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Humanity may lose gains made in global health due to climate change: study
Researchers say that emissions from coal plants damage the respiratory system and increase the risk of cardiovascular diseases
By Jyotsna Singh
Climate change poses one of the biggest threats to public health across the world, according to a study conducted by an international team of researchers and published in the journal, The Lancet.
Extreme weather events such as heat waves, storms, forest fires, floods and drought directly affect our health while effects of climate change on our ecosystem can have indirect impacts, the study says. In view of this, researchers have made 10 recommendations to reduce the adverse health impacts due to climate change.
Climate change and diseases
According to researchers, air pollution can cause allergy and asthma. Similarly, loss of ecosystems can bring pests into direct contact with humans and increase the number of vector-borne diseases, according to the authors. They say that the situation should be treated as an opportunity to develop more resilient health systems across the world.
A specific recommendation is the rapid phasing out of coal from the global energy mix. Currently, 2,200 coal-fired plants for power production are proposed globally, which will damage the respiratory system of people and increase the risk of cardiovascular diseases. The paper recommends that coal plants should be replaced with cleaner energy sources.
Heat waves have a clear association with mortality rate among human beings, researchers say. During the Russian heat wave of 2010, there were 11,000 additional deaths between July and August as compared to same period in 2009, the study says. Western parts of the country had 25,000 cases of fire which increased the concentration of carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, aerosols and particulates in the atmosphere.
Citing similar examples, the paper recommends that climate change needs to be controlled as an emergency, otherwise it will “undermine the last half century of gains in development and global health”.
Web edition Web edition News News News Vector-borne diseases The Lancet Heat wave Health Down to earth Climate Change
Book says climate change will affect global food security and trade
Exposure to toxic parts of PM2.5 during pregnancy harmful for newborn health
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Putting an end to guinea worms
The dreaded guinea worm disease will be eradicated in India by 1995, claims UNICEF. UNICEF country representative for India Jon Eliot Rhode told newspersons the number of guinea worm cases have reduced drastically over the past decade. Figures provided by the National Institute of Communicable Diseases (NICD), the nodal agency for the Rs 70 lakh Guinea Worm Eradication Programme (GWEP), show corroborate Rhode's statement and decline in guinea worm cases from 40,000 in 1984 to 413 in August 1993. NICD director T Varghese predicted the disease would be eradicated from India by 1994.
The guinea worm is a nematode parasite. The adult female can grow as long as 120 cm in the connective tissue beneath the human host's skin, causing ulceration, swelling and pain. It releases its larvae by causing large blisters on the host's limbs. When the host comes in contact with water, the larvae escape into water, where they are eaten by water fleas. The larvae thrive inside the fleas and infect anyone who consumes water containing the fleas. Varghese says, "Village communities should ensure contaminated water is not consumed and inform the authorities as soon as the disease is diagnosed."
GWEP is focussing on the three worst-affected states -- Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka, from where 50 per cent, 43 per cent and 7 per cent, respectively, of the cases are reported. To help India meet the World Health Organization's eradication deadline of 1995, UNICEF is pitching in by ensuring clean water in villages that are covered by the programme.
UNICEF Guinea Worm Guinea Worm Guinea Worm Infectious disease Water WHO News News News
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Tue, Oct 26
DIANA ROSS: The Legend...The Music...The Voice...Live!
10.26.10- DIANA ROSS EXCLUSIVE PERFORMANCES WILL FEATURE GREATEST HITS. ON SALE FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 5TH.
DURHAM, NC – True music legend Diana Ross will perform at DPAC, Durham Performing Arts Center on Friday, March 11, 2011 at 8pm as part of her “MORE TODAY THAN YESTERDAY” tour. The legendary icon will perform her greatest hits in a multi-city spectacular live show. Ms. Ross will be pulling out all the stops with breathtaking costumes and stage designs, along with a live string and horn section.
“Another true legend on stage at DPAC- I can’t tell you how much I am looking forward to this very rare concert appearance,” said Bob Klaus, GM of DPAC. “Diana Ross sings the soundtrack of our lives, and now her signature sound will resonate at DPAC. The Triangle is certain to give back to her what she has given us so many times- sheer joy and an incredibly heartfelt welcome.”
Tickets start at $40.00 plus service charges. Friends of DPAC members may place their orders on Wednesday, November 3rd and tickets go on sale Friday, November 5th at 10am, through Ticketmaster outlets including Crabtree Valley Mall, and Lowes Foods, online at DPACnc.com and charge by phone at 800-745-3000. Joining the Friends of DPAC is free, and you can register at www.DPACnc.com/friendofdpac.
Diana Ross has had a profound influence on American popular culture and has become an icon in the entertainment industry. She is an Academy Award nominated actress for her unforgettable role as Billie Holiday in Lady Sings The Blues, a Tony and Golden Globe winner, a bestselling author, winner of 8 American Music Awards and a recipient of The Kennedy Center Honors. Her reputation as a woman of great style and beauty has put her on the covers of hundreds of magazines. Ms. Ross has sold over 100 million records and recorded 18 #1 hits. Her music became the sound of young America in the ‘60s soon after she signed with Motown Records in 1961 with The Supremes. She embarked on her extraordinary solo career in 1970, and has not stopped since.
To get breaking news, latest tour information and exclusive content, become a fan of Diana Ross’ official Facebook page (www.facebook.com/dianaross).
What’s up next? DPAC’s next exciting events include Elton John’s Billy Elliot The Musical (Oct 30 – Nov 14) and For more information about these and more upcoming events, please go to www.dpacnc.com.
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Places To Go: "Oslo"
Europe » Norway » Oslo
Oslo's unique location means almost unlimited opportunities for fun. Hike in the forest, swim in the fjord and go to a concert - all on the same day.
Members who have been to Oslo.
Members who would like to go to Oslo.
Members who live near to Oslo.
More Photos of Oslo
One of Europe's best-kept secrets, magnificent Oslo stands as an exercise in contrasts. On one hand is its growing metropolis of more than half a million people, whose gleaming, glass-and-steel skyline and ultra-modern shopping centers form a fascinating juxtaposition with wide avenues and stunning late 19th- and early 20th-century Neoclassical architecture. On the other hand are Oslo's vast forested areas, public parks, botanical gardens, and network of pathways, which traverse the mountains on which the city was built — a true nature lover's city if ever there was one.
Scandinavia's oldest capital dates back to the early 11th century, when Harald Hardråde and his Viking minions founded a settlement on a rocky hillside just east of the modern city center. After suffering raids and a series of fires over the next six centuries, the settlement moved west to its current location. In the 1620s, another terrible fire ravaged Oslo; prompting Denmark's King Christian IV to rebuild the city, which he then renamed Christiania after himself. Christiania became the official capital of Norway on the 17th of May 1814 after the dissolution of the union with Denmark. The new name, however, never really took, and when Norway's nationalistic spirit blossomed in the 1920s, the city became Oslo once again.
Plan to spend three or four days exploring the capital region's potpourri of sites: the center of the modern city, Akershus Slott, a castle whose fortifications date from the 13th century; the Norsk Folkemuseum (Norwegian Folk Museum), an open-air museum whose original buildings and structures — some dating from medieval times — are representative of the country's many regions; the University of Oslo's Vikingskiphuset (Viking Ship Museum), which maintains the Oseberg, Gokstad, and Tune, three of the best-preserved Viking ships in existence, all of which were excavated in the Oslo fjord region; and world-class museums devoted to the works of noted Norwegians like painter Edvard Munch, painter Emanuel Vigeland, and sculptor Gustav Vigeland.
For a respite from sightseeing and myriad exhibits, head to Grunerløkka, a district on the banks of the Akerselva River that's popular for its waterside pathways and restaurant scene. Or visit upscale Frogner, a residential area just ten minutes' walk west of the city center that's home to many of Norway's finest restaurants and to the famous Gustav Vigeland Sculpture Park. Oslo's nightlife scene thrives throughout the year, with discos and traditional taverns boasting an international collection of patrons and the Den Norske Opera thrilling audiences with a variety of performances.
Oslo has also become one of Northern Europe's top event towns, thanks to highly publicized celebrations like the Constitution Day, the Ibsen Festival, the Notodden Blues Festival, and the Oslo Jazz Festival. Of course, two events in particular garner worldwide attention. The first is the ceremony honoring the recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize in December; the second is in the middle of March, the Holmenkollen Ski Festival, which draws spectators and competitors from all over the world.
Henrik Ibsen once penned, "A community is like a ship, everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm." Such is Oslo's mentality. The city has long-striven to distinguish itself from the rest of Europe — and even Scandinavia — yet it enthusiastically welcomes visitors and relishes any opportunity to show off. That said, Oslovians take fierce pride in the majestic landscape surrounding their city, and their love of sports (especially of the winter variety) runs deep. Proud, friendly, beautiful — is it any wonder that Oslo so appeals to travelers of today.
If you want to buy a drink for the girl at the end of the bar, know that it is an investment. With the price of alcohol so high, the gesture implies you’d like more than a wave and some small talk. Dole out your gifts carefully because, in Norway, a free drink is not a frivolous gesture.
• Cook your own food - Food is very, very expensive in Norway so the best thing you can do is it simply make your own meals. Go grocery shopping but skip buying lots of fresh vegetables such as peppers or whole chicken fillets as they are very expensive. Minced chicken is cheaper. Avoid eating out!!!
• Eat cheap - If you do decide to eat out, your cheapest options will be shwarma and pizza. These meals usually cost around $10 USD.
• Couchsurf - The best way to avoid expensive hostels is to not stay there. Couchsurf (i.e. staying with locals for free) so you can save your money for what is really important – sightseeing and beer.
• Camp - Because of free public camping laws, as long as you have your own tent, you can camp in the parks and public lands for free.
• Get a tourism card - Attractions in Norway can get very expensive, especially since the exchange rate is so bad. The best way to afford all the attractions is to get a city tourism card so you can get free entry into all the attractions as well as free transportation.
• Book in advance - If you can plan your transportation in advance, you can save up to 50% off the cost of your train or bus tickets. Buying last minute means it’s going to be more than any budget traveler can afford, especially if you want to visit a number of destinations in Norway.
Oslo girls, Bjerke girls, Alnabru girls, Sjursoja girls, Rislokka girls, Sagene girls, Hammerfall girls, Skjetten girls, Skedsmokorset girls, Skytta girls, Tunborg girls, Siri girls, Raudsandnes girls, Mindleheim girls, Tobol girls.
Nora Teplan
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Hester trousered £7.7M
Happy Times Stephen Hester
Royal Bank of Soctland Chief Exec Stephen Hester, currently in a row over just under £1 million in bonuses, picked up £7.7million in bonus and pension payments without fuss in March 2011:
100 RBS bankers on more than £1m
Hester's basic pay is £1.2million.
at Saturday, January 28, 2012 0 comments
Stop War on Iran before it starts
Stop The War Rally - Hands off Iran and Syria
US Embassy 2pm-4pm
Grosvenor Square London W1
Details... Download leaflet...
at Sunday, January 22, 2012 0 comments
£200 Per Hour
This is the sort of thing which brings Unite into disrepute, courtesy of the Daily Mail:
Harman's MP husband forced to apologise after failing to declare £60,000 in payments from Unite union
By Jason Groves
Shamed: Jack Dromey (pictured with wife Harriet Harman) breached Commons rules for failing to declare payments totaling almost £60,000
A senior Labour MP was forced to apologise to the Commons yesterday after secretly accepting almost £60,000 in payments from the trade union Unite. A parliamentary sleaze inquiry found Jack Dromey, who is married to deputy Labour leader Harriet Harman, committed a serious breach of Commons rules by failing to declare a financial relationship with the union – Labour’s biggest donor – for more than a year.
Mr Dromey, 63, is Ed Miliband’s shadow housing minister and served for years as Labour’s treasurer, as well as holding a string of senior positions during a 32-year career in the trade union movement. But Mr Dromey was let off with a slap on the wrist after a committee of MPs ruled he was a ‘new and inexperienced MP’.
After his election in May 2010, Mr Dromey said he was resigning as Unite’s deputy general secretary and had ‘declined my salary in the meantime’. In fact, he continued to work for the union part time, charging up to £200 an hour for several months.
Mr Dromey was paid more than £28,000 in wages until he finally stopped working for the union in October 2010. The following month he was also given a £30,000 pay-off. He also had the use of a union-funded car, which he bought at a discount
Read More >>>>>>>
at Friday, January 20, 2012 36 comments
▼ Jan (3)
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'Zero tolerance' immigration policy 'incredibly dumb,' tent city chief says
The incident commander for a Texas tent city built to house children whose undocumented parents have been arrested at the border says the Trump administration's 'zero tolerance' policy is 'incrediby dumb, stupid.' A top immigration official says prosecution of parents has been temporarily halted.
'Zero tolerance' immigration policy 'incredibly dumb,' tent city chief says The incident commander for a Texas tent city built to house children whose undocumented parents have been arrested at the border says the Trump administration's 'zero tolerance' policy is 'incrediby dumb, stupid.' A top immigration official says prosecution of parents has been temporarily halted. Check out this story on delawareonline.com: https://usat.ly/2tuf1Qc
Madlin Mekelburg, Aileen B. Flores and John Bacon, USA TODAY Published 9:32 a.m. ET June 26, 2018 | Updated 9:36 a.m. ET June 26, 2018
Amid public outcry over the thousands of migrant children separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to keep families together. Here’s a wrap-up of everything that led to this moment. Just the FAQs
Children and workers are seen at a tent encampment recently built near the Tornillo Port of Entry on June 19, 2018 in Tornillo, Texas.(Photo: Joe Raedle, Getty Images)
TORNILLO, Texas — The incident commander for a Texas tent city built to house children whose undocumented parents have been arrested at the border says the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy is "incredibly dumb, stupid."
The comments came as confusion deepened over the status of the policy: A top immigration official said prosecution of parents has been temporarily halted but also claimed that zero tolerance remained in effect.
The commander, who operates the facility through the BCFS non-profit, said he expects the tent city will shut down at the end of its 30-day contract July 13 because few undocumented adults with children are now being arrested. The air-conditioned tents house more than 300 boys and a handful of girls.
The commander, who like other workers on a media tour of the tent city asked not to be named, said he was frustrated by the intense scrutiny resulting from outrage over family separations at the border.
Mark Weber, spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, shrugged off the commander’s comments on family separations.
"Everyone is allowed to have their opinions," he said. "We also have educated opinions, and we welcome people in this country to express their opinion.”
More: Scholars, activists blast Trump tweets ripping due process
More: Stephen Miller's D.C. home a target of immigration policy protest
More: Thousands of immigrants pass through the southern border. Why?
President Donald Trump signed an executive order last week to stop family separations at the border. The result has been nationwide confusion as lawyers and law enforcement officials struggle to comply with the zero tolerance policy that calls for arrests. Courts have ruled that the children cannot be jailed for extended periods, thus the kids are being cared for in tent cities or in other youth facilities across the nation.
Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan said Monday that Trump’s executive order set in motion a temporary halt to prosecution of parents and guardians unless they had criminal history or the child’s welfare was in question. Still, he insisted the White House’s zero tolerance policy toward illegal entry remained intact.
“We can work on a plan where adults who bring kids across, who violate our laws, who risk their lives at the border could be prosecuted without an extended separation from their children,” McAleenan said. “We’re looking at how to implement that now.”
Trump has said he wants undocumented immigrants and their children simply sent home without asylum hearings. Opponents say such a policy would be unconstitutional and harsh, since many of the immigrants are fleeing violence and persecution in their native countries.
"Congress would need to legislate what Trump says he wants, and this seems unlikely," legal scholar Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, told USA TODAY. "Even were Congress to pass legislation, federal courts would probably find that it violates the Constitution."
Bacon reported from McLean, Va. Contributing: The Associated Press
Separating families, immigration policy draws protests
Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Bonin, second from left, joins other protesters in front of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in downtown Los Angeles on July 2, 2018. Protesters who were blocking the entrance to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in downtown Los Angeles have been led away in handcuffs. A group of 17 protesters sat down in the street, blocking the entrance to the facility Monday morning. The protesters, including faith and community leaders, locked arms and chanted, "Shut down ICE!" Richard Vogel, AP
A defiant protester raises her fist at police during a protest in front of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in downtown Los Angeles on July 2, 2018. Richard Vogel, AP
Protesters chant slogans and stage a sit-in before being arrested in front of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in downtown Los Angeles on July 2, 2018. Richard Vogel, AP
Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Bonin is handcuffed after being arrested in front of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in downtown Los Angeles on July 2, 2018. Richard Vogel, AP
Protesters are processed after being arrested in downtown Los Angeles on July 2, 2018. Protesters who were blocking the entrance to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in downtown Los Angeles have been led away in handcuffs. Richard Vogel, AP
A protester exchanges words with a Hartford police officer before being arrested on July 2, 2018 at the federal building in Hartford after immigration groups staged a sit-in at the federal building, disrupting business on Monday morning. About twenty people were arrested while protesting detention of children at the southern border and the Trump administration's other policies. Patrick Raycraft, Hartford Courant via AP
Protestors block the entrance to a downtown federal building housing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) offices on July 2, 2018, in San Diego. People protested against ICE on Monday, chanting slogans and temporarily blocking an entrance to a federal building. Gregory Bull, AP
A protester exchanges words with a Hartford police officer before being arrested on July 2, 2018 at the federal building in Hartford after immigration groups staged a sit-in at the federal building, disrupting business on Monday morning. Patrick Raycraft, Hartford Courant via AP
Buena Ventura Martin-Godinez, center, holds her son Pedro, left, as she is reunited with her daughter Janne, right, at Miami International Airport on July 1, 2018, in Miami. Martin crossed the border into the United States from Mexico in May with her son, fleeing violence in Guatemala. Her husband crossed two weeks later with their 7-year-old daughter Janne. All were caught by the Border Patrol, and were separated. Her daughter was released Sunday from a child welfare agency in Michigan. Lynne Sladky, AP
Buena Ventura Martin-Godinez, left, sits with her daughter Janne, center, after being reunited at Miami International Airport on July 1, 2018, in Miami. At right is Nora Sandigo, of the Nora Sandigo Children Foundation, who helps children who's parents have been deported. Lynne Sladky, AP
Spritual leader Ed Roybal of Las Cruces conducts a native american blessing Friday on a group mostly from New Mexico gathered outside the gates to the Marcelino Serna Port of Entry in Tornillo, TX where undocumented immigrante children are housed. RUDY GUTIERREZ/EL PASO TIMES
Patricia Roybal Caballero, left, a Democratic member of the New Mexico House of Representatives reads a statement before announcing the filing of a complaint with the United Nations Human Rights Council during a press conference outside the South-bound gates to the Marcelino Serna Porto of Entry in Tornillo, Texas. She was joined by a delegation of people from New Mexico from as far as Albuquerque and El Paso State Senator Jose Rodriguez, center. In her statement, she denounced the deplorable and reprehensible actions of the Trump and Sessions Zero Tolerance policies and the collusion therewith of New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez. RUDY GUTIERREZ/EL PASO TIMES
Migrant families are processed at the Central Bus Station before being taken to Catholic Charities in McAllen, Texas, before being moved to other locations in the US. LARRY W. SMITH, EPA-EFE
Migrant families are processed at the Central Bus Station in McAllen, Texas. Immigration along the Rio Grande in Texas has become a political issue, due to the controversy surrounding the US Justice Department's suspended 'Zero Tolerance' policy of criminally prosecuting all migrants entering the country illegally and the now-reversed policy of separating migrant children from their parents. LARRY W. SMITH, EPA-EFE
Migrant families get off the bus to be processed at the Central Bus Station before being taken to Catholic Charities in McAllen, Texas,. LARRY W. SMITH, EPA-EFE
A women chants into a megaphone during the ACLU's Keep Families Together rally in Brownsville, Texas on June 28, 2018. Courtney Sacco, Caller-Times, via USA TODAY NETWORK
Protesters chant in front of the federal courthouse during the ACLU's Keep Families Together rally in Brownsville, Texas on June 28, 2018. Courtney Sacco, Caller-Times, via USA TODAY NETWORK
A group of about 45 parents, many with small children and infants, entered the security lobby of the Federal Building in downtown Burlington, Vt. asking to meet with U.S. Attorney Christina Nolan about resisting immigration policy set down by President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, specifically the practice of separating undocumented immigrant children from their parents. Ryan Mercer, Burlington Free Press, via USA TODAY NETWORK
Protesters rally during the ACLU's Keep Families Together rally in Brownsville, Texas on June 28, 2018. Courtney Sacco, Caller-Times, via USA TODAY NETWORK
A banner is held in front of the federal courthouse during the ACLU's Keep Families Together rally in Brownsville, Texas on June 28, 2018. Courtney Sacco, Caller-Times, via USA TODAY NETWORK
Supporters chant during the ACLU's Keep Families Together rally in Brownsville, Texas on June 28, 2018. Courtney Sacco, Caller-Times, via USA TODAY NETWORK
Protesters gather in front of the federal courthouse during the ACLU's Keep Families Together rally in Brownsville, Texas on June 28, 2018. Courtney Sacco, Caller-Times, via USA TODAY NETWORK
Clergy members match to the federal courthouse from across the street during the ACLU's Keep Families Together rally in Brownsville, Texas on June 28, 2018. Courtney Sacco, Caller-Times, via USA TODAY NETWORK
Emily Sophia attends a CASA in Action and Fair Immigration Reform Movement rally to demand protections for the men, women and children separated at the border as a direct result of Trump's zero tolerance policy at Freedom Plaza in Washington on June 27, 2018. JIM LO SCALZO, EPA-EFE
Protesters cast their shadows as they chant slogans during a rally outside the the Millennium Biltmore Hotel Tuesday, June 26, 2018, in Los Angeles. U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is scheduled to give a speech at the hotel. Jae C. Hong, AP
Activists with Tuesdays with Tillis rally outside U.S. Senator Tom Tillis' office at the Federal Building to demand the reunification of families torn apart by the Trump administration's practice of separating families at the border, Tuesday, June 26, 2018, in Raleigh, N.C. Gerry Broome, AP
Laylah Martinez, 9, center, chants slogans during a protest outside the the Millennium Biltmore Hotel Tuesday, June 26, 2018, in Los Angeles. Jae C. Hong, AP
LOS ANGELES, CA - JUNE 26: Protestors chant during a demonstration over a visit by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions on June 26, 2018 in Los Angeles. Mario Tama, Getty Images
Hundreds gathered on the steps of the Statehouse in Montpelier, Vt., on Monday, June 25, 2018, to protest President Trump's immigration policies, specifically the practice of separating immigrant children from their parents at the border. RYAN MERCER, FREE PRESS, via USA TODAY NETWORK
Diana Jung Kim, right, and Homer Carroll, both from Houston, hug during a protest outside the U.S. Border Patrol Central Processing Center Monday, June 25, 2018, in McAllen, Texas. David J. Phillip, AP
Demonstrators stand outside the U.S. Border Patrol Central Processing Center during a protest Monday, June 25, 2018, in McAllen, Texas. David J. Phillip, AP
A demonstrator wears a jacket saying "I Care Why Don't U?" during a protest outside the U.S. Border Patrol Central Processing Center Monday, June 25, 2018, in McAllen, Texas. David J. Phillip, AP
Actress Evan Rachel Wood speaks at a press conference in McAllen, Texas, on Sunday, June 24, 2018 to announce her participation in a 24-hour fast to pressure the Trump Administration to reunite separated immigrant families. Trevor Hughes, USA TODAY
Activists protest during an "End Family Detention," event held at the Tornillo Port of Entry in Tornillo, Texas. PAUL RATJE, AFP/Getty Images
A woman listens to a speaker during an "End Family Detention," event held at the Tornillo Port of Entry in Tornillo, Texas. PAUL RATJE, AFP/Getty Images
Suki Castillo Ramos, from Socorro, Texas prays at an "End Family Detention," event held at the Tornillo Port of Entry in Tornillo, Texas. PAUL RATJE, AFP/Getty Images
A participant in a press conference holds a sign showing support for immigrants in McAllen, Texas, Sunday, June 24, 2018. Trevor Hughes, USA TODAY
People display signs at the Tornillo Port of Entry near El Paso, Texas, June 21, 2018, during a protest rally including several American mayors against the administration's immigration policy. President Donald Trump ordered an end to the separation of children from their parents on the U.S. border June 20, 2018, reversing a tough policy under heavy pressure from his fellow Republicans, Democrats and the international community. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI, AFP/Getty Images
Security personal stand before shoes and toys left at the Tornillo Port of Entry where minors crossing the border without proper papers have been housed after being separated from adults, June 21, 2018 in Tornillo, Texas. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI, AFP/Getty Images
Children wrap themselves up with Mylar blankets to symbolically represent the thousands of children separated from families on the border during a protest in the rotunda of Russell Senate Office Building on June 21, 2018 on Capitol Hill in Washington. Alex Wong, Getty Images
A child holds a sign as religious groups hold a prayer vigil with children wrapped in survival blankets to protest "the cruel treatment of immigrants by the Trump administration" in the Russell Senate Office Building rotunda at the U.S. Capitol on June 21, 2018 in Washington. NICHOLAS KAMM, AFP/Getty Images
A participant in a rally opposing the Trump administration's immigration policies holds a sign that reads "Love knows no borders," during a protest in McAllen, Texas, on June 20, 2018 where detention hearings for migrants are held. Trevor Hughes, USA TODAY
Henry Ellsworth holds a sign in support of migrant children outside the offices of Sen. John McCain and Sen. Jeff Flake in Phoenix, Ariz. on June 20, 2018. Nick Oza, The Arizona Republic, via USA TODAY NETWORK
Migrant rights supporters in Phoenix, Ariz. bring stuffed toys for children who are being detained, on June 20, 2018. Nick Oza, The Arizona Republic, via USA TODAY NETWORK
Both sides of immigration debate meet outside the offices of Sen. John McCain and Sen. Jeff Flake, where protesters yelled at each other in Phoenix, Ariz. on June 20, 2018. Nick Oza, The Arizona Republic, via USA TODAY NETWORK
Silvia Garcia, right, joined more than 100 others demonstrating outside the federal courthouse where a federal judge will hear arguments over the U.S. Justice Department's request to block three California laws that extend protections to people in the country illegally, Wednesday, June 20, 2018, in Sacramento, Calif. Rich Pedroncelli, AP
More than 100 protestors demonstrated outside the federal courthouse where a federal judge will hear arguments over the U.S. Justice Department's request to block three California laws that extend protections to people in the country illegally, Wednesday, June 20, 2018, in Sacramento, Calif. Rich Pedroncelli, AP
Children and workers are seen at a tent encampment recently built near the Tornillo Port of Entry on June 19, 2018 in Tornillo, Texas. The Trump administration is using the Tornillo tent facility to house immigrant children separated from their parents after they were caught entering the U.S. under the administration's zero tolerance policy. Joe Raedle, Getty Images
Noelle Andrade and others protest the separation of children from their parents in front of the El Paso Processing Center, an immigration detention facility, at the Mexican border on June 19, 2018 in El Paso, Texas. Joe Raedle, Getty Images
People protest the separation of children from their parents in front of the El Paso Processing Center, an immigration detention facility, at the Mexican border on June 19, 2018 in El Paso, Texas. Joe Raedle, Getty Images
Marchers hold placards on Sunday, June 17, 2018 as they wait to start the short march to the entrance to the Tornillo-Guadalupe port of entry in Tornillo, Texas. [Via MerlinFTP Drop] Rudy Gutierrez, El Paso Times, via USA TODAY NETWORK
A demonstrator holds a protest sign during a rally against the separation of immigrant children and their parents outside the U.S. Customers and Border Protection headquarters in Washington on June 19, 2018. ALEX EDELMAN, AFP/Getty Images
A rally organizer holds yellow wrist bands in Washington on June 19, 2018, which are worn in solidarity with families on the border who receive a yellow wrist band during their detention. ALEX EDELMAN, AFP/Getty Images
A demonstrator holds up a sign during a rally against the separation of immigrant children and their parents outside the U.S. Customers and Border Protection headquarters in Washington on June 19, 2018. ALEX EDELMAN, AFP/Getty Images
A mother and daughter watch during a rally against the separation of immigrant children and their parents outside the U.S. Customers and Border Protection headquarters in Washington on June 19, 2018. ALEX EDELMAN, AFP/Getty Images
Children listen to speakers during an immigration family separation protest in front of the Sandra Day O'Connor U.S. District Court building, Monday, June 18, 2018, in Phoenix, Ariz. Ross D. Franklin, AP
Protestors march against the separation of migrant children from their families on June 18, 2018 in Los Angeles. Mario Tama, Getty Images
Protestors clash with law enforcement outside the Ernest Morial Convention Center in New Orleans, La. Monday, June 18, 2018 after U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions spoke at the National Sheriffs' Association opening session. Protestors were against the detainment and separation of immigrant children from the parents on the U.S. Border. Matthew Hinton, The Advocate, via AP
Luciana Villavicencio, 4, holds up a photo of her family on a cellphone during a press conference on June 18, 2018 regarding her father, Pablo Villavicencio. Ecuadorean Pablo Villavicencio was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after delivering a pizza to Fort Hamilton Army base in Brooklyn, and was detained despite being in the process of adjusting his immigration status. His wife and two daughters are U.S. citizens. TIMOTHY A. CLARY, AFP/Getty Images
People gather for a vigil lead by the Families Belong Together campaign on Fathers Day outside U.S. Border Patrol McAllen Station calling for the end of family separation on June 17, 2018. Courtney Sacco, USA TODAY NETWORK
Yu Mei Chen, wife of detained Chinese national Xiu Qing You, cries during a protest in support of her husband on June 18, 2018 in New York City. You, a Queens father who has been in the U.S. for nearly 20 years, was detained by ICE agents when he went for his green card interview last month and is now being threatened with deportation back to China. Spencer Platt, Getty Images
A two-year-old Honduran asylum seeker cries as her mother is searched and detained near the U.S.-Mexico border on June 12, 2018 in McAllen, Texas. The asylum seekers had rafted across the Rio Grande from Mexico and were detained by U.S. Border Patrol agents before being sent to a processing center for possible separation. John Moore, Getty Images
Central American asylum seekers wait as U.S. Border Patrol agents take them into custody on June 12, 2018 near McAllen, Texas. The families were then sent to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection processing center for possible separation. John Moore, Getty Images
People gather for a vigil lead by the Families Belong Together campaign on Fathers Day outside McAllen Border Patrol Processing Center calling for the end of family separation on June 17, 2018. Courtney Sacco, USA TODAY NETWORK
A woman carries a baby as immigrants are dropped off at a bus station shortly after being released from detention through "catch and release" immigration policy on June 17, 2018 in McAllen, Texas. "Catch and release" is a protocol under which people detained by U.S. authorities as unlawful immigrants can be released while they wait for a hearing. LOREN ELLIOTT, AFP/Getty Images
U.S. Border Patrol agents take a group of Central American asylum seekers into custody on June 12, 2018 near McAllen, Texas. The immigrant families were then sent to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection processing center for possible separation. U.S. border authorities are executing the Trump administration's zero tolerance policy towards undocumented immigrants. John Moore, Getty Images
A woman struck by a truck as immigration protestors blocked the street is checked out by New Orleans EMS outside the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans, where Attorney General Jeff Sessions was addressing the National Sheriffs' Association on June 18, 2018. Michael DeMocker, The Times-Picayune, via AP
Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland gives a statement about family separation after visiting the McAllen Border Patrol Processing Center in McAllen, Texas on June 17, 2018. Courtney Sacco, USA TODAY NETWORK
People gather for a vigil lead by the Families Belong Together campaign on June 17, 2018 outside U.S. Border Patrol McAllen Station, calling for the end of family separation. Courtney Sacco, USA TODAY NETWORK
Border Patrol chief for the Rio Grande Valley, Manuel Padilla Jr., speaks during a press conference at the U.S. Border Patrol McAllen Station regarding the Trump administration's zero tolerance policy on June 17, 2018. Courtney Sacco, USA TODAY NETWORK
A protestor dressed as Lady Liberty carries a doll, depicting a baby of color, as demonstrators march at the Families Belong Together March against the separation of children of immigrants from their families on June 14, 2018 in Los Angeles. Demonstrators marched through the city and culminated the march at a detention center where U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees are held. Mario Tama, Getty Images
A protestor holds a sign at the Families Belong Together March against the separation of children of immigrants from their families on June 14, 2018 in Los Angeles. Mario Tama, Getty Images
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DesignStudio works on Premier League rebrand
As Barclay’s sponsorship contract ends, the Premier League has turned to DesignStudio to rebrand the organisation ahead of the 2016/17 season.
By Tom Banks January 12, 2016 5:31 pm August 15, 2017 12:37 pm
The current identity
DesignStudio is working on a rebrand of the Premier League, which will roll out in time for the 2016/17 season.
The impetus for the rebrand is the Premier League’s decision to part ways with long-term sponsor Barclays.
No title sponsor next season
A Premier League spokesman says: “There will be no title sponsor of the Premier League from next season so we are, as a matter of course, considering options in terms of the positioning of the competition and the organisation going forward.”
Next season a new sponsorship structure will be brought in so that the league can add additional partnerships, while the clubs continue to operate their own individual commercial models.
The league will be known simply as the “Premier League”, which will be referenced in the new identity.
Will the lion be dropped?
The Premier League spokesman denied rumours that the lion icon is to be dropped and Design Studio was unable to comment on details of the project.
“Early discussions” are taking place to establish if an ad agency is needed to promote the new direction.
The Premier League was established as the top flight English and Welsh football league in 1992 and the lion is understood to be representative of the Football Association’s three lions.
11-17 January 2016 Projects Branding
David Bowie – a life in album covers
Design Week Studio Sessions #1 – Koto on setting up a studio
Design in 2016 – what will product design look like?
Retailer Oasis encourages customers to “pamper themselves” in new store
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end of year 2014
2014 End Of Year Lists: Films
Once again, forget all other lists. you’re in the spoiler-free, trend-spitting-at, commercial-break-free, movie loving D//E zone and these are the Films Of The Year…
Here’s our list of 30…
30. Boyhood
Putting Boyhood up on the last place is a statement, saying: This is a good enough film to be among the year’s best, but enough with it already! If it wasn’t for the aging in real time gimmick, the world wouldn’t have gone nuts about it nor the actor’s performances, of which Ethan Hawke’s, a frequently overlooked, great actor, was the best. Richard Linklater tries too hard to intentionally point out each timeframe’s ways, the pop hits, the technological advances and how the actors age, particularly the kids, who as kids normally do, grow. People got ecstatic about it, dropping their pants about how this movie is just like real life and named it “movie of the year” in a million lists, but that is not real life, it’s just a movie with a nice gimmick, in need of an interesting storyline to keep someone engaged for the hundred hours that it lasts. If you haven’t seen Boyhood yet, you should, but don’t get fooled, it’s not the “movie of the year”, come on…
29. Edge of Tomorrow
After watching trailers for this one earlier in the year, I never expected it to be one in our final list. The story is adapted from the Japanese viz media book entitled Everyday Is Kill and comes with a very fresh sense of humor to it. The cinema I saw it in, was packed out on the second week, so the word that was going round was that it was surprisingly good and so it was. Tom Cruise was perfect in the leading role and I have to say supporting actor Bill Paxton probably steals the show, whether it’s intentionally meant to be this funny or not, it doesn’t really matter, but for that and the fact it features an actually clever intricate plot, it’s going straight in our year’s finest.
28. Still Alice
Julianne Moore didn’t win an Oscar those four times she’s been up for one so far, with the far more popular movies she was nominated for, but this time she might make it, because the world (and the Academy) loves heartbreak, drama and the drama disabilities bring to someone’s life. The all-star cast delivers strong performances without a single exception, the film is beautifully directed from the directorial duo of Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland and given the fact that Glatzer has been diagnosed with ALS himself, it’s no wonder why Still Alice feels so honest and ultimately a heartbreaking film, like it’s intended to be.
27. Willow Creek
Bobcat Goldthwait is a mighty talented human being, period. Willow Creek is nothing like his previous film, God Bless America (which would probably had been at this list’s #1 spot if the year was 2011) but it’s still crazy good, despite that nine out of ten reviews will probably tell you otherwise. Goldthwait is gutsy enough to show you his main characters staying still in the dark in a tent, crapping their pants for twenty minutes at the eerie sounds the woods produce, all this after an already pretty slow build-up and without even trying, still keep you hooked for the whole time. And it’s about Bigfoot, what more do you need?
26. The Judge
Shangai Nights, Wedding Crashers and The Change-Up director, David Dobkin tries something different for a change, a drama about the dysfunctional relationship of a prodigal son, who happens to be the best lawyer on earth and his principled father, the judge and he does it mighty well. Both protagonists prowl for at least a nomination at this year’s Oscars, fair enough given that you’ll probably reach for the phone to call your dad right after watching this.
25. The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty
Ben Stiller, the director that brought to the world Zoolander, The Cable Guy and Tropic Thunder, this time tried with a little more thought provoking film, that may have its flaws, yet it’s gorgeous visually, funny and heartwarming. This might have been a better movie in the hands of another director, but in the hands of Stiller it’s honest and still worth a watch.
24. Under The Skin
This time around, Jonathan Glazer, the music video director who made Birth with Nicole Kidman a decade ago, managed to shake the movie world with his latest film. Scarlett Johansson does not disappoint with her hypnotic performance in an overall visually stunning film, made upon its many influences and after ten years in the making. If you’re willing to take in the long shots and silences, you’re in for a thrilling sci-fi drama like no other.
23. Tusk
Kevin Smith’s weirdest film to date, Tusk is maybe the most hated movie of 2014. Blending comedy and horror, it did terribly in the US theaters and drew hateful reviews even amongst Kevin Smith’s fans, totally expected for a mad story in which all of its characters are assholes and there’s no one to root for, but watching it from a humorous perspective and putting aside the sickness to your stomach, it should be hard to enjoy a deliberate b-movie, destined to become a cult classic.
22. The Sacrament
One more found-footage-style movie in our list, The Sacrament was a weirdly believable account of a cult experience, clearly exploiting the real-life horror of Reverend Jim Jones and the Jonestown Massacre story, as it follows in documentary style the main character, who travels with the company of two journalists to an undisclosed location to find his missing sister. Upon entering Eden Parish and meeting the community’s leader, it becomes apparent to the newcomers that this paradise may not be as it seems. Ti West is among the currently hottest names in horror and this just furthers his establishment in the genre. The House of The Devil is one of our favourite indie horror flicks and The Sacrament just bolsters that. Using similar casts in his films, along with the likes of Adam Wingard, West proves that it’s not a bad thing to fund raw talent and use it across all his work. Keeping that pace it seems like in just a few years, West like Wingard will be an indie horror household name.
21. Life After Beth
Staring Dane Haan and Parks & Recreation’s Aubrey Plaza, Life After Beth is a so called Rom-Zom-Com, that had its funny and sweet moments. Plaza put in a great performance, actually she was hilarious with how she went from a sane likeable person to a crazy psycho zombie at the sound of a strum of a guitar. This comedy brings a lot to the Rom-Zom-Com table, in quite a different vain than Warm Bodies. It’s got heart, gore and funny one-liners in it, aren’t those enough?
20. As Above, So Below
Another found-footage movie, AA,SB revolves around a young alchemy scholar and takes places under the streets of Paris. Under the streets and into the caves they encounter from tranced-like cultists and other chilling elements to the mighty gates of Hell. The setting is perfect and the imagery is great, with some clever aspects and twists and turns around each corner, however it makes me wonder if this was actually better if it wasn’t a found-footage film and if it was made like this just to follow a trend or maybe just to stand out from the very claustrophobic 2005 movie The Descent by Neil Marshall.
19. VHS Viral
VHS Viral was the third chapter in the found-footage anthology horror series, very much in the style of ABCs of Death. In previous movie installments, we’ve seen some shorts in directed by Adam Wingard, Jason Eisener, Gareth Evans, David Bruckner, Ti West, Glenn McQuaid, Joe Swanberg, and the directing quartet known as Radio Silence. Viral follows fame-obsessed teens who unwittingly become stars of the next internet sensation, including a short written and directed by Nacho Vigalondo (Timecrimes). Although not as strong as a film in general as its predecessors, Viral offers up something new, a completely standalone storyline in which contains four segments. It might not make clear sense for everyone, but the idea behind Viral is deserving enough for its inclusion in this list.
18. This Is Where I Leave You
A bittersweet comedy with an all-star cast, This Is Where I Leave You circles around the many members of a dysfunctional family. Rising star Adam Driver stands out as the youngest, rebel son, next to the many wonderful performances in this sharp movie, possibly the year’s guiltiest pleasure.
17. The Purge: Anarchy
It didn’t take long to develop a sequel to The Purge, a film which had quite a lot of potential, concept-wise. The converted sequel worked even better this time outside the home environment, and worth the risk of venturing outside the box.
16. The Babadook
A weirdly wonderful, yet bleak Australian movie, The Babadook focuses on coping with a major family death. Although it takes some time to ramp up, when it does, it feels a very nerve-racking and moving experience. There’s a retro vibe about it, creepy in the similar design of The Exorcist. Everything from the set, location up to the clothing is odd and unsettling so naturally, that brings the creep-factor up a notch. Released on the same time as Ouija, it certainly shows the distinction in what’s scary and creepy.
15. Horns
Horns is really a deeper movie than what one would expect from the way it was advertised. After Piranha 3D, Alexandre Aja still looks like he likes his fun, but this time in a more elegant way, as Horns turns out to be a romantic fantasy film with plenty of dark humour. Radcliffe is perfect in his part, forcing you to empathize with the main character from the very start, well supported by the rest of the cast, Juno Temple, Max Minghella, Joe Anderson and Heather Graham. Overall, Horns is a genre mixing, well written and produced move, with an outcome not easy at all to predict.
14. Interstellar
Interstellar was this year’s Christopher Nolan movie and it lived up to everything we expected. Hans Zimmer to provide the score, for which few people complained about how it was heard over some of the dialogue, but on the other hand maybe it only served as an extra strength when the film was ramping up. The early trailers didn’t justify how epic the film is, they probably made it look more like a tech-filled sci-fi flick and if you went into it with that mindset, you could come out disappointed. What we have here is a remarkable journey through space time continuum, in order to save humanity and the more imperative aspect, which is the relationship between a father and his children and the bond that holds a family together.
13. Foxcatcher
Almost a decade after Capote and three years after Moneyball, Bennett Miller returns with another compelling drama, drawn from real life, the story of Olympic Wresting Champions, brothers Mark and Dave Schultz and their psychotic millionaire coach, John Du Pont. The movie reeks of Oscar qualities and it’s almost certain that all three of its stars will be nominated, but keep the IMDb starmeter aside while watching, because that’s not the case here. Miller feeds to the mainstream a cold, bleak movie, dealing with failure and manipulation. It’s really remarkable how engaging a sad look at the bizarre friendship of some almost incomprehensible characters can be.
12. X-Men: Days Of Future Past
The seventh movie in the X-Men saga, Days Of Future Past marked the return of the first two X-Men films director, Bryan Singer. The new additions to cast are equally impressive with the returning characters, comprising a remarkable all-star cast, whose chemistry seems stronger than ever. Usually the more sequels they make, the worse a movie is, but that’s not a case with the latest X-Men. If you had to watch just one superhero movie this year, Days Of Future Past should have been the one.
11. Honeymoon
Leigh Janiak directorial debut is based on a simple horror/sci-fi theme, that of the supernatural invisible enemy from the unknown, centered around a newlywed couple played by Rose Leslie and Harry Treadaway, two aspiring young British actors with great chemistry between them. The movie keeps a slow pace that never actually picks up, but the strong performances and the psychological factor are effective enough to make Honeymoon standout from the horror bunch of 2014.
10. Gone Girl
David Fincher’s pairing with author Gillian Flynn finds him at his very best since Fight Club, bringing to the screen a crime story with many twists and a lot of tension. The film is visually impressive and its leading actors deliver great performances, giving their characters much style and depth. Despite the plot holes you might find if you look deep enough, ultimately you’ll sit through Gone Girl for two and a half hours without a single dull moment.
9. Cold In July
A modern day noir western thriller, Cold In July features outstanding performances from all its three protagonists, Michael C. Hall, Sam Shepard and Don Johnson. Like an early Coen Brothers’ movie scored with Carpenter-esque synths, Cold In July is intense and exhilarating from its opening, through the twists and the turns, to the dirty, brutal end.
8. The Drop
Like a more art-sy Scorsese gangster movie, The Drop is graced with a somewhat phenomenal cast, Tom Hardy, Noomi Repace and the late James Gandolfini. Hardy smashes the accent and boy, is he becoming the master of any role! Its script is great, with unexpected twists and turns along the way and you never feel the film’s pace is dipping either. To see Gandolfini in the role he does best one more final time, was truly a blessing.
7. The Skeleton Twins
Saturday Night Live alums, Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig deliver both great performances in a combination of comedy and drama, alongside the equally notable Ty Burrell. The Skeleton Twins balances a dramatic storyline about two siblings’ messed up lives with lots of comedic relief, shedding light into the darkness of the times of two common people characters, in a bittersweet tale where failure meets hope.
6. Nightcrawler
Nightcrawler is a chilling thriller on so many levels, with the main area for the film’s theme is based on power and corruption. Gyllenhaal plays a hauntingly strange, yet power hungry character who will stop at nothing to increase his company’s profile. One of Gyllenhaal’s best performances of his ever-growing career with equally great performances from the supporting cast, including Rene Russo.
5. Coherence
Coherence is a mindfucking, no budget film with Twilight Zone qualities that almost entirely takes place in a dining room. How can you get sci-fi out of a dining room full of jerks, you have to avoid spoilers and see for yourself, because the part that’s most fun about this film, is trying to figure out WTF is going on as the script develops. Technically, stuff like this or Primer from a decade ago are exactly how small (or no) budget films should be made.
4. Starry Eyes
Tense and intimidating from start to finish, Starry Eyes is destined to be a cult film upon its release. Including some of the most impressive gore scenes you could see in recent movies, this film draws you in and keeps you at the edge of your seat, taking the cliche subject of the wannabe actress in a downward spiral and turning it to something very fresh and creative. Alex Essoe delivers an excellent performance, that pretty much certifies that we’ll see more of her in the future.
3. Metalhead
Directed by Ragnar Bragason, Metalhead, tells the story of a family dealing with the tragic loss of their oldest son in a brutal tractor accident, mostly centered on Hera, the younger daughter, portrayed by Thorbjorg Helga Thorgilsdottir. Even though the film intensifies a lot on metal music and its imagery, it’s not the music that it is its main focus. It’s a drama, a tragic tale dealing with loss, pain, isolation, anger and despair that ultimately meets cleansing, in one of the most cathartic bitter ends you could see in a movie.
2. Only Lovers Left Alive
Jarmusch’s latest movie, his best in a long while, is a vampire love story like no other. Despite its subject, Only Lovers… is not a horror movie, but a romantic drama that features characters the viewer can immediately empathize with and a quiet, humble storyline full of fascinating cultural references and set in stylized dark ambiance. All performances without exception are impeccable, this is a much intelligent film and Jarmusch is once again at his best.
1. The Guest
When it came to compiling this list, it was a dead cert that Adam Wingard’s The Guest would be at the top of the pile. Not only does the movie entertain but it further cements the importance of Barrett and Wingard as a filmmaking duo. It would seem Wingard’s movies get better and better each time. The Guest is The Terminator meets Michael Myers, a true masterpiece for the genre. After the success of the 2011 cult hit You’re Next comes another throwback genre film with Dan Stevens as the eponymous ‘David’, a former soldier in Afghanistan, playing the part with so much charm, that you couldn’t imagine anyone better. The former Downton Abbey star brings his English wit and charm to an American southern role perfectly, but it’s not just the acting that’s great about this movie, it’s the host of nods to other eighties cinema. The atmosphere lends itself to the likes of Halloween, with a soundtrack that’s also a star and winner of this film. Thick loud synths and electronic ambiance lay over the key scenes, yet another nod to eighties b-movies, makes you think that all movies in the world should be made using this style. The Guest is D//E’s movie of the year.
Once again, in actual list form…
Starry Eyes
Cold In July
The Purge: Anarchy
VHS Viral
As Above So Below
Life After Beth
The Sacrament
ZR/RS
#end of year 2014
#lists
#rs
#zr
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Local Author Highlights the Importance of Reading and Writing with Autistic Students at East Durham College
An author and former teacher who has recently launched his first book visited East Durham College to talk to students at the Derwent provision about his personal journey and how reading and writing is so important for learning.
Richard Abbott Brailey, who is the author of Azarias Tor, The History Maker, completed a series of sessions with different students at East Durham College’s Derwent Provision, based on the Houghall Campus in Durham.
Students at Derwent are of mixed abilities on the autistic spectrum. Events such as these talks with Richard give them the opportunity to express themselves through questions and answers.
During Richard’s talks, students asked questions they had prepared beforehand. Questions ranged from how long it had taken Richard to write his book, to his favourite football team.
Richard said: “I believe that all young people should have access to books, and also be given the opportunity to express themselves using the written word, regardless of ability.
“I believe, that with encouragement, everyone has a tale to tell, a short story to write, and a potential novel inside them.”
The talks saw many students building their confidence by asking their own questions, a task which can be difficult for those with autism.
Karen Hartis, who is a lecturer at the Derwent Provision, was thrilled with Richard’s talks for the students.
She said: “As our students have a great love of movies and losing themselves in fictional worlds, it was great to have Richard come in to talk to them about fiction in books and to learn more about a career in writing, and the importance of reading and writing in education.
“We’d all like to thank Richard for taking the time to talk to our students, we saw some really good engagement from a lot of learners in the room. It gave them a chance to express themselves.”
Richard’s novel, Azarias Tor, stars a time-travelling man from the North East who travels to both the past and future. The story is a passion project for Richard, who has always dreamed of writing a book.
Richard is a former English teacher who previously worked at East Durham College and has since gone on to write his first book. He now plans a career in writing full-time as he writes the second and third novels in his trilogy.
He said: “I spent a wonderful morning with the students and staff, and felt that it was a worthwhile exercise for everyone involved.
“It would have been nice to have had more time, so as introduce creative writing exercises. I also felt a little guilty for not visiting the library, though I have donated a signed copy to their cause! Again, I would like to say thank you to everyone involved with making me feel so welcome, particularly Karen Hartis, who organised the event.”
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News Releases In the News Maps Publications Blogs Podcasts Media Relations
James Cameron—A Unifier Many Times Over
GIS Hero
As Applications Section administrator for the Information Technology Bureau of the South Florida Water Management District, James Cameron works to provide flood protection for millions of area residents. His efforts help monitor water quality, treat storm water, and restore the Everglades. For Cameron, a native Floridian, his career is a way to express his deep love for the state and a strong appreciation for the environment.
Cameron grew up in south Florida. He fished Biscayne Bay with his family and camped with his Boy Scout troop at Virginia Key, Mineral Springs, and Fortymile Bend in the Everglades. He later graduated from the University of Florida with a bachelor's degree in geography and a certificate in Florida studies.
"After college, I was acutely aware of how important water is in shaping the development of Florida," Cameron says. "I felt I could contribute in a capacity of public service in protecting Florida's precious environment."
Cameron was hired as a water resource planner, and later appointed GIS manager, at the Suwannee River Water Management District (WMD). He began to see the potential for GIS to bring clarity to complex water management issues, a way to transform large volumes of hard-to-interpret information into data and maps that could be easily understood by those responsible for making water management policy decisions.
"Once I realized my work could provide management with the ability to make better-informed decisions, I was hooked; GIS was my career," Cameron says. "What I love about GIS is that we can put maps in front of decision makers, show them where the issues are so they can understand complicated data and environmental issues, and see relationships between various factors."
One of the major accomplishments during Cameron's six years at the Suwannee River WMD was the initial implementation of GIS. Data had to be put into the system, which, in most cases during the early 1980s, meant using a digitizing table to capture information from paper maps. The team constructed basemaps by digitizing hydrography, roads, the Public Land Survey System, jurisdictional boundaries, and hypsography. Along with the basemaps, team members also digitized data layers, such as surface water drainage basins, soil surveys, and locations of groundwater monitoring wells. With the foundation of GIS complete, the Suwannee River WMD was ready to apply GIS in support of its projects and programs.
GIS played an important role in the implementation of the Suwannee River Basin Floodplain Development Ordinance that keeps people from building houses below the 100-year flood elevation in floodplain areas. Another accomplishment was the use of GIS to derive storm water retention and detention standards from delineated watersheds to support the Surface Water Management Program.
For the past 12 years, Cameron has worked with the South Florida Water Management District directing GIS development. The focus of this GIS has been the integration of both data and applications, including the development of a common hydrographic data model.
Steve Dicks studied with Cameron at the University of Florida, and the two worked together through college as roadies for rock 'n' roll shows. Dicks, who is now the information resources director at Southwest Florida Water Management District, recalls the important, early contributions Cameron made to statewide mapping.
"Jim has been a leader in feeding the statewide database with soil surveys for modeling and surface water permitting, statewide aerial photography, and digitized USGS maps," Dicks notes. "He is a big thinker. The role he played in coordinating that—he was able to get five government agencies moving in the same direction."
Building a GIS Career
Over the years, Cameron has had many job titles in several organizations, from GIS manager and director of GIS applications to chief GIS officer and GIS Division director. However, his role has always been to guide and direct the implementation of GIS to support the mission of the organization.
In the 1990s, Cameron worked as the GIS manager at the St. Johns River Water Management District, where he contributed to the development of the US Geological Survey (USGS) topographic quad updates, digital line graphs, digital raster graphics, orthophotos, and National Aerial Photography Program. One of the most significant accomplishments, according to Cameron, was the creation of a detailed land-cover/land-use dataset needed for a variety of applications, including wetland change-over-time analysis and estimates of non-point source pollution loading to surface water bodies.
In 1997, Cameron was appointed by Florida governor Lawton Chiles as the water management district member of the Florida Geographic Information Board. That same year, he and his team were able to assist fire crews with detailed maps, saving homes and property. The following year, working with a contractor, Cameron and his team developed and implemented a methodology to produce gauge-adjusted Doppler rainfall estimates. A modification of this methodology is currently being used by water management districts throughout Florida.
David Maidment, director at the University of Texas Center for Research in Water Resources, recalls seeing Cameron's work many years ago at the Esri International User Conference. "The map of groundwater recharge constructed for the St. Johns River Water Management District remains still a great example of the use of core GIS functions to support geospatial analysis of water resources."
More recently, Maidment says he has admired Cameron's work as a leading advocate of the use of GIS for water resources at the South Florida Water Management District. Instead of having a set of unconnected streamlines, drainage areas, water control structures, and water measurement points, Cameron's efforts have made all the information geographically consistent such that the drainage area outlets fall right on the water control structures and the corresponding streamlines, and all are connected with relationships.
"It was like seeing a fuzzy image suddenly come into a precise focus," Maidment says. "Jim is a great GIS leader with a lifetime of contributions to the field of applying GIS in water resources in Florida."
Leadership on Many Levels
For the past 12 years, Cameron has worked with the South Florida Water Management District and continued the role of directing GIS development. Here, Cameron says, the focus of GIS has been toward integration of both data and applications, including the development of a common hydrographic data model.
Now, one unified database houses hydrography; drainage basins; hydrologic monitoring sites; and hydrologic elements, such as pumps, culverts, and weirs. The unified database provides the ability to define relationships among the hydrographic elements that can then be used for hydrologic modeling. This common hydrographic data model is being incorporated as a foundation component along with the district's SCADA system and a business rules management system to create an operations decision support system that will provide a key resource to water managers. This means the data and GIS tools will support the district's work to provide flood protection for millions of residents of South Florida.
"I have been blessed to lead a team of dedicated GIS professionals who have implemented a GIS that is used by the entire agency," Cameron observes. "As the district staff learn and use existing applications, they begin to understand the power of GIS and how GIS can be applied to meet other business objectives."
Tim Minter, a GIS enterprise architect with the South Florida Water Management District, remarks on not only Cameron's skills in the application of GIS but also his effective management style.
"Jim has a consistently keen eye for spotting significant opportunities to advance the application of geographic information science and technology in water resource management communities," Minter says. "He delivers meaningful and successful GIS services because he builds and supports strong teams by supporting team members' professional interests and growth, highlighting individual and team achievements, and caring about his staff on a personal level."
For more information, contact James Cameron (e-mail: jcameron@sfwmd.gov).
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Home Uncategorized Re-shaping the Future: Becoming a Circular Economy
Re-shaping the Future: Becoming a Circular Economy
By 9 May, 2019 / in Category Uncategorized, World / by ETHOZ Editor
Resource depletion, global warming and climate change are grim realities that our planet and global population are facing as their impact on the state of the economy, society and our very way of life becomes ever more urgent. Much has been said about the need for greater awareness of these environmental problems and crucially, the need for solutions to mitigate or prevent the inevitably dire consequences they will bring.
Amidst the doom and gloom, the circular economy has emerged as a concept that offers a sustainable solution to these complex planetary challenges.
A circular economy is an alternative to the traditional linear economy (which follows a make-use- dispose process) in which we keep resources in use for as long as possible, extract the maximum value from them whilst in use, then recover and regenerate products and materials at the end of each service life.
Image Credit: Medium
The circular economy involves gradually decoupling economic activity from the consumption of finite resources, and designing waste out of the system. It is driven by a transition to renewable energy sources. The circular logic of this model builds economic, natural and social capital.
Even though the circular economy concept appears to be a novel one, the idea of circularity itself has deep historical and philosophical origins. The idea of feedback and of cycles in real-world systems has roots in various schools of ancient philosophy. It was revived in industrialised countries after World War II when the emergence of computer-based studies of non-linear systems revealed the complex and interrelated nature of the world we live in.
With modern-day advances, digital technology has the power to support the transition to a circular economy by radically increasing virtualisation, de-materialisation, transparency, and feedback-driven intelligence.
Benefits of a Circular Economy
A shift to a circular economy portends numerous benefits, the environmental one being foremost. The initial target of the circular economy is to have a positive effect on the ecosystem and to mitigate the exploitation and overstress of the environment. It has the potential to reduce harmful gas emissions and the use of primary raw materials, increase agricultural productivity, and decrease in negative externalities such as pollution and waste.
Economic benefits can still be had under the circular economy. These include continued economic growth, substantial material savings, growth in employment and incentives for innovation. According to calculations by strategic consultancy McKinsey & Co., the GDP of a circular economy grows due to a combination of increased revenue from new circular activities, and cheaper production costs from getting more functionality from materials and other inputs. The value-add of circular products and services leads to higher valuation of labour, which increases income and expenditure per household, thus resulting in a higher GDP.
Image Credit: FreightWeek
Caption: An example of Europe’s circular economy benefits
A transition to the circular economy would also have positive effects on employment. This could be due to greater spending by lower prices, increase in labour-intensive, high-quality recycling and repair practices, and growth in new businesses through innovation, the service economy and new business models.
A circular economy is a driver of innovation as new solutions based on a new way of thinking are sought. A shift to circular rather than linear value chains and aiming for optimization for the entire system results in new insights. It also spurs interdisciplinary collaboration between designers, manufacturers and recyclers, resulting in sustainable innovations.
Embracing the Circular Economy in Singapore
The government in Singapore has acknowledged the need to embrace the circular economy and is enacting multiple policies and initiatives in that direction. Some aspects of Singapore’s vital resources already adhere to the circular concept. For instance, the water sector functions in a closed loop as used water is converted into NEWater, significantly enhancing Singapore’s water resilience and sustainability.
According to Environment and Water Resources Minister Masagos Zulkifli, the authorities are now working on closing the waste loop. To that end, under its Sustainable Singapore Blueprint, Singapore aims to become a Zero Waste Nation and achieve a 70% recycling rate by 2030.
This is an area that needs improvement considering current recycling rates: Singapore’s household recycling rate of 21% is low when compared to other developed countries like Germany and South Korea. The blue recycling bins placed at HDB flats are “gradually becoming a more welcome sight in many estates”, said Minister Masagos, but some still treat them as general waste bins. The National Environment Agency estimates that 40% of the load collected from these bins is tainted. We would all do well do adopt better recycling practices.
Policies are also being reviewed to encourage sustainable production and consumption, particularly in sectors where the market fails to take into account environmental externalities. For that, the government is introducing a mandatory reporting framework for packaging data and waste reduction plans, to be in force in 2020, to require that producers be responsible for the ‘end-of-life’ of their products. Businesses, such as brand owners, importers and large retailers will need to start collecting data on the types and amounts of packaging they place on the market and submit plans for reduction.
Image Credit: MEWR Singapore
Such a system is based on Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), a policy approach under which producers are given a significant responsibility – financial and/or physical – for the treatment or disposal of post-consumer products. EPR It will incentivise businesses to design products that are more easily recycled, or develop innovative circular business models. The overall aim is to bring about more sustainable use of packaging materials, including single-use plastic packaging, by businesses and consumers.
In addition to reducing plastic waste, Singapore is relooking the waste management cycle for three major streams of trash – food waste, packing waste and e-waste – under its first Zero Waste Masterplan. To that end, the environment ministry has designated 2019 as Singapore’s Year Towards Zero Waste, a campaign that aims to raise awareness of waste issues and the need to conserve resources. Electronic waste or e-waste is a waste stream of particular concern due to its toxic nature; Singapore produces in excess of 60,000 tonnes of e-waste a year.
Image Credit: Eco-business.com
Image Credit: Food Bank
In order to help Singapore achieve its zero-waste goals, S$45 million has been invested in harvesting smart technology, as well as research and development. One example is finding other uses for Singapore’s incinerator bottom ash (IBA), a form of ash produced in incineration facilities which is usually dumped into the Pulau Semakau landfill. One option being explored is developing technological solutions to extract potentially toxic metals from the IBA. If that can be done, the IBA can be mixed with construction materials and also used for road construction.
Transforming the environmental services industry is another part of a shift towards a circular economy. The industry currently faces acute challenges such as an ageing workforce and low productivity. Under an industry transformation map, the government is pushing to increase productivity, digitalisation and innovation to introduce new vibrancy into the sector and to provide better jobs under the circular economy.
To support innovation, a regulatory sandbox for environmental services has been introduced. This allows innovative environmental services-related technologies and solutions to be tested in a safe environment with relaxed regulations, a necessary ingredient for a circular economy that always seeks new ways of doing things.
As a city-state known for its excellent governance, infrastructure and human capital, Singapore has the potential to be a world-leading circular economy. However, this will require not just the policies and resources of government and industry, but the enlightened effort of each and every individual as a consumer of goods and services, working member of the economy, and inhabitant of this beautiful planet.
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Industry 4.0: Implications for SMEs in Singapore
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Book Review: Far From The Tree - Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity
Andrew Solomon has painstakingly and intelligently put together an extraordinary book, entitled Far From the Tree - Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity. Published in 2012, this endearing, profound book introduces us to the eternal struggles of parenthood, as viewed from families with uniquely challenging circumstances, and it offers insight and hope for all of us who live side-by-side with such families.
The author spent a decade interviewing families, more than 300 of them, his interest stemming from his relationship with his own parents and the struggles they experienced because of his being a gay man. What he set out do, which is an ambitious task, was to explore how parents adapt to rearing children who differ profoundly from themselves. He chose ten types of family experiences, with the intention to "explore the spectrum of difference, to show that raising a child of extraordinary abilities is in some ways like raising a child of reduced capacities, to show that a child's traumatic origin (rape) or traumatic acts (crime) can have surprising parallels to the condition of his mind (autistic, schizophrenic, prodigious) or of his body (dwarfism, deafness)."
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He introduces us to his idea that individuals have two different types of identity: vertical identities and horizontal identities. Vertical identities relate to those things we inherit from our parents and that we, by default, have in common, such as ethnicity and language. Horizontal identities are those things that children acquire through genetic mutation, health conditions, or simply unique personalities that they don't share in common with their parents. His book focuses on relationships in which the child's horizontal identities are very different from their parents, and are extraordinarily challenging for parents to understand and cope with.
It's a big book, with over 600 pages, which I'm finding very gratifying to read. It's brought tears to my eyes and made me laugh. It's plunged me into worlds I haven't known personally, given me view into parenting struggles I can only imagine. By reading only one chapter at a time, you could say I'm savoring it, and I'm not done yet!
Now, you may be wondering - "great, but what the heck does this have to do with the NICU, Trish?" Good question. The truth is, many families in the NICU will someday be faced with the reality that their children will have horizontal identities that are hard for parents. Whether because of prematurity, down syndrome (which has it's own entire chapter in this book), or complex health complications and physical disability (which also has it's own chapter), many NICU parents will find themselves in the very same shoes that the families in the book are wearing.
I find his thought process refreshing and I find his style of writing comfortably challenging, with words every now and again that I have to stop and look up. It feels like being a part of an fascinatingconversation with an extremely smart and interesting person who is passionate about his work and who has an incredible capacity for empathy.
So, for those of you interested in a unique look at parenting struggles, for those of you willing to take on a heavy book filled with empathy, intelligence, and surprises, give this book a try. I know I'm thoroughly enjoying it, and I hope you will to.
One important point: I would not recommend this book as a gift to any parent currently going through the NICU, for it will likely trigger even greater anxiety over what their future holds for them. But for many people, whether living as families of intense parenting struggles or not, the insight and lessons shared are very valuable.
categories Books, After the NICU, Emotions, Reviews
tags Book Review
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What to buy, and how to get the most from it.
Image credit: Chris Velazco/Engadget
A closer look at RED's audacious Hydrogen One phone
Founder Jim Jannard built the smartphone he wanted to see in the world.
Chris Velazco, @chrisvelazco
06.02.18 in Mobile
In a van sitting between the high school from Pretty Little Liars and the Stars Hollow gazebo from Gilmore Girls, RED founder Jim Jannard takes out his smartphone — the Hydrogen One — and starts whipping through demos with me. We're at AT&T's Shape entertainment conference at Warner Brothers Studios and this might be the most surreal hands-on experience I've ever had with a phone. Then again, this might be the most surreal smartphone I've ever used.
Companies have tried building modular smartphones, and have met varying degrees of success — the LG G5 and its "friends" utterly flopped while Motorola continues to push its various Mods. Companies also have tried to build smartphones with eye-popping 3D displays, and they've been abject failures. Remember Amazon's Fire Phone? No one has tried to squeeze both of those gimmicks into a single smartphone except for RED, a company that has only ever made cinema-grade digital cameras. A healthy dose of skepticism about all this isn't just helpful — it's required. Fortunately, Jannard isn't phased by the skepticism. He speaks with the surety of a man with little to lose.
That's because he doesn't seem stressed about what will happen when the Hydrogen launches on AT&T and Verizon this August. That's not because he's sure it'll be a massive commercial success, either. It's because he built the phone of his dreams.
"This is the phone I wanted," he told me. "If we don't sell one, I have the world's most expensive phone but I'm completely happy and satisfied with that." To underscore his point, he puts things a little more bluntly later in our conversation.
"I've got the coolest fucking phone in the world in my pocket," he said. "And I paid for it."
Gallery: Red Hydrogen One hands-on | 12 Photos
The first thing you'll notice about the Hydrogen One is its look — I'd call its style "badass-utilitarian." While other companies have sought to make stylish phones with glass bodies, the Hydrogen's aluminum (or titanium) frame features grippy, scalloped edges and a patch of what looks like carbon fiber around its dual camera. It's a handful, certainly, but it's not nearly as heavy or as dense as I would've expected.
Designs are meant to give you a sense of a product's character and in this case, that character is very clear: the Hydrogen One is a tool, not a toy. Meanwhile, you'll find the usual smartphone flourishes in the usual places. There's a set of volume keys on the left side, a power button and shutter button on the right, and a slot for microSD cards and the SIM up top next to the headphone jack. To get a real sense of why the Hydrogen One is special, you need to see its front and back.
I wish I could show you the Hydrogen One's face, but I can't — RED won't let people take photos or video of the phone's front since 2D media wouldn't do justice to the "holographic" display. That's unfortunate for you, because it seems like RED is really onto something here. When you're peeking at the homescreen or swiping through your apps in the launcher, the 5.7-inch Quad HD display looks like any other. Fire up some compatible content, however, and the screen springs to life.
Still photos of flowers and fire hydrants Jannard shot with the dual camera seemed to leap off the display, and watching clips from movies like Brave made me feel like the films were unfolding around me. I paused the highlight reel a few times to get a better look, and while you won't be able to see things that weren't already there, the added depth gave scenes a sense of realness and presence I've never experienced on a smartphone. The so-called 4-View (or 4V) effect is strongest when you're looking at the screen dead-on, but you'll still get a sense of it when you peer at the screen from an angle. More importantly, the 3D effect seemed to persist as I moved my head around — an impressive feat when you remember that lenticular 3D looks jumpy and jarring when you switch between different perspectives.
These 4V visuals don't just apply to videos, either. Jannard showed me a recorded demo of a first-person shooter game that looked a lot like Afterpulse, and when the player lined up the reticle to pop an enemy in the head, the barrel of the scope seemed to zoom toward me. It's unclear what kind of work developers would have to do to optimize games for the Hydrogen One, but that's arguably overshadowed by a bigger question: would they even bother to do so for a single phone? The details are still murky. Maybe the most novel demo I tried was a 4V-enabled video chat app, in which I could see my own face — captured by multiple front-facing cameras with the same in-your-face depth as those movie clips. It wasn't just cool; it was utterly transfixing.
I'm told the heart of the experience is a layer of special material beneath the display capable of bouncing light in more than two directions (sort of like this crazy projector screen I saw at CES) to provide a more pronounced sense of depth. Meanwhile, software running directly on the phone's Snapdragon 835 is used to effectively fill in the gap between the two perspectives found in traditional 3D content — it's all happening on the fly and in real-time. This results in the most immersive visuals I've ever encountered on a phone. No wonder RED wants you to actually see the Hydrogen One before you draw your conclusions about its screen: words and photos don't do it justice.
Chris Velazco/Engadget
You can capture and view your own photos in videos in 4V, but that'll only remain interesting for so long. Given RED's history in Hollywood, it's no surprise to hear that the company is aggressively pursuing deals with film studios to get their content libraries up and running on the Hydrogen One. That's where the Hydrogen Network comes in. A number of potential partnerships are still being worked out, but Jannard confirmed that Lionsgate is on board and will bring its entire 3D library to the Hydrogen One. The process of converting existing 3D content to 4V is apparently quite simple, and if studios made the "maximum amount of tweaks and adjustments," it would take about 3 hours to make a 4V file out of a 1.5-hour film.
The other way the Hydrogen One stands out is its modular backside: you'll be able to swap different components onto the phone, like a cinema-grade camera that you can hook existing lenses up to. As mentioned, this isn't a new idea, but since the Hydrogen One is arguably geared toward people who are used to dropping big bucks on camera gear, it seems like a safer (and more lucrative) approach than I've seen from other companies. As far as Jannard is concerned, the limited success achieved by other modular smartphones doesn't mean the concept itself is flawed — it means that the modules those companies have made aren't meaningful enough. Jannard wouldn't elaborate on what other kinds of modules the company plans to build, but he did note that RED is open to working with outside partners to build additional hardware for the Hydrogen platform.
"If there are companies that can add value and we don't have to do it, we'll absolutely embrace that," he said.
RED is being very picky about who it works with to build Hydrogen add-ons, mostly because it wants to keep "crap modules" from being attached to the phone. That said, the company is already making some progress — Jannard confirmed that RED is talking to one potential partner about developing a module, and he thinks it's "likely to happen."
A patent filed in 2015 reveals the company's elaborate mobile vision.
Of all the questions that surround the Hydrogen One, one looms larger than the rest: Why build a smartphone like this? Even mobile incumbents have trouble navigating the market, after all. The answer is a complicated one, and it stems from deeper in the past than you might expect. Before creating RED in the mid-2000s, Jannard was best known as the founder and occasional CEO of Oakley, a company that had spent decades crafting sunglasses, goggles and accessories for active, outdoorsy types. His time at Oakley's helm gave Jannard a deep appreciation for the process of creating products for regular people, and that hasn't changed despite a long tenure at his pro-oriented camera company.
"I'm a consumer product guy," he told me. "When I started RED, I always had the idea that at some point we'd leverage the library, the team, the technology into a consumer product. I thought it would take five or six years — it took twelve."
Despite knowing that he wanted to make something for consumers, Jannard didn't set out knowing RED would build a smartphone — especially one that relied so much on unorthodox technology. The decision to go ahead with a phone like the Hydrogen One came from two sources: his understanding that smartphones are profoundly influential in people's lives, and a strong sense of what he himself wanted to own. Specifically, he couldn't believe that people weren't paying attention to the potential of immersive, next-generation displays like the ones RED found in Leia's labs.
"The idea of 3D [in a smartphone] is not bad, it's just that was never an implementation as convenient as this," Jannard said. "You don't need to wear anything, you don't need to charge anything — it seems like a no-brainer to me."
Add a heaping portion of RED's expertise with cameras and the Hydrogen One was born. It's a radical departure from the norm and, as a result, it ticks some boxes people didn't even know they wanted to be ticked. That's just how Jannard wanted it. He told me he saw the mobile industry becoming mired in a "sea of sameness" and the last thing he wanted to do was wade in himself with something tragically conventional. The Hydrogen One could be a game-changer. It could also be a flop. One thing remains clear, though: RED has built a terribly impressive, wildly ambitious device, and it feels like the very best kind of weird. Regardless of its potential for success, the rest of the industry could take a lesson or two from the Hydrogen One.
In this article: 4v, camera, gear, hands-on, hydrogen, hydrogenone, mobile, red, smartphone
By Chris Velazco @chrisvelazco
Chris is Engadget's senior mobile editor and moonlights as a professional moment ruiner. His early years were spent taking apart Sega consoles and writing awful fan fiction. That passion for electronics and words would eventually lead him to covering startups of all stripes at TechCrunch. The first phone he ever swooned over was the Nokia 7610, because man, those curves.
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Andy Cohen, Kelly Ripa and More Stars Pay Tribute to Anderson Cooper’s Mom Gloria Vanderbilt
by Jamie Blynn | Mon., Jun. 17, 2019 11:48 AM
Charles Sykes/Bravo/NBCU Photo Bank
Gloria Vanderbilt is gone but not forgotten.
Following news of her passing from stomach cancer at age 95 this morning, her son's good friends Andy Cohenand Kelly Ripa have paid tribute to the late icon.
"Gloria Vanderbilt was an amazing woman who lived a life filled with incredible peaks and impossible obstacles," the Watch What Happens Live captioned a black and white shot of her on Instagram. "Through it all she remained eternally optimistic with a wicked sense of humor. In fact, Anderson's iconic and infectious giggle comes from his mom. Sending Anderson all my love, and may she Rest In Peace."
Wrote Ripa, "Gloria Vanderbilt. A true lady and pioneer who lived life to its fullest. I will miss you and everything about you. May you Rest In Peace Gloria.......you deserve it."
In Memoriam: Fallen Stars of 2019
Other celebrities have also shared their memories and condolences. "Gloria Vanderbilt influenced me from a very early age," wrote Lisa Rinna. "She was a bigger than life ICON who I was so taken with. Then I was fortunate enough to meet her son @andersoncooper who is one of my favorite people ever. I am so saddened to hear of her passing. A life well lived!! She is a Legend. Sending love and prayers to you Anderson. Rest In Peace."
Tweeted Maria Shriver, "A life well-lived. Not without pain, not without hurdles, but lived. And how moving to have your son do this. Rest In Peace. And @andersoncooper, God bless. We are holding you in our prayers."
Gloria Vanderbilt. A true lady and pioneer who lived life to its fullest. I will miss you and everything about you. May you Rest In Peace Gloria.......you deserve it. 🌸🌺♥️♥️♥️
A post shared by Kelly Ripa (@kellyripa) on Jun 17, 2019 at 9:14am PDT
Cooper honored his mom this morning on CNN's Newsroom With Poppy.
"Earlier this month we had to take her to the hospital," he shared. "That's where she learned she had very advanced cancer in her stomach and that it had spread. When the doctor told her she had cancer, she was silent for a while and then she said, 'Well, it's like that old song, show me the way to get out of this world because that's where everything is.' Later, she made a joke and we started giggling. I never knew we had the exact same giggle. I recorded it and it makes me giggle every time I watch it."
"I know she hoped for a little more time, a few days or weeks at least," he said. "There were paintings she wanted to make, more books she wanted to read, more dreams to dream, but she was ready. She was ready to go...She was surrounded by beauty and by family and by friends. The last few weeks every time I kissed her goodbye, I'd say, 'I love you, mom.' She would look at me and say, 'I love you, too. You know that.'"
TAGS/ Anderson Cooper , Kelly Ripa , Andy Cohen , Death , Apple News , Top Stories
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ERIN QUON | FOOD STYLIST
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About About Clients
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Erin Quon is a nationally acclaimed, award-winning food stylist specializing in innovative design for photographers and advertisers working in print, film, and video.
Erin's passion for cooking began at an early age. Her early memory of cooking was with her father, a great cook and inspiration. This inspiration was passed down to her daughter Tatum. She and Tatum wrote, cooked, and styled a book together called "Cooking together". Erin spent her formative years beginning as a line cook and moving up to an executive chef for many renowned San Francisco restaurants, such as City Block, Gordon Biersch, Sol y Luna, and Slow Club. Wanting to take food to a higher creative level, she became interested in the look and style of food. She entered the world of food styling bringing her vast years of cooking experience to the plate.
A two time IACP (International Association of Culinary Professionals) award winner, Erin's passion for food was recognized by the leading global organization of nearly 4,000 of the “Who’s Who” of the world of food. She was awarded a Gold Medal for her expertise in food styling for “Chocolate Obsession: Confections and Treats to Savor,” and Erin received a Silver Medal for her outstanding work for James Beard’s “Best Chef in California’s” acclaimed cookbook, “Boulevard, The Cookbook.” Erin's notable styling expertise and artistic flair can also be seen in the Williams-Sonoma “Cook’s Collection” series as well as countless other books by leading publishers, including Ten Speed Press, Chronicle Books, Rodale and Stewart, Tabori and Chang and “Cooking at Home with the Culinary Institute of America.” But it’s not just about cookbooks, Erin's commercial styling can be seen in the grocery aisles with the likes of Safeway Select.
Today, she takes her deep knowledge and understanding of how to pair ingredients for the ultimate dish and couples it with an imaginative, creative artistry to create the ultimate “look.”
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Home > Vol 6, No 2 (2019) > Kimourtzis
University and the Formation of Greek Elites: Past and Present
Panagiotis G Kimourtzis, Pantelis Kyprianos
This article analyzes the history of university studies in relation with the establishment of the Greek elites from the mid-19th century until today, based on primary and secondary sources and on available statistical data. Particular attention is given to studies at universities abroad and to students’ pathways. By examining the prominent position of the elites among students abroad we pose the question to what extent there has been a pattern change since the past. We highlight that the possession of a degree adds power to one’s personal course, especially in two periods (early 1860s until mid-1890s, end of 1950s until mid-1980s). A common feature of these periods is the upward structural social mobility. During the first and especially the second period, shortages in certain professions, along with state expansion, led to the increase in demand for degrees, aside from immediate graduate absorption. The article also ascertains that lately a «reservoir» with a significant number of foreign studied Greeks has «accumulated» abroad. Though comparable with the case in other European countries, this becomes noteworthy when taking into account the relatively smaller Greek population. This mobility concerned a reasoned economic choice, together with being attributed to the social value attached to education. Simultaneously, it was linked to the expectation of global quality education, acquisition of a personal cultural experience, along with improved credentials that create better professional prospects and high income. Nonetheless, in the case of certain groups, this mobility was governed by the spirit of a family tradition and the reproduction of social and cultural capital.
elites; State; social mobility; higher education; students abroad
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Kimourtzis, P. (2017). The best and the brightest. Old and new aspects of Greek student mobility. Higher Education Policy-net (HEP-net) publications, Series: Studies, Patra [under publication] (in greek).
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Lapas, K. (2004). University and Students in Greece during the 19th Century, Athens: IAENEIE. (in greek).
Lareau, A., & Weininger, E.B. (2003). Cultural capital in educational research: A critical assessment. Theory and Society, 32, 567-606.
Murphy-Lejeune, E. (2002). Student Mobility and Narrative in Europe. The new strangers. Routledge: Lon-don.
Meyer (2007). World Models, national curricula, and the centrality of the individual. In Benavot, & Brasla-vsky (Eds.), School Knowledge in Comparative and Historical Perspective: Changing Curricula in Primary and Secondary Education (pp. 259-271). Dordrecht: Springer.
Nowicka, M., & Rovisco, M. (Eds.). (2009). Cosmopolitanism in practice. Ashgate: Aldershot.
Panayiotopoulos, D. (2004). Agricultural education and development The High School of Agriculture in Greek society (1920-1960). Athens: Ellinika Grammata. (in greek).
Tsoukalas, K. (1986). State, Society, Labor in Post War Greece. Athens: Themelio. (in greek).
Vaxevanoglou, A. (1994). The Greek Capitalists (1900-1940). Economic and social approach. Athens: The-melio. (in greek).
Waters, J. (2006). Geographies of cultural capital: education, international migration and family strategies between Hong Kong and Canada. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 31, 179-192.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.14516/ete.244
Copyright (c) 2019 Espacio, Tiempo y Educación
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Golden bench: When quantity meets quality for the defending champs
59dNick Friedell
Sources: Thunder's attempts to move Paul stall
5hAdrian Wojnarowski
Heat's Waiters answers trolls with new physique
New Green days: Celts introduce Walker, Kanter
6hTim Bontemps
Bullock has back surgery day after Knicks signing
Sources: Suns, Cheick Diallo reach two-year deal
Josh Jackson in diversion program for arrest
Which player had the best sneakers at summer league?
2dNick DePaula
5-on-5: What the massive Westbrook-CP3 trade means
Lowe: Are the Rockets better? Pressure's on Russ and Harden now
6dZach Lowe
Thibodeau: McKinnie needs to step up for Warriors (0:35)
Due to the potential absence of Andre Iguodala, Tom Thibodeau designates Alfonzo McKinnie as the guy to step up and take his place in Game 4. (0:35)
Nick FriedellESPN Staff Writer
Nick Friedell is the Chicago Bulls beat reporter for ESPN Chicago. Friedell is a graduate of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University and joined ESPNChicago.com for its launch in April 2009.
PORTLAND -- Alfonzo McKinnie wears the satisfied smile of a man who appreciates that his basketball journey has led him to this moment. After bouncing all over the world in hopes of finally landing a consistent place in the NBA, McKinnie has made the most of his opportunity this season with the Golden State Warriors, but especially over the past few weeks of the postseason.
"Man, it's a great feeling, I know that," McKinnie said recently. "Just being able to be in this position and playing on this stage. It's damn near something like I always dreamed about. For me to be here and be able to get on the court and play -- it's an amazing feeling for me. I know all my family and friends they're just as excited about this whole thing."
McKinnie's rise to postseason prominence -- he racked up a plus-24 in Saturday's Game 3 win over the Portland Trail Blazers -- is just the latest example of a bench group that has found its stride at the best possible time. With Kevin Durant (strained calf) out since Game 6 of the Western Conference semifinals against the Houston Rockets, McKinnie, Jonas Jerebko, Jordan Bell and Quinn Cook (as well as Kevon Looney in an increased role) have all taken turns making big plays in different games, giving Steve Kerr and his staff a huge lift in the process.
Warriors' bench this postseason
1st 11 Games
PPG 21.0 33.8
FG pct 39% 61%
RPG 13.3 18.5
APG 5.4 7.5
Kerr has repeatedly praised his reserves for being able to stay ready throughout the long grind of an 82-game season, a message he reinforced with the group as the playoffs began.
"The best thing is that when I say it, they know I mean it because I was them 20 years ago," Kerr said of his bench players. "I had plenty of playoff runs where I didn't play for five or six games, and then all of a sudden I get thrown into the mix. It's a hard job but you have to be ready for it, and that is your job. So the way to stay ready is to stay engaged and get shots up. Whether it's after the games like Quinn or before practice like Jonas, these guys have their own routines, but part of being a pro in the NBA is being able to deliver when you haven't played for a stretch.
"And we've got a lot of guys who are doing that right now ... they can all play or they wouldn't be in the NBA, and we trust them to come in and deliver."
To underscore just how much the Warriors' bench has delivered in the wake of Durant's injury, consider that the group has scored at least 30 bench points in four straight playoff games, according to ESPN Stats & Information, their second-longest streak under Kerr.
The bench's ability to stabilize the rest of the group has taken pressure off Warriors All-Stars Stephen Curry, Draymond Green and Klay Thompson to perform the same way each night without Durant. The production from several players who didn't get consistent rotation minutes to end the season has become a rallying cry for the team's best players.
"Everyone is saying it's thin this year and all this," Thompson said of the bench. "But they come to work every day. They follow our leaders, and it's a strength in numbers thing."
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The chance that McKinnie and his fellow reserves are embracing in the moment is something that resonates with Kerr after all the years he spent in the league trying to carve out his own niche.
"I can relate to those guys much better than I can relate to the starters and the Hall of Famers," Kerr said. "So I think the bench players play a unique and important role on every team. But on winning teams one of the things I learned from Phil Jackson when I was in Chicago was how important it was to engage the guys on the end of the bench, keep them involved, which means throw them out there. Don't be afraid to put everybody in the game at some point.
"And there's going to come a time where every single player on the roster's going to have to contribute to help your team win."
Kerr drove that point home in Game 3 of the Western Conference finals when he started center Damian Jones, who hadn't started a game since tearing his pectoral muscle on Dec. 1 and had played only three minutes since being activated prior to Game 1 of the Blazers series. While the Jones experiment didn't work the way Kerr hoped, the fact that he gave Jones that chance strengthened the belief that the rest of the group would be given the chance to contribute.
"We're blessed with a lot of talent, so we're able to mix and match and play some of our young guys, bench guys routinely, and put them in with other starters and protect them a little bit," Kerr said. "But I think there's a real power in that dynamic. It keeps everybody more engaged, more connected, I think more committed to the goal. I think what's happened the last few games with our bench playing a key role, Game 6 in Houston and then the last two games in Portland, has been galvanizing."
Legion of doom: Portland becomes the latest victim of the road Warriors
Clean MRI for Iguodala; questionable for Game 4
The collective morale of the Warriors is better than it has been all season, and a large part of that is due to the fact that the entire roster, short of rookie Jacob Evans, is contributing something in the biggest games.
"These are the moments that you're in the gym [for] in the summer," Jerebko said. "These are the moments you're in the gym [for] on a day off. These are the moments after practice you put up [shots for] an extra hour. These are the moments you play for. I don't care if it's 30 seconds or if it's 30 minutes, you got to be ready to do your job."
It's a message that has paid off in huge dividends for a proud Warriors group that is on the verge of becoming the first team since the 1960s Boston Celtics to earn five straight trips to the NBA Finals.
"Coach always tells us to stay ready, and to start this series they told us, 'Everybody be ready,'" McKinnie said. "Me and the other guys, we've just been putting the work in every single day and when we do get out there and get our opportunity, I feel like we're ready because we've already been working towards that moment. And it shows when we get in the game."
While Cook and Bell experienced the happiness that can only come after winning a championship, McKinnie and Jerebko are hoping to have that feeling for the first time in a few weeks. In the meantime, they are enjoying the path that has brought them to this point and have given the group a renewed sense of the joy that was missing at various times during the season.
"It's the playoffs," Jerebko said. "We're playing for a championship. We're playing for a dream coming true for a lot of us, all of us. Some of these guys have been in this moment before ... the bottom [line] is it's just basketball. So you can't get caught up in how important the game is, you just got to play your game. We've got so many players who can step up and play well ... we've got 12 guys on that bench who can step up and play.
"I feel like we've got the best bench in the league no matter what anybody says. With the minutes and the confidence comes numbers; we've got great players on this team all around."
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The Mag Archives: The toughest guy in sports
2563dMat Hoffman, as told to Alyssa Roenigk
9hRyan O'Hanlon
Fall guy
Surgery without anesthesia? No problem for "Condor." Sasha Eisenman for ESPN
Mat Hoffman, as told to Alyssa Roenigk
This story appeared in ESPN The Magazine's Aug. 1, 2005, issue. Subscribe today!
Mathew Hoffman was born on Jan. 9, 1972, in Edmond, Okla., a suburb of Oklahoma City, the fourth of four kids. Why only one "t" in Mat? Dad Matthew wanted a namesake; Mom Joni refused to have her son called Junior. Thus was a compromise born.
As a kid, I dreamed of flying. When I was 7, I built a flying machine out of two-by-fours and a sheet. My brother, Travis, saw it and wanted to fly too. I ran into the house to find my parents. "Come watch!" I yelled. "Travis and I are going to fly over the neighborhood." My mom and my dad, who is a pilot, watched us carry that contraption up a 15-foot-tall sliding-board ladder. We got to the top, counted to three, jumped and crashed. I was banged up, and Travis broke his hand. My parents never tried to stop us. They just watched us try to fly, loaded Travis into the car and drove him to the hospital.
Hoffman got his first BMX bike at 11 and hit the ramps. By 15 he was being touted as the greatest freestyle BMX rider ever. The sport suited him. Extremely shy, Hoffman could hide behind his helmet as his fame grew. At 17 he became the youngest rider in BMX history to turn pro, and he dominated immediately. In March 1989, he entered the King of Vert in Canada. There, he did the impossible.
No one thought the 900 could be done. Two-and-a-half rotations, and you had to spot your spins from inside a tornado. The 900 entered my mind when I turned pro, and when I get an idea like that, I'm thrown into the backseat. The idea takes over; I'm just along for the ride.
The King of Vert was one of my first pro contests. I had a broken thumb and was riding with a cast. Before I dropped in, I still wasn't sure I was going to try the 900. I finished my run and had time left, so I went back to the top of the deck, rolled in, did a setup air and hucked myself. I started spinning so fast -- spotting all my turns -- and got all the way around. I landed on my wheels, then crashed. I thought, "Whoa, I can do this." The crowd started chanting, "Mat! Mat! Mat!" I tried it again and stuck it. The crowd ran down and mobbed me on the ramp.
That was the moment I realized anything was possible.
Joni Hoffman died of cancer in 1990, which led Mat to become more independent. The next year, as freestyle BMX riders were struggling to find equipment, sponsors and contests, 19-year-old Mat started Hoffman Bikes in Edmond and his own team, the Sprocket Jockeys. He also launched his own contests, the Bicycle Stunt Series. Those three moves are why Hoffman is credited with having single-handedly saved his sport.
I suffer for my art. I've been unconscious over 100 times and broken more than 60 bones. I'm constantly in pain and can barely walk. One day in 1993, I technically died. I built a 21-foot halfpipe in my backyard and rigged a weed-eater motor to my bike. After a few days I got 22 feet out of the ramp, highest I'd ever gone. But the motor made the bike off-balance and I crashed when I landed. I had no idea that my spleen had exploded. I stood up and felt dizzy and sick. My collarbone ached, but I hadn't landed on my collarbone. I lay down, and while waiting for the ambulance I started to feel thirsty. I stood to get a drink, but my heart stopped and I fell against a wall and passed out.
Once I was horizontal, my blood was able to pump again and I regained consciousness. The EMT arrived and checked me out, but he blamed his equipment when he couldn't find a pulse. My insurance didn't cover ambulance rides, so when the EMT said there was nothing seriously wrong with me -- I think it was his first day on the job -- my friends drove me to the hospital. The doctors ran tests and said, "Son, you have less than 20 minutes to live." I had so much internal bleeding that blood was filling my cavities and pushing up on my collarbone, which is why it ached. They removed my spleen, so I'm now seven ounces lighter and get drunk much easier. I was back riding in a couple of weeks.
ESPN began televising Hoffman's Bicycle Stunt Series in 1995, after he competed in its Extreme Games that June. It then hired him to organize the BMX events at the X Games the next year. Hoffman has run the BMX events at all 10 X Games, competing seven times. His medal haul: two gold, one silver and three bronze. Injuries knocked him out of the 1998 Games.
I tore my ACL and PCL in 1998. They were replaced with cadaver ligaments. I waited nine months to ride and missed the entire season. Within two weeks, I crashed and tore my ACL again. I was devastated. I thought my career was over.
I started researching synthetic ACL replacements. I found a doctor in France who had developed a polyester ligament and was testing it on rugby players in New Zealand. They'd tear their ACLs, he'd replace them with his invention -- called a LARS ligament -- and they'd be back on the field in four weeks. Then they'd tear that ligament and he'd replace it again. Disposable body parts. That's what I needed.
The surgery isn't legal in America, so I found a doctor in Canada who'd do it. It went down like a drug deal. I flew to Montreal the night before. The surgeon's assistant came to my hotel, and I handed him $10,000 cash in a briefcase. But there was a catch. The assistant told me the FDA might sanction the operation if it could be done without anesthetics. I said, "What the hell?"
The next morning, a cab dropped me off in front of an old hospital. "Bonjour!" the receptionist said. "Take a number." I saw one of those red dispensers you'd see in a deli. I took No. 14. After a while, a nurse called my number and pointed to a room: "Go in there and get on the table." The room was dusty and dirty, and the nurse hooked me up to monitors and told me to keep my heart rate below 80.
Pain is as much about shock and panic as it is about real pain. When you've had as many injuries as I have, you lose the shock and panic. The only pain I feel is real pain. I lay back and closed my eyes as the surgeon cut two-inch-long incisions above and below my knee. I was a Zen master. I don't even remember that pain. When he reached for the drill, I sat up. I had to assist him as he drilled through my bones.
He worked through the first quarter-inch of my femur. The room filled with the sound of grinding and chopping and the smell of burning bone. If you've never smelled your bones burning, I can't explain it. It's gnarly. The outer part of your bone is shockingly sensitive, and that first quarter-inch was intense. That was real pain. As he drilled deeper, through the marrow, the pain became duller, more manageable.
Halfway through the surgery, the doctor handed me the drill. I held it while he changed to a 15-inch-long drill bit so he could finish drilling the eight-inch-long, six-millimeter-wide hole through my femur, knee joint and tibia. He threaded the ligament through the hole, then inserted four screws to anchor the ligament to my bones. As he cranked the top screws down into my femur, it was the most intense pain I'd ever felt. The doctor must have noticed, because he stopped cranking. After he stitched up both incisions I could feel a bump where the top screws stuck out. Sure enough, when I started riding two weeks later, the ligament slipped out and my regular surgeon had to reattach it. I'm now on my third LARS ligament. The replacements were done with anesthesia.
On Dec. 30, 1993, Hoffman married Jaci Keel. Daughter Giavanna was born on Dec. 19, 2000, and son Jet Mathew was born on May 12, 2003. Hoffman has toned down his act since becoming a dad, calling his kids his purest inspiration and the governor of his wild ideas.
I set my first high-air record in 1991, 20 feet above the top of a 21-foot quarterpipe. To do this, my best friend, Steve Swope, towed me behind a motorcycle at 45 mph. When I used the photo of that air in my first Hoffman Bikes ad, people didn't believe it. They thought it was a good Photoshop job. By 1994 I was getting 24 feet out, but I didn't publicize it outside the BMX community. Finally, my ramp was destroyed in a storm. Looking back, that probably saved my life. When I get locked on something, I keep pushing. And I was pushing too hard.
Around 2000, other riders started claiming world-record airs. They were getting about 18 feet out and I thought, man, did people forget the history? That's when I decided to build a bigger ramp to set the record straight. I built a quarterpipe with 24-foot walls. On April Fool's Day 2001, I hit 26½ feet, which is still the record, and rode away from it. At the height of that ride I was more than 50 feet off the ground. But I wasn't satisfied. The next day, about 10 friends came to watch me try for 30 feet. Steve couldn't make it that day, so my friend Page towed me. At the start of the 400-foot runway I tied my tow rope to the back of Page's motorcycle and grabbed the knot at the end of the rope with my left hand. Page took off and I hit the wall and got higher and higher. At the top, I looked at the measuring stick and saw 28 feet. Then I realized I was going to slam. I came down hard, 52 feet straight to the ground. My face slammed the wood and my faceplate shattered. The shrapnel sliced my face and tore my lip off. I was KO'd and was in and out of consciousness for the next three days. When I woke up and saw my 4-month-old daughter, I realized, "This isn't about me anymore." I also realized I didn't remember much.
This was different from my other concussions. I had real brain damage. I lost my taste buds and for years had to order the spiciest food just to taste anything. I had amnesia for six months. My brain was like a hard drive that had crashed. All the information was there, but it had to be reformatted. After that, I promised my family I would never ride a big ramp again. I'm trying to honor that deal, but the desire for 30 feet is always there. I know it's possible.
The young Hoffman was a natural athlete, playing hoops and football. But his favorite was wrestling. A coach once told his dad, "We have a future All-America on our hands." But Mat wouldn't conform for his coaches, and in eighth grade he quit team sports to ride BMX. Smart choice. He's put his streak of individualism to good use, inventing more than 100 BMX tricks.
In my dreams, I control the laws of physics. For 13 years I dreamed of taking my hands off the handlebars on a 900. I was sure it was impossible. There's so much force that I thought if I took my hands off I would lose the rhythm and never make it around. And not landing that trick would be like running into a wall at 60 mph.
I retired after the 2001 X Games, but when the no-handed nine popped back into my head, I came back. I entered the 2002 Games, and the only person who knew why I was there was my wife. I asked her to sit with Giavanna in front, where I could focus on them. I knew if I crashed, I wouldn't get up for a while. So before the contest, I told Jaci to take Giavanna away if I slammed. I didn't want my daughter to see me like that.
On the third wall of my second run, I got a sweet pump, put all my power into it and started to spin. I felt the first spin but it came too quick. That's when I let go and extended my arms. The more I extended them, the slower I rotated. My second spin evened out my first and when I touched down, I landed perfectly. The crazy thing is, the only reason I was able to pull that 900 was because I took my hands off. No other rider has done the trick since.
Hoffman's fascination with flying inspired him to take up skydiving and BASE jumping. In Norway in 1997, he became the first person to jump off a 3,500-foot cliff with a BMX bike, and he's taken about 180 parachute jumps. When he travels, he packs a $7,800 motorized paraglider, which he straps to his back to take spins 1,000 feet above the ground.
I think I was a bird in my past life. Any time I have the opportunity to combine my two passions, BMX and flying, I grab it. In 2004, I dreamed of riding my bike out of a plane. I went to the Arizona desert, which is the only place in the U.S. where I could jump with my bike. I did about 40 jumps out of the Skyvan that week. I practiced running out of the plane and tucking into a ball as if I were holding a bike. I jumped with my friend Orly King, and had him spin me in the air so I could practice stabilizing myself during the fall. On the ground, I practiced riding my bike out the back of the plane. I went over everything that could go wrong.
The day of the jump was hot, 100° hot. At 15,000 feet, I grabbed my bike, walked to the door of the plane and threw Orly a shaka. I looked out at the sky. That's the moment I love best about what I do. I'm about to experience something no one else has. There's nothing to reference other than my imagination. It sounds crazy, but it's like you're looking death in the face but have total control.
Orly jumped first. I took a couple cranks of my pedals and rode my bike out of the plane. When you jump, there is this silent, calm, windless second. Then a 100 mph wind slams you. I flipped onto my back and slid on that air. I righted myself and spun a 360, then did a 360 the other way. I had complete control. But I was bored, so I threw my handlebars to flatten my bike and the wind caught me. I went for a ride.
I was flipping and tumbling through the sky, holding on as tight as I could. I felt like someone had put me in the dryer and turned it on high. At 8,000 feet I threw my bike and stopped spinning. My chute opened at around 6,000 feet and I started looking for my target. Flying above the desert, the ground below looks like Mars; nothing but cracked earth. I saw what I thought was our van and started flying toward it. I went about three miles before I realized I was headed toward an abandoned house. I dropped into the backyard and noticed a kid sitting by a fire, roasting marshmallows. In the desert. In 100° heat. He saw me, pulled his stick out of the fire, reached it toward me and said, "Would you like a marshmallow?"
The toughest guy in sports isn't afraid of heights, pain, crashes, broken bones or even death. Not that Hoffman doesn't have fears. He's afraid of crowds; he's afraid Jet inherited his fearlessness; he's afraid of himself; he's afraid that one more injury will mean his kids could grow up without him. But his biggest fear is not being able to ride his bike.
My surgery in Montreal did nothing to further FDA approval of synthetic ligaments in the U.S., though my doctor is allowed to replace the LARS ligaments when I break them. The problem is I have to get him the ligaments, which are hard to find and illegal to import.
I tore my ACL in March riding at a charity event in Bangkok for tsunami orphans. I tracked down a ligament in Vienna. The ligament costs $2,000, and the four screws are $200 each plus shipping. To get the ligament into the U.S. I had it shipped to my Hoffman Bikes distributor in Toronto. He repackaged it in a Hoffman Bikes box, along with tires and parts, and put HB stickers on the outside. The ligaments were listed as "bike samples" to get through customs.
I took the ligament to my surgeon's office in Oklahoma City two days before the surgery. Dr. Yates, who has worked on me for 20 years, took out the broken ACL, which looked like a frayed piece of rope, and put in the new one. When you've had 21 surgeries, you know the drill. By the fourth day after surgery, you start feeling better. But on Day 4, my knee was twice its normal size; it was infected. I couldn't walk. I was shivering, running a fever, having crazy hot flashes. It felt like there was hot acid in my leg. I guess packaging the ligament with a bunch of bike parts was probably not the best idea.
I had emergency surgery and spent the next five days in the hospital, getting pumped full of antibiotics. I spent the next six weeks pumping myself full of antibiotics. With all of my injuries, I was surprised how tough a staph infection is. I really thought this was the one that would take me out. I didn't think I could come back.
It's now July and I've been riding for about two months. I'm still here.
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Endangered Species - Permitting Process - Ohio
...The rules shall provide for the taking of species endangered or threatened with statewide extirpation for botanical, educational, and scientific purposes, and for propagation in captivity to preserve the species, with written permission from the chief. The rules shall not prohibit the taking or possession of species listed on the “United States list of endangered and threatened wildlife and plants” for botanical, educational, or scientific purposes, or for propagation in captivity to preserve the species, under a permit or license from the United States or any instrumentality of the United States.
Citation: R.C. § 1518.03.
...The rules shall provide for the taking of species threatened with statewide extinction, for zoological, educational, and scientific purposes, and for propagation in captivity to preserve the species, under written permits from the chief. The rules shall in no way restrict the taking or possession of species listed on such United States list for zoological, educational, or scientific purposes, or for propagation in captivity to preserve the species, under a permit or license from the United States or any instrumentality thereof.
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FADIA BADRAWI
Congruence
Ode to Mukhtar
Places & Moments in Time
Apartment Gallery
L'Alta Meta del Cielo
Mahmoud Mukhtar
Mahmoud Mukhtar (1891 - 1934) is considered the father of modern Egyptian sculpture. His short life, just 43 years, belies the tremendous impact he has had on Egypt’s nationalist artistic style and the contemporary sculpture of today.
Born in the Delta, Mukhtar later moved to Cairo where he joined the School of Fine Arts, which had just been newly founded by Prince Youssef Kamal in 1908. In 1911, he was granted a scholarship to study art in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. In Paris, he befriended members of the Wafd Party and was thus prompted to create the prototype of his famous statue, “Egypt’s Renaissance,” which was initially unveiled in Ramses Square in 1928, but now stands opposite the Cairo University Bridge. Winning many honors and awards in Paris and Cairo, Mukhtar also became famous for his two monumental statues of Saad Zaghloul (one in Alexandria, the other in Cairo). Some of his other famous sculptures include “The Secret Keeper,” “Isis,” “The Nile’s Bride” and the “Khamaseen.”
The Museum, along with Mukhtar’s mausoleum where he is buried, were designed by architect Ramses Wissa Wassef, and finally came to fruition in 1962. Renovations to the museum in 2003 solidified the splendor of Mukhtar’s magnificent work.
Return to view collection
© 2016 All Rights Reserved. Please do not share images without attribution.
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Main Musical Halls
The Messiah
The Choir in figures
Princess of Asturias Awards Concert
International Music School
Music Department |
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José Esteban G. Miranda
José Esteban García Miranda, began his studies under maestro Angel Embil, and went on to the University Conservatory of Music in Oviedo to study piano, harmony and composition.
He then moved to Madrid, and studied Orchestra Conducting at the University Conservatory under maestro Enrique García Asensio.
He combined his music studies with university studies in Oviedo, and has a degree from the this university in the History of Art.
In 1984 he was appointed vice-director of the Princess of Asturias Foundation Choirs.
In 1987 he set up the Foundation's Youth Choir under the auspices of the Music Department, and two years later (1989) was appointed incumbent director of the Princess of Asturias Foundation Choir.
Whilst completing his academic training he has taken part in numerous conducting courses, both nationally and internationally, as well as in other music meetings: Lerida's International Music Courses, Bruges' Choir Conducting Courses (Belgium), Orchestra Conducting Courses under maestros Pierre Cao and Aldo Ceccato, the World Choral Music Congress (Stockholm) and others.
Under his directorship the Princess of Asturias Foundation's Choir has worked intensively on preparing a repertoire ranging from the Baroque to the present day and including works such as Bach's 'Passion According to Saint Matthew', Mozart's 'Mass in C minor' and 'Requiem', Brahms' 'Eine Deutsche Réquiem', Rossini's 'Stabat Mater', and Beethoven's 'Ninth Symphony' alongside premieres of Spanish composers.
As regards orchestra conducting, he has conducted the 'Virtuosos of Moscow Chamber Orchestra, the Principality of Asturias Symphony Orchestra, the Córdoba Orchestra and the City of Oviedo Symphony Orchestra.
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Posted in Gig Reviews, Music July 1, 2019 by Donna
Combining vocals, guitars, a piano and a violin together to create an irresistible cinematic pop sound, it’s easy to see why The Rua are riding high in America
It’s safe to say that The Rua are no strangers to playing huge venues. After opening for Train, Adam Lambert and Goo Goo Dolls on their recent US tours, the sibling trio make a welcome return home to the UK to support Westlife on their 30-date comeback Arena tour.
Born in Windsor into a family of Irish descent, The Rua are a family pop rock band consisting of sisters Roseanna (lead vocals, guitar), Alanna (piano, backing vocals) and brother Jonathan Brown (violin, vocals, guitar). Since the release of their debut album ESSENCE in 2015, the band has grown from strength to strength and are currently riding high in the US with their current single GASOLINE at number 28 in the Billboard chart.
Opening their 20-minute set with the upbeat ALL I EVER WANTED followed by toe-tapping PROMISING, it’s clear that The Rua boast a very different musical vibe to fellow support act Keelie Walker. Blending elements of 70’s AM rock with traditional folk and cinematic pop, their music is described as a sound mix of Taylor Swift, The Cranberries and The Corrs, with vocals, guitars, a piano and a violin, all combining together to create a cinematic pop sound that is instantly irresistible.
The best tracks are those which see the band alternate vocals with HEY YOU, a track from their new album particularly standing out as Roseanna and Jonathan trade off lead and harmony roles in a tight vocal interplay. An acoustic version of I WILL LEARN, a self-penned song about not losing yourself in a relationship also stands out as a highlight, its stripped back nature showcasing Roseanna’s raw and expressive vocals.
The biggest reception is reserved for their new single GASOLINE, a beautiful and carefully crafted ballad which slowly builds into a soft rock classic. The Celtic inspired EMERGENCY EXIT also gets a great reception from the audience, its upbeat chorus and haunting harmonies making it a sure-fire hit.
The set closes with WON’T LET GO, a piano-driven pop track with catchy lyrics, demonstrating the reason why The Rua are such a big hit in America. Watch out for them in the UK charts soon.
The Rua support Westlife on their UK Arena Tour until 19 September 2019
Gig Review: The Rua – Manchester Arena was last modified: July 1st, 2019 by Donna
Music Review: Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain - The Lowry, Salford
Gig Review: Shakin’ Stevens GREATEST HITS AND MORE – Bridgewater Hall, Manchester
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Five Griffins Hit New Personal-Record Times At The SLIAC Championship
LITCHFIELD, Ill.—The Fontbonne University women's and men's cross country teams had its best meet to date at the SLIAC Championships on Saturday.
On the women's side, the Griffins finished in fifth place, two spots up from last year and 52 points better. Webster University claimed the SLIAC Championship with 29 total points, while Greenville ended up in third at 59.
Individually, Jessie Kuykendall (Westminster), won overall with a time of 23:01.85. The Griffins, meanwhile, were led by Desiree Brooks as she finished in 25th place with a new personal-record time of 26:49.47.
Last year, at the SLIAC Championship, Katie Gosser finished in 40th place at 29:05.6. Just 15 days ago at the Bradley Pink Classic, she ran the 6K at 29:25.7. Today, the St. Louis, Mo., native, cut two minutes off her time to set a new personal-record 27:06.20 for 29th place.
Colleen Gosser was the third Griffin to hit a new PR as she ran to a time of 28:21.28 for 34th place, which is 18 spots better than last season.
Sarah Rhoads just missed out on a new personal-record by seven seconds, but still clocked out at 28:34.81 for 36th place. Emily Bay left it all out on the course with a time of 30:10.46 for 43rd, while Tara Weiskopf-Kuehn timed out at 37:33.75 and that is a new PR for her by almost one minute.
On the men's side, the team didn't register a team score. Greenville University won with 24 total points. Webster finished in second at 57 points, while Spalding University was right behind them with 59 points.
Individually, Dylan Goodyear (Greenville), separated himself from the pack to win with a time of 25:55.54.
Austin Joyce, a St. Charles, Mo., native, became the fifth Griffin to hit a personal-record with a time of 30:00.63 for 29th. Jacob Dixon ended his day at 33:46.80 for 43rd, while Juan Lee crossed the line with a time of 36:10.71 for 50th.
To view the women's results visit HERE.
To view the men's results visit HERE.
The Griffins return to action on November 10th at the NCAA Midwest Regional in Colfax, Wis.
Fans make sure to stay updated on fontbonnegriffins.com throughout the year for full updates and recaps on the cross country teams.
Make sure to follow us on all our social media accounts: Twitter (@FBUGriffins), Instagram (@fbugriffins) and Facebook (/FontbonneUGriffins).
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Aston Villa must make January move for Scott McTominay
by Matt Law share
2 minute read 26/12/2018 | 09:45am
Aston Villa should look to sign Manchester United midfielder Scott McTominay on loan when the January transfer window opens for business.
What’s the word, then?
McTominay has made six appearances for United this term, and 31 in total for the Red Devils since stepping into the first-team picture.
The 22-year-old has often been criticised by United fans, but he was certainly a favourite of Jose Mourinho.
Mourinho’s exit from Old Trafford might well have changed McTominay’s situation though, and it is difficult to imagine that the Lancaster-born midfielder will be in the plans of United’s next long-term manager.
McTominay has a contract with United until the end of the 2020-21 campaign, and it is always difficult to sign players on a permanent deal in January.
Villa should certainly explore a loan move for the Scotland international, however, as there is no question that he could contribute in the second half of the campaign.
Why should Villa move for McTominay?
The 6ft 4in ace has had a tough time in recent months, but he is capable of making a huge difference to a Championship club.
Villa certainly have ambitions of securing a return to the Premier League for the 2019-2020 campaign, and the January window will be extremely important.
Mourinho might have taken some convincing due to his fondness of McTominay, but the Portuguese’s departure looks to have opened the door.
McTominay will find it difficult to become a first-team regular at United, but he has already made six Premier League appearances this term, and has Champions League experience to his name.
There is no question that Villa should be making a move as McTominay’s arrival would certainly boost the team’s chances of securing a return to the top flight.
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Master Architect Daniel Libeskind Unveils Creative Secrets In New Book
Keith Flamer Senior Contributor
Writer, pop culture virtuoso and luxury lunatic
Architect Daniel Libeskind. (Franco Origlia/Getty Images)
I did the unthinkable. I asked Daniel Libeskind, CEO of Studio Libeskind and one of the leading architects of his time, if he was like lovable Forrest Gump—an accidental tourist, a central figure traveling through history’s epic moments.
No, he’s not low I.Q. or clueless. Quite the opposite. The Pritzker Prize winner is intelligent, charming, jovial and his provocative urban designs are avant-garde genius. But like Gump, he navigates the world with boundless optimism, curiosity, and audacity (running through life to a great soundtrack). Instead of shrimp boats, Libeskind journeys in cultural landscapes (cities, museums, towers, monuments, malls, etc.). Oops, I did it again.
Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum Berlin is intentionally disorienting to reflect the experience of German Jews and the destruction of their culture. (Robert wallis/Corbis via Getty Images)
The son of Holocaust survivors, Libeskind designed the renowned Jewish Museum Berlin (his first official building). As a teenage prodigy musician in the late 1950s, he played with future legend violinist Itzhak Perlman. His first design competition win was for a West Berlin housing complex which was cancelled following the Berlin Wall collapse. After 9/11, he was selected as the master architect to rebuild and revitalize Manhattan’s World Trade Center district.
The New World Trade Center skyline. (Roberto Machado Noa/LightRocket via Getty Images)
“No, I’m not Forrest Gump,” he chuckles. “I applied for each of these projects—Jewish Museum Berlin, the World Trade Center because I thought they were very important. Call it luck, call it karma, call it synergy, call it synchronicity.”
Or call it reputation. Libeskind’s accomplished career is fueled by his insatiable quest for creative expression, which he’s convinced anyone can master. His new coffee table book Edge of Order unlocks secrets to his creative processes and methods via backstories, sketches, notes, plans and photographs of his landmark commissions.
Daniel Libeskind's latest book, Edge of Order offers insight on the master architect's creative process.
Courtesy of Studio Libeskind
Creativity isn’t exactly a secret formula. Like a skyscraper it sways in the wind at the whim of its creator. Edge of Order strips the elitism away from architecture, making it accessible to the layperson. Described as an “intimate portrait of art in action,” Libeskind’s book motivates readers’ understanding of their own creative potential (“architecture for all”).
“People feel very intimidated by architecture, but everyone is creative,” he says. “Everyone has the power to shape their environment at different levels. I reveal secrets, which are often buried in myths about how buildings are produced, and make them available to anyone who’s interested in architecture, buildings, design, cities and environments. Architecture is for everyone.”
Libeskind's Vanke Pavilion, an innovative dragon-skin facade and concrete staircase at Milan Expo 2015. (Hufton+Crow/View Pictures/UIG via Getty Images)
Edge of Order is an architectural tome that’s bold, inspiring and emotional (much like Libeskind’s angular buildings)—a page turner of career highlights, inside knowledge, geometric designs, and personal stories (some heart breaking, all riveting). He candidly discusses his poignant works through entertaining personal snapshots—a zoom lens focused on his influences (music, poetry, liberal arts, Greek mythology and pop culture included). He says every project must have that “Eureka moment” from which creativity is conceived.
Bern, Switzerland’s Westside Shopping and Leisure Centre was inspired by a Marx Brothers song. Libeskind’s World Trade Center design was influenced by an Emily Dickinson poem, “To Fill A Gap.”
One World Trade Center complex site with museum and illuminated 9/11 Memorial South Pool.(Tim Graham/Getty Images)
“The key is to see things that are not obvious—to hear the whispers, voices, musical connection coming from the site,” says Libeskind. “It usually isn’t written down or obvious to the eye.”
Libeskind’s creative impact on the cultural landscape is dramatic. But be careful, that legacy is geometric and sharp as a knife. His dynamic Deconstructivist projects are tailor-made for Instagram (or perhaps vice versa)—most notably the Jewish Museum Berlin and Denver Art Museum extension with their bold, postmodern designs triangulating skyward.
Libeskind's design at the Denver Art Museum. (Loop Images/UIG via Getty Images)
Compared to his contemporaries (Zaha Hadid, Arata Isozaki, Pier Paolo Maggiora, etc.), Libeskind (a former academic) is a late bloomer—launching his architecture career and Studio Libeskind in 1990 at age 52.
Daniel Libeskind poses in the Breuninger Department Store in Düsseldorf, Germany. (Jan-Philipp Strobel/picture alliance via Getty Images)
His journey feels like fate, but truth is, his life was training ground for this latest monumental moment. Born in a Łódź, Poland homeless shelter post-World War II, his survivor family emigrated to Israel before settling in The Bronx, New York where his father worked as a printer and his mother in sweatshops. He'd never even met a lawyer, doctor or architect in his youth.
Jewish Museum, Berlin. (View Pictures/UIG via Getty Images)
As a scholarship prodigy musician in 1959, Libeskind played his scarlet-red accordion alongside a young Itzhak Perlman, the premiere violinist of his time and a Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient. As a student at Cooper Union, Libeskind pursued art before he found his calling in the architecture program.
City Life District residences designed by Daniel Libeskind. (Chapeaux Marc/AGF/UIG via Getty Images)
His family’s Formica kitchen table with rounded corners wasn’t an ideal surface for drawing right angles or tracing straight lines, but it honed the architect’s rule-bending instincts as a designer of some of the world’s most provocative structures like the Felix Nussbaum Haus (Osnabrück, Germany); Imperial War Museum North (Manchester); Contemporary Jewish Museum (San Francisco); Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto); and the Military History Museum (Dresden, Germany).
"The Crystal" front entrance of the Royal Ontario Museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind. (Roberto Machado Noa/LightRocket via Getty Images)
“I always believed in the divinity of drawing,” he says. “Architecture is the only field in the world where everything comes out of a drawing. It’s like a piece of music—a score. Everything comes out of that piece of paper. It’s magical. How is it that a big thing like a city comes from a drawing?”
The Felix-Nussbaum-Haus. (Friso Gentsch/picture alliance via Getty Images)
In Edge of Order, Libeskind ponders the mystery of this question. He says creativity must come from truth—the core is a passionate and loving place in one’s heart. Sounds idealistic until you realize most successful people live by this credo.
Night time view of Libeskind-designed Bord Gais Energy Theatre in Dublin's Grand Canal Square. (Flickr Vision)
“One has to be open to the wonders of the world to build something that projects a new environment, a new house, a new building, a new city,” he says. “There’s not one formula. It’s unpredictable. You must be ready for an adventure at every point of the creative process. It’s traveling to the mind, traveling to the spirit and traveling to creative freedom.”
At Rockefeller Center, Architect Daniel Libeskind reveals the Swarovski star with its 70 illuminated spikes cover by 3 million Swarovski crystals. (Wang Ying, Xinhua News Agency/Getty Images)
Unveiled on The Today Show, Libeskind’s latest design adventure is the 900-pound crystal Swarovski Star (70 illuminated spikes covered in 3 million Swarovski crystals) for the famous Rockefeller Center Christmas tree for the enjoyment of New York City tourists and millions of people on national TV. Who saw that coming? Surprise counts as creativity. is Whether its skylines, Christmas trees or book shelves, Daniel Libeskind wishes you a creative holiday season. Just don’t stand too close or you might get spiked with imagination.
Grand Canal Theatre Dublin Ireland by Daniel Libeskind. (View Pictures/UIG via Getty Images)
“You have to accept the unpredictability of life,” says Libeskind. “Things don’t happen because you will them to exist, you have to consider reality. That’s part of what I discovered, what I write about and what I illustrate.”
Forrest Gump couldn’t have said it more eloquently. Oops.
Follow me on LinkedIn.
Keith Flamer
I’m the über curious type. I’ve photographed Stockholm’s chromatic doors, been ripped off in Athens, and survived an overnight stay in the real Friday the 13th cabin (t
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The Story Behind The Newly Remastered Version Of 'The Grey Album'
Leor Galil Contributor
Keeping an ear to the music blogosphere
Courtesy of John Stewart
Colorado-based recording engineer John Stewart was recently on his way to a date and blasting Parliament Funkadelic when he got the urge to listen to something else: The 25-year-old reached for a random CD in the driver's door of his 2000 Volkswagen Jetta, grabbed The Grey Album, and placed it in his stereo without giving much notice to what he was about to play. "The Grey Album, it's always been, honestly, one of my favorite albums," he says. Released to critical acclaim back in 2004, the mash-up collection combined a cappellas from Jay-Z's The Black Album with backing tracks lifted from The Beatles' The White Album---hence the album's title.
The Grey Album became a cultural tipping point that established the mash-up as a bonafide pop phenomenon; It transformed into a symbol for the burgeoning online remix culture, a work of art that digital activists rallied behind as EMI sent out cease-and-desist orders to take the album down; And it helped its creator, Brian Burton, aka Danger Mouse, skyrocket to popularity and create the venerable pop career that's made him one of the most beloved producers in the industry.
Stewart first heard The Grey Album the year it came out after a friend gave him a burned copy of the album---the very CD-R Stewart recently popped into his car stereo. A fan of Jay-Z, Stewart really took a shine to the album, which he says he's always held in high regard. But on that recent car ride something was slightly amiss---the sound. A graduate of the MediaTech Institute, a Dallas school for media arts, Stewart has been a professional audio engineer for three years and has worked on tracks featuring artists such as Tony Williams, Kanye West, Raheem Devaughn, Wale, Big Boi, John Legend, Chip Tha Ripper, and Big K.R.I.T. He does all his work from his home in Colorado Springs, which allows Stewart to work at a more relaxed pace, though it's not without its drawbacks. "I've kind of become a recluse and a hermit," he says.
It's got plenty of advantages too: Revisiting The Grey Album with an expert ear gave Stewart the ability to pinpoint its audio flaws, and his professional experience gave him the agency to do something about it. Stewart says he first got the idea to remaster The Grey Album on Wednesday, Nov. 21, but it didn't really click until that Saturday. On Sunday he set out to improve the album's audio, tinkering with various faders in ProTools until he achieved the desired effect: "I just kind of put the sonics on steroids," he says. Stewart knocked out the entire project that day and uploaded The Grey Album (Remastered) to SoundCloud and MediaFire on Monday. In the few passing days since releasing the updated version of The Grey Album it's been covered by sites such as The Source and FACT Magazine, and a swarm of fans have reached out to Stewart to thank him. "A lot of people have thought that it needed to be remastered," he says. "So it worked out."
Stewart says he's seen people from around the world flock to him---he said his website received about 200 hits from Hungary on Tuesday alone---though personal fame wasn't the goal. "I wasn't putting it out to be discovered," Stewart says. The digital artwork for The Grey Album (Remastered) does include his name on the back cover ("I've always enjoyed seeing my name in credits," he says), but that's also part of what he considers a pragmatic move. "I wanted people to be aware it was something different," he says. Among the subtle changes Stewart made to the artwork is a bold border, which also covers up the lower half of his name. It's more or less a reminder that this is Danger Mouse's original product, just with a new polish.
While Danger Mouse incurred the wrath of EMI with his original, Stewart isn't worried that his remastered version of The Grey Album will get him in trouble. "I think that the world and how music is perceived and received is very different in 2012 than it was in 2004," he says. Though he initially didn't consider the legal ramifications of his project, researching the fallout from the original Grey Album gave him the confidence that he won't be reined in for remastering the album considering EMI didn't seek any further legal recourse after sending its cease-and-desist letters. Stewart merely took something that's already available as a free download and "gave it a makeover" eight years after it debuted. "I'm not trying to profit off it," he says. "I'm not seeing any harm." Stewart says he's even seen someone from EMI tweet positing things about his remaster.
Danger Mouse has yet to weigh in, though fans have already begun posting it to his official Facebook page. Perhaps he'll give it the remastered version same endorsement the original received from Jay-Z and Paul McCartney, and perhaps Stewart will get a career boost akin to the one Danger Mouse experienced back in 2004. No matter what may happen to Stewart in the future he's certainly found an interesting way to subtly remix the legacy of a classic mash-up album without changing a thing.
Leor Galil
I'm a staff writer for the Chicago Reader and a freelancer specializing in music, arts and pop culture journalism. My work has appeared in The A.V. Club, The Boston Phoe...
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Updated 2019 NBA Mock Draft: Is It Possible Jarrett Culver Jumps All The Way Up To No. 3?
Tommy Beer Senior Contributor
DURHAM, NC - FEBRUARY 16: Zion Williamson #1 of the Duke Blue Devils reacts during their game against the North Carolina State Wolfpack at Cameron Indoor Stadium on February 16, 2019 in Durham, North Carolina. Duke won 94-78. (Photo by Lance King/Getty Images)
March has arrived, which means the Big Dance is right around the corner and we can start to shift our focus to the collegiate ranks, as NCAA games take on added importance.
In this updated mock draft, Zion Williamson and R.J. Barrett maintain their stranglehold on the top two spots, but Jarrett Culver jumps all the way up to No. 3.
1. Phoenix Suns: Zion Williamson, F, Duke
Williamson has missed each of Duke’s last four games due to a right knee sprain; however, his production over the first 21 games of his college career has been unimaginably impressive. Also, consider for a moment that Zion is playing at a listed weight of 285 pounds. It's incredible that he's able to combine his otherworldy explosion and athletism with brutish strength and power. Here’s some context: Moses Malone weighed 215 pounds. Charles Oakley was 225. Patrick Ewing was listed at 240. Tim Duncan and Karl Malone weighed 250 pounds apiece. Nikola Jokic and Joel Embiid are each right around 250 as well. Dwight Howard is 265. Andre Drummond weighs in at 279. Oliver Miller was reportedly 280. Again, Willamson checks in at 285! It’s unfathomable that a man his size moves as quickly as he does. His minor injury is certainly not nearly enough to scare off front office executives. And, more importantly, even if a team’s general manager and scouts were considering taking Barrett first overall, it’s safe to assume every owner would demand Williamson for the boost in ticket and merchandise sales alone. Zion will be the first name called on draft night.
2. New York Knicks: R.J. Barrett, G, Duke
Barrett has had a chance to showcase his enticing skill set to a greater degree with Williamson sidelined since February 20th, and he's made the most of his opportunity. During Duke’s four-game stretch sans Zion, R.J. is averaging 25.8 points (on 54.7% shooting), 8.0 rebounds and 5.8 assists. He is the ACC’s leading scorer and the only player in the country averaging at least 23 points, seven boards and four dimes on the season. Barrett has also played his best against elite competition. He’s scoring over 27 points per game against top-ten teams this season. No other player is averaging more than 18 PPG in such contests. Barrett would be a very nice consolation prize for the Knicks if they lose the Zion Sweepstakes and land the No. 2 overall pick.
3. Cleveland Cavs: Jarrett Culver, G, Texas Tech
According to most talent evaluators, there is a wide gap between the top two players in the draft and the next tier of prospects. Most mock drafts have Ja Morant slotted at No. 3 overall. However, if the Cavs end up picking third, as they are currently projected to do, it will be very interesting to see how they would proceed. They selected Collin Sexton eighth overall last year, and the young point guard is averaging over 15 points per game as a rookie. The Cavs might consider moving down if a team was willing to trade up to snatch Morant. If Cleveland stays put, it’s possible they would reach for Culver, who has been generating a ton of buzz and is zooming up draft boards during his breakout sophomore season.
LUBBOCK, TX - FEBRUARY 27: Jarrett Culver #23 of the Texas Tech Red Raiders watches his shot during the game against the Oklahoma State Cowboys on February 27, 2019 at United Supermarkets Arena in Lubbock, Texas. Texas Tech defeated Oklahoma State 84-80 in overtime. (Photo by John Weast/Getty Images)
4. Chicago Bulls: Ja Morant, PG, Murray State
In last Thursday’s victory over Morehead State, Morant tallied 11 points, ten rebounds and ten assists, becoming just the second NCAA player to post multiple triple-doubles this season. (He’s also one of only nine men with three or more career triple-doubles over the last 20 seasons.) Then, on Saturday, Morant poured in 27 points, dished out 13 dimes and grabbed six boards. With point guard being such a prominent position in today’s NBA, plenty of teams will be hoping to get their hands on Morant on draft day.
5. Atlanta Hawks: Cam Reddish, G/F, Duke
Reddish has a fluid jump shot, remarkable athleticism and ideal size for an NBA wing (6’8” with a 7’1” wingspan). Yet, although he’s flashed potential, Cam hasn’t been nearly as consistent as scouts had hoped he’d be. He too often settles for contested jumpers and, as a result, is shooting just 36.5% from the floor this season. Furthermore, his effort on the defensive end tends to wax and wane. Despite the frustrating flaws, his combination of talent and measurables will likely preclude him from slipping out of the top-five.
6. Memphis Grizzlies: De’Andre Hunter, F, Virginia
While he may not have the ceiling of other players in the top half of the lottery, Hunter’s floor is lofty thanks to his consistent production on both ends of the floor. He is a tremendously versatile and effective defender, capable of bodying up bigs while also staying in front of wings on the perimeter. He’s also remarkably efficient on offense. Hunter is the only qualified player in the ACC this season shooting over 50% from the floor, 45% from downtown and 80% from the charity stripe. Per Basketball-Reference, the last NCAA underclassmen to slash 50/45/80 was Kyrie Irving as a freshman at Duke.
7. Washington Wizards: Jaxson Hayes, C, Texas
Hayes had drawn comparisons to a former Longhorn center, Jarrett Allen. Like Allen, Hayes is long and lanky, and will enter the draft a bit raw on the offensive end. Still, Hayes is a phenomenal finisher around the basketball, as evidenced by the fact that he’s converting 72.8% of his field goal attempts this season. While his rebound rate is a bit lower than expected, he is averaging 4.0 blocks per 40 minutes. With the Wizards in need of some size up front, they may be tempted to roll the dice on Hayes.
8. Atlanta Hawks (via Dallas Mavericks): Rui Hachimura, PF, Gonzaga
Hachimura didn’t start playing basketball until he was 14. Now, in his third season at Gonzaga, his first as a full-time starter, Rui is beginning to fulfill some of his enormous potential. After averaging 11.6 points and shooting 19% from 3-point range in 2017-18, he’s pouring in 20.6 points a night and shooting 46.7% from downtown this year.
9. New Orleans Pelicans: Darius Garland, PG, Vanderbilt
There was a lot of hype surrounding Garland after last year's Nike Hoop Summit, and he entered this season as the only freshman in the conference named to the Preseason All-SEC team. However, he suffered a season-ending injury (torn meniscus) in late November. Typically, a prospect’s draft stock slides when he isn’t available to prove his worth. Yet, assuming he’s fully healed and healthy by June, Garland will have an opportunity to work out for teams and show he hasn’t lost a step. At the start of a rebuild, the Pels may look to take the best player available, and finding a starting point guard would allow Jrue Holiday to shift to his preferred position of SG.
10. Miami Heat: Nassir Little, F, North Carolina
Little is an explosive athlete, but he hasn’t shown the type of progression scouts were hoping to see over the course of his freshman season at UNC. He’s averaging 9.6 points and 4.5 boards in 18.4 minutes off North Carolina’s bench. He has connected on just 11 of his 43 (25.6%) of his 3-point attempts. Nonetheless, the physical tools are impossible to miss, and a lottery team will likely convince themselves they can polish his game and turn him into a gem.
11. Minnesota Timberwolves: Romeo Langford, G/F, Indiana
NBA front-office executives place an incredible premium on shot makers that can stretch a defense, especially in today’s NBA. Coming out of high school last year, Langford was commonly viewed as one of the most feared marksmen in his class. However, he has too frequently failed to deliver for the Hoosiers. Langford is converting just 26.3% of his 3-point attempts and 72% of his free-throws. He may need to produce in March to avoid slipping into the teens.
12. Charlotte Hornets: Kevin Porter Jr., G, USC
The team that drafts Porter will do so based on flashes of promise that pop off the screen, not the consistency of his game tape. Over USC’s last ten games, Porter is averaging just 7.6 points while shooting below 40% from the floor and a frigid 41% from the free-throw line. On the season, he is 19-of-38 from the charity stripe. He also has more turnovers than assists. However, he projects as a prototypical NBA two-guard, capable of developing into a two-way force.
13. L.A. Lakers: Keldon Johnson, G, Kentucky
Much like Porter, Johnson is slumping at an inopportune time. He is averaging 8.3 points while shooting a putrid 29% from the field, 10% from 3-point territory and 59% on FTs over Kentucky’s last four games. Yet, it’s important to note that he averaged 14.3 points and slashed an impressive .490/.414/.743 over UK’s first 25 contests this season.
LEXINGTON, KENTUCKY - JANUARY 26: Keldon Johnson #3 of the Kentucky Wildcats celebrates against the Kansas Jayhawks at Rupp Arena on January 26, 2019 in Lexington, Kentucky. (Photo by Andy Lyons/Getty Images)
14. Boston Celtics (via Sacramento Kings): Sekou Doumbouya, PF/C, France
An 18-year old international man of mystery, Doumbouya is averaging just 6.2 points in 15 minutes off the bench for Limoges in the French Pro A league. However, even in limited playing time, it's clear he's blessed with impressive athleticism. And, while he’s obviously still raw, his versatile skill set, height (6’8”), and length (6’11 wingspan) are undeniably intriguing. As we know, Celtics GM Danny Ainge isn’t afraid to gamble on foreign-born talent.
15. Orlando Magic: KZ Okpala, F, Stanford
Okpala was disappointingly quiet in Stanford's loss to No. 25 Washington on Sunday. With more than 25 NBA scouts in attendance, KZ scored just six points while shooting 2-of-7 from the floor and an embarrassing 2-of-8 from the free-throw line. The 6-foot-9 sophomore also missed what would have been a game-winning 3-pointer at the buzzer. Nonetheless, Okpala, Stanford’s leading scorer, has had far more highlights than lowlights this season and could very well land in the top half of the 2019 draft.
16. Detroit Pistons: Brandon Clarke, PF/C, Gonzaga
Clarke has been incredibly consistent for the top-ranked Zags all year long. He has scored in double-figures in every single of their 31 games. And, remarkably, he’s shot above 54% in 29 of those 31 contests. According to Basketball-Reference, he is on pace to become the first NCAA Division 1 player in more than 25 years to average at least 16 points and three blocks per game, while shooting over 65% from the floor.
17. Brooklyn Nets: P.J. Washington, C, Kentucky
Washington is a beast on the block and has also flashed impressively soft touch from the perimeter (making 43.5% of his 3-pointers this season). A decade ago, he’d have been considered too small to play center in the league, but in today’s positionless NBA, teams will definitely be able to find minutes for someone with his size and skill.
18. San Antonio Spurs: Nickeil Alexander-Walker, G, Virginia Tech
While other prospects have struggled with consistency on both ends of the floor, Alexander-Walker has been extremely reliable for the Hokies since he arrived on campus in 2017. While he may lack the athleticism and upside of some of his draft-worthy counterparts, he’ll be able to contribute at the NBA level right away.
19. Boston Celtics (via L.A. Clippers): Bol Bol, C, Oregon
Bol’s long-term durability was a major question mark coming into this season, so the fact that he will miss the majority of his freshman campaign due to a stress fracture in his foot certainly won't boost his draft stock. The track record for big men that suffer lower-leg injuries earlier in their careers is not exactly encouraging. Plenty of GM’s will be tempted by a 7’2” athlete that can shoot the lights out and protect the rim, but it may be Bol’s medical records that ultimately determine how far he slides on draft day.
20. Utah Jazz: Talen Horton-Tucker, SF, Iowa State
Similar to Nickeil Alexander-Walker, Horton-Tucker’s number’s won’t jump off the page at you. And while some scouts see a one-dimensional player with limited offensive upside, others would argue that he is a versatile, defensive-minded wing who can guard multiple positions while still doing enough to keep defenders honest on the other end.
21. Cleveland Cavs (via Houston Rockets): Jontay Porter, C, Missouri
Porter is recovering from a torn ACL, but it would not be surprising in the least if his draft stock starts to soar as we get closer to June. He showed last season that he could develop in a stud stretch-five. If his medical info checks out, it’s possible he could climb all the way into the late lottery.
22. Boston Celtics: Goga Bitadze, C, Georgia
Bitadze has jumped up draft boards thanks to a surprisingly strong season for Buducnost in the Adriatic League. Through his team’s first eight games, he is averaging 13.1 points (on 57% shooting), 6.6 rebounds and 2.9 blocks. Bitadze is more of a traditional, low-post center, carrying 245 pounds on his 6’11” frame. He’s not afraid to shoot jumpers but is more comfortable operating on the block and protecting the paint on defense. Thus, some team’s may worry that his limited foot speed and lack of agility will leave him susceptible to the high pick-and-rolls that are so prevalent in today’s NBA.
23. Portland Trail Blazers: Grant Williams, PF, Tennessee
The reigning SEC Player of the Year has been far more efficient and effective this season, as his scoring, rebounding, assist and steal rates have all increased, while his turnover rate has dropped. He’s currently one of only three players from a power conference averaging over 19 points and posting a True Shooting percentage north fo 65%. The other two are Zion Williamson and Rui Hachimura.
24. Oklahoma City Thunder: Coby White, PG/SG, North Carolina
There’s some skepticism as to whether White has the handle and quickness to play point guard in the NBA. If he is viewed as more of a combo or shooting guard, that will negatively impact his draft stock.
25. Philadelphia 76ers: Bruno Fernando, C, Maryland
Fernando is an absolute physical specimen. He’s 235 pounds of chiseled muscle and measures in at 6’10” with a 7’4” wingspan. While Bruno is still a bit raw, but he’s made undeniable progress during his sophomore season. He will likely wow scouts at the combine.
26. Indiana Pacers: Luguentz Dort, G, Arizona State
Dort started the season playing very well, then slumped a bit during conference play, but has picked up his production again of late. In Sunday’s victory over Oregon State, Dort scored 20 points and knocked down a season-high four 3-pointers, including a clutch trey and free throws in the final minute. It was his eighth game with at least 20 points this season. In addition, Arizona State coach Bobby Hurley told reporters over the weekend that he’s been impressed with Dort's individual defense. "It's something that we noticed when we first recruited him,” Hurley said. “He takes a lot of pride at that end of the floor and he's got the tools to do it."
27. Brooklyn Nets (via Denver Nuggets): Tyler Herro, SG, Kentucky
Prior to a 2-for-11 dud in a loss to Tennessee on Saturday, Herro was averaging 19.8 points, 6.5 rebounds and 2.5 trifectas (on 52.5% shooting from downtown) over the Wildcats previous four contests. He’s also among the country’s top free-throw shooters, as he's made 71-for-76 (93.4%) freebies this season. Nets GM Sean Marks and coach Kenny Atkinson play an uptempo brand of basketball that would put Herro in position to do what he does best.
28. Golden State Warriors: Daniel Gafford, C, Arkansas
Gafford has played well this season, but unfortunately, the NBA game is not suited to his strengths. He’s beast on the low block but has limited range and slowish feet. That’s bad news, as centers with limited mobility are targeted relentlessly in high pick-and-rolls on the next level.
29. San Antonio Spurs (via Toronto Raptors): Tre Jones, PG, Duke
Saturday’s win over Miami was a great illustration of what Jones brings to the table. He finished the contest with just six points (on 3-of-6 shooting) and five assists, but that in no way indicates just how valuable he was to his team in Duke’s 87-57 dismantling of the Hurricanes. Chris Lykes, Miami’s leading scorer, entered Saturday's contest averaging 17 points per game. However, Jones put the clamps on him, and Lykes finished with just four points on 1-of-15 shooting. Jones is arguably the best perimeter defender in the country and Duke’s on-court leader. Coach Gregg Popovich and the Spurs have qualified for the postseason in 21 consecutive seasons by placing uncommon value on players that excel on the defensive end.
30: Milwaukee Bucks: Eric Paschall, F, Villanova
Paschall is a 22-year old senior, which will work against him on draft day. However, he has posted career-highs across the board in 2018-19 and another deep run in March would boost his stock. A win-now team like the Bucks would be happy to draft a proven winner capable of contributing right away.
WASHINGTON, DC - FEBRUARY 20: Eric Paschall #4 of the Villanova Wildcats takes a foul shot during a college basketball game against the Georgetown Hoyas at the Capital One Arena on February 20, 2019 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Mitchell Layton/Getty Images)
Tommy Beer
I have had the good fortune of being able to cover the NBA for well over a decade. I’ve had my work published by USA Today, Basketball Insiders, Sports Illustrated, and ...
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University Website: www.duq.edu
Apply Online: www.duq.edu/admissions-and-aid/undergraduate/apply-for-admission
Duquesne University of the Holy Spirit (pron.: /djuːˈkeɪn/ dew-KAYN) is a private Catholic university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. Founded by members of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, Duquesne first opened its doors as the Pittsburgh Catholic College of the Holy Ghost in October 1878 with an enrollment of 40 students and a faculty of six. In 1911, the college became a university, the first Catholic institution of higher learning in Pennsylvania to achieve such a distinction. It is the only Spiritan institution of higher education in the world.
Duquesne has since expanded to over 10,000 graduate and undergraduate students within a self-contained 49-acre (19.8 ha) hilltop campus in Pittsburgh's Bluff neighborhood. The school maintains an associate campus in Rome and encompasses ten schools of study. The university hosts international students from more than 80 countries although most students—about 80%—are from Pennsylvania or the surrounding region. Duquesne is considered a high research activity institution by the Carnegie Foundation.U.S. News and World Report's annual college rankings place Duquesne in the top tier among national universities, with the school ranking 120th among national universities. Duquesne's MBA program is ranked 25th in the world by the Aspen Institute.
Duquesne University can count more than 79,000 living alumni including two cardinals and the current bishop of Pittsburgh.
The Duquesne Dukes compete in NCAA Division I. Duquesne men's basketball appeared twice in national championship games in the 1950s and won the NIT championship in 1955.
Duquesne University College Scholarships
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Up to $5,000
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Zeno Fritz End. Scholarship
Duquesne University School of Law
Viola Scholarship
Ton/Rose Brennan Mcmanus Fund
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Robert W. Peirce Endowed Scholarship
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Papernick Endowment
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Nanoscale MaterialsWhat They Could Do for Sensing Technology
by Virginia Sliman |
Feb 1, 2006 1:00am
What has a surface area the size of a football field, structural features smaller than a pinpoint, and can be custom designed to detect specific chemicals for integration into a superior sensor? If you guessed functional multiscale materials—also known as nanoscale materials—you would be correct. What are these amazing materials and how will they revolutionize sensing technology?
Because of the minuscule size of nanoscale materials (1 nm = 10–9 m), their chemical and physical properties differ from those of their bulk counterparts and therefore behave differently. One of these properties is an ability to be "functionalized" or custom-designed to attract specific molecules; another is an extremely high surface area tucked into a tiny space.
The unique characteristics of nanoscale materials make them a perfect fit for the sensor world. Integrating them into existing sensors can increase the devices' sensitivity, selectivity, and speed. In addition, the large surface area and low volume greatly facilitate sensor miniaturization.
Researchers at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) are integrating functionalized nanoporous silica and carbon nano-tubes—both nanoscale materials—into a variety of sensor applications to meet urgent needs in fields ranging from biomedicine and environmental remediation to national security. The scientists' goal is to lay the foundation for a miniaturized sensor that uses the smallest sample to detect the smallest concentration of molecules of interest. "Ideally we'd like to be able to just walk into a room and find one molecule of what we're looking for with a sensor the size of a pinhead and say, 'it's here' without concentrating or distilling all of the air in the room," says Tim Bays, a PNNL scientist who works on the functional multiscale materials team.
Figure 1. Self-assembled monolayers on mesoporous supports (SAMMS), based on a coating process that makes silica bind to selected metals; among potential applications: remediation, water treatment, catalysts, and controlled-release markets
While researchers admit that they have a long way to go before they can effectively achieve this goal, they have made progress in the laboratory. According to Shane Addleman, another member of the team, "We have demonstrated a million-fold improvement in sensors for detection of metals, radionuclides, and gases with the correct integration of nanoscale materials."
Nanoporous Silicas—Selective, Fast, High-Loading
One particularly promising area of nano R&D is a functionalized nanoporous silica called self-assembled monolayers on mesoporous supports (SAMMS, Figure 1), the work of PNNL's Glen Fryxell and Jun Liu. Nanoporous silicas, such as the ones used as the scaffolding in SAMMS technology, contain millions of tiny pores. The nooks and crannies of the pores provide extremely high surface area in a low volume—one tablespoon of SAMMS contains the surface area of a football field, ~5000 sq. yd., which can be loaded with reactive sites where molecules can bind. "The beauty of functional multiscale materials is the ability to make all that space usable," Bays says. And that is done by "functionalizing" or designing a monolayer that is attached to the pores and that seeks out certain substances.
Figure 2. Small amounts of thiol-SAMMS can adsorb an extremely large quantity of mercury, which then becomes inert
Thiol-modified SAMMS has been designed to capture mercury and has also shown an affinity for binding with other "soft" heavy metals, including lead, cadmium (a toxic component of Ni-Cd batteries), gold, silver, and copper. Other types of SAMMS have been designed to capture chemicals such as arsenic (arsenate), chromium (chromate), and radionuclides. The bottom line is that specific functional groups can be designed to target specific ions or molecules. Yuehe Lin is leading a PNNL project for the DOE Office of Science's Environmental Management Science Program to develop SAMMS-based electrochemical sensors for detecting and quantifying toxic metal ions, including mercury, cadmium, copper, lead, and uranium in mixed waste and groundwater.
Figure 3. Thin-film SAMMS can be used as a coating on the electrode surface of electrochemical sensors
One of the greatest benefits of functionalized SAMMS is its ability to preconcentrate. "The concentration of some metal ions in nature may be as low as two or three parts per billion—too low to be detected without preconcentration," says Wassana Yantasee, a PNNL engineer working on this project. Because SAMMS can be designed to "cherry pick" specific molecules out of solution and retain them in its pores, it can effectively preconcentrate even quantities down to 0.1 ppb, according to Bays. As Yantasee explains, "SAMMS used as an electrode coating preconcentrates the substance we want to detect right on the electrode surface, which is an important component of electrochemical sensors." Preconcentration also allows sensor portability. "Most in situ detection methods currently used do not preconcentrate," Bays says. "Typically, you need a lab to preconcentrate and that involves going out, scooping up a liter of river water, transporting it, and then concentrating it at the lab."
Although the up-front costs may be higher in some applications, SAMMS's ability to be specific can offer considerable savings in environmental applications (Figure 2). PNNL scientists put the costs at one-fourth that of using a commercial resin to dispose of mercury and an even better ROI over activated carbon. The smaller amount of SAMMS material required to capture the mercury reduces the cost of disposal.
SAMMS-Based Sensor Platforms
Yantasee and Lin are working on three sensor platforms. Thin-film SAMMS (Figure 3) is a coating that can be applied to the electrode surface of a sensor. It works on any type of surface, and PNNL researchers are using it on microchip electrodes. This could be a first step toward miniaturizing sensing devices.
A second platform involves disposable screen-printed electrodes that have been coated with SAMMS mixed with a conductive material. These electrodes are convenient and inexpensive; they can be dipped into a solution for a quick reading on the concentration of certain metal ions and then discarded. Their potential applications include diagnostics by health professionals in countries where medical facilities are not readily available and in detecting biomarkers for diseases.
Yantasee and Lin are also developing an automated, portable sensor unit. At present it is about the size of a shoebox and incorporates a microchannel device in which samples and reagents are programmed to flow in sequence over the electrode surface for a specified period of time, ~5 s, before providing a reading. The sensor can be set to take readings at specified times during the day.
The next step will be a remotely controlled unit for use in nuclear proliferation activities to detect radioactive substances where there is risk of human exposure.
Figure 4. A new way to attach molecules to the surfaces of carbon nanotubes entails a "supercritical fluid" (not shown) with both gas- and liquid-like properties to load specially designed "anchor molecules" onto the nanotubes without compromising tube strength and sensitivity; the active sites are indicated here binding to a targeted chemical (yellow)
Fine-Tuning Carbon Nanotubes
SAMMS material's behavior is a function of its extensive interior surface area, while that of carbon nanotubes—fine carbon filaments—is based on their exterior surface (Figure 4). "You can put a lot of them together so you get the same benefits of low volume and high reactivity of SAMMS," Bays says. "Their strong suit is specificity and electrical conductivity (Figure 5). Because carbon nanotubes are conductive, they can provide a signal each time a target substance binds to the enzyme attached to the nanotube."
PNNL researchers are putting nano-tubes to work as biosensors and improving the way they can be chemically customized to form the basis for a wide variety of devices, including atmospheric and blood sensors. Yuehe Lin and Guodong Liu fashioned carbon nanotubes into a portable, automated sensor system for organophosphate (OP) detection. Besides posing a serious environmental hazard, OP compounds are the raw materials for nerve agents. Detecting these compounds could give emergency personnel a head start in responding to a terrorist attack in which such agents are used.
Figure 5. Carbon nanotubes offer specificity and electrical conductivity
To make these extremely sensitive sensor materials, Lin and Liu ued a layer-by-layer self-assembly technique to attach enzymes to the surface of carbon nanotubes. These are the same enzymes present in neurotransmitters, the impulses that enable nerve cells to communicate. Next, they prepared a 3 mm dia. sensor with the carbon nanotubes and their bound enzymes. Enzymatic activity is damped in the presence of OP. Acting as electrodes, the nanotubes detect the inhibition as a muted signal and pass that information to an off-the-shelf electrochemical detector. The detector was plugged into a notebook computer for an instant reading of OP at concentrations down to 1 ppt. Most existing OP sensors respond to levels between parts per million and parts per billion. (A paper based on the results has been accepted for publication in Analytical Chemistry.)
Testing another sensor configuration, Lin, colleagues from PNNL, and researchers from Boston College demonstrated that carbon nanotubes could be used in broad biomedical applications such as measuring blood sugar. In a paper published in the February 2004 issue of Nano Letters, Lin described how he stood carbon nanotubes ~50 nm in dia. on end (Figure 6). They were treated with the enzyme glucose oxidase and anchored to an epoxy-covered material that acted as an electrode contact. The tips of the enzyme-covered nanotubes protruded through an insulation layer, allowing them to come into contact with blood. Sugar in the blood started a catalytic reaction, the energy from which was conveyed via the carbon-nanotube electrodes. The stronger the signal, the higher the blood sugar level.
Lin credits the sensor's utility to the reactivity of the enzyme, the excellent conductivity of carbon nanotubes, and the enormous nanoelectrode array—about 1 million nanotubes integrated on a 5 3 5 mm microchip electrode. The next step will be to integrate the microchip electrode into a portable unit to work with blood samples.
Figure 6. To create a blood glucose sensor, carbon nanotubes were treated with glucose oxidase and anchored to an epoxy-covered material that acted as an electrode contact
With their ability to react rapidly and with extreme sensitivity, functional multiscale materials may dramatically improve sensing technology. These advances and others possible with engineered applications of functional multiscale materials will open many new opportunities for sensors in environmental, biomedical, national security, and industrial arenas.
Virginia Sliman can be reached at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA; 509-375-4372, [email protected], www.pnl.gov
More About SAMMS
Self-assembled monolayers on mesoporous supports (SAMMS, Figure 7) is a combination of two novel technologies: a nanoporous ceramic substrate (left), with a regular hexagonal array of nanopores (~6.0 nm), and a contaminant-selective self-assembled monolayer (right) with its cross-linked silane end attached to the pore surface and the functional moiety constituting the top surface of the monolayer.
Figure 7. SAMMS is a combination of two novel technologies whose components are shown here
The resulting material has all the pore surfaces lined with a functional monolayer (bottom) consisting of single layers of densely packed molecules custom designed to detect mercury, lead, chromium, and other toxic or precious metals. SAMMS can be tailored chemically to selectively bind to a wide range of contaminant types, based on the type of monolayer applied. It can be used effectively in water and non-water (hydrocarbon) solution streams.
Virginia Sliman can be reached at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA; 509-375-4372, [email protected]
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FW de Klerk
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/ARTICLE: SOUTH AFRICA RETURNS TO OFFICIALLY IMPOSED RACIALISM IN SPORT
ARTICLE: SOUTH AFRICA RETURNS TO OFFICIALLY IMPOSED RACIALISM IN SPORT
Earlier this week the Minister of the Sport and Recreation, Fikile Mbalula, announced the imposition of sanctions against four of South Africa’s main sporting codes (Athletics South Africa, Cricket South Africa, Netball South Africa and South African Rugby) for not meeting the racial targets that they themselves had earlier accepted. He said that he had resolved “to revoke their privilege … to host and bid for major international tournaments” in South Africa.
By so doing he crossed an important threshold on South Africa’s journey back to officially imposed racialism in sport. For as long as targets remained targets it could be argued that merit and not race was still the main factor in the selection of national teams. However, racial targets enforced by state sanctions are no longer ‘targets’ - they are quotas. Race quotas - together with any form of racial discrimination - are prohibited by the International Olympic Committee and by most international sporting codes. They also prohibit interference by “third parties”, including governments, in the independence of national sporting bodies.
The Minister’s announcement signals South Africa’s reversion to a sport regime that is subservient to the racial ideology of the ruling party. In the old days the ideology was apartheid. Now it is the ANC's National Demographic Revolution with its goal of pervasive demographic representivity. The primary concern is not the success of national teams but the requirement that teams should progressively mirror the racial composition of the South African population.
Ironically, the sporting codes that Mbalula wishes to punish include the very sports in which South Africa has achieved the greatest success in international competition. The Springboks have twice won the Rugby World Cup and the Proteas have in recent years occupied the top position in world Test and One Day cricket.
Achievement in sport is an intensely personal struggle. It requires remarkable dedication and commitment. It involves hours of arduous daily training; it is advanced by rigorous and often heart-breaking competition; and it is crowned by the immense honour of being chosen to represent one's country - to the joy of moms, dads and friends cheering around the family TV screen. Now, once again, sportsmen and women, who should be chosen on merit, will be told that they cannot represent South Africa because they belong to the wrong race. Many will follow other talented South African sportsmen and women to pursue their careers overseas.
However, for the Minister of Sport and Recreation, the primary factor is evidently not the dreams of individual sportsmen and women, or national sporting success. It is race.
This attitude was perhaps best expressed by President Mbeki in a radio interview the day after the Springboks won the Rugby World Cup in 2007. He said that a united South Africa would be “a much larger prize” (presumably than the even the Rugby World Cup). He added that “if the best perpetuates the past (i.e. racially imbalanced teams) - then something must give. If we are going to lose one or two games when we are going to achieve that goal, I think let’s lose one or two games.” His comments echoed his statement in 2002 when he said, “For two or three years let’s not mind losing international competitions because we are bringing our people into these teams.”
The key elements here are the willingness to sacrifice sporting success on the ideological altar of race and the characterisation of black players as “our” people. How could the exclusion of minority players (not “our people”?) from national teams on the basis of their race possibly contribute to President Mbeki’s “much larger prize” of a “united South Africa”?
Unfortunately, these attitudes are manifested not only in sport but in the manner in which transformation is being implemented throughout our society. In the public service, the security forces and the state-owned enterprises many excellent black South Africans have been appointed to key positions, clearly on the basis of merit. However, many others have been appointed on the basis of their race - with little or no concern for merit. Critically needed posts are often left vacant, because filling them with qualified candidates from the non-designated groups would upset the demographic quotas that the government has been working so hard to achieve. It is evidently preferable for local authorities and government departments to be demographically representative than to be successful in delivering essential services. It is more important that farm ownership should reflect South Africa’s demographic profile than that farms should run profitably and provide food for South Africa’s people.
The selection of key players in the private, public and non-governmental sectors on the basis of race rather than merit has been one of the main reasons why South Africa has become a losing nation.
Of course, we must ensure that every child has the opportunity to excel in whatever sport he or she chooses. Sporting codes have an important role to play in creating such opportunities: however, they do not have the sole - or even the primary - responsibility to do so. The popularisation of sporting codes depends just as much on the Department of Sport and Recreation, on our dysfunctional schools, and on our communities.
Even so, some codes will be disproportionally supported by different communities. Participation in sport often has a strong cultural base - not only in South Africa - but throughout the world. The English rugby team is drawn disproportionately from the 5% of the population that attend private schools. Most of the top swimmers in the United States are white, while basketball, boxing and athletics are dominated by the 12% black minority. Can one imagine the outcry if a quota were to be imposed limiting black participation in these sports to 12%?
Perhaps the time has come for us to revive the pre-1994 tradition of non-racial sport in the form of a new SAN-ROC. We could then have one set of teams chosen on a truly non-racial basis - and another chosen according to the ANC's racial criteria. Which teams would attract the most sponsorship, the best players and the most popular support? Against which teams would foreign teams want to play?
The bottom line is that in a free society, government should have no role in dictating to law-abiding sports organisations how they should run their affairs - or in revoking their “privilege” to host international tournaments.
By Dave Steward, Executive Director of the FW de Klerk Foundation
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Ballet Austin performs "Snow White," part of *Grimm Tales.* Artist Natalie Frank created the backdrop.
Photo: A.M. Bloodgood
Natalie Frank Lends Her Dark Feminist Vision to a New Production of Ballet Austin
Original Grimm Brothers tales are brought to life in this ballet debut that showcases female power
By Abby Ronner
Artist Natalie Frank is most well-known for a series of portraits she did subverting the happily-ever-after Grimm Brothers tales in favor of their more sinister roots and an emphasis on female power. In Grimm Tales, a collaboration with Ballet Austin that debuted this past weekend, Frank’s vision is given new life in the sets and costumes in this production, which reimagines three Grimm Brothers fairy tales through a feminist lens.
With Frank’s drawings as a backdrop, the Grimm Tales ballet combines the choreography of Stephen Mills, Ballet Austin’s artistic director; the music of composer Graham Reynolds, who has scored many of Richard Linklater’s films (and collaborated with Mills on previous shows); and the costume design of Tony Award–nominated and New York–based costume designer Constance Hoffman, to achieve a captivating, and at times disturbing, experience.
Ballet Austin performs “The Juniper Tree,” part of Grimm Tales. Artist Natalie Frank created the backdrop. Photo: A.M. Bloodgood
“I have always dreamed of working on visuals for a ballet, and, specifically, a Ring cycle,” Frank tells Galerie. “Wagner has always compelled such visual imagery in my mind—all-encompassing stories and worlds are and always have been of great interest to me. The entire production of Grimm aims to capture this, and I think it does! It feels like it sprang from my head, and I credit my collaborators for this generosity—the generosity of the process was the most staggering part of all of this.”
The first tale in the performance, “The Frog King,” depicts the true Grimm Brothers ending, which is often overlooked in favor of the more popular—and palatable—ending where the princess kisses the frog to break the spell, transforming him into a prince. In Frank’s version (as in the original Grimms’), the princess, disgusted by the frog, smashes it against a wall.
In the performance, we watch as an animation of one of Frank’s drawings, the splattered body of a frog, slides down the white backdrop. Similarly, in “Snow White,” Frank does away with the prince entirely, and the tale ends with Snow White fiercely battling her stepmother, the evil queen. But Mills and Frank save the darkest tale for last.
Ballet Austin performs “Snow White,” part of Grimm Tales. Artist Natalie Frank created the backdrop. Photo: A.M. Bloodgood
In the most evocative scene of “Juniper Tree,” a boy who has been decapitated by his wicked stepmother, is wheeled around the stage wildly on a butcher block as the stepmother chops him up with two massive butcher knives (which were real and apparently sharp—one nicked the dancer during a rehearsal!). There were gasps from the audience as Frank’s animated drawing of a dismembered boy tumbles down the screen behind the dancers.
It is difficult to render such a multimedia collaboration without one element overshadowing the other, particularly when combining dance and visual art. One of the many challenges Frank and Mills faced in the conception of this work was finding a balance within this liminal space. What they created was a stunning dialogue between the dancers and Frank’s paintings as they floated and panned behind them, together providing a more holistic understanding of the fairy tale as it unfolded.
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Even the music—wild and discordant in darker moments yet ringing more traditional when the story warranted—and the costumes, each hand-painted by Jeff Fender Studio, a custom fabric painter whose work has appeared on Broadway for decades, coalesced in a beautifully subtle way. Each element of the show could stand alone as a success on its own, and yet all melded seamlessly to create an evocative, startling, sinister rendition of the familiar tales we all thought we knew.
In her career thus far, this kind of daring is not unfamiliar territory for Frank. Her work often deals with women, storytelling, and the body. “Of course,” she says, “sex and violence come with this.” The Grimm Tales ballet offered Frank a chance to explore these themes from new perspectives and to see her own work in a more expansive way. “This has all taught me about a different type of drawing and storytelling,” she explains, “one for the stage that is viewable and understood almost instantaneously, but one with the capacity to allow unfolding through both movement and imagery.”
Frank lacks depth perception, a condition she shares with other artists such as Pablo Picasso and Rembrandt. Because of this, she says, “I have a difficult time tracking in real time where forms are in space. There is a beautiful fluidity and compositional aspect to watching this ballet, especially as the three tales overlap in movement and storytelling.”
While Frank and Mills explore other venues for staging the ballet in the future, Frank is currently working on a book with Jack Zipes about the 17th-century literary “fairy teller,” as Frank referred to her, Madame D’Aulnoy, whose feminist narratives, such as Cinderella, were ahead of their time and who also coined the term “fairy tale.” A selection of these drawings will be shown at Frieze in May with Frank’s new gallery, Salon 94.
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Miami Tower Trades for $106M
MIAMI-Attorney Carey Stiss of Bilzin Sumberg tells GlobeSt.com there's a lot of money chasing assets, however investors and lenders are being more selective about their investments.
By Jennifer LeClaire | December 21, 2010 at 05:53 AM
MIAMI-In a sign that demand for South Florida’s trophy real estate assets persists despite economic volatility, I&G Miami, has purchased downtown Miami’s landmark Miami Tower office building for $105.5 million. The transaction ranks as the highest-valued real estate trade in the Miami market this year.
Acquisitions/Dispositions
After a Slow Start, Net Lease Market Rebounds in PA, NJ
The completed transactions, most of which were classified as “net lease,” were a mix of restaurants, convenience stores/gas stations, discount stores, veterinary clinics, fitness centers and drug stores, spanning across 12 states, including seven in Pennsylvania and five in New Jersey.
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"Imagine we are linked
not ranked."
Gloria Steinem is a writer, lecturer, political activist, and feminist organizer. She travels in this and other countries as an organizer and lecturer and is a frequent media spokeswoman on issues of equality. She is particularly interested in the shared origins of sex and race caste systems, gender roles and child abuse as roots of violence, non-violent conflict resolution, the cultures of indigenous peoples, and organizing across boundaries for peace and justice. She lives in New York City, and just published her first book in over twenty years.
Gloria tells a story she has never told before
My Life on the Road
My Life on the Road is the moving, funny, and profound story of Gloria’s growth and also the growth of a revolutionary movement for equality—and the story of how surprising encounters on the road shaped both. From her first experience of social activism among women in India to her work as a journalist in the 1960s; from the whirlwind of political campaigns to the founding of Ms. magazine; from the historic 1977 National Women’s Conference to her travels through Indian Country—a lifetime spent on the road allowed Gloria to listen and connect deeply with people, to understand that context is everything, and to become part of a movement that would change the world.
See the calendar below for an event near you!
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7 Ways Local Governments Are Getting Creative with Data Mapping
Government entities appear to be using maps more and more as a tool for creating useful applications. Here are seven ways they're doing it.
by Ben Miller / January 25, 2016
Shutterstock/Zoran Milic
As snow pounded the east coast of the United States this weekend, government entities rushed to do their part in helping citizens cope with the effects of the storm. And amid all those efforts were several jurisdictions that turned to a tool becoming more common in state and local government: maps.
“Unfortunately a lot of the best technology comes out of disasters or major events,” said Christopher Thomas, director of government markets for the geographic information systems (GIS) company Esri.
Among the mapping applications were internal dashboards, which government agencies used to coordinate snow plows and other crews and public-facing informational maps. Thomas said he sees increasing interest in use of GIS at all levels of government. In fact, he said, that's one of the biggest shifts in the field -- in the past, it used to be cities like Chicago and Los Angeles that paid attention to the latest trends in GIS.
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Now, increasingly, Thomas sees small-population cities and towns exploring ways to use maps -- places like Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., and Manassas, Va.
“It’s reaching all sizes and all types of government,” Thomas said, adding that there are several reasons for that. One is that the technology has become much faster, making it possible to create interactive mapping applications that give users information in real time or near-real time.
“It’s become a tool to express what’s going on in a city or county or state,” he said.
The other reason is the open data movement. As government data collection expands, and as more of that data becomes publicly available, more people are looking to maps as a means of expressing the information.
And depending on the type of application, a map can be useful for both the government and its constituents. Many maps help government servants operate more efficiently and save money, while others will answer residents' questions so they don't have to call a government worker for the answer.
“It used to be that mapping was an internal view," Thomas said. "Now it’s an internal view, it’s gov-to-gov, it’s gov-to-academic, it’s gov-to-citizen and it’s gov-to-entrepreneur.”
Here are seven examples of state and local governments using maps to help themselves and the people they serve.
1. District of Columbia, Iowa Get Local and Current with the Weather
As Winter Storm Jonas was busy dropping nearly 30 inches of snow on the nation's capital, officials in D.C. were working to clear it. And thanks to a mapping application they launched, citizens could see exactly how the city was going about that business.
The District of Columbia's snow map lets users enter an address, and then shows what snow plows did near that address within a given range of days. The map also shows where the city received 311 requests for snow removal and gives users a chance to look at recent photos from road cameras showing driving conditions.
In Iowa, snow is big deal year in and year out. Des Moines, for instance, sees an average of more than 35 inches of the stuff in an average season, and the state Department of Transportation spends a lot of time and money clearing it off the roads. So it's no surprise that Iowa's snow plow-tracking map predates Winter Storm Jonas.
It also collects a lot of data about snow and its removal operations. Last year, in an effort to aid motorists battling the weather, the department took that data and put it on a map.
The Iowa DOT's "Track-a-Plow" map lets users see where plows are in near real time, look at photos taken from the dashboards of those vehicles, and see stills from traffic cameras that let them know the condition of the road before they get in the car. It's all set on a map that offers lane closure information, color-coded road condition estimates for different segments of highway and weather radar in the background.
And if that user is curious to know exactly what the state does to clear the roads, they can also take a look at the DOT's brand new "Winter Cost Calculator" map, which lets them see how much money the state has spent clearing individual sections of road.
2. Los Angeles Maps El Niño Resources, Trends
Throughout the winter, weather monitoring experts warned the public time and again that an El Niño system was brewing in the Pacific Ocean that looked to be one of the largest, if not the largest, ever. That would mean torrents of rain for a parched state that's seen mudslides and flooding during storms in the past.
So to prepare its residents, the city of Los Angeles published a map in January that lets users see both decision-informing trends and the location of resources. Using the application, one can toggle layers that let them know what the weather is doing around the city, where traffic is backed up, where the power is out, where they can find sand bags to prevent flood damage and more.
The app is nimble, too. It's built straight into Google's mapping platform, which city officials say allows for people to easily get directions to resources on their smartphones. The map is fed with real-time data and can be updated with new layers.
3. California Dives Deep into Air Pollution Risks
Not all lungs are made equally. Some people can live in a smoggy area with relative ease; for others, medical problems like asthma can make air pollution a looming danger.
So, faced with a legislative mandate to identify disadvantaged communities, the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment decided that it wouldn't just examine smog levels -- it would also take a look at the prevalence of at-risk people across the state.
The result is a series of three maps, the first two examining both factors and the third combining them. That allows the state and its residents to see the places where air pollution is the biggest problem for people it poses a greater risk to.
The map, which offers detail at the census tract level, shows that the state's worst problems are in its low-lying, agriculture-heavy central valley and in its largest city, Los Angeles.
4. Streamlining Resident Service Information
The city of Manassas, Va., relied on an outdated paper map and a long-time, well-versed staffer to answer questions about municipal curbside pickup services until they launched this map in 2014. The map allows users to enter their address, and then gives them easy-to-read information about when to put out various things on their curb for pickup.
That's useful because the city's fall leaf collection schedule changes every year. So the map not only acts as a benefit to residents who want information, but to city staff who don't have to deal with as many calls.
The map also shows users the locations of resources they can use and gives them city phone numbers in case they still have questions, and displays it all in a popup pane at the bottom of the map.
5. Placing Tools in the Hands of the Public
A lot of cities and counties have started publishing online maps showing city services and releasing government data.
But Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia stand out as examples of maps that take the idea one step further -- because each one offers a staggering amount of choices for users.
Chicago's new OpenGrid map, just launched in January, is a versatile map that lets users search for certain data like food inspection reports, street closures, potholes and more. That's enough to answer a lot of questions, but what adds even more utility is the map's various narrowing tools. Users can narrow searches to a zip code, or they can draw a shape on the map and only see results within that shape. They can perform sub-searches within results and they can choose how they'd like to see the data displayed.
Philadelphia's platform makes use of buttons, icons and categories to help users sift through the spatially-enabled data available to them. Options include future lane closures, bicycle paths, flu shots, city resources, parks and more.
Boston's platform is open for users to submit their own maps. And submit they have. The city portal offers everything from maps of bus stops to traffic data pulled from the Waze app.
6. Houston Transforms Service Request Data
A 311 service functions as a means of bringing problems to city staff's attention. But the data itself only goes so far -- it needs interpretation.
Houston's 311 service request map helps users easily analyze the data so as to spot trends. The tool offers lots of ways to narrow data down, and can isolate many different kinds of requests so users can see whether one problem is reported more often in certain areas.
7. Guiding Business Growth
For the last several years, the city of Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., has been designing all sorts of maps through its Rancho Enterprise Geographic Information Systems (REGIS) project. Many of them have served specific city purposes, such as tracking code enforcement violations and offering police a command system tool for special events.
The utilitarian foundation of REGIS extends to its public-facing applications as well. One example is INsideRancho, a map built with economic development efforts in mind. The map lets users search and browse available buildings to suit business needs, narrowing results by square footage, zoning and building type. Users can also find businesses by name or address, and look at property exteriors via an embedded connection with Google Street View.
Ben Miller Associate Editor of GT Data and Business
Ben Miller is the associate editor of data and business for Government Technology. His reporting experience includes breaking news, business, community features and technical subjects. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in journalism from the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, and lives in Sacramento, Calif.
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MORE FROM Government Technology State & Local Articles - e.Republic
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Third-Party App Enhances Campus Security
Mobile options supplement physical security infrastructure at Toronto’s Ontario College of Art and Design.
by Noelle Knell / January 22, 2013
OCAD University photo courtesy of Urban Space Gallery.
The majority of emergency calls received by police departments and security offices on college campuses today come in via cellphone -- as many as 95 percent, said Josh Sookman, CEO of mobile emergency infrastructure provider Guardly. For those without mobile phones, however, there are bound to be gaps, despite a well coordinated system of emergency call boxes and physical help points. This can potentially leave students vulnerable in times of crisis.
"Blue light phones can't be everywhere," Sookman explained to Government Technology. "Our technology is actually able to deliver on a lot of the promise of existing infrastructure, which is to know the real-time location of where they are, as well as provide a way of immediate communication."
Users of the Guardly smartphone app create a brief profile that includes physical characteristics and medical information. Those details are available to emergency responders when they activate the app, allowing a more personalized response. Extreme allergy sufferers experiencing anaphylactic shock, for example, can be met with informed, properly equipped medical personnel. Law enforcement responding to a sexual harassment case access the Guardly subscriber's incident history, which can contain information critical to the timeliest, most effective response.
"We actually provide a lot of information that typically wouldn't be available," Sookman explained. "In the first five seconds, we let you know who it is, where they are and the nature of the emergency. And that's really powerful to dispatchers who have to make really important real-time decisions."
Louis Toromoreno manages campus security at the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD), situated within the downtown entertainment district in Toronto, Ontario. A campus of approximately 6,000 students, Toromoreno describes the student body as 85 percent female. Bustling downtown streets featuring popular nightlife destinations like clubs, bars, theaters and restaurants divide the buildings that make up the university.
Campus hours at OCAD stretch as late as 2:30 a.m. during certain times of the year, creating a challenging environment for security personnel. Following an increase in student reports of harassment from patrons of local businesses a few years ago, the university installed a Code Blue phone in centrally located Butterfield Park. But officials soon realized that the phone, described as a "giant panic button," wouldn't fully address the problem.
"We quickly started to realize that this one phone in the park isn't probably the best option for us," Toromoreno said, adding that he began to investigate other solutions. "How can we reach out to people and give them something that will help them feel safe in the situation of an emergency, on and off our campus?"
Following the recommendation of a colleague, Toromoreno contacted Guardly. OCAD conducted extensive on-campus testing of the mobile technology, and officially launched the app, free to students, in September 2012. Since then, Toromoreno said, they have aggressively marketed the app to first-year students, and are currently conducting department-level training sessions for students and staff. As of Jan. 1, 2013, the app had 447 users.
There are four ways that the app reaches appropriate security personnel when accessed in an emergency situation: it generates a phone call and an email, as well as an online dashboard featuring both visual and auditory alerts.
The app, while bringing benefits for all students, offers particularly valuable emergency help to students with accessibility issues who may not be able to physically access emergency phones or communicate their needs as easily.
According to Sookman, the app is also generating interest from cities and transit systems. The company also targets lone workers, like realtors and home health-care workers, who often meet strangers and share close quarters in remote locations. The Guardly app is available for iPhone and Android devices, as well as BlackBerrys and Windows phones.
"For our campus, this isn't the only tool we are going to use, and it never will be," Toromoreno said. "But we need to make sure that we’re looking at options on how we can put people that are in an emergency into access with campus security or campus police as quickly as possible. And I don’t think in this day and age, that we should rely on something that is completely hardwired anymore."
Wayne State University Upgrades Campus Alert SystemThe Apps That Sandy Built
Noelle Knell Editor
Government Technology editor Noelle Knell has more than 15 years of writing and editing experience, covering public projects, transportation, business and technology. A California native, she has worked in both state and local government, and is a graduate of the University of California, Davis, with majors in political science and American history. She can be reached via email and on Twitter.
Follow @GovTechNoelle
Wayne State University Upgrades Campus Alert System The Apps That Sandy Built
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Katheryn Hayes Tucker,
This month, Angela Elizabeth Speir will finish her yearlong stint as head of the Georgia Public Service Commission. As the first woman chairman in the PSC’s 127-year history, she has put her signature on the office – not so much because she is of a different gender but because she is of a different age and attitude.
Halfway through a six-year term on the commission that regulates the state’s utilities, this Gwinnett County Republican is 38 and looks younger, with long, curly dark hair and plenty of polish. As a newcomer, she encountered patronizing comments about her looks, age and gender. She recalls that old-timers around the office patted her shoulder and said, “You’ve really been thrown into the deep end of the pool.” Speir’s reply: “Yes, I have. But the really great thing is, I know how to swim.”
This is a woman who took on an unsuccessful but ambitious campaign for state senate at the age of 24. She earned a biology degree from Agnes Scott College before her 20th birthday. She worked for the United Methodist Children’s Home medical complex and for an employment agency, then started her own staffing service before going up against former public service commissioner and longtime state legislator Bubba McDonald. She raised less than $4,000 against McDonald’s $200,000. She couldn’t afford advertising, but she knocked on doors and traveled the state campaigning.
She is fond of saying that no one gave her the chance of “a snowball in the devil’s house.” This polite, self-described “Southern Christian lady” wears her innocence like the cross pendant around her neck. But she hasn’t shied away from conflict. She’s been on the losing end of many 3-2 votes – and some 4-1s – usually against rate increases. She hasn’t voted for one yet, despite having presided over several.
She has firmly refused to engage in the behind the scenes political negotiation that is the PSC’s hallmark – and which Speir believes should be illegal, as it is for the courts. She says she is so frugal with the public’s money that she refuses to drive a state car. She takes pride in her well-worn office equipment – from her collection of old pens to the sunken chairs that belonged to a now deceased former commissioner who previously occupied her second floor quarters in the Justice Building near the Capitol.
After a two and a half hour interview in her office recently, this reporter respectfully requests reconsideration of the chairs, but thanks her for the use of her out of production blue ink medium point Paper Mate Flexgrip. Excerpts from the interview follow.
Georgia Trend: Why did you want to be a public service commissioner?
Speir: I knew that I could serve and make a difference. I’ve always been very service minded in every aspect of my life in wanting make a difference and help people. The job that we do impacts Georgians’ lives. The decisions that we make impact your family. They impact businesses both small and large. Every time someone turns on a light, sets their thermostat or picks up their telephone, that decision has been impacted by the public service commission. It is a very important role in Georgia government. Part of my platform when I was running was making people aware of the impact the commission has on their daily lives and their family and their pocketbook. I know it might sound hokey but I just can’t think of a better way to say it. It is heartfelt. I love this state. I love the people of this state. To have an opportunity to serve and make a difference in the lives of the people of Georgia is a tremendous blessing and honor. I got out there and I worked very hard and I’m very blessed to be here. I’ll never take it for granted.
GT: Has this been a difficult job to master?
Speir: It is a very tough job. It’s a massive amount of information to disseminate in a short time. And it’s very important to Georgia. You have to make decisions based on fact, on the law and on the record. That is why I oppose behind the scenes lobbying. Decisions should be made based on the record. Everything should be out in the open. That way, all of the parties, anyone with an interest, has an opportunity to hear the information and perhaps offer a different point of view. That is vital to this process. We’re very much judge and jury in this. You would not let an attorney in a case share information with one juror and not with another. It needs to be handled in a very open format. I think sunshine is the best disinfectant. So, let the sun shine. Put the skunk on the table so we can all see it for what it is.
GT: It sounds like you’re swimming against the tide on the PSC. Aren’t you and Commissioner Robert Baker the only ones who do not engage in ex-parte communications?
Speir: That is correct. Decisions should be made based on the facts on the record – not conversations that were held in New York City or in an office behind closed doors or over dinner. It needs to be on record so that everyone has an opportunity to hear it and respond to it. I’m certainly very open to meeting with people. Any constituent is welcome in my office. But I will not tolerate sharing of information that is relevant to a pending case off the record.
GT: How has that been received on the commission?
Speir: There’s been very open conflict during our administration sessions. One of the commissioners was supporting higher return on equity for Georgia Power based on conversations he had with officials in New York. My response to him was that if the analyst in New York had information relevant to the case, then he should have put himself on a plane and come to Atlanta and stated that on the record. Ultimately, each commissioner makes his own decision about how he receives information and conducts business and that’s how it is. I’ve chosen a position of integrity because that’s my goal each day – to serve with courage, strength and integrity. To me, that’s the above board honest ethical approach to this job. I study those facts. I’m known for having been studious before I came in, and for studying all the technical minutiae relevant to the job. I have my code books, my rule books, my Roberts Rules of Order. I carry them all around.
GT: You have called this past year the busiest in the history of the PSC. Why is that?
Speir: It’s because of the number of dockets that have been on our agenda this year. And also the number of very high profile cases: Georgia Power, Atlanta Gas Light, Savannah Electric.
GT: What are some of the challenges of the job?
Speir: The most challenging aspect of this job is feeling in my heart that I’ve done all the hard work that goes into a decision – feeling that I have arrived at what is the right decision, the best decision for our state honestly, fighting for that, putting on my armor, going onto the bench and fighting for the people of Georgia – and being on the losing side of the vote.
GT: And you’ve had that experience a few times?
Speir: Quite a few times. I’ve not voted for a rate increase during my tenure. If a rate increase were justified, I’d vote for it. That’s my job.
GT: You have voted against every rate increase?
Speir: When we had the Georgia Power case, I felt there should be a lower return on equity than what was ultimately approved. The argument used for approving it, at least by one commissioner, was those off the record discussions. With the Atlanta Gas Light Company case, we voted. We made a decision. We would have reduced rates. The company asked that it be reconsidered. Eventually, a stipulation was approved that changed the outcome. One of the things that was changed was replacement of old gas lines from 10 years to 15 years. I’m very concerned about the safety. It’s disappointing. I work as hard as anyone in this position ever has. And I prayerfully consider my decisions. There are people who have to make a decision about what they are going to eat or whether they are going to take their medicine twice a day as prescribed based on the amount of their utility bill. I voted against the Savannah Electric case. I was the only commissioner to do so. Again, it was because of the return on equity. There were other factors. But we had expert witness testimony that stipulated a lower ROE.
GT: Sometimes you’re the only dissenting vote?
Speir: Occasionally I am. Usually it’s a 3-2 split with me and Commissioner Baker dissenting. At first people would say, “Well, she’s decided to vote with Commissioner Baker,” as though I couldn’t possibly arrive at a decision on my own, couldn’t possibly have studied the issue and decided. I’m very driven and focused. And I’m humble and have a good sense of humor. It’s like President Bush said after his first election: “They misunderestimated me.” When I laugh, it’s because I know that I’m on my path. I’m strong in my convictions. I know who I am. I’m here to work. I don’t falter. I serve the Lord first. And I serve the people of Georgia second. When you’re strong in your personal foundation, then you draw upon that. There is a sense of strength in that. And you just go. You go, girl.
GT: How can the PSC address the issue of global warming and encourage cleaner sources of energy?
Speir: That’s a real concern. We have sulfur dioxide, mercury, lead. Thus, we have the Clean Air Act. We see the companies coming back in asking for more money for the scrubbers and things to try to implement the Clean Air Act.
GT: So, might that be a rate increase you would vote for?
Speir: I look at it like Lady Justice. I put the facts on the scale. It’s going to tilt one way or the other. If it’s justified, I’ll vote for it.
GT: What can the PSC do to offset increased fuel prices?
Speir: All roads lead to fuel. So you have companies coming back for increased rates because of higher fuel costs. The increased cost of natural gas is affecting not only our natural gas bills, but also our electric bills. We definitely need to look at conserving.
GT: How can you encourage the development of renewable energy sources?
Speir: I was a supporter of the Green Energy Program, where customers can opt to pay a premium for power from renewable sources.
GT: What about nuclear power – which is now being talked about by some as a “green” energy source?
Speir: Some environmentalists are very supportive of nuclear energy because there’s no emission. It’s a very clean source. Certainly, there are safety concerns. The first question is, is there a need. Second, we have to do a cost benefit analysis. With a nuclear plant, the upfront cost is very large. But with generation, nuclear is cheaper. There is a savings in the long haul in the kilowatt hour cost. Then, when you look at fuel price increases, it could become more attractive. Safety is a concern, obviously. And then, one of the biggest concerns is the waste – the disposal of the waste. Where is that going? Currently, Georgia has paid $800 million to have waste removed from our state and taken to Yucca Mountain to the repository, but Yucca Mountain is not open for business.
GT: What are your future career plans?
Speir: I’m 38 and I love this job. Every day I come to work and sit on I-85 with my fellow constituents. I look around and I see a real cross section of Georgians. I think, I’m going to work today and I’m going to do a jam up job for you and your family. I get a little miffed when they don’t let me over. I think, it’s 8:45 a.m. If I’m not there to cast my vote, you may not get the best deal. A lot of times I’m here until 7 in the evening.
GT: Do you plan to run again in 2008?
Speir: I do plan to run again. I’m enjoying what I’m doing.
Categories: Features, People
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WSJ: Apple Is Slashing Orders for the iPhone 5C
Apple took a big step when it introduced the iPhone 5C, and since the internet has been abuzz with how successful—or otherwise—the handset will be. Now, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Apple is slashing orders for the device.
The Journal reports that Pegatron and Hon Hai—the two companies that put the 5C together—have received orders to cut back on production. Sources tell the newspaper that orders will be cut by between 20 and 30 per cent.
All of which has seen analysts speculating that the news signals the death of the 5C; that it's experiencing a slump in demand and will die, shrivel and rot (can plastic rot?). What those analysts overlook is that the same thing happened with the iPhone 5 just after it was launched and, uh, that went on to be fairly successful.
If the analysts aren't right—and there's a definitely a case to say they're not—then chances are that either the 5S is eating a little into sales of the 5C, or that Apple was bang on with the stock it needed and can now take it easy. Time, of course, will tell. [Wall Street Journal]
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Brown Calls for Global Transaction Tax
By Laurence Norman and Joe Parkinson
The Group of 20 leading economies should consider applying a global financial transactions tax to pay for the cost of future banking crises, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Saturday.
Mr. Brown said G-20 members should discuss whether they need some kind of "insurance fee to reflect systemic risk or a resolution fund or contingent capital arrangements or a global financial transactions levy."
However he conditioned his proposal with warnings that agreeing a levy would be difficult
Indeed, US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said his government wouldn't support that approach.
"A day-by-day financial transaction tax is not something we're prepared to support," he said in an interview with Sky News.
The US isn't alone, finding an ally in the Russian government.
"I'm quite skeptical about such taxes," Russian Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said. "Gordon Brown is well known as the person who has been raising taxes all the time."
Canadian Finance Minister James Flaherty said a transactions tax was "not particularly attractive."
In the past, the UK has leaned against the idea of a what is known as a Tobin tax, which would use the proceeds of a financial-transactions tax to provide funds to developing nations.
However, Mr. Brown's proposal more closely resembles a deposit-insurance plan, in that the fees gathered from the levy would be placed in a fund that would be drawn on should banks once again need state support to survive. The G-20 governments said at a summit in Pittsburgh in September they would look at this area, tasking the International Monetary Fund with preparing a report for options on "how the financial sector could make a fair and substantial contribution toward paying for any burdens associated with government interventions to repair the banking system."
Mr. Brown said that report would come in April and that any action on a possible tax was unlikely to come for some time after that, UK officials signaled. Mr. Brown himself faces a tough battle for re-election by June 2010.
Mr. Brown said there needs to be a "better social contract" between banks and the rest of society.
"It cannot be acceptable that the benefits of success are reaped by the few, while the costs of failure are borne by all of us," Mr. Brown told finance ministers and central-bank heads from the G-20. "We need to consider if we need to go further in terms of mitigating costs to the rest of society."
Mr. Brown said Britain wouldn't adopt such a plan "unless others move with us together."
He also said the tax would have to be "non-distortionary to avoid damaging reductions in liquidity, inefficient allocation of capital and the temptation of avoidance."
And any tax must not undermine efforts to stabilize the financial system and that the contribution from the financial sector must be "fair" and "measured."
"I do not in any way underestimate the enormous and difficult practical and technical issues that will need to be overcome," Mr. Brown said.
The Bank of England estimates that in the US, the UK and the euro zone, state support for the banking systems has totaled $14 trillion, or a quarter of global economic output.
France has been among the most prominent supporters of a financial-transactions tax, with French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner recently proposing a levy of 0.005% on transactions. He said such a tax could raise around 30 billion euros ($44.5 billion).
French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde Saturday repeated her government's support for a tax on transactions.
Over the last century, bank failures have become increasingly expensive for taxpayers, and short of war pose the greatest threat to the solvency of governments.
If it could be enforced, a levy on transactions would help build up resources to pay for future crises, the cost of which could threaten to bankrupt some governments.
"A global .. tax could make a useful contribution to reducing the risk of future financial crises, and sharing the costs more fairly," said Julian Jessop, an economist at Capital Economics.
But bankers said a transaction tax wouldn't be enforceable.
"You would have to get every country in the world to agree to it," said Angela Knight, chief executive of the British Bankers Association. "It assumes that financial transactions will stay the same, that there will be no innovations or changes. Practically, it wouldn't operate."
And the UK's main opposition party accused Mr. Brown of "chasing headlines."
"Instead of empty headline grabbing announcements, Gordon Brown should focus on the crisis we are living through now which he helped to create, which means businesses are folding and insolvencies rising at record rates," said a spokesman for the Conservative Party.
General Analysis on Global Taxes
Currency Transaction Taxes
Energy Taxes
Aviation Taxes
Alternative Financing for the UN
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Home Global Village Rafsanjani’s death: A shift in Indo-Iran relationship?
Rafsanjani’s death: A shift in Indo-Iran relationship?
Shashank Joshi |
While Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani’s death comes as a blow to Iran’s reformists, the template of Tehran-New Delhi ties established during his presidency is likely to endure geopolitical shifts
The death of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani on January 8 was a landmark for the Islamic Republic of Iran. Rafsanjani was a pivotal figure in the country’s path since the 1979 revolution: a founding father, a military leader in the war with Iraq, and twice President. More parochially, his presidency also saw a historic shift in ties with India, laying the groundwork for the cooperation that has unfolded, haltingly, over the past 20 years.
From radical to moderate
Rafsanjani’s two nicknames, “Akbar Shah” and “the shark”, convey his blend of power, cunning, and adaptability. His funeral last week drew more than two million people, comparable only to that of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989. But in his most recent political incarnation, Rafsanjani was also a source of support for Iran’s beleaguered reformists.
The man who had helped elevate Ali Khamenei after Khomeini’s death, presided over an assassination spree of dissidents at home and in Europe, refused to lift the fatwa on Salman Rushdie, and was famously, fabulously, corrupt — this same man became, in the final decade of his life, a totem of pragmatism, moderation, and reform.
Rafsanjani’s two nicknames, “Akbar Shah” and “the shark”, convey his blend of power, cunning, and adaptability.
It was Rafsanjani who warned that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s victory in 2009 would bring “Islamic fascism”, blamed the Bashar al-Assad regime for the use of chemical weapons in 2013, and supported Hassan Rouhani’s successful bid for the presidency that same year.
He was pushed to the margins of politics, had two of his children jailed, and was blocked from returning to the presidency himself. And so the mourners thronging the streets of the capital last Tuesday — never a comfortable sight for the regime — included the rare sight of supporters of the Green Movement, crushed by force in 2009, and vocal critics of Russia, alongside which Iran is fighting in Syria.
read more: Moderate Iran gets a hit as former President Rafsanjani dies from heart attack
Transforming ties with India
Rafsanjani’s flexibility also played a role in the evolution of Iran’s ties with India. In the early 1990s, the situation was delicate. In September 1993, P.V. Narasimha Rao became the first Indian Prime Minister to visit Iran since the revolution.
This, President Rafsanjani noted, was “a turning point”. In March 1994, Iran bailed out India in the UN Commission on Human Rights, blocking a consensus on Kashmir. Five months later, in August, this bonhomie was interrupted.
Mr. Rouhani, then secretary of Iran’s powerful Supreme National Security Council and deputy speaker of parliament, paid a visit to India. Iran’s now-President spoke his mind: on the “persecution” of minorities, on the Babri Masjid, and on the importance of India-Pakistan talks, including “true” representatives of Kashmiris, such as the Hurriyat Conference, to resolve the conflict in the Valley.
This “unfortunate departure from diplomatic norms”, as one Indian newspaper put it at the time, cast a pall over relations. Worse still, in October, Rafsanjani canceled his own visit, concerned at being associated too closely with India while the then Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) was preparing once more to censure India on Kashmir. The snub was taken badly in India.
But within a year, things had changed. Perhaps the Taliban’s spectacular advance in Afghanistan by then with the support of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence had concentrated minds in both countries. And so, in April 1995, Rafsanjani finally arrived in New Delhi, to be greeted by Prime Minister Rao himself.
It turned out to be a landmark visit. Speaking to over 10,000 Shias at Lucknow’s Bara Imambara — and promising ₹10 million for its upkeep — Rafsanjani gave an unexpected endorsement of Indian secularism, dodged a Pakistani journalist’s question on the Babri Masjid (“I believe there is no need for further propaganda in this regard”), and even praised India’s “serious will” on Kashmir while dismissing Pakistan’s call for American mediation.
In substantive terms, Rafsanjani signed a three-way India-Iran-Turkmenistan transit agreement, allowing India to avoid Russian or Ukrainian ports.
He also urged a Tehran-Delhi-Beijing axis — his proposal, sandwiched between India’s 1993 and 1996 border agreements with China, was perhaps less quixotic than it looks today.
Indian officials, in turn, batted away American criticism of Iran, going so far as to mock then U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin for complaining that his trip to Delhi had coincided with Rafsanjani’s. India’s warm welcome to both was itself a foreshadowing of what, a decade later, would come to be called multi-alignment.
Rafsanjani did not single-handedly change the relationship. Structural factors, such as India’s economic liberalization and the situation in Afghanistan, were more important. But as a relative pragmatist, he was able to overcome those in Tehran who had argued for a tilt to Pakistan and a continued focus on Kashmir and communal issues.
Although Ayatollah Khamenei would make a pointed intervention on Kashmir in 2010, calling it a “nation” and comparing it to Gaza, I can find no account of Rafsanjani’s successors, Mr. Ahmadinejad and Mr. Rouhani, of doing anything similar. In fact, Rafsanjani’s trip marked several themes that would shape India-Iranian relations for the next two decades.
One was economic diplomacy focussed on connectivity, energy, and trade. Another was mutual concern over the future of Afghanistan, and Pakistan’s role there. A third was India’s effort — not always successful — to prevent relations with Washington and Tehran from interfering with one another. How have these developed?
read more: Pakistan, China and Russia: New Great Game in South & Central Asia?
Economic diplomacy has only grown in importance, as a rising India has looked to Central Asia and Iran has emerged from the sanctions straightjacket. This explains last May’s historic agreement over the Chabahar port, even if Iran is considerably more relaxed than India about Gwadar, China’s regional infrastructure plans, and the Chinese navy’s presence in the Indian Ocean.
Last year, India’s oil imports from Iran trebled from the previous year, pushing it into fourth place in the ranking of Indian suppliers, and there is pressure on the Reserve Bank of India to allow Iranian banks to open branches in India, which would boost the relatively modest amount of bilateral trade.
This explains last May’s historic agreement over the Chabahar port, even if Iran is considerably more relaxed than India about Gwadar, China’s regional infrastructure plans, and the Chinese navy’s presence in the Indian Ocean.
Afghanistan is a more complicated story, with Tehran now openly flirting with parts of the Taliban even as Delhi and Kabul draw closer together. Recall that Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour’s death in a U.S. drone strike in May 2016 came as he was returning to Balochistan from Iran, possibly after a long stay. Although Taliban delegations have been coming to Iran for years, they attended December’s International Islamic Unity Conference in Tehran with no semblance of secrecy.
Afghanistan is a more complicated story, with Tehran now openly flirting with parts of the Taliban even as Delhi and Kabul draw closer together.
As for the Tehran-Washington balancing act, this has eased in recent years as the Obama administration in the U.S. has taken a softer approach. With Boeing and Airbus queuing up to sell to Iran, it’s easier for India to do so. But Donald Trump will assume the presidency in three days, surrounded by congenital Iran hawks such as National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, Defence Secretary James Mattis, and CIA Director Mike Pompeo. Within the past few days, President-elect Trump has repeated, to a British newspaper, his view that Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran is “one of the worst deals ever made”.
He will not rip it up on Inauguration Day. Neither Europe nor Mr. Trump’s apparent hero, Russian President Vladimir Putin, would agree to a reimposition of sanctions. But with Mr. Rouhani seeking re-election this year, and hardliners breathing down his neck, it’s not difficult to imagine a spiral of U.S. and Iranian steps that leads to its unravelling. Will the self-styled arch-dealmaker demand that American support to India on Pakistan require a quid pro quo from India on Iran?
This piece was first published in The Hindu.
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Russia-Iran ties surge under US pressure
Pakistan in midst of a fourth generation war?
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1 in 5 College Students So Stressed They Consider Suicide
by By Steven Reinberg
Updated: Sep 10th 2018
MONDAY, Sept. 10, 2018 (HealthDay News) -- College can be so stressful that many students think about killing themselves, and some even try, a new study suggests.
Among more than 67,000 students surveyed, over 20 percent said they experienced stressful events in the last year that were strongly associated with mental health problems, including harming themselves and suicidal thoughts or attempts, researchers found.
"What's striking about our findings is that there is a disproportionate number of students who are reporting a large number of exposures to stress they believe is traumatic or difficult to overcome," said lead researcher Cindy Liu. She directs the developmental risk and cultural disparities program at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.
"There are some stresses that are exceeding the capacity of students to cope," she added.
Stressful events defined as traumatic or difficult to handle included: academic pressures; career issues; death of a family member or friend; family problems; intimate and other social relationships; finances; health problems of a family member or partner; personal appearance; personal health problems and sleep difficulties.
Liu's team found that 3 out of 4 students had experienced at least one stressful event in the previous year. And more than 20 percent experienced six or more stressful events in the past year.
Among these students, 1 in 4 said they had been diagnosed with or treated for a mental health problem. Furthermore, 20 percent of all students surveyed thought about suicide, 9 percent had attempted suicide, and nearly 20 percent injured themselves.
These problems were particularly acute among transgender students, with about two-thirds saying that they had hurt themselves and more than one-third saying they had attempted suicide.
In addition, more than half of bisexual students said they had suicidal thoughts and had harmed themselves. More than a quarter of these students had attempted suicide, the researchers found.
Liu said the rate of students suffering from depression or anxiety is much higher now than it was in 2009, when the last survey was conducted.
Among gay, lesbian and bisexual students, for example, rates for suicidal thoughts were higher than in 2009 -- 58 percent versus 48 percent. They were also higher for attempted suicides -- 28 percent versus 25 percent -- and for self-injury -- 51 percent versus 45 percent.
Liu also said as students progress through college, the chances of experiencing stressful situations increases. That may be due to increased academic and other pressures, she said.
Because many students suffering from these mental woes don't seek help, the extent of the problem is most likely much larger, Liu said.
In terms of race, compared with white students, fewer Asian students reported mental health problems. In addition, black students were less likely than white students to report mental health problems or suicidal thoughts or attempts, she added.
Colleges are doing more than ever to help students cope with depression and anxiety, Liu said. In some schools, these efforts include peer counseling in addition to traditional mental health services.
Also, parents can help by being aware of how well their children are coping with college and asking about whether they are depressed or anxious, Liu said.
Besides the stresses mentioned in the study, one suicide expert pointed out that drugs and alcohol can make matters worse.
"For many college students, they are trying alcohol and drugs for the first time," said April Foreman, a board member of the American Association of Suicidology. "We know that these things are really destabilizing."
Moreover, this is an age when you see the rise of personality disorders and other mental health problems, which can also increase the risk for suicide, Foreman said.
She believes that colleges need to provide help for these students, which includes counseling and keeping tabs on them to ensure they are not suicidal. Parents also need to work with the school to provide support and care for their children.
For the study, Liu and her colleagues analyzed data from the 2015 survey conducted by the Association National College Health Assessment. In the survey, students were asked about depression and anxiety, including if they had been diagnosed or treated for a mental health problem.
They were also asked if they had harmed themselves, considered suicide or attempted suicide, and how many stressful situations they had experienced in the last year.
The report was published online Sept. 6 in the journal Depression and Anxiety.
The U.S. National Institute of Mental Health has more on suicide.
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Home > Jewish World
Ringleader of $57 Million Holocaust Survivor Fraud Found Guilty
Semen Domnister, the former Claims Conference employee who was charged with leading a fraud scheme at the Holocaust restitution organization, faces up to 20 years behind bars.
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U.S. prosecutors work to keep lid on $57m Holocaust Claims Conference case
Leaked internal report: Claims Conference management failed to prevent $57 million fraud
Israeli restitution agency sitting on NIS 1b as poor survivors struggle to make ends meet
Semen Domnitser, the former Claims Conference employee who was charged with leading a $57 million fraud scheme at the Holocaust restitution organization was found guilty on all counts by a U.S. District Court jury in Manhattan.
The Wednesday verdict ended a four week trial in which two others, Oksana Romalis and Luba Kramrish, were also found guilty. Twenty-eight people charged in the fraud scheme had pleaded guilty earlier.
“To have it all come to closure is extraordinarily important,” Greg Schneider, the executive vice president of the Claims Conference, told JTA. “We’re obviously very happy that justice has been served, but focus on the needs of Holocaust survivors has always been our main priority.”
The fraud was discovered in 2009 and dated back to 1993. It involved falsifying applications to the Hardship Fund, an account established by the German government to provide one-time payments of approximately $3,360 to those who fled the Nazis as they moved east through Germany, and the Article 2 Fund, through which the German government gives pension payments of approximately $411 per month to needy Nazi victims who spent significant time in a concentration camp, in a Jewish ghetto in hiding or living under a false identity to avoid the Nazis.
Jury deliberations Wednesday took just a few hours. Domnitser could be jailed for up to 20 years.
“With the verdicts against these three defendants, all 31 people who played roles in the theft of $57 million intended to benefit victims of the Nazi genocide – one of the darkest chapters in all human history – have been convicted,” U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement. “We said we would not stop until we brought to justice those who committed these unthinkable crimes and today our objective was accomplished.”
Claims Conference and German government representatives meeting in July, 2012.Mark Katz
News Agencies and Affiliates
Holocaust survivors
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Image: The American College of Cardiology, together with several prominent hospitals in central and eastern China, is debuting a series of educational forums on valvular heart disease prevention, diagnosis, and management (Photo courtesy of iStock).
The American College of Cardiology (ACC; Washington, DC, USA), together with several prominent hospitals in central and eastern China, is debuting a series of educational forums on valvular heart disease prevention, diagnosis, and management. The forums are aimed at physicians, and will be delivered by valvular heart disease specialists from the ACC, who will join local Chinese speakers for lecture-style presentations and interactive discussions based on case studies.
The program will reach out to hundreds of health care professionals in Kunming, Yunnan Province; Wuhan, Hubei Province; and Fuzhou, Fujian Province and support their efforts to offer high-quality, readily accessible care for patients from underserved communities that may be at risk for developing valvular heart disease. In addition to the educational forums for clinicians, ACC presenters will be distributing patient education materials for each hospital to use with patients to ensure they have the latest information regarding risk factors and lifestyle modification strategies.
The trainings sessions, which are supported by the Edwards Lifesciences Foundation (Irvine, CA, USA) Every Heartbeat Matters initiative, will provide a comprehensive overview regarding common manifestations of valvular heart disease, with a focus on the latest updates regarding international guidelines-based patient care. The forums will also seek to improve coordination between different health care specialists who may treat patients with indications of valvular heart disease, including internists, general cardiologists, and cardiac surgeons.
“We are committed to working with our colleagues in China to implement this program in a way that achieves maximum impact for underserved patients in these areas, and furthers the ACC’s mission to prevent cardiovascular disease and improve patient care on a global scale,” said Mary Norine Walsh, MD, president of the ACC. “By directly working with clinicians where they live and practice, we are aiming to change the culture around treating and preventing heart disease in China.”
“We have identified China as one of our focus regions for ‘Every Heartbeat Matters’ because of the many underserved people suffering from heart valve disease in this country,” said Amanda Fowler, executive director of global corporate giving for Edwards Lifesciences Foundation. “By partnering with the ACC to provide expert clinical education, we believe we can exponentially increase our impact on patients and build-up sustainable high-quality care for the people of this region.”
Edwards Lifesciences Foundation
Hospital Antibiotic Policies Improve Prescription Practices
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Help us continue to fight human rights abuses. Please give now to support our work
February 23, 2011 10:33AM EST
Mexico: Investigate Attacks on Chihuahua Human Rights Defenders
Killings, Abductions Underscore Need for Federal Protection System
An activist puts up cardboard crosses with the names of activist Marisela Escobedo Ortiz and Escobedo's daughter Rubí during a protest demanding justice for Escobedo's death outside an office of the state of Chihuahua in Mexico City on February 2, 2011.
© 2011 Reuters
(Washington, DC) - Federal and state authorities should conduct a thorough and impartial investigation into a series of attacks on human rights defenders and their families in the state of Chihuahua, Human Rights Watch said today. The attacks point out the need for a federal system to protect human rights defenders and the importance of incorporating nongovernmental organizations in designing the program, Human Rights Watch said.
In the most recent attacks, on February 15 and 16, 2011, the homes of human rights defenders María Luisa García Andrade and Sara Salazar, both of whom worked with the organization Return our Daughters (Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa), were set on fire in separate incidents.
"Human rights defenders in Chihuahua take on huge risks for themselves and their families by documenting grave abuses," said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. "How many more must be threatened, abducted, or killed before the government takes the steps necessary to keep them safe?"
The house burnings are the latest in a wave of recent attacks and threats against human rights defenders. Two of Salazar's children, Elias and Magdalena Reyes Salazar, as well as Elias's wife, Luisa Ornelas, were abducted on February 7, and their whereabouts remain unknown. On the day that García's house was set on fire, she was accompanying members of the Salazar family as they staged a hunger strike to demand justice in the killings and kidnappings suffered by their family. Salazar's daughter, Josefina Reyes Salazar, also a human rights defender, was killed in January 2010. García's sister, Lilia Alejandra, was raped and murdered in February 2001.
On January 6, a rights defender and poet, Susan Chavez, was brutally murdered in Ciudad Juarez. On December 16, 2010, another human rights defender, Marisela Escobedo Ortiz, was shot to death in front of the state house in Chihuahua City, where she was holding daily protests to demand justice in the case of her daughter, Rubí Marisol Frayre, who was killed in September 2008. Investigations by authorities into these attacks on human rights defenders have consistently failed to lead to the identification and prosecution of those responsible.
García, Salazar, and other staff of the organization Return our Daughters, together with members of the Women's Human Rights Center (Centro de Derechos Humanos de la Mujer), another human rights organization in Chihuahua, were granted protection measures by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in June 2008. Return our Daughters was founded in 2001 by the friends and families of women who had been killed or disappeared in Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua, and aims to "pressure the different levels of government to assume responsibility for this grave and painful problem." The mission of the Women's Human Rights Center, founded in 2005, is to promote women's right to live without violence and advance justice for the women of Chihuahua.
Despite the measures granted by the Commission, members of both groups told Human Rights Watch that federal and state authorities had failed to take adequate steps to provide protection. For example, the Women's Human Rights Center said that repeated requests to reinforce their office windows with bars and install security cameras had not been granted by authorities, and so they paid for the security measures on their own. They said that an emergency telephone number provided by the state government has been out of order since July 2010, when the new governor, César Horacio Duarte Jáquez, began his term.
Other human rights defenders in Chihuahua told Human Rights Watch that, although they have made numerous reports to authorities of receiving threats, the government has not provided increased protection. In late 2009, for example, someone broke into García's home and left a note saying that if she did not abandon her human rights work, she would be executed. While state police accompany Garcia as bodyguards, as a result of these and other death threats, she has repeatedly asked authorities to extend protection to her two children and to install security cameras outside her home.
Lawyers at her organization told Human Rights Watch that they had submitted more than a dozen requests to the Special Prosecutor for Crimes of Violence against Women and Human Trafficking (Fiscalia Especial para los Delitos de Violencia contra las Mujeres y Trata de Personas) and the state prosecutors' office, but that the requests were never acted on until the most recent attack, when her home was set on fire.
In the wake of the December killing of Escobedo Ortiz, the Inter-American Commission again urged Mexico to "take any necessary legal, administrative, or other measures to ensure that events such as this murder do not happen again, in fulfillment of its obligations to prevent and guarantee the basic rights recognized by the American Convention on Human Rights. This includes the need to implement a comprehensive and coordinated policy, backed by adequate resources, to guarantee that cases of violence against women are properly prevented, investigated, and punished, and its victims redressed."
Several human rights defenders in Chihuahua told Human Rights Watch that the killings and other attacks on human rights defenders have generated considerable fear among their peers, and led some members of their organizations to take a lower profile in public activities such as protests demanding an end to impunity in women's murders.
"We realize that we have to be careful - that our work generates risks," a defender from the organization Justice for Our Daughters (Justicia para nuestras hijas), told Human Rights Watch. The group is made up of the family members of women who have been killed or disappeared in Chihuahua.
In the wake of the attack on her home, García decided to flee Chihuahua with her family. Announcing her departure, García wrote, "The terror and the fear that invaded my heart upon seeing death from up close for the first time not only makes me worry for my own life, but I'm also terrified by the idea that something could happen to my children."
Human Rights Watch has repeatedly documented the failure of authorities to protect human rights defenders at risk, such as in a May 2010 letter to Mexico's home minister highlighting the plight of human rights defenders who had to flee Tijuana because of inadequate safety measures. Like many of the human rights defenders in Chihuahua, they too had been granted protection measures by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights but had received little protection. In light of this systematic problem, Human Rights Watch has repeatedly called on the federal government to develop an effective protection mechanism for human rights defenders, urging President Felipe Calderon in a September 2010 letter to make developing such a protection system a priority.
"For a human rights mechanism to be effective, it needs to include preventive, protective, and investigative functions, have a federal mandate, and sufficient resources and independence," Vivanco said. "And if the government wants to design a system that works, human rights organizations need to be fully incorporated into designing, implementing, and monitoring it."
A group of Mexican human rights organizations drafted a model for a mechanism that meets these requirements and presented to authorities in October. While the Calderon administration maintains that it is working on a plan for the system, it has yet to produce one, nor has it adequately incorporated civil society organizations into the consultation and design process, Human Rights Watch said.
"The attacks on human rights defenders in Chihuahua underscore the urgent need for the Calderon government to work with civil society in creating a system that will protect human rights defenders and their families," Vivanco said.
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Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa
María Luisa García Andrade and Sara Salazar
February 3, 2011 News Release
Mexico: Deliver Justice for Killings, Disappearances in Monterrey
May 25, 2010 Letter
Mexico: Letter to Secretary of the Interior regarding repeated threats against human rights defenders in Tijuana
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“I Felt Like the World Was Falling Down on Me”
Adolescent Girls’ Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights in the Dominican Republic
July 10, 2019 News Release
UN: Unprecedented Joint Call for China to End Xinjiang Abuses
July 11, 2019 Statement
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9:10 am EDT, May 8, 2017
Jennifer Morrison is leaving ‘Once Upon a Time’ after 6 seasons
By Brittany Lovely | 9:10 am EDT, May 8, 2017
Once Upon a Time‘s future may be up in the air but the series’ star, Jennifer Morrison made her plans clear — she is leaving the show.
Should the series return for a season 7, it will do so without the Savior. News came from Morrison herself ahead of any official confirmation that Once Upon a Time would return next fall.
Update: Deadline has offered a small update on where the contracts of a few cast members stand. They’re expected to lead season 7:
The contracts of the original Once cast are up at the end of the current season, so Parrilla and Carlyle need new deals while O’Donoghue has another year left on his. I hear Parrilla and Carlyle are close to new pacts. I hear the revamped Once is expected to center on Parrilla, Carlyle, O’Donoghue and The Walking Dead‘s Andrew J. West, who will debut in the upcoming Season 6 finale before joining as a series regular in Season 7.
Jennifer Morrison bids farewell to ‘Once Upon a Time’
Morrison took to her Facebook and Instagram to pen a letter to the series and her fans:
As I reached the end of my 6 year contract on ONCE UPON A TIME, I was faced with a significant decision. ABC, Eddy Kitsis, and Adam Horowitz very generously invited me to continue as a series regular. After very careful consideration, I have decided that creatively and personally, it is time for me to move on.
Emma Swan is one my favorite characters that I have ever played. My 6 years on ONCE UPON A TIME has changed my life in the most beautiful ways. I am absolutely blown away by the passion and commitment of the Oncer fans. I am so honored to have been a central part of such a special show.
I will be forever grateful to Adam, Eddy, and ABC for giving me the gift of playing Emma Swan.
As I move on to other creative endeavors, I will continue to attend the fan conventions whenever my professional schedule allows. I always look forward meeting the fans.
If ABC Network does in fact order a season 7, I have agreed to appear in one episode, and I will most certainly continue to watch ONCE UPON A TIME. The creativity of the show runners has always inspired me, and I cannot wait to see the ways that they continue to develop and reinvent the show.
What does this mean for the series?
Creators Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis have made it clear heading into the finale that several characters’ stories are due to end. Earlier this year it looked as though Robert Carlyle, Colin O’Donoghue and Jennifer Morrison were all exploring options for a potential seventh season.
Naturally, the spotlight was not on Morrison’s future with the show. Now that she is officially parting ways, will we see Emma Swan’s happy ending carry beyond her wedding day?
“The Final Battle” stakes just got a bit higher. The season 6 finale pits the Black Fairy against Emma Swan for a battle that has been in Emma’s destiny since before she was born. In her visions, Emma meets her end in the streets of Storybrooke. Will this news enforce her fate?
A reset in season 7, as Kitsis and Horowitz call it, would give other characters the chance to take over the story. But is that necessary? After all, the catalyst for the series and the glue that hold all these characters together whether through DNA or true love, is Emma Swan.
The creators already took a stroll in another land — remember Wonderland — and it was not great. One thing season 7 could take away from its counterpart is an abbreviated number of episodes.
Additionally, if Once does return, the new season should lean on Jared Gilmore. Henry has the greatest untold story of all.
If the Savior is no longer in the picture, perhaps it is time for the Author to step up and spin a tale!
What do you think of Jennifer Morrison’s departure?
Watch the Once Upon a Time season 6 finale, “The Final Battle,” Sunday, May 14 at 8:00 p.m. ET on ABC.
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12:00 pm EDT, January 11, 2019
John Green’s ‘Turtles All The Way Down’ movie adaptation finds director
By Andrew Sims | 12:00 pm EDT, January 11, 2019
John Green’s book to film adaptation of his latest novel Turtles All The Way Down has found a director.
The movie will be helmed by Hannah Marks, an actress (Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency ) who is in the midst of building a directing career. She co-directed last year’s After Everything starring Marisa Tomei, Gina Gershon, and Jeremy Allen White. (Thanks to THR for the tip)
Fox was behind Green’s previous two book-to-film adaptations, The Fault in Our Stars and Paper Towns. His first (and arguably best) novel, Looking For Alaska, is being turned into a limited series at Hulu.
In his video announcing the Turtles All The Way Down movie, Green said he was hesitant to turn the book into a movie because the story focuses on an internal dialogue. But for the last two months, he and his team have looked for “a way to tell this story visually without relying on the old tropes that are usually associated with portrayals of OCD.”
“We’re going to give it a try,” Green said, warning that “it doesn’t mean that there will definitely be a movie.”
He added he’s excited by the challenge and will be asking for feedback during the development process. But he’s still not casting it.
Turtles All The Way Down was published in October 2017. Given Green and Fox’s productive and positive relationship with one another, it’s not too big a surprise that his latest novel is getting turned into a movie.
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Home > Privacy & Security Litigation > Courts Split on Standing for Consumer Plaintiffs in Data Breach Class Actions
Posted on December 23rd, 2014 By Michelle Kisloff and Arthur Kim Posted in Privacy & Security Litigation
Courts Split on Standing for Consumer Plaintiffs in Data Breach Class Actions
Within the last two weeks, two different federal district courts have issued decisions in high-profile data breach cases that highlight an important issue to watch in 2015: whether consumers whose payment card data was taken have standing to pursue claims against retailers. Northern District of Illinois Judge John Darrah and District of Minnesota Judge Paul Magnuson issued decisions regarding motions to dismiss in consumer class actions against P.F. Chang’s China Bistro Inc. and Target Corp. respectively, with substantially different results. Judge Darrah granted the motion to dismiss the class action against P.F. Chang’s, while Judge Magnuson allowed most of the putative consumer class action against Target to proceed. The rulings took different approaches in examining whether the plaintiffs had sufficiently alleged injury, showing continuing uncertainty over what consumers must plead in order to pursue a claim after a data breach.
P.F. Chang’s Class Action Dismissed
P.F. Chang’s disclosed a data breach on June 12, 2014 that resulted in compromised credit card and debit-card data from 33 restaurant locations. Multiple class actions followed.
In an effort to demonstrate standing, the plaintiffs alleged five types of injury: (1) overpayment for products and services purchased; (2) fraudulent charges; (3) opportunity costs; (4) identity theft; and (5) mitigation damages. The court rejected all of them.
The plaintiffs stated that they had been harmed because they had overpaid for goods and services, on the theory that the price of food and drink at P.F. Chang’s implicitly included a fee for personal information protection which P.F. Chang’s failed to provide. Judge Darrah deemed the argument “unpersuasive” because no injury in fact was alleged, particularly since credit card users are charged the same amount as customers who pay using other methods such as cash.
The court dismissed the plaintiffs’ other damages claims in short order, finding that plaintiffs failed to show “an unreimbursed charge” on their payment cards such that plaintiffs could demonstrate an actual injury, and that the opportunity cost of not having a credit or debit card for the days between learning about a fraudulent charge and receiving a new card “is not a cognizable injury.”
Judge Darrah also cited the 2013 Supreme Court decision Clapper v. Amnesty International USA in dismissing the plaintiffs’ assertion that their efforts to mitigate or prevent injury following the breach created a cognizable injury, noting that costs incurred in anticipation of non-imminent harm do not qualify as injuries.
The plaintiffs filed a notice of appeal. This case now joins another data breach action, against Neiman Marcus (which also succeeded in securing dismissal of the data breach class action against it), in the queue of cases awaiting briefing in front of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in 2015.
Target Putative Class Action Proceeds
Target discovered a breach on December 15, 2013, which resulted in approximately 40 million compromised credit and debit card accounts. The subsequent class actions, on behalf of United States customers, were consolidated into the District of Minnesota.
Last week, the court found that the plaintiffs largely succeeded in establishing standing to sue based on financial injury. Notably, like the unsuccessful P.F. Chang’s plaintiffs, the Target plaintiffs did not allege that they had unreimbursed charges on their payment cards. But they alleged unlawful charges that went unreimbursed for substantial periods of time and restricted or blocked bank accounts. The plaintiffs further alleged that these problems resulted in late payment charges, an inability for the plaintiffs to pay other bills, and additional charged fees. Judge Magnuson found that these charges and financial damages are “fairly traceable” to Target.
Target made many of the same arguments as P.F. Chang’s in the motion to dismiss, stating that the plaintiffs’ injuries were not “actual or imminent” and that plaintiffs failed to allege that card charges were unreimbursed. But the court found these arguments unresponsive to the complaint in this case. Devoting only a page to the threshold standing issue that was pivotal in the P.F. Chang’s case, the court said that “Target ignores much of what is pled . . . . [Their] arguments gloss over the actual allegations made and set a too-high standard for Plaintiffs to meet at the motion-to-dismiss stage.”
The court did dismiss some of the Target plaintiffs’ claims, including some of the state consumer protection claims, state data-breach notification claims, the bailment claim, and an unjust enrichment cause of action based on the same theory as the overpayment theory presented in the P.F. Chang’s litigation. But the bulk of the claims remain intact, and will proceed to discovery. It remains to be seen, of course, whether the plaintiffs will succeed in having a court certify a class based on the individualized-type injuries that allowed them to survive the motion to dismiss, but that decision will be months away.
Tags: data breach, identity theft, standing
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August 14, 2017 2:28pm PT by Lesley Goldberg
Paramount Network's 'American Woman' Changing Showrunners (Exclusive)
'American Woman'
The Alicia Silverstone comedy will finish production on season one with John Wells at the helm.
Paramount Network has yet to launch, but it's already undergoing a showrunner change on one of its first originals.
American Woman showrunner John Riggi (30 Rock) has exited the Alicia Silverstone 1970s-set series, citing creative differences. Instead, executive producer John Wells (Shameless), whose Warner Bros. Television-based production company oversees the project, will take over showrunning duties to complete the first season of the show.
American Woman is poised to launch in the first quarter of 2018 on Viacom's Paramount Network, which is being rebranded from Spike TV. The cable network is looking to be a home for high-end scripted originals.
The half-hour comedy is based on the life of Kyle Richards (The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills) and was developed and picked up to series by Keith Cox for TV Land but was moved to Paramount Network in an effort to broaden the cabler's male-leaning demo. The single-camera series is set in the 1970s amid the sexual revolution and the rise of feminism. Silverstone stars as a mother of two who finds herself facing a new world after she leaves her husband. Mena Survari co-stars in the series from Wells and Riggi. Cox now oversees originals at both TV Land and Paramount Network.
With the move to Paramount Network, American Woman was expected to add a male lead to heavily recur in a bid to broaden out the female-skewing series with its move from niche network TV Land. The role has yet to be recast.
For the time being, Wells will juggle finishing American Woman while executive producing Showtime's Shameless. Should American Woman be renewed for a second season, a new showrunner would be brought in.
Lesley Goldberg
Lesley.Goldberg@THR.com Snoodit
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Home / Articles / Pakistan: How could a 9-month-old infant commit murder?
Pakistan: How could a 9-month-old infant commit murder?
Jumada' al-Akhirah 12, 1435 2014-04-12
An outrageous case of attempted murder registered against a 9-month-old infant Muhammad Musa Khan has been withdrawn after the police removed his name from the First Information Report (FIR). The case, however, shows the unruly nature of the police as well as the dysfunctional legal system that would allow an infant to be brought to court on such charges and fingerprinted. Have they lost their minds?
Lahore, Crescent-online
Saturday April 12, 2014, 12:53 DST
It must be the most bizarre case ever recorded in history. A 9-month-old infant was charged with attempted murder in Lahore earlier this month, and astonishingly presented in court where his poor parents had to plea for bail.
As part of bringing some sanity to this outrageous case, the police struck off the baby’s name from the First Information Report (FIR), an archaic law dating back to British colonial times, enabling the baby’s lawyer to withdraw his plea for bail earlier today.
The nine-month-old baby, Mohammad Musa Khan, became ensnared in the case when a police constable, one Kashif Muhammad charged him together with his father, grandfather and other relatives, a total of 30 people, for attempted murder.
The policeman alleged that baby Musa and his family were involved in throwing rocks at gas company officials that had gone to the low-income neighbourhood of Ahata Thanedaran of Lahore on April 1, the family's lawyer Chaudhry Irfan Sadiq told AFP.
The gas officials were there to collect overdue bills and threatened to cut off gas supplies if the bills were not paid. A crowd gathered to protest against the visit of gas company officials. The people were protesting against gas cuts—a regular occurrence in Pakistan—as well as exorbitant price increases.
The unruly police that habitually create more problems for ordinary people went to work. Nine-month-old baby Musa was also booked together with his family members with attempted murder. He appeared in court in Lahore on April 4.
As the terrified infant screamed, a court official took his fingerprints. The boy’s father, a labourer, calmed the baby by giving him milk from a bottle. “He can’t even lift his milk bottle, how can he throw stones at the police or anyone else?” asked the infant’s teary-eyed grandfather.
Why the presiding judge allowed such an outrageous charge to be presented in court and then have the baby fingerprinted in beyond comprehension.
The news naturally gained widespread media attention forcing the Punjab government to order an inquiry—yes, an inquiry. The policeman was suspended until the inquiry is completed.
Did the case deserve an inquiry or the summary dismissal of the police constable and his public whipping to make him an example to other unruly police officials to prevent them from wasting the state’s resources on such frivolous matters?
“Police are vindictive. Now they are trying to settle the issue on personal grounds, that's why I sent my grandson to Faisalabad for protection,” the baby's grandfather, Muhammad Yasin, told Reuters after he had brought the child to court on April 4.
While the charge against the infant has been withdrawn, it raises serious questions about the judicial system as well as how poor people are humiliated and oppressed. Why has the judge in the case not been dismissed for even entertaining such a case?
The court merely issued a show-cause notice to the policeman over what it called “dereliction of duty”.
There are different sets of rules in Pakistan. The rich can literally get away with murder in connivance with the police; the poor are terrorized and oppressed.
One is reminded of a case in 1997 when Nawaz Sharif was prime minister. Two members of the Punjab provincial assembly were stopped by an honest police officer as they violated a traffic red light. The police officer charged them for breach of traffic rulers.
Instead of appreciating the honesty of the police officer, the provincial assemblymen complained to Sharif who was then enjoying holidays in the summer resort town of Murree. Sharif immediately had the “offending” police officer as well as the Deputy Inspector General (DIG) of police transferred from Lahore.
What was the police officers’ fault: that they had dared stop the elites from violating the law? And what about the infant Musa who had broken no law—he could not at his age—but was charged with attempted murder?
Perhaps, the presiding judge should have asked for some stones to be brought to court and placed before baby Musa to see what he would do with them. After demonstrating that it was impossible for a baby of that age throw them at anyone, the police constable should have been whipped immediately and his superiors dismissed from service.
The judge could have gone further: he could have ordered the gas company officials to appear in court and explain whether they have ever dared to go after the elites—politicians, generals, police officers, or even judges—that have never paid their gas bills in decades. Are the laws meant only to terrorize the poor?
Unless the unruly police are brought under control and an archaic law like the FIR removed from statutes, the people of Pakistan will continue to suffer at the hands of these tyrants.
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Emery and Rimoin’s Principles and Practice of Medical Genetics and Genomics: Foundations
Publisher Academic Press
For decades, Emery and Rimoin’s Principles and Practice of Medical Genetics and Genomics has served as the ultimate resource for clinicians integrating genetics into medical practice. With detailed coverage in contributions from over 250 of the world’s most trusted authorities in medical genetics and a series of 11 volumes available for individual sale, the Seventh Edition of this classic reference includes the latest information on seminal topics such as prenatal diagnosis, genome and exome sequencing, public health genetics, genetic counseling, and management and treatment strategies to complete its coverage of this growing field for medical students, residents, physicians, and researchers involved in the care of patients with genetic conditions. This comprehensive yet practical resource emphasizes theory and research fundamentals related to applications of medical genetics across the full spectrum of inherited disorders and applications to medicine more broadly.
This volume, Foundations, summarizes basic theories, concepts, research areas, and the history of medical genetics, providing a contextual framework for integrating genetics into medical practice. In this new edition, clinically oriented information is supported by full-color images and expanded sections on the foundations of genetic analytics, next generation sequencing, and therapeutics.
With regular advances in genomic technologies propelling precision medicine into the clinic, Emery and Rimoin’s Principles and Practice of Medical Genetics and Genomics: Seventh Edition bridges the gap between high-level molecular genetics and practical application and serves as an invaluable clinical tool for the health professionals and researchers.
Introduces genetic researchers, students, and health professionals to basic theories, concepts, research areas, and the history of medical genetics, offering a contextual framework for integrating genetics into medical practice
Completely revised and up-to-date, this new edition highlights traditional approaches and new developments in the field of medical genetics, including cancer genetics, genomic technologies, genome and exome sequencing, prenatal diagnosis, public health genetics, genetic counseling, and single-cell analysis for diagnosis
Includes color images supporting identification, concept illustration, and method processing
Features contributions by leading international researchers and practitioners of medical genetics
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Q&A with Mae Krell
"I’m very thankful that people are being introduced to me and my music through vulnerability and honesty rather than something else."
Mae Krell.
Mae Krell is a lot of things. They're a teenager, a musician, and a fan of Post Malone. They're vulnerable, honest, and empathetic. Their music is rooted in their concept of identity as both an artist and an 18-year-old beginning to navigate an industry and adulthood.
What’s your songwriting process like - from beginning to finished song?
It’s really a mixed bag! Most of the time I write around one line, though! So I’ll have one idea/line already written, and then I’ll form a story around that basis. Lyrics are usually done first, and then a melody appears- but there isn’t one set way to do it for me. It’s whatever i’m feeling with each particular song, I think.
How has your gender identity affected the way you write music and think about music?
I write music about the way I experience life, and the way I observe the people around me do the same. My gender identity has affected so many experiences and feelings throughout my childhood / teen years. Essentially, I think that all of my music is in one way or another affected by my gender identity, as any important part of one’s identity helps define the art or music they create.
Your recent single “Monsters” has been met with a lot of excitement and buzz. Has it been challenging to take something so intensely personal and share it with so many people?
From the moment that “Monsters” was written to the day it released, I never thought it, honestly. When the track started gaining some attention and the numbers of how many people were listening got relayed back to me, it became so surreal. I think I’m still processing it. It’s definitely scary to think of how publicly vulnerable I’ve made myself, but at the same time, I’m very thankful that people are being introduced to me and my music through vulnerability and honesty rather than something else.
What do you hope your audience will experience when listening to your music?
Honesty. I want people to listen, and feel something. Whatever that feeling is, is personal to them and their own experience. All I want, is for them to feel something.
"I’ve always felt like I’ve had to define and explain so much- identifying myself as queer has become a safe space for me to know that I don’t need to be 100% defined and refined now if I don’t want to be."
What does the word queer mean to you?
I think just being defined/self defining as “other” in one way or another. My first introduction to the word queer as a non-derogatory term was within the lgbt+ community, and since then i’ve openly reclaimed it for my own identity. Although non-binary, I consider myself genderqueer, and just queer in general. I’ve always felt like I’ve had to define and explain so much- identifying myself as queer has become a safe space for me to know that I don’t need to be 100% defined and refined now if I don’t want to be.
What influences and inspires the music that you write?
My experiences and the experiences of the people around me, mostly. Stories I hear, people who I meet- everything and anything can somehow become music for me.
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Sector 62 Nature Park an example to emulate
The Nature Park in Sector 62 here, which was conceived as a world-class spot, is a delight for residents with its clean and well-maintained surroundings. But, it still has a long way to go before truly becoming ‘world-class’.Spread over 48 acres, this dream project of deputy chief minister Sukhbir Singh Badal brings to mind the adage - ‘where there is a will, there is a way’.
chandigarh Updated: Nov 04, 2014 16:28 IST
Jyotsna Jalali
With consistent efforts being put in for its maintenance, most people visiting the park are all praises for it. And the caretakers of the place attribute it to the senior officials’ interest and efforts.
However, the washrooms have plenty of room for improvement.
First Published: Nov 04, 2014 16:27 IST
more from chandigarh
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Howlin says Croke Park agreement still being resisted
Mary Minihan
MINISTER FOR Public Expenditure and Reform Brendan Howlin has said some managers in the public service have not “embraced” Croke Park Agreement reforms enthusiastically enough.
While he welcomed the findings of the agreement’s implementation body, which found it had saved almost €1.5 billion in two years, Mr Howlin appealed to lower and middle management to “identify any barriers” to bringing about change.
“Managers haven’t embraced reform as enthusiastically as I would have liked . . . I want people to go further,” he said. “We’ve a lot more to do. Will there be resistance? Of course there will be resistance. People don’t like change. Some embrace it with more enthusiasm than others and some will resist it.”
The implementation body’s report, published yesterday, found pay bill savings of €650 million were achieved during the year under review, April 2011-March 2012, driven largely by reductions in staff numbers. Although this figure could be reduced to €521 million if the maximum possible recruitment was factored in, an estimated €810 million in pay bill savings would be achieved in the first two years of the four-year agreement.
Over the period 2009-2015, the exchequer pay bill is expected to fall by €3.8 billion, or €3.3 billion net of expected increases in public service pension costs. So-called “non-pay” savings deriving from administrative efficiency amounting to €370 million were recorded in the same period, bringing non-pay savings over two years to €678 million.
Staff numbers were reduced by 11,530 to fewer than 292,000 during the review period, and by 17,300 over two years. Some 8,000 staff retired by February 29th, 2012. The expiry of the so-called “grace period”, allowing staff to avail of pension payments calculated on the basis of pre-pay cut rates, led many to leave by that date.
The Government’s target is to reduce staff numbers to 282,500 by 2015. Mr Howlin said the amount of money saved by the terms of the agreement was crucial, but the reform element was equally important. “The framework of Croke Park has allowed us to considerably downsize numbers and maintain not only industrial peace, which I think is the envy of many of my European colleagues, but also has allowed us to do more with less,” he said.
“Very significant” voluntary movements across the public service had filled gaps, with 4,500 being redeployed or reassigned across the health sector. In education, 950 primary and 200 secondary level teachers were redeployed.
Mr Howlin said 1,000 community welfare officers had moved into Social Welfare and 750 Fás workers had also been redeployed. Asked if consideration should be given to cutting pay rather than numbers, Mr Howlin said the Government had taken a “business-like” approach. “Obviously that is not infinite. You can’t continue to deliver services with an ever-reducing volume of people.” He thanked the public servants who had changed their work practices, “worked longer, worked harder, worked differently”.
Fianna Fáil’s Seán Fleming said the Minister gave no specific information on severance payments and he accused the Government of having “taken its foot off the pedal” in reducing the exchequer pay bill.
The Civil Public and Services Union called on the Government to trigger the “pay-back clause of the agreement”. Employers’ body Ibec said the payment of increments, reform of the allowances system and an overhaul of “outdated” sick leave policies had to be addressed. Chambers Ireland called for cuts to allowances and a pause on increments.
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Battery buses: Prague’s electrifying future
Posted: 11 October 2017 | Jan Barchanek (DPP) | No comments yet
Jan Barchanek, Deputy Manager, Bus Operation Unit, Prague Public Transit Company (DPP), explains how electrification has become Prague’s most economically viable option for environmentally cleaner bus routes.
The DPP is continuously working to reduce bus emissions, and a large part of this work is testing alternative technologies and fuels. At various points, we have tested LPG and CNG, as well as hybrid vehicles. For several years, some buses operated with diesel emulsion (GECAM) and 100% bio-diesel.
However, due to limited external financial sources and subsidies, we had to consider economic aspects as well as environmental benefits. With this in mind, bus electrification was selected as the most plausible method to further strategic development as, despite its initially high costs, it enables zero local emissions. There’s even potential for the economic balance of e-bus operation to be improved by using the internal synergetic effects of other DPP operations, for example its underground or tram supply network.
The testing phase
The DPP has been testing e-buses with various charging systems since 2011, and these tests have proven valuable in providing significant new information and experiences; existing vehicles and technologies could not meet the operational requirements of diesel buses.
Negotiations with different contractors have resulted in the ‘Battery Bus for Prague Pilot Project’, which has been joined by SOR Libchavy s.r.o., a vehicle manufacturer, and Cegelec a.s., a supplier of electric equipment and charging technology.
The project supplies e-buses with opportunity charging from the city’s tram supply network using a short section of a two-pole (trolleybus) trolley. To consider battery buses a viable option, they need to be able to operate for an entire day, which would typically see them cover 250km. They also need to be a zero-emission solution that can still provide electrical heating and air-conditioning.
The DPP is preparing to purchase 14 e-buses with similar two-pole charging technology after positive testing so far
To meet these requirements, the manufacturer offered the EBN 11, a bus that is 11.1m long, with engine power of 120kW and a battery capacity of 172kWh. Use of the two-pole charging system, while keeping the vehicle’s construction simple (single isolation), was enabled by the installation of a stationary galvanic separator – this secures system safety, and transforms the variable tram section voltage (400-1000V DC) into a safe, stable charging voltage for the e-bus (750V DC).
Vehicle and charging infrastructure tests started in June 2015, and since September 2015 have seen the battery bus used in common operation with passengers on bus lines 163, 188 and 213. As of 31 August 2017, a total distance of 144,000km has been covered by the battery buses, with daily distances amounting to 260-280km on weekdays, and up to 340km at weekends. The project is still ongoing, and now uses a new generation vehicle type, SOR NS12.
Two-pole technology testing
The frequently used multiple-pole charging systems enable a complex ‘turnkey’ solution even for operators with no experience of electric traction. The two-pole solution used in Prague is more difficult: it requires galvanic separation, or vehicle double isolation, but it offers significant simplification of the charging interface (trolley vs pantograph) and compatibility with the operation of (battery) trolleybuses. The construction method is easy, and it can be moved when needed, such as during closures. Furthermore, there is good leeway for stopping in the charging place – other systems require precision to the centimetre – and the option of charging more vehicles at one trolley. Long-term tests have shown the real plausibility of two-pole charging systems, and have also enabled a practical assessment of its limits (maximum charging performance, the influence of different climates, etc.).
Economically effective e-bus operation needs to cover the ancillary expenses of the vehicle and charging infrastructure. Operational tests have shown that even in winter, when power consumption is increased due to electrical heating, the energy costs can be 50% lower compared to diesel operations, and during the summer, this figure rises to 70%. The common purchase of electricity, use of existing tram charging infrastructure, and use of ‘free’ energy from tram recuperation, alongside convenient selection of lines and circuits, means that the total economic balance of the project is comparable to diesel bus operations. As a result, the project was implemented without EU funds or other subsidies, unlike most similar projects in the Czech Republic and abroad.
Electrification of line 207
Based on the positive test results, the next step is full electrification of bus line 207 – the route that connects Žižkov with the city centre. The DPP is preparing to purchase 14 e-buses with similar two-pole charging technology. Opportunity charging will take place at Ohrada terminal, using the tram converter station Krejcárek, while the Vršovice depot will serve as the night battery changing and balancing point, as the tram (ex-trolley) converter station is located there.
During the pilot project, night charging was only possible via cable, but in Vršovice, 14 fully equipped charging trolley points will be built. This system will optimise the charging power and time in accordance with both the battery and the required time of morning departure. The expected economic balance when compared to a diesel operation is slightly worse on this line owing to the lower operational speed and the full provision of all shifts, including those that are less effective. Nevertheless, the non-financial advantages – a decrease in emissions and noise – are very important for the city centre. The operation is set to begin in the second half of 2018, and before then, the charging infrastructure must be built and the e-buses tendered.
In-Motion Charging project
By the end of 2017, we are aiming to launch another pilot project, ‘E-Bus with In-Motion Charging’. This project is being run for the busiest lines (articulated buses, long daily routes and hilly terrain) where opportunity charging may prove to be technically or economically challenging. It will test the possibilities of in-motion charging, so that the positive effects of the zero-emission transport can also be felt on Prague’s busiest bus routes.
For in-motion charging tests, approximately 1km of trolleybus trolley is being prepared in Prosecká street. In the first stage, the operation will be tested from Palmovka to Letňany (a distance of 10km), where in addition, opportunity charging will also be performed at Palmovka terminal. The main difference is that the buses will be driving under trolley for only 10-15% of line length, compared to the usual 70-90%). The project should verify the technical, operational and legislative plausibility of the solution, but it is hoped it will also find an ideal combination of vehicle and infrastructure parameters (battery capacity, ratio of driving under trolley, length of charging breaks for opportunity charging, etc.).
The development of e-mobility in bus operations is a key part of Prague’s long-term emission reducing strategy. The results and experience gained so far show that success depends on close cooperation and the sharing of knowledge and experience throughout the DPP. Where other public transport operators might think that e-bus operations need to be built from the ground up, the DPP is proving that synergy between different modes of transport offers an undisputed advantage.
Jan Barchanek is Deputy Manager of the Bus Operation Unit for the Prague Public Transit Company (DPP). In this role, he is responsible for operational management, quality management and projects of new technologies in bus operation. He has been involved in numerous international projects since 2003 (CIVITAS, SPUTNIC, COST TU 603 BHLS, EBSF, 3IBS, ZEEUS, ELIPTIC). He has been a member of the UITP Bus Committee since 2011, and has been a lecturer at UITP training programmes since 2015.
Alternative Power, Fleet Management & Maintenance
Issue 1 2017
Related modes
By Jan Barchanek (DPP)
Standardisation of e-bus charging is one step closer to becoming a reality
By Intelligent Transport
Andy Lord appointed new Managing Director of London Underground
By Ricard Font i Hereu
Milan choose Solaris to supply up to 250 electric buses
Your email Recipient email What colour is grass?
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Tim Cope Journeys Launched
by Internetrix
You may remember in our March Newsletter the introduction of Tim Cope as one of our newest clients.
Named as one of the top 25 athletes in the world by Outside Magazine in 2002, Tim is a Victorian Adventurer, who has made his mark on the world through a number of amazing feats, most notably his 10,000km journey from Moscow to Beijing on a recumbent bicycle.
Tim has recently pushed his first book, 'Off the Rails' which complements his incredible documentary DVD of this amazing tale of challenge, perseverance and adventure through some of the most isolated parts of the world, including Siberia, Outer Mongolia and the Gobi Desert.
Tim's new website, www.timcopejourneys.com is specifically dedicated to his previous journeys (including a three month, 24 hour per day rowing trip down the length of the Siberian Yensiey, the 5th largest river in the world) and a preview for his upcoming journeys.
Featuring an amazing photo gallery, discussion boards and more, this site is designed to act as a living, breathing resource for Tim and his interested followers as he prepares for his next journey, a walk to the North Pole. Because it is driven by a Content Management System (CMS) Tim can update the site from anywhere without technical training or software
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First-timer discovers the sheer pleasure of Blackpool
Published: 10:54 Updated: 11:21 Thursday 16 August 2018
My name is Jan and I have a confession. Until a few weeks ago, I’d never set foot in Blackpool. In truth, I felt like I had been there because of its almost mythical status in the popular culture of the UK.
Happily, this cheerful old Lancashire seaside resort managed fine without me and is still a perennial favourite with Scots of all ages. After going through more ups and downs than a Pleasure Beach rollercoaster, Blackpool is experiencing a renaissance in popularity with Scots. Easy to get to by train, bus or car from most major conurbations in Scotland, it’s the ideal spot for a short break away from it all.
Together with a friend, Jill, I recently travelled to Blackpool from Glasgow to Preston and took a little local train on to Blackpool. The whole trip took less than three hours.
The stylish Big Blue Hotel, our base for this short break, sits right next to Blackpool Pleasure Beach, which even has its own railway station. The first place we head to after dropping our bags off, is Blackpool Tower.
This famous old girl has dominated the skyline of the town since 1884. Inspired by the architecture – and tourist pulling-power of the Eiffel Tower in Paris – it soars 380 feet into the air, which on the day we visited, was completely cloudless.
If you have a head for heights, beneath your feet, there’s a five centimetre-thick glass viewing platform, from which you can gaze out across the clear waters of the Irish Sea. In 2016, Blackpool South beach was awarded a blue flag for excellent sea water quality and on the day we visit, it glitters in the sunshine.
At the top of the Tower, which has a bar serving drinks and snacks, the famous Blackpool Promenade and its many attractions – Sea Life, the Pleasure Beach, Madame Tussauds, Nickelodeon Land, Sandcastle Waterpark, Blackpool Zoo and Blackpool Model Village and Gardens – spread out below like a smorgasbord of tempting treats.
The town of Blackpool is a jumble of buildings and streets while the North West of England lies beyond with views over Bowland, up to the Lake District and on a clear day down to Liverpool and across to the Isle of Man.
I gaze down through the glass to the pavement below where Gordon Young’s giant artwork, The Comedy Carpet, is being examined by ant-like tourists, checking out the legions of famous comedy names who have played Blackpool’s stages over the years.
I can also make out the shiny gold roof of the Beach House Bistro and Bar on the seafront where we later partake of a fine seafood dinner.
Before leaving the Tower, we take a look-see at its elegant old ballroom, which regularly makes a star appearance in Strictly Come Dancing. Dating back to 1894, The Blackpool Tower Ballroom is famous for its unique sprung dance floor and spectacular architecture and remains a destination for dance fans from across the globe. On the day we visit, Chinese ballroom dancers – visiting for an international dance festival – are shimmying expertly across the dance floor. We watch mesmerised as we take afternoon tea, listening to the sounds of the famous old Wurlitzer organ.
In the course of our two-day trip, we visit several attractions thanks to our Blackpool Resort Pass, which costs £57.50 per person. When we were there, Blackpool Pleasure Beach was gearing up for the arrival of ICON, a £16.25m rollercoaster to end all rollercoasters, which offers riders the same G-force an F1 driver experiences. Another friend partook of the joys the following week and she said it actually felt like she was flying…
Jill and I had a real laugh in Madame Tussauds Blackpool, cosying up to Simon Cowell on a couch and sitting next to Ant and Dec on the famous “I’m a Celebrity” desk, musing on whether Ant would return to the hot jungle seat at the end of this year.
We also had a wee sing-song with Susan Boyle and wondered if Steven Gerrard’s model would become a go-to figure for Rangers FC fans.
If you are visiting with young children, they will love Sea Life Blackpool. There are more than 2,500 sea creatures in this attraction. New for 2018 is Turtle Rescue; an interactive journey in which visitors of all ages are encouraged to become a turtle care expert as they travel on a real-life journey to understand what is involved in successfully rehabilitating a turtle.
Blackpool really does have something for everyone; old, young, inbetweeners and cynical middle-aged folk like me! There’s a year-long calendar of events, including the famous Blackpool Illuminations Switch-On, which takes place on 31 August, eight nights worth of summertime fun in the shape of Late Night Riding and Fireworks at the Pleasure Beach and Livewire Festival, featuring Kenny Rogers, Boyz II Men, Matt Goss and more on the weekend of 22-26 August.
One thing’s for sure, Blackpool… I’ll be back.
https://www.visitblackpool.com/resort-pass/
Jan Patience
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header_15.jpg
Haeder01
http://teachings.sant-kirpal-singh.org/images/stories/ks_literatur_header2/header_15.jpg
The Masters are not the monopoly of anyone, they come for everyone not for one group of humanity or another. They give a knowledge which is beyond the senses, which is an ocean of intoxication – a mighty effulgence of bliss.
Spirituality – What it is
By Sant Kirpal Singh, from the book "Spirituality – what it is"
SPIRITUALITY: Introduction TO THE HONEST SEEKER
"God is in the soul and the soul is in God, as the sea is in the fish and the fish is in the sea." St. Catherine
The term 'Spirituality' is hard to define. The scope and extent of the subject is so vast and varied in its many aspects that it can hardly be put into so many words. Suffice it to say that it deals with the immutable and eternal facts of life- the active principles that are enlivening tile entire creation.
The quest for the 'Spirit' and for the 'Laws of Spirituality' has ever been in the human breast from the dawn of consciousness in man; yet with all its hoary antiquity, the subject retains its freshness as ever before and shall continue to do so. The Spirit or Soul is the vital flame in man, in the light and life of which he lives and has his being, and no wonder that in every clime and in every age, the leaders of spiritual thought – the sages and seers, the saints and sadhs- have attempted to solve the mystery of life.
The subject of Spirituality is concerned purely with the problems connected with the Spirit or Soul – to wit, its origin or source, what it is, its seat in the body and its relation thereto, how it functions in the physical world, whether it is possible to separate it at will from the body and bodily adjuncts, the mind and the senses, and if so, the various processes connected therewith. It deals with the spiritual journey through different spiritual planes and the spirit's capability of traversing the same, the ultimate goal or destination to which this journey leads, and other allied topics, such as the welfare of the spirit, how to feed it and with what, for on its health depends the health of the mind and the body. These are some of the vital questions that fall within the purview of our inquiry.
Spirituality is more a practical science than a mere theoretical dissertation. The various scriptures of the different religions of the world provide us with the theoretical aspect only and cannot give us a demonstrative experience of the Reality in the laboratory of the human body. Writings like the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Avesta of the Zoroastrians, the Tripatakas of the Buddhists, the Gospels, the Quran, the Adi Granth, Triratanas of the Jains, and other canonical literature and extra-canonical works, with their commentaries, etc., medieval and modern (the Mahabhasyas, the Angas and Upangas, etc.), all might point the Way but have no power to take us there. Their chief merit lies in the spade-work they do in creating an interest in the aspirants for Paravidya or the Knowledge of the Beyond. But the Transcendental Experience can be gained only from a Living Master, a Murshid-i-Kamil, well versed and competent in the practical aspects of Spirituality. Life and Light can come only from the Living-impulse of a Master Saint, whose glance of grace is more than enough to quicken higher life in the disciple.
The greatest teachers of humanity, make use, according to the individual needs of the disciple, of all the three methods: (i) Anva or Gross, that is, imparting spiritual instructions by word of mouth; (ii) Shakta or subtle, that is, instilling higher spiritual consciousness in the disciple without his having to go through the external sadhan or discipline; and (iii) Shambhava or Transcendental, that is, raising the disciple, in infinite mercy, to the highest stage of Realisation without his having to do anything at all. As an unerring guide on the inner spiritual path, he appears in his Radiant Form (Guru-Dev) and accompanies the spirit when it transcends the body consciousness while living or at the time of death, and as a veritable Master of Truth (Satguru) he works out the Divine Plan. The need for such a Master-soul who can at once work on the various planes, as Guru, Guru-Dev and Satguru, cannot be over-emphasized.
In a nut-shell 'Spirituality' contents itself only with "Self-Realisation" and "God-Realisation." It has, therefore, nothing to do with institutionalised religions or religiosity, the outward show of religion that we mostly make nowadays.
Spirituality may be distinguished from sectarianism. While most of the great religions of the world tend to become more and more sectarian in their outlook, Spirituality ever remains universal, with its appeal to people of all the religions who can come to and join this Studium Generale or Universal Mystery School for practical training. As opposed to the sealed or codified religions, Spirituality is an open book of God, with the living touch of the Masters who present it from age to age in the spirit of the age. In this scientific age, it is presented as any other science, with mathematical precision and results verifiable on scientific lines.
The term 'Spirituality' is not to be confused with (i) Spiritism, or belief in the existence of spirits apart from matter, which, when disembodied, haunt the nether regions as ghosts, or the lower planes of the astral regions as angels. (ii) Spiritualism, or belief in the survival of human personality and in communication between the living and those who have 'passed on,' in the form of spirit rapping, planchette writing, etc. (iii) Mesmerism, or producing a state of trance by the consciously exerted 'animal magnetism' of the operator so as to subordinate the will-power of his subject. (iv) Hypnotism, which produces a kind of deep sleep in which the conscious-ness is suspended and the patient is made susceptible to the suggestions of the hypnotist. Spirituality, on the contrary, is the science of developing Higher Consciousness in Man on the level of the soul, and making one transcend from mere body consciousness into Cosmic Consciousness and further on into Super Consciousness, so as to enable one to understand the working of the Divine Plan.
With these few words, I would request the seeker after Truth to carefully peruse and study the pages that follow, so as to understand the true significance of the most important and yet mostly neglected subject, the subject of Spirituality.
Kirpal Singh, Sawan Ashram, Delhi.
KIRPAL SINGH TEACHINGS BIENVENIDO
TO THE READER
UNITY OF MAN – LA UNIDAD DEL HOMBRE
La corona de la vida
Baba Jaimal Singh
Charlas Matinales
Godman
Jap Ji: The message of Guru Nanak
Spiritual elixir
Naam or Word
The mystery of death
The night is a jungle
The fundamental truths
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Hurricane, rain hasn't dampened enthusiasm for Web.com Tour Championship
Garry Smits @gsmitter
The story of the first two years of the Web.com Tour Championship at the Atlantic Beach Country Club has been mostly about Mother Nature.
The first attempt in 2016 was washed out when Hurricane Matthew brushed the area. After two perfect days of weather last year, which produced low scores (led by Sam Saunders' 59), rain plagued the event and forced a Monday finish.
Jonathan Byrd of St. Simons Island, Ga., won the tournament, closing with rounds of 64-67 to beat Saunders and Shawn Stefani by four shots at 24-under-par 260.
Will fortunes change for the penultimate event of the Web.com Finals, which will be Sept. 20-23?
"We're going for four straight days of great weather this year," Web.com CEO Dave Brown on Wednesday at the Web.com Media Day at Atlantic Beach.
The good news is that unlike the previous two years, when the tournament's home at Atlantic Beach was on a trial basis, the Web.com Tour saw enough enthusiasm on a local and corporate basis last year to sign a four-year deal to bring the event back through 2021.
Brown said that commitment has been reflected in even more support -- which should increase even more since grounds tickets are free to the public this year. Fans should visit webtourchampionship.com for information.
"There's more enthusiasm this year and it's building every year," Brown said. "We've got more sponsors doing more fun things this year because they know if it works, they can come back and do it again. Having the continuity helps."
Among the new fan features will be the Florida Blue Lounge near the tournament entrance, with interactive indoor golf contests, Taps and Tacos near the ninth green, with $1 beer specials on Friday and Saturday for every birdie made at the hole, and the Patriots Outpost for military and their families, between the ninth and 10th holes.
From last year to this year, our priority was to enhance the fan experience," iourament director Adam Renfroe said.
The week will begin with the North Beach Kickoff to Golf at the Beaches Town Center, from 5-9 p.m. The event will include live music and food vendors.
Atlantic Beach board president Andy Pitler said the club appreciates the faith the Web.com Tour has put in the venue and the area.
"The Atlantic Beach membership takes a lot of pride in this tournament," Pitler said. "It's an opportunity to see these professionals close-up and it brings business to the area and we're able to help charity at the same time. The course is in great shape and we're looking forward to a great week."
The Web.com Finals are at the Canterbury Golf Club near Cleveland this week for the second leg and will be in Boise, Idaho, next week. In addition to the top-75 players on the Web.com Tour regular-season money list, the field contains players who finished outside the top-125 on the PGA Tour FedEx Cup points list this season.
Among the players who potentially will play at Atlantic Beach are multiple PGA Tour winners such as Stuart Appleby, Chad Campbell, Hunter Mahan, Ben Crane, Lucas Glover, Tim Herron and area residents David Lingmerth and Matt Every.
Also in the field will be Julian Suri of Ponte Vedra Beach, who is an exempt member of the European PGA Tour and qualified for the Finals off the PGA Tour’s non-member FedEx Cup points list.
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Texas Sues FDA Over Seized Execution Drugs
By Jolie McCullough Texas Tribune • Jan 3, 2017
iStock.com
Texas on Tuesday sued the Federal Drug Administration for what it says is an "unreasonable delay" in deciding whether to allow the delivery of execution drugs from India. The lawsuit comes more than 17 months after the FDA seized 1,000 vials of sodium thiopental at a Houston airport.
In July 2015, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice tried to import sodium thiopental, an anesthetic previously used in the state for executions, according to the lawsuit. The drugs have been in the custody of the FDA since then.
In a tentative decision in April, the FDA said the drugs appeared misbranded and unapproved, effectively barring TDCJ from importing the drug, but no final decision has been made. On Tuesday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed suit in Galveston, imploring the federal court for the southern district of Texas to force the agency to make a final decision.
In a statement announcing the lawsuit, Paxton said the only two possible reasons for the delay are "gross incompetence or willful obstruction."
“The FDA has an obligation to fulfill its responsibilities faithfully and in a timely manner," Paxton said. "My office will not allow the FDA to sit on its hands and thereby impair Texas’ responsibility to carry out its law enforcement duties.”
Maurie Levin, a capital defense attorney specializing in lethal injection, said it's not surprising that it would take a federal agency a long time to make a decision. But, she added: "The FDA is doing their job. It's Texas that broke the law."
The lawsuit claims the import is legal partially because the drugs are being used solely for “law enforcement” purposes — executions. The corrections department had obtained an import license from the Drug Enforcement Administration before purchasing the drugs, according to Jason Clark, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
A spokeswoman for the FDA said the agency does not comment on pending litigation, but has previously maintained that the import of the drug is illegal because it is not currently approved in the U.S.
Texas hasn’t used the drug in executions since 2011, when it was part of a three-drug cocktail. The state has used only pentobarbital in executions since 2012 and has enough for at least the nine executions currently scheduled, Clark said Tuesday.
“We cannot speculate on the future availability drugs, so the agency continues to explore all options including the continued use of pentobarbital or alternate drugs to use in the lethal injection process,” Clark said.
No state has used sodium thiopental in an execution since Alabama in March 2011, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
The Texas Tribune provided this story.
lethal injections
Death Sentences And Executions Are Down, But Voters Still Support Death Penalty Laws
By Rebecca Hersher • Dec 20, 2016
In 2016, 30 people were sentenced to death in America, and 20 people were executed.
Those numbers are the lowest in decades, according to a report by the Death Penalty Information Center, which collects data on capital punishment in the United States, and advocates against the death penalty.
The 2016 numbers fit with a multi-decade trend. Death sentences and executions have been declining steadily since the mid-1990s.
In An Unusual Year For The Death Penalty, Texas Didn't Have The Most Executions
By Jolie McCullough Texas Tribune • Dec 15, 2016
Graphic by Todd Wiseman
Texas — the state that has executed the most people by far since the death penalty was reinstated in the United States 40 years ago — had the nation's second-busiest death chamber this year for the first time since 2001. Georgia’s nine executions in 2016 surpassed the Lone Star State’s record-low number of seven.
Report Finds Almost 7,000 In-Custody Deaths In Texas
By Johnathan Silver Texas Tribune • Jul 28, 2016
txking / Shutterstock.com
Almost 7,000 individuals in Texas have died while in police custody or behind bars over the past 10 years, according to an online report released Wednesday by a University of Texas at Austin research institute.
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Millennials move to North Dakota
By Cynthia McLaughlin |
Posted: Thu 7:14 PM, Oct 19, 2017
BISMARCK, N.D. - A generation ago, North Dakota was concerned about a long-term trend of young people moving out of state.
But now we have the highest rate of in-migration of any state in the nation.
A strong economy, growing industries and low unemployment rates are very appealing to the incomers, especially one group. Millennials, ages 18 to 34 have been taking over. According to the State's Census Office, North Dakota has the highest percentage of Millennials of any of the 50 states. The younger generation followed the money.
“From the oil exploration, all the other jobs that were created as a result of that was really what brought people into the state,” said Kevin Iverson, Manager of the Census Office.
With this hip new crowd, comes some fresh changes.
“Everything that goes with the younger crowd. More outdoors activities, more sports, more diversity in terms of restaurants and places to pick up beverages,” said Iverson.
Millennials are here for the long run, they are buying houses here and a lot of them. North Dakota represents two of the top five cities for Millennial home buyers.
Dickinson is at number five and Williston made number three, with 55 percent of the town's home buyer population.
“The younger generation is seeing opportunity to move to Williston. They're putting roots here, they're seeing that they have an opportunity for a job and a great paying job,” said Tate Cymbaluk, a real estate broker in Williston.
Tate said the average salary in Williston is about 80 thousand dollars. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate in North Dakota is only 2.7 percent.
Iverson said North Dakota became younger than the national average in about 2009, and the median age continues to drop.
Minot State's Old Main getting an energy efficient upgrade
MSU Summer Theatre looks to renovate and expand
New outdoor mural being painted in downtown Minot
Central Dakota Communications Center plans to move into the Dakota Carrier Network Building
Bishop Zipfel passes away
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littoral | key west life of letters
When Faced with Impossible Options:
a conversation with Lyndsay Faye
Posted on 01/06/2014 , updated on 10/07/2016 by Nancy Klingener
Lyndsay Faye. Photo by Gabriel Lehner.
Lyndsay Faye is the author of three inventive, intriguing, and carefully researched novels that interweave fiction, the historical record, and popular culture. Her debut novel Dust and Shadow: an Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John H Watson is a tribute to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s archetypal detective hero, Sherlock Holmes, and follows his attempt to solve the real-life killings of Jack the Ripper. In The Gods of Gotham and its sequel Seven for a Secret, Faye tracks the development of the New York City Police Department in the 1840s through the eyes of bartender-turned-lawman Timothy Wilde.
This interview with KWLS board member Nancy Klingener took place over email during the past few months. In it, Faye and Klingener discuss the parallels between acting and writing, the joys and sufferings of historical research, and the appeal of characters both fictional and real. Along the way they rank love over crime, adventure over mystery, and we learn a few secrets of Faye’s forthcoming novel, the third and—spoiler alert—final installment of the Timothy Wilde series. (Editor)
Nancy Klingener: I guess I’ll start out by asking how you came to writing, generally, and writing crime fiction specifically. You started out as an actress, right? There are obvious similarities in the work—you’re dealing with words and portraying characters, many of them fictional. Do you find them to be similar jobs? How do they differ?
Lyndsay Faye: Interesting question. Well, as is the case universally, I came to reading before anything else. It’s impossible to come to writing without owning a deep admiration for some story or other, and I was bullying my little brother into staged plays I’d written when we were quite young—dressing him in khakis and gluing cotton balls to his chest and declaring him Mr. Tumnus from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, that sort of thing. My parents were big into reading to us, big into storytelling. I’m very lucky I grew up in that environment. I can’t recall a time when I wasn’t around tales of high adventure.
Being trained as an actress was extremely useful to me as a novelist, and on a macroscopic level they’re exceedingly similar while on the microscopic level they’re as different as creatively possible. In the broad scope, skills I learned—mimicry, attention to detail, a feel for dialogue, sense of dramatic tension, importance of mood, the value of making specific and detailed choices, how crucial it is to create the strongest emotional dilemmas possible for your characters, I could go on all day really, all that’s quite similar. Conversely, on a small scale, theater is a collaborative process. It’s all about interaction. When I’m sitting at my laptop, it’s just me and the nutters in my head. Not to de-emphasize the roles of my agent or editor at all, but the manuscript, that’s all on me, baby. It’s extremely solitary, especially by comparison.
NK: How did you move from acting to writing? Had you been writing all along or did you make a decision to focus on writing instead of performance?
LF: None of this was planned. My career is perennially a surprise when I wake up in the morning. I hadn’t been writing at all—auditioning in New York City is simply very, very difficult. I wasn’t smart enough to create my own work, to do showcases or write cabaret acts for myself. I just kept marching into hallways where there were dozens of me. After a while, I felt as if I lacked autonomy over my career entirely. Of course, I’m still proud of how far I made it, still pay my Actor’s Equity dues every six months. But I didn’t have the drive—I can still be happy without being on stage, telling tales in another way, and some folks can’t.
There wasn’t any conscious decision to focus on writing either, certainly never ever ever as a career. My first novel is a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, and it was an unabashedly dark rip-roaring fanfiction pitting him against Jack the Ripper with scads of the true-crime elements incorporated. I thought maybe a Sherlockian small press might pick it up, or lacking that avenue I could publish it as an e-book for my own gratification. No one was more shocked than myself when I found a talented agent and was published by Simon and Schuster. And I mean no one.
NK: I want to get back to Sherlock and Dust & Shadow but first I’d like to ask about your own creation, Timothy Wilde, the protagonist in your most recent two books The Gods of Gotham and Seven For A Secret—and I hope many more in the future. Where did Timothy come from, and did you start with him, or the setting, or perhaps with George Washington Matsell, who really was New York’s first police commissioner and who appears as a character in those two novels?
LF: Thank you! Timothy came from an abstract concept, which was day one, cop one of the New York Police Department. It’s such an infamous law enforcement body, known the world over, and I simply wanted to see what this group of ragtag men looked like who were meant to defend the populace, but before they had any notion of what they were doing. I wanted the first day of school, not Civil War-Era or Roosevelt reform. Michael Chabon says we write fiction to fill in the gaps in the map a la Heart of Darkness, and I think that’s entirely true—I’d read fantastic books about the NYPD during other time periods, but never about their mythical beginnings. Beginnings are powerful stuff. So research into the world of 1845 New York all began with my wanting to know the NYPD’s origins. If the force had been founded in 1826 or in 1852, The Gods of Gotham would have had a different plot line, and it would have taken place in 1826 or 1852.
The rest of Tim came out of a combination of research and personal experience, as I think any historical character does. I write fairly unabashed hero stories, so I needed Timothy to be his own moral compass—that meant he wasn’t a Tammany insider, and thus needed an older sibling to get him on the copper-star force, who were entirely complicit with the Democratic Party’s agenda. That also meant he resembled some of the contemporary radical abolitionists I researched. Every investigator is indebted to Sherlock Holmes, so to draw a strong line between them, Tim wears his heart on his sleeve and finds his own police work much less competent than it actually is. He’s sympathetic and self-deprecating. I needed him to be observant, and I worked in restaurants for years, so he’s a former bartender. I borrowed his face from a musical theatre friend. He hates city fountains that don’t work because I hate fountains that don’t work. He’s passionately verbose because he’s a 19th-century diarist and I’ll never be able to get away with this sort of language again, so I’m wallowing in it.
You mention Matsell, whom I adore, and who really was a fascinating human. During his time, he was thought everything from a Tammany bully to a liberal reformer. He was both, of course, but he did the unthinkable—he actually created a competent standing police force. It was unprecedented. Every other effort had failed miserably.
NK: When you researched that time period, was that when you learned about the stresses that Irish immigration was placing on America in general and New York City in particular? How did that issue come to drive the plot of The Gods of Gotham? Also, how did you conduct the research—was it going to the library and looking at microfilms of old newspapers? Reading books? Digging up other kinds of primary sources? Did you read novels and plays of that period? Or listen to music? And how did you resist going down the research rabbit hole? It can be so seductive, to just follow one more thread, check on one more connection or look for one more account of a person, event, place, or time.
LF: Yes, when I discovered that the Great Irish Famine landed the same year the NYPD was founded, my mind was blown. Here was a cataclysm begging to be novelized, and one I’d not seen approached from the police department’s perspective before. The Gods of Gotham quickly became a book that encompassed Catholic persecution, civil unrest and economic disparity, fighting for religious freedom in the land of the free. Unfortunately, the topic is still quite relevant—most of the truly hostile arguments against Mexican and Muslim Americans are couched in perfectly interchangeable phrases to those lobbed at the Papists. Modern day scrapping and partisan politics lend my books some immediacy, I hope, because we have a lot to learn from past mistakes.
My research period lasts for six months and is altogether omnivorous, though I vastly prefer primary sources once I have a grasp of the general situation. Old police documents, diaries, plays, travel guides, menus, housekeeping tomes, obviously Matsell’s slang dictionary Vocabulum, Or the Rogue’s Lexicon. I read the Herald newspaper on microfilm pretty much back to front for whatever year I’m covering, which gives me current events, editorials, economics, anecdotes, politics, satire, and advertisements all at once. I probably wouldn’t be writing about New York if I didn’t live here, but the richness of resources I have at my disposal between the Bryant Park Research Library, the New York Historical Society, the smaller museums—I’m like Scrooge McDuck in a swimming pool full of gold.
That being said, falling down the research rabbit hole isn’t an issue for me at all. I have plenty of other issues, but after six months in a microfilm department, I’m desperately tired of it and my fingers are itchy to tell stories. Besides that, I have a hard-and-fast historical fiction rule: if your protagonist doesn’t care, leave the fact out. I don’t care how nifty the fact is. That comes of being an actor, actually. It’s about character specificity. Tim Wilde does not go on and on about architecture, popular music, advances in the sciences (unless they’re directly relevant), how much silverware is set for a proper tea, who his favorite actors are, what the Astors are up to. A fact needs to make it into your narrator’s consciousness before it makes it onto your page. He’s interested in the street life of New Yorkers and how they treat each other and manage to survive. So that’s what he sees.
NK: When I read “The Gods of Gotham,” I was so struck by the epigraphs at the beginning of each chapter—quotations from various publications of Protestants deploring the Irish Catholic immigration in shockingly blunt language. I suspected they were authentic but they sounded almost too emblematic to be real. How did you decide to start using those and did you collect them along the way or go back and hunt them down when you were writing the novel?
LF: Yes, those are all absolutely word-for-word real. I actually recorded them as I discovered them because I couldn’t believe the contents myself. I don’t want to convey the impression that I write social justice novels, I don’t even really write crime novels exactly, I write novels about love and heroism and revenge and self-sacrifice, but certainly politics and prejudice play major roles, and those quotes under each chapter title seemed essential to me.
See, I can easily do the research and write a semi-fictional character who says, for example, “All the persecutions which the true church has suffered from Pagans, Jews, and all the world beside are nothing compared with what it has endured from that unrelenting murderer of men, the Pope.” And people will read that and say, all right, that’s certainly a narrow view, but the author is surely exaggerating for dramatic effect. But if I quote that passage from a speech made by the Orange Country Reformation Society in 1843, and they actually did say that—which they did—the reader automatically understands that these opinions, while grotesquely extreme, did exist. And what’s nuts is I have buckets of these quotes in reserve. Narrowing down the pithiest is much harder than finding them.
NK: What do you mean you don’t write crime novels? Or social justice novels, since issues of social justice figure so largely in the plots of the Timothy Wilde stories? Do you see yourself as fitting within a tradition/genre, or blending such, or doing your own thing entirely?
LF: What I mean is that there are some crime novels—brilliant ones, ones I devour like Thai spiced potato chips—in which the crime is the star of the show. These books, I can’t help but surmise, are written by people who are far cleverer than I am. Take for example Agatha Christie’s tour-de-force The. A. B. C. Murders. Now, when I picked that book up as a teen, it mesmerized me. I could never have written it myself. A serial killer by all appearances is offing people whose first and last names each begin with the same letter as the name of the town they live in, as I recall. Simple enough premise, but my god. The points of view shift enough to keep T. S. Eliot happy, the writing is sublime, the characterization pinpoint-exact. When I reached the solution after practically snapping the book’s spine, I was blown away by the ingenuity of the clues and of the plotting.
Now, my point is that, after the solution is presented, how affected is Hercule Poirot (and I adore him) by all of this? I’d say not very. He walks away and solves more crimes, crimes that I myself could never have invented. Conversely, crimes in my novels are catalysts for character development. How do I tie Tim Wilde or Sherlock Holmes’s hands and then make them bleed and then watch them fight their way out with tooth and claw? What I want to explore are the choices people make when faced with impossible options. Their hearts are going in one direction, their responsibilities in quite another, the odds against them extreme. So now what do they do? How do they mess everything up, how do they take the high road, how do they stand in their own way? The crimes that need solving in the Timothy Wilde series are essentially hammers built to chip pieces away from the shells Timothy and Valentine and many others have created for themselves, so I can get to the reality of the messy passions underneath.
So I don’t really write books about crime, I write books about love. For instance, Dust and Shadow isn’t really a book about the Jack the Ripper murders. It’s about Sherlock Holmes trying to save London, which he loves, and about Dr. Watson making a choice, which is: if it comes to that, I’d die with you, because you’re my friend. The Gods of Gotham isn’t really a book about an anti-Catholic serial killer. It’s about how love can be twisted into savagery if enough misery and rage is visited on a person, and about Timothy making a choice, which is: I will go on with my life despite being ruined, and I will choose to repair what remains of my family.
Now, when I say this, lest I be misunderstood, I believe the distinction between “literary” fiction and “crime” fiction to be an absurd marketing label. The ghettoization of genre fiction is, in my opinion, criminal. I love, love, love Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi, for instance, which is not only an incredible exploration of the human spirit but an adventure to boot. Is The Life of Pi objectively a better book than Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, which came along before books with mysteries in them were given shiny covers and all stuck on the same shelf? The question itself is ridiculous. A crime and a quest happen in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, but it isn’t a “crime” novel, so is it an objectively more artistic book than Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep? I want to love all of these aforementioned books equally for different reasons, and I don’t want people to be put in the position anymore of making excuses for their favorite genre because it isn’t “literary.” There are monsters in Beowulf. Ada or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov is a sci-fi novel. I proudly fit in the genre of crime fiction, which I think is every bit as literary as post-modern tomes about people gazing at their navels all afternoon.
NK: I hope I am not beating a horse that should have died many times over already, but I wonder whether we will ever get past the genre distinctions, and if that should be a goal. You capture the dilemma perfectly by calling it an absurd marketing tool—but also saying you are proud to be part of the crime fiction genre. Can we change genre distinctions from a ghettoization to a non-judgmental description or simply a guide for readers to find the kinds of books they like? Or is this just something that writers and librarians obsess about while readers go about their business?
LF: I vacillate between being pretty cynical about this topic to being a wide-eyed optimist. On the one hand, it’s so difficult for publishers to sell books and promote new authors these days that they are bound to use visual cues to draw readers who’ve invested money in previous similar works. That’s what everyone wants, after all—more readers. Books are now a marketable commodity, and I don’t think we can be naive about that; thrillers are going to have block capital letters and historical mysteries like mine are going to have a guy with an old-fashioned hat on the cover. I honestly don’t know how books were promoted in Mary Shelley’s day, but we can’t go back to a time in which Frankenstein would have a literary cover instead of shiny-slick vampire packaging that precludes its submission to every major writing award or literary prize.
On the other hand, a lot of people who are heard when they speak, not least Michael Chabon and Neil Gaiman, are standing up and saying this is all rather a lot of nonsense, intellectually speaking. And I would ask anyone who thinks of crime fiction as a guilty pleasure to identify another genre that cracks open the human condition so thoroughly, read Crime and Punishment, and fly your crime-reader flag high. Fantasy novels get thrown in the same basket, but point at another novel that explores loyalty and self-sacrifice more thoroughly than The Lord of the Rings trilogy. We’re not meant to limit ourselves when it comes to the human imagination. A big part of my writing Tim Wilde was letting go of these stratifications and saying, “Yes, I will write an unabashed hero story about a guy trying to do the right thing.” It was difficult. I doubted myself. I doubted Tim and whether he’d work in this day and age.
NK: Your wondering whether Tim would work in this day and age has me wondering how you, as a writer of historical fiction, approach character. You want contemporary readers to get Tim—and Valentine and the other great characters—but you also want them to be authentic to their time, right? In other words, do you spend much time thinking, how would a guy in 1846 think about this situation? Or it more a case of creating and inhabiting Tim—and then having him go forth and do what he’s going to do? Or something else entirely?
LF: That’s a question extremely close to my heart, thanks for asking. I absolutely want Tim and Val and everyone else to be authentic to their time, and to the very best of my ability they are. Now, occasionally someone comes along and says to me, “Tim should be more racist,” or “Tim should be more sexist toward women,” or “Tim should be antagonistic toward Val’s boyfriend Jim,” because to their minds the fact of Tim being (while grossly politically incorrect) less of a bigot than he “should” be is an outright anachronism. They’re completely mistaken, but I’ll get to that in a second—I’m sure there are accidental anachronisms in my work, but fair-mindedness isn’t one of them.
The first reason this happens is, I believe, due to the fact that our modern world is both savage and sanitized. Planes fly into skyscrapers, men are shot for wearing hoodies, people open fire in schools, a New York Times poll reported that a fifth of all American women are sexually assaulted at some point. But we think we have the market cornered on virtue, because we plastic-wrap everything and put it in Febreezed boxes. Unless you’re unlucky enough to encounter crime, and crime is everywhere, crime is something that happens to other people. We don’t like to think that humans are just as glorious and as rotten as ever. But we are, speaking in the macroscopic, as a species. We think too highly of ourselves.
The second reason this happens is that we like to think of our modern selves as civilized and past crimes as barbaric when really, for most people, I honestly think that if they were transplanted as infants into, say for example, slavery as an institution in rural Georgia, they would not have promptly freed all their grandfather’s human property upon inheriting the plantation and then joined the abolitionist movement. We think too harshly of those who failed to act in the past.
Which brings me to the people who did do better than their peers and back to your question. Yes, I think a great deal about what Tim would do rather than what I would do, because we’re very different people, but putting myself in his shoes isn’t a spacewalk, it’s stepping next door to visit the neighbors. Tim is a decent, courageous, open-minded fellow because I’ve read countless diaries of decent, courageous, open-minded people in the 19th century who stood up and fought tooth and nail for what they believed in. There’s no mathematical equation that turned Frederick Douglass into a man of surpassing liberality and courage, but he was. There’s no formula that turned Mary Wollstonecraft into a feminist in the 18th century, but she was. The minute you write a protagonist like Timothy, however, someone or other who thinks only modern people have virtues will cry foul. If I wrote a novel based on Mary Wollstonecraft and changed all the names, people would call her a Mary Sue and laugh in my face. But these people really lived, and they were inspiring, so you know what, I’m going to write about them, because I need to read hero stories. They make me believe in people. That being said, Tim is the least reliable narrator on the planet, his flaws are myriad, no reader should trust him any further than they could theoretically throw him.
NK: I’m intrigued by your closing comment about Tim being the least reliable narrator on the planet—and also about how inhabiting him is like stepping next door to visit the neighbor. I know you’ve just finished your third book in the series—do you have a notion of how many you would like to write about Tim and his world? Does each novel feel to you like a separate enterprise, or a part of a larger story?
LF: I’m going to go on record here because you’ve been so good to me. The Timothy Wilde series is a trilogy. Or it is at the moment, never say never after all!
There are several reasons for this, however, and one of them I just touched on. You can’t trust a word Tim says in The Gods of Gotham. Frankly, I’m working—or Timothy, rather—is working with an extremely limited forensics palette. The science was not there for him to sweep crime scenes for epithelial cells or even identify a brand of shoe from the footmark. So the way I’m able to mask clues from the reader, while still playing entirely fair, mind, is through Tim’s misinterpretations. Tim is great at reading strangers and has massive blind spots when it comes to his loved ones. This is such a human failing and I love him for it, but it derails him completely in the first novel. Valentine, Mercy, the Reverend Underhill—no one is really who Tim thought they were. And aren’t our loved ones sometimes the people we take most for granted, aren’t they sometimes the least examined players on our stages? Anyone reading Gotham for the second time would hear an entirely different nuance in every word Val Wilde said.
Where I have rapidly diminishing returns with the unreliable narrator trope, however, is that I made Tim very very smart. So now we’re on to the second novel, and he’s still learning Tammany, learning Val, learning Mercy, he’s still learning police work itself: but he’s better at it. And by the third book, set in 1848, he’s very good indeed. Which I think is the completion of an arc, in a way. Another arc that was very important for me was the emotional one between the brothers. In the first book, Tim doesn’t know Val holds himself responsible for the loss of their parents and even at one point thinks Val is trying to kill him. Once he knows the truth, there’s no going back to that, and you really see him studying his brother in Seven for a Secret as if Val’s another case, learning what really makes him tick. And in the third … in the third they know each other extremely well and still have serious problems, but the difference is now they begin to talk about them. And that’s the completion of another journey.
My sincere hope is that each of the books can stand alone if asked, but that the three together are one story: Timothy’s coming-of-age story and Valentine’s search for redemption, intertwined like a single DNA strand.
NK: Wow—that is big news, that this is a trilogy. And while I’m a little sad to hear we won’t be following Tim for the next 20 years, I also admire your reasons for the decision.
And I’m glad to hear that Val is a big part of the conclusion. This is in no way an insult to Tim, whom I love, but Val is a more interesting character in some ways. Clearly he’s got major demons but also heroic qualities. Were he and Tim born together, in your mind, or did Val come about as a way to enter and illustrate the seedier sides of New York at that time?
LF: It’s sweet that you care about Timothy. Like I was saying, I’m not limiting myself to absolutes—that’s a great way to put your foot in your mouth, I figure. If five years or ten years from now I want to write about Tim again, I’d completely allow myself to do so, maybe even switch narrators—it’s just that this group of three makes a complete story, and that’s important to me. I can definitely pledge not to sit down and apply myself to a half-assed Tim book, because I’d not be able to complete the project and would turn at once to whiskey.
Oh, interesting point about how Val entered the picture—I needed to create a protagonist with his own moral compass, so I cast Tim as a barkeep because they’re extremely observant and I’ve been in the hospitality business for years. But since I wanted a Tammany outsider, I was wracking my brains as to how he’d get himself on the copper-star force in the first place, and my husband suggested nepotism. It was a really sound notion, and Valentine initially hatched from the fact I need someone with political clout to wedge Tim into the star police.
After that, Valentine took on these almost operatic proportions in my head—my family has suffered from addiction and mental ailments, and I’ve dealt with post-traumatic stress disorder for years myself, so I’m very comfortable writing about those things, and I started adding one id-driven quality after another to Valentine and couldn’t put the brakes on. Not because that’s the person he’d be if their parents were still alive, though admittedly he was a bit of a hooligan as a child, but because that’s the man he turned into after their deaths. The pleasure principle for Valentine is this desperate drive to erase himself to the point of forgetting his past. Morphine is the most obvious example, as are the fighting, gambling, and extreme promiscuity. It was incredibly freeing, actually, writing a character like that. He’s far and away my favorite human in the series. Here’s this person some would call vicious and vice-ridden who owns one of the strictest moral codes in the whole panorama, and that only becomes clearer in the third book: family first. That’s it, that’s his whole life. He’s a Tammany man because of what they can do for him and for his brother.
Of course, two of Val’s apparently hedonistic interests (for the 19th century, that is) have nothing to do with id, lest I shortchange the man. He’s bisexual simply because he’s bisexual. And the fact he’s a superlative cook and housekeeper are some of the sincerest expressions of affection in the books. If I am going to cook for someone I care about, I am going to throw everything I have into making it the best meal possible, and since there are hefty chunks of me in Valentine, so does he.
NK: Thank you.
I hope this doesn’t come as too abrupt, but I am starting to feel guilty about how much of your time I’ve been taking—and that if I indulge myself, I’ll keep this up until the Seminar. So thank you thank you thank you for sharing so much about Timothy Wilde and his world, and your creative process along the way.
And … I said early on in this conversation that I wanted to return to Sherlock Holmes. Dust and Shadow, your first novel, is a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, in which Sherlock solves the crimes of Jack the Ripper. You are deeply versed in the wider world of Sherlock Holmes, both in the traditional societies of aficionados, like the Baker Street Irregulars, and the newer Internet-based fan community. What is it about this character and situation that provides such a rich source for interpretations (including all the movies and TV adaptations in the past and more recently Guy Ritchie’s movies, the BBC show Sherlock, the newer American TV series Elementary and the fan fiction and pastiches like your own)? Are we in a Sherlockian moment right now—or have we been in one since Conan Doyle published “A Scandal in Bohemia”?
LF: I’d say to a certain extent, we’ve been gobbling up Sherlock Holmes content as a culture since “A Scandal in Bohemia,” and you’re spot on to have cited the first short story rather than A Study in Scarlet or The Sign of Four. Holmes is absolutely magical in short-story form, and the Strand magazine knew what they had from day one—Doyle turned in the manuscript and the editors looked at each other with glowing pound signs pulsating in their eyeballs. Subsequent tales were just as rich and nuanced and atmospheric and balls-to-the-wall fun. They’re not all perfect, but they’re all far better than they’d any right to be. The characterizations are masterful, the prose lush, the plots exceedingly clever. Doyle changed the face of popular storytelling, and we’ve been riding his coattails ever since.
Then you of course have other great Sherlockian eras following the publication of the sixty canonical cases—the 1940s, for example, when Rathbone was king, or the surge of films and pastiches in the 1970s, or the present day phenomenon that seems to have started with the 2009 Guy Ritchie film. So I’d say that, while we’ve never lost sight of Sherlock Holmes, he’s much more in our sights now than he was in, say, the 1980s, when some of the best examples I can think of are comedies like Without a Clue or The Great Mouse Detective. Which of course begs the question—what do we love about the guy in the funny hat?—and I’ve given a great deal of thought to this of course, and I have two answers that when taken together satisfy me and when taken separately don’t quite cover all the bases.
First of all, it’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Think about that—not The Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes or The Cases of Sherlock Holmes. They’re pop culture gems, they’re tales of derring-do and heroic antics and vigilante justice winning the day over greed and villainy. That’s extremely important—they’re adventures, not puzzles, which is what sets them apart from Poe’s Dupin, and they’re for everyone. They’re extremely egalitarian and always have been—that’s why Holmes works fighting Nazis in a fedora in the 1940s equally as well as he works sweeping around in a Belstaff coat fighting fey Irish supervillains in 2012.
And secondly, we adore Sherlock Holmes because John Watson does. Honestly—it’s the finest example of an emotionally invested narrator I’ve ever seen. People read the stories the first time to see how the crime is solved, admittedly, but people like me who read them over and over again are invested in a carefully rendered portrait of a beautiful forty-year friendship, and honestly, who doesn’t want to hitch their wagon to a genius and spend the rest of their lives making the world a better place? John Watson is the best parts of all of us—he’s decent, he’s patient, he’s loyal, he’s courageous, and Holmes knows it, and Holmes wants him there, and we feel like a part of that magic when we read the stories or watch our favorite adaptations. In the 1990s, Granada Television did the fantastic Jeremy Brett series, with David Burke as Watson, and I’ll never get tired of his expression of childlike joy whenever Holmes does something amazing—it’s this purely blithe look of admiration, and (always supposing we’re watching an adaptation with a talented Watson) we catch the bug almost instantly. We want to be a part of that electric understanding between them, and the lovely thing is, we have so much content to choose from now. From Jude Law to Lucy Liu to Martin Freeman, we can watch the Good Doctor assisting the Great Detective, which Doyle’s Watson called his “greatest joy and privilege.” Which means my fellow Sherlockians and I are presently pretty damn happy to be alive.
Interviewer Nancy Klingener is secretary of the Key West Literary Seminar and works at the Monroe County Public Library in Key West. She reviews books for the Miami Herald, and contributes the “Letter From Key West” to WLRN, South Florida’s NPR station.
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Darkness rushing in … →
A diversity of life thrives in the littoral zone — a thin strip of coastline between high and low watermarks. As the operating metaphor for our online journal, it refers to that part of Key West routinely overrun by the tide of literature and to the rich life of letters in this island city. Here you’ll find event coverage from our team of writers and photographers; news and updates about upcoming opportunities; and rare images from historic collections, interviews, and all manner of report from Key West’s life of letters.
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But sometimes, success gets it right and embraces those who deserve it.
Take the rapidly evolving story of Samantha Fish, which began roughly seven years ago when she first holed up in her bedroom and taught herself to strum chords on an acoustic guitar. She was 15 then and intent only on learning something new every day. It was an inauspicious start to a story that has gained momentum ever since.
The latest milestone came Sunday night, when Fish and her band opened for Buddy Guy at his Legends club in Chicago. The show was sold out.
“It went great,” Fish, of Kansas City, said Tuesday. “Buddy’s show was so outstanding. He’s such a showman.”
How Fish got from her suburban bedroom to the stage of one of the biggest blues clubs in the country is no secret: She took some risks, she took some lessons and she worked hard.
“From the first time she was in here, she just kept getting better and better and then she just completely took off,” said Frank Hicks, owner of Knuckleheads, the East Bottoms music venue where Fish first played in public when she was 17. She has since headlined shows at Knuckleheads, once drawing a crowd of more than 250. She and her band perform there at 7:30 p.m. Thursday.
“She never stops watching or learning or working,” Hicks said. “No matter how good she gets, every time you see her, she has improved from the time before.”
Later this month, Fish, 22, will start her third tour of Europe with the trio Girls With Guitars, a project started by the label she signed to, Ruf Records. In late February she will be on the same bill as Johnny Winter and Corey Harris at the Sighisoara Blues Festival in Romania. In May, she will be in Memphis for the 33rd annual Blues Music Awards, where she is up for best new artist for her solo album “Runaway.”
The success and accolades, however, haven’t affected her perspective or work ethic.
“I’m still learning,” Fish said. “I’m still a work in progress”
‘It worked itself out’
Fish grew up in a home filled with music.
“She was around guitars all her life,” said her father, Bill Fish. “I played a lot, mostly around the house. And friends would come over and play. But she never showed an interest until she was 15 or so when she said she wanted one for Christmas.”
Fish said he showed his daughter a few things on her first guitar, an acoustic, but for the most part she disappeared into her room for hours, teaching herself how to play.
“I focused on strumming chords and singing,” Samantha Fish said. “My influences weren’t the blues then. I liked mostly rock: the Stones, Tom Petty, the Black Crowes.”
On a family vacation filled with too many rainy days she watched a Stevie Ray Vaughn video a few dozen times, then went home and practiced what she’d seen. Then she did the same with lead guitarists like Angus Young of AC/DC and Slash of Guns N’ Roses.
At a neighborhood porch party, with local guitar heroes like Greg Camp in attendance, Fish gave her father his first look at what she’d taught herself over the previous year or so.
“There were about 150 people there,” he said. “She asked Greg if she could play. He handed her a guitar, plugged her in and she played. No one, me included, had any idea what she could do. She didn’t miss a lick. She’s been that way since.”
The blues became her genre, Samantha Fish said, because it gave her entry into the local blues community and its many jam sessions.
“I went in reluctantly,” she said, “but this is a huge blues town. So I learned some standards and started going to the open jams. And I fell in love with it. It was a good way to express myself.”
So she studied a wider variety of players, like Freddie King, Skip James, Son House and Charlie Patton. And her father started taking her to Knuckleheads, where he works occasionally and where she saw Mike Zito, Tab Benoit and local blues heroes Trampled Under Foot.
“I’d watch them play, then go home and work on the guitar,” she said.
By the time she was ready to graduate from Shawnee Mission North, Fish had decided that what she wanted to do most with her future was what she loved most: play music.
“My counselors were saying, ‘No, you probably should go to college,’” she said. “But it had already taken hold. I was absolutely certain this was what I wanted to do.”
After high school, she spent two years working two shifts at a pizza joint, managing the store and delivering pizzas. Eventually that and playing gigs got to be too much, so two years ago she quit the pizza life and became a full-time musician.
“I had no band, no gigs scheduled,” she said. “So I called a couple of guys and set up some gigs. I struggled at first, but it worked itself out.”
At a gig at Knuckleheads in 2010, the right person was in the right place at the right time, and that risk and the years of practice started paying off.
The whirlwind begins
Nothing shows the breadth of Fish’s accomplishments better than “Runaway,” her debut studio album. She wrote nine of the 10 songs; the other is her electric country-blues cover of Tom Petty’s “Louisiana Rain.” The songwriting is a mix of styles, each blues-based but with a different twist or take.
In November, Fish was the cover story in Premier Guitar magazine, which had this to say about “Runaway”: “It’s an impressive outing that spans several styles — from the rumba-fied country-boogie of ‘Soft and Slow’ to the smoky jazz vibe of ‘Feelin’ Alright’ and ‘Today’s My Day.’”
Veteran Kansas City drummer Go-Go Ray, who joined Fish’s band in late September, said: “(Her music) isn’t the usual blues that stays in one area. She can get real quiet and do the jazzy thing or she can roar like at a rock concert. She really puts her own spin on it.”
She has also developed a voice that is getting as much attention as her guitar work.
From the album review in American Blues magazine: “Her singing is the real treat on ‘Runaway’: Her control is exceptional; her elocution is superb ... and her phrasing is never overwrought or strained.”
Fish went to vocal coach Suzanne Blanch for some lessons after realizing something was wrong with her technique.
Like those who have watched her evolve as a guitar player, Blanch said Fish has blossomed as a singer.
“She was 19 when she first came to me and her voice was pretty, but not strong,” Blanch said. “So I showed her some techniques to give her more power and range and control.
“She catches on really fast. She went off and worked on her own with what I gave her. Every so often she comes back for another lesson, and I can see how vastly she has improved.”
“Suzanne helped me so much with my breathing and getting me to relax,” Fish said. “By the end of my first lesson I was hitting notes I didn’t know I was capable of.”
Her singing and playing caught someone’s attention at a Knuckleheads show in spring 2010: Tina Terry of the Piedmont Talent Agency was in attendance, and, to make a long story short, she ended up connecting Fish with Thomas Ruf, who runs Ruf Records in Lindewerra, Germany.
Ruf was looking for someone to fill his Girls With Guitars trio, which is part of the Ruf Records Blues Caravan Tour, and he was interested in Fish. Mike Zito, who had become a mentor (and would produce “Runaway”) alerted her that something big was brewing.
“He called me and said, ‘You’re going to get some emails about some really cool stuff, and you really need to do it,’” she said. “I’d been doing some really cool stuff already, but nothing of this magnitude.”
So she signed with Ruf Records and joined the group with Cassie Taylor and Dani Wilde. In September 2010, they came to Kansas City to do preproduction work for the tour and the album. In October they recorded the “Girls With Guitars” album in Berlin. In January 2011, they headed to Europe for a two-stage tour that would comprise 170 shows, some in festivals with crowds of 5,000 or more, some in clubs filled with 500 people. They also picked up an endorsement deal with Fender, which bestowed upon each a guitar. Fish’s Blacktop Telecaster is now her prized guitar.
At the end of the tour, Fish recorded “Runaway,” which was released in May.
“The whole year was a whirlwind,” she said.
And that wind hasn’t stopped whirling.
Climbing mountains
It’s a Thursday night and a standing-room-only crowd fills BB’s Lawnside BBQ in south Kansas City.
Fish and her band — Ray and bassist Paul Greenlease — are holding court. About 150 people are seated at tables, dining on barbecue, or standing along the bar or along the walls, sipping beverages and listening to Fish show off a voice that sounds even more expressive live than on record.
BB’s has been a live-blues mainstay for more than 20 years, and the music Fish is playing certainly fits within a basic blues template. But it isn’t the standard electric blues that fills so many clubs every night of the year. At times she strongly resembles one of her music heroines, Bonnie Raitt; other times she and her band issue a sound with its own subtle traits and accents that separate it from the pack.
Ray, who plays with a wide variety of bands (including Mike Dillon’s Go-Go Jungle), said playing the blues with Fish isn’t by the numbers.
“The blues is a sacred tradition,” he said. “But she lets me do crazy things you don’t usually do, like a drum solo.
“Or if I hear her repeat a rhythm line, I’ll play that line on the drums — and she always turns around and smiles — and then (I) go back to the beat and give her something to stand on. It’s almost a big band approach.”
“Sam has developed her own sound,” Blanch said. “Her voice has a distinct quality. I go to a lot of blues clubs and hear a lot of blues singers and none sound like her. And her songwriting is exceptional, too. She really has a knack for writing hooks.”
Bill Fish said he imagines his daughter will end up performing music that doesn’t fit snugly into one category.
“The Ruf Records motto is ‘Where the blues crosses over,’ and I think that’s appropriate,” he said. “The blues community may not want to hear it, but I think she’s going to develop her own niche, something that’s got some kind of Americana feel to it but is her own.”
The More Girls With Guitars tour starts later this month, but this time British guitarist Victoria Smith has replaced Taylor. The tour is booked Jan. 22-Feb. 18, March 6-31 and May 15-27. There’s also that festival in Romania in late February.
Fish said that touring can be rigorous and monotonous, especially overseas, but she is quick to put things in perspective when the weariness threatens to overtake her.
“I’m doing what so many people would love to do,” she said. “I remind myself how lucky I am and forget about the grind.”
That process of immersing oneself in a new environment, in new cities surrounded by new people, also has helped her grow. The girl who started alone with a guitar in her room figured out right away that the only way to improve is to practice; she has evolved into a woman who knows another way to mature personally and professionally is to break molds, explore new terrain, take more risks.
As Ray put it: “Samantha climbs one mountain so she can get to the next one and climb it.”
The first overseas tour, Fish said, “was weird and stressful, getting thrown into new situations. It broke me down, and I had to start over.
“Playing with your band and playing the same songs every night — that makes you better. But nothing makes you better than being put in new situations and trying something different and having to make it work. You learn a lot from that. Getting into different situations with different players makes you adapt and grow. It’s vital. And I want to keep growing.”
By GREGORY KATZ and SAMY MAGDY Associated Press
British police say a key suspect in the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing that killed 22 people has been arrested at a London airport after being extradited from Libya.
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Partial Embossing Technique Card!
Hi Stamping Friends,
We're making this cute card in my class today.
This card uses the Decorative Ornament Thinlit die and the Little Letters Thinlit dies.
Do you like the gold element? It's a White Perfect Accent colored with a gold sharpie!
I made a video for you showing how to do partial embossing with the Little Letters dies.
Here's the supply list:
Thanks for looking at my blog!
Posted by Karina at 4:00 AM
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New Zealand player pays tribute to Christchurch victims by bowing in prayer after scoring
A beautiful gesture
The country of New Zealand and the city of Christchurch is currently in mourning after Friday's mosque shootings which have left 50 people dead.
A host of politicians quickly condemned the attacks, which took place at the Al Noor mosque on Dean’s Road and the Linwood Islamic Centre on Linwood Avenue, with Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern stating that they "can now only be described as a terrorist attack".
On Sunday, two days after the attack, New Zealand footballer Kostas Barbarouses was playing for Australian side Melbourne Victory when he opened the scoring for them in their match with Brisbane Roar.
Upon scoring the goal, the 29-year-old walked to the goal line, dropped to his knees and bowed his head, performing the Muslim prayer Sajdah out of respect for those who tragically lost their lives in the attack.
I love this❤️
New Zealander Kosta Barbarouses scores & bows down in prayer as Muslims do in respect of those who were murdered in in the New Zealand mosque attack.
What an absolutely beautiful gesture of love & solidarity❤️pic.twitter.com/D7O4d3vwpx
— Qasim Rashid, Esq. (@QasimRashid) March 17, 2019
After the game, the striker cut an emotional figure as he discussed the events which had occurred on Friday.
"I'm pretty devastated to be honest. A pretty emotional day," Barbarouses told Fox Sports.
"It doesn’t mean much to them (the goal celebration) but it’s something."
On Saturday, New Zealand PM Ardern stated, in the aftermath of the most deadly shooting in the country's history, that gun laws in New Zealand will change.
"While work is being done as to the chain of events that lead to both the holding of this gun license and the possession of these weapons, I can tell you one thing right now," she said.
"Our gun laws will change."
New Zealand,
Christchurch shooting.
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iFLY Indoor Skydiving is gearing up to construct and open a new location at Liberty Center in Liberty Twp. The new business would be iFLY’s first location in Ohio and its 66th worldwide.
Indoor skydiving business iFLY the latest unique attraction at Liberty Center
Eric Schwartzberg, Staff Writer
LIBERTY TWP. —
iFLY’s debut at Liberty Center in May is expected to create even more of a draw to the Butler County shopping, dining and entertainment destination.
The 5,175-square-foot indoor skydiving attraction is located at 7689 Warehouse Row on the outskirts of the $350 million mixed-use complex just off Interstate 75’s Liberty Way exit.
Choosing Liberty Twp. for Ohio’s first iFLY in the growing area between Cincinnati and Dayton seemed to make the most sense to provide easy access for families in Greater Cincinnati and the surrounding cities, iFLY officials told this news outlet.
The business touts its ability to simulate freefall conditions in a vertical wind tunnel.
Such wind tunnels have given skydivers a practical and consistent way to develop and perfect skills that typically require leaping from a plane. The increase in availability of wind tunnels also has spawned a growing sport – bodyflight.
JLL expects the opening of iFLY in Liberty Twp. to not only draw new customers to Liberty Center, but also more retail tenants, according to Giorgio Karras, a Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) vice president tasked with handling retail leasing at Liberty Center.
The visitors bureau previously told this news outlet that iFLY is “a wonderful addition” to not only Liberty Center, but to Butler County’s tourism landscape.
iFLY, the 5,175-square-foot indoor skydiving attraction at 7689 Warehouse Row that simulates freefall conditions in a vertical wind tunnel will open this Friday, officials said.
Being the first of its kind in Ohio, iFLY “will attract thousands of new visitors from across the region to experience not only the best indoor skydiving but everything else Butler County has to offer,” according to Mark Hecquet, president and CEO of the Butler County Visitors Bureau.
Founded in 1998, Austin-based iFLY has flown more than 8 million people in a dozen countries.
It has 49 locations worldwide, 37 of which are in the United States. It recently opened new locations in Brisbane, Australia; Minneapolis, Minnesota and Charlotte, North Carolina.
“iFLY gives us a unique regional draw based within Liberty Center,” said Liberty Center General Manager John Taylor. “It is another landmark of entertainment located on the I-75 corridor that will draw people from Cincinnati and Dayton to experience iFLY, Liberty Center and everything that the I-75/Liberty Way intersection has to offer.
“We look forward to working with them to create new events around their unique activity, as well as the ability for them to partner with our already established tenants to provide food and shopping options for people specifically seeking them out.”
The demographics of iFLY’s customer base hits every age cohort from ages 3 to 103, with the majority of the ages focused from 9 years old to 19 years old, due to its focus on families, company officials said.
Hours are noon to 8 p.m. Monday to Thursday, noon to 9 p.m. Friday, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Sunday. For more information, call 513-901-4359 or visit www.iflyworld.com/cincinnati.
WHAT: iFly Indoor Skydiving
WHERE: 7689 Warehouse Row, Liberty Twp at Liberty Center
WHEN: Book a flight time online.
INFO: www.iflyworld.com/cincinnati
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The Last Olympian - Percy Jackson Book Cover by John Rocco (2009)
Artist John Rocco Platinum Member
Collection Percy-Jackson-Book-Covers
Description The Last Olympian is the fifth and final book in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series by author Rick Riordan. Buy authentic Percy Jackson book cover illustrations by John Rocco, the artist for the series.
John Rocco's Recent Work
John Rocco, Los Angeles
Artist Statement John Rocco studied illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design and School of Visual Arts in New York City. He is the author of several acclaimed books for children: Wolf! Wolf!, winner of the Borders Original Voices Award for best picture book; Moonpowder, part of the Original Art Show at the Society of Illustrators; Fu Finds the Way, and Blackout, winner of the Caldecott Honor and a New York Times Best Book of the Year. Rocco also illustrated Whoopi Goldberg's Alice and the covers for Rick Riordan's three multi-million copy internationally bestselling series Percy Jackson and the Olympians, The Kane Chronicles, and The Heroes of Olympus. Most recently, Rocco illustrated the fantasy fairy tale The Flint Heart, written by Katherine Paterson and her husband, John.
For many years Rocco has also been an art director in the entertainment industry, both in the US and abroad. At Dreamworks, Rocco was the pre-production art director on the top-grossing animated film Shrek. For Walt Disney Imagineering, he designed attractions at Disney's Epcot and served as art director for DisneyQuest, a virtual reality theme park in Downtown Disney. At ImagineAsia in Manila, Philippines, he oversaw production of CGI animation, motion capture and story development for several projects. Rocco has worked with computer graphics pioneer Robert Abel, the creator of some of the first CGI commercials and special effects, and contributed to several museum projects including Newseum in Washington D.C. and Paul Allen's Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame. A solo exhibition of Rocco’s work appeared at the Orlando Museum of Modern Art, July-October 2012.
Subjects Architecture, Book Illustration, Children, Children's Stories & Books, Fantasy, Illustration, Mythology, Science Fiction & Fantasy
Style Drawing
Tags John, Riordan, Rocco, building, empire, fantasy, jackson, john, last, mythology, olympian, pegasus, percy, rick, rocco, state, storm, the
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Midwest Finesse: April 2014
The wind frustrated scores of Midwest finesse anglers in April.
And The Topeka (Kansas) Capital-Journal noted on its website that winds gusted up to 51 miles per hour by 11:30 a.m. on April 16, which was the highest recorded speed during the past 12 months. The second highest occurred on Jan. 26, when it hit 46 mph. According to this newspaper story, the "average and average maximum wind speeds for January and March of this year are by far the highest when comparing data from those months back to 2010."
Accompanying those winds, scores of strong weather systems crisscrossed northeastern Kansas since the beginning of the year, and some Midwest finesse anglers called this phenomenon a piscatorial plague. John Woynick of Topeka, Kansas, and a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said, strong winds are associated with deep low-pressure systems that move across the Plains. As these systems moved across northeastern Kansas, they were often accompanied by unusually cold temperatures.
Consequently, several of the logs in this month's guide contain some observations about how Midwest finesse anglers tried to deal with the wind and strange weather circumstances that confronted them.
After the long, windy, and brutally cold winter, and despite some unseasonably cold and windy stretches throughout the 30 days of April, spring unfolded quite elegantly across northeastern Kansas. The redbud trees glistened for days on end, as did the lilacs, plum thickets, crab apples, cherries, Bradford pears, and dogwoods. And on April 30, to our delight and amazement, dozens of daffodils were still blooming in our gardens. In spite of the many glorious elements of spring's blossoms that sparkled in Midwest anglers eyes, there were a number of outings in northeastern Kansas when we struggled mightily to locate and catch largemouth bass. But for some unknown reasons, there were some outings when the largemouth bass were relatively easy to locate and catch. For instance, Rick Hebenstreit of Shawnee, Kansas, and I caught 47 largemouth bass on April 1. Then I caught 44 on April 3 and 34 on April 4. But on April 5, I caught only 14 largemouth bass. On April 7, Rick Hebenstreit and I caught 55 largemouth bass, but on April 11, Pok-Chi Lau of Lawrence, Kansas, and I labored to catch 11. Then four days later on April 15, I caught 59 largemouth bass, and then I caught 55 on April 18. Then my tussles with locating and catching largemouth bass erupted again on April 22, when I labored to catch 16 largemouth bass and four smallmouth bass. But to my delight, my grandson Gabe Bonanno of New York City and his brother-in-law, Tyler Savo of Lawrence, Kansas, and I caught 102 largemouth bass on April 23.
In total, I fished 10 times. During the 44 hours that I and my various partners fished, we caught 432 largemouth bass and four smallmouth bass, which was an average of 43.2 an outing and 9.90 an hour, which was below our 2013 hourly average of 11.6 per hour. Four of these April outings, however, were bass-fishing-for-trout affairs. On those four outings, we caught 39 rainbow trout, and these encounters with rainbow trout impeded our focus on catching largemouth bass.
Even though the countryside continued to sparkle with the splendors of spring, the wind howled and weather turned fowl during the last days of April, and it kept many of us at bay. In fact, the inclement weather, as well as several family obligations, prevented me from fishing during the last seven days of the month.
It is interesting to note that some of the Midwest finesse anglers who plied the strip pits that stipple the countryside in eastern and southeastern Kansas found that the largemouth bass preferred power tactics rather than finesse this April. And Chris Rohr of Overland Park, Kansas, penned a thought-provoking log about this phenomenon on April 15.
Some smallmouth bass began to show up in northeastern Kansas on April 18, but it was far from being a bonanza for Pok-Chi Lau and his son, Tyler Lau of Lawrence, Kansas, who caught 23 smallmouth bass in about three hours. Then on a very wind-blown April 26, Bob Gum of Kansas City and a friend tangled with 49 of them in six hours. The Laus and Gum were fishing a 6,930-acre U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' flatland reservoir, and they penned brief logs about how and where they caught these smallmouth bass.
Two Midwest finesse anglers made separate trips to Bull Shoals Lake on the Missouri and Arkansas border, during the days surrounding April's full moon. They found the largemouth bass, smallmouth bass and spotted bass fishing to be surprisingly trying, and Bob Gum's April 21 log provides a few details about his endeavors at Bull Shoals.
Besides the logs written by Gum, Lau, and Rohr, there are logs from Terry Claudell of Overland Park, Kansas, Paul Finn of Olathe, Kansas, Brent Frazee of Parkville, Missouri, Rick Hebenstreit of Shawnee, Kansas, Clyde Holscher of Topeka, Kansas, John McKean of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Dennis Medley of Morton, Illinois, Brian Waldman of Coatesville, Indiana, Drew Walker of Springfield, Missouri, and Dave Weroha of Kansas City. Steve Reideler of Lewisville, Texas, wrote nine detailed logs, and as his logs reveal, the wind confounded and plagued a goodly number of his days in north-central Texas. In addition to his logs, Reideler helped edit all of the 25,561 words that make up this month's guide.
Here's hoping these logs will help anglers in the years to come to deal with all of the vicissitudes that Mother Nature and her aquatic denizens can generate during the 30 days of April.
April 1 log
Until this April 1 outing, my cousin Rick Hebenstreit of Shawnee, Kansas, and I had not fished together since Dec. 2, 2013, which reveals how brutal the winter of 2013-14 was and how windy the first dozen days of spring were.
On our Dec. 2 outing, we ventured to a 100-acre community reservoir that lies in the southwest suburbs of Kansas City, where the surface temperature was 42 degrees, and where we caught 43 largemouth bass. And we returned to this reservoir on April 1. I had also made a solo outing to this waterway on Mar. 17, when the surface temperature ranged from 42 to 44 degrees, and I struggled mightily to catch 11 largemouth bass.
A cold front had coursed across northeastern Kansas during the night of Mar. 31 and early morning hours of April 1. The National Weather Service at Olathe, Kansas, recorded the morning low temperature on April 1 at 29 degrees, and the afternoon high temperature was 53 degrees. Initially the wind angled out of the north at 6 mph and eventually switched to the east at 6 mph. Throughout our outing, the sun had a difficult time penetrating various layers and kinds of mid-level clouds. The barometric pressure was 30.11 and gradually falling at 9:53 a.m. On Mar. 31, the NWS recorded the low temperature at 62 degrees and the high temperature at 82 degrees. The sun was shinning nearly everywhere, and the wind was howling out of the south at 23 to 41 mph, and it had been blowing that furiously for several days.
The water level was an inch or two above normal. The surface temperature ranged from 48 to 50 degrees. The water was clear enough that I could see the black propeller on the transom-mounted trolling motor, which was about 22 inches below the surface, and when we can see it, we describe the water as Kansas clear, which isn't very clear when it is compared to the extremely clear waterways in the Ozarks and Ontario. Patches of American water willows embellish some of this reservoir's shorelines, and some of the stalks in these patches were exhibiting hints of green. This reservoir is graced with an abundance of coontail, but on this outing, the coontail patches were in their stubby wintertime motif, and many of them were coated with filamentous algae. Filamentous algae also coated some of the stalks of the American water willows, laydowns, rocks, boulders, boat docks, brush piles and other underwater objects, and of course, it adhered to our lures.
In-Fisherman's solunar calendar indicated that the best fishing would occur from 12:26 p.m. to 2:26 p.m., and during those two hours, we caught the preponderance of the 47 largemouth bass that we caught. It is interesting to note that this was one of the rare times that our best catches corresponded with the solunar calendar's best fishing times since we began monitoring the effectiveness of the solunar calendar during the past two years. We fished from 9:45 a.m. to 2:45 p.m., which was a little longer than we normally fish, but since Mother Nature had kept us at bay for days on end, we rationalized that we should fish a little bit more than we normally do on our midday Midwest finesse outings.
From 9:45 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., we caught only 11 largemouth bass, one walleye and one channel catfish.
Three of the largemouth bass were caught along the dam and at the west end of the dam, and they were caught in about four feet of water and allured by a 2 ½-inch Z-Man Fishing Products' PB&J ZinkerZ affixed to a red 1/16-ounce Gopher Tackle Mushroom Head Jig, which was retrieved with a drag-and-deadstick presentation.
From the dam, we ventured to the upper portions of this reservoir, and we stayed up there until 2:20 p.m.
Four largemouth bass were caught along an east-side shoreline, and they were allured by a 2 ½-inch Z-Man's PB&J ZinkerZ affixed to a 1/32-ounce Gopher jig and a Z-Man's green-pumpkin Hula StickZ affixed to a chartreuse 1/16-ounce Gopher jig. These largemouth bass were extracted from water as shallow as five feet and as deep as 10 feet, and they were seduced by either a drag-and-deadstick retrieve or a drag-and-shake presentation. This shoreline is about 200 yards long, and it is littered with a rock bridge, American water willows, rocky ledges, concrete and stone retaining walls, laydowns, coontail patches, boat docks, and a sundry of trash. A submerged creek channel courses along a short segment of this shoreline. Along some stretches of this shoreline, our boat floated in water as shallow as three feet and as deep as 16 feet. The deeper portions yielded the four bass.
We caught four largemouth bass along a north-side shoreline. It is graced with the same characteristics as the east-side shoreline, but it is bordered by a longer stretch of the submerged creek channel. These largemouth bass were caught on a 2 ¾-inch prototype Z-Man California Craw ZinkerZ on a chartreuse 1/16-ounce Gopher jig and a 2 ½-inch Z-Man Junebug ZinkerZ on a blue 1/16-ounce Gopher jig. One was caught on the initial drop by an American water willow patch, and three were caught along a rocky terrain on a drag-and-shake retrieve in four to five feet of water.
Around 12:30 p.m., we began fishing a west-side shoreline, which is about 400 yards long, and along this stretch we caught 33 largemouth bass. Its topography is similar to the east-side and north-side shorelines, but it is cluttered with more boat docks and trash. We wielded a 2 ¾-inch prototype Z-Man California Craw ZinkerZ on a chartreuse 1/16-ounce Gopher jig, a 2 ½-inch Z-Man Junebug ZinkerZ on a blue 1/16-ounce Gopher jig, and a 2 ½-inch Z-Man California Craw ZinkerZ on a chartreuse 1/16-ounce Gopher jig, and we primarily employed a drag-and-shake retrieve. About a dozen of the largemouth bass engulfed our baits on the initial fall. The majority of the largemouth bass were in close proximity to the concrete and stone retaining walls that line this massive shoreline.
During the last 30 minutes of this outing, we probed a 30-yard section of a steep main-lake shoreline in the lower section of the reservoir, where we caught three largemouth bass adjacent to a retaining wall and two boat docks. These bass were allured by the 2 ½-inch Z-Man California Craw ZinkerZ on a chartreuse 1/16-ounce Gopher jig. They were extracted out of three to five feet of water, while the boat floated in 12 to 17 feet of water.
From that steep main-lake shoreline, we ventured inside a main-lake cove and fished a secondary point, some offshore coontail patches and around one laydown. The 2 ¾-inch prototype Z-Man California Craw ZinkerZ on a chartreuse 1/16-ounce Gopher jig retrieved with a drag-and-shake presentation caught two largemouth bass along the secondary point, and the 2 ½-inch Z-Man California Craw ZinkerZ on a chartreuse 1/16-ounce Gopher jig extracted one largemouth bass from the outside edge of the laydown.
In addition to the 47 largemouth bass, we inadvertently caught one black crappie, one channel catfish, and one saugeye.
**************************************************************************************************************************************************
Steve Reideler of Lewisville, Texas, filed the following report about his April 1 bank-walking outing.
He wrote: "Wind advisories became a common and recurring theme in March, and they continue into April as well. Thus, I was forced to continue my bank-walking endeavors on this April Fool's Day excursion to two small community reservoirs near the southern boundary of Lewisville.
"The afternoon was partly cloudy with sun filled skies. The National Weather Service reported the morning low temperature at 66 degrees and the afternoon high was 83 degrees. A robust wind blew out of the south at 15 to 25 mph, with some gusts up to 30 mph.The barometric pressure measured 29.96 and was rising.
"I fished from noon until 5:00 p.m. In-Fisherman's solunar calendar indicated the optimum fishing period would occur between 12:34 p.m. and 2:34 p.m.
"The fishing, however, was disappointing and punctuated with long and tedious spells between bites.
The first of these two waterways is about five acres in size, and the largemouth bass were displaying some pre-spawning behavior.
The water was stained, exhibiting about one and a half feet of visibility. Its only outstanding features are a large mud flat that spans its south end, steep mud shorelines that are embellished with a large hydrilla bed and a small rock pile near the north shoreline. The water level appeared to be about two feet below normal.
I used two baits: Berkley's four-inch black-blue Power Grub dressed on a blue 1/16-ounce Gopher jig, and Zoom Bait Company's four-inch watermelon-red Mini-Lizard rigged on a red 1/16-ounce Gopher jig.
I caught two largemouth bass that were relating to the northeast edge of the hydrilla bed in five feet of water. Both of these bass were bewitched by the Berkley Power Grub presented in a slow swim-glide-and-shake manner. The large mud flat, steep mud banks, and small rock pile failed to yield any bass. The largest of these two bass weighed 2 1/2-pounds. The Zoom Mini-Lizard failed to induce a strike. I saw several largemouth bass slowly meandering along the east shoreline, but I did not find any spawners.
The second small reservoir is located just north of the first one. It is about the size of a football field, and there were visible signs that the largemouth bass were engaging in some of their spawning rituals.
The water was stained with about two feet of visibility. The water level appeared to be about three feet below normal. A large island is situated near its western shoreline with two creek channels running parallel to the island's north and south shorelines. A steep mud bank borders the eastern shoreline. A decorative stone wall adorns a shallow mud point on the southern shoreline.
Upon arriving at the southeast shoreline, I immediately observed three spawning beds close to the water's edge in about 1 1/2 feet of water, and there was one largemouth bass hovering above each bed. These are the first active spawning beds I have seen this spring. I decided not to disturb these fish from their spawning duties. Instead, I looked for aggregations of pre-spawn bass in the deeper waters off the shorelines. I struggled to catch six largemouth bass. All six bass were scattered and residing about 15 feet off the shoreline in three to five feet of water.
I employed an array of grubs, craw worms, Z-Man's 2 ¼-inch FattyZ tails, and Z-Man's four-inch Finesse WormZs affixed to various colors and sizes of Gopher jigs, but they failed to elicit any strikes. Zoom's watermelon-red Mini-Lizard implemented with a slow twitch-and-deadstick retrieve allured one bass from the east shoreline. Z-Man's three-inch bluegill-hue Scented LeechZ rigged on a red 1/32-ounce Gopher jig and suspended 18 inches below a one-inch Thill Rattling fixed bobber allured three largemouth bass from the northern shoreline, and this rig was presented with a slow twitch-twitch-and-pause cadence. Two more bass, including a second 2 1/2-pounder, were caught from the south-side ledge of the creek channel that runs parallel to the southern shoreline of the island. I failed to elicit a strike on the mud flat adjacent to the decorative stone wall.
I then returned to the five-acre reservoir and refished its steep north shoreline. I used the bobber-and-Scented LeechZ rig with a slow twitch-twitch-and-pause presentation parallel to the shoreline, and I tangled with one largemouth bass. This bass was abiding about 10 feet off the shore in about five feet of water.
In total, I allured nine largemouth bass in five hours. The bobber-and-Scented LeechZ rig bewitched six largemouth bass, and another three bass were able to liberate themselves before I could land them. Berkley's four-inch black-blue Power Grub caught two, and Zoom's watermelon-red Mini-Lizard beguiled one. Two power anglers were also fishing the second reservoir. They employed large tandem-blade spinnerbaits and wacky-rigged Senko-type baits, and they spent some time trying to catch the three spawning largemouth bass along the southeast shoreline. They failed to catch a single fish during the two hours that they fished.
Mother Nature doused northeastern Kansas and northwestern Missouri with some much needed rain on April 2. The National Weather Service in Lawrence, Kansas, recorded 1.09 inches of rain, but that didn't put much of a dent in the drought that has reigned in these parts for the past 27 months. In fact, the precipitation rate is nearly 24 inches below normal. Throughout the evening of April 2 and early morning hours of April 3, the weather forecasters predicted that a couple of thunderstorms would erupt across northeastern Kansas on April 3, but when those storms didn't materialize, I ventured to a nearly-by 195-acre community reservoir.
According to the National Weather Service, the morning's low temperature for April 3 was 49 degrees and the afternoon's high temperature was 70 degrees. The wind angled out of the east at 8 to 10 mph, and shortly after 2:00 p.m., it switched out of the northwest at 10 mph. The barometric pressure was 29.61 and slowly falling at 9:52 a.m. Clouds covered the sun for most of the day, but there were spells when the sun found an opening, and its rays warmed the surface of this reservoir and provoked the leaves on the willow trees to unfold and the buds on several other species of trees to swell and exhibit spring hues. A cold front arrived around 4:30 p.m., causing area thermometers to plummet into the 40s, and it occasionally drizzled. Eventually, the north wind began to roar, and through the night and into the morning of April 4, some gusts surpassed 40 mph.
The water level at this reservoir looked to be up a touch since my last outing on Mar. 25. It looked to be at least six inches below normal, and to my surprise, the reservoir's managers had opened the outlet, and a significant stream of water was streaming out of this reservoir. The water was clear enough that I could see the black propeller on the transom-mounted trolling motor, and the propeller is about 22 inches below the surface. The surface temperature at the dam was 49 degrees, and it was 54 degrees in the back end of this reservoir's southwest feeder-creek arm. Since Mar. 25, the patches of curly-leaf pondweed had grown by leaps and bounds. Around 1:00 p.m. an uncountable number of aquatic turtles were lying on laydowns and boulders, relishing the sun's occasional rays, and vast numbers of aquatic insects were milling about.
In-Fisherman's solunar calendar indicated that the best fishing would occur at 1:56 a.m. to 3:56 a.m., and 2:21 p.m. to 4:21 p.m. There was a minor period at 8:09 a.m. to 10:09 a.m. I was afloat from 9:35 a.m. to 2:35 p.m.
I spent the first hour and 20 minutes fishing the rock and riprap shorelines along the dam and some of the shorelines adjacent to the dam. I caught 12 largemouth bass. Eight were caught on a 2 ½-inch Z-Man's PB&J ZinkerZ affixed to a red 1/16-ounce Gopher jig. Three were caught on a 2 ¾-inch prototype Z-Man's California Craw ZinkerZ affixed to a chartreuse 1/16-ounce Gopher jig. And one was caught on a shortened four-inch Z-Man's PB&J Finesse WormZ affixed to a blue 1/16-ounce Gopher jig; this was the first largemouth bass that I have caught on a Finesse WormZ in 2014. One largemouth bass was caught during the initial drop, and 11 were bewitched by a drag-and-deadstick retrieve. These bass were extracted from three to nine feet of water.
I spent about 40 minutes fishing four spots inside the reservoir's south feeder-creek arm, where I caught four largemouth bass. Two were caught on a 2 ½-inch Z-Man's PB&J ZinkerZ spin affixed to a red 1/16-ounce Gopher jig, which was presented with a swim-glide-and-shake retrieve around patches of curly-leaf pondweed on the mud flat in the back third of this arm, where the boat floated in three to four feet of water. On the same mud flat, I caught a largemouth bass on a 2 ½-inch Z-Man's PB&J ZinkerZ affixed to a red 1/16-ounce Gopher jig, which was presented with a swim-glide-and-shake retrieve in a patch of curly-leaf pondweed. The third one was caught on a steep rocky shoreline on the 2 ¾-inch prototype Z-Man's California Craw ZinkerZ affixed to a chartreuse 1/16-ounce Gopher jig, which was retrieved with a drag-and-shake presentation.
I spent the last three hours in the back end of the reservoir's southwest feeder-creek arm, where I caught 18 largemouth bass and seven crappie. All of the bass and crappie were abiding in two to four feet of water. Three largemouth bass and two crappie were associated with a short stretch of riprap; the rest were associated with patches of curly-leaf pondweed.
Two largemouth bass were caught on the shortened four-inch Z-Man's PB&J Finesse WormZ affixed to a blue 1/16-ounce Gopher jig along the short stretch of riprap. The Finesse WormZ also allured two largemouth bass out of a patch of curly-leaf pondweed. These four largemouth bass were allured by the swim-glide-and-shake retrieve.
The 2 ¾-inch prototype Z-Man's California Craw ZinkerZ affixed to a chartreuse 1/16-ounce Gopher jig that was retrieved with the swim-glide-and-shake retrieve caught two largemouth bass around some curly-leaf pondweed.
The 2 ½-inch Z-Man's PB&J ZinkerZ spin affixed to a red 1/16-ounce Gopher jig inveigled 11 largemouth bass that were abiding in patches of curly-leaf pondweed.
I spent the last 10 minutes wielding a bobber or float rig. The bobber was fastened to the line and 20 inches above a red 1/32-ounce Gopher jig that was affixed to a Z-Man's black-blue-flake Scented Leech. This rig caught one largemouth bass along the short stretch of riprap, which engulfed the Scented LeechZ on the initial drop.
Across five hours of fishing, I caught 44 small largemouth bass or an average of 8.3 largemouth bass an hour, which is a sub-par April outing for a Midwest finesse angler in northeastern Kansas.
But April 3 on this reservoir was even more problematic for power anglers.
The mission and passion of Midwest finesse anglers in northeastern Kansas is to catch 25 largemouth, smallmouth or spotted bass an hour, and we do not care if they are tiny ones or big ones. On average throughout a calendar year, we tangle with 10 of them an hour. That philosophy, however, is the antithesis of power and tournament anglers whose aim is to catch five good-size largemouth, smallmouth or spotted bass an outing.
During this outing, I crossed paths with Eric Fortner of Gardner, Kansas, twice, and both times, we complained about how difficult the fishing was. Fortner is a talented power angler, who cares more about tangling with big largemouth bass rather than vast numbers of small largemouth bass. On this outing, he wielded a Z-Man's ChatterBait, several kinds of jerkbaits, a Storm's Original Wiggle Wart, and a soft-plastic swimbait. But to his chagrin, he caught only seven small largemouth bass and one crappie. In his eyes, it was worse than a sub-par April outing. In Aprils past, he has tangled with scores of lunker-sized largemouth bass, and most of them were caught around the patches of curly-leaf pondweed.
Some unseasonably cold weather and blustery winds traveled across northeastern Kansas during the night of April 3. The wind roared with gusts that ranged from 25 to 40 mph until 11 a.m. on April 4.
When the wind started to wane a touch, I decided to do some bass fishing for trout at a 416-acre community reservoir, where an angler can often find refuge from pesky west and northwest winds.
The National Weather Service recorded the low temperature at 39 degrees and the high temperature at 51 degrees; the normal low is 38 degrees, and the normal high temperature is 61 degrees. The sky was cloudy and filled to the brim with stratus and nimbostratus clouds until 3:30 p.m., and then the sky was cluttered with altocumulus clouds, which allowed the sun's rays to warm the late afternoon hours. Until the sun began to shine, the wind-chill factor had me donning a stocking cap, and my 74-year-old fingers tingled in the cold wind, which provoked me to wear a pair of gloves periodically.
The water level looked to be more than three feet below normal. The surface temperature ranged from 48 to 50 degrees. The water was clear enough that I could easily see the black propeller on the bow-mounted and transom-mounted trolling motors.
In-Fisherman's solunar calendar indicated that the best fishing occurred from 2:54 a.m. to 4:54 a.m. and 3:19 p.m. to 5:19 p.m., and there was a minor period from 9:07 a.m. to 11:07 a.m. I was afloat from 12:35 p.m. to 4:45 p.m.
Although the velocity of the wind wasn't as annoying as it was earlier in the day, it was still necessary to hide from it. Therefore, I spent the entire outing dissecting shorelines, main-lake and secondary points on the north and west sides of the reservoir. I hopscotched from the dam to the reservoir's upper reaches. I did, however, attempt to spend a few minutes probing a beaver hut situated along the north shoreline on the east side of the reservoir, but the wind and waves that angled into that feeder-creek arm from the west and northwest allowed me to make fewer than 2o casts, but those casts yielded three largemouth bass.
The most fruitful locations were two bluffy shorelines in the upper end of the reservoir. One was inside a secondary feeder-creek arm. The other was a main-lake bluff. Both bluffs were linked by a main-lake point. From this locale, I extracted 21 largemouth bass, 13 rainbow trout, four white bass, and the first bluegill of 2014. This bluff is graced with ledges, laydowns, massive boulders, rocks, gravel, and deep-water.
Two largemouth bass were caught on riprap along the west end of the dam.
Seven largemouth bass were caught along the north shoreline and a short span of the south shoreline inside a large and steep-sided cove that was sheltered from the wind. These shorelines are rock-and-boulder laced, as well as embellished with a few laydowns, man-made brush piles, and three secondary points.
One largemouth bass was caught along a shallow, riprap shoreline inside a flat cove on the reservoir's west side. The wind was a tad too bothersome for me to effectively fish in this cove.
The two most productive lures were a 2 ½-inch Z-Man's PB&J ZinkerZ affixed to a red 1/16-ounce Gopher jig and 3 ¾-inch Z-Man's PB&J Finesse WormZ affixed to a blue 1/16-ounce Gopher jig. The Finesse WormZ is 4 ¾-inches long, and when we use it, we always customize it by shortening it by three-quarters of an inch or more.
During the first two hours, the most effective presentation was a drag-and-shake retrieve, and it was occasionally punctuated with the deadstick motif, which was terminated with some substantial shakes . Then for the final two hours, the best retrieve became a swim-glide-and-shake presentation. The shake component of both retrieves was vigorous. It was executed by employing a lot of slack line and creating a series of significant S-curves in the line between the rod tip and where the line penetrated the surface of the water. At locales that were sheltered from the wind, I held the rod at the two o'clock position, which allowed me to create more S-curves.
In total, I caught and released 34 largemouth bass and 13 trout, and four white bass. Some of these fish were caught from near the water's edge in about two feet of water, a few were caught in eight to 10 feet of water, and others were caught in three to seven feet of water.
Since Mar. 18, we have witnessed the demise of the effectiveness of the Z-Man green-pumpkin Finesse ShadZ on a chartreuse 1/32-ounce Gopher jig, the ascendency of the 2 ½-inch Z-Man's PB&J ZinkerZ affixed to a red 1/16-ounce Gopher jig, and the dawning of the effectiveness of the Finesse WormZ. The effectiveness of the Finesse WormZ should gain momentum as April continues to unfold, and once the spawn season is upon us, tiny lizards and creature baits usually become alluring options for us to rig on either a 1/32- or 1/16-ounce Gopher jig.
On April 5 the wind was mild-mannered and angling out of the south and southeast instead of wailing out of the north and northwest as it did on April 4. This change motivated me to make a return trip to the 416-acre community reservoir that I fished on April 4 when the wind prevented me from fishing some of this reservoir's finest lairs along its eastern shorelines.
The National Weather Service in Topeka, Kansas, recorded the low temperature at 39 degrees and the high temperature at 63 degrees. The barometric pressure at 10:53 a.m. was 30.16 and falling. Perhaps in an act of celebration and appreciation of a spell of rather balmy weather, several pelicans kited about majestically in the sun-drenched and cobalt-blue sky. A few loons even made a rare appearance, and one saluted me with its wail that resembles the haunting laugh of the severely insane.
It was a delightful day to be afloat, and it was only the second time in 2014 that I was warm from the tip of my toes to the top of my bald head while I was fishing; in fact, I even broke into a slight and enjoyable sweat for about a half of an hour.
In-Fisherman's solunar calendar indicated that the best fishing would occur from 3:49 a.m. to 5:49 a.m. and 4:13 p.m. to 6:13 p.m., and a minor period would take place from 10:01 a.m. to 12:01 p.m. I was afloat from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., and as noted above, I focused on the east side of the reservoir, which I could not fish because of the wind and waves on April 4.
The water level was more than three feet below normal. The surface temperature ranged from 48 to 52 degrees. The water was clear enough that I could easily see the black propeller on the transom-mounted trolling motor.
I fished about two-thirds of the riprap along the eastern section of the dam, and I failed to elicit a strike. I fished two massive off-shore rock piles, and I didn't garner a strike. I fished a short bluff, where I eked out one largemouth bass. After plying those three lackluster areas, I spent the rest of the time fishing a variety of main-lake shorelines and points, as well as parts of two shorelines inside two feeder-creek arms, where I caught only 13 largemouth bass and 15 rainbow trout. But I elicit nearly two dozen strikes that I failed to hook, and the majority of those strikes felt as if they were administered by rainbow trout.
A 3 1/2-inch Z-Man's PB&J Finesse WormZ affixed to a blue 1/16-ounce Gopher jig allured the bulk of the 14 bass and 15 rainbow trout that I caught and released. A 2 ½-inch Z-Man's PB&J ZinkerZ affixed to a red 1/16-ounce Gopher jig was responsible for bewitching a few of those 29 fish.
The swim-glide-and-radical-shake retrieve elicited the most attention from the largemouth bass and rainbow trout. I caught a few by implementing a drag- deadstick-and-radical-shake presentation. And with both retrieves, most of the strikes occurred when I was creating a significant series of S-curves in the line between the rod tip and where the line entered the water.
Some of the largemouth bass and rainbow trout were inhabiting nine feet of water, others were abiding in water as shallow as three feet or less, and others were somewhere in between those two depths. In essence, I was unable to establish a location pattern.
Who really knows what was transpiring with the largemouth bass and rainbow trout in this reservoir. Some anglers might describe it as a post-cold-front syndrome, but I have never been able to deduce the cause and effect of a stellar outing versus a lackluster one. But I do know that Steve Desch of Topeka, Kansas, and a friend fished this same reservoir on April 6, and they struggled. Then on April 7 Pok-Chi Lau of Lawrence, Kansas, and his son, Tyler, fished it on April 7, and they found it even more trying.
Steve Reideler of Lewisville, Texas, filed a report on the Finesse News Network about his outing with Ralph Manns of Rowlett, Texas, who is a longtime In-Fisherman field editor.
He wrote: "I made a 43-mile foray to a 21,671-acre U.S. Army Corps of Engineer's flatland reservoir, where I joined Ralph Manns of Rowlett, Texas, for an afternoon of largemouth bass, white bass, and wiper fishing.
"The weather was chilly, wet, and dreary with light rain and drizzle falling most of the afternoon and early evening. The National Weather Service recorded the morning low temperature at 50 degrees and an afternoon high of 56 degrees. A persistent wind blew out of the east at 10 to 15 mph, with occasional gusts of 20 mph. By 6:30 p.m., the wind changed and angled out of the north at 10 to 15 mph. The barometric pressure measured 30.11 and was rising.
"In-Fisherman's solunar calendar indicated the best fishing period would occur between 4:16 p.m. and 6:16 p.m. Manns and I fished from about 4:00 p.m. until about 7:30 p.m., though I arrived at the reservoir at about 12:30 p.m. and scouted out several white bass, wiper, and largemouth bass locations before meeting up with Manns at about 4:00 p.m.
"The water was mostly stained, with about two-feet of visibility. Wind-swept areas exhibited about one foot of visibility. The surface temperatures varied from 58 degrees to 61 degrees. The Texas Water Management Board recorded the reservoir's water level at 7.44 feet below normal. With such low water levels, normally submerged stump fields and rocky shoals are now partially visible throughout the reservoir and hazardous to any unobservant boaters.
"Upon my arrival, I was surprised to find a local bass tournament in progress. Manns later estimated about 250 boats participated in the event, and from my observations, I believed he was accurate in his estimation. As I scouted out several white bass and wiper locations, I observed many tournament boats lined up to ply the only wind-sheltered largemouth bass lairs around the marinas and bridge embankments.
"About twenty minutes before I was to meet Manns, I checked a 50-yard section of a riprap-laden bridge embankment that was close to the boat ramp. I fished a respectable distance behind several tournament anglers who were wielding Alabama rigs, jig-n-pig combos, and large tandem-blade spinnerbaits, but I did not see them catch a fish.
"I graphed a rocky shelf jutting out from the south side of the causeway that was covered with three feet of water and abruptly dropped into 11 feet of water. The surface temperature at this location was 61 degrees. I probed the shelf with a Z-Man's green-pumpkin Finesse ShadZ rigged on a chartreuse 1/32-ounce Gopher jig and presented in a slow swim-glide-and-shake manner. I allured two keeper-sized largemouth bass from the top of the shelf. I then left to meet up with Manns at the boat ramp.
"After picking up Manns at the boat ramp, we spent the first 20 to 30 minutes examining a small hump located by a nearby bridge. We graphed a large concentration of what we believed to be white bass and wipers near the bottom in 21 feet of water. Manns plied the area with a fire-tiger tail spinner while I tried in vain to hold the boat steady in the gusting wind. The tail spinner failed to draw a strike.
"We then elected to turn our attention to largemouth bass. Manns directed me to a wind-swept cove on the west side of the reservoir. This cove contained a creek channel lined with stumps and winds its way across the middle of the cove and into a small shallow spawning area next to the west shoreline. The water depth varied from four feet in the creek channel to two feet along the stump-lined channel ledges. The water temperature was 58 degrees and the water's clarity was about one foot. I put the boat in the middle of the creek channel as we targeted the stumps on both sides of the channel. Manns employed an unknown brand white chatterbait and I used a four-inch Berkley's green-pumpkin Power Grub affixed to a chartreuse 1/16-ounce Gopher jig. We presented our offerings with steady do-nothing retrieves, and we failed to elicit any strikes.
We spent the remainder of the day fishing a 200-yard riprap-laden jetty that borders a channel that was once used as a hot water discharge area for an electric power plant. We saw one angler fishing the jetty while we fished the stump-lined creek channel, but we could not see if the angler caught any fish before he left. The surface temperature was 61 degrees, and the water exhibited about two feet of clarity. Manns switched to a wacky-rigged four-inch Gary Yamamoto Bait Company's watermelon with black and gold flake Senko and a dyed chartreuse tail, and he also wielded a Rapala DT-10 crankbait in a baby-bass hue. I utilized a four-inch Z-Man's black-blue-flake Finesse WormZ on a blue 1/32-ounce Gopher jig and Z-Man's green-pumpkin Finesse ShadZ rigged on a chartreuse 1/32-ounce Gopher jig. We worked our baits from the edge of the riprap out to about eight feet of water. The boat floated in 8 to 11 feet of water.
The jetty surrendered 10 largemouth bass, one crappie, and one catfish. Manns caught five largemouth bass, including one four-pounder, on his wacky-rigged Senko and slow lift-drop-and-deadstick presentation. I tangled with three largemouth bass, including a 5-pound, 7 ounce specimen, on the green-pumpkin Finesse ShadZ presented with a slow swim-glide-and-shake retrieve. I coaxed one largemouth bass into striking Z-Man's black-blue flake Finesse WormZ. Manns tangled with one largemouth bass on the Rapala DT-10 crankbait. The crappie and catfish were caught on the green-pumpkin Finesse ShadZ. We had several other largemouth bass that pulled free from the Finesse ShadZ and Senko before we could land them.
All told, we landed 12 largemouth bass, one crappie, and one catfish in about three hours of bass fishing, which includes the two largemouth bass I landed shortly before joining Manns. Yamamoto's four-inch watermelon with black and gold flake Senko implemented with a slow lift-drop-deadstick presentation beguiled five largemouth bass, including a 4-pounder. Z-Man's green- pumpkin Finesse ShadZ and slow swim-glide-and-shake motif inveigled five largemouth bass, including a five-pounder. Z-Man's four-inch black-blue-flake Finesse WormZ utilized with a slow swim-glide-shake scheme enticed one bass. Rapala's DT-10 crankbait in the baby bass hue and straight swim retrieve along the bottom allured one bass.
Terry Claudell of Overland Park, Kansas, filed a brief report on the Finesse News Network about his April 5 outing at a 2,600-acre power-plant reservoir, where the largemouth bass fishing has been extremely lackluster since late November in 2013.
He fished from 11:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. In-Fisherman's solunar calendar indicated that the best fishing occurred from 3:45 a.m. to 5:45 a.m. and 4:10 p.m. to 6:10 p.m., and there was a minor period from 9:57 a.m. to 11:57 a.m.
He noted that the high temperature during his outing was 59 degrees. It was sunny, and the wind angled out of the southeast from 5 to 10 mph.
The water level looked to be a foot or more above normal, and it was littered with debris from a recent heavy rain. The water clarity ranged from stained to muddy. The surface temperature in the lower portions of the reservoir was 56 degrees.
He failed to elicit a strike along the riprap of the dam and along a riprap causeway that lies about a mile to the east of the dam. Ultimately, he crossed paths with a few largemouth bass and white bass along the cool-water side of the riprap jetty that funnels the hot-water from the power-plant into the reservoir. These fish were extracted out of five to seven feet of water, and his boat was floating in 10 to 11 feet of water. He caught 25 white bass, seven largemouth bass and seven freshwater on a 2 ½-inch green-pumpkin-red ZinkerZ affixed to a chartreuse 1/16-ounce Gopher jig. He employed a drag-and-shake retrieve.
Bob Gum of Kansas City posted the following report on the Finesse News Network about his April 6 outing with his wife, Yan, at a 2,600-power plant reservoir on April 6.
The National Weather Service at Olathe, Kansas, recorded the morning low temperature at 46 degrees and the high temperature at 60 degrees. The wind was slight and variable, angling out of the east, southeast, and south at 3 to 9 mph. The sky was overcast. The barometric pressure was 29.99 and falling at 9:53 a.m.
In-Fisherman's solunar calendar noted that the best fishing would occur at 4:37 a.m. to 6:37 a.m. and 5:01 p.m. to 12.49 p.m., and there was a minor period from 10:49 a.m. to 12:49 p.m. They fished from 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.
The water level looked to be a foot above normal. The water clarity at the marina was less than a foot, and along the southeast corner of the lower portions of the reservoir, the clarity was about two feet. The high and murky water was the result of the heavy rains that hit several locales in eastern Kansas and western Missouri; for instance, Knob Noster, Missouri, received 6 ¼ inches.
They used the following baits: 2 ½-inch Z-Man's Bubble Gum ZinkerZ, 2 ½-inch Z-Man's Junebug ZinkerZ, and Z-Man's Bloodworm ShrimpZ. Those baits were affixed to a red 1/16-ounce Gopher jig.
Their first stop of the outing was a 200-yard stretch of riprap along the east side of the reservoir, where the surface temperature was 57 degrees. They caught seven white bass, one freshwater drum and not a single largemouth bass.
From the riprap, they crossed to the west side of the reservoir and plied a bluff and failed to elicit a strike.
Their third stop was at a rock pile situated on a roadbed that traverses a massive mud flat on the west side of the reservoir, where they didn't garner a strike.
From that roadbed they crossed to the east side of the reservoir again and fished a 50-yard stretch of riprap that lines the shoreline around the power plant, where they caught three largemouth bass. They would have fished many yards of this riprap shoreline, but there were two boats of tournament anglers from the Flint Hills Bass Association tournament plying that riprap.
Instead, they ventured to the dam, where the surface temperature was 57 degrees.
Along the riprap of the dam, they tangled with several largemouth bass, including a 20 ½-incher that engulfed the ShrimpZ.
Gum wrote: "We crossed paths with a couple of engaging guys fishing the tournament. They said they were from Topeka and knew Clyde Holscher. They asked me what I was using. I told them I was throwing a Z-Man's bait on a light jig. 'Oh like a Ned Rig,' one said, 'I read Ned's post from last week.' After hearing this, I was somewhat mystified that they were throwing a large crankbait and a double-bladed spinnerbait. By two o'clock in the afternoon, they had only caught a couple of fish.
Gum and his wife ended their outing by fishing the riprap shoreline that parallels a roadway along the side of the reservoir, where they caught several wipers and a couple of largemouths.
In total, they caught three freshwater drum, 15 temperate bass and 16 largemouth bass. Most of the largemouth bass were caught in one to four feet of water, but the biggest one was in six to eight feet of water along the riprap of the dam. The most effective presentation was a swim-glide-and-shake retrieve. When they were using the ZinkerZ, their rod tips were up, and while they worked with the ShrimpZ, their rod tips were pointed down.
Steve Reideler of Lewisville, Texas, filed this report on the Finesse News Network about his bank-walking endeavors with a friend on April 6.
He wrote: "The rain and cool temperatures that settled over north central Texas on April 5 continued into April 6, but it did not deter Rick Allen of Dallas, Texas, and me from donning some warm winter attire underneath our rain suits and conducting a second bobber-rig experiment at two local community ponds.
"Throughout the day, wave after wave of thunderstorms rumbled across the area, and rain fell continuously at varying degrees of intensity. The National Weather Service recorded the morning low temperature at 47 degrees and the afternoon high temperature struggled to reach 52 degrees. A cold wind quartered out of the east at 10 to 23 mph. The barometric pressure measured 29.87. By day's end, my garden's rain gauge had measured one and a half inches of much needed precipitation.
"Allen and I were afoot from about 12:15 p.m. until about 6:15 p.m. In-Fisherman's solunar calendar noted that the optimum fishing periods occurred from 4:44 a.m. to 6:44 a.m., 5:06 p.m. to 7:06 p.m., and a minor period took place from 6:56 p.m. to 8:56 p.m. We did not have the means to measure water temperatures.
We started the outing at a small and scenic community pond that lies on the south side of Lewisville. It is about 100 yards long and 50 yards wide. The water was stained with about two feet of visibility. The water level appeared to be about two feet below normal. This pond features a fairly straight northern shoreline with shallow banks festooned with fresh green sprouts of aquatic vegetation. There is a large island occupying the western portion of this pond with two creek channels winding along the island's southern and northern banks. The east border of the pond is formed by a steep mud bank, and a decorative concrete and stone wall enhances a shallow mud point on the southern shoreline. On April 1, I observed three spawning beds close to the bank in about 1 1/2 feet of water, and there was one largemouth bass hovering above each bed. On this April 6 excursion, there were no signs of any bedding bass.
"We prepared our rods with the following bobber-rigged lures: 2 ¼-inch Z-Man's green-pumpkin FattyZ tail rigged on a chartreuse 1/32-ounce Gopher jig; Z-Man's bluegill hue Scented LeechZ affixed to a blue 1/32-ounce Gopher jig; Z-Man's green-pumpkin Scented LeechZ rigged on a 1/32-ounce blue Gopher jig. All three baits were suspended 18- to 24-inches below a fixed rattling bobber.
"We presented the bobber rig with a slow twitch-twitch-pause retrieve. We found the largemouth bass to be in a finicky mood, and many times throughout the outing, we watched our bobbers slowly bob and glide about while a bass played with the bait. We found ourselves waiting for what seemed like 10 to 15 seconds before a largemouth bass decided to take the lure and finally pull the bobber-rig down below the water's surface. Once the bobber plunged below the surface, we gently set the hook. This tentative and intriguing behavior that the largemouth bass exhibited enlightened our outing.
"We started fishing along the east shoreline and worked our way northward toward the north shoreline. This steep mud bank surrendered two largemouth bass which were caught on the 2 1/4-inch green pumpkin FattyZ tail. Both bass were abiding about 15 feet off the water's edge in five feet of water.
"The north shoreline yielded seven largemouth bass, which were allured by the 2 1/4-inch green-pumpkin FattyZ tail, green-pumpkin Scented LeechZ, and bluegill-hue Scented LeechZ. Four bass were residing in five feet of water along the deep-water edge of this shallow shoreline; two bass were caught in three feet of water along the north bank of the island; and one bass was extracted from the west end of the north bank in about three feet of water. We failed to draw any strikes from the creek channel on the north side of the island.
"We then plied the cove just west of the island. We enticed three largemouth bass from a shallow mud point that extends from the west bank of the cove. These three bass were milling about in three feet of water on top of the point.
"We then proceeded eastward down the south shoreline and inveigled four bass. All four bass were residing about 25 feet off the bank in five feet of water just south of the creek channel.
"In total, we tangled with 19 largemouth bass at this delightful suburban waterway, but we landed only 16. Nine were allured by the 2 1/4-inch green-pumpkin FattyZ tail; five were caught on the bluegill-hue Scented LeechZ; and two were allured by the 2 1/4-inch green-pumpkin Scented LeechZ.
"Allen and I then drove 18 miles to a small community pond in the northern Dallas suburb of Plano, Texas.
"This small reservoir is about 12-acres in size, and it has been very fruitful over the past several weeks.
"It is graced with two small patches of hydrilla. One patch lies in five feet of water on its east side, and it is adjacent to the southwest end of a prominent point. The other one is situated in a cove on its northeast side in three to five feet of water.
"Its north shoreline is mostly straight, with a three-foot mud and gravel ledge that extends outward from the water's edge and drops off into five feet of water. The west shoreline is similar to the north one, but it is comprised of sand, gravel, and a few scattered fist-sized rocks. This shoreline is adorned with a shallow ledge that extends about three feet from the water's edge and slowly descends into five feet of water. The south shoreline borders a large mud and gravel flat, which was stippled with scores of vacant spawning beds near the water's edge. The east side of the reservoir includes two coves that are divided by a prominent sand and gravel point. The southeast cove consists of steep mud and rock banks, a ditch that runs from the southern bank to the northeastern corner of the cove, and a mud and gravel point that courses outward toward deeper water from the southern shoreline, and this point forms the southern mouth to the cove. The northeastern cove is comprised of a large mud flat with a ditch that cuts westward through the middle of the cove from the east bank.
"We continued our bobber-rig experiment with the following baits: 2 1/4-inch Z-Man's Junebug FattyZ tail on a 1/32-ounce blue Gopher jig; Z-Man's Junebug Finesse ShadZ rigged on a blue 1/16-ounce Gopher jig; four-inch Z-Man's Junebug Finesse WormZ affixed to a blue 1/16-ounce Gopher jig; Zman's 2 1/4-inch Z-Man's green- pumpkin FattyZ tail on a chartreuse 1/16-ounce Gopher jig; and four-inch Z-Man's PB&J Finesse WormZ on a blue 1/32-ounce Gopher jig. All of these baits were suspended 18- to 20-inches below a fixed rattling bobber and presented with a twitch-twitch-pause retrieve.
"We started fishing on the west shoreline, where we caught nine largemouth bass. All of these bass were about 25 to 30 feet off the bank in five feet of water. We could not determine what type of cover or structure these fish were relating to.
"We plied the south shoreline next, which is a known spawning area, but we did not find any bass on the spawning flat. We tangled with eight largemouth bass, and they were milling about in five feet of water, and they were 25 to 30 feet from the water's edge.
"We worked our way eastward into the southeast cove. A ditch in the south end of this cove yielded two largemouth bass. One bass was caught off the west-side edge of the ditch in about three feet of water, and the second was extracted from the middle of the ditch in about five feet of water. The north end of the ditch surrendered three more largemouth bass. All three of these bass were taken from the east side edge of the ditch in about three feet of water. We failed to muster any strikes from the west side edge of the ditch and the ditch itself.
"Along the south side of the prominent sand and gravel point, we caught four largemouth bass, which were in about five feet of water and 25 to 30 feet from the water's edge.
"The north side of the point yielded one largemouth bass that was also residing about 25 to 30 feet off the bank in about five feet of water.
"We failed to catch a largemouth bass from the two patches of hydrilla.
'The next spot where we made contact with some largemouth bass was along the east shoreline of the northeastern cove. These three largemouth bass were relating to the north-side ledge of the ditch. We received no strikes from the south-side ledge of the ditch or in the ditch itself.
"We finished our rain-soaked afternoon dissecting the northern shoreline, which produced four largemouth bass. All four of these bass were scattered and situated about 20 feet off the bank in about five feet of water.
"Allen and I tangled with 34 largemouth bass at this 12-acre community reservoir. Twenty-five were allured by the 2 1/4-inch Junebug FattyZ tail; four were beguiled by the Junebug Finesse ShadZ; two were caught on the four-inch Junebug Finesse WormZ; another two were bewitched by the four-inch PB&J Finesse WormZ; and one bass was caught on the 2 1/4-inch green-pumpkin FattyZ tail. We also experimented with a 2 1/2-inch customized Z-Man's Junebug FattyZ tube on a blue 1/32-ounce Gopher jig, but it failed to draw a strike.
"Across the six hours that we fished, we landed 50 largemouth bass. We hooked seven other largemouth bass, but they were able to liberate themselves before we could land them.
"We found the bobber-rig very effective and a fun technique to add to our repertoire of Midwest finesse tactics. From our perspectives, it seems to be most effective when the largemouth bass are reluctant to chase down faster presentations. We also found that baits with floating tails, such as the FattyZ tails and FattyZ customized tubes, Finesse WormZs, Finesse ShadZs, and Scented LeechZs, seem to be the most productive. We did not get a chance to try a bobber-rigged Hula StickZ, but we believe it will work just as well. These baits suspend in a natural horizontal position when the bobber is at rest, and not with the tail angled down as many other plastic baits do."
My cousin Rick Heberstreit of Shawnee, Kansas, and I were planning to do some bass fishing for trout on this outing, but our best rainbow trout waterway turned sour on April 4 and became sourer on April 5, 6, and 7. Therefore, we elected to spend five midday hours at a 100-acre community reservoir that lies along the southwest rim of suburban Kansas City.
Rick and I fished this same reservoir on April 1, when we caught 47 largemouth bass. The bulk of them were caught along a west-side shoreline near the upper end of this reservoir. We anticipated that the same scenario would unfold on this April 7 outing.
Traditionally, the upper portions of the feeder-creek arms in the small flatland reservoirs that stipple the landscape of northeastern Kansas and northwestern Missouri are where we find and catch the bulk of our late winter and very early spring largemouth bass. At the same time, we have a difficult time locating and catching largemouth bass in the lower two-third portions of these reservoirs. The upper portions consist of shallow mud flats and even the steeper shorelines in these upper reaches are relatively shallow. The lower two-third portions of these reservoirs have steeper and deeper shorelines, and we suspect that the bulk of the wintertime and very early-springtime largemouth bass in these lower sections abide in deeper lairs than Midwest finesse anglers probe. Normally the depth of our probings range from one to 10 feet of water, and on a few occasions we have explored depths of 12 to 15 feet. We have been told by anglers, such as Eric Fortner of Gardner, Kansas, that they have used drop-shot rigs and jigging spoons to catch largemouth bass in the winter in 25 to 30 feet of water in the lower segments of some of northeastern Kansas' small flatland reservoirs, but we have no interest in probing those depths. One reason why we don't fish deep-water is the adverse effects of barotrauma, which can erupt when largemouth bass are extracted from deep-water lairs. Another reason is we find deep-water fishing to be too tedious. What's more, a goodly number of largemouth bass abide in shallow water in our reservoirs year around.
On our April 7 outing, the water level was normal. The surface temperature was 52 to 54 degrees. The water was clear enough that we could see the black propeller on the transom-mounted trolling motor, which was 22 inches below the surface. There was a major bloom of filamentous algae, which adhered to our baits on uncountable number of retrieves. In fact , a major quagmire of filamentous algae cluttered the west shoreline along the upper end of this reservoir.
The National Weather Service at Olathe, Kansas, noted that the low temperature was 38 degrees and the high temperature was 64 degrees. The barometric pressure was 29.78 and falling. The wind angled out of the northwest and west at 7 to 21 mph. It was partly cloudy to mostly cloudy throughout our outing. A few rain showers crisscrossed northeastern Kansas, but none fell upon us.
In-Fisherman's solunar calendar indicated that the best fishing times were from 5:42 a.m. to 7:42 a.m. and 5:47 p.m. to 7:47 p.m., and there was a minor period from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
To our surprise, we struggled to catch 11 largemouth bass in the upper reaches of the reservoir. Ten of these were caught along the west shoreline that yielded 33 largemouth bass on April 1. But we caught 44 largemouth bass along several of the shorelines in the lower half of the reservoir.
The best shorelines were relatively flat and graced with burgeoning patches of coontail, and these locales yielded 31 largemouth bass. But we did catch six largemouth bass along the steep riprap shoreline of the dam, and we also caught seven largemouth bass along a steep and rocky shoreline that is littered with a dozen boat docks.
Our three best baits were a shortened four-inch Z-Man's PB&J Finesse WormZ , a Z-Man's green-pumpkin Hula StickZ affixed to a chartreuse 1/16-ounce Gopher jig, and a 2 ½-inch Z-Man's PB&J ZinkerZ on a red 1/16-ounce Gopher jig. Until 1:00 p.m., when the velocity of the wind increased, a red 1/32-ounce Gopher jig affixed to a 3 ½-inch Finesse WormZ was exceedingly effective. Once the wind gusts climbed into the 20-mph or more range, we employed either a blue or a red 1/16-ounce Gopher jig affixed to a shorten four-inch Finesse WormZ.
The best retrieve was the swim-glide-and-shake motif, and our shakes were often vigorous and constant. Our aim was to create a series of S-curves on the line from the tip of the rod to the spot where the line enters the water. The swim-glide-and-shake retrieve was essential around the coontail patches and in the areas that were littered with filamentous algae. Along the steeper and rocky shorelines, which weren't marred with filamentous algae, the drag-and-shake retrieve paid some dividends. The hop-bounce-and-shake presentation also allured several largemouth bass at lairs that weren't covered with filamentous algae and coontail.
Most of the largemouth bass that we caught were abiding in three to seven feet of water.
In sum, this outing revealed that a transition had taken place at several of our small flatland reservoirs as the cold-water period has gradually come to an end. And from this date on, it looks as if we will be spending more time probing the lairs in the lower sections of our reservoirs.
John McKean of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, posted the following report on April 8 about his bank-walking outings for his style of bass fishing for trout, which is actually trout fishing for a few bass and crappie.
We wrote: "I was just checking the Midwest Finesse reports for March, and I was so inspired that I thought I should write a brief report about our early April endeavors near Pittsburgh.
"Ice-out occurred sometime between Sunday and early Monday on Mar. 31 at one of our small local reservoirs. Since then I got out for a few morning hours each day and wielded a little 1/40-ounce darter-head jig that my son and I tie out of raw wool and bright satin fabric, which I affix to three-pound-test line. The water was murky and I elected to use a jig that was tied with an orange and gold fabric.
"The three-pound-test line allowed me to make fairly long casts.
"The water was very cold, of course. So the best presentation tactic was a very slow steady retrieve with slight shaking and intermittent pauses to keep the light jig down and near bottom. It was best to visualize the lure crawling about an inch above bottom, having frequent spasms to get the fibers active. The strikes were really just a tiny bit of extra pressure, and I set the hook by slightly tightening the line, which allowed the sharp No. 8 VMC hook to penetrate the flesh.
"Toward the end of the week, the water warmed slightly and the trout took to the air for fights, but the jig still had to be crawling near bottom rocks to acquire a take. Rains hit on Friday, and the dark, muddy water made it hard for the trout to see even my bright Goldbugs.
"So far, I have tangled with 111 rainbow and brook trout, plus the odd bass and crappie.
"It is still raining, but better days ahead. I hear big Pymatuning Reservoir up north has now thawed and crappies and walleyes are invading the shallows. It is time to take a trip!"
Brent Frazee of Parkville, Missouri, posted the following report on the Finesse News Network about his April outing with a friend on a 120-acre community reservoir that is situated along the northern suburbs of Kansas City.
The National Weather Service in Kansas City recorded the low temperature for the day at 39 degrees and the high temperature at 75 degrees. It was sunny. The wind howled out of the south and southwest at 14 to 35 mph. The barometric pressure was 30.10 and dropping at 8:54 a.m.
In-Fisherman's solunar calendar noted that the best fishing occurred from 6:50 a.m. to 8:50 a.m. and 7:12 p.m. to 9:12 p.m.
Frazee wrote: "I am tired of the wind this spring. It was barreling out of the south today, with gusts up to 35 miles per hour."
Nevertheless, he and his colleague spent a lot of time plying a wind-blown riprap shoreline in the upper end of this reservoir, and he readily confessed that it was a lot of work.
Their wind-blown work yielded 41 largemouth bass. The bulk of them were caught along the riprap shoreline, but a few were also extracted from some steep rocky shorelines and rocky points that had ranks of white caps crashing onto them.
Frazee caught the bulk of his largemouth bass on a 2 ½-inch Z-Man's PB&J ZinkerZ on a red 1/16-ounce Gopher jig, and he caught five of them on a black-and-blue skirted jig and soft-plastic trailer. His friend employed a spider-style grub.
Frazee concluded: "As much as it caused grief, the wind was needed. Every largemouth bass we caught was where waves were crashing into the bank. No trout today, which was surprising, and only one crappie. We had a couple big largemouth bass hooked, but we failed to land them.
April 10 log
Brent Frazee of Parkville, Missouri, posted this report on the Finesse News Network about his April 10 outing at the 120-acre community reservoir that he also fished on April 9. On this April 10 trek, he was accompanied by David Gray of Lee's Summit, Missouri, who is a fishing rod designer and proprietor of Carbon X Rods.
The National Weather Service in Kansas City recorded the low temperature at 57 degrees and the high temperature at 70 degrees. The wind angled out of the north and northeast at 10 to 24 mph. It was sunny. The barometric pressure at 8:53 a.m. was 29.80 and rising.
In-Fisherman's solunar calendar noted that the best fishing times occurred from 7:30 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. and 7:51 p.m. to 9:51 p.m.
Frazee wrote: "Wow, was this a day when changing baits made a huge difference.
"We spent the first part of our four-hour trip fishing the riprap along the shoreline in the upper end of the reservoir and it was a big disappointment. I used a 2 ½-inch Z-Man's PB&J ZinkerZ on a red 1/16-ounce Gopher jig, a black-and-blue skirted jig and pig, and a Wiggle Wart. David used a Jewel Bait Company's brown-skirted jig with a brown trailer. We caught only 11 largemouth bass. I tried to force it, thinking the fish were there, but I finally gave in and went pioneering.
"I thought we could at least catch some trout in the back of one of the coves, and we did.
"Inside one cove, I stopped the boat and made a long cast to a beaver hut and got a strike, which I didn't hook. That's when I decided to change and affix a Z-Man's green-pumpkin Finesse Shad Z onto a red 1/16-ounce Gopher jig. The bite immediately changed for the better. I caught a 15-inch largemouth bass right away, then a few smaller largemouth bass and some big crappies. Then I had David switch to the same bait.
"I had one largemouth bass on that we got a good look at before it broke my 4-pound-test line even though the drag was working properly. I didn't have time to get disappointed. On the next cast, I caught one even bigger. Then David landed another big one. We ended up catching and releasing six big largemouth bass and 10 crappies from that one small area, and all of them were caught on the green-pumpkin Finesse Shad Z.
"We had over 30 bass for the half day. We failed to keep an accurate count once we started catching those big ones."
Dennis Medley of Morton, Illinois, is an ardent bank walker. And on April 11, he filled his first report on the Finesse News Network. This was his first outing in 2014, and it occurred on April 10 at a farm pond that encompassed about three-quarters of an acre of water. Its deepest spot plunges into 30 feet of water.
The ice had melted on April 9. The water temperature along the shorelines was 40 degrees, and the water was exceptionally clear.
He noted that many of the ponds that he fishes suffered significant fish kills during the winter of 2013-14, but he did not know if the pond that he fished on April 10 was afflicted.
In-Fisherman's solunar calendar noted that the best fishing occurred from 7:10 a.m. to 9:10 a.m. and 7:31 p. m. to 9:31 p.m. He fished from 10:00 a.m. until noon.While he was fishing, the air temperature hit 55 degrees. The wind angled out of the south at 20 to 25 mph. The sky fluctuated from partly cloudy to mostly cloudy.
Initially, he wielded Charlie Brewer's Slider Company's 2 1/8-inch watermelon red/copper/black flake Slider Minnow/Grub and several other jigs, but they failed to elicit a strike.
Ultimately, he began employing a live nightcrawler, which he partially threaded onto a No. 4 hook. He attached a RockyBrooks 1/64-ounce limestone sinker two inches above the hook. He also applied a touch of Pro-Cure Bait Scents' Garlic Nightcrawler Super Gel to the nightcrawler. And by employing a slow drag-and-deadstick retrieve, this combo eked out four largemouth bass, which were abiding in five to 10 feet of water.
As Pok-Chi Lau of Lawrence, Kansas, and I were struggling to bass fish for trout at a 416-acre reservoir on April 11, I occasionally wondered if I could find the words to adequately describe our inabilities to wield Midwest finesse tactics that would allure largemouth bass, smallmouth bass and some incidental rainbow trout. Since those initial ponderings erupted about 24 hours ago, I have come to the conclusion that I am unable to construct any sentences and paragraphs that will describe how and why we failed.
On April 4, I had a solo outing at this reservoir, when I battled a brisk northwest wind and unseasonably cold-weather conditions. Despite the problematic weather on that endeavor, I was able to catch 34 largemouth bass, 13 rainbow trout, and four white bass, which isn't a stellar Midwest finesse outing, but it was far better than what I experienced on April 5 at this reservoir, and what Steve Desch of Topeka endured on April 6 at this reservoir and what Pok-Chi Lau and his son, Tyler, encountered on April 7 at this reservoir.
What I can report about our sorry April 11 outing is that the National Weather Service at Topeka, Kansas, recorded the low temperature at 40 degrees and high temperature at 78 degrees. The sun was shining everywhere. The wind angled out of the southeast and east at 5 to 12 mph. The barometric pressure was 30.07 and dropping at 9:53 a.m. It was a gorgeous spring day in northeastern Kansas with a bounty of flowers and trees blooming and about to bloom.
The water level looked to be about 3 1/2 feet below normal. Throughout our outing the surface temperature ranged from 51 to 57 degrees. In the lower 90 percent of the reservoir, the water was clear enough that we could see the black propeller on the transom-mounted trolling motor, which was about 22 inches under the surface. In the upper 10 percent of the reservoir, the water was stained to the point that we could not see the propellers of the bow-mounted and transom-mounted trolling motors.
In-Fisherman's solunar calendar indicated that the best fishing would occur from 8:12 a.m. to 10:12 a.m. and 8:34 p.m. to 10:34 p.m. Lau and I fished from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.
Steve Desch and Gary Brown of Topeka, Kansas, who are talented Midwest finesse anglers, launched their boat around 10:00 a.m., too. The four of us worked together to see if we could locate the whereabouts of this reservoir's largemouth bass, smallmouth bass, and rainbow trout, and we dissected a variety of shorelines and offshore lairs from the dam to the upper reaches of this reservoir.
Across the five hours that Lau and I fished, we were able to catch only 11 largemouth bass, six rainbow trout, one crappie, one green sunfish, and one freshwater drum. We failed to land three rainbow trout and two largemouth bass.
Desch and Brown caught 16 rainbow trout and nine largemouth bass.
All of the rainbow trout were caught in the upper 15 percent of the reservoir. Most of those were caught on two shallow mud flats on the east side of the reservoir, and these trout were extracted from three to four feet of water. Five rainbow trout were caught along a steep rocky bluff on the west side of the reservoir. These trout were extracted out of four to seven feet of water.
Ten of the largemouth bass were caught on one of the shallow mud flats. Five were caught along a steep rocky bluff on the west side of the reservoir. Three were caught along two steep rocky shorelines inside a mid-lake cove on the west side of the reservoir. One was caught along a shallow riprap shoreline inside another mid-lake cove on the west side of the reservoir. And one was caught on a steep rocky main-lake point on the east side of the reservoir.
Because our catch was so paltry, we were unable to determine which baits, colors of baits, and retrieves were the most effective. Desch, however, guessed that a 2 ½-inch Z-Man's green-pumpkin ZinkerZ on a red 1/16-ounce Gopher jig was the best bait, and a drag-and-deadstick retrieve was the best.
Upon struggling through this outing and the ones on April 5, 6, and 7, Brown, Desch, Lau and I are perplexed and worried about the state of the largemouth bass population in this reservoir, which was battered by the largemouth bass virus several years ago.
Traditionally, we are unable to catch smallmouth bass at this reservoir with our Midwest finesse tactics until the surface temperature constantly hovers in the high 50s and low 60s. So far in 2014, we have caught only one smallmouth bass from this reservoir, and that occurred when Lau and I fished it on Mar. 18, and the surface temperature was 43 to 45 degrees.
At the close of this outing, Brown, Desch, Lau and I said that we would wait until this reservoir's surface temperature hits a constant 60 degrees before we return, and then we hope to tangle with a combination of at least 10 largemouth and smallmouth bass an hour.
Steve Reideler of Lewisville, Texas, filed this report on the Finesse News Network about his April 11 outing.
He wrote: "Rick Allen of Dallas, Texas, asked me to join him for an afternoon excursion to an 80-acre water-conservation reservoir located between Chico and Sunset, Texas.
"The weather was warm and partly cloudy. The National Weather Service recorded the morning low temperature at 61 degrees and the afternoon high temperature warmed to 85 degrees. A vigorous wind blew out of the south at 18 to 25 mph. The barometric pressure was measured at 29.91.
In-Fisherman's solunar calendar indicated that the best fishing periods would occur from 2:16 a.m. to 4:16 a.m. and 8:20 a.m to 10:20 a.m. A minor period occurred between 8:42 p.m. and 10:42 p.m. We were afloat from 12:30 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Allen and I have never been to this reservoir before. Upon our arrival, we discovered that the reservoir's banks were ringed with thick stands of flooded timber, which is intertwined with stumps, basketball-sized rocks, and submerged brush.
Throughout our entire outing, the wind was relentless and we could not find any locations that offered any appreciable shelter. Thus, our casting accuracy and lure presentations around the thick timber became a frustrating endeavor, and when we did make reasonably accurate casts for the conditions, the wind seemed to take great delight in blowing our lines around the many tree trunks and tree limbs that lined the banks. We found no aquatic vegetation.
The water was clear with a pleasant emerald-green hue that exhibited more than five feet of clarity. The surface temperature varied from 65-degrees at the boat ramp to 67 degrees in the back of two coves. The water level appeared to be about seven feet below normal.
Except for an occasional open spot here and there, the wood cover prevented the use of our Z-Man's soft-plastic baits rigged on Gopher jigs with exposed hooks. Thus, we mostly employed four-inch Charlie Brewer Slider Company's Plum-Glitter Slider Worms Texas-rigged on Brewer's 1/16-ounce Original Weedless Slider jig, and four-inch Yum's watermelon Dinger wacky-rigged on a 1/32-ounce Owner's weedless Ultra wacky jig. Around the few open spots we found, we experimented with a 2 1/4-inch Z-Man's watermelon-red FattyZ tail affixed on a red 1/32-ounce Gopher jig that was suspended 24 inches below a fixed rattling bobber, and a four-inch Zoom Bait Company's watermelon-red Mini-Lizard rigged on a red 1/16-ounce Gopher jig.
During this four and a half hour outing, we struggled to entice 14 largemouth bass, and five of these fish were able to throw the bait while cartwheeling across the water's surface after they were hooked. All fourteen bass were extracted from coves with steep-rock and thick-timbered banks in three to six feet of water. Five largemouth bass were attracted to the Slider-worm rig, which was presented with what the late Charlie Brewer of Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, called a lift-and-drop retrieve across the bottom and through submerged brush and timber. The bobber-rigged FattyZ tail, which was retrieved with a slow twitch-twitch-and-pause presentation proved effective in a couple of small open areas, and it beguiled five largemouth bass. The weedless wacky-rigged Yum Dinger applied in a slow lift-drop-and-deadstick manner allured three bass, and the four-inch Zoom Mini-Lizard that was retrieved with a slow twitch-and-deadstick presentation enticed one.
Bob Gum of Kansas City filed this report on the Finesse News Network about his April 12 outing to a 6,930-acre U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' reservoir.
The National Weather Service in Topeka, Kansas, recorded the low temperature at 57 degrees and the high temperature at 84 degrees. During the early morning hours, the wind angled out of the south at 8 mph, but by 8:53 a.m. it began to howl, and throughout the day some gusts hit 32 mph. It was sunny. The barometric pressure was 29.75, and it dropped significantly throughout the day.
The surface temperatures were in the low 50s. The water level was 3.02 feet below normal. The water was clear.
In-Fishman's solunar calendar noted that the best fishing times occurred from 8:51 a.m to 10:51 a.m. and 9:14 p.m. to 11:14 p.m. He fished from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.
He launched his boat along the south side of the reservoir about three miles above the dam. He worked his way towards the dam, hoping to ply wind-sheltered shorelines, but those areas were not productive. The only areas that he could garner a strike were along wind-blown shorelines. Therefore, he attempted to deal with the wind by employing a drift sock and focusing on the east-side shorelines inside secondary and tertiary feeder-creek arms, and at times as he probed those shorelines, he wished that he had two drift socks. These shorelines are rock laden and most have less than a 45-degree slope into the water.
He tried to use a 2 ½-inch Z-Man's Bubble Gum ZinkerZ on 1/16-ounce Gopher jig and a Z-Man's green-pumpkin Finesse ShadZ on a 1/16-ounce Gopher jig, but the wind prevented him from properly presenting these baits. But he crossed paths with a pair of anglers who were using 2 ½-inch Z-Man's ZinkerZs on 1/8-ounce jigs, and they had caught several largemouth bass. In retrospect, he thought that he should have tested his ZinkerZs on either a 3/32-ounce or 1/8-ounce jig.
Ultimately, Gum eked out one smallmouth bass that was allured by a three-inch Kalin's blue/silver Triple Threat Grub affixed to a 1/8-0unce jig, and he used a three-inch jerkbait to catch seven white bass, four smallmouth bass, and one walleye.
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Dave Weroha and Joel Heckelbeck , both of Kansas City, fished a 5,090 — acre power-plant reservoir and 6,930-acre U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' reservoir on April 12.
In-Fisherman's solunar calendar noted that the best fishing times occurred from 8:51 a.m to 10:51 a.m. and 9:14 p.m. to 11:14 p.m.
Weroha posted the following report on the Finesse News Network about their endeavors to deal with the horrendous winds that whipped across northeastern Kansas.
He wrote: "It was a wind-blown outing like no other I have experienced before. We launched at 8:00 a.m. and were immediately faced with a stiff south wind, which was blowing at 15 mph. Despite this, we headed into it and straight for the dam, where the surface temperature was 48 degrees.
"I worked with a radically customized Z-Man green-pumpkin ToobZ on a 1/8-ounce drop-shot rig. My partner used a chartreuse, jointed, and medium-diving crankbait. After we plied the dam for 15 minutes and failed to elicit a strike, we decided to fish the mile-long riprap jetty or dyke.
"This jetty runs north and south, and we allowed the south wind, which was blowing 20 to 25 mph, to briskly blow us along the west side of the jetty. My partner's crankbait caught a smallmouth bass, 20-inch walleye and 24-inch walleye. I, however, couldn't elicit a strike with my drop-shot rig or by slowly swimming a customized Z-Man's Redbone-hue Diezel MinnowZ. We fished this jetty for about 45 minutes, and when the wind velocity hit 29 mph, the folks in the guard house signaled us that the reservoir was being closed for safety reasons.
"It is interesting to note that two weeks ago, when the surface the temperature at this power-plant reservoir was 45 degrees and the wind angled out of the north, my customized finesse lures garnered all of the strikes and my partner's crankbaits failed to elicit a strike. I would submit that once surface temperatures hit a specific range (upper 40s and rising), the disposition of the fish changes. I have observed this before — especially at several strip pits in western Missouri — when the largemouth bass prefer faster moving lures, such as a crankbait, rather than a a slow and subtle finesse bait.
"When we were called off the power-plant reservoir, we decided to drive about 20 miles to the north and launch the boat at a 6,930-acre U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' reservoir, where we were afloat from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. And the wind never relented."
In-Fishman's solunar calendar noted that the best fishing times occurred from 8:51 a.m to 10:51 a.m. and 9:14 p.m. to 11:14 p.m. They were afloat on this 6,930-acre U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' reservoir from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.
"On the possibility that my failure to elicit a strike on my custom finesse lures at the power-plant reservoir was a fluke, I continued using them at this reservoir. My partner continued to work with the crankbait.
"We fished the riprap along the dam, and neither of us had a bite.
"After we fished the dam, we spent about 30 minutes fishing some wind-sheltered shorelines on the south side of the reservoir, where we each caught a smallmouth bass.
Our last destination was in the back of a tertiary feeder-creek arm on the north side of the reservoir. The surface temperature was 56 degrees, and the water was very murky. In the upper-third portion of this cove, a submerged creek channel swings near the shoreline, and the shoreline is also graced with a small cove, which is embellished with a laydown. My partner's crankbait extracted a 2 ½-pound largemouth bass from this location.
"Overall, it was a trying and perplexing endeavor. My partner caught two smallmouth bass and one largemouth bass on a crankbait.
My finesse tactics caught only one smallmouth bass.
"In retrospect, I am evaluating the outing from the perspective of which bait and presentation matches the disposition of the largemouth and smallmouth bass. I have now seen three instances on three different bodies of water where the commonality is the surface temperature being 48 degrees and rising, and when that occurs, a faster moving lure is more effective than a subtle and slow-paced finesse bait and presentation. For reasons I cannot explain, it appears that when the bass are in the mood to chase, they, in some defiant way, will ignore a slower moving lure. Part of this observation, however, could be attributed to low-light conditions caused by the high winds, and thus, a faster moving lure combined with color and sound or vibration is more easily detectible than a slower moving lure. My thoughts are purely speculative though."
On April 16, Brian Waldman of Coatesville, Indiana, posted a short report on the Finesse News Network about his April 12 and 13 outings.
He wrote: "Finally able to submit a report after what has been one of the longest winters I can recall in quite some time, and technically it is not over yet either. Forecasters are calling for a half of an inch of snow tonight, which will be followed by nightly lows below freezing for the next two days.
"Anyway, I was able to get out for four hours on Saturday (2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.), and 3.5 hours on Sunday (2:00 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.). Both days were near carbon copies of each other: air temperatures in the mid-70s, sustained southerly winds of 20 to 25 mph with frequent gusts of 30 to 35 mph. The little 325-acre reservoir I was fishing was white-capping something fierce. So, most fishing efforts were in the semi-protected coves. Saturday was mostly sunny, but Sunday was mostly cloudy. Our reservoirs are still suffering from muddy water due to all the rain we have received, but they are starting to clear a bit on their lower ends - not jerkbait clear but fishable, which they largely were not the weekend before.
"On Saturday, I tangled with 32 largemouth bass (eight per hour) on a combination of hair jigs and shallow crankbaits. I started down near the dam and proceeded to slowly move up the lake testing water clarity as I went until I reached fairly stained water.
"On Sunday, knowing what to expect and where, I focused all my time within a half mile of the dam, opting to stay in the clearer waters. I threw a crankbait for less than 10 minutes, a hair jig for another 10 minutes, then I picked up a 1/16-ounce Gopher jig on a 2 ½-inch Z-Man's green-pumpkin/orange ZinkerZ , and I never set it down again for the remainder of the trip. I landed 42 bass on Sunday (12 per hour). All of them were caught on that one half of a ZinkerZ. It will likely be good for several more tussles once I rerig for the next trip.
"There were no large fish caught either day, the best being a pair on Sunday falling somewhat shy of 18 inches. Surface temperatures have moved into the mid-50s. It was a little warmer in some areas, but they are likely to drop with the impending cold front and snow. Looking to get out again this coming weekend."
During the late afternoon and early evening hours of April 12 some thermometers in northeastern Kansas climbed to 84. Then around dawn on April 15, some of those same thermometers plummeted to 23 degrees, and even the bird bath in one of our gardens was covered with ice. Besides those radical changes of temperatures, Mother Nature wacked these parts on April 12, 13, and 14 with hours on end of howling winds, and some gusts broached 40 mph. It even snowed a touch during the morning of April 14, coating the blossoms of the daffodils, tulips, forsythias, redbuds, Bradford pears, and Magnolias.
What's more, the largemouth, smallmouth, and spotted bass have been difficult for scores of Midwest finesse anglers to find and catch since April 5 in the flatland reservoirs of northeastern Kansas. It has been a difficult spring to fish in northeastern Kansas. And according to Drew Reese of Rantoul, Kansas, the fishing was even trying at Bull Shoals Lake around Lead Hill, Arkansas, on April 10, 11, 12, and 13. Reese is a veteran Midwest finesse angler. In fact, he is one of its pioneers who spent his youth in the 1950s and 1960s fishing with the late and great Chuck Woods of Kansas City, and Woods is the creator of this finesse tactic. Reese is also the creator of Z-Man's Hula StickZ, and he is a maestro at wielding it and the 2 ½-inch Z-Man's ZinkerZ. But during his four-days at Bull Shoals, Reese said it was a struggle for him to catch a combination of 25 largemouth, smallmouth, and spotted bass across seven hours of employing Z-Man's Hula StickZs and Z-Man's 2 ¾-inch prototype ZinkerZs, which he affixed to his homemade mushroom-style jigs, and because many of Bull Shoals' shorelines are littered with flooded buckbrush, his jigs sported hook or weed guards.
After Reese told me about his trying Bull Shoals endeavors, I made a solo trek to a nearby 194-acre community reservoir to see what was transpiring with its largemouth bass.
Many anglers assert that radical weather changes put largemouth, smallmouth, and spotted bass into a funk, which makes them difficult to locate and catch. But we tend to dismiss those notions, calling it anthropomorphism, which is attributing human characteristics and emotions to fish, mammals, birds, and insects. Instead of trying to describe the disposition and behavior of the largemouth, smallmouth, and spotted bass, we merely describe where, how, and when we fish for them and how many of them we catch.
The National Weather Service in Lawrence, Kansas, recorded the low temperature for April 15 as 22 degrees and the high temperature was 58 degrees. The wind was light and variable, and when it stirred, it angled out of the southeast at 7 mph and southwest at 5 mph. The sun was bright, and the sky exhibited a brilliant cobalt-blue hue. The barometric pressure was 30.22 and dropping at 10:52 a.m.
In-Fisherman's solunar calendar indicated that the best fishing occurred from 4:49 a.m. to 6:49 a.m. I fished from 10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.
The water level looked to be about two feet below normal. On April 3, the water level was about six inches below normal, and the level dropped because one of this reservoir's bridges is being replaced; this needed to be done to accommodate the construction efforts. The water was clear enough that I could see the black propeller on the transom-mounted trolling motor at most of the areas that I fished, but in the back ends of three feeder-creek arms, I could not see it. The surface temperature ranged from 55 to 57 degrees, and on April 15, 2014, the surface temperature was 52 degrees. There was a slight hint of an algae bloom, and this was the first outing in 2014 when the boat was ringed with a line of algae scum.
In the back end of the southwest feeder-creek arm, many of the patches of curly-leaf pondweed are approaching the surface, and those patches cover many square yards. Patches of bushy pondweed are developing, too. Elsewhere around this reservoir, the aquatic vegetation isn't as thick as it is in the back of the southwest feeder-creek arm.
Traditionally we do not fish the mature or nearly mature patches of curly-leaf pondweed. Instead we focus of rocky shorelines, but I did fish several patches of immature curly-leaf pondweed with a 2 ½-inch Z-Man's PB&J ZinkerZ spin on a red 1/16-ounce Gopher jig, and a shortened four-inch Z-Man's Junebug Finesse WormZ on a chartreuse 1/32-ounce Gopher jig. And the Finesse WormZ caught 12 largemouth bass, and the ZinkerZ spin caught one. The Finesse WormZ was retrieved with a swim-glide-and-shake presentation. The ZinkerZ spin was presented with the straight-swim retrieve. All 13 of these largemouth bass were abiding in two to three feet of water.
I fished 95 percent of the dam, which is lined with rock, and I caught five largemouth bass on a 2 1/2-inch customized Z-Man's Moon Ring FattyZ tube affixed to a red 1/16-ounce Gopher jig, and I caught five largemouth bass on a 3 ¼-inch Z-Man's Junebug Hula StickZ affixed to a blue 1/16-ounce Gopher jig. Three largemouth bass engulfed the bait on the initial fall, and the other seven engulfed it as I employed a swim-glide-and-shake retrieve. These 10 largemouth bass were extracted from three to eight feet of water.
Along the rocky and gravel shorelines inside the east feeder-creek and south feeder-creek arms, I caught 36 largemouth bass. And they were caught on three lures: a 2 1/2-inch customized Z-Man's Mood Ring FattyZ tube affixed to a red 1/16-ounce Gopher jig; a 3 ¼-inch Z-Man's Junebug Hula StickZ affixed to a blue 1/16-ounce Gopher jig; and a 3 ¼-inch Z-Man's PB&J Hula StickZ affixed to a blue 1/16-ounce Gopher jig. These largemouth bass were caught in two to six feet of water on either a swim-glide-and-shake or a drag-and-shake retrieve.
In total, I caught 59 largemouth bass, which was a quantum leap from the sorry outing that Pok-Chi Lau and I endured on April 11 at a 416-acre community reservoir, where we caught only 11 largemouth bass in five hours.
Steve Reideler of Lewisville, Texas, filed the following report on the Finesse News Network.
He wrote: "During the night of April 13 and early morning of April 14, a cold front swept across north- central Texas, causing daytime temperatures to plummet 30 degrees. April 15 was a beautiful picture-postcard day, and the sun was dazzling in the clear blue sky. The National Weather Service recorded the morning low temperature at 35 degrees and the afternoon high temperature rose to 64 degrees. The average temperatures for north-central Texas during this time of year ranges from a low of 52 degrees and a high of 75 degrees. The barometric pressure was high at 30.32 and rising. A pleasant breeze blew out of the northwest at 5 to 10 mph.
"I made a solo outing to a local 21,280-acre U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reservoir.
"The water was stained with two feet of visibility. Water temperatures ranged from 61 degrees to 65 degrees. The Texas Water Management Board recorded the water level at 7.62 feet below normal. I last fished this reservoir on February 21, and during that horrid four-hour outing, I failed to muster a single strike.
"I launched my boat at noon and fished until 5:00 p.m. In-Fisherman's solunar calendar indicated the best fishing periods would occur between 4:52 a.m. and 6:52 a.m., 11:08 p.m to 1:08 a.m., and a minor period would take place between 5:21 p.m. and 7:21 p.m.
"I began the afternoon by plying a 200-yard stretch of a steep, rocky, and clay shoreline inside a small cove behind the marina where I launched. The surface temperature was 61 degrees. I began casting a three-inch Kalin's white Lunker Grub attached to a chartreuse 1/16-ounce Gopher jig. I employed the grub with a slow do-nothing retrieve, but it failed to elicit any strikes. As I continued working my way along the steep shoreline, I used a four-inch Z-Man's green- pumpkin Finesse WormZ rigged on a chartreuse 1/32-ounce Gopher jig, which I retrieved with a slow swim-glide-and-shake presentation, and it inveigled one largemouth bass and one crappie from this steep embankment in three feet of water. I then switched to a Z-Man's blue-steel Finesse ShadZ on a blue 1/32-ounce Gopher jig, which I retrieved with a slow swim-glide-and-shake motif. This Finesse ShadZ beguiled two largemouth bass from four feet of water. I also used the Finesse ShadZ and Finesse WormZ to pick apart several covered boat docks and slips in the back of the cove, but I failed to arouse any bass from underneath those boat slips.
"I then fished my way westward along a shallow rocky bank that lies just to the north of the boat ramp where I launched. This bank leads into an area with three shallow mud and gravel coves. I worked this entire area for about 45 minutes, using a three-inch Kalin's bluegill Lunker Grub affixed on a blue 3/32-ounce Gopher jig and the blue-steel Finesse ShadZ. Both baits were presented with a slow swim-glide-and-shake retrieve. All these areas failed to yield a largemouth bass.
"My next stop was along a riprap embankment and bridge in the southwest tributary arm of the reservoir. I employed the blue-steel Finesse ShadZ and tangled with a three-pound, 10-ounce largemouth bass and a 2 1/2-pound channel catfish. These two fish were relating to the riprap next to the water's edge in about three feet of water. After tangling with those two fish, I failed to engender another strike along the rest of this embankment.
I finished the afternoon in a feeder creek that enters the reservoir from the north shore of the southwest tributary arm. I continued to use the blue-steel Finesse ShadZ with the swim-glide-and-shake retrieve. This feeder creek surrendered 17 largemouth bass, most of which weighed between 1 1/2-pounds and two-pounds, 14 ounces. These largemouth bass were caught in the first half of the feeder creek, and they were relating to steep and rock-laden primary and secondary points. These bass were abiding in three to six feet of water. I found no bass inhabiting any of the shallow mud flats located between several of the rocky points or in the back ends of the coves that grace this feeder creek.
"In sum, I allured 21 largemouth bass, one crappie, and one channel catfish during five hours of angling. The blue-steel Finesse ShadZ enticed 20 largemouth bass, including the three-pounder, and one catfish. The green-pumpkin Finesse WormZ inveigled one largemouth bass and one crappie. I missed several strikes on the three-inch bluegill-hue Kalin's Lunker Grub, and the three-inch white Kalin's Lunker Grub failed to draw any strikes. The slow swim-glide-and-shake retrieve was the most productive presentation."
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On April 15 Chris Rohr of Overland Park, Kansas, filed the following report about several of his strip pit outings this spring in eastern Kansas.
He wrote: "I was finally able to get out during the past couple of weeks and thought I had forgotten how to finesse fish, but after reading some of Dave Weroha's observations about his April 12 outing, I think I may have found a similar pattern.
"Just two weeks ago at the strip pits I fish near La Cygne, Kansas, water temperatures were in the mid to upper 40s, and finesse rigs were the go-to baits in the mornings up until about 11 a.m. After 11 a.m., the fish made a decisive move to spinnerbaits and large jerkbaits. Water temperatures also approached 50 degrees around that time.
"Dave Weroha's observations in his April 12 log about finesse versus speed are spot on with what I observed on April 12. Four of us fished a total of 40 hours (10 hours each guy) at a number of strip pits near La Cygne, where water temps ranged from 52 to 57 degrees. Two of us committed 10 hours of non-stop finesse fishing with every possible color jig, Z-Man bait, and color combinations. The numbers were staggering. During the first five hours of the day, we had a total of 10 bass and two crappie on finesse rigs. Yet, during the same five hours of fishing in the exact same pits, our counterparts who threw spinnerbaits, 10-inch plastic worms and magnum lipless crankbaits, landed more than 100 largemouth bass. It did not matter if we fished an area first or last, finesse was not the answer, but size and speed were critical.
"My boat partner and I finally had enough and switched to power fishing for the second half of the day. We proceeded to land 91 largemouth bass in the next five hours, including a 6.1-, 6.6-, 6.14-and 8.8-pound largemouth. Even where we found schools of bass foraging on shad in coves or windswept banks, we couldn't buy a hit on anything finesse. Yet the bigger the spinnerbait, worm or jerkbait, and the faster one retrieved it, the more hits one would receive.
"I do know the some FNN members were fishing some of the strip pits in the same area as we were, and they had some success with crappie and bass but the numbers were certainly much lower that what has been normal."
Our grandson Gabe Bonnano of New York City is making his yearly pilgrimage to Lawrence, Kansas, for our family's traditional Easter celebration, and he will be here for the week after Easter, and we will spend a couple of those days chasing largemouth bass. He likes to catch at least 15 largemouth bass an hour. In preparation for his arrival, I thought I should see how quickly I could catch 50 largemouth bass at a nearby 180-acre state reservoir.
The National Weather Service in Lawrence, Kansas, recorded the day's low temperature at 28 degrees, and the high temperature was 70 degrees. The barometric pressure was 30.37 and dropping at 9:52 a.m. Initially the wind was calm, and then it angled out of the south and southeast at 3 to 8 mph. The sun burned brightly, and a pair of eagles occasionally kited about in the cobalt-blue sky, which was a glorious sight to see.
The water level looked to be about 10 inches below normal. The water was extremely clear for a flatland reservoir in northeastern Kansas. The surface temperature ranged from 54 to 56 degrees. I didn't cross paths with any patches of aquatic vegetation, but I saw some pieces of coontail and bushy pondweed floating on the surface.
In-Fisherman's solunar calendar noted that the best fishing would occur from 1:24 p.m. to 3.24 a.m. and 1:52 p.m. to 3:52 p.m., and there was a minor period from 7:68 a.m. to 9:38 a.m. I began fishing at 9:50 a.m., and it took me until 1:21 p.m. to catch largemouth bass No. 50.
This time of the year we traditionally fish rock-and-gravel-laden lairs rather than aquatic vegetation. The natural terrain of this reservoir primarily consists of clay, but there are hundreds of yards of riprap.
And on this outing, I executed 90 percent of my casts and retrieves on riprap. I made a few fruitless casts and retrieves on a main-lake clay point and a main-lake clay shoreline. I caught five largemouth bass along a short span of a natural-rock shoreline, and it was a steep shoreline. These five largemouth bass were abiding in about seven feet of water, which is deep-water for mid-April in northeastern Kansas.
Forty-three largemouth bass were caught along the riprap that graces the dam. The dam in about 300 yards long, and it took me about two hours to fish it. I caught two largemouth bass along a steep riprap shoreline adjacent to the dam.
The majority of the bass that I caught on the riprap of the dam were abiding in seven to 10 feet of water, and they seemed to be flush to the bottom. These bottom-dwelling largemouth bass were allured by a slow hop-and-bounce retrieve that was enhanced by incessant shakes. The shakes were executed so that there was a constant series of S-curves radiating along the line from the tip of the rod to the point where the line met the surface of the water. If I elicited a strike and failed to hook a largemouth bass, I allowed the bait to lie on the bottom, and then I executed a series of shakes for more than five seconds, and occasionally that tactic would allow me to catch a largemouth bass. The shallower largemouth bass either engulfed the bait on the initial drop or when I presented it with a slow swim-glide-and-shake retrieve.
Most of the largemouth bass were caught on a 3 1/4-inch Z-Man's PB&J Hula StickZ on a red 1/16-ounce Gopher jig. Four were caught on a 3 1/2-inch Z-Man's PB&J Finesse WormZ on a red 1/32-ounce Gopher jig. Four were caught on a 3 3/4-inch Z-Man's green-pumpkin Finesse WormZ on a chartreuse 1/32-ounce Gopher jig. Three were caught on a customized 2 1/2-inch Z-Man's Mood Ring FattyZ tube on a blue 1/16-ounce Gopher jig. Three were caught on a customized three-inch Z-Man's Mood Ring FattyZ.
I was hoping to catch 50 largemouth bass in about 2 1/2 hours, but it took more time to properly present a soft-plastic bait on either a 1/32-ounce jig or a 1/16-ounce jig in seven to 10 feet of water than it does to properly present one in two to six feet of water. So it took three hours and 31 minutes to accomplish the task of catching 50 largemouth bass. I tried a 3 1/4-inch Z-Man's PB&J Hula StickZ on a red 3/32-ounce Gopher jig, but it failed to elicit a strike. There are times -- especially when the wind howls or when we are swimming a three- or four-inch grub -- when a 3/32-ounce Gopher jig works well, but most of the time the no-feel presentation created by a 1/32- or a 1/16-ounce Gopher jig is our most effective way to present a soft-plastic bait to the largemouth bass and smallmouth bass in the flatland reservoirs of northeastern Kansas. It is difficult to create that no-feel presentation with a 3/32-ounce jig.
It is important to note that the bluegill and green sunfish have not ventured to the riprap and rocky shorelines. In fact, I have caught only one green-sunfish and one bluegill so far in 2014. Traditionally, when we don't inadvertently catch some green sunfish and bluegill, the pre-spawn period hasn't arrived. What's more, the crappie are still scattered and not inhabiting their traditional pre-spawn and spawning haunts along the riprap shorelines.
Steve Reideler of Lewisville, Texas, filed this report about his outing on April 18 with Ralph Manns of Rowlett, Texas, and In-Fisherman magazine.
He wrote: "I made a 43-mile trek to a 21,671-acre U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' flatland reservoir on the far eastern edge of Dallas, where I joined Ralph Manns of Rowlett, Texas, for an afternoon of largemouth bass angling.
"Manns and I last fished this reservoir on April 5, and during that three and a half hour foray, we tangled with 12 largemouth bass including one four-pounder and one five-pounder, one crappie, and one catfish.
"The morning of April 18 was cloudy and calm, but by noon, the clouds had burned away, and the sun was radiant in the blue sky. The National Weather service recorded the morning low temperature at 54 degrees and the afternoon high reached a very pleasant 76 degrees. A light breeze quartered out of the northwest at about 8 mph. The barometric pressure measured 30.29 at 11:00 a.m., but dropped to 30.12 by 6:00 p.m.
"In-Fisherman's solunar calendar indicated the optimum fishing period would occur between 1:57 p.m. and 3:57 p.m. We were afloat from about 2:30 p.m. until dark, which occurred around 8:00 p.m.
We spent the entire afternoon and evening meandering around a large marina for pre-spawn and spawning bass. The water temperature warmed from 63 degrees at 2:30 p.m. to 67 degrees by 7:30 p.m. The water level was 7.45 feet below normal. A dredger had been working inside the marina for the past several days, removing the mud and silt bottom so larger houseboats and cruising vessels could move from their now shallow water docks to deeper moorings, and also prevent them from becoming grounded on the mud bottom as water levels continue to recede. The dredging activity colored the water with an odd milky-white stain. Water clarity was less than a foot in the southern portion of the marina, and about 1 1/2 feet of visibility in the northern section of the marina. We utilized Manns' eight foot boat, which allowed us to explore shallow rocky areas and narrow passageways between the docks and shorelines that larger boats could not access.
We began the afternoon targeting rock and brush along a shallow east-side shoreline ledge that dropped from two to four feet of water. Manns immediately tangled with two keeper-sized largemouth bass that were attracted to a four-inch Gary Yamamoto Bait Company's watermelon with black and gold flake Senko with a dyed chartreuse tail, and nose-hooked on an Owner's size 1 weedless wacky-rig hook. Manns worked the Senko in a slow lift-and-drop manner. I experimented with a four-inch Kalin's bluegill hue Lunker Grub rigged on a blue 3/32-ounce Gopher jig. The grub failed to elicit any strikes.
Next, we probed a series of craggy jetties covered with a labyrinth of large concrete boulders interlaced with protruding twisted extensions of rusty steel rebar. I enticed three largemouth bass from four feet of water and about 10 feet off a jetty with a Z-Man's blue steel Finesse ShadZ affixed to a 1/32-ounce blue Gopher jig, and implemented with a slow swim-glide-and-shake retrieve. Manns' Senko produced three largemouth bass from the small gaps between the concrete boulders in two feet of water. When the Finesse ShadZ could no longer draw strikes from bass roaming outside their boulder and rebar lairs, I switched to a wacky-rigged four-inch Yum's black-blue-flake Dinger, and quickly extracted one largemouth bass from between two concrete boulders.
We continued fishing the concrete boulders along the jetties and several covered boat docks for several hours, catching a largemouth bass here and there on our Senko-type baits, but we did not find any concentrations of fish, nor did we see any signs of spawning fish. Most of the largemouth bass were lying in the narrow gaps between the concrete boulders in shallow water next to the jetty, and if our baits landed more than a foot away from the boulders, we would not get a bite. I tried bobber-rigging a four-inch Z-Man's coppertreuse Finesse WormZ and a four-inch Z-Man's green-pumpkin Finesse WormZ on a 1/32-ounce chartreuse Gopher jig, and these baits were set 18 inches below a fixed rattling bobber. Unfortunately, I could not cast the rig accurately enough to get it into the narrow gaps between the boulders and I failed to elicit any strikes. Manns experimented with an unknown brand white chatterbait and a Rapala DT-6 crankbait, but these baits also failed to trigger a strike.
After fishing the jetties and several covered boat docks, we plied a series of shallow ledges that were situated in two to four feet of water between the boat docks and shoreline. We had to carefully maneuver Manns' boat underneath several overhead walkways and through narrow passageways as we made short pitch casts down the ledge and to the edges of the boat docks in two to four feet of water. We landed an occasional bass, including a 3-pound, 10-ounce largemouth bass that could not resist my wacky-rigged Yum Dinger and slow lift and drop presentation.
As the afternoon slowly melded into evening, Manns suggested we use purple-tinted baits. Manns explained that his piscatorial records revealed a substantial increase in his catch rates when he used purple lures during the last one to one and a half hours of daylight. Furthermore, Manns believes the bass bite is significantly better at dusk than at dawn and he prefers fishing the twilight hours from sunset to nightfall.
I followed Manns' suggestion and switched to a four-inch Z-Man's PB&J Hula StickZ that I threaded onto a blue 1/32-ounce Gopher jig. I utilized the drag-shake-deadstick presentation as Manns slowly trolled down the side of a rock jetty reinforced by several thick wooden posts. As the evening progressed, I noticed the PB&J Hula StickZ became more effective as it got closer to dusk and the Senko-type baits we had used earlier in the afternoon and evening became much less effective. The Hula StickZ seduced six largemouth bass and one 14-inch crappie, while Manns' alternated between his watermelon Senko and a Texas-rigged four-inch purple Roboworm. The Senko allured one largemouth bass and the Roboworm eked out one largemouth bass during the same time I was employing the Hula StickZ.
All totaled, we inveigled 24 largemouth bass, but landed only 21 of them. All but two were keeper-sized fish with several measuring between 15 to 19 inches. The majority of these bass were hunkered down in narrow gaps between the large concrete boulders, and I felt more like a power fisherman as I executed countless underhanded-pitch casts to gaps between boulders and around the edges of boat docks. The four-inch Yamamoto Senko worked in a slow lift-and-drop scheme allured 10 largemouth bass; Z-Man's PB&J Hula StickZ presented in a drag-shake-and-deadstick manner enticed six bass and one large crappie; Z-Man's blue steel Finesse ShadZ implemented with a slow swim-glide-shake retrieve conjured three; and Yum's wacky-rigged four-inch black-blue-flake Dinger applied with a slow lift-and-drop motion attracted the other two. The white chatterbait and Rapala crankbait failed to trigger any strikes. The unwieldy bobber rig proved to be too difficult for me to employ in these close-quarter casting conditions.
Rick Hebenstreit of Shawnee, Kansas, filed a short report on the windy and difficult largemouth and spotted bass fishing that he and his wife endured at the Lake of the Ozarks' Niangua Arm from April 13 to 18.
He wrote: "The bass fishing was very trying last week. The weather and high winds kept us off the water for the most part until Wednesday.
"On Wednesday, we caught only 10 bass in about six hours of fishing. All of them were caught on a Z-Man's green-pumpkin Hula StickZ on a red 1/16-ounce Gopher jig. Most were caught on chunk-rock secondary points inside large coves and in four to five feet of water.
"On Thursday, the fishing was somewhat better. We caught 23 bass, and all of them were caught on a 2 1/2-inch Z-Man's green-pumpkin ZinkerZ on a red 1/16-ounce Gopher jig. Most of them were caught on either a chunk-rock or pea-gravel shoreline and halfway inside coves. Most of the time, the boat was in 10 to 15 feet of water, and the bass were caught about halfway between the bank and the boat, and they were in about five feet of water. We also caught about 10 freshwater drum and numerous crappie while bass fishing.
"On Friday we crappie fished most of the day and it was fantastic. We caught a limit in about three hours by using 1/16-ounce marabou jigs. All the crappie were nice ones, and some of them weighed 1 1/2 pounds.
"We caught only one bass over 15 inches all week, and it weighed 3 3/4-pounds. Most of the other bass were 12 to 13 inches long."
Pok-Chi Lau of Lawrence, Kansas, filed a brief report about his April 18 outing with his son, Tyler Lau of Lawrence, Kansas, at a 6,930-acre U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' reservoir.
The water level was 3.25 feet below normal. The water was extremely clear for a northeastern Kansas flatland reservoir. The surface temperature ranged from 51 to 54 degrees.
He reported that they caught 23 smallmouth bass, five white bass, and two largemouth bass. Four were inveigled on a 2 1/2-inch white-and-red grub on a 3/32-ounce Gopher jig. The rest were caught on a 2 1/2-inch Z-Man's green-pumpkin ZinkerZ on a red 3/32-ounce Gopher jig. One of the smallmouth bass weighed 4.5 pounds, three of the others were three-pounders, and one of the largemouth bass weighed about three pounds. These fish were caught along the riprap of the dam. A depth of eight feet was the deepest that they caught a smallmouth bass; most of them, however, were abiding in five to six feet of water.
Paul Finn of Olathe, Kansas, posted a brief report on the Finesse News Network about his April 20 outing with his son at a 195-acre community reservoir.
In-Fisherman's solunar calendar indicated the best fishing occurred from 3:29 a.m. to 5:29 a. m. and 3:58 p.m. to 5:58 p.m., and a minor period took place from 9:43 a.m. to 11:43 a.m. They were afloat from 10:15 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.
The National Weather Service in Lawrence, Kansas, recorded the low temperature at 52 degrees and the high temperature at 80 degrees. For spells it was partly cloudy and a few drops of rain dropped from those clouds, and at other times, the sun was shining everywhere. The wind angled out of the east, southeast and east at 5 to 26 mph. The barometric pressure at 9:52 a.m. was 30.08 and gradually dropping.
The water level was about two feet below normal. The surface temperature was 59 degrees. The water clarity ranged from 2 1/2 to three feet.
They spent the majority of the time probing the shorelines inside one of the reservoir's east-side feeder-creek arms, which sheltered them from the pesky southeast wind. But they did allow the wind to blow their boat along the rock-lined dam, where they wielded Rapala DT Series No. 6 crankbaits and caught a few largemouth bass. They also worked with a 5/8-ounce Gene Larew Lures' Biffle Hardhead Jig that they dressed with either a Strike King Lure Company's Rage Twin Tale Menace Grub or a Larew's Biffle Bug, but it garnered only a few strikes that were not hooked.
In total, they caught 42 largemouth bass. The biggest was a 20-incher that weighed four pounds, three ounces. It was caught on a 2 1/2-inch Strike King Lure Company's Bama Craw Zero affixed to a chartreuse 1/16-ounce homemade mushroom-style jig with a hook guard. Their most effective bait was a three-inch Missile Baits' green-pumpkin Drop Craw affixed to a chartreuse 1/16-ounce homemade mushroom-style jig. Finn's son used the Drop Craw, and it allured nearly two-thirds of the largemouth bass that they caught.
They employed two retrieves: the swim- glide-and-shake presentation; and the hop-and-bounce motif.
The largemouth bass were caught in water as shallow as two feet and as deep as six feet.
He wrote: "I conducted a solo afternoon outing to a local 21,280-acre U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' reservoir on the northern fringe of Lewisville.
"It was cloudy with an afternoon thunderstorm. The morning's low temperature was recorded at a mild 63 degrees, and the afternoon high reached 82 degrees. A mild breeze blew out of the north at five to 10 miles per hour. The barometric pressure measured 29.97.
"I fished from 12:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m., however, I sat idly underneath a covered boat slip for over 30 minutes during an afternoon thunderstorm. In-Fisherman's solunar calendar indicted the best fishing periods would occur between 4:37 a.m. to 6:37 a.m. and 5:05 p.m. to 7:05 p.m. A minor period would take place from 10:51 a.m. to 12:51 p.m.
"My rods were prepared with the following baits: a Charlie Brewer Slider Company's three-inch watermelon/multi-flake Bass/Walleye/Striper Grub rigged on a red 1/16-ounce Gopher jig; customized 3 1/2-inch Z-Man's Junebug FattyZ rigged on a chartreuse 1/16-ounce Gopher jig; customized 3 1/2-inch Z-Man's California Craw FattyZ rigged on a chartreuse 1/16-ounce Gopher jig; and Z-Man's blue steel Finesse ShadZ affixed to a blue 1/32-ounce Gopher jig.
"The water was stained with 1 1/2-feet of visibility. The surface temperatures ranged from 65 to 67 degrees. The water level was 7.63 feet below normal.
"I began the outing in the back of a marina in the southeastern portion of the reservoir's southwest tributary arm. I plied steep rocky secondary points, rock and clay channel banks adjacent to shallow-water boat docks, and a series of covered boat slips. Brewer's three-inch Slider grub enticed 11 largemouth bass from two to six feet of water along the steep channel banks and rocky points. I manipulated the grub with a steady do-nothing retrieve. I enticed one largemouth bass from underneath a covered boat slip with the 3 1/2-inch Junebug FattyZ and a slow drag-shake-and-deadstick retrieve. This bass was abiding in five feet of water.
"I fished a long, steep, clay, and gravel shoreline that courses behind a slew of boat houses and worked my way underneath nine overhead walkways into a quiet cove. This cove encompasses steep rocky banks, several boat ramps, and a submerged tire reef. I tangled with two largemouth bass and one spotted bass that were caught in four feet of water along a steep rocky bank on the blue steel Finesse ShadZ worked in a slow swim-glide-and-shake manner.
"After waiting out a thunderstorm in a covered boat slip, I finished the afternoon probing several boat ramps, four secondary rock and clay points, three steep clay and gravel banks, and a tire reef. The bite fizzled out after the thunderstorm. During this lull, I experimented with the customized 3 1/2-inch California Craw FattyZ, and eventually it allured a 2 1/4-pound largemouth bass on a clay point behind a boat dock.
"In sum, I landed 15 largemouth bass and one spotted bass in 3 1/2-hours of fishing. Four of those weighed over two pounds. Brewer's watermelon/multi-flake Slider grub retrieved in a steady do-nothing presentation caught 11 largemouth bass. The blue steel Finesse ShadZ and slow swim-glide-and-shake retrieve attracted two largemouth bass and one spotted bass. The customized 3 1/2-inch Junebug FattyZ and a slow drag-shake-deadstick presentation enticed one largemouth bass. The customized 3 1/2-inch California Craw FattyZ implemented with a slow swim-glide-and-shake retrieve inveigled one largemouth bass."
This was another reconnaissance outing in a quest to find a reservoir where our grandson and our granddaughter's boyfriend can easily tangle with 15 largemouth bass or smallmouth bass an hour.
I made a similar outing on April 18, when I caught 50 largemouth bass in three hours and 31 minutes at a 180-acre state reservoir. The problem with that reservoir is the wind. And if it blows more than 12 mph from any direction, it is nearly impossible to fish.
So, on this second scouting endeavor, I explored a 416-acre community reservoir, which has numerous lairs that anglers can fish in a variety of wind directions and speeds.
In-Fisherman's solunar calendar indicated that the best fishing on April 22 would occur from 5:29 a.m. to 7:29 a.m. and 5:56 p.m.to 7:56 p.m. There was a minor period from 11:19 a.m. to 1:19 p.m. I was afloat from 10:45 a.m. to 2:25 p.m.
The water level looked to be more than three feet below normal. A slight algae bloom had erupted, and that colored the water to the point that I could not see the black propeller of the transom-mounted trolling motor, which is 22 inches below the surface. The surface temperature ranged from 52 to 60 degrees.
The National Weather Service in Topeka, Kansas, recorded the low temperature at 46 degrees and the high temperature hit 72 degrees. The barometric pressure was 30.15 and falling at 9:53 a.m. The wind was variable and exceptionally mild-mannered, and when it did stir a touch, it angled out of the northeast at 5 mph. The sky exhibited a brilliant blue hue, and the sun's rays highlighted the blossoms on the redbud trees, plum thickets, lilacs, cherry trees, and apple trees. In my mind's eye, it looked like an ideal day for catching scores of largemouth bass and smallmouth bass around shallow-water lairs that were graced with rocks and gravel. But the whereabouts of this reservoir's largemouth bass and smallmouth bass has puzzled several Midwest finesse anglers this year, and consequently its largemouth bass and smallmouth bass fishing at this reservoir has been extremely lackluster. And to my chagrin, it was lackluster again on April 22.
I caught only 16 largemouth bass and four smallmouth bass, as well as five rainbow trout and eight crappie, which were exhibiting their spawning hues and lingering around some of their traditional spawning haunts.
There was no rhyme or reason to why or where I caught the largemouth bass and smallmouth bass that I did catch. It was one of those outings, when I merely made unending numbers of casts and retrieves, and eventually I would catch a largemouth bass or smallmouth bass or inadvertently catch a crappie or a trout. In sum, it seemed to be mere happenstance.
Four largemouth bass were caught along rocky main-lake shorelines. Ten largemouth bass were caught on rocky shorelines inside two coves and two secondary feeder-creek arms. Two largemouth bass were caught on a clay shoreline inside a secondary feeder-creek arm.
One smallmouth bass was caught around a cable that anchors a buoy at an offshore rock pile on the main lake. One smallmouth bass was caught along a rocky bluff inside a secondary feeder-creek arm. Two smallmouth bass were caught on a rocky shoreline inside a small cove.
A 3 1/2-inch Z-Man's PB&J Finesse WormZ affixed to a red 1/32-ounce Gopher jig caught two smallmouth bass and six largemouth bass. A 3 1/4-inch Z-Man's PB&J Hula StickZ on a red 1/16-ounce Gopher jig caught one smallmouth bass and 10 largemouth bass. A 2 3/4-inch Z-Man's green-pumpkin prototype ZinkerZ on a chartreuse 1/32-ounce Gopher jig caught one smallmouth bass.
A drag-and-shake retrieve allured the majority of the largemouth bass and smallmouth bass, as well as the other species.
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Steve Reideler of Lewisville, Texas, filed the following report on the Finesse News Network about his April 22 outing.
He wrote: "I made a solo 38-mile jaunt to a 24,154-acre U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' reservoir in north-central Texas.
"It was a picturesque spring day. The National Weather Service recorded the low temperature at 58 degrees and the high for the day was 84 degrees. The sun was shining brightly as a few wispy clouds drifted slowly across the light-blue sky. A light breeze quartered out of the northeast at 5 to 10 miles per hour, and the barometric pressure was steady at 30.04.
"The water was clear and exhibited a light-green tint. There was more than four feet of visibility. The surface temperature varied from 65 to 70 degrees. The Texas Water Management Board recorded the water level at 8.04 feet below normal.
"I had prepared the following baits for the day: 2 1/4-inch Z-Man's watermelon-red flake FattyZ tail rigged on a red 1/32-ounce Gopher jig; Z-Man's blue steel Finesse ShadZ rigged on a blue 1/32-ounce Gopher jig; and three-inch Kalin's clear hologram Lunker Grub sported on a blue 3/32-ounce Gopher jig.
"The In-Fisherman solunar calendar indicated the best fishing periods would occur between 5:34 a.m. to 7:34 a.m. and 6:02 p.m. to 8:02 p.m. A minor period occurred from 11:24 a.m. and 1:24 p.m. I was afloat from 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.
"I began the day plying a riprap bank and jetty adjacent to the boat ramp where I launched. I took my time whittling away at this area with the 2 1/4-inch Z-Man's watermelon-red flake FattyZ tail and the blue steel Finesse ShadZ, and I tussled with six largemouth bass, two spotted bass, one crappie, and one white bass. These fish were scattered along the rock jetty in three to six feet of water.
"My next spot was a spawning cove in the southeast end of the west tributary arm of the reservoir. The cove's main features were a steep, gravel, and clay point at the entrance to the cove, a small feeder creek entering from the west end of the cove, a creek channel that parallels the north bank, and large boulders that enhance the northern shoreline. I was disappointed to find that the usual spawning sites were now several feet out of water, including the large boulders along the northern shoreline. I probed this cove with the watermelon-red flake FattyZ tail, blue steel ShadZ, and Kalin grub combos, using either the steady do-nothing or the swim-glide-and-shake retrieves. I enticed two largemouth bass and one white bass from the steep entry point to the cove. I landed four largemouth bass, one spotted bass, and one crappie from the northern edge of the creek channel. All of these fish were taken from three to six feet of water.
"I made a short run to another feeder creek in the same tributary arm. This feeder creek encompasses four mud and gravel spawning coves, two boat ramps, a set of ten concrete pillars that extend out from the north shoreline, and a long east-side shoreline that is covered with basketball-sized rocks. I used the Finesse ShadZ and Kalin's grub to cover the area in a quick and efficient manner, and I garnered four largemouth bass, two spotted bass, and five white bass. One largemouth bass was abiding next to one of the concrete towers in four feet of water. Three largemouth bass, four white bass, and two spotted bass were relating to a boat ramp in three feet of water. One white bass was caught off the long rocky east shoreline in four feet of water. The Finesse ShadZ was presented with a swim-glide-and-shake retrieve, and the Kalin's grub was retrieved in a steady swimming do-nothing manner.
"Next, I crossed over to the east side tributary arm of the reservoir, and entered a feeder creek on the west side of this tributary. This feeder creek is endowed with five steep rocky points and banks, two spawning coves, and numerous patches of brown hydrilla along one of the spawning cove's northern shoreline. I executed scores of fan casts and steady do-nothing retrieves with the Kailin's grub while I slowly drifted along with the breeze, and I tangled with one largemouth bass that was inhabiting the deep water edge of a hydrilla patch in four feet of water. A second largemouth bass and one white bass engulfed the blue steel Finesse ShadZ that was presented in a slow swim-glide-and-shake retrieve along the edges of the patches of hydrilla in five feet of water. The steep rocky banks and points were fruitless.
"My last stop of the day consisted of a submerged roadbed adjacent to a rocky main-lake shoreline and rocky point at the entrance to a main-lake spawning cove. I utilized the Kalin's grub and blue steel Finesse ShadZ, and I failed to entice a strike.
"All totaled, I caught 16 largemouth bass, five spotted bass, eight white bass, and two crappies in five hours.
"Z-Man's blue steel ShadZ inveigled seven largemouth bass, two white bass and one spotted bass. The Z-Man's watermelon-red flake FattyZ tail enticed five largemouth bass, two spotted bass and one crappie. The Kalin's clear hologram Lunker Grub attracted four largemouth bass, two spotted bass, six white bass and one crappie. The swim-glide-and-shake and steady do-nothing retrieves were the most fruitful presentations."
The manifold virtues of Midwest finesse fishing were significantly displayed on April 23.
But it is not a tactic that appeals to bass tournament anglers or recreational anglers who parrot the ways of tournament anglers or producers of televisions shows about bass fishing.
It is interesting to note, however, that on June 9 and 23, 2009, Harold Sharp, who was the original tournament director for Bassmaster, was featured on BassFan.com about the detrimental effects that bass tournaments have had on the way anglers fish for largemouth bass, smallmouth bass, and spotted bass. And as we have seen from Ralph Manns comments in the "Midwest Finesse Fishing: March 2014" column it has also affected the way Texas Parks and Wildlife Department's fisheries biologists manage the waterways in Texas. Moreover, Steve Reideler of Lewisville, Texas, says the way Texas manages it waterways also affects the way children learn to fish in Texas.
Sharp thought that the problem could be remedied if Bassmaster, FLW and other tournament circuits changed the rules, which he played a major role in creating in the 1970s.
In essence, Sharp called his scheme or remedy Cash 'N Bass, and there would be no size and creel limits in these tournaments. What's more, the tournament day would consist of four hours rather than eight hours.
In a June 12, 2009, e-mail, Sharp noted: If the Cash N' Bass system was implemented, every tournament angler would have a chance of catching unending numbers of bass, and each of those bass would count, not just the five biggest bass. He said most anglers think it is easy to catch vast numbers of small bass, but it is not. He contended that anglers would "soon discover it takes as much or more skill to locate and catch numbers of bass," as it does five big ones. In addition, Sharp thought his new system would change the way we fish and the equipment we use, noting more tournament anglers, as well as recreational anglers -- who like to mimic the professional anglers --would adopt the finesse methods similar to the ones developed by the late Charlie Brewer of Lawrenceburg, Tennessee. In Sharp's eyes, it would make fishing fun again rather than a grind.
On April 23, I was afloat with our grandson Gabe Bonanno of New York City and his brother-in-law, Tyler Sova, who recently moved to Lawrence, Kansas, from New York City. Gabe fishes only once or twice a year, and that happens during his annual visit at Easter. This was only the second time that Tyler has fished, and his first outing took place on April 5, 2013, when he and Gabe joined me on a post-Easter outing, and on his maiden outing, they caught 64 largemouth bass and five crappie by employing Midwest finesse tactics, which are somewhat similar to the Charlie Brewer methods that Sharp lauded in BassFan.com observations.
The National Weather Service of Lawrence, Kansas, recorded the low temperature for April 23 at 51 degrees and high temperature at 78 degrees. At times, the sky was cloudy, partly cloudy and then sunny. The barometric pressure at 9:52 a.m. was 29.96 and falling. The wind was substantial at times, angling out of the southeast at 15 mph with gusts that hit 30 mph, and the wind provoked us to use a drift sock for the first time in 2014.
The water level looked to be about 2 1/2 feet below normal. The surface temperature ranged from 59 to 60 degrees. The water clarity was affected slightly by an algae bloom, but we could see the black propeller on the bow-mounted trolling motor, which is about 13 inches below the surface.
In-Fisherman's solunar calendar noted that the best fishing happened from 6:20 a.m. to 8:20 a.m. and 6:47 p.m. to 8:47 p.m.
We were on the water at a 195-acre community reservoir from 10:00 a.m. to 2:20 p.m., and to our surprise and delight, we caught and released 102 largemouth bass, seven crappie, and four green sunfish.
We spent the bulk of our four hours and 20 minutes, hiding from the wind by plying a long rocky and gravel shoreline on the east side of the reservoir. Part of this shoreline stretched into one of the reservoir's feeder-creek arms, but most of it is a main-lake shoreline. It is graced with four main-lake points and several secondary and tertiary points. Its shallow and flat contours, which were embellished with a few massive boulders and gravel, were more fruitful than its steep-sloping areas. Two of the flat main-lake points yielded more bass than the two steep ones. Even though we were hiding from the wind along this east-side shoreline, it was forceful enough that we had to use a drift sock about 90 percent of the time.
We did spend a few minutes trying to fish the west shoreline halfway inside the reservoir's south feeder-arm, but the wind was too brisk and the shoreline is too steep, and we caught only five largemouth bass. The wind plays havoc with Midwest finesse tactics, and it makes it difficult for novice anglers to pinpoint their casts and properly execute their retrieves.
On the east side of the reservoir, we quickly fished the entire shorelines of a main-lake cove that was fairly sheltered from the wind, and we caught seven largemouth bass from its flat gravel and rocky shorelines.
Then we quickly examined the reservoir's eastern feeder-creek arm. The wind was bothersome in this arm, and it had been fished for several hours by a pair of extremely talented Midwest finesse anglers. So we spent about 20 minutes hurriedly fishing some of its flat-rocky lairs, where we caught five largemouth bass.
We spend 240 minutes of the 260 minutes we were afloat hiding from the wind and fishing the east shoreline and its points. In fact, we fished nearly every yard of it twice, and during the last 20 minutes, we fished a 60-yard stretch of it for the third time.
As the first hour of our outing lapsed, we noted that we had caught 34 largemouth bass, and we thought that we were well on our way to catching 101 largemouth bass in four hours. But when 2:00 p.m. rolled around, our mechanical counter revealed that we were five largemouth bass short of our 101 goal, and it took us 20 minutes to reach that goal. In fact, we surpassed the 101 mark when Gabe and Tyler nearly simultaneously caught largemouth bass No. 101 and 102.
We caught these largemouth bass on a 3 3/4-inch Z-Man's PB&J Finesse WormZ on either a red 1/32-ounce or a red 1/16-ounce Gopher jig, 3 1/4-inch Z-Man's PB&J Hula StickZ on a red 1/16-ounce Gopher jig, 3 1/4-inch Z-Man's California Craw Hula StickZ on a red 1/16-ounce Gopher jig, and 3 3/4-inch Strike King Lure Company's green-pumpkin-red-flake Super Finesse Worm on either a chartreuse 1/32-ounce or a red 1/16-ounce Gopher jig. And Gabe spent about 20 minutes wielding a 2 1/2-inch Z-Man's PB&J ZinkerZ spin on a red 1/16-ounce Gopher jig, which inveigled one largemouth bass. Those were the only lures we used.
The best retrieve was a drag-and-shake one that was occasionally punctuated by a deadstick motif. The shake was vigorous at times, and it was implemented by creating a series of incessant S-curves on the line from the tip of the rod to the spot where the line penetrated the surface of the water.
Some of the bass were extracted from water as shallow as two feet and near the water's edge, and others were caught in six feet of water and 20 or so feet from the shoreline.
This was the second time in 2014 that I have enjoyed a 101 or more largemouth bass outing. The first one occurred when I joined Brent Frazee of Parkville, Missouri on Mar. 28, at a 125-acre community reservoir in the northern suburbs of Kansas City. It is always delightful to tangle with 101 largemouth bass in about four hours, but the one that I enjoyed with Gabe and Tyler is one of the grandest of them all. Our April 23 outing revealed one of the many attributes of Midwest finesse angling is that it helps novice anglers catch a lot of largemouth bass, and by tangling with 102 largemouth bass, their minds rarely wandered, they learned about the habits and whereabouts of the largemouth bass when the surface temperature is 59 to 60 degrees in late April in northeastern Kansas, they had fun doing it, and they want to do it again and again and again.
(1) Here are the links to the BassFan.com pieces about Harold Sharp:
(a) http://www.bassfan.com/news_article.asp?id=3334#.U1kZ9lcy1MI.
(b) http://bassfan.com/opinion_article.asp?ID=129#.U1lCBFcy1MI.
Clyde Holscher is a multispecies guide and veteran Midwest finesse angler who resides in Topeka, Kansas, and the brutally cold weather of the past winter and wind-blown days of March and April have kept him and his clients at bay. But on April 23, he filed a brief report on the Finesse News Network about his half-day outings on April 21, 22, and 23 at a 6,930-acre U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' reservoir.
He noted that the water level was 3 1/2-feet below normal. The surface temperature fluctuated daily -- depending on the intensity of the sun, the wind, and the areas that they fished -- from the low 50s to 60 degrees.
They used 2 1/2-inch Z-Man's ZinkerZs in a variety of colors, and they were affixed on either 1/16- or 3/32-ounce Gopher jigs. They opted for the 3/32-ounce Gopher jigs around wind-blown areas.
They caught significant numbers of male smallmouth bass on shallow-water and rock-laden lairs. They also crossed paths with crappie that were inhabiting traditional spawning sites, and some wind-swept shorelines yielded a few white bass.
Brent Frazee of Parkville, Missouri, is the outdoor editor for the Kansas City Star. He was at the Lake of the Ozarks on April 22 and 23, working on a story for the newspaper. He also posted a brief report on the Finesse News Network.
On April 22, Frazee and his friend Jim Divincen of the Lake of the Ozarks and Tri-County Lodging Association were guided by Bob Bueltmann of Osage Beach, Missouri, and proprietor of BassBob.com.
They fished four hours in the Grand Glaize arm.
The National Weather Service in Jefferson City, Missouri, recorded the low temperature at 55 degrees and the high temperature was 69 degrees. The sun was bright, and the sky was cloudless. The wind was mild-mannered and angling out of the north at 7 to 9 mph. At 8:53 a.m., the barometric pressure was 30.10 and falling.
The water was extremely clear, and the surface temperature was 60 degrees.
In-Fisherman's solunar calendar noted that the best fishing occurred from 5:15 a.m to 7:15 a.m. and 5:42 p.m. and 7:42 p.m. There was a minor period from 11:05 a.m. to 1:05 p.m.
Frazee wrote, "We tried everything in the tacklebox: jig and pig, Baby Brush Hogs, spinnerbaits, Wiggle Warts, and jerkbaits. Finally, I thought I would really sucker these guys and start throwing the finesse stuff. Even that was just minimally effective. I caught a 13-inch Kentucky on my first cast with a green-pumpkin Finesse ShadZ, but that must have been a jinx. For the rest of the trip, I only caught a few more. I think we ended up with 17 bass, fishing from 9:30 a.m. to about 1:15 p.m."
On April 23, the low temperature was 40 degrees, and the high temperature was 69 degrees. It was cloudy. The wind angled out of the southeast and east at 9 to 14 mph. The barometric pressure at 7:53 a.m. was 30.09 and falling.
In-Fisherman's solunar calendar indicated that the best fishing occurred from 6:08 a.m. to 8:08 a.m. and 6:34 p.m. to 8:34 p.m. A minor period happened from 11:54 a.m. to 1:54 p.m.
Frazee wrote: "We fished with Vern Jaycox of Lake Ozark, Missouri, who is one of the old masters on the lake. It was really fun to talk to him and get his ideas on bass fishing. We did much better than Tuesday, partly because cloud cover moved in and partly because Vern has plenty of spots. He fishes almost every day, and he knows where they're hitting. We fished in the Lake Ozark area, concentrating mostly on transition banks (from bigger rock to gravel) and between boat docks. We fished from 8 a.m. to a little after noon and we caught exactly 30. Five were keepers, including the 6-pound, 7-ounce toad I caught on a Jewel Bait Company's Jig in their Missouri Craw hue with a green pumpkin trailer. She was hanging in about seven feet of water, just out from a spawning bank. I used that jig for most of the day. Vern found success with a Zoom Bait Company's green-pumpkin Baby Brush Hog on a Carolina rig. Jim caught bass on Crock-O-Gator's Swamp Bug and an assortment of other baits. I tried using the Finesse ShadZ and 2 1/2-inch ZinkerZ and had very little action."
Terry Claudell of Overland Park, Kansas, filed a brief report on the Finesse News Network about his April 25 outing with a friend at a 100-acre community reservoir that lies in the southwest suburbs of Kansas City.
In-Fisherman's solunar calendar indicated that the best fishing occurred from 7:53 a.m. to 9:53 a.m. and 8:18 p.m. to 10:18 p.m. A minor period occurred from 1:40 a.m. to 3:40 a.m.
The National Weather Service in Olathe, Kansas, recorded the low temperate at 46 degrees, and the high temperature was 74 degrees. It was sunny. And while they were afloat, the wind angled out of the south and southeast at 12 to 15 mph, but an occasional gust hit 30 mph. The barometric pressure at 12:53 p.m. was 29.74 and falling.
The water level was above normal. The water clarity in the lower half of the reservoir exhibited six feet of visibility. The upper half was murky.
They fished the clear-water. Wind-blown lairs were the productive ones. In fact, they failed to elicit a strike around the calm locations. Their most fruitful area was along the submerged patches of coontail along the east end of the dam.
They caught 40 largemouth bass by employing two lures: 2 1/2-inch Z-Man's PB&J ZinkerZ on either a red or chartreuse 1/16-ounce Gopher jig; shortened four-inch Z-Man's purple-haze Finesse WormZ on either a red or chartreuse 1/16-ounce Gopher jig. The best presentation was a slow do-nothing retrieve.
Terry Claudell of Overland Park, Kansas, filed a brief report on the Finesse News Network about his April 26 outing with a friend at a 30-acre community reservoir that lies in the west suburbs of Kansas City.
The National Weather Service in Olathe, Kansas, recorded the low temperate at 52 degrees, and the high temperature was 76 degrees. The sky was mostly covered with clouds until after 5:00 p.m., and it rained during the mid-morning hours. And while they were afloat, the wind angled out of the south at 17 to 29 mph. The barometric pressure at 12:53 p.m. was 29.47 and falling.
In-Fisherman's solunar calendar indicated that the best fishing occurred from 8:38 a.m. to 10:38 a.m. and 9:03 p.m. to 11:03 p.m. They fished from 2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.
The water exhibited six feet of clarity. They did not record the surface temperature. It is littered with man-made laydowns and brush piles, as well as many thick patches of aquatic vegetation.
They caught 25 largemouth bass, and the bulk of them were caught on a shortened four-inch Z-Man's purple-haze Finesse WormZ on a red 1/16-ounce Gopher jig. The best presentation was a slow do-nothing retrieve.
Bob Gum of Kansas filed a report on the Finesse News Network about his April 26 outing with Greg Monahan of Lee's Summit, Missouri, to a 6,930-acre U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' reservoir.
The Corps of Engineers reported that the water level was 3 1/2-feet below normal. Gum noted that the water clarity in the main-lake portions of the reservoir was quite clear, and inside three south-side coves, the clarity was dingy. The surface temperature was 57 degrees.
The National Weather Service in Topeka recorded the low temperature at 62 degrees, and the high temperature was 79 degrees.
The wind howled out of the south and southeast from 10 to 38 mph. Initially the sky was partly cloudy, and from 9:53 a.m. on, the sun was shining brightly everywhere. The barometric pressure was 29.74 at 8:53 a.m. and falling.
In-Fisherman's solunar calendar noted that the best fishing occurred from 8:41 a.m. to 10:41 a.m. and 9:06 p.m. to 11:06 p.m. They fished from 8:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.
The wind sequestered them to the south side of the reservoir, where they probed three large coves and a wind-sheltered main-lake flat and shoreline. The terrain of the flat was a mixture of gravel and rock and littered with some massive boulders.
Their most fruitful shorelines inside the three coves were buffeted a touch by the wind, and to dissect those shorelines, they moved with the wind, and to slow the pace that the boat moved along those shorelines, they employed a drift sock and the bow-mounted trolling motor.
They caught 49 smallmouth bass, five white bass, and one walleye. Gum noted that these "fish seemed to be fairly evenly distributed from the back of the cove all the way to the point. The water was clear enough that we could detect rocky outcroppings well under the surface in some areas. We would often hold our casts until we could make an accurate cast at a good looking spot before we blew by."
These fish were caught in two to five feet of water.
They caught a few fish on a three-inch jerkbait, but the majority of them were caught on a 2 1/2-inch Strike King Bait Company's coppertruese Zero on a red 1/16-ounce Gopher jig; 2 1/2-inch Z-Man's watermelon-red ZinkerZ on a red 1/16-ounce Gopher jig; and three-inch Berkley PowerBait Minnow in the smelt-hue on a red 1/16-ounce Gopher jig. They presented these three baits by keeping the rod tip down or pointed at the five o'clock position and trying to deadstick these baits for several seconds as the wind pushed the boat and dragged the baits.
Steve Reideler of Lewisville, Texas, filed the following log on the Finesse News Network about his April 28 outing.
He wrote: "This spring's spawning cycle is winding down in north- central Texas, and the post-spawn phase is becoming more evident. Water temperatures have climbed into the high 60s to low 70s. Countless pods of largemouth bass fry are swarming in the shallows, and if one looks very closely, they can often see a male largemouth bass hovering underneath one of these pods of tiny fry, and these males exhibit a protective disposition as they chase away any bluegills or other predators that wander too close to the pods of fry.
"I observed these intriguing and fascinating sights during a solo afternoon foray to a nearby 21,280-acre U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' reservoir.
"It was another delightful and picturesque day. A beautiful sun filled the bluebird sky and not a cloud was in sight. The National Weather Service recorded the morning low temperature at 56 degrees and the afternoon high reached 83 degrees. The winds dissipated to a tolerable level for the first time in days, and it quartered out of the northwest at five to ten mph. The barometric pressure was steady at 29.62.
"The water was stained but clearer than normal, exhibiting 2 1/2-feet of visibility. The surface temperature varied from 68 degrees to 71 degrees. The Texas Water Management Board recorded the reservoir's water level at 7.62 feet below normal pool.
"I was afloat from 12:30 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. In-Fisherman's solunar calendar indicated the optimum fishing period would occur from 10:20 a.m. to 12:20 p.m.
"My spinning rods sported the following baits: three-inch Kalin's watermelon Lunker Grub with a dyed chartreuse tail and rigged on a black 1/16-ounce Gopher jig; four-inch Z-Man's green-pumpkin Finesse WormZ affixed to a chartreuse 1/16-ounce Gopher jig; four-inch Zoom Bait Company's watermelon-red flake Mini-Lizard on a red 1/16-ounce Gopher jig; and a wacky-rigged four-inch YUM's watermelon Dinger rigged on an Owner's No. 2 octopus-style hook.
"I spent the entire outing in the southeast section of the southwest tributary arm of the reservoir. The fishing was slow and somewhat tedious.
"I began by fan casting with the Kalin's grub on a mud flat just south of the boat ramp where I launched. I applied a slow but steady do-nothing retrieve and caught one 14-inch largemouth bass that was in three feet of water.
"For the next 2 1/2 hours, I plied the steep, rock and clay shorelines near a marina. Some of these shorelines serpentine behind many rows of covered boat docks. Along these steep shorelines I observed several male bass suspended under large pods of largemouth bass fry, along with scores of carp that had paired up and were resting on the bottom in two to three feet of water. I was also entertained by a mother duck and her seven small chicks as they swam in single file ahead of me from boat dock to boat dock. The steep rock and clay banks surrendered 12 largemouth bass -- the biggest weighed 2 1/4-pounds -- and three 12- to 13-inch crappies. These fish were scattered and were extracted from three to five feet of water. The Kalin's grub and steady do-nothing retrieve attracted nine largemouth bass and two crappies. The Zoom Mini Lizard worked in a slow twitch-and-deadstick manner enticed two largemouth bass. The green-pumpkin Finesse WormZ retrieved with a hop-and-bounce presentation seduced one bass and one crappie.
"Next, I made a short run to a 75-yard long stretch of riprap-laden causeway. I slowly dissected this area with the Kalin's grub and Zoom Lizard. The lizard with a slow twitch-and-deadstick presentation induced one largemouth bass that was residing about 15 feet from the water's edge and in six feet of water. The grub failed to elicit any strikes.
"My next stop was a small feeder creek just north of the riprap causeway. This feeder creek encompasses three shallow mud flats sprinkled with fist-sized rocks and rotted stumps, an old submerged asphalt roadbed, five rocky points, four boat ramps, seven enclosed boat houses, and two spawning coves. I caught one spotted bass off the shallow end of a boat ramp. One largemouth bass and one crappie were caught on two adjacent rocky points about halfway back in the feeder creek. Both of these bass were caught in three to five feet of water on the Kalin's grub with a slow and steady do-nothing retrieve. The back half of the feeder creek seemed bereft of bass.
"My last spot was a main-lake point comprised of clay and gravel. This point leads into three shallow mud bottom coves. It is usually at its best in the summer and fall, but I thought I would check it. I quickly covered the point from the main-lake side to the entrance of the coves with the grub with steady do-nothing technique, and I inveigled three largemouth bass that were scattered in three to five feet of water.
"All told, I tangled with 17 largemouth bass, one spotted bass, and four crappies during my 4 1/2-hour endeavor. The Kalin's grub maneuvered in a slow but steady do-nothing presentation proved to be the most fruitful offering, alluring 13 largemouth bass, one spotted bass, and three crappie. Zoom's Mini Lizard retrieved with a slow twitch-and-deadstick technique garnered three largemouth bass. Z-Man's green-pumpkin Finesse WormZ presented with a slow hop-and-bounce method caught one largemouth bass and one crappie. The wacky-rigged YUM Dinger failed to elicit any bites.
On April 28, Drew Walker of Springfield, Missouri, posted a note on OzarkAnglers.com about a 24-angler tournament that he fished at a 25,000-acre U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' reservoir in western Missouri. He also sent a note to the Finesse News Network on April 30 that included more details about this tournament.
He said that he had been reading about the 2 1/2-inch Z-Man's ZinkerZ affixed to a jig for about two years. But in his eyes, it looked like a"dumb bait." Therefore, he couldn't use it with any confidence. He confessed: "I am the guy tackle companies love. I buy what looks good to me, not necessarily the fish." What's more, finesse tactics have never appealed to him.
In his e-mail he wrote: "I recently fished a local tournament with some buddies. I had pre-fished twice the week leading up to tourney day. Both times I enjoyed better than great success on the A-rig and a spinnerbait, landing a 5.3-pound and 5.9-pound largemouth bass. So I loaded up my partner's boat with both of those lures tied on my rods and 40 pounds of additional tackle that I would likely not even touch.
"After throwing the A-rig for about four hours, and having nothing to show for it, I threw the spinnerbait with less confidence than I started the day with. After an hour of that, I all but gave up.
"With four hours left in the tournament, I considered my tackle options. I also texted some of my buddies, and no one was catching anything (not sure they would have told me if they were since it was all against all.). I remembered rigging a few 2 1/2-inch Z-Man's PB&J and green-pumpkin/orange ZinkerZ s on 1/8-ounce jigs, and saying out loud 'what do I have to lose, nothing is getting bites right now.' I used the PB&J ZinkerZ and 1/8-ounce jig with six-pound-test fluorocarbon line and a medium-light-action rod, and I began by casting it to the shoreline and pulling it down the rock ledges. Not ever fishing it before, I wasn't sure what to expect or look for and honestly wasn't paying much attention for lack of my overall success for the day. What I saw next literally took three to four seconds to register, but my line was moving at a rapid rate. I reeled quickly to catch up and lightly set the hook to bring in a keeper bass. On the second cast, I didn't expect anything either, but as soon as the rig settled on the bottom, a thump-thump radiated up the line, and I set the hook. During the next three hours, I landed more than 15 bass."
In sum, he won the tournament by catching 24-pounds of bass. What's more, none of the other contestants had more than one bass. He also marveled about the durability of the ZinkerZ.
Navionics adds SonarChart Shading to its Platinum+ and HotMaps Platinum cartography
In-Fisherman - April 29, 2019
Navionics adds SonarChart Shading and HotMaps Platinum.
Best Drive-To Pike Waters
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Mustad's New Tungsten Weights
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Mister Twister's Comida
Mister Twister's Black/Blue Flake Comida is a classic stick-style bait.
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Designed for Ned Rigs, this high-performance finesse bait can also be used as a standard jig...
Midwest Finesse Fishing: May 2019
Ned Kehde breaks down May Midwest Finesse fishing logs, and discusses in detail what the fish...
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Why Intelligent People Don't Say 'I Feel Like' in Conversations
It's one of the most commonly used "I" statements. That doesn't mean it helps you.
By Wanda ThibodeauxCopywriter, TakingDictation.com@WandaThibodeaux
Every generation has words and phrases they spew faster than they can twitch. For millennials, "I feel like" is certainly on the list, if not at the absolute top. If you haven't trimmed the sequence from your vocabulary, be advised: Drop it and you'll instantly sound significantly smarter. These are the top reasons why.
1. You demean the other person's ability to handle potential conflict.
Psychologists adore "I" statements in part because they force you to take some ownership of your thoughts and feelings. But psychologists also like "I feel like" under the premise that it's less accusatory and thus has the potential to diffuse conflict. But conflict in itself is not problematic. It's the inability to react to the conflict in a respectful, rational way that's the issue. Using the phrase "I feel like" presumes that your conversation partner cannot respond with decorum, which insults their maturity. Even if the person you're talking to has some room to grow, they won't get the practice in civil engagement if there's never a conflict to navigate.
2. It gives you an out.
"I feel like" can stand in for "I think". But because we've been taught that the words are also apologetic and disarming, using "I feel like" as an introductory phrase also demonstrates an effort to make your ideas more palatable. Rather than state what you believe with real confidence and authority, you push the idea that it's OK to disregard what you say if it seems offensive, difficult or not in line with the majority.
3. It's verbose.
There are few times you actually need "I feel like" to communicate your point. For example,
"I feel like this is too big." = "This is too big."
"I feel like we're running out of time." = "We're running out of time."
"I feel like he's the best candidate." = "He's the best candidate."
"I feel like I let you down and I'm sorry." = "I let you down. I'm sorry."
Pro tip: Imagine you're writing what you say. Don't be afraid to pause if the extra time to think and strike through brings you conciseness and clarity.
4. It's not all about you.
"I" statements like "I feel like" by definition put the emphasis on you. That can be appropriate, such as if you honestly want to use comparatives to describe what you're experiencing (e.g., "I feel like a hippo on a tightrope with this project"). But you are not the business. Everyone is. If all you do all the time is shift attention to yourself, you'll come off as self-absorbed, disconnected and insensitive to the needs and ideas of those around you. Over time, that can create the very tension and conflict you hope to avoid.
5. It pushes aside fact.
Feelings and empathy play big roles in business, such as when you trust your gut on a decision or take a moment to comfort an upset member of your team. From that standpoint, emotion matters. But a phrase like "I feel like" can rob you of the specificity that could be more persuasive. For example, instead of saying "I feel like this could jeopardize our budget," give the why and say something like, "We need a return of x percent, but the average return on these case studies is only y."
Your speech doesn't have to be perfect. We're human. But eliminating even one poorly or overly used phrase like "I feel like" does wonders for your efficiency and credibility. Start with this one, and then, if you're feeling saucy, take a crack at these, too.
Published on: Sep 13, 2017
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three point oh
Torvalds Christens The Next Linux Kernel Series 3.x
by Michael Reed
It's official, kernel version 3.0 is on its way. Linus confirmed this both in an announcement and by checking in the first 3.0 release candidate. The new branch is not expected to include any major milestones in terms of features, but it may stimulate developers to adopt policies of cruft removal and modernization.
Linus had mooted the idea of skipping 2.8 (stable branches use even numbers) in favor of 3.0 a couple of weeks ago on the kernel mailing list.
On the forums, reaction to the news has been mixed, with some wondering if Linus is falling prey to the current trend of large major version number jumps to give the impression of significant progress. But, that raises the question: is it worse to have a small version number jump for a new release that breaks everything, or a large version increase that turns out not to be hugely different from the previous release. It's a point that Linus touches on in his announcement:
[...]we are very much *not* doing a KDE-4 or a Gnome-3 here. No breakage, no special scary new features, nothing at all like that. [...] So no ABI changes, no API changes, no magical new features - just steady plodding progress.
His justification for the version jump is two-fold. First, the 2.6.x branch was around for an unusually long time. 2.6 has been with us since 2003, and version 2 itself began way back in 1996. Second, it is symbolic because, as the Linux kernel is 20 years old this year, it is now entering its third decade.
So, it's not a ground-breaking release, and the message seems to be: everything's going great, prepare for more of the same.
The original announcement on the Linux Kernel Mailing List.
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Pedrinho - Killer of Criminals
Pedro Rodrigues Filho is a Brazilian serial killer, a self-described vigilante who was convicted of 17 murders and sentenced to 128 years in prison, although he later went on to kill more while in prison, making his number of victims anywhere from 71 to 100. He’s one of Brazil’s most notorious murderers, who, for the first time, I know it’s weird to say, but he’s really good at it. Not to compliment him or his intentions in any way – he is still taking a life away. But his motivations are strictly to murder “bad people.” Those bad people, according to him, are people who had wronged him or his family, who have hurt women and children, and any man who tried to kill him.
The question is, does Pedro think he’s a bad person? Or is this mere justification to satisfy his pleasure in killing? Whatever it is, it all might’ve started before he was even born. His father, Pedro Rodrigues Sr., would often beat Pedrinho’s mother while she was pregnant with him. The beatings were so severe that he was born with an injured skull.
Pedro Rodrigues Filho, who we will call by his nickname, Pedrinho, was born on June 17th, 1954, in Santa Rita do Sapucai, which is in the southeastern part of Brazil.
There isn’t really anything said about Pedrinho’s childhood and family except for his interviews after he was captured. He did say he lived in poverty all his life and mentioned having to kill monkeys to make shirt collars and fishing to feed his starving family. According to him, he had his first urge to kill when he was 13 years old when he physically attacked his older cousin. His cousin had punched him in the eye while they were playing at an old sugar cane mill. Pedrinho quietly swore revenge and waited for the perfect moment to push his cousin through the sugar cane press as hard as he could. He wanted his whole body to go through the press but only his arm got caught up to his shoulder and stayed there until family members came to rescue the boy. Pedrinho ran but got caught but didn’t spend more than two nights in jail. Pedrinho laughed when he told that anecdote years later.
Now that he had that taste of “justice,” he was ready to really murder someone. He got that chance at age 14, when he murdered the deputy mayor of a neighboring town of Alfenas. His reason was that Pedrinho’s father had been unjustly fired by that man from his job as a night guard because he had been accused of stealing food from the school kitchen. Although he had stolen a Nescau, a chocolate bar, the day guard was stealing a lot more food. So his father took a gun and waited at the door of the deputy mayor’s house. When he arrived, he shot him twice and walked away. A month later, he would do the exact same thing to the day guard.
Soon after, he ran away to São Paulo in the town of Mogi das Cruzes, where Neymar is from. Unimportant fact right there for you (Note: Juan didn’t know who he, was so I should say Neymar is a famous Brazilian soccer player).
The stories during this time period for Pedrinho are sketchy, but we do know he definitely met a woman named Botinha, who was the widow of a well known drug trafficker. Pedrinho continued her deceased husband’s business by trafficking and drug dealing which included murdering all his rivals à la Godfather. He didn’t enjoy trafficking and immediately stopped when Botinha was executed by police during a drug transaction.
He then met Maria Aparecida Olympia and moved in with her while continuing to burglarize drug dealer’s homes. But the inevitable happened when Maria was shot and killed by drug dealers from Jacarei. Pedrinho felt he had to seek revenge.
He went to Jacarei to the drug dealer’s brother’s wedding with two other people. He told them they were going to murder the drug dealer and to make sure every man in the wedding gets a bullet, but no women or children. They ended up killing seven people and wounding sixteen. He wasn’t even 18 years old yet and he had murdered ten people.
Pedrinho was finally arrested for murder on May 24th, 1973. The police put him in the back of the police truck with another criminal, a rapist, not realizing who they were really dealing with. Within minutes Pedrinho had already killed him. We’re not sure how accurate this story is, along with so many others. It seems that local people like adding color to their criminals. That’s how a man becomes a legend and is regarded as a bad ass motherfucker. I have a very good example of one told by Pedrinho himself in an interview with Marcelo Rezende.
One night, a prison guard came up to him and delivered bad news. His mother was killed by his father. She had been stabbed twenty one times with a machete. Pedrinho was devastated and soon got permission to see her body at the morgue. It was there where he swore revenge over her punctured body. Lucky for him, his father had be incarcerated in the same prison as his son!
Pedrinho’s account of how he murdered his father is a little nebulous. He said he took a guard’s gun, locked the guard in his cell, walked up to his dad’s cell block, took out a knife and stabbed him twenty two times. The number of stabbings were very specific because his father had stabbed his mother twenty one times. And if that weren’t enough, he cut out a piece of his heart, took a bite out of it, chewed it a couple of times and then spit it out and threw the rest to the floor. He even mimed the action while being interviewed about it.
Pedrinho continued to murder while in prison because as he said before, they were “bad” and “outlaws” who deserved to die. He targeted rapists, pedophiles, child murderers, anyone he deemed to be “bad”. He got so popular while in prison that people would send letters to ask him to murder someone who raped or killed their loved ones and he would go on and do it! The justice system had been broken in Brazil for quite some time, so people were taking matters into their own hands.
That still does not justify the killing because that gives Pedrinho the power of judgment over someone’s life. Also, many of the men he killed in prison hadn’t even been convicted yet, and some of them were still awaiting trial! The criminal justice system is another even bigger problem than a serial killer who’s been called the Brazilian Dexter. Brazilian prisons are overcrowded, underfunded, and corrupt.
The capacity for a prison like Pedrinho’s stays the same while new prisoners come in. The New York Times reported that in Brazil there are 3000 new inmates per month. Guards let the prisoners do whatever they want since they are incredibly outnumbered and could get killed. They hand the keys to the inmates and just secure the outside. There are usually dozens of prisoners in small cells where they don’t even have enough room to lay down in conditions that are deplorable and unsanitary. A way to stay safe is to join a gang who will provide protection and even money for an attorney. It’s easy to smuggle weapons, cell phones, drugs, and basically anything to continue drug trafficking from the inside. It doesn’t make a difference whether they are in or out.
Stories differ on if Pedrinho was directly involved with gangs or whether he was respected or hated. He did say he had a hard time making friends in prison and recounted the time he was attacked by five prisoners at once and was forced to kill three of them. And there was the time he killed his cellmate because he snored too loudly.
Remember, these stories from cellmates, guards or even himself, are still to be taken with a grain of salt. Many serial killers are known to exaggerate their murders for the sake of looking more menacing and evil. Not to mention the amount of tattoos on Pedrinho, there’s more tattoo than skin. On one of his arms there’s even a tattoo that says “Mato Por Prazer,” which means “I kill for pleasure” in Portuguese.
He stayed incarcerated for 34 years, from 1973 until April 24th, 2007. He was released under a Brazilian law that states that no one can be incarcerated for more than 30 years. An old law from 1940, where the average age expectancy was 45 years old. But he served an extra four years for his murders in prison.
It really sounds crazy to release a well known psychopathic serial killer, but they had to adhere to the law. As backwards as it sounds, many other countries have the same prison term limits. Like Pedro Lopez, the Colombian child killer who murdered around 300 young girls all around South America. He was finally captured in Ecuador and served 14 years in prison because of their prison limit law of 16 years. He got out two years early for good behavior. They then handed him over to Colombian authorities where they kept him in a psychiatric institution and released just three years later. And now know one knows where he is.
Pedrinho lived for three years outside of prison and worked as a housekeeper and caretaker in Camborui, in Santa Catarina, which is south of São Paulo. But on September 15th, 2011, he was arrested by police on charges of causing six riots and false imprisonment many years ago when he was in prison.
He told reporters that he had been living a quiet life in Camboriu, working hard and being well liked by the neighborhood. His neighbors did say he was a nice and gentle man who didn’t bother anyone and felt he did his time for his crimes and should be left alone. No one had a bad thing to say about him.
He also did admit that crime did not pay. If it weren’t for his criminal life, he would’ve tried to be someone in life. But he also justifies his actions by saying he never killed the wrong person. The reasons why he survived in prison for 34 years was because he would kill the outlaws. That and always having a knife on him to defend himself. Even he has mentioned himself how surprised he is that he is still alive.
And maybe he is a tired old man who doesn’t feel the need for revenge killing anymore. He already lost his mother, girlfriend and a wife, not mention his father (even if he did kill him himself). Today he is 64 years old: a man who was born with a fractured skull, grew up in an abusive household, and had no issue with robbing and murdering gangsters and drug dealers. He wouldn’t prey on women or children and, in fact, loathed the men who did.
What he did was terrible – all of the crimes he committed were absolutely horrendous. However, he does get a lot of support from people because he’s like The Punisher to them. Or Batman. Although, Batman does not kill people, but he does hunt them down now that his parents died tragically in his youth. Pedrinho is not the Batman. He is a criminal and a murderer who is almost certainly a psychopath.
He gave himself the power of deciding life or death, which no man should do. Of course, living in that kind of environment where there is practically no policing and no laws being upheld, where you always have to watch your back, a man like Pedrinho would absolutely act out in the best way he could. He did mention that many times he killed to defend his life.
To this day, Pedrinho continues to serve in prison and could possibly be released in 2019.
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¡Bienvenidos a Escuela Sangre!
Escuela Sangre is a weekly Spanish language podcast where each week we talk about Hispanic true crime, serial killers, the supernatural, folklore, and Walter Mercado. The podcast itself is mostly in Spanish but we would like to share an English version of our script so listeners can follow the show and brush up on their Spanish as we brush up on ours. Like many of you, we are Hispanic Americans, which makes us both. Not one or the other!
The English transcript is not a direct translation to the show since we improvise a fair amount here and there but the narrative is as close as it gets. Thanks for listening (and now reading) the show. We appreciate you guys very much.
Carolina and Juan.
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AN EXAMINATION OF PATENTS, LICENSING, RESEARCH TOOLS, AND THE TRAGEDY OF THE ANTICOMMONS IN BIOTECHNOLOGY INNOVATION
This Article examines whether the development of pharmaceuticals, gene therapies or diagnostics is being stifled by the inability of companies to access proprietary research tools needed for the development of those important products and services.
Michael S. Mireles
The continued development of and affordable access to potentialy life saving pharmaceuticals, gene therapies and diagnostics is unquestionably a socialy important issue. However, crafting government policy to encourage the development of and alowing affordable access to those services and products is difficult. On one hand, the development of those services and products requires a large investment of funds because of the complexity, colaborative nature, and uncertainty of the development of those products and services. Accordingly, investors require the safety of strong and stable patent rights to ensure a return on their investment in the development of a commercial end-product or a research tool. On the other hand, patents may foreclose competition for a particular product or service and enable a company to exact a supra competitive price for that product or service, thus denying access to people unable to afford that product or service. In arriving at that supra competitive price, the company seling the commercial end product may have to include in that price a number of additional costs imposed by holders of patented research tools needed in the development of the commercial end-product.
This Article examines whether the development of pharmaceuticals, gene therapies or diagnostics is being stifled by the inability of companies to access proprietary research tools needed for the development of those important products and services. This Article also evaluates proposals for aleviating problems in accessing proprietary research tools, and proposes recommendations to aid in the efficient transfer of that technology. First, this Article recommends that Congress enact a law similar to the proposed Genomic Science and Technology Innovation of Act of 2002, which requires the government to conduct a study of the effect of government policy on biotechnology innovation. Second, this Article recommends that the government encourage public and private parties to enter patent pools to efficiently transfer rights in biotechnology inventions. The government, in conjunction with private and public institutions, should create a publicly available database of proprietary research tools and licenses concerning those tools. The government should also modify the provision of the Bayh-Dole Act concerning reservation of a nonexclusive right to practice any patented invention created with federal funding. The modification would alow the government to transfer a non-exclusive license to a patented research tool developed with government funding to a patent pool created by industry participants if it is demonstrated that the owner of the patented research tool is unreasonably withholding the license of that tool from the pool. Any
* Visiting Assistant Professor of Law, University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law. B.S. 1995, University of Maryland
142 University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform [Vol. 38:1
royalties resulting from the licensing of the research tool in the patent pool wil be distributed to the owner of the patented research tool.
Part I of this Article provides definitions for research tools and commercial applications. Part I discusses the costs, benefits, and purposes of patent law. PartI reviews university and private research and development, including the influence of the Bayh-Dole Act. Part IV examines the development of commercial applications of biotechnology research, including the role of venture capital and the use of licensing provisions requiring reach through royalties and exclusivity. Part V evaluates problems that may occur in attempting to develop commercial applications and licensing patents. Part VI reviews the Tragedy of the Anticommons theory. Part VI discusses research and analysis concerning the existence of the anticommons problem. Part VI examines and analyzes potential solutions for solving the Tragedy of the Anticommons in biotechnology. Finaly, Part IX offers recommendations for addressing an existing or developing Tragedy of the Anticommons.
The complex and uncertain nature of biotechnology innovation1 results in an increasing need for collaborations between multiple public and private institutions to share costs, proprietary technology, and specialized skills to develop commercial applications such as pharmaceuticals, gene therapies, and diagnostics.2 A single
1. Josh Lerner & Robert P. Merges, The Control of Technology Aliances: An Empirical Analysis of the Biotechnology Industry, 46 J. Indus. Econ. 125, 126 (1998)
2. Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), Genetic Invention, Intellectual Property Rights and Licensing Practices ch. 1, p. 7 (2002), available at http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/42/21/2491084.pdf (on file with the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform) [hereinafter OECD Report] (“Biotechnology is a fast-moving field in which new products and services are developed from an increasingly complex and cumulative set of underlying technologies.”)
Fall 2004] The Tragedy of the Anticommons in Biotechnology Innovation 143
pharmaceutical may cost as much as $800 million3 and require numerous proprietary inputs, owned or subject to a tax by multiple parties, to develop. Accordingly, the ability of public and private entities to efficiently transfer proprietary technology is critical to the development of socially beneficial commercial applications. This Article explores whether public and private entities are encountering difficulties in transferring proprietary rights necessary to develop commercial applications. This Article also evaluates proposals for alleviating problems in accessing proprietary technology, such as research tools, and proposes recommendations to aid in the efficient transfer of that technology.
Patent law provides the principal legal protection for biotechnology innovation. In 1980, the United States Supreme Court decided Diamond v. Chakrabarty, which paved the way for the patenting of biotechnological products and processes.4 That decision, along with the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act,5 which allowed universities and small companies to retain title in inventions developed with government funding, created the biotechnology industry and the resulting flood of patent applications and issued patents for biotechnological inventions such as genes and gene fragments.6 Patent protection for those inventions allowed biotechnology companies to obtain much needed capital to fund research and development.7
Scientific Research: Intelectual Property Rights and the Norms of Science, 94 Nw. U. L. Rev. 77, 110 (1999) (“[T] he legal developments of the 1980s and 1990s have generated a large variety of academic-industrial relationships . . . . [S]ome academic-industrial relationships resemble commercial joint ventures.”)
3. Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, Post-approval R & D raises total drug development costs to $897 milion, Impact Report, May/June 2003, available at http:// csdd.tufts.edu/infoservices/ impactreportpdfs/ impactreportsummarymayjune2003.pdf (on file with the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform).
4. Diamond v. Chakrabarty, 447 U.S. 303 (1980).
5. The Government Patent and Policy Act of Dec. 12, 1980, Pub. L. No. 96-517, 94 Stat. 3015-28 (codified as amended at 35 U.S.C. 200-211, 301-307 (1994)).
6. Biotechnology Industry Organization, Biotechnology Industry Facts, available at http://www.bio.org/er/statistics.asp (on file with the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform) (stating that 2,160 biotechnology patents were granted in 1989 compared to 7,763 biotechnology patents granted in 2002).
7. FTC Report, supra note 1, at ch. 2, p. 1 (“Biotechnology start-ups rely on their ability to patent their innovations to attract investment and continue innovating . . . .”)
Patent law is designed to correct a market failure wherein too few inventions are created because copyists may easily free-ride on the efforts of inventors .8 Patent law provides a right to exclude others from making, using, selling, offering to sell, or importing the patented invention to incentivize the creation and disclosure of inventions.9 Patents also provide an incentive for capitalists to invest in the commercialization, including the further innovation, of patented technology.10 In a perfect world, patent law doctrine would reflect the most efficient mechanism to incentivize invention, the disclosure of inventions, and innovation, while at the same time ensuring the existence of a public domain upon which additional inventions may be built. However, in reality, patent law may create roadblocks to the development of commercial applications, particularly when applied to a new technology, such as biotechnology.
In 1998, Professors Michael Heller and Rebecca Eisenberg asserted that biotechnology innovation may be stifled because too many property rights in biotechnology had been granted, resulting in a situation called a “Tragedy of the Anticommons,” wherein no one party can collect those rights to develop a commercial application.11 Heller and Eisenberg further argued that transaction costs, including costs associated with bundling rights, strategic behavior, and the cognitive biases of biotechnology industry participants, will prevent parties from transferring rights to avoid a Tragedy of the Anticommons.12
Two studies have offered apparently conflicting conclusions as to whether a Tragedy of the Anticommons exists or may develop in biotechnology. In one study, the National Institutes of Health
Bruce Lehman, Major Biotechnology Issues for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, 33 Cal. W. L. Rev. 49, 50 (1996) (“[P] atenting is a very important part of commercializing biotechnology. The biotechnology industry requires considerable capital expenditure . . . . That capital is essential and the ability to get that capital is very much dependent upon the capacity to get patent protection for a prospective product.”) .
8. Roger E. Schechter & John R. Thomas, Intellectual Property: The Law of Copyrights, Patents and Trademarks 13.4 (2003) [hereinafter Intellectual Property] .
9. 35 U.S.C. 154(a)(1) (1994)
10. Rebecca S. Eisenberg, Eisenberg: Exclusive Rights and Experimental Use, 56 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1017, 1045-46 (1989). See generaly Edmund W. Kitch, The Nature and Function of the Patent System, 20 J.L. & Econ. 265 (1977).
11. Michael A. Heller & Rebecca S. Eisenberg, Can Patents Deter Innovation? The Anticommons in Biomedical Research, 280 Science 698, 698 (May 1, 1998).
12. See Heller & Eisenberg, supra note 11, at 700.
(“NIH”) found that scientists in academia and industry, university technology transfer professionals, and members of private firms expressed concerns about the difficulties and delays associated with licensing proprietary rights in biotechnology research tools.13 Several years later, a second study conducted by Professors Walsh, Arora, and Cohen, collected information from intellectual property attorneys, business managers, and scientists from biotechnology and pharmaceutical firms
In a recent article, Professor Paul David argues that the Walsh Study is flawed in several respects.18 First, David criticizes the study for failing to describe the interview protocol followed in the survey.19 David notes that the form of the questions can result in responses from interviewees indicating that there is not a problem.20 Second, David asserts that rational actors would not report abandoned projects that otherwise might have been undertaken if patenting practices and law had not changed. Accordingly, David argues that a search for evidence of a Tragedy of the Anticommons is difficult because the researcher is attempting to prove a counterfactual: if something had not happened, then something else would have resulted.21
Based on research and analysis concerning the presence of a Tragedy of the Anticommons, it is unclear whether the Tragedy
13. See NIH Report, supra note 2.
14. John P. Walsh et al., Research Tool Patenting and Licensing and Biomedical Innovation, in Patents in the Knowledge-Based Economy 285 (W.M. Cohen & S. Merrill eds., 2002).
15. Id.
17. Id. at 285, 293-97.
18. Paul A. David, The Economic Logic of “Open Science” and the Balance between Private Property Rights and the Public Domain in Scientific Data and Information: A Primer, 13-15 (2003) , available at http://siepr.stanford.edu/papers/pdf/02-30.pdf (on file with the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform).
19. Id. at 13-14.
20. Id. at 14.
21. See id. at 16.
exists or will exist in the biotechnology sector. A number of commentators, however, have proposed solutions to the Tragedy of the Anticommons
Accordingly, this Article recommends that certain actions be taken to determine if a Tragedy of the Anticommons exists or will develop and to alleviate the effects of an existing or a developing Tragedy of the Anticommons. First, this Article recommends that Congress enact a law similar to the proposed Genomic Science and Technology Innovation Act of 2002,28 which requires the government to conduct a study regarding the effect of government policy on biotechnology innovation. Second, this Article recommends that the government encourage public and private parties to enter patent pools to efficiently transfer rights in biotechnology inven
22. See, e.g., Teresa M. Summers, The Scope of Utility in the Twenty -First Century: New Guidelines for Gene-Related Patents, 91 Geo. L .J. 475, 477-478 (2003) .
23. Eisenberg, supra note 10
24. See Maureen A. O’Rourke, Toward a Doctrine of Fair Use in Patent Law, 100 Colum. L. Rev. 1177 (2000).
25. See Jeanne Clark et al., United States Patent and Trademark Office, Patent Pools: A Solution to the Problem of Access in Biotechnology Patents ? (Dec. 5, 2000), at http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/dapp/opla/patentpool.pdf (on file with the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform) [hereinafter White Paper] .
26. See Biotechnology Industry Organization on Bayh-Dole and Technology Transfer Before the President’s Council on Science and Technology Office and Technology Policy 1 (Apr. 11, 2002), available at http://www.bio.org/ip/pdf/ bd20020509.pdf (on file with the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform) .
27. See Madey v. Duke University, 307 F.3d 1351 (Fed. Cir. 2002)
28. H.R. 3966, 107th Cong. (2d Sess. 2002).
The government, in conjunction with private and public institutions, should create a publicly available database of proprietary research tools and licenses concerning those tools. The government should also modify the provision of the Bayh-Dole Act concerning reservation of a non-exclusive right to practice any patented invention created with federal funding. The modification would allow the government to transfer a non-exclusive license to a patented research tool developed with government funding to a patent pool created by industry participants if it is demonstrated that the owner of the patented research tool is unreasonably withholding the license of that tool from the pool. Any royalties resulting from the licensing of the research tool in the patent pool would be distributed to the owner of the patented research tool.
This proposal attempts to provide increased access to research tools while balancing the relative interests of the public and the owners of proprietary technology. The public interest is protected as greater access to research tools may result in the creation of more commercial applications that benefit the public health. Moreover, the public has already paid once for the research tool and should be not taxed again at a high rate because a company with government funded proprietary technology has chosen to hold things up. In addition, one of the primary justifications for the Bayh-Dole Act is the need for title in inventions to vest in private firms to encourage the commercialization of inventions created with government funding.29 However, with research tools, a market already exists, and the creator of a research tool often may not use or be equipped to use that tool to develop a commercial application. Thus, providing title to an invention created with government funding may be unnecessary for the continued commercialization of the research tool itself. Furthermore, the licensor’s rights are still protected and should be protected enough to allow continued investment in the development of research tools. The license is to be used whenever the licensor is engaged in behavior that unfairly stifles innovation and only when the licensor refuses to join a patent pool. In addition, the licensor is still entitled to recover royalties.
This Article is comprised of eleven parts. Part I provides definitions for research tools and commercial applications. Part II discusses the costs, benefits, and purposes of patent law. Part III reviews university and private research and development, including the influence of the Bayh-Dole Act. Part IV examines the
29. See infra notes 108-27 and accompanying text.
development of commercial applications of biotechnology research, including the role of venture capital and the use of licensing provisions requiring reach through royalties and exclusivity. Parts V and VI evaluate problems that may occur in attempting to develop commercial applications and licensing patents. Part VII reviews the Tragedy of the Anticommons theory. Part VIII discusses research and analysis concerning the existence of the anticommons problem. Part IX and X examine and analyze potential solutions for solving the Tragedy of the Anticommons in biotechnology. Finally, Part XI offers recommendations for addressing an existing or developing Tragedy of the Anticommons.
I. Defining Research Tools and
Developments in molecular biology in the last decade have increased our understanding of the cause and development of incurable diseases, thus enabling us to develop products and services for the treatment of those diseases. The nature of the development of those products and services, however, is increasingly cumulative and collaborative due to the complex and uncertain nature of biotechnology research and development.30 Increasing numbers of so-called research tools are needed to develop much needed products and services that will directly impact the health of the public. Because most of these research tools are patentable, a “patent thicket” could arise to retard innovation and the subsequent development of publicly beneficial commercial applications. “The term ‘patent thicket’ has been coined to characteri[z]e a technological field where multiple patent rights are owned by multiple actors.31 The numerous rights that may need to be brought together for work in this field might possibly impede research and development because of the difficulty or cost of assembling the necessary rights.”32
This Article distinguishes between commercial applications and research tools. However, from the perspective of the developer of the product or service, the definitions of commercial applications
30. FTC Report, supra note 1, at ch. 2, p. 17 (“Innovation is often an ongoing, cumulative process, with each generation of innovations building on what came before.”) .
31. OECD Report, supra note 2, at 92.
and research tools can differ.33 Both the fact that research tools may be developed by the same entity that is developing a commercial application and the fact that research tools may be developed by public entities as well as private entities complicate the distinction. An additional complication exists because research tools may be included in the commercial application sold to the end-user. For purposes of this Article, a commercial application includes a pharmaceutical drug, a gene therapy, or a diagnostic product. Meanwhile, “[a] research tool is a technology that is used by pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to find, refine, or otherwise design and identify a potential product or properties of a potential drug product. As such, it serves as a springboard for follow-on innovation.”34 The main distinguishing characteristic between a commercial application, thus defined, and a research tool is the market for the product or service.35 Though the market for research tools consists of public and private scientists who use those tools in the development of products and services,36 the market for commercial applications consists of the general public.
Some examples of research tools include a fragment of a gene, a gene, “cell lines, monoclonal antibodies, reagents, animal models, growth factors, combinatorial chemistry and DNA libraries, clones and cloning tools (such as PCR), methods, laboratory equipment and machines.”37 Research tools are critical to the efficient development of commercial applications, especially pharmaceutical drugs.38 Research tools can greatly reduce the “costs and time required for the clinical trial phases, which are the most ‘expensive part’ of the drug development process.”39
33. NIH Report, supra note 2.
34. FTC Report, supra note 1, at ch. 3, p. 18.
36. See Genomania Meets the Bottom Line
[T] oolmakers . . . sell the machines, chemicals, chips, and computer codes that make it possible to sequence raw DNA, characterize gene expression, and search for meaningful patterns in the data. Among these are Affymetrix . . ., which makes gene chips that give researchers the ability to screen the activity of scores of genes at a time, sequencing machine-maker Applied Biosystems . . ., and bioinformatics software developer Informax . . . .
37. Sharing Biomedical Research Resources: Principles and Guidelines for Recipients of NIH Research Grants and Contracts, 64 Fed. Reg. 72,090, 72,092 n.1 (Dec. 23, 1999).
38. FTC Report, supra note 1, at ch. 3, p.19 (“[R]esearch tools have led to a considerable reduction in the cost and time required for the targeting of therapeutic antibodies during the initial stages of new drug research.”) .
Examples of commercial applications include gene therapies, diagnostic products, and pharmaceutical drugs. Gene therapy involves replacing malfunctioning genes, which can cause diseases, with functioning genes.40 Genetic diagnostic testing can include: “diagnosing a disease
II. Costs, Benefits, and Purposes of Patent Law
The United States Constitution allows Congress to enact patent law for the purpose of promoting scientific progress .44 In the evaluation of how patents promote scientific progress, courts and commentators have focused on several theories: an incentive to invent, an incentive to disclose, and an incentive to innovate .45 The incentive to invent rationale focuses on the patent grant as provid
40. Human Genome Project Information, available at http://www.ornl.gov/ TechResources/Human_Genome/elsi/patents.html (on file with the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform) [hereinafter Human Genome Project Information]
41. Laurie L. Hill, The Race to Patent the Genome, Free Riders, Hold Ups, and the Future of Medical Breakthroughs, 11 Tex. Intell. Prop. L.J. 221, 228 (2003). Once a gene or several genes are discovered which predispose a person to a certain disease, complementary gene tests are created to determine whether people have that gene or genes. See Human Genome Project Information, supra note 40.
42. Mary Breen Smith, Comment, An End to Gene Patents? The Human Genome Project Versus the United States Patent and Trademark Office ‘s 1999 Utility Guidelines, 73 U. Colo. L. Rev. 747, 753 (2002).
43. Cynthia Robbins-Roth, Buy or Die, Forbes ASAP, Apr. 3, 2000, at http:// www.Forbes.com/asap/2000/0403/153.html (on file with the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform).
44. U.S. Const. art. I, 8, cl. 8
45. Eisenberg, supra note 10, at 1036-37. Courts have primarily focused on the first two theories: an incentive to invent and incentive to disclose. See id.
ing encouragement for developers to invent.46 The incentive to disclose theory promotes scientific progress by ensuring that the patented invention is publicly disclosed, enabling someone skilled in the art to practice the invention.47 The incentive to innovate theory focuses on how patent rights encourage commercialization or development after the patent issues.48 Each theory has been substantially discussed and criticized in economics literature.49 The analysis below will discuss each theory and several criticisms of the theories.
A. Incentive to Invent
The creation or invention of new knowledge is economically beneficial because it leads to the production of new products or processes.50 However, in a competitive market system, the public goods nature of knowledge leads to a market failure .51 Because a public good is nonrival in consumption and is nonexcludable, an inventor may bear the costs to develop an invention but may be unable to recoup the investment made in research and development of the invention .52 Others can easily free-ride on the efforts of the inventor without having incurred the costs of invention .53 This problem leads to a competitive market system that may provide
46. See infra notes 50-68 and accompanying text.
49. Eisenberg, supra note 10, at 1024-30 (discussing criticisms of theories).
50. See Dam, supra note 9, at 252 (“In high-technology industries . . . investment in research and development is itself a major form of competition and leads directly to consumer benefits in the form of new products and lower prices.”)
51. Intellectual Property, supra note 8, at 7
52. Id. A public good has two characteristics: it is nonrivalrous, meaning that one person’s use of the good does not affect the amount of it available for consumption by others
53. Intellectual Property, supra note 8, at 288.
ineffective incentives to invent and, thus, too few inventions .54 From an economic perspective, the patent system is designed to correct this market failure by awarding a property right in a discovery, allowing inventors or innovators to exclude others from making, using, or selling their discoveries .55 The patent system generally is designed to increase consumer and public welfare by encouraging inventors to create inventions that otherwise would not have been created because of the market failure discussed
above .56
There are, however, costs associated with providing proprietary rights in discoveries .57 The potential monopoly power that a patent provides allows the patentee to increase a patented invention’s price beyond the competitive market price, thus reducing the supply of the patented invention .58 Moreover, it is unclear whether it is “necessary to endure the output-restricting effects of patent monopolies in order to stimulate invention.”59 A desire to obtain a competitive advantage by being first in the market or to keep up with the progress of competitors may provide sufficient incentive to invent.60 Moreover, market barriers to entry unrelated to patents may insulate the inventor from competition long enough to justify expenditures in research and development.61
54. See Dam, supra note 9, at 247 (“[T]he primary problem that the patent system solves . . .-often called the ‘appropriability problem’-is that, if a firm could not recover the costs of invention because the resulting information were available to all, then we could expect a much lower and indeed suboptimal level of innovation.”)
55. See Dam, supra note 9, at 247 (“[T]he patent system prevents others from reaping where they have not sown and thereby promotes research and development . . . investment in innovation. The patent law achieves this laudable end by creating property rights in inventions.”).
56. U.S. Const. art. I, 8, cl. 8. The United States Constitution provides Congress the “[p]ower to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” Id.
57. See David, supra note 18, at 2 (“But imposing restrictions on the uses to which ideas may be put also saddles society with the inefficiencies that arise when monopolies are tolerated
58. Janice M. Mueller, An Introduction to Patent Law, 20 (2003)
59. Eisenberg, supra note 10, at 1026.
60. Id. at 1026-27
61. Eisenberg, supra note 10, at 1027. Contra Ko, supra note 54, at 794 (arguing that “[t]ypical non-patent means of appropriation,” such as head start, trade secrets, sales and service efforts, are unreliable nonpatent barriers in the biotechnology industry) .
Generally, only the inventor firm can obtain a patent for its discovery
Additional costs may include the presence of patents that discourage others from improving patented inventions.65 This problem is exacerbated where a questionably invalid patent has been issued.66 Alternatively, patents may also encourage inventor attempts to design around patents, thus yielding inventions serving the same purpose as the patented invention.67 Furthermore, competitors might become concerned about potential patent infringement, or even the threat of patent infringement, which can lead to conduct that wastes resources.68
B. Incentive to Disclose
The patent system provides another benefit in that it increases the storehouse of public knowledge by requiring a patentee to provide a disclosure, which enables others to make and use the patented invention without undue experimentation.69 This
62. Mueller, supra note 58, at 20-21. See generaly Matthew Erramouspe, Staking Patent Claims on the Human Blueprint: Rewards and Rent Dissipating Races, 43 UCLA L. Rev. 961 (1996) (arguing patent system’s mechanisms to minimize rent dissipation, but those mechanisms appear to be failing in race to find and claim commercially valuable genes). Contra Mark F. Grady & Jay I. Alexander, Patent Law and Rent Dissipation, 78 Va. L. Rev. 305, 308 (1992) (reviewing rent dissipation theory and how cases appear to have adopted rules of decision that minimize rent dissipation in the pioneer development stage as well as in the improvement stage) .
63. Grady & Alexander, supra note 62, at 308.
66. Mueller, supra note 58, at 20-21.
67. Eisenberg, supra note 10, at 1027-28.
68. Mueller, supra note 58, at 20-21. See FTC Report, supra note 1, at ch. 2, p. 8 (“The threat of being sued for infringement by an incumbent-even on a meritless claim- may ‘scare . . . away’ venture capital financing.”).
69. See 35 U.S.C. 112 1 (2000)
enabling disclosure is generally made publicly available eighteen months after a patent application is filed.70 “[P]atents create legal rights that permit disclosure, enabling sales negotiations or licensing of the patented product or technology.”71 Accordingly, the public can access the information in the application or in the issued patent, which otherwise might have been kept secret.72
Some critics object to this theory because “[s]ecrecy is not always a practical strategy for protection, and often secret technologies can eventually be uncovered through reverse engineering.”73 Moreover, it may be more desirable to keep an invention perpetually secret, rather than settling for twenty years of patent protection.74 Finally, critics also claim that patents do not provide sufficient information to competitors.75 If an invention is kept secret, it may be difficult to detect infringement of the patent.76 Accordingly, an inventor might prefer to conceal an invention rather than allow competitors to secretly practice the invention.
C. Incentive to Innovate
Patents also provide an incentive to “induce firms to invest in ‘innovation’-i.e., putting existing inventions to practical use.”77 Significant investment may be required to bring a patentable invention to market, whether those costs include constructing a new plant, advertising, or distribution.78 “[T] he incentive to innovate theory gives existing patents an ongoing role in preserving the incentives of patent holders to invest in development during the patent term.”79 The patent provides a basis for possibly earning more than ordinary returns, permitting “innovators to secure the financial backing of capitalists and to bid productive resources
theory holds that without patent protection, inventors would conceal their inventions in order to prevent exploitation by competitors).
70. Mueller, supra note 58, at 22.
71. Ko, supra note 54, at 796.
73. Eisenberg, supra note 10, at 1029. See also Ko, supra note 54, at 796.
78. Eisenberg, supra note 10, at 1037
79. Eisenberg, supra note 10, at 1038. (“Reducing the strength of existing patent monopolies might thus have the effect of undermining incentives to put existing technologies into use.”).
away from their current uses.”80 This theory is usually associated with the work of Joseph Schumpeter on economic development.81 In contrast to the other two theories, the incentive to innovate theory is concerned with ex post activity.82
The patent system arguably provides an additional benefit when a broad patent is issued for a pioneering development, because the patentee is able to efficiently direct multiple firms to allocate resources to develop follow-on innovations .83 “The patent owner is thus in a position to cause researchers to share information and thereby avoid duplicative research efforts.”84 This theory is known as the “prospect theory.”85
III. University and Private Research and Development:
The Influence of the Bayh-Dole Act
Since the 1980s, biotechnology research and development have increasingly become a collaborative effort between the public and private sector.86 A primary reason for increased collaboration involves the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act, a major shift in government policy.87 The Bayh-Dole Act allows universities to take title to inventions developed with government funding.88
The Bayh-Dole Act has a tremendous effect upon the appropriation of technology because the federal government is the largest source of funding for research and development in the United
80. Id. at 1039.
81. Id. But see Ko, supra note 54, at 800 (“Empirical studies testing Schumpeter’s assumption-that monopolistic conditions created by patents more readily induce innovation than do competitive conditions-have proved inconclusive.”).
83. Kitch, supra note 10, at 266. But c.f. Ko, supra note 54, at 803 (“Biotechnology’s unpredictability confounds the prospect theory’s central notion of coordination.”).
85. Kitch, supra note 10, at 266. But c.f. Robert P. Merges & Richard R. Nelson, On the Complex Economics of Patent Scope, 90 Colum. L. Rev. 839, 843-44 (1990) (“Without extensively reducing the pioneer’s incentives, the law should attempt at the margin to favor a competitive environment for improvements, rather than an environment dominated by the pioneer firm. In many industries the efficiency gains from the pioneer’s ability to coordinate are likely to be outweighed by the loss of competition for improvements to the basic invention.”).
86. Epstein, supra note 2, at 11.2.
87. See id.
States for universities .89 The federal government currently spends about twenty-six percent of the total funding for research and development in the United States.90 The government spends almost sixty percent of all funding for research and development in universities in the United States .91 Private industry funds about seventysix percent of research and development in the United States.92 Prior to the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act, less than four percent of all government funded research was commercialized .93
As a result of the increased collaboration, the Association of University Technology Managers reported in 2000 that “$29.5 billion was spent in sponsored university research expenditures-this included $18.1 billion from the federal government and $2.7 billion from private industry”
Although there are apparently benefits to the increased collaboration of universities and the private sector, there are critics to
89. Joshua A. Newberg & Richard L. Dunn, Keeping Secrets in the Campus Lab: Law, Values and Rules of Engagement for Industry-University R&D Partnerships, 39 Am. Bus. L .J. 187, 193 (Winter 2002) (citing Nat’l Sci. Bd., National Patterns of R&D Resources: 2000 Data Update, Table 1A, at http://www.nsf.gov/sbel.srs/nsfl01309/start.htm) (on file with the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform) .
90. Albert H. Teich, AAAS Report XXVII: Research & Development, R&D in the Federal Budget: Frequently Asked Questions 2 (2003) available at http:// www.aaas.org/ssp/rd/03pch1.htm (on file with the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform) .
93. Epstein, supra note 2, at 11.12 (citing Lobenstein, Future of University-Industry Licensing, 25 Les Nouvelles 138 (1990)).
94. Id. at 11.36-.37. (citing Bernmen & Denis, University Licensing Trends and Intellectual Capital, Biotechnology Law 2002: Biotechnology Patents & Business Strategies 551 (PLI 2002)).
95. Id. at 11.16 (citing Bernmen & Denis, University Licensing Trends and Intellectual Capital, Biotechnology Law 2002: Biotechnology Patents & Business Strategies 551 (PLI 2002)).
collaboration .96 Some critics state that the purpose of commercializing university research is in direct conflict with the purpose of university research: to seek knowledge .97 Other critics argue that the collaboration will unduly influence the academic freedom of researchers to pursue whatever projects they deem important, which traditionally have centered on basic research-research geared toward understanding fundamental principles .98 Instead, universities and their researchers will be swayed by desires for financial gain and might thus focus on applied research.99 Moreover, the desire to obtain proprietary rights in technology in the private sector conflicts with traditional academic goals of immediate publication and dissemination of research.100 The private sector might encourage academics to withhold publication and dissemination of research until proprietary rights are established in that research.101 As a result, there may be too little basic research available for other researchers to build upon.102
Proponents of increased collaboration argue that notwithstanding thee above-stated criticisms, universities and private industry benefit from the relationship.103 For example, universities have a new source of funding to support increasingly expensive hightechnology research.104 Moreover, financial benefits may encourage researchers to remain at universities rather than leaving for private companies.105 In addition, university research students may receive valuable practical training and employment opportunities with private firms.106 Private industry might also benefit from increased competition in new technologies, objectivity in research with access to better research talent and facilities, and opportunities to hire highly qualified research students.107
96. Id. at 11.3.
100. Id. at 11.7-8.
101. Id.
102. Id. at 11.8.
103. Id. at 11.3-.6.
104. Id. at 11.9-.16 (“[A] t around the same time that Congress enacted legislation permitting universities to retain title to inventions generated by federally-funded research, the amount of federal research funding available to universities began to decrease.” Id. at 11.11 (citing Lobenstein, Future of University -Industry Licensing, 25 Les Nouvelles 138 (1990) ).
105. Id. at 11.10.
107. Id. at 11.9-.10.
A. The Bayh -Dole Act
The issue of whether title to inventions created with government funding should vest in the government or private companies has been debated since the 1940s.108 In 1947, the United States Attorney General recommended that the ownership of technology developed with the use of government funds, even in collaboration with private firms, should vest in the government.109 However, each agency instituted its own policies concerning the rights the government retained in technology developed with the use of government funds.110 In 1963, a presidential memorandum attempted to achieve a greater degree of uniformity in government patent policy.111 The memorandum allowed the government to generally retain title to inventions developed with the use of government funds but also allowed contractors to acquire rights greater than exclusive licenses if ” necessary . . . to call forth private risk capital and expense to bring the invention to the point of practical application.”112 In 1971, President Nixon issued a revised presidential memorandum and policy statement on government patent policy, which facilitated the allocation of exclusive rights in government funded inventions to private firms.113
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the federal government recognized that significant investment was needed to commercialize innovations developed with government funds and that private firms were unwilling to invest in commercializing innovations unless those firms received a proprietary interest in the end product.114 Thus, the
108. Rebecca S. Eisenberg, Public Research and Private Development: Patents and Technology Transfer in Government Sponsored Research, 82 Va. L. Rev. 1663, 1671-1691 (1996).
109. Epstein, supra note 2, at 14.4. (citing U.S. Dept. of Justice, Report and Recommendations of the Attorney General to the President, Investigation of Government Patent Practices and Policies (1947))
11 0. Epstein, supra note 2, at 14.4.
111. Eisenberg, supra note 108, at 1677.
112. Id. at 1678.
114. Epstein, supra note 2, at 14.4
government determined that technology developed with government funds should be transferred to the private sector for further research, development, and investment to commercialize that technology.115 The new strategy served several goals: “ensure [the] effective transfer and commercial development of discoveries that would otherwise languish in government and university archives”
The Government Patent Policy Act of 1980, known as the Bayh-Dole Act, went into effect in 1981.118 The Act concerned the ownership of technology developed with the use of federal funds by small businesses, universities, research institutions, nonprofit scientific or educational institutions, and hospitals.119 The purpose of the Bayh-Dole Act was “to promote the utilization of inventions arising from federally supported research and development, to encourage the maximum protection of small business firms . . . [, and] to promote collaboration between commercial concerns and nonprofit organizations including universities . . . .”120 By presidential memorandum in 1983, the government extended the Act to entities such as large corporations.121
[F]urther investment is necessary to refine it, test it, build the necessary facilities for production on a commercial scale, and find or create a market for it. Throughout this development process a substantial risk of failure remains. These follow-on investments may greatly exceed the value of the initial investment that created the invention in inchoate form. The government lacks the expertise and facilities to do this development work itself, and therefore needs to turn the invention over to industry at this point. Firms may only be willing to invest in the development of an invention if they hold exclusive rights, either in the form of title or an exclusive license, under a patent.
Id. at 1669.
115. Epstein, supra note 2, at 14.4.
116. Eisenberg, supra note 108, at 1664-65.
11 7. Epstein, supra note 2, at 14.4-.5.
118. 35 U.S.C. 200-211 (1994)
119. Epstein, supra note 2, at 13.46.1.
120. 35 U.S.C. 200 (1994)
121. Epstein, supra note 2, at 13.46.1 (citing President’s Memorandum to the Heads of the Executive Departments and Agencies on Government Patent Policy, 19 Weekly
Although the Act reserves certain rights to the government, the Act allows a qualifying organization to elect to retain title to any technology developed with the use of federal funds.122 The rights reserved by the government include a non-exclusive right to practice the invention worldwide123 and limited “march in” rights to require the granting of a license if the invention is not practiced within a reasonable time period.124 The Act also provides that in “exceptional circumstances” an agency may limit or restrict the right of a recipient of federal funds to elect title if the agency determines that restriction or elimination of that right will better promote the policy and objectives of the Act.125
As a result of the Act, universities are encouraged to take a proprietary position in any technology that is developed with federal funds. The Act also encourages private commercial organizations to collaborate with universities funded with federal monies because those commercial concerns may be able to take an exclusive proprietary position in that technology. The number of patent applications filed by qualifying biotechnology organizations increased by more than 300 percent in the first five years after the enactment of the legislation, as compared with the five years prior
Comp. Pres. Doc. 252 (Feb. 18, 1983)). The Act was originally intended to benefit small firms which were viewed as:
innovative, adaptive, risk-taking, entrepreneurial and competitive, yet consistently underrated by funding agencies in their allocations of research dollars and patent rights. Large business, by contrast, was pictured as short-sighted, risk-adverse, and predatory, more likely to suppress new technologies than to adopt them, yet savvy and powerful in their dealings with government agencies and therefore more successful than their more worthy small business competitors in garnering government research contracts and securing patent rights in the results.
Eisenberg, supra note 108, at 1696.
123. 35 U.S.C. 202 (1994). “Some grantees have taken the position that the statute provides protection from infringement only, and have refused to provide samples of the materials in question to facilitate the actual use.” NIH Report, supra note 2. It is also not clear whether the retained license allows the government to authorize use of subject inventions by other recipients of government funding. Id.
124. 35 U.S.C. 202(c) (2), 203 (1994). The government can only exercise “march-in” rights if the government fulfills certain requirements: (1) meets the requirements for ” ‘public use
125. 35 U.S.C. 202(a) (1994). For an extensive discussion of “march in” rights and the “exceptional circumstances” provisions in the Bayh-Dole Act with proposals for reform, see Arti K. Rai & Rebecca S. Eisenberg, The Public Domain: Bayh -Dole Reform and the Progress of Biomedicine, 66 Law & Contemp. Probs. 289 (2003).
to the passage of the Act.126 “[B]iotechnology patent applications constituted 22 percent of all patent applications filed by these institutions.”127
B. University Licensing
Most, if not all, universities have developed policies directed toward research and development collaborations between private industry and the university.128 Those policies attempt to strike a balance between the desire to use university research to bring products to market, create revenue streams for the university, which generate additional funding for university research, and maintain the ability of university researchers to pursue basic research.129 The policies also state the university’s stance toward university-private industry licensing and define the rights and duties of the inventor, the university, and the outside entity.130 In addition to a policy, most universities will establish administrative procedures for evaluating prospective patented inventions, obtaining and securing patents and other intellectual property rights, and transferring rights to entities outside the university.131 An outside technology transfer firm, a university foundation, or an “in house” technology transfer office typically do the administration and transfer of a university’s property rights.132 Some universities use a combination of those approaches.133 An example of a combination of a university foundation and an outside technology firm is the Triangle Universities Licensing Consortium, which manages and negotiates on behalf of Duke University, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and North Carolina State University.134
126. Epstein, supra note 2, at 13.45-.46.
127. Id. (citing U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, New Developments in Biotechnology: Ownership of Human Tissues and Cells-Special Report (OAT 13A) at 337 (Washington, D.C. Government Printing Office 1987) ).
128. Id. at 11-16. For a detailed discussion concerning the Bayh-Dole Act and technology transfer offices, see Kenneth Sutherlin Dueker, Biobusiness on Campus: Commercialization of University -Developed Biomedical Technologies, 52 Food Drug L .J. 453 (1997).
129. Epstein, supra note 2, at S 11.16.
130. Id. (citing Council on Governmental Relations, Patents and Colleges and Universities, Guidelines for the Development of Policies 8-9 (1985) ).
131. Id. at 11-17-18.
132. Id. at 11-18.
University patent policies often require that the university researcher assign her rights in an invention to the university.135 University policies also require the inventor or discoverer to disclose most potentially patentable inventions or discoveries to the appropriate administrative body, which will evaluate the patentability of any such invention or discovery.136 Policies include provisions to distribute any income from the licensing and subsequent commercialization of any patented invention between the university and the inventor.137 Moreover, though some universities do not require the disclosure of all inventions or discoveries, the university will reserve the right to acquire title in any invention the inventor wishes to commercialize.138
IV. Biotechnology Companies
and Venture Capital
The meeting in 1975 between a young venture capitalist and a researcher at the University of California at San Francisco led to the formation of Genentech and marked the birth of a new relationship between venture capital and the biotechnology market.139 Since that time, venture capital has played a significant role in the development of the biotechnology market.140 Venture capital is the primary source of funding for biotechnology start-ups.141 Venture capital is defined as high risk financing, generally in the form of common stock or debentures convertible from common stock, often provided to companies that do not qualify for other forms of
135. See University of Colorado Patent Policy (December 1997) (on file with the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform)
138. See University of Minnesota Patent Policy (October 1986) (on file with the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform)
139. Terry C. Bradford, Evolving Symbiosis-Venture Capital and Biotechnology, 21 Nature Biotechnology 983 (September 2003).
141. Id. at 984 (“[B]iotechnology has been and will remain the mainstay that defines US VC high-risk, high-return investment.”)
financing.142 Venture capitalists generally require a potential for exceptionally high rates of return in exchange for funding.143
Once a company establishes that a market is valid and important, a key factor to venture capitalists in determining whether to invest in a company includes the company’s ability to defend its market advantage in technology through patents.144 The patent position of a biotechnology company may determine whether that company will close its doors or continue in business.145
Generally, small biotechnology start-up companies do not plan to use the technology that they develop.146 Often, the small start-up companies do not have the expertise or funds necessary to bring a product to market, especially considering the expensive and time-consuming clinical trials involved.147 Thus, most start-up
142. Stephen C. Blowers et al., Guide to the IPO Value Journey 284 (1999).
144. FTC Report, supra note 1, at ch. 2, p. 1 (“Biotechnology start-ups rely on their ability to patent their innovations to attract investment and continue innovating.”)
145. FTC Report, supra note 1, at ch. 3, p. 18. (“The venture capital accessed through patents thus enables not-yet-profitable companies to ‘sustain . . . innovation through massive investments in research and development.’ “)
[P]atenting is a very important part of commercializing biotechnology. The biotechnology industry requires considerable capital expenditure, not only for the initial research and development, but also to go through the regulatory approval process necessary to get a product-particularly a pharmaceutical product-on to the market. That capital is essential and the ability to get that capital is very much dependent upon the capacity to get patent protection for a prospective product.
146. Harold Einhorn & Thomas J. Parker, Patent Licensing Transactions 6A-3 (Release no. 59, April 2004).
147. See id.
On the R&D side, life science companies have long lead times and large development costs to get the drugs and products from the research and development stage to market. Unlike other industries, most of [sic] drugs must endure huge clinical trials and obtain FDA approval before the product can even be marketed. Most smaller start up companies simply do not have the financial resources to even complete the development process. Thus, they and [sic] are required to partner with other companies even to get the technology required to finish their R&D. . . . [O]n the distribution side, once the product is developed, most smaller companies do not have
1 64 University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform [Vol. 38:1
biotechnology companies seek to license their technology to large pharmaceutical companies.148
From 1999 to 2002, venture capitalists invested over $8.5 billion in biotechnology companies.149 After the burst of the Dot Com bubble, conventional wisdom suggested that venture capitalists were no longer investing in biotechnology.150 However, through the first half of 2003, venture capitalists invested $1.177 billion in biotechnology.151 In fact, the total number of deals has remained constant despite the relative weakness in the United States econ
omy.
V. Important Provisions in Licenses
of Research Tools
A large part of the biotechnology industry concerns the development of commercial applications through the use of research tools.153 Research tools can be developed in-house by a company, acquired by purchasing the assets of a company, or licensed.154 However, the cost involved in developing research tools in-house or acquiring the assets of a company can be very high.155 Licensing is the most cost-effective method of acquiring the rights to
the resources for the large-scale commercialization that needs to happen. The distribution channels are controlled by a few large companies that have access to the hospitals through purchasing organizations, doctors, offices[,] and pharmacies around the country.
Id. See generaly Phillipe Ducor, New Drug Discovery Technologies and Patents, 22 Rutgers Computer & Tech. L .J. 369 (1996) (describing drug development process).
148. Einhorn & Thomas, supra note 146, at 6A-3. “[L]icenses are merely instruments through which the licensee receives from the licensor, for an agreed upon consideration, the right to enjoy something the licensor has the right to grant, without interference by the licensor.” Epstein, supra note 2, at 1.1.
149. Bradford, supra note 139, at 983.
150. Id. at 984.
153. Einhorn & Thomas, supra note 146, at 6A-9.
155. Id. Notably, a patent need not be issued at the time of execution of a license. Epstein, supra note 2, at 3.4. Moreover, assuming there is a patent, most patent license agreements do not only include the licensed patent. See id. at 3.3. It is beneficial to the licensor to structure the agreement as a transfer of information and technical assistance that includes the patent rights to reduce the chances that a licensee may successfully attack the agreement on the basis of fraud in the inducement, mistake, failure of consideration, and patent validity. Id.
use a research tool.156 Licensing can be defined as a waiver of the right to exclude the licensee from practicing the claimed invention.157 However, as discussed below, there are numerous issues involved in the licensing of research tools that may lead to an inefficient or ineffective use of the tools, or even a Tragedy of the Anticommons.158 Two important provisions in licenses of research tools concern the valuation of the research tool and the nature of the exclusivity of the license.
A problem that arises in licensing research tools is determining the value of the research tool.159 This problem exists because at the time of licensing the research tool it is difficult to accurately gauge the ultimate value of the product or service developed from use of the research tool or whether any commercial application will be developed at all.160 Thus, the cost of the license for the basic research tool is not simply the cost of development of the research tool
A problem may arise in the development of a new commercial application if it is necessary to use multiple research tools, each of which requires a different license with a separate reach-through
157. Brian G. Brunsvold & Dennis P. O’Reilly, Drafting Patent License Agreements 14 (1998).
158. See infra notes 208-31 and accompanying text.
159. Einhorn & Thomas, supra note 146, at 6A-9. “The value to a licensee of research tools lies, in part, in the point at which those tools are employed in the drug development continuum. A research tool enabling the identification of a drug candidate during high throughput screening, for instance, may supply more value to the ultimate invention than a research tool used to confirm an already recognized drug candidate’s safety or efficacy.” Integra, 331 F.3d at 871.
162. Id. at 6A-10
royalty clause.164 The royalties assigned to various licensors may severely erode profit potential, creating a disincentive for companies that require numerous research tools to develop specific commercial products or services.165 Moreover, a company might abandon developing a commercial product or service that proves unprofitable or not profitable enough for that particular company to continue developing. Some firms have attempted to overcome this problem with a clause that places a ceiling on the total amount of reach-through royalties collected to develop a particular commercial application.166 Thus, “[i]f a third party royalty must be paid, previous rates are adjusted downwards to stay below the limit.”167
A second important issue in the licensing of biotechnology research tools concerns the licensee’s desire to obtain some exclusivity in the technology.168 Exclusivity of a research tool provides a competitive advantage to the licensee.169 Exclusivity allows the licensee to prohibit a potential competitor from using the same research tool.170 Exclusivity can take the form of exclusive use of the research tool in a specific niche market or particular field of
171 If an exclusive license is granted to the licensor, other parties
who need to use that research tool may be prohibited from using that tool.172 A potential problem is that the party best situated to develop a commercial product from the research tool may not possess the rights to use that tool.173 Because of reach-through royalties, however, the licensor has an incentive to license the research tool to the party that is best positioned to develop a particular commercial application. Although the licensor may not be paid until the commercial application is sold, it is not uncommon for licenses to include positive or negative milestone
166. OECD Report, supra note 2, at 62.
168. Einhorn & Thomas, supra note 146, at 6A-10.
169. Id. The grant of an exclusive license can raise antitrust concerns. Brunsvold & O’Reilly, supra note 157, at 19.
170. Brunsvold & O’Reilly, supra note 157, at 18. (“The express grant of an exclusive license conveys an implied promise by the patent owner not to practice under the patent and not to grant any further licenses.”).
172. Epstein, supra note 2, at 3-16. An exclusive license can take many forms including a license exclusive to all but the licensee and all other pre-existing licensees, a license providing exclusive rights limited to a particular territory, a license providing exclusive rights for a limited period of time, or a hybrid of the above-types of licenses. Id. at 3-16-17.
173. See Robert C. Megantz, Technology Management: Developing and Implementing Effective Licensing Programs 83 (2002).
payments or other incentives to ensure that the licensee uses the research tool to develop a commercial product.174 For example, a licensor might request a higher reach-through royalty rate, minimum royalty rate, or large positive or negative milestone payments.175 A licensor might also request that a licensee pay a larger up -front fee.176
Exclusivity, however, as discussed above, also means that the licensee will have to pay a premium to obtain exclusive rights.177 The licensee will have to convince the licensor that she is best positioned to develop a commercial application from the research tool, because the licensor can issue multiple non-exclusive licenses to competitors of the licensee, thus increasing the likelihood that a company will develop an application.178 The licensor may receive a lesser reachthrough royalty rate, and negative and positive milestones, but may increase her chances that a commercial application will be developed.179 Moreover, multiple party competition using the research tool to develop a commercial application may lead to the development of a particular application sooner than if only one party were using the tool.
VI. Licensing Patented Research Tools
Part VI discusses various issues arising because of the cumulative and collaborative nature of the development of commercial applications in the biotechnology industry. This Part reviews blocking patents, complementary patents, hold-ups, royalty stacking, and problems that may arise in licensing patented research tools.
174. A license may also contain a minimum annual royalty provision that allows the licensor to terminate the license if minimum royalties are not met or a conversion to a nonexclusive license provision to protect the licensor. Brunsvold & O’Reilly, supra note 157, at 22-24. However, a termination provision is a very severe sanction, and one that is likely not to be accepted by a licensor. Id. Moreover, either a duty to provide “best efforts” will be expressly provided for in the contract or it may be implied in some cases. Id.
175. Epstein, supra note 2, at 3.17. An additional potential benefit of entering an exclusive license for the licensor is that the costs associated with administering one license are potentially less than several non-exclusive licenses. Id.
178. Id. “If, for example, one company has a large market share compared to its competitors in a particular technology field, it may be more profitable to have a single exclusive license with that company . . . . For this reason, the licensee may seek an exclusive license even if it must pay a higher royalty.” Epstein, supra note 2, at 3.18
179. Megantz, supra note 173, at 83.
A. Blocking Patents
Blocking patents result from the incremental nature of innovation.180 The United States Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO”) may grant a broad, pioneer patent.181 If a second inventor improves an invention covered by the first patent, the second inventor may receive a patent for her invention, assuming her invention fulfills the requirements for patentability.182 However, the improvement patent cannot be practiced without infringing the first patent.183 Similarly, the inventor of the pioneering invention cannot practice the second inventor’s patented invention.184 The second inventor’s patent blocks the first inventor from practicing the improvement.185 The improvement patent is deemed the “subservient patent,” and the first patent is the “dominant patent.”186 The first inventor must obtain a license from the second inventor to practice the improvement. The second inventor must also secure a license from the first inventor to use the improvement.
B. Complementary Patents
Complementary patents cover technology that is useless without a license to another patented invention.187 Complementary patents can occur where different inventors have patented components of a larger invention.188 Absent cooperation between owners of complementary patents, commercial applications may be blocked from development because of competing patent claims.189 Thus, to develop a particular commercial application the owners of
180. Steven C. Carlson, Note, Patent Pools and the Antitrust Dilemma, 16 Yale J. on Reg. 359, 362 (1999).
184. Carlson, supra note 180, at 363.
188. Id. at 364-65.
complementary patents must license their respective rights to one another or to a third party.
C. Hold-Ups
A hold-up may result if a developer, unaware of a particular patent, uses the patented technology to create a commercial application. Assuming, on the other hand, that a developer has both knowledge of a patent that potentially blocks the creation of a commercial application and also sufficient lead-time, he may invest in designing around the patent.190 Any royalty that the patentee may exact from the developer is likely slight.191 The patentee is in a very weak negotiating position
190. Carl Shapiro, Navigating the Patent Thicket: Cross Licenses, Patent Pools, and Standard-Setting 6-7, in Innovation Policy and the Economy (Adam Jaffe et al., eds., 2001), available at http://haas.berkeley.edu/~shapiro/thicket.pdf (on file with the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform).
197. Human Genome Project Information, supra note 40. “[A] demand for payment after lock in can compel the downstream actor to pay the patentee a ‘far greater’ royalty rate. That higher rate . . . can be passed along to consumers in the form of higher prices. [T] he threat of hold up may reduce overall levels of innovation, because some companies will
D. Royalty Stacking
Royalty stacking can occur with blocking or complementary patent situations. Royalty stacking can arise with blocking patents where there are multiple layers of improvement on a pioneering invention. For example, multiple licensees may have a right to a royalty for every sale of a commercial application.
Complementary patents may also produce a royalty stacking problem. Royalty stacking can occur when a single genomic sequence is patented in different ways, for example, when an EST, a gene, and a SNP are each patented.198 Thus, in order to practice a commercially useful invention, such as gene therapy, which uses one or several genes, a company will have to obtain multiple licenses to those patents.199 The company developing the gene therapy will likely have to pay royalties to each and every owner of the patents for each EST, gene, and SNP needed to practice the therapy.200 The value of the commercial development or the profitability of the commercial development may be substantially decreased because of the amount of royalties paid for each research tool, or part of a gene, or several genes used in a commercial application.201 Thus, there may be a disincentive for companies to research and develop commercial applications in areas where there is a patent thicket.
Royalty stacking can also occur when a research tool or multiple tools are needed to conduct research for and development of a particular commercial application even though the application does not include the patented research tool or tools. “Stacking royalty obligations can make a significant dent in the profit expectations of firms that might develop [commercial applications], thereby undermining the commercial attractiveness of potential applications.”202
‘refrain from introducing certain products for fear of holdup.’ ” FTC Report, supra note 1, at ch. 2, p. 29.
198. Human Genome Project Information, supra note 40, at 8.
201. Walsch et al., supra note 14, at 299.
202. NIH Report, supra note 2.
E. Transaction Costs and Impediments
to Efficient Licensing
There are numerous costs associated with licensing patents.203 For example, there are costs in analyzing what patents apply or cover a commercial application204 and in determining ownership of upstream inputs.205 There are also numerous impediments to the licensing of biotechnology research tools: inexperienced parties attempting to license patents
VII. The Tragedy of the Anticommons
In 1998, Professors Michael Heller and Rebecca Eisenberg identified a potential problem involving patents and biomedical research described as a “Tragedy of the Anticommons.”208 The “Tragedy of the Anticommons” theory is a mirror image of the metaphor “Tragedy of the Commons,” which has been used to explain overpopulation, air pollution, and species extinction.209 The Tragedy of the Commons theory states that if people hold
206. Rebecca S. Eisenberg, Bargaining over the Transfer of Proprietary Research Tools: Is This Market Failing or Emerging? in Expanding the Boundaries of Intellectual Property: Innovation Policy for the Knowledge Society 223-50 (R.C. Dreyfuss et al., eds., 2001)
207. Eisenberg, supra note 10, at 1073.
208. Heller & Eisenberg, supra note 11, at 698. For a more detailed analysis of the anticommons theory as it applies generally to property, see Michael A. Heller, The Tragedy of the Anticommons: Property in the Transition from Marx to Markets, 111 Harv. L. Rev. 621 (1998). See also Michael A. Heller, The Boundaries of Private Property, 108 Yale L. J. 1163 (1999). For a criticism of the anticommons theory, see Richard A. Epstein & Bruce N. Kuhlik, Navigating the Anticommons for Pharmaceutical Patents: Steady the Course on Hatch-Waxman, available at http://www.law.uchicago.edu/lawecon/index.html (2004).
209. Heller & Eisenberg, supra note 11, at 698.
property in common, and no person has a right to exclude other persons from using that property, those people tend to overuse the property because there is no incentive to conserve the property.210 The solution to the Tragedy of the Commons is to provide private property rights to individuals using the former commons property.211 Meanwhile, the Tragedy of the Anticommons theory holds the opposite: if too many people own private property rights in a piece of property, then the rights may block one another, and thus, no one person has an effective right to use the property.212 This problem leads to under-use of the property.213 Heller and Eisenberg apply this theory to biomedical research and assert: “[a] proliferation of intellectual property rights upstream may be stifling life-saving innovations further downstream in the course of research and product development.”214
Heller and Eisenberg believe that an anticommons can arise either through “creating too many concurrent fragments of intellectual property rights in potential future products or by permitting too many upstream patent owners to stack licenses on top of the future discoveries of downstream users.”215 Heller and Eisenberg provide two examples of ways in which the government might create too many fragments of intellectual property rights in upstream research.216 The first involves potential patents in gene fragments or genes.217 The second involves potential patents in gene receptors, which are useful to screen potential pharmaceutical products.218 In both examples, the developer of a commercially useful end product, such as therapeutic proteins or genetic diagnostic tests, might need to obtain multiple licenses to gene fragments, genes, or receptors to use the downstream innovation.219 Heller and Eisenberg assert that reach-through royalty license agreements “may lead to an anticommons as upstream owners stack overlapping and inconsistent claims on potential downstream products,” which may provide “each upstream owner a continuing
right to be at the bargaining table as a research project moves downstream toward product development.”220
Heller and Eisenberg recognize Coase’s theorem, which posits that, assuming costless transactions, a tragedy can be avoided so long as people transfer and trade their rights.221 Moreover, the researchers recognize that even in situations without costless transactions, owners of intellectual property rights have solved potential anticommons problems by bundling licenses to multiple rights, whether through patent pools or collective rights organizations such as ASCAP or BMI.222 However, they argue that because of transaction costs in bundling rights, strategic behavior, and cognitive biases of the participants involved in the transfer of intellectual property rights in upstream biomedical research, a tragedy nonetheless may result.223
Heller and Eisenberg state that some of the difficulties in bundling rights include public institutions with limited resources for absorbing transaction costs and limited competence in fast-moving, market-orientated bargaining
Heller and Eisenberg raise the heterogeneous interests of the rights holders as another potential impediment to solving the anticommons problem through collective action.226 They argue that often private and public rights holders will have different goals in licensing patents.227 For example, a public institution may be more concerned about the widespread dissemination of a publicly beneficial technology, whereas the private institution may be concerned
222. Id. at 700-701.
solely with financial gain.228 Lastly, they believe that bargaining can break down between firms that want to bundle their rights because rights holders will overvalue their discoveries.229
Heller and Eisenberg conclude that because an anticommons is likely to arise and endure in biomedical research, “privatization must be carefully deployed to preserve the public goals of biomedical research.”230 They suggest that “[p]olicy-makers should seek to ensure coherent boundaries of upstream patents and to minimize restrictive licensing practices that interfere with downstream product development.”231
VIII. Research and Analysis Concerning
the Tragedy of the Anticommons
This Part describes and analyzes several studies relevant to whether a Tragedy of the Anticommons exists that impedes biotechnology innovation. This Part also reviews an example of the anticommons phenomena in agricultural biotechnology.
A. Report of the NIH Working Group on Research Tools
In response to increasing difficulties in licensing or transferring proprietary rights in research tools-because owners and users are unable to agree on fair terms or negotiations are difficult and cause delays-the NIH formed a Working Group on Research Tools (“Group”) .232 The Group was charged to “[i] nquire into problems encountered by NIH-funded investigators in obtaining access to patented research tools, including refusals to license, onerous royalty obligations, restrictions on the dissemination of materials and information, restrictions on the ability to collaborate with commercial firms, and advance commitments regarding intellectual property rights in future discoveries.”233 The Group was also directed to “[i]dentify and assess possible NIH responses in light of the competing interests of intellectual property owners and re
search users and the role of NIH as a public institution and research sponsor.”234 The Group focused its analysis on the terms of access to research tools in transactions involving NIH grantees.235 The Group examined the issues from the perspective of the three stakeholders involved in transactions of research tools: bench scientists, university technology transfer office professionals, and private firms.236
The Group questioned bench scientists who import and export research tools.237 The Group found a “rising frustration” among academic and industry bench scientists concerning delays caused by negotiating the transfer of IP rights in research when attempting to import research tools.238 In addition, industry scientists expressed frustration concerning delays in access to research tools created by NIH-funded or taxpayer-funded research.239 Scientists in academia and industry would like “access to research tools streamlined, expedited, and rationalized.”240 Interestingly, bench scientists who export research tools had two divergent opinions concerning the ease of access and availability of those research tools.241 Some believe that research tools should be readily available and freely distributed, consistent with their desire for access to the tools that others have developed.242 Others desire to “capture the market value of research tools that they have developed for themselves and their institutions through the terms of patent licenses . . . .”243 Moreover, scientists who develop new research tools tend to overvalue those tools, often undervaluing the number of other tools necessary to research a biological problem.244 Additionally, the value of a tool is difficult to predict and agree upon.245 There is no consensus among scientists on how to distribute and value research tools, leading to increased frustration.246
The Group also questioned university technology transfer professionals concerning issues raised in importing and exporting
research tools.247 The Group noted that responses focused on problems of importing research tools from universities and, particularly, private institutions.248 Some of those problems include: increased administrative burden of reviewing and negotiating an increasing number of transfer agreements
Finally, the Group questioned private firms concerning access to research tools.254 The Group notes that the perspectives of private
249. Id. The Group notes:
Many universities have policies that limit their ability to agree to restrictions on publication of research results . . . . Objectionable terms in proposed agreements include: confidentiality provisions that are so far-reaching in their coverage as to interfere with effective publication of research results, presentations at conferences, or validation of results by other investigators
250. Id. This is a particularly thorny issue. Id. Universities are confronted with violating obligations to current and past research sponsors by contracting away rights to future discoveries developed using a proprietary research tool. Id. Moreover, universities “fear that precommitments to license future discoveries of research tools, interfere with future technology transfer to other firms, and conflict with the university’s stewardship of its inventions for the public benefit.” Id. “Options or rights of first refusal to license future discoveries raise some of the same problems as precommitted licenses.” Id. “Some universities . . . mortgage their speculative future intellectual property so that the research may go forward, while others are unable to arrive at mutually agreeable terms and have to tell their scientists to forego use of certain research tools entirely.” Id.
firms on the issue of access to research tools differs depending on the nature of the tool, the relationship between the firm’s business strategy and the tool, and the importance to the firm of universitybased research using the tool.255 Some biotechnology firms hope to sell pharmaceuticals to consumers, and thus align consumer interests somewhat with those of pharmaceutical companies.256 However, other biotechnology firms market and sell research tools to other firms as part of their business strategy.257 Whether a private firm is willing to make research tools available to universities or others at all depends on the competitive advantage that the tool provides to the firm.258 If the firm allows others to license the research tool, it likely will reserve a high degree of control over dissemination, use, and disclosure, along with an ability to recover some value in re
turn.
The Group found that private firms realize some benefits in providing access to research tools.260 Some of these benefits include: goodwill developed between the private firm and the public sector, which may lead to opportunities to collaborate with university scientists
261. Id. Firms often need to collaborate with the public sector “to further the interests of their research scientists, to obtain certain research capabilities and expertise, and to stay abreast of the most important advances in science.” Id. Moreover, many firms were birthed in academia and feel a strong pressure from their scientists to maintain ties to academia. Id.
262. Id. (“Biotechnology firms often have limited internal research capabilities for exploring the fundamental biology questions related to their products and potential products, and even large pharmaceutical companies find that academic scientists can sometimes perform research that they are not set up to handle in-house.”) .
263. Id. (“Some firms have not yet obtained a commercially valuable discovery from a university as a result of providing a research tool, but many firms count this possibility as an essential quid pro quo for providing their proprietary tools to a university free of charge.”).
265. Id. (“People from other firms noted that they had been ‘burned’ by scientists who entered into deals with multiple companies. Many firms try to manage this risk by
that university scientists make using proprietary research tools will be licensed to competitors of the owner of the tools
Additional risks concern specific tools.269 For example, firms are concerned about licensing proprietary therapeutic compounds for scientists to use in research because a university may discover and patent a new use for the compound, thereby blocking the private firm’s development of the compound.270 Moreover, loss of control over how the compound is used and what is done with the compound because of concerns related to discovering information could affect whether the compound receives FDA approval.271 Firms are also concerned about licensing a research tool such as a molecule (for example, a receptor) that plays a role in a disease pathway that is not fully understood, because if the patent on the molecule itself does not cover the ultimate therapeutic product, “the firm [may] quickly lose its competitive advantage.”272
The licensing of research tools that may have a broad application to many research problems also provides substantial risks to private firms.273 These risks involve appropriating some value from licensing that particular tool.274 A major risk arises when those tools are made available to academic researchers, as it may undermine sales to paying customers by causing them to “use the data generated by the academic researchers rather than buying the tool for use in their own internal research.”275
The Group noted that private firms concurred in complaining that a university’s position on fair terms of access to research tools depended on whether the university was importing or exporting
forbidding the use of their tools in research that is subject to licensing obligations to other firms.”) .
270. Id. (“A typical mechanism for managing this risk is to seek a grant-back of a nonexclusive, royalty-free license to any improvements and new uses of the proprietary materials.”). Many firms, however, desire an exclusive license to improvements. Id.
272. Id. (“If the firm makes the molecule available to a university scientist, the only way to ensure that it is not undermining its own proprietary advantage may be to secure some form of reach-through rights to future discoveries.”).
tools.276 As one lawyer for a small biotechnology start-up stated, ” ‘[u] niversities want it both ways. They want to be commercial academic environments when it comes to accessing technology that others have developed. . . .’ “277 Private firms also complained that universities distort the value of their research tools and fail to comprehend the costs and risks related to product development,278 and are unduly slow and cautious in negotiating deals.279 “Many companies complained about universities granting exclusive licenses for government-funded research tools, arguing that such tools should be made broadly available on ‘reasonable’ terms.”280 Firms also complained about university demands of shared ownership of future discoveries and reach-through royalties on future products.281 “Virtually every firm . . . believed that restricted access to research tools is impeding the rapid advance of research and that the problem is getting worse.”282
The Group concluded its analysis by recommending various steps that the NIH could take to provide greater access to research tools.283 These steps include: promotion of “free dissemination of research tools without legal agreements whenever possible, especially when the prospect of commercial gain is remote”
280. Id. (“One firm that has long taken the position that research tools should be licensed nonexclusively noted that universities seem to be coming around to this view, although another major pharmaceutical firm observed a growing problem of universities granting exclusive licenses on research tools to firms that refuse to grant sublicenses.”) .
281. Id. (“[S] tacking royalty obligations can make a significant dent in the profit expectations of firms that might develop and market the end products themselves, thereby undermining the commercial attractiveness of potential products.”).
funding, and revise and strengthen those policies consistent with the recommendations in this report”
B. Research Tool Patenting and Licensing
and Biomedical Innovation
In a recent study, Professors Walsh, Arora, and Cohen gathered information, primarily through interviews with IP attorneys, business managers, and scientists from ten pharmaceutical firms and fifteen biotech firms, as well as university researchers and technology transfer officers from six universities, patent lawyers, government and trade association personnel, and archival data, to analyze how changes in patenting practices and in the law have affected innovation in the biotechnology sector.289 Their article concludes that “drug discovery has not been substantially impeded”290 regardless of an increase in the number of patents on research tools in the biotechnology industry and certain conditions in the biotechnology industry increasing the likelihood that an anticommons will develop. The article also finds that the patenting of research tools has not stifled university research.291 The authors note, “the vast majority of respondents say that there are no cases in which valuable research projects were stopped because of IP problems relating to research inputs.”292
290. Id. at 285, 293-97. The authors argue that several preconditions exist which may facilitate an anticommons in the biotechnology sector. These conditions are: a rapid growth of biotechnology patents over the past 15 years
291. Id. at 285. The article notes that there is evidence that patents are interfering with university research with restrictions on the use of patented genetic diagnostics. Id. The article also notes that “there is, also, some evidence of delays associated with negotiating access to patented research tools, and there are areas in which patents over targets limit access and where access to foundational discoveries can be restricted.” Id. at 286. Moreover, university research is impacted because research is redirected to areas where there does not exist a thicket of patents. Id.
292. Id. at 286. The authors state that “Although we have no systematic data on projects never pursued, our findings on the absence of breakdowns is consistent with the notion that there are relatively few cases where otherwise commercially promising projects are not undertaken because IP on research tools.” Id. at 303.
The authors examined the impediments to drug discovery that an anticommons in biotechnology may cause.293 The authors specifically examined three potential problems: breakdowns in negotiations over rights, royalty stacking, and excessive licensing schemes.294 The authors found no evidence of breakdowns in negotiations concerning the licensing of patent rights that lead to the end of a research and development effort.295
The authors also found that “royalty stacking did not represent a significant or pervasive threat to ongoing R&D projects . . . . Although about half of respondents complained about licensing costs for research tools, nearly all of those concerned about licensing costs also went on to say that the research always went forward.” 296 According to the authors, three primary factors contribute to the above result: (1) the total amount of royalty or licensing fees that are accumulated do not result in a project becoming a loss
Finally, the authors found that the productivity gains from the licensing of research tools outweighed industry participant concerns over heightened licensing fees resulting from the boom in the
295. Id. at 298. The authors note:
Numerous respondents reported that they did not initiate or had dropped projects if they learned another firm had already acquired a proprietary position on a drug they were considering developing-that is, on the output of a drug discovery and testing process. But that is quite different from other firms having IP for the research tools- the inputs into the discovery process.
One of our other biotechnology respondents suggested, however, that ‘the royalty burden can become onerous’ and that the stacking of royalties ‘comes up pretty regularly now’ with the proliferation of IP [, however, even in that case,] respondent said that no projects had ever been stopped because of royalty stacking . . . . [Additionally] one respondent, an IP lawyer, . . . said that [in cases with too many claimants of royalty percentages] projects were stopped existed, but client privilege prevented the respondent from giving details.
patenting of research tools.298 The authors also found, however, that small start-up firms and universities find the licensing fees for research tools prohibitively expensive.299 The authors note that there are non-economic costs such as publication restrictions for university researchers.300
The authors distinguish their analysis of the need for multiple rights to invent a commercially viable product-the anticommons problem-from the need for a foundational upstream discovery, e.g., one particular research tool that is critical for the development of a commercially viable downstream product.301 The authors examine whether restricted access to a particular research tool, such as exclusive licensing, provides an obstacle to biotech innovation.302 In a National Research Council report titled, “Intellectual Property Rights and Research Tools in Molecular Biology,” the authors review several examples of situations involving restricted access.303 These examples, particularly the polymerase chain reaction (“PCR”) technology, CellPro, and the Geron embryonic stem cell matter, appear to demonstrate that restrictive licensing terms may reduce access to research tools and impede the development of commercial products.304 The authors note, however, that “[e]ven where universities employ restrictive licensing terms . . ., it is not clear that such a practice diminishes follow on discovery, at least when applied to smaller firms.”305
The authors also examine transaction costs related to the increasing number of research tool patents, such as negotiations, litigation, inventions around patented inventions, overseas research, and the monitoring of the use of a firm’s intellectual
299. Id. at 302. “Some firms (particularly genomics firms) holding rights over research
tools did, however, offer discounted terms for university and government researchers.” Id.
300. Id. The authors are unsure of whether these costs apply to license agreements be
tween industry and university participants concerning inputs to academic research. Id.
305. Id. at 309. The authors also discuss widespread complaints from universities, biotechnology firms and pharmaceutical firms over patentholders’ assertion of exclusivity over an important class of research tools, namely ‘targets,’ which refers to any cell receptor, enzyme, or other protein implicated in a disease, thus representing a promising locus for drug intervention. Id. at 310. While the authors note that they do not have systematic data on the frequency of the limitations of access to targets, the authors state that “[f]rom interviews and secondary sources . . ., we heard of a number of prominent examples of firms’ being accused of asserting exclusivity over (or allowing only limited access to) a target.” Id. at 312. However, the authors report that while there is “some evidence of researchers being excluded, we do not find a failure to exploit a target.” Id. at 314.
property.306 The authors report that a third of all respondents stated that transaction costs cause delays and add to the overall cost of research.307 Moreover, the average litigation costs are between $1-10 million per side and, thus, are likely to be a significant cost related to licensing patents in the biomedical field.308 Additionally, the opportunity costs are likely to be large considering the timeintensive burden of litigation on firm managers and scientists.309 The authors state that for large firms the real out-of-pocket costs and opportunity costs are low relative to the large firm budget for research and development.310 However, the authors note that those costs for small firms could be a significant burden.311
The authors report that there is “only limited support for the idea that negotiations over rights stymie precommercial research conducted in universities.”312 The authors highlight one notable exception: “the case of clinical research based on diagnostic tests using patented technologies.”313 In fact, “one study found that 25 percent of laboratory physicians reported abandoning a clinical test because of patents.”314 The authors concluded, however, that while some firms are willing to assert patents against universities performing patented diagnostic tests and “at least some labs are stopping their testing as a result,” the majority of labs are continuing to test.315
The authors review government response and private firm and university strategies dealing with the relatively high level of patenting of research tools.316 First, contracting is not difficult.317
309. Id. The authors also note the significant time loss involved in researching and examining potentially relevant patents to the proposed research project: “One attorney responsible for evaluating research tool IP from a large pharmaceutical firm provided estimates for the time attorneys were occupied with evaluating the IP of third parties and the time associated with actual negotiations that implied a total of $2 million in annual expenses.” Id.
315. Id. The authors report that another potential problem includes the costs associated with delays in negotiating access to research materials or material transfer agreements. Id. at 319. As to that issue, the authors conclude that “to the degree that the patenting of biomedical discoveries may impose additional costs and delays in material transfers it is largely because Bayh-Dole and related acts have provided university administrations, and especially their technology transfer offices, a vested commercial interest in the disposition of intellectual property.”
Firms often deal with only a handful of patents on inputs.318 Second, firms and universities can often ignore patents, especially because infringement of research tool patents is difficult to detect.319 The authors report that some firms may be reluctant to file patent infringement actions against universities involved in noncommercial research for fear of low damage awards or negative press.320 Moreover, firms often will not aggressively enforce their patents because of the cost of litigation.321 Third, some firms may use patented technology offshore to avoid infringement.322 Fourth, some firms may invent-around the claims in the patents.323 The authors conclude that between contracting and current practices, “firms were able to greatly reduce the complexity of the patent landscape.”324
The authors also review institutional responses by firms, the NIH, the USPTO, and courts designed to increase access to research tools.325 Firms, along with other institutions, have co
318. Id. The authors report that,
Several companies with patents on targets noted that, in addition to trying to develop their own therapeutics, they include the liberal and broad licensing of those targets to others as part of their business model, reflecting a belief on the part of some holders of target patents that by giving several firms a nonexclusive license they increase the chances that one will discover a useful drug . . . . Liberal licensing practices are also encouraged to the extent that inventing around tool patents is feasible, . . . [u]nder such circumstances, patentholders are more willing to license on reasonable terms assuming the prospective user does not invent around to begin with.
Id. at 323.
319. Id. at 324. University researchers often will rely upon a “research exemption,” however, the Federal Circuit in Madey v. Duke University has interpreted the exemption very narrowly. Id. at 325 (citing 307 F.3d 1351 (Fed. Cir. 2002)). Additionally, the authors found that a third of industrial respondents, and all university or government lab respondents, “acknowledged occasionally using patented research tools without a license, and most respondents suggested that infringement by others is widespread.” Id. at 327. Also, researchers stated that partly because there is a belief that research tools are invalid or very narrow, researchers would be willing to challenge the patents in court. Id. at 328. Finally, “because of the long drug development process, the 6 -year statute of limitations may expire before infringement is detected.” Id.
320. Id. at 325. Moreover, members of the university community may sanction overly aggressive behavior and are consumers of the products or services of the private firms. Id. Also, private firms and universities have an incentive to develop good relationships because of the need to exchange information. Id. However, private firms will enforce their patents against universities that become competitors. Id.
sponsored public and quasi-public databases of information.326 The NIH has championed the cause of obtaining access to research tools for university scientists.327 The USPTO has heightened the requirement for satisfying the utility obligation for patentability.328 Furthermore, the authors report that respondents cite several recent Federal Circuit cases that have either invalidated research tool patents or limited the scope of the claims of those patents.329
The authors state that the anticommons has not emerged as especially problematic.330 The authors also state that access to foundational upstream discoveries has not yet emerged as a problem, but there is a prospect that a problem might develop and “ongoing scrutiny is warranted.”331 Finally, the authors conclude that “the biomedical enterprise seems to be succeeding, albeit with some difficulties, in developing an accommodation that incorporates both the need to provide strong incentives to conduct research and development and the need to maintain free space for discovery.”332
C. The Preservation of Open Science
Professor David proposes that public policy should ensure that the Republic of Science and the Regime of Technology remain distinct and that a productive balance be maintained between them.333 David criticizes both Walsh’s attempt to find evidence of a “Tragedy of the Anticommons” and Walsh’s interpretation of that evidence.334 David asserts that those who desire broader intellectual property rights should bear the burden to demonstrate that the expansion of existing rights will not be economically damaging.335
that as technology changes and new court decisions, such as Madey v. Duke University, 307 F.3d 1351 (Fed. Cir. 2002), are published, the issues reviewed in this Article may need to be revisited. Walsch et al., supra note 14, at 336.
333. David, supra note 18, at 5. Professor David makes an important distinction between “business support for academic style R&D-as distinguished from industrial contracting for university based applications oriented research with intellectual property rights assigned to the sponsoring firms . . . .” Id. at 8.
335. Id. at 16.
The Republic of Science consists of basic science researchers who receive funding from public sources searching for knowledge.336 The Regime of Technology includes private firms that seek to develop commercial products and acquire proprietary interests in applied technology.337 David states that several trends-university patenting of research tools spurred by the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act, the “concerted effort by all parties to secure copyright protection for the electronic production and distribution of information,” and “growing efforts to assert and enforce intellectual property rights over scientific and technological knowledge”-have given greater control of technology to private interests at the expense of the public domain.338
The conditions that support the Regime of Technology are not conducive to the development of reliable knowledge.339 The purpose of the Regime of Technology is to generate stock wealth through profits from “existing data, information[,] and knowledge, and therefore requires the control of the knowledge through secrecy, or exclusive possession of the right to its commercial exploitation.”340
David notes that the following norms govern the Republic of Science: communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, originality, and skepticism.341 These norms recognize that the development of knowledge is a social process.342 Specifically, knowledge is developed in a cooperative manner through the open disclosure of new knowledge and peer testing of that knowledge.343 The incentive provided to members of the Republic of Science relates to the development of “collegiate reputations and . . . material and nonpecuniary rewards. . . .”344 In addition, the temptation to free-ride on the works of others exists within the Republic of Science, just as it does in the Regime of Technology
336. Id. at 5.
341. Id. at 3. For a further discussion of the norms of science, see Rebecca S. Eisenberg, Proprietary Rights and the Norms of Science in Biotechnology Research, 97 Yale L .J. 177 (1987) .
342. David, supra note 18, at 3.
344. Id. The benefits can include “reputational standing and the esteem of colleagues, enhanced access to research resources, formal organizational recognition through promotions accompanied by higher salary, accession to positions of authority and influence within professional bodies and public institutions, [and] the award of prizes and honors.” Id. at 4.
number of scientists working in the Regime and, consequently, has benefited the public through the creation and distribution of knowledge.345 David also extols the benefits of an incentive system based on good reputation and openness because this system encourages the “rapid validation of findings, and reduces excess duplication of research efforts.”346 A proprietary rights system that encourages secrecy and a race to priority will potentially have a problem with validating findings and managing duplicative research efforts.347 Meanwhile, the wide sharing of information helps to place information in the possession of the people who can best use it, even if these people are not the original discoverer or inventor.348 Moreover, because the incentive structure largely consists of peer-provided benefits, researchers will choose to investigate problems that others have reviewed, thereby achieving appreciation among peers.349 This results in a bias toward ” ‘research spillovers,’ rather than ‘product-design spillovers’ in the sphere of commercial innova tion.”350
David asserts that the structure and purposes of the Republic of Science are better suited to develop reliable knowledge, and the Republic of Science must remain distinct from the Regime of Technology.351 David explores the ways that “public expenditures for the support of open science serve to enhance the value of commercially-oriented R&D as a socially productive and privately profitable form of investment.”352
David discusses the Tragedy of the Anticommons in the context of the Walsh Study’s attempt to gather empirical evidence to determine whether a serious Tragedy of the Anticommons had emerged.353 The “thrust of their ‘findings’ was that while there were
352. Id. David points to the spillovers of applied technology which have originated from basic research such as, “airline reservation systems, packet switching for high-speed telephone traffic, the Internet communication protocols, the Global Positioning System, and computer simulation methods for the visualization of molecular structures.” Id. at 5-6. David also points to the benefit of having an expansive knowledge base developed from basic research. Id. A knowledge base that often informs the applied researcher whether a specific research agenda is plausible or not, which results in certainty in investment. Id. at 7. David also states that universities engaged in basic research provide an excellent training ground for young researchers that are often employed by private firms. Id.
a few isolated instances of serious difficulties in working out the IPR arrangements among firms, and between firms and universities, their interviews disclosed nothing resembling a ‘tragedy.’ “354 David criticizes the study for failing to describe the interview protocol followed in the survey.355 David notes that the form of the questions may compel an interviewee to state that there is no problem when in fact there is one.356 For example, survey respondents may have stated that rights holders do not enforce their rights against potential infringing firms and, thus, there is no problem.357 David argues that this conclusion is misleading because there merely has not been a cause.358 “The proper conclusion is: We can’t say what the effect of the IPR regime will be in this instance, except that when a cease and desist injunction is brought against one of these professors, and her university is charged with patent infringement and sued for damages . . ., it is going to be a big shock.”359
David states that interpreting the evidence can be problematic where the interpretation depends on whether the researcher approaches the Tragedy of the Anticommons in an economically naïve or sophisticated manner.360 A naïve approach would be to believe that
[P]arties to a potentially productive coalition will see only the value of cooperating for a common benefit, and will ignore the possible costs of contracting. So, if IPR has the effect of raising the parties [sic] valuation of their own contribution to the collective project, and makes it possible for them to deny others access to that contribution, the negotiation of cooperative agreements will be surprisingly difficult, and frequently these will fail. One should be able to find records, or elicit testimony of such failures. Look for them in order to test the ‘anti-commons’ hypothesis.361
According to David, a sophisticated analysis begins with Coase’s theorem that “institutional arrangements that assigned property rights to some agents would only affect the efficiency of resource
allocation among them if there were zero ‘costs of transacting,’ of arriving at a contract in which the gains from trade would be secured for the collectivity and distributed among them.”362 David asserts that parties will consider ex ante the benefit of entering into any such contract, including the right to any rent streams and the costs of negotiating that contract.363 A party conducting this analysis will take into consideration any institutional change that may alter the property rights of the parties and the consequent “affect of this on the nature of the contracting process and its costs.”364 If an institutional change occurs, it may modify each party’s expectations of the benefits received from the transaction.365 This, in turn, might raise the costs of the transaction to a point that renders some transactions foolish to complete, especially those projects that would result in a lower expected rate of return and those that are of a higher commercial or scientific risk.366 Consequently, rational agents will avoid serious consideration of certain financially risky projects.367 According to David, a rational agent would not report any higher frequency of blocked or abandoned projects after the institutional change than it would before such change.368 Thus, in order to determine the effect of the institutional change, one must determine what might occur in a counterfactual world: “what projects that were not seriously considered, would have been considered.”369 Project consideration would likely shift then to those projects in which
The distribution of initial property rights among the participating [parties] was already highly asymmetric[,] and the relative disparity in bargaining power would not be materially changed by the altered property rights regime, so the estimated transaction costs wouldn’t be significantly affected
368. Id. This assumes that the rational agent is in possession of the information to make the decision that a particular transaction will or will not fail. For example, the perceived value of a particular research tool by the owner of the IP rights in the research tool is not known until the negotiations begin.
together [and] . . . [t]he risk-return ratios for the projects undertaken are found to have been lower than those among the projects previously undertaken.370
[the] institutional change that raises the marginal costs of transactions of a particular kind need not actually increase the amount of resources consumed by such transactions
The gap of lost opportunities likely cannot be measured exactly because a different group of projects will be present after the institutional shift.372
David concludes that a search for evidence of a Tragedy of the Anticommons is difficult because the researcher is searching for counterfactual evidence.373 She attempts to prove that if something had not happened, then something else would have happened that would have caused the world to be different than it is today.374 David questions why the burden of proof to demonstrate the anticommons must be on the critics questioning the effect of the institutional shift.375 David notes that the assumption that “competitive markets and well-defined private property rights can support a socially optimal equilibrium in the allocation of resources, . . . ceases to hold [true] in the realm of information and knowledge.”376 David would require those in favor of a stronger intellectual property rights regime to demonstrate that
the moves already made in that direction have not been economically damaging
372. Id. David suggest that, in principle, one could “examine the characteristics of the entire portfolio of research projects that were being undertaken before and after the institutional innovation.” Id.
D. A Tragedy of the Anticommons in Biotechnology
and Agriculture: The Golden Rice Problem
While not in the biomedical arena, a recent anticommons problem has arisen in the biotechnology and agriculture field. This anticommons example helps clarify the interaction between technology development, the patent thicket, and attempts to create products that are socially beneficial. Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology transplanted certain genes from the daffodil plant into rice, creating a type of rice that is capable of producing a precursor chemical to vitamin A.378 This so-called “golden rice” has the potential to alleviate life-threatening vitamin A deficiency in disadvantaged children throughout the world.379 However, to create the rice, researchers had to use universitypatented technology that had since been licensed to private agricultural biotechnology companies.380 More than forty patents and contractual obligations associated with material transfer agreements presented obstacles to producing golden rice.381 The private companies initially were unreceptive to providing licenses to the researchers and almost caused researchers to abandon the project.382 However, because of the public debate in Europe concerning genetically modified crops, several private companies seized the “golden rice” opportunity to demonstrate that genetically modified crops can help the poor.383 Consequently, the private companies transferred the necessary rights to the researchers so that they could develop and produce the crops.384
378. Justin Gillis, Researchers to Keep Some Biotech Rights, Wash. Post, July 11, 2003, at E5.
381. Richard C. Atkinson et al., Public Sector Colaboration for Agricultural IP Management,
301 Science 174, 174 (July 11, 2003).
382. Gillis, supra note 378.
E. Analysis of Research
The NIH Study and the Walsh Study apparently reach conflicting results. The NIH Study finds “a rising frustration among scientists concerning delays in obtaining licenses for IP rights” and that “[v]irtually every [private] firm believe[s] that restricted access to research tools is impeding the rapid advance of research and that the problem is getting worse.”385 Moreover, the NIH Study reveals that technology transfer professionals have told scientists to forgo the use of some research tools when a university has been unable to agree with other parties on the terms of licenses for access to research tools.386 In contrast, the Walsh Study asserts that “the vast majority of respondents say that there are no cases in which valuable research projects were stopped because of IP problems related to research inputs.”387 The Walsh Study also indicates that the anticommons has not emerged as particularly problematic.388
The two studies can be viewed as consistent. While the Walsh Study recognizes that certain conditions conducive to creating an anticommons exist, these conditions have not substantially impeded drug discovery.389 The NIH Study might merely provide support for the conclusion that certain conditions exist that may allow an anticommons to develop.390 Moreover, the Walsh Study occurred several years after the NIH Study. Perhaps the lessons learned from the NIH Study, combined with several additional years of experience in between the two studies, allowed industry participants to reduce the transaction costs involved in licensing patented research tools.
Professor David criticizes the Walsh Study for several reasons.391 First, David wonders whether the questions drove the conclusions in the Walsh Study, particularly since the report does not provide the form of the questions.392 The same criticism can be directed at the NIH Study. David further criticizes the Walsh Study for failing to accurately measure the impact of the Tragedy of the
390. See generaly NIH Report, supra note 2.
391. David, supra note 18, at 13-15.
Anticommons.393 David argues that rational actors will ignore certain projects-those yielding a low expected rate of return or carrying high scientific or commercial risk-that might otherwise be considered absent blocking patents and royalty stacking.394 David points out that it is difficult to measure exactly how many projects a rational actor did not pursue simply because he would never consider such project in the first place. Accordingly, David argues that a search for evidence of a Tragedy of the Anticommons is difficult because the researcher must prove a counterfactual: that if something had not happened, then something else would have resulted.395 The Walsh Study provides some support for this argument by noting that royalty stacking did not present a significant impediment to ongoing R&D projects, because in the few cases in which a problem did occur, the problem was anticipated.396 Moreover, as described infra, the golden rice problem, albeit in agricultural biotechnology, provides an example of how easily an anticommons can develop for a commercial application that rational actors may not consider commercially viable yet may provide significant social benefits. As David argues, that particular type of breakdown may not be reported because a rational actor may never seriously consider development of that commercial application.397
An additional problem is that neither study provides the specific number of interviewees that responded in a particular way to a particular question. Thus, the amount of support provided for each conclusion in both studies is unclear.
Because of ambiguous findings concerning the existence of a Tragedy of the Anticommons, this Article suggests that additional studies be conducted to consider this potential problem. The Walsh Study, which suggests that an anticommons problem may develop and that ongoing scrutiny is warranted, supports this conclusion. Further study is especially important in light of recent Federal Circuit cases that clarify the limited scope of the experimental use exception to patent infringement.398 Additionally, in a
396. Walsch et al., supra note 14, at 300. The authors note that, “[o]ur interviews suggest that the main reasons why projects were not undertaken reflected considerations of technological opportunity, demand, and internal resource constraints, with expected licensing fees or ‘tangles’ or rights on tools playing a subordinate rule, salient for only those projects which were commercially less viable.” Id. at 304.
398. Walsch et al., supra note 14, at 331, 335-36.
recent report entitled “Genetic Inventions, Intellectual Property Rights and Licensing Practices,” the OECD recommended the continued monitoring of patenting and licensing of genetic inventions.399 The OECD also recommended the collection and analysis of robust economic data to ensure that access does not become problematic.400
IX. Potential Proposed Solutions to the Tragedy of the Anticommons
This section describes and analyzes proposed solutions to the Tragedy of the Anticommons. Commentators have proposed changes in the utility requirement for patentability, a fair use exception to patent law, expansion of the experimental use exception, and the use of patent pools or collective rights organizations to overcome a Tragedy of the Anticommons.
A. Heightened Utility Requirement
1. Utility-Along with patent eligible subject matter, nonobviousness, and novelty, utility is a statutory prerequisite for an invention to be patentable.401 At least one author has suggested that the utility requirement for patentability be used to curtail the number of patents issued on biotechnology inventions and research tools.402 The Supreme Court, the Federal Circuit, and the USPTO have gone back and forth on restricting and expanding the use of the utility requirement as a device to allow or disallow
401. 35 U.S.C. 101 (2000) (“Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefore, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.”).
402. Summers, supra note 22. But see Julian David Forman, Comment, A Timing Perspective on the Utility Requirement in Biotechnology Patent Applications, 12 Alb. L .J. Sci. & Tech. 647 (2002) (arguing that more restrictive PTO guidelines will hamper the progress of biotechnology invention by delaying patent protection until later stages of invention resulting in less investment in high-risk research and development) .
patents on chemical or biotechnological inventions .403 Most recently, the USPTO issued examination guidelines that set forth an arguably more restrictive view of utility than courts have previously
required .404
The utility requirement ensures that the public receives an invention that is useful in exchange for the limited right to exclude others from practicing the invention .405 An invention is useful if it “perform [s] some function of positive benefit to society,” or achieves some practical utility.406 Courts divide the utility requirement into three parts when analyzing whether an invention possess the requisite statutory utility: general utility, specific utility, and moral utility.407 “An invention that possesses general utility is one that is operable, or capable of doing something.”408 “A finding of specific utility requires that the invention provide a solution to a stated problem.”409 “Courts may then question whether an invention is beneficial to society or if there is an absence of immoral purposes.”410 In the past, courts have laxly enforced the utility requirement, demanding that inventors meet only a very low threshold for patentability.411
The utility requirement is easily met for some types of inventions, i.e., mechanical or electrical inventions
403. See Brenner v. Manson, 383 U.S. 519 (1966)
404. 2001 Utility Examination Guidelines, supra note 403.
405. Brenner, 383 U.S. at 534 (“The basic quid pro quo contemplated by the Constitution and the Congress for granting a patent monopoly is the benefit derived by the public from an invention with substantial utility.”).
406. Donald S. Chisum, Chisum on Patents 4-2 (2003). See also Intellectual Property, supra note 8, at 315 (“Utility ordinarily presents a minimal requirement that the invention be capable of achieving a pragmatic result.”)
407. Robert P. Merges et al., Intellectual Property in the New Technological Age 163 (2000)
408. Forman, supra note 402, at 650, n.16
409. Forman, supra note 402, at 650, n.16.
411. Mark A. Lemley, The Economics of Improvement in Intelectual Property Law, 75 Tex. L. Rev. 989, 1007 n.78 (1997).
processes-particularly pharmaceutical compounds[,]” and biotechnology.412 “In these fields, inventors sometimes synthesize compounds without a precise knowledge of how they may be used to achieve a practical working result.”413 Thus, a particular isolated and purified DNA sequence may have multiple potential downstream uses that are unknown to the researcher.414 The only cited utility of an isolated and purified DNA sequence may be its use as an object of further research.415
In Brenner v. Manson, the Supreme Court examined the utility requirement as applied to chemical processes.416 The examiner denied Manson’s application, and the Board of Appeals later affirmed, on the ground that there was a failure to disclose any utility for the chemical compound that the process had produced.417 The Court of Customs and Patent Appeals (CCPA)418 reversed the Board of Appeals, stating, ” ‘where a claimed process produces a known product it is not necessary to show utility for the product,’ so long as the product ‘is not alleged to be detrimental to the public interest. ‘ “419 The Supreme Court reversed the CCPA.420 The Court rejected Manson’s arguments that the applicant had demonstrated utility by showing one of the following: (1) that the claimed process produced a product under investigation by serious scientific researchers, (2) that the process produces the intended product, or (3) that an adjacent homologue421 of the steroid that the applicant’s process produces has tumor-inhibiting effects in mice.422 The Court held that “[u]nless and until a process is refined and developed to this point-where specific benefit exists in currently available form-there is insufficient justification for permitting an applicant to engross what may prove to be a broad
412. Chisum, supra note 406, at 4-2
413. Intellectual Property, supra note 8, at 315.
414. Summers, supra note 22, at 478-479.
416. Brenner, 383 U.S. at 534.
418. The Court of Customs and Patent Appeals (CCPA) was the predecessor court of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
419. Brenner, 383 U.S. at 522. (quoting In re Manson, 333 F.2d 234, 237-238 (1964) ).
421. ” ‘A homologous series is a family of chemically related compounds, the composition of which varies from member to member by CH [2] (one atom of carbon and two atoms of hydrogen) . . . . Chemists knowing the properties of one member of a series would in general know what to expect in adjacent members.’ ” Id. at 522 n.3 (quoting Application of Henze, 181 F.2d 196, 200-201 (1950)). The Court noted that there is a ” ‘greater known unpredictability of compounds’ ” in the field of steroids. Id. at 532.
field.”423 The Court expressed concern that if a patent were allowed to issue on a claimed process, yielding a product with unknown utility, then the patent might encompass unknown areas of scientific development without providing the benefit to society-the substantial utility-that is at the heart of the quid pro quo that Congress had contemplated.424 The Court stated, “a patent is not a hunting license. It is not a reward for the search, but compensation for its successful conclusion.”425
The Supreme Court in Brenner clearly set forth a restrictive view of the utility doctrine, at least as applied to chemical processes. A patentee, under Brenner, can obtain a patent only after demonstrating a specific benefit from the patentee’s claimed invention. The Federal Circuit in In re Brana examined the utility requirement in the context of pharmaceuticals and established a more lenient approach.426 The court reversed a decision of the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences, affirming an examiner’s rejection of a patentee’s claims because the claimed compounds lacked utility as antitumor substances .427 The court framed the issue on appeal by asking “with regard to pharmaceutical inventions, what must the applicant prove regarding the practical utility or usefulness of the invention for which patent protection is sought[?]”428 The court stated that applicants must provide sufficient evidence to convince a person skilled in the particular art that the invention possesses the asserted utility.429 In this case, the evidence included a declaration with test results showing that several compounds within the scope of the claims exhibited significant antitumor activity against
426. Brana, 51 F.3d at 1560-61.
427. Id. at 1565. The Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences, in In re Brana, based its affirmance of the examiner’s rejection on a lack of utility which violated 35 U.S.C. 112, 1, not 35 U.S.C. 101. Id. at 1564. Section 112, paragraph 1, of 35 U.S.C. states:
The specification shall contain a written description of the invention, and of the manner and process of making and using it, in such full, clear, concise, and exact terms as to enable any person skilled in the art to which it pertains, or with which it is most nearly connected, to make and use the same, and shall set forth the best mode contemplated by the inventor of carrying out his invention.
Id. at 1564. The Federal Circuit thus reviewed the Board’s affirmance based on section
112. Id.
429. Id. at 1566-1567. The Court initially held that the PTO failed to carry its initial burden of challenging the presumptively correct assertion of utility. Id. at 1566. The Court considered the applicant’s rebuttal evidence as an alternative basis for its holding that the claimed invention satisfied any utility requirement. Id. at 1567.
the standard tumor model in vivo .430 Moreover, the court rejected the Commissioner’s argument that in vivo tests in animals are insufficient to demonstrate utility because such tests are not reasonably predictive of the success of the compounds in treating cancer in humans .431 The court stated that “[u]sefulness in patent law, and in particular in the context of pharmaceutical inventions, necessarily includes the expectation of further research and development . . . [and t]he stage at which an invention in this field becomes useful is well before it is ready to be administered to humans.”432 The court noted that “[w]ere we to require [Food and Drug Administration] Phase II (significant testing on humans) in order to prove utility, the associated costs would prevent many companies from obtaining patent protection on promising new inventions, thereby eliminating an incentive to pursue, through research and development, potential cures [to diseases].”433
In 1995, the same year in which the Federal Circuit issued In re Brana, the USPTO released the 1995 Examination Guidelines .434 The Guidelines and In re Brana apparently represented an interpretation of the utility requirement that was much more lenient than that which the Brenner court had contemplated. Subsequently, a flood of patent applications covering so-called “ESTs” were submitted to the USPTO. ESTs are fragments of genes, usually with unknown biological function. In response to industry, academic, and government outcry concerning the patenting of ESTs, the USPTO released the 2001 Utility Examination Guidelines .435 The 2001 Utility Examination Guidelines require a well-established utility in the art, i.e., a utility that a person of ordinary skill in the art would immediately appreciate or a demonstration of a specific, credible, and substantial utility.436 The requirement that an invention have a specific, credible, and substantial utility excludes “nonspecific,” “throw-away,” or “insubstantial” utilities, “such as the use of a complex invention as landfill.”437 At least one author argues that the new guidelines will prevent the patenting of genes .438
431. Id. at 1568-1569.
434. USPTO Utility Examination Guidelines, 60 Fed. Reg. 36,263 (July 14, 1995).
437. Id at 1098.
438. Smith, supra note 42, at 749-50 (arguing that new guidelines will prevent the patenting of genes and deter investment in biotechnology companies) .
Fall 2004] The Tragedy of the Anticommons in Biotechnology Innovation 199 2. Proposed Heightened Utility Requirement and Analysis-One au
thor advocates adoption of a utility requirement that is more stringent than that set forth in the 2001 Utility Examination Guidelines .439 The author states that broad patents in basic biotechnology research are improper because the development of today’s patent law fails to account for two trends in modern biotechnology.440 The first trend is that biotechnology research is unveiling science at an increasingly rudimentary level while patent law is becoming broader, thus threatening to remove fundamental building blocks of science from the public domain.441 The second trend involves the Bayh-Dole Act, which provides an incentive for discoverers- particularly public discoverers-of rudimentary upstream research tools to patent those tools and license them to downstream commercial innovators .442 The author reviews philosophical and economic rationales for patent law and concludes that those rationales support an even narrower utility requirement in light of the cited trends.443 The proposed narrower utility requirement, for example, would require an applicant for a gene patent to disclose the encoded protein along with the function of that protein .444
Early patenting in the biotechnology innovation process is important to the continued growth and development of the industry. Biotechnology research and development is risky, complex, and uncertain, and heavily reliant upon venture capital funding.445 A biotechnology start-up often has no revenue to fund research and development except through outside sources .446 Patents provide biotechnology firms assets, often their only assets, with which to
439. Summers, supra note 22, at 477-78.
443. Id. at 477. The author asserts that the incentive to invent theory fails to justify a broad utility requirement because the traditional public sector is motivated by increasing the storehouse of public knowledge, not by potential patent rights, and the patentee of a patent directed to a DNA sequence which does not disclose the function of the protein it encodes will free ride on the efforts of subsequent researchers that discover that function. Id. at 487. The author also asserts that the incentive to disclose theory does not justify a broad utility requirement because a patent directed to a DNA sequence fails to disclose the uses of a research tool, and the information often disclosed is already known or will be publicly disclosed. Id. at 488. Finally, the author asserts that the incentive to innovate theory fails to justify a broad utility requirement because the “commercial value in biotechnology lies not in isolating a gene sequence, but further downstream once the gene’s function has been determined.” Id. at 491.
445. See supra notes 139-52 and accompanying text.
secure venture capital funding.447 Without a patent, venture capitalists may be unwilling to invest in biotechnology research and development.448 Furthermore, the FDA requires a bevy of clinical trials to test a compound, amounting to a significant investment of time and effort on the part of researchers. 449 Consequently, researchers in the pharmaceutical field have an interest in patenting pharmaceutical compounds early in the development process, even when the specific properties of that compound are not fully understood
Heightening the utility requirement may make sense for ESTs with a minimal disclosed utility given the use of techniques such as high-throughput sequencing. However, the utility requirement should not prevent the patenting of research tools whose only purpose relates to the development or research of commercial applications. Some biotechnology companies only create research tools, and a market for those tools has developed.453 Moreover, if research tools are not patentable, developers of those tools may use them in secret rather than disclosing them publicly.454 Without public disclosure of the tools, competing firms may waste signifi
449. Intellectual Property, supra note 8, at 318:
The utility requirement should be viewed in light of the considerable incentives chemists and biochemists possess to obtain patent protection on compounds of interest as soon as possible . . . . [I]n the case of pharmaceutical compounds, food and drug authorities require considerable product testing before the pharmaceutical can be broadly marketed. Before investing further time and effort on laboratory testing and clinical trials, actors in the pharmaceutical filed desire to obtain patent rights on promising compounds even where their particular properties are, as yet, not well understood. But when patent applications are filed too close to the laboratory bench, chemists and biotechnicians have discovered that the ordinarily dormant utility requirement has posed considerable obstacles.
454. Forman, supra note 402, at 661.
cant resources duplicating research in order to develop a previ
ously invented tool .455
Because of the ambiguous evidence of a Tragedy of the Anticommons, the utility requirement should not be heightened. A more stringent utility requirement may disrupt the valuable incentives that patents provide to invent, disclose, and innovate.
B. A Fair Use Exception to Patent Infringement
Professor Maureen O’Rourke argues that, because of several recent developments, current patent law doctrine fails to strike the proper balance between the grant of exclusive rights to encourage innovation and the maintenance of a vibrant public domain .456 These developments include: fast-paced high technology, an expanded definition of patent eligible subject matter, the PTO issuing patents at a record rate, the impact of the Federal Circuit holding patents valid more often than prior courts, and an increased likelihood of situations in which the grant of a patent would be socially beneficial but a breakdown in bargaining is likely to result.457 O’Rourke advocates the adoption of a fair use exception in patent law-similar to that in copyright law-to address any anticommons effects when the costs for any one entity to accumulate all the required licenses to develop a socially beneficial product or service is prohibitive .458
O’Rourke recognizes that though patent law does not have a broad scope limiting doctrine similar to that found in copyright law, patent law has other scope limiting doctrines .459 Those doctrines include: the ability to reevaluate a patent’s validity, the ability to construe claims, the reverse doctrine of equivalents, the doctrine of blocking patents, the experimental use exception, and
455. Id. (arguing that the issuance of patents will deter rent seeking because the issuance of a patent itself communicates to firms that a particular problem has been solved and competitors should stop expending R&D dollars to solve that particular problem).
456. O’Rourke, supra note 24, at 1178-79.
458. Id. at 1177-79. The fair use exception to copyright infringement generally provides a privilege for one to use a copyrighted work in a reasonable manner without the owners consent. Id. at 1188. Effectively, the fair use exception “imposes a limited royalty-free compulsory license on the copyright owner: The party asserting the defense has infringed, but that infringement is excused.” Id.
459. O’Rourke specifically references Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., wherein the Supreme Court held that the fair use doctrine applied to excuse allegedly infringing copying of copyrighted broadcasts. Id. at 1188-1189 (citing 464 U.S 417 (1984)).
patent misuse.460 O’Rourke notes that patent law may not have a broad fair use doctrine because, in contrast to the almost negligible costs of obtaining copyright protection, obtaining a patent can be very costly.461 O’Rourke argues that even a combination of the above doctrines fails to match the prowess of the copyright fair use defense, which rectifies market failures that would render “exclusive rights overbroad and prevent socially efficient and desirable uses of the copyrighted work from occurring.” 462 Market failures occurring in copyright law fall within three categories: “(i) high transaction costs that frustrate private bargaining [, including identifying, contacting, and contracting with multiple rights holders]
According to O’Rourke, market failures are occurring more often in markets for patentable products .464 O’Rourke relies upon domestic scholars and international movements to point to specific market failures that current patent doctrine does not remedy but that a fair use exception would remedy.465 The market failures include: the liability of a researcher who infringes a patent in the course of verifying the functionality of the patented invention
O’Rourke identifies five factors relevant to determining whether a fair use exception should apply to patent infringement: (1) the nature of the advance that the infringement represents,467 (2) the
460. Id. at 1188-89.
465. Id. at 1198-1202. O’Rourke also relies upon provisions of the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Agreement as providing “a strong international norm in favor of allowing socially beneficial infringements to occur” to justify adoption of a fair use exemption. Id. at 1202.
467. Id. at 1205. This factor focuses on whether the infringing work is a major or minor advance in the art. Id at 1206. If the work is a major advance, then the public welfare is likely substantially improved and thus, the work is more likely a fair use. Id.
purpose of the infringing use,468 (3) the nature and strength of the market failure that prevents a license from being concluded,469 (4) the impact of the use on the patentee’s incentives and overall social welfare,470 and (5) the nature of the patented work.471 Similar to the fair use analysis in copyright law, the court should balance the fair use factors to determine whether the fair use exception should apply to patent infringement.472 Finally, if the court determines that the use is fair, then the court must determine whether the infringer should compensate the patentee with a royalty.473
O’Rourke applies the fair use factors to specific industries, in
cluding the software industry474 and the biotechnology industry.475
Specifically, O’Rourke reviews Heller and Eisenberg’s Tragedy of
the Anticommons theory and concludes that the doctrine of fair
use can be used to excuse some infringement and alleviate anti
476 O’Rourke suggests that fair use “could be
commons concerns .
used to excuse infringement by researchers attempting to invent around the patent even when the eventual end product is to be marketed commercially.”477 She also states that fair use could be
468. Id at 1205. This factor determines whether the use is non-commercial, indirectly commercial or commercial. Id. at 1206. A finding of commercial use increases the likelihood that fair use does not exist. Id.
469. Id. at 1205. This factor examines the specific market defect and how it impacts the market. Id. at 1206-07.
470. Id. at 1205. This factor focuses on whether widespread infringing use would adversely impact the market for the patented invention. Id. at 1207. Particularly, this factor examines the “social benefit to be gained by allowing the infringement balanced against the cost to the patentee, including the impact on incentives to invent.” Id. “Harm to the patentee is likely to be greater when the infringement leads to a competitive product and it will be greatest when that product is also directly infringing.” Id at 1207-08. Moreover, “[t]he courts should focus on the nature of both R&D and product-market competition in the particular industry.” Id at 1208.
471. Id. at 1205. This factor examines whether the work is a pioneering work or a smaller advance over the prior work. Id. at 1208. If the work is pioneering, then the fair use right should be narrow. Id.
472. Id. at 1209. “The most important factors are the third and fourth which emphasize the reality of market conditions and the impact on the intellectual property balance. As in copyright law, no one factor would be determinative and fair use would be an equitable and affirmative defense with the burden of proof on the infringer.” Id.
474. Id at 1211. O’Rourke argues that the fair use defense is needed to excuse reverse engineering to produce software compatible with the dominant operating system. Id. at 1212. She asserts that a fair use approach would allow the court with doctrinal latitude to consider policy concerns without contorting “existing patent doctrine to achieve a desirable result.” Id. at 1230.
used in situations wherein a developer of a product has gathered almost all of the necessary licenses to bring a product to market, but because of a hold-out, is unable to license the final piece of technology needed .478 The fair use doctrine might allow the developer of a product to move forward without the license from the holdout.479 Finally, O’Rourke states that the mere presence of a fair use doctrine “may make patentees more willing to form institutions to decrease transaction costs.”480
O’Rourke’s suggested proposal for a fair use exception fills in the gaps between several patent law doctrines, including the experimental use exception and the reverse doctrine of equivalence, and attempts to preserve the incentive to invent that the patent grant provides. However, a broad, uncertain exception might erode the incentives that patents provide to invent, innovate, and disclose inventions. This outcome is particularly likely in the biotechnology industry, where research and development is uncertain and complex.481 As discussed above, the biotechnology industry is capital intensive and relies upon the influx of funding from venture capitalists to continue innovating.482 Strong and stable patent rights provide the necessary incentive for venture capitalists to invest in biotechnology companies .483 A broad exception, the scope of which is determined only after litigation, may undermine the incentive to invest that stable and certain patents provide.
Moreover, a broad exception to copyright infringement may be justified because of the low threshold for obtaining, and the ease of securing, copyright protection for a work of authorship. Patent protection is only granted after a relatively extensive USPTO review. Furthermore, patents are subject to USPTO reexamination and court invalidation. The expense and time involved in obtaining a patent for a non-pioneering, yet patentable, invention may not be justified if a broad fair use defense is available. Notably, it is in precisely this type of case that the fair use defense may apply.484 In these situations, an inventor may decide to keep an invention secret instead of attempting to obtain patent protection .485 In addition, the effectiveness of the fair use exception for market failures
481. See infra Introduction.
482. See infra Part IV.
484. O’Rourke, supra note 24, at 1208.
485. See supra notes 69-76 and accompanying text.
in copyrighted works may be overstated as the market still needs collective rights organizations such as BMI and ASCAP to address numerous failures.486
Professor O’Rourke provides the example of using the fair use doctrine to prevent a potential licensor from refusing to license to a product developer that has amassed almost all of the necessary licenses to bring a product to market.487 At least one problem with the application of the fair use doctrine in this case is that the licensor may be refusing to license simply because the license fees are not acceptable. If the court applies the fair use doctrine, it must determine whether the requested license fees are reasonable .488 The court is put in the position of valuing a piece of intellectual property and determining the appropriate amount of a license fee .489 Though a court can determine a license fee, a collective rights organization or a patent pool is arguably better equipped to determine the value of a piece of intellectual property.490
As reviewed above, the evidence of a Tragedy of the Anticommons is, at best, unclear. Accordingly, it is unnecessary to weaken patent rights, a move that may undermine the incentives that patents provide to invent, disclose, and innovate.
C. The Experimental Use Exception
In a series of decisions, courts developed a common law exception to patent infringement relating to experimental use.491 The exception recognized that “an experiment with a patented article for the sole purpose of gratifying a philosophical taste, or curiosity, or for mere amusement, is not an infringement of the rights of the patentee.”492 Accordingly, if the researcher had a commercial intent or, in other words, an intent to profit, then the researcher’s use of
486. Robert P. Merges, Contracting into Liability Rules: Intelectual Property Rights and Colective Rights Organizations, 84 Cal. L. Rev. 1293, 1328 (1996).
488. Merges, supra note 486, at 1317 (“Unless a special ‘rate court’ were established to administer these [licensing] disputes, each judge in each case would have to be educated about the industry, about appropriate [intellectual property rights] valuation ranges, and the like. These costs would clearly be large . . . .”).
490. Id. Professor O’Rourke argues that in the biotechnology industry some players may be repeat players, but there is rapid market turnover which imposes negative externalities on the public. O’Rourke, supra note 24, at 1245.
491. Whittemore v. Cutter, 29 F. Cas. 1120, 1121 (C.C.D. Mass. 1813) (No. 17,600).
492. Poppenhusen v. Falke, 19 F. Cas. 1048, 1049 (C.C.S.D.N.Y. 1861) (No. 11,279).
the patented invention would not be exempted from infringement.493 Justice Story stated the rationale for the exception: “[i]t could never have been the intention of the legislature to punish a man, who constructed such a machine merely for philosophical experiments, or for the purpose of ascertaining the sufficiency of the machine to produce its described effects.”494 In recognition of the need to bring generic pharmaceuticals to market quickly, Congress enacted a statutory experimental use exception.495 The exception is limited to pharmaceuticals and medical devices and use of the patented invention while preparing for clinical trials.496 University scientists using patented research tools to further their research often rely upon these common law and statutory exceptions .497 However, because of the very narrow scope of the exception, it is not clear that all the actions of those claiming the exception should be exempted from infringement. In recent years, because of the expansion of patentable inventions to research tools and the merger of public and private research, commentators have called upon Congress and the courts to broaden the experimental use
493. Sawin v. Guild, 21 F. Cas. 554, 555 (C.C.D. Mass. 1813):
“[T] he making with an intent to use for profit, and not for the mere purpose of philosophical experiment, or to ascertain the verity and exactness of the specification (citation omitted) . In other words, that the making must be with an intent to infringe the patent-right, and deprive the owner of the lawful rewards of his discovery.
Id. See also Ruth v. Stearns-Roger Mfg. Co., 13 F. Supp. 697, 703 (D. Colo. 1935)
494. Whittemore, 29 F. Cas. at 1121.
495. 35 U.S.C. 271(e)(1) (1994). This section was enacted in response to Roche Products v. Bolar Pharmaceutical Co., 733 F.2d 858 (Fed. Cir. 1984), which held that Bolar’s use of Roche’s patented active ingredients of Dalmane for equivalency testing to satisfy federal requirements before marketing of the generic drug was not exempted from infringement. Id. at 867.
496. 35 U.S.C. 271(e) (1) (1994).
497. See Biotech Strategies, supra note 147 (“[A National Academies of Sciences] survey showed that almost 80% of scientists at academic institutions and companies believed their research activities were immune under the [research use] exemption.”)
While the words in the cases seemed somewhat narrower, most patent owners either understood (or operated under the implicit assumption) that others could conduct research using their inventions, when that research was designed to make other inventions, whether complementary or substitute, or to do research simply for the sake of doing research, historically the function of our universities.
exception .498 However, in a recent Federal Circuit decision, the court interpreted the common law exception extremely narrowly.499 Moreover, the Federal Circuit limited the reach of the already nar
row statutory exception .500
1. Madey v. Duke University -In Madey v. Duke University, the
Federal Circuit made clear that the common law experimental use defense did not apply to the use of patented inventions in university research that has even a remote commercial purpose, including merely furthering the university’s legitimate business objectives.501 The Federal Circuit reversed the district court’s grant of summary judgment in favor of Duke, and held that the experimental use exception did not apply to Duke’s use of Plaintiff Madey’s patented laser technology.502 Plaintiff Madey, a successful researcher in the laser research field, had joined Duke as a lab director and had moved his laser research laboratory there .503 Madey owned two patents used in some of the equipment in the laboratory.504 Duke eventually removed Madey as lab director, and Madey subsequently resigned from Duke .505 Duke continued to use the lab equipment after Madey’s resignation .506 Madey then sued Duke for patent infringement.507 The district court granted summary judgment to Duke, reasoning that Madey failed to raise a genuine issue of material fact as to whether Duke commercially benefited or intended to benefit commercially with respect to either patent.508 The district court held that the experimental use exception applied to Duke’s use of the patented inventions .509
On appeal, Madey asserted that the district court committed three errors: (1) the district court improperly shifted the burden of
498. Eisenberg, supra note 10
499. Madey, 307 F.3d 1351
500. Integra, 331 F.3d 860. For further analysis of the Madey and Integra decisions, see Martin J. Adelman, 3-3 Patent Law Perspectives 3.6(2) (2003).
501. Madey, 307 F.3d at 1352.
proof to Madey to prove that Duke’s use was not experimental
Specifically, the Federal Circuit criticized the district court’s formulations of the experimental use defense as overly broad. The district court stated that the experimental use defense applied to uses that “were solely for research, academic, or experimental purposes,” and covered uses that were “made for experimental, nonprofit purposes only.”512 The Federal Circuit stated that the defense was “very narrow and strictly limited [to] . . . actions performed ‘for amusement, to satisfy idle curiosity, or for strictly philosophical inquiry.’ “513 “Further, use does not qualify for the experimental use defense when it is undertaken in the ‘guise of scientific inquiry’ but has ‘definite, cognizable, and not insubstantial commercial
purposes. ‘ “514 “[U] se is disqualified from the defense if it has the
‘slightest commercial implication’ [and] use in keeping with the legitimate business of the alleged infringer does not qualify for the experimental use defense.”515 The Federal Circuit reasoned that although major universities “often sanction and fund research projects with arguably no commercial application whatsoever . . . these projects unmistakably further the institution’s legitimate business objectives, including educating and enlightening students and faculty participating in these projects, [increasing] the status of the institution[] and lur[ing] lucrative research grants, students and faculty.”516 The Federal Circuit concluded that the district court overemphasized Duke’s non-profit nature and stated that the correct
510. Id. at 1361. Madey also argues that the experimental use exception no longer exists because it is inconsistent with Warner-Jenkinson Co. v. Hilton -Davis Chem. Co., 520 U.S. 17 (1997), which held that intent plays no role in the application of the doctrine of equivalents. Id. at 1360. The Federal Circuit disagreed with Madey and concluded that the experimental use defense persists. Id. at 1361.
512. Id. at 1361 (quoting district court opinion at 9).
513. Id. at 1362 (quoting Embrex, Inc. v. Service Engineering Corp., 216 F.3d 1343, 1349 (Fed. Cir. 2000).
514. Id. at 1362 (quoting Embrex, 216 F.3d at 1349).
515. Id. (quoting Embrex at 216 F.3d at 1349 and Pitcairn v. United States, 547 F.2d 1106, 1125-26 (Ct. Cl. 1976)).
focus should be “on the legitimate business Duke is involved in and whether or not the use was solely for amusement, to satisfy idle curiosity, or for strictly philosophical inquiry.”517
The Federal Circuit, notwithstanding the call of commentators to broaden the experimental use exception, has interpreted the experimental use exception very narrowly and has clearly sent the following message to universities: unlicensed research using a patented invention constitutes an unexcused infringement if the research furthers the institution’s legitimate business objectives .518 Given the court’s extremely broad definition of legitimate business objectives, neither applied nor basic university research is exempted from liability for patent infringement.519 The decision makes no distinction between private-public collaborations for applied research, government-funded university research, and university research conducted for purely basic research purposes, i.e., the quest for knowledge. The Federal Circuit’s decision can contribute to the anticommons phenomena, as university researchers must either find and license patents to basic research tools or risk liability for patent infringement.520
2. Integra Lifesciences I, Ltd. v. Merck KGaA -In Integra Lifesciences I, Ltd. v. Merck KGaA, the Federal Circuit narrowly interpreted 35 U.S.C. 271(e)(1)-the safe harbor provision for the use of patented inventions reasonably related to the development and submission of information-to satisfy the requirements of the Food and Drug Administration Act.521 Section 271(e) (1) is part of the Drug Price Competition and Patent Term Restoration Act of 1984, which was a compromise between the makers of generic drugs and research-based pharmaceutical companies.522 Through the Act, Congress sought to restore the patent term to the drug maker because of the regulatory delays that result from time-consuming testing of a new drug prior to approval to sell the drug, and ensure that a patentee’s rights do not de facto extend beyond the statutory period because a generic drug maker could not enter the market without regulatory approval.523 Section 271(e)(1) allows a generic
520. In Integra, Judge Newman, in a dissent, criticizes the Madey majority opinion as fail
ing to “distinguish between investigation into patented things, as has always been permitted,
and investigation using patented things, as has never been permitted.” Id. at 878.
521. 331 F.3d 860.
drug manufacturer to use a patented drug in preparation for regulatory approval.524 Section 271(e) (1) provides:
It shall not be an infringement to make, use, offer to sell, or sell within the United States or import into the United States a patented invention (other than a new animal drug or veterinary biological product (as those terms are used in the Federal, Drug, and Cosmetic Act and the Act of March 4, 1913) which is primarily manufactured using recombinant DNA, recombinant RNA, hybridoma technology, or other processes involving site specific genetic manipulation techniques) solely for uses reasonably related to the development and submission of information under a Federal law which regulates the manufacture, use, or sale of drugs or veterinary biological products.525
The Federal Circuit noted the legislative history concerning section 271(e)(1), stating that pre-market approval activity involves ” ‘a limited amount of testing so that generic manufacturers can establish the bioequivalency of a generic substitute,’ ” while ensuring that the ” ‘nature of the interference with the rights of the patent holder’ not be ‘substantial,’ but ‘de minimus [sic].’ “526
In Integra, the Federal Circuit affirmed the district court’s holding that 35 U.S.C. section 271(e)(1) did not immunize Merck against liability for infringement of several patents.527 The issue, as the court framed it, was whether section 271(e) (1) embraces the development and identification of new drugs that will, in turn, be subject to FDA approval, not merely experiments to supply information for submission to the FDA.528 According to the court, Merck needed to demonstrate that its activities were ” ‘solely for uses reasonably related to the development and submission of information’ ” to the FDA.529 The court noted that “[t]he focus of the entire exemption is the provision of information to the FDA” and that “[a]ctivities that do not directly produce information for the FDA are already straining the relationship to the central purpose of the safe harbor.”530 The court rejected an interpretation of
525. 35 U.S.C. 271(e) (1) (1994).
526. Integra, 331 F.3d at 865 (quoting H.R. Rep. No. 857 at 8, reprinted in 1984
U.S.C.C.A.N. at 2692) .
529. Id. (quoting 35 U.S.C. 271(e) (1)).
section 271(e) (1) that would have expanded the phrase “reasonably related” to include the development of new drugs needing FDA approval
Tragedy of the Anticommons .535
3. Proposals for a Broader Experimental Use Exception -Prior to the
Integra and Madey decisions, several commentators, including Professors Eisenberg and Janice M. Mueller, advocated for a broader experimental use exception .536 In a 1989 article, Professor
533. Id. (quoting 35 U.S.C. 271(e) (1) ).
535. Judge Newman, in a dissenting opinion, argues that the Integra majority decision “disapproves and essentially eliminates the common law research exemption.” Id. at 873. She states:
The subject matter of patents may be studied in order to understand it, or to improve upon it, or to find a new use for it, or to modify or ‘design around’ it. Were such research subject to prohibition by the patentee the advancement of technology would stop, for the first patentee in the field could bar not only patent-protected competition, but all research that might lead to such competition, as well as barring improvement or challenge or avoidance of patented technology. Today’s accelerated technological advance is based in large part on knowledge of the details of patented inventions and how they are made and used. Prohibition of research into such knowledge cannot be squared with the framework of patent law . . . . [The Author not] undertake to define the boundaries of the research exemption for all purposes and activities, other than to observe that there is a generally recognized distinction between ‘research’ and ‘development,’ as a matter of scale, creativity, resource allocation, and often the level of scientific/engineering skill needed for the project
Id. at 875-76 (footnote omitted).
536. See supra note 23. One commentator advocates for the adoption of “a limited research exemption for the public sector (e.g., university), non-commercial research in which
Eisenberg relies upon literature in sociology, history, and the philosophy of science to reason that free access to discoveries might promote technological progress more effectively than an exclusive rights scheme, given the continuing merger of basic and applied science.537 Eisenberg argues that a three-prong model for the experimental use exception should be adopted to achieve a balance between the traditional free access model in basic science and the proprietary model in applied science.538 First, Eisenberg proposes that the experimental use exception should apply to research use of a patented invention to check the adequacy of the written description and the validity of the claims.539 Second, the exception should not apply to “[r]esearch use of a patented invention with a primary or significant market among research users . . . when the research user is an ordinary consumer of the patented invention.”540 Finally, “[a] patent holder should not be entitled to enjoin the use of a patented invention in subsequent research in the field of the invention, which could potentially lead to improvements in the patented technology or to the development of alternative means of achieving the same purpose.”541 However, “it might be appropriate . . . to award a reasonable royalty after the fact to be sure that the patent holder receives an adequate return on the initial investment in developing the patented invention.”542
In a 2001 article, Mueller expands upon Eisenberg’s thesis, taking into account the substantial increase in transaction costs since 1989, primarily attributable to stacking royalties.543 According to Mueller, and contrary to one of Eisenberg’s assumptions, research
a researcher engages in research with a tool or seeks to better understand how the tool itself works,” and the elimination of reach-through royalties. Natalie M. Derzko, In Search of a Compromised Solution to the Problem Arising from Patenting Biomedical Research Tools, 20 Santa Clara Computer & High Tech. L.J. 347, 409-10 (2004). While reach-through royalties provisions may create an anticommons, they also provide a useful measure of the contribution of a research tool to the development of a commercial application. Moreover, the effect of most reach-through royalty clauses has been diminished through the use of contract clauses which restrict the total amount of reach-through royalties. Patent pools provide a better measure to allow parties to value tools. In addition, attempting to define what is noncommercial versus commercial is difficult and that uncertainty could lead to less investment in the development of research tools. The continued merger of the public and private spheres will make it increasingly difficult to continue to define what is non-commercial and commercial. See NIH Report, supra note 2.
543. Mueller, supra note 23, at 57.
tools are not readily available, with minimal transaction costs, to
“ordinary users.”544 Mueller’s article extends Eisenberg’s thesis to
permit non-consensual use of research tools that are not readily
available for licensing on reasonable terms or via an anonymous
marketplace purchase .545 Mueller argues that where significant
transaction costs are associated with licensing patented research
tools to develop downstream commercial products, the experimen
tal use doctrine should exempt from infringement the non
consensual use of those tools, even if for ultimately commercial
546 She recommends that a “liability rule” be adopted that
purposes .
prohibits the patent owner from enjoining the non-consensual use of the research tool, but compensates the patent owner with an ex post royalty set by the market value of any commercial product developed with the tool.547
Mueller further argues that because of the increased collaboration between the public and private sectors, the traditional view that experimental use does not insulate from infringement research with some commercial purpose using a patented invention is no longer viable .548 According to Mueller, the current inflexibility of the experimental use exception, which seeks to categorize research as either for a commercial purpose on the one hand or merely to satisfy philosophical interest on the other hand, must be reevaluated.549 “The involvement of a for-profit firm in the use of patented research tools to develop new products should not be treated as per se outside the scope of the experimental use doctrine.”550 Mueller relies upon foreign patent systems as examples of legal rules that exempt experimental or research use of a patented invention from infringement.551 For instance, the Federal Supreme Court of Germany interpreted an exemption for experimental use of a patented invention to include clinical trials of a patented pharmaceutical, even though “the trials were conducted for the purpose of finding new applications for the pharmaceutical.”552
547. Id. at 9-10.
548. Id. at 36. Undoubtedly, Mueller would not be supportive of Madey v. Duke University, which did not even involve public and private collaboration, but concerned almost purely university research.
552. Id. at 38. (citing Wolfgang von Meibom & Johann Pitz, Experimental Use and Compulsory License Under German Patent Law, Patent World, June/July 1997, at 29).
Mueller cites the NIH Working Group on Research Tools, which concluded that “foreign patent systems properly distinguish between ‘experimenting on the patented invention-i.e., using a patented invention to study the underlying technology or perhaps to invent around the patent,’ and ‘experimenting with a patented invention to study something else.’ “553 Mueller argues that if transaction costs are severe enough to impede the development of new commercial products, then the line drawing between “experimenting on” and “experimenting with” is no longer justified. While Mueller recognizes that the NIH Working Group’s concern about undermining incentives to produce and disseminate research tools is valid if all non-consensual users of tools are exempted from liability, an approach that Mueller believes will preserve incentives is to impose a liability rule, i.e., the patent owner can obtain “an ex post royalty based on the marketplace valuation of products developed through use of the tool.”554 According to Mueller, the researcher’s “access problem is alleviated because a license need not be negotiated prior to the use and an appropriate level of royalty to the patent holder will ensure that incentives to innovate are not significantly decreased.”555 In Mueller’s model, the proposed user of the patented research tool will have to provide notice to the owner of the patent prior to use or be subject to treble damages if infringement is eventually proved .556
4. Analysis of the Proposal for a Broader Experimental Use Exception-
Extension of the experimental use exception to include uses of research tools for some or any commercial purpose would effectively destroy the market for those tools, thus removing any incentives to create research tools .557 Even an extension that does not completely end the market for research tools could impair the
553. Id. at 39 (quoting NIH Report, supra note 2.)
557. NIH Report, supra note 2:
It is difficult to imagine how a broader research exemption could be formulated without effectively eviscerating the value of patents on research tools. Researchers are ordinary consumers of patented research tools, and if these consumers were exempt from infringement liability, the patent holder would have nowhere else to turn to collect patent royalties. An excessively broad research exemption would eliminate incentives for private firms to develop and disseminate new research tools, which on balance do more harm than good to the research enterprise.
Id. See also Eisenberg & Merges, supra note 407, at 19 (arguing that withholding patent protection from research tools could undermine their creation and distribution).
incentive to invent that the patent grant provides.558 This is especially true in the biotechnology industry, where patents are necessary for companies to obtain venture capital funding.559 Venture capitalists that currently invest in biotechnology companies may stop investing, because the value of the intellectual property portfolio of a company will be severely impacted if the company has no effective ability to exclude others from using its patented invention or if the company’s ability to exclude others is uncertain.560 The boundaries of the exclusive right would not be known until the experimental use exception had been litigated. It is difficult to value or set the royalty for use of a research tool, especially one that arguably does not contribute directly to the creation of a commercially successful product. For example, if a user utilizes a research tool to determine that a particular research course is a failure, but ultimately develops a commercially successful product, does the owner of the research tool receive a royalty? The user clearly has received some value. If the court applies the experimental use exception, the court must determine the amount of the royalty ex post
558. Eisenberg, supra note 10, at 1074 (“An exemption from infringement liability for research users would deprive patent holders of some of the social value of their inventions, thereby reducing the value of patents and weakening patent incentives. Whether such an exemption is nonetheless desirable in the interest of promoting continuing scientific progress is ultimately an empirical question.”).
560. Jordan P. Karp, Note, Experimental Use as Patent Infringement: The Impropriety of a Broad Exception, 100 Yale L .J. 2169, 2179-2181 (1991) :
A system with a broad experimental use allowance would have a disparate impact on less well-financed inventors whose ability to conduct R&D may be limited in the short term when they are not able to convince possible investors of the potential commercial success of their patented inventions. If larger, well-funded competitors are able to utilize the patented inventions of smaller inventors to develop their own patented alternatives, these smaller inventors will be less able to raise funds for R&D. The experimental use exception, thus, could very well have a dampening effect on small scale, highly speculative R&D inventive endeavors, which scholars have recognized as comprising a substantial portion of the overall innovative activity in the United States.
Id. at 2183 (citing F.M. Scherer, Industrial Market Structure and Economic Performance 416-17 (2d ed. 1980) and J. Lowe & N. Crawford, Innovation & Technology Transfer for the Growing Firm 33 (1984) ).
561. Cf. Merges, supra note 486, at 1317 (“Unless a special ‘rate court’ were established to administer these [licensing] disputes, each judge in each case would have to be educated about the industry, about appropriate [intellectual property rights] valuation ranges, and the like. These costs would clearly be large . . . .”).
arguably better equipped to deal with such a matter.563 Accordingly, a broad exemption encompassing the use of research tools for commercial purposes, by failing to ensure the patent owner’s ability to recoup investments in research and development, could disable the incentives to invent and innovate that patents pro
vide .564
A broad experimental use exception might also result in public disclosure of fewer research tools. Inventors may desire to keep research tools secret instead of disclosing those inventions through patents. This is especially likely because research tools are rarely disclosed through the sale of the patented commercial applications developed using the tools. Moreover, there are several beneficial non-infringing uses of information contained in a patent or a patented invention. For example, a researcher may study a patent, take good ideas from a patent, and verify an invention for operability, proof of principle, and proof of verification.565 Accordingly, researchers may decide not to disclose research tools and rely on trade secret law for protection, and this would hurt scientific progress by not allowing other researchers to study patents or adopt good ideas from patents.
D. Colective Rights Organizations
Historically, institutions have used collective rights organizations, such as patent pools, to overcome transactional hurdles involved in accumulating the numerous intellectual property rights necessary to create a commercial application .566 “A ‘patent pool’ is an agreement by two or more parties to license one or more patents to one another or to third parties.”567 A patent pool also can be defined as “the aggregation of intellectual property rights which are the subject of cross-licensing, whether they are transferred directly by patentee to licensee or through some medium, such as a joint venture, set up specifically to administer the patent pool.”568
564. Karp, supra note 560, at 2180.
565. See Biotech Strategies, supra note 147
566. Merges, supra note 486, at 1342-1352 (describing patent pools in automobile and aircraft industries). See also Carlson, supra note 180, at 373.
567. White Paper, supra note 25.
568. Joel I. Klein, An Address to the American Intelectual Property Association on the Subject of Cross-Licensing and Antitrust Law (May 2, 1997), available at http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/ public/speeches/ 1123.htm (on file with the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform) :
A few recently successful patent pools include the MPEG-2 pool and two pools related to Digital Versatile Discs.569 Additionally, in the golden rice problem discussed below, several institutions570 formed an initiative called the “Public Sector Intellectual Property Resource for Agriculture” (“PIPRA”).571 One of PIPRA’s goals is to create shared technology practices, including “the possibility of pooling specific public-sector technologies, making technology ‘packages’ available to member institutions and to the private sector for commercial licensing or, at the very least, for designated humanitarian or special use.”572
All patent pools share one fundamental characteristic: they provide a regularized transactional mechanism that takes the place of the statutory property rule baseline requiring an individual bargain for each transaction. But in most other respects, their characteristics vary. They range from huge, industry -wide institutions with dozens of members and hundreds of patents, to relatively simple arrangements that look like nothing more than multilateral relational contracts.
Id. Merges, supra note 486, at 1342.
569. Robert P. Merges, Institutions for Intelectual Property Transactions: The Case of Patent Pools 28-37 (1999), available at http://www.law.berkeley.edu/institutes/bclt/pubs/merges/ pools.pdf (on file with the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform). (describing DVD pools and MPEG-2 pools approved by the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice) .
570. The institutions include: University of Wisconsin-Madison
571. Atkinson, supra note 381, at 174-175. In forming PIPRA, the institutions recognized that “[w] hen IP rights for agricultural materials and technologies are held by multiple public- and private-sector owners, this fragmentation produces situations where no single institution can provide a commercial partner with a complete set of IP rights to ensure freedom to operate . . . with a particular technology.” Id. at 174. PIPRA participants believe that, if public sector institutions would collaborate in gathering information about and in the use of agricultural IPRs, the collaboration would make it easier for them to fulfill part of their public missions by speeding the creation and commercialization of improved staple and specialty crops. Id. at 175.
572. Id. at 175
1. Guidelines for Licensing Intelectual Property -While patent pools can be used to overcome transactional barriers, they are nonetheless subject to antitrust review.573 Patent pools have served as fronts for suspect collusive behavior, such as price fixing and preserving invalid patents.574 Those practices have led federal regulators and courts to view licensing practices, including patent pools, with suspicion .575 Recently, however, federal regulators and courts have recognized that patent law and antitrust law serve complementary purposes: ” ‘both are aimed at encouraging innovation, industry and competition. ‘ “576 The largest impediment to the formation of patent pools includes antitrust scrutiny of patent
pool arrangements .577
In 1995, the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice jointly issued the Antitrust Guidelines for the Licensing of Intellectual Property (“Guidelines”) .578 The Guidelines “describe the agencies’ current complementary approach to applying anti
a developer may only need to license rights from 3 parties. The collective pressure from universities may encourage private companies to join in these pools.
573. White Paper, supra note 25, at 5.
574. Bradley J. Levang, Comment, Evaluating the Use of Patent Pools for Biotechnology: A Refutation to the USPTO White Paper Concerning Biotechnology Patent Pools, 19 Santa Clara Computer & High Tech. L.J. 229, 244-246 (2002).
575. The trend towards narrowing the types of conduct exempt from antitrust scrutiny culminated in the 1970s with a now-infamous government policy called the ‘Nine No-Nos’ that was first articulated in a speech by a DOJ official. The Nine No-Nos were certain types of conduct that the Department always regarded as suspect and likely to unreasonably harm competition.
Sheila F. Anthony, Antitrust and Intelectual Property Law: From Adversaries to Partners, 28 AIPLA Q.J. 1, 5 (2000). The Nine No-Nos included: a patentee requiring a licensee to grant back patented improvements to the licencee’s original technology
576. Anthony, supra note 575, at 7. (quoting Atari Games Corp. v. Nintendo of America, Inc., 897 F.2d 1572, 1576 (Fed. Cir. 1990) ).
577. Shapiro, supra note 190, at 144:
We can ill afford to further raise transaction costs by making it difficult for patentees possessing complementary and potentially blocking patents to coordinate to engage in crosslicensing, package licensing, or to form patent pools. Yet antitrust law can potentially play such a counterproductive role, especially since antitrust jurisprudence starts with a hostility toward cooperation among horizontal rivals. . . . [T]he Federal Trade Commission . . . arguably is making it more difficult for firms to engage in crosslicenses, to offer package licenses, or to form pro-competitive patent pools.
578. Anthony, supra note 575, at 7.
trust principles in cases involving intellectual property rights.”579 Moreover, the Guidelines specifically apply the principles of particular licensing practices, such as cross-licensing arrangements, pooling, or the acquisition of intellectual property rights .580
The Guidelines specify that intellectual property pooling may provide “procompetitive benefits by integrating complementary technologies, reducing transaction costs, clearing blocking positions, and avoiding costly infringement litigation.”581 Moreover, “[b]y promoting the dissemination of technology, cross-licensing and pooling arrangements are often procompetitive.”582 Pooling arrangements, however, can be anticompetitive if: “the excluded firms cannot effectively compete in the relevant market for the good incorporating the licensed technologies, the pool participants collectively possess market power in the relevant market, and the limitations on participation are not reasonably related to the efficient development and exploitation of the pooled technologies.”583 Additionally, “[a]nother possible anticompetitive effect of pooling arrangements may occur if the arrangement deters or discourages participants from engaging in research and development, thus retarding innovation.”584 “However, such an arrangement can have procompetitive benefits, for example, by exploiting economies of scale and integrating complementary capabilities of the pool members (including the clearing of blocking positions), and is likely to cause competitive problems only when the arrangement includes a large fraction of the potential research and development in an innovation market.”585 The Guidelines are collapsed
580. See id. at 8.
581. U.S. Dep’t of Justice & Fed. Trade Comm’n, Antitrust Guidelines for the Licensing of Intellectual Property 5.5 (1995), available at http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/ public/guidelines/ipguide.htm (on file with the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform). [hereinafter Antitrust Guidelines].
583. White Paper, supra note 25, at 7 (quoting Letter from Joel I. Klein, Assistant Attorney General, U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Antitrust Div., to Carey Ramos, Esq. (June 10, 1999), available at http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/public/busreview/2485.htm (on file with the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform) ).
584. Antitrust Guidelines, supra note 581, at 5.5.
The Justice Department has applied these guidelines in considering and approving three proposed patent pools. Its first review set forth the following additional guidelines: (1) the patents in the pool must be valid and not expired, (2) no aggregation of competitive technologies and setting a single price for them, (3) an independent expert should be used to determine whether a patent is essential to complement technologies in the pool, (4) the pool agreement must not disadvantage competitors
into two questions: (1) ” ‘whether the proposed licensing program is likely to integrate complementary patent rights’ “
program.’ “586
X. Proposals for Using Patent Pools to
Overcome Thickets of Patents
Professor Merges argues that collective rights organizations, such as patent pools, are better suited to overcome thickets of intellectual property rights than are compulsory licenses because knowledgeable industry participants set the rules of exchange, including valuation and royalty rates, which are both more likely to represent market bargains.587 Merges argues that patent pools are more likely to form when industry participants are required to transact with one another multiple times and when participants can work out a scheme more consistent with their needs than a congressional one-size-fits-all solution .588 Merges specifically discusses the application of patent pools to solve patent thicket issues in the multimedia industry.589 Moreover, commentators argue that patent pools may be used to overcome a potential Tragedy of the
in downstream product markets, and (5) the pool participants must not collude on prices outside the scope of the pool, e.g., on downstream products.
Id. White Paper, supra note 25, at 7.
In analyzing these issues, the Justice Department focused on the patents to be licensed (i.e., an independent expert in the relevant technology determines that they are “essential” to complementing the central technology in the pool), the joint licensing arrangement (i.e., collusion is unlikely, access to technology is enhanced), and the positive effects on innovation (e.g., the pool participants are required to license to each other “essential” patents they obtain in the future, less of a chance for future “blocking” patents, newer patents weigh heavier in calculating royalties to patent owners).
587. See Merges, supra note 486, at 1294-1300. Professor Merges argues that intellectual property rights are property rule entitlements and the high costs of transferring those rights leads to the creation of a liability rule -like regime based on collective valuation by firms. Id. at 1302-03.
588. See id. at 1299. “[R]epeat-play makes it easier to reach agreement on any particular issue, because disparities tend to balance out over many transactions.” Id. at 1341.
589. See id. at 1373-90.
Anticommons in biotechnology.590 The USPTO also advocates the use of patent pools to overcome the access problems that excessive
biotechnology patents pose .591
In a white paper issued by the USPTO, the authors argue that a patent pool can eliminate problems associated with blocking patents or stacking licenses, while simultaneously encouraging cooperative efforts needed to effect true economic and social benefits of biotechnology invention .592 Pools also potentially remove licensing transaction costs such as litigation, which provides certainty of patent rights and saves businesses time and money, especially small business that cannot survive costly litigation .593 Pools also create an efficient mechanism for obtaining patented technologies, removing the opportunity for the last party with necessary rights to holdout for a substantially higher royalty than other licensees .594 Patent pools also efficiently distribute risk because the pool provides an incentive for further innovation by enabling its members to share risks associated with research and development.595 Pools ensure that all participants recover some of its costs for research and development efforts.596 Finally, pools provide a way for the free sharing of technical information related to patented technology between members and the pool’s licensees .597 Members are also less likely to engage in overlapping efforts because of their greater access to information .598
The authors also address some of the criticisms of patent pools.599 The first common criticism is that patent pools may include patented alternatives that could compete with a certain technology.600 According to the authors, this criticism can be addressed through the careful evaluation of patent pool participants
590. See Heller & Eisenberg, supra note 11, at 700. See also Shapiro, supra note 190
593. Id. at 8-9.
to ensure that the patents are truly blocking.601 The second common criticism is that pools can shield potentially invalid patents.602 If a pool shields a potentially invalid patent, then consumers may pay royalties for products with patents that courts would have otherwise invalidated.603 The authors argue that an independent expert can review and select the patents to be added to the pool.604 Moreover, the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission provide some oversight of patent pools.605 Finally, patent pools are criticized as detrimental to competition because they encourage collusion and price fixing.606 The authors argue that careful evaluation of patent pools under the Guidelines, and the threat of antitrust violations and treble damages, should discourage the formation of anticompetitive patent pools.607
The work of Professor Carl Shapiro supports the white paper’s recommendations.608 Professor Shapiro cautions:
we can ill afford to raise transaction costs by making it difficult for patentees possessing complementary and potentially blocking patents to coordinate to engage in cross-licensing, package licensing, or to form patent pools. Yet antitrust law can potentially play such a counterproductive role, especially since antitrust jurisprudence starts with a hostility towards cooperation among horizontal rivals.609
Patent pools provide a solution to the Tragedy of the Anticommons problem and preserve the incentives to invent, disclose, and innovate. Patent pools reduce transaction costs and potential litigation costs associated with bargaining with multiple parties to obtain rights.610 Importantly, patent pools allow industry participants to select experts to evaluate licenses, more nearly representing a market valuation than a court or legislative determination.611 In addition, patent pools may reduce the possibility of hold-ups after
607. Id. The White Paper also discusses three recent successful patent pools: MPEG-2 Standard (1997), DVD-ROM and DVD -Video Formats I (1998), and DVD-ROM and DVDVideo Formats II (1999). Id. at 13-15.
608. Shapiro, supra note 190, at 28.
610. Merges, supra note 486, at 1296-1301.
the formation of the pool. However, hold-ups may still occur at the initial formation of the pool. Pools also reduce the likelihood that parties participating in the pool will engage in overlapping research efforts.
While the threat of antitrust liability and treble damages might provide a deterrent to the use of patent pools for anticompetitive purposes, government regulators and courts should approach and review patent pools with care to ensure that pools are not being used improperly. Improper purposes may include shielding invalid or unenforceable patents, or naked price -fixing.612 If an arrangement is being used solely for the purpose of naked price-fixing, a per se, or “quick look,” analysis is warranted.613 Otherwise, patents pools should be analyzed under a rule of reason.614 The rule of reason analysis identifies anticompetitive effects and balances these effects against procompetitive benefits.615 As discussed above, anticompetitive effects can include “price-fixing, anticompetitive exclusionary practices, and the foreclosure of competition in related markets. Procompetitive benefits include the clearing of blocking positions, the advantages flowing from integrating complementary technologies, and the cost savings from avoiding litigation.”616
If anticompetitive effects exist, the analysis [inquires] whether the arrangement is reasonably necessary to achieve procompetitive benefits that outweigh the anticompetitive effects. One important factor in determining whether a restraint is ‘reasonably necessary’ is to consider whether the parties could have achieved the procompetitive efficiencies through the use of significantly less restrictive alternatives.617
Though pools can have anticompetitive effects, pooled patented technologies can be carefully evaluated to ensure that those patents are complementary or blocking, and not competing.618 However, patented research tools are not always blocking or complementary in the sense that the research tool is included within the commercial application itself. Research tools may be needed to conduct or simplify the research and development of a commercial application. Thus, independent experts, regulators, and the courts
612. See Hovenkamp et al., supra note 52, at 34.4a.
613. Id. at 34.4a n.2.
614. See id. at 34.4a.
616. Id. at 34.4a2.
618. See id. at 34.4b1.
must ensure that a research tool is “necessary” for the particular research and development agenda of the pool at the time of the formation of the pool. The definition of “necessary” must be evaluated in light of the purpose or use of the particular patented research tool. At the time of the formation of the pool, however, it may be unclear whether a tool is needed to develop a particular commercial application because of the uncertain nature of biotechnology research and development.619 Accordingly, where research tools used to develop a product are neither blocking nor complementary but are still needed to efficiently develop a particular commercial application, regulators and courts should not determine that a patent pool has anticompetitive effects that outweigh its procompetitive benefits. The use of a research tool to determine that a particular research and development agenda will not produce a useful commercial application provides a benefit to all members of the patent pool, even though that particular tool is not “necessary” to develop a commercial application. In determining whether a patent pool with patented research tools fails or passes the rule of reason test, regulators and courts should consider the realities of the market, including the uncertainty and complexity of biotechnology research and development, the transaction costs in licensing numerous patents directed to research tools, and the necessity of using numerous research tools to develop a single commercial application. In addition, pools of patented research tools allowing the licensing of the pooled technologies to parties outside the pool should be viewed as procompetitive.620 Meanwhile, patent pools allowing veto rights over licensing of pooled technologies are more likely to have anticompetitive effects.621
Patent pools can be used to overcome a Tragedy of the Anticommons that exists or may develop in the biotechnology sector. Patent pools including patented research tools can have procompetitive effects and can withstand antitrust scrutiny. As discussed below, government policy makers should encourage biotechnology industry participants to enter patent pools.
619. In addition, new patented technologies added to the pool after its initial formation must be carefully evaluated to ensure the technology is necessary to develop a particular commercial application.
620. See Hovenkamp et al., supra note 52, at 34.4b2.
XI. Recommendations
Because it is unclear whether a Tragedy of the Anticommons exists or will develop, this Article recommends against a change in patent law doctrine that may upset the incentives that patent law provides to invent, disclose, and innovate. A weakening of the patent grant might discourage investment in uncertain and expensive biotechnology research and development, which, in turn, will result in fewer socially useful commercial applications being brought to market. Weaker patent rights may also discourage firms from entering the biotechnology market because those firms will not be able to obtain venture capital funding.
This Article proposes two recommendations. First, this Article recommends that the government commission a study similar to that described in House Bill 3966.622 Second, this Article recommends that the government take certain actions to facilitate the entering of patent pools by public and private institutions.
A. Study of the Effect of Government Policy
on Biotechnology Innovation
Because of the conflicting nature of prior studies concerning the presence of a Tragedy of the Anticommons in biotechnology, and the importance of biotechnology innovation to the public health and economic welfare of the United States, the government should commission a study of the effect of government innovation policy on science and technology innovation in the biotechnology industry. In 2002, Representative Lynn N. Rivers of Michigan introduced a bill, the “Genomic Science and Technology Innovation Act of 2002” (“Genomic Act”) in the House of Representatives, which “provides for an in-depth study by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy on the impact of Federal policies, especially patent policies, on the rate of innovation, the cost, and the availability of genomic technologies.”623 However, Congress failed to enact the Genomic Act. This Article proposes that Congress should enact a slightly modified version of the Genomic Act. The changes in the
622. H.R. 3966, 107th Cong. (2002), available at http://thomas.loc.gov/home/ c107query.html (on file with the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform) .
623. 148 Cong. Rec. E354 (daily ed. Mar. 14, 2002) (statement of Rep. Rivers).
proposed Act ensure that the study include an examination of the impact of the patenting of research tools on biotechnology innovation and an analysis of government policies, including the Bayh-Dole Act, both of which affect innovation. The following sections provide the recommended changes to the Genomic Act:
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE
This Act may be cited as the “Genomic [Biotechnology] Science and Technology Innovation Act of 2002 [2004].” [Ed.: The title sounds redundant-Biotechnology Technology.]
SECTION 2. FINDINGS.
The Congress finds the following:
(1) Genomic science [Biotechnology] promises a revolution in the development of new and effective genomic [biotechnology] techniques and other innovations, and it is in the national interest to speed the development and deployment of these new technologies through policies that promote innovation in the field of genomic [biotechnology] science and technology.
(2) While Federal innovation policies can help stimulate innovation by attracting capital investment to the development of commercial products, such policies can also inhibit basic research and hinder sharing of information that is the basis of scientific progress, thereby slowing the innovation process.
(3) Intellectual property policies for genomic [biotechnology] science and technology products are being implemented without an adequate understanding and consideration of the net impact of such policies on the innovation process.
(4) Decisions about intellectual property policy being made now are likely to have significant impacts on basic research and the development of genomic technology [biotechnology] for decades to come.
(5) The Office of Science and Technology Policy is uniquely positioned to lead the development of a coordinated, inter-
agency policy to promote innovation in g ii
technology [biotechnology]. A definitive study coordinated by the Office of Science and Technology that identifies the impacts of Federal innovation policy on the innovation pipeline for genomic technology [biotechnology] and includes recommendations for policies, including any statutory changes needed to optimize the genomic technology [biotechnology] innovation pipeline, would contribute significantly to the development of the policy.
SECTION 3. STUDY
(a) Requirement. The Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy shall conduct, or may contract with the National Academy of Sciences to conduct, a study that assess the impact of Federal policies, including intellectual property policies, on the innovation process for genomic technologies [biotechnology] .
(b) Consultation. In conducting the study, the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy shall consult with the National Science and Technology Council, the National Science Foundation, the Secretary of Energy, the Secretary of Commerce, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and other agencies or divisions of agencies the Director considers appropriate.
(c) Advisory Committee. In conducting the study, the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy shall consult with a committee, organized as a subcommittee of the President’s Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology, that shall include balanced membership from research universities, [including technology transfer professionals and research scientists
(d) Contents. The study shall-
(1) identify and quantify, to [the] extent possible, the actual and reasonably expected effects of innovation policy on geic science and technology [biotechnology] innovation
(2) explicitly consider various alternative levels of intellectual property protection genomic [biotechnology] materials may receive and the likely impact of the various levels of protection of each element of the innovation pipeline, including-
(A) fundamental genomic [biotechnology] research carried out at universities and other nonprofit research institutions
(B) commercial genomic [biotechnology] research at universities, nonprofit research institutions, and for-profit institutions, including the expected effects on intra-company investment and external private capital
(C) development of commercial genomic technologies [biotechnologies and research tools], including the expected effects on investment capital
(D) access to genomic technologies [biotechnology products,] and processes[, and research tools]
(3) include an assessment of the net impact of Federal innovation policies on innovation for genomic technologies [biotechnologies], including an assessment of-
(A) researchers’ access to genomic [biotechnology] materials [and research tools]
(B) the rate of innovation
(D) the cost of new genomic [biotechnology and research tools]
(E) the impact of restricted access to [biotechnology] diagnostics on evaluation, improvement, and clinical utilization
(F) the cost and availability of innovative technology
(G) whether Federal innovation policies create barriers to research through denial of use of a research tool, increased costs of licensing, legal and litigation costs, transaction costs, or the perception of increased legal liability, or hinder the access of researchers to genomic [biotechnology] materials and to databases of genomic sequence information
(H) whether Federal innovation policies affect the choice of area of research conducted by researchers or institutions or provide positive benefits to such research, including additional funding from private sector partners
(I) the range of incentives providing motivation for genetics research and technology development other than intellectual property protection.
SECTION 4. REPORT
The Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy shall, within 270 days after the date of enactment of this Act, transmit a report to Congress that-
(1) contains the findings of the study conducted under section 3
(2) makes recommendations for policies, including legislative changes, needed to optimize the genomic technology [biotechnology] innovation pipeline.
SECTION 5. COORDINATED POLICY
After the report is transmitted to Congress under section 4, the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy shall incorporate the policy recommendations into a coordinated interagency policy to promote innovation in genomic science and technology [biotechnology], including the sound use of intellectual property policy.
230 University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform [Vol. 38:1 SECTION 6. DEFINITIONS
For the purposes of this Act-
(1) the term “genomic [biotechnology] materials” means any material containing a human or human pathogen polynucleotide sequence other than genetic probes and markers and transgenic organisms
(2) the term “genomic technology” [“biotechnology”] means any genetic diagnostic methods or kits, tools, probes, or markers, and any pharmaceutical or therapy uses or incorpo – rates [developed with, using, or incorporating genomic materials]
(3) [the term “research tools” shall include, but is not limited to a fragment of a gene, a gene, cell lines, monoclonal antibodies, reagents, animal models, growth factors, combinatorial chemistry, and DNA libraries, clones and cloning tools, methods, laboratory equipment, and machines
(3) the term “innovation policy” includes intellectual property protection and policies, [including, but not limited to, the Bayh-Dole Act] .
B. Facilitate Creation of Patent Pools
The complex nature of the development of commercial applications in the biotechnology sector often requires multiple private and public firms to collaborate and exchange specialized skills and proprietary inputs. If transaction costs for transferring patented research tools are not minimized, these firms may be unable to assemble the necessary rights to bring a product or service to market. Patent pools provide a way to minimize transaction costs and facilitate the transfer of proprietary rights. Moreover, patent pools represent a solution that likely does not undermine the incentives for investment in biotechnology research and development, and is
consistent with the desire of scientists in academia and industry to streamline access to research tools.624
Government policy should encourage the creation of patent pools in two ways. First, the government, in collaboration with universities and private firms, should create a public database that contains information concerning proprietary and public domain research tools, including the identity of the owner, licensor, and/or licensee of each proprietary research tool
The database would reduce transaction costs in determining whether a particular technology is subject to a proprietary right and in searching for the identity and contact information for the potential licensor. Through the use of a public database, participants would be able to quickly determine which rights are necessary to develop a particular commercial application or follow a particular research agenda. The public database would also allow researchers to determine whether a particular research tool has been developed, thus providing notice to researchers not to waste valuable resources pursuing development of an existing tool.626 Moreover, as a result of the golden rice problem discussed above, universities and foundations now realize the benefits of a public database and are forming one to overcome any anticommons in the development of agricultural products.627 The PIPRA database, if successful, could serve as a model.
Second, the Bayh-Dole Act should be amended to allow the government to retain a nonexclusive license to any patented technology developed with the use of federal funding. The Bayh-Dole Act currently provides that the government may either limit the recipient’s right to elect title to an invention or retain title itself “in exceptional circumstances when it is determined by the agency
624. See NIH Report, supra note 2.
625. This may create the added benefit of creating a market for research tools maintained as trade secrets.
626. See Grady & Alexander, supra note 62, at 307-08 (discussing rent dissipating races to develop same technology by competing firms). See also Ko, supra note 54, at 795-96 (“Secrecy can also lead to waste to the extent that competitors duplicate research.”).
627. Atkinson, supra note 381, at 174 (discussing goal of forming a collective public IP asset database, “so that public-sector researchers can be informed about FTO [freedom to operate] obstacles at the initiation of their research”).
that restriction or elimination of the right to retain title to any subject invention will better promote the policy and objectives of this chapter.”628 The policy and objectives of the Act include:
[T]o use the patent system to promote the utilization of inventions arising from federally supported research or development
area.
As currently drafted, the Bayh-Dole Act requires the government to designate a case of exceptional circumstances at the time of the government’s award of funding, which could be difficult.630 At that time, the government may not know whether particular federally funded research will result in a research tool or not.631 The NIH Working Group recommends that the NIH use this authority as a means to ensure broad dissemination of research tools.632 However, adopting a policy that requires the government to retain title for all inventions created with federal funding may provide disincentives for public and private collaborations to develop research tools with federal funding. Prior to the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act, less than four percent of all government-funded research was commercialized.633 Moreover, a blanket policy reserving title to the
628. 35 U.S.C. 202(a) (ii) (2000).
629. 35 U.S.C. 200.
630. See id. at 202 (a) (ii)
633. See Epstein, supra note 2, at 11.7 (citing Lobenstein, Future of University-Industry Licensing, 25 Les Nouvelles 138 (1990)).
government may result in less commercialization of innovations that are not research tools.
The Bayh-Dole Act also currently provides that in all inventions created with government funding, the government retains “a nonexclusive, non-transferable, irrevocable, paid-up license to practice or have practiced for or on behalf of the United States any subject invention throughout the world . . . .”634 This license allows the government to use any patented research tool in the course of federally sponsored research without liability for patent infringement.635 It is unclear whether this provision applies to samples of research materials and whether the government can authorize use of subject inventions by other recipients of NIH grants.636
These two sections, along with the limited “march in” rights that the government retains, provide evidence of current government policy to secure for the government limited rights to patented inventions created with federal funding. To facilitate the ability of parties to enter patent pools, the Act should be revised to state that the government retains “a non-exclusive, transferable, license to make, use, offer to sell, sell, and import the patented invention throughout the world.” However, the Act should specify that the government will only exercise that right if it is necessary to license those rights to a patent pool to ensure dissemination of a research tool. The Act should further state that the research tool is to be licensed only if the exclusive licensor unreasonably withholds the license from a patent pool. The question of unreasonableness will depend upon whether the potential licensor is attempting to hold up the potential licensees, whether the potential licensor’s right is the last of several rights needed to create a commercial application, and whether the licensor is currently using the technology to develop an application. A patent pool would be defined as the need to pool two or more patented technologies in order to develop a commercial application or follow a particular research agenda to create a commercial application. The government would pay any proceeds from the patent pool to the party holding out. Both the Federal Trade Commission or the Department of Justice is well equipped to evaluate whether a potential licensor is unreasonably withholding a license to a patented research tool from a patent pool.637
634. 35 U.S.C. 202(c) (4) (2000).
637. The DOJ and FTC are particularly well-suited to perform this task considering the current conflict of interest scandal at the National Institutes of Health. See David Labrador,
These changes are justifiable for several reasons. One of the primary justifications for the Bayh-Dole Act is the need for title to inventions to vest in private firms to encourage commercialization of an invention created with government funding.638 However, with research tools, there already exists a market for those tools, and often the creator of a research tool may not use or be equipped to use that tool to develop a commercial application. Thus, providing title to an invention created with government funding might be unnecessary for the continued commercialization of the research tool itself. In addition, the public has already paid once for the research tool and should not be taxed again at a high rate simply because a company that refuses to license government funded proprietary technology has chosen to hold things up. Moreover, the licensor’s rights are still protected and should be protected enough to allow continued investment in the development of research tools. The license is only to be used whenever the licensor is engaged in behavior that unfairly stifles innovation and only when the licensor is refusing to join a patent pool. Additionally, the licensor is still entitled to recover royalties, a factor that should somewhat dampen any disincentive to invent.
The effect of this proposal is substantial because the government currently funds approximately 26% of total research and development in the United States and 58% of research and development in U.S. colleges and universities.639
The proposals of creating a public database and modifying the Bayh-Dole Act promise to provide increased access to research tools to public and private researchers. These proposals should encourage public and private entities to enter patent pools. Patent pools provide an effective, flexible mechanism to transfer rights by limiting valuation, litigation, and enforcement costs.
Perhaps no technological advance in human history promises to provide as much benefit to humanity as recent developments in
Damage Control: A Crackdown to Prevent Conflicts of Interest at the NIH, 291 Scientific American 18-20 (November 2004).
638. See 35 U.S.C. 200.
639. Newberg & Dunn, supra note 89, at 193 (citing Nat’l Sci. Bd., National Patterns of R&D Resources: 2000 Data Update Table 1A at http://www.nsf.gov/sbel/srs/ nsf01309/start.htm) (on file with the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform)
biotechnology. Some of the promises include biotechnological solutions to countless diseases that plague us, such as cancer and heart disease, and to world hunger. However, the very mechanism that spurs development in the biotechnology industry should not be weakened without adequate empirical evidence. A heightened utility requirement, an expanded experimental use exception, or a fair use exception for patent law will undermine the incentives that patents provide to invent, disclose, and innovate.
At best the question of whether a Tragedy of the Anticommons exists or will develop is unclear. However, studies indicate that conditions conducive to the development of an anticommons exist. Accordingly, additional study to determine the effect of government policy on biotechnology innovation is warranted. Moreover, the government should revise the Bayh-Dole Act to encourage biotechnology sector participants to pool patent rights, thus ensuring that government funded technology is accessible, and preserving incentives to invent, disclose, and innovate.
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Home > News > Press releases > LCL deelnemer aan European Code of Conduct voor energie-efficiëntie in datacenters
LCL deelnemer aan European Code of Conduct voor energie-efficiëntie in datacenters
European Commission program to reduce energy consumption and environmental impact of data centers
Diegem / Antwerp / Aalst, October 11, 2018 - The three LCL data centers participate in the "European Code of Conduct for Energy Efficiency in Data Centers" program. This is an initiative of the European Commission's scientific service. The aim is to reduce the energy consumption of data centers in Europe and thus reduce CO2 emissions, reduce global warming and also save costs. In addition to being a participant, LCL is the first data center company in Belgium to also be "endorser". As an "endorser", LCL advises clients on how to use the installations better to save energy.
The IT sector is responsible for up to 2% of global CO2 emissions. Moreover, it is estimated that data centers have the fastest growing ecological footprint from the entire IT sector, including new developments such as cloud computing and digitization. The "European Code of Conduct" for data centers was designed to limit the increasing energy consumption of data centers and to reduce the impact on the environment, economy and energy security. The program sets out ambitious standards that inform and encourage participants to reduce their energy consumption in a cost-efficient manner, without impeding the critical function of data centers. The UN report this week showed that "far-reaching and unseen" changes are needed to achieve the climate target.
LCL is approved as a participant in the program. For example, the data center company promises to adopt the standards of the code of conduct in a continuous improvement process. For the application process, LCL has carried out an energy zero measurement and audit to identify the savings options. In addition, LCL has submitted an action plan. The next step is to implement the action plan and regularly monitor energy consumption. To conduct the audit and prepare the action plan, LCL called on the advice of the sustainable IT consultancy company Carbon3IT.
"The aim is to be even more aware of the consumption of our data centers and their impact on the environment," says managing director Laurens van Reijen. “Data centers are major users, but they are also indispensable. That is why we need to think about ways to optimize its energy efficiency. We now have a better view of our energy consumption and proactively think about future actions to control it. The first domain we focus on is making cooling more energy efficient. The results of our efforts can already be seen there. ”
The power usage effectiveness (PUE) is calculated by dividing the total consumption of the data center by the energy consumption of the IT equipment (servers, storage, network). The closer that number 1 approaches, the more energy-efficient the data center. The PUE of LCL has fallen by 5 to 7% since the start of the application process.
First data center company in Belgium as Code of Conduct "Endorser"
In addition, LCL is the first data center company in Belgium to also be "endorser": promoter and advisor of its customers' code of conduct. The organization provides best practice guidelines for energy management. "There will be more and more rules for IT companies," says van Reijen. “We are happy to advise our customers on the best practices they can implement to save energy and reduce CO2 emissions. We are already looking forward to the new guidelines on the ecological design of servers that the committee is currently working out. That way our customers can consciously buy energy efficient servers. "
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Sports Ex-Arsenal player, Emmanuel Eboue is broke, sleeps on a friend’s floor
Ex-Arsenal player, Emmanuel Eboue is broke, sleeps on a friend’s floor
by Unknown on December 25, 2017 in Sports
Former Arsenal defender, Emmanuel Eboue, cannot afford a washing machine and sleeps on the floor in a friend’s place after suffering a dip in fortunes.
The Ivory Coast’s former player pocketed millions of pounds per year while plying his trade in England, but in a bare-all and heart-wrenching interview with The Mirror, the 34-year-old revealed he had been pushed to the brink of suicide.
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Apart from sleeping on the floor of a friend’s home, Eboue – who also played for Galatasaray and Sunderland, claimed he dodges court bailiffs on a daily basis.
How did Eboue’s fortune changed? The right back, who is currently unable to play football because of ill-health, lost all his assets to his wife Aurelie after a divorce battle.
He was ordered by a judge to transfer his home to Aurelie, so the former Arsenal defender has since hidden from bailiffs for three weeks.
“I can’t afford the money to continue to have any lawyer or barrister. I am in the house but I am scared. Because I don’t know what time the police will come.” Eboue told The Mirror.
“Sometimes I shut off the lights because I don’t want people to know that I am inside. I put everything behind the door.”
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To add to his woes, the 34-year-old has not seen his children since June. Not to mention the fact that his grandfather Amadou Bertin, who raised him throughout his life, died in October.
Eboue spoke about being naive and has warned other young African footballers to learn from the mistakes he made:
“I look back and say ’Emmanuel, you have been naive… why didn’t you think about that before?’ It is hard. Very, very hard. The money I earned, I sent it to my wife for our children.” Eboue said.
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“In Turkey I earned eight million euros. I sent seven million back home. Whatever she tells me to sign, I sign.
“She is my wife. The problems with FIFA were because of people advising me. People who are supposed to care. But it was because of them FIFA banned me
By Unknown at December 25, 2017
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A new deal for Broadway
Volume 119, No. 7July, 2019
Adam Krauthamer
Local 802 President Adam Krauthamer
Happy summer to all! I’m happy to report that Local 802, the Broadway League and the coordinated bargaining partners have entered into a new three-year collective bargaining agreement. The deal features the largest wage increase in the past two decades, plus a 23 percent increase in healthcare contributions and a new option for using a 401(k) retirement plan. The Broadway Negotiating Committee and the Local 802 Executive Board have both unanimously approved the agreement, and as I write this, we anticipate an exciting ratification meeting on June 22 where the negotiating committee and I will present the entire agreement to the Broadway bargaining unit.
Leading up to negotiations with the League, we took surveys of the bargaining unit, which showed that the key priorities were increases to healthcare contributions, higher wages, and better retirement security. Increasing healthcare contributions became even more important once we were notified in late March of a projected $2.7 million deficit at the Local 802 health fund. We believe the new contract meets these key priorities. However, as is the case with all negotiations, each side had to give on certain proposals.
Highlights of the deal include:
Wages: 3.5 percent increases in each year of the contract. This is the largest wage increase in the past two decades.
Health: 15 percent increase in employer contributions in year one, and 3.5 percent increases in each of years 2 and 3. These increases were essential to keeping our health fund on sound financial footing.
Retirement: Establishment of a new 401(k) plan, which will be employee contributory only. With cuts looming at the AFM-EPF, the new 401(k) gives musicians a powerful new way to shore up their retirement security. This year, eligible workers can contribute to their 401(k) up to $19,000 (or $25,000 for those age 50 or older), which lowers their taxable income and allows their investment to grow tax free.
I want to thank the Negotiating Committee for their tireless work on this agreement: Jan Mullen (chair); Tom Monkell (vice chair); Rob Jost; Chris Reza; Kate Spingarn; Justin Vance; Caitlin Warbelow; Jon Weber and Ian Weinberger. Particularly I want to thank Chair Jan Mullen and Vice Chair Tom Monkell for their leadership. Their data-driven approach to the negotiations allowed us to focus on the issues most important to our membership. I want to thank our managing director, Jon Kantor, who was able to help creatively solve many problems presented in the negotiations. Frank Moss, our counsel for the negotiations from the firm Spivak Lipton, brought a wealth of experience and was a great help. Joy Winkler, Theresa Couture and Sarah Koshar were also valuable contributors and they deserve our gratitude.
The real force behind this successful negotiation was the power of organizing – and the credit goes to you, the members. This includes every member of the Broadway bargaining unit who filled out contact cards in January, showed up to meetings in February, helped create and then participated on the contract action team, showed up to Theatre Committee discussions throughout, and everyone who helped support what is just the start of our #802strong campaign. That engagement, excitement, and collective action is what helped deliver this new contract. I would like to personally thank every member of the Broadway bargaining unit who participated.
LOCAL 802 FINANCES
In this issue of Allegro, we are publishing the audited financial reports of the union, including Local 802, the Emergency Relief Fund, and the summary annual report of the Health Fund. This gives members transparency into 802’s finances. As you can see, beginning on page 36 of the print edition, last year left us with a $646,000 deficit, which makes 2018 the fourth year in a row in which Local 802 operated at a deficit. My administration is making a great effort to balance the budget and avoid deficit spending in 2019, which you can read about in Financial Vice President Karen Fisher’s report on page 7. (Karen also reports on our new single engagement classical concert scales.)
PENSION UPDATE
On a related note, the AFM-EPF trustees recently announced that our pension plan is in critical and declining status. This marks the beginning of the process by which our trustees will apply to the U.S. Treasury for cuts to our accrued pension benefits. In pursuing these cuts, the AFM-EPF joins a minority of all multi-employer plans which have taken this drastic step to reduce plan participants’ hard-earned benefits. The cuts are meant to be aligned with the preservation of the pension.
The Executive Board, officers and I believe that the AFM-EPF trustees need to be transparent throughout this process with the members of our union. In March, we asked that the trustees personally appear before the membership of Local 802 to answer member questions about the pension crisis. The trustees turned down this request.
The Executive Board of Local 802 will continue to educate and advocate on behalf of its members. The pension crisis will be a continuing priority of our membership meetings, and we will seek to educate our membership on the cut process and the legislative situation in Washington. The Executive Board also believes that the time has come to add much needed expertise to the AFM-EPF Board of Trustees. As you may know, Local 802 sponsored a bylaw change at the AFM convention. This bylaw proposal mandated that AFM-EPF Trustee Co-Chair Ray Hair appoint two experts, an actuary and an investment professional, to the AFM-EPF board. By the time you read these words, we’ll know whether our bylaw proposal was successful. We’ll give you a full report on the AFM convention in the next issue.
Finally, the Executive Board is urging all members to support S. 833, a bill to amend the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 and the Internal Revenue Code of 1986. This proposed amendment provides that plan participants have a meaningful vote on whether to accept or reject benefit cuts to multi-employer plans in critical and declining status. Current law deprives us of that meaningful vote. S. 833 would ensure that a fair and democratic vote can take place concerning any proposed benefit cuts.
BEST YEAR ON BROADWAY
The Broadway League has released end-of-season statistics for the 2018-2019 season, which began May 28, 2018 and ended May 26, 2019. For the 2018-2019 season, total attendance reached over 14.7 million and Broadway shows yielded over $1.82 billion in grosses, making it the best attended and highest grossing season in Broadway recorded history. All new and continuing productions ran a record total of 1,737 playing weeks.
As a point of reference, 2017-2018 was a 53-week season (most seasons are 52 weeks, but every seventh year, a 53rd week is added to catch up to the calendar year). The 2018-2019 season was 52 weeks. Had last season ended the week prior, this season would have concluded with attendance up 9.5 percent, grosses up 10.3 percent, and playing weeks up 9.3 percent.
Even with one less week, the 2018-2019 season ended with attendance up 7.1 percent over last season’s 53 weeks, grosses up 7.8 percent, and playing weeks up 7.0 percent.
“The trend is clear. Broadway has never been more appealing to so many different people ranging from kids to grandparents and everyone in between. This substantial growth in attendance clearly reflects the large variety of offerings including long running shows, new hit productions and stories relevant to our society today,” said Charlotte St. Martin, president of the Broadway League. “This coupled with the fact that over 50 percent of tickets are priced below $101, the industry is achieving its goal of being more accessible to everyone.”
Broadway attendance in the 2018- 2019 season topped those of the ten professional New York and New Jersey sports teams combined. Broadway surpassed the combined sports teams by over 4.6 million in attendance.
During the 2018-2019 season 38 productions opened which included 13 musicals (11 original, 2 revivals), 21 plays (14 original, 7 revivals) and four special engagements.
CONGRATS TO TONY WINNERS
Congratulations to all those who won a Tony this year, including the musicians of “Hadestown” (which won best musical), “Oklahoma” (which won best revival of a musical) and “Tootsie” (which won best book of a musical). Congrats also to Anaïs Mitchell (who won best original score for “Hadestown”), Nevin Steinberg and Jessica Paz (who won best sound design of a musical, for “Hadestown”), Michael Chorney and Todd Sickafoose (who won best orchestrations for “Hadestown”).
Also, congratulations to Harold Wheeler, who won a special Tony Award for lifetime achievement. Wheeler has been a member of Local 802 since 1967 and has credits on 27 Broadway productions, including “The Wiz,” “Dreamgirls” and “Hairspray,” as well as the current “Ain’t Too Proud.”
As usual, this issue of Allegro has lots of great content, including:
Our cover story, an interview with husband-and-wife team Omar Hakim and Rachel Z (see page 10).
Many musicians have heard of beta blockers to relieve stage fright. But should we actually use them? Don Greene shares his opinion in his column on page 26.
Harvey Mars lets us know the latest news about the Baltimore Symphony – and reminds us that cutting costs is not the answer to preserving artistic integrity (page 17).
We share heartfelt tributes to Sam Pilafian (page 22) and Dr. John (page 21), both members of Local 802.
Please check out plenty of new audition notices on page 9 of the print edition.
Read an update on our Jazz Mentors Jam Session, along with some great photos of young musicians, many of whom are learning about the union for the first time (page 18).
I’m pleased to report that more and more members are contributing to Allegro. In this issue, enjoy stories by Elisabeth Lohninger (page 29), Mark Doyle (page 25) and others. To contribute to Allegro, send an e-mail to Allegro@Local802afm.org.
A NEW CONTRACT FOR ST. LUKE’S
Local 802 and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s ratified a new three-year agreement, expiring Sept. 7, 2021. We took some great photos of a recent rehearsal, and Karen Fisher has more details about the new contract on page 31.
Congratulations to all those who won a Tony this year, including the musicians of “Hadestown,” which won best musical. The Broadway season of 2018-2019 was the best attended and highest grossing in history, yielding over $1.82 billion. Local 802’s new Broadway contract features the largest wage increase for musicians in the past two decades.
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Robert Creeley's SELECTED LETTERS: Not Settling for Happiness
The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley. Ed. Rod Smith, Peter Baker and Kaplan Harris. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. 512 pp. $65.00 Hardback.
It will be difficult for a biographer to do a better job of revealing Creeley and his life than the editors – and of course Creeley himself – have done in this selection. Whether in letters to other writers, his wives or his children, Creeley wrote openly about his often changing views, responses, feelings, hopes and plans. He is often so ingenuously open and self-focused that he discloses even more than he may be aware of – i.e. reading a Creeley letter can be a lot like reading Browning monologue.
The context and tenor of the early letters during which Creeley farmed in New Hampshire, lived in Aix-en-Provence, Mallorca and Black Mountain, NC, will be familiar to those who have read volumes of George Butterick’s ambitious but uncompleted Charles Olson & Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence. It’s a period in which Creeley is aggressively seeking his place in postwar American poetry, searching for mentors and exploring possible connections with his younger contemporaries. Before he has any significant publications he is confidently introducing himself to Williams and Pound, asking for their help, and exchanging views on poetics. He soon discovers more fruitful connections with Cid Corman, Denise Levertov and Olson. These letters mostly concerned with questions of how to write, literary politics and publishing possibilities but are also punctuated with reflections on his poverty, his unhappiness with the places in which he is living, and his embarrassment at not being able to support his young family in a ‘manly’ fashion. What is especially interesting is how he wrestles with himself in these letters, posing various possibilities against one another in both his writing and domestic lives. There’s an obsessive sense of irresolution similar to the one which gives the first decade of his poetry such power.
Throughout he tends to be excited about new poems he has written. But often within a few months he re-reads them and thinks they are weak, facile, slight, too “easy” because they are so similar to ones he has written before. He finds them again a year later – if he hasn’t destroyed them – and is impressed with them. Later when they are published and well received by some of his writer friends his estimation of them rises again. The excitements, self-doubts, conflicted feelings, moments of despair – often caused by the same things that have excited him – tumble one after
Rachel Blau DuPlessis's PURPLE PASSAGES
Senior American poet Rachel Blau DuPlessis has been investigating how the history of English-language modernist poetry came to be mapped, and its poets identified, ranked or excluded, since at least 1985, when she published Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers. Her most recent publication in this historiographic project is Purple Passages: Pound, Eliot, Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley and the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry (U of Iowa P, 2012).
DuPlessis suggests that she could have focused in this book on other or additional male modernist poets without her findings being “significantly changed” (195). Her choices appear to have been not so much assertions of poetic importance as namings of writers who benefited most visibly from the patriarchal assumptions of both our literary and general culture. They’re also namings without blaming. DuPlessis recognizes the enormous advantages that patriarchal position-taking has offered/offers to male poets – the unquestioned right to ‘speak’ for all gender roles and material situations, to pronounce ‘authoritatively’ on all topics, and to be praised for doing so. She notes also how male poets have been not only reluctant to share such advantages with women poets whom they recognized as able – such as Pound with Mina Loy – but have also quarrelled and maneuvered among themselves for the (most) patriarchal mantle. She both regrets the resultant exclusions and envies the male ability – because of the greater social power the general culture still accords to men – to make “imperial” pronouncements. She begins her book’s final paragraph “I wanted (imperially?) to declare the end of the patriarchal era of poetry by the sheer force of these sometimes negative examples and by the temperate if also suspicious empathy that characterizes most of my analysis” (196). That is, as a willing
Poets' Archives
Part of the work of writing my recent biography of Canadian poet bpNichol (aka bpNichol) took me to the special collections department of Simon Fraser University’s W.A.C. Bennett Library, where several deposits of Nichol’s literary and other papers had accumulated since the early 1970s. Most had come from Nichol himself, at least one posthumously from his wife Eleanor, and one or two from others, such as artist Arnold Shives, who had exchanged letters with Nichol in the mid-1960s. At Simon Fraser I discovered that parts the Nichol collection were not only large but relatively complete; the collection contained all but one of the diary-like notebooks he had kept, most of the letters he’d received, most of the outgoing letters that he had begun keeping copies of in the 1970s, and most of the many drafts of his published and unpublished writing. There were 50-60 or more large file boxes of often surprising materials. There was also his comic book collection, a large file of his visual poems, many done in colour, a part if not all of his toy collection, and a collection of audio recordings.
But there seemed to be also significant gaps, perhaps only noticeable to someone who hoped to write a Nichol biography. There was very little from the early years of his life, other than the recollections he had recorded in his
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Loughborough College
National culinary award for college’s young chef
He won a scholarship arranged by the Royal Academy of Culinary Arts for three years of training at the highest level, at establishments such as The Dorchester, The Ritz and Claridge’s.
Zoe Higgins
Loughborough College student James Ganderton, 17, who won the national final of the Teflon Diamond Standards Awards 2015. He is pictured with Loughborough College Head of Service Industries Kim Thorogood (left) and Darren Creed (right), Loughborough College Programme Area Lead for Hospitality, Travel and Aviation.
A LOUGHBOROUGH College student has won the national final of a prestigious culinary competition which took place in London.
James Ganderton, 17, secured the title at the Teflon Diamond Standards Awards 2015 cook off at the Waitrose Cookery School on Wednesday, April 29.
James and fellow college students Parisse Liggett and Daniela Hubickova had already secured three of only 11 coveted places in the final – but then went on to scoop the top three positions.
The day of challenges started with observation and skills tests, followed by the demonstration of a classic dish which competitors were asked to replicate in the afternoon, together with preparing their own traditional dish.
James, who lives in Loughborough, said it was an “incredible day” with an “intense series of challenges”.
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Brits spend more time on social media than in the pub
Gemma Murray
The average British person will spend more than three years of their life updating social media, a new study has found.
The Samsung survey also found that we spend on average eight months laughing, as opposed to 30 hours crying - but five weeks arguing.
And a stereotypical Brit will spend 235 hours waiting in a queue, seven months commuting, and 12 months in the pub - although the data shows that English people will be in their local hostelry for longer than their countryfolk in Scotland, Ireland and Wales.
Those surveyed also believed that their thirties were the happiest time of their lives, which may or may not tie in with that age group’s heavy social media use - the under-40s spending on average one hour 47 minutes per day, as opposed to the 40 minutes spent by the over-65s.
However, pensioners weren’t completely technophobic - a quarter of this age group saying that they used more than one screen for their online activities, although this fell short of the 90 per cent figure overall.
“The 'always-on generation' of under 40's are working longer hours, have their diaries packed with social activities and are glued to multiple screen devices to stay constantly connected to the world via social media,” said Dr Becky Spellman.
Speaking to the Press Association, the social psychologist who conducted the research said: “As we become a generation of people who find it hard to switch off, our brains are adjusting and making us even better multi-taskers.
“Our ability to juggle, manage and process information is growing at a substantial rate.”
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Investigation launched after discovery of contaminated cans at Coca-Cola plant
The Coca-Cola plant at Knockmore Hill, Lisburn. Pic by Google
Coca-Cola and the PSNI have launched an investigation after a shipment of empty drinks cans at the company’s Lisburn plant were found to have been contaminated.
The soft drinks manufacturer hasn’t given any details about the possible source of the contamination, but said it is treating the matter “extremely seriously”.
Stressing that none of its products currently on sale are affected by the contamination, a spokesperson for Coca-Cola said: “We take the safety and quality of our products extremely seriously. We are aware of an incident involving empty cans at our plant in Knockmore Hill, Lisburn. We are treating this matter extremely seriously and are conducting a thorough investigation in cooperation with the PSNI.
“The problem was identified immediately through our robust quality procedures and all of the product from the affected batch was immediately impounded and will not be sold. This is an isolated incident and does not affect any products currently on sale.”
Shipments of empty cans arrive at the Knockmore plant where they are filled and sealed before being sent for sale across Northern Ireland. But it’s understood workers on the night shift last week discovered that a number of cans in one particular shipment had been contaminated.
A PSNI spokesperson commented: “Detectives are investigating an incident at commercial premises in the Lisburn area following reports that a consignment of containers delivered to the premises had been contaminated.
“The investigation is at an early stage and there are no further details at this time.”
The Food Standards Agency said it is aware of a contamination incident at the Knockmore Hill facility, but stressed that there is no evidence to suggest that any affected products have reached the market.
Staff from Lisburn and Castlereagh City Council’s Environmental Health department are also understood to be involved in investigating the incident.
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Facebook delays Home in Europe, wants a stronger 'First' impression
Users in the UK and France will have to wait a bit longer to get their hands on the HTC First. The first smartphone to come preinstalled with Facebook Home has been delayed in those countries while Facebook updates the software to address some negative user feedback.
By Zach Miners , IDG News Service | 24 May 13
Facebook is wise to delay the rollout, one analyst said, rather than release the product to other markets and risk turning people off.
"It's like the old adage, 'You don't get a second chance to make a first impression,'" said Greg Sterling, senior analyst with Opus Research.
"Facebook is trying to maximize Home's potential in these other markets," he said.
Facebook Home is a suite of software that sits on top of the Android OS to put the social network front and center on smartphones. In the U.S. it can be downloaded from the Google Play Store and also comes pre-installed on certain smartphones out of the box, starting with the HTC First.
Home was unveiled last month, but so far it has not exactly been a home run. The software has a rating of 2.3 out of 5 stars in the Play Store, based on about 18,000 reviews. A common complaint concerns the way Home takes control of a user's home screen.
Facebook reported earlier this month that Home had attracted close to a million downloads, though that figure constitutes a small slice of the company's 1 billion-plus user base.
Facebook is working on new versions of the product to address feedback from those first adopters, it said during a recent media briefing. Users have complained about the way Home's app launcher reorganizes their apps, and asked for an easier way to initiate chats.
"There's been a lot of criticism about accessing apps," Sterling said. "Facebook needs to overhaul it pretty substantially to appease those who roasted it."
"While many people love it, we've heard a lot of great feedback about how to make Home substantially better," Facebook said Thursday in a statement.
"As a result, we're focusing the next few months on adding customization features that address the feedback we received," it said.
In the meantime, EE and Orange, the largest carriers in the UK and France, respectively, will hold off on shipping the HTC First. There was no word when it will arrive in those countries.
"We will shortly be contacting those who registered their interest with us to let them know of this decision," an EE spokeswoman said.
The Home software download, meanwhile, was made available globally on April 16 on Android-supported devices, which also include the HTC One X and the Samsung Galaxy S III.
The Home interface puts people's friends, and the content they post, front and center on the user's smartphone. One of the product's chief features is Cover Feed, which replaces the home and lock screen on the smartphone to give users a constantly updated visual display of content curated from their regular News Feed on Facebook.
Zach Miners covers social networking, search and general technology news for IDG News Service. Follow Zach on Twitter at @zachminers. Zach's e-mail address is [email protected]
Box buys iOS app to improve its own
Podcast: Google I/O from an iOS perspective
Does Apple's Online Store redesign reveal future of iOS and Mac OS X?
Samsung sells over 10 million Galaxy S4 smartphones in first month
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Just two sugary drinks per week may raise type 2 diabetes risk
Published Friday 3 November 2017 Published Fri 3 Nov 2017
By Ana Sandoiu
Fact checked by Honor Whiteman
New research — appearing in the Journal of the Endocrine Society — examined 36 existing studies published in the past 10 years to look at the possible effects of sugary drinks on cardiometabolic health.
Sugar-sweetened beverages may pose a serious threat to our cardiometabolic health.
The World Health Organization (WHO) report that at least 19 million yearly deaths are from cardiometabolic disorders – an umbrella term for cardiovascular disease and conditions such as metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes.
In the United States, a study from 2012 reports that in that year, 702,308 people died from a cardiometabolic disorder, and dietary factors such as food and beverages seemed to raise the risk of cardiometabolic mortality.
Another recent study suggested that two soda drinks every day makes consumers 2.4 times more likely to develop diabetes, regardless of whether these beverages contain sugar or not.
However, as the authors of the new research explain, the results of such studies have been deemed "controversial."
So, in the new review, the researchers — led by M. Faadiel Essop, Ph.D., of Stellenbosch University in Stellenbosch, South Africa — decided to investigate overall trends in the findings of 36 studies, spanning over a decade.
The harms of sugary drinks
Essop and colleagues included clinical trials, both controlled and randomized, as well as observational studies in their analysis.
The studies were from the last decade, ending as recently as September 2017, and predominantly examined participants who consumed over five sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) a week – or the equivalent of less than one such drink a day.
Although some of these studies yielded contradictory results, or did not produce enough evidence to support a link between SSBs and cardiometabolic diseases, most of them did reveal a clear association between SSBs and the risk of developing cardiometabolic illnesses.
Overall, the review found a strong correlation between SSBs and metabolic syndrome – a collective name for a range of risk factors that increase the odds of developing cardiometabolic disorders.
These risk factors include a large waistline, a high level of triglycerides (i.e., fats that can be found in our blood), low levels of the "good" kind of cholesterol, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure.
"Most epidemiological studies strongly show that frequent SSB intake contributes to the onset of the [metabolic syndrome] in the long-term," write the authors.
More specifically, a minimum daily consumption of one SSB increased the risk of hypertension, and even as little as two SSBs per week increased the chances of developing type 2 diabetes.
Additional findings include the fact that regular SSB consumption may decrease insulin sensitivity by as much as 17 percent, which explains the raised blood sugar levels.
The senior investigator comments on the findings, saying:
"Sugar-sweetened beverage consumption is steadily rising among all age groups worldwide [...] Our analysis revealed that most epidemiological studies strongly show that frequent intake of these beverages contributes to the onset of the metabolic syndrome, diabetes, and hypertension."
M. Faadiel Essop, Ph.D.
"The findings demonstrate there is a clear need for public education about the harmful effects of excess consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages," Essop adds.
"But our understanding of this topic would benefit from additional research to further clarify how sugar-sweetened beverages affect our health."
"We do see some limitations in the current research on this topic," he concedes, "including a need for longer-term studies and standardized research methods."
Too much salt could increase diabetes risk
Excessive sodium intake may also increase the risk of type 2 diabetes.
Too much soda may raise children's risk of fatty liver disease Consuming high amounts of fructose - particularly from sweetened drinks - has been linked to nonalcoholic steatohepatitis in children and adolescents. Read now
Weight gain in early adulthood linked to health risks later in life Gaining a moderate amount of weight from early to middle adulthood may be associated with an increased risk of chronic disease and premature death. Read now
Your DNA may dictate which diet works for you Different diets work for different people, depending on their DNA, suggests new research. Findings may soon lead to personalized diets. Read now
Diet drinks not 'diet' after all A new review of existing research finds 'no solid evidence' that diet drinks are any better for weight management than full-sugar drinks. Read now
Eating too fast may lead to weight gain, heart disease Japanese-based researchers find that eating too fast may lead to metabolic syndrome, a cluster of risk factors for severe cardiometabolic conditions. Read now
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Mother threatened to tear up teenager's passport if she did not marry, court told
by Hannah Summers
https://www.meforum.org/islamist-watch/55836/mother-threatened-to-tear-up-teenager-passport-if
A teenager from Birmingham has told a court how her mother threatened to tear up her passport if she did not marry a man by whom she had become pregnant at the age of 13.
The girl, who is now 19, said she cried through a wedding ceremony and begged her mother for help after being forced into the 2016 marriage in Pakistan, four years after her pregnancy.
She told jurors that prior to the event her mother, who is charged with two counts of forced marriage, also bribed her with a smartphone. She claimed her mother became angry when she told her she did not want to marry the 33-year-old Pakistani national – a man by whom she had become pregnant on a previous visit in 2012 when she was 13 and he was 29.
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Another illegal rooming house found in Milford
Paul Crocetti, DAILY NEWS STAFF
MILFORD - Officials discovered another overcrowded apartment yesterday, finding numerous violations including three bedrooms in the basement of the two-family house at 10 Cherry St. "It's illegal. It's a rooming house," said Public Health Director Paul Mazzuchelli, standing in the building's basement, which also contained a sink and a mini-fridge. "It's totally in violation of health and building codes, and fire codes, I imagine."
Officials discovered another overcrowded apartment yesterday, finding numerous violations including three bedrooms in the basement of the two-family house at 10 Cherry St.
"It's illegal. It's a rooming house," said Public Health Director Paul Mazzuchelli, standing in the building's basement, which also contained a sink and a mini-fridge. "It's totally in violation of health and building codes, and fire codes, I imagine."
The Health Department will send a letter to Nolfa Salazar, the landlord of the building, requiring she clear up the violations, Mazzuchelli said.
A neighbor's estimate of 20 inhabitants is "probably right on," Mazzuchelli said.
"They have obvious health code violations, it's dangerous to the occupants, but it's also a neighborhood blight," he said. "It's a classic case."
Inspectors last visited the building in 2005 after receiving a complaint about overcrowding, he said.
"At the time, to me, it was being used as a rooming house-type building," Mazzuchelli said. "(Salazar) was told it couldn't be used as a rooming house. I believe it stopped for a little while and then it started up again."
Mazzuchelli and other officials, including Building Inspector Anthony DeLuca and Health Inspector Steven Garabedian made the trip yesterday, after receiving a question about the second floor from RMX, the company performing apartment inspections throughout town.
Another thing that sparked the return visit is RMX representatives could not get into the basement at the time of their visit, Mazzuchelli said.
Two of the basement bedrooms measured about 7 by 8 feet, Mazzuchelli said. A twin-size mattress took up most of the space in each room.
According to Mazzuchelli the minimum size of a bedroom is 70 square feet and if there is a second person in the bedroom, you'd have to add another 50 square feet.
One bedroom is close to the boiler. Another is tucked into a corner near the stairs, has only a mattress for a bed and has no ventilation.
When he went into the third bedroom, Mazzuchelli said a man was in it. The resident told inspectors he pays $200 a month in rent, Mazzuchelli said.
There were pools of water on the floor of the basement, possibly from the rain Thursday, said Loriann Braza-Pallaria, the assistant zoning enforcement officer.
The basement, which had a musty odor, suffers from "chronic dampness," Mazzuchelli said.
"Is this the way to live?" Mazzuchelli said, looking around the basement.
Salazar could not be reached yesterday. Her listed phone number has been disconnected.
On the second floor, officials found four bedrooms where there are only supposed to be three, Mazzuchelli said.
"One of the bedrooms off to the side was a makeshift," he said. "There was also a little baby there too, with her mom."
Inspectors could not get into the first floor of the building, where the occupancy limit is also three bedrooms, Mazzuchelli said.
The Health Department will be in touch with RMX to determine the maximum occupancy limit of the building.
"It's something we're confronting almost every time we go out: bedrooms in the basement," Mazzuchelli said. "They're out there. You can see the need for the continuation of the (inspection) program."
Paul Crocetti can be reached at 508-634-7583 or pcrocett@cnc.com.
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For Syrian bus drivers mayhem, danger, and making a living
By Nigel Wilson | 09/03/2013
As the US considers a strike on Syria and allegations of a chemical weapon attack fly, drivers continue to ferry Syrians around the war-torn country and back and forth across its southern border with Jordan.
For the estimated 1.3 million Syrians living in the safety of Jordan, the trips are perilous, but considered essential. Many return home temporarily to see family members left behind, others to check on property or business assets.
For the drivers, who are mostly Syrian, the job is a financial lifeline in a desolate economy. Syrians who have fled to Jordan aren’t allowed to work officially and jobs are even harder to come by at home.
The crossing point is subject to closure from either side’s border guards and had previously been shut to buses for six weeks due to fighting on the Syrian side. After it reopened in early July, just before the holy month of Ramadan, demand was such that up to four buses left Amman for Syria daily. Today the numbers prepared to travel fluctuate depending on security reports from friends and family in Syria.
One Syrian driver, who requested anonymity, has carried passengers from Jordan to Syria and back for 10 years. His family remains in Syria but he stays in Amman. He continues to drive his bus from the Jordanian capital of Amman, 55 miles from the Syrian border, through the volatile Syrian province of Daraa, where the uprising began, to Damacus. Before the uprising, the route used to be popular with tourists and day-trippers.
“I go to Damascus every four or five days and return the same day. It’s normally fine but sometimes there are problems at the checkpoints,” he says.
The trip from Amman to Damascus used to last two to three hours, but now take eight due to the countless checkpoints in Syria. Ghassan Zaza, the office manager of an Amman-based travel company, says that he used to take 40 dinars from each passenger in order to pay off the checkpoint soldiers.
“As a driver, you’re helpless. Sometimes we had to sit and wait at the border for five hours. We were stopped at Army checkpoints and had to pay. The regime soldiers take money and mobile phones from passengers, anything they want. Even rice, lentils, cigarettes – they take whatever they want,” says Mr. Zaza, who used to shuttle people between Amman, Damascus, and Beirut in a private taxi.
He says his drivers and passengers are frequently robbed at gunpoint and the buses have been fired on many times as they traverse contested areas.
The man who continues to drive his bus to and from Syria said the price of a ticket has increased because he has to pay off soldiers, but he still takes home the same money as he did before the conflict.
“I’ve never thought about stopping. I have a family in Syria. If I quit, they would starve. I’m not worried about my safety – death is death, it’s written.”
Faith of this kind is rare among the drivers at Zaza’s Alia Travel, which runs buses and private taxis from the Jordanian capital to Damascus and Aleppo. He said that 50 drivers have changed routes away from Syria since 2011, instead driving to safer destinations in Saudi Arabia or Iraq.
“Our buses and cars have been shot at. We’ve lost five drivers in the last two years. The latest death was just before Ramadan. The motorway to Daraa can be very dangerous,” he says.
Until recently, his drivers had no other option, because the alternative safer route through Sweida, a Syrian town that has largely avoided the fighting, had been closed by the Free Syrian Army for strategic reasons. It was reopened a week ago but the viability of the route remains unpredictable.
He ended his trips after witnessing the Syrian Army’s takeover of Khirbet Ghazaleh, a town on the main route linking Damascus to Jordan.
“It was the worst time of my life. The Syrian army were attacking the town and had taken control. They were burning houses, destroying everything. I saw soldiers leading families from their homes. Soldiers were dragging half dressed women into their vehicles. They kept me there for two hours and eventually I got out. I already knew that every time I left Amman that there was a possibility I wouldn’t come back. After that day I stopped driving,” he says.
Still, the buses continue to run. On Wednesday about 20 Syrians boarded the midnight bus to Damascus, while a small crowd lingered on the pavement, saying emotional goodbyes. Among them was a young Syrian man who was going home for the first time in two years.
“I know it’s dangerous but I want to see my mother and brothers. I’m a bit scared because I posted anti-regime things online but I’m not worried by reports about chemical weapons and the Americans preparing attacks. I just need to get home.”
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The Minneapolis Foundation generously supports MinnPost's Community Sketchbook coverage. Learn why.
School-readiness report: Poverty biggest hurdle for Minnesota’s vulnerable children
By Cynthia Boyd | 12/09/2013
CORBIS/Walter Bibikow
Early Head Start and Head Start are serving more children than ever before but cannot keep up with the growth of eligible children in poverty.
A new statewide report on school readiness shows many of Minnesota’s youngest citizens face hurdles that affect their learning in kindergarten and beyond.
At the root of the problem is poverty, says Richard Chase, key author of the first School Readiness Report, which was prepared by Wilder Research for the Minnesota Office of Early Learning.
Not only do one in five of the states’ 420,000 infants, toddlers and preschoolers live in poverty, but of that group about 30 percent are children of color whose poverty rate is a steep 61 percent, Chase says.
Yet the data shows not enough of those youngsters are getting the help they need to succeed.
“We are failing many of our kids, especially in communities of color. It’s sort of an indictment of how much we do not invest in all communities. Why is there no urgency in supporting the children who are most vulnerable?” Chase said in an interview.
The report, intended to set up guidelines to help monitor the state’s progress toward the goal of having every child ready for kindergarten by the year 2020, reflects disparities in education, health and social well-being for these children.
That “place[s] their own and our state’s future prosperity at risk,’’ wrote Chase, the senior research manager at Wilder, in a blog.
“Early childhood policies and practices are too metro-centric, too white-centric and too focused on education and literacy as opposed to the whole child,’’ Chase told me, speaking from almost two decades experience collecting, studying and measuring data concerning the healthy development of young children.
Early childhood, he said is the time to prevent achievement and opportunity gaps for children and to ensure children are brought up in safe, secure environments rich in language and learning to ensure healthy brain development and to help them attain their full potential. Otherwise, disadvantage leads to more disadvantage, he said.
For the report, researchers developed “indicators” of kindergarten-readiness that range from mothers’ mental health and access to prenatal care to a child’s access to preschool education and high-quality childcare. They then gathered U.S. Census and state data to draw a full picture of how Minnesota’s youngest citizens are doing.
The report is not surprising in its conclusions, Chase said, but it is a comprehensive look at Minnesota children under age 6 and shows the need to “change the mindset from closing the achievement gap to promoting opportunity as early as possible.”
In fact, the report was news to some last week. Two early childhood education experts I talked with had not seen it. One, after being emailed the report for comment, said the findings are not new.
“The information is consistent with the 2012 and 2013 reports produced by the Minneapolis Foundation, entitled “One Minneapolis,’’ Jeffrey Hassan, co-author of “Best in Class; How We Closed the 5 Gaps of Academic Achievement,’’ responded by email.
According to a 2010 report, only 60 percent of all Minnesota’s kindergartners “demonstrate readiness for school” with children from lower-income families, Latino children and American Indian children having the lowest rates of kindergarten-readiness.
Further, only one-third of 3-year-olds receive the health and developmental screenings that could head off future problems.
Chase points to other highlights.
In 2011 data, access to adequate or better prenatal care, which can affect a child’s healthy birth and development, is 12 to 37 percentage points lower for mothers of color than for white mothers.
Mothers of color report higher rates of depression, which affects their children as well. “A mother’s mental health can impact her baby’s brain development and the healthy attachment between parent and child which can affect the child’s physical and mental health and ability to learn,’’ Chase wrote. Overall, about 12 percent of babies have mothers with a history of depression, he said, compared to 2010 data that shows 18 percent of African-American and 28 percent of American Indian mothers reporting depression.
“Early Head Start and Head Start are serving more children than ever before but cannot keep up with the growth of eligible children in poverty.” In 2013, those preschool educational programs had only enough slots to enroll about 19 percent of low-wealth children under 6, he said.
“Children of color have higher rates of out-of-home placement.” In 2011 about 3,000 children under age 6 were living in “out-of-home placement or foster care with large disparities for American Indian and black children,” Chase wrote, often because of “reported abuse and neglect.”
“It’s time to stop documenting these things and actually take steps to prevent these disparities. They’re not inevitable, they’re preventable,” Chase said, pointing to the positive efforts of the Northside Achievement Zone in Minneapolis, St. Paul Promise Neighborhood and smaller, early childhood initiatives around the state.
Closing the achievement gap: a new vision for making it happen
By Craig Wethington | 11/12/2013
If we are to realize Minnesota’s potential to lead and succeed in the 21st century, we must address the health and education disparities that limit the ability of our children to succeed in school.
Rybak’s passion for gap-closing efforts has ed community applauding his job choice
By Beth Hawkins | 10/31/2013
“I think there’s honestly no public figure who cares more about kids,” said Pam Costain, CEO of AchieveMPLS.
Wilder Research
Cynthia Boyd
Cynthia Boyd, MinnPost's Community Sketchbook reporter, covers poverty, homelessness, mental health, and other topics related to the social and economic challenges facing communities. Community Sketchbook is sponsored by The Minneapolis Foundation. Email Cynthia at cboyd@minnpost.com.
Submitted by Rebecca Hoover on 12/09/2013 - 12:19 pm.
Plenty of money for arts but not enough for hungry babies, kids
I think too many of our legislators and our governor have lousy values. They manage to fund the arts but not take care of our babies, toddlers and children. These politicians have the wrong values.
Submitted by julie moore on 12/09/2013 - 12:20 pm.
What do we need to do to get them ready? Get high school students to do some free child care to expose them to eduated students? Ask those high school students to spend the time reading and drawing with them? It seems that there are some free resources out there (reading times, library programs, etc) but the parents either can’t, don’t know how, or don’t want to take the young children to the programs that could all help ready them. There is plenty of info on why this is happening, but not enough in how to fix it.
Submitted by Pat Thompson on 12/09/2013 - 03:25 pm.
It’s poverty
The answer is it’s poverty itself, and the stress and scarcity-response it causes. Read (or just google to get the gist of) the book Scarcity by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir.
Anything done at the school, or even the preschool, level will only be bandaids on the real problem.
Jobs with living wages. Mental health support. Prenatal care. It’s not a single magic bullet. And it’s definitely not more standardized tests.
Submitted by Rachel Kahler on 12/09/2013 - 12:47 pm.
teacher’s unions!
Somehow, I missed where terrible teachers and unions cause kids to not get early medical care and head start. Wait…you mean it’s not there? Could it be that, when you look at the facts, it really is a lack of resources that’s disadvantaging the poor, and not how new hotshot grads wanting to pad their resumes, as opposed to well trained teachers, are going to somehow reverse the disadvantages? This doesn’t surprise me.
Thanks, Rachel.
Even in the Dark Ages, when I first started teaching, it was widely understood that the primary factor affecting educational achievement was the socioeconomic position of the child’s family. That doesn’t seem to have changed dramatically in the decades since. Oddly enough, most commentators on the failures of public education who call themselves “conservative” don’t seem much interested in this…
Submitted by Greg Kapphahn on 12/09/2013 - 06:32 pm.
Of Course This is the Case!
This result is not surprising to anyone who pays any attention to how “the other half lives” especially since The Wilder Foundation seeks to lift up and underline, as objectively as possible, the plight of those less fortunate than most of the rest of us,…
whereas MOST of the rest of the proposals for educational “reforms” which will somehow magically overcome the challenges faced by disadvantaged youngsters,…
are produced by foundations and “Think Tanks” being sponsored by those who are seeking to bust teacher’s unions (simply because they have the audacity to BE unions), massively reduce the cost of our already-underfunded public education systems, pad their own pockets selling states and school systems their latest standardized tests, high tech educational equipment and/or create a privatized, for profit school system by which they can profit massively after they have dismantled the public schools.
Of course we may all wish for universal excellence among the staff of our public schools, but the good old normal curve tells us an important truth: that for every wonderfully excellent teacher or principal, there will be another teacher or principal who is barely adequate to the task,…
with the vast majority of staff falling somewhere between those two extremes.
This is human nature and is also the case in every work place, in every family, and among the parents in every neighborhood. To expect universal excellence, especially considering the complexity of the task of teaching and managing school staffs, and pay that does not come close to matching what equally skilled and talented people can attain in private industry, is every bit as realistic as expecting that every child will have excellent support for their education at home or expecting that every student will walk in the door motivated to be a high achiever each and every day.
Teachers, students and administrators always have and always will have their flaws (as will people in every other field of endeavor).
To expect perfection in anything human is complete folly. Anyone who claims to be able to offer it to you is trying to sell you something as overpriced and useless as the snake oil peddled by traveling hucksters in earlier days.
Submitted by Alec Timmerman on 12/09/2013 - 09:30 pm.
The powers that be don’t want to end poverty
Look at the hundreds of millions being spent by the most powerful people in our culture to make sure that poverty is not part of the conversation. Our whole education agenda, dictated by the Walton’s/Gates/Koch’s and executed by educelebririties is predicated on the idea that if you even bring up poverty as an issue you are an excuse making racist. I am honestly even surprised that Minnpost would publish something that says poverty might be part of the he problem.
The Number one education reform the Walton’s and their ilk could provide would be to pay our kids parents a living wage. They could do it tomorrow, but it is cheaper to purchase local school boards and superintdents than to actually pay their workers. And they get the bonus of pretending to be education supporters and paragons of equality.
I have a hard time seeing our way out of poverty when there is a such a powerful force so heavily invested in telling us not t consider it.
A lot of these kids are hungry too
And let’s not forget that a lot of youngsters in Minnesota suffer from hunger and malnutrition. I used to live in a poorer neighborhood and the little kids were always looking for food. This is one reason I cannot overlook the callousness involved in funding arts while claiming we cannot afford to address hunger and malnutrition.
Submitted by Jerilyn Jackson on 12/11/2013 - 08:59 pm.
Arts? What about the Vikings..
Our priorities are very skewed, but don’t blame “the arts.” At least they aren’t owned by billionaires who are out to increase their already enormous profits by reaching into the taxpayer’s purse. Theaters, museums, music performers, etc. are largely nonprofit institutions who exist for the benefit of the community (yes, they do add real value) . And philanthropists play a big part in supplementing any financial role of the state. We can support the arts AND feed our hungry citizens.
Submitted by Joe Nathan on 12/16/2013 - 08:50 pm.
Lots of urgency that Wilder missed
Actually, there is a lot of urgency on this – some of us have been promoting high quality early childhood education for low income kids for decades (even before Art Rolnick, then of the fed discovered the issue with assistance from McKnight Foundation). See, for example, the National Governors Association 1985 (that’s right, 1985) report, Time for Results. See efforts by “Think Small” – a coalition of groups in the Twin Cities.
Let’s recognize that the DFL controlled legislation decided to allocate DOUBLE the funds for all day kg – for even the most affluent kids in this state – as they allocated for scholarships for low income families to use for early childhood programs. All day kg is ok but Think Small shared research showing that early childhood programs are a far higher priority.
Several legislators tried to tie more $ to early childhood programs to funding for the Viking stadium but that was rejected. People who want to work on this should contact “Think Small”
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The Iranian uprising and Europe’s shameful silence
January 6, 2018 January 6, 2018 Melanie
The Iranian uprising and Europe’s silence In all the years of anxiety over what to do about the greatest sponsor of global terrorism, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the hope has been that the Iranian people would overthrow the brutal theocracy that has subjugated them.
The past week has seen the most significant popular uprising in Iran since the regime took power in 1979. Mass demonstrations erupted in an unprecedented spread across the country. At least 22 demonstrators have been killed and more than 1000 arrested.
Now the head of the regime’s Revolutionary Guards says the protests are over. Given the viciousness and brutality of the Guards and the Basij security militia, this is certainly possible; but even if so, this is unlikely to be the end of the resistance.
For the revolt is more important even than the last big protest, the so-called Green Revolution in 2009. That was against voting irregularities and president Ahmadinejad. This time it has been against the regime itself.
The people have been calling for “Death to Khamenei,” Iran’s supreme leader, “Death to Rouhani,” Iran’s supposedly moderate president, and to “End the clerical regime!” Revolutions against tyrannical oppressors require extraordinary levels of courage and determination. We know from Soviet Union dissidents how desperately such people need to know the world is with them and to hear their oppressors put on notice that their behavior is being watched.
The very worst thing for those pitting their lives against tyranny is silence from the rest of the world. That’s what tyrants depend upon to stamp out the sparks of freedom.
President Trump stepped up to the plate by repeatedly tweeting support and encouragement to the protesters and issuing warnings designed to undermine and weaken the regime.
But from all those progressive folk in the West who never stop parading their anti-fascist credentials and signaling their support for the persecuted and for human rights there has been… silence.
The media tried to dismiss the uprising as merely an economic protest. Instead of condemning the regime for killing and jailing protesters, the media condemned Trump for supporting them.
The British and EU governments, with their vast and sordid financial ties to the regime, have given zero support to the revolt, offering merely bromides about the need to avoid loss of life. In the US, former Obama administration staffers have been desperately playing down the uprising.
Obama’s Middle East coordinator Philip Gordon called on Trump “to keep quiet and do nothing” in response to the protests.
The Iranians, he claimed, wouldn’t want Trump’s support. His threat to end the nuclear deal, his unconditional support for “Iran’s biggest adversaries, Saudi Arabia and Israel” and his recent recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital would give the Iranians reasons to unite against him.
Gordon thus stupidly conflated the Iranian people with the Iranian regime. It’s the regime that is against America on all these issues. The Iranian people, by contrast, have no intrinsic prejudice against Israel, have no reason to reject the recognition of Jerusalem and are unlikely to lose sleep over the ending of the nuclear deal, nor America’s alliance with the regime’s foes in Saudi Arabia.
For the protesters were also shouting: “No to Gaza, no to Lebanon! Our life only for Iran!” They don’t support the regime’s aim of regional and global domination. They want Iran to be run for the benefit of Iranians.
For this, they desperately need Trump’s support. They want to know that the US won’t support the regime. Obama did that, and it hurt the Iranian people.
Obama believed the only reason Muslims attacked the West was that it had oppressed them. If the West offered Iran the hand of friendship, he suggested, it would turn into a model global citizen.
So he was determined to empower Iran, and Britain and the EU – driven as ever by a combination of greed and funk – fell into line behind him.
Obama thus bent over backward to give Iran a free pass. According to Politico, his administration stymied an FBI-led operation to shut down Hezbollah’s drug-running, terrorism- financing racket.
In the 2016 prisoner swap deal with Iran, he released several men who his own law enforcement agencies believed posed a danger to national security.
And in the 2009 Green Revolution, Obama abandoned the Iranian people by refusing to give the protesters support.
All of this was to secure the nuclear deal – which has merely empowered Iran to use the money released by sanctions relief to strengthen its terrorist infrastructure and step up its malign and aggressive meddling in the rest of the region.
The Iranian protesters offer the one hope that a catastrophic conflagration can be averted by regime change from within.
But the Western Left doesn’t want them to succeed – because that would shine the harshest possible light on the moral bankruptcy of the Obama administration that the Left supported to the hilt.
More unthinkable still, it would mean giving some credit to Donald Trump. But the Left’s unhinged hatred of the US president will allow nothing – not even the liberation of an oppressed people and the safety of the world – to challenge their unshakable conviction that he can never do a single thing that is good.
If the Iranian uprising is stamped out, it will be because of the absence of support from Britain and Europe. Their silence makes them complicit with a genocidal regime at war with the West and has caused them shamefully to betray a brave people fighting for its freedom.
Our crazy world
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July 14, 2019 July 17, 2019 Melanieappeasement, Iran, nuclear deal, Sir Kim Darroch
Today’s papers are full of the political fall-out from the leak of undiplomatic messages which caused...
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The US Army War College surrenders to intimidation
July 5, 2019 July 6, 2019 MelanieCAIR, Raymond Ibrahim, US Army War College
Raymond Ibrahim is the author of an important new book about Islam, “Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen...
The dark shadow Iran is casting on the world
July 5, 2019 MelanieIran, Israel, North Korea, President Trump
In Israel, as the drumbeats of war grow ever louder, people are preparing with a mixture...
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Memset wins at fifth PC Pro awards
Guildford, Surrey – 5th October 2010 – Memset, the UK's leading virtual machine cloud provider, has been awarded the PC Pro Best Web Host for a fantastic fifth time at this year’s PC Pro Reliability and Service Awards held on Wednesday last week.
These awards are the most comprehensive guide to customer support and product reliability in the UK and Europe and are compiled from the UK’s largest independent survey of IT customer satisfaction.
In each category, PC Pro asks its readers to rate the reliability of the products they have bought, customer support, and how satisfied they are – in particular, if they would buy from that company again. All the feedback is then collated to produce a numeric rating, and the company with the highest rating wins.
On collecting the award at the ceremony, Kate Craig-Wood, Founder and MD of Memset, said: “We are delighted to have won this award for an amazing fifth time, it’s fantastic. We are so grateful to all of our customers for their continued support, especially those who took the time to vote for us.”
“Our continued success in the PC Pro awards is down to the Memset crew, for their unwavering dedication and hard work over the last 5+ years,”concluded Craig-Wood.
PC Pro said: “Memset has undoubted pedigree when it comes to web hosting: this is the company's fifth successive PC Pro award. The UK-based host provides top-quality service to match its unmatched reliability, according to our survey.”
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UNU speaks truth to power at the #SDGGlobalFest
by UNU-MERIT
Africa, communications, SDGs, sustainability
Prof. @shyamaramani of @UNUMERIT representing the UNU community at @SDGglobalFest in #Bonn! She spoke on the panel for “The Power of the Collective: Leave No One Behind”. #ACT4SDGs #GlobalGoals pic.twitter.com/bsVjYMLjNN
— UN University (@UNUniversity) March 23, 2018
‘Leave no one behind’ is one of the boldest commitments in the UN’s 2030 Agenda. But what exactly does this mean? UNU-MERIT’s Prof. Shyama Ramani and Dr. Maty Konte joined the Global Festival of Action for Sustainable Development in Bonn, March 2018, to explain our work and efforts across the board. In so doing they stressed the importance of research, outreach, and evidence-based policymaking to ensure that truly no one is left behind.
Leading a plenary session, Prof. Ramani said that UNU’s holistic approach, working on all SDGs while respecting the interconnections, will be key to achieving the agenda. Yet research alone, even world-class research, is not enough. It has to be filtered, translated, made relevant to funders at the top of the pyramid and voters at the bottom. It has to be made digestible and accessible for both policymakers and the general public in a virtuous circle that reinforces scientific literacy.
The control and flow of knowledge is critical in this regard – but never has it been so challenged or manipulated as in our ‘post-truth’ era, said Ramani. This has led to real-world tradeoffs in power relations, with knowledge used as currency or ammunition at all levels: from family circles to civil society to the international community.
As the fine line blurs between opinion and fact, research and expertise are at risk of being swept away by the media tsunami. One answer is to shore up the scientific method and peer review process as the ‘gold standard’ in the quest for ‘truth’. But that is only half the battle.
As a global think tank and research network, UNU must improve its communications and connections to both citizens and decision makers: i.e. broadcasting and ‘narrowcasting’. In other words, make sure our research is widely read, well understood, and that it ultimately feeds into policymaking. To this end, Ramani pointed to various UNU initiatives including ‘Site4Society’, the ‘UNU Jargon Buster’, and the ‘Reach and Turn’ science reporting series.
Helping girls and women in Africa
Later in the day Dr. Maty Konte was interviewed on UN WebTV for the festival’s SDG Studio (followed by Dr. Mathew Kurian from UNU-FLORES). Speaking about her upcoming book on ‘Women and Sustainable Human Development – Empowering Women in Africa’, Konte stressed the dual importance of education and political participation, i.e. the need to mobilise knowledge. This means better schools, better opportunities for girls, and fairer, more transparent political processes for women.
The key message of the book is that women will not be empowered by focusing solely on SDG5, for gender equality. Rather, said Konte, we need to put women at the centre of ALL the SDGs. We need to mainstream their participation, in a kind of ‘gender full spectrum‘ approach. She added that the book focuses on Africa because that is one of the regions where women have clearly been ‘left behind’. Finally, Konte weighed up the ambitious timeframe of the SDGs, saying that the agenda is not likely to be achieved by 2030 — although 2050 may be possible. Watch the full interview here.
FESTIVAL VIDEO
Please share your thoughts on our Facebook page and our Twitter feed.
Global Festival of Action for Sustainable Development
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Talk of transitional justice is usually reserved for countries emerging from civil wars or brutal dictatorships, but Cedeño and others say Venezuela’s political crisis requires the same type of creative thinking.
Read More: Venezuela’s top lawyer breaks with Maduro
For the moment, the discussion remains largely academic. Paz Activa has tried to reach out to civil-society organizations that are aligned with the government with little success. But as pressure continues to build in the country, plans for a post-Maduro future are likely to gather steam.
The initiative comes as both the opposition and the Maduro administration are digging in amid widespread protests that have claimed almost 70 lives and brought large swaths of the country to a standstill.
Protesters are demanding early elections, the release of political prisoners and humanitarian aid. Maduro, in turn, is pushing an unpopular plan to overhaul the constitution, and says he will stay in power until his term ends in January 2019. He has also publicly dismissed the protesters, who have sometimes resorted to lethal violence, by labeling them as terrorists.
Vice President Mike Pence spoke out against the Venezuelan government at the Conference for Central America at FIU on June 15, 2017.
Even as there is an increasing number of defections within the ruling party — most notably the attorney general — analysts say many in the governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) are rallying around the president out of fear of what the legal implications might be if he loses power.
Some high-ranking officials would likely face civil and criminal charges for human rights violations.
Maduro came to power in 2013 after winning a tight and contested election to replace Hugo Chávez, who died that same year from an undisclosed form of cancer.
In a recent letter to subscribers, Risa Grais-Targow, an analyst with the New York-based Eurasia Group, said that the political “exit costs remain high, and even if chavista leaders are uncomfortable with the current situation, a transition is not necessarily imminent.”
Read More: Mormon missionary jailed in Venezuela waits for his day in court
And while the nation is ailing under hyper-inflation and food shortages, Maduro still has an approval rating of near 20 percent.
Marco Antonio Rodriguez-Acosta, a Caracas-based lawyer working on the justice initiative, said the idea is not to promote impunity or provide amnesty for serious crimes, but rather to explore forms of “restorative justice” instead of “punitive justice” as a way of overcoming the political impasse.
Venezuelan opposition leader Henrique Capriles tweeted out a video, on June 13, 2017, that allegedly shows a group of protesters jumping into a canal and swimming to safety as a Venezuelan official opens fire from the shore.
“Transitional justice is an answer to the systematic human rights violations that we’ve suffered for the last 18 years,” since Chávez first took power, he said. “The primary objective is to recognize the victims, promote peace and reconciliation and live in democracy.”
But the justice scheme also provides a release valve for officials — police officers, judges — who have committed crimes under orders and who now fear the repercussions.
“It’s a way to lessen the load for those who have to pay for their actions,” he said.
Even so, Rodriguez-Acosta acknowledges that Venezuela presents something of a chicken-or-the-egg problem.
“We have to have a political and social transition before we can have transitional justice,” he said. “That’s the first thing that has to happen.”
Latin America offers numerous examples of how transitional justice helped heal old wounds — for example, in the wake of military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina. Closer to home, Colombia is implementing an alternative justice scheme as it tries to reintegrate some 7,000 former guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
In Colombia’s case, ex-combatants who confess to their crimes and make amends to their victims can avoid jail time, even as they serve alternative sentences similar to community service. The deal has been controversial, but President Juan Manuel Santos says it was the only way to bring the FARC to the table.
The Colombian model is one of the experiences Paz Activa is studying.
Jorge Narvaez is with Colombia’s Foundation for Reconciliation, a nonprofit that has been a pioneer in trying to help Colombia recover from more than a half century of civil conflict. He said that once political violence sets in, as it has in Venezuela, it can be very difficult to break the cycle.
Read More: Hard times for Venezuelan seniors
The organization promotes events where victims and their aggressors can meet face to face. It’s less about forgiveness and more about understanding each other and learning to live together, Narvaez said.
“When societies like Venezuela become so fractured by rage and resentment, [society] is destroyed,” he said. “You have to rebuild culture and civility.”
And those face-to-face meetings are key, he said. But in Venezuela, neither side is talking to the other in any meaningful way. The country’s security forces have stepped up efforts to break up the protests. Demonstrators are increasingly turning to violence, arson and looting as they try to defend their constitutional rights.
“We shouldn’t have to have a civil war to start talking about transitional justice,” said Cedeño, of Paz Activa. “We need to help create a change in the regime that doesn’t generate more victims.”
Anti-government protesters set fire to debris in an attempt to block roads in the Las Mercedes area of Caracas, Venezuela, on May 31. Members of the opposition party Voluntad Popular (People’s Will), leading the protests, say that President Nicho
Follow me on Twitter @jimwyss
Anti-government demonstrators throw rocks at government forces during protests in Caracas, Venezuela, Wednesday, June 14, 2017. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators have taken to the streets demanding new elections as the nation battles triple-digit inflation, crippling food and medical shortages and rising crime Ariana Cubillos AP
New footage released shows massacre in Venezuela
USA: Venezuela-Negotiation crisis
Trump refuses to grant TPS to Venezuelans in U.S., senators say
By Antonio Maria Delgado
The administration of President Donald Trump is refusing to grant Venezuelans Temporary Protected Status, despite claiming that the South American country is ruled by a dangerous dictatorial regime, Sens. Dick Durbin and Bob Menendez said Tuesday.
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New video shines light on massacre of indigenous group by Venezuelan government
Amid confusion and silence, Norway says Venezuelan political talks are continuing
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Remittances don’t provide enough in Venezuela, so these elderly parents now live abroad
Ex-Venezuela spy chief says Maduro ordered illegal arrests
Venezuela forces killed thousands, then covered it up, U.N. says
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Education and Arts
Engineering and Built Environment
Biomedical Sciences and Pharmacy
Medicine and Public Health
Academic Division
Dr Kelvin Kong
Dr Kelvin Kong, an otolaryngology, head and neck surgeon, is passionate about addressing the disparity in health outcomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous children.
» Find out more
Professor Julie Byles
Ageing and Gender
Professor Julie Byles is the Director of the University of Newcastle's Priority Research Centre for Gender, Health and Ageing. A key activity of the Centre is the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health which aims to identify biological, psychosocial and environmental factors affecting the health of women from all walks of life.
Professor Marjorie Walker
Professor Walker’s work explores several facets: pathology in the gut in dyspepsia and irritable bowel syndrome, the relationship between brain and gut health in gastroenterology, coeliac disease and also unique biomarkers in prostate cancer.
Dr Rebecca Wyse
Behavioural Science - Childhood Obesity
Dr Rebecca Wyse is a behavioural scientist with the career objective of reversing increasing population rates of childhood obesity. Her applied research involves settings-based interventions in schools and childcare services to facilitate healthy behaviours in the people within them.
Dr Luke Wolfenden
Behavioural Science - Chronic Disease
Dr Luke Wolfenden's research into the modifiable risks of chronic health conditions and injury is helping the community to improve their overall wellbeing.
Professor Billie Bonevski
Behavioural Science - Smoking Cessation
Professor Billie Bonevski is a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Career Development Fellow and Behavioural Scientist whose smoking cessation programs are being implemented by Cancer Councils across the nation.
Conjoint Professor Peter Gibson
Cardiovascular Medicine and Haematology
Professor Peter Gibson is a world leading authority in asthma, respiratory physician at the John Hunter Hospital and co-director of the Priority Research Centre for Asthma and Respiratory Diseases.
Dr Geoff Isbister
Clinical Toxicology
Clinical researcher Dr Geoff Isbister courts controversy as he challenges time-honoured beliefs about the treatments given to envenomed patients.
Professor John Attia
Clinical Epidemiology
Professor Attia's research expertise includes clinical, molecular, and genetic epidemiology methods. He is also Director of the Clinical Research Design, IT and Statistical Support (CReDITSS) Unit.
Professor Jennifer Martin
Optimising choice, dose and timing of medicines for a particular patient are the focus of Professor Jennifer Martin's clinical work and research career.
Laureate Professor Nick Talley
Laureate Professor Nick Talley is a neurogastroenterologist, a specialist in unexplained gut disorders affecting nerves and muscles such as irritable bowel syndrome, severe indigestion and slow stomach emptying, conditions which affect millions of people.
Professor Christine Paul
Health Behaviour Sciences
A/Prof Chris Paul is an NHMRC Career Development Fellow with the School of Medicine and Public Health, Priority Research Centre for Health Behaviour and Hunter Medical Research Institute. Her work spans preventive health issues and provision of patient care.
Dr Mariko Carey
Health Behaviour Interventions
Dr Mariko Carey is a NHMRC Translating Research into Practice (TRIP) Fellow working within the Priority Research Centre for Health Behaviour. Key research interests include health behaviour interventions, measurement of patient reported outcomes, multidisciplinary care, systems of care, evidence-based practice and quality of care.
Dr Kym Rae
As Director of the Gomeroi gaaynggal Arts Health and Research Programs, Dr Kym Rae creates a link between community and research scientists, working together to facilitate tangible improvements to Indigenous perinatal outcomes.
Dr Gillian Gould
Dr Gould’s primary research focus is strategies to improve the risks from tobacco smoking for Indigenous Australians. She is an NHMRC Early Career Research Fellow (Australian Public Health and Health Services). The focus of the fellowship is improving cessation strategies for pregnant Indigenous smokers
Professor Amanda Baker
Mental Health and substance use
Professor Amanda Baker is a National Health and Medical Research Council Senior Research Fellow at the University of Newcastle. An award winning innovator, she specializes in the treatment of co-existing mental health and substance use problems.
Dr Emma Beckett
Dr Emma Beckett is exploring the genetic secrets behind microbiomes and whether you really are what you eat.
Dr Andrew Bivard
Dr Andrew Bivard is an award-winning imaging expert who is working on an HMRI clinical trial of the clot-busting drug Tenecteplase involving 20 stroke centres across Australia, and 50 world-wide.
Conjoint Professor Chris Levi
Working on eight ground-breaking research projects, internationally renowned researcher Conjoint Professor Chris Levi is on a medical mission to cure stroke.
Dr Andrew Gardner
Dr Gardner is an early career research clinician, working in a full-time capacity as a Neuropsychologist for the Hunter New England Local Health District in the Neuropsychiatry Service. He is also a Co-Director of the Hunter New England Local Health District's Sport Concussion Clinic, an Executive Committee Member of the Priority Research Centre for Stroke and Brain Injury, and serves as a member of the Australian Rugby Union's (ARUs) Concussion Advisory Group.
Professor John Forbes
Oncology and Carcinogenesis - Breast Cancer
Professor John Forbes AM is an internationally renowned researcher in the field of breast cancer prevention and treatment, with a number of pioneering breakthroughs credited with saving millions of women's lives over his 40 year career.
Dr Adam Collison
Dr Adam Collison’s research explores why some people develop allergies, while others, who are exposed to the same triggers don’t. His work is focussed on the exposures that occur in the first years of life, including in-utero.
Associate Professor Deb Loxton
Associate Professor Deb Loxton examines the health and wellbeing of women who have lived with violent partners, and the impact of reproductive health options and choices on women.
Dr Alexis Hure
Dr Alexis Hure's research expertise are in the areas of fetal growth, breastfeeding, child nutrition, nutrition during pregnancy, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and obesity, developmental origins of health and disease and methyl metabolism and epigenetic programming.
Professor John Wiggers
Professor Wiggers focuses on population health research, particularly in the area of re-orientating health and other agencies towards the adoption of policies and practices that have a disease prevention and health risk reduction focus. This work has primarily involved research in changing the service delivery practices of agencies with regard to the prevention of obesity, and to reducing alcohol and tobacco related harms.
Laureate Professor Rob Sanson-Fisher
Public Health and Health Services
Laureate Professor Robert Sanson-Fisher is an internationally recognised cancer care and health behaviour expert. His latest ground-breaking research aims to reshape thinking surrounding death and chronic illness, so that end-of-life preparations are as thorough as preparing for the birth of a child.
Professor Roger Smith
A self-described 'specialised zoologist,' Professor Roger Smith is keen on understanding the idiosyncrasies, interactions and inner workings of multiple animal species but especially human.
Dr Jonathan Paul
An emerging leader in the field of reproductive medicine, Dr Jonathan Paul has been internationally recognised for his work on targeting therapeutic nanoparticles to the muscle cells of the uterus.
Associate Professor Jodie Simpson
Associate Professor Jodie Simpson's pioneering research has changed the focus of asthma treatment and promises new relief for many who suffer from the disease.
Professor Ulli Schall
Schizophrenia Research
Professor Ulrich (Ulli) Schall investigates cerebral activity to better understand the riddles of the brain.
Professor Brian Kelly
Clinical Science - Neurology and Psychiatry
Professor Brian Kelly believes mental illness is not the sole domain of psychiatrists and psychologists but the responsibility of many in the health system.
Dr Chris Williams
Dr Chris Williams is an HMRI Postdoctoral Research Fellow working with Hunter New England Population Health and the University of Newcastle's School of Medicine and Public Health in the field of musculoskeletal pain.
Dr Meredith Tavener
Social Gerontologist
As a social gerontologist, Dr Meredith Tavener's research encompasses identity in older age, women's health across the life course, baby boomers, narrative analysis, and qualitative methodologies.
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https://www.newstimes.com/local/article/Hartford-s-exorbitant-commercial-property-tax-14058954.php
Hartford’s exorbitant commercial property tax curbs economic growth
By Greg Bordonaro & Matt Pilon, Hartford Business Journal
Published 10:40 pm EDT, Sunday, July 7, 2019
Hartford’s high property-tax rate was a major reason Daniel D’Aprile said he moved his D&D Market grocery store to Wethersfield, where he is saving tens of thousands of dollars annually on property-tax costs.
Hartford’s high property-tax rate was a major reason Daniel D’Aprile said he moved his D&D Market grocery store to Wethersfield, where he is saving tens of thousands of dollars annually on property-tax
Photo: Greg Bordonaro / HBJ Photo
When D&D Market closed its Franklin Avenue storefront in Sept. 2016, Hartford lost more than a landmark small business.
The third-generation family grocer, caterer and purveyor of fresh foods traces its Capital City roots back to 1932, when present-day owner Daniel D’Aprile’s grandfather opened a bustling market that became a mainstay on one of Hartford’s most vibrant small-business corridors.
However, things changed dramatically over the decades. Shifting demographics, a shrinking customer base and higher rents all made doing business in Hartford more difficult, Daniel D’Aprile said in a recent interview.
But the biggest pain point was property taxes. Though D’Aprile didn’t own D&D’s old Hartford quarters at 276 Franklin Ave. — his father actually does — he was still responsible for paying real estate and personal property taxes. At its peak, he owed $54,000 a year to the city — a sum that became too much to bear and led him to buy a smaller property less than four miles away in Wethersfield, where he’d eventually relocate his entire business and 38 employees.
Since opening the Wethersfield location on Wolcott Hill Road in 2014, sales are up 35 percent, D’Aprile said. Just as important, he’s paying less than a quarter of the property taxes — $12,000 annually — than he did in Hartford.
“I never wanted to move my business out of Hartford, but the rent was skyrocketing, the property taxes were skyrocketing, and sales weren’t going up,” D’Aprile said. “We were working very hard for nothing. There was no money left over after paying property taxes.”
“If we stayed in Hartford we would have been out of business,” he added.
D&D Market’s story isn’t wholly unique. For years, Hartford’s small and large businesses have complained they’re paying an exorbitant and disproportionate share of property taxes, hurting their ability to prosper.
At 74.29 mills, Hartford’s property-tax rate is by far the state’s highest and among the nation’s highest. In fact, the effective property-tax rate for a commercial landlord in Hartford (over 5 percent) is higher than what New York City, Boston and Chicago landlords face.
That’s stifled economic growth in the city — Hartford’s $4 billion grand list is valued 30 percent below what it was near the turn of the 21st century, and 38 percent below its 1990 peak of $6.5 billion.
By comparison, neighboring West Hartford — one of the region’s wealthier communities with half the population of Hartford — has a 41 mill rate and $6.3 billion grand list.
New Haven, a city with a comparable population to Hartford but lower mill rate (42.98 mills) has a $6.6 billion grand list.
“[Hartford’s mill rate] has brought development to an absolute screeching halt,” said Hartford City Councilor and lawyer John Gale. “It’s a huge drag. This has been the biggest single financial issue the city has faced in the last 15 years.”
With limited exceptions, private development has eschewed Hartford over the last decade or longer, unless it’s been supported by state government subsidies or city tax breaks.
The city’s small businesses in particular have felt enormous pressure from the high property-tax rate, part of the reason key commercial avenues — Franklin, Maple, Main, Albany, etc. — in various neighborhoods have lost their luster.
And for anyone who thinks commercial taxpayers will soon get relief after the state last year helped the city avert bankruptcy by agreeing to pay off Hartford’s $550 million in general obligation debt over the coming decades, think again.
Despite its bailout, Hartford’s finances remain in a precarious position, and commercial taxpayers aren’t likely to see a tax-rate reduction anytime soon, according to Mayor Luke Bronin.
“For a small business or any property owner paying the full freight 74 mills, it’s an unsustainable and unfair burden,” Bronin said. “I think it’s a huge issue and one that our state has to confront if we want to be competitive.”
For Hartford’s mill rate to be competitive over the long run, Bronin said it needs to be cut in half. That, however, would likely require major reforms at the state level, or a miraculous surge in new commercial development.
House Majority Leader Matt Ritter (D-Hartford) said he agrees Hartford still has a long road to recovery, but he also thinks the bailout he helped broker provided the city with much-needed financial stability. He said it could take 10 to 15 years to put any sizable dent in the mill rate, and that’s only if Hartford is able to grow its grand list and secure additional state funding, among other efforts.
He also said the bailout deal was the best the city could have hoped for, given the political environment.
“For anyone who thinks the deal could have been better, they are sorely mistaken,” Ritter said. “There was not an appetite to reduce the mill rate.”
The Hartford Business Journal has spent months interviewing property-tax experts, commercial property owners, landlord-developers, policymakers, homeowners, city officials and others about the effects of Hartford’s property-tax system, which is complicated and broken in myriad ways.
Occupying just 18 square miles, Hartford is a tiny city that also houses many tax-exempt properties, significantly limiting the city’s ability to grow its grand list.
In fact, 59 percent of the assessed real estate in the city is exempt from taxation because it’s owned by governments, nonprofits, churches or other tax-exempt organizations, an HBJ analysis of city property records shows. Meantime, Hartford is also home to one of the poorest populations in the country, increasing the need for social, health care and other services.
Adding insult to injury, Hartford has the state’s only bifurcated property-tax system, in which commercial property owners pay a higher tax rate than residential homeowners.
Hartford’s challenges are a statewide concern because the city’s fortunes are directly tied to the state’s, especially as more employers and skilled workers want to be in or near vibrant cities.
Despite its challenges, some business leaders are still bullish about Hartford’s future, especially given downtown’s new vibrancy in recent years, helped by the additions of Dunkin’ Donuts Park, UConn’s West Hartford campus, a fledgling tech scene and about 1,500 new apartment units.
“I’m more optimistic about Hartford’s increasing attractiveness as a location for companies due to the urbanization trend,” said Jon Putnam, executive director of commercial realty broker Cushman & Wakefield.
Hartford didn’t land in its current financial and property-tax predicament overnight. Numerous factors over many decades stacked up to create an unstable and untenable situation with no clear or easy solutions.
The start of the decline of Hartford’s property-tax base and system can be traced to the mid-20th century when the city — like many others in Connecticut and across the U.S. — was going through major economic and demographic shifts as more people moved to the suburbs. That squeezed out a large portion of Hartford’s middle class, and the affluence that went along with it. The city’s manufacturing and industrial base also began to shrink, while its impoverished populace grew, leading to higher city-government costs.
As taxes rose to compensate, more properties also shifted to nonprofit ownership. That came on top of the enormous share of city property already owned by tax-exempt institutions like colleges, hospitals, sewage plants and even the state itself.
Over the past half-century, the portion of Hartford’s tax-exempt grand list has more than doubled.
State government reimburses the city for some of its tax-exempt property, but it doesn’t come close to filling the gap.
City government, too, has exacerbated the problem over the decades by overborrowing, making pension promises whose costs have outpaced grand-list growth, and then kicking the can down the road either through short-term and costly debt restructurings or by raising taxes.
However, Bronin, who is running for reelection this year, said much larger structural issues have been the leading cause of Hartford’s fiscal stress.
“At the root of the problem is the fundamental flaw of having an 18-square mile city with an enormous concentration of non-taxable property and intense concentration of poverty and asking that city to run itself on only one local source of revenue,” he said, referring to the fact that municipalities in Connecticut are only allowed to raise revenue through the property tax (in addition to permit and other fees). “The biggest problem is that you have a city built on the tax base of a suburb. That, from the start, is a structural flaw that has all kinds of consequences.”
Bronin said his administration is running a “very lean government” and has made deep cuts over the last few years. The city council just passed the mayor’s $573.2 million budget for fiscal 2020, which does raise spending by $3.2 million, but doesn’t rely on borrowing and keeps the city’s workforce — excluding public-safety personnel — 11 percent below 2015 levels. Notably, since taking office in 2016, Bronin has also managed to not increase the city’s sky-high mill rate.
Even still, Hartford is unable to lower its property-tax rate. That shows excess borrowing isn’t the root cause of Hartford’s problems, Bronin said, since the state essentially eliminated most of the city’s long-term debt.
“If the city had never borrowed a single dollar, you would still have a mill rate of 74.29 to make the city function,” he said, noting that city finances are now reviewed by a state oversight panel.
Without the state bailout or bankruptcy, Hartford would have had to quickly raise its mill rate an additional 10 to 15 mills, Bronin said, which wouldn’t have been sustainable.
He argues much more drastic reforms are still needed at the state level, including giving the city additional ways to raise revenue. The bailout has provided enough relief to prevent a financial Armageddon, but the city still has limited financial flexibility, Bronin said. At the end of the day, he said there is a cost to delivering basic core services in Hartford and the value of taxable property does not come anywhere near funding that.
State Rep. Jason Rojas, a Democrat from East Hartford who co-chairs the powerful Finance, Revenue and Bonding Committee, said the city will likely continue to lean on the state.
“Absent pretty significant economic growth in the grand list, which I think is difficult to do, … I think there’s still a lot more work to do for the long-term future of the city,” Rojas said.
Marc Fitch, an investigative reporter for the Yankee Institute, a free-market think tank, said there’s plenty of blame to spread for Hartford’s fiscal situation.
On the one hand, the city awarded “really generous” labor contracts in the past, so Fitch views the bailout, at least partially, as rewarding fiscal mismanagement. On the other hand, the state has not fully reimbursed Hartford for its tax-exempt property, shortchanging it of vital operating funds.
Hartford has avoided bankruptcy for now, but Fitch, who credits Bronin for his budgeting discipline, said the city appears stuck in limbo for the foreseeable future.
“Even with the bailout and everything, their finances are razor thin and they’re relying on potential grand list growth to hopefully fill those gaps in the next few years, and that is a gamble,” Fitch said.
Out-of-whack property taxes
Hartford’s financial and economic instability over the years have birthed arguably the most dysfunctional commercial property-tax structure this state has seen in the last half-century.
Besides the exorbitant mill rate, Hartford is the only Connecticut municipality allowed to assess commercial property at a higher tax rate.
To calculate any property-tax bill in Connecticut, owners must multiply their property’s assessed value by a city’s or town’s mill rate and then divide by 1,000.
In the 1970s, Connecticut passed a law requiring municipalities to adopt a 70-percent assessment ratio. That means to determine the assessed value of a property — whether it’s a single-family home, commercial property or apartment — assessors multiply its market value by 70 percent.
By the late 1970s Hartford faced a crisis. The city was in the middle of its first revaluation in 17 years and many residential properties experienced a significant spike in value. If all properties were assessed at the same level, some homeowners faced average tax increases of well over 80 percent, which was deemed practically and politically untenable.
So, city officials hatched an agreement with state policymakers that, among other things, allowed Hartford to lower its residential assessment ratio to 45.8 percent. That shielded homeowners from a major tax hike, while leaving commercial property owners with a higher tax rate.
That initial bifurcated tax structure was actually phased out by 1986, but adopted again in 2006 and remains in place today. Commercial and apartment properties are assessed at 70 percent of value, while single-family homes are assessed at 35 percent.
There is a formula in place that gradually raises the residential assessment ratio to 70 percent, but it will take decades before that happens, said City Assessor John S. Philip.
Hartford and New Haven developer Bruce Becker says the uneven property-tax setup matched with the high mill rate dissuades commercial investment and fosters an environment in which the city must cut tax deals to spur development, especially for larger, costly projects.
He knows that firsthand. He redeveloped the 777 Main St., 26-story office tower into 285 apartments in 2015, an $85 million project that relied heavily on public financing and tax credits.
He also got a tax break from the city. Without that support, he said the project wouldn’t have happened.
“Relying on the property tax exclusively to fund municipalities,” is inefficient, Becker said.
Delayed revals
One source of Hartford’s problems over the years is that it often waited long periods between revaluations. When that coincided with wild swings in the real estate market it led to dramatic changes in assessed property values.
For example, Hartford waited 10 years before conducting its 1998-1999 reval, which shrank the city’s grand list 38 percent, to $3.6 billion, while the mill rate jumped from 29.50 to 47.
The grand list nosedived because assessed property values hadn’t fully taken into account the effects of the late 1980s and early 1990s savings-and-loan crisis, which put Connecticut and the nation into recession.
Over a 40-year period starting in 1962, Hartford only conducted three revals. Today, state law requires municipalities to do revaluations at least every five years.
“Waiting 10 years to do a revaluation is not a great idea,” Philip said.
Some have pitched the idea of conducting revaluations more frequently to better capture real estate value changes in a more timely manner, but it’s seen by many as too costly.
Hartford has also experimented with a commercial property-tax surcharge that reached as high as 15 percent and stayed at that level for nine years, starting in 1997. The surcharge drew the ire of the business community, led by the MetroHartford Alliance, which eventually lobbied to phase out the additional tax in 2010.
Hartford’s mill rate has stabilized since 2011. There have been no tax increases under the Bronin administration, but the mill rate went on a consistent and steady climb at the turn of the 21st century going from 29.50 in 1998 to its current 74.29 mills today.
Bottom-line impact
The effect of Hartford’s bifurcated tax system is that commercial landlords and their tenants are shouldering a much higher tax burden than homeowners.
In fact, city homeowners have an effective tax rate of about 2.2 percent, on par with the statewide average, while commercial properties have an effective tax rate of more than 5 percent.
That means for every $1,000 of assessed value, a Hartford commercial taxpayer pays more than $50 in taxes vs. $22 for residential. By comparison, the effective property-tax rates on commercial properties in Boston and New York City are 1.8 percent and 3.9 percent, respectively, according to the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. (Businesses in those cities, however, face other unique costs. Property values are also much higher in those cities.)
Hartford’s high tax rate has a negative effect on commercial property values, said John McDermott, a former Hartford city assessor during the 1970s, who is now a consultant to Connecticut businesses.
Commercial properties are valued based on how much net operating income they generate from rents. Property taxes are typically the second-highest expense behind a mortgage. When taxes rise, they eat into a building’s profitability, thus eroding their market value.
That, in turn, negatively impacts the city’s grand list. In 1996, when Hartford’s effective commercial mill rate was 33.4, the grand list totaled $5.8 billion. Today, Hartford’s grand list sits at only $4 billion.
Making things more challenging for commercial landlords, particularly those who own downtown’s Class A office towers, is that rents have been stagnant for nearly three decades, settling in at about $22 to $26 per square foot, while property taxes and operating expenses increased, squeezing their bottom lines.
Combined, operating expenses and taxes cost downtown landlords around $10 to $11 per square foot in the late 1980s, but reached as high as $15 to $17 in the early 2000s. Those costs have retreated a bit more recently as landlords found ways to reduce operating expenses and the city kept a lid on real estate tax increases, said Putnam, the Cushman & Wakefield commercial realty broker.
And it’s not just landlords stuck paying higher property taxes. Many commercial tenants have a “triple net lease,” meaning they must pay a share of a building’s property taxes.
Businesses must also pay taxes on personal property like machinery and equipment and motor vehicles. That’s how tax bills begin to add up for small and midsize merchants — like D’Aprile’s D&D Market — that rent space in the city.
McDermott said Hartford’s mill rate is a major impediment to renaissance efforts taking place downtown.
“It’s a competitive environment,” he said. “In today’s world, clearly entrepreneurs have an opportunity to go anywhere they want to go. There are clearly advantages to being in the city, but also from an economic perspective, the suburbs have a tax impact that is dramatically less. You can very easily go to Glastonbury or Rocky Hill where the tax burden is half or two-thirds of the city’s.”
Urban draw
Despite Hartford’s tax burden, the city, particularly downtown, has seen noticeable development and investment in recent years. Most of it, however, has been subsidized by the state, or is the beneficiary of city tax breaks.
Still, many employers find it necessary to have a Hartford presence, especially as Millennials and others desire urban settings where they can live, work and play. In fact, Hartford has seen some employers move from the suburbs to downtown in recent years to be closer to a wider talent pool and the various amenities the city offers.
The vacancy rate for Class A office space downtown is currently 17.7 percent, down from 25.5 percent in the first quarter of 2011, according to commercial realty firm CBRE. The city’s overall office vacancy rate fell from 26.1 percent to 16.5 percent over that same time period.
The state’s purchase of two major office towers and the conversion of vacant office buildings into apartments have helped lower the vacancy rate.
Meantime, the grand list, despite being well below historical highs, is up 23 percent since 2006.
The city lately has also attracted out-of-state realty investment, including from New York landlord Shelbourne Global Solutions LLC. Shelbourne has invested more than $200 million since 2014 buying up some of downtown Hartford’s most prized office towers, cementing it as one of the center-city’s most prominent landlords.
Most recently, it teamed up with Hartford parking giant Laz Parking to buy the city’s iconic “Gold Building” skyscraper for $70.5 million.
Shelbourne managing member Ben Schlossberg said his group finds the city attractive because it’s walkable, uniquely located between New York and Boston, and has a strong corporate and higher-education presence.
However, he is also cognizant of Hartford’s high tax rate. Shelbourne sued the city a few years ago after its appeal for lower property taxes on several of its recently revalued buildings was denied. It eventually brokered a tax-break deal with the city to resolve the issue. Without that helping hand, some of Shelbourne’s properties would have gone into foreclosure, Schlossberg said, an issue familiar to downtown, especially in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
“We are very excited about what is going on in Hartford,” Schlossberg said. However, he added “the state needs to find a way to lower the mill rate, which is oppressive.”
Travelers Cos. is one employer that has made significant investment in Hartford. In recent years the property-and-casualty insurer spent about $55 million giving its famous Travelers Tower office high-rise and campus a facelift. It’s currently spending millions more to spruce up its interior offices.
The company was also one of three insurers — in addition to The Hartford and Aetna — to promise a combined $50 million donation to the city over five years to help Hartford deal with its budget crisis.
Travelers, which is the second-highest taxpayer in the city with $143.2 million in assessed real estate and property, is aware of the high property-tax rate but is also bullish about Hartford’s future, said Andy Bessette, the company’s executive vice president and chief administrative officer.
He said companies look at more than just taxes when deciding where to locate and he’s attracted to Hartford because of the insurance talent here and the quality of life and amenities the region offers.
Bessette also sits on the board of the Capital Region Development Authority, which has helped finance development of 1,500 apartment units downtown in recent years. That, along with a growing innovation ecosystem, has added to the center-city’s vibrancy.
“Do we care about property taxes? Absolutely,” Bessette said, adding he recognizes that the high tax rate might impact small and midsize companies more than a large corporation. “Would you like to have them lower? Absolutely. But you know what, we believe in the city and want to be sure it’s successful.”
“You need a thriving urban environment,” he said.
The Cities Project is collaborative journalism and reporting on how to revitalize Connecticut cities from The Connecticut Mirror, Connecticut Public Radio, Hearst Connecticut Media, The Hartford Courant, the Republican-American (of Waterbury), the Hartford Business Journal, and Purple States.
What other stories are there in this series?
Returning CT cities to their glory days
CT cities left to deal with the shells of industry
One problem with empty, blighted buildings? Knowing how many there are.
Taxpayer money among biggest drivers in brownfield redevelopment
Bridgeport brownfield rises from blight to center of revitalization
City revival — did we learn from the urban renewal era?
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Searching for the Magic Bullet Against Cancer Caused by Asbestos: One Step Closer?
17-Jan-2014 9:05 AM EST
Sbarro Health Research Organization (SHRO)
scientific journal Cell Cycle
Cancer, Environmental Health, All Journal News
Antonio Giordano, Shro, Sbarro Health Research Organization, Asbestos, Cancer, p53 protein, RITA, MK-1775, Cisplatin, WEE1, DNA, Mesothelioma
Newswise — 17 January 2014 | Mesothelioma is a very aggressive cancer associated with asbestos exposure, which is usually diagnosed in an advanced stage. So far no therapeutic strategy has proven effective against this deadly cancer and the prognosis remains very poor with only few exceptions.
In December, the research team of Antonio Giordano, an internationally renowned pathologist, Director and Founder of the Sbarro Health Research Organization in Philadelphia, PA (www.shro.org) and Professor of Pathology and Oncology at the University of Siena, Italy, published two separate studies aiming to address the urgent need to identify possible new methods for mesothelioma treatment.
In the first study, published in the scientific journal Cell Cycle, Giordano’s researchers tested on mesothelioma cells the effect of two drugs designed to reactivate the p53 protein, one of the most important 'tumor suppressors', which is turned off in most human cancers. “In mesothelioma, although p53 is rarely mutated, it is inactivated by alterations in its pathway,” says Francesca Pentimalli of the National Cancer Institute of Naples, Italy, lead author of the study. Both of the drugs used in the study target p53, but with different mechanisms of action. One in particular, called RITA, proved to be very toxic. Specifically, RITA caused mesothelioma cells, and not ‘healthy’ cells, to undergo apoptosis — a type of programmed cell death that occurs through the activation of a specific 'cascade' of events.
“The ability of RITA to induce apoptosis is remarkable considering that mesothelioma is very refractory to this process. In fact the most aggressive and rare variant, sarcomatoid mesothelioma, did not respond to the treatment probably because of its intrinsically high levels of molecules acting as inhibitors of this process” says Alfredo Budillon, Head of the Experimental Pharmacology Unit of the National Cancer Institute of Naples and coauthor of the study. “It remains to be seen whether the combination of RITA with other activators of apoptosis can achieve efficacy also against the more aggressive cases.”
Furthermore, challenging mesothelioma cells with RITA worked in synergy with the chemotherapy drug cisplatin, which is the mainstay of treatment for this disease, suggesting that its use in a clinical setting could possibly help to reduce the required doses and the side effects of chemotherapy, thereby improving patients’ quality of life.The second study, published online in Cancer Biology and Therapy and led by Paola Indovina of the University of Siena and the Sbarro Institute for Cancer Research and Molecular Medicine, Temple University in Philadelphia, was designed along the same lines as the first study. In the second study, the authors tested, for the first time in mesothelioma, a new drug called MK-1775 in combination with cisplatin. MK-1775 is a selective inhibitor of WEE1, a protein that is crucial in activating a ‘checkpoint’ for the repair of damaged DNA before the cell starts its division process. The rationale for this strategy is based on the fact that many cancer cells, especially those with non-functional p53, rely on WEE1 to stall cell division and allow cells to repair the damage induced by genotoxic agents, such as many chemotherapeutic drugs, including cisplatin. WEE1 inhibition limits the time available for repair and, therefore, sensitizes cancer cells to DNA-damaging agents. Indeed, inhibiting WEE1 with MK-1775 selectively sensitized mesothelioma cells to the genotoxic action of cisplatin by preventing checkpoint activation and forcing the cells to divide despite the damage, thus triggering apoptosis.
“Overall our studies are aimed at identifying promising new molecular therapies against mesothelioma that hold the potential for clinical use in the near future. MK-1775, for example, is already being utilized in clinical trials for other types of tumors in the United States,” Giordano concludes.
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Why More Firms Should Adopt the Facebook Bereavement Policy
What most employers offer and what one grief counselor advises mourners
By Kerry HannonEntrepreneurship and Personal Finance ExpertFebruary 16, 2017
By Kerry Hannon
Credit: Getty ImagesSad Hispanic woman being comforted by husband
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg announced in February that the company now offers 20 days of time off for employees mourning the death of an immediate family member, 10 for a member of their extended family. Now, I believe, it’s time for more employers to take Facebook’s lead.
After a parent, spouse or other loved one dies, your life can be a blur as I can attest from personal experience. When my dad died a few years ago, at 88, after battling Alzheimer’s, I was heartbroken that I would never look into those blue eyes of his again. But there were things to do straightaway: travel arrangements, funeral arrangements, writing an obituary and a eulogy, entertaining out-of-town mourners and — with my three siblings —looking after Mom.
Working while grieving is a challenge personally and practically. But in many cases, employees have no choice.
For those employers that do offer bereavement leave, the period of absence is usually limited to a few days.
Bereavement Policies at Employers in America
The Fair Labor Standards Act doesn’t require employers pay workers for time off to attend a funeral. That said, 60 percent of all workers and 71 percent of full-time workers do get paid funeral leave due to a death in the family, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). For those that do offer it, however, “the period of absence is usually limited to a few days (for example, three paid days for immediate family members and one paid day for other relatives),” according to BLS.
The Society for Human Resource Management’s (SHRM) 2016 Employee Benefits report, based on a poll of SHRM members, revealed that 81 percent of employers surveyed provide paid days for bereavement leave. On average, they give workers four days off following the death of a spouse or child; three days for a domestic partner, foster child, grandchild, parent, sibling or grandparent and one or two days for extended family members of a spouse’s relative, according to the SHRM 2016 Paid Leave in the Workplace Survey.
That’s good, but a far cry from Facebook’s 10 to 20 days.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons | Moritz Hager
Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO
Applauding Facebook’s New Bereavement Policy
“Family-friendly policies like the one announced by Facebook are part of a broader recognition by employers that it is important to support their employees as they balance their work and personal lives,” Kate Wilber, Mary Pickford Foundation Professor of Gerontology, at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, told me. “Extending bereavement support acknowledges a family member’s need for time to recover and regroup.”
Ellen Galinsky, president and co-founder of the Families and Work Institute, was pleasantly surprised by Facebook’s generous policy. “It’s unusual for a company to offer this benefit,” she said.
Sheryl Sandberg’s Personal Loss
But it follows from Sandberg’s wrenching experience — the sudden 2015 death of her husband Dave Goldberg, then CEO of SurveyMonkey, at 47.
While an extended bereavement policy can be a potentially pricey benefit for employers, firms might be smart (and kindhearted) to consider it.
“If you feel like your company is there for you in a really hard time, it means the world,” Galinsky said. “Employees think: ‘I try to be there for them when they need me. Are they there for me when I need them?’”
For employers, the upside of offering this kind of bereavement benefit is employee retention, explained Galinsky.
Sandberg outlined Facebook’s improved policy at the 2017 Makers conference, as well as in a post on her Facebook page, where she wrote about her personal experience with bereavement leave. Clearly, she struck a chord with her followers. The last time I checked, her post had more than 900 comments from people telling their own tales of work and grief and it had been “shared” by more than 3,000 people.
Why Facebook Did It
Here’s part of what Sandberg wrote:
“People should be able both to work and be there for their families. No one should face this trade-off. We need public policies that make it easier for people to care for their children and aging parents and for families to mourn and heal after loss.”
Sandberg went back to work 10 days after her husband’s death. “Starting the transition back to work has been a savior, a chance to feel useful and connected,” she wrote on her Facebook page on June 3, 2015.
Going Back to Work After a Loss
But the return to her job wasn’t easy initially. In a commencement speech at UC Berkeley last year, Sandberg said: “I remember sitting in my first Facebook meeting in a deep, deep haze. All I could think was, ‘What is everyone talking about and how could this possibly matter?’ But then I got drawn into the discussion and for a second — a brief split second — I forgot about death. That brief second helped me see that there were other things in my life that were not awful. My children and I were healthy. My friends and family were so loving and they carried us —quite literally at times.”
Jill Smolowe, a grief coach, author of the memoir Four Funerals and a Wedding: Resilience in a Time of Grief and a Next Avenue contributor applauds the new Facebook policy. “Anything that broadens the options for bereaved people is a positive,” she said. “But I also want to stress that for many people work is a lifeline. Getting back into a routine, back into a familiar environment is what they need most.”
Smolowe, too, speaks from personal experience. During a 17-month period starting in 2009, she buried her husband, sister, mother and mother-in-law.
Returning to her job as a senior writer at People after a 10-day bereavement leave, Smolowe said, “forced my mind out of the grief space for little periods at a time. What you are trying to do is break up that hum of sorrow. If you have even five minutes in a workday where you forget yourself for five minutes to focus on the financial report before you, the kids in your classroom, whatever it is, that helps.”
Keeping Your World Moving
Work can be the pick-me-up that keeps your world moving after a loss.
“When you’re bereaved — I say this as a coach who has listened to many people as well as someone who has experienced grief multiple times — your world shrinks down to the fact of the person’s absence,” Smolowe explained. “Work can jar your thinking and move it somewhere else. If you’re forced by deadlines to focus on the work that’s in front of you, that’s where your concentration will be, not on this person who is missing. The more you can push out those parameters, even if it doesn’t feel good at the moment, is a process of widening your world back out to be more than the fact of that person’s absence. Sandberg knew that instinctively. She went back to work quickly.”
That said, Smolowe cautioned: “There are people who will want every one of those 20 days. But please don’t feel compelled to take it. The key is that bereavement is very personal. If someone needs those 20 days, that’s great — but don’t feel obligated.”
A Different Script for Grief
When an Ex Dies: No Place for Your Grief
How to Cope With the Death of a Friend
Kerry Hannon is the author of the upcoming book, Never Too Old to Get Rich: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Starting a Business Mid-Life. She has covered personal finance, retirement and careers for The New York Times, Forbes, Money, U.S. News & World Report and USA Today, among other publications. She is the author of a dozen books including Money Confidence: Really Smart Financial Moves for Newly Single Women, Great Jobs for Everyone 50+: Finding Work That Keeps You Happy and Healthy...and Pays the Bills, Getting the Job You Want After 50, Love Your Job: The New Rules for Career Happiness and What's Next? Finding Your Passion and Your Dream Job in Your Forties, Fifties and Beyond. Her website is kerryhannon.com. Follow her on Twitter @kerryhannon.
© Twin Cities Public Television - 2019. All rights reserved.
When a Parent Dies: Ways to Help Yourself and Your Surviving Parent
A grief-support expert shares a letter she wrote to a grieving friend
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https://www.mrt.com/news/education/article/Five-to-things-to-do-this-weekend-7399297.php
Five to things to do this weekend
By Rich Lopez jrlopez@mrt.com
Published 7:05 am CST, Thursday, January 14, 2016
Gage Hale and Paije Mulkey trim their goat during check in for the Midland County Livestock Show on Wednesday, Jan. 13, 2016, at Midland County Hoseshoe Arena. James Durbin/Reporter-Telegram
Photo: James Durbin
We hope one resolution you've made for 2016 is quitting the mantra "There's nothing to do." That's simply not true - especially this weekend. Our top picks for your things to do are a mix of diverse outings and exciting discoveries.
Midland County Livestock Show at Horseshoe Arena and Pavilion, 2514 Arena Trail.
Where else can you see goats, lambs and heifers in town? The Horsehoe turns into a menagerie of farm animals competing for blue ribbons this weekend at the annual show. But it's not just for rural types. Who can resist today's peewee rabbits show or the peewee goats on Saturday. The show culminates with a barbecue meal open to the public and the auction and awards Saturday afternoon. Visit midlandhorseshoe.com for a full itinerary.
J.B. and the Moonshine Band at Rockin' Rodeo, 4400 N. Big Spring St.
In June 2015, the East Texas band dropped their third album "Mixtape" which debuted at No. 33 on the Top Country Albums chart and would ultimately peak at No. 4 on the U.S. Heatseekers charts. The band moves into the new year with a slew of live shows including tonight's. No strangers to Midland, the band will likely bring their A-game to the local stage. 9:30 p.m. $10. Rockinrodeomidland.com.
Improv at the Yucca at Yucca Theatre, 208 N. Colorado Ave.
After a brief hiatus, Improv at the Yucca returns to their home stage downtown. Regular cast members come back for a night of unscripted laughs and bawdy jokes. So much so that the show isn't recommended for ages 16 and younger. 8 p.m. $15. Mctmidland.org.
Wild Kratts Live at Wagner Noel, 1310 N. FM 1788.
The hit television series "Wild Kratts" comes to life with a double-header of shows. Audiences will follow the Kratt brothers as they engage their creature power while searching for a stolen invention. Along the way, fans will learn about animals and their abilities while the brothers work to make sure the creature world is safe from the bumbling Zach and his robots. Two showings at 1 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. $29-$34. Wagnernoel.com.
Aloha O Hawaii at Yucca Theatre
The local Polynesian dance troupe performs their annual show Dances from the Islands. This year, the show will highlight new dances by the male members of Aloha. Led by Ben Sola, the men will display traditional Samoan dancing. The show is also a fundraiser for the troupe. Aloha has been invited to perform at Disneyworld and Universal Studios this summer and proceeds from the show will help them fund their June trip. 7 p.m. $10 advance, $15 door. Advanced tickets can be purchased by calling 432-528-1192.
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Virginia CB Bryce Hall Focused on Bowl Game, Not Accolades
Virginia junior cornerback Bryce Hall is solely focused on the bowl game against South Carolina, despite the All-ACC and All-American honors, and predictions of a first round selection in the NFL Draft.
Friday, December 14th 2018, 6:51 PM EST
Edited by Mike Shiers
Junior cornerback Bryce Hall
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (WVIR) - The Virginia football team will play in the Belk Bowl on December 29th, as the Cavaliers will be taking on South Carolina in Charlotte.
The Gamecocks averaged 440-yards of total offense this season.
They were third in the SEC with 277-yards passing per game, which means someone like cornerback Bryce Hall could have a major impact on the outcome.
Virginia defensive back Bryce Hall wasn't on the 2018 All-ACC Preseason Team.
But after a strong junior campaign, he was named First Team All-Conference.
The honors continue to roll in, as Hall has also been named Second Team All-American by the Football Writers Association and the Walter Camp Football Foundation.
"It's a huge honor," says Hall. "It's a blessing to see how the work that we put in is starting to pay off. It's an honor to be up there with some of the greats who have also been named All-American."
Head coach Bronco Mendenhall says, "There are some times in sports and some times in life, where the public accolades warrant and reflect the preparation and the diligence, and this would be one. His preparation is really what he ought to be All-American for."
Mendenhall says he's particularly impressed by Hall's dedication to the film room.
"I think it was 6:30 on a Saturday night, and he was here, by himself, studying tape," says Mendenhall. "His preparation is exceptional."
Hall says he's seen a talented South Carolina team on film.
"I like the receivers they got, so it's going to be a good matchup," says Hall. "They got a good offense. They got a good quarterback. It's really going to test us as a secondary, and we look forward to the challenges."
Hall has been a starter since his freshman season at UVa.
He leads the nation with twenty pass breakups, and also has 59-tackles and two interceptions.
Only a junior, Hall has been receiving a lot of attention in NFL Mock Drafts, including First Round potential.
"Right now, I'm just solely focused on South Carolina, and developing into the best I can as a player," say Hall. "That kind of stuff tends to take away from what we're building to as a team. So I'm kind of setting that aside right now, and just focusing on this week, and just preparing for South Carolina."
The Cavaliers and Gamecocks kickoff on December 29th at noon in Charlotte, North Carolina.
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Spain: Pamplona Kicks Off Running of Bulls Festival
During the festival, Pamplona's population swells from nearly 200,000 residents to around a million visitors
By Alvaro Barrientos and Aritz Parra
Published Jul 6, 2019 at 12:58 PM
Alvaro Barrientos/AP
Revelers celebrate the official opening of the 2019 San Fermin fiestas in Pamplona, Spain, Saturday, July 6, 2019. The blast of a traditional firework opened Saturday nine days of uninterrupted partying in Pamplona's famed running-of-the-bulls festival. A member of the northern city's official brass band was chosen for this year's launch of the rocket, known as the "Chupinazo," to mark 100 years since the local ensemble's foundation.
The blast of a traditional firework on Saturday opened nine days of uninterrupted partying in Pamplona's famed running of the bulls festival.
A member of the northern city's official brass band was chosen for this year's launch of the rocket, known as the "Chupinazo," to mark 100 years since the local ensemble's foundation.
Jesús Garísoain addressed an ecstatic crowd from the city hall's balcony, declaring "Long live San Fermin," the saint honored by the festival. The blast was met by an eruption of joy from revelers, who sprayed each other with wine, staining in pink the traditional attire of white clothes and a red scarf.
Early 20th-century American author Ernest Hemingway immortalized the fiesta in his "The Sun Also Rises" novel.
First Bull Run in Spain Injures Four
At least four people were injured but no one was gored as thousands of thrill-seekers tested their agility and courage by racing alongside fighting bulls through the streets of Pamplona on July, 7 2016. The race in the northern Spanish city in the first bull run of the San Fermin festival. Runners dash along with six bulls down a narrow 930-yard course from a holding pen to Pamplona's bull ring. Thursday's run lasted 2 minutes, 28 seconds. The nine-day fiesta became world famous with Ernest Hemingway's 1926 novel "The Sun Also Rises" and attracts thousands of foreign tourists.
(Published Friday, July 8, 2016)
During the festival, Pamplona's population swells from nearly 200,000 residents to around a million visitors, who are attracted by the adrenaline boost of bull runs along an 850-meter (930-yard) street course to the city's bullring and seamless nights of partying.
The city is also trying to leave behind the scandal that stemmed from a gang rape of an 18-year-old woman during the 2016 festival. The initial prison sentences of nine years for sexual abuse to the five defendants last year was seen as too lenient and led to widespread public outcry, galvanizing the country's feminist movement.
Last month, Spain's Supreme Court overruled the lower courts and sentenced the men to 15 years in prison for rape. In the full-length ruling, published on Friday, judges say the attackers were fully aware of the crime they were committing and bragged about it in a WhatsApp group that they called "The Animal Pack."
The case has led to authorities in Pamplona to step up police surveillance and set up information booths, cellphone apps and 24-hour hotlines allowing instant reporting of abuse cases.
The protests of pro-animal rights groups have also become a fixture in recent years. On the eve of the festival, dozens of semi-naked activists staged a performance simulating speared bulls lying dead on Pamplona's cobbled streets to draw attention at what they see as animal cruelty for the sake of human entertainment.
Bullfights are protected under the Spanish Constitution as part of the country's cultural heritage.
Six Injured in Sixth Running of the Bulls of 2017
Wednesday was the sixth running of the bulls this year in Pamplona, Spain. As part of a nine-day festival, hundreds run ahead of six bulls on a path to the bull fighting stadium. Six people were injured Wednesday morning. Five people had been gored by bulls since the festival began on Friday.
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What's really worth watching
“Lost” Finale Will Cost Advertisers Plenty
By Drew Magary
Published Mar 31, 2010 at 8:43 AM | Updated at 2:39 PM EDT on May 30, 2012
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We’re at the point now with “Lost” where everyone would like to get to the series finale as soon as possible. Losties would like to have all their questions answered, so that they can finally sleep at night. And non-Losties would like the show to finally, mercifully end, so they don’t have to hear Losties drone on and on. That makes the show’s final episode one of the more eagerly awaited in TV history, and ABC is charging advertisers a royal amount to join the fun.
Brian Steinberg of Advertising Age reports that ABC will be asking for a whopping $900,000 for a 30-second spot on the show (Or $910,000 in the sideways dimension).
Buyers suggest ABC has been seeking between $850,000 and $950,000 for an ad berth. ABC executives declined to comment…
The series finale of "Lost" is slated to air as part of a three-hour block on Sunday, May 23. The 8 p.m. hour of the evening will be devoted to a recap of the mysterious show and the last episode will run from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m.
The hefty cost -- the price is just $400,000 to $600,000 less than the cost of a 30-second spot in this year's Oscars broadcast.
The asking price for the “Lost” finale remains well below the cost of other recent series finales, including “Everybody Loves Raymond” and “Friends,” both of which charged over $1 million a spot. And while the price may still seem steep, I’d argue the $900K is well worth spending for advertisers. Not only will the finale get a ratings boost over previous episodes of “Lost” (people who dropped out of the show at certain points will probably return to see how it all wraps up), but fear of spoilers will make the episode DVR and DVD proof. Unless you are an idiot, you know full well that a single glimpse at Twitter or a newspaper the day after the finale will give away more than you need to know. Anyone who wants to watch the “Lost” finale will likely watch it live, and TV events like that are growing rarer by the second.
In fact, when you think about it, is there any other show on TV right now that will command as much fan and media interest in its finale as “Lost?" Maybe the original “CSI,” if it ever goes off the air. Maybe “24.” That’s really about it. It could be that, with serialized shows dying off, “Lost” represents the very last of the highly anticipated series enders. And that’s why it’s gonna cost your local toothpaste company 900 large.
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Big Brother Has Officially Been AXED By Channel 5
But this might not be the end...
After this year's series of Celebrity Big Brother was one of the most controversial ever, Channel 5 have now made a big announcement about the future of the show.
Their statement read: 'The forthcoming series of Big Brother will be the last - of either celebrity or civilian versions - on Channel 5.
We’d like to thank Endemol and all of the production team who have worked tirelessly to make the show a success.
FINALLY! Celebrity Big Brother Has Announced Its Lineup... With One Massive Surprise!
We’d also like to thank our brilliant presenters - Emma on Big Brother and Rylan from Bit on the Side - for their consummate professionalism, Marcus, the voice of Big Brother and all of the housemates who have created so many memorable moments.
Most importantly, we’d like to thank fans of the show for their support over the last seven years.'
The show has been on Channel 5 since 2011, when the broadcaster took over the show from Channel 4. However, all may not be lost for fans of Big Brother as statements from presenter Rylan Clark-Neal and production company Endemol suggest that the show could well be back on UK screens sometime soon. Check out the video to see what they had to say...
September 14, 2018 at 3:16 PM • Daisy Jones
Over 10 Years Later, This Is What The Cast Of ‘Twilight’ Looks Like Today
Harry Potter Fans Are Freaking Out Over This New Theory About The Weasley Twins
A Soldier Opened The Ball With His Daughter, But No One Was Expecting This!
Chris Hughes And Jesy Nelson Just Took A Massive Relationship Step
Belle Hassan Looks Completely Different In These Old Photos
Tamer Hassan Plans Special "Road Trip" For "Disrespectful" Anton
Fans Done With ‘Sabotage’ Tommy And ‘Money-Made’ Weeks Before Final
What Did Big Brother's 'Human Ken Doll' Rodrigo Alves Look Like Before All Of The Surgery?
Fans DIVIDED Over 'Psychic' Sally's Controversial Comments In Big Brother House
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Dr. James Dobson
Dr. Dobson's Parenting Devotional - Jan. 21
Hearts of Compassion
Clothe yourselves with compassion.
It was a cold December in Philadelphia. Eleven-year-old Trevor Ferrell was watching TV in his comfortable home when images of street people flashed on the screen. Trevor’s heart was touched—he had to do something. He grabbed a blanket and pillow from his closet and begged his parents to take him downtown. They resisted at first—it could be dangerous, after all—but eventually relented. Soon, Trevor was handing the blanket and pillow to a grateful homeless man.
That night marked the first of many visits by the Ferrell family to Philadelphia’s street people. Trevor’s friends started joining him, others began donating items to hand out, and a ministry was born. Trevor’s Campaign for the Homeless attracted national interest and inspired chapters across the country. An abandoned Philadelphia hotel was turned into Trevor’s Place, a home for street people, and an adjacent building was transformed into Trevor’s Next Door, a residential living and service center.
Hundreds of people found help and hope because a fifth-grader remembered the words of Jesus: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me” (Matthew 25:40). Christ had incredible compassion for the down-and-outers of the world, touching even lepers who were likely shunned by others (Luke 5:12–13). When you encourage your children to help those in need, you move them that much closer to the compassionate heart of Christ.
Before you say good night…
How are you encouraging your kids to show compassion to others?
What could you do this week for the “least of these” in your town?
Lord Jesus, may we all have ears to hear the cries for help around us. Show us how to respond as You would, bringing Your compassion to our family and to our world. Amen.
Illustration adapted from Focus on the Family radio broadcast, 20 January 1986.
Listen to today's broadcast of Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk at OnePlace.com. For more from Dr. Dobson, visit the resource center at drjamesdobson.org.
This devotional is taken from Night Light for Parents. Copyright © 2000 by James Dobson, Inc. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
About Family Talk
Family Talk is a Christian non-profit organization located in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Founded in 2010 by Dr. James Dobson, the ministry promotes and teaches biblical principles that support marriage, family, and child-development. Since its inception, Family Talk has served millions of families with broadcasts, monthly newsletters, feature articles, videos, blogs, books and other resources available on demand via its website, mobile apps, and social media platforms.
About Dr. James Dobson
Dr. James Dobson is the Founder and President of Family Talk, a nonprofit organization that produces his radio program, "Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk." He is the author of more than 30 books dedicated to the preservation of the family, including The New Dare to Discipline, Love for a Lifetime, Life on the Edge, Love Must Be Tough, The New Strong-Willed Child, When God Doesn't Make Sense, Bringing Up Boys, Marriage Under Fire, Bringing Up Girls, Head Over Heels and, most recently, Your Legacy: The Greatest Gift.
Dr. Dobson served as an associate clinical professor of pediatrics at the University of Southern California School of Medicine for 14 years and on the attending staff of Children's Hospital of Los Angeles for 17 years. He has been active in governmental affairs and has advised five U.S. presidents on family matters. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California (1967) in the field of child development. He holds 17 honorary doctoral degrees, and was inducted in 2008 into The National Radio Hall of Fame. Dr. Dobson recently received the following awards: Winston Churchill Lifetime Achievement Award from the Faith & Freedom Coalition (2017), Daniel Award from AZ Christian University (2016), and the Defender of Life Award from the Justice Foundation (2015).
Dr. Dobson is married to Shirley and they have two grown children, Danae and Ryan, and two grandchildren. The Dobsons reside in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Contact Family Talk with Dr. James Dobson
E-mail: constituentservices@drjamesdobson.org
Website: http://www.drjamesdobson.org/?memo[source]=FOP
540 Elkton Drive
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Sheffield Wednesday: Change Needed Now
It was all too predictable against Derby, even after we took the lead. Say what you want about missed chances and hitting the woodwork - it's only goals that count. We lack goals going forward and we concede with alarming regularity. We have conceded 32 goals in 18 matches; the worst in the division. We are on course to concede 82 goals by the end of the season (81.78 to be precise-ish). Our lack of defence is all the more apparent when you consider we have scored just 22 goals. Interestingly, Middlesbrough have scored just 21 goals in 18 games but are 2nd in the league. They do boast by far the best defensive record having conceded only 9 goals in their league campaign, which means they can afford to not score that many. For Wednesday, however, we are faced with having to score two or three times minimum, in order to win a game.
I've posted at length about how I don't think changing the manager will solve all our problems. The problems at Sheffield Wednesday run deeper than the manager. I don't think there is anything sinister happening, but rather a lack of experience and knowledge about football in England, and more specifically Sheffield and the Championship. We have a squad that is largely talented and the core of this squad was the one responsible for two play-off finishes in the last three seasons. Changing manager might not solve everything, but appointing the right man may just give us that extra 20-30% needed to climb away from a relegation scrap, because like it or not that is what we are sinking towards. Have a look at the form tables I've placed below:
In the last five matches we are bottom of the form table. One point from a possible fifteen, in a match we did not play with any attempt to win. 12 goals conceded and only 2 scored.
Even accounting for our little run of form where we won two and drew two in the previous set of five fixtures, we are still averaging less than a point per game which is nailed on relegation form.
I am now convinced that we will need a change of manager to avoid relegation but this assumes that we replace Jos Luhukay with someone better. In his time here, Mr Chansiri has appointed two managers and I would assume that almost no Sheffield Wednesday fan would have heard of either Carlos Carvalhal or Jos Luhukay prior to their appointment. We are crying out for familiarity and experience with the Championship but you can bet that if Jos is sacked, or if he walks, our next appointment will be someone equally unfamiliar.
In football it is unusual, at least at our level, for a manager to be sacked preemptively. What I mean by this is that managers are often sacked once the horse has already bolted. There are those who argue that managers need to be given time, and in some cases there is a wisdom to this. However, football fans are often bang on the money when they can see something not working. Sheffield Wednesday fans witnessed this first hand with Carlos last season. When we were beaten by Sheffield United at home 2-4, that match encapsulated everything wrong with Carvalhal's approach. He should have gone at full time, and had he been dismissed at full time I believe we would have finished much higher up the table. Instead, we appointed Jos and to be fair he instilled discipline and organisation into a team that was lacking both. With some quality players coming back from injury we picked up enough points to never really be troubled by relegation. The point is we waited too long to part company with Carlos even though many of us could see what was coming even prior to the Steel City Derby.
I get the same feeling now with Jos Luhukay. It's not working. It really is that simple. Jos is hoping that it will work though, and his strategy (at least from the outside) to go from things not working to things actually working is to do the same as he has all season. Isn't that the definition of insanity? From match to match our team line up changes, almost as though names were being drawn from a hat. Players are mysteriously missing from the starting eleven who have immense quality in this league. To use a racing example; we are not going to catch the rest of the league up by going running more slowly than they are, but that seems to be our approach.
It is clear as day to me that the Jos Luhukay experiment will not work. I would thank him for his efforts and part company now before it is too late. The question is who would replace him? Assuming that we are willing to go with tried and tested in the English league, as opposed to plucking someone from the Romanian Second Division (hands off László Balint who is doing great things with Sportul Snagov), then these are my favoured options.
1. Slaviša Jokanović
I appreciate that things did not go his way in the Premier League with Fulham but there are not many managers that can best his record in the Championship in recent seasons. He has won promotion to the Premier League with Watford and Fulham. He knows the division and knows the players. I expect he will be a man in demand and if we are not already having informal talks with him, then I will be disappointed. He should be our number one priority.
2. Paul Heckingbottom
Paul Heckingbottom did an incredible job with Barnsley with limited resources. He knows the club, the area and the division. I think it was a huge mistake leaving for the Leeds job, which is arguably the most difficult job to keep in English football. Not as high profile a name as Jokanović but I suspect he would do a good enough job to stabilise The Owls and help nurture our younger players.
3. Steve Bruce & 4. David Moyes
It's at this point that things get a bit more speculative, in my opinion. Steve Bruce has had a fairly impressive career to date and there are few managers with as much experience of the Premier League and Championship as him. He was hardly a raging success at Aston Villa but I suspect there were things beyond his control happening there. David Moyes' stock has plummeted since he was appointed Manchester United manager and he may struggle to find another Premier League role in the near future. It might be wise for him to take a step back and rebuild his reputation in the Championship. Another factor which potentially sets these two options apart is money; I think it unlikely that we could afford Moyes' wages and I suspect we could not give Bruce enough money to spend for him to be tempted to take the job.
The next three games for Wednesday will give us a much clearer picture of whether we are just having an extended blip or whether we are really in serious trouble. On Tuesday we face Bolton at home, before travelling to Blackburn next Saturday. The following Saturday we host Rotherham. Two home games against teams around us in the table. These are both six-pointers. I suspect that we will fail to win both games. We are only three points above the relegation places and there is a very real danger we could go into the first week of December already in the bottom three.
LiveFootballTickets link
Changing the manager was never a solution. I don't understand why do people think changing the manger will somehow bring a robust change in the skills of the team. Pathetic thinking..
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