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Elvio Estrada places a textbook onto his project, which is made of index cards and masking tape.
Elvio added the school’s logo onto his project.
H’Nadahri Joyner adds a textbook to the pile. His project held 34 books.
Mr. Ferland and H’Nadahri at the end of last Tuesday’s class.
Freshman Alae Mohammad with the robot’s controller. His coding work makes the robot move.
Vanessa Giron, a junior, uses an engineering notebook to record the Robotics Club’s progress.
Students working on the Robotics competition project.
There are no rappers in Saffron Walden, according to the Office of National Statistics. In the 1930s there was one resident who attended a garden party in spats but there have been no further recorded incidents of anything else like this. One of the most popular pastimes of Saffron Waldeners is a game that is peculiar to the town and one commemorated on the football club's badge.
"Reveal The Chimney" can be played as a parlour game or, as in most instances, can be enjoyed in a communal way, on a grassy area with a barbecue, music and real ale. In the latter version, a large print, sometimes up to ten-foot square, of a photograph of a local person's chimney, is hidden behind tarpaulin. The game leader, or "Chimeneer" (either the most senior person present or someone who drinks green tea) tugs at the tarpaulin to reveal a section of the photograph at a time.
Donna Nelson, who chairs the Texas Public Utility Commission, is trying to crack down on deceptive electricity providers and make it easier for Texans to shop for electricity.
Donna Nelson has issued a warning to companies that try to trick Texans into buying electricity plans that are pricier than they appear: The state’s Public Utility Commission is watching.
That was a reference to listings on the state-run website called Power to Choose, which is supposed to help Texans shop for retail electric providers on the competitive market. The commission created the portal for comparing rates in 2002 after Texas deregulated the electricity market across most of the state.
Consumer advocates have long complained that per-kilowatt-hour price listings for some plans can deceive ratepayers — with fees or other provisions hidden in fine print.
Nelson has launched an effort to crack down on the trickery. That yielded changes to the shopping tool late last month: The site now automatically filters out prices with built-in credits for customers who use certain amounts of energy. (In some of those cases, customers can be dinged for using too little electricity.) The move also weeds out some offers — some as low as one cent per kilowatt-hour — that appeared artificially cheap.
“The tweaks were really important,” Nelson said.
Nelson — first appointed to the commission by Gov. Rick Perry in 2008 and named its chair in 2011 — sat down with The Texas Tribune in her office this week. She discussed what could be next for the Power to Choose website and spoke of trying to strike a balance between too much and too little information for Texans shopping for electricity.
TT: What prompted you to bring up the website revamp this year?
Nelson: I check the website periodically, just to see what the rates are, and I started seeing those one-cent offers.
When I was appointed to the commission in 2008, prices on Power To Choose would just come up randomly. And I was concerned that people would just look at two or three offers, and if they were too high, they would stick with their current plan without looking further. I believe firmly that the only way a competitive market works is if people have access to information, and they can compare offers. So I asked if we could make the lowest offer come up first. Ever since then, there’s been a little bit of game playing. I just want to make sure that customers are seeing something understandable, and it’s not inherently deceptive.
TT: It sounds like the website has been evolving ever since Texas deregulated the market.
Nelson: We did a revamp of the website a few years ago, and we learn all the time from customer interaction. There are very few retailers out there who want to deceive customers. I think some companies are inventive, and they put a 1.5-cent offer out there. Then the other retailers start losing customers, and there’s a rush to the bottom. So it was time to reevaluate the website.
TT: After the latest tweaks to the website — filtering out the credits — what other changes might we see?
Nelson: There is a lot discussion on displaying average customer use of electricity. The average Texan uses about 1,000 to 1,200 kilowatts of electricity a month. At one time, there was confusion because website offers showed only prices for 1,000 kilowatts. You had to click further to find rates for other usages. Now, we require up-front postings for 500, 1,000 and 2,000 kilowatt-hours.
Still, one question is: How do customers know what their use is without pulling out their bills? Do we somehow connect the Power to Choose website with the Smart Meter Texas website? [That state-run portal allows millions of Texans who have smart meters in their homes to view electricity use. Few have ever logged on.]. We’re trying to strike a balance between providing too much and too little information, while making the website relatively simple to use.
TT: How much responsibility lies with the consumer to research the best deal? I know of some ratepayers who switch plans every couple of months.
Nelson: Our market is set up so that the power is with the consumer. We have educated consumers in Texas — much more than in other states — because they do have the power to choose. As long as we can make the information accessible, the burden is on them to shop around.
TT: What’s the timeline for any further changes to Power to Choose?
Nelson: We want to get it done quickly. But I think the change we’ve done right now makes a big difference. The other website — the advanced meter portal — is in transition right now, too. So I think it’s a good time to see if we can link the two together.
TT: Each year, the Texas Coalition for Affordable Power [which advocates for cities and other local governments and negotiates their power contracts] analyzes how much Texans are paying for electricity. The latest reports appear to show that Texans in deregulated areas are getting better at finding good deals, but on average, they are still paying more than people served by monopoly providers. Do those studies say anything about how Texas has fared since deregulation?
Nelson: I think Texas has fared really well, and I think the rates are really good. On the free market, there’s a difference between what people pay and what they could pay. For instance, you can go to HEB and buy milk, or go to Whole Foods and buy milk. If people are paying more than the available offers, it’s their decision. We're just trying to make sure they have the information to make that decision. I think the vast majority of people would prefer to be in an area where they could choose.
The studio known as the home of the James Bond franchise has also hosted such productions as "Les Miserables."
Walt Disney’s Star Wars: Episode VII will shoot at studio facilities operator Pinewood Shepperton's Pinewood Studios outside of London, sources confirmed Friday.
The studio known as the home of the James Bond franchise has also hosted such productions as Les Miserables and was expected to get the new Star Wars film, which is expected to start shooting in early 2014.
Disney/Lucasfilm previously announced that the movie will be shot in Britain, but didn't detail a studio facility.
A rep for Pinewood Shepperton declined to comment on the Star Wars VII shoot, citing company policy not to comment on specific projects. A Disney rep couldn't immediately be reached.
Star Wars: Episode VII, scheduled for a 2015 release, will be directed by J.J. Abrams. Michael Arndt will write the screenplay. The eighth and ninth Star Wars installments are expected to hit theaters in 2016 and 2017, respectively.
All six Star Wars movies to-date included at least some production work in the U.K., at studios including Elstree, Shepperton, Leavesden, Ealing and Pinewood.
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BBY ended the day down 28.59%, or $10.74, to close at $26.83.
For the nine weeks ended Jan. 4 – aka the crucial holiday season, which can amount to up to 40% of annual sales – Best Buy's sales slipped 0.8% at stores, websites, and call centers open for at least 14 full months. Analysts had expected growth.
Best Buy's steep seasonal price cuts, aimed at getting shoppers into its roughly 1,105 big box stores, 100 mini mobile standalone stores, and clicking "buy" on its online site, actually worked to the company's disadvantage.
President and Chief Executive Officer Hubert Joly said in a statement that the deeply discounted holiday season, coupled with Best Buy's aggressive competitive pricing efforts, came at a higher-than-expected cost to the company's bottom line. The company now expects operating income to decline in Q4.
Total revenue slumped 2.6% to $11.5 billion over the holiday shopping season, with domestic sales slipping 1.5%.
"Their initiatives are not driving traffic," Michael Pachter, a Wedbush Securities analyst who has an "Underperform" on shares, told Bloomberg. "They are positioning as if competition will go away, and it won't. The Internet never sleeps."
The Internet proved to be Best Buy's one bright spot. U.S. comparable online sales climbed 24% over the holiday period.
Yet while its website receives more than a billion visitors per year, just 1.3% of those visitors actually purchase a product. Most use the site simply to peruse and conduct price checking. And competing with the likes of Amazon isn't easy.
Some traders see a short-term opportunity in BBY shares amid Thursday's painful plunge. The feeling is the steep one-day nosedive is an overreaction, leaving shares cheap.
All the large retailers are in some degree of "trouble", as the rate of population growth and long term economic growth ( annual GDP) has slowed considerably since 2000. Our "recovery" or so-called "new normal" simply can not support the many specialty retailers and big box traditional retailers in millions of malls scattered about the U.S.A. Too many retailers, too many malls, too much floor space and too much inventory.
Migration to the internet for e-commerce has hurt too, but may not be the deciding factor. Higher costs for the essentials, such as transportation, housing, food, gas, utilities, etc. have squeezed consumers whose wages are essentially flat. Taxes are going up too. Less disposable income means the mass market retailers are overbuilt.
There is an issue seemingly not recognized, or included in, Best Buy's financials. In 2009, this company decided to make a conscious effort to pander to Muslim customers. They distributed a flyer wishing customers a happy Eid al-Adha while forbidding store personnel from using the phrase, "Merry Christmas." This angered many and kept shoppers away in droves. They later doubled down on this pandering and began funding the group, CAIR. A HUGE mistake.
Thus, I am not surprised BB is in trouble. Shoppers, well aware of the controversy, have, and will continue to, take their money elsewhere. Personally, I have not shopped at BB since that 2009 ad ran and will never shop there again.
The captors of a journalist in Syria are threatening to execute her tomorrow (13 December) unless their demands for a $50m ransom are met.
Anhar Kochneva, a reporter with Russian and Ukrainian dual nationality, was kidnapped by the Free Syrian Army (FSA) near the city of Homs at the beginning of October. She was said to be on assignment for several Russian media outlets.
In a video released on 7 November, she appealed to the embassies of Ukraine and Russia, as well as the Syrian government, to meet the demands of her kidnappers.
In a second video, released on 28 November, she made a short statement in Arabic, as above, in which she says that her reason for being in Syria was to act as a translator for "Russian intelligence."
"I'm Anhar Kochneva, a Ukrainian citizen who was living in Russia. I was born in 1972. I came to Syria on January 2012 as a journalist with a forged ID, but my main task was to translate between Syrian officers and their Russian counterparts.
I took part in battles in Baba Amro and Zabadani, and I was translating for a Russian officer, Peter Petrov, and Syrian officers, Essam Zahr al-Deen and Ali Hotham.
When I arrived in Syria, I met Brigadier General Asef Shawkat and he sent me to Homs. I worked also as a translator in Aleppo and Idlib and Zabadani… I'm here at the behest of Russian intelligence.
They [?] kidnapped me when I was returning from Tartous to Damascus with a captain in the Syrian army whom was assigned to protect me. I ask the governments of Russia and Ukraine to respond to the kidnappers' request."
European journalists' organisations, including the Russian Union of Journalists, believe she was pressured to read that text. Her kidnappers have called her "a Ukrainian spy".
"We are gravely concerned for the safety of Anhar Kochneva," said Jim Boumelha, president of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ). "Those who are holding her will be held responsible for summary execution if she is killed."
The IFJ and the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) have called on those who are holding Kochneva to respect her right to life.
Her captors are believed to have demanded a ransom of $50m (£31m). "This blatant use of journalists as a money-spinning scheme is outrageous," said Arne König, the EFJ's president.
"She and her family should not be subjected to such a cruel blackmail. She should be released immediately and unharmed to be reunited with her relatives and colleagues."
Both sides in the current Syrian conflict have been accused of serious violations, including arbitrary arrests and detention, kidnappings as well as killings of journalists and media workers.
At least three other journalists and media staff are either missing or held by warring factions in Syria. US freelance Austin Tice, who writes for the Washington Post and McClatchy newspapers, went missing in August 2012.
Palestinian Bashar Fahmi al-Kadumim of the Arabic-language television channel Al-Hurram, also disappeared in August in the city of Aleppo. And Mustafa al-Khateeb, a Syrian interpreter, was detained by the FSA in Bab al Salameh in October.
WHEN Chip Kidd, the celebrated book designer, fell in love with the poet and Yale professor J. D. McClatchey 10 years ago, the two had to contend with more than the usual challenges of a new relationship.
Mr. Kidd, then 31, was a rabid pop culture consumer, living in a two-room apartment with 20's modern furnishings and a huge collection of Batman and Justice League memorabilia. Mr. McClatchey, highbrow, low-tech and almost 20 years Mr. Kidd's senior, lived in 19th-century splendor downtown in the Police Building, with a harpsichord topped with an old French candlestick, paintings by Fairfield Porter and Edward Hopper, distant and formal, and vast floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.
"The lobby there," Mr. Kidd said, "is the sort of place where you walk in and you feel like you're there to sign a treaty."
Mr. Kidd's home is more like a very expensive toy store. It reflects the same graphic punch seen in his book covers, which helped transform the American book jacket from a decorative bit of packaging into a striking evocation of the writing it contained. Its items are arranged like a pocket shrine, as much a carefully curated archive of Mr. Kidd's obsessions and evolving eye as his new book, "Chip Kidd, Book One: Work: 1986-2006," published this month by Rizzoli.
"When you walk into my apartment I want you to feel like you're walking into my head," he said. "These things are the things that excite me visually and formally."
The apartment, 800 square feet in a 1928 building in the East 60's, is largely given over to "these things." The walls flaunt romantic gouaches of superheroes by Alex Ross and typographically explosive cartoon riffs by Chris Ware (Mr. Ross and Mr. Ware, both comic book artists, are collaborators and buddies of Mr. Kidd's).
The Justice League stuff -- action figures and the boxes they came in, lunchboxes, comic books, movie posters -- is corralled on glass shelves, along with Mr. Kidd's greatest hits, from David Sedaris's "Naked" to Michael Crichton's "Jurassic Park."
Mr. Kidd, 41, came to New York in 1986, straight out of the graphic design program at Penn State. Within a month he had a job in the art department at Alfred A. Knopf, where he intended to stay for a year or two, but has remained ever since.
He bought his current apartment 11 years ago, for a sum that he prefers not to share with the public but that was low enough to make a visitor squirm with envy. ("It was a complete wreck," he said in a mollifying tone.) A terrace nearly as big as the apartment gives Mr. Kidd another "room" in warm weather, along with a panoramic Gotham City view.
With the help of Steven Killcoyne of Allen + Killcoyne Architects in New York, Mr. Kidd made the place look as it might have when it was built in 1928, with furniture and fittings to match. He built late-20's-style cabinets and shelves for both rooms to hold his unruly collection of superhero items, which now numbers 500 or so objects.
Mr. Kidd brought what John Updike, in his introduction to Mr. Kidd's book, calls a "playful thinginess" to jacket design -- tweaking familiar forms to create visual puns, blowing up images until they veered into abstraction or took on new meanings, playing with type and color -- always in the service of a simple, arresting idea about the book.
Such vividness can have unintended results. In Mr. Kidd's monograph, Augusten Burroughs describes an exchange, overhead at an airport bookstore, about the paperback version of his memoir "Dry," published by Picador last year. Mr. Kidd, whose title at Knopf is associate art director, has always had the freedom to design for whomever he liked (he is also an editor at large for Pantheon's comics division). The book chronicles Mr. Burroughs's experiences with alcoholism and recovery, and Mr. Kidd designed a cover whose type was soaked, so that it bled in rivulets down the frontspiece.
A retrospective of Mr. Kidd's work, a companion to his book, will be on display at the Cooper Union from Nov. 17 to Feb. 4.
Mr. McClatchey calls the apartment the Bat Cave. When he and Mr. Kidd met, at a party for a book one had edited and the other designed, he was 50 years old, a grown man for whom much of pop culture, he said, was a foreign country. But he learned the language quickly, its codes, its neighborhoods and its citizens, and he cherished the experience.
"The trouble with falling in love when you are a certain age is you bring a wary experience to things," he said, marveling at how he shed his wariness. "You also trail an accumulation of tastes and objects that, when they are different from your beloved's, have to be accommodated. It's like a third person in the marriage."
Or in Mr. Kidd and Mr. McClatchey's partnership, a third and fourth person. You can imagine Mr. McClatchey's harpsichord squaring off against Mr. Kidd's shiny silver helicopter seat.
"On the face of it, Chip is the last person I'd fall in love with," Mr. McClatchey said, adding that before meeting Mr. Kidd his only referent for Superman was Nietzsche. "Fortunately, at the time, I was smart enough not to let my taste control my life."
Since their relationship began, they have lived what Mr. Kidd calls a triangulated existence, ricocheting between his place and Mr. McClatchey's, and spending weekends in Mr. McClatchey's little fisherman's cottage in Stonington, Conn., where Mr. McClatchey's framed letters from Abraham Lincoln, Proust and Verdi make a backdrop for an enormous figure of Batman.
Mr. Kidd likes to talk about Batman as a piece of graphic design.
"The wings, the horns, the angelically demonic visage: he is a gargoyle come to life," he said. "He just looks so damn cool."
Then there's the content, Mr. Kidd continued, warming to his subject, the back story of the child whose parents are killed by a mugger right in front of him. "Bruce Wayne then devotes his life to fighting crime," he said. "But the idea is that by the time he grows up the Gotham City police force is so corrupt that he must work outside of it to effect any meaningful change. Thus he becomes an urban legend. One that actually exists. Who among us, especially in New York, has not dreamt of this. We want to be whispered of, talked about, regarded in awe, perhaps even feared."
Mr. Kidd isn't really sure how many Batman things he lives with.
"Certainly enough to command my life in an emotional way," he said. "Though it's a bummer that I'm running out of room. What I'm preserving, basically, is me."
Correction: November 10, 2005, Thursday An article last Thursday about the book jacket designer Chip Kidd misspelled the surname of his companion. He is J. D. McClatchy, not McClatchey.
U.S. stocks were poised for a slightly higher open Tuesday, as investors remained unwilling to place any big bets ahead of decisions out of Europe and from the Federal Reserve.
Global markets were modestly lower ahead of Wednesday's ruling from Germany's Constitutional Court on the legality of the European Stability Mechanism, a permanent bailout fund that's expected to have a maximum lending capacity of €500 billion.
Investors are waiting to see how the ruling may impact the European Central Bank's plans to preserve the euro, which remained near its highest level against the U.S. dollar since May.
European markets were lower in afternoon trading, while Asian markets closed mixed.
In other markets, gold prices moved higher and oil prices were little changed. U.S. Treasuries faltered, lifting the yield on the benchmark 10-year note to 1.67%.
On the domestic front, investors are waiting to hear if the Fed will announce highly anticipated new stimulus measures when it wraps up its two-day policy meeting on Thursday.
Poll: Will the Fed announce QE3?
U.S. stocks ended lower Monday.
Economy: The Census Bureau is scheduled to release data on the U.S. trade balance for July on Tuesday morning. The report is expected to show a deficit of $44 billion, according to a survey of analysts by Briefing.com.