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As a charter member of the National League in 1876, the Cubs were first called the White Stockings. By 1890, they were nicknamed the “Colts” because they were left with a bunch of young players after veterans were lured away by the short-lived Players League. They also were called Cap Anson’s Colts in honor of their pl...
Other nicknames were floated, including Rainmakers, Remnants, Cowboys, Broncho Busters and Murphy’s Spuds.
When the American League began in 1901, the team’s best players took off for the new league, leaving them again with a bunch of youngsters, hence the popular nickname “Cubs,” which also fits today’s young team.
And that’s where my grandfather comes in.
Fred A. Hayner was a reporter for the Chicago Inter-Ocean and later the Chicago Daily News, where he covered baseball, football, boxing and six-day bicycle races.
As a high schooler on the West Side in 1890, Fred was recruited for a tryout with the struggling Pittsburgh Alleghenys, in town to play Chicago at their old ballpark on the Near West Side. Fred pitched four innings and was rocked for nine runs, six earned. After working an 0-and-2 count on Anson, he walked him.
But Fred’s real piece of Cubs history came when he was a young sports editor in the early 1900s.
Some sources say there was a newspaper contest for the name, and some say nobody knows — probably Sox fans. But whenever somebody is given credit for the origins of the Cubs’ name, it seems to be either my grandfather or my grandfather along with Daily News sportswriter George Rice.
Fred started championing the name Cubs in 1901, according to a 1934 team booklet — a treasured family heirloom that’s useful in bar bets.
Other sources cite one of the name’s first appearances as March 27, 1902, (in a Daily News article). And some, including “The Dickson Baseball Dictionary,” credit both Fred Hayner and George Rice as coming up with the name in 1901, along with a logo of a bear cub to go with it.
By 1907, the new team name had stuck.
A second reason for the name can be found in a 1972 Chicago Tribune interview with James Gilruth, an old Daily News sports reporter who described a 1904 meeting he had with Fred, George and Charles Sinsabaugh, the assistant sports editor.
“Hayner complained that the names Orphans and Capt. Anson’s Colts were too hard for the headline writers to use and he wanted a shorter name,” Gilruth said.
Unfortunately, I never got to ask my grandfather for details. On the bitter cold night of Jan. 14, 1929, Fred’s Lake Forest house burned down. My dad, James, 11, my Uncle Francis, 15, and my grandmother Jeannette were pulled from the house, but Fred died trying to save the family dog. His body was found in the basement...
I have only a few things of my grandfather’s: a watch he was given by Charles A. Comiskey, a porcelain greyhound with a broken nose — and the story of how the Cubs got their name.
Don Hayner is a former Chicago Sun-Times editor in chief.
LONDON (Reuters) - Former U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton cautioned Britain on Sunday over its push to secure a trade deal with U.S. President Donald Trump after it leaves the European Union.
Clinton, the Democratic Party candidate who lost out to Trump in last November's election, also said Britain would face serious disruption if it left the EU without a negotiated deal with Brussels.
The British government has talked up the prospect of bilateral trade deals with the United States and others as one of the major benefits of leaving the EU following last year's surprise referendum vote to leave.
Asked about the prospects of a British-U.S. deal, Clinton told the BBC: "You're making a trade deal with somebody who says he doesn't believe in trade, so I'm not quite sure how that's going to play out over the next few years."
British Prime Minister Theresa May visited Trump in January to talk trade. The countries share $200 billion of trade each year.
But May has since intervened in a dispute between U.S. aerospace firm Boeing and Canadian planemaker Bombardier, lobbying in the interests of Bombardier to try to protect jobs at its factory in Northern Ireland.
Clinton also said Britain would be at a "very big disadvantage" if divorce negotiations with the EU failed, and went on to compare the factors behind the Brexit vote to her own election loss.
"Looking at the Brexit vote now it was a precursor to some extent to what happened to us in the United States... The amount of fabricated, false information that your voters were given by the 'Leave' campaign," she said.
She said her own presidential campaign was subject to similar treatment, citing the spread of false stories by online news outlets, and warned that Britain and other countries must be alert to the risks of such new media.
"The big lie is a very potent tool," she said.
About half of Blue Cross’s 3.8 million customers in the state are expected to be in the new model by next year, including 500,000 in the Triangle and the Triad.
Conway said the goal is to bring down health care cost increases to close to zero percent a year. He said costs are currently increasing more than 5 percent annually on average, and noted that this year’s 4.1 percent statewide average rate cut in Affordable Care Act plans was possible only through the same type of coor...
Blue Premier is modeled on strategies increasingly being adopted by other insurers, Medicaid and Medicare, with varying degrees of success. Some have not succeeded and have been discontinued because the cost assumptions were off, or the doctors were unable to meet their targets, among other miscalculations. Such strate...
Blue Cross will perform a central function by sharing patients’ medical bills with the participating providers, which is expected to help doctors understand all the care a patient has received so unnecessary and redundant procedures can be eliminated. Providers typically can only look up a patient’s medical history wit...
Wesley Burks, the CEO of UNC Health Care, said Tuesday he had been frustrated by just such an experience this week while working in an allergy clinic as a pediatrician.
The sharing of medical claims will have another effect: It will reveal how area labs, clinics and hospitals compare on prices for similar procedures. Blue Cross can review such data internally but now the hospital systems will also be able to compare prices for patients who use more than one system.
“This level of transparency allows us to find outliers, identify the causes and to improve,” said Mark Gwynne, president of UNC Health Alliance, a network of more than 5,000 providers statewide.
Gwynne was on the UNC Health Care negotiating team during the development of the Blue Premier contract.
Gwynne said the medical claims data won’t reveal the confidentially negotiated reimbursement rates between the providers and Blue Cross, but they will show the total cost of a medical “episode,” such as hospitalizing and treating a patient for a heart condition.
This approach, if properly executed, should deliver benefits for a typical person insured by Blue Cross, said Pam Silberman, a professor of health policy at UNC Chapel Hill. She said doctors are not likely to skimp on diagnostic tests and ignore basic health care to achieve short-term financial savings, because such sh...
But Silberman said the biggest concern for these strategies in general is the fate of low-income, chronically ill patients who are very challenging to manage and can run up exorbitant medical bills with frequent visits to the emergency room. For such patients, Blue Premier would deploy social workers and community heal...
Hundreds of such programs have been adopted across the country in anticipation of the nation’s health care system moving to payments for quality rather than for quantity. One of the first was started in 2009 by Blue Cross Blue Shield in Massachusetts, which cut costs by 5.8 percent and 9.1 percent over four years by re...
Over the past decade or so, a great deal of data has been accumulated, showing which programs work and which ones don’t, Gwynne said. Medicare has been experimenting with these approaches since 2008, and one of its programs, Next Generation, was launched in 2016 when Blue Cross CEO Conway was director of the Center for...
Research has shown that physician groups have been able to achieve savings and health improvements in Medicare value-based programs, said UNC health policy professor Valerie Lewis, but hospital systems have struggled to achieve financial savings because their traditional business model is keeping hospital beds filled, ...
The specific details and terms of Blue Premier were not released because Blue Cross said the contracts, which went into effect this month, are proprietary. Next year, Blue Cross, the hospitals and doctors will have the option to begin sharing the financial risk and reward of managing patients, based on 2019 data. In 20...
Jeff James, CEO of Wilmington Health, a group of 175 doctors, nurse practitioners and physician assistants, said in a phone interview that Blue Premier is a much-needed attempt for containing health care costs, but there is no guarantee it will succeed for everyone.
Yesterday the mountaineering community lost a legend when French climber Maurice Herzog passed away at the age of 93. Herzog is best remembered as the first man to summit an 8000-meter (26,600-foot) peak when he, along with climbing partner Louis Lachenal, successfully summited Annapurna back in 1950, an accomplishment...
The ascent was not an easy one and the men struggled to climb without using supplemental oxygen. Near the summit, Herzog lost his gloves, which would later prove to be a costly mistake. On the descent, he, Lachenal and two other teammates were forced to camp over night without shelter and only one sleeping bag between ...
The following year, the Frenchman would publish a book about the climb entitled “Annapurna: The First Conquest of an 8000-Meter Peak,” which would go on to sell more than 11 million copies in 40 different languages, making it the best selling mountaineering book of all time. Some of Herzog’s account of events on the cl...
In honor of the passing of Maurice Herzog, here is a video of a recent expedition to scale the mountain, which provides some context on its challenges. After watching the short film, consider what it must have been like for Herzog and his team more than 60 years ago.
Three Korean climbers have gone missing on a remote Himalayan peak that has a reputation for being amongst the most deadly in the world. The men had hoped to reach the summit along a new route yesterday, but search and rescue were initiated when there had been no word from them in nearly three days.
Park Young-seok, Kang Ki-seok and Shin Dong-min left Base Camp on Annapurna, the tenth highest peak in the world, earlier in the week with designs on reaching the summit yesterday. On Tuesday however, they radioed their support team in BC to let them know that they were aborting their climb due to dangerous conditions ...
Realizing the climbers were overdue, the Base Camp team called for help in Kathmandu on Thursday, and a high altitude SAR team was dispatched, along with a helicopter, to search for the missing men. They discovered a rope that they believe was used by the team, but so far they have found no trace of the climbers themse...
Annapurna stands 26,545 feet (8091 meters) in height and has been called the deadliest mountain in the world. The massive peak has a fatality rate of 38%, meaning that for every three climbers who summit, one doesn’t make it back alive. That is the highest death rate on any of the 14 mountains that reach 8000 meters in...
The Rev. Rod Loy is like a lot of ministers. In a time when distraction is only a Web page away, he'd like to lure more people to church and away from TVs and computer screens. To do this, however, he's taking a cue from TV itself.
A few months ago, Mr. Loy launched the church's own "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" game here at First Assembly of God. The two winners won $1,000 each when they correctly answered biblical questions.
Loy has also been known to bring tigers, camels, and elephants to the sanctuary for the annual Christmas pageant - all to attract new members. "It's a bit intriguing for members and visitors," he says. "It's important to keep things visual because people remember it."
As church attendance drops, Loy typifies how many ministers are turning to attractions beyond the sermons to fill pews.
To the churches, worship services with fancy food courts or glitzy entertainment are well worth it if they bring people into contact with the Bible.
Yet to others, the fanfare is more in line with Madison Avenue than Matthew or Moses, and cheapens religion.
Perhaps nowhere is the shift more meaningful than here in the South, where more people attend church on Sunday mornings than anywhere else in the country.
"Among rural Southerners, the church has continued to play a much larger role in community life than in the North and West, and thus rural Southerners remain the most faithful church attenders in the nation," says Glenn Firebaugh, a history professor at Penn State University.
But those numbers are dropping - in Dixie's urban areas, and even in the traditional country churches. In recent decades, Dr. Firebaugh says, rural Southerners appear less inclined to darken church doors just to follow their neighbors.
Church attendance, say theologians, declined in the past two decades for a variety of reasons. Young Southerners and their contemporaries around the United States have proven more likely to attend church out of "individual choice or in a spirit of volunteerism" than out of a sense of duty or tradition, says Firebaugh.
Baby boomers, by contrast, have sought out their own religions. Many of today's new churchgoers pondered heightened awareness in the 1960s, gravitated to gurus and self-actualization movements in the 1970s, and dabbled in New Age nostrums in the 1980s.
More recently, a more widespread interest in spirituality has grown, as have highly successful megachurches. But that hasn't necessarily translated into a broader interest in churches and organized religion nationwide.
Churches, however, have had some success attracting boomers and Generation X-ers by merchandising the gospel, a phenomenon that has crisscrossed the country and Dixie in recent years.
Indeed, churches in the South are realizing they program- and people-oriented incentives can be successful ways to fill their sanctuaries.
"When you have variety in a church, it adds to the experience," says Ann Weeks, a visitor to First Assembly of God on a recent Sunday. "I'm looking for a church that offers various elements - like the Millionaire game. It's not so much about denomination, but what I am getting out of the service.... I certainly don't w...
To keep people like Ms. Weeks returning, some churches in the South are turning up the hospitality, sending gift baskets filled with fresh bread and fruit to visitors after their visits. Other churches offer newcomers gift certificates to local restaurants.
The Fellowship of Las Colinas in Texas even makes sure to conclude its Sunday services in time for Dallas Cowboys football games. The games are then shown on a big screen outside the church as part of their post-worship fellowship.
Many churches are now also offering Saturday night services for late sleepers.
Perhaps the starkest move, though, is to simply pay people to attend church services.
In Bryan, Texas, the Rev. Rick Sebastian cruises around homeless shelters, cheap motels, and housing projects in a big blue bus emblazoned with this plea: "We will pay you $10 to come to church on our bus."
Mr. Sebastian defends his methods. "It gets them into church, and if we can get them into church where they can hear the word of God, their lives can be changed," he says.
Still, some theologians question such blatant tactics as misguided and improper.
"Our influence over men must not be human manipulation, but divine inspiration," says the Rev. Joseph Chambers of Paw Creek Ministries in Charlotte, N.C.
Others maintain that such incentives are part of a bigger trend of many churches turning more toward "side door" instead of "front door" evangelism.
In other words, they're sponsoring local clinics and workshops instead of going out to preach the gospel in order to make converts.
"You'll see church seminars on marriage enrichment, divorce recovery, dealing with grief," says Flavil Yeakley, director of church growth at Harding University in Searcy, Ark. "These days it's about building a relationship with each other as opposed to a higher being, which is often secondary."
More than one-fifth of IT effort is potentially wasted on technology outputs that are never used, up to forty percent of business opportunities may be missed due to delays, and outdated management practices tax the IT workforce productivity by double digits.
In the May 1963 issue of Harvard Business Review, the renowned management consultant Peter F. Drucker coined the term business effectiveness as an attempt to achieve the best possible economic results from the available resources. In a similar vein, I refer to IT effectiveness as the strive to achieve the best business...
Despite the awe-inspiring pace of the digital revolution, mounting evidence suggests that the enterprise IT effectiveness is ailing because of unrealized opportunities due to delays, increasing costs, lagging innovation, growing technical debt, demoralized workforce, rising shadow IT, and diluted technology know-how, a...
Conventional wisdom says that culture, leadership, skills-gap, governance, business-IT misalignment, lack of collaboration, and disjointed operational processes are to blame. Although they may contribute to company-specific challenges, these reasons cannot explain why so many enterprises, in so many industry, have been...
To get the best value for money, enterprises have long focused on the unit cost efficiency of IT inputs, e.g. $/ developer hrs., with little regard for the volume or pace of IT outputs, e.g., functionality. Consequently, only a portion of today's IT efforts yields its intended outcome, while the rest falls by the waysi...
Why can’t we simply eliminate the IT byproducts?
If a similar phenomenon were happening at a products company, e.g., Apple Inc., it would mean that tens of millions of manufactured iPhones couldn’t be sold to customers while a significant portion of the remaining iPhones would arrive at stores after Christmas. A waste of this magnitude could not escape company’s exec...
We can detect dormant output – a type of IT byproduct – easier at agile organizations while the traditionally-run, plan-driven IT isn’t immune to it.
Typically, agile initiatives are progressively decomposed into projects, features and stories for execution. The stories are then packaged into product releases for deployment. Technology spending is governed at a project level, whereas expected outcomes are defined per feature and realized only after associated produc...
The agile methodology comes with an indispensable ability to bond technology investments and business outcomes – the two ingredients of IT effectiveness – at every step of the project execution from the initial decomposition of initiatives to the packaging of product releases. However, most agile organizations are not ...
The parent feature isn't ready to be released; hence, stories age in the final work in progress (WIP) inventory and become obsolete when customer needs change.
The expected business outcome effect of stories isn’t captured in any system.
Cost of delay (CoD)— another type of IT byproduct – measures the business outcome that is missed due to a delayed activation of a required functionality in the real-world environment and is therefore paramount to managing IT effectiveness.
Most IT organizations manage key milestones only at a project level, which are proven to be too raw to optimize activity schedules at a lower level, such as individual tasks, stories and scenarios.
CoD did not really matter in the industrial age when IT used to perform a support function, and technology solutions had a multi-year useful-life. Today, technology is front and center of digital opportunities that are extremely perishable, and the first mover advantage is strategic. The omission of the CoD concept is ...
How significant is the value leak from the IT byproducts?
We conducted an empirical study, which is possibly the most comprehensive analysis of the system behavior of enterprise IT organizations to date, to better understand IT byproducts. As our study progressed, we continuously discovered new patterns of management practices causing these byproducts. We then realized the fu...
Predictive algorithms in work scheduling and capacity management can yield a double-digit productivity gain.
It is a well-known notion that IT organizations frequently end up spending a portion of their effort on tasks that are unnecessary or late, a.k.a., IT byproducts. However, this waste is considered to be a relatively insignificant but necessary cost of running a complex operation.
No conventional IT strategies, like consolidation, rationalization, sourcing, automation, and even cloud can deliver enough productivity or throughput gain to narrow – let alone close – the performance gap between the efficient IT and effective IT.
Furthermore, most of the data, tools, and know-how to implement the effective IT management practices are already available at most mature enterprises.
To date, digital transformation has been primarily perceived as a technical challenge that led to many advances in enterprise technology. What is slowing down the digital aspirations now is a corresponding wave of innovations in technology management.
IT effectiveness is the engine of digital transformation but still runs on industrial-era management practices; hence, it performs like a typical combustion engine – reliable and gets the job done but expensive and dirty. The innovative and digital-age appropriate management practices, which we used to construct the ef...
[b]Geneva, 23 February, (Asiantribune.com):[/b] The Sri Lankan Government's Chief negotiator Minister Nimal Siripala de Silva yesterday highlighted that although the Ceasefire Agreement was the first step towards achieving permanent peace in the country, there was a urgent need to rectify certain 'grave anomalies' aris...

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