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WASHINGTON — College students, freshly relieved of pressure from term papers and final exams, served as a backdrop for President Obama on Friday as he warned of another impending fiscal deadline: student loan interest rates are set to double in 30 days under current law. “That means that the average student with those loans will rack up an additional $1,000 in debt,” Mr. Obama said at an event in the White House Rose Garden. “That’s like a $1,000 tax hike.” Both Democrats and Republicans say they want to head off an increase in the interest rate for federally subsidized student loans to 6.8 percent as scheduled on July 1, but they disagree about how best to manage the rates’ trajectory. Senate Democrats plan to vote to extend the government-subsidized rate — 3.4 percent for the 7.4 million students with Stafford loans — for another two years, while House Republicans approved a measure last week that would make the rate variable, tied to prevailing market trends. |
Cathy McMorris Rodgers. Image: Flickr/Gage Skidmore Update: We originally reported that Donald Trump had nominated Cathy McMorris Rodgers as Secretary of the Interior, according to information leaked to Reuters. The story has been updated to reflect that Trump had only allegedly nominated McMorris Rodgers. Today, Donald Trump is alleged to have nominated his pick for Secretary of the Interior: Cathy McMorris Rodgers, chair of the House Republican Conference, and a vocal climate change denier. Just days after selecting Scott Pruitt—an attorney general whose pockets have been lined by the fossil fuel industry—to head up the Environmental Protection Agency, Trump has beefed up his roster of pro-fossil fuel personalities. At this point, a larger theme is emerging. As president, Trump intends to undo the current administration's climate legacy by unleashing Cabinet officials with experience systematically striking down climate regulations. According to the League of Conservation Voters, a national environmental nonprofit, McMorris Rodgers boasts a lifetime voting score of 4 percent. She's voted to strike down bills that would limit emissions from power plants, protect communities from toxic coal ash, ban the sale of ivory products in the US, and protect threatened species like the lesser prairie chicken. As Secretary of the Interior, McMorris Rodgers would have tremendous jurisdiction over the fate of America's climate future, national parks, and wildlife. The Center for Biological Diversity, an endangered species protection nonprofit, called the congresswoman a "foe" to public lands, having actively promoted "the privatization and industrialization of America's public lands," and cosponsored "multiple bills to weaken protections on public land." In 2011, McMorris Rodgers supported H.R. 1126, which would have offered up more than 3 million acres of federal lands in the West to private interests. In her role as Secretary, she'd oversee 20 percent of America's public lands, including national parks and national wildlife refuges. Like Pruitt and Trump, McMorris Rodgers also believes that man-made global warming is a hoax. In 2008, during a forum on climate change, the congresswoman said the following: "We believe Al Gore deserves an 'F' in science and an 'A' in creative writing." She also told the Spokane Review that, "Scientific reports are inconclusive at best on human culpability of global warming." (Approximately 97 percent of climate scientists agree that global warming is real and can be attributed to human activities.) It's especially concerning that McMorris Rodgers has voted to weaken the Interior's power to make decisions based on climate science. In 2014, she opposed an amendment that would allow the Interior Secretary "to include climate change as a consideration in making decisions related to conservation and recreation on public lands." "If McMorris Rodgers brings her ideology to management of America's public lands, it will be open season for polluters who want to frack, drill and mine our public lands and waters," said Randi Spivak, public lands program director at the Center for Biological Diversity. "She just doesn't understand that the nation's public lands are a legacy for this and future generations rather than up for grabs to industry." Get six of our favorite Motherboard stories every day by signing up for our newsletter. |
Like it or not, CyanogenMod is one of the most popular and widely supported custom Android ROMs. With other projects you're lucky to see a handful of devices supported, but CM runs on dozens of phones and tablets. Users of those devices may soon have some new goodies to play with when the CM team releases the new Cyanogen Platform SDK, allowing app developers to integrate with various features in CyanogenMod. The Cyanogen Platform SDK will eventually support features like screen-off gestures, proxies, and more. Right now it looks like custom quick settings tiles will be the first part of the API made available. So, imagine you download a system monitor app in the not too distant future. It might have special integration with CyanogenMod to display stats of some sort in a quick settings tile. This is just an example I'm making up—I'm sure there are better potential uses. There's a Google+ community already live, but no information has been posted yet. CM is an open source project, of course, so you can monitor the progress on GitHub and the CyanogenMod code review site. |
DATE: Dec 22, 2014 | BY: Brent McKnight | Category: Sci-Fi Every piece of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is closely linked to every other one, which creates one massive, sprawling world where events in one title ripple across all the others, like how Captain America: The Winter Soldier helped make Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. good. So when you kill a character in one movie, they’re dead in all of them. Guardians of the Galaxy added a few new wrinkles to the MCU, taking it out into deep space, but they almost did something that would have sent shockwaves through the entire program: they almost killed Stan Lee. That was the plan anyway. You’re well aware that the Marvel Comics legend has a cameo in every Marvel movie, even the ones that aren’t really Marvel movies, and waiting for him to pop up is part of the fun. Sure, he plays a different character in each film, so you could totally get away with killing him off in one movie without impacting the rest of the world, but it might irreparably damage the psyche of fans out there. In a recent Q&A with Jeff Goldsmith, Guardians director James Gunn laid out the original plan. Here’s what he had to say: Originally, when they walked through, they come into the Collector’s museum, and they walk in there. And they’re walking up there, and we look over and we see Cosmo, who growls at Rocket. And if you’ve ever read Guardians of the Galaxy, Cosmo and Rocket don’t like each other. Cosmo’s a space dog. And then they look over here, and Quill looked into this box that was full of steam, and this tentacle shoots out, and he jumps back. And he’s embarrassed and he’s scared in front of Gamora. And then, we went to another box, and Groot looks inside it, and it’s Stan Lee just sitting there. And we actually did two different versions. We did one where Stan Lee was just sitting there, and one where he looked at Groot and just gave him the finger. But it wasn’t really Stan Lee, because we were in England, and Stan’s an older gentleman, and he couldn’t make the trip. So we did it with a double. And then we were going to digitally replace his head with Stan’s head, which we were going to shoot later. But we weren’t sure if we should add it. Kevin thought it was a little bit too jokey. And then also we very clearly saw Stan Lee’s box exploding, when the thing explodes. And I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if Stan Lee’s … these are the kind of ideas that I would come up with and Marvel would say I think that’s Super James Gunn … but Stan Lee’s head is rolling into frame.’ And anyway, so we didn’t do that. We’ve actually seen a photo of this double that came out a while back, and while we knew a broad description of the potential scene, we didn’t know they planned to off the beloved comic scribe. It’s easy to understand why they didn’t go with this version, it’s not the same without him actually there, but Stan Lee’s head rolling into frame could have been awesome. The flipping the bird thing is a little overboard, especially with Star-Lord doing the same thing earlier. In the finished movie, Lee is credited as Xandarian Ladies Man, and shown hitting on some young alien women. While the original version would have been a bit too much of a detour from the main story, you have to wonder what could have been. What do you think, should they have killed Stan Lee? In this same Q&A session, Gunn also reiterated that Guardians does not exist simply to serve the Avengers films and as a lead up to the two-part Infinity Wars. He said: Whether or not at some point, some Guardians and some Avengers meet up and meet somewhere in the world, whether it’s two years from now, three years from now, four years from now, fifteen years from now…I’m not going to say. But Guardians of the Galaxy does not exist as a prequel to Avengers 3 and 4. They have their own thing that they’re involved in. They have their own mythos that they’re involved in. They have their own stories that are equally important. Guardians of the Galaxy is now out on DVD, Blu-ray, and a variety of other platforms, and Guardians of the Galaxy 2 hits theaters May 5, 2017. |
Australia's women cricketers have succeeded where the men failed, winning the Ashes on English soil for the first time since 2001 with a 20-run Twenty20 win at Hove. The Southern Stars - led by Ellyse Perry (2-13), player of the match Rene Farrell (3-17) and Megan Schutt (2-18) - bowled magnificently to defend a small target of 108, dismissing the hosts for 87 in front of a sell-out crowd of over 5000. The victory in the second of three T20 internationals meant Meg Lanning's team took an unassailable 10-4 points lead having already won the one-off Test and two of the three one-day matches. It was the first time since the multi-format series was introduced in 2013 the Southern Stars have triumphed over England. But they did it the hard way after England won the toss and elected to bowl, restricting the tourists to 7-107, a total bolstered by a big final over from Jess Cameron that yielded 13 runs. Lanning was full of praise for her players for the manner in which they kept their composure with the ball to decimate the England top order, who were reduced to 5-28 after five overs. "We didn't bat well tonight but our bowlers came to play and our fielding was the best it's been all series," Lanning told Sky Sports. "It's one of the best wins I have been a part of. It's really nice to win this series. "Winning the Ashes is the only thing we haven't been able to do over the last five years. But we came here very confident and used our whole squad which has been great." Australia players celebrate their win over England during the 2nd NatWest T20 of the Women's Ashes Series between England and Australia. (Getty) () Perry failed with the bat after being promoted to the top of the order, scoring just seven. But she was brilliant with the ball, her 17 dot deliveries preventing England getting off to a strong start. She also took two wickets in as many balls including the prized scalp of the dangerous Sarah Taylor for eight. "Ellyse is a genuine all-rounder - she is great with bat and with ball and she always steps up on the big occasions," Lanning said. "I am very happy she is on my side. You need early wickets when you are defending 107 and we did that with five in the powerplay." Disappointed England skipper Charlotte Edwards said the side should have been able to chase down such a small total but admitted the Australian bowlers had been too good throughout the series. "Full credit has to go to Australia they have completely outplayed us today," Edwards said. "We did brilliantly with the ball but our batting throughout this series hasn't been good enough. We're going to have to go away and do something about it. "We came here with real belief that we could take this to Cardiff (for Monday's final T20) and you should be able to chase down 107. We just weren't good enough." © Nine Digital Pty Ltd 2019 |
Jody Allard is back. For those who do not recall, Allard wrote an article in 2016 titled My teen boys are blind to rape culture. Allard argued in the article that despite all her efforts as a good feminist single mother, her two teenage sons are riddled with misogyny. Instead of taking heed of Allard’s demands that they check their privilege, stop their internalized misogyny, and challenge their friends who deal in “rape culture”, the boys laughed her off. Any reasonable parent would look at that response and reflect on their own behavior. They would ask themselves why this approach did not work. They would ask why their children reject the very foundation of their parent’s identity and political beliefs. Allard, however, is not a reasonable parent. She is a narcissistic, passive-aggressive, sociopathic ideologue, and so she does what anyone so mentally deranged would do: blame and publicly humiliate her sons. Again. For the fourth time. Here is the title of her most recent article: I’m Done Pretending Men Are Safe (Even My Sons) Think of what type of person you must be to write something so vicious about your own sons. Think about how warped your mind must be to in one breath say that your sons are good and in the next accuse them of being rapists. Because that is what Allard did. You need not take my word for it. Take Allard’s: I have two sons. They are strong and compassionate—the kind of boys other parents are glad to meet when their daughters bring them home for dinner. They are good boys, in the ways good boys are, but they are not safe boys. I’m starting to believe there’s no such thing. Why would they not be safe? You just stated that they are the kind of boys other parents would want their daughters to bring home. Does that not imply that they are not just safe, but ideal? What type of parent says this about their own child? I wrote an essay in The Washington Post last year, during the height of the Brock Turner case, about my sons and rape culture. I didn’t think it would be controversial when I wrote it […] That is a lie. You knew that writing an article in which you accused your sons of being “blind to rape culture” would go viral. That is why you wrote it. Do not sit there pretending you wrote a simple, bland article for the Washington Post about how your sons basically support rape and act as if people inexplicably took offense. You are not that stupid. […] I was sure most parents grappled with raising sons in the midst of rape culture. No rational parent “grappled” with this. Only feminists and progressives so wrapped up in their misandrist thinking “grappled” with this non-issue. Dozens of you wrote article after article after article attacking your own sons, from teenage boys to newborn babies, for the sin of being male. All of you expressed fear that the boys you are raising, the boys you instill with morals and ethics, are still somehow destined to be rapists because the evil “rape culture” will find some way to snare them. You peddled this nonsense as they were the Outer Party in 1984 at perpetual risk of committing a thought crime. The struggle I wrote about was universal, I thought, but I was wrong. My essay went semi-viral, and for the first time my sons encountered my words about them on their friends’ phones, their teachers’ computers, and even overheard them discussed by strangers on a crowded metro bus. It was one thing to agree to be written about in relative obscurity, and quite another thing to have my words intrude on their daily lives. What part of “The Washington Post” was unclear? It is not like you have not written for the paper before. You were aware of the scope and reach of that publication. Again, you are not that stupid. One of my sons was hurt by my words, although he’s never told me so. How are you surprised by this? What son wants his mother to think of him as someone who supports rape when she know he does not? Again, you are not that stupid. No one is that stupid. It is impossible for you, the woman who raised him, not to know how he would feel about your words. You clearly show this because according to you, he has not told you that your article hurt him, but you know it did. So ask yourself: why did you write it? Why would you talk about your sons in such a derogatory manner? Why would you choose one of the most public forums to do so? He doesn’t understand why I lumped him and his brother together in my essay. He sees himself as the “good” one, the one who is sensitive and thoughtful, and who listens instead of reacts. He doesn’t understand that even quiet misogyny is misogyny, and that not all sexists sound like Twitter trolls. He is angry at me now, although he won’t admit that either […] That implies that you have asked him about it. Are you surprised that he will not admit that he is angry with you given your propensity to run to the internet and shame him for disagreeing with your deluded ideology? […] and his anger led him to conservative websites and YouTube channels; places where he can surround himself with righteous indignation against feminists, and tell himself it’s ungrateful women like me who are the problem. Oh thank god he found Sargon of Akkad, Dave Rubin, Steven Crowder, and the Honey Badgers. At least he can listen to someone who will not make him feel like garbage for committing the original sin of being born the wrong sex. I teeter frequently between supporting my son and educating him. Is it my job as his mother to ensure he feels safe emotionally, no matter what violence he spews? Yes. Is it my job as his mother to steer and educate, no matter how much that education challenges his view of himself? Yes. What part of “parent” do you not understand? I think it’s both, but the balance between the two has proven impossible to pinpoint. No, it is not. The problem is not your sons; the problem is you and your man-hating ideology. This is what happens when you take feminism to its logical conclusion. You wind up emotionally abusing your sons because your ideology makes you think they are the enemy because they are male. Now I can already hear feminists saying “that’s not my feminism”. Yes, it is. There is no magical difference between your faux milquetoast brand of feminism and the insanity Allard spews. It is the same. It is simply a matter of extremes. You cannot have an ideology that blames half the human species for all the world’s problems, argue that even if individual males do nothing wrong they are still collectively culpable, and offer no means of cleansing this sin and pretend this will not result in people like Allard. No group that functions on an ideology of hate and fear keeps to mere slogans and theory. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. Here is your proof: When I hear his voice become defensive, I back off but question whether I’m doing him any favors by allowing his perception of himself to go unchallenged. When I confront him with his own sexism, I question whether I’m pushing too hard and leaving him without an emotional safe space in his home. What has this child done? According to his mother, he has done nothing. He has committed no crime against any woman. Yet here she is ranting about him becoming “defensive” when she confronts him about his “sexism” that she can never present a concrete example of. This is what feminism does. It is all that it does. As a single mother, I sometimes wonder whether the real problem is that my sons have no role models for the type of men I hope they become. And whose fault is that? Who was the one who could have provided her sons with male role models? But wait: But when I look around at the men I know, I’m not sure a male partner would fill that hole. Where are these men who are enlightened but not arrogant? Who are feminists without self-congratulation? That is right. All the men you know, every one of them, are terrible misogynists. Honestly, if you are a man who associates with Jody Allard, unfriend her. Do not talk to her, look at her, or breath in her direction. She may think you are trying to rape her. She will certainly think you are an arrogant, self-congratulating scumbag. If my sons need role models, they may have to become their own. You just spent a thousand words complaining that your sons are seeking out their own role models because they reject your retrograde ideology, but now you are fine with them doing so? I joined Bumble recently, after a six-plus year break from dating. What grown, undrugged man would want to subject himself to Allard? I’m not overly interested in dating in the first place, but I’m starved for adult conversation so dating feels like a necessary evil. Or you could talk to other adults? You do not need to date anyone to have a conversation. How many times must it be said: you are not that stupid. Bumble, as I explained to my married friends, is like the feminist Tinder. Women have to initiate contact with men, so at least there’s no inbox full of dick picks every day. There are plenty of vagina-related jokes that I will let readers make themselves. But, feminist or not, the men are no different from the men anywhere else and I quickly felt deflated. If the feminist men — the men who proudly declare their progressive politics and their fight for quality — aren’t safe, then what man is? No man, I fear. How do you know they are not any different? How do you know they are not safe? Where are you getting this from? I know I’m not supposed to cast an entire sex with a single paint brush — not all men, I’m sure some readers are thinking and preparing to type or tweet. But if it’s impossible for a white person to grow up without adopting racist ideas, simply because of the environment in which they live, how can I expect men not to subconsciously absorb at least some degree of sexism? White people aren’t safe, and men aren’t safe, no matter how much I’d like to assure myself that these things aren’t true. That makes zero sense. It is completely possible for a white person to grow up without adopting racist ideas. The civil rights movement featured hundreds of them. This deluded thinking that every white person is racist because they are white is ironically racist, as is the notion that men are inherently sexist. Stop projecting your racial and sexual problems onto others. Just because you and your fellow feminists and progressive are a gaggle of racist, sexist bigots does not mean everyone else is. My sons won’t rape unconscious women behind a dumpster, and neither will most of the progressive men I know. So what is the problem? But what all of these men share in common, even my sons, is a relentless questioning and disbelief of the female experience. I do not want to prove my pain, or provide enough evidence to convince anyone that my trauma is merited. Unfortunately you have to because no one should merely take your word for it. Look at what you claim: “But if it’s impossible for a white person to grow up without adopting racist ideas, simply because of the environment in which they live, how can I expect men not to subconsciously absorb at least some degree of sexism? White people aren’t safe, and men aren’t safe, no matter how much I’d like to assure myself that these things aren’t true.” When you spout nonsense like that, no one should take you at your word. Your “female experience” is made of pure craziness. In the words of Lewis Black, it is stone-cold fucknuts. No one should believe any of it without evidence. I’m through wasting my time on people who are more interested in ideas than feelings, and I’m through pretending these people, these men, are safe. Feels over reals? That is your problem? People care more about the opinions you put out into the ether — the things that affect other people — than they do your precious feelings? How unfair. It is almost as if other people’s experiences and feelings matter just as much as yours. I love my sons, and I love some individual men. You do not love your sons. What you have done to your sons four times, including and most egregiously whining about how bad your son’s suicide attempt made you feel while completely ignoring any of the reasons your son tried to take his own life, shows you do not love your sons. You use them. You manipulate them. You shame them. You humiliate them. You blame them for things they have not and would never do. You scapegoat them. You vilify them. You gaslight them. You abuse your sons. You are an emotionally manipulative, narcissistic, likely sociopathic ideologue who craves attention, and so you write very public articles hoping to get any response feed your fragile ego. If you cared about your sons a tenth as much as you care about “rape culture”, you would have the sense to use a pseudonym when you write articles accusing your sons of being rapists in wait so that they will not have to put up with the negative responses. But you never thought of that because you do not love your sons. You do not care about them. They are tools to you, nothing more. It pains me to say that I don’t feel emotionally safe with them […] I am sure the feeling is mutual, and that is a shame because children should feel safe with their parents. They should be able to share their feelings without fear that they will be attacked or scolded for feeling the wrong thing. This is not a reflection of something broken or damaged in me […] Yes, it is. This all comes from you. No one else is responsible for your feelings. That is 100% on you. You decide how you feel, and if you have any trauma experiences that damage your ability to cope with complexity of the world, it is on you to deal with it. It is not some man’s responsibility, and it is certainly not your teenage sons’ responsibility to deal with your nonsense. […] it is a reflection of the systems we build and our boys absorb. No, that is just your warped ideology talking again. Remove the feminism, and everyone would simply consider you another self-adsorbed moron who should be kept as far away from children as the average pedophile. Those little boys grow into men who know the value of women, the value that’s been ascribed to us by a broken system, and it seeps out from them in a million tiny, toxic ways. And you wonder why your sons do not listen to you. I don’t know what the balance is between supporting these men and educating them, but I know the toll it takes on me to try. I am too valuable and too worthy to waste my time on men who are not my flesh and blood. Yes, it is always about you, is it not? Your sons do not have feelings. They do not need emotional support and balance. Only your feelings matter. I tried to think of a nice way to put it, but cannot, so I will just write it: my child rapist father has more compassion and love for the sons he abused than you do for sons. That is how terrible a person you are. But as my boys grow into men, I wonder whether I’ve done enough to combat the messages they hear from everyone but me. They are good boys, and maybe that’s the best they can be in the system we’ve created for them. One can only hope that they make enough money to pay for the decades of therapy they will need to deal with your emotional abuse. What an absolutely terrible mother. |
Mar 21, 2017 SMU Guildhall has risen to the top spot among the world’s best graduate game-design programs in The Princeton Review’s eighth annual report, published Tuesday, March 21, 2017. At #1, SMU Guildhall ranks above UCF’s Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy (the #1 program in 2016) at #2, as well as the University of Utah (#3), Rochester Institute of Technology (#4), USC (#5), New York University (#6), Drexel (#8), Abertay University in Dundee, Scotland (#9), DePaul (#10), Michigan State (#11) Ohio State (#19), the University of Wisconsin-Stout (#20), MIT (#22), the University of Malta in Msida (#23), the University of Pennsylvania (#24), and the University of Miami in Florida (#25). In addition, it ranks higher than two other top-25 graduate programs in Texas: the University of Texas-Dallas (#14) and Texas A&M (#17). “Becoming the #1 graduate game-design school is a tribute to faculty with deep experience, bright and motivated students, a robust network of successful alumni, stellar industry support, cutting-edge curriculum, and a commitment to continual improvement,” said SMU Guildhall Director Gary Brubaker. The Review determined its rankings based on its 2016-17 survey of 150 institutions in the United States, Canada, and abroad that offer game design coursework and/or degrees. The 40-question review asked schools to report on everything from academic offerings and faculty credentials to graduates’ starting salaries and employment experience. Curriculum, faculty, facilities, career services, and technology were all among criteria The Princeton Review weighed to make its selections. The Princeton Review’s reporting partner, PC Gamer magazine, will include a section on the top schools in its May 2017 issue, available on newsstands March 29. It will feature information on degree programs, class offerings, events, prominent professors, and alumni. The Princeton Review developed its “Top Schools to Study Game Design" project in 2009 with assistance from a national advisory board that helped design the survey instrument and methodology. Board members included administrators and faculty from respected game design programs, and professionals from some of the top gaming companies. |
After setting out the All-DC offense earlier we can now turn to the All-DC defense. DE – Doomsday Anyone who can lay a vicious beating on Superman possesses the ability to evisorate the pass protection and sack the QB hard. Doomsday's strength, speed and aggressive nature make him the perfect candidate for defensive end. Plus, since Doomsday's reactive adaptation means he can only be beaten the same way once, he would constantly force the opposition offense line to try out new and ever more imaginative ways in order to stop him. NT – Swamp Thing In a three-four formation the nose tackle needs to clog the running lanes up the centre in order to allow the linebackers to make plays. Swamp Things superhuman strength and durability would allow him to hold his own on the line of scrimmage. Crucially, Swamp Things ability to make plants grow super-fast allows him to grow walls of grass that significantly delay if not completely stop plays. Of course, his effectiveness on astro-turfed pitches is reduced. DE – Darkseid Super strong, nearly impossible to kill and possessing physic powers, Darkseid is a great choice to slot in an defensive end. Some have raised questions about his speed off the snap but his ability to blast tackles and guards away with omega force more than makes up for this. CB - Cyclone In the simplest terms possible a cornerback is there to make sure the wide receiver doesn't catch the ball. Cyclone's ability to manipulate the wind means that no matter how good the throw, the wide receiver is going to need a miracle if they are to catch the ball at all. CB – Shazam! Although Cyclone can fly, she is more of a finesse corner than an enforcer who is going to get wide receivers looking over their shoulder searching for the hit, taking their eyes off the ball. Shazam should provide this. Shazam provides the speed and strength to cover any receiver whilst also possessing the ability to call down lightening giving the opposition the shock of their lives. MLB – General Zod Blessed with Superman-level powers thanks to Earth's Sun, General Zod's all-round athleticism make him the perfect three down linebacker. Add in his warrior mentality and Zod should be a great of the game. Question marks over his character persist however after he made genocidal statements and pledged to build a new Krypton on Earth. Less moral defensive co-ordinators are also concerned about his tendency to get trapped by Phantom Zone plays. MLB - Brainiac Possessing similar levels of strength to any son of Krypton there is no doubting Brainiac's ability to compete in professional football. Where he really excels though is in his ability to read the game. Brainiac's superhuman intellect means that he can work out what the play is within microseconds of the snap. He is however, frequent target for suspension by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell due to his predilection for miniaturising the opposition to memorialise victories. WLB – Ra's Al Ghul Ra's Al Ghul is the ultimate Veteran linebacker. Despite playing for many seasons he never seems to lose his peak conditioning. Although reticent to go into specifics in interviews he puts this down to his very own private spar. SLB – Batman Every defense needs a Captain and lining up in the strong linebacker position The Dark Knight is positioned in the perfect place to lead the defense and make plays. Some scouts question whether he possesses the physique to keep up with his super-powered team mates but those in the know look at Batman's intelligence and sheer willpower and see an NFL superstar in the making. FS – Green Arrow A superb marksmen and intelligent planner Green Arrow slots into the free safety position nicely. Equipped with numerous trick arrows Green Arrow can sit back in cover and eliminate the play before it ever becomes a red zone threat. SS – Cheetah Cheetah's elite speed makes her ideally suited to play strong safety. If anyone manages to get through the likes of General Zod, Darkseid and Doomsday then Cheetah's elite speed should make sure the play doesn't finish in a first down. Plus her speed makes her able to slot in as a third cornerback if the need arises. Owner/General Manager – Lex Luthor Mulit-Billionaire owner Luthor is the ultimate Jerry Jones style NFL owner. Every so often he attempts to play himself at QB in place of franchise star Superman but it never seems to work out. Write for GiveMeSport! Sign-up to the GMS Writing Academy here: https://gms.to/1a2u3KU DISCLAIMER: This article has been written by a member of the GiveMeSport Writing Academy and does not represent the views of GiveMeSport.com or SportsNewMedia. The views and opinions expressed are solely that of the author credited at the top of this article. GiveMeSport.com and SportsNewMedia do not take any responsibility for the content of its contributors. |
Following two sell-out screenings at the London Film Festival, ’71 will be released in cinemas across the UK on Friday 10 October. It’s a tense thriller in which the viewer experiences the inferno of bomb-torn Belfast in 1971, as a young British squaddie (Jack O’Connell) gets caught behind enemy lines after being separated from his unit and must escape the provisional militia while determining which loyalist allies he can trust. It is screening as part of the First Feature Competition strand at the Festival. 10 to try Each of the recommendations included here is available to view in the UK. It’s the latest in a long legacy of films about the Troubles, the euphemistic term for the political conflict that plagued Northern Ireland, Ireland, Britain and Europe for decades from the late 1960s. Troubles films of the late 60s and 70s tended to be documentaries, such as A Place Called Ardoyne (1973), in which members of a working-class Catholic community were interviewed about their experiences. Marcel Ophüls may have won an Oscar for The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), about the Vichy government’s collaboration with Nazi Germany, but his documentary on the Troubles, A Sense of Loss (1972), was flawed, and naive in its seemingly approving stance towards the IRA. By the 1980s, the Troubles were best represented on the small screen rather than in cinemas. Harry’s Game (1982) was a popular thriller which gave us Clannad’s theme song, sung in Irish, used to soundtrack endless newsreel footage of the conflict ever since, while Alan Clarke’s Contact (1985) and Elephant (1989) offered unflinching representations of the violence and its effects. Most controversial of all was the This Week documentary Death on the Rock (1988), which offered compelling evidence that suggested three IRA soldiers killed by the British army in Gibraltar were unarmed when they were shot. Members of the British government were unimpressed, much tabloid furore ensued, and attempts were made to smear the reputation of key eye witnesses. By the 1990s, Troubles-influenced thrillers were rolled out both in Britain and in Hollywood, and IRA soldiers became staple baddies and antiheroes, with Richard Gere and Brad Pitt offering imaginative Irish accents in The Jackal (1997) and The Devil’s Own (1997) respectively. The success of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) and its ilk led to the unintentional glamorisation of violent thugs in films such as Resurrection Man (1998). The role of mothers became more prominent, with Helen Mirren giving a moving performance in Some Mother’s Son (1996) as the desperate parent of a hunger striker, and Julie Walters excelling as the peace campaigner in the underrated Titanic Town (1998). Since the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, films about the Troubles have continued to fascinate directors, either as material for black comedies (An Everlasting Piece, 2000), thrillers (Fifty Dead Men Walking, 2008) or intimate character studies (Five Minutes of Heaven, 2009). The following ten films avoid the clichés of so many films about the conflict to offer fresh, surprising and often controversial perspectives on an era which changed the UK forever. The films selected focus on the period of the Troubles between 1968 and 1998, rather than the historical context of the conflict. There are many great films about the era from the partition of Ireland and the Irish Civil War in the early 1920s up to the end of the 1960s, which offer plenty of inspiration for a future list. The Outsider (1979) Director Tony Luraschi An Irish-American Vietnam vet (Craig Wasson), inspired by his grandfather (Sterling Hayden), joins the rebels to fight for Irish unification, but has no idea of the complexities of the struggle and finds himself targeted by both sides – the cunning IRA fighters send him straight to Belfast, hoping that he will be killed by the British Army to cause international outrage and encourage financial support from sympathisers in the US. A horrific scene in which a blind pacifist is tortured with the approval of a British officer caused controversy, and the sole, unfortunate example of the film tipping into sensationalism. But the depiction of Belfast as an alien urban battlefield (although most of the city was recreated on the outskirts of Dublin, some scenes shot while driving through Belfast made it into the film) and the refusal to sympathise with either side make for a compelling and disturbing watch. Wasson, gung-ho and idealistic, makes for a gauche hero, perfectly in keeping with his outsider status. Maeve (1981) Directors Pat Murphy and John Davies Pat Murphy’s neglected drama, about a young woman (Mary Jackson) returning to her Belfast home after years in London, is a key feminist work, one that sees the representation of the Troubles – and history itself – from a female perspective. Criticised by her sister (an early appearance from Brid Brennan) for her feminism and subject to the petty sexism of both the Irish and the British soldiers, who leer at her breasts during a stop-and-search, Maeve argues angrily with her republican boyfriend over his obsession with the past, claiming that women get ‘remembered out of existence’. Unlike many feminist films of the era, Maeve is accessible to a wide audience, with potent imagery, strong and interesting characters and a poetic and poignant representation of memory that would be seen later in the work of Terence Davies. It’s intelligent and provocative – lines such as “men’s relationship to women is just like England’s relationship to Ireland” are likely to divide audiences. Cal (1984) Director Pat O’Connor Cal opens like a slasher horror film, using a tracking shot of a killer’s point of view as a car drives to the house of a member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary before an unseen gunman shoots him dead. After this sensationalist beginning, the tone mellows, as we follow the life of Cal (John Lynch), a young IRA soldier with no taste for violence – it is revealed that he drove the getaway car used in the murder. Bullied by fellow IRA members and hassled at his home by loyalist gangs, he is a wretched figure. He attempts to atone for his crime by working for the dead man’s widow (Helen Mirren) – and a dangerous affair begins. Pat O’Connor’s film subtly portrays the terrible effects sectarian violence has on both the victims’ families and the fighters themselves. Mirren won the best actress award at Cannes for her moving performance of a woman coping with grief, anger and new romantic attraction, while the underrated Lynch is excellent in his film debut. Elephant (1989) Director Alan Clarke Alan Clarke’s second TV film about the Troubles, following Contact (1985), is his bleakest and most unrelenting work. It dispassionately depicts 18 killings, with neither motive nor dialogue, to represent the terrible human cost of the Troubles, and forces the viewer to confront the reality of the violence by lingering on the corpse of each victim. Its title is taken from a quote by Irish writer Bernard MacLaverty, who described the Troubles as like having an elephant in the living room, which, though ever-present, you learn to live with. It had a great influence on Gus van Sant’s 2003 film of the same name, inspired by the Columbine High School massacre, which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Clarke’s film was produced by Danny Boyle at the start of his film career, and remains one of the most evocative films of the conflict. While news coverage sanitised the violence, and lesser films glamorised it, intentionally or otherwise, this shows the unrelenting circle of violence for what it is: numb, inhuman and pitiless. The Crying Game (1992) Director Neil Jordan Even if you haven’t seen it, you probably already know of the big ‘twist’ in The Crying Game (although in fact it’s just one of many in the unpredictable narrative). But there are many other reasons to watch Neil Jordan’s Oscar-winning film, about Fergus (Stephen Rea), an IRA soldier whose life changes forever when he kidnaps a British soldier (Forest Whittaker) at a South Armagh funfair. After an intense first third, the story relocates to London and the genre switches from thriller to unlikely romance – until ghosts from Fergus’s past reappear. Neil Jordan had explored the Troubles before – his film screenwriting debut was Traveller (1981), in which two newlyweds take an uneasy journey through 1980s Ireland, while Angel (1982) also starred Rea, this time as a saxophonist tracking down the loyalist killers of a deaf-mute girl. The Crying Game is the most intriguing of all, offering an inspired take on the themes of masculinity, violence and loyalty synonymous with cinema of the Troubles. In the Name of the Father (1993) Director Jim Sheridan Jim Sheridan followed the success of My Left Foot (1989) and The Field (1990) with this searing representation of the arrest, trial and eventual acquittal of the Guildford Four, wrongfully convicted for the 1974 pub bombings in one of the British legal system’s most egregious miscarriages of justice. It’s Sheridan’s angriest film, and boasts excellent performances from Daniel Day-Lewis as Gerry Conlon and Pete Postlethwaite as his father, Giuseppe, who tragically died in prison. The film isn’t 100% accurate – it considerably overplays the role of lawyer Gareth Peirce (Emma Thompson) in clearing the innocent prisoners’ names – but its ferocious criticism of a grave misjustice make it a great political work, and a deserving winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Sheridan, Day-Lewis, Postlethwaite, Thompson and the film itself were all nominated for Oscars. Bloody Sunday (2002) Director Paul Greengrass The killing of 14 unarmed protesters during a civil rights march through Bogside, Derry, commonly referred to as ‘Bloody Sunday’, is one of Britain’s most shameful episodes of the 20th century. In Paul Greengrass’s film, made for TV but released in cinemas, James Nesbitt (on career-best form) plays Ivan Cooper, the politician who organised the march. It also features a supporting role for Don Mullan, whose damning book Eyewitness Bloody Sunday triggered a new inquiry into the tragedy, following the perceived whitewash of the initial tribunal. Greengrass’s signature style, with heavy use of handheld cameras, is evident even this early in his career. Two years later he wrote and produced Omagh (2004), a more intimate portrait of another Troubles atrocity – the IRA bomb that killed 29 people in the Northern Irish town. Captain Phillips (2013) may have won more awards, and his two Bourne Identity sequels (2004-7) greater box office revenue, but Bloody Sunday remains Greengrass’s finest work, and, like In the Name of the Father, won the Golden Bear award at Berlin. Mickybo and Me (2004) Director Terry Loane Take away a couple moments of pitch black humour and a lot of the swearing and Mickybo and Me would be the perfect family film, about the friendship that develops between a Protestant lad (Niall Wright) and a Catholic boy (John Joe McNeill) in Belfast in 1970. Both become obsessed with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), and dream of escaping to Australia. Tiring of the hostility and bullying of their peers, they run away with a stolen gun, planning to live as outlaws. The recreation of key scenes from the western in humbler, Northern Ireland locations provide some terrific set pieces. It’s very funny, with a dark sensibility – following a bomb attack, Mickybo discovers an expensive ring on a disembodied finger. Expressing his delight at the discovery of treasure, he discards the ring and pockets the finger. Both Wright and McNeill are excellent as the child leads, while Adrian Dunbar, Julie Walters, Ciarán Hinds and Gina McKee offer excellent support as their parents. Hunger (2008) Director Steve McQueen The feature debut of Steve McQueen (Shame, 12 Years a Slave) is an intense portrait of the last days of Bobby Sands, who died after 66 days of a hunger strike protesting the British government’s refusal to bestow political status on Republican prisoners. The near-wordless depiction of the strike and resulting violence and repression in Long Kesh prison is powerful, while a long and brilliantly acted dialogue sequence between Sands (Michael Fassbender) and a priest (Liam Cunningham) is utterly electrifying. It gives a fair portrayal of the British officers, who are shown dealing with daily threats to their lives and the trauma of their situation. Hunger launched the career of Fassbender, who has collaborated on all of McQueen’s subsequent movies, while the film won awards at Cannes and Venice, a BAFTA, and was voted the best film of 2008 by Sight & Sound magazine. It is one of the greatest debuts in the history of British cinema. Good Vibrations (2012) Directors Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn Music biopics are often insufferable, packed with clichés, a pretence that every song was a masterpiece and recreating tired male fantasies of cool, drug-fuelled antics with blokey rock bands before everybody burns out. Not so with Good Vibrations, telling the tale of Terri Hooley, founder of the Good Vibrations record shop and label, which kickstarted the success of many prominent punk bands in Troubles-ridden Belfast. The sequence where Hooley first hears The Undertones’ Teenage Kicks, still one of the best pop songs ever written, is wonderful. The music’s great – fans of the scene should check out the excellent documentary Shellshock Rock (1979), available to watch for free in the BFI Mediatheques – but best of all is Richard Dormer, who gives a warm and winning portrait of the impresario, and effortlessly imitates Hooley’s distinctive Belfast rasp. It’s a rousing and rowdy celebration of punk triumphing in a hostile environment – as Hooley’s bellows to the crowd at the end, “New York has the haircuts, London has the trousers, but Belfast has the reason.” |
There was much squirming on Radio 4 on Thursday, when British Medical Association boss Mark Porter hit the airwaves to defend the coming wave of junior doctors' strikes. Five times, in the space of a minute, Today programme host Nick Robinson asked Dr Porter if the industrial action, which will lead to the cancellation of 125,000 operations and a million appointments, had the 'unanimous support' of the BMA's governing council, whose members had met to discuss it just a few hours earlier. Five times, the union boss refused to answer, claiming either not to hear, or not to properly understand the question. Finally, when Robinson refused to let him off the hook, Dr Porter loftily declared that he 'will not engage' with requests to discuss what he described as 'the long and difficult debates we had inside Council'. In the days that followed, this grumpy exchange has passed largely under the radar. But that could be about to change. For insiders say that a fractious and ugly political conflict lies at the heart of Dr Porter's strange refusal to answer this basic query. Scroll down for video British Medical Association boss Mark Porter (pictured) hit the airwaves to defend the coming wave of junior doctors' strikes It revolves around a simple fact: behind the scenes, the BMA's high command — not to mention its 168,000 members — are now deeply divided over the rights and wrongs of staging the most disruptive industrial action in the 68-year history of the NHS. Few medics dispute that junior doctors have some legitimate grievances over the Government's efforts to impose a new contract that will (among other things) see them paid slightly less for weekend work. Nor will you find many who doubt these highly educated and hard-working professionals deserve to be properly valued and compensated. Yet growing numbers believe that the BMA's unprecedented decision to call for rolling five-day strikes, monthly, for the rest of the year, is disproportionate, unjustified, and risks both harming (and perhaps killing) innocent patients and alienating the public. What's more, senior figures in the BMA believe the junior doctors' dispute is now being cynically hijacked by a hard core of far-Left activists who have quietly gained power within the organisation and are using it to advance a radical political agenda. To this end, they say a crucial point has thus far been lost in the noise surrounding this week's announcement of the walk-out. It is as follows: that the BMA's Junior Doctors Committee (JDC), which is at the heart of the decision to call five-day strikes, is now dominated by a cabal of Labour Party members, Jeremy Corbyn supporters, and activists with links to Left-wing campaign group Momentum and extreme fringes of the anti-capitalist movement. Take its leader, Ellen McCourt for example, a self-styled 'Left leaning, straight talking' former orthopaedist who spent May Day on a protest march in Newcastle which had the official theme 'turn the tide against the Tories'. Fierce industrial disputes are in her blood. Her mother Kath McCourt was chairman of the Royal College of Nursing when it threatened its own national walkout four years ago. Take also the committee's deputy chairs. They are David Rouse, a Labour member, Aaron Borbora, a trade unionist who has spoken at meetings of the National Shop Stewards Network, and Lucy-Jane Davis, a Bristol-based Remain supporter who has used her Twitter feed to accuse the Leave lobby of 'rage and racism', and advised followers to vote Labour at the last General Election. Other highly influential members of the committee include Yannis Gourtsoyannis, a hard-Left Marxist who has spoken alongside Jeremy Corbyn at 'fight austerity' rallies, and Pete Campbell, a Momentum supporter who wears 'Make Capitalism History' T-shirts and has used his Facebook page to promote talks in his native Newcastle on the subject of 'how capitalism is killing you'. Then there's Kapil Ojha, a GP who uses his Twitter feed both to support Corbyn and heap personal abuse on Jeremy Hunt, dubbing the Tory Health Secretary a 'smirking idiot', an 'ignorant, arrogant waste of space', an 'idiotic dishonourable moron' who is 'cowardly, unscrupulous, ruthless and selfish'. Also at the table is Lauren Robson, a Labour member who said last August that Corbyn was 'certainly getting my vote!', and Adam Collins, a Scottish doctor who in April shared a tweet that charmingly called Jeremy Hunt a 'c***'. We shall look at this cabal, and their confrontational approach to industrial relations, in more detail later. Ellen Court, (pictured) a self-styled 'Left leaning, straight talking' former orthopaedist, spent May Day on a protest march in Newcastle which had the official theme 'turn the tide against the Tories' First, though, it should be pointed out that not everyone within the BMA, or the wider medical community, is exactly enamoured by the brand of extremist politics they espouse. Take, for example, the Wednesday meeting that Dr Mark Porter the BMA boss has so abruptly refused to discuss. Held at the organisation's headquarters in London's Tavistock Square, the secret meeting was attended by 40 of the 53 members of the BMA's Council, of which 28 were in the room, and another 12 took part via a video-conferencing link. Thirteen sent apologies, two blaming their absence on jury service. It was confrontational from the start, says a witness, and at times descended into a shouting match between pro-strike members of the JDC and moderates from other sections of the organisation. At one point, there was so much heckling that Porter, the non-voting chairman, had to appeal for calm. Details of what exactly was said differ. According to a detailed account passed to the Mail by one attendee (who has also shown us paperwork circulated at the meeting) supporters of five-day strikes were described as 'immoral' and 'militant' by a member of the BMA's ethics committee, and accused of 'threatening behaviour' by a senior consultant. The account states that another anti-strike official warned militant junior doctors: 'People will die. This will be blamed on us. We cannot argue it's about safety. It's about money and it always has been.' Later, a different official is said to have argued firstly that doctors should be referred to the General Medical Council's regulator if they took part in strikes, and secondly that going on five-day strikes was 'equivalent to imposing harm on patients'. The source claims pro-strike Council members were equally strident. For example, he alleges that a hard-line consultant on the Council urged the BMA to become more 'militant' and 'pick up where the coal miners left off' by seeking to 'break' Theresa May. At this point, it should be stressed that others remember things differently. When contacted by the Mail, the BMA accepted that some of the quotations above were accurate, but described others as either 'false' or 'inaccurate'. The consultant with the hard-line views also denied making the comments about aping the miners and bringing down the Government. What no one disputes is that the pro-strike lobby intervened during Wednesday's meeting to ensure that the all-important vote on whether to back five-day strikes was taken via a public roll-call rather than a secret ballot. 'It was supposed to be a closed session, where no minutes or votes would be released,' says the attendee. 'But the militants discovered that under BMA rules, an open roll call would instead be held if five people there voted for it. 'This suited them because some opponents of strike action are afraid to make their position public in case it leads to them being subjected to abuse from the far-Left.' Even with a public roll call, the vote to endorse strike action was far from a landslide. Indeed, only 16 of the 34 voting members of the BMA's Council supported the move. Another 11 opposed it, while seven were either absent, or abstained. Those who were eligible to vote included Thomas Dolphin, a Labour Party member, Andrew Collier, a junior doctor elected to the Council on a ticket that endorsed turning the BMA into a 'real trade union', and Sundeep Grewal, a GP Registrar whose Facebook page describes the Health Secretary as 'Jeremy 'no one else will do this job' C**t', and whose Twitter feed in April circulated petitions calling for the 'utterly shameful' David Cameron to resign. Like anyone else, they are, of course, perfectly entitled to hold party-political views (though you can look in vain for Conservative Party members on the BMA Council). However, taking both an extreme position on the political spectrum, and a confrontational approach to the ongoing contract dispute, puts them at odds with many of the union's 38,000 rank-and-file junior doctors, who may also feel upset at the fact that obscenities are being levelled at Cabinet ministers via social media in their name. To this end, it should be noted that a secret BMA document leaked to the Mail earlier this week suggests that less than a third of junior doctors (31.5 per cent) support a 'time-limited full walk-out' of the sort the organisation now proposes to undertake. The figure was obtained from a survey carried out in June. 'On the face of this survey, the remaining 68.5 per cent of respondents would not be prepared to take part in that action,' reads the secret document, which goes on to admit that public support for junior doctors is falling while the BMA's 'member relations staff are reporting that they are not detecting the same appetite for industrial action among members [as] for previous phases of industrial action'. Astonishingly, despite this finding, Ellen McCourt's JDC has decided not to actually ask junior doctors to vote on whether the imminent industrial action ought to go ahead. That's because a strike ballot held last November still provides it with a legal right to call industrial action. The secret memo reveals that the committee has therefore 'decided that a new ballot should not be undertaken'. Yannis Gourtsoyannis (pictured) has spoken alongside Jeremy Corbyn at 'fight austerity' rallies While that decision is likely to be legally watertight, senior figures within the BMA tell me they regard it as 'ethically troublesome'. 'The original strike vote was taken ages ago, in a completely different political environment, when a different contract was on the table. Things have moved on, and many members will find it astonishing that they are now being called out on extended strikes without being asked to endorse those strikes via the ballot box,' says one. 'There is little evidence that a majority of junior doctors now support holding five-day strikes once a month. 'Apart from anything else, they will forfeit a quarter of their income. It's a mess.' To understand how it has come to this, it's necessary to wind back the clock to 2013, when negotiations between the BMA and the Government over the new junior doctors' contracts began. Amid growing disagreements between the two sides, several long standing members of the Junior Doctors Committee decided to step aside, finding that they could no longer cope with the demands that negotiations were placing on their time. In their place, perhaps attracted by the colourful nature of the dispute, came a number of committee members with ties to the far-Left. 'To a degree, what has happened to the JDC is exactly the same thing that has happened to the Labour Party,' says one insider. 'Most junior doctors are what I'd call small 'c' conservatives, with fairly centrist views. But the organisation has been taken over by Left-wing radicals.' The extent of this trend is difficult to pin down since, bizarrely, the BMA refuses to say how many people actually sit on its Junior Doctors Committee, or to name anyone aside from the committee's chairman and three deputy chairs. However, we have identified 11 current members, believed to be the vast majority of its serving officers. Of that number, at least four are Labour Party members and three are activist supporters of Jeremy Corbyn. One, Pete Campbell, has spent recent days using his Facebook page to attack Owen Smith, Corbyn's rival for the Labour leadership, saying he 'promises a maintenance of the status quo . . . so we should do all we can to see Jeremy Corbyn win'. Another, Yannis Gourtsoyannis, is a regular speaker at events organised by an action group called the People's Assembly Against Austerity, who has called for a 'spring awakening' to topple the Government. On social media he has claimed the BMA once sought to 'avoid any confrontation' but is now undergoing 'radical change' and is 'stepping up to the plate in its role as a trade union'. A third, Lauren Robson, has attended Corbyn rallies in Bradford, describing him as 'a total breath of fresh air'. A further five members of the JDC have either used social media to endorse the Labour Party, recently attended anti-capitalist rallies, or support Left-wing trade unions who have no obvious relevance to the medical profession. Just two have no discernable political allegiances, although one of those two, Kitty Mohan, also has a seat on the BMA's ruling council, and spent Wednesday's meeting vigorously endorsing strike action. The effect of their takeover has been to create a culture within the committee which celebrates and glamorises industrial action, seeking to co-opt the doctors' union into a wider anti-austerity struggle. 'It's time to dust off our picket arm-bands, an escalated fight is on,' Gourtsoyannis told junior doctors on Facebook earlier this month. 'Theresa May is about to reap what her predecessor has sown.' Meanwhile, critics of strikes have also found themselves attacked by supporters of industrial action on social media. The most obvious recent casualty of the increased radicalisation was Johann Malawana, the previous chairman of the Junior Doctors Committee. In May, after five 24 and 48- hour strikes, followed by protracted talks with the Government, he successfully negotiated an amended contract that both he and the BMA called a 'good deal' for junior doctors. However, when members were balloted the following month over whether to accept the new deal, Malawana's fellow JDC members did little to persuade them to endorse it. Unsurprisingly, it was then rejected (by 58 per cent of participants in the vote, although low turnout meant that only represented around a third of Britain's junior doctors) and Malawana duly resigned. Barely noticed at the time was the fact that the rejected contract also had the strong support of BMA head Dr Mark Porter, who around the time Malawana quit narrowly survived an effort by the BMA's emboldened Left-wingers to remove him from office. |
JERUSALEM (AP) — A trove of ancient manuscripts in Hebrew characters rescued from caves in a Taliban stronghold in northern Afghanistan is providing the first physical evidence of a Jewish community that thrived there a thousand years ago. On Thursday Israel’s National Library unveiled the cache of recently purchased documents that run the gamut of life experiences, including biblical commentaries, personal letters and financial records. Researchers say the “Afghan Genizah” marks the greatest such archive found since the “Cairo Genizah” was discovered in an Egyptian synagogue more than 100 years ago, a vast depository of medieval manuscripts considered to be among the most valuable collections of historical documents ever found. Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up Genizah, a Hebrew term that loosely translates as “storage,” refers to a storeroom adjacent to a synagogue or Jewish cemetery where Hebrew-language books and papers are kept. Under Jewish law, it is forbidden to throw away writings containing the formal names of God, so they are either buried or stashed away. The Afghan collection gives an unprecedented look into the lives of Jews in ancient Persia in the 11th century. The paper manuscripts, preserved over the centuries by the dry, shady conditions of the caves, include writings in Hebrew, Aramaic, Judea-Arabic and the unique Judeo-Persian language from that era, which was written in Hebrew letters. “It was the Yiddish of Persian Jews,” said Haggai Ben-Shammai, the library’s academic director. Holding the documents, protected by a laminated sheath, Ben-Shammai said they included mentions of distinctly Jewish names and evidence of their commercial activities along the “Silk road” connecting Europe and the East. The obscure Judeo-Persian language, along with carbon dating technology, helped verify the authenticity of the collection, he said. “We’ve had many historical sources on Jewish settlements in that area,” he said. “This is the first time that we have a large collection of manuscripts that represents the culture of the Jews that lived there. Until today we had nothing of this.” The documents are believed to have come from caves in the northeast region of modern-day Afghanistan, once at the outer reaches of the Persian empire. In recent years, the same caves have served as hideouts for Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan. It remains unclear how the ancient manuscripts emerged. Ben-Shammai said the library was contacted by various antiquities dealers who got their hands on them. Last month, the library purchased 29 out of hundreds of the documents believed to be floating around the world, after long negotiations with antiquities dealers. The library refused to say how much it paid for the collection, adding that it hoped to purchase more in the future and didn’t want to drive up prices. The documents arrived in Israel last week. Comparisons with the other find are inevitable. The Cairo Genizah was discovered in the late 1800s in Cairo’s Ben Ezra Synagogue, built in the ninth century. It included thousands of documents Jews stored there for more than 1,000 years. Ben-Shammai said it was too early to compare the two, and it would take a long time to sift through the findings from Afghanistan. He said they were already significant since no other Hebrew writings had even been found so far from the Holy Land. He said the Jewish community in the region at the time lived largely like others in the Muslim world, as a “tolerated minority” that was treated better than under Christian rule. Afghanistan’s Jewish community numbered as many as 40,000 in the late 19th century, after Persian Jews fled forced conversion. By the mid-20th century, only about 5,000 remained, and most emigrated after Israel’s creation in 1948. A lone Jewish man remains in Afghanistan, while 25,000 Jews live in neighboring Iran — Israel’s bitter enemy. The library promises the finds will be digitized and uploaded to its website for all to see. Aviad Stollman, curator of the library’s Judaica collection, said much more would be gleaned after intense research on the papers, but already it tells a story of a previously little known community. “First we can verify that they actually existed — that is the most important point,” he said. “And of course their interests. They were not interested only in commerce and liturgy; they were interested also in the Talmud and the Bible,” he said. “They were Jews living a thousand years ago in this place. I think that is the most exciting part.” Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. |
Ed: Firstly, what is a ‘virtual’ economy? And what exactly are people earning or exchanging in these online environments? Vili: A virtual economy is an economy that revolves around artificially scarce virtual markers, such as Facebook likes or, in this case, virtual items and currencies in an online game. A lot of what we do online today is rewarded with such virtual wealth instead of, say, money. Ed: In terms of ‘virtual earning power’ what was the relationship between character gender and user gender? Vili: We know that in national economies, men and women tend to be rewarded differently for the same amount of work; men tend to earn more than women. Since online economies are such a big part of many people’s lives today, we wanted to know if this holds true in those economies as well. Looking at the virtual economies of two massively-multiplayer online games (MMOG), we found that there are indeed some gender differences in how much virtual wealth players accumulate within the same number of hours played. In one game, EVE Online, male players were on average 11 percent wealthier than female players of the same age, character skill level, and time spent playing. We believe that this finding is explained at least in part by the fact that male and female players tend to favour different activities within the game worlds, what we call “virtual pink and blue collar occupations”. In national economies, this is called occupational segregation: jobs perceived as suitable for men are rewarded differently from jobs perceived as suitable for women, resulting in a gender earnings gap. However, in another game, EverQuest II, we found that male and female players were approximately equally wealthy. This reflects the fact that games differ in what kind of activities they reward. Some provide a better economic return on fighting and exploring, while others make it more profitable to engage in trading and building social networks. In this respect games differ from national economies, which all tend to be biased towards rewarding male-type activities. Going beyond this particular study, fantasy economies could also help illuminate the processes through which particular occupations come to be regarded as suitable for men or for women, because game developers can dream up new occupations with no prior gender expectations attached. Ed: You also discussed the distinction between user gender and character gender… Vili: Besides occupational segregation, there are also other mechanisms that could explain economic gender gaps, like differences in performance or outright discrimination in pay negotiations. What’s interesting about game economies is that people can appear in the guise of a gender that differs from their everyday identity: men can play female characters and vice versa. By looking at player gender and character gender separately, we can distinguish between how “being” female and “appearing to be” female are related to economic outcomes. We found that in EVE Online, using a female character was associated with slightly less virtual wealth, while in EverQuest II, using a female character was associated with being richer on average. Since in our study the players chose the characters themselves instead of being assigned characters at random, we don’t know what the causal relationship between character gender and wealth in these games was, if any. But it’s interesting to note that again the results differed completely between games, suggesting that while gender does matter, its effect has more to do with the mutable “software” of the players and/or the coded environments rather than our immutable “hardware”. Ed: The dataset you worked with could be considered to be an example of ‘big data’ (ie you had full transactional trace data people interacting in two games) — what can you discover with this sort of data (as opposed to eg user surveys, participant observation, or ethnographies); and how useful or powerful is it? Vili: Social researchers are used to working with small samples of data, and then looking at measures of statistical significance to assess whether the findings are generalizable to the overall population or whether they’re just a fluke. This focus on statistical significance is sometimes so extreme that people forget to consider the practical significance of the findings: even if the effect is real, is it big enough to make any difference in practice? In contrast, when you are working with big data, almost any relationship is statistically significant, so that becomes irrelevant. As a result, people learn to focus more on practical significance — researchers, peer reviewers, journal editors, funders, as well as the general public. This is a good thing, because it can increase the impact that social research has in society. In this study, we spent a lot of time thinking about the practical significance of the findings. In any national economy, a 11 percent gap between men and women would be huge. But in virtual economies, overall wealth inequality tends to be orders of magnitude greater than in national economies, so that a 11 percent gap is in fact relatively minuscule. Other factors, like whether one is a casual participant in the economy or a semi-professional, have a much bigger effect, so much so that I’m not sure if participants notice a gender gap themselves. Thus one of the key conclusions of the study was that we also need to look beyond traditional sociodemographic categories like gender to see what new social divisions may be appearing in virtual economies. Ed: What do you think are the hot topics and future directions in research (and policy) on virtual economies, gaming, microwork, crowd-sourcing etc.? Vili: Previously, ICT adoption resulted in some people’s jobs being eliminated and others being enhanced. This shift had uneven impacts on men’s and women’s jobs. Today, we are seeing an Internet-fuelled “volunterization” of some types of work — moving the work from paid employees and contractors to crowds and fans compensated with points, likes, and badges rather than money. Social researchers should keep track of how this shift impacts different social categories like men and women: whose work ends up being compensated in play money, and who gets to keep the conventional rewards. Read the full article: Lehdonvirta, V., Ratan, R. A., Kennedy, T. L., and Williams, D. (2014) Pink and Blue Pixel$: Gender and Economic Disparity in Two Massive Online Games. The Information Society 30 (4) 243-255. Vili Lehdonvirta is a Research Fellow and DPhil Programme Director at the Oxford Internet Institute, and an editor of the Policy & Internet journal. He is an economic sociologist who studies the social and economic dimensions of new information technologies around the world, with particular expertise in digital markets and crowdsourcing. Vili Lehdonvirta was talking to blog editor David Sutcliffe. |
The Los Angeles Dodgers held a private workout for Cuban infielder Yulieski Gourriel on Tuesday, J.P. Hoornstra of the Los Angeles News Group reports, citing sources. Gourriel, 32, was declared a free agent by Major League Baseball last week. In addition to the Dodgers, he'll also work out for the New York Mets -- which GM Sandy Alderson confirmed to reporters -- and at least one other team, Hoornstra reports. Gourriel shared a photo of himself standing outside Dodger Stadium on his Instagram account. Béisbol time en #dodgerstadium A photo posted by Yulieski Gurriel 01 (@el_yuly10) on Jun 21, 2016 at 7:28pm PDT ESPN's Jim Bowden wrote about Gourriel on Wednesday in a look at the market for Jose Reyes (Insider required): Yulieski Gourriel [is] a seasoned longtime Cuban Serie Nacional player who could contribute at the big-league level shortly after being signed, maybe as early as Aug. 1. I think he'll hit in the majors immediately with 20-homer power while holding his own at second or third base. Bowden mentions the Dodgers as a possible landing spot for the slugger but notes that "it appears they like [Justin] Turner over Gourriel." Turner, whose been on fire at the plate recently, is set to become a free agent at the end of the season. |
Just a week after the Pirate Bay trial ended, another site finds itself up against the music industry. IsoHunt, one of the leading BitTorrent sites, is fighting out a dispute with the CRIA in court today. Of course, everything can be followed through Twitter. Last September, isoHunt decided to sue the CRIA looking for confirmation that the site is not doing anything illegal. In an act of self defense, isoHunt owner Gary Fung filed a petition (pdf) asking the Court of British Columbia to confirm that isoHunt –and sister sites Torrentbox and Podtropolis– do not infringe copyright. “This is our preemptive strike with a narrowly defined petition for Declaratory Relief that we do not infringe, in anticipation they are going to file their own lawsuit that we do infringe (their copyright),” Fung told TorrentFreak at the time. IsoHunt has asked the court to decide whether .torrent files, and BitTorrent search engines in particular, are infringing copyright or not. In other words, should BitTorrent search engines be held liable for the .torrent files that might point to copyrighted data? If so, what does this mean for other search engines, and sites such as YouTube? Today, isoHunt and the CRIA appeared in court. While isoHunt asked the court to rule that they do not break any laws, the CRIA is demanding a full trial against the BitTorrent site. This landmark case might be the one to define how files can be distributed online. Among other things, isoHunt argues that they are just a search engine, like Google, and that they have no control over the files they find elsewhere on the web. In court today, they showed that a filetype:torrent search for Coldplay on Google returns plenty of torrent files, similar to a search on isoHunt. All isoHunt does is index other BitTorrent trackers and indexers, without human intervention. The files that can be found on isoHunt are scattered all over the Internet, and even these files are just metadata. IsoHunt founder Gary Fung told TorrentFreak that the judge converted their petition into action at the end of today’s hearing. “He just thinks the issues are too complicated and consequences far reaching legally and technically, and a full trial is more appropriate for discovering all documents,” Gary said. “The important issue is not about the complexity or ramifications of our case which we won’t dispute, but rather CRIA liking to use full action and discovery because it’s costly for all parties and the court and was exactly why we decided to bring our petition first for efficiency before they were going to sue with an action,” Gary told TorrentFreak in a response. IsoHunt is likely to appeal the order for conversion. To be continued. |
Posted Monday, August 14, 2017 12:11 pm SPARTA — A nonprofit group recently formed to help Virgin Falls State Natural Area get the financial resources it needs also is becoming a hit on the regional lecture circuit. The Friends of Virgin Falls, the newest in the state's officially sanctioned "friends of" groups, launched a speaker series this summer with support from the city of Sparta. Topics have ranged from wildflowers to waterfalls and mining to music. The Tuesday evening series kicked off on July 13 at the historic Oldham Theater in downtown Sparta and runs every week through Sept. 5. "They came to us saying they wanted to do some lectures — give back to the community," said Sparta City Administrator Chris Dorsey. The city offered up the Oldham Theater at no charge since it was a state-sanctioned group. The first talk — with Stuart Carroll, the ranger who manages the Virgin Falls Natural area and other state lands — filled the house. He spoke on the state's unique pocket wilderness system. Last week's session featuring Chuck Sutherland talking about the geologic features of the Eastern Highland Rim was standing room only. Many spilled out the door and listened to Sutherland talk about caves and meteor craters from the lobby. At that session, most attendees came from White or neighboring counties, but one man said he drove in from north of Nashville. Dorsey said the success of the series has taken him by surprise. "They've really got their finger on the pulse," he said. It's not just the landscape that's being discussed at these lectures. Musician and state park ranger Seth Webster showcased some of the rare music from the Cumberland Plateau in his talk on old-time music. Linda Mackie and members of the Bon Air Historical Society gave a presentation on the legacy of coal mining in White County. State naturalist Randy Hedgepath, a highly sought-after expert, talked about the wildflowers in the area. And there are plenty of lectures still to come. This Tuesday, staff from Sparta-based Jackson Kayak will talk about paddling and fishing the waters of White County. On Aug. 22, Sawyer Campbell of Outdoor Experience in Cookeville will discuss preparing for a Virgin Falls hike or backpack. On Aug. 29, Stuart Carroll is up again, this time talking about the "Hiking Tennessee" guidebook he co-authored. And closing out the series on Sept. 5 is veteran nature photographer Bob Salyers, who will be sharing his tips and tricks. City officials wouldn't mind extending the series. "We're really happy with it," Dorsey said about the lectures. "I hope they'll continue." |
“I couldn’t let go,” Jerome Charyn begins his author’s note to A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century, as if remembering a severed romantic relationship. He remained transfixed after writing a fictionalized account of Dickinson’s life, The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, in which he inhabited, or vampirized, as he says, the nineteenth-century poet’s voice, detailing flings with noted scholars and tattooed handymen—all imagined of course. He spent two years on the book, culling through all the letters, biographies, studies, accounts, and poems he could. “I never believed much in her spinsterhood and shriveled sexuality,” Charyn writes in his new book. “Yet she was a spinster in a way, a spinner of words. Spiders were also known as spinsters, and like a spider, she spun her meticulous web…” A LOADED GUN: EMILY DICKINSON FOR THE 21ST CENTURY by Jerome Charyn Bellevue Literary Press, 256 pp., $19.95 Her seduction of Charyn implies her lingering claim on the present, but his inability to “let it go” introduces his attempt to put his mark on her. In the twenty-first century, Emily Dickinson has become very much about our selves, an interpretation that has been allowed to flourish partly because of her anonymity: The bulk of her poems, of course, were published after she died, and she lived with her parents all her life, unmarried and leaving letters that only hint at possible lovers, hardly ever leaving her home. During the last 30 years, it has been many writers’ impulse to try her on, explore the “masks,” as Charyn calls them, that she wore in her poems, and give motive to her writings through more expressive means. Among the better-known works there’s Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson, which traces the works that informed Dickinson’s rich interior life; Adrienne Rich’s essay “Vesuvius at Home,” which sees her as feminist forebear; Maureen McLane’s “My Emily Dickinson” from her biblio-memoir My Poets; and Camille Paglia’s essay from Sexual Personae, comparing her to the Marquis de Sade. Charyn’s book gives a checkered history of the many interpretations of Dickinson, at times attempting to connect them to her actual biography. He starts to trace key disputes in Emily Dickinson scholarship, from the intended recipient for her Master letters—a major clue to a possible hidden romance—to her jumbled publication history. (Her editors Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd removed her punctuation, then her heirs began to find more unpublished poetry and letters—as did their children.) There was no complete volume of Dickinson’s poetry until 1955. This volume, when it finally appeared, led to a fuller picture of Dickinson by 1976, when “Vesuvius at Home” and the popular one-woman play The Belle of Amherst, which Charyn writes much about, both came out. The goal of such writings is ostensibly to better know Emily Dickinson, though by means of murky, refracted knowledge—as if making sense out of the same image as projected through a hall of mirrors. But in Charyn’s book, which leans heavily on his own personal web of associations, some sense of who Dickinson might have been ends up feeling more out of reach. |
'Evangelical Drug Bosses' Accused of Leading Attacks Against African Brazilian Religions' Centers in Rio 10/02/2017 - 14h10 Advertising ANNA VIRGINIA BALLOUSSIER SPECIAL ENVOY TO RIO DE JANEIRO "Look at this, my friends; the master devil is here. Burn it down, break everything!" On that September afternoon, mãe de santo (high priestess) Carmen de Oxum, 66, was attacked by evangelical drug dealers. The criminal group of the city of Nova Iguaçu, in the Baixada Fluminense region, in Rio de Janeiro, had allegedly converted and began to attack African Brazilian religions in its area of influence. Her house was one of the eight attacked in the region since August in crimes connected to the evangelical drug bosses. At least in Carmen's case, the connection was confirmed, the Police General Director of Baixada Fluminense, Sérgio Caldas, told Folha. The police have identified some of the alleged attackers in an investigation still kept confidential. The victim is a ialorixá (priestess) in Candomblé; her name is Carmen Flores. The invaders chose other definitions though, as Carmen told Folha: "Witch, macumbeira and a major sorceress who feeds Satan." INQUISITION The marks of religious intolerance are often branded on the victim's skin. Also in Nova Iguaçu, a practitioner of another African Brazilian religion (Umbanda) was attacked with stones by an evangelical neighbor in August. Maria da Conceição da Silva, 65, had to get stitches on her forehead and mouth. In August the department launched the Fight against Prejudice Hotline. Ten of the 41 calls received in the first month complained of religious intolerance. Another hotline, Disque 100, a line of the Presidency's Human Rights Department for accusations against human rights violations, registered 15 similar cases in 2011 and a total of 756 last year. Translated by THOMAS MUELLO Read the article in the original language |
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed by me and Penny Grunseid, “At the U.N., Only Israel is an Occupying Power.” The piece was the result of a research project in which we use content analysis software to compare the language of U.N. resolutions about Israel with the language of other resolutions. Here, we focused on comparing the legal language and general tone of U.N. resolutions dealing with Israel to the legal language and tone of resolutions dealing with the eight recent or ongoing situations of belligerent occupation that have involved substantial levels of settlement activity, which I identified in my new research paper, “Unsettled: A Global Study of Settlements in Occupied Territories.” Everyone knows the U.N. spends a disproportionate time on Israel, but the data reveal that even within resolutions, it uses a unique legal vocabulary for the Jewish state. The scale of the difference is quite striking. Here is an excerpt from the Wall Street Journal piece: Since 1967, General Assembly resolutions have referred to Israeli-held territories as “occupied” 2,342 times, while the territories mentioned above are referred to as “occupied” a mere 16 times combined… Similarly, Security Council resolutions refer to the disputed territories in the Israeli-Arab conflict as “occupied” 31 times, but only a total of five times in reference to all seven other conflicts combined. General Assembly resolutions employ the term “grave” to describe Israel’s actions 513 times, as opposed to 14 total for all the other conflicts, which involve the full gamut of human-rights abuses, including allegations of ethnic cleansing and torture. Verbs such as “condemn” and “deplore” are sprinkled into Israel-related resolutions tens more times than they are in resolutions about other conflicts, setting a unique tone of disdain. Israel has been reminded by resolutions against it of the country’s obligations under the Geneva Conventions about 500 times since 1967—as opposed to two times for the other situations. … [T]he U.N. has only used the legally loaded word “settlements” to describe Israeli civilian communities (256 times by the GA and 17 by the Security Council). Neither body has ever used that word in relation to any other country with settlers in occupied territory. One of the striking findings here is that the supposedly more sober Security Council shares the General Assembly’s vice: When it comes to settlements and occupation, it can see no evil if Israel is not the culprit. This provides further demonstration of the findings of my new research paper, that the supposed international norm against settlers is in practice a norm about Israel, rather than a general rule of law. But some may be inclined to shrug off the U.N.’s particular interest in Israel, on the theory that “one has to start somewhere.” In this view, international law is deeply intertwined with politics (which is true), and the international legal system is weak and immature. Dealing with alleged Israeli wrongdoings is the first level in an eventual broader and more systematic approach. Another response is that if it is impossible to censure serious wrongdoers — say, Turkey and Morocco, whose occupied territories are now mostly populated by settlers — something is better than nothing. But the data — which covers the past 50 years — show this is not happening. If anything, causation seems to run the other way. Turtle Bay’s focus on one country has apparently robbed it of the ability to address the world’s many situations of occupation and settlements. This shows the double role of the scapegoat: It does not just get all the blame, but it also effectively absolves others. The U.N.’s blindness to settlements around the world is actually the flip side of its focus on Israel. |
“Animal intelligence may be the next big thing in artificial intelligence,” proclaims a video on the IEEE Spectrum site. “But first, scientists must digitize a rat brain.” The video accompanied a 3,000-word article that explained that, currently, “there are some situations when a three-year-old can easily defeat the fanciest AI in the world.” Specifically, children excel at “one-shot learning” — the ability to recognize something after only seeing it once. “Humans have an amazing ability to make inferences and generalize,” said Harvard University neuroscientist David Cox, who is also an expert on artificial intelligence. Or, as IEEE Spectrum puts it, AI researchers are “deeply envious of toddlers’ facility with it.” So there’s now an ambitious $100 million project funded by the U.S. the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA, an intelligence community cross-agency office) to reverse engineer this kind of smarts. Its five-year mission: to identify a brain’s “strategy” for simple feats of identification, so it can be recreated with algorithms. The Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICRONS) program is focusing on that area where the brain processes what it sees — the visual cortex. But it’s actually attempting to map every neuron in one cubic millimeter of brain tissue. 50,000 neurons — interconnected through a half a billion synapses. The ultimate big data set. No one has ever attempted this before. The article points out today’s neural networks are “loosely inspired by the brain’s structure,” but that human brains ultimately have 86 billion neurons — or, 1.7 million times more than appear in that cubic millimeter. Trillions of connections are possible. That’s 1,000,000,000,000. But apparently, the important thing seems to be identifying the mechanism that underlies it all. “The big gap is understanding operations on a circuit level,” the IEEE quoted (now former) MICRONS program manager R. Jacob Vogelstein, “how thousands of neurons work together to process information.” If they succeed, the article suggests, the payoff could be enormous: “The government’s big bet is that brainlike AI systems will be more adept than their predecessors at solving real-world problems.” One obvious application would be identifying faces from security-camera footage — but the hope is to apply this to more than computer vision. The entirety of the cerebral context has a “suspiciously similar” structure, according to Cox — which suggests there’s one fundamental circuit that the brain uses to process information. Identifying it would be a major step toward human-like general intelligence. Their research focuses on embedding state-of-the-art technological equipment on the brains of rats and mice. “It all starts with a rat in a cage learning to play a video game,” quipped the video that accompanies the article. The rat gets rewarded with a drop of sweet juice if they correctly identify one of two images flashed on a small display. Using a two-photon excitation microscope, the researchers first scan a live rat’s brain with an infrared laser to record flashes from a fluorescent tag that indicates when a neuron is active. “The microscope makes movies of neural activities,” explained the video, while the article adds poetically that “The 3D video shows patterns that resemble green fireflies winking on and off in a summer night.” “You can watch a rat having a thought,” Cox explained. “It’s very similar to how you’d try to reverse engineer an integrated circuit,” Vogelstein added. “You could stare at the chip in extreme detail, but you won’t really know what it’s meant to do unless you see the circuit in operation.” “It may be much easier to engineer the brain than to understand it.” — George Church, Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering But that’s just the beginning. The rat’s tissue is then FedEx’d from Massachusetts to Illinois, where the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory performs a sophisticated imaging using a particle accelerator to produce “extremely bright” X-rays. After the tissue is captured from different angles, the X-ray images can be combined into a three-dimensional image. Then the brain returns to Massachusetts, where it’s sliced into 33,000 strips, each one just 30 nanometers wide, captured with tape strips and delivered to silicon wafers. The 33,000 slides then meet “the world’s fastest scanning electron microscopes,” which runs continuously, and creates an image of each one at a 4-nanometer resolution. Now it’s possible to see the axons that connect the neurons, and — since there’s millions of them — there’s another piece of automation, a piece of software that can automatically trace the axons from one tissue slice to the next, along with its thousands of connections to other neurons. Or, as IEEE Spectrum puts it, it “reconstructs all the neural wiring within the cube of brain tissue.” Ironically, the computer isn’t as good as a human scientist, but “there aren’t enough humans on earth to trace this much data,” said Cox, who the article describes as “obsessively focused on automating every step of the process.” It’s a problem that software engineers at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are already working on. But however the diagram gets made, researchers will then combine it with the fluorescent images of the rat brain’s activity, which according to the article should reveal the brain’s computational structures. “It should show which neurons form a circuit that lights up when a rat sees an odd lumpy object, mentally flips it upside down, and decides that it’s a match for object A,” the article’s writer, Eliza Strickland, noted. In an interesting twist, they also plan to train a neural network on the same image-recognition task, and compare the results. Meanwhile, there’s also another MICRONS project taking an entirely different approach. Researchers at Harvard and Carnegie Mellon University have genetically engineered mice so there’s a unique sequence of molecules on both ends of each axon (a technique called “DNA barcoding.”) Then their software can generate a map by connecting each pair sharing the same axon-identifying code. One of the team’s leaders — George Church, a professor at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering — thinks the technique could ultimately map the whole brain of a mouse. That’s all 70 million neurons and 70 billion connections. Church ultimately even suggests that one day it may be possible to ditch the silicon altogether, and engineer brains with special circuits that speed up their cognition — in effect, to build better biological brains: “I think we’ll soon have the ability to do synthetic neurobiology, to actually build brains that are variations on natural brains.” In the article, he shares a near-heretical thought — that successfully recreating a brain with circuits and algorithms may not ultimately provide an answer. “I think understanding is a bit of a fetish among scientists,” he tells IEEE Spectrum, in a refreshing counterpoint to the prevailing belief that everything we humans experience can be reduced to patterns of electric pulses. “It may be much easier to engineer the brain than to understand it.” Feature image: IEEE video. |
Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. Jan. 20, 2015, 10:32 PM GMT / Updated Jan. 21, 2015, 12:05 PM GMT The Ebola virus strain that’s killed more than 8,600 people in West Africa is mutating in a way that could make experimental drugs less likely to help, researchers reported Tuesday. They said they’d found 10 new mutations that might interfere with how three of the most advanced drugs work against Ebola. The drugs, including the experimental ZMapp given to several Ebola survivors, should be tested against the current strain, the researchers said. “Based on our findings, the virus has changed and is continuing to change,” said Jeffrey Kugelman, a viral geneticist at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), who led the research published in the journal mBio. All viruses mutate, some faster than others. Ebola changes slightly from outbreak to outbreak, and the more people or animals infected, the more likely the virus is to mutate as it replicates inside a living body. "The virus has changed and is continuing to change.” The virus that’s sickened more than 21,000 people in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone is called Ebolavirus Makona variant. It’s similar to the strains that have caused outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Zaire. Kugelman’s team, with researchers at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, compared the genetic sequence of the Ebola Makona samples to Ebola Zaire and found 600 mutations. That sounds like a lot, but may not mean much for treatment. However, they found 10 mutations that affect the parts of the virus targeted by treatments including ZMapp, a drug made by the Canadian company Tekmira, and one called AVI-7537, being developed by Massachusetts-based Sarepta Therapeutics. All these drugs are specifically designed to attack Ebola based on its physical structure. ZMapp, made by San Diego-based Mapp Biotherapeutics, consists of three genetically engineered immune system proteins called monoclonal antibodies. They are designed to recognize and neutralize Ebola. “Their efficacy should be reevaluated against the currently circulating strain." The Tekmira and Sarepta drugs are based on an approach called antisense. They’re designed to interfere with the virus by sticking to it and stopping it from infecting cells. The mutations affect the bits of the virus that these three drugs are specifically designed to interfere with or recognize, Kugelman’s team said. “Their efficacy should be reevaluated against the currently circulating strain,” they suggested. Tekmira has made some adjustments, it says in company statement, but hasn't yet tested them. The World Health Organization has approved the use of experimental therapies to fight the Ebola epidemic. ZMapp has done well in monkeys, but they were not infected with Ebola Makona. And while most of the human patients given ZMapp survived, not all have, and doctors stress they have no idea if the drug has actually helped anyone. The same is true of Tekmira's drug. |
Many curries were found to be high in salt Curry lovers are being warned about the high levels of salt in the dish. Research by Consensus Action on Salt and Health (Cash) showed the salt content in some dishes was more than the daily recommended limit. The campaign group warned with side-dishes, such as naan bread and chutney, salt levels could be even higher - but some healthier options were found too. Nearly 800 products in supermarkets, independent shops and takeaways were analysed during the research. The recommended maximum intake of salt is 6g a day. But the researchers found one chicken tikka masala takeaway had 6.8g per portion, while curries on sale at Iceland also had more than the daily limit. 'Worrying' Even rice was found to be fairly high with one brand containing 1.4g per portion and naan bread having 3.2g. Katharine Jenner, from Cash, said: "A regular curry night is becoming a British institution, making these high salt levels extremely worrying. "This survey shows salt can be hidden behind all the spices and chilli in your curry, even in side dishes and sauces. "Add to this the lack of clear labelling on packaging in takeaway restaurants and it makes it very hard for consumers to choose a healthy option." But Cash said if people shopped around they could find lower salt options. Both the Co-operative's Healthy Living Rogan Josh and Weightwatcher's Korma had just 0.5g per portion. A spokesman for Iceland said it had been working with suppliers to reduce salt levels. "We have achieved reduction in salt levels over the last number of years in most product areas bringing the majority of them into line with the Food Standards Agency targets." Julian Hunt, of the Food and Drink Federation, added: "UK food manufacturers are leading the world on changing the recipes of their products - including cooking sauces and ready meals - to contain less salt." |
Holy blank! ABC is mounting a revival of the star-studded, big-money 1970s comedy panel show Match Game — and 30 Rock star Alec Baldwin has signed on to host, Vulture has learned. The network and producer FremantleMedia North America will announce later today that they are teaming up for ten one-hour episodes of Match Game 2016, a new twist on the long-running staple, which will air Sundays at 10 p.m. as part of a three-hour game-show block on ABC this summer. Dubbed ABC’s “Sunday Fun & Games,” the evening, launching June 26, will also include the return of last summer’s Steve Harvey–hosted smash Celebrity Family Feud and a previously announced reincarnation of The $100,000 Pyramid. Like the original, ABC’s Match Game will lean heavily on laughs: The show’s format will feature civilian contestants trying to guess how a panel of six celebrities will answer comedically tinged fill-in-the-blank questions. (To wit: “Harry and Larry, the Siamese twins, just shaved their heads. Now, from their necks up, they look like a pair of blanks.”) Baldwin, taking control of the skinny microphone long held by original host Gene Rayburn, will serve as the (usually) straight man to a collection of celebrity cutups. He’ll also serve as an exec producer on the show, along with FremantleMedia North America’s Jennifer Mullin. As part of his deal to host what Baldwin is calling a “limited series,” the actor will donate his appearance fee to arts-related organizations via the Hilaria and Alec Baldwin Foundation. The 1970s Match Game was anchored by the Will & Grace–ish comedy couple Charles Nelson Reilly and Brett Somers, whose back-and-forth banter was filled with double entendres and subtle references to Things You Couldn’t Say on TV back in the day. Richard Dawson was also a regular presence on the show and ultimately became so popular, he was given his own series (Family Feud). There’s no word yet on whom ABC and FremantleMedia are hoping to land for the new Match Game, though with Baldwin onboard, it’s not hard to imagine some of his celebrity friends taping a few episodes. (Please say yes, Tina Fey, Tituss Burgess, Tracy Morgan, and/or Jack McBrayer.) The show will be taped in New York City. In its heyday, Match Game was an incredibly popular game-show staple. Its roots actually stretch back to the 1960s, with an early NBC version and a relatively staid half-hour, with straightforward questions and answers. That edition has been surpassed in the minds of baby boomers and Gen Xers by the 1973 CBS revival, in which producers Mark Goodson and Bill Todman decided to add a comedy angle to the mix and bring in more celebs. Various versions of the Rayburn-hosted Match Game ran on CBS and in syndication for a decade, including an ill-fated 1983 move back to NBC as part of the Match Game-Hollywood Squares Hour. After a seven-year hiatus, in 1990, ABC tried to revive the show in daytime; it lasted a year. A syndicated edition that launched in 1998 also flopped. The last time an original Match Game was seen by U.S audiences was in 2006, when the format was revived for a single episode of CBS’s game-show anthology Gameshow Marathon, hosted by Ricki Lake. More recently, RuPaul’s Drag Race has paid homage to the series with its one-per-season “Snatch Game” episodes. |
“A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” by John Perry Barlow “Yesterday, that great invertebrate in the White House signed into the law the Telecom “Reform” Act of 1996 … It attempts to place more restrictive constraints on the conversation in Cyberspace than presently exist in the Senate cafeteria, where I have dined and heard colorful indecencies spoken by United States senators on every occasion I did. This bill was enacted upon us by people who haven’t the slightest idea who we are or where our conversation is being conducted. It is, as my good friend and Wired Editor Louis Rossetto put it, as though “the illiterate could tell you what to read.” Well, fuck them. Or, more to the point, let us now take our leave of them. They have declared war on Cyberspace. Let us show them how cunning, baffling, and powerful we can be in our own defense.” [Download PDF] Advertisements Share this: Share Facebook Reddit Twitter Related Posted in Uncategorized |
Thursday, 10 Jul, 2008 Science According to the study performed by the University of Sussex, music can calm much better if it is played by real musicians rather than computers. Neuroscientists analyzed the reaction of the brain to the piano sonatas, which were played by a musician and a computer. They discovered that, though computerized music did get some response from the brain – mainly to unpredicted changes of the chords – the effect was not as strong as the response to the same melody played by a professional pianist. Dr. Stefan Koelsch, a senior research fellow in psychology, was the one to lead the research, being supported by his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, located in Leipzig. The scientists played a number of extracts from classical piano sonatas to 20 people, who were not professional musicians, and made records of the brain responses, as well as reactions of the skin conductance, which fluctuate with sweat production as a result of emotional reaction. Despite the fact that the participants did not have any experience in playing musical instruments and considered themselves to be unmusical, their brains had a clear reaction to musical changes (including unexpected chords and modifications in tonal key). Such reactions show that the brain was able to understand musical grammar. The reaction of the brain was much sharper when the classical piano sonatas were played by professional musicians. "It was interesting for us that the emotional reactions to the unexpected chords were stronger when played with musical expression. This shows us how musicians can enhance the emotional response to particular chords due to their performance, and it shows us how our brains react to the performance of other individuals," mentioned Dr. Koelsch. During the study the researchers were also able to discover that when a classic composition was played by a real musician, human brain was more likely to search for musical meaning. "This is similar to the response we see when the brain is responding to language and working out what the words mean. Our results suggest that musicians actually tell us something when they play. The brain responses show that when a pianist plays a piece with emotional expression, the piece is actually perceived as meaningful by listeners, even if they have not received any formal musical training," said Dr. Koelsch. Powered by www.infoniac.com |
I am fairly new to Qt and creating a simple application that initializes a number of custom QGraphicsItems in a custom QGraphicsScene. Each item is initialized with a random start position and a Weight value which is dependent on the position of the item. On a mouse move event, i want the Weight value of the items to update based on the position of the mouse cursor I think my the mouseMoveEvent is not recognized within the graphicsScene, it seems to work fine in the main window where i implemented a label in the status bar to show the number of mouseMoveEvents and the X-Y position of the mouseMoveEvent Here is the code: Custom graphics Scene .h: class ParticleScene : public QGraphicsScene { public: ParticleScene(); protected: void mouseMoveEvent(QGraphicsSceneMouseEvent *event); private: qreal WTotal; Particle *particle; } Custom Graphics Scene .cpp: ParticleScene::ParticleScene() { //this->setBackgroundBrush(Qt::gray); this->setSceneRect(0,0,500,500); WTotal=0; int ParticleCount =5; for (int i =0; i<ParticleCount; i++) { particle= new Particle(); particle->StartX= rand()%500; particle->StartY= rand()%500; particle->W= qSqrt(qPow(particle->StartX,2) + qPow(particle->StartY,2)); particle->setPos(particle->StartX,particle->StartY); this->addItem(particle); particle->setFocus(); WTotal+=particle->W; } } void ParticleScene::mouseMoveEvent(QGraphicsSceneMouseEvent *event) { update(); QGraphicsScene::mouseMoveEvent(event); } Particle.h: I added the Keypress event function and this moved only the last item that was added to the scene, i assume only one item can get focus. The mouseMove event on the other hand didn't do anything class Particle :public QGraphicsItem { public: Particle(); QRectF boundingRect() const; void paint(QPainter *painter, const QStyleOptionGraphicsItem *option, QWidget *widget); int StartX; int StartY; qreal W; protected: //added keyPressEvent to test virtual void keyPressEvent(QKeyEvent *event); virtual void mouseMoveEvent(QGraphicsSceneMouseEvent *event); }; Particle.cpp: Particle::Particle() { // setFlag(ItemIsMovable); setFlag(ItemIsFocusable); } QRectF Particle::boundingRect() const { return QRect(0,0,120,30); } void Particle::paint(QPainter *painter, const QStyleOptionGraphicsItem *option, QWidget *widget) { QRectF rec= boundingRect(); QBrush Brush(Qt::white); painter->fillRect(rec,Brush); painter->drawText(15,15,"Weight: "+QString::number(W)); painter->drawRect(rec); } void Particle::keyPressEvent(QKeyEvent *event) { switch(event->key()){ case Qt::Key_Right:{ moveBy(30,0); break;} case Qt::Key_Left:{ moveBy(-30,0); break;} case Qt::Key_Up:{ moveBy(0,-30); break;} case Qt::Key_Down:{ moveBy(0,30); break;} } update(); } void Particle::mouseMoveEvent(QGraphicsSceneMouseEvent *event) { this->W= this->W / qSqrt(qPow(event->pos().x(),2) + qPow(event->pos().y(),2)); moveBy(30,0); update(); } MainWindow .h and cpp: the status bar label here displays the mouse coordinates correctly i.e. mouseMoveEvent functions here namespace Ui { class MainWindow; } class MainWindow : public QMainWindow { Q_OBJECT public: explicit MainWindow(QWidget *parent = 0); ~MainWindow(); void mouseMoveEvent(QMouseEvent *event); protected: private: Ui::MainWindow *ui; ParticleScene *scene; QLabel *statlabel; int moves; }; MainWindow::MainWindow(QWidget *parent) : QMainWindow(parent), ui(new Ui::MainWindow) { ui->setupUi(this); statlabel=new QLabel(this); ui->statusBar->addWidget(statlabel); statlabel->setText ("Mouse Coordinates"); setCentralWidget(ui->graphicsView); centralWidget()->setAttribute(Qt::WA_TransparentForMouseEvents); ui->graphicsView->setMouseTracking(true); scene= new ParticleScene(); ui->graphicsView->setScene(scene); ui->graphicsView->setRenderHint(QPainter::Antialiasing); moves=0; } MainWindow::~MainWindow() { delete ui; } void MainWindow::mouseMoveEvent(QMouseEvent *event) { moves+=1; statlabel->setText("MouseMoves " +QString::number(moves)+ " X:"+QString::number(event->pos().x())+"-- Y:"+QString::number(event->pos().y())); } What am I missing in the program that causes the mousemoveevent to not function and Is there a way to focus all the items together? Would i need to perhaps, make them into QList? In the Next step of the program, I would like the items to update their weight value based on the sum of all their weights and also move based on an algorithm that uses the new weight value to determine a new position. |
The Open Society Foundation for South Africa (OSF-SA) is a South African non-profit grant-making organisation that supports the civil society sector. Its mission is to "promote the values, institutions and practices of an open, non-racial and non-sexist, democratic civil society." [1] The foundation was established by George Soros in 1993, just prior to the dismatling of apartheid and South Africa's transition to democracy.[2] OSF-SA's Executive Director is Fatima Hassan who is a human rights lawyer and social justice activist. Before joining OSF-SA she was a lawyer for the Aids Law Project where she frequently represented the Treatment Action Campaign. She also clerked at the Constitutional Court of South Africa for Justice Kate O'Regan and later served as Special Advisor in the Health and Public Enterprises Ministries under Barbara Hogan.[3] OSF-SA is connected to the Open Society Foundations. |
Rumor It's no surprise given his success with the Seattle Sounders, but rumor has it that Roman Torres' old club, Colombian side Millonarios, wants him back. He's reportedly not interested in going anywhere, however. Rumor The Trinidad & Tobago FA website reported on Apr. 4 that Seattle Sounders D Joevin Jones is receiving transfer interest from "clubs from the German Bundesliga, Spanish La Liga, the Mexican First Division and also another unnamed club in France." Rumor Reports out of the Paraguayan press on Mar. 30 claim F Derlis Gonzalez is possibly joining the Seattle Sounders, according to comments from the player himself. The 23-year-old is currently playing in Ukraine for Dynamo Kyiv. Signing The Seattle Sounders announced on March 2 that they have signed Ms Zach Mathers and Jordy Delem to the first-team roster after both played for Sounders FC 2 in 2016. Rumor A piece on futbolcidade.com offers insight into the saga connecting AC Milan’s Keisuke Honda to the Seattle Sounders. It notes that the Italian club’s uncertain ownership situation has raised some questions over the timing of Honda’s rumored move to Seattle, specifically over whether Honda could arrives in MLS’ primary transfer window, which closes on May 8, or after his contract expires in the summer. Rumor Italian outlets reported on Friday that the Seattle Sounders are close to adding Japanese international M Keisuke Honda from AC Milan. Honda, 30, would presumably command a Designated Player contract. Loan The Sounders loaned Homegrown F Victor Mansaray to FC Cincinnati, the USL side announced on Feb. 6. The 19-year-old turned pro in 2015, and has spent most of his playing time the last two years with Seattle's USL side, S2, having made three career MLS appearances to date. Report Seattle bid farewell to popular Swede Erik Friberg over the winter but according to Expressen on Jan. 29, the Sounders may acquire his countryman, M Gustav Svensson, from Chinese side Guangzhou in large part to that league's new restrictions on foreign players. Rumor After earlier MLS Italia reports that Sevilla midfielder Hiroshi Kiyotake was considering MLS, it appears he's now on the move, with an offer on the table, likely from the Sounders. Training Seattle Sounders coach Brian Schmetzer told reporters on Jan. 27 that former Sounders star Steve Zakuani, who retired as a player after the 2014 season, has been training with the club this preseason and is "somewhere between training and on trial." Signing Dipping into the reserve roster at USL side Sounders FC2, Seattle announced the signing of Cameroonian D Nouhou Tolo. Trialist A former USMNT prospect and US youth international is on trial with the Seattle Sounders. D Gale Agbossomounde, formerly of Toronto and Colorado, is on Seattle’s initial preseason roster. Signings The Seattle Sounders announced on Jan. 18 that they had signed forward Seyi Adekoya and midfielder Henry Wingo as the eighth and ninth Homegrown Players in team history. Rumor Italian outlet SportLatina reported that Kenyan midfielder McDonald Mariga is drawing interest from the Seattle Sounders, Portland Timbers, and Vancouver Whitecaps. The Timbers, however, are the ones who are reportedly closest to signing him. Rumor San Lorenzo's Sebastian Blanco is linked once again with a move to the Seattle Sounders after the player's agent told Argentina's Radio Punto the winger has received offers from the MLS side and from Club America. Departing Multiple reports out of Paraguay on Dec. 31 have Sounders forward Nelson Haedo Valdez returning to his native Paraguay with Cerro Porteño. Departing After having his option declined following the season, M Erik Friberg is on the verge of re-signing with his former club in Sweden, BK Hacken, according to a Swedish outlet. Rumor The Seattle Sounders are the latest club to be linked with a swoop for AC Milan playmaker Keisuke Honda, with his agent saying he would prefer to come to MLS over China. Report Word in Europe is that Real Salt Lake and MLS Cup champions Seattle Sounders are reportedly set to battle Roma and Swansea for the services of young Groningen attacker Albert Rusnak. UPDATE: Fox Sports Netherlands journalist Martijn Visscher reports that RSL and Groningen have agreed to a deal for the 22-year-old Slovak inernational, though Rusnak and the MLS side have yet to agree to personal terms. Trade On Dec. 23 Seattle Sounders announced they had acquired F Will Bruin from Houston Dynamo in exchange for Targeted Allocation Money and General Allocation Money. Trade The Sounders acquired attacking midfielder Harry Shipp in a trade with the Montreal Impact on Dec. 22, in exchange for general allocation money. Shipp, 25, spent the 2016 season with the Impact after beginning his professional career with hometown side Chicago Fire in 2014. Rumor Reports on Twitter began circulating on Dec. 21 that the Sounders were close to signing a Nicaraguan defender, believed to be D Luis Fernando Copete. The 27-year-old was born in Colombia but has represented Nicaragua internationally, and currently plays for Nicaraguan powerhouse Real Esteli. Report On Dec. 17 Sounder at Heart analyzed an early-December report from Algerian outlet Le Buteur that Seattle were one of several suitors for F/M Hilal El Arabi Soudani, an Algeria international and 2014 World Cup veteran who is considering a move from his current club Dinamo Zagreb. Re-Entry The Sounders selected GK Bryan Meredith from San Jose in Stage 1 of the Re-Entry Draft on Dec. 16. Per league rules, Seattle will now pick up the 2017 contract option for Meredith, who returns to Seattle -- his first club -- after three years in San Jose. Re-Entry Seattle lost D Dylan Remick to the Houston Dynamo in Stage 1 of the Re-Entry Draft on Dec. 16. Report A Dec. 13 report out of Scotland said that 23-year-old M Aaron Kovar would be on trial with Scottish second division leaders Hibernian. Rumor MLS Italia reported on Dec. 14 interest from Colombian F Victor Ibarbo in joining the MLS champions. A 26-year-old who is a Colombian international, Ibarbo's club situation is currently shaky, as he's on loan at Greek side Panathinaikos, where he's played and scored in the Europa League this season. But reports are that he isn't getting paid regularly there, and could be looking to depart Italian side Caligiari permanently, where he's been on the books since 2011 but has been regularly sent out on loan. Returning Seattle announced on Dec. 12 that the following players' contract options had been exercised for 2017: GK Tyler Miller, D Tony Alfaro, D Oniel Fisher, D Joevin Jones, D Roman Torres, M Brad Evans, M Aaron Kovar and F Victor Mansaray. The club confirmed that GK Stefan Frei, D Chad Marshall, M Osvaldo Alonso, M Nicolas Lodeiro, M Alvaro Fernandez, M Cristian Roldan, F Clint Dempsey and F Jordan Morris are all under contract for next year. . Departing The Sounders also announced that they would not pick up 2017 options on the following players: F Oalex Anderson, M Michael Farfan, M Erik Friberg, F Herculez Gomez, M Andreas Ivanschitz, F Darwin Jones, D Damion Lowe, GK Charlie Lyon, D Tyrone Mears, D Jimmy Ockford, D Dylan Remick, M Nathan Sturgis and F Nelson Valdez. D Zach Scott had previously announced his plans to retire at the conclusion of the 2016 season.. Trade On Dec. 5, the Seattle Sounders received General Allocation Money from Atlanta United FC in exchange for the righ of first refusal to M Miguel Almiron. |
Revised Supersport Race 1 Results - statement 4.15pm on Monday 6th June 2016 STATEMENT ISSUED BY ACU EVENTS LTD ISLE OF MAN TT RACES - SUPERSPORT RACE 1 POST RACE DISQUALIFICATIONS ACU Events Ltd can confirm that two competitors have been disqualified from today’s Supersport Race 1 at the Isle of Man TT Races. Michael Dunlop has been excluded from the results for a technical infringement identified during post race examination. ACU Events Ltd do not believe that there was a deliberate attempt to gain an unfair advantage and no significant performance advantage was gained. As a result of this disqualification, Dean Harrison moves up to second place with James Hillier now taking the final podium position. In addition Rob Hodson, who finished 14th in the same race, has also been disqualified from the race having been found to have been running a significantly oversized engine. - Ends Statement from Mar-Train regarding Michael Dunlop's exclusion click here Statement from PRF Engineering: "PRF racing would like to issue the following statement in response to yesterday's disqualification from the super sport 1 race. PRF racing would like to apologise to everyone concerned for unknowingly fielding an illegal engine in yesterday super sport 1 race. PRF bought a replacement 600cc engine in good faith due to multiple engine failures in qualification last week. We categorically place on record that we never have and never would knowingly field an illegal engine under any circumstances which has been proven in past history by having many engines striped and inspected. Furthermore we would like to also pass on our sincere apologies to Rob Hodson who rode a great race yesterday and was unaware as we where that the engine in his super sport machine did not comply to super sport 600 regulations." |
Turing, Alan Mathison (1912–1954) Alan Turing was an English mathematician and computer scientist considered to be one of the fathers of modern digital computing. At an early age, Turing showed signs of the genius and eccentricity that were to become hallmarks of his adult personality. He taught himself to read in three weeks and made a habit of stopping at street corners to read the serial numbers of traffic lights. Later, he became a near-Olympic class runner and ran long distances with an alarm clock tied to his waist to time himself. At Cambridge, Turing studied under G. H. Hardy and got involved with problems that David Hilbert and Kurt Gödel had proposed to do with completeness and decidability in mathematics. In 1936, he introduced the idea of what became known as Turing machines – formal devices capable of solving any conceivable mathematical problem that could be represented by an algorithm. However, the Turing machine was only a theoretical possibility at that time and not a working implementation. It would remain for later researchers to solve the various practical difficulties required to make the computer a reality. Turing also showed that there were mathematical problems that a Turing machine could never solve. One of these is the halting problem. While his proof was published after that of Alonzo Church, Turing's work is more accessible and intuitive. During World War II, Turing was a major player at Bletchley Park, near present-day Milton Keynes (a town built after the War) in the successful efforts to crack the Nazi Enigma ciphers. While serving at Bletchley Park (1939-1944), he stayed at the Crown Inn, Shenley Brook End, and somewhere near here he buried two silver bars, carefully recording the site with respect to local landmarks. When he returned to recover them, the area had been rebuilt. Despite several attempts with metal detectors, he never recovered them and no one else is known to have found them. The Crown is now a private house and the area where he buried the bars is a housing estate. Turing's interest in computing continued after the War, when he worked at the National Physical Laboratory on the development of a stored-program computer (the ACE or Automatic Computing Engine). In 1948 he moved to the University of Manchester, where the first stored program digital computer ran later that year. In 1950, in the article "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," Turing tackled the problem of artificial intelligence, and proposed an experiment now known as the Turing test. In 1952 his lover helped a compatriot to break into Turing's house and commit larceny. Turing went to the police to report the crime. As a result of the police investigation, he was charged with homosexuality (then a crime), offered no defense, and was convicted. Following the well-publicized trial, he was given a choice between incarceration and libido-reducing hormone injections. He chose the latter, which lasted for a year and had side effects including the development of breasts during that period. In 1954 he died of poisoning after eating a cyanide-laced apple. Most (though not his mother) believed that his death was intentional, and the death was ruled a suicide. According to one urban legend the Apple company's logo is symbolic of this event: an apple with two bites (or possibly bytes) out of it and rainbow colors that code for homosexuality. Turing machine A Turing machine is an abstract model of computer execution and storage introduced in 1936 by Turing to give a mathematically precise definition of algorithm (see Figure 2). A Turing machine can be thought of as a black box that carries out a calculation of some kind on an input number. If the calculation reaches a conclusion, or halts, then an output number is returned. Otherwise, the machine theoretically carries on forever. There are an infinite number of Turing machines, as there are an infinite number of calculations that can be done with a finite list of rules. A Turing machine that can simulate any other Turing machine is called a. The concept of Turing machines is still widely used in theoretical computer science, especially in complexity theory and the theory of computation. Reference 1. Hodges, Andrew, and Hofstadter, Douglas. Alan Turing: The Enigma. New York: Walker & Co, 2000. |
SAN FRANCISCO (CN) – Native American and black students face blatant racial and sexual harassment on a daily basis from students and staff at Eureka City Schools District, the ACLU claims in a federal lawsuit on behalf of students and parents. Lead plaintiff Jessica K. accuses school officials of “perpetuating a racially and sexually hostile environment in district schools,” allowing black students to be called “niggers,” forcing Native American students out of the district, and condoning weekly traditions of “Titty-Twisting Tuesdays” and “Slap-Ass Fridays,” in the 51-page complaint. Two of the plaintiffs are black and female, one is black and male, and one is Native American and female; all are 13 to 16 years old. They and their guardians accused the Eureka School District of “allowing pervasive racial harassment, disproportionately and unfairly disciplining Black and Native American students, disproportionately pushing Native American students out of district schools and into alternative schools, and providing racially offensive and culturally denigrating curricula in district schools.” Defendants include top administrators in the district as a whole, and at Eureka High School and Zane Middle School. Black and Native American students are suspended at three to five times the rate of their enrollment, whereas white students are suspended at or around their rates of enrollment, according to the complaint. School officials are aware of this disproportionate discipline, but have done nothing to address the disparity, the ACLU claims, citing data from the 2011-2012 school year. Native American students are pushed out of mainstream schools and into county-run community schools for “high-risk” students who have been expelled or referred by the county probation department or school attendance review board, according to the lawsuit. The school district transfers Native American students to alternative schools for other reasons, such as “credit recovery, as a means of disciplining students, and as an alternative to providing services and educational supports that students need and to which they are legally entitled,” the ACLU claims. Plaintiff Alexis R., a Native American, says she was forced to transfer to a community school when she fell behind after contracting the H1N1 “swine flu” virus. Rather than help her catch up, she says, her school shipped her to an alternative school, which does not provide appropriate coursework for college-bound students. “During the 2011-2012 school year, defendants transferred Native American students to Eureka Community School at such a high rate that their enrollment there was three times more than their district enrollment,” according to the lawsuit. Black and Native American students say they face daily discrimination and harassment from students and sometimes even staff members. “White students frequently use racial slurs, calling black students ‘niggers,’ and making comments such as, ‘Black girls grow up to be whores.’ Although students regularly utter these slurs in class and in school hallways, school staff do not stop them. Not only do school staff allow students to use racial slurs in their presence, but school staff also make derogatory comments, such as, ‘Black people get bored easily.’ White students also regularly threaten and inflict violence on students of color,” the students say in the complaint. Curriculum and school activities throughout the district include materials that use the words “savage” and “nigger,” and Native American students are “made to feel ashamed of their culture,” according to the lawsuit. The students claim the school district is a sexually hostile environment for girls, who are subjected to unwelcome verbal provocations and sexual physical conduct during school hours on school grounds. Officials at Zane Middle School tolerate “weekly traditions of ‘Titty-Twisting Tuesdays’ and ‘Slap-Ass Fridays,’ where students assault other students by hitting or grabbing their nipples, breasts, and buttocks in the hallways, locker rooms, and other areas of the school. District staff witness and sometimes even participate in these practices, demonstrating to students that sexual harassment is acceptable in district schools,” the students say in the 51-page lawsuit. Students have even slapped the buttocks of school administrators and female teachers without the staff taking any steps to stop the behavior, according to the complaint. Girls are verbally harassed, called “hooker,” “whore” and “slut,” and district officials know it, but have not stopped it, the students say. Finally, the ACLU says, the district discriminates against minority students with disabilities by failing to provide them meaningful access to education. “Rather than identifying and providing accommodations and modifications that would enable students to succeed in district schools, defendants disproportionately suspend and push out students with disabilities to alternative schools,” the complaint states. For example, at one school, 90 percent of the black students and 50 percent of the Native American students who were suspended had disabilities, while only 26 percent of their white counterparts had disabilities. At one elementary school, all of the black students who were suspended had identified disabilities, according to the complaint. “School officials must be held accountable for failing to uphold their obligation to ensure that all Eureka students are protected from harassment and discrimination,” said Jory Steele, managing attorney and director of education equity for the ACLU of Northern California. In a response to the lawsuit, Eureka City Schools said it has been implementing programs to educate students and staff about the backgrounds and needs of the student body. “We have investigated and will continue to investigate claims of harassment and discrimination that are brought to our attention,” the district said in a statement on its Internet home page, checked this morning. “At this time we are not aware of evidence to support the allegations. We do not tolerate harassment or discrimination, and we believe every student is entitled to a safe school environment free from discrimination, harassment, intimidation and bullying. As a district we take the allegations seriously, and we are actively investigating the charges to determine the facts. The well being of our students continues to be a top priority for Eureka City Schools.” The statement, dated Wednesday, Dec. 18, is the lead item on the district’s web page, and was posted in response to the lawsuit. The plaintiffs seek compensatory and statutory damages for harassment and discrimination, and a protective injunction. Also Wednesday, the ACLU joined forces with California Indian Legal Services to file a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education, alleging racial discrimination against Native American students by Loleta Union School District employees. The complaint charges the staff at Loleta Elementary School with physically assaulting Native American students, using racial slurs in front of them, and routinely suspending and expelling Native American students for minor behavioral issues. Loleta is about 10 miles south of Eureka. Like this: Like Loading... |
History of "The World's Largest Teapot" 1938 The Chester Teapot was constructed by William "Babe" Devon. The Teapot started its life as a gigantic wooden hogshead barrel for a Hire's Root Beer advertising campaign. Devon purchased the barrel in Pennsylvania and had it shipped to Chester where it was set up on Carolina Avenue, which is also State Route 2. A spout and handle were added at this time and the wooden barrel was covered with tin to form the teapot's shape. A large glass ball was placed on top to make the knob of the "lid". The Teapot stood in front of Devon's pottery outlet store. Local teenagers were hired to run a concession and souvenir stand which was set up inside the Teapot. 1947 - Late 1960's After being closed for two years during World War II when gas rationing caused a decrease in traffic and thus visitors, the Teapot and Devon's pottery business were sold to Mary Wucherer and Rhelda Cain in 1947. Food was once again sold out of the Teapot until the late 1960's when that became unprofitable. It was at that time that the Teapot was used to sell lawn and garden items as well as china and novelty pieces. 1971 The Teapot was sold to Cecil and Alice Fletcher. The Teapot had been painted blue and white by this time. The Fletchers continued to sell pottery and other gift items from it for many years before they finally closed the business and shut down the Teapot. 1984 The Teapot sat abandoned in place until 1984 when C&P Telephone purchased the land it was on. The main building of the old business was demolished and the Teapot itself was in danger of being scrapped. Geneva Hill, a Chester native, brought citizens to action in helping to save the Teapot from destruction. 1987 C&P Telephone offered to donate the Teapot to the City of Chester. A restoration committee was formed by Councilwoman Anne Ford who polled town residents on their feelings about the Teapot. The town overwhelmingly approved the restoration of the Teapot and fund-raising plans were made. The Teapot was moved to various places in Chester while the $3000 required to restore it was raised. Repair work eventually began on the floor and roof joints. The exterior tin of the Teapot was also sandblasted for cleaning, but it caused wrinkling in some places. As this repair work continued, problems with the State Highway Department and various townspeople caused much debate on where the Teapot should be permanently located. The debate drug on and the Teapot endured a number of years of bad weather which created new problems for it. At this point, Ford's committee was disbanded and further restoration attempts were halted. |
smoke-belching chimneys health complications blood pressure Crawford Market BMC GT Hospital KEM Hospital Thousands of residents struggling with poor health and loss of livelihood say they have been sent to Mahul to die.Six years ago, the city started packing off thousands of its poorest citizens from various areas to Chembur’s Mahul locality, where they were promised a better life in a huge apartment complex. Today, most of the residents in the colony — which is flanked byand where basic amenities are appallingly inadequate — are prepared to trade the flats for their old slum existence.“At least we won’t be breathing in or drinking poison. There won’t be black patches or painful blisters on our skin, and we will still have some way to earn a livelihood,” said 53-year-old resident Sarladevi Gupta.The Mahul colony, which has 72 buildings, was supposed to be a quiet rehabilitation community for people displaced by various infrastructure and municipal projects across Mumbai, but it is increasingly being described as a hellhole. Sewage routinely overflows, water supply often lasts for only an hour, there is no school or a big hospital, and fumes from refineries and industries nearby fill the air.Hundreds of residents, across different age groups, are suffering from a wide range of— skin conditions, respiratory problems, low immunity,. Many have also complained of rapid hair loss, and irritation in the eyes and a burning sensation in the throat. They have to travel to Ghatkopar, Sion orto seek treatment at a public hospital, the only place they can afford medical care.“I left my home of 50 years in Nehru Nagar, Kurla, and came here so the city’s water pipeline is not affected, and this is what I get,” said 70-year-old resident Hirabai Sequeria, showing rashes and black patches on her skin.Over 30,000 Project Affected People (PAP) were brought to Mahul from slums and settlements in Kurla, Ghatkopar, Vidyavihar, Mahalaxmi, and Bandra. The shanties of majority of them, including Sequeria’s, were demolished for the BMC’s Tansa pipeline. The Slum Rehabilitation Authority constructed the 72 buildings, which are each seven storeys tall and have about 300 one-room-kitchen flats. The entire PAP zone now comes under the, which is the nodal agency for maintaining the area.There are a number of industrial units near Mahul: Hindustan Petroleum and Bharat Petroleum refineries, Sea Lord Containers, Aegis Logistics Ltd, Tata Power and Rashtriya Chemical and Fertilizers.Kusum Gangavane, a 37-yearold software engineer, moved with her parents from Kurla’s Santoshi Mata Nagar to Mahul in 2012. Six months later, her parents died following an asthma attack. They were in good health before they shifted to Mahul.“This is a gas chamber. Soon after we came here, my mother became very ill. She often complained of breathlessness. The doctor said: ‘Hawa badalli ahe. Suit hot nahi (Your climate has changed. It doesn’t suit you).’ But we had nowhere else to go — our house in Kurla had already been demolished,” Kusum said before breaking down.Kusum’s health has also slowly deteriorated. Her immune system has almost collapsed, she experiences severe body ache and she struggles to move around. She has sold off her mother’s jewellery to manage expenses.“How long can this go on? People here are dying bit by bit. Why don’t they (authorities) make us stand in a row and shoot us instead?” she said.Mahesh Gaikwad, 16, often gets called a ‘freak’ by some mean kids in the locality. He has blisters on his face, which is swollen. “The skin problem developed only after I moved here with my family. We used to earlier live in a shanty in Vidyavihar,” he said.Dr Akhilesh Goud, who runs a homeopathic clinic in the locality, gets four to five patients with skin or respiratory problems every day. “It’s a serious problem here. I refer them to bigger hospitals like BMC-run Rajawadi in Ghatkopar,” he said.But getting to the hospital is a challenge. Hirabai Sequeria, 70, has to take a packed bus, where she doesn’t always get a seat, then take a train to CST and walk for 20 minutes to reach state-runnear Crawford Market.Doctors and experts have not directly blamed the fumes from the refineries and the factories for the health woes suffered by the residents. They believe a combination of factors, including suspected water contamination, could be behind the problems.In 2013, a survey byrevealed high incidence of respiratory issues in Mahul and Ambapada. It revealed that “67.1 per cent population had complaints of breathlessness more than three times in a month”. The National Green Tribunal cited the findings in 2015 while hearing a case moved by residents against the industries.A 2014-15 report by the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board said: “Concentrations of nickel and benzopyrene are regularly exceeding the standards in all samples... significant presence of volatile organics, benzene, toluene, xylene, ethyl benzene.”Laxmibai, 61, who also lives in the complex, said the rehabilitation was increasingly looking like a death sentence. “There is always a haze over the locality, we cannot get around easily as there is no proper public transport and we don’t have many work opportunities here. It seems we were sent to Mahul to die slowly,” she said. “My husband passed away within months of shifting here.”She is considering to sell her home in the colony and move out. “It’s better than suffering here. We were better off in the slums.”Many residents are struggling to make ends meet after losing employment while shifting to Mahul.“Our lives has turned upside down. The buildings are nice, but we get little work in the area,” 60-yearold Khatija Bi, who sells confectioneries and cigarettes. She came to Mahul from a slum colony in Bandra East. “Earlier, I used to wash utensils at weddings and big parties and make Rs 300 a day. Now, I hardly make Rs 100 at this stall. I have mortgaged my daughter’s earrings to support the stall,” she said. A number of stalls have come up near the complex, most of them started by the poor residents. “There are no opportunities here. It’s expensive to work in another area as there are only two bus services here, one to Kurla and the other to Mantralaya,” said Ravinath Adsul, who shifted to the locality with his mother, wife and kids from Kurla’s Nehru Nagar in 2016.Leaders from across political parties have demanded that Mahul be given a special package for upgrading its poor civic infrastructure. The BMC, however, is yet to take a call on the Rs 300 crore package.“Where in the world does it happen that people are rehabilitated in a place which is worse than their original settlement?” asked Bilal Khan, an activist with the Ghar Bachao Ghar Banao Andolan.Another member of the organisation, Nandu Shinde, is part of a group that has moved the Bombay High Court over the appalling conditions.“This is technically a relocation. Actually, I wouldn’t even call this relocation, this is dumping,” said Bilal Khan, a member of the organisation.The BMC said there was no other place in the city where Project Affected People could have been accommodated. “There are no other tenements available to move people in such large numbers. We don’t have an alternative,” said Parag Masurkar, assistant municipal commissioner (estates).Municipal commissioner Ajoy Mehta said the civic body was taking steps to improve the conditions. “We will appoint contractors for the complex’s maintenance. We have also provided a hospital and a school in the area. Every concern is being addressed,” Mehta told Mirror.But corporator Sandeep Patel is not convinced. “There is no budgetary provision for Mahul as was promised,” he said. |
Dean Beeby, The Canadian Press OTTAWA, Ont. -- Defence researchers spent almost $14,000 on a survey that asked whether superheroes can leap over skyscrapers. The study for the research arm of National Defence also asked 150 people online whether superheroes can fly through the air; see through walls; hear whispers from miles away; become invisible; and walk through walls. The oddball questions were part of a short study completed in October to help the Canadian Forces "win the hearts and minds" of the local populations it faces when deployed overseas, such as recently in Afghanistan. Some of the questions were designed to probe people's expectations about -- as the study put it -- "supernatural categories that are so prevalent in popular culture and religion." The study was carried out by Toronto researcher M. Afzal Upal for Defence Research and Development Canada, or DRDC. National Defence spokesman Noel Paine said the project included a $13,750 payment to the University of Toronto for data collection. "Work on this study was also done by internal DRDC staff," Paine said in Ottawa. "This work will not only allow cultural scientists to better understand the spread of non-natural and religious concepts but also allow the Canadian Armed Forces ... to design messages that are more memorable for their target audiences," says a summary of the research. The armed forces have "no modeling or analytic capability to understand how its actions will impact the psychological meaning space of individuals." The study, one of several planned on the subject, included three experiments that posed a range of philosophical statements, to which online participants indicated their level of agreement. "All mental beings can perceive the world through their sensors," was one such statement. There was relative agreement among survey participants that superheroes can fly and leap over skyscrapers. The survey found least agreement about whether they can become invisible or walk through walls. "The Canadian Armed Forces needs to be able to inform and reassure local populations," DRDC spokeswoman Myriam Bower said in an email, when asked why the research was undertaken at a time of defence budget cuts. "This cannot be done without understanding people's psychological meaning space, i.e., how people perceive, understand and remember various messages." She added: "To ensure best value for taxpayers, the study was offered in a competitive process." The next step in the research, Upal wrote, is to examine the common messages already used by the Canadian Armed Forces to reach local populations, and how those populations actually understand them. Upal's research is related to "psychological operations" or "PSYOPS," a capability that began to be formally developed within the Canadian Army in 2004. Previously, Canada's soldiers relied on other NATO countries for such training. The military says PSYOPS are designed to influence attitudes and behaviours to bring about political and military objectives. Beginning in 2007, the Canadian Forces established a radio station -- RANA-FM -- in support of the Canadian army in Kandahar, as a way to ensure NATO messaging with the local population. The station was actually based in Kingston, Ont., transmitting in Afghanistan using a satellite link. |
Triangle-shaped geographical area in West Yorkshire, England, famed for its production of forced rhubarb Rhubarb sculpture in Wakefield. The Rhubarb Triangle (also alliteratively known as the Tusky Triangle,[1][not in citation given] from the Yorkshire word for rhubarb) is a 9-square-mile (23 km2) triangle in West Yorkshire, England between Wakefield, Morley and Rothwell famous for producing early forced rhubarb. It includes Kirkhamgate, East Ardsley, Stanley, Lofthouse and Carlton.[2] The Rhubarb Triangle was originally much bigger, covering an area between Leeds, Bradford and Wakefield.[3] From the first decade of the 20th century to 1939 the rhubarb industry expanded and at its peak covered an area of about 30 square miles (78 km2).[4] Rhubarb is a native of Siberia and thrives in the wet cold winters in Yorkshire. West Yorkshire once produced 90% of the world's winter forced rhubarb from the forcing sheds that were common across the fields there.[5] In February 2010, Yorkshire Forced Rhubarb was awarded Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) status by the European Commission’s Protected Food Name scheme after being recommended by Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).[6] Cultivation [ edit ] Rhubarb shed in the Rhubarb Triangle The cultivation method for forced rhubarb was developed in the early 1800s.[7] The fields were fertilised with large quantities of horse manure and 'night soil' from the nearby urban areas and woollen waste from "mungo and shoddy" mills.[8] The rhubarb plants spend two years out in the fields without being harvested. While in the fields the plants store energy from the sun in their roots as carbohydrates. The roots are subjected to frost before being moved into sheds in November where they are kept in complete darkness. In the sheds the plants begin to grow in the warmth and the stored carbohydrate in the roots is transformed into glucose resulting in forced rhubarb's sour-sweet flavour.[9] The sheds are long low buildings which are heated; originally with coal, which was plentiful and relatively cheap in the area, but this has been replaced by diesel.[10] Forced rhubarb grown in the sheds is more tender than that grown outdoors in summer. Without daylight the rhubarb leaves are a green-yellow colour, and the stalks, measuring around 2 feet (61 cm), are crimson in colour with a smooth texture. Traditionally, the pickers pull the stalks in candlelight as any exposure to strong light will stop the growth. By the end of March the harvest is over and the root stock is totally exhausted and used for compost.[10] History [ edit ] Growing and forcing rhubarb was originally done by many hundreds of small farmers, smallholders and market gardeners. In later years some growers expanded and owned many thousands of roots and extensive forcing sheds.[4] In the late 19th century early forced rhubarb was sent to Spitalfields and Covent Garden markets in London in time for Christmas and was sent to Paris for the French market. A special express train carrying rhubarb was run by the Great Northern Railway Company from Ardsley station every weekday night during the forced rhubarb season from Christmas until Easter. Up to 200 tons of rhubarb sent by up to 200 growers was carried daily at the peak of production before 1939.[7] In 1962, a rail strike caused the growers to look for alternative transport and the service ended shortly after.[4] Rhubarb became less popular after the Second World War when more exotic fruits became more available.[5] The Oxford English Dictionary dates the name "rhubarb triangle" to a 1965 textbook mentioning pre-war trains rhubarb specials that ran from the West Riding rhubarb triangle to London and it was mentioned in the Guardian newspaper in 1986.[11][12] EU recognition of Yorkshire Forced Rhubarb [ edit ] Carlton village sign celebrates its link with rhubarb Twelve farmers who farm within the Rhubarb Triangle applied to have the name "Yorkshire forced rhubarb" added to the list of foods and drinks that have their names legally protected by the European Commission's Protected Food Name scheme.[13] The application was successful and the farmers in the Rhubarb Triangle[a] were awarded Protected Designation of Origin status (PDO) in February 2010. Food protected status accesses European funding to promote the product and legal backing against other products made outside the area using the name. Other protected names include Stilton cheese, Champagne and Parma Ham. Leeds Central MP, Hilary Benn, was involved in the Defra campaign to win protected status.[14][15] Culture [ edit ] Wakefield Council holds an annual Rhubarb Festival in February, celebrating the area's links and promoting the surviving rhubarb industry. A Farmers' Market, cookery demonstrations, walks and tours of the forcing sheds are among the attractions.[2][16] In 2005 Wakefield council erected a sculpture depicting a rhubarb plant in Holmfield Park Wakefield.[17] Rhubarb growing and the 'Rhubarb Express' are featured in Wakefield Museum. References [ edit ] Notes ^ [14] The Rhubarb Triangle's geographical area in EU law is " from Ackworth Moor Top north along the A628 to Featherstone and Pontefract. Then on to the A656 through Castleford. It then goes west along the A63 past Garforth and West Garforth. Head north passing Whitkirk, Manston and on towards the A6120 by Scholes. Follow the A6120 west, round to pass Farsley which then leads south west via the A647 onto the A6177. Pass Dudley Hill to pick up the M606 south. At junction 26 take the M62 south to junction 25 head east along A644 toward Dewsbury, passing Mirfield, to pick up the A638 towards Wakefield. At Wakefield take the A638 south to Ackworth Moor top. Citations Bibliography Bell, Richard (2009), Walks in the Rhubarb Triangle , Willow Island Editions, ISBN 978-1-902467-18-4 Markham, Len (2005), The Wharncliffe Companion to Wakefield & District , Wharncliffe, ISBN 1-903425-89-1 Robinson, Harry (1965), Geography for business studies, MacDonald & Evans Coordinates: |
I hate almost ALL fitness marketing that’s geared towards women. If these marketers were telling the truth, they’d be saying things like: “Want to tone, tuck, and tighten those abs? Don’t waste your time with this!” “Want to banish that belly fat? This ab coaster won’t help!” “Want to get stronger? You’re gonna need to pick up something heavier than this!” In every issue of practically every women’s fitness magazine, you’re presented with a new workout that promises crazy results in minutes a day by ‘toning muscles’ with light weights and crazy equipment. You’re promised super-foods that specifically target belly fat, and ab workouts, butt workouts, and thigh workouts that are designed to “tighten those problem areas.” All of this lingo makes me want to vomit. And I haven’t vomited in a long time (I’d like to keep that streak going). More than half of the readers of this website are women, and most of them are interested in strength training, but there is a lot of misinformation out there. For that reason, I want to set the record straight today and destroy every myth I’ve heard when it comes to women and strength training. I paired up with Staci Ardison, our lead female trainer for our 1-on-1 Coaching Program at Nerd Fitness, to put this article together. If you’re not familiar with Staci, here are her credentials: Staci has been training clients for the past 5 years, now deadlifts over 400 pounds, and is the strongest person I know. I’m going to dig into 7 brutal myths that need to be put out to pasture in this article, but I want to quickly mention something: If you’re interested in strength training and are unsure of how to do squats or deadlifts, or you’re unsure of how to get started, or you’re lacking confidence to hit the free weight section of the gym – that’s okay, you’re in the right place! We actually created our Coaching Program with women like you in mind! Our coaches can help you with form check on your movements, answer all the questions you have, teach you how to get started with powerlifting, provide much needed accountability and guidance on how to eat and train, and more! You can schedule a call with our team to see if our coaching program is a great fit for you by clicking on the image below and scrolling to the bottom! Okay, let’s get into these myths! Myth #1: Women shouldn’t lift heavy or they’ll get bulky Gwyneth Paltrow’s trainer makes sure that Gwyneth doesn’t pick up anything more than 3 lbs. …because she doesn’t want Gwyneth to get too bulky. Which means, I guess, Gwyneth isn’t allowed to pick up groceries, move a chair, carry her child, or do pretty much anything. This is the biggest myth in all of female training, and it makes me want to punch a hole in the wall. If you’ve been reading this site for a while, you know this isn’t true. If you’re brand new to Nerd Fitness, then allow me to assure you: YOU WILL NOT GET BULKY FROM PICKING UP HEAVY THINGS. You know those women bodybuilders who look really bulky? They eat, train, and take supplements specifically so they can look like that! They’ve probably been working towards that goal for years and years. Here’s the truth: when you pick up heavy things, your muscles get STRONGER (but not necessarily bigger). If you pump yourself full of testosterone and eat way more calories than you are burning every day, sure…you could get bigger. However, if you pick up heavy things, and eat a caloric deficit (and eat the right kinds of food – actual healthy foods), your muscles will get stronger and denser; you will burn the fat on top of your muscle, and you will get that “toned” look that you’re after. You know the aformentioned Staci, right? She picks up very heavy things. How heavy? Her last deadlift session had her picking up 400+ lbs. for a set of five. She weighs 150 lbs. and wears a size US4. Would you call her bulky? Or would you say “I would love to look like that!” Here’s how it works: Picking up light weights for 20+ repetitions builds muscular endurance; it does not build tight, dense, strong muscle. So, want to look damn good AND be strong? Pick up heavy things. And continually force yourself to pick up heavier and heavier things as you get stronger. If you’re interested in picking up heavy things but have NO idea where to start, I got you covered. Staci and I worked together to create a massive, free resource that walks you through every step of the process: from bodyweight training up to finding a gym and what workouts to follow to get comfortable with barbells. Grab your free guide, Strength Training 101: Everything You Need to Know, when you sign up in the box below and join the Rebellion! Download our comprehensive guide STRENGTH TRAINING 101! Everything you need to know about getting strong. Workout routines for bodyweight AND weight training. How to find the right gym and train properly in one. I identify as a: Woman Man Myth #2: You can spot reduce fat Sr Mix-A-Lot was wrong. Don’t do side bends and sit ups, because you’re wasting your time! Side bends will strengthen your side muscles without actually reducing any fat there, potentially making you bigger around the waist unless you change your diet as well. Sit-ups will not remove belly fat. They can also wreak havoc on your lower back, and are an incomplete exercise. Your body cannot spot reduce fat in specific locations. If you have flabby arms or a big stomach, doing thousands of bicep curls and thousands of crunches won’t help. Your body is genetically predisposed to storing fat in certain locations in a certain order. When you start to lose weight, your body will lose the fat you currently have in a certain order as well – it might come off your arms first, then your legs, then your belly, then your chest, and THEN your butt. Or in a different order, depending on your personal genetic makeup. No amount of targeted exercise will change how that fat disappears. Want to make it disappear faster? Eat better. Your diet will be responsible for 80-90% of that fat loss. Strength train, not with targeted exercises, but with big compound movements that recruit lots of muscle (and thus force your body to rebuild lots of muscle, which requires extra calories burned, even after the workout is done). Myth #3: You need cardio to lose weight. If the thought of running on a treadmill for four hours sounds miserable to you, don’t do it. Bronwyn (above), certainly didn’t achieve her results on a treadmill or elliptical! If you never run another mile in your entire life, there’s no reason you cannot be incredibly healthy and look amazing. Despite what you might think, and what you might see in a gym, you will never need to step foot on another cardio machine again. UNLESS YOU WANT TO. I’m a big fan of “do what makes you happy.” If you happen to enjoy running or zumba or step aerobics or jazzercize, that is awesome. More power to you. However, if you are ONLY doing those things to lose weight and you’re not seeing results, stop. There’s a better way. Believe it or not, strength training will produce a more efficient weight loss effect than an equal amount of cardio. When you strength train, your muscles are broken down, and then rebuilt over the next 24-48 hours. While your body is rebuilding those muscles, it’s recruiting more calories and energy to make the process happen (generally referred to as the ‘afterburn’ effect). What this means is that your metabolism operates at a faster level even while you’re sitting on the couch after a workout. Want to hear something else? You don’t NEED to strength train either! I hate saying it, but it’s true: if your goal is to JUST lose weight, then fixing your diet will get you 80-90% of the way there. If you never want to set foot in a gym or pick up a weight, that’s fine. For exercise, it’s important to find things that make you happy. Now, if your goals go beyond just losing weight and include things like “looking good” and “being healthy,” then I’m going to ask you to strength train, but there are many ways to do that: Picking up heavy things Swinging kettlebells Doing yoga Doing bodyweight exercises Carrying your kids on a hike Whatever makes you use your muscles in a strenuous way Strength training is more than just sweating in a gym! As we’ve pointed out before: “Strength training helps correct issues relating to cholesterol, high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, and inactivity – all factors for heart disease. Cardiologists are even starting to recommend strength training for people who have suffered a heart attack as little as three weeks after the attack.” Myth #4: One plan will work for every woman You might be out shopping for that ‘master workout plan’ that works for everyone. You might read 10 different books on diet, each presenting a contrasting style that promises amazing results. You might have read our posts on The Paleo Diet and Intermittent Fasting, and wonder: “Will this work for me?” Maybe you’ve considered buying a Nerd Fitness product and you ask yourself “Is this the plan that will finally get me results?” The truth: I don’t know. Everybody, both men and women, react to foods, training, and different stimuli differently. We are all genetically different, have unique characteristics, different lives, preferences, and struggles. The only way to know what works for you is to TRY IT OUT, and then TRACK YOUR RESULTS. Yes, I am a big fan of the Paleo Diet and strength training for both men and women. Will these things work for everybody? Nope. HOWEVER, in my 8 years of experience as Rebel Leader, observing tens of thousands of people working to live better, I believe that following the Paleo Diet and strength training give the greatest number of people the greatest chance for success with the best results. It’s for those reasons that I champion these diet and fitness strategies. These are the same techniques that we’re building our foundation around in our flagship course, The Nerd Fitness Academy: we understand that all women are different, which is why we present multiple training options for multiple environments, and diet advice that allows for flexibility based on one’s situation. Your mom was right. You are, in fact, a unique snowflake 🙂 Myth #5: Men and women should train differently This is another myth that drives me crazy. In commercial gyms across the country, competent trainers are having their male clients go through intense strength training routines with squats, and deadlifts, and overhead presses, and push-ups, and pull-ups, and lunges. In those same gyms, other trainers (both male and female) are putting their female clients through light weight dumbbell circuits, and stability ball squats for high repetitions, and having them do tricep kickbacks, machine hamstring curls, and more. There’s no reason men and women should train differently. I’m fairly confident Staci can outlift me (and everyone else in her gym) in a dozen different ways. That’s AWESOME. There’s no reason that men and women can’t complete the same types of exercises. While a guy can lift a certain way to get bigger, a woman can lift in the same way, but instead build that dense, tight, and lean look (“toned” ugh) that most are aiming for. Thanks to hormones, estrogen, testosterone, genetic, and dietary differences, those two people will end up with drastically different results. Remember, your diet is 80-90% of the battle! Women have just as much a right to be in the free weights section and squat rack as guys do. Unfortunately, it’s just less common (though the Women of Nerd Fitness are changing that!). Train how you want to train. There is no reason you can’t do overhead presses, pull ups, squats, and deadlifts like everybody else. In fact, following a routine like that is a damn good way to give you the best chance to build the body you want! To hammer this point home: Staci wrote the majority of our free guide, Strength Training 101: Everything You Need to Know. The videos we mention and link to within the guide are generally of her demonstrating them. And we know that women often have to face additional challenges when training in the weight section of a gym (usually it’s idiot dudes who think they need help, ugh). If that sounds like something that can help you, download your guide free when you sign up for our mailing list in the box below: Download our comprehensive guide STRENGTH TRAINING 101! Everything you need to know about getting strong. Workout routines for bodyweight AND weight training. How to find the right gym and train properly in one. I identify as a: Woman Man Myth # 6: Want to lose weight? Just eat less! A calorie is a calorie is a calorie, right? If you want to lose weight, just eating less will get you there! And eating even LESS than that will help you get there even faster! This prevailing attitude is responsible for people all over the country being weak, miserable, irritable, and frustrated. Yes, eating less will help you lose weight. However, that is not the whole story. Surviving on 1200 calories (or less a day) is a miserable way to go through life: always hungry, never happy. Our bodies need real food, and they need enough of it in order to operate at optimum efficiency. As I’ve explained a lot on Nerd Fitness, not all calories are created equal (the foundation of the Paleo Diet): Our bodies can react differently to the consumption of protein and healthy fats and vegetables than we do to processed foods, grains, and dairy. Some trigger positive reactions in our body (“rebuild muscle!”), while others trigger negative reactions (“Spike your blood sugar levels! Pump out more insulin! Winter is coming, so store more fat!”) You need to eat real foods. And you need to eat enough of it. Honestly, unless you’re incredibly small, I would never recommend ever putting any woman on a diet of 1200 calories. In fact, I don’t recommend women ever dip below 1800 calories per day if they are exercising regularly! I understand that every woman is different, and every woman processes calories differently, but I can’t emphasize enough that quality of food is so dang important! As long as these calories are composed of the right kinds of food, and this diet is combined with a fun workout that gets your muscles exercising and your heart pumping, you will have success. Conversely, if you only consume 1200 calories per day and you try to exercise, I’m going to guess your body hates you, won’t have any energy, and potentially even revolt against you! You won’t last long on this routine. This is what we’re trying to avoid. I absolutely LOVED this article – and it needs to be read: An Open Letter to My Weight Loss Clients: I’m sorry because every time you ate something you “shouldn’t” or ate more than you “should,” I talked about “getting back on the bandwagon.” I cringe now every time someone uses that phrase. When did the way we eat become a bandwagon? When did everyone stop eating and become professional dieters? I’m sorry because I get it now. If you’re trying to starve your body by eating fewer calories than it needs, of course it’s going to fight back. I used to tell you that then, when you wanted to eat less than 1200 calories a day. The problem was, I thought 1200 was enough. I thought that was plenty to support a healthy body. Why did I believe that for so long? I’m sorry because I wasn’t trying to trick you or play games to get your money. I believed the lies we were fed as much as you did. I am sorry because many of you walked in healthy and walked out with disordered eating, disordered body image, and the feeling that you were a “failure.” None of you ever failed. Ever. I failed you. The weight loss company failed you. Our society is failing you. Just eat food. Eat real food, be active, and live your life. Forget all the diet and weight loss nonsense. It’s really just that. Nonsense. Eat real food! Gluten free cookies are still cookies. 100 calorie packs of junk food? Still junk food. Fat-free Oreos contain more sugar and chemicals than regular Oreos. Naked Juices aren’t good for you (which is why they got sued for $9 million). Eat enough food to provide your body with energy to get through your day and your workouts. Just eat the right KINDS of foods. Myth #7: Older women shouldn’t strength training After women reach menopause, and the potential for osteoporosis kicks in, many women tend to shy away from strength training for fear of injuring themselves. Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! That is the PERFECT time to strength train! Studies have shown that in post-menopausal women, strength training “preserved bone density while improving muscle mass, strength, and balance in postmenopausal women.” Age is only a number. Women don’t get old and thus have to stop strength training, they get old WHEN they stop strength training! So, if this 73-year old grandma can strength train, what’s your excuse? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3BxcrYohxg 73-Year Old Grandma Powerlifter Video Ready to Start? Check out The Nerd Fitness PROGRAMs Over the past 9 years, Team Nerd Fitness and I have learned a tremendous amount about how to best serve the ladies of this community. We’ve taken years of experience, hired people like Jim Bathurst and Staci to make our team even better, worked hard to create an experience that helps you get started with strength training and reaching your goals. I want to share with you my favorite success story. Meet Leslie, a very sedentary single mom who works long hours that managed to lose 100+ lbs with the Nerd Fitness Coaching Program: Does she look like somebody who let myths rule her life or keep her afraid? Heck no! She learned to train the right way, picked up a barbell, fixed her diet, and now does crazy things like handstands and ring work! If you are done with the myths above, and you’re ready to start strength training, you’re in the right place! Not sure what to do or how to get started? Consider checking out our 1-on-1 Coaching Program! Our philosophies help women like Leslie above, they’re the philosophies our lead trainer Staci lives by, and they can be the philosophies that help you become strong inside and out. Click on the image below to schedule a call and see if we’re a good fit for each other! What myths drive you crazy? These are the myths that drive me crazy, because they keep many women from picking up a barbell and discovering just how empowering picking up a barbell can be. In the meantime, I’d love to hear what other myths make your blood boil. What questions do you have that still have you confused? Let’s hear it! We’re here for ya 🙂 -Steve and Staci PS: We know starting with this stuff can be intimidating, which is why we’ve built services and products to help you overcome the chaos and feel confident in the actions you’re taking every day: 1-on-1 Online Coaching: No more guesswork. No shame. No guilt. Just a sympathic ear, expert guidance, and accountability. A coach from Team NF gets to know you better than you know yourself and builds a workout program and nutritional strategy that fits your busy life, your body type, and your goals. No more guesswork. No shame. No guilt. Just a sympathic ear, expert guidance, and accountability. A coach from Team NF gets to know you better than you know yourself and builds a workout program and nutritional strategy that fits your busy life, your body type, and your goals. The Nerd Fitness Academy A self-paced online course with 7-level no-gym-required workouts, boss battles, HD-video demonstrations, a nutrition and mindset roadmap, and supportive community in our flagship course. ### photo source: post-its, weight, silhouette woman, lego, man vs woman, bullseye, sexist ad, magazines |
40 SHARES Share Tweet I am a therapist, but I am not your therapist. Therapy, in my opinion, is not just about the information I give, but also about the highly individualized relationship I build with each client, getting to know their unique needs, strengths, and challenges. This column is not meant to substitute individual therapy. And when in doubt, speak to a therapist about these issues — preferably someone who knows you, who you feel safe with, and who is equipped to support you exactly as you are. ** All of the questions I received were complex, and profoundly honest. Thank you for your submissions. The questions answered in this month’s column were edited for length and privacy, while attempting to preserve the original question. Dear Feminist Therapist, I’m a lesbian in a long-distance relationship with a wonderful woman. Lately, I’ve been experiencing nightmares with unpleasant (hetero)sexual connotations. Sometimes these dreams begin with me finding out that I’m pregnant and not knowing how I was impregnated or who the father is. Other times they involve a male friend of mine pressuring me for physical intimacy such as cuddling and kissing, and me giving in because he’s lonely and I feel sorry for him. The dreams make me really uncomfortable and creeped out, even long after I’ve woken up from them. I don’t know if it’s possible to make the nightmares go away, but how can I learn to let go of them and not let them affect me during the daytime? -D Dear D, I’m so sorry to hear that those nightmares have been occurring; I can imagine that would feel so confusing and scary. Even though we know nightmares are not real, when we can’t escape the disturbing themes, and the lasting mental torture feels very real indeed. We can have dreams and nightmares for a variety of reasons. One theory of dreaming is that our brains are mixing factual information with experiential and affective information from our life, and we process it during our dream sleep. Sometimes our dreams are jumble of nonsense information, and other times it’s our brains “working through” something we’ve experienced, that may be unresolved in some capacity. I believe this is particularly the case when recurring themes appear in our dreams. Think of these kinds of dreams as a reminder notice for a parking ticket: when we have an unpaid parking ticket the city sends us a reminder to deal with this “unfinished business,” that, despite the fact we forgot, hasn’t been resolved. This is often the case for people who have been through trauma or have PTSD. Although there are some popular themes when assessing symbols of dreams, I prefer to take a more person-centered approach. In therapy, I would probably want you to reflect on the predominant feelings connected to the dream, particularly feelings and themes that you experience during the dream, and ask if they resonate with some part of your life, past or present. I certainly don’t want to tell you that I know what the dreams mean, but I would be curious about the feelings you’ve conveyed around giving in to accommodate others, at your own cost, and the confusion or shock at the reality of your circumstances. Just as importantly, we live in a heteronormative patriarchal society in which we are inundated with normalized narratives of male sexuality; as such, pressuring and coercing women into sex is normalized as well. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if one cause for dreams of this nature is simply about the culture we live in. Because of how our brains recycle and process information during dreams, you could have watched a movie that day in which the main female character found out she was pregnant but didn’t know who the father is. So, as your mind is sorting through the feelings you’re currently experiencing in life, it may be superimposing this normative heterosexual narrative which is pervasive in our culture, on top of other feelings you may need to process and work through. While this is a nicely packaged answer, I can understand that this would be frustrating and upsetting. If you’re really concerned, I would recommend keeping a dream journal (recording dreams you think are significant for some reason, even if unpleasant) and possibly speaking to a therapist about this. While this experience is distressing, I think there is an opportunity for these dreams to help you understand something more about yourself, and the world you live in. Make space in your life to think about the things that might need your attention, and remember to read something pleasant or calming before you go to sleep. Thanks for sharing! ~~~ Dear Feminist Therapist, I’m struggling with guilt connected to my relationship with my parents. I grew up in a really traditional home, and my parents were really upset when I told them I was a lesbian and planned to move in with my partner. I know my parents are really good people and they love me a lot, but there are several things they’ve done to hurt me that make it so hard to have them in my life. To start, they basically outright reject that my relationship and love for my girlfriend is real, and don’t accept her as my partner. We don’t speak much anymore, but on special occasions when we’re together, or when we do talk over the phone, I feel really guilty for keeping the distance that I have with my family. What do I do about that guilt? -L Dear L, What you’re going through sounds so hard. I’m glad that you found a person you love that much. I can tell from your letter that there is an inner conflict for you. I think at various stages in our lives, we struggle with being stuck between who we believe ourselves to be and who we think we “should” be. Sometimes these “shoulds” are communicated to us directly by the people around us, and other times the “shoulds” are inferred by a lack of alternative messages/images/identities in our culture. I have a few thoughts about this. First, do you actually want to have relationship with your parents or are you just grieving? I always think that real authentic and meaningful relationships take effort from both parties. It’s going to be hard for your parents to know how to repair their relationship with you if they don’t know what you need and how you’re hurting. So, if you feel safe talking with them about this (it’s always ok to try with the help of a family therapist) it could be really healing to show them how much their actions have hurt you and ask them to support you in certain ways, even if they don’t agree with your choices. Second, sometimes we feel guilty because we’ve actually done something wrong (for example, if you felt guilty after stealing something). Other times we feel guilty because are worried someone we love feels hurt (which doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve done something wrong, ourselves). Lastly, we can often feel guilty when we’re learning to be ourselves in a relationship and/or culture that tells us that we’re only lovable if we do what other people want us to. I’m not saying that when you’re in a relationship you can do whatever you want and there are no consequences to that. But sometimes when we’ve had relationships with people that are predicated on us being the version of ourselves that makes them happiest, stepping out to be yourself can trigger some old beliefs that act as a warning that you’re stepping outside of old boundaries. It’s unfortunate that this rift has occurred, and I’m sorry that you’re carrying the guilt that you do. I would encourage you to think about what you really want in your relationships with your parents, however that may look. Then, assess what role guilt might be playing in keeping you from moving in that direction. Although it doesn’t sound fun, I think there is an opportunity for you to grow into healthier relationship with yourself, and possibly with your parents. ~~~ Dear Feminist Therapist, I’ve been married for a few years. I fell in love really quickly and dated my partner for a few years before getting married. Until I met her, I had only dated men, and when we were together it felt like something I’d been wanting all those years finally happened. The problem is that right now I’m struggling in my marriage. I feel really isolated and alone. I don’t know who to talk to, and it seems like we’ve just drifted apart over the past few years. I tried reading a few books about marriage, but they were all really hetero-centered and didn’t address lesbian marriage, and what issues might come up in them. Help. -S Dear S, Thanks for taking the risk to share this with me. Taking steps towards honestly examining the state of our relationship can be incredibly painful, but is often the only way to help things move forward. This is my opinion, and other people may feel differently, but I believe that we are all longing for and deserving of love and belonging. We can’t use those things to cover up our insecurities, and stop us from doing our own work, but there is something fundamental to who we are that desires to know we matter to those around us. When we feel disconnected from someone who matters the most to us, that can feel particularly painful. It might seem like a harsh place to start, but the best way to begin change is to consider what we need to take responsibility for. So, can you see what you need to own in your marriage, that might have contributed to this distance? Ideally, if I was seeing you both in therapy, I’d ask you both to answer that question. I know I’m biased as a therapist, but I really do think that we have way too much stigma against therapy in our culture. We don’t expect ourselves to know how to fix our cavities ourselves or check our own eyesight, yet we assume that we have to know everything about relationships and how to heal them? I cannot say this enough: there is no shame in going to therapy. There is only strength and courage in asking for help. You are not alone. While it’s good to have people in our lives we can talk to, be careful not to disclose things to other people that you are both close with and who aren’t safe (i.e. who can’t keep confidentiality). And if you share your marriage struggles with a friend, try and do it in a way which says more about your feelings, your hopes/dreams, than describing the other person’s wrongdoings. It’s hard to uphold the other person’s dignity, and our own integrity, when we’re hurt and alone. Its best to go to your wife and tell her how you’re feeling. Try and do it in a way which brings her close to you, instead of pushing her away. This might sound like, “I’ve noticed recently that I feel further away from you than I want to. I love you and want to be close to you. I want more of ______”. Pushing her away might sound like, “You never ______, I always ______, why can’t you just ______.” There is a super book by Dr Sue Johnson called Hold Me Tight that looks at relationships and healing destructive relationship patterns while building strength and intimacy. Johnson is great at using examples from all kinds of relationships, addressing how a person’s past and personality shapes their patterns in relationship, instead of focusing on the idea that people should behave in a certain way because they were born male or female. I have a lot of hope for your marriage, and believe that this could be a great opportunity to deepen your bond with each other. But don’t be afraid to ask for help with it. If you do decide to see a couples therapist, ask for someone who has training in EFT or EFCT. You can send your questions for Hillary, our Feminist Therapist, to [email protected] or [email protected] with the subject: “Feminist Therapy,” or tweet her @hillarylmcbride using the hashtag, #feministtherapy. (We will anonymize your questions, unless you specifically ask us to include your name.) 40 SHARES Share Tweet Hillary McBride Hillary McBride is a registered clinical counsellor working in the Vancouver area. She specializes in women's experiences and feminist therapy. Hillary is a PhD student at the University of British Columbia, where she researches women's experiences using feminist methodologies. She is the author of "Mothers, Daughters, and Body Image: Learning to Love Ourselves as We Are" and recently won the International Young Investigator Award in Human Sexuality from Taylor & Francis for her research and clinical work on sexuality in mothers. |
Some time back I got a very pleasant surprise in the form of an email from Stewart Cowley himself. In fact it was something of a shock for me - it simply wasn't something I expected to get despite having had contact from the other Stewart Cowley who is also writing books. Not only that but he supplied a lot of information on the hows and whys of the books. Accordingly, with his permission, I've taken the emails he sent me and edited them into an interview of sorts. I hope fellow TTA fans find it as interesting to read as I did. Without further ado, here is Stewart himself... (Stewart Cowley) Someone mentioned your site to me so I checked it out. It brought back a host of memories. Spacecraft 2000-2100AD was the first book I ever wrote and represented a major point of change in my life. I was working as a graphic designer when I had the idea. I was doing work with an illustration agency called Young Artists based in London UK. They happened to represent a new generation of brilliant artists working in the SF arena, and I was really excited about their work. The only outlet for their illustrations at the time were paperback covers, but I felt convinced more could be done with the amazing images they were producing. I persuaded them to loan me file transparencies of art samples and had them stuck on my lightbox for a couple of weeks. I'd look at them every day, trying to think how they could be utilised. Then one day I remembered a book I'd had seen as a child. It was Jane's Fighting Ships - a survey of the world's navies - and it hit me. Spacecraft 2000-2100 AD was born. Being a designer rather than a writer, I tried to find someone to author the project but couldn't find anyone with the same vision as I had. I wanted someone who could not only create specifications for the spacecraft shown, but set them in a believeable historic context. I had already discussed the project with Hamlyn Publishing who wanted to do it and issued a contract. As I was running out of time, I started writing it myself and sent sample text to them to keep them quiet to buy time until I could find a suitable author. They liked it, so I thought, what the hell, and finished it. The rest is history as they say. (Philip Banks) That actually answers a question I was going to ask , which was whether Janes Fighting Ships was an inspiration for the first book particularly. (SC) The book went on to sell 800,000 copies in eight languages so they asked me to do a sequel. Space Battles was produced in 3 weeks and as you rightly point out in your review, suffered in quality as a result. That also did well, nevertheless, and they commissioned a further title. The strong sales of both books gave me more clout and I was able to insist on having more time to complete the following two titles; Spacewreck and Starliners. I'm afraid I must also own up to the Galactic Encounters series by Steven Caldwell. I'm not proud of those six books. I was approached by another publisher to write for them, and they offered me enough money for me to quit my job as a designer and become a full-time writer. I confess that I just did it for the dough and all I had to work with were the images that I had rejected for my earlier books. It wasn't only for contractual reasons that I used the pseudonym of Steven Caldwell. So that's the story behind the TTA in a nutshell. Incidentally, there isn't a combo of the second two TTA titles as far as I'm aware. (PB) What was the idea behind the combo books? Simply a way for the publisher to re-use material and get more sales or was it a way to do a reprint of the first two books when the later two came out? (SC) The combo was the publisher's response to requests from their customers who apparently felt there was a demand for it. (PB) You mentioned pretty much authoring the series entirely yourself - how did Charles Herridge, co-author on Great Space Battles, fit into the picture? (SC) Charles was the publisher who commissioned the books from me. Because of the almost impossible deadline he contributed some of the storylines and worked closely with me on others so I felt he should share the writing credit. (PB) Whose idea was the 'Space Warriors' book? It seems to have been the idea of the TTA Books stripped down and targeted at nine to twelve year old readers, so was it a publisher request? (SC) The request for a title for younger readers came from a publisher (Deans, I think). I was still living in the world of TTA and decided to keep the context for the stories in this title. (PB) Is this the only direct spin off book from the TTA series? (SC) Yes, as far as I'm aware. However, there may have been references to the TTA in the Galactic Encounter series, but I haven't looked these for about 25 years so might be wrong. (PB) It has to be asked, what was the story behind the 'pasta master' modelmaking running joke? (SC) I'd forgotten about this but it was a nickname I earned at that time because as my friends constantly reminded me it was the only thing I could cook. In order to try and interest some interest in my limited catering, I used to build exotic constructions out of pasta shells, giant clams, alien heads etc.,and stuck together with melted cheese to hide the unchanging sauces beneath. (PB) Did any of the artists featured in the books thank you for promoting their work via these books? Do any keep in contact with you? (SC) Yes. After the success of the first book, some of them got more involved and I worked with them on the selections. One or two had not done a lot of work before and the exposure in the books got them more work. I did stay in contact with one or two, like Chris Foss who went on to great things, but the currents of life eventually took us different ways. (PB) Where you aware that the TTA books were a big influence on the two Homeworld games made by Relic? (SC) Not at all. I didn't even know about them. If that's true, it's nice to know that the books meant something to some people. Most writers don't really get much in the way of feedback on their work and positive responses mean a lot. (PB) Which is your favourite book of the series and why? (SC) The first one was a milestone because it helped to change my life and created lots of opportunities for me. As a book, though, Spacewreck is my personal favourite. Space itself is a mysterious place and I loved the idea of astro-archaeology - starting with a mysterious artefact and working back to try and unravel it's story. Even if it is fiction, the process embodies the same sense of curiosity and a sense of the truly alien. (PB) Was it a surprise to find a website out there dedicated to your books? Indeed are you surprised at how popular these books have turned out to be? (SC) A complete surprise! Especially after so many years. When I wrote these, I don't remember there even being a world wide web available to people! |
Sometimes, after a bad result, the morning after can provide a bit of calm and clarity. Sometimes the frustration from the night before is even more keenly felt, and this morning is one of those. I don’t think it was one of our best performances of the season, far from it, but when you look back at the chances we had to score it’s impossible to be anything other than bitterly disappointed. There are issues with this team right now. There are players who are struggling for form. We surely don’t need any more evidence that Aaron Ramsey and Mathieu Flamini in midfield go together like toothpaste and orange juice. And we now haven’t scored in the league for three successive league games. Yet last night, despite the fact Southampton looked livelier and well up for it in the first half, we had the best chances. Mesut Ozil’s control from an Alexis Sanchez pass was sublime, the finish tame. Ozil again broke the offside trap to find himself with just Fraser Forster to beat, but poked his shot a little too close to the keeper and saw his touch send the ball just wide. He should have scored from there. In the second period, we picked it up, we were better than they were, and we got on top of the game in a big way. Giroud saw a right-footed effort tipped over. We cut them apart with Ozil and Alexis, there was nobody there to apply the finish until Campbell curled over. He should have done better. There then came an astonishing five minutes when we had 4 or 5 very good opportunities and spurned them all. After Gabriel had left hearts in mouths at our end with a slide on Mané, we went up the other and fashioned a chance for substitute Theo Walcott. With just the keeper to beat, his finish was dismal, a side-footed attempt when he really should have cracked it to the far corner – something he’s more than capable of. The keeper saved the rebound. From the corner Forster saved from Alexis. We kept the pressure on. Laurent Koscielny, who made the difference against Newcastle, headed over the bar from inside the 6 yard box. It would have been easier to score. He should have scored. Alexis had a shot cleared off the line. Ramsey had a shot. And then an injury to a Southampton man dented that momentum a little, but even afterwards there were more chances. We ended up having taken 21 shots, 20 of them from inside the area, Ozil creating 10 chances (a season high), and failing to score. Afterwards, Arsene Wenger, who is not usually so abrupt, said: You expect their keeper to have a good game but I believe as well we had very poor finishing. I think we have to look at ourselves and start to finish with a bit more conviction. The way we have took our chances was not good enough and that’s why we dropped two points. I’d certainly be more worried this morning if we were going through one of those spells where we weren’t creating chances, but it does nothing to ease the frustration of dropping points last night. Especially when all of the teams around us won. Leicester beat Liverpool, Man City beat Sunderland, Sp*rs beat Norwich, leaving us in 4th place and giving this season an all too familiar feel. It’s impossible not to be worried that things are slipping away form us too easily, and it’s impossible not to worry that something deep in our psyche is playing a part in our recent form. The warm embrace of the bosom of 4th is where we feel safest and best. When leading the pack, when the pressure and expectation is ratcheted up, we can’t cope. Last night, having taken just 2 points from 9, that pressure was on. You might point to all those chances created as evidence of a team that did quite well, and I can understand that to an extend. But I’ll point to all those misses as evidence of one that was only able to do half the job. I’d rather make one chance and score than see a half-dozen fantastic opportunities wasted. Players who should be more than capable of applying the finish from the positions they were in were unable to do so when it really mattered. And if you’re a team with genuine title ambitions, you can’t let points slip away from you like that. I don’t think you can bumble your way to winning the league. If you talk to me about how many times previous champions won games late with injury time goals, or scrapping out a win when playing badly, all it makes me think is that those teams had the character required to do that. We don’t. When we play badly we tend to drop points. When there’s pressure on, we drop points. Leading 3-2 at Anfield in injury time, we drop points. What difference hanging on there would that have made to our current run is speculation, but to me that game feels more and more like one which inflicted some serious damage on us from a psychological point of view. We are not, and have not been for some time, been playing like a team that looks like it’s going to win the title. We’ve been clinging on by our fingernails a bit, and last night we slipped. We’re 5 points off the top, a couple of weeks ago we were 2 points clear. The chasing pack have caught us, overtaken us, and are mooning us out the back window as they speed on down the road. So what do we do? Clearly we have to do something. 5 points is not insurmountable, especially when we have Leicester to play in a couple of weeks time, but it’s going to require something more than we’re seeing right now, and for the manager to take some risks. He simply has to find a way to make the midfield function properly again. If I see Flamini and Ramsey together for any other reason than all the others are dead, I might scream. They both try hard, but the limitations of that partnership have been demonstrated to the point where the opposition must be licking their lips every time they see it. Get Coquelin back in. Give Elneny a run. Find a way to make it work, because that will make the team better. Be brave in other areas too. Theo Walcott came on and played 34 minutes of football last night and made 2 passes – he attempted a massive 3. I know he’s not there to play like Iniesta and tika-taka his way across the pitch, but that’s a ludicrously poor contribution to make in that amount of time. He had a shot from which he should have scored, and made one nice cross, but that’s not enough. It’s clearly not enough because we dropped points. And before I get pulled up for having some kind of Walcott agenda, I’m not trying to blame him for being something he’s not, but maybe we can see that what he is just simply isn’t sufficient for a team that needs players of his stature and position in the squad to do more. People often ask if you can win a title with Olivier Giroud as your main striker. Ignoring his 18 goals this season (to Walcott’s 5), and leaving aside the fact that having a seriously clinical finisher would undoubtedly make this team more efficient, maybe a better question is can you win a title with a player like The Walcott in your team at all. To me he is emblematic of us at our most insipid, and waiting for him to ‘come good; is a fool’s errand. He’s had 10 years! We know what he is at this point, and to win titles you need better. And that falls on the manager. His belief in the best of what players can be is admirable in some ways, but deeply frustrating in others because it protects their inconsistencies, and those are the things that hold us back. He’s got to be brave. He has to shake off the conservatism that made him think Flamini and Ramsey was the right choice despite now having options. Because if we don’t do something different, something to spark us into life, and something to help us start winning games again, this season is going to end up being the one where the patience is stretched to its absolute limit. To be in the position were in a few weeks ago, and not continue that title fight until May, cannot be viewed in any other way than a total bottle job. It’s not over, there are still plenty of points to play for, but it feels like we’re pin-wheeling on the edge of a cliff right now. We either right ourselves and get going again, or we fall right off it. Sorry if that’s all a bit miserable this morning, but that’s just how I feel. We’re letting a great chance slip. It’s slow motion car crash stuff. I hope we can sort ourselves out, but try as I might it all feels a bit: Till tomorrow. |
You Don’t Know Jack is a series of smart, smack-talking trivia games that were popular on the PC in the ’90s. After nearly a decade of silence, the franchise has resurfaced in a new edition available for just about every gaming platform out there. The iPhone and iPad versions will be available tomorrow, but we got our hands on the iPad version for an early look. If you’ve played any of the You Don’t Know Jack games before, then you’ll feel instantly at home here because it’s evolved very little in its time off. Unlike most trivia videogames, this one doesn’t use pictures, music, or videos in the questions. In fact, mostly what happens onscreen as you play is that text and numbers move around. Clearly, most of the developer’s focus went toward the witty writing and professional-grade voice work. Clever– and often bawdy– jokes are peppered between the questions, and the host delivers every line with a charismatic flair. Because the experience is so dependent on audio, this isn’t a game you’ll want to (or even be able to) play without the sound on. The questions themselves are difficult, humorous, and sometimes extremely up-to-date. In the rounds we’ve played so far, we’ve encountered references to Elizabeth Taylor’s death and Rebecca Black’s delightfully awful music video “Friday.” Your score is based on how quickly you can answer the questions, so fast thinking is rewarded. The game contains 20 unique sets of questions, which will keep you busy for quite some time, since each set takes about 15 minutes to play through. Unfortunately, there’s no multiplayer mode to round out the experience. Sure, you and a buddy can work together to play the game cooperatively, but since there’s no head-to-head competition, it’ll be tough to prove that you’re the smartest person in the room. Regardless, we’re enjoying You Don’t Know Jack so far. The risque humor, coupled with the mix of serious academic questions and pop culture trivia, makes You Don’t Know Jack stand out against other quiz games like Trivial Pursuit. The iPhone and iPad versions of the game will be released tomorrow (actually at 11 p.m. EST tonight) for $2.99 and $4.99 respectively. |
We want to start this post off by saying that we really, really, really hope this story isn't true. La'el Collins—who went undrafted in the 2015 NFL Draft because of a murder investigation surrounding his pregnant ex-girlfriend—is already facing enough problems. But the story is simply too ridiculous/crazy/scandalous to ignore. Over the weekend, an escort who goes by the name of "Throatzilla" (O_O x 1,000,000!) took to Twitter to call Collins out for allegedly using her services and then refusing to pay her. Or more specifically, she called him out for, well, just look at the tweet: Yikes. Not exactly the kind of thing Collins wants out there in the world, considering the uphill battle that he's already facing. But wait, it gets worse! A short time after that tweet was sent out, the @Orallygifted214 Twitter account disappeared with "Throatzilla" (nope, still can't believe that's the name she goes by…) claiming that Collins and his agent had the account deleted: So @ lcoll71 & his agent reported my twitter u can't report my shirt I'm getting made & these text messages u the nigga that lied... Its funny to me... Run me my money La'el ... Ctfu.... A photo posted by OrallyGifted/Throatzilla (@orallygifted_214) on Jun 8, 2015 at 10:05am PDT I get one of my Twitters back in a few minutes... Petty ass Nfl nigga Lael & his agent.... A photo posted by OrallyGifted/Throatzilla (@orallygifted_214) on Jun 8, 2015 at 9:26pm PDT So she went ahead and released a statement about the alleged incident: I’m an escort & lael Collins hired me to eat his a** & give him head last Sunday but when it came time to pay, he said he meant he would take me out to eat. After us arguing for 20 minutes he agreed to pay me Thursday. So when Thursday came, he made me delete his number & all of our text messages, but I requested them from Sprint he has now changed his number but I blasted him on Twitter & him & his agent got my Twitter deleted. She has also gone on Instagram and called Collins out: But on May 31st I couldn't get my $400 for sucking ya ass... & then u threaten me with the police @ lcoll71 ... ✌ A photo posted by OrallyGifted/Throatzilla (@orallygifted_214) on Jun 14, 2015 at 10:46am PDT So far, it doesn't sound like her attempt at shaming Collins has forced him to pay up and/or respond. But…wow. This guy is definitely making headlines for all the wrong reasons since coming into the NFL, eh? POST CONTINUES BELOW Send all complaints, compliments, and tips to sportstips@complex.com. [via Black Sports Online] |
Settlement for Saba Button, severely disabled after flu vaccine Updated The family of a West Australian child left severely disabled after receiving a flu jab has reached a settlement with the vaccine's manufacturer and the State Government. Saba Button suffered brain and organ damage after getting the Fluvax shot when she was 11 months old in 2010. Her parents launched legal action in the Federal Court against the vaccine's manufacturer, CSL Limited. CSL cross-claimed against the State of WA and the Health Minister. All parties have reached a confidential settlement which has today been accepted by Federal Court Justice Michael Barker. This doesn't just stop now, once all the cameras are gone, it's back to business and we've got a lot to do with Saba, Mick Button Saba's father, Mick Button, said it had been a long battle for compensation. "Today is a bittersweet feeling for us," he said. "It's a relief to have the legal case behind us. "We now have the ability to be able to supply Saba with the care, the therapy, the equipment, all the things that she needs to give her the best quality of life." Her mother Kirsten Button said she was relieved the legal action had been finalised. "It doesn't matter how much you have because you can't buy your health but it is a good outcome, and the fact that it's settled, we're quite a strong family and we have moved forward but I think having that hanging over your head as such can be stressful so now we can move forward knowing that it's all over." Mr Button said the funds would help Saba continue ongoing therapy and explore new options both in Australia and overseas. "This doesn't just stop now, once all the cameras are gone, it's back to business and we've got a lot to do with Saba," he said. Problems with flu vaccine sparked national ban In his judgement, Justice Barker said Saba had suffered hypoxic brain injury and consequential, severe disabilities. "Her life expectancy has been significantly shortened," he said. "Her disabilities are profound and permanent. "She will require constant care for the remainder of her life." The settlement is described as "a substantial figure, plus a contribution towards legal costs" and is believed to be worth millions of dollars. Her disabilities are profound and permanent. She will require constant care for the remainder of her life. Federal Court Justice Michael Barker Health Minister Kim Hames said he was pleased the matter had been resolved and wished the Button family well. Hundreds of children suffered adverse reactions after they were given the flu shot in 2010 with many of them taken to hospital. It led to an Australia-wide suspension of the vaccination for children under five. Authorities were criticised for not acting quickly enough to advise GPs of the problems or identifying that there was an issue. An independent report, compiled by a former chief medical officer, criticised both Commonwealth and state health authorities for the way they dealt with the incident. Fluvax has since been banned for children under the age of five. Topics: health, courts-and-trials, vaccines-and-immunity, perth-6000 First posted |
The nation's largest doctors group blasted the House Thursday for passing a GOP measure repealing large parts of ObamaCare, warning that the bill could turn back the clock on protections for patients with pre-existing conditions. "The bill passed by the House today will result in millions of Americans losing access to quality, affordable health insurance and those with pre-existing health conditions face the possibility of going back to the time when insurers could charge them premiums that made access to coverage out of the question," American Medical Association (AMA) President Andrew Gurman said in a statement. He added that the country's healthcare system is in need of improvement, and that his group is ready to work with the Senate and Trump administration on making changes. "The AMA urges the Senate and the Administration to work with physician, patient, hospital and other provider groups to craft bipartisan solutions so all American families can access affordable and meaningful coverage, while preserving the safety net for vulnerable populations,” he said. The AMA had already denounced the American Health Care Act, which passed the House by a narrow margin on Thursday. Thursday was Republicans' second attempt in less than two months to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. The initial version of the measure failed in March amid dwindling support by Republicans. That prompted a number of amendments to the bill aimed at making it more palatable for both conservatives and moderates. Among those additions was a provision allowing states to waive ObamaCare's rule blocking insurance companies from charging customers with pre-existing conditions more for coverage. To appease moderates, another amendment setting aside $8 billion over five years to help such patients afford coverage. But questions remained about the measure, particularly about how many people could possibly lose coverage if it is signed into law. House GOP leaders called the bill to a vote before the Congressional Budget Office came out with an assessment of its cost and impact. The CBO's original score of the AHCA in March estimated that roughly 24 million people would lose coverage under the law over the next 10 years. The next major hurdle for the bill is in the Senate, where some Republicans have voiced skepticism over the current measure. Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn John CornynHillicon Valley: Senators urge Trump to bar Huawei products from electric grid | Ex-security officials condemn Trump emergency declaration | New malicious cyber tool found | Facebook faces questions on treatment of moderators Key senators say administration should ban Huawei tech in US electric grid Senate plots to avoid fall shutdown brawl MORE (R-Texas) suggested that the bill could see a significant makeover in the Senate. |
With high protein diets often being falsely equated with misguided varieties of keto diets where you eat nothing but sausages and bacon, the public jumps at 'news' like "A new study suggests there's a downside to all that protein" (time.com) and ignores that high protein dieters like you and me limit the amounts of these foods and eat way more veggies and fruits than Mr. Average is often forgotten in the debate. High-protein diets are much safer than some 'experts' say, but there are things to consider... Practical Protein Oxidation 101 Practical Protein Oxidation 101 5x More Than the FDA Allows! 5x More Than the FDA Allows! More Protein ≠ More Satiety More Protein ≠ More Satiety Satiety: Casein > Whey? Wrong! Satiety: Casein > Whey? Wrong! Protein Timing DOES Matter! Protein Timing DOES Matter! High Protein not a Health Threat High Protein not a Health Threat a hypocaloric diet (-30% energy intake) containing 0.8 g protein/kg/day (NP) to a a hypocaloric diet (-30% energy intake) containing 1.2 g protein/kg/day (HP) Figure 1: Flow of study participants (from supplemental material for Smith. 2016) Figure 2: Changes in body weight and composition. Percent changes in body mass (A), intra-hepatic triglyceride (IHTG) content (B), intra-abdominal adipose tissue (IAAT) volume (C), percent contribution of fat-free-mass(FFM) to total weightloss(D) as measured after 28 weeks and 10% weight loss (Smith. 2016). no difference in basal and insulin and glucose levels, or the insulin and glucose levels in response to a hyperinsulinemic-euglycemic clamp test you would expect to see both if the subjects' glucose management worsened significantly due to the increased protein intake, no difference in free fatty acid levels at rest and during the hyperinsulinemic-euglycemic clamp as you would expect them if the high protein intake had had a negative effect on the subjects' glucose and subsequently fatty acid metabolism, no difference in the reduction of the amount intra-hepatic triglyceride (liver fat), which has been associated with significant decreases in full-body insulin resistance, no difference in the effect of the global inflammation markers hs-CRP and IL-6, which could explain the allegedly worsened glucose metabolism in the HP group, no differences in the loss of intra-abdominal fat, which is among the most important determinants of whole body inflammation and thus - again - one's insulin sensitivity no difference in the small and mostly non-significant effect of the treatment on the expression of genes involved in lipogenesis, and fatty acid oxidation and mitochondrial function in muscle that could potentially explain the emphasized "downside to all that protein" (time.com) no difference in the change of AMPK, the master regulator of cellular energy homeostasis no difference in serum BCAA levels, of which previous studies have shown that their accumulation in the blood is at least correlated with the development of obesity and a worsening of glucose management (She. 2007) "[...] suggest that the adverse effect of HP intake on insulin action during weight loss therapy may have been mediated through its effects on oxidative stress because it prevented the WL-induced decrease, and even increased, metabolic pathways involved in oxidative stress response in muscle" (Smith. 2016). Figure 3: The chronic consumption of a high protein diet (1.7 g/kg vs. 0.7g/kg) has been shown to increase fasting glucagon and the endogenous production of glucose (gluconeogenesis) in the fasted state. This finding from a human study that was conducted by Linn et al. in 2000, alone, could explain the unexcepted difference in the HECP results. Remember: Irrespective of the argument that the result may be a methodological artifice and potentially of limited practical significance, a more important and non-hypothetical argument against panicking is that we are dealing with a single study in a very specific part of the population. It's thus not the time for over-generalizations and hectic responses, yet. Figure 4: Studies like Farnsworth et al. (2003) show that increasing the protein content of the diet of overweight subjects from ca. 60g to ca. 120g has beneficial effects on both the glucose (HP -8.6%; HC -2.6%) and insulin (HP -25.4%; HC -4.2%levels during the classic oral glucose tolerance test in the Farnsworth study. I openly admit that I am, based on the plethora of scientific evidence in its favor, biased towards high(er) protein diets. What I am not, though, is blind to potential downsides of high protein intakes. You can read about one I've discussed only recently in "Protein Oxidation 101: 8 Simple Rules to Minimize PROTOX and Maximize the Proven Benefits of High(er) Protein Diets" I don't ignore potential downsides of this way of eating and for me, the Smith study alone does not provide convincing evidence of another downside of high(er) protein intakes. So, do I have to stop eating more protein / suggesting higher protein intakes to clients? In my humble opinion the answer to this question is "no"; and this answer is not based on my personal bias... well, at least not primarily ;-) It's rather based on my knowledge of previous evidence from studies that compared high protein (HP) to high carbohydrate (HC) weight loss diets, studies like Piatti et al. who found, likewise with HECP, that "glucose disposal and glucose oxidation significantly increased after the HP diet and significantly decreased after the HC diet" - the exact opposite of what Smith et al. report in their more recent study. Ok, the diet Piatti et al. prescribed was consumed for 'only' 21 days, the caloric deficit was sign. more pronounced (800kcal/day) and the 25 obese, female subjects were pre-, not postmenopausal women and still... the "one study suffices to 'Rethink High-Protein Diets for Weight Loss'"-approach the time.com article takes appears even more questionable in view of these and similar study results (e.g. Farnsworth. 2003 - sign. improvements in the classic glucose tolerance test; see Figure 4). What all studies, including the one at hand, report, though, is that the increase in protein intake will have beneficial effects on the subjects' body composition by preserving lean, and in many cases promoting fat mass loss without messing with the classic measures of glucose metabolism: insulin, fasting glucose, HOMA-IR, HbA1c, or the previously mentioned oral glucose tolerance test (Brinkworth. 2004 a,b; Sargrad. 2006; Claessens. 2009; Hession. 2009) | In my humble opinion the answer to this question is "no"; and this answer is not based on my personal bias... well, at least not primarily ;-) It's rather based on my knowledge of previous evidence from studies that compared high protein (HP) to high carbohydrate (HC) weight loss diets, studies like Piatti et al. who found, likewise with HECP, that "glucose disposal and glucose oxidation significantly increased after the HP diet and significantly decreased after the HC diet" - the exact opposite of what Smith et al. report in their more recent study. Ok, the diet Piatti et al. prescribed was consumed for 'only' 21 days, the caloric deficit was sign. more pronounced (800kcal/day) and the 25 obese, female subjects were pre-, not postmenopausal women and still... the "one study suffices to 'Rethink High-Protein Diets for Weight Loss'"-approach the time.com article takes appears even more questionable in view of these and similar study results (e.g. Farnsworth. 2003 - sign. improvements in the classic glucose tolerance test; see).What all studies, including the one at hand, report, though, is that the increase in protein intake will have beneficial effects on the subjects' body composition by preserving lean, and in many cases promoting fat mass loss without messing with the classic measures of glucose metabolism: insulin, fasting glucose, HOMA-IR, HbA1c, or the previously mentioned oral glucose tolerance test (Brinkworth. 2004 a,b; Sargrad. 2006; Claessens. 2009; Hession. 2009) | Comment Brinkworth, G. D., et al. "Long-term effects of a high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet on weight control and cardiovascular risk markers in obese hyperinsulinemic subjects." International journal of obesity 28.5 (2004a): 661-670. Brinkworth, G. D., et al. "Long-term effects of advice to consume a high-protein, low-fat diet, rather than a conventional weight-loss diet, in obese adults with type 2 diabetes: one-year follow-up of a randomised trial." Diabetologia 47.10 (2004b): 1677-1686. Claessens, M., et al. "The effect of a low-fat, high-protein or high-carbohydrate ad libitum diet on weight loss maintenance and metabolic risk factors." International journal of obesity 33.3 (2009): 296-304. Farnsworth, Emma, et al. "Effect of a high-protein, energy-restricted diet on body composition, glycemic control, and lipid concentrations in overweight and obese hyperinsulinemic men and women." The American journal of clinical nutrition 78.1 (2003): 31-39. Han, Seung Seok, et al. "Lean mass index: a better predictor of mortality than body mass index in elderly Asians." Journal of the American Geriatrics Society 58.2 (2010): 312-317. Hession, M., et al. "Systematic review of randomized controlled trials of low‐carbohydrate vs. low‐fat/low‐calorie diets in the management of obesity and its comorbidities." Obesity reviews 10.1 (2009): 36-50. Leidy, Heather J., et al. "Higher protein intake preserves lean mass and satiety with weight loss in pre‐obese and obese women." Obesity 15.2 (2007): 421-429. Linn, T., et al. "Effect of long-term dietary protein intake on glucose metabolism in humans." Diabetologia 43.10 (2000): 1257-1265. Mettler, Samuel, Nigel Mitchell, and Kevin D. Tipton. "Increased protein intake reduces lean body mass loss during weight loss in athletes." Med Sci Sports Exerc 42.2 (2010): 326-37. Piatti, P. M., et al. "Hypocaloric high-protein diet improves glucose oxidation and spares lean body mass: comparison to hypocaloric high-carbohydrate diet." Metabolism 43.12 (1994): 1481-1487. Sargrad, Karin R., et al. "Effect of high protein vs high carbohydrate intake on insulin sensitivity, body weight, hemoglobin A1c, and blood pressure in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus." Journal of the American Dietetic Association 105.4 (2005): 573-580. She, Pengxiang, et al. "Obesity-related elevations in plasma leucine are associated with alterations in enzymes involved in branched-chain amino acid metabolism." American Journal of Physiology-Endocrinology and Metabolism 293.6 (2007): E1552-E1563. Smith, Gordon I., et al. "High-protein intake during weight loss therapy eliminates the weight-loss-induced improvement in insulin action in obese postmenopausal women." Cell Reports 17.3 (2016): 849-861. You will probably remember the headlines: "It’s Time to Rethink High-Protein Diets for Weight Loss" ( time.com ). Now, that the notion that an increased protein intake can help you shed body fat by increasing your satiety, reducing your cravings and improving the ratio of lean-to-fat-mass you will lose while dieting is finally becoming common knowledge (Leidy. 2007; Mettler, 2010), the impact of biased reporting on studies such as Smith, et al. (2016) could become a public health problem of its own.That's a daring hypothesis, I know, but my own bias towards higher protein diets is not the only reason I do not subscribe to the what Bettina Mittendorfer, co-author of the study and a professor of medicine, argues in the previously cited article on time.com: "There’s no reason to [follow a high(er) protein diet], and potentially there is harm or lack of a benefit" (quote from the time.com article).So what are the reasons, there's no reason to panic... yet? Let's first take a look at the study design. In the study, the author compared the effects of 10% weight loss (took ~28 weeks in both groups) w/...on muscle insulin action in postmenopausal women with obesity and found that "HP intake reduced the WL-induced decline in lean tissue mass by 45%" (Smith. 2016).In view of the only recently fully appreciated importance of lean mass (muscle, organ and bone mass) in metabolic health and healthy aging (Han. 2010) and considering the special needs of the study population, postmenopausal women of whom studies indicate that the will regain only the fat, but not the lean mass (Beavers. 2011) and thus set themselves up for the dreaded yo-yo effect, the lack of loss of lean mass clearly is - as the scientists (allegedly) acknowledge - very good news.Unfortunately, the often-cited abstract to the study (and the press release that's at the heart of the mass media coverage I hinted at in the introduction) creates the impression that this was the only positive result, the scientists observed in a study the most important finding of which was that the "HP [high protein] intake also prevented the WL[weight loss]-induced improvements in muscle insulin signaling and insulin-stimulated glucose uptake".If we take a closer look at the evidence as a whole, however, this conclusion is obscured by the following observations: There was/were ...I guess you will agree that each and every of these eight observations stands in contrast to the "bottom line" the authors of the press release propagate. They do, after all, contradict the notion that the increase in protein intake would ruin any benefit of high(er) protein intakes while dieting and refute the assertion that's resonating in the placative title "It’s Time to Rethink High-Protein Diets for Weight Loss" ( time.com ) of the previously referenced article on time.com (similar articles can be found on other media outlets, as well).Now, none of these "good news" invalidates the scientists' analysis of glucose dynamics during the hyperinsulinemic-euglycemic clamp procedure (HECP), of which the scientists say (not without reason, by the way) that they were indicative of the fact that a "HP intake also prevented the WL-induced improvements in muscle insulin signaling and insulin-stimulated glucose uptake" (Smith. 2016). What these "good news" do, however, is to warrant the question how practically significant this observation actually is - after all, you would expect, and I know that I am repeating myself here, insulin, glucose, inflammation, visceral fat and the other parameters listed above and/or the way they changed over the course of the study to differ between groups, as well.A lack of changes outside of the HECP makes the quest for potential mechanisms even more important. The scientists, however, cannot even explain the "adverse effect of HP intake on insulinaction", in general. They call it "unclear" (Smith. 2016) and argue, just like me, that this is particularly true in view of the "absence of any major differences in body weight, body composition, plasma FFA availability, and inflammatory markers" (Smith. 2016). Based on the increase of the glutathione recycling gene GSTA4 and expression of PRDX3 a muscle-specific gene that's increased when animal muscle is exposed to oxidative stress, Smith et al. argue that eventually their resultsThis is yet only one possible explanation. Another hypothesis that would explain the differences in the extreme situation of the HECP, i.e. the continuous infusion of glucose under hyperinsulinemic conditions as you would like and in 99% of the cases can avoid them in reality, can be derived based on data from a Y2K study by Linn, et al. In this study, the authors investigated the long-term effects of high protein diets (1.8g/kg vs. 0.7g/kg) on glucose metabolism without weight loss and found one effect of high protein diets, Smith et al. ignore completely:Alongside the increases in glucagon concentrations, the endogenous glucose production aka the gluconeogenesis increases significantly. And that's something that is most pronounced in the fasted state - the same state in which the HECP was conducted in the Smith study. It is thus simply math: If more glucose is produced by the liver (esp. at the beginning of the HECP), the total amount of glucose that has to be stashed away (or oxidized) increases. This increase, however, is not quantified by the rate of glucose infusion that's measured in the HECP, where the glucose infusion rate and the disappearance of marked exogenous glucose that's injected into the subjects are measured and any endogenous production, is ignored.In the nutritional practice, however, where the increased insulin response that begins as early glucose (and to a certain extent protein) from a real meal are ingested orally, will - at least in healthy individuals - counter this effect.In the HECP, on the other hand, the insulin levels of both groups will be the same, namely maxed out. The previously described compensation that occurs in the real world and in response to real food and the other gold-standard of measuring an individual's glucose metabolism, the oral glucose tolerance test, is thus physiologically impossible in the artificial hyperinsulinemic-euglycemic clamp procedure - and the 2003 study by Farnsworth would confirm that: In the "real world", i.e. under dynamic insulin conditions as you would see them with both, the oral glucose tolerance test, Farnsworth et al. conductedthe ingestion of a real meal, practically relevant disadvantages of the chronic consumption of a high protein diet don't exist.References: |
Copyright 2019 Nexstar Broadcasting, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Evidence in Nevada suggests that individuals who commit crimes rarely do so with newly-purchased firearms. The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, reported that roughly two-thirds of all firearms recovered by law enforcement agencies in Nevada from 2006 through 2011 had been purchased at least three years prior. Only 5.9 percent had been purchased within three months of their recovery. That is one of many nuggets that can be mined from annual ATF firearms trace reports that are available for all 50 states. Trace data comes with several caveats. Among them is the fact that law enforcement agencies can request firearms traces for any reason. As the ATF states on its website, "not all firearms used in crime are traced and not all firearms traced are used in crime." Law enforcement agencies recovered 19,608 firearms in Nevada from 2006 through 2011, including 10,178 pistols, 3,856 revolvers, 3,040 rifles and 2,167 shotguns. Also recovered were 127 machine guns. The number of recovered firearms rapidly declined during that six-year period, from 4,533 in 2006 to 2,204 in 2011. The most common categories these firearms fell into were health or safety concerns, 3,591, weapon possession issues, 3,075, family offenses, 2,652, and ties to dangerous drugs, 1,608. Of the firearms recovered in Nevada, 17,012 or 86.8 percent were found in the Las Vegas area. When law enforcement agencies trace a firearm they often, but not always, can find out where the gun originally was purchased. Among those instances where the state of origination could be determined, California was the starting point for 1,425 firearms recovered in Nevada, followed by Arizona, 525, Texas, 259 and Utah, 231. Conversely, 2,824 guns recovered in California during the six-year period were traced to Nevada, indicating the possibility that far more firearms used in crimes are transported from Nevada to California than vice versa. But that doesn't mean a gun recovered in Nevada or elsewhere came directly from the state where the firearm was initially purchased. The gun could have changed hands either legally or illegally and therefore could have come from a state other than the one the trace identified as the place where the firearm was originally acquired. |
Transcript >> Amazon, a company that's built its business on disrupting major industries, is now setting its sights on the lucrative ticketing business. Four sources telling Reuters, exclusively, that the e-commerce juggernaut is in talks with US venue owners to partner up on selling tickets online for concerts and sporting events across the country. Reuters correspondent Jessica Toonkel broke the story.>> It could be pretty bad for Ticketmaster. I mean, up until now, Ticketmaster is the 800-pound gorilla in the ticketing space in the United States. Most venue owners have exclusive arrangements with Ticketmaster. So, now, Amazon is going to everyone saying, we wanna partner with you. We wanna be the person selling your tickets. Toonkel says special access to tickets could be another means to lure more customers to its subscription service, Amazon Prime.>> Amazon sees a huge opportunity here, cuz, on one hand, you have a lot of venue operators that are not thrilled with Ticketmaster, don't like their interface, don't like the way that they can't cross-sell their merchandise. And then, on the other hand, you have customers that are sick of paying fees to buy tickets to the concerts and shows that they want to attend. So if Amazon can go in there and satisfy both those markets, then that's a win-win. Amazon has had conversations to partner with Ticketmaster as a potential way to get into ticketing in the US, but sources tell Toonkel that those conversations stalled over who would control customer data. |
1. What If the Rent Is Late As a tenant, you are obligated to pay only the rent you and your landlord have agreed upon. You must pay the rent in advance, on or before the date you and the landlord agreed rent is due. Often the agreed rent date is the first of the month. If you are late paying the rent, a landlord may try to charge you a late fee or penalty. It is against the law for landlords to charge late fees in some cases. See below in Late Fees.9 A landlord may also try to evict you for repeated late payments or for non-payment of rent. Most landlords do not send eviction notices if once in a while tenants are several days late with the rent. Even if a landlord sends an eviction notice, you may be able to stop the eviction by paying the rent you owe. See below in Stopping an Eviction for Non-Payment or Late Payment.” a. Late Fees Your landlord cannot charge you interest or fees on late rent payments unless your lease or written rental agreement specifically gives the landlord the right to charge late fees in what is commonly called a “late payment penalty clause.” 10 If you have a written lease or tenancy-at-will agreement, check to see whether it has such a late payment penalty clause. If you do not have a written lease or rental agreement, or there is no late payment penalty clause, you do not have to pay a late fee, even if your rent is late. Even if your written agreement has a late payment penalty clause, a landlord cannot collect any late payment fee until you are 30 days late with the rent.11 If the late payment penalty clause says that the landlord can collect a late fee before 30 days pass, the clause is illegal, and you should not pay a late fee. 12 For late fees in public housing, see the booklet Rent in Public Housing, available online at: www.MassLegalHelp.org/housing/tenants-rights-in-public-housing b. “Discounts” for Paying on Time If you have a lease , a landlord may try to collect a late fee through what is called a "discount clause." A discount clause says your agreed rent is a “discount rent” for when you pay rent on time, and you have to pay an extra amount if you are late. A discount clause is a late payment penalty clause in disguise, and it is illegal in Massachusetts.13 If your lease has a discount clause, you do not have to pay the extra amount, even if your rent payment is late. Pay only the rent you agreed to pay. If your landlord demands extra money based on a discount clause, tell your landlord (in writing) that the discount clause is illegal. For more information about late penalty and discount clauses, see Chapter 1: Before Moving In - Common Lease Clauses. 2. Disputes about the Amount of Rent If your landlord incorrectly calculated your rent, did not credit you for rent you paid, or charged you fees or damages that are not your responsibility to pay, there are steps to take to try to protect yourself. a. Payment and Acceptance One way to resolve a dispute about rent is to pay your landlord what you think is owed with a check that includes the following statement on the back of the check: "Endorsing or cashing this check constitutes full payment of rent due up to and including for the month of __, year __." You may also include with your check a letter that explains why you do not owe the amount the landlord claims you owe. In most cases, if your landlord cashes the check with this statement on the back without any objection, she has accepted your offer of full payment and agreed to give up ( waive ) any disagreement about the amount of rent due.14 If your landlord takes your rent check but also writes on it that she is not accepting it as full payment for all rent owed, you still may be able to argue that she had accepted the check as payment in full.15 b. Protect Yourself If your landlord continues to dispute the amount of rent you owe after accepting and cashing your check with this statement written on the back, you should put the disputed amount in a bank account that is separate from your other money. By setting aside the money in dispute, you will be more credible to the judge if your landlord takes you to court. Always protect yourself by keeping in a safe place a copy of: The front and back of your check with your statement that you are paying the full amount of rent. The cancelled check after the landlord cashes it, and Any letter you send the landlord. 3. Stopping an Eviction for Non-Payment or Late Payment a. Always Try to Cure You have a right to stop your landlord from bringing an eviction by paying all the rent you owe by certain deadlines. This is called “ curing ” the non-payment. A landlord is required to accept the rent if you try to cure before the certain deadlines.16 Deadlines to cure are different for tenants with leases and with no leases. b. You Have No Lease If you do not have a lease and your landlord gives you a 14-day notice to quit for non-payment of rent, you have the right to stop your landlord from bringing an eviction by curing and paying all the rent you owe within 10 days of receiving the notice to quit .17 The only time that you do not have a right to cure is if you have already received another 14-day notice to quit for non-payment of rent within the previous 12 months. 18 If you do not have a lease , your 14-day notice to quit for non-payment must have the following sentence about your right to cure : ''If you have not received a notice to quit for nonpayment of rent within the last twelve months, you have a right to prevent termination of your tenancy by paying your landlord or your landlord's attorney or the person to whom you customarily pay your rent the full amount of rent due within ten days after your receipt of this notice.'' 19 If your 14-day notice to quit is missing this language, and your landlord files an eviction case, your deadline to cure is extended to the date your answer to the landlord’s court papers are due (“ answer date ”). In this situation, if you cure by the answer date , you can ask the court to have the eviction case dismissed. The answer date is on the Summons and Complaint served on you by you landlord. For more about the answer date, see Chapter 12: Evictions - Important Dates. c. You Have a Lease If you have a lease and your landlord gives you a 14-day notice to quit for non-payment of rent, you have the right to stop an eviction by curing and paying all the rent you owe on or before the answer date that is listed on the court papers (the Summons and Complaint ).20 If you cure by the answer date , you can ask the court to have the eviction case dismissed. If you have a lease and cure before the expiration of your tenancy by the 14-day notice to quit , your landlord is not allowed to bring an eviction case against you at all, even if this is not the first time you have cured a non-payment within the previous 12 months.21 If you wait until after your landlord starts an eviction case to cure , you can still ask the court to have the eviction case dismissed, but it becomes more expensive. You must then pay not only the rent owed, but also the landlord's costs for filing the eviction case and interest on the rent owed.22 It is illegal for a lease to say that you have given up ( waived ) your right to cure . 23 d. Landlord Refuses Payment If your landlord refuses to let you cure by accepting your payment, be sure to document the refusal. If you hand deliver your payment, have someone come with you who can witness whether the landlord refuses to accept it. If your landlord refuses to accept payment, send her a letter that you offered to pay and the date and amount you tried to pay. Have your statement signed by a witness who knows of your attempt to cure. Even if you miss the deadline to cure the non-payment, try to convince your landlord to accept your rent and stop any eviction action. Often, landlords agree not to go ahead with an eviction case because their real interest is in receiving the rent. Important: If your landlord refuses to accept your rent, it is very important that you set aside all the rent that becomes due each month in a bank account that is separate from your other money. Having the rent set aside in a separate account will increase your credibility in court. It will also help you because if you pay what is owed the landlord within 10 days of any judgment against, you can keep your tenancy. e. Eviction for Repeated Late Payment If you pay rent late often, your landlord may try to evict you on the basis of repeated or chronic late payment, instead of non-payment of rent. Late payment of rent is not the same as non-payment of rent.24 For late payment of rent, a landlord cannot use a 14-day notice to quit but in most cases, must use a 30-day (or rental period ) notice to quit . However, if you have a lease , the lease may allow the landlord to send you a notice to quit that is shorter than 30 days for any reason other than non-payment of rent.25 Read your lease to figure this out. f. Delay in Government Assistance Payment and Other Good Reasons If the late payment or non-payment of rent is caused by a delay in your receipt of government assistance or rental payments and you are facing an eviction, you have the right to a 7-day continuance of an eviction action.26 Your landlord cannot proceed with the eviction case if you are able to pay all rent due with interest and costs of the court case within the continued court date.27 Also, if you or someone in your household has a disability, you may be entitled to a reasonable accommodation to prevent eviction. For example, if you do not receive your disability SSI income until the 3rd of the month, you should ask the landlord and the judge for a reasonable accommodation of a later due date for your rent. If you have a disability which interferes with your ability to make rent payments on time, you may ask for a reasonable accommodation for example, by arranging for representative payee to handle your rent payment. For more on reasonable accommodations , see Chapter 7: Discrimination - Discrimination Based on Disability. If there are other good reasons for a late- or non-payment, you should explain the reasons to the landlord and the judge. Temporary financial hardships or other sympathetic circumstances may be persuasive to reach an agreement for a reasonable time to pay and to avoid eviction. For more about your rights in an eviction case, see Chapter 12: Evictions. 4. Paying Rent to a Condo Association If you rent a condominium, you pay rent to the owner of the condo, who is your landlord. The owner is required to pay a monthly condo fee to the building's condo association. If the owner stops paying the monthly condo fee, or if she refuses to pay other condo charges called “assessments,” the condo association is authorized by law to ask you to pay your rent to the condo association instead of to your landlord, the condo owner.28 In no event, can the condo association collect from you more than your agreed upon rent.29 Before the condo association can collect rent from you, it must wait until your landlord's condo fee payments are at least 25 days late. It must then send a notice to the landlord explaining that it intends to collect the rent for her unit to pay the late condo fees. If the landlord does not respond to the condo association's notice within 10 days, or if she admits that she owes the association money, then the association is allowed to collect all or some of your rent each month until your rent has paid off the amount the landlord owes to the condo association. If the landlord responds to the condo association within 10 days, but denies that she owes the association any money, then the condo association cannot collect any rent from you. If a condo association asks for your rent, you should ask the association to put the request in writing. You should also ask for copies of the notice the association sent to your landlord and any written response from your landlord to the association. Remember that in no event can the condo association ask you to pay more than your rent. |
This post tries to give an overview about the background and impact of the new Rails XML parameter parsing vulnerability patched today. The bug The root cause of the vulnerability is Rails handling of formatted parameters. In addition to standard GET and POST parameter formats, Rails can handle multiple different data encodings inside the body of POST requests. By default JSON and XML are supported. While support for JSON is widely used in production, the XML functionality does not seem to be known by many Rails developers. XML parameter parsing The code responsible for parsing these different data types is shown below: # actionpack/lib/action_dispatch/middleware/params_parser.rb .... DEFAULT_PARSERS = { Mime::XML => : xml_simple, Mime::JSON => :json } .... def parse_formatted_parameters(env) ... when Proc strategy.call(request.raw_post) when : xml_simple, : xml_node data = Hash.from_xml(request.raw_post) || {} data.with_indifferent_access when :yaml YAML.load(request.raw_post) when :json data = ActiveSupport::JSON.decode(request.raw_post) data = {:_json => data} unless data.is_a?(Hash) data.with_indifferent_access else false end ... While the Proc and :yaml cases fortunately are not reachable by default and JSON is of minor importance, the XML case calls Hash.from_xml() passing the raw POST body as argument. The code below is a simplified, showing only relevant parts of this code path. def typecast_xml_value(value) case value.class.to_s when 'Hash' if value['type'] == 'array' .... ... elsif .. || (value["__content__"] && (value.keys.size == 1 ||value["__content__"].present?)) content = value["__content__"] if parser = ActiveSupport::XmlMini::PARSING[value["type"]] parser.arity == 1 ? parser.call(content) : parser.call(content, value) else content end ..... end when 'Array' value.map! { |i| typecast_xml_value(i) } value.length > 1 ? value : value.first when 'String' value end end Typed XML As can be seen, the code supports the deserialization of XML trees into different datatypes. While basic types like Arrays, Strings and Hashs can be handled pretty easily, the XML parser includes additional support for several other types in order to allow code like the snippet below to be parsed correctly. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <hash> <foo type="integer">1</foo> <bar type="float">1.3</bar> </hash> This typing support helps applications which do not want to implement their own date or integer parsing code. It is implemented using the “type” attribute and the following code line: if parser = ActiveSupport::XmlMini::PARSING[value["type"]] parser.arity == 1 ? parser.call(content) : parser.call(content, value) Unfortunately ActiveSupport::XmlMini::PARSING not only includes harmless types like Integers or Floats, but also two special ones which have a critical security impact: symbol and yaml. Symbols and Rails A Symbol is a special ruby type which normally gets created using the :name syntax. Symbols have several interesting properties which are out of the scope of this blogpost, but most importantly internal Rails functions rely on the assumption that no external user can inject symbols with malicious values. This assumption has already been attacked in several ways, most recently by joernchen roughly one month ago in CVE-2012-5664. Even with the coressponding patch, more attack vectors using malicious symbols probably exist. For this bug the impact is reduced because the call to data.with_indifferent_access in parse_formatted_parameters transforms all Symbol keys in the hashtable to Strings which makes the exploitation of CVE-2012-5664 more difficult. However, the vector still exists and and exploitation might still be feasible. In the end, the injection of symbols is a serious security issue. Still the second type “yaml” is even more interesting. YAML YAML (YAML Ain’t Markup Language) is a data serialization format similar to JSON. Support for YAML inside XML is implemented using the following entry in ActiveSupport::XmlMini::Parsing: "yaml" => Proc.new { |yaml| YAML::load(yaml) rescue yaml } As you might remember YAML formatted parameters are not enabled by default in Rails due to YAML (or more specifically the YAML parsers used by most scripting languages like e.g. Python or Ruby) not being designed to handle malicious user input. The YAML parser used by Ruby supports the serialization and deserialization of arbitrary data types. This includes Symbols (again!) and also arbitrary Objects. The YAML string “”— !ruby/object:A foo: 1 bar: 1 ” will create an object instance of class A and set the object attributes @foo and @bar to the value 1. This means that an attacker can create instances of all classes defined in the targeted Rails application. This includes the basic ruby classes, all classes defined in the different activexy namespaces and even the ones used by lower level libraries like rack. This opens a enormous attack surface as described in the next sections. Object Injection Attacks So we have the ability to insert arbitary object instances as parameters into a running Rails application. What’s the impact? Let’s take a look at other web stacks: PHP Object injection in PHP is possible using the unserialize() function as described by Stefan Esser in 2009. Thanks to “magic methods” like __wakeup and __destruct which get called every time an object is deserialized or garbage collected, command execution is possible in most non trivial and current PHP applications, as demonstrated by bugs in phpMyAdmin, Typo3, Piwik or CakePHP. Java A quite similar vulnerability was discovered by Johannes Dahse in the Apache Struts2 web framework. Summarizing the very detailed blog post: Remote command execution is possible. Python Finally, the pickle library used by python is easily attackable, because it includes class definitions in the serialized data format as demonstrated in this blog post by Nelson Elhage. As these examples demonstrate object injection vulnerabilities can be exploited in many different ways. In the next section we show some potential attack vectors for Rails applications Exploitation in Rails Let’s recap the abilities that an attacker obtains due to the described YAML injection: He can create an object instance of any class defined in the application. Furthermore he can set all instance variables to arbitrary values and is not restricted by validatios in the initialize or setter methods. class B def initialize() @code = "puts 4" end def foo() eval @code end end Imagine the (rather stupid) example class B above, if we are able to call the foo() method on a deserialized object we can execute arbitrary code. For example the YAML string “— !ruby/object:B code: puts 10 ” results in the execution of puts 10. Of course, most real world applications do not have such simple exploitation vectors but thanks to the power of ruby, Rails becomes an easy target: Ruby does have a dynamic type system and a rich support for operator overloading. Missing type checks and the assumption that all user passed values are Strings,Array or Hashes open many exploitation vectors. While we do have discovered multiple classes and code paths that can be used to inject arbitrary code, we will not publish details about them till the majority of sites have applied the patch. Instead we demonstrate how object injection can be used to execute SQL injection attacks against Rails 3 application using arel objects. arel allows the creation of complex SQL queries using familiar ruby syntax. An in depth discussion of arel is out of the scope of this post but arel objects have an interesting property when passed as argument to one of Rails dynamic finder methods (find_by_*): The SQL code representing the arel object is directly copied into the SELECT statement created by the finder method, without applying any escaping: irb(main):008:0> arel = Arel::Nodes::SqlLiteral.new("foo") => "foo" irb(main):009:0> Blog.find_by_id(arel) Blog Load (0.5ms) SELECT "blogs".* FROM "blogs" WHERE "blogs"."id" = foo LIMIT 1 SQLite3::SQLException: no such column: foo: SELECT "blogs".* FROM "blogs" WHERE "blogs"."id" = foo LIMIT 1 This is quite similiar to CVE-2012-5664 and would not be a problem under normal circumstances, but because we can create an Arel::Nodes::SqlLiteral object using YAML it becomes easily exploitable when a finder method is called like this: XYZ.find_by_*(params[:x]) We can pass the string representing such an object as value of the x parameter inside a correctly formed XML post body. This will result in the creation of a SqlLiteral object and the injection of “SQLCODE” inside the executed SQL statement. We validated this attack against Rails 3.2.10 running the most recent version of the redmine project managment application and could extract arbitrary database entries as unauthenticated user. Note that the dynamic finder requirement is specific to this attack vector. Arbitrary code injection is still possible even when no dynamic finders are used. Summary The discussed vulnerability is highly critical and allows code executions and SQL injections in all Rails applications that do not disable parsing of XML formatted parameters. Administrators should apply the published patch as soon as possible. If a timely update is not possible ActionDispatch::ParamsParser::DEFAULT_PARSERS should be modified to remove XML support. Felix Wilhelm |
Economists are usually a lot more concerned about how an economy is doing than how the people in it are doing. But there is a branch of econometrics that focuses on the well-being of populations rather than the quarterly meanderings of somewhat abstract concepts like gross domestic product. One source of such data is the OECD, often referred to as a think tank focusing on economic policy for rich countries. A fresh report out this morning attempts to answer the the basic question “How’s life?” for people in different populations. It’s chock-a-block with interesting tidbits, as well as a fair number of fascinating charts. Here are just a few that lay out some of the remarkable distinctions between the world’s developed economies. Americans still have the most cash to play with … But the Swiss, Japanese and Italians live the longest. (And Russian lifespans are still shockingly short.) People in Turkey and Mexico work incredibly long hours. And Finland and Japan have some of the most literate and numerate populations. A benefit of living on a small island? The Icelandic and the Irish are the tightest with their friends and families. In most countries, voter turnout is falling. It’s highest in Australia, where voting is compulsory. Mexico is very violent and getting worse. (Most murders there are never solved.) Russia and Estonia have both become far safer. The Swiss, the Dutch and the Nordics are the most satisfied with their lives. (More on the Cantril Ladder here.) Italian men do a ton less housework than Italian women. And Canada has far too many rooms. Another example of froth in housing? This post originally appeared at Quartz. We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com. |
I don’t like systems that use git push for deployment (Heroku et al). Why? I do a lot of this: $ git push deploy ... realize I forgot a domain name ... $ git commit -m "fix domain name" -a ; git push deploy ... realize I didn't do something right with the database setup ... $ git commit -m "configure database right" -a ; git push deploy ... dammit, I didn't fix it quite right ... $ git commit -m "typo" -a ; git push deploy And then maybe I’d actually like to keep my config out of my source control, or have a build process that I run locally, or any number of things. I’d like to be able to test deployment, but every deployment is a commit, and I like to commit tested work. I think I could use git rebase but I lack the discipline to undo my work so I can do it correctly. This is why I don’t do continuous commits. There’s a whole different level of weirdness when you use GitHub Pages as you aren’t pushing to a deployment-specific remote, you are pushing to a deployment-specific branch. So I’ve generally thought: git deployment is wrong. Then I was talking to some other people at Mozilla and they mentioned that ops was using git for simply moving files around even though the stuff they were deploying was itself in Mercurial. They had a particular site with a very large number of files, and it was faster to use git than rsync (git has more metadata than rsync; rsync has to look at everything everytime you sync). And that all seemed very reasonable; git is a fine way to sync things. But I kind of forgot about it all, and just swore to myself as I did too many trivial commits and wrote too many meaningless commit messages. Still… it isn’t so hard to separate these concerns, is it? So I wrote up a quite small command called git-sync. The basic idea: copy the working directory to a new location (minus .git/ ), commit that, and push the result to your deployment remote. You can send modified and untracked files, and you can run a build script before committing and push the result of the build script, all without sullying your “real” source control. And you happen to have a nice history of deployments, which is also nice. I’ve only used this a little bit, but I’ve enjoyed when I have used it, and it makes me feel much better/clearer about my actual commits. It’s really short right now, and probably gets some things entirely wrong (e.g., moving over untracked files). But it works well enough to be improved (winkwinknudgenudge). So check it out: https://github.com/ianb/git-sync |
Breaking news: Physics has a serious image problem. Okay, that's not really news to anyone engaged in the Sisyphean task of physics-related education and outreach to the general public. But it seems the problem has spread to the science writing community. And that makes Jen-Luc Piquant very sad. Let me explain what prompted this post. There are many excellent science blogs around these days, and one of the best is The Last Word on Nothing (LWON), so named in honor of Victor Hugo: "Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing." It's a group blog featuring a dozen very talented and accomplished science writers specializing in a wide range of disciplines. LWON just celebrated its five-year anniversary -- congratulations! -- and to mark the occasion, five of the writers contributed to a post on what they considered to be the best and worst fields of science to write about. Fair enough -- we all have topics for which we have a natural affinity, and others where, for whatever reasons, we struggle to summon much enthusiasm. Alas, I was dismayed to find some rather bizarre commentary from the two who chose physics as their "worst." First up: Craig Childs, who moaned, "It’s the numbers. I’m sorry. It’s more math than anything, and math is hardly a science." Then he tells a story about this one time where a physicist wrote an equation on the blackboard, he didn't understand it, and it made him feel dumb, and hence physics is Teh Worst. Then came Jennifer Holland: "I struggled enough with these in high school that I should have known not to get near them again. I like writing about things I can see clearly, and that I can explain in a way that’s fun and exciting and accessible. All that theoretical junk is confusing and hard to explain, and the physicists I’ve talked to are incapable of dropping down to my level. I’ve had them become rather condescending, in fact." So a physicist didn't explain things very clearly and got a bit condescending and made her feel dumb, and hence physics is Teh Worst. My reaction to these kneejerk criticisms: Anyway, lively debate ensued on not one, but two, Facebook threads (mine and LWONian Ann Finkbeiner's), where additional LWON writers confessed their loathing of physics -- and also physicists, who apparently are viewed as dull, colorless, characters with no good stories to tell, working on things far too abstract and removed from everyday human experience to drive a compelling narrative. Oh, and they were all mostly kidding, except when they weren't. Look, I get that the post is meant to be light-hearted and at least partly tongue-in-cheek. And I certainly don't expect every science writer to share my love of physics. But It's frustrating to have such accomplished professional colleagues perpetuating -- even in "fun" -- the kind of lazy riffs on physics I typically encounter in non-science-minded folks: it's hard, it's math-heavy and they suck at math, physicists aren't clear when explaining the concepts and can be arrogant and condescending, the complainant hated math and physics in high school, it's too abstract, and so on. I expected better from my peers. As fellow physics fan Lisa Grossman observed on Facebook, "It's disheartening to have to fight against physics fatigue even among science writers." Every science writer has favorite and least favorite subjects. But let's phrase the reasons why as something a bit deeper and more nuanced than "Ewww! Math! Eww! Physics!" In that same post, Sally Adee picked behavioral economics as her Best choice, and neuroscience as her Worst choice -- but her reasoning behind the latter was thoughtful, citing the interdisciplinary complexity of the topic and the many potential pitfalls when it comes to peeling back layers of hype and separating the wheat from the chafe. She didn't go on about how she was grossed out by dissected brains in school, or didn't grok neuro-speak, or once had an unpleasant experience with a condescending neuroscientist who couldn't translate his/her research into plain English effectively. See the difference? It would have been nice if physics -- even when placed in the "Worst" category -- had warranted the same measure of respect. I'm not really interested in offering a point-by-point rebuttal, because physics isn't perfect, nor are physicists, and sometimes those critiques apply. But they also apply just as often to every other scientific discipline. I personally find the technical details of genetics as mind-numbing and baffling as others find the Standard Model of Particle Physics, just because I'm more familiar with the latter. It's not because I have a natural affinity, or because I'm some genius-level whiz kid -- I majored in English lit, with a minor in journalism, so I am first and foremost a "word" person -- but because I am dogged and patient and put in the hard work to improve my grasp of the particle zoo early on in my science writing career. I take that same approach when writing about topics well outside my disciplinary comfort zone, too. Science writing is hard. It's supposed to be hard -- that's what makes this such a fulfilling and challenging career. LWON contributor Helen Fields picked ecology and evolution as both her worst and best fields to write about -- a savvy move, since it recognizes that even one's favorite topics have their pros and cons. Allow me to take a similar approach. For me, physics is the best field to write about because it is so incredibly broad and all-encompassing, it's impossible to become bored or run out of ideas. It is constantly surprising me and helping me to see the world in new, fascinating ways. Physics explains how the world works at the most fundamental level. Physics is there when you're sailing upwind on a weekend boat jaunt, or when a fire breaks out on a NASCAR track. It's at work in home appliances like your dishwasher, and in your light bulbs. Physics explains how geckos stick to surfaces and the best way to crack an egg. You can see its beauty in soap films, in the breaking of ocean waves on the shore, in the flight of the falcon, in diving gannets, in insect swarms, and in the unique structures that give beetles and bird feathers -- and the occasional overturned iceberg -- their breathtaking hues. Physics helps analyze art and ancient artifacts. It can mathematically model the likelihood of encountering extraterrestrial zombies, or analyze a dirty joke cracked on a popular cable sitcom. Heck, the predator/prey dynamics Fields cites while singing the praises of ecology and evolution is based on mathematical modeling (specifically, Lotka-Volterra curves), and hence involves physics at some scale. But physics is also the worst field to write about, because despite the best efforts of so many of us engaged in writing and communicating physics, it so badly misunderstood. Most people reject it out of hand, unwilling to take the time to delve just a bit deeper to see past the bewildering jargon and scary-looking equations and appreciate the elegance and clarity of the (often counter-intuitive) concepts lurking just beneath the surface. And those people apparently include many of my fellow science writers. |
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