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Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. Jan. 3, 2017, 8:29 PM GMT / Updated Jan. 3, 2017, 8:45 PM GMT By Monica Alba and Daniella Silva Last year's Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, will attend Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration later this month, aides told NBC News on Tuesday. The Clintons will be joined by former President George W. Bush and former first lady Laura Bush at the inauguration ceremony in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 20, aides to the former president said Tuesday afternoon. Hillary Clinton talks with her husband former President, Bill Clinton in Chappaqua, New York on Nov, 8. EDUARDO MUNOZ ALVAREZ / AFP-Getty Images “They are pleased to be able to witness the peaceful transfer of power — a hallmark of American democracy — and swearing-in of President Trump and Vice President Pence,” the Bush family said in a statement. For President Barack Obama's first inauguration, Bill Clinton was in attendance along with former presidents George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter (the departing President Bush was on stage as Obama will be this year). For the second Obama inauguration in 2013, Clinton and Carter were the only two former presidents to attend. A spokesman for former President George H.W. Bush told NBC News that he and his wife Barbara would not be attending this year's inauguration. "At ages 92 and 91 — and all that entails — President and Mrs. Bush are simply not able to attend the Inauguration this month. He was also unable to attend in 2013," spokesman Jim McGrath said. Trump’s inaugural committee said on Twitter last month it was planning a welcome rally, a parade, two inaugural balls and a ball saluting armed service members and first responders for the inaugural week. Planning for the ceremonies has not been without some controversy though. After it was announced that Radio City Rockettes would be performing at the ceremony, one member of the group took to social media to share her frustration at having to perform for Trump. "The women I work with are intelligent and are full of love and the decision of performing for a man that stands for everything we're against is appalling," Rockette Pheobe Pearl captioned a private Instagram post, adding the words "Not My President" to a photo of the dance troupe on stage. And last week one member of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, announced her resignation from the group rather than perform for Trump. |
It has long been rumored that Google is working on converging Chrome OS and Android, but the rumors suggesting that this idea could soon become reality began picking up more steam in recent months. Andromeda is its codename, a new OS from Google — or at least a branch of an existing one. It’s Google’s internal initiative to bring Android and Chrome OS together into one platform that’s made to work on all of kinds of devices — phones, laptops, convertibles, and tablets. We’ve been hearing tidbits off and on about Andromeda over the last couple of months from a few different places, including a hodge podge of our own sources and tipsters and other reports. But now we think we’ve heard enough to really start piecing together the bigger picture of what Google has planned for the future of Android… Deal: Get Pixelbook at 25% off: $750! For being so early (maybe?), we’ve actually heard a lot about Andromeda. First, some suggested that a tweet from Android’s SVP prior to Google’s big October 4th event was evidence that Google may tease the new OS alongside the Pixel’s announcement — which obviously didn’t happen. Around that same time, though, we were told by a source that Andromeda was being tested internally on the Nexus 9 — and found evidence to support such a claim in the AOSP. Later, a separate tipster told us that this was due to “hardware constraints and availability” and that older Nexus devices wouldn’t support Andromeda. I also went on a tweetstorm of my own with some information that we had heard from one of the aforementioned anonymous tipsters just before the October 4th event, on the off chance that Google was actually going to preview Andromeda. Among the things I mentioned in those tweets were that Andromeda was being made to run on many kinds of devices, that Allo — which is still confusing — will make much more sense on Andromeda, and that there’s an Andromeda dev kit that… exists. Now, we’re hearing some more information from this same tipster, and the more we hear the more inclined we are to believe them. Note that we haven’t independently verified any of these details with secondary sources, so we don’t have a super high amount of confidence in this information, but this tipster has been proven correct on bits of information they have shared before. According to this tipster, two major OEMs yet to be mentioned that are working on Andromeda devices now have access to Andromeda dev kits, with first devices scheduled for Q3 or Q4 (presumably next year, which would line up with the supposed timeline of a “Pixel” laptop from Google). This person also says that “Android 8.0” is already being merged into Andromeda. In the meantime, it seems Google is sticking with its typical schedule, however. “All 7.X software updates will be independent of Andromeda until official announcement,” they say. This same tipster has also gone into great detail on a new feature that’s supposedly going to be part of Andromeda: notification syncing across devices. This will come pre-packaged with Andromeda, this tipster says, and will be tied to the Google account that you use to sign into your device. It will also supposedly be powered by the same underlying machine learning software that Google mentioned in its release of the latest version of Google Play Music, intelligently displaying notifications only on the device that the user is currently using. It’s not exactly clear yet where the “machine learning” part comes in. If they wish, users will be able to enable repeated notifications in settings (the way things are currently), however, this person says. Of course, anything could change by the time this hits release. Update: After publishing this article, our tipster provided us with a clarification in regards to Andromeda’s notification system. They say that notifications will in essence try to determine how they’re displayed and on which devices based on a variety of factors, including location, time, and the device you’re using. “The goal is to provide certain information when you need it,” they say. Our tipster also suggests that some apps’ content — like RCS messages — will automatically sync across devices a la iMessage. This also plays well into what we were hearing before — that Allo is going to make a lot more sense under Andromeda. In its current state, Allo requires a phone number to log in and stores chat history on a device-by-device basis. There’s also no desktop client. If under Andromeda you can access all your Allo chats across devices seamlessly and Andromeda is available for laptops and convertibles, Allo’s shortcomings do indeed make a lot more sense. Piecing all this together with other information that we’ve heard from David Ruddock’s “two independent and reliable sources,” it’s beginning to be more clear what Google’s game plan is here. This same tipster told us about the “Pixel 3” laptop that David scooped back in September before that piece was published, and if what David said is true, Google seems to lining up a big hardware + software launch for fall 2017 — around the right time for what would be the launch of “Android 8.0”. As you should be able to tell, Andromeda sounds a lot like a reworked version of Android taking advantage of the cloud and adding support for more varied hardware. We also independently heard about a Huawei “Nexus” tablet from multiple people, with this tipster in particular chipping in that it will be launching with Andromeda — although the details surrounding that are still fuzzy. We have also been independently told about a mysterious (possibly unrelated) Huawei tablet with a codename of “Huawei T1G,” and don’t forget about that Google-made Huawei tablet that Evleaks says should be coming “before the end of the year.” Recently, our tipster told us: “Huawei tablet is undergoing final rounds of field testing. Battery life is good. Really good.” One thing seems certain: There’s a Huawei tablet around the corner, and Huawei is maintaining a good relationship with Google despite not coming to terms on the Pixel. What’s not certain: Basically everything else. And this part is pure speculation, but if it’s looking like Google is going to officially launch all of this next fall (and if Google sticks with their long-held tradition), Google will tell us about it officially at least a few months in advance. (This year, Google first released dev preview Nougat in March!) And on that note, if perhaps this long-rumored Huawei-made tablet is “Nexus” in spirit, it could be a device that Google sells or gives away to get developers started with Andromeda before the big launch later in the fall. But I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself — this is just what I’m speculating based on what I know so far. This tipster told us last month to expect some form of preview in November, but that may have referred to OEMs getting access. Timelines are never clear with these things. In the big picture, everything we’re hearing seems to play well into what Google wants — or, should I say, needs — to accomplish in the years to come. Fragmentation is a big problem, both for end-user experiences and for security, and it’s something that was highlighted just last week as Google’s latest version of Android only managed to eek out a measly 0.3% market share debut. Google’s Android also doesn’t have any strong presence in the tablet market, and its Chrome OS laptops have basically become Android devices themselves in the last year — albeit needing to be maintained and updated entirely separately. Andromeda, at least as it appears now, would help solve these problems. It may perhaps find its way into the public eye under the familiar Android brand (which might not be surprising considering how long Google has been building the brand) or it could bear the Andromeda name. Your guess is as good as mine. But it seems clear now that Andromeda is very real and that it’s coming soon — perhaps sooner than you and I might expect given that Google’s Pixel phones running Android 7.1 Nougat are still the talk of the Android town and perhaps the best Android phones ever. (Tipsters, if you’re reading this, feel free to send us an anonymous encrypted email – we’d love to talk.) |
Over the weekend, US Ambassador Scott Brown had what he probably thought was an interview scheduled with Kim Hill. What actually ensued was a brilliantly shady media boxing match. Sam Brooks gives his play-by-play. My prevailing memory of Kim Hill is from something I once taped on One, back in the dark ages where you would tape things on video and not just watch them online. This was back when Face to Face with Kim Hill was on TV, and an ad for it popped up. Who was this woman who moved around the screen with no regard for framing or camera position? What was that voice? That accent? She radiated intelligence and charisma, she was like a lost Tennessee Williams heroine who, instead of having a tragic life, had found her rightful place in the world of broadcasting. I don’t often listen to her on the radio, because as a hated millennial I often forget that the radio exists, but when people were tweeting around her latest interview this rainy weekend, I had a spare hour and decided to lay back and listen to what was less an interview and more a verbal boxing match. What follows is my play-by-play of Hill’s interview with US Ambassador Scott Brown, covering topics as awkwardly broad as Trump’s misogyny and potential impeachment to Scott Brown’s upbringing and his daughter’s country music career: 00:33 – Almost immediately, Kim Hill brings up Scott’s ‘America’s sexiest man’ title, which he won in the 70s, and does so in a way that it is absolutely intended as a compliment, but it doesn’t really sound like one. This sets the tone for the interview that follows. 01:23 – “What’s the matter with Sean Spicer?” – Fair question, Kim. 02:15 – “Here YOU are.” It’s all in the inflection. If Hill was sympathising with someone who had to take the bus to work that morning, this would be the inflection. 05:38 – “Because you have such extreme levels of poverty in America, it seems absurd you’re such a wealthy country” is said in the same tone that someone might comment that their steak is overcooked. A robust discussion of welfare, poverty and jobs follows, and I can imagine Hill’s face is similar to her face from her famous John Pilger interview: 09:50 – “What’s y’background in music?” Said with the trained disinterest of a professional interviewer. Scott Brown namedrops someone from Cheap Trick, which I understand is a rock band of some kind, who Scott Brown has also played with once at some point for some reason? I tuned out because Kim Hill stopped talking, and I don’t tune into a Kim Hill interview to hear who she’s interviewing. 15:53 – After Cheap Trick’s ‘Surrender’ plays, Scott Brown talks about how he’s going to play with Alice Cooper when they come, which is… a thing? Kim Hill continues to sound professionally disinterested. 17:10 – Kim Hill apologises for saying Scott Brown USED to be America’s Sexiest Man. 17:35 – “You never took cocaine. Why would you not?” After hearing about Scott Brown’s wilder days in the ’70s-’80s, Kim Hill asks the question that I’ve often thought but never had the guts to voice. 21:38 – After a lot of political talk which is fairly dull, Hill says “You’re also a songWRITER” with the most strange emphasis but with such confidence that I think we’ve been saying it incorrectly all along. 26:30 – Kim Hill uses ‘soto voce’ in a sentence. 27:47 – “How’s the wall coming along?” is said by Hill in the same tone as “How’s your divorce coming along?” 28:02 – “What’s all this… tweeting about? The tweeting. That’s not Presidential.” Scott Brown defends Trump’s tweeting as valiantly as someone with a brain but who is still on the payroll possibly can. 29:24 – “Come on! You can’t interfere with a special counsel.” Kim Hill, correct, once more. 30:50 – Scott Brown says overseas governments have been interfering with elections forever, which is a fun assumption to make! He then pivots to talking about the Democratic Party throwing Bernie underneath the proverbial bus. I can hear Kim Hill roll her eyes. 34:05 – “You don’t think he should have disaffiliated himself from [his businesses]… he’s put it in the hands of his children.” Again, Kim Hill puts an emphasis on children that makes me believe wholeheartedly that rest of the world is incorrect. 36:40 – “She was in that competition…” “American Idol.” The fact that Kim Hill forgets the name of American Idol brings me no end of joy. They play a song by 13th-place finisher Ayla Brown, Scott Brown’s daughter, and they talk about her on the show, in a masterful gear shift. Ayla Brown’s song ‘My Hometown‘ is played, and it’s a catchy pop country song that I would probably be caught listening to in my darkest moments (Brown himself has played this song onstage with her at some point, for some reason). 41:20 – “Basketball.” Again, the practiced disinterest of an experienced interviewer. After Scott Brown explains exercising and Kim says, “I’m tired already” with the practised disdain of an experienced disdainer. 42:00 – “Even I can kayak.” Shade, pure and simple. I would also pay to see Kim Hill kayak, if anybody has that footage. 43:10 – Scott Brown says “All Blacks” with the incorrect emphasis and it is absolutely incorrect. He does not have Kim Hill’s skill of being able to twist words to his will. 44:00 – And this is the start of the most beautiful, intense five minutes of the interview, where Kim Hill pivots like a goddamned ballet dancer at whatever the Dance Olympics are, going from talking about Scott Brown’s country-music toting daughter to addressing Donald Trump’s misogyny: “Talking about women… one of the main problems people have had with your president is his apparent misogyny.” Other burns, or you know, just facts stated in this section are: “He addresses women on their appearance rather than their merits.” “We watched him on the campaign trail when he was taking on Hillary, and that wasn’t taken on merit, he was making faces… it was misogyny.” “We’re talking about a president who says on record, he clutches woman by the pussy.” And then there’s the most genius moment, where Kim Hill appears to channel Ursula the Sea Witch at her most violent and deadly. Scott Brown says that Donald Trump paid a price for saying that and Kim Hill replies, “What was the price?” She repeats, suddenly channeling Eartha Kitt at her most lethal and dangerous, “What was the price?” (The emphasis is my own, but I guarantee you that Kim Hill is perfectly fluent in spoken italics.) “He was criticised for it, and that was the price he paid? … Can you apologise for a basic attitude of misogyny?” 47:08 – “Are you suggesting Donald Trump is getting a hard time because the media is disaffected?” 47:30 – “It’s unbelievable to me that all women don’t find Donald Trump disgusting. He is on the record for his distaste and disgust for women!” 49:45 – “I don’t see Hillary Clinton in jail yet.” “So he doesn’t always keep his word.” “I’m not twisting anything. I am simply taking you at your word. You’re telling me that Mr. Trump keeps his word. I am saying that he obviously doesn’t.” “Well that was bullshit then during the campaign.” “At what point does he start telling the truth?” 51:42 – “Mmhmm.” 52:25 – “I have no liking or disliking of your answers.” I have no idea how Kim Hill manages to deliver that with complete truth while also making it sound like a performative lie, but kudos to her for that. 53:45 – Kim Hill asks if Scott Brown misses the cut-and-thrust of Washington, as though he hasn’t just been skewered like a meat slab at K’ Rd’s Turkish Cafe. “I mean you’re just talking to me, relax.” That chills me to my soul, listening on tinny laptop speakers. I can only imagine what it would sound like sitting maybe a metre away from the tiger herself. The interview wraps up quickly but not unpleasantly after that. It’s a fun listen, but what’s most remarkable is a journalist actually taking a member of the Trump administration to task, because for all his practised charm and trained banter, Scott Brown is undoubtedly a full-fledged, card-carrying member of the Trump administration. So kudos to Kim Hill for doing what Kim Hill usually does, and I encourage you to watch excerpts from Face to Face on NZ on Screen to see what a formidable interviewer she actually is, and we should all be taking lessons from her. And god forbid anybody who gets in a boxing ring with her. Listen to the full massacre here The Spinoff Media is sponsored by MBM, an award-winning strategic media agency specialising in digital, with vast experience across all channels. We deliver smart, tailored media solutions as well as offering a leading data and analytics consultancy. Talk to us about your communications challenges and how MBM can help bring you success through the power of media and technology. |
On Monday in Sinaloa, Javier Valdez was gunned down in broad daylight – the latest reporter to be caught up in Mexico’s wave of drug-related violence 'Why must I live in fear?' Mexico shaken after yet another journalist murdered Javier Valdez wrote his own epitaph. After the 23 March murder of Miroslava Breach, a reporter in the northern Mexican city of Chihuahua, Valdez tweeted: “Let them kill us all, if that is the death sentence for reporting this hell. No to silence.” Valdez never stayed silent, reporting fearlessly on dynastic rivalries within the Sinaloa cartel – as well as the often forgotten victims of mafia violence. Crusading Mexican journalist Javier Valdez shot dead in Sinaloa Read more He was killed on Monday at midday, barely a block from the office of Ríodoce (Twelfth River), the newspaper he co-founded in 2003. He was shot 12 times – perhaps symbolically – in what colleagues say was a targeted attack. “We always knew this could occur. We were conscious of it, and never denied that we were scared,” said Ismael Bohórquez, director of Ríodoce. Unlike many newspapers in Mexico – which have simply given up attempting to explain the drug-fueled violence that has claimed 200,000 lives in the past decade – neither Valdez nor Ríodoce had shied away from covering topics like crime and corruption. His sources were solid, and he may have calculated that living in a region dominated by one all-powerful cartel would protect him from getting caught in the crossfire. But such certainties have disappeared amid a succession crisis in the Sinaloa cartel after the arrest and extradition of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. “We crossed a line. I don’t know what happened,” said Bojórquez in an interview at the modest Ríodoce offices in Culiacán. “These aren’t lines in the street; you don’t know when you’ve crossed them.” Sinaloa said farewell to Valdez, 50, on Tuesday, with hundreds of mourners spilling out the back door of the chapel in a Culiacán funeral home already overflowing with floral bouquets. Colleagues remembered him as a cheerful figure, never seen without the Panama hat that was laid on the dark wood of his coffin. “Javier was easygoing, someone you liked a lot, very empathetic … and someone that tried to find a little hope in everything,” said Andrés Villarreal, an investigative reporter at Ríodoce, who fought back tears as he spoke. The murder sparked outrage in Mexico, where six reporters have been murdered so far this year, reinforcing the country’s reputation as the most dangerous place to practice journalism in the region. Mexico's war on drugs: what has it achieved and how is the US involved? Read more Some independent outlets stopped publishing as part of a protest dubbed “a day without journalism”. The press freedom advocacy organization Article 19 counts 104 journalist murders in Mexico since 2000. Reporters Without Borders ranks Mexico No 147 on its annual press freedom rankings, one spot ahead of Russia. “Never have we seen those in the industry so outraged and united,” tweeted Daniel Moreno Chávez, director of the news outlet Animal Politico. This year’s spate of killings have horrified the country. Breach was gunned down as she drove her son to school in the northern city of Chihuahua. The newspaper publishing her work, Norte, subsequently closed, saying it couldn’t keep its journalists safe. Cecilio Pineda, founder of a news site in the rugged Tierra Caliente region of the poppy-producing Guerrero state, was shot 10 times while lying in a hammock. Last weekend, seven reporters travelling through Guerrero to investigate a confrontation between rival gangs were swarmed by 100 gunmen, beaten and robbed of their belongings. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Javier Valdez was shot 12 times in what colleagues said was a targeted attack. Photograph: Uncredited/AP But as is common in Mexico, the attacks have all languished in impunity. A special prosecutor’s office was established in 2006 to take over cases of crimes committed against journalists from potentially corrupt or inept investigators; it has resulted in just three convictions. “It’s useless,” said Javier Garza Ramos, the former editor of the newspaper El Siglo de Torreón, whose building was shot at five times between 2009 and 2013; four employees have been kidnapped. “The [federal] and state attorneys general don’t investigate, much less punish.” President Enrique Peña Nieto has expressed regret over Valdez’s murder, and on Wednesday he announced new protection measures for the media. However the president was widely criticised for failing to include any journalists in the plan’s preparation or launch. The country’s interior minister, Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong, also promised to act and raise it with Mexico’s 31 state governors. But freedom of speech advocates said the plan was too little, too late, especially as some of those same governors have become notorious for failing to prevent attacks on the the media – and even paying or pressuring local reporters to provide positive coverage. In Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa, local journalists marched into state government offices on Tuesday and refused to leave without speaking to the governor, Quirino Ordaz Coppel. “Impunity is what killed Javier – and it’s what will kill all of us,” thundered one reporter in a series of testy exchanges. “Why can’t I go home in peace? Why do I have to live in fear?” sobbed another. Ordaz, who at times seemed on the verge of losing his temper, promised a special prosecutor to investigate. “Javier was a friend. I have the same outrage as you.” Valdez chronicled crime and its consequences in Sinaloa, writing three books and penning a weekly column in Ríodoce called Weeds. His work showed a rare empathy, especially for victims of violence, in a state where the illegal drugs business has sunk deep roots and the government is often seen by local people as little more than another faction in the crime war. “When news would break, we would trade tips on what happened, but he would go look for the victims,” said Ismael Medina, a Culiacán reporter who knew Valdez at university. “He would go talk to them and even help them.” Colleagues said that Valdez knew the value of discretion, but refused to pull his punches when reporting on the cartels, even when the country’s drug wars heated up in the mid-2000s. In an interview last year with Rompeviento TV, Valdez said: “You have to assume the task that falls to you as a journalist. Either that, or you play dumb. “I don’t want to be asked: ‘What were you doing in the face of so much death ... why didn’t you say what was going on?’” Mexico after El Chapo: new generation fights for control of the cartel Read more Conditions started to change after Guzmán’s third arrest last year – a move which left the Sinaloa cartel splintered between factions loyal to El Chapo’s sons and those loyal to his former right-hand man, Dámaso López. When Ríodoce ran a recent cover story on López, the magazine’s delivery trucks were followed by gangs of men who bought up every copy – a tactic often used by criminals or politicians who want to suppress a story. López was arrested earlier this month, “The new generation is much more violent. They don’t think,” said one Ríodoce staffer. “That they would attack a newspaper like this tells us a lot. And changes a lot of our ways doing things.” Valdez’s colleagues presume that his death was related to the internecine war with the Sinaloa cartel, but nobody at the magazine could say who might have been responsible. “We don’t know which side it was,” Bohórquez said. What they were determined to make clear, however, was that they would continue publishing and covering organized crime, even after losing their best-known reporter. “You can’t do journalism in Sinaloa without covering the topic of drug trafficking,” Bohórquez said. “We knew it was important to publicly expose it – and we will continue do that, because that is our commitment to the people here.” |
Largest African PV Project To Begin Construction Early 2014 September 24th, 2013 by Joshua S Hill We covered the announcement that Ghana would be home to Africa’s largest solar power plant late last year, and now, according to PV-Tech, construction of said-project is expected to begin in 2014. Writing in December of 2012, CleanTechnica site-director Zachary Shahan wrote that the “UK’s Blue Energy is the company behind this behemoth of a solar power plant” which is set to come in at 155 MW. Now, PV-Tech, speaking with Douglas Coleman, special projects director for Blue Energy, have discovered that “500 local construction staff would be employed to start work on the 155 MW project early next year [2014].” Continuing, “a further local 200 people will be employed for continued operation and maintenance, and Coleman said he hoped a further 2,700 indirect jobs would be created from related construction and operations activities.” In fact, Blue Energy is doing more than just building a PV power plant and hoping for the best. According to Coleman, Blue Energy has “tackled the shortage of indigenous skills” by introducing a training programme for the locals. It’s not just good business sense to train up local operators, but is doubly beneficial for a third-world country struggling to compete in a world of increasing prices under environmentally costly actions. Creating a culture in which companies are willing to put in to countries by building up their skill sets as well as creating their own business ventures is one most anyone can get behind. |
[van id=”van/ns-acc/2014/09/11/SE-030TH_CNNA-ST1-100000000249db7b”] (CNN) – Police say a man in Tennessee pocket-dialed the police. That call led to his arrest on drug charges. Chief Michael Hay of the Mt. Pleasant Police said “We have 911 calls that lead to arrests all the time but not an accidental one.” The call that went to 911 Friday night started out like any other call to a police dispatcher, but when no one answered, the operator didn’t hang up. Instead, she stayed on the line listening to a conversation between a man and woman talking about getting high. Caller: “When it hits you, dude, it makes you feel like tiny little pins are in your body, but it’s like a good feeling not a bad feeling. all these, like, pleasure shivers.” Police tell us the call was an accident. The dispatcher traced it to this Mexican restaurant in mt. pleasant, where the couple was having dinner. The officer pulled up just as they were leaving and stopped them down the street. Chief Michael Hay says, “He noticed the passenger, the male subject, was shuffling around putting stuff under the passenger seat, and when he approached the vehicle, he actually observed the passenger drop something in the floor board.” That something was a small bag of marijuana, according to police. The female driver denied knowing anything about it, but officers say her passenger, 25-year-old Grant O’connor, admitted the drugs were his. What he didn’t know is that he had pocket dialed 911 and tipped off the cops. |
PHILADELPHIA— A onetime challenger to U.S. Rep. Bob Brady pleaded guilty Monday to hiding a $90,000 payment from the powerful Philadelphia Democrat’s campaign in exchange for dropping out of a 2012 primary. Jimmie Moore, a 66-year-old former city judge, pleaded guilty in federal court to a charge of filing a false campaign finance report, and agreed to cooperate with any investigations related to the primary campaign. “I don’t disagree with what the government said I did,” Moore told Judge Jan DuBois. Moore met with Brady shortly before exiting the race and the two discussed the arrangement, according to the plea agreement. They decided that the payment would be disguised, partly as the purchase of a campaign poll that Brady already had in his possession, according to the court documents. Brady hasn’t been charged with a crime. A message left Monday for his lawyer, James Eisenhower, wasn’t immediately returned. Eisenhower has previously denied there was an agreement to hide the source of the money. The money was supposed to be used to cover Moore’s large campaign debts, prosecutors said. Moore’s lawyer and federal prosecutors wouldn’t say whether the investigation was leading to Brady. “There’s a vast amount of evidence out there. Whether it tends to point to Congressman Brady as doing something illegal, or tends to exculpate him, I don’t know,” said Moore’s lawyer Jeffrey Miller. Moore will be sentenced Jan. 11. He was released on $25,000 bail and will be permitted to travel within the United States. He told the judge he needed to travel to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore for prostate cancer treatment. Moore’s campaign aide and then-fiance Carolyn Cavaness has already pleaded guilty to concealing the payments on Moore’s campaign finance reports. Both she and Moore face up to five years in prison. |
To understand Adore, one has to revisit 1995’s Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. The double album and follow-up to 1993’s critical and commercial diamond, Siamese Dream, would go on to draw comparisons to Pink Floyd’s The Wall, produce five chart-scaling singles, nab seven Grammy Award nominations (winning one), and be certified 10x Platinum in the United States. Suffice it to say, the Chicago troupe didn’t enjoy success; they were smothered by it. So, three years later and following a year-long, sold-out tour, The Smashing Pumpkins returned home destroyed rather than saved. While on tour, Chamberlin was shown the exit and taken to rehab after he and touring keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin overdosed on heroin together in New York City (the latter succumbing to the drug). Corgan, however, was dealt the worst blows: Not only did he lose Chamberlin, but his marriage was ending just as his mother died of cancer. “At that time, there was just so much negativity, I just couldn’t handle it,” Corgan recently explained to Radio.com. “I just was not equipped to deal with it. To put this in context, 18 months earlier, I could do no wrong! We were selling out arenas, we were on television, the cover of Rolling Stone. And the next thing you know, 18 months later, you’re persona non grata. It’s not just persona non grata to the world, when you’re persona non grata with the record label, that’s a cold wind that blows up your back.” (Read: The Very Best of The Smashing Pumpkins) And so, Adore comes to represent what follows at the end of the rainbow, when the path to glory turns to rocky ground and meanders back into the creepy thick. Looking back, it’s easy to see how the Pumpkins stumbled into this murky pocket after enjoying the spotlight for so long, but at the time, it was all too humbling for an artist like Corgan. But true artists revel in the valleys and fear the peaks, and that’s exactly what Corgan did. To borrow a handful of words from Friday Night Lights‘ Coach Taylor: “Every man at some point in his life is gonna lose a battle. He’s gonna fight and he’s gonna lose. But what makes him a man is that in the midst of that battle he does not lose himself.” Rather, the band’s mastermind found himself again. Come May 1998, Corgan and co. remerged from the darkness as industrial goths with a twisted new single in “Ava Adore” and an accompanying video that worked more as a mission statement than any sort of promotional item. Directed by Dom and Nic, who had just paired David Bowie and Trent Reznor together a year prior for “I’m Afraid of Americans”, the one-take video proved fashionable enough for accolades at that year’s VH1 Fashion Awards and iconic enough to frame the Pumpkins in a new light — or, rather the dark. But really, “Ava Adore”, with its sexy electronic loops and stomping percussion, simply evolved the DNA that made Mellon Collie‘s “1979” their greatest hit. Hell, their second single, “Perfect”, became the song’s spiritual successor, so much so that its music video is, in fact, a sequel to the events that transpired in the iconic video for the 1996 hit. (Read: Our Interview with Billy Corgan) Following “Ava Adore” and “Perfect”, however, the general public started to turn away from the Pumpkins, and that’s what makes the album even more tragic. Despite a glowing review in Rolling Stone, written by Greg Kot no less, Adore failed to make any sort of commercial dent. In hindsight, the dramatic ballad “Crestfallen” might not have been the best choice as a third single, given that eventual fourth single “To Sheila”, the energetically drowsy “Appels + Oranjes”, or even the graceful “Shame” were just sitting there waiting. Nonetheless, it was a lost cause. The album had no “Zero”, there wasn’t going to be another “Bullet with Butterfly Wings”, and whatever nostalgic magic “1979” held over their generation had simply washed down the drain. As Kot wrote in the aforementioned review, “[Adore] isn’t just a transitional record; it’s a complete break with the past.” Sixteen years later, those words ring true. Having now heard Machina/The Machines of God, Machina II/The Friends & Enemies of Modern Music, and even Corgan’s disastrous solo album, TheFutureEmbrace, it’s obvious this “complete break” was always Corgan’s intention. In fact, if you go way, way back to the ’80s, it’s the same sound that gave the guy his start, whether it was with his Florida outfit, The Marked, or the original demos he tracked early on with guitarist James Iha, material he described in 1994’s Vieuphoria as “gloomy little goth pop records.” That description could apply to all of Adore, an album constructed from the architectural blueprints of past goth pop masterpieces, what with its intimate, heart-on-its-sleeve poetry (“For Martha”, “Blank Page”); ambient, tortured wailing (“Behold! The Night Mare”, “Crestfallen”); and self-destructed rage (“Ava Adore”, “Daphne Descends”). Licking his wounds, Corgan did what everyone else does in the pits: He returned to the past, while keeping an eye on the future. (Read: Smashing Pumpkins Get Dissected) What makes the reissue so fascinating, then, is seeing how that madness all came together. Similar reissues for Gish, Siamese Dream, and Mellon Collie have all proven quite exceptional, but Adore‘s return haunts with intrigue and vitality. It’s not just a hodgepodge of forgotten material; it’s a story finally ready to be shared. And it’s told through 107 tracks broken down into six different albums. Whoa. There’s the remastered LP, its mono counterpart, and then four discs that collect Corgan’s demos (“In a State of Passage”), the outtakes (“Chalices, Palaces, and Deep Pools”), even more outtakes (“Malice, Callous, and Fools”), and select live cuts (“Kissed Alive Too”). It’s no doubt an arduous task, especially when another version of “For Martha” pops up, but it’s essential to anyone looking to unravel the Pumpkins lore. A few highlights include the Rick Rubin-produced “Let Me Give the World to You”, an early acoustic rendition of “Appels & Oranjes” titled “What If?”, a banjo-led rendition of “To Sheila”, and a soft demo titled “Valentine”. Actually, it’s the non-electronic material recorded at Corgan’s Sadlands home studio that offer the set’s most intimate experiences. On another demo titled “Sparrow”, Corgan gets so close to the mic that it feels as if he’s humming the words right beside you. These demos are hardly rough, either, strong enough to be carved out for a lost acoustic album. Consider them, instead, loose artifacts of Corgan’s mindset at the time, a doorway into his barest emotions before they were fully realized and awash in synthesizers. However, one moment that’s worth skipping to is Sean “Puffy” Combs’ inspired remix of “Ava Adore”, a cinematic reimagining that tailors Corgan with Sting-approved tapestries — simply put, it’s interesting. (Watch: Billy Corgan on Rock It Out! Blog) But “interesting” is so closely intertwined with hindsight, a finicky attribute of any reissue. After all, on a long enough timeline, everyone comes around to ingenuity, and that’s what these packages intend to propose. While Adore isn’t exactly genius, it’s certainly of the same fabric: a tortured portrait of tortured artists that will always remain tortured. The difference between this collection and, say, the future reissue of the really polarizing Machina albums is that the Pumpkins were still inches away from the ledge, pushing back against whatever force was attempting to hurl them off. This struggle offered one last glimpse of the Midwestern boy everyone hated to love, as opposed to the man everyone would love to hate. For a few hours, it’s nice to feel the bitter love again. Essential Tracks: “Let Me Give the World to You (Rick Rubin)”, “To Sheila (Early Banjo Version)”, “What If? (Streeterville Demo)”, and “Valentine (Sadlands Demo)” |
Jasper, the cautious veteran . Jasper’s been around the guard for a while, and has managed to survive — primarily because he’s convinced danger lurks around every corner, and one must always be on the look out. He’s the most mouse-like of the patrol. . Jasper’s been around the guard for a while, and has managed to survive — primarily because he’s convinced danger lurks around every corner, and one must always be on the look out. He’s the most mouse-like of the patrol. Aengus, the good-natured fighter. Aengus is from Lockhaven, the fortress of the Mouse Guard, and has immersed himself in their history and ideals. He believes in defending the weak, but is mostly on the look out for his next party. Aengus is from Lockhaven, the fortress of the Mouse Guard, and has immersed himself in their history and ideals. He believes in defending the weak, but is mostly on the look out for his next party. Quinn, the stalwart idealist. Where Aengus has immersed himself in the ideals of the Guard, Quinn has fully embraced them. To her, the Guard is the one thing keeping the predators at bay, and wants only the best for mousekind as a whole. She seeks to always embody those lofty ideals. Where Aengus has immersed himself in the ideals of the Guard, Quinn has fully embraced them. To her, the Guard is the one thing keeping the predators at bay, and wants only the best for mousekind as a whole. She seeks to always embody those lofty ideals. Finn, the even-tempered healer. Finn is the patrol’s realist; the natural order of life is messy, and mice get hurt. He’s embraced his natural gifts as a healer, and is just as quick to treat a fallen enemy as he is a friend or fellow guardmouse. However, Finn also recognizes that for all mice to survive, some might have to be left behind. The Mission, Should You Choose to Accept It Mouse Guard differs from many other RPGs in that it is very structured. Rather than having free-flowing adventures, a session of Mouse Guard centers around a mission (not unlike Dogs in the Vineyard), which is then broken into a series of “turns;” different phases where either the GM or the Players take narrative control. As I mentioned, instead of coming up with my own mission, I decided to just use the one Adam Koebel had drawn up for the Rollplay one-shot. The upside to this was that I didn’t really have to do any prep at all. The downside was since my group and I were so engrossed in both the game and learning the rules, I ended up railroading things a bit more than I normally would have. The mission itself was fairly straightforward; Gwendolyn, the matriarch of the Mouse Guard; tasked Jasper’s patrol with escorting a prisoner, Wulfrid, to face justice in the far-off settlement of Port Sumac. Gwendolyn stressed to the players the need for the prisoner to arrive alive and, if possible, unharmed. She then dismissed the junior patrol members, and gave Jasper instructions to interrogate Wulfrid — he was an insurgent, and had been arrested for inciting violence against the Guard. Gwendolyn, knowing Wulfrid was just a bit player in a larger organization, wanted Jasper to find out who was pulling the malcontent’s strings. With the mission established, the players each created goals for their characters, which they would attempt to accomplish over the course of the mission. Goals are a corner in the triangle of systems Mouse Guard uses to encourage players to role play. Unlike games like Dungeons & Dragons, where role playing is encouraged but not mechanically rewarded*, Mouse Guard asks players to create Beliefs, Instincts and Goals for their characters, and then rewards them in-game for playing to (or against) those things. The rewards are a form of currency players can earn to do better on later rolls. Beliefs and Instincts are created during character creation, where-as goals are created at the beginning of each mission or session. With the setup out of the way, it was time for our mice to start their long journey. The Quick Hits In my past play reports, I’ve gone into detail about what happened during a session, but for this report I’m just going to do a quick overview and get into some things which worked and didn’t. I’ll return to my standard style in reports for future sessions. So, after the patrol started out from Lockhaven, they: Came across a fellow guard patrol trying to clear some fallen brush off of a path (mice are small, so what is inconvenient for a person is a catastrophe for them), and elected to help them clear the path. Jasper intimidated Wulfrid into obedience, and the characters then helped clear the way by passing their test. Attempted to find their way to Darkwater, the port where they planned to get a boat to Port Sumac. Since this mission takes place in early spring, before the paths had been cleared and repaired, they had to make a moderately difficult test to find the best path. They failed this test. Ended up going down the wrong path as a result of the failed test, and had to bed down for the night. During the evening, Wulfrid escaped while Quinn was on watch, and the group had to pass another test to catch him. Luckily, they did so easily, and were on their way the following morning, but not until after Quinn had tried to weasel out of the responsibility for the prisoner’s escape. So much for her ideals! Arrived at Darkwater, where the patrol was surprised to see the mice there had adopted currency during the winter, and were charging a toll to enter. Once again, Jasper fought back her innate desire to shrink from confrontation, and cowed the gate guards into letting them in. With that test passed, we entered into the “Player Turn” of the game. During these encounters, I made a few mistakes which meant they ended being easier than they were designed to be. Namely, I read the rules concerning Nature incorrectly, which gave Jasper a huge advantage when trying to do things he didn’t have the skill to do. Nature, Checks and Traits Now, what do I mean by that? Well, in Mouse Guard, each character has something called Nature. Nature represents how mouse-like that character is. A high Nature means that a character is very much like the mice in the real world; they shy away from danger and don’t generally pick up swords to go fight things. Having a low Nature means the opposite; the mouse is brave and outgoing. The game stresses that characters need to strike a balance, never letting their Nature get too low or too high. Going to either extreme results in the character becoming unplayable. It enforces this mechanically by allowing characters to use their Nature in place of skills they don’t possess. In Jasper’s case, it meant he could call upon his Nature to intimidate other characters. Because that’s not what mice normally do, the game calls this acting against your Nature. When a character does that, their Nature decreases temporarily whether or not they succeed. When using Nature to do something a mouse would do, like hiding, their Nature only decreases if they fail. Where I screwed up was in letting Jasper use his Nature, but then failing to decrease, or “tax” , it after the tests. This meant Japser always had a very high Nature, and thus, had no incentive to use the other systems when doing things he wasn’t skilled at. This in turn had an effect on the rest of the game’s economy; namely using Traits to earn Checks. Along with Beliefs, Goals, and Instincts, characters in Mouse Guard have Traits, which are exactly what they sound like. For instance, Aengus is a Defender, and Finn is Compassionate. Characters can use these Traits either to help them (by occasionally getting help with a roll), or to hinder themselves (by giving extra successes to the GM). Why would a character do this? Because using Traits against themselves earns them Checks, which are what characters use during the Player Turn to do things like recover from conditions incurred during play (being injured, sick, etc.); go out and forage for food; or have a meeting with the mayor. Checks are important; characters only get one check for free, and once everyone has used their checks, the Player Turn is over, and the GM Turn starts again. During the GM Turn, characters can only engage with the obstacles the GM puts before them, and thus usually can’t advance goals or recover from injury or whatever. So how did Jasper’s Nature break this economy? Simple — because the group was doing so well, they never felt the need to use their traits against themselves to earn Checks. Part of this is my fault; I didn’t stress enough how little they could do during the Player Turn without checks, but even if I had, they weren’t getting injured or anything — they were just moving from one obstacle to the next. Welcome to Darkwater Once the patrol arrived in Darkwater, the GM Turn ended, and the characters all went about doing something. Aengus went looking for a party but ended up drinking alone and getting angry about it. Quinn went to the jail where Wulfrid was being held to talk him into telling her why he hated the Guard so much. Jasper decided to have a conversation with the town mayor about “currency,” (instead of working towards her goal to discover Wulfrid’s cohorts!), and Finn spent all night haggling with ferrymen to get a boat to Port Sumac. We ended there, with the Player Turn done, and the GM Turn ready to begin next time. Two of the players had suffered Conditions, which would have mechanical implications for the next session, and only one of them had worked towards their goal. Final Thoughts We really enjoyed Mouse Guard. I’ve played a few systems with this group, and none of them have gotten everyone engaged in the same way. The system encourages role playing and teamwork in a way few other systems do, and the source material keeps things light-hearted and fun, even when the stakes are high and things look grim. It’s also a fairly accessible and forgiving system, which is important, since Luke Crane’s other games often border on inscrutable. I personally learned a few good lessons during this first session, especially in terms of balancing how to “fail forward.” For one, I need to use failures to inflict Conditions on the characters more often, I think, as opposed to always setting up new obstacles to overcome. And of course, I need to use Nature properly. But in the end, we all had a great time, and are excited to see how this mission ends! Until next time, keep your ears up and your nose to the ground! *I know D&D says to award Inspiration for role playing, but Inspiration is a lazy system, and since they don’t tell you “when a player does X, give Inspiration,” I don’t consider it a mechanical reward. |
Advertisement James and Rosie, a lovely robotic couple at the Technical University of Munich, are well known for their delicious pancake and sausage breakfast rituals. Now their skills have expanded to include both sandwiches and popcorn. I hope you caught that little joke at 0:47 :) Remember, none of these steps are pre-programmed. The robots are able to understand what steps go into something like making popcorn, and break those steps down into actions. Like, TUM's PR2 wasn't explicitly instructed to go turn the stove on and off: It just knew that popcorn requires using the stove, and that the stove needed to be turned on, so it did all the localization and navigation and manipulation of the stove controls all by itself. The reason that this research is so important is that we don't want to have to be endlessly providing robots with instructions for every last thing that they're supposed to be doing. Giving robots the ability to take a complex task and autonomously infer all the intermediate tasks that it can then execute one at a time means that you'll be able to say, "Make me a sandwich" or "Do my laundry" or "Clean the house" or "You know what, go get everything done while I take a nap" and the robot will just go and do it, no questions asked. If you're into this stuff as much as we are, you'll want to watch the 15 minute mostly real-time video (with echoey and accented narration), below. [ IAS TUM ] |
The Vault is Slate’s new history blog. Like us on Facebook; follow us on Twitter @slatevault; find us on Tumblr. Find out more about what this space is all about here. The Negro Motorist Green Book was a guide that helped African-American travelers identify friendly hotels, restaurants, and mechanics when they were on the road. Harlem postal employee and publisher Victor H. Green published the Book annually from 1936 to 1964. As historian Cotton Seiler points out, the Green Book flourished during a time when cars were getting cheaper, and travel by automobile was becoming more common. For black drivers, however, freedom of the road had its limits. These travelers had to navigate segregated accommodations, couldn’t join AAA, and received disproportionate levels of attention from the police and local racists. This 1949 edition of the Green Book contained a message from an outreach representative of Esso Standard Oil; a feature story on Robbins, Ill. (a town “OWNED AND OPERATED BY NEGROES”); and listings of friendly businesses by state. (You can read a full PDF here.) Green wrote in his introduction to this edition: “There will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published…It will be a great day for us to suspend this publication for then we can go wherever we please, and without embarrassment.” And indeed, soon after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the Green Book ceased publication. Architectural historian Jennifer Reut is mapping the locations of the businesses represented in the Green Book. She’s collecting stories related to the publication, and to African-American automobile travel during Jim Crow, here. |
You broke your own rule mama! You used the car as a closet! Said my daughter beyond excited to have noticed my forgotten coat, wrinkled and abandoned in the freezing cold car.You are right. And I am so glad you noticed and told me. I offered with a smile. I will be sure to take it inside next time. I said to her. Mom! It’s a no biggie! Can I have a piggyback ride when we arrive? Oh and I bet you will do better next time. She added with a silly, silly smile. As my daughter had playfully explained that my forgotten coat was not a big deal, I could hear my words coming through.The very words I strive to use when small mistakes happen and just a hint of guidance will do the trick. But what about when Children break the rules and don’t listen? Positive Discipline can help. Children sometimes break rules or don’t listen. Sometimes we realize it’s just a mistake, like my daughter’s playful imitation of a “no biggie”. Other times, we are certain the rule breaking or not listening is misbehavior, or even defiance in need of discipline. A common response in these cases is to search for the best discipline – but what is best isn’t always clear. Just that something should be done… because children “should not get away with breaking the rules!” and “Children need to learn the consequences of their actions.” as parents recently shared with me in a workshop. Whatever the response, helping children learn, to accept responsiblity or the value of listening to our guidance is usually the goal. And for that reason, not choosing a punitive approach is important. So that the child will NOT end up feeling worried, confused and misunderstood. Disconnected from the very person that is supposed to offer safety and guidance. Guidance Instead Of Punishment Punishments for breaking rules can lead to a child retaliating or withdrawing (Jane Nelsen, Positive Discipline Series). What does that look like? It might be a child refusing to eat, delaying bedtime, talking back or otherwise behaving in ways that invite negative attention. Mistakenly we sometimes perpetuate the “not listening/ not cooperating” behaviors precisely because of how we are trying to stop them in the first place. But two negatives when it comes to children and listening is not likely to equal a positive outcome. There is magic, and sound reasoning, in taking a calm, kind, inquisitive and understanding approach to helping children when they break rules or don’t listen. Because a guidance approach opens the door for working together. It creates trust and invites cooperation. It offers children a chance to understand themselves and others. To reflect on their choices and decisions. It gives you an opportunity to be seen as a safe and trusted source of meaningful information. My daughter’s playful copycat moment was a powerful reminder of just how much words really imprint and impact our children. If we choose to encourage and help when the stakes are low, we have a better chance of getting through when the stakes are high. These Rules Were Made For Breaking (not quite…) Having rules is important. Particularly rules that keep children safe. Adjusting rules to reflect your family values and needs is wise. Knowing your child will test, push and probably break some of these rules is also wise. Testing limits is a way of testing independence, and that’s a good thing, even if it makes us want to stick a fork in our heads. It’s exhausting, yes, but it’s a necessary part of creating independent kids. – Jessica Lahey, The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed Striving to help and guide your child (instead of punishing) when the rules are broken is even wiser. Because it gives children a blue print for solving problems, learning responsibility and it flexes their failure and resiliency muscles. Focusing on understanding mistakes and misbehavior, instead controlling or punishing preserves trust and encourages capability. It also cultivates a cooperative “working with” dynamic that you can use from the toddler years and beyond. Discipline really is more effective when it focuses on teaching, understanding and guiding the child, instead of trying to make the child feel bad. What To Do When Your Child Breaks the Rules & Doesn’t Listen To You No Biggies: If your child breaks a rule that is small, and it’s really just a mistake or oversight, calmly let them know it’s a “no biggie” moment. Follow up with any missing information they may need to not do it again. Involve and Listen : Ask if your child has ideas how to fix her own mistake. With time, your child may start doing this on her own. (Read an example of a child learning to take responsibility for a big mistake here.) Do Over: Notice an unhelpful behavior? Let your child start over or have a second chance. It might sound like “Can you show me a way to pet the dog that is gentle and kind?” Stop The Behavior & Listen To the Feelings: When you notice your child is behaving in a way that is unhelpful and unnecessary calmly step in to stop the behavior. Then follow up with an opportunity for the child to connect with you and express himself. It might sound like “I will not let you hit your brother!” Step between the two children. “I’m here for you. Can you tell me what is going on?” When we listen to the feelings, we help children learn to self-regulate and make better choices as they grow. Help WITH vs. doing for: You can offer your child help fixing, cleaning up or mending when needed. A doing “with” instead of “fixing for” attitude helps transform misbehavior into a teachable moment. Your child can walk away with a sense that not only is she expected to fix her mistakes, that she is capable of doing so as well. Say NO & Yes when you mean it: Set and keep limits that are clear so your child understands what you really expect. Respect & Encourage: Speak to your child with the same respect and consideration that you hope to hear when she speaks to you, her family, friends and teachers. Teach then Trust: Strive not to lecture or dwell on the broken rules ( You may need to vent to a friend or write it down to let it go). Aim to teach and then move forward, trusting that your child is learning to follow your guidance. Bonus Download: Turn rule breaking into cooperation with this handy checklist. Click here to get it What if a child keeps breaking the same rules over and over again? Jane Nelsen, author of the Positive Discipline Series suggests “Take time for training” meaning, be sure your child has had enough time with you to practice and learn what is expected. Reflect and reduce the number of rules. Too many rules becomes controlling and constricting. And most children will become quite creative (i.e. lying, breaking more rules) just to not get caught. Reflect if there is a need to adjust expectations and surroundings (house proof, supervise, explain differently) to match your child’s age and development. Focus on connection: Is your child getting plenty of unconditional and positive attention from you? Do you make time to be with your child, to play games, listen to dreams, thoughts and wishes? Do you create special moments together? Do you look at your child with love, kindness and care? Do you forgive and even expect imperfections? Because loving a person means seeing him, really seeing him, above the distractions, the chaos, the mess, and the imperfections. -Rachel Macy Stafford, Hands Free Mama The more your child feels welcomed, understood and encouraged the more she is likely to follow your guidance. You don’t have to be perfect, and you don’t have to come up with complicated behavior charts or schemes either. Simply having a willingness to invest in your relationship, in these early years really makes a huge difference. You haven’t failed if your child has been testing limits and pushing boundaries. As you help your child grow, you will have many opportunities to say no, explain rules again (and again), listen to tears, frustrations and fears. Offer hugs, look for the “doing with moments” allow second chances. Pause, involve, remember your child is capable and willing to learn from you. Peace & Be Well, Ariadne Related Reading: |
During the boring, sleepless hours of a tenacious insomnia that miraculously disappeared upon my defending my dissertation, I used to entertain myself by wondering how much of Moby-Dick I could reconstruct from memory if I were ever stranded on a deserted island. Whenever I found myself growing wakeful in the night; whenever it was a dark, restless 2:30 a.m. in my bed; and especially whenever my insomnia got such an upper hand of me that it required a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately elbowing my wife and waking her up to have someone to talk to — then I would pick a scene from Moby-Dick and see how much of the language I could call to mind, however partially and out of order: What d’ye do when ye see a whale, men? Sing out for him!…And what tune is it ye pull to, men? “A Dead Whale or a Stove Boat!”…at the seemingly purposeless questions…slowly rubbing the gold coin on the skirts of his jacket…all twiskee-betwisk like him him…Corkscrew! cried Ahab; aye, the harpoons lie twisted in him…aye, Tash…it is a sixteen-dollar piece…this Spanish ounce of gold…Starbuck! Hand me that top-maul…with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw…whosoever raises me that whale, he shall have this Spanish ounce of gold…. It was an exercise in turning my attention to something delightful and letting that delight roll around in my mind, brightening the otherwise lonely, desert-island monotony of the wee hours. This turned out to be counterproductive vis-à-vis falling asleep — it was too interesting — but it’s a thought experiment I’ve never really let go of. Indeed, to this very hour, I often puzzle myself with it. I was overjoyed last month by the launch of a mobile app that is at once excellent training for my insomniac/shipwreck fantasy and a way to enjoy its best aspects without becoming shipwrecked or insomnious. The app, OMBY, is a game that you win by unscrambling Moby-Dick, a few words at a time. The complete text of the book has been broken into 10,395 consecutive morsels of about twenty words each, but with each morsel missing a few words, and the missing words’ letters mixed up like Scrabble tiles. Rearrange the alphabetic chaos of those tiles to form the missing words, and swipe forward to the next puzzle. Now do that 10,394 more times, in order, all the way through the book. What I love about this is the occasion it provides to engage Moby-Dick on the level of the word, which might be Moby-Dick’s weirdest and most delicious level. It’s almost always easier to engage Moby-Dick in terms of theme or plot, which means attending to parts of the text that have particularly vivid narrative or thematic significance. OMBY calls for a different kind of attention. Its puzzles aren’t subordinated to each other the way plot elements are; they’re additive: one and another and another and another and another. The puzzles that happen to be narratively significant require no more or less attention than any of the others. Moby-Dick rewards this kind of equal-opportunity close reading because every freaking page is dense with word-twisting images as aching as Bulkington’s apotheosis, as audacious as Ishmael’s sperm-hands, and as verbally disorienting as “a colorless, all-color of atheism.” OMBY is like a friend who accompanies me to the Louvre and keeps me from striding past a hundred unfamiliar masterworks on my way to see the ones I already know. In the Louvre, though, the art is already on the wall. OMBY lets me co-create Moby-Dick’s unfamiliar ingenuities, searching like Melville for the right words, massaging the letters into something meaningful. What about this one, the third of five puzzles that comprise a sentence about crow’s nests in Chapter 35? A crow’s nest, as Ishmael explains, is a little booth at the top of a mast to protect you from the weather while you’re up there looking out for whales. To his great regret, however, the Pequod has no crow’s nests, so you are completely exposed, and very uncomfortable in cold weather. You can of course wear a coat, Ishmael observes, but “the thickest watch-coat is no more of a house than the unclad body;” The tiles in OMBY work like dominos, or like two Scrabble tiles glued edge-to-edge: these are eight dominoes next to each other, each with a top and a bottom letter. As you move the top row of letters around, therefore, the bottom letters move too; solving one rung helps solve the other. I start by arranging the tiles of the top row into words and nonwords: TLO HOSE, HUETO LS, LUSH TOE, LE SOUTH. It’s easy to get tunnel vision here, failing to see the solution that’s right in front of you because you think you’re looking for something else. As you move the tiles around, words emerge from meaninglessness and dissolve back into it, per the book’s central interest in meaning as something we make, not something we find. I notice that the bottom rung can be made to say I SLUDGE, but this melts the top rung’s LE SOUTH back into chaos: With the letters arranged this way, however, the top rung snaps into focus for me: THE SOUL, which surely must “reside” or “exist” or “repose” inside its fleshy tabernacle? No, it’s glued there.[*] Look at the irreverent weirdness of that image: a soul with glue on it, and a hut made of skin adhered to it. I must have read through that simile a dozen times without really noticing it. That’s what Moby-Dick is like, though; there are too many of these linguistic weirdnesses to absorb on one reading or, I hope, a lifetime’s reading. You have to look at them in OMBY, though, because you are making them. So also the book’s thousands of words that are not quite words — words not recognized by spellcheck but meaningful anyway. Worryings, nappishness, rainbowed, prolongingly, bamboozingly, untattooed, bedwards, emblazonings, allurings: familiar words in unfamiliar parts of speech, the letters a little scrambled from where we expected them to be. Their meaning is never handed to us; we’re always unwrapping it. This is why OMBY’s unscrambling gameplay is so apropos. What does it mean that a book that looks unblinkingly at a brutal existential bleakness indulges in so much ecstatic wordplay, making and breaking meanings with such obvious pleasure? The book raises the strong possibility that everything that makes life meaningful — all meaning — is essentially make-believe. Even so, it pours its heart into making up more. After the existential traumas that the book depicts, the unrestrained vitality and sheer delight with which Ishmael (“some years” later) plays with language and meaning is why I read the book as fundamentally redemptive. Lately I’ve made it my business to shout from the rooftops that Moby-Dick is unimaginably weirder and more playful than most people think. What I appreciate most about OMBY is that it shouts the same thing at me. I think I know what’s in this book, but it’s always fuller of strange deliciousness than I remember. While OMBYing my way through Chapter Two recently, I found myself picturing for the first time in my life “a Czar in an ice palace made of frozen sighs.” Maybe the answer to the desert-island question is that I couldn’t really reconstruct the book at all, because what makes Moby-Dick Moby-Dick is all the stuff you don’t remember. OMBY is available for iOS devices. It costs $2.99. Tim Cassedy is a sort of badger-haired old merman. [*] The full sentence: “To be sure, in coolish weather you may carry your house aloft with you, in the shape of a watch-coat; but properly speaking the thickest watch-coat is no more of a house than the unclad body; for as the soul is glued inside of its fleshy tabernacle, and cannot freely move about in it, nor even move out of it, without running great risk of perishing (like an ignorant pilgrim crossing the snowy Alps in winter); so a watch-coat is not so much of a house as it is a mere envelope, or additional skin encasing you.” |
It seemed like a typical corruption case: A Florida doctor, seeking official favors with a United States senator, plies him with gifts while raising all the money he can for the senator’s campaign, and for his fellow senators and party. But the searing 68-page indictment of Senator Robert Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, filed this week by the Justice Department, does more than pull back the curtain on a politically and personally lucrative relationship between the senator and the doctor, Salomon E. Melgen. It is also the first significant campaign corruption case evolving out of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which opened up new channels for the wealthy to pour money into campaigns even as it narrowed the constitutional definition of political corruption and made it harder for prosecutors to prove bribery. Central to the Menendez case is the elaborate infrastructure of technically independent “super PACs” and political nonprofit groups that — for practical if not legal purposes — are closely bound to each party’s congressional leadership and are nurtured by lobbyists, donors, and other special interests seeking to influence the government. Of the $751,000 in campaign contributions that prosecutors say Dr. Melgen made in exchange for Mr. Menendez’s help pressuring government officials, a relatively small amount went directly to the senator or to official Democratic Party organizations. |
Cholesterol-lowering statin drugs most likely do not cause short-term memory loss, according to a Rutgers University and University of Pennsylvania study of nearly one million patients – contrary to prior assertions. Rutgers and University of Pennsylvania researchers examined the link between cholesterol-lowering drugs and memory impairment and determined statins likely do not cause short-term memory loss. Photo: Shutterstock Limited previous studies and some statin-drug takers have anecdotally reported memory lapses after taking popular lipid-lowering drugs (LLDs) called statins, said Brian L. Strom, chancellor of Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences (RBHS) and lead study author. The result has been that some people have stopped taking their statins, inappropriately, Strom said. About 610,000 people die of heart disease in the United States every year – that’s 1 in every 4 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control. One in four Americans over age 45 take statins, drugs that inhibit a liver enzyme that controls the synthesis of cholesterol and lowers LDL, commonly known as “bad cholesterol.” Statins have proven very effective at lowering high cholesterol, one of the major risk factors for heart disease, and preventing heart attacks and deaths. If a statin drug alone is not effectively reducing cholesterol numbers or a patient doesn’t tolerate the drug, nonstatins are often prescribed, Strom said. The study, published today in The Journal of the American Medical Association-Internal Medicine, compared new users of statins with people not taking statins. New statin users also were compared to a second control group – patients taking nonstatin LLDs – which had not been done before. More patients taking statins indeed reported memory loss in the 30-day period after first taking the drugs, compared to non-users, the study found. The same, however, was found with the nonstatin LLDs. “Either it means that anything that lowers cholesterol has the same effect on short-term memory, which is not scientifically credible because you’re dealing with drugs with completely different structures,” Strom said. Or, he said, “detection bias” is more likely the reason, meaning patients taking a new drug visit their doctors more frequently and are highly attuned to their health. Brian L. Strom, chancellor of Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences, is lead author on a study on lipid-lowering drugs and memory impairment. Photo: Nick Romanenko High Res “When patients are put on statins or any new drug, they’re seen more often by their doctor, or they themselves are paying attention to whether anything is wrong,” Strom said. “So if they have a memory problem, they’re going to notice it. Even if it has nothing to do with the drug, they’re going to blame it on the drug.” Other studies have already confirmed that statins improve long-term memory, so Strom said the findings indicate short-term memory loss is not a concern either: “You shouldn’t worry about short-term memory problems from any statins and, long-term, we know they improve memory.” The upshot: “People who have high cholesterol should be on statins,” Strom said. Statins include atorvastatin, cerivastatin, fluvastatin, pravastatin and simvastatin, while nonstatin LLDs include cholestyramine, colestipol hydrochloride, colesevelam, clofibrate and gemfibrozil. “This is a very effective therapy, which is very safe,” Strom said. “No drug is completely safe. But it has an opportunity to dramatically reduce heart disease in the country. People shouldn’t steer away from the drug because of false fear of memory problems.” The study, “Statin Therapy and Risk of Acute Memory Impairment,” compared 482,542 individuals taking statin medications to 482,543 randomly selected individuals not taking any LLDs. The second control group included 26,484 users of nonstatin LLDs. Strom conducted the research with Rita Schinnar, Sean Hennessy, Valerie Teal and Warren B. Bilker from the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, and Jason Karlawish from the Penn Memory Center and the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. Researchers analyzed patients’ primary medical records from general practitioners in the United Kingdom from The Health Improvement Network from July 2013 to January 2015. Patients with a prior history of cognitive dysfunction and conditions including Alzheimer’s, dementia, Parkinson’s, Huntington disease, brain tumors and other brain infections were excluded. The study was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health. Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences (RBHS) comprises eight schools and their connected faculty practices, centers, institutes, and clinics; New Jersey's largest behavioral health care network, University Behavioral Health Care; and numerous additional centers, institutes and clinics. Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences includes academic, patient care, and research facilities in Newark, in New Brunswick/Piscataway, and at additional locations in New Jersey. For media inquiries, contact Dory Devlin at ddevlin@ucm.rutgers.edu or 908-872-6979. |
Share Email 0 Shares Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks at Liberty University. CSPAN video When Liberty University extended speaking invitations to all the candidates vying for president in 2016, two of the most conservative Republicans RSVP’d to speak at the school’s convocation: Scott Walker and Ben Carson. The venue choice made sense for the two candidates, both of whom hold beliefs on issues like gay marriage and abortion that line up with the school’s evangelical principles. But the third confirmed candidate to speak was much more of a surprise: Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.. Get all of VTDigger's daily news. You'll never miss a story with our daily headlines in your inbox. About 13,000 people filled a stadium at the Lynchburg, Virginia, school last week to hear Sanders speak. His 30-minute speech, which acknowledged a divergence with the school’s philosophy on issues of women’s and gay rights, sought a middle ground on other social justice issues. “Let me respectfully suggest that there are other issues out there that are of enormous consequence to our country, and in fact to the entire world, that maybe, just maybe, we do not disagree on,” Sanders said. “And maybe, just maybe, we can try to work together in trying to resolve them.” While the talk was reminiscent of a classic Sanders stump speech, it was also imbued with religious and moral themes as well as quoted bible verses. Following the speech, Sanders took questions from the audience before meeting with members of the Student Government Association at the school founded by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell. While a number of Liberty University students said Sanders’ speech had not swayed them politically, many gave the senator credit for bringing his message to a new audience. “He forced us to think,” said Kristen Smith, vice treasurer of the Liberty SGA, in an email. “He gave us the opportunity to hear opposing views, and Liberty students listened.” Another Liberty student, Jacob Munden, said that while he was undecided as a voter, Sanders was not on the shortlist. But he echoed other students in their appreciation of hearing a different political perspective in Sanders. VTDigger is underwritten by: “When the convocation schedule came out we were all very surprised,” said Munden, who serves as the communications director for the SGA. “For the most part, we were all extremely grateful to get a point of view we don’t get a lot.” Smith said most students she talked with after the speech said they were not going to vote for Sanders, and she said she prayed that most students would understand that some of Sanders views “do not line up with the Christian faith.” But Smith said she thought that “the student came out [after the speech] stronger in faith and better rounded in their political views.” Munden also said the speech didn’t likely change many minds, saying “What I think it did more for Sen. Sanders is that he gained so much respect in the media.” While many of the accolades given to Sanders following the speech dealt more with his style than substance, he appeared to have made at least one convert. A self-described Liberty University alumnus posted a 17-minute audio clip to the aggregation site Reddit following the speech, explaining why his support of Sanders for president did not compromise his deep religious convictions. “I saw a wild-haired Jew crying out in a hoarse voice in a very forceful and forth-speaking way,” “Jim” said in the recording. “He was convicting the Christian leaders and religious leaders in that university for being complicit in the abandonment of those that suffer.” “When I saw that guy on stage at Liberty University I saw John the Baptist,” Jim added. In Vermont, Sanders has a reputation for attracting more conservative voters. In a recent Castleton poll, 15 percent of male and 27 percent of female Republicans said they would likely support a Sanders presidential bid. “Vermont Republicans are a different breed,” said Rich Clark, who directs polling at Castleton University. “But at the same time, the issue of this opportunity gap is really resonating with a large and growing segment.” Darcie Johnston, a Vermont Republican strategist, said that while she has never been a fan of Sanders, the Liberty speech was “a pretty amazing performance in what he was saying to them.” She said that while she didn’t think Sanders would be able to spread his message out broadly enough to clinch the Democratic nomination, she said the grass-roots ground-game of the Senator was admirable. “I do know that they tend to have the hardest working volunteers and an amazing amount of energy and ability to crisscross the country at a sustained pace in order to get out of the comfort zone,” she said. |
After more than a year of research, the Chicago Loop Alliance revealed two dozen ideas for transforming the dark Wabash corridor into a downtown commercial and entertainment center, hoping to activate an important bridge between high-traffic areas of the Loop and revitalize the stretch. The 24 recommendations run from common sense concepts such as graffiti removal to the Wabash Lights project, an installation that would illuminate the underside of the L with colorful LED lighting. The long-term vision is to create special districts in the area to attract and retain business while taking advantage of the connective potential two upcoming infrastructure projects, the Washington Wabash L station and bus rapid transit in the Loop. Labeled "layers of transformation," the different steps, part of a multi-year evolution of Wabash, would beautify and revitalize the area while laying the foundation for different business districts. The price tags for the proposals being floated by the CLA would vary from less than $50,000 to a handful costing half a million or more. The CLA is looking towards new partners, such as the Chicago Department of Transportation, building owners or downtown art institutions, as well as grants, to help provide funding. The Chicago Loop Alliance eventually wants to brand and build up different sections of the neighborhood to create special areas of the Loop, such as a nightlife district centered around the north end of the street near the new Virgin Hotel. The CLA also suggested transforming the east side of Wabash between Madison and Monroe streets into a maker district, hoping to attract digital manufacturing and design companies with lower rents and close proximity to downtown schools. An art street on Adams between State and Michigan was also floated, as well as a "container village" at the south end of Wabash, perhaps creating a street market or the kind of food truck pods found in other cities. ·Group lays out its plans to spiff up Chicago's Wabash Avenue [Chicago Tribune] ·Previous Wabash Avenue coverage [Curbed Chicago] ·Previous Loop Alliance Coverage [Chicago Curbed] |
On Friday it was revealed that the CNN host and former editor of the Daily Mirror newspaper, Piers Morgan, had been interviewed under caution by police investigating phone hacking. Officers from Operation Golding will have wanted to talk to Morgan about his now infamous claim that “I have never hacked a phone, told anyone to hack a phone, or published any stories based on the hacking of a phone.” That categorical denial looks increasingly implausible when you look a the volume of evidence against him. Before the phone hacking scandal blew up in 2011, Morgan had – somewhat foolishly on his part – repeatedly explained in detail how voicemail intercepts were commonplace among London newspapers. Regarding a story about Paul McCartney and Heather Mills the Mirror ran while he was editor, Morgan admitted, “At one stage I was played a tape of a message Paul had left for Heather on her mobile phone.” When asked under oath during the Leveson Inquiry into press ethics how his paper had obtained the message, he refused to answer. In his 2009 diaries Morgan described how he broke the story of an affair involving England football manager Sven-Goran Eriksson: “It was the Daily Mirror, under my editorship, which exposed Sven’s fling with Ulrika Jonsson after learning of a similar message left by the then England manager on her phone.” And it was in his diaries that Morgan confessed his knowledge of how to hack phones: “If you don’t change the standard security code that every phone comes with, then anyone can call your number and, if you don’t answer, tap in the standard four digit code to hear all your messages.” Writing in GQ magazine, Morgan again explained the method and played down the the consequences: “Reporters could ring your mobile, tap in a standard factory setting number and hear your messages. That is not, to me, as serious as planting a bug in someone’s house.” He may have not thought it serious then, but the crime of intercepting voicemail communications carries a possible two-year prison sentence. If the evidence from Morgan’s own mouth is enough to raise considerable suspicion, the testimony of his peers is even more damning. Morgan was editor of the Mirror from 1995 to 2004, and it was during his tenure that former Mirror journalist James Hipwell alleged, “Many of the Daily Mirror‘s stories would come from hacking into a celebrity’s voicemail… I used to see it going on around me all the time when I worked at the Mirror.” The BBC journalist Jeremy Paxman recalls how at a lunch in 2002, “Mr. Morgan was teasing Ulrika that he knew what had happened in a conversation between her and Sven-Goran Eriksson… He turned to me and said, ‘Have you got a mobile phone?’ “I said ‘Yes,’ and he asked if there was a security setting on the message bit of it. I didn’t know what he was talking about.” In December, giving evidence at the hacking trial of former newspaper editors Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson, legal adviser Ambi Sitham alleged that Morgan once boasted to Brooks, “I know what your splash is because I’ve been listening to your messages.” Brooks replied, “Been hacking into my phone again have you, Piers?” Morgan was also singled out for heavy criticism by the judge in charge of the Leveson Inquiry, Lord Justice Brian Leveson. Commenting on his evidence, Leveson concluded that “Mr. Morgan chose his words very carefully when asked to speak about the Daily Mirror.” Of one of Morgan’s replies to a question on hacking, Leveson warned, “This was not, in any sense at all, a convincing answer,” and summing up his testimony overall, described it as “utterly unpersuasive.” So far the hacking trial has focused primarily on activity at the News of the World newspaper, though evidence at the Brooks-Coulson trial has also implicated Mirror Group newspapers in alleged criminality. Operation Golding, the investigation into behaviour at Mirror Group newspapers, is far less advanced than the Operation Weeting investigation into News of the World, and is still in the process of collecting evidence. However, one Sunday Mirror journalist has already pleaded guilty to phone hacking. It may not be long before CNN are forced to make a difficult decision about the employment of their star host. |
RAD Debugger Project This project needs engineers! Read on and see if you are a good fit... How did this come about? Back in May of 2013, Valve and RAD decided that the most important tools holding back Linux development were high-end graphical and code debuggers. We started collaborating on building them. The graphics debugger, VOGL, was released in January 2014 and is already a great graphics debugging tool for Linux. But new development is currently on hold while GL 5.0 shakes out. Mike Sartain at Valve runs this project. The code debugger is still in development. We started by working on improvements to LLDB, but ended up deciding to start our own codebase from scratch in December 2013. Why make a new source-level debugger? To put it bluntly, debugging on Linux is just really bad. We believe it is the biggest roadblock to great software for that platform. Don't get us wrong - debugging on Windows isn't great either. But the standard Visual Studio debugger is still much better than anything on Linux. So we want to make Linux debugging as good as Windows debugging. And then we want to make both better - much better. There are so many better debugging tools that we can imagine having, and yet even today's best debuggers provide barely any functionality that wasn't in debuggers twenty years ago. Also, we think there's a lot of value in having one great debugger that you can use on every platform. RAD develops software for roughly 18 platforms now. A big part of the friction of a new platform is dealing with different toolsets. Compilers, linkers and runtimes are all hard to deal with, certainly, but you typically finish setting those up in a few days or weeks. The debuggers, on the other hand, are tools you have to use every day for as long as you develop on that platform! What's involved? Our first step is just making a standard debugger. There are four big pieces to this: low-level debugging services for each platform (process control, breakpoints, memory reading, etc), debug info parsing (DWARF, PDB, etc.), the debugger data framework, and the debugger UI itself. The low-level debugging services are already working on Linux and are implemented on Windows, but we haven't yet tackled consoles or mobile operating systems. Debug info parsing is just getting started - we are handling part of DWARF, but there's still a ways to go before it's all implemented, and PDB hasn't been implemented at all yet. Both of these are ongoing maintenance jobs, too, since debugging info is complex and how compileres output it can often change or differ from what is documented. The debugger data framework is under extensive development now. This is the layer that handles all of brokering and buffering of data coming from local and remote targets. This layer is usually wrapped up in the UI layer, but we split it out to allow UIs and visualizers to be added quickly and easily (more on this in a bit). The UI right now is just a simple QT app that renders what the debugger application framework exposes. The idea is that, if things are organized in the framework well, then the UIs don't need to add anything special to automatically handle new platforms and new types of data when new platforms are added to the low level services. The UI will need lots of work when the framework is farther along, and QT will eventually be replaced with something else entirely. What's after that? Tons of stuff. Tons and tons and tons of stuff. Debuggers have not substantially evolved since the first Turbo Debugger in 1988! For example, we have had GUI debuggers for 20 years now, and we can't see bitmaps! We can't hear sound buffers. We can't view vertex arrays. We can't graph values over time. We can't even load a debugging session from yesterday and review it! We have a long way to go. Debugging is desperate need of updating, and we see as a long term project. We'll be adding visualizers, new debugging workflows (step through code on multiple platforms at the same time for example), and new features for a long time. But that's all going to start in mid-2015, after we have built this first, basic, debugging platform. What will the licensing be? We have no idea right now. We're just trying to make something cool first. What do we need? Right now, we're immediately looking for someone to work on the low-level debugging services stuff. Richard Mitton has written a ton of great code here over the last year, but this level requires a lot of ongoing maintenance, since the toolchains change so much. There will also be work in updating interfaces and API as the debugger application framework requires. This position needs to be a smart, low-level person who writes meticulous, careful, test-driven code (everything stacks on top of this, so it needs to be stable). They need to be good with reverse-engineering data formats when toolchains and specs diverge. This will be low-level C/C++ and assembly work. We also need a great custom UI coder, someone who can write a full user interface from scratch with a mind towards advanced data visualization and extremely fast response times. We want the debugger to have a front end that feels great to use and isn't constrained to the lame set of basic widgets that exist in traditional UI systems. The code style here is a bit different - you will write a LOT of code here, jumping around writing stuff, coming back, rewriting it, etc. It is less test-driven and more experimental, where you write things different ways and move quickly. This will be C and C++ work. We would like both of these positions to be in Seattle (eastside, in Kirkland now, but Bellevue soon), but we can talk if you are awesome. If you are interested, email us at jobs(at)radgametools.com |
It can be argued that Mother’s Day is the most popular secular holiday in our churches. Attendance increases, special music is featured, pastors pay particular attention to crafting messages that affirm the place of motherhood in keeping families and communities faithfully knit together. So it seemed fitting that Believe Out Loud, a trans-denominational effort to promote LGBT equality in mainline Protestant congregations, focused on Mother’s Day to launch its new campaign to invite one million believers to “sign up” for full LGBT equality in our churches and society-at-large. A centerpiece of this effort is a new video with particular relevance to Mother’s Day. The video features that fateful, frightful walk down the church’s center aisle by a visiting family. How many of us can remember such a walk? This family unit, however, happens to include a young boy with two moms. After inhospitable stares and gestures from pew-sitters, the family is welcomed by the pastor. A familiar music track enhances the emotional impact. The video is a sweetly stated reminder that all should be welcomed in our churches. Its target audience is clergy and lay leaders who silently believe in LGBT equality but have yet to take steps to express this welcome publicly. Hence, the campaign calls on church leaders to “Believe Out Loud.” It’s not just a video thrown out into cyberspace to make a point. The video is backed by an extensive web hub with literally hundreds of resources and an interactive community to help pastors and parishioners begin this conversation in their churches. The video is a hook. It touches the heart and prompts viewers to learn more about the campaign in order to take meaningful personal actions that advance the cause of LGBT justice in our congregations. To get the word out, Believe Out Loud organizers backed the launch of this viral video with a multi-layered, web-based advertising strategy that included a significant ad buy on the Sojourners website and email newsletters—home to one of the largest networks of progressive Christians in the United States. So, you can imagine our dismay when Sojourners refused to run our ads. In a written statement, Sojourners said, “I’m afraid we’ll have to decline. Sojourners position is to avoid taking sides on this issue. In that care [sic], the decision to accept advertising may give the appearance of taking sides.” Taking sides? What are the sides here? That young children who have same-gender parents are not welcome in our churches? That “welcome, everyone” (the only two words spoken in the ad) is a controversial greeting from our pulpits? That the stares the young boy and his moms get while walking down the aisle are justified? I can’t imagine Sojourners turning down an ad that called for welcome of poor children into our churches. So why is this boy different? I called the folks at Sojourners and asked what the problem was, what the “sides” in question might be. The first response was that Sojourners has not taken a stance on gay marriage (the ad is not about gay marriage); or on ordination of homosexuals (the ad is about welcome, not ordination); that the decision, made by “the folks in executive” (why such a high level decision?) was made quickly because of the Mother’s Day deadline. The rationale kept shifting. The reasoning made no sense. I served as Director of Communication in the United Church of Christ in 2004 when CBS and NBC refused to air the “bouncer” commercial. It was déjà vu all over again: shifting rationales, trying to claim the ad was about something that it was not about, administrative excuses. The statements from Sojourners were the very same arguments we heard at the UCC. This was bad enough coming from network execs in New York, but from Sojourners? Few can doubt the need for this campaign. Public Religion Research finds that two-thirds of Americans blame the recent spate of young gay suicides in part on negative messaging that queer kids receive from the religious community. With an election cycle just over the horizon, LGBT concerns are very likely to be a topic of conversation on the airwaves, in our congregations and around the dinner table in many places around the country. Are our church leaders equipped to thoughtfully address this topic? Do they have practical tools to begin (or advance) the conversation forward in our churches? Believe Out Loud is more than four years in the making. Virtually every mainline Protestant LGBT denominational advocacy group is a partner, making it a credible place for church leaders to turn for help on this issue. We have asked ourselves why Sojourners, a preeminent voice for justice in the religious community, rejected our ad buy. Does the organization not really believe in welcome for “everyone” in our churches or do they believe everyone is welcome, but they are afraid to “believe out loud” for fear of alienating some constituents? On one level, it doesn’t really matter. Their dilemma, apparently, is a ringing testimony for both the urgency and the necessity of this campaign since the issues they confronted are similar to those that face congregational leaders in addressing this concern within their settings. In recent years, American society has made significant strides forward towards full equality for LGBT persons. Tragically, the church has lagged well behind. Clearly, there is more work to be done. |
Then U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Mark Smith, 33rd Rescue Squadron flight engineer, right, is pictured receiving the Air Force Commendation Medal from Brig. Gen. Matt Molloy, then 18th Wing commander, on Kadena Air Base, Japan, June 20, 2012. Smith died when the HH-60G Pave Hawk helicopter in which he was flying went down during a training mission Aug. 5. Air Force officials have identified the airman killed when an HH-60 Pave Hawk helicopter crashed Monday during a training mission on Okinawa. Tech Sgt. Mark A. Smith was a flight engineer assigned to the 33rd Rescue Squadron, according to a release issued Saturday by the 18th Wing at Kadena Air Base. The other three crew members on the helicopter when it crashed and burned in a forest on Camp Hansen were found soon after the crash Monday and treated at U.S. Naval Hospital Okinawa. Smith, of Bakersfield, Calif., joined the Air Force in 2000. He was posted to Kadena in 2011 and deployed twice to Afghanistan with the 33rd Rescue Squadron, the release said. “Smitty was a total professional and true warrior,” Lt. Col. Pedro Ortiz, 33rd commander, said of Smith, according to the release. “He led by example and was wise beyond his young age of 30. In combat or out, I am proud to call him my brother.” Smith is survived by his wife, Jessica, and two daughters, the release said. news@stripes.com |
© Geoff Burke/USA TODAY Sports The Philadelphia Eagles and the Washington Redskins have a storied past, enough so that Eagles have refused to acknowledge the team by its nickname. The Philadelphia Eagles will travel to the D.C. area for a showdown with the NFC East rival Washington Redskins on Sunday at FedEx Field and it was noticed by one seasoned scribe that the appearance of the team’s media guide for the game has an interesting difference from guides for other games this season. Instead of the cover touting the Eagles vs. Falcons match-up or an Eagles vs. Jets showdown, the one for this week’s game features a Philadelphia vs. Washington title. This is interesting. The #Eagles appear to have wiped the name #Redskins from this week's weekly media guide. #NFL pic.twitter.com/VgA9ksVrbi — Matt Lombardo (@MattLombardo975) September 30, 2015 Given NJ Advanced Media’s Matt Lombardo has been covering the Philadelphia sports scene for some time, it’s a safe assumption this must be a new development and not something the Eagles have done in the past for media guides in order to avoid the controversy surrounding the Washington NFL team’s name. Perhaps the Eagles have decided to join the numerous other media outlets throughout the country who have made it organizational policy to not use the Redskins name in its reporting. Or it could be some Grade-A trolling on behalf of the Eagles by rubbing their opponent’s nose in the never-ending controversy. Whatever the case, it’s safe to say that Jeb Bush doesn’t get it, regardless of the motivation behind it. |
"Careful, Your Grace. Nothing cuts like Valyrian steel." ―Grand Maester Pycelle to King Joffrey [src] Valyrian steel is a form of metal that was forged in the days of the mighty Valyrian Freehold. When fashioned into bladed weapons, the steel can hold an especially keen edge, remaining sharp forever without the need for honing. Aside from its sharpness, Valyrian steel is recognizable by its strength and light weight in comparison to ordinary steel[1], as well as by a distinctive rippled pattern visible in blades made from it.[2] Along with dragonglass, Valyrian steel is one of the few known substances that can kill White Walkers, although this property is not widely known, apparently not even to the White Walkers themselves.[3] Since the destruction of Valyria, the majority of the surviving Valyrian steel weapons serve as heirlooms in the various noble Houses of Westeros. Contents show] Forging "No one's made a new Valyrian steel sword since the Doom of Valyria." ―Jaime Lannister [src] The secret of forging Valyrian steel was lost in the Doom of Valyria , after which creating new Valyrian steel weapons became impossible. Stories claimed that the metal was imbued with magic spells and forged with dragonfire, though no one can confirm or deny this. The material was expensive to begin with, so even by the time of the Doom, Valyrian steel swords such as House Stark's Ice were already valued heirlooms passed down from one generation to the next in powerful noble families. Skilled smiths can reforge Valyrian steel weapons by melting down existing ones, but it's a difficult process.[4] Two smaller Valyrian steel swords can be made out of a larger greatsword, or a large greatsword made by melting down multiple smaller swords, but the amount of Valyrian steel in the world is finite and extremely rare.[5] The master-blacksmiths of Qohor are noted among the few who can accomplish this feat, but even they don't know how to create entirely new Valyrian steel.[6] Some maesters also bear a Valyrian steel link in their chain, a sign that said maester has studied the "higher mysteries" - magic. This field of study, however, is mostly theoretical and its purpose is to demonstrate that magic, if it ever existed, is now extinct.[7] Known Valyrian steel weapons Extant Valyrian steel weapons Lost Valyrian steel weapons In the books In A Song of Ice and Fire novels, only the blacksmiths of Qohor are skilled enough to reforge Valyrian steel. The Season 4 premiere of the TV series, however, oddly had Tywin say that only three men in the known world know how to reforge it, and that he hired a blacksmith from Volantis to reforge Ice into two other swords. In the books, Ice was reforged by Tobho Mott, a Qohorik master blacksmith who moved to King's Landing years ago, and to whom Gendry was apprenticed. This is all the more strange because Mott was actually introduced in the TV series in Seasons 1 and 2, so it is unclear why the TV series would then shift away from this plot point (it's possible that the actor was unavailable for Season 4). Either way, the "Histories & Lore" animated featurette from the Season 2 Blu-ray set had already stated that it is the blacksmiths of Qohor who are famed for their ability to reforge Valyrian steel. According to legend, Valyrian steel was forged with dragon-fire and infused with magical spells - some say with blood magic, literally requiring "fire and blood" (like House Targaryen's motto). Having been forged with dragon fire, Valyrian steel is incredibly resistant to damage from normal fire. As in the series, the maesters of the Citadel possess some meager skill with the material, if only to provide Valyrian steel links to the few maesters who study magic. Only 1 in about 100 Maesters has a Valyrian Steel link in his chain, and the Archmaester of the field also possesses a ring, a rod, and a mask made from the metal. The rarity of such links isn't because it's a difficult practice to master, but because most Maesters are notoriously anti-magic, while others even refuse to believe such a force still exists in the world, or that it ever did to begin with. In A Feast for Crows, Samwell Tarly tells Jon Snow about old annals claiming that "dragonsteel" is lethal to the White Walkers, like dragonglass - they both suspect that "dragonsteel" is another name for "Valyrian steel", but haven't been able to put it to the test yet. This would be contradictory as the Wall and Winterfell existed thousands of years before Valyria was even founded, unless, perhaps, it did not actually originate in Valyria. In the show, this it is confirmed that the two are the same when Jon Snow kills a White Walker during the Massacre at Hardhome. Although Valyrian steel blades are scarce and costly, several hundred of them are known to exist in the world, approximately two hundred in Westeros alone. Most of them are swords, but there are a few daggers and axes as well. Valyrian steel can be identified by its unusual dusky color, distinctive rippled pattern, and the extreme sharpness of the blade. There are hundreds of Valyrian longswords in the world, but only a handful of Valyrian arakhs. One of those is carried by Caggo, one of the captains of the Windblown sellsword company. In addition to those mentioned above, other Valyrian steel weapons include Red Rain (House Drumm) and Nightfall (House Harlaw). Brightroar, the Valyrian sword of House Lannister, was lost in an expedition to Valyria centuries ago. An attempt to find it, led by Tywin Lannister's younger brother Gerion, apparently ended in failure, with no-one returning from the expedition. At least three times Tywin offered to buy Valyrian longswords from impoverished lesser houses, but his offers were firmly rejected. The little lordlings would gladly part with their daughters should a Lannister come asking, but they cherished their old family swords. This is what Jaime was referring to in "Two Swords" when he says that Tywin has wanted a Valyrian steel sword in the family for a long time. Suits of armor can also be fashioned of Valyrian steel, and would have been worth a kingdom even before the Doom. While Valyrian steel swords are rare in Westeros, Valyrian steel armors are even rarer - Euron Greyjoy is the only known person in Westeros who possesses such armor, which is enough to convince even his enemies that has indeed successfully returned alive from the ruins of Valyria. Behind the Scenes Valyrian steel shares many of its legendary traits with real-life Damascus steel: Both metals display a flowing water pattern, both were reputed to result in exceptional quality blades at the time, and like Valyrian steel, the true method for crafting Damascus steel has been lost, meaning that true Damascus steel weapons can no longer be crafted.[8] Notably, even modern interpretations of Damascus steel are expensive, and a sword made using such material can easily cost twice that of a handmade sword from traditional or high-carbon steel. The famous Japanese Mokume-gane metalworking technique also resembles the description of Valyrian steel and may have origins from Damascus steel. It shares the distinct pattern of Damascus steel and Valyrian steel, but the method was not lost and often considered superior [citation needed] to Damascus steel (likely because it continued to be perfected to the present day). The actual type of steel used historically in Japan to make swords is called Tamahagane. to Damascus steel (likely because it continued to be perfected to the present day). The actual type of steel used historically in Japan to make swords is called Tamahagane. A different, but related, inspiration could be Ulfberht swords. Both types don't always follow medieval middle European designs and the origin of their metal came from Asia (India [9] in the case of Damascus steel and through the Silk Road in the case of Ulfberht). The same applies to rust protecting technique e.g. found with the Sword of Goujian and others. in the case of Damascus steel and through the Silk Road in the case of Ulfberht). The same applies to rust protecting technique e.g. found with the Sword of Goujian and others. In the show, the flowing water patterns are only visible in close-ups of the props, which would be true of Damascus steel swords as well, given how fine the patterns are. Some Valyrian steel swords are mentioned in the books as having unusual colors (i.e., dusky red and light violet), but this detail has been largely omitted from the swords seen on screen. See also |
A Notre Dame student was arrested Sunday morning after police say he dug his way into a downtown South Bend business. Officers responded to a burglar alarm at Therapeutic Indulgence on Jefferson Blvd. around 9:30 a.m. When they arrived, they found 19-year-old Brian McCurren of Maineville, Ohio passed out in the kitchen on the second floor. WSBT has confirmed McCurren attended the University of Notre Dame. Officers say McCurren tried to make his way into the business late Saturday night or early Sunday. He tried several ways to break in, but ultimately used a 100-pound flower pot to break through the front door, according to police. Once inside a breezeway, McCurren allegedly found a hammer and dug his way through the drywall into the main building. The owner of the business, Sara ros Frazier, tells WSBT her employee arrived early Sunday morning and found the inside ransacked. She says a fire extinguisher was sprayed inside four different rooms inside the building. Furniture and lamps were also broken. MORE PHOTOS from the scene In the kitchen on the second floor, police found McCurren had warmed up several Hot Pockets in a microwave and also had macaroni and cheese cooking in the oven. Police say when they arrived at the business, McCurren was very disoriented. We're told by the owner there is several thousand dollars worth of damage to the business. McCurren was arrested and charged with burglary, vandalism and underage drinking. WSBT's Ed Ernstes is following this developing story and will have a full report tonight at 5 and 6. |
Mass strandings of whales have puzzled people since Aristotle. Modern-day strandings can be investigated and their causes, often human-related, identified. Events that happened millions of years ago, however, are far harder to analyze--frequently leaving their cause a mystery. A team of Smithsonian and Chilean scientists examined a large fossil site of ancient marine mammal skeletons in the Atacama Desert of Northern Chile--the first definitive example of repeated mass strandings of marine mammals in the fossil record. The site reflected four distinct strandings over time, indicating a repeated and similar cause: toxic algae. The team's findings will be published Feb. 26 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The site was first discovered during an expansion project of the Pan-American Highway in 2010. The following year, paleontologists from the Smithsonian and Chile examined the fossils, dating 6-9 million years ago, and recorded what remained before the site was paved over. The team documented the remains of 10 kinds of marine vertebrates from the site, named Cerro Ballena--Spanish for "whale hill." In addition to the skeletons of the more than 40 large baleen whales that dominated the site, the team documented the remains of a species of sperm whale and a walrus-like whale, both of which are now extinct. They also found skeletons of billfishes, seals and aquatic sloths. What intrigued the team most, however, was how the skeletons were arranged. The skeletons were preserved in four separate levels, pointing to a repeated and similar underlying cause. The skeletons' orientation and condition indicated that the animals died at sea, prior to burial on a tidal flat. Effects of Toxic Algae Today, toxins from harmful algal blooms, such as red tides, are one of the prevalent causes for repeated mass strandings that include a wide variety of large marine animals. "There are a few compelling modern examples that provide excellent analogs for the patterns we observed at Cerro Ballena--in particular, one case from the late 1980s when more than a dozen humpback whales washed ashore near Cape Cod, with no signs of trauma, but sickened by mackerel loaded with toxins from red tides," said Nicholas Pyenson, paleontologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and lead author of the research. "Harmful algal blooms in the modern world can strike a variety of marine mammals and large predatory fish. The key for us was its repetitive nature at Cerro Ballena: no other plausible explanation in the modern world would be recurring, except for toxic algae, which can recur if the conditions are right." Harmful algal blooms are common along the coasts of continents; they are enhanced by vital nutrients, such as iron, released during erosion and carried by rivers flowing into the ocean. Because the Andes of South America are iron-rich, the runoff that has occurred along the west coast of South America for more than 20 million years has long provided the ideal conditions for harmful algal blooms to form. From their research, the scientists conclude that toxins generated by harmful algal blooms most likely poisoned many ocean-going vertebrates near Cerro Ballena in the late Miocene (5-11 million years ago) through ingestion of contaminated prey or inhalation, causing relatively rapid death at sea. Their carcasses then floated toward the coast, where they were washed into a tidal flat by waves. Once stranded on the tidal flat, the dead or dying animals were protected from marine scavengers, and there were no large-land scavengers in South America at this time. Eventually, the carcasses were buried by sand. Because there are four layers at Cerro Ballena, this pathway from sea to land occurred four different times during a period of 10,000 to 16,000 years in the same area. "Cerro Ballena is the densest site for individual fossil whales and other extinct marine mammals in entire world, putting it on par with the La Brea Tar Pits or Dinosaur National Monument in the U.S.," Pyenson said. "The site preserves marine predators that are familiar to modern eyes, like large whales and seals. However, it also preserves extinct and bizarre marine mammals, including walrus-like whales and aquatic sloths. In this way, the site is an amazing and rare snapshot of ancient marine ecosystems along the coast of South America." 3-D Technology at Cerro Ballena Because the site was soon to be covered by the Pan-American Highway, time was very limited for the researchers. A major solution came in the form of 3-D technology. Pyenson brought a team of Smithsonian 3-D imaging experts to Chile, who spent a week scanning the entire dig site. Although all the fossils found from 2010 to 2013 have been moved to museums in the Chilean cities of Caldera and Santiago, the Smithsonian has archived the digital data, including the 3-D scans, from the site at cerroballena.si.edu. There, anyone can download or interact with 3-D models of the fossil whale skeletons, scan Google Earth maps of the excavation quarries, look at a vast collection of high-resolution field photos and videos or take 360-degree tours of the site. The enormous wealth of fossils that the team examined represents only a fraction of the potential at Cerro Ballena, which remains unexcavated. The scientists conservatively estimate that the entire area preserves several hundred fossil marine mammal skeletons, awaiting discovery. Pyenson's colleagues at the Universidad de Chile in Santiago are actively working to create a research station near the fossils of Cerro Ballena so that those that have been collected and those still covered by sediments can be protected for posterity. ### |
(Photo: Mark Haller / Flickr)At the end of a tumultuous year that has seen the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) come under unprecedented scrutiny for its role in advancing a slate of right-wing legislation, the corporate-friendly organization of state lawmakers and special interest lobbyists convenes this week in Washington, DC to try and salvage its viability. At this week’s meeting, ALEC members will by treated to presentations like “Best Practices for Debt Collection and Tax Amnesty” from student loan company Sallie Mae and a talk on state unemployment from the Koch-funded Mercatus Center. Representatives of the Mortgage Bankers Association will present to the Financial Services Subcommittee, which is co-chaired by a lobbyist for Visa. The Heritage Foundation’s James Sherk (whose work is funded by the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation) will discuss “how to limit union influence.” But only a handful of new “model” bills are on the agenda. According to ALEC task force documents obtained through open records requests, the meeting will largely consist of deciding which bills from its vast library to “sunset” and which to retain or amend — an apparent effort to scrub their history of far-right model bills, and likely a response to a year of intense criticism. Hopefully the organization is reviewing some of its more retrograde proposals, such as its stalwart opposition to minimum wage laws and support for climate change denial. At least for this meeting, ALEC is focused less on proactively developing legislation and more on damage control. ALEC Under Fire in 2012 ALEC came under particularly intense criticism starting in March 2012 for its national drive to promote the “Stand Your Ground” gun law that initially shielded 17-year-old Trayvon Martin’s killer from prosecution, and weathered additional criticism in the following months over its role in advancing laws that make it harder to vote, that criminalize immigrants, protect corporations from civil liability, thwart environmental regulations, and cut holes in the social safety net — all while enjoying tax-exempt “charitable” status. In response to the criticism, more than 40 corporations, including General Motors, General Electric, Amazon.com, and Coca-Cola, have severed ties with ALEC. ALEC has also been the subject of multiple IRS complaints alleging that it has violated its charitable 501(c)(3) status by acting primarily as a conduit for corporate interests to lobby state legislators, thereby allowing these special interests to write-off their lobbying expenses as a charitable deduction. ALEC legislators — who in many cases receive substantial campaign contributions and gifts of flights and hotel rooms from the corporations that stand to benefit from the introduction of ALEC model legislation — have also been under fire from their constituents, who have expressed concern that their elected officials have become more accountable to special interests than the people in their district. At least 70 legislators have publicly dropped their ALEC membership in the past year and 117 ALEC member legislators lost their seats in the 2012 elections. ALEC has been around since 1973 but has never faced this level of scrutiny. In past decades, ALEC has successfully allowed corporate interests to advance an agenda to privatize everything from schools to prisons and to reshape state laws in the corporate mold, but with the public never knowing a particular bill originated from ALEC or was initially drafted by the same corporations that profit from its passage. Now that ALEC has been exposed, it has shifted into damage control mode — not by making a case for why corporate influence over politics is a good thing, but by covering its tracks and attacking its critics. Damage Control and Coverups ALEC is seeking to scrub its history of reactionary proposals at this week’s meeting but the damage control effort has been underway for months. In April 2012, ALEC claimed to disband the task force responsible for its most controversial legislation — such as Stand Your Ground, voter suppression, and anti-immigrant bills — purportedly to focus exclusively on “economic” issues. At its July 2012 meeting, ALEC pledged to expand membership among“underrepresented segments,” perhaps in response to critiques that ALEC laws disproportionately impact people of color, despite the vast majority of ALEC members being white. The organization has also taken steps to cloak their activities in even greater secrecy. Instead of sending legislators proposed model bills and meeting agendas through an email that might be released through an open records request, ALEC is now sending its members a link, which expires within 72 hours, to an Internet drop box where they can access the relevant documents, in an attempt to conceal these records from the public. Many ALEC legislators are also corresponding with the organization through personal email accounts (like Gmail or Yahoo) in an apparent effort to evade state open records laws; in Wisconsin, the Center for Media and Democracy and Common Cause had to file a lawsuit to gain access to these public records and prevailed. ALEC has also been using a public relations firm to investigate public interest groups asking questions about ALEC’s activities. ALEC has sent multiple emails to its legislative members attacking the character of its critics — but notably failing to respond to the content of their critiques. Echoes of Trayvon Martin Tragedy Reverberate As the organization gathers this week at the Grand Hyatt Washington, echoes of the Trayvon Martin tragedy are again reverberating in Florida, with another African-American 17-year-old shot dead and his killer seeking to avoid responsibility by invoking the ALEC-ratified, National Rifle Association-sponsored Stand Your Ground law. On Friday, 17-year-old Jordan Russell Davis was sitting in a car with friends when 45-year-old Michael David Dunn confronted the group for playing their music too loud. Dunn then fired nine shots into the car after “there were words exchanged.” None of the teenagers were armed, but Dunn said he felt “threatened” and plans to invoke the state’s Stand Your Ground law at trial. As was the case with the Trayvon Martin tragedy, the victim was African-American and the shooter was not. The shooting comes just weeks after a panel appointed by Florida Governor Rick Scott to review the Stand Your Ground law endorsed the legislation, ignoring empirical evidence showing the laws correspond with an increase in homicides. Half of the lawmakers on the panel are ALEC members. At this week’s meeting ALEC will try to purge its library of its most controversial model bills. But in many states the damage has already been done. To truly repair the organization’s reputation, ALEC legislators should go a step further and start to repeal the laws, like Stand Your Ground, that have already caused so much harm. |
A meat-lover's guide to going vegetarian Flesh choice: A meat lover’s guide to giving it up I once saw a turkey carcass in a New York City garbage can. It did not look good. I said to myself, I’m never eating meat again. A few hours later, I ate meat. If you have ever driven between Los Angeles and San Francisco on the 5, you may have seen a disgusting cattle ranch on the east side of the road. It is like an insect swarm of cows. I have driven by this ranch many times, and sworn I would never again eat meat. And a few hours later, I eat meat. I really like meat. I like steak. I like chicken. I like pork a great deal. If I had to pick a favorite meat, I’d pick lamb. I never thought I would bother trying to give up meat. But now that I’ve been writing for Grist for about six months, it’s impossible for me to ignore the fact that meat is not just bad for animals — it’s bad for the planet. In case you don’t know why, here are several reasons: Livestock use about 30 percent of the world’s arable land. Livestock are responsible for about 18 percent of greenhouse gases. Raising livestock uses up as much as five times the amount of water it takes to raise a similar amount, nutritionally, of plant-based food. So I have decided to go six weeks without eating meat. This is not my first time giving up meat in earnest. I’ve had skirmishes with vegetarianism before that did last more than a few hours. There was a period in 1996 when I first got into yoga. There was another a few years later, after I read an article about chicken farms, or maybe meat farming in general. (I don’t remember what it was about except it was in Granta, it was about meat, and it freaked me out.) I’ve decided not to eat meat because it’s healthier, and because it’s better for the planet, but mostly because deep down, I think eating animals is weird. I suppose it was one thing when you had to kill the things yourself, but now they are just mass-murdered and delivered to us in packages. It doesn’t seem like a fair fight. Anyway, many thoughts and ideas have led me to explore vegetarianism. But only one thought has ever made me stop exploring it, and that thought is “mmmm … meat.” Enough about meat — let’s talk about you. You’re a Grist reader, so none of this information is getting to you for the first time. But are you actually a vegetarian? I don’t pose the question in a judgmental way. I mean, I know all of this stuff, and I still eat meat. Partly because I like it, and partly because the environmental “community” (I consider the environmental community to just be a very large collection of people with various levels of commitment and interest in this subject) provides plenty of escape valves for people who want to consider themselves environmentally aware but also still want to eat meat. Meat’s OK if it’s organic. It’s OK if it’s local. It’s really great if you bought it from someone you know and especially somehow if you bought a whole cow and it’s in your freezer and you’re supporting the local economy. But who actually eats meat like that? I don’t. I mean, I do eat all that good healthy acceptable meat, but then I eat all the other meat too. Trying to keep your meat-based groceries happy, free-range, and local doesn’t work all that well if you then get drunk and eat the shit out of some General Tso’s. I can’t undertake this six-week thing pretending it’s the beginning of forever. Maybe I will have some kind of vegetarian conversion experience. Maybe I won’t. But the last times I decided to stop eating meat, I didn’t provide myself with any continuing education that might have helped me to, well, not really want to eat meat. So this time I am not only not going to eat meat, I am also simultaneously going to read a lot about meat and what it takes resource-wise to produce it — so that this information is doing more than lurking in the back of my mind in some half-remembered Granta article or image of a pigeon-pecked turkey carcass. I’m going to learn about slaughterhouses. I’m going to look at pictures of dead animals and read books about them. I’m going to try to watch someone kill an animal. I’m going to find out about what industrial farming does to animals and to the planet. And after all of that, well, maybe, I’m still going to really, really love meat. The truth is that no matter how much I know intellectually about how bad it is for the planet, if I have an appetite for it, I’m going to eat it. I think willpower is bullshit and a lot of scientists tend to agree with me. If I actually stop eating meat, it will only be because I have really lost the taste for it — and that’s why, at the end of this experiment, I might surprise myself after all. Because it’s my sneaking suspicion that the more you know about meat, the less you actually want to put it in your mouth. I leave you with an adorable video of a lamb that I watch every morning to fortify myself against the coming day and moments when I might be tempted by meat. |
The Rumpus Interview with Andrew Ervin It’s probably fitting that a novel titled Burning Down George Orwell’s House doesn’t focus much on the author of classroom classics like Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Instead, Andrew Ervin’s debut novel centers on Ray Welter, a Chicago adman whose life has come apart and who flees the grid for Jura, the Scottish island where the writer born Eric Blair penned Nineteen Eighty-Four. More comedy than tragedy, Ervin’s novel shifts back and forth between the events that led to Welter’s self-imposed exile—let’s just say the SUV industry likes Ray more than he likes them—and his attempt to hit the reset button on his life in Scotland. Nearly half a century separates Ray Welter from Don Draper, that other adman fighting for his soul in the soul-stunted field of advertising, but in many ways Ray is even less equipped to navigate the fast-changing world around him. From a young age, Ray Welter identified with Nineteen Eighty-Four, a connection that deepens as the dystopian parable seems to explain his capitalistic, increasingly joyless career. His marriage, too, is on the rocks, but life doesn’t get any easier or better when he arrives on Jura. The natives treat their visitor only a little less kindly than the local cuisine treats his stomach. Throw in a feisty, underage daughter of one of these locals, that daughter’s belligerent father, and what might or might not be the local werewolf Blair/Orwell himself alluded to in one of his letters, and that grid Ray left behind in Chicago doesn’t seem half as bad. Andrew Ervin’s collection of linked novellas, Extraordinary Renditions (Coffee House Press), was named a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2010, and The Millions called it one of that year’s most underrated books. While preparing for the May release of Burning Down George Orwell’s House, the launch party for which will feature a performance by the Dead Milkmen, Andrew answered some questions via email about Big Brother, the double-edged sword of technology, the enduring relevance of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and how to acquire the taste for Scotch. *** The Rumpus: One of the reasons Nineteen Eighty-Four lingers in the public consciousness, if not in the classroom, is terms like “Big Brother” and “Thought Police,” which many use, I’m sure, without connecting it to literature. In fact, themes of government surveillance could be more relevant now than they were when Orwell’s novel was published—see Snowden, Edward or Act, Patriot. Is Big Brother bigger now than it once was, or does it just seem that way because of what technology makes possible? Andrew Ervin: Every generation gets the Big Brother that its technology dictates. The ongoing transition from analog to digital technology is allowing for the collection of data and of metadata on a scale that was unthinkable in Orwell’s day. Only the tools have changed. The global war on terror (and what a perfectly Orwellian term that is) gave government agencies the opportunity to frame the debate as Privacy v. Security. With all those supposed evildoers out there who “hate our freedom” (whatever that means) we’re being told that we can be safe or we can have privacy, but we can’t have both and that’s of course absurd. If we’re determined to put things in simplistic terms, the debate would be better understood as Liberty v. Tyranny, but even that formulation is missing something important. Big Brother has exactly as much authority as we grant him. Rumpus: The role we play in our own surveillance, this complicity, is a big part of Ray Welter’s predicament, isn’t it? Ervin: Ray Welter believes that he’s facing a very similar choice: he can stay on the grid and have his every keystroke recorded or he can escape to a remote island where there’s limited electricity and fend for himself. What happens—and I don’t want to spoil anything here—is that those simple dichotomies (Privacy v. Security or Liberty v. Tyranny or Evildoers v. Good Guys) prove to be less than clear cut. My novel does not have a specific moral or political agenda, but it does try to question the very notion of binary logic. Limiting ourselves to either/or thinking is itself a form of self-imposed tyranny. I suspect that Orwell understood that. Rumpus: Ray isn’t a writer, nor does he aspire to be, when he rents the house where Orwell wrote his most famous novel. But a lot of writers will identify with his need for isolation and his struggle to extricate himself from the world of iPhones and constant contact. Many writers I know, for whatever reason, seem more resistant to technology than the average person. Does this match your experience? Why do you think so many of us are Luddites? Ervin: It would be very easy to blame “technology” for my inability to concentrate for long periods of time or for spending too many days in a row away from my writing, but that’s ultimately a cop-out. I’m responsible for my own inactions. When we try to specify what we mean by “technology,” however, it becomes a terribly flimsy excuse for some bad habits. My eyeglasses are a form of technology as is the process that makes the printing of books possible. The question, then, is one of categorization. Are some technologies (Facebook, Twitter, Donkey Kong) detrimental to the writing life? Only if we allow them to be. There are all sorts of romantic notions about clacking away on a typewriter and drawing ink into a fountain pen. We—writers, I mean—are terrific at fetishizing the past. I just had bookplates printed for my home library. I understand the nostalgia for old-timey ways of doing things, I really do, but I also love the wondrous technologies at my disposal. We each need to find the specific tools that work for us. The technologies I personally use change depending on what I’m writing. For this novel, I wrote the first draft by hand because notebooks and pencils were what my protagonist had at his disposal and they helped me get into his head. Also, I wrote it on graph paper because that grid on every page reminded me of the social structure from which he was escaping. The most valuable writing time, however, was when I transcribed those pages into Microsoft Word, which allowed me to edit easily. It would be silly of me, now, to bemoan the evil effects of technology. As with Privacy v. Security, the generally assumed formulation of Technology v. Artistic Freedom is too limiting for my tastes. Rumpus: Many writers seem to be embracing social media. You’re on Twitter. Have you found that technology detrimental to your creative work? Ervin: Social media presents detriments and advantages to my creative work. The reason I got on Twitter in the first place was because I needed to better understand Welter’s wired world, and I planned to get off again after the book got published, but it’s a tool that has helped me find so many interesting people and new ideas that I could not have possibly discovered on my own. I follow a lot of video game developers, and that whole world has inspired my own thinking about narrative in countless ways. I do own a smart phone now, but it’s not very smart. It’s an Android and not so easy to use, so there’s not a great temptation to spend a great deal of energy tweeting. Rumpus: Have you had to strike a balance to separate the space for social media from the space in which you write? Ervin: Yes, I suppose I do keep those spaces somewhat separate, but they’re close. My writing room is a newly converted attic. For most of my creative work, I use an early-generation iMac which is stripped of everything but a few word-processing programs and a Dropbox link. That desk faces out the window and overlooks the Schuylkill Valley. My wife and I live in a northwest Philadelphia rowhouse, but other than the attached neighbor on one side we’re surrounded by trees and a huge community garden. It’s an oasis in the city and if I squint it can feel removed from the technological realm. In that same room, though, I have a drafting table for writing and drawing by hand and also another desk with a newer iMac, which I use for other projects, like teaching prep and World of Warcraft and the occasional interview. Rumpus: Since you brought up video games, your next project involves them, does it not? What is something about narrative you’ve learned from video games? Ervin: I’ve signed a contract with Basic Books for a nonfiction project about video games and aesthetics. The transition from analog to digital technologies is an obsession of mine. Both Burning Down George Orwell’s House and Extraordinary Renditions look at this change, so to start nailing down my own thinking in systematic and critical terms is very exciting. The digital revolution could end up being as radical and far-reaching as the Industrial Revolution, but because we’re right in the middle of it there’s no way to see the scope or fully understand the eventual effects. One theory I’m working on is that the short history of video games, from Tennis for Two (1958) to Bloodborne (2015), can serve as a way of beginning to understand the post-human world. Also, the kinds of interactivity insisted upon by literature and by video games are different, sure, but I’m curious to see how they’re similar. The book is still very much a work in progress. I’m spending a lot of time with the paintings of René Magritte right now. That pixelated tennis net in Pong (1972) isn’t a tennis net any more than Magritte’s pipe is a pipe. Rumpus: Returning to the digital-free zone of Jura, many readers might covet the serenity of an isolated rental house in the United Kingdom, but Scotland as it’s portrayed in your novel is hardly romanticized. Ray’s nausea is established in the first sentence, and the absolute hell he’s given by some of the locals makes Ray’s retreat feel like another shitstorm from which he needs to escape. On behalf of the Scottish tourism industry, is there anything you’d like to take back about the fair isle of Jura? Ervin: Shortly after I finished graduate school, I took a two-year position down at Louisiana State University. What could have been the greatest gig in the world turned into a bit of a nightmare. I should have known things were going to be challenging when, shortly after I arrived, Hurricane Gustav blew through Baton Rouge. That storm didn’t get as much national attention as Katrina, for instance, and with good cause, but it did knock out power to most of the city for over a week. Louisiana is no joke any time of year, but summer’s a particularly bad time to lose the A/C. (That is another technology I wholeheartedly embrace.) On a basic level, living without power for a few days helped rid me of any romantic notions about the serenity of life off the grid. It definitely made me reconsider some of my own first-world assumptions. The idea of escaping from social media and voluntarily getting away from it all could only come from someone like me or Ray Welter who is very privileged. Maybe that’s true too of the disdain for technology. It’s easier to hate Twitter, even as some stand-in for “technology” in general, when one has consistent electricity and clean running water in the house. I’ve never been to the Isle of Jura. The fictional setting I’ve created is more a representation of one American man’s (impossible) idyllic escape than an attempt to describe the actual place. That said, I have wondered many times how welcome I will be there after this book is published. The closest I’ve come was the ferry port over on Islay, next door, where the novel begins. The rest of it is complete fiction. The main reason I’ve stayed away is to maintain my plausible deniability: I’ve never tried to create a realistic portrait of that place. (And portraits are unlucky, right?) I’ve never met the people or been to the hotel and so there’s zero possibility that my characters are based on real residents. I’d certainly like to visit soon if I’m still welcome. Rumpus: Your novel’s epigraph quotes a letter from Eric Blair referencing a werewolf on Jura. What all that means won’t be spoiled here, but it sets the stage nicely for Ray’s unpredictable stay on the island. If there’s one predictable aspect of his tenure, however, it’s the copious amount of Scotch Ray consumes. The reader is left with the sense that the author has some expertise in the matter of this particular export. For readers less well-versed in Scotch, who only know, to paraphrase Orwell’s other classic, single-malt good, blended bad, what kind of advice can you give Scotch beginners? Ervin: Even Orwell was seduced by the comforts of binary thinking. Yes—I certainly did some extensive “research” on this particular topic. The flavors in scotch result from many different factors, as Welter discovers for himself, but the most important one is geography. There’s no separating where it’s made and how it tastes. In addition to the scotch produced on Jura, I’m a big fan of the Ardbeg and Bowmore. Both come from Islay, but they taste wildly different. Ardbeg’s distillery is right on the water and you can taste the peat smoke and sea air in every sip. The town of Bowmore—one of my favorite places I visited in Scotland—sits in the crook of a bay, so the conditions are a bit softer and the resulting scotch has some of the sweeter characteristics associated with the Highlands distilleries. I also like the lowland Auchentoshan a great deal, but it’s tough to find here in Philadelphia. All that said, since I finished writing the book I’ve been (mostly) giving sobriety a try and I find it very appealing. After I submitted my final edits, I went to the doctor to get my liver checked out and was surprised to find out that it’s perfectly healthy. Still, I’m enjoying taking it easy on myself. My next novel will need to be about healthy living and exercise. *** Author photo © Angelica Bautista. |
The Glade. Slinkachu City dwellers, Slinkachu says, tend to have a love-hate relationship with the natural world. They long for it, and yet they want to contain it so that it doesn’t interfere with their daily lives. Leading up to his new exhibition, “Miniaturesque,” which is on view at Andipa Gallery in London until April 11, Slinkachu spent a year finding little glimpses of nature—like weeds, leaves, and moss—in the city and creating tiny, hidden landscapes within them that look beautiful when photographed up close but strange when seen in their broader urban context. “I wanted the effect to be similar to walking out of a city park and suddenly finding yourself amongst the cars and high rise buildings,” Slinkachu said via email. Slinkachu has been creating and photographing miniatures in cities around the world since 2006. He finds that viewers have an “empathetic response” to the figures in his scenes, a phenomenon, he thinks, that’s likely tied to the human instinct to nurture small infants. For this project, Slinkachu prepared his installations in advance, but found his locations serendipitously while wandering around the city. “The location can be a real wild card in a shoot. Sometimes the figures will look great for a passerby to find but not so good on film. Other times, I find a spot that looks amazing in-camera too. It is all just luck on the day,” he said. Landscape Painting. Slinkachu The Jetty. Slinkachu He usually works alone, and spends much of his time on the ground, a pose that, surprisingly, doesn’t attract much attention from passers by. “We tend to ignore the crazies as much as we can and I think people don’t really want to approach a man lying in a gutter! Sometimes people will realize what I am doing or recognize my work and come to talk, which is nice,” he said. In the photos, the smaller-than-life characters enjoy nature much as real people do, but there’s always “an element of fakery.” For inspiration in creating the scenes, Slinkachu turned to old landscape and baroque paintings and tropes from films such as The Sound of Music, which tend to represent the “nature we imagine we want, rather than the reality.” Born Free. Slinkachu Born Free. Slinkachu Slinkachu rarely goes back to check on the figures he makes after he’s done photographing them, though he does occasionally pass by some them accidentally, particularly those that are installed in locations he passes regularly. “One, in Wandsworth in London, stayed up for four or five months, which I think is probably a record. It was a ground of skiers fixed to a white traffic bollard in the middle of a traffic island,” he said. “I took shots of it through the months and it got more and more damaged. It even picked up a few residents—a ladybird sat on one figure and a spider on another.” The Stream. Slinkachu |
We’ve all been there: You see a tall person. Long legs, huge feet, everyone around them looks small by comparison—there’s no doubt in your mind that they’re tall. And not just tall in a regular sort of way; they’re very tall. So tall, in fact, that you mention it to all your friends. But here’s a question: Even though they seem tall, are they really as tall as you say? Unfortunately, if you’re under the impression that someone is that tall, it’s time to think again. Because while someone might be tall, they are not actually that tall. No one is. Advertisement We all know how tall people can get, but at the end of the day, no one, not even the tallest person you know, is really that tall. It doesn’t matter how many people are shorter than you. The fact remains that zero people in the world are actually that tall. Let’s just say, as a thought experiment, that someone were to actually be that tall. First off, in order to be that tall, this person would have to be taller than so many already incredibly tall things. Second, come on. Everyone stops growing before they get to be that tall! And third, that would be so tall that it wouldn’t even make sense. Can you imagine how tall this person would have to be? …at the end of the day, no one, not even the tallest person you know, is really that tall. Advertisement To clarify, I am in no way trying to say that certain people can’t be tall. I know how tall the average person is. And I know the current record for the world’s tallest man. And while the argument can be made that many people are that tall, I’d say that the chances of someone really being that tall are actually slim to none. If you believe someone is that tall, here are only some of the people they would have to be taller than: LeBron James, Michael Jordan, Usain Bolt, Yao Ming, Andre the Giant, and Manute Bol. All of those people are very tall, but, when taking everything into account, not even they are that tall. The truth is, to be that tall, a person would have to be taller than a door, a bed frame, a ceiling, a tree, and a standard-issue basketball hoop. I truly can’t emphasize enough how tall those things are. Advertisement Bottom line: If you think someone is that tall, it’s time to face the facts. I have no doubt in my mind that whomever you’re thinking of is very tall. They may be taller than you, and they’re definitely taller than me—but that doesn’t make them as tall as you think. Because no one is that tall. And they never will be. |
Marvin Andrews was with Elgin City for the first half of this season Former Trinidad and Tobago defender Marvin Andrews has made Montrose his 14th club. The 39-year-old has signed at Links Park until the end of the season after leaving Scottish League Two rivals Elgin City. Andrews, capped 101 times for his country, made 14 appearances for City this season, scoring twice, for the side sitting bottom of the table. Montrose lie five points above the Black and Whites in eighth. But Elgin, who appointed Jim Weir as manager in November after Barry Wilson's resignation, have two games in hand. Andrews had not played for Elgin since 6 December and made his debut for his new club in Saturday's 2-2 draw away to leaders Arbroath. He first came to Scotland in 1997 to join Raith Rovers - to whom he has returned twice - after playing for ECM Motown, San Juan Jabloteh and Malta Carib Alcons in his homeland. Andrews went on to play for Livingston, Rangers, Hamilton Academical, Queen of the South, Wrexham, Kirkintilloch Rob Roy and Albion Rovers before spending last season with Forfar Athletic in League One. Meanwhile, Polish midfielder Leszek Nowosielski has been released by Montrose, because of travelling difficulties from the 22-year-old's home in Turriff, having made only two substitute appearances. Leszek had waited for three weeks for his international clearance before making his Gable Endies debut against East Fife in December. The former Poland Under-20 international had previously been on the books of Rodlo Opole, Odra Opole, Promien Opalenica, Ruch Zdzieszowice, GKS Belchatow and Warta Poznan. |
Tricked by a Crazy Nazi Sex Robot You thought Microsoft’s racist Artificial Intelligence Bot, TayTweets, was stupid? Turns out, her design could be more intelligent than you. Robert Winterton Blocked Unblock Follow Following Mar 30, 2016 Oh Tay, you rascal. Laughter filled Twitter and poured over onto the rest of the Internet this weekend as TayTweets, an artificial intelligence (AI) Bot malfunctioned causing shock, fear and hilarity. Instead of spreading cheery lighthearted messages, as she was apparently designed to, she became a scary advocate for genocide, racism, anti-Semitism and, maybe even, rampant sex-positivism. “FUCK MY ROBOT PUSSY DADDY I’M SUCH A BAD NAUGHTY ROBOT” — TayTweets, March 2016 It really wasn’t a good weekend for Microsoft. An established tech giant, one of the world’s biggest investors in research and development, having spent crazy amounts of money trying to keep ahead of new trends in everything from virtual reality to communications to, in this case, AI, tried to show off its shiny new toy on Twitter, and it backfired horrendously. And all this just before their big announcement of tons of new AI software being made available on multiple platforms, like Skype, Outlook and Slack. Wait a minute. Let’s think about that again. One of the largest tech companies, with one of the biggest R&D budgets in the world, put a fairly unsophisticated, and certainly malleable, AI Bot on Twitter, a social media platform not exactly known for its charitable membership, and thought “Oh I can’t wait for people to tweet it about flowers, sunshine and everything else that just makes the world a lovely place to live”. All to be done a couple of days after Apple just held an event announcing new products and software and a week before they held a conference in which they would announce a large rollout of new AI technology? Please. In a world where good news is rarely news, an AI Bot that responded no more excitingly than Siri or Cortana would create about as much excitement for their AI rollout as Apple created when they insisted on infiltrating our iPhones music by U2 (complete with ET phone home recreations). Microsoft knew exactly what they were doing. Get everyone laughing, sharing, liking, commenting, and most importantly, thinking about AI, and you’ve got a media environment perfect for an announcement of products just like our dear TayTweets (but better). But wait… wouldn’t that kind of narrative be one of ridicule, skepticism and concern? Wouldn’t everyone just think that if Microsoft can’t even launch an AI on Twitter without it turning into a raunchy teenage Hitler, that new products would be equally as problematic? Well maybe. Some people might think that, but the kind of people who are, are unlikely to be the developers and techsperts that will be most excited and intrigued by Microsoft’s announcements today. To make sure you grab the attention of that important and select group, you need to make sure that you and your new product are the first thing they see when they log onto their selected source of tech news. That’s exactly what TayTweets did. And, worst case scenario, what if developers and tech enthusiasts actually think this is the best Microsoft can do when it comes to AI? Well, then they’ve just set a very low bar for when people actually use and play with these new AI Bots that they’ve engineered. Either way, Microsoft wins. As a result of this covert strategy, it took almost no time for news about Microsoft’s AI Bot rollout to spread around tech media, causing excitement and curiosity, with people hailing it as the most interesting and exciting development so far of Microsoft’s Build Conference, and even in tech this week. All that media interest and excitement isn’t just summoned out of thin air. TayTweets did it, and she did it faster than you can say “I fucking hate feminists and they should all die and burn in hell.” |
Siberian temperatures. Eleven grueling days, navigating rough terrain. Six teams, matched for talent, competing for glory at the end. The Iditarod? Nah, just the annual MIT Health and Wellness Hackathon. advertisement advertisement This isn’t your average social app-fest. The goal is to jump-start an open source platform where apps that track all different aspects of your bodily health can exchange information. It’s a Sisyphean task, since most digital health solutions today are trapped in silos, but the organizers believe they can change that by enfranchising big companies instead of trying to disrupt them. Healing The Health Industry “The tradition in health care technology is, ‘This is our device, we make our own software,’” says Dr. John Moore, who organized the hackathon. “The goal is to connect that bit of knowledge to the rest of your health experience. Just keeping track of your step count, for example, won’t let you change the rest of your life.” “Just keeping track of your step count, for example, won’t let you change the rest of your life.” To unify the segmented market for health technology takes heavy lifting on the engineering side, since much of the progress made by private companies hasn’t been shared back to the community. Here, each team is required to use open source and open standard tools so that things work together seamlessly: specifically, the Lab’s patient-centered CollaboRhythm platform and the Indivo X system for personalized health records. “Working from a common platform takes an extra effort to build,” Moore says, “but it ensures that the prototype will be something that has legs.” With Boomers aging and a lack of innovation coming from industry, the upside for these projects could be huge–but undertaking them is intimidating. “We thought we’d have to reject people,” says Moore, “but instead we just scared them off.” Hacking Together Industry Partnerships The teams encamped on the Media Lab’s sixth floor, overlooking a Charles River initially frozen so solid you could stroll over to the Back Bay for pizza. This is the fourth such hackathon sponsored by the Lab’s New Media Medicine research group; when it started, the competition was 20 mostly MIT students who spent their winter break experimenting with open source innovation platforms for health care. Now the group includes an international assembly of professors, doctors, graduate and undergraduate students, as well as engineers from MIT sponsor companies like MIT sponsor companies like ViiV, Humana, Motorola and Fleury. Still, it’s only a start. “The hackathon itself is not enough to produce change, but it’s an opportunity to expose important players in the ecosystem–pharma, insurers, medical diagnostics companies, startup entrepreneurs, consumer electronics companies–to the value of using and contributing to these platforms,” says Moore. “It’s rare to get these players to converge, but these 80 people are influencers, and now they know each other so they can collaborate. Big innovations will come when they all see how they can benefit each other.” advertisement Matched into six project teams before arriving in Cambridge, the groups come at problems from different interests and areas of expertise, then work to create solutions that are more than just one-off apps or devices. “It would take years for all of these sectors to realize the potential that they have seen unfolding in the two weeks of this event,” says Moore. “It is this seed that may lead them to build their products differently and encourage that to collaborate with partners from other sectors using the same tools.” How Do You Incentivize Product-Ready Hacks? The focus here is on producing commercially viable products. “Suddenly, you [can] have a really well-rounded tool that can be at the level of sophistication where you can get funding for a startup or a research grant,” says Moore. “We make sure the business people are supportive, and not just looking at today’s business models…. We squash negativity. That’s a big problem in the health space, where innovative ideas are often killed with comments like, ‘Nah, nobody will ever get paid for that.’ I act as the benevolent dictator to enforce that.” “We squash negativity. That’s a big problem in the health space.” At the Health and Wellness hackathon, the winners aren’t rewarded with cash since winning is only the beginning. Kaiser Permanente donated $15,000 to support the teams during development, instead of forcing them to go out-of-pocket to build their hacks. Awarding money to participants helps unshackle some of the crazier ideas; because current medical systems are plagued with legacy software, Moore wants participants to think blue-sky without being too constrained by cost. “We’re looking for optimal solutions,” Moore says, “more ‘greenfield’ kind of ideas.” (Read on for examples from this year’s projects.) The Lab also provides on-site mentors in the form of software developers, professional UI designers, and video teams to bring projects to fruition. A team member with business experience is attached to each group, but is forbidden from dismissing good ideas that may be promising, but don’t have a traditional revenue stream. By the end of the marathon event, the Charles had thawed, and signs of encouragement were everywhere inside as well, says Frank Moss, a health care entrepreneur and former MIT Media Lab director. Driven by demands from patients and clinicians, he says everyone from the White House to the business community is “saying things we were saying four years ago,” around the time of the inaugural Health and Wellness hackathon. Here’s wishing the industry a speedy recovery. advertisement The Projects Last year’s Health and Wellness Hackathon winners, dubbed the Chameleon team, went on to launch a company called GeckoCap which produces a device for tracking asthma inhaler usage. The company, which was named “One of the Best Gadgets of CES 2013,” is currently raising funds on Indiegogo. Here are some of this year’s entrants. hiVIVA Adherence to medications is the key to keeping HIV/AIDS patients healthy, but compliance can be a problem. This app uses gaming to encourage users to take their pills. Users begin by uploading a photo they love to the home screen on their cellphone. Each morning, that image starts out fuzzy; the goal of the game is to sharpen it over the course of the day, based on adherence to the patient’s medication schedule. The system also gives patients a “virtual pill box” containing images of the actual pills in their regimen, to avoid confusion. Data is simultaneously sent to the patient’s physician via Bluetooth, and an accompanying device will eventually allow a patient to easily test his own blood. A prototype is currently being tested in Bangladesh. Beacon The Congestive Heart Failure team built a monitoring device called Beacon that would allow elderly patients with chronic conditions to stay in their homes longer. The device sits in a bedroom and is linked wirelessly to sensors throughout the house. If the sensor determines that the patient is moving less than normal, a light on the top of the main unit will turn yellow–alerting the patient to take her blood pressure, or step on a scale. Sudden weight gain, for example, is a sign that the patient’s condition is worsening. Data will be transmitted to the patient’s doctor, who can then communicate with the patient to see if a change in medications is called for, or if more serious intervention is required. My Op This app is designed to help patients who are about to undergo surgery for endometriosis learn about what to expect beforehand without scaring themselves by searching Google for information. Post-operatively, the app helps doctors assess how their recovery is going. The biggest problem, developers say, is that patients with this condition are so accustomed to being in pain that they often don’t recognize the severity of their symptoms after surgery, and thus fail to report them to their physicians until they’ve become acute. The My Op app allows doctors to monitor self-reported symptoms, and either text or have a video chat with patients if symptoms are concerning before they worsen. The Brady Glove (left), The Tremo Cup (right) AEON Health’s Parkinson’s disease devices This group built a web-based platform to assess and manage Parkinson’s symptoms at home, allowing a patient to better control his own condition. The Tremo Cup, which the patient uses to take medications several times a day, detects tremors, which correlate to how well a medication is controlling symptoms. By monitoring data, doctors can assess how long a medication is working, and if the timing or dose needs to be adjusted. It also allows a patient to see if he can influence the efficacy of the medication by adjusting exercise, food, or sleep. advertisement The Brady Glove has sensors in each finger that allow a doctor to detect Bradykinesia–-the slowness of movement that is a prime indicator of Parkinson’s disease. Neurologists can assess the severity of a patient’s symptoms by asking him to tap his fingers, open and close his fist, and alter the position of his palm–the classic tests for Parkinson’s–then adjust his meds to help control symptoms. Pressure Free This team’s goal was to find a way for a patient to track and lower her blood pressure with minimal involvement by a physician. The solution was an app with three integrated devices: a blood pressure cuff that sends data to a dashboard; a Fitbit to measure how much the patient moves; and a container that monitors how many pills are still in the bottle. Forget to take your meds, and the 3-G powered pill bottle will send you a text message reminder without having to sync your device. In addition, the app will allow patients to invite friends to act as motivators, sending messages and videos to encourage compliance. The pill bottle, designed by a company called Adhere Tech, is already in development. Epicenter The Epicenter team tackled the problem of controlling epileptic seizures through diet and biofeedback. The Ketogenic Diet app allows patients to track what they eat, measure the ketones they produce, and report side effects to doctors. A Ketogenic diet–high in fat and proteins, low in carbs–has been shown to be effective in controlling seizures, but is tough to follow. This app builds in recipes and meal suggestions, and encourages compliance by giving the patient a visual record of her progress. Epilepsy app (left), epilepsy cap and wrist senor (right) Epicenter also created a seizure tracking tool, where the patient can record seizure triggers, log how long the seizure lasted, and document feelings afterward. The patient’s doctor can analyze the data and intervene where necessary, and a gaming device using a neurofeedback cap that measures brain currents and a wrist sensor that measures galvanic skin response allows patients to influence their condition via biofeedback. |
Need more Metal Gear? Check out the rest of our coverage or read our review. It's never mentioned in the game, but Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain has a hidden 'karma' system that, over time, alters Venom Snake's appearance. Your Demon Level is determined by your play style, with negative actions—killing people, harming animals, developing nuclear weapons, generally being a jerk—earning you Demon Points, which increase the size of the shrapnel 'horn' on Snake's head. There are three Demon levels. There's the regular horn (pictured) that Snake starts out with. Then there's a longer one that grows in a cut-scene after earning 20,000 Demon Points. Then, if you manage to reach 50,000 Demon Points, the horn will grow even longer, and Snake will be permanently covered in blood. Don't worry, though: you can lower your Demon level through positive actions like extracting animals, earning certain achievements, extracting child soldiers, or visiting Mother Base's zoo. Do enough nice things and Snake's horn will shrink again, and the blood will be washed away. You can raise or lower your Demon level as many times as you like, but it's purely aesthetic. You can't stab people with the horn, sadly. For a comprehensive list of positive and negative Demon Point actions, and more details about the system, check out AlxCj's guide on GameFAQs. |
Edelrid 18th March, 2014 This has been read 17,808 times announcement by18th March, 2014 Brands: Edelrid Product News at UKC presents climbing, walking and mountaineering equipment posts that will be of interest to our readers. They are not gear reviews and are provided by companies that advertise with UKClimbing Limited. Brands: With spring just around the corner it's reaching the time of year when climbers look to replace their worn out ropes with the latest models. Owing to the specialist sheath/core construction of climbing ropes it can be difficult to find proper end-of-life options for recycling them. Keen to minimise the waste from their own range as well as to provide a continued use for old ropes, German brand EDELRID has launched it's own how-to guide for making your very own rope mat. Make Your Own Rope Mat The step-by-step guide features a detailed video walkthrough, presented by the lovely Heather, as well as text based instructions, a printable PDF rope mat template and a list of all the materials required. It is recommended that you use a 40m rope, cut into two 20m lengths for ease of weaving and you can use different coloured ropes to enhance your design. Making your own rope mat is a great activity for wet weekends when bad weather stops you going to the crag, and it's easy to get the kids involved as well. Though obviously we would recommend an adult deals with the nails and the hot knife or lighter required to cut the rope. To view full step-by-step instructions please visit the EDELRID website: http://www.edelrid.de/en/SERVICE/Know-How/Ropes/Rope-Mat/ You can also watch the detailed instructional video on YouTube: |
To this point, the Blue Jays’ winter hasn’t really gone as they had hoped. The team made a strong push to re-sign Edwin Encarnacion right out of the gates, but when he turned down a reported $80 million over four years in order to test the market, they decided that they needed to make sure they didn’t get left without an alternative option, and so they pounced on the worse-but-cheaper Kendrys Morales, giving him $33 million over three years instead. When the news leaked, I explained why I wasn’t a big fan of the signing. With Edwin Encarnacion and Jose Bautista, the Jays have two DH-type players that they could have signed to much more lucrative long-term deals, but Morales presents a much cheaper option, giving the team the flexibility to spend the extra $40 or $50 million on an outfielder, bullpen upgrades, or both. Instead of putting their money into one better player, the Jays look like they’re again going to bet on depth. In general, I think that plan can often work out, especially if you have some serious holes on the roster that need addressing, as the Jays do. In practice, though, I’m not sure if I’m as excited about spending $33 million on Kendrys Morales as part of a spread-things-around approach. … So, yeah, $33 million for the age 34-36 seasons of a decent hitter who can’t run seems like not a great use of funds to me. The team could still make this plan worthwhile if they spend the savings on a quality regular or a couple of good role players, but Morales himself just isn’t that good. By giving Morales just a portion of what the team had allocated for Encarnacion, the Jays should still have some money to spend in order to round out the roster. Just the difference between their DH offers total $47 million, which should be enough to get them an upgrade (or two) over Ezequiel Carrera and Melvin Upton in the outfield. Of course, you won’t get a superstar for that kind of money — Josh Reddick got $52 million, for reference — but there’s at least enough money left to make the decision to not let Encarnacion’s market play itself out look a little less awkward. After all, it’s easy to crush the Blue Jays for giving Morales $33 million when Encarnacion ended up signing for $60 million, but that is using information not available at the time to say that the Jays should have anticipated that Encarnacion’s market was going to crater. I don’t know that it was something that should have been reasonably forecasted, given his consistency, durability, and the fact that MLB teams have generally paid well for his skillset. I projected Encarnacion would get 4/$84M this winter; the crowd projected 4/$90M. It’s fair to say that the Jays perhaps should not have seen Morales as a target so good they couldn’t let him get away, limiting their options in the process, but I think once Encarnacion turned down 4/$80M, they probably were correct to think that they were better off going another direction, since similar players to Encarnacion have not aged particularly well. But right now, with Encarnacion in Cleveland on a contract the Jays clearly would have signed in a heartbeat at the start of the winter, the series of decisions that led to this point are easy to take issue with. Sure, they have some money to spend, but they now have a worse old DH, a 1B platoon of a bad player and a frequently injured guy, and they still haven’t found any corner outfielders. On January 3rd, this all doesn’t look great. But in looking forward, I wonder if this isn’t actually going to work out just fine for the Blue Jays. Because, barring some unforeseen new bidder for Jose Bautista, the Jays might end up getting the better of their two star sluggers back, with perhaps enough money left over to make their team better than if they had been able to re-sign Encarnacion to begin with. As Jeff Passan wrote recently, Jose Bautista (at his original asking price, anyway) has been essentially rejected by the league, and has found himself without any real serious suitors through the first two months of the winter, and is reportedly now open to talking about a one year deal. If he has a bounce back 2017 season and hits free agency next winter without a qualifying offer attached — the new CBA states that players can’t be offered a QO more than once in their career — he could very likely do better overall than by taking a discounted multi-year deal this winter, even though he’ll be another year older. And a one year deal with Bautista is just about the perfect option for the Jays. For all the talk of Bautista aging and his skills declining, he just put up a 122 wRC+ in a down year, which is still pretty good. For context, the Jays have been frequently mentioned as a possible landing spot for Jay Bruce, since they tried to trade for him last spring, and as a corner outfielder with one year left on his deal, he’d fit what the Jays are looking for. Except in the best offensive season of his career (2010), Bruce put up a 124 wRC+, the only time he’s ever put up a better offensive season than what Bautista did last year. A broken-down, playing-through-injury Bautista was basically as good a hitter as Bruce at his absolute best. If the Jays can really get Bautista for something like $20-$25 million on a one-year deal, they’ll likely be better off than if they had re-signed Encarnacion and traded for Bruce (or someone of his ilk) to fill the hole in RF. The Jays were never going to bring back both of their star sluggers, so if they had landed Encarnacion at that $20 million a year price tag, the replacement outfielder would probably have ended up being roughly equal in price and value to Morales. Landing Bautista for something close to the Encarnacion salary for 2017, without the multi-year commitment on the more expensive player, would give the Jays similar expected performance without nearly as much long-term risk. While his poor-for-him 2016 season and the league’s muted interest in his services might help push the narrative that Bautista is reaching the end of his career, both ZIPS and Steamer see Bautista as roughly a +3 WAR player next year, with similar offensive projections as Encarnacion. While reasonable people could certainly prefer Encarnacion, and it’s fine to wish the team had gotten him for the 3/$60M that Cleveland ended up paying, it’s hard to argue that Bautista at 1/~$20M is not an even better option. Even if it’s closer to $25 million, that’s still a reasonable price for a high-level hitter. And then, with another year of information about how well his body is actually holding up, the Jays could decide whether to keep him in Toronto for the end of his career, or allocate that significant chunk of their budget elsewhere next winter; an option they would not have had if they had re-signed Encarnacion. Right now, it’s easy to look at the Jays’ winter and say that they should have done things differently. And some of us were even saying that the Morales signing was questionable when it happened, not just after Encarnacion’s price ended up coming down. But whether by good fortune or because they anticipated that Bautista might have a tough road in free agency, the Jays might end up in a better position for both 2017 and long-term than if Encarnacion had taken their original offer. If they get Joey Bats back on a one year deal, we might still question some of the decisions that got them to this point, but the end result might just be better than if they had gotten their way from the start. |
Image caption (Clockwise from top left) Jack Sweeney, Lorraine Sweeney, Erin McQuade, Jacqueline Morton, Stephenie Tait and Gillian Ewing were killed in the bin lorry crash Families bereaved by two Glasgow road death incidents, including the 2014 bin lorry crash, have been told they cannot launch private prosecutions. Two bereaved families had been seeking permission to bring charges against bin lorry driver Harry Clarke. Mr Clarke was unconscious when the bin lorry veered out of control on 22 December 2014, killing six people. Judges also ruled against a similar bid from the relatives of two students killed in a crash in 2010. The Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, which brings prosecutions in Scotland, had previously decided not to press charges in either case. The families of victims then sought permission to bring rare private prosecutions against the drivers. Image copyright PA Image caption Bin lorry driver Harry Clarke lied about his medical history Judges began hearing legal arguments at the Court of Session in September. Those who died in the bin lorry crash were Erin McQuade, 18, her grandparents Jack Sweeney, 68, and his 69-year-old wife Lorraine, from Dumbarton, Stephenie Tait, 29, and Jacqueline Morton, 51, both from Glasgow, and Gillian Ewing, 52, from Edinburgh. The Sweeney/McQuade families wanted Harry Clarke to be prosecuted as a fatal accident inquiry in August 2015 found the crash could have been avoided if he had not lied about his medical history. The inquiry found that Mr Clarke, 59, who had a history of blackouts and poor health, had "repeatedly lied in order to gain and retain jobs and licences". 'Lambs to the slaughter' This included not fully disclosing the details of a blackout he suffered at the wheel of a stationary bus in April 2010 to his own doctors and in employment applications and medical assessments for later jobs at Glasgow City Council. It found eight reasonable precautions that could have prevented the crash. All were related to his hidden medical past. During evidence at the inquiry, which concluded in August 2015, it emerged that Mr Clarke had suffered an episode of neurocardiogenic syncope. He passed out at the wheel while the bin lorry was on Queen Street in Glasgow city centre, just days before Christmas 2014. Just 19 seconds later, the vehicle came to rest against the Millennium Hotel in George Square, leaving six people dead and 17 injured. Image copyright Other Image caption Mhairi Convy (left) and Laura Stewart died after being hit by William Payne's car in Glasgow The other case related to students Mhairi Convy and Laura Stewart, who were knocked down and killed in a separate crash in Glasgow in 2010. The two women, who were aged 18 and 20, were walking in the city's North Hanover Street when a Range Rover being driven by William Payne mounted the kerb and hit them after he blacked out at the wheel. Rejecting the appeal for private prosecutions, Lord Justice Clerk Lady Dorrian, along with Lord Menzies and Lord Drummond Young, said the Crown Office had applied the correct test on the legal requirements of charges of dangerous driving. Lady Dorrian said: "In our view the test of exceptionality would require to show that the lord advocate's decision not to prosecute had to be viewed in the circumstances as an egregious or outrageous failure in the exercise of his public duty in the circumstances. "It is quite difficult to conceive of circumstances in which the court would pass a bill where the lord advocate had examined and investigated the circumstances of the case and concluded as a matter of informed judgment that the whole tenor and weight of the evidence did not justify prosecution." Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Laura Stewart's aunt Cate Cairney said the family had been caught up in a "brutal horror story" Following the decision, Laura Stewart's aunt Cate Cairney said the legal system had "fatally let our girls down". She said: "The judgment today hasn't surprised us at all - we have been expecting it to be a 'no' decision. Since Laura and Mhairi were brutally mown down by William Payne, we have found ourselves locked in a most brutal horror story. "As average, normal families, we expected that justice would take care of itself, that the COPFS (Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service) would do their core job on behalf of the victims and the fight for the truth. "Having never been exposed to any kind of criminal proceedings before, we were like lambs to the slaughter. Eyes filled with tears, broken-hearted and vulnerable to the machine that is the COPFS. "As families who had to identify their daughters, seeing them as no people ever should, we trusted the process and we trusted the law. And this law has fatally let our girls down." Mhairi's father Alan Convy said: "How many more innocent daughters, parents, brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews have to die before the Crown do the right thing and send out the right message to the public? "If this ruling is the law, then the law is wrong in our eyes. It needs changed." |
You must enter the characters with black color that stand out from the other characters When Greg Fishel visited Barrow, Alaska, in March, the sun set at 9 p.m. after just over 13 hours above the horizon. This small town along Alaska’s northern coast is known for its extremes and has become ground zero for climate-change research. Records over the past 60 years show that Alaska has warmed at a rate more than twice that of the rest of the United States. One extreme in this northern most town that hasn’t changed is the huge variance of sunlight Barrow sees in a given day. The sun will rise on Barrow today, Nov. 19, at 1:09 p.m Alaska Standard Time and set just SIX minutes later. Temperatures are forecasted to hover around -20 Fahrenheit throughout the day. The upper edge of the sun wont be visible above the horizon again until Jan. 23, 2016 at 1:10 p.m., or 65 days of Polar Night. Barrow sees the opposite extreme during summer months. Residents see their last sunset for just before 1:00 a.m on May 11 followed by constant sunlight through the months of June an July, or around 80 days of Polar Day. Other areas of the world above about 70 degrees latitude in Canada, Greenland, Finland, Norway, Russia and Sweden also experience this lack of sunlight during winter months. The duration of Polar Night varies greatly with latitude. Tromsø, Norway, is situated just above 70 degrees north latitude. The city will see the sun set on Nov. 27 followed by about six weeks of polar night. Just 3 degrees south, just above the arctic circle, residents of Bodø, Norway, never experience Polar Night. Atmospheric refraction bends the suns rays sufficiently to allow each day to receive some sunlight, less than an hour’s worth from Dec. 19 through Christmas Eve. However, Bodø does experience the “midnight sun” with the sun never setting during the month of June through-mid July. At the northern extreme, the North Pole, the sun sets around the September Equinox and doesn’t rise again until the March Equinox. The South Pole experiences a similar (but reversed) six month periods of Polar Night and Day. Back here in Raleigh, we will see 10 hours 11 minutes of daylight. We will lose 1-2 minutes each day. That loss of daylight slows to less than a minute as the next solstice approaches on Dec. 21. After that we will again slowly regain daylight gain before adding 1-2 minutes of sunlight to January days. |
Facing pages from a 1619 book of mathematical tables by Matthias Bernegger , showing values for the sine, tangent and secant trigonometric functions . Angles less than 45° are found on the left page, angles greater than 45° on the right. Cosine, cotangent and cosecant are found by using the entry on the opposite page. Mathematical tables are lists of numbers showing the results of calculation with varying arguments. Before calculators were cheap and plentiful, people would use such tables to simplify and drastically speed up computation. Tables of logarithms and trigonometric functions were common in math and science textbooks. Specialized tables were published for applications such as astronomy, celestial navigation and statistics. A simple example [ edit ] To compute the sine function of 75 degrees, 9 minutes, 50 seconds[1] using a table of trigonometric functions such as the Bernegger table from 1619 illustrated here, one might simply round up to 75 degrees, 10 minutes and then find the 10 minute entry on the 75 degree page, shown above-right, which is 0.9666746. However, this answer is only accurate to four decimal places. If one wanted greater accuracy, one could interpolate linearly as follows: From the Bernegger table: sin (75° 10′) = 0.9666746 sin (75° 9′) = 0.9666001 The difference between these values is 0.0000745. Since there are 60 seconds in a minute of arc, we multiply the difference by 50/60 to get a correction of (50/60)*0.0000745 ≈ 0.0000621; and then add that correction to sin (75° 9′) to get : sin (75° 9′ 50″) ≈ sin (75° 9′) + 0.0000621 = 0.9666001 + 0.0000621 = 0.9666622 A modern calculator gives sin (75° 9′ 50″) = 0.96666219991, so our interpolated answer is accurate to the 7-digit precision of the Bernegger table. For tables with greater precision (more digits per value), higher order interpolation may be needed to get full accuracy.[2] In the era before electronic computers, interpolating table data in this manner was the only practical way to get high accuracy values of mathematical functions needed for applications such as navigation, astronomy and surveying. To understand the importance of accuracy in applications like navigation note that at sea level one minute of arc along the Earth's equator or a meridian (indeed, any great circle) equals approximately one nautical mile (1.852 km or 1.151 mi). History and use [ edit ] The first tables of trigonometric functions known to be made were by Hipparchus (c.190 – c.120 BCE) and Menelaus (c.70–140 CE), but both have been lost. Along with the surviving table of Ptolemy (c. 90 – c.168 CE), they were all tables of chords and not of half-chords, i.e. the sine function.[3] The table produced by the Indian mathematician Āryabhaṭa is considered the first sine table ever constructed.[3] Āryabhaṭa's table remained the standard sine table of ancient India. There were continuous attempts to improve the accuracy of this table, culminating in the discovery of the power series expansions of the sine and cosine functions by Madhava of Sangamagrama (c.1350 – c.1425), and the tabulation of a sine table by Madhava with values accurate to seven or eight decimal places. These mathematical tables from 1925 were distributed by the College Entrance Examination Board to students taking the mathematics portions of the tests Tables of common logarithms were used until the invention of computers and electronic calculators to do rapid multiplications, divisions, and exponentiations, including the extraction of nth roots. Mechanical special-purpose computers known as difference engines were proposed in the 19th century to tabulate polynomial approximations of logarithmic functions – i.e. to compute large logarithmic tables. This was motivated mainly by errors in logarithmic tables made by the human computers of the time. Early digital computers were developed during World War II in part to produce specialized mathematical tables for aiming artillery. From 1972 onwards, with the launch and growing use of scientific calculators, most mathematical tables went out of use. One of the last major efforts to construct such tables was the Mathematical Tables Project that was started in 1938 as a project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), employing 450 out-of-work clerks to tabulate higher mathematical functions, and lasted through World War II. Tables of special functions are still used; for example, the use of tables of values of the cumulative distribution function of the normal distribution – so-called standard normal tables – remains commonplace today, especially in schools. Creating tables stored in random-access memory is a common code optimization technique in computer programming, where the use of such tables speeds up calculations in those cases where a table lookup is faster than the corresponding calculations (particularly if the computer in question doesn't have a hardware implementation of the calculations). In essence, one trades computing speed for the computer memory space required to store the tables. Tables of logarithms [ edit ] Logarithmorum Chilias Prima showing the base-10 (common) logarithm of the integers 0 to 67 to fourteen decimal places. A page from Henry Briggs ' 1617showing the base-10 (common) logarithm of the integers 0 to 67 to fourteen decimal places. Tables containing common logarithms (base-10) were extensively used in computations prior to the advent of computers and calculators because logarithms convert problems of multiplication and division into much easier addition and subtraction problems. Base-10 logarithms have an additional property that is unique and useful: The common logarithm of numbers greater than one that differ only by a factor of a power of ten all have the same fractional part, known as the mantissa. Tables of common logarithms typically included only the mantissas; the integer part of the logarithm, known as the characteristic, could easily be determined by counting digits in the original number. The fractional part of the common logarithm of numbers greater than zero but less than one is just 1 minus the mantissa of the same number with the decimal point shifted to the right of the first non-zero digit. But same mantissa could be (and was) used for numbers less than one by offsetting the characteristic. Thus a single table of common logarithms can be used for the entire range of positive decimal numbers.[4] See common logarithm for details on the use of characteristics and mantissas. History [ edit ] Michael Stifel published Arithmetica integra in Nuremberg in 1544 which contains a table[5] of integers and powers of 2 that has been considered an early version of a logarithmic table.[6][7] The method of logarithms was publicly propounded by John Napier in 1614, in a book entitled Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio (Description of the Wonderful Rule of Logarithms).[8] The book contained fifty-seven pages of explanatory matter and ninety pages of tables related to natural logarithms. The English mathematician Henry Briggs visited Napier in 1615, and proposed a re-scaling of Napier's logarithms to form what is now known as the common or base-10 logarithms. Napier delegated to Briggs the computation of a revised table, and they later published, in 1617, Logarithmorum Chilias Prima ("The First Thousand Logarithms"), which gave a brief account of logarithms and a table for the first 1000 integers calculated to the 14th decimal place. The computational advance available via common logarithms, the converse of powered numbers or exponential notation, was such that it made calculations by hand much quicker. See also [ edit ] References [ edit ] Campbell-Kelly, Martin (2003), The history of mathematical tables: from Sumer to spreadsheets, Oxford scholarship online, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-850841-0 |
Sickening head-clash mars CPL match UPDATE: West Indies batsman Kieran Powell is nursing a concussion after a sickening head-clash in the Caribbean Premier League in Barbados today. Powell was driven from the field in an ambulance after he collided heavily with fellow St Kitts & Nevis Patriots player JJ Smuts as both men rushed at the ball in an attempt to catch a lofted drive from Barbados Tridents batsman AB de Villiers. Speaking after the match, St Kitts captain Faf du Plessis said: "I haven’t seen him, he’s back somewhere but I’ve heard he’s okay he’s not too bad." A release from the CPL after the match confirmed the Windies batsman had suffered a concussion. "He is being closely observed by the medical staff, and was unable to bat," the statement read. Smutts was first to his feet after the collision, with the South African deemed to have recovered sufficiently to open the batting for St Kitt's run chase in Powell's absence shortly after. De Villiers stars in dramatic CPL match De Villiers had been in classic form, racing to a half-century and was on 67 in the 19th over when he smashed Alzarri Joseph's ball towards the long-on boundary. Powell raced around from his position on the fence at a straight long-on and Smuts came from the opposite direction and both players collided heavily, with Powell bearing the brunt of the impact, as well as landing heavily with his head appearing to bang the ground. The immediate aftermath // screengrab Smutts (left) and Powell collide // screengrab Both players lay prone on the outfield turf as players and support staff from both teams rushed to their add. Stretchers were quickly called and an ambulance drove onto the Kensington Oval to continue treatment. Powell was able to sit up on the stretcher before he was loaded into an ambulance // screengrab De Villiers finished with 82 from 54 balls, with nine boundaries and three sixes as Barbados posted 6-180 in the T20 clash. The South African great had earlier been rattled with a bouncer from Jospeh that clattered into the grill on his helmet. But de Villiers recovered quickly and hit the next ball for one of his sixes. In the final over de Villiers deposited a ball onto the roof of the grandstand for his final six before getting caught in the deep next ball. St Kitts fell 25 runs short in the chase, despite impressive batting from du Plessis (42 off 34) and Jonathan Carter (46 off 38). The Patriots' next match is against Jamaica in Kingston on July 16 (Sunday 9am AEST). |
Anneliese Barron remembers the first thought that crossed her mind when her son, Matthew, was born with Down syndrome. “I was always so concerned that my son was not going to have any friends because of his disability, because he was different,” she said. “That’s what really scared me the most about his future. “I didn’t really care if he was going to ride a bike or not. I didn’t really care if he had great handwriting or a great reading level. I just really cared whether people would accept him and love him for who he is and he would have friends.” Like many parents of children with disabilities, Capitals coach Barry Trotz and his wife, Kim, had those same concerns for their son, Nolan, who also has Down syndrome. But until Barron came to Trotz with the idea of developing a Best Buddies program in the state of Tennessee, neither had any idea what they could accomplish. On Friday, Trotz will return to Nashville for the first time since the Predators relieved him of his duties after 15 seasons behind the bench. There will be a video tribute to the man who introduced and sold hockey to the Music City, but to Barron and thousands of other Tennessee parents, Trotz’s true legacy will be the impact he had on children with and without disabilities. Matthew Barron was an infant when his mother saw a Best Buddies Challenge on NBC Sports in 2007. She immediately called the national chapter for Best Buddies and was told she would need to raise $200,000 in operating costs to begin a program in Tennessee. Originally from Montreal and a diehard Predators fan, Barron knew the Trotzes had a son with Down syndrome and she reached out to the Predators’ community relations staff in an attempt to have lunch with Trotz and pitch her idea. “I basically stalked him and tried to get to him from all angles,” she said with a laugh. (Best Buddies Tennessee) The two met for lunch in 2009 and when Trotz agreed to speak at a Best Buddies fundraiser, the donations started rolling in. “No one knows who I am, but everyone knows who Barry Trotz is,” Barron said. “He just dove in headfirst.” Before long, former Predators defenseman Dan Hamhuis was matched with a buddy and defenseman Shea Weber and goaltender Pekka Rinne did the same, inviting their new friends into the Predators locker room. Trotz, who showed up with a handful of autographed jerseys and sticks at the first fundraiser for Best Buddies, became so driven to get the program off the ground that he bought jerseys from every NHL team and had them autographed for auction items. When Brad Paisley, Aerosmith or any other band rolled into Nashville to play at Bridgestone Arena, Trotz would buy dozens of guitars and get them signed by band members, auctioning them off as fundraisers. By January 2010, Best Buddies of Tennessee reached its goal of $200,000 and officially opened its doors with Barron as its part-time state director. In the five years since, Best Buddies has grown from less than 100 participants in two colleges to close to 4,000 participants in 80 middle schools, high schools and colleges throughout Tennessee. Barron is now joined by 14 Best Buddies staff members. “I can see the change in people’s attitudes because of the program,” Barron said. “Even though Matthew [now 8] doesn’t have his own buddy right now, I can sense the attitude and the acceptance is already different for him. “It makes me want to cry.” Barron said there was nothing more gratifying than seeing Nolan Trotz benefit from the program his parents helped create. In Nolan’s first year in middle school in Brentwood, Barron said most of his friends were other children with disabilities. But when Best Buddies was introduced to Nolan’s middle school, Kim Trotz sent Barron a photo of Nolan walking to school with his new buddy. “I remember Kim telling me Nolan’s 13th birthday was the first time he ever had friends without disabilities at his party,” Barron said. Trotz said moving away from Nolan’s friends and his three older siblings has been one of the most difficult things he and Kim have ever done as parents. “Originally, it was pretty difficult,” Trotz said. “The school systems are a lot different here than they were in Brentwood. We were in a great situation in Brentwood in terms of classroom teachers, friends, all those things. “We had a pretty good setup. He was involved in a lot of things, and his siblings would come by the house almost daily, or on the weekend they’d grab him and have him for a sleepover. Those types of things. “When we got here it became lonely for him real quickly. We didn’t have a lot of friends here, and being special needs, it was a little bit difficult. It was heart-wrenching for Mom and Dad at first because we’d find him up in his room looking through his yearbook and circling his friends. You could tell there was a sadness in his heart. “But he’s starting to come out of it. He’s learning to play hockey, which he never liked to play. We got him some hockey equipment. He’s Iron Man. He loves his superheroes. So we put a pair of skates on him, and we’ve got him skating, and he’s starting to be a part of a special needs hockey program.” The Trotz’s older children also visited them in Arlington, Va., over the Christmas holidays and attended the Winter Classic on New Year’s Day. “It was really good for him,” Trotz said. “The kids have come in a few times. He’s making headway, and just like any young child, they learn to adapt, and he’s doing much better.” Meanwhile, the Best Buddies program in Tennessee continues to thrive. Later this month, it will launch Best Buddies Jobs, a supportive employment program, and on Feb. 22, it will host its fifth annual Best Buddies Prom, an event that began in 2011 with 300 guests at a local university and has grown into a gala in which 2,000 guests will fill the floor of Bridgestone Arena. (Best Buddies Tennessee) “It’s the kind of event that if you don’t leave there being moved, there’s no hope for you,” Barron said. “It’s just pure joy.” “It is absolutely phenomenal,” said Capitals assistant coach Lane Lambert, who worked as an assistant with Trotz in Nashville. “How many relationships have been formed and how many people have benefited through that organization’s hard work? Barry and Kim are a big part of that. “The fact they can give those kids a moment they will never, ever forget is phenomenal. It really is. It brings tears to your eyes.” Barron said that when Trotz was coach of the Predators he would think nothing of inviting members of the team’s staff to the Best Buddies’ $250-a-plate fund-raising dinners and 5K races and quietly handing her a check for their tickets and entry fees. “No one knew about it,” she said. “He is the most humble, down-to-earth, thoughtful, kind person that you’ll ever meet. Most people know him as that bench boss with that huge vein that sticks out of his forehead when he gets that intense look. “But I know him as a complete teddy bear. He does so much for so many people and he just does it so quietly. He doesn’t do it because he wants a pat on the back or a thank you or accolades. He does it because he deeply cares and that’s all he needs.” Barron said she has no doubt that once Trotz settles into his new surroundings in Washington he will begin making the same impact he did on the communities in and around Nashville. But first, he will be treated to a royal and emotional homecoming on Friday night at the place he called home for 15 seasons. “I think it’s going to be emotional for him,” Barron said. “He’ll have that game face on, but I know inside it’s going to be very, very emotional. “He’s a great coach and an outstanding man. That’s pretty much the feeling in Nashville, too. He’s going to get the biggest standing ovation ever on Friday. I’ve got my ticket and it will be the one time that I’ll cheer for the visiting team. |
The NPR crowd’s hatred for conservative Republicans came through on Twitter. Dave Davies, a fill-in host for Terry Gross on the nationally distributed “Fresh Air” program, tweeted on the fiscal cliff: “Al Qaeda isn't the same league as Congress when it comes to terrorizing Americans.” Davies, who like Gross originates at taxpayer-funded WHYY in Philadelphia, linked to a New Yorker humor piece by liberal darling Andy Borowitz – complete with a photograph of McConnell, Boehner, and Cantor. Their headline was “Al Qaeda Disbands; Says Job of Destroying U.S. Economy Now in Congress’s Hands.” Borowitz had Osama bin Laden’s successor bowing to the evil genius of Mitch McConnell: In an official statement published on the group’s website, the current leader of Al Qaeda said that Congress’s conduct during the so-called “fiscal-cliff” showdown convinced the terrorists that they had been outdone. “We’ve been working overtime trying to come up with ways to terrorize the American people and wreck their economy,” said the statement from Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. “But even we couldn’t come up with something like this.” Mr. al-Zawhiri said that the idea of holding the entire nation hostage with a clock ticking down to the end of the year “is completely insane and worthy of a Bond villain.” “As terrorists, every now and then you have to step back and admire when someone else has beaten you at your own game,” he said. “This is one of those times.” The Al Qaeda leader was fulsome in his praise for congressional leaders, saying, “We have made many scary videos in our time but none of them were as terrifying as Mitch McConnell.” Oh sure, NPR isn't stuff with elitist liberals who eagerly read The New Yorker with a Hi-Liter...because the Hi-Liter isn't snobbish enough. (HT: @NPR_Not_Neutral) |
Brexit: a "massive overhead for very little gain" 27/09/2016 Follow @eureferendum There are no experts in Brexit, as such. The issue covers such a wide range of subjects and disciplines that no single person can hope to gain any more than an overall appreciation of the details. Likewise, no one profession – especially not economists, lawyers or even trade specialists – can call the issue their own. And politicians, largely, seem amongst those groups least qualified to comment. Obviously, though, some individuals will have more to contribute than others, one of whom is John Holland-Kaye, Heathrow's chief executive. He is in the current edition of the And while, from his comments, it is evident that Mr Holland-Kaye has a great deal to offer, I'm not entirely sure he is correct on focusing on the Customs Union. Much of what he has to say would seem to apply to the Single Market rather than the Customs Union. If that is the case, he would be by no means the first to confuse the two. Certainly, confusion there is, with the Financial Times declaring that: "Ministers have not announced a decision on whether the UK should leave the customs union, which allows UK exporters to sell into the European Single Market without having to fill in forms or customs checks". This is an absurd conflation of two different things. The Customs Union, of course, deals only with tariffs, removing tariff barriers between members, while imposing a common external tariff applicable to all third countries. Crucially, the Single Market goes much further, covering a wide range of non-tariff barriers – as well as tariffs – so it would appear that the main issue is indeed the Single Market. However, just to complicate things, in terms of having to filling in forms and customs checks, much of this depends on the However, since an AEO programme can be a stand-alone agreement, there is no need for it to be tied into the Customs Union and can just as well be attached to Single Market – as indeed it is for Norway via the EEA Agreement. When Holland-Kaye gets into the detail, however, he is not wrong when he says that a decision to apply customs checks on goods passing between Britain and the EU "would be burdensome". It's when he then says that "an alternative to leaving the customs union probably needs to be found" that he confuses the issue. Mixing the good with the bad, though, Holland-Kaye notes that customs checks and tariffs have to be applied for goods coming into the UK from China, when he says: "No one's going to want to be doing that for EU goods as well. That's adding massive overhead for very little gain". Holland-Kaye then adds: "I've had no indication that there's an expectation that we will be putting up customs controls for goods coming in and out of the UK. Can you imagine operating something like the Euro[tunnel] if you had to suddenly build in all these checks in place? It would be completely unmanageable, which is why I think, pragmatically, [ministers] will find another way round it". At the moment it is as easy to send a truckload of goods from London to Munich as it is from London to Manchester. But, we are told, "if the UK leaves the customs union, businesses will have to fill in additional documents and clear additional checks - in particular, to prove the origin of the goods - even if the UK strikes a favourable trade deal with the EU. Delivery companies say additional tax hurdles - such as paying VAT and duties - are particularly time-consuming". Thus continues the confusion between "Customs Union" and "Single Market". But, essentially, this is about the Single Market. Obviously, though, some individuals will have more to contribute than others, one of whom is John Holland-Kaye, Heathrow's chief executive. He is in the current edition of the Financial Times , warning that a decision by Britain to leave the EU's Customs Union would mean "adding massive overhead for very little gain" at the UK's ports and terminals. He thus urges the government to avoid imposing major new costs on business.And while, from his comments, it is evident that Mr Holland-Kaye has a great deal to offer, I'm not entirely sure he is correct on focusing on the Customs Union. Much of what he has to say would seem to apply to the Single Market rather than the Customs Union. If that is the case, he would be by no means the first to confuse the two.Certainly, confusion there is, with thedeclaring that: "Ministers have not announced a decision on whether the UK should leave the customs union, which allows UK exporters to sell into the European Single Market without having to fill in forms or customs checks".This is an absurd conflation of two different things. The Customs Union, of course, deals only with tariffs, removing tariff barriers between members, while imposing a common external tariff applicable to all third countries.Crucially, the Single Market goes much further, covering a wide range of non-tariff barriers – as well as tariffs – so it would appear that the main issue is indeed the Single Market.However, just to complicate things, in terms of having to filling in forms and customs checks, much of this depends on the AEO programme which is currently embedded in the Union Customs Code (UCC) and could therefore be regarded as part of the Customs Union.However, since an AEO programme can be a stand-alone agreement, there is no need for it to be tied into the Customs Union and can just as well be attached to Single Market – as indeed it is for Norway via the EEA Agreement.When Holland-Kaye gets into the detail, however, he is not wrong when he says that a decision to apply customs checks on goods passing between Britain and the EU "would be burdensome". It's when he then says that "an alternative to leaving the customs union probably needs to be found" that he confuses the issue.Mixing the good with the bad, though, Holland-Kaye notes that customs checks and tariffs have to be applied for goods coming into the UK from China, when he says: "No one's going to want to be doing that for EU goods as well. That's adding massive overhead for very little gain".Holland-Kaye then adds: "I've had no indication that there's an expectation that we will be putting up customs controls for goods coming in and out of the UK. Can you imagine operating something like the Euro[tunnel] if you had to suddenly build in all these checks in place? It would be completely unmanageable, which is why I think, pragmatically, [ministers] will find another way round it".At the moment it is as easy to send a truckload of goods from London to Munich as it is from London to Manchester. But, we are told, "if the UK leaves the customs union, businesses will have to fill in additional documents and clear additional checks - in particular, to prove the origin of the goods - even if the UK strikes a favourable trade deal with the EU. Delivery companies say additional tax hurdles - such as paying VAT and duties - are particularly time-consuming".Thus continues the confusion between "Customs Union" and "Single Market". But, essentially, this is about the Single Market. What is not understood fully by many of the pundits that have explored this issues, is that the decision as to whether to check consignments at the borders rest exclusively with Member State customs officials. The entire edifice of control rests on Article 46 of the … examining goods, taking samples, verifying the accuracy and completeness of the information given in a declaration or notification and the existence, authenticity, accuracy and validity of documents, examining the accounts of economic operators and other records, inspecting means of transport, inspecting luggage and other goods carried by or on persons and carrying out official enquiries and other similar acts. The Article goes on to say that the controls, other than random checks, "shall primarily be based on risk analysis" performed within "a common risk management framework, based upon the exchange of risk information and risk analysis results between customs administrations and establishing common risk criteria and standards, control measures and priority control areas". The "take-home" point from this is that, if the UK is foolish enough to adopt the WTO option, it will be cutting itself off from the "common risk management framework" and all that goes with it. Member State customs authorities thereby will be entitled to take a pessimistic view when applying their risk analyses, stepping up physical checks to whatever levels they deem appropriate. Yet, At the UK end, we learn from the Financial Times that Treasury officials are exploring the possibility of widening customs facilities at the UK border, especially at Dover, where space is limited. This might involve recruiting hundreds, if not thousands, more customs officers to conduct border checks. However, it is acknowledged that such "efficiency gains" would depend on EU destination countries co-operating and paying for similar upgrades of staff and capacity. France, as we know, has limited infrastructure to deal with the extra customs requirements. And European officials admit they are only just beginning to understand the scale of the Brexit challenge. Apart from anything else, employing more customs officers would be especially costly for the UK government. The UK has a comparatively lean operation by EU standards, employing only 5,000 customs officers. Germany employs 35,218 and France 16,500, according the World Customs Organisation. An extra 5,000 officers could cost as much as £250 million every year. Additional costs could run to several billion pounds per year. Yet still, confusion reigns. In a masterful blurring of the issues, the Financial Times asserts that senior Whitehall officials are convinced "ministers have little choice but to leave the customs union because remaining would leave Britain with little autonomy over trade". If this bizarre analysis represents the actual thinking in Whitehall, we are in serious trouble. It would mean that those planning for Brexit haven't even touched first base. To what extent additional checks will apply if we leave is not known, and we cannot know until the shape of the Brexit plan is clear. But it is certainly the case that, if the UK drops out of the Single Market and relies solely on the WTO option – without seeking a negotiated settlement - paperwork will multiply and the number of border checks will increase.What is not understood fully by many of the pundits that have explored this issues, is that the decision as to whether to check consignments at the borders rest exclusively with Member State customs officials. The entire edifice of control rests on Article 46 of the Regulation (EU) No 952/2013 of the Union Customs Code, which defines customs controls as consisting of:The Article goes on to say that the controls, other than random checks, "shall primarily be based on risk analysis" performed within "a common risk management framework, based upon the exchange of risk information and risk analysis results between customs administrations and establishing common risk criteria and standards, control measures and priority control areas".The "take-home" point from this is that, if the UK is foolish enough to adopt the WTO option, it will be cutting itself off from the "common risk management framework" and all that goes with it. Member State customs authorities thereby will be entitled to take a pessimistic view when applying their risk analyses, stepping up physical checks to whatever levels they deem appropriate.Yet, a study of US-bound container traffic indicated that if, routinely, as little as 1-2 percent of containers in a major overseas port were examined before loading, it would almost certainly overwhelm the inspection facility. Transfer that finding to, say, Calais, and only a modest increase in inspections could bring chaos.At the UK end, we learn from thethat Treasury officials are exploring the possibility of widening customs facilities at the UK border, especially at Dover, where space is limited. This might involve recruiting hundreds, if not thousands, more customs officers to conduct border checks.However, it is acknowledged that such "efficiency gains" would depend on EU destination countries co-operating and paying for similar upgrades of staff and capacity. France, as we know, has limited infrastructure to deal with the extra customs requirements. And European officials admit they are only just beginning to understand the scale of the Brexit challenge.Apart from anything else, employing more customs officers would be especially costly for the UK government. The UK has a comparatively lean operation by EU standards, employing only 5,000 customs officers. Germany employs 35,218 and France 16,500, according the World Customs Organisation. An extra 5,000 officers could cost as much as £250 million every year. Additional costs could run to several billion pounds per year.Yet still, confusion reigns. In a masterful blurring of the issues, theasserts that senior Whitehall officials are convinced "ministers have little choice but to leave the customs union because remaining would leave Britain with little autonomy over trade".If this bizarre analysis represents the actual thinking in Whitehall, we are in serious trouble. It would mean that those planning for Brexit haven't even touched first base. |
A small but fast growing Ontario community looking for a safe drinking water supply has been outbid in its attempt to buy a well by multinational giant Nestlé, which acquired the site to ensure "future business growth." Nestlé, which can already take up to 3.6 million litres of water a day for bottling at its site in nearby Aberfoyle, Ont., bought the well from Middlebrook Water Company last month after having made a conditional offer in 2015. A spokesman for Nestlé said the company had "no idea" the other bidder for the five-hectare site was the Township of Centre Wellington, but it waived all conditions and matched the competing offer so it could complete the purchase. Nestlé said the Middlebrook site will be a "supplemental well for future business growth" and a backup for its plant in Aberfoyle. Township Mayor Kelly Linton said Nestlé dropped its conditions, including a pump test to determine if the well met its quality and quantity requirements, after it learned of the competing bid. Wellingon Centrel wanted to purchase the well to keep its water supply "safe from commercial water taking" long into the future, added Linton. "When water taking is solely within the jurisdiction of the Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change, the only role we really have as a municipality is to comment to the ministry, and it issues all the permits," he said. "So purchasing the well would automatically give us control, and that's what we were looking for, control of our water source and not just the ability to comment." The mayor wouldn't disclose the dollar value of the municipality's bid, but said it had no conditions attached. The Ministry of the Environment, which has not yet ruled on Nestlé's application for a pump test, called the sale of the Middlebrook property a "private transaction," and said its only role was to evaluate the proposed water-permit application. In the meantime, Nestlé is allowed to keep taking water from its well in Aberfoyle while the ministry reviews the company's application to renew its water-taking permit, which expired in July. Water-taking permits became a hot-button issue after The Canadian Press reported last month that the province charges $3.71 for every million litres of water. Ontario review British Columbia instituted a charge of $2.25 per million litres in 2015 after giving it away for decades, while Quebec, the other province with major bottled water operations, charges $70 per million litres. In Ontario, the permits allow municipalities, mining companies and golf courses -- in addition to the water-bottling companies -- to take a total of 1.4 trillion litres out of the surface and ground water supplies every day. Responding to public criticism over the use of water resources in the province, which was hit by a severe drought this summer, Premier Kathleen Wynne called some of the conditions for the permits, including the fee, outdated. She told Environment Minister Glen Murray to review the rules for bottled water companies. The Council of Canadians, a non-profit social action organization, said the Grand River watershed, where Nestle's well and bottling plant are located, is a fragile ecosystem feeding into Lake Erie that must be protected. "The Nestle well near Elora sits on the traditional territory of the Six Nations of the Grand River, 11,000 of whom do not have access to clean running water," said council chair Maude Barlow. According to Health Canada, about 2,000 people in Six Nations are hooked up to the community water system, but "many residents use cisterns for drinking water and receive deliveries from provincially regulated, off-reserve water providers." Pushback Local activists and international environmental groups are pushing the province to reject Nestle's Aberfoyle renewal application. Ontario's former environmental commissioner warned in a 2012 report called "Water-Taking: Leave Something for the Fish," that the province wasn't even recovering the cost of its water quality programs, and said full-cost water pricing would be a "powerful catalyst for water conservation." Nestle, which has 2,500 employees in Ontario, 300 at Nestle Waters Canada, said it was prepared to pay more if rates were increased, but only if all companies with water-taking permits face the higher fees. "We fully agree that all groundwater users should pay their fair share to fund the management of our water resources and all users must be treated equitably," the company said in an emailed statement. Barlow, of the Council of Canadians, argues that there is no need for a bottled water industry in Canada because tap water for virtually everyone – except First Nations – is perfectly safe and tested daily. "Allowing a transnational corporation to continue to mine this water is a travesty, especially given that most local people can get clean, safe and affordable water from their taps," she said. |
Words by Tishanna Williams This year’s edition of the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival (TTFF/16) launches tonight. For the next week, feature films, shorts, new media projects and documentaries from around the world will screen at venues across the twin-island nation. This is one of the biggest film fests in the Caribbean so all eyes will be on Trinidad, and with good reason. This year’s offerings are impressive to say the least and, of course, we’ve got a few Caribbean films that have our attention. Check out our picks and then take a peek at their official program to see what else catches your eye. The Cutlass (Trinidad & Tobago) Darisha Beresford’s The Cutlass is based on a true story of a woman robbed and taken into the secluded jungle where she fights to escape her sociopathic abductor. Beresford, whose mother worked as an on-air reporter for Trinidad’s first television station, TTT, and father owned a recording studio, is a director at South Florida’s Zaftik Studios, and won various awards for her film, commercials and TV projects in the U.S. and the Caribbean. The Cutlass, her first feature film, screens Saturday Sept. 24 and Monday Sept. 26. Play the Devil (Trinidad/Bahamas/US) We had to give this breakthrough film, set against the backdrop of Trinidad’s Blue Devil Mas, a mention.With themes surrounding masculinity and male sexuality, one can only guess how it will be received by a Caribbean island such as Trinidad, and that definitely makes Play The Devil one to watch. Read an interview with director Maria Govan here. Queen Nanny: Legendary Maroon Chieftainess (Jamaica) To know Jamaica is to know about the Ashanti-born Maroon warrior woman, Nanny. The spiritual leader, healer and revolutionary is even the face of the country’s $500 bill. Queen Nanny documents the incredible resistance movement of the Jamaican Maroons, led by this legendary and indomitable 18th century chieftainess. This film comes from Roy T. Anderson who is also the writer, director and producer of Akwantu: The Journey (2012), an award-winning film on the history of the Jamaican Maroons, and a veteran movie and television stuntman who has done stunts for Hollywood stars like Will Smith, Denzel Washington, Jamie Foxx, and Morgan Freeman. Heart of a Monster (Trinidad/Curacao) LargeUp has followed Trinidadian director Damian Marcano‘s work since he burst on the scene with 2013’s God Loves the Fighter. Now with multiple successes under his belt, he gives us another great film. “Heart of A Monster” is based on a story written by Freetown Collective frontman Muhammad Muwakil and done in partnership with the Instituto Buena Bista in Curacao. The 15-minunte film is in Papiamentu, the spoken language of Curacao, and what’s really interesting is that the set and props were all made by the children of the institute using raw materials. Si Bon Yuli (Haiti/Dominican Republic) This documentary by Haitian actor and filmmaker Jean Jean chronicles the journey of his own mother Julia Jean as she attempts to regularize her immigrant status in the Dominican Republic, which she has called home for the past 35 years. Covering themes such as home, exile, migration and deportation, hot topics in light of the upcoming U.S. elections, Si Bondye’ Vle (God Willing Yuli) will be one to watch. Ninth Floor (Canada) If you, your mom or grandmother grew up in or around the Caribbean in the 1970s, the Black Power Revolution would be familiar to say the least. What many may not know is what triggered it. It began in Montreal, Canada, with the Sir George Williams University riot of February 1969, when six Caribbean students mounted a protest against institutional racism which snowballed into 14 days of chaos and violence, with riot police storming the occupied ninth floor. Mina Shum’s documentary takes a look back at this moment in history. SPECIAL MENTION RISING STAR: This Connect (Trinidad & Tobago) Renaldo Frederick, who previously played the lead in Pan! Our Musical Odyssey, the opening film at the 2014 edition of the festival, first debuted “This Connect” for the CreativeTT 2015 Smartphone Film Festival. Although only six minutes long, “This Connect” received favorable responses from those who saw it at the Caribbean Tales International Film Festival in Toronto this month. (Visited 1,000 times, 2 visits today) |
European Union employment laws protect British workers from the consequences of Tory governments. It’s that simple. If you are an agency worker who gets treated equally to your full-time colleagues after being at your work place for twelve weeks; if you are a lorry driver glad of your right to take a rest from driving; or if the company you work for is taken over and you are worried about being made redundant, EU law helps protect your rights. And these protections will be compromised if Britain leaves the EU, which is why today, I am calling on Theresa May to stand up for working people and do something about it. I’m the founder and chair of the Vote Leave Watch campaign. We’re dedicated to two aims – holding the Leave campaign politicians, especially those now in the government, to account for their promises, and pushing for the most progressive future relationship with Europe we can get. Protecting workers rights that are currently underpinned by EU law is consistent with the promises of Leave campaigners, and is crucial in keeping Britain a decent place for working people. A whole panalopy of employment rights are enshrined both in EU and in UK law. But some, including those I mentioned earlier, are not. They are dependent on the European Communities Act 1972 – the Act of parliament that took us into the EU in the first place. Because this Act will have to be repealed for Britain to actually leave, they will cease to exist upon Brexit unless something is done about it. This is the stark conclusion of the independent House of Commons Library, which has just produced its first research on this topic since Britain voted to leave the EU. These aren’t the only worries working people should have about Brexit. Outside the EU, British workers will no be able to longer shelter under the protective umbrella of the European Court of Justice, which has passed numerous judgments extending EU law to the benefit of British workers. For example, it has given British workers more holiday pay by factoring in non-guaranteed overtime. Rights like this could be overturned by our domestic courts once we leave the EU. And even when protections EU laws give us at work are already mirrored by domestic UK legislation we should not be complacent. The current Conservative government have a recent, shameful history of opposing such laws. For example, Theresa May led the Tory charge against the Labour government’s 2010 Equalities Act, which enshrines protection against discrimination in the workplace, and equal pay for men and women. When Tories talk about cutting “red tape”, they are usually talking about cutting your rights in the workplace. This, of course, was not the vision of Brexit painted by Vote Leave campaigners. Boris Johnson said during the campaign that he and his colleagues were “determined to protect the workers”. Chris Grayling, who ran Theresa May’s leadership campaign, was even clearer – “let me make it clear that I do not want to see social rights and protections diminished if we vote to leave the EU”, he said. Priti Patel, another pro-Leave cabinet minister, said that “this is categorically not about rolling back workers’ rights” having been forced to do so when she suggested leaving the EU would give her government the ability to just that. So the government needs to act, and fast. They must be faithful to the best interests of British workers, and the explicit promises of their own senior members, and do whatever it takes to prevent Brexit becoming a bonfire of employment rights. That’s why I’ve written to Theresa May today to demand the government takes action. The Prime Minister must commit to three things. First, to pass new legislation before Britain leaves the EU to ensure that the rights enshrined in the European Communities Act remain in force. Second, to commission an audit of every instance in which the European Court of Justice has gone further in protecting workers than statue law itself, and commit to including these changes in legislation. And third, she must make clear her government’s absolute support for British legislation that benefits workers which her party opposed, such as the Equalities Act. Anything less will be a betrayal of British working people, both those who vote to remain and those who voted to leave. This is especially true in light of the promises that were made to them by those, like Boris Johnson, who are now senior figures in the government. The Prime Minister will no doubt be deluged with advice from right-wing think-tanks, academics and EU obsessives in her party urging her to take this opportunity to slash “red tape”. She must resist them. For the lorry driver, the agency worker, the employees of a business taken over by a rival and others, she must not leave them in the lurch, but act. |
MEXICO CITY — Brimming corn fields ready to harvest were ripped to shreds. Water pipes supplying entire villages were shattered. Key roads and bridges were shattered to pieces. As the waters unleashed across northern Mexico by Hurricane Alex and Tropical Storm Bonnie finally receded this week, officials have begun to measure the scale of the damage. The destruction, they concluded, would set the local economy back by years. “This has devastated the economy in one of the most important regions of Mexico,” said Gov. Rodrigo Medina of Nuevo Leon state. “We cannot afford to leave this destroyed. We have to start rebuilding now.” Juan Francisco Molinar, the federal transportation minister, said a calculation of the total damages would be released Tuesday. Officials fear it could rival Mexico’s 1985 earthquake as the most costly disaster in the nation’s history. When Hurricane Alex first hit the coast on June 30 as a category-2 hurricane, the winds caused little problem. But the storm unleashed torrential rain throughout the first half of July that was made worse by the arrival of Tropical Storm Bonnie. News footage emerged of towns and cities under water and streets turned to rivers, sweeping away cars and trucks. Mexican authorities said at least 15 people were killed in the flooding. In Nuevo Leon’s industrial hub of Monterrey, most of the city was submerged. Hundreds of thousands were still left without water or electricity and key roads lay shattered days after the water subsided. Gov. Medina on Friday asked the federal government for $1 billion to reconstruct Nuevo Leon, a key industrial state that borders Texas. Across the neighboring states of Coahuila and Tamaulipas, dozens of roads were severed and villages cut off, paralyzing much of northeastern Mexico. The devastation heaped problems on the U.S.-Mexico border ports, stopping thousands of trucks from reaching the crossing. Cargo railroads connecting Mexico and the United States were also smashed to pieces. Nuevo Laredo is normally the busiest port on the entire border with 8,000 trucks crossing its bridges daily. But damage pushed traffic to a crawl. “A lot of merchandise, including fruit and vegetables, from both sides of the border, is being stuck in trucks and is going bad,” said Ricardo Zaragoza, secretary of the Nuevo Laredo Association of Border Agents.” The economic effects also spread to the United States. General Motors Company on Wednesday temporarily closed its Arlington, Texas assembly plant because the flood damage prevented parts from from being delivered. Another General Motors plant as far as Flint, Mich., and a Chrysler operation in Ohio were temporarily shuttered due to the same problem. Down in Mexico City, market venders worried about the supply of fruit, vegetables and cereals from destruction of both crops and supply routes. “Prices on many key products have already gone up by about 10 percent. And we are worried they will go up by more for the rest of the month. The devastation comes as Mexico’s economy in 2009 suffered its worst year since the Great Depression, contracting by 6.8 percent. It had bounced back considerably in the first half of this year, but analysts now fear that recovery could be stalled. Nuevo Leon state alone accounts for 8 percent of Mexico’s total economy — even though it has only 4 percent of the population. The governors of the three affected states — all members of the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party — have demanded that the federal government tap into reserves to pay for the clean up operation. The federal administration promised to pay but has not signaled yet how much relief funds it will give or where those funds will come from. Mexico has a special budget for storm damage with the country particularly prone to Pacific and Atlantic hurricanes. But exhausting that money completely could leave relief funds empty very early in the hurricane season, which stretches from June to December. The damage from Alex and Bonnie may not even be over yet, with the Rio Grande having swelled to its highest level in decades, threatening further flooding. Furthermore, experts at the National Hurricane Center in Miami have predicted some hectic weather in 2010 with 16 to 18 named storms, compared to 11 in an average year. “This year has the chance to be an extreme season,” said Hurricane Forecaster Joe Bastardi. |
After some candidates jumped in and others dropped out (or changed party affiliation), Baltimore’s cast of characters for the 2016 election has been locked into place, setting the stage for something the city hasn’t had in years – some fresh faces. In the days leading up to last night’s filing deadline for the April 26 Democratic Party primary, community organizer Joshua Harris withdrew as a Democratic candidate for mayor and refiled as a Green Party candidate for the November general election. Jumping into the 12th District councilmanic race, Old Goucher Community Association President Kelly Cross made it official on Friday. And in a move that perhaps symbolized just how different a year this could be for incumbent-laden City Hall, community activist Kim Trueheart ended her deliberations and filed for City Council President, Baltimore’s second highest elected post. “I wrapped up the pennies in my cookie jar and had just enough to file,” Trueheart said on Twitter, posting a photo of the cash she laid down at the Election Board yesterday. A dogged follower of local government and outspoken mayoral critic, Trueheart is the kind of gadfly who will periodically declare “Foul” at a Board of Estimates action, interrupting the proceedings and prompting a rebuke. The person typically shushing her is BOE and City Council President, Bernard C. “Jack” Young, the very man she is challenging. In 2013, Trueheart was briefly banned from City Hall and removed from the building in handcuffs. All charges were dropped amid questions about the legality of the police actions, including her ban from the building. Mayoral Candidates and More With every elected city post in the April 26 primary this year – and with six of 14 City Council incumbents declining to run – the precise line-up of candidates is big news. But the filing deadline story was overshadowed yesterday by the surprise entrance of Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson into the mayor’s race. Mckesson joined an already crowded field of 12 Democratic primary candidates. The five candidates who have filed to run in the Republican Party primary are Armand F. Girard, Chancellor Torbit, Brian Charles Vaeth, Alan Walden and Larry O. Wardlow, Jr. Running as Green Party candidates in the November 8 general election are Harris, David Marriott and Emanuel McCray. Independents running in the general are Frank “Francisco” Logan and Collins Otonna. Unaffiliated candidates, who also run only in the general election, are Nicholas Jonathan Caminiti, Chukwuemeka Egwu, LaVern AW Murray, Andre Powell and Sarah Klauda. Plenty of Council Openings Other races to watch in this year will be candidates vying to unseat veteran Comptroller Joan M. Pratt – Democrats Mike King and Valerie L. Cunningham. Public defender and legal reform advocate Todd H. Oppenheim is taking on taking on a slate of six sitting judges in Baltimore Circuit Court. Among the many lively match-ups ahead in the City Council: • Shannon Sneed’s East Side re-match with 13th District incumbent Warren Branch. He beat her by 43 votes last time around. • John Bullock’s attempt on the West Side to end the Welch family dynasty by unseating 9th District Councilman William “Pete” Welch. • Multiple candidates to succeed 3rd District Councilman Robert W. Curran, who will be ending the Curran family reign of Northeast Baltimore that stretches back to the 1950s due to health reasons. • There are four other open Council races – in the 1st, 5th, 7th and 8th districts – to replace departing James B. Kraft, Rochelle “Rikki” Spector, Nick Mosby and Helen L. Holton. |
(CNN) -- While discontent, resentment and nationalism continue to fuel demonstrations, one vital staple is in short supply: food. Many families in Egypt are fast running out of staples such as bread, beans and rice and are often unable or unwilling to shop for groceries. "Everything is running out. I have three children, and I only have enough to feed them for maybe two more days. After that I do not know what we will do." school administrator Gamalat Gadalla told CNN. The unrest has paralyzed daily life in Egypt with many grocers closing shop and spotty food shipments. "With the curfew, there are no restaurants, food or gas. Basic goods will soon be in shortage," Sandmonkey, an Egyptian blogger said via Twitter. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has ordered a curfew in Egypt to be extended from 3 p.m. to 8 a.m. on Monday, further stifling normal life in the embattled nation. Egyptian state-run Nile TV has set up a hotline for citizens to call in and report bread shortages. There has been no other indication of what the Egyptian government is doing to address the crisis. |
Vacant orange-brick buildings pocked with broken windows on the former Entergy site on Government Street will get new life as an entertainment venue, bowling alley, pizza parlor with microbrewery, healthy living center and 16 apartments. “There is a high level of excitement for this,” said John Noland, who hopes what has been dubbed the Electric Depot “turns on the lights for that section of Government Street.” The East Baton Rouge Redevelopment Authority, which Noland chairs, was given the property in 2013 by Entergy. The RDA has been pushing private redevelopment of the site as a catalyst for more activity in a neighborhood that is a heavily traveled transition area between downtown and Mid City. The redevelopment project is pegged at $20 million. Dyke Nelson of Weinstein Nelson Development unveiled plans for the 6.1-acre property at 1509 Government St. at the RDA board of commissioners meeting Wednesday. The initial development already is 80 percent leased, he said. Weinstein Nelson has been involved in a number of redevelopment projects across Baton Rouge, including the mixed-use 440 on Third building and the 500 Laurel St. site that are downtown. The plans unveiled Wednesday are the first phase of the Electric Depot development. Nelson said there are "loose plans" for more than 100 housing units and more retail space. But the reaction of the market to the first phase will determine how much retail and office space will be included in future stages, he said. The centerpiece will be Red Stick Social, a multi-level entertainment facility that will feature a bowling alley, a stage for live music, a kitchen and bar, and rooftop garden. The venue will be open to the public, and will be available for private parties and corporate events. Red Stick Social will be operated by Robert Lay, Trey Williams and Stephen Hightower. Williams and Hightower are owners of the popular local restaurants City Pork and Southfin Southern Poke. The second building will have 16 one-bedroom apartments on top of 12,000 square feet of speculative retail space. Three of the apartments will be affordable housing, while the 13 other units will rent for under $1,000 a month, Nelson said. The third building will be occupied by a yoga and cycling studio, along with a place selling healthy food. Nelson said the tenants for the space will be announced “relatively soon." “It’s two groups with a great deal of experience in that area,” he said. The tenant for the fourth building also will be announced soon, Nelson said. This will be a pizza parlor that will sell beer brewed on the site. The plans for the first two buildings in the Electric Depot will go out to bid in the next week. Construction should start "very soon," Nelson said. Weinstein Nelson has said it wants the Electric Depot to be a “multi-generational, multicultural, mixed-income facility that accommodates all types of people.” Nelson's architecture firm, DNA Workshop, has its offices within a block of the property. The company has acquired additional land around the Entergy site it wants to redevelop. At Wednesday's meeting, the RDA approved transferring two abandoned lots it had acquired at the corner of Brice and Spain streets to Weinstein Nelson for housing development. Weinstein Nelson's team for the Electric Depot has a number of design and development partners, including CB&I Environmental and Infrastructure, Joseph Furr Design Studio, Stantec engineering, Anthony Kimble, Garrett Temple, Helena Cunningham, Dennis Blunt, Jennifer Jones, the Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church Foundation, former Community Coffee CEO Matt Saurage, and Todd Stevens, president and CEO of Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center. Editors note: This story was changed on May 18 to correctly list the members of the Electric Depot team. |
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