012.
1. drunkclever
drunkclever Member
Aug 2, 2010
Likes Received:
Trophy Points:
So I pressed the "make available offline" button... apparently for my whole music collection... but now I can not get it to stop... and it has not finished... its been about 3 days. Its killing my battery all the freaking time.
Thank you
Sent from my DROIDX using Tapatalk
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stop google music from downloading | <urn:uuid:6aa5d644-08e1-4de5-91e6-f3b5fce2c114> | http://www.droidforums.net/threads/stopping-google-app-from-downloading.203083/ | en | 0.895615 | 0.272497 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
As Lutheran Christians, we maintain a dual citizenship in two kingdoms: one spiritual and the other earthly. But living out the Christian faith in witness and mercy while honoring the governments and rulers set in place can sometimes be tricky business. What happens when the government promotes lifestyles that are contrary to the Word of God? How does a Christian respond when it intrudes into the realm of the Church?
Please click here for resources on the topics of "Child Abuse" - "Domestic Violence" - "Sexuality" - "Religious Liberty" - "Persecution" - "Immigration" - "Disability" - "Marriage"
Make a free website with Yola | <urn:uuid:0fdf5984-7760-4ac3-8b89-8e038bf36f82> | http://www.faithabilene.org/social-issues.php | en | 0.896523 | 0.58415 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Mandalay - Filip Šubrt Photo
Ansel Adams .
Mandalay ( မန္တလေး) is the second-largest city and the last royal capital of Myanmar. Located 716 km north of Yangon on the east bank of the Irrawaddy River.
The city gets its name from the nearby Mandalay Hill. The name is probably a derivative of a Pali word, although the exact word of origin remains unclear. The root word has been speculated to be mandala, referring to circular plains or Mandara, a mountain from Hindu mythology.
Mandalay was founded by King Mindon in 1859, and was the last capital of an independent Burmese kingdom, annexed by the British in 1885. The city was built at the foot of Mandalay Hill; it was prophesied by the Lord Buddha that this spot would become a ‘Metropolis of Buddhism’ on the 2,400th jubilee celebration of the founding of Buddhism. In January 1857 the king issued a proclamation to establish a new kingdom (and city) to fulfill the prophecy. The royal city of Amarapura was moved by teams of elephants in July 1858 to the new site at the foot of Mandalay Hill.
The new city was called Yadanabon Naypyidaw, but in the Pali language it was known as Ratanapura, the ‘City of Gems.’ Its name was later changed to Mandalay, after the hill rising above it. When the British captured Mandalay in 1885, King Thibaw and his queen, Supayalat, fled to exile in India. The palace and fort were re-named Fort Dufferin, with the palace used for housing British and Indian troops. Many of the palace’s treasures were looted by the troops; and some of the most important pieces were sent to England where they can be seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum today.
During WWII, Mandalay was captured by the Japanese in May 1942. The occupying forces turned the palace and fort into a supply depot, which suffered significant damage from British bombing raids during the liberation of the city in early 1945. It wasn’t until the 1990s that a replica of the original palace was completed.
Mahamuni Buddha Temple
Maha Muni is the holiest pagoda of Mandalay and considered the second holiest place in Myanmar just after Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon.
This pagoda contains the most ancient Buddha image of Myanmar. The seated Mahamuni image is enshrined in a shrine which is topped by seven tiered roof. It is estimated 3.8 m high and weighs 6.5 tons, casted mostly by bronze, gilded by gold leaves of devotees over the time. From ancient time until now, the image is covered by a thick gold layer which is about 15 cm or 200 tons of pure gold and crowned by glittering diamonds, rubies, and sapphires. He now is wearing a royal costume in gold. Compare to his original figure, Buddha is distorted by his own gold leaves except for his face.
burmamandalyMahamuni Buddha TempleMahamuni Temple | <urn:uuid:0af28fc5-1d46-4464-9d35-89359f65d23d> | http://www.filipsubrt.com/Travel/Myanmar/Mandalay/i-mvFbjsm/ | en | 0.973358 | 0.031632 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Owners Denver
We'd love to know more about you, and why an Irish Wolfhound?
That's what we were asked and yes, that does make you think about it. Why an Irish Wolfhound? You love the breed and are fascinated by them or you don't like them at all. It's that simple, we think. Wil has had Irish Wolfhounds for at least 30 years and together we've had them for more than 20 years now. This beautiful breed will always be our favorite. They will always surprise us and make our hearts melt; together with other breeds they are wonderful too, are well aware of their strength and size. We consider ourselves very fortunate that we had two who lived well after their tenth birthday, and now we have another terrific well matched pair.
Denver is 7½, he's the teacher, a picture of health, all playfulness and strength. Denver's charisma commands admiration and respect in humans and animals. Boonnoo is almost 6 and has been suffering from epilepsy since he was 4, but the medication keeps it well under control now. He is certainly a magnificent, big , wiry Irish wolfhound, and his appearance will always make people take another look. He tries to run the show, is obstreperous and still very naughty. Together they play a lot, put on sprints every day and after that they rest together in one basket or they race each other for a spot on the sofa, and it happens often that we find them on there together.
Why would we take part in the outcross project? When we were approached with the request to have Denver take part in the outcross project we didn't hesitate for a minute, but said, Yes!
Why? You, having Irish wolfhounds yourselves, will probably say exactly the same as we did, our dogs are so wonderful, but the majority has such terribly short lives and that really should change. We want our beautiful breed to grow old in good health and we are delighted to help with that.
In the meantime our Denver has been taken through the usual health tests and the results are all good, so now he can make his special contribution to the outcross project.
And who are we?
We are Wil and Tilly, together we are Dog Shape Midden Nederland, the fresh petfood shop we are running from our home. We live in the Veluwe-region in the middle of the Netherlands, with our Irish wolfhounds, dachshund, cats, chickens, horse and sheep, enjoying life in the country. | <urn:uuid:0b92af3f-4f2f-4a5e-a877-b0534eb4238c> | http://www.iwhealthfoundation.com/the-outcross/owners-denver | en | 0.982973 | 0.033538 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
The Campaign For DA
Random Wednesday Morning Thoughts
• Wow: The Wise County Messenger's Wednesday edition will now be free. I'll speculate that the reason is this: Can you make more money off paid subscriptions or going to potential advertisers and telling them it is being sent to 27,000 houses?
• From the best I can tell from discovery disclosures of videos in my criminal cases, body cams are now fully or partially implemented at Decatur PD, Bridgeport PD, Boyd PD, and the Wise County Sheriff's Office. I don't think I've ever watched a video from DPS with a body cam. With their massive budget, that is surprising.
• His spelling is worse than mine:
• I told you Zuckerberg, who suffers from anxiety, would not like testifying before Congress. This moment (photo below) had to have been frightening for him. Overall, however, he did very well. That being said, Congressional hearings are nothing but a dog and pony show. If I were him, I would have been so tempted to tell them, "I'm the owner of a company where I allow citizens, even you, to make money off of me. I'm a billionaire because of the private sector and American Capitalism. You are government employees who live off of my taxes and all the Facebook users who pay taxes. You are our servants but have forgotten that. Get off my ass." Then you walk out. Look back and say, "If you want to subpoena me, do it. I'll show up. Let's see how that works out for you in the next election."
• One Congressman told him, with all America to see, "Your user agreement sucks." That may be true but that could be a scene right out of Idiocracy.
• Trump cancelled his South American trip. Why?
• I made this pun (the name of the album) the other day and the Females in the House told me it was an old joke. "Let me tell you where it came from," I said.
• For you old folks familiar with the songs on the album, I happen to know an incredibly successful businessman in Decatur who broke up with his high school girlfriend (temporarily) and told her, "It's time for me to fly." He came to his senses and has been married to her for at least 30 years.
• I had a brief but great discussion with someone at the courthouse yesterday about both of us retiring in the future. We both worried if we would get bored if we did. I thought it was funny that later in the day I saw that the coach of the Highland Park Scots, who had retired a month or so ago, announced that he was coming back.
• Oh, my!!! Fox News' Diamond and Silk attacked Ted Cruz! "Uh, huh! That's right!"
• I'm trying to convince Mrs. LL to get a picture of us with Stormy Daniels when she comes to Fort Worth. Unless we are both lazy that day, it's a done deal.
• Whatever happened to Boil In A Bag meals? (I think I've got that name right.)
• The original Roseanne was horrible. The new version is worse. And the fact that they actually use a laugh track in 2018 tells you all you need to know. (I'm ashamed that the great John Goodman would allow himself to be a part of it.)
• I've been beaten down for years from those who say, "I don't have anything to hide. The police can search my house at any time even without a warrant." Now those same people are upset about a good and honest man investigating Trump.
• If Trump "fires" Mueller, which the incompetent Sarah Huckabee Sanders said yesterday he had the right to do, the Justice Department would simply ignore him and the investigation and grand jury would continue. Who do you think wins that war? I know. We have no Kings in America. | <urn:uuid:8248f17b-6228-439b-b37f-f6a7d2765568> | http://www.liberallylean.com/2018/04/random-wednesday-morning-thoughts_11.html | en | 0.980278 | 0.032831 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
An Even Colder Spin on the ‘Frozen’ Hit Song ‘Let It Go’
Frozen‘s hit song Let It Go, about an ice queen, or ice princess or something, gets performed on what looks like an actual ice glacier, rather than an animated ice glacier like in the film.
The coldest musical performance you’ve ever seen.
It’s (probably) a lot colder on a real ice glacier than a cartoon one. But these guys stay warm with energetic playing.
Hey, they’re not even wearing hats.
Homemade Buttery Snowman Cookies... Because Santa Is Worth the Effort
This Molting Tarantula Looks Like Some Sci-Fi Creature Out of 'Alien' | <urn:uuid:428fe3d9-2855-4dcd-a753-ed0a053cbc8b> | http://www.visiontimes.com/2014/12/19/an-even-colder-spin-on-the-frozen-hit-song-let-it-go.html | en | 0.86407 | 0.095523 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Calls for the Start of the Holocene to be put Back 2,000 Years due to Lack of Mammoth Belches
American Scientists have linked the extinction of mammalian mega fauna by humans to the loss of methane from the atmosphere which in turn led to a global cooling event. In a paper published in the scientific journal “Nature Geoscience” a team of scientists from the University of New Mexico have put forward a theory that the killing off of a number of large mammal species by humans led to the removal of a substantial amount of methane from the atmosphere. This brought on a period of substantial cooling that severely affected temperatures in the northern hemisphere. This cooling period is known as the Younger Dryas and scientists claim that this event was brought on when the extinction of the mega fauna led to the loss of their planet warming burps.
Studies of ice cores indicate that the Younger Dryas event began about a thousand years after mass human migrations into the Americas from across the Bering Strait land bridge that linked Siberia to Alaska. With mass human migrations into the Americas this put pressure on the populations of giant herbivores such as Mammoths, Mastodons and ancient camels as these animals were hunted by the human migrants. With the extinction of these animals, the atmosphere would have lost the methane they contribute caused by the process of digestion of tough plant material. The scientists postulate that the loss of these methane producing animals contributed to the cooling event known as the Younger Dryas which saw temperature drops in parts of the northern hemisphere ranging from 4 degrees to 8 degrees Celsius.
According to ice core studies, the Younger Dryas event began about a thousand years after mass human migrations into the Americas 13,400 years ago, near the end of the last ice age. Within a thousand years of the human migrations more than 114 species of large plant-eaters became extinct and the study links the loss of the methane these animals would have produced with the cooling event. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, twenty times more effective than carbon dioxide when it comes to trapping heat in the Earth’s atmosphere and contributing to global warming.
As they digest plant material, large herbivores give off the gas, which, contrary to popular belief, escapes via the head in the form of burps and belches.
Could the Extinction of Mega Fauna Helped Cause Global Cooling?
Picture Credit: Schleich of Germany
Could the extinction of mega fauna such as the Woolly Mammoth (M. primigenius) have led to a change in the Earth’s climate?
To view a range of prehistoric mammal soft toys and dinosaur stuffed animals: Dinosaur Toys and Stuffed Animals
Study leader Felisa Smith of the University of New Mexico, stated that the methane was not released as these animals broke wind:
“Eighty to ninety percent of methane produced is in the form of a burp.”
At the onset of the Younger Dryas cooling event, atmospheric methane concentrations dropped two to four times faster than at any other period in our planet’s history according to the ice core studies. The fall was caused by all those missing methane burps that would have been produced by the herbivores.
Felisa Smith added:
“We estimate that just under ten teragrams [about ten million tons] of methane would have gone missing when these animals went extinct.”
As Ice Age atmospheric methane concentrations were about one third of what they are now, the missing emissions would have had a magnified impact, accounting for at least 12 to 15 percent of the methane reduction the researchers claim.
Traditionally geologists have said humans are now living in the Holocene epoch, which began 11,500 years ago. Smith and her team are among scientists who argue that Earth has entered a new age, characterised by widespread, human-wrought change, the Anthropocene. Other scientists have claimed the onset of the industrial revolution in the 18th Century should mark the dawn of a new geological age, highlighting the profound effect mankind has had on the Earth’s climate. However, if it is assumed that humans were responsible for the Ice Age die-offs, the advent of the Anthropocene should be pushed back to 13,400 years ago, into the Ice Age, the study authors say.
Felisa Smith commented:
“Any way you spin it, humans had a discernible effect on the environment prior to the beginning of the Holocene.”
| <urn:uuid:dcc7299d-b325-4f71-a763-0f44e05787d2> | https://blog.everythingdinosaur.co.uk/blog/_archives/2010/06/05/4545196.html | en | 0.940751 | 0.202821 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Figuring Out Massage
Informative Ways of Locating a Reliable Medical Massage Services
Medical massage is the act of putting pressure in your body to cure disorder that can cause pain which is a sustainable one. Therefore, when you need to choose a reliable massage therapist that will offer you with services. The medical massage therapist who you will hire will determine the type of services they will offer you. There is a high demand for the medical massage services since many people face the disorder that causes pain. Several medical massage therapists are in the market because the demand for their services is a bit high.
Some of the medical massage therapists have their private offices and some are located in the medical institution. You will, therefore, find it hard to choose the best therapist to offer you with the medical massage services. There are tips which will guide you when you need to choose the best therapist who will offer you the medical massage services. The below are some of the factors to consider when you need to hire the best massage therapist.
The knowledge of the massage therapist is the first consideration you should make when looking for the best massage therapist to use. You will only be addressed as a medical massage therapist when you have a certificate that shows your qualification for the job. You will thus consider the therapist who is proficient enough to provide you with the medical massage treatment. You will not make considerations of the medical massage services offered by the therapist that is not qualified enough for the job.
The second consideration you should make is the registration of the medical massage therapist when you need to choose the best one. The therapist should only start his or her operation upon approval by the local authorities. Therefore, you will be sure that the therapist is registered when you see the license of operation. Confirm is the license is from legal hands before you approve the services offered by the medical massage therapist.
The reviews of the medical massage therapist is the third consideration you should make when you need the best one. The most incredible information about the medical massage therapist is found when you speak to the patient who they have treated. The reputable massage therapist is the one you will choose to offer you the services you need.
When choosing a medical massage therapist, make consideration of the process you will pay to get their services. The quality of the services will determine the amount you will pay. Consider the massage therapist who you can afford for the cost of the services you need.
Getting Down To Basics with Colon
The Best Advice on Medical I’ve found | <urn:uuid:91e49d0b-c909-4769-b7a4-99c2859455bb> | https://healthfitnesskentucky.info/figuring-out-massage-2.html | en | 0.958473 | 0.028145 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Tag Archives: gymnastics
Take it to the cellular level
If I were asked to give one single advice to posterity, I’d say: STRETCH.
My life has changed by keeping two 15 minute sessions a day of stretching every and any muscle I can think of. The well-being that flows through a stretched body is better than sex. I was talented at sex and had my share. But this is better.
In fact, I’ve come to think that rather than going down the psychosomatic lane, that is our soul affects the health of our body, why not just inverse the whole deal? Since our minds are sooo creative, it stands to reason that for every little physical ailment, it creates a mental equivalent, sort of like explanations for a certain feeling in a way that makes sense.
SuperStock_1886-5181I may feel restricted, stifled, assaulted, apprehended, bound, withdrawn, feeble, unloved, neglected, and a whole slew of other things that I lack the nerve to list now. Obviously the mind picks scenarios from my environment to explain those feelings. We are so good at looking everywhere but inside. But then how come, when I stretch, all those scenarios don’t feel valid any longer? When on a cellular level, my body doesn’t get the scope of expansion it is capable of, why make up misery? Why not just STRETCH?
Can you get your nose to your knees? Well, that’s the scope of stretching in the average toddler body. No wonder we all are nostalgic about how things used to be better when we were young…
%d bloggers like this: | <urn:uuid:9d5d2f83-1254-4b0c-aaa6-7ac4749000a5> | https://irmaladouce.wordpress.com/tag/gymnastics/ | en | 0.947994 | 0.518589 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
In Service to the Deities, the Pharaohs Game
In Service to the Deities, the Pharaohs Game
The closest many will ever get to paradise; Duat is the gaming community fit for the Gods.
The Lands of Duat, more commonly referred to simply as Duat, is a gaming community. What does that mean? In the shortest possible explanation, we're a group of people who like to game together. Bam, that's it really. Except that there's more to it than that. The Duat mentality is that we work together, we collaborate, and we pool our resources (which include people) towards the common goal of dominating whichever games we are playing, and its varied sub goals.
How we run
Duat's organizational structure is pretty straightforward. We're culty, and we like it that way. Anyone who wants to begin their journey into the pinnacle of gaming excellence need only ask a member to recommend them.
The Caretaker is the highest authority within the community and is also a member of the Council of Deities. Ultimately, it's Greene's job to oversee all of Duat, and make sure we're thriving.
Heavenly Council
The Caretaker hand-picks the Gods to serve on the Council, and these individuals are responsible for overseeing the day-to-day interactions. In server terms, these individuals are Admins.
Imperial Collective
The Collective of Emperors are the senior members of Duat, and these individuals also serve as Moderators within our Discord.
Barons & Kings
Whether you're a member of the Grey Field or a part of the League of Crowns, being a member off Duat is always rewarding, and a challenge worth while. | <urn:uuid:5a3eb22a-853f-4bcb-b58e-d9ea55045f2e> | https://landsofduat.com/ | en | 0.972863 | 0.759797 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Is television watching really that harmful?
The Impact of Television on Early Childhood Brain Development
by Carly Seifert
As you walk by the television and hear Elmo singing songs about the number four to your toddler, it can be tempting to disregard all the fuss about too much television. After all, isn't your two-year-old learning so much from his furry friend? But the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) cautions against early and excessive television watching for good reason: too much TV early in life has been linked to developmental delays, attention problems and lower academic performance.
Early Experiences Matter
Between birth and age two, the brain actually triples in size--more rapidly than at any other time in a person's life. The brain has all the neurons it will ever have when a child is born, but the connections between the brain's neurons are formed based on a child's early experiences. It is important to make sure these early experiences are worthwhile and beneficial to your child's growth and development. Engaging in pretend play, coloring, spending time outdoors or visiting the zoo are experiences that help your child's brain form these important connections as they observe and participate in life in the "real world".
Though the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends against screen time before age 2, Dr. Dimitri Christakis, the Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Washington, says that most children are introduced to the television around four months of age. But when a leisurely field trip to the farm in kindergarten fails to mimic the fast-paced one a child saw on a television program, behavior and attention difficulties often result. When a child so young is exposed to the rapid image changes that come with early childhood TV programs, this can lead to ongoing struggles with ADD or ADHD later in life.
Reading and Language
A study done in 2002 by the Kaiser Family Foundation showed that children who had the television on frequently were less likely to read at all during the day, and if they did, they read for a shorter period of time than those with limited TV exposure, often resulting in low reading scores later in life. Having the television on also takes the place of families having conversations, which can lead to language delays in little ones. Language development happens best when a child has a conversation with an adult...not with Dora. The language and speaking a child hears from the television happens too quickly for a budding speaker to reap any type of real benefits. In contrast, when adults talk with toddlers, they often speak at a slower pace while looking directly at the child. This helps builds the child's confidence about speaking, while the slower pace helps the child's brain to process the sounds being made and expand her vocabulary. An adult can also ask questions that give children the opportunity to develop ideas and opinions as they answer.
More Important Work
Regardless of the negative effects of television on a child's developing brain, perhaps one of the lurking and most real dangers in watching too much TV (or watching TV before age two) is that it is replacing time in the "real world." The time a toddler spends watching cartoons could be better spent playing at the park, building with blocks or interacting with family. These activities are what ultimately provide the most benefits to a youngster's developing brain.
About the Author
Carly Seifert has been a piano instructor since 2001. She has also covered adoption and introducing children to the arts for "Montana Parent Magazine." Seifert graduated from University of California, Irvine with a Bachelor of Arts in drama.
Photo Credits
• Ryan McVay/Photodisc/Getty Images | <urn:uuid:2dd654d9-6053-4945-833f-2978c18d2f0e> | https://living.thebump.com/impact-television-early-childhood-brain-development-16605.html | en | 0.969274 | 0.025293 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Will there be a judgment day for animals?
I had a discussion with a British military person based on the fact that he asked me why God places more value on human life than other lifeforms on this earth and how can that be right. He also wanted to know why animals are considered inferior when they can intercommunicate like we do with each other. What happens to their souls once they die, are they judged like people? Animals commit terrible acts, such as taking other animal life and not always for food purposes, so how will they pay for these actions like people have to do? To me, these were very strange questions but I answered from the Scriptures that this is how God ordered things in Genesis, that mankind was to rule over the animals of the earth. How would you respond to these types of questions? Thank you very much and may the Lord help you in this.
God is sovereign over His creation
What right does God have to make the animals inferior to mankind? Since God created the world and all that is in it and the fact that He is God, He has the right to set up whatever order He chooses. He is the Potter and we are the clay. We cannot tell God what to do and how to do it. We are to be grateful that He has created us and given us an immortal soul, as opposed to the animals. The Apostle Paul, knowing that some of the members of the church in Rome were going to be bold enough to question God’s sovereignty, wrote to them the following:
The second important fact on the difference between animals and mankind is . . .
Mankind was created according to God’s own image and likeness
When the Bible explains the things created during the sixth day, we find the following:
I would like to draw attention to some specific differences between mankind and animals:
• The animals were created after their own kind while mankind was created according to the image and likeness of God
• The animals were placed in mankind’s rule by God
What happens to animals’ souls when they die?
First we must realize that the souls of animals and mankind are categorized very differently. Mankind’s souls are eternal while the souls of animals are not. There is not mention anywhere in the Bible that the souls of animals will experience judgment. There is a passage in the Bible that explains how animals will pay for their actions when they kill humans.
5 “Surely I will require your lifeblood ; from every beast I will require it. And from every man, from every man’s brother I will require the life of man. (Genesis 9)
This text indicates the actions that man must take when an animal takes a human’s life, that is, man must put the animal to death.
Animals were created by God for mankind, yet mankind, God’s crowing achievement in creation, is to take care of the animals that God has placed under his rule. The Bible says the following:
10 A righteous man has regard for the life of his animal, But even the compassion of the wicked is cruel. (Proverbs 12)
We have two cats of our own that hang around our yard. The neighborhood cats began to hang out in our yard more than at their own homes. We do not really like this and would prefer that the other cats would remain in their own yards instead of ours. The cats do not seem to agree with our way of thinking though. I do not know why they think that they bring us more joy by being in our yard than bringing their own masters’ joy by staying at home, but that is the way that it is. Right now we are in the middle of winter and the other night it was -16 degrees F. outside so we gave our cats a warm place to sleep for the night. The next night, all of the other cats showed up with sad eyes looking for a warm place to sleep too. We had mercy on them and allowed them to sleep in the warm place as well. Now it is morning and they are all meowing, wanting us to let them out so that they can run around.
Translation by: Erik Brewer | <urn:uuid:b1938118-5659-43fb-bc18-3fbe03bb8f46> | https://moldovacrestina.md/en/will-animals-be-judged-by-god/ | en | 0.980827 | 0.074686 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
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Hollywood broken leg theory - Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway [entries|archive|friends|userinfo]
Marissa Lingen
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Hollywood broken leg theory [Jun. 10th, 2010|04:46 pm]
Marissa Lingen
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One of my friends has posted a bit under friendslock about dealing with a health-related thing that is also a work-related thing; you can see why this would be understandably private and not the sort of thing I would be poking this friend to unlock. So I wanted to pull what I was thinking out here where I can poke at it and not poke at my friend's private issues as well.
The thing is, I think we are, as a culture, sort of in love with the broken leg model of illness, injury, and disability.
Here's what makes the Hollywood broken leg model so shiny.
With a broken leg, you:
*know what has happened.
*know when it happened AND
*know it right away.
*know what to do to fix it.
*know about how long it will take to heal.
*know that it will not suddenly get less healed for awhile in the middle and then jump back to more healed again.
*can easily predict which things will stress the injury.
*know that it will be completely fixed when treatment is done.
*have at least some theory of where the person experiencing it falls on the continuum of sinner ("What were you doing on top of that water tower at 3 a.m. anyway? You're lucky it wasn't your neck!") to saint ("Hit by a drunk driver while helping an elderly nun across the crosswalk? Let me fluff that pillow for you, you poor baby!").
*do not have any doubt as a casual passerby whether there is something wrong, or what.
Of course, not all of this is actually true of broken legs, even! (I have edited in a few spots to add "Hollywood," because I want it to be absolutely clear that I know that my friends' leg injuries to not come with these magical advantages.) It's just the assumption from people who don't have the said broken legs. But it is a mighty convenient set of traits for an illness, injury, or disability to have. And the farther from this model your actual illness, injury, or disability goes, the more frustration you are likely to face from other people, because their questions are likely to be centered around the broken leg model.
Why didn't you go in sooner? they will snap. Sometimes they don't even notice that they are snapping, and if you point out that they're snapping, you need to stop being defensive. But see: if you break your leg, there are bits of broken leg sticking out, and you are an idiot for not going right in, right now! But what if you wake up just exhausted one morning? Should you go to the doctor that morning? "How long have you been exhausted?" the doctor will say. "Since this morning," you say. Wrong answer. Get more sleep, or less sleep. Get more exercise, or less exercise. Eat differently. Change something up. What if you feel a little dizzy? If you're female, does this correlate with your menstrual cycle? Well, if you've only had it for one day, you can't really say, can you? Why didn't you go in sooner? Because some things are not a broken leg. And if you get a history of going in and mentioning things that have not really been a problem very long, if you're not very lucky, you get a doctor who writes down "hypochondriac" or "drug-seeking," and then when it's still a problem later, you've got that to deal with. The cardiac surgeon's memoir I read recently acted as though women could go in with fatigue and find out whether they'd had a heart attack every time they had fatigue, since fatigue is the main symptom of heart disease in women, and I laughed and laughed. It is not some feminine perversity that makes that not happen. Really, really not.
Why don't you take meds for that? they will ask. Because naturally there are meds for that in existence. And they work for you. And they don't interact badly with anything else you have to take. It's just spite that makes you not take them, or spite that makes you take them wrong so that they don't work perfectly. This is the twenty-first century! They can fix things! Who can? You know--They! They can! Them! They would have already if you had only gone in sooner! What these people mostly want is for you to have a big plaster cast on your kidney, your endocrine system, your ears, or whatever else is not working--in some cases your actual broken leg that was not perfectly fixed by divine fiat somehow, because the world does not magically work like that--so it can fix the thing, they can sign it, and then in a few weeks somebody can come along and saw the thing off and everybody can go skipping merrily along. Most of us want this too. It just doesn't happen to work that way.
I'm pretty sure I do this to people, because one thing I've learned in the last few years is that we are all really terrible at spotting the ins and outs of illnesses, injuries, and disabilities not our own, so one of my new self-checks before I open my mouth is going to be, "Am I trying to treat this like a Hollywood movie of a broken leg again?" Too many of the formal things we have set up for employment and compensation are working on the broken leg assumption. The least we can do is not perpetuate them when we have the option.
[User Picture]From: jenett
2010-06-11 03:33 am (UTC)
You are brilliant. (And I do hope to be making some posts less under lock about some of it, but am being sensible and waiting till the current work stuff is not on the table before I do.)
(Reply) (Thread) | <urn:uuid:b9a12473-6fb6-4ff0-9ebc-54b8a15e795c> | https://mrissa.livejournal.com/723084.html?thread=13073804 | en | 0.969571 | 0.661719 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
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Thing > Intangible > BedDetails
An entity holding detailed information about the available bed types, e.g. the quantity of twin beds for a hotel room. For the single case of just one bed of a certain type, you can use bed directly with a text. See also BedType (under development).
PropertyExpected TypeDescription
Properties from BedDetails
numberOfBeds Number The quantity of the given bed type available in the HotelRoom, Suite, House, or Apartment.
typeOfBed BedType or
Properties from Thing
alternateName Text An alias for the item.
description Text A description of the item.
identifier PropertyValue or
Text or
image ImageObject or
mainEntityOfPage CreativeWork or
Inverse property: mainEntity.
name Text The name of the item.
subjectOf CreativeWork or
A CreativeWork or Event about this Thing..
Inverse property: about.
url URL URL of the item.
Instances of BedDetails may appear as values for the following properties
PropertyOn TypesDescription
bed HotelRoom or
Available properties in extensions
This element is based on the STI Accommodation Ontology, see for details. Many class and property definitions are inspired by or based on abstracts from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Schema Version 3.4. | <urn:uuid:f0bf026f-0a09-40ba-908e-69ff2bd1e9ce> | https://schema.org/BedDetails | en | 0.76042 | 0.032399 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Tag Archives: Treaty
Peace and Friendship Treaties
The Summer of the 1815 Peace and Friendship Treaties
1815 – Just as residents of Saint Charles were the last to know of the beginning of the War of 1812, news of its end would come just as slow. Too slow to prevent the horrible incidents that would occur during the spring of 1815. By late that summer, the Nation’s history would converge and collide at a small settlement called Portage des Sioux. There the Peace and Friendship Treaties between the Kings, Chiefs, and Warriors, of the Tribes or Nations, in behalf of their said Tribes or Nations, on the one part; and the American representatives William Clark and Ninian Edwards of the other part; were signed. A turning point in American history. The beginning of westward expansion; and the end of the American Indians way of life.
On the frontier in the St. Charles District of the Louisiana Territory, Daniel Boone’s grandson James Callaway, had taken command of Nathan Boone’s company of Rangers at Fort Clemson on Loutre Island. They were about to mount another campaign, so Callaway had sent many of his men home to prepare, when the Sauk and Fox stole several horses. The alarm sounded, and Callaway gathered several of his men still at the Fort and took off in a westward pursuit. Following the trail up the dry fork of the Loutre creek, they discovered an abandoned Indian camp, with their horses and a few Indian women. They retrieved their horses, and turned towards home. Some of the men believed that to return the same way they had come would take them into a trap. It did. As they forded the creek, they were fired upon and Daniel Boone’s son, Capt. James Callaway was shot. He and five other soldiers lost their lives that day.
In May, atrocities against the settlers continued, unknowingly and despite the events in the East. Bands of the Sauk and Fox attacked the Ramsey family, murdering and scalping the entire family, except a two year old and an infant. The final battle in the St. Charles Territory would come May 24, 1815, called the Battle of the Sinkhole. Black Hawk and a band of Sauk Indians attacked Fort Howard (City of Troy) north of the Cuivre River. That ambush on a group of American Rangers led to a prolonged siege in which seven Rangers were killed. This is considered by many to be the last battle of the War of 1812 in America. Finally, word had reached the frontier about the Treaty of Ghent signed five months before.
The United States assembled all Chiefs of any Nation that touched the waters of the great Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, to treaty with them. These treaties, at the conclusion of the War of 1812, were to bring Peace and Friendship between the residents of Missouri and Illinois and the Native Americans. This was the opening of the United States westward expansion. This was the beginning of the end for way of life that the Native Americans had known for centuries.
President James Madison called for a Treaty to be made with the Indians, and selected Portage des Sioux for the location. He appointed Gov. Wm Clark, Illinois Gov. Ninian Edwards, and Col. Auguste Choteau to handle the affair. With the U.S. showing their strength with Col. John Miller and his Third Infantry, and almost the entire force under Gen. Daniel Bissell stationed at Ft. Bellefontaine in one place, the drums began to roll. The tribes began arriving July 1st and negotiations lasted for months, with Black Hawk never signing. But the War of 1812, our Indian War, was finally over.
Its location made Saint Charles a passageway for all the Indian nations to the north, who had hunted this area for years prior to the arrival of the white man. Settlement was scattered. St. Louis and St. Charles (the oldest city north of the Missouri River) had begun as trading posts for French Canadians fur traders, whose lives had melded with the Native American Indians by the time of the Louisiana Purchase. The purchase gave America a place to push all of the displaced tribes east of the Mississippi. It wasn’t long before the settlers followed. By 1804, there were already over 100 homes and 450 residents in St. Charles.
ON MARCH 11, 1815, President James Madison appointed William Clark, governor of Missouri Territory and Ninian Edwards, governor of Illinois Territory to extend invitations to the Chiefs of all Indian Nations of both territories to treaty following the end of the War of 1812.
The treaty signings at Portage des Sioux were to occur between July 18 and September 16, 1815, with the Osage signing their Treaty on September 12, 1815. These events were a turning point in our Nation’s history. While it was the opening of America’s west for expansion, it was the beginning of the end for the American Indian’s way of life. This series of treaties officially marked the end of conflicts between the U.S. and the Native Americans in the west, at the conclusion of the War of 1812, with a purpose to “restore to such Tribes or Nations respectively all the possessions, rights, and privileges which they may have enjoyed or been entitled to in 1811″.
The treaties formed the legal basis in which tribes were relocated west of Missouri into Indian Territory, clearing the way for Missouri to enter the Union. President James Madison appointed Gov. Wm. Clark, Governor Ninian Edwards and Auguste Chouteau to arrange the treaty, by extending 37 invitations to the Chiefs. The tribes signing (in order of dates) were the Potawatomi, Piankeshaw, Teton, Sioux, Makah, Kickapoo, Wyandot, Osage, Fox, Iowa, and composed the largest gathering of tribes ever seen in Missouri, or west of the Mississippi.
The Treaty read
THE parties being desirous of re-establishing peace and friendship between the United States and the said tribes or nations, and of being placed in all things, and in every respect, on the same footing upon which they stood before the war, have agreed to the following articles:
ARTICLE 1 Every injury, or act of hostility, by one or either of the contracting parties against the other, shall be mutually forgiven and forgot.
ARTICLE 2. There shall be perpetual peace and friendship between all the citizens of the United States of America and all the individuals composing the said tribes or nations.
ARTICLE 3.The contracting parties, in the sincerity of mutual friendship recognize, re-establish, and confirm, all and every treaty, contract, and agreement, heretofore concluded between the United States and the said tribes or nations.In witness whereof, the said William Clark, Ninian Edwards, and Auguste Chouteau, commissioners as aforesaid, and the king, chiefs, and warriors of the said tribes or nations have hereunto subscribed their names and affixed their seals, this twelfth day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and fifteen, and of the independence of the United States the fortieth.
Wm. Clark, [L. S.]
Ninian Edwards, [L. S.]
Auguste Chouteau, [L. S.]
Done at Portage des Sioux, in the presence of—
R. Wash, secretary of the commission,
Thomas Levers, lieutenant colonel, commanding First Regiment, I. T.,
P. Chouteau, agent Osages,
T. Paul, C. C. T.,
James B. Moore, captain.
Samuel Whiteside, captain.
Jno. W. Johnson, United States, factor and Indian agent,
Maurice Blondeaux.
Samuel Solomon,
Noel Mograine,
P. L. Chouteau,
Daniel Converse, third lieutenant.
On Saturday, September 12, 2015 at 1:00 p.m. the City of Portage des Sioux invites the public to join us for a ceremony to commemorate the signing of the Peace and Friendship Treaties. Our special guests will be the Principal Chief of the Osage Nation, Geoffrey Standing Bear; State Representative Anne Zerr; St. Charles County Executive Steve Ehlmann; and Bud Clark, 3rd Great Grandson of William Clark. The ceremony will be located in the original location called “the pecan grove” where the treaties were signed in 1815.
It is suggested that the public bring lawnchairs and blankets. Portage des Sioux is on Hwy 94, and approximately 14 miles north of its intersection with Hwy 370. There will be signs with directions that day.
May 1804
Saint Charles, May 1804
The War of 1812 began with President Jefferson’s purchase of the Louisiana Territory in 1804. Westward expansion, Manifest Destiny, Louisiana Purchase are the same. Quite a deal had been cut because France needed the money. Saint Charles territory stretched northwest of the Missouri River to uncharted lands. After the Corps of Discovery departed that May, the Territory’s trickle of settlement began. We were far outnumbered though, by the Indian tribes as the Territory contained nearly the entire domain of the Sauk and Fox. We lived with the constant fear of attack.
When Sauk and Fox killed several settlers north of Saint Charles, they turned over one of the warriors involved in the incident, with a petition for pardon to Governor Harrison. The result was a Treaty, in 1804, that read,
“As long as the lands that are now ceded to the U.S. remain their property, the Indians belonging to the said tribes shall enjoy the privilege of hunting on them.”
Some questioned whether the U.S. even really had the right to Treaty as the acquisition was so freshly inked. The land involved included today’s Saint Charles County.
By 1812, we did not know that our young country had just officially gone to war for the first time, with President Madison’s signature. Without today’s internet, facebook, blogs and tweets, they were totally unaware that the House of Representatives had hotly debated the issue, behind closed doors, ending with the closest vote for war in our Nation’s entire history. For most of the United States, this war would be over the issues of trade embargoes and the capture and forced service of over 10,000 of our men into their British Navy. But for those living here on the frontier, it was the Indian War, and we had been fighting it here for years. The British used the Indian tribes, inciting them to harass and slaughter, because of our expansionist activities. Britain was involved in a fierce struggle with Napoleon in Europe. Our pride would not allow us to ignore these threats to our national honor, that most viewed as a continuation of our war for Independence. | <urn:uuid:81d2b4f5-de3b-4529-b2b0-dc5d428db3e4> | https://stcharlescountyhistory.org/tag/treaty/ | en | 0.953832 | 0.019748 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Have you ever watched a cartoon?
Once upon a fleeting time, in 1901, a child was born who would touch the lives of
millions of children. His name was Walter Elias Disney. And he loved to draw.
Early in the mornings, Walt would help his father and brother on a newspaper route.
He learned to work hard. In the evenings, Walt would draw. He practiced by copying
comics from newspapers. He liked to work with watercolors and crayons.
In high school, Walt was the cartoonist for the school newspaper and took art
classes. Once his neighbor paid him to draw a picture of his horse. Walt got a job as an
illustrator at the age of 18. All the time he spent drawing paid off.
Walt grew up to become a cartoonist, film producer and animator. Animators are
artists that specialize in the creation of animation. Animation is the process that makes
drawings seem to move. Before computers, artists drew pictures by hand for each
frame of a film. Each picture was slightly different from the other, making it look like the
drawing was in motion.
Ub Iwerks was a friend of Walt’s and together they drew a funny, animal cartoon
character named Mickey Mouse, who became the official mascot for the Walt Disney
Company. Mickey Mouse appeared in one of the first sound cartoons.
Disney Company films include the stories of Pinocchio, Snow White and the Seven
Dwarfs, Bambi, Dumbo, Fantasia, The Three Little Pigs, Cinderella, Peter Pan,
Treasure Island, Robin Hood, Lady and the Tramp, Mary Poppins and many more.
There was a total of 81 films that Walt Disney was involved in making.
Disney theme parks are fun places to go to. There are amusement rides, shows and
Disney characters to see. The parks are located in California, Florida, Japan, France,
Hong Kong, China, and Hawaii.
Mr. Disney died of lung cancer at the age of 65. His family built the Walt Disney
Family Museum in San Francisco. Over his life time, Walt Disney and his staff received
more than 950 honors and awards from around the world.
Disney holds the record for the most Academy Awards earned by an individual, 22 | <urn:uuid:e4369f04-7756-4d99-83e0-6a6fed0c5ccf> | https://www.americankidscreate.org/walt-disney/ | en | 0.979862 | 0.212144 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Benefits of buying a home through mortgage
Getting money to buy a house is not easy. Not everyone has enough money to pay cash for a house. This is why we have alternative methods of buying a house like a mortgage. A mortgage is an ideal home ownership method for people who have a constant income and can repay for the house over a large period. Most of the mortgage financing are offered by a financial institution. You can look at advertised comparison rate for mortgage. You can get the rates offered by the different financial institutions and choose the best one for you.
Why mortgage?
Making home ownership affordable
To buy a home, you need a large sum of money if you are planning to get the hsdasdasdsadasome on a cash basis. This means that you have to save for money years. Financial institutions understand that not everyone can be able to afford the cash payment method. This is why most of the banks offer home buyers loans that are payable over a large period. By making small payments every month, homeowners can be able to own the home at the end of the payment method. This eases the huge task of accumulating a large amount of cash.
Gain benefits of living in the house
Once you decide to buy a house on mortgage, you have the luxury of living in the house while you are still paying for the house. This means that you get to enjoy the house even before you finish paying for it. While living in the house, you can save the amount that you could have used in paying for rent. Instead of paying rent for an apartment that you will never own, the best method is to start paying for a mortgage and get the opportunity to own the house after the repayment method.
Flexible method ofsadasdasdas repayment
A mortgage is usually payable over a certain period. There are some that can be paid as long as 30 years. This means that you have the luxury of making specific monthly payments until the whole loan is cleared and the house fully becomes yours. On the other hand, if you happen to find some money in advance, you can pay for the house and clear the balance. The earlier you pay for the house, the lower the interest rate. | <urn:uuid:6dea6f76-a0c2-46dd-9589-35e7a4ef25c2> | https://www.luisengroba.com/benefits-of-buying-a-home-through-mortgage/ | en | 0.972896 | 0.918291 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
T: 01327 828602 - E: enquire@manorial.co.uk
These are just a small selection of frequently asked questions, should you have any additional questions about our service or titles please contact us and we will be happy to assist you.
Our Titles
Q. What Titles do you sell?
A. English Lordship Titles and Barony Titles.
Manorial Counsel offer three types of title for sale;
• Lordship Titles; Lordship Titles where extensive research concludes there is very little recorded history. An opportunity to acquire a title at an attractive price.
• Exclusive Lordship Titles; Lordship Titles where extensive research identifies a known documented history.
• Barony Titles; A very exclusive selection of these incredibly rare titles are available to buy from Manorial Counsel. It is estimated that approximately only 300 feudal baronies ever existed.
Q. Why are Barony Titles more expensive?
A. There are believed to have only been around 300 Baronies, compared with several thousand Lordships. Therefore their rarity, prestige and exclusivity is reflected in the price.
Q. Do Lordship Titles and Barony Titles come with a Ladyship and Baroness?
A. Yes, all Lordship Titles and Barony Titles include the Ladyship and Baroness Title. The rights were afforded to historic owners of the Lordship or Barony, as both titles (Lordship and Ladyship, or Baron and Baroness).
So for example you can purchase the title as a female, you would own the title in its entirety but would simply use the Lady or Baroness part of the title.
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What Is a Church Community?
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Do you want to chat with a missionary?
Hi I'm Katie
I am 17 and just graduated high school. I love playing tennis and softball, and just having fun with my friends, and I'm a Mormon.
About Me
I have always had a love for sports, and I play both tennis and softball competitively, but my friends and I play just about any sport just for fun. I am going to college to major in Journalism, and hopefully one day you can all watch me argue with Skip Bayless and Stephen Smith about the sports world. Besides sports I love to hang out with my brother, he is my one of my best friends and we do just about everything together.
Why I am a Mormon
I am a recent convert, and I can not be happier with my decision to join the church. When I was making this choice I took a leap of faith, and I was greeted with many blessings of happiness. I think the biggest thing for me was that the people that I met were just normal people like you and me. They were not weird or overly preachy, but they knew where they came from, what they needed to do, and where they were going. I find comfort and peace in this, and being around people with the same moral values as me make it so much easier to stay away from things that could potentially hurt me. Don't get me wrong I have had my trials like everyone else, but everything just seems easier with the gospel in my life, and it is hard to explain, but I am just genuinely happy.
How I live my faith
I try to follow the Word of Wisdom to the T, because I can already tell the affects it has had on my family and friends. I have never had problems with drugs or alcohol so following the Word of Wisdom came easy, but once my family and friends realized that I had such a strong stance against the things listed I noticed that they also started to stop partaking of those things around me, and I even notice my brother(who is of legal drinking age) has cut back on his alcohol consumption. Even though I am far from perfect I try to be a strong example of faith to those around me. | <urn:uuid:0e523a77-f344-46fe-b792-f4dc855a8673> | https://www.mormon.org/me/98X1 | en | 0.987767 | 0.027996 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Dogs know who to obey. Household robot appliances, so far, don’t. Several schemes have been proposed for sending signals between such agents but I have not heard a non-gullible scheme yet. How should suitably suspicious appliances be convinced to obey?
I am thinking of stationary agents like hot tub thermometers, TV controls, PCs, light switches and coffee pots. I will assume that most of these have no significant user interface, perhaps none. I also assume tamper-proof appliances.
In one scheme I imagine an easily carried wand with dominion over a set of appliances. An agent fresh from the factory is susceptible to the first wand that attracts its attention. If the wand gets close enough to tap the appliance then it bonds to the wand. Afterwards the new appliance is under the wand’s dominion. If the wand breaks or is misplaced then a new fresh wand is bought at the store and attached to a trusted computer with a secret protected like a private key. The new wand then supplants the old. I have no good story yet for a stolen wand.
Part of the appliance behavior is that it will not obey a new master until it has been released by the old master. (There is a “release” button on the wand.) The wand might have a simple indicator lamp indicating acceptance or rejection by the appliance. This is subject to confusion about which appliance the indication is for. After release it would be wise to keep the appliance in a potato chip bag to protect it from other wands, a bit like protecting RAM chips.
This scheme may be part of a solution.
The WPS button addresses this question. | <urn:uuid:1611d047-e3cb-40fd-af13-e751faf7e1ac> | http://cap-lore.com/Hardware/Agent.html | en | 0.944593 | 0.223382 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Thursday, May 16, 2013
May I get a glass of water please?
It is getting harder every day to distinguish our shiny airports as city after Indian city acquires massive glass fronted buildings with high ceilings, and store frontages within it sporting a sameness that tell you they are part of globalisation and mass production at their best.
As we rapidly set up franchises of French bakeries and
American coffee shops, it gets difficult at times to identify in which city of which country am I? The sights and sounds of India are getting gulped down with the cappuccinos and americanos on the menus.
My client recently treated me to a 'Koorgi (with a K) coffee', excitedly suggesting it as a new offering at this trendy cafe in Pune. I have so often longed for the unique and rich taste of 'filter coffee', a rarity when not in the locales of south India. So of course I was delighted to taste Indian Coorgi coffee in an Indian cafe away from South IndiaI do love cappuccino and am fiercely loyal to Starbucks to an obsession, but when in Rome......
We can do as the Americans of course, can't we also do as the Indians?
I got a cappuccino at Delhi's smaller terminal from a 'Bistro' recently, where all servers looked French forehead upwards, efficiently whipping up and productively serving the queue of eager buyers. After paying Rs. 300 for a cake and coffee, I asked the server 'may I get a glass of water please?' The imitation French girl gave a sweet Indian smile and said matter-of-factly, 'No, we do not serve water'. She said they had those sparkly bottles of water that I could buy. Of course, how stupid of me to expect it for free with the 300 rupees I paid....but I just wanted a sip, not a litre.....
Of course I understand the running of a business. God forbid that they go bankrupt giving free water to all and sundry.... .....profitability, bottom line, return on investment, all must naturally be preserved.
But can't we be French or Italian or whatever AND Indian? And hospitable and profitable? Why not be creative AND contextual beyond being imitative? What a potentially wonderful opportunity to have the confidence of a franchise along with the richness of being culturally relevant?
Something had not felt right.......wasn't what I just experienced against the core of our Indianness, our 'atithiyata' (hospitality), our culture and our pride in our hospitality? Aren't we, at least until my generation, brought up to know that giving water is a part of breathing the air of India?......and refusing water??!
My mother taught me that if you do not give water to the thirsty, you become a 'chatak pakhi' (a Bengali word for the bird that cries lifelong with the agony of thirst) in your next life......old wives tales maybe, but something about being rooted in compassion and hospitality. Perhaps these birds do not exist in French...
If the server had asked me, 'would you also like a bit of water and may I add a rupee to your bill for the paper cup?', I would probably have been happy to pay five. They would have made a profit from the cup and I would have left a happy customer. And we would have preserved the essence of being Indian while still being a profitable cookie from the global cookie cutter.
Lets move to the next level of globalisation through creative AND cultural adaptation....
Wednesday, December 26, 2012
Water, the new Coca Cola
I walked through Istanbul airport, in transit for my transcontinental flight. Istanbul appears a new entrant in the globalisation of airports. That is why it felt more like a crowded market alley than an airport terminal. We should perhaps then discount them some for their faux pas about which I am writing. However they created the inspiration for this blog, enough to feel outraged, stay thirsty for awhile and to write it. And for that I am thankful to them.
I walked around looking for a water fountain, my throat parched after long hours inside a pressurised cabin. I saw sparkling bottles lining every coffee shop, restaurant and cafe.
I had been questioning the concept of bottled water for some time now and this kept getting reaffirmed since I had been observing people instinctively buy bottled water while buying food, often without a second thought.
It always took me back to our childhood days of train travels, where my parents carried a long necked earthen pitcher on a wooden stand that kept the water really cool. It got refilled at large train platforms or in bottles that people carried. And every station had free water for whoever was thirsty. Granted we had more stomach viruses then. And of course, why look back, keep looking forward always....
But I have resisted buying water since some time, while also trying to retrain myself to minimize these and other resource wasting habits.
So I walked on, thinking there has to be free water somewhere!
That's when I came across bottled water vending machines, swathed in Coca Cola wrapping and branding......the very idea bothered my sensibilities.
And to add to the thirst distress of travelers, the machines took only Turkish money and only in coins....
I stayed thirsty for an hour.
Don't ask me why. Pigheadedness? Principle? Did not have Turkish money? All of the above perhaps....
Yes I could afford to buy a bottle of water as could any of the travelers there who had afforded to buy an international airline ticket. But that was not the point...
Just how far will we go to displace water from being a fundamental free resource?
Accepting that we always must have the right to choose between an opportunity for a stomach virus and a peaceful night of sleep. But no choice?
Istanbul airport, I hope you see it the way I do. | <urn:uuid:2aa843c5-edd4-4144-ad8d-b9807a0368fd> | http://eiobakprithibi.blogspot.com/ | en | 0.956214 | 0.028447 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
The 3rd edition is available. Read it here!
Chapter 20
A student asked ‘The programmers of old used only simple machines and no programming languages, yet they made beautiful programs. Why do we use complicated machines and programming languages?’. Fu-Tzu replied ‘The builders of old used only sticks and clay, yet they made beautiful huts.’
Master Yuan-Ma, The Book of Programming
So far, you have learned the JavaScript language and used it within a single environment: the browser. This chapter and the next one will briefly introduce you to Node.js, a program that allows you to apply your JavaScript skills outside of the browser. With it, you can build anything from simple command-line tools to dynamic HTTP servers.
These chapters aim to teach you the important ideas that Node.js builds on and to give you enough information to write some useful programs for it. They do not try to be a complete, or even a thorough, treatment of Node.
Whereas you could run the code in previous chapters directly on these pages, since it was either raw JavaScript or written for the browser, the code samples in this chapter are written for Node and won’t run in the browser.
If you want to follow along and run the code in this chapter, start by going to and following the installation instructions for your operating system. Also refer to that website for further documentation about Node and its built-in modules.
One of the more difficult problems with writing systems that communicate over the network is managing input and output—that is, the reading and writing of data to and from the network, the hard drive, and other such devices. Moving data around takes time, and scheduling it cleverly can make a big difference in how quickly a system responds to the user or to network requests.
The traditional way to handle input and output is to have a function, such as readFile, start reading a file and return only when the file has been fully read. This is called synchronous I/O (I/O stands for input/output).
Node was initially conceived for the purpose of making asynchronous I/O easy and convenient. We have seen asynchronous interfaces before, such as a browser’s XMLHttpRequest object, discussed in Chapter 17. An asynchronous interface allows the script to continue running while it does its work and calls a callback function when it’s done. This is the way Node does all its I/O.
JavaScript lends itself well to a system like Node. It is one of the few programming languages that does not have a built-in way to do I/O. Thus, JavaScript could be fit onto Node’s rather eccentric approach to I/O without ending up with two inconsistent interfaces. In 2009, when Node was being designed, people were already doing callback-based I/O in the browser, so the community around the language was used to an asynchronous programming style.
I’ll try to illustrate synchronous versus asynchronous I/O with a small example, where a program needs to fetch two resources from the Internet and then do some simple processing with the result.
In a synchronous environment, the obvious way to perform this task is to make the requests one after the other. This method has the drawback that the second request will be started only when the first has finished. The total time taken will be at least the sum of the two response times. This is not an effective use of the machine, which will be mostly idle when it is transmitting and receiving data over the network.
The solution to this problem, in a synchronous system, is to start additional threads of control. (Refer to Chapter 14 for a previous discussion of threads.) A second thread could start the second request, and then both threads wait for their results to come back, after which they resynchronize to combine their results.
In the following diagram, the thick lines represent time the program spends running normally, and the thin lines represent time spent waiting for I/O. In the synchronous model, the time taken by I/O is part of the timeline for a given thread of control. In the asynchronous model, starting an I/O action conceptually causes a split in the timeline. The thread that initiated the I/O continues running, and the I/O itself is done alongside it, finally calling a callback function when it is finished.
Control flow for synchronous and asynchronous I/O
Another way to express this difference is that waiting for I/O to finish is implicit in the synchronous model, while it is explicit, directly under our control, in the asynchronous one. But asynchronicity cuts both ways. It makes expressing programs that do not fit the straight-line model of control easier, but it also makes expressing programs that do follow a straight line more awkward.
In Chapter 17, I already touched on the fact that all those callbacks add quite a lot of noise and indirection to a program. Whether this style of asynchronicity is a good idea in general can be debated. In any case, it takes some getting used to.
But for a JavaScript-based system, I would argue that callback-style asynchronicity is a sensible choice. One of the strengths of JavaScript is its simplicity, and trying to add multiple threads of control to it would add a lot of complexity. Though callbacks don’t tend to lead to simple code, as a concept, they’re pleasantly simple yet powerful enough to write high-performance web servers.
The node command
When Node.js is installed on a system, it provides a program called node, which is used to run JavaScript files. Say you have a file hello.js, containing this code:
var message = "Hello world";
You can then run node from the command line like this to execute the program:
$ node hello.js
Hello world
The console.log method in Node does something similar to what it does in the browser. It prints out a piece of text. But in Node, the text will go to the process’ standard output stream, rather than to a browser’s JavaScript console.
If you run node without giving it a file, it provides you with a prompt at which you can type JavaScript code and immediately see the result.
$ node
> 1 + 1
> [-1, -2, -3].map(Math.abs)
[1, 2, 3]
> process.exit(0)
The process variable, just like the console variable, is available globally in Node. It provides various ways to inspect and manipulate the current program. The exit method ends the process and can be given an exit status code, which tells the program that started node (in this case, the command-line shell) whether the program completed successfully (code zero) or encountered an error (any other code).
To find the command-line arguments given to your script, you can read process.argv, which is an array of strings. Note that it also includes the name of the node command and your script name, so the actual arguments start at index 2. If showargv.js simply contains the statement console.log(process.argv), you could run it like this:
$ node showargv.js one --and two
["node", "/home/marijn/showargv.js", "one", "--and", "two"]
All the standard JavaScript global variables, such as Array, Math, and JSON, are also present in Node’s environment. Browser-related functionality, such as document and alert, is absent.
The global scope object, which is called window in the browser, has the more sensible name global in Node.
Beyond the few variables I mentioned, such as console and process, Node puts little functionality in the global scope. If you want to access other built-in functionality, you have to ask the module system for it.
The CommonJS module system, based on the require function, was described in Chapter 10. This system is built into Node and is used to load anything from built-in modules to downloaded libraries to files that are part of your own program.
When require is called, Node has to resolve the given string to an actual file to load. Pathnames that start with "/", "./", or "../" are resolved relative to the current module’s path, where "./" stands for the current directory, "../" for one directory up, and "/" for the root of the file system. So if you ask for "./world/world" from the file /home/marijn/elife/run.js, Node will try to load the file /home/marijn/elife/world/world.js. The .js extension may be omitted.
When a string that does not look like a relative or absolute path is given to require, it is assumed to refer to either a built-in module or a module installed in a node_modules directory. For example, require("fs") will give you Node’s built-in file system module, and require("elife") will try to load the library found in node_modules/elife/. A common way to install such libraries is by using NPM, which I will discuss in a moment.
To illustrate the use of require, let’s set up a simple project consisting of two files. The first one is called main.js, which defines a script that can be called from the command line to garble a string.
var garble = require("./garble");
// Index 2 holds the first actual command-line argument
var argument = process.argv[2];
The file garble.js defines a library for garbling strings, which can be used both by the command-line tool defined earlier and by other scripts that need direct access to a garbling function.
module.exports = function(string) {
return string.split("").map(function(ch) {
return String.fromCharCode(ch.charCodeAt(0) + 5);
Remember that replacing module.exports, rather than adding properties to it, allows us to export a specific value from a module. In this case, we make the result of requiring our garble file the garbling function itself.
The function splits the string it is given into single characters by splitting on the empty string and then replaces each character with the character whose code is five points higher. Finally, it joins the result back into a string.
We can now call our tool like this:
$ node main.js JavaScript
Installing with NPM
NPM, which was briefly discussed in Chapter 10, is an online repository of JavaScript modules, many of which are specifically written for Node. When you install Node on your computer, you also get a program called npm, which provides a convenient interface to this repository.
For example, one module you will find on NPM is figlet, which can convert text into ASCII art—drawings made out of text characters. The following transcript shows how to install and use it:
$ npm install figlet
npm GET
npm 200
npm GET
npm 200
figlet@1.0.9 node_modules/figlet
$ node
> var figlet = require("figlet");
> figlet.text("Hello world!", function(error, data) {
if (error)
_ _ _ _ _ _ _
| | | | ___| | | ___ __ _____ _ __| | __| | |
| |_| |/ _ \ | |/ _ \ \ \ /\ / / _ \| '__| |/ _` | |
| _ | __/ | | (_) | \ V V / (_) | | | | (_| |_|
After running npm install, NPM will have created a directory called node_modules. Inside that directory will be a figlet directory, which contains the library. When we run node and call require("figlet"), this library is loaded, and we can call its text method to draw some big letters.
Somewhat unexpectedly perhaps, instead of simply returning the string that makes up the big letters, figlet.text takes a callback function that it passes its result to. It also passes the callback another argument, error, which will hold an error object when something goes wrong or null when everything is all right.
This is a common pattern in Node code. Rendering something with figlet requires the library to read a file that contains the letter shapes. Reading that file from disk is an asynchronous operation in Node, so figlet.text can’t immediately return its result. Asynchronicity is infectious, in a way—every function that calls an asynchronous function must itself become asynchronous.
There is much more to NPM than npm install. It reads package.json files, which contain JSON-encoded information about a program or library, such as which other libraries it depends on. Doing npm install in a directory that contains such a file will automatically install all dependencies, as well as their dependencies. The npm tool is also used to publish libraries to NPM’s online repository of packages so that other people can find, download, and use them.
This book won’t delve further into the details of NPM usage. Refer to for further documentation and for an easy way to search for libraries.
The file system module
One of the most commonly used built-in modules that comes with Node is the "fs" module, which stands for file system. This module provides functions for working with files and directories.
For example, there is a function called readFile, which reads a file and then calls a callback with the file’s contents.
var fs = require("fs");
fs.readFile("file.txt", "utf8", function(error, text) {
if (error)
throw error;
console.log("The file contained:", text);
The second argument to readFile indicates the character encoding used to decode the file into a string. There are several ways in which text can be encoded to binary data, but most modern systems use UTF-8 to encode text, so unless you have reasons to believe another encoding is used, passing "utf8" when reading a text file is a safe bet. If you do not pass an encoding, Node will assume you are interested in the binary data and will give you a Buffer object instead of a string. This is an array-like object that contains numbers representing the bytes in the files.
var fs = require("fs");
fs.readFile("file.txt", function(error, buffer) {
if (error)
throw error;
console.log("The file contained", buffer.length, "bytes.",
"The first byte is:", buffer[0]);
A similar function, writeFile, is used to write a file to disk.
var fs = require("fs");
fs.writeFile("graffiti.txt", "Node was here", function(err) {
if (err)
console.log("Failed to write file:", err);
console.log("File written.");
Here, it was not necessary to specify the encoding since writeFile will assume that if it is given a string to write, rather than a Buffer object, it should write it out as text using its default character encoding, which is UTF-8.
The "fs" module contains many other useful functions: readdir will return the files in a directory as an array of strings, stat will retrieve information about a file, rename will rename a file, unlink will remove one, and so on. See the documentation at for specifics.
Many of the functions in "fs" come in both synchronous and asynchronous variants. For example, there is a synchronous version of readFile called readFileSync.
var fs = require("fs");
console.log(fs.readFileSync("file.txt", "utf8"));
Synchronous functions require less ceremony to use and can be useful in simple scripts, where the extra speed provided by asynchronous I/O is irrelevant. But note that while such a synchronous operation is being performed, your program will be stopped entirely. If it should be responding to the user or to other machines on the network, being stuck on synchronous I/O might produce annoying delays.
The HTTP module
Another central module is called "http". It provides functionality for running HTTP servers and making HTTP requests.
This is all it takes to start a simple HTTP server:
var http = require("http");
var server = http.createServer(function(request, response) {
response.write("<h1>Hello!</h1><p>You asked for <code>" +
request.url + "</code></p>");
If you run this script on your own machine, you can point your web browser at http://localhost:8000/hello to make a request to your server. It will respond with a small HTML page.
The function passed as an argument to createServer is called every time a client tries to connect to the server. The request and response variables are objects representing the incoming and outgoing data. The first contains information about the request, such as its url property, which tells us to what URL the request was made.
To send something back, you call methods on the response object. The first, writeHead, will write out the response headers (see Chapter 17). You give it the status code (200 for “OK” in this case) and an object that contains header values. Here we tell the client that we will be sending back an HTML document.
Next, the actual response body (the document itself) is sent with response.write. You are allowed to call this method multiple times if you want to send the response piece by piece, possibly streaming data to the client as it becomes available. Finally, response.end signals the end of the response.
The call to server.listen causes the server to start waiting for connections on port 8000. This is the reason you have to connect to localhost:8000, rather than just localhost (which would use the default port, 80), to speak to this server.
To stop running a Node script like this, which doesn’t finish automatically because it is waiting for further events (in this case, network connections), press Ctrl-C.
A real web server usually does more than the one in the previous example—it looks at the request’s method (the method property) to see what action the client is trying to perform and at the request’s URL to find out which resource this action is being performed on. You’ll see a more advanced server later in this chapter.
To act as an HTTP client, we can use the request function in the "http" module.
var http = require("http");
var request = http.request({
hostname: "",
path: "/20_node.html",
method: "GET",
headers: {Accept: "text/html"}
}, function(response) {
console.log("Server responded with status code",
The first argument to request configures the request, telling Node what server to talk to, what path to request from that server, which method to use, and so on. The second argument is the function that should be called when a response comes in. It is given an object that allows us to inspect the response, for example to find out its status code.
Just like the response object we saw in the server, the object returned by request allows us to stream data into the request with the write method and finish the request with the end method. The example does not use write because GET requests should not contain data in their request body.
To make requests to secure HTTP (HTTPS) URLs, Node provides a package called https, which contains its own request function, similar to http.request.
We have seen two examples of writable streams in the HTTP examples—namely, the response object that the server could write to and the request object that was returned from http.request.
Writable streams are a widely used concept in Node interfaces. All writable streams have a write method, which can be passed a string or a Buffer object. Their end method closes the stream and, if given an argument, will also write out a piece of data before it does so. Both of these methods can also be given a callback as an additional argument, which they will call when the writing to or closing of the stream has finished.
It is possible to create a writable stream that points at a file with the fs.createWriteStream function. Then you can use the write method on the resulting object to write the file one piece at a time, rather than in one shot as with fs.writeFile.
Readable streams are a little more involved. Both the request variable that was passed to the HTTP server’s callback function and the response variable passed to the HTTP client are readable streams. (A server reads requests and then writes responses, whereas a client first writes a request and then reads a response.) Reading from a stream is done using event handlers, rather than methods.
Objects that emit events in Node have a method called on that is similar to the addEventListener method in the browser. You give it an event name and then a function, and it will register that function to be called whenever the given event occurs.
Readable streams have "data" and "end" events. The first is fired every time some data comes in, and the second is called whenever the stream is at its end. This model is most suited for “streaming” data, which can be immediately processed, even when the whole document isn’t available yet. A file can be read as a readable stream by using the fs.createReadStream function.
The following code creates a server that reads request bodies and streams them back to the client as all-uppercase text:
var http = require("http");
http.createServer(function(request, response) {
request.on("data", function(chunk) {
request.on("end", function() {
The chunk variable passed to the data handler will be a binary Buffer, which we can convert to a string by calling toString on it, which will decode it using the default encoding (UTF-8).
The following piece of code, if run while the uppercasing server is running, will send a request to that server and write out the response it gets:
var http = require("http");
var request = http.request({
hostname: "localhost",
port: 8000,
method: "POST"
}, function(response) {
response.on("data", function(chunk) {
request.end("Hello server");
The example writes to process.stdout (the process’ standard output, as a writable stream) instead of using console.log. We can’t use console.log because it adds an extra newline character after each piece of text that it writes, which isn’t appropriate here.
A simple file server
Let’s combine our newfound knowledge about HTTP servers and talking to the file system and create a bridge between them: an HTTP server that allows remote access to a file system. Such a server has many uses. It allows web applications to store and share data or give a group of people shared access to a bunch of files.
When we treat files as HTTP resources, the HTTP methods GET, PUT, and DELETE can be used to read, write, and delete the files, respectively. We will interpret the path in the request as the path of the file that the request refers to.
We probably don’t want to share our whole file system, so we’ll interpret these paths as starting in the server’s working directory, which is the directory in which it was started. If I ran the server from /home/marijn/public/ (or C:\Users\marijn\public\ on Windows), then a request for /file.txt should refer to /home/marijn/public/file.txt (or C:\Users\marijn\public\file.txt).
We’ll build the program piece by piece, using an object called methods to store the functions that handle the various HTTP methods.
var methods = Object.create(null);
http.createServer(function(request, response) {
function respond(code, body, type) {
if (!type) type = "text/plain";
response.writeHead(code, {"Content-Type": type});
if (body && body.pipe)
if (request.method in methods)
respond, request);
respond(405, "Method " + request.method +
" not allowed.");
This starts a server that just returns 405 error responses, which is the code used to indicate that a given method isn’t handled by the server.
The respond function is passed to the functions that handle the various methods and acts as a callback to finish the request. It takes an HTTP status code, a body, and optionally a content type as arguments. If the value passed as the body is a readable stream, it will have a pipe method, which is used to forward a readable stream to a writable stream. If not, it is assumed to be either null (no body) or a string and is passed directly to the response’s end method.
To get a path from the URL in the request, the urlToPath function uses Node’s built-in "url" module to parse the URL. It takes its pathname, which will be something like /file.txt, decodes that to get rid of the %20-style escape codes, and prefixes a single dot to produce a path relative to the current directory.
function urlToPath(url) {
var path = require("url").parse(url).pathname;
return "." + decodeURIComponent(path);
If you are worried about the security of the urlToPath function, you are right. We will return to that in the exercises.
We will set up the GET method to return a list of files when reading a directory and to return the file’s content when reading a regular file.
One tricky question is what kind of Content-Type header we should add when returning a file’s content. Since these files could be anything, our server can’t simply return the same type for all of them. But NPM can help with that. The mime package (content type indicators like text/plain are also called MIME types) knows the correct type for a huge number of file extensions.
If you run the following npm command in the directory where the server script lives, you’ll be able to use require("mime") to get access to the library:
$ npm install mime@1.4.0
npm http GET
npm http 304
mime@1.4.0 node_modules/mime
When a requested file does not exist, the correct HTTP error code to return is 404. We will use fs.stat, which looks up information on a file, to find out both whether the file exists and whether it is a directory.
methods.GET = function(path, respond) {
fs.stat(path, function(error, stats) {
if (error && error.code == "ENOENT")
respond(404, "File not found");
else if (error)
respond(500, error.toString());
else if (stats.isDirectory())
fs.readdir(path, function(error, files) {
if (error)
respond(500, error.toString());
respond(200, files.join("\n"));
respond(200, fs.createReadStream(path),
Because it has to touch the disk and thus might take a while, fs.stat is asynchronous. When the file does not exist, fs.stat will pass an error object with a code property of "ENOENT" to its callback. It would be nice if Node defined different subtypes of Error for different types of error, but it doesn’t. Instead, it just puts obscure, Unix-inspired codes in there.
We are going to report any errors we didn’t expect with status code 500, which indicates that the problem exists in the server, as opposed to codes starting with 4 (such as 404), which refer to bad requests. There are some situations in which this is not entirely accurate, but for a small example program like this, it will have to be good enough.
The stats object returned by fs.stat tells us a number of things about a file, such as its size (size property) and its modification date (mtime property). Here we are interested in the question of whether it is a directory or a regular file, which the isDirectory method tells us.
We use fs.readdir to read the list of files in a directory and, in yet another callback, return it to the user. For normal files, we create a readable stream with fs.createReadStream and pass it to respond, along with the content type that the "mime" module gives us for the file’s name.
The code to handle DELETE requests is slightly simpler.
methods.DELETE = function(path, respond) {
fs.stat(path, function(error, stats) {
if (error && error.code == "ENOENT")
else if (error)
respond(500, error.toString());
else if (stats.isDirectory())
fs.rmdir(path, respondErrorOrNothing(respond));
fs.unlink(path, respondErrorOrNothing(respond));
You may be wondering why trying to delete a nonexistent file returns a 204 status, rather than an error. When the file that is being deleted is not there, you could say that the request’s objective is already fulfilled. The HTTP standard encourages people to make requests idempotent, which means that applying them multiple times does not produce a different result.
function respondErrorOrNothing(respond) {
return function(error) {
if (error)
respond(500, error.toString());
When an HTTP response does not contain any data, the status code 204 (“no content”) can be used to indicate this. Since we need to provide callbacks that either report an error or return a 204 response in a few different situations, I wrote a respondErrorOrNothing function that creates such a callback.
This is the handler for PUT requests:
methods.PUT = function(path, respond, request) {
var outStream = fs.createWriteStream(path);
outStream.on("error", function(error) {
respond(500, error.toString());
outStream.on("finish", function() {
Here, we don’t need to check whether the file exists—if it does, we’ll just overwrite it. We again use pipe to move data from a readable stream to a writable one, in this case from the request to the file. If creating the stream fails, an "error" event is raised for it, which we report in our response. When the data is transferred successfully, pipe will close both streams, which will cause a "finish" event to fire on the writable stream. When that happens, we can report success to the client with a 204 response.
The full script for the server is available at You can download that and run it with Node to start your own file server. And of course, you can modify and extend it to solve this chapter’s exercises or to experiment.
The command-line tool curl, widely available on Unix-like systems, can be used to make HTTP requests. The following session briefly tests our server. Note that -X is used to set the request’s method and -d is used to include a request body.
$ curl http://localhost:8000/file.txt
File not found
$ curl -X PUT -d hello http://localhost:8000/file.txt
$ curl http://localhost:8000/file.txt
$ curl -X DELETE http://localhost:8000/file.txt
$ curl http://localhost:8000/file.txt
File not found
The first request for file.txt fails since the file does not exist yet. The PUT request creates the file, and behold, the next request successfully retrieves it. After deleting it with a DELETE request, the file is again missing.
Error handling
In the code for the file server, there are six places where we are explicitly routing exceptions that we don’t know how to handle into error responses. Because exceptions aren’t automatically propagated to callbacks but rather passed to them as arguments, they have to be handled explicitly every time. This completely defeats the advantage of exception handling, namely, the ability to centralize the handling of failure conditions.
What happens when something actually throws an exception in this system? Since we are not using any try blocks, the exception will propagate to the top of the call stack. In Node, that aborts the program and writes information about the exception (including a stack trace) to the program’s standard error stream.
This means that our server will crash whenever a problem is encountered in the server’s code itself, as opposed to asynchronous problems, which will be passed as arguments to the callbacks. If we wanted to handle all exceptions raised during the handling of a request, to make sure we send a response, we would have to add try/catch blocks to every callback.
This is not workable. Many Node programs are written to make as little use of exceptions as possible, with the assumption that if an exception is raised, it is not something the program can handle, and crashing is the right response.
Another approach is to use promises, which were introduced in Chapter 17. Those catch exceptions raised by callback functions and propagate them as failures. It is possible to load a promise library in Node and use that to manage your asynchronous control. Few Node libraries integrate promises, but it is often trivial to wrap them. The excellent "promise" module from NPM contains a function called denodeify, which takes an asynchronous function like fs.readFile and converts it to a promise-returning function.
var Promise = require("promise");
var fs = require("fs");
var readFile = Promise.denodeify(fs.readFile);
readFile("file.txt", "utf8").then(function(content) {
console.log("The file contained: " + content);
}, function(error) {
console.log("Failed to read file: " + error);
For comparison, I’ve written another version of the file server based on promises, which you can find at It is slightly cleaner because functions can now return their results, rather than having to call callbacks, and the routing of exceptions is implicit, rather than explicit.
I’ll list a few lines from the promise-based file server to illustrate the difference in the style of programming.
The fsp object that is used by this code contains promise-style variants of a number of fs functions, wrapped by Promise.denodeify. The object returned from the method handler, with code and body properties, will become the final result of the chain of promises, and it will be used to determine what kind of response to send to the client.
methods.GET = function(path) {
return inspectPath(path).then(function(stats) {
if (!stats) // Does not exist
return {code: 404, body: "File not found"};
else if (stats.isDirectory())
return fsp.readdir(path).then(function(files) {
return {code: 200, body: files.join("\n")};
return {code: 200,
type: require("mime").lookup(path),
body: fs.createReadStream(path)};
function inspectPath(path) {
return fsp.stat(path).then(null, function(error) {
if (error.code == "ENOENT") return null;
else throw error;
The inspectPath function is a simple wrapper around fs.stat, which handles the case where the file is not found. In that case, we replace the failure with a success that yields null. All other errors are allowed to propagate. When the promise that is returned from these handlers fails, the HTTP server responds with a 500 status code.
Node is a nice, straightforward system that lets us run JavaScript in a nonbrowser context. It was originally designed for network tasks to play the role of a node in a network. But it lends itself to all kinds of scripting tasks, and if writing JavaScript is something you enjoy, automating everyday tasks with Node works wonderfully.
NPM provides libraries for everything you can think of (and quite a few things you’d probably never think of), and it allows you to fetch and install those libraries by running a simple command. Node also comes with a number of built-in modules, including the "fs" module, for working with the file system, and the "http" module, for running HTTP servers and making HTTP requests.
All input and output in Node is done asynchronously, unless you explicitly use a synchronous variant of a function, such as fs.readFileSync. You provide callback functions, and Node will call them at the appropriate time, when the I/O you asked for has finished.
Content negotiation, again
In Chapter 17, the first exercise was to make several requests to, asking for different types of content by passing different Accept headers.
Do this again, using Node’s http.request function. Ask for at least the media types text/plain, text/html, and application/json. Remember that headers to a request can be given as an object, in the headers property of http.request’s first argument.
Write out the content of the responses to each request.
Don’t forget to call the end method on the object returned by http.request in order to actually fire off the request.
The response object passed to http.request’s callback is a readable stream. This means that it is not entirely trivial to get the whole response body from it. The following utility function reads a whole stream and calls a callback function with the result, using the usual pattern of passing any errors it encounters as the first argument to the callback:
function readStreamAsString(stream, callback) {
var data = "";
stream.on("data", function(chunk) {
data += chunk.toString();
stream.on("end", function() {
callback(null, data);
stream.on("error", function(error) {
Fixing a leak
For easy remote access to some files, I might get into the habit of having the file server defined in this chapter running on my machine, in the /home/marijn/public directory. Then, one day, I find that someone has gained access to all the passwords I stored in my browser.
What happened?
If it isn’t clear to you yet, think back to the urlToPath function, defined like this:
function urlToPath(url) {
return "." + decodeURIComponent(path);
Now consider the fact that paths passed to the "fs" functions can be relative—they may contain "../" to go up a directory. What happens when a client sends requests to URLs like the ones shown here?
Change urlToPath to fix this problem. Take into account the fact that Node on Windows allows both forward slashes and backslashes to separate directories.
Also, meditate on the fact that as soon as you expose some half-baked system on the Internet, the bugs in that system might be used to do bad things to your machine.
It is enough to strip out all occurrences of two dots that have a slash, a backslash, or the end of the string on both sides. Using the replace method with a regular expression is the easiest way to do this. But since such instances may overlap (as in "/../../f"), you may have to apply replace multiple times, until the string no longer changes. Also make sure you do the replace after decoding the string, or it would be possible to foil the check by encoding a dot or a slash.
Another potentially worrying case is when paths start with a slash, which are interpreted as absolute paths. But because urlToPath puts a dot character in front of the path, it is impossible to create requests that result in such a path. Multiple slashes in a row, inside the path, are odd but will be treated as a single slash by the file system.
Creating directories
Though the DELETE method is wired up to delete directories (using fs.rmdir), the file server currently does not provide any way to create a directory.
Add support for a method MKCOL, which should create a directory by calling fs.mkdir. MKCOL is not one of the basic HTTP methods, but it does exist, for this same purpose, in the WebDAV standard, which specifies a set of extensions to HTTP, making it suitable for writing resources, not just reading them.
You can use the function that implements the DELETE method as a blueprint for the MKCOL method. When no file is found, try to create a directory with fs.mkdir. When a directory exists at that path, you can return a 204 response so that directory creation requests are idempotent. If a nondirectory file exists here, return an error code. The code 400 (“bad request”) would be appropriate here.
A public space on the web
Since the file server serves up any kind of file and even includes the right Content-Type header, you can use it to serve a website. Since it allows everybody to delete and replace files, it would be an interesting kind of website: one that can be modified, vandalized, and destroyed by everybody who takes the time to create the right HTTP request. Still, it would be a website.
Write a basic HTML page that includes a simple JavaScript file. Put the files in a directory served by the file server and open them in your browser.
Next, as an advanced exercise or even a weekend project, combine all the knowledge you gained from this book to build a more user-friendly interface for modifying the website from inside the website.
Use an HTML form (Chapter 18) to edit the content of the files that make up the website, allowing the user to update them on the server by using HTTP requests as described in Chapter 17.
Start by making only a single file editable. Then make it so that the user can select which file to edit. Use the fact that our file server returns lists of files when reading a directory.
Don’t work directly in the code on the file server, since if you make a mistake you are likely to damage the files there. Instead, keep your work outside of the publicly accessible directory and copy it there when testing.
If your computer is directly connected to the Internet, without a firewall, router, or other interfering device in between, you might be able to invite a friend to use your website. To check, go to, copy the IP address it gives you into the address bar of your browser, and add :8000 after it to select the right port. If that brings you to your site, it is online for everybody to see.
You can create a <textarea> element to hold the content of the file that is being edited. A GET request, using XMLHttpRequest, can be used to get the current content of the file. You can use relative URLs like index.html, instead of http://localhost:8000/index.html, to refer to files on the same server as the running script.
Then, when the user clicks a button (you can use a <form> element and "submit" event or simply a "click" handler), make a PUT request to the same URL, with the content of the <textarea> as request body, to save the file.
You can then add a <select> element that contains all the files in the server’s root directory by adding <option> elements containing the lines returned by a GET request to the URL /. When the user selects another file (a "change" event on the field), the script must fetch and display that file. Also make sure that when saving a file, you use the currently selected filename.
Unfortunately, the server is too simplistic to be able to reliably read files from subdirectories since it does not tell us whether the thing we fetched with a GET request is a regular file or a directory. Can you think of a way to extend the server to address this? | <urn:uuid:974c270c-1905-4ec9-8dfc-c6ad469e178e> | http://eloquentjavascript.net/2nd_edition/20_node.html | en | 0.88578 | 0.307347 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
In this recipe we use 3 ebooks to show how topic analysis can identify the different topics each text represents. We will use Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) approach which is the most common modelling method to discover topics. We can then spice it up with an interactive visualization of the discovered themes. This recipe is based on Zhang Jinman's notebook found on TAPoR.
NB: Any number of texts can be used, we choose 3 for this recipe.
Tokenization is the process of splitting a sentence or a chunk of text into its constituent parts. These “tokens” may be the letters, punctuation, words, or sentences. They could even be a combination of all these elements. This recipe was adapted from a Python Notebook written by Kynan Lee.
A common requirement in extracting information is the ability to identify all persons or characters referred to in the text. It is an elaborate process of knowing parts-of-speech in the text, tagging them and retrieving the names associated with those dialogues. The common approach is by using part-of-speech POS-tagger which analyses a sentence and associates words with their lexical descriptor i.e. whether it is an adverb, noun, adjective, conjuntion e.t.c. NLTK is a robust library and therefore the main ingredient of our recipe. | <urn:uuid:403aa61d-09e8-418a-bb10-f601977c79a9> | http://methodi.ca/categories/example | en | 0.900398 | 0.792394 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Vessel Design and Performance
From early concept design, naval architecture and detailed production design through to survey, construction support and inspection, BMT has the commercial and technical skills and capability to offer a high quality engineering service.
The group has a proven record of managing complex and innovative design briefs from feasibility through to detailed design and, in many cases, production.
When it comes to vessel performance, the successful operation of a ship depends upon a complex number of factors. Some will be totally within the ship owner's control and some, such as the weather, can only be forecast and attempts made to mitigate the impact. In both respects, knowledge and an understanding of the risk and consequences are key to optimising a vessel's performance and ensuring safe operation.
To read more about Vessel Design and Performance, please click here. | <urn:uuid:0940c75d-5bf7-4522-aa5f-26b868cb169e> | http://navcon.com.br/locations/market | en | 0.94773 | 0.024217 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
"Chinese latter-day society and law changes " academic seminar overview - Chinese Legal Research Net
Welcome toChinese Legal Research Net
Add to Favorites | Chinese
From; Author:Stand originally
"You You deer cries, feed wild Hao. I have a honored guest, clear of heart sound hole. " arrived 8 days on June 7, 2008, during be worth the festival carrying midday of Chinese tradition, bound of Chinese law historiography also greeted regale of a learning -- " Chinese latter-day society and law changes " academic seminar. Bencihui discusses the region of Beijing Yan Qing in scene charming and gentle big castle restaurant holds hot spring of 8 Da Linghua wind. Choose such time to hold this conference to have some kind of special sense. Carry midday holiday as the first, this old festival obverse side that there already was history of a few chiliads in China is facing new task: How the traditional culture bequest of irradiate gives new glamour and vitality in the coruscate in modern society, and the theme of this just and conference formed some to plant " agree without prior consultation " -- the reasonable kernel in how inducting culture of Chinese traditional method is today's legal place to use. Conference room is cool and comfortable, peaceful the environment of elegant out-of-the-way, also make attend the meeting scholars can the heart is not had by the development that ground of slight corneal opacity throws pair of this one theme ponders and discuss in.
Bencihui is discussed by kid of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences historiography of law of research center of article society science, China is met branch of Oriental law culture, Beijing University is latter-day law institute 3 learning orgnaization undertakes. Research center of article society science established kid of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences 2001, aim to back each subject 40 years old the following backbone of young scientific research, develop the research project that has fundamental application value and macroscopical and direct sense, begin social survey, strengthen academic communication, hold groom multiformly, reward in the academic positive result that gains great society benefit domestic and internationally. Branch of culture of can Oriental law established Chinese law historiography 2004, its tenet is culture of research China law, transmit China law civilization, classics world is sent with, those who devote oneself to culture of thing method law is compatible, the national law in promoting wipes the generation of viewpoint of value. Recent law institute basically is engaged in Beijing University the following the research of 3 respects: The research of Chinese recent law, foreign country is latter-day the comparison of recent law studies the research of the law and China and foreign countries, cent undertakes China and foreign countries partly the research of recent law and China and foreign countries are latter-day of the law studying quite is this research characteristic. What Bencihui discusses is successful holding is with 3 afore-mentioned orgnaizations work hard to be not divided with close cooperation. Scholars attending the meeting discussed sufficient preparative work and meticulous and considerate meeting Wu arrangement to give high affirmation and praise to Bencihui in succession.
Previous12 Next | <urn:uuid:aab62a42-f54f-4014-b0fd-c29aedaba457> | http://nayotiamiller.com/Academic-Information/200901/04-266.html | en | 0.92199 | 0.020764 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Travel to Malaysia
There are many reasons why you should travel to Malaysia. One of the top sightseer destinations in countries around the world, Malaysia is home to wonderful seas and breathtaking views. The country is culturally diverse and features numerous natural ponders that lure tens of thousands of sightseers from across the world.
Why travel Malaysia?
Malaysia is a picturesque, welcoming, and culturally rich country that offers the right appraise of coin to the tourists. The country is full of natural graces and is home to numerous luxury hotels and recourses that speak the last word in comfort and class. The top concludes to advance Malaysia are given below :Check travel agent malaysia
Art and culture in Malaysia
Malaysia is a country of diverse culture and habit. The mix of racial forces in the two countries is the outcome of long periods of migration and business with other parts of the world, especially with China, Arabian countries, and India. Every one of these cultures has remained intact in the two countries i.e. none has genuinely been homogenized. Conventional churches and churches lie alongside mosques. Some of the most popular ethnic commemorations and events in the country are as follows 😛 TAGEND Colors of Malaysia Festival World Harvest Festival and Gawai Dayak Sarawak Rainforest World Music Festival Merdeka Month Celebration Ramadan Bazaar
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| <urn:uuid:a646e51b-26c1-4fe3-a0af-46a286faaa44> | http://pinterestmarketpro.com/travel-to-malaysia/ | en | 0.918351 | 0.027073 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
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Mon May 11 18:11:07 CEST 2009
Computer Modern is Too Thin
Not really so math-y but I have no other place for it..
Something that has been bugging me ever since I used LateX for the
first time (1998?) is that Computer Modern is a very thin font.
Looking around the web, I've found several people complaining about
On paper this problem isn't as pronounced because resolution is high
enough, and black is black. But on screen, thin lines turns grey, and
that is really annoying. It's easier to read black blobs than grey
ones. On blurry low-quality paper, ink doesn't turn to grey either.
So, how to fix this?
The simplest way to fatten up a font is to use erosion (replace pixel
with minimal pixel value in a 3x3 square). Alternatively, blur
followed by increased contrast will also work.
So, why doesn't ink on paper turn grey when it spills out a bit? The
reason is probably that what is diffused is pigment (amount of
absorption or negative color) and not light intensity. Even with
pigment diluted, black is still very black.
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
int min (int a, int b) {
return (a < b) ? a : b;
int main(int argc, char **argv) {
int w=0,h=0,d=0;
size_t size = w*h;
unsigned char *buf;
unsigned char *obuf;
int l,c;
if (3 != fscanf(stdin, "P5\n%d %d\n%d\n", &w, &h, &d)) exit(0);
printf("P5\n%d %d\n%d\n", w, h, d);
size = w*h;
buf = malloc(size);
obuf = malloc(size);
fread(buf, 1, size, stdin);
for (l = 1; l < h-1; l++) {
int line = l * w;
for (c = 1; c < w-1; c++) {
int l1 = buf[(line-w) + (c-1)];
int l2 = buf[(line-w) + (c)];
int l3 = buf[(line-w) + (c+1)];
int l4 = buf[(line) + (c-1)];
int l5 = buf[(line) + (c)];
int l6 = buf[(line) + (c+1)];
int l7 = buf[(line+w) + (c-1)];
int l8 = buf[(line+w) + (c)];
int l9 = buf[(line+w) + (c+1)];
obuf[line + c] =
fwrite(obuf, 1, size, stdout);
goto again;
return 0;
Let this operate on images generated by "pdftoppm -gray -r 300" before
passing it to a DJVU converter. Don't do this on lower rez. | <urn:uuid:7c7b102b-df6c-44f1-b455-2fa8a9309185> | http://zwizwa.be/-/math/20090511-181107 | en | 0.8196 | 0.880046 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
There is a Facebook page which is promoting this cause, and it has already been liked by more than 7,000 people. In comparison, my recently created Facebook page has only been liked by about 3,000 people. So this is not just a small handful of occultists that we are talking about.
As word of this has gotten out, it has made headlines all over the planet, and so this is going to be a truly global occult ritual. The following comes from the Daily Mail
take our poll - story continues below
Those that are participating in this twisted ritual have been given some very specific instructions. In addition, to “an unflattering picture of Trump“, a number of other items will be required to perform it correctly. The following comes from WND
The rite, requiring a stub of a candle, a pin, salt, matches, a tarot card, a feather and other odds and ends, calls on spirits to ensure President Trump will “fail utterly.” It also includes burning a picture of the commander in chief, visualizing him “blowing apart into dust or ash.”
Participants apparently have the option of using a baby carrot instead of an orange candle.
Among the various spirits invoked are the “demons of the infernal realms.”
If you are not familiar with these things, all of this may sound quite humorous to you.
But the truth is that the powers of darkness are quite real. The reason why these occultists put so much time and energy into their spells is because they actually can work. Some occultists can even do things such as summon spirit beings, travel out of their bodies and see things that are happening on the other side of the world.
Of course the powers of darkness are nothing compared to the power of God, but so many people are attracted to the powers of darkness these days because the dark side allows you to live however you want.
Sadly, so many people love the darkness rather than the light because their deeds are evil.
We live at a time when Christianity is rapidly declining in America while at the same time interest in occult organizations is absolutely exploding. The following is an extended excerpt from one of my previous articles
Even some of our top leaders in the realms of business, politics and entertainment are into the dark arts, and this is one of the themes that I explored in my apocalyptic novel entitled “The Beginning Of The End“. On my websites I have tended to write about economic collapse, politics and the important social issues of our day, but I think that as time moves along I am going to start addressing the very strange and unusual things that are going on behind the scenes a bit more.
Secret societies all over the world are steeped in occultism for a purpose. The elitists that participate in these secret societies know where their power comes from, and they take that world very, very seriously.
Some of the biggest names in entertainment, business and politics have literally made a deal with darkness. Such deals can result in great wealth, fame and power, but in the process these individuals have lost their souls.
As interest in witchcraft and other forms of occultism continue to grow, they will continue to have a larger and larger influence on our society.
But that doesn’t mean that they will win.
In the end, God is the one that is in control, and darkness has no power over Him.
Article reposted with permission from End of the American Dream
| <urn:uuid:e516d0f5-ced5-405a-b513-5cee666598eb> | https://freedomoutpost.com/a-global-alliance-of-witches-plans-to-cast-a-binding-spell-on-trump-and-his-supporters-every-month-during-the-crescent-moon/ | en | 0.956601 | 0.019217 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
A glowing solution to data security
By creating organic materials that phosphoresce, scientists have paved the way for new applications in information storage and data security
Scientists have developed a simple and low-cost method for producing long-lived phosphorescence from organic materials that could provide a new way to encrypt and decrypt confidential information, according to a study in Science Advances.
Some crystalline organic materials can emit ultra-long room temperature phosphorescence (URTP) in which the glow from excited atoms remains observable for seconds to several hours, and is used in applications ranging from biological imaging to storing confidential information.
However, producing and maintaining the high-quality crystalline structures necessary for URTP is very challenging.
Now, a China-Singapore team, which includes researchers from Nanyang Technological University, has created high-quality crystalline films of URTP made from organic materials that can emit phosphorescence for several seconds after being exposed to ultraviolet light of a specific wavelength at room temperature.
By creating UV-responsive URTP materials, the work could lead to new devices for applications in bioimaging, information storage, and data security.
| <urn:uuid:bc87db21-fd20-49d0-966b-0584d4c298ac> | https://gluons2galaxies.com/a-glowing-solution-to-data-security | en | 0.929913 | 0.171894 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT (Ingmar Bergman, 1955)
Eighteen-year-old Anne poses an odd question to Fredrik Egerman (Gunnar Björnstrand, elegant), her fortysomething husband, as he tucks her in: “Would you be jealous if Henrik started paying me more attention?” Henrik is lawyer Fredrik’s studious son; the Egermans’ marriage remains unconsummated. So the answer is “Yes.” One-time wolf Fredrik patiently plays the part of […] | <urn:uuid:3ffa07a6-457a-40fb-a2a4-f710898305d7> | https://grunes.wordpress.com/2008/08/01/ | en | 0.895809 | 0.027135 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Film » Screens
The Cyberpostman Always Writes Twice
Nora Ephron's You've Got Mail offers a new spin on an old Hollywood charmer.
Ephron, of course, made her bones five and a half years ago with the huge hit Sleepless in Seattle, but since then she's given us a failed screwball farce (1994's Mixed Nuts) and a commercially successful but uninspired supernatural comedy Michael (1996). So it's not surprising that You've Got Mail blatantly tries to recreate the winning formula of Sleepless in Seattle, with the same leads (Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan) in a slightly similar plot.
Sleepless was structured as a long tease: Two people--whom the audience knows are made to be together--have tenuous knowledge of each other but manage not to meet until the film's final scenes. In You've Got Mail the two have shared intimate knowledge as pseudonymous e-mail correspondents; when they meet in real life, neither realizing the other as the beloved correspondent, they develop an intense dislike for each other. The tease here is: When will each realize that his/her most hated enemy and most loved friend are one and the same?
The plot will be familiar to film and musical buffs; it's an updating of Ernst Lubitsch's wonderful 1940 comedy The Shop Around the Corner, which was later remade as a film musical (1949's In the Good Old Summertime) and as a (totally different) stage musical (She Loves Me).
The central modern element upon which Ephron bases her update is the Internet (replacing the original's snail mail). Although Kathleen Kelly (Ryan) has a nearly live-in relationship with boyish New York Observer columnist Frank Navasky (Greg Kin-near), she is "cheating" online with someone she only knows by the log-in "NY152." NY152 is really Joe Fox (Hanks), who likewise sneaks away from live-in girlfriend Patricia Eden (Parker Posey) to "cheat" with Kelly, whom he knows only as "Shopgirl." The two have fallen in love by e-mail and are simultaneously eager and terrified about meeting in real life.
By coincidence they do meet one day and actually take a liking to each other . . . until Kathleen realizes that Joe is her mortal business enemy. She is the owner-manager of a children's bookstore called The Shop Around the Corner (the name is the film's most blatant internal acknowledgment of its source), which she inherited from her mother. After forty years it's become a beloved neighborhood landmark, but now it's being threatened by a Fox's Books, a chain superstore opening up across the street.
Kathleen plays her one trump card--a boyfriend with an influential newspaper column. Frank stirs up public support for her beleaguered little enterprise.The night the two penpals are to finally meet, Joe discovers the truth and keeps his identity a secret from Kathleen, leaving her to think she's been stood up by NY152 and breaking her heart. The rest of the film is the sometimes comic, sometimes poignant dance between the two, as each inevitably heads toward a reconciliation between online and real-life personae.
Despite these flaws, much of You've Got Mail is funny and touching in precisely that old-fashioned way that many of us miss so much. Some of that is a holdover from the Lubitsch film, but much of it comes from Ephron and her collaborators. One has to give Ephron credit for doing so many of the right things in this world of craven and unnecessary remakes. She chose a film that, perfect as it was, at least had some rationale--the changes wrought in the shift from mail to e-mail--for being remade. (That said, not much is done to exploit or explore those changes.) Ultimately the screenplay lacks the gemlike near-perfection of The Shop Around the Corner.
You've Got Mail.
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Getting Branded Searches Right – Whiteboard Friday
Hey guys, it's Friday again! By now, you know what that means! Another Whiteboard Friday with Rand! When you're dealing with keywords, there's a little difference between branded keywords and unbranded keywords. The real difference between the two is that branded keywords are way easier to rank for than unbranded terms. But this doesn't meant [...] | <urn:uuid:8654ea1f-af17-48d5-991e-258d0109adaf> | https://thrivesearch.com/tag/branded-search/ | en | 0.954048 | 0.051184 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Restaurant Acoustics
Hubbub. Everyone likes a restaurant filled with hubbub, which is not the same as a restaurant that is too noisy. Hubbub is “background noise”. Hubbub means to the owner that business is going strong and it means to the patron that people like to be here.
Restaurant Acoustics
“It’s too Noisy...,” The single most common complaint about restaurants. It’s not about food, the waitress or dirty glasses, or any other employee caused problem, it’s about too much noise. Fix an employee problem and it’s back again in 2 years, but fix the noise problem and it's gone forever. Yet the owner/manager continues to say no to making changes in restaurant acoustics and continues to spend funds retraining employees. So what’s the problem with eateries and noise, the patrons and the owners?
If a restaurant is too noisy, that means that the place is full of people and business is booming, and owners like that. If it is too quiet, that means the place is almost empty and the owner doesn’t like that. Owners like the noise and don’t like the quiet. Owners don’t like anything that makes their restaurant quiet. No one goes into a quiet restaurant. No one likes to eat in a quiet restaurant. A quiet restaurant means something is wrong. And so the owners don’t like to add acoustics to quiet down a restaurant. We are using the “Q” word to talk about restaurant acoustics and the “Q” word is not the right word to use.
One of the better restaurant designs are large restaurants with high ceilings and tables spaced well apart, and of course, a menu and service to attract the customers, and keep them coming back. These spaces have a steady din of hubbub, that backfills any lull in the conversation. The tables are far enough apart that table top conversations are not overheard at adjacent tables. And there is a large glass lamp fixture over each table, which keeps table top conversations on the table top. But not every available commercial spaces meets these requirements. Many available commercial spaces are wide enough but have a lower ceiling. Low ceilings act like megaphones beaming sound everywhere, and loudly as long as it is in the horizontal direction. The commercial restaurant space is all too often just too noisy.
The basic concept in developing a good sounding restaurant is a sense of privacy. It’s the feeling that one’s conversation is not being overheard by others nearby. How people know they have privacy is because they can’t exactly eavesdrop on the conversations around them. In order for people to have privacy they want to talk quietly and be heard clearly, just above the hubbub. By the time their voice travels out across other tables, it is lost in the hubbub. But speaking quietly and being heard is not exactly easy when the room is filled with hubbub. Here is where the low ceiling comes into play. The ceiling is shiny and reflects the vertical part of a table top conversation right back town to the table where it belongs, and then back up again, and then back down again. To have a quiet table top conversation we need a reflective ceiling.
In order to have privacy in a restaurant the intrusion of sound from afar must be blocked. Something has to be done to attenuate loud sounds from across the room. If we hear the neighboring table speaking up, we can also see the animated movements out of the corners of our eyes and expect to hear the sounds. But hearing equally loud sounds from somewhere across the room is annoying. We have no visual clue about that sound being made and so it becomes an intruding sound. Horizontal sound needs to be attenuated in a good sounding restaurant.
Table top conversations. It is a fundamental social event, eating and visiting at the same time. A good restaurant promotes table top conversation by insuring that people can visit with each other across the table, without a strained effort or raised voice. In addition to the direct sound between people at the table, the reflection of sound off the top of the table makes people's voices louder, without having to raise the voice. A good reflection off the ceiling of the restaurant also contributes to a bright and clear table top conversation.
The acoustic coffered ceiling system uniformly distributes large sections of highly reflective ceiling surfaces, separated by narrow strips of sound absorbing panels, otherwise known as acoustic beams. These ceiling vertical ceiling bounces are essential for clear table top conversations. This is one important reason that this system works best on lower instead of higher ceilings.
Acoustic Coffered Ceiling
Acoustic Coffered Ceiling
And so, in good restaurant acoustics we want to reinforce table top conversations, allow for vertical reverberation and attenuate intruding sounds from across the room. The ASC acoustic beam coffered ceiling system does just that in lower ceiling rooms.
A little hubbub is a good thing... and just the thought of adding sound panels to a restaurant brings chills to the owner, imagining how awful a quiet restaurant sounds. Hubbub provides a sense of welcome to the newcomers and privacy to the seated guests. Hubbub encourages table top conversation and good fun. When we work to revoice a restaurant, we sort out what is working from what is not working.
Most restaurants that have a noise problem are not on the drawing board but are up and running. Starting over, to redesign and remodel the restaurant to sound better is not an option. There is a cost effective “magic bullet” that tends to work very well in most restaurant spaces that need the help. It is the ASC Acoustic Beam Coffered Ceiling System. It promotes the needed background ambience effect of hubbub. It cuts down on the intrusive sounds from across the room and it supports crystal clear table top conversations. And here is how it works.
The Acoustic Coffered Ceiling is a directional acoustic ceiling mounted grid. It is officially a ceiling mounted acoustic baffle. However it is disguised as a classic architectural element, the coffered or box beam ceiling. It allows vertical sound to be reflected and horizontal sound to be absorbed. It works exactly opposite of standard T-bar acoustical ceiling which absorbs vertical sound and reflects horizontal sounds.
The system works best in wide and or long rooms with fairly low ceilings, 8 to 12 feet. The height of higher ceiling rooms minimizes the ability of the acoustic coffered system to independently control vertical and horizontal sound and the ceiling system becomes an attractive general purpose noise control ceiling, making acoustic adjustments only in the reverb time. The lower the ceiling and wider the space the more powerful and vivid becomes the performance of the acoustic coffered beam ceiling.
The Acoustic Coffered Ceiling typically will have 3 to 5 foot squares of existing ceiling separated by 6” wide and 2” deep sound absorbing faux beams. Different depths or widths of acoustic beams produce more or less aggressive results in either the vertical or horizontal direction, as does changing the size of the grid pattern. These faux beams are light weight, fire rated and install easily with nothing more than a few dabs of acoustic ceiling adhesive. They are beveled and shaped to form any number of patterns, the most common of which is the mitered grid pattern.
The size of the exposed ceiling in the grid determines how bright the table top conversation will be. The larger the ceiling grid, the lower is the vertical absorption coefficient. A 4x4 grid with a 6” beam provides a vertical NRC of about 25%. (Noise Reduction Coefficient). Unlike an acoustic tile, that provides the same NRC, this system alternates small areas of 100% absorption with larger areas of 100% reflection. This is very unlike typical acoustic T-bar ceilings, where the absorption and reflection is uniformly distributed. With the acoustic coffered ceiling, the ceiling reflection is not dull as with T-bar ceilings, it sparkles.
Sound traveling in a horizontal direction, grazing the ceiling runs into the sound absorbing sides of the acoustic coffered ceiling. The depth of the acoustic coffered beams determines how aggressive it is with respect to absorbing the grazing horizontal or “cross talk” type of sound out of the restaurant air.
The reflective ceiling not only returns the table top conversation back down to the table top, which makes it more easily heard, but it supports the buildup of the background noise floor, the very important hubbub effect. Because the ceiling is composed of large squares of reflective surfaces, and despite their being separated by sound absorbing edges, multiple vertical reflections are accommodated.
When people are talking in a space that has an acoustic coffered beam ceiling they hear the table top conversation clearly, enjoy the sound masking or privacy effect of ongoing hubbub and are protected from loud and intruding sounds from across the room.
The 3 existing conditions of Loudness, Privacy and Clarity (LPC) were estimated to be 4, 3, 1; very loud, reasonably private and poor clarity. The owner wanted moderate background noise, reasonable privacy and good clarity for table top conversations; LPC rating 2,3,3. This means we need to drop the background noise, retain the existing privacy and improve table top clairity.
The room was a deep and wide restaurant with a fairly low, 10’ ceiling. The surfaces were painted sheetrock, huge plate glass windows and linoleum floor. Wall mounted acoustics would be too far away to control the sound in the middle of the room, it would only quiet things around the perimeter, which might be OK for a nightclub but not for this Bistro. That leave ceiling mounted acoustics. We want to turn the volume of reverberation down which means we need to add acoustic panels to the ceiling. We want to retain conversation clarity, which means we do not want sound panels on top each table. We also want to retain privacy, which means we want to absorb or block sound from crossing the room. We want to improve tabletop clarity, which means we want to introduce more reflecting surfaces near the table.
Converting the floor plan from open tables to booths with an acoustic coffered ceiling is an excellent way to achieve the desired effect. The coffered ceiling adds acoustics to the room, aggressively absorbs sound traveling across the room and only lightly absorbs sound that is reflecting vertically. This quiets the buildup of noise, quiets sounds from across the room and retains hubbub, vertical reverberant hubbub. If the tables are far apart, inter table privacy will be achieved, but if the tables need to be closer, some sort of sound barrier effect is needed between tables, and the barrier should reflect sound from a table back to the table so the conversational sound levels are improved. The owner chose booths in the middle of the room and spaced tables around the perimeter and was very pleased with the change because his target clientele returned and the restaurant is busy, busy, busy... | <urn:uuid:773010ea-8ce6-4071-8aac-d6e043afaceb> | https://www.acousticsciences.com/public-spaces/restaurant-acoustics | en | 0.932564 | 0.159219 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Court Struggles With Question of Who Should Have Standing Under Lanham Act
By Anandashankar Mazumdar
Dec. 3 --The U.S. Supreme Court struggled with the question of how to determine who has standing to bring a claim of false advertising under federal law as counsel for parties involved in the printer business made their arguments before the court on Dec. 3 (Lexmark International, Inc. v. Static Control Components, Inc. , U.S., No. 12-873, argued 12/3/13).
Some justices also questioned the concept of “prudential standing,” wondering when courts should look beyond a statute's own text to limit who can bring claims created by such a statute and Justice Stephen G. Breyer tried to illustrate the issues with an analogy about an ice cream parlor facing accusations of using poisoned chocolate sauce.
Lexmark and Static Control's History
Lexmark International Inc. of Lexington, Ky., is a maker of laser printers for use with computer systems. For certain high-cost printers, Lexmark instituted a discount program called a “prebate.”
Those customers that purchased toner cartridges at the lowered prebate price were required to return used ink cartridges to Lexmark for refilling. Those who purchased the cartridges at the regular price were not subject to this restriction.
In order to enforce the prebate restriction, Lexmark installed two computer programs that managed access to the printer cartridge by the printer.
One program, the Toner Loading Program, a very short piece of code, was designed to measure the amount of toner remaining in the cartridge. This program was located on a chip on the cartridge.
The Printer Engine Program, a longer program installed on the printer itself, controlled a number of printer functions.
Static Control Components Inc. of Sanford, N.C., sells parts and supplies for reusing used printer toner cartridges. Static Control made a chip, the Smartek chip, for sale to makers of third-party replacement toner cartridges. Many such third parties take used toner cartridges and refurbish them for reuse.
Thus, the chip, if used in a refurbished cartridge, would mimic the effect of the chip on the Lexmark cartridges, allowing customers to obtain and use cartridges from sources other than Lexmark. The Smartek chip contained an identical copy of the Toner Loading Program.
This argument represented the latest skirmish between two companies in the laser printer business in a dispute that has now lasted more than a decade and has touched on most of the intellectual property regimes covered by federal law.
Initial Patent and Copyright Decisions
In 2002, Lexmark sued Static Control, alleging that Static Control's mimicking of the Toner Loading Program infringed Lexmark's copyright interests.
In February 2003, Judge Karl S. Forester of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky ruled that Static Control's activity was likely to violate the anticircumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. §1201, et seq., and imposed a preliminary injunction (41 PTD, 3/3/03).
In February 2004, Static Control filed an action seeking a declaration that its new line of re-engineered toner chips did not infringe Lexmark's copyrights or violate the anticircumvention provisions of the DMCA (43 PTD, 3/5/04).
In that declaratory judgment action, Lexmark filed several counterclaims, including claims of patent infringement. Lexmark also joined as defendants some of Static Control's customers, which used the chip to remanufacture used printer cartridges.
In September 2004, the federal district court ruled that Lexmark could pursue its counterclaims against Static Control in this proceeding (181 PTD, 9/20/04).
In October 2004, the Sixth Circuit vacated the preliminary injunction, ruling that Lexmark's claim might fail because the control measure at issue merely prevented use of the printer without controlling access to the content of the Toner Loading Program. Lexmark International Inc. v. Static Control Components Inc., 387 F.3d 522, 72 U.S.P.Q.2d 1839 (6th Cir. 2004) (209 PTD, 10/29/04).
The Sixth Circuit called into question whether the Toner Loading Program was protected under copyright law. It concluded that Lexmark had failed to demonstrate a likelihood of success on the merits of its infringement and DMCA claims and remanded the matter back to the district court. In October 2005, the Sixth Circuit rejected Lexmark's request for en banc review (45 PTD, 3/9/05).
In August 2005, the district court consolidated Lexmark's infringement action with Static Control's declaratory judgment action (164 PTD, 8/25/05).
On remand, Static Control moved for partial summary judgment on the copyright infringement claim and the district court found that the Toner Loading Program was not sufficiently original to be afforded copyright protection (79 PTD, 4/25/07).
Nine mechanical patents held by Lexmark were found valid, and the court granted summary judgment of direct patent infringement against some of the third-party cartridge remanufacturers. However, by this time, they had already settled with Lexmark.
The district court also found valid Lexmark's single-use prebate license, which meant that the sale of a toner cartridge to a user did not exhaust Lexmark's patent rights.
The district court also granted Lexmark's motion for dismissal of Static Control's antitrust, Lanham Act and state law counterclaims. Thus, when the case went to trial, the jury was presented only with the issues of patent inducement and patent misuse.
The jury handed down a verdict in Static Control's favor on the question of inducement of patent infringement and advised the court that Lexmark had misused its patents.
Lexmark then renewed a motion for judgment as a matter of law and moved for a retrial, arguing that the evidence had been sufficient to establish direct infringement by the cartridge remanufacturers and that evidence of inducement had been erroneously excluded at trial.
False Advertising Issue
Judge Gregory F. Van Tatenhove of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky, reversing the prior decision that Lexmark had not exhausted its patent rights, denied the motions.
Both parties appealed and the Sixth Circuit determined that Static Control had sufficiently alleged a claim of false advertising under Section 43(a) of the Lanham Trademark Act of 1946, 15 U.S.C. §1125(a)(1), based on Lexmark's statements to its customers that Static Control's products were infringing.
The appeals court rejected Lexmark's argument that standing in this case should only be granted to direct competitors (177 PTD, 9/13/12). Lexmark argued that Static Control was not a direct competitor because it only made parts for refurbishing printer cartridges. Static Control--unlike its customers--did not actually sell goods that directly competed with Lexmark's goods.
According to Sixth Circuit precedent, standing for a false advertising claim could be based on a showing of a “reasonable interest.” The appeals court also restored Static Control's counterclaims of unfair competition and false advertising under North Carolina state law.
On June 3, the Supreme Court granted certiorari on Lexmark's question of which of three different tests should apply to the question of who has standing to bring claims of false advertising under the Lanham Act.
Petitioner Argues for Narrowed Standing
Arguing for Lexmark, Steven B. Loy of Stoll Keenon Ogden PLLC, Lexington, Ky., argued that the appropriate standard for standing under Section 43(a) was a multi-factor test set forth by Associated General Contractors of California Inc. v. California State Council of Carpenters, 459 U.S. 519 (1983), which has been adopted by the Third, Fifth, Eighth and Eleventh Circuits.
AGC interpreted the standing provision of Section 4 of the Clayton Antitrust Act, 15 U.S.C. §15, whose language had come from the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. That decision acknowledged the broad language of the statute but nevertheless determined that Congress did not intend such a broad range of plaintiffs to be empowered to bring antitrust claims. Instead, AGC set forth several factors to be considered before granting a party standing--such court-derived limitations on standing are known as “prudential” limitations.
Justice Antonin G. Scalia immediately questioned the analogizing of the Lanham Act to the Sherman Act, noting that unlike the Sherman Act, the Lanham Act “goes well beyond” the common law.
When Loy began reciting the AGC factors, Justice Sonia M. Sotomayor stopped him after the very first one, “Is this the type of injury Congress intended to address?”
“Tell me why the answer to that question doesn't end this case here,” Sotomayor demanded. “You're disparaging the goods of a person. You're saying that it's illegal to use that person's products. It seems to me that's the essence of the Lanham Act as it's now written.”
In response to a query by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., Loy conceded that other toner cartridge makers did have standing under the Lanham Act. Based on that, Alito wanted to know why standing should be denied here.
“But it's not a very big step from the manufacturer of the cartridge that competes to the manufacturer of the chip, which is really … an essential component of the cartridge that competes,” Alito said.
According to Loy, wherever the court drew the line, there would always be a party that believed it should be on the other side.
Breyer then introduced his ice cream parlor analogy, an analogy that later in the proceeding he said he regretted introducing:
Suppose that Bailey's sells ice cream sundaes, and the defendant has said the chocolate sauce in Bailey's ice cream sundaes is poisonous. Now, the chocolate sauce does not compete with the defendant because he's an ice cream parlor, but nonetheless he is directly affected by the statement that he is suing about. He is, therefore, different from the other suppliers who might have supplied Bailey's with cushions, heat, electricity. But shouldn't at least that supplier of chocolate sauce have the standing to bring the claim against the ice cream parlor that competes with Bailey?
Loy replied that in such a case, a defamation claim would be available under state law, but Breyer wanted to know why the Lanham Act would deny any recourse. Loy repeatedly cited to Section 45 of the Lanham Act, 15 U.S.C. §1127, which includes in a statement of the statute's intent, a clause stating that the law had been enacted “to protect persons engaged in … commerce against unfair competition.”
Should the scope of standing be broadened to include component manufacturers, Loy asked, why shouldn't a company that made the labels for Static Control's cartridges also have standing to bring a claim?
“Well, the answer to your question, if you're asking, is 'no,' ” Breyer replied, “because … the statement that is sued about has nothing to do with labels. So the people who have nothing to do with the statement wouldn't have standing.”
Sotomayor then returned to the question of why the issue of Congress's intent was not the sole issue when determining whether a party had standing under the Lanham Act. Why, she asked, should the other AGC factors also be applied?
Loy replied that congressional intent “should always be a question.” And this time Justice Elena Kagan joined Sotomayor's line of questioning: “If that's the question, the AGC test strikes me as not the answer to that question. I mean, we don't usually say 'what was Congress's intent, how broad did Congress mean for this cause of action to go?,' and then sort of devise a five-part test with a lot of things that aren't mentioned in the statute.”
According to Loy, standing should be limited, because the Lanham Act offers extraordinary remedies, such as treble damages and attorneys' fees, and also because a showing of intent is not required to make a case for false advertising under Section 43(a).
Loy criticized as too expansive, the “zone of interest” test as put forward by Static Control, as well as the “reasonable interest” test, which was applied by the appeals court in the instant case, and which has been adopted by a few other circuits.
Kagan and Scalia then revisited their discomfort with the entire concept of “prudential standing.”
“When should there be prudential standing requirements in a statutory right of action?” Kagan asked. “In other words, Congress passes a lot of statutory rights of action. And let's say that almost never … does Congress talk about prudential standing one way or the other. Do you think that every time Congress passes a right of action, the courts are supposed to engage in a kind of free-form inquiry about what kind of prudential standing rule should apply to that particular right of action?”
Following Loy's response that sometimes prudential standing limitations are required, she asked, “And you just sort of know them when you seen them, or it's a reaction to what are perceived to be very broad statutes? … When do we know that we should be off on a prudential standing jag?”
Alito jumped in to offer a suggestion: “Maybe the answer is when we just can't believe that Congress really meant the literal words of the statute to be interpreted without some limiting principle. So here, Congress says 'any person' and any person surely includes people who purchase printer cartridges. So, if we don't think that … Congress really meant for every single person who purchases a printer cartridge to be able to file a claim in federal court … then that would be a situation where some consideration of prudential standing would have to take place.”
Scalia tried to bring the conversation back to basics: “What is prudential standing?” he asked. “I don't really understand. Is it anything other than … statutory standing?”
He was not satisfied with Loy's response and continued to question the premise.
“I'm uncomfortable with the notion that … in my prudence I give standing here and I deny standing there. It's up to me,” he said. “Unless prudential standing means statutory standing, so that I look to the statute to see whom it was intended to empower to bring lawsuits, I am very uncomfortable with the whole notion.”
Loy said he would be fine with changing the term of art to “statutory standing.”
Respondent Advocates 'Zone of Interests' Test
Arguing for Static Control, Jameson R. Jones of Bartlit Beck Herman Palenchar & Scott, Denver, proposed that standing under Section 43(a) be governed by the “zone of interest” test, which has been applied to other federal claims, such as in Elk Grove Unified Sch. Dist. v. Newdow, 542 U.S. 1 (2004), which said--quoting from Allen v. Wright, 468 U.S. 737 (1984)--that standing “encompasses … the requirement that a plaintiff's complaint fall within the zone of interests protected by the law invoked.”
Alito asked how the zone of interests test would apply if Lexmark's allegedly false statements had not mentioned Static Control's components. Jones replied that Static Control would still have standing because the statements regarding “the legality of remanufacturing Lexmark's printer cartridges … are about Static Control's products and the legality of using them.”
There was implicit in Jones's reply that not every component supplier of service provider profiting downstream from the sale of remanufactured cartridges would have standing, and Alito tried to find where the line would be drawn.
“I don't understand how you get from the zone of interest to the limiting principle that you are suggesting, which is that the zone of interest includes only those businesses, other than the direct competitor, whose products are targeted by the false statements,” Alito said.
Scalia also prodded Jones on this point: “I'm still left with a lack of understanding of how the disparagement of the composite product is automatically a disparagement of your chip,” he said.
Jones said that the reference to Static Control was implicit in this case.
So then Alito asked about a situation in which there was not even any implicit reference to Static Control.
Jones responded by saying that the context would be important: “In many circumstances where the false advertising is not about a product, those products will have multiple different uses, such as commodity products that are supplied, gears and springs, for example, that may have many different uses. The false statements here would not be about those products. And those manufacturers can sell their gears to many other different users that require gears. Static Control's microchips here only work for remanufacturing Lexmark printer cartridges.”
Alito then re-introduced Breyer's ice cream parlor hypothetical in which a defendant has said that the chocolate sauce was toxic: “If the effect of that is to drive out of business a little company that manufactures ice cream that's used there, that company would not have standing?”
In that case, Jones said, if only the chocolate sauce was the subject of the allegedly false statements, then the ice cream manufacturer would probably not have standing. Bailey's ice cream parlor, which was also explicitly referenced in the hypothetical defamatory statement, would also have standing, he said.
Breyer then said he was “sort of sorry I used that hypothetical.” Scalia quipped: “I am too, because I'm sick of it.”
However, Breyer said that should he accept Jones's formulation, he wanted to know how it could be related to the various tests for prudential standing that were under discussion, including the AGC test, the reasonable interest test.
Jones said that the tests used so far at the circuit level “don't necessarily encompass this situation as well as they could” and that's why Static Control was advocating the zone of interest standard.
Breyer indicated that he was troubled by one aspect of the zone of interest test. The standard was set forth in Association of Data Processing Service Organizations, Inc. v. Camp, 397 U.S. 150 (1970), which said that standing would be permitted if the plaintiff were “arguably within the zone of interests to be protected” by the relevant statute. It was the presence of the word “arguably” that was problematic, because in the case of the Lanham Act, it would seem to create a cause of action for a consumer.
“Isn't it arguably in part to protect consumers?” Breyer asked.
Referring to the text and history of the Lanham Act, Jones said that it would be clear that commercial actors, not consumers, were intended as the parties to be given a cause of action.
Scalia also objected to the breadth created by the word “arguably,” and Jones conceded that Static Control would not object to removing that qualifier from the test.
Scalia offered his own solution: “ 'Arguably' could refer to factual matters. That is, you are within the zone of interest if certain facts are established. And if you don't establish those facts, you are not. That's how I've always understood the 'arguably.' I don't think it means 'close enough for government work.' It doesn't mean that.”
Kagan stepped in to say that “just a couple of years ago we made clear that 'arguably' was to be taken very seriously, and essentially established a kind of buffer zone so that … we weren't going to be too strict about it.”
However, she said, that was in the context of the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946, which could be distinguished from the Lanham Act context, which creates “a particular right of action. And rather than create any kind of buffer zone around it, we should just ask how is it sensible to interpret that right of action.”
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Naresh Sritharan at
Request Intellectual Property on Bloomberg Law | <urn:uuid:f378b1ee-3a9c-4549-b1f6-6c3818ead4b4> | https://www.bna.com/court-struggles-question-n17179880483/ | en | 0.964472 | 0.034291 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Even their hair looks strong. They've got big, long knotted ropes of it, ponytails down their backs, thick as steel cables. It's not often you see utter world domination anymore, but the U.S. softball team has offered a rare view of it. Through eight straight shutouts, delirious, shirtless Americans have bobbed in the sun-filled bleachers to "Woolly Bully."
Let's just say that it's a good thing that sour, frail, complaining Russian Svetlana Khorkina doesn't play softball. It's one thing to pick a fight with 16-year-old hummingbird gymnast Carly Patterson. I dare say we wouldn't hear quite so much of Khorkina's lip if she had to go up against third baseman Crystl Bustos. After watching Bustos drive in a couple of runs against Australia as the Americans completed yet another shutout, 5-0, to advance to the gold medal game, I can cheerfully report that Bustos's braid is bigger than Khorkina.
You don't want to mess with Bustos. Or with pitcher Lisa Fernandez, that wad of brunette tucked under her visor, skipping and kicking her red cleats in the dirt, as she sends batters to the chiropractor with her change-up, a wavering apparition of a pitch that goes in more directions before it crosses the plate than a moth. Then there's Jennie Finch, all 6 feet 1 of her, throwing the heat at 65 mph from her huge windmill windup, a skein of hair flying out behind her like a spear.
Last week, LeBron James ran into Finch at a Nike party and playfully suggested that he could handle her at the plate. Here is Fernandez's reply: "I thought it was pretty funny that he went there," Fernandez said. "We went to a Nike party and they had a tape of LeBron playing softball, and he struck out in slow pitch. He needs to start with the T-ball first. Then we'll talk."
The Americans' performance here has been so comprehensively, thoroughly great in every phase of the game that they're being called, by male sportswriters no less, the female version of the 1927 Yankees. It's not a ridiculous statement. After all, the effect of a softball hurled from 43 feet at 65 mph is not unlike that of a 90 mph fastball from a mound 60 feet 6 inches away.
Let's review just a few of the Americans' stats in this tournament. Five of their eight games have been one-hitters. In four of them, the mercy rule had to be invoked. They have a 0.00 ERA while they're hitting .344. They've outscored opponents, 46-0, with pitchers giving up just 14 hits and 10 walks in 49 innings.
But here is the most impressive number of all. Not only have the U.S. women refused to give up a run in eight games. They've only allowed two runners to reach third base in the entire tournament. "The bases are very precious to us," Fernandez said. "We're very stingy in allowing people on the bases. Bustos, the last thing she wants is to see someone standing next to her at third base. That is her base. We take it personal. Same thing at home base. Stacey Nuveman is not letting anyone get in there without a fight."
Their victory over Australia on Sunday in the semifinals was a typical outing. Against a power-hitting team that is without doubt the second-best one here, Fernandez pitched a three-hitter. She kept the Aussies guessing with junk that turned into infield dribblers or popups. It was also Fernandez who gave the Americans a 1-0 lead with an RBI double in the fourth.
You don't want to fall behind against this group, especially not early in the order. Every American who stepped to the plate from then on must have looked like a huge bronzed version of Athena. In the fifth inning, here came 5-10 shortstop Natasha Watley, who has 10 infield hits. Aussie pitcher Melanie Roche was so tentative on the mound that Watley's bunt froze her completely and she couldn't make the throw to second. "It's my job to wreak havoc out there," Watley said later.
Now here came 5-9 first baseman Leah O'Brien-Amico, with a single to load the bases. Next up was Bustos, who is 5-7 and about 200 pounds, and who promptly smacked a two-run single. Now here came Fernandez again, with an average of .550 in the tournament. Roche, by now totally unnerved, hit her with a pitch. Now here came the 6-foot catcher, Nuveman, with a sacrifice fly. Kelly Kretschman's home run in the sixth inning undid the Aussies once and for all.
It was the USA's 78th straight victory in international play, and a 79th and its third consecutive Olympic gold medal seemed certain. Although the Americans, with a relentlessly good attitude, refused to treat it as a foregone conclusion. "Who cares if you hit 1.000, if you lose?" O'Brien-Amico asked. "You don't let that get in your head. We haven't had our best game yet."
Should the Americans win another gold, the question will be asked: Just how great are they? But the better question is, why? Why this team? The answer seems to be a combination of attitude and wherewithal. It used to be that a female softball player could expect to get a college scholarship out of the sport, and then she could expect to get a job in a bank, or selling insurance. Now with increased funding from the U.S. Olympic Committee, players like 33-year-old Fernandez can make the game their full-time calling -- and they can stay together, in a cohesive program, and play the game year-round. The NBA might take a lesson from them.
But oddly, the Americans' greatness may not earn them recompense in the larger world of the Olympics. Other countries find their one-sided results so tiresome that there has been some discussion that softball doesn't belong in the Games, because it's too much of an American specialty. Their reward could be to see their sport discarded. "They've set their minds to raising the bar," said Coach Mike Candrea. "That's what the Olympics are supposed to be all about. I'd hate to see us get penalized for that."
The greatness of this team hasn't been universally admired, nor has it been examined, as it should be.
Third baseman Crystl Bustos is one of the intimidating stalwarts of the utterly dominant U.S. softball team. | <urn:uuid:8e18294c-67c1-4cde-bf3d-1d03810991fc> | https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/sports/2004/08/23/at-these-olympics-athena-wears-a-softball-jersey/2035f54e-ce34-423c-a20b-c55b69368c67/ | en | 0.978973 | 0.026494 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
English 101: Simple Present Tense of the Verb
The simple present tense of the verb describes an action which happens every day or all the time.
1. Juan works in the farm every day.
2. They always travel by train.
3. Mr. Santos eats lunch at the school canteen.
4. Her mother washes clothes daily.
5. I ride the bus to office.
For first person pronouns ( I, you, we) and plural subjects, just copy the form of the verb. The third person singular of most verbs is formed by adding s. However, add es instead of s in the following cases:
1. if the verb ends in o
go = goes
do = does
2. if the verb ends in s, sh, ch, x or z
wash = washes
catch = catches
fix = fixes
3. if the verb ends in y, the y is changed first to i before es is added as long as y is preceded by a consonant
study = studies
carry = carries
Practice Test
Use the correct form of the simple present tense of the verb in the following sentences:
1. I (study) my lessons every night.
2. Gina always (try) to arrive early.
3. We (go) to church every Sunday.
4. Kenneth (do) his chores without being told.
5. She often (catch) cold.
6. Mrs. Samson (teach) Physics.
7. My brother (play) in the park.
8. Harry (kiss) her mother before going to school.
9. They (watch) the game on television.
10. You (like) doughnut and coffee.
1. study
2. tries
3. go
4. does
5. catches
6. teaches
7. plays
8. kisses
9. watch
10. like
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Thursday, November 20, 2014
SDTTFSS series 1 episode 1
The first episode of Sound Design Tips and Tricks for Screen and Stage wherein we answer the question of what to do when you need sound to come from somewhere on the stage. Ien DeNio was essentially the knowledge base around this episode. Here are the notes for the episode (these were my notes that I was working from in raw, unedited format.)
1. There's a phone ring or computer sound that's supposed to be coming from the stage. It sounds dumb coming from the speakers overhead. What can I do on an unlimited budget, and what can I do to fake it?
The right (old-fashioned) way:
IFB and squawk box
The more recent hack is to use a baby monitor.
Ien’s favorite baby monitor to mod is the Sony NTM-910
Yea, the black wire was just something I had lying around.. a crap speaker 1/8" input jack or something.. so I hacked it off, pulled the red and white lines that went to the little microphone and connected them up. I didn't even solder this one... its just wrapped and taped
2014-11-18 (2).jpg
2014-11-18 (1).jpg
Photo on 3-6-14 at 12.39 PM.jpg
Also: walkie-talkies can be used.
Note that like all wireless things you can have trouble with taxicabs and other radio interference.
“It works best, I've found, if you throw up a dedicated wireless connection sans internet, connect the phone and computer to that.”
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The Pipeline
The Pipeline
No. Not that pipeline, the other pipeline.
We should build a pipeline from San Diego, just across from Tijuana, to Brownsville, Texas,
that’s about 1,600 miles. Such a pipeline would connect the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Of course, safeguards to prevent cross ocean species migration would have to be installed at both ends, but it would be a relatively simple procedure. An oil pipeline of the same length would cost about four (4) Billion dollars. Since a water pipeline would not have to be made of steel, the costs would be significantly less than that. But even if there were no savings, it would be worth it.
Let’s look at three major problems that will cost us billions over the next ten years or so.
1. The lack of control at our southern border.
There have been many calls for a fence along the border, but it is a political hot potato. We need a steady flow of immigrants across the border for many more reasons than I care to go into here. A pipeline, with its attendant buffer and security protection, would provide an effective barrier to illegal immigration and funnel cross border traffic to legitimate crossing points. Huge savings in the cost of Border Patrol, Drug Enforcement, and Homeland Security would accrue. Additionally, it would force us to reckon, finally, with the issue of recreational drugs. That flow would slow to a trickle. Local resources now devoted to law enforcement, judicial proceedings, and incarceration would be freed up for more constructive uses.
1. The continuing drought in the southwest.
While I do not want to get into a discussion about Climate Change, the fact of life in the southwest, including California, is long term drought. Even with slight natural improvements in rainfall, it is likely that the loss of crops will cost us billions in increased cost of food and the loss of jobs that would result. Our growing population is putting tremendous pressure on the limited water resources throughout the country, but especially in the southwest. By constructing de-salinization plants at strategic points along the pipeline, fresh water could be delivered where it was needed to irrigate crops, provide drinking water, and supply water for industrial purposes. Sale of this water could generate significant revenues, including taxes at the local, state, and federal level. It is likely that the significant depletion of the aquifers in the region could be at least stabilized, if not reversed. The process creates a salt sludge that could be pumped back into the pipe to re-join the ocean, or directed to shallow flats where solar evaporation would produce sea salt in huge quantities for industrial use. That is, after all, how sea salt has been harvested for thousands of years.
If what we are told about climate change and the rising sea level is even partially true (forget about the cause for a moment) the pipeline might even slow that process down a little.
1. The now long term unemployment, especially among those under thirty.
The construction of such a pipeline would require a huge labor force. Even after completion, maintenance and operations would still require significant manpower. Additionally, at each de-salinization station communities would spring up to provide housing, schooling, provisioning, and support services. The boom to local economies would be incredible.
I’m sure there are pitfalls I haven’t considered. After all, I’m a cook, not a construction engineer. But I am also sure there are benefits I haven’t identified either. On the whole, I am sure it’s not a worse idea than, say, oh Hell, pick any idea the government has had in ten or so years.
Let’s build a pipeline. Let’s make water one of the few things we don’t have to worry about anymore.
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One Response to The Pipeline
1. judy says:
good job
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Outcome Chart - Manitoba - Social Studies 11
This outcome chart contains media-related learning outcomes from the Manitoba, Grade 11 Social Studies curriculum, with links to supporting resources on the MediaSmarts site.
It is expected that students will:
Identity, Culture, and Community
Students will explore concepts of identity, culture, and community in relation to individuals, societies, and nations.
Many factors influence identity and life in communities, including culture, language, history, and shared beliefs and values. Identity is subject to time and place, and is shaped by a multiplicity of personal, social, and economic factors. A critical consideration of identity, culture, and community provides students with opportunities to explore the symbols and expressions of their own and others’ cultural and social groups. Through a study of the ways in which people live together and express themselves in communities, societies, and nations, students enhance their understanding of diverse perspectives and develop their competencies as social beings. This process enables them to reflect upon their roles as individuals and citizens so as to become contributing members of their groups and communities. The specific learning outcomes within Identity, Culture, and Community include concepts such as human interaction and interdependence, cultural diversity, national identities, and pluralism.
Kellogg Special K Ads
Marketing to Teens: Alternate Ads
Marketing to Teens: Gender Roles in Advertising
Marketing to Teens: Gotta Have It! Designer & Brand Names
Marketing to Teens: Introduction
Marketing to Teens: Marketing Tactics
Marketing to Teens: Talking Back
Sex in Advertising
The Pornography Debate: Controversy in Advertising
The Price of Happiness
Crime in the News
Television Newscasts
Comparing Crime Dramas
Advertising and Male Violence
Movie Heroes and the Heroic Journey
The Blockbuster Movie
Violence on Film: The Ratings Game
Popular Music and Music Videos
The Function of Music
Defining Popular Culture
Historical Connections
Students will explore how people, events, and ideas of the past shape the present and influence the future.
The past shapes who we are. An exploration of Canadian and world history enables students to acquire knowledge and appreciation of the past, to understand the present, and to live with regard for the future. An important aspect of this process is the disciplined investigation and interpretation of history. Students learn to think historically as they explore people, events, ideas, and evidence of the past. As they reflect upon diverse perspectives, personal narratives, parallel accounts, and oral and social histories, students develop the historical understanding that provides a foundation for active democratic citizenship. The specific learning outcomes within Historical Connections enable students to develop an interest in the past, and focus on chronological thinking, historical understanding, and concepts such as progress, decline, continuity, and change.
Cinema Cops
Selling Tobacco
Global Interdependence
Students will explore the global interdependence of people, communities, societies, nations, and environments.
People, communities, societies, nations, and environments are interdependent. An exploration of this interdependence enhances students’ global consciousness and helps them develop empathy with respect to the human condition. Students critically consider diverse perspectives as they examine the connections that link local, national, and global communities. Consideration of global connections enables students to expand their knowledge of the world in which they live and to engage in active democratic citizenship. The specific learning outcomes within Global Interdependence focus on human rights and responsibilities, diversity and commonality, quality of life and equity, globalization, international cooperation and conflict, and global environmental concerns.
Crime in the News
Cinema Cops
Comparing Crime Dramas
Crime Perceptions Quiz
Viewing a Crime Drama
Bias in the News
Fact Versus Opinion
Power and Authority
Students will explore the processes and structures of power and authority, and their implications for individuals, relationships, communities, and nations.
Power and authority influence all human relationships. Students critically examine the distribution, exercise, and implications of power and authority in everyday life and in formal settings. They consider diverse forms of governance and leadership, and inquire into issues of fairness and equity. This exploration helps students develop a sense of personal empowerment as active democratic citizens. The specific learning outcomes within Power and Authority include concepts such as political structures and decision making, governance, justice, rules and laws, conflict and conflict resolution, and war and peace.
Online Propaganda and the Proliferation of Hate
Political Cartoons
Free Speech and the Internet
Economics and Resources
Students will explore the distribution of resources and wealth in relation to individuals, communities, and nations.
The management and distribution of resources and wealth have a direct impact on human societies and quality of life. Students explore the effects of economic interdependence on individuals, communities, and nations in the global context. They examine economic factors that affect decision making, the use of resources, and the development of technologies. As students explore diverse perspectives regarding human needs, wants, and quality of life, they critically consider the social and environmental implications of the distribution of resources and technologies, locally, nationally, and globally. The specific learning outcomes within Economics and Resources include concepts such as trade, commerce, and industry, access to resources, economic disparities, economic systems, and globalization.
Marketing to Teens: Gotta Have It! Designer & Brand Names
Crime Perceptions Quiz
Perceptions of Youth and Crime
Viewing a Crime Drama | <urn:uuid:bfd68d2e-2a50-46f0-9411-51c362ede8dc> | http://mediasmarts.ca/curricularoutcomechart/outcome-chart-manitoba-social-studies-11 | en | 0.872037 | 0.056962 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Showing posts from 2003
Did you get enough to eat on Thanksgiving?
Some people didn't. If you're looking for a good cause this season, or at least have some tax-deductible charity money burning a hole in your pocket, I recommend The Boston Rescue Mission ( They give people a place to stay while they help them get back on their feet. It's more than just a shelter from the cold, though I'm sure its residents appreciate that, as well. If you don't want to give here, that's fine, just give your money and/or time somewhere.
The blessings you receive will turn sour if you keep them to yourself, just as a river that stops flowing grows putrid.
Write as clearly as you think (I'll take what I can get).
I have found my new Style Bible.
Mother, brother, sisters, and me
(Cross-posted to Applied Laziness. Look there for more.)
Every company is, in essence, an extended family. We have the parental figures, the sibling rivalries, and the uncle no one likes to talk about. We also have all of the emotional connections that people used to form only with family and neighbors. Some companies embrace this fact, creating an “Us against the world” mentality, or welcoming their new employees into “the Globalcorp family.” Other companies try to “keep things on a professional level,” maintaining that employment is nothing more than a fiscal contract to provide labor in return for wages, and it’s never personal.
The fact is, it’s impossible for work to not be personal. People are emotional creatures, instinctively seeking connections with everyone we meet. It is impossible to spend 8 (or more) hours per day with a group of people and not form a bond with them, which is why it is ludicrous to me to see managers and human resource professionals try to deny this…
The other day, I heard this quote from the new VP of Product Development at a software company:
"I fully expect that 75% of the engineers working here today will leave, because this place isn't a country club anymore."
And this man is in charge of software development!
Now, I will grant you that the company where he now works once had a reputation for having achieved the pinnacle of "work hard, play hard" existence, with flexible hours, foosball tables, and an emphasis on having fun at work. During the gloriously excessive dot-com boom, this company prided itself on throwing the best parties around (“Not the most expensive, just the best”).
The thing is, though, all those flexible hours usually added up to far more than 40 per week, and this company’s engineers built the most innovative software products in their space. They also managed to fend off bigger and richer rivals and stay six months to a year ahead of fierce competition for more than five years. …
Thought for the Day:
"Common wisdom" is occasionally the former, rarely the latter, and often neither.
The great (s)capade
For the past two days, a debate has raged over the electronic frontier of my workplace. It has to do with three little characters, but boy, are they important.
We’re performing the final tests on a new software feature, and our new feature changes the layout of some screens for those people who are lucky enough to see it. We have been testing this feature for 6 weeks now, and somehow we missed something that our client team picked up on immediately.
When this feature appears, it causes the text next to it to wrap. For one client in particular, that makes things look a little odd. For you see, modern English is not flexible enough for our needs, so we saw fit to extend it in our application. The extension looked something like this: "Please review your number and the other number(s) below." (not actual text, but you get the idea). We just wanted to make sure that, in case there was more than one number below, we were covered. Of course, when you ac…
Making a hard ride harder
Bonk …
Oh, were you still using that?
Believe me, I'm amazed that we're even in business.
My Climb to the Clouds: Stubbornness, Pain, and Gatorade
What do you think? Well, you're wrong!!!
Thoughts From the Road
This morning was my first sunny morning bike commute, and it made a difference. From my average speed (16.2 mph) to my general attitude to my water intake, everything was up from last week's gray trudge. I was soaked again when I got to the office, but at least it was my own sweat and not rain and road goo.
It's still not the most exciting ride, though, so I have to find ways to keep myself entertained and stop the first three lines of "Unwell" from endlessly repeating in my head. Today's game was "What was that before it was roadkill?" the game where you try to identify the original owner of the various chunks of fur and goop on the side of the road. Hey, I figure that I have to look at them to dodge them anyway. I might as well make it fun. Here's an excerpt from today's game:
Squirrel.... Squirrel.... Opossum?... Frog. Hey, little guy, what were you doing so far from water? Besides getting squished, I mean....…
"Why ask why?" I'm glad you asked. I'll tell you.
I read a blog by a former coworker of mine, and it started me thinking about the different faces we put up to the world. This guy's a decent guy at work who clearly likes to have fun in the office, but he can also be a real -- how to put this nicely? -- hardass. He scared the heck out of almost everyone when he first started at our company, and has a reputation -- self-proclaimed, I might add -- for cleaning house as the first order of business in every new job. But when you read his blog you see a tender-hearted dad who's concerned about how nervous his girl will be at the recital and who has picnics after church. Is this the same guy?
Men are famous for compartmentalizing their lives. Work goes here, home over there, and ne'er the twain shall meet. I have been accused of forgetting that I have a family when I am at the office, so I know whereof I speak. But why do we do that? I can understand trying to put on a good face to the world, but the faces that we put on…
Did another ride the other day. It's hard to get up at 6:00 knowing you have a 90-minute ride before spending the day at work, but it's not so bad once you're on the road for a while, especially when the sun is (finally) shining. The afternoon ride was glorious, though, and far better than sitting in the Mass Pike for 45 minutes.
I have more proof on the "Massachussets tilts" theory, too:
My average speed going east in the afternoon: 18.8 mph
My average speed going west the next morning: 15.2 mph
And no, I don't believe that this can solely be attributed to the fact that I hate mornings, though it certainly feeds that sentiment.
My century comes up in four weeks, so I have to amp up the mileage, morning blues or not.
Pennsylvania Gazette: Alumni Voices (The Deluxe Edition)
Today I posted a memory of my time at the University of Pennsylvania. I'll put it here, too, for posterity's sake:
My memories of my time at Penn are a collection of sensations: the sights, sounds, tastes, and smells (oh, the smells!) of Penn:
My first sight of Hill House when the taxi dropped me and my huge boxes off in front. It took me five minutes to figure out where the front entrance was.
The sound of someone saying who-knew-what in Irvine Auditorium. The acoustics in that place were so bad, you could be 20 feet from someone and not be able to understand them, never mind catching a word of Dennis Miller's rants from the top of the balcony.
The taste of my first Sophie's cheesesteak. I don't care what anyone else says, that truck served the best steaks in town and, therefore, the world.
The slightly sweaty smell of Franklin Field on a hot spring day, the rough feel of the twine on the javelin grip in …
Thought for the day
If everyone in a meeting agrees on a decision, half of them aren't paying attention.
No Regrets
My recent grumpy posts may leave you, gentle reader, with the impression that I regret leaving my old job, or feel I may have made a mistake. While I must admit that I do miss certain aspects of my old company, and I certainly miss my friends there, I have no regrets. In terms of my career, this was the right move to make. I have a much greater ability to make a positive impact now than I did before, both within the small consulting startup that pays my salary and for the clients we serve. I expect that we will someday set the standard for how to get things done, and I want to be in the forefront of that effort. Working at a "grown-up" organization is part of the price of this new reach, as well as part of the learning process. Until I see what it is like to work for a company, I can't effectively suggest improvements in that environment.
This has always been my biggest complaint about consultants: they zoom in, hold a few interviews, then drop a binder…
They paved Paradise and put up a "No Parking" sign
To quote Joni Mitchell (or the Black Crowes now, I suppose): "You don't know what you got 'til it's gone." I can't believe that I ever complained about restrictive policies or things that kept me from getting my job done when I worked at a small company. That was paradise, from a freedom to do my job point of view, compared to large company life. I already mentioned the total lockdown of my desktop, the filtering of "dangerous" Internet sites ( Watch out!), and the strictly enforced conformity. But did I mention that, unless the computer was ordered by IT, built by the IT-approved vendor, and installed by an IT tech, it's not allowed on the network at all? This in a company where -- by my scientific technique of walking around and looking at the color of everyone's badges -- an estimated 20% of staff are contractors.
My consulting company issued me a laptop,…
The Long Ride Home
I learned a few things on my lon…
I start a new job in two weeks. Last Friday, I told my team that I was leaving, and there was a stunned silence for a couple of minutes. While it made me sad, that also made me proud, because they didn't want me to leave. It seems better than variations on, "Well, duh! I mean, when was the last time you did anything other than surf the net, anyway?"
I also realized that this was the first time anyone had voluntarily left in a very long time. I think people had forgotten you were allowed to do that.
This got me thinking about the various reactions you could get from people when you announce that you're leaving a job:
The Boss:
Good: "This will be a great loss to the company. Is there anything I could do to convince you to stay?"
Bad: "All right! I met my quarterly goals 2 months early!"
Your peers:
Good: "I'm sorry for us, but glad for you. Good luck!"
Bad: "Can I have your chair?"
Your direct reports:
Good: "I d…
Thought for the day:
"Revenge is not a rifle. It's a shotgun. You just want to get the person who hurt you, but you end up hurting everyone around them, sometimes for generations."
-- Pastor Steve Schell, Northwest Church, Federal Way, WA.
What if you were given three "do-overs," chances to go back to any point in your life and start over again from there. What would yours be? Would you kiss the girl, take the risk, do the work? Every life has turning points, where a decision opens one door and closes another, where we look back and say, "If I had just...." Do you have doors that you wish you had opened, or ones you wish you had left closed? If you had three do-overs, would you have had the patience to save them, or would you have used all three of them trying to get that one girl into bed your junior year in high school?
What would your do-overs be? Tell me.
To be honest, I don't know what I would do over. I'm pretty happy with where I've ended up so far, the individual annoying details of any given day notwithstanding. I wonder if, were I to go back and do something over, I'd wish I had stayed with the original plan, after all.
Painfully funny link of the day:
Frank Lingua and Buzzwords
It's funny because I hear language like this every day. It's painful, well, because I hear language like this every day. Why do we feel compelled to constantly make up new ways to say the same thing, only less clearly? I suspect that it's because the concepts we deal with daily, especially in the high-tech world, are so abstract that we have to resort to metaphors to try to make ourselves understood. This process has gone completely out of control, however, to the point where I don't even understand what my coworkers are saying anymore, and it takes them forever to say whatever it is.
So, as part of my one-man effort to rescue professional communication, I hereby swear to cull the following phrases from my daily conversation:
"Hone in on...."
"Flush out the details." I will, however, be glad to flesh them out, since that sounds so much more positive.
"Get our arms around it," or…
Living and working in Boston/Cambridge is kind of like being in college forever, except the money flows in the opposite direction. You still interact with all the same personality types:
The software engineer who's really a musician/author/stand-up comic, and is just hanging in with this programming thing until the other career takes off.
The guy who everyone assumes must be a genius, because why else would he show up to work dressed like Robin Hood/the Borg/Batman?
The brooding, perpetually upset libertarian/vegetarian/human secularist who will protest anything as long as the majority of America agrees with it, and who demands her/his right to free speech as long as it agrees with his/her views.
The throwback who still thinks the 60's and early 70's were the greatest time in history, mainly because back then he wasn't the only one still smoking pot.
You get to have all the same conversations, too, only now it's by email, generally in front of a large virtual audience…
Things I have learned about myself in recent weeks:
While I like the idea of starting to write again, I don't necessarily sit down to do it, especially if I get a new game to play.
Icewind Dale, while lacking the depth of the Baldur's Gate series, can be just as addicting.
Given the opportunity, I will go for a week or more at a time on fewer than six hours of sleep a night, to guarantee that I get some time to myself.
Trying this blogging thing again, and hoping that this time I keep it up...
Watch this spot. I guarantee it will be worth it.
OK, I can't really guarantee it. I mean, how do I know how you measure worth? For all I know, you might not consider anything worthwhile unless it includes a killer recipe for apple strudel, which I don't have. But, to be honest, this isn't really for you, it's for me. I want to have somewhere to write, just to capture random thoughts and snippets of ideas and to practice writing for an audience. This may never be seen by anyone else, but at least I can pretend to have an audience. Even that's a start.
And that's what this was: a start. So watch this space, and there will be more. And I'll see if I can get you that strudel recipe. | <urn:uuid:8a8294f3-3961-410d-a2df-42751fa2ff24> | http://wickedsmaht.blogspot.com/2003/ | en | 0.977752 | 0.040406 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
In late August, I spent eight days trekking the might Tombstone Mountains of the Yukon catching the aurora borealis sparkle to my delight. It took a lot of effort to haul my food, clothing and shelter on my back through the rugged Yukon, but it was so worth it. I caught amazing views and the aurora was phenomenal. I am planning another shorter northern lights adventure during the beginning of October. I have decided to fly to Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories that is littered with pristine lakes. However, this trip will be a lot easier with roofs over my head and rental cars rather than hiking over giant passes. Yellowknife is the only city in the Northwest Territories and falls directly in the aurora oval in the far north of our globe. The weather is looking decent and the aurora forecast is predicting strong lights.
Two quick flights and I was staring at a stuffed polar bear at the Yellowknife Airport as I grabbed my bag; it felt like I was in the far north. Got a rental car, quick bite to eat and was chilling on a houseboat that I had booked through Airbnb. The clouds were thick and the air was cold but was excited to be deep in Canada with the weather expected to improve.
Many tourists visit Yellowknife in anticipation of seeing the northern lights. There is an Aurora Village that supplies warm beverages and heated teepees. However, I prefer to be deeper, away from humanity & urban lights. I found myself the second night at Reid Lake Territorial Park, a quick drive to the east of Yellowknife down the Ingraham Trail. There was a nice spot that had sweeping views north, east and west over a gorgeous lake. I got my camera ready as the sunset turned to night. Immediately, aurora activity was noticeable to the north. The lake quickly calmed and the show was on. The northern lights sparkled over the lake with a perfect reflection dazzling. It was my first 24 hours in Yellowknife and I was being blown away by the glowing skies. The lights danced to the north then to the east and switching to the west. Finally, the aurora switched to the south. The lights were happening in every direction and I was trying my best to capture what I could with my camera. The show lasted for a solid five hours before clouds descended. It was an unreal night that defies reality.
The next day, got some rest, checked out the visitor center and the city of Yellowknife. However, the real entertainment is the aurora. The third night the aurora was active through the clouds. The show dazzled the crowd gathered at Prosperous Lake but the pictures did not match the prior eve. Though, the glowing skies still make an immense impression of amazement. The fourth day, decided to do a short hike to Cameron Falls which was tranquil and serene. The crowds have thinned out as fall season bring chilly air to the north. Decided to visit Cameron Falls during the eve to see the aurora over the falls. It was another gorgeous eve with the northern lights glowing and shifting over the falls, rivers and lakes of the area. Also caught some of the aurora reflecting in a small lake close to the falls.
It was a quick trip to experience a beautiful and remote from Canada. For those who want a different travel experience to see the northern lights, Yellowknife is a great spot. The Ingraham Trail is an established road that meanders east of the city passing by lakes and beautiful woods. The inland nature of the Northwest Territories does allow for clear eves. The fall is a great time to visit as the lakes have not frozen allowing for amazing reflections. It was a beautiful couple of days and definitely fit the bill of seeing the Northern Lights the easy way. | <urn:uuid:aaa8e43d-441b-4703-9659-35fcd707a650> | http://www.stardustimages.org/northern-lights-the-easy-way/ | en | 0.953299 | 0.027395 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Quartz #14—>Off the Rails: How to Get the Recovery Back on Track
blog.supplysideliberal.com tumblr_inline_mlkedka0Pt1qz4rgp.png
Link to the Column on Quartz
Here is the full text of my 14th Quartz column, “Off the Rails: What the heck is happening to the US Economy? How to get the recovery back on track,” now brought home to supplysideliberal.com. It was first published on February 1, 2013. Links to all my other columns can be found here.
• consumer spending rose,
• home-building rose, and
• business investment on buildings and equipment rose.
On the negative side,
• exports fell more than imports, and
• government purchases fell.
Net exports and government purchases are the big worries going forward as well.
The decline in US government spending comes from the struggle of state and local governments with their budgets and at the federal level from the ongoing struggle between the Democrats and Republicans about the long-run future of taxing and spending. Last quarter saw a remarkable decline in military spending that Josh Mitchell explains this way in today’s Wall Street Journal (paywall).
Our problems are so big they need new solutions. In our current situation, the fact that a proposal is “untried” is a plus, since none of the economic approaches we have tried lately have worked very well. In the last few months I have focused my Quartz columns on explaining how the US and the world can get out of the economic mess we are in with new solutions. A recap:
1. One of the new solutions is really an old one, that Congress and the President might be timidly tiptoeing toward too little of: dramatically more open immigration. Done right, this is guaranteed to add to long-run economic growth, as more workers make more goods, perform more services, and contribute to solving our long-run budget problems. And it isn’t just the US that would benefit from more open immigration. Ryan Avent has a must-read article in The Economist arguing that “Liberalising migration could deliver a huge boost to global output.”
3. For stimulating the economy, the one current approach that has been working at least halfway is “quantitative easing”: the Fed’s large purchases of long-term government bonds and mortgage-backed securities. But quantitative easing is hugely controversial and has an unfortunate side effect of making our long-run government debt problem worse than if we could stimulate the economy some other way. Establishing a US Sovereign Wealth Fund to do the purchasing of long-term and risky assets would give the Fed room to maneuver in monetary policy, and restrict its job to steering the economy rather than making controversial portfolio investment decisions. And a US Sovereign Wealth Fund could stand as a bulwark against wild swings in financial markets. (In addition to the column linked above, I spoke on CNBC’s Squawkbox about a US Sovereign Wealth Fund.)
4. Although valuable, a US Sovereign Wealth Fund is a poor second best to electronic money. It is the fear of massive storage of paper currency that prevents the US Federal Reserve and other central banks from cutting short-term rates as far below zero as necessary to bring full recovery. (If electronic dollars, yen, euros and pounds are treated as “the real thing”—the yardsticks for prices and contracts—it is OK for people to continue using paper currency as they do now, as long as the value of paper money relative to electronic money goes down fast enough to keep people from storing large amounts of paper money as a way of circumventing negative interest rates on bank accounts.) As I argued in “Could the UK be the first country to adopt electronic money,” the low interest rates that electronic money allows would stimulate not only business investment and home building, but exports as well—something that would lead to a virtuous domino effect as the adoption of an electronic money standard by one country led to its adoption by others to avoid trade deficits. If I were writing that column now, I would be asking if Japan could be the first country to adopt electronic money, since Japan’s new prime minister Shinzo Abe is calling for a new direction in monetary policy. For the Euro zone, I argue in “How the electronic deutsche mark can save Europe” that electronic money is not only the way to achieve full recovery, but the solution to its debt crisis as well.
5. Finally, if electronic money is too radical, the government can stimulate the economy without adding too much to the national debt by giving consumers extra borrowing-power with a government-issued credit card and a $2,000 credit limit to every taxpayer. These Federal Lines of Credit would stimulate the economy at a fraction of the cost of tax rebates. This is a big advantage for countries deep in debt, which includes most major economies. And Lines of Credit are an affordable way to stimulate the economies of European countries such as Spain and Italy that lack an independent monetary policy because they share the euro with many other European countries.
Franklin Roosevelt famously said:
| <urn:uuid:f015ec02-da6d-4a17-900e-83ec9d40dcd2> | https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/48923088780/quartz-14-off-the-rails-how-to-get-the | en | 0.949785 | 0.092688 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Add and Edit Check In and Out Times
You can view all in and out times under Check In/Out.
1. Select the date you want to record
2. Click the children who were present for the specified day (names will turn green when marked "in").
3. Click the children again to record their out time
4. By using the drop down arrows next to each child's name, you can individually record the in and out times or click the Expand All button.
5. You can also click the Apply enrollment times button at the top of the page to auto-fill the in and out times indicated on their enrollment forms.
6. Do the same process for children who come and go more than once per day and both sets of in/out times will be recorded. | <urn:uuid:27e45387-f7a1-4003-8058-c2ca7af833e2> | https://help.kidkare.com/help/add-and-edit-check-in-and-out-times | en | 0.920117 | 0.02038 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Police Story 2 (1988)
by guest contributor Volcan Kacar
Dedicated cop, upholder of the law and protector of the citizens, no it is not Judge Dredd it’s Jackie Chan for the second time as Sergeant Chan Ka Kui. Our favourite Hong Kong tough guy super cop is back again fending off the villains from the 1985 squeal Police Story, and at the same time trying to stop a group of bombers! With more thrilling choreography, astonishing stunts and high octane scenes that leave you on the edge of your seat, Chan Ka Kui is back doing what he does best, generally wreaking havoc! Police Story 2 is a brilliant amalgamation of comedy, romance, action and as always, martial arts.
Jackie Chan as Sergeant Chan Ka-kui, Maggie Cheung as May, Chor Yuen as Chu Tu, Charlie Cho as John Koo and Lam Kwok-Hung as Superintendent Raymond Li.
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After the violent and high cost of damages from the events of the first Police Story, Chan is left with a demotion and on highway patrol duty. Chan’s girlfriend May (Maggie Cheung) is pleased with the demotion, knowing that her boyfriend’s days of gun shootouts and jumping from moving cars are over. Now, he has more time to dedicate to being a boyfriend rather than the local superhero! However this ‘honeymoon’ stage is short lived when Chan is confronted by John Ko’s right hand man Chu Tao. It seems that Chu Tao has been released from prison due to being terminally ill and only having a short time to live, vowing to take revenge on the very cop that put him behind bars.
Some henchmen and including John Ko head to Chan’s apartment to terrorize him, leaving him no choice but to fight them. John Ko and his henchmen cross the line when they attack and beat up May and her mother. Infuriated, Chan goes and seeks revenge on the gang. Chan discovers them at a restaurant turns the place upside down. Giving John Ko and his henchmen a seriously good kicking. After avenging May’s honour, Chan is left ashamed of his actions. Knowing that he took the law into his own hands was not the right thing to do, so he resigns from Police Force. Chan and May decide to get away from it all and take a little honeymoon away to Bali. As karma would have it however, Chan is unable to escape the fame he earned from arresting the big time drug boss lord Chu Tao. A simple trip to a shopping mall gets intense when officers on duty recognise Chan and ask for help. Knowing that innocent people could get hurt, he is unable to resist and gets involved. Unable to deactivate a planted bomb, Chan tells everyone to evacuate the area. The bomb detonates, destroying the entire mall….
Praised as a hero, Chan has his duty as an officer reinstated and is assigned to discover the bombers and bring them down. Planting a surreptitious device in the mall, hoping this would help them discover the bombers’ identity, eventually leads Chan to a suspect a deaf-mute who is an explosives expert and a deceptively vicious martial artist. However, the stealth mission does not succeed and Chan and the police’s, cover is blown. Aware now that the police are on to them, they plan a synchronised bombing which will target the police headquarters. The gang knows their chance to escape is tight so they double their ransom and kidnap May. They lure Chan into a trap and strap him with an explosive vest forcing him to obey their orders. Chan is now a hostage and has to pick up the ransom money for the bombers! Just as Chan is about to seemingly give the bombers their ransom, he manages to drive his car into a tunnel. Knowing that there is no signal underground, the vest cannot be activated remotely, so he carefully disarms and rips the vest off. Chan now sets out on his rescue mission to save May who is being held captive at a fireworks warehouse. The final showdown begins between Chan and the deaf-mute! After over powering the villain and throwing him into a mass of barrels, Chan manages to rescue May in the nick of time for, just seconds afterward the warehouse explodes…!
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Of course we enjoy watching how the story plays out but as for any Jackie Chan film what we really want to see is the intense action, insane stunts, dazzling fight scenes and the amazing choreography that comes with it. Police Story 2 delivers on these with a vengeance! Police Story 2 is also loaded with physical comedy. Jackie Chan wins the day with his Charlie Chaplin-like performance, including a penchant for overacting when in pain!
It seems that a meal with Jackie Chan is never a simple affair. I realised this after the fight sequence in the restaurant when Jackie went to avenge May’s honour. The term “escalated quickly” really does come to mind here! What better place to show off Jackie’s skill in a restaurant full of fine china dinnerware, bottles of expensive wine and plenty of chairs and tables to break! Anything Jackie gets his hands on, can be a weapon -chairs, stools, tables and even pillars! One can’t help but feel sorry for the restaurant owner after Jackie and the henchmen decide to settle their differences here! Imagine how much the damages would amount to with all the furniture, dinnerware and glasses that need replacing…not to mention removing the pickup truck that smashed into the restaurant!
One of the most eventful highlights of Police Story 2 is the playground fight scene. This is yet another awesome example of Jackie’s high energy, creative stunt-style, brawling technique and choreography. As in all Jackie’s films, he uses the entire surrounding to his advantage! Whoever would have thought a children’s playground would be a brilliant location for a fight sequence? It was both fascinating and incredibly funny to see Jackie use monkey bars to gain momentum for a kick in a face and use slides to escape tight situations. Seeing Jackie lure all the henchmen to the jungle gym and fight inside the climbing frame reminded me of Mel Gibson’s Mad Max, Beyond The Thunderdome!
A worthy sequel to Police Story; featuring some more of that hard-hitting, raw, ground breaking action, and quite brutal martial arts that was awarded Best Action Choreography at the Hong Kong Critics award and finally more daring, memorable stunts.
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• A stunt went horribly wrong when Jackie Chan smashed through the wrong glass pane causing severe cuts to his head and body.
• The outtakes theme song is actually sung by Jackie Chan himself!
• There are many different edits to the movie, the longest cut is the Japanese one of 122 minutes, Hong Kong’s 101 minutes and the United States’ one of 92 minutes.
Film Rating: 7.5/10
All our guest contributors share an unrivalled passion for all things martial arts; movies, books, and in some cases practising various forms too!
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Kung-fu Kingdom | <urn:uuid:8a8f5d1d-6e71-4480-93a4-e7cf4dd67bd3> | https://kungfukingdom.com/police-story-2-movie-review/ | en | 0.963065 | 0.028748 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Chaffey Event Review
English 1A – Chaffey Event Review – Fall 2018
Attend one event at Chaffey College this semester and write a detailed analytical review of the event (2+ pages, 4-6 paragraphs, typed).
• final draft (2+ pages, typed, 5 pts.) due
• When you write your review, answer all of the following questions in detail:
1. What was the event?
2. Where did it take place? When did it take place?
3. How many students do you think attended?
4. What were the responses or reactions of those who attended?
5. What were the strengths of the event? How could the event have been improved
6. What information related to this class or your other classes did the event provide?
7. What connections did you make between the event and your classes?
8. How did the event affect your understanding of Chaffey College?
9. Would you recommend this event to a friend if it were scheduled again? Why or why not? | <urn:uuid:1a2a33d1-6060-48b9-af01-2ad8f202206e> | https://professorwatkins.wordpress.com/english-1a-3/event-review/ | en | 0.958433 | 0.99984 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Midway through my cruise, I decided to wake up early one morning to witness and photograph the sun rising somewhere in the Caribbean Sea. The ship was passing by a group of islands when suddenly a flock of sea birds started flying in front of the ship as if guiding it towards its destination. I moved to the front of the ship for a more unobstructed view and I was astounded by the sight of the golden sun rising from the horizon. I was all alone at the top of the ship and I felt very privileged to have been there for that moment.
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Mushroom Pizza
This recipe is kind of a jumbo size to the mushroom appetizer I posted on Friday. I have decided to ditch the pizza dough for a large portobello mushroom. As I have previously stated in my cooking I try to avoid making food to substitute for something I shouldn’t eat and that is why for this recipe I chose to go all natural instead of making soy pizza dough…yuck! A large portobello mushroom is the perfect replacement for pizza dough and it makes such a cute individual pizza. I made this recipe as a simple pepperoni pizza, but please feel free to add more toppings.
• 1 Portobello Mushroom
• 2 tablespoons of Pizza Sauce with no sugar added
• 1/4 cup of Pizza Cheese
• as many Low Carb Toppings as you want!
Serving size: 1
1. Preheat oven to 350°f
2. Clean each mushroom with a damp paper towel, remove the stem, and use a spoon to scrape out the gills.
3. Add the pizza sauce to the center of each mushroom.
4. Sprinkle half the cheese in the mushroom.
5. Top with Pepperoni and/or other toppings of choice.
6. And then top with the rest of the Cheese.
7. Bake the mushrooms for 10 minutes.
8. Switch to broiler on high to make the cheese bubble and have a nice golden top. This takes about five minutes, but I recommend watching them during this step.
9. Enjoy!
Link to the main publication | <urn:uuid:09c7e610-1564-499c-bb08-37ac9277ef77> | https://sugarfreechic.com/2012/09/mushroom-pizza/ | en | 0.934159 | 0.048753 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
F 35
An F-35
US Air Force
"We are practicing taking what would be a smaller contingent of jets and moving them to another location and then having them employ out of that location," Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian, former Director, F-35 Integration Office told Scout Warrior in an interview several months ago.
Harrigian said the Air Force plane would likely deploy within several years and pointed to mini-deployments of 6 F-35As from Edwards AFB in Calif., to Mountain Home AFB in Idaho as key evidence of its ongoing preparations for combat.
"They dropped 30-bombs - 20 laser-guided bombs and 10 JDAMS (Joint Direct Attack Munitions). All of them were effective. We are trying to understand not only how we understand the airplane in terms of ordnance but also those tactics, techniques and procedures we need to prepare," Harrigian explained.
The training exercises in Idaho were also the first "real" occasion to test the airplane's ability to use its computer system called the Autonomic Logistic Information System, or ALIS. The Air Force brought servers up to Mountain Home AFB to practice maintaining data from the computer system.
A pilot takes the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter aircraft up for its first night flight near Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., Jan. 18, 2012.
US Air Force photo
F-35A "Sensor Fusion"
The computer system is essential to what F-35 proponents refer to as "sensor fusion," a next-generation technology which combines and integrates information from a variety of sensors onto a single screen. As a result, a pilot does not have to look at separate displays to calculate mapping information, targeting data, sensor input and results from a radar warning receiver.
Harrigian added that his "fusion" technology allows F-35A pilots to process information and therefore make decisions faster than a potential enemy. He explained how this bears upon the historic and often referred to OODA Loop - a term to connote the Observation Orientation, Decision, Action cycle that fighter pilots need to go through in a dogfight or combat engagement in order to successfully destroy the enemy.
Courtesy of Lockheed Martin
Also, the F-35 is able to fire weapons such as the AIM-9X Sidewinder air-to-air missile "off boresight," meaning it can destroy enemy targets at different angles of approach that are not necessarily directly in front of the aircraft.
"Before you get into an engagement you will have likely already shot a few missiles at the enemy," Harrigian said.
The F-35s Electro-Optical Targeting System, or EOTS, combines forward-looking infrared and infrared search and track sensor technology for pilots - allowing them to find and track targets before attacking with laser and GPS-guided precision weapons.
Matt Cardy/Getty Images
F-35A Joint Strike Fighter Deployment
Once deployed, the F-35 will operate with an advanced software drop known as "3F" which will give the aircraft an ability to destroy enemy air defenses and employ a wide range of weapons.
"Within a couple years, I would envision they will take the squadron down range. Now, whether they go to Pacific Command or go to the Middle East - the operational environment and what happens in the world will drive this. If there is a situation where we need this capability and they are IOC - then Air Combat Command is going to take a hard look at using these aircraft," he said. | <urn:uuid:a1ea7371-f38c-4739-b7ad-0c7541c6f5e7> | https://www.businessinsider.com/f35-mini-deployments-a10-navy-seals-2016-10 | en | 0.958727 | 0.162159 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
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