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The Politics of Caring Alex B Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jun 16, 2016 Republicans need to narrow the empathy gap In the 2012 exit polls, Mitt Romney won on the issues of “shares my values” (55–42), “is a strong leader” (61–38), and “has a vision for the future” (54–45), but President Obama swept the subset “cares about people like me” by a lopsided 81–18. This empathy gap is a deeper statistical hole than the widely documented and analyzed gender and race gaps. This is merely an example of the broader implications the GOP and the conservative movement in general is facing. They are looked upon by the general public as aloof, established interests disconnected from the average struggles of everyday Americans while the Democrats are seen as the party closest to the people — the party that cares. Jack Kemp described this phenomenon many decades before in a concise manner. The Republicans and conservatives operated under the “Scrooge Strategy,” of favoring balancing the budget under a program of spending reductions — double whammies against the population. The arguments against these coming from the left are rather simple: “Socking it to the poor in favor of the rich.” The Scrooge Party Much of the rhetoric of the 2016 Republican primary focused on issues such as illegal immigration, Planned Parenthood, entitlement reform, and tax cuts. These are important issues, but the manner of which they have been discussed played directly into the false dichotomy the Democrats had viciously cultivated since the Great Depression — Democrats care while Republicans don’t. Most Americans lack a general understanding of the intricacies of entitlement revenue or the economic validity of how tax cuts on corporations stimulate the economy. They care about how their family’s lives will be affected, how they will pay their bills, protect their families, educate their children, etc. Ronald Reagan effectively turned the fairness debate on its head in the eighties by advocating for an across the board tax cut for all Americans. Handing more money to the people instead of bloated government was a selling issue, because it was so easily relatable — a formula that worked with George W. Bush as well. However, in current times, all the public sees are Republicans in congress nearly shutting down the government over tax rates for the wealthiest of Americans. Low taxes (yes, even for the rich!) benefit all Americans but the image is a problem. What does it say to hardworking taxpayers when the first thing Republican legislatures try to tackle are divisive social issues that really have no bearing on their everyday lives? That is exactly, however, what Republican legislatures did in Minnesota and North Carolina upon their election in 2010. How does it look when supposedly non-crackpot candidates such as Ted Cruz push for immigrant restrictions harsher than those of Donald Trump, basically conceding many immigrant groups that could be wooed and helped by conservative ideas? These moves are easily manipulated by Democrats, who twist Republican statements on social issues and economics to brand Republicans as bigots who don’t care about the poor. The Santa Claus Party The Democrats, meanwhile, used the “Santa Claus” strategy. Generous spending programs being lavished and promised to the population to cure every ill imaginable, with the only arguments against it focusing on lines of deficit and fiscal implications incomprehensible to the general public. “35% marginal tax rates on top 5% income earners will lower economic growth” is not an understandable argument to the average American. Here are just a few examples of how Democrats have successfully framed the issues to their advantage: The minimum wage. To struggling Americans who see the cost of living getting higher, raising the minimum wage is seen by an overwhelming majority as a relief. That is will actually hurt the poor isn’t as clearly noticed. Free college. Another Santa Claus goodie pushed by liberals. It would only exacerbate the problem of high tuition rated by ballooning federal spending, but it is “free”. Anti-discrimination laws — Americans are a fair people, and nothing upsets them more than discrimination. With the racists and alt-righters coming out of the woodwork to support Trump, Republican stances against these laws turn away many minority groups and their majority allies. This needs to be countered. Tax the rich. Class envy is deplorable, but it is a potent weapon. The left loves these “fairness” debates, because they frame the issue as Republicans supporting the rich over the poor/middle class since Republicans oppose taxes and regulations that hurt the economy. A Needed Shift How can the Republican Party, and the conservative movement, adapt to this reality? How can it they narrow the empathy gap? The answer lies in a set of policies and rhetoric that have been taken up, by, among other, Senator Marco Rubio in his book American Dreams and House Speaker Paul Ryan. Both eschew the traditional academic arguments of the past and focus on how conservative policies can help the average American. The rhetoric and policy proposals must be geared to improving the life of average Americans rather than existentially benefiting the country. Get out from under the leftist traps by appealing to fairness the same way that they do. Some examples: Tax policies that are designed to favor the average American and regulatory policies that reduce the cost of living. Sell all free-market policies this way. Nuclear power should be be advocated as a , a safe and emissions-free form of energy, which is more climate change. National Security hawks can counter the impression of homophobia by pointing out that counterterrorism measures will make all Americans safer, especially those at greater risk of being targeted such as the LGBT community (given that terrorist groups such as ISIS regularly proscribe the death penalty for homosexuals). On gun rights, focus less on Constitutional arguments and zero in on how gun control can hurt families, especially in anti-crime neighborhoods. Exemplifying the cases of how guns can protect women against sexual assault (the examples are quite extensive) are potent to rebut the “war on women” lie. Conservatives fully believe — and are supported by the empirical evidence — that conservative principles will work to improve the American way of life. When lured into a fight regarding efficiency and effectiveness, the liberals will always lose. That is why they resort to fairness battles and arguments over whether one “cares” or not. Here they hold the advantage, but it need not be so. This advantage will exist until conservatives gear their arguments toward ordinary Americans struggling to survive rather than debating clubs and one-issue activists. |
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Prime Minister David Cameron is to announce plans for the NHS to create a massive database of patients' DNA, which experts have advised could lead to massive health benefits and advances in medical technology. However the creation of such a database has obvious and far reaching privacy implications. In an attempt to address such concerns, an official statement issued ahead of the announcements states that such data would be anonymised "apart from when it is used for an individuals own care". "A number of ways to store this data will be investigated," a Downing Street spokesman said. "The privacy and confidentiality of NHS patients will be paramount in this decision." Under the proposal, the DNA of NHS patients from England will be sequenced over three to five years and analysed, the Prime Minister said today. He added he hoped to "transform cancer treatment" in the country. Cameron said that £100m had been set aside for the database, although Downing Street's official announcement was careful not to use that particular word preferring instead to reference a "data infrastructure" to be built for genetic boffins. Yes, Prime Minister, it will be a MASSIVE database. Pic credit: No. 10 Number 10 added: The genome profile will give doctors a new, advanced understanding of a patient’s genetic make-up, condition and treatment needs, ensuring they have access to the right drugs and personalised care far quicker than ever before. It will also help to develop life-saving new drugs, treatments and scientific breakthroughs, which experts predict could significantly reduce the number of premature deaths from cancer within a generation. The PM said the millions of pounds his government planned to pump into the project would "unlock the power of DNA data". A human genome can be fully sequenced for less than £1,000, Number 10 said. The original DNA-mapping programme undertaken during Tony Blair's premiership at around the turn of the century cost £500m. Now that costs have supposedly plummeted, the market is ripe to be exploited by private companies hoping to cash in by using these rich datasets to create "personalised medicines and individualised treatments". GeneWatch UK previously warned that such a plan "amounts to building a DNA database in the NHS by stealth". ® |
During the Hannibal Season 3 press rounds, Bryan Fuller took time to drop some interesting intel on his upcoming TV adaptation of Neil Gaiman's American Gods, a series being currently developed with Michael Green (Heroes, Smallville) for Starz (Spartacus, Black Sails, Outlander, Ash vs Evil Dead). The series -- which centers around Shadow, a mysterious and taciturn ex-con who found employment as a God's bodyguard -- won't be seen until late 2016, based on Fuller's estimates. It hasn't been officially picked up yet, but the Pushing Daisies creator is, ahem, "pushing" forward -- the first two scripts have been written, and they've got some cool concept art for some of the book's iconic locations, including Jack's Crocodile Bar, the Bone Orchard and Zorya's rooftop, Bryan Fuller revealed in an interview with Den of Geek. He also let drop that there will be new things that'll be unique to the TV series that weren't in Gaiman's book, and said they're already talking to an actor for a lead role and reiterated the importance of casting a diverse pool of actors to match the novel's ethnic diversity. Here's what Fuller said about casting for the TV show, and how they'll go about announcing the cast (hint: don't expect to get casting news one at a time): "We haven't made an offer but we've made an approach to one actor in particular. It all hinges on the final trigger being pulled by Starz. We have several people lined up that we would love to get in various roles and plan on making approaches. Neil [Gaiman's] plan—and Neil's very internet savvy—what Neil would like to do is cast Laura and Shadow and Wednesday and Mad Sweeney and Bilquis, because Bilquis will be a major character in the show, and the Technical Boy and then trot them all out on-stage at a Comic-Con coming up. That's his plan. He's saying 'I don't want to make any casting announcements, I want to announce the cast in full when they walk out on stage at a Comic-Con'." That sounds exactly like what Marvel did when they announced the cast for the first Avengers movie, dragging all the actors on stage to the crowd's thunderous applause. Will Starz let Fuller and company pull this off as well? As for making sure that the cast wouldn't be whitewashed in terms of ethnicity, Bryan Fuller had this to say: "One of the things I'm most excited about for American Gods is the diversity in the cast because there's such a wide range of ethnic Gods in the world. Right now, we're imagining two white roles and everybody else is non-white, so my goal, Michael's goal, certainly Neil's goal has been to have a very ethnically diverse cast. That's important to all of us. Also now, we can cite Empire and we can cite The Walking Dead as being primarily non-white in their casting, and they're the two biggest shows in the world right now, so that has to say something. We have to be moving forward with a representation that is accurate to the world." When he was told that the upcoming series had to look like it was 2015, Bryan Fuller agreed, saying, "There's no excuse with American Gods. There's absolutely no excuse to cast, say, Mr Ibis and Mr Jacquel as ... those should be African-origin actors in terms of their heritage." It's reassuring to see that Bryan Fuller seems to have a tight grasp on the material. What do you think? Is American Gods in good hands? (via Den of Geek) |
Mexicans are seeking asylum in Canada at a rate that projections indicate will be at least four times greater than that of 2016. The number of Mexicans claiming to be refugees at the Canadian border is already higher in 2017 than it was for the entire year of 2016. According to the latest figures from the Immigration and Refugee Board, March indicated the the number of refugee claimants is increasing every month, with 110 new cases. With the figures from the first two months of the year factored in, that makes for 266 so far, already up from the 241 cases recorded last year. The reason is linked to a decision by the Liberal government to waive the visa requirement for Mexicans traveling to Canada. An increase in refugees was anticipated by that move, specifically because the previous Conservative government had issued the visa requirement in order to reduce the numbers of Mexicans claiming refugee status when they entered Canada. Mexico resented that decision and the new Liberal government said it was advisable to drop the mandatory visas with the certainty that NAFTA would be renegotiated. But Canada has suggested that visas could be reintroduced if asylum claims continue to escalate — as they are every month. The government has even privately provided the Mexican government with a claim level that it says, if surpassed, will affect a change in visa policy. The government has not revealed that figure but it is believed to be much higher than the current rate of asylum seekers. In 2008, the last year that Mexicans could travel to Canada without a visa before the Conservative government changed the policy, 9,000 people claimed asylum — 25 percent of all claims that year. The visa requirement drastically reined in those numbers and by 2016, less than a dozen Mexicans a month were attempting to stay in Canada as refugees. The financial cost of eliminating the visa requirement is estimated to be $261.9 million over 10 years, even after consideration is given to anticipated higher tourism revenue from Mexican tourists. There are more flights from Mexico to Canada now, though this hasn’t led to a corresponding increase going in the other direction. Most of the Mexicans are landing in Vancouver, British Columbia. Follow David on Twitter |
2 Aviation Cops Who Dragged Doctor Off United Flight Have Been Fired By Stephen Gossett in News on Oct 17, 2017 8:25PM Two Aviation Security Officers involved in the infamous, violent dragging of Dr. David Dao from a United flight in April have been fired, according to the Office of Inspector General. Four officers were determined to have "mishandled" the "non-threatening situation" aboard the flight at O'Hare International Airport. One officer, "who improperly escalated the incident," and a sergeant, who purposefully took out facts from a report, were both terminated, the OIG said on Tuesday. The two other officers involved were suspended. One was suspended for five days, but it was knocked down to two days after he lodged a formal grievance; the other also filed a grievance against his five-day punishment, but then withdrew it and resigned, the report states. "The investigation also uncovered that the employees made misleading statements and deliberately removed material facts from their reports," according to Inspector General Joseph Ferguson's quarterly report. The Chicago Department of Aviation is currently reviewing policies and procedures. Its assessment will be done early next year, the OIG said. Thomas Demetrio, the lawyer the represented Dao, said news of the officers' termination was not cause for celebration on the part of his client, "who is neither vindictive nor happy about Mr. Ferguson’s findings." Demetrio added: "There is a lesson to be learned here for police officers at all levels. Do not state something that is clearly contrary to video viewed by the world. But for the video, the filed report stating that only 'minimal' force was used would have been unnoticed. Simply put, don’t make stuff up. Also, the Inspector General's report should become the poster child for why passengers should always maintain the right to videotape mistreatment of all kinds. Our cell phones are the best deterrent to ensure mistreatment becomes a rarity." Dao, 69, suffered a broken nose and concussion and lost two front teeth when he was violently dragged off Flight 3411 at O'Hare. Dao told aviation cops he had patients to see the next day and refused to be bumped from the flight in order to make space for airline staff. United's initial responses prompted a public-relations fiasco. Dao settled in late late April for an undisclosed sum. The CDA announced in July that Chicago police—not Aviation Security Officers—would be lead responders for disturbance calls at airports and on planes, and aviation officers would have markings changed on their uniforms to reflect their role as security, not police. |
The Marijuana Policy Project (MPP.org) is attempting to get marijuana legalized for adults in Arizona. Mason Tvert, spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project stated, “Marijuana prohibition has proven to be just as huge a failure as alcohol prohibition.” Recently, the U.S. Department of Justice, Senator John McCain, and former Mexican president Vicente Fox have all begun to support the legalization of marijuana for adults. “The department of justice has made it clear that states like Arizona and Colorado can adopt these laws, and they will respect them,” Tvert added. In April, a Pew Research Center poll found that 52 percent of Americans support the legalization of marijuana for adults. And in May, a behavioral research center poll found that 56 percent of Arizonans favor the legalization of possession of marijuana in small amounts. Tvert, an Arizona resident, knows those numbers don’t lie and that “It would be more sensible to regulate marijuana and start treating it like alcohol.” But Maricopa County attorney Bill Montgomery is still against the voter-approved Arizona Medical Marijuana Act and will do everything in his power to fight the Marijuana Policy Project’s attempts to legalize marijuana for adults in Arizona. Montgomery has been openly and overly strict on medical marijuana growers, sellers, patients, and consumers, even though they are abiding Arizona’s medical marijuana laws. Apparently Mr. Montgomery has never heard the axiom: “The Will of the People is the Law of the Land.” |
I recently stumbled upon the work of a young female Czech artist who makes these amazing hand painted stash boxes. Besides being absolutely gorgeous they are also authentic one of a kind pieces which any cannabis consumer would be proud to keep their stash in. Each one is adorned with a different animal exhaling a monster hit. They are as comical as they expertly painted, and the clear finish on top of them gives them both a beautiful sheen, but also protects these vintage stash boxes for years to come. I recently purchased the giant octopus box you can see in the gallery below, and I’ll update with pictures of when I get it, but needless to say, it’s pretty epic! Studies which have been done into how the brain reacts when handing equipment associated with smoking marijuana have proven to be quite interesting. In what such study researches at University of Texas conducted MRIs of 70 frequent cannabis consumers. They noticed that the reward center of the brain associated with pleasure can actually be triggered merely by handling a pipe, stash box, bong, etc. This means that your high actually starts before you even start smoking weed! There may be a reason why older smokers have frequently stated that they often smoke in the same manner, and with the same gear, as they did when they start. To them, these old wooden stash boxes amazingly also have the power to make them feel high! Stash boxes, and tins have come in all shapes and sizes over the years. Often they were made from old cigar boxes, or other simple wooden boxes. More specialized containers for pipes and bongs have evolved over the years to include foam lined cases which ensure that your favorite glass piece won’t get damaged. In the 60s there was a plethora of different craftsmen making everything from stash boxes to carpets and rugs. These older pieces have a bit more character to them, and give off a classy feel when you sit down with that special friend to roll up a joint. Marijuana and weed paraphernalia has really come a long way over the years, and it’s exciting to see the new designs that are developed to supply your local head shop, and which become the fixtures of cannabis consumers all over the world! You can buy Jana’s super cool hand painted stash boxes direct from her at her Etsy Shop here. |
In response to the deadly violence last weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia, Bowdoin College announced Saturday that it has relocated from a public space to its archives a bronze plaque listing the names of alumni who fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War. “What occurred in Charlottesville and the subsequent national conversation have led us to conclude that historical artifacts like this that are directly tied to the leadership of a horrible ideology are not meant for a place designed to honor courage, principle, and freedom,” Bowdoin President Clayton Rose said in a statement. The 21-by-25-inch plaque includes the names of 19 Bowdoin College and Medical School of Maine alumni who fought for the Confederacy, including Confederate President Jefferson Davis, who received an honorary degree from Bowdoin a few years before the war. Bowdoin said the plaque was relocated from the ground floor lobby of Pickard Theater in Memorial Hall to the Brunswick college’s archives and special collections in Hawthorne-Longfellow Library. According to Bowdoin College records, the honorary degree – and the plaque – have been controversial before. Two years ago, the college ended an annual student award given in Davis’ name. A Bowdoin historian said Davis got the honorary degree in 1858 because he happened to be attending a Bowdoin commencement during a doctor-ordered stay in Portland. “The Boards were in an embarrassing position,” Louis Hatch wrote in “The History of Bowdoin College.” “Mr. Davis was the Southern leader in the United States Senate and his principles were diametrically opposed to those of a majority of people in Maine; but when a man of his ability and prominence … was present at Commencement, it would have been a personal insult not to give him a degree.” When Davis was elected president of the Confederacy in 1861, there were efforts to rescind his honorary degree. College officials considered it, Hatch wrote, but decided that “when the degree was conferred Mr. Davis was a fitting man to receive it and that his later conduct had no bearing on the matter.” The plaque listing the names of the men didn’t go up until 1965, when the school marked the 100th anniversary of the Confederate Army’s formal surrender at Appomattox, overseen by Bowdoin graduate and Union officer Joshua Chamberlain. The lobby in Memorial Hall also has large tablets with the names of 288 Bowdoin alumni, including Chamberlain, who fought for the Union. Then-Bowdoin President James S. Coles dedicated the plaque in memory “of the Bowdoin men who served with the Confederate forces 1861-1865.” “We are gathered this evening in Memorial Hall, dedicated to the Bowdoin men who fought … for the preservation of the Union. Other Bowdoin men, led by conscience or circumstances unknown to us, saw fit to espouse the cause of the Confederacy,” he said. On Saturday, Rose noted the dissonance of having the plaque in Memorial Hall. “For the last fifty-two years, this plaque has hung, incongruously, in a space completed in 1882 that honors the service of alumni who fought to preserve the Union and to end slavery,” he said, adding that it belonged “in a setting appropriate for study and reflection.” Rose also said that “this move explicitly preserves and acknowledges our history, our unusual relationship with Davis, and the fact that there were those at the College who did not support the preservation of the Union or the causes of freedom and human dignity.” Bowdoin officials said Saturday the plaque had already been removed and will be replaced with a panel describing its history, why it was moved and where it can be viewed. Bowdoin also once had a Jefferson Davis Award, funded entirely by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, given annually to a student excelling in constitutional law. “Beginning in 1960, there was a determined effort by admirers of Davis to create a lasting memorial in his name at Bowdoin,” according to the campus website. In 1972, the award was created. In 2015, citing Davis’ efforts to preserve and institutionalize slavery and to dissolve the Union, the Bowdoin board of trustees voted to return the value of the prize fund to the United Daughters of the Confederacy and discontinued the Jefferson Davis Award. “It is inappropriate for Bowdoin College to bestow an annual award that continues to honor a man whose mission was to preserve and institutionalize slavery,” Rose said at the time. The United Daughters of the Confederacy were also the driving force behind a plaque to Jefferson Davis on a pew inside First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church on Congress Street in Portland. First Parish is considering whether to remove the plaque. Noel K. Gallagher can be contacted at 791-6387 or at: [email protected] Twitter: noelinmaine Share filed under: |
Holy fucks, I love this community. Reply Thread Link Wow. I had no idea that Email (tm) was a trademark! Reply Thread Link You can so obviously tell from that picture that they were using the internet for swinging. Reply Thread Link And that they share glassware. Reply Parent Thread Link LOL my thoughts exactly also, icon love. Reply Parent Thread Link That 800 number still goes to Compuserve. Reply Thread Link For some reason, Email™ cracked my shit up. Reply Thread Link This is probably one of my favorite posts yet. Great historical significance. Reply Thread Link Dialup internet 10 years ago was slow as fuck. I can only imagine how slow it was in 1983! Reply Thread Link 300bps to 1200bps. Text would come in slow enough that you could read it comfortably without pausing! Reply Parent Thread Link I remember when 14.4 was consider high speed. Reply Parent Thread Link Oooh, me too. We were so excited when we upgraded to 14.4. Reply Parent Thread Link I remember being astounded by the speed the text came in at 1200. But then, I remember shoving phone handsets into the cups on a modem. Reply Parent Thread Link Oh man, I love love love retro computer ads. Reply Thread Link oh hell yes! Reply Thread Link I had a Compuserve account for years. Oh man, it could get EXPENSIVE. They probably paid a lot of money for their party for eleven people in nine different states! Reply Thread Link That was our first online service provider (wouldn't use the term ISP since it wasn't the Internet per se), back in the early 90s... :) Reply Thread Link I can only assume that "Multi-channel CB simulator" means "IRC." How delightfully retro-dorkish! Reply Thread Link I remember Compuserve. I was recruited by Apple to write most of the on-going content for their eWorld online service, whose business model was supposed to directly compete with CS. Strange times, indeed, to see Apple try to go head to head with such a well-established service as CS. I have friends who stayed on CS almost to the end, then finally got an aol.com address. They loved it so much, they'd be on it to this day -- and even pay the premium charges! LOL! Thanks for posting the ad. Definitely brings back some fond memories. Reply Thread Link Why are they in their robes? They have that "we just got busy" glow, and it ain't from the computer. I wonder if the people in the commercial are still alive. I'll bet they are in their 70's. Reply Thread Link I graduated from HS in 1983, it wasn't THAT long ago! :P They're probably in their 30s in this pic, so that would put them at 50-60 now. Reply Parent Thread Link I'm going with the comment above and picturing an ASCII webcam, delivered one character at a time. Okay, so that didn't exist, but if it had, there might have been more couples like this. Also, I'd like to know how everyone else refered to this 'Email,' since they make it sound oh-so exotic. Does seem like an early non-hyphenated use. Reply Parent Thread Link |
I was at the store yesterday and saw an article about how Americans are more optimistic about the economy but unhappy with the country in general: WASHINGTON — Americans overwhelmingly disagree with President Trump on just about everything from his military threats to North Korea to his combative stance toward NFL players who won't stand for the National Anthem. But a USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll also finds an unusual disconnect: Americans are increasingly optimistic about the nation's economy. "He's just really intent on keeping the nation divided," says William Reed, 52, of Cleveland Heights, Ohio, who voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton last year and was among those polled. "No empathy; no compassion; just all about him and tweeting." Trump's defenders counter that he has faced tough problems and unrelenting opposition from his political foes. "It's not a good climate out there, and he's navigating through it," John Sakach, 80, the owner of a construction-supply business in suburban Chicago, said in a follow-up interview. For the first time during Trump's presidency, a majority of Americans, 53%, say in the USA TODAY poll that the economy is in a recovery. That typically would lift views that the nation is headed in the right direction. But this time, nearly two-thirds, or 64%, also say the country is on the wrong track, up 21 percentage points since the beginning of the year and the highest of his tenure. Remember when polls showed the opposite--that people "approved" of Obama but were not optimistic about the economy? Why the disconnect? Because the media was a non-stop lovefest for Obama with any outliers demonized, and that psychological mindhit was enough to cause people to say they approved of Obama despite his policies not being good for the economy. Studies have shown the media to be up to 91% negative on Trump (it's probably more) and frankly, my ears perk up when I hear anything positive from the media because of the rarity. This negativity has a psychological impact on people; it makes them more depressed about the world around them: |
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Dr. Cushing, born in Cleveland in 1869, was an undergraduate at Yale and finished his career here as a professor of history of medicine. In between, he went to Harvard for medical school, did his early surgical training at Johns Hopkins and became a surgical professor there, and then spent most of his career as chief of neurosurgery, a new specialty, at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital at Harvard (now Brigham and Women’s). When he began operating in the late 19th century, a few other doctors were also venturing into the brain, but for the most part the patients did not survive the procedure. “In the first decade of the 20th century, Harvey Cushing became the father of effective neurosurgery,” the medical historian Michael Bliss wrote in “Harvey Cushing: A Life in Surgery” (Oxford, 2005). “Ineffective neurosurgery had many fathers. “Cushing became the first surgeon in history who could open what he referred to as ‘the closed box’ of the skull of living patients with a reasonable certainty that his operations would do more good than harm.” Sometimes doctors went into the brain and could not find the tumor. Sometimes they talked to patients during surgery. Dr. Cushing, for one, often used only the local anesthetic Novocain. (The brain itself does not have pain receptors, but having one’s skull cut open must have been agonizing.) Mr. Bliss writes that in 1910, midway through a 10-hour operation on the renowned physician and Army Gen. Leonard Wood, Cushing wanted to stop operating and continue another day, but General Wood — fully alert — begged him to continue. Photo Dr. Dennis Spencer, the chairman of neurosurgery at Yale and the Harvey and Kate Cushing professor of neurosurgery, said Dr. Cushing’s major accomplishment was “his meticulous operative technique.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story “Whatever approach he was going to use to get to a tumor,” Dr. Spencer said, “he had this incredibly good judgment in terms of where the tumor was, getting there without harming the brain and then getting out.” Brain surgeons in those days were medical sleuths, relying largely on patients’ accounts of their symptoms to figure out where the tumor was. Dr. Cushing popularized an eye exam that took advantage of the specific ways in which different tumors can distort vision — a strategy used into the 1970s, when M.R.I.’s and other imaging tools replaced it. Even today, many tumors in the pituitary gland, which straddles the optic nerves, are initially detected because patients have trouble seeing. Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters. Dr. Cushing also discovered that pituitary tumors could lead to vast changes in the body. Cushing’s disease and Cushing’s syndrome — two illnesses linked to hormones gone awry — are named for his discoveries. Indeed, comparatively little progress has been made since Dr. Cushing’s time in actually prolonging life in brain-cancer patients. “It is fascinating how far we’ve come in terms of technology but not really in terms of progress for most malignancies,” Dr. Spencer said. “Everything we’ve done in the last 100 years has changed the progress for malignant brain tumors very little, extending life maybe eight months to two years.” He added, though, that “in many tumors we are getting closer to the genetic understanding, and I’m optimistic in the next 10 years we will make a lot more progress.” Photo In addition to his medical achievements, Dr. Cushing won a Pulitzer Prize in 1928 for his biography of his mentor, Dr. William Osler. He devoted his life to his work, leaving little time to his five children. His three daughters gained notoriety for their marriages — one to James Roosevelt, a son of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom she divorced, later marrying the publishing plutocrat John Hay Whitney; one to William Vincent Astor, heir to a $200 million fortune, whom she divorced, later marrying the painter James Whitney Fosburgh; and the youngest to the Standard Oil heir Stanley Mortimer Jr., whom she divorced, later marrying the CBS founder William S. Paley. The collection expanded while he moved from Johns Hopkins to Harvard and eventually Yale, where they ended up in dusty storage bins before their recent $1.4 million restoration, partly paid for by money from a former patient’s family. The brains and their records were a “complete mess,” recalled Dr. Gil Solitaire, a professor of neuropathology at Yale in the 1960s who once shared an office with some of the Cushing paraphernalia. “Some were totally dehydrated, and the jars were cracked.” In 1979, the specimens were moved from the bowels of the hospital to the basement of the medical school’s dorms. It was there that the students in the 1990s started a Brain Society — with membership extended to anyone who had the nerve to sneak into the dank basement, walk through the cluttered hall of brains and sign a poster, which now hangs in the Cushing Center. “It was a rite of passage,” said Dr. Tara Bruce, now an obstetrician-gynecologist in Houston, who became a society member during her first year of medical school in 1994. “Everyone went to see the brains. It was surreal. I had just got to Yale and I remember thinking, ‘I guess Yale has so much great stuff that they can just shove a bunch of brains in the basement.’ ” Dr. Christopher J. Wahl, an assistant professor of orthopedics and sports medicine at the University of Washington, wrote his thesis about the brains when he was a Yale medical student, stirring an interest in the restoration. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “The most incredible thing is that it’s not just the physical documentation of the founding days of neurosurgery but a social document,” Dr. Wahl said. “The bravery of these patients that really had nowhere to turn and this guy who was — cowboy is the wrong word, but an incredible innovator who was doing things at the right time and place.” |
EDIT: Somehow I managed to not get 7 of each colour (excluding yellow). This has now been fixed. Print away! :P My calendar for NaNoWriMo. It’s finally done! Only took a week… The top one is what it should look like when you print out the bottom four and glue them together. It’s also the one you can use as a desktop background. ^_^ To make the calendar: Print out each of the 4 pictures onto a separate piece of A4 paper. Using the dotted lines as reference, overlap the edges so that the edges without dotted lines cover the edges with dotted lines. Stick together with glue, tape, whatever. At the start of every day, subtract yesterday’s wordcount from the total words left to be written, and write the amount on the line above “words to go”. Eg on day 2, if you wrote 1700 words on day one, you would write 48,300 on the line. Keep going till you reach the end! Write that novel! Comments muchly appreciated. :) Thanks to NaNoWriMo HQ for the use of their Logo. :) |
July 1977: My dad was 20 and spent most of his time managing his afro and a McDonald’s in Cleveland. My mom was 18 and had recently given birth to my older brother. He had a mini afro. The young couple was looking to get married. The owner of the McDonald’s where my dad worked agreed to have the wedding at his restaurant for free. See, McDonald’s was the s**t and a lot less common than today. (There were fewer than 5,000 McDonald’s restaurants worldwide, compared to over 36,000 now.) Anyhow, the store remained open during the ceremony–McDonald’s doesn’t play when it comes to their money–but the ceremony was outside of peak hours, so my parents had most of the outside area to themselves, even as restaurant guests looked on like, “I can dig it!” They were married at McDonald’s on the 23rd of that month. Four kids and nearly 40 years later, they’re still together. And of course, the McDonald’s on Lee Road is still there, too. My parents today: -Dewan Gibson |
DONALD TRUMP doesn’t give many press conferences. But when he does, as on January 11th—for the first time since July—they are utterly unlike the press conferences of any other American president-to-be. Speaking without notes, Mr Trump threatened and cajoled Mexico and the pharma industry (its shares tumbled). He boasted about his genius for business (and went some way to reduce his own conflicts of interest—see article). He poured scorn on a shocking report that Russian intelligence had dirt on him and had worked with his people during the election (he shouted down a reporter from the news channel that revealed the report’s existence). And that was just the highlights. It was such a spectacle (see article) and pointed in so many directions at once that you could fail to catch a drumbeat which, for the safety and security of the United States, Mr Trump needs to silence immediately: his continuing hostility towards America’s intelligence agencies. Intel outside Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks. Relations were already rocky. Before the election the agencies let it be known that they had concluded Russia hacked, stole and leaked documents which damaged Hillary Clinton, Mr Trump’s opponent. Most of the agencies (but not all) think that Russia’s intention was to help Mr Trump win. He responded by mocking them for being wrong before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 about weapons of mass destruction. This week things got uglier, when it was leaked that the agencies had supplied Mr Trump with a summary of the report, whose claims remain unverified, despite plenty of effort by plenty of people. In a tweet, Mr Trump complained that enduring such leaks was like “living in Nazi Germany”. And in his press conference he repeatedly suggested that the agencies had done the leaking, casting doubt on their conduct and loyalty. Mr Trump would hardly be the first president to have scratchy relations with the intelligence services (see article). Career officers mutter about Barack Obama’s reluctance to stand up to China and Russia and what they saw as his soft line on spy-catching. However, Mr Trump’s disputes are in a different class, because they eat away at trust. The agencies’ job is to tell the president about threats and opportunities facing the United States. Even though America’s intelligence machine is the world’s most formidable, it deals mostly in judgments and informed speculation, not certainties. In speaking truth to power, intelligence officers will sometimes have to bear bad news. They take that risk and the president listens to what they have to say because it makes the United States better prepared for whatever is coming its way. By ridiculing the agencies for their findings, Mr Trump has signalled that he does not want to hear their bad news. By saying he cannot be bothered with the president’s daily briefing, he suggests their work is of little value. By claiming that the agencies have a political agenda, his people are themselves politicising intelligence work. By impugning their motives, he is undermining public confidence, which was already damaged by Edward Snowden (see article), and which, as with any institution, is essential if they are to go about their duties. If he wants America to be safe, Mr Trump must make amends. He took a first step by criticising Russia for the Democratic hack (albeit reluctantly and mildly). Unlike his national security adviser, his nominees as directors of the CIA and of national intelligence enjoy support among spooks. In 90 days, he has said, they will produce a report on hacking: he should follow its advice. As president, he needs to stop criticising the agencies and demonstrate they have his backing. None of that is hard. Except that it is a test of Mr Trump’s self-control. |
I’ve been a Star Wars fan for my entire life. My mom used to tell me that I wasn’t born, but rather one day my dad sliced open a Taun Taun and I fell out. Been waiting for 6″ SW figures forever. Love the Black Series. Just recently got addicted to the Clone Wars show, and thanks for that Lucas because your prequels nearly pushed me to the dark side. So here is one of the baddest dudes from that show, Captain Rex! Anikan’s right hand man, and a soldier to his core. I can’t decide which one is more bad A between Commander Cody and Rex, so I made them both! Rex comes with his trademark dual pistols, 2 blasters, and blaster rifle. Rex is made from a Black Series Sandtrooper, blown up cast head, fodder, and sculpted details. Finished him with a battle warn paint job. Enjoy! See you in the future! AC |
Best July Moment: July 7th-9th vs. The Braves. If it is illegal to pick three days instead of one moment, sue me. After the Braves swept the Mets in Atlanta to begin the month, it felt real good to win a squeaker, a blow out, and a pitching duel. This series, sandwiched between the Rangers and Marlins series, gave Mets fans hope that the team wasn’t going to call it quits before August came. Worst July Moment: The End Of The Padres Rubber Game. You remember the game. Odrisimar Dispagne was throwing a no-hitter and any Mets fan was ready to give his/her right arm to avoid having the Mets be the first no-hit victim in Padres history. Then something funny happened. The Mets broke up the no-hitter, tied the game up, and looked like they were going to sneak out a win. The Mets used to be the kings of throwing 7+ no-hit innings and then end up taking the loss. So I was salivating at the thought of them turning the tables on the Friars. Instead, Vic Black gave up the game-winning run and the Mets left San Diego losing 2 of 3 games. This game sucked. July Man Crush (Position Player): Travis d’Arnaud. More like Travis d’ArYES, am I right? (I’m sorry). I gave the AAA coaches The Junior Mint award in my Seinfeld Midseason Awards blog because his improvement is soooo important to this team becoming a contender. Having a good all-around catcher does wonders for a baseball team, just like having a good tight end in football. It is a position that is usually occupied by a player that is either good at offense or defense. But if you have one that is good at both, you are well ahead of the game. Oh yeah, and this: July Man Crush (Pitcher): Jacob deGrom. Jacob’s pitching abilities are finally catching up to his hair-growing abilities, which is the best compliment he can possibly receive. A 1.39 ERA to go along with a 38 to 7 K:BB ratio is good for your fifth starter, right? I am man crushing on Jakey Poo hard right now. Best Tweet of July: The Mets have a 2.80 ERA from their bullpen since May 1. — D.J. Short (@djshort) July 23, 2014 The Mets staring pitching having a good bullpen behind it is like John McClane getting a machine gun in Die Hard. Watch out, National League. Ho-Ho-Ho. July Confession/Rant: I really thought the Mets were going to make a push to trade for at least one big bat by the trade deadline. This team is an outfielder and a shortstop away from being a pretty complete team. Now obviously I have made my feelings for Troy Tulowitzki very well known. He is the best answer for any team that needs a shortstop, despite his injury issues. The outfield bat can come from a bunch of different directions. Matt Kemp, Melky Cabrera, and Rusney Castillo are all potential options via trade or free agency. Kemp has the highest ceiling (rightful MVP in 2011) and the lowest floor (injury marred seasons in 2012 and 2013). There have been numerous reports that the Dodgers would eat a good portion of Kemp’s contract to open up an outfield spot for uber-prospect Joc Pederson. Any player the Mets will get in a trade will likely have some warts. Whether it is a big contract, injury issues, off the field issues, or something else. At this point, they need to take some sort of a gamble, like Frank Cashen did with Keith Hernandez in 1983. Good thing we have an ownership that doesn’t mind spending money *Places gun in mouth* Terry Collins Hot Seat, Hot Chick Level: Maggie Gyllenhaal. The seat and the chick would have been MUCH hotter in the beginning of July. But if the hotness level of the seat is at Maggie Gyllenhaal level, Terry better put some thermals on. I do not think much of ol’ Mags. In fact, her replacing Katie Holmes in The Dark Knight may have been the worst casting decision of all-time. I truly didn’t care if her character survived or not. If Ms. Holmes was in the movie, I would have lived and died with her every breath. Another thing that Tom Cruise and Scientology has ruined. Oh yeah, back to Collins and the Mets. The team has played some of it’s best baseball recently and I don’t see ownership doing much if they continue to tread water. TC isn’t going anywhere as of now, unless the bottom absolutely falls out from the team in September. Each series in July broken down in GIF form 25-Man Roster Ink Blot Test Replacing the lightning round this month is something very similar. I will take a look at each player like I would an ink blot and say what that player looks like to me as of today. Bobby Abreu: A legit pinch hitter who should be played in the outfield only after every other position player and pitcher has been used up. Vic Black: A keeper for the bullpen. Not as important as a closer, but please cherish having a good, young arm in this spot. Eric Campbell: A better Josh Satin. On a related note, I just Googled “Satin” and the first Google Autocomplete Suggestion was Satin and Lace, an adult toy store in Danbury, CT. So, ummm, yeah. Buddy Carlyle: Good bullpen pitcher, even better 1950’s name. Bartolo Colon: A strike throwing machine with the body of a microwave. Not much else to say about Fat Bart other than he has been exactly what most people thought he was going to be this year: Part reliable vet, part punchline joke, and part potential trade chip for pitching desperate teams (if he passes through waivers). Travis d’Arnaud: As mentioned above, I have a huge crush of “Little d” right now (we need to work on a nickname). So my opinion may be sliiiiiightly skewed right now. But I see the evolutionary Buster Posey. Jacob deGrom: Tommy Seaver in the pitching game, Uncle Jess in the hair game. Have mercy! Lucas Duda: He has become everything I hoped Ike Davis would become (except for a Gold Glove first baseman). His face looks significantly less dumb when he is hitting moon shots off of pitchers. And again, those orange batting gloves make him look 8,000,000% more intimidating. Lucas Duda appears to be <gasp> a legit, power-hitting first baseman! Josh Edgin: I am ashamed to admit that I think of this scene when I hear Edgin’s name brought up. So other than that weird scene, he is also another decent bullpen lefty. Dana Eveland: Faceless middle reliever, which is a good thing. Fans only remember the really bad middle relievers faces, even if they have a girl’s name. Jeurys Famila: A potentially legit closer if Mejia ever falters/gets injured. Wilmer Flores: Either the shortstop of the future, the second baseman of the future (if Murphy gets dealt), or someone the Mets give up in a trade for a middle infielder (cough, Tulowitzki, cough). Curtis Granderson: Low average, high power, and higher character. Exactly what I was expecting when we signed him. Dillon Gee: Likely trade candidate for a return Mets fans will be unhappy about until they realize Gee is more guts than talent. Juan Lagares: Gold glove centerfielder. Clutch hitter. And the object of my desire and affection when David Wright retires. Wait, what? Jenrry Mejia: A good, not great closer with a good, not great celebration. If you squint your eyes, you see Old Man Clemens from Billy Madison when Mejia closes a game. Daniel Murphy: He just doesn’t have the makings of a championship athlete. Jon Niese: A young, injury prone lefty that is locked up for years and will end up being a bargain as long as he stays healthy. Anthony Recker: A below-average catcher with an above-average last name. Ruben Tejada: <Cue The Charlie Brown Music> Carlos Torres: I see some Turk Wendell in him, which is the highest complement I can give a Mets reliever. My man crush on Torres seems like it was years ago, but Carlito has become a sturdy, unspectacular part of the bullpen. Zack Wheeler: The Koosman to Harvey’s Seaver for years to come (please God). David Wright: The honor of a Boy Scout with the happy demeanor of Mickey Mouse. The 2nd best Met of all-time (and best position player Met of all-time). Eric Young Jr: A fourth outfielder or pinch runner that isn’t good enough to play every day on a contender. Basically Benny “The Jet” Rodriguez at the end of his career. Chris Young: A cockroach. Young is a survivor that somehow pulls out a handful of good plays out of his ass right before the guillotine comes down on his head. Pretty impressive when you actually sit down and think about it. Advertisements |
While Christians may think of themselves as divided into different churches and denominations, the devil actually sees that they are one in their faith in Jesus, Pope Francis said in a video message to a Christian unity celebration in Phoenix. “Division is the work of the ‘Father of Lies,’ ‘the Father of Discord,’ who does everything possible to keep us divided,” the Pope said on Saturday in the message to the gathering sponsored by the John 17 Movement. “I feel like saying something that may sound controversial, or even heretical, perhaps,” he said in the video. “But there is someone who ‘knows’ that, despite our differences, we are one. It is he who is persecuting us. It is he who is persecuting Christians today, he who is anointing us with (the blood of) martyrdom.” The devil, he said, “knows that Christians are disciples of Christ, that they are one, that they are brothers! He doesn’t care if they are Evangelicals or Orthodox, Lutherans, Catholics or Apostolic … he doesn’t care! They are Christians.” The John 17 Movement — named after the Bible passage in which Jesus prays for the unity of his disciples — includes evangelicals and Catholics. One of the participants at the Phoenix meeting was Giovanni Traettino, a Pentecostal pastor from southern Italy whom the pope has known since his days in Buenos Aires. The Pope visited Traettino’s church last summer. The Pope promised Traettino and all those gathered in Phoenix that he would spend the day praying with them for the grace of unity, “the unity that is budding among us is that unity which begins under the seal of the one baptism we have all received.” In the video produced by the Vatican television centre, Pope Francis told the group that “division is a wound in the body of the church of Christ. And we do not want this wound to remain open.” Christians, he said, must seek unity together, they must pray for one another and they must work together to assist the poor and vulnerable. While the Catholic and mainline churches have been engaged in high-level ecumenical dialogues for 50 years, Pope Francis told the Phoenix meeting, “I am convinced it won’t be theologians who bring about unity among us.” The work of theologians is essential for understanding, he said, “but if we hope that theologians will agree with one another, we will reach unity the day after Judgement Day.” “The Holy Spirit brings about unity,” he said, and Christians must open their hearts to the Spirit’s gifts with “prayer, friendship, closeness and reflection.” |
by Maj Toure, Founder, Black Guns Matter - Tuesday, September 20, 2016 Speaking during the Clinton Global Initiative in June, former President Bill Clinton stated that he wanted masses of Syrian refugees to rebuild Detroit. Clinton said: “Detroit has 10,000 empty, structurally sound houses—10,000. And lot of jobs to be had repairing those houses. Detroit just came out of bankruptcy and the mayor’s trying to do an innovative sort of urban homesteading program there. But it just gives you an example of what could be done. And I think any of us who have ever had any personal experience with either Syrian Americans or Syrian refugees think it’s a pretty good deal.” I don’t know exactly what that Clinton quote means since some politicians practice serious double-talk and speak with forked tongues. It sounds like he’s implying that we should get Syrian refugees to come restore Detroit. My question is, “Why?” We already have people in Detroit who need jobs. We have people coming home from prison who need jobs. We already have people in Detroit who need jobs. We have people coming home from prison who need jobs. If you are talking about using tax dollars to help with rebuilding Detroit, why not do it for the people that actually live there? Why does Clinton want to bring someone from the outside in? I think a lot of these politicians have a vested interest in supporting the outsider because they are more concerned with their own personal investment and not with the community. Take someone who just came home from jail: He or she has just paid a debt to society, and there is a billion dollars in funding for people to fix these homes and later become owners of them. Why not create programs like that for the people of Detroit? When you come home, you have a job. You live in a certain section while you’re working. Then after you’ve held a job for two years, or you do a certain amount of hours, one of these homes becomes yours. Why ask Syrian refugees to build a community in Detroit? That might sound like a harsh thing to say, and I might sound like I am being insensitive to Syrian refugees, but I’m not. I’m from hoods like the ones in Detroit. If Clinton is saying we should hire Syrian refugees to do this, that makes no sense to me. You have people in the community who need the jobs—let them do it if they want the jobs. Even if it’s only $8, $9, $10 an hour, when you’re from a community, you have more of a vested interest in maintaining it—especially if you have ownership. The question is: Do you want to empower people, or do you just want to look like you’re fixing something because you know you can get some money on the back end? That’s the question. But you ain’t got to go to Syria for that. I totally understand that Syrians are refugees in a catastrophe. Of that there’s no doubt. But you can’t just leave the people of Detroit out of the rebuilding process. Brothers and sisters coming home from the penitentiary, who have actively shown improvement in their lives, would love to be in that position. An opportunity for brothers and sisters that are out of jobs, that need work, that would bend over backwards for a piece of the American dream—that’s what works. Even the people of New Orleans who have been displaced yet again by another flood—those are American refugees, and letting them help rebuild Detroit would be practical. I think that’s more impactful, and that’s how we make America great. When you reinforce that with firearm safety knowledge and training, conflict resolution and de-escalation, prosperity follows. This topic relates to the Black Guns Matter Tour because defending the Second Amendment, defending your freedom of expression and defending your human right to exist ties directly into poverty in our inner cities. When communities are more secure—when there’s less crime, when there’s more community policing, when we are checking ourselves—the neighborhood economy grows. When you reinforce that with firearm safety knowledge and training, conflict resolution and de-escalation, prosperity follows. Because when those things happen, the businesses come back to the ’hood. Then we put money into proper lighting, good streets, good roads, good schools, hospitals. While we’re doing that, the money begins to circulate in that neighborhood because the community is safe, because the community policed itself, because the community can defend itself against tyrants, foreign or domestic. Again, this ties in with the Black Guns Matter Tour because it’s not just about guns, it’s about all of the other things that you have to secure with guns. If someone takes your firearm or you think you don’t have the human right to defend yourself by any means necessary, then people can trick you or force you to do what they say. So all of these things—Detroit being rebuilt by people from Detroit, Philadelphia being rebuilt by people from Philadelphia, and Baltimore, Chicago, Compton—all of those different things, when you remove that gentrification component, then you get a lion’s share of what you are supposed to get a lion’s share of, not just the crumbs. Then you have more of a natural instinctive right to defend those things. So all of these things are very holistic. That’s the irony of the Black Guns Matter Tour: It actually has less to do with guns, and more to do with knowledge. Black Guns Matter Founder Maj Toure is currently in the middle of the 13-city Black Guns Matter Tour, teaching those in America’s inner cities about their Second Amendment rights and their responsibility as gun owners. |
Can a flattened car be considered art? Of course it can! Just ask industrial designer Ron Arad, whose smooshed Fiat 500s will be setting up shop in the Design Museum Holon in Israel for the next few months. Arad (who also designed the museum) will showcase the crushed Cinquecenti as part of an installation called In Reverse, reports BBC Autos. Here's what they had to say: Arad... has been working with metal for three decades, and these crushed cars are part of a recent project in which he explores, “through physical experiments and digital simulations, the way in which automobile bodies, specifically the Fiat 500, behave under compression.” Advertisement Well, now we know: like adorable little Italian metal pancakes. The exhibit also goes into how Arad crushed the cars, and it features the vintage 500’s original wooden panel-shaping mold on loan from the Fiat Archive and Museum. It sounds like a pretty cool exhibit. If anyone happens to be in Israel, they should check it out. The exhibit runs through Oct. 19. |
Due to issues with wordpress htmlifying code of posts when I edit them to add next part links, I’ve created this page. Latest parts at the top. RISC-V: Designing a RISC-V CPU in VHDL, Part 17: DDR3 Memory Controller, Clock domain crossing Designing a RISC-V CPU in VHDL, Part 16: Arty S7 RPU SoC, Block Rams, 720p HDMI Designing a CPU in VHDL, Part 15: Introducing RPU Github RPU CPU Repo Github Arty S7-50 SoC Repo TPU: Designing a CPU in VHDL, Part 14: ISA changes, software interrupts and bugfixing that BIOS code Designing a CPU in VHDL, Part 13: Memory system and BIOS beginnings Designing a CPU in VHDL, Part 12: Text mode video output Designing a CPU in VHDL, Part 11: VRAM and HDMI output Designing a CPU in VHDL, Part 10b: A very irritating issue, resolved. Designing a CPU in VHDL, Part 10: Interrupts and Xilinx block RAMs Designing a CPU in VHDL, Part 9: Byte addressing, memory subsystem and UART Designing a CPU in VHDL, Part 8: Revisiting the ISA, function calling, assembler Designing a CPU in VHDL, Part 7: Memory Operations, Running on FPGA Designing a CPU in VHDL, Part 6: Program Counter, Instruction Fetch, Branching Designing a CPU in VHDL, Part 5: Pipeline and Control Unit Designing a CPU in VHDL, Part 4: The ALU, Comparisons and Branching Designing a CPU in VHDL, Part 3: Instruction Set Architecture, Decoder, RAM Designing a CPU in VHDL, Part 2: Xilinx ISE Suite, register file, testing Designing a CPU in VHDL, Part 1: Rationale, tools, method Github repository with VHDL sources, ISE project, assembler and ISA. |
Former Zulu Nation Minister of Information Grandmaster T.C. Izlam (real name Tony Bell) has been killed in Atlanta, according to prominent New York City Hip Hop promoter Van Silk and DJ Kevie Kev Rockwell. Through uncontrollable tears, Kevie Kev called Silk towards the end of one of his routine Facebook Live posts to tell him the tragic news. “They killed T.C. Izlam, man,” Rockwell can be heard saying in the video. “They got him. They killed my man.” T.C. Izlam, who coined the “Hip-Step” subset of Hip Hop, was considered a “little brother” to countless pioneers of the culture, including Kurtis Blow, Grand Mixer DXT, Kool Kyle and Kevie Kev, who all spoke to HipHopDX together on a conference call. While DJ Kool Red Alert was present for the phone call with DX, he was unable to gather his thoughts about T.C.’s passing because he was in shock. DXT gathered a few words to share about his late friend. “T.C. was and is one of the youngsters that came up among us that was a teacher,” DXT told DX. “He was a well-educated young man and his ambitions to lead and teach were profound. We don’t know what the circumstances are and were, but we know our brother is gonna be missed by the community. He had a wealth of knowledge through his research and studying to share, as far as in the community of uplifting people to move in a more positive direction despite organized and systemic dissemination of destructive behavior in our community. “He’s one of these people who ‘over-stood’ the ills that affected our community and chose to take the position to be a spokesperson on behalf of the movement that we’re calling Hip Hop,” he continued. “He would try to educate people on the values that we have to maintain in order for us not to lose the cultural aspect of what we’re trying to build. He was trying his best to understand what’s actually happening to us in our desire to express ourselves through the medium we call Hip Hop.” Alongside Grandwizard Theodore, Kevie Kev was not only drawn to T.C.’s talent on the mic, but also his deep breadth of knowledge. “He was extremely powerful, especially with our youth,” Kevie Kev said. “He would take the ones doing bad things and educate them mentally to where he’d change young kids lives with wisdom and knowledge. A lot of people look at T.C. as one of the big MCs of his era of Hip Hop. He was nice and he was good, but people often overlooked his massive intellect. He was one of the most intelligent gentlemen I ever met. He could decipher anything for you and be correct. He shared his wisdom with everybody. Grandwizard Theodore and I brought him — not people around him —into the limelight with us because we liked the way he rocked the mic, but also because of how smart he was.” The aforementioned Hip Hop luminary Kurtis Blow made an album with T.C. called Tricka Technology while working with DJ Krafty Kuts and A. Skillz, and consequently spent nearly two months with him on an extensive European tour. The two became extremely close during that time. “When we met, I was making an album and we ended up recording one together,” Blow said. “We spent a lot of time together on tour. To see him on stage, he shocked and surprised me as a real legitimate force. He wasn’t just an MC. This guy was really good. He was masterful and incredible. To hear him live, he shocked me with his skills. I will never forget the times we had. We were an incredible duo together on stage. He made me love Hip Hop. I knew there were other people who loved it as much as I did and do. He was one of them. He had a lot of talent and creative energy. He was a real spirit. He had his own sound. That drum and bass thing he was doing [Hip-Step] — he was one of the pioneers of that. My hat goes off to him. He’s a legend in his own right we’ll miss him. Rest in peace.” Kool Kyle the Starchild is another pioneering Bronx Hip Hop artist known for the 1980 track “Do You Like That Funky Beat” and shared similar sentiments on T.C. “T.C. was a very wise brother for his time,” Kyle said. “We talked about a lot of personal things besides MCing. We did things together on the mic, but during our personal talks, we shared knowledge of our hood, what was going on in the culture, and what we had to do to support each other. He was very smart about what we had to do to take care of each other. He stood out to me on that level. He was a great MC, but what stood out to me was being able to analyze where we stood as MCs and pioneers. As MCs that did not reach a certain level commercial, he knew what we could do to get recognized.” While details surrounding his sudden death are not yet available, the way the pioneers of Hip Hop culture came together so quickly to remember T.C. speaks volumes. DXT was in awe that he knew T.C. as a community leader more so than an MC. “This is the first time I’m really hearing about him as an MC,” DXT said. “I was nurturing him as a community leader. The time I spent with him was solely on being a public speaker and directing energy into our youth. That’s what my relationship was. When he was the national spokesperson for Zulu Nation, I felt I needed to help him to take that position and have it stand on solid ground as a national person instead of regional. I find it very interesting that I’ve known him longer than everyone on the phone right now, but I never engaged him in music. He came up with his own ‘Hip-Step’ genre of Hip Hop and now that’s all around the world. That was his movement.” |
Swachh Bharat Abiyan Swachh Bharat Abiyan Congress expelled its veteran leader and former Union minister Ram Lal Rahi on charges of anti-party activities, which included participating in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's 'Swachh Bharat Abiyan' in Sitapur district. He had participated in 'Swachh Bharat Abhiyan' on December 19. Rahi has been expelled for six years, reported Indian Express . Rahi has been a four-time MP from Mishrikh (Sitapur) Lok Sabha constituency. A complaint in this regard was submitted with the party both by its Sitapur district unit and former Union minister Jitin Prasada, who alleged Rahi had been engaging in anti-party activities ever since the Lok Sabha polls. The party had sought explanation from Rahi and on finding it "unsatisfactory" decided to expel him for six years. Also, the party served a showcause notice to former AICC secretary K K Sharma for calling Raj Babbar "a nachaniya (a dancer)" and questioning Rahul Gandhi's decision to field him in Lok Sabha polls from Ghaziabad. Meanwhile, the party also served showcause notice to Sharma. In a function to mark Congress foundation day on December 28, Sharma, while addressing party workers, reportedly made a comment on Raj Babbar saying that he was against Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi's decision to send "a nachaniya" to contest election from Ghaziabad. |
Quarriors is a tabletop game that I’ve only played a half-dozen times, but it’s really sunk its teeth into me. Not in the sense that I love playing it, but because it tickles a certain part of my designer brain. For the large number of you that I’m sure haven’t heard of it, the game is basically a deck-builder (like Dominion or Ascension), only with dice instead of cards. It’s fairly simple, but brings many interesting design topics to the table. … Game Summary The goal in Quarriors is to be the first player to earn roughly a dozen victory points. The main way to collect points is by “scoring” creature dice that have survived a full round. At the start of each player’s turn, he or she pulls 6 dice randomly out of their dice bag, then rolls them. Most dice have a great deal of variance between the results found on each face. A “creature” die might have two sides that actually provide money instead, with the other four divided between a fairly weak and strong versions of the creature. Everyone begins with 12 dice. 8 of them are basic “money,” only used to buy other dice from the game-wide supply. There are ten types of dice that are available to be purchased in each game. The set is randomly pulled from a much larger library of possible dice. This means each playthrough is different from all others, ensuring the same strategy won’t work every time. The other dice that players start with are the most basic creature type. When creatures enters play, their collective attack strength is done to the in-play creatures belonging to all other players. The goal here is to kill as many enemy minions as possible and hope your own survive until your next turn, when they score. Whenever a die is used during a turn or killed by an opponent, it goes to the player’s discard pile. When his or her dice bag becomes empty, the discarded dice are put back into the bag. When a creature scores that player has the option of returning a die from the discard to the game-wide supply. This is the only time dice are permanently removed from a player’s pool. As the game progresses, players strengthen their “decks” by buying more powerful dice and culling the weaker ones as creatures score. Eventually someone earns enough points to win. Quarriors is a pretty quick game, and most playthroughs finish in under 30 minutes. Dice VS Cards The first quality that stands out about Quarriors (and, indeed, one of its biggest selling points) is the fact that it uses dice. A lot of them. And in all sorts of colors. There’s just a certain visceral pleasure in rolling a bunch of dice. However, I tend to favor games that use cards over ones that use dice. Why? The amount of randomness. With a deck of cards there are only so many possibilities. Yes, the order can be dramatically different, but you know that in a 52-card deck there will be four aces, four kings, etc. This is even more significant in much smaller decks like those players wield in Dominion. On the other hand, dice are random. Completely random. You could roll a 1 twenty times in a row. In a card game know that there’s no chance of drawing twenty queens in a row. Randomness and Strategy In Dominion I know that if I draw a Gold card and a Silver card, I’ll be able to buy a Market. In Quarriors, almost anything can happen. You might draw a Dragon die out of your bag, only to have it turn up as a small bit of money instead of an invincible behemoth. Having spent a serious amount of time with Dominion over the past several years, it’s often fairly obvious to me what the best cards are in a pool and the order in which they should be purchased. A brand-new player would be at a major disadvantage, and have little chance of winning unless he or she was very lucky. Being a dice game, Quarriors is naturally much less predictable than Dominion. I might know all the best dice and how to combo them together, but if I keep rolling the money side on my Dragons then it’s not going to matter. And the odds are often against your desired result. The Dragon die has three sides that provide money and three that act as a creature. Even with the creature sides there’s significant variance, with the weakest of the three forms being “pretty good” and the strongest being “completely unstoppable.” All of these fluctuations make it difficult to plan ahead. If I don’t know that the Ghost will actually be able to come back after being killed, how can I combo that with another card that provides free money whenever a creature is killed? Strategy in Quarriors often devolves into “buy the strongest, most reliable dice you can.” Interesting decisions aren’t nonexistent, but nor are they a key feature of the game. Pacing In a controlled environment, designers can have complete say in when events can or will happen. In a turn-based strategy game like Civ, if the production rate for all cities is identical then the designer can know for certain that a Warrior will always take 5 turns to build and a Catapult will take 20. This can be a very powerful tool, as poor pacing can derail an otherwise-excellent game. Does training units take too long? Boring. Too quick? The map can become flooded and the player’s army unwieldy – unfun. Hitting that sweet spot in-between is tough. In Dominion, the best starting hand is five Coppers, each of which is worth 1 “money.” This means a 5-cost card is the most expensive one a player can buy on the first turn. There are several powerful 5-cost cards in the game, but nothing ridiculous. The juggernauts are all 6 and above, and the designer made it that way for a reason. The pacing in Quarriors is more questionable. A Dragon die costs 8, and if players are very lucky in their first roll they’ll end up with just that. This certainly isn’t common, but when it happens it’s incredibly frustrating to be one of the other players. At that point the only chance you have to win is if the lucky fellow suddenly becomes star-crossed and never rolls one of the creature sides. Which, of course, also happens. Randomness and Audience We’ve discussed in previous articles how the more of a role luck plays in a game the more it appeals to casual players. As someone who appreciates strategy more than just about anything else games can offer, Quarriors definitely misses the mark for me. But that doesn’t mean it’s a bad game. Games that are 100% skill-based narrow their audience considerably, possibly even to the point where the ‘critical mass’ of a lively community is never achieved. In the Magic card game, if there was no such thing as getting unlucky with a bad mana hand then the more skilled player would always win. New players would quickly become frustrated, and it’s possible the community shrinks down to only a tiny hardcore group. This is not a place most developers want their games to end up. There’s a balance to be struck. Quarriors is certainly within the “enjoyable” range of the spectrum, but were I designing a similar game for my own entertainment I’d certainly make some changes. Speaking of which… What Would I Do Different? As noted above, one of the coolest features of Quarriors is all the dice. It also makes ‘shuffling’ incredibly easy – you just throw everything into the bag, shake it, and pull out however many you need. This is basically the same concept as what David Sirlin did with Puzzle Strike, only he used gaming chips instead of dice. But the dice are what really brings chance to the forefront. Replacing the dice for chips would dramatically alter the game to the point where it would be unrecognizable, so we probably don’t want to be that aggressive. I could see toning down the variance in possible results with a single die though. Instead of the Dragon die having a 50/50 chance of being money or a creature, it could always be a creature, just with varying amounts of strength. This isn’t as loose as Quarriors is now, nor as strict as the single-use cards in Dominion. I would take a similar approach with modifying the starting “money” dice. At present, five of the sides provide 1 money and the sixth provides 2. On occasion this gives the feeling of hitting the jackpot, but doubling your money is a big deal, even if the numbers are small. Just a few lucky rolls and you’ll build a huge advantage over your opponents. To fix this, we could normalize the range a bit. The die could have four sides that give 2, with the other two giving 3 and 1. Chance still plays a role, but the extremes have been toned back considerably. This will also help with the pacing issues I outlined above. Changes of this nature to the most fundamental die in the game would obviously require rebalancing the whole economy, but that isn’t a challenge that ought to deter us. “Because it’s hard” should never be the reason why something isn’t good. Quarriors has a ton of potential and I really want to like it. The core design is sound and it’s unique compared with similar titles. I think a few tweaks could elevate it into the territory where serious strategy gamers would love it. Quarriors 2, anyone? – Jon |
The first clip I remember seeing of the sports anime series Yuri!!! On Ice was of one of the main characters standing up stark naked in a hot spring, facing the other male protagonist and declaring that he was going to be his skating coach. This, coupled with my previous frustrations from never-to-be-realized queer subtext in other sports anime like Free! Iwatobi Swim Club, led me to believe that Yuri!!! would never allow its two male protagonists to be together romantically before I even started watching it. I have never been more thrilled to be proven wrong. Despite my resigned certainty that I was about to be drawn in by the potential of a queer relationship only to be disappointed for the umpteenth time, Yuri!!! On Ice managed to exceed all of my expectations. In the end, the show delivered a thoughtful portrayal of two men developing a deep and trusting romantic relationship that provides LGBTQ viewers with representation of queer individuals being happy together above all else, which is something that we desperately need. The show follows twenty-three year old Japanese figure skater Yuuri Katsuki’s athletic career after a personally devastating loss at the previous season’s Grand Prix of Figure Skating Final. However, his life and his career change forever when Yuuri’s idol, Russian figure skating legend Victor Nikiforov, moves in at Yuuri’s family’s hot spring and declares that he’s going to be Yuuri’s coach for the upcoming season. As they work together, their relationship progresses from fan and idol to skater and coach and finally to equals who fall in love. After realizing that Yuuri and Victor were fully, romantically in love (and overcoming the euphoria that queer subtext had finally become text in a sports anime), I prepared myself for the worst, expecting one of the characters to be outed or for them to be tragically separated. However, as the series progressed I realized that Yuuri and Victor didn’t face the kind of discrimination that LGBTQ individuals are used to seeing both in real life and on the screen. Furthermore, this lack of discrimination was a deliberate choice: in a tweet, series creator Mitsurou Kubo stated, "Whatever the reality seems to be in this work... will not be discriminated against by absolutely loving something in the world of this work. I absolutely will protect... that world." (Translation via Google Translate) For me, it was the first piece of entertainment media I had seen that didn’t present queer individuals as “other,” but allowed them to simply freely love and exist. While watching, I didn’t have to worry about whether Yuuri or Victor would be outed in an unsafe environment or if Yuuri was going to be unfairly judged on the ice because of his sexuality like so many real life figure skaters have feared in the past. Rather, I fretted over when they were finally going to kiss (because really, it was a long time coming) and if I was ever going to get to see the wedding that was hinted at by their matching gold rings. Watching Yuuri and Victor fall in love was so emotionally rewarding for me as a queer individual because it allowed me to experience a queer love story simply for what it was: a love story. Often, I have to turn to fan-produced content for this kind of idyllic, worry-free representation when I don’t want to deal with the emotional rollercoaster of fearing for the fates (and the lives) of my favorite queer characters. This isn’t to say that Yuuri and Victor’s relationship is without conflict, but rather that any conflict in their relationship derives from their struggles to better understand each other rather than discrimination that they face on the basis of their sexuality. Ultimately however, watching Yuri!!! On Ice made me feel safer and more secure in my own identity because it presents its queer characters as normal people falling in love. At a time when I was still struggling with feeling comfortable calling myself bisexual, watching queer characters simply exist in the world of Yuri!!! helped to reassure me that I could experience love in the same way as my heterosexual peers. Although it is true that the discrimination-free world of Yuri!!! On Ice isn’t realistic (yet), it can help reassure queer individuals like me that they can experience love in the same way as anyone else. At the same time, it provides a glimpse of a future where being queer doesn’t mean being “other”. And that notion is something that I will always work towards and protect. Yuri!!! On Ice is available for streaming on Crunchyroll in Japanese with English subtitles and Funimation in English and Japanese with English subtitles. |
Good morning, as it were, to all that have stopped by our humble, little website that, try as I might, I still am hustling to get folks to check out. Here are some RAW Thoughts from Montreal as we gear up for part one of Tuesday's Kurt Angle Ross Report conversation that drops at 9 pm eastern time on podcastone.com. It's good....it's damn good. Grilling time..... Congrats to the live audience in Montreal who had a nice night and made the show better, without question. Now I will get hammered on twitter @JRsBBQ as to when WWE will have another PPV in Montreal or elsewhere in Canada. For the record, it's the same answer as for Oklahoma, I don't know. Just stay tuned is all I can tell you. Excellent first hour of RAW or so I thought. It went by quickly which is always a nice sign. No Authority Figures and the show sailed along well. HHH and Steph do a great job but the roles themselves is tired in my view. Everyone has been playing catch up to Vince McMahon as it relates to the authority role on any wrestling TV show. Mr. McMahon can't be topped because he's too easy to dislike, a natural. Mr. McMahon is a true heel that resonates throughout multiple generations. Short promos starting RAW work best and get a restless audience that's just worked all day in many instances involved in the show without having to mentally break down an interview. Reigns was good in his verbal role and simply needs to keep working to "find his voice" and his cadence. Next year at this time, we shouldn't even recognize the verbal skills of Roman Reigns. The Harper/Rowan vs. Usos match was stout as a good story was told in the ring and by the announce team as they focused on the match and it made me more interested in investing in it. WWE seems to be getting it that backstage vignettes need not be long. many fans, again, have worked all day and don't want to listen to long oratory or dialog. If they wanted dialog they wouldn't' be watching pro wrestling. Not sure what Nikki vs. Alicia was supposed to be but I have to admit that some of Alicia's antics were entertaining. It was likely never booked to be a wrestling match but merely an attraction of which it was. The ending was abrupt to say the least. Folks just have to get used to the fact that this isn't the Trish-Lita era any longer in a variety of areas. Smart use of RVD while getting Rusev a quality win. Lana needs to watch the great female valets with a producer to better explain and recognize the nuances of talents like Sherri Martel for instance. Generally enjoy most things that Orton and Ambrose do but their outing on RAW did not trip the trigger. It certainly was not bad but it did not exceed my expectations. I liked the verbal tension between Cena and Reigns. Felt fight. Goldust/Stardust promo felt like it was written by Cheech or Chong as in it was very irreverent. Hope all the hype to sample the WWE Network for FREE this week works. (I have a selfish motive) plus it's very good. Nice to see Bret Hart on TV again. I've got to book him as a Ross Report Podcast Guest soon. Twitter followers tell me Sandow has pissed off the brass and he's a despised man w/ upper mgmt yet Sandow continues to be on prime time TV multiple times a week or so it feels. Nice selling of the punch to the nose by Miz ala the late, Dick Murdoch. Miz' selling was a highlight of the match vs. Jericho. Miz should study Buddy Rogers, Ric Flair and the heel Shawn Michaels to fully understand the nuances of being the proverbial chickensh*t heel and update it for today. You knew Bray Wyatt would be lurking to keep the story alive between Wyatt and Jericho which is on target for something good at Summer Slam where Chris will do all he can to steal the show. That's what 40 year old overachievers do. Sort of liked the Diva tag but it felt rushed. Thought the concept of Paige/AJ being partners and Paige doing the ring announcing was clever but no one seemed to care about the brawl that occurred. Curious booking to see Cesaro lose again but it was camouflaged so much with Kofi and Big E along with Heyman that I'd give it a pass. I still think that Kofi has legs as a heel. He's a 'face who's been started and stopped too many times and he needs a makeover. Good kid. Bo Dallas should want to become the biggest chickensh*t heel in history if he's smart and those around him produce him as such. His body type, athleticism, face, hair, personality etc provides the 3rd generation youngster a shot at greatness. I assume that Cena won the main event of the three hour show that I waited to see but I can't be sure. Generally, when RAW TV shows are good for the three hour marathons it is usually a sign that the immediate, short term direction has been signed off on which is a good thing for everyone involved. I thought the Montreal RAW show was a solid, TV show that was decently paced and well written. Three hour RAWS will never be perfect but they should be, at worst, solid and this one was certainly that if not a little better. Hit the Ross Report and download part one of my two part conversation with @RealKurtAngle Tuesday (Today) at 9 eastern time on podcastone.com and iTunes. Part two will air next week. It's good stuff that I rally think that you will enjoy. Price's right. Thanks for stopping by and come back any time. Boomer Sooner! J.R. |
Comic Dat Phan Comic Dat Phan 'Last Comic Standing' winner Dat Phan performs Aug. 25 at UTSA (Aug. 25, 2004)--Dat Phan, winner of NBC's "Last Comic Standing," performs at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday, Aug. 25 at the UTSA Convocation Center on the 1604 Campus. Doors open at 7 p.m. The event is free to UTSA students, staff and faculty with UTSACard. Each UTSA community member may bring one guest, also at no charge. "I stumbled across comedy by accident, but then I ended up having something to say and that's why I stayed in the business," said Phan of his comedic beginnings. "And you kind of have to have that message or otherwise you won't be able to survive in this business. I got a lot to say to people." According to Campus Activities magazine, Phan's endearing style of comedy earned him the title of America's Funniest Person by virtue of being the Last Comic Standing. The final vote came from America's viewers after they had become familiar with all the finalists. Dat Tien Phan was born in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1975. He and his mother emigrated to the United States and suffered through financial hardships for most of his childhood. He grew up in San Diego, Calif., and attended West Hills High School in Santee, Calif. After the Sept. 11 attacks, realizing that life is short, Phan moved to Los Angeles to focus on his stand-up comedy career. For a time he lived out of his car, and one night was robbed at gunpoint while working at the Hollywood Improv. Feeling he had nothing to lose as he auditioned for the NBC reality show, Phan found himself one of the five finalists and on Aug. 5, 2003, he became the Last Comic Standing. --Tim Brownlee |
This course examines the psychology of eyewitnesses and its impact on police investigations-- revealing the limitations of the human mind and the dangers for criminal justice. Witnesses often only identify somebody about 40% of the time from a line up. Sometimes the suspect that's been identified isn't actually the culprit. The journey begins by exploring some serious miscarriages of justice. Featuring a real eyewitness whose testimony sent the wrong man to prison. I knew there had been misidentification-- I mean I knew that. It wasn't malicious intent, it wasn't racially motivated-- but it didn't matter, because the end result was Ronald Cotton spent a third of his life in prison for something he didn't do. The course also gives you a chance to follow two investigations of a fictitious crime. And use your cognitive and investigative skills to evaluate the evidence. The course was created by professor Graham Pike, who specialises in eyewitness identification, including E-Fit technology. There are new generation of facial composting systems that are beginning to be used by the police. Graham Pike was also behind a BBC Open University co-production, which is incorporated into the course, and which puts eyewitnesses to the test. By working solely from eyewitness accounts and positive identifications, how close to the truth have they got? Giving you the chance to use what you have learned to solve a crime and compare how you did against a team of real police officers. By completing the eight week course, you will have gained some basic knowledge about forensic psychology, gained insights into how your own mind works, and understood the vital role of psychology in police investigations. |
Rider fights back against horseback DUI charge (WFLA/NBC News) A Florida woman charged with DUI and animal neglect after allegedly riding her horse while drunk is fighting back against the charges. While DUI’s are not an unusual offense to law enforcement, this case was. A deputy spotted Donna Byrne apparently weaving after getting a call about a horse and rider on a busy road. The deputy stopped Byrne and gave her a field sobriety check. The deputy eventually arrested Byrne and took her horse into custody. Byrne claims she was not drunk when she was stopped. “They said I was slumped over in the saddle,” said Byrne. “I was scratching my leg.” Attorney Craig Whisenhunt, now representing Byrne, believes the state might have a problem with this case. He says generally the DUI statute refers to a person operating a device, such as a car or a truck. “Whatever this is, it isn’t a DUI,” said Whisenhunt. “By law, a horse rider on the side of the road is to be treated as a pedestrian and a pedestrian can’t readily be DUI. ” Read more: http://bit.ly/2jdCItO |
Coming off of my 9-2 finish at Eternal Weekend, I felt great going into the Open. Well, more accurately, I felt great about my 75. I, on the other hand, wasn’t doing so hot. I ended up taking off work for half of Wednesday and all of Thursday. I had picked up the dreaded “con crud” at EW the previous weekend. Two of the guys who went to EW with me were some combination of exhausted and sick as well, so the crew that made it from Roanoke to DC for this event was smaller than expected. Back to back out of town events can be rough, so they opted to rest up. I had some reservations about going to the event myself, unsure if I’d be able to play well through the Dayquil daze. After two consecutive 4-1 MTGO finishes in my pajamas while my head was pounding, I resigned myself to fate. With my medicine cabinet loaded into my bag, I headed to DC Friday after work and registered the same 75 I played the previous weekend. Crusader D&T Day one was a wild ride, I’m not going to lie to you. There was a really fun subgame going on that involved me planning on when I could afford to go to the bathroom and take shots of Dayquil. I got a good laugh out of calculating how much time was remaining in the round vs how long it would take the drugs to kick in, all while pondering how many doses would prove fatal to my ability to play. I settled on three doses of Dayquil over 9 rounds, and balanced them out with two sandwiches from Arby’s; they seemed to be the only thing my body wanted to eat for some reason… Despite the fact that I was feeling terrible, my head was pounding, and I generally felt like I was in a dream-like daze, I managed an impressive 8-1 start on day 1! Day 1 2-0 vs D&T 2-0 vs Eureka Tell 2-0 vs Grixis Delver 2-1 vs ANT (off-camera feature) 2-1 vs Grixis Delver 2-0 vs BR Reanimator (off-camera feature) 1-2 vs Elves 2-1 vs Shardless BUG (backup feature match) 2-1 vs D&T (Mike Derczo, off-camera feature match) Round 1 vs D&T You know that moment where you friends give up on your chances of winning a match? They shake their head and walk off rather than watch you get pummeled. One of my friends did that once she saw my opponent coming at me with a Batterskull equipped with a Sword of Light and Shadow. At 30 life, my opponent suspected the game was over. They were right. I Vialed in a Mirran Crusader and activated a Stoneforge Mystic to put in a Sword of War and Peace. My opponent had 5 cards in hand, and I already had an Umezawa’s Jitte with two counters. Turns out that adds up to 30 damage in a single Crusader attack. I ripped off my shirt and beat my chest in a display of manliness. Not really, but it was a thought that occurred to me at the time. That one was the Dayquil talking, and I didn’t take its advice. Round 2 vs Eureka Tell Show and Tell. He puts in Griselbrand. I put in Mirran Crusader. He attacks me for 7. I attack him for 32 with a Crusader who was flailing around with Jitte and SoFaI. High score! People ask me why I’m playing four Crusader. It’s basically this. Those were the two most impressive examples of Crusader damage from this event, but it wasn’t uncommon for me to do lethal out of nowhere with a Crusader. Round 5 vs Grixis Delver I got one of these games for free. We got deck checked this round, and my opponent didn’t register his True-Name Nemesis on his decklist. Whoops. I got a warning for marked cards. Four of my cards had a little bit too much wear, and the judges asked me to replace them. I ended up resleeving my deck after day 1, because I didn’t want to take any chances. I went through the rest of day 2 with SCG mammorth sleeves because they didn’t bring KMCs with them. Daggers! Rest in Peace stranded double Gurmag Angler in my opponent’s hand in game 3, making the win pretty easy from there. Round 7 vs Elves Let me just summarize this round by saying that my opponent said something along the lines of “It doesn’t matter how badly I play, I’m so sorry. I have no idea how you are sitting there and still smiling after I played this badly and still won.” My opponent received two GRVs during this match, one for not paying the Thalia tax for a Green Sun’s Zenith, and one for trying to cast a Natural Order as his second spell for turn while I had an Ethersworn Canonist in play. The Elves matchup is so bad that even if your opponent misplays almost every turn (and gets a game loss mid-match for their third GRV of the day), they’ll still probably find a way to win. C’est la vie. Round 8 vs Shardless BUG I was not expecting Master of the Wild Hunt as a sideboard card. I’m not sure that it is generally a good idea to play, but boy it sure ate me alive in game 2! My opponent kept a risky, mana light hand that didn’t pan out in game 3. The deck with 4 Mirran Crusader was probably going to get the win here anyway, but it was a shame to watch the third game go down so quickly after two super-intricate games. Round 9 vs D&T Mike Derczo got his rematch, but, I ended up winning the equipment war one more time than he did. The games were very interesting and skill-testing, and I enjoyed them immensely. There were a few times where I tried to call bluffs throughout the match, but he always had the Swords to Plowshares he represented when I made the call. I could have played a bit more conservatively, but sometimes you have to just go for it and make them have it. It was almost a card for card mirror match (74/75), and it ended with dueling Sword of War and Peace on the table as well as probably a combined total of 6 or 7 pieces of equipment in play. The math got a little weird since we both had the potential for a ton of life gain, but I connected a few too many times with SoWaP and pressed my life point advantage pretty hard. Ending the day at 8-1 and 7-2 was a solid start for both of us, and we were obviously pretty happy with the results. Day 1 ended with a hearty dinner at Iron Age, an all-you-can-eat Korean BBQ joint of deserved notoriety. After a night of feasting, I retired to my chambers and imbibed the necessary Nyquil to time travel to day 2. Day 2 0-2 vs Sneak and Show (3x Omniscience maindeck) 2-1 vs Grixis Delver 0-2 vs Deathblade (backup feature match vs Jon Goss) 1-2 vs Stax 1-2 vs ANT 2-0 vs D&T The wheels fell off the bus a bit on day 2, and with the exception of the Stax matchup, all of my losses were completely out of my control. I kept good hands and played well, but it just wasn’t in the cards this time. Jon Goss obliterated me with his playset of True-Name Nemesis, the ANT player stormed off before my turn two twice, and my Sneak and Show opponent had Omniscience hands when I had hands that could beat anything but Omni. So it goes. But let’s talk about that Stax matchup… Round 13 vs Stax I sit down for my match, and my opponent is like noticeably jittery. When we drew our opening hands, he was super nervously shuffling his cards in his hand. After eyeing him up, I put him on D&T, assuming that he recognized my name and was really nervous about playing the mirror against a potentially better player. He leads on Rishadan Port and passes. I mentally fist pump at my power of deduction, and smile at my hand that is basically unbeatable in the mirror. He follows it with an Ancient Tomb into a Crucible of Worlds…oops, this isn’t D&T, it’s MUD! Then he plays a Smokestack…this isn’t MUD, it’s full on STAX!!! Smokestack eats my board over about the next 6 turns, and he locks me down pretty good. He begins to loop Inventor’s Fair to tutor for various things. He gets a Metalworker on board, and I offer to concede as soon as he can show me a win condition. He says he just wants to play it out. I take this as him wanting to run down the clock, going for a 1-0-1 win, and I concede. I would later find out that he didn’t actually have any other win condition in the main other than Metalworker… I respect you, bro, I really do. I quickly aggro my opponent out in the second game, and he takes five mulligans in the third game. To be fair, three of them hardly counted since there were off Serum Powder. My opponent began the game with 21 cards in exile, and I notice that a ton of goodies are already in exile. I’m feeling good about this one, but then my opponent landed the third Ensnaring Bridge, and my plan of aggroing him out went down the drain. My plan instead became to deck him. I dumped as many permanents as I could on the board, including using a Gidoen, Ally of Zendikar, which I had boarded in since it could produce Smokestack fodder. It’s at about this time that I could have won this match if I had better matchup knowledge. My opponent had Crucible of Worlds and Inventor’s Fair. I decided to shut down this engine with a Surgical Extraction. When I looked through my opponent’s deck, I saw, in horror, that their only remaining win condition was a Walking Ballista. If I had opted to wait and nab the Ballista instead, I could have won the game via decking like I intended. Instead, a few turns later, I died to an infinite Ballista laser fueled by Metalworker and Staff of Domination. It’s really hard to guess deck composition of something like Stax since it can be so pilot-dependent, so I won’t say that it was necessarily a misplay, but it was something that was clear to me in retrospect after seeing the list. My opponent admitted that his deck was less than 50% vs the field, but that he almost always knew the matchup better than his opponent, and that gave him a big edge. He went on to top 16 the event. My finish at 10-5 was good enough for 35th, and Derczo ended up at 11-4 for 15th. We were both very happy with our performances and how the deck felt. I really enjoyed this event despite my personal illness making things a bit tougher on me. I’m glad I have a couple of weeks to rest up before the team open in Baltimore though, I’m not gonna lie. Speaking of, one of my teammates for that event (and my roommate), Harley Cox top 4’d the Open this weekend. Congrats, buddy, it’s been a long time coming. He went X-3 at EW last weekend, and though it took a little convincing to get him to play Eldrazi in a potential sea of Lands, the choice ultimately paid off for him. I have a couple of things I want to test before Baltimore, but generally speaking, I don’t mess with a decklist that has given me above a 70% win rate. <3 you, Mirran Crusader! |
You may know him as the host of the Mormon Stories Podcast. Perhaps you’ve heard of his studies on why Mormons question and on the quality of life for LGBT+ Mormons. Or maybe you’ve participated in one of his communities or have just seen him in his many media appearances as the face of liberal Mormonism. For all of these accomplishments and more, the CoJCoL-dS finally excommunicated him in early 2015!! And, as a result, the X-Mormon online community voted him the winner of the “William Law X-Mormon of the Year 2015” award!! Congratulations, John!! Some speculate that the reason the CoJCoL-dS excommunicates so many media personalities is to discredit them; so the faithful will know not to listen to them — and instead only listen to the official leadership hierarchy of the church. Here’s what John Dehlin had to say on that in a recent podcast: Part of why I’m not backing down is that I don’t want to empower that strategy or tactic by going silent. So, some of you may be sick of me, but I’m not going away — just to defy that tactic alone. 0:53:21 Good for you — keep up the good work John Dehlin! And congratulations to all of the other candidates as well, who’ve all helped make 2015 a great year to be an exmo!!! |
England may have lost two of their three games in the tournament, but to beat the world champions and more than match France and Germany shows a team evolving well under their canny coach Mark Sampson England return from America’s east coast and the SheBelieves Cup with room for improvement but reason for cautious optimism ahead of this summer’s European Championships in the Netherlands. If the euphoria of beating the USA, the world champions, was tempered by narrow defeats to France and Germany, the England full-back, Demi Stokes, reflected that “something special’s happening with this team”. 1 What is the SheBelieves Cup and why the big deal? It’s a friendly tournament featuring four of the world’s top sides: the USA, France, Germany and England. Mark Sampson’s Lionesses – who exceeded expectations by finishing third in the 2015 World Cup in Canada – suffered a late 2-1 defeat against France in Philadelphia after dominating much of the match, beat the USA 1-0 in New Jersey and lost 1-0 against Germany in Washington. They ended up third behind France, the winners, Germany and ahead of the bottom-placed USA on goal difference. Germany’s Anja Mittag downs England to end SheBelieves Cup hopes Read more 2 Why was everyone so excited about the win over the USA? Beating the world champions – courtesy of Ellen White’s 89th-minute goal - can be seen as a watershed in this squad’s evolution under Sampson. “We’re breaking barriers,” said Manchester City’s Stokes, who started all three games, avoiding being omitted by Sampson, known as one of football’s great rotators. “We’re in a good place. Something special’s happening with this team.” Given the context that the USA were beaten 3-0 by France in their final game, no one should get overly carried away but Stokes’s positivity was endorsed by not just that strong showing against America but slightly harsh reverses to France and Germany. 3 Sampson really is one of the game’s biggest, and most successful, ‘Tinkermen’ isn’t he? Yes, the young Welshman is a seriously clever tactician – that is why his advocates at the Football Association recently championed him as a potential men’s Under-21 coach – who constantly shuffles his squad, switches systems and makes bold mid-game substitutions. Against the USA for instance, he retained only four of the XI that had started against France and changed formation from 3-5-2 to 4-4-2 featuring a midfield diamond. Typical Sampson. Happily the players seem to buy into a philosophy that ensures almost everyone enjoys game time and is kept constantly on their toes. “There’s a lot of depth in the squad and it’s good Mark mixes things up for different games, which means players get proper rests,” said Stokes, who hopes to compensate for the disappointment of missing out on Canada 2015 by starring in the Netherlands. “Everyone in our team really understands that, just because you play one game doesn’t mean you’ll play the next, but you always need to be ready. Mark’s game management is very good and almost everybody in the squad can expect to be involved at some point.” Meanwhile Sampson is unafraid to make big selection calls such has his controversial decision to leave the Chelsea striker Eni Aluko behind this month. 4 Sampson may appreciate that the devil really is in the detail but does he grasp the ‘vision thing’? Most definitely. As befits a man on a mission to “grow the game” in England, he compared beating the USA to “a rugby team winning in New Zealand against the All Blacks.” Considering England began SheBelieves as the tournament’s lowest-ranked side his delight is understandable. “The US had only lost once on home soil since 2004 and have been the dominant team in women’s football since the start of time, really, so it was a huge result,” he said. Alex Morgan: ‘If Fifa start respecting the women’s game more, others will follow’ | Donald McRae Read more “This was a tough tournament but, for our players now, it’s about fronting up in the big games. There’s often small margins between winning and losing and, unfortunately, against France and Germany we fell just the wrong side – but I know we’re much better than we were here. The important thing is that we reveal our full hand in July. The challenge is to be a much better team in Holland and we’ve definitely got the potential and the attitude to do that. “We want to win the European Championship. It would be a game changer for the women’s game in England and my players know it’s big opportunity.” 5 What next for the Lionesses? April friendlies against Italy (at Port Vale) and Austria (at Milton Keynes), then it’s off to their Utrecht base for the 16-team Euros in July and August which sees them facing Scotland, Spain and Portugal in Utrecht, Breda and Tilburg during the group stage. |
This is going to be a bit of a long post. There are many ideas and responses to recent comments that I would like to clear up as well as some suggestions that would be good to get comments on. Is the world changing? Well it would seem so, the collapse of the financial system that now seems to depend on rapid changes to the value of currencies around the planet. The overthrowing of governments. The exposing and subsequent disgust at the financial sector bonuses, government corruption of both politicians and lobbyist groups. The collapse of housing markets. The wars that seem to just never go away and even less so, seem justified. The growing gap between dying people and others who languish in wealth beyond counting. Yes the world is changing and no wonder! An option for the future MaidSafe has been a journey of a lifetime. I say that as I believe you could not do it twice. The focus, attention and complete tenacity of all of us involved has been pretty tough to say the least. It’s not about working hard, many do that, it’s not about sacrifice, many die for a country or cause and none of us died. It’s the sheer effort of introducing something that’s hard to understand and harder to implement. That is a task that I for one underestimated. Anyway would I do it again? definitely! The technology MaidSafe has created is extraordinary in many ways. No less than the fully distributed nature of the network, which I believe is a worlds first, only if you ignore almost every single species that has existed over the years. In terms of technology and invention of humankind then I think it is right at the edge of the level of change we can accept. I think many reading this blog will know enough about MaidSafe to have an understanding of the overview. The detail is absolutely fascinating though and I wish everyone could see it. I think it represents something truly revolutionary and of such benefit to us all that it’s just a privilege to have seen it, never mind be a small part of its creation. So we can establish the MaidSafe technology is at the very least, innovative, novel and commercially applicable. If that sounds like patent talk, it is and I will come back to that later. Strong technology fails without a strong business model The best technology in the world will fail or delay for many decades without a cohesive and thought out business model. Even fully Open Source projects will agree, the need to engage the world as it is, must be done with careful thought. In many ways the business model has to be innovative and novel to introduce a new paradigm successfully. Here in the UK and maybe further afield there has been a shift in the economic climate towards financial sector modelling. This has lead to businesses being run by ‘professionals’ not versed in the very art that created the business. This piece assumes no such nonsense and instead realises innovators who invent complex advances are probably able to count and when absolutely necessary read a spreadsheet. So a strong business model is required. I would go further and say an innovative business model is required. This should be something an innovator does, it will require deep thought, investigation, measuring and an execution plan. This will have to take into account existing models in order to make the changes necessary in society for a step change. Patents are not the root of all evil OK lets get controversial! Patents were set up to allow inventors to be able to profit from inventions, not to be used as a weapon of mass destruction and killing innovation as they do today. There are many opinions on patents and their value. In software particularly they are a double edged sword. In any case if you are innovating and get attacked by a patent troll then you may be finished. So instead of bringing a knife to a gunfight, get ‘tooled up’ and get yourself protected. MaidSafe has a pretty large patent portfolio which cost a fortune. Many people attack when they hear this, oh no you are bad, evil and many more insults. In any case, we have patents and I am delighted. We are going to turn up to a gunfight with much more than a knife for sure. As MaidSafe is extremely innovative, it allows certain advantages. To be awarded a patent you have to show how you can implement the claim. This means your application should have enough information that anyone versed in the art could reproduce your claims. So as nobody has created an autonomous network with self authentication and a PKI system that’s implemented in maths alone, we have a great advantage over others. We can make broad claims, very broad. This means that we have a patent portfolio that covers a wide area and this area is central to a distributed Internet to exist. Whoa! that sounds very dangerous! It is and we are not afraid of the risks. That and to also protect us and the technology while we ironed out all of the kinks. I would hate to think what would have happened if a large incumbent had got this technology and extended and locked it into their own network. A network that allowed no competition and could enhance vendor lock-in, we have all seen that previously, it’s bad for innovation. Don’t try and take over the world, be part of a new world So what do you do when you have technology that could disrupt nearly every other company out there? I mean every company, no matter how large or powerful. Well the first thing to do is find friends, like minded people to share the initial costs of getting started. These are your seed investors. We were very successful there. Then build your product and think the whole time how this technology could change the world. Stay excited and focussed. As the technology is ready, then it’s time to launch your attack on the status quo. Do not run in front of a speeding car or a machine gun nest. Others may not want you to succeed, initially the jealous then later the dangerous. It’s time to find more friends. These, like your investors should be great friends. These people take you to the next stage. For us these friends are all the projects, people and companies who will help build the decentralised Internet. One of the things you must do for your friends is to include them at the final steps of launch. When all the wrinkles are flattened and the bugs under control and you have a working system, get some friends involved. These new friends, the users of your invention, your customers, are going to have to be amongst the best friends you get. They do not need risks involved with getting your product ready, they have their own battles to fight and you need to supply the ammo. MaidSafe supplies its customers with an amazingly powerful armament. That is technology that dramatically improves customer experiences and helps people to live with privacy, security and the freedom to communicate, share and store information of all types. This is done with no infrastructure costs or any start up worries related to registering interest etc. No API keys and no limit on what can be achieved. That’s all great, but we also do something that adds significant benefit. We use the very broad patents to protect the sphere these customers will be operating in. That’s right, when our friends are drawn into a gunfight, we bring in the heavy artillery. Together we present a larger and more powerful force to enable us to make the changes to this world and improve it for everyone. As opponents try and continue to enforce rules, regulations and oppressive regimes on people, we free them. What about the projects that develop, do they patent? In my opinion, if there are terrific innovations, I would prefer they did get defensibly patented. These days, whether it is right or wrong, it is the current landscape. It’s better to be protected and fight against innovation stifling businesses, rather than be closed down by a judge somewhere. This is a symptom of the world we live in today. No point in creating a brilliant application with phenomenal ideas and somebody patents around you, stifling your ability to grow that application. It will happen. I hope the MaidSafe network can create a container for all the associated projects to place patents in. These would be used by everyone to help everyone else and protect this new culture from the ravages that plagued the old ways. What about this dual license thing? A quandary for many and it’s a shame the licensing system is so complex and seems to have become a war-ground with opposing forces completely at odds with each other. The GPL license issue This works very well for us. I met a chap who is well known in the GNU community who told me, you will hate the GPL and want to kill it eventually. For your company to succeed you will have to tell everyone how evil the GPL is! Oh how I laughed (internally), this is where people miss the point. GPL is not bad in our case. It allows the code to be protected by a fantastic community. That community need fear nothing from us as the network owners, because in GPL world we do not own the network or the code, great! A problem solved. If the MaidSafe network is to be the underpinning of the decentralised Internet, how can it be owned. So it’s not owned any more. The Non GPL license issue This is the license the GNU person thought was our goal. Yes this is where we will make our revenue, sometimes, but a goal? To me it’s like a fisherman wishing the only bit of water was surrounding the fish he wanted to catch at that moment, insane! We need everyone to create decentralised applications, that means, schoolkids, enthusiasts, tinkerers, open source projects, free projects, community projects, commercial projects etc. Yes we want an ecosystem that encompasses all walks of life. We want all the water to still be in the sea and other fish for later on for everyone. So if anyone wanted to link our code into their application, for instance, they can, in any way they want. They can statically compile our code and we don’t care, we just hope they succeed in whatever their goal is. Simple! They can build applications, sell them, give them away, raffle them or bin them, all comers welcomed and more importantly able. No hindrance, no registration and no hassle. How does MaidSafe make money then? Aha, that good business model issue, yes I agree this is an important point. It’s so important in fact that we have thought about it long and hard and only at the end of the journey have we unveiled our plans. Yes we got to the line first, checked the landscape, confirmed our thoughts and put our plan in place. We have two immediate options here and we think they are both very fair. Our mantra has always been, profit follows value. i.e. profit is not something to be forced from people and yes you should leave something on the table. Greed fails, it always has and always will. Option 1, license fee As a project, open source (except GPL) or commercial brings in revenue from a MaidSafe enabled project then our license kicks in. That is there is a 1% payment to be made to MaidSafe. This is a small amount and known in advance. It’s super simple to allow projects to factor in as a cost of goods sold item on their business plan. It’s also at a level to not cause grief and should provide significantly more in return through continued advancements in our technology. What I like about this, especially, is that if a project builds a product and it does not work out for them, i.e. little or no sales, then their investment in terms of MaidSafe is extremely small if not zero. That’s fantastic for innovation. Option 2, Token based system There is a fantastic paper here that outlines a phenomenally exciting proposition. This is a proposition based on utilising systems of crypto backed tokens (or currency if you like). There are many options available here and they all need investigated. Essentially a project like MaidSafe supplies tokens to another project who builds on top of the platform. These other companies then increase the value of their token as they become successful in the marketplace. This in turn increases the tokens that MaidSafe has. So a mechanism to increase wealth, yes, but so much more. Every company with such a token now sees their value increase as others increase the value of their own business. Now it gets interesting, wealth starts flowing through the system and nothing moves, no bankers or third parties got involved, it was just some calculations. This means the wealth increases and is free of the professional services burdens and fees associated with wealth movements today. This is at an early stage and many questions need to be worked out, such as do you pre-create tokens (called pre-mining in many areas), or create them as projects are created, is there a finite amount, do they convert to other currencies and token systems etc. These are all mechanical questions, but in a decentralised world this is all possible. That’s what is exciting, the possibilities are immense and these are paths no human has walked on before. We are charting new territory here and there is no need to be scared, we know we will not fall off the end of the world. It’s what growth this value will bring for everyone that is exciting. What if somebody just steals the code and does not pay or take a token? Well my first thought is, I am glad they stole our code. My second is they possibly could not afford to pay and maybe the project failed in some way. Those are probably quite good reasons and easy to understand. If, however, a project was generating substantial revenue and not paying or increasing the value of tokens then they are a threat to the community. In this case they have broken the law with respect to a license agreement, bad enough and I would not like to be in that position. That is very hard to defend. But it’s not over yet. The thieves have not only broken a license agreement, they are acting outside the community. They threaten our friends and network. They are outside another important thing, they are outside the protection of our patent umbrella, they have also broken patent law, so they have a license issue but they also have a trading issue now. This is looking serious for enemies of the community. As I said, do not bring a knife to a gunfight; if large companies steal from the community we bring in the hounds of hell. Where do we go from here: Chaos or community? OK, you may have noticed the Martin Luther King Jr rip off in this section’s title. You get the book here, I feel it’s the least I can do. It’s just a perfect question for MaidSafe. Many think immediately, change equals chaos, whilst others see it as bringing a better sense of community. Take the case in point, we had to change slavery, we had to change child labour laws, we had to stop killing indigenous people etc. Change can be very good and nature requires us to keep probing the unknown. So let’s investigate some of that unknown now! Options for the consumer Internet This is a particularly easy issue for the decentralised community. The easy wins here are: Private data sharing (e.g. DropBox, Box.net etc.) Video provisioning (youtube, vimeo etc.) Social networking (FaceBook, Twitter etc.) Email and messaging There is a plethora of ‘low hanging fruit’ that would benefit immensely from decentralisation. Ask any of the businesses mentioned if they would like their infrastructure to be secure, reliable and free. I think the answer is obvious. Now ask their users if they would prefer to not have their identity taken and used in advertisements or have their activity tracked to advertise to. We know the answer to that one too, I think. Well how do they profit? Good question, maybe some don’t. Others will come up with ingenious mechanisms I cannot foresee. They should be innovators, right? There are in fact many ways to profit. advertising is still possible. Build advertising into the app, select adverts from a network location that’s sorted on some categories, geographies etc. and serve these to the user. Significantly though there is no need to take user data, store it and mine it. All the matching for advertisements can be done in your application. Simple, cheap and in no way a harm to privacy of users. It’s still possible to measure advertising impressions etc. It just reverses the proposition, where advertisers get what they want, users get what they want at no cost to their privacy and security, now that’s great. There will be a ton of opportunities to commercialise applications on the market. Options for AI/robotics I spoke with the RoboEarth project a while back on this very issue. One of my goals is Autonomous Distributed Intelligence. This is ONLY possible when there is a secure network that is not owned by anyone and takes decisions based on sound logic (math based). The RoboEarth people really liked the idea of not storing AI data on the public web, under the control of server admins and maybe corporations. Imagine being able to have our machines all communicate on a network with the ability to securely share data that can be ranked on validity and shared. Add in some inference techniques and you have the culmination of intelligence recalculating continuously. What could that achieve? An experiment I am currently looking at is with robotics. I have 3d printed parts of 2 robots now and need to reconfigure a couple of beagleboards as brains. These already compile and build all the MaidSafe code (small ARM devices). They will join the MaidSafe network when it’s up an running. I will then locate these robots at opposite ends of the house and have face recondition software on them. When people come in the front of the house and introduce themselves to Alebert1 he will upload the image and tags etc. to the share. When the person goes to the back of the house Albert2 will be able to greet them by name. In a similar manner, teach Albert1 French and Albert2 knows French at the same time (almost). Now start dreaming of the possibilities. I do and they are endless. The system will as I said earlier allow for inference to alter existing data as new variables are known. Options for medicine A decentralised Internet holds exciting medical advances. Imagine you had access to your records. Only when you give a doctor access can the doctor see them. In case of illness then you have nominated others who can also do this (using n+p data dispersal techniques). Now you are in charge of your data. Another aspect could be that all machines taking scans report as the robots do. The results of all scans are shared between all medical machines and they can use inference again to build up patterns and check results. If these machines could access medical records in an anonymous fashion, amazing things would happen. You go for an MRI scan of your hip, the machine, unlike a human can process all the scan details and compare with others. The machine notes you have some growth or similar where the doctor was looking. In this case the machine notes you have a very small imperfection in an organ, apparently unrelated and not even considered by the human doctor. The machine notes that every time these two events happened a single dose of pill X cures it all. Meanwhile the human doctor is booking surgery to cut parts out of you, unnecessarily. Not to get rid of doctors, but to provide this amount of information and cross referencing would be a dramatic help for us all. That is only the start, now think of genetics and proteomics, the advances could be astounding. What about longevity, it is really exciting and I do not think this glance even touches on the possibilities. Options for trade Bitcoin has been pretty remarkable for MaidSafe as it shows that even a system that is not fully decentralised makes so much sense. If we take bitcoin and merge it with a fully decentralised system we can achieve massive improvements. Secure wallets (simple), decentralise the blockchain (privacy returns) and add in transaction accountability via scripting (aka Ethereum project) and things start to look bewildering. I have not even started on the possibilities here, worldwide voting systems, autonomous corporations etc. the list is incredible and the future will make all of our heads spin and life will be significantly better. |
A special-purpose chip for artificial intelligence and other tasks in Google's new Pixel smartphones draws on Intel technology. In addition to a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chip, the Google Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL both feature a new custom Pixel Visual Core co-processor, which is meant to improve speed and battery life when shooting photos with Google's HDR+ technology, and better handle AI workloads in apps, Google has said. But the company didn't disclose details about its partners on the chip. Then, last week, device repair website iFixit published a teardown of the Pixel 2 XL that showed what the Pixel Visual Core chip actually looks like. The serial number on the chip in a photograph begins with "SR3," like some Intel chips. In an email to CNBC, a Google spokesperson confirmed that the company worked with Intel on the Pixel Visual Core and noted that no existing chip had exactly what Google wanted for the new Pixel devices. The Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL may not sell well — the first generation Pixels, released in 2016, barely made a dent. Even so, the collaboration with Google on the Pixel Visual Core chip is a win for Intel. Last year Intel canceled some chips for smartphones and tablets, although certain commercially available phones and tablets still have Intel chips or modems inside. It's also some evidence that Intel is making some progress in AI, where Nvidia's graphics processing units are popular among researchers. Last week the company said it's collaborating with Facebook to develop AI chips for data centers. Google has a mixed relationship with Intel when it comes to AI. Waymo, Google's sister company working on self-driving cars, has relied on Intel chips for years, but Google has done a lot of work on its own to develop its tensor processing unit chips for accelerating AI workloads in its data centers. Apple, for its part, designed its own "neural engine" chip for its upcoming top-of-the-line iPhone X. Intel declined to comment. (Clarification: A quote from Google was mistakenly included in a previous version of this story.) |
New science-fiction series launches to critical acclaim “Gorgeous.” —Vulture.com “The best new comic book of 2015.” —Vox.com “Your new sci-fi obsession is here, and its name is Descender…” —Entertainment Weekly Writer Jeff Lemire (Sweet Tooth, Hawkeye) and artist Dustin Nguyen (Batman: Li'l Gotham) take the comics scene by storm with the launch of DESCENDER #1—already optioned for film before even hitting the shelves—and collect an outpouring of advance praise. In order to keep up with customer demand, Image Comics is pleased to announce a second printing of DESCENDER #1. DESCENDER follows one young robot's struggle to stay alive in a universe where all androids have been outlawed and bounty hunters lurk on every planet. A rip-roaring and heart-felt cosmic odyssey that pits humanity against machine, and world against world, to create a sprawling space opera. DESCENDER #1 remains available for purchase across all digital platforms, including the Image Comics website (imagecomics.com), the official Image Comics iOS app, Comixology’s website (comixology.com), iOS, Android, and Google Play. DESCENDER #1, 2nd printing (Diamond Code JAN158232), arrives in stores on April 1. DESCENDER #2 (Diamond Code FEB150601) will arrive in stores on April 8. More praise for DESCENDER: “Your new sci-fi obsession is here, and its name is Descender… a gorgeous, moody story about a future where a lonely robot boy searches for a home in a galaxy that hates and fears him.” —Entertainment Weekly "Jeff Lemire has dreamt up an emotional, imaginative new universe, lavishly brought to life by the great Dustin Nguyen. I can't wait to see where they take TIM-21 next." —Brian K. Vaughan “The best new comic book of 2015.” —Vox.com "Lemire and Nguyen just pulled the curtain back on the medium's new best science fiction heartbreaker." —Matt Kindt “Between Lemire's penchant for building sweeping yet personal stories and Nguyen's gorgeous, painterly art, the book is stunning to behold.” —Comic Book Resources “Epic, intelligent, and full of heart.” —Comics Alliance “Gorgeous.” —Vulture.com “An epic sci-fi tale with a huge heart.” —Scott Snyder “Remarkable…. Descender #1 truly takes you on a journey that’s so gripping, you’ll be begging for more..” —Bleeding Cool “Exciting.” —The Los Angeles Times’ “HeroComplex” “Jeff Lemire has a real talent for drawing me into cold, alien worlds that I'd never dream I'd care about and then having me not want to leave them.” —Mark Waid “The craft on display in this first issue of Descender is tour-de-force stuff.” —Greg Rucka “Descender by Jeff Lemire & Dustin Nguyen is hauntingly beautiful sci-fi that manages to be both epic and powerfully intimate. Masterfully done.” —Jason Aaron "What a beautiful, beautiful book. Descender is worth buying for the artwork alone, so it's almost a bonus that it tells such a compelling story about the future of humanity in a universe filled with terrors (planet-sized killer robots, for one). I can't wait to see where it goes." —Charles Soule “A beautiful cosmic opera and nuanced think piece, balancing the fear of the unknown with the spirit of adventure. Driven by the gorgeous visuals of artist Dustin Nguyen, Descender is a book on the rise.” —IGN “I love Jeff Lemire. I love Dustin Nguyen. But believe me when I say Descender #1 is the best I've seen from both. This is a 5 star book!” —Mark Millar “Like the best sci-fi, Lemire’s script transcends the fantastic to dissect such universal issues as fear, acceptance and hope… From the same scribe behind such reflective graphic novel touchstones as the Essex County trilogy, The Underwater Welder and Trillium, we’d expect no less.” —PASTE Magazine “Bloody hell, Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen's Descender looks fantastic... “ —Declan Shalvey |
It’s no secret that my favorite comic strip of all time is Closer Than We Think by Arthur Radebaugh. The strip is largely forgotten today, but it featured the very best of flying cars and jetpacks from the Golden Age of futurism. The pulpy time capsule ran in over 200 newspapers from 1958 until 1963, and ever since I first discovered it roughly a decade ago I’ve been obsessively collecting copies. Now independent filmmaker Brett Ryan Bonowicz is making a documentary about the strip and its eccentric creator, and I couldn’t be more excited. Advertisement Bonowicz has already conducted a few interviews for the project, including with some famous people like Syd Mead, the production designer on films like Tron and Blade Runner. And he’s also talked with some not so famous people—like me. But Bonowicz is currently self-financing and he needs more money to finish his film. “Syd Mead and Arthur Radebaugh have a shared connection in that they both started their careers as car illustrators,” Bonowicz told me. “In making this film, we’ve been able to talk to a broad spectrum of people and they’ve all been fascinated with Radebaugh’s illustrations and we can’t wait for people to see his story come to life.” You can check out the video preview for the film below and contribute to the documentary over at Indiegogo. I can’t wait to see the finished product. Bonowicz has done so much research on the life of artist Arthur Radebaugh that he clearly knows so much more than me about the man at this point. It should be a fascinating film about an important midcentury futurist. Advertisement [Indiegogo] |
In the past three years, SpaceX has made incredible progress in their program of reusability. In the practice’s first year, the young space company led by serial tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has performed three successful commercial reuses of Falcon 9 boosters in approximately eight months, and has at least two more reused flights scheduled before 2017 is out. Blue Origin, headed and funded by Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame, is perhaps most famous for its supreme confidence, best illustrated by Bezos offhandedly welcoming SpaceX “to the club” after the company first recovered the booster stage of its Falcon 9 rocket in 2015. Blue Origin began in the early 2000s as a pet project of Bezos, a long-time fan of spaceflight and proponent of developing economies in space. After more than a decade of persistent development and increasingly complex testbeds, Blue Origin began a multi-year program of test flights with its small New Shepard launch vehicle. Designed to eventually launch tourists to the veritable edge of Earth’s atmosphere in a capsule atop it, New Shepard began its test flights in 2015 and after one partial failure, has completed five successful flights in a row. The space tourism company has subtly and not-so-subtly belittled SpaceX’s accomplishments over the last several years, and has engendered a fair bit of hostility towards it as a result. Admittedly, CEO Elon Musk nurtured high expectations for the consequences of reuse, and has frequently discussed SpaceX’s ambition to reduce the cost of access to orbit by a factor of 10 to 100. However, after several reuses, it is clear that costs have decreased no more than 10-20%. What gives? Well, Musk’s many comments on magnitudes of cost reduction were clearly premised upon rapid and complete reuse of both stages of Falcon 9, best evidenced by a concept video the company released in 2011. The reality was considerably harder and Musk clearly underestimated the difficulty of second stage reuse, something he himself has admitted. COO Gwynne Shotwell was interviewed earlier this summer and discussed SpaceX’s updated approach to complete reusability, and acknowledged that second stage reuse was no longer a real priority, although the company will likely attempt second stage recovery as a validation of future technologies. Instead of pursuing the development of a completely reusable Falcon 9, SpaceX is instead pushing ahead with the development of a much larger rocket, BFR. BFR being designed to enable the sustainable colonization of space by realizing Musk’s original ambition of magnitudes-cheaper orbital launch capabilities. Competition on the horizon? Meanwhile, SpaceX’s only near-term competitor interested in serious reuse has made gradual progress over the last several years, accelerating its pace of development more recently. Blue Origin’s second New Shepard vehicle, designed to serve the suborbital space tourism industry, conducted an impressive five successful launches and landings over the course of 2016 before being summarily retired. NS2’s antecedent suffered a failure while attempting its first landing and was destroyed in 2015, but Blue learned quickly from the issues of Shepard 1 and has already shipped New Shepard 3 to its suborbital launch facilities near Van Horn, Texas. While NS3 is aiming for an inaugural flight later this year, NS4 is under construction in Kent, Washington and could support Blue’s first crewed suborbital launches in 2018. More significant waves were made with an announcement in 2016 that Blue was pursuing development of a partially reusable orbital-class launch vehicle, the massive New Glenn. On paper, New Glenn is quite a bit larger than even SpaceX’s Falcon 9, and appears to likely be more capable than the company’s “world’s most powerful rocket” while completely recovering its boost stage. In a completed, manufactured, and demonstrably reliable form, New Glenn would be an extraordinarily impressive and capable launch vehicle that could undoubtedly catapult Blue Origin into position of true competition with SpaceX’s reusability efforts. The New Shepard booster. (Blue Origin) Blue Origin’s New Shepard capsule could carry passengers as high as 100km in 2018. (Blue Origin) A render of Blue Origin’s larger New Glenn vehicle. (Blue Origin) However, while Blue Origin executives brag about “operational reusability” and tastelessly lampoon efforts that “decided to slap some legs on [to] see if [they] could land it”, the unmentioned company implicated in those barbs has begun to routintely and commercially reuse orbital-class boosters five times the size of Blue’s suborbital testbed, New Shepard. Apples to oranges The only point at which Blue Origin poses a risk to SpaceX’s business can be found in a comparison of funding sources. SpaceX first successes (and failures) were funded out of Elon Musk’s own pocket, but nearly all of the funding that followed was won through competitive government contracts and rounds of private investment. To put it more simply, SpaceX is a business that must balance costs and returns, while Blue Origin is funded exclusively out of billionaire CEO Jeff Bezos’ pocket. As a result of being completely privately funded, Bezos’ deep pockets could render Blue more flexible than SpaceX when pricing launches. If Blue chooses to aggressively price New Glenn by accounting for booster reusability, it could pose a threat to SpaceX’s own business strategy. If SpaceX is unable to recoup its investment in reusability before New Glenn is regularly conducting multiple commercial missions per year, likely no earlier than 2021 or 2022, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 pricing could be rendered distinctly noncompetitive. However, this concern seems almost entirely misplaced. SpaceX has half a decade of experience mass-producing orbital-class (reusable) rockets, (reusable) fairings, and propulsion systems, whereas Blue Origin at best has minimal experience manufacturing a handful of suborbital vehicles over a period of a few years. Blue has a respectable amount of experience with their BE-3 hydrolox propulsion system, and that will likely transfer over to the BE-3U vacuum variant to be used for New Glenn’s third stage. The large methalox rocket engine (BE-4) that will power New Glenn’s first stage also conducted its first-ever hot-fire just weeks ago, a major milestone in propulsion development but also a reminder that BE-4 has an exhaustive regime of engineering verification and flight qualification testing ahead of it. First hotfire of our BE-4 engine is a success #GradatimFerociter pic.twitter.com/xuotdzfDjF — Blue Origin (@blueorigin) October 19, 2017 Perhaps more importantly, the company’s relative success with New Shepard’s launch, recovery, and reuse has not and cannot move beyond small suborbital hops, and thus cannot provide the experience at the level of orbital rocketry. New Shepard is admittedly capable of reaching an altitude of 100km, but the suborbital vehicle’s flight regime does not require it to travel beyond Mach 4 (~1300 m/s). The first stage of Falcon 9, however, is approximately four times as tall and three times the mass of New Shepard, and boosters attempting recovery during geostationary missions routinely reach almost twice the velocity of New Shepard, entering the thicker atmosphere at more than 2300 m/s (1500-1800 m/s for LEO missions). Falcon 9’s larger mass and velocity translates into intense reentry heating and aerodynamic forces, best demonstrated by the glowing aluminum grid fins that can often be seen in SpaceX’s live coverage of booster recovery. Blue Origin’s New Glenn concept is extremely impressive on paper, but the company will have to pull off an extraordinary leap of technological maturation to move directly from suborbital single-stage hops to multi-stage orbital rocketry. Blue’s accomplishments with New Shepard are nothing to scoff at, but they are a far cry from routine orbital launch services. SpaceX’s future fast approaches Translating back to the new establishment, Falcon 9 will likely remain SpaceX’s workhorse rocket for some five or more years, at least until BFR can prove itself to be a reliable and affordable replacement. This change in focus, combined with the downsides of second stage recovery and reuse on a Falcon 9-sized vehicle, means that SpaceX will ‘only’ end up operationally reusing first stages and fairings from the vehicle. The second stage accounts for approximately 20-30% of Falcon 9’s total cost, suggesting that rapid and complete reuse of the fairing and first stage could more than halve its ~$62 million price. Yet this too ignores another mundane fact of corporate life SpaceX must face. Its executives, Musk included, have lately expressed a desire to at least partially recoup the ~$1 billion that was invested to develop reuse. Assuming a partial 10% reduction in cost to reuse customers and profit margins of 50% with rapid and total reuse of the first stage and fairing, 20 to 30 commercial reuses would recoup most or all of SpaceX’s reusability investment. Musk recently revealed that SpaceX is aiming to complete 30 launches in 2018, and that figure will likely continue to grow in 2019, assuming no major anomalies occur. Manufacturing will rapidly become the main choke point for increased launch cadence, suggesting that drastically higher cadences will largely depend upon first stage reuse with minimal refurbishment, which just so happens to be the goal of the Falcon 9’s upcoming Block 5 iteration. Even if the modifications only manage a handful of launches without refurbishment, rather than the ten flights being pursued, each additional flight without maintenance will effectively multiply SpaceX’s manufacturing capabilities. More bluntly: ten Falcon 9s capable of five reflights could do the same job of 50 brand new rockets with 1/5th of the manufacturing backend. BulgariaSat-1 was successfully launched 48 hours before Iridium-2, and marked the second or three successful, commercial reuses of an orbital rocket. (SpaceX) SpaceX’s Hawthorne factory routinely churns out one to two complete Falcon 9s every month. (SpaceX) Falcon 9 B1040 returns to LZ-1 after the launch of the USAF’s X-37B spaceplane. (SpaceX) Assuming that upcoming reuses proceed without significant failures and Falcon 9 Block 5 subsumes all manufacturing sometime in 2018 or 2019, it is entirely possible that SpaceX will undergo an extraordinarily rapid phase change from expendability to reusability. Mirroring 2017, we can imagine that SpaceX’s Hawthorne factory will continue to churn out at least 10 to 20 Block 5 Falcon 9s over the course of 2018. Assuming 5 to 10 maintenance-free reuses and a lifespan of as many as 100 flights with intermittent refurb, a single year of manufacturing could provide SpaceX with enough first stages to launch anywhere from 50 to 2000 missions. The reality will inevitably find itself somewhere between those extremely pessimistic and optimistic bookends, and they of course do not account for fairings, second stages, or expendable flights. If we assume that the proportional cost of Falcon 9’s many components very roughly approximates the amount of manufacturing backend needed to produce them, downsizing Falcon 9 booster production by a factor of two or more could free a huge fraction of SpaceX’s workforce and floor space to be repurposed for fairing and second stage production, as well as the company’s Mars efforts. Such a phase change would also free up a considerable fraction of the capital SpaceX continually invests in its manufacturing infrastructure and workforce, capital that could then be used to ready SpaceX’s facilities for production and testing of its Mars-focused BFR and BFS. “Gradatim ferociter” It cannot be overstated that the speculation in this article is speculation. Nevertheless, it is speculation built on real information provided over the years by SpaceX’s own executives. Rough estimates like this offer a glimpse into a new launch industry paradigm that could be only a year or two away and could allow SpaceX to begin aggressively pursuing its goal of enabling a sustainable human presence on Mars and throughout the Solar System. Blue Origin’s future endeavors shine on paper and their goal of enabling millions to work and live space are admirable, but the years between the present and a future of routine orbital missions for the company may not be kind. The engineering hurdles that litter the path to orbital rocketry are unforgiving and can only be exacerbated by blind overconfidence, a lesson that is often only learned the hard way. Blue Origin’s proud motto “Gradatim ferociter” roughly translates to “Step by step, ferociously.” One can only hope that some level of humility and sobriety might temper that ferocity before customers entrust New Glenn with their infrastructural foundations and passengers entrust New Shepard with their lives. |
[1] The Gender gap index for India compared to other countries. The gender gap index is one of many multi-dimensional measures of gender inequality. India was scored at 0.66 by the World Economic Forum, and ranked 101 out of 136 countries in 2013. Gender inequality in India refers to health, education, economic and political inequalities between men and women in India.[1] Various international gender inequality indices rank India differently on each of these factors, as well as on a composite basis, and these indices are controversial.[2][3] Gender inequalities, and their social causes, impact India's sex ratio, women's health over their lifetimes, their educational attainment, and economic conditions. Gender inequality in India is a multifaceted issue that concerns men and women. Some argue that various gender equality indices place men at a disadvantage. However, when India's population is examined as a whole, women are at a disadvantage in several important ways. In India, discriminatory attitudes towards either sex have existed for generations and affect the lives of both sexes. Although the constitution of India grants men and women equal rights, gender disparities remain. Research shows gender discrimination mostly in favour of men in many realms including the workplace.[4][5] Discrimination affects many aspects in the lives of women from career development and progress to mental health disorders. While Indian laws on rape, dowry and adultery have women's safety at heart, these highly discriminatory practices are still taking place at an alarming rate, affecting the lives of many today. Gender statistics [ edit ] The following table compares the population wide data for the two genders on various inequality statistical measures, according to The World Bank's Gender Statistics database for 2012.[6] Gender Statistic Measure[6] Females (India) Males (India) Females (World) Males (World) Infant mortality rate, (per 1,000 live births) 44.3 43.5 32.6 37 Life expectancy at birth, (years) 68 64.5 72.9 68.7 Expected years of schooling 11.3 11.8 11.7 12.0 Primary school completion rate, (%) 96.6 96.3 [7] Lower secondary school completion rate, (%) 76.0 77.9 70.2 70.5 Secondary school education, pupils (%) 46 54 47.6 52.4 Ratio to males in primary and secondary education (%) 0.98 1.0 0.97 1.0 Secondary school education, gender of teachers (% ) 41.1 58.9 51.9 48.1 Account at a formal financial institution, (% of each gender, age 15+) 26.5 43.7 46.6 54.5 Deposits in a typical month, (% with an account, age 15+) 11.2 13.4 13.0 12.8 Withdrawals in a typical month, (% with an account, age 15+) 18.6 12.7 15.5 12.8 Loan from a financial institution in the past year, (% age 15+) 6.7 8.6 8.1 10.0 Outstanding loan from banks for health or emergencies, (% age 15+) 12.6 15.7 10.3 11.6 Outstanding loan from banks to purchase a home, (% age 15+) 2.26 2.35 6.6 7.4 Unemployment, (% of labour force, ILO method) 4 3.1 [7] Unemployment, youth (% of labour force ages 15–24, ILO method) 10.6 9.4 15.1 13.0 Ratio to male youth unemployment rate (% ages 15–24, ILO method) 1.13 1.0 1.14 1.0 Employees in agriculture, (% of total labour) 59.8 43 [7] Employees in industry, (% of total labour) 20.7 26 [7] Self-employed, (% employed) 85.5 80.6 [7] Cause of death, by non-communicable diseases, ages 15–34, (%) 32.3 33.0 29.5 27.5 Life expectancy at age 60, (years) 18.0 15.9 [7] Global rankings of India [ edit ] [2][3] India's Global Rank on various Gender Inequality Indices. These indices are controversial. Various groups have ranked gender inequalities around the world. For example, the World Economic Forum publishes a Global Gender Gap Index score for each nation every year. The index focuses not on empowerment of women, but on the relative gap between men and women in four fundamental categories – economic participation, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment.[8] It includes measures such as estimated sex selective abortion, number of years the nation had a female head of state, female to male literacy rate, estimated income ratio of female to male in the nation, and several other relative gender statistic measures. It does not include factors such as crime rates against women versus men, domestic violence, honor killings or such factors. Where data is unavailable or difficult to collect, World Economic Forum uses old data or makes a best estimate to calculate the nation's Global Gap Index (GGI).[8] According to the Global Gender Gap Report released by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in 2011, India was ranked 113 on the Gender Gap Index (GGI) among 135 countries polled.[9] Since then, India has improved its rankings on the World Economic Forum's Gender Gap Index (GGI) to 105/136 in 2013.[8] When broken down into components of the GGI, India performs well on political empowerment, but is scored to be as bad as China on sex selective abortion. India also scores poorly on overall female to male literacy and health rankings. India with a 2013 ranking of 101 had an overall score of 0.6551, while Iceland, the nation that topped the list, had an overall score of 0.8731 (no gender gap would yield a score of 1.0).[8] Alternate measures include OECD's Social Institutions Gender Index (SIGI), which ranked India at 56th out of 86 in 2012, which was an improvement from its 2009 rank of 96th out of 102. The SIGI is a measure of discriminatory social institutions that are drivers of inequalities, rather than the unequal outcomes themselves.[10] Similarly, UNDP has published Gender Inequality Index and ranked India at 132 out of 148 countries. Problems with indices Scholars[3][11] have questioned the accuracy, relevance and validity of these indices and global rankings. For example, Dijkstra and Hanmer[2] acknowledge that global index rankings on gender inequality have brought media attention, but suffer from major limitations. The underlying data used to calculate the index are dated, unreliable and questionable. Further, a nation can be and are being ranked high when both men and women suffer from equal deprivation and lack of empowerment.[2] In other words, nations in Africa and the Middle East where women have lower economic participation, lower educational attainment, and poorer health and high infant mortalities, rank high if both men and women suffer from these issues equally. If one's goal is to measure progress, prosperity and empowerment of women with equal gender rights, then these indices are not appropriate for ranking or comparing nations. They have limited validity.[2] Instead of rankings, the focus should be on measuring women's development, empowerment and gender parity, particularly by relevant age groups such as children and youth.[12][13] Nevertheless, it is widely accepted that India along with other developing countries have high gender inequality and lower women's empowerment than developed nations.[14][15] Birth [ edit ] The cultural construct of Indian society which reinforces gender bias against men and women, with varying degrees and variable contexts against the opposite sex,[16] has led to the continuation of India's strong preference for male children. Female infanticide and sex-selective abortion is adopted and strongly reflects the societally low status of Indian women. Census 2011 shows decline of girl population (as a percentage to total population) under the age of seven, with activists estimating that eight million female fetuses may have been aborted in the past decade.[17] The 2005 census shows infant mortality figures for females and males are 61 and 56, respectively, out of 1000 live births,[18] with females more likely to be aborted than males due to biased attitudes, cultural stereotypes, insecurity, etc. A decline in the child sex ratio (0–6 years) was observed with India's 2011 census reporting that it stands at 914 females against 1,000 males, dropping from 927 in 2001 – the lowest since India's independence.[19] The demand for sons among wealthy parents is being satisfied by the medical community through the provision of illegal service of fetal sex-determination and sex-selective abortion. The financial incentive for physicians to undertake this illegal activity seems to be far greater than the penalties associated with breaking the law.[20] Childhood to adulthood and its education [ edit ] Education is not equally attained by Indian women. Although literacy rates are increasing, the female literacy rate lags behind the male literacy rate. Literacy rate census of India 2001 and 2011 comparison Literacy for females stands at 65.46%, compared to 82.14% for males.[21] An underlying factor for such low literacy rates are parents' perceptions that education for girls are a waste of resources as their daughters would eventually live with their husbands' families. Thus, there is a strong belief that due to their traditional duty and role as housewives, daughters would not benefit directly from the education investment.[22] Adulthood and onwards [ edit ] Discrimination against women has contributed to gender wage differentials, with Indian women on average earning 64% of what their male counterparts earn for the same occupation and level of qualification.[23] This has led to their lack of autonomy and authority. Although equal rights are given to women, equality may not be well implemented. In practice, land and property rights are weakly enforced, with customary laws widely practiced in rural areas. Women do not own property under their own names and usually do not have any inheritance rights to obtain a share of parental property.[24] Economic inequalities [ edit ] Labour participation and wages [ edit ] The labour force participation rate of women was 80.7 in 2013.[25] Nancy Lockwood of Society for Human Resource Management, the world's largest human resources association with members in 140 countries, in a 2009 report wrote that female labour participation is lower than men, but has been rapidly increasing since the 1990s. Out of India's 397 million workers in 2001, 124 million were women, states Lockwood.[26] Over 50% of Indian labour is employed in agriculture. A majority of rural men work as cultivators, while a majority of women work in livestock maintenance, egg and milk production. Rao[27] states that about 78 percent of rural women are engaged in agriculture, compared to 63 percent of men. About 37% of women are cultivators, but they are more active in the irrigation, weeding, winnowing, transplanting, and harvesting stages of agriculture. About 70 percent of farm work was performed by women in India in 2004.[27] Women's labour participation rate is about 47% in India's tea plantations, 46% in cotton cultivation, 45% growing oil seeds and 39% in horticulture.[28] There is wage inequality between men and women in India. The largest wage gap was in manual ploughing operations in 2009, where men were paid ₹ 103 per day, while women were paid ₹ 55, a wage gap ratio of 1.87. For sowing the wage gap ratio reduced to 1.38 and for weeding 1.18.[29] For other agriculture operations such as winnowing, threshing and transplanting, the men to female wage ratio varied from 1.16 to 1.28. For sweeping, the 2009 wages were statistically same for men and women in all states of India.[29] Access to credit [ edit ] Although laws are supportive of lending to women and microcredit programs targeted to women are prolific, women often lack collateral for bank loans due to low levels of property ownership and microcredit schemes have come under scrutiny for coercive lending practices. Although many microcredit programs have been successful and prompted community-based women's self-help groups, a 2012 review of microcredit practices found that women are contacted by multiple lenders and as a result, take on too many loans and overextend their credit. The report found that financial incentives for the recruiters of these programs were not in the best interest of the women they purported to serve.[30] The result was a spate of suicides by women who were unable to pay their debts.[31] Property rights [ edit ] Women have equal rights under the law to own property and receive equal inheritance rights, but in practice, women are at a disadvantage. This is evidenced in the fact that 70% of rural land is owned by men.[citation needed] Laws, such as the Married Women Property Rights Act of 1974 protect women, but few seek legal redress.[32] Although the Hindu Succession Act of 2005 provides equal inheritance rights to ancestral and jointly owned property, the law is weakly enforced, especially in Northern India. Occupational inequalities [ edit ] Entrepreneurship [ edit ] An example of entrepreneurial work that women in India perform – selling produce at local markets. Different studies have examined the women in entrepreneurship roles and the attitudes and outcomes surrounding their participation in this informal economic sector.[33][34] A 2011 study published by Tarakeswara Rao et al. in the Journal of Commerce indicated that almost 50% of the Indian population consists of women, yet fewer than 5% of businesses are owned by women.[33] In fact, in terms of entrepreneurship as an occupation, 7% of total entrepreneurs in India are women, while the remaining 93% are men.[33] Another 2011 study conducted by Colin Williams and Anjula Gurtoo, published in the International Journal of Gender and Entrepreneurship describes women entrepreneurs face several barriers in the development of their work due to different factors.[34] Some of these barriers include lacking access to institutional credit which presents negative consequences in terms of expanding businesses.[34] In addition, women in this realm may lack a formal designated space for their occupational work and can face gendered violence due to their more open presence in society.[34] The other major challenge for women entrepreneurs is the type of activities performed in their occupational role.[34] Often times, these activities may be quite limited, corresponding to traditional gendered roles, performing business ventures such as selling fruit or flowers at temples in India, which hinders the further development of women entrepreneurs beyond a certain point.[34] This study by Colin Williams and Anjula Gurtoo also gathered data in the form of personal interviews with various women working in a entrepreneurship realm.[34] In the study, the categories of occupation among women entrepreneurs were defined as the following: home helpers, venders, office assistants, and shop assistants.[34] The findings from the study indicated that these entrepreneurial women did not consider job security to be an area of concern like some of their counterparts working in other industries.[34] However, a primary concern for these women was the lack of alternate employment which initially prompted them to pursue entrepreneurial work, though economic benefits were slowly acquired after gaining a foothold in the industry.[34] Teaching [ edit ] An early portrayal of female teachers in India through Helen Bisahu, an English teacher in India in 1950. There are gender differences in the number of teachers and their impact on education.[35] During the mid-1970s, females were 25% of teachers, increasing to 43% by 2008.[35] Compared to male teachers, female teachers had lower educational qualifications, though a slightly greater proportion of female teachers had received teacher training.[35] In addition, on average, more female teachers in the study compared to male teachers had over ten years of teaching experience.[35] Scientific professions [ edit ] Multiple factors may contribute to the barriers and discrimination that women in face in science, although the situation has improved over the years.[36][37] A 2003 study of four science and technology higher education institutions in India found that 40% of female faculty members felt some form of gender discrimination in their respective institutions, favouring male faculty members.[36] In addition, in terms of hiring practices, the interview committees of these institutions asked female applicants how they would balance their family with work, and why they were applying for a position rather than being a homemaker.[36] Discriminatory hiring practices in favour of men were also pursued due to beliefs that women would be less committed to work after marriage.[36] Military service [ edit ] Women are not allowed to have combat roles in the armed forces. According to a study carried out on this issue, a recommendation was made that female officers be excluded from induction in close combat arms. The study also held that a permanent commission could not be granted to female officers since they have neither been trained for command nor have they been given the responsibility so far. Although changes are appearing and women are playing important roles in army and the defence minister is also female.[38] Education inequalities [ edit ] Schooling [ edit ] India is on target to meet its Millennium Development Goal of gender parity in education by 2015.[39] UNICEF's measure of attendance rate and Gender Equality in Education Index (GEEI) capture the quality of education.[40] Despite some gains, India needs to triple its rate of improvement to reach GEEI score of 95% by 2015 under the Millennium Development Goals. In rural India girls continue to be less educated than boys.[41] Recently, many studies have investigated underlying factors that contribute to greater or less educational attainment by girls in different regions of India.[42] One 2017 study performed by Adriana D. Kugler and Santosh Kumar, published in Demography, examined the role of familial size and child composition in terms of gender of the first-born child and others on the educational attainment achieved in a particular family.[43] According to this study, as the family size increased by each additional child after the first, on average there was quarter of a year decrease in overall years of schooling, with this statistic disfavoring female children in the family compared to male children.[43] In addition, the educational level of the mother in the family also plays a role in the educational attainment of the children, with the study indicating that in families with mothers that had a lower educational level, the outcomes tended to more disadvantageous for educational attainment of the children.[43] Secondary education [ edit ] Image of a classroom in an all girls boarding school in Tamil Nadu, India In examining educational disparities between boys and girls, the transition from primary to secondary education displays an increase in the disparity gap, as a greater percentage of females compared to males drop out from their educational journey after the age of twelve.[44] A particular 2011 study conducted by Gaurav Siddhu, published in the International Journal of Educational Development, investigated the statistics of dropout in the secondary school transition and its contributing factors in Rural India.[45] The study indicated that among the 20% of students who stopped schooling after primary education, near 70% of these students were females.[45] This study also conducted interviews to determine the factors influencing this dropout in Rural India.[45] The results indicated that most common reasons for girls to stop attending school was the distance of travel and social reasons.[45] In terms of distance of travel, families expressed fear for the safety and security of girls, traveling unaccompanied to school every day.[45] In rural areas the social reasons also consisted of how families viewed their daughter's role of belonging in her husband's house after marriage, with plans for the daughter's marriage during the secondary school age in some cases.[45] Post-secondary education [ edit ] Participation in post-secondary education for girls in India has changed over time.[46] One 2012 examination conducted by Rohini Sahni and Kalyan Shankar, published in High Education, investigated the aspect of inclusiveness for girls in the realm of higher education.[46] The source indicates that overall participation for girls in higher education has gone up over time, especially in recent years.[46] However, there are persisting disparities in terms of spread across disciplines.[46] While boys tend to be better represent all educational disciplines, girls tend to have concentration in selective disciplines, while lacking representation in other educational realms.[46] There has also been research on the dropout statistics across time in higher education.[47] A 2007 source authored by Sugeeta Upadhyay in the journal Economic and Political Weekly, described that the dropout rate in higher education in greater for boys rather than girls.[47] This trend is reversed in secondary education with dropout rates being greater for girls versus boys.[47] The article suggests that the dropout rate in higher education could be explained by the sense of necessity and urgency that boys may feel to acquire employment.[47] Thus, as employment is attained, boys may be more likely to drop out compared to girls in higher education institutions, as the employment urgency could be less pressing for girls.[47] Literacy [ edit ] Though it is gradually rising, the female literacy rate in India is lower than the male literacy rate.[48] According to Census of India 2011, literacy rate of females is 65.46% compared to males which is 82.14%. Compared to boys, far fewer girls are enrolled in the schools, and many of them drop out.[48] According to the National Sample Survey Data of 1997, only the states of Kerala and Mizoram have approached universal female literacy rates. According to majority of the scholars, the major factor behind the improved social and economic status of women in Kerala is literacy.[48] From 2006-2010, the percent of females who completed at least a secondary education was almost half that of men, 26,6% compared to 50.4%.[25] In the current generation of youth, the gap seems to be closing at the primary level and increasing in the secondary level. In rural Punjab, the gap between girls and boys in school enrollment increases dramatically with age as demonstrated in National Family Health Survey-3 where girls age 15-17 in Punjab are 10% more likely than boys to drop out of school.[49] Although this gap has been reduced significantly, problems still remain in the quality of education for girls where boys in the same family will be sent to higher quality private schools and girls sent to the government school in the village.[50] Reservations for female students [ edit ] Under the Non-Formal Education program, about 40% of the centres in states and 10% of the centres in UTs are exclusively reserved for females.[41] As of 2000, about 0.3 million NFE centres were catering to about 7.42 million children, out of which about 0.12 million were exclusively for girls.[41] Certain state level engineering, medical and other colleges like in Orissa have reserved 30% of their seats for females.[51] The Prime Minister of India and the Planning Commission also vetoed a proposal to set up an Indian Institute of Technology exclusively for females.[52] Although India had witnessed substantial improvements in female literacy and enrollment rate since the 1990s, the quality of education for female remains to be heavily compromised. Health and survival inequalities [ edit ] On health and survival measures, international standards consider the birth sex ratio implied sex-selective abortion, and gender inequality between women's and men's life expectancy and relative number of years that women live compared to men in good health by taking into account the years lost to violence, disease, malnutrition or other relevant factors.[53] Sex-selective abortion [ edit ] [54] Birth sex ratio map for India, boys per 100 girls in 0 to 1 age group according to 2011 census. In North America and Europe the birth sex ratio of the population ranges between 103 and 107 boys per 100 girls; in India, China and South Korea, the ratio has been far higher. Women have a biological advantage over men for longevity and survival; however, there have been more men than women in India and other Asian countries.[55][56] This higher sex ratio in India and other countries is considered as an indicator of sex-selective abortion. The 2011 Census birth sex ratio for its States and Union Territories of India, in 0 to 1 age group, indicated Jammu & Kashmir had birth sex ratio of 128 boys to 100 girls, Haryana of 120, Punjab of 117, and the states of Delhi and Uttarakhand to be 114.[54] This has been attributed to increasing misuse and affordability of foetus sex-determining devices, such as ultrasound scan, the rate of female foeticide is rising sharply in India. Female infanticide (killing of girl infants) is still prevalent in some rural areas.[48] Patnaik estimates from the birth sex ratio that an expected 15 million girls were not born between 2000 and 2010.[57] MacPherson, in contrast, estimates that sex-selective abortions account for about 100,000 missing girls every year in India.[58] Girl babies are often killed for several reasons, the most prominent one being financial reasons. The economical reasons include, earning of power as men as are the main income-earners, potential pensions, as when the girl is married she would part ways with her family and the most important one, the payment of dowry. Even though, it is illegal by Indian law to ask for dowry, it is still a common practice in certain socio-economic classes which leads to female infanticide, as the baby girls are seen as an economic burden.[59] Gender selection and selective abortion were banned in India under Pre-conception and Pre-natal Diagnostics Technique Act in 1994.[60] The practice continues illegally. Other institutional efforts, such as advertisements calling female foeticides a sin by the Health Ministry of India and annual Girl Child Day[61] can be observed to raise status of girls and to combat female infanticide. Health [ edit ] Immunisation rates for 2 year olds was 41.7% for girls and 45.3% for boys according to the 2005 National Family Health Survey-3, indicating a slight disadvantage for girls.[62] Malnutrition rates in India are nearly equal in boys and girls. The male to female suicide ratio among adults in India has been about 2:1.[63] This higher male to female ratio is similar to those observed around the world.[64] Between 1987 and 2007, the suicide rate increased from 7.9 to 10.3 per 100,000,[65] with higher suicide rates in southern and eastern states of India.[66] In 2012, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and West Bengal had the highest proportion of female suicides.[63] Among large population states, Tamil Nadu and Kerala had the highest female suicide rates per 100,000 people in 2012. Mental health concerns [ edit ] Mental Health Awareness Rally in 2014, Salem, India Some studies in south India have found that gender disadvantages, such as negative attitudes towards women's empowerment are risk factors for suicidal behavior and common mental disorders like anxiety and depression.[67] These mental health aspects can be studied in different environments for women such as in the home, the workforce, and the educational institutions due to varying social conditions that contribute to the development of mental illnesses in some cases.[68][69] According to a 2001 study performed by U. Vindhya et al., published in Economic and Political Weekly, women tend to have greater suffering from depression and somatoform and dissociative disorders compared to men in the study.[70] Furthermore, the research attributed depressive symptoms to social interactions both in the workplace and home that fostered a sense of learned helplessness.[70] This stems from feelings of powerlessness in different types of relationships that are male-dominated and do not offer equity for women.[70] Other social stressors that contribute as influences in mental illnesses include marriage, pregnancy, family, with pressure to fit into certain traditional roles ascribed to women in India.[70] Furthermore, another 2006 study conducted by Vikram Patel et al., published in Archives of General Psychiatry, further examined specific aspects of gender disadvantages that contributed to common mental disorders.[71] The areas investigated within gender disadvantages included marital history, life experience of various forms of violence in relationship with spouses, autonomy regarding a woman's personal choices, level of engagement outside the home, and social support from family during times of difficulty.[71] Women with situations in which they were ostracized from their community, for example due to being divorced or widowed, the risk for common mental disorders grew significantly.[71] The results of the study indicated that for all factors represented, if these contributed in a negative manner, there was a higher occurrence of common mental disorders in rural and periurban communities in India.[71] Gender-based violence [ edit ] [72] Average annual crime rates per 100,000 women in India by its States and Union Territories. Crime rate in this map includes all Indian Penal Code crimes such as rape, sexual assault, insult to modesty, kidnapping, abduction, cruelty by intimate partner or relatives, importation or trafficking of girls, persecution for dowry, dowry deaths, indecency, and all other crimes identified by Indian law. Domestic violence,[73][74] rape and dowry-related violence are sources of gender violence.[48][75] According to the National Crime Records Bureau 2013 annual report, 24,923 rape cases were reported across India in 2012.[76] Out of these, 24,470 were committed by relative or neighbor; in other words, the victim knew the alleged rapist in 98 per cent of the cases.[77] Compared to other developed and developing countries, incidence rates of rape per 100,000 people are quite low in India.[78][79] India records a rape rate of 2 per 100,000 people,[76][80] compared to 8.1 rapes per 100,000 people in Western Europe, 14.7 per 100,000 in Latin America, 28.6 in the United States, and 40.2 per 100,000 in Southern African region.[81] Other sources of gender violence include those that are dowry-related and honor killings. NCRB report states 8,233 dowry deaths in the country in 2012.[82] Honor killings is violence where the woman's behavior is linked to the honour of her whole family; in extreme cases, family member(s) kill her. Honor killings are difficult to verify, and there is dispute whether social activists are inflating numbers. In most cases, honor killings are linked to the woman marrying someone that the family strongly disapproves of.[83] Some honor killings are the result of extrajudicial decisions made by traditional community elders such as "khap panchayats," unelected village assemblies that have no legal authority. Estimates place 900 deaths per year (or about 1 per million people). Honor killings are found the Northern states of Punjab, Haryana, and Uttar Pradesh.[83] Political inequalities [ edit ] This measure of gender inequality considers the gap between men and women in political decision making at the highest levels.[84] On this measure, India has ranked in top 20 countries worldwide for many years, with 9th best in 2013 – a score reflecting less gender inequality in India's political empowerment than Denmark, Switzerland, Germany, France and United Kingdom.[85][86] From the prime minister to chief ministers of various states, Indian voters have elected women to its state legislative assemblies and national parliament in large numbers for many decades. Women turnout during India's 2014 parliamentary general elections was 65.63%, compared to 67.09% turnout for men.[87] In 16 states of India, more women voted than men. A total of 260.6 million women exercised their right to vote in April–May 2014 elections for India's parliament.[87] India passed 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments in 1993, which provides for 33 per cent quotas for women's representation in the local self-government institutions. These Amendments were implemented in 1993. This, suggest Ghani et al., has had strong effects for empowering women in India in many spheres.[88] Reasons for gender inequalities [ edit ] Gender inequality has been a historic worldwide phenomena, a human invention and based on gender assumptions.[89] It is linked to kinship rules rooted in cultures and gender norms that organizes human social life, human relations, as well as promotes subordination of women in a form of social strata.[89] Amartya Sen highlighted the need to consider the socio-cultural influences that promote gender inequalities[90][91] In India, cultural influences favour the preference for sons for reasons related to kinship, lineage, inheritance, identity, status, and economic security. This preference cuts across class and caste lines, and it discriminates against girls.[92] In extreme cases, the discrimination takes the form of honour killings where families kill daughters or daughters-in-law who fail to conform to gender expectations about marriage and sexuality.[93] When a woman does not conform to expected gender norms she is shamed and humiliated because it impacts both her and her family's honor, and perhaps her ability to marry. The causes of gender inequalities are complex, but a number of cultural factors in India can explain how son preference, a key driver of daughter neglect, is so prevalent.[91][94][95] Patriarchal society [ edit ] Patriarchy is a social system of privilege in which men are the primary authority figures, occupying roles of political leadership, moral authority, control of property, and authority over women and children. Most of India, with some exceptions, has strong patriarchal and patrilineal customs, where men hold authority over female family members and inherit family property and title. Examples of patriarchy in India include prevailing customs where inheritance passes from father to son, women move in with the husband and his family upon marriage, and marriages include a bride price or dowry. This 'inter-generational contract' provides strong social and economic incentives for raising sons and disincentives for raising daughters.[96] The parents of the woman essentially lose all they have invested in their daughter to her husband's family, which is a disincentive for investing in their girls during youth. Furthermore, sons are expected to support their parents in old age and women have very limited ability to assist their own parents.[97] Son preference [ edit ] A key factor driving gender inequality is the preference for sons, as they are deemed more useful than girls. Boys are given the exclusive rights to inherit the family name and properties and they are viewed as additional status for their family. In a survey-based study of 1990s data, scholars[98] found that son are believed to have a higher economic utility as they can provide additional labour in agriculture. Another factor is that of religious practices, which can only be performed by males for their parents' afterlife. All these factors make sons more desirable. Moreover, the prospect of parents 'losing' daughters to the husband's family and expensive dowry of daughters further discourages parents from having daughters.[98][99] Additionally, sons are often the only person entitled to performing funeral rights for their parents.[100] Thus, a combination of factors has shaped the imbalanced view of sexes in India. A 2005 study in Madurai, India, found that old age security, economic motivation, and to a lesser extent, religious obligations, continuation of the family name, and help in business or farm, were key reasons for son preference. In turn, emotional support and old age security were main reasons for daughter preference. The study underscored a strong belief that a daughter is a liability.[101] Dowry death rates per 100,000 people map for Indian States and Union Territories in 2012. Discrimination against girls [ edit ] While women express a strong preference for having at least one son, the evidence of discrimination against girls after they are born is mixed. A study of 1990s survey data by scholars[98] found less evidence of systematic discrimination in feeding practices between young boys and girls, or gender based nutritional discrimination in India. In impoverished families, these scholars found that daughters face discrimination in the medical treatment of illnesses and in the administration of vaccinations against serious childhood diseases. These practices were a cause of health and survival inequality for girls. While gender discrimination is a universal phenomena in poor nations, a 2005 UN study found that social norms-based gender discrimination leads to gender inequality in India.[102] Dowry [ edit ] In India, dowry is the payment in cash or some kind of gifts given to bridegroom's family along with the bride. The practice is widespread across geographic region, class and religions.[103] The dowry system in India contributes to gender inequalities by influencing the perception that girls are a burden on families. Such beliefs limit the resources invested by parents in their girls and limits her bargaining power within the family.[citation needed] The payment of a dowry has been prohibited under The 1961 Dowry Prohibition Act in Indian civil law and subsequently by Sections 304B and 498a of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).[104] Several studies show that while attitudes of people are changing about dowry, the institution has changed very little, and even continues to prevail.[91][105] Marriage laws [ edit ] Men and women have equal rights within marriage under Indian law, with the exception of all men who are allowed to unilaterally divorce their wife.[102] The legal minimum age for marriage is 18 for women and 21 for men, except for those Indians whose religion is Islam for whom child marriage remains legal under India's Mohammedan personal laws. Child marriage is one of the detriments to empowerment of women.[102] Discrimination against men [ edit ] Some men's advocacy groups have complained that the government discriminates against men through the use of overly aggressive laws designed to protect women.[106] Although socially women have been at a disadvantage, Indian laws highly favor women.[107] If a husband commits adultery he will be jailed, but a woman cannot be jailed for adultery and neither will she be punished by the courts.[108][109] There is no recognition of sexual molestation of men and rarely the police stations lodge a First Information Report (FIR); men are considered the culprit by default even if it was the woman that committed sexual abuse against men. Women can jail husband's family for dowry related cases by just filing an FIR.[110] The law IPC 498A demands that the husband's family be considered guilty by default, unless proven otherwise, in other words it implements the doctrine of 'guilty unless proven innocent' defying the universally practiced doctrine of 'innocent until proven guilty'. According to one source, this provision is much abused as only four percent of the cases go to the court and the final conviction rate is as low as two percent.[111][112]Supreme Court of India has found that women are filing false cases under the law IPC 498A and it is ruining the marriages.[113] Some parents state, "discrimination against girls is no longer rampant and education of their child is really important for them be it a girl or a boy."[114] The Men's rights movement in India call for gender neutral laws, especially in regards to child custody, divorce, sexual harassment, and adultery laws. Men's rights activists state that husbands don't report being attacked by their wives with household utensils because of their ego.[115] These activist petition that there is no evidence to prove that the domestic violence faced by men is less than that faced by women.[116] Political and legal reforms [ edit ] Since its independence, India has made significant strides in addressing gender inequalities, especially in the areas of political participation, education, and legal rights.[10][117] Policies and legal reforms to address gender inequalities have been pursued by the government of India. For instance, the Constitution of India contains a clause guaranteeing the right of equality and freedom from sexual discrimination.[118] India is also signatory to the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, or CEDAW.[119] However, the government maintains some reservations about interfering in the personal affairs of any community without the community's initiative and consent.[102] A listing of specific reforms is presented below. State initiatives to reduce gender inequality [ edit ] Different states and union territories of India, in cooperation with the central government, have initiated a number of region-specific programs targeted at women to help reduce gender inequality over the 1989-2013 period. Some of these programs include[102] Swarnajayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana, Sampoorna Gramin Rozgar Yojana, Awareness Generation Projects for Rural and Poor women, Condensed Course of Education for Adult Women, Kishori Shakti Yojana, Swayamsidha Mahila Mandal Programme,[121] Rashtriya Mahila Kosh, Support to Training and Employment Programme for Women, Swawalamban Programme, Swashakti Project, Swayamsidha Scheme, Mahila Samakhya Programme,[122] Integrated Child Development Services, Balika Samriddhi Yojana, National Programme of Nutritional Support to Primary Education (to encourage rural girls to attend primary school daily), National Programme for Education of Girls at Elementary Level, Sarva Shiksha Abyhiyan, Ladli Laxmi Yojana, Delhi Ladli Scheme and others.[102][123] Bombay High Court, recently in March 2016 has ruled out a judgement that "Married daughters are also obligated to take care of their parents". This is a very bold step towards breaking the traditional norms of the defined roles in the society. Also this shall also motivate women to be more independent not only for themselves but also for their parents.[citation needed] Organisations [ edit ] See also [ edit ] |
If there is any consensus in Brampton about Tuesday’s historic vote on the future of a $1.6 billion LRT, it’s that the issue has divided city council and many in the community. Mayor Linda Jeffrey, has entered into a war with the man who was once her biggest political backer, former Ontario premier Bill Davis; a resident tried unsuccessfully to get a court injunction to prevent a councillor from voting Tuesday; the city’s board of trade got into a public dispute with a prominent local lawyer over the light rail transit; and a last-ditch, $53,000 attempt at a facilitation process seems to have failed. Linda Jeffrey is now in a tiff with former premier Bill Davis over his objections to the Main St. route, which she says would run by his own property. ( DAVID COOPER / TORONTO STAR ) The original vote was scheduled in June, but has twice been postponed. On one side, Jeffrey and councillors Martin Medeiros, Gurpreet Dhillon, Gael Miles and Pat Fortini say the province’s proposed Main St. route will finally revive the city’s struggling downtown core, and transit ridership will grow. On the other side are councillors John Sprovieri, Elaine Moore, Jeff Bowman, Doug Whillans and Grant Gibson, arguing there is not enough ridership along the route to justify an LRT, that Brampton should get a similar length of LRT line as Mississauga, and that other options would better serve Brampton’s needs. Article Continued Below Councillor Michael Palleschi has maintained throughout the months-long feud that he hasn’t made up his mind. Anticipating plenty of public interest, the council meeting will be at the Rose Theatre. But it’s unclear what the outcome might be. The province has agreed to fund the full capital cost of the Hurontario-Main LRT project, $1.6 billion, and supports the Main St. route in Brampton. About 17.6 kilometres of the line will be in Mississauga (where council has approved the project) and 5.6 kilometres would be in Brampton. If Brampton rejects the route, it’s not clear what would happen to the money dedicated to it. The acrimony reached a boiling point last week when Jeffrey sent a public response to Davis. Jeffrey, who had earlier appointed Davis as the chair of a new committee to help the city land its first university, accused him in a letter of having a personal interest in the LRT matter. “Despite Mr. Davis’s misgivings about an LRT route in front of his Main St. property, I will be voting in support of the Hurontario main light rail transit option,” Jeffrey’s letter, dated Oct. 23, states. “I believe the (university committee) chair overstepped his mandate and has raised some serious questions about the ethics and relevance of the (university) panel.” In an open letter to council a couple of days earlier, Davis confronted Jeffrey after she said a vote against the Main St. LRT route would hurt Brampton’s chances of getting its first university. “By portending that a particular transit option and route is a precondition to our ability to be successful is not only unfounded but unhelpful as it suggests that this community is not committed to greater transit accessibility which is patently untrue,” Davis said in his letter. Article Continued Below The LRT debate grew even more heated on Friday, when the Brampton Board of Trade released a newsletter tha claimed a lawyer from a “prominent Brampton firm” had “threatened severe consequences” to the Board of Trade if it continued its push for the Main St. route. Then, later on Friday, it was reported that a Brampton resident had filed a request with the Superior Court for an injunction to block Medeiros from voting Tuesday. The application alleged Medeiros had “misrepresented” his place of residence when he applied to run for city council last year and at the time did not even live in Brampton, therefore should not have been allowed to run. He has since moved to Brampton. On Monday, the court dismissed the injunction. As the turmoil unfolded, a facilitator hired by the city at council’s request to help find a consensus, at a cost of more than $53,000, has struggled to bring both sides together. Jeffrey had said she was not going to change her mind on the issue. An attempt to hold a last-minute facilitation session Monday failed. Asked if the process had in fact helped toward finding a consensus, LRT facilitator Lee Parsons said: “I don’t know if there was any headway, as far as a vote (goes).” As council prepares to make what many residents are calling the biggest decision they will ever face, the city and its leaders appear more divided than ever. Read more about: |
Auburn offensive lineman Jordan Diamond will not play for the Tigers in 2016. AL.com’s James Crepea reports that the senior posted a message to his Instagram account indicating that last Saturday’s spring game was his last in a Tigers uniform. Diamond, who has been with the Tigers since 2012 but played sparingly due to injuries, was expected to be a backup guard and tackle for new offensive line coach Herb Hand. He has one year of eligibility remaining, but he did not make it clear whether he intended to attempt to use it elsewhere. “I’ve been fortunate enough and blessed to wear this historic Auburn Tigers uniform,” Diamond wrote. “I’m humbled and honored to have been here for 4 years. A-Day was the last time I will run through the smoke at Jordan Hare Stadium.” “I would like to thank all the coaches that has been in this program throughout the years,” Diamond wrote. “I want to thank Coach Malzahn for always having my back. I want acknowledge and thank all of my great teammates for allowing me to be me. I wanna send thanks to Dr. (James) Andrews and the great training staff that we have. Thank you coach Russell and the strength staff as well. Last but not least I would like to thank my parents and my brother for being here for me every single step of the way, even when it seems like there was no hope, I could always count on y’all to be here for me. Also I can’t forget about the Auburn Family and the greatest Fans in College Sports, you guys are absolutely amazing! “I’ve been here since 2012 and one thing we all did was stick together. Off football Hopefully I have inspired you all to be the best person you can be. Throughout my years here it’s been some adversity for me, and hopefully I’ve impacted someone’s life by being positive, motivated, hard working and most importantly grateful and humble. If I’ve impacted one life I’ve done my job. Just like the picture I did everything with a smile on my face: Auburn Thank you for all the great times, thank you for the good and the bad. Just know Auburn, a kid from the south Side of Chicago is getting a degree from Auburn University, that’s something to be proud of. I want send a special message to Auburn. You saved my life. Thank you and War Damn Eagle.” Here’s a look at Diamond prior to Saturday’s spring game: |
Last August, President Obama held a White House press conference and fielded a question from Fox News’ Ed Henry about the Benghazi attack from 11 months earlier Henry told the president, “You said on September 12th, ‘Make no mistake, we’ll bring to justice the killers who attacked our people.’ Eleven months later, where are they, sir?” Obama replied, “Well, I also said that we’d get bin Laden, and I didn’t get him in 11 months…. [W]e are intent on capturing those who carried out this attack, and we’re going to stay on it until we get them.” It appears the president meant it United States commandos have captured the suspected ringleader of the attack on the United States mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, Pentagon officials said Tuesday. Apprehension of the suspect, Ahmed Abu Khattala, is the major breakthrough in the two-and-a-half-year-old investigation into the attack, which also killed three other Americans. President Obama vowed swift action to bring the perpetrators to justice. The Washington Post report added some important details, explaining that this secret mission required months of planning and involved coordination between U.S. troops in Libya and the FBI. A “jubilant” U.S. official described Abu Khattala’s capture as “a reminder that when the United States says it’s going to hold someone accountable and he will face justice, this is what we mean.” Even better, officials confirmed that the mission was completed without any U.S. casualties and the personnel involved have all safely left Libya. NBC News added that the suspected terrorist is in custody at an undisclosed location outside Libya, after having been captured over the weekend “in an extremely tightly-held [Special Operations Forces] operation.” The officials tell NBC News Abu Khattala is currently being interrogated by FBI officials in a “criminal case to be prosecuted by the Justice Department.” At least at first blush, this would appear to be a breakthrough victory for the Obama administration and the United States overall, and it’s not yet clear what kind of partisan complaints, if any, we should expect from the White House’s critics, many of whom have clung to Benghazi conspiracy theories since the 2012 attack. |
We've spent the last two years in and out of Twin City studios recording our third album, "Ocean Songs." In fact we had to go through four different studios because we wanted to get it just right. We would love your help now to bring all of these sessions to their epic conclusion: That's right, the highest quality 180 gram 12" vinyl record, pressed right here locally. It's not only full and beautiful to listen to, but something you can see, touch, and smell as well. It's got eight new Poosa songs to make your toes tingle and your head hum as you stroll along the beach that is "Ocean Songs". On top of that, the album artwork might just make you want to mount it on your living room wall. We've also got great rewards for you to say thanks for your support. Please take a moment to watch our video above that details a little of the history of the band and the recording process. We think you'll like it. Thanks! Listen to a couple samples: Morning Window Coconut Tree Sample Album Art: Sample of Vinyl Record: Main Goal ($5500) - Final mastering of the album for the highest quality sound possible - Production of 500 high quality vinyl albums with the option to press 500 more -Production of materials to go with the album like CD's, t-shirts, photos and stickers Stretch Goal ($7500) If we are fortunate enough to exceed our goal we'd really love to do some extra promotion for the album on the radio and internet. Walk along the ocean... |
Straight up, I've never particularly cared for The Miz. I've never outright disliked him, but I just haven't been captivated by many of his performances. As a guy who's into wrestler’s wrestlers (Daniel Bryan, Katsuyori Shibata), I find The Miz as an in ring performer, well, kind of boring. Not saying he's a bad wrestler. He's not. He's perfectly fine. Just don't ask him to catch anyone. The Miz’s (Miz’z? Miz’? Mizzez?) real strength from day one has been his mic work. The guy can talk. Fact! Well, it's an opinion, but most wouldn't disagree. Would you? He's ’The Miz with the Mouth,’ as opposed to that other, mouthless The Miz (Deadpool reference - Check!). He's talked his way, ever so briefly, and what feels like a lifetime ago, to the top of the WWE. He's a former WWE Champion who's headlined WrestleMania. Not bad for a guy who used to imitate The Rock on The Real World. So while not putting on too many five star bouts, he's made himself relevant using his words. That, despite me saying it was just a moment ago, actually isn't his real strength - SWERVE! The Miz has got as far as he has because he's just so gosh darn unlikable. That's his number one skill, his real moneymaker. The Miz has an innate ability to make the fans boo him. Now, I know I said I’ve never disliked the guy - still true - but if I watched wrestling like a normal person, and not someone who’s as fascinated by what goes on behind the scenes as I am what's in front of them, I'm pretty sure I'd hate The Miz and his stupid smug face. Quick review: The Miz can talk; He’s a natural bad guy; He’s a passable in-ring worker. Can we agree on these points, readers? Cool. So what's Mizzy up to these days, anyway? Getting prepped to headline another WrestleMania? Oh, that's right, he's being used as fodder to advance a Chris Jericho vs. AJ Styles program. Is this the best use of The Miz and all his Mizness? Well, yes and no. Recently on Raw, The Miz hosted a Miz TV segment with Styles. Normally, I don't really care for the Miz TVs or the Highlight Reels as the only time they're memorable is when Shawn Michaels is throwing guys through windows or getting thrown into TV screens. Other times, they're forgettable time fillers (are there memorable time fillers?). This episode, however, was, to quote The Miz, awesome. The Miz killed it on the mic. Him putting over AJ’s accomplishments while simultaneously belittling him was perfect. For the first time in a long time, or ever, I gave a sweet hoot about The Miz. (By this point, you're probably sick of me always putting ’The’ in front of The Miz? Honestly, I'm getting tired of doing it, but that's his name, so too bad for all of us.) One of the key points of the segment was Miz offering his A-List services as a mentor to Styles. Styles emphatically rejected the offer, and has moved on to his program with Jericho. But the idea of The Miz The Mentor (Miztor?) is one I find intriguing. The Miz The Mentor is an idea that WWE have been toying with in recent months, but so far nothing has really come of it. Before Styles, Miz had set his sights on Neville, who like Styles, "respectfully" declined Miz’s proposed mentorship. And then the whole idea was dropped until Miz brought it up again with Styles. I'm not sure if the idea of Miz The Mentor is just a joke to WWE, and a quick and easy way to draw heat, or if it was a serious thought that was just dropped. Probably the former. Joke or not, "The Mentor" is the perfect role for The Miz, kayfabe and shoot. But let's be clear though, I do mean mentor, NOT manager. It's important to distinguish between the two because WWE doesn't do managers. His Name Is Paul Heyman is the exception to the rule. Zeb, when he's around, is the exception to the exception. WWE is down on managers, which as a guy who grew up watching and love/hating managers like Lou Albano, Mr. Fuji and Jimmy Hart makes me sad. Mentors, on the other hand, are not yet on Mr. McMahon’s list of ’do nots.’ (Guys, just between us, managers and mentors are pretty much the same thing. Wink emoji thumbs up) Yes, The Miz in a manager-- I mean mentor role is best for business, or in this case, best for...mizness (high five, anyone?). As an on screen mentor, The Miz could guide a young go-getter to the same heights he himself once reached; a promising heel straight out of NXT, or a naive babyface who can go in the ring might be a good option. In this role, The Miz could focus on his strengths, which are talking and his heat generating face. Meanwhile, the talent fresh out of NXT will have a clear focus and hopefully avoid getting the "Tyler Breeze" treatment. Off screen, The Miz shoot has years of WWE experience to expound upon a rising star. Daniel Bryan, in his awesome book, talked about learning from The Miz during their "Wacky Challenge" NXT days when Miz was the debuting Bryan's Pro. In comparing The Miz with other Pros on the show who were less than thrilled to be there, Bryan said, “The Miz didn’t complain at all. Instead, he saw it as an opportunity and spent time with me to find ways we could make our partnership stand out. He genuinely wanted what we did to be good. The more I saw how hard he worked, the more I respected him. I also learned a lot from him on how to navigate the political waters in WWE. He’s also somewhat of a perfectionist; if he wasn’t content with what we were doing, he would talk to as many people as he could to get it changed. Sometimes he was successful, sometimes he wasn’t. But watching him handle it all was really helpful in familiarizing myself with the world of WWE." That sounds like the kind of guy someone out of WWE's developmental pool would be grateful to be paired with. Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses unless you are perfection like Shinsuke Nakamura. In wrestling, it's about accentuating those strengths and hiding the weaknesses. After spending ten minutes in a room with The Miz, I'll wager listening to Matt Striker on commentary for a day will seem like heaven (love ya, Matt!). The Miz draws heat, and he's one of the best talkers the WWE’s got. But when he wrestles, I fall asleep. In a mentoring role, The Miz would accentuate his strengths while hiding his weakness. At the same time, he could impart his knowledge and experience on an up and coming talent, all the while riding said talent's coattails back to the top. Win-win. |
History.com - After 71 years, a British historian has located the final resting place for a heroic young Royal Air Force pilot who was listed as missing in action and presumed dead in May 1940 during World War II. According to British newspaper the Telegraph, 22-year-old Flying Officer Derek Allen took to the skies for his first time in combat on May 10, 1940, the day that Germany launched its invasion of France and the Low Countries. Over the next eight days, Allen shot down four enemy aircraft himself and shared credit for three other downed planes. He would be awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his performance. Forced to bale out on May 15 after his Hurricane plane was hit with anti-aircraft fire, Allen walked for 24 hours through enemy territory in order to get back to his squadron. About 6:30 a.m. on May 18, Allen was back in the air when a German gunner shot his plane down over farmland in northern France. By that time, German tanks and infantry had already managed to break the French defensive lines; they would soon advance to the coast. On May 26, the RAF provided much-needed protection from the sky as Allied forces were evacuated en masse from the French seaport of Dunkirk to England. Paris fell to the Germans on June 14, and defeated, France signed an armistice on July 22. When Allen’s parents were first told their son was missing in action, it was hoped that he might have been captured by the Germans and still be alive. Much later in the war, a RAF adjutant visited to tell them his plane had crashed and he was presumed dead. When the war ended in 1945, Derek Allen was one of 40,000 missing British airmen. For more from History.com, click here to read the full story. |
A new feature in Chrome radically improves the quality of video casted from the browser to your Chromecast—but only if you toggle a hidden setting on. Why Tab Casting Is So Terrible (and What Google’s Doing About It) RELATED: Mirror Your Computer’s Screen on Your TV With Google’s Chromecast If you’ve used the screen-mirroring function to send video from the Chrome browser to your Chromecast, you’ve certainly noticed one thing: the feature is a bit rough around the edges. That’s because unlike casting a video from your phone (where your phone simply tells the Chromecast where to look and the Chromecast grabs the direct video stream), tab casting transcodes the video for the Chromecast and it is passed along in this altered state. The end result is typically pretty bad, and even if the video on your computer screen is beautiful (like a nice HD video stream from Vimeo or a sports broadcast from NBC), the video that shows up on your HDTV looks like a janky mess. It works, but it isn’t pretty. Fortunately, a brand new feature in Chrome allows you to significantly improve the quality of tab casted videos with a tiny tweak. Once you toggle the setting on, Chrome will attempt to pass along the actual video stream, unaltered, to your Chromecast, instead of the entire tab. If it works, you’ll get beautiful video from services that don’t currently offer direct Chromecast support. Even better, if it doesn’t work, it’ll juts fall back to normal tab casting—this feature doesn’t break anything. How to Enable the New Tab Casting Improvements in Chrome RELATED: How to Switch Between Release, Beta, and Dev Versions of Google Chrome To use the feature, you need to be running Chrome Development Channel or higher. The settings are accessible in more stable versions of Chrome, like the Standard and Beta releases, but they have no effect unless you’re running Development or Canary builds. Here’s how to check what version you’re using. (If you just want to test the feature out, try installing Chrome Canary, which installs as a separate application instead of overwriting your regular Chrome installation.) Then, to enable the feature, simply enter the following address in the address bar of the Chrome installation you do your casting from: chrome://flags/#media-remoting Once in the Chrome flags menu, simply toggle “Media Remoting during Cast Tab Mirroring” from “Default” to “Enabled”. While that’s technically all you need to do to turn it on, let’s cover our bases: go ahead and toggle secondary entry “Encrypted content too” on. Then click “Relaunch Now” to restart Chrome. To take advantage of the new setting, all you need to do is visit a streaming video site (Vimeo is a great one to test with, as we can confirm it’s working and it has lots of HD content) and select a video to watch. Then, cast like you normally would: go to Chrome’s menu, choose the Cast option, and select your Chromecast. Then, once it’s running, set the video to full screen (you must switch to full screen for the feature to turn on). If the video stream can be directly sent to the Chromecast, the in-progress video will vanish and be replaced by this screen. If you don’t see that screen, that means the improved tab casting isn’t working on that site, and you’ll just get the normal low-quality tab casting. We’re pretty confident you’ll be blown away by the difference in both the audio and video quality. With most of the videos we tested, the change quite dramatic; the video quality went from worse-than-SD-TV played through a speakerphone to perfectly-HD video with crisp audio thanks to this simple change. |
There aren’t any fixed constants in economics, and most of the statistical regularities identified by economists disappear when they are used as a fulcrum for policy. For example, the seemingly robust relationship between inflation and the rate of growth of the money supply disappeared once central banks tried to use the link to control inflation. But one stylized fact did seem stable. In a 1957 study, economist Nicholas Kaldor noted that the shares of national income that went to labour and to capital were roughly constant over time. In other words, expressed as a share of GDP, total wages and salaries paid to workers stayed more or less the same. In the short and medium term, this ratio would increase during economic downturns, because even if labour income generally falls during recessions, investment income drops even more. And as the economy recovers, profits grow faster than wages, bringing workers’ shares back down. But over the long term, movements induced by the business cycle would look like fluctuations around a constant labour share. Because more people are able to earn wages that allow workers to save for their retirement, the median pure capitalist is now a retiree, not a plutocrat This pattern persisted in the decades that followed Kaldor’s original 1957 study and economists grew to rely on it, to the point of having constant labour shares built into most models of the economy. There was remarkably little discussion behind this assumption; the labour share of income was the dog that did not bark during the profound structural changes of the second half of the last century. Economists are usually preoccupied with explanations for how and why things change, and spend rather less time wondering why they stay the same. To be sure, there was — and is — much discussion about the effects of technical change and globalization on how national income is distributed. For instance, workers in sectors that benefited from new export opportunities were better off, while those in sectors exposed to foreign competition did worse. Similarly, for some workers, new technologies meant higher productivity and incomes; others saw their jobs disappear as more tasks became automatized. But these gains and losses among workers cancelled each other out, leaving the total labour share unchanged. Recent U.S. data are forcing economists to revisit their thinking. Ever since the spike during the U.S. recession in 2001 (remember, the share goes up in recessions), labour’s share of income has declined significantly. This decline is to be expected during an expansion, but the U.S. labour share did not jump up during the 2008-9 recession and has remained flat ever since. This decline is discernible in Canadian data, but it is much less apparent than it is south of the border. For one thing, the current labour share is similar to what it was 15 or even 30 years ago, and it did follow the usual pattern of rebounding during the recession. But if you were to draw a line through the Canadian data over the past 35 years, you’d see a downward trend. It is customary to greet almost any new development in the economy with alarm, and the decline in the labour share is no exception. The decline has occurred in conjunction with an increase in the share of income going to the top end of the income distribution and many have gone on to conclude that the shift of income from labour to capital is at least partly to blame for increasing income inequality. Old habits die hard: capitalists are still equated with high incomes and workers are still equated with low incomes. To be fair, those habits were ingrained by centuries of economic history. Up until very recently, the only way to generate high incomes was to own a lot of capital and wages were so low that it was almost impossible for workers to save much. In a world where wages are barely above subsistence levels and in which only the rich owned capital, a shift of income from labour to capital will exacerbate income inequality. But that’s not the world we live in now. The high earners in the U.S. and Canada are, for the most part, working for a living: their surging incomes are driven by the salaries they earn, not the assets they hold. If there is a link between profits and the high salaries earned by certain corporate executives, the story directly contradicts the narrative in which the shift of income from labour to capital increases income concentration. If corporate executives are using their position to siphon off profits before they can be distributed to shareholders, this reduces the share of total income going to the owners of capital. The problem would be a labour share that is too high, not one that is too low. [np_storybar title=”Read & Debate” link=””] Find Full Comment on Facebook [/np_storybar] In any case, capitalists aren’t who they use to be. Because more people are able to earn wages that allow workers to save for their retirement, the median pure capitalist — that is, someone who does not work and who derives her income from her asset holdings — is now a retiree, not a plutocrat. Plutocrats still exist, but any policy designed to suppress investment income is going to generate significant collateral damage among the elderly. And who’s to say that the increased labour income won’t simply be appropriated by the one per cent? While the decline in the labour share of income may still be a puzzle that requires an explanation, I’m not yet convinced it’s a problem that needs solving. Demographics seem to be the key for understanding why the labour share is falling, and for why the decline should be welcomed. In an aging population, a constant labour share of income means the steady immiseration of retirees. National Post |
A drug sweep this morning, during which students stayed at their desks at Hackettstown High School, turned up nothing, district Superintendent David Mango said this afternoon. "It was a positive, excellent thing," he said. That doesn't mean Hackettstown students aren't using drugs, Mango said, adding that he doesn't subscribe to "the ostrich syndrome," where administrators bury their heads to the problem. Working with the Warren County Prosecutor's Office and using K-9 teams and personnel from police departments in Hackettstown, Independence Township, Washington Township, Morris County, and South Plainfield, N.J., the school was searched while students remained at their desks from 8:30 until about 11 a.m., when the operation was cleared, he said. It's the second year in a row that a random search was performed, Mango said, and officials are still working out kinks in the effort. The student handbook, he said, allows for such searches, he said. Last year, the unannounced sweep ended in charges being filed against one juvenile, said Hackettstown police Sgt. Darren Tynan. He called today's efforts a success and said he was pleased no drugs were discovered. "We look at it as a good deterrent and, hopefully, kids will think twice if they are thinking about bringing drugs into school," he said. "I think it's a positive thing and it's a positive thing that no drugs were located." Warren County Prosecutor Richard Burke, who also declared the sweep a success, said the benefits of the sweep were two-fold. "It sends the message that drugs won't be tolerated in our school," he said. "The second part is it sounds like kids are getting that message because we didn't find anything today." Organizing such an effort, however, is no easy task, the prosecutor said. Cooperation is required from various departments, since authorities need to have the personnel and canines to execute the search. "It takes a lot of coordination to do these sorts of things," Burke said. On the district's end, the operation was difficult to set up this year because of the long winter, various exam schedules and the upcoming graduation, Mango said. "Unfortunately, drug use can hit anyone at any time," he said. "It's better to get out in front of issues." The district uses the searches along with educational programs and "partnering with parents," Mango said. And "you have to deal with problems as they arise," not only confront them with searches or other police activity, he said. The town police department works with the schools, providing walk-throughs as well as other police partnerships, such as the D.A.R.E program, he said. Police are not regularly stationed in the schools, Mango said. The district, which has to advise the prosecutor's office in writing when it wants to do a sweep, has developed "a very positive relationship" with police and prosecutors in its efforts to lessen the impact of drugs in town schools, Mango said. While Hackettstown is the only district, to date, that has participated in the sweeps, Burke said his office offers the opportunity to other schools in the county provided authorities can coordinate with personnel for the effort. Reporter Matthew Bultman contributed to this report. |
The 24 Hours of LeMons has been coming to Thunderhill Raceway in Northern California since 2007, and this time we’ve managed to set the record for the most entries in any LeMons race so far: 194 teams! The justices of the LeMons Supreme Court inspected most of those racin’ machines today, and we saw some excellent examples of innovative low-buck road racers. Let’s check out the highlights! Advertisement - Continue Reading Below The former Dungeons & Dragsters Capri became the Mad Maxeltov Capri became the Beevil Mnieval Capri, which is now equipped with a Ford 302-cubic-inch V8, 5-speed transmission, and big wheel flares to fit the junkyard Mustang rear end. On paper, this car should dominate. On paper. The NSF Plymouth Reliant-K wagon, which has been passed from team to team all year , has traveled the length and breadth of the United States during the 2013 season and showed up at Thunderhill after a Maryland-to-Florida-to-California trek. Will this be the race that sees the “K-it-FWD” car finish in the top half of the standings? When you decide to race an Olds 88 Brougham that sat in a field for decades, what do you do to fix up the icky-looking paint? Why, cover it with fur, of course! Advertisement - Continue Reading Below This Chevy Corvair competed in Thunderhill and Reno-Fernley races a few years back and has now returned to the fray this weekend. We’ve seen a few Corvairs in LeMons, and they haven’t been as slow as you might expect (though they’re still pretty slow). The Corvair’s four-carburetor setup wasn’t working so well, so the team removed two of the offending carbs and replaced them with blocks of wood. Now that’s LeMons-style problem solving! Five years ago, a team of very talented body-and-paint guys turned a Volvo 240 into a very credible ’57 Chevy . This weekend, The Flakes are back with the same car… which is now a ’55 Chevy, complete with 350-cubic-inch Chevrolet V8. Advertisement - Continue Reading Below Advertisement - Continue Reading Below It’s a Bel Air, of course. Class C is reserved for the best (i.e., least likely to belong on a race track) cars, such as this Hillman Imp. Class C is also reserved for certain V12-equipped German cars that sold new for over $100,000 . The smart money will be betting on the Imp to get more laps than the 850 this weekend. The Hello Grumpy Kitty organization now boasts two BMW E30 3-series cars plus a Subaru-engined VW Beetle. Advertisement - Continue Reading Below Modern German cars are too complicated! That’s why this BMW 325i team decided to remove all instruments and controls in their car, other than an ignition kill switch and a starter button. Not much to go wrong here! This Lincoln Mark VII team went with a Hot Rod Lincoln theme: “The guy beside me was white as a ghost.” Stick Figure Racing, creator of a pair of Corolla/MR2-mashup twin-engined cars , showed up with the cars dressed as “LeMonite” pioneers’ covered wagons, in honor of their Utah home base. Here we see the team using a three-dimensional teaching aid to explain their tribulations at race tracks in California, Nevada, and Colorado. Dead horses and new wives! We’ve seen plenty of Volvos in the 24 Hours of LeMons, Amazons, 200s, 700s, 800s, 900s, even a couple of Bertones, but today was a first: our first LeMons P1800 ! It’s going to be a great weekend of racing, so be sure to check the 24 Hours of LeMons wrapup page to see what happens. |
It seems like rusted out Porsche 356s are dime a dozen and while we hate seeing any beautiful classic rusting away, it is always interesting to look at them. There is something terribly alluring about high dollar exotics in less than pristine condition. Looking back at all the rusty heaps of exotic metal we have featured over the years, we realized we haven’t seen many rusted out Ferraris. Having owned Italian cars, we know that Ferraris aren’t impervious to rust so that leaves us curious as to why we haven’t seen more tin worm ravaged ones. When Sean C sent us a link to this 1973 Ferrari Dino being offered here by Silverstone Auctions, we realized it is the rustiest Ferrari we have ever seen. Before we get into the history of this car, let’s take a quick look at the history of the Dino. The story behind the Dino is that Enzo had it commissioned in honor of his son Alfredo, who passed away at the age of 24. Alfredo or Dino as his father often called him, was very technical and worked on several racing projects, including the development of the 750 Monza. He had dreams of developing a small V6 to race in Formula 2. He was able to help in a small part with the development of the 1.6 liter V6 that went on to power Ferrari’s F2 car. Little if any of the 1.6’s design made it to the V6 that would power the Dino street cars. The production 2.4 liter V6 made it to several cars, including a few non-Ferraris. Now for this Dino’s history. The story Silverstone presents is an interesting one. It is being offered from the estate of the second owner, who parked it in their garage 39 years ago and never touched it again. Apparently they raced motorcycles and drove everything as if they were at the race track. One day while driving home, a police officer attempted to pull them over for speeding. Even though the Dino wasn’t the fastest Ferrari, it had no problem outrunning the police. Once the owner had evaded authorities, they took it home and parked it in their garage while they waited for the heat to die down. Not wanting to risk being seen in it again, a replacement car was found and the Dino was simply forgotten. As you can see in the photos, this Dino is beyond just being rusty. Most of the front end has rusted away and there are massive holes around the windshield and doors. You would think that having been stored indoors for all those years would have prevented this, but the garage’s roof was leaky. The combination of regular moisture, poor ventilation, and Italian steel added up to the tin worm trifecta. The interior is showing some wear, but most of the parts could be salvaged with minor work. It isn’t surprising that the interior is still so solid, especially if the odometer’s reading is correct. It currently reads just 13,932 miles, which seems possible if the car was really parked after only two years of use. We can only imagine how incredibly expensive and labor intensive restoring this Ferrari will be. If it didn’t wear that Prancing Horse badge, we would guess it would end up being parted out, but we are sure there are several aficionados out there willing to spend the cash to restore it. It should prove to be interesting to see how much this one ends up going for. We will be sure to request the results after Silverstone’s May Sale on May 24th. So why do you think we don’t see more rusty Ferraris like this one? |
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