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As people enjoy better health and live longer, pensions costs are far exceeding what once would have been expected. As a result, defined benefit (DB) schemes – based on years of service and final salary – are no longer providing the comfortable retirement private sector employees anticipated; in contrast their public service counterparts who continue to enjoy gold -plated certainty funded largely by the taxpayer.
Many private DB schemes have been wound up, reorganised (with benefits cut and contributions raised) or closed to new members. Among the top 20 companies listed on the Irish stock exchange, pension deficits have almost doubled to (€5.7 billion) in the seven months to July last.
Difficulties in private sector pension provision have been exacerbated by falling global interest rates. Central banks have used quantitative easing – printing money to buy government bonds – to stimulate economic activity. This has depressed interest rates, resulting in higher bond prices and lower bond yields, with adverse effects for pension funds. Lower yields have made the purchase of retirement income more – and in some cases prohibitively – expensive.
Public service pensions also operate on a defined benefit model but, in contrast, are funded differently. They are largely financed from general taxation on a pay-as-you go basis, supplemented by members’ contributions. Answers to Dáil questions from Sinn Féin’s Pearse Doherty have starkly illustrated the difference between the two sectors.
A public service pension of €66,000 for someone aged 65 would, if bought in the market place, cost €3.3 million to purchase. A private sector worker aiming to secure a pension of €24,000 annually from age 65 would have to contribute €15,750 annually from age 25 in order to do so. Since 2008, the public service pension bill has risen by 75 per cent and last year cost €2.8 billion.
The issue of how the State provides a far more generous pension system for the public service has yet to be seriously questioned. Though as major beneficiaries of the inequality involved, politicians are hardly incentivised to do so. |
Tesla is rolling out its Autopilot software to Model S and Model X cars built since October, which are equipped with second-generation Autopilot hardware, according to a tweet from Tesla CEO Elon Musk. The cars have been without a litany of safety features that are available in many older Tesla cars. The Autopilot software is being deployed to eligible Teslas over-the-air, and owners will not need to do anything special for the software to be downloaded.
However, new Teslas still will not have all the Autopilot and semi-autonomous features that older Teslas have. And some cars, Musk says, will need to have their on-board cameras adjusted by Tesla’s service department for Autopilot to work correctly. Though new Tesla cars have superior hardware (according to Tesla, at least), the software that runs on the system is still being worked on. Tesla says that the hardware is physically capable of eventually controlling the car in all circumstances.
Autopilot for HW2 rolling out to all HW2 cars today. Please be cautious. Some cars will require adjustment of camera pitch angle by service. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 21, 2017
Cars with Gen 2 Autopilot hardware will now have a speed-limited version of Autosteer, the feature that most owners consider to be “Autopilot.” It will work at speeds below 45 mph, and is meant for use on highways with clear lane markings. It helps maintain position within the lane in slow-moving traffic. It works with the traffic-aware cruise control system (TACC), which is also rolling out with the update. TACC allows the vehicle adjust its speed based on the car ahead, decelerating or accelerating as needed. TACC is currently limited to a maximum speed of 75 mph. Previously, cars with second-generation Autopilot hardware only had basic cruise control.
Autopilot will work at 45 mph and below
Vehicles are also gaining Forward Collision Warning (FCW), where the car will alert the driver when there is an object in your path and a collision is likely. The system will sound a chime and give a visual warning on the instrument panel. The car will not have Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB), where the car can apply the brakes in an attempt to avoid or reduce the severity of a crash.
The update does not bring new Teslas to parity with the Autopilot and safety features available in older Teslas with Autopilot hardware, but it’s a great improvement over what was available previously. Along with AEB, new Teslas also do not have the ability to parallel or perpendicular park themselves, nor Tesla’s Summon parking feature.
Tesla has been preparing the software for months, and hinted about two weeks ago that a widespread release was coming. |
The Texas Longhorns are in the midst of an apparent resurgence; they have won 3 straight against ranked teams for the first time in Rick Barnes' tenure, they're ranked in the top 25 for the first time in 2+ years, and they're in sole possession of 3rd place in a league where they were picked to finish 8th in a 10 team conference. With Baylor currently in a free-fall that seems endless(both in duration & in schadenfreude), Texas may be the best team in the state of Texas. Marinate on that for a minute; 3 months ago there was an argument being made that Texas might be the 5th best team in the state behind Baylor, SMU, Houston, and a knapsack full of feral cats...and it was a solid argument. (I hear those cats play a hell of a box & 1 defense, though they're under investigation from the NCAA for alleged improper catnip payments from fat cat boosters so they might be ineligible for post-season consideration.) There isn't a person outside of Rick Barnes' house that was seriously considering this situation in November and fans feel like they're playing with house money right now. As a Texas basketball fan, this season has turned me into Princess Kenny.
While I'm as happy as anybody else with how this season has gone and this Texas team deserves the respect it has worked hard to earn, there is something important that needs to be said.
It ain't over.
Now is arguably the most dangerous point in the season yet for two reasons. The first is the remaining schedule(RPI ranking as of 01/29):
Kansas (#1)
@ TCU(#190)
@ Kansas State(#39)
Oklahoma State(#14)
West Virginia(#79)
@ Iowa State(#12)
@ Kansas (#1)
Baylor(#64)
@ Oklahoma(#15)
TCU(#190)
@ Texas Tech(#135)
That's an average RPI of ~67, and if you toss out TCU(Can we do that? Why are they in this league again?) the average RPI of the remaining 9 games is 40. For a point of reference, Texas is currently #32. The average KenPom rating ($) of these teams is 39 & Texas is #35. In other words, 7 of the last 11 games are against teams performing near or above the level Texas has played this season and 2 of the remaining 4 have the potential to be problematic as well. The Big 12 is a brutal conference this year by any quantifiable standard, and Texas' remaining schedule is one of the tougher schedules in the league. TCU is the closest thing to a gimme left on this schedule, though if Baylor has completely checked out - and watching the end of the WVU/Baylor game last night leads me to believe Baylor's going through a crisis of confidence similar to what Texas dealt with last year - the Bears could phone that game in as well. There aren't many chances to relax for a team that's still playing on a knife's edge of missing the NCAA tournament.
The second reason this point in time is dangerous is because for the first time, this group is getting lauded outside of a small group of friends & fans. If you think about it, there isn't a single scholarship player on this team who knows what it's like to be the favorite, what it's like to be the hunted instead of the hunter. The last time this program was ranked in the top 25, Jonathan Holmes was a San Antonio high school senior. Do they know how to handle the ever-growing spotlight? Do they know how to play in front of more than 4,000 fans? Can they keep working & producing at the level they've done so far? Can Rick Barnes stay loose or does he start to put a death grip on the team? We'll find out over the next 5-6 weeks.
I'm going to circle back to the schedule & update my guesses from earlier this season as there is more data & observations to work from.
Kansas (L)
@ TCU (W)
@ Kansas State (L)
Oklahoma State (W)
West Virginia (W)
@ Iowa State (L)
@ Kansas (L)
Baylor (W)
@ Oklahoma (L)
TCU (W)
@ Texas Tech (W)
That's a 6-5 mark over the last 11 games, good for a 22-9 overall record and a 11-7 conference record(which is coincidentally the same as Pomeroy is predicting right now). The homer in me wants to put down a win against Kansas Saturday, but the rational fan in me sees the gap between Kansas & Texas at this point. Kansas is still king of this conference, and I don't see any real way their conference title streak ends this year outside of somebody discovering that Joel Embiid is actually Hakeem Olajuwon undergoing a full-body botox treatment. Texas could potentially snatch that Kansas State game, but they could just as easily lose the OSU game as well. If Texas can hold serve at home they'd be in prime contention for a 4-6 seed in the NCAAs, and if our fans are serious about this team they need to pack the Drum for all 5 home games left on the schedule. There hasn't been a Texas team this fun & likeable in years and they're giving the UT faithful plenty of reason to cheer them on.
SO GO CHEER ALREADY.
I could go on another tirade about the fan support for this Texas squad, instead I'm advocating anyone within 30 miles of campus go watch this team. Something special is happening at the Drum; this is Barnes' 2nd best coaching job since he set foot in Austin(taking 7 scholarship players to the NCAAs his first year on campus is still the high-water mark for me) and you could be a part of it. Barnes might be in the midst of the career revival Mack Brown was unable to manage, and the team he's coaching is full of guys that you want to root for anyway. So go buy a ticket to a game & see what they're doing, you'll be pleasantly surprised by what you find. |
USA Today
Cincinnati Reds right fielder Jay Bruce is reportedly on the trading block ahead of the trade deadline on July 31.
Continue for updates.
Reds Getting Cold Feet on Bruce Deald
Friday, July 31
Jerry Crasnick of ESPN reported the Reds and Mets' talks may have lost momentum as the Reds have concerns over the Mets' package of players.
Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports reported the New York Mets were in overnight talks with the Reds regarding Bruce, and noted the "expectation among many in [the] industry is that [the] deal will happen."
Adam Rubin of ESPN noted a third player could be involved in a deal.
According to ESPN's Buster Olney on July 30, the Reds are "willing" to deal Bruce to the Mets in exchange for pitcher Zack Wheeler.
Anthony DiComo of MLB.com reported the Mets were "heavily scouting" Bruce on July 26.
Bruce Reportedly Available; Orioles Express Interest
Monday, July 20
Jon Morosi of Fox Sports reported the Orioles have been "scouting" Bruce. On July 13, Jon Heyman of CBSSports.com reported Bruce was being made accessible in trade negotiations—even with three years remaining on his current contract.
Bruce is a two-time All-Star and Silver Slugger Award recipient who averaged 32 home runs per season from 2011-2013. Last year was a down year for Bruce, as he batted just .217, but after a rocky start to the current campaign, the 28-year-old has bounced back.
Olney reported on July 12 that Bruce has been on the block for a while. Olney also highlighted how Bruce has made significant strides since seeing his average dip to .162 on May 14, and he speculated the New York Mets as potential trade suitors in his analysis on July 13:
Bruce discussed his slow start with the Cincinnati Enquirer's John Fay:
I had a bad first month and 10 days. I left myself with a hole to dig out of. There's still a lot work to do. I'm still not close to where I want to be. I'm continuing to get better.
Despite the huge improvements, Bruce hasn't been immune to trade buzz in the midst of his resurgence. Crasnick and Baseball America also indicated on July 10 there was a "50-50" chance the Reds would trade Bruce in the month of July.
The next several years figure to be the prime of Bruce's career, though his recent inconsistency and high overall strikeout rate are causes for concern. Given the roll he's been on of late, it's wise for Cincinnati to at least explore selling high on Bruce if it can.
In his report, Heyman says the Reds could be in for a massive sale in a matter of days, with Bruce being shipped out of town as one element of a roster overhaul. That could well be the case, as Cincinnati has a remote chance of making the playoffs at this point.
Numerous rumors swirling around Bruce suggest his days with the Reds are numbered. Perhaps a change of scenery and continuing to work on his craft elsewhere will be in Bruce's best interests and also net Cincinnati solid compensation. |
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With the death of four more persons the toll in the Assam floods on Saturday increased to 37 even as the number of affected people rose to 16.5 lakh in 21 districts.
One person each died in Darrang, Dibrugarh, Morigaon and Nalbari district taking the total in the second wave of floods in the state to 37, an Assam State Disaster Management Authority (ASDMA) release on Saturday said.
A release by Nalbari district administration said a one-and-half-year old boy had been claimed by the flood at Barkhetri Revenue Circle.
ASDMA said over 2100 villages in 21 districts were submerged in the deluge that destroyed standing crops in 1.8 lakh hectare agriculture land .
The affected districts are Dhemaji, Kokrajhar, Bongaigaon, Sonitpur, Barpeta, Goalpara, Morigaon, Cachar, Lakhimpur, Jorhat, Tinsukia, Darrang, Baksa, Nalbari, Kamrup, Dibrugarh, Sivasagar, Golaghat, Kamrup(Metro), Dhubri and Nagaon and National Disaster Response Force(NDRF) was deployed in all of them.
Besides, the Army is assisting the civil administration in Nagaon district for rescue and relief operations, the ASDMA said adding nearly three lakh people have taken shelter in the 320 relief camps set up by the state government.
The ASDMA release said Brahmaputra is flowing above its danger mark at Dibrugarh town, Nematighat in Jorhat district, Tezpur in Sonitpur, Guwahati and Goalpara and Dhubri towns.
The low lying areas of rhino habitat Kaziranga National Park have been flooded forcing animals to move to the highlands in the neighbouring Karbi Anglong hills, Forest Department officials said.
An adult elephant from Bagori Range of the Park was electrocuted during the day when it tried to move across it to the highlands for shelter.
Another rhino homeland - Pobitora Wildlife Sanctury in Morigaon district has been completely inundated by the deluge forcing wild animals there to move to safer high grounds, while its the link roads were breached at several places. |
As I’ve been saying here for some time, behind all the GOP noise and hoopla about Beltway scandal-palooza is a stark reality that can’t be obscured. House Republicans are confronting two major challenges — what to do about the debt limit and about immigration reform, both of which will require cooperation from House conservatives that they aren’t prepared to give — and they don’t have an answer to either one.
This is driven home in fresh and vivid detail by today’s big Post story on the deep divisions within the House GOP caucus. As the story details, there is no strategy for dealing with either the debt limit or immigration:
[T]he most momentous policy decisions, including an immigration overhaul and a fresh deadline for raising the federal debt limit, have no coherent strategy to consolidate Republicans, much less take on the Democrats.
And there is rising fear among some Republicans that House conservatives won’t accept any debt limit hike:
Many within the party wonder if there’s any approach Republicans will unify behind this time. Several veteran Republicans, speaking on the condition of anonymity to criticize their colleagues, said they fear there are too many extreme budget hawks to approve a deal with GOP votes alone, further hampering their leverage in negotiations with the Senate. Rep. Dave Camp, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, is trying to rally support for a broad rewrite of the tax code in exchange for lifting the debt ceiling. But many conservatives consider that insufficient to meet the Williamsburg agreement, which they hold requires a path to balancing the budget within a decade.
This is remarkable stuff. John Boehner is already on record confirming he has no intention of allowing default, which he admits would constitute putting the “full faith and credit of the federal government” at risk. Yet Republicans are now insisting they will demand tax reform in exchange for agreeing to something (a debt limit hike) we all know is inevitable. On top of that, even this exchange would not be sufficient for House conservatives, who still want to balance the budget in 10 years with no new revenues — in keeping with the Paul Ryan fiscal blueprint — even though that could require wiping out large swaths of the federal government and even though Republicans will never, ever, ever propose specific cuts that would accomplish it.
For all the good cheer among Republicans over the ongoing scandals, they still don’t know how to persuade House conservatives to stop acting crazy. They don’t know how to get them to Yes on either the debt limit or on immigration reform. And so later this year the “narrative” could be not about the scandals, but about Republicans. Far right Republicans may well have deep-sixed immigration reform’s hopes — dealing a serious blow to efforts to repair relations with Latinos, which even some Republicans say is essential for the party to remain competitive in national elections. At the same time, the party could well be mired in deep discord over whether to stage another reckless, destructive debt limit crisis that is all about nothing more than giving conservatives the hostage standoff they must have — further underscoring the House GOP’s inability to engage in basic governing.
* DEMS NOT TAKING GOP’S BAIT ON OBAMACARE IMPLEMENTATION: Politico reports that Democrats are coming together around a party-wide strategy not to run from Obamacare during the 2014 elections, and instead to embrace the law, particularly its most popular elements. I’ve been reporting here for some time that Dems would do this; it’s good to have it confirmed again.
Republicans continue to insist implementation problems will be a good weapon against Dem candidates. And certainly there will problems. But again: Dems can — and should — criticize implementation where it falls short, while simultaneously standing squarely behind the whole law and its goals. Dems should not take the GOP’s bait and run from the law.
* STATES REJECTING MEDICAID EXPANSION GETTING TERRIBLE DEAL: Relatedly, the Wonkblog team has a good post on a new study confirming that GOP-controlled states opting out of the Medicaid expansion will get a truly awful deal:
It finds that the result will be they get $8.4 billion less in federal funding, have to spend an extra $1 billion in uncompensated care, and end up with about 3.6 million fewer insured residents. So then, the math works out like this: States rejecting the expansion will spend much more, get much, much less, and leave millions of their residents uninsured. That’s a lot of self-inflicted pain to make a political point.
Indeed, and as the good news out of California has shown, states that actively try to sabotage the law will only look more ridiculous and corrupt when compared to those trying to make it work.
* GOP PUSHES TAX REFORM IN WAKE OF IRS SCANDAL: The Times reports that top House Republicans are moving to channel public anger over the IRS scandal into the cause of overhauling the tax code, on the theory that this will make it easier to get the public to accept doing away with politically popular deductions and exclusions.
Tax reform is one area where Republicans do seem serious about getting something done, but it will require them to get the wealthy to part with cherished tax preferences. If they can’t embrace their one leading cause, it’s more confirmation they are a “post policy” party. The need to link the case for reform to the IRS scandal doesn’t help matters.
* OBAMA SET TO STAGE JUDICIAL SHOWDOWN: The President today is set to nominate three judicial picks for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, a central ideological battleground, and this will escalate the battle over whether Dems will revisit rules reform. Steve Benen puts this in perspective:
Republicans are characterizing this as a scandalous power-grab, while many political reporters are describing this as Obama thumbing his nose at his political rivals. In reality, it’s neither — presidents filling judicial vacancies is basic American governance. It’s Civics 101. That today’s announcement is seen as somehow remarkable is evidence of just how broken the process has become.
It’s also evidence of the degree to which the undemocratic 60 vote Senate has been internalized by many observers as normal and inevitable.
* DOES IMMIGRATION REFORM LACK VOTES TO PASS SENATE? The Washington Examiner’s David Drucker talks to proponents of immigration reform who claim immigration reform is still short of 60 votes in the Senate. Color me skeptical. There seems to be a faction among Dems that wants to shift the bill farther and farther to the right, to win very broad bipartisan support for the Senate, on the theory that this will suddenly get House Republicans to embrace a path to citizenship.
* GOP SCANDAL OVERREACH PRODUCING MEDIA BACKLASH: The other day, Darrell Issa, confronted with his lack of proof of White House involvement in the IRS scandal, said Republicans are “getting to proving it.” In a good column dissecting GOP overreach without evidence, Dana Milbank gets it right:
Congressional investigators have not produced evidence to link the harassment of conservative groups to the White House or to higher-ups in the Obama administration. But the lack of evidence that any political appointee was involved hasn’t stopped the lawmakers from assuming that it simply must be true. And so, they are going to hold hearings until they confirm their conclusions.
As I’ve been saying here, perhaps optimistically, the GOP hyping of scandals really does appear to be producing a media backlash.
* AND THE BLOGWAR OF THE DAY: Josh Barro versus Erick Erickson, which reveals a good deal about what’s wrong with today’s GOP. Barro:
For two decades, the Republican party’s strategy to overcome its disadvantage on economic issues has been a cultural appeal to people like Erickson: non-urban whites who feel threatened by social change. That is, the kind of people who think it’s an alarming trend that women are financially independent, or who think the most salient fact about a writer they dislike might be his sexual orientation…the party’s reliance on a resentment-based appeal has caused its policy apparatus to atrophy.
What else? |
It’s back, folks. Ideaa — the same folks who brought you the awesome Big Android Meat and Greet in Washington DC earlier this year — today announced that the Big Android BBQ’s dates are set. It’s all going down in Hurst, TX and will take place October 22nd through October 23rd.
The BBQ has grown to be a rich platform for developers and enthusiasts to come together for a good time, learn about Android development, and — well — eat. It’ll feature panels hosted by developers from all over the place, including Google’s very own crop of engineers in Mountain View (in fact, this year’s BBQ is “delivered” by them). You’ll also have workshops, parties, and the grandaddy banner event: some delicious Texas-style barbecue.
Early bird tickets are currently going for $55, and this will come with a nice “gift” that’s yet to be detailed. Early bird pricing ends May 22nd so you’ll want to get your order in as soon as you can.
You should also note that the early bird ticket will only entitle you to all the standard ticket features (which typically includes access to all panels, Code Kitchens and the BBQ itself). Upgraded tickets — which have yet to be detailed, but typically include perks such as private dinners and cool transportation — will be available at some point soon, and you will be able to upgrade your ticket if you so desire when that time comes.
Other details — such as travel discount packages — have yet to be revealed, though we’re sure Ideaa will be releasing that information in due time. If you’re absolutely sure you can make it to Texas for the shindig later this year you can head to the BBQ’s EventBrite page right here to place your order. |
HAMBURG, Germany — Workplaces often display a particular type of signage: “This Department Has Worked __ Days Without An Accident.” These notices, with their hopefully ascending numbers, are meant to remind employees of institutional standards, of individual responsibilities, of the importance of mindfulness and consistency.
The Hamburger S.V. clock is sort of like that.
Displayed prominently in the northwest corner of Hamburg’s cavernous home, the Volksparkstadion, the clock marks the total time, down to the second, that the team has spent in the Bundesliga, the top tier of German soccer. Last Friday, the digital numbers, glowing in white, ticked relentlessly upward when the club hosted Bayer Leverkusen: 53 years, 163 days, 3 hours, 31 minutes, 28 seconds at kickoff, all without an accident. As you read this sentence, they continue to mark the days, the hours, the seconds.
In Hamburg, the simple act of keeping time commemorates an essential fact of the club’s identity. A founding member, it has played continuously in the Bundesliga since the league’s first competitive moments, on Aug. 24, 1963, at 5 p.m. It is a distinction no other German club can boast. Not the former European champion Borussia Dortmund. Not Hamburg’s Nordderby rival, and fellow founding member, Werder Bremen. Not even mighty Bayern Munich.
All this helps explain the complicated angst once again shadowing this city’s biggest team. Pride outstripped performance here long ago. After decades of producing quality soccer — Hamburg has three Bundesliga titles on its résumé, and it reigned as the champion of Europe at the end of the 1982-83 season — the club is currently mired in a yearslong rut. Hamburg narrowly avoided its first relegation in 2012, and has survived two even closer calls since then. |
“We’ll take anything,” says Angela Lacey, a pet importer working in the shadow of Heathrow’s Terminal 5.
Hundreds of thousands of dogs, cats, guinea pigs, tropical fish, parrots, rabbits and even the odd rat have passed through the Airpets handling and quarantine centre since its founder converted it from a pig farm 47 years ago.
“But we try to put [customers] off hamsters,” says Lacey. Her colleagues break out into giggles. “They don’t make it,” she adds. “They don’t live very long, little hamsters. The flight coming over, then the [four-month] quarantine. The average lifespan is, what, a couple of years? I wouldn’t pay all that money for a hamster, no I don’t think so.”
And it is a lot of money. Flying in a hamster from New York plus the legally enforced four-month stay in the quarantine cages would cost at least £2,000 ($3,204).
The cost of sending a pet overseas depends on the animal’s size, but Nick Foden-Ellis, Airpets managing director, says it is “rarely less than a business-class ticket for the same route”. A recent job sending a chocolate labrador to Sydney cost more than £4,000 ($6,407).
Despite the economic downturn business has been booming for Airpets and the dozens of other pet importing and exporting firms. “We’ve had the busiest summer for 10 years,” says Foden-Ellis.
The firm has recorded a recent rise in pet exports to Australia after its currency fell against the pound, he says. The pound has recovered to A$1.71 from A$1.44 in March. “The exchange rate change adds a huge amount to disposable income. People that might not have been able to afford to take their pets with them and might have left them behind with a relative now feel they can afford to take them with them.”
He says exports to Australia – the most expensive destination as it requires a stopover – are up 8%-10%. Australia is Airpets’ biggest export destination accounting for 40% of all pet travel. “Everyone has been watching [ITV show] Poms in Paradise,” he says.
Official figures from the Animal Health and Veterinary Laboratories Agency show 139,000 dogs were brought into the UK last year compared with 85,000 in 2011. Imports of cats jumped 74% to more than 14,000. Even ferrets, popularised in recent years by Paris Hilton and Jonathan Ross rose from 68 in 2011 to 93 in 2012.
The agency, part of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, also reports a big rise in families importing rabbits, chinchillas, rats, guinea pigs, fish, snakes and even frogs.
It says imports of cats and dogs to the UK exploded on 1 January last year when the pet passport scheme made it much easier for people to move pets from the European Union and certain other countries to the UK.
“Overnight, it meant the end of mandatory quarantine for thousands of animals that had rabies jabs and vet certificates,” says Foden-Ellis. “We opened at midnight on New Year’s Day as some of our animals were eligible to leave without seeing out the rest of their sentence. Four or five people came in to collect their pets, we had some champagne.”
While it is now much easier to bring in animals, it still requires planning with vaccinations for rabies and check-ups several weeks in advance.
“People don’t think about how tricky it can be,” says Foden-Ellis, a former paratrooper. “An awful lot of our customers are people who go on holiday to north Africa, Cyprus or Spain and fall in love with a street dog and want to bring it home with them. They’ll manage to get it on a flight back from Spain or wherever, but when they arrive here they’ll be asked for documentation. ‘Well, I haven’t got it,’ they’ll say. That means it will have to go into quarantine, which can cost £1,500-£2,000 ($2,403-$3,204).”
Sadly, he says, when some people find out the size of the bill they fall out of love. “We will never destroy an animal. That’s why if you check out these guys’ staff profiles you’ll see how many pets they’ve got. They’re predominately strays that people haven’t been able to afford the quarantine bill for.”
While the number of strays Airpets handles is rising, they are a tiny proportion compared with the pets which executives take when posted abroad. “There has been a huge rise in pets going out to Asia and Bric [Brazil, Russia, India, China] countries,” he says. “As those economies grow businesses are sending their people there, and animals are becoming more accepted as family pets in Asia.”
Laura Nolan, an Airpets customer who took her cat, Gizmo, from Plymouth to Sydney, says the trip cost up to £16,000 ($25,630) including her own flight and visas. “We had her since she was a kitten and we both agreed that we wouldn’t have been able to leave her behind and not know what happened to her.” Despite the cost, Nolan adds, she will take Gizmo with her if she ever has to move again.
Foden-Ellis also boasts a string of celebrity customers, some of whom even fly out their pets with them on holiday. “We have movie stars, footballers, everyone,” he says. One of the world’s best-known footballers regularly books his dogs on transatlantic flights, he lets slip, before threatening to hunt me down if the Guardian names him.
Mike Sawyer, sales and development manager of rival pet transporters JCS Livestock, says his firm has also recorded an increase in business. “We have got a couple of people who take their pets on holiday with them; one customer takes his dogs to New York back and forth at least twice a year and another client sends his dogs to Australia and back,” he says. “Another client shipped their dog to America for a two-week holiday. Luckily it was a small dog – you pay by the size.”
Sawyer points out that the airlines make much more than the handlers. Ramón Delima, vice-president of special cargo at Air France-KLM, which claims to transport more animals than any other airline, says animal transport does not follow socioeconomic trends because pets are largely seen “as part of the family”.
He refuses to say how much money KLM makes from transporting animals, but it’s a much higher margin than regular cargo. “It’s not as simple as transporting a box. We have an animal hotel in Schiphol [airport near Amsterdam]. We take full care of them … dogs are walked in the park, literally. We have animal attendants, just like cabin attendants for passengers. This is not just putting an animal in a box and sending it off.”
This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk. |
Primer Primer is The A.V. Club’s ongoing series of beginner’s guides to pop culture’s most notable subjects: filmmakers, music styles, literary genres, and whatever else interests us—and hopefully you.
Motown 101
In January of 1959, Detroit songwriter Berry Gordy founded Tamla Records, launching its sister label Motown that fall. Though Gordy no doubt had high hopes for his venture, he probably didn’t realize he’d change the course of popular music, turning out era-defining hits via an everything-under-one-roof talent cultivation, songwriting, and producing system. Motown looked to the assembly lines of the city’s auto industry for inspiration, but it was the label’s artists that won the hearts of listeners, creating irresistible music that won over audiences across color lines.
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Gordy enjoyed his first hit as a label head the year he founded Motown with Barrett Strong’s “Money (That’s What I Want).” It was Strong’s only significant hit as an artist—he remained onboard as a highly successful songwriter—but one-offs were a rarity for a label that thrived on spotting and cultivating talent. Among the first acts signed to the label were The Miracles, led by Smokey Robinson.
When Robinson first met Gordy, he immediately recognized Gordy’s name from the labels of all the Jackie Wilson hits he wrote; and Gordy was reportedly impressed because Robinson already had notebooks full of his own songs. The two bonded over their craft, and shortly thereafter, Robinson’s group, The Miracles, became one of the first acts Gordy signed to Motown. While some Motown artists became big because of their sound, The Miracles were defined more by their songs: “Shop Around” (Motown’s first million-selling single), “Mickey’s Monkey,” “Ooh Baby Baby,” “The Tracks Of My Tears,” “Tears Of A Clown,” and more. The Miracles were always one of Motown’s more pop-savvy acts—even after Robinson went solo, the band scored a hit with the proto-disco “Love Machine”—and with Gordy and Robinson bouncing ideas off of each other like a couple of music geeks, The Miracles were able to shift easily between styles, their songs unified by their brightness and by Robinson’s high, sweet voice. Robinson was a team player, too, penning songs for other Motown acts (and recording other writers’ songs if he thought he could do something with them), and serving as one of Gordy’s most trusted advisers.
Motown’s history can be viewed as a series of waves, the first being the rush of hits that defined the label’s sound in its early years. Some artists’ hit-making years, like those of The Miracles, extended beyond the wave that brought them up; others did not. And while Martha And The Vandellas (later to be called Martha Reeves And The Vandellas) saw some chart action after the mid-’60s, the group will forever be associated with its early hits, which helped define the early Motown sound: a chugging rhythm section, honeyed vocals, and inescapable hooks. (Even the group’s last smashes, 1967’s “Jimmy Mack” and “Honey Chile,” sounded like throwbacks.) In the group’s early years, the Vandellas benefited from receiving the full attention of the Motown machine, which groomed their image, promoted them aggressively, and handed them hits by the songwriting and producing team of Brian Holland, Edward Holland, and Lamont Dozier (the source of many of the label’s biggest songs and collectively known as Holland-Dozier-Holland) and others. These propulsive tracks included “(Love Is Like A) Heat Wave,” “Dancing In The Street” (written by Marvin Gaye, Mickey Stevenson, and Ivy Jo Hunter), and “I’m Ready For Love.” By decade’s end the group was troubled by internal tension, the departure of Holland-Dozier-Holland and other supporters, and Gordy’s decision to focus on other acts. But its catalog is quintessential early Motown and rewards those who explore beyond the biggest hits to uncover gems like “You’ve Been In Love Too Long” and “In My Lonely Room.”
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Few acts benefited from the Motown combine—the etiquette lessons, the style consultations, the teams of skilled songwriters and session men—as much as The Supremes. And few exemplified so clearly how difficult it became over time for Gordy to control his employees. Diana Ross, Mary Wilson, and Florence Ballard first caught Gordy’s attention when they auditioned for him as teenagers, though he made them keep re-auditioning before he finally signed them. Then Gordy pushed them to try out different styles, and to tour incessantly (and on the cheap) before the group finally came up with a hit, “Where Did Our Love Go?” With Gordy pushing Ross as the lead, The Supremes got on a roll in the ’60s, scoring with a string of offbeat “Love” songs: “Baby Love,” “You Can’t Hurry Love,” “Love Child,” and more. But Ross’ rise to prominence irritated Wilson and Ballard, who were used to sharing the spotlight; and her closeness with Gordy didn’t exactly endear her to her labelmates, either. She was known to steal bits of other Motowners’ acts, and to passive-aggressively manipulate people to get the songs and attention she wanted. But that was all behind the scenes; the public only saw the results: catchy, heartfelt songs like “Come See About Me” and “Reflections.” And whatever Ross’ personal failings, she was a dynamic performer who adapted well to the changing times. Her 1980 solo album Diana—with its disco-inflected hits “Upside Down” and “I’m Coming Out”—was one of the best of her entire Motown stint.
One of the label’s biggest acts came from the merger of two Detroit groups, The Primes and The Distants, which manifested first as The Elgins, then The Temptations. But while the name stayed the same, the group never really stopped turning over its membership or changing its sound. For a while, though, the tumult led to creative and commercial success. David Ruffin joined The Temptations in 1964 after original lead singer Elbridge Bryant flamed out. And the hits started rolling in for what became known as the “Classic Five” lineup (known for its songs, snappy outfits, and even snappier choreography): Ruffin, Melvin Franklin, Eddie Kendricks, Paul Williams, and Otis Williams. Kendricks lent his voice to the early hit “The Way You Do The Things You Do,” but it was Ruffin’s at the fore on “My Girl,” “Ain’t Too Proud To Beg,” “I Wish It Would Rain,” “(I Know) I’m Losing You,” and most other charting songs from that period. That success brought problems of its own, however, leading to internal tension and the dismissal of Ruffin—whose behavior had become erratic as his drug habit became more of an issue—and the hiring of Dennis Edwards in 1968. It also allowed producer and songwriter Norman Whitfield, who’d already started to favor a harder-edged sound, to push the group in a new direction. Taking cues from Sly And The Family Stone, Temps singles like “Cloud Nine” and “Ball Of Confusion (That’s What The World Is Today)” started to address the ills of the day while incorporating the sounds of psychedelic rock. The “psychedelic soul” era gave the group a second wind and proved hugely influential on the label’s output. Under Whitfield, the Temptations enjoyed a run of hits that stretched into the early ’70s, even as health problems and internal strife led to more personnel shake-ups. The Temptations’ success started to wane after Whitfield’s departure in 1974, but, like a lot of classic Motown groups, they just kind of hung around. One version or another has carried on through the present day, with Otis Williams remaining the only constant.
Formed by four high-school friends, The Four Tops, on the other hand, enjoyed a stable membership for decades until death and infirmity started to force lineup changes in the ’90s. Consistence defined the group in other ways, as well. The way lead singer Levi Stubbs’ deep, pleading voice plays against a foundation provided by the Funk Brothers—classic Motown’s ace, often overlooked, and for years uncredited house band—on “Bernadette,” “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch),” “Reach Out, I’ll Be There,” and “It’s The Same Old Song” is Motown to the bone, creating transcendent songs by pairing high emotion and musical efficiency. After the Holland-Dozier-Holland team’s departure, the Tops had more sporadic success and left the company entirely when Motown packed up for Los Angeles in 1972. But the group carried on, enjoyed some further hits, eventually reunited with Motown in the ’80s, and stayed on the road with the same lineup until Lawrence Payton’s death in 1997. (Stubbs, who left the group following a stroke in 2000, died in 2008. Renaldo “Obie” Benson died in 2005, leaving only Abdul “Duke” Fakir from the original lineup.)
The career of Stevie Wonder, like that of Marvin Gaye (covered below), provides a history of Motown in miniature. Signed to the label at age 11 and billed as “Little Stevie Wonder,” the blind musical prodigy first made a name for himself with the 1963 song “Fingertips (Pt. 2),” the explosive second half of a live performance of a mostly instrumental song that Wonder turned into a showcase for his musical talent and boundless charisma. He might have seemed like a novelty act at first, but the proof was in the music, and the rest of the decade saw him flooding the charts with sophisticated hits like “Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours” and “For Once In My Life.” As he grew up, Wonder wanted to assume more creative control, a source of tension between the artist and the label. During the ’70s, Gordy eventually relented, and the result was a flood of classic albums: Music Of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions, and the double-length Songs In The Key Of Life. They won him acclaim, an even bigger following, and Grammys. And though Wonder wanted to wrest control in part to make albums that worked as discrete artistic statements—as opposed to the label’s haphazard singles-and-other-stuff approach to LPs in the ’60s—each of these albums also sent singles up the pop charts. They’re dense, ambitious masterpieces that also double as great pop albums. Wonder’s output slowed as the decade drew to a close—in part because of time spent trying to establish a national holiday to recognize Martin Luther King, Jr.—and the ’80s found him successful but also out of sync with the times. His output slowed even more in the ’90s and ’00s, though he’s continued to tour.
As the ’60s became the ’70s, Motown found it harder than before to break new acts with one major exception: The Jackson 5. A brother act from Gary, Indiana, The Jackson 5 had some regional success before joining the label, where they received the full Motown publicity push. The group’s debut was entitled Diana Ross Presents The Jackson 5 and Gordy’s hands-on involvement didn’t stop with the blessing of his biggest star, even forming a songwriting and producing group—The Corporation—specifically to create material for the band. (The group, which included Gordy himself, went unbilled so as to avoid another Holland-Dozier-Holland situation in which the writers became stars in their own right.) It worked; powered by songs like “ABC,” “I Want You Back,” and “I’ll Be There,” The Jackson 5 became musical superstars and a merchandizing machine shortly after their public unveiling in 1969. Things were changing behind the scenes, however. Most of the Jacksons’ hits were recorded in Los Angeles, where Gordy had started to shift the bulk of his operations. In mid-1972, L.A. became Motown’s official home, making The Jackson 5 the last superstars produced in the classic era. It’s fitting, then, that their songs sound like transitional works—part classic-’60s Motown, part teen-appealing ’70s pop—and with subsequent releases, the group put down even stronger ’70s roots, anticipating disco, for instance, with “Dancing Machine.” In the meantime, both Michael and Jermaine Jackson launched successful solo careers, and in 1975 the group’s father took The Jackson 5 to CBS Records, where they became simply The Jacksons. (Jermaine, married to Gordy’s daughter, stayed behind.)
For all the joyous music Motown produced, it didn’t produce that many happy stories, and Marvin Gaye’s is one of the unhappiest, including years of substance abuse, two divorces (one from Gordy’s sister Anna), financial woes, and Gaye’s death at the hands of his own father in 1984. Yet through it all, Gaye always made it look easy. He defined smooth as he rolled out winning song after winning song in the ’60s, breaking through with “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)” after working as a songwriter for the label and never looking back. Gaye’s voice made despair sound seductive with “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” and lent drama to songs like “I’ll Be Doggone” that might have sounded like trifles when performed by other artists. And, like Wonder, he found even greater ambition in the ’70s, turning out a series of concepts initiated by 1971’s What’s Going On, a stunning cri de coeur inspired by the troubled times. Its sequels included the self-explanatory Let’s Get It On and Here, My Dear, a wrenching album inspired by his fractured marriage (and recorded with the knowledge that half the royalties would go to his wife as part of the divorce settlement). After parting ways with Motown, Gaye had restarted his career at Columbia at the time of his death, and found new success in the form of “Sexual Healing,” but where Gaye might have gone from there remains one of music’s great unanswered questions.
Gordy went through some major financial trouble after the label’s heyday, and though Motown continued to exist, it wasn’t the tightly controlled show-business megalith it once was. Motown still had hit records, though, with some of the biggest coming courtesy of Boyz II Men, a ’90s combination of classic R&B boy bands and the hip-hop-informed dance-pop known as “New Jack Swing.” Boyz II Men even overtly connected the old and the new with the single “Motownphilly,” though by the time the song was released, the “Motown” side of the equation seemed more like a respectful nod to the past than a statement about the hip, modern sound. Still, the Motown of the ’90s tried its best to capitalize on what was popular in R&B at the time, promoting acts like Johnny Gill and Another Bad Creation alongside Boyz II Men.
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Intermediate Work
Another first-wave Motown act, and the first to prove the label could have just as much success with female artists as with men, The Marvelettes began as a bunch of high-school glee-club pals. The group enjoyed considerable success out of the gate with “Please Mr. Postman” in 1961 and “Beechwood 4-5789” the following year, but struggled to replicate it as the lineup changed due to health and personal issues. It also didn’t help that the group remained third in line among Motown’s girl groups, overshadowed by Martha And The Vandellas and The Supremes. But even while having to struggle for attention and good material, they still produced late-career hits like “Don’t Mess With Bill” before disbanding, and the Marvelettes’ catalog is a strong one, filled with should-have-been-smashes like “Too Many Fish In The Sea” and “I’ll Keep Holding On.” The Motown factory system didn’t always know how to promote everything it put out, but it still produced strong products.
As Motown became more successful, the label began attracting artists who already had a following. Gladys Knight And The Pips were already big on the R&B charts when Gordy lured them to Motown, where Knight reached an even wider audience for her gospel-tinged, deeply Southern soul, heard in songs like “That’s The Way Love Is” and “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” (both later even bigger hits for Marvin Gaye). But the poaching went both ways; Knight never felt that she got the “crossover” push that Gordy’s favorite Ross received, and when Buddah Records came calling in the ’70s, Knight and her Pips jumped ship, and immediately scored their biggest pop hit with “Midnight Train To Georgia.”
Still, having Knight on the label even for a few years bought Motown some R&B credibility with the people who’d criticized Gordy for aggressively courting a white audience. The same could be said of the label’s early signing of The Isley Brothers, who were veterans of the black nightclub circuit when they joined the Motown roster. Unlike The Pips, though, the Isleys were absorbed into the Motown system. Known for fiery call-and-response anthems like “Shout,” “Twist And Shout,” and “Nobody But Me,” the Isleys softened on Motown, turning out covers of songs that had already been hits on the label, and having their own smash with the relatively tame “This Old Heart Of Mine.”
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The classic Motown brand included sophistication among its key elements, which made Jr. Walker And The All-Stars an awkward fit. Awkward but welcome. A saxophonist and vocalist, the Arkansas-born Walker played gutbucket R&B driven in turn by growling vocals and a squawking sax. The group’s first hit single, 1965’s “Shotgun,” announces itself with the sound effect of a gun blast, and from there it’s a three-minute party. Subsequent efforts like “Shoot Your Shot” and “(I’m A) Road Runner” didn’t vary the formula too much, and when the group didn’t know what else to do, it covered Motown hits from other artists. Walker even found ways to fit into changing tastes, scoring a big hit with the smoother-sounding “What Does It Take (To Win Your Love)” in 1969. Walker struggled to find a foothold in the ’70s but ended up exerting a considerable influence on the sound of ’80s rock by contributing to Foreigner’s “Urgent” in 1981, helping to usher in a new era of dramatic sax solos.
The Jackson 5 were one of the last groups to be a “Motown act” in the traditional sense of being nurtured and developed within a well-established system, but even as Motown evolved in the ’70s—allowing their established acts more creative freedom, and signing new acts that had their own, not-always-Motown-like sounds—the label continued its commercial winning streak. One of the most successful bands in Motown history was The Commodores, originally signed to the more rock-oriented MoWest imprint before moving over to the main label. The Commodores explored a sound as much country-influenced as R&B; for every hard, funky Commodores number like “Machine Gun” and “Brick House,” frontman Lionel Richie delivered mellifluous, twangy ballads like “Sail On,” “Easy,” “Still,” and the 10-million-selling single “Three Times A Lady.”
Motown also rode the wild stallion that was Rick James about as far as he could go. A veteran of the ’60s rock scenes in upstate New York, Canada (where he worked with a pre-Buffalo Springfield Neil Young), and California, James reinvented himself as a Prince-like impresario for Motown in the late ’70s and early ’80s, recording rubbery funk workouts like “Give It To Me Baby” and “Super Freak,” while also serving as a songwriter, producer, and mastermind behind the career of The Mary Jane Girls.
And while the classic Motown system had more or less broken down by the time Gordy personally got involved with the sibling act DeBarge, the band’s extraordinary run of hits in the ’80s (including the solo smash “Who’s Johnny” from El DeBarge) briefly made it seem like Motown had another Jackson family on its hands. Instead, DeBarge was just another fleeting ’80s success, able to produce solid, radio-ready ballads and dance tracks, very few of which were as timeless as Motown’s best. The one major exception: the exultant, Latin-tinged “Rhythm Of The Night,” a catchy tune that likely would’ve been just as big a hit in the ’60s and ’70s.
Advanced Studies
Marvin Gaye also excelled as a duet artist, recording albums with Mary Wells, Kim Weston, and Diana Ross. But his most frequent duet partner was Tammi Terrell, with whom he found a chemistry he never duplicated with anyone else. Terrell, who’d previously recorded as Tammy Montgomery and toured with James Brown, had some success as a solo artist but was never better than when playing against Gaye. “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” written by Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson, kicked off a run that included “You’re All I Need To Get By,” “Ain’t Nothing Like The Real Thing,” and other enduring favorites. The team recorded three albums together, but Terrell’s health cut their partnership short. She died of brain cancer at the age of 24.
Gaye’s first duet partner, Mary Wells, was briefly one of Motown’s biggest stars, lending her beguiling voice to early-’60s hits like “You Beat Me To The Punch” and “Two Lovers.” The biggest hit of her career occurred in 1964 with “My Guy.” The Beatles sang her praises and invited her to open for the group the same year. Then Wells, sensing she might be better off elsewhere and feeling there might not be room for her as The Supremes’ star ascended, left the label to seek her fortune elsewhere. It never really worked out, and her relationship with Motown remained bitter until her death in 1992. The songs, however, are some of the brightest from the first phase of the label’s existence.
Gordy’s insistence on making Diana Ross the unchallengeable queen of Motown hampered the careers of Mary Wells and Martha Reeves, but in an odd turn of events, Ross owes at least some of her fame to minor Motown starlet Brenda Holloway. Holloway’s stunning ballad “Every Little Bit Hurts” found a fan in Dick Clark, who asked for Holloway to be a part of his touring show “Caravan Of Stars.” Gordy agreed, with the condition that Clark take The Supremes, whose song “Where Did Our Love Go” was just about to break, Gordy felt. By the end of the tour, The Supremes were huge, and while Holloway was asked to open for The Beatles the following year, she was never given Motown’s best material, and her career floundered (as did that of her younger sister Patrice, who was also under contract to Motown but couldn’t catch a break from her bosses). Before she left the label, Holloway co-wrote and recorded one of Motown’s enduring classics: “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy,” which was minor hit in Holloway’s version and then a smash when Blood, Sweat & Tears covered it two years later.
The talented singer-songwriter Syreeta Wright also had a hard time catching on with record buyers and radio programmers, though not for lack of trying on Motown’s part. With the help of Stevie Wonder (to whom Wright was briefly married), Motown tried selling Wright as both a pop diva and a soulful hippie, as “Rita Wright” and as just “Syreeta,” and as a star on the more adventurous MoWest label as well as a mainstream Motown hit-maker. As a result, Wright’s ’70s output—much of it in collaboration with Wonder—is some of Motown’s most eclectic and undervalued. Even Wright’s biggest hit, her 1979 duet with Billy Preston “With You I’m Born Again,” in unusually beautiful.
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Edwin Starr had already enjoyed a couple of R&B hits, including “Agent Double-O-Soul,” before he came to Motown when Gordy purchased his contract, and the Nashville-born star’s rough vocals didn’t really sound like they belonged on the label. But he arrived in time to take advantage of producer Norman Whitfield’s taste for harder-edged sounds and enjoyed success there in the late ’60s. All of which was overshadowed by his biggest success, the protest anthem “War.” He never topped it, but kept busy recording through the disco era and recording in the UK, where he found great popularity with Northern Soul. (Worth seeking out: Just We Two, a 1969 duet album with the sweet-voiced, unfortunately named, virtually forgotten Blinky.)
Motown had always diversified beyond the soul music that made it famous, putting out pop vocalists and country artists alongside its more famous artists, even if it didn’t push them that hard. The label invested heavily in one rock act, however, Detroit’s Rare Earth. Though it sounded closer to Iron Butterfly than Smokey Robinson, the group clearly knew and loved Motown, concluding its first album for the label with a 21-minute version of The Temps’ “Get Ready.” Cut down to the length of a single, it gave the act a hit in 1970, and for a few years it looked like Motown might have some genuine rock stars on its hands, though Rare Earth turned out to be more of a fuzzy oddity than a game-changer.
The short, eventful career of Thelma Houston on Motown pretty well exemplified the label’s dysfunction in the ’70s. Having gotten some attention working with Jimmy Webb in the late ’60s, Houston signed with Motown in 1971 and promptly stalled, a victim of singles that didn’t catch on and film and TV projects that occupied her time. She was also, like many other Motown women, hamstrung by Diana Ross, who claimed the surefire Top 10-er “Do You Know Where You’re Going To?” for her film Mahogany before Houston could release her version. But as happened with a few Motown acts in the ’70s and ’80s, Houston finally broke through almost in spite of her bosses, recording a discofied version of Harold Melvin’s Philly-soul anthem “Don’t Leave Me This Way” that became one of Motown’s biggest hits, and one of the label’s first successful forays into what was becoming the most important market for R&B artists in the mid-’70s.
It’s also a shame that a weakened Motown couldn’t make a bigger star out of Teena Marie, though that was as much a case of Marie being a musical and cultural misfit as Motown being in disarray. At a time when the R&B market was angling toward electro-funk and hip-hop, Marie was an old-fashioned soul woman—and white, to boot—without much of a market for her skills. After Rick James became one of Motown’s biggest moneymakers, he took on Marie as a project, and had some success fitting her into his more fluid fusion of rock, soul, disco, and new wave. But someone with Marie’s voice and passion could’ve been huge in a different context. In the early days of Motown, the label got its records onto pop radio by disguising the race of its artists. It initially tried a similar gambit for Marie, but couldn’t keep her under wraps forever in the era of Soul Train and MTV.
Times change, though, and it’s fitting that one of the last major artists to sign to Motown was Erykah Badu, a proponent of what came to be known in the late ’90s and early ’00s as “neo-soul.” Influenced more by ’70s experimenters like Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, and Syreeta Wright than by the more synthesized R&B of the era, the neo-soul acts found an audience among both nostalgic old-timers and young people who’d never heard R&B sound so warm and lush. By and large, Badu’s material hasn’t been up to the standard that her idols had set, but someone as steeped in the past as Badu would’ve been crushed by the music business a decade earlier—and lost in the shuffle at Motown back then—which makes her popularity heartening.
Miscellany
Some of Motown’s best singles came from artists like The Velvelettes and The Dazz Band, who didn’t have lengthy or otherwise significant careers. And some of the label’s most unusual music came via its various imprints, some of which were fairly mainstream (like Tamla and V.I.P.), and some of which were more bizarre (like Motown’s two country labels, Mel-o-dy and Hitsville). That’s why, as formidable as many of the Motown artists and their albums are, the various catchall Motown compilations out there are useful for filling in the gaps in the label’s story. The two four-disc Hitsville USA box sets cover a lot of ground—and will be a boon to those who really want a copy of “Let It Whip” but don’t necessarily want to buy a whole Dazz Band album—but even more valuable are the occasional anthologies that consider Motown’s more unusual detours. The recent Motown’s MoWest Story is a good example, gathering decidedly non-Motown-esque tracks by the likes of country-rockers Lodi and the spacey soul act Odyssey that were recorded for Motown’s more experimental West Coast venture. Another set worth tracking down: The double-disc A Cellarful Of Motown collects some of the many songs that Motown recorded but never released, usually because Gordy rejected them during the label’s weekly listening sessions in the ’60s. Some of Motown’s most under-utilized artists—like the Holloway sisters—get more of their story told via A Cellarful Of Motown.
One of the reasons why Motown faltered financially in the ’70s and ’80s was because Gordy poured a lot of the label’s resources into producing movies, without much in the way of return. Most often, Motown produced kitsch classics like the disco musical Thank God It’s Friday and the martial-arts fantasy The Last Dragon. And naturally, Diana Ross found her way into multiple Motown films, including the critical and commercial disasters Lady Sings The Blues and Mahogany, and the adaptation of the Broadway hit The Wiz, for which Ross insisted on playing the lead role of Dorothy despite being about twice the character’s age.
Motown would never have had the success it did without The Funk Brothers, the forces of nature that backed the label’s artists on track after track during its Detroit incarnation. Sadly, they were overlooked for years, thanks to Motown’s policy of not crediting its musicians. Without the creative basslines of James Jamerson, the guitar work of Joe Messina, or the insistent drum of Benny Benjamin, we’d be talking about a very different Motown sound, if we talked about the Motown sound at all. Though it was too late for many of them to enjoy the return to the limelight, The Funk Brothers started to get some belated recognition with the release of Paul Justman’s 2002 documentary Standing In The Shadows Of Motown, which features live performances from the surviving Funk Brothers and recounts, sometimes quite movingly, the band’s contributions and the ways in which the members’ anonymity haunted them.
Gordy also spent a lot of money on Motown-themed TV specials, though those did reasonably well for the company, if only by showing the show-business establishment that Motown’s roster had star quality even outside the recording studio. And it was a TV special that helped keep the label afloat at a difficult time. Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever, broadcast on NBC in 1983, brought back most of the stars who’d moved on from Motown, including Michael Jackson, whose “moonwalk” during his performance of his new (non-Motown) song “Billie Jean” stunned TV audiences, and helped propel his new (non-Motown) album Thriller to international success. But while Jackson may have gotten the biggest boost, the 25th-anniversary special also helped revive interest in classic Motown, spurring a boom in repackaging the back catalog, and a run of Motown songs on movie soundtracks and in TV commercials.
The Essentials: 10 songs that defined Motown
1. Marvin Gaye, “I Heard It Through The Grapevine”
Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong’s infidelity exposé had a long life at Motown, initially recorded by The Miracles (and subsequently rejected by Gordy at the weekly meeting) before Gladys Knight And The Pips did a Southern-funk version that hit No. 1 on the R&B charts and No. 2 on the pop charts in 1967. But even before Knight took on “Grapevine,” Marvin Gaye had recorded what Whitfield felt was the definitive take, complete with a dramatic string arrangement and softly cooing background singers. Whitfield finally persuaded Gordy to release Gaye’s “Grapevine” in 1968, where it promptly became the singer’s breakout hit, and the biggest-selling single in Motown’s history to that point.
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2. The Supremes, “Come See About Me”
There were stronger singers in the Motown stable than Diana Ross, starting with Ross’ overshadowed bandmate Mary Wilson. But the reasons she became a star extend beyond careerism and the attention of Berry Gordy. She knew how to make her limitations fit the song. Here, on one of The Supremes’ signature hits, she coos until the song forces her to give just a little bit more. The way she has to push herself just to the limits of breaking sounds a lot like love.
3. The Miracles, “The Tracks Of My Tears”
That Bob Dylan once called Smokey Robinson America’s greatest living poet has been repeated to wearying effect, but the claim makes sense. Just listen to the words to “The Tracks Of My Tears.” Sure, it gets literary bonus points for referencing Ruggero Leoncavallo’s most famous creation, but is there any poem that captures the anguish of smiling through heartbreak quite as well? Or any poet who could convey that feeling so smoothly?
4. The Four Tops, “It’s The Same Old Song”
Born of commercial circumstance and a not-so-sly in-joke, The Four Tops’ “It’s The Same Old Song” was reportedly written and recorded (by the Holland-Dozier-Holland team in both cases) in less that 24 hours, in reaction to the Tops’ former label re-releasing one of the band’s pre-Motown non-hits. HDH essentially re-wrote The Four Tops’ previous smash “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch),” keeping the basic chord changes intact. The rushed circumstances bring a little more urgency to the sequel, and the lyrics about “the different meaning” to a familiar tune give the writers’ self-plagiarism a purpose.
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5. Stevie Wonder, “I Was Made To Love Her”
Wonder was already a reliable hit-maker by the time he recorded “I Was Made To Love Her” in 1967, and in just a couple of years he’d be hailed as one of Motown’s true auteurs, once he started writing, producing, and performing almost as a one-man band. “I Was Made To Love Her” is a just-about-perfect “bridge” song between Wonder’s ’60s and ’70s work, relying on the brightness of his harmonica and the joyous abandon of his voice to turn a simple love song into something ecstatic.
6. The Jackson 5, “ABC”
Though it shares almost the exact same structure and melody as the Jacksons’ first hit single “I Want You Back,” there’s something special about “ABC”—from its Sly And The Family Stone-style vocal exchanges to the way the youthful Michael Jackson is fully in his element singing a love song with a grammar-school metaphor. Even before The Jackson 5 became a Saturday-morning cartoon, they were fully animated.
7. Martha Reeves And The Vandellas, “Nowhere To Run”
Motown recorded explicit songs throughout its existence. Then there were the incidental protest songs, like this horn-heavy hit that got a lot of play by soldiers in Vietnam. It’s justifiable paranoia with a beat, the sound of being trapped in a dead end and needing to let others know what that feels like.
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8. Jr. Walker & The All Stars, “Shotgun”
Accented by bleating sax and roller-rink organ—and driven by the single funkiest rhythm track in Motown’s history—Jr. Walker & The All Stars’ “Shotgun” is a concentrated dose of dance music, Motown-style, with fevered, near-stream-of-consciousness imagery to match the blisteringly hot music.
9. Eddie Holland, “Leaving Here”
One of the more frenetic and “hard” songs in the Motown catalog, this Holland-Dozier-Holland composition has proved especially popular with rock bands, including The Who, Motörhead, and Pearl Jam, all of whom have recorded raging covers of “Leaving Here.” (The Who’s hit “Magic Bus” also incorporates some melodic elements from the song.) Holland’s original doesn’t “rock” per se, but it rolls forward like a speeding train, giving Holland’s lyrics about fed-up, fleeing women a sense of desperate inevitability.
10. Brenda Holloway, “Every Little Bit Hurts”
Brenda Holloway had already recorded “Every Little Bit Hurts” once before cutting it for Motown in 1964, but the second version both showcases the importance of getting songs right and what early Motown did so well. Holloway and the band take the title seriously, singing and playing as if their life depended on getting the song’s desperate sentiment across. |
Hello everyone and welcome to my tumblr triggered SJW blog! Yes, today we will be discussing why Gurren Lagann is problematic. Go ahead and roll your eyes at the "hypersensitivity" if you must, but it's hard to deny that Gurren Lagann has some serious issues (and if you do roll your eyes you might want to reflect a little on your own life). The problems present in Gurren Lagann are prevalent in many, many anime. Usually we dismiss it, I know I do, but it's good to examine the problematic nature of things we enjoy. While I'm being very critical of Gurren Lagann in this blog, I don't actually think it's a bad show. Personally, I didn't enjoy it much, but if you did I'm not saying you have shit taste. As this analysis will be in-depth, there will be many spoilers and not too much summary. If you haven't seen the series read at your own risk. So without further ado, it's time to roast this anime.
:warning: Spoilers ahead :warning:
Gurren Lagann is a 2007 mecha anime series much loved by fans and critics alike. It focuses on two teenage boys living underground and their fight to free and defend humanity. The vast majority of the series's characters are male and the target audience is men. As we all know, anime targeted at men and women alike feature ecchi, usually in the form of scantily clad women with exaggerated breasts and men ogling them. Gurren Lagann is certainly no different. Repeatedly in Gurren Lagann the female characters are sexualized and defined by men.
Additionally, Leeron Littner, the main mechanic of Team Dai-Gurren, is hyper sexualized as a gay man and perpetuates harmful stereotypes about homosexuals. While most would probably commend Gurren Lagann for including an LGBT character, accurate representation is everything. Leeron is constantly flirting with a myriad of male characters. Even if it is in a joking manner, it normalizes the idea that homosexuals are attracted to every member of their gender. If you can't see the problem here, apply the stereotype to real life. Many people feel uncomfortable sharing locker rooms with homosexual people. Their worry comes from the idea that gay people will target any and all people of the gender their attracted to. Additionally, many people act coldly to homosexuals because they are worried they might "hit on them." The idea that homosexuals hit on everyone encourages homophobia. While a good and lovable attempt at diversity, Leeron's character is actually harmful representation.
The main female lead, Yoko Littner, typically wears a bikini top and short shorts. When she is first introduced, Kamina (a hero in the series) immediately flirts with her, saying "surface girls are a breed apart." The fact that Kamina comments on her body even though she just dropped from the sky to save them from a giant monster speaks volumes to how the sexualization and romanticization often takes precedence over having a good character. While Yoko is regarded as a strong female lead, she is still defined by men. At the beginning she is Kamina's romantic interest. After his death she is driven by his memory. Later in the series she comes back and is immediately Kittan's romantic interest. During the seven year period of peace she leaves the city because "government isn't really her thing." While this is a valid choice and completely true, none of the other characters make this decision. Most of Team Dai-Gurren are not government types and yet they are officials. Instead of taking a position of power, Yoko becomes a teacher on a remote island where she doesn't reveal her identity as a hero. Although Yoko is fierce and strong during the action part of the series, she leaves to pursue a stereotypically feminine job as a teacher of young children. Singling out Yoko as the only person in Team Dai-Gurren to leave and not get recognition just goes to show how different women are treated in this series.
The Black Siblings are four orphan siblings who fight gunmen on the surface. The oldest and only boy is Kittan. The next oldest is Kiyoh, then Kinon, and finally Kiyal. Kittan is presented as a more significant character than the sisters from the start. While Kittan is a strong personality that stands on his own, his other siblings are presented as a unit and split lines between them. They are shown as either Kittan's sisters or Kamina's arm candy. In the second half of the series their characters are stripped of power much like Yoko. Although they're members of Team Dai-Gurren none of them have high ranking jobs in the government. Kiyoh gets married and has a child, Kinon has a position under Rossiu in the government, and Kiyal is only shown taking care of her eldest sister. Kinon is probably the worst treated in the second half of the series. She is a loyal servant of Rossiu and abandons her individuality for him. As Kittan says, her "personality does a 180." Kinon goes against her family and puts all her faith in Rossiu, showing just how little women in Gurren Lagann stand on their own.
Nia, the second female protagonist of Gurren Lagann, is the series's resident idyllic, distant dream girl. The strange girl who falls from the sky and captures the protagonist's heart is a painfully common trope in anime. As with many similar characters, Nia's contribution to the anime is in how she inspires other characters. She arrives after Kamina's death just when Simon needs a motivation boost. The rest of Team Dai-Gurren also rallies behind her. Yoko soon follows after. Nia pulls the anime out of the post-Kamina slump. In the second half of the series, Nia is a messenger for the antagonists and is subsequently taken by them. She provides additional motivation for Team Dai-Gurren to defeat the anti-spirals, as if saving humanity wasn't enough. At the end of the series she disappears once no one needs to be inspired anymore. Nia is no more than a damsel in distress, a classic position for women that robs them of power. The damsel in distress is a perfect metaphor for Nia's character throughout the series. She motivates other characters, usually men, without doing much herself. More than a character she is a figurehead.
Each of the prominent female characters in Gurren Lagann are defined by men in some fashion. Lacking independent female characters is a huge problem; however, the sexism in Gurren Lagann runs much deeper. While women on Team Dai-Gurren fight, they aren't key elements in the battle. The women don't get to make heroic sacrifices. Even Yoko, the strongest female character, becomes less and less important as Team Dai-Gurren grows. Despite participating in battle, female characters in the show are never large sources of spiral power. When Kinon and Simon go to find Rossiu before he attempts suicide, it's a perfect opportunity to show how Simon isn't the only powerful source of spiral power and create more depth in Kinon's character. However, they teleport solely because of Simon and Kinon is only there for moral support. Even the pig mole Boota displays more spiral power than any female character. In the beginning of the series Kamina, the one who inspires spiral power in every character, often talks about masculinity. He describes himself as "A paragon of total masculinity," and bases many of his morals on masculinity. Many of his speeches that inspire Team Dai-Gurren for years to come are based in the idea of being a man. Those speeches later become sources of spiral power. At its core, spiral power is for men. At no point in the series do we see women producing massive amounts of spiral power, taking positions of power, or making dramatic sacrifices.
At the end of the series the future of earth is in the hands of a new generation. With this new beginning we see that, for women, nothing has changed in the Gurren Lagann universe. Simon gives Gimmy the core drill, rather than his sister Darry who has been equal with Gimmy every step of the way. Viral leads the ship going to the Galactic Spiral Peace Conference. Yoko's male student Naakim is selected for the Grapearl squadron while we hear nothing from her other highlighted student Maosha. The sweet taste of a happy ending and hope for the future is soured by the uneven achievements of men and women, as with the whole series. Although Gurren Lagann is a good show, it is certainly problematic. |
The body of Pakapong 'Moei' Tanyakan was taken for an autopsy after he died, and authorities at the army's Phramongkutklao Hospital forensic department removed his brain and organs during an autopsy - and kept them. (File photos)
The mystery over an army cadet's death thickened Wednesday, with the hospital which removed his organs without the knowledge of his parents saying they would supply them for a second autopsy.
Army-owned Phramongkutklao Hospital forensic officials insisted they had acted legally in removing Pakapong "Moei" Tanyakan's organs as part of an autopsy procedure, despite failing to tell the dead man's family.
His parents, Pichet and Sukanya Tanyakan, suspect foul play in their son's death.
Staff at the hospital removed the organs during an autopsy and returned the body to the family for religious rites with the organs still missing.
The parents secretly took the body from a temple where the religious rites were to be performed and delivered it to the Central Institute of Forensic Science (CIFS), a private entity, for a second autopsy, as they were suspicious about the first amid uncertainty about their son's cause of death.
The centre said Wednesday its autopsy on Pakapong, a cadet at the military preparatory school in Nakhon Nayok, would be completed by the end next week.
According to the family, the death certificate indicates their son died of acute heart failure but provided no details. Their suspicions intensified after the CIFS team found some organs under the chest and abdomen and the brain had been removed.
CIFS director Samana Promros said the institute has contacted police who are expected to collect the removed organs from Phramongkutklao Hospital and deliver them to the CIFS today. He said the CIFS autopsy team should complete the examination and identify the cause of death within seven days.
In defence of the hospital, the director said the doctors removed the organs to examine them to further determine the cause of death, which would help allay the family's suspicions. He said the controversy surrounding the removed organs is likely to stem from a communication problem between the hospital and the family.
On Tuesday, the Armed Forces Academies Preparatory School said the organs were taken out to fully determine the cause of the cadet's death. Pakapong collapsed at 4pm on Oct 17 with a weak heartbeat. He was rushed to hospital where he was pronounced dead. Due to the unusual nature of his death, the hospital decided on an autopsy.
The family secretly removed their son's body from funeral rites at a temple on Oct 24 to undergo the autopsy at the CIFS. During the procedure, the autopsy team found some of the organs were missing and the autopsy could not be completed.
According to Mr Samana, the family's letter requesting the autopsy was sent to the CIFS on Oct 25 and it started the autopsy on Nov 1. Dr Panjai Woharndee, a CIFS official, said that removing organs for further examination without asking the family's permission is neither illegal nor unethical.
She said there are no standard rules on the matter while noting that DNA testing can prove if the returned organs belonged to the cadet.
Traiyarit Temhiwong, deputy director and spokesman of CIFS, said the centre normally allows the family to observe every step in the autopsy procedure, and the missing organs aroused the family's suspicions further. However, Dr Traiyarit said the CIFS has informed the cadet's family the removed organs were not discarded, but taken for further tests. |
Django 1.2 release schedule - Update 7
We're in the final stretch As a result of some good bug killing activity over the week, there are just 2 bugs blocking a release candidate. Both of these bugs (#13166 and #13315) are reasonably well understood; they're just waiting on the time needed to polish and commit the patches.
So -- that means we're on target for a release candidate around May 3, with a final release around May 10. The exact date might be off by a day or two, depending on the ability of our esteemed Release Manager James Bennett to find the time to turn the crank and make the official tarballs.
Once we have a release candidate, work will shift to closing the 48 outstanding documentation and translation issues. Luckily, progress on these tickets is much easier than fixing code problems, and there's lots of opportunity to contribute. To that end, we'll be having a virtual sprint on May 8th to try and get as much documentation work sorted out as possible. If you want to help out, join us on #django-sprint on IRC on the 8th; or if you can spare time before then, pick a documentation ticket and work up a patch (or edit a patch on an existing documentation ticket). As always, any and all help is most welcome. |
Friday on ABC’s “The View,” actor Kurt Russell explained his view on the reasoning for the Second Amendment, saying in part it was established by the Founding Fathers for certain protections of its people.
Russell said, “In reality, when we’re dealing with things like, terrorism, whatnot, we’re all going to have different opinions on how to do it. How to deal with it. Mine happens to be that, I think there’s a very strong reason the Founding Fathers had for the Second Amendment. And that is that no government ever hasn’t had to fight its own people, and its own people hasn’t had to fight its own government. We had our civil war. If that Second Amendment hadn’t have been there, those people wouldn’t have had the opportunity to do what they considered defending their life, their way, their style of living. So I agree with that. I think that’s an important part of our existence. It’s basically that simple.”
Co-host Joy Behar said, “I think people more object to the excesses of the Second Amendment. Not the Second Amendment. It’s the boom, boom, boom, boom, boom guns.”
Russell said, “And that’s where the debate comes in. I think it’s too bad the debate can’t remain civil, too. It’s hard to do. I talked about, sometimes talking about terrorism, whatever we do, we all have our opinion on that, too. Whatever we do, we’re a little late for the people who have died….and if you know somebody or you know a child that was maimed in that situation, I got a strong feeling that one’s opinion has a tendency to change then. So I just leave it open for interpretation by all different people and say, we’re all in this together. We’re going to hear people talk about it.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN |
Kids Halloween Costumes Ideas for 2017
CouponPark Blocked Unblock Follow Following Oct 19, 2017
The Halloween season is just around the corner - are you already planning your kids Halloween costumes? We have rounded up the favorite kids Halloween costumes ideas for your viewing pleasure. We have mentioned below the latest kids Halloween ideas that are simply genius, the kids will love to wear and you’d be proud to show off.
Mickey & Minnie Mouse Costumes
If you’re planning to dress your kids up as Mickey or Minnie Mouse for this Halloween, you’re in a good option. There are thousands of costumes out there you can buy for your kids or make. Top options are Minnie Mouse Cuddly Costumes, Mickey Mouse Plush Costumes, Minnie Mouse Fleece Costumes and dozens of others to select from.
Star Wars Costumes
Is Halloween day just about to start? Don’t you have a costume? Dressing up like an angel might be out of reach, but there numerous other Star Wars costumes that can make your day wonderful. Here you can find the best Star Wars costumes that will help you get ready fast. Costumes included The Last Jedi Rey, The Last Jedi Boy’s Poe Dameron, The Last Jedi Deluxe Child Executioner Trooper, The Last Jedi Deluxe Boy’s Poe Dameron and hundreds of others.
Anna Costumes
Despite being the other characters, Anna is counted as one of the unique characters to make any Halloween memorable. Dress up your kids in Anna costumes and let them proud to show off. All the unique and trendiest character costumes are available at shopDisney and you can get all these at the best price along with discount by using shopDisney Coupons.
Captain America Costumes
It is so hard to convince your kids to be a batman or spider-man on Halloween. But instead, they might love to wear Captain America costumes as this character is one of the most famous characters in the superhero universe. So, before going for the Captain America costume, don’t skip the shield — so you can avoid enemies and look good doing it. It isn’t indestructible, but it’s sure to protect you from flying candy. |
Vic George examines the views of welfare theorists from ancient times to the 19th century, considering a range of welfare issues including wealth, poverty and inequality, slavery, and gender issues through the eyes of Aristotle, Locke, and Mary Wollstonecraft amongst others. Covering a wealth of theory, the disappointment of Major Thinkers in Welfare lies in its lack of a concluding chapter, writes Jacob Lesniewski, but there remains great value in George’s approach.
Major Thinkers in Welfare: Contemporary Issues in Historical Perspective. Vic George. The Policy Press. 2012.
Find this book:
Standard histories of social welfare in the United States tend to focus on the politics, policies and programs of the welfare state. The ideological and philosophical underpinnings of the particular historical moments under examination are usually leveraged as context and background. Vic George’s Major Thinkers in Welfare approaches the study of social welfare and the welfare state in an opposite fashion. Instead of centring his analysis on policies and programs, George takes ideas and their historical development as the centre of his analysis. Starting from ancient Greece and moving through Western European history to T.H. Green, George’s examination of the ideas of various thinkers in radically different economic and political environments is a testament to the enduring historical dilemmas of welfare provision.
George rightly focuses on some fundamental questions in his presentation of the ideas of the various thinkers in this volume. Each chapter focuses on “thinker’s views on wealth, poverty, and the satisfaction of basic needs” (viii) and the importance of various sources of welfare, from the state to the market and intermediary institutions (church, family) in between. Importantly, George pays particular attention to how each thinker approaches “different social groups in society” (viii). His insistence on discussing each thinker’s approach to women and slaves is helpful for understanding the implications of the ideas of each thinker. It also allows for the inclusion of early feminist thinkers such as Mary Wollstonecraft. Given the gendered nature of modern welfare provision and the debates surrounding them, this is an important contribution. Finally, George focuses on education and the historical context in which the ideas under discussion developed.
George’s discussion reveals that two important dilemmas have occupied the minds of thinkers since Plato: determining the deserving and undeserving poor, and the social control role of welfare provision. Plato was troubled by inequality in ancient Athens because he felt that it was a “disturbing influence on government,” one that could potentially undermine the stability of the Guardian class’s rule over “inherently unequal and hierarchically organized classes” (p12). Aristotle was critical of Plato’s idea proposal that one small class of Guardians should rule, but shared Plato’s fear of unbridled personal freedom and the concentration of wealth. For both Plato and Aristotle, social stability was the main concern and the goal of social welfare provision was the achievement of a stable, and hierarchical society.
Classical liberalism, represented by John Locke, brings forward the issue of social control to another period of economic and political upheaval, that of 17th and 18th century England. Thomas Hobbes is often put forward as the champion of harsh social control during this same period, but Locke’s classical liberalism emphasizes the need to manage the poor. Hobbes claimed that civil authority existed to maintain social order, Locke believed that the preservation of private property through the actions of civil authority “provides security and liberty to the individual” (p95). Locke saw poverty not as the result of structural failings in the economy, but as “the result of individual character and behavioural failings” (p98). Locke’s championing of liberty did not extend to the undeserving poor (‘idle vagabonds’ (p99)), for whom he proposed a set of travel restrictions as well as parish-based monitoring and behaviour adjustment programs that were deemed too harsh for English poor law (p100). The threat that undeserving working age male poor posed to private property was sufficient for Locke to propose draconian solutions that emphasized the need for social control over these sectors of the population. The Lockean view of the poor and the role of welfare provision is most iconically represented by the institution of the poorhouse.
The importance of a structural analysis of poverty is evident in the work of Rousseau and Thomas Paine, who both move away from expansive definitions of the undeserving poor and minimize the social control aspects of welfare. Rousseau sees the establishment of private property “ signalling the arrival of both wealth and poverty in society” (p134) and sees a role for the state in “preventing and reducing poverty” (p135). Rousseau condemns idleness and dependency, but does not exhibit the same programmatic concern with it as Locke. Paine locates the causes for poverty in the relationship between economic restructuring and a state apparatus that perpetuates and exacerbates the effects of economic change (p189). Paine is the first to sketch out a universal welfare state and the idea of the right to welfare. Both come in response to his disgust with English poor law of the time and its effects on free citizens. Paine does see a “culture of poverty” as contributing to the disorder in poor communities and the anti-social behaviour of some elements of the poor, but locates it squarely within economic and political causal stories. His discussion prefigures some of the debate that stirred up by William Julius Wilson in The Truly Disadvantaged.
No philosophy of welfare or system of social welfare provision can avoid aspects of social control. Paine notion of a universal right to welfare is important for pushing back against a modern ideology and system of social welfare that has taken an ideology social control over undeserving elements to an intensely punitive extreme through expansion of the carceral state at the expense of the welfare state. George’s discussion of Paine, Marx, and TH Green’s structural understandings of poverty and inequality that (eventually) points to the failure of unbridled capitalism to provide universal welfare is a useful one that can potentially push back against the ideological underpinnings of these arrangements.
Where George disappoints is in his uncritical emphasis on the role of education in his selected thinkers understanding of welfare and welfare provision. He is correct to note that theories of education have long been important to thinking about welfare, but he leaves out any generalized discussion of why and to what end. This points to the major weakness of the book, the lack of a concluding chapter that pulls some of the threads that are obvious to a critical reader in the book together in some coherent way.
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Jacob Lesniewski is a doctoral candidate at the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. His research broadly focuses on low-wage labour markets and the attempts of communities and workers to change working conditions in low-wage labour markets. His dissertation is an ethnographic study of a workers center in Chicago, focusing on the implications of the center’s approach to community organizing practice, radical social work practice, urban social movements and labour market regulation. Read more reviews by Jacob. |
Selfie! - Marc Marquez, Dani Pedrosa and Andrea Dovizioso, Americas MotoGP:
My hotel room is pimp!!! Or maybe they think I'm a pimp #notwhatihadinmind pic.twitter.com/wg23Ej8ms7-- Colin Edwards (@texastornado5) April 24, 2014
"The priest didn't want noise on Sunday, so [that is why] they decided to hold the Dutch TT on Saturday... It's strange because Superbike is on Sunday - so maybe the priest prefers Superbike!" - Valentino Rossi, Dutch MotoGP: CLICK HERE
Jack Miller, Dutch Moto3:
Cal Crutchlow, Twitter, MotoGP Summer Break:
Wiping is going to be a problem ...!
Poor Lucy , hahahahaha pic.twitter.com/3evnit37nu-- Cal Crutchlow (@calcrutchlow) July 15, 2014
68 grados. Como? No lo se! / 68 degrees. How? I don't know! pic.twitter.com/2azCn77r9l-- Marc M?rquez (@marcmarquez93) August 18, 2014
Valentino Rossi, Twitter. Rossi and MotoGP rival Marc Marquez ride dirt track at the Italian's ranch:
Gran d?a en el Motor Ranch VR46! / Great day in Tavullia. Thanks guys! pic.twitter.com/4UDnV1geRa-- Marc M?rquez (@marcmarquez93) September 16, 2014
"I think I set a 'stoppie' record because it was very long! Maybe three or four seconds and very high-speed. I asked my mechanics to check how long it was" - Dani Pedrosa, Japanese MotoGP: CLICK HERE
HRC vice president Shuhei Nakamoto gets soaked during Marquez title celebrations, Japanese MotoGP:
"I was trying to do Doohan style! But in the end I did like Doohan [in 1997] when he was leading this race and he crashed!" - Marc Marquez, Australian MotoGP: CLICK HERE
Valentino Rossi photobombs the Repsol Honda victory celebration, Malaysian MotoGP:
Mika Kallio's 'wave' after being taken down by Maverick Vinales, Valencia Moto2:
"I thought about riding away from the circuit and seeing if a local shop would repair it!" - Cal Crutchlow, Valencia MotoGP Test: CLICK HERE |
The NFL is in a death spiral. And so is the rest of football (pee-wee, high school; maybe not college yet). Even though I played the game growing up, I'm glad to see it declining in popularity. There are several reasons for the coming collapse.
First and foremost, parents don't want their children's future development impacted by playing what is supposed to be a game. Many coaches and parents have delusions of grandeur about their child and want to see little Johnny become the athletic superstar that they spend all day every Saturday and Sunday watching on television. Their kids spend an inordinate amount of time working out, practicing, traveling for games, and neglecting school and studying. Parents spend huge sums of money to make sure their kids have all the latest gear. Then when they get cut from the high school or college team, it's too late to develop good study habits. The nerdy kids are way out in front of the jocks in academics and the jocks end up with limited employment options. Many parents are looking farther into the future than coaches and want to expand opportunities for their kids.
Secondly, there are the injuries. I know lots of guys with high school football injuries that still bother them 30 years later. CTE is also a real problem for even very young kids. It's going to get even worse in the future. You have young kids, some as young as 10, 11 or 12, taking supplements and steroids, all with the tacit approval of parents and coaches. Who wants their 11-year old kid who's 100 lbs playing pee-wee football against a 200-lb linebacker? So parents are pulling their kids at a young age because there are plenty of activities other than football where kids can get exercise without the potential of getting injured badly. There's a reason most jocks are dumb, and it's not always because they didn't study hard enough.
Thirdly, it's unhealthy for white people to waste their time watching a bunch of roided-out, CTE-brain dead niggers humping a football. Professional sports as run by the jews elevates negroes over whites. What kind of message does it send to kids when their father is so emotionally invested in his favorite sports teams? Dads must not realize how their families and others perceive such behavior. The son sees that his father's main concern is about how well he does in sports, so academics take a backseat. He foolishly idolizes negro culture and starts listening to gangsta rap, smokes weed, becomes thuggish, and is ok with racemixing. Hopefully he doesn't have any daughters. Dad becomes emasculated because the older he gets, the farther away he is from what he really wants to be; a star athlete worshiped by everyone (Al Bundy Syndrome). Something he probably never was but always dreamed about. The wife is probably disgusted by his lack of masculinity.There's a reason why sports programming is loaded alcohol and boner pill advertisements.
Lastly, the niggers are at a point where they feel strong enough to bite the hand that feeds them. They have no problems showing whitey just how much they despise him. They are encouraged to do so by a media that hates white America also. The national anthem protest may have started off as a protest against perceived "racism", but it has fully morphed into open hatred for white people. We've opened our homes to these sports franchises and put nigger athletes on a pedestal and act as if their thoughts matter. And we've found out that they are stupid violent savages that contribute nothing of value to society. In fact they ruin society and civilization.
So, it's time for sports obsessed white Americans to put down the remote control, cancel their cable subscriptions, and stop following college and professional sports, as if it matters. It doesn't. It's nothing but a huge waste of time and money. And it's making everyone miserable. |
How’s this for an amazing tax break? Your Subchapter S corporation goes bankrupt, forcing the banks to write off $1 million in debt. The banks are out the $1 million, not you. Yet you get to claim an extra $1 million of losses on your individual return, which you can use to offset income from other sources for up to 20 years. One New Jersey couple invested $200,000 in two S corps and saved more than twice that in taxes.
It sounds like one of those too-good-to-be-true tax shelters peddled on the Internet. But it’s not. This break was blessed by the U.S. Supreme Court in a little-noticed decision earlier this year.
There are some big dollars in play here. Richard M. Lipton, a Chicago partner of McDermott, Will & Emery, represents a set of real estate developers now eligible for $900 million in windfall writeoffs. Some investors in defunct S corps may even be sitting on valuable writeoffs without knowing it, says Seattle tax attorney John M. Colvin. His firm, Chicoine & Hallett, represents Denver developers David Gitlitz and Philip Winn, who won the Supreme Court case.
No one seriously argues Congress intended to create this loophole, and Justice Stephen Breyer strongly urged his colleagues to plug it. “All things being equal, we should read ambiguous statutes as closing, not maintaining, tax loopholes,” he wrote in a dissent. But the eight other judges decided that, intended or not, the break was allowed by the language of the convoluted tax laws. “The court was sending a message: Don’t rely on the courts to clean up the tax code,’” says Lipton, who chairs the American Bar Association’s tax section.
In fact, that is exactly what the IRS was trying to do. An ABA panel warned about the glitch nearly a decade ago. But instead of getting the law changed, the IRS issued rules denying that the loophole existed and fought off taxpayers who disagreed. For a time it succeeded. The Tax Court sided with the IRS, as did three of five appeals courts. But those courts backing the government came up with different rationales for doing so. One appeals panel lamented: “Interpreting the Internal Revenue Code is about as easy as swimming through mud.”
This particular mud was created by the interaction of two sections of the tax code. The first governs S corporations. An S isn’t normally taxed on the corporate level; its income is passed through to the owners’ tax returns. The owners can deduct an S corp’s losses, too, but only to the extent they’ve invested money in it or previously declared income from it--that is, to the extent they have “basis” in it. Any losses the owners can’t deduct are “suspended” until they put more money in or have more income from the S corp.
The second section provides that the forgiveness of debt counts as income to the lucky borrower unless the borrower is insolvent. The rule makes sense: If your mortgage is $50,000 and one day the bank tears up the mortgage in return for $40,000 in cash, you have a windfall indistinguishable from a $10,000 lottery payoff. But if bankrupt borrowers had to pay taxes on all their forgiven debt, they’d never get back on their feet.
What happens when the debt of a bankrupt S corp, owned by solvent taxpayers who didn’t personally guarantee the debt, is written off by a bank? According to the Supreme Court, the erasure of the debt becomes a sort of twilight income. At the same time that it does not count as taxable income to be declared on their 1040s, it does count as the kind of income that raises their “basis.” It thus enables them to write off, against other taxable income, the losses the S corp racked up in its death throes.
As word of the Supreme Court decision spreads, investors in defunct S corps are scrambling for refunds. The rules work like this: Depending on what year the S debt was forgiven, losses can be carried back for 2 or 3 tax years and forward for 15 or 20 years from that year. You can amend past returns and file for back refunds for up to three years from the original due date of a return, including extensions. That means you can still amend returns from 1999 and 1998 and even 1997, if you got a filing extension.
So dust off the records of your disastrous S corp investments and see if you’re a winner. Colvin has two clients (not Gitlitz or Winn) who have gained enough paper deductions to wipe out their income taxes for the next decade. “They may be able to retire on Gitlitz,” he exults |
Event Organizer Refuses to Testify Before House Panel, Saying State Can't Regulate Privately Funded Conference
An Iowa Republican lawmaker is threatening to subpoena a gay-rights activist who's refusing to testify before a House panel that's investigating a safe schools conference for LGBTQ youth.
Anti-gay state Rep. Greg Heartsill (photo), who oversees the panel, sent a letter Thursday to the attorney who represents Iowa Safe Schools Executive Director Nate Monson. Iowa Safe Schools puts on the annual Governor's Conference on LGBTQ Youth, which drew more than 1,000 students, parents and teachers last year and is said to be the largest event of its kind in the nation. Despite its name, the conference is not funded by the governor's office nor by state tax dollars.
Monson is refusing to testify before the panel, which is looking into allegations from Bob Vander Plaats' anti-gay Family Leader group that the 11th annual conference in 2015 included sexually explicit content.
"I would entreat Mr. Monson one more time to reconsider the bi-partisan Panel's invitation to hear testimony from him regarding the April 3, 2015 Governor's Conference on LGBTQ Youth," Heartsill wrote in his letter to Monson's attorney, Nate Boulton, which was obtained by The New Civil Rights Movement. "I would like to draw your attention to Iowa Code sections 2.15 (1) (b) Powers and duties of standing committees and 2.23 Witness- attendance compulsory as you make your recommendation to Mr. Monson. I believe the best outcome for all involved is for Mr. Monson to fulfill his original agreement to meet voluntarily with the appropriate legislators to provide a response to the January 27 report."
PREVIOUSLY: Anti-Gay Iowa Lawmaker Says He's Sick Of Reading About How Anti-Gay He Is
Monson, who's compared lawmakers' investigation to a "witch hunt," told NCRM he doesn't believe Heartsill, who heads up the panel, has the authority to subpoena him given that the conference is a private event and doesn't receive state funding.
Heartsill, who's led a hateful two-year campaign against the conference, has said that because taxpayer dollars are used for transportation, there is a public interest in the event.
"The issue is huge public policy," Monson told NCRM. "If a school bus transported kids to a play — do legislators have authority over that play?"
Boulton wrote to Heartsill recently that Monson's testimony would "unnecessarily blur the bright line" between the private conference and the state's regulatory authority.
"That is simply a step too far," Boulton wrote, adding that Monson's testimony would "appear to acquiesce to state regulation and oversight of the content of this private organization's programming."
GOP Rep. Bobby Kaufmann, who initiated the investigation as chair of the House Committee on Government Oversight, called Monson's refusal to testify "poor form and an escalation," adding that it "kind of shows guilt."
Monson responded that the investigation is being fueled by lawmakers who are "obsessed" with LGBTQ issues, according to The Waterloo Cedar Falls Courier.
Heartsill is scheduled to report on the investigation to the full House Oversight committee this week, but Monson said Iowa Safe Schools has no plans to heed any recommendations.
This year's conference is set for April 29 in Des Moines. To support the conference, which is funded entirely by donations, go here. To register for this year's event, go here.
Read Heartsill's full letter below.
Image of Rep. Heartsill via Facebook
See a mistake? Email corrections to: [email protected] |
No single descriptor could sum up Prince, and he was acutely aware of this, turning his perceived ambiguity into copy (“Am I black or white / Am I straight or gay?” his how he mimicked outsiders’ curiosity in 1981's “Controversy”) and rejecting labels openly in a litany of all the things that he wasn’t in 1984's “I Would Die 4 U” (“I’m not a woman / I’m not a man / I am something that you’ll never understand”). He went by many names (Jamie Starr, Alexander Nevermind), wrote in many voices (most deliciously for his abandoned Camille album), mastered a multitude of instruments, and blended genres. He did so much to color and confound his persona, in fact, that if there is any one go-to word to describe Prince the artist objectively—not counting “genius,” which was commonly and I think justifiably applied to him—it’s “prolific.” With an album released almost every year in the ‘80s and ‘90s, a few of which were double-albums or multi-disc sets, perhaps the only thing that rivals his material’s quality in its capacity to astonish is its sheer quantity. He was a machine, and in the mid-to-late-’80s, he was as close to being a perfect machine as a human artist could possibly get.
But that’s only part of the story. Decades before Kanye West submitted several revisions of his Life of Pablo album for public consumption, essentially rendering an aesthetic out of his editing process, Prince was pitching and canceling albums left and right. Sometimes he’d change his mind so close to the release date that these works would be pressed and leak, as in the case of The Black Album and Camille. Dream Factory mutated into Crystal Ball mutated into Sign ‘o’ the Times. What didn’t see the light of day officially occupied as distinct a place in Prince lore as what did.
This combined with Prince’s terseness—his periodic allergy to interviews, his refusal to be recorded during them, his fondness for shortened words and proto-emoji—makes the official release of 11 tracks from Prince’s legendarily vast vault of unreleased material a morally complicated occasion. If Prince were alive today would we have wanted these released? It’s doubtful, and this question and answer matter if we are to consider his entire approach to communication, which necessarily included the art of withholding. (He refused prerelease publicity for his Purple Rain follow-up Around the World in a Day, effectively pulling a Beyoncé almost 30 years before Beyoncé.)
I think about how much artists say now, how rarely the extra social media chatter actually enhances their art or makes them more interestingly and endearingly human, and Prince’s taciturn nature becomes so appealing, so gloriously mystique-enriching in contrast. If only more people knew when to shut up as brilliantly as Prince did.
These new old songs come bundled in the deluxe reissue of Purple Rain, alongside a remastered version of that landmark 1984 album (recorded with his band the Revolution) and a disc of single edits and b-sides (the former of which are needless, the latter of which comprise no fewer than three essential songs from the man’s catalog: “17 Days,” “Erotic City,” and “God”).
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The real prize of the set, though, is that disc of rarities, all recorded between 1983 and 1984 (there is some debate, though, as to whether the version of “Wonderful Ass” on the disc indeed originates from September ‘84 as noted, as it had previously circulated on bootlegs labeled as the 1986 version of that song). For a fan, it is, of course, a thrill to hear an album’s worth of new stuff from Prince beamed over from over 30 years ago, just as he was reaching his creative peak. Many of the songs previously circulated amongst diehards in substandard audio quality, while others like the studio version of “Electric Intercourse” previously were not known by fans even to exist. This disc is not just an audio upgrade, it’s a boon to any Prince collection as at least half of these songs can easily sit alongside his funkiest. They illustrate the sort of excess that Prince got away reveling in because he was so good at locking in a groove and letting it ride—the proto-house of “The Dance Electric” (which gurgles and hisses like “Thriller” plunged into Minneapolis deep freeze) stretches on for almost 12 minutes and, in my experience, justifies such indulgence. The similarly extended “We Can Fuck” shows how Prince cultivated humor in blunt sexuality. The same could be said for “Wonderful Ass,” on which Revolution keyboardist Lisa Coleman, a creative genius and invaluable asset to Prince’s catalog in her own right, sings lead vocal simultaneously with Prince, rendering the very concept of wonderful ass an egalitarian treat to be enjoyed by all. “Computer Blue,” here in its 12-minute “Hallway Speech” version really lifts off into a rave-up after the halfway point. It’s a funk explosion that the truncated version on Purple Rain doesn’t even hint at.
Aside from bootleg releases, many of these songs found their way out, as Prince songs were wont to do. “We Can Fuck” was revised as a duet with George Clinton on the Graffiti Bridge soundtrack in a toned down format (“We Can Funk”). “Computer Blue,” both the extended and original version on Purple Rain, incorporate the vault disc’s concluding “Father’s Song,” an instrumental Prince composed with his own father and appears briefly in the Purple Rain movie. Prince gave “The Dance Electric” to his childhood friend and former collaborator André Cymone, who released it as a single in 1985. It made only a minor dent on R&B radio, far from the “hit” Prince had foreseen. I contend that it would have easily gone Top 5 had Prince released it under his own name and so close to Purple Rain—like much of the man’s work time has done nothing to erase its sonic futurism, and its lyrical content about the need for people to love each other in the face of impending apocalypse (a more spiritually anchored version of the discourse in “1999”) feels more current than ever.
In a video promoting this deluxe reissue, Prince’s audio engineer Susan Rogers—yet another key collaborator in a stable of talented humans that I think would play very well if fictionalized in a prestige series about Prince’s life and music in the mid-to-late ‘80s (imagine watching his breakup with Vanity and rebound with Apollonia play out on screen!)—describes “Roadhouse Garden,” another just-released vault track, as “kind of a work in progress...a stop on a journey but not his destination,” saying that ideas on the track would later be applied to Around the World in a Day’s “Paisley Park.” Says Rogers:
Prince was so prolific that sometimes a song would be written as a way to another song, as a way of trying out an idea or a feeling just to see how well it will work. And then he would revisit that feeling or that idea on a later song that would take the idea a little bit further.
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As much as it feels weird for these songs to see the official light of day without the explicit permission of the man who created them, the man who hawkishly lorded over his image to the extent of suing his fans for posting pictures of him on the internet, Prince’s ideas had a way of wiggling out over time, so that this release is not exactly out of step with the way his music would eventually reach people. He dipped into the vault for a few official releases, most notably 1998's Crystal Ball. The curation of this particular batch of songs, too, via his estate, is knowing and clued-in to fan demand. Minor audio quibbles on the vault disc aside, they did this right and I can’t wait to see what else they can do with this man’s unreleased body of work.
This is such a fan-focused release that for the uninitiated, that vault disc in particular is sort of an advanced lesson in Prince. The other two discs make a much better introduction. The remaster of Purple Rain turns up the sound for a mix that’s way less dynamic in range than the gorgeous original. I do not like my sound to come in block waveforms, so this remaster will not replace the original in my rotation. But it is in step with modern tastes, and anything that can convince kids’ ears of Prince’s greatness is a good thing for the world, in my opinion.
Even though Prince was an absolute superstar, there’s still much of his catalog that went unappreciated—the fact that masterpieces like “If I Was Your Girlfriend,” “I Wish U Heaven,” and “Mountains” weren’t Top 5 smashes means our culture failed Prince on some part. It’s hilarious to think of people getting down to an oddity like “Love and Sex” or “Katrina’s Paper Dolls” when there’s so much rich material that’s been readily available, crying out to be loved for decades. If you don’t know the key two words of the narrative of “Joy in Repetition,” if you haven’t had internal debates about Prince’s best b-side (it’s “She’s Always in My Hair,” no wait, its “Shockadelica,” no wait, it’s “Girl,” no wait...), if you haven’t at least considered the notion that Parade is superior to Purple Rain, much listening awaits you. Go out there and rave unto the joy fantastic. |
For some people, quiet buttons on their home arcade sticks are a must. Whether it’s because they play late at night when everyone is asleep, or they live in a small apartmant complex where the sound of buttons can easily be heard by neighbors, these folks need a way to muffle the sound of the buttons on their arcade sticks. Arcade buttons however, were originally meant to be used in noisy arcades where there really was no need to make them quieter. While companies like Sanwa have offered silent buttons for a premium, it has often fallen to the community to create solutions for this. Enter Pei and his HBFS series of buttons.
In 2012, Pei decided to take matters into his own hands by crowdfunding his original HBFS-30 silent buttons on Indiegogo. Using a combination of padding and technology originally used in mechanical keyboards, the HBFS-30 (or HBFS30-G1, as it is now called) was a hit and the donation drive was a success. Now, a year later, Pei (with the help of Gamerfinger) is back with a second generation button, the HBFS30-G2, which we have obtained copies of for this exclusive Shoryuken review.
The Basics
The HBFS30-G2 is an evolution of the previous HBFS30-G1 button. It features the same unique hexagonal shape, padded clear plunger and Cherry MX micro switch as the previous model. The main difference lies in the adapter system for the Cherry MX switch. Whereas the G1 required a separate external adapter that plugged into the bottom of the button, the new G2 has the adapter built into the housing of the stick. This deals with the main issue with the G1, wherein vigorous play would often shake the adapter loose in the middle of a match. With the new built-in adapter, any risk of this happening is gone.
Build Quality
As with most arcade buttons, the HBFS30-G2 is made of high-quality ABS plastic. Just from the feel alone, you can tell that these are some tough buttons – maybe even too tough, as the locking tabs on either side do not have as much give as an equivalent Sanwa button. This means that inserting and removing them from a stick takes a bit more elbow grease than normal. The same can be said for the locking pegs that hold the transparent top cap in place.
As for the micro switches themselves, the Cherry MX switches are widely renowned for their quality and longevity, and are guaranteed for 50 million presses by Cherry themselves – more than the stock switches in Sanwa or Seimitsu buttons.
Sound Deadening
To achieve its low sound output, the HBFS30 line uses a combination of padding and quieter Cherry micro switches to minimize the noise coming from the buttons. In testing the G2, we performed the same test that we did with the pre-production HBFS30-G1 last year. We checked the noise level from from the buttons (HBFS30-G2s using both Cherry MX Red and Blue buttons with a Sanwa OBSF-30 for comparison) from three different distances: point blank, one foot away and three feet away.
This time however, we mounted the buttons on a Razer Atrox Arcade Stick. We also had access to a room used by professional radio DJs for recording voice overs to do the testing (which should account for the lower values seen here than in the previous test). The software used was Sound Meter for Android. Results are as follows:
Point Blank OBSF-30 – 77db
HBFS30-G2 (Cherry MX Red) – 69db
HBFS30-G2 (Cherry MX Blue) – 68db 1 foot away OBSF-30 – 64db
HBFS30-G2 (Cherry MX Red) – 52db
HBFS30-G2 (Cherry MX Blue) – 54db 3 feet away OBSF-30 – 58db
HBFS30-G2 (Cherry MX Red) – 43db
HBFS30-G2 (Cherry MX Blue) – 46db
As we can see, the HBFS30-G2 is clearly quieter than the stock Sanwa button. More importantly, the muffled sound doesn’t seem to travel as far as that of the stock OBSF-30, with the noise level greatly dropping off as the distance from the button increases. This is important as it means that the sound from these buttons is less likely to reach other people within the same household.
Customization
The HBFS-30 comes with a clear cap that allows for art inserts to match the top panel art of any stick. Meanwhile, the Cherry MX micro switches can be switched out to suit the users desired feel. The default red switch offers the least resistance and quietest actuation. However, those preferring a more tactile feel can switch to the blue or brown switches, and those wanting a less sensitive button can simply use the black one.
In addition to all of this, the bottom of the buttons has holes for mounting LED lights for those inclined to do so.
Ergonomics
As previously stated, the feel of the HBFS30-G2 can be changed depending on the type of Cherry MX micro switch used. The samples sent to us had both the red and blue micro switches. Among the four available types, these are probably the closest in feel to the Sanwa OBSF-30. The main difference is that the blue switch has a tactile “bump” in the middle. Folks who prefer a bit more feedback on their buttons will likely prefer these over the red ones.
Value
The HBFS30-G2 will retail for$5.99 over at the Gamerfinger shop, but those who pre-order can purchase them for a reduced price of $4.99. This price is slightly higher than one would expect to pay for a similar clear or skeleton button (both the Sanwa OBSC-30 and Seimitsu PS-14-KN go for about $4-$5 depending on where you buy them). It’s also slightly higher than that of silent buttons from Sanwa (the solid coloured OBSFS-30 goes for $4 and the clear OBSCS-30 is $5). The extra cost can be justified, however, by comparing it to the cost of other buttons with similar long life buttons. Sanwa OBSF-30RGs go for about $6-$7 depending on where you buy them, so compared to that the HBFS30-G2 is actually quite a good value, especially when you add the quietness factor and the ability to customize the feel of the button.
Conclusion
Overall, the HBFS30-G2 is an excellent piece of hardware. It takes the already impressive HBFS30-G1 and improves on that model’s one major flaw. While the button may seem a bit pricey compared to the stock buttons from Sanwa or Seimitsu, it’s not bad when you consider all the features and compare it to other top of the range long life buttons. This is a great product that shows what can be done when the community steps up to solve a problem.
Pros
Quieter than stock buttons.
Cherry MX buttons will last a long time.
Built-in adapter for the Cherry MX switches won’t fall off in the middle of a match.
Can change feel of buttons depending on microswitch selected.
Built-in holes for LED mods.
Cons
Hard to install due to hard plastic tabs.
Slightly more expensive than the silent buttons from Sanwa.
The HBFS30-G2 is currently available for pre-order through the Gamerfinger online store. Planning on getting a set? Share your thoughts on the comments below. |
Amazon on Monday handed full-fledged series orders to six pilots, including Chris Carter’s supernatural drama The After. Additionally, the Internet giant renewed political comedy Alpha House for a second season, and the Silicon Valley-themed Betas has been cancelled.
The After follows eight strangers who are thrown together by mysterious forces and must help each other survive in a violent world that defies explanation. The cast includes Aldis Hodge, Andrew Howard, Arielle Kebbel, Jamie Kennedy, Sharon Lawrence and Adrian Pasdar.
The five other projects snagging series orders include…
* Bosch, an hour-long drama based on Michael Connelly’s book series about a relentless LAPD homicide detective (Titus Welliver). 24‘s Annie Wersching also stars.
* Mozart in the Jungle, a half-hour comedic drama about sex, drugs and classical music. The cast includes Gael Garcia Bernal, Saffron Burrows, Lola Kirke, Malcolm McDowell, Bernadette Peters and Peter Vack.
* Transparent, a half-hour dramedy about a Los Angeles family with serious boundary issues. It stars Jeffrey Tambor, Judith Light, Gaby Hoffmann, Amy Landecker and Jay Duplass,
* Gortimer Gibbon’s Life on Normal Street, a live-action coming-of-age tale (aimed at kids 6-11) that centers around Gortimer, his two best friends Ranger and Mel, and their exploits on Normal Street — an ordinary suburban neighborhood that has a hint of something magical just beneath the surface.
* Wishenpoof!, an animated series that revolves around a girl possessed with “wish magic.” |
Superheroes and villains in video games are notorious for leaving behind interesting and sometimes hard to find easter eggs. From The Fantastic 4’s building in the PS1 release of Spider-Man, to the hint of a sequel almost never found in Batman: Arkham Asylum, crime fighters often leave shout outs to their friends and creators in their path.
Batman: Arkham City is no different. With subtle hints of future story lines and nostalgia, players find more and more easter eggs around every corner. So far gamers have discovered bits and pieces of Scarecrow’s future plans for Arkham, his secret codes found in radio signals, and even Azrael looking down on a young Bruce Wayne (I assume he must have known Batman’s true name all this time).
Even though so much was almost immediately found by Batman fans, Rocksteady says there are a few left that no one has reported finding. They have not given any clues as to what these easter eggs are, or where they are located. Rocksteady simply stated that not all of them have been found, and that they are probably extremely subtle hints.
So, what are these mysterious hidden easter eggs? Could be anything. Perhaps there’s another preview of the next game hidden somewhere deep in Arkham, or maybe another unseen villain stalking Batman somewhere in the game.
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(Wired) -- Google is set to become your new phone company, perhaps reducing your phone bill to zilch in the process.
Seriously.
Google has bought Gizmo5, an online phone company that is akin to Skype but based on open protocols and with a lot fewer users. TechCrunch, which broke the news on Monday, reported that Google spent $30 million on the company.
Google announced the Gizmo acquisition on Thursday afternoon Pacific Time. Gizmo5's founder Michael Robertson, a brash serial entrepreneur, will become an Adviser to Google Voice.
It's a potent recipe -- take Gizmo5's open standards-based online calling system. Add to it the new ability to route calls on Google's massive network of cheap fiber. Toss in Google Voice's free phone number, which will ring your mobile phone, your home phone and your Gizmo5 client on your laptop. ÿþ
Meanwhile you can use Gizmo5 to make ultracheap outgoing calls to domestic and international phone numbers, and free calls to Skype, Google Talk, Yahoo and AIM users. You could make and receive calls that bypass the per-minute billing on your smartphone.
Then layer on deluxe phone services like free SMS, voicemail transcription, customized call routing, free conference calls and voicemails sent as recordings to your e-mail account, and you have a phone service that competes with Skype, landlines and the Internet telephone offerings from Vonage and cable companies.
That's not just pie in-the-sky dreaming.
Ask longtime VOIP watcher and consultant Andy Abramson, who introduced the idea of integrating Gizmo5 and Grand Central (now Google Voice), long before Google bought either.
"Google is now the the uncommon carrier," Abramson said, punning on the iconic 7-UP commercials and the phrase "common carrier." That refers to phone companies that operate on the traditional publicly switched network -- a status that gives them benefits and obligations.
"If AT&T is Coca-Cola, Google is now 7-UP," Abramson added.
"All of a sudden you have something that offers more than Skype," Abramson said, saying the combo could now put Google in competition with phone and cable companies, IP "telephony" (VOIP) companies and Vonage. "But now you can do everything with Google and pay nothing and have a platform where engineers can build new things."
In fact, Gizmo5 offered a rogue version of that service for $6 a month until last week.
On November 2, Gizmo5 abruptly canceled the two-month old "residential service," which paired the free phone number available through Google Voice with Gizmo's Internet calling service to provide the equivalent of a home-phone replacement like Vonage.
Now, that service has been wiped off the Internet and, more intriguingly, Google's cache of the page disappeared the day after the acquisition was reported.
For $6 a month, Gizmo5 residential users got 300 minutes a month of outbound calling anywhere in the United States, unlimited incoming calls on their home computers or even home phones (using a broadband-to-phone network conversion box) and E911 service (which means 911 calls work like landlines calls do, once you register your home address).
It's not too surprising that offer got taken down.
For one Google is already trying to steer clear of U.S. regulators by making it clear that Google Voice isn't a replacement for a home phone since you have to have phone service from some other company to use it. You can forward calls from a Google Voice number to your Gizmo5 number, but you must have a mobile or landline number as well.
Google doesn't say it, but clearly it hopes that restriction will keep the service from incurring the common carrier obligations attached to the regular phone system (PSTN), and the 911 and wiretapping requirements that apply to Internet telephony and to traditional copper wire phones.
AT&T has already tried to sic federal regulators on Google Voice because Google is blocking outgoing calls to a handful of shady calling services mostly free conference-calling services that exploit federal rules that let rural phone companies charge high fees to connect calls to rural areas.
AT&T itself has sued similar services that play this arbitrage game, and complaining to the feds may have only brought more attention to an issue the FCC has procrastinating fixing for too long.
Gizmo5 will also help save Google money on phone-call termination fees as users start to use computer-based clients to connect to Google Voice. That would allow Google to recoup the purchase price of $30 million in little time, if only it saves even a few dollars per user per year.
Google also gets Michael Robertson, a troublemaker with technical chops. Robertson made millions from MP3.com in the dot-com boom, despite drawing lawsuits from major record labels for creating innovative services. He was later sued by Microsoft for his startup Lindows, which made Linux installations for cheap PCs. And his current music venture, MP3tunes.com, is being sued by EMI.
Though still in invite-only mode, Google Voice has about 580,000 active users and nearly 1.5 million registered users, according to a Google filing with the FCC.
If you are interested in the combination, you might want to sign up for Gizmo5 before the acquisition is formally announced, since Google often freezes new registrations at companies it acquires until it figures out how to integrate the technology.
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Copyright 2011 Wired.com. |
A month ago, a Nicaraguan committee approved Chinese billionaire Wang Jing's project to create The Nicaraguan Canal. With a planned capacity to accommodate ships with loaded displacement of 400,000 tons (notably bigger than The Panama Canal), the proposed 278-kilometer-long canal that will run across the Nicaragua isthmus would probably change the landscape of the world's maritime trade.
"The project is the largest infrastructure project ever in the history of man in terms of engineering difficulty, investment scale, workload and its global impact," Wang told reporters, adding that with regard the project's financing, which is around $50 billion, Wang seems quite confident, "If you can deliver, you will find all the world's money at your disposal."
Worried about conservation? Don't be: "We have 100-year concession rights, we will be responsible to ourselves, and we are there to build, not to destroy," explained Wang.
As China Global Times reports,
In the mountains and rivers of Central America, work on one of the world's largest infrastructure projects is progressing as planned, driven by Chinese billionaire Wang Jing. ... The Nicaragua Canal, which is about four times the length of the Panama Canal, will connect the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean upon its completion. The project is estimated to cost $50 billion. "Our canal lock is 15-meter-thick, hard steel. Imagine its size. [It'll be] the world's largest," the 41-year-old Wang said.
The Nicaragua Canal project is just one of many giant infrastructure projects commenced by Chinese around the world.
There are at least another five megaprojects that are currently being planned or under construction, including the $32 billion China-Pakistan economic corridor and the $1.7 billion Baltic Pearl Project, according to media reports. ... Wang's company secured a 50-year concession for the canal and an extension right of another 50 years.
Panama Canal competitor?
Wang said the Nicaragua Canal will be able to accommodate ships with a displacement of 400,000 tons. Wang dismissed speculation that the canal he is building would become a competitor to the Panama Canal. "The Panama Canal won't fit my clients' ships. After expansion, they can only accommodate ships up to 150,000 tons. But our canal offers an alternative route for those sailing across the Panama Canal," he said. "The world's leading shipbuilders have already commenced research projects to design and build ships especially for the Nicaragua Canal," Wang said. Analysts said that currently ships with a displacement of 400,000 tons mainly carry crude and bulk cargo such as minerals, coal, and grains, but as trade develops, larger ships could be a trend.
Financing the $50 billion?
"If you can deliver, you will find all the world's money at your disposal," Wang said, adding that he will raise the money through combined measures of cross-shareholding, bank lending and debt issuance. Wang estimates that his company could collect several billion US dollars worth of tolls on an annual basis, but he urged investors not to lose sight of the bigger picture. "The canal would bring huge benefits to the world's seaborne trade. It will make large-scale, low-cost, high-efficiency trade possible, unlocking trade demand between the East and the West," Wang said. "The continuously growing Chinese economy and a rising Latin America underpin a growing global maritime transport volume," Zhang Yongfeng, a Shanghai-based shipping expert, told the Global Times Monday.
Costs?
For the locals at Nicaragua, a key concern has been the man-made canal's environmental impact, particularly on the Nicaragua Lake, the largest freshwater lake in Central America.
"We have 100-year concession rights, we will be responsible to ourselves, and we are there to build, not to destroy," Wang said.
* * *
Time to print some more Yuan...
* * *
Wang concludes... when asked "Does digging a canal in the "backyard of the US" not bug you?" |
True Detective—a show about people who actively
refuse to look at who they really are.
At the end of this party, WasThere/Audrey sang to me, "Tell Laura I Love Her."
This is coincidentally the same song my father always sang when I was a young girl.
A few nights ago, I was watching some videos on oprah.com, which I do once in a while—I especially love Eckhart Tolle's—and I came across this very inspiring clip of Janet Mock: http://www.supersoul.tv/supersoul-sessions/the-path-of-authenticity-embracing-the-otherness/Yes, I know, it's corny to watch Oprah videos. But I dare you to watch that and not be moved to tears.In her speech to Oprah's audience at UCLA, and with a very careful, poised, studied delivery, Mock tells her story about growing up transgender. This speech is inspiring to me in so many ways, but I think the part that touches me the most is her description of her move to New York and her work as an editor atmagazine. Or rather, her climb to becoming a magazine editor. She talks about how despite her shiny and strong exterior, as this successful person she had set out to be, she was secretly suffering. Because as someone whose job it is to supposedly be a truth-teller, her whole persona was a lie. When she moved to New York, Mock chose to keep her transgender status concealed. She enjoyed the freedom that secret provided and the anonymity she felt as just another woman in such a big city.Ultimately, Mock expresses in this video how important it is to tell your story, to have the courage to be your most authentic self. "Embrace the otherness," she says. Because it is the otherness that makes you who you are. Mock has since gone on to write a New York Times best-selling memoir calledI've also been a bit infatuated with the Disney movielately. Maybe this is because since my bridal shower, I've been noticing elephants appearing around me in odd places—on my cousin's tote bag at the shower, on the curtains in the room where we played "Head's Up" (the game fromhave you played this? It's so much fun!), on a scarf my aunt wanted to buy in Anthropologie the next day, on videos that kept popping up on Facebook, on a necklace a new girl in the elevator at work was wearing. Like many people, I recently watched the Walt Disney biography on PBS, so maybe that implanted the movie in my mind.Dumbo is someone Janet Mock would consider to be "other." He is different. But, as Timothy S. Mouse tells him after the two find themselves inexplicably high up in a tree after an accidentally drunken night of hallucinating pink elephants, "the very things that held you down are gonna carry you up and up and up."When my father died in a car accident in 2003, part of me looked at what had happened and got very angry, because in a way, this was one more event in my life that was making me "other." And, like Janet Mock, I had escaped to New York City from a life I no longer wanted.I'd been lucky enough to earn an internship at a magazine in New York. I knew the going would be tough. This was an opportunity I took after sending out hundreds of résumés to various news outlets, and mostly getting no responses whatsoever. Looking back, I probably should have tried harder to get something in my hometown, just to start. But my eyes were bigger than my stomach. I wanted excitement, I wanted to see the world. So I chose the $10 per day internship.(A disclaimer: When I was at home in Delaware, looking for jobs, I was fortunate enough to have parents who allowed me to live with them for free, despite being just out of college. They also paid for my college education in its entirety. Especially as I get older, I am very well aware of how blessed my circumstances as a child were, and grateful for how hard my mother and stepdad had to work to make that happen. That being said, both of them were very nervous about my moving to New York with only $1,000 to my name and a $10 per day internship.)I was fearless then. My gut was telling me,So I listened. But I was also only 25 and very inexperienced in the world.Like Dumbo, I quickly found a guide. My now-fiancé was a part-time writer and editor in Seattle, and a full-time IT guy. He also wanted something more exciting in his life.And thank God I found him when I did. I had just gone through an incredibly difficult, life-changing year.I'll put it this way: When I made the decision to move to New York, my ex-boyfriend, who I was still friends with at the time, said to me, "I'm glad you're doing this. New York is the perfect place for people like you."What he was alluding to was the fact that a week after my college graduation, I'd had to spend six days in withdrawal from nine medications in a hospital. This was because I'd agreed to see a therapist in my last year of college who decided that my clinical depression required a complicated "cocktail."I chalk this up now to the trendiness of prescribing lots and lots of prescription drugs to patients who probably mostly needed talk therapy—this was just beginning back in 2002. But as I was only 24, I listened to everything he told me. When he told me I needed to consider my limitations in life, I listened. When he told me I was a "failure at life," because I refused to take a prescribed Ambien at night sometimes, I listened.He eventually told me he could no longer treat me because I was "not compliant." The irony of this is laughable. My life was falling apartI was so compliant.When I saw a new doctor a few weeks later, she was horrified by how many medicines I was on. I'm not even going to go into the various side effects these drugs incurred, but I'll just say that I was a bit of a walking zombie, had gained about 20 pounds very rapidly, had panic attacks that often required ER visits and was a shell of my former self. But after those six days in the hospital, getting off all those drugs, the doctors there simply said, "All you have is severe anxiety, you don't need to be here." And I went home.(Another disclaimer: Depression was something I first showed symptoms of when I was 16 years old, and by the hospital visit, it was something my parents and brother and I had struggled to find the right treatment for. I'd seen seven different doctors over the years by the time I ended up with the prescription-happy one. It's fair to say that my mother saved my life by getting me treatment when I was a very depressed teenager, and that as a mother, she went through more anguish than I did dealing with this...because mothers always do. And I have an especially generous one.)My new doctor, the one who'd sent me to the hospital to withdraw, said I'd survived it due to my own inner strength, that I should be proud of myself, and that she wasn't worried about me in the least because I had a good head on my shoulders.She signed me up for talk therapy, but after a few visits I decided it wasn't for me. I had become fairly disenchanted with counseling.When I left the hospital, I was a very different version of myself. It was the first experience I'd ever had that I sensed not one person in my everyday life had experienced—and when you're 25, this idea that nobody has ever gone through what you've gone through is heightened, of course. Because you are largely basing this on what your peers tell you.I realized I had two options in front of me: I could decide that I was a freak because of the stigma I felt, or I could choose to use it to my advantage. I picked the latter.The worst had already happened to me, I thought. Nothing else could possibly be as scary and awful as that hospital had been.And so like Janet Mock, I hid what had happened. I spent the next year of my life avoiding men from Delaware, who I assumed might have heard about me through the grapevine (though that probably wasn't anywhere close to the truth...then again, Delaware is a small place), and dating guys from various places (this is when Internet dating started getting big). One was from Syracuse, New York. One was a Mormon in Utah. One was a music writer in Philly who didn't own a phone in his house and smoked pot all day—that one did not end well.And then one was a young guy in Seattle, who'd also gone out into the world seeking something...my Timothy S. Mouse. His name was Steven.When I finally reached the right moment to tell Steven about my hospital experience, I braced myself for rejection. A week or so after I'd left the hospital, my boyfriend at the time had sat across from me in the food court of a shopping mall and said he had to break up with me because his parents were concerned. He said his parents had been flipping through his high school yearbook, looking for other eligible girls for him to date. This was odd, I thought, because his mother had told him once that if she could have chosen a girlfriend for him, it would have been me. "What changed?" I asked him. "I thought your parents liked me?" "Well," he reminded me. "You were just inThis wasn't a huge blow romantically speaking...he wasn't a man I loved, just a guy I had fun with. But it was certainly a betrayal, and it only echoed what they'd told me when I was in the hospital...one day we were all sitting in group therapy, and one of the patients asked a counselor, "What do I tell people when I leave here?" And the counselor replied, "I'd highly advise never telling anyone that you had to spend any time in this place." The emphasis was on that patient's ability to find a job. But as the youngest member of this therapy group, I heard that message differently.So when the moment came, and I told Steven what I had experienced—and many young men had failed this test in that year, the year I became the United Nations of online dating—he responded with one sentence: "I think you are an amazing woman."Four years later, my brother introduced me to a TV show calledBy this time, I was living in Baltimore and frustrated about not having found full-time work in magazines—after all, I'd been trying for four years, which felt like a lifetime to a 20-something. I started binge-watchingduring the week of Thanksgiving 2007—this was just as binge-watching was becoming a thing.By the show's next season, I was all caught up. I'd had a lot of time on my hands to do this, because four months after I finally got that long-coveted magazine job, albeit at a very small trade magazine in the middle-of-nowhere, New Jersey, my company had had to lay off several employees for financial reasons. I was one of them.This was in the middle of the recession, the perfect time to be job-hunting, especially in journalism (that's sarcasm). At the time, multiple magazines and newspapers were closing shop. People talked every day about how the Internet would eventually replace print journalism.After many freelance copyediting jobs that year, I eventually landed at a celebrity news magazine. And because they covered entertainment, I got a shot at writing about what had become my TV obsession.Three years later, I was working atand tried to reprise myeffort with a show calledWhen I wrote aboutmy goal was to emulate Jeff Jensen fromI loved that he was able to find the literary references on the show and expand on them...that he could find things the writers were trying to communicate that viewers might not pick up on right away, but which could enhance viewers' experience if they read about them. This was the beginning of smart TV—Jensen was a pioneer.WithWeb editor and I came up with this concept of checking our magazine archives and seeing if I could find photos of outfits and hairdos identical to the ones that appeared on the show.is 130 years old. We felt this could be a corner of the TV recapping "market" that nobody had grasped. And whilewas not a fantasy show, and not literary in the wayhad been, writing about fashion and pop culture was something that really interested me. It was also very intimidating, though, becausewasn't a show that involved solving a puzzle, likewas. It was based on real-life events. And I was no history buff.In the spring of 2014, I started writing myrecaps, and much like this particular blog post, they were lengthy and involved and complicated. I'd had the same issue with myrecaps—I wasn't really doing this intentionally, but in the back of my head, I was emulating Jeff Jensen. And Jensen isn't exactly known for his brevity.I soon learned that what I was doing was too much for thewebsite. And not only that, but when the recaps were trimmed to a more appropriate size, they still weren't popular enough with readers for the Web team to justify continuing posting them.I was really dismayed by this. But ever my Timothy S. Mouse, Steven set me straight. "You have to keep writing these," he told me. "Even if it's only on your blog."This idea made me concerned. After all, I'd only reached 800 to 1,000 readers a week with myrecaps because they were posted on the! website. Granted,! readers didn't always have the desire to sit there and get through 2,000 words, and God bless those Web editors who still let me keep posting them. But at least I had a podium. And when the recaps were on thewebsite, I had a chance of reaching a million readers.Downtrodden but determined, and very worried I would appear to be some super fangirl sitting in her basement, I continued with the recaps, here on fashionandgrammargripes.blogspot.com—a blog I'd started back when I had to pretend to be a women's magazine editor, because I hadn't become one and who knew if I ever would.Promoting my recaps was difficult. I knew I was annoying people on Facebook, posting my statuses every week, asking everyone to please check out my work. TheWeb editors graciously allowed me to keep using thetitle in my recap names, so at least that gave it some feeling of validity. And then one day I had a brilliant idea. Why not post links to these recaps on AMC'sforum? That's where the true fans were, after all. They called themselves "Maddicts."And then slowly but surely, my writing developed a following, for the first time in my life.I met people in theforum who truly liked what I had to say. Yes, I'd always gotten kudos for my writing, from teachers, family, friends, etc. From my college journalism professors, from employers. From Steven. From literary journal editors. But this was the first time I had real, live readers who didn't know me from Adam. And I had barely anything backing up my abilities—I mean, let's be real here, this is a pretty rudimentary-looking blog. And my bio on the right screams "I am stuck in 2007."But they were steadfast, and every week after I wrote a recap, whether it got 200 clicks (mostly from reddit.com) or 1,500, I knew I could rely on that AMCforum for a real assessment of its worth.This was significant to me for so many reasons.By being willing to sit there and toil for days, researching the 1960s and 1970s (and eventually I went back and researched every decade of the century—I found every documentary I could on American pop culture, just so I could make sure I was getting my facts right), I finally embraced my inner "otherness."I'd always been a person who was happy sitting for hours working on something that interested me. I had an ability to become interested and immersed in minutiae that many people I knew didn't have. I didn't know why I was this way. If often got me into trouble. When I was in high school, besides being diagnosed with depression, I was also diagnosed with ADHD-inattentive type. I received extra time on tests...my innate attention to details and perfectionism was often more of a hindrance than an asset. It takes me much longer than most normal people to do most things, and that includes leaving the house, especially if it involves packing a suitcase at the end of a long work day. It is probably what causes the most grief about me to anyone I am close to, and I have experienced a lot of loss and shame in my life because of it. My brother has joked in the past that I have a Type F personality because of my slowness. Yes, I benefitted a great deal in school from what I now realize is a slightly photographic memory, though this might be because my attentional style forces me to take in a lot more when I look at something.But mostly there has always been a part of me that knew I was a bit odd, a bit different.A bit "other."And yet when my writing aboutbrought in loyal readers, I realized there were people who were benefitting from my otherness. They threw a party on a hotel rooftop in Times Square and asked me to come. And when I got to the party, I felt like a guest of honor. They had questions for me about my writing and how I came up with some of the things I wrote about. It was the closest I'd ever come to being treated like a celebrity.Steven came with me to this party, and was both proud and bewildered.WasThere was there, and she regaled us with all her amazing tales from the real 1960s, such as the time she met Joe DiMaggio and kissed him on the cheek. Tipsi was the life of the party, and kept telling me she expected to see great things from me someday. Eva stayed late talking films with Steven and me. One lovely Maddict, who has since changed her code name in the Facebook forum (please forgive me, Maddicts, but these names have changed so many times—was it you, Lavender?), even offered to let me stay at her house for a week just to write! Liz Geier and I talked about her job in the fashion industry, making incredible costumes for Broadway shows. And CleoClio, who I'd suspected in the forum was a man for some odd reason, told us all about his days working in advertising. It was really a wonderful night, and could have only been made better if Jon Hamm in the flesh had shown up to join us.And so now, many months later, I am finally sitting down to recap this party and talk about these wonderful people who took a liking to things that came out of my head and ended up on this blog. And I can't help but realize that though I already had a Timothy S. Mouse in Steven, whom I met in 2003, it wasn't until I met the Maddicts that I found my elusive feather.And it was because of finding that feather that I was able to set out and try to publish my writing in other places. I took an opportunity to write aboutfor lippsisters.com. This was a mixed blessing, since so many people disliked the show, but I still got so much out of it as a writer.And most importantly, I decided to come clean about my otherness, and write about the things that mattered to me most.Around the same time I'd started myrecaps, my brother's ex-girlfriend introduced me to running. Though I'd participated in sports in high school, I'd never really considered myself an athlete. But most of my coworkers atseemed more interested in working out than hanging out in bars (this was not the case at my previous job), so I took on running full-force. First I competed in 5Ks. Then I decided to run a half marathon. And then I entered into the New York Marathon on a lark, and got in.Also around the same time I'd started myrecaps, I met a man named Joel Feldman, who'd started an organization called End Distracted Driving. Joel lost his daughter, Casey, in a distracted driving accident when she was 21 years old. She had been walking to her summer job in Ocean City, NJ, and was studying in New York at the time to become a journalist. I found Joel through my job atwhen we published an article about EndDD. I have to wonder, if I hadn't followed the path that led me to that job, would I ever have even known Joel or his organization existed?With Joel's encouragement, I spoke in a high school that year to a gymnasium full of students about my father and how we had lost him. It was terrifying and liberating at the same time. This thing in my life I'd kept hidden for so many years, much like my hospital stay, was finally out in the open. And anyone and their mother could say anything they wanted to about it.The truth was, I'd written several essays about what had happened that summer in 2003 and about my relationship with my dad in general over the years. But most of them had gone unfinished and unpublished because of this fear I had of being seen as different. Or because I was concerned that my writing was not up to par enough to publish them.I'm only realizing today that whether or not I was publishing these stories about my dad—one of which has now appeared on thewebsite, while another is coming out in December'sby writing those TV recaps, I was already describing his otherness. And my own.Onmany of the main characters have to review their lives and come to terms with who they are, how their weaknesses can often be their strengths. They have to learn how to forgive in order to move on, and oftentimes the person they are forgiving is themselves. They have to find their true purpose and calling—often they realize this has to do with helping other people, and not just staying hermitic and obsessing over their own flaws (think of Jack and his drinking problems and his reluctance to be a leader). It is when they are able to "let it go," as Jack's father says, that they truly move on.And then onDon Draper is a character somewhat similar to Jack. Don's appeal as an antihero came about because so many of us wanted to understand who our fathers really were, andthey were the way they were. We wanted to be able to see our parents as real, live human beings, who are capable of making mistakes, just like we are. Matt Weiner gave the TV-viewing audience a great gift in this show, the gift of "moving forward," as Don often says, but doing so with grace and humility—the lesson Don learns at the end of the series. To let go of vices that ultimately constitute a false self—Don Draper is the ultimate false persona, after all—and to embrace the parts of you that make you unique, as people learned to do more of in the 1970s.I've recently told my younger brother, who is also my best friend, that he is my "feather" when it comes to running. That I need him to be present when I run the marathon, because I don't know if I can fly without him. Going through this process, training to run this many miles in honor of my dad and all the other families who've lost someone so senselessly, and also getting to publish some of my essays about my dad, has given me a scary feeling of empowerment—that I can take what was a very difficult time in my life, some of which I've described here, and use it to benefit others.But today I'm realizing that maybe I've had the ability to fly all along. And in addition to my father, my parents, my brother, my stepbrothers, my aunts, uncles and cousins, my friends, Steven and Joel Feldman, I have a very special group of people to thank for that: the Maddicts.Thank you, you lovely people, for allowing me to accept my otherness. Thank you for helping me to let go of my fears of judgment, to be OK with who I am and what I have to offer and realize that being passionate about a fictional story isn't nerdy—it's actually really cool. |
Zuma: No one should be raped in SA
Cape Town - Women and children should not have to face violence or rape anywhere in South Africa, President Jacob Zuma said on Thursday.
"No woman or child should be beaten, raped, stabbed, shot or attacked in any manner anywhere in our country, whether by known or unknown attackers," he said in a speech prepared for delivery at the launch of the Stop Rape Campaign at Glendale Secondary School in Mitchells Plain, Western Cape.
He said the ongoing abuse of women and children in South Africa was a critical problem facing the country.
"We have to build a more caring society in which the rights of all are respected, especially the rights of women and children," Zuma said.
'Horrendous attacks'
The campaign was being co-ordinated by the department of basic education and Lead SA.
Zuma said the campaign was to ensure that people came together to say these "horrendous attacks" had to stop.
Zuma said boys and men were also the victims of sexual assault.
"Importantly, we remind you that all cases of rape, sexual assault or any form of violence should be reported to the police," he said.
Zuma said police and courts were empowered under the Domestic Violence Act, the Sexual Offences Act and Children's Act to arrest, prosecute and convict perpetrators of violence against women and children.
"Our fight has been further bolstered by the re-introduction of the Family Violence, Child Protection and Sexual Offences Units at the SA Police Service from 30 June last year," he said.
"We urge you to use these units to report cases of violence or attacks. We have also taken a decision to re-open the Sexual Offences Courts."
Everybody's campaign
Zuma said the campaign was not just for women.
"It is everybody's campaign. It is also a campaign for all South Africans as this scourge affects all communities," Zuma said.
"Together we must say that abusers, murderers and rapists should face the full might of the law. In addition, we must support the victims of sexual crimes as to rebuild their shattered lives."
The campaign comes after a number of highly publicised rape and murder cases in South Africa.
On 2 February, 17-year-old Anene Booysen was raped and murdered.
Booysen visited a Bredasdorp nightclub on Friday, 1 February. A few hours later, she was gang raped and mutilated.
She was found at the construction site where she worked the next morning. She died in hospital later that day. |
It shouldn’t come as that great surprise that Paul Ryan so systematically hid his own views, values, influences and agenda in his big intro to the casual voter last night. This is the hidden-hand convention of a political party that knows its agenda isn’t popular, but will do anything to put itself in a position to rapidly and ruthlessly implement it.
Now it’s clear by now that when its mendacity is revealed, the Romney campaign has a simple tactic: deny, deny, deny, and count on media clulessness and fear of looking “partisan” to muddy the waters or consign the dirty deed to background noise.
It was interesting to me, then, to read a long, pointed article by Ron Fournier at National Journal accusing Romney ops of lying in order to appeal to racial grievances and then lying about the lying, right through their expensively capped teeth.
Fournier, you see, is nobody’s idea of a “liberal media” figure. If anything, he’s been strongly suspected (particularly by my predecessor Brother Benen) of leaning the other way. Here’s part of what he had to say about the welfare ads:
Before explaining why these tactics work (and why Romney’s team knows, or should know, they are playing the race card), let’s quickly deal with this fact: The ad is wrong. As countless impartial fact-checkers have noted, the Obama administration memo cited by the Romney team actually gives states flexibility to find better ways of getting welfare recipients into jobs.
Why ignore fact-checkers? First, internal GOP polling and focus groups offer convincing evidence that the welfare ad is hurting Obama. Second, the welfare issue, generally speaking, triggers anger in white blue-collar voters that is easily directed toward Democrats. This information comes from senior GOP strategists who have worked both for President Bush and Romney. They spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retribution….
Furthermore, a senior GOP pollster said he has shared with the Romney camp surveys showing that white working-class voters who backed Obama in 2008 have moved to Romney in recent weeks “almost certainly because of the welfare ad. We’re talking a (percentage) point or two, but that could be significant….”
Romney and his advisors stand by an ad they know is wrong – or, at the very least, they are carelessly ignoring the facts. That ad is exploiting the worst instincts of white voters – as predicted and substantiated by the Republican Party’s own polling.
That leaves one inescapable conclusion: The Romney campaign is either recklessly ignorant of the facts, some of which they possess – or it is lying about why (and how) it is playing the race card.
I know some readers might think Fournier is actively abetting the GOP’s lies because he doesn’t finish the syllogism and point a trembling finger at his old friends in the Romney campaign and shout “Unclean! Unclean!” That ain’t happening. But Ron’s gone about as far as the conventions of the MSM allow in calling them out. The question is whether anyone notices or cares. |
Who’s inspired by a plain white pad of paper? We offer our compendium of brilliantly designed journals for the scribe in all of us.
+ Moleskine promises to remain a classic for years to come – but even classics need an update once in a while. The company recently launched the latest addition to its XS line of delightfully teeny notebooks – hardcovers in ruled or plain paper. In a departure from Moleskine’s traditional “any colour you like, as long as it’s black” approach, the 65-by-105 millimetre journals come in yellow, green pink and purple ($10).
+ If you’re having trouble choosing a colour, the Pantone Chips notebook by Chronicle Books embraces every hue under the rainbow – at least, a wide selection of tones from the colour systems guru’s graphics palette. Added value: you’ll always have a paint chip booklet on you, for those impromptu design sessions ($12, available at Magic Pony on Queen St. West).
+ And for those who prefer a distinct void of colour, Whitelines’ notepads feature light lines on a slightly-tinted background that disappears when photocopied – so that the object of your affection will think you can not only craft brilliant prose, but write in perfectly straight lines at the same time. Isn’t that what everyone looks for in a mate? ($20, available at Chapters).
+ Don’t let the threatening 3-D forms on the covers of the Armed Notebooks by Megawing fool you; the PVC-clad books actually carry an anti-violence message. The grenade, we’re told, is designed to remind us life is ticking. Each of the three journals features a different type of paper: light grey plaid in the grenade book, oversized rules and a blank bottom portion in the knife, and blank paper in the revolver ($30, available at Rolo).
+ While we’re on a slightly ominous tear, consider the Exorcise Book by British design studio Product of Your Environment. The classic exercise book is re-imagined with an evil bent. The book is bound with 365 pages “to help rid you of your demons,” says the studio ($30, available at Up To You). |
Lloyd’s of London has reported a £3.2bn profit for last year, the insurer’s biggest profit in four years, as its business benefited from a drop in natural catastrophes.
Profits increasd 14pc year-on-year as catastrophe claims fell by 52pc in what Lloyd’s said was an especially “benign” year.
The fall in claims helped offset the impact of low interest rates, which have continued to depress the company’s income.
“While we saw fewer catastrophe claims in 2013, continued low interest rates saw reduced investment income and high levels of capital continuing to flow into the market, which put pressure on prices,” said John Nelson, chairman of Lloyd’s.
The fall in claims came despite the flooding that hit large swaths of the UK and meant that, while in 2012 the world’s oldest insurance market paid out 91.1p in every £1 it took in premiums, last year the payout rate fell to 86.8p. |
Illustration by Martin Rowson
This article is a preview from the Summer 2016 edition of New Humanist. You can find out more and subscribe here.
The humanist approach to life is sometimes seen as a very recent thing – the product of the Enlightenment of Europe, rooted in the modern West, dependent on the Christian tradition for its context and content, even (in the allegations of its detractors) parasitic on that tradition. Nothing could be further from the truth and regular readers of New Humanist will be no strangers to the timeless and global nature of the humanist world-view. Long before there was Christianity, the beliefs and values that constitute humanism had formed the perspective of millions of people around the world in Europe, Asia and China, to name just those regions from which we have ancient written records.
“Who is it paints the peacocks, who is it makes the cuckoos sing?” asked the materialists of the Charvaka school in India 2,300 years ago, answering, “There exists here no cause except nature.” They were rigorous naturalists, seeing no need for belief in gods to explain reality, and their anti-clericalism is as fierce as any espoused by the partisans of the French Revolution. When the Chinese teacher Mencius, a disciple of Confucius at about the same time, sought the explanation for human morality, he hypothesised no divine law-giver but saw human morality as natural, rooted in our biology, in our instincts: “The feeling of commiseration is the beginning of humanity; the feeling of shame and dislike is the beginning of righteousness; the feeling of deference and compliance is the beginning of propriety; and the feeling of right or wrong is the beginning of wisdom. Men have these Four Beginnings just as they have their four limbs.” As the influence of these Chinese and Indian manifestations of humanism spread on the other side of the world, in ancient Europe, too, we can trace a full-blooded humanism.
In his excellent book Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World, Tim Whitmarsh focuses specifically on atheism in ancient Europe. Ancient Greek and Roman atheism has been sidelined, he believes, because it has been in the interests of Christians for the past 1,500 years, as it is today, to pretend their faith is timeless; because it is in the interests of atheists to claim their beliefs are cutting edge, the products of a modern scientific approach; and because generally we have lost popular knowledge of the classical world throughout our culture. He wants to combat this, both for the truth’s sake and to give back to the modern non-religious something of their heritage.
Just under 1,000 years of ancient European thought are covered, mostly in the Greek world and mostly through profiles of individual thinkers. Whitmarsh is an admirable pen portraitist, bringing these characters to life with elan. In the history of Greek religion he wants to “restore to life” the sceptics of the ancient world and his brisk pace carries us along on a journey that seems like a progression.
Whitmarsh starts by establishing the nature of the Greek gods. Greek atheism differs from modern European
atheism as it reacts against a different sort of religion. Greek myths had moral purpose but they were not sacred texts; the stories are dynamic and flexible according to context. The myths were philosophical, playful and, Whitmarsh writes, “experimental” (a highly perceptive and provocative description). There was no concept of “sin” in Greek religion and no commandments issued from the Greek gods.
Religion was, for the most part, not focused on morality in the sense that monotheistic believers or adherents would understand religion today. Although many myths had etiological purposes, it was not through their organised religion but through their schools of philosophy that the Greeks inquired into the nature of right and wrong and the nature of reality, too.
Like the Norse gods, the Greek gods were not omnipotent – they could in principle be defeated. This allowed thinking to develop that could unravel claims about divine power. With the coming of the arts, the gods could be depicted and imitated by humans. The line between the gods and humans in myth had always been permeable (humans of legend acquired cults, modern athletes were hymned, heroes in stories were deified) and Hellenistic kings were (quasi-)deified. This allowed for the idea that the gods were originally great men who portrayed themselves as gods in their reigns and whose self-portrayal as such endured. The existence of Hellenistic schools of philosophy into Roman times allowed the case for atheism to be fully systematised.
The narrative reaches a pinnacle in an excellent chapter on Epicurus – a character who, in the author’s words, can “quicken the pulse of any humanist” – and culminates in a chapter on the early Roman empire. In that multicultural melting pot, atheist beliefs were not controversial and even socially conservative establishment figures might express them. There is a hint that atheism may have been on its way to vanquishing theism altogether but the book ends as we know it must, with the coming of Christianity – that oppressive force that destroyed so much of the classical humanist tradition.
Although the overall narrative is strong, the individual chapters are like pieces of a mosaic and the full picture doesn’t ever cohere. This is no fault of the author: we can’t fully excavate the nature of Greek humanism because of the lack of sources. What we can do is discern an array of non-religious approaches to life.
Whitmarsh writes with scholarship and confidence and I wished for only two changes to his book. The analysis could have focused more often on what was present in the social and religious landscape of the time. This is done sporadically – for example, with analysis of how the competitive nature of Greek society fostered critical thought, or of the effect of cultural exchange with the east. It would have been fascinating to gain a greater understanding of the ways in which the conditions for the emergence of the ideas explored might parallel the conditions that were obtained in classical India, ancient China, the Arab golden age, or Enlightenment Europe at the time of analogous intellectual developments in those places.
Second, there is a problem in the book’s use of the concept of “atheism”. In his writing on atheism, Richard Dawkins has said that although it was possible to be an atheist before Darwin, it was only possible to be a fully intellectually satisfied atheist after Darwin. For this reason and others, many of the figures described by Whitmarsh are deists – they reject supernatural ideas of ongoing divine intervention but accept an original divine designer – rather than full atheists, and some of them are even theists.
The result is that “atheism” often does not feel like the best word for the matter under discussion; rather it is scepticism, anti-clericalism, humanistic morality, science, or the idea of free inquiry. The field of inquiry for the book could be framed differently: by deploying the concepts of humanism as a world-view (Whitmarsh’s characterisation of the “playfully subversive humanism” of Socrates is a flash of analytical brilliance) and deism as an approach to the question of God, the whole might have been brought into greater focus.
These are minor points. Whitmarsh’s book deserves to be read for its verve and quality but also because the more the existence of the rich history and heritage of humanist thought is known by the public, the better it will be for society. The ever-growing proportion of people who are non-religious need to know that their world-view is not a novel one, solely the creation of modern science, but a position that has been adopted by millions of people around the world. They need to know this not just because it is true but because it helps to give confidence and rootedness to those who can often be made to feel as if they are cutting themselves off from their heritage, rather than – as we really are – rejuvenating a perennial human view.
“Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World” by Tim Whitmarsh is published by Faber & Faber |
by
In March, 2007, Al Pedrique was a scout in the Houston organization, managing in Venezuela, and he called GM Tim Purpora and told him this 5-foot-5 kid came in for a tryout and that he loved him, so much that while he’d sign for $5,000, he wanted to give him $15,000 not only because he believed he was special, but because at that size he thought it would be good if he realized the Astros appreciated him. Ten years later, here we are, and after an interim stint as Diamondbacks manager, Pedrique is the Yankees’ AAA manager in Scranton-Wilkes-Barre.
Altuve is still driven by the motivation of being overlooked because of his size as a kid, as Pedrique understood. The Astros kidded that where once there was The Mendoza Line, now there is an “Altuve Line”–.300, because when he falls below it, he manically works to get back over.
And back over he’s gotten, to the level of MVP, World Champion and one of the faces of sport in America, as well as his strife-torn Venezuela.
********************************************
Chris Sale may have finished a distant second behind Corey Kluber in the American League Cy Young balloting, but he now has a remarkable run of consistency, finishing in the top six in the voting each of the last six seasons. In terms of Cy Young voting points, only Adam Wainwright and Curt Schilling have more without winning the award.
What happened with Sale when he went 4-4, 4.09 the last two months, allowed four homers in his final regular season start against the Blue Jays, then struggled in his start against the Astros in the ALDS. It may have been the wear of a 300 strikeout season, but it never changed who he is.
His work ethic was a model for other Red Sox pitchers, then after the playoffs he took his responsibility to another level. He called scouting director Mike Rikard and asked about Jason Groome, the 19-year old lefthanded pitcher who was Boston’s first pick in the 2016 draft, but went through an up-and-down season in 2017 because of injuries and a trial that sent his father to jail.
Sale was told Groome lives at a condo in Ft. Myers and works out at the Red Sox complex. Sale lives in the next town to Ft. Myers, got Groome’s number from Rikard and now is working out with the teenage pitcher, overseeing his offseason conditioning program.
This is the first time in those six years that Sale was the actual runner-up, not that a failure to win the award disadvantages ones Hall of Fame credentials. The only pitcher to be a Cy Young runner-up three times and never win the award is Curt Schilling, who finished second behind Arizona teammate Randy Johnson in 2001 and 2002 and Johan Santana in 2004. In those three runner-up seasons, Schilling was 66-19, 3.15 in the heart of the steroid era with 832 strikeouts and 107 walks. It will be interesting to see how Schilling fares in this winter’s Hall of Fame balloting. Analytics show him to be in the top 30 starting pitchers in history, very close behind another HOF deserving candidate Mike Mussina.
Schilling’s post-season business and socio-political life hasn’t been cast in a positive light, to say the least. But his Cooperstown resume, especially but not wholly his post-season record, is deserving of The Hall. We’re not voting on him matched up against Paul Allen, who was a very successful businessman for the Council on Economic Affairs—or Ty Cobb. Steve Carlton had some obtuse political views that many found offensive beyond quirky. But if those three years when he was runner-up, with those 832 strikeout/19 walk numbers, he hadn’t been matched up with Johnson and Santana and had three Cy Youngs and three World Series rings in a seven year period would have landed him in Cooperstown years ago.
As for the acceptance speech…
*****************************************
There is an ongoing debate in the Orioles organization whether or not Manny Machado should move over to shortstop in 2018, before he becomes a free agent next November. Because of their failure to develop players since scouting director Jim Jordan fled to Philadelphia, the O’s have to go month to month and year-to-year and many feel that Machado prefers shortstop, and with a huge free agent deal on the horizon, Machado might put up a monster year at a middle-of-the-field position. Tim Beckham had a big August and batted .301 in 50 games for Baltimore, but he batted under .200 in July and September, was second in the league in errors, struck out 167 times and as he approaches his age 28 season has doubts concerning his longterm position.
******************************************
We watched the Astros offensive approach get them a world championship—figuring what each hitter wanted, hunt for that pitch and go after it, be it the first, second or fourth pitch of the at-bat. Their feeling was that trying to extend every at-bat to four to seven pitches too often put hitters in deep, negative counts, created a degree of passivity and worrying about running up pitch counts instead of hitting their pitches, which was so huge 15 years ago with the Athletics, Red Sox and Yankees, had been countered by the evolution in bullpen usage.
Now the Red Sox are expected to emphasize the Astros approach, searching and attacking strikes no matter what the count.
If the game then evolves from the thrill of watching how many pitches batters can take, rather than hit, will it lead to a faster pace of game? Is the George Springer/Alex Bregman/Jose Altuve/Carlos Correa approach (with exceptional skill sets) more fun to watch than Joey Votto walks?
Votto is a great player, and those who felt he should have been the MVP, not Giancarlo Stanton, have respected views. This was an unusual MVP year in the National League. One can argue than Goldschmidt (with two seconds and one third place finishes), Nolan Arenado or Charlie Blackmon deserved the award. Anyone one of those five players could have won the award in another season based on his 2017 performance.
I make no bones about believing Stanton/Arenado/Goldschmidt were 1-2-3, but appreciate that Votto is a great player. But, please, when I read that voters had denied Ted Williams the 2017 MVP, I just laughed at hyperbole. Go look at the 1947 numbers. Ted Williams was robbed, Joe DiMaggio won. In the words of the great Long John Baldry, “Don’t Try to Lay No Boogie Woogie on the King of Rock’n Roll.”
*****************************************
Blake Swihart is back in New Mexico from a three week stint in the Dominican Winter League, preparing to get married; the bachelor party thrown by his sidekick Alex Bregman comes first, of course. In a short stint, per agreement, Swihart played first, caught and DHed, put up a .407/.515/481/.987 line, but, most important, “felt the best I’ve felt in two years.”
In 2016, Swihart severely injured his ankle running into the wall down the left field line at Fenway—where Hanley Ramirez similarly hurt his shoulder—and after missing the remainder of that season played the first five months of the 2017 season still feeling the ankle problems. He finally got healthy in late August, and those who know him from the time he was a first round pick in 2011 know the promise of a switch-hitter who can hit and is such a good athlete that Mike Hazen once said he thought “he could play first, third, left field…anywhere he wants.” Dave Dombrowski and Frank Wren haven’t seen that. Alex Cora has heard about it from Bregman.
“I’ll play anywhere they need or want me,” says Swihart. “I’m planning to work at my catching, at first, second, third and the outfield until I get to spring training.” He was originally going to play shortstop on the 2010 Team USA club, but a kid from Puerto Rico named Francisco Lindor showed up.
Some club officials want to see if he can at least play some second base, similar to Ben Zobrist, with Dustin Pedroia expected to miss the first two months.
“It’s been a long time,” says Swihart. “But going to the Dominincan gave me the chance to re-establish myself and my confidence. I’m ready to go now.”
******************************************
Shohei Otani won’t have to wait long to be free to sign with whomever he chooses. “There’s no way of knowing where he’ll want to go, he just wants to prove he can succeed in MLB and knows the big money will come,” says one club official who knows him over three years. “Understand, money doesn’t drive him. He comes from a small town in the North of the island, an area very similar to New England.” One agent who interviewed him likens his hometown “to a village of 4000 in northeastern Vermont, who living in Tokyo preferred living in a dorm to protect his privacy.”
The Japanse Yasimodo company wants to promote him as a commercial star in Japan, with C.A.A. as its American conduit.
“The interviews and his understanding of his role as pitcher and positional player will be very important,” says the club official. “He may have people in Japan and the U.S. telling him how he’s going to make the most money over the long run, but I’m not sure he’s motivated the way his agents are motivated. He’s a different breed of cat. Fascinating person.”
There are National League teams that are calculating that he can get nearly as many at-bats as a pitcher/pinch hitter/role player in that league, as he can as a pitcher/DH in the American League.
The Dodgers have the history with Asian players. So do the Yankees and Mariners, to a lesser degree the Red Sox. How great would it be for MLB if he went to Minneapolis, fell in love with the city, decides he likes the idea of the opening of Walleye Season and decides Miguel Sano is his ultimate bodyguard?
–Heading for Thanksgiving, the industry consensus is that the Alex Cobb showdown will come down to Cubs v. Yankees.
–When the sanctions against the Braves are revealed and they lose some international signings, one member of the organization who had nothing to do with the violations says that an example is that one Asian infielder that was signed got a $300,000 bonus that kept them within the allotment borders, but he was promised another $300,000 in 2018 that would have been paid under the table. They also expect to lose infielder Kevin Maitan, who received $5M, but the new order Braves are not concerned, feeling Maitan was no worth the money or the hype. |
Click images for larger versions
Capcom: Please introduce yourself and give us a little background on what you do for Marvel.
Sean Chen: I'm a veteran comic book artist with about 20 years in the industry. Mostly known for a long run on the Iron Man comic, but have also done stints on Wolverine, X-Men, Spider-Man, The Avengers, among others.
These days I split my time between comic and advertising. In comics, I do mostly covers and special projects for different publishers. In the advertising industry, I mostly do storyboards for television commercials.
Gerardo Sandoval: My name is Gerardo Sandoval. I have worked on titles such as: Age of Apocalypse, X-Men, Guardians 3000, New Avengers, Wolverine and Venom.
Capcom: Who is your favorite character to draw from both the Marvel and Capcom universes and why?
Sean Chen: I always love drawing Iron Man since I am very tech oriented. A big part of the fun of drawing comics is to engage a variety of character types, and this book had them all. A great counterpoint to the hard edges of Iron Man was the organic and feminine forms of Storm and Morrigan.
It was also great fun to draw the anime and cartoon characters as Zero and Viewtiful Joe. I would have to say that Morrigan was the most fun to draw from the Capcom side because she had a unique offbeat design. In terms of personality, Viewtiful Joe was great fun to portray because of his big, in your face attitude.
Gerardo Sandoval: Venom, Wolverine, Sagat or Zangief. For some reason, I am not into the good guys, I always liked the bad guys. Not Luke Skywalker but Darth Vader, not Spider-man but Venom, not Ryu but Sagat. Villains, or anti-heroes, are more interesting characters for me so I really enjoy drawing bad guys. Also, when I was a gamer, I always played as a villain. |
In a month packed with Rocket League history, we saw the first-ever player to claim back-to-back RLCS World Championships (that would be Turbopolsa, btw, congratulations to him!) and our official release on Nintendo Switch! While our last Community Spotlight put Rocket League pro players center-stage, we’re shifting gears this month to focus on giving new Rocket League players, particularly those playing on the Switch, a solid ‘Custom Training’ foundation for practice.
CUSTOM TRAINING
Just in time for the holiday season, Nintendo Switch owners got their hands on Rocket League for the first time earlier this month. While there will be some familiar faces playing on the Switch, we want to offer the true Rookies out there a top-tier list of community-sourced ‘Custom Training’ packs consisting of ground shots, wall shots, goalie packs and even aerial shots. New players can practice using this ‘Custom Training’ list to get a head-start against the Switch competition, while experienced players coming over from other platforms can use the new packs to hone their skills on the new hardware.
AUTHOR NAME DIFFICULTY CODE 1 Wayprotein Shooting Consistency Platinum 4912-A5C9-9A56-555D 2 SPG | ProfessorShanks LEVEL 002 - POWER HITS Silver DC62-FEEC-D575-1B6F 3 Coach Ryuu Ground shots v1 Gold 7C94-D3A7-46A9-82DC 4 Wayprotein Air Roll Ground Shots Gold B4EB-C56A-BA9D-5300 5 Wayprotein Ceiling Bounces Platinum D68F-3BD8-6DFD-4A51 6 jstn. TRAINING PACK Gold F8E9-1895-2313-D5E8 7 Bush Bush's Progressive Saves Pack Bronze 6AFE-E510-BAA3-CB43 8 Carl Spangler Carl's Aerial Training Silver 57AA-3994-71EC-7BCD 9 Flax7 | Telekom ftw UPSIDE DOWN AERIALS #2 Diamond 3883-8507-B84A-34F5
If you want to catch the pro player-made ‘Custom Training’ packs list, then jump over to last month’s Community Spotlight for a glimpse at the RLCS training regimen! |
From The Cutting Room Floor
This page details one or more prototype versions of Kirby & the Amazing Mirror.
This demo was found on the Japanese GameCube demo disc "Gekkan Nintendo Tentou Demo 2004.5.1". According to the build date, it was compiled on December 29, 2003 - 3 months and 17 days before the game's Japanese release.
Graphics
Title Screen
Prototype Final
The title logo was completely redone. Furigana was also added below the game title's kanji.
Mirror Gate
Prototype Final
The lines surrounding the star have been removed from the final version. It's otherwise identical.
Rainbow Route's Background
Prototype Final
The background in Rainbow Roads has been given some slight refinements.
Rainbow Route's Mirror
Prototype Final
The mirror itself is one pixel lower in the prototype.
Peppermint Palace Mirror
Although unused in the prototype, the other areas' mirrors are present in the tileset. It seems Peppermint Palace's mirror graphics were interchanged - The cave version was once supposed to be shown in the hub room, instead of the palace version. Additionally, the cave version has been mirrored for the final game.
Proto Final Peppermint Palace
first gate Peppermint Palace
second gate Unknown if it exists.
Cell Phone
Prototype Final
The black button became red and the antenna is slightly more visible.
Signal Waves
Prototype Final
There are no waves emerging from the antenna in the prototype. Kirby's animation for this is also slightly slower than it is in the final.
Demo Completion Screen
After defeating the King Golem boss and watching the ensuing cutscene, this screen - advertising the game's release in March 2004 - is shown and the game returns to the title screen. The same also occurs if you game over.
World Map
Prototype Final
Though only viewable when the one present switch is pressed, the colors of the world map are much brighter in the prototype. As may be expected, the locations for other areas are not present.
Audio
Shadow Kirby
Proto Sorry, your browser either has JavaScript disabled or does not have any supported player.
You can download the clip or download a player to play the clip in your browser. Final Sorry, your browser either has JavaScript disabled or does not have any supported player.
You can download the clip or download a player to play the clip in your browser.
The sound that plays when encountering Shadow Kirby is different.
Miscellaneous
An "enemy inhaled" sound effect is present in both the previous game and the prototype, but absent in Amazing Mirror's final version. It is still used by some enemies, though.
When copying an ability, the "ability get" sound effect plays right away in the prototype. The final game added a "swallow" sound that plays before it.
The Fire and Spark ability's sounds can be interrupted by certain other sound effects in the prototype. They cannot be interrupted in the final game.
Pausing doesn't have a sound effect in the prototype.
The "enter door" sound seems to play twice in quick succession in the prototype, as opposed to once in the final game.
The ability roulette doesn't have the beeping sound effect in the prototype.
After beating King Golem, the hub room theme starts playing on the prototype version. This theme has been replaced by a unique theme in the final version. Also, there is no sound effect when acquiring the mirror shard on the prototype, as opposed to the final version which makes a normal "item get" sound.
Enemies and Objects
Generally speaking, about half of the objects and enemies are present, of which some, but not all, are shown during the prototype game. The following listed enemies and objects exist in the prototype; the ones in red appear to be unused.
Enemies Items Objects Waddle Dee
Bronto Burt
Scarfy
Gordo
Snooter
Chip
Soarar
Roly-Poly
Cupie
Blockin
Big Waddle Dee
Waddle Doo
Hot Head
Laser Ball
Pengy
Sir Kibble
Sparky
Sword Knight
Golem
Foley
Boxin
Heavy Knight
Batty
Shotzo
Mr. Frosty
King Golem Cherry
Energy Drink
Meat
Maxim Tomato
Battery
1-Up
Lollipop
Mirror Shard Small Button
Large Button
Small Fire
Mirror (door)
Triggered Vertical Sliding Door
Mirror to random boss (Boss Endurance)
Stone Block
Large Stone Block
Star Platform
Left Facing Flame
Small Chest
Large Chest
Warpstar to next room
Warpstar (bonus game)
Kirby Cannon
Manual 8 Directional Kirby Cannon
Master Sword (cannot be collected)
Since the object and enemy IDs in almost all cases match with the ones used in the final game, it seems the developers had mostly finished planning which enemies and objects they were going to implement. There was early work started on things like Boss Endurance and the Warpstar bonus game.
Whether they had planned for things like the Banana Peel or enemies like Master Hand to be in the game at the time remains a mystery, though.
Abilities
Available Abilities
Only the following abilities can be acquired:
Wheel, Beam, Bomb, Cupid, Cutter, Fighter, Fire, Ice, Laser, Parasol, Spark, Stone and Sword.
Wheel doesn't show up in the ability roulette but can be acquired from a rolling Golem (in the King Golem battle). There are several differences in the abilities present, compared to the final game.
Fighter
Fighter is slightly different than what it is in the final.
Prototype Final
In the prototype, the standard B attack in the air is the downward kick; in the final, this move was changed to ↓+B, and the B attack was changed to the ←/→+B on ground, but with less momentum.
Prototype Final
The ←/→+B in air attack was also given much less momentum in the final.
The ↑ +B uppercut has a different sound effect
uppercut has a different sound effect The lowest charge of the (hold)B Hadouken is faster in the prototype; charged and low-health shots are same.
Bomb
Bombs can be thrown faster in the prototype.
A held bomb explodes faster in the prototype.
Sword
The slashing combo takes slightly longer to start in the prototype.
You can't go into the multi-hit ground combo (after the first slash) as quick as you can on the final version.
Sword Kirby's sound effect when doing the spinning attack in the air is cut off.
Stone
Prototype Final
Stone Kirby in stone form was pinker in the prototype version.
After using Stone, the game adjusts your angle to 0° or 180° in the final version, but not in the prototype.
When Kirby is going into Stone form while running, he gets a little speed boost, making him roll further.
When Kirby is grounded and turns from Stone back to normal, he bounces lower in the prototype than he does in the final game.
Spark
Prototype Final
The diadem and spark hair got brightened and refined for the final release.
Cutter
In the prototype, the Cutter Boomerang falls all the way off the screen when it hits a wall; in the final, it dissipates almost immediately.
Wheel
When driving through enemies, the game uses "punching" sound effects that would later be used for the Fighter ability.
Unavailable Abilities
The following abilities cannot be acquired outside of memory editing:
Burn, Throw, Sleep, Cook, UFO, Tornado, Magic, Smash, Mini, Crash, Missile and Master.
These abilities are mostly unfinished.
Master
Prototype Final
Prototype Final
Prototype Final
Master Kirby has Sword's hat in the prototype. Additionally, the jewel in the hilt is green in the prototype, but red in the final.
Pause Screen
Early sketches of the instructions and ability descriptions displayed on the pause screen exist in the prototype. These can only be accessed by editing your current ability at 02020DFF and then pausing. Despite some of these versions going unused in Amazing Mirror, finalized versions of these sketches had already been showcased in the preceding game Nightmare in Dream Land.
To do:
Add missing description screens (Japanese Kirby Nightmare in Dream Land)
Early Pause Screen (No Ability)
Prototype (Early) Prototype (Final) & Release Kirby Nightmare in Dream Land
Swallow an enemy , duck down, and you're able to copy their ability !
Swallow different enemies and learn how to use all the different abilities !
Swallow an enemy , duck down, and you're able to copy their ability !
Swallow different enemies and learn how to use all the different abilities !
Early Ability Descriptions
Prototype (Early) Prototype (Final) & Release Kirby Nightmare in Dream Land
FIIIRE!!
Hot!
This is pretty hot.
FIIIRE!!
Hot!
This is pretty hot.
Freeze enemies and fling them away!
Ugh... it's so COLD.
Freeze enemies and fling them away!
Ugh... it's so COLD.
A tackle wrapped in flames !
Can't stop!
Won't stop!
A tackle wrapped in flames !
Can't stop!
Won't stop!
Ride like the wind out on the circuit .
Fast. Way too fast!
Ride like the wind out on the circuit .
Fast. Way too fast!
The sun shines
The parasol thrusts
Go for a walk
Protect from enemies
Float as you fall
(This sentence is structured as poetry, with the first three lines forming a haiku. The first two lines also play on さして being the verb for both sun rays beaming down and pointing or thrusting something.)
The sun shines
The parasol thrusts
Go for a walk
Protect from enemies
Float as you fall
Cutter Boomerang!
(No text)
Cutter Boomerang!
The beam that bends like a whip!
Anyway, beam!
Beam! Beam! BEAM!
The beam that bends like a whip!
Anyway, beam!
Beam! Beam! BEAM!
If you become a stone , hey! You're invincible!
Push from above , hey! You're awesome!
Rolling Rolling Rolling Rolling
Rolling on a slope .
You can also smash the road.
BOOM!
oom...oom...
hyururururu....
(Onomatopoeia for a bomb ticking down and then exploding, with the smaller text below being the echo effect.)
BOOM!! Take it!
THROW!!
Try throwing the enemy immediately!
Change the throwing direction !
Try throwing the enemy immediately!
Change the throwing direction !
Delicious! Surely delicious!
Cook something good for you .
Meal→
Cook something good for you .
※Only once N/A
Optical weapon loaded
There's a rumor
that if you hit a slope,
the direction changes.
Optical weapon loaded
There's a rumor
that if you hit a slope,
the direction changes.
You are lucky to have been able to copy this! Learn to use four abilities that are based on how long you hold the button!
You are lucky to have been able to copy this! Learn to use four abilities that are based on how long you hold the button!
Oh, this!
Sparkling Sparkling Sparkling
(Onomatopoeia for electricity or sparks repeated over and over.)
Oh, this!
Sparkling Sparkling Sparkling
Spin. Spin.
Spin spin spin
Uwaaa!
Spin. Spin.
Spin spin spin
Uwaaa!
Go with a bam-bam!
You can hit posts too, and areas you can't destroy except with a hammer.
DEADLY!
Of course, you can hit posts.
Go with a bam-bam!
You can hit posts too, and areas you can't destroy except with a hammer.
The fallen angel arrives!
Shoot arrows that hit and painful.
Press and release and arrows fly.
It's angel -like devil . N/A
Power shot! Moonsault
Rising upper!! Kick
Mega power shot!!
( タメる indicites holding the button to shoot an energy blast, no text elsewhere.) N/A
Here it is.
Hand Power .
...You can only do it once .
I don't know .
You can only do it once . N/A
EXPLOSION! SMASH BROS. FIST !
(Kirby is a starter character in Super Smash Bros.)
DEADLY! SMASH BROS. FIST! N/A
Oh that's strange. Become small
and thin passages are no problem!
SMALL!
BE SMALL! N/A
WARNING: FINAL WEAPON IN CONTROL!
WARNING: FINAL WEAPON IN CONTROL!
Wherever you are I 'll chase you down!!
Kabooom!
Even in the fire or in the water , I'll chase you everywhere.
Ah, but no way in the fire , maybe... N/A
It's a BONUS .
UNIVERSAL SWORD
Everything will be destroyed . N/A
Prototype (Early) Prototype (Final) Release Kirby Nightmare in Dream Land
I won't be defeated with this sword .
I will slash with it .
(I will slash even without it.)
I won't be defeated with this sword .
I will slash with it .
(I will slash even without it.)
SLASH
The final prototype version had a graphical glitch with the "DO NOT DISTURB" text.
The glitch was fixed in the release version, and the color of the "DO NOT DISTURB" text was changed to red.
Placeholder
Escaped (dead)
I knew it was impossible..
Something came out
( げだつ means to escape one's bonds or pull through a situation and ポア (Phowa) is a Buddhist concept of transferring consciousness that can be associated with death. It could be that this picture was made as a pause screen for when the player is dead, but was scrapped. Interestingly, a Ghost ability did make an appearance in the game's sequel.)
Level Design
To do:
Add proper stage maps. Properly list changes, accompany with images
Rainbow Route
The penultimate room of Rainbow Route is different in the prototype; a long horizontal room instead of a vertical room. It is no longer present in the final game.
Shadow Kirby Room
As long as Shadow Kirby hasn't disappeared, you won't be able to descend into the pit on the left side of the room. This has been fixed in the final game by moving the screen to the right, so there is no pit to fall into.
Moonlight Mansion
Prototype Final
The switch remains after being pressed in the prototype; it disappears after being pressed in the final. The left door is closed off in the prototype, and the ability trophies are not yet present.
Prototype Final
The background used in this room is surprisingly more fitting in the prototype. It may have been changed so that the bosses in the background could only be seen in the hallway before the boss itself, which was not present yet.
Prototype Final
This Golem activates when approached from the right in the prototype; it activates from the left in the final. The switch below is also not present.
King Golem Room
King Golem is located a few pixels further to the right and the ground is lower in the prototype.
Chests
Prototype Final
This chest with a cherry inside is replaced by a standalone cherry in the final. Probably removed since it would be much more convenient to just get the food rather than watch the chest animation.
In other places, the prototype lacks some chests that the final game has.
Miscellaneous
Enemy types and placement has been changed a lot, between the prototype and final.
Other Differences
Missing Features
Intro sequence, save game selection and game mode selection are absent.
Map screen, Area name and area ID display are absent.
Pressing L to warp out of a level doesn't work. It behaves like R instead, calling the other Kirbys.
Gameplay-Related
You can inhale infinitely. In the final game, Kirby stops and coughes after a while.
Getting hit does not stop the inhaling process. Objects and enemies that have been fetched by Kirby's inhaling will continue to fly towards him after he has been hit. In the final version, when Kirby is hit, the fetched enemies will instantly die, instead.
When inhaling food or items, Kirby isn't stuck like he is in the final game. He can stop inhaling and move, while the food continues to fly towards him.
Unpausing takes slightly longer in the prototype.
To unpause, you have to press A in the prototype as opposed to Start in the final version. Pressing B works on both versions.
in the prototype as opposed to in the final version. Pressing works on both versions. Kirby jumps about 5 pixels less high compared to the final game.
Crouching makes the camera scroll down much sooner.
After Kirby lands with horizontal speed, he walks a bit further in the prototype. In the final game, he stops almost immediately.
When running and letting go of arrow keys, Kirby switches to walking in the prototype. In the final game, he keeps running for a short while.
When Kirby keeps getting hit and repeatedly loses his ability, his ability star moves away quicker in the final version. This behavior isn't present in the prototype.
When starting to float, Kirby can cancel into using his ability or inhaling, in the final game. This feature isn't present in the prototype.
Shadow Kirby can be inhaled immediately, whereas he behaves like a heavy enemy in the final game.
Shadow Kirby doesn't drop anything on death, but he drops a Maxim Tomato, 1-Up or Lollipop in the final game.
Shadow Kirby doesn't reappear if you redo the room. He does reappear in the final version.
CPU-Kirbys can inhale your ditched ability star. In the final game, they can't, making it easier for players to try and retrieve their lost ability.
CPU-Kirbys will keep following you through the rooms persistently. They leave you alone more easily in the final game.
CPU-Kirbys can't grab the Warpstar. In the final version, they can.
The game's wall-ejection behavior appears to work slightly differently.
When opening a chest, the acquired item is shown slightly longer in the prototype.
Graphical
When airborne, Kirby is placed about 6 pixels lower than on the final version. As a result, his sprite can reach partially inside the floor before Kirby gets grounded. It looks like the correlation between his sprite and hitbox is different.
Kirby's animation when airborne and on the ground is different; it is more still in the final version.
Some door graphics are different.
The mirror shard from King Golem doesn't have a blue flashing light. Neither does the Kirby victory dance or the Moonlight Mansion mirror that appears after pressing the button.
Kirby's facing direction after entering a room differs in some rooms.
Bugs
There are minor graphical bugs with the arrows pointing at offscreen Kirbys, as well as with the mini Kirby icons in the top left of the screen.
A bug with enemies' invincibility periods: when Kirby, after getting hit, touches an enemy, the enemy gets hit every frame. However, if Kirby ate an Invincibility Lollipop, the enemy's invincibility period works normally.
Ability Stars can continue bouncing after falling into pits, sometimes enabling them to get stuck in the ground. This was fixed in the final game where Ability Stars break as soon as they fall far enough into a pit.
A minor graphical bug with the ability roulette: the ability display is graphically glitched for one frame, then intact for three frames. In the final version, the display is never glitched.
There's a minor graphical bug with falling Parasol Waddle Dee.
Stone Kirby as a stone can fall through a Warpstar. In the final version, he detransforms and grabs the Warpstar.
Kirby is noticeably invisible for a brief moment after entering a room.
There's a rare glitch where swallowing an ability may cause enemies on the screen to zip horizontally across the room very quickly.
There's a glitch in the room before King Golem where a sword-wielding enemy will try to deflect your puff of air even when you aren't anywhere near him nor exhaling.
CPU-Kirbys can enter a Cannon, which makes them turn into Pink Kirbys and stop acting. In the final version, CPU-Kirbys are disabled from entering Cannons.
Development Text
Similar to the build dates in each of the retail versions of the game, this version's build date can be found at 0x A2BF78 in the ROM:
0.21 Mon Dec 29 19:37:23 2003 |
An unloaded subway train derailed Tuesday in the Chenggong section of Kunming's metro. During a routine trial run a train carrying two drivers left the tracks, killing one conductor and injuring another. Photos of the accident show the front of the train suffered extensive damage to both the windshield and roof.
The train was approaching the Dounan Station (斗南站) in southern Kunming and had just emerged from a tunnel when the derailment occurred. The deceased conductor was not killed by the crash but rather by a ceiling-mounted heating unit falling on him, according to media reports. Information regarding the slain conductor has not been released.
No reasons for the derailment have yet been given but an investigation by the Kunming Rail Transit Company Ltd (昆明轨道交通有限公司), which operates the city subway, is underway. Subway test runs in Chenggong began last November in preparation for the opening of Metro Line 1.
Conflicting reports issued by different news outlets have listed the opening date as early as December 31, 2012, and as late as February 2013. Currently, local newspaper Life is reporting the subway line's scheduled premier will coincide with Spring Festival, which this year falls on February 10. No announcements regarding scheduling changes have been made since the incident.
The accident underlines continuing safety concerns that have plagued the Kunming subway. In 2011 a subway crash in Shanghai was blamed on trains manufactured by China South Locomotive & Rolling Stock Corporation Ltd (CSR).
The company was also designing and producing trains for Kunming's metro. Spring City residents were anxious over reported speeds CSR trains would reach when put into operation. The train manufacturer subsequently released plans explaining train controls and precautionary measures.
Tuesday's accident will surely raise new questions regarding the soundness of the subway's safety system. Also coming under scrutiny is the age of the man operating the train at the time of the accident. The driver, Chen Junmin (陈俊民), is only 19-years old but reportedly fully certified to be a subway conductor. He suffered minor injuries in the derailment.
This is the third subway-related accident in China in the past two weeks. A New Year's Eve collapse of a Shanghai Metro parking structure killed five and injured 18 others. That was followed two days later by an incident in a Nanning subway tunnel that hurt several construction workers.
Images: 163.com
© Copyright 2005-2019 GoKunming.com all rights reserved. This material may not be republished, rewritten or redistributed without permission. |
A Maine woman says she would rather risk jail time than take down her yard signs in support of President Trump after city officials said she had to remove them.
Officials from the city of Rockland told Susan Reitman, 75, that she had to take down her signs or face fines because the signs violate a local ordinance, the Daily Mail reported.
“I was shocked,” she said. “This is my freedom of speech. People have a right to voice their opinion.”
The signs, which hang over her front gate, read “I Love Trump” and “He Won, Get Over It.”
A code enforcement officer from the city told Reitman that, under the city ordinance, residents could only display one sign attached to a structure no larger than two square feet or one free-standing sign no larger than four square feet. Reitman’s signs violate the ordinance because she has two signs that are just over three feet by two feet, according to the officer.
Officials say that if she does not remove her signs by Friday, she faces fines of $100 to $1,000 per day.
The code enforcement officer added that another resident complained about the size of the signs.
Reitman, however, is not backing down. She told New England Cable News that she would neither pay the fines nor take her signs down.
“If I have to sit in jail for the rest of eternity, that’s my choice,” she said. “I guess I’m being stubborn … but I’m not going to back down from what I believe.”
Town officials say that residents can apply for permits to display signs larger than what the ordinance allows.
Reitman added that she was not aware of the ordinance and thinks city officials should change it to allow for political speech.
Rockland Assistant Code Enforcement Officer William Butler argues that his directive had nothing to do with the content of the signs.
“I admire your passion for our president. Truly, I do,” Butler wrote in a Monday email to Reitman, according to the Press Herald. “However, we have received a complaint, and I have to do my due diligence, and I have determined your signs are not in compliance with the Rockland Code.”
“It is your business what you put on the signs. It is the city’s business regarding the size and number of signs,” he added.
Butler reportedly did not mention any threat of jail time in his email to Reitman.
The Herald reports that Reitman would only face jail time if she refused to follow a court order from a judge asking her to remove the signs. For that to happen, the city would have to file a land-use complaint in court. |
What is the origin of ‘boycott’?
Despite being such an influential social and political term, boycott is of more recent vintage than many people realize. The word, which can be used as either a noun or a verb, refers to the practice of ‘withdrawing from commercial or social relations with (a country, organization, or person) as a punishment or protest’. Boycott is also the rare word that we can trace to an exact origin, first appearing in the autumn of 1880, during the Irish Land War.
At the time, the Irish Land League was advocating for better conditions on behalf of the tenant farmers in rural Ireland, pushing back against the wealthy landlords and agents who controlled the land. One particularly effective tactic the League developed was ostracizing the land agents and those who associated with them, which offered communities away to combat those in power that was both legal and nonviolent.
This tactic of ostracizing ultimately took its name from one of its earliest victims: Captain Charles C. Boycott (1832-97), one of the land agents. In its entry for boycott, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) quotes from an article in the 25 September issue of the Dublin newspaper Freeman’s Journal:
The multitude…rushed to Loughmask House, the residence of Captain Boycott, the agent on the estate, and the party against whom the popular ire was chiefly directed, and in a very short time every labourer and servant employed on or around the place was driven off and cautioned not to work there again.
It was not long before newspapers enthusiastically turned ‘Boycott’ into an eponymous word, employing it to broadly refer to this practice of public shunning supported by the Irish Land League. It seems that as early as December 1880, only a few months after the boycotting of Boycott, the word had acquired a wider currency, with the Illustrated London News noting that, ‘to “Boycott” has already become a verb active, signifying to “ratten”, to intimidate, to “send to Coventry”, and to ‘taboo”’. By the early 20th century, the scare quotes had disappeared and the ‘B’ had dropped down into lowercase, evidenced by a 1908 Westminster Gazette article reporting that ‘the local Labour Party is inclined to boycott preference voting’ without so much as a wink at Captain Boycott.
In fact, the word (and, presumably, the political tactic) proved so popular that it was quickly adopted by other European languages, including French boycotter (1880), German boycottieren (1893; now boykottieren), Dutch boycotten (1904), and Russian bojkotirovat (1891).
In the age of social media, the word boycott remains as viable as ever, and its use in hashtags – such as #BoycottDolceGabbana – enables such protests to spread around the globe at a rate which would have been unimaginable to the original boycotters. |
With the Season 2 World Playoffs only a day away, we dont want fans to miss a thing during the most momentous eSports event of the year. Twelve teams from all across the globe will be competing for a share of $2,000,000 in prize money and a shot at the title of World Champion, so the next two weeks will overflow with action-packed matches and bloody battles on the Fields of Justice.
In addition to live broadcasts and coverage on the event site, information about the Season 2 World Championship will also be readily available in the palm of your hands. Download the League of Legends World Championship mobile app to get updated event brackets, match schedules and results, event photos, team and player bios, and more all instantly accessible through your iPhone or Android smartphone.
To access the Season 2 World Championship mobile app:
1) Download the Guidebook application for your iPhone or Android
2) Scan the provided QR code or search for League of Legends in Guidebook
3) Read about your favorite teams and players, and set your schedule so youre on time to witness your most-anticipated matches |
scrapped Rs 500 notes +
Indore-Patna Express derailed +
PUKHRAYAN: Some passengers injured in the train derailment here on Sunday mysteriously received cash, mostly in the denomination of, while they were admitted in a hospital.Stumped by this development, the authorities promised to probe the matter.Commissioner of Kanzpur Zone Iftikharuddin said he will get the matter inquired into by the chief medical officer of Mati Hospital in Kanpur Dehat district where such cases were reported.Over 120 passengers were killed and more than 200 injured, nearly half of them grievously, when 14 coaches ofhere in Kanpur rural area in the wee hours today due to suspected rail fracture.Among those who were given Rs 5,000 cash by some unknown persons were Asha Mishra and Anil. Both received 10 notes of Rs 500, which have been declared invalid since November 8.A relative of one of the injured claimed that the person who handed over the money told her that the money was given to them by the railways.There was, however, no confirmation as to whether the money was actually sent by the railways.Commenting on the development, a BJP leader R P Singh said, "We don't know really who distributed it, whether it was some political party or employees of the railways. I immediately tweeted to (Railways Minister) Suresh Prabhu and got confirmation from him that he will look into this matter."Terming it as a "very sad" development, he said, "If railway authorities have done it, even then it is sad and if some politician has done it, then it's more upsetting because you can't rub salt on people's wounds." |
CORRECTION: This story was updated on May 28, 2014, to correct the map, which had previously indicated that Maryland requires accreditation for forensic laboratories. Accreditation is optional. Maryland requires that forensic laboratories obtain and maintain a Maryland State license to perform services. These licensure requirements sometimes exceed forensic accreditation standards. [+]Enlarge
Five years ago, the National Academy of Sciences put out a report condemning the state of forensic science. It concluded that many common forensic techniques—the analysis of fingerprints, bite marks, blood splatter, and ballistics, for example—lack sufficient scientific underpinnings. Thousands of convictions were thrown into question.
But in the years since, little has been done to shore up the discipline’s scientific base or to make sure that its methods don’t result in wrongful convictions. Quality standards for forensic laboratories remain inconsistent. And funding to implement improvements is scarce.
While politicians and government workers debate changes that could help, fraudsters like forensic chemist Annie Dookhan keep operating in the system. No reform could stop a criminal intent on doing wrong, but a better system might have shown warning signs sooner. And it likely would have prevented some of the larger, systemic problems at the Massachusetts forensics lab where Dookhan worked.
A glimmer of progress is starting to emerge, though, in the form of initiatives at the Department of Justice and the National Institute of Standards & Technology. These agencies are creating two oversight organizations that will attempt to make reform ideas a reality, both in Washington, D.C., and in forensic labs nationwide.
↑ Top New Federal Infrastructure Attempts To Reform Forensic Science
The National Academy of Sciences’ scathing 2009 report called for massive changes to forensic science oversight and further research to shore up the discipline’s methods. But five years later “not much has happened,” says Jay A. Siegel, a forensic scientist who was on the committee that wrote the report.
Big changes may finally be in the offing for forensic science, though, as the federal government, Congress, and the larger scientific community attempt to address forensics’ fundamental flaws.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) and the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST) have teamed up to create a National Commission on Forensic Science, which will attempt to take the National Academy’s broad recommendations and turn them into action. And NIST is starting a new organization to create uniform standards across forensics disciplines, including several chemistry-related fields.
Chemists are playing an important role in those changes. A half-dozen chemists are on the new national commission, and more will undoubtedly join NIST’s effort to create new standards. The American Chemical Society, which publishes C&EN, recently adopted a policy statement that calls for increased scientific rigor in forensic science (http://bit.ly/StMhT2). In addition, ACS and other scientific organizations have supported pending legislation in Congress aimed at reforming the discipline.
“Seeing the full power of the scientific community come into this is thrilling to watch,” says Madeline deLone, executive director of the Innocence Project, which works to exonerate prisoners who have been wrongly convicted. “It is not a simple process to change the way forensic science has been done. These changes are the biggest step forward in years.”
But some observers are not so sure that the current changes will be able to restore faith in forensic evidence. And they have a right to be skeptical. The White House reacted quickly after the 2009 report was released: Within months it charged the interagency National Science & Technology Council with making reform recommendations. Almost five years later, however, nothing from that effort has been publicly released. Congress hasn’t had much luck either. Bills introduced last year haven’t yet gone anywhere.
In fact, national-level reform seemed stalled until 2013, when DOJ and NIST announced their plans to create oversight bodies intended to jump-start change. Those organizations—the National Commission on Forensic Science and the Organization of Scientific Area Committees—are just now starting their work.
The National Commission on Forensic Science held its inaugural meeting in February and meets again this week. Its 30 members, chosen from around 300 applicants, represent the forensic science, legal, and law enforcement communities. The commission also includes high-profile scientists outside of forensics, such as Nobel Prize-winning chemist Thomas R. Cech and University of Maryland physicist S. James Gates Jr.
The commission will map out what must be done to ensure that forensic scientists produce reliable evidence using scientifically rigorous methods. The U.S. attorney general will then have to decide whether to make federal labs or those who get federal money to follow the commission’s recommendations.
But the attorney general doesn’t have the power to force the thousands of forensic labs overseen by states to do the same. “The federal government doesn’t have enforcement power over the states,” explains commissioner John Fudenberg, assistant coroner with Nevada’s Clark County Office of the Coroner/Medical Examiner.
Instead, the commission will have to rely, in large part, on the power of persuasion to bring change nationwide. “Our job is to be the bully pulpit,” says commissioner Suzanne Bell, a forensic chemist at West Virginia University.
Unlike the National Science & Technology Council’s effort at reform, the national commission’s meetings will be held in public, and its recommendations will be available whether the attorney general endorses them or not. That means they will be available to defense attorneys to use when cross-examining forensic scientists and for states to consider when looking at whether their state or local forensic labs are doing their job.
“Make no mistake. People in the forensic sciences want to do a good job. They want standards, and they want guidelines,” Fudenberg says. “This is a unique opportunity for the forensic science disciplines to have a voice at the federal level. We can make a big impact on the entire nation.”
Some of the major issues that the commission will need to tackle became clear during its first meeting. Just a few examples include ensuring accreditation of forensic labs and certification of forensic scientists, explaining scientific uncertainty in the courtroom, training current and future forensic scientists, and creating an enforceable code of ethics.
Underlying it all, the commission must lobby for research into what aspects of forensic science are actually science. Fingerprint analysis, a staple of many forensic cases, is the most commonly cited example: No study has ever shown that every individual has unique fingerprints or defined what is needed to ensure that two fingerprint samples match.
“If we can make forensic science more science-based from the bottom up, I think that would make a big difference,” says Bell, who is chairing the commission’s Scientific Inquiry & Research Subcommittee.
But the commission won’t go so far as setting standards for how individual forensic scientists should perform specific experiments, whether it’s testing drugs or comparing ballistics. ↑ Top
Creating A Forensics Commission Chemists are well represented on the new National Commission on Forensic Science, which will help guide forensics policy for the Justice Department and the National Institute of Standards & Technology. In addition to the doctoral or master’s degree chemists listed, several more of the 30 commissioners and seven ex officio members have bachelor’s degrees in chemistry or related fields. Commission Members ◾ Suzanne Bell, associate professor, West Virginia University
◾ Thomas R. Cech, distinguished professor, University of Colorado, Boulder
◾ M. Bonner Denton, professor, University of Arizona
◾ Andrea Ferreira-Gonzalez, professor of pathology and director of the Molecular Diagnostics Laboratory, Virginia Commonwealth University
◾ Linda Jackson, director, Virginia Department of Forensic Science
◾ Michael (Jeff) Salyards, executive director, Defense Forensic Science Center, Department of the Army Ex Officio Member ◾ Marilyn Huestis, chief, Chemistry & Drug Metabolism Section, National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health Vice Chairs ◾ Nelson Santos, deputy assistant administrator, Office of Forensic Sciences, Drug Enforcement Administration
◾ John M. Butler, special assistant to the director for forensic science, National Institute of Standards & Technology SOURCE: NIST
That job will fall to NIST’s new standards-setting organization, the Organization of Scientific Area Committees (OSAC). Approximately 650 forensic scientists and other experts will be part of this multitier organization, which will set standards and guidelines to improve the quality and consistency of forensic science. Recruiting ended last week, and NIST hopes to have OSAC up and running by the fall. “It is a logical path to more enforceability,” says Mark D. Stolorow, who is leading the effort at NIST.
OSAC will replace the scientific working groups, a somewhat ad hoc system that laid out guidelines for different forensic science disciplines but didn’t have a uniform system of organization or oversight. Some of these groups, for example, those focused on forensic toxicology and drug testing, put out thoughtful guidelines for the community and secured federal support for their work. But others were underfunded, rarely met, allowed unqualified members to join, and didn’t rely on research, observers note.
The new OSAC structure will bring similar disciplines together under one umbrella to share ideas, plus provide stable funding for meetings. “It seems like a logical fit for us,” says Robert A. Middleberg, a director of NMS Labs, which provides forensic services, and chair of the Scientific Working Group for Forensic Toxicology.
Eventually NIST hopes OSAC will create a registry of forensics standards that could be used to accredit forensic labs. At the moment, there is no federal requirement for such accreditation, nor any oversight of the organizations that currently offer it. The two largest accrediting organizations now require little in the way of discipline- or technique-specific standards. They say they are open to the idea of ensuring that labs meet more detailed standards but want to make sure OSAC is working before they commit to following its lead.
“The challenge is how mobile or agile is it going to be? Is it going to be bogged down in bureaucracy?” asks Keith Greenaway, vice president at ANSI-ASQ National Accreditation Board, which accredits many industries, including forensics.
Even if OSAC rises to that challenge, there are still problems in forensic science that can be fixed only through legislation. The biggest one might be money. NIST and DOJ are funding their current efforts out of their existing budgets. But that funding isn’t sufficient to support the research required to shore up the scientific underpinnings of forensic science. Other agencies, including the Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation, have expressed interest in funding such research. But none of those agencies have dedicated money to such an effort.
Congress could address the money problem by appropriating funds for forensic science research. There is no indication, however, that Congress will add such funds to the relevant agencies’ budgets.
The forensic bills currently in the Senate and House of Representatives instead add to existing calls for reform. Parallel versions of a bill recently introduced in the House and Senate would create a more robust forensic science research program (H.R. 6106 and S. 2022); another bill recently introduced in the Senate would create a forensics oversight structure within DOJ (S. 2177). If passed, the legislation could work seamlessly with what NIST and DOJ are currently creating.
These bills would codify into law what the Administration has been doing, says the Innocence Project’s deLone. That’s important because a future Administration could choose to address forensics differently.
Clearly, much work still needs to be done, but members of the original National Academy of Sciences panel are excited just to see things start to happen.
“Momentum is now building,” Siegel says. “This is the best and maybe last chance to implement some of the recommendations for forensic science.”
↑ Top Pinpointing Red Flags In Massachusetts Drug Lab Scandal
Disgraced forensic chemist Annie Dookhan was sentenced to prison more than five months ago. Yet her saga continues to roil both her home state of Massachusetts and the forensics community, providing a very public example of the need for reform in forensic science.
Dookhan fabricated drug test data and lied under oath. Her misdeeds affected cases involving more than 40,000 individuals, cases Massachusetts has set aside $30 million to review.
Meanwhile, a March report from Massachusetts Inspector General Glenn A. Cunha revealed a rash of management failures at the William A. Hinton State Laboratory Institute, the now-shuttered drug lab where Dookhan worked. Managers failed to provide proper chemistry training, and they ignored the concerns of Dookhan’s colleagues.
The findings flabbergasted many in the forensics community. The quality bar for forensic chemistry labs has risen dramatically in recent decades, notes West Virginia University’s Bell. But the Hinton lab, she says, “would’ve been considered off the cliff back in the 1980s—the report is that appalling.”
The report reveals more than bad management, however. It also highlights Dookhan’s forgery of gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer (GC/MS) quality-control records—actions that have a small but not insignificant chance of affecting other chemists’ results. In addition, it shows that multiple chemists—not just Dookhan—unknowingly performed a drug identification technique improperly.
The Hinton lab’s history contributed to its dysfunctional culture. From 1910 until 2012, when a long-planned reorganization brought it into the Massachusetts State Police department, the lab was situated within the state’s Department of Public Health. While the rest of the department concerned itself with disease outbreaks or wellness promotion, Dookhan and her colleagues struggled with a backlog of criminal cases that didn’t mesh with her administration’s mission statement. “No one in that management structure knew the pressures in a forensic lab,” or in the justice system in general, says forensic chemist Siegel.
Because most managers’ backgrounds were in scientific disciplines other than chemistry, they also were ill-prepared to catch Dookhan’s fabrications.
[+]Enlarge WHAT IS THE HYPERGEOMETRIC APPROACH? It’s a statistically validated way to make inferences about the chemical identity of drug evidence from analysis of a portion.
In particular, the inspector general’s report shows that on at least four occasions, Dookhan falsified quality-control (QC) records for the lab’s GC/MS. Raw data showed that the instrument failed to find cocaine or codeine in a standard mix. But Dookhan signed off as if the instrument had detected cocaine and codeine. “And then management signed off because she signed off, instead of looking at the underlying data,” says José R. Almirall, a forensic analytical chemist at Florida International University.
Every chemist at the lab relied on gas chromatography/mass spectrometry, the gold standard for confirming the chemical identity of seized drug samples. But Dookhan’s QC forgery doesn’t automatically invalidate every chemist’s results for the day, says Jack Mario, a forensic chemist and consultant hired by Cunha’s office to assist with its investigation. Labs use several procedures to make sure a GC/MS gives chemists reproducible spectra that can be compared with standards, he says. The instruments in drug labs, he adds, are workhorse machines that tend to be very robust.
With respect to QC, “Dookhan committed an egregious lapse in protocol,” Mario says. “Do I think it really affected others’ results? I can’t imagine it would. But I don’t know that that reasoning could overturn the concerns of a defense attorney.”
Other chemists think Dookhan’s actions call for close inspection of all GC/MS data from the days in question. “It raises a red flag as soon as there is fabricated GC/MS data,” says Nelson Santos, a chemist with the Drug Enforcement Administration and an expert in the analysis of seized drugs.
“I would want to review every case that was done on those days,” agrees Bell. Certain cases, such as those involving designer cannabinoids, demand that an instrument be in top working order.
Dookhan was the only chemist at the Hinton lab who deliberately forged records, the investigation concluded. Unintentional errors, though, were widespread. According to the report, many chemists in the lab were incorrectly using sampling techniques in drug trafficking cases.
In seized-drug cases, sample weight can be critical in determining charges, such as possession or trafficking, or the severity of a penalty. Samples often arrive at a drug lab in multi-item batches, so weighing is not trivial. Chemists often weigh and chemically characterize each item, or do so until they reach a threshold weight for a charge. But this can be impractical.
So international forensics working groups have agreed upon a small number of techniques that permit an analyst to test a portion of a multi-item population and then make statistical inferences about the identity of a larger portion of that population. One of these methods, the hypergeometric approach, was in use at the Hinton lab.
But most of the lab’s chemists lacked sufficient grounding in statistics to use this approach properly. They selected samples incorrectly, made improper conclusions about their data, and failed to report the inherent uncertainty associated with their measurements.
At times, these errors resulted in chemists overstating the weight of a population of drug samples, “a critical error in a case near a statutory trafficking weight threshold,” according to the report. Or, as George Washington University forensic spectroscopist Walter F. Rowe puts it, “they knew just enough science in that lab to get themselves in trouble.”
The report stopped short of recommending that the 55 cases affected by this issue be retested. In each of those cases, chemists did not statistically identify enough of a drug sample to exceed the relevant trafficking threshold. The report notes that the inspector general’s office will notify the agencies that prosecuted these cases.
Retesting samples of seized drugs stored in evidence for months or years might be problematic in certain cases, Siegel says. Cocaine picks up moisture with time, marijuana leaves can dry out, and other samples can decompose.
Rowe has often retested seized-drug samples and says that those weights are typically a few percentage points lower than originals. New tests may indeed raise more questions than they answer, he says, “but I think it’s worth looking again, especially for cases near a threshold.”
The report does recommend mandatory accreditation for all forensic labs in Massachusetts. Currently, accreditation is voluntary in that state. The Hinton lab was not accredited, but the state police lab that now conducts most Massachusetts drug testing is. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 83% of publicly funded crime labs nationwide were accredited in 2009.
Accreditation “would’ve been an enormous benefit for this lab,” Mario says. But even those safeguards aren’t a guarantee against human nature, he cautions. |
How do you make sure that your passwords are safe? You can make them longer, complicate them by adding odd characters, making sure to use different passwords for each user account that you have. Or, you can simply skip them all together.
The secure shell, ssh, is a key tool in any Linux user's toolbox. As soon as you have more than one machine to interact with, ssh is the obvious choice.
When logging into a remote machine through ssh, you are usually prompted with the remote user's password. An alternative to this is to use an asymmetric key pair.
An asymmetric key pair consists of a private and public key. These are generated from an algorithm - either RSA or DSA. RSA has been around for a long time and is widely supported, even by old legacy implementations. DSA is safer, but requires v2 of the ssh protocol. This is not much of an issue in an open source world - keeping the ssh daemon implementation up to date is not a problem, but rather a requirement. Thus, DSA is the recommended choice, unless you have any specific reason to pick RSA.
The generated keys are larger than a common user password. RSA keys are at least 768 bits, default 2048 bits. DSA keys are 1024, as the standard specifies this.
To generate a DSA key, use the following command:
$ ssh-keygen -t dsa
This generates the files ~/.ssh/id_dsa and ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub. You can specify a passphrase in the key generation process. This means that they key only can be used in combination with a passphrase, adding to the security.
The generated file ending with pub is the public half of the pair. This can be shared with remote hosts that you want to ssh to. The other file, id_dsa, is the private half of the pair. This must be protected just as you password. I.e. do not mail this, do not store it on untrusted machines, etc.
Having a 1024 bits long key can be thought of as having a 128 characters long password. This means that the key pair method is safer than most passwords that you can remember. Keys are also completely random, so they cannot be cracked using dictionary attacks. This means that you can increase the safety of your remote host by disabling logins using passwords, thus forcing all users to use key pairs.
Having generated your key pair, all that is left is copying the public half of the key to the remote machine. You do that using the ssh-copy-id command.
$ ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub user@remote
This adds your key to the remote machine's list of authorized keys. Just to be on the safe side, it is also good to ensure that the ~/.ssh and ~/.ssh/authorized_keys aren't writable by any other user than you. You might have to fix this using chmod.
Having added the key to the remote machine, you should now be able to ssh to it without using a password.
$ ssh user@remote
This applies to all sshd-based mechanisms. So you can scp freely, as well as mount parts of the remote file system using sshfs.
One potential catch twenty two issue here is if the remote machine does not allow password-based logins. Then the ssh-copy-id command will not work. Instead you will have to take the contents of the public key half and manually add it as a new line to the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file on the remote machine. This is what the ssh-copy-id command does for you.
This also tells you what to do if a key is compromised, or simply falls into disuse. Simply remove the corresponding line from the remote's list of authorized keys. You can usually recognize the key in question from the end of the line where it reads username@hostname.
So, until next time, no more passwords! |
A $30-million hemp fibre-processing facility is set to open in southern Alberta this fall, but it won’t — at least for now — be sourcing hemp from Canada.
“I’ll be moving into a facility in about two months, and we’ll be operational from there,” said Brett Boag, chief executive officer of Cylab International.
“But I’ll be bringing my fibre, at that point, in from overseas.”
Boag built his company eight years ago in China, where tall hemp varieties thrive and workers separate the fibrous stalk from the internal hurd (the soft part of the stem) by hand.
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He knew the labour situation would be different here, but was expecting hemp fibre “would be abundantly available,” he said.
But as it turns out, the varieties of hemp currently grown in the province fall short on a couple of fronts — fibre strength and length — and the two characteristics go hand in hand.
“It’s a really, really good material if you get long-fibre format, and that’s what we’re looking for — a longer fibre format than the standard 70- to 80-millimetre length. We’re looking for 200 to 300 millimetre.”
Fibre strength is critical, said Boag. Some companies are even testing hemp as an alternative to Kevlar in bulletproof vests.
“These systems rely on the strength hemp offers and the ability of hemp to resist impact, which is what Kevlar is all about,” he said.
“But Kevlar is $80 a square metre. This material is a couple of dollars, and yet it’s probably got 80 per cent the performance of Kevlar.”
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Although there’s been a lot of interest in hemp, and an increasing number of acres in southern Alberta, long-fibre varieties would perform best in the north, said Boag.
More on “hemp” from the Alberta Farmer Express: Industrial hemp acres on the rise, especially in southern Alberta
“This stuff grows on sunlight. You’ve got longer days of sunlight up there,” he said. “In my mind, this area (in central Alberta) and farther north is the growing area for a good-quality fibrous hemp.”
That’s good news for central Alberta hemp grower Todd Bystrom, who currently burns his hemp fibre.
“I would consider any kind of hemp straw right now a cost,” he said. “That’s actually a cost against growing it. Any time you can turn a cost into a revenue, that makes it a better calculation.”
Bystrom has been growing hemp on his farm near Sylvan Lake for the past three years, primarily as seed and for the food market.
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“When you look at hemp as a farmer, you’ve got to have a reason to grow it. The No. 1 reason for me is it’s worth more money.”
A hemp fibre-processing facility would allow producers like Bystrom to sell the whole plant, while making it easier to manage post-harvest straw.
“It would be a good thing because you have to remove this straw to be able to seed into it next year,” he said.
The Cylab facility could see a big jump in hemp acreage, which is roughly half of what that plant can handle.
“We would be requiring within about two years from now about 41,000 acres of hemp — not for the seed, not for anything other than the stalk and the internal hurd,” said Boag.
In order to get hemp from the field into a material that companies like Cylab can manufacture, the fibre must first be separated from the internal hurd — ideally in a location close to where the crop is grown in order to maintain the fibre strength.
“To turn this product here in Canada into a product that I can use, you need decortication,” said Boag.
The province funded a decortication pilot plant in Vegreville to grow the potential market for hemp in the province, said Lori-Jo Graham, biomaterials program lead with Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development.
“We invested in that multimillion-dollar project in 2009,” she said. “It’s North America’s largest fractionation facility.”
In the past five years, she’s seen a “real resurgence in the market.”
“We’re getting a lot of processors and manufacturers coming here and using the facility for research,” said Graham.
“We’re trying to establish Alberta and Canada as a centre of excellence for hemp, and it really sets Alberta apart from other places.” |
Pioneer Wants to Track Every Song DJs Play…
Pioneer DJ (the company that recently spun-off from Pioneer) is trying to roll out their KUVO platform to a wider audience. KUVO is a “social platform… that connects clubbers, DJs, and clubs around the world“. It’s already being used by Ministry of Sound, Space, Pacha, XOYO, and other clubs.
Basically, KUVO is a black box that connects to wifi and Pioneer decks at the club. Pioneer is the leader in DJ hardware, and many clubs have compatible hardware.
When DJs play their sets, the KUVO box automatically pulls artist and track information and uploads it to the KUVO online platform (as long as DJs pass it through Pioneer Rekordbox software). Club-goers, labels, fans, and artists can go to the KUVO website or app to see what tracks are playing at clubs in real time. Fans can use the map feature to discover nearby clubs, and DJs can sign up for the KUVO platform to add additional information about their tracks.Artist Richie Hawtin thinks this could change the game for DJ charts, by providing more accurate information on what is being played.
Pioneer will also report information to performance rights organizations, so artists can receive accurate payments. DJ Seth Troxler says he currently has to fill out sheets by hand with songs played in his sets, and club owners turn these sheets into PROs. It’s difficult and often times impossible to remember what songs were played during a set. KUVO will automate the process and make sure the money goes to the right people.
This sounds great, but it seems like a lot of unnecessary steps. Couldn’t Pioneer develop audio detection software that runs on a tablet or phone?
Nina Ulloa covers breaking news, tech, and more. Follow her on Twitter: @nine_u |
David Beckham Major League Soccer contract came with a clause that he'd be able to purchase an MLS franchise of his own one day. It's been no secret that he's been scouting Miami as a potential location over the past few month. British tabloid the Daily Mail reports that Beckham is moving forward with those Miami plans and could announce his progress sometime before Christmas.
The Mail, whose reporting was picked up both by Yahoo! Sports and ESPN UK, claims Becks is "almost settled" on South Florida. He's just now currently trying to get co-investors in place. Those said to be potential partners include Bolivia-born billionaire Marcelo Claure, who had joined Beckham on his tour or Miami, American Idol creator Simon Fuller and, potentially, Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross.
Ross had previously stated he'd like to bring an MLS team to Miami, but it's been unclear whether he has his own plans. |
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Most PC gamers are familiar with Nvidia’s GeForce line of video cards, which ranges from budget-friendly options like the GeForce GTX 950, all the way up to the $1,000 Titan X. There’s a whole line of professional cards as well, the Quadro line, and the green team just doubled the amount of memory in the top-end Quadro to a hefty 24GB without raising the price.
With the exception of the now sky-high memory, not much has changed since the previous M6000 card, which packed in “just” 12GB of memory. The GPU at the heart of the card is still Nvidia’s Maxwell 2-based GM200 chip, which boasts an 1,140MHz max boost clock, and both cards utilize 6.6Gbps GDDR5 memory. It also includes four DisplayPort plugs and one DVI output, dropping the HDMI usually found on GTX cards.
Before you get excited and start planning a new gaming rig around the beastly graphics card, it’s important to note these professional level cards aren’t meant for Rocket League marathons or maxing out your frames per second in The Division.
Instead, the cards are specifically engineered for non-gaming purposes, many of which run much better on the processing structure found in a GPU than a traditional CPU. That could mean graphical work like CAD and rendering, but also extends to weather prediction, facial recognition, and Bitcoin mining. They’re also typically equipped with certified drivers that ensure complete compatibility with high-end rendering and 3D modeling software suites.
In this case, the card also ships with more controls over thermals and clock speeds than are found even on the 12GB model. Since it’s the same construction, it’s likely just a firmware update, and although Nvidia doesn’t specify, it may be one that comes to other cards in the family later.
Like the 12GB M6000, the new 24GB version will cost a healthy $5,000 a pop. That places it well out of reach of your average PC gamer, and firmly in the hands of professionals and developers. It’s already available through Nvidia suppliers, and replaces the 12GB version, which is no longer listed on Nvidia’s Quadro page. |
Ann Freeman was filling up her Pontiac Vibe, watching the numbers on the pump spin so fast they blurred, when she noticed something she'd never seen before.
"I had never broken 40 bucks on gas before," she said, muttering to herself: "This is ridiculous."
She went home, got out her bicycle and took it in for a tuneup.
"My knees aren't what they used to be," Freeman, 54, said Monday afternoon. "But thanks to higher gas prices, I am motivated to drive less, ride more, save money and consume less."
As the average price of regular gasoline hit $3.88 a gallon Monday in the Twin Cities -- and threatened to enter the $4 orbit last reached in June 2008 -- Freeman wasn't the only one changing habits.
Buses are packed. Bike lanes are jammed. People are juggling child visitation dropoffs and making errand loops instead of separate trips to the vet, the cafe and the grocery store.
Steep gas prices are even affecting romance. Tom Marver of Mendota Heights said he changed his settings at dating service match.com, limiting his radius to 25 miles instead of the 50-mile range over which he used to cast his net of potential love.
"The empirical evidence shows that escalating gas prices prompt people to cut back on driving and travel, work more from home and combine trips," said Prof. Akshay Rao, a marketing expert at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management. "We are seeing a lot more sensitivity to energy consumption."
For five straight weeks, Americans have bought less gas than in comparable periods last year, according to MasterCard Spending Pulse, which monitors gas sold at 140,000 stations nationwide. The first week of April saw drivers pumping 2.4 million fewer gallons than they did last April -- a 3.6 percent drop despite an economic warmup that has created roughly 1 million jobs in the past year.
"More people are going to work and they should be buying more gas," said John Gamel, MasterCard's gas research director.
But more than two-thirds of major gas station chains reported lower sales in a March survey. In the Twin Cities, where the price of gas soared 30 cents this month, that drop is showing up in places large and small.
Parking ramps in downtown Minneapolis are seeing higher vacancy rates, said Dan McLaughlin, executive director of the Transportation Management Organization, which helps car-poolers find parking discounts. He said car-pool rates are up 30 percent and ramp owners are approaching him to fill vacant stalls.
First-quarter Metro Transit ridership numbers come out later this week, but spokesman John Siqveland said light-rail, train and bus ridership rose 1.5 percent in the first two months of 2011 compared with 2010. Visits to Metro Transit's website broke records last month, with 205,000 people clicking there 650,000 times -- despite a typical lag of a few weeks between spikes at the pump and increases in transit ridership.
Siqveland and others expect commuter behavior to mirror the summer of 2008, when gas cost $4 a gallon and surveys showed a 29 percent increase in bicycling and Metro Transit recorded all-time highs.
"The buses are really packed," said Laura Kittelson, who commutes from Chanhassen to her downtown Minneapolis accounting job. "I used to be able to park on the second floor of my park-and-ride ramp. Now they need overflow lots."
Errand loops
Steve Basile and his wife, Naomi Sack, used to make a few errand runs a week from their south Minneapolis home. Both own economy cars, but now Basile says they do "giant errand loops together on the weekend." Recently, that meant combining the dropoff of their dog at the vet for an annual checkup, a grocery run, visits to a book and thrift store, and lunch at a cafe -- all on the same outing.
"We sit there and plan it," Basile said. "It cuts our errand driving in half."
For Freeman, that recent $42 fill-up proved to be the boiling point. She used to commute by bike from the Seward neighborhood to her job at the University of Minnesota. She'd use her bike to visit friends, buy groceries and pick up prescriptions.
But then she raised two kids, dropping them off at different day-care centers.
Now a grandmother of two with somewhat creaky knees, Freeman says gas prices have motivated her to saddle up again. "That $40 tank," she said, "renewed my commitment to return to those good habits."
The Associated Press contributed to this report. Curt Brown • 612-673-4767 |
(CNN) The European Space Agency (ESA) has confirmed the Schiaparelli spacecraft , which was expected to land on Mars on Wednesday, has been lost.
During a press conference on Thursday, scientists said that Schiaparelli stopped transmitting around 50 seconds before the expected landing.
The agency suspects something went wrong when the parachute was jettisoned:"The ejection itself appears to have occurred earlier than expected, but analysis is not yet complete," it said in a statement.
ESA's Director General, Jan Wörner, said Schiaparelli's primary role was to test whether they could successfully land a probe on Mars.
"Recording the data during the descent was part of that, and it is important we can learn what happened, in order to prepare for the future," Wörner said.
ESA David Parker: #Mars exploration is hard but that is why we do it. #ExoMars — ESA (@esa) October 20, 2016
David Parker, ESA's Director of Human Spaceflight and Robotic Exploration said it's what they wanted from a test.
"We have data coming back that allows us to fully understand the steps that did occur, and why the soft landing did not occur," he said.
The probe was equipped with nine thrusters that were due to be activated for the last 30 seconds to help cushion the landing. But while they were confirmed to have been briefly activated, the agency believes they switched off sooner than expected.
The anxious wait
Scientists with ESA were anxiously waiting for news from Schiaparelli yesterday.
After a high-speed, fiery descent through the Martian atmosphere, scientists at mission control in Darmstadt, Germany, did not get a signal back from the 1,272 pound (577 kilogram) probe.
The mission, a joint venture between ESA's ExoMars program and the Russian state corporation Roscosmos, was primarily designed to test ESA's ability to land on Mars. The agency has a bigger mission, the ExoMars rover project, slated for 2020.
Sister ship is safe
Schiaparelli's companion craft, an orbiter with a much longer mission, successfully made it to orbit on Wednesday. The Trace Gas Orbiter will investigate the source of methane on Mars, which could be a sign of life or geological processes.
The orbiter adds to a fleet of spacecraft that are looking for signs of life on our neighboring planet.
The presence of methane is a signature of life on Earth, so the orbiting spacecraft will be trying to detect it and determine where it is coming from.
Adam Stevens, a researcher at the University of Edinburgh and the UK Centre for Astrobiology said methane may be produced by other processes but the mission will help "rule out some possibilities ... to tease out what is going on."
The Trace Gas Oribiter is expected to operate until 2020.
When will humans get to Mars?
Photos: Mars Opportunity and Spirit rovers Are those Martian blueberries? These tiny spherules pepper the sandy surface in this 3-centimeter (1.2-inch) square view of the Martian surface. Opportunity took this image while the target was shadowed by the rover's instrument arm. Hide Caption 1 of 19 Photos: Mars Opportunity and Spirit rovers From its perch high on a ridge, Opportunity recorded this image of a Martian dust devil twisting through the valley below. Just as on Earth, a dust devil is created by a rising, rotating column of hot air. When the column whirls fast enough, it picks up tiny grains of dust from the ground, making the vortex visible. Hide Caption 2 of 19 Photos: Mars Opportunity and Spirit rovers While traversing on and around the ancient volcanic feature called Home Plate, Spirit took many images of finely layered and more frothy looking volcanic rocks. Hide Caption 3 of 19 Photos: Mars Opportunity and Spirit rovers Opportunity photographed its tracks in the soft sand between the Endurance and Victoria craters on the Meridiani Plains. Hide Caption 4 of 19 Photos: Mars Opportunity and Spirit rovers More blueberries! Opportunity took this photo in 2004 of a rock called "Last Chance." The spherules embedded in the rock reminded the researchers of berries in muffins. The textures in the rock actually helped researchers determine that Mars had wet environmental conditions in the past. Hide Caption 5 of 19 Photos: Mars Opportunity and Spirit rovers Oppy's panoramic camera gathered this mosaic in 2014 of Wdowiak Ridge, as well as the rover's tracks to the right. This is about 70 degrees from north/northwest to east/northeast, showing the 500-feet ridge that rises 40 feet tall. Hide Caption 6 of 19 Photos: Mars Opportunity and Spirit rovers The rover took a selfie to show how much dust it had accumulated in 2011 before the windy season helped knock some of it off. Hide Caption 7 of 19 Photos: Mars Opportunity and Spirit rovers Sometimes, when Opportunity's solar power was limited, it would stop between treks to different features on Mars. This 2010 photo of its tracks on the surface show it "hopping from lily pad to lily pad." Hide Caption 8 of 19 Photos: Mars Opportunity and Spirit rovers The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took this photo of Victoria Crater, about a half-mile in diameter. It was Opportunity's home for 14 of the first 46 months it spent on Mars. Hide Caption 9 of 19 Photos: Mars Opportunity and Spirit rovers Opportunity's panoramic camera took this photo of outcrop rocks that it encountered on its journey in 2005. Cracks and other features are obvious. The two holes visible were drilled by the rover to expose the underlying material. Hide Caption 10 of 19 Photos: Mars Opportunity and Spirit rovers A shadow selfie. On July 26, 2004, the rover took this photo commemorating its 90 days on Mars -- the amount of time the mission was supposed to last. Instead, it continued for 15 years. Hide Caption 11 of 19 Photos: Mars Opportunity and Spirit rovers Opportunity made an impact. A panoramic image shows the heat shield impact site when it landed in 2004. Hide Caption 12 of 19 Photos: Mars Opportunity and Spirit rovers This iron meteorite was the first meteorite of any type ever found on another planet. The basketball-sized meteorite is rich in iron and nickel, and Opportunity found it in 2005. Hide Caption 13 of 19 Photos: Mars Opportunity and Spirit rovers Endurance Crater and its tendrils of sand presented a beautiful photo chance for the rover in 2004. Mars is full of dunes, and this is just one example Opportunity encountered. Hide Caption 14 of 19 Photos: Mars Opportunity and Spirit rovers These pointy features were called "Razorback." They're only a few centimeters tall, but the chunks of rock were found sticking up at the edge of flat rocks in Endurance Crater. They may have formed when fluids moved through rock fractures. Hide Caption 15 of 19 Photos: Mars Opportunity and Spirit rovers In 2010, Opportunity took this panorama of the eastward horizon view of Endeavour Crater's rim. Hide Caption 16 of 19 Photos: Mars Opportunity and Spirit rovers The Mars Spirit rover was Opportunity's twin, and it's mission ended in 2011. Both rovers featured a piece of metal with the American flag on the side. They are made of aluminum recovered from the site of the World Trade Center towers in New York City. Hide Caption 17 of 19 Photos: Mars Opportunity and Spirit rovers These two views from NASA's Curiosity rover -- from June 7, left, and June 10 2018 -- show how dust increased over three days from a major Martian dust storm that became planet-encircling on June 20, 2018. Opportunity was stranded in the middle of the storm and wasn't heard from afterward. Hide Caption 18 of 19 Photos: Mars Opportunity and Spirit rovers NASA's Opportunity rover appears as a blip in the center of this square. This image taken by HiRISE, a high-resolution camera on board NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, showed the dust storm over Perseverance Valley had substantially cleared. Hide Caption 19 of 19
While ESA continues its attempt to land on Mars, the United States is moving ahead with plans to send humans to the planet.
Two NASA rovers continue to operate on the Martian surface -- Curiosity, which arrived in 2012, and Opportunity, which has been returning images for more than 12 years. Spirit's mission ended in 2011. |
CTV Vancouver
Newly available data highlighting hundreds of incidents of senior-on-senior violence at B.C. care homes, including some that resulted in death, has prompted a review from the province’s seniors advocate.
Officials estimate there were between 425 and 550 violent incidents between seniors at care homes in 2014-2015 alone, according to the Monitoring Seniors’ Services report.
Seniors advocate Isobel Mackenzie said more than a dozen such incidents recorded over the last three years were fatal.
“With this population, any incident that results in harm is a potential fatality,” Mackenzie said. “When you’re a frail, elderly person at 93, falling on the floor is a potential fatality to a much greater degree than if you or I were to fall on the floor.”
Mackenzie said the issue isn’t as widespread as it might seem, given that there are more than 27,000 people in residential care in B.C., but it still warrants a more in-depth review, which the Office of the Seniors Advocate will be conducting this year.
The review will try to identify any systemic issues contributing to the problem of senior-on-senior violence.
“It’s complicated,” Mackenzie said. “You’re dealing with a population the majority of which have a diagnosis of dementia. Dementia is not absolutely predictable in terms of the symptoms it will present.”
The Monitoring Seniors’ Services report, which was the first of its kind but will be published annually moving forward, also revealed home support hours decreased in three of five B.C. health authorities over the same period, while the number of clients increased in four of five.
The report also found that residential care beds in the province only increased by 3.5 per cent since 2012, while the population of British Columbians over the age of 75 has gone up by 10 per cent.
There were also several positive findings, including that 96 per cent of seniors reported having a regular general practitioner.
Mackenzie said it was also promising to find four of five seniors over the age of 85 do not have a dementia diagnosis.
To read the full report, visit the Office of the Seniors Advocate website. |
Ubuntu’s convergence has made some serious strides in the past few days – having been made available with the OTA 11 software update on the original Ubuntu Touch powered Meizu Pro 5 via Aethercast i.e wirelessly, it is making its rounds boastfully to other smartphones powered by the open source mobile operating system.
We are getting it as fresh news that the aforementioned Convergence technology will be making its way to the OnePlus One and the Nexus 5 thanks to UBport’s developer Marius Gripsgård for making it known to us via his Google Plus post.
The recent OTA-11 update brought about the Aethercast for wireless Convergence to the Meizu Pro 5 while leaving the older Ubuntu Touch smartphones behind. But worry not, the update will equally be pushed out to other devices running Ubuntu Touch officially in the nearer future.
It is, however, worth noting that the performance of Convergence is expected to suffer terribly on these older devices which includes the Bq Aquaris, and Meizu MX4 as they don’t pack as much punch as the Meizu Pro 5.
Disregarding the odds, we hopefully will still be able to do the most basic stuffs like running a web browser with a few tabs opened, creating docs and using an email client.
Anything other than that like running GIMP and any other power hungry application would definitely be asking too much from the the smartphone’s hardware.
Convergence via Aethercast on OnePlus One and Nexus 5
The OP1 and Nexus 5 are some of the devices receiving unofficial support from the UBports group and Marius is apparently working hard to bring this to fruition on the above-mentioned smartphones.
Quoting Gripsgård, “This build is based on the ubp-5.1 branch (android 5.1/cm12.1), and build is released on the ubports unstable channel “devel_rc-proposed” and will be released on the main channels once it’s stable”.
Currently, the build for the Nexus 5 can be downloaded and tested while that of the OP1 is underway (ready sometime next week). If you’re feeling adventurous, you can go on ahead and downlad the respective image for you device and switch to the unstable branch by entering this link (http://system-image.ubports.com/) on your smartphone so as to help report and fix bugs.
Furthermore, Marius urges those of you that own a Microsoft Wireless Display Adapter to test the Aethercast feature using this app on the Google Play Store on your Android device. |
As anyone who has ever tried manipulating large photos on a slow computer will know, high-res images can be tough to navigate.
That problem is far, far tougher when you’re dealing with cutting-edge scientific imaging — where current high-end microscopes routinely generate images of between tens of gigabytes and terabytes in size.
“The challenge is that there is no screen in the world which can show you a terabyte’s worth of information,” David Wiles, applications engineer for Arivis told Digital Trends. “Even a high-end 4K resolution display can’t show you close to that resolution.”
For the past decade, Arivis has been working to solve this issue by developing smart software that, in Wiles’ words, works by “only [fetching] those pixels that people need to see as and when they need to.”
More recently, however, the company has taken its work to the next level by building an impressive, Minority Report-style virtual reality interface that lets users work with volumetric images truly interactively. Called InViewR, the tech lets people travel freely within 3D and 4D images using gesture controls to measure and navigate: opening up new insights in the process.
“Biologists who study the structure and interactions of various organs, or parts of organs, can use this to get a much better understanding of the 3D relationship of these objects,” Wiles said. “It means that you can clearly see how certain structures extend, interact, and connect.”
The InViewR technology makes possible an ultra high-res way of viewing data from Light Sheet Microscopy, Confocal Microscopy, Magnetic Resonance Tomography and other sources in what could be an exciting tool for neuroscience, developmental biology, cancer research, and more.
Due to Arivis’ existing technology, there is no limitations on data size, and no matter how complex the visualization is, it can be manipulated freely in full 90-frames-per-second movement.
“Because the technology is new, we’re still developing the use-cases as we go along,” Wiles concluded. “We’re enabling something that people really haven’t been able to imagine before.”
InViewR is being officially unveiled at the Society for Neuroscience’s Neuroscience 2016 conference in San Diego this week. |
For the marijuana novice, weed is just weed. But for the cannabis connoisseur, there’s a whole world of flavors, scents and effects – and it goes beyond just different types of strains.
The next frontier of curating a cannabis experience, experts say, lies not in a strain of the plant – the Sour Diesels and Pineapple Kushes that your dispensary will surely have on its menu – but in harnessing the terpenes within cannabis.
“Terpenes are essential oils found in different botanicals and plant matter. They’re why lemon has that citrusy smell, why pine needles smell like pine,” said Seth Yaffe, operations manager at Ermont Inc., a nonprofit medical marijuana dispensary in Quincy, Mass.
Terpenes are mostly known for giving plants their unique aroma, which is why there are essential oils of lavender and eucalyptus. But when they work in conjunction with cannabinoids like THC and CBD, “it’s an entourage effect,” Yaffe said, meaning terpenes can actually change or heighten the therapeutic effects of marijuana.
To take advantage of terpenes, many labs isolate them when they process the cannabis into a concentrate.
“Most people processing for THC strip out the terpenes and other minor cannabinoids to get to a clear product,” explained Norman Olson of High Tech Extracts in Maine. “Then to get flavor and aroma, you add the terpenes back. That’s the sommelier art of it.”
Speaking of wine, Yaffe actually worked in the restaurant industry for 25 years, where he wrote wine lists. He’s seen how people can smell a certain strain and know right away what it is, “just like a sommelier would be able to blind smell wine.”
But with terpenes, his role goes above and beyond suggesting flavors and scents someone might like. It’s about the kind of high these terpenes bring with them, too.
“It might be the same level of cannabis, but by adding in different blends of terpenes, we’re able to promote specific effects … like promoting more relaxing sleep,” Yaffe said. “The four major effects of the line we carry are concentration, helping sleep, anti-anxiety and the ability to have more energy.”
This is the customization that is taking over the business side of cannabis, Yaffe said. People aren’t necessarily looking just for certain strains anymore, but for a curated high, and terpenes help achieve that.
Still, terpenes are “new to the game” in terms of what we know, Yaffe said. Though there hasn’t been a lot of scientific research around cannabis and all its components yet, experts in the industry hope that with its acceptance – like the legalization in Massachusetts – comes more knowledge about it.
“Regardless of medical or recreational, a tremendous amount of people are cannabis users that are really looking for an effect,” he said. “It’s the importance of those terpenes and how we understand them, how we move forward with science to be able to manipulate and safely add them, that will allow for the creation of new products.” |
The Sûreté du Québec says disclosing details contained in the search warrants it used in its investigation of the Quebec City mosque shooting could put the public at risk.
Some of the information contains elements related to “national security and could jeopardize ongoing investigations.” Releasing the material “could (also) result in a threat to public safety.”
The warning is included in nine warrants the SQ issued in the days after the Jan. 29 shooting rampage in which six men were killed. Redacted versions of the warrants were made public Friday in response to a request from media outlets, including the Montreal Gazette.
Most of the information in the 242 pages was removed, including what police were looking for and what they seized. Lawyers representing news organizations are to be in court later this month arguing that more of the details should be released.
The documents indicate police twice searched the home of the parents of Alexandre Bissonnette, who has been charged with six counts of first-degree murder and five of attempted murder with a restricted weapon.
Police also seized evidence at the mosque, at the hospital where shooting victims were taken and at SQ and RCMP offices in Quebec City. The locations of the other locations searched was not disclosed.
Last month, media outlets were given another search warrant, which had been used by police to seize a computer at Bissonnette’s family home a day after the shooting.
The warrants all describe the bloody scene police found when they arrived minutes after the shooting.
Bissonnette’s case returns to court on May 29.
ariga@postmedia.com
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Humans are poorly adapted for underwater vision. In air, the curved corneal surface accounts for two-thirds of the eye's refractive power, and this is lost when air is replaced by water []. Despite this, some tribes of sea gypsies in Southeast Asia live off the sea, and the children collect food from the sea floor without the use of visual aids []. This is a remarkable feat when one considers that the human eye is not focused underwater and small objects should remain unresolved. We have measured the visual acuity of children in a sea gypsy population, the Moken, and found that the children see much better underwater than one might expect. Their underwater acuity (6.06 cycles/degree) is more than twice as good as that of European children (2.95 cycles/degree). Our investigations show that the Moken children achieve their superior underwater vision by maximally constricting the pupil (1.96 mm compared to 2.50 mm in European children) and by accommodating to the known limit of human performance (15–16 D) []. This extreme reaction—which is routine in Moken children—is completely absent in European children. Because they are completely dependent on the sea, the Moken are very likely to derive great benefit from this strategy.
Results and Discussion
1 Land M.F Vision in air and water. 4 Sivak J.G A survey of vertebrate strategies for vision in air and water. Several animals, such as amphibious fishes, frogs, birds, and insects, are known to have evolved special adaptations—such as a flattened cornea or greater accommodative power—to be able to see well in both air and water []. The human eye, however, is generally considered a typical example of a terrestrial eye because it uses both the curved outer cornea and an internal lens to refract the incoming light. If a human eye is immersed in water, which has about the same refractive index as the cornea and aqueous humor, the image becomes severely blurred because the eye loses about two-thirds of its refractive power. Thus, human eyes underwater produce a severely defocused image.
2 Ivanoff J 5 UNESCO All over Southeast Asia live human populations called sea gypsies, a people known for their skills in swimming and diving []. The children do not use visual aids when diving for shells, clams, and sea cucumbers. For this, good underwater vision should be essential. A particular tribe of sea gypsies, the Moken, live in the archipelago of Burma and along the West Coast of Thailand []. Because these children clearly manage to see small objects underwater, we suspected that the Moken might be adapted for improved underwater vision.
Figure 1 Contrast Sensitivity Underwater Show full caption Filled circles, Moken children; open circles, European children. The Moken children have greater sensitivity to contrast at all spatial frequencies tested (p < 0.05 at the lowest frequencies, down to p < 0.0001 at the highest frequencies). We tested the visual acuity of six Moken children. We used 28 European children in the same age range, on holiday with their families in nearby areas, as a control group. We set up a head-stabilizing apparatus underwater with a fixed viewing distance. With this apparatus, we presented the children with achromatic sinusoidal gratings of different spatial frequencies. The results clearly show that the Moken children have significantly better underwater acuity (Mann-Whitney test: p < 0.001); they were able to resolve gratings (100% contrast) more than twice as fine as those resolved by the European children (Moken children: 6.06 ± 0.59 cycles/degree (mean ± SE), European children 2.95 ± 0.13 cycles/degree). When further tested with gratings having a range of different contrasts, the Moken children also had higher contrast sensitivities underwater at all spatial frequencies presented ( Figure 1 ).
6 Gordon R.A
Donzis P.B Refractive development of the human eye. We next performed several experiments to explain this improved underwater vision. Some of the possible explanations require the eye to have undergone drastic changes in morphology. If, for instance, the Moken have evolved a flatter cornea and a stronger lens, they would achieve good resolution on land and improved resolution when diving. If, instead, they have become severely myopic, this would improve vision underwater but result in blurred vision when on land. And finally, if Moken children simply have the ability to accommodate more than normal, this too would improve underwater vision. All three of these strategies are known to exist in the animal kingdom. We thus examined (on land) the eye's corneal curvature (keratometry), refractive state, and accommodative power in both groups of children. These results show us that on land the Moken children do not differ from the European children in any of these respects. The keratometry values are well within the normal range [] in both groups. The majority of the children are slightly hyperopic, with refractive errors ranging from +2 to −0.5 D, and there is no difference in accommodative range between the two groups of children. In conclusion, all results are well within the normal limits for children of that age range.
Figure 2 Images of Pupils Underwater Show full caption The pupil of a Moken child (A) is smaller than the pupil of a European child (B). Both images were taken with infrared light. Scale bars = 4 mm. However, we did find one important difference concerning pupil size. On land, pupil size normally has little effect on resolution, and both groups of children were found to have the same pupil size (Moken children, 2.33 ± 0.06 mm, n = 6; European children, 2.30 ± 0.04 mm, n = 15; Mann-Whitney, p = 0.48). But underwater, when the image is severely blurred, a smaller pupil can significantly improve resolution. Our measurements clearly show that there is indeed a difference underwater; when diving, the Moken children constrict their pupils, whereas European children do not, and pupil size differs significantly ( Figure 2 , Moken children, 1.96 ± 0.05 mm, n = 6; European children, 2.50 ± 0.05 mm, n = 15; Mann-Whitney, p < 0.001).
7 Davson H 8 Marg E
Morgan M.W The pupillary near reflex. 9 Roth N Effect of reduced retinal illuminance on the pupillary near reflex. We assume that two opposing forces are at work here. One acts to open the pupil to increase the amount of light entering the eye as light levels decrease underwater. The other acts to constrict the pupil as the Moken children accommodate to see the spatial pattern—in bright light accommodation is normally coupled to a reduction in pupil size []. In the Moken children the force favoring accommodation is evidently the stronger one, but the European children seem not to accommodate at all. Unfortunately, available methods for measuring accommodation underwater require a pupil size of at least 3–4 mm, which is much larger than pupil sizes under our experimental conditions.
10 Heath G.G The influence of visual acuity on accommodative responses of the eye. 11 Phillips N.J
Winn B
Gilmartin B Absence of pupil response to blur-driven accommodation. Figure 3 Amount of Defocusing Underwater Show full caption (A) According to simple geometry, the diameter of the blur circle (x) on the retina is d(f-a)/f, where d is the diameter of the pupil, f the focal length, and a the distance to the retina from the lens. (B) The solid line shows how the size of the blur circle on the retinas of Moken children changes with their accommodative response, if one assumes that pupil size stays constant. If we assume that the European children do not accommodate underwater, their blur circle diameter is 1.71 mm. The Moken children need to accommodate 15.7 D (arrow) to reduce the diameter of the blur circle to half this value (0.85 mm). When the Moken children dive, their pupil size decreases from 2.33 mm on land to 1.96 mm underwater. For optical reasons, human visual acuity underwater is severely limited, and the image on the retina will be out of focus. Because a severely blurred image usually triggers very little accommodation, or none at all [], the response from the European children when diving is as one would expect. They open their pupil slightly, possibly in response to dimmer light, and show no evidence of accommodation. The Moken children, on the other hand, constrict their pupils when diving. Besides being an indicator of accommodation, this on its own improves spatial resolution because the diameter of the blur circle on the retina decreases with decreasing pupil size. In fact, the smaller pupil can explain a large part of the improvement in underwater vision ( Figure 3 ), but the remaining part must be due to accommodation.
3 Westheimer G The eye as an optical instrument. 7 Davson H How much then do the Moken children accommodate? Knowing that the underwater acuity of Moken children is roughly twice as good as that of European children ( Figure 1 ), we can calculate that the amount of accommodation necessary is about 15–16 D ( Figure 3 ). This is actually the reported limit of accommodation for children of that age []. The pupil cannot constrict beyond 2 mm [], so the Moken children both accommodate and constrict their pupil to the limit of human performance. |
If there’s one thing we’ve learned this offseason, it’s to expect the unexpected.
The Dolphins looked like the league’s most aggressive team in the days leading up to free agency, trading for Philadelphia cornerback Byron Maxwell and linebacker Kiko Alonso and signing defensive end Mario Williams, who was released by Buffalo.
But once free agency began the Dolphins watched their top free agents — defensive end Olivier Vernon, running back Lamar Miller and receiver Rishard Matthews — head to other destinations.
Then Miami scrambled to sign a running back but struck out, settling for Isaiah Pead and Daniel Thomas, who will compete for roster spots.
The Dolphins’ biggest signings in free agency were safety Isa Abdul-Qaddas, offensive linemen Jermon Bushrod and reserve defensive end Andre Brach.
So the obvious draft order for the Dolphins would be cornerback, running back, offensive line. It’s their biggest needs.
But it’s not that simple. You have to take in to account long-term and short-term needs and what positions are deep in this draft.
Here’s our Dolphins full mock draft, with an assist from Samuel Cohen, a South Florida-based scout and freelance writer who is my draft consigliere.
Round 1 (No. 13)
CB Eli Apple (Ohio State)
Cornerback is a major need for the Dolphins. Byron Maxwell is the Dolphins only sure starter and it’s debatable whether he’s a No. 1 corner.
If UF’s Vernon Hargreaves III is available, it might be tough for the Dolphins to pass up on him, even though Apple, a redshirt sophomore, has more upside.
But Hargreaves is a strong candidate to be selected by Tampa Bay at No. 9 overall.
The Dolphins might be better off with Apple. At 6-foot-1, he has ideal size for the position.
He’s a shutdown corner who could have a similar impact to Ronald Darby, Buffalo’s outstanding second-year cornerback.
Round 2 (No. 42 overall)
DE Noah Spence (Eastern Kentucky)
If this were based purely on talent, Spence would be a top 10 pick.
He’s arguably the best pass rusher in the draft but has off-the-field issues that led to his dismissal at Ohio State.
He tested positive twice for the drug Ecstasy while at Ohio State and was banned from Big Ten.
He’s said his struggles with the drug were more about a lifestyle than an addiction. He’s ready to prove that he’s clean and his problems are in the past.
But is the NFL ready to take a gamble on him?
If the Dolphins draft him, there’d be immediate parallels to Dion Jordan, the pass rusher taken No. 3 overall in 2013 who was suspended for the entire 2015 season after failing his third drug test.
We don’t know how the Dolphins front office feels about Spence. But if they’re fairly confident that he’s cleaned up, it could be a smart pick.
Dolphins head of football operations Mike Tannenbaum was believed to be behind the surprise selection in last year’s second round of Jordan Phillips, a defensive tackle who was considered an underachiever at Oklahoma.
Spence’s past is completely different. But talent-wise, he could be a steal if he’s available with the No. 42 overall pick. And new Dolphins defensive coordinator Vance Joseph, previously the Bengals defensive backs coach, dealt with some troubled players in Cincinnati.
Spence — 6-foot-2, 251 pounds — would be a luxury pick for the Dolphins in 2016. Miami already has Mario Williams, Cam Wake and Andre Branch.
But Wake is 34 and coming off an Achilles’ injury. Williams is 31. Branch is on a one-year deal.
Pass rushers are so important in the NFL and it’s hard to find one with more talent than Spence, who had 22.5 tackles for loss and 11.5 sacks last season.
Round 3 (No. 73 overall)
WR Braxton Miller (Ohio State)
Receiver is another position that seems like a luxury for the Dolphins. But first-year coach Adam Gase knows the importance of quality skill players and the Dolphins have looked at Ole Miss receiver Laquon Treadwell, a potential first-round pick.
Kenny Stills is on the last year of his rookie deal and we still have only seen flashes of DeVante Parker.
This is why Miller could be perfect in the third round.
He’s still developing as a receiver after transitioning from quarterback. With a trio this year of Jarvis Landry, Parker and Stills, you don’t need to rely heavily on Miller.
Gase likes his quarterbacks to get rid of the ball quickly and in to the hands of his playmakers. At 6-foot-1, 201 pounds, Miller has size and playmaking ability.
Round 4 (No. 107 overall)
LB Nick Vigil (Utah State)
How about some brotherly love in the Dolphins locker room?
Miami already has Zach Vigil, a linebacker who made the team last year as an undrafted rookie.
His brother Nick Vigil — 6-foot-2, 239 pounds — is a bigger prospect. And he’s a player who could quickly develop in to a starting-caliber NFL middle linebacker.
The Dolphins plan to start Kiko Alonso in the middle but Alonso can also play outside.
There are still questions about weak-side linebacker Jelani Jenkins, who had a solid 2014 season but dealt with injuries last year. And strong-side linebacker Koa Misi won’t be around forever.
It’s been a while since the Dolphins developed a middle linebacker. Vigil could open up the season as a key reserve and either work his way in to the starting lineup now or in 2017.
Round 5 (No. 147 overall)
OL Spencer Drango (Baylor)
Yes, the Dolphins need a guard. So, you’re thinking, why wait until the fifth round?
Gase is confident in his play-calling ability. He believes the Dolphins offensive line, even in it’s current configuration, will be much improved this season — especially if the tackles and center are healthy.
The Dolphins already brought in Bushrod, a veteran tackle who might start at left guard. If he starts at left guard, that leaves Dallas Thomas, Billy Turner and Jamil Douglas and a potential rookie competing for one spot. You’d have to imagine that Gase believes one of them could play well enough in his system, even if it’s a fifth-round rookie.
The Dolphins haven’t drafted a guard higher than the third round in years. And there’s no reason to think they’d suddenly change that strategy.
Drango — 6-foot-6, 315 pounds — is considered anywhere from a fourth to sixth rounder. He’s getting more buzz as a guard but could be a swing player for the Dolphins.
He’s an All-America tackle who played in a pass-heavy Baylor offense and didn’t allow a sack in 2015.
He missed the final four games of the 2013 season after undergoing surgery for a ruptured disk in his back.
The biggest complaint is that Drango fails to explode at the snap and struggles with speed rushers around the edge — a reason he might be best-suited as an NFL guard.
Round 6 (No. 186 overall)
RB Josh Ferguson (Illinois)
If the Dolphins don’t take one of the top running backs early in the draft, it would not be surprising if they wait until the fifth or sixth round.
There’s plenty of talent to be found in the ground game later in the draft and Ferguson could be an ideal fit in the Dolphins offense.
Gase likes running backs who can catch the ball and starter Jay Ajayi has that ability — but he’s more of a downhill runner.
Ferguson — 5-foot-9, 198 pounds — is an energetic running back who excels in the passing game.
He dealt with some nagging injuries his senior season but still finished with 738 rushing yards in nine games. He averaged 5.5 yards per carry and had 37 catches for 280 yards, scoring a combined five touchdowns.
In 2014, he ran for 735 yards and eight touchdowns, while adding 50 receptions for 427 yards and two receiving touchdowns.
Round 7 (No. 227 overall)
QB Jacoby Brissett (N.C. State)
Ryan Tannehill and Matt Moore will once again enter the season as Miami’s 1-2 punch at quarterback, but it’s time to develop a younger player.
Logan Thomas is still on the roster, but the Dolphins have been working out quarterbacks in Davie in the weeks leading up to the draft. Perhaps Gase wants a quarterback other than Thomas to mold.
Quarterbacks are tough to predict in the draft. Brissett, a Dwyer High graduate and one-time University of Florida quarterback, is seen as a possible fifth-round draft pick. But he could easily drop.
If he is available in the seventh round, he’s a player who has real ability and a chance to develop in to a backup quarterback and maybe even a starter.
He’s mobile with a strong arm but has accuracy issues.
If Brissett isn’t available and the Dolphins want a project quarterback in the seventh round, Stanford’s Kevin Hogan could make sense.
Hogan could be a solid backup but has less potential than Brissett to become an NFL starter.
Round 7 (No. 231 overall)
DL Anthony Zettel (Penn State)
Zettel is mostly listed as a defensive end but he could easily move inside in the NFL and play tackle.
The Dolphins could use some depth at tackle and Zettel is a player who moved around the defensive line at Penn State, playing both on the edge and inside. His versatility could come in handy as an NFL reserve.
Zettel had a strong 2014 season with 42 tackles, eight sacks, three interceptions and eight passes defended.
His numbers dropped in 2015 playing alongside talented teammates Carl Nassib and Austin Johnson, but Zettel still had 47 tackles, 11 tackles for loss and four sacks. |
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, left, stands with Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton at the first presidential debate at Hofstra University on Sept. 26, 2016, in Hempstead, N.Y. (Photo: Evan Vucci / AP)
A new Vanderbilt University poll on the presidential race in Tennessee raised eyebrows by showing Democrat Hillary Clinton leading Republican Donald Trump by just 2 percentage points in historically blue Nashville.
But view with caution. The political scientist team that oversaw the poll says not to put much stock in this particular subset, noting that the survey was designed as a statewide, not a local, snapshot.
Vanderbilt’s poll, which found Trump ahead of Clinton in Tennessee by a sizable 11 percentage points, reported not surprising big leads for Trump in East Tennessee and Middle Tennessee suburban and rural counties, and an equally not surprising lead for Clinton in West Tennessee, which includes the Democratic stronghold of Memphis.
But the same phone survey also found Clinton beating Trump by a margin of only 40 percent to 38 percent in Nashville — within the poll’s margin of error.
This would mark a shockingly sharp break from the city’s recent and historic voting trends.
Democratic President Barack Obama won 60 percent of voters in blue-leaning Nashville in the two most recent presidential elections, eclipsing Republicans John McCain and Mitt Romney by 20 points each in Davidson County. This was despite Republicans carrying Tennessee by nearly 20 percentage points both in both 2012 and 2008.
A two-point lead for Clinton over Trump in Nashville would be enough to terrify local Democrats, who have suffered massive losses at the state legislature level during recent election cycles.
In fact, some Tennessee Democratic candidates — including District 20 state Senate candidate Erin Coleman, who is running against incumbent Republican Sen. Steve Dickerson — are hoping to exploit a perceived unpopularity of Trump in suburban and urban areas to help their election chances.
But John Geer, a political professor at Vanderbilt University and co-director of the poll, said that despite the inclusion of four regional breakdowns, the poll of 1,000 registered voters in Tennessee wasn’t designed to accurately measure Nashville.
“The data suggests it's really close (in Nashville), but (Clinton is) going to win Davidson County comfortably at the end of the day,” Geer said. “I would be willing to bet on that.
“This is a state-based survey,” he said. “This poll is not designed to be representative of the city, so I wouldn’t generalize that 40 percent. What I would do is jump to broad patterns: Nashville is more Democratic than the state.”
Josh Clinton, who also teaches political science at Vanderbilt and oversaw the poll with Geer, estimated that the margin of error on the geographic breakdowns of the poll is likely as high as 7 percentage points, around twice that of the 3.7 percentage point margin for statewide figures.
Hence, because of the smaller sample size that produced the Davidson County results, the Nashville numbers alone are likely not statistically significant.
Clinton, of Vanderbilt, reiterated the statewide scope of the poll as well, saying the people who were interviewed in Nashville did not necessarily reflect Nashville’s demographics.
Likewise, Geer said the poll was not meant to accurately predict how state-level candidates or other down-ballot candidates might perform based on the regional poll results.
Geer pointed to a different subset of the poll that breaks down rural, suburban and urban voters as a more predictive analysis. It found Trump up 27 percentage points among rural voters and 21 percentage points among suburban voters. The poll found Clinton ahead among urban voters, which includes all of Nashville and Memphis, by a 49 percent to 27 percent margin.
“The urban areas are very Democratic, so that’s got to be good news for the Democrats,” Geer said. “Statewide, they’re still struggling.”
Candidate choice by region in Tennessee
Nashville
Democrat Hillary Clinton: 40 percent
Republican Donald Trump: 38 percent
Libertarian Gary Johnson: 9 percent
Green Party's Jill Stein: 2 percent
Some other candidate/would not vote: 3 percent
Undecided: 6 percent
Eastern Tennessee
Democrat Hillary Clinton: 28 percent
Republican Donald Trump: 53 percent
Libertarian Gary Johnson: 7 percent
Green Party's Jill Stein: 0 percent
Some other candidate/would not vote: 4 percent
Undecided: 6 percent
Middle Tennessee, excluding Nashville
Democrat Hillary Clinton: 21 percent
Republican Donald Trump: 50 percent
Libertarian Gary Johnson: 8 percent
Green Party's Jill Stein: 3 percent
Some other candidate/would not vote: 6 percent
Undecided: 8 percent
Western Tennessee, including Memphis
Democrat Hillary Clinton: 46 percent
Republican Donald Trump: 28 percent
Libertarian Gary Johnson: 8 percent
Green Party's Jill Stein: 0 percent
Some other candidate/would not vote: 3 percent
Undecided: 10 percent
* Poll of 1,000 registered Tennessee voters, taken between Sept. 19 and Oct. 2. Margin of error +/- 3.7 percentage points.
Reach Joey Garrison at 615-259-8236 and on Twitter @joeygarrison.
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Nexus Continues to Impress
I have been a big fan of the Nexus line since Nexus 4, and in my opinion the brand continues to deliver. The Nexus 5X is great for anyone that wants stock android, direct updates from Google, and a sub 6" phone. There build quality is lower than the 6P, but so is the price. And while it is an all plastic body, the phone feels much nicer in my hand than I expected. If you want a more premium phone, spring for the 6P. But the 5X is more in line with my needs for reliable daily driver that fits in my front pocket. I really love this phone after getting my hands on it, and woudl reconnect it to anyone on the fence.
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: New |
Behind the scenes of Gimme Shelter
In 1974, after harboring dissident author Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his country home, cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich was forced into exile from the USSR. Fifteen years later, the Soviet Union dissolved, and Rostropovich returned to Moscow to conduct a concert with the National Symphony Orchestra. In Soldiers of Music: Rostropovich Returns to Russia (91), Albert Maysles—the late New York–based Direct Cinema pioneer whose very first film, the 14-minute documentary Psychiatry in Russia (56), was shot in Moscow—accompanied the celebrated musician and his family to document the emotional weeklong journey.
Midway through the film, the family travels to the grave of another Soviet dissident, scientist Andrei Sakharov. Just prior to this scene, we’ve watched Rostropovich tell broadcast journalist Mike Wallace that Sakharov was the greatest figure of his generation. Wallace, a recurring nuisance throughout the film, is documenting the Rostropovich trip for 60 Minutes, and Maysles’s camera, handheld and personal in contrast to the impersonal, stationary camera that usually captures Wallace’s interviews, observes him extract sound bites using glib and heavy-handed techniques. Wallace’s tone-deaf scenery-chewing recalls the press corps of Maysles’s Meet Marlon Brando (65), a similarly self-satisfied group who, during a junket for Morituri, are blindsided by an intensely engaged Brando, who proceeds to playfully tear into their inane queries.
Wallace’s methods couldn’t be further from Maysles’s sensitive and unintrusive approach. In the scene immediately following Wallace’s bombastic interview, Maysles walks silently with the Rostropovich family to Sakharov’s grave. The camera trails behind father, mother, and daughter as they lay a wreath next to Sakharov’s tombstone. They huddle around the grave for a moment of silence.
Meet Marlon Brando
In a two-minute take, Maysles’ moves his camera with amazing attentiveness. One by one, he closes in on their faces, starting with Rostropovich, whose quivering lip gives way to sniffling midway through the shot. His daughter Olga also chokes up but regains her composure when she notices her father struggling; she offers a comforting look. Meanwhile, his wife Galina Vishnevskaya remains stoic. The camera follows her misty breath as it floats toward the grave, before settling on a photo of Sakharov. “So that’s how a man sacrificed his life,” we hear her say, as the camera pauses on Sakharov’s face for several seconds. Maysles pans left, and the family is suddenly in the distance, walking out of the cemetery together while the filmmaker remains behind.
In great observational filmmaking, the camera is a character. It has its own unique gaze. The audience, consciously or unconsciously, judges how it’s directed. In many situations every movement, every zoom, and every pan is a loaded ethical and aesthetic decision. The visit to Sakharov’s grave derives its power from the empathy and expressiveness of Maysles’s camerawork, which fully registers the complex and intense emotions brewing in this space. The camera adjusts at the precise moment it threatens to lapse into gawking, allowing the Rostropovich family their space.
Would a younger Albert Maysles have behaved the same way? Unlike his brother and collaborator David, Albert Maysles was not a major presence in the editing room. But thanks to his acute and distinctive eye and the deft hand of editors such as Charlotte Zwerin, Ellen Hovde, and Deborah Dickson, he is one of nonfiction cinema’s greatest and most enduring figures.
Showman
Starting in the Sixties, the Maysles, Zwerin, and other collaborators authored game-changing chapters to the documentary playbook, with each successive supplement complicating matters. The innovation sprung from newly accessible technology—lightweight 16mm cameras and portable sound recorders—that allowed filmmakers to freely roam, gathering sounds and images. The Maysles operated as a two-man crew, with Albert shooting and David recording sound. Those images and sounds were handheld and personal and therefore imperfect and subjective. For some viewers, there was a sense, however false, that the filmmakers were invisible presences, like the proverbial fly on the wall.
The Maysles were realizing the thrilling and radical new aesthetic possibilities of this technology, applying them to the documentation of day-to-day life. Is an artist allowed to stand on a balcony and film a woman roaming around in her swimsuit, as the Maysles do in Showman (63)? If a filmmaker receives permission from the woman to use her image, do they need to let the viewer know, and if so, how? Or is there an implicit trust between audience and filmmaker? What if the filmmaker had asked that woman to appear on the beach? The Maysles’ films, which helped introduce the idea of a filmmaker finding poetry in real time, naturally aroused some suspicion.
Born in 1926, Albert Maysles grew up in the Boston area, studied psychology at Syracuse. In the mid-Fifties he went on to teach it as a graduate student in Boston, where he also worked at a mental hospital. Made during this time, Psychiatry in Russia is a report on the state of mental health care institutions in Russia. Because Maysles did not record sound, he narrated the film, spelling out his findings in a manner belying his later work. In 1960, he worked alongside Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, and D.A. Pennebaker on the groundbreaking Direct Cinema film Primary, which observes rival Democrats John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey during the Wisconsin primary.
With Love from Truman
Throughout the rest of the Sixties, Maysles collaborated with his brother on a series of shorter works that pointed to their cinema’s goals and interests. Showman follows Hollywood producer Joseph P. Levine, on guard throughout the film, and his underlings during the Oscar campaign for Two Women; in the process, it reveals the compromises made in the name of success. Cut Piece (65) records a Yoko Ono performance piece and, with its zooms and shifting perspectives, subtly reveals how a camera operator’s gaze determines how we watch. With Love from Truman (66) tracks Truman Capote during the promotional campaign for In Cold Blood. Capote talks about the book inaugurating a new literary genre, “the nonfiction novel,” and says that he wrote it to “accommodate an aesthetic theory . . . that you can produce a work of art out of factual material that has the same impact that the most imaginative literature does.”
Salesman (68), the Maysles’ attempt at nonfiction storytelling, and the cinematic equivalent of Capote’s experiment, shadows four Boston-based Bible peddlers as they knock on doors selling lavish holy books. The camera’s presence is ambiguous. It follows the film’s characters going door to door with breathtakingly smooth tracking shots. At first, it is positioned behind its four subjects as they give their flustered potential customers the hard sell. But eventually it becomes less of a disinterested observer. It suddenly appears in a living room, waiting for the knock on the door. Later, when one subject returns from a successful sale, the camera seemingly stands on both sides of a motel threshold. Throughout the film, it zooms in on faces as people respond to the sales pitch, weighing a number of factors: the practical (do they really have the money or desire to purchase these expensive books?), the empathetic (should they reward this desperate man who’s just trying to make a buck?), and the spiritual (what would Jesus do?). To a disturbing degree, the camera maintains control of its scenes, but it also observes its subjects with sensitivity.
While the camera’s role feels unresolved in Salesman, there’s far more clarity in Maysles and Zwerin’s next and greatest film, Gimme Shelter (70), which is constructed around the Rolling Stones’ catastrophic 1969 concert at the Altamont Speedway. In one of the film’s first shots, Mick Jagger prances around the stage wearing a superhero cape. The crowd is enthralled; the camera is curious. It zooms in on the singer until it has him pinned in a close-up. As he struts, the camera stays tight, never letting him go. The scene changes. We’re suddenly looking at the same shot on a monitor in an editing suite, as is Jagger. Zwerin and the Maysles have the Stones under their thumb, forcing them to confront their posturing (would there be an Act of Killing without Gimme Shelter?). As Albert films their dazed responses, David explains the way documentary editing works: “This gives us freedom. All you guys watching it, we may only be on you for a minute, then go to anything.”
Grey Gardens
Having elegantly established the way this new nonfiction cinema works—giving us a sense of the camera operator’s gaze, showing us how the editor shapes that gaze—the Maysles’ next film scrambled a potential misreading of their work: namely, that they were invisible presences and that their gaze was innocent. Their perverse chamber documentary Grey Gardens (75) is set in and around a dilapidated mansion where Edith “Big Edie” Ewing Bouvier Beale lives with her daughter, Edith “Little Edie” Bouvier Beale. There’s something unbearably sad about their circumstances. It’s not just the condition of the house but also the two women’s relationship. They constantly bicker, and most of their conversations revolve around the past. Little Edie seems particularly haunted by her inability to find a suitor. How could the Maysles seamlessly assimilate their camera into this situation? They couldn’t, and they didn’t try.
Throughout, Albert’s camera seems to be looking for the right way to frame his subjects. The Beales are distant relatives of the Kennedy family, and the aristocratic class has a rich tradition of dignified artistic representation. We are shown many photographs and paintings of the Beales that are in line with this tradition—but Grey Gardens in no way adheres to those standards. The camera is frequently at a downward angle. We stare from above at Big Edie and Little Edie as they sunbathe or eat ice cream in bed. When Little Edie addresses the camera, she is looking up at David. Later, when she performs a dance routine for the camera, Albert follows her movements, but he does not dance with her.
It is unfortunate and unfair that distribution and discussion of Maysles’s work tends to elide most of the films created after Grey Gardens. Soldiers of Music: Rostropovich Returns to Russia is one of a string of films produced by Peter Gelb, then an executive at the Columbia Artists talent agency. Gelb and Maysles’s decade-long collaboration resulted in six other features from 1985-94. More than simple work-for-hire projects, these films are unusual for the amount of trust they place in Maysles’s observational camerawork, which guides us through rehearsals and performances, rivetingly showcasing virtuosity (Jessye Norman Sings Carmen, 89; Horowitz Plays Mozart, 87). Maysles also picks up on the tension in the room, be it affectionate (1992’s sexy Baroque Duet, in which, through word and body language, Kathleen Battle and Wynton Marsalis constantly flirt with each other) or antagonistic (Accent on the Offbeat, 94).
Accent on the Offbeat
Whereas Accent on the Offbeat offers definitive, sometimes uproarious proof of the independence afforded Maysles during the Gelb era, Ozawa (85) is where his camera is at its sharpest. One of his final films co-directed with his brother, Ozawa is a patient, gently probing profile of the Japanese-born, U.S.-based conductor Seiji Ozawa that delicately explores his prickly relationship with his homeland. As his career was ascending, Ozawa relocated to the West. Upon returning, he was shunned by his Japanese music contemporaries who refused to work with someone who had “picked up too many Western ways” and regarded him as a conductor who expressed his opinions too confidently, perhaps to the point of abrasiveness. When this topic arises during lunch with a friend, Ozawa becomes completely caught up in the conversation but then suddenly realizes the Maysles are nearby. He looks at David: “Are you filming this? This is very private, very private.” The Maysles turn off their equipment, and in the next scene, Ozawa apologizes: “I’m sorry I stopped it. Sometimes I’m sensitive. And that moment I was sensitive.” “No, that’s the way you should be,” David responds.
While Ozawa’s nationality crisis forms the film’s narrative crux, its camera’s concerns are rooted in the art of conducting. As Ozawa espouses in meetings with students, a conductor’s every gesture carries significant weight. In long, intense takes, the camera holds on Ozawa, particularly his sweaty, expressive face, as he conducts. The parallel with nonfiction cinematography is clear: “All afternoon I was conducting, I never thought about technique. You just do it,” Ozawa says.
David Maysles passed away in January 1987. Maysles continued to make films for the rest of his life. Following the Gelb period, Maysles and his collaborators Deborah Dickson and Susan Froemke shifted to a series of social-issue films for HBO.
LaLee’s Kin: The Legacy of Cotton
Likely the most astonishing of the late-period Maysles films, Letting Go: A Hospice Journey (96) intimately observes hospice workers as they take care of three dying patients. One subject is forced to confront everyone he’s hurt in his life, including his wife, who accuses him of being emotionally distant. While this animosity eventually comes out into the open in bitter verbal fights, Maysles’s camera picks up on the tension early with a close-up of the husband’s arm frantically grasping his wife’s arm while she remains passive and reserved. LaLee’s Kin: The Legacy of Cotton (00) is a low-key portrait of a Mississippi Delta town mired in poverty. Its titular protagonist is an illiterate former cotton picker attempting to raise her grandchildren. More so than Letting Go, its editing sometimes betrays Maysles’s footage, treating intimate, candid testimony as fodder for fast-moving, heavy-handed, didactic montages. But by and large, we feel LaLee’s bond of trust with Maysles, whom she addresses candidly throughout the film. That’s particularly clear in a scene in which she reflects on the death of her adult son, ultimately coming to a devastating conclusion: “You like to love your children, but don’t love them too hard.”
Maysles mentored filmmakers throughout his life, and his influence is evident in many new works of nonfiction cinema. In 2005, he created the Maysles Documentary Center, a nonprofit cinema in Harlem. This April saw both the theatrical release of Iris and the premiere of the long-in-the-works In Transit. The affable, slickly constructed Iris profiles 90-something fashion icon Iris Apfel, a witty New Yorker who seems most comfortable directly addressing Maysles’s camera. Shot on Amtrak’s Empire Builder train, In Transit focuses on fleeting, intimate, and occasionally revelatory conversations among passengers. At times Maysles’s camera activates the conversations, at others it eavesdrops. At one point, a young woman looks at the camera and says: “These are the things I talk about in my head that I can’t tell anybody. I’m not supposed to be telling you these things.” In Transit offers further evidence of the trust earned by Maysles, an empathetic, gifted filmmaker who left us with a series of unresolvable ethical questions and a treasure trove of indelible images. |
The AquaClear Filter Media Bag makes media maintenance extremely simple. The fine mesh holds small grained filter media and the bags may be used in both fresh and saltwater aquariums. It is designed to fit the AquaClear 50 Power Filter.
The AquaClear Filter Media Bag makes media maintenance extremely simple. The fine mesh holds small grained filter media and the bags may be used in both fresh and saltwater aquariums. It is designed to fit the AquaClear 50 Power Filter. AquaClear Power Filter
The AquaClear Power Filter represents one of the most versatile hang-on filter systems available. The five models available provide a complete selection of flow rates for the most popular sizes of aquariums. The filter’s unique design allows for up to six times more media volume and the longest water to media contact time in the industry.
Superior Contact with AquaClear Filter Patented Re-filtration System Sometimes delicate fish and plants require a more gentle water flow. The patented AquaClear re-filtration system allows you to control the flow rate without compromising filtration efficiency. When the flow rate is reduced, up to 50% of the water within the filter chamber is processed multiple times. CycleGuard Multi-Stage Filtration System Provides optimal mechanical, chemical, and biological filtration. A healthy aquarium requires "beneficial" bacteria. Invisible and harmless, beneficial bacteria are essential in the removal of toxic ammonia and nitrite. With cartridge filtration systems, when you throw away the cartridge, you throw away beneficial bacteria. It can take weeks for the bacteria to re-colonize, resulting in a stressful environment. Typical Filter Media Placement: Bottom AquaClear Foam Insert, which does the following: 1. Helps with debris removal and provides optimal water distribution patterns, allowing subsequent filter media to perform at full efficiency. 2. Biological filtration, due to the porous structure of foam, providing surfaces for beneficial bacteria. Middle AquaClear Activated Carbon Filter Inserts contain 100% premium research grade carbon. Premium research grade carbon provides large amounts of surface area for adsorption of undesirable impurities. Top AquaClear BioMax Filter Inserts contain BioMax ceramic rings. The surface of BioMax is made up of a complex pore system that allows bacteria to thrive.
AquaClear Power Filters Power Filter Maintenance For maximum filter operation and efficiency, regular cleaning of the filter and its parts is recommended every two weeks.
Always unplug the Aquaclear Power Filter prior to cleaning.
First you want to remove the cover, filter basket, and discard water remaining in the filter case. Thoroughly rinse collected debris from the case, impeller cover and impeller assembly using clear lukewarm water.
Then intake "U" tube and extension tube can be cleaned with a filter stem brush to remove any build-up of deposits.
When all parts have been cleaned and thoroughly rinsed, reassemble filter and replace any scheduled media. Install the filter once again back on the aquarium making sure that the filter is tipped slightly forward.
Then fill the AquaClear filter box with aquarium water. Finally plug the filter into an electrical outlet and the AquaClear will self-prime and begin running in a few seconds. Media Replacement AquaClear Foam Filter Insert: Replace Foam Filter Insert every two months. AquaClear Activated Carbon Filter Insert: Replace Activated Carbon Insert every month. AquaClear BioMax Filter Insert: Replace BioMax Insert every three months. Warranty The AquaClear Power Filters are guaranteed against defects in material or workmanship under normal aquarium usages and service for as long as you own the filter. We offer a Lifetime Guarantee on all non-replaceable parts which means that the filter will be repaired or replaced at the manufactures discretion, free of charge, when the complete pump is returned with proof of purchase and postage paid. Please include $5.00 to cover shipping and handling. This warranty does not apply to any filter that has been subjected to misuse, negligence or tampering. No liability is assumed with respect to loss or damage to livestock or personal property irrespective of the cause thereof.
AquaClear Media |
Alcohol kings ThaiBev have bought up all KFC restaurants in Thailand, raising the very unlikely vision of beer with your fast food. (Photo provided)
Thai Beverage, the spirits giant that makes Chang beer and SangSom rum, is expanding into the fast-food business.
ThaiBev agreed to purchase more than 240 existing KFC restaurants in Thailand for about 11.3 billion baht ($340 million).
A deal is also in place for the company to take over stores that are being developed, with the cost of those locations to be determined when the transaction closes, according to a filing.
KFC is operated by a US company, Louisville, Kentucky-based Yum! Brands Inc., which also runs the Pizza Hut chain.
Nongnuch Buranasetkul, senior vice-president for the food business, said besides the business expansion, the deal would give ThaiBev access to KFC's network across the country.
"With QSA’s restaurant management expertise, we are well positioned to accelerate KFC’s further expansion in Thailand," she said in the statement.
The acquisition is expected to be completed by the end of this year, the statement said (PDF link).
Billionaire ThaiBev chairman Charoen Sirivadhanabhakdi, who founded the company, has been seeking to diversify ThaiBev's operations for years, with a goal of generating more revenue from non-alcoholic beverages by 2020.
For Thai Beverage, the KFC deal is a bid to seize on the popularity of chicken in Asia, according to Nirgunan Tiruchelvam, a director at Religare Capital Markets in Singapore.
"The KFC acquisition is a very good way of exposing oneself to the rise of quick-service restaurants in Asia, especially the rise of chicken consumption," he said.
Thailand accounted for 2% of KFC's sales in emerging markets last quarter. It was the only region in that division that saw sales drop year-over-year, posting a 2% decline.
Mr Charoen previously expanded his property business amidst government measures to curb alcohol consumption. He was ultimately forced to list the company unit in Singapore in 2006 after activists and monks held protests to block a local share sale by the company.
The company's long-term strategy involves generating 50% of its revenue from countries outside Thailand and non-alcoholic beverage by 2020. That's expected to drive more deals in the region.
Sales outside that country amounted to less than 4% in the last fiscal year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
"Thai Beverage is a company that is looking to expand in the food and beverage space in Southeast Asia," Tiruchelvam said. "It has very strong core cash flow from its spirits business, and it's expanding into other areas." |
Christian Benteke has distanced himself from reports of interest from Everton by insisting he is 'very happy' to stay at Crystal Palace.
The Eagles striker has been touted as a future Toffees player after Ronald Koeman's side sold Benteke's international team-mate Romelu Lukaku to Manchester United for a potential world-record £90m fee.
However, speaking to the press during Palace's pre-season tour of Asia, Benteke explained why he wanted to be part of Frank de Boer's plans for the 2017/18 campaign and why he was giving no thought to the rumours of a return to Merseyside.
He stated: "I'm very happy. I want to be part of the project of the manager and I'm looking forward for this new season.
"I want to perform and to score more goals and to really help the team to reach where they want to be. Since we came back for pre-season I didn't really want to talk, but I want to be here.
"There's the World Cup and that's an important aspect of being with the club and you have to perform to be part of that group."
Benteke had been on the books of Everton's fierce city rivals Liverpool for 12 months but, after an unimpressive spell at Anfield that saw him net just 10 goals in 42 appearances, the 26-year-old moved to Selhurst Park last summer.
A return of 17 goals in 40 games showed that the frontman was back to his best form, and led to speculation that Blues boss Koeman wanted to bring him to Goodison Park as Everton's new target man.
"Christian Benteke says he's very happy at Crystal Palace" pic.twitter.com/YwNwEU7tE0 — Michael De Asha (@MichaelDeAsha) July 21, 2017
However, de Boer claimed that Benteke would be going nowhere this summer regardless of how much money Everton could offer and, with the ex-Genk man also revealing his intention to stay in London, the Toffees will need to look elsewhere for a new striker.
Benteke will next be in action for Palace when they face off against West Brom in their next Asia Trophy match in Hong Kong on Saturday. |
An ambitious plan to build a mosque next to New York’s Ground Zero is prompting hope — and anger — in a city scarred by terrorism.
There’s little to see now at the site, an abandoned clothing store two blocks from the former World Trade Center where nearly 3,000 people died on September 11, 2001.
But Feisal Abdul Rauf, a New York imam and a leader of the project, says the planned multi-story Islamic center will transform both the drab lower Manhattan street and the way Americans have looked on Muslims since 9/11.
Boasting a mosque with sports facilities, a theater and possibly day care, the center would be open to all visitors to demonstrate that Muslims are part of their community, not some separate element.
“There’s nothing like this that we know of in the United States,” Rauf told AFP. “This will be a community center for everyone, not just for Muslims, but non-Muslims.”
These are tense times for American Muslims who find themselves increasingly painted both by the public and law enforcement bodies as a possible source of terrorism.
A failed car bomb in New York’s Times Square on May 1 was allegedly planted by a Pakistani-born American, prompting senior figures in Washington to recommend stripping basic rights from US passport holders suspected of Islamist militant links.
The Islamic center is part of Rauf’s program, called the Cordoba Initiative, meant to build bridges between the West and the Muslim world.
But because of the proposed mosque’s location, just around the corner from the gaping Ground Zero hole, Rauf’s call for peace is seen by some as a battle cry.
“The outrage continues,” says website www.nomosquesatgroundzero.wordpress.com under a close-up of the collapsing Twin Towers.
Accusing the Cordoba Initiative of trying to “sneak it through,” the protest site says the center will “cast a rude shadow over Ground Zero.”
Others compare the idea to building a German cultural center at Auschwitz.
“Spitting in the Face of Everyone Murdered on 9/11,” writes Blitz, a self-described “anti-jihadist newspaper.”
That level of anger is not uncommon among New Yorkers who blame Islam, rather than just Al-Qaeda or other militant groups, for 9/11 and the global confrontation with the United States.
“This is the wrong neighborhood to put the mosque in,” Scott Rachelson, 59, said as he went to his office. Rachelson, who works with people seeking compensation over 9/11 related damages, said his life changed forever the day that two hijacked airliners smashed into Manhattan.
“I was here. For me, and everyone else who was here, we have post-traumatic stress disorder,” he said. “It feels like yesterday.”
A woman living in the apartment building next to the proposed mosque said she couldn’t accept the project.
“I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me a little nervous,” said Jennifer Wood, 36, as she took her young son for a walk. “It seems a little in the face, a little too much too soon. I don’t know why it has to be here — this is a big city.”
An eloquent and erudite man, Rauf sounds slightly weary when asked about hardcore opposition, but says he hopes the center will become a catalyst for helping Muslims and the wider community to integrate.
“It’s about building an American Islamic identity, because we have second-, third-generation Muslims who don’t feel they are part of (the country),” he said.
“The complaint throughout the years has been: ‘Where’s the voice of the moderate Muslims?'” Rauf said. “Well, here we are.”
Many look forward to the center, which Rauf estimates will cost 105-140 million dollars to build, possibly financed with bonds.
Mohammed-Iqbal Hossain Chowdhury, a Bangladeshi immigrant running a newspaper kiosk across the street, called for an end to prejudice.
“The people who will come to pray here are working people. We are coming here to pray to God,” the 42-year-old said, lifting his hands skyward with a huge smile.
“Ground Zero — that is about terrorists. Terrorism is a different thing. There are a billion or more Muslims around the world. They aren’t all terrorists! I hope people will see us coming here and see that all of us come from one god.”
Walking past the shuttered-up Burlington Coat Factory retail store to catch a Subway train, local worker Angela Long, 60, said Muslims can be as American as anyone else.
“I don’t believe that Islam equals terrorism. There are crazy people everywhere,” she said.
And those arguing that a mosque has no right to exist near Ground Zero?
“They should read our Constitution,” she said. |
The Associated Press - FARMINGTON, N.M. (AP) - Just a few months after announcing a task force to overhaul campaign finance practices in New Mexico, state officials are still not clear on how many violations are being investigated.
"We are currently in the process of compiling our list of candidates still out of compliance for referral to the Attorney General at this time," Ken Ortiz, chief of staff and spokesman for Secretary of State Dianna Duran's office, said in an email Friday.
Attorney General Hector Balderas' office released one violation referral from Duran on Friday. More are expected to be disclosed by June 10, the Daily Times in Farmington reported.
Balderas and Duran formed a joint task force in February to review issues of campaign finance reporting, enforcement and the referral process.
The newspaper found Duran's office only collected 4 percent of roughly 2,000 fines imposed on candidates during the 2012 and 2014 primary and general elections. Furthermore, she waived 34 percent of the other fines and never collected another 62 percent.
Duran's office randomly audits 10 percent of campaign finance reports submitted after each election cycle, Ortiz said. But he did not say when her office began auditing reports.
"When the 2012 audits were conducted, any potential violations were resolved through voluntary compliance, and no referrals were made to the Attorney General," Ortiz said in an email.
A late campaign finance report triggers a letter from state officials, saying the candidate will be fined $50 per working day until the report is filed. If the candidate offers an explanation within 10 days, that fine could be waived under the state's Campaign Reporting Act.
Viki Harrison - director of Common Cause New Mexico, the state branch of a national organization that advocates government accountability - said the current laws and Duran's reporting system are confusing.
It's a good thing that the secretary of state can waive penalties for candidates who unintentionally committed a violation, Harrison said. The push for enforcement is about ensuring compliance, not trying to shake down a candidate for money, she said.
"This is about access for the public," Harrison said. "It's not about a 'gotcha' to the candidates." |
Three Chinese men were arrested in a hotel on Wednesday night after stealing from a Japanese tourist passing through Bangkok Airport.
According to a local news report, the three suspects identified as Li Defa, Xu Jianjun and Song Guangxu were arrested. 130,000 baht in cash (around $3,573), two credit cards and an ATM card were confiscated.
Thai authorities said that they received a report on Tuesday from a 62-year-old Japanese tourist who said that he had lost his belongings while on the second floor of the airport’s arrival lounge.
Police then examined the video footage at the arrival lounge and quickly spotted the three suspects who followed a group of Japanese tourists before moving in to steal a wallet and other personal belongings.The police moved to make arrests at a hotel in downtown Bangkok, with those caught all confessing their involvement in the crime.
The suspects said that after stealing his wallet and other personal belongings, they rode the airport express shuttle to downtown Bangkok before altering the passport photo. After buying six iPhones with the stolen credit cards, they sold them on for cash.
The police said that the suspects were in possession of tourist visas and it was likely they had been operating in the airport for some time.
By Lucy Liu
[Images via Tencent]
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Ransomware Leads Surge In 2014 Mobile Malware Onslaught
Mobile malware increases 75 percent in U.S.
Mobile threats are no longer a mythical boogieman for security teams anymore. Instead, mobile malware presents very credible risks against IT assets as criminals have learned to add malicious mobile software into their quiver of profitable attack tools. And according to a report out last week from Lookout, those malicious mobile tools are increasingly put into play. The firm showed that mobile malware grew significantly both in volume and sophistication.
The Lookout Mobile Threat Report showed that mobile malware encounter rates shot up by 75 percent in 2014 within the U.S., with ransomware named as the top category among these malicious mobile apps. According to Lookout, many of the ransomware schemes forced victims to pay anywhere from $300 to $500 to unlock their phones, with the malware like ScarePackage, Koler, ScareMeNot and Cold Brother leading the charge as favorite flavors of malware to ransom phones.
Hiding as either an Adobe Flash update or a variety of antivirus apps, ScarePackage is delivered as a drive-by-download and runs phony 'scans' on victims' devices. It locks the phone and claims it discovered illicit content, showing a fake message from the FBI in an attempt to get the victim to pay up rather than face criminal charges or lose control of their device data. ColdBrother and ScareMeNot operate much in the same manner, masquerading as security scanners. Meanwhile Koler's blackmail scheme is similar, but pretends to be a media app instead.
According to researchers with Malwarebytes, consumers and security professionals should expect a surge in similar attacks. The ransomware model was perfected prior to the mobile revolution and attackers are finding it profitable to port their attacks to phones and tablets.
"What we see on the PC side, we soon see on the mobile side. We have already seen mobile malware variants that encrypt phone data and demand payment to retrieve," says Nathan Collier, senior malware intelligence analyst with Malwarebytes. "Pre-existing phone backup options will make this threat less severe, however many users still might be willing to pay to get their data back."
However, ransomware isn't the only mobile threat hitting the radar, according to Lookout. In the US, for example, the top malware encountered was NotCompatible, a versatile piece of malware that is the underpinning for a one of the longest-lived mobile botnets, infecting billions of devices. It is used for a number of fraudulent purposes, including stealing bank data from infected devices. Lookout's report warned that NotCompatible was a testament to the fact that "attackers are upping their threat construction and deployment game" on the mobile front.
And according to Collier, it won't be the only Trojan to make headlines for targeting mobile banking. They believe mobile banking Trojans will increase significantly in 2015.
"With more people using mobile devices to bank, it’s becoming more popular for malware authors to exploit," he says. "Creating a fake site that looks like a mobile banking site may be a bit easier for malware authors since many sites are limited to keep the data processing low."
Ericka Chickowski specializes in coverage of information technology and business innovation. She has focused on information security for the better part of a decade and regularly writes about the security industry as a contributor to Dark Reading. View Full Bio |
This same bus was seen running through the streets of Madrid with its blunter message that “boys have penises and girls have vaginas. Don’t be deceived”This advertisement for intolerance, which belies intelligence on this subject is now in Manhattan parked in front of the UN building and says something slightly different in English:“Its biology…Boys are boys and always will be and girls are girls and always will be. You can’t change sex. Respect all”Never mind that message is written by people who understand nothing and most importantly are confusing gender identity with sexual organs and I won’t surprise you by telling you it has been funded by 3 right wing conservative groups one of whom is called the National Organization for Marriage.Of the Spanish version, one Madrid councilman declared it the “bus of shame,” and city officials ordered it removed from the streets for violating a traffic law restricting advertising on private vehicles.“We need a discussion about how to respect everyone,” says Joseph Grabowski who is a representative for one of the groups. But he also claimed that being transgender is a “disorder” and that a respectful discussion does not extend to recognizing a transgender person’s gender identity in public settings. (The American Psychiatric Association does not classify being transgender as a mental disorder.) He also added, “They can live that out privately.”Not only are these groups profoundly ignorant of science and reality but they also represent a dangerous new backlash trend among the “earth is flat crowd”; the very same ones that occupy the Bible belt in the United States and voted for Donald Trump. They can also be found in every country in the world usually also denying climate change, women’s rights and decrying homosexuality as a sin.Let’s hope that their message does not receive a receptive ear and enough people take exception in order to educate the sponsors although I suspect that wouldn’t have much effect on those who've already drunk the Kool-Aid.Is it not the least bit ironic that the "respect all" in their message doesn't ring a bell of contradiction in their minds? |
According to Cancer Research UK, men are in general, at a significantly greater risk than women from nearly all of the common cancers that occur in both genders, with the exception of breast cancer.
The joint report, The Excess Burden of Cancer in Men in the UK (2009), published by National Cancer Intelligence Network, Cancer Research UK, Leeds Metropolitan University and Men’s Health Forum 2009), reveals that when rate ratios were calculated by excluding breast cancer, and cancers which are unique to either men or women only, 60% more men in the 15–64 year age range are dying from cancers that should be affecting men and women equally. Thus, a greater effect seems to be predominately because the cancer deaths that occur in younger women are those related to the breast and genital organs (37.1% overall of cancer deaths in those aged 15–64; and around 50% in the 35–44 years age group). From the rate ratios of male to female deaths it is evident that there is a significantly higher rate of death for men over all ages. This ratio is lower in the 15–64 age range but rises substantially over the age of 65 years.
The mortality rate for lung cancer is substantially higher in men than women due to differing smoking patterns over the previous 60 years, despite there being more men who have reportedly given up smoking, relative to the number of females smokers. When rate ratios are calculated after excluding lung cancer to examine the influence on the burden of cancer in the two sexes after excluding the major cancer caused by smoking, then the ratio for all ages drops slightly to 1.31, with corresponding falls to 0.98 for 15-64 year olds and 1.51 for those aged 65 and over. This could suggest that younger males also have higher overall cancer mortality because of their excess rate of lung cancer.
There has also been a rapid increase in the incidence of prostate cancer, with rates rising from 32.5 per 100,000 in 1975 to 97.2 per 100,000 in 2006 in Great Britain. Although statistics by Cancer Research reveal that more women averagely die of breast cancer, than men of prostate cancer, there are fewer campaigns targeted at men and the importance of early detection. Prostate cancer mortality combined with the male mortality rates for common non-gender specific cancers, means that more awareness campaigns are necessary for male cancer.
It is interesting that despite September being Prostate Cancer month, blue ribbons and blue coloured merchandise did not engulf the country in any manner similar to the flurry of pink ribbons that emerged in the subsequent month of October. Perhaps it is no coincidence that November has now become a month for male cancer fundraising, with the “Movember” challenge.
“Movember”, a portmanteau of the word “mo” (from moustache) and “November”, is an event involving the growing of moustaches during the entire month of November, to raise awareness and raise funds for more effective detection, diagnosis, treatments, and to reduce the number of preventable deaths from male cancers. The Movember Foundation has run Movember events since 2004 in Australia and New Zealand, and since 2007 in Ireland, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Spain, the United Kingdom, Israel, South Africa, Taiwan and the United States. The foundation’s goal being to “change the face of men’s health.”
As I believe in equality and, therefore, believe that male cancer deserves the same attention and awareness as that generated by female cancer campaigns, such as the ‘Pink Ribbon Campaign’ and ‘Race for Life’, I would join in with the moustache growing… If I had enough facial hair to grow one! Therefore, I have instead decided to join in by going razor and wax-free with regards legs, arms, and…etc! My fundraising page can be found HERE.
No doubt many will turn their noses up at my challenge, and I must admit that I will find it difficult to walk around unshaven. On the continent, many women are reported to grow their body hair, but it is very much a faux pas in Britain. Women whose body hair falls outside aesthetic standards may experience social acceptance problems. The exposure of body hair on women other than head hair, eyelashes and eyebrows, is generally considered to be unaesthetic, unladylike, undesirable and embarrassing. People will usually point and laugh at a “hairy lady”, just like Julia Roberts caused a stir at the film premiere of Notting Hill, when she raised her arm and revealed a hairy armpit.
Yet, it would appear that in casting aside the razor, she is in good company. Drew Barrymore, Elizabeth Jagger, even fashionista, Trinny Woodall, have all had a hairy moment:
Even the ever-so-sophisticated Sophia Loren has been known to fashion a bush!
Women participating in the “No Shave Novemeber” challenge have also been causing some revolt on Twitter.
I confess to also finding body hair most unsightly. But, is that really my own opinion, or is it one that has been indoctrinated into all of us all by society? Hair removal has, after all, been an integral part of grooming since prehistoric times, when men used flint to remove unwanted hair as early as 30,000 B.C, and historical accounts of women’s hair removal have been linked to ancient Greece, the Trobriand Islands, Uganda, South America and Turkey. The rise of hair removal can certainly be closely linked with fashion – as most of society’s ideals are. In ancient cultures, the absence of body hair often indicated class. Only the lower classes let their hair grow. In the Middle Ages, women even removed all of their hair, including the hair on their head, in the name of fashion. The first commercial for a female hair removal product was in 1915 when Harpers Bazaar printed an advert which showed a woman in a sleeveless evening gown which exposed her perfectly shaven armpits.
In the 1970s, feminists put their razors aside as a form of political statement, but today even women who object on principle, are still under pressure to remove body hair. Merran Toerien, who has researched gender and body hair, believes that bodies are seen as needing disciplining into an ideal:
“Hair is seen as masculine…Historically, medically and in the media, it is nearly always associated with men. Shaving female body hair is seen as a way to differentiate between the sexes.”
Women with body hair are even perceived by men and women to be more aggressive and immoral, according to a study by US psychologist Dr Susan Basow, who asserts that non-hairy women are generally seen in a positive light. Indeed, a UK study found that 99% of modern day women removed some hair, most commonly from the underarms, legs, pubic area and eyebrows. Shaving and plucking being the most common removal methods.
Professor Stevi Jackson, Director of the Centre for Women’s Studies at York University stated:
“Over the years body hair on women has been viewed more and more as a monstrosity and dealing with it has become more and more draconian,” she says. “It is about conforming to standard and if you don’t you are viewed as unattractive and ungroomed… It is not about being seen as beautiful; it is about conforming, not standing out.”
The removal of female body hair has become such a social requirement that little 12 year old girls are being subjected to a Brazilian wax, as this anonymous article titled “The Bare Truth”, published in the Economist reveals:
“An Irish beautician called Genevieve is explaining what a ‘Brazilian’ is a she practices the art on your correspondent. … Between each excruciating rip, she explains that she is going to remove nearly all my pubic hair, except for a narrow vertical strip of hairs the width of a couple of fingers. This is known colloquially as the ‘landing strip.’ … In only a few years, this form of waxing has gone from the esoteric to the everyday and is starting to rival the ordinary bikini wax in popularity. At the same time the bikini wax is becoming a normal procedure for women of all ages: the youngest person Genevieve has waxed is a 12-year-old girl”
It is socially acceptable for men walk around with beards, hairy chests, backs, legs, etc., and is even considered an expression of manliness. Ironically, if a man shaves his legs (which may be required for a sport such as rugby or swimming), he will often be ridiculed. In fact, thick hair is associated with strength and masculinity, and so much so, we often find many men going to great lengths to prevent male pattern baldness on their heads. Femininity demands a hair-free body, and a hairy woman is not considered sexually attractive, whilst body hair on men is associated with masculine virility. Whilst I accept the physical differences between men and women on a biological level, society’s dictation of body hair is surely yet another example of ironic hypocrisy, which affects both genders.
When society faces a serious health issue such as cancer – a cruel disease that takes so many lives away from us on a daily basis, surely this is a time to set aside such social and cultural expectations. If ditching the razor and wax strips for a month, and joining the Movember campaign is a social faux pas, then so be it. I like to think I have the strength of character to stand up to what is, essentially, a rather pointless social ideal, in order to raise much needed money for cancer research – an important cause that might help save lives.
It would be nice to see other women who are also brave enough to “stand by her man”, and ditch the razor for a month (or at least sponsor my endeavour), instead of trying to adhere to narrow-minded social norms. It is, after all, for a good cause. I would also like to to remind all the chaps out there: Please remember to have an annual health check up, and a PSA Test if you are over 40. Furthermore, young men should regularly check their testes for any abnormalities, as testicular cancer is most common in young men.
Please remember to donate to my “No Shave November” page at Cancer Research UK. It does not matter if you can only donate as little as £1, for as long as everyone donates something, all the small donations will add up to something bigger. Although it is a UK cancer charity, with which readers from other parts of the world may not feel is relevant to them, one must remember that as long as money is donated to cancer research, it is irrelevant as to where in the world the money is donated for research. What is most important is that valuable research can be conducted, to ensure a cure is ultimately found, instead of focusing upon where in the world the cure was found.
Please donate. Thank you.
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Image caption Several million animal experiments are carried out each year
An Italian student suffering from a rare disease has denounced death threats she received after defending medical experiments on animals.
Caterina Simonsen said more than 30 "death wishes" and 500 abusive messages were sent to on her Facebook page.
The messages came after she uploaded a photo of herself with a message: "I am 25 thanks to genuine research that includes experiments on animals."
In response to the abuse, she has posted videos of her condition online.
Caterina Simonsen, 25, lives in Padua and studies veterinary medicine at Bologna University.
She says she suffers from four rare genetic disorders and cannot breathe unaided.
"Without research, I would have been dead at nine," she said in her initial message on 21 December. "You have gifted me a future."
But a torrent of comments followed - some suggesting the world would be better off with her dead.
She has forwarded the details to the Italian authorities.
Animal research has always been controversial.
Many people strongly oppose the use of any animals in experiments arguing it is cruel and unethical. |
Image caption A map of the UK with Doggerland marked as red
A huge area of land which was swallowed up into the North Sea thousands of years ago has been recreated and put on display by scientists.
Doggerland was an area between Northern Scotland, Denmark and the Channel Islands.
It was believed to have been home to tens of thousands of people before it disappeared underwater.
Now its history has been pieced together by artefacts recovered from the seabed and displayed in London.
The 15-year-project has involved St Andrews, Dundee and Aberdeen universities.
Image caption The fossilised remains of a mammoth uncovered from the area
The results are on display at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition in London until 8 July.
The story behind Doggerland, a land that was slowly submerged by water between 18,000 BC and 5,500 BC, has been organised by Dr Richard Bates at St Andrews University.
Dr Bates, a geophysicist, said "Doggerland was the real heartland of Europe until sea levels rose to give us the UK coastline of today.
"We have speculated for years on the lost land's existence from bones dredged by fishermen all over the North Sea, but it's only since working with oil companies in the last few years that we have been able to re-create what this lost land looked like.
"When the data was first being processed, I thought it unlikely to give us any useful information, however as more area was covered it revealed a vast and complex landscape.
"We have now been able to model its flora and fauna, build up a picture of the ancient people that lived there and begin to understand some of the dramatic events that subsequently changed the land, including the sea rising and a devastating tsunami."
Image caption Dr Richard Bates at work building up a picture of the ancient landmass
Ancient tree stumps, flint used by humans and the fossilised remains of a mammoth helped form a picture of how the landscape may have looked.
Researchers also used geophysical modelling of data from oil and gas companies.
Findings suggest a picture of a land with hills and valleys, large swamps and lakes with major rivers dissecting a convoluted coastline.
As the sea rose the hills would have become an isolated archipelago of low islands.
By examining the fossil record (such as pollen grains, microfauna and macrofauna) the researchers could tell what kind of vegetation grew in Doggerland and what animals roamed there.
Using this information, they were able to build up a model of the "carrying capacity" of the land and work out roughly how many humans could have lived there.
The research team is currently investigating more evidence of human behaviour, including possible human burial sites, intriguing standing stones and a mass mammoth grave. |
Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld The writer has been a long-term adviser on strategy issues to the boards of several major multinational corporations in Europe and North America.He is board member and former chairman of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and recipient of the LIfetime Achievement Award (2012) of the Journal for the Study of Anti-Semitism. More from the author ► The writer has been a long-term adviser on strategy issues to the boards of several major multinational corporations in Europe and North America.He is board member and former chairman of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and recipient of the LIfetime Achievement Award (2012) of the Journal for the Study of Anti-Semitism.
Manfred Gerstenfeld interviews Ricki Hollander and Gilead Ini
“The New York Times (NYT) is guilty of advocacy journalism. Both its editorial pages and news reporting lean heavily toward an anti-Israel perspective. This is in blunt contravention of its directive to journalists in the Ethical Journalism handbook it publishes, ‘to cover the news as impartially as possible’ and ‘tell our readers the complete, unvarnished truth as best we can learn it.’
“Without employing the type of crude incitement against Israelis that is rampant in Palestinian society, the NYT poisons the public's mind against Israel by shaping the perception of the Jewish state as responsible for many, if not most, of the region's ills. It does this with double standards in reporting about Israel versus her enemies and recounting only half the story. It sanitizes the role of Israel's adversaries, including terrorist organizations, and obsessively indicts Israel at every turn.”
Ricki Hollander and Gilead Ini are senior analysts at CAMERA, where they co-authored the major long-term study Indicting Israel: New York Times Coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict.
“In addition to news coverage, CAMERA's study looked at the newspaper's opinion pages over a period of 9 months in 2011-2012. NYT editorials are written by a board of journalists who adhere to an apparent formula in their columns about Israel. First they pay lip service to Israel's right to defend itself. Then after the ‘but,’ they devote the bulk of the column to condemnation of any self-defensive action by Israel.
They ignore facts, statistics, and anything else that would provide readers with a deeper understanding of, or sympathy for Israel's actions.
"We found that 6 out of 7 NYT editorials addressing the Arab-Israeli conflict were negative toward Israel, while none were positive. Opinion columns by NYT staff followed the same pattern of condemning Israel: 5 out of 6 were negative toward Israel, while none were positive. As for invited Op-Eds on the topic, 15 out of 20 were negative toward Israel, while only one was positive.
"An earlier 19-month CAMERA study conducted in 2006-7, also found a preponderance of columns critical of Israel, many of which were written by Arab leaders and even some by a Hamas representative. By contrast, there were no columns by any Israeli leaders.
"In the past, there were columnists who wrote positively about Israel, namely William Safire and Abe Rosenthal. But since their retirement and passing, there is no one to balance the largely negative opinion of Israel on the newspaper's editorial pages.
“In the global context, Israel faces discrimination through NYT’s disproportionate scrutiny of its conflict. The paper also holds the Jewish State to a much harsher standard relative to the Palestinians. Author Virgil Hawkins in his book Stealth Conflicts, shows that the media's focus on Israel came at the expense of reporting on conflicts up to a thousand times more deadly than ones between Israel and its neighbors.
"The newspaper's disproportionate focus is also reflected in its headlines. Our study identified 12 headlines implicating Israel for killing Arabs. None implicated Arabs, although 14 Israelis were killed by Arabs during the same period.
“One among many examples of the NYT’s double standards can be found in its disparate treatment of violent attacks. When in 2012, several Jewish teens beat an Arab teenager in Jerusalem resulting in injuries that required hospitalization, the newspaper covered the story on its front page above the fold. The attack was framed as reflecting negatively on Israeli society as a whole.
A second front page story informed readers that the attack, ‘revealed festering wounds regarding race, violence and extremism.’ Has there ever been a beating by teenage thugs anywhere else in the world that made the front page of the NYT twice?
“Contrast this with the newspaper's treatment in 2011 of a gruesome massacre perpetrated by Palestinian teens in the Israeli town of Itamar. The NYT buried news of this murder of a Jewish couple and three of their young children, including a three-month old girl, deep inside the paper. Nor did any articles about the attack focus on what it indicated about Palestinian society's morals and racism.
“The NYT's news pages are, at times, indistinguishable from its opinion pages. In one month, the NYT used the following subjective and hostile adjectives about Israeli leaders in its news reporting: 'shrill,’ ‘strident,’ ‘stubborn,’ ‘abrasive,’ and ‘cynical.’ One reporter asked ‘whether Israel is guilty of “hopeless hypocrisy”’ because the country opposes nuclear enrichment by Iran, a country sworn to Israel's destruction.
“Unfortunately, turning to the NYT’s public editors (ombudsmen) is not a solution. Their columns tend toward general platitudes about the conflict being a hot-button issue that generates criticism ‘from both sides,’ as they equate thoughtful and evidence-based complaints with those of Israel's most virulent and hateful enemies, for whom nothing is anti-Israel enough.
“To inform passersby of NYT’s extreme bias, CAMERA has hung up a large billboard on a building opposite the newspaper’s editorial offices in Manhattan.” |
The Grasshopper cocktail is a fairly rich, thick, and creamy after dinner drink that combines (in equal parts) creme de menthe, creme de cacao, and heavy cream. The drink reportedly originated at the historic Tujague’s Restaurant and was quite popular in the 50s and 60s. The cocktail fell out of favor, replaced by flavored vodkas and more spirit-forward after dinner drinks.
While there are some variations on the Grasshopper (you can make it a “Brown Grasshopper” by adding coffee to the mix), the drink has remained virtually unchanged since its introduction. That is until one fateful night when legendary bartender Audrey Saunders and her husband, cocktail author Robert Hess, walked into the now defunct Vessel bar on a busy night and ordered a “Fernet Grasshopper” from Jim Romdall, an extremely talented Seattle bartender. Not knowing who had ordered it, and being very quick on his feet, Romdall came up with a riff on the Grasshopper that has become The Noisy Cricket.
Instead of using Fernet Branca, which can quickly take over a cocktail, Romdall turned to Fernet Branca’s mintier and gentler cousin, Brancamenta. He then turned to Tempus Fugit Spirits‘ Creme de Cacao a la Vanille and then finished with the Grasshopper’s traditional third ingredient, cream. The result is a fantastic cocktail which manages to be sweet and rich, but more balanced than the original Grasshopper.
The Noisy Cricket
by Jim Romdall
1 1/2 oz Fernet Brancamenta
3/4 oz Tempus Fugit Creme de Cacao
3/4 oz cream Vigorously shake all the ingredients with ice, strain into a chilled cocktail glass, and garnish with a mint leaf.
Brancamenta is a digestif, and so it brings with it some wonderful medicinal qualities to the equation. The bitterness from the Brancamenta also helps balance the drink, making it slightly less rich than the traditional Grasshopper Cocktail (although still thick and sweet).
The Noisy Cricket isn’t just a great cocktail, it’s a perfect example of the collaboration that can happen when a savvy customer orders something unique from a talented bartender, with the result being something completely new and original. This Thanksgiving we plan on making The Noisy Cricket the official Drink Spirits after turkey dinner drink. |
Image caption The original experiment let children interact with a PC via a hole in a wall
A 10-year experiment that started with Indian slum children being given access to computers has produced a new concept for education, a conference has heard.
Professor Sugata Mitra first introduced children in a Delhi slum to computers in 1999.
He has watched the children teach themselves - and others - how to use the machines and gather information.
Follow up experiments suggest children around the world can learn complex tasks quickly with little supervision.
"I think we have stumbled across a self-organising system with learning as an emergent behaviour," he told the TED Global (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference.
Learning curve
Professor Mitra's work began when he was working for a software company and decided to embed a computer in the wall of his office in Delhi that was facing a slum.
"The children barely went to school, they didn't know any English, they had never seen a computer before and they didn't know what the internet was."
To his surprise, the children quickly figured out how to use the computers and access the internet.
"I repeated the experiment across India and noticed that children will learn to do what they want to learn to do."
Image caption The experiment has been repeated in many more places with very similar results
He saw children teaching each other how to use the computer and picking up new skills.
One group in Rajasthan, he said, learnt how to record and play music on the computer within four hours of it arriving in their village.
"At the end of it we concluded that groups of children can learn to use computers on their own irrespective of who or where they are," he said.
His experiments then become more ambitious and more global.
In Cambodia, for example, he left a simple maths game for children to play with.
"No child would play with it inside the classroom. If you leave it on the pavement and all the adults go away then they will show off to one another about what they can do," said Prof Mitra, who now works at Newcastle University in the UK.
He has continued his work in India.
Stress test
"I wanted to test the limits of this system," he said. "I set myself an impossible target: can Tamil speaking 12-year-olds in south India teach themselves biotechnology in English on their own?"
The researcher gathered 26 children and gave them computers preloaded with information in English.
"I told them: 'there is some very difficult stuff on this computer, I won't be surprised if you don't understand anything'."
Two months later, he returned.
Image caption Many initiatives aim to put computers in the hands of children
Initially the children said they had not learnt anything, despite the fact that they used the computers everyday.
"Then a 12-year-old girl raised her hand and said 'apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA contributes to genetic disease - we've understood nothing else'."
Further experiment showed that having a person - known as "the granny figure" - stand behind the children and encourage them raised standards even higher.
Returning to the UK, he fine-tuned his method even further.
He gave groups of four children a computer each and set them a series of GCSE questions.
The groups were allowed to exchange information and swap members.
"The best group solved everything in 20 minutes, the worst in 45 minutes."
To prove that the children were learning, and not just skimming information off the web, he returned two months later and set the same questions. Crucially, this time the children had to answer them on their own with no computer aids.
"The average score when I did it with computers was 76%. When I did it without computers, the average score was 76% - they had near photographic recall."
Professor Mitra has now formalised the lessons from his experiments and has come up with a new concept for schools called SOLE (Self Organised Learning Environments).
These spaces consist of a computer with a bench big enough to let four children sit around the screen.
"It doesn't work if you give them each a computer individually," he said.
For his experiments he has also created a "granny cloud" - 200 volunteer grandmothers who can be called upon to video chat with the kids and provide encouragement.
He has tested the spaces in the UK and Italy, with similar results, and now believes it should be tested more widely.
"We could change everything," he said.
TED Global runs form the 13 to the 16 July in Oxford, UK. |
This site is dedicated to all crocheters who have experienced that desperate search for a link you ran across, didn't bookmark and then couldn't find when you wanted it.
A word here about a great tool for anyone who is searching for patterns that are defunct. There is a webpage called the Wayback Machine that will take defunct links and direct the searcher to a listing of dates on the internet when the link was active. If you find dead links on my page (which you will) you can try using the Wayback Machine to access the pattern. Here is the web address: http://www.archive.org/index.php This will sometimes produce a copy of the pattern that can be printed for use. Sometimes the search itself works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes the links that are brought up by the search will work and sometimes they won't as well. Also sometimes you will get the pattern and not the picture with this link. |
Cover Stories Unaffordable: Home price soar, salaries lag Hot competition for a slice of the American pie.
In Grant Hill, “there’s still some affordability.” This house is listed at $475,000. (Andy Boyd)
The median price for a single-family home in San Diego County at the end of 2016’s first quarter, according to the California Association of Realtors, stood at just over $554,000.
Assuming you’ve got access to a 20 percent down payment, sterling credit to qualify for a top-tier loan, and minimal other debt, it would require a household income in excess of $110,000 to afford such a property.
San Diego’s median income, meanFGrabt while, sits at $63,400 for a family of four. For potential homebuyers in this income range, the city’s own website recommends a purchase price no higher than $225,000. Seventy two percent of San Diegans, then, find themselves priced out of affordable ownership. Nationwide, the percentage of individuals who own the home they reside in is at its lowest point in more than 40 years.
Still, recent polling indicates more than four in five Americans believes owning a home is a good investment, ranking homeownership as an even more crucial investment than maintaining a retirement account.
Where, then, can aspirational homeowners turn to find their piece of the American Dream? Does such a place even exist in San Diego proper? Or within county lines, for that matter? I recently set off to find out.
“Clairemont is a good spot for families. Grant Hill, there’s still some affordability in the City Heights neighborhood, but it’s appreciating so fast,” opines local real estate agent Melissa Costa as we spend a Saturday afternoon nibbling pretzel bits and sipping craft beer in a Point Loma eatery near her home. “South Park, Normal Heights, those were great starter neighborhoods a few years ago that I think have now passed beyond the range of average buyer affordability. Golden Hill is getting there, too.”
Head east, advises agent Melissa Costa. (Andy Boyd)
These seem promising — definitive neighborhoods within city limits where Costa says she’s recently worked with first-time buyers. I ask what, in her clients’ eyes, makes a neighborhood an ideal fit.
“I think walkable access to parks and restaurants, especially if you feel safe walking at night, makes a lot of the neighborhood,” says Costa. She’s also a big fan of renovating the existing Craftsman and adobe-style bungalows that line many of San Diego’s more established blocks. “People are revitalizing instead of tearing down these fantastic older homes, and I think that’s something that helps.”
But these urban traits — walkability, access to fine dining and nightlife, and historic preservation are ones that resonate mostly with younger, childless singles and couples. For the first-time family buyer, the situation is different.
“With family buyers, schools are by far the number-one thing they’re looking for. But they’re also interested in quieter neighborhoods with slower traffic, cul-de-sacs, almost a Wisteria Lane kind of feel,” Costa continues, referring to the supposed utopian namesake street that formed the setting of Desperate Housewives, which so far as I can glean from my wife’s obsession with the show was a prime-time soap opera about adultery, backstabbing gossip, and violence whose picturesque suburban landscape apparently made up for all the neighborhood’s drawbacks.
Still, I get what she means — a quiet neighborhood where kids can set up a basketball hoop or ride bikes and skateboards without traffic whizzing past, where the school system receives good reviews, and reported crime rates are relatively low.
Schools, in particular, are among the top concerns cited by a host of both buyers and real estate agents when selecting a community. A veritable smorgasbord of websites, chief among them GreatSchools.org, publish rankings of the most and least desirable schools and compile data on performance of both districts and individual sites for parents to pore over. They largely list schools in the north-of-I-8 communities of Rancho Bernardo and Scripps Ranch as top-ranking destinations, though with median home prices ranging from $665,000 to $929,000, these are well outside the realm of average affordability.
Costa explains that these buyers will sacrifice proximity to amenities and accept that they won’t be leaving the house on foot in exchange for lower traffic levels and stronger school rankings. Many leave the city proper to find what they’re looking for at an affordable price.
“There’s definitely a certain demographic that would benefit from going east — they’re not as concerned about proximity to the beach, they’re not looking for a trendy neighborhood necessarily. And there’s much more affordable property in Lemon Grove, Spring Valley, parts of La Mesa, and El Cajon, even Santee,” says Costa, though in my nearly two decades selling real estate I’ve heard the same desires echoed by buyers heading for North County, South Bay (eastern Chula Vista, in particular), and some even moving to southern Riverside County — Temecula, Murrieta, and surrounding cities— in search of the same suburban bliss.
Median price in Chula Vista is $425,000 (Andy Boyd)
We’ve established some baseline traits for what makes a neighborhood desirable. But we still haven’t established a connection with what makes those same neighborhoods affordable, at least to those of us who’d like to occupy homes there. This is where the discussion gets a bit wonkish.
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Let’s take a look at some of the common first-time buyer neighborhoods Costa suggests, with numbers provided by Core Logic for average home sale prices as of June 2016.
First off, we’re going to have to sadly conclude that, unless you’re willing to travel to the far extremes of the county such as Boulevard (about 68 miles from downtown San Diego; average recent sales price $252,000) or Borrego Springs (86 miles; $188,000) and spend considerable hours and gas money in the name of ownership, the comfortable definition of affordability is going to need to be stretched a bit.
One way the government does this is by including households making up to 120 percent of an area’s median income (let’s call that $76,080/year) in the pool of buyers eligible for “affordable” housing. Another is the FHA loan-guarantee program, which allows buyers to put as little as 3.5 percent down when buying a home, as most prospective first-time buyers don’t have tens of thousands of cash on hand.
As a hedge against risk based on how little the buyer is investing as compared to a traditional buyer with 20 percent cash on hand, FHA charges both an upfront “mortgage insurance premium” of nearly 2 percent of the loan amount that’s tacked on to the total loan amount as well as “private mortgage insurance” of 0.85 percent, essentially added to the interest rate. These extra charges go into a fund that guarantees lenders they won’t have to absorb the bulk of the loss if an FHA loan goes bad.
Location, location, location (kiacoltd)
The difference in monthly payments buyers must be able to weather is substantial. Let’s take a $400,000 home as an example. For a conventional buyer with 20 percent down and good credit, the monthly payment would be roughly $1931; for an FHA buyer it’s closer to $2354.
As of late July, the average going rate on an FHA loan was around 3.0 percent, effectively 3.85 percent when considering the mortgage insurance on top of the nominal interest rate. What does that buy?
Not a whole lot, unfortunately. Keeping within federal guidelines for an affordable home, a family earning just over $76,000 could buy a house for $320,000 at $1881/month (including property taxes and fire insurance) — that pretty much prices out anything within an hour’s drive of the city core.
But wait — a few more tricks with arithmetic might bring us closer to finding an affordable home for a slightly above-average buyer. For prospective borrowers with exceptional credit who are willing to put it all on the line to realize the dream of home ownership, loans are available allowing a buyer to spend up to 45 percent of their pre-tax income on fixed debts including the cost of the home and any other bills including car payments, student loans, and credit card debt.
Keeping the same numbers as before, our 120-percent-better-than-the-median buyer can now spend up to $2849 per month on housing, provided he or she has no other debts whatsoever — that’s good for a purchase price up to $494,000, and suddenly the map of prospective neighborhoods comes to life!
Median price in the Oak Park/Encanto area is $395,000 (Andy Boyd)
Clairemont ($595,000 median) is still a stretch, though City Heights ($374,000) and Encanto ($395,000) are in. Hillcrest ($948,000) and North Park ($576,000) are still rarefied air, but La Mesa ($487,000-572,000), Lakeside ($458,000), and Lemon Grove ($405,000) are in the picture. Poway ($697,000) and San Carlos ($600,000) are out, but National City ($365,000) and Spring Valley ($420,000-459,000) remain contenders. Going north and south, Vista (as low as $428,000), Escondido (starting at $425,000) and western Chula Vista (from $425,000 up) are players.
It turns out Costa has a pretty good handle on what buyers say they’re looking for in a place to call home.
“Not being on a main, busy street was huge for us — somewhere where we could feel safe with our kids playing out front, and if I had to run inside for a second it’s not like I’d feel scared of something happening to my child,” says Anna Carel, who along with her husband David and two young children, moved into a townhome in Lakeside last May.
“It’s funny, everyone who comes to visit us remarks how they never even knew this neighborhood existed.”
Indeed, the cul-de-sacs off Saddle Ridge Road, each occupied by a handful of twin-homes (treated like a single-family house but with one shared wall), is easy to miss. Flanked on the north by a newer housing tract and the south by mid-century ranch homes, the ’70s-era development is dotted by eucalyptus and palms, with mature oak trees offering patches of shade in a handful of communal grass lawns dotting the complex. Go a quarter-mile in about any direction and you’ll find nothing but open space, hilly patches of southeastern Lakeside as yet untouched by the ever-charging force of suburban development.
For the Carels, moving back home to East County where they grew up from Oceanside (where the family had temporarily relocated to be closer to David’s job at the time) was a bumpy road.
“We’d been working on trying to buy a house for two or three years, saving and getting our credit in order. We’d have actually done it a lot sooner, we just weren’t quite there yet,” says David. The couple’s home, purchased for a little over $330,000 (though homeowners’ association fees drive the cost up above that of a similarly priced single-family home), was made possible through an FHA-guaranteed loan with its mandatory monthly mortgage insurance premium tacked on to the regular payment.
“The older I get the more it becomes clear that you’re only really worth what your credit score and your bank account says about you to a lender, how you look on paper,” adds Anna, 29, who is nonetheless thrilled to be a homeowner. “The tax write-offs and financial benefits are huge, so is knowing that you’re investing in something for the future. “It’s something that definitely makes you feel like you’ve graduated into a more responsible phase of life.”
Aside from the quiet location, I ask what else influenced the Carels’ decision when they were home shopping, and what other parts of town might have appealed to them. Quality of school district is the first thing that comes to mind, and it does so in a big way.
“I did a lot of searching around on different websites, asking friends who were parents at different schools, looking for our best options. But obviously the better the school district, the more expensive the houses are around it,” Anna laments. “For instance, Poway has amazing schools, among the tops in California, but real estate there was entirely out of reach financially. I feel comfortable that we’ve made a good choice with where we are, though — the schools here are rated higher than a lot of other areas in our price range.”
“We wanted to get back to where our friends and family were, and where we could plan on staying for some time without worrying about moving our kids from school to school. That was another big target, to get into a place before our son started kindergarten, so he could stay with the same group of friends throughout his time there,” David adds, though the long process of improving the couple’s credit and amassing a down payment means that first grade, not kindergarten, will be the younger David’s introduction to the school system where the family hopes he’ll stay through high school.
“We looked in Santee, El Cajon, La Mesa, Mira Mesa, Poway, Tierrasanta…” David tells me, counting off neighborhoods both in San Diego and the suburbs the family had been interested in before Anna jumps in again.
“A lot of those areas were kind of, like...we went and looked there because of the school districts, then right away we figured out we weren’t going to be able to really find a viable option financially.”
Not only were high prices a deterrent, poorly ranked education was just as likely to take a neighborhood out of the running.
“Schools were a huge obstacle. We’d find a great house at the right price, but the local schools wouldn’t be rated so well, so that one would be out,” David admits. “There were a lot of houses I wanted to buy but I didn’t want to enroll my kids in the local school system.”
Despite the arduous process, the Carels are convinced they made the right choice by electing to buy.
“Cosmetic things — deciding what to put where, what color paint to use, what you want to do with your yard — that’s really the most exciting part to me,” says Anna.
“I definitely think we made the right choice in becoming homeowners as opposed to remaining renters,” David concludes.
The once-again-high-flying housing market, though, doesn’t seem as rosy to everyone in town.
The corner of University and Fairmount Avenues in the heart of City Heights paints a picture of rebirth that seems to represent urban renaissance idealized. Two corners are occupied by newly built mid-rise office and mixed-use residential/commercial structures. A third is home to a new shopping plaza, the colorful paint still crisp on the façades of Denny’s, McDonald’s, and Panda Express, shade trees planted along the parkways are still years from maturity.
The fourth corner, housing a decades-old strip mall that’s home to a discount shoe store and combination donut shop/Chinese restaurant, may be more indicative of life on the Boulevard, a life that at least some residents will mourn the loss of.
Walking down Polk Avenue, just a block north of University, it feels like an entirely different world. The sounds of reggae, horn-heavy norteño ballads, and mid-morning television talk shows provides the narrow one-way street’s soundtrack. An old mattress slumps against the side of an apartment building, threatening to fold over itself and flop onto the sidewalk.
Properties in the neighborhood are a mix of early-1900s Craftsman-style bungalows and Huffman six-packs, boxy, characterless apartment buildings stuffed onto former single-family lots in the late 1970s and early 1980s with a push from developer Ray Huffman and then-mayor Pete Wilson as a proposed solution to conquering suburban sprawl in the face of a population influx. The landscaping is barren in some spots, mature or overgrown in others. Many front yards have been given over to parking.
Working people have been priced out of Rich Kacmar and Anna Daniels’s City Heights neighborhood. (Andy Boyd)
Amid this scene stands the cozy two-bedroom abode of retired librarians–turned–community activists Anna Daniels and Rich Kacmar. A canopy of climbing roses and vines overtaking black bamboo surround the cottage. A pink trumpet tree grows near the colorfully painted wooden fence out front. Despite their relatively stable footing today, Daniels worries that not only is ownership getting farther out of reach, the simple matter of remaining housed at all in the face of another real estate spike poses a real challenge to some of her neighbors.
“The house was, at the time and relatively speaking, affordable,” Daniels says, speaking of when she and her husband first purchased their home on 45th Street in 1986. I ask her, if she were in the same position today as 30 years ago, would she be considering moving into the same neighborhood?
“Oh, heavens no. This has been a working-class neighborhood since its inception in the ’20s, and while I’d say it’s still a working-class neighborhood the people today have to work a lot harder. I’d probably write off the possibility of buying a house. Even after 30 years my husband’s and my salary never increased at the same rate as the price of real estate in San Diego, particularly the inner-city communities. The reality is this house, that we paid $81,000 for, was a stretch — it would be absolutely, completely out of reach at $350,000 today.”
An estimate from Zillow, a popular automated home-valuation system, estimates the current value of the couple’s home closer to $412,000.
“The big issue here is affordable housing, with a significant ancillary issue being livable wages. You have to remember that City Heights is one of the poorest communities in San Diego — people on my block have about a $3000 monthly household income,” Daniels tells me as we sit on her porch, occasionally interrupted by a passing car or groups of enthusiastically loud chatters walking by. “I talk to people and I’m amazed to hear that they’re paying over a thousand dollars a month for a one-bedroom apartment in City Heights. Is that affordable? I think it’s a relative term; historically, families have been able to make the rent somehow, though it’s usually meant they’re having to double up.”
She mourns the fact that efforts to prop up affordability are often overshadowed by a push to gentrify urban neighborhoods and celebrate newfound affluence while ignoring residents pushed further to the fringe.
“When we moved here, there was a 16-unit apartment complex across the street. They were turned into condos right before the economy tanked. Prior to that, those units were filled with Mexican-Americans who supported a whole economy on the street — everyone from a green grocer to a door-to-door egg man. And these people were displaced when the apartments were turned into condominiums, which the developer tried to sell for around $290,000. The prices kept dropping, though, until the units were eventually rented back out. So we took 16 families who were living in City Heights and displaced them with new renters able to afford higher rents. I’ve kept up with a lot of those families, and a few of them found other neighborhoods nearby, but a lot ended up in El Cajon. And for people without cars who are commuting to work, that adds a lot of extra time to their days.”
Daniels is interested in exploring the possibility of using community-based nonprofit organizations to acquire and maintain a housing stock that’s attainable for lower income families, though she says most of the focus to date is on private investment, where builders are encouraged through subsidies and incentives to maintain a certain percentage of their development as “affordable” housing.
Under the California Redevelopment Act, which governed redevelopment agencies until these bodies were dissolved in 2012, for example, developers had to make at least 15 percent of the units developed in a residential project affordable to people of “low-to-moderate-income households,” defined as those making up to 120 percent of the area’s median income, or $76,080 per year in San Diego.
“When you’re looking at affordability, my sense is that, after having participated in all sorts of community forums and planning committees, turning over the problem to the private sector is not an answer to our crisis. And affordable housing certainly is a crisis,” Daniels warns. “The path that we’ve been following hasn’t been able to provide an adequate number of units.”
Median price in University Heights is $550,000 (Andy Boyd)
Licensed real estate agents are bombarded with dozens of promotional emails from other agents daily. A sampling I’ve received: there’s a 676-square-foot Craftsman on the border of North Park and City Heights going for $420,000; a slightly larger two-bedroom, one-bath Spanish adobe house in Kensington for $609,000; a cozy three-bedroom single-story in suburban Rancho Peñasquitos boasting access to the coveted Poway schools is only $580,000. A 4S Ranch “executive home,” really just a nondescript tract home surrounded by hundreds more like it but with considerably more square footage than the others on this list, is priced at $1,150,000.
Despite Daniels’s bleak assessment of the current state of real estate, there are still plenty of hopeful buyers scouring the city for a place they hope to call home. One of them is Angela Clapp, a nurse manager of a surgical department at Scripps Memorial Hospital La Jolla who’s been placing offers since early May.
House hounting “has been tough” for Angela Clapp. (Andy Boyd)
I meet Clapp when her agent leaves town for a few weeks on vacation. We get to know one another a bit when I step in to show her a few condos in case an irresistible deal pops up. She agrees to help me understand her perspective as a first-time, single buyer searching for a home in San Diego’s urban landscape.
“I’ve been shopping for about three and a half months,” Clapp tells me. “Now that I’ve narrowed it down I’m looking mainly around the PB and Bay Park neighborhoods. When I started, I was looking everywhere — Clairemont, North Park, just seeing what was out there. But for me and my lifestyle, I wanted to be closer to the bay. I like to kayak, so having access to recreation is what I’m looking for. Can you just walk out the door and go grab a cup of coffee? Is there a store to walk to? That’s a big appeal to me. That’s a big selling point to me, accessibility of the community.”
Clapp, though, has a problem common to first-time buyers who want to stay close to the urban core and its attendant amenities. Without the significant lump of cash that usually comes from selling another property that’s built up equity over the years, she needs an FHA loan that will let her borrow all but 3.5 percent of the purchase price. And she’s got a spending cap of $400,000, which means she’s almost definitely looking for a condo.
During the last market crash, FHA took two actions that severely limited the available supply of condominium housing eligible for financing. First, they eliminated the “spot approval” process, where a single unit within a larger development could be considered for loan approval, given that the homeowners’ association books showed sufficient cash reserves to cover anticipated repairs and that the building was primarily occupied by the owners of the units. Second, they cancelled the blanket approvals that many complexes had qualified for, which allowed FHA buyers to purchase within a development without jumping through the extra spot-approval hoops. Even half a decade later, few associations have applied for reapproval of their buildings.
“It’s been tough,” Clapp sighs. “It’s certainly been difficult as an FHA buyer when it comes to condos. I’m looking at potential avenues to possibly go conventional. After the market crashed, FHA changed so that there’s so much more that needs to be done to get a condo FHA-approved, so I’ve definitely hit a roadblock.”
I should mention here that many conventional, non-government-backed lenders offer “FHA lookalike” loans that, like FHA loans, allow a buyer to borrow 95 to 97 percent of the money needed to buy a home. These could open the door to condo ownership for some first-timers, but much more stringent credit-score requirements and higher interest rates place them out of reach for many borrowers, Clapp included.
“There have been a couple I’ve found that are approved, but unfortunately I’ve been outbid on the offers I’ve put in,” Clapp says of the few chances she’s had to get in on a condo that fit her loan requirements. “When I’ve put bids in, there have always been other offers and I’ve had to deal with counter offers. Anyone looking to buy should anticipate competition — it’s not going to happen quickly, and when the time is right it’s right.”
She realizes, though, that wherever she ends up probably won’t meet the definition of a “forever” home, and that’s okay.
“For this phase of my life, this is what fits. Whether I’m there for five years, ten years — it’s not a lifelong place. I’d like to keep the place and rent it, even if I don’t live there. I definitely still want to be in San Diego a decade from now. I’m 31; in five or ten years maybe I have a family, I might outgrow a two-bedroom condo.”
Despite months of setbacks, Clapp remains optimistic and keeps in mind the personal motivations that drive her, along with hordes of other hopeful buyers she’s competing with for a slice of the pie, to keep searching.
“I have friends who’ve recently bought homes, and they’re very happy. So I thought, why not me too? I want to be able to have somewhere to call home, and that’s somewhere to share with people that matter to you. That’s my incentive, my push.” |
Silicon Studio announces “Enlighten” global illumination technology now available for “Nintendo Switch” development
Tokyo, Japan, (June 21, 2017) – Continuing their support of the “Nintendo Switch™” development environment, middleware technology and game development company, Silicon Studio Corporation are pleased to announce the official release of a new version of the global illumination technology “Enlighten” optimized for the Nintendo Switch game console, from Nintendo Co., Ltd.
Global illumination (indirect lighting expression) calculates how light is reflected and absorbed by the objects and materials in the scene. By adding light reflection effects, artists can illuminate a scene with a few light sources and bring unparalleled sense of unity and accurately represent delicate details. Implementation of “Enlighten” can allow artists to take total control over both subtle and dynamic lighting to fluidly create breathtaking visuals.
About Enlighten "Enlighten" is a high quality real-time global illumination (indirect light expression) technology used for the game, movie, real estate and product visualization industries. The technology can efficiently calculate a large amount of mathematical processes which are an important task in real-time global illumination to generate and maintain beautiful high-quality images through the usage of light maps, spherical harmonic probes, and reflection captures.
Enlighten is available for the following platforms:
Xbox One, PlayStation®4, PlayStation®Vita, PC Games for Windows®, Apple® Mac OS, Linux, Android™ (& 64-bit), iOS (& 64-bit)
About Silicon Studio Silicon Studio is a Japan-based game engine and middleware company providing quality rendering, optical effects, and post-effects solutions for game development. Silicon Studio also publishes games across mobile, PC and consoles, and develops games for third parties. |
It’s that time of year again. We’ve got just under a month of summer left, and hopefully you have one last trip to the beach or the mountains left, where you can take a little time before cold weather and responsibilities close in. So once again, we present The Federalist’s guide to books for summer reading. Once again, this list is not limited to new books—but rather, anything that Federalist writers found worthy or interesting. (See last year’s list for even more recommendations.)
Gracy Olmstead: With the HBO adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s classic dystopia captivating progressives everywhere, it’s a great opportunity for conservative readers to consider the original. The Handmaid’s Tale is a captivating novel, beautifully written, with thought-provoking considerations of freedom, community, and faith. Atwood is a skillful writer, and deserving of praise. She managed to present a truly frightening and honest look at the dangers of fundamentalism—one that should caution both Left and Right.
Beartown, by Swedish novelist Fredrik Backman, explores the question of community—what it is, and what holds it together—with thoughtfulness and depth. The author, most famous for his more humorous novel “A Man Called Ove,” here considers darker themes. Beartown’s obsession with the victor of its junior hockey team foments a tribalism that threatens to bring out the town’s worst vices. But it’s a credit to Backman that he manages to bring joy, humor, and goodness to this book amid the bleakness.
Joel Salatin’s The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs: Respecting and Caring For All God’s Creation is all about the way we (as Christians and non-Christians) consume food and steward the earth. It’s a rebuke of those who don’t consider the massive environmental and spiritual implications of the way they eat—but Joel does try to add grace and humor to his criticism. As this is an exploration of what Christ-centric environmentalism and stewardship should look like, I’d recommend it for every Christian reader interested in the subject.
Currently reading A Man Called Ove, also by Fredrik Backman, and loving the curmudgeonly tone of its protagonist. Also reading The Givenness of Things, a collection of essays by Marilynne Robinson, which has been sitting on my bookshelf for far too long. Highly recommend.
Daniel Payne: Doris Kearns Goodwin’s The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism is a fantastic three-pronged examination of Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and the era of progressive journalism in which the two men rose to prominence on the American stage. The book highlights Taft in particular as a president whose policy accomplishments and famously affable manner are both worth remembering for their unique place in American history.
Ilya Shapiro: In this turbulent time when our politics is a mess, our culture is often ugly, and our trust in institutions is at an all-time low, I thought I’d read about another such period: the 1970s. As it happens, David Frum—who’s no stranger to getting attacked from all sides, and with whom I certainly don’t agree on everything—wrote what’s probably the best book about that ridiculous decade. I’m only part way through, but How We Got Here: the 70’s: The Decade that Brought You Modern Life (for Better or Worse)—an unwieldy title befitting its subject matter—is really insightful. Its application to contemporary punditry is somewhat limited because it came out (just) before 9/11, but still, a hearty recommend.
Like many American sports fans who like to broaden their consumption of the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, every July I become obsessed with the Tour de France. The rest of the year I have no idea what’s going on in the cycling world—I do a cram session the night before the big race starts—but once the lads start their three-week trek across Gaul, when little else is going on aside from mid-season baseball (and this year, inexplicably, a delayed Wimbledon) it becomes my athletic focus. And so each summer I read a cycling book. This year it’s Michael Barry’s Shadows on the Road: Life at the Heart of the Peloton, from U.S. Postal to Team Sky. Barry began his pro career riding with Lance Amstrong and ended it with current and four time champion Chris Froome. His memoir is engaging.
My friend Tevi Troy, whom I first met on the Bush-Cheney ’04 re-election campaign and who went on to several senior administration posts, has written a wonderful little survey of presidential leadership in times of crisis: Shall We Wake the President: Two Centuries of Disaster Management from the Oval Office (you can read The Federalist’s full review of the book here). Tevi combines a historian’s eye with a policymaker’s discernment of the inside story. I’m so glad that it’s finally come to the top of my beside-bed reading stack.
Matt Battaglia: For comic book fans of all-ages, I recommend Paul Pope’s Battling Boy. The first volume in Paul Pope’s new series, it follows the adventures of a young superhero as he’s tasked with defending Arcopolis from a variety of monsters run amok. Pope’s a fantastic artist and illustrator whose work tends to teach lessons of personal responsibility and self governance. This is a great book for kids to read instead of the progressive-SJW-flavor-of-the-day books Marvel has been pushing. Also related is Pope’s Batman: Year One Hundred, which shows a Gotham city under tight watch of an NSA stand-in and a Batman fighting against it. This collection also features a short story where Batman saves Austrian free-market economist Ludwig Von Mises from the Nazis.
Frank Miller lives! The Dark Knight Returns: The Last Crusade sees Miller re-teaming with his collaborator from way back on Man Without Fear, John Romita Jr, to tell the story of Batman’s “last adventure” leading up to his seminal classic “The Dark Knight Returns.” The past few years have seen a resurgence for Miller and this feels more like him than the somewhat lackluster “Dark Knight III: The Master Race.” It also is some of the best art Romita Jr. has put out lately.
For adults only, I recommend Tokyo Ghost by Rick Remender and Sean Gordon Murphy take us into a not too hard to imagine future where people live within the confines of their devices, constantly doped up on electronic feedback and media. Debbie is one of the few offline and the book follows her struggle to save the love-of-her-life Led from being completely engulfed in his addictions. It’s a “one last job” kind of story that also grapples with addiction, rehabilitation, and the all-consuming Internet age. It’s a fantastic book and readers of The Federalist should find its message relevant.
Luma Simms: For writers who love the craft and desire to improve (no matter how long they’ve been writing) I recommend Do I Make Myself Clear? Why Writing Well Matters by Sir Harold Evans, a master journalist and editor of Henry Kissinger. It is witty and informative, infects the reader with a sincere desire to improve. He does push the limits of political jabs; that, I could have done without. But I liked the book so much that I can forgive his admiration for Obama.
For those interested in how America is in the midst of an unprecedented opioid epidemic, look no further than Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones. I promise, it is not a social science book that will put you to sleep. It is very well researched, analysis interweaved with stories perfectly paced—you won’t be able to stop turning the page.
For those curious or anxious about our current political chaos and calamities, read or re-read Plato’s “Republic.” While you’re at it, watch or listen to Paul Cantor’s lectures on political thought in Shakespeare. Access for free at the Great Thinkers website; Cantor uses the Signet editions of the plays.
Finally, I recommend Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky is a master of the human soul, and a prophet, as Henri de Lubac calls him in The Drama of Atheist Humanism, another book I highly recommend. Happy reading!
Anna Mussman: In the 1890s, an anonymous author offered a solution to mothers who claim they have no time to read. She quoted a woman who explained her successful cultivation of the mind by saying, “I always keep three books going — a stiff book, a moderately easy book, and a novel, and I always take up the one I feel fit for!”
A “stiff” book I recommend to anyone interested in education (a category which includes, I hope, all parents) is Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education by Stratford Caldecott. Although the later sections of the book are unlikely to be applicable to readers who do not share Caldecott’s Roman Catholic faith, the opening chapters are immensely useful in considering the real purpose of education without falling into reactionary extremes. I particularly appreciate his discussion of the conflict between teacher-centered education vs. student-centered education.
A moderately easy book I recently finished is John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller. It’s a fabulous resource for anyone interested in understanding the timeless building blocks of good stories. Lots of manuals on writing tell aspiring authors to do various things, but Truby actually shows the reader how.
Two days ago I finished W. R. Gingell’s Masque. A murder mystery in the style of Georgette Heyer that is also a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, it’s set in a fantasy world full of wit, style, and dangerous magic. It’s great fun and you should read it, too.
Mark Hemingway: Living in the DC area, it seems like everyone I know who is in the military or otherwise in the national security orbit has read Ghost Fleet by P.W. Singer and August Cole. Singer is known as a futurist who focuses primarily on war, and instead of writing dry policy papers at his think tank, he broke down and wrote a technothriller with Cole to illustrate the issues involved in twenty-first-century warfare. I finally broke down and read it, and I see why it’s so popular in the Pentagon.
The book centers on the near future with an economically damaged United States on the brink of war with China and Russia. While the book is fiction, the various amazing things that happen are all footnoted, explaining how the ideas and weapons in the story are drawn from existing technology. Making it even more relevant, it also deals a lot with hacking and cyberwarfare. Imagine Tom Clancy meets William Gibson with a story ripped from current headlines. The book is as entertaining as it is terrifying about the fragile state of America’s national security.
For years, people have been gushing about Mark Helprin to me and I never got around to reading him until this year. Many of you reading this are probably already fans, but for those of you who remain unfamiliar, you should rectify that. He’s something of a giant among American writers, and along with Saul Bellow, he’s about the only openly politically conservative author who’s very well regarded by the literary establishment. (His entry in The Salon.com Guide to Contemporary Authors is comically begrudging, it’s basically “We concede he writes exquisite prose BUT CAN YOU BELIEVE THE WAY HE DEFENDS CAPITALISM?!)
Anyway, after seeing him offer some insightful commentary on a panel in Washington, I went home and picked up the paperback of A Winter’s Tale I’ve been carting around since college and read it. It really is a singular book, and at first I wasn’t sure what to make of it, bordering on dislike. Eventually I surrendered my cynicism completely, and fully gave myself over to Helprin’s sprawling Dickensian tale about a magical realist version of New York. Had I read it in high school, I have a feeling would have been obsessed with it. As an adult reader, I was happy enough to dissect the craft and admire Helprin’s boundless imagination.
I’ve long loved Charles Portis. The movie versions of his book True Grit have made his work famous without proportionate appreciation for the author and the source material. Portis’ books were even out of print for long periods of time, which is absolutely criminal, because he’s an utterly brilliant writer whose comic mind is basically without equal among American writers of the last century.
I recently reread Dog of the South, a first-person novel about a man named Ray Midge chasing his runaway wife and her lover on a long road trip from Arkansas to Belize. Along the way, various insane things happen, not the least of which is that Midge picks up an incredibly eccentric, disgraced doctor as a travelling companion: “I learned that he had been dwelling in the shadows for several years. He had sold hi-lo shag carpet remnants and velvet paintings from the back of a truck in California. He had sold wide shoes by mail, shoes that must have been almost round, at widths up to EEEEEE. He had sold gladiola bulbs and vitamins for men and fat-melting pills and all-purpose hooks and hail-damaged pears.”
You spend the whole book laughing so hard, you almost don’t notice the sadness of Midge’s plight sneaking up on you. Anyway, there’s been a Portis revival in recent years, but he’s still tragically underappreciated. Don’t be the last to know he’s one of the greatest, and certainly one of the funniest, American writers of the last century.
Well, that about does it. I’ll leave you with this quote from the great abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher: “There is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work; and it is to this region, just between laziness and labor, that summer reading belongs.” You’ve got the whole month of August ahead of you. Go get in the zone. |
Serena Williams' coach Patrick Mouratoglou has given an update on whether she will be returning to tennis action at the 2018 Australian Open.
Williams emerged victorious at the 2017 Australian Open earlier this year when she defeated her sister Venus in the final to win her 23rd Grand Slam.
Following her win in Melbourne, the American suffered a knee injury which saw her withdraw from Indian Wells before she eventually took time off from tennis after revealing that she was 20 weeks pregnant in April.
Having given birth to her daughter Alexis Olympia Ohanian Jr in September, Williams, currently ranked 22nd in the world, later revealed her intention to defend her title in Australia.
This was also followed up with Australian Open tournament director Craig Tiley claiming that "Serena will be back".
However, the 36-year-old's coach Mouratoglou says that although she is getting ready for the new season, nothing is certain at this moment.
"Serena is getting ready for 2018," Mouratoglou told CNN. "She is practising and getting back in shape. I will be joining her soon in Florida.
"We will see how her body is reacting and how her tennis level is and we will take a decision regarding Australia."
If Williams does not return in time for the first Grand Slam of the year, she could possibly return for Indian Wells or the Miami Masters, both of which take place in March.
Williams is notably one major title away from tying Margaret Court's record of 24 Grand Slams, the most that any player has won in tennis history in the Open era. |
By By JohnThomas Didymus Jun 15, 2012 in Health Korean researchers report a case of painful insemination of the membranes of a woman's mouth by squid spermatophores after she ate parboiled squid along with its internal organs. Bug-like organisms stuck to the woman's tongue, cheeks and gums. Male squids use this mechanism for inseminating the female, but in this case, the attempt at insemination took place in the woman's mouth. There have been several reports of "sperm stings" after eating raw or parboiled squid, but the latest case study was the first to confirm spermatophore activity in partially cooked squid. According to the paper titled, "Penetration of the oral mucosa by parasite-like sperm bags of squid," published in the Journal of Parasitology, researchers determined that the 63-year-old woman's mouth was literally inseminated by spermatophores of parboiled squid of the species Todarodes pacificus, after laboratory examination of the "twelve small white spindle-shaped, bug-like organisms stuck to the membrane of her tongue, cheeks and gingiva." The bug-like organisms were identified as squid spermatophores on the basis of their morphology and the presence of a sperm bag. Medical Daily reports that the woman, who immediately spat out the partially boiled squid, rushed to the hospital where the doctors "diagnosed" her condition. According to the researchers , the spermatophores survived cooking, and were still active enough to inseminate the woman's oral cavity. Medical Daily explains that "a spermatophore or sperm ampulla is a capsule, which contains spermatozoa, produced by males of various animal species and is transferred in its entirety to a female during copulation. Each sperm capsule has an ejaculatory apparatus, capable of ejecting the sperm mass quite forcefully, and a cement body for attachment."Male squids use this mechanism for inseminating the female, but in this case, the attempt at insemination took place in the woman's mouth.There have been several reports of "sperm stings" after eating raw or parboiled squid, but the latest case study was the first to confirm spermatophore activity in partially cooked squid. Science20.com , however, explains to calamari connoisseurs, who may be thinking of abandoning their delicacy dishes, that in most parts of the West, internal organs of squids are removed before they are prepared for human consumption. In such circumstances, there is no risk of diners ingesting squid spermatophores and getting their mouths "painfully" inseminated. More about parboiled, Squid, Mouth, inseminates More news from parboiled Squid Mouth inseminates |
Mindy Meyer on MyFoxNY
It's the summer, so the only stories that are interesting anyone concern weird bloated creatures that wash up from the East River and... 22-year-old State Senate candidates with hot pink, blingy websites? Mindy Meyer, the law school student and Republican candidate challenging State Senator Kevin Parker (who is no stranger to trouble) for the 21st District in Brooklyn, has become a media darling, thanks to her, well, different approach. For instance, this is what she told Capital New York's Azi Paybarah: "My campaign manager just spoke to Kim Kardashian's publicist because she's a diva and everything, so they're getting back to me because we're trying to get her endorsement because, you know, she, whatever, my website is literally like her." LITERALLY LIKE HER? LIKE LITERALLY?
On Good Day New York, Meyer told Rosanna Scotto and Dave Price that she was first inspired by Rudy Giuliani, whom she met when she was 11, "I told him he was the best mayor we ever had and he said, 'I'm probably the only mayor you ever had!'" Thanks, Giuliani, you created "Mindy Meyer 4 Senate!"
Meyer complained about Parker, "He has been in office for 10 years and he prides himself on the changes he made for NYC water. I think it's pretty sad. He should have advocated more for womens rights." Keep in mind that Meyer, an Orthodox Jew, has stated that she's pro-life (plus she also would have voted against gay marriage). On her website, her stance on abortion begins "Mindy believes women today have choices" but ends with "In addition, there are many couples who are longing to provide a warm and loving home for these children through adoption."
As for her MySpace-like website, Meyer points out, "I was trying to attract the attention of my young constituents in the district to show them the politics can be exciting and I decided to channel my adventurous side into my website and to show people... to get them interested in politics. 've been on a lot of websites doing research. I've been on a lot of the senators' websites of the 50 states from Wyoming to Colorado and I literally fall asleep."
Also, for some leopard-printed LOLZ, here's more from Paybarah's Capital story, which suggests she's been looking at more websites than brushing up on... the state government:
I asked her about Andrew Cuomo, who has in many ways been a friend to the Republican majority in the State Senate. She seemed unsure, at one point telling me, "Honestly, I'm not really familiar with him." I said he was the governor. Meyer later said, "I'm not familiar with him in particular, his issues and, you know, and everything about him. You're asking me how I would work with him?" Yes, I said. "Yeah, so, I guess I would have to see if I was elected," she said.
And, for further LOLZ, try the Mindy Meyer Loves Pink Tumblr |
Dear Razorback Fans,
I have a lot to be thankful for during this Thanksgiving season.
This time last year, I was rehabbing my neck after getting injured playing against Auburn and that was a lot to go through. At that point, I thought I would never get to play football again and lead a normal life.
To be where I am right now – leading the SEC in rushing yards, competing for the chance to get the rushing title and being around my teammates – is a blessing and it’s something I don’t take for granted.
My faith in God has helped me tremendously during the past year. I’m a spiritual person thanks to my mom who ministers on top of her job and my grandfather, who is a pastor.
When I was laying down on the field at Razorback Stadium during the Auburn game last November, I couldn’t control my arms. At that point, I was starting to panic. I didn’t know how bad it was going to be after I saw how scared my mom and dad were that day.
Everything happened so quickly – the ambulance ride, getting X-rays, being inside the MRI machine and getting rushed into surgery – it was a weird situation.
It’s crazy to think about it now because it was only a year ago. I remember watching TV with my family in my hospital room after surgery and I was trying to look around and I could barely turn my head. I didn’t know what my future would be like. I wasn’t even thinking about football; I wanted to be a normal kid again. I was thinking about class and being my usual self because at that point I was in a wheelchair and it was tough. |
News
Important and complex systems, from the global financial market to groups of friends, may be more controllable than they appear
We don’t often think of them in these terms, but our brains, global financial markets and groups of friends are all examples of different kinds of complex networks or systems. And unlike the kind of system that exists in your car that has been intentionally engineered for humans to use, these systems are convoluted and not obvious how to control. Economic collapse, disease, and miserable dinner parties may result from a breakdown in such systems, which is why researchers have recently being putting so much energy into trying to discover how best to control these large and important systems.
But now two brothers, Profs. Justin and Derek Ruths, from Singapore University of Technology and Design and McGill University respectively, have suggested, in an article published in Science, that all complex systems, whether they are found in the body, in international finance, or in social situations, actually fall into just three basic categories, in terms of how they can be controlled.
They reached this conclusion by surveying the inputs and outputs and the critical control points in a wide range of systems that appear to function in completely different ways. (The critical control points are the parts of a system that you have to control in order to make it do whatever you want - not dissimilar to the strings you use to control a puppet).
“When controlling a cell in the body, for example, these control points might correspond to proteins that we can regulate using specific drugs,” said Justin Ruths. “But in the case of a national or international economic system, the critical control points could be certain companies whose financial activity needs to be directly regulated.”
One grouping, for example, put organizational hierarchies, gene regulation, and human purchasing behaviour together, in part because in each, it is hard to control individual parts of the system in isolation. Another grouping includes social networks such as groups of friends (whether virtual or real), and neural networks (in the brain), where the systems allow for relatively independent behaviour. The final group includes things like food systems, electrical circuits and the internet, all of which function basically as closed systems where resources circulate internally.
Referring to these groupings, Derek Ruths commented, “While our framework does provide insights into the nature of control in these systems, we’re also intrigued by what these groupings tell us about how very different parts of the world share deep and fundamental attributes in common – which may help unify our understanding of complexity and of control.”
“What we really want people to take away from the research at this point is that we can control these complex and important systems in the same way that we can control a car,” says Justin Ruths. “And that our work is giving us insight into which parts of the system we need to control and why. Ultimately, at this point we have developed some new theory that helps to advance the field in important ways, but it may still be another five to ten years before we see how this will play out in concrete terms.”
To read the full paper, ‘Control Profiles of Complex Networks’ in Science by Justin and Derek Ruths: http://www.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/science.1242063
To contact the researcher directly: derek.ruths [at] mcgill.ca |
Simultaneous Xcode 7 and Xcode 8 compatibility
You’re an iOS developer. You’re excited about all the great new features iOS 10 brings, and you’re eager to implement them in your app. You want to start working on it right now so that you’re ready to ship on day one. But that’s still a few months away, and until then, you have to keep shipping new versions of your app every few weeks. Does that sound like you?
Of course, you can’t use Xcode 8 to compile your shipping app — it wouldn’t pass App Store validation. So you split your project into two branches, one stable, another for iOS 10 development…
And inevitably, it will suck. Branching works beautifully when merely working on a feature for a while. But try maintaining a huge branch for many months, with changes spread across the whole codebase, while the main branch also evolves, and you can brace yourself for some serious merging pains. I mean, have you ever tried to resolve .xcodeproj merge conflicts?
In this article, I will show you how to avoid branching altogether. For most apps, it should be possible to have a single project file that will compile for both iOS 9 (Xcode 7) and iOS 10 (Xcode 8). And even if you do end up branching, these tips will help you minimize the difference between your two branches, and make syncing them less painful.
Swift 2.3 and you
Let me get this straight:
We’re all excited about Swift 3. It’s awesome, and if you’re reading this article, you shouldn’t be using it (yet). As great as it might be, it’s a huge source-incompatible change, much bigger than Swift 2 was a year ago. And if you have any Swift dependencies, they too need to upgrade to Swift 3 before your app can.
The great news is that, for the first time ever, Xcode 8 comes with two versions of Swift: 2.3 and 3.0.
In case you missed the announcement, Swift 2.3 is the same language as Swift 2.2 in Xcode 7, but with some minor API changes (more on those later).
So! To maintain simultaneous compatibility, we’ll be using Swift 2.3.
Xcode settings
But that much is likely obvious to you. Now let me show you how to actually configure your Xcode project so that it runs on both versions.
Swift version
To begin, open your project in Xcode 7. Go to project settings, open the Build settings tab, and click the “+” to add a User-Defined Setting:
“SWIFT_VERSION” = “2.3”
This option is new to Xcode 8, so while it will cause it to use Swift 2.3, Xcode 7 (which doesn’t actually have Swift 2.3) just ignores it completely and keeps building with Swift 2.2.
Framework provisioning
Xcode 8 makes some changes in how Framework provisioning works — they will continue to compile as-is for the simulator, but will fail to build for a device.
To fix this, go through Build Settings for all your Framework targets and add this option, like we did with SWIFT_VERSION :
“PROVISIONING_PROFILE_SPECIFIER” = “ABCDEFGHIJ/“
Be sure to replace “ABCDEFGHIJ” with your Team ID (you can find it in Apple Developer Portal), and keep the forward slash at the end.
This essentially tells Xcode 8 “hey, I’m from this team, you take care of codesign, okay?”. And again, Xcode 7 will just ignore it, so you’re safe.
Interface Builder
Go through all of your .xib and .storyboard files, open the right sidebar, go to the first (File inspector) tab, and find the “Opens in” setting.
It will most likely say “Default (7.0)”. Change it to “Xcode 7.0”. This will ensure that even if you touch the file in Xcode 8, it will only make changes that are backwards-compatible with Xcode 7.
I still suggest to be very careful about changing XIBs with Xcode 8. It will add metadata about the Xcode version (I can’t guarantee that this is stripped when you upload to App Store), and will sometimes try to revert the file to Xcode 8-only format (this is a bug). When possible, avoid touching interface files from Xcode 8, and when you have to, carefully review the diff, and only commit the lines you need.
SDK version
Make sure that your project and all its targets have the “Base SDK” build setting set to “Latest iOS”. (This will almost surely be true, but worth double-checking.) This way, Xcode 7 will compile for iOS 9, but you can open the same project in Xcode 8 and work on iOS 10 features.
CocoaPods settings
If you’re using CocoaPods, you also have to update the Pods project to have the right Swift and provisioning settings.
But instead of doing this manually, add this post-install hook to your Podfile :
post_install do | installer | installer . pods_project . build_configurations . each do | config | # Configure Pod targets for Xcode 8 compatibility config . build_settings [ 'SWIFT_VERSION' ] = '2.3' config . build_settings [ 'PROVISIONING_PROFILE_SPECIFIER' ] = 'ABCDEFGHIJ/' config . build_settings [ 'ALWAYS_EMBED_SWIFT_STANDARD_LIBRARIES' ] = 'NO' end end
Again, be sure to replace ABCDEFGHIJ with your Team ID. And then run pod install to regenerate the Pods project.
(If you find that a Pod is incompatible with Swift 2.3, and you need to pull it from a different branch for Xcode 8, Igor Palaguta wrote in to suggest a solution.)
Open in Xcode 8
Alright, it’s time: open the project with Xcode 8. The first time you do so, you will be bombarded with a lot of requests.
Xcode will urge you to upgrade to the new Swift. Decline.
Xcode will also suggest to update the project to “recommended settings”. Ignore this as well.
Remember, we already set up the project so it compiles on both versions. For now, it’s best to change as little as possible to keep simultaneous compatibility. And more importantly, we don’t want the .xcodeproj to contain any metadata about Xcode 8 while we use the same file to ship to the App Store.
Dealing with Swift 2.3 differences
Like I said before, Swift 2.3 is the same language as Swift 2.2. However, the iOS 10 SDK frameworks have updated their Swift annotations. I’m not talking about the Grand Renaming (that only applies to Swift 3) — still, the names, types, and optionality of many APIs are slightly different.
Conditional compilation
In case you missed it, Swift 2.2 introduced conditional compilation preprocessor macro. It’s straightforward to use:
#if swift(>=2.3) // this compiles on Xcode 8 / Swift 2.3 / iOS 10 #else // this compiles on Xcode 7 / Swift 2.2 / iOS 9 #endif
Awesome! One file, no branching, simultaneous compatibility on two versions of Xcode.
Two caveats you need to be aware of:
There’s no #if swift(<2.3) , only >= . To invert, you can say #if !swift(>=2.3) . (You can also use #else and #elseif , if needed.)
, only . To invert, you can say . (You can also use and , if needed.) Unlike with the C pre-processor, the code between #if and #else must be valid Swift. You can’t, for example, just change a function signature, but not its body (see the examples later for solutions)
Optionality changes
In Swift 2.3, many signatures lost their unnecessary optionality, and some (such as many properties of NSURL ) now became optional.
You could, of course, just use conditional compilation to deal with it, like:
#if swift(>=2.3) let specifier = url . resourceSpecifier ?? "" #else let specifier = url . resourceSpecifier #endif
But here’s a little helper you might find useful:
func optionalize < T > ( x : T ?) -> T ? { return x }
I know, it’s a little weird. Perhaps it will be easier to explain if you first see the result:
let specifier = optionalize ( url . resourceSpecifier ) ?? "" // works on both versions!
We’re taking advantage of Optional lifting to get rid of ugly conditional compilation at call site. See, what the optionalize() function does is it turns whatever you pass in into an Optional, unless it’s already an Optional, in which case, it just returns the argument as-is. This way, regardless if the url.resourceSpecifier is optional (Xcode 8) or not (Xcode 7), the “optionalized” version is always the same.
(To explain in more detail: in Swift, Foo can be considered a subtype of Foo? , since you can wrap any value of Foo in an Optional without loss of information. And since the compiler knows about this, it allows you to pass a non-optional in place of an optional argument — lifting Foo into Foo? .)
Typealiasing out signature changes
In Swift 2.3, a numer of functions (especially in the macOS SDK) have changed their argument types.
For example, the NSWindow initializer used to look like this:
init ( contentRect : NSRect , styleMask : Int , backing : NSBackingStoreType , defer : Bool )
And now looks like this:
init ( contentRect : NSRect , styleMask : NSWindowStyleMask , backing : NSBackingStoreType , defer : Bool )
Notice the type of styleMask . It used to be a loosely-typed Int (with the options imported as global constants), but in Xcode 8, it’s imported as a proper OptionSetType .
Unfortunately you can’t conditionally compile two versions of the signature with the same body block. But don’t worry, conditionaly-compiled type aliases come to rescue!
#if !swift(>=2.3) typealias NSWindowStyleMask = Int #endif
Now you can use NSWindowStyleMask in the signature, as you would with Swift 2.3. And on Swift 2.2, where the type doesn’t exist, NSWindowStyleMask is just an alias for Int , so the type checker stays happy.
Informal vs formal protocols
Swift 2.3 changed some previously informal protocols to formal protocols.
For example, to be a CALayer delegate, you just had to descend from NSObject , no need to declare conformance to CALayerDelegate . Indeed, the protocol didn’t even exist in Xcode 7. But it does now.
Again, the intuitive solution of conditionally compiling the class declaration line won’t work. But you can solve this by declaring your own dummy protocol on Swift 2.2, like so:
#if !swift(>=2.3) private protocol CALayerDelegate {} #endif class MyView : NSView , CALayerDelegate { . . . }
(Joe Groff points out that you can also typealias CALayerDelegate to Any — same result, but no overhead.)
Building iOS 10 features
By this point, your project should be able to compile on both Xcode 7 and Xcode 8 without any branching necessary. Awesome!
It’s time to actually build iOS 10 features now, and with all of the tips and tricks described above, this should be fairly straightforward. Still, here are some things you need to be aware of:
Just using @available(iOS 10, *) and if #available(iOS 10, *) is not enough. First of all, it’s safer not to compile any iOS 10 code in your shipping app. But more crucially, while the compiler requires these checks to ensure safe API usage, it still needs to be aware that an API exists. If you mention any method or type that doesn’t exist in iOS 9 SDK, the code won’t compile on Xcode 7. Therefore, you need to wrap all of your iOS 10-specific code in #if swift(>=2.3) (You can safely assume Swift 2.3 and iOS 10 are equivalent for now). Often times, you’ll need both conditional compilation (so that you don’t compile unavailable code on Xcode 7) and @available / #available (to pass safety checks on Xcode 8). When you’re working on an iOS 10-specific feature, it’s easiest to extract all the relevant code into separate files — this way you can just wrap the whole contents of a file in a #if swift… check. (The file might still touch the compiler on Xcode 7, but all of its contents will be ignored.)
App extensions
But the thing is, if you’re working on iOS 10, you probably want to make one of those new extensions for your app, not merely add more code to the app itself.
That’s tricky. We can conditionally compile our code, but there’s no such thing as a “conditional target”.
The good news is that Xcode 7 won’t complain about those targets as long as it doesn’t have to actually compile them. (Yes, it might issue a warning that the project contains a target configured to deploy on a higher version of iOS than the base SDK, but that’s not a big deal.)
So here’s the idea: keep the target and its code everywhere, but conditionally remove it from the “Target Dependencies” and “Embed App Extensions” build phases of the app target.
How to do this? The best approach I came up with is to have the app extension disabled from build by default for Xcode 7 compatibility. And only while you’re working with Xcode 8, re-add the extensions temporarily, but never actually commit the change.
If doing this manually sounds fickle (not to mention incompatible with CI and automated builds), don’t worry, I made a script for you!
To install it:
sudo gem install configure_extensions
Before comitting any changes in the Xcode project, remove iOS 10-only app extensions from the app target:
configure_extensions remove MyApp.xcodeproj MyAppTarget NotificationsUI Intents
And to work with Xcode 8, add them back:
configure_extensions add MyApp.xcodeproj MyAppTarget NotificationsUI Intents
You can put this your script/ , use it with Xcode build pre-actions, with Git pre-commit hooks, or integrate it with your CI or automated build system. (More info about the tool on GitHub)
One final note about iOS 10 app extensions: Xcode templates for those will generate Swift 3, not Swift 2.3 code. This won’t actually work, so make sure to set the app extension’s “Use Legacy Swift Language Version” build setting to “Yes”, and rewrite the code to Swift 2.3.
In September
Once September hits and iOS 10 is out, it’s time to drop Xcode 7 support and clean up your project!
I made a little checklist for you (be sure to bookmark it for future reference):
Remove any Swift 2.2 code left over and the unnecessary #if swift(>=2.3) checks
checks Remove any transition hacks, such as uses of optionalize() , temporary typealiases, or dummy protocols
, temporary typealiases, or dummy protocols Remove uses of the configure_extensions script, and commit the project settings with new app extensions enabled
script, and commit the project settings with new app extensions enabled Update CocoaPods, if you use it, and remove the post_install hook we’ve added from your Podfile (it will almost surely not be necessary by September)
hook we’ve added from your (it will almost surely not be necessary by September) Update to recommended Xcode project settings (select project in the sidebar, then in the menu: Editor → Validate Settings…)
Consider upgrading your provisioning settings to use the new PROVISIONING_PROFILE_SPECIFIER
Revert all .xib and .storyboard files to the “Opens in: Latest Xcode (8.0)” setting
and files to the “Opens in: Latest Xcode (8.0)” setting Make sure all of the Swift libraries you depend on have updated to Swift 3. If not, consider contributing the Swift 3 port yourself.
When all of the above is ready, you can upgrade your app to Swift 3! Go to Edit → Convert → To Current Swift Syntax…, select all of your targets (remember, you need to convert everything at once), review the diff, test, and commit!
If you haven’t done so already, consider removing support for iOS 8 — this way you can get rid of more @available checks and other conditional code.
Good luck! |
It was a wild and woolly debate, with lots of arguments worth commenting on and exchanges worth evaluating. But as is sometimes the case in these debates, only one statement really mattered.
Asked to defend his 2008 comment that George W. Bush should have been impeached, Donald Trump said: "They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none, and they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction."
Interviewers should press Trump on this: What evidence does Trump have that George W. Bush and his top advisers knowingly lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? How many other government officials does Trump believe were in on the deception? What does Trump believe would have been the point of such a lie, since the truth would soon come out?
The other candidates should be challenged: Given Trump's lie that Bush and other American officials knew there were no weapons of mass destruction, how could you support Donald Trump if he were to become the Republican nominee?
And Republican primary voters need to be asked: You may want to send a message. You may be frustrated with politics as usual. You may agree with Donald Trump on some issues. But can you conscientiously support a man who is willing to say something so irresponsible about something so serious, for the presidency of the United States? |
If you're reading this, you probably follow the news. So you've probably heard of the latest iteration of the "crisis at the border": tens of thousands of children, many of them unaccompanied by an adult, crossing the desert from Mexico into the United States, where they surrender to the Border Patrol in hope of being allowed to remain here permanently. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's detention and hearing system has been overwhelmed by the surge of children and, in some cases, their parents. The Obama Administration has asked Congress to approve new funding to speed up processing and deportations of these illegal immigrants.
Even if you've followed this story closely, you probably haven't heard the depressing backstory — the reason so many Central Americans are sending their children on a dangerous thousand-mile journey up the spine of Mexico, where they ride atop freight trains, endure shakedowns by corrupt police and face rapists, bandits and other predators. (For a sense of what it's like, check out the excellent 2004 film "Maria Full of Grace.")
NPR and other mainstream news outlets are parroting the White House, which blames unscrupulous "coyotes" (human smugglers) for "lying to parents, telling them that if they put their kids in the hands of traffickers and get to the United States that they will be able to stay." True: the coyotes are saying that in order to gin up business. Also true: U.S. law has changed, and many of these kids have a strong legal case for asylum. Unfortunately, U.S. officials are ignoring the law.
The sad truth is that this "crisis at the border" is yet another example of "blowback."
Blowback is an unintended negative consequence of U.S. political, military and/or economic intervention overseas — when something we did in the past comes back to bite us in the ass. 9/11 is the classic example; arming and funding radical Islamists in the Middle East and South Asia who were less grateful for our help than angry at the U.S.' simultaneous backing for oppressive governments (The House of Saud, Saddam, Assad, etc.) in the region.
More recent cases include U.S. support for Islamist insurgents in Libya and Syria, which destabilized both countries and led to the murders of U.S. consular officials in Benghazi, and the rise of ISIS, the guerilla army that imperils the U.S.-backed Maliki regime in Baghdad, respectively.
Confusing the issue for casual American news consumers is that the current border crisis doesn't involve the usual Mexicans traveling north in search of work. Instead, we're talking about people from Central American nations devastated by a century of American colonialism and imperialism, much of that intervention surprisingly recent. Central American refugees are merely transiting through Mexico.
"The unaccompanied children crossing the border into the United States are leaving behind mainly three Central American countries, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. The first two are among the world's most violent and all three have deep poverty, according to a Pew Research report based on Department of Homeland Security (DHS) information," reports NBC News. "El Salvador ranked second in terms of homicides in Latin America in 2011, and it is still high on the list. Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador are among the poorest nations in Latin America. Thirty percent of Hondurans, 17 percent of Salvadorans and 26 percent of Guatemalans live on less than $2 a day."
The fact that Honduras is the biggest source of the exodus jumped out at me. That's because, in 2009, the United States government — under President Obama — tacitly supported a military coup that overthrew the democratically elected president of Honduras. "Washington has a very close relationship with the Honduran military, which goes back decades," The Guardian noted at the time. "During the 1980s, the US used bases in Honduras to train and arm the Contras, Nicaraguan paramilitaries who became known for their atrocities in their war against the Sandinista government in neighbouring Nicaragua."
Honduras wasn't paradise under President Manuel Zelaya. Since the coup, however, the country has entered a downward death spiral of drug-related bloodshed and political revenge killings that crashed the economy, brought an end to law, order and civil society, and now has some analysts calling it a "failed state" along the lines of Somalia and Afghanistan during the 1990s.
"Zelaya's overthrow created a vacuum in security in which military and police were now focused more on political protest, and also led to a freeze in international aid that markedly worsened socio-economic conditions," Mark Ungar, professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York, told The International Business Times. "The 2009 coup, asserts [Tulane] professor Aaron Schneider, gave the Honduran military more political and economic leverage, at the same time as the state and political elites lost their legitimacy, resources and the capacity to govern large parts of the country."
El Salvador and Guatemala, also narcostates devastated by decades of U.S. support for oppressive, corrupt right-wing dictatorships, are suffering similar conditions.
© 2014 Ted Rall |
If you did something silly today—like publicly revealing you were looking at hentai, for example—take comfort. You still did not fuck up as bad as the jobs website ZipRecruiter, which got ad time on an alt-right podcast this week, apparently by accident.
As first noted on Reddit, the advertisement was read on Wednesday’s episode of The Daily Shoah, a podcast on the white nationalist website The Right Stuff. Among other odious features, the site maintains a “lexicon” page defining some of The Right Stuff’s most used terms, like “cuck” (“a decent substitute for ‘faggot’”), “Dindu Nuffins” (“what it sounds like when a Basketball American attempts to say the phrase ‘He didn’t do nothing!’”), and “Niggertech” (“technology built not to improve lives, but to maintain mediocre ones”). “Shoah” itself is a Hebrew term for the Holocaust.
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Nasty stuff! And yet, there the ad was, read out loud about 49 minutes into a recent episode of The Daily Shoah:
Well listen, these business owners having these problems, I mean... maybe if they had a good service available to them like, uh, ZipRecruiter, they, they wouldn’t, uh, run into these issues. They’d be able to find the help they need without any of these weird, these weird autistic arguments and things, so, you know.
[...] Are you hiring? Do you know where to post your job, find the best candidates? With ZipRecruiter, you can post your job to 100+ job sites with just one click, then their powerful technology efficiently matches the right people to your job, better than anyone else. That’s why ZipRecruiter is different. Unlike other job sites, ZipRecruiter doesn’t depend on candidates finding you, it finds them. In fact, it finds over 80 percent of jobs posted on ZipRecruiter get a qualified candidate in just 24 hours. No juggling emails or calls to your office. Simply screen, rate, and manage candidates all in one place with ZipRecruiter’s easy-to-use dashboard. Find out today why ZipRecruiter has been used by businesses of all sizes to find the most qualified job candidates, with immediate results, and now our listeners can post jobs on ZipRecruiter for free, that’s right, free, just go to ZipRecruiter.com/TRS, that’s ZipRecruiter.com/TRS, one more time, try it for free, ZipRecruiter.com/TRS.
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As late as Thursday afternoon, the promo page was still active, displaying the message “Welcome TRS RADIO Listeners!” when visitors entered the URL. After Gizmodo contacted ZipRecruiter for this story, the page was removed.
So how did this happen? Well, according to ZipRecruiter’s ad buyer, Ad Results Media, they didn’t mean to put ads on that TRS. The spot was supposed to air on TRS Radio, a sports podcast about triathlons.
In a statement to Gizmodo, a partner at at Ad Results Media provided this account of the error:
Last month Ad Results Media placed an advertising buy for a sports podcast for one of our clients. Unfortunately, we ended up contacting and booking this particular podcast that had the same name (TRS) as the sporting podcast we intended to book. This is an isolated incident where we bought ad time on the wrong podcast out of two that had the same name. To be clear – our client did not request or approve this podcast and it has been canceled effective immediately. In no way did we intend to book this particular podcast and in no way do we condone or support their content as an organization or on behalf of any of our clients. We take full responsibility for this isolated incident.
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In a follow-up phone conversation, the partner said the mistake “went under the radar and we all missed it,” attributing the mistake to a “junior ad buyer” who contacted the wrong website after making a Google search. He also said The Right Stuff did not receive any payment for the ad. A ZipRecruiter representative told Gizmodo that no one signed up using the promo code.
Asked for comment by Gizmodo, The Right Stuff made light of the incident in a series of sarcastic, anti-Semitic emails.
“I can imagine one thinking it’s odd that [ZipRecruiter executives] Ian Siegel and David Travers would want to tacitly support a political show so far and away from what they believe in as individuals,” wrote Daily Shoah host Jesse Dunstan. “I’m proud to work with them.”
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Presumably, the feeling is not mutual. |
H ow will history regard Stephen Harper? My guess is that he'll be seen as a prime minister who transformed Canada's view of itself.
Not necessarily through concrete reforms. While Harper's Conservative minority government has made important legislative changes, such as slashing corporate taxes, many of these were continuations of schemes started by previous Liberal regimes.
Rather, Harper's major accomplishment has been to redefine the terms of political debate. This unlikely figure (among Canadian prime ministers, only Mackenzie King had less charisma) has made conservatism and conservative causes respectable.
Ten years ago, Canada was a country that prided itself on pacifism, deference to law and its status in the world as a middle power. It did not matter that these characteristics were often more mythic than real. That's how we saw ourselves. We were the peaceable kingdom, the honest broker.
Today, Canada is a nation proudly at war, headed by a government that not only disregards laws (its persistent refusal to enforce gun registration being the most obvious example) but actively takes on the courts – most recently in its decision to limit the discretion of judges in sentencing.
In international affairs, we no longer even pretend to speak with an independent voice but instead openly and fully ally ourselves with the U.S. on virtually every front – from unequivocal support for Israel to unequivocal opposition to Iran.
Indeed, at times, Harper seems more in tune with the elemental thrust of American foreign policy than U.S. President Barack Obama. Obama went through a brief period of attempted even-handedness in the Middle East, before returning to the pro-Israeli position of his predecessor George W. Bush. The current president's initial and markedly un-Bushian overtures to Iran promise to follow the same route. Harper, by contrast, hasn't bothered with the detours.
Perhaps nothing exemplifies the death of the middle power period more than Harper's recent trip to India. Ten years ago, Canada was an ardent advocate of nuclear disarmament and an equally ardent supporter of international rules aimed at isolating nations, like India, that didn't play along.
Ottawa also had to live down the embarrassing fact that in 1974 India used Canadian technology to secretly and illegally construct its first nuclear bomb.
Then, last year, Canada joined the U.S. to quietly change the rules governing nuclear exports to India. In his trip to New Delhi this week, Harper spent much time trying to sell the Indians both Canadian uranium and Canadian nuclear technology.
"We are not living in the 1970s," he said there by way of explanation. "We are living in 2009."
It's perhaps telling that this about-face on what had been a key Canadian foreign policy plank earned the prime minister virtually no criticism from the public, opposition parties or media.
But Harper's key success in the ideological remoulding of Canada has been his ability to change the country's perception of soldiering.
While it was former prime minister Paul Martin who first authorized Canada's deadly military involvement in Kandahar, his then Liberal government tended to downplay the conflict.
Not so Harper. Aided by former top general Rick Hillier, as well as the agreeably acquiescent media, he has pounded the drums of military nationalism, reminding Canadians of their proud traditions in war.
At the same time, he has drawn on one of the country's most enduring mythic beliefs – that of Canada as northern giant – to win support for military spending technically aimed at defending Canada's Arctic sovereignty.
It matters little that Ottawa is eagerly co-operating with the U.S., the one Arctic country that actually threatens Canada's sovereignty claims (the two nations dispute both ownership of the Northwest Passage and key undersea oil reserves).
Nor does it matter that Harper's real interest in the Arctic appears to lie in its gas and mineral reserves.
What matters is that he has been able to successfully tap Canada's romantic view of itself.
To credit Harper with single-handedly inventing a new Canadian sensibility would be to exaggerate. This is a country of contradictory and often internally inconsistent views. We are both warlike and peaceable, deferential to authority but also suspicious.
We both love and hate the U.S., marrying resentment with envy and genuine affection with anger at being ignored.
For years, small l liberals – in both the Liberal and Conservative parties – played to one half of this complex mood. Liberal Canada was a country that, theoretically at least, prided itself on sharing and caring, tolerance and diversity. Its patriotism was muted but real. Jingos were frowned upon.
Given the realities of the post-war period, this self-image fit. For a while, Canada was truly a middle power, explaining the U.S. to the rest of the world and the rest of the world to America.
At times of stress – such as the Korean War – it was always clear whose side we'd be on. But in most years, push rarely came to shove. Canada could and did avoid both the Vietnam War and the Washington-dominated Organization of American States. We were less obsessed by Communism than the U.S. and thus more nuanced in our approach to Cuba, China and the old Soviet Union.
We relished our image as a peacemaker and, in the ongoing disputes between Israel and the Palestinians, cleaved to middle-of-the-road positions staked out by the United Nations.
Even before the end of the Cold War, that middle power role was beginning to erode (former prime minister Pierre Trudeau's fruitless 1984 peace mission across eastern Europe marked the end of the honest broker period).
By the early '90s, North American free trade arrangements had made Canada's economic dependence on the U.S. more visible and direct – which is why Ottawa, even under Liberal governments, began to hew more closely to Washington's line.
Under Brian Mulroney's Conservatives, we joined the OAS. Under Martin's Liberals, we aligned ourselves more closely with the U.S. position on Israel.
Similarly, it was a Liberal government that implemented the new conservative domestic agenda – lowering taxes on the wealthy, privatizing crown corporations, cutting social services to the poor, eliminating health and safety rules.
But as the Liberals moved farther to the right, they always exuded a slight sense of embarrassment. Rhetorically, the party insisted it hadn't changed even when the evidence showed otherwise
With Harper, there is less confusion. While he is not uniquely responsible for all the changes in Canadian political life, he articulates them better than his political opponents.
He is mining the Canadian psyche to create a new language of politics. The old language emphasized fairness in foreign affairs (don't take sides in the Middle East), independence (don't always agree with the U.S.) and tolerance (make adjustments for immigrants).
The new language emphasizes morality in foreign affairs (side with Israel); loyalty (always agree with the U.S.) and responsibility (immigrants should adjust to us).
Earlier this week, my colleague Chantal Hebert noted in passing that Canadians shouldn't doubt Harper's capacity to bring about transformative change. Given that language is important, she was quite right.
Thomas Walkom's column appears Wednesday and Saturday. |
By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI JUNE 21, 2016
MAGNANVILLE, France — The first time Larossi Abballa appeared on the radar of French terrorism investigators, the only act of violence they could pin on him was killing bunnies.
He had joined a small group of men, all bent on waging jihad, on a trip to a snowy forest in northern France five years ago, when he was 19. There, they videotaped themselves slaughtering the rabbits, bought so the men could grow used to the feel of killing.
When he and seven others were later arrested, the authorities found that several of the men had saved the video of the slaughter on their cellphones, alongside footage of soldiers being beheaded, according to French court records. Mr. Abballa was eventually convicted on a terrorism charge and spent more than two years in prison.
In hindsight, it is not hard to see how that first act of brutality foreshadowed what happened last week: Armed with a knife, Mr. Abballa attacked a couple in northern France in the name of the Islamic State and left them to bleed to death.
Across Europe and the United States, law enforcement officials are struggling to reckon with attackers like Mr. Abballa and Omar Mateen, whose shooting rampage this month at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., left 49 dead. They are men who clearly seemed to be building toward violent acts, and whose names had surfaced in terrorism investigations, but who avoided crossing legal lines that could tip off the authorities until it was too late.
With thousands of terrorism surveillance cases running at any given time, the European authorities say they are swamped and are in the difficult position of trying to head off attacks of which the only forewarning is often in the form of what someone thinks or what they are overheard saying. …
As the most junior member of the group, Mr. Abballa was not chosen to go, and that frustrated him. “I’m thirsty for blood, Allah is my witness,” he wrote in an email intercepted by the authorities. In another, he begged, “Please let me go, pls, pls, pls.”
When it appeared that he would not be sent to Pakistan, he turned his rage toward France, writing on Feb. 19, 2011, “With Allah’s will, we will find a way to raise the flag here.” A week letter, he wrote that his cell would “wipe away the infidels.” …
Considered the group’s least influential member, Mr. Abballa spent more than two years in prison and was released in 2013. He was kept under surveillance until the end of 2015. …
“We are in fact drowning in intelligence,” said Alain Bauer, a professor of criminology at the National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts in Paris.
He and others said there were structural problems, including the fact that France’s so-called S List, a database of people believed to have been radicalized, has over 10,000 names and is not ranked according to threat level.
Though most on the list never commit violence, others have now been responsible for gruesome headlines. Eight of the 10 men who staged the deadliest European terrorist attack in over a decade — the Paris killings on Nov. 13 — were on the S List and several had spent time behind bars, yet were able to sneak back into France and Belgium from Syria. Another suspect on the list, Amedy Coulibaly, had also been imprisoned on a terrorism conviction. Eight months after his electronic bracelet was removed by the French authorities, he killed a police officer and opened fire in a kosher supermarket in Paris in January 2015, leaving four more people dead in the Islamic State’s name. …
After Mr. Abballa killed the couple in Magnanville, France, last week, a deputy in Parliament, Éric Ciotti, introduced a bill creating the status of “administrative detention” for those representing a security threat. … |
After months of delay, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has unveiled an online educational site for children. The bureau's "Don't Be A Puppet: Pull Back the Curtain on Violent Extremism" program is designed to sway kids from falling prey to violent extremists.
It's a great concept, as we often hear of one prosecution after another of somebody in the US being apprehended after wanting to join ISIS and succumbing to the terror group's online recruitment tactics.
The site, which surprisingly lauds the First Amendment, teaches kids about propaganda, symbols, and "groupthink." It talks about "what is violent extremism" and, among other things, how violent extremists make contact.
But here's where things go awry: On the site, which debuted days ago, there's a free video game called The Slippery Slope to Violent Extremism.
It basically looks like a prequel to the world's first-ever video game. The player uses the left- and right-arrow computer keys to move a running goat to avoid blocks. The blocks apparently represent violent extremists. Hit the block, and the goat explodes. Here's the game's instructions:
Use the left and right arrow keys on your keyboard to move the goat side to side. Avoid the blocks, cross each finish line, and wait for the distorted logic text to appear before continuing. Use the spacebar to start over if you crash. The game will end after you finish all six levels or use up all of your attempts (shown in the upper right corner of game).
That "distorted logic text," however, appears to be taken right out of the playbook of any US politician inciting violence or war. There are phrases like "We must defend our traditions;" "The enemy is responsible for this injustice;" and "Our Violent Actions will result in a better future."
This is how the FBI describes the site:
The site doesn’t refute violent extremist beliefs point by point or discuss matters of faith or politics. Instead, it makes teens aware of the destructive reality of various forms of violent extremism, including hateful attacks based on race, religion, or other factors. Through its Don’t Be a Puppet theme, the program encourages teens to think for themselves and display a healthy skepticism if they come across anyone who appears to be advocating extremist violence.
"We want teens to apply their critical thinking skills to this issue just like they would to any subject in school,” said Jonathan Cox, an FBI spokesman. "We’re saying, ‘Don’t be a puppet,’—in other words, don’t just blindly accept what violent extremists tell you or you could end up being controlled and manipulated by people who want you to hurt or kill innocent people."
The site was to have gone live in November, but it was reworked after members of the public who got a preview said it focused too much on Islamic extremism. |
By Bridget Kendall
BBC diplomatic correspondent
Vladimir Putin (L) and Dmitri Medvedev must agree policy decisions Getting to the bottom of the shadowy depths of Kremlin decision-making is tricky. Machiavellian power struggles, dark paranoia of security chiefs and long fingers of corruption can turn seemingly rational and transparent explanations inside out. But even public signals are instructive, and in the wake of the Georgia crisis, Russia's leadership is taking stock and has several messages for the West. The first key question about Russia is - who is really in charge? The standard answer is President Medvedev as Commander in Chief. He, and only he, ordered Russian troops across the border to hit back when Georgia attacked on South Ossetia. But presidential power is now the tip of an iceberg. What murky currents swirl beneath the surface is less clear. Dmitry Medvedev says he was caught unawares and admits his relative inexperience. "I was on holiday on the Volga when the defence minister called," he said at a conference of the so-called 'Valdai Club' of foreign academics and journalists who specialise in Russia. "I'll never forget that night, knowing the consequences there would be when I gave the order to return fire especially when I'd only been president for 95 days," he said. But what about Russia's ex-president, now his prime minister, who was also at the conference? "However much authority I have, whoever I may be talking to, none of the troops or tanks would have moved an inch until President Medvedev's order," was Vladimir Putin's attempt to deny his own importance when we asked about his role, thereby indicating that his clout and involvement were considerable. 1998 to present: BBC diplomatic correspondent 1994-98: Washington correspondent 1989-94: Moscow correspondent
More about Bridget What is more, at the outset of the crisis, when Mr Putin was in Beijing for the opening of the Olympic Games, he was already thinking about Russia moving swiftly to recognise the two enclaves at the heart of the crisis. He had taken the time, he told us, to inform the Chinese leadership that Russia would understand if Beijing chose not to react. Double act It begs the question - who is really driving policy, the president or the prime minister? The choreography and timing of our audiences with both were instructive. A pair of three-hour meetings, two elegant luncheon settings, two declarative statements for Russian TV cameras at the start, and even two carefully informal blue suits with matching ties. All to signal, perhaps, that their status is equal - a dual leadership exercising power in tandem. I never thought I'd need to use harsh rhetoric when I began this job. But there are some moments as president when you are left with no choice
Russian President, Dmitri Medvedev Indeed one senior government official made a point of emphasizing the duality, constantly referring to them in the same breath. Policy decisions had to be cleared with both, he said. And what was wrong with that? A double act surely strengthened, not muddled governance, requiring a green light from two instead of one. We met Mr Putin first. Almost the entire discussion was devoted to foreign policy. He was burning to give his point of view. He seemed supremely confident, engaged and in charge. His anger at the way he felt Russia had been treated in recent years blazed through, as though it was his own personal animosity which is now firing and fuelling current policy. It was hard to remember he was no longer president. Economic policy, supposedly at the heart of his new job as prime minister, came up sporadically and he admitted he is still mastering his new brief. When he did comment directly on Dmitry Medvedev, the impression he left was curious. Mr Putin seemed to want to play up the differences between them, as though suggesting a "good cop, bad cop" routine. He described himself as "conservative" and with an uncharacteristic flash of self-deprecation admitted his penchant for blunt speaking was sometimes a liability. Whereas he described Dmitry Medvedev as bright, young and highly educated, with modern and - he stressed this twice - liberal views. "He's a good lad," said Mr Putin a touch condescendingly, as though recommending his young protege to a would-be employer for a new job. The aim, it seemed, was to send a signal to the West that Dmitry Medvedev is indeed more flexible and reformist than Putin himself - and was forced to act tough because the crisis left him no option. Moral high ground So the US and its allies should understand they had made a big mistake by allowing this conflict to happen - and they would make an even bigger mistake unless they made the compromises Russia now wants. When we met Dmitry Medvedev he underscored the point. "I never thought I'd need to use harsh rhetoric when I began this job. But there are some moments as president when you are left with no choice," he said. "I very much don't want the Caucasus crisis to destroy Russian co-operation with Europe and the United States," he elaborated, and suggested he felt frustrated at his new role of "President of War". He's a good politician, I think I have a better opinion of George than most Americans
Vladimir Putin on George W Bush "A whole month has been lost on this war I'd rather have been doing other things," he said. "Yesterday when I met the defence and finance ministers, instead of talking about car and tractor production, we had to discuss where to deploy the Russian army. Priorities have had to change." So what, then, at this juncture does Russia want from the West? The first message is that the Russian government is in no mood to compromise. It insists it occupies the moral high ground in this crisis and sees no reason to give way. This was tantamount to Russia's 9/11, President Dmitry Medvedev declared to us, a defining moment in national policy and in relations with the outside world. That conviction was echoed from top to bottom in our discussions with government officials, mainstream academics and journalists, all of them insisting Russia had no choice but to respond militarily and take South Ossetia and Abkhazia under its wing. Any suspicion that Russia cunningly laid a trap that Georgia rashly walked into was dismissed as an outrageous lie. The idea that by deploying troops deep inside Georgia and unilaterally recognising the two disputed enclaves' independence Russia had gone too far was rejected out of hand. The suggestion that by invading Georgian territory, and asserting its right to redraw the map, Russia made itself look like a bully, was also thrown out. Instead President Saakashvili was blamed for triggering the conflict. The United States had nudged him into it and rashly armed and trained his men while Europeans had looked the other way. Any Western criticism to the contrary was hypocritical, given interventions in Kosovo and Iraq, and yet another example of anti-Russian hysteria and unfair stereotyping, based on prejudices left over from the Cold War. Red line Curiously both Mr Putin and President Medvedev were carefully respectful when it came to President Bush. "He's a good politician, I think I have a better opinion of George than most Americans," said Mr Putin, at the same time complaining that he had twice tried to get the US president to intervene. Instead it was Vice-President Cheney and the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, with their Soviet expertise, who were targeted as villains, suspected of fuelling anti-Russian sentiment in the US administration and egging Georgia on. "We need to get rid of stereotypes. The US president has too many Sovietologists in his entourage," observed Dmitry Medvedev caustically. Russia is keen to avoid accusations of annexing Georgian territory The second message that came through clearly was that Russia's "red line" - any move to extend Nato to Russia's borders by seeking to incorporate Georgia or Ukraine - still stands. What Russia really wants is a new discussion on European security arrangements to replace Nato with something else entirely. But short of that, attempts by the United States or Nato to rearm Georgia or to extend formal invitations to either Georgia or Ukraine to join the alliance seem likely to prompt a furious Russian response. "Russia has zones that are part of its interests. For the West to deny it is pointless and even dangerous," said President Medvedev. "It's unjust, it's humiliating, and we've had enough. It's something we are no longer prepared to endure," he said. "You have a very clear choice here. Let there be no doubt about it." What exactly Russia would do to try to prevent this further Nato enlargement was left unclear. "We'll do all we can to make sure it doesn't happen," said Mr Putin carefully, talking about Ukraine. Although on Georgia he noted Russian tanks had been within 15 kilometres of Tbilisi and could have taken the capital in four hours. Economic concerns So the hints of a threat, but not exactly - and that is interesting. Because the third message that came through was that Russia would like to think a major East-West confrontation can still be avoided. There may well be powerful forces in Russia's military and security elite, ultra nationalists who would like to see their country retreat from global integration and rely once more on internal resources - economic and military - as in Soviet days, to reclaim influence geographically and show the outside world Russia's might can no longer be ignored. Russia's stock market value has fallen by 50% since May this year But diplomatic and economic isolation does not seem to be what the Kremlin leadership currently wants to embrace. The haste with which both Mr Putin and Mr Medvedev shrugged off the notion that Russia might have to pay a price for this crisis was telling. They denied that the loss of nearly 50% of Russia's stock market value from its all time high in May had much to do with the Georgia crisis. A far more likely cause, they argued - with some justification, given what is happening on Wall Street - was the impact of global financial instability. In comparison to many other countries, they insisted, Russia's economy was in good shape - signs of capital flight were temporary. Foreign investors would be back. Russia's energy resources were needed by everyone and it had weathered economic storms before. The fact only Nicaragua had joined Russia in recognising Abkhazia and South Ossetia was also dismissed as unimportant, even if the glaring lack of overt diplomatic support for Russia's actions appears to be a sensitive point. When the leader of South Ossetia told us he intended to follow up independence by amalgamating his tiny republic with North Ossetia and becoming part of the Russian Federation, he was hurriedly slapped down. Within hours he had issued a retraction. Outright annexation by Russia of what is, after all, legally speaking Georgian territory is an accusation Moscow seems anxious to avoid. Yes, Russia wants to claim that the ball is now firmly in the court of the US and its allies - that it is up to them, not Russia, to decide how this geopolitical crisis plays out. But behind all the moral outrage, I felt there was also a nervousness, a worry that if Russia's bluff is called and further tensions with the West ensue, it might force a stand-off from which neither side could back down. "There is a chill in the air and a loss of trust," said Dmitry Medvedev, "but I don't think this is a corner turn that will lead to a long confrontation. This is not what we want. And it's not what you want either."
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Rep. Maxine Waters, the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, called Thursday for the bank Wells Fargo to be broken up.
The Californian issued the call at a hearing to investigate the San Francisco-based company's scandal involving millions of fake accounts created for customers who didn't ask for them, in front of Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf.
"I have come to the conclusion that Wells Fargo should be broken up," Waters said as the grilling of Stumpf neared the four-hour mark. "It's too big to manage."
Waters did not specify how the bank should be broken up, but said that she would be working with members of the committee to do so, referring specifically to Republicans and committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling.
"I'm moving forward to break up Wells Fargo," she told them.
Other Democrats have called for breaking up Wells Fargo, including members of the panel who questioned Stumpf on Thursday.
For the top-ranking member on the panel with oversight of the industry and of regulators, however, a commitment to breaking up the bank is a new factor. |
Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the fired engineer's comments were not OK. Thomson Reuters James Damore, the Google engineer who was fired Monday for writing a controversial memo about diversity, has filed a complaint with federal labor officials.
The complaint against Google was filed on Monday according to the National Labor Relations Board website. While the site does not list Damore's name alongside the complaint, it lists the Paul Hastings LLP as the law firm representing Google.
A Paul Hastings representative confirmed that the firm was representing Google in the Damore case but declined to provide further comment.
It's not clear exactly what the complaint says, as the actual filing is not yet available online (and the NLRB site notes that the document may need to be redacted). The only specific information on the NLRB site about the nature of the complaint is the general classification for the type of allegation involved: "Coercive Statements (Threats, Promises of Benefits, etc.)"
The filing is not a complete surprise: Damore told Reuters and The New York Times on Monday night that he planned to file an NLRB complaint accusing Google's management of trying to silence him. Damore was fired from Google on Monday for violating the company's code of conduct.
Damore's 10-page manifesto, which went viral over the weekend and stirred passions across the political spectrum, accused Google of alienating conservatives at the company and attributed Google's lack of gender diversity to biological differences between men and women.
Damore did not respond to several emails requesting comment on Tuesday. Google has declined to comment on the situation beyond the memo CEO Sundar Pichai sent employees Monday night, in which he called some of Damore's statements "not OK." |
Overview Edit
History Edit
Programmer's perspective Edit
Further information: Reverse Polish notation Forth relies heavily on explicit use of a data stack and reverse Polish notation (RPN or postfix notation), commonly used in calculators from Hewlett-Packard. In RPN, the operator is placed after its operands, as opposed to the more common infix notation where the operator is placed between its operands. Postfix notation makes the language easier to parse and extend; Forth's flexibility makes a static BNF grammar inappropriate, and it does not have a monolithic compiler. Extending the compiler only requires writing a new word, instead of modifying a grammar and changing the underlying implementation. Using RPN, one could get the result of the mathematical expression (25 * 10 + 50) this way: 25 10 * 50 + CR . 300 ok This command line first puts the numbers 25 and 10 on the implied stack.
The word * multiplies the two numbers on the top of the stack and replaces them with their product. Then the number 50 is placed on the stack.
The word + adds it to the previous product. The CR moves the output to a new line (it is only for formatting purposes and could be omitted but—in most implementations—without it the output would occur on the same line as the input and would be less readable in the example). Finally, the . command prints the result to the user's terminal. As everything has completed successfully at that point, the text interpreter then outputs the prompt OK and moves to a new line to get more input without needing anything explicit to do that.[19] Even Forth's structural features are stack-based. For example: : FLOOR5 ( n -- n' ) DUP 6 < IF DROP 5 ELSE 1 - THEN ; This code defines a new word (again, word is the term used for a subroutine) called FLOOR5 using the following commands: DUP duplicates the number on the stack; 6 places a 6 on top of the stack; < compares the top two numbers on the stack (6 and the DUP ed input), and replaces them with a true-or-false value; IF takes a true-or-false value and chooses to execute commands immediately after it or to skip to the ELSE ; DROP discards the value on the stack; and THEN ends the conditional. The text in parentheses is a comment, advising that this word expects a number on the stack and will return a possibly changed number. The FLOOR5 word is equivalent to this function written in the C programming language using the ternary operator: int floor5 ( int v ) { return ( v < 6 ) ? 5 : ( v - 1 ); } This function is written more succinctly as: : FLOOR5 ( n -- n' ) 1- 5 MAX ; You could run this word as follows: 1 FLOOR5 CR . 5 ok 8 FLOOR5 CR . 7 ok First the interpreter pushes a number (1 or 8) onto the stack, then it calls FLOOR5 , which pops off this number again and pushes the result. The CR moves the output to a new line (again, this is only here for readability). Finally, a call to . pops the result and prints it to the user's terminal.
Facilities Edit
Forth has no explicit grammar. The interpreter reads a line of input from the user input device, which is then parsed for a word using spaces as a delimiter; some systems recognise additional whitespace characters. When the interpreter finds a word, it looks the word up in the dictionary. If the word is found, the interpreter executes the code associated with the word, and then returns to parse the rest of the input stream. If the word isn't found, the word is assumed to be a number and an attempt is made to convert it into a number and push it on the stack; if successful, the interpreter continues parsing the input stream. Otherwise, if both the lookup and the number conversion fail, the interpreter prints the word followed by an error message indicating the word is not recognised, flushes the input stream, and waits for new user input.[20] The definition of a new word is started with the word : (colon) and ends with the word ; (semi-colon). For example, : X DUP 1+ . . ; will compile the word X , and makes the name findable in the dictionary. When executed by typing 10 X at the console this will print 11 10 .[21] Most Forth systems include an assembler that allows one to specify words using the processor's facilities at its lowest level. Mostly the assembler is tucked away in a separate namespace (wordlist) as relatively few users want to use it. Forth assemblers may use a reverse-polish syntax in which the parameters of an instruction precede the instruction, but designs vary widely and are specific to the Forth implementation. A typical reverse-polish assembler prepares the operands on the stack and have the mnemonic copy the whole instruction into memory as the last step. A Forth assembler is by nature a macro assembler, so that it is easy to define an alias for registers according to their role in the Forth system: e.g. "datastackpointer" for the register used as a stack pointer.[22] Operating system, files, and multitasking Edit Most Forth systems run under a host operating system such as Microsoft Windows, Linux or a version of Unix and use the host operating system's file system for source and data files; the ANSI Forth Standard describes the words used for I/O. All modern Forth systems use normal text files for source, even if they are embedded. An embedded system with a resident compiler gets its source via a serial line. Classic Forth systems traditionally use neither operating system nor file system. Instead of storing code in files, source code is stored in disk blocks written to physical disk addresses. The word BLOCK is employed to translate the number of a 1K-sized block of disk space into the address of a buffer containing the data, which is managed automatically by the Forth system. Block use has become rare since the mid-1990s. In a hosted system those blocks too are allocated in a normal file in any case. Multitasking, most commonly cooperative round-robin scheduling, is normally available (although multitasking words and support are not covered by the ANSI Forth Standard). The word PAUSE is used to save the current task's execution context, to locate the next task, and restore its execution context. Each task has its own stacks, private copies of some control variables and a scratch area. Swapping tasks is simple and efficient; as a result, Forth multitaskers are available even on very simple microcontrollers, such as the Intel 8051, Atmel AVR, and TI MSP430.[23] Other non-standard facilities include a mechanism for issuing calls to the host OS or windowing systems, and many provide extensions that employ the scheduling provided by the operating system. Typically they have a larger and different set of words from the stand-alone Forth's PAUSE word for task creation, suspension, destruction and modification of priority. Self-compilation and cross compilation Edit A full-featured Forth system with all source code will compile itself, a technique commonly called meta-compilation or self-hosting, by Forth programmers (although the term doesn't exactly match meta-compilation as it is normally defined). The usual method is to redefine the handful of words that place compiled bits into memory. The compiler's words use specially named versions of fetch and store that can be redirected to a buffer area in memory. The buffer area simulates or accesses a memory area beginning at a different address than the code buffer. Such compilers define words to access both the target computer's memory, and the host (compiling) computer's memory.[24] After the fetch and store operations are redefined for the code space, the compiler, assembler, etc. are recompiled using the new definitions of fetch and store. This effectively reuses all the code of the compiler and interpreter. Then, the Forth system's code is compiled, but this version is stored in the buffer. The buffer in memory is written to disk, and ways are provided to load it temporarily into memory for testing. When the new version appears to work, it is written over the previous version. Numerous variations of such compilers exist for different environments. For embedded systems, the code may instead be written to another computer, a technique known as cross compilation, over a serial port or even a single TTL bit, while keeping the word names and other non-executing parts of the dictionary in the original compiling computer. The minimum definitions for such a Forth compiler are the words that fetch and store a byte, and the word that commands a Forth word to be executed. Often the most time-consuming part of writing a remote port is constructing the initial program to implement fetch, store and execute, but many modern microprocessors have integrated debugging features (such as the Motorola CPU32) that eliminate this task.[25]
Structure of the language Edit
The basic data structure of Forth is the "dictionary" which maps "words" to executable code or named data structures. The dictionary is laid out in memory as a tree of linked lists with the links proceeding from the latest (most recently) defined word to the oldest, until a sentinel value, usually a NULL pointer, is found. A context switch causes a list search to start at a different leaf. A linked list search continues as the branch merges into the main trunk leading eventually back to the sentinel, the root. There can be several dictionaries. In rare cases such as meta-compilation a dictionary might be isolated and stand-alone. The effect resembles that of nesting namespaces and can overload keywords depending on the context. A defined word generally consists of head and body with the head consisting of the name field (NF) and the link field (LF) and body consisting of the code field (CF) and the parameter field (PF). Head and body of a dictionary entry are treated separately because they may not be contiguous. For example, when a Forth program is recompiled for a new platform, the head may remain on the compiling computer, while the body goes to the new platform. In some environments (such as embedded systems) the heads occupy memory unnecessarily. However, some cross-compilers may put heads in the target if the target itself is expected to support an interactive Forth.[26] Dictionary entry Edit The exact format of a dictionary entry is not prescribed, and implementations vary. However, certain components are almost always present, though the exact size and order may vary. Described as a structure, a dictionary entry might look this way:[27] structure byte: flag \ 3bit flags + length of word's name char-array: name \ name's runtime length isn't known at compile time address: previous \ link field, backward ptr to previous word address: codeword \ ptr to the code to execute this word any-array: parameterfield \ unknown length of data, words, or opcodes end-structure forthword The name field starts with a prefix giving the length of the word's name (typically up to 32 bytes), and several bits for flags. The character representation of the word's name then follows the prefix. Depending on the particular implementation of Forth, there may be one or more NUL ('\0') bytes for alignment. The link field contains a pointer to the previously defined word. The pointer may be a relative displacement or an absolute address that points to the next oldest sibling. The code field pointer will be either the address of the word which will execute the code or data in the parameter field or the beginning of machine code that the processor will execute directly. For colon defined words, the code field pointer points to the word that will save the current Forth instruction pointer (IP) on the return stack, and load the IP with the new address from which to continue execution of words. This is the same as what a processor's call/return instructions do. Structure of the compiler Edit The compiler itself is not a monolithic program. It consists of Forth words visible to the system, and usable by a programmer. This allows a programmer to change the compiler's words for special purposes. The "compile time" flag in the name field is set for words with "compile time" behavior. Most simple words execute the same code whether they are typed on a command line, or embedded in code. When compiling these, the compiler simply places code or a threaded pointer to the word.[21] The classic examples of compile-time words are the control structures such as IF and WHILE . Almost all of Forth's control structures and almost all of its compiler are implemented as compile-time words. Apart from some rarely used control flow words only found in a few implementations, such as a conditional return, all of Forth's control flow words are executed during compilation to compile various combinations of primitive words along with their branch addresses. For instance, IF and WHILE , and the words that match with those, set up BRANCH (unconditional branch) and ?BRANCH (pop a value off the stack, and branch if it is false). Counted loop control flow words work similarly but set up combinations of primitive words that work with a counter, and so on. During compilation, the data stack is used to support control structure balancing, nesting, and back-patching of branch addresses. The snippet: ... DUP 6 < IF DROP 5 ELSE 1 - THEN ... would be compiled to the following sequence inside a definition: ... DUP LIT 6 < ?BRANCH 5 DROP LIT 5 BRANCH 3 LIT 1 - ... The numbers after BRANCH represent relative jump addresses. LIT is the primitive word for pushing a "literal" number onto the data stack. Compilation state and interpretation state Edit The word : (colon) parses a name as a parameter, creates a dictionary entry (a colon definition) and enters compilation state. The interpreter continues to read space-delimited words from the user input device. If a word is found, the interpreter executes the compilation semantics associated with the word, instead of the interpretation semantics. The default compilation semantics of a word are to append its interpretation semantics to the current definition.[21] The word ; (semi-colon) finishes the current definition and returns to interpretation state. It is an example of a word whose compilation semantics differ from the default. The interpretation semantics of ; (semi-colon), most control flow words, and several other words are undefined in ANS Forth, meaning that they must only be used inside of definitions and not on the interactive command line.[21] The interpreter state can be changed manually with the words [ (left-bracket) and ] (right-bracket) which enter interpretation state or compilation state, respectively. These words can be used with the word LITERAL to calculate a value during a compilation and to insert the calculated value into the current colon definition. LITERAL has the compilation semantics to take an object from the data stack and to append semantics to the current colon definition to place that object on the data stack. In ANS Forth, the current state of the interpreter can be read from the flag STATE which contains the value true when in compilation state and false otherwise. This allows the implementation of so-called state-smart words with behavior that changes according to the current state of the interpreter. Immediate words Edit The word IMMEDIATE marks the most recent colon definition as an immediate word, effectively replacing its compilation semantics with its interpretation semantics.[28] Immediate words are normally executed during compilation, not compiled, but this can be overridden by the programmer in either state. ; is an example of an immediate word. In ANS Forth, the word POSTPONE takes a name as a parameter and appends the compilation semantics of the named word to the current definition even if the word was marked immediate. Forth-83 defined separate words COMPILE and [COMPILE] to force the compilation of non-immediate and immediate words, respectively. Unnamed words and execution tokens Edit In ANS Forth, unnamed words can be defined with the word :NONAME which compiles the following words up to the next ; (semi-colon) and leaves an execution token on the data stack. The execution token provides an opaque handle for the compiled semantics, similar to the function pointers of the C programming language. Execution tokens can be stored in variables. The word EXECUTE takes an execution token from the data stack and performs the associated semantics. The word COMPILE, (compile-comma) takes an execution token from the data stack and appends the associated semantics to the current definition. The word ' (tick) takes the name of a word as a parameter and returns the execution token associated with that word on the data stack. In interpretation state, ' RANDOM-WORD EXECUTE is equivalent to RANDOM-WORD .[29] Edit The words : (colon), POSTPONE , ' (tick) are examples of parsing words that take their arguments from the user input device instead of the data stack. Another example is the word ( (paren) which reads and ignores the following words up to and including the next right parenthesis and is used to place comments in a colon definition. Similarly, the word \ (backslash) is used for comments that continue to the end of the current line. To be parsed correctly, ( (paren) and \ (backslash) must be separated by whitespace from the following comment text. Structure of code Edit In most Forth systems, the body of a code definition consists of either machine language, or some form of threaded code. The original Forth which follows the informal FIG standard (Forth Interest Group), is a TIL (Threaded Interpretive Language). This is also called indirect-threaded code, but direct-threaded and subroutine threaded Forths have also become popular in modern times. The fastest modern Forths use subroutine threading, insert simple words as macros, and perform peephole optimization or other optimizing strategies to make the code smaller and faster.[30] Data objects Edit When a word is a variable or other data object, the CF points to the runtime code associated with the defining word that created it. A defining word has a characteristic "defining behavior" (creating a dictionary entry plus possibly allocating and initializing data space) and also specifies the behavior of an instance of the class of words constructed by this defining word. Examples include: VARIABLE Names an uninitialized, one-cell memory location. Instance behavior of a VARIABLE returns its address on the stack. CONSTANT Names a value (specified as an argument to CONSTANT ). Instance behavior returns the value. CREATE Names a location; space may be allocated at this location, or it can be set to contain a string or other initialized value. Instance behavior returns the address of the beginning of this space. Forth also provides a facility by which a programmer can define new application-specific defining words, specifying both a custom defining behavior and instance behavior. Some examples include circular buffers, named bits on an I/O port, and automatically indexed arrays. Data objects defined by these and similar words are global in scope. The function provided by local variables in other languages is provided by the data stack in Forth (although Forth also has real local variables). Forth programming style uses very few named data objects compared with other languages; typically such data objects are used to contain data which is used by a number of words or tasks (in a multitasked implementation).[31] Forth does not enforce consistency of data type usage; it is the programmer's responsibility to use appropriate operators to fetch and store values or perform other operations on data.
Programming Edit
Words written in Forth are compiled into an executable form. The classical "indirect threaded" implementations compile lists of addresses of words to be executed in turn; many modern systems generate actual machine code (including calls to some external words and code for others expanded in place). Some systems have optimizing compilers. Generally speaking, a Forth program is saved as the memory image of the compiled program with a single command (e.g., RUN) that is executed when the compiled version is loaded. During development, the programmer uses the interpreter in REPL mode to execute and test each little piece as it is developed. Most Forth programmers therefore advocate a loose top-down design, and bottom-up development with continuous testing and integration.[32] The top-down design is usually separation of the program into "vocabularies" that are then used as high-level sets of tools to write the final program. A well-designed Forth program reads like natural language, and implements not just a single solution, but also sets of tools to attack related problems.[33]
Code examples Edit
Hello world Edit For an explanation of the tradition of programming "Hello, World!", see "Hello, World!" program One possible implementation: : HELLO ( -- ) CR ." Hello, world! " ; HELLO <cr> Hello, world! The word CR (Carriage Return) causes the following output to be displayed on a new line. The parsing word ." (dot-quote) reads a double-quote delimited string and appends code to the current definition so that the parsed string will be displayed on execution. The space character separating the word ." from the string Hello, world! is not included as part of the string. It is needed so that the parser recognizes ." as a Forth word. A standard Forth system is also an interpreter, and the same output can be obtained by typing the following code fragment into the Forth console: CR . ( Hello, world!) .( (dot-paren) is an immediate word that parses a parenthesis-delimited string and displays it. As with the word ." the space character separating .( from Hello, world! is not part of the string. The word CR comes before the text to print. By convention, the Forth interpreter does not start output on a new line. Also by convention, the interpreter waits for input at the end of the previous line, after an ok prompt. There is no implied "flush-buffer" action in Forth's CR , as sometimes is in other programming languages. Mixing states of compiling and interpreting Edit Here is the definition of a word EMIT-Q which when executed emits the single character Q : : EMIT-Q 81 ( the ASCII value for the character 'Q' ) EMIT ; This definition was written to use the ASCII value of the Q character (81) directly. The text between the parentheses is a comment and is ignored by the compiler. The word EMIT takes a value from the data stack and displays the corresponding character. The following redefinition of EMIT-Q uses the words [ (left-bracket), ] (right-bracket), CHAR and LITERAL to temporarily switch to interpreter state, calculate the ASCII value of the Q character, return to compilation state and append the calculated value to the current colon definition: : EMIT-Q [ CHAR Q ] LITERAL EMIT ; The parsing word CHAR takes a space-delimited word as parameter and places the value of its first character on the data stack. The word [CHAR] is an immediate version of CHAR . Using [CHAR] , the example definition for EMIT-Q could be rewritten like this: : EMIT-Q [CHAR] Q EMIT ; \ Emit the single character 'Q' This definition used \ (backslash) for the describing comment. Both CHAR and [CHAR] are predefined in ANS Forth. Using IMMEDIATE and POSTPONE , [CHAR] could have been defined like this: : [CHAR] CHAR POSTPONE LITERAL ; IMMEDIATE A complete RC4 cipher program Edit In 1987, Ron Rivest developed the RC4 cipher-system for RSA Data Security, Inc. The code is extremely simple and can be written by most programmers from the description: We have an array of 256 bytes, all different. Every time the array is used it changes by swapping two bytes. The swaps are controlled by counters i and j, each initially 0. To get a new i, add 1. To get a new j, add the array byte at the new i. Exchange the array bytes at i and j. The code is the array byte at the sum of the array bytes at i and j. This is XORed with a byte of the plaintext to encrypt, or the ciphertext to decrypt. The array is initialized by first setting it to 0 through 255. Then step through it using i and j, getting the new j by adding to it the array byte at i and a key byte, and swapping the array bytes at i and j. Finally, i and j are set to 0. All additions are modulo 256. The following Standard Forth version uses Core and Core Extension words only. 0 value ii 0 value jj 0 value KeyAddr 0 value KeyLen create SArray 256 allot \ state array of 256 bytes : KeyArray KeyLen mod KeyAddr ; : get_byte + c@ ; : set_byte + c! ; : as_byte 255 and ; : reset_ij 0 TO ii 0 TO jj ; : i_update 1 + as_byte TO ii ; : j_update ii SArray get_byte + as_byte TO jj ; : swap_s_ij jj SArray get_byte ii SArray get_byte jj SArray set_byte ii SArray set_byte ; : rc4_init ( KeyAddr KeyLen -- ) 256 min TO KeyLen TO KeyAddr 256 0 DO i i SArray set_byte LOOP reset_ij BEGIN ii KeyArray get_byte jj + j_update swap_s_ij ii 255 < WHILE ii i_update REPEAT reset_ij ; : rc4_byte ii i_update jj j_update swap_s_ij ii SArray get_byte jj SArray get_byte + as_byte SArray get_byte xor ; This is one of many ways to test the code: hex create AKey 61 c, 8 A c, 63 c, D2 c, FB c, : test cr 0 DO rc4_byte . LOOP cr ; AKey 5 rc4_init 2 C F9 4 C EE DC 5 test \ output should be: F1 38 29 C9 DE
Implementations Edit
Because the Forth virtual machine is simple to implement and has no standard reference implementation, there are numerous implementations of the language. In addition to supporting the standard varieties of desktop computer systems (POSIX, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X), many of these Forth systems also target a variety of embedded systems. Listed here are some of the more prominent systems which conform to the 1994 ANS Forth standard. Gforth, a portable ANS Forth implementation from the GNU Project
SwiftForth, native code desktop and embedded Forths by Forth, Inc.
VFX Forth, highly-optimizing native code Forth
Open Firmware, a bootloader and BIOS standard based on ANS Forth
pForth, portable Forth written in C
SP-Forth, ANS Forth implementation from the Russian Forth Interest Group (RuFIG)
See also Edit
colorForth, a later Forth-variant from Chuck Moore
RTX2010, a CPU that runs Forth natively
Joy, a functional language with similarities to Forth
Factor, a language influenced by Forth
References Edit |
Around 30,000 Kurds and Kurdish supporters took to the streets of the German city of Frankfurt on Saturday to protest against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the approaching referendum that would vastly expand his powers.
The demonstrators, who had arrived from all over the country, chanted "Erdogan terrorist" and "Freedom for Ocalan" as they carried Iraqi Kurdistan flags and portraits of Abdullah Ocalan, the detained leader of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).
"The Europeans should hear us, empathize with our suffering and help us. It would be best if they imposed economic sanctions on Turkey," one of the demonstrators told Reuters.
The protesters said they wanted to reach out to voters in Turkey so that they vote against the constitutional changes that would increase presidential powers in the referendum.
Frankfurt police didn't interfere, saying on Twitter that the protest was peaceful and that most of the demonstrators had complied with German laws.
© AP Photo/ Michael Probst Thousands of Kurds celebrate the Newroz spring festival and protest against Turkish President Erdogan.
Turkey sharply criticized Germany for allowing the protest after placing a ban on referendum rallies by Turkish officials in German cities on security grounds.
Erdogan's spokesman Ibrahim Kalin said that by letting anti-Erdogan demonstrations take place, Germany was allowing open support for terrorism.
"We strongly condemn the German authorities for allowing the demonstrations by PKK terrorist supporters," Kalin said in a statement.
"We once again remind European countries: on April 16 the decision is to be made by the [Turkish people], not Europe."
Around 1.4 million out of 3 million ethnic Turks living in Germany are eligible to vote in the April referendum, according to Foreign Ministry spokesman Martin Schaefer.
Tensions between the countries escalated after Erdogan accused Germany of resorting to Nazi-era tactics in response to several German cities withdrawing their permission for the rallies in support of Turkish government. |
The last thing an opinions writer wants is to be discovered by their least “defendable” post. But sometimes a little unvarnished opinion leads to a moment of clarity that objectivity would otherwise muddle.
Such a moment was provided to me a month ago when I was doing one of my (many) daily digg and reddit clicking rituals. I happened upon an article from Harvard Business, picked up by BuisnessWeek called “8 Things We Hate About IT”.
Source credibility and dissonance –
I must admit, I only made it to the third bullet point before making the assumption that the author was simply “blowing something out of their someplace”. But it’s a Harvard Business article, so I gave it a full read… and then another… and another. I can describe it like this: You know those tragic stories where the protagonist is also the antagonist, seeing problems as they are, but impervious to the notion that their own world view is the cause? It’s like that.
I am always a little irritated when people who understand business can’t identify business problems. Let’s take point #1 (which is actually two points).
1) “IT Limits Managers’ Authority. You bring in 10% of the company’s revenue but can’t authorize a $100,000 project if it requires IT. Furthermore, IT’s bureaucratic governance process rivals the tax code in complexity and inhibits rather than promotes innovation.”
To which I say –
Those who learn to cooperate with their experts may bring in 20% of the revenue. When you think you’re great and everyone else is just in your way, that’s not even a business problem, it’s a professionalism problem. Bureaucracy, on the other hand, is a reflection of how the business approaches process management. Your IT reflects the values of your organization… so if you want more innovative, less bureaucratic IT, hire more innovative, less bureaucratic IT Execs. That’s a business problem, and one that continues to grow.
I know you are, but what am I? –
IT is often an unknown quantity, seemingly mysterious in how it works, but I assure you that the same forces that influence other portions of your business will also influence IT. What your organization values will be reflected.
But, and here’s the part that may surprise you, Susan’s observations are, in fact, *very real and true*. Real and true in the sense that promoting simple top-down blame, rather than harnessing the unique features and natural motivations of your organization and its people, is what gets everyone into trouble in the first place. This article is an demonstration of that failing.
The 8 Things We Hate About IT and their ilk are perceptions which are seeded, cultivated, and sold in bulk within organizations that do the LEAST effective job of integrating IT into the mission and functions of the business. It is the norm, not the exception, and why such an article might resonate with a good percentage of those likely to read it. As such, each point should be taken seriously and addressed at every available opportunity until the organization begins to understand, instinctively, what IT’s role really is.
IT Pros, on the other hand, can learn a very important fact about the IT industry from this article. That fact is, in your IT careers, you will be criticized and congratulated, mostly, for things that simply don’t apply to you. That’s just the way it is, cope and adjust. IT is often the mirror by which an organization unwittingly puts its own flaws on display.
Blame fills what comprehension leaves empty –
I will illustrate with a dramatization that is typical in IT, but would be absurd in another profession:
Imagine a plumber goes to a customer’s house to clear a bathroom drain. The plumber does so… and the customers says, “Hey, now the garage door doesn’t work… what did you do?” The plumber attempts to explain that the plumbing has nothing to do with the garage door, but the customer still calls the plumber’s boss to complain. A week later, the same customer says “Hey, my car has been running great since you came by, thanks!”.
This… and I wish it were an overstatement… is the life of the average IT person. It only takes a few months for most organizations to drive IT staff to pure cynicism… and perhaps alcohol. Unfortunately, IT eventually stops explaining itself and becomes essentially complicit in the perpetuation of false perception, which is just as bad as the perceptions themselves.
IT is blamed for all sorts of things which are, ultimately, the very business problems the organization has as a whole. Let us examine the rest of the 8 Things We Hate About IT for the real story (Read the full text of each Thing here):
2) “They’re missing adult supervision.” The argument here is that Senior execs are so elite that the only person capable of helping them is a senior executive. If you’re worried about talking to junior IT staff, grow up and get over yourself. Most IT groups embrace a very distributed management style… they have to nowadays, just to keep up. It is likely that the mid level IT person you find IS the decision maker for your problem. Be an adult and deal with it.
3) “They’re Financial Extortionists.” If there is a lack of visibility in how IT spends dollars, then the organization doesn’t value such numbers, or isn’t managing risks effectively. If dollars are being wasted, that’s a business problem. Often, IT is forced to overspend to deal with political realities and insulate against criticisms founded in similar ignorance. When the CEO asks "This is a billion dollar company, why did you go cheap on that server?" what do you say? The million dollar solution may have crashed all the same, but the CEO probably doesn’t know/care/respect the realities of computing. We spend because it looks good, not because it is good… and that is a prevalent business problem.
4) “Their Projects Never End.” Again, if project management isn’t a value to the organization, no one will be called to the carpet. Worse yet, you may not have competent people capable of gauging what is and isn’t "timely" at sufficiently high levels of the organization to deal with it. If your IT is off course and spinning and there’s just no reasonable explanation for it, that’s a business problem.
5) “The Help Desk is Helpless.” Now, I will agree that sometimes the Helpdesk requires some convincing that a problem exists… but if you’re having a problem, you can demonstrate it. If you can demonstrate it, and don’t get service, you’ve exposed a management problem. If you can’t, then *you* may be the problem.
6) “They Let Outsourcers Run Amok.” As I have written before, if your company (given sufficient size) is so adept that it can effectively manage an outsourced IT relationship, it would save a lot of money by *not* outsourcing. It is *very* hard, even under ideal circumstances, to extract value from most kinds of IT outsourcing, and that is most definitely not an IT issue.
7) “IT is stocked with out-of-date geeks.” I agree on this one, and even more, I’ll say that IT is also stocked with a lot of young, underdeveloped talent going nowhere quick. As I wrote before, education should consume about half of an IT pro’s life. If it doesn’t, that’s a management problem which does have a real cost and IS noticed.
8) “IT Never has Good News.” No, it’s just that the bad news is important to the execs, and the good news isn’t. I am currently saving my organization about $50K/year by making a change to the way it does server storage and backup instead of continuing an old system, just one of many cost saving tweaks. But frankly, it had no visible impact on the users, and thus, I received no pat on the back. God forbid a server is down for an hour, though… that is a different story. This is why CIO’s are so focused on headlines, and why IT pros are congratulated and criticized for trivial or irrelevant matters, and why IT undergoes cyclic erosion and major rebuilding within most organizations. The perception that IT never has good news is merely the visible artifact of an organization’s failure to equate success of the business with success in IT and vice versa.
Clarity from absurdity –
As a referendum on IT, this article misses the point. There are a lot of valid reasons to hate IT, and these aren’t they. As a referendum on what happens when we fail to integrate critical components of our businesses into the organization, the article speaks volumes to us from the white space.
To the IT pros and CIOs out there, take note. The next time you’re faced with one of those situations where the nuance just doesn’t seem worth the time of explanation, just remind yourself that you’re propagating the misconceptions that this article is based on. |
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— The 2014 N.C. State Fair announced its Dorton Arena lineup Tuesday and things are about to get icy.
Vanilla Ice will kick things off with a "Throwback Thursday" show on Oct. 16. Tickets are $5 for this show. Here are the rest of the artists and dates:
Friday, Oct. 17: Gospel artist Tamela Mann ($10)
Saturday, Oct. 18: Clay Walker ($12)
Sunday, Oct. 19: Parmalee ($10)
Monday, Oct. 20: Love and Theft ($10)
Tuesday, Oct. 21: Comedian James Gregory ($5)
Wednesday, Oct. 22: Brandy Clark ($5)
Thursday, Oct. 23: TBA
Friday, Oct. 24: Newsboys ($10)
Saturday, Oct. 25: Trace Adkins ($17)
Sunday, Oct. 26: Joan Jett and the Blackhearts ($15)
All shows start at 7:30 p.m. and doors open at 6:30 p.m. Tickets go on sale for all shows on Aug. 1 through the N.C. State Fair website. |
In September, I laid out how Fox News had spent the months since President Obama's election attacking and calling for the repeal of virtually every progressive accomplishment of the 20th century, from Social Security to Medicare to parts of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to constitutional amendments. More recently, they've added to the mix the estate tax, first passed in its current form 90 years ago.
Tonight during Glenn Beck's special on the Constitution, Fox Business host Andrew Napolitano -- who has called for the repeal of the 16th and 17th amendments -- came closer than any other Fox figure has to using the network to openly call for the repeal of the century:
NAPOLITANO: The 20th century is a disaster for the Constitution, in large measure because of the way it began with Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the way it moved up to FDR, the three of them together demonstrating publicly and privately utter contempt for the natural law, the concept that individuals have natural rights that the government can't interfere with, and the concept that the Constitution was written to keep the government off the peoples' backs. Teddy Roosevelt, his cousin Franklin Roosevelt, and their mentor, Woodrow Wilson, basically ushered in periods of government in which the government took the position that it could write any law, regulate any behavior, tax any event, and seek any goal, whether authorized or permitted by the Constitution or not.
Beck has previously used his radio show to call the 20th century the "greatest lie ever told" and say it was "one of the most stunning con jobs ever - it is the big lie." |
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Americans, as they look at countries like Russia, are thankful they have an independent judiciary that serves as a check on both the legislative and executive branches. But recent Wisconsin Supreme Court decisions on the John Doe investigations raise the question whether the court views itself as a branch of Gov. Scott Walker’s administration.
The first investigation, often referred to as Doe I, resulted in six convictions of people including three staff members working in Walker’s Milwaukee County Executive Office who illegally worked on campaigns on county time. This investigation started when the office failed to produce financial records of the veterans’ organization—in retrospect unsurprising since one of the thieves was the assistant chief of staff in the office. This led to examination of the email and other computer records of office employees—including an illegal private email system set up in the office—which led, in turn to evidence of the other crimes.
While the investigation came close to Walker, in the end he escaped. From the evidence publicly available so far, his closest call was related to the county’s decision as to whether to renew a lease in the Reuss Plaza building. In the words of a request for a search warrant, “I submit that there is probable cause to believe that Scott Walker, John Hiller, and Andrew Jensen, in concert together, committed a felony …”
Hiller and Jensen both represented the Reuss Plaza. Hiller was also the chair of Walker’s campaign committee and seems to have aggressively tried using his connection with Walker to gain an advantage over other bidders. As described in the search warrant request, Walker’s chief of staff, Tom Nardelli, sent an e-mail to the county public works director asking him to request a six-month extension on the existing Reuss lease, to allow the county time to evaluate its space needs.
Using the private e-mail account, Walker sent an e-mail to Hiller saying that he needs “ … a letter .. saying no to an extension.” Subsequently Jensen sent the letter denying the extension. In the words of the warrant request, “the request from County Executive Scott Walker requesting the rejection of Milwaukee County’s request for an extension made by Walker’s own Department of Transportation and Public Works, was against the interests of Milwaukee County according to witnesses.”
At some point the Doe I investigation unearthed evidence of coordination between Walker’s campaign committee for governor (Friends of Scott Walker) and supposedly independent groups such as Wisconsin Club for Growth and Wisconsin Manufactures and Commerce. While not technically illegal, long-time federal and Wisconsin law required that such coordination be treated as a contribution to the campaign, likely exceeding the allowable contribution limit. Thus was born Doe II.
Because the individuals being investigated lived in at least five counties, five district attorneys became involved. The investigation was put under the control of the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board which hired Francis Schmitz, an attorney in private practice, as the Independent Prosecutor.
The targets of these investigations have been prolific in filing lawsuits to derail the investigation and destroy Wisconsin’s campaign regulations. In addition to the three suits that the state high court addressed, here are three others:
O’Keefe v. Chisholm was a federal lawsuit that challenged Doe II, in which Federal Judge Rudolph Randa ruled for O’Keefe and the Wisconsin Club for Growth. It was unanimously reversed by a three-judge panel of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. O’Keefe’s appeals to the full appeals court and the US Supreme Court were rejected. Thus the 7th Circuit’s reversal of Randa is final.
ruled for O’Keefe and the Wisconsin Club for Growth. It was unanimously reversed by a three-judge panel of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. O’Keefe’s appeals to the full appeals court and the US Supreme Court were rejected. Thus the 7th Circuit’s reversal of Randa is final. Archer v. Chisholm stems from Doe I. Cindy Archer was an official in the Walker county administration who alleges she was mistreated as part of the investigation. Although initially brought in state court it was quickly moved to federal court since it claimed violation of federal law. It is ongoing.
was an official in the Walker county administration who alleges she was mistreated as part of the investigation. Although initially brought in state court it was quickly moved to federal court since it claimed violation of federal law. It is ongoing. O’Keefe v. Wisconsin Government Accountability Board is a state case presently being argued in Waukesha County.
In addition to the lawsuits, the investigations have been the subject of numerous unverified claims in the Wall Street Journal and the right wing media, including, National Review and, most notably the obsessive Wisconsin Watchdog which claims its latest post is “Part 296 of 294 [sic] in the series Wisconsin’s Secret War.” These publications claim numerous violations of proper procedures during the serving of search warrants.
The only case where these claims were put to the test was the search for evidence at Archer’s residence. The initial claims by Archer had to be completely rewritten once evidence on the search, including an audio tape, were released, as the audio did not support her original claims.
None of the presumed victims of searches conducted as part of Doe II has brought suit, as they certainly should if the accounts are true. One likely explanation is that, as with Archer’s, the accusations would not survive scrutiny. A brief filed by investigators in connection with the Archer suit states that audio tapes were made of every search and interview.
The lack of evidence has not stopped either Judge Randa or the Wisconsin Supreme Court majority from treating them as proven. Usually no source is referenced except in the cases of Justice Annette Ziegler, who credits Wisconsin Watchdog and the National Review as her source for allegations she repeats as fact.
The core constitutional issue in these cases is whether the First Amendment, protecting free speech, is violated by laws regulating communications coordinated between candidates and supposedly independent groups. Existing federal and Wisconsin law allowed such coordinated communications but required them to be treated as campaign contributions.
Opponents of the investigations argued that such laws are constitutional only if limited to so-called “express advocacy,” that is, they explicitly advocate the election or defeat of a candidate. Under this argument, an ad accusing John Smith of misconduct or an admiring profile of Mary Jones are both “issue” ads, and exempt from restrictions on coordination.
The problem with this argument is that the US Supreme Court has never accepted it. In overturning Judge Randa the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals reiterated this: “No opinion issued by the Supreme Court, or by any court of appeals, establishes (‘clearly’ or otherwise) that the First Amendment forbids regulation of coordination between campaign committees and issue-advocacy groups——let alone that the First Amendment forbids even an inquiry into that topic.” (O’Keefe v. Chisholm)
The 7th Circuit is not alone. This July the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeal ruled in Delaware Strong Families v. Delaware Attorney General that “the Supreme Court has consistently held that disclosure requirements are not limited to ‘express advocacy’ and that there is not a ‘rigid barrier between express advocacy and so-called issue advocacy.’”
What the US Supreme Court has done is repeatedly point to the lack of coordination as a reason that other restrictions on issue ads by independent groups can be safely removed. The lack of coordination, in Court’s view, makes such ads less effective.
The US Supreme Court has never accepted a case which challenges restrictions on coordinated communications. Therefore it has not addressed where discussion turns into coordination. A heavily redacted brief from Schmitz to the Wisconsin Supreme Court suggests where he would draw the line:
… the Special Prosecutor takes no issue with candidates or candidate committees appearing at a fundraiser for a “like-minded” yet nevertheless independent group. Indeed, he does not object to any form of candidate interaction with an entity that is truly independent. Many examples of interaction between a candidate committee and a third party entity that maintains its independence of the candidate can be imagined, as the Movants have done. The facts here, however, tip the scales at the opposite end of the spectrum. We do not deal here with interaction in the form of discussion and exchange of ideas. We deal here with a candidate who was sent by his (redacted) committee and by (redacted) specifically to collect substantial amounts of cash for (redacted) to be used to the benefit of his campaign, all by a design (redacted)
In their decision against Doe II, the Wisconsin Supreme Court majority quotes extensively from the Buckley decision. Yet, it never acknowledges that, by ruling that the Constitution only allows regulation of “express advocacy,” it is disagreeing with that decision. Do they think the US Supreme Court was wrong? Is something unique about Wisconsin that makes the Constitution different here than elsewhere? They don’t say. Instead they claim “the special prosecutor’s legal theory is unsupported in either reason or law,” neglecting to note that his theory is also the US Supreme Court’s legal theory.
The multiple suits against the investigations allow a view of how the arguments have evolved. In O’Keefe’s federal suit, there are repeated assertions made that the investigations are animated by Milwaukee District Attorney John Chisholm’s animus towards Walker. To the extent he enters the picture at all, the Special Prosecutor is described as largely a figurehead, doing Chisholm’s bidding. Archer’s lawsuit makes much the same argument. No credible evidence is presented for either of these claims, other than that Chisholm was elected as a Democrat and is friendly with Mayor Tom Barrett, who ran against Walker.
In O’Keefe’s Waukesha County suit against the GAB, however, Chisholm becomes a non-player. Instead, Schmitz, the Special Prosecutor, takes on the role of the villain, described as largely out of the control of the GAB.
The majority decision written by Michael Gableman is full of loaded phrases that make it clear that the court majority dropped all pretense of neutrality. Without bothering to at least hold a hearing the majority asserted:
That the Special Prosecutor “employed theories of law that do not exist in order to investigate citizens who were wholly innocent of any wrongdoing.”
That there was “a ‘perfect storm’ of wrongs that was visited upon the innocent” targets “and those who dared to associate with them.”
That the targets of the investigation were victims of “the tyrannical retribution of arbitrary or capricious government prosecution.”
That targets were subjected to “paramilitary-style home invasions conducted in the pre-dawn hours” in retaliation for their free speech.
That “documents were subpoenaed and/or seized without regard to content or relevance to the alleged violations”
That the investigation was a “fishing expedition” and a campaign of “harassment and persecution by a vengeful [and unethical prosecutor.”
What actually happened? Given the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s insistence that all evidence be destroyed, there is a good chance we will never know for sure. Those inclined to believe folks like Eric O’Keefe (whose Wisconsin Club for Growth was under investigation) will remain convinced massive violations of people’s rights took place. Skeptics will believe the court majority was part of cover-up of criminal acts by Walker and others. It doesn’t help that the four justices remain tone deaf to the ethical issues resulting from the $8 million in campaign contributions they received from two organizations targeted by the investigation.
The evidence available to the public indicates that, for whatever reason, Walker did decide to coordinate with supposedly independent groups and expected not to get caught. At several points in its discussion the justices seem to tacitly concede this, but then argue that the apparent violation was okay because Walker and the outside groups already agreed on the issues. Still, there is a chance that the investigators, if allowed to complete their investigation, might have concluded the evidence wasn’t strong enough to support charges.
Will the federal courts step in? If instead of coming from a state Supreme Court, the Doe decision was from a lower federal court, it seems almost certain it would be overturned, as happened recently with lower court decisions in the Delaware Strong Families and O’Keefe v Chisholm cases.
However, the Supreme Court might view this decision as a decision by the State of Wisconsin. The decision in Buckley represents a ceiling, not a floor, on government regulation. In other words, if a state decides to allow coordination between candidates and outside groups, it may be free to do so.
There is also the intriguing question of what the federal district judge will do with the Archer case. Given the likelihood that other similar suits may be brought against prosecutors it would appear it is incumbent on him to protect the evidence the Wisconsin Supreme Court order destroyed or returned. After all, if others charge, as did Archer, that the prosecutors acted without probable cause, how can that be fairly litigated without being able to examine the evidence?
Finally there is the mysterious decision by Archer’s attorneys to insert several paragraphs into Archer’s revised complaint quoting from the Wisconsin Supreme Court decision. This almost requires the federal judge to try to reconcile the irreconcilable—the contradictions between the state and US courts’ decisions. |
Thousands of residents in Montreal's west end have signed an on-line petition, protesting against Canada Post's firing of a mail carrier — for being "too nice" to his customers.
A supervisor checking up on Sylvain Carbonneau on his route spotted him signing for a client in order to leave a package at her address when she wasn't home.
"She agreed on that," Carbonneau said. "We had a...verbal agreement, the first time."
Carbonneau says he bent the rules only when clients asked him to. Those requests came both from households and from institutional clients like the Royal Bank, which has sent him a letter of support.
Many of Carbonneau's former customers speak highly of their longtime carrier for his generosity and personal touch, describing him as one of the most caring people they've ever met.
"My sister-in-law is just living two blocks from here," one woman said from her front door. "When she wasn't there, he knew that [she] was my sister-in-law, so he [delivered] her mail here."
"He was always friendly, always pleasant, always had a smile on his face, always willing to stop and talk," said a neighbour.
"He gave me Christmas cards," said yet another customer. "He was just — rare, you know. He was rare."
Canada Post now finds itself on the receiving end of a letter-writing campaign, demanding that it reinstate Carbonneau.
The corporation has said only that it does not make decisions to fire people lightly, and Carbonneau is welcome to appeal his dismissal.
Carbonneau has filed a grievance through his union, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW.)
CUPW says it won't comment publicly on the case because that grievance is underway, and it does not want to jeopardize Carbonneau's chances of getting his job back. |
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